MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 4

 In my essay MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3 I made this statement:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important to a given author's creative priorities, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

In this essay I established that, although I specified that the category of fantasy stories I call "magical fantasy stories" are not intrinsically better than other metaphenomenal fictions, they are better with respect to one literary goal. That goal consists of transporting the readers of our various post-industrial cultures back into worlds where magic is the primary instrumentality through which the denizens of said worlds understand existence. I explicated this idea with the formulations of Mircea Eliade, with some caveats that I didn't think Eliade was always very clear about his distinctions between "the sacred" and "the profane." Having lodged that complaint, I thought I ought to try to be equally clear about how "far" magical fantasy stories can get from our profane world.

The answer is that they can never escape the shadow of the profane entirely, at least partly because they're being written by authors who have lived in profane worlds. But more than that, there's often a "domain of impurity" within the fantasy-worlds that calls the magical domain into question.

For instance, few fantasy-tales take place at the real "beginning times," when God has (or the gods have) just made the world. One of the few exceptions that comes to mind is C.L. Moore's 1940 short story "Fruit of Knowledge," which relates the story of the Garden of Eden from the POV of Adam's first wife Lilith. But it's far more frequent for the magical-fantasy author to set his stories in a world where humankind has acquired some level of advancement short of what we call "the industrial age." And as soon as humankind attains such a level, a certain amount of life's profane nature assumes its own domain within even worlds where magic rules.

The simplest form of profanity is one in which everyone in the world is aware that magic exists or has existed, but individuals believe that for various reasons that the power of magic cannot affect them. Clark Ashton Smith often created characters living in utterly magical worlds who nevertheless had some blindness on that matter. In the masterful "Voyage of King Euvoran," the monarch witnesses a mage challenge his power, and then foolishly pursues the wizard for vengeance, leading to his undoing. In many ways, such stories parallel the dynamics of the modern-day supernatural story, in which, say, unbelievers trespass on a mummy's tomb and suffer a magical revenge.

Sometimes magical fantasy narratives include characters who are either of a materialistic bent or take actions that have the effect of post-industrial materialism. THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE, set in medieval Russia, depicts a village of people who are overtly Christians but who still covertly observe the old pagan ways of propitiating the spirits of houses and forests. A fanatical Christian monk enters the village and belabors the citizens until they put aside their pagan practices-- which brings about a major conflict for the heroine to cope with.

There also may be an inbuilt sense that the world of magical phenomena is doomed to be superseded by a profane one. Every "fall of Camelot" story implies that ordinary history will take over once the wonders of Arthurian Britain are no more. Patently, J.R.R. Tolkien followed the same pattern at the end of LORD OF THE RINGS, by implying that "The Time of Men" will succeed the era in which Men mingle with Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits. 

A. Merritt's SHIP OF ISHTAR provides a variation on the above theme. Modern archeologist John Kenton, despite knowing that Babylon has long been superseded by more mundane historical cultures, plunges into a cosmos where the Babylonian gods still exist-- though they rule a very limited cynosure, limited to one island and the titular Ship of Ishtar. The author never explains how this sub-cosmos comes into being, but one may fairly assume the deities created the world, probably so that they could continue to enjoy mortal worship.

All of the forces that countervail against the total efficacy of magic and the sacred within a "secondary universe" can be viewed as "agents of the profane," and thus of the author's awareness that he or she exists in a time when magic has been diminished if not extirpated. Because all such authors have themselves have lived in cultures where magic and the sacred are continually called into question, that may be a prime reason as to why most magical fantasies take place in worlds with a medieval, but pre-industrial, level of advancement. A qualified exception may be made for stories patterned after rural folktales. PINOCCHIO probably takes place in post-industrial times, based on a very tiny number of internal references. But the novel remains steadfastly in a rural, small-town universe, never letting the reader see any phenomenon that suggests the heavy industry that existed in the 19th century. Further, the author reinforces the sense of a folktale universe by showing humanoid animals who can talk and wear clothes, as well as numinous entities not strictly allied with any established religion.

 

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3

 At the end of MIND 2.5 I wrote:

But for now it's more important to move on to the matter of why the presence of the magic-accepting society is as important to the category as the magic itself-- as I shall convey in Part 3.

I started this essay-series with the question, "is there something that sets the genre we usually call 'fantasy' from all other genres with metaphenomenal content?" I established that I believed that the dominant colloquial usage of "fantasy" concerned a particular subgroup of metaphenomenal narratives I have now dubbed "magical fantasy stories." From this category I have excluded narratives which are complicated by the presence of competing forms of wonder-rationale (as discussed in Part 2.5), OR by the absence of the proper kind of magic-welcoming society. I also mentioned that my desire to set aside the unique appeal of "magical fantasy stories" due to my own personal response to the fantasy-genre. I do not automatically assume that my response is characteristic of all fantasy-readers. But I also do not automatically assume that there is no relevance even if no other person has ever made the correlation I will now make.

I have reviewed, in three linked essays, one of the earliest breakthrough works of religious historian Mircea Eliade, 1957's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. My second essay provides the most detailed look at what Eliade sought to say in that book, though I should stress that he wrote only of religion, and not, as I do, of literature and folklore.

The first chapter, "Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred," explores many of the ways that religious people around the world have sought to endow specific objects or locales-- trees, stones, temples, or entire cities-- with a sacred quality that transcends the everyday interactions of the profane world. Given the chapter's concern with space, it's logical enough that Eliade leads off with a quote from Exodus: "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Eliade cites numerous other cultures-- Vedic Indian, Algonquin, Australian aborgine, Roman, Egyptian-- in order to support his claim: that "homo religiosus" shows a supervening tendency to formulate spaces in which the sacred can enter to banish the profane, which Eliade defines, albeit only briefly, as all those contingent factors involving "man's vital functions (food, sex, work and so on."

Now on this blog I've repeatedly discussed both the similarities and differences between the dynamics of religion and the dynamics of art. And I've always concluded that the differences are less significant than the similarities. The sense of constricting, "profane" ordinariness that religion banishes for the believer can also be banished by the "shadows of imagination" that audiences enjoy through art. The stories I deem "magical fantasies"are not any better or worse than any other stories in terms of potential ability to dispel dull care. But because magical fantasies create the feeling of a world imbued with magic, the worlds in those fantasies come closest to duplicating the dynamic Eliade describes:

...the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator's hands.

But such a cosmos is not defined only by space, but also by time. So quite logically, Eliade follows up his chapter on "sacred space" with one entitled "Sacred Time and Myths." Profane time, Eliade says, is "ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without religious meaning have their setting." In contrast, sacred time "represents the re-actualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past."

Now, I have not implied that magical fantasy stories, which belong to literature rather than religion, share religion's purpose of recapitulating the sacred stories of any particular culture-- though some stories do draw upon such established stories. Kelly Cipera, the essayist cited in Part 2.5, mentions that the Arthurian myths, which are not technically religious narratives, have their appeal in what *I* consider depicting events outside the scope of "profane time."

We recognize all of the ingredients of high fantasy is stories such as Le Morte d’Arthur, or the story of Arthur, Camelot and the search for the Holy Grail, a legend of Welsh origin. It is a hero’s tale — Arthur, who has no control over whether or not he can pull a sword from a stone or not, does, and suddenly kingship is thrust upon him. Matters beyond him and magic turn his life, which would have been otherwise dull and ordinary, into the stuff of legend.

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important according to the creative priorities of any given author, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

And that, for now, is my conclusion as to the special appeal of what I term "magical fantasy stories." I imagine that in future weeks I might be able to write as much as I have over these two days on all of the stories that don't convey this Eliadean sense of sacred exoticism.

ADDENDA: I will note that what Eliade calls a "pure and holy cosmos" often includes, in many religious cosmologies, all sorts of significant transgressive actions-- Odin slaying Ymir to make the world out of the giant's bones, or Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise. So the nature of religious purity and holiness does require some meditation to account for the significance of transgressive actions in molding a cosmos.

SACRED PROFANITIES PT. 3

 One corollary result of my reading of Eliade's 1957 THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE is that I began comparing his ideas of primitive life with those of George Bataille, of whom I've written far more often here. One reason for this is that Bataille's philosophy concerns both religion and literature far more than most if not all Eliade works. Eliade did write fiction but as he was first and foremost a historian of religion, he did not work his thoughts about literature into his seminal works, whereas as Bataille, also a writer of fiction, did so.

So it would seem that Bataille had a rough contrast between "sacred" and "profane" activities in the formative eras of human evolution. But he did not speak, in any major way, of ancient man following what Eliade calls "paradigms." Eliade seeks to understand the phenomenon of religion from the imagined perspective of religious adherents, based more on custom than on direct testimony. Bataille follows the lead of the anthropologists he favored, such as Mauss and Durkheim, and so his analysis is more from the perspective of an outsider seeking to understand a phenomemon "from outside," to the extent that this was possible for Bataille. From my citation in BACK TO BATAILLE PT. 1:

“Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinct parts.  The first reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the continuation of the individuals’ productive activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the fundamental condition of productive activity.  The second part is represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected from genital finality) - all these represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves.  Now it is necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production.”—Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure.”

Obviously Bataille does not use the terms "sacred and profane," but he is in many respects duplicating the distinction between profane activity, which is pursued for "the conservation of life," for entirely practical reasons, and sacred activity, which involves "unproductive expenditures." Of those he lists, only the category of "cults" is expressly linked to religion, though anyone can think of ways in which such categories as war, mourning, monument-building, games and arts are linked to religious concepts and practices. 

Now Eliade focuses on paradigms because he theorizes that their appeal is that they depict some transcendental action taken by God or the gods that impinges upon human affairs. Eliade does not distinguish between hierophanies that benefit man in a practical way, as when a god gives a tribe the secret of cultivating grain, or hierophanies that imagine some more abstract process, like Marduk forging the world out of the corpse of a vanquished dragon-goddess. I might theorize that the more practical God-acts might not meet Bataille's definition of "unproductive expenditures," but I can't be sure based on the Bataille works I've read.

In contrast, Eliade lightly passes over what some would call the "Dionysian" aspects of religion; his concern is strictly Apollonian in nature. In fact, though I did not remember this when I began exploring my previous Bataille issues, to some extent I made a comparable comparison in BACK TO BATAILLE PT 1, in that I drew a possible contrast between Bataille and Joseph Campbell. (I briefly mentioned Jung in the section quoted but I did not explore any specific Jungian content.)

Bataille would probably have deemed both Joseph Campbell and his chief influence Carl Jung as overly oriented upon idealism, which Bataille despised due to both his personal history and his reading of Marx. But Jung and Campbell were far from being the foursquare defenders of Platonic Idealism that detractors claim. Both were invested in dynamic psychological processes akin to what Kendall calls “negotiation.” The principal difference between Bataille and Campbell is that Bataille focuses on images of destruction for his concept of expenditure, emphasizing customs like animal/human sacrifice and the Amerindian potlatch.  In contrast Campbell focuses on images of construction: on negotiating the identity of the world through piecing together its separable aspects: the cosmological, the metaphysical, the sociological and the psychological.

I have the general sense that Bataille was so obsessed with his concept of the Dionysian "sensuous frenzy" as it applied to both human psychology and religion that he would have had little patience with Campbell's epistemological patterns, and maybe even less with Eliade's definition of religion on the model of the Christian *imitatio dei* (which Eliade explicitly mentions on page 106 of THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE). Given my investment in the epistemological model-- which may theoretically subsume Eliade's paradigmatic model-- I must prefer Apollo over Dionysus. Still, Bataille's focus on "unproductive expenditures" does tie in to the fact that all religious activity is fundamentally impractical. This insight can be related to my assertions here and here, that although the epistemological patterns in literature are based on concepts of knowledge, they are not the same "truths" found in non-fiction, but become instead "half-truths" in a fictional context, allowing them to keep open the doors of affective freedom.

 

SACRED PROFANITIES PT. 2

 So I've finished re-reading Eliade's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE as mentioned in the previous essay. I remembered a lot of Eliade's essential points, probably because he tended to re-iterate similar positions in his other books. 

SACRED is probably not Eliade at his most expansive in a philosophical sense. If there's one sentence that most captured the book's theme statement, it might be the one on page 106:

... through the reactualization of his myths, religious man attempts to approach the gods and to participate in being; the imitation of paradigmatic models expresses at once his desire for sanctity and his ontological nostalgia.

This sounds very high-minded, but terms like "being" and "ontology" are not defined here, though Eliade may have previously descanted about such concepts in earlier works. Nor does he define the "existential situation" of the profane as he suggested he might in this quote from his introduction-chapter:

The reader will very soon realize that sacred and profane are two modes of being, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history.

Eliade certainly does state in that chapter that his priority is to expound on the "modalities of the religious experience," and he does this by listing dozens of ways in which human beings sacralize the ordinary necessities of the world. The building of houses or temples is founded upon the paradigm of the gods' creation of the world; the tilling of the fields is linked to the paradigm of the gods' gift of vital foodstuffs for man to harvest. In the absence of a thoroughgoing definition of the profane, though, what one has is the sense that the profane is a chaos which must be made into a cosmos through the process of sacralization. One of Eliade's more effective examples is that of "the Vedic ritual for taking possession of a territory; possession becomes legally valid through the erection of a fire altar consecrated to Agni." I would add, in addition to the various cited conquests of dragons or giants that bring about the founding of new terrains, the somewhat more mundane event of Aeneas' single combat with Turnus, which ends the AENEID as we have it and prefigures the rise of the Roman people in the Latin country they conquer.

So all these paradigms are very well, but is that all that common, profane experience actually is: raw matter to be transcended? Does profane experience not have its own modality?

I do not doubt that many primitives sought meaning in acts of paradigmatic imitation, and this may indeed be the source of all religion. Certainly it's a better theory than the materialists' idea that religion was a con-game originated by various knavish priests, who in caveman days figured out a way to rook the naive laity. Still, I don't think even cavemen would have been endlessly absorbed in paradigms. The modality of the profane would be the idea that one is doing a thing purely out of necessity. I imagine a primitive cursing his fate to labor for his daily bread...

"DAMN I got to hollow out this DAMN log to make a DAMN canoe so I can catch some DAMN fish!"

As I said in the previous essay, this is the "short-term" view of life; one does what one can to live, and nothing more. Such a view naturally breeds as many if not more dissatisfactions as the imposition of paradigmatic models on mundane activities, and such dissatisfactions may be the main reason that religion took hold upon preliterate societies. They might not need "ontological nostalgia" as such, but they could well need an escape from drudgery-- which would also be the inspiration for all forms of art and storytelling as well as religion. Not surprisingly, Eliade is so focused on his thesis that he's entirely silent about the parallel developments of expressive art and paradigmatic religion in general pre-literate societies. In the final analysis, THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE is primarily significant for exemplifying Eliade's methodology and erudition, but as a philosophical exploration of "the sacred" it's a very limited work.

SACRED PROFANITIES

Though I've only mentioned Mircea Eliade once or twice here, I've read most of his works over the years, and I was probably an Eliade fan in college before I knew anything about Northrop Frye, since I remember discovering Frye after graduating.

Most of Eliade's key works were published in the 1950s and 1960s, and recently I happened to pick up a copy of one of the most influential, 1957's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE (the source of my punny title). This will be the first Eliade book I've reread since beginning this blog, so I don't yet know if I will write more than one post on it.

Whenever I first read the book, I surely didn't know Rudolf Otto from a hole in the ground. So I found it interesting that Eliade's opening chapter names Otto's 1917 IDEA OF THE HOLY as an influence upon Eliade's theories of the sacred, particularly since I myself ultimately wrote a series of analyses on Otto's book, starting here. The Romanian myth-critic claims that while most historians of religion concerned themselves with "the ideas of God and religion," Otto focused on "the modalities of the religious experience." 

Eliade then segues to his own definition of those modalities, which are dominated by the perception that the sacred "is the opposite of the profane." That said, he admits that the sacred often manifests through objects in profane reality, through "some ordinary object, a stone or a tree." In this chapter Eliade does not distinguish what are the sacred qualities that distinguish a profane object that has been "sacralized," though I presume other chapters will expand on this assertion.

He may also expand later on this passage:

The reader will very soon realize that sacred and profane are two modes of being, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history.

But before I read further, I will say that I've also frequently emphasized "two existential situations" in human culture, though my inspirations there have more often been Schopenhauer, Frye and Cassirer. My 2016 essay THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL posits that one may view the metaphors of "close-sightedness" and "far-sightedness" as they might apply to the two types of will identified by Schopenhauer. I did not specifically relate these types of will to the sacred/profane duality, though I can see ways in which it would apply, with "close-sightedness" aligning with "the profane" and "far-sightedness" aligning with "the sacred."

Take as a quick example the exogamy restrictions of primitive tribes. Claude Levi-Strauss was quick to point out that contiguous tribes may have totally opposite customs, with one tribe forbidding marriage between cousins in the maternal line while another tribe restricts marriage between cousins in the paternal line. An advocate of the profane, "close-sighted" view might find these customs pointless, since the tribal citizens had no real way of knowing that either form of consanguineal marriage had any ill effects on either the spouses or their offspring. But a "far-sighted" view might argue that total lack of restriction is not beneficial to the tribe's sense of identity. Thus taboos may, in a short-term sense, seem arbitrary. However, in the long-term sense of defining the tribe's identity, the sense that some behaviors are restricted is a necessary evil, even when there is no rational justification.

And that is where I'll leave things for now.

SHORTCHANGING THE SECOND MASTER

In this essay I noted that I was currently re-reading Wagner and Lundeen's analysis of the STAR TREK franchise, DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. I also noted that I felt a little reluctant to blog further about it, though I only referred to the "chimera" of rebutting points made in a book published over twenty years ago. It's a little different when a critic breaks down an earlier work that still has a following, like Ursula Le Guin's THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT, which I assailed in this essay and the two subsequent posts. Even if I had a larger following, would all that many fans, be it of STAR TREK specifically or of metaphenomenal criticism generally, even care about what Wagner and Lundeen said about "Star Trek in the American Mythos?"

However, one interesting aspect of the authors is their attempt to "serve two masters," as per the Matthew 6:24 quote. In HALF-TRUTHS AND CONUNDRUMS PART 2 I attempted to give the authors the benefit of the doubt because they claimed that they were pursuing the course of pluralism, even if they do not do so in the same ways I do. But now that I'm about halfway through the book, I think that the authors' claim to appreciate different paths was just them talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Wagner and Lundeen's claim to pluralism appears in the first chapter, following a generalized history of the many intellectual and academic interpretations of myth. In the concluding section, entitled "Plural Vision," Wagner and Lundeen write:

It is possible, when writing about myth, to be so driven toward a preconceived goal that one may select only the material that fits the chosen approach or stretch and whittle it until it does fit. Those who read myth in order to interrogate its hegemonic messages, are likely to write about such subjects as gender, race, ethnicity... [while] those inclined toward the veneration of myth are more likely to focus on heroism, self-transcendence, the achievement of inner wholeness and illumination...

Now that I've read more of the book, it's quite evident that there's a reason why Wagner and Lundeen first listed the critical, reductive analysis of "hegemonic messages," and gave short shrift to the view, expressed by such authorities as Jung and Frye, that myth has its own integral logic that cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations. Though I intend to keep reading, in the first six chapters I've found nothing to justify the book's title. DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. The title sounds like a response to one of mythographer Mircea Eliade's more "transcendental" books on mythology, such as THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN or THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. But Eliade is only cited three times in the index, just like Carl Jung-- which indicates that the authors were just bullshitting about their supposed respect for the non-reductive views of myth.

Since this is just a blogpost, I'll confine myself to one example of the authors' reductive proclivities. Chapter 5, subtitled "Gender in the STAR TREK Cosmos," concludes with a section with the bumptious title "Tinfoil Bikinis and Political Correctness." The authors assert that in the fourth season of STAR TREK VOYAGER, the producers introduced the svelte character "Seven of Nine" to add sex appeal to the series, with the clear implication that for the show's past three seasons not that many fans. hetero or otherwise, were enthralled with the existing female cast-members. Wagner and Lundeen paraphrase a quote by Berman from a 1997 article in which he made some comment about the show having become too "politically correct." The bias of the authors toward the feminist agenda is clearly shown by their response:

If "political correctness" means a sensitivity to feminism and other left-liberal political views, it is probably too simplistic to blame it for the decline of the "sexy" STAR TREK female.

Wagner and Lundeen then veer off any actual estimation of the "correctness" accusation by accusing the Original Series-- the souce of the "tinfoil bikinis"-- of focusing on "women as the sole object of the sexual gaze, with men doing all the gazing." This is not sustainable, not least because Mister Spock managed to attract a sizeable female fandom-- but he did so as men usually do in the real world, through his actions rather than through the use of makeup and attire. One need not be a Jungian essentialist to notice that hetero men and women have different orientations with respect to the opposite sex, and one cannot glibly downgrade any of the TREKs if they reflect that basic experiential truth. In fact, the "sexual gazes" directed at Seven of Nine's smoking body in her skin-tight attire apparently included a number of lesbians, since during the run of VOAYGER, a petition was circulated to declare Seven as having a lesbian relationship with the ship's female captain, as reported in this Wikipedia article.

I've often made fun of overly politicized critics, such as Noah Berlatsky, who blathered about my myth-critical approach without the slightest understanding of the issues involved. But at least he only served one master, unlike the hypocritical authors of this not-so-deep analysis.

ADDENDUM 12-15-21: I considered devoting a separate post to  the remainder of this book now that I've finished it, but I found it such a mixed bag that I don't think it's worth it. There are some okay insights here and there, but in large point this is a "proto-woke" work, continuously complaining about the STAR TREK franchise's lack of proper intersectionality. Even after admitting that the shows are all television programs that must use human actors for the majority of their players, the authors STILL fault the shows for being too anthropocentric, and so they are guilty of a fundamental dishonesty, throwing out valid reasons for production procedures and then dismissing those reasons out of hand. 

Though there have been Far Left studies with inventive points of view, Wagner and Lundeen are largely derivative and unoriginal in their analyses. The only puzzling aspect of their work is that I don't know why they stuck the phrase "sacred time" in their title. They correctly attribute the phrase to Mircea Eliade, and even quote the context correctly. But given that the authors are mildly hostile toward the claims of any religious hegemonies-- as was, BTW, Gene Roddenberry-- it's clear that they aren't the least bit concerned with the philosophical aspects of Eliade's idea. Maybe in some fashion they viewed Eliade's concept of a originary time before time itself started as some sort of "modernism," which they incorrectly associate with cultural traditionalism. But if so, they failed to make that association clear, and so their whole project shortchanges their readers as well as their "two masters."

VERTICAL VIRTUES

In this essay I said: "In a future essay I will also draw comparisons between Campbell's heuristic system and the forms of transcendence that are not reasonable; that can mount to the heavens or descend into the darkness of Hades..."  However,Campbell will have to wait, as I delve a little more into the heuristics of Aldous Huxley, the man who conceptualized the concepts of vertical and horizontal forms of transcendence.

I noted in this essay that Huxley's essay on self-transcendence included barely any examples of "upward transcendence," but he may have felt it unnecessary to do so given his previous book, 1945's THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY. This book, which I have not read, represents itself as "an attempt to present this Highest Common Factor of all theologies by assembling passages from the writings of those saints and prophets who have approached a direct spiritual knowledge of the Divine."

One may fairly speculate that this book's pluralistic vision of mankind's ongoing attempts to seek for a mystical "ground of being" parallels the dynamics of the 1953 "self-transcendence" essay, which appeared as an epilog to Huxley's non-fiction work THE DEVILS OF LOUDON. Throughout the essay Huxley scorns the tendency of human beings to lose themselves within the mazes of the countervailing "downward transcendence." However, he's fair-minded enough to admit that some of the techniques used to produce this sense of transcendence-- what Mircea Eliade has called "techniques of ecstasy"-- can be used in a disciplined fashion. When Tantric priests utilize "elementary sexuality" as part of their sacred rites, they do so in order to "transform the downward self-transcendence of elementary sexuality into an upward self-transcendence."

What's puzzling about the 1953 essay is that even though Huxley had been publishing fictional works since 1921, he does not apply his concept of transcendence to any aspect of art, which has, as much as religion, a reputation for allowing its audiences to escape "the tormenting consciousness of being merely themselves." That is not to say that he never addressed this possibility elsewhere in his voluminous writings. However, since Huxley was not a systematic literary critic, I find it probable that he never explored this aspect of "transcendence."

In my essay UP THE DOWN TRANSCENDENCE  I drew a brief comparison between Huxley's two forms of vertical transcendence and two categories proposed by SF-critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay.
Csicsery-Ronay asserted that "sublimity" was produced by an "expansion of apprehension"-- an argument very much in line with philosophers of sublimity like Burke and Kant-- and added that his parallel category, "the grotesque" was produced by "a projection of fascinated repulsion/attraction." I reject Csiscery-Ronay's separation of these two affects, and instead regard them as "expansive" and "contractive" forms of the same affect: the affect of of the sublime. Further, these forms differ with respect to whether the art-work producing the affect is more dominated by "sympathetic affects" or "antipathetic affects." Sympathetic affects produce feelings of expansion and harmony, while antipathetic affects produce feelings of contraction and separation. (I first posted my conception of these affects on this blog here, though I formulated them long before I ever began this blog, in dissatisfaction with Aristotle's inadequate categories of "pity and terror.")

Here I should specify that I am not limiting either type of affects to works that produce the sublime. Every conceivable narrative is defined by these affects, and the reader generally orients himself within a text according what the focal characters "like" or "don't like." This is not to say that the reader is confined to the feelings of the viewpoint character alone, a matter I've covered in some detail here. But his reactions, so far as he is engaged by at least one character in the text, will be patterned by what the story's significant characters like or dislike. I concluded the above essay by adapting Huxley's schema to one suggested by Octavio Paz:

Horizontal transcendence= Paz's "the body"
Upward transcendence= "non-body" in the sense of Ronay's "expansion of apprehension"
Downward transcendence= "non-body" in the sense that "the object disturbs the sense of rational, natural categorization; i.e., contractive"

Thus the domain of horizontal transcendence is one where the reader experiences things as one experiences one's own body in a state of relative stability. Whether one encounters things one likes or does not like, those things have no special power to inspire either the expansion or the contraction of apprehension. In this state, one can self-identify with any human activity-- collecting stamps or studying birds, to cite two of Huxley's examples-- or, equally, one can choose not to find these things of interest. But one's sympathy or antipathy to the activity of collecting stamps remains on a stable, horizontal plane; the activity cannot act as (to use Campbell's felicitous phrase) as a "supernormal sign stimulus" that propels one into either a radical expansion or a contraction of one's consciousness.

In my next essay I'll use this formulations as a springboard to discuss the problems I have detected in the overly "horizontal" critical attempt to run roughshod over narratives that possess a more vertical appeal.