Nerdology 101: My Top 5 Favorite Gods

Heyyy! Welcome back to another week of Nerdology 101. I just realized the blog is 6 months old now. Last week was my 26 week post. Yay meee! I have no real way of telling how many people are actually reading this blog, but I can say it accounts for almost 20% of my website traffic. So, it’s definitely helping with the discoverability issue. Whether you’re new, an occassional visitor, or a regular visitor, I appreciate it a lot.

With that being said, let’s get into some Nerdology! This week I’m going to be going over some of my favorite gods and why I love them so much. As I shared in the post announcement, I’m working on a mythological romance right now. To be clear, these are simply my favorite gods in real life. Some of them may appear in the work when it releases, other’s may not. I’m not telling.

5th Place - Amaterasu (Shinto/Japanese)

Starting off strong with Amaterasu, the Shinto (Japanese) sun goddess, and chief diety of the pantheon. Amaterasu is the only chief diety that will appear on this list. That’s for a reason. While she certainly isn’t the only goddess who has ever been a chief deity, she sticks out to me in a lot of way. For those that don’t know, here’s a quick summary:

Born of Izanagi and Izanami, Amaterasu and her siblings are some of the most central figures in the pantheon. The most famous story about her is one about a conflict she had with her brother, Susanoo, god of seas and storms. She retreated into a cave. That caused some trouble for the other gods and they had to lure her back out in order to convince her to return to her role.

In modern times, Amaterasu is still a highly influential figure. In fact, the imperial family is said to be descendants of her. This is one of my favorite key details and probably the one that makes her a favorite of mine. It’s fascinating to me because, here in the Western world, there was this idea at one time that kings were annointed by by the god the west believed in. This meant that rulers were seen as “chosen” to rule. We see other iterations where a ruler is see as the personification of a diety, like the pharoahs of Egypt. This idea of being descended from a diety, though, is a bit unique (not to say there is no other culture that took this approach. I’m sure other’s existed, but I can only speak in comparison to the ones I’ve researched). It’s just an interesting approach that had impact on how views regarding ancestry, rank, and monarchy formed within the Japanese culture. Thus, Amaterasu became one of my favorite gods because she exposed me to a way of thinking I hadn’t encountered before.

4th Place - Freyja (Norse)

Badassery. I love Freyja for the badassery. In the actual mythology, in every depiction, in everything, Freyja is badass. The balance is amazing because, on one hand, she’s this nurturing sort of maternal figure, but on the other she’s a terrifyingly powerful warrior that you do NOT want to tick off. It’s nice because it’s reflective of the reality of the versatility women can take on. Humans aren’t one-dimensional creatures and sometimes I think the world can forget that, specifically when it comes to women and other historically marginalized groups. Freyja doesn’t fit neatly into anyone’s box and, for that reason, I consider to be a feminist sign of adaptability, power, and freedom.

For context, in the mythology, Odin and Freyja married for political reasons. She birthed Thor, Tyr, and Balder—some of the most fearsome gods in the mythology. Odin, like most gods, was an ass. She sought revenge for the abuse and continuously fought to maintain her own identity, freedoms, and power.

As such, many women can identify with her stuggles. She’s easy to connect to and see ourselves in. I consider her a favorite of mine because her story shows us how, for all the changes the world has seen, many of the struggles women knew then have endured.

3rd Place - Buddha (Buddhist)

I think Buddha’s story is great because it calls into question godhood in and of itself. It’s a story that focuses on ascent rather than descent, where who you become is more important than the bloodline you come from. This is important because it throws a wrench in the idea most belief systems adapt where who you were born from determines your position in life. I think it’s origins have a lot to do with why Buddhism is such an adaptable belief system. This sort of fluidity it has is, to me, one of the most realistic approaches to belief because it focuses on things a person can actually do—like training their body and mind, helping others, and other things.

While the Buddha was ultimately a human, not a god, I think I’d be remiss not to count him because of his leadership, impact, and the spirituality he spurred on. Gods, for all intents and purposes, are figures through which we form our beliefs and explain the thoughts behind them. For this reason, Buddha is a god-adjescent figure that headed a spiritual movement still widely practiced in the world today. In fact, that’s probably why I put him at number 3. It’s complex and there’s no clear answer. I like that the existence of the Buddha isn’t clearly defined as one thing or another. Grey areas and contradictions are some of my favorite things—which makes it wasy to understand why I’d see Buddha as a favorite. The entire practice focuses on existing somewhere in between two polar extremes.

2nd Place - Anubis (Egyptian)

The best I can say here is that I think this god is fundamentally misunderstood a lot of the time. Many people have a specific image that comes to mind when they think of any “god of the dead”. That image is likely formed by media depictions more than it is the actual culture or mythology. In most depictions of Anubis from ancient Egypt, he was kind, protective, and comforting. While there’s no doubt he was a powerful god that could do some real damage if you ticked him off, it was more often feroscity that stemmed for a desire to protect the souls of the dead, thus most well-intentioned people/gods had no reason to feel threatened by him.

It’s this misunderstood nature of Anubis that draws me to him, He’s like an OG of the misunderstood badboy archetype. I think I relate a lot to that vibe because A) BookTok, but more importantly, B) it speaks a lot to humanities underlying beliefs about death in general when you compare Anubis to other dieties or figures meant to depict death. I, personally, have never seen death in the way most people seem to. I’ve never understood the obsession with extending ones life as long as possible, even to ones own detriment. Like, we joke a lot about Billionaires uploading their brains to the cloud or escaping to Mars and we see every day people dedicating their entire lives to being as physically healthy as possible. I mean, good for them, if that’s what they want for themselves. I think the people should live the life they want (minus the billionaires because they are actively interfering with other people living the way they want). It’s just not for me. I wholeheartedly accept that I likely won’t like to be ancient. It doesn’t sound like it would be comfortable or enjoyable. Quality of life is more important to me than length of life. As long as I’m generally happy and able to enjoy my life for whatever time I have, I’m cool.

Of course, that means beliefs systems where death isn’t depicted as a villain we’re all supposed to be running from appeal to me. I see death in a similar-ish way to how Anubis is portrayed within his mythology. Thus, he’s a perfect second place to me because I haven’t seen many other concepts or ideas of what being dead might look like that align with my view of death.

1st Place - Thoth (Egyptian)

Two Egyptian gods? Yup, two Egyptian gods. Come on, you seriously thought you were making it through a writers list of favorite gods without encountering a god like Thoth? He’s Egyptian god of wisdom, writing, math, science, and pretty much everything that has to do with being a nerd—if you didn’t know. In fact, my obsession with Thoth runs deep enough that I stumbled into an academic text about him I wanted to read, which was of course only available in academic libraries. So, I called every academic library in a two hour radius of me to try to convince them to let me in. When that failed, I went to my public library and asked them to try to get an academic library to lend it to them to lend to me. They told me they’d ask but that my chances were only 20% and that it might take months. I said okay and they tried. Luckily, the kind people at the University of Vermont ended up shipping the book all the way to Maryland for me to nerd out on for a few weeks. If that story doesn’t tell you why I align so well with Thoth, I don’t think there’s another way to explain it. There is no better god to hold my top spot.

That’s about it for this weeks segment of Nerdology 101. Hope you’ll come through again next Friday! Until then, have a nerdy week!

Nerdology 101: Record of Ragnarok

***Light Spoiler Alert***

Hey, hey! Welcome back to Nerdology 101—the blog where we’re currently freakin TF out because it’s almost time for the new season of Record of Ragnarok! My name is Maria Levato and I’m your nerdy professor here to whip you into shape and keep you up-to-date on all the nerdy happenings. Now, be a good boy/girl, sit down, and enjoy the ride.

ROR quickly made my list of favs back in 2021 when it made it’s anime release (haven’t read the manga at all). Being outside of my normal tastes, I was hesitant to start it back then because I’m normally a romance lover, even other none romance anime that I watch usually feature some romantic elements. ROR, though, is quite different from that. It’s bloody and brutal to the core, but the characters are hot AF and I read dark romance anyway, so why not?

Now, in S3 we’re getting a bad ass line-up. In an article by Fandom Wire, it was revealed that we should expect to see Hades v. Qin Shi Huang, Beelzebub v. Nikola Tesla, and Apollo v. King Leonidas. Out of these, I’m personally looking forward to Hades the most (I’m team gods all the way). ROR has a way of making its most beautiful characters the most ruthless too and I think that means we’re in for a wild fight here. I mean, it’s Hades. It’d be hard to make his character anything less than the absolute wonder that he’s always been. I actually had to look up his opponent, though. I’m not well-versed in Chinese history, but he’s the first emperor of China and founded the Qin dynasty. He also coined the term Emperor in China. You can learn more about him here, if you’re interested, but he built the Great Wall and established the Terracotta Warriors—making him a substantial figure in Chinese history and a human figure who can actually match the legend that is Hades in terms of influence over the respective culture.

The other fights won’t be anything to sneeze at either, though. I think Beelzebub v. Nikola Tesla is an interesting match up. If it weren’t for my personal bias toward Hades, this would be the most interesting match up this season. I feel like this is the most unpredictable of the fights. I can’t even begin to imagine how it goes down. It’ll be great to see what direction they take it in.

As for the last match, Apollo is an interesting choice on the gods front. In Greek mythology, he has a ton of domains, though he’s best known for music and healing, but the one I think the creators might be thinking of is one that’s not so commonly discussed. Apollo is also a god of plagues and disease, as you can see here. I’m almost imagining him showing up in the arena looking all sweet and innocent then using some sort of dark plague magic. It'd be cool to see him depicted that way since other depictions of him usually don’t highlight that aspect of him. I hope they do this.

What are your thoughts and expectations for the season? Do you imagine Apollo’s fight the way I did? Is there one you’re most excited for? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you back next Friday at 3PM ET for the next segment of Nerdology 101.

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!

Nerdology 101: Don’t Just Say the Weird Thing, Ask the Weird Questions.

Hiya! Welcome to my new blog, Nerdology 101, where we explore all things nerdy. I’m Maria. My professional bio can be found on the homepage, but here, I’ll give you the fun version.

I’m a playful, goofy person who’s weird neither starts nor ends at her public persona. I embrace all the quirks so please be prepared to bring your weirdest to my comment section. My nerdy qualifications involve a plethora of books, anime, and historical/mythological/scientific/philosophical rabbit holes and it’s a list longer than any textbook you’ve ever seen. Here’s a few basics, though. Favorite authors: Amber V. Nicole, Harley Laroux, Xiran Jay Zhao, H.D. Carlton, etc. Favorite animes: Fairy Tail (guild mark tattooed on thigh), Inuyasha, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, Record of Ragnarok, Bleach, Naruto, and My Happy Marriage. Philosophy, history, and mythology are all kind of one big hobby for me. I’m fascinated with culture and the way humans think/function, so I research all three. I’ve focused on cultures from around the world at different points, but Japanese, Egyptian, and Greek, and Norse are the ones I’m best versed in.

Now that you know a bit about me, let’s get into some NERDOLOGYYYYY! (please read that in hype voice with alarms sounding in the background).

This week's topic is: Ask the weird thing. With the trend on social media telling us to “say the weird thing,” I want to encourage people to ask the weird questions. Weird questions tend to lead to weird information and any good nerd knows that knowing weird stuff is our area of expertise. My most recent weird question involved a scene I was writing where, for reasons most likely attributed to creative sadomasochism and a need to track power scaling, I decided I needed to know the answer to a hypothetical math/science question with little to no basis in reality. So, you know what I did? I asked. Amazingly enough, I got an answer from a scientist willing to indulge hallucinations affiliated with my profession and I now know how many joules a random tsunami crashing out of the sky would generate. The information is otherwise useless to me outside of the context of what my brain tells me I need to know in order to write the scene, but what’s more nerdy than otherwise useless information?

As another example, I'll bring up someone I admire—someone who built her entire career off of asking the weird thing—Dr. Esmé Louise James (@esme.louisee on IG). She’s a sex historian who wrote a book titled Kinky History. As you may have guessed, sex history isn’t a major offered at most colleges (or any, to my knowledge). But she always asked the weird thing and ended up crafting a field perfectly suited to her niche interest. This led her to a career she’s passionate about and a slew of interesting information that few have taken the time to learn. Thanks to that career, she's been able to cultivate similar interests in sex history in other people and find a following of people who love her work almost as much as she does. To me, Dr. James is a nerdy shero deserving of every bit of success she’s built.

Asking the weird thing is the key to nerdiness. The way we become absorbed in our interests—allowing them to consume our soul—makes us who we are as people. For that reason, I encourage everyone to be open-minded and to ask the questions that seem strange, or even socially unacceptable. So, who are your nerdy sheroes/heroes? Do you have any weird questions you want to ask, or have asked and want to share? Let me know in the comments and make sure you come back next Friday at 3P.M. for the next segment of Nerdology 101. Have a nerdy week!

This post was made with the permission of Dr. James’s manager, Ben Grand, at Stage Addiction. If you’re interested in Dr. James or her work, please see her website.