Ovid's Metamorphoses Book III

CADMUS:     Europa's brother kills a snake and plants the teeth to birth men who annihilate each other instantly.
ACTAEON:       Naked ladies are fun to look at if they aren't virgin Goddesses, you may get eaten by your own stag-hunting dogs.
SEMELE:     Another rape victim is punished by Hera who tricks the girl into unknowingly asking for her death.
TIRESIAS:     Which gender enjoys sex more? Don't tell Juno the answer, she may make you blind.
NARCISSUS & ECHO:     A cursed nymph forever remains in the hills and the cause of her broken heart learns what it's like to love something you can't have.

PENTHEUS:      Refuses to respect Bacchus and gets torn from limb to limb; bitches be crazy.

Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2

* Now I know that we are only supposed to choose 5 of the outlines and write a sentence, but choosing the particular 5 is too difficult so I opted to just do the entire book. but you may choose to only read 5!

PHAETHON:      Some promises are deadly to keep and the entire world suffers at a boy's ignorance and bad driving skills.
THE HELIADES:     Mourning sisters of Phaethon turn to trees that drip amber as tears.
CYCNUS:     Kin of Phaethon also went to mourn and became a swan; moral is Don't Mourn for Phaethon.
PHOEBUS:     Mourning his son's death throws a hissy fit and refuses to do his work, spitefully blaming the other Gods.
CALLISTO:      Beautiful virgin is tricked and raped by Jove and then banished for getting pregnant and Hera's wrath transforms her to a bear.
ARCAS:    Callisto's son and Mother Bear are taken up into the sky as constellations and never to return.
 
THE RAVEN:       This talkative bird loses his color due to the peacocks newly addition of eyes.
CORONIS, THE RAVEN, THE CROW, NYCTIMENE:       A bunch of women are turned into birds after engaging in sex, some willing some forced; and the raven gets a black outfit for instigating Apollo to kill the unfaithful Coronis.
OCYRHOE:     A daughter who knows to much should have kept her mouth shut before turning into a horse.
BATTUS:      Mercury steels some cattle and an old man lies about keeping the secret and becomes stone.
MERCURY, HERSE, AGLAUROS:          Envy turns the wicked sister to stone.
EUORPA & JOVE:     Zeus takes the form of a bull to lure the innocent virgin away.

Myth and Reality Chapter 7

"This is why, in so far as it is 'forgotten,' the 'past'--historical or primordial--is homologized with death. The fountain Lethe, 'forgetfulness,' is a necessary part of the realm of Death. The dead are those who have lost their memories."  (M&R pg. 121)



* This is a picture of The Awakening, a statue in Washington, D.C. most definitely related to a mythological event! *


In class, as well as the earlier chapters of M&R, the most important part of mythologies is to know the origin. If we remember (remember being the key word because we were there to witness it in illo tempore and the rest of history is just a repetitious cycle) the origins of the earth and of the things of the earth then we can hold power over these things and control them. Examples are of the many Rain Dances, or Harvest Ceremonies (mythologically based to honor Ceres).  These origins are the primordial past that we should not forget. By respecting our history we can change our future.


Historical past is remembering transmigrations, or former lives. These people like Pythagoras or Empedocles are said to overcome death by anamnesis, literally translated on dictionary.com as "Platonism . recollection of the Ideas, which the soul had known in a previous existence, esp. by means of reasoning." This reasoning, this truth, this wakefulness is what keeps us from dying.


This quote never relates this forgetfulness to sleep or being blinded by ignorance, but those are key synonyms for "death" in this chapter. "Waking" implies re-cognition of the celestial origin. So everyone Wake Up! Take those espresso shots or straight adrenaline injections and shed the veil or ignorance that we have all acquired in our slumber. Our history and therefore the key to our futures are waiting!

Ovid's Metamorphoses Chapter 1

"The explanation of life by the theory of an indwelling and practically immortal soul is one which the savage does not confine to human beings but extends to the animate creation in general." New Golden Bough (pg. 549)

I thought this quote was appropriate because from all our one minute creation stories we discover that animals are just as important as humans. Some are Gods that help create the world in illo tempore, or some are people who were changed due to bad things that they accomplished in their human life. Either way, animals play an important role in Mythology and need not to be forgotten.

THE  CREATION:     "unraveling these things from their blind heap" a God forms everything and creates the noblest of animals- human beings.
THE FOUR AGES:     Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron; things only got worse as man became more selfish.
THE GIANTS:      Get greedy trying to overthrow Jove and get killed, their blood forming angry humans.
LYCAON:     Lycaon gets changed into a wolf after trying to trick Zeus; bad idea.
THE FLOOD:      The wrath of Jove lets loose all his natural disasters and floods the earth of all it's evil; sound familiat?
DEUCALION AND PYRRHA:     The sole survivors of the flood are innocent and obey the oracle by "spreading the bones of the mother" which turn into other humans.
PYTHON:    A horrible snake, killed by Phoebus, that started legendary games of men proving themsleves as manly.
APOLLO AND DAPHNE:     Phoebus teases Cupid and gets a love shot to a woman who despises him so much she chooses to be changed into a tree; ouch, love bites.
IO AND JOVE:     Jove rapes a girl and then changes her into a heifer (sexist bastard) and yet his wife blames the girl; wtf.

SYRINX:     Pan falls in love with a nymph who also despises him so much she is changed into reeds that whistle in the wind and become pan's signature instrument.
IO AND JOVE:    Mercury kills Argus and so Juno gives into Zeus and restores IO to her human form.
PHAETHON:     Son desperately wants to know of his father the mighty sun and travels to meet him.



* I chose the picture of IO and JOVE to reperesent Chapter one because it is the myth that sticks out to me the most and represents Frazer's quote of animals with souls who may be trapped and degraded *

living in a story

I'm gonna apologize upfront for writing blogs that are probably of no great intellectual stimulation or interest. But this is the time that I first felt alive and part of a story:

The book was Adam Raccoon in Lost Woods. It's about this raccoon that goes on a trip with King Aaron and wants to bring all his possessions with him. But crossing the river he drops ALL of them except one, this small red ball. So he and King Aaron and walking along and he is distracted by this ball so stops watching where King Aaron was leading and gets lost. His ball rolls away into Lost Woods and he runs in after it. The words are scary and full of wolves, but he searches and searches frantically for his ball :( Then the wolves start surrounding him, slowly closing in. And who appears but King Aaron! and He roars (he's a lion) and scares all the bad wolves away. Adam picks up his ball in one hand and in the other grabs King Aaron's hand who leads him out to safety. At the edge of the woods Adam Raccoon lets his ball fall to the ground. And King Aaron asks if he wants to pick up his ball. And Adam replies "No, I don't need it anymore!" and they walk off into the sunset.

I bawled like a little baby!!! I could NOT believe that Adam Raccoon would just leave his ball on the ground, and frankly it pissed me off that he did since he went into so much trouble trying to find it.

My parents were fairly religious so the book was supposed to represent humans leaving their earthly possessions to follow the King, but I never really took it that way because I was too devastated that the little red ball had been left behind.

First Memory

My first memory is December 17th, 1992. I had just barely turned two years old (25 months old). It was the day our house burned down.

I was just playing in my room when my mom screamed frantically to get my winter gear on (it was Winter in Canada afterall) and so I ran downstairs to smoke. I put on my coat and gloves and walked across the street to my neighbours house. I stayed there all night. I kept on trying to look out their huge front window that looked directly at my house but the mother wouldn't let me, said that there was stuff going outside and we needed to stay hidden. I kept on asking about my parents and they said that they had gone into town and would be back later. I could hear the sirens from the firetruck and I just laid on the carpet and watched the celing flicker with the red lights going round and round. The next time I looked out the window, my house was completely gone.

The next memory I have isn't til a couple months later and I think I remember this so vividly because it was a traumatic experience for me.

No worries all my family was safe. But we did lose ALL our posessions and christmas presents and our cat :(

Dream

The last few nights I have been unable to remember most of my dreams :( but there is one that is a little more vivid than the others. It's about a boy...but this boy is a kid who was a few years younger than me in high school. He was good friends with my ex actually and I have never really spoken to him ever. So anyways this dream. We are at a building, maybe it's a church, I cannot remember. but it's me, him, and one of my best friends this little asian chick named Breckyn. All three of us are laughing and having this awesome time, rolling around and wrestling on the ground (where this boy and I are flirting quite a bit while falling all over each other). Then it starts thundering so we run outside and climb up the tree to our fort. and it's like "Swiss Family Robinson" style like totally huge and totally awesome. So we're just running around up there when the cockroaches come out due to the rain. and they are everywhere! and totally disgusting. So I hop in my car to drive away but I come to a T in the road and it's blocked off by a flash flood! So I reverse the car and run out back into the rain to hang out with this super cutie of a boy and my bestie.
Random I know. So maybe I'll get a better one tonight that I can actually remember...

(Melody Brucks) History; novel or repeating?

"The notion of a man-god, or of a human being endowed with divine or supernatural powers, belongs essentially to that earlier period of religious history..." --James Frazer (pg 95)
"Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it" -- George Santayana

I felt both of these quotes were a perfect addiction to the topic discussed in class today; that is that "history is bunk" and everything repeats itself. One of the points that Sexson has been trying to get us to realize is the notion of "precedent behind action"; that there is no such thing as originality; that myths have already written history; and that nothing is novel because it has all been done before!

The quote by Satayana was one of my friend's senior quote, but I doubt she even knew what it meant. To me it almost a contradiction with myth, because you must know your history of mythology but this is because you WILL no doubt repeat it. But I guess the "catch" lies in the word doomed. For those that respect the myths of origin they are granted the power to control these things, but for those who ignore the origin myths and forget where they came from then these people will have very little control over what's around them and are therefore doomed.

This is a good lesson to all of us because no one wants to be doomed! We need to learn to respect the myths/history because in doing so we gain power and control. This power may not be the ability to walk through fire without it burning or to make rain, rather this power may come in the subtle form of knowledge. As T.S. Elliot said "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and knew the place for the first time."

(Melody Brucks) What is REALity?

"Myth is a passsage into reality" --Eliade (as discussed in class)

Today in class we discussed Plato's allegory of the cave. In high school we had gone over this particular story and had to write a few paragraphs on our thoughts. This was my take:

"As I read Plato's essay about the cave I found myself in deep thought of just what exactly he was saying; this idea of ignorance vs. enlightenment, of dark vs. light. His allegory of the prisoners was not far off from realization that I came to, that we are all prisoner's of our own mind.



I found it interesting how Plato defined truth. He states that this "truth" is found in the condition that the people are put in. The prisoner's would not consider actual forms truth, they would consider the shadows of these forms real because that is what they were accustomed to. This made me relate "truth" to the people around me. No one person is in the same truth as any other one person! This is because we are all in our own cave of reality that we have made throughout our lifetime.


Plato also addresses how the darkness of the cave represents ignorance. This makes sense to me because it always seems to be that the person with the least amount of knowlege on a topic thinks that he or she is absolutely correct on the issue. This is because they have come accustomed to the shadows and cannot see clearly to admit that their reality is not actually real.


This brings up an entirely new topic of what exactly reality is?! Plato calls it the light. But how do we know whose light is actually the pure sun or whose possibly is only UV rays inside of some tanning bed? This question is exactly the thoughts that Pluto was trying to stir. He goes on to say that even in the light, prisoner's can still be led astray, and that to find true enlightenment, we need to keep searching. We must never be satisfied with our cave of ideas, because there may always possibly be another world out there that can show us more than mere shadows. We just have to have the courage to admit we were wrong and keep on looking for the sun."

I find my thoughts completely relevant to mythology because our own cave of reality is no more right or wrong than any other person's cave of reality, so who are we to judge myths and say that they aren't truth and who are we to tell someone not to believe in Santa Clause?! Myths are powerful and meaningful to the person believing and retelling them and we should honor and repect that whether we think they are sane or not, because maybe what we consider "real" is completely off from the actual truth as well.

Inception is an amazing movie and I would tell everyone to watch it. The topic of what is real or not plays heavily in that movie and there is a scene where a bunch of old men get together and dream everyday. A character asks why they want to be in a dream and another character replies (and I'm totally paraphrasing because I cannot remember the exact quote) "because to them, the dream is reality; they come here to live." If that is not a modern sentence for illo tempore I don't know what is!

I'll end with a quote from Joseph Cambell that we also discussed in class; "What is a dream if it isn't a personalized myth? And what is a myth if it isn't a depersonalized dream?" --great quote and shows how dream/myth/reality are all interchangeable words. Re-read this post and substitute each word for the other two; the message is still the same!

(Melody Brucks) Myths as part of our Reality

"Again, magic be wrought on a man sympathetically not only thgough his clothes and severed parts of himselg, but also through the impressions left by his body in sand or earth. In particular, it is a worldwide superstition that by injuring footprints you injure the feet that made them. Thus the natives of south-eastern Australia think that they can lame a man by placing sharp pieces of quartz, glass, bone, or charcoal in his footprints. Rheumatic pains are often attributed by them to this cause." --The New Golden Bough pg. 68


I like this incerpt because it goes along withe the voodoo dolls we were talking about in class last Thursday; the fact that you can take something of someone else's and by disrespecting that item you can cause harm to the human being.


It also shows how "myths" respect a person's history because they attribute that everything in life is present due to a myth itself. So as the old saying goes "Don't step on a crack or you'll break your mother's back"....some cultures might actualy believe this because like a footprint, maybe that crack was left by their mother, and you should respect your mother and be careful not to alter the piece of history that she left. Or if you hate your mother, you can add quartz. glass, bone, etc. and slam that down into the crack by jumping repeatedly over and over again...depends on the family dynamic. But either way, you can show respect or disrespect by how you treat the little things.


Even little things such as a footprint or a crack can represent some origin of myth...and this is why cultures still strive to remember these myths because to forget is to lose parts of yourself. I liked a quote in Myth and Reality saying "Myth is a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force." Myths are the origin of the World and this is why when we remember these myths we can control the certain elements based on the stories of their origin.


This goes along with what the professor said about not being able to go 24 hours without witnessing a mythological event. Everything has origin and so everything relates to myth. an example of my own is when I was sitting in church yesterday morning. The sermon was on Job and how God was telling Job that he knew nothing of supernatural power and as an example of astronomy he asks "Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades? Can you loose the cords of Orion?" Mythology in the Bible....I was blown away!


Anyways I am probably rambling here so I will stop now and just say humbly that I think we were supposed to read chapter 1 in Myth and Reality and then post something about it; so here is my first offical mythology post!