WEBVTT

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Most of us get exposed to mythology
through illustrated kid's books

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This gives us the false impression
that mythology is like a book -

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written down and not particularly prone to change.

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But that's more like...
what mythology fossilizes into over time.

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The actual living mythology looks very different

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from the carefully articulated skeletons
that we put in the museums.

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Mythology is stories, and stories change with every telling.

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If youre passing stories down generationally

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through folklore and oral tradition,
things change a lot.

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Specially the characters.

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And in mythology, the characters are gods.

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So the gods end up evolving alongside their society.

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Every time a myth of a god gets written down,

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it's like a photograph of that god
in that single moment of their development,

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or like a single frame from an animation.

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That single frame might be very cool and interesting,

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but if we can find enough of those keyframes
and put them in the right order,

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we can try and trace out what the full animation
might have looked like

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and get a feel for how this god
actually evolved over time.

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When we do a deep dive like this,

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I usually go as far as I can

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to try and find the earliest stories
so we can trace this evolution,

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and watch as the gods we're familiar with now
start out as wildly unfamiliar figures

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before growing and changing
with their societies

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to eventually become the figure we recognize today.