Dissecting Literature

Hey there, traveler! Christmas is just a few days away (yeah, I know, it’s still March for me too), so being the party poopers that we are, we thought we’d dissect this happy family holiday to it’s really pagan roots. So grab your candy canes, put on that Santa hat and hold onto the nearest eggnog - and let’s see what weird origins lay beneath Christmas’s surface. The name Christmas literally translates to “a mass on Christ’s day”, but as I’ve read, it’s a fairly new name in terms of history. In the early days of christianity, people (or more precisely, clerics) really opposed the idea of celebrating someone’s day of birth, even that of Christ. Celebrating birthdays was seen as a pagan tradition, whereas christians celebrated the day worthy people (saints, martyrs, etc.) died and were allowed into heaven. However one day a historian named Sextus Julius Africanus (yeah, he was very Roman, but the Christian kind of Roman) made the first complete chronology, and in that he named the 25th ...

Hey there, traveler! I promised you last week another religion post concerning how authors implemented the foundations we talked about previously, and I am a man of my word - so here it is. I tried to choose as diversely as I could from our shared booknerds past, and I apologize in advance if your favourite and most unique fictive pantheon got left off this list. So, here we go! When I started writing this post, I originally intended to include a lot of authors, then decided to start with H.P. Lovecraft and realized I could write a whole post about it. So I did. One of the most successful authors considering religion, since basically that was his whole deal. H.P. Lovecraft let his imagination run dark and openly encouraged any contemporary writer to join in, to twist and shape his Mythos into something that’s the closest to real-life mythologies anyone ever created (IMHO). This freedom to contribute was the main factor that turned the Yog-Sothothery (as the man himself called it) into ...