Mythology Blog Fall 2019

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