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Post by Heron on May 7, 2009 19:43:04 GMT -1
Yes, we are in complete agreement actually! That was beautifully put. Not so sure about Frye though: he was no classicist, and Xenophanes' famous comments show that it was possible at least for a Greek to step out of the cultural 'way of seeing' or perceptual mode: "Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealings and adulteries and deceivings of one another" (Fr. 11; R. P. 99). Fr. 14: But mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are, and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form. (R. P. 100) Fr. 15: Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds. (R. P. ib.) Fr. 16: The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair. (R. P. 100 b.) He goes on to define God in a monotheistic way as an unmoved prime mover, doing everything by thought. No, Frye wasn't a Classicist and he applies those comments to the older books of the Old Testament and other near-eastern texts too. He has a scheme by which he calls that period 'Hieroglyphic'. By the time we get to the Greek philosophers he says we have arrived at the next phase the 'Hieratic' a process that is complete by the time of Plato (I think a generation after Xenophanes?). The final phase is 'Demotic'. He says that polytheism is the characteristic practice of the Hieroglyphic phase, monotheism of the Hieratic and atheism of the Demotic. All very schematic and structuralist, I know, but I was much influenced by Frye too long ago now to shake it off. I remember finding his reading of Blake inspirational.
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Post by megli on May 8, 2009 6:23:35 GMT -1
I like his 'Anatomy of Criticism' myself. In all these stages one can see the effect he had on Harold Bloom!
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Post by Adam on May 10, 2009 18:15:41 GMT -1
LOL! Going back to the issue in hand, what is the difference between gods-as-they-actually-are-in-themselves and gods-as-they-appear-in-our-minds? There might be no difference: there might be a huge difference. Gods might only exist in our minds, like figments; alternatively, there might be a whole host of 'real gods', real superbeings out there whom we simply do not perceive at all and who bear no relation to our ideas of gods. At the risk of dinking into 6th form philosophy, and replacing "as-they-appear-in-our-minds" with "as-we-experience-them", what is the difference between people-as-they-actually-are-in-themselves and people-as-we-experience-them? I've quoted this elsewhere before and I'll no doubt quote it again, but nobody quite summed up my own thinking as eloquently as Robert Anton Wilson. OK, maybe not a great philosopher in the minds of most, but I like and I'm only 46:-)
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Post by megli on May 10, 2009 23:10:49 GMT -1
yes, ish, though more 'yes' than 'ish'!!
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Post by redraven on Aug 15, 2009 20:13:39 GMT -1
Moved to separate Personal beief's section.
RR
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Post by Deleted on Sept 30, 2009 5:13:48 GMT -1
I don't mean to make an immediate bee-line for Theology having only just arrived on the forum but this is an exceedingly interesting thread. Wow, the Greeks really weren't the parent culture of modern logic for nothing. That being said, whatever the Classical credibility, or otherwise, of Northrop Frye I think there is something generally theologically compelling about this notion. What you said here Heron makes a great deal of sense to me:
"Epona, and her association with horses, then becomes not so much an article of faith as a mode of experience. I think this is different from faith or belief because it is not a willed experience. It is, to answer your final question, to 'think' gods not as nouns or verbs but both at once and not to separate either mode of perception from the other. The problem is not so much that it is difficult for us to do this (though it might be) but that we are trained to think analytically as the default mode of problem solving. We don't necessarily do this when we are in love, or engaging is pleasurable activities. So we don't have to be dominated by it. "
I think this difference between the modern Western mind and those of early animistic peoples can be sensed when reading the myths, legends and folklore of ancient cultures, especially when one first begins there is quite a distance there between our habitual way of thinking and the internal logic of myth. And I think implicitly we all accept this premise, at some level, that the ancestors saw things in a less divided way that most of us no longer can, that they didn't live in the logic centre of their brain in the 'hard-line around things' sort of way most do today and thus have great richness to impart to us. This would seem to me to be one of the reasons for all the research we do to try to pin down the facts of and then resurrect their religion. A way of being that does not so starkly separate between gods and spirits as nouns or verbs and allows for deity to become an experiential happening also fits well with my own experiences of ritual consciousness and trance states.
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Post by Heron on Sept 30, 2009 19:06:15 GMT -1
I think this difference between the modern Western mind and those of early animistic peoples can be sensed when reading the myths, legends and folklore of ancient cultures, especially when one first begins there is quite a distance there between our habitual way of thinking and the internal logic of myth. And I think implicitly we all accept this premise, at some level, that the ancestors saw things in a less divided way that most of us no longer can, that they didn't live in the logic centre of their brain in the 'hard-line around things' sort of way most do today and thus have great richness to impart to us. This would seem to me to be one of the reasons for all the research we do to try to pin down the facts of and then resurrect their religion. A way of being that does not so starkly separate between gods and spirits as nouns or verbs and allows for deity to become an experiential happening also fits well with my own experiences of ritual consciousness and trance states. Good to have this picked up Annua as I think we could avoid a lot of confusion about what we mean when we talk of gods (both generally and in particular) if we could have the discussion on the basis not just of who or what they are but in what sense their being is manifested in a relationship we have with them.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2009 1:19:51 GMT -1
To me this is the all-important aspect of 'having' gods at all. I think if we accept that premise, that a god can be both (or either in certain circumstances) a being and to us a 'way of being' we must imagine that what we lost in the loss of our gods was enormous. We may not have lost access to entire ways of being (though we may have) but we would have lost access to an immediate awareness of their sanctity. This I see as bound to lead to a devaluing of experience and I think that is well reflected in the habits of the secular society we see around us. I don't mean to suggest that the gods have no essential being, or at least no less than anyone else does, only that what we call 'gods' is an experience of, a manifestation of a relationship between us and them. And in that sense it doesn't matter so much if we have it all perfectly right; though I'm not at all adverse to good scholarship; what matters is the depth and profundity of that relationship and whether people are finding their way to that relationship and finding it fulfilling and transformative.
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