Talk:Goddess Ilias/@comment-98.82.18.42-20130403183738/@comment-7523816-20130403204211

The parallel has been drawn before, and while I share your sentiments regarding Christianity (and religion generally) the last two sentences were superfluous.

A more interesting thing is the contrasts between Ilias's religion and the animist faith that preceded her. Anthropology and critical religious studies divide religions into earth-cults and sky-cults. Earth-cults are older, while sky-cults are Johnny-come-latelys. Here divinity is immanent, present in everyday life and everyday things. This naturally leads to reverence for nature and living in harmony with it, as well as with the creatures that make it up. The Divine is not something from on high, sitting on a cloud apart from us, but all around us and acting upon us. As the Old Man in Yamatai said to Luka, "You westerners worship only one thing. We worship many things." Be that as it may, before Ilias the Four Spirits were worshiped as Goddesses. Perhaps not the sole deities, but certainly the most important. They do embody the basic elements of Greek & Eastern metaphysics.

This brings up another thing to think about. The various monster girls can be thought of as 'daemonic'. The spelling is intentional. In the original Greek, a daemon was a divinity or being higher than man but lower than the Gods. The daemons were of the Earth, dwelling alongside man. Like nature itself, they were simultaneously good and evil. (Another trait of earth-cults: good and evil, light and dark, are not as clearly separated as in sky-cults.) After all, nature brings both life-giving rains and death-dealing floods. This is represented by the Tao, and in MGQ with Alice's telling of their world's creation.

Being an atheist, I oppose all cults, sky or earth. Given the choice, though, the latter has (historically) been benign.