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What does it mean when God doesn't look like you? A bazillion people across the planet must wonder this. For me there's a twist on the question: my God is a young woman of Middle Eastern appearance. Is this why I'm so keen on claiming Mesopotamia as a part of Western heritage, the forerunners of the Greeks et al?
Dec. 1st, 2007
"There is much trickery at large in the world, all sorts of sly and cunning tricks among human beings, animals and even plants, which could no more remain hidden from a story-teller whose inner life was as much bound up with the world as his outer one, than they could from an observer at a distance."
"Archaic social hierarchies are exceedingly strict. To be archaic does not mean to be chaotic. Quite the contrary: nothing demonstrates the meaning of the all-controlling social order more impressively than the religious recognition of that which evades this order, in a figure who is the exponent and personification of the life of the body: never wholly subdued, ruled by lust and hunger, for ever running into pain and injury, cunning and stupid in action. Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the trickster. His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experienced of what is not permitted."
"I must confess that I have not been able to discover... any such thing as the 'inner development' of the hero. Gods and primitive beings have no inner dimension, and neither have heroes, who inhabit the same sphere."
- Karl Kerényi, "The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology". In Radin, Paul. The Trickster: a Study in American Indian Mythology. Greenwood, New York, 1956.
"Archaic social hierarchies are exceedingly strict. To be archaic does not mean to be chaotic. Quite the contrary: nothing demonstrates the meaning of the all-controlling social order more impressively than the religious recognition of that which evades this order, in a figure who is the exponent and personification of the life of the body: never wholly subdued, ruled by lust and hunger, for ever running into pain and injury, cunning and stupid in action. Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the trickster. His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experienced of what is not permitted."
"I must confess that I have not been able to discover... any such thing as the 'inner development' of the hero. Gods and primitive beings have no inner dimension, and neither have heroes, who inhabit the same sphere."
- Karl Kerényi, "The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology". In Radin, Paul. The Trickster: a Study in American Indian Mythology. Greenwood, New York, 1956.