"Our long voyage of discovery is over and our bark has drooped her weary sails in port at last. Once more we take the road to Nemi."(The Golden Bough, 827)

Our last official day of class was lovely, though not untinged by the bitterness of parting. Though as Corrin observes in her final blog so wonderfully, we are mythologically fated never to part. In the words of Eliot we must be still and still moving into another intensity for a further union, a deeper communion, through the dark cold and the empty desolation.

Michelle's observation of her readings of Dawkins and Hitchins was as telling as Mary Sean's. It brings up the need for understanding what is true and what is True. These authors, militant atheists as they are, feel that religion(which at a fundamental level is indistinguishable from myth)must be combated for the evil it has done to the human race--which cannot be denied, because it does exist. The dark side of myth can be very dark. But Dawkins and Hitchins make the same error that religious fundamentalists of every stripe do. They treat something as "true" that really is "True". Eliade said that myth is a True Story. And so it is, and so resides the power and eternal relevance of it.

Kari has enjoyed this class enormously. The rest is silence--Great Silence!

"For it is a common belief that the effect of contact with a sacred object must be removed, by washing or otherwise, before a man is free to mingle with his fellows. Thus the Jews wash their hands after reading the sacred scriptures."(The Golden Bough: Osiris as a Pig)

Day two of presentations went swimmingly. Even though Melinda may have dreaded having so many presentations on Henderson the Rain king, this was unfounded due to the sheer variety of interpretations that people came up with. Great presentation with a great aid, by the way Melinda.

I was impressed particularly with Mary Sean's presentation on what she had learned; namely, that mythology did not threaten her Catholicism but actually complimented it in a deeply enriching way(it probably should be said, if your faith was threatened or destroyed by hearing stories from Ovid or reading about the ritualistic killing of the King in Frazer, than your faith probably wasn't that deep to begin with). Her's paired nicely with Sally's on her own personal life expectations of literal eschatology and coming to understand that the world is actually ending all the time and we just didn't know it. This is illuminated by a line of Gerard Manly Hopkins': "Each day dies with sleep."

Way to go everyone, and read blogs for the final exam!

"We are told that in Chios men were rent in pieces as a sacrifice to Dionysus; and since they died the same as their god, it is reasonable to suppose that they personated him. The story that the Thracian Orpheus was similarly torn limb from limb by the Bacchanals seems to indicate that he too perished in the character of the god whose death he died."(The Golden Bough, 439-440)

Concerned as I am with Orpheus and the endurance of his myth, but mostly for the sake of my own petty pleasure, I thought I would do a blog here about the film Moulin Rouge(Baz Luhrmann, 2001) and how it stands as an adaptation of the Orphic story.

Luhrmann's movie is a story within a story(featuring a play within a play within the story within the story--a frame narrative!--) told by a poet with a genius gift for song, Christian(played by Ewan MacGregor). The way in which his creative power is expressed is through late 20th century pop/rock songs. The film's nominal setting is Paris at the beginning of the 20th century(a faint hint of the millennial, perhaps?). Shortsighted critics have complained about this being "unrealistic". They misunderstand--it is a unabashedly a created world, but a created world made accessible and immediate by the use of familiar songs.

The Eurydice to Christian's Orpheus is Satine(Nicole Kidman), chief courtesan at the Moulin Rouge nightclub, which serves as the Underworld(with Jim Broadbent's impresario Harold Zidler standing in as Hades). The tradition of Bohemian fin de siecle literature is acknowledged here as well--Dumas fils' La Dame Aux Camellias is a clear precursor, as are the films Camille and Children of Paradise--. As in the Greco-Roman story, our artist hero loses his true love to death, and is left to tell the story. And it is through telling the story that the immortality that the lovers couldn't achieve literally is reached anagogically. Art is the only form of lasting union that can be achieved("I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secrets of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." Lightbulbs anyone?) This is an undeniable component of the Orpheus story; even if the greatest artist in the world is only human and cannot live forever, the beauty of their creation can. Or to quote the final lines of the film: "Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. And then, one not so very special day, I went to my typewriter. I sat down, and I wrote our story. A story about a time, a story about a place, a story about the people. But above all things a story about love. A love that will live forever."

Maybe Kari is babbling on senselessly. But I still think that something is here of substance.

"We are now in a position to hazard a conjecture as to the meaning of the tradition that Virbius, the first of the divine Kings of the Wood at Aricia, had been killed in the character of Hippolytus by horses." (The Golden Bough, 552)

Today was the first day of group presentations. Groups 1,2 and 3 were all entertaining, and appropriately so, since the trope of games cropped up in all of their performances. Group 4 will have an interesting challenge when our time comes, as it always does.

Individual presentations begin next week, I will be in the first batch to go. My paper is most likely going to be an examination of the Orphean myth, likely giving particular emphasis on a modern film adaptation of it, Baz Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge(which is one of Kari's favorite movies--perhaps a petty motivation). I shall see what I can do, in any case.

"In Siam it used to be difficult to ascertain the king's real name, since it was carefully kept secret from fear of sorcery; any one who mentioned it was clapped into gaol." (The Golden Bough, 299)

We wrapped up the one minute Ovid presentations, which were very entertaining, I thought. It can be said(well actually said by Mr. Sexson) that The Metamorphoses is one of the exemplar examples in the annual of Mythologies of Text, where the litmus test for greatness becomes this: does this text have everything in the world in it or not? Obviously, there are few books that could pass this test truthfully. But then again, if you think it's mythological, that makes it so(there is a poem by Wallace Stevens called Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is which gets at pretty much the same thing). If you can find everything that there is to be found in the Bible, for example, than the Bible becomes the book that contains absolutely everything--like in The Secret of Kells--.

But you have to be able to bring everything to any text. It's a matter of right perception again. Just as you must percieve the metaphorical meaning of Apocalypse, so you must perceive the possibility of finding everything in a text. You than become what Eliade would describe as a "specialist in ecstasy". Which means you truly have gone off the deep end. But that's just so it goes.

"By the advice of the god of wisdom she took refuge in the papyrus swamps of the Delta. Seven scorpions accompanied her in her flight." (The Golden Bough, 422)

This Apocalyptic imagery of this passage has hopefully been noted. Because we have to make a distinction between literal eschatology(where, if you are idiot friends of my mother's, you believe that there is a specific historical time and moment where the world comes to an end once and for all) and mythical apocalypse(which is the end of the way you used to see the world). Do those who believe in a literal Apocalypse know they are engaging in a deep mythological patterns that run deeper than they can comprehend? Do college boys drink beer?

We also discussed the vast influence of The Golden Bough, throughout literary history, and also in terms of popular culture: it's one of the three books that Curtz has in his room in Apocalypse Now, alongside Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance(heavily influenced by GB) and the Bible.

We also prepared questions for the test, which will be apocalyptic for all of us, I am sure.

"Herodotus tells us that the grave of Osiris was at Sais in Lower Egypt, and that there was a lake there upon which the sufferings of the god were displayed as a mystery by night." (The Golden Bough, p. 433)

This a belated blog about Thursday's splendid class, which dealt with eschatology and apocalypse(which may or may not be the same thing) and the unavoidable reality of sadness. The possible truth arises that we can only deal with sadness by attempting to transmute it into beauty. This isn't a justification or a vindication, it is simply all that we can do. And every now and then we actually succeed! It may be as Freud said, that we laugh to keep from crying. But then we have those indelible moments of crying and laughing at the same time--which it turns out there is nearly a word for: dacrygelosis, or alternate laughing and crying. Thank you Rio!

I also had a lightbulb moment when we were discussing Finnegans Wake, and the motif of female memory in mythology. How the male "forgets" when he falls asleep for the winter or dies or what have you. When he awakens, he has forgotten everything. But She has not. She has to make him remember that he is her lover, father brother... and this is going to go on endlessly and it makes her infinitely weary.

Well, it reminded me of this 40's Hollywood movie called Random Harvest, starring Greer Garson and Ronald Colman. Its about an amnesiac soldier who falls in love with a dance hall girl but then is hit on the head, remembers who he really is(a powerful industry tycoon) and goes back to his old life, forgetting her. She than goes to work for him, trying to make him remember. Talk about a tear-jerker! Anyway, I just realized that it was true; mythology is everywhere. Random Harvest and Finnegans Wake are united in common mythos, strange as it may be.

I am also going to be writing about the Orphean myth for my term paper, which makes me twitch with anticipation.

"The worshippers of Attis abstained from eating the flesh of swine. This appears to indicate that the pig was regarded as an embodiment of Attis. And the legend that Attis was killed by a boar points in the same direction." (The Golden Bough, 546)

Announcements at the start: We are to read chapter 16 of The Metamorphoses in tandem with chapter four in Eliade, which deals with eschatology. Which is to say, the end of the world. Our world is going to be brought to an end. On a related note, Group presentations begin on November 23.

In The Golden Bough Frazer gives particular emphasis to the connection to the entities of Attis, Osiris and Adonis, all of whom are periodically slain and brought back to life through ritual. It is an intriguing coincidence(if you believe in those sorts of things) that one of the Hebrew names for God is Adonai. Can this have anything to do with the ancient cults devoted to Adonis, populated by ecstatic women, that really freaked out ancient Biblical patriarchs?

We also discussed the stories of Hercules and the shirt of Nessus(no, it is not in the Disney movie) and the story of Pygmalion, surviving to the present through George Bernard Shaw, My Fair Lady and Vertigo, among other things. One of the things that most excited me today was a book pulled up entitled The Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, by Victor L Stoichita. As a fan of Hitchcock and Ovid, this intrigues me greatly. Thank you Rio!

We have also been advised to look up the poem "the Lament of Tammuz", which stands along with the story of Venus and Adonis as an archetype of divine love. I began to wonder if it is possible for mortal beings to achieve divine love. I don't know. If it is it's something that you'd run the risk of coming undone by.

"A feature in the mythical character of Dionysus , which at first sight appears inconsistent with his nature as a deity of vegetation, is that he was often conceived and represented in animal shape, especially in the form, or at least with the horns of, a bull." (The Golden Bough, 452)

We embarked upon a piquant discussion of the Metamorphoses as secular scripture, meaning basically that it contains everything of import, whether the extant be broad or narrow and fleeting. And Ovidian focus can be a slippery thing with unexpected objects. For instance, the hero Theseus and his slaying of the Minotaur is mentioned perfunctorily, while a great deal of space is granted to the artist/inventor Daedalus, creator of the Labyrinth and wax wings, in that order.

This connects to another thing that occupies a great deal of space in mythology: bulls. When you start looking, you notice them everywhere. The story of Mino's wife and the( yukky )conception of the Minotaur is an example of the trifold mythological intersection of the human world, the animal world and the divine world.

Roberto Calasso, in the Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, designates three stages of humankind's relation to the gods.

1. Conviviality(where everything is close and hunky-dory)
2. Rape(were there is a very disturbing, violent seperation)
3. Indifference (the state of which most of us currently reside)

State two is something that Flannery O'Connor in her fiction gives extensive attention to. Such as her story Greenleaf, which deals with Rape and with bulls and with violent apocalyptic revelation. O'Connor is in compatible company with Mary Renault, author of The Bull from the Sea.

The Greek word for "home" is nostos, from which we get "nostalgic" because there's no place like home, which mythologically speaking would be back at state one. If that makes any sense.

"The soul is commonly supposed to escape by the natural openings of the body, especially the mouth and nostrils." (The Golden Bough, 208)

We have all been assigned our one-minute Ovid story. I have "Orpheus and Eurydice", which fills me with excitement and apprehension, as we are to know more about the story given us than any one else does.

We than moved into the very rosy mythological sphere of suffering and theodicy and the battle to be had therein. We have already assigned to learn about the existential dimensions of myth by having a bad day. I admit that I wasn't aware that it was Nietzsche who said "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." Though there really is something to be said here about tone--having "me" instead of "you" changes this from one of those moralistic pronouncements that are easy to dispense but less so to ingest in life to a personal state of resolution in the face of horrible suffering. It seems to Kari that there is a difference, but that could just be Kari.

Because when we reach the question of "what's the worst that can possibly be imagined?" in Ovid(and the answer turns out to the story of Tereus Procne and Philomela), we end up wondering: is it somehow a pathetic little snide slap in the face to try and draw morals about how "everything's for the best in the best of all possible world's" and "oh, you can learn from this" from things that are this terrible? Maybe I'm just taking it too much to heart, and that the real needful thing is to confront the specter of horrific suffering in stories; the telling of stories has the potential of making us better morally, not by having tidy "morals" but in a deeper more complex double-edged sword kind of way. Or perhaps, as the King in The Odyssey puts it: "we suffer so that the poets will have something to write about."

"Paterfamilias" refers to the male head of a family; on the obverse, the "materfamilias" is the female head of a family.

"The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the City of God coming in the clouds of heaven." (The Golden Bough, 415)

We will be assigned, some time in the coming weeks, a story from Ovid that hasn't been discussed in class and tell it in one minute. This will be a challenge, but a stirring one to our imaginative faculties; Ovid, after all, brings up connection between reality and the imagination.

Ekphrasis is a very interesting word, meaning to talk about one medium of art in terms of another. We beheld a singular instance of this in Titian's painting The Rape of Europa and in Velazquez' painting The Spinners, which frames the Titian painting in the background as the tapestry being woven by Arachne with an audience looking on. Neat-o. It is in the story of Arachne that we find, quite strongly, that Ovid is of the Classical secular tradition which exalts humanity over divinity. Things frequently turn out badly for mortals, but it is the passionate struggle against divine cruelty that ultimately carries more weight.

And Persian storytellers employ the phrase "It was so, and it was not so" instead of "Once upon a time". I find this strangely compelling and(pardon the pun)telling.

"With more probability the modern student of comparative religion traces such resemblances to the similar and independent workings of the mind of man in his sincere, if crude, attempts to fathom the secret of the universe, and to adjust his life to its awful mysteries." (The Golden Bough, 415-16)

Below are sentences on the stories from Ovid, such as they are.

Book I

The Creation - If you could have verse to try and express giving form to chaos, this is about as good as you could do(makes me think of Expressionistic art with vivid strokes of red and gold).

The Four Ages - As we can see, time as man experiences it basically is one vast aesthetic declension.

The Giants - The world given texture by the blood of massive creatures; if they hadn't bled where would we be?

Lycaon - If you're going to act like a beast, be a beast; odd how this moral underpinning doesn't run constant in the rest of The Metamorphoses.

The Flood - The world becomes an ocean(as it once was, even in mere history).

Deucalion & Pyrrha - Or the story of the "other Noah", you know the one that involves incest and stones becoming bones.

Python - Primordial instance of the slaying of a serpent/dragon to bring about order(I've always known dragons were integral to the world!).

Apollo & Daphne - And the moral of the story is: what you can't have is what will probably become most cherished and sacred to you.

Io & Jove - If your a beautiful mortal woman, boy are you in for it.

Syrinx - A story within a story, as is the whole of The Metamorphoses; the ongoing interconnected story of all life.

Io & Jove - Transformation just might lead you back to where you were; you'll be you, and yet infinitely more so.

Phaeton - There are some things that simply are not attainable to the mortal man, but oh how he can strive.

"Often the stormy wind is regarded as an evil being who may be intimidated, driven away, or killed." (The Golden Bough, 94)

Today was the day of compiling the exam questions, which can be found on the blogs of those more industrious than myself--namely Rio--. I did desire to put down one of the questions that will be on the test that wasn't already in my notes, which was the names of Cadmus' daughters, who all come out badly in different ways: Semele, Autonoe, Agave, Ino.

I also wish to state my intention of doing a blog with Ovidian sentences. Preview of coming attractions, I could say, if I didn't know that Dustin already has me bested. But I will try anyway.

"At Celaenae, if we can trust tradition, the piper Marysas, hanging in his cave, had a soul for harmony even in death; for it is said that at the sound of his native Phrigian melodies the skin of the dead satyr used to thrill, but that if the musician struck up an air in praise of Apollo it remained deaf and motionless." (The Golden Bough, 411)

The novelist/philosopher Iris Murdock loved Titian's painting of the flaying of Marsyas, who was punished this way because he played the flute better than Apollo. Similarly, Arachne was turned into a spider by Athena because she could weave better. The gods tend to be sore losers in mythology. But it is the mortal's hubris(excessive pride, especially in defiance of the gods) that draws their wrath.

The sentence assignment has been altered slightly; five stories from each individual book of The Metamorphoses. Unless of course your Dustin, then you've already blown everyone out of the water, including me.

Name confusion was addressed in class, mainly Roman versus Greek names for divine beings. It all comes down to the same thing really, because the Romans stole everything from the Greeks. I did not know that Zeus comes from a rootword meaning "light" or "sunlight".

We are also to find the story from Ovid that we cannot do without, and to read Norman O'Brown's Daphne or Metamorphosis, which shows that Apollo and Daphne was the story he couldn't live without.

"The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco love to hunt the ostrich,but when they have killed one of these birds and are bringing home the carcase to the village they take steps to outwit the resentful ghost of their victim. They think that when the first natural shock of death is passed, the ghost of the ostrich pulls himself together and makes after his body." (The Golden Bough, 610)

We've been assigned to do a blog about chapter 7 of Eliade, entitled "Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting." He concentrates primarily on Platonic and Gnostic mythological conceptions of memory; more specifically, the danger(no, sin)of forgetting, and the call to wakefullness, which is common to both, as well as Indian philosophy. Plato after all urged those within the cave to come out into the light, to "wake up". Anamenesis, or recollection of all that can be recollected, is vital if mortal beings are to (re)discover what it is that they once were; in another life(which if your Pythagoras or a shaman you can remember experiencing, apparently) or even another astral plain, if you're a Gnostic. Really for the latter living in the world is to be looked on a as bad thing generally, a Fall from a purer reality(caused by a jealous ignorant God). But we still retain a tiny spark of Divine Reality within us, which we can recapture when we do "remember" and awaken.
So, in a way, everything in the "Real World" and everything that has happened in the real world, recounted by History, is only operating on one particular level--divine recollection and myth operate on another all together. Or as Eliade puts it:

"The sufferings that constitute every human life vanish at the moment of waking. Waking, which is at the same time an anemnesis, finds expression in an indifference to History. Only the primordial myth is important. Only the events that occured in the past of fable arre worth knowing; for, by learning them, one becomes conscious of one's true nature--and awakens."(Eliade, 134)

Eliade also mentions something in passing that is vitally important, as many passing things are:" Indian literature uses images of binding, chaining and captivity interchangeably with those of forgetting, unknowing, and sleep to signify the human condition; contrariwise, images of being freed from bonds and the tearing of a veil(or the removal of a bandage from the eyes), of memory, remembering, being awakened, the waking state, express abollishing(or transcending) the human condition, freedom, deliverance(moksa, mukti, nirvana, etc)" (Eliade, 116)

The word Apocalypse literally means in Greek "removing the veil. So all of this stuff about the importance of remembering is apocalyptic, in its etiological sense. Let's ponder that for awhile.

I decided to post WH Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts(not the least so I could spell it correctly). It works well, it seems to me, as being a commentary on a painting(art criticism, if you like) and at evoking the sense of the unavoidability of mortal suffering, so frequent is it in this world in which we move, and which we must be blind to in order to not come undone.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

"If there is any truth in this conjectural explanation of the custom, we readily understand why other Asiatic goddesses of fertility were served in like manner by eunuch priests. These feminine deities required to recieve from their male ministers, who personated the divine lovers, the means of discharging their beneficent functions: they had themselves to be impregnated by the life-giving energy before they could transmit it to the world." (The Golden Bough, p. 406

We learn today that Ovid's Metamorphoses has inspired more art than any other work besides the Bible; little surprise being as Ovid is so intensely visual a writer. And then we have instances of literary works inspired by art that is inspired by myth, such as WH Auden's poem Musee D'Arts, from Brueghal's(sic?) painting of the death of Icarus.

As an ongoing assignment, we are to devote at least one sentence to each particular story from each book of Ovid. As there are over 250 distinct stories, this comes to 250 sentences, roughly. And all are burgeoning with life, because to the mythological world everything is alive. Anima, the Latin for "soul" gives us "animated" and "animal" after all. Relatedly, we are to read Chp. 7 of Eliade and do a blog on it.

And the significance of the Triple Goddess(subject of a book by Robert Graves), personified as the Mother, the Maiden and the Crone. These are, significantly, three stages which virtually all women pass through. Therefore, all women are embodiments of the Goddess. Or as page 626 of Finnegans Wake puts it, "Allgearls is wea. At times. So."

I never would've thought I was divine, but then it seems we learn something new everyday.

" The custom of eating bread sacramentally as the body of a god was practised by the Aztecs before the discovery and conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. Twice a year, in May and December, an image of the great Mexican god Huitzilopochtli or Vitzilipuztli was made of dough, then broken in pieces, and solemnly eaten by his worshippers." (The Golden Bough, p. 566)

Class was opened with the residual one-minute creation myths that were left, which was an appropriate note, ushering our entrances into a heterocosm(other world), which is where you go when you enter a story, really enter it. We will apparently have to perform a story from Ovid in a similar fashion later on. Yay.

We also learned the term axis mundi, the center of the world, which can be represented as a universal tree or sacred mountain; omphalos, Greek for "navel", refers very similarly to the center or hub of something, especially of a religious nature.

We are also assigned to write a blog about somebody else's blog, there being much weird and wonderful material to be had. Like Dave's earliest memory of destroying the front porch with a(real) hammer, or Alex's story of pretending to be a mermaid surrounded by pillows, and Tyler's earliest memory which actually might be a dream instead. But it really doesn't matter because both dreams and memory spring from the same place: your imagination, your unconscious which if you're inclined like Jung, connects to the unconscious of everyone else in all the world(or if your Freudian, it is just about you and your repressions and instincts).

Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge and Emma Donaghue's Room, according to Mr. Sexson, are novels which are profoundly mythological; I've gathered in the sense of dealing with the dark and horrifying side of myth which crops up before us and cannot be denied but only endured.

" In the Tuhoe tribe of Maoris 'the power of making women fruitful' is ascribed to trees. These trees are associated with the navel-strings of definite mythical ancestors, as indeed the navel-strings of all children used to be hung upon them down to quite recent times."(The Golden Bough, p. 138)

I suppose this quote was chosen because of the recurrent motif of copulation in the stories of Creation which everyone in class related today(procreation is creation is it not?), and of the details in the Norse/Scandinavian creation myth where the first human beings were born of trees. Several people chose that one, as well as various Indian creation myths(Native-American and Hindu). I think Lynette's story of the Salish/Kootenai was especially special, being as she heard it from her own great grandmother, who is 104 years old!

Mary-Sean's Celtic creation myth(which also cropped up a couple times) tells of a giant god made of hoar frost, who melted when fire came into the world, and had the world formed from his body--his blood became the sea and streams and rivers and his skeleton the mountains.

And Doulgas' rendition of the Sami creation myth, which provided handy ethno- and geographic information which I did not know of before. Yay!

And it didn't matter that some of the stories repeated because no one tells the same story the same way.

" The soul of a sleeper is supposed to wander away from his body and actually visit the places, to see the persons, and to perform the acts of which he dreams." (The Golden Bough p. 218)

The earliest memory that I am able to recall(aside from scattered impressionistic flashes and physical sensations) is from when I was about two. I was with my mom and my sister Erica(who would've been four or five)in the cabin up Gallatin canyon, and Mom is telling Erica that Grandpa Duane(my father's father) had died. Erica is devastated and crying, and I feel concerned and impressed at the magnitude of her emotions. I grasp that this is something serious and final, death. I have no memories of Grandpa Duane, but I do remember the telling of his death.

On a curiously related note, I had a deeply frightening dream the other night. In the dream both my mother and my sister Erica die, and I keep moving around a vast, darkly hued scape of rolling hills and cliffs, always coming back to the old cabin in Gallatin Canyon. I awoke to a strange sensation of smothering(I'm not sure how else to put it). It just seems that there was a circling back to the fears and understandings of my two year old self. In a way, perhaps I never really stopped being my two year old self.

Perhaps all of this relates to mythology's attempting to confront the Final and the Massive and the Unfaceable, which must be faced anyway. Well I wonder...

For Thursday we are all required to bring in a Creation myth(excluding those in the Bible and Hesiod's Theogony), and tell it to the class in less than a minute. Primitives to Zen is clearly going to be ransacked.

The Five Basic Types of Creation myths are as follows:

1. Creation ex nihilo, through the thoughts, voice or bodily secretion of a divine being.(ie. first creation story in the Bible. The acquisition of language is the acquisition of order. Sounds like The Idea of Order at Key West)
2. Earth diver(avian or amphibious) diving into the sea and retrieving sand from the bottom of the seabed, which becomes the terrestrial world.
3. Emergence-- where progenitors pass through a series of worlds until reaching the present one.
4. Creation by dismemberment of a primordial being(ie. Tiamat)
5. Creation by cracking of cosmic egg, and bringing form out of chaos.(ie. Humpty Dumpty or the Kaba stone in Mecca)

This list(taken from Eliade) was later expanded by Martha Weigle who brought a feminist slant to the study of myth.

As she points out, the first creation myth(historically speaking) involves a female diety speaking the world into being by herself. Eventually this developed into creation alongside a male consort(usually a snake), to creation of the world by splitting the body of the female consort into two, until finally arriving at the Bibilical style creation story in which a male diety speaks the world into creation on his own. And after this, women and snakes, who had been held in highest honor, are denigrated and dismissed as inferior and evil. Just how did this come about? Being limited me I am not quite sure, but I think Douglas was on to something when he said it's all about jealousy and power. But more on this later.

And we are to do a blog about our very first memory. It shall be interesting to see where it takes us all.

"Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art and science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be dissociated from industrial or economic progress, and that in its turn receives an immense impulse from conquest and empire. It is no mere accident that the most vehement outbursts of activity of the human mind have followed close on the heels of victory, and that the great conquering races of the world have commonly done most to advance and spread civilization, thus healing in peace the wounds they inflicted in war." (Golden Bough, p. 55)

If that quote was too large and whopping, let's just consider it as a component of dialectical activity, which our blogs are intended to be. Someone ought to come and reprimand Kari for being longwinded, preferably by being more concise and specific.

There was a great quote from Joseph Campbell that was shared today that incapsulates much of the power of myth: 'What is a dream if it isn't a personalized myth, and what is myth if it isn't a de-personalized dream?" What dreams are for the single dreamer, myth is for humanity in toto.
This is why storytellers come from all traditions, whatever the particular beliefs of the individual system may be. Because this is dealing with a different mode of belief all together, that is True, rather than true. Or as Wallace Stevens says in his Adagia: "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." (I'm big into quotes today it seems)

It is when we don't believe in a fiction willingly that we end up encountering the dark side of myth, which is represented by a short story by Shirley Jackson called The Lottery(unread by me, but not forever), and by the application of a literal Bible upon the world in which we happen to corporeally reside. AJ Jacobs gives a humorous vision of this deeply serious issue in his book The Year of Living Biblically. This is a subject I could expound upon at length, but today I choose not to.

It is an undeniable fact of life that human beings are imitative creatures; we like to copy one another and other creatures. What mythology says is "these are the things you must imitate." Myths, according to Eliade, are three things:
1. Sacred
2. Exemplary
3. Significant
(really Eliade offers difficulties with the modes of belief as well. He was a member of the Iron Guard, the Romanian Fascist party, in his youth. Does this mean that we concentrate on his troubling personal history, or on his capacities as a mythic scholar? Probably for our purposes the latter is what matters most. But then what do I know?).

And if you want a really gory creation myth, check out the Babylonian story of Tiamat and Marduk.

"So in Bavaria you are directed to anoint a linen rag with with grease and tie it on the edge of the axe that cut you, taking care to keep the sharp edge upwards. As the grease on the axe dries, your wound heals. Similarly in the Harz Mountains they say that if you cut yourself, you ought to smear the knife of the scissors with fat and put the instrument away in a dry place in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." (Golden Bough, p. 48-49)


So many things from one class period! It boggles Kari's tiny little mind. But Kari shall try anyway.

Important dates that must be remembered are the birthday of Corin: July 15, 1991 in St Luke's Hospital in Franklin Wisconsin; October 7, the date of the first quiz; November 9, the date of the second quiz; November 23, when group presentations begin.

For the next few weeks Creation is to be our concern. After which we will move onto the Middle(characterized by war and pain)and the End(characterized by Revelation, which is good and bad). We are also to read Mr. Sexson's essay entitled Myth: the Way we Were, or the Way We Are? It(that is to say myth) ties in very strongly with Tevye's explanation of tradition in Fiddler on the Roof: it tells man where he is and what God expects him to do. Mircea Eliade follows up with a wonderful quote(provided by Dustin on his very impressive blog about Kierkegaard and forward remembering): living a myth is "seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected."

In following with Creation, there is a great word, etiology, which is a simple explanation of how things came to be the way they are. Kipling's Just So Stories are examples of this. Imagining the way things are, to use a phrase Eliade likes a lot, in illo tempore(in that time, obviously related to 'once upon a time').

We also learned about the surprisingly long history of doubting the truth of myth(at least in the limited small 't' sense), of arguing that it must be moved past(James Frazer was certainly of this opinion). Xenophanes, around 500 BCE, insisted that the Greek gods were projections of the human mind; hence his great statement about how if horses had gods they would look like horses(this would be something of a theomorphic religon, one that uses animals as gods). Plato also contrasted the power of logos against mythos. Euhemerus argued that the Gods were "based on" historical persons, and thus coined the word euhemerism, whereby myth is exaggerated history(ie. Alexander the Great having superhuman capacites attributed to him that he did not in reality possess). Then we move on to allegory, which removes stories from myth, thereby making it safer. Hence, the Song of Solomon is made to be about God's love for his people or Christ's love for the church and the Metamorphoses is made into a collection of morality tales. Now allegory shouldn't be dismissed completely(it was after all, how these two sublime works of poetry survived throughout medieval European history), but it is a reduction of mythic proportions. The bad pun hopefully is noted.

I am now off to read more Eliade and more Ovid...

"The Peruvian Indians moulded images of fat mixed with grain to imitate the persons whom they disliked or feared, and then burned the effigy on the road where the intended victim was to pass. This they called burning his soul." (The Golden Bough, p. 15)

The practice described above falls under the banner of homeopathy, a theory of medicine whereby like produces like. An ailment can be treated with another element of similar form, like the saliva upon the hand that will sooth the wound dealt by the hand spat upon(according to a philosopher and Roman general named Pliny). Or, as in the quote above indicates, injury brought about by injuring a likeness. The voodoo doll has had a wide cross-culture appeal, apparently.

We also discussed the influence of Lord Raglan, who collected hundreds of stories from different cultures and found that they were structurally similar to one another. This proved the foundation of his book The Hero. He had twenty points of progress for the Hero's Journey; Joseph Campbell took this as a starting point and whittled it down to three.

1. Seperation

2. Initiation

3. Return

It seems, basically, that myth is behind everything that's been done. Which is why there's nothing you can do that hasn't already been done, because its all part of a vast mythic pattern.

What remains to do, then is to strive and see sacredly, speak sacredly and do sacredly. Or to use the polar image of this motif from the Three Monkeys: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

9/1/10

"No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it"

That is from the first page of the first chapter("The King of the Wood") in Sir James Frazer's massive The Golden Bough, which we are required to have a quote from on every blog entry for Mr. Sexson's Lit 285 class. I liked it because it speaks to an element of myth(from the Greek for "story", mythos) that seems vital: myths are stories that you cannot forget. Even if you might want to, you cannot forget. You may not want to remember the icky hots that Myrrha had for her father, but how else would you know that myrhh derives from her tree, or the beginning of Adonis, who would inspire Willliam Shakespeare to write Venus and Adonis?

For James Frazer, the story of the Golden Bough was the myth of myths, which prompted his writing of this massive thirteen volume anthropological study. The Golden Bough was a sacred tree on the site of Nemi(off of Greece), which was guarded constantly by a priest with a sword, called King of the Wood. One day the priest would lose in battle to a stronger opponent(or because he just got too old)and be killed, ritually eaten by the community, and his killer would than take his place and carry on the cycle. Why does this myth matter so much to Frazer? Maybe we'll find out as the semester continues.

Everything, in short, is based upon myth(and the Bible, which I almost want to be nitpicky about designating as seperate from myth, but never mind). So therefore, the three Great Phases of Myth correspond to our lives.
1. Birth(Creation)
2.Life (the middle, where everything gets muddled by morality)
3. Death
The objective than, for the class, is to train yourself to see what's already there. Which is to say, myth. I'll see what Kari can do.