Mythopoetics

  Mi abuelo paterno, ciclista amater por la montañas de Ávila, soldado en la Guerra de Marruecos, después mecánico de locomotoras de Renfe y siempre un hombre bueno en el mejor sentido de la palabra, trabajó 12 horas al día toda su vida, librando un domingo de cada dos, hasta que la gangrena le deboró una pierna y tres dedos del pie de la otra. Su salario apenas sirvió para dar de comer a su familia lo que hizo que mi abuela tuviera que regentar una tienda de ultramarinos en la Calle de la Toledana, tienda adjunta a la casa en la que pasé mágicas temporadas de mis vacaciones infantiles, días fabulosos que me reviven con su recuerdo, las horas en las que disfruté de su compañia con la veneración del niño que se siente en presencia de un héroe legendario y amoroso. Estas líneas son en su memoria. Cada generación se yergue sobre los hombres y mujeres de las generaciones previas, sobre hombros de gigantes sin duda alguna, aquellos benignos titanes que nos han permitido tomar aire, mirar al

       To understand and give meaning is to limit infinity. Whether in a model of physics or in an old myth, we limit reality (whatever it is) and only then claim to understand it. To understand is to verbalize, to make Logos, speech, and communication. And to do so, our limitation needs some rules and procedures. That apparent taming of the indomitable Universe is its conversion into a game. Kant said that we understand the universe insofar as we consider it the creation of an unknown creator. This amounts to saying that we understand the universe insofar as we consider it a work of art, or what is equivalent, we understand the universe when we see it as a game. Every explanation has to be made from outside of the explained system if it aspires to more than being mere gibberish. However, this simplistic distinction must be clarified: the game we are talking about, the Cosmic Game, is not a dual-action, there is not a game and a non-game (there is nothing outside the Game

The Internet produces new forms of "Assembly" (which is exactly what is meant by "Church" in classical Greek (Ecclesia). The new forms of gathering and structuring of forms of group-consciousness of the internet are closer to the myths of the Universal Law than the myths of the Human Law because scientific psychology fails to function as an instrument for the generation of identity narratives that are harmonized with contemporary science and technology. Contemporary psychology fails to create meaning for our lives, and the old paradigms come back dressed in new costumes. The old myths of the great "Ecclesiae" revive without renewing their psychological contents. On the other hand, the Web has already begun to develop the foundations for future cults, such as Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. Kopimism , which is now a cult, will be incorporated in a syncretic way by other narrative forms that over the years will end up in new religions devoid of

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

       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

 It seems that the development of a language like ours has been a long process of small steps that began in the animal world. It spanned from the first attempts at communicating the presence of predators, the mutual attractions and rejections, the social actions and hierarchies inside the group, and in general, all the relevant information for survival (so effectively encoded in the emotional protocols), to the first human protolanguages, crossing over the slow gradation of the hominid limbo. This postulate stands upon the theories of Neural Darwinism and affective neuroscience as well as upon Pinker’s proposal of language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche, i.e. as the result of a biological evolution.1 It is obvious that human syntax allows a precision in the transfer of information that we cannot find in any other mammal, but if we examine human mythology and history, it is also obvious that the content of our communications belongs basically to the emotional realm, and that su

"Lo que es posterior en el orden de generación es anterior en el orden de sustancia". Aristóteles. Libro de Metafísica XIII. 1077.a.26-27 Aristóteles hace el comentario en relación a la construcción de objetos matemáticos, pero en relación a la vida el enunciado alcanza un significado más profundo. Esta afirmación apela a una intuición básica: en la generación de un objeto, lo último completa la construcción y sella la identidad del objeto. En los seres vivos, lo último en aparecer tiene un orden de sustancia anterior, es la sustancia que se expresaba y se abría camino en pasos incompletos: es la evolución de un orden superior involucionado. El Ser, sustancia de primer orden, es un proceso de desvelamiento, de evolución de lo involucionado. "Lo que llega a ser" proviene de un orden de generación anterior que contiene codificada la condición de posibilidad de lo posterior, como sucede con las semillas, que contienen todo el árbol y a sí mismas como posibilidad y como

Cuando hace algunos años ya expresé en la Mitopoética mi rechazo del concepto de “Das Heilige” (Lo Sagrado) como un concepto útil para poder expresar el contexto específico que define la mitología en relación a la religión y la metafísica, no era tanto un rechazo al “Mysterium estupendum et tremendum” que da contenido fundamental a “Das Heilige” como al uso racional que la metafísica  ha hecho del concepto en todas las tradiciones. Mi rechazo era más de la racionalidad adentrándose en el terreno de lo Inefable creyendo que realmente está diciendo algo con sentido en relación al Ser, que del ámbito vital donde “Das Heilige” ocurre, un ámbito espontáneo de la Vida-Inteligencia. Una cosa es la tesis filosófica del “Mysterium Tremendum” de la existencia y otra es la experiencia de ese Misterio. Según la tesis filosófica, el Misterio tiene una dimensión racional y otra irracional. Esto no tiene sentido, pùes el Misterio, el Numen, el Ser, no es racional ni irracional. Racional e irracional

 The mythical-ritual actions that center the order of the city on this mythical plane are those of the agrarian festivals, which cover the extension of the astronomical year and follow a triple cyclical pattern based on the birth of the divine child-king, his subsequent nuptials as an adult, and his death and resurrection. It is a staging, which can be complex and sophisticated, of something whose emotional content is extremely simple, a simplicity from which its effectiveness derives. Its extreme simplicity has saturated the possible additional interpretations, in fact, the pre-valuation of these actions, their understanding at a perfectly delimited prehuman level and conditioned by their evolutionary success, makes their symbolic expressions redundant, although it is precisely through this redundancy (that myths and art produce over and over again) how these representations reach their status as the center of social meaning, a position that is guaranteed by their basic emotional cont

 On the mythical plane of the King-God, we witness the deliberate creation of the social persons of the gods, whereas the divinities and supernatural beings in general of the Anima Mundi (First Generation Gods), were the result of spontaneous evolutions of the metaphysics of the totems (an evolution that in some cases led these beings to the posterior category of city founding gods) and of the very foundations of the narrative of Anima Mundi. In the Rigveda, we observe the line that begins with Dyaus-Pitar (“The Sky Father”, First Generation God) and continues through Varuna and Indra (Second Generation God), a line that the Mahabharata continues to Krishna (Vishnu, Second Generation God) in creating a full mythology. Other gods, however, are the conscious and deliberate creation of new social persons, linked to new activities or new moral and epistemological concepts (Third Generation Gods) produced by the new social relationships. It would be tedious to list all the variety of priest

 It is very likely that the legal idea of ​​belonging to a person, slavery, developed in small steps of administration of the most basic social persons within other more complex collectives: those of gender, totem, or caste. In fact, it does not seem that until today there has been a single human society in which the subject, in any of its social persons, has not been considered as conditioned to the will of the group, as an object owned by the community, with an independent life only as long as there is no group urgency, or only in moments when the social function is not active. And this dependence reaches the kings themselves and the gods. Dependency within cold societies occurred reciprocally, and as a need based on basic social emotion: the individual cannot be without the group. However, in complex urban societies, although the same emotional system operates, the group is divided into subgroups with dominance conflicts between them, so the dependence of one caste on another, and i