The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

This depends on how we define "space" or "mythology".

"Heaven" is traditionally thought of as upwards for example, and you do see spaceship-like objects in mythology. Indeed, God actually does seem to own something akin to a spaceship.

Of course, you have to keep in mind that we might tend to project our own biases on what a certain concept represents.

I would also argue that UF Ology is...if not a modern mythology per se, is a modern folklore of sorts. In fact, you can think of Ancient Aliens myths as a sort of syncretism.

The Wikipedia article does mention that them being called “demons” seemed to happen postconquest, and that the Aztecs probably treated them as actual goddesses.

Which wouldn't be that surprising; it's not unheard of for one religion to try and "degrade" the deities of another religion, such as insisting that the other gods are actually demons, saints, or some other form of human.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Jun 14th 2022 at 12:53:24 PM

(also relevant to History, but this was the thread I thought of first) I came across an article detailing "The Astolfo Effect", which posits that Fate/ versions of known historical or mythological people (Astolfo being the poster boy here) would overtake the actual "canon" (that is the research material about the figures in question) in the google search results. The research article also notes that it is more likely the more obscure the character in question is (with some strange exceptions), and less likely the more liberties Fate takes with say...the name. (Altria aside, the rominsation of Japanese Servants names uses a double vowel system that makes alternate spellings liable to avoid it. Kagetora, Chacha, Ushiwakamaru, among others, have other names that they are known by and using those would avoid the Fate entries, and it seems like it is just so common to refer to the roman Emperor as simply "Nero" that including his "surname" is the way to get to Umu dominating the results)

I find it interesting as it speaks to how impactful Fate is and also because how it might be an issue if pop culture gets in the way of actual historical analysis. An (rather apt) analogy would be trying to find information on fairy tales or by the Disney (or Marvel) versions of said tales instead of the source materials.

I want to ask about the impact this might have on scholarship going forward. FWIW, I'm not expecting a Pricus scenario where misinfo is allowed to fester and spread because of this...yet.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jul 10th 2022 at 9:02:52 AM

I imagine this will make mythology more relatable to younger generations and provide mental images when reading the source materials including the characters, which would make reading those stories less tedious and keep the interest in doing so.

As much snark as we can derive from some of the questionable takes that Type-Moon has done on their characters, the fact remains that they generally do their research and at least try to be respectful to the historical and mythological figures that appear in each work.

Also, and while this is somewhat of a stretch, the Fate series does bring some needed modern sensibilities into the analysis of past mythology. Jason for instance is acknowledged as a douchebag for what he did to Medea and the character, while not any less of a jerk, tries at least to atone later on for not being a better person in life in his own way.

Funnily enough, something similar happened when Creative Assembly released a game's campaign (Rome II) set during the Crisis of the Third Century. If you check out the name Aurelian in google images, the first results you get is the design they gave to him in that game over his alleged bust.

Jason being a douchebag is not contradictory with him being a classical hero, mind you. In classical mythology, being a hero just meant that you were selected by the gods to perform some task. It said nothing about their morality.

This also explains why some of those tasks seem rather more menial (like cleaning out godly stables) than heroic.

Similarly, the term "Anti-Hero" originally didn't imply moral ambiguity per se. The term generally meant a character akin to say, Guybrush Threepwood.

Plus for every character they reexamine through the lens of modern values, there's another character who is absolutely terrible but they whitewash to hell and back, or the opposite case where they were actually a good person, but because they are up against the protagonist or fan-favorite character, they are made out to be a villain.

Edited by danime91 on Jul 9th 2022 at 11:25:05 AM

Also, simply speaking there is values dissonance, Zeus did have good thing on him like sacred hospitality and his handling if typhon, but most of his acts kinda reflect greek morality(or a least part of it, people forget it did evolve with time).

I'm not sure it always reflected Greek morality so much as that their gods were very flawed, and very human. The Greek pantheon was like a soap opera writ large, and like the characters in a soap, they were not supposed to be morally ideal beings.

Also the tendency to link your city's founder to a god led to them getting around a lot.

Edited by alekos23 on Jul 10th 2022 at 11:20:36 AM

Living in ancient Greece is like living in a very high stakes live 24/7 soap opera, where the actors are all powerful gods with a captive audience, and they have no qualms messing with the audience, especially if you do something they don't like (like being on your phone), and you'd better not heckle them, because then you're in for a real beatdown.

Edited by Redmess on Jul 10th 2022 at 10:44:59 AM

Didn't Athens' founding had a different story of Athena and Poseiden competing to be it's patron god and the winner getting the city named after them? Wonder why that way of linking one's city to a god wasn't considered appealing instead going for the "founder/ king is a blood related to this god" approach.

Defeating Typhon was just more a show of Zeus's strength rather than his morality wasn't it? If I am not wrong, it was more a continuation of the succession myth and Zeus defeating Typhon was him defying the cycle of the current god getting overthrown by the next. Given that many Greek gods have themselves engaged in actions they consider wrong when done by their human subjects, they could have probably been seen as a case of above good and evil, couldn't they?

It's not really values dissonance since Zeus was not meant to be some ultimate good. That's a thing for the Abrahamic God, but not for the classical gods.

And even the Abrahamic God was not entirely good either early on, just see the Old Testament, where God still has many traits in common with more classical counterparts (particularly in the vengeance department). It's only later on, when God becomes more abstracted, that he becomes a purely moral, virtuous God.

Coincidentally, that's also around the time God disappears from the stories as a direct, active actor. At that point, the audience become the actors on the stage, and God retreats to the role of stage manager and ultimate critic.

Whether the goddess is named after the city or the city after the goddess has ever been controversial. Wikipedia claims that a consensus for the former has become established b/c the ending "-ene" is more a placename than a personname.

I think the other factor about the Greek gods is that there’s almost certainly hundreds or thousands of stories we don’t know anything about that weren’t preserved. And a whole lot of them were likely ones like “Demeter blessed this tree, don’t cut it down” and then no one cut it down.

The stuff that gets preserved is usually the exciting stories or important stories, there tends to be a lot of absolute nothing stories that are important to a very specific group of people but that don’t really make much sense to anyone else or have much relevance. It’s also a blend of stuff from different cultures and eras.

Like, a whole lot of the stuff we have about Athena is from Athens, and the reason she probably looks so reasonable (in general) is because of course the Athenians would have the positive stories. While Aries would look excessively shitty because the main culture he was the patron of, Sparta, didn’t bother to write anything down for most of their history and everyone else had to deal with Sparta being belligerent idiot assholes to them, so mostly just the negative stories would be preserved.

It’s easy to forget that Classical Greece was like 40 distinct different nations that had, more or less, a shared language and, more or less, shared food styles and clothing, but that could be radically different from each other in other ways.

Edited by Zendervai on Jul 12th 2022 at 11:57:29 AM

What made Jason so unlike a lot of other Classical Myth heroes is that...by and large he didn't really do anything. All of the really impressive stuff was done by the crew of genuine badasses he gathered and Medea.

Other Classical Myth heroes at least did their own shit.

Edited by M84 on Jul 12th 2022 at 11:59:30 PM

Minor nitpick, but Sparta's main patron deity was actually Apollo, whom they honoured in the annual Karneia festival. As an Idle Rich society that specifically took pride in not having to work (as Plutarch noted), they reserved their official cult for the god of things their culture valued most: music, dance and festival games. And while most textual records on their culture came from Athenian writers (as well as Hellenistic/Roman-era chroniclers), these are dominated by the works of Lakonophiles like Xenophon and Plato who admired the Spartan system, a little like how many conservative pundits in modern-day liberal democracies look up to rival authoritarian states as a foil to the faults of their own society.

Then how did the people of Sparta get their reputation as the ultimate Proud Warrior Race Guys? :S

And he dies when the stern of the rotting Argo falls on his head in his sleep.

Jason being considered to be a dick isn't just a modern invention.

It's worth pointing out that his betrayal of Medea wasn't "just" a dick move, it also made him an oathbreaker - he loses Hera's divine favour while Medea escapes on a chariot apparently gifted to her by Helios, implying she still had support from the gods.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jul 12th 2022 at 8:21:48 PM

It's even worse since he wasn't just breaking any oath to Hera. He was breaking a marriage vow to Medea that Hera, the goddess of marriage, set up.

Jason basically spat on the domain of his own patron deity.

Edited by M84 on Jul 13th 2022 at 2:24:38 AM

Not having to work meant having a lot of time on their hands for military training, but there was also a lot of propaganda involved.

It also helped that other city-states had their fair share of what's basically the Ancient Greece equivalent of weebs when it came to Sparta.

Indeed, a lot of Sparta's reputation was built up in the centuries afterwards, as some ideal warrior society. You still see it today with movies like 300 and games like Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Something very similar is happening with the Vikings, who incidentally also have an Assassin's Creed game about them.

Not just in the centuries afterwards - there were people obsessing over Sparta while it was still a major player.

There were Athenian philosophers who whinged about how much cooler Sparta was etc.