Phantom Armies Of The Night Analysis

Folklore and mythology are ageless. The two have been a constant throughout the history of mankind, playing pivotal roles in how certain cultures and religions view the world. The action of passing down stories through word of mouth through generations have been used to share cultural and religious beliefs, costumes, and values. Whether it is Christians who believe that sin is attributed to Adam and Eve eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil or the ancient Greeks who believed that the god Apollo made the sun rise everyday with his flying chariot, folklore and myths can be seen passing down a plethora of messages. There are even cultures and religions that share similar myths. The caveat of these shared myths is that …show more content…
This crossover of myths with different messages can be seen in Claude Lecouteux’s Phantom Armies of the Night by displaying many cultures and religions interpretation of the “Wild Hunt” and all its supernatural …show more content…
He states that, “Simultaneously, the recycling of the theme of the Wild Hunt by the clerics allowed pre-Christian traditions to survive and evolve parallel to those spread by the church.” In shorter form, Lecouteux explains that because of the emergence of the Wild Hunt and the Christian church adopting the ideas and making them their own, traditions of the church are still present. Another reason as to why I agree with Lecouteux’s argument that the church took over the Wild Hunt is due to the way that he explains that the wild huntsman theme was clearly visible through the Christian religion. Christians took this theme of the huntsman and applied religious terms and teachings to it. For example, Lecouteux writes that the hunter is often a deamon and sometimes a devil who preys on a revenant, a sinner, or a dammed soul. The church took this theme of the huntsman and used it to scare people to not commit