Me? I like those obscure Scandinavian ones that are like... a gnome that steals your extra raisins or whatever
Also mothman is pretty cool but he's totally real so he doesn't count 😤
Me? I like those obscure Scandinavian ones that are like... a gnome that steals your extra raisins or whatever
Also mothman is pretty cool but he's totally real so he doesn't count 😤
The Rainbow Serpent as a concept was pretty precious to me as a contrarian kid in a rural area full of evangelicals. The whole evil serpent thing seemed so mean to me, a kid who liked the funny lil tube dudes (mostly garter snakes) in my backyard.
But then I find out about this weird old folklore involving the world being given its shape by a giant beautiful snake that was just doing its snake thing. Then I read about what happened to the aborigines yadda yadda yadda I'm posting on a niche leftist board in 2023
Yeah snakes were good in a lot of old religions
True, but the best part for me was that the rainbow snake isn't necessarily good or bad, just a snake doing its thing. It's like it's "naturally supernatural," larger than life but operating within the scope of the natural world as the people who told the story understood it.
A beautiful force of nature, rad.
I think that Abrahamic mythology is extremely polarised between good and evil. You rarely find absolute good and absolute evil in other mythologies. The Norse gods were revered and worshipped but they would absolutely do stupid or malicious stuff from time to time and fight among themselves, meanwhile the Jotuns were rivals of the gods and could be dangerous to encounter but the gods could intersct with them and they were dangerous in a "ancient force of nature you shouldn't fuck with" way rather than the Abrahamic "wants to torment you forever" kind of way.
Norse mythology is an interesting example too because what we have today is supposedly only a small, dubiously-translated piece of the whole. And from what we do have, I swear it has to be ironic or something. The Norse gods are portrayed at every turn as childish and downright villainous, doing all kinds of petty evil like worming their way out of paying for contract labor to systematic oppression and mistreatment of "ugly" dwarves and jotuns. Considering the patriarchal, deeply unequal society that characterized a lot of the region at the time when they were meeting lots of Christians, it makes me wonder if all the tragedy and irony and hopelessness of the famous Voluspa is the result. Maybe an older, now lost, version of the tale is less doom and gloom?
I can't find it for the life of me, but I can recall once reading this interesting paper that argued the vilification of snakes in Christianity was as a rejection of a lot of superstition in bronze age Europe where snakes were seen as a symbol of wisdom (for example, in some variations of the myth of Asclepius he gained his healing powers from observing snakes caring for each other).
Certainly, after all, early Christianity was pretty concerned with depicting God not as divinity itself as we see today but as just the strongest deity that could give all the others a swirly. There were a lot of religious politics to consider back then. Just look at Islam and its origin involving a town that made its money selling figurines of Gods, Mecca, throwing out that pesky monotheist Muhammad who was gonna ruin their economy. The early storytellers who are responsible for what became Judaism could easily have been aware of the political significance of demonizing certain tropes associated with other (pagan) traditions.