9/29/11

“Everything repeats itself, everything comes back again, but always with some slight twist in its meaning: in the modern age the group of initiates becomes the police force. And there is always some tiny territory untouched by the anthropologists’ fine-tooth comb that survives, like an archaic island, in the modern world: thus it is that in antiquity we come across the emissaries of a reality that was to unfold more than two thousand years later” (pg.249 Cadmus).

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

History repeats itself. People have to learn from history to know how to prevent things from happening again. For example in the story of Charila, there was a famine throughout the land. Charila asked the king for food because he had given it all to the rich people. The king threw a shoe in her face and wouldn’t give her any food. So, she left the city and hung herself. The king finally went tot he oracle to ask for a way to end the famine. The oracle told him appease the young virgin Charila. They finally found Charila’s body after a while of searching for it. It was still hanging from the branch she hung herself from. They buried her body near the tree. The king  then gave food to everyone rather than just the rich. He to throw his sandal again but this time in an effigies face. They took the effigy to a tree, hung it and then buried it. The famine then ended. They started this ritual that they performed every eight years. This kept famines from coming to the land but after a few hundred years people would begin to forget this ritual and history would then repeat itself.

Class Notes:

Sybyl

• A person has to make their own discoveries.
• sacrifice = to make sacred
• “fie”- to make
• “sacra”- sacred 
• Disassemble any structure of order, intoxication and wine = Dionysus
• The Sybyl- Oracle
• Rape- not just literal rape but also of the mind; psychological rape
• “gon”- birth
• We have an assignment to write about a dream we have
• Dreams are great sources for mythological stories
• Become the thing you partake in- you are what you eat

• Two parts to life with the gods

1. Abduction
2. Metamorphoses 

• Four common ways for the creation of the world

1. Female who created the world from herself
2. Created by a female and her side kick a snake (snake sheds skin)
3. Creation from a goddesses body
4. God creates by voice (biblical)