Most of us get exposed to mythology through illustrated kid's books
This gives us the false impression that mythology is like a book -
written down and not particularly prone to change.
But that's more like... what mythology fossilizes into over time.
The actual living mythology looks very different
from the carefully articulated skeletons that we put in the museums.
Mythology is stories, and stories change with every telling.
If youre passing stories down generationally
through folklore and oral tradition, things change a lot.
Specially the characters.
And in mythology, the characters are gods.
So the gods end up evolving alongside their society.
Every time a myth of a god gets written down,
it's like a photograph of that god in that single moment of their development,
or like a single frame from an animation.
That single frame might be very cool and interesting,
but if we can find enough of those keyframes and put them in the right order,
we can try and trace out what the full animation might have looked like
and get a feel for how this god actually evolved over time.
When we do a deep dive like this,
I usually go as far as I can
to try and find the earliest stories so we can trace this evolution,
and watch as the gods we're familiar with now start out as wildly unfamiliar figures
before growing and changing with their societies
to eventually become the figure we recognize today.