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Mythology: The Power of Presence
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Mythology
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See also:  [Philosophy Concepts]
           [(art) concepts]
           [Time Line]


See esp:   [The Power of Presence] (Armstrong, etc)

Mythology: The Power of Presence

On this page:  
                {Greek Myths}
                {"The Powers of Presence"} (Robert Plant Armstrong)





                
  

Greek Myths

An interesting question is: 

    "So, what importance do these ancient myths
     hold for us today in the modern world?"

Kenneth McLeish

In his introduction to Robert Graves' masterwork 
"The Greek Myths", Kenneth McLeish puts it thusly

BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE

  [The Christian writers would sift through 
  the various Greek works trying to fit them
  into the existent theology.] 
[P. 15]
                               This is the kind
  of reductionism Graves mentions at the beginning
  of his introduction -- and he was one of the 
  people influential in throwing open the windows
  and letting in fresh air from the world of 
  classical appreciation outside of 'the classics'.
  A robust alternative tradtion began in the 
  Renaissance and contintinued un-abated: Of 
  viewing the Greek and Roman legacy, and the myths
  which underpinned it, not as pedant-fodder, but
  as a source of fascination and delight on the 
  one hand, and of inspiration for new work on 
  the other.

  In Renasissance Italy, Donatello, Michelangelo, 
  and Palladio had begun their careers by studying
  ancient sculptures and buildings -- and then 
  re-defined former rules and practices to suit 
  the sensiblities of their own age. 

  Peri and his fellow-members of the camerata [Note 1], 
  trying to work out the structural and emotional
  strategies of ancient Greek trageday - invented Opera.

  In England, study of Aristotle and Seneca
  led not just to anodyne pastiche of classical
  drama, but to the work of Shakespeare and 
  Jonson - prefigured a generation before,

  when Marlow as a universeity student, seeking
  and English quivalent for Virgil's hexameter
  in his Dido: Queen of Carthage, perfected
  the "The mighty line" which was thenceforward 
  standard English verse drama.

  Sidney re-interpreted Theocritus to create English
  pastoral; 

  Froissart's chronicle history of the fourteenth
  century, drawing on the methods of Herodotus and
  Plutarch, translated into English in the 1520's,
  sparked a dozen imitators to investigate the 
  originals witht he result that the Plantagenets
  and Tudors were written about with the same energy,
  and the same annalistic and analytical techniques,
  as had once been used to descrribe Xerxes, Alexander,
  and Cleopatra. 

  All this activity, at the populr rather than the 
  academic level, used ancient literature in the same
  seedbed manner as that in which literature itself
  used ancient myth. And it provoked a hunger not just
  for new work, but for accessible translations of
  ancient texts. Until the Reformation, it had been
  anathema in Europe to translate the Bible, on the
  grounds (understandable if you were a fundamentalist
  and thought that God spoke Latin) that translation
  might damage the divine utterance. 

  The same attitude had been applied to all works in 
  ancient languages: If you wanted to enjoy Homer, 
  Virgil, or Ovid, you had to learn Greek or Latin.
  But in the sixteenth century all that changed. Two
  of the most popular English-language books of the 
  time, both drawing heavily on Greek myth, were 
  Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses
[P. 16]      
  (1565-1567) and Chapman's version of Homer's Odyssey          
  (already circulating in the 1590's, published in 1616).

  In the next two centuries, 'amateur' enthusiasm 
  for the ancient world continued to grow at an 
  exponential rate, fueled by such events as the 
  un-earthing of Pompeii in 1748, Napolean's 
  discovery of ancient Egyptian culture in the 
  1790's and the delivery by Lord Elgin of the
  Parthenon Marbles to Britain in 1812. 

  Molier's plays assumed knowledge of Platus,
  La Fontaine's Fables drew on Aesop 
  and Horace,

  Johnson parodied Juvenal,

  Gibbon magisterially followed Tacitus.

  Eighteenth-century (1700c) painters, sculptors
  and opera libretists left practially no story 
  from classical myth or history un-touched, and
  for anyone baffled by some of the references, 
  there were handy books such as Lemri'ere's 
  Classsical dictionary ! (1788, and 
  still one of the best available to set them 
  straight.

  As familiarity grew, two things happened. First,
  popular knowledge and enjoyment of the ancient 
  world moved even further away from academic study.
  Second, writers of fiction began to use the ancient
  world as subject-matter, either closetly researching
  the sensibilities and attitudes of its inhabitants
  (as Flaubert did in Salammbo^, 1862, set in
  ancient Carthage), 

  or cheerfully assuming that Greeks and Romans were 
  prototypes of our-selves (as Lord Lytton did in 
  The Last Days of Pompeii, 1834, or as 
  Lew Wallace did in Ben Hur/em>, 1880.

  By the 1930's there was a long tradition, 
  side-stepping academe, both of popular transaltions 
  of ancient authors (such as those in Everyman's Library 
  or in Samuel Butler's and T.E. Lawrence's versions of 
  the Odyssey and of fiction re-interpreting 
  the past in modern terms.

  Robert Graves himself contributed three of the most 
  influential, and outstanding, examples of this second
  genre in I, Claudius and Claudius the God 
  (both in 1934), giving the fourth Roman emperor the 
  psychological attitudes of a post-Freudian, post-Imerial
  age, and The Golden Fleece (1944), rationalising
  the story of Jason and the Argonauts. 

  Amazingly, despi9te all this interest and all [of] this work,
  the Greek myths themselves still tended to be downgraded. 
  They were regarded as stories, ingrdients, and nothing
  more; their religious status was systematically sneered 
  at and demolished by Christain apologists and their
  socail and anthropologoical resonances went largely 
  un-acknowledged. Frazer's The Golden Bough 
  (1890-1915), the first attempt to relate myth to real
  socieites and genuine practices, was side-lines by his
  academic colleagues.

[P. 17]
  even in the 1960's, an Oxbridge tutor could advice a 
  student, "If you want to shrink your brain with that
  sort of non-sense, go and look at the other Pitt-Rivers
  shrunken heads" -- and although the myths were told
  brilliantly for children (for example, in Hawthornes 
  Tanglewood Tlaes, 1853), they were hardly
  regarded as fit material for adult attention, except
  when worked over in works of fine or literary art. 

  This was the climate in which Graves [] was educated. 

  Robert Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) 
   -wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Graves

  If you were interested in myth, you were automatically
  lumped with children, 'primitives' -- in the mid-1930's
  one respected Encylopedia of Mythology refered
  tp Afrian aboriginal myth as "fairy-tales for Blacks,
  of no interest to the advanced European mind" -- or 
  such "cranky" anthropologists as Margaret Mead. 

  Then at last, in Britain at least, the thaw began.
  
[also:  J.R.R. Tolken is writing about this time!!]

  In 1846, Allen Lane established the Penguin Classics
  list, devoted to new translations of the great works of
  European (and later world) literature, and found, in
  E. V. Rieu, an editor who combined a scholar's eye
  for detail (Rieu was a classics-educated civil servant)
  with an open-ness of imagination and a romantic willingness
  to try hunches - the idea combination for such a post.
  
  Rieu wrote one of the finest versions of Homer's Odyssey
  ever published (Penguin Classics' inaugural volume),
  introducing the classical world to millions of ordinary
  readers; he commissioned outstanding versions of the 
  Athenian tragedies (from E.F. Watling and Phili Vellacott),
  and in 1951 he turned his attention to Greek myth, asking
  Robert Graves - an inspired choice - to produce what would
  be, in effect, the first collection to treat the myths 
  both as fascinating stories and seriously, with narrative
  cohesion, psychological verisimiltude and philosophical
  density - in short, as matter fit for adult human minds.

  Graves began The Greek Myths  

Armstong: POP

"The Powers of Presence -- Consciousness, Myth and Affecting Presence",
 by Robert Plant Armstrong....

"THis book is a wonder (a gift) to the world. [It] ... along with the
other two books ("In Vain I Tried to Tell You" -- Essays in Native
American Ethno-poetics" and The Social Use of Metaphore [sic]) 
could be used for an abs fab course in spiritual modernism"
                              -- Frank Leeding, UGAATUT, 2006.05.02.
[P.3]
The Powers of Invocation
Powers of Virtuosity


Chronology


Notes
(this section only)





[1] Peri 
The *camerata* ....

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[2]

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[3]

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[4]

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[5]

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[6]

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[7]

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[8]

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[9]

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