Emotionality and Rationality of Myths

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 17^th 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.

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[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 20^th and 21^st 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.