Black Tie Affair's

Final Exam

December 15th, 8 pm-9:50. Same class room as usual.

The exam should only take about 30-45 minutes.

Papers are due this Thursday

Presentations no longer than 5 minutes.

Check blogs for paper topics as most people are on the right track.  Simple topic of myth and Magus is just a set up, go deeper.  Minimum of three pages long, beginning middle end, must hold attention. Cite sources!!!  Paper must also have a theme, which should be supported with actual quotes from the text, do not overgeneralize. God is in the details, do not BORE your audience!

Thursday:

1. Christine

2 Stefanie GRRRR bad luck!

3.Lucia

4.Mathew

Group 5 had a fantastic movie! I have nothing but praise for their amazing performance.  For anyone who missed their movie, they did the story of Demeter and Persephone.   They titled their masterpiece Myth and Marriage. They interwove many different myths within the main myth and story.  They also provided popcorn for audience enjoyment.

Following the wedding was a funeral.

Group 6
This group did a great play showing the many different types of Funerals.  The class attended the death of Kyle Miller, with flowers, candles, prayer cards.  For the Irish funeral, we were given the alcohol(apple juice).  The body stays with the family and a party is thrown all night.  Whiskey is put at the mans feet, because of the man who climbed the ladder and fell and once they splashed whiskey on his face he revived.
The viking funeral-boat brought onto land, the mans harem of women get to choose to die, and then are raped, lifted up through a doorway, and then killed and put with the man.  All of his treasures are there as well.  The boat is burned on land.
The pirates sink their men to the bottom of the sea.  The cowboys are buried into a cedar and poetry is present.  In heaven they ride the perfect horse who does not buck, or kick.  A lot of the burial terms we currently have come from cowboys. Their saddle, hats, and stones were usually placed on top of the grave.  Chinese burials include bowing three times to the dead, and burning incense and money so that they may pay their way out of hell.  Egyptian funerals were the last to be covered.  The bodies are taken apart, and a blessing is said so that they may come back to life.  We know much about Egyptian death because of all the things they wrote down about it.

What different cultures were represented in the funerary rights of group 6.
Sati-Indian funeral service. the wife jumped into the grave, and twirled her finger while they placed dirt on her until her finger stopped in death.

The changing butterfly

Before class thoughts:

• Do NOT use the word "like" or "stuff" in our presentations.
• The term paper is worth 100 points.  Sam asked if that was part of our presentation grade, which it is not, it is a completely independent grade.
• We must have about 25 to 30 blog entries, however, if we have 15 awesome blog entries it will be accepted.  We can do many blogs at the end of the semester, they just have to be good quality.
• Final paper over 3 under 100.  Due the same day as our presentation.
• Copy of our paper must be posted to our blog.
• 
  

The end of the end: Notes for November 15th, Tuesday.

1.) Jennifer's Blog  http://jennythornburgsmyths.wordpress.com/

• Has an amazing title. Myth and the Word Made Flesh.  Homophobia is always recognized with speragmos.  It is also sacramental.
• Sacrifice comes from fice- to make something sacred.
• Requirement of the books, deface them with underlining.  Make them un-returnable.
• The most important line of the Magus Page 311 or page 333 "All that is past, possesses the present".  How does ending where we began stress this one sentence?  whatever happens here now, is essentially what happened in the past, in the Norwegian forest.
• Masque-theatrical term that refers to a type of theater, performances that we put on in people's houses, characterized by events that took place in mythology.  It was not supposed to be thought of as real, because people were dressed up, and people coming back from the past.
•  Pablo Picasso-Nicholas 
• Myth is the precedent behind every action.  You are carrying with you everything of the past.  The same thing as "all that is past, possesses the present".  We carry the great present of the past everywhere with us.
• Abby writes "History" on the background, his tory- his story.  Whereas if a women were to make history it would not end up there.
• Our lives are quotidian, we watch tv, and we usually talk jibberish.  For us the world is compellingly present.  All the mythological and historical pressure is there.  It is known as the collective unconscious.
• There is a trap door to remember when we were born, and to remember everyone else's conscious since the beginning of time. The only way to make people conscious of their collective unconscious is through shock.
• Our job is to wake up, and realize what is happening in our collective unconscious.
• Jennifer has pulled a quote from Calasso and put it in her blog about the Magus.  She also referenced Jerrod "not only is he humanity, he is fallen humanity"
• It has all been planned, including the rock.  We need to know the stories so that we can see the blueprint of our own story. We know that Nick is a narcissist.  Every man must make a trip to see Persephone before they can go on living.

2.) Darrell Blog  http://darrellsblog-unknown.blogspot.com/

• The truth beyond magic.  The only reality is magic, the only reality is fiction.
• Devita is Professor Sexson's grandaughter, Devi is also a name referenced in Darrell's blog.

3.)  Jerrod's blog  http://ohmygodzjerrod.blogspot.com/

• A man dying of terminal cancer wrote to Fowle's that he hated the answer.  He wrote to this man that they got back together.  To an awful woman the same day he wrote that they never got back together.
• In all other classes, the answer is right or wrong.  In this class, every answer is a kind of death.  
• Jerrod writes that the ending of the book gives us the ability to ponder the characters.  The ending plants a seed, that gives the reader the ability to let the story bloom.  The story will remain in our minds, it has been made immortal.  It provokes us to keep thinking about it.

4.) Rosemary's blog  http://rosemarysmythologicaladventure.blogspot.com/

• The thing that makes us neurotic is the insistence that we are not.
• Rosemary says that Nick will continue on because it is all about himself, that is why he is narcissistic.
• Sexson's daughter says "Dad, it is not about you".  The collective unconscious is impersonal.  "it is not about you"  It is about every person. Nick continued because he wanted it to be all about him, but he only ended up alone with all the magic gone.
• Madi disappears, but she becomes something far more amazing, fantastic, magical. 
• Zeus says you do not want to see me as I really am because you cannot really see. She was not able to hold the reality of everything, so she exploded.  Do not consider the fruit of action-the bub of agita?  Do not do things for a reward, the only reason for action is for the action itself for it is divine.
• Do not read this book for an A, read it to be divine, to understand reality.  One by one they closed their eyes because they were not ready for the divine of what really was.  

5.) Parker's Blog  http://parkersmythology.blogspot.com/

• Diving into the depths, exactly as Nick does. "about it's veiled implications"-->Sam's idea of Harry Potter and JK Rowling and the veil that Serious falls through, joining the past, the present, the future, the collective unconscious.
• Detail is a construction of deconstruction.??
• The deadly female, the negative archetype of the female.  Often portrayed as spiders.  The black widow waits for the male to come to her web "and uses him for some purpose"-Teresa.  Women are spiders.
• Mae West-very sultry seductive woman, "common up and see me sometime", "is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me" She was the devouring female, she gives them a good time then she devoured them.
• We must quote a passage from the book in our final paper.  
• The theme of the Magus is the narcissism of Nick.

6.) Madi's Blog  http://madismythology.blogspot.com/

• Stranger than Fiction- about a man who hears his life being written out.  Reminds me of the uncollective conscious,  we are all just characters of a novel.
• It is all the same, God, the gods, afterlife.  It is all a circle, from the beginning we have just been characters, reliving the original book.  No one knows where it starts, no one knows the end.  We are all part of it, every religion, every story, the universe, nothing, and everything.  It is all the same.
• Get up and act, every movement must become a movement of the sacred.  Do it in the remembrance of the sacred.
• Taoism-religious or philosophic tradition in which the basic concept is to establish harmony with the tao, which is the mechanism of everything that exists.
• Mircae Eliade and the story of the butterfly.

The singing Cicada

Tuesday November 8th Class Note

- Exams were passed back, average grade was a 88%

-Magus was due today, Mr. Sexson has given us some extra time to finish it.  We are also to blog about it, and a substantial blog at that

-The paper is a 3 page term paper that is assumed to be about the Magus unless you tell Mr. Sexson a different idea to write about. 

•  Dead Man-THE Johnny Depp movie made in 1995 about William Blake, who is going to the far west, he is an accountant, he is an oaf.  He gets in a fight with the man who shovels coal. (One scene has them riding through the red wood forest by the looks of it)  Native American (nobody) says to William Blake-I have prepared your canoe, it is time for you to leave now, to go back where you came from, to the place where all the spirits came from, where they return, this world will no longer concern you.   
•     Sexson cannot say enough positive things about this film
•   In the movie, he is already dead through the entire thing...he just does not know.This is about Odysseus in the Cyclopes cave.  Odysseus says his name is nobody to the cyclopes.
• Tibetan book of the dead = documentary, before the soul can go to the other world, it must first repeat all the violent          things of its past life.  You are already dead, you just need to prepare for it.
• We have forgotten about myths, because we watch movies like Pirates of the Caribbean and not Dead Man.
•  Before Kevin was a gleam in his daddy's eye, he was nobody.
• The Swerve ( a book about how the world became modern) written by Stephen Greenblatt. Pagio discovered it and copied it. It was read by many people of the word.  It had a lot to do with how the world turned out today.
• All the world is already made, we are just its players.  When we die, we do not grieve ourselves, those we left behind grieve.
• Socrates once said, all of life is a preparation for death.

Page 335,  Mircae Eliade-Primitives to Zen

• Moment of death-http://www.mircea-eliade.com/from-primitives-to-zen/160.html
• Nobody knows who you are, and nobody knows what to do. 
• Need to send people off with the proper things seen, proper things done, and the proper things said.  Not all fake like funeral homes make them.
• William Shakespeare - 
• Eschatology-(logos-a ground) (the soul) has to do with the things at the end.  A branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind
• Metempsychosis-transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death.  Nothing ever dies.
• Parabola is a magazine of myth and rituals and symbols.  First created in Dylon Montana,written by D.M. Dooling. ( Montana knows about Myths)  A parabola is a swerve, it is a conic section of a right circular conical surface and a plane parallel to a generating straight line of that surface.  Means coming in off the side. 
• Parabola-Parabol ( a story told to illustrate a moral point)  Parable of the lost sheep, the good Samaritan...A story that deconstructs the point you thought it would make.  A man walking down 8th street in Bozo is come upon from Pike thugs who beat him up, and a Catholic priest passes him by to go to mass, a Methodist passes him by on his way to lunch, a Middle Eastern who lives in an attic  takes the injured by to the pickle barrel and buys him a full sandwich, plus anything else he wants.  Morale?  (Impressive if he can eat a whole sandwich.) The person you thought would help didn't, and the person you didn't think would help did.

Page 375 Mircae Eliade

• On the Transmigration of the soul-http://www.mircea-eliade.com/from-primitives-to-zen/181.html
• Spokane = sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Father tells his 2 son after his trip to Spokane, come home and we will forgive and throw you a party.  The other 1 son is furious because he has worked every day in his life and been good. Father says, I see you every day, but son 2 was lost and now he is found.
• Mary and Martha- Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus, Martha is washing the dishes.  Martha says I have to spend all my day working and slaving so that YOU can go out and do whatever you want! Jesus tells Martha, you are distracted by many things, there is only one thing that is needful.  What is this thing? He suggest that Mary has chosen the right thing
• Gesang ist dasein- Sonnet to Orpheus... translation. A god can do it. but tell me how a man can follow him thorough the narrow lyre.  the human self is split; where two heart ways cross, there is no temple to Apollo.  Song, as you teach it, is not desire, not a wooling of something that is finally attained; song is existence.  Easy for the god....
• The ant and the grasshopper  grasshopper (cicada) spends his time fiddling around, while the ant works.  The grasshopper is cold for the winter, the ant is warm.  ~Who chose the right path?  Song is existence, we are hear in order to sing!  
• Cicada leave behind a beautiful case, there is no death there is only translation.
• Justin's Blog, why do we suffer?  Justin says we should be our own bards!  We are here to sing.
• Socrates says Cicadas were once human beings, the muses taught them to sing, and it was so enjoyable that they forgot to sleep, eat, they forgot to do everything, so they died.  Zeus transformed them into cicadas (song is existence  because he loved the song so much.