"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.