Question
Mythology: Who was the most badass mythical character of all?
Answer
Heh, on questions like this, population will tell. With 1 billion plus each, you can be sure that badass candidates from Indian and Chinese mythologies are going to be proposed and dominate. Greek and Norse stuff is going to be overwhelmed by numbers.
Curiously though, my own favorite is from relatively modern mythology, and one produced by a single person rather than an entire culture (let alone one with 1 billion plus people...):
Tom Bombadil from LOTR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom...
What could be more bad-ass than being unaffected by/indifferent to the One Ring?
Being unaffected by it and not taking part in using that immunity to influence the story.
Clearly, in some sense, Bombadil is "good" and on the side of Frodo and company. Clearly he has enormous power and could help "good" prevail over evil. But he stays out of it. Why?
That suggests a deeper wisdom... actually that's the wrong word... it suggests that he inhabits some meta-level of the Tolkien universe where the story means something entirely different than what it means to those embedded in Middle Earth.
This is not the indifference of being outside a system (unlike the centaurs in Harry Potter). This is also not the detachment of beings that are eternal or very long-lived compared to the ones the story is about (Gandalf in LOTR, the Guardians in Green Lantern, Brahma/Siva in Hindu mythology...). It is a sense that Bombadil is reading a different story in which the LOTR story means something completely unrelated to what it means in its own universe.
Though Tolkien was just one person, and it is difficult to compare his work with the complete mythologies produced by large cultures, there are elements of mythic imagination that are represented nowhere else but in Tolkien. Bombadil is fascinating because he represents simultaneously an engagement of life, and a natural immunity to being ensnared by it. He is both above and apart from the rest of the Tolkien universe, and has a residual mystery to him that is never adequately explained (I read some material somewhere suggesting that Tolkien deliberately chose to present him that way. In a letter to a friend, he said something along the lines of "there should be some basically unexplained mystery in an epic").
Tolkien was getting at the role of fundamental doubt and metaphysical unknown-unknowns in animating a mythology, something that is not well recognized or understood. In most religious traditions, this is understood as something like "chaos" but that's a poor way of framing it, because it projects onto the idea of metaphysical doubt the lack of metaphysical structure as understood in terms of things that are comprehended. It's like trying to think of a 4th dimension through complicated visualizations in 3 dimensions.
I think Tolkien found a more effective way to symbolize this than any popular mythology old or new.
Curiously though, my own favorite is from relatively modern mythology, and one produced by a single person rather than an entire culture (let alone one with 1 billion plus people...):
Tom Bombadil from LOTR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom...
What could be more bad-ass than being unaffected by/indifferent to the One Ring?
Being unaffected by it and not taking part in using that immunity to influence the story.
Clearly, in some sense, Bombadil is "good" and on the side of Frodo and company. Clearly he has enormous power and could help "good" prevail over evil. But he stays out of it. Why?
That suggests a deeper wisdom... actually that's the wrong word... it suggests that he inhabits some meta-level of the Tolkien universe where the story means something entirely different than what it means to those embedded in Middle Earth.
This is not the indifference of being outside a system (unlike the centaurs in Harry Potter). This is also not the detachment of beings that are eternal or very long-lived compared to the ones the story is about (Gandalf in LOTR, the Guardians in Green Lantern, Brahma/Siva in Hindu mythology...). It is a sense that Bombadil is reading a different story in which the LOTR story means something completely unrelated to what it means in its own universe.
Though Tolkien was just one person, and it is difficult to compare his work with the complete mythologies produced by large cultures, there are elements of mythic imagination that are represented nowhere else but in Tolkien. Bombadil is fascinating because he represents simultaneously an engagement of life, and a natural immunity to being ensnared by it. He is both above and apart from the rest of the Tolkien universe, and has a residual mystery to him that is never adequately explained (I read some material somewhere suggesting that Tolkien deliberately chose to present him that way. In a letter to a friend, he said something along the lines of "there should be some basically unexplained mystery in an epic").
Tolkien was getting at the role of fundamental doubt and metaphysical unknown-unknowns in animating a mythology, something that is not well recognized or understood. In most religious traditions, this is understood as something like "chaos" but that's a poor way of framing it, because it projects onto the idea of metaphysical doubt the lack of metaphysical structure as understood in terms of things that are comprehended. It's like trying to think of a 4th dimension through complicated visualizations in 3 dimensions.
I think Tolkien found a more effective way to symbolize this than any popular mythology old or new.