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Disclaimer
Right off the bat; yes, this is clickbait, but not a false one. Pretty much every single myth or close to it is going to be affected.
Second: This thread is completely unrelated to the earlier thread about the Jade Emperor, religion and etc. I have been planning this for weeks. I was just too personally-lazy to post this and ultimately decided to ride on the recent mythology controversy so that this thread could get more attention (because I do feel it's important)
The Thread
I'm going to make this short, if only because the actual wall of text with the relevant evidence will only come later, once I'm done writing an explanation blog up.
A good portion of our mythology profiles suck.
The reason is very simple; they're all suffering from a case of "Modern-Thought-and-Knowledge-Overriding-the-Ancient-View-of-Things"ism. If that's too much a mouthful for you, I personally called it the "superimposition theory" on a thesis I wrote for college many moons ago. I think "the profiles are wrong" is more straightforward though.
Basically, lots of our profiles for mythology fail to acknowledge the fact that, back when those mythologies were written and composed, people viewed the universe in a vastly different manner than we do in this enlightened age.
What's funny about this is that the page itself acknowledges this issue, yet it seems to pretend or be under the impression that the only thing that changed since the Pre-Roman world was the physical size of the universe. All myth profiles assume we always knew the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of the other way around, that the Earth was spherical in shape, that the Sun was a big ball of gas, that outer space was a thing and orbits existed. This is because every single god who creates, embodies or affects the universe and those who scale to them are rated at 4-C up to as high as 4-B for creating stars, the planets, the Sun or the Solar System. Some profiles for ancient mythologies even go as far as to provide the Earth's modern rotational speed or the mass of the Earth's atmosphere (such as Hercules), which is just...missing the entire point.
Every single ancient or near-modern myth out there describes its cosmology in intricate detail, from Ancient Sumerian, Egyptian or Babylonian myths to Greek mythology all the way to Norse mythologies from the 12-13rd centuries. The same dilemma applies to non-mythological, classic stories from the same time period, such as Dante Alighieri's Inferno, which bases much of its cosmology on the scientifical theories of the time and this definitely shows in the way its cosmos is described.
Therefore, my suggestion is pretty simple - use what is actually described in the literature itself. Whether this warrants an upgrade or an downgrade is irrelevant. Of course, it's going to be case-by-case, depending on the story - some of the larger mythologies have a considerable number of authors that have different views on the cosmology - but most Pre-Hellenistic mythologies (<300 B.C) had very consistent cosmologies, which I'm going to detail on an extensive blog I'm writing on the subject.
Y'all probably know what I'm getting at anyway, though.
Addendum: Since chose a relatively poor time to post this (I'll have to go to sleep shortly after doing so), any questions or reservations are probably not gonna get answered instantly.
Right off the bat; yes, this is clickbait, but not a false one. Pretty much every single myth or close to it is going to be affected.
Second: This thread is completely unrelated to the earlier thread about the Jade Emperor, religion and etc. I have been planning this for weeks. I was just too personally-lazy to post this and ultimately decided to ride on the recent mythology controversy so that this thread could get more attention (because I do feel it's important)
The Thread
I'm going to make this short, if only because the actual wall of text with the relevant evidence will only come later, once I'm done writing an explanation blog up.
A good portion of our mythology profiles suck.
The reason is very simple; they're all suffering from a case of "Modern-Thought-and-Knowledge-Overriding-the-Ancient-View-of-Things"ism. If that's too much a mouthful for you, I personally called it the "superimposition theory" on a thesis I wrote for college many moons ago. I think "the profiles are wrong" is more straightforward though.
Basically, lots of our profiles for mythology fail to acknowledge the fact that, back when those mythologies were written and composed, people viewed the universe in a vastly different manner than we do in this enlightened age.
What's funny about this is that the page itself acknowledges this issue, yet it seems to pretend or be under the impression that the only thing that changed since the Pre-Roman world was the physical size of the universe. All myth profiles assume we always knew the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of the other way around, that the Earth was spherical in shape, that the Sun was a big ball of gas, that outer space was a thing and orbits existed. This is because every single god who creates, embodies or affects the universe and those who scale to them are rated at 4-C up to as high as 4-B for creating stars, the planets, the Sun or the Solar System. Some profiles for ancient mythologies even go as far as to provide the Earth's modern rotational speed or the mass of the Earth's atmosphere (such as Hercules), which is just...missing the entire point.
Every single ancient or near-modern myth out there describes its cosmology in intricate detail, from Ancient Sumerian, Egyptian or Babylonian myths to Greek mythology all the way to Norse mythologies from the 12-13rd centuries. The same dilemma applies to non-mythological, classic stories from the same time period, such as Dante Alighieri's Inferno, which bases much of its cosmology on the scientifical theories of the time and this definitely shows in the way its cosmos is described.
Therefore, my suggestion is pretty simple - use what is actually described in the literature itself. Whether this warrants an upgrade or an downgrade is irrelevant. Of course, it's going to be case-by-case, depending on the story - some of the larger mythologies have a considerable number of authors that have different views on the cosmology - but most Pre-Hellenistic mythologies (<300 B.C) had very consistent cosmologies, which I'm going to detail on an extensive blog I'm writing on the subject.
Y'all probably know what I'm getting at anyway, though.
Addendum: Since chose a relatively poor time to post this (I'll have to go to sleep shortly after doing so), any questions or reservations are probably not gonna get answered instantly.
