The average ancient greek citizen would say a hero cannot be made. Heroes have always been born from the union of a human and a god, everybody knows that. Our Greek man would spend long hours telling the deeds of Heracles, Jason, Theseus, Odysseus, Perseus, Bellerophon or Achilles, depending on who his favorite one was. Divinity, courage, strength, loyalty and fairness were just a few qualities that would be attributed to Greek heroes.

The modern intellect has interpreted Mythology as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer). It was Thomas Carlyle who in 1841 introduced the idea of hero as a Great Man whose life bonds to the History of mankind at a certain time and meaningfully changes its course forever. According to him, heroes were intrinsically made of the same material: a great soul, openness to the Divine Significance of Life, and the fit to speak or sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a victorious enduring way.

More than a century later, Sidney Hook defined Greatness as something that must involve extraordinary talent of some kind and not merely compounded luck of being born and of being present at the right place at a happy moment, contradicting  all forms of determinism.

Hook divided men in two different kinds: the eventful ones, and the event-making ones. The eventful man was regarded as being any man whose actions influenced subsequent developments along a quite different course that would have been followed if these actions had not been taken, whereas the event-making man was described an eventful man whose actions were the consequences of outstanding capacities of intelligence, will, and character rather than of accidents of position.

On his analysis of heroes, Campbell concludes that the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality, and art is in full decay within the progressive societies, reinforcing what Nietzsche had said years before him in the words of Zarathustra: “dead are all the gods“. Mysteries have lost their force, symbols have lost interest, meaning has gone from the hands of groups to the hands of individuals. “Man is that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed”, said Campbell.

Hero is just another word corrupted by the necessity of answers to problems created by men and unlikely to be dealt with by themselves. Why is it that as society we think we can make heroes?

(First published on POSI+TIVE MAGAZINE)

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A released last Monday the proceedings of two conferences about life in other planets organized in January and October 2010 including not only scientists working across  astronomy, physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, computational linguistics, medicine, biology, biochemistry, geochemistry, planetary, Earth sciences, but also a psychologist, an anthropologist, a philosopher, a theologian, a space lawyer, two science-fiction authors, a futurist, a former diplomat, a former NASA Chief Historian, the leader of the UK delegation to theCommittee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), and the Director of the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA).

The detection of now about 500 extrasolar planets has nourished the expectation to meet extra-terrestrial life. According to scientists, the United Nations should be charged with coming up with a plan to deal with extraterrestrials when contact happens. They believe COPUOS should put “supra-Earth affairs” on their agenda and establish structures similar to those proposed for dealing with threats from near-Earth objects, such as asteroids, that might be on a collision course with our planet.

Simon Conway Morris, a professor of evolutionary paleobiology at Cambridge University, points out that evolution on alien worlds is likely to be Darwinian in nature. Morris argues that life anywhere else in the universe will therefore probably have important similarities with life on Earth – especially if it comes from Earth-like worlds that have similar biological molecules to ours. “Why should we ‘prepare for the worst’? First, if intelligent aliens exist, they will look just like us, and given our far from glorious history, this should give us pause for thought”, he said.

(First Published on POSI+TIVE MAGAZINE)

Magic was an ancient kind of religion practiced by primitive people. It coexists today with other religions in several countries and in a way or another, it is still present in the lives of many of us. According to Frazer, magic is divided into two fields: Imitative and Contagious. Imitative magic is based in the principle that like produces like, while Contagious magic is based on the principle that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

Perhaps the most familiar application of the principle that like produces like is the attempt which has been made by many peoples in many ages to injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him. Voodoo is an old practice many of us have heard of, and the habits of kissing pictures, drawing your significant one’s and your happy future, placing your names together in little hearts on your notebook pages can have roots in the Imitative Magic belief.

The most familiar example of Contagious Magic is the magical sympathy which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of his person, as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of such things may work his will, at any distance, upon the person from whom they were taken. This is a world-famous superstition. I remember my mom used to keep my sister’s and my umbilical cord stumps safely hidden from everyone. Her mother, possibly taught by her own mother used to say that she had to keep them safe because if they were eaten by some rat or ants, bad things would happen to us.

Another curious application of the doctrine of contagious magic is the relation commonly believed to exist between a wounded man and the agent of the wound, so that whatever is subsequently done by or to the agent must correspondingly affect the patient either for good or evil. Isn’t the relationship between Lord Voldemort and Harry Potter explained by this?

(First published on Diários de Filosofia)

“Falling stars” or  ”shooting stars” are caused by tiny bits of dust and rock called meteoroids falling into the Earth’s atmosphere and burning up. The short-lived trail of light they produce is called a meteor. A folk belief common in many parts of the world is that if a person makes a wish when she sees a falling star, this wish will come true or be fulfilled. In some areas there is the caveat that the wish must be made before the starlight is extinguished.

Some scholars speculate that the belief originated at a time when people thought that the gods occasionally opened the dome of heaven to see what was occurring on Earth, thereby releasing a star. If one made a wish while there was still light and before the doors slammed shut, the gods would hear the wish and see to it that it was fulfilled. In other areas, shooting starts are favorable omens signifying that the viewer will enjoy good luck.

But much more frequently, however, ancient and modern peoples considered meteors to be signs of misfortune, disaster or death. The idea was prevalent worldwide in the nineteenth and early twentieth certuries as shown in Cosmic Debris: Meteorites in History by John G. Burke. In the big screen, When Worlds Collide (1951), Meteor (1979), Armageddon (1998) and Deep Impact (1998) are presently the best ‘fear of collision representatives’. NASA actually monitors the risk of potential future Earth impact events over the next 100 years by keeping a catalog of  near Earth objects and observing their behavior in the outer space.

The best time to look at Geminids is probably between midnight (UTC)  and sunrise on Tuesday, Dec. 14, when the Moon is low and the constellation Gemini is high overhead, spitting falling stars across the sky.  Be sure to bundle up, keep warm with your favorite hot drink and enjoy the starry sky.

(First published on POSI+TIVE MAGAZINE)

The Horcruxes are introduced in Harry Potter and the half-blood prince and described as “receptacles in which a Dark wizard has hidden a part  or parts of his soul for the purpose of attaining immortality.” This wizard becomes immortal as long as the Horcrux remains intact. Nevertheless, it was in The Golden Bough, a comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the anthropologist Sir James George Frazer first published in 1890 that they were discussed for the first time. Frazer looks at, among other things, the ancient belief that the soul could be placed for either a long or a short period of time in some safe place outside the body. He observed it was an idea commonly found in different popular tales of many races. The planting of a tree at the birth of a child, still practiced in a few countries around the world, is directly connected with this belief.

According to Frazer, savages used to remove their souls from their bodies in various occasions of real or imaginary danger while heroes did the procedure as a preparation for battle, in order to make their bodies invulnerable and immortal.  These so-called “soul-boxes” were chosen among animals, plants and objects as well.

A popular representative tale of Frazer’s observations dates back to the middle of the eighteenth century.Asbjørnsen and Moe, Norse “Brothers Grimm“, tell the tale of  The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body – he had it hidden inside an egg which sat in a duck swam’s nest inside a church in a distant island. He would have lived long enough to tell his own story, if he hadn’t let it out to a princess he kept as a prisoner. The myth of Koschei the Deathless, from Slavic mythology tells the story of a man who kept his soul  hidden  inside a needle in an egg in a duck inside a hare which was in an iron chest buried under a green oak tree which sat on the island of Buyan in the ocean. There is also Punchkin, a magician in a popular Indian tale, who kept his soul inside a parrot he kept in a small cage which was in the sixth chattee in a pile in the center of a circle of palm trees in the middle of a thick jungle covering a desolate far far away country. Let’s not forget Dorian Gray, created by Oscar Wilde, whose soul inhabited a portrait of himself painted by an artist friend and was kept hidden in his attic.

(First published on POSI+TIVE MAGAZINE)

Accept the mystery. (Larry Gopnik)

‘What have I done to deserve it?’ First man to ask this question was possibly Job. He was a righteous blessed man who lost all his goods and children, got severely ill and everyone rejected him overnight.  That’s because of him we use the term ‘the patience of Job’ – because even having his life tormented and messed by Satan, he refused to blame it on God. Instead, he entered into a series of dialogs that culminated in a conversation with God Himself.  Job ended up seeing the errors he had been making, he sought forgiveness, and everything was restored.

The book of Job’s age is uncertain, but the modern cinema version of Job has been just created by Joel and Ethan Coen. His name is Larry Gopnik, he’s a Physics professor and he lives in Minnesota with his wife, two children and a brother.

Larry is a good man trying to be serious but he suddenly discovers himself immerse in a series of problems which include debts, bribery, betrayal, divorce and a broken TV antenna, to mention a few. Expectators wait for his breakdown at any moment but it never happens. He then tries to find some relief and answers in Religion, he goes to see Rabbi Nachtner, who declares that questions are all that we have. ‘Either there are no anwers available or, when they exist, they are irrelevant because we are not supposed to know everything’, he states.

We’ll all go through a hell of tragedies, obstacles and problems in a lifetime. Aren’t we trying to get it right? Aren’t we trying to be serious men and women ourselves? We don’t have the required understanding or size to fully grab the meaning of everything happening in our lives. We aren’t required to, either. We must survive hard times and accept the mystery – this is certainly one of the lessons to learn from A serious man. Totally worth watching.

PS.: Two movies and I’ll be done with my new year resolution #2.

Barton Fink, 1991Fargo, 1996
The big Lebowski, 1998
O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 2000
The Man Who Wasn’t There, 2001
No Country for Old Men, 2007
Burn After Reading, 2008
A Serious Man, 2009

Monsters were often associated to misfortunes and tragedies in Ancient times, but they found their place in the universe with a little help from Saint Augustine in the Middle Ages. Their existence was explained by the necessity of ugliness to the natural harmony of things, following the explanation of harmony in a painting defined by the observance of the proportional use of both light and shadow. But ugliness has never been the only feature of monsters. Their instrinsic tendency to evil bothered the natural order of the universe established by a pancalistic view (the world being essentially beautiful and good), but not to the point to ruin it, once there was always a kind of punishment for evil and as far as monsters are concerned, such punishment could be loneliness, exile and even death.

Some would consider ugliness as a flaw in human perception, because any eye can be deceived when looking at someone under adverse conditions of light or under the presence of fog. But it was only in Renaissance that monsters started to be seen and accepted as they really are, to be looked at in a friendlier way and then organized in catalogues called “Beastiaries“, where they lived side by side with the beautiful creatures of God.

Going past books, movies and cartoons like Dracula, Mr. Hyde, King Kong, Quasimodo, Monsters Inc., Shrek, Foster’s home for imaginary friends and Where the wild things are it’s possible to notice a growing effort to make monsters at least more sensible. Some are still prevented from happy endings, but there are the fortunate ones. Monster of today’s message is that of beauty being plural instead of singular, and therefore an extremely subjective concept.  They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I dare to say so is ugliness.

( For additional reading: “On beauty” and “On the history of ugliness” by Umberto Eco)

According to the International Lesbian and Gay Association, ILGA, there are at least seven Muslin countries today which still retain capital punishment for homosexuality: Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Yemen. The situation with regard to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is unclear. Al-Fatiha attempts to promote the progressive Islamic notions of peace, equality and justice. They hope to “work in order to enlighten the world that Islam is a religion of tolerance and not hate, and that Allah (God) loves His creation, no matter what their sexual orientation might be.”

The results of the survey will guide the organization’s educational and advocacy work on behalf of LGBTIQQ Muslims. There are 54 questions concerned with cultural and religious background, social behavior, emotional health, among others. Responses are anonymous and confidential so people feel comfortable to answer openly.