#demythologization

[anaxerneas]

Nor should we doubt for a moment how very literally these images were meant to be taken. All of this might seem to some of us today, of course, to reduce much of the soteriology of the New Testament to little more than naïve mythology or bad science; but that would be a thoroughly parochial judgment. Persons of every age are constrained to think and speak within the image of reality they know; but that does not mean that the truths they attempt to enunciate are exhausted by those conceptual forms. Whatever the case, though, the fact remains that, for Paul (as for all the Christians of his time), Christ’s triumph over and subjugation of the cosmic Principalities and Authorities and Powers (1 Corinthians 15:24-28) has literally opened a path through the planetary spheres, the encompassing heavens, the armies of the air and the potentates on high, all the way to God. This is a claim at once both physical and spiritual. And, even if now most of us can make sense of only the latter, we should nevertheless—just for understanding’s sake—understand that this was not so for the earliest Christians. We should at the very least let ourselves recognize the integral unity of the natural and the supernatural, the cosmic and the divine, in Paul’s joyous proclamation that “neither death nor life nor angels nor Archons nor things present nor things imminent nor Powers nor height nor depth nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8:38-39). (Needless to say, we could easily add “aerial toll houses” or “demons of the air” to that inventory.)

David Bentley Hart, "Nor Height Nor Depth: On The Toll Houses"

#david bentley hart #theology #demythologization #?

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[tomorrowusa]

« Why do children’s stories about the Civil Rights era generate such visceral MAGA opposition, including passionate demands to ban books in schools and libraries? Because the savages in these stories are not hatchet-wielding Indians on the prairie or slaves bound on ships from Africa. They are Southern white Christian conservatives who blow up little girls in church, shoot Black heroes in the back and murder courageous young men under the cowardly cover of a Mississippi night.

[ … ]

There was a time when mindless natives whooped and scalped their way through the stylized plains of 1950s Hollywood. Conservatives continue to view that era as a cultural lodestar. But the old sets have been struck. »

— Francis Wilkinson at Talking Points Memo, one of the most enduring political blogs.

Yeah, concepts like the "winning of the west" and the "paternalistic plantation owner" will die hard with rightwingers.

It's true that Hollywood and even the early years of TV programming had much to do with perpetrating these distortions of history. But as long ago as the late 1960s attempts were being made to take a more reality-based view of history.

This is actually from a comedy group called "The Firesign Theater" The blurb at YouTube gives the original release date as 1968. Although it's obviously satire, it must have given people back then a more unvarnished view of history than John Wayne films.

So the effort to demythologize the more blatant distortions in US history goes back more than half a century. The difference is that it's now trending mainstream and therefore is being strongly resisted by those with an interest in preserving such distortions.

#us history #maga censorship #book banning #the far right #teaching history in schools #demythologizing #native americans #the firesign theater #francis wilkinson

[size-two-shrimp]

My Eternity by Vanelily is so Gabrielcore

#“this world is decorated by the hands of lies” hell yeah it is brother kill the council right now do it #“define my life despite the gods pathetic cry” again kill the council gay boy get their asses!! #“theyve played us all for fools for in their everlasting rule faux death is but a dirty tool” 3- #*again the council / 3-2 epilogue #“if i take the blade of abraham i could use this vessel as a sacrificial lamb ill awake my fate to calculate and escape...” again #council slaughter #“ill bring the ones i love to my eternity and demythologize my lines” showing off the councilors head ykyk #“so what could be the reason my blood turned to wine” hehe v1 #“im scared my fears locking up the holy sky if i told the world the truth of this reality id be eaten alive my heads been bugged and no #matter how i try ill never get a chance to reach eternity or even say goodbye“ trying to kill v1 because hes scared of death via lightless #then being ok with it killing the council and not having a chance to atone for what hes done to say.. the primes #do you understand what im saying do my words make sense

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[strawberry-crocodile]

When I say "Birds are Dinosaurs" and you say "No you know what I mean, when we say dinosaurs we mean Something Else" I think like... you don't know what I mean.

There's sort of a constructed category of dinosaurs as these scaly, powerful, outdated animals, and birds as these delicate modern animals, and I want you to understand that these ideas are based on outdated science and human biases. That birds can and have grown huge and predatory, that dinosaurs were a hugely diverse group that had grazers and small arboreal animals and fast intelligent ones.

Birds are a category of dinosaur, the only one we have left around. Appreciate them, demythologize dinosaurs, and destroy the boxes you put nature into.

#dinosaurs #palaeoblr #dalucaray

[andromerot]

It took Angela Carter to demythologize “Sleeping Beauty” and break the magic spell that has taken us all in ever since Basile, Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm codified the fairy tale. “In a faraway land long ago”: Disney’s Sleeping Beauty begins with words that remind us of the drive to preserve the mythical power of tales from times past, to perpetuate the cult of the beautiful corpse that is the fairy tale in the form told in times past. Just as Carter’s Sleeping Beauty in her story “The Lady of the House of Love” repeats “ancestral crimes,” so the fairy tale enables us to lose ourselves in a mindless cycle of repetition compulsion that reproduces and reinforces social norms. The house of fairy tale, like the House of Love, degenerates into ruins—“cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster”—when left to its own devices, visited only by sycophantic suitors driven more by the lure of beauty than the desire to reanimate. Without the right suitor, Carter’s somnambulant beauty has become “a cave full of echoes,” “a system of repetitions,” “a closed circuit.” Leading a “baleful posthumous” existence, she feeds on humans to sustain her. It is from this dark tradition that Neil Gaiman constructs his breathtakingly compelling “Snow, Glass, Apples” Sleeping Beauty and Briar Rose, with their magnetic beauty and supremely passive status, remain hauntingly seductive figures in our cultural imagination, reminding us of the pleasures of beauty but also of the attractions of morbidity. They may be immobile, but they also migrate with ease into new media as counterparts to mercurial tricksters—all the warrior women who hunt, shoot, and seek revenge in today’s cinematic refashioning of fairy-tale figures. That their stories have been resurrected and are constantly reimagined is a stark reminder that the emergence of a female trickster—feisty and ferocious heroines like Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and Lisbeth Salander in The Millennium Trilogy—does not necessarily signal a seismic shift in our understanding of female agency, even if trickster tales frame new perils and possibilities for postmodern heroines. Sleeping Beauty, a true hermeneutic puzzle in her many cultural incarnations, preserves the magical, mythical elements of fairy tales, even as she cries out for disenchantment.

From Maria Tatar's The Classic Fairy Tales

#just thought u guys would have fun w this one :3 #taleposting

[kaatiba]

I am excited and proud to present the prologue to volume one of my fantasy series, Legends of Mourra, featuring a kidnapped prince, a rescue mission, djinn, and lingering legends.

With much love to @treesandwords, @olive-riggzey, @malglories, @anubisisms, @a-dream-deferred, @dogscomplex, @tracle0, @demythologized for your interest! 💕

#lofm.wip #wip excerpt #kaatibawrites #do let me know if the link is working #im getting intermitten errors #if so ill share it in full on tumblr without the external link

[teeteepeedee]

and always in good fun, of course

#ttpd prep #Abbie asks a question

[power-chords]

On Zionist Literature, which aims to demythologize the origins of Jewish nationalism, is an analysis of Zionism from the vantage of the people upon whom it was inflicted. With a verve verging on swagger, Kanafani challenges the very foundations of Jewish historiography on the origins of Zionism through a close reading of the literary precursors to the colonization of Palestine. Along the way, he makes historical claims that radically contradict the conventional wisdom of both his day and ours about Jewish ethnic identity and assimilation in Europe.

While some of these claims are myth-breaking, others are ahistorical. But as Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita notes in his introduction to the new edition, his controversial analyses are usefully provocative, as Kanafani “inverts the common narrative of Zionism as an existential necessity.” Indeed, the strength of Kanafani’s contribution lies less in its ability to intervene in Jewish historiography than in its power as a method of reasoning from his own existential condition as a colonized Palestinian.

Ever the revolutionary, Kanafani’s intellectual pursuits were in direct service of a positive political project. After immersing himself in these texts—and in the wake of the total collapse of the Arab front following its military defeat in the June 1967 war (colloquially known as the “Six Day War” in Israel)—Kanafani began to believe that unlike Zionism, which turned the racializing logic of antisemitism on its head to produce its own racial chauvinism, Palestinian liberation must chart a path that destroys, rather than inverts, the essentialisms that undergird their oppression.

#ghassan kanafani

[eilinelsghost]

Director's Cut: Grief in All Her Guises

Continuing to chip away at the Director's Cut game (still taking asks if you have any you'd like to send in - the more specific the better 😊) and today I'm hopping in with this delightful ask from @mangez-peches-art:

This is such a good question!

I actually went back and forth on this for a long time while I was planning out the series arc, and it was one of the main reasons it took me a really long time to get the first two installments nailed down (I'd been working on both of them for probably four months or so before I finally decided to post part 1 and get the series going). That meeting is such an iconic moment in their whole story and it felt like an oversight to leave it out at the beginning.

However, I ended up deciding to jump in after the relationships had been established for several reasons:

Logistics

First and most simply, there was the logistical difficulty of writing those encounters. I confess I balked at trying to accurately depict the process of two people learning each others' languages from scratch, even with the help of Finrod's ability to just stroll through Balan's brain. I don't have a lot of linguistics in my background and I wanted to be careful that I didn't lead with an installment that would undermine authorial trust if I completely botched how that process would go. Or, to put it more forthrightly, I was just scared of looking like I didn't know what I was talking about 😂

Perception of the Encounter

Another thing that made me hesitate was that the whole nature of that first meeting is laden with dreamlike imagery and I did not want to begin by "demythologizing" it at the start of the series. I wanted it to retain an unsteady and ethereal presence throughout their growing relationship that undergirds how they relate to each other. Each, in their own sense, feels that they have stumbled upon the other in a dream and the unsteadiness that brings to their daily reality shapes how each beholds the other.

For Finrod, dreams are laden with intent. It is through such that he retains any tangible connection to the Valar (or to Ulmo at least), and it is through such that he was given what he understands to be his purpose and duty in Beleriand. Even his moments of foresight hold a dreamlike quality where he seems to be pulled out from the reality about him to experience/witness moments of understanding that structure the subsequent direction of his life. Meeting Balan in a kind of dream, therefore, sets Balan alongside those other moments of import: their meeting is intended, their bond is unquestioned, this encounter was fated and they (Finrod and Balan/Balan's people) immediately belong to each other in a way that other meetings do not engender. In fact, this ends up being a large part of why Finrod is able to deceive himself re his own feelings for the whole of that first year. He does not question that he feels an unusually close bond - this is Balan, sent to him in a dream; Balan's people, brought to him by powers outside himself and each fated towards the other. Thus when he realizes what is actually going on within his own feelings, he panics both at the mortal/immortal divide and also at the fear that he has betrayed what was entrusted to him (entrusted by fate? by Eru? by the Valar?) through desiring that which was committed to his keeping.

For Balan, he and his people have finally crossed through the perils of the mountain passes, they have left behind (as they think) the danger of their former lives, and have come at last to a land of safety - where some even believe they may find the gods' own dwellings. And one of the first things that happens is he wakes in the middle of the night (is he awake? is he dreaming?) and meets Finrod's eye over a dying fire, his own harp held in the hands of a seeming god and images rising through the air about him in ways that defy understanding. Balan remembers this vividly throughout his life, but it is always somewhat fluid, always filled with an uncanny awe, fear, a nagging sense of unreality. This recurs throughout their relationship at various points - see, for example, the confession scene from In These Holy Waters where Balan once again encounters Finrod in a woods and once again doubts the reality about him:

The glade was spinning. Balan forced himself not to look away, for he could see his own passion blazing back from the other’s gaze, ardent and desperate, and his breath fled before the force of it. Did he sleep still? Had he awakened indeed or was he slumbering yet beside the boulder in the sun? He reached out to brush a strand of hair from Nóm’s face, his movements slow and muddled as though caught in the dream he feared

Keeping the mythological feel of that initial meeting was really important to me, especially early in the series to set the tone, and so I concluded that beginning with depicting it in full would likely undermine that strategy.

Memory as a Character

Finally, the third deciding factor for me here was that I wanted memory to function, in some sense, as another character in the series, given how Finrod speaks about the Eldar and memory in the Athrabeth. We begin the series with Finrod's confession to Aegnor and end the series with [redacted for spoiler reasons], which serve together to structure the intervening installments as a cluster of progressing memories, moving between past and present in (what I hope is) a stream of consciousness flow of connections. The lines between Balan's memories and Finrod's memories are deliberately blurred (who is it doing the remembering when both POVs are present throughout?) because their bond leaves them with the lines between each self blurred as well - Balan never fully absent because some part of him is still present in Finrod's own self, Finrod ever with one foot crossing into mortality because Balan too has preserved some part of Finrod within his own departed self.

So as part of this, there are three main memories that the series dances around long before we see them (or hear of them in greater detail): their first meeting, their eventual coming together, and Balan's death. Each of these are such laden moments that memory shies away from recalling them directly until it cannot be avoided. (This doesn't mean that you have to wait till the end of the series for each of these, I promise! Just that they all participate in a similar dance before appearing directly in the narrative.)

------

I think that covers most of the reasoning? That ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would! 😂 Let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to unpack more or if this didn't quite answer what you were wondering. Thanks so much for the question - this was such a fun one to answer!

#director's cut #asks and answers #finrod #bëor #atandil #the silmarillion

[thecreaturecodex]

Nunda

Image © @a-book-of-creatures​, accessed at A Book of Creatures here

[The nunda is yet another African mythological creature (Swahili this time) that is sorely misrepresented in the West. This is despite several solid English translations being available for more than a hundred years. It appears as its actual self (a giant, non-magical cat capable of swallowing people whole) in The Violet Fairy Book by Lang, for example. But, under the name mngwa, it became more demythologized by colonial British forces, reflecting their anxieties about dangerous animals in East Africa (the cryptid mngwa is larger than a lion, not larger than an elephant). This mngwa is made into a supernatural assassin by Pathfinder 1e, which is a cool monster that is only related to the original by being in the shape of a cat. And JK Rowling brought it into the original Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (back when that was just a charity booklet and not an increasingly deranged franchise attempt), where it kept its enormity, but became venomous. And, for some reason, had a name change from “nunda” to “nundu”. 

In an attempt to give my version a mechanical niche beyond “hey, it’s a cat, but bigger!”, I gave it sound mimicry, inspired by the discovery that margays, and maybe other cats as well, mimic the sounds of small animals to lure their prey in. If you want a Fantastic Beasts style “nundu”, change these stats to a magical beast, and give it a breath weapon in a 30 foot cone 3/day that acts as burnt othur fumes (Con based DC). That would make it a CR 12 creature.]

Nunda CR 11 N Animal This creature resembles a cat larger than an elephant. It has stocky legs and a thick tail. Its coat is blotched and striped.

A nunda is a massive big cat, large enough to prey on just about any mundane animal, and many monstrous and magical ones as well. Because of their great size and stout limbs, they are rather slower than other cats. Instead of relying on speed to hunt, nundas use deception. They are remarkably good at imitating the cries of other animals, and so attract curious, distressed or amorous creatures to meet their fate. They also know enough to use these calls to attract humans, and lure in hunters with the sound of a wild pig, antelope or even of a mundane cat.

A nunda requires an enormous home range, and thus are typically solitary. The males are larger than the females and have larger territories that encompass the territories of multiple females, but females still try to avoid or repel males unless they are in heat. Females give birth to only one cub at a time, which they raise diligently until they are about the size of a leopard, at which point they are chased from the territory. At this stage, they may be mistaken for a more mundane feline, and even adopted as pets by the wealthy and privileged, leading to a rude surprise when a prized leopard keeps growing, and keeps demanding more and more meat.

Nunda as Animal Companions Use the statistics for a big cat animal companion for a nunda, except that it has a move speed of 30 feet, sound mimicry (animals) as a 1st level companion, and gains swallow whole instead of pounce at 7th level. Characters with a nunda animal companion sometimes become mammoth riders.

Nunda  CR 11 XP 12,800 N Huge animal Init +6; Senses low-light vision, Perception +9, scent Defense AC 23, touch 11, flat-footed 20 (-2 size, +2 Dex, +1 dodge, +12 natural) hp 161 (14d8+98) Fort +16, Ref +13, Will +8; +4 vs. fear Defensive Abilities bravery Offense Speed 30 ft. Melee bite +19 (2d8+11 plus grab), 2 claws +19 (2d6+11/19-20 plus grab) Space 15 ft.; Reach 10 ft. Special Attacks pounce, rake (2 claws +19, 2d6+11/19-20), swallow whole (AC 20, hp 32, 2d6+16 bludgeoning) Statistics Str 33, Dex 15, Con 24, Int 2, Wis 15, Cha 10 Base Atk +10; CMB +23 (+27 grapple); CMD 40 (44 vs. trip) Feats Defensive Combat Training, Dodge, Improved Critical (claw), Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Lightning Reflexes, Skill Focus (Stealth) Skills Acrobatics +12, Bluff +3 (+11 mimicking animal sounds), Perception +8, Stealth +7 (+11 in undergrowth); Racial Modifiers +4 Acrobatics, +8 Bluff when mimicking animal sounds, +4 Stealth (+8 in undergrowth) SQ armored stomach, sound mimicry (animals) Ecology Environment warm hills and plains Organization solitary or pair Treasure none Special Abilities Armored Stomach (Ex) A nunda gains an additional +4 natural armor bonus against swallowed creatures attacking it, and it requires twice as many hit points of damage as normal or a creature to cut itself free. Bravery (Ex) A nunda gains a +4 racial bonus on Will saves against fear effects.

#nunda #nundu #mgnwa #swahili #african folklore #a book of creatures #world tour #animal companion