"By giving its support to these series, the Onassis Foundation wished to explore the links existing between the culture of ancient Greece and the world today." "It was never in it intention to associate itself to any opinion concerning the history and the political life of modern Greece." "The Onassis Foundation insists in clarfying that the choice of the themes as well as the selection of the interviewed persons are the sole responsibility of the director." "THE OWL'S LEGACY" "10 MYTHOLOGY or Lies like Truth" "The word myth has a noble connotation only when used in a past." "In a present tense, it is a synonym for a lie, whence 'mythomania'." "There's a link between these two and common ground once more is language." "We are chatterboxes." "In Greece we love to talk and it's all the more paradoxical since the word 'poiesis', poetry, comes from the word 'poiein', which means 'doing'." "It's the opposite of the Word." "The Word is ethereal and abstract and 'poiein' means doing." "The etymology of the word poetry fascinates me because the word poetry has become the opposite to its true meaning." "And very often Greeks substitute talking for doing." "They build worlds with words." "They are great theoreticians." "The Greeks create these worlds drinking coffee around a table." "We love coffee, Turkish naturally." "You mustn't confuse the myths, the myth created by a community and the one created by individuals, by a personal relation." "Because in the latter case the myth conveys a message." "These myths have fueled the thinking of the whole world." "There are a very few ancient myths that fuel theatre, literature, etc." "The basic myths like Prometheus, Oedipus, Antigone The European cycle...yes..." "When Strindberg wrote 'The Father' his thoughts were on Agamemnon." "These myths have acted as models for historical development." "We call them Creative Myths." "Myths create History." "You'd think after 2500 years we'd have some new ideas - but no!" "The red faction in Germany the bomb-throwing young women call themselves the Red Antigones." "If there is a trial for matricide or a disaster in a Cevennes Family it's 'the Medea of Cevennes'." "If there's someone of great beauty which makes people somewhat uneasy they say 'this is a Narcissus'." "When Freud wanted to define the concepts of psychoanalysis it was Oedipus and I ask - why?" "This wonderful parsimony, this reversion to key Greek myths, couldn't it also permeate even our grammar?" "The discovery of the future tense is monumental." "I don't think animals have it." "Man can say ' the future - the day after tomorrow'." "The very myth of Prometheus of trying to understand the future." "Oedipus, the problem of knowing - Who am I?" "What is the self?" "Where does it come from?" "The first person singular." "Incest myths linked to the problem of the grammar of kinship." "What are our taboos?" "Taboo means we know it's forbidden, but to know that it is forbidden you need a vocabulary of kinship that is defined by certain myths." "The shape of evolution, evolution of syntax, of our hopes, our memories, fears, evolution of our personalities, is it influenced by these myths?" "The grammar of the myth would be the myth of the grammar." "Maybe at the beginning of time the first wealth of Man was the grammar of myth." "The man who had little to eat who economic and social life was most rudimentary became a Dream millionaire." "To survive on this cruel planet we started to build the opposites of reality." "Once you start to dream forward or to dream against death, and all myths dream against death, the first great myths all contain the problem of overcoming death" "because Man said to himself 'I can dream against death'." "So the myth became a framework for this incredible dice-throw." "It would be a valid exercise to study some of these great myths in their current, attenuated form and what remains of these grammars, these wild, rich, opulent grammars, with their expenditure of form." "In our relationship with the world" "I don't think that Man started with a fixed world." "I think he tried to give a shape to what he saw." "And I have the feeling that this attempt to give a shape was made in two ways which are basically the same." "On the one hand, myth and on the other language, choice, rationallity, if you like." "And I wonder if the first attempt to rationalize the objective world is not already there in the myth which also has selective elements." "Myth and language are inseparable." "It's a normal human activity." "We needed language to tell the myth." "Myth cried out towards language." "In the drama of the origin of myth at the dawn of time in the reflexions about mythology we have this mystery of language," "of the mouth, of Plato's bees visiting the philosopher's lips that has given us this lethal gift of being able to tell stories." "And if you can't tell stories I think you fall into darkness because they save us from despair." "Myth is also a way of mastering this incomprehensible gift that differentiated us from animals and from organic matter." "The gift to question the gods and to question ourselves." "And Greek myth is haunted by this problem of questioning." "If I had the ability of a Jungian psychiatrist" "I'd say 'According to Jung and other great mythologists there are collective archetypes lying dormant within us'." "This moves me deeply because deja vu precedes the great myth." "You say to yourself 'I know this, I've been to this imaginary land before even hearing about it'." "I can't give this answer because there is no genetic proof of the existence of a memory that would have been impersonal throughout the millenia, but" "I think there is in our psyche a centre not for exact memories but which prepares us for myth." "Myth is absolutely essential for the structure of the 'we'." "Think about the role of Oedipus, of Narcissus, of Orestes, Electra," "Hamlet, the other great modern myth which is a variation on Orestes." "For Goethe himself said Faust is a variation on Prometheus." "He said it about his own masterpiece." "I think that we always come back to the question of a beginning where the structure of the brain and of the statement is the myth of the discovery of the personality by itself." "You should mention beside the world myths the great propagation in the thinking of every period" "of Plato's philosophical myths." "What European doesn't know about the Cave myth in Plato's Republic?" "Who hasn't been moved by the myth of the Judgement of the Just and the Unjust?" "Let me tell you something that I don't know if you know." "One of the professors interviews for this programme was a Japanese called Yoshida." "He said something which taught me that some of the gods" "in Japanese mythology like the goddess Amaterasu," "I believe that's her name, her myth is identical to the myth of Athena of Demeter and of Orpheus." "This coincidence amazed me." "I had already noticed similarities between Noh drama and Greek tragedy." "Yoshida himself said that hellenic myths traveled to the Black sea with the Scyths and to Korea and on to Japan." "A monstrous route yet all details remained intact." "As you know, Scythia is situated to the north of the Black sea." "There were many Greek towns on the coast of the Black sea." "Through these Greek towns the Greeks had trade relations with the Scyths." "Scyth kings liked Greek objects particularly Greek vases depicting scenes of mythology." "You find these Greek vases in great number in the Scyth kings' tombs." "Most of these myths relate to the land of the dead to the destiny of man after death the stories of Persephone, Orpheus, of Demeter, of Adonis, all relate to the land of the dead." "Because the Scyth kings were fascinated by afterlife, life after death." "So when they heard Greek mythology you can imagine that it was the Greek myth" "relating to the land of the dead that the Scyth kings were most interested in." "It's precisely these myths that resemble Japanese myths." "For the Greeks the world of the gods is not unconnected with ours." "The relationship with the god is not that of a single person who, in the depths of his heart, finds an almost ineffable contact with a divinity outside our world." "The gods are with us in nature." "Eros is both a god and a force that enters in my body, identifies with me, and turns me into somebody else." "It was wonderful." "They invoked them, made them speak." "I can understand this completely because I had a pagan childhood and the rustling of the leaves, invisible things within nature, the mystery of water" "is very Greek in me, ancient Greek." "There is some resemblance between the religions." "of Japan and Ancient Greece." "Both religions are polytheistic and also both religions mainly consist of a cult of nature." "The Japanese felt and continue to feel the presence of the divine in trees, rocks and rivers," "that is, in the whole of nature." "Likewise, the Greeks felt the presence of the divine in trees, in nymphs, in springs and in rivers, etc." "The atmosphere of this sanctuary is reminiscent of Greece." "Because in Delphi, for example, you find this coming together of very pure water and the mountain, the trees, etc." "Even today in Delphi you can feel" "a sort of divine presence." "I think that the feeling you have in this Ise sanctuary is very similar to the spontaneous feeling you have in Delphi." "In 1930, Jacques de la Crotelle wrote:" "'What's so astonishing about the fact that there were happen to be clever men who used the natural setting at Delphi for their own ends, that an ambitious brotherhood should've enbank on human produity and with a mixture of piety and cunning set up a great religious" "enterprise there to take up charge of national affairs should come as no surprise either." "But don't think that Delphic Pythia, a half-mad woman who fasted then chewed laurel leaves and cried out when she was held over the vapours, provides the true picture of Ancient Greece." "Delphi is no more representative of Greek civilisation than Rome is represented by Christianity.'" "And la Crotelle added that the Greek people, with all their imaginative power and poetic inclination, enjoyed being credulous." "Produity still rates high in our cities." "As of the sacred - that isn't doing so well." "The city offers you a digest of human urges and of their violence, consenquently." "That's what is recreated first." "Once you recreate violence you recreate not God, but gods." "God, before being a god of mercy, began as a god of violence." "Then came meditation, a meditation for mercy." "So since we're discussing religion, religions in the life of the city can only be justified" "by their message of charity." "Otherwise, they are perverse, they are dangerous and out of place." "So yes to charity, yes to mercy, but no to religions which pretend to guide the soul but really seek to guide the body." "Today, in this pre-election period all the big American opinion polls believe that American society wants more compassion." "That's the word they use." "Surely, it's the same thing." "It's a kind of generous caring towards each other." "Not that they want to attain this caring through the State." "But they are good souls and what they want is a sort of universal caring." "Were the Greeks a caring people?" "They had a few slaves, hadn't they?" "The slave question worries me." "I have never really looked into it." "I'm ignorant about such things, about what really happened." "But it's very worrying, yes." "Very negative." "It annoys me." "It saddens me, I suppose." "But I can't help thinking that those people were so young then, so close to the very beginning, to the first upright men." "I deeply admire the progress made." "I wonder how is it possible." "Humanity was still in its dawn yet had already found out so much." "Greek children grow up with Homer." "They learn him by heart." "But in Homer the most humane people are not Greek, they are Trojan, like Hector." "The tragic hero of the Illiad is not Achilles, but Hector." "Andromache is an amazing character." "In the famous farewell to Hector, which is in the fifth canto I think, she says 'You will die in this war your wife will be enslaved your little boy Astyanax who's afraid of your helmet and the horse-tail on the top your child will also be enslaved'." "So the Greeks knew that a king could become a slave." "So they couldn't justify slavery." "The first to justify slavery was Aristotle who also said" "'If we had weaving machines we wouldn't need slaves'." "And Marx quotes it." "I can hear those who are wondering just how we moved from gods to slaves." "There is a link." "Out of slavery will rise a religion which in turn shall put an end to the reign of Olympian gods." "Gods and heroes will seek asylum in art collections, like political refugees in foreign embasies." "And yet the struggle won't stop there..." "Nietszche first launched the idea that Greek polytheism, childish as it may seem, was at least full of tolerance." "They had hundreds of gods." "Trees spoke with the nymph's voice." "Pan sang in the woods." "On the hilltops and mountains you felt Juno's fleeting shadow." "In such a world as this you wouldn't kill your neighbour over abstract theological questions." "But in the world of deserts, of the Jordan, Sinai, the Negev, a ruthless, merciless world, a world of no shadow at noon, where there is only one God, invisible and unimaginable," "who punished you for imagining him, in Judaism that is a crime, there, the theological question the question of heresy the orthodox and heterodox question, more Greek words, the question itself becomes deadly." "Because as Kierkegaard would say 'It is either/or'." "No compromise in between." "If Greek tradition had overcome the judaistic elements in Paul, in the Church Fathers and Apostles, perhaps we would have a world, as Nietszche thought, an ironic and provocative thought, without civil wars, or massacre," "without ideological barbarism."