Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Michael Dolzani
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  • Education
  • Updated Weekly

This podcast is aimed at a non-specialist audience interested in acquiring what Northrop Frye called, in the title of one of his books, an educated imagination. Its materials are drawn from the many courses in literature and mythology that I taught, combined with material from my book The Productions of Time, for which I hope the podcast may provide an accessible introduction, with concrete examples.

  1. 2d ago

    Episode 272: The Bible and Greek Myth. The Alienation of the Self from the Other, Leading Either to Aggression against the Other or Desire for the Other.

    The Fall interpreted psychologically was the shattering of the unity of all things, in which the subject or self is alienated from a whole objective environment. This leads to two fallen attitudes: fear and hate, resulting in aggression; and desire to pursue and reunite. Ovid: the poet of fallen desire, the Bad Boy of the Classical tradition.

    38 min

  2. Jun 7

    Episode 271: The Bible and Greek Mythology. The Fall of Nature. The Tree and Water of Death. Modulations of Those Images Later in the Bible and in Classical Myth.

    The forbidden tree in Genesis is identified with Christ’s cross, but the image is echoed in Odin’s hanging on the world tree, in the sacrificed vegetation deities called dying gods. The water of death is the Flood, the Red Sea, also Leviathan, identified with Jonah’s fish. On a symbolic level, we are drowned, like Atlantis.

    39 min

  3. May 31

    Episode 270: The Bible and Greek Mythology. The Fall or Decline from the Golden Age on Three Levels: Natural, Human, and Spiritual. The Fall of Nature: Imagery of the Tree and Water of Death.

    Paradise is a state of harmony and unity. The Fall or decline from the Golden Age is a fall from unity into disunity, conflict instead of harmony, fear and hate instead of love in three contexts, natural, human, and spiritual. Demonic parodies of ideal imagery. The tree and water of life and the tree and water of death.

    39 min

  4. May 24

    Episode 269: Biblical and Classical Mythology. The Paradisal Imagery of Human Love. The Song of Songs.

    The Song of Songs, the Bible’s main treatment of human love, though later allegorized as the love of Christ for his Church. The woman’s body identified with the paradisal garden. Two lovers seek each other and finally unite. Ascribed to Solomon, but may go back to old fertility rituals.

    39 min

  5. May 17

    Episode 268: The Bible and Greek Myth. Paradise: The Myth of Eros, of Natural and Human Love.

    Biblical tradition is wary of the pagan tendency to worship nature and of human love, so much of our imagery of Eros comes from the Classical side. Red and white: the colors of Eros on all three levels of love, sexual, romantic, and spiritual.

    38 min

  6. May 10

    Episode 267: The Bible and Greek Myth. Paradise in Mythology. The Garden of the Biblical J Account. The Classical Myth of the Golden Age. Nostalgia for Paradise Lost.

    The J account beginning in Genesis 2:4 of the Garden. The Classical counterpart of the Ages of Man. Originally four ages, as in Ovid. Hesiod adds a 5th, the age of heroes. Decline: each age is worse than the previous. Nostalgia for “paradise lost.” The dangers of nostalgia, but also paradise as a positive model for the good life.

    38 min

  7. May 3

    Episode 266: Biblical and Classical Mythology. Creation: Above Interacts with Below, and Something Is Born in the Middle.

    In many Creation myths, a mystery above interacts with a mystery below, and something comes into being in the middle. This is true in the two Biblical versions of Creation, P and J, also in the Classical versions of Hesiod and Ovid. But also in world mythology. The interaction may be (1) sexual; (2) by combat; (3) by emergence from below reaching towards the above.

    37 min

  8. Apr 26

    Episode 265: The Paradoxes of Creation. The Paradigm of Creation: Above Interacts with Below, and Something Is Born in the Middle.

    Thinking of Creation involves us in paradoxes of being and non-being, as shown in two famous Creation hymns from the Rig Veda. But in these, as in the Biblical and Classical myths, something above interacts with something below, and out of that union something is born in the middle.

    39 min
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About

This podcast is aimed at a non-specialist audience interested in acquiring what Northrop Frye called, in the title of one of his books, an educated imagination. Its materials are drawn from the many courses in literature and mythology that I taught, combined with material from my book The Productions of Time, for which I hope the podcast may provide an accessible introduction, with concrete examples.

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