A fascinating uninterrupted journey, that of Greek myths to which the new series on newsstands from Tuesday 20 April with Corriere is dedicated. From the very beginning they have been the building blocks of Western civilization. Their process goes beyond historical epochs, it has spread for three thousand years over time to reach contemporary reality. A maze of popular narratives, a complex intertwining of exceptional feats lived between passions, feelings and destiny: the sacredness of memory, which is perpetually regenerated and continues to penetrate the collective feeling of the cultural identity of both the ancient Greeks and net generation.
There are no gods, or heroes, who act in the name of Good and are symbols of ethical values. Indeed, the Greek Pantheon represents all the vices and impulses of human behavior, even the most violent and destructive ones. Think of Zeus in perennial metamorphosis, in order to satisfy his erotic pleasures, who transforms himself into a swan to possess Leda, into a bull to join Europe, into an eagle to grab the beautiful Ganymede, into a golden rain to conquer Danae. Not least his brother Poseidon who, to mate with Demeter, mutated into a mare in order to escape him, becomes a stallion. Or the cruel Eris, goddess of discord, who threw the famous golden apple to provoke the terrible dispute between Hera, Athena and Artemis, which ended with the judgment of Paris and the inevitable Trojan war. Ubiquitous, mysterious, irrational, Dionysus, a sensual masculine divinity, but of feminine nature, androgynous manifestation of sexual and generative vitality, who oversees the collective rite of the symposium, the offer of wine and drugs, the loss of reason, the intoxication .
The same arguments apply to heroes, mostly generated by the union between a divinity and a mortal creature, overwhelmed by excesses, longings and frenzies: the invincible and angry Achilles, faster, infernal machine of death, leaves behind him a sea of blood; the astute Ulysses (protagonist of the volume from tomorrow in homage with the Corriere) with a multiform talent, pragmatic and hungry for knowledge, presents himself as a serial maker of deceptions; the unaware Oedipus becomes an incestuous parricide; the vengeful Clytemnestra quenches her thirst for hatred by killing her husband Agamemnon; the passionate Medea takes jealousy to the extreme, punishing Jason, the traitorous spouse, with the killing of their two children; the unheeded Cassandra, priestess of Apollo, vainly opposes the introduction of the wooden horse inside the Trojan walls, a metaphor for those who predict misfortunes without ever being believed.
On the other hand, the same concept of religion in classical Greece it is completely different from that of those who have been influenced over the centuries by a monotheistic vision. In short, an opposite way of understanding the world becomes a non-rational but dreamed thought, capable of grasping and describing the multifaceted characteristics of Nature and its powers, almost an indecipherable whisper in half-sleep.
The Greek religion lives through the mythos, a term that literally means word, speech, story. He does not have a sacred book like the Bible or the Koran nor a community of believers fideistically incorporated. In a civilization of purely oral tradition, such as that of the aedi of Homeric poems before the spread of writing, in practice the memory assumes an exalting role, represented by the goddess Mnemosyne, who presides over the poetic activity, for nine nights in a row owned by Zeus with the consequent birth of as many Muses, as Hesiod recalls in Teogonia.
Traditionally represented blind, the aedi testify to the invisible, they live the mythical events in the delirium of clairvoyance in the same way as the prophets. From these narratives, at the beginning of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis drew widely, eternalizing the Greek myths in contemporary existence as pathological and dreamlike expressions of the unconscious. Freud identifies in the Oedipus complex the universal element of the unexpressed human desire, so much so that the killing of the primitive father would be at the origin of humanity, while in the figure of Narcissus he hypothesizes the existence of an intermediate stage of sexual evolution, self-eroticism. Instead, Jung believes that myths are the archetypes of human experience, the windows through which the deeper layers of the individual and collective psyche are observed.
Through the centuries the mythological memory managed to be handed down vividly and to generate numerous idioms in our daily life. The Trojan horse applies to cyber threats; an impending danger recalls the sword of Damocles supported as’ by a slender horsehair; in the search for an expedient to save himself from a difficult situation, it is necessary to find Ariadne’s thread, which allowed Theseus to get out of the labyrinth. And again the Achilles’ heel to signify the weak point of a person; for those who take time with delaying tactics it is said to weave Penelope’s web; the talent scout, who molds young people leading them to success, is called pygmalion from the name of the sculptor who fell in love with his work, a statue, to the point of marrying it.
Ulysses, the free book opens the review
The book goes to newsstands on Tuesday 20 April as a tribute to Corriere della Sera Ulysses. The journey of reason: a survey of the various aspects linked to the figure of the Homeric hero by Simone Beta, professor of Classical Philology at the University of Siena, with a contribution by Luigi Marf. This is the first issue of the Great Greek Myths series edited by the antiquarian Giulio Guidorizzi, former professor at the Universities of Milan and Turin. Guidorizzi himself signs in this first volume an overall presentation of the work and a specific introduction on the myth of the king of Ithaca, perhaps the most modern and evocative character of the entire Homeric saga. The intent of the series is to provide readers with a broad and exhaustive panorama of the narratives on which some pillars of the Western collective imagination are based. They are archetypes that are also deeply rooted in individual psychology because they respond to the needs and impulses of the human mind. After this free offer, starting with the second issue on Tuesday 27 April – the book Oedipus. the game of fate, edited by Guidorizzi – the books of the Grandi Myths Greek series will be on sale with the Corriere della Sera every week at the price of € 6.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. They will follow: Apollo, curated by Giuseppe Zanetto (May 4); Achille, edited by Tommaso Braccini (May 11); Dionysus, curated by Roberto Mussapi (May 18); Zeus, curated by Chiara Lombardi (May 25). (i.bo.)
April 18, 2021 (change April 18, 2021 | 19:45)
© Time.News
.