THE READING RHEUM: STOP, IN THE NAME OF GOD (2026)

 

In KEEPING VS SHARING, I confessed that I was not well-acquainted with the philosophy of Charlie Kirk at the time of his untimely assassination. Since then, I've listened to assorted podcasts, and I've come to admire his Socrates-like ability to engage total strangers in sustained debate, particularly on college campuses like the one on which a demented trans took Kirk's life. But such forums could not provide a holistic view of Kirk's life-philosophy-- and although the majority of Kirk's books were dominantly political in nature, his devotion to his evangelical organization Turning Point suggests to me that his conservatism was based in his religious views. His last book-- which I will abbreviate as STOP-- concentrates primarily on Kirk's beliefs, centering upon the Judeo-Christian concept of the Sabbath. Kirk declared that since 2021 he had obliged himself to observe the Sabbath as a day of rest, despite his many time-consuming commitments. And as I suspected, in STOP Kirk used his meditations on the Sabbath custom to elucidate his religion in general.

As I've stated elsewhere, I'm an agnostic who admires religion's power to tap humanity's propensity for archetypal concepts. So on one hand I'm somewhat sympathetic to Kirk's religious leanings, though not to his evangelism. Kirk insists that the intertwined faiths of Judaism and Christianity are, or should be, the universal truths for humankind, and I reject that assertion whether it comes from theists or atheists. So I can only value Kirk's formulations in a Jungian fashion, even though Kirk rejects that sort of comparativism.

The short review is that STOP is strongest when Kirk is speaking passionately about the Sabbath as a means of recapturing one's spiritual energies by "tuning out," as the hippies used to say. For instance, since Kirk's God is a being incapable of becoming tired from activity as humans tire, Kirk declares that when God finished creation, his "rest" on the seventh day was not a matter of exhaustion. Rather, he was simply looking upon his creation and deeming it good.  Similarly, for humans the Sabbath is not intended to be just a day to "veg out." Keepers of the Sabbath are supposed to be connecting with the traditions of their faith(s) and recognizing their place in God's creation. 

Since I knew Kirk was not a comparativist, I didn't attach much importance to his statement that the archaic Jews were first to formulate any custom like that of the Sabbath. If corrected on this point, Kirk could have always claimed that even if the Jewish Sabbath wasn't the first custom of its kind, it was still the best because "reasons." This is the sort of special pleading Kirk indulges in during Chapter 1, where he makes the self-aggrandizing claim that for all other religions of the ancient Near East, the gods were purely expressions of natural forces while the Hebrew God was totally outside nature. Kirk holds similar views when speaking of modern polytheism. Also in Chapter 1, he mentions how, as a child, he encountered the many gods of Hinduism and could only think of the lack of "moral order" implied by such a plenitude of competing deities. Yet in a later chapter he's not above quoting Scripture to demonstrate that the Church Fathers possessed a far-sighted tolerance toward individual customs and/or proclivities-- which IMO also explains the early evolution of polytheism:

One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind.-- Romans 14:5-6

Thankfully, Kirk mainly attacks secular movements that compete with Judeo-Christianity. He doesn't devote much space to the most execrable movement seen in his lifetime, that of the so-called "anti-racists," but that's probably because he couldn't make their grievance-happy rhetoric relevant to his theme. More space is given to the influence of modern American atheism, but most of these arguments are funneled from Stephen Meyer's RETURN OF THE GOD HYPOTHESIS, which I found interesting though not compelling, given my Jungian preferences. Kirk only attacks one Marxist for having dumbed-down the academic campuses, Herbert Marcuse. But Marcuse seems a good choice, since one Wiki-author claims that he is "considered among the most influential of the Frankfurt School critical theorists on American culture, due to his studies on student and counter-cultural movements on the 1960s." But though I realize that STOP's subject could not take on a voluminous topic, I'd like to have seen more on that subject here, since Kirk lost his life making his philosophical appeal to an academic audience.

A couple of titles have a self-help ring to them, such as "The Sabbath Improves Your Sleep," though I believe Kirk was sincere, not playing huckster-games. His most egregious special pleading appears in Chapter 8, which takes as its starting-point Exodus 20:8-11, a section emphasizing that the Hebrew Sabbath and its blessing of rest was extended not only to Hebrew believers but also to "livestock" and to slaves of any faith. Kirk labors mightily to sell the notion that the custom of the Jewish Sabbath was an "ontological" change from older cultures' beliefs about the status of the enslaved. Kirk also seeks to distance Hebrew slavery from the "moral abomination" of American chattel slavery. However, this opens Kirk up to a familiar criticism of 19th-century Christianity, which has become notorious for using a particular Scriptural citation in defense of slavery:

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.-- Genesis 9:24-25

Did 19th-century Christians quote Genesis out of context? Probably, but slavers in both North and South were still practicing Christians. Maybe they were abominable because they didn't keep their version of the Sabbath properly? Also, I tend to doubt that even the most liberal translation could erase the core idea in that passage: that the children of Ham, whoever they were, were destined to serve Hebrews. To a believer, this declaration is as much a part of sacred history as the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. Since as a comparativist I believe that the anthropological evolution of the slavery custom is far more complex than Kirk represents, I could wish he hadn't gone wading in such deep waters.

STOP offers a good portal into the mind of a celebrity evangelist. Not all of Kirk's justifications hold water, but he was still more dedicated to a vision of human improvement than, say, anyone in the Frankfurt School or any of their exploitative descendants.   

SYMBOLS, SEX AND SELECTION

 While going through books I hadn't read yet, I encountered a 1997 item by evolutionary biologist Terrence W. Deacon, THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES. This time I decided to sample a chapter out of order. I wanted to get a general idea of Deacon's approach to symbols in the context of an evolutionist's standard priority of organisms maximizing species survival through sexual selection. The random chapter I chose, "Symbolic Origins," happens to concretize one of Deacon's most interesting takes on the evolution of symbols in culture.

What was the spark that kindled the evolution of symbolic communication? If symbolic communication did not arise due to a "hopeful monster" mutation of the brain, it must have been selected for. But by what factors of hominid life? How can we discover the context of this initial push into such a novel form of communication?

One of the first ideas Deacon dismisses is the notion that language must have come about to optimize many of the standard societal interactions between prehistoric hominids of the Pleistocene. he points out that at a time when most animals, including hominids, communicated many day-to-day interactions with nonsymbolic strategies such as gestures and call-and-response vocal exchanges.    

 A generally less efficient form of communication could only have gained a foothold if it provided something different, a communicative function that was not available even in a much-elaborated system of vocal and gestural indices. Given these disadvantages, what other possible selective advantage of symbolizing could possibly have led a group of hominids to incur such costs? 

Deacon then points out that "intense sexual selection" is usually the factor that causes "significant evolutionary changes in communication in other species." He references the evolutionary use of the term "ritualization" to describe lower animals taking on patterns to optimize sexual selection, whether the patterns are gestural (male and female grebes dancing together on a lake's surface) or visual (the familiar example of the peacock's tail, a modification bad for survival but good for gene transmission). These examples initially suggested to me that Deacon meant to argue that symbolic language might have evolved to facilitate sexual liaisons, but it turned out that Deacon pursued a more roundabout conclusion.

After some general comparisons to other animal species' habits of both mating and provisioning for the young, Deacon focuses on one of the distinctive provisioning strategies of hominids: the regular seeking of meat as fodder, even in times when there are not shortages of edible plant-life. Again, all or most of the hominid strategies for mating and provisioning can be handled by nonsymbolic communications.

Although there is a vast universe of objects and relationships susceptible to nonsymbolic representation, indeed, anything that can be present to the senses, this does not include abstract or otherwise intangible objects of reference. This categorical limitation is the link between the anomalous form of communication that evolved in humans and the anomalous context of human social behavior. 

The thing that hominids do, that other animals do not do (and yes, Deacon addresses so-called "pair bonding"), is the abstract system of marriage.      

Marriage, in all its incredible variety, is the regulation of reproductive relationships by symbolic means, and it is essentially universal in human societies. It is preeminently a symbolic relationship, and owing to the lack of symbolic abilities, it is totally absent in the rest of the animal kingdom. What I am suggesting here is that a related form of regulation of reproductive relationships by symbolic means was essential for early hominids to take advantage of a hunting-provisioning subsistence strategy.

In this chapter at least, Deacon does not address the social evolution of religion in detail. But he seems to imply broadly that the pressure to negotiate a non-Rousseauan "social marriage contract" came first, and therefore all other forms of ritualization utilizing symbolic constructions came later.

Deacon concludes his argument by stressing "co-evolution:"

The argument I have presented is only an argument for the conditions which required symbolic reference in the first place, and which selected for it despite the great difficulties and costs of collectively producing and maintaining it. Much of the story of this intermediate evolutionary history, extending for over 2 million years from language origins to the present, has yet to be even imagined in any clarity. But putting evolutionary causes and effects in appropriate order and precisely identifying the anatomical correlates of this transition are a prerequisite for providing anything beyond "just so" versions of the process. The key to this is the co-evolutionary perspective which recognizes that the evolution of language took place neither inside nor outside brains, but at the interface where cultural evolutionary processes affect biological evolutionary processes.  

And I conclude my argument, for now, by adding that though I agree with the basic concept of co-evolution, I don't necessarily think that marital customs alone, with their emphasis upon "social altruism," necessarily preceded religious customs, which certainly carry much of the same valence. According to the index Deacon does not address prehistoric religion in the rest of the book either, so it would be stimulating to compare Deacon's hypothesis with those of an "evolutionary biologist" who had studied the historical manifestations of prehistoric religiosity.      

ETHOLOGICAL ASIDE

Here's a section of an online argument I had with an atheist poster who, as the final section explains, attempted to claim that early humans evolved "ethics" without any input from the abstractions of religion. Hope it makes sense on its own, which I preserve here for the possibility of further development. ______________________________________                                                        Animals of many species have demonstrated at least the possibility of very elementary reasoning processes. We know that ants use tools, as with transporting liquids. Did they reason, "if I do this thing with this thing X will happen," or did they just stumble across something that worked? We don't know. But in that case, as with the case of male lions murdering other lions' offspring, we're talking about observing possible consequences in the near future. Lions might not be able to articulate: "if I leave the lioness' other cubs alive, the lioness won't have milk for my cubs." But it's a zero sum game that a lion might observe, not any more abstract that making plans to find food. We know that cougars cache their excess of food, which also indicates some sense of future outcomes, though some have argued that the animals don't retain the memory of their caches very long. My earlier example of large rats giving in to smaller rats while in wrestling-play applies here too: it doesn't take abstraction for the big rat to figure out that he has to give a little to get a little. ALL of these examples depend on time-sensitive observations imbued with self-interest. But it takes abstract correlation of many factors to make the conclusion, "Hey, my cubs with a strange lion came out good and the cubs with my sister didn't; ergo, better avoid incest." It's particularly counter-intuitive because offspring with relations don't ALWAYS show immediate physical flaws. Maybe some primates *might* make some such connections, but if so we're getting back into the deep end of the brain-pool. Your concept of animals forming societies through an "ethics" based on acceptable/non-acceptable behavior is also predicated with pre-cognitive reasoning processes. I brought up the lack of strong incest avoidance in lower animals to show one of the places where humans diverged from animals, to give an example of an ethical conclusion founded in abstract conceptualizing. We know that in modern times tribal-level humans correlate their incest injunctions with their religious beliefs, so it's not a giant leap to theorize a parallel development in prehistoric eras. So again, your attempt to segregate "ethics" from "religion" is a dogmatic belief that isn't even justified by available anthropological and ethological evidence.    

INTERRUPTED MEDLEY

I'm putting a short hold on the next EVIL post, to respond to a comment by AT-AT Pilot in the comments to Part 2. One of his two references included a link to a post on the EDUCATED IMAGINATION blog, excepting a section from one of Northrop Frye's essays, albeit one devoted entirely to the Christian religion he practiced, and not to the literary works he more often analyzed. 

In an argument against the social tendencies toward literal readings of Biblical passages, Frye says in part:

In short, the Bible is explicitly antireferential in structure, and deliberately blocks off any world of presence behind itself. In Christianity, everything in the Old Testament is a “type” of which the “antitype” or existential reality is in the New Testament. This turns the Bible into a double mirror reflecting only itself to itself. How do we know the Gospel is true? Because it fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament. But how do we know that the prophecies of the Old Testament are true? Because they are fulfilled by the Gospel. Is there any evidence for the existence of Jesus as a major historical figure outside the New Testament? None really, and the writers of the New Testament obviously preferred it that way. As long as we assume a historical presence behind the Bible to which it points, the phrase “word of God,” as applied both to the Bible and the person of Christ, is only a dubious syllepsis. In proportion as the presence behind disappears, it becomes identified with the book, and the phrase begins to make sense. As we continue to study the significance of the fact that the Bible is a book, the sense of presence shifts from what is behind the book to what is in front of it. (CW 4, 82-6)

I like to think I fully understand Frye's point in stressing the circular nature of the Bible-- and possibly, by extension, of most or all other religions. However, Christianity in particular has encouraged some degree of literalism in its discourse, not least as a result of grounding many events of Scripture in the perspective of a linear history. True, the Bible does not offer the sort of close chronicling of minutiae that readers today expect of "history." Further, many narratives in the Bible that purport to relate historical events are disputed by the evidence assembled by modern historiography. Yet it's unquestionable that Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, centered all narratives within a *simulacrum* of linear history. 

Thus, certain key events happen in a straight line; the Jewish captivity in Egypt always precedes Rome's dominance of Judaea, for example. The Biblical writers tie all these events together with the repetition of religious images or tropes, as Frye says-- but the use of history is meant to convince the unconverted of the vastness of God's scheme for humankind. All three "religions of the Book" profited enormously from grounding their religious narratives within the sphere of "real" history. 

Reading the Frye excerpt coincides with my having read another chapter of Bataille's LITERATURE AND EVIL-- and, as in Part 2 of my essay-series, I find myself again endorsing Bataille's view over Frye's. In a chapter devoted to William Blake, Bataille agrees with Blake's idea that "Poetic Genius is the true Man," Bataille extended that statement, contending that "there is nothing in religion that cannot be found in poetry." The chapter's main point concerns Bataille taking issue with a particular Jungian scholar who, in Bataille's opinion, sought to reduce Blake's narratives to Jungian paradigms. Bataille, who disputed any philosophy that smacked of idealism, concocted an interesting take on how Poetry "destroys immediate reality" yet "admits the exteriority of tools or of walls in relation to the ego."

Though poetry does not accept sense-data in their naked state, it is by no means always contemptuous of the outer world. Rather, it challenges the precise limitations of objects between themselves, while admitting their external nature. It denies and it destroys immediate reality because it sees in it the screen which conceals the true face of the world from us. Nevertheless poetry admits the exteriority of tools or of walls in relation to the ego. Blake’s lesson is founded on the value in itself, extrinsic to the ego, of poetry. -- LITERATURE AND EVIL.

For Bataille, then, Poetry subordinates but does not negate all "real-world referentiality." I would say that, even though I don't concur with Bataille that Poetry and Religion are consubstantial, Religion follows the same dynamic, in which even linear history is subsumed by the vision of godhood continually interacting with mortals confined within, but not limited to, that history. If I wanted this essay to go on forever, I'd bring in the ways "real-world referentiality" also takes in the endorsement of specific, work-oriented goals, found in both religion and literature.

Next, back to considerations about taste, sadism, and perceptions of evil.

 

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 4

 For reasons I'll enlarge upon shortly, I was able to finish STORIES WITHIN STORIES, including the chapter I skipped earlier. The reason is simple: the latter chapters of the book concentrated on explicating several modern fantasies I hadn't read, and since I'd already got the overall sense of Attebery's project, I could give them all no more than a cursory once-over.

Even though I broke this review into sections for ease of posting comments, that procedure has one distinct advantage over the usual summary approach: it allows me to anticipate some of the directions in which the argument seems to be trending. In Part 3, even though I'd not seen Attebery use the word "appropriation" in the sense popularized by Roland Barthes, I recognized that this was essentially the argument Attebery was promulgating. Before that chapter, the author had mentioned the word "appropriation" once in the introduction, but in a fairly neutral manner, which MIGHT have been merely discussing the overall political climate for fantasy fiction (or, for that matter, any fiction).

So I feel some vindication when I reach Chapter 5, with the forbidding title, "Colonial Fantasy." and find Attebery discussing Australian author Patricia Wrightson. Attebery gets fairly exercised at Wrightson's hubris, as a White Australian, for having utilized Aboriginal religious concepts in her fantasy novels, and the "A" word is not far from Attebery's lips:

As with similar endeavors in Canada, the United States, and other colonial locales, a goal of the [colonial] project... was to get rid of indigenous peoples through a combination of assimilation and genocide while APPROPRIATING [my emphasis] their songs, stories and rituals.

Any comparison between (a) a fantasy-author invoking religious concepts not strictly part of the author's heritage to (b) a general process of colonial officials enforcing "assimilation and genocide" on real people is, quite clearly, a thoroughly reprehensible equation. But, for what it's worth, in the same chapter Atteberry claims (despite his earlier negative remarks on an Alan Garner book) that he has no problem with fantasists using "myths of vanished civilizations." Though earlier he criticized Campbell's monomythic interpretation of such myths, here he claims that such myth-tales "no longer belong to anyone but are legitimately part of a cultural commons." But the stories of "living traditions," like those of the Aboriginal native, are different. "They are still surrounded by rituals and obligations; they demand that the listener live by their rules."

But do they, really? When an Aboriginal native orally relates the myth-stories of his people to a group of Australian tourists, certainly the tourists are expected to listen seriously and not critique the stories. But if a modern Aboriginal fiction-writer did what Patricia Wrightson did-- creating a entirely fictional story in which the myths of his people were (presumably) depicted with the same fidelity as the oral storyteller-- what "authority," to use Atteberry's favorite word, does a purely fictional story have over listeners not of the Aborigine's tradition? 

Attebery's mistake is ironic, given that elsewhere he expressly distinguished between traditional myth-narratives and fictional stories based upon them. For instance, in Chapter 1 he states uncategorically that the most famous works of Ovid and Apuleius "function as fantasy to the degree that they are not authorized or reverent retellings of myth... they play with the material, inventing details, rearranging incidents, and inviting a response of amusement rather than awe." 

Tangentially, Attebery never mentions the financial motives for "in-tradition" authors to nullify "extra-traditional" competitors. But the motive remains present, nonetheless. I gave a real-world example of such motives in this 2017 post.

A fuller discussion of the chimera of "appropriation" must await a separate article. Therefore I'll wrap up this part of the review by stating that i the latter sections of the book Atteberry very much thumps the tub for numerous new authors of fantasy who meet his political criteria, while granting older authors either negative assessments (Zelazny, Lewis) or cursory attention (A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard). And there's nothing wrong with this priority in itself. Attebery should absolutely champion the books he likes best. But his politicized justifications for his tastes are up for counter-critique.

I said "this part of the review" because at the end of Part 3 I said that I would speak to another of Atteberry's mistakes regarding "the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture." 

Though Attebery is undoubtedly aware of the tremendous difference between the two cultures, he doesn't make much of the matter. In Chapter 4 he states that "oral traditional stories are always formulaic," though he does a bit of a take-back by claiming that traditional tale-tellers can still choose "the lesser known among alternative formulaic elements." This breeds a somewhat tortured comparison to the interaction in modern stories' "formulaic elements" and "nonformulaic components." But whenever he praises deeper psychological insights in modern fantasists, as against the usually flat characterizations seen in traditional tales, Attebery plows over the question of differing venues. In dominantly oral cultures, a traditional storyteller has no motive for memorizing deep psychological insights for Sleeping Beauty or Rumpelstiltskin; they're just baggage that slows down an orally relayed story. Such fine details are only valuable to literate cultures, who inculcate the habit of reading their stories in static media, where detail can be accurately preserved.

Similarly, at the end of Chapter 2, he gives approbation to the just-discussed works of Hope Mirrlees and Charles Williams because each creates a viewpoint character who "brings to the world of myth and magic a contemporary sensibility and skepticism." This is part and parcel of Attebery's attempt to bestow upon 20th-century fantasy some of the gravitas of Modernist literature. But I definitely do not think that the fantasy genre is typified by authors' emphases of "contemporary sensibility and skepticism," even when those attitudes are rejected. Again, Attebery is entitled to prefer fantasies that signal questions of Modernist skepticism. But his analysis fails any strong test of logic.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 3

 Since I'm not sure I'll finish STORIES ABOUT STORIES, I skipped Chapter 3 and read Chapter 4, at least in part because it concerns Attebery's antagonistic relationship to Joseph Campbell.

But before getting to anything about Campbell, it occurred to me to relate Attebery's definition of myth as "any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief" to one of the first "mythographers" I evaluated on this blog, Eric Gould. In the work referenced here, Gould coined a term I've often used, "mythicity," but he did not share Attebery's broad valorization of any mythic tale simply because it "authorized belief."

The fact that classical and totemistic myths have to refer to some translinguistic fact-- to the Gods and Nature-- proves not that there are Gods, but that our talents for interpreting our place in the world may be distinctly limited by the nature of language.

In my own essay I registered my disagreement with Gould on that point. Nevertheless, Attebery seems to have vaulted over the epistemological question, "what authority does religious 'belief' possess, even if it expresses the collective worldview of a given tribe, nation, or ethnicity?" I would be the last to validate the Doubting Thomas fallacy of the materialists, "If you can't dissect the risen body of Christ, that means no such body ever existed." But belief can be epistemologically valid insofar as its narratives reproduce epistemological patterns that are, in a sense, common to all human experience, not just to particular human groupings. For me at least, that transcendence of particular cultures trumps the "limits of language" that Eric Gould finds so disconcerting.

At base, Joseph Campbell shared this belief in such patterns, though he was, as I've said elsewhere, rather scattershot in his hermeneutics during his unquestionably distinguished career. But since Campbell and some of his fellow travelers are not validating myth based only upon whether the myth-narratives "authorize" a particular group's "belief," it's not surprising to me that Atteberry implicitly dismisses many comparativists that came into prominence in the 1960s, lumping together "Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, and Mircea Eliade" as proponents of "myth criticism." Attebery is initially a bit circumspect about pinning down what he doesn't like about myth criticism, though immediately after these citations he brackets the myth-critics as sharing "the assumption that all myths are psychically available to modern writers and readers." Attebery does not at first raise the Barthesian specter of "appropriation," the idea that it's wrong to pilfer cultural artifacts from cultures not one's own. The author's initial reticence may come about because he segues from talking about the cultural influence of the myth-critics (presumably in America and Western Europe, though Attebery doesn't specify) to discussing the concomitant rise of the mass-market proliferation of the fantasy genre in the same decade and thereafter. But when he turns his attention to Campbell's HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, it's clear the author has that devil Appropriation on his mind.

The problem with Campbell's monomyth as an analytical tool  is that it always works because it simplifies every story to the point where nothing but the monomyth is left. It ignores the many mythic stories that do not have questing heroes, and it leaves out the culturally defined values and symbols that make each tradition unique.

I disagree with only one part of this statement. As I may have said elsewhere on this blog, I have not read HERO in several years, and have not ever reviewed it, but I think it the least epistemologically valid of his works. If I had my way, Campbell would be much better known for his "four functions." But I must admit that Campbell's concept of an over-arching "super-myth," while fallible in many ways, had the effect of getting a lot of people to check out that particular book, including (allegedly) George Lucas. 

Yet Attebery makes the opposite mistake. When he bestows upon traditional myths a uniqueness that sets those stories apart from other cognate stories, he makes the same mistake Barthes did in MYTHOLOGIES. Long before there existed either "capitalist" or "post-industrial" cultures, so-called "traditional cultures" constantly swapped or stole story-ideas from each other. Did Norse Odin precede Germanic Wotan? No one knows, and no one should care. The same principle should apply to the intermingling of elements from disparate cultures in order to craft modern magical fantasies. We would not have a LORD OF THE RINGS if Tolkien had not synthesized many myth-traditions, not least the very disparate traditions of Celtic tales and medieval Christian religion. Alan Garner's WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN is nowhere near the greatness of RINGS. But Garner's synthesis was a good one, and does not deserve to be downgraded because (according to Attebery) he "mixed mythologies indiscriminately," with "Nordic dwarves, Celtic elves, a Tolkienian evil force named Nastrond, and a Merlinesque wizard who guards a cave of sleeping warriors like those of the Germanic Frederick Barbarosa." It's odd that Attebery should invoke a 12th century German ruler in concert with a "Merlinesque wizard," rather than referencing the "sleeping warrior" myths about King Arthur, who's more frequently associated with Merlin.

In the end, the argument comes down not to logic but taste. Attebery clearly prefers modern fantasy authors to pick some corpus of culturally related myth-stories and to build from that corpus. But as I said, Tolkien himself did not do this, and as yet I have not seen the author critiquing the Oxford don on the same terms he uses toward both Campbell and Alan Garner. I too can think of many bad admixtures of disparate traditional stories, but that does not prove that "mix and match" is a bad strategy in itself. I also think Atteberry wants authors to stick to particular mythoi so that he can judge better if the creators do what he thinks most valuable: ringing in modern interpretive changes to traditional lore. 

If I make it through another chapter, I plan to address one of the major omissions in Attebery's schema: the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 2

Upon finishing the second chapter, I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into Brian Attebery's STORIES ABOUT STORIES.I thought his 1980 book on American fantasy provided a good overview of the genre. But here, the critic seems to be a little too focused on trying to bring the fantasy-genre into the sphere of literary modernism. He can make a statement like, "the principal difference between the Modernists' mythic method and that of fantasy is that the latter constructs apparently seamless narratives that put the mythic on the same diegetic plane as the modern, or at least modern sensibility." And yet, Attebery keeps coming back to the notion that the two are more strongly related by their mutual desire to re-interpret archaic myths for the purpose of modern audiences.

Certainly Attebery did a lot of homework to support his thesis. Long ago, I read the Ballantine edition of Hope Mirrlees' 1926 fantasy novel LUD-IN-THE-MIST, and retained a more or less favorable impression. But I never researched Mirrlees herself, and Attebery informed me that not only did the author run in the same circles as the esteemed literary author Virginia Woolf, both of them had a "mutual mentor, the Cambridge don and classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison." I certainly find that datum of passing interest, given Harrison's key influence upon the mythic analyses of the Cambridge Ritualists-- though my online research did not confirm Attebery's claim that Harrison was Mirrlees' "life companion." But despite the author's intelligent discussion of Mirlees' sole fantasy novel, Attebery almost seems determined to name-drop figures from respectable literature and scholarship in order to build up the repute of the fantasy genre, which was in Mirrlees' day far more socially marginal than works by people like Woolf and Harrison. 

A more key point of departure for me is Attebery's definition of myth. I certainly did not expect anything comparable to my own, or even to that of my key influence Joseph Campbell (though Campbell is given various citations throughout STORIES). But on the book's second page, Attebery provides his definition: "throughout this book, myth is used to designate any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief." And throughout the three sections I've read, Attebery's definition is meant to draw a line between myth, stories upon which archaic cultures center belief, and fantasy, whose virtue is, as the book's subtitle says, that of "the remaking of myth."

To maintain this distinction, Attebery frequently writes as if the archaic myths were changeless, while literary fantasies are all about ringing in changes on that changelessness. I feel sure a critic as learned as Attebery is aware that myths do change over time, even though the religions built around them may insist that the sacred narratives remain immutable over generations. 

Joseph Campbell's work supplied several examples of such cultural shifts, but I'll confine myself to one. In the chapter "Ancient India" in ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY, Campbell describes the religion of the so-called "Aryan" tribes that invaded the Indian subcontinent circa 1500 B.C., which extolled the warrior-god Indra, celebrated for having killed the demonic dragon Vrita. However, a millennium later, the epic Mahabharata introduces the idea that Vrita was a Brahmin, and that Indra's slaying was therefore a crime, no matter Vrita's actions. Campbell interprets this change in the mythic narrative surrounding Indra as a shift in India's cultural matrix, as the former Aryan overlords were assimilated, via intermarriage, by the older tribes then denoted as "Dravidian," a congeries of peoples with very different priorities.

So for me the essence of myth is not the assertion of unchanging narratives, even though religions may claim that the narratives don't change in order to persuade the laity. In Chapter 1, Attebery asserts that we don't know to what extent Roman authors like Ovid and Apuleius really believed in the myths they depicted. But by the same token, we don't really know that the first Native American to tell a story of the trickster-god Coyote was a True Believer. Maybe he'd heard another tribal storyteller tell a myth-story about Raven, and he decided to tell a different story about Coyote for his own tribe. All sorts of motives can go into the making of all sorts of stories. The most one can say is that, as long as a given religious myth endures, someone may hold belief in its literal truth. But is that really fundamentally different from the enduring appeal of literary myths? Their adherents may never believe that the stories were true accounts of the gods, but they often give just as much devotion to all the fine points of those stories, parsing out just as many meanings as the practitioners of religious hermeneutics. And as distinctions between belief and unbelief grow hazy, we find ourselves back looking into Tolkien's "cauldron of story" for our answers, if not also to Jung's collective unconscious. And, to reiterate the conclusion I made in MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3, the base motive to myths both religious and literary may be to propel the listener into the realms of sacred space and sacred time.

SUPERNORMAL POETICS REVISITED

Now, Campbell did make a somewhat similar argument, that on some occasions certain creatures seemed to prefer the more "unnatural" stimulus. Hoffman, perhaps in line with his 2010 source, goes so far as to claim that ALL creatures do, including humans. "A male Homo sapiens doesn't just like a female with breast implants as much as a female au natural: he likes it far more." His footnote for this and similar assertions also cite the 2010 book, but whatever that work's data, I find the conclusion fatuous.-- READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES, LAST PART.

The fatuity of Hoffman's claim doesn't need much elaboration. Without even looking at his footnoted source, I surmise that its "proof" of male preference is derived from purely visual tests, where male subjects look at photos, possibly subliminal, of the different types of feminine breasts. This of course would be a thoroughly incomplete study without invoking tactile sensations as well. But try to persuade some research center to give the go-ahead on a study in which a set number of male subjects grope a set number of both real and fake boobies.

But I will elaborate upon Campbell. In this blog's infancy I examined in detail Campbell's supernormal poetics (my term), in this 2009 blogpost. Whereas Hoffman rejects the "existence claims" of myth and religion, Campbell embraces them in the following terms:

[Campbell]  suggests that though mythology cannot be rationally understood, it may be "viewed in the light of biological psychology as a function of the human nervous system, precisely homologous to the innate and learned sign stimuli that release and direct the energies of nature." Campbell, building largely on the ethological researches of Lorenz and Tinbergen, calls this psychobiological system "the supernormal sign stimulus," and implies that it is through such stimuli that both myth and art work their wiles on audiences.

There was a time when I was very invested in Campbell's theory. When I was writing my as-yet-unpublished book on the superhero phenomenon, I initially devoted a chapter to the supernormal sign theory. However, I soon realized, through close analysis of that chapter of PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, that an awful lot of Campbell's heuristic conjectures proved shaky. For instance, later in my 2009 essay, I extrapolated from Campbell the idea of "normal sign stimuli," but Campbell never actually renders such a conception. It's possible that the author was exposed to the semiotics of his time, but if so, he's too caught up in explicating supernormal signs to worry about their opposite. Further, though in the essay I agreed with Campbell's quoted poet A.E. Houseman that "intellect is not the fount of poetry," I caviled that Houseman had not given intellect its due in the process of making art.

Much later I expanded upon the intertwining of intellect and imagination, under the more general terms "cognitive restraint" and "affective freedom," in this appropriately titled essay. And though I favor the poetics of Campbell and Houseman far more than those of Hoffman and Richard Dawkins, I tried in this and other essays to strike a balance with respect to how these two aspects of human existence affect creativity:

Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

FIRESTARTERS

 Another response-post; context should be evident.

__________

You don't have the slightest concept of how much experimentation would have gone into something like the making of fire. First, fire has to occur naturally, from bolts of lightning and/or volcanic matter setting combustible objects on fire. Slowly early people, doubtless in separate tribes all over the globe, have to pick up on the idea that fire might be worth incorporating into tribal life for its warming properties, even though it's both intangible and harmful to the touch. That means Thoth knows how much trial and error those people had to go through to figure out what materials kept fire going-- not always a simple matter, since fire will burn dry wood but will not flourish on green wood. And who knows how the idea of nurturing coals even started, or the use of tree fungus as tinder, or your fatuous idea of just "rubbing two sticks together."

And the really funny thing is that all that experimentation took place among primitives who were, en masse, still religious. Their science did not require the massive arrogance of atheist materialists, who presume that knowing this or that datum about material forces meant that they knew everything about all of existence.

ANOTHER FORUM-DERIVED ANSWER WITHOUT THE QUESTION

 Back to my debates with online materialists, one of whom tried to counter my position with the idea of "atheists who still believe in things supernatural, just not gods."

__________

If you choose to search this forum for the word "psychic" you will see that I've noted, possibly a half dozen times, that belief in psychic forces does not presuppose belief in gods.

That, however, does not mean that the former belief was not influenced by the growth of materialist interpretations of the universe. 

On this page I responded to (name withheld) as to previous posts in which I asserted the possibility that gods were not necessarily purely imaginary, but may rather have been inchoate forces molded by human imagination into culture-specific icons. This theory is not one in which I "believe," but is rather an agnostic counter to the materialist belief that all gods must be purely imaginary.

But this informal postulate, which I did not originate, was also influenced by mainstream materialism, albeit without being in any way identical with mainstream materialism. This "spiritual materialism" is what is represented by your non-mainstream atheists who assert that supernatural forces are generated by humans and disembodied principles rather than by gods.

I've said repeatedly that theism and atheism grow out of intellectual discourse. Theism is almost certainly first. It's possible that early man did sense what the Polynesians called "mana" in both living and unliving phenomena, but such inchoate forces lack any power to personify the mysteries of the universe for human meditation. Thus we get the articulation of "departmental gods" who administer different aspects of reality, whether physical phenomena like storms or social phenomena like war. Possibly in their earliest forms one would not even call such figures "gods," but something more like the millions-of-years-later Japanese concept of kami.

​

This informal postulate, though, does not assume that even if this is the way belief in gods evolved, that tribal peoples were conscious of such formulations. They would not have been able to stand back from their own assumptions, just like modern materialists. Therefore it's probable that most tribal humans really did believe that gods had existence independent of human interaction. Naturally any given tribe would have become aware at an early date that the neighboring tribe might have different gods, but this would not have led to the assumption that all gods were imaginary in nature. Rather, it probably led to henotheism, the idea that rival gods exist in the common universe but that the god of one's own tribe is the biggest and the best. This form of theism appears in a few Old Testament passages in which it's implied that the Hebrew God does share his celestial space with rival gods, rather than being the only one.

Eventually we do see the historical development of actual atheism, the spawn of intellectual discourse that I've fruitlessly tried to explain to my opponents. It might have appeared earlier than the documents of the Greeks, but that's our main source for the history of that philosophy. One assumes that theists pushed back against the atheists, as attested by Socrates and his deadly cup, but theists were not the only opponents of atheists. 

It were better, indeed, to accept the legends of the gods than to bow beneath that yoke of destiny which the natural philosophers have imposed.-- Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus.

We have only sketchy documents of what figures like Epicurus and Lucretius believed, but I think it likely that they are among our first "spiritual materialists." Lucretius believes in the gods as principles more than as departmental chiefs, and while he's not agreeing with "natural philosophers" who believed that Greek science explained everything, he's been influenced by them.

So when we come down at last to modern spiritual materialists, we are dealing with individuals like Lucretius, who have some notion that supernatural forces exist but do not conceive of gods in the sense of mainstream theism. Moderns who attest to supernatural force residing in their chakras, but not in the universe as literal gods, have been influenced by mainstream materialism; in a "man is the measure of all things" formula. By taking this human-centered form of supernatural belief, the supernatural materialists are still subscribing to one doctrine taken from mainstream materialists: that gods are not necessary to explain the functioning of the universe. And thus the discourse of the supernatural materialists remains influenced by atheist discourse, accepting that at least some phenomena are entirely explained by material evidence, including the chakras, which may have also started from theistic belief but grew independent of it thanks to the influence of mainstream materialist discourse.

METAPHYSICAL EVIDENCE

 Materialists and their opponents, whom I will call "idealists" for convenience, have both written a great deal of irrelevant nonsense about the purpose and meaning of religion. But on one aspect of religion they are on the same page. Both believe that religion depends on human interpretation of the universe. That page then gets torn in half from the groups' respective valuations of that interpretation. Materialists believe that human interpretation not based in physical evidence amounts to no more than projection, wishful thinking, and that therefore gods cannot exist if there is no physical evidence for them. Idealists believe that human interpretation is absolutely necessary for humans to understand their position in the universe, and that to extol physical evidence above human intentionality is what Georges Bataille termed "the worship of dead matter."

While materialists are almost all on the exact same page with respect to physical evidence, idealists may have varying opinions on what constitutes "metaphysical evidence," that is, evidence of anything that transcends the physical, which can include anything from Plato's Forms to the Christian creator-god to the entire panoply of the Greek pantheon. Since there are so many multivalent rationales, I won't attempt to cover them all here, but instead will just discuss two forms of metaphysical evidence that do not depend on the materialist's fetish for dead-matter evidence.

The first is the rationale of PARALLEL EVOLUTION of religious concepts, which suggest a continuity of concepts used by worshipers who are not in direct contact with one another. 

For instance, the 19th through the 21st centuries made available to modern analysts the many Indian variations on the practice of yoga. Of particular interest is the discipline of kundalini, in its current form a synthesis of assorted yogic schools, and whose essential concept is that through breathing techniques a practitioner can summon up energies that manifest upon the spinal column like a rising cobra.

To a dogmatic materialist, this is just an airy fantasy, at most a self-deception brought on by derangement of the senses. But to an idealist it means something if an entirely separate culture evolves a parallel metaphysics utilizing similar imagery. I'm far from the only person who's noticed parallel imagery between that of the Indian yogis and the god-imagery of Dynastic Egypt from about 2500 BCE. Here's one such online comparison:

I'm interested in the possibility that Egyptian religious
ideas were transmitted to India and eventually became the
source or a contributing source for what we now call kundalini
yoga. I know there has been some vague New Age and
Theosophical speculation along these lines, but now I'm
beginning to wonder if it might just possibly be an actual
historical fact.

The associations would be between (1) the forehead uraeus
and the brow (ajna) chakra, and (2) the Egyptian solar disk
above a figure's head and the crown (Sahasrara) chakra.

This is obviously not the sort of evidence a materialist wants, because one can't subject either an Egyptian worshiper of Ra or a 6th century yogi to close analysis. But to a comparative idealist, the recurrence of imagery is relevant to what Mircea Eliade called the magician's "techniques of ecstacy." To the comparativist, it's unimportant as to whether the magician/yogi/worshiper actually contacts a god, or whether any of them manifest supernatural powers (Sansrkit siddhi). Parallel mythopoeic concepts of this kind, such as a magician's power manifesting as a serpent cresting upon the magus's skull, are not explicable by the sort of aimless fantasizing that materialists attribute to all religion.

The second rationale is that of WIDESPREAD AFFIRMATION. Materialists like to claim that archaic religious experiences were fantasies thought up by clever con-men who tricked the rank and file into believing their wish-dreams of benevolent gods. This facile condemnation, though, is a little harder to sell in modern times, when the scientific theories beloved by materialists have gained so much persuasive power. The results of a 2002 Gallup poll show a wide dispersion of American citizens-- 1,509 in all, contacted via telephone interviews and thus not restricted to one area-- testifying as to religious experiences.

In a June 2002 Gallup survey*, Gallup asked respondents to rate the statement, " I have had a profound religious experience or awakening that changed the direction of my life," on a scale from 0 to 5, with 0 standing for "does not apply at all" and 5 for "applies completely." Forty-one percent of Americans -- which projects to about 80 million adults nationwide -- said the statement completely applies to them.

In the latest survey, as in previous surveys on the topic, women and people without a college degree were somewhat more likely than others to give ratings of ‘5', but there was little difference by age. Religious experiences are not tied solely to those with formal religious involvement. For example, even 25% of people with no religious preference said the statement completely applied to them, as did 27% of people who said they rarely or never attend religious services.

Gallup first polled on this topic in 1962, when 20% responded, "yes," when asked, "Would you say that you have ever had a ‘religious or mystical experience,' that is, a moment of sudden religious insight or awakening?" In subsequent measurements of this question over the last four decades, the percentage has hovered near the one-third mark.

Why should there be, according to Gallup, an increase in such experiences in comparison to a similar Gallup poll in 1962? Given the familiar claim that Americans aren't going to church very much in the 21st century, why should there be any increase in testimonies of religious experience? Again, this is a form of "metaphysical evidence" that the materialist cannot countenance, because there is no way to prove it with the tools of the laboratory. To materialists, if you cannot place a phenomenon under a microscope, it must not exist-- and of course, their fancied "evidence" for this posture remains entirely tautological.

AGNOSTICISM ASIDES

 Below are some assorted thoughts from Thomas Huxley on the agnostic movement for which he became famous, though he insisted that he merely followed earlier examples set in archaic cultures. The essay "Agnosticism" was written in 1889 and replied to what Huxley considered a certain churchman's inaccurate definition of agnosticism.

________

So I declare, as plainly as I can, that I am unable to show cause why these transferable devils should not exist; nor can I deny that, not merely the whole Roman Church, but many Wiccan “infidels” of no mean repute, do honestly and firmly believe that the activity of such like demonic beings is in full swing in this year of grace 1889.

Nevertheless, as good Bishop Butler says, “probability is the guide of life;” and it seems to me that this is just one of the cases in which the canon of credibility and testimony, which I have 7  ventured to lay down, has full force. So that, with the most entire respect for many (by no means for all) of our witnesses for the truth of demonology, ancient and modern, I conceive their evidence on this particular matter to be ridiculously insufficient to warrant their conclusion. 

####

When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis,”—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion.

####

This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a place among the members of that remarkable confraternity of antagonists, long since deceased, but of green and pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every variety of philosophical and theological opinion was represented there, and expressed itself with entire openness; most of my colleagues were “ists” of one sort or another; and, however kind and friendly they might be, I, the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with, could not fail to have some of the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the 11  appropriate title of “agnostic.” It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the term took; and when the Spectator had stood godfather to it, any suspicion in the minds of respectable people, that a knowledge of its parentage might have awakened was, of course, completely lulled. 

#####

If anyone had preferred this request to me, I should have replied that, if he referred to agnostics, they have no creed; and, by the nature of the case, cannot have any. Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, “Try all things, hold fast by that which is good”; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him; it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him. 

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

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.

THE READING RHEUM: PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 1-2 (1678-1684)

 

Despite my having made a relatively recent reference in this post to John Bunyan’s 17^th-century Christian allegory, I never had any desire to read the thing. But the work was nominated by a local book club, so I gave it a go.

As I expected, PILGRIM’S PROGRESS was not stimulating in and of itself, but it does furnish me with some insights regarding its place in European Lit, not least because its two sections—published respectively in 1678 and 1684—have never been out of print, unlike the rest of Bunyan’s largely theological writings. Both parts take the form of a dream stemming from someone who may or may not be Bunyan. The first part’s narrative concerns a Christian seeker, literally named Christian, who leaves behind his wife and children in order to find his way to Heaven—though it’s not actually stated that he has died. Though death would be a fitting excuse for deserting one’s family, the allegory presents Christian’s actions as those of a living man, and thus emblematic of a good Christian’s priorities. I’ve read nothing about the genesis of Part 2. Yet since it concerns how Christian’s wife and children follow in his footsteps and also attain Heaven, I can’t help that one of Bunyan’s contemporaries gave the author some static about the immorality of family-desertion, even if Bunyan believed that Scripture justified the original act. So Part 2 is “the Rest of the Family Gets to Heaven,” with a narrative so close to the first one that it might be deemed a foretaste of Hollywood sequel-itis.

Since I found Bunyan’s religious philosophy shallow at best, the book’s primary interest to me is its place in the history of fantasy-literature. Bunyan, having been born in 1628, belonged to the generation after the reign of the Elizabethan playwrights. Some of these playwrights were staunch realists, like Ben Jonson, but others, like Marlowe and Shakespeare, had no problem with portraying fantasy-content on stage, and often in a much more freestyle manner than one got in the religious plays of the Middle Ages. Bunyan feels like a throwback to the era of Christian allegories like ‘Everyman,” and though there’s ample fantasy content in both parts of PROGRESS, figures like giants and demons are rendered nugatory since they take place within the confines of a dream. (In my system this would make the whole work “uncanny,” BTW.)

I’ve argued elsewhere that the 17^th century started out as a more realistic age, as exemplified by the successful reception of Cervantes’s 1605 DON QUIXOTE, a burlesque of the chivalric legends that had delighted previous generations. But PROGRESS may be an even more insidious attack on the noble knights of Arthur. Christian’s peregrinations usually consist of the seeker encountering false prophets, with names like “Mr. Legality” and “Mr. Worldly Wise,” who try to lure him from his path. But on one occasion, Christian dons armor and fights a similarly outfitted demon named Apollyon. The fact that Christian loses the fight, but remains on his path nonetheless, may have signified something to Bunyan that escapes me. Certainly Part 1 doesn’t emphasize the combative mode, but combative elements do surface again in Part 2. “Christiana” and her children encounter, as did her husband, giants and demons, but since they’re not able to fight, a knightly savior, “Great-Heart” sorts out the fiends in their stead. Neither section of PROGRESS is a combative work, but it may be that the scenes of violence—notably, one in which Great-Heart beheads the giant Despair-- may have played a role in the enduring popularity of PROGRESS. (A few centuries later, the author Philip Jose Farmer paid Great-Heart homage by inventing a new character, “Greatheart Silver,” for the pulp-oriented paperback series WEIRD HEROES.)

I had a lot of trouble making progress through PROGRESS, given that its philosophy is simplistic and its humor mostly confined to the funny names of the false prophets. The only section I really liked appeared in Part 1. Christian gets his armor, appropriately, from an armory, and in that holy sanctum the owners have stored a host of famous death-dealing weapons from the Old and New Testaments, such as the sling of David, “the hammer and nail with which Jael slew Sisera,” and Samson’s “jawbone of an ass.” Bunyan never makes any studied observations about the significance of this sacred arsenal, but the mere fact that he chose to enumerate so many of these Biblical weapons may say something about his ideas of “muscular Christianity.”

MYTHCOMICS: “THE ONE CLEAR WAY” (CHRONO CRUSADE, 2004)

 

 

As much as I admire the mythic tropes informing Daisuke Moriyama’s CHRONO CRUSADE, I’ve determined that they don’t cohere well enough to bring about the complexity and concrescence of a full-fledged mythcomic. I’ve occasionally identified some long serials, like HELLSING and DANCE IN THE VAMPIREBUND,  as episodic novels that possess such concrescence. But CRUSADE never feels as unified as these works. Structurally I label it as a “basic serial,” often an assemblage of short stories, vignettes, short arcs and long arcs, having a closer resemblance to works like MAYO CHIKI and NISEKOI. And just as I was able to rate one arc within NISEKOI as a mythcomic, CRUSADE does have one long arc that proves sufficiently concrescent.

I’ve chosen to label this concluding arc the title of its first chapter, “The One Clear Way,” because these nine chapters embody the central heroine’s quest to find her way in a chaotic universe. I’ve already written a summary of the manga’s concept for my review of the anime TV collection, and so won’t repeat the details here. All I need mention is that early chapters establish that heroine Rosette Christopher has made a demon-pact in order to rescue her beloved brother Joshua, and that her will to use the services of “good demon” Chrono has the effect of shortening her life. At the commencement of the arc, Chrono and Rosette have mounted an attack on the demon-lord Aion, both in order to liberate Joshua and to foil Aion’s plans to destroy Earth. Chrono warns Rosette not to call upon his power, since she’ll drain her own life force. Rosette then states her credo (at least, according to the authorized English translation):

I’d rather go forward together, getting bloodied and bruised along the way, than be unharmed but have to do it all alone. And if I can make that happen—I have no problem offering my soul to a demon.

I should note that, even though the Magdalene Order is nominally religious, its main purpose is that of fighting literal demons who imperil the physical world, not the inner demons that plague human souls as Christianity imagines that struggle. It would be impossible for a Christian nun to offer her soul to a demon, given that there are no “good demons” in orthodox Christianity. In essence, Rosette’s real religion is her familial devotion to her brother, and so everything she does has the purpose of bonding with him once more—though arguably she forms an even deeper bond with her “demon lover” Chrono. Yet her struggle also reflects the need of all human beings for reciprocity, for acknowledgment from the significant others in one’s life. In that same first chapter, Chrono echoes that need, thinking, “Together, we can share our sadness and our pain. Even so, people keep on struggling, without complaint—searching for that one clear way.”

Fittingly enough, Rosette is separated from Chrono when she has her climactic face-down with Joshua, who has become an unthinking demon due to having had Chrono’s horns grafted to his head. When Rosette seeks to make him realize who he is, Joshua repudiates her, claiming she’s not his true sister. The two of them fight, and Rosette’s last resort is to use her pistol to shoot off one of Joshua’s transplanted horns. This gambit re-acquaints Joshua with the world of pain and loss, i.e., humanity, and he completes her task by ripping the other horn off his head by main strength.

Despite casting off his demonic personality, Joshua still has supernatural powers, and he joins Rosette in fighting the minions of Aion. But just as Chrono finds Rosette again, she seemingly succumbs to her contract, and her body shuts down. Aion appears on the scene to gloat at his enemy’s demise, and he compares Rosette’s sacrifice to that of the founder of the Magdalene Order, Mary Magdalene. (There’s no direct relation to the Biblical figure, though Moriyama may be linking her name, and that of Joshua—a variant of Jesus—to evoke not a sibling relationship but the maternal one of Mary to Jesus.) Aion departs to pursue his world-destroying scheme, but Azmaria, another of Rosette’s allies, arrives and states that it may still be possible to bring back Rosette’s wandering soul.

 

We then see Rosette on a locomotive train, implicitly transporting her soul, and those of the other passengers, to the land of death. She feels herself drained, of “all passion spent” in the words of Milton, and she reflects that her life was filled with running all the time, so that now she feels reconciled to her fate. However, one of the other passengers is Rosette’s ancestor Mary Magdalene, and she helps the young nun realize that she still has unfinished business with Chrono. In a moving scene, Rosette casts herself from the train as if falling backward into a pool—and she rejoins her body once more. She then prepares to join Chrono in an assault upon Aion.

However, Chrono has come to love her too much to let her waste her life in the final conflict, and he freezes her, denying her the chance to charge into battle. Chrono engages in solo battle with Aion, but artist Moriyama doesn’t allow the reader to see exactly what transpires, save that Aion is defeated and the world is allowed to return to peace. No one knows precisely what befell Chrono, but Rosette swears to wait until he returns, even if it takes fifty years.

Not surprisingly, even the dissolution of the demon-contract doesn’t allow Rosette that much time. She becomes less the hard-driving hero-nun, becoming pacific as she waits, though she avers that “waiting can be a kind of fighting, too.” She holds on longer than any of her friends expect, but ultimately, they aren’t with her when death takes her. But in her last moments, Chrono does indeed return to her, possibly because he too has crossed over. All that one can tell from his few panels is that he has a cloth wrapped over his eyes, which are presumably wounded or missing, while his horns—which he re-attached to his head during the fight with Aion— seem to be gone. Whatever the attachment of the two characters in life—and Moriyama is oblique about how much “eros” obtains between the two of them—apparently nun and demon enjoy a hieros gamos in the afterlife. And though it has nothing to do with the mythicity of the arc, I would remiss not to mention that “The One Clear Way” rates as one of the great sentimental conclusions to any literary work. A fair number of Japanese heroes and heroines may perish at the end of their stories, but it’s rare that their fates are so illustrative of both the perils and rewards of the mortality we all share.