Gyrrakavian wrote:Man, pop culture really has a way of mucking up things over the centuries. Mixing all sorts of religions together thanks to lazy translations and English Romantic poets who can't be bothered to do proper research*.
- Hades runs a kingdom of the dead in the underworld in Greek mythology (there are no current practitioners, thus "mythology").
- Lucifer is being punished like the rest of those lost souls cast into Hell according to the Christian religion.
*Incidentally, these rich bums are also largely responsible for the now quite common inaccurate depictions of many mythological creatures and figures. Lamia, for example, DID NOT have a serpent tail in place of legs. That was the drakaina Sybaris. Lamia just had a distorted face. Hell, we even know which poet's fault it was, John Keats.
Yeah, but Keats was just following an older traditional practice. Much older. Probably 20,000 years older, or more.
The human race has been conflating, mixing, trading, renaming, and remapping attributes in its religions and mythologies for a very long time. Cultures meet and mix and conquer one another, and the names and attributes of the gods they worship mix and meld and melt together. The supreme god/gods/goddesses of one people are absorbed into another culture, often being "downgraded" to a lesser status (helper-god or angel) or declared to be an "aspect" of the new culture's own deity. It's got a five-dollar-word name - syncretism - and it's been going on for a long time and is still going on today.
Throughout much of this time, "pop culture" was 99% of what there was... few people could read and write, most cultural and religious traditions were passed down verbally, and there was often major differences between "folk religion" as actually practiced by the common folk and "temple religion" as practiced by the priests and rulers. If you look at (e.g.) Greek mythology, different writers recording the beliefs in different areas in Greece often ascribed significantly different ancestries and characteristics to the various gods and demigods and monsters. I don't think there's such a thing as any "pure" mythology... at most there seems to be a general consensus among most scholars about what was likely the most-commonly-held set of beliefs at a given place and time. The times that societies have tried to "purify" their own belief systems... acknowledging only one correct interpretation, and eliminating all that don't comply... well, these have usually been terribly,
terribly bloody periods in history.
There's plenty of syncretism in the roots of Christianity. Look back at biblical scholarship about Yahweh, El, Elohim (plural), and the complex relationship between early Israelite religion and Canaanite beliefs. More recently, look at how Catholicism exists in much of the New World e.g. Central and South America - many of the local saints, and traditional ways of portraying Christian holy figures are derived or adapted from the local indigenous pre-Christian religious traditions. Consider the Peruvian and Bolivian
Pachamama tradition, where the Virgin Mary has been syncretized with the Pachamama "Earth Mother" goddess figure. Even today, in Peru, if you go into a Catholic church, you'll see the Virgin Mary portrayed wearing a wide triangular dress with a profile like a mountain peak.. a traditional symbol for Pachamama, and quite unlike any European or Middle Eastern representation of the Virgin that I've ever seen. For another example, look at Louisiana Voodoo - a syncretic collision between western African regions and Catholicism.
So, if anybody wants a canonical "pure" mythology, I think you'll find it rather difficult to pin one down.
Look on the bright side, though. Among all these varied and inter-mixed deities, demigods, spirits, daemons, underworlds, and purgatories, I'm sure that you'll be able to find
someone willing to make a pit to hold punsters like me!
