have stories about opening interdimensional portals been a thing in human history for longer than say, 100 years? is it just me or are we subconsciously memeing this into existence...
(i just watched Stranger Things 3 fyi)
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goes back at least as far as alice in wonderland, so that's 1865. i assume there's older folklore about traveling to fairyland but idk anything about it 🤔
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oldest antecedent i can think of is stories about traveling to the underworld, so stuff like orpheus and eurydice. that's much older! presumably also many stories about dream lands (alice in wonderland is apparently canonically a dream?)
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By this metric, pretty much all ancient stories apply, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf to Arthurian legend
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jeez I should have thought of that, yeah, the underworld myth, most of the stories I had in mind are basically underworlds of sorts (DOOM's Hell, a lot of the worlds Rick Sanchez travels to, etc.)
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Underworlds, dreamworlds, fairy worlds (Shakespeare even wrote about this one!), Spirit worlds.
Humans have been fascinated with the "doorway to another world" since we invented doors!
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would be interesting to trace the memetic genealogy of the modern portal fantasy, obviously it owes something to portal itself, maybe also stargate, i would guess something about wormholes in general relativity as an idea popularized by science fiction
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oh, narnia of course, i was going to list that earlier and forgot
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