Daily Deities #2: Sun Wukong

    Today's Daily Deity is Sun Wukong. It's not actually a topic I've been thinking about, but is one that my little brother Neel has been thinking about. So I decided to talk about Sun Wukong today.

    Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, is a character from Chinese Mythology. He comes to us by way of The Journey to the West, one of China's four great classical novels. Sun Wukong is a stone monkey who was born from a magic rock on a mountain called Flower Fruit Mountain. When the wind blew over him, he came to life and already knew how to walk and talk. This origin story could have been based off of that of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god of bravery, courage, and devotion. Anyway, Sun Wukong proves himself to be the bravest amongst the monkeys and becomes their king. One day, when one of his monkey citizens dies, he gets sad and so goes to a Taoist immortal to teach him knowledge and how to become immortal. He then uses an iron pillar from the palace of the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, which he uses as a weapon.

    Sun Wukong is then taken to the underworld, which makes him angry, so he erases the names of all the monkeys that he knows from the records of the underworld, making them immortal. To control him, the Jade Emperor, the ruler of all deities in the Chinese heaven, gave Sun Wukong different positions in heaven. But, each time, Sun Wukong would abandon his post for some reason and cause tons of chaos in Heaven. Soon, the Jade Emperor is forced to send the entire heavenly army and their most powerful divine warriors and gods to fight and take down Sun Wukong, but they all fail. So Guanyin, a powerful Bodhisattva, suggests that they send Erlang Shen, a powerful warrior monk, to go and fight Sun Wukong, who he defeats with the help of Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher who founded Taoism. They then fail to execute him many times before he escapes and starts causing more destruction in heaven. The Jade Emperor is finally forced to turn to Buddha himself. The Buddha is the enlightened founder and main deity, or focus, of Buddhism. Buddha easily uses his powers to test, and then trap Sun Wukong under a mountain for 500 years.

    Sun Wukong stays under the mountain until Guanyin meets him and tells him that a pilgrim will come and free him from the mountain, after which he must help the pilgrim get where he's going. The pilgrim who comes is the Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang (or Tripitaka), who has been sent on a journey to the western heaven to obtain Buddhist scriptures. He frees Sun Wukong, who is then forced to help him on his journey. At first, he's kind of unhappy at this, but soon he takes the journey and it's purpose more seriously. Throughout the journey, demons kept trying to abduct Tripitaka to eat him, because it was believed that if he was eaten, then his flesh would grant them immortality. So, Sun Wukong was basically his bodyguard and constantly had to fight all kinds of demons throughout the story. By the time he had finished the journey, Sun Wukong had become fully enlightened. He got to meet Buddha again and achieved Buddhahood.

    That is the basic gist of it. The reason my brother is thinking about Sun Wukong today is because he was feeling a sense of mischievousness and fun, which reminded him a lot of the story of Sun Wukong, who was a very impulsive, incontrollable, and powerful trickster, and also very funny. Thank you for reading! Do you have a favorite character from The Journey to the West? Do you have a favorite story from The Journey to the West? Why? You're free to comment down bellow!

Daily Deities #1: Hades and Persephone

     Happy Valentines Day! This is Dev. This will be the first of a longish series of Daily Deities, where I take a moment to talk about a certain god or concept or something from mythology that I've been thinking about that day and why. I know that it's called "Daily" Deities, but I won't always have time to make one of these posts every day, since I have a limited amount of computer time a day, even on weekends. During weekdays, I have schoolwork to do and so I may not always write one of these every day, but I will try. I also might not write one of these if my head is still stuck on the previous topic.

    With that out of the way, let's talk about Hades and Persephone, who have both caught my attention recently, and both of whom I've been thinking about lately. Recently, Valentines Day happened and it made me think about love stories in mythology. My mind moved to Greece, since they have their fair share of love stories, most of which, unfortunately, end terribly. So, a question came to mind: "what are some really good love stories in Greece that have a happy ending and are actually functional?" I've only been able to determine two couples: Eros and Psyche, and Hades and Persephone. If you find any more, please comment down below.

    Eros is the god of love in Greek mythology and he shoots arrows to make people fall in love. Psyche was his beautiful wife, whom his mother Aphrodite was jealous of and did her absolute best to keep them separate. Eventually she gave up and Eros and Psyche were happily married, and unlike most Greek gods, Eros remained totally faithful to his wife.

    Hades and Persephone, instead, got off to a rough start. Demeter, the goddess of the harvest was very overprotective of her daughter Persephone, who was also Zeus's daughter. So, when Hades fell in love with her, knowing that Demeter would refuse, he asked Zeus for permission to marry Persephone, and Zeus specifically told him to kidnap her, which he did. In reality, this wasn't some terrifying assault, but instead, an arranged marriage. Demeter didn't respond happily to the disappearance of her daughter and refused to let anything grow on the earth unless she got her daughter back. Zeus sent Hermes to go get Hades to release Persephone. Hades and Persephone had actually gotten along well and when Hades heard what Demeter was doing, he actually told Persephone to return to her mother to sort things out. But he promises her that she will be his queen and that he will try to be the best husband for her. Persephone returned to earth, and then admitted to her parents that she had eaten some food in the underworld and so she had to stay there for one third of the year, while she spent the rest of the year with her mother. When Persephone was with Hades, Demeter would become sad again and it would become winter, and when Persephone was with Demeter, she would be happy and spring and summer would occur.

    What I find which I thought was pretty nice, was that Persephone did end up loving Hades, and Hades did keep his word. Him and Persephone never cheated on each other, and Persephone was in the rare position of getting to share equal power in the underworld with her husband. This was not standard in Ancient Greece, because Greece considered women to be very unimportant and less than men. So, knowing that Persephone was being treated equally by her husband makes me feel good inside, because that's how relationships should be like, and it's good know that Hades isn't a bad guy at all. When people think of Hades, they either make him a default Satan analog, or you think of the Hades interpretation in Disney's Hercules movie. These versions are both inaccurate, since Hades has never done anything cruel ever. He is a good person who does his job and loves his wife. So, I really hope that somewhere along the line, we will get a modern interpretation of Hades that matches his good original characterization, which is the characterization that I like. My current favorite adaptation of the story is Rachel Smythe's Lore Olympus Webcomic. I'm a huge, hardcore fan.

    I hope you enjoyed my first Daily Deity, and I'll try to write more of these as the time goes by. I hope this has reshaped how you think about Hades and Persephone and I hope you are all safe at home during this pandemic. Please wear your masks and socially distance where necessary. We'll get through this together!