Mythopoetics

The future development of Mythico-Ritual axes more complex than those of Human Law (the one we are living in) seems to point to narratives of open identity for different social, individual and collective masks. The history of our myths is the general narrative of the emergence of social personae, their associations and conflicts, in growing circles of action that have given rise to new identity masks. On this journey, Humans cross thresholds of identity transformation, liminal moments in which old identity masks are left behind and replaced by new ones more harmonious with the vital experience of the present. These moments of paleopsychology have been reflected in traditional mythical narratives. A fascinating moment in our development occurred when we stopped sacrificing on the altars of the Gods in search of a more Universal and unified principle on which to base the Universe. In a hymn from the Rigveda (I.170), the god Indra, lord of the storm, dialogues with the r...

The thesis of this lecture is that any historical reflection is an interpretative construction of the experience of the passage of time which is ontoepistemologically conditioned by the determinations of human material existence. Such a construction is an endomorphic process of representation of experience, a metaphorical rendering of the world in familiar terms, a mythologization. This process is not unique to traditional myths and history, but also to science and philosophy, in fact, philosophy of history is a mythologizing action. Let me construct an argument for this thesis.

Carl Kerenyi used the term to designate the common elements in myths belonging to different traditions, like the tales of the Sacred Child, the descent of the hero to the underworld, the marriage of the King-God to the Earth Goddess, and so on. The first question which spontaneously rises is: how can this be? The easiest answer is, well, someone copied it, or it was forced upon on a conquest. Then objections rise: how do we explain that cultures like the Maya and the Egyptian, for instance, have a similar mythologem for the creation of the world through the word of a divine figure, with apparently no cultural contact? At this point, different kinds of transcendentalisms come to the answer. Putting aside extravagant modern speculations of the New Age, like the so-called theory of the ancient astronauts, we are faced with the traditional ontotheologies. They quickly answer that the common element is the existence of a transcendental realm in which human history has its fram...

The representations which are the building blocks of a myth can be literal (or final), or a metaphor, i.e., a chain of representations linked to basic cultural referents (those linked to basic emotions). Let’s call exomorphic to the first type and endomorphic to the second. Exomorphic representations or exomorphisms are final ontological declarations, limits for our thinking that function as referents for the linguistic constructions of our communication. Endomorphisms, on the other hand, are familiar renderings of exomorphisms, as well as rendering of other endomorphisms. Exomorphisms change through time, what today is final and literal tomorrow will be a metaphor. With an example. In Egiptian mythology, the sun was called the eye of Ra , and the devotee took it at its face value, literally: Ra sees the world and humans through the sun. For us today is a metaphor, for we have other representations that explain the sun, that endomorphize it, though the representations of particle p...

    Does History fulfil today the social function of identity creation which in the past was accomplished by mythology (religious mythology included), as Lévi-Strauss [1] thought? If we observe the relationship between political identity and literary and artistic myths of the 19 th Century in Europe we obtain a few relevant examples to give an answer to this question. In the 19 th Century, with the upsurge of European Nationalisms, history covered to a great extent the gap left by Christian mythology after its collapse due to the subsequent development of positive science and the triumph of the Industrial Revolution. The revitalization of the great national poems and the writing of new ones along the 19 th Century in most of Europe, shows a relatively recent example of exclusively endomorphic mythologization, in which new national identities are invented through a process of linguistic fusion of elements of pre-Christian mythology with historical science. We observe h...

Un posible segundo candidato a referente conceptual que nos sirviera para caracterizar los mitos, y explicar su diferencia con la religión y la metafísica, podría ser la estructura ontoepistemológica de los relatos tomada antropológicamente, sin referencia a das Heilige. Si examinamos los relatos sobre los orígenes de las principales mitologías tradicionales del mundo 1 , observamos que todas ellas contienen cuatro elementos básicos: ser humano, dios o ser sobrenatural, naturaleza o mundo, y caos o desorden, los cuales intercambian con gran facilidad sus identidades y se hibridan, siguiendo una clara tendencia antropomórfica. Así por ejemplo, no es raro encontrar seres caóticos que a la vez son elementos de la naturaleza (agua, fuego), y que toman forma animal (algún tipo de ofidio o de monstruo acuático), pero que a la vez son dioses primordiales, o titanes, cuyo comportamiento es humano a nivel emocional, o son incluso reyes demonizados de tribus rivales a las que venc...

Un candidato a referente conceptual que nos aclare la posición de la mitología en relación a la religión y la metafísica sería el de lo sagrado, das Heilige 1 , presente en estos tres campos. Sin embargo, los intentos por comprender la mitología tomando como fundamento categorías sobrenaturales, no sólo das Heilige, sino la misma idea de los dioses, o la de alma, tan sólo han servido para exponer las contradicciones conceptuales que se derivan de ellas. Un ejemplo lo tenemos en la teoría animista de Tylor, problemática en dos puntos epistemológicos 2 . Según Tylor, la idea de alma es el resultado de la confusión de las experiencias objetivas y subjetivas en el pensamiento de las sociedades arcaicas 3 , confusión que lleva a mezclar e intercambiar el mundo onírico y el de la experiencia ordinaria. El concepto fundamental de la teoría es entonces un error, lo que nos forzaría a descartar los mitos también como un error, acabando ahí la investigación. Por otra parte, decir...