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