5. Sure, but regarding a divine trinity having a daughter it's just the one case: do you have any opinion on whether that might be part of the Etruscans awarding women higher status than other societies of the time? (Seems to me that a society having an important "fertility goddess" doesn't mean it does particularly well regarding human women.)
I think it's awfully hard to infer all but broad strokes about a culture from only its myths, because I think it's overly narrow to interpret myths as "this is a model of how we actually want society to be, at it's best." I think myths often (always?) most embody those things that a culture *can't* articulate and often doesn't even wholly enact. Now, if you have myth, and language, and archaeology, and best of all, actual history, you can start to find the common threads and make some judgments.
All of which is to say, it would not surprise me if the Etruscans gave women more/different status than other contemporary cultures, but I don't know enough off the top of my head to say confidently. Some indicators that come to mind, all of which are based on the assumption "since the Romans were heavily influenced by the Etruscans, these things might be Etruscan in origin": a) Roman women, at least of the Patricians, had a lot of legal protections and even more informal (but respected) social power, despite a very Greek-like requirement that every woman of any age always be "in the care of" some man, b) the Romans seem to have had a more tender and romantic view of sex between men and women than the Greeks did - romantic love poetry, artistic depictions of sex where the partners are actually looking at each other, touching faces, kissing, and so forth, versus the Greek depictions that tend to look more like Patrick Batemen checking himself out in the mirror, and c) there were at least some priestesshoods and associated festivals that were treated with utmost solemnity for a very long time, see the scandal when Clodius supposedly snuck in to try to seduce Caesar's wife (of course, that one brings with it the counter-example that Caesar divorced her for even the suspicion, but hey).
8. I certainly tend to think the same, but a bit of me wonders: "Compared to what?", as the only non-Indo-European mythologies I consider myself significantly above rank ignorance regarding are the Abrahamic ones.
Hmmm, fair point, when I said "weirdly", I might have subconsciously meant "compared to the very us vs them myths of the Magian world". I'm also fairly light on non-Indo-European myth, though I'd like to remedy that. Maybe nuance about morality is the norm and lack thereof is the weird exception?
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I think it's awfully hard to infer all but broad strokes about a culture from only its myths, because I think it's overly narrow to interpret myths as "this is a model of how we actually want society to be, at it's best." I think myths often (always?) most embody those things that a culture *can't* articulate and often doesn't even wholly enact. Now, if you have myth, and language, and archaeology, and best of all, actual history, you can start to find the common threads and make some judgments.
All of which is to say, it would not surprise me if the Etruscans gave women more/different status than other contemporary cultures, but I don't know enough off the top of my head to say confidently. Some indicators that come to mind, all of which are based on the assumption "since the Romans were heavily influenced by the Etruscans, these things might be Etruscan in origin": a) Roman women, at least of the Patricians, had a lot of legal protections and even more informal (but respected) social power, despite a very Greek-like requirement that every woman of any age always be "in the care of" some man, b) the Romans seem to have had a more tender and romantic view of sex between men and women than the Greeks did - romantic love poetry, artistic depictions of sex where the partners are actually looking at each other, touching faces, kissing, and so forth, versus the Greek depictions that tend to look more like Patrick Batemen checking himself out in the mirror, and c) there were at least some priestesshoods and associated festivals that were treated with utmost solemnity for a very long time, see the scandal when Clodius supposedly snuck in to try to seduce Caesar's wife (of course, that one brings with it the counter-example that Caesar divorced her for even the suspicion, but hey).
8. I certainly tend to think the same, but a bit of me wonders: "Compared to what?", as the only non-Indo-European mythologies I consider myself significantly above rank ignorance regarding are the Abrahamic ones.
Hmmm, fair point, when I said "weirdly", I might have subconsciously meant "compared to the very us vs them myths of the Magian world". I'm also fairly light on non-Indo-European myth, though I'd like to remedy that. Maybe nuance about morality is the norm and lack thereof is the weird exception?