Mytho-Historic Studies

As we saw last time, the secret identity-in-difference between Hephaestus, Daedalus, Talos, and Icarus begins to expose the greater network of mythic inflexions that belong to the archetype of the artist in Greek mythology. If Daedalus represents the artist himself, Icarus, his son, stands for the work of art and its fall into the lifeless...

Asking the fundamental question of being in our own times, we have to face the gaping existential blindspot which prevents us from properly knowing ourselves.

Robert Graves notes the secret identity-in-difference shared by all the figures associated with Daedelus—an archetypal network of partial identifications—whose divine ‘center’ is Hephaestus, the ‘hobbled’ God of artistic productivity and ‘Vulcanic’ creation.

From time immemorial, in the highlands of Mesoamerica, the spectacle of the winter solstice, this most sacred of rising dawns, has offered a precise point of spiritual concentration and reflection on the nature of being in time.

Attempting to trace my own “path to bliss” I do not engage in a self-centered affair, for it is not a question of “my” individuation alone...

A consequent grammatological opening of the Popol-Wuh has already been deployed by Gordon Brotherston in his remarkable Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas Through Their Literature

“We, in fact, are dealing with a unified history that embraces in continuous succession the whole historical-cultural process: history written in terms of mythological thought, which is historical for these people.”

Let us place emphasis for a moment on this silent hyphen of mytho-history, this inaudible little dash which at the same time unites and separates the mythical dimensions from the historic substance of creative-being itself. This little dash that dialectically separates and unites myth and history in the mytho-historic dynamics of creative-being belongs to that...