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)

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 DeathThere 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

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. 

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!

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

Class Notes

New assignment: Need a 3 minute creation story for next class.

-visual boosters
-books:  techniques of consolation

Justin: the moon and the origin of death

To expect in Chapter 2 of Eliade's Primitives to Zen:

(can be found here: www.mircea-eliade.com/from-primitives-to-zen/index.html )
Io/ Maori cosmology
Earthdiver creation myth
myth of beginnings of endings
Scandinavian creation story

3 parts to story we tell in this class:
Aristotle: 3 things of all good literature beginning, middle, and an end
sublimely simple/ great truths
The 3 Big Things

never a duplicate in storytelling....
part of requirement for this class is to become 3 years old again
"tell me the same story"

Luddites: Robert Ludd- took a hammer and destroyed all industry because he hated technology....

visit Daniel's blog for technical info:  www.danielleawoken.blogspot.com

Tree hugging assignment:  Jenny Thornburg's blog
Diamon----Demon
Diamon's like tutelary spirit
Genie/Genius....  altar ego/ other self who is there for you if you look for him or her


suffering: not always a bad thing-menas you are paying attention
Calasso:  page 93-94 "whenever their lives were set aflame through desire or suffering or even reflection, the homeric heroes knew that a god was at work. they endured god, but...
thus disposed of their emotion their shame..

...to me you are not the cause, only the gods can be causes"
Hamlet: the player kings description of the death of old Priam

opposite of today's response...."take responsibility for your own actions"

"no psychology since has ever gone beyond this...all we have done is invent for those powers...
(oedipus complex, etc.)
what god is present in your life that makes this happen?
these gods may be projections of our own imaginations, but what isn't?
 the homeric heroes knew nothing of that word, responsibility
....such infirmity meant that the gods were present and at work....
 ate:  infatuation, where you are no longer in control of a situation, something has possessed you
enthusiasm: (enthus) (en-thus) (theos-god)  in god....
 (theodore) one beloved of god
micha-el one who is like god
the gods are all there ersting in our names, our reflections, our desire and suffering

venus/aphrodite/ eros/ gods of desire

athena/odysseus (wily odysseus) loved liars
 infatuation....twitterpated
enthusiasm-possessed by the gods....most oft refers to dionysus  "cmon, have another"

so cute...

the things we call modern and contemporary are actually quite ancient.
 My Chemical Romance....alchemy... lead into gold... alchemy is about the perfection of the human spirit
what rock concert do you wish you could go to?
it's Michael Sexton's birthday! wants to go to the first music concert ever...

the lyre... the Homeric Hymns- a group of songs sung to various divinities: to Demeter, Apollo, etc.

Hesiod- Theogany
GOMY= birth
Cupid- eros...venus...
Hermes: Maya/Zeus  like baby Stuey...stole cattle from Apollo, a trickster...would play tricks during the day and jump back in his crib. "Born Yesterday" movie. Hermes kills a turtle and uses cat gut to make the lyre... to make up for his mischeif for Apollo. invention of music....

Arachne--Minerva- Spiders...

"you bitch"...
Charlotte... Wilbur never forgot, Charlotte.

think about ETIOLOGIES: how did it all begin?

....Some things never change

I created my blog at about 8 this morning while waiting on a friend at ICT, and at the time I hadn't really come up with the right strategy to break ground on this thing....afterall, the first blog entries are always the worst. Thankfully my lack of inspiration was short-lived. I've been out of the country since early June, so as my friend and I drove to Sypes Canyon to pick up his truck we naturally caught up about our similarly crazy summers; his stories centered on the usual subject: the pursuit of women.  Jim, as I'll call him, spent his summer working for a non-profit, traveling from town to town through the wilds of Montana, and this situation afforded him what seemed to be the perfect framework for chasing lots and lots of girls, as he told me, this summer "it was practically raining *****"

now, you might be asking yourself what this could possibly have to do with mythology or really anything at all, for that matter, but just wait. I was particularly captured by one story that Jim told me, and I intend to re-tell it here.

While riding in the truck next to Jim, I discovered a small silver bangle lying on the floorboard, and asking who it belonged to, Jim looked shocked.  He responded:
"There was the girl in Prairie." and that's where our story begins....
One evening Jim's company rolled into this particularly small Montana town, and after getting situated with a place to stay and an early dinner, Jim set out to smoke a bowl.  Jim had been to Prairie a few times before, and being an avid pot smoker, had already lined out a good place to smoke in private, just under a bridge near a local park. However, instead of the privacy he had intended on finding there, he discovered a girl who was all alone, thin, waifish, standing at the riverside with her back to him, fishing. She had headphones in and a Miller Lite in hand.  "I just stood there watching her for five, maybe ten minutes....it was like seeing a ghost....or a water-nymph or something....she had no idea I was there."
Then, after awhile Jim got his courage up and walked right up to her. She took her headphones out, and as he told me, without saying a word he just started kissing this girl.... eventually they decided to go back to Jim's hotel, and we all know how the story goes from here....

He told me that that night he got her number, but woke up in the morning and she was gone from his bed without a trace.  he tried calling but "the thing just rang and rang....not even a real number...typical"

Now if that ain't mythological, then I don't know what is....Reminds me of the short story we talked about in class the other day...an adaptaiton of the abduction of Persephone by Hades. I just thought this was such a perfect example of those mythological footprints...two people who just inherently know how to follow the blueprints provided them...they didn't even need to talk...so many things are at play there, the idea of the nymph unaware of her seducer...Jim, her dusky, cynical "demon lover"...
there's the "siren" imagery too...only twisted...the siren literally "luring" someone in...but also a fisherman herself....a woman capable of the role as the victim (as a virgin nymph) and as the predator, literally fishing on the side of the river...(sea-wary fisherman being a favorite quarry of the mythic steamy songstresses)

also, the tale of the maiden who disappears with not a trace but some kind of token belonging  (glass slipper, anyone?)
this and all the cliches of courting...the "lines" the "typical female" all the lore of the night stand... (maybe she even came down the fire escape!) ...the whole thing was just brimming with mythology...and I just thought it was brilliant. 'Til next time

L

Testing....testing 1, 2, 3....

See you in a few.