by Joshua Simmet

Created on: January 05, 2010

Note; I am in no way an expert or student of Mythology. This is just my belief and understanding on the subject.

Mythology is a dead religion that is no longer practiced. The most popular and widely know is the mythology of the Greeks and Romans, which is mostly the same but with different names for the deities. Other mythologies include the religions of the Nordic people, the Egyptians and the Druidic religion of the English Isles.

Just like modern religion the mythologies set a serious of rules, norms and values, for the people of that land to live by. The Greeks and Romans valued perfection. Their gods were immortal, indestructible and creatures of action. For the most part though, they did not overly value thinkers, which is why their main hero, Hercules, is a raging idiot. However the Athenians did and their main hero was Theseus. Their afterlife was broken into different areas for the good and the bad, giving people a reason to respect the will of the gods.

The Egyptian gods were created, like the Greek and Roman gods, to give people values and norms to live by. They also gave a reason for things that were, for them, unexplainable. People died because Osiris died and came to rule the underworld. The sun rose in the morning and set at night because of a struggle between the pharaoh’s soul and an avatar of the god Osiris. The Egyptians were smart too, they saw that many natural occurrences are related and so made the gods representing that occurrence to be related. The Egyptian afterlife was either to join the gods with all of the possessions you were buried with or to the underworld to be punished for your worldly deeds. The Pyramids were built to shelter the pharaohs and the things they wished to take with them.

The Nordic people lived in a frozen northland that created a hard and bitter people who worshipped hard and bitter gods. They believed that the Gods waged an eternal struggle with the evil giants and that one day, the gods would all fall. Their pantheon was made up of numerous gods who pretty much drank and caused a ruckus, much like their mortal worshippers. But when things went down, the people and gods would stand and fight till dead or victory. Their afterlife was the hall Valhalla in the Gods keep Asgard. Fallen heroes would gather there to wait the time of the last battle between the gods and the evil giants. While the Norse knew that eventually evil would triumph over good they also believed that in time, after their defeat there would be a renewal of the world with no evil. This gave them the courage to continue on in a otherwise bleak and rather horrible world.

I don’t know much about the Celtic Druidic religion, but I know that they worshipped a large number of gods associated with nature. It is believed that Stonehenge was built as a temple with an alter, which has gone missing, at the center. They also believed in reincarnation and that the deeds of this life affected the creature you would come back as.

Modern day religion works in much the same way. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all have one God who set down rules for people to live buy and in so doing ascend to heaven upon death. But if you fail to comply with those rules you will burn in eternal torment in Hell. 

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