Despite this, Journey to the West (a novel) and the Cthulhu Mythos (a series of novels by H.P. Lovecraft) lets lumped into the category. Of course in Journey to the West's case, the novel is itself accepted into Daoist culture and there are even statues dedicated to Sun Wukong. The Cthulhu Mythos, however, gets lumped in with mythology whenever the opportunity arises (most recently in SMITE where he's introduced as the BBEG), which is a weird flex for a series of stories written by a man who thinks black people are cats.
A complicating factor with Journey to the West, is that while it's often treated as an original work by Wu Cheng'en , academically it appears to be a retelling of several other previous works and stories, with the overlap of cultures becoming present in the story.
I don't think it's unfair to compare it to something like Beowulf or even The Odyssey, where oral traditions predate the written sum, and in some cases we can see the evolution and interactions of different religions and cultures.
Though in that case, we do also have a much earlier source in Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain", which might be the original source for a large part of the Arthurian legend.
Relevant to SMITE - I lived with a Chinese family for a few years. The dad was born in 1970's Shandong, and he was very traditionally Chinese. Anything about China or Chinese history was his favorite thing to talk about and he'd go on for hours. Feeling somewhat emboldened by my learnings from Smite (and doing my own reading afterwards of course) I tried to ask him about various mythological figures: Hou Yi, Chang'e, Xing Tian... he not only did not know the word 'mythology' in English, but didn't know it in Mandarin either. He recognized 0 of the fantastical figures I presented to him, either by name or by image or by story.
Obviously he wasn't some kind of scholar for his own historical context, and he couldn't explain it to me, but between him and his wife I got the feeling that China's relationship to its own mythology differs massively by generation and seems to, anecdotally, just be different from how other nations relate to their own mythology. Totally off in my own world here, but I attribute a lot of this to the purging of artists and scholars during the cultural revolution, which surely severed a cultural through-line from the past to present.
It could also depend on which part of China he was from. There was so much "consolidation" during the Chinese revolution that I wouldn't be surprised if those stories were truly foreign to him.
One, the Cthulhu mythos doesn’t have a single author, it was initially am effort by H.P. Lovecraft alone, but was adopted by Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith some years into the project, with the stated goal of the Cthulhu Mythos being to act like a mythos, which conflicting stories and perspectives. To the point that after H.P. Lovecraft’s death, Clark Ashton Smith did his best to make the mythos public domain and even didn’t copyright it in France when he had his friend's works translated and sent them there. Technically, anything written in the Cthulhu Mythos is canon to it, as it is that author’s understanding of the Other Gods. Yes, even Sucker for Love. And much like a normal mythology, it is up to the individual to accept the story, or reject it for the contradictions it brings. Like how sometimes Athena is Hephaestus’s older sister and how sometimes Hephaestus is the one who cracked open Zeus’s skull to free here. Both are present in the mythology both are canon to it, and both disagree with each other.
Two. To H.P. Lovecraft, to compare an any person to a cat is an insult to cats. For they are the truly Babylonian in their features and quite esoteric in their demeanors. Whereas humans hold so many flaws as to list them would require enough time to speak on every human alive.
Edit: grammar, corrected some historical mistakes I made
It's impressive to see the interest of modern humans in creating their own mythologies, first as author-built fictional universes with their own bibles of settings and characters and rules, then as collaborative efforts where multiple authors add to the lore, generally under the helm of a company like most pop-culture productions, then as the rare attempt at a more public-domain lore such as the Cthulhu mythos, or the more recent SCP Foundation, to an extent. The problem with collaborative efforts is, of course, that they still rely on the original work of an author or a group of authors, and if one of those core authors is outed as problematic, the entire lore downstream can get tainted by those authors' biases, such as the Cthulhu mythos' inherent fear of the unknown being guided by Lovecraft's own xenophobia - little can be done to separate the newer art from the former artist in that case.
Indeed, but if you're willing to let a 135 year old man who was so paranoid that he was afraid of air conditioning and so self-contradictory that as an antisemite he married a Jewish woman dictate your enjoyment of the face of cosmic horror, then you're just weak. Accept death of that author already and enjoy the newer stuff made on his foundation. Ain't even like you're supporting a racist family buy buying his stories, the man had no kids, only cats.
Then you are supporting kittens. And you should picture the cuteness of the kittens instead of focusing on their racism. They are kittens, they'l eventually realize that all humans are lesser to them and not just some of us.
I am coming in here as a big outsider to this question, but is there not plenty of problematic mythology? Just to look at a recent example, the Kojiki was heavily reinterpeted in a racist paradigm during the Pacific War/ WW2 by the Japanese state. That doesn't mean it suddenly stopped being mythology.
Just looking at Greco-Roman mythology I do not see lack of racism or sexism, etc, as ever having been a criterion for consideration as mythology. Instead I think we consider mythology to reflect cultural and social values when it was first conceptualized so we should almost expect some of it to be problematic.
Mythology being problematic is a historical fact indeed. And it should imply that people stop building on top of it to avoid perpetuating its problems.
I don't think you can really achieve this by avoiding recognizing problematic content as mythology when appropriate. Mythology is a descriptive term. I too would prefer that people not add racist content to mythology, but it doesn't mean that we should fail to recognize when said content does achieve the cultural prominence necessary to be considered mythology.
Wait, Lovecraft thought black people were cats? But he hated anyone who was a specific kind of white, and adored all cats? Is this a reference to a specific Mythos story I'm missing?
His family owned a black cat when he was growing up (the cat died of old age when H.P. Lovecraft was 14), who was named N****r, probably by his uncle or father.
The more telling story about Lovecraft's racist xenophobia is that he was so proud of his "pure" Anglo-Saxon heritage that, when he learned that one of his grandparents was Welsh (and thus a filthy Celt) he was thrown into a mental breakdown that he resolved by writing a story about evil fish people infiltrating a small town.
Lovecrafts racism is evident in his writing. He was racist I imagine due to the cultural backdrop of the time. If you read any of his stories, it usually features some otherworldly presence, whose existence threatens or troubles a group of minorities or uneducated folk, or perhaps this group were worshiping said otherworldly being, and some learned white man usually attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery, often loosing his mind on the way.
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u/Flashlight237 9d ago
For context, here's the dictionary definition of mythology: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mythology
Despite this, Journey to the West (a novel) and the Cthulhu Mythos (a series of novels by H.P. Lovecraft) lets lumped into the category. Of course in Journey to the West's case, the novel is itself accepted into Daoist culture and there are even statues dedicated to Sun Wukong. The Cthulhu Mythos, however, gets lumped in with mythology whenever the opportunity arises (most recently in SMITE where he's introduced as the BBEG), which is a weird flex for a series of stories written by a man who thinks black people are cats.