"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.