Mythology Blog

Hey Guys, So, a little bit about me and negative feedback. I quickly found out while playing sports in high school and college that my biggest critic was always me. Even when coaches or teammates would tell me I had done a good job, I felt like it wasn't enough and that is what I told myself. Come to find out a while later that is actually how I feel about a lot of aspects of my life, so I have recently been doing some reading and research into that area of psychology and mental health. So I was happily surprised that the article "A Simple 5-Second Habit to Rewire Your Harshly Self-Critical Brain"  was so relevant to my own situation. In the article Joel Almeida talks about reality-based self-congratulation which in short is just the concept of mentally congratulating yourself for every small step towards your goal or inline with your set out intentions rather than self critic for things that pull you away from your goal or intentions. For me this seems like a re...

Hello All, To brainstorm for this project I started by thinking about fiction books that I like to read that might be related to this class. Right off the bat I though about vampires, werewolves, and witches. A classic trio, but the first two have really been in pop culture a lot in recent years so I decided to go with witches. That thought lead me to think about other magical topics which is where I thought of Merlin. After that I was just clicking through links looking for inspiration when I found a book in Freebookapalooza about religion and magic, then got linked to The Sacred Texts website where I found a page about Atlantis. So that is how I found my four topics, and now to tell you a little bit about each of them and my ideas. Witches across cultures:  Witches appear in many cultures across time and have been a reading interest of mine since I was a little kind. A useful link might be this one from the History Channel , although it will likely not have much that isn't Eu...

Author's note: I wrote this story after reading Pygmalion and wanting to develop on the statues story. So this story gives the statue a back story, and rewrites some of the original tale, in the form of my character named Ivory. I hope you enjoy it.  In ancient Greece there was a woman named Ivory that had grown up in a village far from any city. Her family farmed the land around their home and raised livestock. When she was older, her father would take her with him on the long journey to the city when it was time to sell their crops at the market. One year at the market, Ivory met the most beautiful man she had ever seen. This man’s name was Deveron, and he was known widely for his charm and beauty. Soon after they met, Deveron and Ivory fell in love and were married.  They built a small home on the land Ivory’s family owned and continued to farm the land and live good lives that seemed to be blessed by the gods. They were so happy in their love and in their life th...

Hello!  I couldn’t quite decide how to start these notes, so I decided I would stick with that theme and take style notes over how the stories in the anthology were started. Many of them started with some form of “ once upon a time,” or “one day” this included the stories in, The divine, Tricksters, and the Fairytales sections. This is a beginning I think a lot of us are familiar with from fairytales and has almost become a cliché in some ways. Unless I was going to write a fairytale, I don’t think that I would use this tool to start a story and even then, I might not. The other stories in the anthology had what I called a “ cold start ,” to distinguish them from the stories that used the “once upon a time” start. There were a few similarities that I noticed. The stories in the Origins section were a very cold start. For instance, “ The Man in the Moon ” only states that there was a blacksmith that didn’t like his job. We don’t learn anything about who he is as a p...

Hi there!  Over the last two years,  I have gotten into a podcast habit and have listened to all of the episodes available of more than a few podcasts in that time. In fact, I have listened to all of the “Lore” podcast by Arron Mackie, on Spotify and, although the it tended to center more often on European stories, consequently I have heard quite a few stories from around the world. So feeling like I had already heard a lot of stories, I was surprised to see just how many unfamiliar units there were in the UnTexbook. Although many of them are interesting to me, I think that I would like to focus on units that I am less familiar with. Three that really stood out to me are the Indian Fairy Tales , the Russian Folktales , and the Filipino Popular Tales . These units come from areas that I don’t really remember hearing stories from, and whose culture interests me. "Globe Gores by Giovanni Maria Cassini, Published in Rome, 1790"  Photo from in sight