scent of cedar
New Member
I was reading something about Joseph Campbell, this morning. Joseph Campbell was a comparative mythologist. He explored the myths every civilization has evolved to explain the mystery that we are here, at all, and the mystery of the pain at the center of so many of our lives. He has written such things as "Hero With a Thousand Faces." Which is a study of our (the human race) interpretations of God over time, and through great distances.
Well, anyway. So, I began to think about some of those myths. For instance, wasn't it Isis whose son was killed, cut into a million pieces and scattered throughout the world? And she (the grieving, inconsolable mother) found every one of those pieces, except one.
For that one, she still searches.
Raging, vengeful, inconsolable Isis.
Because she knows that, if she could just find that missing piece....
Or Persephone's mother. Taken into the underworld by whoever the god of the underworld is. The daughter eats one seed. A pomegranate seed, I think it was. And because the daughter has eaten of the fruit of the underworld, the mother can never truly recover her daughter, again. The daughter must return to the underworld for six months of every year. And so the mother, being a goddess...decreed Winter for those six months, refusing to allow anything to grow on the surface of the Earth until her daughter has been returned to her.
And when Persephone's mother has her daughter with her again in the Upper World where everything is the way it's supposed to be...we have Summer.
And you know, we hear those myths and we think it means "this is why we have Winter."
But surely the Greeks, with their knowledge of the planets and the stars, understood Winter was caused by something else, all together.
Barbara
Well, anyway. So, I began to think about some of those myths. For instance, wasn't it Isis whose son was killed, cut into a million pieces and scattered throughout the world? And she (the grieving, inconsolable mother) found every one of those pieces, except one.
For that one, she still searches.
Raging, vengeful, inconsolable Isis.
Because she knows that, if she could just find that missing piece....
Or Persephone's mother. Taken into the underworld by whoever the god of the underworld is. The daughter eats one seed. A pomegranate seed, I think it was. And because the daughter has eaten of the fruit of the underworld, the mother can never truly recover her daughter, again. The daughter must return to the underworld for six months of every year. And so the mother, being a goddess...decreed Winter for those six months, refusing to allow anything to grow on the surface of the Earth until her daughter has been returned to her.
And when Persephone's mother has her daughter with her again in the Upper World where everything is the way it's supposed to be...we have Summer.
And you know, we hear those myths and we think it means "this is why we have Winter."
But surely the Greeks, with their knowledge of the planets and the stars, understood Winter was caused by something else, all together.
Barbara