Summary

When I signed up for this class, I had a very narrow-minded idea of what it would be like.  I really just thought that we would hear lectures about characters and have to write papers.  But I ended up really liking the class.  In some weird way, it fit with my major so I didn't have to change up my way of thinking.  But at the same time, it really opened my mind up and gave me the chance to make connections between my childhood and now with mythology.  And I think that is really cool because there are things I probably never would have connected if I hadn't been in this class.
This was one of my favorite classes this semester.  And I'm not used to liking anything outside of my major.  I would definitely recommend this class to my friends, I think it's really worth it; and if I could, I would probably take it over again, just for fun.

My Life As A Mythic Detective

This class posed several issues for me that made becoming a “mythic detective” extremely difficult.  But the most difficult part for me was probably my major and how my mind works.  I’ve been working on my history degree since before college started, when I took AP history classes in high school.  My passion lies in history and f people spend time around me, they can see that I will talk about the Russian Revolution or the assassination of Franz Ferdinand for no reason.  In everything that I do, I look for historical significance, and I made my opinions and rationales based off of how I see things. 

In this class though, we were asked to look at everything through a mythical lens.  That is something that contradicts the way that my mind is programmed, but I have found ways to work within this differentiation.  My senior capstone became the most random, but effective way of merging history and mythology.  One of the things that I never thought I would be doing as a history major is writing a twenty five page paper on animal history.  The semester started with my entire class having a serious sense of confusion—none of us had any idea how to write about animals and their role in history.  We did not even consider the question of whether they have agency.  But then, towards the beginning of the semester, we talked about the staff of Asclepius and its relation to the goddess Hygenia and the historical significance of the early Roman versions of healing places.  And then we talked about the caduceus and the fact that it has become for medicine.  And to that effect, a symbol of medical associations around the world.  Both of these symbols represent a history of medicine in some manner.  Without even realizing it, I began to form a thesis about the role of snakes as symbols in history. 

I never would have considered the significance of snakes in a historical setting before this class started, mostly because they are the most terrifying creature, ever, to me.  But it seemed like mythology was pushing me to study snakes.  I do not think that this was a coincidence at all.  The fact that I hate snakes is completely rational, as I have learned in the last few weeks, but there were too many situations where snakes came up in conversations—whether in class or in conversations with my friends.  The first was the staff, and the second was the caduceus.  But then, every few days, our conversations in class would veer back to snakes.  Even our midterm had snakes.  When we had to sit down and draw ourselves hugging trees, but our arms all had to be snakes, I was not happy ( I also had not chosen snakes as my capstone topic yet).  I sat there and drew my picture, seeing it as out hug a tree assignment, as well as a really cruel joke.  But then I realized that it’s just a representation of us as the snake, doing something that has been repeated time and time again in different ways, with different snakes, throughout time.  And the origin of this is myth. 

I decided snakes would be my capstone topic about a week after drawing myself as the snake during the midterm, and since then, everything I do, I’m thinking about snakes or seeing them.  The final decision to make that my topic was when my friend Becca told me a story about her and her little brother unwrapping snakes from trees and using them to scare their parents, while they were on a camping trip.  I’ve known Becca for a few years and she had never told me that story before even though we talk about pranks and our families all the time.  That was one more sign that snakes were taking over my life—even in a normal, everyday conversation, I was hearing about snakes being wrapped around trees. So now, I wake up thinking about them, and I fall asleep thinking about them.  And it’s horrible.  Seeing the thing that you fear everywhere is just so wrong on so many levels. 

At the same time though, it’s pretty cool.  This mythological reasoning that is fueling my research is helping me with a lot of things.   I’m finally able to watch all of the Harry Potter movies instead of covering my face and hiding myself when there is a snake on screen.  That is definitely not something that I ever thought I would be able to do.  Seeing snakes everywhere is also making me deal with my larger fear of snakes.  The snakes in Harry Potter are, for the most part, fake.  They’re models and computer generated images.  But I have to look at pictures of snakes and read about attacks every day.   There are two newspaper articles that are from 1904 and 2002, where I was literally picturing the staff of Asclepius in my head while I was reading.  The 1904 article was about a snake wrapped around a piece of driftwood, floating down a river.  The main point of the article was not the snake, but the panic that it caused and the one hundred people that died because of their fear.  But in all reality, this snake was just floating along, without really bothering anyone.  The reality that I saw in this article is that the snake was literally just a mythic representation, maybe it was showing the people in India to not be scared, but it was misinterpreted (like snakes often are) and a disaster happened.  It made me rethink my fear of snakes for a minute.  I’m so used to seeing snakes as this terrible force that can do damage, even when it is a baby snake or it isn't poisonous; but in that instant, I saw the situation from the point of the snake.  It did nothing wrong.  The other article actually had nothing to do with snakes and trees, so I really should not have seen the caduceus or staff of Asclepius in it at all, but I did.  A boa constrictor was found in a park in Queens, NY and a man went up to it, with NO fear, and let the snake slither around his arm until it was completely coiled.  I feel that this is a little bit of a stretch, but anytime the snake wraps around something, I feel like it is a representation of a tree now.  And literally, it was just a man’s arm.  But it was the key point of the story.  And the snake did nothing to the man.  He took it home, fed it, and kept it warm until animal control could come collect it.  Stories like this make me so confused because I have this severe need to make snakes evil and dangerous, but stories like these are making me see the entire species in a different light. 

I know now that less than fifteen percent of snakes are venomous, making my fear more irrational.  I think that my capstone project was myth’s way of helping me with my fears.  A species of animal has never taken up so much space in my brain and my day to day life.  I am a very human-centered historian and I am completely okay with that, but I am coming to terms with the fact that I actually like reading about snakes.  That doesn't mean that I will ever get a snake as a pet, or probably be able to go into the reptile house at the Denver Zoo without freaking out.  But it is becoming easier to see pictures of snakes on paper, or seeing a representation of them in a drawing or in my head before I close my eyes, without going into a full-on panic attack.  I’m not going to stop fearing them because I don’t think that is possible, but there is a chance that I will continue to do historical research on snakes for a longer period in my life.  And I genuinely believe that I can thank mythology for that.  For making me challenge myself and question my reasoning for being scared of an animal because it made me do research and understand my fear, and it is also making me see the caduceus and staff of Asclepius everywhere (which I actually kind of like).

2012

You know, I always laugh at movies that are about some upcoming apocalypse, but there was a commercial on today about the end of society.  It looked so similar to the commercials for "2012" when they came out in 2009.

 I can honestly say that I've never watched that movie, mostly because I thought that it was so pointless after hearing a speech from someone that actually understood the Mayan calender.  If you look closely at the Mayan calender, technically the world ends every twelve years.  Everyone can remember being excited for the turn of the century, until all the conspiracy theorists came out with the Y2K idea, which was, once again, based off the Mayan calender. The woman I heard a speech from was Rigoberta Menchu Tut, a Nobel Peace winner from Guatemala, that is an indigenous person.

She explained that, based off of the Mayan belief system, society resets itself every twelve years, in an effort to start a new cycle.
In my last blog, I wrote about how I think it is possible for a symbolic apocalypse to happen.  And technically, that's true based off of their belief system.  I really want to know what the origin of this chain of thought is, because I'm assuming that there's something significant about the number twelve, since there is usually something important about anything that relates to a belief system and the stories/myths associated with it.
I'm actually really glad that I never watched 2012, because I like knowing the reason that the Mayan calender resets itself, and I don't want to watch the Hollywood take on what it means.

 I think that movie is important, though, because it made the Mayan calender a big talking point in our society for several years.  And it gave people, like myself, the ability to learn the significance and the reason that a movie could be based off of some traditional idea of a foreign culture.



On a side note-- one of my history professors showed us a spoof of 2012 in my Soviet Russia class this semester and I really just want to post it...
It doesn't really fit, but it's still entertaining if you know anything about Russian politics.

Ring Around the Rosie/ The Bubonic Plague

I didn't really expect that we would ever talk about the plague in this class, but I completely understand why it correlates with the third section of the semester.  The really funny part to me is that I actually have experience with a "plague" and I never really thought about the contradiction of it.

In my European History class in 10th grade, we spent a lot of time (about a week) talking about the Bubonic Plague and its origins/ the effects it had on human populations and smaller animals.  And we actually spent an entire day analyzing "Ring Around the Rosie".

But the plague actually didn't have any real significance in my life until I was 17.

I'm from Westminster, Colorado and literally right across from my street is a huge open space that covers the distance to the mountains less than a dozen miles away.  On the drive home, going south on Simms Street, there were dozens of little orange signs, which no one paid any attention to.  The following day, though, there were  giant signs that said "Beware: Bubonic Plague".

 It was probably one of the most random, most entertaining things that my friends and I had ever seen, and we genuinely though that is was just some huge joke.  But, it turned out that the signs were serious-- there was a plague occurring literally forty feet from my neighborhood and we were never affected.  Some random strain of Bubonic Plague had been transmitted to the prairie dogs in the area to the west and south of my neighborhood.

 The weirdest part is that, although we were no longer allowed to enter these areas, the plague could not hurt us.  In some ways, I think that this was actually an apocalypse, but not in the "traditional" sense.  It was just kind of an end to the way of life that we knew.  Leaving my neighborhood each day, I was used to seeing prairie dogs running into the street and turning their heads to look at the middle schoolers waiting at the bus stop.  But then, randomly, it stopped happening.  The signs stayed up for around six weeks, and during that time, I don't remember seeing even one prairie dog.  And then, randomly, they just disappeared and we never heard anything about the "end" of the plague...  

For the twelve years that I lived in my neighborhood before college, people would always complain about the prairie dogs and the holes that covered the trails in our open space.  For five or six years, there was this huge motion to wipe them out completely because it would be "beneficial".  Yet, the second that the signs went up, people were so worried about these little animal terrors.  It was a huge shift for our community because everyone started to realize that the little nightmare pests were just as much a part of our world as any of us were.  

In class last Wednesday, we talked about the idea of realized eschatology and how it is the end, but only in a symbolic manner.  I feel like, in my little bubble in Westminster, Colorado, we kind of went through this transformation.  This huge shift happened, where everyone stopped badmouthing prairie dogs day-in and day-out, but no one even knew that it happened.  It literally just took four years to make that realization myself.  But an end did come, because there haven't been any bills proposed in my area since that time, to exterminate the population of hundreds of thousands of prairie dogs.  

But, its literally still one of the funniest things, who would ever expect to see a sign about the Bubonic Plague in the suburbs of Denver? Because I surely didn't!

In one of my books that I'm reading for my Modern Turkey class, the final section of each chapter is a narrative, which actually doesn't fit into the point of the chapter.  At the end of the fourth chapter though, the narrative that is told, is the story of Troy and the role of Achilles.  But, to start out the story, the narrative describes his mother, Thetis, sitting on the shores of the Euphrates River in southern Turkey.

There is no background to who Thetis is, beyond stating that she is Achilles' mother, and a sea nymph, in this narrative.   When I started reading this section of Crescent and Star, I thought about what her story must be.  So, I've spent the last couple of hours trying to connect a mythic character to a physical place that I've spent the entire semester learning about.  It's really hard for me to place that connection because I am so used to facts and dates, that prove something happened.
At the same time, though, I think that the story of Troy is mostly true (even though most people think that it is highly exaggerated to make it seem like a bigger deal) including the role of Achilles, so that kind of has to mean that Thetis was also real, even if her origins are exaggerated and turned into myth.

Her story, in Metamorphoses, is pretty much like the other stories, the gods were fearful of her, because she  was going to give birth to Achilles, so they sent Peleus to marry her in an attempt to prevent this.  And then he raped her and had her tied down to prevent her from escaping.  But, in the end, she married Peleus and gave birth to Achilles.  So, by trying to stop Achilles' birth, Jove pretty much caused it.  And led to the battle of Troy.  That, in turn, led to the author of Crescent and Star to record this story in a random section of the book  I don't know what the significance of this could possibly be, but I really like that one of my history books actually tells a story from mythology.

Ryan and Christine had been married happily for ten years, even though their jobs both required them to travel, causing them to spend a lot of time apart.  One day, in mid-January, Christine was supposed to fly back to Billings from a business trip in Denver; but, on the way to the airport from her hotel, she was hit by a semi.  After being rushed to St. Luke's Hospital in Denver, Ryan received a phone call, informing him that his wife had several severe injuries from a major car accident, and that he should come to Denver immediately.

Ryan's first thought was to book a flight and get to Denver with in a few hours, but he could not find any flights that had space seats open until the following night.  Instead of waiting another twenty-four hours, Ryan packed a bag and quickly piled into his Ford F-150.  If this had been a normal drive, he could have made it to Denver in about nine hours, but he encountered several issues along the way.  In Casper, a freak snow storm hit, closing down all the main roads.  But he was able to talk one of the traffic control workers to open up the roads, by persuading him that the truck could manage anything.  Although he was held back by three hours, Ryan was able to get back on the highway twelve hours before it opened for everyone else.  To make up that time, Ryan picked up speed and completely bypassed Douglas, not even considering that his gas tank was running low.  About twenty-five miles south of Douglas, the truck ran out gas, and Ryan had to talk someone into giving him a lift to Glendo to get enough gas to refill his tank.  Once again, this diversion took about an hour.  From that point, Ryan stopped only when he needed gas (in Wheatland and Fort Collins).  He finally made it to the Denver Metro, in time to hit rush hour.  When he tried to take a side road to the hospital, he started to speed and was pulled over by a large, old police officer.  By some miracle, he was able to convince the police officer to not give him a ticket, and to escort him to the hospital.  It took nearly fourteen hours to reach the hospital, and when he walked in, Christine's doctor was waiting to speak to him.

Christine had lost all function on the right side of her body and had been in a coma since she got out of surgery.  Her doctor said that Ryan could spend as much time with Christine as he wanted, as long as he did not touch any of the tubes that were attached to her, particularly since she was not able to breathe on her own.  The following morning, Ryan got up from the chair beside her bed, to go get some coffee, and accidentally pulled several of the tubes, including the one on her face.  Unknowingly, he left the room.  When he returned, the room was filled with doctors (and a crash cart), attempting to resuscitate Christine.  Unfortunately, by doing the one thing that he was told to avoid, he had created an even bigger accident that took his wife's life.

Icarus and "The Croods"

Apparently, the Icarus story is following everyone through their lives at this point.  I went to see the new Disney movie, The Croods, last night with friends and could not stop thinking about Icarus.  At some point in the movie, each character had a moment where they were "flying".  There was also a lot about stories... and "life lessons".  In one of these stories, a man "jumped on the sun and flew to tomorrow".  This seemed to be a running theme through the whole movie.  I don't think that any of my friends would have gotten the reference, because they were just there for the entertainment, but, literally, every five minutes, there was something else that was "Icarus" related.

  I think that this story is a really nice displacement.  It told the story in a new way, that was kind of subtle, and was very entertaining.  And beyond that, it will probably be a movie that kids think about in ten/fifteen years when they read the Icarus story.  They'll have a very modern representation of the story that they have grown up with and care about.  

I wish that I could really go into detail about more things from the movie that made me think of Icarus, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone that wants to see it and hasn't yet.