Mythology day 4

"'So men love women even when they are made out of stone'" p. 83
I had some things I needed to do for another class I'm in, so I was about 20 minutes late for class yesterday. Not proud of it, but things had to get done. I came into class about where we were talking about Plato, and in illo tempare- in the beginning. The discussion then went to Plato's idea of anamnesis which is inate knowledge. The theory essentially states that we are born knowing everything we need to know, and that we have simply forgotten it. Making the teacher's duty to remind students of how things work. We briefly touched on the idea of nurture- babies are blank slates whose lives are influenced by everything around them. Most psychologist believe in a mixture of nature (anamnesis) and nurture. That is why we don't know exactly the same amount of knowledge. Our environment (nurture aspect) will influence what innate knowledge that you can retrieve. Or at least that's how I understand things to work currently in the world of child psychology. We told the tale of the myth of the cave, which is attributed to Plato. People are chained in a cave so that they can't turn around, and then see shadows before them. It's people behind them that they can't see, and one person figures it out, but gets killed by the other people for stating this theory. The suggestion that the world isn't real, is a big philosophical point for Plato. However, this story also shows humanity's xenophobia. We fear that which is new, that which is different. These people kill someone, simply because they can't make the same leap in logic as the other person. There was mention of an idea stating that our immortal souls flew with wings that became too heavy and we fell into the human condition. When things like love find us, we start to grow our wings back, and that is why our shoulders itch when we see someone we like. We repeatedly mentioned a tribe somewhere (I think initially this story was told before I got there), and how they urinate. The men urinate in the same fashion that their mythology dictates their gods urniated after creating the world. We spoke of the
Babylonian creation story, where Marduk killed his grandmother, Tiamot, and cuts her in half, taking one half to make the dome of the sky, and the other to make the bowl of the earth. We spoke about what will be on the test, next Thursday. We need to know Homer, Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, and classic dramatists. The classical dramatists being: Euripides, Aeschyles, and Sophocles. These three were under mandate from the government to write dramas about mythology. At the centers of these dramas was sparagmos, which means tragedy. Tragedy started with the mutilation of a goat, and they weren't allowed to talk about current (for them) events. We nearly told the whole story of the play Oedipus Rex. I don't know if we'll get the chance to finish it because we are doing our creation story readings on Tuesday, and then the test on Thursday. We also took apart the word "apocalypse" and explained that it's meaning truly is "to take off the veil", and see the world as it really is.
That took longer than I had expected. We also talked about quite a bit of stuff, I took quite a few notes for having come in about 20 minutes late. I had basically just read the quote abouve before putting it on here. It would appear to be a parable about friends arguing over sexual desires. For as I thought, there is much unnecessary sex in there, but not as explicit as I feared at the beginning of the book. Calasso is really too confusing to have much explicit stuff in there. There are major hints to what I can only describe as homosexuality, or the ancient Greeks were all pedophiles. I only refer to those two things because there is much mentioning of adult men getting it on with young boys. This comment was made after a story was told to three men explaining a stain on a statue of Aphrodite. A young man had spent the night alone with that statue, and apparently had his way with it for he was madly in love with Aphrodite. He has never been seen again according to the story. So the one friend states the quote above, and the other states that the same stain proves his point about young boys being better for that activity. The second man points out that the stain is in the back of the statue, meaning some crazy young Greek man had anal sex with a statue. He stated that the statue was taken like a young boy, so it wasn't quite how I just put it. I thought it interesting that some people fail to see clues that are right in from of them. People do crazy things when they are in love, no matter how they are oriented sexually. Sometimes, it leads to anal sex with statues of Aphrodite, other times it leads to less publicly embarassing things, like writing love poetry.