Cats At The Temple Of Philae, Egypt

But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker. And sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning.

Joan Didion, from On Keeping A Notebook in: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

James Baldwin.

The Epic of Gilgamesh illustrated by Wael Tarabieh (2/2)

@onpyre asked if I knew any books about monster theory, and I decided to share my list with everyone. I haven’t read all of these, so please let me know if any of them is absolute crap.

Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (particularly his ‘Seven Theses’)

The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (great introduction to a lot of different texts and ways of approaching this kind of study, so big rec!)

Ten Theses on Monsters and Monstrosity, Allen S. Weiss + this lecture

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle (particularly the introduction)

Monsters, John Michael Greer

Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors, David D. Gilmore

Horror and the Holy: Wisdom-Teachings of the Monster Tale, Kirk J. Schneider

On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Stephen T. Asma

Other related resources:

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke (here)

The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud (here)

Abnormal, Michel Foucault (here)

Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection, Julia Kristeva

The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States, ed. Michael E. Heyes

The Monster Show. A Cultural History of Horror, David J. Skal

Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, Richard Kearney

Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach

Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, And The Middle Ages, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity, Fred Botting (here)

Theses on Monsters, China Miéville (here)

Persephone and the Springtime was written by Margaret Hodges with illustrations by Arvis Stewart.

Part 2

The Epic of Gilgamesh illustrated by Wael Tarabieh (½)

“The manifold self-contradictions in Greek ideas and phrasing about death are not errors. They are styles of imagining the unimaginable, and are responsive both to personal needs and to old conventions. The same conflicts surge up in many cultures. They are necessary ambiguities in a realm of thinking where thinking cannot really be done, and where there is no experience.”

— Emily Vermeule, “Immortals are Mortal, Mortals Immortal,” Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry

“The so-called ‘mystery cults’ were a handful of marginal Eastern Mediterranean cults which achieved popularity throughout the Roman empire and were distinguished as a unique religious phenomenon by the Belgian archaeologist and philologist Franz Cumont in his 1906 book Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. This modern label of ‘mystery cults’ has now long been used as a blanket designation to cover the cults held in honour of Mithra, Attis and Cybele, Isis and Osiris, Demeter and Persephone, Orpheus and Bacchus/ Dionysus, and the Samothracian Kabeiroi, among countless other minor and local groups who will never be remembered. Each of these cults (with perhaps the exception of Mithraism) revolved around the dramatic and ecstatic veneration of “dying-and-rising-gods,” a title formulated by the founding father of comparative religion, James G. Frazer, and subsequently developed by British and Scandinavian members of the Myth-and-Ritual School. These so-called “Cambridge Ritualists,” held to the notion that myths do not stand on their own, but are born out of ritual. This theory, of course, is heavily disputed; but the alternative view is equally enlightening: that myth and ritual evolve along parallel lines, without one developing strictly out from the other. The ‘Divine Bridegroom’ is similarly a name I use for these dying mystery gods. For the most part, the mystery religions were sanctuary based, taking place in a telestrion (initiation chambers), caves, or mountain groves, and their members were organized by a structure of hierarchical degrees of initiation. The “mysteries” themselves generally entailed dramatic experiences conveyed via esoteric initiation ceremonies that were reflections of annual agricultural and astrological cycles. Already the mainstream view of old-school ethnologists believed in the notion that the mysteries were survivals of ancient “rites of passage,” especially by Mircea Eliade and Angelo Brelich. Many believed that the origin of the mysteries should be sought in some stage of primitive agricultural development, and it is in illo tempore - into that mythic dream time - to which I wish to return throughout this book.”

— Dan Attrell -  Shamanism and the Mysteries: A Brief History of the Cult of Ecstasy

Thinking about how, to let the myth of Persephone fit the themes of the Metamorphoses, Ovid had to insert two rather unknown/unpopular side stories about  a river nymph turning into water/liquid in her own stream, and a nymph giving Demeter the news, and how this affects the myth

Like for one the Metamorphoses in essence is caught up with the gods’ violence against lesser beings, mostly nymphs, women and mortals in general, and deals with the utter helplessness and loss of control these beings experience when they are transformed, as punishment or to escape a worse fate or simply because their suffering becomes too great for any mortal to bear. And here’s Persephone, a goddess and a rather major one, who by all means experiences the same type and amount of suffering. Ovid literally calls her a goddess on par with the other gods, and reasons this is why the six-month rule comes about. Where do you take that myth? The outcome is set in stone, her cyclical seasons-bound fate is so integral to the ancient cosmos, and yet it falls flat in a story like the metamorphoses, where the Olympian gods are usually on the other side of the fence. But here we have these two nymphs, who both experienced the violence done to Persephone and either give it a voice or dissolve into nothing, have their body and being entirely taken away from them. 

So I really think Cyane and Arethusa are almost stand-ins for Persephone, where the the former gets the metamorphosis that symbolizes the pain and suffering that the abduction causes, as she literally dissolves into tears and cannot speak anymore when she manifests again, and Arethusa’s story of her own nearly successful abduction and subsequent exile/displacement give us Persephone’s side of the story, but in a less repetitive way than in the Homeric hymn. 

gdrive link where you can find free books regarding Palestine, liberation and orientalism to download and read