Mythopoetics

  The narrative tradition of India contains true gems of fantastic literature that give rise to the most entertaining ethical and metaphysical speculations. In the collection of stories from the 11th century Katha-Sarit-Sagara ( The Ocean that Contains Streams of Stories ), which collects traditional stories from India, the loquacious ghost of a corpse taken down from a gallows tells the king who took him off the macabre swing a very interesting tragicomic tale. Two friends undertook a pilgrimage to a sacred spa of the goddess Kali, and there they saw a beautiful girl. One of them fell ill with passion, stopped eating and sleeping, and was sure that he would die unless he could have that girl as his wife. His friend contacted her father and explained the situation. The father, hurriedly, went to the girl's parents in order to organize the wedding. Shortly after the hasty marriage, the young couple and her friend left for her parents' house. On the way, they ca...

  The narrative grew in the process of being told, as myths always do. The Blog has become more labyrinthine over the years. It contains my Mythopoetics book and a few other things. For those who access these texts without knowing anything about Mythopoetics, I am going to post the introduction of the first part, so you can decide if you want to spend your precious time thinking about the identity narratives that we humans have developed over the years. throughout our eventful existence as a species. "Mythological narratives are the only intellectual activity that has been continuously practiced by human beings, a fact that makes them a unique tool for thinking synthetically our evolution as homo-sapiens. In this sense, they are the first valuation settings that humans have made about themselves and their environment, and as such, they have conditioned the ones that have come afterwards, both in form and content. Their communicative function places them at the basis o...

The counter-cultural movements that flourished all around the world after 2008 represent a new instance of a very old paradox of political metaphysics: the defense of a private realm of rights within a social structure of stratification. The paradox is produced by the fact that it is precisely the structure of stratification that created the conditions of possibility for the genesis of the private realm represented by the social persona of the citizen, and such structure is not compatible with the implications of those rights. Nowadays, the 2020 Covid pandemic has reopened that very same scenario in a very dramatic way. The tension between the spheres of the individual citizen and those of the social group as a whole, the tension between a “res privata” and a “res publica”, is at the very base of the social structure. It is a tension that was perfectly treated and dealt with in the old Eleusinian mysteries and the ancient Greek Theater. The core of the tension is the individuation proc...

       The presentation that I have made up to this point of the symbolic constructions of human identity carried out throughout the past ages, has followed an evolutionist point of view as far as possible. Drawing from the richness of our turbulent past, I have tried to develop humanistic psychology that on the ground of philosophical anthropology follows the increasing complexity of our symbols and identity narratives. Starting from economic survival activities, humans have developed complex and fascinating symbolic buildings that determine our identity and that of the cosmos. By trying not to give transcendentalist interpretations, I have tried not to start constructing the building from the roof, but also, I have tried not to base our understanding of the cosmos on imaginal constructions that, although have their origin in genuine deep psychological tendencies, accumulate large quantities of sediment made of errors and ghosts. These can do more harm than good to ...

       La presentación que he hecho hasta aquí de las construcciones simbólicas de la identidad humana llevadas a cabo a lo largo de los tiempos, ha seguido en la medida de lo posible una interpretación evolucionista. A partir de la riqueza de nuestro turbulento pasado, he intentado desarrollar una psicología humanista que sobre el suelo de la antropología filosófica sigue la creciente complejificación de nuestros símbolos y narraciones de identidad. Partiendo de las actividades económicas de supervivencia, el humano ha desarrollado unos complejos y fascinantes edificios simbólicos que determinan nuestra identidad y la del cosmos. Al intentar no dar interpretaciones transcendentalistas he intentado no empezar a construir el edificio por el tejado, pero también, no fundamentar nuestra comprensión del cosmos en construcciones imaginales que aunque tienen su origen en genuinas tendencias psicológicas profundas, acumulan un largo sedimento de errores y fantasmas que pued...

  Modern democracies are not the government of the majority, but the government of any elite that controls the means of production and is capable of satisfying the emotional needs of the majority through a mythical- ritual axis that can be ratified in full electoral rituals   in which the subversion of order (at least as a possibility) is considered as a ceremonial principle. This principle, as we have already seen, has been in force since at least the plane of the King-God in Akitu . Obviously, the degree of anomie is reduced by the liminoid exposure of the risk in a controlled space-time . In postmodern democratic electoral campaigns , the liminoid critical opening functions as a justifying principle of the process, in which any center of power, public or private, is exposed to criticism and is held accountable. Democracy, as a narrative of the identity of human...

  Although the person of the human being serves as a fundamental narrative reference, it has not been the  most active economically in this mythical plane , a role that has corresponded to the legal person of commercial, industrial and financial companies, which we could group under the general term of  corporations  , a metaphor that suggests the formation of a physical body to which to attribute a set of economic activities. Of course, since corporations are groups of human beings, the actions of corporations are carried out by men, as is the case with collective social persons (tribes, villages, cities, states), but corporations are  more active  than other social persons from the moment they determine the economic order in a way that the individual subject cannot. Its modern legal origin occurs in the  fictional person,  which appears in the 13th century (in the ecclesiastica...

  The central person of the mythical plane of human law is the social person of the  human being , a complex narrative that is the evolutionary result of social persons of different mythical planes. As we understand it today in a text such as the   1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,  is the evolutionary result of the fusion of the person of the lyrical citizen -the narrative author of the emotional private sphere- with that of the cosmopolitan citizen of Hellenism (determined by the multicultural scenarios of natural law), as well as with elements of the transnational person of the Christian, based on a transmundane lineage common to all human beings, to which some components of the Enlightenment narrative have been added (especially those of the  Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen  that the French Revolution published in 1789) as wel...

  The psychology of the plane of Human Law, contemporary scientific psychology, continues to be incapable of creating integrated meaning for human life, nor of developing alternative narratives of immortality, a mythical-ritual space that is partly covered by monetary metaphysics , which finds in the old accounts of debt and guilt a perfect complement to their general transactional postulates. The revitalization produced follows more the cosmopolitan model of Hellenism, in which mysteries and private cults flourished, a slightly more lyrical dimension of the old metaphysical stories of immortality in which less personal forms of divinity are adopted, whether they are Platonic, pantheists, or A nima Mundi, more compatible with the degree of symbolic abstraction of scientific physical determinations, with which a partial harmonization is sought. However, such harmonization is only feasible at the price of schizophrenia...