/lit/ - Literature

>>16152278
I think this is true for the most part, although discounted both in the myths and history. There is always a divide, a chasm of thought, we can see this in the art and technology of all eras. Even the primitive man has to take up the artificial eye to sever a stone into the precise angles of a cutting tool; or the aerial view in which he sees the mistakes of a young hunter.

In the myths this is the Gigantes and Titanes. Their being is often regarded as the greatest division, and yet even within their own types there is a division of what we refer to as perception - of insight and the instincts, the rational and the imaginative. The Giants have the Cyclopes and Antaeus, the Titans have Prometheus and Epimetheus.

Our sense of the impossible is caused by this divide, which can be widened by either type of thought. The poet is an Epimethean figure, but also a descendent of Antaeus; the politician is of the genealogy of Prometheus and the Cyclopes. The very idea of Sophia is itself a division, one which proscribes thought to the law of the Olympians. This is already a decline.

One may see an outline of this in the story of Marcellus and Archimedes at the Siege of Syracuse. Marcellus, taking flight, sees the great machines of Archimedes turning his ships into ladles of the ocean, and curses him as a 'geometrical Briareus who outdoes the hundred-handers of mythology. And in the war for Troy, the lines of soldiers overrun by Diomedes as a falling tidal wave, returning Aphrodite herself to the moment of creation.