Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Class Notes 1/9-1/21

Mythos - 'story' + Logos - 'word/truth' = Mythology - 'truth of stories'

Myth - precedent behind all actions, no orginiality, going back to the orgins

Nothing ever dies: it changes into new forms




'In Ilo Tempore' - in the (great, big) time

Sparagmos - the act of rendering, tearing apart, or mangling
  • performed during acts involving Dionysus
  • animals and even humans are sacrificed
  • omophagia (eating of raw flesh from the sacrified) follows after
Joseph Cambell's Monomyth: Hero's Journey
  • Call to adeventure
  • Refusal or denial of adventure
  • Supernatural aid
  • Crossing of the threshold
  • Belly of the whale
  • Road of trials
  • Meeting with the Goddess
  • Woman as temptress
  • Atonement with father
  • Aptheosis
  • Ultimate Boon
  • Refusal of the return
  • Magic flight
  • Rescue from without
  • Crossing of return threshold
  • Master of two worlds
  • Freedom to live
Baucus/Dionysus - god of wine, winemaking, grape harvest, ritual madness, and ectasy

All fairy tales are degenerated myths.

Italo Calvino - Italian journalist, wrote the novel, Invisible Cities

Caduceus Staff - medical staff
Asclepius - father of Hygieia - goddess of health, cleanliness, and sanitation
Asclepion's Temple of Healing ( Faith Healing )
- People go in with a sickness, pick a single room and lay down in a bed and fall asleep. The therapy was that you hopefully have a dream about Ascleplus and/or his staff, and if you did, you would be cured of whatever illness you have.

The Doors ( of Perception) by Aldous Huxley
Brave New World

Orpheus - legendary muscian and poet
- tries to get his wife back from Hades on one condition, he cannot look back at her until he is in the mortal world again, he looks back and loses her again forever

Recursive Structure - stories with in stories with in stories

Theseus - philander and abandoner of women
  • killed minotaur in the labyrinth
  • friend to Pirithous who helped each other get girls
  • wanted Helen of Troy
    • daughter of Leda and Zeus
    • Zeus raped Leda in the form of a swan
    • laid two eggs, one with Helen and Polydeuces and one with Castor and Clytemnestra
  • tries to kidnapp Helen but her brothers rescue her
  • Pirithous wanted Persephone
  • went into the underworld and ask Hades for her, he said ok and asked for them to wait on a bench while he went to get her, so they sat and when he brought her out, they were unable to get up, they were stuck to the bench, they sat there for years and years until Hercules was in the underworld and asked Hercules to help them, he only had time for one and helped Theseus, in the process of pulling him off the bench, Hercules ripped Theseus' butt off, reason why Greek men have small butts today
Leda and the Swan
-William Butler Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Sisyphus - didn't return to the underworld directly after scolding his wife for not proper burial and showing respect for him and tricking persephone and now eternally damned to rolling a boulder up a hill
Tantalus - fed his children to the gods and now eternally damned to be thristy and hungry
Ixion - tried to seduce Hera, and now eternally damned to be chained to a fiery wheel either in the sky or the underworld

No comments:

Post a Comment