[ SECRET POST #3346 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3346 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.
(Donald Trump / Milo Yiannopoulos)



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02.
[Pathologic]


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03.
[Legends of Tomorrow]


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04.
[Tom Hiddleston in Crimson Peak]


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05.


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06.


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07.
(How to be a Serial Killer)


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08.


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09.


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10.
[Pretty Little Liars]


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11.
[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]


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12.












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 032 secrets from Secret Submission Post #478.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Mythology Threads

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a huge mythology fan. I actually do academic work in European pagan religions (though I've studied a bit of East Asian myth/native religions, too, but it's been awhile).

What I'm the most interested in is variance within the "same religion" and religious identity. Basically, that is, religious identity doesn't much exist at all until the rise of Christianity, let alone a self-identification with paganism. And between two different villages, you could have completely different ideas about gods and myths! For example, Thor was considered the all-powerful king-god in many Germanic areas, not Odin. I also love adoption/adaptation of gods. It's really interesting to see, for example, who the Romans considered Jupiter to be before the deity predominantly absorbed the Greek Zeus. I like how gods could bounce around the continent, under different names or variations of the same name, picking up pieces of myths here and there. Pre-Christian religious outlook was amazing, though to be fair, Christianity did a fair bit of absorption/adaptation itself.

.../nerd. I could talk about mythology for approximately forever.

Re: Mythology Threads

[(Anonymous)]

That's really interesting. I remember reading somewhere about how Aphrodite used to be the local Mother Goddess and was subsumed into the Greek Pantheon. The original Mother Goddess figure that you see in really old religions fascinates me. I'd love to know what kinds of rituals they had for her (you can see a tiny many-breasted figure of her that I think it neolithic). The play between this really powerful female goddess and what happens to her in myths really shows how the gender roles shifted and were viewed by different societies (I think).

I agree about the variation in the deities. Whenever I'm looking them up, it's always so curious to see how the traits of one god end up in another god, or how one story can be ascribed to different gods. I hadn't considered that they'd be that varied from village to village (I thought it was more "country" and time), so that's interesting but it makes sense. My logistics-loving heart is curious about the ways travel and daily life affected that kind of thing.

I'm also fascinated by ancient Celtic religion since so little appears to have survived. I'd love to know more about their rituals and what kind of knowledge they had.

/not as well versed but also a mythology nerd

Re: Mythology Threads

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not super familiar with Aphrodite as a mother goddess, but that was the case with Artemis/Diana! I went to Turkey, and in a museum in Istanbul a popular portrayal of Artemis was as a many-breasted goddess (Artemis of Ephesus). I bought a copy of it in the museum's gift store, I thought it was Super cool, especially since the most popular surviving conception of Artemis is as a virgin goddess, not really associated with motherhood.

I love the variation too, because it's kind of interesting sociologically. Not to imply that rivalry between different gods or whatever didn't exist, but groups were pretty quick to "associate" certain gods from other cultures as being the same god as one from their culture. Such as what the Romans did when they conquered Germanic and Celtic areas. That's how we got the days of the week, after all, since the Roman days were "translated" into names corresponding with Germanic counterparts.

I also so wish there was more surviving about the Celtic religion. I think some of what makes Northern European mythology so interesting is that it was "illiterate". You occasionally get tiny bits of information coming from missionary writings, or even more indirectly through the various things that were made illegal once paganism was outlawed... but yeah. I always hope one day we'll find an in-depth encyclopedia on Celtic paganism buried in some mound somewhere that dates to the seventh century or earlier. We can hope, right?

Re: Mythology Threads

[(Anonymous)]

I think a lot of the Greek goddesses started out as local Mother Goddesses that were later incorporated into the Greek pantheon. The Artemis thing sounds familiar. I know there was a meteor that was recovered and shaped into a many-breasted statue (I think for Diana). I think one of the Seven Wonders of the World was built to house it. (As an aside, this is one of my other fascinations. Did you know that ancient Greeks did find dinosaur and mammoth/other extinct animal bones? Archeologists used to find them in their digs and just dismissed them as being unrelated to their dig, but now there's some thought that Greeks actually collected them and might've been inspired by those bones for some of their mythological monsters.)

I find illiterate societies to be fascinating. I'd actually love to hear the original Beowulf because I'm personally convinced that the Christian elements were added later, so it would be really interesting to see what it originally looked like.

On a similar note, I'm curious about all the "secret" knowledge that priests and tradesmen had. I wonder if there was profound knowledge that was lost when one of them died too soon. But I also look at some of the showboat-tricks that Roman/Greek temples put in place to drum up money, and it makes religion seem like big business. The dichotomy is fascinating.

Re: Mythology Threads

[(Anonymous)]

I've studied a fair bit about northern European paganism. It's so fascinating!

One of my favorite tidbits is the viking Buddhas. There's just so little known about pre-Christian religious practicies there. And most of what's known is very tinted by a Christian mindset. I come from a polytheist background myself so this is very apparent to me. Few scholars seem to consider that a polytheist would have very little trouble accepting the existence of other gods, or even paying them occasional tribute, without that signifying a total conversion.

Christianity says you can have no other gods, and lays down lots of absolute laws on it's followers (though how much this was enforced during conversion periods varies) but other faiths don't have these sorts of all-or-nothing rulings.

There's also the fact that the pagan gods we are familiar with today are not necessarily the same that were well-known back then, and also that existing recordings such as Snorri's work may totally distort the "original" stories to make them more palatable to the Church. Things like Lokatattur definitely suggest later reworking of the myths.

Re: Mythology Threads

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, exactly! You know, the Romans often accused Christians of being atheists, in fact, because they denied the existence of most of the gods. Not to generalize the pagan mindset - atheism isn't new, neither is viewing the gods more as spiritual symbols than literal beings that drag the sun across the sky, that was very much present in society back then. But the "pagan mindset" if you will, was not exclusive and for the most part it wasn't organized, especially in illiterate areas. There wasn't a centralized pagan church, beyond -maybe- a king participating in religious rituals or being considered a demi-god or something. Exclusivity to the point of denying other gods was a fairly radical idea, and it really confused the Romans. Sure, the Jews did it too, but they at least mostly kept to themselves, unlike the Christians. It's a really fascinating comparison, and it's pretty cool to read polemics of the time. Reading stuff by, say, Porphyry, Julian the Apostate, Celsus, and all these philosophers who were brought into the debate is really interesting.

And yes, you are absolutely right. We tend to think we know more about Norse mythology just because there's some pretty rich Icelandic material, but what people don't always realize is that Snorri Sturluson wrote long after the Viking Age, and he himself identified, at least ostensibly, as a Christian. His creation myth includes a volcano - which exists in Iceland. But there are no volcanoes in Scandinavia. I do believe Snorri probably was writing down a lot of folklore, but I also am fairly confident he made a lot of it up, or things were adapted in the hundreds of years after Scandinavia officially converted to Christianity. Now, myths being adapted is entirely within the spirit of paganism. But the point is, what people actually believed still is pretty mysterious, and our understanding of mythology today doesn't necessarily reflect what pre-Christian peoples believed.