What is your favorite mythological figure (of ancient religions only)?
Ezekiel.
That guy want on a peyote trip in the middle of the desert and literally saw God.
Hands down it’s Dionysus for me. He keeps his promises.
Lord Enma (or Yama) rules over a pretty cool buddhist hell
Diomedes, he got eaten by horses, which sounds metal as fuck.
Baron Samedi
The ghost of Christmas future
Demeter is up there.
Her baby father (Zeus), aka the big douchebag, married away her daughter Persephone to his brother Hades. Patriarchy does what patriarchy does. The brothers were aware neither Persephone nor Demeter would approve of the deal so Hades had to kidnap Persephone and force the deal upon her.
So Persephone were abducted and her mother were beyond herself with worry about her absence. Once Demeter learnt about the deal she threw the hissy fit that all hissy fits are measured against. Plants stopped growing, livestock stopped giving birth and the world soon was in a cataclysmic state. Behold a mother’s justified wrath and tremble.
Douchebag-in-chief was forced to negotiate but wouldn’t anull the whole deal. Only that Persephone would spend half her time with her mother (spring, summer) and the other half with the husband forced upon her (autumn, winter).
This comment alone is making me interested in Greek mythology. I’d like to know more. Any reading suggestions toward that end?
Not as much reading but I’m taking much of my cues regarding mythology from Red over at Overly Sarcastic Productions (https://www.youtube.com/@OverlySarcasticProductions).
Two related videos
Wrath of Demeter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhhANZKerug
Hades and Persephone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac5ksZTvZN8What I especially like about their content is that there is plenty of source critique. Things are seldom presented as “this is the exact truth”. Mentioned in the video about Hades and Persephone is “we don’t know the original myth” which I find telling of much of their mythology work.
Im currently listening to an audiobook by Arthur C Clarke called ‘The Greeks’ which is about ancient greek history.
Ive also listened to Stephen Fry’s ‘Mythos’ which is about ancient Greek mythology.
I would strongly recommend them both.
Thanks a lot for the suggestions!
Mara
NSFW
I think Odyssey is a pretty cool guy. Eh trojans hores and doesnt afraid of anything.
Could you mean the book by Homer the poet, The Odyssey?
Mainly, Lilit(h). Not mythological for me, although both Sumerian and Jewish Kabbalah are generally said as “mythological” by historical references.
I believe in a Goddess that extends beyond a single archetype, while I try to blend archetypes and concepts from various religions and “myths” in order to materialize my own understanding of existence and cosmos.
For me, She is Lilith/Lilit (the fearsome Sumerian Goddess of Winds as well as the Demoness and First Woman not banished from Eden as She fled on Her Will), She is Kali (the fearsome Hindu Goddess and Demoness of destruction and transformation), She is the Yin (the receptive Darkness complementing whilst opposing the Yang light) and the Tao (the wholeness and oneness), She is Al-Lat / Allatu (the Pre-Islam Arabic Goddess of War and Fertility), She is Isis and Bastet and Naunet (Egyptian Goddesses) She is Asherah (Hebrew Goddess consort/sister of Yahweh), She is Ereshkigal and Inanna (Sumerian Goddesses), She is Nuit and She is the Scarlet Woman (Thelemite Goddesses), She is Hekate (the Greek Goddess of Magic and Moon) and Aphrodite (the Greek Goddess of Love) and Athena (the Greek Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare) and Gaia (Goddess of Earth), She is Morana (Slavic personification of Death) and a feminine counterpart of Thanatos (Greek personification of Death as well), and so on, but mainly, Lilith Herself, as beautifully multifaceted as She is, both motherly nurturing and darkly reaping, neither good nor evil, just… Her nature.
I believe in a Sacred and Dark Feminine energy that’s inside and outside everywhere, reaching scientific and philosophical concepts such as the entropy, the fields (as in electromagnetic field), the primordial soup from the beginning of earthly life, the quantum fluctuations, the apeiron, the Nietzschean Abyss. She’s the shining Darkness, infinite nothingness, omnipresent wholeness and the cosmic Oneness.
In summary, the Dark Mother Goddess, often manifesting to me by Her Lilith’s archetype.
Talos
Chill out there, Heimskr.
The Demiurge. Not that I like the Demiurge itself. But explaining the human condition as being a product of bad design appeals to me. I don’t believe the myth and I’m not religious. But as far as myths go, that one is my fave.
inb4: the God of the Abrahamic religions hurr durr
But is it Yhwh or El?
There are numerous names and in fact, there are sources which I cannot recall, that said his full name was like 24 letters long or something like that. Not surprising since he’s a hodgepodge of lots of prior mythos and was probably written of and modified over hundreds of years.
Ah now that’s a trick question, because the Abrahamic god is in fact an amalgam of both, which is why he’s so derangedly bipolar in the Old Testament!
Yeah. I think historically it is interesting, because the Hebrew Elohim of Genesis is in the plural, and there is evidence that followers of El believed him to be one deity in a pantheon. In that sense, Elohim and the associated creation myths have their roots in a polytheistic religion.
Yhwh was more likely a figure from a belief system of a different region which ended up co-opting the earlier stories. I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I think it is actually plausible that things like the Catholic Holy Trinity have roots in El and Yhwh technically being different figures.
Interestingly enough, when Eelohim is used to refer to the Hebrew God in the bible, it takes singular verbs, while it take plural when referring to the gods of the nations surrounding them.
I wonder how much of that has to do with semantic drift on Elohim, i.e. by the time the oldest extant manuscripts were written, the figure was already considered singular despite retaining the noun plural morphology. The implication there would be that earlier (now lost) manuscripts may have had plural verb agreement for Elohim, or maybe simpler / more plausible, there was a time in the oral tradition where Elohim was still considered a plural figure and would have naturally gotten plural verbs.
I think the fact that the plural morphology exists on the noun at all suggests at least that the figure started as a collective.
Edit: probably also worth a mention that portions of Genesis (e.g. Garden of Eden) mirror portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story which is overtly polytheistic.
Yeah, that asshole is nobody’s favorite.
Prometheus
It might seem like a subjective question, but the answer is objectively Prometheus and his replacements in other cultures.
Someone that went against God(s) to give humans knowledge that at the time was considered magical
Like, we talk about how much tech changes stuff today, but fucking fire?
Imagine being alive when your group of humans mastered fire. That shit would have been fucking mind breaking.
He is the one that have humans fire and was chained to the rock for all time while having his guts eaten by a bird each day which healed each night?
Yep.
The OG Light Bringer sentenced to eternal damnation for providing knowledge to humans.
And yes, I’m still salty Christians made him the bad guy.
