With all the hullabaloo about zodiac signs changing scattered around the internet, I thought it would be fun to break out my copy of Hamlet's Mill (sadly, not the one with my college notes in it) and do an excerpt from the venerable tome by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. The pair of authors relate mythology to astronomy, and discuss mythology as a scientific language that describes events in the heavens. They delve into the concept of world ages, as well as discussing a lot of material that I didn't entirely comprehend in college and have yet to really delve back into. (In fact, in my final paper for Mark Vecchio's Mythic Imagination class, which was required as a script of multiple voices, including the writers and myself, one of the characters comments on my analysis of Hamlet's Mill that I still haven't quite figured out what they're talking about. I knew my own shortcomings.)

So, for your reading pleasure, the Precession of the Equinoxes.

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First, what was the "earth"? In the most general sense, the "earth" was the ideal plane laid through the ecliptic. The "dry earth," in a more specific sense, was the ideal plane going through the celestial equator. The equator thus divided two halves of the zodiac which ran on the ecliptic, 23 1/2 degrees inclined to the equator, one half being "dry land" (the northern band of the zodiac, reading from the vernal to the autumnal equinox), the other representing the "waters below" the equinoctial plane (the southern arc of the zodiac, reaching from the autumnal equinox, via the winter solstice, to the vernal equinox). The terms "vernal equinox," "winter solstice," etc., are used intentionally because myth deals with time, periods of time which correspond to angular measures, and not with tracts in space.

This could be neglected were it not for the fact that the equinoctial "points"--and therefore, the solstitial ones, too--do not remain forever where they should in order to make celestial goings-on easier to understand, namely, at the same spot with respect to the sphere of fixed stars. Instead, they stubbornly move along the ecliptic in the opposite direction to the yearly course of the sun, that is, against the "right" sequence of the zodiacal signs (Taurus->Aries->Pisces, instead of Pisces->Aries->Taurus).

This phenomenon is called the Precession of the Equinoxes, and it was conceived as causing the rise and the cataclysmic fall of ages of the world. Its cause is a bad habit of the axis of our globe, which turns around in the manner of a spinning top, its tip being in the center of our small earth-ball, whence our earth axis, prolonged to the celestial North Pole, describes a circle around the North Pole of the ecliptic, the true "center" of the planetary system, the radius of this circle being the same magnitude as the obliquity of the ecliptic with respect to the equator: 23 1/2 degrees. The time which this prolonged axis needs to circumscribe the ecliptical North Pole is roughly 26,000 years, during which period it points to one star after another: around 3000 B.C. the Pole star was alpha Draconis; at the time of the Greeks it was beta Ursae Minoris; for the time being it is alpha Ursae Minoris; in A.D. 14,000 it will be Vega. The equinoxes, the points of intersection of ecliptic and equator, swinging from the spinning axis of the earth, move with the same speed of 26,000 years along the ecliptic.

The sun's position among the constellations at the vernal equinox was the pointer that indicated the "hours" of the precessional cycle--very long hours indeed, the equinoctial sun occupying each zodiacal sign for about 2,200 years.

Back in 2006 when I made my first voyage to Ireland with Mark Vecchio and students, I had the privilege of getting to know then theater student, Rich Vaden. Since then, I've traveled with Rich to Turkey and Greece on another one of the myth tours (where he performed a Homeric Hymn for our group in the theater at Delphi), have seen him perform in college productions, and have had the opportunity to see the play that he wrote and performed in, Hide and Seek, in two different incarnations: one at the Berkshire Fringe Festival, and one produced by Scheherazade Theatre in Pioneer Valley and performed at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre in Times Square. He's remarkably talented, and a good friend. Right now, he's off in Ireland, chaperoning the same trip where we met, so I asked if he'd be willing to write a guest blog about his trip. He sent me this piece earlier in the week, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

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May 22, 2010 Strandhill, Ireland, Co. Sligo:

"Mythical Meditation"

Since I've arrived in Ireland, its been a developing process of trying to strip away the blocks my own modern mind has placed on the process of delving deeply into the myths and the mythic imagination that Ireland (its culture, landscape and legends) inspire. One of the tools I have been using is meditation. At each sacred location we visit (thus far: Tara, Newgrange, The Lake Isle of Inishfree, Maeve's Cairn/Knocknarea, & Knocknarea Glen) I take, at the very least, ten minutes to meditate using a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu techniques, with my own personal "stank." This is the way that I find most helpful in tuning into the mythic aura/tone/atmosphere/energy of the locations.

When I achieve a meditative state, I listen to the nature around me (the birds, the wind, the sheep, the earth) and try to allow it to inhabit the fiber of my being. I let it guide my consciousness and, hopefully, my subconscious. I try to feel the nature of the mana of the place, its quality and strength, as well as my own response to it (can I focus? can I feel it? can I attune myself to it?) This is all done while simultaneously trying NOT to try to do anything. Sometimes I am successful, sometimes I am not.

Today, in the Glen of Knocknarea, close to Maeve's Cairn, I was able to attune myself to the nature literally surrounding me. I began to feel a pulse, a rhythm, almost a language that was formed between my mind/soul/body and Mother Nature. I believe this was possible because A) I have been practicing this meditation daily (sometimes twice or three times daily) since I arrived, and it takes that many times for me to achieve a meditative state in an environment of "meditation on the go;" and, B) The myth of Meave is one that is filled with elements that are particularly powerful to me: the Moon, the Goddess/Queen, the Power and Divinity of the Feminine, the Bull, and the mixture of earth and water, and thus, fertility. These elements are post powerful to me astrologically (if you know astrology, I am a Pisces, with Cancer Rising, and Taurus Moon, thus the aforementioned elements in combination are particularly regenerative to me).

During my meditation, I focused on what was around me, the confluence of these elements, the elements themselves, and the myth of Meave. As I ended my meditation, raising the Kundalini through my chakras, I could almost feel the power of Meave flow through me, from my first, all the way to my seventh chakra, and the cares of the modern world melted away. Afterwards, I felt a bit of the Goddess in me, or at least flowing through me ever so slightly. It felt like pure power mixed with compassion, sensitivity, and abstract wisdom (that is, the feeling of having passively learned/absorbed something profound, without knowing what it is). It was an experience for which I am eternally grateful and I look forward to my further exploration of Mythical Meditation.

A funny thing happened at the beginning of the trip. Mark bought a new course book for all the students (and one for me as well), since he discovered it after the initial course books had already been ordered and figured it would be easier just to procure them instead of having the students do it last minute. At the airport in Boston, he distributed the books to everyone, and I decided to take mine on the plane, so I could get ahead on the reading. The title, Stonehenge, by John North (which is also in my sidebar), is a discussion of astronomy and the alignment of ancient monuments and barrows not only to the sun and moon, but also to particular stars at particular times of year, accounting for the precession of the equinoxes (or the movement of the earth's rotation that accounts for the change in angles at which the stars appear over thousands of years). When I opened my copy to begin reading, however, I discovered not an investigation into alignment and ancient thought, but a novel of the same name by Bernard Cornwell. This, of course, was not entirely helpful (although possibly a more lighthearted read!). Some bookseller stuck a copy of the novel inside the jacket of the nonfiction title and thought all would be well -- but of course, it was not. We spent a good chunk of our first day in London tromping around to every esoteric book store (and several major chain stores here) in our general area trying to track down a copy of the North book to replace my novel. We didn't find one until the second day, when I poked my head into a store called Atlantis expecting the same result of "not in stock, but we can order it for you." Instead, the bookseller showed me to the section where she thought it would be, and lo and behold, there was a copy!

After I purchased it, one of the students asked, "So, did you check to make sure it's the right book inside the jacket?" Doh! I hadn't, but it was, indeed, the right book. I'm still catching up on the reading, having lost the flight and part of my opportunities on the first day to get some reading done, but at least now I have it. The excerpt below is from North's apologetics section -- he speculates quite a lot in his book, but comes to some pretty reasonable conclusions that support his hypothesis of star alignment, which he backs up with some interesting numbers. This has less to do with myth directly than most of my guest blogs do, but it gives you a taste for what we're discussing in the course these three weeks, and also offers a peek into what might have been important to people thinking inside a mythic consciousness.

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It should now be clear that there are very many different types of initial assumption. A skeptic might argue thus, taking fairly wide limits for the ranges mentioned: 'I do not believe that long barrows were placed in relation to the stars. If I were to drop a typical long barrow on the landscape at random, the chances are eight in ten that I should be able to find a date within a plausible period of prehistory at which your roughly opposed lines of sight would align accurately on bright stars'. ... Following this line of argument in a very crude way, and multiplying probabilities, the chances of finding solutions for two barrows would be 64%, of finding three 51%, of finding seven 21%, and so on. One might reduce still further the chances that the claims against which the unbeliever is arguing are illusory--for instance, by appealing to multiple solutions for the same epoch (usually in close agreement with radiocarbon dating), especially solutions paired at right angles, and having relations with the surrounding landscape--but all this is unlikely to convince resolute skeptics, who are used to having figures in millions quoted against them.

So much for the 'generic barrow on the landscape'. A more reasonable approach is to take a single known long barrow, say Wayland's Smithy, and to ask about the likelihood of finding a solution by chance. It may be supposed, for example, that the long barrow is placed at random on the landscape, with appropriate closely limited characteristics. ... What then are the chances of finding a precise solution involving bright stars in both directions between 4000 BC and 3000 BC?

To take this specimen case, even after adding five more bright stars ... to the previous list, there are only three distinct solutions, each with two orientations (interchanging rising and setting), making six in all. Without giving the lengthy calculations, one can say that for the opening decades of the period, the barrow could be dropped into one of only six narrow sectors of the compass, each covering about 1.4 degrees and 3 degrees. with time, those sectors drift somewhat ... and one pair eventually ceases to be useful, but another takes its place. The details are not important, but it can be said that at a very generous estimate, the barrow could have been assigned an azimuth falling within sectors totaling 54 degrees of the whole compass. In short, a randomly placed Wayland's Smithy has a three in twenty chance (15%) of accommodating a pairing of bright stars in the way explained in the present chapter. This is generous, and on another count far too generous: the thousand years could have been narrowed down appreciably, greatly increasing the odds against finding a random solution. And even with odds of 15%, to find seven solutions--if they happened to produce the same odds, which of course they would not--would mean odds of less than two in a million of finding the whole set of solutions by chance. ... The odds against consistently hitting a solution by chance are very great indeed, and the conclusion must be that astronomical activity at the long barrows is not an illusion.

This may seem a complete tangent from my last post (and it sort of is), but it's come up several times in conversation recently, and I suspect it has to do a bit with training your thinking, so it's vaguely relevant. One of the things I have trouble with as a writer and as a freelancer is self-motivation. People who work for themselves have to be very self-motivated in order to accomplish anything, and figuring out how to find that motivation and drive can be a struggle. I suspect that anyone who works alone has to deal with the same thing, as humans need interaction (we're social creatures) to keep our spirits (and thus our motivation) at high levels. We have to train ourselves to find motivation in unexpected places, since the usual community routes aren't open to us.

One of the ways I'm finding compelling recently is having the benefit of mutual admiration. I've spread out my writing projects among a bunch of different people and groups, so I'm not hitting up the same folks for motivation all the time. In addition, I'm surrounding myself with people who are, in short, brilliant. An old saying (or at least a repeated one here) is that "excellence recognizes brilliance." I've long known that while I'm pretty good at a pretty wide variety of things, I'm rarely the best at any of it. (Some of this comes from being related to extremely talented people and surrounding myself with incredibly smart friends --and vice versa.) I strive for excellence, but really appreciate it when the brilliant folks show up in my life -- and better yet, are interested in the stuff that I'm doing. There are few things so satisfying as having someone who you admire creatively asking for more of what you're up to.

Today was a great day for remembering this. Not only do I have an e-mail from one of the Substraters in my inbox, asking when he'll get to see some more of the new super-secret (super-drafty) new novel that may or may not become anything more than a first chapter, but I was up visiting students at Simon's Rock. The purpose of the trip was to become acquainted with the students who will be going to England in May, but it also served as a brain refresher. The myth students are usually a clever bunch, and this group is no exception. The ideas they were throwing around -- and catching, and tossing back -- were just delightful to witness. (The discussion was of Barfield's Saving the Appearances, and the refresher on those ideas was also a motivator for me to get back to Breakfast with Barfield -- and then move onto the Mabinogion, so I can keep up when we're abroad.) After class, I spent some time with the students I've traveled with before, just chatting and catching up, and then went out to dinner with Mark Vecchio. All in all, it was a wonderful day of feeling appreciated by people who amaze and challenge me, and that's just the sort of day that can fuel my motivation for a long time to come.

Perhaps tomorrow, I'll even get back on track with guest blogs and posting here more regularly. But I'm off to ICon on Long Island tomorrow, and up to Boston for Mythic Greece on Sunday, so my best intentions may have to wait 'til next week.

sartorias proclaimed it so, and tltrent put a snippet up on her lj as well, so I thought, hey, why not join the club?

Quick note about writing in general: after a long conversation with former guest blogger and my college mentor Mark Vecchio, I realized I need to make some changes in how I think about my writing work as opposed to my writing. They keep competing with each other, and the paid assignments win. So, they have to stop competing, and the fiction writing has to be its own priority or it won't get done.

This means I actually started following my own rules about sending first reader Arielle some fiction last Friday, and I've been spending more quality time doing fiction writing. I've actually started the WIP novel, and put a little more work into "Rodeo at Area 51," which is the snippet you're getting today.

Here's to the start of a new (and hopefully continually good) trend!

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"If you're offering me work, Mr. Hughes, you sure got a strange way of doing it."

He coughed, just slightly, as the dust from her gloves blew into his face. "Let's just say I've had to learn the hard way about distinguishing fact from fiction," he said. "If you are as good as your reputation suggests, I'm sure this opportunity will intrigue you and benefit us both."

She gestured over her shoulder. "I've still got two days of shooting."

Eddie shook his head dramatically. All right, there was a lot of money in this.

"I'm sure something can be arranged," said Hughes.

And now her manager was practically begging, clasped hands under his chin. If she didn't agree to this, he'd be prostrate soon. "I don't suppose it'd be top secret," she said, trying to keep her voice lazy.

"It would, in fact," Hughes responded, his voice just as tempered as hers. "You'll certainly be able to list us on your extensive resume, but I'm afraid otherwise, the information you receive will be classified."

"All right," she said with a quick nod, and Eddie flashed her two thumbs up. "Talk over the details with Eddie--I assume you've met him--while I get cleaned up. Shouldn't be more than a tic."

Hughes adjusted his jacket and grinned. "Do you always talk like that, Miss Cloud?"

Jo tried to throw Hughes's earlier smirk back at him, though she suspected he was more practiced. "Only in Hollywood, Mr. Hughes. It's part of my image."

Finally, the long awaited guest blogs! Given that the subject of the guest blogs is some riff on mythology, I thought it would be appropriate that the first entry come from an academic involved in studying and teaching the subject. Mark J. Vecchio currently teaches courses on mythology and theater (how Dionysian!) at Simon's Rock. He received his D.Univ. at the University of Kent at Canterbury, England, and his M.F.A. at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. An award winning director and published poet, Vecchio has taught courses on Greek mythology in Greece, Celtic mythology in Ireland, and Arthurian legend in England.

(As a note, any errors in presentation are mine; I am still learning html, and this is, thus far, the most complex coding I've attempted!)

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Distinguishing Myth, Folk-tale, Legend, & Literature

By Mark J. Vecchio—Copyright 2006

The following is observational, not definitional. I’m less sure about the middle sections (Folk-tale & Legend), and include them mainly for a sense of arc and also to show overlap. Folk-tale & legend are represented as parallel branches, because they differ from each other in character (folk-tale more like fiction, legend more like nonfiction) rather than effectiveness (see below), in terms of which both are in between myth & literature.


Myth

• A traditional tale: no author


• Relevant on a tribal-cultural level; priestly or bardic transmission


• Oral, non-literary narrative


• Meaning is compromised when the tale is written, but once written suffers no loss of meaning in translation


• Fully participatory† (e.g. through ritual or dramatic performance): must be immediately experienced or full meaning is compromised; a collective, not an individual, experience; participation of myth is effective‡


• Occurs in cyclical, not linear, time with no simple (i.e. mappable) location in space—a.k.a. the Dreamtime; law of non-contradiction doesn’t apply (i.e. two things can occupy the same space at the same time); a-historic

Folk-tale

• A traditional tale: no author


• Relevant on a private or communal (i.e. familial, rural) level; local or private transmission


• Oral, but loses little meaning when written


• Pure narrative: suffers no loss of meaning in translation


• Imaginal participation only; contradicted by causal logic; usually only effective (i.e. experienced as true) in a child’s imagination (thus tales can be instructive); an individual or intimate group experience


• Occurs in imaginary, a-historical, linear time & mappable space (“Once upon a time . . .”)

Legend

• A traditional tale: no author


• Variable scope of relevance; bardic or local transmission


• Oral, but loses little meaning when written


• Narrative only: has the quality of history; may be reenacted (e.g. in children’s games) but a legend, unlike myth, does not ritually renew (see Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return)


• Participation is nostalgic, sometimes imaginal (as a folk-tale), but not effective; subject to belief


• Situated in time & place as prehistory that purports to historicity: construed as prior to but on the same timeline as known history

Literature

• Necessarily authored (even if the author is unknown or “Anonymous”)


• Multi-genre; not necessarily a tale (e.g. lyric poetry); fuzzy distinction between historical & imaginative, but sharp distinction between fiction & nonfiction


• Relevance not a given, but instead dependent on critical & popular reception


• Literary, not oral: transmitted in print (i.e. published) through markets to individuals & institutions


• Meaning is language-bound and compromised in translation; meaning is private, not public; interpretations are shared person-to-person or through secondary literature


• Varying degrees of imaginal participation only: at most one is “transported” by a book; the least degree would be like reading a recipe (i.e. information); an individual, not a collective, experience


• Effectiveness is potential only, & entirely indirect: rests with reader reception & interpretation


• Occurs in linear time & mappable space; law of non-contradiction in full force; actually or construed as historical (even fiction implies fictional history)

†“Participation” in all its forms is used here in the sense in which Aquinas used it regularly, and as discussed at length by Owen Barfield in Saving the Appearances. It can be thought of as sympathetic condition or activity, but not as copying. Purposely returning someone’s smile is akin to copying; being infected with someone’s smile is participatory. A parallax illustration is that the earth’s atmosphere participates the light of the sun.
‡ “Effective” in this context means capable of creating reality; e.g. participating the myth of Demeter & Kore at Eleusis was a matter of initiation, which changed the initiate both personally & socially—but because the myth-ritual was participated, the change was effected internally (the social change being a response to the essential change in the person). By contrast, in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, “effective dreaming” changes the external structures of reality: the solution to racism was not to alter attitudes but to uniformalize everyone’s skin color.

Thanks to slwhitman, I'm now aware of the reading list that Joseph Campbell used for his mythology classes at Sarah Lawrence. (He taught at Sarah Lawrence? Who knew?)

What's incredibly interesting to me is that fairy tales by the Grimm brothers are on this list. That's right: fairy tales in a mythology course. I have an ongoing dialogue with Mark Vecchio, my mythology prof from college (who is a great friend and mentor as well), about fairy tales vs. mythology, so it will be lovely to pull this information out in our next conversation. It's nifty to see the Levy-Bruhl on there, which Mark's current students referred to in Greece and Turkey, but I haven't read.

It's an extremely diverse list--though it neglects to include the Graves Greek Mythology, which I've been informed is the best collection of Greek myths out there, in favor of the Golden Bough, which is assorted myths, and was probably used to cover Greek, Norse, and possibly Celtic. I'll have to look at it on the shelf today at the library.

Things I'd add to this list based on my recent mythology classes (that may or may not have been available to Campbell):

The White Goddess by Robert Graves
Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend
The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade
Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield
"On Fairy Tales" by J. R. R. Tolkien
Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World by Maurice Leenhardt
Mythology of the British Isles by Geoffrey Ashe
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by C. G. Jung

Hrm. I feel like I may be missing a few. There's one on sacred landscapes that I'm not finding on my bookshelves at the moment.

Thanks to slwhitman for today's prompt. The distinction between mythology and fairy tales is something I was planning to investigate at the library today (as time allows), as they're separated in the Dewey Decimal System. I'd like to know how the distinction is made.

Edit: Is "dialogue" archaic? I've always spelled it that way, but the lj spell checker doesn't like it. Must turn to my new-book-smell Webster's and look it up.