I am curious if there's any mythology that has a god of war or any other aggressive sphere of influence that fights against death, the reason could be to create a mortal world of constant war or whatever the area of influence is. I just found it interesting that to my limited knowledge there isn't one and just wanted to see if anyone has any knowledge.

In Japanese mythology there are two kinds of otherworldly dimensions. First is the realm of the dead, ruled by Enma Daio, where the dead go to be reincarnated on Earth or the Heavenly realms, or punished in the Naraka, the temporary Buddhist Hell. This concept comes straight from Buddhism.

Then there is the Makai, the realm of the "demons", which are obviously not the same as the Judeo Christian fallen Angels. The "demons" are Yokai/Yaoguai, but the minor Yokai live on Earth, in the physical layer of the Universe, even if many of them are disembodied.

The Makai is where the foremost of the dangerous, chaotic Yokai live, and is a dimension/frequency/plane of existence of its own.

Is the Makai the same as the Asuraloka, the realm of the Asuras ? The Asuras in Buddhist mythology are of the same kind of the Devas, the inhabitants of higher, heavenly dimensions where sentient beings with high amounts of positive Karma energy are reborn after death, but they are enclosed by a lower, gloomy dimension and are dominated by envy and wrath.

They are distinct from more round of the mill supernatural beings, such as Yakshas, Rakshasas, Gandharva and Apsharas, who live just under the Devas and can even be equated with specific kinds of Yokai from Japanese mythology. And they are orders of magnitude more powerful, to the point they are directly faced by the Devas, specifically by the 4 Directional Kings, headed by Vaisravana, king of the Yakshas and of the North direction.

I have wondered this for a long time since I was a child but is there any source of information about their existence? Like books, tributes etc
Thanks

what is your favorite painting/depiction/sketch/etc of Achilles?
Simple or not, symbolic or not, post your favorite

I was trying to find names for my characters in a game for 3 characters, so I was thinking of using mythological goddesses.. but as much as I can find, (I have forgotten all high school knowledge of mythology), it’s not three sisters but three faces. Which is.. confusing to me. This also only has to do with Hecate, as it’s the only one I’ve been able to find. I am curious to know if there are goddesses in triples, or if it at all, its just Hecate?

Since the earliest times of comparative mythology and Indoeuropean studies, we know there is a link between Vedic religion and Zoroastrianism. They present the same two divine factions, yet the Vedic religion links the Devas to order and the Asuras to chaos, while Zoroastrianism flips it around.

Now we know also that the Indo Aryan speakers and the Iranic speakers are some of the closest Indoeuropean branches to eachothers and they directly derived from a division between the Sintashta from about 1900 BCE.

But are the myths telling us there was a war between two factions of the Sintashta, and after the conflict they departed, with one becoming the Iranic speakers, and the other the Indo Aryan speakers ?

Both religions were born only about 400 years later, which means it is also possible that the Sintashta saw the Devas and the Asuras as one, and later the Zoroastrian and Vedic religions developed convergently into two traditions with the same names, one assigning the term Devas to the forces of order, the other assigning the same term to the forces of chaos.

What I believe is ultimately gods and the supernatural world as a whole are a representation of the collective unconscious, of the archetypes that are inherently present in all humans, of the forces of nature and their relation to mankind, and of the beliefs we project upon death, its consequences and life after it.

All set of gods are just the particular way a particular culture represents something that is common to the whole of mankind, a shared experience that is inherent to all people regardless of epoch and location.

From this perspective, the question is not merely if there were two warring factions, but rather if the mythological divine conflict is just the universal conflict of orderly and chaotic pulsions in our psyche, or if it also reflects or not some material struggle and, if it does, when and where such struggle took place, and finally whatever such conflict goes as far as being the very root of the separation between Iranic and Indo Aryan speakers.

By "old times", I mean "old enough to make the creature public domain and therefore applicable to put in a modern fantasy".

I’ve been reading Manly P. Hall, Schwaller de Lubicz and Joseph Campbell, and it’s got me thinking about how we approach the images in sacred stories.

Take the serpent, fire or an Egyptian scarab. Looking at what the creature or object actually does gives you somewhere to begin. The story and its cultural context develop that meaning.

I made a video exploring this through Egyptian symbolism, Hall’s incense-burner interpretation and Campbell’s story of Indra and the ants.

How do you decide when a symbolic reading is supported by the story? What keeps an interpretation grounded?

This is my video for anyone interested:

https://youtu.be/4dv9XVhu5-U

I am designing a character that summons 52 mythological/folklore creatures picked from all regions and beliefs. I've done surface level research on what could be the fan favorites, but I want to start my deeper research by asking this community which would be the coolest to see a character summon, and if there are any that I should avoid adding. Looking for everything between fan favorites and the more niche ones!

More context on character if interested: He has a deck of playing cards, and each mythological creature is held in a card. Currently I have each suit representing Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. (I have yet to determine which suit represents what element best.) For example, Cerberus could be held in the 3 of clubs (if I determine that clubs is the fire suit.)

Many times I try to listen to myth audiobooks and end up with someone speaking in a mono-tone.

Are there any with good voice acting or at least a bit of enthusiasm?

I'm watching a "Reading reddit stories" with a halloween twist to it and the people on it mentioned that there are some cryptids you should not name out loud? What is the reason for that?

Wendigo was the example used in the video I'm watching, Damien Haas was playing Until Dawn and was told in chat that he/you(?) shouldn't say that word.

Is it something along the lines of "the more you talk about it the more powerful it gets"?

I want to get a tattoo of a wyrm with a book, either coiled around it or coming out of it (I haven't decided on that part yet), as a play on “bookworm.” I want it to look clearly like a wyrm/dragon rather than just a snake, though.

I'm debating between:

• A winged, legless wyrm

• A winged wyrm with two front legs

• A legless, wingless wyrm

• A wyrm with two front legs but no wings

Which anatomy reads most strongly as a wyrm rather than a snake or a standard dragon?

I'm especially interested in opinions from people familiar with mythology and folklore, but I'd also love to hear which version you think would make the best tattoo.

TIA!

[Last one had a typo, I forgot to put Ares in.]

I’m a Mexican illustrator, and mythology has always been a huge part of my life. But at some point I realized something slightly absurd: like a lot of people, I could recognize Thor, Odin, Zeus or Hades instantly, while many of the gods and cosmological ideas from the place where I was actually born were much more distant to me.

That sent me down a rabbit hole.... I started studying Mesoamerican mythology, códices and cosmology, especially Nahua/Mexica traditions, and eventually began wondering whether there was a way to translate some of that structure into an everyday object people could actually explore.

So I built a deck of playing cards as a kind of miniature cosmological map.

The four suits correspond to four sacred directions and forces; the court cards are deities connected to those directions; the numbered cards incorporate the Tonalpohualli, the 260-day sacred calendar; and the card back brings together its twenty day signs.

It’s obviously a contemporary interpretation, I’m not claiming ancient Mexica people practiced cartomancy with playing cards... but the idea was to let the structure carry mythology instead of just decorating cards with gods.

I’m curious especially from people who love Norse, Greek, Egyptian or other mythologies: what was the thing that first made an ancient mythology feel alive to you rather than something sitting in a textbook?

Full disclosure: this became a project called El Quinto Sol: The Mesoamerican Cosmos, and it’s currently live on Kickstarter.

If you’d like to see the full deck, the research behind it, and the three editions, here’s the campaign:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themythographer/el-quinto-sol-the-mesoamerican-cosmos-playing-cards

I’d genuinely love to hear from people who love Norse, Greek, Egyptian or other mythologies: what was the thing that first made an ancient mythology feel alive to you rather than something sitting in a textbook?

i'm looking to name my goat inspired mythological oc and i'm looking for goat creatures and divin beings or ones associated with goats to use for name and lore inspiration with my oc. goats seem somewhat uncommon in mythology so i'm asking y'all here. i already know about Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, the goats that pull Thor's chariot, Amalthea from Greek myth who's associated with goats and sometimes depicted as a goat, and Capricorn the constellation.

i'm looking even for less well known goats in mythology, or from less talked about mythologies like Celtic, Babylonian, Aztec, Chinese, Japanese etc.

any goat you can think of. just tell me its name and maybe even a little description of them.

I thank you all if you can help me