/lit/ - Literature

Lately I've been fascinated with how civilizations survive through culture and how those artifacts and concepts mutate and change over centuries. How Ishtar turns into Aphrodite who turns into Venus, how Yahweh went from a local storm God to the most popular diety on the planet, or how Moloch is still a real threat to some people while thousands of other tribal deities disappear into time. It feels so illuminating to track mythology all the way back to the origins of society, that we can draw this line that continues til this day.

It makes me curious to think of how it will continue to evolve, how will the American empire be seen in a thousand years? How much information will survive and how will that story mutate? In the same way America takes influence from the Roman empire, what lessons will the next empire learn from America? Personally I think that the mythology of the Yeoman farmer will survive, the pure individualism of the American dream, of tea harbors and fighters against Tyranny. I think that leads wonderfully into our neoliberal decline of the corporate oligarchy, where the flair ups of satanism get attached to the ruling class giving people the impression that "everything was great until the Satanists came into power". But then what does Satanism become? Considering the majority of American policy makers are chrisitians but they then become attatched to satanism does that mean God then becomes Satan? That "oh it wasn't the real God they worshipped it was a false God that pretended to be Yahweh and that false God was Satan." or maybe Mormonism and the CIA gets folded into American Christianity and they become the target.

Even beyond just the royalty of the American political machine what becomes of the pioneers of the technological revolution? Will Bill Gates be seen as a great innovator? Will Amazon be heralded as the people that brought the world together? Will our next heroes wear suit and ties instead of steel armor? What mythology will come out of the computer? That we were able to communicate over vast distances with just our fingers? Will that become telepathy? Will science become magic?

To be clear I'm thinking in the vein of a post-post apocolypse, where history can become influenced by time and consciousness.