We don't know. We lost them as a result of natural consequences.
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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Have you heard about the person leaving the village in which everyone dies? Me neither.
most of where christianity has touched, any of the pagan beliefs/gods have been astroturfed by christian belief system.
The Spanish destroyed all of the written works of the Mayan people.
Is this a trick question? I mean the answer is in "pre-christian " and "natural consequence". The " conquista" answer to both for example.
Having the Spanish show up with armor, horses, and some weird book naturally has a detrimental effect on your mythology.
But, most of the (at the time of the conquista) conteporary prehispanic mythologies (late post classic period) were not completely lost, we know quite a bit about them, actually. even some spaniards attempted to preserve and study that knowledge (church folk). A lot of it , predominarily mexica lore and traditions got incorporated into catholicism in a process known as syncretism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism
We did lose tonnes of artifacts (gold and silver stuff), art, and architecture, though.
So I'm gonna specifically suggest the Teotihuacan civilization that existed during the mesoamerican classical period. They predated the mexica people (aztecs) but their temples and other vestiges of their culture were found by the aztecs and incorporated into their own mythology.
Still to this day, we don't know much about them.
Exactly, the Inquisition is another example. And, if we translate "pre Christian" into an era say around 1000 CE, theb the same can be said of the Ottoman Empire, or any other empire in history. Traditionally, smaller communities tended to have an oral tradition, so nobody can know what's lost.
Civilizations are big, and people are resilient - so we rarely find things like, "This plague/volcanic eruption/extinction of a species 100% wiped out this civilization and their culture". People tended to move away rather than just die, and their cultures tended to assimilate and combine rather than just vanish.
But there are placed where we reasonably believe that natural consequences resulted in the decline of civilizations:
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The decline of the Sumerian nations is associated with increasing salinity of the fields in southern Sumeria, shifting populations north towards Akkad. I believe there's still uncertainty over whether this was driven by Sumerian irrigation practices or some other cause, but the fact that it happened is undeniable.
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The Hittite Empire was a vast prehistoric empire which collapsed as part of a period of upheaval known as the Late Bronze Age collapse. The cause of the collapse is still disputed, but it is clear that there was some environmental shift involved. Warfare, plague, and economic changes may also have contributed.
In both these cases, we have only very fragmentary remnants of the surviving culture, often filtered through the lens of subsequent civilizations' recordings. The Hittites even were arguably "lost" for a time - until the mid-1800s, they were only known through Biblical references, rather than any relics or ruins.
Gaulic but thats mostly because they didnt write down their traditions and it was all verbal. And the ancient pre roman germanic faith.
I heard somewhere that The Oddysey was actually part of a bigger series but most of it was lost
@FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca It's part of the Epic Cycle. Only the Iliad and the Odyssey have survived, but there were actually 8 works.
Is the mere passage of time a natural consequence? Not sure what you mean exactly. If so maybe I could bring up the Canaanites. This is where Judaism's god and then all forks afterwards like the failing upwards prophet Jesus (didn't fulfil prophecy at all) and forks of forks come from. Yahweh eventually morphed over time into monotheism. Henotheistic at one checkpoint. It's a messy non-linear timeline and I don't feel like writing a huge novel right now. The modern day Hebrew Bible itself contains butchered remnants of this evolution, with passages suggesting early Israelites worshipped multiple gods too at some point. So anyways their god was originally a minor god in a polytheistic religion where El was the god of gods with his consort the goddess Asherah. Calling her his wife is contested.
I marvel how people can take any of this seriously after just a casual read up on this basic history of their own so called gods. I consider it evidence against them.