: I have come to the conclusion that though Myth has an
: excellent mythology, it is has one major flaw...no
: apocalypse.
: Myth has all the elements of a major mythology: a
: creation myth, gods, demigods, heroes, good 'n evil
: etcetera.
: But it misses one major element: an apocalypse!
: almost every major mythology has one. we got the northern
: europeans who got Ragnarok, the Götterdammerung, we
: got Christianity with armageddon etc. (not sure about
: greek/roman mythology though), but myth hasn't got
: one.
: And I'm not talking cycles here, a leveler who wreaks a
: lil' havoc just doesn't cut it compared to the seven
: (yes 7: the tru7h?) bowls of wrath™...
Doesn't cut it? Soulblighter was gonna rip the entire world in half! Myth teeters on the edge of Armageddon every two thousand years, and is only barely preserved by the noble sacrifice of practically every Light-aligned warrior in the world. Or so the Mythworlders believe, although we've theorized that the Leveller actually doesn't "mean" to destroy the planet.
If you want a true End of All Things, you could use GURPS' reunification of the One Dream; it has that the forty-nine Dreams of Wyrd (which manifest themselves as spells like the Dispersal Dream, the Binding Dream, etc.) are fragments of his consciousness, the One Dream, which was shattered by the Dark Gods. When some mage learns all forty-nine Dreams, Something Big Will Happen...perhaps he will recreate Wyrd's consciousness within his own mind, and become Wyrd's avatar. Perhaps Wyrd will awake and sweep all of this crap away and create a new world like that he set out to make original. But something will happen that's big enough to qualify as the end of this world.
And religions/mythologies with an apocalypse (today's post is brought to you by the word "eschatological") are really not that common, you know. We're used to the concept because of Christianity and Islam, but even pre-Christian Judaism didn't have much of one; they had a Messiah, but he was pretty much just going to drop in and make things a bit nicer for the Hebrews. Most variants (there were a hell of a lot) of Greek religion have no apocalypse; Hinduism has cycles of destruction and rebirth which were a definite influence on Myth and The Black Company; from what I've read, most Native American religions were also apocalypse-free before they were influenced by Christianity.
That's not to say that most religions don't have some prophecies of big things--including worldwide carnage--happening in the future, but these are generally treated as business as usual on a cosmic scale; a cyclic rather than a linear progression. Myth follows in their footsteps.
What an incredibly interesting post I just wrote!
--SiliconDream
