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

       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 pueden hacer más daño q

  Totems are emblems of identity in human groups that bring together narratives of economic and primitive determination and interact in a hierarchical way to form mythical-ritual structures. Most of the totems have names of animals or plants, the rest being climatological, or the seasons, orography, or celestial names. In addition to the identity function, the totem system allows a fairly complex ordering of social relationships that avoids, through a system of membership rules, perfectly intuitively understandable, incest and systems of links that are too genetically close. The totem system can be understood as an extension of general social persons (i.e. social masks) to larger communities, a system that ab initio incorporates the concept of the Anima mask as a link with the rest of living beings and ancestors, which supposes that it is a further development of a simpler form of organization. A society governed by this system makes explicit a range of masks that the same

 In anthropological terms, we can speak of four great narrative periods according to the symbolic complexity of communications: the Anima Mundi plane, that of the King-God, that of Universal Law, and that of Human Law.  The mythical plane of the anima mundi, which begins with the Middle-Upper Paleolithic, is made up of the narratives of the so-called cold societies, linked to hunter-gatherer economies. In the Neolithic, the narrative plane of the King-God arises with the narratives of the harvest and the myths of the city. For its part, the plane of Universal Law, which begins with the progressive independence of the law with respect to the figure of the King-God, arises after the 16th century BC, approximately after the Hycso interregnum in Egypt, and is made up of the narratives of the state religions that reify an objective order of the universe, from which the transcendentalist narratives of the first philosophy will be derived. Finally, the narrative plane of Human Law, which begi

  The history of ontology, known under the unfortunate name of  "metaphysics", has become an annoying witness to the evolution of philosophical thought, since it is a written document not only of the simplicities of our past, but also of its profound imbecility, ignorance, arrogance, violence and contradictory intentions. These blunders are not part of any cosmic evil, but the sum of the actions of the group's life, which in its conflicts and harmonies adjusts to the emotional conditioning of our species, as well as to the restrictions imposed by a simple struggle for survival that goes far beyond the survival needs that an intellectual capacity like ours would require. Traditionally considered the heart of philosophy, ontology has been the field of dispute and disagreement among philosophers for two and a half millennia. Its decline from the dawn of modern science, paralleling the decline of Christianity in the West, and its final rejection in the nineteenth

 

Mythical actions are narrative actions that encode either points of origin or economic actions. This encoding allows multiple decoding. They can be understood as functional information processes whose data has three basic structures: dramatis personae, objects and narratives.  Dramatis Personae: men, gods, animals, plants, inorganic beings. They are not mutually exclusive categories. They are the input and output of the functions. Objects: non-personal material elements (OM), scenes (OE). They are not inputting if they are not accompanied by a person, they are the output of the functions. Narration: Sequence of functions Primary actions. x, y, z structures, <a1>, ... <an> actions     1. Determinative. X <Det> X, ¬X     2. Substitute. Change one structure or one function for another. X <Sust> y     3. Associative. Between people and objects. Formation of a set of outputs from n inputs. x1, x2, ... xi <Asoc> (x1, x2,… xi)     4. Inverse. Take another action

 The notion of Ursprache, a primordial language that supposedly spoke human beings, presupposes a monogenesis of the different languages ​​of our species. This unity of origin hides the communicative plurality on which animal emotional communication is based. Only if we think that what the first human beings spoke is the result of a divine gift that established a discontinuity in the communications of life with life, would such a monogenesis be of interest to philosophical study. Otherwise, that first human language would be just one more element in a sequence of events that led and continues to lead to increasingly complex forms of human communication and psychological development. The basic emotions would then be a proto-Ursprache, which could, in turn, be referred to more basic forms of organic and cellular communication. We communicate emotions, and not only between organisms of our species: life is understood with life through basic emotions, and they are a fundamental tool for th

  Vital actions are fixed in social memory as narrative actions, but this fixation goes beyond our species. Our social memory is the result of evolution, and therefore it is prior to the memory of any particular culture that we can think of, ours or our historical past. When we became aware that we have myths and rituals, we had been in that dynamic for a long time and lived with them, determining our vital actions based on strict emotional ritual protocols, which were passed from generation to generation if they proved their effectiveness to group survival. Our actions were given a meaning, in a continuous cycle of reinterpretation and readjustment of the life processes open to the present, before being human. The emotional structure establishes the interpretive semantics, without which the syntactic actions of life are nothing. Emotions link physiological actions, which follow the syntax of chemical reactions relevant to the organism, in complex units of interaction capab

En un pasaje de la  Orestíada  de Esquilo encontramos el que quizá sea el primer registro de la condición psicológica de la individuación en términos sociales:  Yo tengo mi propia mente, separada de los otros 1 . El hecho de que entendamos la frase de Esquilo muestra que es falso su contenido, porque una mente aislada de los otros no podría hacerse entender. Su arrebato apolíneo no es sino una propuesta ideal en la que se expresa una paradoja, ya observada en el mundo moderno por Friedrich Nietzsche 2 , y que podríamos expresar así: Cuanto menos utilizo mis capacidades simbólicas generales soy menos individual, pues soy incapaz de establecer mis diferencias con respecto a otros. Pero también, Cuanto más utilizo mis capacidades simbólicas generales, menos individual soy, pues las diferencias son expresadas y pensadas en términos de un lenguaje que no he creado yo, sino los otros. Podemos entonces inferir: No puedo expresar ni pensar la individuación de mi ment