Mythology Blog Fall 2019

Oak Tree In the beginning, there was nothing but darkness. Over time this darkness grew and accumulated, and the spirit of the Earth Doctor floated over this darkness like a piece of spiders web in the wind. Noticing how lonesome he was, he began to weep. As his teardrops fell and hit the darkness, they began to form a small pond. After noticing the pond, the Earth doctor ceased his weeping. He came close to the pond to examine his creation. In it, he saw his reflection for the first time. He saw his rich brown skin, deep brown eyes, and long black hair. He took a piece of his hair and let fall into the pond. Out sprouted a big healthy oak tree, but with nothing to keep the tree in place, it kept falling over. The Earth Doctor then scooped up some of the darkness and mixed it with some water from the pond and some of the leaves of the oak tree and squeezed it, and molded it between his hands. In his hands, he had a small ball of dirt. He blew on it, and it dispersed and cover...

Coyote Today's stories focused a lot on the coyote. I feel like in the past when I've read coyote stories, the coyote is always swift and cunning. However, in these stories, he's pretty dumb. He gets tricked by almost all the other animals and always ends up as the loser. They all must have really hated coyotes lol. I don't have much to write about, I liked yesterday's creation story much more. Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest by Katharine Berry Judson (1912)

The Sun and Moon From today's readings, I really like the one about the creation of the world from the Pima people. The part that really caught my attention, for whatever reason, was the part where he made the sun and the moon. I thought it was a bit strange to see the sun being made from a ball of ice, but I can see how that would make sense. I also liked how they got the sun and moon into the sky. The part where it keeps falling down was a little funny but it was clever how it finally settled in the east. Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest by Katharine Berry Judson (1912)

Cipatli , the monster whose body created the earth according to the Nahuatl legend.  This weeks videos were over creation myths which is pretty cool since one of the main parts of my storybook project includes the Nahuatl Creation Myth. These videos went into detail over some of the similarities between the two groups of creation stories which were voids vs dualities? I think that’s how to describe them. Anyways, I saw a lot of smilarities between them and the Nahuatl creation story even though mine was not mentioned in the videos. A big common concept is the creation of the world or earth from the body of a god or higher being. Which my story has. The later videos went into detail about how the creation myths might be a way to enforce or make common the role of a man onto a women. Which kind of confused me. In earlier videos, I believe the pantheons one, he talked a lot about matriarchal pantheons. But in this video series he did not talk about them which i was kind of expe...

Today i am going to look more in depth into the story of Quetzalcoatl in order to find as many details of his legend as possible. This source has a lot of details of when he was deceived:  http://neomexicanismos.com/mexico-prehispanico/leyenda-de-quetzalcoatl-biografia-serpiente-emplumada-maya-azteca-mito/ This source has a good summary of events:  https://www.inside-mexico.com/la-leyenda-de-quetzalcoatl/3/ I’ve read a handful of other stories but they talk about different origin stories for Quetzalcoatl. Some of them are similar to that of Jesus lowkey and say that he was born to a virgin mother. Which is interesting because earlier in the semester when i was doing my initial research I read some articles that mentioned that the Mormons believe quetzalcoatl to be Jesus Christ. This stuff gets crazy, but I already have my origin story so I’m not going to change it. The two sources I have I think are good enough to make the 2nd part of my project. I did not find good im...

Portrait of an Inuit family.  Image source Today's stories were really dark but they were really interesting. The first few ones, I think three, we're talking about what happens to you when you kill someone or lie. They were really gruesome and one of them had some imagery that was pretty explicit. The rest of the stories after that were somewhat different. These stories didn’t appeal to me as much, but I was a fan of the first three. Source:  Eskimo Folk-Tales  by Knud Rasmussen with illustrations by native Eskimo artists (1921).

A polar bear, like the one from the story. Image source For this weeks reading I chose the Inuit folk tales. These stories are much different that the other tales I’ve read this semester so far. Some of them, like the Earth’s creation story, were really blunt. In the creation story, the Earth and all its trees and valleys just fell from the sky. Not much imagery or mysticism in this story, but the others are different. Some of the others are full of some sort of magic or sorcery. I’m still confused not the one about the man and the wizard where the wizard made the man’s wife disappear by making her hang her shoes to dry? My favorite of all of the stories was the one about the pet polar bear. I like how they really personify the polar bear and it basically becomes one of the members of the tribe. I felt really bad for it when the people of the other villages would attack it. I think imma use that story for my story on Thursday. Source: Eskimo Folk-Tales by Knud Rasmussen wi...

Okay, so this one is a little embarrassing. I downloaded the word counter tool at the beginning of the semester but I never figured out how to use it lmao. After reading the instructions posted on the tech tip assignment I finally got it to work. This is going to save me a lot of clicking in the future because I would have to copy and then paste it in another browser with a word counting website open. While this wasn't necessarily a super big hassle it'll now be less of an annoyance. I'm excited to use it! I know this will come in handy because I'm typically the type of person who writes to little so I'll check my word count frequently to make sure I'm meeting the minimum. In the stories, I'm not so bad at this, obviously from my storybook, but in the comments, I am so this is where this tool will come in handy the most. 

Kali , a Hindu goddess. This week's video sets talked about the father god and the mother goddess. It went into detail about the roles they play and how they influenced society. The main point of these videos, I think, were the roles. However, it was something else that caught more of my attention and I thought it was a very important takeaway. In one of the videos, he talks about how goddesses were typically associated with fertility and bearers of life. This was assumed, not because there was evidence of this, but because they found old statues of women with large features, mainly big boobs. The guy mentions that these statues or carvings were never found with anything that resembled a fertility ritual of sorts. So this idea is simply a theory. The important thing to understand is that this theory was made by "modern" humans. The humans that came after the Victorian age of science and believed that men were superior to women. The guy makes an important point say...

Two rats. Image Link One early morning, during a time of great scarcity, a greedy rat came across an enormous and ripe peach that had fallen from the tallest branch of a nearby peach tree. Overjoyed, the hungry rat quickly dragged the delicious fruit back to its nearby hole. Once the rat had arrived home, his equally greedy brother asked where he had found such a good looking piece of fruit. “It was under the large peach tree down by river bend,” explained the rat, “and it’s all mine!” The brother, too lazy to go find his own fruit, immediately began plotting an evil scheme to steal the rat’s peach. Later that evening, while the rat was enjoying his delicious peach, the brother appeared with a few measly pecans he had found while scavenging. He showed them off the rat in an attempt to bait him. “Since you live under my roof, you must give me half of your nuts!” Said the rat, unknowing falling victim to the brother’s scheme. “No, they’re all mine! But you can have them all ...

picture of a crow because he lost his meat. Image Today's stories were pretty interesting. I think my favorite part about them was that a lot of them were origin stories. They also had some stories that had really good moral stories. The one I liked of those was the one where the envious crow lost his meat to the hawk for trying to steal the other little bird's rat. The writing was simple and easy to read. No extravagant words or overly-detailed scenes. Plain and simple stories that had good moral lessons that were straight to the point! Filipino Popular Tales by Dean Spruill Fansler link

A macaque monkey, which seems to be in a lot of the stories. Image For today’s reading I chose the Filipino popular tales. The stories reminded me a lot of the African stories I read for week 7. Most of them involved some sort of trick or trickster like the African ones did. A lot of them followed the same plot? Where the trickster would trick them into eating hot peppers that they said belong to the king and then got them to wear the Kings belt which was actually a boa and killed the poor soul lol. Other than the ones that followed the same plot, the others were really interesting as I had never heard or read them before. I really liked the ones that had the moral written out at the end. It made the purpose or educational part of the story clear which I wasn’t too sure about on the others. Filipino Popular Tales by Dean Spruill Fansler Link to stories

I tried to create a favicon using the same Huitzilipoochtli image I used for my Canvas profile pic, because I'm boring and I like him, but for some reason, I don't think it's working for me? I followed the steps listed in the instructions but whenever I click preview, it still shows the orange blogger square thing? I don't know if I'm somehow doing something wrong? I used two different favicon generators that I found. I just chose the first two that appeared on google, I downloaded both files and used several of the images in each but none of them managed to change my favicon. I even tried using the one that ended in file type .ico several times but nothing seems to work? pls help

This week's videos were very interesting. They talked about the African, Norse, and Indian pantheons. Each is incredibly complex and there is a lot of material to take in. I expected to know the most about the Norse one from what I had seen on TV, but I guess I shouldn't be too quick to trust Hollywood to be historically precise. I didn't know Thor had red hair, Odin had several more kids than I knew about, and Thor's mom was the Earth? I really enjoyed learning about the mythology of the Yoruba people from West Africa. We are learning about them in my African Repercussions class and the professor had mentioned the Orisha to us in class and how they basically possess some human bodies in these sacred rituals. There's a lot going on there as well. I really enjoy learning more mythology through these videos. The videos are put together really well and I love the animations. Link to videos

This semester has definitely felt like a long staircase for me. Image from:  https://www.yourtango.com/2019324469/list-inspirational-quotes-college-students I’m not too happy with the progress I’ve made. Throughout the semester I’ve attended a couple of research conferences and I’ve fallen behind in the class. There’s a lot of room for improvement in my weekly routine, I often do things last minute and I want stop that habit. The class assignments I enjoy the most are definitely the reading ones, learning all the different stories is really cool to me. I try to use as much extra credit as I can based on how much time I have lol, I really enjoy the crash course videos, they’re really informative and entertaining. I think my blog and website are going pretty good? Like I said earlier, I want to get in a better routine of doing the assignments. I’ve just been so busy this semester it’s hard to keep track of everything. What’s definitely messed me up in the past is not doing th...

I thought this image was cute and accurate. Image from:  http://builder.cheezburger.com/Builder#step2_8504778240,https://i.chzbgr.com/imagestore/2015/6/4/3d480738-5c66-498f-b673-dc5da194a5be.jpg Feeback in The feedback I have been receiving is pretty spread out. I've seen some posts where people comment on grammar, plot, or word choice. Some of them are really really good, and they provide me with ideas for future stories or help me fix the current ones. The ones I find most useful have to be the ones dealing with grammar. I'm not a writer, and I never have been, so my grammar is not the best and it may make my writing messy or hard to understand. The feedback that helps correct my grammar helps me avoid confusing paragraphs. Feedback out I'd have to admit that the feedback I leave isn't as good as the ones I receive. If there's part in the story where I get confused I'll let the writer know, but other than that all I really do is compliment the p...

Herakles, the man that became a greek god. Image from:  https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/hercules For the extra credit reading this week, I watched the videos over the ancient Mediterranean. I learned a lot from these videos. I was familiar with some of the myths that were told in the videos but the video helped me look at them from a new perspective. The one that really to opened my eyes the most was the one where they started talking about how not all gods are created with the intent of explaining natural phenomenon, rather some of them are created to explain human nature. I had never really thought about this but as the video progressed and continued to talk about the greek gods it all made sense.  The greek gods weren't perfect, they were actually quite a ways from perfect, but that made the gods seem less distant and more relatable. The stories of the gods and their defects provide great examples of what not to do. What the gods struggled with were th...

I really do enjoy these stories. So simple and different. The one about the king chameleon was funny, the poor guy ended up all alone. I'm also glad they stopped talking about Mr. Spider. The one about how mushrooms were created was also really funny. The debt just kept transferring over and over. I really like how these stories end. If I was to write one, I would hope to imitate the unexpected ending ones. Some weird looking mushrooms: Link Today's stories were from:  https://archive.org/details/westafricanfolkt00barkrich/page/n8 West African Folktales  by William H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair, with drawings by Cecilia Sinclair (1917).

I think these spiders are so cute. This is how I imagine Anansi. Picture from: Link This week's stories were fascinating. I really enjoyed them. Usually, when I think about creation stories, I think of these super intricate and highly detailed stories. These were short and sweet and often didn't end the way I expected them too. I wasn't a big fan of the spider, that guy was a real jerk hiding food from his own family. He was so selfish, I assume that's why his stories are an excellent way to teach lessons about generosity and kindness. The son seemed like a fascinating character. He was just as intelligent as his dad, yet he only ever used it to teach his father a lesson when he was selfish. These stories had a really interesting father-son dynamic. My favorite one was "Anansi and Nothing" I think it demonstrated a very important lesson and ended in a way I could have never imagined. It explained why little kids cry. This really caught me off guard and...