Their fate indeed was a proof that suffering was not a punishment for wrongdoing; the innocent suffered as often as the guilty.
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Müzeyyen gibi kadınlar kıskanılır. Müzeyyen kıskanılır....
"Men must fight for such as she," they said to each other. " For her face was like to that of an immortal spirit."
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"You will always have the last word," Hera said, " but no power to speak first."
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Love cannot live where there is no trust.
Think of how many creation myths start with murder. Kronos castrated and killed his father, Ouranos, and then Kronos cannibalized his own children until Zeus castrated and killed Kronos. In Norse mythology, Odin, Vili, and Ve killed their grandfather, the giant Ymir. So much blood flowed from his body that it flooded the universe and formed the oceans. His flesh became the land; they shaped the mountains from his bones and raised his skull up on four pillars to become the vault of Heaven. Man formed from the maggots that feasted on his corpse.
From the beginning, this world has been built by cannibals out of the corpses of their forefathers. Mors janua vitae: death is the gate of life.
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Utopian literature was not fully materialistic, as science fiction has been. But neither was it an expression of the old spirit realm of ancient mythology. Rather it reflected that in-between period and state of mind in which man was assumed to have been specially created by a benevolent Deity and to be connected to Him still by the faculty of the rational soul.
Unlike Greek mythology, where the gods continually descend to earth and interfere with the affairs of mankind, in Hindu mythology men frequently acquire sufficient ascetic or moral power to rise to heaven and challenge the gods. When this occurs, the gods must find a way to reduce the power of these men, even as they often have occasion to pervert virtuous demons.
Suçluluk ve utanç arasında derin bir fark vardır. Suçluluk, ne yaptığımızla, utanç ise direkt olarak kim olduğumuzla ilgilidir.
- Perera, Sylvia Brinton, The Scapegoat Complex:Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt
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sümerlerde.
“Çıkarılan tabletlerde anal seksin tabu olarak nitelendiğini gösterecek hiçbir iz yoktur. ‘Entu-rahibeleri’ hamileliği önlemek için tapınaklarda zaman zaman bu yolu da denemişlerdir. Cinsel ilişki, oluştuğu günden beri evreni yöneten tanrısal yasalardan sayıldığı için, homoseksüellik bile kutsal sayılırdı. Önemli olan cinselliği hissetmekti. Bu nedenle mastürbasyon da teşvik edilirdi. Öyle ki, tek başına yaşanan cinsellik sürecinde erkekler kolay ereksiyon olsun diye -puru yağı- denen bir madde kullanılırdı. Bilim adamları bu yağın son derece uyarıcı olan manyetik özelliği olan demir zerrecikleri ihtiva etmekte olduğuna inanmaktalar.” Sarah Dening, The Mythology of Sex.
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It’s just too terrible to contemplate that there maybe no ONE, or there maybe several ONEs to spend their lives with. This western romanticized mythology is based on the premise that there is only ONE perfect mate for any single individual and as much as a lifetime can and should be spent in constant search of this ‘soul-mate.’
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One can look at just about all the motives for Heracles' labors and find this theme of frustrated or wasted effort, whether Heracles is formally motivated by profit, wages, penance, servile necessity, gratitude, or debt.
Heracles' life is a life of useless struggle, except in one important respect, and this is where we find the decisively aristocratic spin in the tale. The aristocratic work he does pays off: insofar as he worked "for glory," he gets in the end his just reward in the form of everlasting fame and real immortality. Even his losses are made up, though only according to the aristocratic code: he revisits those who cheated or dishonored him and recovers his honor by avenging all those who treated him with contempt.
Heracles usually fails to pay back the proper respect to hosts and guests. Pholus the centaur proves himself the perfect host to Heracles, but Heracles repays him by willfully breaking open a pithos of wine, despite Pholus's protests, and starting a drunken riot which leads to the death of Pholus by one of Heracles' arrows. Similarly, though he is the guest of Eurytus, he starts a fight, steals Eurytus's horses, and later ends up sacking Eurytus's kingdom and killing all his sons. He twice kills the sons or relatives of his hosts while they are serving him, for trivial offenses, like accidentally splashing one of them with water while offering him a basin to wash his hands. Heracles' reputation for being a bad guest lived on in comedy and even tragedy.
Epinician poetry regularly draws an analogy between winning the panhellenic games and conquering death. The myth of Heracles does more than any other to sustain the illusion that the successful athlete in some way surpasses the condition of ordinary mortality. Heracles' deeds not only bring him undying fame, but literally confer immortality. Artistic representations of his ascent to Olympus adopt the schema of the homecoming of an athletic victor. Heracles is usually seen crowned, in a winged chariot, driven by Athena, or by Nike, the personification of victory itself, up to the house of his father Zeus and the assembled gods who eagerly await him.
Heracles' deeds are called athloi. The Greek word means "contests." Athloi is normally used of the panhellenic contests which played such an important role in aristocratic status-competition. Athlos specifically refers to contests for prizes, prizes which in theory at least were mere symbols of glory, and of no intrinsic value. Diodorus reports that Heracles introduced the first games at Olympia for "only a crown since he himself had conferred benefits on the race of men without receiving any pay"