Myths

Well, the Meister has recently been as sad, depressed and drunk as a skunk in a funk.

In one of these moodes, he started thinkin about mythology - you know the stuff with gods and demons and heroes etc etc. So here is what he thought.

Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

Barring that, what we have is basically a lot of seriously cool stories involving lots of drinking, wars and sex, one great thing about mythologies is the characters - esp the animals.

Greeks: Chimera (1/3rd lion, goat and serpent..who thought of that?? seriously thats one of the coolest creatures ever), 9 headed Hydra, Cerebus, Minotaur

The Phoenix is a bit of a traveller and keeps popping out in many myths - Egyptian, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese (not to mention Harry Potter)

The Norse, on the other hand were not that into animals. True they had that giant snake and that giant wolf, but apart from them it was mostly men and women. However, what they do have going for them are the Valkyries.

Picture this, you go fight, if you win you get gold, cattle, women; if you die some big boobed woman will come and carry you off to Valhalla where you will spend the rest of eternity in a party with neverending buffet and alchohol. I mean this is the perfect win-win situation if there ever was one. No wonder those dudes were so fearless and all. Its the best after death scenario ever.

Talking about death, lets compare after death scenarios in some other cultures.

According to them Greeks, you die, then you go to the underworld where you have to pay Chiron to take u across Styx or Acheron, and then you get judged and depending on the result, you are sent to Elysium for the blessed, Tartarus for the damned, and Asphodel for the rest.

Everyone knows about the Egyptians and their morbid preoccupation with death. In their case, it is the baboon/ibys Thoth who judges the soul in a balance with a feather.

I am leaving out the Mayans and the Incans. Those bloodthirsty dudes were more interested in the deaths of their victims than their own.

Now we come to our very own Hindu myths. You die, you go to th underworld and you meet whom - another bloody clerk/ bureaucrat!!!!!!!!!! Bloody Chitragupta with his bloody ledger. A prime area for corruption if you ask me.

For that matter, look at our gods. The most powerful one is a pothead who kills his wife when she nags him too much (not cool dude, not cool). Another of our main gods in a geriatric married to a young lady - who is supposed to be the god of wisdom and learning - you married a geriatric lady, how smart was that? and we are supposed to follow your example). The 3rd of our main gods is the grandfather of all loose characters - the dude goes around marrying/seducing hundreds of women and as a kid, goes and hides the clothes of ladies when they are bathing thus forcing them to walk naked in front of him!!!

On the plus side, we do have some pretty powerful goddesses and pre-incarnations of Buffy so to speak - you know all them demon slaying goddesses et all. We have the world's 1st multi species transplant involving for some weird reason gods and eleophants, we have nuclear weapons, flying chariots, shapeshifting demons etc. Some of our gods are even green you know, they recycle themselves and come as different avatars.

However, they are some mean bastards - they regularly make the asuras do the hard work and then they steal all the good stuff and kill the asuras.......hmm doesn't that remind you of the modern day bosses?