Right now I am sitting at my computer as my girlfriend reads her awful and disgustingly fascinating book about Fluid Mechanics. Her text reads in a didactic, pedantic, pretentious manner: "We must begin by responding to the question, 'What is a fluid?' Broadly speaking, a fluid is a substance that will deform continuously when it is subjected to a tangential or shear force, much as a similar type of force is exerted when a water-skier skims over the surface of a lake or butter is spread on a slice of bread" (Wilkes 3, Fluid Mechanics for Chemical Engineers). She looks at me disdainfully as I write this, but I tell her I love her and everything is okay. Then she slaps me across the face with her strong pimp hand. Though my face is red and pounding with blood barely under the surface, I do arrive at an interesting conclusion: even science needs myth to get its point across.
Myth is a road map to life. Where science looks deeper and deeper, never finding the answer, myth is life through story. Alan Watts describes it as such: "Myth doesn't mean something untrue, but it means an image. In terms of which make sense of life and the world. Supposing for example you don't understand the technicalities of electricity, and somebody wants to explain them to you, he wants to explain about the flow of currents, well to do that he compares electricity to water, and because you understand water you get some idea about the behavior of electricity. Or if an astronomer wants to explain to you what he means by expanding space, he'll use the metaphor of a balloon, a black balloon with white spots on it. The white spots represent the galaxies, and if you blow up the balloon they all get further away from each other at the same speed as the balloon blows up. In neither case are we saying that electricity is water or that the universe is a balloon with white spots on it, we are saying it's something like it. So in the same way the human being has always used images to represent his deepest of ideas about how the universe works and what man's place in it is." Dr. Sexson has said that by finding what story you are in, what myth, you can find the true meaning of it all. The universe is living through each and everyone of us, and by tracking down each motif, arch, beginning, middle, and end, we can discover it all. The story of Adonis and Venus is a classic of example of this--it is a story that echoes across the world, as if caught in the wind. Enkidu and the whore. Adam and Eve. Mowgli. The wild man, the hunter, who is tamed and deposited to civilization. Venus is just another Isis rearing her head--
Manly P. Hall, an hierophant to the ancient mysteries, cites Apuleius account from the Golden Ass in his Secret Teaching of All Ages: "Behold, I moved by thy prayers, am present with thee; I, who am Nature, the parent of things, the queen of all the elements, the primordial progeny of ages, the supreme of Divinities, the sovereign of the spirits of the head, the first of the celestials, and the uniform resemblance of Gods and Goddesses. I, who rule by my nod the luminous summits of the heavens, the salubrious breezes of the sea, and the deplorable silences of the realms beneath, and whose one divinity the whole orb of the earth venerates under a manifold form, by different rites and a variety of appellations. Hence the primogenial Phrygians call me Pessinuntica, the mother of the Gods, the Attic Aborigines, Cecropian Miverva; the floating Cyprians, Paphian Venus, the arrow-bearing Cretans, Diana Dictynna; the three-tongued Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; and teh Eleusinians, the ancient Goddess Ceres. Some also call me Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, and others Rhamnusia. And those who are illuminated by incipient rays of that divinity the Sun, when he rises, viz. the Ethiopians, the Arii, and the Egyptians silled in ancient learning, worshipping me by ceremonies perfectly appropriate, call me by my true name, Queen Isis" (Hall 105). The mother Goddess reoccurs across cultures--Queen Moo in Central America and even the Virgin Mary for the Christians. In Shakespeare's version, Venus (the earth mother) tells the dude to have sex with her and become a good cultured man. Willy could have never read the tale of Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the connections couldn't be clearer...
This is a rough draft and just a series of thoughts with typos and the ilk. I will update it and make connections tomorrow, but for the time being, here's a series of thoughts. heh. As for my girlfriend and myself, we are doing well, though she is slightly upset with me for posting this.
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