HUMA 1105 Lecture Notes - Mother Goddess, Lightning, Etiology
25 Mar 2014
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Book 2: many transitions and transformations, phaethon is the son of helios, the myth of phaethon is an aetiological myth. This is myth is a mythological explanation of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west: dialectic of enlightenment: there is rationality in this explanation. To the greeks, this is because of helios driving his chariot with fire breathing horses from one end to the other: many of these myths contain certain morals, phaethon asks helios to drive his chariot across the sky. The moral of this story is not to be too curious about your origin. Phaethon does not have the significant strength or weight to successfully do this: pheobus tries to tell him to pick something else, but phaethon insists. Line 165-166: phaethon loses control over the chariot, and helios instructs his son to steer the chariot in a diagonal in the 5 zones.
