Session 8: Cultivating Good Guys and Bad Guys
3rd Global Conference
Saturday 10th September – Monday 12th September 2011
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
Good and Evil in Ancient Persian Festivals: an Analytical Psychology Approach
Sana Khalesi
Foreign Languages and Linguistics Department, Shiraz University, Iran
In empirical psychology, the concept “good and evil” is only of recent concern. However, this phenomenon exists and has always existed in the human world. A fundamentally formal and rationalistically oriented psychology could offer much toward perceiving social and cultural values of ancient times. Most Persian national ceremonies and religious rituals – rich in context and incisive in form – depicted mythological tales according to the demands of its own era. Consequently they have undergone radical changes throughout the ages in order to reflect the depth of cultural experiences and the complexity of human relations.
Ancient Iranian customs hinge on struggles between good and evil. The roles of ceremonies were first and foremost to set those stories in motion or to lend their vividness through a distribution of moral ethics. Iranian New Year’s ritual is in full accordance with representations of good and evil. In Persian mythology Gods were celestial divine heroes. It was only after several cultural amalgamations and wars with nearby tribes that they became new earthly creatures, as powerful as Gods, who threatened and disturbed the life of Aryans. The importance of such tales was so significant that Iranians have even named the months of their calendar after those mythical angels, Gods and Goddesses. In this paper we have confined ourselves in the main to Persian myths and we have discussed the issue – from the standpoint of Jungian psychology – of how those festivals could represent natural events in the unconscious psyche. It appears to us essential to mention how Iranian eschatology has exerted an enormous influence on the literature of the world. It is highly interesting to note that these mythological themes are not only Iranian but also Indo-Iranian and even Indo-European.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Physiognomic Depiction of Hero and Villain
Qi Chen
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy
In Chinese classical novels in Ming and Qing dynasties, the entering on the stage of characters is usually with a typical physical description, which is to convey the characteristics of characters. The heroes and villains are distinguished not only by their conduct but also by their face. The hero has a heroic look, while the villain has villainous appearance. In both of the two types there are the references of physiognomy. The article seeks to explore the features of the physiognomic descriptions and to analyze the possible causes of the phenomenon.
Entries (RSS)