World Building: Myths and Legends for a ringed planet.

[Blood Legend]

You're an ancient shaman/priest/hobo living on a world with 2 moons and rings like saturn. What are some godly myths you'd invent to inspire or control your fellow cavemen?

[Refplace]

Moons are parents and rings children would be an obvious one.
Effects based off one or the other in the sky and when both are none are visuble,

[Flyndaran]

The rings are the glittering trails upon which the gods follow their prey.
The moons are hunting dogs keeping the herds from scattering.

[AlexanderHowl]

Rings like Saturn require a lot of moonlets to maintain, so they would be unlikely to occur around a terrestrial planet (if you are concerned about the scientific realism). However, you could have the world be a distant moon of a large gas giant, though there would probably be a lot more moons for their mythology (for example, Jupiter has 69 moons and Saturn has 62 moons). Perhaps the large gas giant that they would orbit would be their mother goddess, the moons would be her daughters, and the rings would be the blessed souls of the dead attending to her and her daughters?

[Flyndaran]

Rings can form from an ice moon breaking up and survive for thousands if not maybe a few millions years around a terrestrial planet, I think.
That's certainly more than long enough for become a fixture in mythology.

[Humabout]

Can you even see the rings from the planet? Rings are only a few hundreds of meters thick. If they look like scifi art, I'd say the rings are the road to heaven (think bifrost on a planetary scale). Moons could mean a lot of things based on their periods and the biology of the local sentient species. Our moon gets associated with women a lot because of its seeming connection (real or imaginary) to menses.

[LoneWolf23k]

The easy answer for me is that the Ring is the domain of the gods. Or it might actually be called the Great Arch, as people won't know the damn thing circumvents the planet until global travel is invented.

[Dr. Beckenstein]

- One moon is the realm of the dead. The rings are the roads on that the soul of the departed travel to it.

- The other moon is the realm of the unborn. The god of fertility sends his servants -storks, what else? - with the new babies on the rings down to the world.

Plot / myth hook: From time to time, the storks or the death mess things up and take the wrong ring. Tragedy or hilarity ensues.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Humabout

Can you even see the rings from the planet? Rings are only a few hundreds of meters thick. If they look like scifi art, I'd say the rings are the road to heaven (think bifrost on a planetary scale). Moons could mean a lot of things based on their periods and the biology of the local sentient species. Our moon gets associated with women a lot because of its seeming connection (real or imaginary) to menses.

I assumed that most cultures put the moon as female, because they assigned the sun as male. The menses issue seems far too "Victorian pseudoscience" of men that know jack all about how irregular and not really 28 1/2 day cycles they are for women.

[Ketsuban]

Originally Posted by Humabout

Can you even see the rings from the planet? Rings are only a few hundreds of meters thick.

Here's a thread using Saturn as an example, and here's a video with some simulated images of (gravitationally dubious) rings from different places on Earth. Short version: yes, you can see the rings, so long as your view is reasonably oblique and the planet doesn't get in the way.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I assumed that most cultures put the moon as female, because they assigned the sun as male. The menses issue seems far too "Victorian pseudoscience" of men that know jack all about how irregular and not really 28 1/2 day cycles they are for women.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The monthly cycle of the moon, in contrast to the annual cycle of the sun's path, has been implicitly linked to women's menstrual cycles by many cultures, as evident in the links between the words for menstruation and for moon in many resultant languages.

A male sun god implies a female moon god, and vice versa, but which one is true of any given culture seems to be essentially a coin flip - Wikipedia suggests the Germanic god Mani, Sin in Mesopotamia and Tsukuyomi in Japan as examples of male moon gods.