Tree hugging and other things

Thanks to my roommate who took this picture. Random tree near Sherrick hall, over by the duck pond. Yesterday in class we discussed that there are three parts to our story: a beginning, a middle, and an end. We were also asked to become three-year-olds again. Sounds easy enough to me. We spent much of the beginning of class discussing our assignment to find a creation story that we could present to the class. I already found mine, but I'm not sure how I'm going to present it yet. Thanks went out to Danielle for figuring out how to bookmark everyone else that is on blogspot. I have already added the blog list to this blog. We discussed that Calasso isn't easy to read, but he does give good food for thought. We discussed the tree hugging, and that daimons live in trees which are good spirits, similar to geni (who are liberated in some fashion). Daimons were alternate personalities/conciousense ( I can't spell very well), We discussed ate ( I'm not going to fight the system to get the accent marks for it, pronounced ah-tae). which means divine infatuation, or obsession. There was also a side about the word enthusiasm and what it's meaning is. We named the god and godess of desire (Aphrodite and Eros). There is also a line about suffering isn't necessarily a bad thing. We have all gone out of our minds (been possessed by the gods) at some point in our lives. Infatuation/suffering is how life is, we can't have grandeur without it. We briefly spoke of the first musical instrument (the lyre) and how it came to be (Hermes played some joke on Apollo, who got really angry, and Hermes created the lyre to placate Apollo). We were also told of why spiders are called arachnids (Arachne challenged Minerva to a weaving match, and won). We were asked to consider etiology-- how did it all begin?
As I forgot before, here is my The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony quote for this blog: Heraclesdeserves the compassion of the moderns, because he was one of the last victims of the Zodiac."p.63
I know, that's supposed to be at the top, but whatever, it's here today. The Zodiac, which do they mean? I assume that they mean the one that says my sign is Virgo because I was born on the 6th of September. I was amused by the reference to my astrological sign in Calasso. But how can one be a victim of the Zodiac? I'm not sure. I don't even have an idea really to throw out there. I like the question though. Was it something astrological? Did the stars really control Heracles' fate? There are many constellations out there, and I think Heracles (or the Roman spelling "Hercules") is one of them, but I am by no means certain of this. I shall continue to puzzle over how one can be a victim of the Zodiac. I know they don't mean the Zodiac Killer from whenever that was. I did a research project once on him for high school Psychology, but that was some time ago. An interesting use of the mythological term, perhaps he wasn't fully aware of what he was invokiing.