#since its basically impossible to separate western media from the bible (even when the parallel is not intentional)

[anarchoarchie]

top five once upon a time christ figure moments <3

OH HOW TO CHOOSE... i will definitely need to update this list once i rewatch the show but off the top of my head(most of these are early on because i haven't watched the later seasons in quite a while):

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

okay the read more thing is getting fucked up so im adding this paragraph in hopes that it will get it to work. tumblr why are you like this

henry getting poisoned from the apple turnover and coming back to life at the end of s1. he goes oh you don't believe? well what if i die and you have to bring me back to life through the power of love and magic. double emma and henry christ figure moment there. also that scene where henry bites the turnover and passes out is SO iconic

just everything with emma's birth. literal baby who everyone is trying to kill and who represents hope and love and is predestined to save the world!!!

neal/baelfire is very jesuscoded to me. gentle nice kid with a scary powerful dad; dies to save emma and henry et cetera. neal and emma are kind of a jesus4jesus power couple if you think about it

snow white!!! special princess who is badass and kind and all the animals love and who everyone is trying to kill. when she eats the poison apple knowing what's going to happen. and then essentially gets resurrected. (bonus: that scene with the huntsman where he spares her life and then later gets martyred for it) sidenote maybe there's some kind of genetic component here actually because snow, emma, henry, and lucy are all some level of jesuscoded. pretty neat of them

henry having the heart of the truest believer!! also his little speech in new york where he tells everyone to believe and make a wish and its like that moment in a covertly religious hallmark movie where the christ figure character gets everyone to believe in the magic of christmas. does that make any sense

anyways i really need to rewatch this show because i know there are so many more that i'm forgetting especially in the later seasons.

(honorable mentions: whatever was going on with lily's whole judas (and/or antichrist??) thing with emma. pinnochio/august booth. lucy mills. everything about the final battle. many more things that i simply don't remember off the top of my head)

[scriptmyth]

Good and Evil in Mythology

Good and Evil are terms we hear a lot, and they’re pretty fundamental to how people in cultures dominated by Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam and the offshoots thereof) see the world. But most non-Abrahamic religions don’t really have a moral framework that maps neatly onto that. In fact, even early pre-Christian Judaism does not necessarily present such a moral framework - or rather, the dichotomy of good/evil often coincides with kin/foreigner. Whatever g-d does also construed as good, and sometimes it makes little sense even within the Biblical narrative. Basically, it’s complicated.

In the pre-Christian Middle East, the most important dichotomy was between order and chaos, with the gods representing order and various demons and spirits chaos. The demons and spirits weren’t actively malevolent, they usually were just careless, and caused destruction without really giving a damn who was in their way. Other cultures, like the Norse, had a dichotomy between the human and natural worlds. Again, the Jötnar (often translated as Frost Giants, though this is misleading as they didn’t all relate to coldness and weren’t all giants) represented natural forces beyond human control, mountains and forests and, in the case of Loki, fire.

The Greeks shared an ancient base mythology with the Norse, thousands of years earlier, which adapted and changed as the two cultures separated, moved into different environments with different features, wildlife and challenges, and came into contact with third parties. The Greeks came into contact with Anatolian cultures like the Lydians and Phrygians and Middle Eastern cultures like the Phoenicians and Egyptians, which gave them an order/chaos dichotomy to compliment their human/nature one. The Titans, and primordial gods before them, were not evil, and most of them were worshipped throughout the period of Greek religion. They simply represented natural forces that, while not inimical to humankind, were not particularly helpful either, like the titan Helios, the sun, or Selene, the moon. They just straight up didn’t care most of the time. Even the Titans who fought the Olympians, like Chronos, did continue to receive worship, and were often identified with foreign gods, in this case with Baal Malek and Saturnus.

Even in order/chaos dichotomies, like Egyptian myth, chaos was not entirely evil. Set represented a degree of chaos, but he also fought off Apep (the great serpent of the underworld) each night in order to protect Ra. In Mesopotamia, Tiamat and Abzu represent primordial chaos, but they are the ancestors of all the other gods, and creators of the whole world, and Tiamat’s body forms the vault of heaven and the sea, while Abzu is imprisoned beneath Enki’s temple (E-Abzu), and provides most of his power. It is possible that order/chaos dichotomies grew out of human/nature ones, but it is impossible to say for certain.

The good/evil dichotomy of Abrahamic religion may have been taken from Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion (see this post: https://scriptmyth.tumblr.com/post/162649752702/ok-i-am-not-that-anon-but-i-am-really-wondering, and the wiki article for basic info on Zoroastrianism), and then spread by Christianity and Islam (Judaism and Zoroastrianism not really being big on proselytising) until it overpowered and erased the older worldviews in the Western and Islamic worlds.

The Western world has endured several cultural shifts since mostly adopting Abrahamic religions, with Catholicism and its related denominations in particular becoming dominant in Western Europe and North America. One of these shifts was the adoption of the good/evil dichotomy as a means of enforcing culture-wide morality in a way that paralleled an us/them perception. Figures that were once taken to be chaotically-aligned or morally-grey in native mythologies were given the new label of “evil”, in order to identify them as outside the narrative that the Bible’s newer versions of the time proscribed.

In the Catholic Church, we can see this from their official adoption of Thomas of Aquinas’ philosophies as written in the Summa Theologica. Thomas was an influential philosopher of the 13th century and many of his works were used as later models in Western philosophy and related fields of thought. Although this happened several centuries ago, it still has a hold on the Western world’s moral compass, and thus influences how popular media from that area of the world is created when tackling dubious topics of morality. It, too, influenced modern Western perception, as the good/evil dichotomy is not one often found in ancient cultures or pre-Christianity regions.

Basically, there are very few, if any evil gods, because most non-Christian, non-Jewish and non-Muslim cultures don’t have a concept of good and evil that maps neatly onto modern Western morality. What most pantheons do have is wild or chaotic gods, who can be helpful or harmful depending on the situation, and these are usually considered a separate, older set of gods.

Silim, 

Utuabzu