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New College of California
Fall Semester 1998
Undergraduate Humanities: Upper Division [3 Units]
Instructor: Scott J. Thompson
From Myth to Mind
Course Syllabus
I. Contents:
Week 1 - August 31, 1998: Course Introduction & Lecture: "Dreamtime and the Goddess of All Living Things: From Walter Benjamin to the Venus of Willendorf"
[Sept. 7 -- Holiday -- Building Closed]
Week 2 - September 14: The Palaeolithic Mind & the Neolithic Goddess
Week 3 - September 21: Caste, Contemplation & Alphabet in the Ancient Near East
Week 4 - September 28: The Minoan Goddess and her Year God --Dionysos in Crete
Week 5 - October 5: The Mycenaeans & the Greek Dark Ages -- Olympian Religion
[Oct. 12 -- Holiday -- Building Closed]
Week 6 - October 19: Dionysos in Greece/ Greek Tragedy & Satyr Plays
Week 7 - October 26: Bakchic and Orphic Mysteries & Greek Shamanism
Week 8 - November 2: Between Myth & Philosophy / Pherecydes & the Seven Sages
Week 9 - November 9: Science vs. Mysticism: Ionian Physics & Pythagoras
Week 10 - November 16: Being & Becoming: Parmenides and Heraclitus
Week 11 - November 23: From Pluralism to Atomism - Empedocles & Democritus
Week 12 - November 30: Socrates and Other Sophists
Week 13 - December 7: The Pythagorean Plato and the Platonic Academy
Week 14 - December 14: Plato vs. Aristotle/ Aristotle and the Middle Ages
Week 15 - December 21: Greek Philosophy After Aristotle & the Survival of Myth
II. Objectives:
As a general goal, the class shall familiarize the student not only with origins of Western thinking but also with the problems involved in the traditional approach to these origins. From the anthropological perspective of participant-observer, willful suspension of disbelief regarding new ideas will be combined with critical evaluation of key texts.
III. Method: Lectures, discussions, short student reports
IV. Evaluation: class participation, short class reports, three papers [two 5 -7 pp. papers & one 10 - 15 pp. paper]
V. Reading Plan:
Week 1: [Aug. 31 - Sept. 14]
Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (excerpts)
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths [Foreword, Intro., "Pelasgian Creation Myth"]
H. & H.A. Frankfurt, "Myth and Reality"
Week 2: [Sept. 14 - Sept. 21]
Epic of Gilgamesh
Enuma Elish - Babylonian Genesis
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, "The Earliest Precursor of Writing"
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (sections 36, 38, 52,58)
Week 3: [Sept. 21 - Sept. 28]
Weston La Barre, "Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion"
Carl Kerényi, "The Cretan Core of the Dionysos Myth"
P.G. Kritikos & S.P. Papadaki, "The History of the Poppy and of Opium and Their Expansion in Antiquity in the Eastern Mediterranean Area"
Robert Graves: The Greek Myths (Sections 6 & 7; 14; 53 & 54)
Week 4: [Sept. 28 - Oct. 5]
Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis (Chapters 3 -5)
Hesiod, Theogony
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (sections 2 & 3; 5 - 10; 13; 24)
Week 5: [Oct. 5 - Oct. 19]
Erwin Rohde, Psyche (Chapters 8 & 9)
Carl A.P.Ruck, "The Wild and the Cultivated Wine in Euripides' Bacchae"
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (sections 27, 28, 30)
Week 6: [Oct. 19 - Oct. 26]
Erwin Rohde, Psyche (Chapter 10: "The Orphics")
E.R. Dodds, "The Greek Shamans and the Origin of Puritanism"
Carl A.P. Ruck, "The Offerings of the Hyperboreans"
H. & H.A. Frankfort, "The Emancipation of Thought from Myth"
Week 7: [Oct. 26 - Nov. 2]
M.L.West, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Chapts. 1 & 2)
Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (Intro., Synopsis, Note to Reader, pp. 1 -50)
Week 8: [Nov. 2 - Nov. 9]
Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (pp. 55 - 88)
Week 9: [Nov. 9 - Nov. 16]
Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy [pp. 89 - 158]
Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus [the fragments, pp. 27 - 85]
Week 10: [Nov. 16 - Nov. 23]
Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy [pp. 161 - 294]
Week 11: [Nov. 23 - Nov. 30]
Plato, from The Last Days of Socrates (Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito)
Xenophon, The Banquet
Week 12: [Nov. 30 - Dec. 7]
Plato, Ion & Phaedo
Carl A.P. Ruck, "Mushrooms and Philosophers"
Week 13: [Dec. 7 - Dec. 14]
W.K.C. Guthrie, "Plato and Aristotle" from The Greeks and Their Gods [pp.333 - 374]
Aristotle: Metaphysics [Books I & XII, pp. 238 - 296]
Week 14: [Dec. 14 - Dec. 21]
Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, Life of Pythagoras & On The Cave of the Nymphs
E.R.Dodds, "The Astral Body in Neoplatonism" [pp. 313 -321]
VI. First Lecture: [August 31, 1998]
From Walter Benjamin to the Venus of Willendorf
"If one had to expound the teachings of antiquity with utmost brevity while standing on one leg, as did Hillel that of the Jews, it could only be in this sentence: 'They alone shall possess the earth who live from the powers of the cosmos.' Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former's absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods. Its waning is marked by the flowering of astronomy at the beginning of the modern age. Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe were certainly not driven by scientific impulses alone. All the same, the exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a portent of what was to come. The ancients' intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance [Rausch ]"
---Walter Benjamin, from "To the Planetarium," One-Way Street (1928)