Test Review

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TUESDAY EVENING EXAM

6.30-7.30

A-L : PHYS 112

M-Z : PHYS 114

Review• Adam• Ainos (folktale) Opening: Once upon a time. Ending: with wedding.

Occasion: low secular. Belief value: fiction. Time and place: any. Characters: humans/animal same or inferior in degree. World: highly flexible. Casuality: chance and luck in extreme. Fairytale, wish-fulfilment. Stance: optimism and opportunism. Morality:relevant: moral character+ quality of experience.

• Anthropogony: the story of the origin of human beings. Myths of human creation.

• Aphrodite: is born after the castration of Uranus. When Cronus throws Uranus’s genitals in the sea behind Paphos rocks. Mixture of blood and sperm and water causes her creation.

• Apsu: Fresh Water in Enuma Elish. Apsu and Tiamat form the beginning of being.

Review• Archetype: latent patterns are genetically transmitted. • Athena: is born out of Zeus’ skull. Virgin and stays with

her father because she never has sex and so not a threat.

• Autochthony: the Greek narrative of humans’ coming into being. Auto: self and chthon: earth. Humans come from a hole in the ground.

• binarism: Polarity is a basic structuring principle in ancient Greek culture. male/female. Good/bad. Human/animal.

• Chaos: one of the Primal Beings in Hesiod’s Theogony. (Chaos: void. Gaea: matter and Eros: motion). It means emptiness and void unlike its contemporary meaning in English.

Review• Collective unconscious: Jung• Combat myth: The Combat Myth allows communities to project

back into mythic time the basic categories in whose terms they understand the relation between human and animal, culture and nature, male and female, us and them. These categories are opposites, and the relation between them is often considered a hostile one. This hostility can be used to justify the treatment of non-humans, the natural world, females, and strangers. See Week 3 Self-test.

• Cosmogony: narrative account of coming into being. • Created world cosmogony: in cosmogony types of worlds: inert

nature, transcendent deity, examples Genesis. • Cronus: the youngest son of Gaea and Uranus. He castrates his

father. And He is imprisoned later in the underworld “Tartarus” by Zeus

• Daphne: is a nymph. Cupid makes Apollo fall in love with her. Apollo tries to rape her. She prays to the gods and she is turned to Laurel bush. Apollo takes the leaves and uses them as a crown.

Review• Ea: Descendent of Apsu, the primal father in Enuma Elish, and he

castrates his father because he discovers that Apsu is about to flood the world. Also, he is the father of Marduk, storm god.

• Ego: the rational part of self; conscious in Freudian Psychology. • Eden:• elpis ("hope"): is the only spirit that stays in Pandora’s Pithos. As a

result, in Greek Mythology, there is a a perpetual hunger that cannot be statisfied.

• Enkidu: story of his creation is narrated in the Epic of Gilgamesh. He is created by goddess of creation and put out in the wilderness. He becomes wild and savage and lives in harmony with animals and nature. His story parallels the story of Adam and Eve with some minor variance.

• Enuma Elish: the earliest western cosmogony. It is the text that narrates the coming into being of evolved world. It is a Babylonian account of creation as it takes place in the Mesopotamia.

Review

• Epimetheus: the twin of Prometheus. While Prometheus is smart and a trickster, Epimetheus is a fool. He is the one who accepts the gift of Pandora, Pithos, a big jar that is beautiful from outside and has the seeds of evil in the inside.

• Epos (legend): opening: sing, muse. Ending: death. Occasion: high secular. Belief value: fact/fiction. Time: historical. Place: battlefield. Characters: divine human (hero), superior in degree. World; somewhat flexible, generally hostile. Casualty:rigid laws, fatal determinism, some room for human choice. Stance: acquiescence and endurance. Morality: irrelevant, moral character not: quality of experience.

• Eros: Sexual impulse. The third primal being in Hesiod’s.

• Etiological myth: myths represent primitive or pre-scientific attempts to explain a-natural processes or b- natural features like rain, lightning and thunder are ascribed to Zeus, and Poseidon or c- regular features or events in human society.

• Euhemerism: is the claim that myths are the distorted forms of actual, historical events and characters, that behind each myth lies something that once actually happened. Named after Euhemerus, a student of Aristotle.

Review• Eve: • Evolved world cosmogony: dynamic nature, immanent deity,

examples: Enuma Elish and Theogony.• Freud: the founder of psychology. • Gaea: (female) is earth, which is the primordial in Hesiod’s.• Genesis: • Hesiod: a Greek Poet and the author of Theogony.• hieros mythos (sacred myth): In the beginning. Ends; confirmation

of the way things are. Occasion: sacred. Belief value; fact. Time;remote. Place: primeval world. Characters: divine (gods), superior in kind. World; inflexible. Casualty; hard determinism. Stance; absolute resignation. Morality: irrelevant: good= divine will.

• Homeostatic: it matches the expectations of the audience. • Id: the irrational part of self. repressed desires, taboos. Freud.

Review• immanent deity: exists in the evolved world in

the cosmogonic types of world. • Jung: A student of Freud but he founds his

psychology school. Collective unconscious.• Kumarbi: son of Anush in the Hittite Myth. Song

of Ullikummi. Abused by his father, he fights his father and bites his genitals off.

• Lévi-Strauss: Founder of structuralism.• logos ("rational account"): before the 5th century

BCE, it means: word, story, fictive statement.• Marduk: storm god, who defeats Tiamat, and he

becomes the ruler of the universe.

Review• Metis: Zeus’s aunt and he mates with her. Then,

he swallows her.

• Monolingual: Each telling of a myth claims to be the only true and authoritative telling.

• Moral allegory: characters represent moral qualities and values. Encoded lessons to elevate humanity morally.

• Multiform: Myths change constantly each time they are told. There is no "orthodox" version of a myth. dynamic.

• Muses: Daughter of Zeus.

Review• mythos ("traditional account"): before the 5th century BCE, it

means traditional story, account, explanation, important statement, true statement

• Nedys (belly/womb): it is ambiguous in Greek as it means both. Cronus swallows his children in his belly to prevent his children from dethroning him.

• Night (Nyx): Offspring of Chaos and parthenogenetically gives birth to strife.

• Oedipus Complex: In Freudian psychology: the sexual desire a child feels towards his mother.

• Olympian: offspring of Titans. Older Olympians like Hera and Zeus.• Omphalos (navel, center): the rock Cronus swallows instead of

Zeus; vomits up first, it falls to the earth at Delphi, center of the universe.

• Pandora: Zeus’ creation to punish humans. Means all-giving. She looks beautiful from the outside and inside is full of lies and cheatings, deceptions, etc.

Review• Parthenogenesis: Partheno: virgin/ genesis: coming

into being. To give birth without prior sexual activity.• Physical allegory: assumes that the gods and other

characters in myths actually refer to natural things and processes. So, fire is Apollo, air is Hera, Athena is good sense, Ares is insanity and Aphrodite is desire.

• Prometheus: a titan and an offspring of Gaea and Uranus. He is the source of culture as he teaches to make a fire and horsemanship. Also, he is a trickster. He is both good and bad. He tricks Zeus and Zeus punishes him by making his Eagle eats his lever every day.

• Rahab: A serpentine-like creature crushed by Yahweh in Genesis.

Review• Rhea: Mate of Cronus and mother of Zeus and

the older Olympians.• Shamhat: the female that seduces Enkidu in

Gilgamesh.• Strife (Eris): offspring of Night. Produces

parthenogenetically distress, distraction, famine. • Structuralism: a school of interpretation founded

by Levi-Strauss. the inner structure of myths is an attempt to categorize the world.

• Taboo: • Tartarus: under the universe and it is the worst

punishment in Greek myth as it has no spatial boundaries.

Review• Teshub: son of Kumarbi. Born out of his father’s

genitals because Kumarbi swallows his father’s genitals, Anush. Teshub overthrows his father by splitting Ullikummi from Ubelluri borrowing the knife that Ea used to castrate Apsu.

• Theogony: Is Hesiod’s narrative of the coming into being of gods, which is the coming into being of the world.

• Tiamat: Salt water in Enuma Elish and the primal monster

• Titan: Offspring of Gaea and Uranus, like Cronus. • Transcendent deity: exists in the created world

cosmogony.

Review• Typhoeus: is a monster produced by Gaea to fight Zeus.

Zeus is helped to retain his sinews and then he crushes Typhoeus under a mountain called Aetna.

• Ubelluri: • Ullikummi: in the Hittite Myth narrated in the Song of

Ullikummi. Is a monster, offspring of Kumarbi and a boulder. Then, he unites with a sea-giant, called Ubelluri.

• Uranus: is sky, who is produced by Gaea and Gaea mates with him and they produce the titans.

• Verisimilar: Myths reflect what given community considers to be true.

• Yahweh: Creator of the world in Genesis• Zeus: Older Olympian. Son of Cronus and Rhea. He solves

the problem of succession by destabilizing the threat of son/father conflict by incorporating the female inside his body.

Review

• Characteristics of "myth" • Narrative, oral, traditional, anonymous, multiform, homeostatic,

monolingual, verisimilar. • Comparison among "sacred myth," "legend," and "folktale": • See Week 1, Self-test.• Basic assumptions in psychological interpretation of myths: Both

Freud and Jung assume that • (a) myths express inner, psychological realities (emotions,

impulses).• (b) myths have the same basic structure as dreams, and differ only

in that myths are the "dreams" of entire communities.• (c) the proper way to interpret myths is to apply to them the same

tools used to interpret the dreams of individual patients. • See, Week 2 Self-test for the differences between Freud and Jung.

Review• Basic assumptions in Structuralist interpretation of myths:• a) There is a human need to classify in order to understand.• b) Classification tends to be binary: up/down, right/left,

light/dark, etc• c) Whatever resists classification causes anxiety:

homosexual (male or female?), fetus (person or not?), comatose (living or dead?)...

• d) Binary pairs form sequences connected by analogy: up, right, light, day implicitly belong together, as do down, left, dark, night.

• e) "Natural" pairs used to justify "arbitrary" ones: up/down = superior/inferior = male/female.

• f) Myths (1) encode classifications, and (2) attempt to solve problems those classifications cause.

Review• Differences between created and evolved

world cosmogonies:

Type Nature Deity Myth

Created World

Inert Matter Transcendent Genesis

Evolved World Dynamic Matter

Immanent Enuma Elish, Theogony

Review• Basic pattern for cosmogonic myths: • 1- Primal Unity. 2- Separation. 3- Proliferation of

beings. 4- Destabilization. 5- Plot. 6- Confrontation. 7-Resolution. 8- Stability. See Week 2 Self-test for further details.

• Comparison between Greek and Near Eastern (Babylonian, Hittite) cosmogonies.

• all are similar in structure. • Primal fathers: Apsu/Anush/Uranus. • Castrators: Ea/Kumarbi/Cronus. • Storm god: Marduk/Teshub/ Zeus. • Primal Monster: Tiamat/ Ullikummi-Ubelluri/

Typhoeus.

Review

• Problems and resolutions in Hesiod's cosmogony:

• the conflicts over male control of female reproductivity across the three generations from Uranus to Cronus, along with the solutions (unsuccessful until Zeus) attempted to protect male gods from being overthrown by their offspring.

• Themes in Hesiod's myth of succession: Week 3, lecture 7, see the notes for further details.

• Basic pattern for anthropogonic myths: 1-Unity. 2-separation. 3-disharmony/rupture.

Review • Comparison between Greek and Near Eastern

anthropogonies: 1-Primal Unity/Initial union, harmony. 2-Separation/rupture by accident or transgression. 3-Destabilization/1-disharmony from (a) separation of human and divine or (b) punishment. 2- rupture as origin of evils: work, pain, injustice, etc.

• Basic themes in myth of Prometheus and Pandora: Prometheus tricks Zeus into choosing bones wrapped with fat while he hides meat inside a cow’s stomach. Then, Zeus withholds fire from humans. Again, Prometheus steals fire from Zeus. As a result, Zeus creates Pandora to punish humans. Pandora and women by extension are the source of evil.