"Special pleading" isn't quite the right term for the book--I know it has a specific meaning as a logical fallacy, and what I was looking for was a pithy way of describing the tendency to claim that subject X, when written about by writer Y, is actually the source of A, B, C, D, and E, despite A-E being widely separated in time and space--so the Persians are the source of Arthurian myth--that sort of thing.
A related tendency is to claim that A,B,C,D,E, and X are all manifestations of one's own pet archetype, and proof that said archetype is a human universal--often at the expense of editing or ignoring all the awkward exceptions.
(An example: of course a masculine/rational solar deity and a feminine/intuitive lunar deity are common to all world mythologies--except that the Norse, Inuit, Koreans, Japanese, and Cherokee [among others]evidently didn't get the memo.)
(And if you're scoring at home, I didn't know about the Chionites, Kidarites, or Gok.)
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"Special pleading" isn't quite the right term for the book--I know it has a specific meaning as a logical fallacy, and what I was looking for was a pithy way of describing the tendency to claim that subject X, when written about by writer Y, is actually the source of A, B, C, D, and E, despite A-E being widely separated in time and space--so the Persians are the source of Arthurian myth--that sort of thing.
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(An example: of course a masculine/rational solar deity and a feminine/intuitive lunar deity are common to all world mythologies--except that the Norse, Inuit, Koreans, Japanese, and Cherokee [among others]evidently didn't get the memo.)
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