I Am The Resurrected Scientific Frog Prince!

Just some scattered thoughts:

The line between myth (and rituals) and reality is tight indeed. Finding a point of origin is something abled minds haven't been able to really figure out with any conclusive confidence. No doubt, despite our rational and secular heritage inherited from the Englightenment (and begun during The Renaissance and Reformation), we did incorporate into our common Western civilization "barbaric" mythology. We see it all around us everyday. From our prayers, to our superstitions, right to our beliefs in the spirit world and even modern advertising to explain (and in the latter sell) all sorts of things.

If the Roman-Germanic worlds collided, so did our ability to rationally speculate in conjunction with scientific skepticism and philosophy crash head on with irrational rituals and mythology.

Of course, the (often illogical and confusing to us modern morons) mythology most familiar to us are the Ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Romans. In North American, Indian (Native) mythology is also well known. Yeah, sure, the Raven was the origin of earth. You do that.

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But here's the interesting thing. To me anyway. We tend to romanticize Native mythology as if it contains a degree of wisdom and nobility we somehow overlook or lack, yet, when we look upon, say, the Middle-Ages and its superstitions, we mock it. Though I never did quite get that. In a few hundred years we'll be mocked as well. Maybe the political ideology is but a mere form of modern mythology? Who knows!

The irony of course, is when Missionaries came to convert the 'savages' they used Christian religious mythology which in itself was alien to Natives at the time - to say nothing of our freaky technology. It was like The Terminator descending upon the Red race. Two wrongs made a right apparently. Or is it the blind leading the blind? In defense of Christianity, it at least help spawn the age of the Englightenment.

Native tribes around the world did not, though curious, expand or develop any form of speculative investigation choosing instead to use nature as an answer to what ailed or cured them. To explain, in other words, the world around them. I suppose this is why we say they were 'primitive?'

We also have described, in our narratives, that the White Man's arrival on the scene was violent if not nothing but a mistake of history. There's some truth to this (the Indian Wars were indeed violent (with both sides committing atrocities) and the use of Indian nations as pawns by the British and French weren't exactly peaceful) but isn't this a fact of history? The constant movement, collision and warring of one tribe or nation to merge, conquer and form another?

To obsess over this (and worse, apologize for it) is beyond the scope of logic when one confirms and accepts this is man's history. Yes, even its natural state.

To be angry with our imperfect past it is as petty as it is pointless.