With the new Avatar series having been out a few months now, here's another mythology and language lesson people overlook and it's...tiring.
The word and concept of Avatar is South Asian. I can't Hinglish it, but it's close to pronounced like: Uhv-thaar. you can just google it, but it's the idea and ability of gods or powerful beings to incarnate in new time/new forms/bodies, sometimes both mortal and divine.
It happens a lot in the Vedic epics.
Avatar: The Last Airbender? Concept, reincarnation, South Asian as fuck.
South Asia (as does other areas of the world/cultures) has a take on the x number of elements as well. Usually it's: wind, fire, earth, water, and sound/voice/space or spirit - aether - w.e. you wanna call it. Spirit bending the idea of the spirit world. Obviously this set is not a direct 1:1.
A:TLA draws a closer to parallel in ways to Chinese takes on the elements.
Obviously James Cameron's avatar takes this concept to a sci fi degree, essentially bringing your mind/consciousness into a new/different (Alien) body.
We also get into the world tree mythos/axis mundi parts of his story too, but that's beside the point and not unique to any one culture - that's anything out of proto Indo-European up. Obviously within in the pantheon of sff literature and other media the idea of reincarnation and cyclic nature of time - birth across time isn't new or rare.
The idea of a Wheel of Time, in fact, comes quite from: Kalachakra - translation = "Wheel of Time." This is an Indian belief that later spread through/over distance as well as religion, popping up in Buddhism and finding prominence most notably in Tibet still to this day.
The belief also ties back into the idea of conventional reality - time being an aspect of the larger world-universe- the smaller aspects of which are comprised of, once again: earth, wind, water, fire, space - sound familiar to something rom fantasy?
Probably. If not, read more. Or...more carefully.
