Sounds-of-my-silence - The Sounds Of My Silence

Someone asked a good question yesterday that got me thinking: why are some mythologies more “mainstream” than others? Where I’m from, everyone knows at least a couple things about the Egyptian, Norse, and Greek (and sometimes Roman) pantheons, but no one’s ever discussed those of East Asia, or South America, for example. 

My theory: Eurocentrism and colonialism.

Egypt, Greece, and Rome all have some relevant proximity to the history of Christianity. Egypt features prominently in the Exodus, and Greece and Rome were important cultural shapers in the time of Jesus and Paul. When Christianity spread and gained the force of empire through Constantine and others and spread up through Europe, it dominated nearly all the local traditions in its wake. This domination continued through the European colonization of the Americas, Africa, India, and others -- history is written by the colonizers, so it makes sense that the prominent revival pantheons among European-descended pagans aren’t those of the conquered people but those of their own people (Norse) and those that are “necessary” to provide historical weight to Christianity.

Completely conjecture, but this was interesting to think about today.

Always love lifelong learning.

Harvard University offers a completely free online course on the Fundamentals of Neuroscience that you can get a certificate for successfully completing and which requires nothing other than basic knowledge in Biology and Chemistry. This excites me! Here’s the website

Organization vs. Mobilization: "We coagulate like organelles in an amoeba, like a swarm to a colony, ferrous fragments to a magnet of hope And as one mind, axon to axon advance to bend the very fabric of time"

Externalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being into the world.

Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy