Why Greek, Roman and Norse mythologies are overused, where others rarely get used?
Once upon a time, there was torrential rain. Such heavy downpour that the animals saw their homes flooding. They run to the hills, the flooding got worse; they run to higher hills, the flooding was still getting worse; eventually they couldn’t help but gather together onto the largest hill of the region.
Such a ruckus wouldn’t go unnoticed by the Mboi Guazú, the giant serpent; she woke up from her deep slumber, feeling a bit peckish. Unlike most animals she could see in the dark, and what she saw was a feast. Such abundance of prey! She could even ignore their meat, and go straight for the tastiest bits: the eyes.
So she ate the other animals’ eyes. One by one. She ate so many eyes that they wouldn’t fit the serpent’s belly, but she kept eating them. So the eyes started appearing over her body, in-between her scales, creepily emitting light. The more eyes she ate, the more eyes she would have over her body, to the point that she was bright, she was light, she was fire.
She has become the Mboi-Tatá, or the “fire serpent”. And she still roams those lands, looking for prey, burning the path as she goes through. If you ever find her while roaming, don’t ever forget to close your eyes - and hope for the best.
Okay, that doesn’t answer your question but I was in the mood of sharing a bit of the Guarani mythology, the fire serpent. This version of the myth is the one from the Mbyá.
If anyone wants I don’t mind sharing other Guaraní myths. I also remember a few Kaingang ones.
It’s interesting that so many religions from all around the world has a ‘big flooding’ story in it.
I also think that it’s interesting. And I wonder if it’s something shared by the “collective memory” of humankind, or if it’s just that flooding events are so common and impactful that any culture is almost certain to develop that myth, given enough time.
We keep living next to rivers because reliable water is the single most important consideration. Flooding happens. Most parts of the world independently developed sun and moon worship as well, and name colors in roughly the same order.
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before the train you could not feed a city without water transport. Your transport power would eat more food than it could deliver
In addition to the point about Western mythologies dominating because of cultural exports, I think there is also the undercurrent of England’s original mythologies having been “lost” and so the English were always fascinated by the mythologies of the Norse (due to being invaded) and by the Greeks and Romans (as previous “great” civilizations they aspired to be).
Combine that with America’s obvious English influences and the influence of England as a colonizer around the world, and those mythologies gained a huge outsized influence.
cuz you live in the west ;) if you mean online, cuz it’s made by the west
as a Hongkonger, almost all mythological references I see are Chinese
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Rule of cool.
Other (Western) mythology just ain’t as cool. IDK why Western media doesn’t borrow from Eastern mythos tho. Japan has some gnarly mythology! But you really only tend to see Chinese and Japanese and other Asian/Eastern mythology in stuff from that part of the world. 🤷🏻♂️
Exposure is probably a reason, but you could create more exposure by, you know… Exposing your audience to it.
As many others are pointing out, cultural hegemony plays a major role—but I think there’s another factor at play as well:
Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology have been dead and fossilized for a thousand years and more, and in the meantime a long tradition grew up of mining them for allegory, with their prior religious significance stripped away. Most other world mythologies, on the other hand, still form part of active belief systems, or recently died out under colonial occupation and so carry postcolonial political overtones. So borrowing from them could be more problematical, whereas classical mythology has basically been left up for grabs by its former adherents.
