OK, Tango: you are using Works and Days, not the Theogony, which is a far more comprehensive overview of Greek cosmogony and lineage. Fair enough. I don't think the δαίμων you cite as living with the gods is to be taken as man of the sort we consider to be such, but rather as the Romans saw their household genius. The story is hard to follow, but man seems to really come into being as man after Pandora (before whom, as in other ancient tales, there seem to have been no human females). Apollodorus and Ovid (and even Pausanias) tend to follow this, and Ovid in the Metamorphoses gives a more literal four ages than the ones found in W&D, though interestingly enough, he does question whether the unknown creator god may have created man or whether Prometheus did so (as accepted by Apollodorus and Pausanias after).

(November 29, 2011 at 5:00 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Once we've gone down the rabbit hole of myth as a retelling of some actual thing or time or place in each and every case, especially when we try to get specific...anything becomes possible.

You are right about the reversal of good/evil and of the role of the monks and everything. Still, there is no need to get specific because it is the older myths, the older legends that count. Mythology is based on a solid unmovable base: the Mother, The famous Cow.

Audhumbla, the enormous cow who uncovered Buri, the grandfather of the Aesir, is not an invention of the monks because they did not now (and they still don’t) what Cow means in mythology. Even modern translators of ancient texts have serious problems in translating “cow” as “Mother”.

It is true that we were very unlucky as regards recording of the tradition of Northern Europe. Yet, as humanity, we have the texts of the ancient Near East which serve as a guide in understanding cultures of which the tradition was recorded recently
In the Pyramid texts there is a description of the Mother that matches the depiction of the Mother in the statuette of the Venus of Willendorf and at the same time it solves the problem of the head gear of the statuette by describing it as a blindfolding hood.
Neither the Cro-Magnon nor the Norsemen recorded their legends, but they produced lots of Mother figurines.
These figurines, which were constantly produced for about 35k to 40k years, the scientific community is unable to tell us with certainty what they stand for.

Chaos came before cows.

Perhaps they didn't all stand for the same thing specifically. You keep going on as though your assumption is proof of your assumption. It is not. Granted, it's more likely than a theistic interpretation of Odin as an actual god that exists in reality, for example. More likely than bullshit still isn't equivalent to true. People say that this or that god was in control of the rain, and caused the tides to come in or the crops to grow or whatever. I'll go ahead and take their word that they actually believed this to be the case, that they were explaining physical reality in a narrative that is now mythology. It may be that there was a concerted and forced interbreeding effort across otherwise unrelated societies, and that yet older myths than the ones we have available to us have their basis in this. There just isn't anything solid enough to call this hypothesis a fact. It also does not take into account that we know for fact that human beings have invented religions whole cloth, out of nothing but thin air. No one was raping neanderthals when cargo cults and scientology were born.

(November 29, 2011 at 9:34 pm)Epimethean Wrote: Apollodorus and Ovid (and even Pausanias) tend to follow this, and Ovid in the Metamorphoses gives a more literal four ages than the ones found in W&D, though interestingly enough, he does question whether the unknown creator god may have created man or whether Prometheus did so (as accepted by Apollodorus and Pausanias after).

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Thank you for making me read Ovid.
Once he is referring to a creator god, he automatically becomes a theologian poet!!

I was very much impressed by the verse: They lived safe without a Judge, in everie Realme and lande because the Hebrew term Elohim is used in the Old Testament for Judges, Angels, gods and God
Therefore, we can modify the verse to read: They lived safe without Elohim, in everie Realme and lande !!

As regards the verse: The earth from heaven, the sea from earth, he parted orderly, I am of the opinion that he did not know what “Separation of Earth and Heaven” meant. In order to know, one has to read the ancient Near Eastern texts and he had no means to read them (I mean to read texts written more than a thousand years before his time).

(November 30, 2011 at 2:22 am)Epimethean Wrote: Chaos came before cows.

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Cows gave birth to philosophers who spoke of chaos.

You are twisting Ovid to suit your argument. Not so easy, though very convenient.

Here is the text to which I believe you are referring:

Aurea prima sata est aetas, quae vindice nullo,
sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectumque colebat.
poena metusque aberant, nec verba minantia fixo
aere legebantur, nec supplex turba timebat
iudicis ora sui, sed erant sine vindice tuti.

When you suggest, via the translation of another, that we can then back transliterate and supply whatever word we like to make a connection, you literally pervert the original to your purpose. This passage does speak of an early time when men were not under judgement, but it does not suggest that this was an xtian god, a monotheistic one at all, nor that there were angels or any other silly conflation of the judeo-xtian myths with the pre-xtian ones. This is no substantiation for your contention-none whatever. As an influential member of the highest level of sponsored poets, Ovid most certainly had access to eastern knowledge. Your suggestion to the contrary is one of convenience, not supportable fact. The Romans had direct access to Alexandria, Pergamum, Antioch, Ephesos, Colchis, etc., and so Ovid would have had access to resources from such, far and beyond the silly xtian sect, which was not considered very seriously at the time.

(November 30, 2011 at 9:29 am)Epimethean Wrote: You are twisting Ovid to suit your argument. Not so easy, though very convenient.

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You are quite right as regards the translation. It was my intention to look for the Latin text and find some means to translate it word for word.
I trust nobody’s translation and since I base what I believe of the past on the Egyptian funerary texts, I had to teach myself to translate the hieroglyphic script.

Ovid could not read the Pyramid texts. Ovid had not the means to know that what the Greek philosophers taught about the soul, the underworld and the judgment was the result of the Egyptian priesthood having presented the judgment of the living, which is described in the texts, as a judgment of the dead. The experiences of the people who survived judgment, which are narrated in the texts, were changed into experiences of dead people who were plowing, sowing, eating, drinking and having sex after their death.

According to the texts, the gods commenced their activities as Shepherds/Bulls then acted as Judges, as messengers of the gods and finally as spiritual gods residing in the sky. Therefore, if the translation They lived safe without a Judge is correct, it is the gods that are meant by “Judge”.
If you know Latin and can help me with this, I would be truly obliged to you.

Today’s translators of the Egyptian funerary texts still believe what the priests told the Greek philosophers. New Egyptologists, however, commence to show their disagreement. James Allen in his translation of the Pyramid texts has ceased to translate the terms “ba” soul and “ankh” spirit. The next step would be to cease render the term “mt” as the dead and thus have a proper translation of the funerary texts without mighty ones who become spirits for the benefit of their souls (as Faulkner managed to render a passage).

Most probably you are aware of an Egyptian text entitled “The Dispute of a man with his Ba.” This text has been mocking, for decades now, not only the Egyptologists and the translators, but the entire scientific community because everybody believes of the Egyptians what the Egyptologists taught them to believe of them. With more than 50, probably even 70, official translations of the text accomplished, nobody knows for certain what the text is about!

Neither Thales nor Plato or Ovid knew as much of the past as we do now. We know that “Separation between Heaven and Earth” means separation between men and gods, something that Hesiod knew (Theogony 535) but since Ovid adds separation between sea and earth, he obviously did not know.

You're basing your understanding of history on egyptian funerary texts? Willing to wager that's where everything starts to go off the rails.

(November 30, 2011 at 2:25 am)Rhythm Wrote: People say that this or that god was in control of the rain, and caused the tides to come in or the crops to grow or whatever. I'll go ahead and take their word that they actually believed this to be the case, that they were explaining physical reality in a narrative that is now mythology.

Theagenes of Rhegium was a Greek literary critic of the 6th century BC. He is noted for having defended the mythology of Homer, from more rationalist attacks. In so doing he became an early proponent of the allegorical method of reading texts(Wikipedia).

He taught that by Apollo Homer meant the sun. In Greece there was no clergy to create funny gods and so it was left to the philosophers. In Egypt Ra, who was an elderly god whom Isis killed by having a snake bite him, was transformed to a Sun-god by the clergy. No people ever believed in gods who control rain and thunder. They were made, though, to believe in them by theologians.
The layman does not bother to explain physical reality. The philosophers do that.

(November 30, 2011 at 2:25 am)Rhythm Wrote: It also does not take into account that we know for fact that human beings have invented religions whole cloth, out of nothing but thin air.

Still you have to explain why did they invent gods who are described to have behaved in the same manner in so many unrelated cultures.
You have to explain why people were killing their firstborns in order to satisfy imaginary gods.
Why were they artificially deforming the skulls of the infants almost all over the globe.
Why were they purifying themselves in so many crazy ways, and they still do.

(November 30, 2011 at 12:43 pm)Rhythm Wrote: You're basing your understanding of history on egyptian funerary texts? Willing to wager that's where everything starts to go off the rails.

No objection here.
If it was not for the Egyptian funerary texts, the humanity would be travelling now on the right track. No soul nonsense, no netherworld nonsense, no immortality, no Judgment.

Yet, who is to be blamed? The texts, or the ancient philosophers and modern scientists who knew what was written on the texts before even reading them?

How come students all over the world are aware of the ancient Greek and
Latin literature but know nothing of the Egyptian and the Sumerian one?

So those earliest people who created mythological or legendary traditions weren't trying to explain reality (unless you want to propose cave philosophers)? Wouldn't that rule out your hypothesis as well?

Really? People create gods that behave like people. People in unrelated cultures are still people, and very similar. The other three might have something to do with the fact that we're people as well, prone to do strange things for shoddy reasons.
(I'd also like to mention that there are differences as well as similarities between pantheons, vast differences, also completely in line with the situation between people of dissimilar cultures. You seem intent on ignoring the differences and focus only on the similarities. Even then, you may be prone to interpreting things into being similar when they are not.)

You only assume this because you believe that all religions are somehow connected or spawned from these texts. Again, scientology, cargo cults. You seem to like the egyptian texts very much, and in each of these conversations you've argued that you have found a way to make all religions somehow equivalent to these texts. I don't think this is the case. Going further you give a hypothesis (supported by your love of these texts and how many ways you can interpret other myths to be so similar) based on an actual and singular event in each and every case. Perhaps the funerary texts are just fanciful stories. What then?

This is honestly getting as bad as Zeitgeist.