Every culture has a flood narrative. If you think about it, flood was the greatest fear of ancient people. Floods wiped out their only source of food, devastated entire civilizations, and changed the landscape, often permanently. Civilizations were often built near major rivers, such as the city-state of Sumer between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq. We have two flood narratives from the Middle East. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the "Noah" character is Utnapishtim. Gilgamesh, half god and half man, is on a quest for immortality, and he seeks out the survivor of the flood. Utnapishtim gives his account of the flood. There are similarities when compared to the Old Testament account. Both Utnapishtim and Noah bring two of every animals onto the boat and save their families. Both send birds to find land. But in the Sumerian epic, a raven comes back with a sprig of vegetation, while in the Bible version a dove comes back with signs of life. The dove in the Old Testament symbolizes a return to peace between God and man. The Sumerians, like the Greeks and Egyptians, believed that when people died, they went to the Underworld. There was no reward or paradise waiting for them. The raven emphasizes grief and darkness of so many flood deaths while the dove illustrates the Hebrew belief in the relationship between man and God, restored after the flood.
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Early storytellers, such as Arab griots and Anglo-Saxon scops, used poetry, music, and drama to keep the values of their cultures alive. Greek worshippers acted their stories out during celebrations at religious festivals and while sacrificing animals to the gods. Greek drama became "tragedy," from the Greek word tragos, meaning goat-song. This engraving was made by William Blake, a poet who lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In class, we talked about what myth means and what it doesn't mean. Many people think that a myth is something people used to believe that has now been "busted" or disproven, as in the show Mythbusters. Today we learned that myths are stories we tell each other to tell us who we are. We also defined archetype as a symbol that transcends culture, time, and place, such as a dove symbolizes peace in much of the world. We established "theme" as expressed in a statement, usually a sentence, specifically what the author is trying to communicate, the lesson or moral of the story, or the deeper meaning (below the surface) that the author is trying to bring out in the work. In the World Masterpieces textbook, we read the First Garden story from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible. Students found examples of archetypes, including the serpent, which they saw as evil, Satan, sin, fear, or deception; the tree, found in many cultures creation stories as the universal tree or spirit-indwelled tree; the forbidden fruit, which echoed many other myths, including Pandora (who opened the box and let out evil), Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and suffered punishment for it, and Victor Frankenstein who dared to create life without God, the fruit of which was the monster, who carried the curse and punishment in his own body. The students suggested possible themes. I asked the question: Why would the Hebrew parents tell their children a story about boundaries? They said the parents were trying to tell the kids: Be careful whom you listen to; Protect your innocence, because once it's gone, you can't get it back; You can't cross every boundary or break every barrier, because there will be consequences.
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1984 linkhttp://www.mondopolitico.com/library/1984/1984.htm Archives
September 2019
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