Notes 11/15/2011

Talked about the paper. The theme is focused on The Magus, unless you have talked to professor Sexson on writing something else. Be specific, entertaining, do not bore your audience!

THE END OF THE END

• masque - certain kind of theater often times put on in somebody's house
• History -> His- battles, big events 
• Personal unconsciousness is baggage or a great pressure that we carry around with us everyday
• Jung- We believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on personal unconsciousness)
• quotidian- ordinary, everyday
• The only reason for action is action itself
• Taoism- philosophical or religious tradition in which the basic concept is to establish harmony 

Bourani becoming reality over actual reality?

"I only know I'm haunted, possessed by everything over there." (The Magus pg. 270)
On this page when Allison was visiting and pages and pages after that. It seems that Bourani has indeed become his reality over actual reality. Especially in this part of the book when he is not at Bourani he's thinking about it all the time and what kind of test Conchis has for him in store next. He wants to know and understand so badly what exactly he is in the middle of. It seems like the uncertainty annoys him, especially not knowing whether "Julie" is who she says she really is. I could relate with the character through out the whole book, it was confusing trying to figure out the maze that he was in. When I was reading it, I had thought of a movie that was kind of similar. The movie is called "Stranger Than Fiction" it's about this ordinary guy named Harold Crick who is an IRS agent and he starts to hear this voice that is narrating his life. Little does he know that he is the main character in a new book that Karen Eiffel is writing who is known for killing all of her main characters. You could imagine it was a strange process trying to find out what is happening to him as well.

10/27 notes

THE SECOND COMING
    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
from PotW.org

• It's not the thing that is sacred, if you believe it's sacred, then it is. Ex. Bible for the christian, lucky jersey for an athlete.
• Gerard Manly Hopkins - "The world s charged with the grandeur of God."
• If you see how it really is, you see how it's connected to the universe. 
• C.G. Jung- Follower of Sigmund Freud, studied typology, understood something going on in mythology and fantasy that goes along with psychology. Found that psyche is not the about the mind, but the soul. 

• Thinking(extrovert)- Zeus
• Sensation - Athena, connected to birth of Athens.
• Intuition - Demeter
• Feeling (introvert) - Dionysus God of rock and roll

• Eros and Psyche- Psyche was the most beautiful, a bit of a floozy. Ero's wanted her and Apollo wanted to have her sacrificed because Aphrodite was jealous of her beauty, this refers to Snow white when the queen was jealous of Snow white because she was the most beautiful girl in all of the land. Eros loves Psyche and took her to his castle to take care of her this also refers to Beauty and the Beast, when the beast took Bell to his castle. The only thing that Eros asked Psyche to do was she was forbidden to look at him. Then Psyche's sisters come and tell her that Eros is a monster and should be killed (because they were jealous). Psyche decides to have a look at Eros before killing him since she disobeyed the one thing he asked Eros says,"I'm going home, my mother cooks better than you do!" When he leaves Psyche tries to hand on to him, but slips off and finds out she's pregnant. She goes to Aphrodite and asks for her husband back, Aphrodite makes her do all these chores and animals help her (reference to Cinderella)....didn't get the rest of it, but that's most of it. 
• All fairy tales are to prepare women for marriage.  

Incubus!

• Referring to how when you go to a rock concert you get an out of body experience feeling, from Dionysus King of Ecstacy
• I looked up the definition of Incubus from Wikipedia, here it is:

An incubus (nominal form constructed from the Latin verb, incubo, incubare, or "to lie upon") is ademon in male form who, according to a number of mythological and legendary traditions, lies upon sleepers, especially women, in order to have intercourse with them. Its female counterpart is thesuccubus. An incubus may pursue sexual relations with a woman in order to father a child, as in the legend of Merlin.^[1] Religious tradition holds that repeated intercourse with an incubus or succubus may result in the deterioration of health, or even death

Santa Claus

So when I found out that Santa Claus wasn't real, I was probably about 11 or 12. I remember thinking about it logically and realized that it was physically impossible for Santa Claus to be able to deliver gifts to every house in the world in one night. When you're a kid, you don't really think about that stuff. It made sense, that my parents would wait for my brother and I to go to bed and when they were certain that we were asleep, they would take all the gifts downstairs and fill our stockings. I still to this day have no idea where they hid the presents. I used to make cookies for Santa and put milk out, the next morning one of the cookies had a bite in it the next morning, but it was really just my parents. Once I had found out there was no Santa, it definitely took away some of the magic of the holiday. I still love Christmas, however its not the same as when I thought Santa was actually real.

Rosemary doing Dia De Los Muertos

Ritual presentation

The ritual I'm going to be presenting is called Rain Making and it comes from the Karamundi nation from Australia

Mircea Eliade "From Primitives to Zen":RAIN-MAKING

It is universally believed by the tribes of the Karamundi nation, Of the Darling River, that rain can be brought down by the following ceremony. A vein in the arm of one of the men is opened and the blood allowed to drop into a piece of hollow bark until there is a little pool. Into this is put a quantity of gypsum, ground fine, and stirred until it has the consistency of a thick paste. A number of hairs are pulled out of the man's beard and mixed up with this paste, which is then placed between two pieces of bark and put under the surface of the water in some river or lagoon, and kept there by means of pointed stakes driven into the ground. When the mixture is all dissolved away, the blackfellows say that a great cloud will come, bringing rain. From the time that this ceremony takes place until the rain comes, the men are tabooed from their wives, or the charm will be spoiled, and the old men say that if this prohibition were properly respected, rain would come every time that it is done. In a time of drought, when rain is badly wanted, the whole tribe meets and performs this ceremony.

When I think of ritual, I think of tradition. When I think of tradition Christmas automatically comes to mind. I have always loved Christmas time, spending time with my family, putting Christmas lights on the house, decorating the tree, and everyone seems to be more jolly around that time of year. The way Christmas day would go in my family is on Christmas Eve, I remember being excited for what Christmas day would bring. So I would never really get much sleep that night and would always be up early the next morning. Most times when I was younger my mom had to work on Christmas, so my brother and I would be anxiously waiting for her to get home. So Christmas could really start. As soon as she got home we would all open our gifts, we would always start with our stockings which would be filled with candy and all kinds of good stuff. Then we would open our gifts and I remember always being happy with what I had gotten. Most of the rest of the day was spent together as a family appreciating what we have and how good we have it. Of course, part of that day was spent preparing Christmas dinner. Christmas dinner was not like dinner on normal days, we would have a festive table cloth on the table, nice plates put out, some kind of Christmas decoration in the middle, and candles. Our Christmas dinner gave us a chance to appreciate our company and be thankful for our lives and what has been given to us.

My own personal understanding of ritual, is something that you cherish and look forward to every year or however often the ritual is done. Whether it be a tradition that was created by your immediate family or something your family has done for generations. Tradition is meant to bring people together and celebrate life.