[REVIEWS] End of Month Reviews - December 2004 (spoilers)

[saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au]

[Bleah, what a mess. Issue numbers missing and Novembers date
in the header line as well/ Bleah bleah bleah.]

Martin Phipps (phippsmartin at hotmail.com) wrote:
> Saxon Brenton wrote:
[...]

> In all fairness though, the idea that there were many gods in
> Looniverse Y comes from a throw away line in DSSS #63.

Off the top of my head I think I also implied in the lines about
unaligned gangs of diabolicals doing freelance evil between various
pantheons, but I'd have to go back and check.

>      There's no reason to assume that
> the idea that there are many different gods in Looniverse Y means
> competing mythologies: after all, the Egyptians had over a thousand
> gods throughout their 3000 year history.  If you assume that there
> all the god from all the different mythologies simultaneously exist
> then you would easily have over 5000 gods, with at least four
> different gods of the ocean (five if you count Neptune and Poseidon
> as different gods) alone.  That's a few too many, I think.

Not an unreasonable proposition.

[...]

> I started by trying to tie all of western mythology, including
> Biblical stories, together.  I was surprised how easy it was.

I suspect that may be at least partly because of the underlying
patterns in the way human cultures tend to think, ala Freud's
Archetypes. There's a whole encyclopedia which lists motifs of
myths, legends and folktakes (the name of which I'm blanking on
at the moment) whose basic assumption is that once you've
stripped away the surface details, most stories only have a
certain number of themse (which is similar to the notion that
there are only a half dozen or so different plots, but IMO works
on a slightly different level of story construction)

[...]

>   Apparently Indo-Europeans saw their gods as people interested
> in their politics whereas the Chinese saw their gods as spirits
> interested in their daily lives.

Now there's an interesting idea.

> Of course, I found it necessary to not only conflate between
> mythologies but also within mythologies.  For example, Isis not
> only was the goddess of love in Egyptian mythology but also had
> dominion over the underworld so she was in some ways like
> Freyia and in some ways like Hela so Hela and Freyia
> implicited become conflated.  This simplifies things a lot,
> I think.

In a way the different versions of different myths, reminds my of
the continuous retconning of say, the Legion of Super Heroes -
with multiple different versions of continuity.  This then raises
the rather amusing question of who or what would be the equivalent
of the annotation fanboys on the discussion boards and discussion
groups arguing over which version is their favourite, or has more
legitamacy as the 'classic' version, or whatever.  And *that*
seques into recollecting that in the ASH universe there are
multpile versions of continuity thanks to the Continuity Wars,
which makes me think I should give up on this line of thought
before I start suggesting inappropriately silly for that imprint.

---
Saxon Brenton    Uni of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia
ASH miniseries proposal: "There is a secret cabal of gods of history,
truth, archives and oracular revelation who, unbeknowst to their
fellows, hold the annotated versions of *all* the histories of the
gods, including the now lost One True Origin. What? Yes, OF COURSE
it contains a secret which would destroy them all."