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, mira...

 I proposed this question to my students. Let's take a trip to a parallel Universe. Suppose for a moment that since the fifth century before the Christian Era (about 2,500 years ago), human beings had achieved gender equality.  What science and what technology would we have today?   A possible answer. Gender equality implies class equality. Otherwise, a slave woman would not have gender equality in relation to a free man, nor would a slave man have gender equality in relation to a free woman. Since there is only one class in the world, there would be neither rich nor poor people. As there are neither rich nor poor, capital gains would not be generated based on slave labor or underpaid labor. The trade would be fair, with minimal margins of capital gains, the equivalent to whatever the average wage would be. Furthermore, human communities would not have capital gains to generate industries beyond non-slave handicrafts. By having equality worldwide, there would be no wars, ...

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 ...

  Social persons or social masks are narratives of primitive determination elaborated by a human group in relation to the function and valuation of its individuals in social life. As we know, primitive determinations are developed after economic determinations, so we will find different persons according to the degree of complexification of a particular society. The simplest forms of social masks are those that appear in the narratives of Anima Mundi societies (cold societies), such as those of the Blackfoot myth, whose three characters, the old man, the woman and the child, delimit the population by gender and age. The double opposition between men-women and young-old (the latter opposition that can be given by the categorization into three ages, child, young-old) operates both in human communities and (in its male-female variant) between the great apes and group mammals. The distinction is completely relevant from an emotional point of view. In archaic human groups, the oppositio...

 The link between monetary debt and sin is found in the Rigveda, or in the Bible, but in one way or another, we find the idea expressed in all mythological traditions: the life created by divinity implies a debt to supernatural powers, or, in terms of mythopoetics, a permanent debt to the group, to which the lives of its individuals literally belong. Sin is going against the will of the group, and not recognizing subordination to authority. The debt is paid with one's life, either a miserable existence as a slave or by losing it all at once in a ritual public execution. Monetary myths are fundamental to the exchanges that constitute the city, and the city, as it extends beyond its borders, has to universalize the concept of debt to include new client- citizens, either as slaves or as relatively free men. Behind the idea of debt, we find the centrality of the social emotion of solidarity, but its complex elaborations entail the mixture of the different “wills to power” of the subgro...

What is the meaning of being Catalan, or Spanish, or English for that matter? It is evident that the correspondent narratives of political identity express both a particular historical inertia and the very basic need for a group identity in order to function in an economic milieu. Those basic needs have deep roots in human emotional nature and imply old narratives fully equipped with hard metaphysics. And so we heard, in a not too distant past, of a unity of destiny in the universal in relation to Spain, or of a manifest destiny in relation to the British Empire. A nationality expresses, unavoidably, a set of metaphysical beliefs, for the very concept grew up in the middle of a particular European milieu, linked to particular Institutions. To declare oneself Spanish or Catalan, would be merely the expression of a belief in certain Institutions, a rather accidental question related to the place where one happens to be born or live. However, in modern Europe, and even more so in c...

In moments when Europe has its fundamental values tested by the recalcitrant narrowness, cruelty and ignorance of religion, I recall Pericles’ Funeral Oration, as recorded by Thucydides, amazed by its relevance: "We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality..." (Perseus Project translation of Peloponnesian War ). The barbarians, those that do not believe in the myths of the human law and impose their nightmares to others, are now forcing us to close our borders, and what is worst, to close our minds, and change our beliefs for a dream of security that could never be fully guaranteed. Thus we are caught in a web of terror and lose our identity to a poor and sad trivialization of our democratic political foundations. In liminal times, basic emotions take control over the neocortical enaryzed symbolic constructions that we ...

El dinero  es energía  potencial metafísica , y como tal, es un generador de acciones económicas . En este sentido, es una narración que interpreta los intercambios de energía potencial metafísica en energía económica . Funciona como aglutinante de las acciones económicas  diversas de la ciudad, algo que consigue gracias a su contenido simbólico  puente, gracias al vínculo que establece entre las determinaciones primitivas  y las determinaciones económicas  de la ciudad. A través del mito del dinero, cuantificamos y cualificamos la homeostasis  social valorando el conjunto de nuestras experiencias, reduciendo a la semántica  emocional común las diferentes acciones económicas  y los objetos determinados por ellas, relacionando acciones y objetos a partir de su valor en el conjunto energético del organismo, de manera análoga a cómo operan los protocolos  emocionales . ¿Por qué deshacernos de un mito tan ingenioso que ha permitido una...

As noticed by Locke and later on by Keynes, one of the values of money, the value of use, given by the rate of interest, has the same nature as land, for land -once is rented- generates an income. Such an isomorphism gave the first modern metaphysical translation of land into money and vice versa. The high liquidity premiums attached in the past to the ownership of land and in modern times to money, show perfectly that the relation is invariantly isomorphic. During liminal times, i.e., economic crisis, the liquidity premium detaches itself from money and goes back to land (or gold). The isomorphism is an old inheritance from the myths of the King-God , the synthetical unity of his four personae, in this case of the Ensi (Landlord) and the Ugula (Merchant). However, Locke’s equivalence, by leaving outside the metaphysical component of economical valuation gave the ius naturale support to colonization which the manifest destiny politics lacked. The isomorphism land-money in relat...

The genesis of monarchies in Ancient Mesopotamia offers a clarifying picture of the different economical and ideological narrative forces which form the social persona of the King-God. The King-God is the synthesis of the Sangu, or spiritual leader, the Lugal, or military leader, the Ensi, or landlord, and the Ugula or great merchant. The Sangu is the evolution of the personae of the Shaman and the priest. It is the mediator with the ancestors and the unknown forces of life. It is the royal persona with higher prestige and the unquestionable figure which controls the basic narratives of life and death, the giver of the referential valuation for social action, a valuation which has its roots in successful economic actions of the past. The persona of the Lugal emerges out of the needs of war. It is an active extension of the Sangu, and only the Sangu can justify and support ideologically his performance. Lugal and Sangu represent also two different ways of ascension to power. Th...

(Link to text in Spanish)     In Ancient Mesopotamia, monarchy was one of the Mes contained in the bronze Tablets of Destiny which the god Marduk wore as a symbol of his power. The Mes included abstract concepts as well as physical objects. Me is lordship, kingship, truth, the shepherd like care of the elite for their masses, the legal language, sexuality, prostitution, art, musical instruments , and several other actions and symbols which somehow function as civilizing tools, the knowledge needed to organize a city. The Mes represent the universal law, or better, the universal law is an induction from the Mes , the way things are on a cosmological scale which includes the order of the city. The unstable homeostasis of social order unveiled the divine pretenses of the King-Gods: both Isis and her divine royal family were exposed. Naked to the eye of the intellect, kings could only maintain their prestige bowing themselves to the law which they were supposed to r...

  Let me insist on the scope of the concept of individuation , for it is fundamental to understand the structure of myth.  In Agamemnon , Aeschilus expresses, paradoxically, what is probably the first register of the social context of the phenomenon of individuation: I have my own mind, separated from the others . [1] The fact that we understand what he is saying is a proof of its falsity, for an isolated mind could not make itself understood.          1. I cannot think or express my individuation without a language.           2. Languages are group constructions, never individual.                 Therefore, I cannot think or express my individuation with individual terms.                 But when I think or express my individuation, the group does not articulate my voice. The paradox is solved if we understand that identities ...

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...

 Affective neuroscience postulates a neural circuit for the regulation of the mammal emotion of the social bond. [1] Curiously, this circuit is located in the same cerebral areas where the sexual and the maternal emotions are located, and near also to the processing areas of pain. This circuit is responsible for the distress that mammals suffer from separation (especially in the young ones), but its positive function is related to the experience of pleasure in bonding. The process is mediated by endorphins and oxytocin, like in the maternal emotional system, i.e., is a pleasurable experience. Oxytocin is relevant to the formation of group memories [2] , and therefore, to the creation of myths. We are biologically conditioned to be social, as was pointed out by Aristotle in a famous passage of his Politics . In this sense, social media feed upon our needs. They give endorphins and make us addicted to our own opioids and sexual neurotransmitters. But this is not new, is what t...

La semántica mitológica tiene una clara composición metafórica, aspecto que llama la atención desde el punto de vista de los lenguajes filosófico y científico, que buscan la precisión formalizando y protocolizando sus elementos. Sin embargo, si el examen se hace desde la valoración del Lebenswelt, desde el acervo de saber acrítico de una comunidad, que se expresa en todo tipo de imágenes, paralelismos, sustituciones y alegorías, el contenido metafórico es algo común y ordinario. Decir que el mito es metafórico no es caracterizarlo por una diferencia específica: los lenguajes naturales humanos también lo son. Partiendo de esta observación, Ernst Cassirer postuló que mito y lengua han seguido una misma evolución debido a que comparten una misma raíz, el pensamiento metafórico, es más, redujo la caracterización del mito a la dilucidación de una cuestión teórica: determinar si es el habla la que genera el mito debido a su naturaleza original metafórica, como proponía Max Mü...

  De manera provisional, adoptaré las tesis de Durkheim y Habermas que definen el mito a partir de su funcionalidad comunicativa como narraciones fundadoras de la identidad social. Los mitos son acciones comunicativas humanas, y su comprensión supone la elucidación de la funcionalidad del lenguaje humano, aclaración que a su vez remite a algunos otros temas relacionados. Desde una perspectiva antropológica, la problemática sobre el origen del lenguaje requiere una aproximación psicobiológica que incluya un análisis del proceso de comunicación animal y no una mera discusión metafísica, ya sea hecha esta desde los supuestos de alguna ontoteología o de la psicología racional 1 que utilizó la filosofía hasta el siglo XIX. No obstante, considero relevante hacer un boceto, aunque sea rápido, de las tesis más importantes que sobre la relación entre mito y lenguaje se han pensado, ya que ayudará a perfilar mejor la posterior teoría psicolingüística, además de mostrarnos l...