Fall Fallowturn Moon
Pierre Cécile Puvis de Chavannes French, 1824-1898. Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and Muses Art Institute of Chicago
Moving on in our mythology class to Hesiod and his Theogony, the Birth of the Gods. This is a very different epic poem from Homers though no less beloved in antiquity. Hesiod’s a beginnings and genealogies sort of guy over against Homer’s narrative genius. By our narrative saturated standards the two don’t stand comparison, but in the past Hesiod’s poem was seen as inhabiting an equal but different place.
I think it’s like Genesis compared to the gospels, a grand narrative of beginnings, including the first people and the first important sacred events over against the story of a well loved figure whose life had a distinct arc.
It’s interesting to me since I’m at the same time preparing to tour the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit at the MIA. This has me tucked into Asian antiquity, the Chinese branch, especially the Warring States Period, 475-221 BC and the immediately subsequent Qin dynasty, 221-207 BC. The Greek material from Homer and Hesiod is in 700-800 BC range, so deeper back in the Western story, yet it’s all well before the Christian era.
One of the things that really fascinates me at the moment is the cultural continuity in China from the early Shang dynasty in 1600 BC to the present laid over against the more fragmented but equally old Western cultural tradition. In material I study there seems to be a bias that the cultural continuity of Chinese civilization produces a superior civilization. I’m not sure at all that that’s true and I’m also not sure that there is less cultural continuity here in the West.
Another day on this controversial point.
