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.

RUNNING ON ABOUT DISCOURSE

In the 2016 essay AFFECTIVE FREEDOM,COGNITIVE RESTRAINT and in the two parts of 2019’s AND THE HALFTRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, I aligned the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities with, respectively, my categories of “cognitive restraint” and “affective freedom.” I made heavy use of Ernst Cassirer in these essays, but for this one, I’ve decided to take a different path in order to dilate on the salient differences between the ways these potentialities operate.

In literature as in other cultural forms, all potentialities express themselves through processes of discourse. The discourses of “lateral meanings” deal with concrete subject matter—that of what sensations the subject experiences, and of the subject’s emotional reactions to those sensations. In contrast, the discourses of “vertical meanings” concern themselves with abstractions, with the didactic making use of “ideas” while the mythopoeic makes use of “symbols.” For the sake of argument, I will treat both ideas and symbols as if they existed as discrete monads, which is not the way either are experienced. Both ideas and symbols are best expressed in the form of typical story-tropes. Levi-Strauss was pleased to term these tropes “mythemes,” conveniently ignoring how such monadic forms were dispersed throughout all forms of human communication, not just myth.

Didactic discourse and mythopoeic discourse are not as intimately entwined as those of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities. The discourses can appear independently of one another, or they may intertwine within a narrative to support one another, or they may conflict with one another so as to confuse the narrative. An example of the last-named would be Steve Ditko’s story “Am I Roma…,” which I explicated it in this post.

The word “discourse” stems from a Latin root meaning “to run around.” However, all four discourses run in different ways, though I’ll only discuss the two vertically aligned potentialities here.

The didactic discourse runs in the fashion of a single contestant in a one-on-one foot race. The course of the race may be winding or straight, but the contestant runs in as direct a line as possible from start to finish. Didactic discourses may employ idea-tropes as disparate as “Christ died for our sins” or “Capitalism is doomed by its own excesses,” but the discourses are always aimed at teaching some sort of linear lesson to listeners.

In contrast, a mythopoeic discourse is more akin to a team of runners in a relay race, opposed, naturally, by a corresponding team. There’s still a goal that a given team aspires to reach first, but achievement of the goal depends on the successful interaction of all players on the team. Symbols can be used to help convey linear lessons, but their primary potency is poetic and associative. In my first post on the ARCHIVE, I quoted William Butler Yeats, who asserted that “symbols are an endless inter-marrying family.” The interactions of members in a family is of course analogous to the concerted efforts of a relay-team, and symbol-tropes in a mythopoeic discourse only win their “race” when they work so as to reinforce one another.

As noted, the vertical discourses align respectively with the categories I’ve termed “cognitive restraint” and “affective freedom.” Didactic discourse aspires to teach, and while some teachers seek to help students learn how to think for themselves, it’s implicit that each student will still end up choosing to advocate favored ideas over non-favored ones—in essence, “restraining” any potential tendency to advocate the latter idea-group. Even writers who analyze myths, both religious and literary, must use didactic discourse to assign a particular set of values to the myths analyzed. In this essay I showed how Claude Levi-Strauss advocated a “scientific” approach to myth and stated that he believed that mythic activity was on its way out of human culture. By contrast, Ernst Cassirer championed myth as an irreducible element of human culture. But both had to use didactic discourse to explain their respective ideas and philosophies. The didactic discourse thus is at its strongest within the sphere of non-fiction but has a more tendentious hold in fiction.

The mythopoeic flourishes in fiction but only appears sporadically in non-fiction, and then usually only in commentaries on fictional constructs, such as Raymond Durgnat’s FILMS AND FEELINGS. Mythopoeic discourse doesn’t so much send a message as open up all lines of communication. In contrast to the old saw “If it feels good, do it,” the mythopoeic discourse says, “If it seems significant, symbolize it.”

Mythopoeic discourse aligns to the category of “affective freedom,” meaning that symbols can combine in any way a creator may please to arrange them, irrespective of logical amenities. To be sure, mythicity takes on greater value when an author relates the symbols to the epistemological patterns that the audience recognizes from the world of experience. But I’ve argued, as did Cassirer in MYTHICAL THOUGHT, that mythic symbols are not gain their power from simply copying what audiences see around them. Cassirer had a more Platonic emphasis than I do. On page 3, he speaks of how Plato valued myth as signifying “the world of becoming” in contrast to the adherents of the allegorical school, and throughout the book he emphasizes myth’s potential to dissolve the boundaries between inner reality and outer reality (particularly on page 156). I agree, but for me the dissolution comes about when myth and its near relative literature make use of “real” epistemological patterns for “unreal” purposes.

In mythopoeic discourse, “perfect freedom” not only doesn’t mean “perfect service,” said freedom can be free of any utilitarian purpose. Case in point: Robert E. Howard’s 1936 novelette BLACK CANAAN, recently reviewed here. I pointed out that although Howard placed his story of an aborted race-war in a real location-- an Arkansas town named Canaan-- the author showed no real interest in reproducing the realities of life in that time (post-Civil War) and place. I noted that the outcome of the Civil War made no difference to the novel, and that Howard had no interest in what inequities might have contributed to the mutual hatred between the whites of Canaan and the blacks of the neighboring swamplands, called Goshen. Going purely by the content of the existing story—while acknowledging that the author was forced to cut his original draft for publication—it’s apparent that Howard wanted a pure “clash of civilizations.” The only motivation for the strife is rooted in the tropes of fantasy-fiction, in that Howard imagines the blacks of Goshen as having made diabolical alliances with elder voodoo-deities. Yet this is certainly not a didactic argument, since Howard says absolutely nothing about the presumed Christian orientations of the Canaanites.

Indeed, the only references to Judeo-Christianity devolve also to the blacks of Goshen. Howard named his imaginary swampland after the Egyptian domain where the pre-Exodus Jews were kept in bondage, before they escaped the land of the Pharaohs into Canaan. This symbolic trope is reinforced by the history of the way blacks of pre-emancipation America identified with the pre-Exodus Jews, which I tend to believe a Southerner like Howard could not help but know of. Thus, in the story the minions of Saul Stark, by rising up against white Canaanites, duplicate the action of the archaic Jews who conquered archaic Canaan and transformed that land into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

But what message was Howard sending in the story? None, I would venture. While he certainly could have infused his story of a fictional uprising with his own political opinions, as did many other authors, here Howard only cares about a conflict of good and evil. And even Howard’s concept of “good” may be problematic, since the righteousness of protagonist Kirby becomes compromised by his unquestionable hunger for the “forbidden fruit” of the quadroon voodoo-priestess, the Bride of Damballah. If Howard had wanted only to denigrate the evil represented by Black People—whom, to be sure, he denotes with the customary Nasty Taboo Word of the period—he could have left out this tantalizing sorceress. From first to last, though, she has Kirby under her thrall, and she’s defeated only by the chance intervention of a minor support-character. The hero enjoys the final triumph over the evil Stark, but Kirby doesn’t win because he’s white, and in many ways Stark and Kirby are mirror-images of each other, each striving to make sure his own race holds the whip hand.

There’s no harm in admitting that such a story has no moral to offer, but it’s far from proven that a story with a moral is necessary superior. On a personal note, in my youth I probably liked a good number of preachy stories, since my own ethos was still being formed. But today I tend to find even the best “idea-tropes” in fiction to have less value than the best “symbol-tropes,” while in non-fiction I often fault authors who load their arguments with clumsy symbolism, as per Frederic Wertham’s tortuous comparison between children and garden-flowers. Both discourses have their strengths, but the races they run come off to best effect on level playing-fields.  

MYTHS OF PLEASURE AND PATTERNS

 

I had an additional reason for LEVERAGING LEVI-STRAUSS recently. For some time I’ve been meaning to get around to reading THE POETICS OF MYTH by Russian scholar Eleazar Meletinsky. I purchased the book purely because I was intrigued by the title, not knowing anything about the genesis of the project or the author’s background. The title suggests that the author means to produce a poetics for mythology, arguably humankind’s first literature, in a manner analogous to Aristotle formulating his Poetics for Greek art.

I had scanned a few sections of POETICS, though, and I noted that the author expressed an uncritical admiration for Claude Levi-Strauss. This did not in my opinion bode well, but before delving into Meletinsky I wanted to be as grounded as possible—or at least as grounded as I could tolerate—in Levi-Strauss’s work. Now that I have a solid grasp of the French anthropologist’s methodology, I can better understand why this Russian theorist admires him, and how I think that predilection hurts his theory.

Meletinsky’s project is to provide a broad overview of the many ways in which scholars have sought to explain the nature of archaic myth, with some additional material discussing the use of myth in modern literature. (This justifies the inclusion of scholars who are literary rather than religious scholars, such as Northrop Frye.) Meletinsky provides a substantially accurate timeline of the development of myth-analysis, beginning, as do similar timelines, with the 15^th-century writer Giambattista Vico. Meletinsky even makes Vico into a sort of “founding figure” for myth-studies:

Vico’s philosophy of myth also contains in embryo … almost all of the main tendencies of later mythological studies… Herder and the Romantic poeticization of myth and folklore; the link between myth and poetic language analyzed by Max Muller, A.A. Potebnja, and Ernst Cassirer; the theory of survivals associated with English anthropology; the work of the folklore historians; and even distant allusions to Durkheim’s collective representations and Levy-Bruhl’s notion of primitive rationality—p. 7.

This is an appealing “cultural myth” on its own, even if Meletinsky expresses the vaguely Marxist idea that Vico had these vital insights because his native land of Italy was “undergoing a general and political decline” in that historical era. The “main tendencies” that the author finds in Vico divide into “two contrasting schools of myth interpretation” in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of these schools Meletinsky calls “the anthropological school,” whose method inheres in “comparative ethnography.” He doesn’t apply a specific name to the other school but aligns it with Romanticism and linguistic analyses. For my own convenience I will rename them as the Synchronic School and the Diachronic School.

Followers of the Synchronic School are focused upon studying material in a particular time frame. They either collect data about traditional tribal-style societies “in the field” or collate data derived from such anthropological investigations. The “field” types would include such thinkers as Tylor, Malinowski, Levy-Bruhl, Durkheim, and Levi-Strauss, while the armchair analysts would include Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualist School.

The Diachronic School is more concerned with taking the long view of myth in many different and often contrasting cultures, seeking to come to grips with the essence of myth as a human activity. Of the figures Meletinsky names, this school includes Herder, Schegel, Nietzsche, Cassirer, Langer, Frye, Jung and Eliade.

A foreword remarks that the author may have received some hostile scrutiny from Soviet authorities because “any book or theory that privileged thought—the “superstructure” in Marxist jargon—at the experience of empirical contingencies and economic infrastructure was not readily welcomed in Soviet ideology.” I admit that Meletinsky doesn’t come off like a driveling Marxmallow, but some of his remarks suggest that he still had more concern with “empirical contingencies” than with the “poetry” that his book is supposedly concerned with. For instance, he faults Frye for an “anti-historical undercurrent’ (p. 87). Yet he has no problem with Roland Barthes for diminishing myth in favor of “acknowledging the primacy of history” (p. 69). When he began claiming, erroneously, that Cassirer had failed to logically distinguish the form of myth from the forms of literature and philosophy, I quit reading the book.

Meletinsky’s bias toward historicism and the Synchronic School reveal a critical inability to think of myth as a poetic activity, which inability renders his book’s title fatuous. He has almost zero interest in the ways in which myths appeared in the literature of Greeks and Romans, Babylonians and Egyptians, and pole-vaults over centuries of art so that he can address the use of myth in Modenist literature. (He does work in some desultory comments on Defoe and various Romantics.) But even Aristotle’s offhand comparison between the tragedies of his time and old traditions of “goat-songs” is more poetically insightful than anything Meletinsky writes.

Given my voluminous postings on writers like Jung, Frye and Cassirer, plainly I’m as much of the Diachronic Party as Meletinsky is of the Synchronic one. I’m not for a moment claiming that everything those worthies wrote was flawless, and at the very least the approach of the more data-oriented writers might serve as a check on over-Romantic tendencies. But it takes an extreme narrowness of vision to imagine that one can speak meaningfully of the link between myth and poetry without writing SOMETHING about the archaic origins of both.

Of course, one can only approach such origins diachronically, synthesizing general tendencies from such fragmented data as cave paintings and early hieroglyphs. But even if by some miracle we knew more about the general origins of myth and art, such knowledge does not change the fact that myth is not determined by history. Yes, one must presume that every story has come into being within historical time, even when we do not know just when. But the elements making up the stories—elements I’ll call “tropes” for simplicity’s sake—are ahistorical, arising and combining in endless chimerical ways according to the needs of a given audience. Even Levi-Strauss’s tedious anatomical dissections of countless archaic tales don’t testify to the abstruse “mathematics” that Levi-Strauss hypothesizes. Rather, such tales reveal the actions of innumerable nameless storytellers, seeking to please their audiences with patterns and pleasures.

I won’t repeat in detail my conviction that mythology depends upon the evocation of epistemological patterns. But I will add that for tribal humans, these patterns would be the essence of poetry; the fusion of the objective and subjective worlds in which those humans lived. Stories that relate that the sun is really a boat traversing the sky, or that the world was made from the bones of a giant, don’t serve any scientific purpose, nor at base do they serve the purpose of Malinowski’s functionalism (to which Meletinsky seems strongly allied). While myth-stories may eventually be used to support a given culture’s social order, no teller of tales thinks to himself, “Hmm, I think I’ll make up a story about that ball of light in the sky so that this generation and those that follow will have a sense of societal unity.” Nor would any audience listen to such stories for any reason save that imaginative sojourns give them pleasure. One of those pleasures includes the listeners imagining that the mysterious non-human world is at least tinged with human sentiments and priorities—and that may be the base origin of all of the tropes of art and religion, which may precede those stories we moderns would term “myths.” Meletinsky has a long section in POETICS. “The Classic Forms of Myth,” which seems to be nothing but a haphazard list of assorted mythological characters and situations, grounded in the aforementioned functionalism. I suppose this may be his idea of a diachronic overview, but even the most self-indulgent myth-commentaries by Jung and Joseph Campbell are better thematically organized. The author’s inability to discern the pleasurable element in mythic stories keeps his book as distant from being a “poetics of myth” as it’s possible for any single work to be.

LEVERAGING LEVI-STRAUSS

 

Given that I’ve claimed for myself the status of a “myth-critic” (a term that Northrop Frye claimed others foisted upon him), I’ve naturally read heavily into the various approaches to myth by anthropologists, religious historians, psychologists and literary critics. I’ve avoided delving into Claude Levi-Strauss, however, despite his celebrity as a major myth-theorist and as the founder of structuralism, which is also a minor interest of mine. I have a dim memory that some commentator spoke disparagingly of L-S’s tendency to reduce myth to mathematical formulae, and I would imagine that anytime I scanned L-S’s mammoth volumes, mostly on South American myth, his method of presentation would’ve confirmed that bias for me. I may have also been turned off by the fact that he’s a very pedantic writer in comparison with authors like Eliade and Campbell, and thus it’s difficult to find his insights persuasive. Looking back over my few Archive-entries on L-S, I find that I recorded an attempt to read THE ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF KINSHIP— which may have srruck me as pretty damn dull, since I don’t even remember cracking the covers.

Recently, though, I girded my cerebral loins (so to speak) and forced myself to plunge into the first two volumes of L-S’s four-volume MYTHOLOGIQUES. I made it through volume one, THE RAW AND THE COOKED, despite the fact that it consists of dozens upon dozens of South American myth-tales with only minimal interpretation, but then gave up halfway through volume two, FROM HONEY TO ASHES, because it all but duplicated the same niggling approach to the subject. However, in the second volume I skipped ahead to see if L-S offered anything in the nature of a summation. I was slightly pleased to see that he (finally) did so—and that said summation confirms my earlier bias.

To be sure, THE RAW AND THE COOKED does offer something akin to a theme statement, buried on page 240:

Myths are constructed on the basis of a certain logicality of tangible qualities which makes no clear-cut distinction between subjective states and the properties of the cosmos.

So far, so good. Most myth-theorists would agree that myth depends on the association between subjective factors in the human psyche and the objective phenomena of the cosmos, though that association is not always deemed “logical,” least of all by theorists of a Romantic bent. L-S goes on:

Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that such a distinction has corresponded, and to an extent still corresponds, to a particular stage in the development of scientific knowledge—a stage that, in theory if not actual fact, is doomed to disappear.

Even when L-S begin writing about myths in the late forties, the idea of a transition from mythical discourse to the discourse of science and theoretical philosophy can be found in Vico, Cassirer, and any number of analysts, even those of opposed methodologies. But it’s certainly odd that someone who’s writing so obsessively about mythology should claim that the impulse that spawned myth was “doomed to die,” even “in theory.”

Volume two more or less gives the answer: L-S comes to do the reverse of Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony, for he’s come not to praise myth, but to bury it, under his own mathematically oriented theory—whle tacitly admitting that many people may find his method enervating.

If any reader, exasperated by the effort demanded by these first two volumes, is inclined to see no more than a manic obsessiveness in the author’s fascination with myths, which in the last resort all say the same thing and, after minute analysis, offer no new opening but merely force him to go round in circles, such a reader has missed the point that a new aspect of mythic thought has been revealed through the widening of the area of investigation.—p. 472.

What is this “new aspect of mythic thought?” L-S tells readers on the next page:

…the demarcative features exploited by the myths do not consist so much of things themselves as of a body of common properties, expressible in geometrical terms and transformanle into one another by means of operations which constitute a sort of algebra.

Thus, L-S would argue, contra Yeats, that you can know the dancer from the dance, because the dance is also a body of common properties expressible in geometrical terms, whereas the dancers merely transmit the algebraic operations. This position proves problematic in that the stories, mythic or otherwise, told by human beings don’t arise out of nothing like the kinetic forces of physics, nor are the stories encoded in our genes like, say, the mating-dances of assorted lower species. L-S observes that the stories surveyed are composef of tropes—he uses the term “mythemes”—and that the tropes are frequently re-arranged by various storytellers, whether for similar or dissimilar effects. Elsewhere L-S used the metaphor of bricklaying—in French, bricolage—which assumes that the tropes are as inert as bricks. But the very fact that the tropes are plurisignative reveals the limitations of that metaphor.

Despite assorted theories, no human knows precisely how the human practice of storytelling originated. I would tend to think that profane stories arose before sacred ones, though even the profane ones may have been touched with elements of mythic imagination, derived from the worldview of primitive humans. But even in prehistoric times not every human would have had the same talents as every other human, and the talent of storytelling would have loomed larger in some persons than in others, resulting in any number of social specializations—the primitive analogues to shamans, priests and traveling bards. Skilled storytellers would know how to pick up on the tropes that their respective cultures favored, and to weave them into an assortment of shapes, whether for personal preference or to earn the storyteller’s daily bread. Some stories are less well-told than others, even allowing for the fact that the earliest stories might have been more like dreams than coherent narratives—but the ones that embed themselves in human cultures come about not because of abstract algebraic operations, but because of human will, playing with the shapes as on a loom, rather than setting them in concrete as one does with bricks.

Even though I reject L-S’s reductionism, I have to give him credit for being aware—again on page 473—that some readers may choose to dismiss his system as the projection of the author, rather than a true “science of mythology,” as he seeks to prove with numerous graphs and anatomical dissections. While I would admit that the more Romantic interpretations of myth may be more obvious in terms of their authors’ projections, they also may be more honest than L-S’s pseudo-scientific flummery.

THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS PT. 3

In Part 2, I enlisted Jung's idea about function-sovereignty to champion Aristotle's preference for "unity of action" over Levi-Strauss's structuralist, "nothing-is-more-important-than-anything-else" approach to analyzing the themes of archaic myth. Yet the Jungian concept that most resembles Levi-Strauss's formulation of binary oppositions is that of enantiodromia. From PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES:

I use [Heraclitus' discovery of] enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, onesided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.

Naturally, since I'm concerned with the themes of literary works rather than myths as such, I'm not concerned with Jung's idea about an unconscious "counterposition" arising in reaction to a "one-sided tendency" that "dominates conscious life." The writer of fiction may be drawing on both conscious and unconscious factors in his own mind, but the work he presents to the reader depends on a conflict between at least two opposed principles, usually personified into characters. Levi-Strauss implied such a conflict in his binary oppositions, though he does not seem nearly as interested in Aristotle's idea of the *agon,* the idea that conflict is fundamental to "poetry." If anything, Levi-Strauss's approach to the way a myth-tale approaches opposed forces resembles Tzvetan Todorov's model for an aesthetics that "just happens,' based not in conflict but in changing equilibriums.

…we must inquire into the very nature of narrative. Let us begin by constructing an image of the minimum narrative, not the kind we usually find in contemporary texts, but that nucleus without which we cannot say there is any narrative at all. The image will be as follows: All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.

I suppose Todorov may have de-emphasized the radical of conflict because he was aware of literary works that appeared to dispense with overt conflict. However, in my analysis of the Ray Bradbury story "The Last Night of the World," I found that even in a story with no apparent intrinsic conflict, there existed a conflict between what the story portrayed and the audience's expectations:

In the minds of some if not all readers of the story, there will be the expectation that if humanity were faced with an "end of days," it would be an occasion of great tumult, of "raging against the dying of the light."  What Bradbury's story offers is, in keeping with the literary audience to which it is directed, is a triumph of the "will to nothingness" against all the audience's expectations.

In Part 2, I gave my "binary opposition" to describe the potential underthought in a Jack Kirby story: "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." The story was equally weak in terms of having a discursive overthought, which came down to nothing more than "good must triumph over evil." So what would a strong underthought on the same theme look like?

The Golden Age Origin of Hawkman might be seen as following roughly the same paltry "good vs. evil" overthought, though its development of its underthought is one of the strongest in the comics medium.

In Fox's Hawkman story, as in Kirby's Challengers story, the heroes are tough guys who prove skillful with weapons, while their respective enemies more or less align with the archetype of the evil sorcerer. So the opposition here would be not unlike that of "sword versus sorcery."

To move on to a different underthought which keeps to the same good-vs.-evil overthought, I'll cite Kanigher's 1947 "The Injustice Society of the World." In this story the underthought is more like "law vs. crime," perhaps best represented by the scene where the villains put the heroes on trial for their deeds against crime. This underthought is not nearly as well developed as Fox's Hawkman story. However, the Kanigher story is one of many that I've considered as mythcomics simply because the stories had one "binary opposition" devoted to giving readers a discourse regarding the opposed elements.

Similarly, I have at times given the mythcomics designation to works in which the overthought and underthought are both strong, though not necessarily forming a unity.

The 1982 graphic novel "God Loves, Man Kills" does provide such unity, though. This time the overthought isn't just a vague opposition of good and evil, but that of "religious doctrine versus biological reality." Various earlier X-Men stories had opposed the biological reality of mutantkind to human beliefs regarding normality. However, those earlier stories didn't reference the more controversial topic of religion, as Chris Claremont's story does.

Cyclops's speech depicts the positive opposition of the overthought, using logic to assert that mutants are part of humankind. In contrast, Reverend Stryker fulfills the negative function, anathematizing the abnormal and stressing the need for purification.

Since both of these philosophical postures relate to the history of ideas, they belong to the story's overthought. The underthought, however, is concerned more with the opposition of images and the numinous associations they carry. Elsewhere in the story, the sometime villain Magneto makes what I've termed the "separatist argument," that humans and mutants should be separated from one another. But his appearance in this panel gives Magneto a less rational appearance, making of him a sympathetic "devil"-- born up by magnetic waves rather than wings-- who storms the church-like meeting-hall of the obsessed preacher.

"God Loves" is not as rich in images and symbols as other stories, particularly the Hawkman-origin. Clearly Claremont's story functions primarily as a dramatic exploration of ideas, while the symbols are less important. However, "God Loves" is one of the better stories in which overthought and underthought form a significant unity.

THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS PT. 2

A careful analysis of the text of this myth, which in one version alone takes up thirteen pages of Dorsey's work, discloses that it is built on a long series of oppositions: (1) initiated shaman versus non-initiated shaman, that is, the opposition between acquired power and innate power; (2) child versus old man, since the myth insists on the youth of one protagonist and the old age of the other; (3) confusion of sexes versus differentiation of sexes; all of Pawnee metaphysical thought is actually based on the idea that at the time of the creation of the world antagonistic elements were intermingled and that the first work of the gods consisted in sorting them out. […] (7) magic which proceeds by introduction versus magic which proceeds by extraction.-- Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthology

In STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 1, I drew certain comparisons between Aristotle's concept of the unity of action with Claude Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage. Levi-Strauss is far better known, though, for his concept of binary oppositions,  a few of which he cites in the quote above. Many of Levi-Strauss's analyses are much like the one above, citing an assortment of binary oppositions between abstract representations, such as "confusion of sexes versus differentiation of sexes." This would seem, on the face of things, to contradict Aristotle's dictum, which I last cited in THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS in February 2016.

The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one action. . . . The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.

For the purpose of literary criticism, however, I think that these two insights can prove complementary, and once more I turn to the mediating influence of Jung, whose views of "sovereignty" I surveyed in JUNG AND CENTRICITY:

This “absolute sovereignty always belongs, empirically, to one function alone, and can belong only to one function, because the equally independent intervention of another function would necessarily produce a different orientation which, partially at least, would contradict the first. But since it is a vital condition for the conscious process of adaptation always to have clear and unambiguous aims, the presence of a second function of equal power is naturally ruled out. This other function, therefore, can have only a secondary importance.”

Jung, who devotes PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES to analyzing the many mental functions revealed by his depth psychology, ascribes "secondary importance" to any and all other functions as against the primary one, just as Aristotle says that the poet must confine his attention to "several incidents...so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole."

Of these three academics-- anthropologist, philosopher (and proto-literary critic), and psychologist-- the anthropologist is not especially interested in seeing a "unity of action" in his narratives (and here I'm considering Jung's analyses of the internal goings-on of his hypothetical patients as "narratives.") Levi-Strauss's orientation stems, I believe, from his having focused his studies primarily on the sort of often-fragmentary tales that he encountered in tribal peoples. This led him to view myths as fundamentally fragmentary, rather than being capable of forming "wholes" as Aristotle believes that stories should.

Anyone dealing with modern stories, of course, is not dealing with products of a tribal aesthetic. Such stories are usually informed by Aristotle's idea of *dianoia,* which I've loosely translated as "theme statement" elsewhere. In literature the "unity of action," the unity that arises from a given work's theme, does not preclude that other "imitations of action" that complement the main action. This concept of unity parallels Jung's concept of sovereignty, that a given personality-- or at least, Jung's abstraction of a personality-- will have other functions, but that a central function will be "in charge."

Now, often in my own myth-critical analyses of films and comic book stories, I've found that the most mythic works I've surveyed possess a strong underthought, one that often can be expressed as one of Levi-Strauss's binary oppositions.  In this essay, I summarized the potential (yet inadequately expressed) theme statement of a particular Jack Kirby-Dave Wood story:

Boiled down, the potential underthought-- for Kirby and Wood probably would never have become didactic enough to produce a complementary overthought-- might read something like, "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." 

Kirby's NEW GODS series, which I also touched on the same essay, received a fuller examination in this mythcomics essay, and there too I summarized the implied theme of the short-lived series:

...where NEW GODS excels is in Kirby’s take on a theme that Tolkien himself had evoked. In a world where mythic good and mythic evil have palpable existence, and where their battle is the proper working-out of their joint destiny, how does good keep from becoming corrupted by the power of evil?

There are patently other binary underthoughts expressed in Kirby's saga, notably that of "father vs. son," but I would regard all of these are, as Jung says, "of secondary importance." 

More in Part 3.

COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 1

In order to explain why I'm choosing to devote a lot of space to one essay in Raymond Durgnat's 1967 collection in FILMS AND FEELINGS, as I said that I would in this essay, some personal reflections by an amateur literary theorist may provide some context.

I'm not certain as to when I read the Durgnat book, but since I was exposed to a lot of esoteric materials while working for a college library in the early 1980s, that's as likely a time as ever. I already had quite a bit of grounding in Jung and Campbell, and I probably discovered Frye around the same time as Durgnat. Durgnat didn't offer a lot of heavy theory in his essays, but in one essay, "Tales Versus Novels," he propounded a theory with which I both agreed and disagreed.

I lacked a certain amount of context to Durgnat's argument when I first read it, for the essay was in part a response to a type of literary elitism the writer found in a 1884 Henry James essay, "The Art of Fiction."  To my consternation Durgnat did not cite the source of James' remarks, which I later tracked down thanks to the wonders of the Internet. "Art of Fiction" itself was written in response to a diatribe by a more obscure writer of James' time, whom I chose not to seek out. In brief, James sought to set forth his parameters for excellence in literary fiction, and in the excerpt from "Tales Versus Novels" I'll print below, it should be evident that Durgnat is arguing that James' standards are based purely upon the art of the novel, not of fiction generally. Thus, Durgnat contrasts the virtues of "tales," meaning not only bonafide folktales but also pop-fictional creations like "Li'l Abner and James Bond," with the more celebrated virtues of largely naturalistic novels.

To the aesthetic of the "tale" academic culture has, by and large, turned a blind eye. As recently as my grammar school days, English masters instructed us all in the necessity for realistic and deep characterization, logically consistent behavior, penetrating studies of motive, and that proliferation of vivid detail suggested by Henry James' phrase, "density of specification." We were besought to insist upon the "texture of lived experience," and many of the exegeses we studied had strained to detect such "density" in such improbable places as folk ballads, or Chaucer's tale of Patient Griselda. Yet it was curious that, rich and complex as was the showpiece of the "complexity" school, HAMLET, each critic struggled to isolate its hero's "real" motives, to simplify, to synopsize, him into a figure almost as systematic and simple as another famous procrastinator, Li'l Abner. For, as Erich Auerbach remarked in his study of the development of European literary realism, "To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend."

A minor point first: in the essay to which I linked, James actually speaks of "solidity of specification" when he extols the ability of modern fiction to bring forth that texture of lived experience.  However, Durgnat's inaccurate memory is more inspired than the original, for the ideal of literary realism is based not so much in how "solid" things are-- which is "not at all" since fiction is not real-- but rather, in how "densely" an author provides all the details that produce the illusion of reality.

Now to a more substantial point: Durgnat is suggesting is that academic culture ought to appreciate not just the aesthetic of complex specification, but also the aesthetic of simplicity that one finds in folktales and popular fiction, and even in "high art" (like HAMLET), whose complexities ultimately reduce down into many of the same simple oppositions one finds in "low art." Here's Durgnat celebrating the symbolic oppositions one finds in Mary Shelley's famous creation:

The Frankenstein Monster is brutal but pathetic; he's a creature who masters his creator; he's brute material capable of a lofty idealism that, turning sour, makes him a devil-- but a sympathetic one.

I agree with Durgnat's readings of folk-lit and pop-lit in general, but the "disagreement" I mentioned above comes in when he tries to make these rather Levi-Straussian oppositions emblematic of his "aesthetic of simplicity." I don't think that, say, his Frankensteinian oppositions are simple; I think that they're just as "dense" as all the verisimilitude that Henry James ladles into his novels. I think I understand fairly well why Durgnat sought to create a contrast between his notion of tale-like simplicity versus academia's received opinion that "proliferation of vivid detail" was the defining virtue of all fiction, with the prose novel standing in as the best representation of that aesthetic. But I also think it was a mistake, because the academic community flourishes on the demonstration of hidden complexity beneath the surface of any narrative. As far as I can tell, Durgnat's aesthetic of simplicity had little effect on academia, be it concerned with the critique of prose or of cinema. In contrast, while the influence of Carl Jung's analytical psychology proves less popular than the pseudo-scientific formulations of Freud and Marx, there are still assorted critics who advocate the exploration of symbols through a Jungian lens-- in large part because Jung, like literary critics, was all about finding complexity amid apparent simplicity.

In future essays within this series, "density" will prove useful in further identifying the virtues of what I've termed, with due reference to Jung, the four potentialities.

NEAR MYTHS: ODKIN SON OF ODKIN (1981)

To elaborate on his definition of mythical thought, Levi-Strauss drew an analogy to "bricolage": "Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual 'bricolage'" (p. 17). The French verb, "bricoler," has no English equivalent, but refers to the kind of activities that are performed by a handy-man. The "bricoleur" performs his tasks with materials and tools that are at hand, from "odds and ends." He draws from the already existent while the engineer or scientist, according to Levi-Strauss, seeks to exceed the boundaries imposed by society. "The scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the 'bricoleur' creating structures by means of events" (p. 22).-- Janine Mileaf.

As I said in my previous essay, Wally Wood's second installment of his "Wizard King" concept-- completed at a time when Wood was seriously ill, with considerable fill-in work from his assistants-- was by no means as successful as 1978's THE KING OF THE WORLD.

For my purposes, though, ODKIN is the perfect illustration of the virtues of the "near-myth." Levi-Strauss' view of the process of "bricolage"-- which other sources compare to the idea of a "brick-layer"-- was articulated only with regard to "mythical thought," but in truth it compares to any creative thought, and therefore to the whole of literature. When Aristotle perceives the genesis of the great tragedies in the ritual dramas of the so-called "goat songs," he affirms that simple components can be used to construct larger, more ambitious structures.

Wood, who never found a long-term hospitable berth at any comics company, paid most of his bills by taking on diverse assignments. This may have inclined him to a sort of "handyman" approach to his art. KING OF THE WORLD shows Wood extending himself to emulate the classical rigor of Hal Foster's PRINCE VALIANT, but even in KING there are some rambling, episodic sequences, and a few concepts that don't fit the faux-medieval fantasy-world (more on which shortly). ODKIN, however, really is a work of "odds and ends," comprised of three chapters that have no more rigor than a "Dungeons and Dragons" scenario. In fact, the first chapter-- which barely relates to the other two chapters-- is titled "Table Top Land," and is named for a miniature table-game that a wizard uses against his enemies.

The latter chapters explain the meaning of the title, for Odkin literally dies in chapter two, and is resurrected in chapter three through the technological magic of the wizard Alcazar. So the second Odkin is "odd kin" indeed: Alcazar tells Second Odkin: "in a sense you are your own father and mother." In KING Wood flirted with incest-tropes by claiming that Odkin and his father shared the same mother. In addition, the lost King Atlan was preserved from death in the same way as Odkin: whenever the evil Anark managed to slay the King, the monarch simply came to life in another identical body, also implicitly the creation of Alcazar. This element was the only time I felt one of Wood's "bricks" had been badly laid, for the idea of extra bodies seems purely science-fictional, and was an idea he recycled from the "Noman" feature in 1965's THUNDER AGENTS.

In addition, the big conclusion of Odkin's quest lacks the dramatic heft that Wood set up in the first book. Odkin has been manipulated, albeit out of necessity, into infiltrating the crypt in which Atlan has been placed in an eternal sleep, much like a medieval Arthur waiting for rebirth. However, the only way Odkin can free Atlan is to chop off the head of his sleeping body, so that Atlan's spirit will re-incarnate in one of the bodies controlled by Alcazar. Since Odkin is under the wizard's control when he does the deed, this removes any potential drama from the situation-- and even First Odkin's subsequent death lacks much in the way of pathos. Later, Second Odkin must return to the site of the first one's death, in order to reclaim the magical Sword of Atlan, much as Noman often had to seek out one of his dead android bodies in order to reclaim the irreplaceable invisibility cloak.  Odkin beholds his own dead body-- but Wood can only give the scene a strange detachment. Then the story moves move on to a short-term quest, sending Odkin after a mystic jewel that's been stolen by a dragon, which seems to be little more than an unsatisfying analogue to Bilbo Baggins' encounter with Smaug. Wood also tosses out the names of two opposed gods, "IAM" and "AMNOT," but though these sound like principles of affirmation and negation, Wood refuses to invest any attention to the metaphysical symbolism he himself suggests.

In short, ODKIN SON OF ODKIN is an assortment of odds and ends, lacking the relative unity of KING OF THE WORLD. But certainly many of those conceptual "bricks" possess considerable mythic power by themselves, even if they aren't assembled into a satisfying structure. In contrast to the works I've labeled inconsummate, the symbolic value of the building-blocks has not been distorted. The value merely "lies in state," like one of Atlan's bodies, and fails to come alive.

DUELING QUOTATIONS II

From a blogpost by Jonah Lehrer by way of Curt Purcell's GROOVY AGE:

Double-scope integration integrates two mental assemblies, two notions, two thoughts that conflict in their basic conceptual organizations, because they are based on conflicting frames or conflicting identities. The result of this integration is a new conceptual array, a "blend," that has a new organizing structure and emergent meaning of its own. In "double-scope" integration, there are two input menial spaces that we typically keep quite separate, but there is also the invention of a blend that draws crucially on both of them.

I thought of this observation while recently reading (or attempting to read) Claude Levi-Strauss's 1969 work THE ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF KINSHIP, where L-S addresses what he calls "the 'polymorphism' of child thought:"

...it must be allowed that infantile thought represents a sort of common denominator for all thoughts and all cultures. This is what Piaget has frequently expressed in speaking of the 'syncretism' of child thought, which, however, seems dangerous to us since it admits of two different interpretations. If by 'syncretism' is meant a state of confusion and undifferentiation in wich the child's distinction between himself and another, between people and objects, and between the objects themselves, is poor, there is a risk of being content with a highly superficial view of things and overlooking the main point. This seeming 'primitive undifferentiation' is not so much an absence of differentiation as a different system of differentiation from [that of adults], and furthermore the result of several systems being in co-existence, and the constant transition from one to another."

Should I also bring in Coleridge to have his say? Nah, not today. But I will note a mild disagreement to one statement by Curt:

Here's my theory. Every fictional work is essentially a guided fantasy or daydream in which we cast ourselves as the protagonist or viewpoint character.

I would amend this to say that the "guided fantasy" can also coalesce around what a Wikipedia article calls the focal character, about which I'll have more to say in future essays.

INCEST WE TRUST PART 1

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.-- Sigmund Freud, "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love."

"[The incest taboo in man was the]fundamental step because of which, by which, but above all in which, the transition from nature to culture was accomplished."--Claude Levi-Strauss, ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF KINSHIP.

In LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION I agreed with George Bataille's theory of transgressive sexuality, in which even "right" sexual relations are essentially transgressive. I do draw my own non-Bataillean distinction about differing types of transgression, though, and will expound on the differences between "cooperative" and "competitive" forms of transgression in a future essay.

Now the two scholars quoted above both privilege one particular form of sexual transgression, that of incest, as being central to mankind's experience in some way. Obviously Freud focuses on individual development and Levi-Strauss emphasizes societal factors, but both are putting "the Big I" right at center-stage.

In HO HUM-- BATMAN'S GAY AGAIN I assailed as wrongheaded any literary or philosophical theory which privileged one particular form of sexuality over any other. An example of this purblind tendency can be found in Eve Sedgwick's EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET, where she argues that "any aspect of modern Western culture" is "damaged" if it does not "incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition." Freud and Levi-Strauss cannot be accused, as I believe Sedgwick can, of forming a concept of sexuality based purely on their personal sexual tastes, but the tendency all three share, that of making one aspect of human sexuality the centerpiece of their theories, is no less problematic.

George Bataille's EROTISM, though strongly influenced by both Freud and Levi-Strauss, disagreed with them on this score:

"The taboo within us against sexual liberty is general and universal; the particular prohibitions are variable aspects of it... It is ridiculous to isolate a specific 'taboo' such as the one on incest, just one aspect of the general taboo, and look for its explanation outside its universal basis, namely, the amorphous and universal prohibitions bearing on sexuality."-- EROTISM, pp. 50-51.

Later, in the chapter entitled "The Enigma of Incest," Bataille examines Levi-Strauss's ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES in depth. The chapter-essay also includes a few side-comments on Freud, as well as quoting L-S's own commetary on TOTEM AND TABOO, which L-S valued for being "an inveterate fantasy" even though the book described the origins of incest in mythic terms that probably never took place in real time. Bataille shows tremendous respect for L-S's theories, praising (page 212) its "accuracy" in answering questions about "the nature of the taboos on incest in archaic societies." However, on the previous page, he says "it is rather a pity that Levi-Strauss has paid so little attention to the bearing of eroticism" in the exchange of women between one tribe and another.

By "eroticism" Bataille means what he calls the "sensuous frenzy" that potentially disrupts societal homeostasis and yet remains indispensible to the continuance of society through propagation of new societal members. One might think he wants Levi-Strauss to be a little more like Freud, more concerned with human syndromes of compulsion, but I feel that Bataille was a little less concerned than Freud with defending his own concept of societal homeostasis. For Freud, the taboo against aberrant sexuality is one with the Law of the Father, and is not meant to be violated without serious repercussions. Bataille, in this and other sections, emphasizes rather that "the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it." It it because Bataille is aware of man's separateness from other animals that his concept of sexuality is better than that of Freud, Levi-Strauss, or (certainly) Sedgwick, in that Bataille understands that it is in the nature of man that:

"the bounds set on freedom of action give a fresh fillip to the irresistible animal impulse."

POLITICAL POTTY

I continue to read FJ's PU, and am finding it tedious whenever he parses arguments with fellow Marxists like Lukacs and Althusser. Despite Jameson's conviction that Marxist theory offers a gauge of reality that supersedes any other methodological approaches to literature, the fine points of such theory are about as relevant to life as debates about how many angels can dance on Zippy the Pinhead.

So far the book only takes fire whenever Jameson tries to claim territory from myth-critics like Frye and structuralists like Levi-Strauss. His attempts to appropriate mythic material on behalf of ideology are cunningly phrased, which puts Jameson above the tedious "spawn of Frankfurt" from THE COMICS JOURNAL, but his proofs are just as riddled with fallacies and superficial thinking.

The book's title, POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS, is meant to appropriate on behalf of Marxist theory the notion of a psychological "unconscious" that literary studies inherited from Big Daddy Freud. By the same token, all hermeutical systems that center upon factors of individual "desire" (Bataille, Deleuze) are mistaken precisely because they focus on the individual rather than the social. In a similar vein it's amusing to see Jameson try to replace Levi-Strauss' concept of the "mythologem"-- a term Levi-Strauss meant to define a "unit" of mythological narrative equivalent to a phoneme in linguistics-- with the clunky Marxist term "ideologem," with the assumption that Marxist ideology is just that all-encompassing a hermeneutic.

As an example of Jameson's evasive argumentation, we have his attempt to dismiss myth criticism, not even with his own argument, but with that of another scholar:

"To such allegories of desire, indeed, may be applied Norman Holland's powerful critique of myth criticism as a whole, about which he observes that it works only if we have been told the work is mythic ahead of time, the unquestionable 'resonance' of the mythic rewriting presupposing not the operation of some mythic unconscious, but rather our own preliminary conscious 'set' around the reading in question."

I don't know what logical proofs Holland offered for this opinion in the cited work, but I'll assume that they're of a piece with those of Jameson, who took exception to Frye's supposed indiscriminate championing of "resonance" in pop culture.

Now, what objects of pop culture did Northrop Frye champion? His references to it in his signature 1957 work ANATOMY OF CRITICISM are exceedingly general, but at one point he remarks (and I paraphrase) that science fiction uses many of the motifs of myth, particularly in stories about the earth undergoing some great deluge or upheaval. But in 1957 I don't believe any influential voices were speaking on behalf of science fiction as being "modern mythology," as noted in this much later essay. Thus on the face of it the Holland-Jameson assertion is nonsense. By their lights, Frye could not consider a given SF work to be mythic because no one previous to him, be it other academics or the genre's reading public, had been told "ahead of time" that the work was mythic.

Clearly Jameson is trying to "de-mythologize" myth criticism with much the same strategy one might use to "de-mythologize" an actual myth. But whereas there might be some justification for speculating as to how a myth is created for and received by its audience, no myth critic is trying to claim that a literary work with myth-like qualities operates in precisely the same way as an actual myth. One may agree or disagree as to whether a modern work possesses "resonance" (or what I call, in a similar vein, "mythicity"), but the attempt to analyze the presence of resonance is quite independent of some outside agency having told the critic "ahead of time" that the work is mythic.

As for the "operation of some mythic unconscious," I can't speak for the late Professor Frye, but for me the presence of mythicity is not in the least dependent on whether it proceeds from the conscious mind or from what is better called the "subconscious." As I showed in my rebuttal of Steven Grant's essay, there's no reason to think that mythic material is only properly mythic as long as it remains subconscious. Indeed, even where a mythic association is clearly earmarked as a conscious product of the artist's mind (like Melville's many meditations on whales and leviathans), one cannot discount the possibility that the conscious reference sprung from a subconscious association that has been given conscious articulation, just as Joseph Campbell asserted that it might.

I'll be discussing this in more detail in a future essay: "Interrogating Icy Harris."

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE STORM

I mentioned in the essay "Myths of Sociology" that I have a problem with thinkers who reduce every aspect of mankind to sociological parameters, as do many anthropologists and social scientists. And while I hardly want to find myself going to the opposite extreme of Rousseau, who liked to define mankind as utterly independent of society, it should be made clear that "mankind" and "society" are not coterminous concepts.

Take religion. (Please.)

I have no opposition to the notion that religion evolved out of contingent factors, but I part company with many prominent anthropologists-- notably, Claude Levi-Strauss-- in seeing religion's as having evolved out of predominantly social factors. This is where a knowledge of Campbell's "four functions" of myth may prove a useful corrective, even when applied to the beings from which humans themselves evolved. Of course, anything one speculates about the early origins of human culture or those damn dirty ancestors is necessarily a heuristic assumption, based on fragmentary evidence of archaic times and backward extrapolations from our present reality.

The aspect of present reality to which I'd call attention is an anecdote from Jane Goodall related in her book on the chimpanzees of Gombe, IN THE SHADOW OF A MAN. In SHADOW, Goodall relates that during a particularly fierce thunderstorm that struck over the heads of a tribe of chimps, some of these anthropoids were submissively terrified while others ran up and down the hills, hooting and waving sticks at the storm, as if the storm were an enemy to be repelled.

Now, let us make the heuristic assumption that something like this happened in the days before hominids evolved, when chimps were the highest form of life. We do not necessarily have to suppose that early hominids inherited this pattern of behavior from their nonhuman brethren; only that big-brained species may be more capable in general of forming at least rudimentary concepts of unseen enemies, which in humans would then be articulated as gods, spirits or what have you.

Now, the notion that religion might ultimately stem from some combination of "challenge patterns" and "abasement patterns" is not original with me. It can be asserted that other animals lower on the "brain-chain" may well sometimes reflexively fall into "fight or flight" patterns when faced with unknown phenomena, but I would be surprised if there was any evidence of their conceptualizing the unknown phenomena. Of course the skeptic will point out that it's still dicey as to what extent chimpanzees can form concepts, though we know that at very least they can conceive of tool-using ("It is easier to dig up an anthill with a stick than with my fingers.")

What I wish to make clear with this heuristic example is that IF religion had its own beginnings as a set of "challenge/abasement patterns" in reaction to unknown phenomena, then this would challenge the notion of religion's origins as a sociological phenomenon. Challenge and abasement patterns are intrinsically biological responses keyed to promote the survival of the individual. They are not keyed to help the society, as one can say that "a protective response toward children" IS a pattern to aid society. Challenge and abasement indirectly help the individual survive in society, but there is no automatic benefit to society thereby, and indeed, depending on the individual, the survival of that individual may be a burden to his society.

Ironically, of the three functions Campbell sets down, the sociological is the weakest link, so to speak. One may characterize the chimps' reaction as a purely somatic response to the excitation of the storm, which would fit broadly within the category Campbell calls "cosmological." One may characterize it as "psychological," insofar as the reaction involves individual psych0logies (i.e., some chimps challenge the storm but others don't). Or, given that the imagined author of the storm's flashing and booming may be the ancestor of Old Yahweh himself, one could also see the reaction as belonging to the matrix of the "metaphysical."

We do not know the beginnings of Beginning, but one chooses to entertain this heuristic example (the sociologically-inclined, of course, will not) as forming at least part of the foundations of that Beginning, then one must concede that religion could not have been conceived simply to bind people closer together, or for the priesthood to keep the people buffaloed, as in scenarios popular with everyone from Ayn Rand to Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Religion then would proceed from individuals first-- albeit as an "intersubjective" spirit, to flagrantly borrow Husserl's term-- and then society would cope with the religious tendency in the form of rituals and other paraphernalia. Only the existence of an intersubjective tendency to believe in invisible spirits would thus be able to convince the "laity" of primitive societies to do all sorts of things contrary to their immediate interests, such as the sacrifice of time, hard work, and perhaps other creature's lives.

We're a long way now from Rand's goofy notion of primitives falling down in fear before the ravings of an epileptic priest, so-- let's stay as far away from that notion as possible.