KaneLynch.com
Updates & miscellaneous musings!
Saturday, January 29, 2005
The Latest BSN
Monday, January 10, 2005
Click on the picture to enlarge.
Overall, a decent, if uneventful weekend. The fact that it was mostly spent inside was somewhat mitigated by when I was walking home from the bus stop tonight. Those leafless trees were casting heavy shadows everywhere. I spent several minutes photographing them, which was somewhat more difficult than it should have been--my new camera's really good at taking high resolution pictures, but they blur fairly easily. That's cool if you're going for vague artiness, but more troublesome for capturing something legitimately pretty that you stumble upon.
But the end result came out very nice, I think.
And really, it's only because of the camera's small size that I had it with me at all. So, awesome.
Sadly, in the process, I scared a family of racoons that was eating out of the garbage right next to me.
Sorry guys!
I could be (and probably am) totally wrong, But it's still interesting
From Pantheon.org--
In Irish-Celtic mythology, the Tuatha Dé Danann ("People of the goddess Danu") are the Irish race of gods, founded by the goddess Danu. These gods, who originally lived on 'the islands in the west', had perfected the use of magic. They traveled on a big cloud to the land that later would be called Ireland and settled there.
Shortly after their arrival they defeated the Firbolg at the first battle of Mag Tuireadh. In the second battle of Mag Tuireadh they fought and conquered the Fomorians, a race of giants who were the primordial inhabitants of Ireland. The Tuatha Dé dealt more subtly with the Fomorians than with the Firbolg, and gave them the province of Connacht. There was also some marrying between the two races.
The Tuatha Dé themselves were later driven to the underworld by the Milesians, the people of the fabulous spanish king Milesius.
Ok, in Greek mythology Uranus and Gaia gave birth to the Titans, who then defeated them. The Titans, like the Fomorians in the Celtic story, were a race of primordial giants. They were defeated by Zeus and the other Olympians, who then established themselves as the gods worthy of worship by humankind.
It's possible these stories are so strikingly similar because there are certain mythological patterns that people respond to and all that other Joseph Campbell shit, which I'm all for, but it seems just as likely that when the Romans came over and dominated Britain and Ireland, their stories conflated with the native ones and produced something which took elements from the pre-existing Celtic mythology and grafted it onto a Greek story.*
This happened more obviously in some cases (the Romans created a new goddess that combined one of their goddesses and the Celtic Brigid, called "Aquae-Sulis". You can see stuff deticated to her at the temple in Bath.).
There are of course other explanations--both mythologies feature a female triple goddess of war, but Pantheon also notes that the Celtic one, Morrigan, likely dates back to the "the megalithic [pre-historic] cult of the Mothers," so it's possible that they evolved from a common root.
But the theory doesn't seem implausible. It's also likely a fact in Native American flood stories, which are so similar to the one told iN Genesis that Western tampering seems a much more likely explanation than anything else.
Something to think about.
I wish I could take random classes in things that interest me, so I could write about shit like this and actually know what I was saying.
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*Since the Romans' mythology came from the Greeks', obviously.