Myths of the Greeks
& Romans Reimagined for the 21st century |
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All these 20th century authors share a high regard
for the great 20th century pioneer and cartographer
of the collective
unconscious, C.J. Jung. His
guides to this world where archetypes live waiting
for their cue to emerge into
conscious are best understood by cultures as myths
with
characters our mind uses to play out the drama of
our lives.
ROOTS of DIONYSUS
"The Aryans entering
Greece, Anatolia, Persia, and the Gangetic plain, c.
1500-1250 B.C., brought with them...the comparatively
primitive mythologies of their patriarchal pantheons, which
in creative consort with the earlier mythologies of the
Universal Goddess generated in India the Vedantic, Puranic,
Tantric, and Buddhist doctrines, and in Greece those of
Homer and Hesiod, Greek tragedy and philosophy, the
Mysteries, and Greek science."
- Joseph Campbell,
Creative Mythology
Across all cultures the hero
must be purified, fulfill his deeds, return with his boon to
the community and be sacrificed in an eternal cycle of fulfillment.
- Joseph Campbell,
Hero of a
Thousand Faces
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"Nothing will see
us through the age we're entering but high
consciousness, and that comes hard. We don't have a
good, modern myth yet, and we need one.
I think the
patriarchal world has reigned supreme for so long
that the pendulum's swinging too far the other way.
It needed to be rectified, but to swing the pendulum
too far the other way is almost as bad.
We live in a time of
great change in how men and women see themselves and
how they respond to life and to each other.
Robert Johnson |
Explore
your active
imagination after you sign up for a Carnaval group.
If their theme works it will move
you to being actively
playing your role with your fellow band members. |
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The Need for
an Ecstatic Vision of Human Consciousness |
Ecstasy: Understanding
the Psychology of Joy
by R.A. Johnson
 Reviving the myth of
Dionysus, this book elucidates and brings to us the
importance and need for an ecstatic vision of human
consciousness. Johnson offers many avenues through
which each one of us can find and enjoy inner
ecstasy and ecstasy in our connection to the
collective unconscious and to each other.
Robert A.
Johnson,
is a noted lecturer and Jungian analyst, is also the
author of He, She, We, Inner Work, Ecstasy,
Transformation, & Owning Your Own Shadow
Establishing a
working relationship between the conscious and the
unconscious levels of the psyche. The psyche, Jung &
Johnson believe, is purposive. If the material
arising from unconscious levels is carefully
attended to, it can move us toward greater balance,
health, and creativity.
According to
Robert Johnson:
"It is not active unless you are
participating in the drama with your feelings and
emotions . . . The 'I' must enter into the
imaginative act as intensely as it would if it were
an external, physical experience"
Robert A. Johnson
on Google Book Search
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Roberto
Calasso
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Translated
by Tim Parks. New York: Vintage, 1994. |
"The
Greeks were drawn to enigmas. But what is an
enigma? A mysterious formulation, you could
say. Yet that wouldn't be enough to define
an enigma. The other thing you have to say
is that the answer to an enigma is likewise
mysterious." |
With time,
men and gods would develop a common language
made up of hierogamy and sacrifice . . . .
And, when it became a dead language, people
started talking about mythology'' |
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Italian
author Roberto Calasso, was first published in
English in 1993, his ability to take apart the old
myths to discover the birth of history and modern
thinking amid timeless patterns of behavior has been
widely acclaimed.
Calasso's reexploration of the fantastic fables we
may think we know explodes the entire world of Greek
mythology, and presents it to us in a new, and
contemporary way.
The only way according to Roberto Calasso to
penetrate deeper into the mythological universe is
to retell the stories from beginning to end. Yet believing is deadly for myth, Calasso
believes. When you enter a myth your venture your
soul to be engaged in a magic spell. The myth
is where our heroes are created and live. This is a
natural reflex of the human condition. The myths and the gods are not dead. They
continue to live on in us, and know them deeper is to
retell the stories from beginning to end
"When the phantom, the mental image, takes over our
minds, when it begins to join with other similar or
alien figures, then little by little it fills the
whole space of the mind in an ever more detailed and
ever richer concatenation. What initially presented
itself as the prodigy of appearance, cut off from
everything, is now linked, from one phantom to
another, to everything."
"No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth
opens out into a fan of a thousand segments. Here
the variant is the origin. Everything that happens,
happens this way, or that way, or this other way.
And in each of these diverging stories all the
others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of
the same cloth. If, out of some perversity of
tradition, only one version of some mythical event
has come down to us, it is like a body without a
shadow, and we must do our best to trace out that
invisible shadow in our minds." (p.147/148).
DIONYSUS & APOLLO |
"
No victory is ever complete, nor ever enough
to last the whole year.
Neither Apollo nor Dionysus can reign
forever, neither can do without the other,
neither can be there all the time. When
Apollo reappears and squeezes Dionysus's
arm, we hear the last notes of the
dithyrambs, and immediately afterward the
first of the paeans. The only continuity is
sound."
(Roberto Calasso. The Marriage of Cadmus
and Harmony, pg 148-149)
more about Apollo
versus Dionysos |
The book opens with
the story of Europa’s kidnapping by a bull, what follows is a seemingly endless array
of rape, betrayal, murder and adultery. The
abduction of Europa was also the one captured by Zeus
that would have the most far-reaching consequences. Europa’s brother Cadmus would follow his sister and
later found Thebe, Europa’s son Minos would become
king of Crete and build the labyrinth that would
become the home of the Minotaure, which would be
killed by Theseus, helped by Ariadne, Europa’s
granddaughter. Cadmus would also give the Greeks a
seemingly innocent but precious gift: the alphabet.
Roberto Calasso
on Google Book Search
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'But how did it all
begin?' The eternal question that Man has always
asked of his universe also forms the opening words
of this book.
In answer, and in the voice of the
born story-teller, Calasso leads us through the
maze, back to the time when the gods were not yet
born from the original coupling of Uranus and Ge,
Mother Earth; then forward again, all the way to the
death of Odysseus, which marks the end of the age of
heroes; and—most important of all—to
the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, the last occasion when the gods
sat down at a feast with mortal men.
Presenting the stories of Zeus and Europa, Theseus
and Ariadne, the birth of Athens and the fall of
Troy, in all their variants, Calasso also uncovers
the distant origins of secrets and tragedy,
virginity, and rape. "A perfect work like no other.
(Calasso) has re-created . . . the morning of our
world."--Gore Vidal
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Jean-Pierre
Vernant
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Jean-Pierre Vernant born
in 1914 in Toulouse , historian and
anthropologist French, specialist in ancient
Greece and more especially in the Greek
myths.
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Study of
Ancient Religions at the College de France.
In 2002 , he was given an honorary doctorate
by the University of Crete.
Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet
are leaders in a contemporary French
classical scholarship that has produced a
stunning reconfiguration of Greek thought
and literature through a neoclassical
reading of Greek myth and tragedy.
"As the only Greek god endowed with the
power of maya ("magic"), Dionysos transcends
all forms and evades all definitions; he
assumes all aspects without confining
himself to any one. Like a conjurer, he
plays with appearances and blurs the
boundaries between the fantastic and the
real. Ubiquitous, he is never to be found
where he is but always here, there, and
nowhere at the same time. As soon as he
appears, the distinct categories and clear
oppositions that give the world its
coherence and rationality fade, merge, and
pass from one to the other. He is at once
both male and female. By suddenly appearing
among men, he introduces the supernatural in
the midst of the natural and unites heaven
and earth. Young and old, wild and
civilized, near and far, beyond and
here-below are joined in him and by him.
Even more, he abolishes the distance that
separates the gods from men and men from
animals. |
Jean-Pierre Vernant
on Google Book Search
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Ginette Paris, Ph.D is a renowned feminist
psychologist, teacher, and author of
Pagan Meditations: the Worlds of Aphrodite,
Artemis, and Hestia (Spring Publications).,
Pagan Grace: Dionysus and Hermes, and Goddess Memory
in Daily Life and The Sacrament of
Abortion. She is also core
faculty in the Mythological Studies Program, and the
Research Coordinator. Originally from Montreal, where she taught for many
years in the Communications Department at Université du Québec
à Montréal, since 1995, she has been
a member of the core faculty at the Pacifica Institute,
Santa Barbara, California.
"Psychoanalysis somehow has convinced us that it
must "make a man" of our weak, irrational,
hysteric inner woman, because neither weakness,
nor maenadism, nor receptivity, now femininity
is valued as part of the human experience.
Wasn't the first act of psychoanalysis to
replace Dionysos, God of women, with a diagnosis
of hysteria?
Domestic Tyrants from Pagan Grace
pg 34 |
But if
scholars have tended to pathologize the
Dionysian, it's not just because of a
lack of words. It's because we've lost the
connection to that archetype and, with it, the
chance to let off steam without risking
denigration as pathological freaks. The
translators couldn't find worlds because (as
James Hillman says) "they
saw hysteria in Dionysos rather than recognizing
Dionysos in hysteria!"
Dionysos from Pagan Grace pg 5 |
"We may well ask what there is about our
collective unconscious that feeds this archetype
of a revolutionary, law-breaking, destructive
God. Why does human society secrete its own
destruction?
Dionysos the Liberator from Pagan Grace
pg 27 |
Ginette Paris on Google will return over 260,000
links during Nov-2005
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Camille
Paglia
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"The Left is hollow, nothing left but this snob cool attitude.
The only thing the Left can offer is ART, but it has done
nothing but trash ART. That notions of quality are ideological
quotas. I embrace the ideological seeking the best.
Religious when we only see the politics of the sixties. There
was a truly mystic spiritual vision of the age of Aquarius. The
left cannot defeat the right till this is recovered. ... Until
the left comes up with something of equal value, gravity....
Lose this idea it is unhip to be too enthusiastic. "
Camille Paglis in San
Francesco for the Booksmith April 22nd 2005 |
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Camille Anna Paglia
(born April 2, 1947 in Endicott, New York) is a social critic, author,
and self-described Amazon-feminist. She is University Professor of
Humanities and Media Studies at the
University of the Arts in
Philadelphia.
Paglia is an intellectual of many apparent contradictions: a classicist
who champions art both high and low, with a view that human nature is
inherently dangerous, while at the same time celebrating Dionysian
revelry in the wilder, darker sides of human sexuality.
Her significance in the 1990s intellectual world was two-fold: First, the seventies had sef a particularly rigid, doctrinaire
"feminism" that many were finding stifling but only a few were
challenging (e.g., the "sex positive" S/M lesbians, perhaps typified by
Susie Bright). The second concerned a challenge to the cannon of Western
Civilization often championed by her mentor Harold Bloom. The left was
pushing for a change in the traditional focus deriding the curriculum as the study of "dead
white males".
Against this backdrop, cultural critic Paglia appeared on the scene as a female
intellectual who enjoyed challenging the left-wing position in these
areas. But she did so by arguing from an unusual position that also
embraced homosexuality, fetishism, and prostitution. She describes
herself as a Democrat and a libertarian as well as an atheist with
Italian-Catholic sensibilities, who thinks comparative religion and art history
should be at the center of world education.
"My point of view on life is
cinematic, as is abundantly clear from my prior books, not
only my study of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds for the
British Film Institute (1998) but Sexual Personae
(1990), where I argue that the cinematic "Western eye" was
born in ancient Egypt. Others beside myself have noted how
Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic
strangely prefigures a movie screen and theater. The
cinematic nature of Western perception, intellect, and
psychological projection is one of the major, motivating,
and of course controversial hypotheses of my work. " |
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Despite the unflattering review of
The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche remained respected in his
professorial position in Basel, but his ailing health, which led to
migraine headaches, eyesight problems and vomiting, necessitated his
resignation from the university in June, 1879. From 1880 until his
collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a wandering, gypsy-like
existence as a "stateless" person (having given up his German
citizenship, and not having acquired Swiss citizenship), circling almost
annually between his mother's house in Naumburg and various French,
Swiss, German and Italian cities. His travels took him through the
Mediterranean seaside city of Nice (during the winters), the Swiss
alpine village of Sils-Maria (during the summers), Leipzig (where he had
attended university), Turin, Genoa, Recoaro, Messina, Rapallo, Florence,
Venice, and Rome, never residing in any place longer than several months
at a time.
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Lou Salomé Muse to both Nietzsche & Freud |
On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age
thirty-seven, met Lou Salomé, a twenty-one-year-old Russian woman who
was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. He soon fell in love
with her, and offered his hand in marriage. She declined, and the future
of Nietzsche's friendship with her and Paul Rée appears to have suffered
as a consequence. In the years to follow, Salomé would become an
associate of Sigmund Freud, and would write with psychological insight
of her association with Nietzsche.
These nomadic years were the occasion
of Nietzsche's main works, among which are Daybreak (1881),
The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85),
Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morals
(1887). Nietzsche's final active year, 1888, saw the completion of
The Case of Wagner (May-August 1888), Twilight of the Idols
(August-September 1888), The Antichrist (September 1888),
Ecce Homo (October-November 1888) and Nietzsche Contra Wagner
(December 1888).
Nietzsche on Google Book
Search |
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The author and poet
Robert Graves' study of the nature of poetic myth-making, The White
Goddess, first published in 1948, and revised,
amended and enlarged in 1966, represents a tangential approach to the
study of mythology from a decidedly idiosyncratic perspective. It
proposed the existence of a European deity, the White Goddess of Birth,
Love and Death, represented by the phases of the moon, who he argued
lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European
mythologies. In this work, Graves argued that "true poetry" or "pure
poetry" has inextricable links with ancient cult-ritual of his proposed
White Goddess and of her son. His conclusions were based upon his highly
speculative conjectures about how religions formed, and there is no
historical evidence that this White Goddess as he describes her was ever
a feature of any actual belief system.
Graves described The White Goddess as "a historical grammar of the
language of poetic myth." The book draws from
mythology and poetry from Wales and Ireland through most of Western
Europe and the ancient Middle East. Relying heavily on arguments from
etymology, Graves argues not only for the worship of a single goddess
under many names; but also that the names of the letters in the Ogham
alphabet used in parts of Gaelic Britain contained a calendar that
contained the key to an ancient liturgy involving the human sacrifice of
a sacred king; and also that these letter names concealed some lines of
ancient Greek hexameter describing the goddess.
The Golden Bough (1922) by Sir James George Frazer, is the starting
point for much of Graves's argument, and Graves thought in part that his
book made explicit what Frazer only touched upon. Graves wrote:
"Sir James Frazer was able
to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge,
until his death by carefully and methodically sailing all
around his dangerous subject, as if charting the coastline
of a forbidden island without actually committing himself to
a declaration that it existed. What he was saying-not-saying
was that Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the
refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous
beliefs, and that almost the only original element in
Christianity is the personality of Jesus." |
Graves' The White Goddess deals with
goddess worship as the prototypical religion, analyzing it largely from
literary evidence, in myth and poetry. Instead of skirting the issue, as
he accused Frazer of having done, Graves said what he meant, creating
controversy that cost him some friends. The book was originally only
read by scholars, but as interest in goddess-based religions increased
since the 1960s, the public demand for books about the alleged roots of
goddess worship has increased as well.
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Life
-Death - Rebirth: the oldest story ever retold |
Karl
Kerenyi
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Dionysos:
Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life |
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The mythographer Karl
Kerenyi (January 19, 1897 - April 14, 1973) devoted
much energy to Dionysus over his long career; he
summed up his thoughts in Dionysos: Archetypal
Image of Indestructible Life (Bollingen,
Princeton) 1976. which traced the career of the
cults of Dionysus from his origins in Minoan culture
to the cosmopolitan religion of late Antiquity. |
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For Kerényi, mythology
lays the foundation for a meaningful world. Myths
are always unfolded in a primordial time.
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NO FESTIVAL WITHOUT
THE DIVINE: |
"No festival or cult --
that is, no festival or cult in the real sense --
was ever founded for the relationship of persons to
persons without the Divine, which is the
presupposition of the religious phenomena of
"festival" and "cult" being experienced in it. There
have been and are ceremonies of love and friendship.
The same is true of love poems and poems of
friendship, but they are truly poems only as they
become elevated into the realm of art. Similarly
there are festivals of love and friendship, but they
are proper festivals and proper cults only when they
have been elevated to the sphere of the Gods"
Athena, Virgin and Mother in Greek Religion
(1952) Karl Kerenyi
Later, when the Christians wished to lend
their God legitimacy, they would claim that
his first miracle mimicked those of Dionysos,
by turning water into wine (John 2-3).
Although they would also claim that Jesus
was the "True vine" (John 15) the people
knew otherwise, and continued calling out
the name of Dionysos during the treading of
the grapes, even after a Council of
Constantinople in 691 CE forbid them to do
so, or to wear satyr masks while they
worked.
(Carl Kerenyi, Dionysos pg 67)
Dionysus is a god
in whom foreignness is inherent. And indeed,
Dionysus's name is found on
Mycenean
Linear B tablets as "DI-WO-NI-SO-JO"1,
and Kerenyi traces him to Minoan Crete, where his
Minoan name is unknown but his characteristic
presence is recognizable. Clearly, Dionysus had been
with the Greeks and their predecessors a long time,
and yet always retained the feel of something alien.
In Greece in
1929 he met W. F. Otto, who influenced him to
combine the studies of comparative religions and
social history, while his friendship with Jung
induced him to take the findings of modern
psychology into consideration as well. Kerényi's
long correspondence with
Thomas Mann was published in 1975. In 1949 Jung
and Kerenyi published together Essays on the
Science of Mythology: the Myths of the Divine Child
and the Divine Maiden. Kerenyi and Jung both
furnished commentaries to Paul Radin's The
Trickster: a Study in American Indian Mythology,
where Kerenyi saw the trickster as an enemy to
boundaries,
“The
teller of myths steps back into
primordiality in order to tell us what
`originally was'” According to Kerenyi, it
was not intoxication which was the essential
element of the religion of Dionysos, but the
"quiet, powerful, vegetative element which
ultimately engulfed even the ancient
theaters, as at Cumae."
(Dionysos, pg xxiv)
Kerenyi sees Dionysus a
life-death-rebirth deity.
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One of the founders of modern studies in
Greek mythology, Karl (Carl, Károly) Kerényi
(January 19, 1897 - April 14, 1973) was born
in Timisoara, then in Hungary, to a family
of some landed property. In Greece in
1929 he met W. F. Otto, who influenced him
to combine the studies of comparative
religions and social history, while his
friendship with Jung induced him to take the
findings of modern psychology into
consideration as well. Kerényi's long
correspondence with Thomas Mann was
published in 1975.
He was a close friend
and collaborator of
Carl Jung, who described him as having
"supplied such a wealth of connections [of
psychology] with Greek mythology that the
cross-fertilization of the two branches of
science can no longer be doubted." In 1949
Jung and Kerenyi published together
Essays on the Science of Mythology: the
Myths of the Divine Child and the Divine
Maiden. Kerenyi and Jung both furnished
commentaries to Paul Radin's The
Trickster: a Study in American Indian
Mythology, where Kerenyi saw the
Trickster figure as the "enemy of
boundaries." |
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Otherness
Inspires Creativity
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God of ecstasy
and terror, of wildness and of the most blessed
deliverance. -
Walter Otto |
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Dionysos was known
as a god of women, to the extent of being sneered at
as womanish. His whole existence, Otto writes, was
illuminated and crowned with the love of women |
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To become creative, however, the human mind has to
be “touched and inspired by a wonderful otherness.” |
At
the beginning, that is, at the center of all
religions, stands the appearance of a God. It is
only such a divine epiphany that gives meaning and
life to all primordial forms of religion. Rejecting
all the modern explanations of the origin of ritual
and myth, Otto writes:
“Let us finally be convinced
that it is foolish to trace what is most productive
back to the un-productive: to wishes, to anxieties,
to yearnings; that it is foolish to trace living
ideas, which first made rational thought possible,
back to rational processes; or the understanding of
the essential, which first gives purposeful
aspirations their scope and direction, to a concept
of utility” (Dionysus
., pp. 29-30). |
"Greeted with wild shouts of joy, the form in
which the truth appears is the frenzied,
all-engulfing torrent of life which wells up
from the depths that gave it birth. In the myth
and in the experience of those who have been
affected by this event, the appearance of
Dionysus brings with it nourishing intoxicating
waters that bubble up from the earth. Rocks
split open, and streams of water gush forth.
Everything that has been locked up is released." |
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For
Greek scholar Walter F. Otto, it is impossible to
understand Dionysos, except through madness. Madness is a
state of intense emotional overflowing, when our small
rational minds are swallowed up by a far greater thing - the
beautiful but terrible Mad God himself, Dionysos - and for a
brief moment, we see the world and ourselves as we truly
are. In this sublime state of ecstasy, when we feel our soul
to be touched by the hand of God, the most amazing things
are possible.
Otto's book is widely
considered the best on Dionysus, the Greek God of ecstasy,
mystery, and culture. Complete illustrations, notes,
and a rich index have made this book the standard reference
work in the field, as well as a profoundly moving experience
that carries the reader into participation with all things
Dionysian.
Walter Otto
Dionysus: Myth and Cult: explores the divine drama of
the deity and his various roles as conqueror, deliverer,
Lord of Souls, God of Wine and vegetative nature, his
special relationship with the Feminine.
Greek scholar, Walter Otto, brought out Dionysus in 1933.
Complete
illustrations, notes, and a rich index have made this book
the standard reference work in the field...."a profoundly
moving experience that carries the reader into participation
with all things Dionysian."
Also important: Walter F. Otto's Homeric Gods
(Pantheon, 1954)
walter f. Otto
on Google Book Search |
Main Page: Carnaval.com

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