Welcome back to the column of horror! All hope abandon, ye who enter here. In case you are new, this is the column where I write about how disgusting, foolish and generally insane your ancestors were. Yes: yours, and yours, and yours. Don’t be ashamed—we are all in the same boat.
Religion in ancient times was quite a bit more weird than religion today. Here are some examples of very strange religious beliefs the ancients had. SPOILER: ancient gods were very, very perverted.
The Greek Gods were into bestiality, other weird things
The Olympians were famous for their… escapades. None was more famous that Zeus, whose conquests included: impregnating a woman in the form of a shower of gold, raping a woman while in disguise as a swan, raping a different woman in the form of a bull, and, just for a change, raping still another woman and turning her into a cow. The cow thing was meant to hide her from Zeus’ wife, who also happened to be his sister. You know you are perverted when marrying your sister is the least weird thing you are doing.
Hawaiian goddesses were like X-rated Mr. Potato Head
Ancient Hawaiian gods and goddesses were, like most divine pantheons, rather fond of sex. However, unlike Zeus, they did draw the line somewhere. For example, the goddess Pele was courted by the god Kama-pua’a, but she was less than enthusiastic. This is because he was a pig – literally and metaphorically. That is to say, not only was he a porker, but when she friendzoned him, he chased her all over Hawaii trying to rape her.
Fortunately, Pele had a sister named Kapo, who came to her rescue with a completely sane and logical plan. That is to say, she pulled her vagina off and threw it into the air to distract Kama-pua’a. Well, that would be distracting. The pig-god then went chasing after the vagina, because that was really the only part of women he cared about, and Pele and her family went off and hid.
Kapo then said, “Meh, I don’t really need that vagina any more” and left it to wander around Hawaii. No one knows where it is to this day, though some point to a volcanic crater on Oahu, which is certainly impressive if true. From then on, Kapo was known as Kapo-kohe-lele, which means “Kapo with the flying vagina”. This needs to be made into a superhero movie, stat.
Mesopotamia’s geography was formed by…
In the ancient Middle East, life largely depended on the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, which caused the land to be fertile. Naturally, it is pretty reasonable that sexual fertility was associated with agricultural fertility. Of course, the logical next step is to believe that the god Enki dug them… with his own penis. It seems like a rather inefficient way of doing it, but shovels were probably not invented back then. Unsatisfied with just the rivers, he then invented irrigation, digging the ditches in the same way. To bring life to the rivers, he then mated with them, meaning that the water is exactly what you think it is.
Enki went on to invent sexual reproduction… afterwards, which means that instead of symbolically bringing life, at the time he had just been dicking around and attached a meaning to it later. Well played, dude.
The Egyptian god Horus had a sex competition… with his uncle
Horus’ uncle Set was a pretty bad dude. In the first place, he killed his brother, Horus’ dad Osiris, which meant that Osiris’ wife (and sister – notice a theme here?) Isis raised Horus to kill his uncle in revenge. Naturally, this meant that before they had their epic fight to the death, they first had to establish sexual dominance.
Set decided to do this the old-fashioned way, by raping Horus. Fortunately, Horus managed to escape this, and made off with a handful of Set’s sperm. He understandably washed his hands in the river, and then proceeded to get revenge much more sneakily. That is to say, he put his own sperm in Set’s salad, which Set did not notice for some reason. Presumably there was a lot of ranch dressing on it.
For some reason, Set and Horus went before the other gods to have their sexual dominance judged. Apparently in ancient Egypt, divine sperm could talk, and the other gods called upon the sperm to speak up so that they could locate it. When it turned out that Set’s sperm was in the river, and Horus’ was in Set’s stomach, the panel of judges awarded the case to Horus.
THEN they had a fight to the death. If only politics was settled this way today.
Japanese mythology has nothing sane about it
It’s true: literally nothing is sane. Let’s start from the beginning.
In the beginning, the earth was void and without form. Then, the god Izanagi had sex with it. Some versions say he only stabbed it with a spear, but c’mon, we all know what that means. The semen floated to the top of the ocean and formed an island, where Izanagi settled down with his wife Izanami. They then had a bunch of kids who were also islands. Unfortunately, Izanami then got pregnant with fire, which burned her and caused her to lose control of her bodily functions and die. All of the poop, vomit, etc. turned into more gods.
Izanagi then went to the underworld to get his wife back. However, she said, “Ok, I’ll come back, but don’t look at me because I am a gross rotten corpse.” Of course, he looked at her and was horrified. This made Izanami angry and she tried to kill him. Since the only way these gods solve problems is with body fluids, Izanagi peed out a river to separate the world and underworld, thus keeping the zombies safely away. Unsurprisingly, they then got divorced.
The weirdness in Japanese mythology doesn’t stop there. Tune in next issue for more.
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