# data[].attributes.body
Tochmarc Emire (The Wooing of Emer)— is one of the earliest texts in the Ulster Cycle, preserved in the Book of the Dun Cow (Lebor na hUidre, c. 1100). Cú Chulainn, already the greatest warrior of Ulster, seeks to court Emer, the most accomplished woman in Ireland. Her father Forgall Monach opposes the match and sends Cú Chulainn to train with Scáthach, a legendary warrior-woman who rules a perilous otherworld fortress in Scotland, hoping the journey will kill him. It doesn't.

Cú Chulainn trains under Scáthach, survives her wars, receives the Gáe Bolg — a spear made from sea monster bone that enters with one wound and opens into thirty barbs — and returns transformed. He defeats Forgall and wins Emer. She is not a passive prize: the courtship opens with an elaborate exchange of riddles in coded language that only Cú Chulainn can parse.

# data[].attributes.body
Emer's voice is the text's most unusual feature. When Cú Chulainn first approaches her, she answers entirely in kennings — a dense coded Irish that requires heroic literacy to decode. The conversation is a mutual test, not a seduction. Scáthach, who trains Cú Chulainn in Scotland, is one of the few figures in world mythology who is simply the best martial teacher available, with no narrative interest in undermining or seducing her student.

The text encodes a world in which female excellence — Emer's intellectual accomplishment, Scáthach's martial wisdom — is the condition of the hero's development, not its obstacle. The Gáe Bolg itself is a gift from a woman. None of this is incidental to the story. It is the story.

# data[].attributes.body
Math fab Mathonwy, the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, centers on Arianrhod, daughter of Dôn and sister of the trickster Gwydion. When she is brought before Math as a candidate for foot-holder — a ritual role requiring virginity — she fails the test, giving birth to two sons as she steps over his magical staff.

She names neither child and places three destinies on the second: he will have no name, no weapons, and no human wife unless she grants them. Gwydion tricks her into giving the boy both a name (Lleu Llaw Gyffes — "the fair one with the skillful hand") and weapons. A wife is later made for Lleu from flowers. Arianrhod never relents.

# data[].attributes.body
You've summoned Arianrhod, Cú Chulainn, and Lugh in Persona. But do you know who they actually are — and what got lost when they became collectible demons?

# data[].attributes.body
Arianrhod is not a villain — she is a woman whose autonomy was violated in a public ritual and who responds with the only power available to her: refusal. The three destinies she places on Lleu are acts of resistance as much as curses. The text is dense with Welsh legal tradition around honor, inheritance, and the obligations of kin.

Her name means "silver wheel" — associated with the circumpolar stars, the moon, and the turning of fate. She is one of Welsh mythology's most psychologically complex female figures, and the Fourth Branch is one of the few medieval Welsh texts where a woman's refusal is treated as structurally central rather than incidental.

# data[].attributes.body
This project compares three Celtic mythological texts with their appearances in the Persona video game series to show how global texts change — and what disappears — when they travel across cultures, media, and time.

# data[].attributes.headline
Connecting this Media to Texts & Technology Scholarship

# data[].attributes.subject
Connecting this Media to Texts & Technology Scholarship

# data[].attributes.body
Using ideas from Walter Benjamin (aura & reproduction), Walter Ong (orality & literacy), and Wendy Chun (habitual media), we explore what happens when sacred stories become content.

# data[].attributes.body
The Fate of the Children of Tuireann is one of the Three Sorrows of Irish Storytelling, preserved in medieval manuscripts of the Tuatha Dé Danann cycle. Lugh's father Cian is hunted and killed by the three sons of Tuireann — Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba.

As blood-fine, Lugh sends them on an impossible globe-spanning quest for magical objects:

Golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides

A healing pigskin from the King of Greece

A poisoned spear from the King of Persia

Two horses and a chariot from the King of Sicily

Seven pigs that can be slaughtered and eaten and found whole again the next morning

A hound pup from the King of Ioruaidhe

A cooking spit from the sea-women of an underwater island

Three shouts on a hill guarded by a warrior whose standing orders are to allow none.

They complete nearly everything — and die of their wounds when Lugh refuses to heal them, citing the terms of the fine.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a story about justice, revenge, and the weight of blood debt. Lugh is not purely heroic — he engineers their deaths through a technicality. The quest spans the known world (Greece, Persia, Sicily, the ocean floor) and reads as a mythological atlas of how the gods acquired their weapons.

# data[].attributes.body
In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), Walter Benjamin argues that mechanical reproduction strips the original context, time, place, and ritual meaning from a work of art; he terms this the "aura."

SMT networks mythologies for game assets. The aura, the landscape, language, oral community, and original cosmology disappears as they are flattened and then folded into SMT's narrative.

# data[].attributes.body
In Orality and Literacy (1982), Walter Ong argued that oral cultures think differently from literate ones. Whereas myth in oral tradition is performed, dynamic, and tied to community memory, the written word fixes what was fluid into a static form. Digitization then commodifies what writing preserved.

By the time Arianrhod is a summoning card described as "Goddess of England," the oral Welsh world that gave her meaning has been overwritten three times: first into manuscript, then into print translation, then into a game asset stripped of language, landscape, and kinship. Each transfer loses something the previous medium could still hold. What arrives in SMT is the residue.

# data[].attributes.body
Wendy Chun argues that digital media creates habits — we "update" our relationship with content without noticing the assumptions embedded in the update. In Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), she describes how repeated encounters with digital objects naturalize the frameworks those objects carry.

Persona players habitually encounter Celtic gods as battle tools — summoning Lugh as a solar combat asset, Cú Chulainn as a frenzy-weapon, Arianrhod as a celestial power. That habit shapes how they understand Celtic culture without ever knowing what was replaced: the blood-fine jurisprudence, the kenning-language, the woman whose refusal was the point. The update has already happened. The original is no longer missed.

# data[].attributes.body
Across three source texts and one franchise, this project documents a consistent pattern: what survives the journey from oral tradition to manuscript to print translation to game asset is what can be rendered as combat power. What gets lost is everything that complicates it.

Three findings hold across all three texts:

Female agency is systematically absent. Emer's kenning-language, Scáthach as a full character, and Arianrhod's refusal do not survive the transfer. The franchise retains the hero and removes the relational world that produced him.

Moral complexity is flattened. Lugh's calculated jurisprudence, Arianrhod's legally grounded resistance — both disappear in favor of clean archetypes: solar warrior, celestial feminine.

Cultural specificity is reassigned. Arianrhod becomes "Goddess of England." Welsh oral tradition, manuscript tradition, and living language are overwritten simultaneously. The colonizing culture absorbs the colonized culture's mythology and relabels it.

# data[].attributes.body
This project is supported by a full collation database of Celtic mythology entries across the SMT/Persona franchise, tracking origin discrepancies, misattributions and cross-tradition links across Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Celtic, English, Arthurian, and William Blake mythology categories—the last of which reflects the franchise's unusual absorption of Blake's constructed cosmology into its English mythology taxonomy.

The database documents over 130 entries across eight mythological traditions, with amber-flagged origin discrepancies where franchise documentation conflicts with scholarly sources.

Primary sources consulted include the Lebor na hUidre (Book of the Dun Cow, c. 1100), the White Book of Rhydderch and Red Book of Hergest (14th c.), and the CELT digital archive at University College Cork. Franchise data was cross-referenced against the Megami Tensei Wiki.

# data[].attributes.body
This project opens several questions it does not resolve:

If Celtic figures are now nodes in a global textual network alongside Norse, Hindu, Abrahamic, and Shinto traditions, who shapes which connections get made — and whose cosmologies provide the organizing logic while others arrive as raw material?

The franchise's English mythology category absorbs historical criminals, 20th-century slang, and colonial artifacts alongside traditional folklore in ways the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish categories never do. What does that asymmetry reveal about how national mythological categories are constructed in global media?

Welsh mythology is represented in the franchise almost entirely through its Arthurian mediation — its most distinctive figures, Arawn and Rhiannon, are absent. What would it mean to trace a tradition's presence in global media through its absences rather than its appearances?

Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome describes the network SMT produces but does not account for the power differentials that shape it. A fuller account would require frameworks that can hold generativity and colonial asymmetry simultaneously.

# data[].attributes.body
The three source texts examined in this project are freely available online:

The Mabinogi of Math

The Fate of the Children of Tuireann

Wooing of Emer

Welsh and Irish are still living languages. The Mabinogion has been retranslated as recently as 2007. The CELT project at University College Cork has digitized hundreds of original Irish-language texts and made them freely available: https://celt.ucc.ie

# data[].attributes.body
Shin Megami Tensei (SMT) is a long-running Japanese role-playing game franchise developed by Atlus. First released in 1987, it spans dozens of games across multiple subseries. Its central premise is unusual for the genre: instead of fighting monsters, players recruit and fuse demons — drawn from the mythologies, religions, and folklore of cultures worldwide — to form a party and navigate conflicts that are as often philosophical as they are physical. Gods, spirits, tricksters, and monsters from Irish, Japanese, Hindu, Norse, Abrahamic, and hundreds of other traditions appear side by side, stripped of their original contexts and redeployed within the game's own cosmological framework.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shin Megami Tensei Videogame GIF by ATLUS West

# data[].attributes.body
Persona is the franchise's most commercially successful subseries, beginning in 1996. Where mainline SMT titles tend toward bleak, high-stakes narratives about the end of the world, Persona centers on groups of high school students who awaken the ability to summon a "Persona" — a psychological projection of the self drawn from myth and legend — to battle supernatural threats hidden within everyday life. The series is known for its stylized visual design, social simulation mechanics, and emotionally grounded character writing.

# data[].attributes.headline
The core dilemma in comparing global texts

# data[].attributes.subject
The core dilemma in comparing global texts

# data[].attributes.body
These myths came from Wales and Ireland — colonized, marginalized cultures whose languages nearly died. Japan's Shin Megami Tensei franchise processes them through its own mythological imagination, which is equally rich and complex — but the encounter is asymmetrical. The Celtic myths arrive partially stripped of their cultural owners.

# data[].attributes.body
Group Members

Christina Restrepo Nazar

Teddy Duncan Jr.

Glenn S. Ritchey III

This project was originally built for a Digital Media Library project for Texts & Technology in History as a requirement for core course work. This project represents a digital humanist approach to exploring global texts' travel across cultures, media, and time.

# data[].attributes.body
In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose the rhizome as an alternative to hierarchical, root-and-branch thinking. Where a tree has a single origin and grows in one direction, a rhizome spreads laterally — connecting any point to any other point, with no fixed center, no privileged origin, no single path through.

SMT is a rhizomatic system. Cú Chulainn, Lugh, and Arianrhod enter a network alongside Norse gods, Hindu devas, Abrahamic angels, and Shinto spirits — connected through fusion mechanics, shared stat systems, and narrative proximity in ways their source traditions never imagined and never authorized. New meanings emerge from those connections that belong to no single mythology.

This does not cancel the postcolonial critique latent to these stories, as the rhizome does not restore what Benjamin, Ong, and Chun describe being lost. Still, it opens a different analytical question: if these figures are now nodes in a global textual network, what are the politics of that network? Who shapes which connections get made? Whose cosmologies provide the organizing logic — and whose arrive as raw material? These questions work against Deleuze & Guattari's negation of ideologies within a rhizomatic understanding of textual functionality. The balance found between these criticisms is where future work begins.

# data[].attributes.body
Arianrhod appears across multiple SMT and Persona titles — in SMT II, SMT if…, Persona 2: Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment, and Liberation Dx2 — typically as a high-ranking Persona associated with fate, the moon, and celestial power.

In Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, the in-game compendium describes her as "Goddess of England." She is Welsh. Her refusal, her legal situation, her role as Lleu's mother, her name's astronomical meaning — none of it survives. What remains is a celestial feminine archetype, stripped of the specific Welsh political and kinship context that gives her actions meaning.

# data[].attributes.body
The Fourth Branch survives in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, both 14th-century manuscripts recording material that circulated orally for centuries before. Welsh — the language in which Arianrhod's story encodes its meaning through wordplay, legal register, and place-name tradition — is a living language that has survived centuries of colonial pressure, including active suppression under English rule. By the time Arianrhod becomes a collectible Persona card described as English, that entire history of survival and specificity has been not just lost but inverted.

# data[].attributes.body
Both franchises treat world mythology as a living repository of symbolic material. Celtic mythology — Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and broader pan-Celtic traditions — is extensively represented across the entire franchise, appearing in weapons, demons, Personas, and locations across nearly every title.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Persona Welsh References (Welsh References in Video Games)

# data[].attributes.body
Cú Chulainn is the most extensively represented Celtic figure in the entire Shin Megami Tensei franchise — appearing across mainline SMT titles, Persona 3, Persona 4, Persona 5/Royal, and others. His battle frenzy (the ríastrad — a full-body physical transformation described in the Ulster Cycle in graphic anatomical detail) and his spear the Gáe Bolg are consistently present.

In several titles he is accessed through an evolution chain beginning with Setanta, his birth name, which is a genuine engagement with the source tradition. What is consistently absent: Emer, Scáthach as a full character, the riddle exchange, the coded language, and the relational world in which his heroism is developed and witnessed by women. The franchise keeps the weapon and the frenzy. It removes the women who made both possible.

# data[].attributes.body
Tochmarc Emire survives in multiple manuscript versions with no single authoritative text — the story was already a written record of an oral tradition by the time it reached the Book of the Dun Cow. Each manuscript layer fixed something that had been fluid. Persona is a further removal: the franchise accessed Cú Chulainn primarily through the combat tradition of the Ulster Cycle rather than through its courtship literature, which means the selection was already skewed before translation and adaptation began.

The ríastrad was available as a visual and mechanical asset. Emer's kenning-language was not. What gets preserved across media is determined as much by what a medium can represent as by what a culture chooses to carry forward.

# data[].attributes.body
Lugh appears as a high-tier Persona associated with light, solar power, and divine combat across multiple SMT and Persona titles — including Persona 2, Devil Survivor 2, and others. His spear — the Brionac, also called the Gáe Assail, one of the Four Treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann and said to be unstoppable once thrown — appears as a weapon across several titles in the franchise.

The moral complexity of the Children of Tuireann disappears entirely. The Lugh who calculates a blood-fine specifically designed to kill, who refuses healing to dying men on a legal technicality, is not the figure the franchise represents. What arrives in Persona is the solar warrior — master craftsman, divine champion — with the jurisprudence stripped out. The franchise preserves his power and removes his coldness.

# data[].attributes.body
The Children of Tuireann survives in a single primary manuscript tradition and exists in multiple variant versions, none authoritative — like Tochmarc Emire, it was a living oral text before it was written down. Persona accesses Lugh through the tradition that was most legible as a game asset: the solar warrior with an unstoppable spear.

The legal and moral architecture of the tale — the blood-fine system, the technicality, the refusal — requires cultural context that doesn't translate into combat mechanics. Across all three texts examined in this project, the pattern holds: what survives the journey into the franchise is what can be rendered as power. What gets lost is everything that complicates it.