Oden the all father, Thor the thunder god, Mars the god of war, Eros the god of love. These are all gods that had worshippers thousands of years ago.
The worshippers of these gods were sure that their gods were real. They dreamed of being picked up by the valkyries upon there death on the battlefield and being taken to Valhalla. I love to read these stories and think what it was like for the people that loved these gods.

Today the collected stories of the gods of the past are taught in classes in college and elsewhere as mythology. In these classes you learn about the many creation myths of where the earth came from. You read about all of the different ideas about what happens when we die. Going to the underworld taken by the ferryman across the river of Styx. So many great stories.

The old pantheons contained male and female gods and by reading their stories we can learn about social interaction. Sometimes between gods and humans or gods and other gods. Sometimes gods are conquering other gods. We read it, and we enjoy it. We can learn many valuable lessons from these interactions. The Greek and Roman gods also had offspring with humans.

Norse mythology has Oden and Freya, a man and wife, and as far as I can tell they are different but equal. Norse, Greek and Roman mythology had gods that were very human. These gods were emotional and did things wrong and were corrected by other gods.

Mythology is alive today in many of the words that we use. The names of the days of the week. Wednesday is from Oden. Oden’s day. Friday is Freya’s day. March is Mars month and Thursday is Thor’s day. In psychology mythology is everywhere. Narcissists and named for Narcissus who was so enamored with his reflection that the gods made him a flower.

Mythology was so good at describing interactions between the characters and the personalities to the characters (gods) that psychology uses the names of the characters to describe human personality traits, mental diseases and syndromes.

When I learned about mythology as a child, I could see the similarities between the creation myths that I was being taught and the ones that I was told were real in our modern religion. I used to think of the followers of the ancient religions being in the hell that I was being taught about. Their sin being, living before the god that I was being told was real, was created.

Recently I learned about just how much overlap there is between the celebrations of the ancient religions and the modern religion. Our modern religions took the old calendars and overwrote them with new celebrations that in many cases did not differ from the pagan celebrations that took place at the same time of year.

As I think about all that I have written here I wonder: What will it be like 500 years from now? Will the religions of today be the mythologies of the future? Think about it….