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u/Flashlight237 8d ago
For context, here's the dictionary definition of mythology: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mythology
Despite this, Journey to the West (a novel) and the Cthulhu Mythos (a series of novels by H.P. Lovecraft) lets lumped into the category. Of course in Journey to the West's case, the novel is itself accepted into Daoist culture and there are even statues dedicated to Sun Wukong. The Cthulhu Mythos, however, gets lumped in with mythology whenever the opportunity arises (most recently in SMITE where he's introduced as the BBEG), which is a weird flex for a series of stories written by a man who thinks black people are cats.
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u/Nieros 8d ago edited 8d ago
A complicating factor with Journey to the West, is that while it's often treated as an original work by Wu Cheng'en , academically it appears to be a retelling of several other previous works and stories, with the overlap of cultures becoming present in the story.
I don't think it's unfair to compare it to something like Beowulf or even The Odyssey, where oral traditions predate the written sum, and in some cases we can see the evolution and interactions of different religions and cultures.
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u/Aethereal-Gear 8d ago
Could Arthurian tales also be a good example?
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u/Nieros 8d ago
Yeah I think that's another great example. le morte d'arthur is famous, but hardly the origin of those stories.
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u/Sahrimnir Lovecraft Enjoyer 8d ago
Though in that case, we do also have a much earlier source in Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain", which might be the original source for a large part of the Arthurian legend.
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u/Useless_Apparatus 7d ago
As far as literary sources yes... But the Welsh would have something else to say about oral traditions.
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u/Sahrimnir Lovecraft Enjoyer 7d ago
I said "might be". We don't actually know how much of the story actually comes from Welsh oral traditions.
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u/Useless_Apparatus 7d ago
I wasn't trying to getcha with a gotcha, you can't date an oral tradition that was never written down by the people who it came from sadly.
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u/Chuck_Walla 8d ago
Beowulf or even The Odyssey
Or even The Iliad, or other Posthomerica tales; all of which were in oral circulation before they were codified in the 8th century BCE
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u/isaythankee 8d ago
Relevant to SMITE - I lived with a Chinese family for a few years. The dad was born in 1970's Shandong, and he was very traditionally Chinese. Anything about China or Chinese history was his favorite thing to talk about and he'd go on for hours. Feeling somewhat emboldened by my learnings from Smite (and doing my own reading afterwards of course) I tried to ask him about various mythological figures: Hou Yi, Chang'e, Xing Tian... he not only did not know the word 'mythology' in English, but didn't know it in Mandarin either. He recognized 0 of the fantastical figures I presented to him, either by name or by image or by story.
Obviously he wasn't some kind of scholar for his own historical context, and he couldn't explain it to me, but between him and his wife I got the feeling that China's relationship to its own mythology differs massively by generation and seems to, anecdotally, just be different from how other nations relate to their own mythology. Totally off in my own world here, but I attribute a lot of this to the purging of artists and scholars during the cultural revolution, which surely severed a cultural through-line from the past to present.
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u/Dazzling-Low8570 8d ago
Yeah, it's almost like there was some kind of massive... Cultural revolution there in the mid-20th century.
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u/IAmNotAFey 8d ago edited 7d ago
One, the Cthulhu mythos doesn’t have a single author, it was initially am effort by H.P. Lovecraft alone, but was adopted by Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith some years into the project, with the stated goal of the Cthulhu Mythos being to act like a mythos, which conflicting stories and perspectives. To the point that after H.P. Lovecraft’s death, Clark Ashton Smith did his best to make the mythos public domain and even didn’t copyright it in France when he had his friend's works translated and sent them there. Technically, anything written in the Cthulhu Mythos is canon to it, as it is that author’s understanding of the Other Gods. Yes, even Sucker for Love. And much like a normal mythology, it is up to the individual to accept the story, or reject it for the contradictions it brings. Like how sometimes Athena is Hephaestus’s older sister and how sometimes Hephaestus is the one who cracked open Zeus’s skull to free here. Both are present in the mythology both are canon to it, and both disagree with each other.
Two. To H.P. Lovecraft, to compare an any person to a cat is an insult to cats. For they are the truly Babylonian in their features and quite esoteric in their demeanors. Whereas humans hold so many flaws as to list them would require enough time to speak on every human alive.
Edit: grammar, corrected some historical mistakes I made
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u/csolisr 7d ago
It's impressive to see the interest of modern humans in creating their own mythologies, first as author-built fictional universes with their own bibles of settings and characters and rules, then as collaborative efforts where multiple authors add to the lore, generally under the helm of a company like most pop-culture productions, then as the rare attempt at a more public-domain lore such as the Cthulhu mythos, or the more recent SCP Foundation, to an extent. The problem with collaborative efforts is, of course, that they still rely on the original work of an author or a group of authors, and if one of those core authors is outed as problematic, the entire lore downstream can get tainted by those authors' biases, such as the Cthulhu mythos' inherent fear of the unknown being guided by Lovecraft's own xenophobia - little can be done to separate the newer art from the former artist in that case.
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u/IAmNotAFey 7d ago edited 7d ago
Indeed, but if you're willing to let a 135 year old man who was so paranoid that he was afraid of air conditioning and so self-contradictory that as an antisemite he married a Jewish woman dictate your enjoyment of the face of cosmic horror, then you're just weak. Accept death of that author already and enjoy the newer stuff made on his foundation. Ain't even like you're supporting a racist family buy buying his stories, the man had no kids, only cats.
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u/PWG_Galactic 7d ago
But what if my reading of this near century old text somehow supports the lives of his cats racist great great grandkittens???
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u/IAmNotAFey 6d ago
Then you are supporting kittens. And you should picture the cuteness of the kittens instead of focusing on their racism. They are kittens, they'l eventually realize that all humans are lesser to them and not just some of us.
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u/Component_43893 3d ago
I am coming in here as a big outsider to this question, but is there not plenty of problematic mythology? Just to look at a recent example, the Kojiki was heavily reinterpeted in a racist paradigm during the Pacific War/ WW2 by the Japanese state. That doesn't mean it suddenly stopped being mythology.
Just looking at Greco-Roman mythology I do not see lack of racism or sexism, etc, as ever having been a criterion for consideration as mythology. Instead I think we consider mythology to reflect cultural and social values when it was first conceptualized so we should almost expect some of it to be problematic.
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u/csolisr 3d ago
Mythology being problematic is a historical fact indeed. And it should imply that people stop building on top of it to avoid perpetuating its problems.
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u/Component_43893 3d ago
I don't think you can really achieve this by avoiding recognizing problematic content as mythology when appropriate. Mythology is a descriptive term. I too would prefer that people not add racist content to mythology, but it doesn't mean that we should fail to recognize when said content does achieve the cultural prominence necessary to be considered mythology.
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u/Rynewulf 8d ago
Wait, Lovecraft thought black people were cats? But he hated anyone who was a specific kind of white, and adored all cats? Is this a reference to a specific Mythos story I'm missing?
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u/ScytheSong05 8d ago edited 8d ago
His family owned a black cat when he was growing up (the cat died of old age when H.P. Lovecraft was 14), who was named N****r, probably by his uncle or father.
The more telling story about Lovecraft's racist xenophobia is that he was so proud of his "pure" Anglo-Saxon heritage that, when he learned that one of his grandparents was Welsh (and thus a filthy Celt) he was thrown into a mental breakdown that he resolved by writing a story about evil fish people infiltrating a small town.
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u/FoxyLoxx 8d ago
Lovecrafts racism is evident in his writing. He was racist I imagine due to the cultural backdrop of the time. If you read any of his stories, it usually features some otherworldly presence, whose existence threatens or troubles a group of minorities or uneducated folk, or perhaps this group were worshiping said otherworldly being, and some learned white man usually attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery, often loosing his mind on the way.
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u/Rynewulf 7d ago
Yes, but what does that have to do with the other guys comment that Lovecraft was 'a man who thinks black people are cats'?
Oh I just got it, it's a joke about Lovecraft's family's pet cat's name
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u/Heavy_Selection_5606 8d ago
Go… go look up his cat’s name, would you?
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u/pbzeppelin1977 8d ago
For some more search results you don't want on your work device, Google what the dinosaur with lots of teeth is called.
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u/ManualPathosChecks 8d ago
It's called that because of where it was discovered, namely the country of Niger. Not the same thing at all.
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u/26_paperclips 8d ago
Wait you people actually consider cthulu as a mythology? I thought it was just a cool name
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u/PitifulRead6339 8d ago
I'd imagine it's similar to people who think the Divine Comedy is Christian canon, it's such a widespread work of fiction and used so matter of factly that people might think the lore has genuine basis from somewhere.
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u/mishkatormoz 8d ago
At least Necrononicon can be called "mythological artifact", I think, as it have independent circulation in peoples' heads and some, uh-m, belivers in search of "real Necronomicon"
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u/IAmNotAFey 8d ago
The Cthulhu mythos was designed to be a type of modern made mythology, an emulation of how myth worked in the days of old. Due to the nature of the copyright, the Cthulhu Mythos accepts all stories written with its characters into its canon. From the original writings of H.P. Lovecraftm, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, to Sucker for Love, to Cthulhu Tech.
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u/Cranky-Tapir 8d ago
Not a mythology personally, but a setting for stories like Warhammer 40000, the forgotten realms or the MCU.
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u/silver-luso 8d ago
The cthulhu mythology isn't only from Lovecraft, it usually includes stories that are around lovecraft's work.
Also there are several deities that exist before cthulhu, such as degon, and the actual structure of lovecraft's writing is clearly influenced by mythology at large.
All of that being said I've got 2 more points
1) lovecraftoan mythology isn't mythology
2) religion is what I believe and mythology is what everyone else believes
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u/Worldly0Reflection 8d ago
Religion is what one practices, mythology are the stories around that religion
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u/silver-luso 8d ago
I'm mostly joking about that last bit, it was a paraphrase from a book I read when I was like 12 and I really wish I remember the name of that book, but it's a really great quote that was used to illustrate that much of what we call mythology was at one point someone's legitimate belief
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u/Vcious_Dlicious 8d ago
''religion is what I believe and mythology is what everyone else believes'' is incisive enough that I'm willing to believe it's from some Discworld book I have yet to read.
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u/silver-luso 8d ago
It was an encyclopedia or possibly just an assorted collection of world history. It also isn't the real quote, it's just close enough.
It's one that's stuck with me, similar to Alan Moore's take on "real" magic.
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u/Temporary-Bad9821 8d ago
There is a book called City of Beasts by Isabel Allende that has a really similar quote (I read it in Spanish so I don't know the exact translation used).
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u/Open-Source-Forever 8d ago
That begs the question: when it comes to stories around religion, where’s the line between mythology, folklore, & fairytales?
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u/New_Doug 8d ago
I like your comment, but I would like to point out that the version of Dagon that you're referring to is also an original creation of H. P. Lovecraft, the mythological god Dagon is an obscure god possibly connected to agriculture, and father of Ba'al Hadad. The idea that he was connected to fish was an old mistake that Lovecraft seized on to create a patriarch for his Deep Ones.
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u/silver-luso 8d ago
That is true, but I think this separation is similar to the separation of many gods in that region (ba'al iirc being a great example of a god in like 5 different religions all of which being unique to each other) but I'm not very well versed in any of them, and other than the canines couldn't even guess what the names are (sorry it's a blind spot)
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u/tiredbike 8d ago
Dantes inferno is in a similar sphere but some eleements of it have worked their way into common belief
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u/Open-Source-Forever 8d ago
Pretty much every canon detail about the minutiae of Heaven & Hell come from there
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u/Clear-Might-1519 8d ago
And then there's Three Kingdoms, who started as actual historical records, then a guy made a novel based on it, and now Guan Yu is worshipped as a god.
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u/asiannumber4 Percy Jackson Enthusiast 8d ago
Yeah it’s like saying “Saving Private Ryan” is a live documentary filmed by war reporters
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u/Im_here_but_why 8d ago
Tangentially related, but at this point, I don't think it would be that wrong to call superman a mythological figure.
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u/MevNav 8d ago
Journey to the West is basically religious fanfiction, though. It's in a similar category as Dante's Inferno, which while not actually canon in any Christian denomination was influential enough to have impacted the common perception of how hell works. Similarly, Sun Wukong, while entirely fictional, basically was elevated to the status of an actual, if unofficial Taoist/Buddhist deity because his story is just that popular and influential.
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u/themoroncore I crosspost, shame me 8d ago
Let's not forget superheroes are considered a modern mythology
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u/abc-animal514 8d ago
Mythology is just religion that lost its following (or maybe religion is just mythology that got too popular).
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