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).