| Myths of the Greeks & Romans Reimagined for the 21st century |
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"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." 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.
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The Need for an Ecstatic Vision of Human Consciousness |
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Ecstasy: Understanding
the Psychology of Joy
by R.A. Johnson
According to
Robert Johnson: |
This Page
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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.
"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."
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. |
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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
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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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). |
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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:
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 | |||||||||||||||
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"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. 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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NO FESTIVAL WITHOUT
THE DIVINE:|
Otherness
Inspires Creativity
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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: |
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