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#140309 - 02/27/05 04:41 AM Joseph Campbell and One Eye
Wordwind Offline
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Registered: 09/30/01
Posts: 6296
Loc: Piedmont Region of Virginia, U...
I have read Joseph Campbell only in excerpts, but what I've read is consistent in getting across archetypes that are common to various cultures.

My kids are studying excerpts from the Odyssey, and I have wondered for a long time now what the Cyclops themselves could have represented on a spiritual or archetypal level. Why one eye? They are a group without rule, each one of them being a law unto himself with no higher law. Could the single eye somehow represent this? A limited point of view? All solo?

Just wondering...
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#140310 - 02/27/05 07:15 AM Re: Joseph Campbell and One Eye
Faldage Offline
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Registered: 12/01/00
Posts: 11418
FWIW, Robert Graves thought the whole one-eye thang was because they wore eyepatches, being blacksmiths and all, to keep sparks out of their eyes. Cyclops means (most likely) round-eye.
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#140311 - 02/27/05 07:31 AM Re: Joseph Campbell and One Eye
of troy Offline
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Registered: 10/17/00
Posts: 5364
Loc: rego park
well totally non architypal, i read, that the early greek had seen skeletons of elephants (before they ever saw an elephant alive) and mistook the large front nasal cavity for an eye socket and 'constructed' the cyclops myth from that. (they had evidence of some large animal, that had mythical powers, never have seen one, and with only the skull to judge.. came up with cyclops.. (there is the same sort of evidence about 'griffens'--you can google and--there was an article in the early 1990's in archiology magazine about how mythical griffens might have been constructed out of fossilized evidence(of a dinosaur)

elephant aren't found (naturally) north of sahara, and african elephants don't lend themselves to domestication anyway, so the closet elephant that could be domesticated would have been indian.. (and pretty far away.)

there are large game animals who's existance was thought to be fabled until the modern exploration of the interior of africa (ie, late 1800/early 1900's.

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