Conceptions of the Unconscious and Mythology — Homeric Epic Poetry and Slavic Oral History Studies from Harvard University in the 1920s

The following is an email that I sent to a friend about a discussion regarding conceptions of the Unconscious and Mythology — Homeric Epic Poetry and Slavic Oral History Studies from Harvard University in the 1920s

Thank you very much for your response. I sincerely appreciate it. This is actually really fascinating.

• I agree. I think it’s worth bringing mythos together because it could help us all integrate and bring the historical process together. I think it could also help us find gaps in our history/histories that we had or help us interpret phenomena that have hitherto not been interpreted. The thing is that we might actually be able to create a concrete picture after all. I think if we’re able to utilize the mythological constructs that exist and be able to synthesize them in an effective and efficient matter and manner similar to those established by the Grimm Fairytales and those continually going on in Europe and particularly in England where they are categorizing and writing down all the country songs and lullabies going back for centuries. I also think it would be fascinating to be able to put together the complex and result of the many layers of input going back to the Byzantine Empire. I think that would be absolutely fascinating to be able to get a clear picture of daily life in the Byzantine Empire. There are some snapshots that we receive such as those from Pompeii and the mountain explosion of Mt. Vesuvius — but even then we don’t get the entire full picture. But at some point, it might be said that the consciousness of nationality could be brought about in its mythological constructs. I think this is why it is very important to focus on Jungian interpretation….
• I did not read the entire article you shared but it seems that it would be interesting to compare and contrast with what Slavoj Zizek is saying in an interview about Balkanization:
• “You once said, “The Balkans are Europe’s myth, they have been the screen onto which the Europeans projected their dreams, and that has been their doom.” Could you elaborate on the myth of the Balkans?
• The idea came to me when my friends and I here — we all have a psychoanalytic orientation — were reading Freud and we noticed how, whenever there is an obscene, dirty, corrupted, morbid dimension to be indicated, he regularly uses examples from the Balkan region. In his most famous example, “Fehlleistung” (a memory lapse or failure, generally translated as a “Freudian slip”), the forgetting of the painter Signorelli’s name at the beginning of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the key is that old Bosnian guy who brings together death and sex. The guy who says, “After you are no longer able to have sex, the only thing remaining is death.” And, then again, there are some other dreams, so the Balkans is always this area, this space of morbidity for Europe. And what is important for me, an elementary thing, is to claim that, parallel to what in cultural theory is called “Orientalism,” there is also a “Balkanism.”
• What’s the mystery of the Balkans? Where is it?
• Yes … where is the Balkans? This was a standard joke. Let me do the entire theory. First, let’s go down. (Žižek shows the location of individual Balkan countries on a big map of Tito’s time.) For us up there in Slovenia, if you were to ask a person in Slovenia, every Slovene will answer, “We are Mittel-europa, Croatia is already the Balkans.” This is where Balkan confusion be-gins. We are civilized. And they will even give you an explanation: they will say when the Austrian Empire was divided up, we were under Austrian rule … Croatians were in the Hungarian part, which made them part of this Balkan, eastern European confusion. Okay, then let’s go on: if you ask a Croatian, he will tell you, “It is clear. Croatia is Mitteleuropa, Catholic; Belgrade Serbia, Orthodox religion: they are the Balkans.” Then you ask a Serb, he will tell you, “We are the last bastion of Christian civilization.” Down here, in either Sarajevo or Kosovo, they will tell you, “This is the true Balkans.” Now the irony is, if you go too much down on the map, all of a sudden the Balkans are up there. In Greece, they will tell you, “We are the origin of Europe, up there are the dark Balkan Mountains.” So practically, well, it’s nowhere — it’s always a little bit to the southeast or a little bit to the northwest. If you ask an Austrian, he will tell you, “In Slovenia, the Balkans begin.” Slavic, primitives, and so on. And you can go on. If you ask a German, he will tell you, “Austria, when they had an empire, it was a little too much mixed with all these, it’s already balkanized; pure Germany is okay.” French people will tell you, “Germany, dark, fascist, kind of a Balkan, we are civilization.” And, finally, the British will tell you, “All of Europe today is a big Balkans, with Brussels and its bureaucracy as a new Istanbul. We British are the only ones.”
• “
• https://www.luerzersarchive.com/en/magazine/interview/slavoj-iek-181.html
• That article you shared seemed to indicate that there was a unified concept of the Balkans. But Zizek seems to say something different.
• I also shared this article independently with you in another email. But the link is above as well. As always, I am curious as to your response to what Zizek is saying.
• .I think it’s absolutely fascinating to bring up the slide deck origins of oral tradition. It’s very sad that a lot of it was lost when Yugoslavia was formed. But I think in large part it was due to the fact that people became literate. Because when you have a literate society on the majority, these are all traditions that can thrive. But now that people are becoming more literate, there is not as much on you to memorize the stories. But I do think that the excavations and enterprises into oral traditions going back to the 1920s sponsored by Harvard University and conducted by Milman Perry are absolutely amazing.
• I suppose, the reason I’m asking about Indo- European down this Wikipedia “rabbit hole” is because Milman Perry led me to Dumezilian trifunctionalism. I’m not sure if this is a widely excepted theory, but Dumezil was a linguist. He argued for a common pattern in Indo European political/social structure. I suppose this is analogous to saying that Indo Europeans have similar declensions and conjugations. I likewise am wondering now if they have similar improvisational patterns based in the “culture” Georges Dumézil
• The French Wikipedia on Dumezil goes into much more depth: Georges Dumézil — Wikipédia
• Actually, this reminds me of Harold Bloom and his Anxiety of Influence theory — I am not sure if it is connected. But there must be a connection of tradition being passed down on how other artists/composers influenced their successors. I wonder if it works in the same way for jazz music — I sincerely don’t mean this as a tangent with jazz music.
• Regarding Milman Parry, it’s simply astonishing how much he influenced subsequent studies. I suppose it doesn’t affect studying his work, but it seems curious that it’s unclear how he died. This article asking if he is Ajax or Elpenor circumstances seem to imply he committed suicide, but it’s not that clear.
• It seems that it is as tragic as Ajax and as unfortunate as Elpenor. Though the article ends by suggesting, “rather than Ajax or Elpenor, Parry would have preferred a comparison with one of the great Slavic heroes that he devoted his later years to studying: a Smailagić Meho or a Kraljević Marko.” The Myth of Milman Parry — Oral Tradition
• A potentially more neutral source regarding Perry’s death: LORD, Albert Bates
• I actually had a professor who knew/studied under Milman Perry’s protege right before he passed away — Albert Lord. I sort of want to buy his book and savor it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lord
• This is Lord’s Singer of Tales book: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975736
• The summary of the book seems incredibly appealing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singer_of_Tales
• Do you think it correct to assume most of these oral traditions are extinct now? Or are there places in the Balkans where such traditions still exist?
• Serbo-Croatian still exists though, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian
• You mentioned that Education plays a really big role in this. I guess the question is what is education? It could be the oral tradition being transmitted down. Do you think it’s possible to have an oral tradition that is completely unchanged from year to year? It seems that the Harvard studies in the 1920s indicated that there was not actually much change from Homeric times all the way to the 1920s. Do you think that’s accurate? And if it is accurate what do you think is the implication of such oral transmissions being hardly changed for so long?
• Yeah, I think the thing is that you really have to do really serious studies with the whole psychological concept of a completed spirit. It’s interesting I remember reading George Eliot Middlemarch in college and there was this character named Rev. Edward Casaubon who is very interested in trying to answer questions of uniting all the myths, but later on, in the book, he finds out a little bit of to his dismay that the “Germans” have solved this question. The protagonist Dorthea Brooke marries Casaubon… but things change throughout the course of the book. What a lovely read…
• Lenga d’òc is truly interesting. Evidently the Parliament of Catalonia has considered using the Aranese Occitan to be the preferred language in the area of the Val D’Aran. What would Roland and Charlemagne say! La Chanson de Roland!
• Do you think it would be possible for language to shift not just in cities predominately but in the countryside in villages? I suppose it makes sense of the countryside and villages would come up with her own dialect. Actually it is interesting because there is a unique dialect of German that comes from the 1800s that exists in certain areas of Texas even to this day. However, that dialect of German no longer exists in Germany. Just a little tidbit that sort of supports what you’re saying about language.
• I agree that a lot of languages can change due to trade and military expansionism. It’s interesting to consider the ancient Greek collective and individuals that live in Sicily and that part of the world.
• I agree that neolithic Greece is somewhat of a shadowy era. However, it is not entirely shrouded in mystery. I was recently watching a documentary on National Geographic which is available on the Disney+ channel if you subscribe to it that went into detail about neolithic Greece not just in them I know in civilization but also on mainland Greece and outside of Attica. I agree that it’s also difficult to determine whether or not it is possible to have a collective memory of the Neolithic era. However, remember that part of this email chain started because you were discussing how we had a collective forgetting. We’re humans can no longer remember that they did not exist in a civilized society.
• But if we take the stories from Greek integrity to be accurate to some degree at least as a mythological representation of what actually happened, right? Wouldn’t it mean that the clash with the Titans and everything that Zeus went through to fight the Titans and Kronos was really in Neolithic times, wouldn’t you say?
• Do you think the collective memory existed because it was represented in math or do you think it represented itself in the collective unconscious regarding the Trojan war? That is to say with the Trojan war be represented in the collective unconscious even if it was not passed down by homer or would it be represented by the mythological construct in the forefront of consciousness? Does this question make sense I’m wondering if but for the Homeric Epic would this war they remembered? I don’t think that’s an easy answer because I think the world was absolutely earth-shattering and there was a huge movement that effectively changed the history of Greeks uniting and invading Asia Minor. Something very big happened.
• Presumably, some Greeks took the religion quite seriously. Remember there were also colds and things like that that people are discussing in platonic dialogues in relation to the Pythagoreans and then you even have Hegel in the 1800s in his writing discussing the Pythagoreans. These mythic cults did exist especially with relation to the bucket guards and other things. This is nothing new and it is interesting to consider what cults represent from a psychological standpoint and also an anthropological standpoint. What do you think Culture represents anthropologically speaking?
• In any case, Socrates’s Athens was likely thinking differently from others. Granted Thebes had probably slightly different rituals from Sparta, Eritrea, etc.
• You asked why I’m interested in Neolithic Greece. I guess I’m just interested in a lot of things I’m trying to put everything put together I agree that it’s interesting to be interested and less document it unless popular mainstream errors when it comes to studying history. I find it an absolutely fascinating subject…

© Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV