Perseus and Atlas

The Perseus stories begin in Book IV at around page 133 of Ovid's Metamorphosis.

Perseus was the son of Danae and technically the son of Jove. In the myth, however, Jove helped conceive Perseus by way of a golden shower. Of course. Perseus was blessed with the task of flying around the world via wings carrying the head of Medusa. He eventually scared Atlas the giant into a mountain:

At that, he turned his back to Atlas--and held up Medusa's head with his left hand. Great Atlas now became a mountain mass as huge as he had been; his beard, his hair were changed to woods; his shoulders and his arms, to ridges; what had been his head was now a mountaintop; his bones were changed to stones. That done, in all his parts his form grew still more huge--such was your will, o gods; his head supported all of heaven and its stars.

....And that's how mountains were formed. It's interesting to think of a man transforming into a mountain. Which parts represent his legs? Where is the 'eye' of the mountain?

Perseus went on to wrap Medusa's head in seaweed, turn it to rock, and cast it into the ocean. This was the creation story for coral.

The dude kicked some major ass AND got the girl Andromeda in the end. How is there not a movie based off of this character? He should at LEAST have a mediocre cartoon based after him. I didn't see Clash of The Titans, was this story in there?

Blogs, Dreams, and INCEPTION

I was particularly interested in Curtis Pattee's blog because of the Inception reference at the end. Like any good story, I could immediately bring myself into Curtis's dream and see the Lego walls, feel the ominous presence of a void, and instantly recall the falling motion he experiences.

Since we're on the topic of dreams. I decided to insert this clip of Inception which highlights what makes dreams awesome:

"Dreams....they feel real while we're in them, it's only when we wake up do we realize that something was strange.....You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on." In this sense, myths and creation stories fall into the same category. There is no actual start to anything, its more of a jump into an already established setting. Dream, myths, and realities make up that "collective unconscious" that Dr. Jung discovered. In Myth and Reality, Eliade links it all together:

We must now show in what sense Plato's theory of ideas and the Platonic anamnesis can be compared with the attitude and behavior of man in archaic and traditional societies. The man of those societies finds in myths and exemplary models for all his acts. The myths tell him that everything he does or intends to do has already been done, at the beginning of Time, in illo tempore. Hence myths constitute the sums of useful knowledge...Philosophical anamnesis does not recover the memory of the events belonging to former lives, but of truths, that is, the structures of the real.(Eliade, 124).

The myths are not just tales to entertain us, but they are encyclopedias of knowledge pulled from our unconscious basement. The myths provide the structure for which we make sense of reality. Dreams feel real because they have every single element that reality has. Dreams allow for a person to put together no only memories, but also text (written and oral) into visualizations by way of imaginations. It's a meeting ground for myths coming to fruition. People may not believe in Santa Claus in reality, but in a dream they might. The obstacles that people face in their waking moments come crashing down in dreams because they realize that the barrier is an illusion in the first place.

Now go forth and design your reality.

Dreams

I am no good at remembering early memories, but I do have a reoccurring dream to share with you all. It usually happens to me this time of year...

I awake or appear at school not really knowing how I got there. I don't know the day of the week, or the time of day, but I know I am late for a class. Somehow I am taking classes at my old high school and I have neglected to attend one class for a whole semester. I quickly rush to my class and try to catch up what I've missed. It's not working and the teacher is very upset with me. It's always a teacher that I disliked or got a poor grade in a prior class. Suddenly I am transported to a different day. I am late for the class again. I keep racing down the stairs to get to my class and then............. I wake up.

Puke and Rally

Here's an excerpt from The Book of Overthrowing Apophis on the Primitives to Zen site:

Mircea Eliade "From Primitives to Zen": EGYPTIAN COSMOGONY AND THEOGONY

The Lord of All, after having come into being, says: I am he who came into being as Khepri (i.e., the Becoming One). When I came into being, the beings came into being, all the beings came into being after I became. Numerous are those who became, who came out of my mouth, before heaven ever existed, nor earth came into being, nor the worms, nor snakes were created in this place. 1, being in weariness, was bound to them in the Watery Abyss. I found no place to stand. I thought in my heart, I planned in myself, I made all forms being alone, before I ejected Shu, before I spat out Tefnut ¹ before any other who was in me had become. Then I planned in my own heart, and many forms of beings came into being as forms of children, as forms of their children. I conceived by my hand, I united myself with my hand, I poured out of my own mouth. I ejected Shu, I spat out Tefnut. It was my father the Watery Abyss who brought them up, and my eye followed them (?) while they became far from me. After having become one god, there were (now) three gods in me. When I came into being in this land, Shu and Tefnut jubilated in the Watery Abyss in which they were. Then they brought with them my eye. After I had joined together my members, I wept over them, and men came into being out of the tears which came out of my eyes.² Then she (the eye) became enraged³ after she came back and had found that I had placed another in her place, that she had been replaced by the Brilliant One. Then I found a higher place for her on my brow⁴ and when she began to rule over the whole land her fury fell down on the flowering (?) and I replaced what she had ravished. I came out of the flowering (?), I created all snakes, and all that came into being with them. Shu and Tefnut produced Geb and Nut; Geb and Nut produced out of a single body Osiris, Horus the Eyeless one ⁵ Seth, Isis, and Nephthys, one after the other among them. Their children are numerous in this land.


Notes

¹ Shu the air, Tefnut the moist.
² Same myth in the Book of Gates, division 4 (The Tomb of Ramesses VI, P. 169).
³ An allusion to the myth of the Eye of the sun god which departs into a foreign land and is brought back by Shu and Tefnut. Another aspect. of this myth is to be found in the Book of the Divine Cow.
⁴ The fire-spitting snake, the uraeus on the head of the god.
⁵ The Elder Horus of Letopolis.

For those who are keeping track at home, mark this origin myth in the "bodily fluids category". I particularly found the "conceiving by hand" and the ejection of Gods from the mouth. For some reason, I have a picture in my head of Khepri literally giving birth to men via a birth canal sprouting from the palm. I searched online for a visual representation of such, but alas I could not find one. In many of the origins discussed in class, it is established that man is created in God's image. In this Egyptian myth, man is a descendant of God's mucus.

Once again, the snake theme stays consistent throughout thus creation myth. It shows how unoriginal these religions are if they steal the same animal examples from all of the other religions. C'mon Christianity! Let's use some scorpion analogies! "...And then the evil scorpion tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit by waving it back and forth....little did Adam know that the apple was attached to the scorpion's stinger! And that's the story of how God gave man canker-sores.

Class Notes 9/14

My notes from 9/14.....

-Discussed All Souls Day (A sister holiday of Halloween) where people are brought back from the dead and the living are responsible for feeding them.
-Discussed Creation Myths and the tragic hero leaving the perfect home, have his world be split in two (like an egg) and then return to the home or a fragmented/new version of home.

-Defined a creation myth as a symbolic narrative of a cultural tradition or people that describes their earliest beginnings.

5 Basic creation Myths:

-creation ex nihilo: through thought word, dream, or bodily secretions of a divine being
(ex nihilo means out of nothing)
-Earth diver: a bird or amphibian plunges to the seabed to gather mud. It then creates a terrestrial world with the mud.
-Emergence myths: progenitors or earliest ancestors pass through a series of worlds until they reach the present world.
- Creation by the dismemberment of a primordial being
- Creation by the splitting or ordering of a primordial unity such as cracking a cosmic egg or a bringing to form from the chaos

-Discussed Tiamat, monster of chaos and how Marduke kills her with the arrow, splits her in two and creates the sky and earth

-Mentioned the Kaaba stone, the holy rock of Islam located in Mecca.
-Gnosticism is the belief within Christianity that God is actually imperfect.
- Discussed the character Mnemosyne which means memory

Dreams, Reality, and Actuality

The soul of a sleeper is supposed to wander away from his body and actually to visit the places, to see the persons, and to perform the acts of which he dreams. For example, when an Indian of Brazil or Guiana wakes up from a sound sleep, he is firmly convinced that his soul has really been away hunting, fishing, felling trees, or whatever else he has dreamed of doing, while all the time his body has been lying motionless in his hammock. A whole Bororo village has been thrown into a panic and nearly deserted because somebody had dreamed that he saw enemies stealthily approaching it. A Macusi Indian in weak health, who dreamed that his employer had made him haul the canoe up a series of difficult cataracts, bitterly reproached his master next morning for his want of consideration in thus making a poor invalid go out and toil during the night. The Indians of the Gran Chaco are often heard to relate the most incredible stories as things which they have themselves seen and heard; hence strangers who do not know them intimately say in their haste that these Indians are liars. In point of fact the Indians are firmly convinced of the truth of what they relate; for these wonderful adventures are simply their dreams, which they do not distinguish from waking realities.

---The Golden Bough, Chapter 18, The Perils of the Soul

I have yet to have my soul venture off into interesting venues recently. I dream, but they are mundane, consisting of my Dad making me breakfast, or of myself arguing with a friend over meaningless topics. For those who have seen Inception, the dreams within the film are way cooler.

SPOILER ALERT:

The movie, Inception, is about people who go into other people's minds via their dreams through a special device. They then can steal an idea from that person's dreams or they can proceed further into the subconscious by entering into another dream while in the first person's dream. Some characters go down so many levels of dreaming that they eventually reach a stage called limbo; a dream so complex that the dreamer believes he or she is actually in reality.

This touches closely to what Professor Sexson was saying about what is real and what is imaginary. If we think it's real then to us, it's real. If we think it's imaginary, than we have already set a limit on that situation and it can not jump to the level of reality. What about deja vu? Wouldn't that feeling of a situation being eerily familiar only belong in a dream? Pay attention to what we conceive as reality. You may be dreaming sooner than you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sd0ff1sbJU&feature=channel

Long Thoughts and Short Decisions

A Golden Bough quote: (Somewhere in Chapter 28):

Thus we may fairly conjecture that the names Carnival, Death, and Summer are comparatively late and inadequate expressions for the beings personified or embodied in the customs with which we have been dealing. The very abstractness of the names bespeaks a modern origin; for the personification of times and seasons like the Carnival and Summer, or of an abstract notion like death, is not primitive. But the ceremonies themselves bear the stamp of a dateless antiquity; therefore we can hardly help supposing that in their origin the ideas which they embodied were of a more simple and concrete order. The notion of a tree, perhaps of a particular kind of tree (for some savages have no word for tree in general), or even of an individual tree, is sufficiently concrete to supply a basis from which by a gradual process of generalisation the wider idea of a spirit of vegetation might be reached. But this general idea of vegetation would readily be confounded with the season in which it manifests itself; hence the substitution of Spring, Summer, or May for the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation would be easy and natural. Again, the concrete notion of the dying tree or dying vegetation would by a similar process of generalisation glide into a notion of death in general; so that the practice of carrying out the dying or dead vegetation in spring, as a preliminary to its revival, would in time widen out into an attempt to banish Death in general from the village or district. The view that in these spring ceremonies Death meant originally the dying or dead vegetation of winter has the high support of W. Mannhardt; and he confirms it by the analogy of the name Death as applied to the spirit of the ripe corn. Commonly the spirit of the ripe corn is conceived, not as dead, but as old, and hence it goes by the name of the Old Man or the Old Woman. But in some places the last sheaf cut at harvest, which is generally believed to be the seat of the corn spirit, is called “the Dead One”: children are warned against entering the corn-fields because Death sits in the corn; and, in a game played by Saxon children in Transylvania at the maize harvest, Death is represented by a child completely covered with maize leaves.

I can already tell that I will have trouble quoting the Golden Bough simply because all of the text ties into one another and each sentence is just as important as the next. It's a text that has stories within stories, just like the movie, Inception. And just like Inception, the explanation to what is real and what is important may be long and confusing. I'll save my Inception rants for another post though. Back to the top quote.....

If you read the whole quote you may reach the conclusion that much of our language is inadequate. Or, more specifically, the fewer the words we try to use, the more nebulous our meaning comes across to the reader. Does corn signify birth, rebirth, death, or all three? It depends on who you ask. I'm not writing this post to deconstruct this passage, however. I believe Professor Sexson has taught too many decades of English classes for him to care THAT much about an undergraduate Literature Major perform close readings of The Golden Bough. I think instead he wants us to inject our personal lives into the readings and class. Our professor is serious when he wants us to eavesdrop on the conversations scattered throughout campus and report back to him. It's how he stays young. He gets a kick out of one of his mythology students producing a phobia with cornfields because of the discussion of Saxon children in Transylvania impersonating dead corn.

Having this knowledge given to us by The Golden Bough is useless if we don't use it. At the very least we should see corn now as "Old Men".