A look at Edith Hamilton's 1942 "Mythology", which looks at why the Greek myths were super awesome. Even though they're full of weird gods doing weird things, they're still a lot easier to grasp than the later Celtic stories. Character motivations basically make sense and causality is generally clear. Full of violence but only rarely given to bouts of wanton barbarism, they also have characters who are thoughtful and forgiving. She also charts how they evolved over time, with the pinnacle of the storytelling essentially happening as belief was already declining. The stories were versatile, but the demand to make the gods fundamentally nicer was perhaps their undoing. A god you negotiate with is hardly a god at all.

#Mythology
#Religion
#Literature

https://decoherency.blogspot.com/2024/10/review-mythology.html