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.