Mythopoetics

Open door, threshold, the limen is what is in between, neither one thing nor the other, the place of change and of encounter with the Noumen, with the radical other. On the threshold opens up the chasm, the depth, and the individual sinks into a cosmos without limits or measures. There, space and time relationships are suspended, we are in the territory of dark and uncertain borders, we are on the edge, any form is imaginal and virtual flow. The liminal artist experiences himself at the limit of himself discovers areas that he did not know as his own, and checks how his/her individuality extends in Nature and the Cosmos. He or she opens the incurable wound within his/her community, to expose its members to the convulsion of its main values, a general convulsion of foundations that allows the subsequent growth and evolution. Limits are expanded, new experiences are included and the other, the different, the Noumen found on the threshold is assimilated. Liminality is not the only state o...

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 ...

 When some years ago, I expressed in "Mythopoetics" my rejection of the concept of "Das Heilige" (The Sacred) as a useful concept to express the specific context that defines mythology in relation to religion and metaphysics, it was not so much a rejection to the "Mysterium stupendum et tremendum" that gives fundamental content to "Das Heilige" as a rejection to the rational use that metaphysics has made of the concept in all philosophical traditions. My rejection was of the role of rationality entering the field of the Ineffable, believing that it was really saying something with meaning in relation to Being, not about the vital realm where “Das Heilige” occurs, a spontaneous realm of Life-Intelligence. One thing is the philosophical thesis of the "Mysterium Tremendum" of existence, and another is the experience of that Mystery. According to the philosophical thesis, the Mystery has a rational and an irrational dimension. This does not...

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 irracio...

La forma mimética musical más compleja de la Antigüedad griega es la tragedia ática. Desarrollada a partir del siglo VI a. C., integra, desde el punto de vista de sus formas, los diferentes perfeccionamientos alcanzados por la lírica coral en trenos y peanes, así como las teorías armónicas y coreográficas de su tiempo en una gran representación artística. En la tragedia, se da la fusión de los tres ritmables musicales de los que hablara Aristoxeno 1 , lo que la constituye en el arte musical por excelencia. Pero esta sofisticada síntesis formal en la que todas las artes confluyen en un único río no es sino el resultado de la síntesis religiosa que formula la sociedad ateniense entre el siglo VI y el cuarto, en la que la musical religion helena encuentra el gran rito en el que vehicular sus creencias sobre el mundo. Los griegos, que en sus dioses dicen y a la vez callan la doctrina secreta de su visión del mundo, erigieron dos divinidades, Apolo y Dioniso, como doble fue...

Samsara, Maya, the illusion, what is not real. There is a non-transcendentalist interpretation of the concept which does not appeal to a substantial reality, or truth, or whatever final and definite referent for things (i.e. an exomorphism ), for the universe, and for us. Samsara is the trivial pursuit and pain of most human lives. Bound to nothing, to empty air, to obsolete myths, withered patterns of emotional protocols that maintain life at the high price of repetitive nothingness and misery. It is not only the trait of modern life, old inertias of transcendental thought carry the same burden, a hunt for phantoms, a feast of crazy magpies stealing the shining shit and thinking it a golden treasure. Heavy human sleepwalking, chained to our physiology and proud of it. Once you see the patterns of the eternal return of the movements of life, the endless repetition, the perennial dreams of choice, then the game is over, and you find yourself out, as good as dead, dead for the others...

       There is a wonderful passage in Lucretius in which Nature speaks to the old dying man who wails aloud, over-complaining about his own death: What troubles you so much, oh mortal? The passage is part of a long funerary advice for those who do not practice the dreams of an afterlife, a consolation before death that follows the principles of the human law.    If you lived well, what is all this groan and moan about? Why don’t you, like a banqueter fed full of life retire, and rest in peace forever, you greedy?    But if you lived a miserable life, if all you once had is now spilt and lost, why do you lament the end of your pains, why would you like to add more, you fool?    The one who lived gathering blessings develops greed, a condition of the dopaminic emotional system in which the neurotransmitters responsible for the movement and search functions of the organism cannot be turned off. It is curious how such a lack of b...

  We can represent the transformations of the different social personae (Totem Ancestor, Shaman, Sangu, Lugal, Ugula, Ensi , Titan, God, Universal Law, etc.) according to the temporal increase of mythopoetical complexity in the different mythical planes (Plane of the Anima Mundi, Plane of the King-God, Plane of the Universal Law and Plane of the Human Law). This figure is Apendix B of Volume I of Mythopoetics: The Symbolic Construction of Human Identity. 

  Suppose for a second that we were to prove that mystic visions and religious revelations are just a question of neurotransmitter imbalances. Could our social order withstand such a postulate? Taken literally, it would mean that the narratives of our past are invalid to justify Kings , Churches and all traditional political orders, together with their claims of rights and properties. But would this mean that our history is just the expression of a mistake, that our existence as species is the grandiloquent and violent narrative of an error?  We do not need a nihilist answer to this question. We could neither construct a meaningful present denying the new realm of experience provided by the modern myth of science.   There is a rather vast neuroscientific literature that links high levels of dopamine with religious experience.

Paper Presented at the  Oxford Symposium on Religious Studies. December 2013. 1     Introduction. In the foreword to his seminal work, Das Heilige , Rudolf Otto advised the reader not to venture in the investigation of the Numen Ineffabile before having devoted assiduous and serious study to the Ratio Aeterna. [1] Such recommendation advances the proposal stated at full length in chapter XIV of the book: the sacred (or the Holy) is an a priori category in the Kantian sense with both rational and irrational content. [2] With this thesis, Otto was reopening an old philosophical problem -which goes back to early Greek philosophy- about the rational or irrational nature of the Divine. In the VI century B.C., Xenophanes of Colophon noticed the inconsistencies of an ethic based on the amoral behavior of the Olympian gods, a theoretical question that shook the foundations of the Greek Polis and that was finally solved with the progressive and steady grounding...

The concept of anima mundi gave the first general epistemological frame to human beings. The world appeared as a representation thanks to the unified image of experience that it allowed, putting a reference frame for our actions. Nevertheless, the concept is loaded with a full set of contradictions, something obvious in the study of the myths of the cold societies. These paradoxes have been overlooked in the construction of the immortality myths of both the plane of the King-God and the universal law, and are responsible not only for misunderstandings about the narratives of the individual but also of all sorts of manipulations and narratives of domination. Here I just mention a few aporiae. In the myths of the anima mundi plane, the soul is a common principle to living and not living beings. In this sense, therefore, is either a property of everything or we can say that everything is soul. If the first case, i.e., the soul is a property, we are implying that there is something el...

   According to Herder, language is a register of the evolution of the human soul, and due to the fact that our first innerization of the world was theological, our dictionaries are pantheons. [1] Let’s put aside for the moment the theological part of the argument, for theological myths are later elaborations of myths of the anima mundi , whose main figure is not the god, but the ancestor, and translate the idea to the theory of morphisms. 1    1.     Our first exomorphisms were in the symbolic spheres of the ancestors, gods and the supernatural. 2    2.   Those exomorphisms were endomorphized, rendered familiar through the use of metaphors. With the example of the eye of Ra.  The sun is exomorphic, belongs to the realm of literal representations of the god Ra, but is vitalized through the metaphor of the eye, and comes closer to our vital experience. Exomorphisms must have a minimal endomorphic connection in order to be refere...