Our world
image is a cognitive-emotional construction based on the evaluations of that
which threatens our existence. Modern science is the final result of a process
of continuous rationality in which coexist inseparably integrated emotional and
logical elements. The very same process of investigation is the development of
the emotion of seeking, the resolutory anticipation of existential problems.
The myths of humanity gather this cognitive-emotional image of the world,
setting it in language and applying to it a social intersubjective content
which erroneously and inevitably is adopted as a goal. Neither the thing in itself has an
epistemological sense, as it was understood since the Kantian critique (it
would never be cognoscible if it did not maintain a minimum relation with the
subject), nor is emotionally relevant, unless it may be used as an exomorphic
narrative referent, as a social axiom. The world only exists in relation to the
social subject’s survival. Mythologies, whether those of the traditional
religions or the new materialists myths (which have dominated and dominate human
societies) are a good proof of that. For thousands of years, human beings have
lived with mythological constructions in which the world has been devaluated as
an illusion or as a temporary stage between other two stages which are more
stable. The survival of the community in other worlds, in netherworlds populated by ancestors and nirvanas in which the
biological needs are always satisfied, have determined the images that we have
formed of this one, and we have persisted in maintaining archaic
representations despite the fact that they were refuted long time ago by
experience. This heritage of mistakes does not seem to be easily renounceable.
Our myths
express a wide range of n-ary emotions, but their core is constituted by the
basic ones. The emotion of self-stimulation has been recognized, under the name
of desire, very early in mythology,
even though its range of action was not understood until the experimentation of
affective neuroscience. In the doctrines of the three souls of the
onto-theological tradition, the Platonic as well as that of the three gunas that we find in the Hindu Bhagavad-Ghita,[1] there is a distinction between the actions of an
intellective soul, of a passionate soul, and of a third soul which is called
vegetative. Each of these souls is in charge of different functions of the
organism, and the predominance of one or two over the rest determines the
personality. This model also applies to the social body, an organism which
needs these three different groups of organizational drive, and serves as a
metaphysical justification for the existence of castes or classes. Within this
metaphysical schema, an emotion consisting on the self-stimulation of the
organism in order to carry out its metabolic activities, would belong to two of
the three categories: to the passionate (rajas
in Hinduism) and to the vegetative or appetitive (tamas). Even though the valuation of the passionate aspect is more
favorable in the Greek case than in the Hindu, the appetitive or vegetative
aspect is in direct conflict with reason and must be tempered or abandoned in
favor of the intellective soul and the satvas.
To Plato, it will be the philosopher king who, through the intellect, will
accomplish this control over himself and over the city, whereas in Hinduism it
will be the priest or man of knowledge, defined as such for knowing this
doctrine. However, the system of seeking or self-stimulation, is not only at
the basis of the most instinctive impulses towards the search for food,
shelter, sex, etc., but it is linked also to learning, investigation, exploration,
and in its most stimulated versions,
to the so called spiritual quests,[2]
that is, it underlies all activities of the old doctrines of the soul.
Subsequent philosophical theories, even the most observational ones, like that
of Aristotle, were prone to an appetitive classification of this emotion, a
tendency that was maintained almost unaltered until William James.[3]
The emotion of self-stimulation, which in popular and artistic psychology has
been frequently called vitality, corresponds
with the concept developed by Nietzsche of will
to power. To Nietzsche, the will to power is already a form of knowledge
grounded on biology, on the need that the preservation of life imposes, a kind
of knowledge that generates valuations which favor survival.[4]
In fact, Nietzsche hoped to elaborate a unitary conception of psychology after
the concept of will to power, proclaiming
it as the primitive form of affection from which the others emerge.[5]
For its part, behaviorism, by being less prone to consider internal causes of
behavior, and in the absence of brain maps that would show the neural typology
of the emotions, had interpreted the evident impulse for searching shown by the
experimental animals as a mere function of the reward for a specific behavior.
Rage, for
its part, has deep roots in the religious and social world, where we find gods
of destruction and violence in all the mythologies of humanity, in polytheistic
as well as in monotheistic, to such an extent that if the criterion were to
exclude the human narratives that expressed some kind of rage, not a single
mythology would pass the requirement. With these we could include also
materialist mythologies, like that of Marxism, or the allegedly lay republics
that have flourished since the Enlightenment. We are a violent species, like
many others, and the development of deductive and metalinguistic abilities has
not diminished such tendency a bit: the destructive fury awaits its opportunity
at any liminal situation.[6]
Our violence is in fact associated with more than one emotion, is not only the
patrimony of rage. The invasive violence of a human community over another in
order to control its resources (to steal), would be a type of predatory
violence, linked to the emotion of seeking, whereas self-defense violence would
be linked to rage, and sexual male rivalry would correspond to action protocols
within this primary emotion. Communal human actions already entail a mixture of
primary emotions that make them, in principle, more complex, even though the
component of irate aggression is distinguishable as the means to maintain the
homeostatic social order.
Rage and
fear integrate a ubiquitous and central emotional tandem in theological myths
and in the emotional life of the individuals who live according to them. With
the exception of some myths of pre-urban communities, the relationship between
gods and men has always been mediated by these two emotions, to the extent that
it would be hard to imagine the religious experience without them. In the Greek
thinkers, we find a specific term to denote the emotion of religious fear, phriké,[7] which happens in the presence of the god. This fear
implicates an emotional preparation for catharsis, through which the emotion is
annulled into a psychological comprehension of a wider scope,[8]
into an n-ary emotional web. We find examples of this religious fear in the
theophany of Brahman to Arjun in the Bhagavad-Ghita, in which the god shows his
absolute shape, a form which contains all other individual forms whose
irresistible beauty is parallel to his destructive capacity, and is more than
what anyone can endure, for it can only be experienced as terror,[9]
or in the irate impulses of Yahweh, Allah, Indra, Marduk, Seth, Zeus, and many
others. Phriké is produced due to the
contrast between the limitation of the psychological individuality and the
unlimited extension of the notion of the divine and nature experienced in its
processes of change. Analogous to this vision is the one that the seer Tiresias
from Greek mythology has -who is blinded when he sees Athena bathing naked-,
and in general the majority of the visions of the divinity that in any
mythology the prophets and divine mediators have. The emotion of fear, by
working actively during learning, becomes, in its religious and mythological modulation,
a tremendously persuasive instrument for enculturation, and is to a great
extent responsible for the seriousness and solemnity achieved by our own
mythological tales compared to those of other cultures, for they are reinforced
by the power that the group exerts in order to maintain its integrity.
Myths
have been a traditional effective way to regulate the social relations that are
in one way or another linked with sex. They offer the acceptable moral models
and the relationships of kinship are protocolized in catalogues of emotions and
actions for the different moments of life. The sexual emotion has worked also
as a tool of knowledge, as an instrument to understand the world and give it
meaning. Probably, the epistemological dimension of the sexual emotion has been
responsible for the most successful generation of meaning for human life. Long
before the Modern science of the 17th Century saw mathematical
principles in the order of the universe, before we could explain the subatomic
randomness and that of genetic mutations, sexual emotions gave us an intuitive
image of the universe as a great womb. In Hindu mythology, Prakriti is kindled
by the sperm of the Purusha, and several mithologies see the universe as the
work of a Father or a Great Mother who create and take care of their eternally
infantile offspring. The meaning of life was sexual, reproductive, and violence
and toils, fears and frustrations were but moments of a cosmic scene
orchestrated around the family group and its extension, the village or city, a
scenario that was directed by this very same reproductive force. Sex as an epistemological
emotion has shaped the human world and the cosmos through myths, it has
contributed to provide us with the idea, useful but absurd, that the universe
has a meaning. Sex, and its associated emotions of mother care and the social
emotion, are projected over the universe and link its origin to human life, the
macrocosm follows the same principles of family group reproduction followed by
the microcosm. This animalization of the cosmos, that sacralizes and
universalizes life, allows the harmonization of the myths that narrate the
mythological determinations that account for the origins, and the myths in
which the economic determinations appear, those which organize the activity of
the group. When such a harmonization occurs we say that life makes sense at a
collective level. The meaning of life is, therefore, a concept conditioned by
representations of reproductive and social actions in general, and it has no
validity outside such a conditioning. Therefore, when from the perspectives of
physics -a discipline of modern science that is today the artificer of the
narratives about origins-, a voice is given to that which derives from the
cosmological theories of the present, being stated that the more comprehensible
the universe may seem the more without sense it may appear;[10]
there is no paradox expressed in such statement, but it is simply being
validated the phenomenon of the emotional content of meaning, independent, to a
certain degree, of the empirico-rational constructions that we make,
constructions which are linkable to the narratives of psychological identity
insofar as they may be translatable into social emotions. The meaning of the
universe is only a concept which is valid within a mythic emotional schema, because
the image of the universe over which we project sense or nonsense is a human
construction, something which does not diminish its empirical validity at the
level of the individual psychology. One of the most common forms for the meaning
of life is the one established by family and collective relationships. Thus,
the maternal emotion in mythology shows life as an amazing and self-contained
phenomenon, incomprehensible to itself. The ignorance of the biological processes
that lead to birth, and in general, that constitute the organism, makes of this
emotion the basis for the mythico-religious emotion of mystery. The mystery of
motherhood is identified with the mystery of life and of the universe. The
maternal emotion has been considered sacred in the mythologies of the Great
Mother, as attested by the Eleusinian mysteries, those of Isis, Cybele, or the
cult to Kali. Coupled with the sexual emotion, it constitutes the foundation
for the notion of meaning and the form of the first epistemological
representations about the origin of the universe, even though separately, the
maternal emotion has a dimension of its own. However, the scientific
understanding of life compromises the religious dimension of the maternal
emotion and of any other emotion: an injection of oxytocin in the ventral
tegmental area produces maternal behavior in an animal who seconds before did
not exhibit such a behavior, as well as drugs that block the
beta-norepinephrine receptors are capable of calming down a rage attack.[11]
Curiously enough, part of this sacred content of the unknown, thought as
mystery, has been inherited by modern science, which in its myths thinks that
is unveiling the true and only way of things. As an example, it suffices to
observe the inevitable metaphysical content of the models of the universe as a
totality with a beginning and an end.
In the
same way, the social or socio-organic emotion is responsible for the
sacralization of the group, whether in its democratic or in its aristocratic
structure, via the sacralization of the myth that contains the social identity.
The group, or the chosen people, or the glorious country, is the center of the
world, in that peculiar form of hypostasis that conforms the identity of the
community not only with its present members, but also with the ancestors and
those of the future. The expulsion from the group, the excommunication, the
exile, is worse than death, for it involves, besides this, oblivion, the total
disappearance and nothingness. The social emotion, in its negative aspect, is a
type of violence of abandonment similar to fear, whereas in its positive aspect
is the sacralization of the group, a process by which the limits of the
individual are extended beyond his life, into something indefinite but of his
own, which he feels as powerful and nourishing, divine. The emotion is
responsible for the development of the basic social bonds in conjunction with
the sexual and the maternal emotion, but the social emotion alone is sufficient,
since it has its own neural circuit, to encourage collective behaviors and
discourage individual adventures. Oxytocin is present in the sexual emotion
(during orgasm), but also in the maternal and in the social, that is, in the
group of the social emotions, and if it favors the formation and preservation
of this kind of memories, we can expect that myths will mainly gather memories
that are relevant to these emotions. This would partly explain the uniformity
of human mythologems, how the history of the group, in its most economic and
reproductive dimensions, focuses its attention and conditions its ontology and
epistemology.
For its
part, the emotion of play has a very important role in most mythologies, in the
representations of games and contests, as well as in the divine figures of the
playful and trickster god, like Hermes, Prometheus, Loki, Odin, Maui, Eshu
(Yoruba), the Coyote of the North American Crow,[12]
the raven, and others. Play and amusement, although not always compatible
amongst each other, are part of traditional narratives as didactic and
socializing motifs. In some cases, play is imbricated in the deepest values, as
it can be observed in the dice game that Yudhisthira plays in the Mahabharata, in which he bets and loses
against Duryodhana, his reign, his wife, his freedom and that of his brothers,
a passage in which the game of chance is related to the Vedic ritual for the
selection of a new king.[13]
Games as ritual, this time athletic, are present at the end of the Iliad for the distribution of Achilles’
weapons. In fact, besides the Pythic games that Apollo establishes at Delphi,
two of the most important heroes of Greek religion, Heracles and Theseus, are
associated with the institution of athletic games.[14]
In Mesoamerican religions, ball games obeyed ritual purposes perfectly
delimited, and not very different to those of the transformation of war into a
game that we see in Greece, turning the game into a symbolic war that serves
not only to channel violence or as a process of military training, but also as
a token of the political power capable of organizing spectacles. The field of
the ball game that the Zayua ruler Our Venerable Noble builds in order to
establish peace with his powerful neighbors, is made of emerald, ruby, diamond
and red quartz,[15]
which, besides providing the color symbology, supposes an spectacular display
of constructive energy, which in mythological terms would be exchangeable for
the concept of mana, or
economico-religious power of divine character. Circus games in the imperial
Rome were funded by the emperor or members of his family, and the competition
to organize the best spectacle had as a goal to gain the favor of the people by
entertaining them, and to show the grandeur of the ruling power, which contributed
to the strengthening of the bond that the social emotion provides, and
reaffirmed the identity of the community. In this sense, games fulfilled, in
part, the functions that the ritualized myth exerted in the different
festivals, ceremonies and religious rituals, complementing them as an added
element. The functions that in current societies sport events perform are not
very different from those of the mythological complementation that they once
had, although today they complement different rituals.
N-ary
emotions, in spite of their complexity, can be easily traced to the basic
emotions that originated them. The simplest semantic scenarios are
reinterpreted in processes of increasing symbolization, in the terms of the
emotional sublimation proposed by Freud,[16]
as well as in the production of symbolic structures with emergent elements
capable of inverting even the valuations of the simplest semantic scenarios, as
is the case of religious nihilism. Thus, for example, in literature, we can
trace the emotion of immortality up to the tale of Gilgamesh (2500-1500 B.Z.), although it does not seem to be an
unknown emotion to Paleolithic societies and in general to all those societies
that have practiced funerary rituals, hence, probably even present in other
hominid species. In any case, immortality such as it is understood in the Gilgamesh can be perfectly put in
relation with the immortality of later religions, inheritors of the old
Mesopotamian ones. In the myth of Gilgamesh,
the desire for immortality overcomes the hero after the death of his friend
Enkidu, when the fear of his own death overtakes him and he decides to enter
into the underworld in order to find the ancestor Utnapishtim, a human who
attained immortality, with the goal of acquiring the knowledge of his secret.[17]
We have the emotion of fear as trigger of the desire for eternal life, a fear
which anticipates a situation that has not been produced yet, which is
developed by induction from the observation of the death that overtakes all
living beings. This type of fear, which other mammals do not experience, for
they are not capable of anticipating their own death, appears when imagining
the loss of the individuation and the separation from the group, from the
everyday social life, by constructing a scenario in which all vital actions and
emotional bonds disappear. The loss of the individuation alone is not enough
for such a fear and pain to appear, for individuation is equally dissolved in
communal rites, and it is only in relation to others that life has meaning. The
socio-organic emotion is linked to the neural circuits of pain and stress, and
its dimension is basically negative. Most mythologies solved the problem of the
fear of death by imagining a later existence, more or less blissful, in which the
group continues and the relationships are maintained. There are no tales of
immortality in which the deceased follows a completely isolated existence, like
a blissful and lonely monad. With the fear of death, is anticipated the
frustration of the rest of emotions, which produces rage, as the Gilgamesh illustrates. The anticipation
of the negation of the emotional contents that constitute the individual
activates the search for immortality, although this time the emotional system
focuses its will to power over a non-existent object. Without the figure of the
gods, the emotion experienced by Gilgamesh
is not possible. The fear he feels is not simply for dying or disappearing,
in a universe where every living being disappears, but because the contrast
with the possibility of not dying, as it happens with the gods, and the
uncertainty of a pseudo life beyond, over which he is not in control, enlivens
a more complex fear in which the perspective of a prolonged frustration,
semi-conscious, modulates the rest of the basic emotions. Nevertheless, it is
not enough to be able to form representations of immortality like that of the
gods in order to achieve the idea of immortality, just as it happens to Gilgamesh –who does not attain his
purpose. It becomes necessary an intermediary representation that may
agglutinate human and animal life, and also such a representation will have to
be understood as something that prevails beyond the individual creations and
destructions, being able to link human nature with the gods in a positive
manner. Such an idea never had a constant shape in mythological development. It
started by being something indefinite, common to all living beings and things,
an anima mundi, to later be
transformed into the figure of the gods, pressured by forces of social origin,
and even later, under the influence of other economic actions, into an absolute
universal principle. In the case of the Gilgamesh,
we find ourselves at the time of the divine representations –through which
we shaped our identity and that of the universe- in which the link with the
divine did not have the positive content that may have allowed the human being
to become immortal, a limitation that must be understood in terms of social
order, as can be observed in the vulgarization of immortality that will take
place in the mysteries of Osiris in Egypt.[18]
In allegorical terms: Gilgamesh is not able to withdraw from sleeping –as the
gods demand in order to be like them-, he is not able to surmount the limits of
his own physiological individuality, and he never will, for the immortality of
the gods is of a symbolical degree, is the immortality of language, the mythic
narrative itself.
The
emotion of immortality is not a positive emotion, in the sense that nobody has
that experience and could never have it, for one’s own life is only experienced
at a given moment. If I could live for thousands of millions of years (or an
unlimited sequence of them) I could only say that I live in each of those
moments, but never that I am immortal. It is an imaginary projection that takes
the shape of a specific belief, but its foundation is the impulse to live that
we find in the neural dopamine circuits, and in even simpler semantic scenarios,
in the replicative ability of the DNA. What we can experience from life is the
emotion of the faith in immortality, that is, we experience faith, and in the
same manner, when we do not have such a belief, what we experience is not
mortality but a mere projection of our emotions enculturated through some
specific myths. The shape that the secondary emotion takes (or the n-ary in
general) depends on the myth in which it has been elaborated. The emotion of
eternity that the concept of reincarnation incites, or the eternity of a
torture in some underworld created by a crazy priest of feverish and perverse
imagination, is very different to the limbo of the Hades where the days and
years are hardly distinguishable one from the other, or the eternity for Muslim
males in the arms of the houris. In some cases, we have projected sex over the
emotion of immortality, in others, rage and pain, in some others, like the
Valhalla, play and camaraderie amongst warriors, and in many cases, simply the
social emotions of the group and progeny: an emotion of oxytocin and endorphin
wellbeing in which we live without effort and pain. The desire for eternal
life, the will to power accompanying life, the destabilizing impulse that
continuously seeks homeostasis, to later be destabilized again and continue
with a new balance, that never-ending cellular process in which
self-replicating proteins have been passed on for almost four thousand million
years, is elaborated in an n-ary
manner into an emotion which is hardly identified as such. It is hard for us to
think that our beliefs are emotions, that something so contingent may sustain
the edifice of our personality and our society, that something as apparently
sophisticated and complex as our longing for immortality may be the result of
iterations of relatively simple animal actions. However, emotions are as
contingent or as necessary as life may be, they are not something apart from
it.
The
developments that the emotion of immortality has had since writing have
crystalized in the systems of values of the great religions as its more complex
form, for the development of the most recent scientific and meta-symbolic myths
has been incapable of elaborating psychological images of eternity with social
and individual relevance. In these religions, immortality is conditioned to the
behavior in life in relation to others, and the degrees of bliss, from the
Hindu ananda to the Buddhist nirvana, through the paradises of
Christianism or Islam, or the infernos of torment, are not distinguishable from
the physiological ecstasies or tortures that we experience in life. With the
development of writing, immortality gradually mingled with the emotion of love.
The eternity of the blessed is imagined like that of lovers, and the desire for
eternity (the dopaminic search without object) finds its image in the beloved.
An interesting transformation of the desiring emotion of love is the one
produced when the person who is the object of love is substituted by an
imaginary person, even by an ideal, like that of the concept of beauty. We find antecedents in Egypt
around the 1300 B.Z., in the writings in which these emotions are expressed,[19]
as it will later appear in the Solomonic Song
of Songs, or in the Chinese erotic poetry of the Classic of Poetry (1000-600 B.Z.),[20]
or in the verses of Sappho of Lesbos and some other Greek poets, and later in
sufi poetry and the troubadours, where the mimetic image of the divine is
superimposed over the human image of the beloved. The beloved is a symbol of
another symbol, the entire nature, which is understood as an Eternal Feminine in which the poet seeks
his own image and wonders.[21]
The first images of immortality, like the ones we find in the Mesopotamian and
Egyptian religions, had simply imagined a continuity of life: gods and
immortals continue doing what they did in life, eat, fight, generate gods,
etc., but the merging of immortality with love, a union in which all basic
emotions concur, makes of the afterlife an ineffable ecstasy. The emotion of
love consists of a collection of different n-ary emotions, depending on which
of the basic emotions intervenes more, that of sex, of maternity or the
socio-organic. It concerns, then, the social emotions which include behaviors
of attraction, protection, solidarity, and similar others, which allow the
formation and maintenance of human collectives, that is, love implies a desire
for permanence, an enamored immortality. Let us take, for example, the so
called New Law of the Christian Gospel, which
reduces the Mosaic Law to a double moral code of love for God and for thy
neighbors. The love for God within Christianity is an n-ary emotion composed of
a parent-child emotional web and a desire for an eternal life of joy and bliss.
For its part, the love for others, for thy neighbors, is the fusion of the
group’s emotions under the idea of brotherhood. We can say that the New Law is
an emotional web of love and desire for immortality in a blissful brotherhood
governed by a father.
Emotions have not only made language possible,
providing the content for animal communications, but they are protolanguages
per se, and later on, languages with full rights which are established on
evolutionary syntaxes, ever more complex in the narrative action. The narrative
action, the imaginative construction of non-present spatio-temporal scenarios,
with all its associated objects and emotions, transformed emotions into
different symbolic objects which the manipulation of writing, not limited by
the blackboard memory, transformed with a much wider scope than the initially
physiological one, although always linked to it. Maternal love has developed
until becoming a religious emotion gathered in the religions of the Great
Mother (and its survival in the Christianity and the Hinduism), in which the
reproductive process and the caring for the offspring is invested with numinous
content, and is a symbol of order and purpose of the universe. Myths generate
their symbolic objects, and for a moment –which can last the entire existence
of a human community- we find ourselves outside the biological world, in a
human world built upon ideas that seem to apply an accelerated exaptation to the neural systems and to
turn them into something else. The emotion of the archaic myths and its
subsequent development in the great religions has been taken even further, to
the meta-literary and meta-symbolic analysis, in which the old myths are
contrasted with each other and with different branches of knowledge, like
psychology, anthropology, linguistics and the life sciences, in an n-ary
narrative of continuous rationality that constitutes a general image of
identity of the human being.
[1] See Plato, Republic.
435 and s.q. and Bhagavad Ghita. Chapt.
14. In the ethical works of Aristotle it appears as one of the passions under
the name of orexis.
[2] Panksepp suggests a link of the system, mediated with
the cortex, to religious and mystical experiences, and the derived conclusions
of such states. In Affective
Neuroscience. Ed. Cit. p.145.
[3] The Principles
of Psychology. Vol.II. Ed. Cit. p.p.472-473. However,
in James there is not a sufficiently clear understanding of instincts or
emotions so as to enable us to understand from his theory the fundamental
importance that this system has for the behavior of the organism. In part,
because of the limitations of the experimental science of the epoch, but also
due to his own ontological assumptions surrounding will and free will, James
sustained that there are no special emotional centers for emotion in the brain,
but they correspond with the cortical sensory-motor centers, that is, an
additional cortical processing transforms the perceived objects into emotional
objects.
[4] See Friedrich Nietzsche. The Will to Power. Book Three: Principles
of a New Evaluation. p.p.261-324.
[5] Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche. Theory of the Will to Power and Values. #688. The Will to Power. Ed. Cit. p.366.
[6] In this sense, contemporary theses, like those of
Pinker, which affirm that statistically we
are much more peaceful now than in the past, something which does not imply
that we are not violent, present a self-complacent view of social reality that
makes a meager favor to the possibilities of improvement, trivializing the
numbers of victims of the world wars and the genocides of the 20th
and 21st Centuries. See the book of Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why
Violence has Declined? Viking. Penguin Group. New York. 2011.
[7] See Plato. Phaedo.
251 a. Ed. Cit. p.497. And also Aristotle, On
the Soul. 3.5.
[8] See Thomas Gould. The
Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy. Princeton University Press.
Princeton, NJ. 1991. p.p.55-62.
[9] “Tell me who Thou art with form so terrible.
Salutations to Thee, O Thou Great Godhead, have mercy.” 11.31. In A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Edited
by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore. Princeton
University Press. Princeton. 1989. p.140.
[10] Cf. Steven
Weinberg. Los Tres Primeros Minutos del
Universo. Alianza Editorial. Madrid. 1989. p.132.
[11] See Panksepp, Affective
Neuroscience. Ed. Cit. p.p.202 and 253.
[12] And also the Karuk, the Winnebago, and others.
[13] Cf. J.A.B. van
Buitenen. Introduction to the Book of the Assembly Hall. The Mahabharata. The University of Chicago press. Volume 2. Chicago.
1981. p.p.27-28. That the decision of such an issue may be left to the dice,
makes plenty of sense in the cases in which the contenders present equal
strength and merits in order to be elected as the dominant dynasty. Of we also
consider, as the Rigveda considers
(Mandala 1.41.9.), that it is the divinity who has the four dice of destiny in hand,
such election is equivalent to a traditional divinatory process.
[14] Heracles with the Olympic games, and Theseus with the
Isthmic games at Corinth.
[15] See the purpose of the ruler Our Venerable Noble in: Alfredo López Austin, and Leonardo López
Luján. The Myth and Reality of Zuyúa. In
Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage.
Edited by David Carrasco et al. University Press of Colorado. Boulder. 2000.
p.45.
[16] Freud maintains this idea only for the sexual
emotion, and its redirection towards social emotions. See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion: Civilization and
its Discontents. Pacific Publishing Studio. Seattle (Washington) 2010.
[17] See Gilgamesh in
The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Volume A. W.W. Sarah Lawall and Maynard Mack (eds.). Norton & Company.
New York. 2002. p.p.10-41.
[18] This issue will be discussed in Mythopoetics. The Symbolic Construction of Human Identity. Volume III:
Mythico-Ritual Axes. Oscar E. Muñoz. Mandala Ediciones. Madrid. (Not yet released in its English translation).
(See also Complete Spanish Edition: Mitopoética.
La Construcción Simbólica de la
Identidad Humana. Mandala
Ediciones. Madrid. 2013.)
[19] In these poems are gathered the loving emotions of
men and women which are almost identical to the ones expressed in any
subsequent literature, even in one of the songs, My love is one and only, without peer, there are sacred
connotations in the treatment of the beloved. See Ancient Egyptian Poetry. Love Songs. In The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Volume A. Ed. Cit. p.49.
[20] Poems which gather everyday life themes of the Chou
period.
[21] Cf. Charles
Mela. Le Beau Tronné. Etudes de theorie
et de critique litteraires sur l’art des trouveurs au Mogen Age. Paradigme
Ed. Caen 1993. p.214, in the essay: Le
Miroir Perrilleux on l’alchimie de la Rose.
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