Tuesday, December 6, 2011

My paper:

Lauren Scull
Mythologies
Dr. Sexson
12-6-11
Myth in The Magus:
Nick Urfe’s Volatility of Belief and Calasso’s ‘Three Regimes’

In Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony the author asserts that, “man’s relationship to the gods passed through two regimes: first conviviality, then rape. The third regime, the modern one is that of indifference.” (53) Likewise, he adds, “there was an age when the gods would sit down alongside mortals, as they did at Cadmus and Harmony’s wedding feast in Thebes.” (53) That, however, was at an earlier time. Now, according to Calasso, the gods’ indifference towards man has created a similar reaction from humanity, a modern secularism sprung from a world unaccustomed to contact with the divine.
Similarly, throughout John Fowles’ The Magus, Nicholas Urfe’s response to his seemingly super-natural experiences, and to the sort of “living” mythology taking place on Bourani is nearly always rejection, no matter how tactile the experiences might seem.
Nicholas, like the other characters in the novel, is constantly re-negotiating his belief system to account for a new kind of schizophrenic reality that at once confirms and rejects the divine. Consequently, the volatility of each character’s understanding of his or her reality in The Magus demonstrates how mythology impresses itself on even the most vehement of secularists, or as Calasso writes, “how mortal mind and body are still subject to the divine, even when they are no longer seeking it out…” (53)
Nicholas’ atheism is most specifically manifested by his rejection of the female divine. Throughout the book he repeatedly casts off his bonds to female figures, especially those that he is closest with. Before we even meet Allison, we are told of his wayward affair with Janet, a schoolmaster’s daughter, whom he quickly cuts ties with when he recognizes her desire to marry. Yet, even this relationship was preceded by several others, and he admits that, “I became almost as neat at ending liaisons as at starting them.” (21) Clearly, Nicholas seems to have a gift for dismantling the female psyche, even comparing himself to a magician, “revealing the solitary heart”, overcoming the wishful goddess with his powerful faithlessness.
             His rejection of Allison however isn’t nearly as “neat” as the other women. Brooding over his loneliness, his regrets, and his newly diagnosed “syphilis”, Nicholas confesses to Conchis that he “turned her down”, to which Conchis tellingly replies, “you sound like Adonis. Have you been gored?” (144) Conchis’ allusion to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis evokes both Nicholas’ goddess-rejection and Allison’s subsequent retribution. Nicholas’ self-interest and “love of freedom” is continually at the bottom of his coldness towards females, and it is likewise his most internalized reason for leaving Allison.
As Conchis points out however, freedom is only lawlessness; it is the ability to act without morality, without God. Referring to the Nazis, though clearly meant to convey a larger message, he tells Nicholas,
“They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”                                                                                                            
If Nicholas is the quintessential, “semi-intellectual” (508) of an “amoral and permissive era” (512) then he is representative of what Calasso described as the “indifference” of modern humanity’s relationship to the divine. Likewise, as Calasso writes, “the familiarity between god and man lost, with the ceremonial contact through sacrifice impoverished,” Nicholas, like all modern men, would be “exposed to a gusting violence.” (53) Nicholas’ refusal to play at Conchis’ “god-game” thus results in a series of quite violent interventions, first with the Germans, and later as full-scale abductions where, while he is not raped, he is robbed of his dignity and has his most intimate desires exposed and ridiculed.
Yet, while Nicholas is certainly a skeptic, he appears to waver between the perhaps imperfect divisions of conviviality-rape-indifference that Calasso prescribes.  In fact, Nicholas’ “indifference” to the divine seems to merely mask a greater curiosity for it, and perhaps even a fear of personal inadequacy in its presence.  In his conversations with Lily de Seitas, whom he compares to Demeter, he is concerned that his “crassness” might offend her. To thwart this insecurity about his atheism, he consistently employs his Oxford education and his knowledge of literature when faced with situations he cannot account for within his comfortable secular reality.  Rather than accepting Conchis’ antics as a supernatural or divine force, he spends the majority of the novel searching in vain for clues to the real identity of the “man behind the curtain”, only to find that every “advancement” he makes on the case is yet another element of the conspiracy.  In the end, he is nearly consumed by his paranoia that Conchis and the other members of the god-game are actually omnipotent, yet remains skeptical nonetheless.
Though he is constantly given examples of Conchis’ reach, Nicholas continues to try to outsmart him, every dead-end further engendering his cynicism; he is now “more than ever impossible.” (654) Like Conchis, like Prospero, like modern-man, Nicholas still tries to overcome these “divine” forces in his increasingly confused life with the power of his books; he is not a deity but a “magician”, a mortal seeking to overcome the power of God. In the end, as Calasso describes it, it is Nicholas’ confusion about these “ritual approaches to the divine” that prevent him from ever reaching conviviality with Allison. Nearly pantomiming Orpheus who foolishly looks back at Eurydice, Nicholas’ lack of faith in Allison, his decision not to “choose” her this time results in her final judgment towards him: “she will never speak, never forgive,” (656) and in this final statement is perhaps woven a warning from Fowles, that one day the gods may stop existing altogether, that, like Allison, “the great Pan is dead.”


 AND
More presentations:
Andy: "regardless of what path you take, unless you do something drastic you will be pushed along by some other force..."
Nicholas as Zeus
lots of papers about free will and the Magus
...Nicks rejection of the feminine..Venus and Adonis motif..Ted Hughes book
Jason and Nick...Theseus and the Minotaur....

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Individual Presentations: Crunch Time

All of us have been hashing out the dreaded end of the year papers. It's always exciting, and daunting to hear what everyone has planned. Luckily, I'm not presenting until Tuesday, but until then, enjoy these others:


Christine


"for every step, the footprint was already there."
Disney, Grimm, and Myth
metaphor between myth and fairytales and oak trees and vines
Walter Benjamin---no culture's stories are original, an amalgamation of others


fairytales have there roots in mythology




Theresa


Mythology in Startrek
Who mourns for Adonais?
The gang finds Apollo. 
...other gods couldn't survive as memories....
"he has merely forgotten all the things that give life meaning."
"I wonder if it would have hurt us to gather just a few laurel leaves?"
Google "Mourning for Adonis" for an interesting connection:




Meagan


Women in powerful roles in the Magus
Allison= Helen (phantom role, Helen) both characters are absent, haunting
Calasso--the betrayal function




Calasso, 19 when men slay monsters they release women from bondage, but with women, it is men who are the monsters. Theseus, Perseus, Hercules




Juniper 


Lily as Persephone
one of her names is Isis
references to her in the Ezra pound poem
Joe is Hades
he is black
dressed as Anubis 
Shown as a guard in the beginning of the novel


Maddie


The Labyrinth in the Magus
Stranger than Fiction and the Magus


Eric 


Angels of Ignition
The Lesser Blessed
Nicholas' binary thoughts about Alison.... separation
patricide


WOW
"this is what books are like these days"---no kidding




Rosemary
The Proscenium of The Magus Revealed
Webster...


Kevin


The Magus and trickery and deception
Persephone and the pomegranate seeds


Bailey


Life's mystery
board game presentation, series of quotes
Eliot, Leverrier, etc.


Parker


development of Nicholas as a character


Stephanie
The Magus and Mirrors




The Magus and The Tempest...



*****ALSO: On Tuesday, December 6th at 7:30 PM in Reynold Recital Hall (in Howard Hall)
CORONA PRODUCTIONS presents the 400th birthday celebration of The Tempest and the King James Bible....students who attend will receive extra credit

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Class Notes 9: Reviewing for the exam

Calasso: pg. 209-212 (four stories to the quaternity--much like Myers-Briggs test), Zeus (thinking) Athena (sensation) Dionysus (feeling) Demeter (intuition)  also talked about in terms of space. Zeus (up) Athena (out---civic-polis-community) Dionysus (down, not thinking, pure feeling, thonic diety-relating to the underworld) Demeter (in function)

Narcissus flower
Kore---maiden
the tripartite goddess-- maiden mother crone

244--chapter 8 the Elusynian mysteries...

the supremacy of the visible

336-we see now as through a glass darkly...
daylight and light as important metaphors in homeric theology
"let me look at the light one last time"-- Ephiginea
"do it in the sun"--Odysseus
pg 359--Zeus has prepared a woeful destiny for us...so that in the future we might be sung of for the bards"

the blues...Robert Johnson
we suffer so people can write blues songs about us...
 383-(387)390- Definition of mythology as the precedent behind every action
invasion of the mind and the body vs. a convivial
the necklace from Aphrodite
to invite the gods ruins our relationship with them.
to invite the gods creates disasters...
Cadmus becomes the founder of the city of Thebes....sets in motion a series of disasters
gave the greeks the gift of fly's feet
brought vowels and consonants...gave them the alphabet
all of his daughters turned out badly

the great Pan is dead
WB Yeats poem
Dionysus from the Bacchae
Eleusynian material
Tarboleum


what does spiritus mundi mean?
--spirit of the world
in the marriage of cadmus and harmony, what two animals were drawing the couples chariot?
--the lion and the boar
What country are the nacirema tribe from?
--America
Which of the three things important at the elusinian mysteries was important to the theater?
--the thing done (dromenon/drama)
The word psychology is not the study of the mind, but of the?
---soul
pg 204 calasso
---Persephone
What is the basis of our present legal system?
--story of Orestes
In mythology there is a night where women beat men with sticks--what its it?
--tete toge (day of the dead)
What is the animal that is associated with the tarboleum?
--A bull
What makes something sacred?
--it has to be made sacred, they don't come that way
According to your instructor, the real hero is?
--us (me)
Jame's joyce's novel which talks about an ordinary person is based on?
--Odysseus
It always starts with a ___ and a _____
--a girl and a bird
What is the greek image for the soul?
--butterfly
What did Zeus injest when he ate the mother of athena?
--Metis (wisdom)  Athena born from his head
WHich word best typifies a space cared out in which sacred rituals are carried out?
--Temenos
WHo is the god of the double door and what does it mean? (Dithyramb(os))
--Dionysus--born twice, once of a mother Semele, and from Zeus' thigh...he wants you to see double
--Dithyramb (os)

Diomone--Demon, the angel of your better nature...now in the religious age, it means demonic
What was said to end the pagan world and initiate the religious age
--great Pan is dead
Whats the difference between gods and heroes?
--mortality--the gods don't die...
ON what occassion do the furies get pissed?
--kill your mom (blood murder)
What is the psychological development of the femenine?
--story of psyche and eros
Which ritual was repeated many times during our presentations?
--the australian rain making ritual
What is the name of the peasant girl that the king threw a sandal at?
--charila  re-read this passage....163
---answer is Antigone
What is the root behind senator?
--Senex

an image that is presumably universal...but found most clearly in myth and fantasy

---archetype (mythological typologies)
22 points of the hero formula
WHo covers most more than anyone? Oedipus
What christian ritual did we discuss that had to do profoundly with death and rebirth?
--baptism
Why did demeter put the baby in the fire?
to make him immortal
If you have someone in your family who is a daddys girl, who is she modeling?
Athena




MIND BABIES

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Rituals, need to recite one next Thursday: get from the internet or Calasso
cannot share one that has already been discussed in class
find ones that are entertaining
can use a personal ritual
ritual in Hamilton Hall: guys being chased by girls and snatching hats
"I don't know"
most rituals are unconscious
fertility rites
carpe diem rituals
go out in the forest and do what "comes naturally"
bear meat ritual: a bowl of bear meat goes to the bear
....and pouring out some beer for your dead homies

e7315f75_homies.jpg

we had to kill the thing that provides us with our food

Peruvian fertility rituals:

"makes the crops grow better"
a sacrificial ritual
a "harvest rite"
like Tarbolium, a young man and woman, both virgins, slit their throats

Mr. Summer  Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”
Three legged stool—Oedipus, chapter 6 in Calasso
 Corner of Wilson and Main:  Miss Kitty’s and The Baccus, Dionysus and Aphrodite
Sacrifice of a human being for agricultural prosperity
Foxfire…Aztec rituals

6a00d8341cba3953ef0105371e017a970b-800wi.jpg
Deus ex machina
Icarius and the Goat, also check out Vargas Llosa's "Fiesta del Chivo" or the Feast of the Goat
File-Feast_of_the_Goat.jpg
We don't make choices, our society and culture chooses it for us
everytime you read mythology you are reading the spoken part of the thing that was done
Myth and the ritual school
Myth is the story behind the thing done
Passover rituals 
meal.jpg
Precision...Repetition...
Classical literature: with dance their is song
the chorus performs a strophe and an anti-strophe
There's Something about Mary
chorus
The Virgin Suicides
Middle Sex
The Marriage Plot
Jeoffrey Eugenides
(a greek name meaning good birth)
Carilla, the virgin suicide
pg. 162 Calasso
ritual of expulsion, the bible in the book of numbers
an animal is chosen and dragged into the center of town and everyone puts their sins on the animal in the form of notes
they pin it to the goat
expel them into the wasteland
"the scapegoat"
scapegoat.jpg


Ceremony: Ceres
Demeter: Goddess of bounty/harverst
LUCKY-CHARMS.jpg
mis an a beam... french for "falling into an abyss"
Quaker holding a box of quaker oats, with a quaker holding a box of quaker oats, etc.
"the crime lay not so much in having done such things but in not having realized what it was they did"
Effigy solves the famine
large_effigy.jpg
MuslinVoodooDoll-2.jpg
"Remainder" by Tom McCarthy...the main character gets rich in a settlement after he is in an accident and uses his money to reenact the events of his life before.....repetition of events
remainder_mccarthy.jpg
"I'll tell you, I don't know"
Tradition in Fiddler on the Roof

the Maypole ritual
maypole.jpg






(axis mundi? center of the world)
pl02.jpg
The initiation: 260, Calasso
Hades abducting Persephone
Patty Hearst
_blog_images_hearst1.jpg

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Class Notes 8: BBQ at Juniper's

Juniper got 105%, she will now be sacrificed, as is customary.
please do not rest on your laurels...Apollo and Daphne
Everybody: How's the Magus goin'?
we're going to segway from concerns with beginnings to concerns with middles
The Middles:
principle difference b/w gods and humans: immortality
in the middles we are dealing with HUMANS
element of sadness because of mortality
The Heroe by Lord Raglan
the 22 points
The Hero Pattern
This pattern is based upon The Hero: A study in Tradition, Myth and Dreams by Lord Raglan 

Incidents which occur with regularity in hero-myths of all cultures: 

1. Hero's mother is a royal virgin;
2. His father is a king, and
3. Often a near relative of his mother, but
4. The circumstances of his conception are unusual, and
5. He is also reputed to be the son of a god.
6. At birth an attempt is made, usually by his father or his maternal grand father to kill him, but
7. he is spirited away, and
8. Reared by foster -parents in a far country.
9. We are told nothing of his childhood, but
10. On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future Kingdom.
11. After a victory over the king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast,
12. He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor and
13. And becomes king.
14. For a time he reigns uneventfully and
15. Prescribes laws, but
16. Later he loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects, and
17. Is driven from the throne and city, after which
18. He meets with a mysterious death,
19. Often at the top of a hill,
20. His children, if any do not succeed him.
21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless
22. He has one or more holy sepulchres. 

Superman, Christ,   Superman doesn't fulfill all of these, stuck at 11.  America is obsessed with the hero constantly overthrowing the beast.  What do other heroes score:
Oedipus: 21
Superman: 11
Arthur:
Luke Skywalker:
Simba:


Joseph Campbell: The Hero with a Thousand Faces

1. separation from home
2. initiation into new reality
3. return to home, to discover it has changed

The real hero of any story, according to psychologists, is you!
The middle is the muddle: characterized by   ambiguity, murkiness, the middle is the labyrinth
This is the magus...main character Nick finds himself in a labyrinth, initiation
Assignment: Need to find a ritual and or initiation to talk about a week from this Thursday
go back to Eliade book
Harvest rituals
A ritual is something we do.
DO: very important
every human being's greatest problem
what am I supposed to do?
pages in Calasso: 99ish?
Ate, the act of doing and responsibility
Robert Bly, nobel prize winner
Iron John, a book about men
stories told by the brother's Grimm
about a boy who needs to have rituals in order to grow up and be a man
Bly thinks that men in our society need rituals, but not physically, just the retelling of them
Taurobolium--Taurus
Bull headed, strong, earthy
a week from this Thursday
Body Ritual Among The Nacirema
think about someone who is obsessed with rituals
neat-freak_10-advantages-of-living-alone.jpg

24 hours to confess about your weird ritual
Personally, I'm a list-maker
Eleusinian Mysteries: To see, to say, to do.
DROMENON, the thing done
===>DRAMA
Cleopatra, greatest drama queen of all


The Taurobolium:


taurobolium_christ.gif
Flannery O'Connor
Everything that Rises Must Converge
Need to hold them down long enough to struggle
need the existential experience of pain, a death and a rebirth
water-boarding
water_boarding_188_xlarge.jpeg


why would they get rid of fraternities and sororities....violent initiations, hazing

hazing.jpg

Have you been washed in the blood of the lamb?
LambofGod.jpg



Homeopathy: Like produces like...Imitate the thing that you want to happen here
Where does Drama originate? IN the represenation of the thing you want to happen
James G Frazier Homeopathy
The Golden Bough

The Storyteller- Mario Vargas Llosa


and...GO DONATE BLOOD!

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Class Notes 7:

Lauren...Theresa...Maddie....Juniper:  we're awesome. 'nuff said.
Housekeeping:

everyone bookmark Cortney: cortneybury.blogspot.com
 Today: going to assign groups
Lauren's group: 6

mythology in everyday life.  Be surprising, interesting and wonderful. That's all.
The Test:

1. everyone needs to know the following items from Eliade:  Haineweli and Creative Murder, Pythian apollo, earth mother of all, enumelish, Hesiod's theogony, Saturn devouring his children (painting)  nothing else from the test...
2. Calasso: First six chapters, and exact pages: 5 (the basket, the picture of your story, Europa)  15 (etyologuy, why do greek men have slim hips?) 39 (goats, Rigoree and her father escarious..johnny appleseed mythological equivalent) 81 (who has more fun making love, man or woman? soothsayer Tireseus..it was women, Hera turned him into a woman for 5 years, thus she blinded him) 94 (Ate-divine infatuation, a life without it isn't worth anything) 383- the definition of myth--the precedent behind every action

illo tempore-- in the beginning....once upon a time...in the dream time

52 (and meagan's blog, the decline of the ages...conviviality...rape...indifference)
176- (how it all came about, not just how it began..Pelops...who was Pelops...Peloponesian war... and also a son of Tantalus..chopped up Pelops and fed him as a stew to the gods...Meneleus and Agamemnon, without them no Trojan war)

Leda and the Swan by WB Yeats


A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
    Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
    By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
    He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

    How can those terrified vague fingers push
    The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
    And how can body, laid in that white rush,
    But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

    A shudder in the loins engenders there
    The broken wall, the burning roof and tower[20]
    And Agamemnon dead.

                        Being so caught up,

    So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
    Did she put on his knowledge with his power
    Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? 
Zeus took the form of a Swan...If she is ravaged by a divinity, does she take on his form and his power?
Laid two eggs, from one Castor and Pollux and the other Helena and Clitemnestra, two sets of twins...
Beginning of Jill's blog: Eliade's statement on various kinds of creation stories, need to know this very thoroughly  eschatology
1. mother of the muses--Mnemosyne
2. what was persephone doing when hades abducted her? picking flowers
particular flower--narcissus
3. the suggestion that we are all prisoners regarding the flickering images on the wall as reality refers to what myth/allegory/fable:the allegory of the cave-Plato
4. Who was always described as deceitful and beautiful, she was salso thought to be a phantom: Helen  who had the face that launched a thousand ships? Marlowe
5. Who was Europe named after? Europa
6. What is the mythological root of this word...enthusiasm? en-theos...the god inside you...to be god-possessed
7. Who arrives unexpected and possesses? Dionysus
8.who says "one more time, Athena, love me as much as you can." Odysseus
Hercules is Antony's tutelary spirit...diomones, divine spririts...daemons..
9. abduction is always followed by....metamorphoses (getting married is an abduction dream...transferrance of property from one male to another) all marriage is rape
10. Who was born from the dismembered members of Uranus? Aphrodite
what does aphrodite mean? born of the foam
11.  who was the mother of the minotaur? pasiphae
12. tearing of limbs? Sparagmos
13. what follows sparagmos---homophagia...the consumption of the flesh....communion rites..
14. 3 stages of mythological monomyth...separation..initiation...return/initiationwhat do all heroes want to do? they want to go home, to arrive where they started
15. define anamnesis..the pugnacious paradox, you already know what you need to knwo, you just forgot...recollection...what have we forgotten according to Plato? everything of any importance
16. what does the word apocalypse actually mean? to take off the veil,referring to calypso, the veiled one
17. what is eschatology? the study of ends, end times...
18. what in the greek story was housed in the labyrinth? minotaur
19. who was the destroyer of the delights? death from the arabian nights, we have our stories, and then the destroyer 
20. zeus came as a what when he abducted io? io: cloud europa: bull leda: swan  the shower of gold: danae, who gave birth to perseus.. Semele, daughter of Cadmus: took the form of a mortal...can you do me a favor? when a god agrees to do something they cant take it back... can you show yourself to me as you really are? she burns up, zeus grabs the fetus and puts it into his thigh and dionysus is born. 
20.
10. 

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Class Notes 6: Mmmm Churchill Burger....Or: "Lauren, could you please expose your right ear lobe..."


The Labyrinth:  profoundly mythological
Jorge Luis Borges
blog assignment: respond to someone else's blog
the secret that Prometheus knew..
Egg: image of creation   (Easter...)
Ashley's blog:
hat with wings...Hermes
why at the flower shop....gonna send you some flowers fast
(deterioration of mythology)
The Game... Nicholas... The Magus
Maddie's blog: purification and communion...expulsion and assimilation
FIC- to make, to make up   (i.e. fiction)  SACRA= to make sacred...
Jewish sacrifice.. necessary element of violence
Sherwood:  Calasso  147 "NO sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens up into a thousand segments"  it blossoms...


Pasifae...  mated with a bulll (Zeus) = Minotaur
Daedelus:  first thing he built for Minos, King of Crete was the labyrinth. needed to be fed every month, so male and female virgins shipped to Crete to feed the minotaur. Shortage of Virgins...damn.
What shall we do?  Who ya gonna call?
Call a hero...Theseus
Andy Kaufmann ....  Mighty Mouse
Ariadne...
Ozzy: killing friendly mythological muppets

Dionysus, God of intoxication and wine
not being in your proper mind
Sibyl:  oracle who knew many things

conviviality....rape....indifference

The Fall: movie about a girl with a wild imagination....told a story about 5 mythological ppl working together.
Weird=Good

Test one week from today
The Beginnings:
Jill's blog: Eliade book online
Othello- put out the lights...and then put out the light (put her to death...Desdemona)
Robert Frost- miles to go before I sleep...and miles to go before I sleep

1. Conviviality-out going and friendly
2. Rape-Sudden powerful invasion that pluchks away the flower of thought
3. Indifference-The Gods withdraw

Cosmogonic myths... gon, gam= birth
pg. 83 in Eliade
1. creation ex nihilo- creation out of nothing
2. earth diver myth
3. creation by dividing in two a primordial unity
a. separation of the parents
b. separation of the amorphous mass
c. separation the cutting into of a cosmogenic egg

Homeric theology: you only get one shot at life...don't mess it up


an act of violence caused us to be here:
The Maarind-anim: Ameta
 (tell us about a dream in your blog)
dreams are a great source of mythological material
pay attention to weird...
repetition of the number 3 in mythology

Osiris...being torn to pieces .... and planted
spreading of the parts of the divine being...
Tupac Amaru...whose body parts were distributed across Peru when he was dismembered by Spanish colonists
You are what you eat
Churchill burgers


"If I were a rich man"  Fiddler on the Roof lyrics
abduction, metamorphoses
Inuma alish- when on high
Barisheet- in the beginning  (Hebrew)
Tihum (Hebrew, nothingness) = monster, Tiamat (Babylonian)
Call a hero. It could be Marduk. But who knows, it could be this guy:
Human beings were born in the blood of a traitor. Thus, they are subordinate to the Gods.
If a white cloth had been put over the face of a King, he knows his time is up. He has grown old, is washed up, and therefore must die. Long live the King. The "Golden Bough"- Sir James George Frazer
Scottish anthropologist.  the old man being taken over by the young whipper snapper.
Young overcoming the old.
Four creation stories:
4. God creates by his voice  (latest)
3.The world is created from the body of a goddess
2. Female goddess, and a male snake (shed their skin) secret of eternal life (Gilgamesh)
1.  The female who created the world all by herself (earliest)

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Class Notes 5: "Read these three stories and call me in the morning"

The Wizard of Oz
Jenny's blog:  The most mythological is the ordinary world
connecting the dots...making the picture
Perkins
You don't have to leave Bozeman to find the mythological
the best stories are better if you tell lies about them
that's why Odysseus was so loved by Athena...wily Odysseus
Jared's story: colliding with a stranger on the street
because he switched he ran into him...
Oedipus and the Delphic oracle....he tried to avoid it and that's what sealed his fate
the scripted end
Here's a brief history of the character Oedipus Rex:
http://www.medeaslair.net/oedipus.html
Appointment in Samarra
merchant in Baghdad

"The Appointment in Samarra"
(as retold by W. Somerset Maugham [1933])The speaker is Death
There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture,  now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.




in the Magus, finds book of TS Eliot's poetry
 as in Oedipus, with Antigone, tragedy comes down through the generations
the suffering never stops, it goes on and on and on


the Norman Bate's motel
Procrustes-robber who stretched or amputed the limbs of his victims
Procrustean argument: stretching the facts to make them fit your argument


"it was bound to happen"  97 of Cadmus and Harmony
you can only admire the results of a contest in which their is a struggle


Jacob and the man wrestling in the bible---because you have prevailed against me, your name shall no longer be Jacob, but it shall be Israel...
 Gagauin's depiction



Humpty Dumpty....had a great fall...so did Adam and Eve, Icarus, we too shall fall, is the human condition
Jame's Joyce's interpretation in Ulysses
St. Augustin:  felix culpa... my most grievous fall... felix (happy) fortunate fall..that adam fell in the garden so that we can be redeemed through Christ
Finnegan-- fall's off a ladder, dies.  feeding the whiskey to the dead man
Fin- the end (French)
Fin- Again  (his wake... so many meanings)
waking up, wake in the water

Funferal-- Funeral

Myth is the precedent behind every action. Ordinary plane in Wizard of Oz and mythological plane

Moses...Superman... raised by foster parents
mythology loves the same old story


http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/Superman.html      

Marvel the Charlatan in Wizard of Oz  ... a magus

stories with this formula:  near death as a child...spirited away, raised by foster parents...becomes a hero
Sigefreud
King Arthur
Jesus
Harry Potter
Hercules
Oedipus

deus ex machina... being raised up to the gods...

helpers:  courage, brains, a heart...   all dorothy wanted was to go home, and this is what all heroes want
but then she discovers the man behind the curtain
it's important for Dorothy to know about the machinery that creates the illusions

but Dorothy has always been able to go home...can go back to Kansas, but is no longer an ordinary world because she has been to another world.
 Same for Nicholas in Magus when he returns from Greece, it has changed her

Calasso

the destroyer of delights
 page 5 of Calasso: But how did it all begin?
Europa was walking with her friends... a cycle of one of the stories within classical mythology
the story of Europa and the Bull..Io...Theseus...Minotaur... it will end with the Bull as well
Europa and the Bull

Theseus and the Minotaur
Sparagmos: dismemberment
Homophaegia: the eating of a body which has been dismembered  (eating the dismembered body of a divinity)
transubstantiation... metomorphoses... cannibalistic rites

The Eucharist: the bread represents the body of Christ, and the wine the blood of Christ
"abduction and metamorphoses"  the two big things to understand Calasso

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Class Notes 4: water, water everywhere...

More Creation stories...

Jason:  Myth #34 Eliade-Yao Mani Yokoots? :  water water everywhere....then a giant tree. chillin in the nest...wolf...eagles...
dough guy....creation

More earth-diver myths

"a change of style is a change of subject" - Wallace Stevens

To Be: a good way to define an etyology... how an elephant got its trunk...

Hamlet: to be or not to be...
perchance to dream...aye there's the rub...


ontology: the study of being...   Shakespeare

what is the nature of being...what does it mean to be?


Calasso is working with 600-700  sources 
Hermes and The Lyre from Homeric Hymns
No music before this happened...reminds me of how my radio recently stopped 
Kevin is being mythological today: musicians on his tshirt- Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix...are gods to us today
Music comes from the muses...
this unfamiliar sound is a divine thing...what anguish healing music is this?
Eliade is not going to simplify the world for us

Pythian Apollo:  from the rottiong body of Python comes the Oracle at Delphi


Mesopotamian Cosmogony
Hesiod's Theogony and Cosmogony: the creation story of the ancient greeks. not just how the world came to be with uranus and gaia, but also rebellion of their children til we get to Zeus.
dyaus-dayeus-ze-eu-pitar (rock and the head, pate) jupiter... from the sanskrit
Freud loved this story fit his idea of the psyche, male children over coming their fathers with the aid of their mothers
Patterns of Initiation:  the "middles" of the class
now that you're here, what is life like? only one answer: life is suffering
initiation ceremonies are secret: 
First phase: separation (being kicked out of something that was really nice) 
Second: initiation
Third: transformation
beginnings-middles-ends
  5 extra points for being a twin or adopted
I had a womb-mate
Here's the big mythological thing. Everything you need to know about mythology you can learn in 3 pictures. 

circle. two halves. dash circle
in the beginning there is wholeness, harmony, everything is great.
one day something happens


says Lear when he meets Gloucester: let me wipe it first it smells of mortality: when we are born we cry that we have come to this great stage of fools

our first introduction to the world is TRAUMATIC
you recreate the birth trauma when you are scared


your very earliest memory, with something that you did that you were told not to do and you got in trouble:  doing the thing of which you were commanded not to do

the word to use between stage one an stage two

good scar stories...


the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

your early memories will congregate around our communal creation story.  our culture's- do not eat of that fruit---avocados- of the tree of knowledge. 
the python, the snake, more subtle than other creatures

when did you know you were naked.  naked as a jaybird. 
that's a no-no

princess and the golden ball. falls down the well. frog says he'll get the ball on one condition, that she let the frog live in her house, eat her food and sleep in her bed.
Hans my hedgehog- Grimm story
she kisses the frog---and he turns into the prince (transformation)
all 3 cycles into this story
seperation: all okay til ball falls in well
initiation: kissing the frog
transformation-transmigration of souls... frog is a prince
paradise-paradise lost-paradise regained
Campbell:  the hero with a thousand faces
star wars...
luke skywalker is an iconic mythological figure including all of the things in the mythological formula, the "mono-myth" as he calls  it
through the agency of intelligence and imagination you can recreate the beginnings
coleridge poem: Kubla Kahn
"that with music loud and long I would build that dome..."
drunk the milk of paradise...

aboriginees.... puberty initiation rites.
circumcision. yum. separation from mother's milk. 






Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Class Notes 3

If you undergo an initiation experience, it's undoubtedly painful....

Going through the "syllabus" or reading schedule.... need to read 2 chapters of Calasso/ wk.

Today we are giving oral presentations of creation stories. Here's mine, it appears originally in Keepers of the Earth: http://books.google.com/books?id=HsK1IPPUAl8C&pg=PA25&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

This is one that I used to tell with children at The Imago Earth Center ( www.imagoearth.com ) , a non-profit nature center located in a very urban area of my hometown in Cincinnati, OH.

There could be nothing more greek than Herodotus's amazement on discovering that in Persia no one could make a sacrifice unless a Magus was there to oversee the ceremony...   247, Calasso

DON'T read Abby's blog! She let's "the cat out of the bag" about the Magus.

IN THE BEGINNING:

Justin/ : Moon said that when people died they would come back to life.
Old man told the moon to keep people alive.
End of story.

Meagan/ African origin:
 God Juwak wanted to create humans...picked up black dirt and made black people...white sand/white ppl....brown mud...brown ppl... legs like flamingos....arms for farm tools

Juniper/Scandinavian:
close to mine....bottom of the ocean there are seeds....son decides to go down to the earth/ changed into a duck...dove down to get the seeds

Sam Middlestead/Himalayan: Mother nature/father winter...group of devils destroyed everything that was dear to them...brought five clouds into their region...Mount Everest was their love child

Theresa: 56- in Eliade:Poem/Story: but who can say how creation happened...wrapped in layers of darkness...not nothingness but before nothingness...desire descended upon it...a seed born of the mind...


Wena Tsan/Hispanic legend/ La llorona/ : beautiful Maria...thought she was better than everyone else, didn't want the men in her village. Said  "when i grow older Im gonna marry the most handsome man in the world" saw a man riding his horse...he proposed to her....they eventually had 2 children... later he went back to the farm to work...and found a new woman more elegant than her...Maria drowned her children in the river....killed herself...villagers found her body and buried her in a white robe....heard a weeping sound coming from the river


Andrew 50/ : water/ tree in the beginning. There was a nest w/ 6 animals: coyote/panther/falcon/hawk/condor/eagle   eagle decided to make earth. sent out the ducks. dirt/water/seeds made dough. wolf needs to shout. dough vanished. lake...


Many "earth-diver" myths... 

Jenny Thornburg/ Slipper:  village messenger. wouldnt let the sister go with him...maybe tomorrow....but brother got sick....now sister had to cross the lake for him. she put on moccassins and went into the snowstorms... bloody footprints....brought herbs...each of the bloody footprints= a ladyslipper flower

Ashley/ Iroquois earth-diver myth:

Maddy/Medicine: Animals used to live peacefully together and talk to one another. Then they multiplied too much and had to seperate. the humans started using the animals for food and that made them very angry. animals waged war with human weapons on the humans. bears sacrificed themselves for the strings. Old White Bear. The creation of medicine.

Lisa/ Sierra Nevadas:  crow and eagle...fishing...piles of dirt....duck


Vittoria Porcella/Norse:  Umir drinking from the udders of the cow. Odin kills Umir...from his blood it drowned all of the giants... sons of boor carried Umir's body and created the earth out of it....flesh=earth  blood=ocean/lakes    brains=clouds   two trees...man and woman.. spirit and life Ask and Embla...

Jill Yoder/ Legend of Devil's Tower:

Parker Dunn/Crow/Old Man Coyote Creates Earth:

Matthew/ Creation of the Lamppost:



Enjoy....I'll try to add more details later!

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Class Notes 2

the fluttering of her dress pg. 5 europe... eroticization of rape by ovid... etc.
but how did it all begin?
 "Thus her dreams insisted. And so it was."

Announcements: Jenny Thornberg's blog is the master blog
                           seeing lots of tree hugging photographs
 next tuesday: origin myths....etiology...cosmogeny
two levels of etiology:simple and complex

Simple: how the x got it's y
 how the tiger got its stripes
how the giraffe got its neck

"The Just Stories" Rudyard Kipling   stories for children

why do the men of your tribe urinate in this way:    Why/Because   Mythology is a system that answers all of your questions...

Fiddler on the Roof    "I will tell you....I don't know"  Tradition (clip)
<iframe width="420" height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gRdfX7ut8gw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

In Illo Tempore ... "In the Beginning"
 Mnemosiny= mother of the muses
Innate Knowledge... Plato The Doctrine of Anamnesis


The Allegory of the Cave...Plato


nature vs. nurture
                          
whenever humans look upon a beautiful thing, your shoulders itch because your wings begin to grow

Wings of Desire... Peter Faulk

Once upon a time...
Ungo and Gungo...

Myth is a model for imitation.

When on high...In the Beginning...

And God said "Let there be light" and there was light ....  "Thus her dreams insisted. And so it was."   (Calasso)
The Creation of the world by the dismemberment of a great goddess. Tiamat... Marduk
cuts her in half.. uses one half of her body to make dome of earth..other for the heavens
tell story every year and we psychologically renew ourselves



When I was a kid... 
The Myth of the Declining Images

Names you gotta know for THE TEST
The Iliad and The Odyssey Homer
Theogony  Hesiod
Homeric Hymns
Classic Drama


Creation story of the Greeks...


The Trojan War...the event that the Greeks are obsessed with...
and the Jews .... flight of the Jews out of bondage from Egypt led by Moses
both: 1200 BCE, central mythological events for both cultures...no historical evidence of either

Sparagmos: The Tearing or the rending of living flesh

Three Tragedians: 
Euripides
Aeschylos
Sophocles
Playwrights were required to write about the gods and goddesses....but couldnt talk about contemporary politics, but could create allegories between the two

written by Euripides:  The  Trojan Women (with Katherine Hepburn as Hecuba) Andromeda has a son called Astyanex...Hecotor her husband was killed in the Trojan war.. Massacre at Milos. All the women are left over and will be sold as concubine to their greek captors. Astyanex...what kind of world is it where the grandmother buries the grandchild
Tragedy...the song of the goat


Greatest trilogy in world drama:  Orestes, the Orestaya...
his sister is killed by there father


Oedipus...Luke Skywalker...the formula of hte hero, adoption as a major motif in mythology


He goes to the place where three roads meet. 
Jocasta:


Eschatology...A
The Doors, Jim Morrison:  The End
Apo- (to take off)
Calypso-  The Veil... the veiled nymph from the Odyssey

To remove the veil....  this is the vision of the world how it really is...

Johnny Depp...  Dead Man  Jim Jarmusch