The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

A reading list about Gaelic mythology, especially the Scottish branch.

...Sir/Madam, you could not have posted that link at a better time, because I was just thinking about researching on those topics in the future, much thanks!

Speaking of research, I've already read The Bible at least three times by now. I think I can stop reading the original text and now focus more on Biblical commentary, Christianity's history, and other deeper theological subjects.

Alright I did some digging into the goetic demons recently and I noticed that there are some trends. as in there are a lot of recurring powersets among the 72.

• the most noticeable case would be inciting love. That is actually understandable as I'm pretty sure Solomon was the "700 wives and 300 concubines" guy and these are y'know, demons we're talking about with.
• another common power is the ability to make people invisible...and somehow witty. I suspect there is some correlation centered on tricksters here.
• Granting Familiars is also a common thing
• Then there are the "teaches liberal arts" thing....
• But the strangest would be enabling the conjurers to "know the virtues of precious stones and herbs". I assume that has to do with their nature as wealthy status symbols of the time (something only the former retained) given that Solomon's reign is likely around the spice trade days. but it still feels like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking here.

I imagine the love thing comes from the name as well. Goetia is the Greek word for charm after all.

As for the precious stone thing, gems were considered to have magical powers no? Amethyst for example shielded from drunkenness.

Edited by alekos23 on Apr 12th 2024 at 9:57:06 PM

Keep in mind that magic, philosophy, the "natural sciences" and so on, were all considered fairly closely linked for a good long while.

The Charming Arts...yeah I can see why they never translated the title from latin. It feels like something a pick up artist would pen

It sounds like someone did a Google search on "Magic Spells" and just cut and paste the first 100 hits onto a demon.

Has there been any research done to try to explain why snakes seem to be the only animals in some mythologies that are portrayed as both a force of good and evil?

Like which mythologies?

I do know they're associated with medicine in Classical mythology but also mostly monsters.

There's also the snake being a tempter and sometimes Satan in Adam and Eve.

Snakes are associated with immortality (due to their skin shedding) in the ancient near east, whether as guardians or thieves or something else. So their role in a story can be helpful or antagonistic depending on the story being told and what lessons that story is trying to teach.

East Asian mythologies definitely has their share of snakes portrayed as a force of good. The Chinese goddess Nüwa is a mother goddess who is said to have created humanity from clay, and she's often portrayed as having a snake-like body.

The Japanese goddess Amaterasu is also thought by some to have an association with snakes, though apparently the evidence for that is not super solid from what I heard.

Hindu mythology has snakes seen as both a force of good or evil depending on the snake. You have Vasuki (the snake coiled around Shiva), Sheshanaga (the one who Vishnu uses as his mount) and others among the good ones as well as one of the sages who stops a snake genocide carried out by the Pandava's descendant and many sages, being a half Naga half sage nephew of Vasuki, and we have a festival worshipping the naga (nagpanchami). While on the evil end, they are supposed to be the enemies of Garuda (though their mother seems to be more the villian tbh) with them tricking his mother into servitude (at the command of the naga's mother), forcing him to beat the celestial army and devas to get an immortality serum to trade for his mother's freedom and then tricking the snakes out of the serum and exercising his Indra given right of eating his serpent half brothers. And their mother getting angered by the defeat and cursing the snakes into being all burned alive at some point.

I read in Upinder Singh's History of ancient and early medieval India that snake and yaksha worship were once dominant cults across India that also cut across religions before they were eventually assimilated and sidelined by the dominant hindu cults. So them being both forces of good and evil, partly could also be due to the rivalry and process of assimilating said snake cults into the hindu fold. She also stated that the story of Krishna beating the kaliya naga could be interpreted as an allegorical reference to the same.

Edited by xyzt on Apr 19th 2024 at 11:56:42 PM

Ironically, it was actually the naming of a new giant madtsoiid snake from the Eocene (Vasuki indicus, after the Hindu serpent god and India where it was found), that made a little more curious on the subject.

To add onto the above mentions, Egyptian mythology also has a number of protection and healing serpent deities.

Of course there’s also Apep, who could probably qualify as the Ur-Example of evil serpents in mythology unless the Sumerians or Babylonians recognized a snake demon in their mythologies.

Edited by Angelspawndragon on Apr 19th 2024 at 8:20:39 AM

Heh, this talk about snakes remind me of a passage from Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth. Well, the book version, that is - I haven't watched the series and only read the book, just like I did with Cosmos.

Speaking of dragons, I really like the theory that in some cultures their ideas of dragons are actually based on whales' skeletons.

I'm not sure how solid that theory is, but considering how massive and even scary those bones can be, I certainly can't blame them.

I like the cyclops being elephant fossils myself.

Say, wasn't the Leviathan inspired by a whale?

I was watching Troy, and I find it a little ironic that everyone is talking about the eternal legacy of Achilles, when it is Odysseus who will be the more famous name today.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. Has it ever been confirmed which island Ithaca is supposed to be? According to my dad, we actually visited that particular island during one of our vacations to Greece.

Well, there's plenty of candidates, and not much consensus, as with everything surrounding the Trojan war. That's what happens when wars pass into mythology long before they are written down.

The Trojans be like:

I found an interesting bit in the summary of the Illiad:

Apparently the gods really get involved in the fighting here, and even get injured. I thought they were usually pretty much untouchable by mortals.

So, today I learnt that in the original tales mermaids lived in inland water sources like lakes and rivers, and not out in the sea. In retrospect this makes perfect sense, as the word "mermaid" can be broken down into two parts:

1. "Mere", which is the old English word for "lake".

2. "Maid", which refers to a young woman.

This also means a modern translation for the word "mermaid" could be "Lady of the Lake." This in turns makes me wonder whether the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian lore was originally a mermaid; especially since mermaids were seen as spiritual beings by the Anglo-Saxons, rather than the fully corporeal beings shown in modern media.

Them being associated with lakes/rivers also makes sense condescending their human halves as well. Something like that would be more plausiable for beings that were around humanity to begin with and rivers were hotbeds of civilization for the free access to potable water

It has me thinking that the idea of them as oceanic beings might had stemmed from Greek influence via the Siren and Atlantis