Day Nineteen: Tolkien the Plagiarist?

J.R.R. Tolkien was once a professor of Anglo-Saxon studies at Oxford universities, so it makes sense that most of his stories have something or other to do with Anglo-Saxon (Norse) mythology. A few things that I noticed specifically:
He used many of the dwarf names from Edda in The Hobbit
Gandalf was the name of one dwarf (I guess he thought it sounded more like a wizard's name?)
He wrote several languages to use in The Lord of the Rings, but they all have a distinct Saxon sound to them

But was he a plagiarist?

I don't think so. While names of things like "Gandalf" and "Middle-Earth" were sort of taken, and of course the general ideas of a world of elves and dwarves sound remarkably like Edda, the actual plot is different. There is no Thor, no Midgard serpents. Beyond that, there are no hobbits in Edda! As well as no ents, no Mordor, no Sauron. So he had to come up with the actual story himself, and maybe just borrowed some of the setting.

Thoughts?

Day Eighteen: Mysterious Mistletoe

As was mentioned today in class, mistletoe was Bragi's weakness, the plant that was "too young" to be asked not to harm him. (Maybe mistletoe came to Norway later than most plants?) So why is mistletoe associated with Christmas and kissing?

According to the internet, there are two types of mistletoe: Viscum album from Europe, which is what would have killed Bragi, and Phoradendron flavescens, native to North America and used for Christmas traditions.

Viscus Album

Phoradendron Flavescens

In Europe, mistletoe was highly regarded for centuries for mystical powers. It was believed to bring fertility, protection against poison, and serve as an aphrodisiac. It was sometimes used in ceremonies involving the sacrifice of two white bulls to renew the king and his consort, so it was probably also considered a symbol of the goddess.

Meanwhile, in Greece, mistletoe was used in the festival Saturnalia and primitive marriage rites, and it became a symbol of peace. Because of this, people would meet under mistletoe with their enemies and shake hands or warring spouses would kiss under it to end conflict. The tradition of kissing under mistletoe at Christmas allegedly began in England in the eighteenth century, and anyone who remained under mistletoe without being kissed could not expect to marry in the next year.

Day Seventeen: Musical Bricolage

According to the great god Wiki, "bricolage" comes from the French verb "bricoler" (brick-oh-lay), which means   "to fiddle" or "to tinker." Originally, I was going to talk about someone in society who might be seen as a bricoleur, but then I found something much more interesting--musical bricolage.

Musical or instrumental bricolage means using non-musical objects to improvise music. Hermes making the tortoise into a lyre would be one example, and a few other interesting ones are:

Spoons

Wax paper comb

"Stomp," which is a performing art that involves dancing and creating music with common household things like brooms, garbage cans and pots.



Comments
Now the real question is, does this make any of them tricksters, and how are you a bricoleur?

Day Sixteen: Children of Hermes

Here we have Hermes, god of commerce and thieves, guide to the underworld and messenger of the Olympians. According to the internet, he may have fathered as many as thirty-five children! I guess the winged sandals must have been pretty sexy, no?


So here's a list of the most important kids:

Pan: son of Hermes and the nymph Dryope. He was a satyr and invented the panpipe, which you can see in this picture. He was a trickster and supposedly lured people into the woods with his pipe and then did horrible nasty things to them.

Hermaphroditus: son of Hermes and Aphrodite, goddess of love. He fell in love with the nymph Salmacis, who asked the gods to make it so they would never be apart. They embraced in a pool and were subsequently turned into a hermaphrodite. Hermaphroditus then cursed the pool so that any man who entered it would be castrated.

Priapus: son of Hermes and Aphrodite, cursed by Hera because of his mother's promiscuity. Her curse gave him an enormous permanent erection. Minor fertility god, guardian of livestock, fruit plants, gardens, and protector of male genitalia.

Eros (Cupid): son of Hermes and Aphrodite, although he may have been the son of Ares, Hephaestus, or just sprung from thin air. God of love and given magical arrows to pierce lovers' hearts.

Tyche: daughter of Hermes and Aphrodite. (Man, those two got it on!) Also known as Fortuna, she was the goddess of luck and destiny. She wore a crown shaped like the walls of a city.







Autolycus: no photo available unfortunately, he was the son of Hermes and Chione. Apparently Hermes put Chione to sleep and raped her. Autolycus wasn't all that exciting, but he was the grandfather of Odysseus, which would make Odysseus one-eighth god.

Day Fifteen: Herms

For your viewing pleasure, a few herms from around the world:

<-- Herm of Demosthenes

Unknown herm

Herm of Fundilia Rufa

Another unknown herm. This one seems older than the others.

Day Fourteen: The Cult of Attis

For the great number of people who missed class today, here's a little back story on Attis: He was the child of Agdistis, who was the child of either Hera sponaneously reproducing or a man jacking off on a rock. Agdistis was a hermaphrodite and was wreaking havoc, so the gods tied its man parts to a tree while it slept. When it woke up, it jumped back and became female. Unfortunately, "she" soon died from blood loss (menstration implications?) and a tree grew from "her" blood. A while later, a princess sat under said tree and a pomegranite/almond fell onto her lap/breasts, depending on the version. She gave birth to Attis.

Attis was raised on "he-goat milk" (your guess is as good as mine . . .) and, being the son of a tree and the grandson of a rock, he was a very handsome young man. He is also rumored to have been related to King Minos (symolism of goddess?). He was so handsome that Cybele, the goddess of the earth, fell in love with him. He did not reciprocate and decided to marry a woman named Sangarius. Cybele was so angry that she showed up at his wedding in all of her goddess-y fury, which drove him mad to the extent that he castrated himself and died from the blood loss. Cybele/gods/somebody was so upset that he was resurrected into a pine tree.


Now we come to the exciting part!

The Cult of Attis supposedly began around 1200 B.C. It involved going into the forest and cutting down a pine tree. The tree was decorated with ornaments and carved figures of Attis and Cybele, and everybody danced around in a frenzy and cut themselves, believing that the spattered blood might resurrect Attis. Every year, a few men would get so impassioned during the festival that--get this--they would willingly castrate themselves. These men would then hit the figure of Cybele with their, ahem, severed limbs, then run wildly through the streets and throw their *cough* limbs into the doorway of a house. That house was responsible for giving them women's clothes.

Note: none of this is made up. Seriously.

Day Thirteen: Theophany

The word "theophany" comes from the Greek word "theophania," meaning "appearance of god." I like the Britannica definition: "manifestation of deity in sensible form."

Theophany is also one of the feasts celebrated by the Orthodox church. It occurs on January 6 and celebrates the baptism of Jesus and appearance of the Trinity. According to orthodoxwiki (yeah, that really exists! Crazy, huh?), it's sometimes also referred to as "Epiphany," although apparently that applies more to the feast celebrating the Magi coming to give gifts to baby Jesus. (Does anyone else ever feel like traditional Catholics just really, really liked feasting?)

<-- the theophany of Christ



There are tons of great Biblical examples of theophany--think Moses and the burning bush, the pillars of dust or smoke that led the Israelites across the desert, basically everything in the story of Moses. A few other stories also show that theophany can be so overwhelming that God occasionally uses it as punishment. The shock and awe of it are too much for people to handle, and they almost always die of fear.

The internet yielded no results for any other religion, but I think Zeus appearing to his lady "friends" as various things is a pretty good example.

Day Twelve: Frodo's Hero Cycle

Review time!
The thing I'm most concerned with remembering is the entire hero cycle, so I'm going to try to do it from memory with everybody's favorite Hobbit, Frodo Baggins!

I: Departure
1) Call to Adventure -- *Gandalf voice* You must take the ring to the elves!
2) Refusal -- I don't remember him refusing to carry the ring. I'll have to re-read it
3) Unexpected Aid -- I'm thinking when Aragorn shows up and saves them at the inn
4) 1st Threshold -- if I remember right, he specifically mentions that it's the farthest he's ever been from the Shire at some point. Maybe that was Sam though
5) Belly of the Whale -- getting stabbed. Not much fun. Or maybe when Gandalf dies?

II: Initiation
1) Road of Trials -- separated from the group (except Sam) and making a long scary journey
2) Meeting with Goddess -- elves and Galadriel?
3) Woman as Temptress -- MIA
4) Atonement with Father -- seeing Bilbo again maybe?
5) Apotheosis -- overcoming the power of the ring!
6) Ultimate Boon -- ring is destroyed, yay!

III: Return
1) Refusal -- (we're going to die up here on Mt. Doom, Sam!)
2) Magic Flight -- could it be more obvious? Eagles!
3) Rescue from Without -- eagles take the hobbits to the elves. Elves have magical medicine. And lots of food.
4) 2nd Threshold -- returning to elves/Shire/civilization/not being possessed by evil ring
5) Master of Two Worlds -- savior of known world and Hobbit Extraordinaire
6) Freedom to Live -- elf boat

Day Eleven: Hercules the Playa

Special Valentine's-Day-ish edition: Hercules' love life!

So first off, we have Megara. Everybody knows her from the Disney version. "Kidnapped" by Hades, although I think she did it to herself. (She did volunteer, all Hades really did was hold her to the agreement . . .) Anyway, they had several children and life seemed good, but then Hera, being the angry, no good very bad high queen goddess that she was, decided to mess with Hercules some more. So she made him insane and he killed his kids and sometimes Megara, though that depends on the version. (In the versions where she survives, she's given to Iolaus.)

A while later, Hercules accidentally kills this guy Iphitus when he accidentally threw him over a wall in a fit of rage. As punishment, he's made the slave of Omphale, daughter of either the king of Lydia or a river god. Most records of her are MIA, but the general concensus is that she made Hercules wear women's clothing and stole his lion skin and club. After a year or so, she set him free and made him her husband (heiro gamos!). Then she just disappears from the story and he's suddenly single again.

Then comes Deianira, whom we just read about in Ovid. Hercules fought the river god Achelous for her, then a centaur named Nessus tried to rape her. Centaur dies and gives Deianira poisoned "love cloak," Deianira later sends it to Hercules, Hercules puts it on and has his skin burned until he dies. Nasty. Then "till death do us part" comes in, and Hercules is once again Single Bachelor of the Year.

Once Hercules arrives at the pearly gates of Mount Olympus, Hera has apparently decided to forgive him. Feeling a little bad for maybe being just a bit mean, she gives him her daughter Hebe, also known as Juventas, the goddess of youth. She also happens to be his half-sister. Yuck.






Other interesting note: When Hercules is in the "thirteenth labor" and kills the Lion of Cithaeron, King Thespius challenges him to have sex with all of his daughters in one night--all fifty of them. Hercules, being the amazing studly man that he is, does so with no problem. Every single girl becomes pregnant, making the entire next generation of the royal family of Thespiae his illegitimate children.

Yikes.

Day Ten: The Mystery of Canceled Class

(the following best appreciated if read in Vincent Price's voice)

Charity Kaufmann was not your ordinary hero. She was not descended of a god, nor was she blessed with many superpowers (or was she...). Still, this never stopped her from seeking adventure, and she went out one day in search of the biggest legend of America: Bigfoot.

After climbing the M to get a better view of the world, she decided to start looking in Butte. She searched the town thorougly, examing every room of every building, and when she finished ten minutes later, she decided to look in the mine ruins. To get there, she had to cross the most deadly ocean of all: The Pit.

As all Montanans know, The Pit is a massive lake made of acid, oil, refuse and other various nasty things that will kill anything that gets within ten feet of the liquid. Charity tried to make a rope bridge across, but the vapor rising from The Pit was too strong, and the ropes broke quickly. Thinking hard, she decided to stack several dozen boats on top of each other and fasten them with duct tape. As she sailed across The Pit, the boats dissolved in sequence, and she reached the opposite side just as the last boat dissolved into the water. (Luckily, not even sea monsters can survive in The Pit, so her journey was otherwise undaunted.)

Now on the other side, Charity walked into the woods and started looking for footprints when suddenly she saw . . .

Tune in to class Friday to hear what happens next!

Day Nine: Mithraism

The Cult of Mithra was based on worshiping the god Mithra, who in traditional Hindu religion was the god of the sun, solar system, sky at day, and other similar things depending on who you ask. Mithra was considered a minor deity until a guy named Zoroastrian came along and decided to reform the religion a bit. He created a branch that was essentially monotheistic with Ahura Mazda as supreme god. Directly below Ahura Mazda in ranking was Mithra, who was essentially the god's hero and went around fighting for the right.

The most interesting thing about Mithraism is that in a lot of ways, it's very similar to traditional Christianity. Besides the obvious similarity of Ahura Mazda and Mithra to God and Jesus, a lot of their traditions were very similar. Not a whole lot is known about the rituals of Mithraism, but they've found evidence that they had animal sacrifices, led what we would consider moral lifestyles, and had a ceremony involving bread and wine.

The Catholic church in particular says that Mithraism is probably similar to Christianity because they borrowed a lot of Christian ideas. They also say that a major difference is that Jesus Christ has been proven to have walked this earth, although whether or not he was the Son of God depends on your own beliefs. Mithra, in contrast, has no evidence to support his existence, and it was a fairly small area that believed in him, which some say is evidence against him.

Day Eight: Harry, Hercules and Hannah Montana

Just kidding, I won't talk about Hannah Montana : )

Well, it's a lovely Wednesday *checks clock* evening, and we are going to do a little run down on heroes! First off, a few definitions:

Merriam-Webster Dictionary: a man admired for his achievements and qualities
dictionary.com: a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities
wikipedia.org: a person who performs extraordinary deeds for the benefit of others

This hero figure will almost always acquire a "boon," that meaning something he brings back, learns or earns for the benefit of the general public, i.e. a special treasure, the ability to heal, being crowned king. There is also a cultural/psychological thing called an archetype, that is, our typical idea of what something should look like. The definitions above are all examples of archetypes; while one hero might be radically different from another, they're still expected to have those general traits.

So here's a hero in our generation: Harry Potter. Let's do a bit of evaluation, shall we?
Starting at the end of the series, Harry's boon is that he kills Voldemort. Fairly obvious, yes? I think it's about the only good thing he did for society overall, so there we go. He fits the general archetypes of being extraordinary (duh, he survived, plus he's extraordinarily hot), talented (well, in some ways?) and generally courageous, selfless, that sort of thing. See how he doesn't fit every detail but still has the general ideas down well?

Then you have your more professional heroes, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lennon. Any more clever ideas? Be sure to comment with them!

Day Seven: Nut and Other Nutty Gods

Is it just me, or did anybody else have trouble reading the Isis Osiris myths without having that Prince of Egypt song stuck in their head? You know, the one where Hotep and Hoy name off a bunch of gods and they all make snakes?

What confused me the most was the fact that Nut was pregnant with all of their kids at once. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works, but who knows? Maybe anatomy and conception was radically different back then. Or maybe they just had better excuses for adultry . . .

Anyway, it was also interesting that the story of Isis hiding Horus in the Nile was so similar to the story of Moses. Angry powerful people want child dead, child hidden in river, child grows up to deal with said no good very bad authority. So far Horus hasn't led a nation of slaves through a sea and eventually to freedom, but give him time, right?

Here's a few more things I don't think the Egyptians understood very well: physics and plant life. Okay, if you throw a wooden box containing a person into a river, it could possibly float, depending on the weight distribution, but after dipping it in lead? Come on. And then it just grew into a tree somehow?

Well, at least they weren't pretending to have sex with horses like somebody we know of . . .

Day Six: Inanna-Ishtar

First off, as promised, a bit of goddess background:

The Gaia Hypothesis: the earth is a live system (Mother Earth) constantly working to bring things to order, like Fern Gully

Great Goddess Hypothesis: just like it sounds, goddess > god, woman > man

Societies that have a supreme goddess instead of a supreme god tend to be more woman-focused. These societies are called matrifocal. If the woman is also the head of the family, the husband will take on her name when they get married, which is called matriarchal society. Not many of those left today. As far as I know, the only major religion today that has a supreme goddess is Wicca. Fun fact: matriarchal societies tend to have less violence and more gender equality than patriarchal (male-focused) societies.

There's a Queen of Heaven (aka supreme goddess) who was known in Samaria as Inanna and in Akkadia as Ishtar. It's also possible that she's the goddess Tiamat from Babylonian stories, as well as Isis in Egypt. My first thoughts were that I read a manga once about a princess named Ishtar. I'm pretty sure there's no relation though.

<-- Ishtar from Vampire Game. Yeah, I know, it has "vampire" in the title, but it's actually well-written and has development, as well as legitimate vampires, not sparkly effeminate century-old-teenagers who creep on little girls as they sleep.

Inanna-Ishtar was apparently just chilling out ruling everything one day when her brother came over and said she needed new sheets on her bed. She disagreed, but he insisted, and finally he admitted that what he really meant was that she should get married. (I don't get that analogy either.) He introduces her to this shepherd and they get married and live happily ever after, until one day she has to go to the underworld. Possible reasons include a funeral, visiting her sister who is goddess of the underworld, or maybe she was just bored and wanted a change of scene.

Going off on a tangent here--underworld. Happens in a lot of myths, right? Heracles, for one, and I'm sure I'll think of more after a mug of coffee. But why? What does it really mean or matter if they go down with the dead people for a stroll?
Well, according to psychiatrists like Freud, it symbolizes going into your own unconscious and facing your "demons"--guilt, nasty memories, bad habits, that sort of thing. (Since Freud supported the theory, it probably also has something to do with your mother.) And apparently, in order to mature, we have to face our own demons.

Scary thought, huh?

Day Five: Ireland

I'm going to be perfectly honest here: until yesterday, I knew almost nothing about Irish mythology. In fact, I don't remember ever even thinking about whether they have mythology. Except for Halloween, of course.

Here's the Halloween story, which is actually proven and not just a myth: According to the Catholic Church, November 1st is "All Saints' Day." The way that works is more or less that every day of the year is some saint's day, but November 1st is one humongous holiday to celebrate everybody at once since you probably forgot one or two throughout the year. On All Saints' Day, you're supposed to be on your absolute best behavior. Way back in *checks wikipedia* the 5th century, Catholic missionaries went to Ireland and started setting up churches. The people that lived in Ireland, the Druids, were fairly open-minded about this new religion, but there were still some that didn't like the idea of being good one day. So it became a tradition that every year on October 31st, the night before All Saints' Day, they would do as many bad things as they could. This included making enormous wooden cages in the shapes of people and animals, shoving sick people, old people and criminals inside, and setting them on fire. (Also, after these fires all that would be left was bones, which is where we get the word bonfire.)

Okay, back to mythology class. I don't know about everyone else, but I found the origins-of-Ireland story to be a bit confusing. What I got out of it was that Ireland was constantly taken over by different groups with each group being less godly, the first legal case ended with an adulturous woman winning, and finally the ancestors of Irish people showed up. One of them wanted to be on good terms with the goddess whose body is Ireland, but another one thought they didn't owe her anything. I wish it had said more about how
that worked out for them in the long run.

The big deal with this particular myth was that it introduced the idea of a supreme goddess and a matriarchal or matrifocal society, which I'll discuss more in my next post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geX8IVBv4wk&feature=related

Day Four: The End is Nigh?

It only makes sense that since just about every culture has a creation story, there are a lot of end-of-creation stories as well. End of time, end of the world, or just end of humanity--it just depends on how they view the world. End of the world myths are closely related to afterlife myths in most circumstances, which is why we have them. Like it or not, what we think happens after we die affects how we feel about death.

In India, there's a special sort of calender called the Maha Yuga. It consists of four sections of time in sequence that repeat over and over for most of eternity. One whole sequence makes up about four million years, and each section is around a million, but they get a little shorter as you go down the list. They are as follows:

1. Krita: The golden years when people have contact with the gods. You don't have to live in a house because the weather is great, you can talk to trees that give you food, life is awesome.

2. Treta: Maybe call it the silver years. Life is still good, you can still talk to trees, but there's a bit of evil creeping into society.

3. Dvapara: Starting to get not so happy. People are becoming greedy and corrupt, and we have to grow food and live in houses.

4. Kali: Where we are right now. Life sucks. The world is corrupt, everybody is obsessed with money, sex and power, and there's constant war. Sound familiar?

Revelation from the Bible is a little simpler, but still fairly nasty. The whole world will be destroyed and evil people and things thrown into Hell, and then God will create a new heaven and a new Earth, where everything will be milk and honey and happiness for all of eternity.

So what will the end of the world sound like?
"Grapevine Fires" by Death Cab for Cutie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu4qQKlyF7s

Day Three: Great Big Storms

How many of each animal did Moses take on the ark?
Tee hee, corny joke. (Noah had the ark) Sorry, but talking about flood myths, I couldn't resist.


Alright, seriousness now. Here's the lowdown of two of the major flood stories.

Biblical (Genesis 6-9): The whole world has turned into thieves, whores, that sort of thing. There are even women sleeping with (angels? demons?) and making crazy, evil giants, which is where Goliath comes from later on. But God is kind of pissed that His people are acting like this, so he decides to destroy the whole world. Our guy Noah is the only legitimately righteous guy in the world, so he, his wife, his three sons Shem, Ham, and Japeth, his daughters-in-law, and two of every kind of animal get to be saved by means of an enormous boat he builds. It rains for forty days and nights, then they float around and eventually end up on a mountaintop. After just over a year, it's safe to go out again, and God makes the rainbow as a promise to never flood the whole world again.

Ovid: Again, gods are pissed at their creation. At first they want to destroy the world in fire with thunderbolts, but they're worried heaven might get singed, so they decide to flood it instead. A man and a woman, Deucalion and Pyrrha, who are both siblings and spouses (yay incest!), randomly survive--not because they're particularly intelligent or faithful, but just because they got lucky. The gods take pity on them and tell them to throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders, and eventually Pyrrha figures out this means rocks. The fact that they came to that conclusion is really weird. Then the water goes away and the earth spawns a lot of animals to repopulate.

If you remember, there was a Native American myth earlier where an angry sea monster flooded an entire world and then almost flooded the next one everybody fled to. I've also heard that there are a lot more flood myths, so I went to offer sacrifices to the great god Wikipedia. I learned that there are flood myths in Sumerian, Babylonian, Israeli, Greek, Germanic, Irish, Finnish, Indian (India), Chinese, Malaysian, Laotian, Australian, Polynesian, Native American, Mesoamerican, Inca, Mapuche, and Muiscan cultures. So what does that mean?

According to wiki, most of these myths are thousands of years old and had been told for generations before trade was established. In fact, the Native Americans and South Americans didn't have regular contact with Europe and Asia until a few hundred years ago! So with little to no contact, why is it that all of them have strikingly similar stories of the whole world drowning?

As far as I'm concerned, this means there was one heck of a flood.

Day Two: Origins

Whatever you believe, wherever you go to church and however liberal or conservative you are, everybody has an idea about where we came from. The big difference between now and a few hundred years ago is that we think our theories are more logical. In some cases, this is true, but the fact remains that none of our theories has been completely proven yet, which is why there are multiple theories.

Big theories today:

• Big Bang
• Judeo/Christian
• Evolution

What I've noticed about a lot of modern beliefs is that, compared to old stories, we're boring. I mean, if we're just guessing and speculating, couldn't we make it a little more interesting? When did Zeus making Cronus vomit up the Greek gods turn into pages and pages of how little tiny differences added up until we were slightly more human than monkey?

Our stories--sorry, theories--are mostly  ex nihilo or primal unity theories. There are five categories that most theories fall into:

• ex nihilo: from Latin "out of nothing"
• Earth-diver: an animal or god dives from above (heaven, the ocean etc.) and ends up creating Earth/mankind/plants/all that other good stuff
• Primal Unity: unity breaks apart and Earth is created from the damage
• Dismemberment: something is chopped apart and its head becomes the mountains, its blood oceans, that sort of lovely story
• Emergence: life just kind of happens

So evolution and the Big Bang would fall somewhere between ex nihilo and emergence, depending on the scientist's personal views. The common belief seems to be that the universe was simply there forever, which is more of an emergence theme. The Big Bang could also be called primal unity if you look at the explosion as breaking things apart rather than creating.

Why do we need creation stories, anyway? It seems like everyone has a really hard time imagining living without an idea of where they came from and how they were made. But why? Does it affect how we live our lives?

My theory is that we base a lot of ourselves, our sense of self-worth and how we live our lives, on our views of where we came from and why we're here. Someone with a deep faith in Christianity may work extremely hard to do good in their lives and look forward to death to go to Heaven, while a Buddhist may work equally hard with the end goal of being reincarnated into a good form. Many Mormons believe if they live good lives and follow the teachings of Joseph Smith, they will one day be the gods of their own worlds. Atheists and agnostics are generally less concerned with the goal after death and more concerned with life, as they believe that there isn't much to look forward to after this world. No matter what you believe, it affects what you do, how you think and act, and what you want and expect out of life. Creation stories set the floor for that by giving us a sense of what we're worth in the first place--molded out of clay by a drunk god, formed out of a dead god's blood, or even vomited into existence (I think I prefer the clay theories...)

Day One: What is a Myth?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary: "myth \'mith\ n : a legendary narrative that presents part of the beliefs of a people or explains a practice or natural phenomenon."

Some myth characteristics according to my mythology class:

• a story about origins
• has some truth
• good vs. evil, good always wins (I disagree--Heracles, anyone?)
• teaches a moral lesson
• a phenomenal explanation for questions or occurrences
• entertaining

The first thing that comes to mind at the word "myth" is something involving Greek gods putting alligators in the New York sewer system. But obviously, society at large doesn't tend to go for that sort of thing these days. What do we go for instead? Well, science. Myths explain our world with gods and events that seem peculiar and aren't proven. Science explains our world with events that are all perfectly logical and completely proven . . . right?

Back to grade school when you had to find what was wrong with a sentence! So, first part of that sentence. "Events that are all perfectly logical." That's true, isn't it?

Okay, maybe this is just me, but how the heck do remote controls work? I mean, yeah, they send an electrical signal to the TV, but how?Why? How does the TV know which signal it is almost all of the time? How did the signals get there in the first place?

Here's another doozy: magnets. Right, there's a north and south end that are somehow north and south no matter which way the magnet is facing. There's some crazy exchange of electrodes, which we can't see or even prove exist, and this makes the gray thingie stick to your fridge and spoon and some metals, but not to other ones like gold.

Wait, what?

Moving on, second part of the sentence. Everybody knows that science is completely proven, right?

First, we have evolution. Yeah, most of what they tell us about humans coming from a common single-cell ancestor that magically came to life in the ocean seems pretty legitimate. It's possible, at least. But did it really happen? If something potentially could have happened, does that mean it did?

What about global warming? Glaciers and ice caps are melting, and it's possible that overall climate is warming, although that seems a bit far-fetched in Montana. Still, it could happen, and a lot of scientists say it is happening. But did you know that less than fifty years ago, esteemed scientists thought we were about to go into another ice age? So who's right?

Sometimes, I think we'll believe anything if a guy in a white coat with a test tube says so.

Personally, I don't believe in evolution and global warming, but not because of my religious beliefs at all. My theory is that we don't know anywhere near enough about the world to come up with the right answer. Think about the billions of creatures in the ocean that no human has ever seen, the crazy stuff down in the center of the Earth that we can only guess about based on magnetic fields. How could we possibly come up with exactly the right answers about the world when, in reality, we still don't have access to almost any of the clues?

But back to mythology, here's one thing a lot of myths have: a hero. There's Heracles, Perseus, Odysseus, Momoko, Robin Hood, the little mermaid, just to name a few. And what do they all have in common (other than Disney)?

They all mess up.

That's all I can come up with--they're not all selfless or beautiful or rich or successful, but they all screw up at least once. Maybe that's why they're heroes and not gods. I think we all want to be heroes, so we make our heroes somebody it's easier to act like. Nobody can be as awesome as Jesus or Mohammad, so what about the guy who spends years being seduced by a siren when he's supposed to be going home to his ridiculously loyal wife Penelope? That's not so hard to relate to, is it?

A couple modern heroes:

• Martin Luther King, Jr. (by the way, why do we still call him Jr. when nobody knows a thing about Martin Luther King, Sr.?)
• Oprah
• Abraham Lincoln
• Lady Gaga
• Beethoven
• Dr. House

Not too much in common with that list, either.

Anyways, after much ado, here's my definition of a myth: an unproven story that defines the unknown because, really, the unknown makes us uncomfortable. We like answers, and we like them now.

To finish off, here's a couple Charity quotes:

"What happens when the monster comes out of the closet? It has a gay pride parade!"
"What other people flush becomes our problem."