User:Phatius McBluff

About me
I also have a meta-wiki account.

I've been on Wikipedia for a while now, and I'm getting the disturbing impression that some people think my real name is actually Phatius McBluff. Just so everyone knows, my real name is Joseph. How did I come up with the name "Phatius McBluff"? Well, my parents have a neighbor named Thatius, and I thought his name was Phatius for a long time before I got corrected (fortunately not by him). As for "McBluff"... Well, that's truly my own invention, one of the many useless mutant ideas my brain occasionally spews forth. And I think it sounds cool.

I am a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley (graduated in Spring 2009). My studies were in philosophy, and in religious studies with a concentration in myth. I am currently in a graduate program in philosophy at the University of California, Irvine.

As far as my Wikipedia activity goes, my main interests are mythology, comparative religion, and philosophy (in that order). I'm particularly interested in theories dealing with the differences between mythical thought and modern thought. (See Mythopoeic thought and Eternal return (Eliade).) I don't consider myself an expert in any particular area of mythology, but I have done a fair amount of reading on the subject.

Articles I've created

 * Eternal return (Eliade) - I originally joined Wikipedia specifically for the purpose of creating this article. Up until then, Wikipedia had been mainly focused on the shady political involvements of the famous religious historian Mircea Eliade, and had lacked an in-depth discussion of his scholarly work.
 * Hierophany
 * Myth and ritual
 * Mythopoeic thought
 * Origin myth - this title originally redirected to Creation myth

Other articles to which I've contributed significantly

 * Animism
 * Claude Levi-Strauss - the section on the structural analysis of myth
 * Hina - I had to pretty much remake this article.
 * Ishtar
 * Mircea Eliade - I have added, and am still adding, info on Eliade's scholarly work.
 * Mythology
 * Religion and mythology
 * The Da Vinci Code - the section on the inaccuracies of the book's portrayal of Gnostic Christianity
 * Christian mythology - performed complete re-write on June 5, 2011, in accordance with my project at User:Phatius McBluff/Christian mythology.
 * Hylomorphism - on 7/2/09, performed major re-write and renamed Hylomorphism (Aristotelian) (instead of just Hylomorphism), although the name has since been changed back
 * Islamic mythology
 * Jewish mythology
 * Comparative mythology - I had to pretty much rewrite this article
 * Mythology - performed a major re-structuring of this article around 2/1/09; performed another re-write on 4/3/09
 * Essence-Energies distinction
 * Palamism