The Great Pan is Dead

"Then Zeus, who had been just another of the Titans' children, became, alone, the beginning, the middle, and the end" (Calasso pg. 199). This is the sequence all stories must go. So far in class, we've covered beginnings and middles. Now comes the ends. This is best personified through the god Pan's death, which marked the end of the mythological world and the beginning of the religious one. However, hints of old myth carry over into the new ones. For example, it always begins with a bird and a woman. Leda and Zeus in the form of a swan, and the same story with Mary and God. Because of this corrolation, the Spiritismundi (Spirit of the World) has always will exist no matter what religious changes come to pass.

Nacirema

What is Nacriema? one may ask. It is American spelled backwards and it is part of a joke which lays out the ritual of bathroom activities. Today, we continued on with the topic of rituals, beginning with many fascinating traditions, including a retelling of an Austrailain rain- making ritual, trick- or- treating, and my own Indian ritual which involves dropping a baby from a fifty foot tower. We then went on to hear a lecture with the theme that if a ritual is done improperly, such as a burial or All Halllow's Eve, the entire order of the universe would be thrown out of balance.

The Book of the Dead

This last session, each member of the class got up and told of a certain ritual, whether of some culture or a personal one. A big one was the "entering manhood" rituals, which generally included a great deal of pain such as stabbing oneself. Another popular ritual was the ancient Egyptian mummification ritual (mummifying both the person and the pet cat). This included having one's organs taken out and placed in canopic jars, and the brain picked out through the nostrils. Ritualistic spells to help the deceased move on to the afterlife would then be spoke via the Book of the Dead, a text common througout many ancient cultures for the above purpose. As far as my Indian ritual goes, I didn't get a chance to tell it before time ran out, but I look forward to telling the story on Tuesday!

What is a Ritual?

A ritual is something done for the sake of something else. For example, there are numerous ancient fertility rituals. There are also rituals to help the dead into the afterlife. The ritual I plan on sharing on Thursday seeks to give young children good fortune. This is an Indian ritual in which a child (usually aged one or two) is dropped from a 50- foot tower to land on a sheet handled by several men. The child is then handed to his or her parents, and they are expected to live a good life. Apparently, surviving a fifty- foot drop means you have great luck on your side.

Goat Song

"A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation" (Calasso pg. 260).  In this lesson, we continued our talk on the Middle, this time focusing on the initiation aspect of it. We discussed the Fertility Rites: rituals performed in Spring, to help the harvest, a couple of examples of Calasso's rituals (such as the origin of tragedy-- dancing around in goat skins around a mangled corpse... doesn't get more tragic than that), and finished with a talk on ceremonies. The word comes from Ceres, which was the Roman name for Demeter, goddess of the harvest. As previously mentioned, there were many rituals performed to help the harvest grow with the assistance of the gods.

Patterns and Rituals

"Equality only comes into being through initiation" (Calasso pg. 250). A child only becomes equal to a man once he has proven himself through initiation. This is a ritual done over many generations. Rituals and patterns exist all throughout mythology. One of these pattern's is Lord Raglon's twenty- two points of a hero's life.

1. Hero's mother is a royal virgin;
2. His father is a king, and
3. Often a near relative of his mother, but
4. The circumstances of his conception are unusual, and
5. He is also reputed to be the son of a god.
6. At birth an attempt is made, usually by his father or his maternal grand father to kill him, but
7. he is spirited away, and
8. Reared by foster -parents in a far country.
9. We are told nothing of his childhood, but
10. On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future Kingdom.
11. After a victory over the king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast,
12. He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor and
13. And becomes king.
14. For a time he reigns uneventfully and
15. Prescribes laws, but
16. Later he loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects, and
17. Is driven from the throne and city, after which
18. He meets with a mysterious death,
19. Often at the top of a hill,
20. His children, if any do not succeed him.
21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless
22. He has one or more holy sepulchres.

Granted, heroes do not always follow this list to the "T". Even Superman only made it to point eleven: figting monsters and other assorted villains.

Finishing The Magus

"But this reprieve didn't last long. Even when they were white they terrified him, more than before maybe, and they never stopped following him" (Calasso pg. 191). This seems an accurate description of Nick's life in The Magus. No matter how much he escaped Conchis and his fellows, the older man appeared to have a constant presence, if only in Nick's mind. It was this that triggered the ultimate fallout between Nick and Alison. One could almost say the whole situation was akin to the days when every bad choice a person made was due to the presence of a god inside them.

All in all, the book was rather interesting.... and then I came to the end. I was warned, but it did not fail to infuriate me all the same. I may not have been willing to burn the book, but tossing it out my ten- story window and watching as it was run over by a truck, followed by dancing over its mangled remains would have sufficed.

The Magus and Ancient Greek

The last week, I have made it four- hundered pages into The Magus. I admit it had a bit of a slow start, but now I am quite perplexed. There are constant twists and turns. I'm not sure which of the characters are being deciteful and honest. I also noticed a certain correlation between this story and the tales of ancient Greece; namely that of sexuality. The body and its interactions with other bodies was such a big thing in ancient Greece, as well as the tales of full- grown men taking sexual advantage of boys. This was also implied in The Magus, when Nick was saying how the boys at his school offered a more tantalizing sexual vibe than the women. The difference was that Nick, unlike the ancient Greek gym teachers, did not follow up on this feeling.

In other news, we reviewed for our exam in class. Pieces from all the texts except The Magus will be fair game, though we were gratefully offered about sixty percent of it. Some of the subject matter ranges from Hesoid's Theogony to questions regarding first six chapters of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and questions such as which goddess was created from Ouranos's dismembered sexual organs (Aphrodite) and what does il lorro tempre mean. For future reference, it means "in the beginning".