Mythopoetics

The concept of anima mundi gave the first general epistemological frame to human beings. The world appeared as a representation thanks to the unified image of experience that it allowed, putting a reference frame for our actions. Nevertheless, the concept is loaded with a full set of contradictions, something obvious in the study of the myths of the cold societies. These paradoxes have been overlooked in the construction of the immortality myths of both the plane of the King-God and the universal law, and are responsible not only for misunderstandings about the narratives of the individual but also of all sorts of manipulations and narratives of domination. Here I just mention a few aporiae. In the myths of the anima mundi plane, the soul is a common principle to living and not living beings. In this sense, therefore, is either a property of everything or we can say that everything is soul. If the first case, i.e., the soul is a property, we are implying that there is something el...

  Let me insist on the scope of the concept of individuation , for it is fundamental to understand the structure of myth.  In Agamemnon , Aeschilus expresses, paradoxically, what is probably the first register of the social context of the phenomenon of individuation: I have my own mind, separated from the others . [1] The fact that we understand what he is saying is a proof of its falsity, for an isolated mind could not make itself understood.          1. I cannot think or express my individuation without a language.           2. Languages are group constructions, never individual.                 Therefore, I cannot think or express my individuation with individual terms.                 But when I think or express my individuation, the group does not articulate my voice. The paradox is solved if we understand that identities ...

   In traditional African thinking, time doesn’t move forward, towards a climax or an end of the world, but it rather falls back into the pool of memory. There are two categories of time, Sasa and Zamani, Swahili words for the designation of what seems to be the present and the past. On a closer look, Zamani includes its own past, present and future, so we oversimplify calling it the past. Time moves from Sasa to Zamani, from the present moment of vital experience, to a kind of macrotime of mythical experience, self-contained more than strictly cyclical. Sasa is a lineal microtime based on the experience of economic activities, while Zamani is the narrative time where meaning is created. One could say that the weight of Zamani annihilates Sasa, or better, that Sasa is a mere security buffer where the unpredictability of vital experience is differed until is valuated and interpreted. Myth functions in its more basic levels as a homeostatic force for the individual and the grou...

Carl Kerenyi used the term to designate the common elements in myths belonging to different traditions, like the tales of the Sacred Child, the descent of the hero to the underworld, the marriage of the King-God to the Earth Goddess, and so on. The first question which spontaneously rises is: how can this be? The easiest answer is, well, someone copied it, or it was forced upon on a conquest. Then objections rise: how do we explain that cultures like the Maya and the Egyptian, for instance, have a similar mythologem for the creation of the world through the word of a divine figure, with apparently no cultural contact? At this point, different kinds of transcendentalisms come to the answer. Putting aside extravagant modern speculations of the New Age, like the so-called theory of the ancient astronauts, we are faced with the traditional ontotheologies. They quickly answer that the common element is the existence of a transcendental realm in which human history has its fram...

   If the social persona is a mythical construction of the group, our individuation is a social narrative constructed with some of the personae developed in the economic actions, either of the present or the past. There is no free will  because our psychological will, linked to the basic emotion of vitality (the dopamine system that is in charge of stimulating the individual in its search for whatever is needed to survive), is just like the will of others, a will to power. This does not mean that I cannot choose among different things, but the person who chooses is not more an individual than the narratives that he or she identifies as himself or herself, and choice is always conditioned by basic emotions and their complexification in the mythical actions. Nowadays, the concept of freedom has basically meaning in juridical terms, as a narrative that maximizes the diversity of a group, and therefore, its power for survival. However, few forces are as important to human d...

 Affective neuroscience postulates a neural circuit for the regulation of the mammal emotion of the social bond. [1] Curiously, this circuit is located in the same cerebral areas where the sexual and the maternal emotions are located, and near also to the processing areas of pain. This circuit is responsible for the distress that mammals suffer from separation (especially in the young ones), but its positive function is related to the experience of pleasure in bonding. The process is mediated by endorphins and oxytocin, like in the maternal emotional system, i.e., is a pleasurable experience. Oxytocin is relevant to the formation of group memories [2] , and therefore, to the creation of myths. We are biologically conditioned to be social, as was pointed out by Aristotle in a famous passage of his Politics . In this sense, social media feed upon our needs. They give endorphins and make us addicted to our own opioids and sexual neurotransmitters. But this is not new, is what t...

La semántica mitológica tiene una clara composición metafórica, aspecto que llama la atención desde el punto de vista de los lenguajes filosófico y científico, que buscan la precisión formalizando y protocolizando sus elementos. Sin embargo, si el examen se hace desde la valoración del Lebenswelt, desde el acervo de saber acrítico de una comunidad, que se expresa en todo tipo de imágenes, paralelismos, sustituciones y alegorías, el contenido metafórico es algo común y ordinario. Decir que el mito es metafórico no es caracterizarlo por una diferencia específica: los lenguajes naturales humanos también lo son. Partiendo de esta observación, Ernst Cassirer postuló que mito y lengua han seguido una misma evolución debido a que comparten una misma raíz, el pensamiento metafórico, es más, redujo la caracterización del mito a la dilucidación de una cuestión teórica: determinar si es el habla la que genera el mito debido a su naturaleza original metafórica, como proponía Max Mü...

As it is well known, ἱστoρἱα   means investigation , and presupposes notions such as historical fact and necessary sequence of facts , which are also implied in traditional myth. When we deal with the question of origins, a sequence of facts has a first member which is final or literal, (exomorphical in our notation) say, a creator god, a Demiurgos (or any representation that we choose to be final, beyond which we cannot go). The sequence of facts that form our narrative of how the Demiurgos created the world is not homogeneous, for the necessity of passing from fact 1 to fact 2, is of a different character than the rest of the sequence. The actions of a supposed divinity are not of the same ontological, epistemological, or praxiological order than the human ones, so they do not belong to a critical historical investigation, which needs homogeneous sequences in order to make meaningful narratives. The notion of a sacred history , in the sense of a history as a divine plan, is con...

Myths contain exomorphisms, which determine the limit conditions, the fundamental ontological representations, as well as endomorphisms which develop them in narratives and connect the liminal representations to the everyday acritic knowledge of the community, the Lebenswelt. By mythologization we have described the sequences of exomorphisms and/or endomorphisms, and we have characterized myths by this linguistic action, but there is another linguistic process inverse to mythologization which completes its operations: divinization. Mythologization rendered familiar the unknown. Divinization renders unknown the familiar. The process is specially clear in the social persona of the ancestor, although it can be extended to objects or to the world at large. As time passes, the persona of the ancestor becomes less and less familiar. In the cases where the particular ancestor made a strong imprint in the memory of the group, by means of a successful civilizing action (Maui, Prometheus, Cecro...

   According to Herder, language is a register of the evolution of the human soul, and due to the fact that our first innerization of the world was theological, our dictionaries are pantheons. [1] Let’s put aside for the moment the theological part of the argument, for theological myths are later elaborations of myths of the anima mundi , whose main figure is not the god, but the ancestor, and translate the idea to the theory of morphisms. 1    1.     Our first exomorphisms were in the symbolic spheres of the ancestors, gods and the supernatural. 2    2.   Those exomorphisms were endomorphized, rendered familiar through the use of metaphors. With the example of the eye of Ra.  The sun is exomorphic, belongs to the realm of literal representations of the god Ra, but is vitalized through the metaphor of the eye, and comes closer to our vital experience. Exomorphisms must have a minimal endomorphic connection in order to be refere...

The representations which are the building blocks of a myth can be literal (or final), or a metaphor, i.e., a chain of representations linked to basic cultural referents (those linked to basic emotions). Let’s call exomorphic to the first type and endomorphic to the second. Exomorphic representations or exomorphisms are final ontological declarations, limits for our thinking that function as referents for the linguistic constructions of our communication. Endomorphisms, on the other hand, are familiar renderings of exomorphisms, as well as rendering of other endomorphisms. Exomorphisms change through time, what today is final and literal tomorrow will be a metaphor. With an example. In Egiptian mythology, the sun was called the eye of Ra , and the devotee took it at its face value, literally: Ra sees the world and humans through the sun. For us today is a metaphor, for we have other representations that explain the sun, that endomorphize it, though the representations of particle p...

  De manera provisional, adoptaré las tesis de Durkheim y Habermas que definen el mito a partir de su funcionalidad comunicativa como narraciones fundadoras de la identidad social. Los mitos son acciones comunicativas humanas, y su comprensión supone la elucidación de la funcionalidad del lenguaje humano, aclaración que a su vez remite a algunos otros temas relacionados. Desde una perspectiva antropológica, la problemática sobre el origen del lenguaje requiere una aproximación psicobiológica que incluya un análisis del proceso de comunicación animal y no una mera discusión metafísica, ya sea hecha esta desde los supuestos de alguna ontoteología o de la psicología racional 1 que utilizó la filosofía hasta el siglo XIX. No obstante, considero relevante hacer un boceto, aunque sea rápido, de las tesis más importantes que sobre la relación entre mito y lenguaje se han pensado, ya que ayudará a perfilar mejor la posterior teoría psicolingüística, además de mostrarnos l...

    Does History fulfil today the social function of identity creation which in the past was accomplished by mythology (religious mythology included), as Lévi-Strauss [1] thought? If we observe the relationship between political identity and literary and artistic myths of the 19 th Century in Europe we obtain a few relevant examples to give an answer to this question. In the 19 th Century, with the upsurge of European Nationalisms, history covered to a great extent the gap left by Christian mythology after its collapse due to the subsequent development of positive science and the triumph of the Industrial Revolution. The revitalization of the great national poems and the writing of new ones along the 19 th Century in most of Europe, shows a relatively recent example of exclusively endomorphic mythologization, in which new national identities are invented through a process of linguistic fusion of elements of pre-Christian mythology with historical science. We observe h...