@starsandepithets / starsandepithets.tumblr.com
Asks - Closed
Hymn Requests - Closed Indefinitely
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It seems people are still interested in the Adoration Cycle hymns from 2018, so I thought I’d throw up the links if anyone is still interested;
PDF;
☀️ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1khBnCpfJ6-B0r_dqECqMZdZ4oPBf_Vmk/view?usp=sharing
Physical copies;
☀️ https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/9145624-adoration-of-the-netjeru
💙 DragonHeartDigital 💙
https://dragonheartdigital.etsy.com
Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?
I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.
Thank you!
That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.
Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!
(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)
My favorite example from there is Tinkerbell, but it also points to “Gods Need Prayer Badly” on TVTropes
Most of the responses in that Reddit thread are talking about the idea of gods deriving physical sustenance from sacrifices made in their honour, rather than the modern literary trope of gods gaining their miraculous powers from the strength of their worshippers' faith; the former is, of course, an ancient notion, but uncritically conflating it with the latter may result in misleading conclusions.
I had been thinking that in response to the original prompt, because it's an interesting difference, right? Modern religions often focus on orthodoxy, believing the right things; but ancient polytheisms didn't care about that. They cared about orthopraxy, which is doing the right things.
Ancient polytheistic religions were fairly functional and transactional. They didn't spend much if any time thinking about "belief"; at least in the Mediterranean, atheism basically didn't exist, and the closest you got was believing the gods didn't care about you. (Bret Devereaux writes about this, and other differences between D&D religion and real historical polytheisms, here.)
Cultures do ritual sacrifice because "it works". (Yes, it doesn't "work" in reality, but it "works" in the sense that the cultures are performing these sacrifices and surviving, therefore the sacrifices are at least compatible with surviving as a culture.) And that comes before the theory, honestly; but the purpose of ritual is to make things happen. They're tools. And "just as a hammer and a wrench do not very much care if you think the ‘right things’ about hammers and wrenches, so the ritual does not care if you ‘believe’ in it, or have the ‘correct’ doctrine of it, so long as – like the wrench and the hammer – you use the tool properly."
And then the sacrifice is an exchange.
Do ut des is Latin and it means, “I give, so that you might give.” ... The key here is the concept of exchange. The core of religious practice is thus a sort of bargain, where the human offers or promises something and (hopefully) the god responds in kind, in order to effect a specific outcome on the world.
So then we can ask, what was the theory for why this stuff worked? And that varied.
Now, why do the gods want these things? That differs, religion to religion. In some polytheistic systems, it is made clear that the gods require sacrifice and might be diminished, or even perish, without it. That seems to have been true of Aztec religion, particularly sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl; it is also suggested for Mesopotamian religion in the Atrahasis where the gods become hungry and diminished when they wipe out most of humans and thus most of the sacrifices taking place. Unlike Mesopotamian gods, who can be killed, Greek and Roman gods are truly immortal – no more capable of dying than I am able to spontaneously become a potted plant – but the implication instead is that they enjoy sacrifices, possibly the taste or even simply the honor it brings them (e.g. Homeric Hymn to Demeter 310-315).
Now you can see how e.g. the Aztec take relates to the "gods need belief" thing, but it's also very different, because the Aztec gods needed sacrifices. They don't care about the belief, they care about the stuff and the actions.
So the "gods need belief" thing is sort of a weird fusion of ancient polytheisms, which posited gods who needed or wanted sacrifice, with modern religions, with their focus on belief and orthodoxy. So it can basically only happen in a modern-invented pagan or polytheistic religion—which is, presumably, why we see them popping up in mid-century sword and sorcery stuff. It's a vague recreation of the shape of ancient polytheisms, but filtered through a very modern take on what religion is and how it works.
The short story "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Man_on_the_Subway" by Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl was originally written in 1941 and fairly explicitly posits gods powers as fueled by followers' belief, but it does so in a way that feels to me like it's exploring an idea from other fiction. So I doubt it's the first example, but being originally written even earlier than the previously cited A E van Vogt story (although it wasn't published until 1950), it might be useful to look at Pohl's other early stuff or extant work he might have been drawing on.
I'm inviting participants 18 years or older who identify as Hellenic Polytheist practitioners or closely related religions that include worship of the Greek gods to participate in a questionnaire for my PhD thesis. If interested, I will send over the participant information.
Sutekh and Nut. Two holy beings.
Somewhere out there on a planet very far away is a civilization that has included our sun in a beloved constellation of some animal we couldn't dream up if we tried
Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?
Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.
Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.
Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?
Long collection of resources under the cut.
ALSO you should consider browsing Virtual Pet List and seeing if there are any pet sites you might be interested in playing. There is a whole genre of browser games right under your nose
Another one that I just found recently is this, which is a whole collection of blogs, organized by topic!
Look guys the real internet IS STILL THERE I’m going to cry
Getting off of twitter and onto neocities has really healed me and I am so glad to see it is healing other people too ;u; let’s retreat into the self-made digital woods and away from corporate bs pls, I am so tired
thoth knows the answer (digital, 2024)
[prints]
This trio of statues of goddess Sekhmet are located in the Sackler Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sekhmet was an Egyptian goddess of healing and war.
Brandon Falls Photography
No one:
Tumblr users at 00:00 on March 15th:
et tu brute?
Nehebkau (also spelled Nehebu-Kau) was the primordial snake god in ancient Egyptian mythology. Although originally considered an evil spirit, he later functions as a funerary god associated with the afterlife. As one of the forty-two assessors of Ma’at, Nehebkau was believed to judge the deceased after death and provide their souls with ka – the part of the soul that distinguished the living from the dead.
Nehebkau was ultimately considered a powerful, benevolent and protective deity. In late mythology, he is described as a companion of the sun god Re and an attendant of the deceased King. As he is so closely associated with the sun god, his name was evoked in magical spells for protection. His festival was widely celebrated throughout the Middle and New Kingdoms.
you can tell a lot by a womans hands, for instance, she has hooves? horse.
is this true
Not enough information. Are the hooves cloven?
a prayer to Hestia from a lost child:
Hestia, goddess of the hearth, help me find a place where i can be safely myself, guide me home to sleep safely each night under your protection.
Hestia, goddess of family, protect the people i love, the family i chose for myself and the ones that are mine by blood, the people to whom i belong.
Hestia, goddess of civilization, teach me to build myself a place in a community, to work for others and to help.
My Lady, guide me on your path, help me be a safe place, a hearth and a home to others and a hearth and a home for myself. May the home fire in my spirit never go out.
Day 32 Heru
Guess what! Heeeeerrrrreeee Heru! and a quick sketch in his human form.
Going to continue Anktober for alittle bit longer to include a few other gods like Ma'at, Tefnut n Shue, etc
Soooooooooo. I've made some changes to Aset artwork. I keep noticing how Neb-het and hers are not similar, including some details that parallels to Nut. Considering their twins, I thought it was fair to update Aset artwork a bit.
