You ever wonder how myths and mythical creatures came into being?

[puss2puss]

10 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

Why? Because it opens a can of worms which is beyond the comfort zone of most of the people around here?

nope, because it's a one-way debate you opened up ..

[Grey Cloud]

4 hours ago, puss2puss said:

nope, because it's a one-way debate you opened up ..

I didn't start the thread.

 

Lots of people like you who know nothing of the subject jumped in with meaningless twaddle. You or anyone else are free to challenge or otherwise comment on my take.

[Grey Cloud]

5 hours ago, Mr. Otaku said:

Because people either thought they were cool or connected to some spiritual bullshit, it's not that deep.

Which people and when exactly? So you are saying 'cool' was a thing several thousand years ago? How do you know the spiritual connection is bullshit? What is not very deep? Have you ever studied anything to do with mythology of metaphysics or do you just get your 'knowledge' from what you get fed by TV and Hollywood?

[Miauzi]

Vor 4 Stunden sagte Puss2puss:

Nein, weil es eine einseitige Debatte ist, die Sie eröffnet haben.

 

the whole thing now reminds me of a long "discussion" about the "story of O" - which took place 10-12 years ago in a German-speaking BDSM community ("sklavenzentrale").

You were only allowed to have a say - if you knew the "Book of Books" (that story) almost by heart - only then were you "qualified" enough to express your views.

So here too ... if you can't read the 2-3 obscure tomes - which are the only valid source of information ... read them at least 10 times or at least quote pages from memory without errors ... you're just a stupid, ignorant pleb

and one has kindly not to disturb the pseudo-academic circles who are in love themselves.

If it had been planned as a parody from the start... it would have become a full-length TV format

?

[Grey Cloud]

44 minutes ago, Miauzi said:

So here too ... if you can't read the 2-3 obscure tomes - which are the only valid source of information

Who mentioned 'obscure tomes'? There are many primary sources and many of them are readily available for free on the Internet.

 

47 minutes ago, Miauzi said:

read them at least 10 times or at least quote pages from memory without errors

Who mentioned the number of times a book must be read or memorising texts?

 

48 minutes ago, Miauzi said:

you're just a stupid, ignorant pleb

Who called anyone 'stupid'? 'Ignorant' in English just means to not know.

[Mr. Otaku]

1 hour ago, Grey Cloud said:

Which people and when exactly?

 

We don't know the names of every single person that came up with all the concepts of mythical creatures in their entirety, these are concepts that people have been developing and compounding for thousands of years.

 

1 hour ago, Grey Cloud said:

So you are saying 'cool' was a thing several thousand years ago?

 

Yes? Why wouldn't cool be a thing several thousand years ago? What is this question lmao.

 

1 hour ago, Grey Cloud said:

How do you know the spiritual connection is bullshit?

 

Because it is? I don't wanna get into personal beliefs here but spirituality quite objectively is not a real thing and even if it is i wouldn't trust other humans to know what the fuck it is, especially humans from thousands of years ago that didn't understand what lightning is.

 

1 hour ago, Grey Cloud said:

What is not very deep?

 

OP's question and the things you're hyperfixating on.

 

1 hour ago, Grey Cloud said:

Have you ever studied anything to do with mythology of metaphysics or do you just get your 'knowledge' from what you get fed by TV and Hollywood?

 

Ignoring the weirdly adversarial tone and implication, no i haven't and i don't have to. We can understand basic things like "how myths and mythical creatures came to be" just by understanding how people used to operate in the past. As a species we've always created fantastical stories and attached meanings to them depending on the era and culture in question. Again, it's not that deep.

[Mez558]

On 4/27/2023 at 6:58 AM, coldheartzero said:

So yeah the topic.

 

I'm a big fan of mythology, not a master or even remotely claim to be but I do like it, I do read a lot and I've got a lot of stored up useless info about different mythology and mythos.

 

So more to the point,,,, how do you think people originally thunk up things like centaurs? I've read stories that Native Americans upon first seeing men on horseback thought they were centaurs before they had a name for them. (for those that don't know, horses went extinct in NA 11,000 years ago and then were brought over from the old world around 1500) So basically natives had no frickin' clue what a horse was.

 

Other creatures like dragons are a real conundrum, because it's one of the few mythological beasts that have tales all over the world. Not so much in NA but lots in SA and pretty much everywhere in the old world.

 

Mermaids,,, really, how dafuq did they come up with that one?

 

Just random ramblings.

 

They were all invented/concieved by George J.R.R. Rowling.
He/She/Xe/They came up them all for the book, Game of the Ring of Fire, in which a young Hobbit, Tyrian Potter, goes out for a curry with his mates and regrets it the next morning.

 

Well, someone mentioned bringing the Dumb, I thought I would do it properly.

[Guest]

It's a mix of people back then not having the knowledge they do now and not having anything better to do. It's what made them such amazing story tellers.

[Guest]

34 minutes ago, Mez558 said:

 

They were all invented/concieved by George J.R.R. Rowling.
He/She/Xe/They came up them all for the book, Game of the Ring of Fire, in which a young Hobbit, Tyrian Potter, goes out for a curry with his mates and regrets it the next morning.

 

Well, someone mentioned bringing the Dumb, I thought I would do it properly.

I'm not sure if I should laugh or cringe at that...

[Alessia Wellington]

1 minute ago, deadjester226 said:

I'm not sure if I should laugh or cringe at that.

 

Laugh in cringe.

[Grey Cloud]

29 minutes ago, deadjester226 said:

It's a mix of people back then not having the knowledge they do now and not having anything better to do. It's what made them such amazing story tellers.

You would know this how?

Yet another trite statement made without the least amount of knowledge of the subject.

[Grey Cloud]

Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind
Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth
Yulia Ustinova

O.U.P. 2009
 

 

Preface
My interest in cave experiences was born during a tour of prehistoric
caverns in France. I realized that cave paintings and engravings are
largely misrepresented in book reproductions of parietal art. Only
live encounter with images emerging from the rock, in the dark
coolness of a cavern deep in the earth, can give some idea of the
power of parietal art, and even then artifcial lighting, and above all
the cultural background of the modern observer, lessen the sense of
awe and admiration. The question that puzzled me was what motivated a human being, Homo sapiens exactly like us, to clamber down,
encumbered with lamps and pigments, hundreds of metres into an
enormously long and frightening cave, in order to depict there
animals and mysterious signs? As a classical scholar, I also wondered
whether ancient Greeks did something really important in caves, and
could not then remember much.
Back home, I looked through some works on parietal art. The eye opener was the book by David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave:
Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London, 2002). The author
compellingly demonstrates that the activities of the Cro-Magnons
in caverns were ‘the matter of mind’, and that it was mental imagery
of shamanistic trances that led the prehistoric painters to image making in the depth of the caves. I also looked for some examples of
Greek cave experiences, and was surprised to discover that, more
often than not, they were associated with various mystic states. The
crossover of the two themes fascinated me. When asked by colleagues
what I was working on, I said that the subject was ‘The Greek Mind in
the Cave’.
 

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

You would know this how?

Yet another trite statement made without the least amount of knowledge of the subject.

For the record, I am religious. I'm a Satanist, so I don't really have any right to judge someone else's beliefs.

As for how I would know, it's quite simple really. As an example of my points, back then they didn't know how the Sun moved across the sky. The ancient Greeks, who were a very intelligent bunch of people, came up with the idea that it was the god Helios pulling it across the sky via a carriage. Now we know, thanks to our our technology and better understanding of the world around us, that it's actually just the Earth rotating on its own axis creating the image of the Sun moving across the sky. It's our perspective, in other words.

Yeah, I know my mythology. Did you really think that I would post something like that without having the knowledge to back it up? I wasn't talking smack on anyone. I was simply pointing out that they just didn't know what we know, and that they didn't have the stuff we do now, so they would spend a lot more time writing stories and stuff. I love mythology, with Greek mythology being my favorite.

[Mr. Otaku]

47 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

We' don't know the name of a single person that came up with the concepts of mythical creatures. We don't even know a particular time or place. So you stating "ecause people . . ." as a fact is nonsense.

 

So because we don't know who came up with these concepts when we can't infer how they came to be? Do you think wheels don't exist cause we don't know who came up with it and when?

 

47 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

What is your evidence for this?

 

The fact that they exist? Tf are you even asking?

 

47 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

I'll leave it to you to define 'cool' and then provide examples of people doing 'cool'.

 

Wait so you think cool as a concept didn't exist a thousand years ago then? Why, cause they didn't use the exact word cool? If you need me to explain what "cool" means you're not as smart as you think you are.

 

47 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

Once again a statement made without any supporting evidence. Just because you have a prejudice against and no experience of something does not mean it does not exist.

 

So then you show evidence of it's existence, go on present peer reviewed evidence for spiritual phenomenon in the real world. I don't need prejudice to know that magic and mystical shit doesn't exist in real life, the complete lack of any evidence for it's existence IS my evidence.

 

47 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

I fail to see the connection between knowledge of lighting and spirituality. Do you know what lightning is, other than an atmospheric electrical discharge or some-such description?  Were Chinese, Babylonian or Indian astronomers not intelligent by today's standard?

 

You fail to see a lot of things so that's not surprising to anyone. Nobody said ancient astronomers were not intelligent in the past, but it is fact that they knew less than we know now simply because we have learned a lot since their time and because they knew so little compared to us i wouldn't trust them to know what spirituality is EVEN IF it existed, which it doesn't unless you can prove otherwise. It's clear that nobody taught you the difference between intelligence and knowledge.

 

47 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

Hyperfixating? Mythology and (ancient) metaphysics are just two of the many subjects in which I have a decades-long interest.

 

The subject of mythology like most other subjects is as 'deep' as you wish it to be. If you limit your knowledge of the subject to TV, films and mass-market books then one's knowledge will be very shallow and superficial.

If one the other hand one reads primary material as well as academic books and papers on the subject one gains an understanding that is both broad and deep.

 

Decades long interest that resulted in absolutely nothing worthwhile, great. If a subject can be as deep as i wish then it has no depth to begin with and unlike you i don't try to argue for it's validity from a negative sum position. You keep bringing up TV and media but they're simply conjecture on your part, i guess your "primary material and academic books and papers" didn't teach you why that's not a wise thing to do.

 

47 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

So you say you haven't studied anything to do with mythology or metaphysics and don't have to. Your second sentence then demonstrates that perhaps you do have to as it flies in the face of modern academic study of both mythology and metaphysics.

How does one 'understand' how people operated in the past? In many cases their is no evidence. Which people? When is the past?

 

You have nothing to contribute to the discussion other than hackneyed statements which are not even remotely sustainable.

 

Oh and you've studied a lot right? That's why you have to ask how we know the ways people operated in the past? Because you've studied "mythology and metaphysics" you don't know shit lmao.

 

The only thing you've contributed here is smugly responding to everyone in an overly hostile tone and pretending to be smarter than you are, you are the poster boy of why age doesn't always translate to wisdom.

Edited April 28, 2023 by Mr. Otaku
Ninja Edit

[Grey Cloud]

22 minutes ago, deadjester226 said:

As for how I would know, it's quite simple really. As an example of my points, back then they didn't know how the Sun moved across the sky.

Back when exactly? Who exactly didn't know? Do you know how the sun moves across the sky?

We still talk figuratively of the Sun 'rising' and 'setting'.

 

24 minutes ago, deadjester226 said:

The ancient Greeks, who were a very intelligent bunch of people, came up with the idea that it was the god Helios pulling it across the sky via a carriage.

And the Greek view was the only one? What of the Chinese, Indians, Babylonians, Egyptians etc, etc?

How do you account for the fact that in Iliad Homer mentions both Helios and Zeus and identifies both as the Sun? What about far-shooting Apollon who is also associated with the Sun?

 

30 minutes ago, deadjester226 said:

Now we know, thanks to our our technology and better understanding of the world around us, that it's actually just the Earth rotating on its own axis creating the image of the Sun moving across the sky.

Sorry to burst your bubble but the Earth orbiting the Sun is what causes the illusion of the Sun moving. The Earth revolving on its axis is what causes day and night.

The Sun itself is also moving around.

 

35 minutes ago, deadjester226 said:

Yeah, I know my mythology. Did you really think that I would post something like that without having the knowledge to back it up?

Yes and I've not yet changed my mind.

 

36 minutes ago, deadjester226 said:

I was simply pointing out that they just didn't know what we know, and that they didn't have the stuff we do now, so they would spend a lot more time writing stories and stuff.

You posted simplistic nonsense without any evidence to support it.

 

The vast majority of people in the ancient world were illiterate - they would not be writing anything. Even the literate would be unlikely to be wasting expensive and difficult to produce papyrus, bark, animal skin etc on 'stories'.

They probably wouldn't be able to afford the electricity bills from having the lights on while they wrote.

 

40 minutes ago, deadjester226 said:

I love mythology, with Greek mythology being my favorite.

Love of does not equate to knowledge of.

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

Back when exactly? Who exactly didn't know? Do you know how the sun moves across the sky?

We still talk figuratively of the Sun 'rising' and 'setting'.

 

And the Greek view was the only one? What of the Chinese, Indians, Babylonians, Egyptians etc, etc?

How do you account for the fact that in Iliad Homer mentions both Helios and Zeus and identifies both as the Sun? What about far-shooting Apollon who is also associated with the Sun?

 

Sorry to burst your bubble but the Earth orbiting the Sun is what causes the illusion of the Sun moving. The Earth revolving on its axis is what causes day and night.

The Sun itself is also moving around.

 

Yes and I've not yet changed my mind.

 

You posted simplistic nonsense without any evidence to support it.

 

The vast majority of people in the ancient world were illiterate - they would not be writing anything. Even the literate would be unlikely to be wasting expensive and difficult to produce papyrus, bark, animal skin etc on 'stories'.

They probably wouldn't be able to afford the electricity bills from having the lights on while they wrote.

 

Love of does not equate to knowledge of.

This isn’t in my normal font because I’m not on my PC right now.

 

”Back when”? Oh, I don’t know, back in around 700 BC, when they were believed to have been written. You would know that if you knew anything about Greek mythology.

 

We use the terms “risen” and “setting” figuratively because it’s how people have been saying it for centuries. Why change it when it’s been the norm for as long as humans have been around?

 
I was using Greek myths as one example. Yes, I know of others, but that was the first one I thought of.

I love how you pretty much just repeated what I said about the Earth rotating around Sun and how that creates the illusion of the Sun moving.

 I know you haven’t changed your mind, and I know you never will, because then you would be admitting that you’re wrong.

 

It wasn’t simplistic nonsense. It was me stating something that anyone with common sense would be able to realize.

 

If people back then were illiterate, then how did they WRITE the stories? There’s the issue with your little statement there. They did write that stuff down, because there were people who could afford it. And because there were literate people then.

 

Love of something does equal greater knowledge, because it means that I have the passion to study it in detail, unlike you who makes assumptions.

[MadMansGun]

as usual lame cloud is ruining a perfectly good conversation, just add him to your block list folks, he's not worth the effort.

[Mez558]

2 hours ago, deadjester226 said:

I'm not sure if I should laugh or cringe at that...

 

Best to not do either. I take both as encouragement.

[MadMansGun]

now for back on subject, finding giant squid washed up on shore lines would definitely create some myths.

Edited April 28, 2023 by MadMansGun

[Alessia Wellington]

3 minutes ago, Mez558 said:

Best to not do either. I take both as encouragement.

 

Are you going to write that book? Would love to read it.

[Grey Cloud]

@Mr. Otaku

Sorry old boy but the forum just ate my post and I've not got the inclination to start again.

[Grey Cloud]

37 minutes ago, MadMansGun said:

as usual lame cloud is ruining a perfectly good conversation, just add him to your block list folks, he's not worth the effort.

What perfectly good conversation?

 

Apart from myself only one person has mentioned a book and that one was published in 1867. Virtually everyone else has merely trotted out stock answers gleaned from the TV and other media.

Dinosaur bones. Giant squid. All those academics who have been wasting their time for over a century.

[Mr. Otaku]

15 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

@Mr. Otaku

Sorry old boy but the forum just ate my post and I've not got the inclination to start again.

 

Aight whatever i can't be mad at that  i'll add this to my list of many Ws.

 

Here's a tip for future though, when you're suspecting the page reloading and eating up your post always click on the tab on your browser and duplicate the page. Then you can click on the text box and get your whole post back to reply. Alternatively you can copy the whole thing to a temp notepad file and paste it back in the text box after reloading the page.

[Mr. Otaku]

47 minutes ago, MadMansGun said:

now for back on subject, finding giant squid washed up on shore lines would definitely create some myths.

 

Real talk though i've always been really interested in deep sea creatures cause we've been discovering some really bizarre things there lately. The fact that there are likely thousands of species we've never seen before cause they're too deep in the ocean for us to reach is pretty wild to think about.

 

Also "lame cloud" that one killed me lmao.

[Grey Cloud]

2 hours ago, deadjester226 said:

Oh, I don’t know, back in around 700 BC, when they were believed to have been written. You would know that if you knew anything about Greek mythology.

I assume you are referring to the dates for Hesiod and Homer. You didn't specifically mention the Greeks, you used the vague and indeterminate 'they'. This date for Hesiod and Homer is for the first written accounts not the origin of the actual stories themselves.

This:

Whence each of the gods came into being, or whether they always
existed, and what their functions were, the Greeks did not know until
recently – yesterday, so to speak. Hesiod and Homer . . . were the ones
who made a theogony for the Greeks and gave the gods their names
and distinguished their honours and skills and indicated their forms.
(Herodotus 2.53.1–2)

 

There is internal evidence within both Hesiod and Homer that some of these stories originated in Anatolia, i.e. they were not originally Greek.

https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2000/2000.05.08

 

So what about the origin of Egyptian, Chinese or any other mythology?

 

2 hours ago, deadjester226 said:

We use the terms “risen” and “setting” figuratively because it’s how people have been saying it for centuries. Why change it when it’s been the norm for as long as humans have been around?

Do you not think 'they' (ancient people) did not speak figuratively? Do you not think they understood metaphor, allusion, analogy, allegory and other literary devices? Do you not think that the understanding of the educated elite may be different from the uneducated masses?

 

2 hours ago, deadjester226 said:

I love how you pretty much just repeated what I said about the Earth rotating around Sun and how that creates the illusion of the Sun moving.

I love the way you totally ignore the fact that you never mentioned the Earth revolving around the Sun. You said it was because of the Earth rotating on its own axis which is an entirely different kettle of fish.

 

2 hours ago, deadjester226 said:

It wasn’t simplistic nonsense. It was me stating something that anyone with common sense would be able to realize.

Strange that no modern academic has managed it then.

Edited April 28, 2023 by Grey Cloud