Crapsack World / Myths & Religion

• Aztec Mythology:
  • The Aztec afterlife required you to run a big damn gauntlet to get to it, at which point... you spend eternity sitting around inside a pyramid, doing nothing, only even getting to eat on the Day of the Dead. On the plus side, you can read the life stories of everyone else who got there, maybe write your own.
  • There are a few Aztec afterlives that are a paradise or at least better, but usually involve dying a violent death or under very specific circumstances. Tlalocan is eternal springtime, but reserved for those who died from drowning, lighting strikes and other things related to the rain god Taloc.
  • If you think the afterlife was bad, in life the god who controls the sun is a bloodthirsty, warmongering psychopath. If the Aztecs do not constantly war with other tribes and perform grotesque human sacrifices, he will refuse to let the sun rise and the entire world will freeze. However, it's not spite: he'll starve if he doesn't get the necessary hearts. And according to one version of the relevant origin myth, he sacrificed himself that the people of the earth could live to become a sun god. Sometimes all the gods except the wind sacrificed themselves to fuel the ignition of the sun and have no bodies but the temple statues, and so require much blood to persist and protect.
  • The stars in Aztec religion were believed to be scary lady skeletons called the Tzitzimimeh who wanted to eat the sun and could possess humans during eclipses. That tells you all about Aztec mythology, that they saw something baleful even in something beautiful as the stars. Those human sacrifices were, in part, needed to keep the sun god strong enough to fend off the attacks from the moon and stars. And that's before we go into the part where they believed that the earth was a sleeping eldritch abomination that also needs to be fed with sacrifices so that it won't wake up and davour... well... the cosmos.
• The basic idea of the Gnostics was that Earth is a Crapsack World made by a flawed would-be God that trapped humanity in a prison of matter and flesh and tyrannizes over them.
• The Bible:
  • From Genesis, we have the Antediluvian World, which was apparently so horrifyingly corrupt and full of evil that God destroyed it completely with the Great Flood. All that was left was Noah, his family, and the animals on the Ark.
  The LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the LORD regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened ... The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness. When God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth... (Genesis 6:5-6, 11-12)
  • The Book of Ecclesiastes is about Solomon's struggle with his faith. His belief that he lived in a Crapsack World offered him no relief of a heavenly afterlife after death, but mere eternal unconsciousness.
• In Beti-Pahuin Mythology Engouang Ondo threatened to bring a mob of ghosts back to life. At first they laughed and ask how that’s even a threat. He responded by reminding them of how miserable living is from birth to old age.
• One of the basic tenets of both Buddhism and Jainism is that the Samsara (the universe we live in) is an never-ending cycle of pain. Existence inevitably leads to pain. Pain is caused by desire, which generates karma, which leads to reincarnation, which leads to more desire, and therefore pain and karma... It`s a wonder Buddhism has an image as an optimistic religion in the West.
• Sumerian Mythology:
  • Only seems to have one afterlife destination, which is a dusty, barren and empty hall described as sucking immensely.
  • The entirety of The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ode to the concept that dying can only result in endless tedium and suffering. Also, the goddess in charge of the place routinely threatens to unleash the angry, bored dead to fuck up the living world if her father, the head honcho god, doesn't agree to her arbitrary whims.
  • The pain of whatever killed you in life carries on eternally in the afterlife. Ponder that for a moment. There are ways to improve the general shittiness of the afterlife, however. First and foremost is having lots of children.^note And consider the Fridge Horror of that considering that in pre-industrial societies the leading cause of death for women is childbirth... Having few, or no, children will severely increase your suffering in the afterlife. The reason for this is unexplained, but one would assume it is related to the lack of grave offerings or something of that sort. There is also the possibility of being upgraded to godhood upon death (which happened to Gilgamesh himself in one of the Sumerian poems) which will give you a small part of the underworld to reign over and possibly improve.
• Classical Mythology:
  • The world is ruled by a pantheon of Jerkass Gods who will utterly screw over mortals (often literally) for the most petty of reasons, or no reason at all. (The Olympian gods deposed the Titans, who were allegedly worse, but we only have the Olympians' word for it.) Oh, and by the way, destiny rules everything and man has no control over his own life. Nice to note that of the five deities in the pantheon that were actually nice or nicer to humans, one was god of the underworld, one was his wife, one was a Titan - who created humanity in the first place (Prometheus), the other had that as her primary character trait, and the last one was the dark goddess of magic, ghosts, and witchcraft, described as living in the Underworld too.
  • The ancient Greek word for "safe" translates to English as "free from fear". Their word for "safe" meant that they weren't in danger. It's a negative. To them, the default state of existence was "not safe".
  • One thing that cements Greek mythology as it: There is a reason that Hope is one of the things in Pandora's Box. The Greeks didn't have a very high opinion of it, because they thought it deludes people into thinking that they live in a World Half Full, only to crush this belief utterly.
• Many mythologies have one or several deities occupied with creating intricate traps and riddles in order to "test" humans. The only problem is that many to most of these tests could only be passed with mastermind levels of omniscience. Which is to say they are impossible, unless you have the Power of Plot on your side OR you don't actually solve it, but are ridiculously lucky.
• Norse Mythology, in which the world is doomed to end in ice and fire overrun by giants and monsters and the gods themselves will die. The light at the end of the tunnel really IS an oncoming train. Going to Valhalla just means training for the Final Battle of Ragnarok.