The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

I guess? Even with the Moirai you just have a trio of old women who spin threads of fate, the only part of the "triple goddess" motif that applies is that they're a trio, which strikes me as a bit naff to exalt as a motif.

They don't even map to the Nornir very well because while the Eddas may only have the names of three norns, there are far more of them.

I think the trinity goddess thing seemed to started with (depictions of) Hecate, among others.

It started with Robert Graves, but it's much too late for me to complain about how Robert Graves ruined everything. I will return with a vengeance tomorrow to do it.

I worry I'm not getting an accurate picture of Christian doctrine by reading the King Kames version of the Bible because I keep seeing references to things in the Bible around the internet that I don't remember reading.

We’re still waiting for your vengeance.

Like what?

Also, it's important to remember that a hell of a lot of the doctrine is essentially fanon that grew up around the church over 2000 years.

Edited by Zendervai on May 24th 2022 at 1:49:26 PM

I know that in the church I grew up in (a Baptist church in Oregon) and the community around it, the KJV was seen as a bit of a joke because of how many Woolseyisms it has.

Right, I promised to yell at Robert Graves.

So, you may be familiar with Robert Graves if you're in the English lit space - he's a fairly well-known poet. His father, Alfred Perceval Graves, is associated with the Gaelic Revival - the first crop of scholars, poets and artists to begin seriously engaging with the body of work we (erroneously) call "Celtic" or "Irish mythology." While Robert Graves is a bit of a hack, Alfred Perceval Graves is mostly considered as a serious, if extremely dated, translator and commentator of Irish texts. He's bad, but he's no Yeats or Lady Gregory. ^note both of whom forged or made up large parts of the bodies of work they purported to translate or manipulated the sequence of events in the texts in order to further their cause of propagating Irish nationalism

Robert Graves, on the other hand, is not a serious scholar. His most popular work dealing with Celtic material is The White Goddess, which is the origin of the idea of the "Triple Goddess" you may have seen in neopagan circles - the idea of a maternal or matriarchal goddess representing three stages of a woman's life as "Maiden" "Mother" and "Crone." This was influenced in part by Graves' Classical influences, looking to figures like Hekate ^note who is said to be triple-bodied but these manifestations look no different from each other and by Irish figures like the Morrígan, who isn't a triple goddess. There's just a goddess named "The Morrígan" and a collective of goddesses ^note contrary to what this very wiki would have you believe, it's not a trifecta that changes names - four of them appear in the Táin named the Morrígana, the "Great Queens."

To read some choice quotes from actual Celticists who read and critiqued Graves' work:

Graves responded to these criticisms by calling people who studied Irish folklore for a living "psychologically incapable" of perceiving myth, a criticism very similar to the one he leveled at the Classicists when he wrote The Greek Myths in 1954 and used the "insights" from The White Goddess to analyze Greek mythology. In response to poor reviews ^note  my favorite being: "either the greatest single contribution that has ever been made to the interpretation of Greek myth or else a farrago of cranky nonsense; I fear that it would be impossible to find any classical scholar who would agree with the former diagnosis". by professional Classicists, he claimed that they were too "prose-minded" to interpret "ancient poetic meanings" and the "few independent thinkers are the poets, who try to keep civilization alive."

He was later involved in a translation of supposed Persian poetry but it was discovered that his co-translator had used a fake manuscript that he claimed had been in his family's possession for eight hundred years. As you can see, Graves was a very astute man.

To whit, from a review of The Greek Myths:

Edited by math792d on May 24th 2022 at 9:08:23 PM

Graves was a master at making a dubious inference, then making a second dubious inference based on the first one, and then yet a third dubious one based on inference #2, and SO ON. He was like a man fearlessly walking the plank, nailing ever-flimsier planks to the ends of the previous ones, and so tottering & bending over the abyss ad infinitum. As shoddy as his methods were, he really had no excuse not to make his myths more entertaining.

Just thought I'd share my latest Algorithm Suggestions with you. An incredibly well done, but also seriously creepy animation of Biblically Accurate Angels

This makes me think about how in Lord of the Rings the name Fangorn applies to both the Ent we know as Treebeard and to the forest itself.

Or Mata Nui the Spirit vs Mata Nui the island?

It's sort of similar, yeah. Another surefire way of telling that they're not the same person is that they often show up in different contexts.

For example, the Morrígan appears in the Táin because she's down bad for Cú Chulainn because he keeps doing murders all over the shop and tries to drag him away from the battlefield, and they end up having a fight over it. She's also deeply pro-Connacht outside of this fascination with Cú Chulainn.

Meanwhile, the Badb is backing the Ulaid and hangs around Cú Chulainn because she's often depicted as a giant carrion bird and he makes a lot of carrion. One time he's described as

Edited by math792d on May 26th 2022 at 10:46:41 AM

I've got the epics of Antarah, Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, and the Banu Hilal open. I'm wondering if they should be their own pages or if they should go in the main Arab Mythology page. They're pretty lengthy.

Sorry for changing the subject, but I'm looking for answers to a Norse Mythology-related question, and I figured this thread might be able to aid me.

Many pages on this very wiki mention Odin wearing a "wide-brimmed hat" when he is walking the earth in disguise, or just generally wearing such a hat, sometimes with the addendum that the hat serves him specifically to hide his missing eye. This appears with minor variations on numerous trope pages, such as Eye-Obscuring Hat:

Nice Hat:

Robe and Wizard Hat:

The problem is that none of these examples name a specific source or a specific case in which Odin is wearing such a hat. I've combed through my own small collections of translated Old Norse literature and I found only one description of Odin wearing a wide-brimmed hat, which is this one from Saga of the Volsungs:

However, I found two other descriptions of Odin in disguise wearing a "hood" which he lets fall over his face; one from a different chapter in Saga of the Volsungs:

and a similar one in The Saga of Arrow-Odd:

So far my impression is that the idea that Odin's "wide-brimmed hat" is some kind of Iconic Outfit for him is a modern pop-culture thing. It might actually come from The Ring of the Nibelung, because according to Eye-Obscuring Hat

On the other hand, it occurred to me that this might be some kind of translation thing, i.e. the head covering worn by Odin ("hood" or "hat") might to some degree depend on the personal interpretation of the translator. But I don't have any kind of expertise on Old Norse, so I cannot check this easily.

Does anyone reading this thread feel competent to give me some tips on Odin's "wide-brimmed hat"?

I don't have the exact answers to this, but I can go bother someone I know who reads Icelandic and can translate the relevant passages to see what it's supposed to be?

You can also check how various translations of those works have interpreted that passage.

I don't know whether it's at all interesting to you, but I have (following Redmess' suggestion) checked out two other translations of Saga of the Volsungs, and found one case of the translation making a difference.

This is the first of the two passages from Saga of the Volsungs I quoted above in the Morris/Magnusson translation from 1870:

As you see, in the translation I quoted above (Byock, 1990), the "slouched hat" was a "low-hanging hood". In the R. Finch translation (1965), it is a "low hood" as well, like in Byock.

On the other hand, the headgear in the second passage from Saga of the Volsungs is always a "hat", although the Byock translation is the only of the three to call it a "wide-brimmed hat".

Not all that much of a progress, but I figured I'd share it.

@math782d: The expertise of an Old Norse reader would certainly help, though of course it's up to you to decide if it's important enough to bother your friend. It doesn't seem like a piece of information that I would expect anyone to have at their fingertips, no matter their level of knowledge.

Edited by LordGro on May 29th 2022 at 12:00:17 PM

FWIW, I've just been rereading Neil Gaiman's retelling of the Norse myths, ^* The book in question is also, rather originally, called "Norse Mythology", and was published in 2017 and he describes Odin wearing "his broad-brimmed hat" in the Death of Balder, and describes him wearing a hat in several other myths.

Obviously, his book isn't a direct translation, but he did prioritise being faithful to the myths. The fact that he included the wide-brimmed detail suggests to me that he probably has some source for it.

...Of course, if there's no source for it that can be found, it might be that he made it up and someone edited the "fact" onto the wiki in the mistaken belief that it was from the original myths.

I'm only really familiar with 'Antarah (via the translated compilation War Songs by James Montgomery), but I'd say that they warrant their own pages. Jahiliyya poetry is obviously quite intertwined with Semitic paganism and pre-Islamic folk beliefs like the jinn, but enough of it is grounded in real life that it feels weird for me, personally, to see it slotted under the "mythology" label. I just took a look at the Arab Mythology page, and found the way it mentions 'Antarah in the same breath as the obviously mythological Cú Chulainn rather eyebrow-raising.

I remember finding Gaiman's retelling to be rather... Gaiman-y. Which I don't mean as a knock on his writing or scholarship, but that book's not intended to be scholarship, after all. And there were several points where I got the sense that Gaiman had decided to fill in a gap or two with original writing, since suddenly I felt like I was reading American Gods again.

So... good book? Sure. Usable source? Nah, probably not.

Edited by RedSavant on May 29th 2022 at 8:31:44 AM

Mythology does not necessarily mean untrue or overtly fantastical. Simply a traditional narrative believed in by a culture.

That said, historical and semi-historical figures are components of mythology just as entirely fictional characters are. Prince Vladimir was most likely not a werewolf who consorted with wizards and giants in his court. Sundiata Keita most likely wasn't transformed into a buffalo by the ten mistresses of darkness before winning a magic sword and leading a revolution against a demon-king. The battle of the Ten Kings and the Trojan War most likely didn't involve literal gods on the battlefields and supermen killing elephants in one blow with their hammers.

By the same token, Antarah bin Shaddad most likely never killed dragons or defeated entire armies single handedly or had encounters with Jinn. But for the people who sang of his deeds, he did. Cú Chulainn is most likely a purely imaginary figure, but the people who wrote about him genuinely thought he existed in Irish history. As such I think he fits under mythology in this respect as much as Guan Yu of China and Ewuare of Benin for example do.

Is intersting how even in a modern age we use the idea of "modern mythos" with founder of countries, dictators, liberators and many more, giving them often quality that while not over fantastical does often feel very mythological.

Mmm, I see your viewpoint, but I feel the difference here is that 'Antarah is a primary source on his own life in a way that the other folk heroes you mentioned aren't.^* Guan Yu the historical person wrote poetry but not in the same autobiographical details; I don't know anything about Ewuare, but I'm presuming that his life was chronicled through third-party oral tradition like his fellow West African notable Sundiata Keita. 'Antarah's poetry, AFAIK, were only put to ink by the court scribes of Harun al-Rashid, a couple centuries after his lifetime — but the accurate preservation of oral accounts in early medieval Arabia is a whole 'nother can of worms I'm not ready to dive into. He employed religious and mythical imagery in the same way that, say, Tacitus invoked omens and the divine will of the gods in his Histories: to ground their experiences within the worldview of their cultures. The most bombastic events he sang about himself, like the battles between Banu Ghatafan and the Sasanian armies of Khosrau Anushirvan, were things that happened and backed up by other sources.

I'm not the wiki police, so I don't really mind whichever namespace he goes into, but I suppose a useful point of comparison is Alexander the Great, who is most definitely a historical figure and yet also more mythologised by far. The tales ranged from relatively grounded ones within the context of his native Hellenistic tradition (like his taming of Bucephalus and cutting of the Gordian knot, which had been around for a while by the times of Plutarch and Arrian), to outright mythification as the Persian ruler Iskandar in The Shahnameh, to his conflation with the Qur'anic ruler Dhu-l Qarnayn, who sealed off Gog and Magog and from whom rulers from as far away as Southeast Asia would claim descent. We know that he's both a historical figure and a mythological one — but we don't usually slot him into the same category as Odysseus or Esfandiyar because of the latter, if that make sense.

While I get the principle of the argument, Cú Chulainn specifically is a very very bad example because he is the result of a bunch of Irish monks being really, really into Achilles and thinking it'd be super rad to have their own Achilles.