Eschatology and Cosmogony

             12-3-2008, 95% of the Old City Centre in Venice was flooded.

In the fourth chapter of Myth and Reality we are told of several creation and armageddon stories. The thing is they happen every year on December 31, 11:59:59, which is amazing because they see the end of the world simply being a new beginning of a year. This may be how our worlds would be if people actually followed through on their New Year’s Resolution but we rarely do, or at least I fail quickly every year.

To me the image of numerous civilizations celebrating the coming of a new, improved year on earth, is one of an amazing festival dedicated to their specific gods. Since each civilization had a god for every damned thing, we know they were pouring lots of 40’s out to their homies in the sky. In  other words, they were getting intoxicated, yet staying somewhat sensible so they could perform their ritual dances and song around the Pirate Ship fire. They did this not to celebrate the destruction of an old world but simply because it had expired, most likely the emperor had too,but through this expiration a new world would be born, and likely had evolved just as we saw humans doing over a slow period. 

I found the most interesting part of the chapter to be about settlements in India who believed, “there is no final End of the World properly speaking; there are only periods of varying lengths between the annihilation of one Universe and the appearance of another” (p.63). This draws my attention because we often here of the world coming to an end because of sin or an overpowering evil. This seems to me, the world is annihilated as it was before, to create a new evolved earth; in this period of limbo the world is building itself up to come back stronger. This may be through an ice age or maybe even a period of global warming; through the eyes of an ancient civilization we believe that the creator will provide for us and create an ideal world for us to live in.

Dreamin'

                               John Howard Griffin during his experiment.

Dreams are an amazing part of our lives, not only when we are sleeping, but they fuel our drive to live. As we sleep our dreams are a form of our inner-conscious coming out of our mind whether we intended to or not. In a book I am reading for a class, Black Like Me, the author has a dream. I will put it in perspective for those of you who have not read the book by John Howard Griffin. He is a white man from Texas who decides to head to the deep South to find out what fuels the whites hatred of the Negroes. He takes medication (Oxsoralen),tans under an ultra violet light, and rubs a dye on his skin to make it appear as though he is black. One night when he is hitch hiking across Mississippi Griffin is picked up by a young black man who takes him home to his wife and six kids so he has a place to sleep...

“Mr. Griffin...Mr. Griffin”

I heard the man’s soft voice above my shouts. I awakened to see the kerosene lamp and beyond it my host’s troubled face.

“Are you alright?” he asked. In the surrounding darkness I sensed the tension. They lay silent, not snoring.

It was the same nightmare I had been having recently White men and women, their faces stern and heartless, closed in on me. The hate stare burned through me. I pressed back against a wall. I could expect no pity, no mercy. They approached slowly and I could not escape them. Twice before, I had awakened myself screaming.” p.116

He writes in his journal a few days later of a similar experience.

“I slept and woke up shouting from the old familiar nightmare of men and women closing in on me, shuffling toward me. I lay there fully dressed under the cell’s bare globe, trembling. I felt myself flush with embarrassment at having disturbed the Trappist silence. Surely monks sleeping in other cells,their bodies exhausted from work in the fields and hours of prayers, heard me and lay awake wondering.” p.138

It is from reality that Griffin has these thoughts but it is not until he is sleeping, peacefully that these night-terrors escape from his inner conscious. I personally do not dream much anymore, why I do not know, but I do miss it. The nights as a child when I would have nightmares made the connection to life much stronger, because to be truly living, a person must have fears, regardless of what they are. Dreams get people through tough times, it could be as Griffin explains of the nights he dreamt of his children when he was dealing with tough times in the South knowing he was doing something crucial for blacks around the world. 

As I was just posting, I read Ashley Arcel’s blog and noticed the quote she ended with by Dr. George Boeree, what stood out to me was, the very same thing she emphasized, “The experiences of love at first sight, of deja vu (the feeling that you've been here before), and the immediate recognition of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths, could all be understood as the sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality of the collective unconscious.” As Ashley pointed out this is exactly what we were talking about today but it offers an explanation for why we have felt specific ways before. Once I started thinking about this theory it starts seeming as though it has this Miss. Cleo feel to it and this brings up a night of drunken ramblings I had with one of my friends from high-school way-back-when. 

Her mother for a living is a spiritual connector (or whatever you prefer to call it) and this is how she makes her living. I never knew this until this night and was rather astonished because when I met her mom I did not think, “holy shit! I wonder if she can feel anybody attempting to stab me with their voodoo doll or something along those lines.” It was rather, “she strikes me as a homely mother.” As we sat there talking, or more likely stumbling as we smoke a “cigaweed” she tells me how she has some of the same feelings her mother has explained to her when she is around certain people. 

This gets me wondering about the connections people can have and how this may be due to the collective unconscious Jung’s theory revolves around. That this may be passed from generation to generation through parts of our DNA?! How fascinating this may be or this may be the fact I have been watching too much X-Files on Netflix and Mulder is standing on my right shoulder chanting his non-sense into my ear. It is when I release all “normal” cognition and allow myself to think like Mulder that I truly enjoy analyzing religion and theories that revolve around spiritual connections. 

                                                  Mulder and Skully

My first dream...

Is rather blurry due to my poor memory but it goes something like this. When I was young (four or five) there was not a day that went by when I did not dress up as some superhero. During this phase I was Super Man, it was during Halloween so you can’t hate too much, but I was dressed up as him for about a week straight jumping off of everything from my tree fort to the dinner table (never got caught). One night I was having a dream I was like Super Man flying through the air and next thing I know I was falling from my bunk bed in a Super Man stretch until BAM! I landed right on my stomach on the floor, probably burst out crying, and there was Super Man’s mom to comfort me until I passed out once again.

                                                         Supah Man

Maori Creation Myth

Ex Nihilo (translates to “Out of Nothing” in the Maorian language) is the creator of Ranginui (Sky Father) and Papatuanuku (Earth Mother). They come together in a “pro-creative” embrace and have numerous children born into darkness (use your imagination to where they may be...). One day the darkest of the children, Tumatauenga voices his opinion that they should murder Ranginui and Papatuanuku in hopes of seeing the light, but Tanemahuta opposes Tumatauenga in hopes they will be able to push their parents apart. All the siblings bicker back and forth unable to decide on what should be done, they decide Tawhirimatea should make the verdict.

                     Ranginui (Sky Father) and Papatuanuku (Earth Mother)

Tawhirimatea decides they should push the parents apart but no one is able to separate them. Until one day Tanemahuta places his shoulders against earth and his feet against the sky. Upon the slow separation Ranginui and Papatuanuku start to bleed and this becomes known as ochre (red clay) and is now the sacred color of the Maroi tribe.

                               This tree is representative of Tanemahuta

After the offspring have completely separated Sky Father and Earth Mother, Urutengangana offers the idea of creating women. They search high and low, on land and in the sea, and women are no where to be found! Tanemahuta decides to visit Papatuanuku and she tells him to search in Kura-Waka; upon visiting this area they find an element, which they dig up and give to Papatuanuku. Once she has the element, she mixes together a dough, and gives it back to her children. The elder siblings shape the body while the younger ones add flesh, fat, muscles and blood to the body. Tanemahuta breaths life into the body giving rise to Hine-Ahu-One, or what we know as today, women.

Ranginui misses Papatuanuku soooo much that he starts to cry, the children feel Papatuanuku should not see Ranginui like this. They come with a plot to rotate Papatuanuku to her back but she continues to roll, over and over; this becomes known as Hurihanga a Mataaho (rotation of earth). The drops from Ranginui’s tears naturally become what is believed to be rain.

Badabing badaboom and there is a story behind everything.

To start, I have not received my copy of The Golden Blough in the mail yet so I cannot satisfy you with a beautiful quote to start...my bad.

"When he- whichever god it was- arrayed that swarm, aligned, designed, allotted, made each part into a portion of a whole, then he, that earth mighht be symmetrical, first shaped its sides into a giant ball" (p.4, Metamorphoses of Ovid). This is the thing I like most about Greek/Roman and whatever other mythology is mixed into this book, there god is not the selfish God we so often hear about. Ovid's god creates the earth for the people to enjoy and accepts help creating the world from Jove, Augustus, and the numerous other gods we are introduced to through the first two books. I also enjoyed seeing this is where, Styx (the band) got there name from, on page 10 it reads, "I swear on the infernal streams that glide beneath the woods of Styx..." so they named themselves after a river of death, interesting. 

The Metamorphoses of Ovid is similar to the Bible in numerous ways, after all they are both tall-tales of creation. I enjoy the creation story told by Ovid more than Genesis, as I actually have read part of the Bible due to Dr. Sexson's high demand to attempt to read the entire Bible last fall for his Bible as Literature class. 

The story I enjoyed most was about Phaethon and Phoebus, in the story we learn a lot about how the earth was formed, and how mere-mortals are not capable of flying our god's chariots (especially ones that have gold rims, bling-bling). This story eventually tells us much more about life than creationism, something the Catholic Church could take a lesson in because when read as a guide on how to live, the Bible actually produces some good, strong, moral lessons but when taken word-by-word in context it creates more problems than were once imaginable. 

The story starts by Phoebus telling his son to not allow the wheels to veer too far right or too far to the left, to me it is as if it is a guide for people to not follow the straight and narrow path but to allow ourselves to veer to either side as long as we do not lose site of our original goal, because when the intended goal is lost all ambition is thrown to the wind. But then the four horses, Eous, Aethon, Pyrois, and Phlegon realize their master is not in control of the chariot and Phaethon has lost control of the ship and is at the mercy of the gods...This is because he has strayed from his comfort zone where he has no desire to be  and is the reason the serpent driven to the wild creating a world where, "he can see earth blaze upon all sides" (p.45). Inevitably proving the point of the gods to stay inside the set path and not to stray to far from this path or else our world will go up in a blaze of chaos.