Mythic Guides

I have a Merriam-Webster's 365 New Words calendar. The March 16th word was a doozy: Dragon's Teeth (isn't that two?).
It fascinates me how the stories of ancient myth speak to us still. Here the Destruction/Creation story plays out.

"...'dragon's teeth' alludes to a story involving Cadmus, the legendary Phoenician here reputed to have founded Thebes and invented the alphabet. The tale holds that Cadmus killed a dragon and planted its teeth in the ground. From the teeth sprang fierce armed men who battled one another until all were dead but five. These founded the noblest families of Thebes and helped build its citadel."

Stream of Consciousness: Lawrence Biemiller over at the Chronicle of Higher Education summerizes the ancient Sumerians and symbolic language:

"...writing traces its origins to little clay markers the Sumerians started using more than 9,000 years ago to keep track of things like grain and cattle. A clay cone represented a small measure of grain, for instance, while a sphere meant a larger measure, and a cylinder stood for an animal. A few thousand years later, around 3500 BC, markings incised in such tokens let the simple shapes represent more things, like wool and mats. Soon the incised cones and spheres and cylinders were being pressed into wet clay tablets to make records of what the tokens represented, and finally — by about 3100 BC — the Sumerians dispensed with the tokens in favor of recording information with marks made directly on tablets."

This gets me to my (brief) story about a woman I met at a rock show last night.

Woman: I'm into astrology. What's your sign?

Bill: Which astrological chart?

Woman: What do you mean?

Bill: You know those astro charts they use for horoscopes in the newspapers and doing birth charts and $5/minute phone consultations and stuff?

Woman: Yes?

Bill: It's based on the ancient clay tablets created by Babylonian astrologers. The celestial bodies those primative calculations were based on have shifted in the course of 5, 000 years.

Woman: So?

Bill: My sign is different if based on the traditional method as compared to the up-to-date method. Basically, you shift your birth date back fifteen days if you want your 'true' sign.

Woman: Well, I'm still the same sign.

Bill: I'm not. So, which am I? One, or the other, or both, or neither?

Woman: I don't know.