10/27 Notes

10/27/11

The Great Pan- He was a half goat half man.  Great Pan is dead, the myths are gone, and the gods have all turned into a row of statues.  But in mythology, when one system ends, another one begins.  ‘It always starts with a woman and a swan.  Bird meets the woman and impregnates her.  She gives birth to Helen: the start of the Trojan War and the whole mythological world.  But Yates is right; another bird will come along and impregnate another woman. 

·      Mary is visited by a divine being in the form of the bird.  The Immaculate Conception.  Every 2000 years a bird impregnates a woman, but the problem is, those 2000 years have gone by.

·      We have now entered the third phase.  William Butler Yeats: ‘The Second Coming’

·       THE SECOND COMING

·           Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

·           Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

·           The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What B+D were saying: It is not the thing that is sacred; it is sacred if you believe it is sacred.  The strength of belief creates the thing.   

Holy Stone! Do not think that the stone is holy in itself; it is holy because it has been thought to be holy.  To the initiated, these are holy things. 

The world is charged with the Grandeur of God.  Gerard Manley Hopkins.  Gave MSU our motto and sprung rhythm. 

Myers Briggs personality test: Thinking, Intuition, Sensing, and Feeling

            -This is all boring stuff

Carl Jung: He gave us the psychological term introvert and extrovert; a follower of Sigmund Froyd. He was interested in typologies of mythology and fantasy.  Psychology: happened to be centered on the person of Psyche.  Eros abducts her and he takes her to this wonderful palace.  (Beauty and the Beast).  Almost all fairytales are about preparing young women for marriage and the wedding night.  Eros kicks her out because she looked at him and Eros abandons her; she is also with child.  Aphrodite gives her all these impossible tasks and some little animals help her (Cinderella).  She is sent down to the underworld to get some Cosmetics from Persephone.  She is put under, Eros gives her a kiss, brings her back to life, marries her… SO, Psyche means SOAL.  The story of Psyche is the story of the soul.  In Greek, the image of the soul is that of a butterfly.  What Plato will call a light-winged, holy-thing.  Psychology is the study of the soul.  The great stories came out of dreams and fantasies.  Jung gave us the four functions of stories.  We need to change the functions back into the stories from whence they came.  The mythological system is a total system where stories do all the work that psychology does today.  The stories are: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.  And these can be divided into Introverts (S+T) and Extroverts (F+I). 

Stories of thinking process: ZEUS-he thinks it through. UP.

Stories of Sensation: Athena, daughter of Zeus.  Concerned with cities: Athens. She is connected with the whole birth of the city Athens, and it is a grotesque story.  Ejaculation, Semen, Generation of snake-child, and that is how Athens was created.  Connected with the jury system.  OUT.

Stories of Intuition: The secret that goes on between mother and the maiden.  The Great secret of the Eleusinian mysteries. 

Dionysus: The feeling function.  Surrounded by women, stands for everything that is most, liquid, here today and gone tomorrow, mysterious, here today and gone tomorrow, and unspeakable.  Get in touch with your deepest bodily needs.  The whole function of Dionysus is to get you to stop thinking.  Have a drink.  Participate in something that is not you. 

Dionysus is the god of ecstasy:  Means to be out of your body.  She is with the god, god-possessed and enthusiastic.