Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Mythology”

Episode 177: Riddles in the Dark: On Fairy Tales, Interpretation, and 'Rapunzel'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Fairy tales are among the most familiar cultural objects, so familiar that we let our kids play with them unsupervised. At the same time, they are also the most mysterious of artifacts, their heimlich giving way to unheimlich as soon as we give them a closer look and ask ourselves what they are really about. Indeed, these imaginal nomads, which seem to evade all cultural and historical capture, existing in various forms in every time and place, can become so strange as to make us wonder if they are cultural at all, and not some unexplained force of nature — the dreaming of the world. In this episode, JF and Phil use "Rapunzel" as a case study to explore the weirdness of fairy tales, illustrating how they demand interpretation without ever allowing themselves to be explained.

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SHOW NOTES

Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" in Illuminations (Hannah Arendt, ed.; Harryn Zohn, trans.).
Novalis, Philosophical Writings. (Margaret Mahony Stoljar, trans.).
Cristina Campo, The Unforgivable and Other Writings (Alex Andriesse, trans.)
William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment
Marie-Louise von Franz,, Swiss Jungian psychologist
Sesame Street, “Rapunzel Rescue”
Disney’s Tangled
The Annotated Brothers Grimm
Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index
Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time
W. A. Mozart, The Magic Flute
Dante Alighieri, Il Convito
Panspermia hypothesis
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature
John Mitchell, Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist
Clint Eastwood (dir.) The Unforgiven

Episode 102: On Pan, with Gyrus

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 10:30:00 -0400

"What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" With this question, the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning opens her famous poem "A Musical Instrument," which explores nature's troubling embrace of savagery and beauty. It seems that Pan always raises questions: What is he doing? What does he want? Where will he appear next? Linked to instinct, compulsion, and the spontaneous event, Pan is without a doubt the least predictable of the Greek Gods. Small wonder that he alone in the Greek pantheon sports human and animal parts. In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Gyrus, author of the marvellous North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos, to capture a deity who, though he has made more than one appearance on Weird Studies, remains decidedly elusive.

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REFERENCES

Gyrus, "Sketches of the Goat God in Albion"
Gyrus, North
James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
Pharmakon, philosophical term
Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive
Philippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece
Hellier, television docuseries
Weird Studies, Episode 98 on exotica
Pink Floyd, Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Clayton Eshelman, Juniper Fuse
Plutarch “On the Silence of the Oracles”
Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger
D.H. Lawrence, “Pan in America”
Jim Brandon, The Rebirth of Pan

Episode 68: On James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 16:00:00 -0400

In 1979, the American psychologist James Hillman published The Dream and the Underworld, a polemical meditation on the nature of dreams. Rejecting the orthodoxies of both Freud and Jung, Hillman argued that the the "nightworld" of dream should not play second fiddle to the "dayworld" of waking life, because in the soul as on earth, day and night are equally essential, and equally real. To reduce a dream to a message or interpretation is to fail the dream. In order for dreams to do their work on us, says Hillman, we must cease to regard them as hallucinations, mere metaphors, epiphenomena, or illusions, and instead see them as the imaginal other life we all must live. Every night, for Hillman, each of us descends into the underworld to encounter those forces that shape us and our surroundings. The way down is the way up.

REFERENCES

James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
George Steiner, Real Presences
Hakim Bey, Orgies of the Hemp Eaters: Cuisine, Slang, Literature and Ritual of Cannabis Culture
Erik Davis, High Strangeness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
Brad Warner on drugs and Buddhism
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Christopher Nolan (dir.), Inception
Jorge Luis Borges, "Nightmares" in Seven Nights
Henri Bergson, Dreams

Episode 57: Box of God(s): On 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 10:00:00 -0400

Raiders of the Lost Ark is more than a Hollywood movie made in the summer blockbuster mold. As Phil says in his intro to this popping Weird Studies episode, the film is "a Trojan horse of the Weird, easy to let in but once inside, apt to take over." This conversation sees him and JF discuss a movie we dismiss at our own risk, a cinematic masterpiece replete with enigmas that reach back to the foundations of Western civilization. What does the Ark of the Covenant signify? What does it contain? What happens if you open that box of god(s)? And whose god is this, anyway? These are questions that have puzzled theologians and mystics for centuries, and Steven Spielberg's great work asks them anew for an age gone nuclear.

Image by arsheffield

REFERENCES

Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark
Steven Soderbergh’s version of Raiders with sound and color removed
Weird Studies Patreon extra, “Weird Genius”
Weird Studies episode 28, “Weird Music Part 2”
Camille Saint-Saëns, Danse Macabre
M. Night Shyamalan, Signs
Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon
Neil Jordan (dir.), The End of the Affair
Weird Studies episode 29, “On Lovecraft”
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism
Howard Carter, British archaeologist
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
Claude Levi Strauss, French anthropologist
Clement Greenberg's concept of medium specificity
D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation
David Mamet, On Directing Film
Dumbo (1941 film)
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Strange High House in the Mist”
Jan Fries, Helrunar: A Manual of Rune Magick
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
GIF of the soldier moving funny at the end of Raiders
Weird Studies episode 2, “Garmonbozia”
Aaron Leitch, occultist
Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure
Gene Wolfe, [Soldier of the Mist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoldieroftheMist)_