(Part 3) Best folklore & mythology studies according to redditors

Here's mine!

https://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Beings-Mythical-Imaginary-Terrors/dp/0812220889

Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast is very good.

Classical Mythology: Images and Insights is the textbook I used in a classical mythology course I took a couple years ago. You can get an older edition for very cheap.

I read Ancient Greece: A Very Short Introduction last week and can recommend it. There are a few other books in this series that you might check out as well, like Myth, The Roman Republic, The Roman Empire, Alexander the Great, Herodotus, etc. I'm reading the one on the Trojan War now and it's excellent.

I think the spirits will help you learn to love yourself as you are during each moment of transition, not just the end result. We are a journey/ process oriented people. You must love yourself today if you want to love yourself tomorrow too. It's okay to not be everything you want to become right away. You have time and space to fly as high and far as you can imagine. <3

There have been powerful intersex and trans people throughout shamanistic history. One that comes to mind is the prophet who predicted the success of the the Lakota including the legendary warriors Red Cloud and Crazy Horse in a vision that became known as the-hundred-in-the-hands. So you will find you have a rich cultural tapestry to draw from when you spend a little time researching, these figures are everywhere in our history.

Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0887558305/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_k1.3Cb9DC9BNC

The story is a Turkish tale called Don't You Have Any Donkeys in Your Country? It can be found in Turkish Short Stories from Four Decades by Aziz Nesin.

Here's a summary: A Turkish guide is traveling through the countryside with an American rug collector. They come across a peasant with an old, mangy donkey. The collector instantly recognizes the donkey’s filthy blanket as a spectacular antique carpet, and orders the guide to buy it. But don’t tell him we want the blanket, the collector warns the guide, tell him we need a donkey; otherwise he’ll realize the blanket is valuable and overcharge us! The peasant warns the guide that the donkey is lame, sick, and weak, but the guide insists he wants it. “Alright then,” the peasant says, “the price is $5000.” He explains to the shocked guide that if the American is so anxious to have such a bad donkey, there must be some reason for it.

The collector is disappointed, but $5000 is still much less than the value of the rug. So he agrees to buy the donkey. But when the peasant unties the donkey and leads it to the collector and guide, he takes off the blanket and slings it over his shoulder. Now the collector is really starting to get worried, and the guide tries to convince the peasant to include the blanket so that the donkey doesn’t catch cold and die.

“I can’t do it,” the peasant says, “absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“Because this is my good luck donkey blanket.”

The guide asks the peasant what he could mean by this, and the peasant explains:

“I used to be a poor man who barely made a living selling donkeys. Then my father died and gave me this blanket. Now, two or three times a year, an American or European comes and buys one of my donkeys for $5000 apiece! At that rate I’m a rich man!”

Ironic how this sub is about reading, yet only 1 answer at this point actually makes any attempt to answer OP's question in the slightest.

OP: Your best bet is to find your nearest university library and look in their catalog. There are TONS of books about vampire lore from various disciplines, particularly anthropology and film.

I've seen this as a textbook, but haven't read it myself: Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture. Also The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend, but that may be more about history of vampires rather than the lore itself.

Your local library can get you pretty much any book you want via interlibrary loan.

There are plenty of books on Gods and Goddesses with basic descriptions like this one, but I'm not sure of any from the perspective of occultism and invocation. I have to imagine there are though.

My understanding comes from teachers, study, and experience. Experience is the best teacher though as many mythological depictions miss the point or are difficult to understand. Like Aphrodite being a cheater, sure that's how her energy may manifest sometimes, she is pure attraction, but that's more an abuse of her power than it is her will. She is true divinity, pure and blameless at the highest level.

For study, I'd recommend astrology, or at least exploring the zodiac and planets. If you understand the elemental, zodiacal, and planetary energies, it's easy to see how these powers have manifested in various mythologies as the gods. It's a great system too in that no pantheon is necessary, you can just invoke/evoke the planetary and zodiacal consciousness' directly. Not that the system is better than a pantheon based one, every representative of an original power, be it god or planet, has it's own distinct flair (if only because of the angle at which it is viewed).

ooc: I have:

This one

this one

This one!

>Organology? I had to look it up. It’s not in the dictionary, or at least only listed as a definition for the study of organs in the body (biology related). Sounded like the study of the organ (the instrument) at first.

I'd hate to tell you to Google it, but these are the first, second, and fourth results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organology

>Organology (from Greek: ὄργανον – organon, "instrument" and λόγος – logos, "study") is the science of musical instruments and their classification. It embraces study of instruments' history, instruments used in different cultures, technical aspects of how instruments produce sound, and musical instrument classification.

https://dictionary.onmusic.org/terms/2442-organology

>The science of musical instruments including their classification and development throughout history and cultures as well as the technical study of how they produce sound. The Hornbostel-Sachs system of musical instrument classification is probably the best-known system in use today.

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/abstract/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000020441

>The study of musical instruments in terms of their history and social function, design, construction and relation to performance.

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>I guess I’m looking more for instrumentation, the anatomy of instruments and how their timbre is applicable to making music.

Yeah, so organology and maybe orchestration/instrumentation. Your choices for the latter are basically reference books. Organology is traditionally a subset of musicology/ethnomusicology. Here are some organological books:

https://www.amazon.com/Clarinet-Classical-Period-Albert-Rice/dp/0195342992

https://www.amazon.com/Clarinet-Yale-Musical-Instrument/dp/0300102828/

https://www.amazon.com/Guitar-Cultures-Andy-Bennett/dp/1859734294

https://www.amazon.com/World-Flutelore-Folktales-Stories-Magical/dp/0252079418

Sounds like many of you would like my book [FROM THE DEEP OCEAN ABOVE] (http://www.amazon.com/DEEP-OCEAN-ABOVE-MANKINDS-UNHEEDED/dp/0692469869/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452391908&sr=1-1&keywords=from+the+deep+ocean+above) it answers where religion came from. It maybe hard to jump into a new paradigm, but I believe via years of reading mythology, religion, and Younger Dryas impact hypothesis books that this is the correct scenario. A comet came into the inner solar system all angelic in space and once it has contact with the Earth it became real and Demonic as it entered our atmosphere and was the causation of the world wide flood myths, it fits, God casts down the Devil. There is much much more that all adds up, adds up much more than any other posit I've ever heard before. Check out my site https://sites.google.com/site/fromthedeepoceanabove/ It basically is a collection of myths that tell the same story of the end from past experiences, that's where all this end times comes from. Ancient Man knew it happened before and will happen once again, that is why we now have a Planetary Defense Officer now !