9/22/11

“After all, from the Olympians’ point of view, man are already dead because death lurks within them” (pg. 214 Cadmus).

The gods wanted to know more about death. Death, being the only thing humans knew a lot more about than the gods. Demeter and Dionysus both needed help from the mortal men to find out how to get into the underworld. The humans told the gods, but only under one condition, they needed something back in return. Both gods had to surrender themselves to a mortal. “A god surrendering himself to a mortal is like a man surrendering himself to death: every dead man has a to bring a coin with him, to pay his way to Hades. Gods don’t use money, so they give their bodies” (pg. 214). Both gods wanted something dear to them and they would do anything to get to it. 

Class Notes:

• Bozeman has the word oz in it, meaning oz is in bozeman. Bozeman is very mythological.
• Axis Mundi - center of the world

• Omphalos -naval or center
• Do you know why you have a belly button? Well, the creator formed everyone from clay and laid them out in the sun to bake. He didn't know when the people were done baking, so, he took a stick and poked all the people in the belly, and that is why we all have belly buttons.
• Three stages a person thinks of a god in mythological stories:

1. Conviviality- outgoing and friendly- relation people had with the divine
2. Rape- experience of the divine in terms of invasion
3. Indifference- in the divines existence

• The cloud that seduces Io is Zeus
• Xenophanes- was a greek philosopher and a poet
• Our gods are projections of ourselves
• Beginning- nostalgia, everything is perfect, great age of decline
• Initiation- giving up what you thought to be true; losing all of the wonderful parts of the beginning- pain, suffering, initiation
• Transformation- seeing your home with a different perspective because you have changed
• No pain, no real initiation
• "We must suffer into the truth"
• Polytropos- poly (many) tropos (turn) = many turns
• Everyone is always in the three stages- beginning, middle and end- people are always transforming, suffering and in a nice stage

• Everything is in the light. There is a good quote on pages 200-201 of Cadmus and Harmony that talks about how light came to be.

9/20/11

“No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens out into a fan of a thousand segments. Here the variant is the origin. Everything that happens, happens this way, or that way, or this other way. And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of the same cloth. If, out of some perversity of tradition, only one version of some mythical event has come down to us, it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to trace out that invisible shadow in our minds” (pg. 147-148 Cadmus).

Maybe this quote explains how all stories written about a certain person or event turns out to be about the same thing. All the stories told by different people about the same event are different only because people interpret things or events differently. That’s what is great about hearing the same story retold by different people. People emphasize a certain detail more in a story than someone else might, because people have different feelings about different things, and maybe one person feels something is important to the story when someone else might think a different detail is even more important. The different story tellers’ interpretations of the actual event have different details. For example, some say Helen was the cause of the Trojan War and that she was there in Troy, but someone else says that she wasn’t actually there; it was only her phantom, and the real Helen was off somewhere else doing something else. We don’t know what actually happened or what is the truth, we can only decide for ourselves. There are so many parts that make up a single story, that it is no wonder each story that is told is slightly different from the next. People interpret things differently in certain situations because in those different situations a person can be affected by something when someone else might be affected by something totally different. By putting all the stories about the same event written by different people into one big story, gives the reader more than one interpretation. This allows the audience to choose for them selves what they think might have happened. 

Class Notes:

• The last creation story that was told was The Creation of the World.
• A change of style is a change of subject.
• The first music was written about the muses.
• Life = pain and suffering
• To Be- how do things come into being? "To be or not to be?" -Hamlet
• Ontology is he philosophical study of the nature of being and existing. What does it mean to be? simple and complex
• Freud- interpreting the ancient myths (psychologist) 

At the beginning everything is together, everything is perfect. The transition from togetherness to separation is a painful process. A person is born and moves from togetherness to a world filled with suffering and brokenness. Lastly, a person moves to the transformation stage where they recreate the beginning by imagination.

• Separation- Beginning
• Initiation- Middle
• Transformation- End

• The first stage, when a person enters the world, is very traumatic

We were asked to tell a story of one of our first memories.

 I guess one memory I can think of was when I was about 3 or 4. I was pushing some type of cart down the side walk, I think I was running away from home, but my mom caught up to me and I tried running away. She told me not to run because I might trip and fall. So what did I do? I ran, and then I tripped and fell face first into sidewalk. I got a pretty nice fat lip from the fall. My mom took me home and then gave me a popsicle to ameliorate my fat lip. The fall was definitely worth it.

Rainbow Popsicles!

9/15/11

“There is no such thing as the isolated mythical event, just as there is no such thing as the isolated word. Myth, like language, gives all of itself in each of its fragments. When a myth brings into play repetition and variants, the skeleton of the system emerges for a while, the latent order, covered in seaweed” (pg 136 Cadmus).

 All of the stories told about the same person have many details in common with each other. They all seem to involve the same type of behaviors. For example, “the same sequence of flight with metamorphoses followed by rape is repeated” and “the repetition of the mythical even, with its play of variations, tells us that something remote is beckoning to us” (pg. 136 Cadmus). Mythological stories usually seem to have some sort of sexual run in with a god that changes his/her appearance or changes things in the environment to then rape the unsuspecting victim. It’s interesting that different people’s/cultures interpretation of a story can end up about the same.

Class Notes:

We finished up with the creation myths in class. The rest of the stories were:

• Norse Creation Myth
• The Stone and the Banana
• La Llorona
• The Cast Skin
• How the Night Sky Got its Stars
• Who Can Say Whence it All Came and How Creation Happened
• The First Lamp Post
• Creation From Genesis One
• The Origin of the Hidden People
• The Creation of the Earth and the Great Flood
• The Origin of Death (Cruel Bird)
• Commanche Creation Myth
• How the Elephant Got His Trunk
• Creation by Thought
• How a Snake Lost His Legs
• Thompson Indian Creation Myth
• The First Lyre
• Thompson Indian Creation of Everything

cosmogonic- everything

Mythos (story) Logos (truth): Mythologies are trues stories

From Primitives to Zen, By: Mircea Elliade- Creation of Myths page 83

1. Ex Nihilo is the creation out of nothingness. High beings create everything by thought or by word, or by heating himself in a steam-hut. The words that are said have the power of becoming real.
2. Earth diver myths god sends down aquatic birds or amphibious animals, or dives down himself, to the bottom of the primordial ocean to bring up a particle of earth from which the entire world grows.
3. The creation by dividing in two a primordial unity (one can distinguish three variants: a. separation of Heaven and Earth, that is to say the World-Parents; b. separation of an original amorphous mass, the 'Chaos'; c. the cutting in two of a cosmogenic egg)
4. Creation by dismemberment of a primordial Being, either a voluntary, anthropomorphic victim (Ymir of the Scandinavian mythology, the Vedic Indian Purusha, the Chinese P'an-ku) or an aquatic monster conquered after a terrific battle (the Babylonian Tiamat).

9/13/11

“But this time the chaos is the vast shadowy canvas that lies behind our eyes and on which phosphoric patterns constantly merge and fade. Such constant formation of images occurs in each one of us in every instant. But these are not the only peculiarities of the phenomenon. When the phantom, the mental image, takes over our minds, when it begins to join with other similar or alien figures, then little by little it fills the whole space of the mind in an ever more detailed and ever richer concatenation. What initially presented itself as the prodigy of appearance, cut off from everything, is now linked, from one phantom to another, to everything.

At one extreme of the mental image lies our amazement at form, at its self-sufficient and sovereign existence. At the other lies our amazement at the chain of connections that reproduce in the mind the necessity of the material world. It is hard to see those two opposite points in the phantom’s spectrum. To see them simultaneously would be unbearable. For the Greeks, Helen was the embodiment of that vision, beauty hatched form the egg of necessity” (pg.133-134 Cadmus).

Phantoms are projections of real people or whatever image needs to be shown to someone. In certain circumstances the phantom is a projection of person that is already dead. These images of people are shown for a purpose. They come to people as a sign. For example, some say the Helen that was there at the Trojan War was a phantom, she was there to temp men into battle to win her for their king.

In other cases a phantom can come in the form as a missing limb. Some amputees, usually people with terrible accidents that caused the loss of a limb, have a phantom limb. After a limb is lost the person thinks that the missing part is still there. They can feel their missing limb and sometimes they can even see their missing limb. Usually it is a painful phantom. The person feels the terrible pain that their missing limb had before it was removed and now that it is gone they can still feel it and sometimes even see it.

I think it is pretty interesting how the phantoms are made up in our brains. So made up that a person can think a phantom is a real thing, also that some people can even still see and feel a limb that has been amputated. I have never experienced a phantom before, or I suppose I wouldn’t know if I have or not since phantoms seem to appear completely real. 

Class Notes:

In class we told our creation stories. The first 15 stories that were told were:

• Moon and Death
• A Tale of African Origin
• Turtle Creation Story
• The Saga of the Legend of the Stag
• The Origin of Mount. Everest
• Who Can Say From Whence it Came and How Creation Happened
• La Llorona "The Weeping Woman"
• The Beginning of the World
• Legend of the Lady Slipper
• The Beginning of the Earth-Iroquois
• Origin of Medicine
• Flood/Creation Myth- Yutuk Tribe
• I told the Norse Creation Myth
• Legend of Devils Tower
• Old Man Coyote Creates Earth

What is it that we find to be common with all of these stories? They are all true!

Common creation stories that are told are the creation of the world by a giant and the earth diver myths.

<---- Sons Bor creating the world from Ymir's body.

9/8/11

"With all the cosmic scaffolding that had stood between the gods and men having thus colapsed, life seemed the more boyant and resplendent, but lonely too, fleeting and irretrievable. Such is the dominant sentiment that runs through the lucid age of Greece from Homer to Euripides. Everything is reduced to a few simple elements that can be reduced no further. Life is no longer a series of trade-offs between invisible powers but 'the sweetness of looking at the light'" (pg.108)
Sacrifice in ancient Greece happened all to frequently. For example, Iphigenia, was sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon, so the Greek army could sail across the sea to fight the barbarians in Troy. Iphigenia, for lack of a better word, was a hero for Greece when she was forced to die. The Greeks seem to look at life as almost a meaning less gift or not to important. Death is just another stage of life and depending on what a person does during their life ultimately decides where they will end up once they die. Agamemnon did care about killing his own daughter and with much hesitation but an extreme want and desire to destroy Troy, decided to sacrifice his daughter.

Then when the Achaean's finished fighting in Troy they had to sacrifice another virgin. Again, the winds were not blowing in the right direction. This time it was a girl named Polyxena that was sacrificed. She was to be Achilles wife, but Achilles was killed by Apollo at the end of the battle, so he couldn't save her. He comes back as a spirit and claims his girl after she is also killed. Again, after the girl was sacrificed "they threw leaves over Polyxena as if she had won an event at the games: for this was the way they congratulated the winners" (pg.119). It's strange that no one seemed to care about killing innocent people.

Class Notes:

Mythology is a system that answers all questions, total explanation. Myth is a model for imitation, it is the beginning, it was before anything began, when everything was void, nothingness. Mythology is about tradition. Without tradition people wouldn't know what to do or where they came from.
Etiology is the explanation of how something came to be, short stories.
"Anamnesis- in Meno, Platos character (old teacher) Socrates is challenged by Meno with what has become known as the sophistic paradox, or the paradox of knowledge" (Anamnesis). Because in ilio
tempore (because in the beginning) everyone was born wih innate knowledge that they had aquired in the spirit world, before they were born. People were supposed to know everything there is to know, but they just forgot. So, the function of a teacher is to help the people remember what they already are a supposed to know.
Mnemosynein (memory) is the mother of the nine muses.
We talked about the story, The Myth of the Cave.  Which is about Humans that sat in a cave and were chained up with their backs to the entrance. There were projections by the light on the walls of the cave. The prisoners believed the projections to be reality because they were born in the cave and don't know of anything outside of it. One day one of the prisoners escaped and walkd outside into the light and then realized that his whole life had been only a shadow of illusion. The man returnd to the cave with wonderful news of his new discovery. He told the others what he had found and they became angry because they don't want to understand the truth. Then the cave people kill the man. 
Everything we need to know about life and the world around us was taught to us by nature, how we were raised and where we have lived.
Everything we think we see is not real.
Marduk was a god that was connected with water, vegetation, judgment, and magic. He is a god from ancient Mesopotamia. He was a deity of Babylon.
The Trojan war is the most important event/story in mythology for the Greeks.
Sparagmos: a type of sacrifice where the victims limbs are torn from their body
The real world consists of pain and suffering.

Massacre at Milos happened during the Peloponnesian War, where the Athenians attacked Milos. All of the men were killed and all of the women and children were sold as slaves. Some Athenians were left to repopulate and colonize the city.
The Trojan Women is a story about what happened to the women after the Athenians had killed all the men and sold the women as slaves. The speech of Hecuba happens after the Astyanax is killed and she talks about how wrong it is to kill a young boy and how that it isn't fair that she has to bury her grandson.
Orestes- from his story arose the jury system
Oedpis- fate and free haunted him throughout his life. As a child his heels were drilled and tied together and he was supposed to be left at the top of a mountain to die, but the person who was sent to put him at the top of the hill couldn't leave the kid. He took the child to a city where he was adopted by the King and Queen. When he grew up he found out he was adopted and set out to find his real parents but on his journey he ended up killing his father, then met his mother and without knowing she was his mother, they got together and had children.
Beginning- origins, how things came to be
End (apocalypse)- transformations into something else, veil lifted to show what/how things really are. At the end of the world or the Apocalypse the world will be destroyed and reveal its true self and show how things really are. Apo-calyps: Apo means take off and calyps means veil.


Work Cited
"Anamnesis (philosophy)." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 16 Aug. 2011. Web. 12 Sept. 2011.
         <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)>.

9/6/11

"Instead of a god who would live longer than other gods, he became a man who would have a shorter life than other men. And yet, of all men, he was the closest to being a god. Because he had taken the place of he who should have put an end to Zeus, his own end was forcibly etched into his flesh"(pg.105).

Thetis was the only woman to ever reject Zeus. Zeus later found out that Thetis was fated to have a son who would other throw his father. Zeus feared the thought of his reign ending so he married Thetis to mortal man. Thetis had seven sons but six of them were killed by her failed attempt to make them immortal by burning them. Achilles on the other hand, survived, but the flames only made him almost immortal, "and what that meant was more mortal than other mortals"(pg.105). Achilles was bound to die earlier than other men and was therefore killed in the Trojan War.
When someone's life was laid out for them before they were even born, once they were actually born they were forced to follow the path and come to whatever end was prophesied. In Achilles' case, he was to have a short life and thus had a short life. When a person is born to do a certain thing and all of their actions were made before the person did them, they couldn't prevent or change the outcomes.

In class we talked about how mythology tells the truth about the beginning, middle and end. We talked about different names and how they relate to mythology, for example, Theodore means beloved of gods. Original mean the origin of things, the very beginning. Aracane's story was told in class, and how she claimed she was the best weaver and so Minerva challenged her to a contest. Arachne won but the goddess, Minerva, didn't want to admit defeat so she turned Arachne into a spider, so she could weave for the rest of her life. Lastly, we talked about the Lyre and how it was the first instrument and music that was ever played. Hermes created the Lyre out of a turtle shell and dried guts. He gave it to Apollo to apologize for making trouble.

Tree in Cooper Park

"For centuries people have spoken of the Greek myths as of something to be rediscovered, reawoken. The truth is it is the myths that are still out there waiting to wake us and be seen by us, like a tree waiting to greet our newly opened eyes."
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony pg. 280

9/1/11

"When Huracles saves Theseus, dreagging him from the chair by force, he leaves strips of flesh behind. Which is why, they say, Athenian boys have such small, lean buttocks."
 The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, pg. 15

Theseus and Peirithous go to abduct the queen of the underworld. Thinking they are cunning enough to fool Hades, they tell him they want his queen. Hades, "answering mockery with mockery" (pg. 15) tells the men to make them selves at home and sit on the two golden chairs. The men do so thinking they had tricked the god, but then soon realize that they are glued to the chairs and can never get up. "Peirithous 'he who wanders in circles,' and Theseus, the abductor, must forget their very selves, sitting in the kingdom of the dead" (pg. 15). Then a while later Huracles comes to the underworld, sees Theseus, an old friend of his, and pulls him from the chair to set him free.
These two men, Theseus especially, think they are smooth enough to fool a god into giving up his wife. This silly act forever glues them to a seat to be tortured to the end of eternity.

Class Notes:
Myth is defined as "the precedent behind every action, it's invisible, ever-present lining" (pg.383). Mythology is saying, doing and seeing. It is about rituals.

I thought it was interesting on page 79 where it talked about women who wear make up. "When it comes to women, Greek sensibility brings together both fear and repugnance: on the other hand, there is the horror at the woman without her makeup who 'gets up in the morning uglier than a monkey' ; on the other, there is the suspicion that makeup is being used as a weapon of irresistible deceit. Makeup and female smells combine to generate a softness that bewitches and exhausts." It's interesting that the greeks thought of makeup in this way. It is relevant even in today’s society that women that wear too much makeup have something to hide--in hiding imperfections it is implied that women are secretive.  They are hiding behind a false mask, so to speak. If a person doesn't show their natural appearance then they may be concealing their true self.