Nerdology 101: Ties Between Mythology and History

Hellooo! Welcome to Nerdology 101, the blog where I explore your favorite nerdy topics and you read it because you, like me, are the nerdiest of nerds. My name is Maria Levato, your host, and today, your guide to all things mythical (or at least all things mythical that helped shape the world as we know it).

This weeks topic is the ties between mythology and history. With books like Scarlett St. Clair’s Hades x Persephone series and Abigail Owens’ The Games Gods play, even with anime like Record of Ragnarok, we often see mythology featured in pop culture, but seldom do we stop to remember that mythologies are just religions that most people no longer have faith in. Once, they had power and influence over humans—impacting the decisions leaders made and shaping the history we now learn about. I wanted to take the time in this blog post to explore aspects of history that were impacted by the beliefs of the culture and time. So, lets get into some Nerdology!

Japan

I love Shinto because of how much it influenced (and still continues to influence) Japanese culture. It’s perhaps one of the strongest examples of this phenomena. We see in most religions that at some point, people who believe in it believed they should be governed by a religious leader. This is true in the Pope and European monarchs, but also in other parts of the world, and other times, like Japan. There’s a key difference, though, in Japan, the Emperor has historically been viewed as descendant of Amaterasu’s lineage. For those who don’t know, Amaterasu is the Shinto sun goddess and the chief diety of the pantheon. Today, Japan is primarily ruled by a parliament rather than actively ruled by a monarch, but that wasn’t always the case. Emperess Suiko, the first recorded Empress regnant of Japan, was a ruling monarch (not the only ruling monarch in their history, just one).

Empress Suiko ruled at an interesting time in Japan’s history. It was a time when Buddhism was becoming more popular in Japan. The Empress did something interesting for someone who was descended from a Shinto diety, though: She supported the rise of the new religion, holding the balance between Shintoism and Buddhism. That decision impacted the relationship between Shinto and Buddhism, as we see it today, even though she made that decision between the years 593 and 628. It also laid the foundations for factions like the Sohei to gain traction and become favored by the Shogunate in the 700’s. We see these events later snowball into a series of other events that ultimately ended up influencing a substantial portion of Japanese history. Therefore, we have to believe that without the call for balance that Emperess Suiko made because it was a tenant shared by both Shintoism and Buddhism that Japan may not exist in the way that we recognize it today because so many events that shaped it were impacted by these beliefs.

While most of the world refers to Shintoism as a mythology, aspects of it are very much alive and well in Japan, meaning that it is in many ways still an active religion that co-exists in Japan alongside Buddhism, Christianity, and other religions. Even those who identify with another religious practice often still intergrate Shintoism into their lives. An author and creator by the name of Kyota Ko (IG: @themetroclassic) explores a lot about the history, mythology, and culture of Japan in his work. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, please visit his website. Kyota Ko has given his permission to be brought up in reference to this blog post. He’s a great source on the topic and I think anyone interested in it would really enjoy his content.

Egypt

Ancient Egypt is another fascinating example of the ways mythology influenced history because the beliefs of the time are a key factor in so much of what we know about the history of Egypt. The hieroglyphics, burials, politics, and culture were centered around Egyptian mythology for so much of Egyptian history. There’s no doubt that at the height of its beliefs, Egyptian mythology impacted Egypt as a whole, which, in turn, influenced the world. It would be easy to draw the same parallel I did with Japan between the pharaohs and the religion since the pharaohs were also believed to be descendants of Ra just as the emperors are with Amaterasu, but there’s another aspect I’d like to focus on here—one I think would be hard to ignore when it comes to Egypt—its influence on European beliefs and history. I choose this because I think it’s important to acknowledge just how wide the impact is in this aspect. Most religions influence their country and culture of origin, but Egypt’s reach stretched across continents, influencing the ways of cultures beyond its own.

Aset, an Egyptian goddess, was the origin of the goddess the Greeks called Isis, as explained here, in a listing from the Egyptian Museum. As you can see here, in an article out of the University of Oregon, that influence touched Roman beliefs as well. Sources from Cornell, Princeton, and other researching entities are provided there too. So, it can be concluded that Egyptian mythology definitively influenced some European mythologies which influenced the shaping of the histories of those cultures, which I’ll explore further in the Greek section below.

Greece

Referencing this article from the North London Collegiate School, we can learn how Greek Mythology influenced literature in works that are still renowned in the modern age. Those works reached Rome and influenced their culture and social norms as well as they did Greece’s. We also see where it impacted the stories told in Christianity. That impact on Christianity is explored in this article out of Columbia University where we see that the Virgin Mary in Christian beliefs evolved from Isis in Greek beliefs, which as we covered previously, stemmed from Aset in Egyptian beliefs. This fascinating web of evolutions of one goddess between cultures eventually met rise of Christianity in Europe, which led to the Catholic Church having so much power, and therefore is the origin of most of the events that took place during the European middle ages where Christianity then decided who became kings and queens, which wars were holy and which were not, and ultimately became the foundation for the entirety of western civilization. To this day, the Virgin Mary remains a prominent and influential figure in the world, impacting not just history already made, but history still in the making. Seeing that, it’s not so far-fetched to say that mythology is history in many ways, given its influence over the way civilization has been shaped in culutres from around the world.

Please, add to all of this in the comments. I’d love it if you all shared more stories of how mythology impacted history in other areas of the world! I’ll see you next week on Friday at 3PM ET for another segment of Nerdology 101. Until then, have a nerdy week!