“After that remote time when gods and men had been on familiar terms, to invite the gods to one’s house became the most dangerous thing one could do, a source of wrings and curses, a sign of the now irretrievable malaise in relations between heaven and earth. At the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Aphrodite gives the bride a necklace which, passing from hand to hand, will generate disaster after another right up the massacre of the Epigoni beneath the walls of Thebes, and beyond. At the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, failure to invite Eris leads to the Judgment of Paris in favor of Aphrodite and against Hera an Athena, and thus creates the premise for the Trojan War. Lycaon’s banquet, where human and animal flesh are served together, brings about the Flood. Tantalus’s banquet, where little Pelops is boiled in the pot, marks the beginning of a chain of crimes that will go on tangling together ever more perversely right up to the day when Athena casts the vote that acquits the fugitive Orestes” (pg.387 Cadmus).
Everything happens for a reason. “The gods ruin our relationship with them but sets history in motion” (pg. 387). The gods make life worth living because they make things interesting. They are there to give the humans experience and mess things up to make good stories. Life is a series of chain reactions. If Aphrodite hadn’t given Harmony the necklace then massacres, wars, floods, etc would have never happened. Yes, these are all bad things but, everything does happen for a reason.
Class Notes:
- Rituals are sometimes horrifying or grotesc
- Carpe Diem- cease the day
- Gods provide the food for the people
- Dark side of mythology- the short story “The Lottery” http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lotry.html
- Dont know how rituals start
- People perform rituals to make something else happen
- Deus Ex Machnia- hero formula- god out of the machine
- Goat- Icarious- Ritual
- Ritual- set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value
- Origins of Tragedy
- Myth and Ritual
- Myth is the story part of what is done- ritual started with myth-Precise, repatition
- Ritual Stories in Cadmus and Harmony:
- pg.39- Icarious Wine
- pg. 160- Charila
- pg. 260- Initiation
- What is behind all of this?
- What is the precedent behind every action?
- Delphi is based upon the rotting corpse of the python that Apallo killed
- Put the sin on something else- expel him/her from the city = scape goat
- Ceremony- Ceres is the roman name for Hera- the goddess of the harvest
- Eating cereal is performing a ritual to the goddess Ceres
- Don’t do rituals unless you understand why it is performed
- Effigy- voodoo doll, representation of a person
- Homeopathy- doll must have something of the other persons on it to make it work
- Rite-Ritual-Ceremony-Initiation
- May poll- axis mundi
- Pryapus- garden god- god of procreation
- Calasso has no fondness for the spartans
- Dont eat anything when you go to the underworld
- What is the ritual that the people of Eleusis perform for Demeter?
- They have to build a temple for her where the initiated should celebrated her mysteries
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