Category Archives: Mythology World Tour

Mythology World Tour: The Serer

The Fantasy Genre has long been dominated by the religions and customs of countries touched on by the Crusades. While this makes sense, with the familiar image of a knight wandering foreign lands being key to the genre itself, there has been stagnation in recent times. As such, I’ve taken it upon myself to look into the cultures of the world and find fascinating details about other mythologies often overlooked by the genre we so love, going on a bit of a tour of world mythologies.

During the quest for some interesting details, going through West Africa, it’s become clear that many major patterns begin to form. Almost all of the West African cultures have a single supreme deity which is supported by lesser spirits. Often times this deity will have a love/hate relationship with the people who worship them, but will (usually) have a soft spot for the people they’ve created. Generally, the idea is that God loves us but is a little disappointed with our life choices.

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Something all art majors can understand.

But outside of the general similarity of all the supreme deities, the differences between the West African cultures stem primarily from how they interact with that God. In some cultures there is a need for houses of worship, in others it’s a matter of self-improvement, and for others still it requires violent retribution. But what is known in almost all cases is that, even in their attempts to appease or communicate with their deity, they cannot do it directly. God is unknowable, untouchable, and beyond human contact without an intermediary. And, in the case of one culture…that requires a great deal of reverence for trees.

Continue reading Mythology World Tour: The Serer

Mythology World Tour: The Igbo

After relaunching the blog, getting a few cute holiday articles out of the way and getting past one hell of a seasonal health problem, I’m back and ready to dig back into the mythologies of the world.

For those just joining, the premise is simple: our fantasy genre, especially epic fantasy, is determined in large part by the mythologies that originated out of countries touched by the crusades. The dragons and ghouls that grace our pages are essentially just one version of thousands we could be drawing from. So, in an effort to inspire some diversity in the stories we tell, I’ve made a point to start learning about new religions and then take some time to shine a light on the alternatives I’m finding along the way.

As we last left this series, we were deep in the mythologies of the major West African cultures with the Efik and their not so friendly creator deity Abassi, may he never notice humanity has invented the internet. The Efik, as a result of their beliefs, have had some rough relationships with other cultures. And one of the cultures most impacted by the Efik in this region were their neighbors…

Continue reading Mythology World Tour: The Igbo

History of the Holidays: Christmas

As it is a Monday, and I’ve recently established a theme for the day, I feel it’s time to once again tackle the world of Mythology, specifically continuing my tour of world mythologies. But, seeing also that it’s the Christmas season, I felt the urge to do something a bit festive. So, with the mission statement of trying to expand my mythological horizons, I went looking for unusual or unique myths from around the world tied into this time of the year. What I found, though, was that there was one figure known all over the world which had origins so complex that, even though people know of him almost everywhere, most don’t have the slightest clue how complex he is.

Who could it be? This fat jolly bastard.

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Because what we’ve got here is a fusion of figures so distinct from each other that the end product looks like all of them and none of them at the same time. Basically, he’s a holiday smoothie. And so, for the first time, Alternative Mythologies will look towards Europe and dig deeper into the figure we know as…

Continue reading History of the Holidays: Christmas

Mythology World Tour: The Efik Religion

Realizing that the fantasy genre can be pretty euro-centric, I decided to start researching mythologies of the world to potentially enrich the source materials and look for inspiration. These mythologies have their highs and lows, just like the ones we’re familiar with, and a part of this article deals with one of the lows. Don’t be confused and think this reflects the entirety of these people, however, and don’t think that we’re somehow much better. As I point out in this entry and many others, these cultures are not as different from ours as we think them to be – including our past flaws.

One of the great myths perpetuated about West Africa over time was that all of their religions were somehow “inferior” compared to the ones they were eventually converted to. And often the idea is that the conversion was “helpful” to them. These were excuses to try to ease the conscience of those who perpetuated so many things on the region. And. as seen with the Akan and the Fon, it was clearly never the case. I hope after the last few entries you’ve seen a lot of the similarities with other religions show the Europeans weren’t as “culturally superior” as they thought they were and that these cultures mirrored the more popular religions of our day in several ways.

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Besides, Europeans can do some crazy shit

So it was a great surprise, to me at least, that one of the cultures in West Africa actually asked for evangelicals to come to them. In 1842, two of the rulers of the Efik people in the southwest corner of Nigeria, King Eyo Honesty II of Creek Town (formerly Ikot Itunko) and King Eyamba V of Duke Town (formerly Iboku Atapka), issued letters to the European traders that they wished to maintain their long standing relationships with Europe and would like to have missionaries and traders come to their land.

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This King is less gaudy than the Pope.

For the kings, it was primarily a business decision. Prior to the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade, European contacts had been an important part of the economy in these towns.  But with the end of the slave trade, and the chance the Europeans might move on, these kings saw an opportunity to improve their region and their standing by inviting the Europeans back. Issuing letters in December of 1842, the two kings invited the Europeans to modernize their territory and evangelize their population.

Today, many of the Efik people are Christian, but there are still others who follow the old religion. Which leads one to ask: if they weren’t forced to do it, what motivated so many of them to change? Though much of it could be attributed to pressure from their kings to appease the Europeans, the fact that it wasn’t forced on everyone lead me to ask just how this transition would have taken place.

And so, in the interest of seeing what may have facilitated that sort of change, today I look into… Continue reading Mythology World Tour: The Efik Religion

Mythology World Tour: The Dahomey Religion

Realizing that the fantasy genre can be pretty euro-centric, I decided to start researching mythologies of the world to potentially enrich the source materials and look for inspiration. Don’t forget to share on Twitter and Facebook, as this is definitely a message that doesn’t get out enough.

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One of the most influential but lesser known cultures of the West African region was the religion of the Fon people of the Dahomey Kingdom in modern day Benin. Though the Fon people were followers of West African Vodou, the Dahomey variation of Vodou was unique for bringing in several pre-existing animist traditions that spread through the rest of West African Vodou and even into the Vodou practiced in the western world (especially South America).

Because of this, they share a similarity to the Amazigh in the way that other, better known, cultures are given credit for ideas that originated there. In fact, when looking through concepts that are better known for their representation in Vodou, you can find that several of them originated with the more animist inspired Fon traditions from the Dahomey Kingdom.

So, before eventually hitting Vodou down the line, it’s only fair to take a look at the major contributions made by… Continue reading Mythology World Tour: The Dahomey Religion

Mythology World Tour: The Ashanti/Akan Religion

For many of the cultures to come out of West Africa, what we know in the western world is often a derivative of one of their abstracts. Of course, the best example of this is Vodou, the culture we’ve long since associated with the darker aspects of their own superstitions, rather than the more mainstream beliefs. But even outside of Vodou you’ll find that the common knowledge of West African cultures is generally limited to things which are the easiest for us to process.

One great example of this is the Ashanti, one of the most commonly known cultures of West Africa. People who are familiar with the word immediately know of the Ashanti folk hero Anansi the spider. But after that point you’d be hard pressed to find someone who knows more about who they are. In fact, most aren’t even aware of the fact that the Ashanti are a subgroup, a single part of a greater whole, and that the majority of their beliefs actually originate from the people who share their language: The Akan.

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Akan conceptual symbols, the “Adinkra”

It makes some sense that the Ashanti take the limelight here, they are the largest subgroup of the Akan and thus most Akan that we’ve encountered over the centuries have been Ashanti. But what’s important about it is that details like that lead to us sometimes not understanding the culture as a whole. And so, today, let’s address the larger group’s beliefs (as well as I can in the space I have). Continue reading Mythology World Tour: The Ashanti/Akan Religion

Mythology World Tour: Introduction to West Africa

When I started touring the mythologies of the world, I did so with two major reasons in mind. The first was that the fantasy genres, by and large, have stagnated in the recent years. Our novels, games, and movies all fall under similar categories with the differences primarily in presentation and angle rather than source. As a result, some parts of the fantasy genre have been on the decline. The popularity of Urban Fantasy proves that it’s not the genre itself that’s a problem, but rather that people want to see something different from what has been done for so many years. New material can’t hurt.

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Dare you to guess which one this is without looking it up

The second is that we’re living in a more global society than ever before. International markets have become more vibrant and viable for creators to work with. People in the domestic markets are becoming more aware of the outside world. We are slowly becoming an open multi-cultural society. There’s always been a vein of people who follow the teachings of another culture and those people have usually been marked as outcasts and weirdoes in the western world.  But today we’re finding those people are becoming mainstream rapidly.

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There won’t be true equality until this starts happening

Some may point at the internet, but the fact of the matter is that silly white people getting Chinese tattoos has been a thing for at least a couple decades. Rather, the reason is more fundamental: as people have become more accepting of each other, so too have we become more accepting of our cultures. Some start to complain that it’s “cultural appropriation”, but someone trying to show respect and love for someone else’s culture is not a bad thing, it’s a sign we’re starting to appreciate people and history other than our own. And, the fact is, we really could afford to know more about places like… Continue reading Mythology World Tour: Introduction to West Africa

Mythology World Tour: Guanches & The Distilled Essence of Mythology

So far, my tour of world mythologies has been mostly about showing everyone a glimpse of the world outside of our typical fantasy genre offerings. And along the way it’s easy to notice similarities that abound. People try to explain the animals they encounter in the wilderness, they try to explain the weather, they share a fear of death or of the idea that the dead may remain. Some of them may combine aspects to become things such as a rainbow which is really a massive serpent, or a cobra which holds the earth aloft. Come to think of it, a lot of mythologies involve the general idea of “snakes”.

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Seen here: all places where people are concerned about snakes

But the similarities make sense: our cultures have intermingled at one time or another throughout history. We not only respond to the world that we know, but the world others have known. Shared fears and shared concepts bleed across borders and vast distances. And, as I spoke of last time, at least one culture is so intermixed with every other culture around them that we hardly know them while still knowing almost everything about them. The Amazigh are, for all intents and purposes, the Beatles of Mediterranean mythology.

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But what happens when you take a culture and stick it in a place where there’s nothing to really interact with. Put people on a set of small, tropical islands off the west coast of Africa, away from the empires and constant movements of the Mediterranean seas, and what do you get? Well, you get people who have the most distilled essence of what mythology looks like when there is no need to explain the gods of other people. You get a people who have no Mongols, Hippos or invading drunken barbarians to worry about. In fact, while it remains true that a major driving force behind mythology is what scares or confuses people, only one thing has ever really scared or confused the aboriginal natives of the Canary Islands:

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A fucking volcano.

So, of course, the only real story I have from the mythology of the Guanches of Canary Islands is one explaining eruptions. It’ll do. Continue reading Mythology World Tour: Guanches & The Distilled Essence of Mythology

Mythology World Tour: The Amazigh – They’re Everywhere

A few months ago I started my mythological world tour with the premise that fantasy, specifically epic fantasy, was usually fairly Euro-centric. The basic premise was to start pointing at different regions of the world, selecting a handful of interesting stories, and wetting your appetite for the concept of possibly using these regions in your own writing. It’s gone well – I’ve covered Asia, Australia, and Egypt. But then I ran into a really strange speed-bump.

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And believe me, if they build a speed bump in that region it’s sturdy and painful

The region around Egypt has several other cultures that have existed there, some of them absorbed into what we’ll refer to as the “Crusade belt” and thus folded into the greater fantasy genre already. But others are a little more confusing and a little more subtle. For instance, the kingdom of Kush to the south of Egypt was for a very long time considered to actually just be a subset of Egypt. Only in recent times has Kush been considered by some scholars to be a distinct group of people who had a culture sufficiently different enough to be worth study. This means that even if I wanted to talk about Kush’s culture, there’s no real information for me to use except: “it’s, kind of like Egypt, but not.” On the other hand, another culture existed to the west of Egypt in what is now modern day Libya known by many as the Berbers but referring to themselves as the Amazigh. And the story of the Amazigh is… complicated.

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Like I said, Africa has a lot of skin tones.

Honestly, how the fuck do I explain the Amazigh?

I considered skipping the Amazigh and declaring that Egypt was enough to cover what could be called “North Africa”. But looking into them made me realize just how stupid the Euro-centric model in epic fantasy actually is. Over the course of thousands of years, the Amazigh were kind of a melting pot and test-bed of cultures from all around their corner of the Mediterranean. Not sharing the background of how these cultures intermixed would be allowing the process to be ignored and let people miss the fact that all of these cultures are interconnected on some level.

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They even had pyramids… round ones.

So today I’m going to do something a little different and discuss more about how things can be the same, rather than different… Continue reading Mythology World Tour: The Amazigh – They’re Everywhere

So about Horus…

Some months ago, a group of people several thousand strong gathered together and began to play a game of Pokemon in the most inefficient way possible: by all playing the same game at once. Twitch Plays Pokemon was a thing for a while as the group did their damn best to control a child who they’d decided had a schizophrenic mental episode and was following the commands of every voice in his head. But along the way, one thing to come out of it was a religious satire in the nature of “Lord Helix” the helix fossil they frequently went to for advice, and his only begotten Pidgeot, Abba, the Bird Jesus, who followed the philosophy of “do unto others” over and over through literal interpretation by reflecting attacks right back at his enemies.

But this was not the first bird variation of Jesus to roam the internet. For the first, you’d have to go to the time when the internet discovered the ancient legends of Horus, a child born to a (technical) virgin mother and had to be hidden away from the king of the land to prevent his death. He wandered the desert, undertook great tests and became the king of kings, the savior of Egypt.

Only the truth is, Jesus’ story is a straightforward affair with few twists and turns: he was born of a virgin, had miraculous powers and was eventually betrayed. Horus’ story is a bit more… insane. And because of that, I intend to recount: Continue reading So about Horus…