labyrinth story

The true antiquity of the song cannot be proved and yet it seems to be more than an amusing metaphor for acknowledging the origin of ale or whiskey. It is hard not to find connections between John Barleycorn and the ancient culture heroes of the bronze age who are cur down only to rise up again reborn with the annual new growth. Many of the ‘so called’ mystery cults of the Middle East with their familiar heroes, Damuzi, Attis, Adonis, may share something with our more homely, John Barleycorn. That they are connected with herb (vegetable) and grain crops can be readily demonstrated. Osiris, one of the most popular of the culture heroes of ancient Egypt was said to have brought the arts of civilization to the Black Lands, including knowledge of cultivation. Osiris was threatened by his brother Set, Lord of the storm and desert places, and aided by his sister and wife, Isis, who restored him to life after he was cut down by Set, by gathering up the pieces of his scattered body.—https://storyarchaeology.com/john-barleycorn-2/

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8878chOvfI

Crete and the Mediterranean Worship of the Bull

In actual history, Minoan Crete did worship the bull, a popular symbol of fertility and also vegetation. Many cave cultures used bulls in rites for the dead. Parts of Spain worshiped the bull during the same period, and the bull is the most important animal at the Neolithic shrines at Çatalhöyük, an ancient Turkish civilization from 7000 B.C.—https://greekgodsandgoddesses.net/myths/cretan-bull/

The Origins of Greek Religion By Bernard C. Dietrich

Post modern literary theory: Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. Sometimes the term "postmodernism" is used to discuss many different things ranging from architecture, to historical theory, to philosophy and film. Because of this fact, several people distinguish between several forms of postmodernism and thus suggest that there are three forms of postmodernism: (1) Postmodernity is understood as a historical period from the mid- 1960s to the present, which is different from the (2) theoretical postmodernism, which encompasses the theories developed by thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and others. The third category is the “cultural postmodernism,” which includes film, literature, visual arts, etc. that feature postmodern elements. Postmodern literature is, in this sense, part of cultural postmodernism. BORROWED FROM WIKIPEDIA

ROLAND BARTHES on The Pleasures of a Text: Roland Barthes describes a text as . . . "a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..." (1974 translation)What he is basically saying is that a text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours. Once we start to unravel a text, we encounter an absolute plurality of potential meanings. We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from one viewpoint, bringing to bear one set of previous experience, and create one meaning for that text. You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle, by pulling a different thread if you like, and create an entirely different meaning. And so on. An infinite number of times. If you wanted to. Barthes wanted to - he was a semiotics professor in the 1950s and 1960s who got paid to spend all day unravelling little bits of texts and then writing about the process of doing so. All you need to know, again, very basically, is that texts may be ´open´ (ie unravelled in a lot of different ways) or ´closed´ (there is only one obvious thread to pull on). (MediaKnowall site)BORROWED FROM http://mediaclaremont.blogspot.com/p/narrative_27.html