Journal articles on the topic 'Orpheus (Greek mythological character)'

Ever since its Greek and Roman mythological and literary sources during Antiquity, the myth of Orpheus has been of paramount importance in the edification of the Artist as a key-character of understanding Music as magic and Love beyond death. Over the course of millennia, the myth has underwent numerous transformations, reflecting cultural and creative views of each period. Up to this day, the myth of Orpheus continues to allure composers` creative imagination. Within the modern and even postmodern tempestuous avatars of the myth in musical creation, the myth stays true to revealing the creator`s inner landscape, his/her reflective searching, and the nature of love between life and death. The current essay proposes a set of correlations between the essential motifs of this ancient myth and the symbols in Béla Bartók`s Bluebeard`s Castle, in a quest for answering the question whether this iconic opera of modernity could be understood, to some extent, as a new avatar of the Orpheus myth.

The inclusion of De astrologia in the Lucianic corpus has been disputed for centuries since it appears to defend astrological practices that Lucian elsewhere undercuts. This paper argues for Lucian’s authorship by illustrating its masterful subversion of a captatio benevolentiae and subtle rejection of Stoic astrological practices. The narrator begins the text by blaming phony astrologers and their erroneous predictions for inciting others to “denounce the stars and hate astrology” (ἄστρων τε κατηγοροῦσιν καὶ αὐτὴν στρολογίην μισέουσιν, 2). The narrator assures readers that he, the knowledgeable astrologer, will correct for the “stupidity and laziness” (μαθίῃ καὶ ῥαθυμίῃ, ibid.) that bring about false predictions. The narrator’s credibility quickly decays when he attempts to recast Orpheus, Bellerophon, Icarus, Daedalus, and a host of other mythological figures as Greek astrologers. Lucian’s audience would expect such far-fetched interpretations of myth from the stereotypical Stoic philosopher, a character lampooned elsewhere in the Lucianic corpus.

The paper gives a short comparison of three dramatic versions of the Orpheus-myth in Modern Greek drama. Among the mythological themes dramatized in Modern Greece the most frequent is Troia cycle, the Atrides, the Argonautic cycle, heroes like Prometheus, Heracles, Theseus, Zeus etc. Orpheus is quite rare. The first analysis concerns the Greek translation of «Orphée et Euridice», the second reformation opera of Christoph Willibald Gluck, concretely the French version of Pierre Louis Moline (1774 in Paris), which is edited in Greek in Vienna 1796, and highlights the context of this translation. The second is «The Dithyramb of the Rose» (written 1932, translated in French 1933 by Louis Roussel, 1939 in English), performed 1933 in Athens, as a sort of continuation of the Delphic festivals (1927 and 1930), The third is a satiric dramatic version «The process of Orpheus and Eurydice» (1973) where Orpheus is condemned by the rulers of the Underworld because he caused troubles by his invasion with music; the one-act play has to be seen in the context of the political processes at the time of the Junta regime and is very exact in reproducing mythological details.

My paper focuses on the influence of an important descent-into-hell narratives of classical literature, the catabasis of Orpheus on Dante's journey through the other world. Dante, in his own confession, is familiar with the Ovidian myth of the Thracian poet, but he is undoubtedly influenced also by other elaborations and interpretations of the myth. One of the aims of this work is to present and explore these sources. The special feature of Orpheus is that he is both poet and traveller of the underworld, and in this quality he turns out an unique Greek-Roman mythological antecedent of Dante. The other purpose of my analysis is to examine Dante's attitude with the comparison of Dante's texts and their possible sources, while taking into consideration the 14th century commentaries to Dante which shed light to the intellectual horizon of the contemporary reader.

Criticism of Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy alongside the Greek mythological story of “Orpheus and Eurydice” has usually been an engagement in drawing parallels between both texts, or of uncovering symbols and allusions found within the novel that echoes the Greek myth. None, however, has explored at the same time the range of similarities and dissimilarities between both narratives; nor is there available a sustained attention devoted to the criticism of both. This study fills that critical vacuum. The question thus opened up is that there are convergences as well as divergences in the narratives; and although Season of Anomy is not without borrowings from the Greek mythology which constitutes the convergences and to some extent informs some of the divergences, the novel’s trajectory and imaginative framework transcend the classical story. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the figure of “double destinations” under her theory of intertextuality is brought into play in this study to make sense of the parities and disparities between both accounts.

In the first chapter of my book Tradition and Originality in Plautus: Studies of the Amatory Motifs in Plautine Comedy, I have expressed the view that mythological hyperboles in which the Comic character asserts his superiority in one respect or another to a mythological hero, far from being a product of Plautus' own imagination, as suggested by E. Fraenkel, are a specifically Greek element, adapted by Plautus from his originals. Here I should like to draw attention to one particular aspect of the pattern of thought in question, not dealt with in my book, which reinforces my argument and further underlines the traditional framework of which this pattern forms part.

This article is devoted to the study of the main distinguishing features of the economic ethics of religious and mythological systems of the main ancient ethnic groups of Europe in the pagan era. The economic ethics of these systems is the very first foundation of the Christian economic ethics that dominated in the traditional market economy. It formed the basis for its development in ancient philosophy and, then, in Christianity. This economic ethics is most clearly expressed in ancient Greek mythology. But it is not limited to this, and its main features are also present in the religious and mythological systems of other European ethnic groups (Scandinavians, Celts, Balts, Slavs), which gives it the universal character.

AbstractThat the Late Bronze Age cultural koine included a musical dimension is suggested by the Mesopotamian and Hurrian/Ugaritic musical tablets. This paper presents a selective survey and analysis of evidence for a parallel phenomenon, the deification of lyres/harps, which seemingly originated in late third millennium Mesopotamia and spread abroad in the second. Deified lyres are considered as both a ritual reality and an inducement to poetic elaboration by the same poetpriests who used them; much of the textual evidence thus represents remnants of a professional repertoire. At the same time, the motif also commonly centers on kingship, which is explained in terms of the dual office of priest-kingship; as such, there is some involvement of the deified lyre with the ritual of sacred marriage (hieros gamos). Relevant material comes from Ugarit and Cyprus, especially in the figure of Kinyras. In Greek evidence, 'lyre heroes' like Orpheus, Amphion, Cadmus and Linus are seen as late mythological derivatives of the pattern, Archaic survivals of Mycenaean ritual-poetics. Finally, Old Testament evidence for musical prophecy is considered in light of the foregoing.

The study is devoted to the analysis of methods and techniques of mythologization in the novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet written by the British author of Indian origin S. Rushdie. The paper explores the narrative organization of the novel, in which images and motifs of ancient mythology are used as a special code for artistic interpretation of European culture of the second half of the 20th century. The article examines the artistic reality of the novel, which combines the modern history of rock culture and classical mythology of Ancient Greece. S. Rushdie addresses problems related to the nature of creativity using as the main plot-forming motifs such mythologemes as the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the myth of alldevouring Tartarus, twin myths. The study shows that a typical technique for creating expressive threedimensional multivocal images in Rushdie's novel is a combination of real facts from the world of rock culture and mythological allusions, intertwining, overlapping and collision of various motifs and plots of Greek mythology, which, taken all together, generates the original artistic reality. The article analyzes how the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice acquires a cultural dimension in the novel and what techniques are used by the author to activate the extensive cultural memory of the Orphic myth. The concentration and interpretation of iconic images and motifs of ancient mythology are used in the novel for artistic analysis of the state of culture in the second half of the 20th century and of its attempts to counter the catastrophic tendencies of destruction and death of the modern civilization.

The article is devoted to the consideration of the plot scheme associated with the death of a girl at a young age – a plot that is quite common in Bunin poetics. The mythological and ritual-sacral etymology of the plot is transformed in Bunin’s poetics into an existential problem of searching for human freedom and its borders, and generates a philosophical opposition/identity «love and death». The ways of introducing the plot scheme and the types of the girl’s death are original – a certain effect of “estrangement” of the author is created, indicating a deep ontological contradiction between the beauty and sensuality of a female character and the tragic end of her fate. The heroine’s life and death is based on the model of the ancient Greek pnigos, and has the qualities of hyperbolized theatricality, but without the effect of catharsis. Thus, the ritual and mythological content of the plot scheme is problematized and filled with new meanings in Bunin’s poetics.

The concept of heroic is an integral part of the mythosystem and ideological constructs characteristic of the culture of a particular period. In Soviet culture, the heroic is modeled and promoted through artistic images that reproduce the ideals of the Soviet state. A special role in the concept of heroic is given to the image of a hero who reflects the ideals of society and broadcasts a pattern of behavior that meets the picture of the world characteristic of culture. Based on the traditions of the Greek mythosystem, Soviet culture transforms ideas about the heroic and hero in accordance with ideological attitudes. The article analyzed the evolution of the image of Hercules in the Soviet animation in two periods: the period of «stagnation» and the period of «perestroika». The authors turn to the cycles of animated films created based on the Greek mythology by directors A. G. Snezhko-Blotsky and A. A. Petrov. Focusing on the plot basis and interpretation of Greek myths presented by A. G. Snezhko-Blotsky, the authors note the glorification of the image of Hercules, which differs from the concept of heroic, presented in the Greek mythosystem. The image of Hercules acquires a synthetic character, combining the features of the heroes of Greek mythology and Soviet culture, the tragic character of the heroic is emphasized, the mythological chronotope acquires historical features. Analyzing the cycle of cartoons created by A. A. Petrov, the authors focus on the evolution of the concept of heroic, which loses scale and loses its dominant character. Heroic is replaced by lyrical, psychologism and universal human problems come to the fore, not burdened with ideological connotations. The article notes the influence of sociocultural processes on the meaningful constructs of the Soviet mythosystem, which lead to a change in cultural codes and their representation in domestic animation.

This paper analyses two exegetical strategies adopted by ancient scholars to explain Euripides’ mythological innovations and variations with respect to Homer through a selection of scholia. The first approach considers Euripides a (mis-) reader of Homer. The dramatist regards an epic passage as the reference text, but fails to understand its wording correctly: therefore, he uncritically reproduces the model, even though inspired by a genuine impulse to emulate; this circumstance de facto equates the tragedian with a sort of exegete and represents his deviation from the epic text as the locus of an implicit (erroneous) interpretation. The second approach evaluates the work of Euripides, comparing it with the Homeric poems, by means and in the light of concepts of literary criticism. The tragedian creates a good or bad product depending on whether his innovation achieves a certain poetic result: an implausible or unrealistic description of a character is contested, whereas a strategy to enhance the emotional impact of the dramatic moment is recognised and perceived as a careful and conscious artistic operation, hence possibly praised. Keywords: ancient scholarship, exegetical activity, Greek scholia, literary comparison, literary criticism

AbstractThe paper deals with significantly different sources and historical periods: the parts dedicated to breastfeeding are based on votive statuettes of adults with infant/s from ancient Latium and Southern Etruria; the ones on pregnancy and childbirth are based on two archeological sources – one from Southern Etruria and one from Imperial Rome – which show the male (divine) appropriation of exclusively female biological functions; The parts on mothering are based on the concept of “mothering figures” (male mothering, animal mothering…) through mythological examples from Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art and narratives. Despite the heterogeneous documentation, we may conclude that the mother was not the only active character in the process of conceiving, giving birth, breastfeeding, and raising an infant in the Greek, Etruscan, and Roman societies. Many other figures close to the mother – male and female – were engaged in obtaining divine protection for her and her child; in helping, supporting, and even substituting her when necessary (and, of course, when possible). The research has been conducted mainly by using the concept of kourotrophia and mothering figures as analytical tools.

The aim of this paper is to analyse two characters who suffered the punishment of not being allowed to close their eyes so as to retain in their retinas the image of the loss of their children: Lamia and Ellaria Sand. The first one, Lamia, is a Greek mythological or folklore character punished by Hera for having an affair with her husband, Zeus. The second one is Ellaria Sand, from the series Game of Thrones (seventh season, third episode, titled “The Queen’s Justice”), who was robbed of her daughter Tyene by Cersei Lannister in King’s Landing. In this paper, the author will also point out the similarities and differences between the two scenarios. For this purpose, she will consider the characters’ antecedents and evolution after being punished with the impossibility of closing their eyes.

This paper discusses the role of the Czech language in forming Polish vocabulary. The question is presented on the basis of one of the thematic groups of vocabulary, beliefs and religion, classified as Bohemianisms, including such words as Old Polish anioł, diabeł, and tatrman, as well as the Polish dialectal antyjasz, b’inek, cwerg, czechman, dias, fajermon, Fontana, hastrman, jaroszek, korfanty, kuźlak, mužík, Pustecki, raraszek, sotona, szatan, waserman, wiestnica and zazrak. The classification of Czech borrowings in Polish includes three groups. The main groups are: borrowings from Old Czech, borrowings from literary Czech from the 14th to the beginning of the 16th centuries, and borrowings from common Czech dialects (especially from a transitional group of dialects). The first and second group contains many international words (borrowings from Greek, Latin and German), while the third appear chiefly in the Polish dialects of Silesia and the Małopolska province. The author notes that the early Old Czech brought Latin borrowings from Christian terminology and demonological nomenclature. The 14th and 15th and also 20th centuries brought words related to witchcraft and traditional demonology, such as the names of wizards and witches, the devil, ghosts, etc. The author ascertains that, first of all, such loan names concern beings of the lowest demonic ranks and, in general euphemistic determination, present “evil ghosts.” Linguistic geographical analysis indicates that Czech loans of demoniac names occur mainly in the south-west and repeatedly exhibit a strictly regional (sometimes individual) character. The Czech language has also fulfilled an intermediary role in adapting borrowings from other languages (German, Greek and Latin); it has thus had a significant effect on modern disparity and Polish mythological vocabulary. This article aims at the ethnic and chronological classification of fragments of Slavic mythological vocabulary, and analyzes the problem of language influence between Czech and Polish.

Abstract In this study I argue that the translator of Prov 24:50–51 LXX (30:15–16 MT) adapts the Hebrew text to his Hellenistic audience by alluding to Hesiod’s Theogony. The core message of these verses—the ineluctability of cosmic greed—remains the same, yet the images employed in the Septuagint are engrained in and originally belong to the Hellenic mythological understanding of how the universe came into being. The use of classical literature to convey the message contained in the texts of the Hebrew Bible speaks to the hybrid character of the Jewish community of the Egyptian diaspora. When the translator quotes or alludes to Greek literature, he is not borrowing foreign material, but rather drawing wisdom from his very own well. In Alexandria, the waters that flowed from the rock at Horeb and from the Hippocrene spring have merged their course.

The facts of Gogol's appeal to the models of classical forms of myth and ritual are interesting not only by themselves but also in the aspect of their relationship with the arsenal of Christian mythology. The fundamental point here is that in light of the historical interpretation of the myth and the Revelation by F. W. J. Schelling, the mythology since its initial stage organically developed to Christianity, to the truths of Revelation (as the historical movement “flowed” into them). The symbolic complex of the story Vij, interlacing with Eros and Thanatos, allows parallels to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice since in the case of the story Vij and in the case of myth, the motive of prohibition on sight also holds. The philosopher (i.e. the poet in the archaic and romantic notion) Homa Brut comes into contact with the world of death not of his own free will, besides, the panicle Eurydice died because of him. Orpheus partakes of the Dionysian sacraments. A visit to Orpheus of hell equated him, in Christian understanding, with Christ. In Gogol's story Vij, Dionysus and Christ have implicitly come together. The motive of the story Vij for blindness is related to Oedipus's self-blindness motive. Mythological Erinnes, persecuted by Oedipus, are old women, which correlates with one of the chthonic incarnations of the plaque, thereby drawing closer to the goddesses of revenge, punishment, and remorse of conscience. The fact of the final recognition of Oedipus as “holy” is reflected in the potential Christian semantics of the image of Homa as a martyr and passion-bearer. As the winner of the witch, the deliverer of people from her misfortunes and the passion bearer Homa is a Christian ascetic. Against the background of Christian parallels, the second stay of Homa on the farm becomes as if his “second coming”, symbolically comparable to the expected second coming of Christ, who is coming all the time. The terrible glance of Vij and pannochka certainly reminds of the slaying glance of Medusa Gorgon, which forced all living things to petrify. There is pathos of fighting tyranny in ridding the farm from the witch by Homa. Although Homa defends himself first of all in the beating scene, the general social meaning of his action is obvious. The power of the pannochka (she is the daughter of a wealthy sotnik), who for some reason considers himself pious, is not only socio-political but, in the main, existential-anthropological, this domination over man as a species, over man as such. The motives of ancient Greek and in general pagan mythology are closely intertwined in Gogol's story with Christian motives, which formed the unique spiritual and aesthetic synthesis of the story Vij.

The initial grounds of knowledge about music appeared virtually at the same time as it emerged as an art, i.e. tens of thousands of years ago. The earliest testimonies to this could be found in the mythological perceptions of various peoples, which has been realized most perceptively and diversely in the Greek myths. The primal elements of music theory were generated in the ancient hearths of civilization. Some of the outlooks widespread in the ancient world appeared in the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Ancient Jewish artistic practice has also created its impact on the musicians of antiquity. The peoples of India and China also forged their own paths. Ancient Greek, as well as Ancient Middle Eastern musical knowledge was characterized by a syncretic connection of musical perceptions combined with scientific and philosophical systems, in what connection the musical perceptions of the ancient civilizations were frequently endowed with a cosmological character. Since the music of the ancient peoples was predominantly monophonic and, consequently, presented a culture of a monodic type, the theory of music in its entirety turned out to be essentially a teaching about melody. Musical aesthetics absorbed into itself an extremely broad circle of questions concerning the examined period, whereas the ethos of ancient peoples by its practical sides was aimed at the goals of musical upbringing.

In her article, the author analyses an example of a text and its staging brought about by the sudden death of a member of the playwright’s creative team. In his solo performance Inflammation du verbe vivre (Inflammation of the Verb To Live), created at the Paris Théâtre National de la Colline in 2015, Canadian-Lebanese playwright, director and actor Wajdi Mouawad interwove the ancient Greek literary and mythological heritage with a personal confession about the loss of his friend and professional colleague Robert Davreu, upgrading it with a socially critical depiction of the situation in today’s Greece. The performance was made as the penultimate part of a staging cycle of Sophocles’s seven preserved tragedies under the common title Le dernièr jour de sa vie (The Last Day of his Life). Mouawad had intended to direct the cycle in new translations by Davreu. Mouawad thus connected the process of mourning the death, which stopped the project, with the documentation of the writing process of the text that he later also directed and performed in the form of a peculiar theatre elegy. He fused the character of Philoctetes with the character of Odysseus; not the Odysseus from Sophocles’s tragedy who plots to steal Philoctetes’s bow, but the one from Homer who seeks his way home to Ithaca for ten years after the conquer of Troy and visits Tiresias’s shade in the underworld.

Abstract Romanian composers’ interest in Greek mythology begins with Enescu’s peerless masterpiece – lyrical tragedy Oedipe (1921-1931). The realist-postromantic artistic concept is materialised in the insoluble link between text and music, in the original synthesis of the most expressive compositional means recorded in the tradition of the genre and the openness towards acutely modern elements of musical language. The Romanian opera composed in the knowledge of George Enescu’s score, which premiered in Bucharest in 1958, reflect an additional interest in mythological subject-matter in the poetic form of the ancient tragedies signed by Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles. Significant Romanian musical works written in the avant-garde period of 1960 to 1980 – Doru Popovici’s opera Prometeu, Aurel Stroe’s Oedipus at Colonus, Oresteia I – Agamemnon, Oresteia II – The Choephori, Oresteia III – The Eumenides, Pascal Bentoiu’s The Sacrifice of Iphigenia – to which titles of the contemporary art of the stage are added – Cornel Ţăranu’s Oreste & Oedip – propose new philosophical and artistic interpretations of the original myths. At the same time, the mentioned works represent reference points of the multiple and radical transformation of the opera genre in Romanian culture. Emphasising the epic character, a heightened chamber dimension and the alternative extrapolation of the elements in the syncretic complex, developing new modes of performance, of sonic and video transmission – are features of the new style of opera associated to the powerful and simple subject-matter of ancient tragedy. In this sense, radio opera The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1968) is a significant step in the metamorphosis of the genre, its novel artistic value being confirmed by an important international distinction offered to composer Pascal Bentoiu – Prix Italia of the Italian Radio and Television Broadcasting Company in Rome. The poetic quality of the text quoted from the masterpiece of ancient theatre, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, the hymnic-oratory character of the music, the economy and expressive capacity of the compositional means configured in the relationship between voice, organ, percussion, electro-acoustic means – can be associated in interpreting the universal major theme: the necessity of virgin sacrifice in the process of durable construction.

This paper focuses on the mythology of Yamī and her twin-brother Yama (the first humans according to Indo-Iranian mythology), their non-human origin and some aspects of Yamī’s behaviour which presumably betray a number of features of a female half-deity. The relationships between Yamī and Yama are the central topic of the dialogue hymn Rgveda 10.10, where Yamī attempts to seduce her twin to incest in order to produce offspring and thus continue the human race. This offer is refused by Yama, who refers to the inappropriateness of incest. Although Yamī and Yama are humans according to the Vedic tradition, their origin from two half-deities – a Gandharva father and an Apsara mother – remains inexplicable: how could a couple of non-human beings (half-deities or demons) give birth to humans? Obviously, the mythological status of the twins should be reconsidered. I argue that at least one of them, Yamī, retains immortality and some other features of the non-human (semi-divine) nature. On the basis of the analysis of the Yama and Yamī hymn and some related Vedic texts, I argue that this assumption may account for certain peculiarities of Yamī’s behaviour – particularly her hypersexuality (which can be qualified as demonic type of behaviour), as opposed to the much more constrained, human type of conduct displayed by Yama. Given the notoriously lustful character of the Gandharvas, an origin from this semi-divine creature may account for Yamī’s hypersexuality. Although the word gandharvá- does not have Indo-European etymology, we can find possible Indo-European parallels. In particular, the Gandharvas are comparable with the Centaurs, which cannot be etymologically related but possibly originate in the same non-Indo-European source. There are some reasons to assume that both words are borrowed from the Kassite language and mythology, which, in turn, may have been related to the language and culture of the Proto-North-Caucasians. Although we do not find exact equivalents of Yamī outside of the Indo-Iranian pantheon, indirect parallels can be found in other Indo-European traditions. The Apsaras (water nymphs) can be compared to a variety of water deities (nymphs) in Greek mythology, such as the Naiads, or to the Slavic rusalki.

The article tells about the transformation of a wandering ancient story about the passion of a mother to her stepson, shows how each era brings about changes in the depiction of the heroine, set in a boundary situation between happiness and duty. In the tragedy of Euripides "Hippolytus" the main character is the king´s son, and Phaedra is a performer of the will of the goddess Cypris. Without knowing, Hippolytus violated ethics law that prescribed to honor equally all the gods and goddesses: he loved to worship the goddess of the hunt Artemis and didn´t bring enough victims to Aphrodite. According to the mythological sources, the election of Phaedra as the instrument of revenge can be explained by the fact that Phaedra carries the burden of a tragic guilt for her grandfather, who told Hephaestus about the affair between Aphrodite and Ares. Euripides describes the suffering of Phaedra. His character brings her life as a gift to the children. The tragedy of the debt victory is displayed brighter by the Greek author than by the French one. But the image of Phaedra, made by Jean Racine, is nobler than it was made by Euripides. The heroine of Euripides sacrifices herself for the sake of duty and commits suicide, but makes a low act, leaving a note that slanders Hippolytus, but the queen by Racine, dying, emphasizes the innocence of her stepson. The stepson´s attitude to the passion of his stepmother changes too. For Hippolytus by Euripides the passion of Phaedra is the evidence of low-lying nature of women, for Hippolytus by Jean Racine it is the touching continuation of conjugal love at first, and then, when Phaedra separates him in her mind from the father, and emphasizes that loves Hippolytus, it is a horrible discover, but not the reason for the generalization, reasoning and discrimination against all women. The continuation of the incarnation of vagrant story about Phaedra we see in the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva in the tragedy "Phaedra". Tsvetaeva simplifies antique tragedy, removing the problem of choosing between happiness and duty, but in the poem she returns to the tragic beginning of it, highlighting the theme of the sublime punishments with passion that is emphasized in the interpretation ofR. Viktyuk, who created a cinema play "Passion about Phaedra in four dreams of Roman Viktyuk" on the basis ofTsvetayeva´s texts.

Currently discourse of the monstrous and demonological has been intensified. These phenomena are gaining new understanding due to the processes occurring in the post-secularitanian society undergoing a succession of critical shocks. The interest in the demonic and monstrous as the manifestation of the desire tends to form a new point of view on the anthropology and man's place in the new reference frame. The judgments about the demonic and monstrous allowed creating representation of the correct, normative, standard, and normal. Hereafter the definition of the demonic and monstrous characters is presented as well as differentiation between the concepts of the demonic and monstrous is drawn through analysis of etymology of the words "demon" and "monster" and their connotations in different languages. Particular attention is drawn to the changes in the concepts of demonological and monstrous in cultural traditions and historical perspective on the basis of analysis of the ancient Greek literature, pre-Christian mythological and biblical texts, philosophical treatises and works by Plato, Thales, Socrates, Hesiod, Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, Pliny, Ctesias of Cnidus, St. Augustine, Vl. Solovyov, Av. Fr. Pott, A.F. Losev, G. Umberto Eco, Derrida, Sl. Zizek. The analysis revealed the differences in relation to the monstrous and demonic. If the idea of the demonic has evolved from the divine to the sinister, and has completely lost the binary of the semantic opposition up to now, the monstrous continues to show the duality of its nature. As a result the monstrosity is associated with limitary existence between the normal and abnormal, possible and admissible, esthetic and ugly, ethical and immoral, represented and unimaginable. If the demonic is the manifestation of the supernatural and demonstration of the Other, the monstrous as exiting outside the scope of the ordinary and habitual, represents the image of the Other. Both the supernatural of the demonic and the marginality of the monstrous ground concatenation, furnishing the images with the phantasmic. If the demonic appears as the distortion of the divine, the monstrous is the distortion of the human. The hybridous or synthetic character of the forms and qualities is the feature common to both the demoniac and monstrous images.

Latvian folksongs of three types (LD 33802, 34043, 34047) and a Lithuanian song Aušrinė (‘the Morning Star’) published by Liudvikas Rėza (Ludwig Rhesa, RD I 62) depict a tree struck by the Thunderer (Latvian Perkons). The kind of the tree may vary: usually, it is an oak, but sometimes it may be an apple-tree. Researchers of Latvian mythology and folklore call it Saules koks (‘the tree of the Sun’). In different variants, the striking of the tree tends to be part of the plot of the heavenly wedding. Sometimes Perkons allegedly strikes the tree in order to express his objections regarding the Sun’s decision to marry off her daughter to an “unsuitable” groom.Scholars interpret this image of the thunderstruck tree in different ways. Wilhelm Mannhardt thought the image to have stemmed from a natural phenomenon – the rays of the setting Sun. Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov attributed this motive to the symbol of the World Tree and the Indo-European “basic myth” that they had reconstructed. According to Pranė Dundulienė, the thunderstruck oak is a symbolic representation of the bridegroom. Having amassed considerable ethnographic and folklore data, the author of this article questions the earlier explanation presented by Leopold von Schröder and Haralds Biezais. According to them, the motive of Perkons striking the oak may stem from the traditional Latvian wedding custom: the bride’s coachman makes a sign of the cross on the gate or the door with his sword upon arrival, imitating the cutting. Our analysis employs the comparative method. The appreciation of this motive requires considering the connections between the Thunderer and the oaks that exist in numerous ancient Indo-European religions (including Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Baltic). The lightning strike to the oak, possibly, only added some extra meaning to this connection (the thunderstruck wood was used for magic purposes), which emphasized power and strength attributed both to the thunder and the oak. The plausibility of relating the powerful celestial oak to the sacred tree of the homestead would require further discussions. Some variants of the mythological folksongs suggest that the oak hit by Perkons must have been growing by the gate. However, in folksongs and customs, this particular location emerges as liminal and unsafe in relation to home.Although Biezais used the Latvian example, similar customs of imitated cutting of the gate, door, or beam are also widespread in the Eastern Slavic lands. This enables us to understand better their nature, variations, and possible origins. Currently, we can use more ample Latvian and Lithuanian data. In wedding customs, actions similar to cutting or striking mostly indicate the active or masculine principle, including clashing between the bride’s and the groom’s parties, and invading of the foreign territory; but generally are characteristic of both sides. The fierce and militant character of Perkons is especially evident in this liminal sphere; there, as wedding customs and songs clearly indicate, also the hardest clash between the opposing parties takes place at some stage of the wedding. Although this clash is most prominent at the beginning of the wedding ceremony (during matchmaking, and particularly when representatives of the groom arrive to take the bride to her new home), certain “active response” is also evident in the way that the bride’s party behaves at the gate or door of the groom’s house. This may also include new elements, such as threatening to break the table with a specific musical instrument. Taunting of the wedding parties while using similar images and formulas to those used by folksongs describing animals enable us to see more clearly some peculiarities of the Thunderer’s image apparent in the songs describing the heavenly wedding (his attribution to the bride’s party and unexpectedly destructive character). The selected folklore and customs serve to considerably widen and deepen the possibilities of discussing the hypothesis raised by von Schröder and Biezais. However, this does not solve the main issues inherent in the substantiation of this hypothesis – e. g., it contradicts the authentic storylines of the songs describing the heavenly wedding; objects that are cut differ as well, while the consequences of the action – the destruction of the oak – do not ground its possible ritual purpose. The use of the sign of the cross is also ambivalent in customs, since it can serve both as means of protection against the adversary of the Thunderer – the devil, and against the thunder itself.However, the collected comparative materials provide a better idea regarding the meaning of this mythic thunder strike in the wedding contexts, elucidating certain regularities and inconsistencies.

In The Sea (2005) and The Gathering (2007), John Banville and Anne Enright incorporate modernist and postmodernist intertextuality into accounts of bereavement. While the shattered existence of the protagonists is seemingly devoid of religious belief, they mobilize the palimpsestic immemorial past of mythological and fairy-tale intertexts to make sense of broken realities. The narrators’ self-portraits and invocations of lost people and places, oscillating between reminiscence and mythification, underscore postmodernism’s play with canonical stories. Both authors use mythological syncretism to express their characters’ quest for meaning: while Greek, Egyptian and Norse gods invade The Sea’s modern-day “Atlantis” (132), The Gathering is peopled with subverted Christian and Irish figures. However, rather than restoring coherence, myth and fairy-tale tropes are suffused with desperate irony, and the magic spell woven by mythological counterpoints turns out to be a post-traumatic, grimacing reflection of the characters’ troubled psyches, or an obfuscating screen. By interweaving and debunking seminal myths and tales, Banville and Enright give life to personal myths that bespeak the characters’ deep-seated sense of loss and disenchantment. The reader is thus left wondering if, by filling the gaps of post-traumatic memory with mythological rewritings, these defamiliarizing narratives of bereavement convey potential solace or reinforce their protagonists’ post-traumatic loss of landmarks.

Abstract:Much as he is famous, Orpheus is only mentioned by name fourteen times in the Greek tragedies and tragic fragments that have survived the ravages of time. Furthermore he is never shown as a protagonist, but always evoked by a dramatic character as an example, a parallel, a peculiarity, or a fantasy. This legendary singer is mentioned every time, if not explicitly, at least implicitly, in conjunction with

Introduction. This article aims to compare two seemingly different patterns of attitude towards such a significant figure as a teacher. Considering it was the Greeks who have established the entire prototype for such a relationship in our culture it seems interesting to look at the development and meaning of such a relationship within their context.Materials and Methods. Based on the texts from The Library of Greek Mythology by Apollodorus and other sources that draw attention to some aspects of upbringing described already in the ancient myths, as well as on the basis of Plato's dialogues dedicated to the character of Socrates, this study compares two lines of such relationship, one derived from the story of the mythological hero Heracles and his relationship with his teachers, and that of the teacher of all Athens – Socrates and his students. This study is based on such methods as comparison, juxtaposition, interpretation, and generalization, as well as the psychoanalytic approach developed by Z. Freud and J. Lacan.Results. Acknowledging certain parallels in how the relationships mentioned earlier end, this study draws attention to the fact that a person must take the path of self-transformation with a considerable degree of necessity to learn something new. A noteworthy aspect in this process is the role of what is commonly referred to as “love”.Discussion and Conclusions. The figure of Socrates is central to this study in two ways. He is interesting to us not only as a philosopher who is in love with wisdom and discussion but also as one who educates, with all the dynamics of relationships that follow. As the author of the dialogues about Socrates, Plato reveals his views on love deriving from his grief about the loss of his teacher. His reflections represent the work of sorrow, and the dialogues that immortalize him in history seem to be its natural fruits.

The Forbidden Forest by Mircea Eliade is a “total novel,” whose complexity is evident on every page through the variety of suggestions, metaphors and symbols, of intertextual and mythological references. In this study, I will mostly discuss the penultimate chapter of this novel where the death of Biriș, the rational and sceptical philosopher, at the beginning a follower of the philosophy of Kierkegaard, is presented. In this troubling episode, I identified the presence of two myths whose unconscious actor this rational spirit currently anchored in history became. The myth—an exemplary story about foundation—seeks his Chosen One and finds him in the opposite of an intellectual, an “unbeliever,” just as Jesus chose his most bitter enemy, Paul of Tarsus, to become his faithful apostle. But the gnostic and religious philosopher also needs to believe in self-salvation from the clutches of the demon of fear and cowardice, and impending death, surrounded by friend-interrogators (Mihai Duma), by a compassionate executioner (Bîrsan), and demonic monks (Bursuc). The healing function of the story is lost in this world of suspicion, where Biriș is surrounded by masks, which disguise their true role. The myth of the sacrifice of Christ acquires a double saving power, because Biriș saves himself and redeems his torturers, too. By converting nocturnal stories into a sacred ritual of story, the destiny of Scheherazade, the heroine of One Thousand and One Nights, is saved from the banality of a simple literary character, because “the story in the story” provokes the human being to descend into the abyss and to live by the symbol. In the company of his interrogators—human aspects of demons—the frightened philosopher becomes the image of a Thracian Orpheus, trying in vain to “tame” the human beasts by his wise Logos. By the Logos, Biriș fails to rescue his torturers and himself from their own bestiality, but at the level of his “trance-conscious”—where Eliade speaks in his scientific work—he mystically lives a symbolic and mysterious superposition between the stages of the sacrifice of the shepherd in “Miorița” and those of the sacrifice of Christ. This intelligent, subtle and erudite intellectual lives deeply rooted in history with the consciousness of the presence of death in all intimate structures of life, a mentality specific to Western conception. In the last moments of his life, Biriș is converted to the sacred mystery of the Great Passing. Homo sapiens becomes Homo religiosus, the mysterious veil of Maya rises and the exit of the labyrinth is a certainty. The two myths which I take into account are the Orphic myth about the healing word and the mixture of the mioritic and the Christ myth of salvation through sacrifice.

Cultural sociologists (Bourdieu; DiMaggio, “Cultural Capital”, “Classification”; Gans; Lamont & Foumier; Halle; Erickson) wrote about high culture and popular culture in an attempt to explain the growing social and economic inequalities, to find consensus on culture hierarchies, and to analyze cultural complexities. Halle states that this categorisation of culture into “high culture” and “popular culture” underlined most of the debate on culture in the last fifty years. Gans contends that both high culture and popular culture are stereotypes, public forms of culture or taste cultures, each sharing “common aesthetic values and standards of tastes” (8). However, this article is not concerned with these categorisations, or macro analysis. Rather, it is a reflection piece that inquires if opera, which is usually considered high culture, has become more equal to popular culture, and why some directors change the time and place of opera plots, whereas others will stay true to the original setting of the story. I do not consider these productions “adaptations,” but “post-modern morphologies,” and I will refer to this later in the paper. In other words, the paper is seeking to explain a social phenomenon and explore the underlying motives by quoting interviews with directors. The word ‘opera’ is defined in Elson’s Music Dictionary as: “a form of musical composition evolved shortly before 1600, by some enthusiastic Florentine amateurs who sought to bring back the Greek plays to the modern stage” (189). Hence, it was an experimentation to revive Greek music and drama believed to be the ideal way to express emotions (Grout 186). It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when stage directors started changing the time and place of the original settings of operas. The practice became more common after World War II, and Peter Brook’s Covent Garden productions of Boris Godunov (1948) and Salome (1949) are considered the prototypes of this practice (Sutcliffe 19-20). Richard Wagner’s grandsons, the brothers Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner are cited in the music literature as using technology and modern innovations in staging and design beginning in the early 1950s. Brief Background into the History of Opera Grout contends that opera began as an attempt to heighten the dramatic expression of language by intensifying the natural accents of speech through melody supported by simple harmony. In the late 1590s, the Italian composer Jacopo Peri wrote what is considered to be the first opera, but most of it has been lost. The first surviving complete opera is Euridice, a version of the Orpheus myth that Peri and Giulio Caccini jointly set to music in 1600. The first composer to understand the possibilities inherent in this new musical form was Claudio Monteverdi, who in 1607 wrote Orfeo. Although it was based on the same story as Euridice, it was expanded to a full five acts. Early opera was meant for small, private audiences, usually at court; hence it began as an elitist genre. After thirty years of being private, in 1637, opera went public with the opening of the first public opera house, Teatro di San Cassiano, in Venice, and the genre quickly became popular. Indeed, Monteverdi wrote his last two operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea for the Venetian public, thereby leading the transition from the Italian courts to the ‘public’. Both operas are still performed today. Poppea was the first opera to be based on a historical rather than a mythological or allegorical subject. Sutcliffe argues that opera became popular because it was a new mixture of means: new words, new music, new methods of performance. He states, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (65). By the end of the 17th century, Venice alone had ten opera houses that had produced more than 350 operas. Wealthy families purchased season boxes, but inexpensive tickets made the genre available to persons of lesser means. The genre spread quickly, and various styles of opera developed. In Naples, for example, music rather than the libretto dominated opera. The genre spread to Germany and France, each developing the genre to suit the demands of its audiences. For example, ballet became an essential component of French opera. Eventually, “opera became the profligate art as large casts and lavish settings made it the most expensive public entertainment. It was the only art that without embarrassment called itself ‘grand’” (Boorstin 467). Contemporary Opera Productions Opera continues to be popular. According to a 2002 report released by the National Endowment for the Arts, 6.6 million adults attended at least one live opera performance in 2002, and 37.6 million experienced opera on television, video, radio, audio recording or via the Internet. Some think that it is a dying art form, while others think to the contrary, that it is a living art form because of its complexity and “ability to probe deeper into the human experience than any other art form” (Berger 3). Some directors change the setting of operas with perhaps the most famous contemporary proponent of this approach being Peter Sellars, who made drastic changes to three of Mozart’s most famous operas. Le Nozze di Figaro, originally set in 18th-century Seville, was set by Sellars in a luxury apartment in the Trump Tower in New York City; Sellars set Don Giovanni in contemporary Spanish Harlem rather than 17th century Seville; and for Cosi Fan Tutte, Sellars chose a diner on Cape Cod rather than 18th century Naples. As one of the more than six million Americans who attend live opera each year, I have experienced several updated productions, which made me reflect on the convergence or cross-over between high culture and popular culture. In 2000, I attended a production of Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre in Prague, the very theatre where Mozart conducted the world premiere in 1787. In this production, Don Giovanni was a fashion designer known as “Don G” and drove a BMW. During the 1999-2000 season, Los Angeles Opera engaged film director Bruce Beresford to direct Verdi’s Rigoletto. Beresford updated the original setting of 16th century Mantua to 20th century Hollywood. The lead tenor, rather than being the Duke of Mantua, was a Hollywood agent known as “Duke Mantua.” In the first act, just before Marullo announces to the Duke’s guests that the jester Rigoletto has taken a mistress, he gets the news via his cell phone. Director Ian Judge set the 2004 production of Le Nozze di Figaro in the 1950s. In one of the opening productions of the 2006-07 LA opera season, Vincent Patterson also chose the 1950s for Massenet’s Manon rather than France in the 1720s. This allowed the title character to appear in the fourth act dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Excerpts from the dress rehearsal can be seen on YouTube. Most recently, I attended a production of Ariane et Barbe-Bleu at the Paris Opera. The original setting of the Maeterlinck play is in Duke Bluebeard’s castle, but the time period is unclear. However, it is doubtful that the 1907 opera based on an 1899 play was meant to be set in what appeared to be a mental institution equipped with surveillance cameras whose screens were visible to the audience. The critical and audience consensus seemed to be that the opera was a musical success but a failure as a production. James Shore summed up the audience reaction: “the production team was vociferously booed and jeered by much of the house, and the enthusiastic applause that had greeted the singers and conductor, immediately went nearly silent when they came on stage”. It seems to me that a new class-related taste has emerged; the opera genre has shot out a subdivision which I shall call “post-modern morphologies,” that may appeal to a larger pool of people. Hence, class, age, gender, and race are becoming more important factors in conceptualising opera productions today than in the past. I do not consider these productions as new adaptations because the libretto and the music are originals. What changes is the fact that both text and sound are taken to a higher dimension by adding iconographic images that stimulate people’s brains. When asked in an interview why he often changes the setting of an opera, Ian Judge commented, “I try to find the best world for the story and characters to operate in, and I think you have to find a balance between the period the author set it in, the period he conceived it in and the nature of theatre and audiences at that time, and the world we live in.” Hence, the world today is complex, interconnected, borderless and timeless because of advanced technologies, and updated opera productions play with symbols that offer multiple meanings that reflect the world we live in. It may be that television and film have influenced opera production. Character tenor Graham Clark recently observed in an interview, “Now the situation has changed enormously. Television and film have made a lot of things totally accessible which they were not before and in an entirely different perception.” Director Ian Judge believes that television and film have affected audience expectations in opera. “I think audiences who are brought up on television, which is bad acting, and movies, which is not that good acting, perhaps require more of opera than stand and deliver, and I have never really been happy with someone who just stands and sings.” Sociologist Wendy Griswold states that culture reflects social reality and the meaning of a particular cultural object (such as opera), originates “in the social structures and social patterns it reflects” (22). Screens of various technologies are embedded in our lives and normalised as extensions of our bodies. In those opera productions in which directors change the time and place of opera plots, use technology, and are less concerned with what the composer or librettist intended (which we can only guess), the iconographic images create multi valances, textuality similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of multiplicity of voices. Hence, a plurality of meanings. Plàcido Domingo, the Eli and Edyth Broad General Director of Los Angeles Opera, seeks to take advantage of the company’s proximity to the film industry. This is evidenced by his having engaged Bruce Beresford to direct Rigoletto and William Friedkin to direct Ariadne auf Naxos, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Gianni Schicchi. Perhaps the most daring example of Domingo’s approach was convincing Garry Marshall, creator of the television sitcom Happy Days and who directed the films Pretty Woman and The Princess Diaries, to direct Jacques Offenbach’s The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein to open the company’s 20th anniversary season. When asked how Domingo convinced him to direct an opera for the first time, Marshall responded, “he was insistent that one, people think that opera is pretty elitist, and he knew without insulting me that I was not one of the elitists; two, he said that you gotta make a funny opera; we need more comedy in the operetta and opera world.” Marshall rewrote most of the dialogue and performed it in English, but left the “songs” untouched and in the original French. He also developed numerous sight gags and added characters including a dog named Morrie and the composer Jacques Offenbach himself. Did it work? Christie Grimstad wrote, “if you want an evening filled with witty music, kaleidoscopic colors and hilariously good singing, seek out The Grand Duchess. You will not be disappointed.” The FanFaire Website commented on Domingo’s approach of using television and film directors to direct opera: You’ve got to hand it to Plàcido Domingo for having the vision to draw on Hollywood’s vast pool of directorial talent. Certainly something can be gained from the cross-fertilization that could ensue from this sort of interaction between opera and the movies, two forms of entertainment (elitist and perennially struggling for funds vs. popular and, it seems, eternally rich) that in Los Angeles have traditionally lived separate lives on opposite sides of the tracks. A wider audience, for example, never a problem for the movies, can only mean good news for the future of opera. So, did the Marshall Plan work? Purists of course will always want their operas and operettas ‘pure and unadulterated’. But with an audience that seemed to have as much fun as the stellar cast on stage, it sure did. Critic Alan Rich disagrees, calling Marshall “a representative from an alien industry taking on an artistic product, not to create something innovative and interesting, but merely to insult.” Nevertheless, the combination of Hollywood and opera seems to work. The Los Angeles Opera reported that the 2005-2006 season was its best ever: “ticket revenues from the season, which ended in June, exceeded projected figures by nearly US$900,000. Seasonal attendance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stood at more than 86% of the house’s capacity, the largest percentage in the opera’s history.” Domingo continues with the Hollywood connection in the upcoming 2008-2009 season. He has reengaged William Friedkin to direct two of Puccini’s three operas titled collectively as Il Trittico. Friedkin will direct the two tragedies, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica. Although Friedkin has already directed a production of the third opera in Il Trittico for Los Angeles, the comedy Gianni Schicchi, Domingo convinced Woody Allen to make his operatic directorial debut with this work. This can be viewed as another example of the desire to make opera and popular culture more equal. However, some, like Alan Rich, may see this attempt as merely insulting rather than interesting and innovative. With a top ticket price in Los Angeles of US$238 per seat, opera seems to continue to be elitist. Berger (2005) concurs with this idea and gives his rationale for elitism: there are rich people who support and attend the opera; it is an imported art from Europe that causes some marginalisation; opera is not associated with something being ‘moral,’ a concept engrained in American culture; it is expensive to produce and usually funded by kings, corporations, rich people; and the opera singers are rare –usually one in a million who will have the vocal quality to sing opera arias. Furthermore, Nicholas Kenyon commented in the early 1990s: “there is suspicion that audiences are now paying more and more money for their seats to see more and more money spent on stage” (Kenyon 3). Still, Garry Marshall commented that the budget for The Grand Duchess was US$2 million, while his budget for Runaway Bride was US$72 million. Kenyon warns, “Such popularity for opera may be illusory. The enjoyment of one striking aria does not guarantee the survival of an art form long regarded as over-elitist, over-recondite, and over-priced” (Kenyon 3). A recent development is the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to simulcast live opera performances from the Met stage to various cinemas around the world. These HD transmissions began with the 2006-2007 season when six performances were broadcast. In the 2007-2008 season, the schedule has expanded to eight live Saturday matinee broadcasts plus eight recorded encores broadcast the following day. According to The Los Angeles Times, “the Met’s experiment of merging film with live performance has created a new art form” (Aslup). Whether or not this is a “new art form,” it certainly makes world-class live opera available to countless persons who cannot travel to New York and pay the price for tickets, when they are available. In the US alone, more than 350 cinemas screen these live HD broadcasts from the Met. Top ticket price for these performances at the Met is US$375, while the lowest price is US$27 for seats with only a partial view. Top price for the HD transmissions in participating cinemas is US$22. This experiment with live simulcasts makes opera more affordable and may increase its popularity; combined with updated stagings, opera can engage a much larger audience and hope for even a mass consumption. Is opera moving closer and closer to popular culture? There still seems to be an aura of elitism and snobbery about opera. However, Plàcido Domingo’s attempt to join opera with Hollywood is meant to break the barriers between high and popular culture. The practice of updating opera settings is not confined to Los Angeles. As mentioned earlier, the idea can be traced to post World War II England, and is quite common in Europe. Examples include Erich Wonder’s approach to Wagner’s Ring, making Valhalla, the mythological home of the gods and typically a mountaintop, into the spaceship Valhalla, as well as my own experience with Don Giovanni in Prague and Ariane et Barbe-Bleu in Paris. Indeed, Sutcliffe maintains, “Great classics in all branches of the arts are repeatedly being repackaged for a consumerist world that is increasingly and neurotically self-obsessed” (61). Although new operas are being written and performed, most contemporary performances are of operas by Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini (www.operabase.com). This means that audiences see the same works repeated many times, but in different interpretations. Perhaps this is why Sutcliffe contends, “since the 1970s it is the actual productions that have had the novelty value grabbed by the headlines. Singing no longer predominates” (Sutcliffe 57). If then, as Sutcliffe argues, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (Sutcliffe 65), then the contemporary practice of changing the original settings is simply the latest “new formula” that is replacing the old ones. If there are no new words or new music, then what remains are new methods of performance, hence the practice of changing time and place. Opera is a complex art form that has evolved over the past 400 years and continues to evolve, but will it survive? The underlining motives for directors changing the time and place of opera performances are at least three: for aesthetic/artistic purposes, financial purposes, and to reach an audience from many cultures, who speak different languages, and who have varied tastes. These three reasons are interrelated. In 1996, Sutcliffe wrote that there has been one constant in all the arguments about opera productions during the preceding two decades: “the producer’s wish to relate the works being staged to contemporary circumstances and passions.” Although that sounds like a purely aesthetic reason, making opera relevant to new, multicultural audiences and thereby increasing the bottom line seems very much a part of that aesthetic. It is as true today as it was when Sutcliffe made the observation twelve years ago (60-61). My own speculation is that opera needs to attract various audiences, and it can only do so by appealing to popular culture and engaging new forms of media and technology. Erickson concludes that the number of upper status people who are exclusively faithful to fine arts is declining; high status people consume a variety of culture while the lower status people are limited to what they like. Research in North America, Europe, and Australia, states Erickson, attest to these trends. My answer to the question can stage directors make opera and popular culture “equal” is yes, and they can do it successfully. Perhaps Stanley Sharpless summed it up best: After his Eden triumph, When the Devil played his ace, He wondered what he could do next To irk the human race, So he invented Opera, With many a fiendish grin, To mystify the lowbrows, And take the highbrows in. References The Grand Duchess. 2005. 3 Feb. 2008 < http://www.ffaire.com/Duchess/index.htm >.Aslup, Glenn. “Puccini’s La Boheme: A Live HD Broadcast from the Met.” Central City Blog Opera 7 Apr. 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.centralcityopera.org/blog/2008/04/07/puccini%E2%80%99s- la-boheme-a-live-hd-broadcast-from-the-met/ >.Berger, William. Puccini without Excuses. New York: Vintage, 2005.Boorstin, Daniel. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.Clark, Graham. “Interview with Graham Clark.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 11 Aug. 2006.DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Capital and School Success.” American Sociological Review 47 (1982): 189-201.DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.”_ American Sociological Review_ 52 (1987): 440-55.Elson, C. Louis. “Opera.” Elson’s Music Dictionary. Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1905.Erickson, H. Bonnie. “The Crisis in Culture and Inequality.” In W. Ivey and S. J. Tepper, eds. Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life. New York: Routledge, 2007.Fanfaire.com. “At Its 20th Anniversary Celebration, the Los Angeles Opera Had a Ball with The Grand Duchess.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.fanfaire.com/Duchess/index.htm >.Gans, J. Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1977.Grimstad, Christie. Concerto Net.com. 2005. 12 Jan. 2008 < http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=3091 >.Grisworld, Wendy. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1994.Grout, D. Jay. A History of Western Music. Shorter ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1964.Halle, David. “High and Low Culture.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. London: Blackwell, 2006.Judge, Ian. “Interview with Ian Judge.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 22 Mar. 2006.Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001. 19 Nov. 2006 < http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=opera&searchmode=none >.Kenyon, Nicholas. “Introduction.” In A. Holden, N. Kenyon and S. Walsh, eds. The Viking Opera Guide. New York: Penguin, 1993.Lamont, Michele, and Marcel Fournier. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Lord, M.G. “Shlemiel! Shlemozzle! And Cue the Soprano.” The New York Times 4 Sep. 2005.Los Angeles Opera. “LA Opera General Director Placido Domingo Announces Results of Record-Breaking 20th Anniversary Season.” News release. 2006.Marshall, Garry. “Interview with Garry Marshall.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 31 Aug. 2005.National Endowment for the Arts. 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Research Division Report #45. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.nea.gov/pub/NEASurvey2004.pdf >.NCM Fanthom. “The Metropolitan Opera HD Live.” 2 Feb. 2008 < http://fathomevents.com/details.aspx?seriesid=622&gclid= CLa59NGuspECFQU6awodjiOafA >.Opera Today. James Sobre: Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Capriccio in Paris – Name This Stage Piece If You Can. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Rich, Alan. “High Notes, and Low.” LA Weekly 15 Sep. 2005. 6 May 2008 < http://www.laweekly.com/stage/a-lot-of-night-music/high-notes-and-low/8160/ >.Sharpless, Stanley. “A Song against Opera.” In E. O. Parrott, ed. How to Be Tremendously Tuned in to Opera. New York: Penguin, 1990.Shore, James. Opera Today. 2007. 4 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Sutcliffe, Tom. Believing in Opera. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996.YouTube. “Manon Sex and the Opera.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiBQhr2Sy0k >.

It would be fair to say that in our day to day negotiation between the personal and the public, we encounter and process cultural, material and symbolic products in all strata and sections of society. In our homes and in our workplaces, we appear to manage multiple senses of timekeeping and contrasting time-frames with fluid unconscious dexterity. In our forms of entertainment and relaxation, from print to television to cinema or from html to Mp3s to DivX, we juxtapose like and unlike metaphors/images/products/ text in a post-Frankensteinian assemblage of innovated cultural meaning – for example, The Phantom Menace and Austin Powers are commentaries on our visual eclecticism, from mixing mythological elements from feudal times in a space opera to our nostalgic enjoyment of presenting the old sixties' "style" as renewed, millennium-way;Napster is a logical extension of file-sharing which reflects a globalising trend towards the distribution of all content worldwide while meeting the specific requirements of individual taste (that is, the do-it-yourself musical cdrom drawn from thousands of international mp3 libraries). Likewise, in our trade of human utterances and syntax, multiple meanings become attached to words and sentences simultaneously in a variegated exploitation of interpretative dissonance. Oxymora abound and debates over interpretation form the contents of a great number of publications or the motivation behind short-circuiting dominant meanings. For example, in the oxymoron play with language, there exist useful combinations of opposite terms like "Original Copy", "Pretty Ugly", "Genuine Imitation", or "Microsoft Works" which have a commonsense use in daily exchanges. Or, in dialogues on the power behind mutual intelligibility, a term like 'sex', which means one thing in gender discussions, can be used in other contexts or moments to indicate the erotic. Through such language manoeuvres in the fields of meaning-application and interpretation, persons are accepted or discriminated where power differentials are predicated on difference of understanding. Where interpretative practices differ, or where intelligibility is definitely not mutual, misunderstandings and resistance breed. In this way, in our millennium of revealing society's mixture of meaning, the instrumentalities of master narratives are being unmasked in voicing these moments (and rules) of misunderstanding and resistance. What was once predominantly treated as a text or object -- sometimes exhaustively studied in isolation from various social and historical contexts, other times as cultural products facilitated by processes of production and consumption -- is now examined within or alongside different contexts and meanings. It is more contemporaneously sensitive towards our wonderfully elaborate and diverse mix of interpretative practices to situate cultural products and interpretative orders in relation to other social practices, political structures of dominance and exploitation, and cultural hierarchies like race, class, gender and cyber. The implication of this approach is that the meanings of material and symbolic products are no longer stable nor replicated in identical fashion within cultural dna. Society instead is transmitted from generation to generation with mutations, and unlike cultural artefacts conjoin in new births of meaning. The mix gene, it would appear, is widely dispersed in intricate and novel ways. The articles in this publication by M/C serve to illustrate the significance of ‘mix’ for reshaping cultural products, social ideas, even learning pedagogies, in ways that dramatically affect how we perceive and interpret the world. The interpretations of ‘mix’ by contributors were diverse, as expected by the broad uses of the word ‘mix’. Popular culture, however, remained a dominant aspect of culture for analysis, and this is reflected in the mix of articles we have chosen. These articles demonstrate that the fine lines separating genres can be smudged and shaded, and that meaning can be created from blending and swirling rather than only through linearity. Our feature article, "Digital Transformations: The Media is the Mix" by Lori Landay talks about the digital media and its hybrid form and content. This article thinks through "how digital narrative emerges from the mix of interactivity and nonlinearity" – this makes for a non-traditional narrative in both its structure and the way meaning is derived from it. The recombinations draw the spectator into the mix, where the mix is the content. Owen’s Chapman’s "Mixing with Records" follows Landay’s article in the sense that the linear format of the vinyl record, both in its constitution and the way it is played and listened to, is disrupted by the dj practice of "mixing" to create a new audio product. This new sound is created by the interaction of the dj and the choices of sounds, and how these sounds are put together in a new ‘mix’. Toby Daspit’s "The Noisy Mix of Hip Hop Pedagogies" responds to a familiar parental request — "Turn down that damned noise!!!" — in an engaging examination of educational experiences, epochal shifts and the wider implications of incorporating hip-hop aesthetics and recombinant textuality into schooling pedagogies. Daspit’s discussion over a fundamental reorientation to educational pedagogies is a timely piece which resonates well within the ‘mix’ imperative. The mixes evident through narrative are also investigated by Jody Mason, though her article on Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife looks more at thematic mixes within an individual literary character’s life, rather than mixes of meaning, structure and format. Mason’s article looks at the mix of cultures and the impact of that mix upon a female character. It seems, through an analysis of Wife, that different components and subject positions don’t always mix well, if indeed at all. Cutting up narrative, and cutting up sound, mixing it up and creating something new. These two distinct media are twisted together in Jeff Rice’s article, "They Put Me in the Mix: William S Burroughs, DJs, and the New Cultural Studies". The article itself cuts and pastes three key cultural events to prepare an argument that questions the methods of cultural studies regarding new media practices. Mark Pegrum takes a theological perspective on ‘mix’ in "Pop goes the spiritual", and interrogates society’s increasing trend towards religious eclecticism via an assortment of contemporary examples of religious references made by Western pop stars. Pegrum introduces us to this relatively new phenomenon by looking at the dizzying admixture of religions to be found in the songs and words of artists and groups worldwide. Todd Holden analyses the intriguing semiotic processes within Japanese advertising in "Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese Television Commercials". Advertising in Japan is characterized less and less by attention to product. Instead, the endless stream of Greek myths, Hollywood movies, political references, pop music, scientists and novelists comprise a major corner of audio-visual space. Holden examines the place of Japanese commercials as cultural historian, entertainer, social commentator or hawker. Collectively, these articles demonstrate how dynamic meaning is intimately linked to the idea of 'mix' and is concerned with questions of meaning and value, of culture and philosophy. To rework a tired cliché, no meaning is an island to itself but is an integral part of a shifting, fluid, and unusual combination of cultural, material and symbolic products in various ‘mixes’.

IntroductionThe common origin of the adjective “corporeal” and the noun “corpse” in the Latin root corpus points to the value of mortuary practices for investigating how the human body is objectified. In post-mortem rituals, the body—formerly the manipulator of objects—becomes itself the object that is manipulated. Thus, these funerary rituals provide a type of double reflexivity, where the object and subject of manipulation can be used to reciprocally illuminate one another. To this extent, any consideration of corporeality can only benefit from a discussion of how the body is objectified through mortuary practices. This paper offers just such a discussion with respect to a selection of two contrasting mortuary practices, in the context of the prehistoric past and the Classical Era respectively. At the most general level, we are motivated by the same intellectual impulse that has stimulated expositions on corporeality, materiality, and incarnation in areas like phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 77–234), Marxism (Adorno 112–119), gender studies (Grosz vii–xvi), history (Laqueur 193–244), and theology (Henry 33–53). That is to say, our goal is to show that the body, far from being a transparent frame through which we encounter the world, is in fact a locus where historical, social, cultural, and psychological forces intersect. On this view, “the body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes an infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78). However, for all that the cited paradigms offer culturally situated appreciations of corporeality; our particular intellectual framework will be provided by cognitive science. Two reasons impel us towards this methodological choice.In the first instance, the study of ritual has, after several decades of stagnation, been rewarded—even revolutionised—by the application of insights from the new sciences of the mind (Whitehouse 1–12; McCauley and Lawson 1–37). Thus, there are good reasons to think that ritual treatments of the body will refract historical and social forces through empirically attested tendencies in human cognition. In the present connection, this means that knowledge of these tendencies will reward any attempt to theorise the objectification of the body in mortuary rituals.In the second instance, because beliefs concerning the afterlife can never be definitively judged to be true or false, they give free expression to tendencies in cognition that are otherwise constrained by the need to reflect external realities accurately. To this extent, they grant direct access to the intuitive ideas and biases that shape how we think about the world. Already, this idea has been exploited to good effect in areas like the cognitive anthropology of religion, which explores how counterfactual beings like ghosts, spirits, and gods conform to (and deviate from) pre-reflective cognitive patterns (Atran 83–112; Barrett and Keil 219–224; Barrett and Reed 252–255; Boyer 876–886). Necessarily, this implies that targeting post-mortem treatments of the body will offer unmediated access to some of the conceptual schemes that inform thinking about human corporeality.At a more detailed level, the specific methodology we propose to use will be provided by conceptual blending theory—a framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, and others to describe how structures from different areas of experience are creatively blended to form a new conceptual frame. In this system, a generic space provides the ground for coordinating two or more input spaces into a blended space that synthesises them into a single output. Here this would entail using natural or technological processes to structure mortuary practices in a way that satisfies various psychological needs.Take, for instance, W.B. Yeats’s famous claim that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” (“Easter 1916” in Yeats 57-8). Here, the poet exploits a generic space—that of everyday objects and the effort involved in manipulating them—to coordinate an organic input from that taxonomy (the heart) with an inorganic input (a stone) to create the blended idea that too energetic a pursuit of an abstract ideal turns a person into an unfeeling object (the heart-as-stone). Although this particular example corresponds to a familiar rhetorical figure (the metaphor), the value of conceptual blending theory is that it cuts across distinctions of genre, media, language, and discourse level to provide a versatile framework for expressing how one area of human experience is related to another.As indicated, we will exploit this versatility to investigate two ways of objectifying the body through the examination of two contrasting mortuary practices—cremation and inhumation—against different cultural horizons. The first of these is the conceptualisation of the body as an object of a technical process, where the post-mortem cremation of the corpse is analogically correlated with the metallurgical refining of ore into base metal. Our area of focus here will be Bronze Age cremation practices. The second conceptual scheme we will investigate focuses on treatments of the body as a vegetable object; here, the relevant analogy likens the inhumation of the corpse to the planting of a seed in the soil from which future growth will come. This discussion will centre on the Classical Era. Burning: The Body as Manufactured ObjectThe Early and Middle Bronze Age in Western Europe (2500-1200 BCE) represented a period of change in funerary practices relative to the preceding Neolithic, exemplified by a move away from the use of Megalithic monuments, a proliferation of grave goods, and an increase in the use of cremation (Barrett 38-9; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Brück, Material Metaphors 308; Waddell, Bronze Age 141-149). Moreover, the Western European Bronze Age is characterised by a shift away from communal burial towards single interment (Barrett 32; Bradley 158-168). Equally, the Bronze Age in Western Europe provides us with evidence of an increased use of cist and pit cremation burials concentrated in low-lying areas (Woodman 254; Waddell, Prehistoric 16; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Bettencourt 103). This greater preference for lower-lying location appears to reflect a distinctive change in comparison to the distribution patterns of the Neolithic burials; these are often located on prominent, visible aspects of a landscape (Cooney and Grogan 53-61). These new Bronze Age burial practices appear to reflect a distancing in relation to the territories of the “old ancestors” typified by Megalithic monuments (Bettencourt 101-103). Crucially, the Bronze Age archaeological record provides us with evidence that indicates that cremation was becoming the dominant form of deposition of human remains throughout Central and Western Europe (Sørensen and Rebay 59-60).The activities associated with Bronze Age cremations such as the burning of the body and the fragmentation of the remains have often been considered as corporeal equivalents (or expressions) of the activities involved in metal (bronze) production (Brück, Death 84-86; Sørensen and Rebay 60–1; Rebay-Salisbury, Cremations 66-67). There are unequivocal similarities between the practices of cremation and contemporary bronze production technologies—particularly as both processes involve the transformation of material through the application of fire at temperatures between 700 ºC to 1000 ºC (Musgrove 272-276; Walker et al. 132; de Becdelievre et al. 222-223).We assert that the technologies that define the European Bronze Age—those involved in alloying copper and tin to produce bronze—offered a new conceptual frame that enabled the body to be objectified in new ways. The fundamental idea explored here is that the displacement of inhumation by cremation in the European Bronze Age was motivated by a cognitive shift, where new smelting technologies provided novel conceptual metaphors for thinking about age-old problems concerning human mortality and post-mortem survival. The increased use of cremation in the European Bronze Age contrasts with the archaeological record of the Near Eastern—where, despite the earlier emergence of metallurgy (3300–3000 BCE), we do not see a notable proliferation in the use of cremation in this region. Thus, mortuary practices (i.e. cremation) provide us with an insight into how Western European Bronze Age cultures mediated the body through changes in technological objects and processes.In the terminology of conceptual blending, the generic space in question centres on the technical manipulation of the material world. The first input space is associated with the anxiety attending mortality—specifically, the cessation of personal identity and the extinction of interpersonal relationships. The second input space represents the technical knowledge associated with bronze production; in particular, the extraction of ore from source material and its mixing with other metals to form an alloy. The blended space coordinates these inputs to objectify the human body as an object that is ritually transformed into a new but more durable substance via the cremation process. In this contention we use the archaeological record to draw a conceptual parallel between the emergence of bronze production technology—centring on transition of naturally occurring material to a new subsistence (bronze)—and the transitional nature of the cremation process.In this theoretical framework, treating the body as a mixture of substances that can be reduced to its constituents and transformed through technologies of cremation enabled Western European Bronze Age society to intervene in the natural process of putrefaction and transform the organic matter into something more permanent. This transformative aspect of the cremation is seen in the evidence we have for secondary burial practices involving the curation and circulation of cremated bones of deceased members of a group (Brück, Death 87-93). This evidence allows us to assert that cremated human remains and objects were considered products of the same transformation into a more permanent state via burning, fragmentation, dispersal, and curation. Sofaer (62-69) states that the living body is regarded as a person, but as soon as the transition to death is made, the body becomes an object; this is an “ontological shift in the perception of the body that assumes a sudden change in its qualities” (62).Moreover, some authors have proposed that the exchange of fragmented human remains was central to mortuary practices and was central in establishing and maintaining social relations (Brück, Death 76-88). It is suggested that in the Early Bronze Age the perceptions of the human body mirrored the perceptions of objects associated with the arrival of the new bronze technology (Brück, Death 88-92). This idea is more pronounced if we consider the emergence of bronze technology as the beginning of a period of capital intensification of natural resources. Through this connection, the Bronze Age can be regarded as the point at which a particular natural resource—in this case, copper—went through myriad intensive manufacturing stages, which are still present today (intensive extraction, production/manufacturing, and distribution). Unlike stone tool production, bronze production had the addition of fire as the explicit method of transformation (Brück, Death 88-92). Thus, such views maintain that the transition achieved by cremation—i.e. reducing the human remains to objects or tokens that could be exchanged and curated relatively soon after the death of the individual—is equivalent to the framework of commodification connected with bronze production.A sample of cremated remains from Castlehyde in County Cork, Ireland, provides us with an example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in a Western European context (McCarthy). This is chosen because it is a typical example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in the context of Western Europe; also, one of the authors (MG) has first-hand experience in the analysis of its associated remains. The Castlehyde cremation burial consisted of a rectangular, stone-lined cist (McCarthy). The cist contained cremated, calcined human remains, with the fragments generally ranging from a greyish white to white in colour; this indicates that the bones were subject to a temperature range of 700-900ºC. The organic content of bone was destroyed during the cremation process, leaving only the inorganic matrix (brittle bone which is, often, described as metallic in consistency—e.g. Gejvall 470-475). There is evidence that remains may have been circulated in a manner akin to valuable metal objects. First of all, the absence of long bones indicates that there may have been a practice of removing salient remains as curatable records of ancestral ties. Secondly, remains show traces of metal staining from objects that are no longer extant, which suggests that graves were subject to secondary burial practices involving the removal of metal objects and/or human bone. To this extent, we can discern that human remains were being processed, curated, and circulated in a similar manner to metal objects.Thus, there are remarkable similarities between the treatment of the human body in cremation and bronze metal production technologies in the European Bronze Age. On the one hand, the parallel between smelting and cremation allowed death to be understood as a process of transformation in which the individual was removed from processes of organic decay. On the other hand, the circulation of the transformed remains conferred a type of post-mortem survival on the deceased. In this way, cremation practices may have enabled Bronze Age society to symbolically overcome the existential anxiety concerning the loss of personhood and the breaking of human relationships through death. In relation to the former point, the resurgence of cremation in nineteenth century Europe provides us with an example of how the disposal of a human body can be contextualised in relation to socio-technological advancements. The (re)emergence of cremation in this period reflects the post-Enlightenment shift from an understanding of the world through religious beliefs to the use of rational, scientific approaches to examine the natural world, including the human body (and death). The controlled use of fire in the cremation process, as well as the architecture of crematories, reflected the industrial context of the period (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 16).With respect to the circulation of cremated remains, Smith suggests that Early Medieval Christian relics of individual bones or bone fragments reflect a reconceptualised continuation of pre-Christian practices (beginning in Christian areas of the Roman Empire). In this context, it is claimed, firstly, that the curation of bone relics and the use of mobile bone relics of important, saintly individuals provided an embodied connection between the sacred sphere and the earthly world; and secondly, that the use of individual bones or fragments of bone made the Christian message something portable, which could be used to reinforce individual or collective adherence to Christianity (Smith 143-167). Using the example of the Christian bone relics, we can thus propose that the curation and circulation of Bronze Age cremated material may have served a role similar to tools for focusing religiously oriented cognition. Burying: The Body as a Vegetable ObjectGiven that the designation “the Classical Era” nominates the entirety of the Graeco-Roman world (including the Near East and North Africa) from about 800 BCE to 600 CE, there were obviously no mortuary practices common to all cultures. Nevertheless, in both classical Greece and Rome, we have examples of periods when either cremation or inhumation was the principal funerary custom (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21).For instance, the ancient Homeric texts inform us that the ancient Greeks believed that “the spirit of the departed was sentient and still in the world of the living as long as the flesh was in existence […] and would rather have the body devoured by purifying fire than by dogs or worms” (Mylonas 484). However, the primary sources and archaeological record indicate that cremation practices declined in Athens circa 400 BCE (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 20). With respect to the Roman Empire, scholarly opinion argues that inhumation was the dominant funerary rite in the eastern part of the Empire (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 17-21; Morris 52). Complementing this, the archaeological and historical record indicates that inhumation became the primary rite throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Inhumation was considered to be an essential rite in the context of an emerging belief that a peaceful afterlife was reflected by a peaceful burial in which bodily integrity was maintained (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21; Morris 52; Toynbee 41). The question that this poses is how these beliefs were framed in the broader discourses of Classical culture.In this regard, our claim is that the growth in inhumation was driven (at least in part) by the spread of a conceptual scheme, implicit in Greek fertility myths that objectify the body as a seed. The conceptual logic here is that the post-mortem continuation of personal identity is (symbolically) achieved by objectifying the body as a vegetable object that will re-grow from its own physical remains. Although the dominant metaphor here is vegetable, there is no doubt that the motivating concern of this mythological fabulation is human mortality. As Jon Davies notes, “the myths of Hades, Persephone and Demeter, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Adonis and Aphrodite, of Selene and Endymion, of Herakles and Dionysus, are myths of death and rebirth, of journeys into and out of the underworld, of transactions and transformations between gods and humans” (128). Thus, such myths reveal important patterns in how the post-mortem fate of the body was conceptualised.In the terminology of mental mapping, the generic space relevant to inhumation contains knowledge pertaining to folk biology—specifically, pre-theoretical ideas concerning regeneration, survival, and mortality. The first input space attaches to human mortality; it departs from the anxiety associated with the seeming cessation of personal identity and dissolution of kin relationships subsequent to death. The second input space is the subset of knowledge concerning vegetable life, and how the immersion of seeds in the soil produces a new generation of plants with the passage of time. The blended space combines the two input spaces by way of the funerary script, which involves depositing the body in the soil with a view to securing its eventual rebirth by analogy with the sprouting of a planted seed.As indicated, the most important illustration of this conceptual pattern can be found in the fertility myths of ancient Greece. The Homeric Hymns, in particular, provide a number of narratives that trace out correspondences between vegetation cycles, human mortality, and inhumation, which inform ritual practice (Frazer 223–404; Carney 355–65; Sowa 121–44). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for instance, charts how Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the dead, and taken to his underground kingdom. While searching for her missing daughter, Demeter, goddess of fertility, neglects the earth, causing widespread devastation. Matters are resolved when Zeus intervenes to restore Persephone to Demeter. However, having ingested part of Hades’s kingdom (a pomegranate seed), Persephone is obliged to spend half the year below ground with her captor and the other half above ground with her mother.The objectification of Persephone as both a seed and a corpse in this narrative is clearly signalled by her seasonal inhumation in Hades’ chthonic realm, which is at once both the soil and the grave. And, just as the planting of seeds in autumn ensures rebirth in spring, Persephone’s seasonal passage from the Kingdom of the Dead nominates the individual human life as just one season in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. A further signifying element is added by the ingestion of the pomegranate seed. This is evocative of her being inseminated by Hades; thus, the coordination of vegetation cycles with life and death is correlated with secondary transition—that from childhood to adulthood (Kerényi 119–183).In the examples given, we can see how the Homeric Hymn objectifies both the mortal and sexual destiny of the body in terms of thresholds derived from the vegetable world. Moreover, this mapping is not merely an intellectual exercise. Its emotional and social appeal is visible in the fact that the Eleusinian mysteries—which offered the ritual homologue to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—persisted from the Mycenaean period to 396 CE, one of the longest recorded durations for any ritual (Ferguson 254–9; Cosmopoulos 1–24). In sum, then, classical myth provided a precedent for treating the body as a vegetable object—most often, a seed—that would, in turn, have driven the move towards inhumation as an important mortuary practice. The result is to create a ritual form that makes key aspects of human experience intelligible by connecting them with cyclical processes like the seasons of the year, the harvesting of crops, and the intergenerational oscillation between the roles of parent and child. Indeed, this pattern remains visible in the germination metaphors and burial practices of contemporary religions such as Christianity, which draw heavily on the symbolism associated with mystery cults like that at Eleusis (Nock 177–213).ConclusionWe acknowledge that our examples offer a limited reflection of the ethnographic and archaeological data, and that they need to be expanded to a much greater degree if they are to be more than merely suggestive. Nevertheless, suggestiveness has its value, too, and we submit that the speculations explored here may well offer a useful starting point for a larger survey. In particular, they showcase how a recurring existential anxiety concerning death—involving the fear of loss of personal identity and kinship relations—is addressed by different ways of objectifying the body. Given that the body is not reducible to the objects with which it is identified, these objectifications can never be entirely successful in negotiating the boundary between life and death. In the words of Jon Davies, “there is simply no let-up in the efforts by human beings to transcend this boundary, no matter how poignantly each failure seemed to reinforce it” (128). For this reason, we can expect that the record will be replete with conceptual and cognitive schemes that mediate the experience of death.At a more general level, it should also be clear that our understanding of human corporeality is rewarded by the study of mortuary practices. 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