So the 19th and 20th centuries, industrial age, nationalist age, romantic age, Occidental age, age of progress revalorization of the Norse and Greek myths, right?
\nin those pantheons the lightning (which is to say, electrical) gods outranked the sun gods. Millennia before electrification and the replacement of agriculture with industry as the human idiom. That’s so obvious someone must have made a thing of it right?
\n(Or was it one of those things where one just came from an older pantheon in the same mythos? When I was in middle school I felt sooo clever for coming up with the idea that pantheon succession [Titans to Greek gods, etc.] was the result of mythologizers of material culture justifying continuity with the mythologizers from the same culture in previous stages of development and then eventually I discovered Joseph Campell and all that and I was like dang. I still wonder whether that was a parallel discovery or just reverse-engineered from the culture that had already processed the idea.)
\n[One of my favorite mythological theories I’ve encountered is that the Proto-Semitic pantheon fell out amongst themselves and Yahweh was the trickster who emerged victorious pretending to be the life god. {Now that I type this out it’s glaringly obvious how well this theory itself serves as a nationalist mythologization of the role of Jews in Christendom}]
\n(The reason that folklore & mythology, and linguistics, and physical anthropology were such a thing was because before radiocarbon dating and the discovery of DNA, that was what we had of prehistory)
\n\nIn related news I think I might start practicing \u00c1satr\u00fa. It feels right in Portland. When I was in LA I worshipped (distinct from “believed in”, pff) Santa Muerte - the man-scarred desert felt like the right place to revere death.
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