Mythopoetics

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...

  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 ...

   In traditional African thinking, time doesn’t move forward, towards a climax or an end of the world, but it rather falls back into the pool of memory. There are two categories of time, Sasa and Zamani, Swahili words for the designation of what seems to be the present and the past. On a closer look, Zamani includes its own past, present and future, so we oversimplify calling it the past. Time moves from Sasa to Zamani, from the present moment of vital experience, to a kind of macrotime of mythical experience, self-contained more than strictly cyclical. Sasa is a lineal microtime based on the experience of economic activities, while Zamani is the narrative time where meaning is created. One could say that the weight of Zamani annihilates Sasa, or better, that Sasa is a mere security buffer where the unpredictability of vital experience is differed until is valuated and interpreted. Myth functions in its more basic levels as a homeostatic force for the individual and the grou...

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...

   If the social persona is a mythical construction of the group, our individuation is a social narrative constructed with some of the personae developed in the economic actions, either of the present or the past. There is no free will  because our psychological will, linked to the basic emotion of vitality (the dopamine system that is in charge of stimulating the individual in its search for whatever is needed to survive), is just like the will of others, a will to power. This does not mean that I cannot choose among different things, but the person who chooses is not more an individual than the narratives that he or she identifies as himself or herself, and choice is always conditioned by basic emotions and their complexification in the mythical actions. Nowadays, the concept of freedom has basically meaning in juridical terms, as a narrative that maximizes the diversity of a group, and therefore, its power for survival. However, few forces are as important to human d...

 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...