I think this is an interesting point of discussion, but my take is a bit different, coming at it from the opposite direction -- https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1337477594464149507

In that I think even religion itself functions a lot more like MCU fandom than we usually think, and that SOME of the ideas we have about what distinguishes a religious mythology from other kinds of storytelling are themselves products of evangelical dominance in our society.

For example, the idea that it's important whether or not you "really believe" in a literal sense that any of this stuff actually happened.

I once pushed back HARD when @paulcarp13 asserted something like "mythology is what OTHER people believe" -- meaning, if you believe it it's just "truth" not mythology at all. (The context was college classes, maybe a specific college class, that part I'm no longer sure of)

I claimed that "mythology" meant a certain kind of story, often a story conveying some sort of important cultural value. But now that I think about it, I would make a distinction between "mythology" and "mythology as conveyed in a particular medium"

For example, the European folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm -- those tales were already out there in the culture, but they wrote them down in a particular form and popularized them broadly.

But I would argue that the "mythology" isn't what the Grimm brothers actually wrote down, but rather, our shared cultural understanding of those stories, the sort of vague "everybody knows" cultural zeitgeist.

Another example: the vampires in Twilight. Stephenie Meyer, as memory serves, had never read or seen any kind of vampire fiction when she wrote Twilight -- she was going entirely off the zeitgeist of vampire mythology.

Another anecdote: my friend Angela, who is a pastor in the more liberal Lutheran synod, talked about how she would sometimes get questions from people in her church about the "Left Behind" style mythology about the end times --

And she would have to explain to them, gently, that Lutherans (their synod anyway) don't actually believe in all that. They think Revelation is already-fulfilled prophecy & have a different interpretation of many of the key Biblical texts used to build that mythology.

So, which part is the mythology? The Bible itself? Books like Left Behind and The Late, Great Planet Earth, which could be regarded as Bible fan fiction? What pastors actually teach from the pulpit?

Or, take a seasonal example. What is Christmas "really about"? The very idea that it has to be "really about" something is part of the mythology, nobody cares what Halloween is "really about"

Christmas has its own "Christmas mythology" which is separate -- but not entirely separate -- from the Christian mythology that built it, and from the pre-Christian northern European midwinter rituals that gave us so many of our common practices.

So, I would argue that the stories & notions that swirl around the concept of the "superhero" are very much a modern mythology, because it operates the way a mythology operates -- a vague, shared, "everybody knows" cultural zeitgeist

And I would also argue that, especially for Christians in a Christian-majority country, *their own actual religion* works in much the same way.

They might read the Bible -- evangelicals certainly do! -- but the Bible is not where they get their notions about what it means to be a Christian. The Bible itself isn't even where they get their ideas about what the Bible means.

I'll finish off with vampires again. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula and created a modern mythology of vampires (the Victorian Gothic gentleman vampire). He also implied the existence of an ancient, raw, folkloric mythology of vampires that he used to build his famous Count.

He also based his Count on a real historical person, kind of.

Dracula was a BIG hit, and created both its own mythology (the Victorian Gothic vampire) and retro-created a different mythology found in non-fiction like "The Vampire: His Kith and Kin" and "In Search of Dracula"

But the interesting thing about this retro-mythology is that even though there ARE many folkloric stories about vampires & vampire-like monsters, Stoker didn't actually base his Count very closely on any of them.

Most of it, he just made up.

And yet, it's extremely common for people I run into at SF & horror conventions to believe that Dracula is the romanticization of a folk vampire myth that, in its original form, was uglier, more like Nosferatu or something.

Nosferatu came LATER.

It was BASED on Dracula.

But that's how mythology works. It's weird and non-linear and hard to pin down. Like language and culture itself, it exists only as a kind of framework in our minds, but it's extremely powerful at shaping our thoughts.

Mythology, like religion, occupies a strange liminal space between real and imaginary, between that which just exists and that which we, humans, invented.

Dracula was a particular book written by a particular person at a particular time -- fictional, purely a matter of human invention.

But there are people out there who believe they're really vampires, and that Bram Stoker "got it right" because he just knew, somehow.

Or, one of my favorites, people who point out the ASTONISHING resemblance of Stoker's Count to a kind of profane inverse Christ figure. "Drink my blood and live forever"

Gosh, do you think Jesus was a vampire?

No, doofus, I think Bram Stoker was a Christian.

And, even as a Christian -- a Catholic -- he gets aspects of *his own religious mythology* wrong, at least according to Tim Powers on a Dracula '97 panel -- our heroes fight vampires doing things that actually count as desecration of the host and whatnot.

That's mythology for you.

And, especially for @paulcarp13, that's the end of the thread.