The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

It's Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom. In the Tanakh, it mostly refers to the specific place. Like, a pagan altar was built there at one point and Josiah tore it down.

In the New Testament, it is kind of used as a metaphor for hell, but mostly in a really abstract kind of way.

Oh, I see. I can see how that got conflated with talking about it as if it was actual hell. Stories can tend to lose little details like that over the centuries.

I'll point out, Gehenna was a site of child sacrificies as recorded in the old testament, so the conflation with hell probably had to do with the historical impiety of the place.

Yeah, basically it was a place where a lot of sacrifices to children were made. IIRC when it was conquered, the Israelites decided that the only thing that the place could justifiably be used for was as a landfill of sorts.

&Is that where Moloch hung out?

Yeah, I can see how that became a place of evil in the Old Testament.

Someone in the War in Ukraine thread made the claim that much of what we think of today as Slavic or Irish mythology was fabricated during the 19th century. I am aware that during the 19th century many countries had nationalist movements which involved creating or formalizing some type of mythology. A prominent example is the Finnish national epic the Kalevala, which was written in the late 1800's and later adapted into an opera by Jean Sibelius. But my impression was that these myths were adapted from existing folk tales that had before been passed down in oral traditions. I'm not sure if we could safely dismiss the entire mythology as fabricated from whole-cloth.

At least in the case of Irish mythology many of the primary sources date back to the 11th century. Doesn't mean they didn't elaborate a bit in the 19th.

The Irish situation is contentious because it depends on how you define "mythology" in a broad sense and how that relates to the European stories we have that are post-Christianization and how to meaningfully address that. We have no texts in Ireland from before Christianization, and even beyond that, we have no texts from Ireland that aren't from a period where ^note depending on which side of a vicious academic argument you're on the island had been Christian for somewhere between four hundred and five hundred years.

This leads to the question of whether or not these texts are adopted wholesale from an old tradition and just "remade" in a modern image in order to appease Papal censors, ^note they weren't, the Pope had so little control over Ireland it's not even funny a collective of Irish monks spinning yarns about a pagan past because it was cool to have a pagan past at the time, or a combination of both: the Irish monks having a genuine love of these stories as told to them by the fíli, adapting them for the way they thought the world ought to work and telling these long and complex stories in spite of the Pope very much telling them to stop. Depending on which side of the argument you fall on (and how much you care) you might be better off referring to the stories as "medieval Irish literature."

I'm not saying that everything Yeats and Gregory made up is from wholecloth - they are working from adaptations of existing material that were extant when they were alive - but they distort and recontextualize those stories to serve a nationalist idea. The best example is how every modern retelling of the Táin Bó Cuailnge ends with the death of Cú Chulainn, because that makes him a martyr to a worthy cause protecting his people against an outside invader. That's a very compelling narrative if you're in the business of either Irish nationalism or, later, Ulster supremacy.

We have some evidence of some figures in the "Slavic mythology" umbrella having possibly been pre-Christian figures, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to how many of them emerge in the 19th century out of whole cloth with no prior reference even to folk figures who might resemble them. We can't just say "well if we have no evidence to suggest they were folkloric figures before we must conclude they're just from an oral tradition nobody had previously bothered to write down."

The Kalevala is interesting, though, because we keep finding more and more archaeological evidence that at least some parts are remarkably well-preserved from what may very well have been a living folk tradition. It's just that we can't apply that standard everywhere, and the archaeological evidence coming out of Eastern Europe still doesn't support a lot of the figures written about in the 19th century.

Edited by math792d on May 8th 2022 at 7:34:29 PM

All very interesting, but I can’t help but feel that your statements in the Ukraine thread were rather reductive in light of this. This all seems a lot more complicated than “Irish mythology does not exist”.

Edited by KarkatTheDalek on May 8th 2022 at 1:39:39 PM

The caveat I posted in there was "in the popular consciousness." I was by no means trying to suggest that Eastern Europe did not, at one point, have a religious tradition separate from the various strands of Christianity. That is obviously patently absurd, given we have historical records of crusades in the Baltic specifically to eradicate the last pagan powers of Europe.

I suppose if you read that as reductive I can see where you're coming from, but hopefully my statements here help to underline the broader point that there's a similar problem in Slavic mythology as there is in the Norse or Irish material - a lot of how we think about it is wrapped up in people who wrote about it in the 19th and early 20th century, and a lot of the people writing about mythology then were:

1) Liars.

2) Not nice people.

For perhaps the most extreme example you have the example on this very wiki of Tyr being described as a "god of justice," a statement that you can trace back to a Dutch scholar named Jan de Vries who, amongst other things, was a fanatical Nazi. Now consider the idea of a god of war being labeled as a god of justice if you apply a National Socialist lens and you can perhaps see where that idea came from. There are no extant attestations of anything of the sort in the sagas, but de Vries was such a household name and people kept citing him without going back and checking where he read it that it seeped into popular imagination.

The Ireland part I could have definitely phrased better, though.

Edited by math792d on May 8th 2022 at 7:47:42 PM

Fair enough. I suppose it was the matter of how you worded it previously, but perhaps I was being uncharitable there. My apologies.

I thought the Norse stuff was formalized much earlier with stuff like martyr odin and Ragnarok tacked on by a Christian guy pushing a pan-scandinavian narrative some time in the 1400s or 1600s or some time around there.

Nah, some of the poems are older than that but they're not put together and formalized until after Norse Christianization is in full swing (mostly because the Norse didn't really do long-form literature before then), and even the "older" stories in the Poetic Edda are, linguistically, from somewhere around the 9th century, which is before formal conversion but long after regular contact with Christianity and missionary efforts began. And these 9th century stories include Ragnarok, so even the very oldest material we have mentions it.

I appreciate it being brought to my attention, honestly - I'm not always aware of how exactly that comes across, so if it comes across as being rude or oversimplifying I'd rather know it than not.

Edited by math792d on May 8th 2022 at 7:59:38 PM

I don't disagree that a lot has been distorted or lost in translation with many of these mythologies. I suppose I also misunderstood your point. Considering current events, I'm a bit more wary of people claiming or seeming to claim that a culture does not have a real mythology, especially one that has been historically oppressed.

I feel like there may be a distinction between how colonized countries such as Finland or Ireland desired to reclaim or reconstruct their cultural mythology and the desire of imperialist countries to do something similar. They both have very different motives even if some of the sentiments overlap.

It's also worth noting that this is nothing new. Myths have always evolved and changed over time depending on who is telling them and when. There probably isn't a single 'authentic' version of any mythology

Edited by Xopher001 on May 8th 2022 at 11:34:43 AM

I agree with this sentiment but that's not actually what this argument is about. If you go back and read the Irish sagas they are, indeed, quite different in substance, tone and subject matter from each other, deeply internally contradictory, and yet full of some fairly consistent themes that remain so whether you're looking at The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel (probably ca. 8th century based on the language) to the Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne (thoroughly late medieval in the form we have), that things change is an inevitable fact of a storytelling culture. Hell, even changing things for political purposes isn't new - the Fomoire started out as merely one group of supernatural beings under the Túatha Dé Danann among many, and it wasn't until substantial contact with the Norse that the Irish went "no actually fuck these people, they're invaders from across the sea now."

Neither, however, makes the 19th century stories any less distorted for an explicit aim, and it's worth interrogating that, and the roles this has played in fundamentally misrepresenting the medieval sagas, in the global popular imagination, and how it continues to perpetuate certain ideals that, depending on how you frame them, are profoundly poisonous to people trying to understand the perspective of the people who wrote the sagas down in the first place. Is it your right to misrepresent your ancestors' words just because you share a prima facie relationship with them, especially when your own distortions are all too often rooted in the colonialist distortions of the people who oppressed you? ^note For an actual example of this, there is no such thing as a "fae" or "fairy" by that name anywhere in the Irish sagas, nor any reference to them being vulnerable to iron, prior to English colonization. The Aos Síde are wholly unrelated to both the name and the idea.

"There probably isn't a single 'authentic' version of any mythology". That's true, even with respect to something as well documented as the Greek pantheon, there are so many variations from different regions and time periods that the idea of an "official" version is itself something of a myth. Most of what we know about them was first systematized by playwrites, not popular sources. We don't even know if most of them were believers.

In general, beliefs change in response to the conditions that people find themselves living in. In a sense, belief systems are as dynamic and adaptable as living things.

In that sense, a population choosing to reinterpret their own traditions as a way of coping with circumstances is entirely in keeping with traditional practice.

Yeah. It is certainly worth interrogating what the intent behind these stories was when they were originally told. But you could just keep going further and further back to each retelling. At some point you have to wonder if any one version of these is more valid than any other. From that perspective, the reconstruction of these mythos in the 19th century is not any less different or less valid.

Then again that also comes close to saying the ways imperialist countries like Japan Germany or Italy reinterpreted their mythos was a-okay. But that's why I tried to highlight the distinction between retellings by colonized countries and imperialist countries. I think that distinction is important.

It probably goes without saying that these meta-analyses of mythology are also colored with their own inherent biases. That's pretty unavoidable

Edited by Xopher001 on May 8th 2022 at 12:18:00 PM

"But that's why I tried to highlight the distinction between retellings by colonized countries and imperialist countries. I think that distinction is important."

I agree that this is an important distinction, and that we should give much more weight to how an indigenous population chooses to interpret their own traditions over that of any foreign party trying to promote their own version.

But it gets more complicated than that. It's not at all uncommon for a colonized people to borrow elements from their occupiers, integrate them into their own traditions, and generate an entire new belief system. Voudoun and Santeria are examples. Few would argue that they are living religions, belonging to the people who practice them, but they originated in part as a syncretic merger between traditional beliefs and newer beliefs borrowed from their overlords. Then, of course, the mainstream culture re-copied sanitized and whitewashed versions of those newer belief systems and the result was "Hollywood Style" Voodoo as depicted in movies and novels. Since then, further cross-pollination has continued as the belief systems of each culture keep getting influenced by borrowed elements of the other.

Cultural reinterpretation seldom just goes one way.

I don't think a mythology becomes less "authentic" simply because another has bled into it. Humans love stories. And because of that the most cross-culturally compelling stories tend to travel. I mean Hercules made it all the way to Japan. Not Hercules, but at the same time undeniably Hercules. Buddha made his way from Nepal into the Greek Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic Church, as far west as Britain. I think that by segregating beliefs by ethnic or national origins causes a mythology to lose something inherently magical and illogical, its dreamlike quality so to speak. Kinda like when the Imperial Japanese tried to purge Shinto into something "pure" and free of non-Japanese elements like Buddhism and Daoism after centuries of syncretism.

Then again, destruction of the old can sometimes create something new and equally great. Like when the Jewish priests and Mohammed purged the Northwest Semitic pantheon of all gods except El/Allah. Or when Zoroaster demoted the Yazatas from the status of true gods in their own right to a nature more reminiscent of Abrahamic angels.

While I agree in theory with the idea that cultural syncretisms are not inherently a bad thing and in fact part and parcel of the human experience and worth celebrating, I think applying that directly and equating a 19th century poet's fanfiction with the account made by the Irish monks is, on some level ^note and please don't think I'm calling out anyone in this thread, I'm using it as an illustrative example kind of intellectually lazy.

Or rather, I find the idea that we should treat it as a legitimate continuation of the same tradition as if it had superceded that earlier tradition to be kind of insulting to the people who wrote the original story down. If you go and read it, the Táin is a tragedy starring the world's most violent teenager, who's forced to fight his uncle, kill his "foster brother" ^note they're foster siblings in the same way Achilles and Patroclus are "just comrades" and ultimately lose the war in a pointless stalemate that did nothing but kill thousands of Irish warriors for no gain by anyone. All that killing, at the behest of a king who murdered his own kin for the sake of a woman in violation of an oath. Cú Chulainn survives the events of the war and leaves it as Ulster's undisputed greatest warrior, but the cost for himself and his kingdom is apocalyptic. It's a story about misuse of authority and an important milestone in the story of cyclic violence that is the Ulster Cycle as a whole. It's no surprise that when Cú Chulainn finally dies, ^note between ten and sixteen years after the Táin it's the children of three men he killed that come to collect.

To take that story, or to take the story of Diarmuid and Gráinne and frame it as a love story rather than a story about a man being robbed of his agency and forced to fight his king who's taking the whole thing way out of proportion to satiate his own greed, is to misunderstand what these stories meant to the people who first wrote them down. At the extreme end of this you have the Venn diagram of "Norse pagans" and "actual Nazis" so fundamentally misrepresenting the body of text to suit their odious beliefs that they're utterly unrecognizeable.

And that's where I feel I start to lose the plot a bit by treating the 19th century-onward treatments as simply being "continuations" when they are radical departures from the context in which the stories they're editorializing on originate. When a journalist like Peter Berresford Ellis creates a corpus of "Celtic myths" in which he purports to tell nothing but stories from the Irish sagas and then forges a creation myth from whole cloth and Extra Credits does a video on this forged creation myth, can we compare that, in good faith, to long-term religious syncretism? Because I don't think we can, at least not without attaching some caveats.

Another way in which I draw the line is in recontextualizing them as stories when they've ceased to be mythological, or when there's such a long "break" in contiguous worship that we can't really talk about them as the same religion. "Hollywood Voodoo" isn't really a thing with a large community following the way Voudoun and Santeria are central to many Afro-Caribbean communities. Celtic reconstructionism/Irish paganism is the blind leading the blind, using a series of texts that cannot be divorced from an Insular Christian context and trying to read into this an "original" set of myths divorced of Christian influence. ^note This usually ends up looking a lot like Classical Mythology because the Irish monks were Classics nerds and adapted a whole bunch of material from it - there's an Irish retelling of the Iliad and Odyssey.

I think we owe it to the people who gave us the foundation to tell these stories to not put words in their mouths and admit when we know why and how changes have been made.

Zoroaster did no such thing. Monotheist Zoroastrianism doesn't really become a thing until the modern era, and equating them to the way the Abrahamic faiths works is also a very modern concept, but that goes into the whole debate about whether or not "monotheism" is actually useful as a descriptor.

Edited by math792d on May 8th 2022 at 12:59:03 PM

Two questions - do the Irish sagas have any mention of a near equivalent, and what would you say are the main origins of fairy folklore? I ask because I wanted to do some stuff with fairies in my own writing, and I'd like to know what to research.

The closest thing in terms of being "spooky neighbors with supernatural power" are the Aos Síde, literally "People of the Hills/Mounds" ^note  referring to the many Neolithic structures that dot the landscape of Ireland where they're supposed to reside. who are very widely attested in the sagas. They're kind of the origin of the "fairies can't lie" myth, it's just wildly taken out of context. It's a quirk of medieval Irish law that if you directly lie, you can get sued, but if you just twist the truth into an unrecognizable pretzel, legally speaking you're off the hook.

So it's not that they physiologically can't lie, they're just rules lawyers par excellence.

But the word "fairy" and many of the other tropes associated with them come courtesy of the English and the French rather than the Celtic-speaking people of the British Isles.

I see. Any stories in particular that are worth looking at?

Am I to understand the implication here is that these guys are subject to Irish law?

Edited by KarkatTheDalek on May 8th 2022 at 7:23:11 AM

They were the previous owners of the surface of Ireland before they were banished to the Otherworld and the people of the Irish sagas more or less run the same legal system as them, so it's really more like the people of Ireland follow their law.

As for specific ones, nothing is coming to mind at 1:30 AM.

Edited by math792d on May 8th 2022 at 1:27:49 PM