Speaking of myths, I've been spending a lot of time on them lately—you want to know what got me started unpacking them? It wasn't Sallustius. It wasn't Plotinus. No, I was reading translations of some of the various versions of Innana's Descent into the Underworld that we've dug up, where the Sumerians describe the underworld as a wasteland where everything is colored gray and all the food tastes like dust. I said to myself, "Oh! That sounds just like our world!" And then the penny dropped—the mythic underworld is our world, and all the other pieces of that myth and others like it fell into place pretty easily from there.
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Date: 2023-08-28 10:56 am (UTC)Speaking of myths, I've been spending a lot of time on them lately—you want to know what got me started unpacking them? It wasn't Sallustius. It wasn't Plotinus. No, I was reading translations of some of the various versions of Innana's Descent into the Underworld that we've dug up, where the Sumerians describe the underworld as a wasteland where everything is colored gray and all the food tastes like dust. I said to myself, "Oh! That sounds just like our world!" And then the penny dropped—the mythic underworld is our world, and all the other pieces of that myth and others like it fell into place pretty easily from there.