Mythology Blog Fall 2019

The Wendigo For my last assignment, I chose to watch the last set of crash course videos on the list. I really enjoyed watching these videos throughout the semester and wanted to finish it off with them. This set of videos was really neat. The guy went kinda philosophical when he started talking about what it means to be a monster. I was really shook with the Wendigo story. I had heard of them before but didn't know much about them. Learning how they come to existence from humans was pretty creepy and I think it was the best example at representing how monsters are like just humans personified as evil creatures based on their deeds or nature. I also really enjoyed the dragon video. I like how it talked about the differences between eastern and western cultures in regards to how they view dragons. I had gotten a sense for the differences growing up and watching cartoons. All the Asian based cartoons like Dragon Ball Z and Avatar the Last Airbender (if you consider it Asian-b...

Tlaloc In this week's videos, they talked about a lot of different flood myths from all over the world. I had heard they flood myth from the Bible, but all the other ones were new to me. I thought they were really interesting. I could see a lot of similarities between all of them which is wild especially when they come from different continents. I really like the American ones about the Aztec, Inca, and Maya. Even though I did a lot of research on Aztec mythology I had not read the one about the flood. Maybe if I had I could have used it in my storybook. Link to videos:  http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2017/12/crash-course-myth-flood-stories.html

Image Source Loki and his kids seem so powerful, I wish they would have been included in the movies. For this week's extra credit reading I watched the Creation and Destruction videos. As always, they were really entertaining and very informative. They mention the cyclical nature of creation and destruction since most of these doomsday myths often end with the creation of a new world. This I'm pretty familiar with since the Aztec creation legend has the Earth become destroyed and recreated several times. However, I do not know if the Aztec have an apocalypse story. That might be something interesting to look into. Actually, that might be a great idea. This is just me writing out my thoughts but for my storybook project, I could try to search for an Aztec apocalypse. And then essentially I'll just find a way to have Quetzalcoatl destroy the world except for like Huitzilli and his family and the people of Tollan. In the Aztec stories several of the Gods have caused...

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...

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...

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

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...

Cool mythology map I found at  https://metal-gaia.com/2013/06/07/a-map-of-world-mythology/ I watched all three videos and I have so many questions. I never knew that myths were studied this intensely. There is so much to them that I do not even know where to begin. I like the idea of the monomyth, I think it's a great way to turn a myth into more than just a story. The theory that everyone is a hero makes these stories far more relate-able. I never thought that I would relate to Odysseus fighting a cyclops, but with this theory maybe I have already fought mine or will fight mine idk. Thinking about myth's this way can definitely inspire some people with the "if they can do it, then so can I" mentality. Now after watching these videos I'll be sure to keep an eye out for the universal traits they talked about and will definitely consider them when I am working on my storybook project. Videos found at:  http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2017/12/crash-cours...