mouthporn.net
#greek mythology – @atheostic on Tumblr
Avatar

Atheostic

@atheostic / atheostic.tumblr.com

Agnostic Atheist | She/They | Brazilian-Canadian | Will happily answer any questions you have about atheism/what it's like being an atheist
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
atheostic

Christian Privilege (1/?)

Pop culture prioritizing depicting Hades as evil and Zeus as good to meet Christian preferences and expectations rather than accurately representing Hellenic mythology.

Zeus was a serial cheater and serial rapist who was all-around brutally violent at the best of times.

Hades was a quiet level-headed homebody who did his best to mind his own business.

But according to Christianity, the supernatural being that rules from above is good and the supernatural being that rules from below is bad, so Zeus is depicted as good and Hades as bad to conform to Christian beliefs.

a) Other than Persephone Hades didn't rape anyone, as opposed to Zeus, who went around raping everyone. Plants included.

b) As my Classics prof put it, "The Ancient Greeks would be very confused at us getting upset about Persephone. They'd be like "What? She's just getting married! Everyone gets married!""

That was just how you got married in Ancient Greece. One day you'd get carried off by some dude and you'd be like "Oh look, I guess I'm getting married."

Is it horrific? Yes. But by Ancient Greek standards Hades basically did the equivalent of proposing and eloping.

@p4eiiss

What part of "Is it horrific? Yes." suggests that I don't think rape is bad?

Avatar

Listen, this is a very specific topic to be iffy about, but for your knowledge, the Roman gods are not the Greek gods.

The Romans were big on syncretism (the combination of different forms of belief or intellectual thought) and the adoption of foreign gods. The Greek deities were known since very early periods via the Etruscan culture, which was heavily influenced by Greece since the middle of the 8th century BC because of trade routes as well as the Greek cultural potential and would come to be completely engulfed around the third century BC with the Roman-Etruscan wars, but just like you’d see the Romans claiming the Germanic tribes worshipped their own gods under different names (the Germania by Roman historian Tacitus, written around 98 AD), the same happened here, and the fusion wasn’t 100% accurate.

While in the case of Zeus and Jupiter, for example, it worked well, Venus is far more motherly and political than Aphrodite (as Mars is the Father of Rome via the myth of Romulus and Remus, Venus is Venus Genetrix, Venus the Mother, and the only time you’ll see Aphrodite being motherly is in… the Aeneid, a distinctively Roman piece), Mars is an agricultural god as well as the god of war and has way more political connotations than Ares (he was a member of the archaic Capitoline Triad), Mercury is far more linked with commerce than the more pastoral Hermes, and the list goes on. Apollo was imported directly and very early (a temple for him, the Temple of Apollo Sosianus, was erected in the city of Rome as early as 431 BC), thus keeping the name but undergoing a very distinct Romanization of his attributes and worship. Janus, Quirinus and Terminus were very important Roman gods which had no Greek equivalent.

Isis, for example, was worshipped as herself, equated with a number of deities in both the Greek and the Roman worlds and some of her methods of worship and symbolism were associated with the Virgin Mary. It’s a far more complicated scenario, babes, especially when you consider Alexander’s conquests and the expansion of Hellenistic culture as well as its contact with many other cultures.

Syncretism is way more complicated than “the Romans just stole the Greek gods and gave them different names, the uncreative fucks”. The traditional date for Rome’s foundation is 753 BC and the Western Roman Empire would last until 436 AD. That’s over a thousand years of conquest, trade and growing and shrinking territories, and none of these factors are likely to leave a religion unaltered.

Besides, the practice of religious syncretism is way older and more common than you’d expect. The Akkadians did it to Summerian deities a few thousand years before this especially after the conquest of Sargon of Akkad in 2340 BC (“Mesopotamia: the Sumerians”. Washington State University). The Greeks were doing much the same with the Roman pantheon itself (Dionysus of Halicarnassus and Plutarch use Greek names for Roman cult), with the Egyptian pantheon and with the Scythian pantheon (Herodotus in both cases, though the associations would outlive him, such as the case of Zeus/Amon).

So, no the Roman gods aren’t the plagiarized versions of the Greek gods, and I could defend this in front of a jury.

Avatar
atheostic

While I agree with the claim that the Roman and Greek gods are not the same, I'd like to point out that my Classics prof in uni would vehemently disagree with you on why they are so similar.

As she put it on the first day of Classics 101, "The Romans did NOT borrow from the Greeks. The reason their gods are so similar is that the two cultures had the same parent culture, and their religions used to be the same, not unlike the Norse-Germanic religions or Abrahamic religions."

That being said, the Romans did indeed love adopting other religions' deities. The same professor also talked about how one of the first questions the Romans would ask a new culture they met was "Do you have any gods, and if so what are they" so they could add a statue of said god(s) to the Parthenon.

Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
atheostic

Christian Privilege (1/?)

Pop culture prioritizing depicting Hades as evil and Zeus as good to meet Christian preferences and expectations rather than accurately representing Hellenic mythology.

Zeus was a serial cheater and serial rapist who was all-around brutally violent at the best of times.

Hades was a quiet level-headed homebody who did his best to mind his own business.

But according to Christianity, the supernatural being that rules from above is good and the supernatural being that rules from below is bad, so Zeus is depicted as good and Hades as bad to conform to Christian beliefs.

a) Other than Persephone Hades didn't rape anyone, as opposed to Zeus, who went around raping everyone. Plants included.

b) As my Classics prof put it, "The Ancient Greeks would be very confused at us getting upset about Persephone. They'd be like "What? She's just getting married! Everyone gets married!""

That was just how you got married in Ancient Greece. One day you'd get carried off by some dude and you'd be like "Oh look, I guess I'm getting married."

Is it horrific? Yes. But by Ancient Greek standards Hades basically did the equivalent of proposing and eloping.

Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
jewfrogs

if you call greek myths fanfiction i am not going to listen to anything you say

They are literally fanfiction op

i am literally a classicist and you are literally wrong!

by definition, fanfiction a) relies on a centralized body of work (a source or canon) and b) is understood and intended as fiction on the part of both the author and the audience. for greek audiences, the line between history and mythology was largely nonexistent. when a text is a part of a people’s religious lives and practices, it’s not fiction to them, and calling a religious tradition fanfiction is more than a little reductive and ugly. fanfiction is written by fans of a particular fiction. it is simply mind-boggling to describe practitioners of a religion as “fans” or to assert that the relationship between ancient greeks and their religion is comparable in any way to the relationship between a modern-day fan and a piece of media.

not only that, but there is no singular, authoritative canon of greek mythology. it is a decentralized web of thousands of different stories with no definitive source to speak of. even works that could be seen as derivative of other works (such as, say, the aithopis to the iliad) are part of the mythology in and of themselves, meaning that there is no line between “canon” and “fanon” that provides a defining distinction of fanfiction. if neither the authors nor the audience see a text as fiction and there is no original text to refer back to as the source, it’s not fanfiction.

Avatar
atheostic

The Bible is a lot closer to fanfiction than Greek mythology could ever hope to be. 

Noah’s Flood is demonstrably borrowed from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the oldest story written down that we know of. (Look up Utnapishtim’s Flood).

Source: My History of Information class during my Master’s degree in Information Science.

Avatar

What is this? a crossover episode?

My advice to you, run

Avatar
autumngracy

Solution:

Tell Zeus you’ll agree to meet him but only if he’s in the guise of a swan (a very sexy swan)

Tell Odin you will arrive in the form of a swan

Give them the same meeting location, pop some popcorn and hide in the bushes

Loki, is that you?

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
mouthporn.net