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Satyr
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PostSubject: Ritual Ritual EmptyFri Mar 29, 2013 1:23 pm

I've been reading a book by Brian K. Smith Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion.

I came to an interesting point, early on, concerning rituals. First, something no Vedic rituals.


Staal, Frits wrote:
When the nomads began to settle in the subcontinent and established lasting relationships with the indigenous inhabitants, the expedition receded to the background and the accompanying activities lost their accompanying functions...Thus ritual was the sole survivor and all other activities were ritualized...Rituals tend to absorb everything that has gone before and has lost its original function.
According to Staal, as Smith understands him, is that rituals are disconnected from reality and have lost their meaning.

Smith, Brian wrote:
Staal does not allow for the possibility that "obsolete" activities acquire new meanings over time by being ritualized, but he concludes that by losing their original meanings the activities must carry no meaning for those who ritualized them.
Then Smith points to an inconsistency in Staal's reasoning.

Smith, Brian wrote:
Faced with these texts, Staal reverses his quasi-historical argument. instead of claiming that a meaningless ritual arose from formerly meaningful activity, the theorist now (or in addition) wants to say that originally pure and meaningless activity is over time encrusted with meaning:
Staal, Frits wrote:
Much later, when ritual was contrasted with ordinary, everyday activity, its meaninglessness, became patent and various rationalizations and explanations were constructed. Ritual became deeply involved with religion, which always stands in need of the mysteriuos and unexplained....In the course of time rituals, instead of remaining useless and pure, became useful and meritorious.
The author goes on to explain how rituals arose and what purpose they served, and how they became disconnected from reality.
I agree with his analysis.

To cut to the chase, he claims that rituals arose from a primitive relationship between predators and prey, or between static homesteaders, farmers, and the wanderers, the raiding warrior clans, who took advantage of them, and cites Heesterman on this.
According to this explanation, the ritual arose as a formal display of nature's chaos, placed within controlled circumstances. The Ritual was an ordering of nature's, chaotic, brutality. It also became an apeasemnt of guilt, by the one who succumbed to need and killed, in order that he may survive; knowing that he too will be preyed upon.
A way of making amends and acknowledging the cycles of nature, by recognizing the prey's pain and suffering.
In current popular spirituality, the identification with the sufferer becomes the central theme, leading to the Cults of Vcitims so popular in our culture.
The sacrifice became this reenactment of predation, and a recognition, by the predatory, that they too are part of this cycle.
By giving back, so to speak, they stemmed back the time when they would have to become the eaten.
The ritualized slaughter, reflected the messiness of nature, in contrast to the ordered form the ritual took.

In time, the slaughter became symbolic, the priest becoming the slaughtered, and so was disconnected from the reality of life/death, which the ritual was, originally, supposed to represent.
The disconnection increased, losing, in time, all meaning....by having no reference to anything perceptible.
It became stylized, and abstract, to the point where the participants could not find anything useful in it.
They repeated it, mechanically, because it became a part of the tribal, cultural, bonding practice.

This got me thinking about how we, in modern environments, repeat, ritualistically, certain practices and beliefs, with no understanding of them and without knowing the meaning.
Religion, in our time, is highly ritualized and detached.
We repeat traditional practices with no connection to them. They attach us to the group, but not to the origins of the practice itself...in nature.
The explanations are rationalized but they remain detached from what is experienced.

I would call it institutionalization.
The ritual, the practice, the tradition, is repeated, not because it refers us to some perceptible world, but because it refers us to the group, who then cut us off, protecting us for our own good, from the perceptible world.

We repeat, for instance "Hello, how are you" without any connection to the practice.
Most repeat the practice without knowing why.
We go to the same movies, drink the same drinks, value the same things, each in his own way, s if we were involved in a social ritual that never ends.
A ritual turned to a routine.

I dare to go as far as to believe that our positions on etiquette have become ritualized.
Our categories and how we feel about them are ritualized.
Our thinking is ritualized...made rigorous.
When speaking of philosophy we must go through the appropriate ritualistic avenues, using the precise terminology and the right deference to the priests of philosophical discourse in our time.

I became aware of this when trying to converse about reality with others on the internet.
The idea of "rigorous philosophy" had acquired, for most, this ritualistic style to it.
What was considered "serious" was what made the idea complex, using the words the authority figure used, and trying to remain true to him, rather than true to some conception of the world around us.
Ideas were not simplified, but were ritualistically made elaborate, to make it appear like something more was occurring than an exploration of the immediate, and the sensually perceived.
Concepts no longer refereed us to a shared sensual world, but, via some priestly figure, to some detached, transcendental, point, with little reference to the world.
The obsessive commitment to all-inclusion, and to politeness, facilitating the first, has also taken on a ritualistic angle.
Most do not know why more is better, nor why not hurting another is preferable than being honest, but they hold both as being true, because not doing so would exclude them from the order the shared ritual has placed them within.
Thinking is contained within parameters, and lowered to the lowest, of all possible lows, point of communion.
This point is inevitably animalistic, because the term "human" refers to a sexual practice and has no meaning outside of it.
But, as ritualization has detached us from the original purpose, the meaning is lost in some repeated, mystical definition, which none can defend, but repeat automatically.
The illusion of transcending the base is preserved by repeating the mantra and then placing it in a symbolic, controlled, environment, where the concepts are given new labels, turning them more complex than they are.
In the Greek Orthodox faith, Scripture is still recited in the ancient Greek it was written in, when the crowd does not understand it.
Repeating the same in Modern Greek or in English exposes it as what it is.
The ancient tongue and the Latin of the Catholics gives the text an air of mystery and transcendence.

The average mind does not know why "human" is less judgmental, why it is less discriminating, and why it is less simplifying than the concept "race," but he repeats the belief, as if he were repeating a text from some religious book.
Like all rituals, the repetition, offers this sense of order, within the chaos of the world, and the individual by adhering to this order, and perpetuating it, feels relief from the unpredictable unknown.

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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptySat Mar 30, 2013 11:12 am

I mean I've studied cults and rituals in terms of esoteric thought, but what you're saying doesn't make sense. On one hand, you're criticizing modern society for lacking ritual. On the other, you're saying that ritual emulates modern victim mentalities.

I don't think you have a solid grasp on internet philosophy either. Yes, there's an abundance of authority obsession with mantra repetition, but internet philosophy is hardly rigorous. People joke around all the time and don't explain why their ideas are necessary. They simply brutally assert possibilities, calling the opposition impractically absurd, usually when ridiculing the value of ritual itself (because internet philosophy is incredibly left-wing). There's also an abundance of detached rationalization in not understanding the ontology of what makes things possible, but again, this comes in opposition to ritual, not celebration of it...

...and of course, there's hardly any etiquette or politeness on the internet either.

Can you clarify what you're trying to say?


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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyThu Apr 04, 2013 8:09 pm

Vorchev wrote:
I mean I've studied cults and rituals in terms of esoteric thought, but what you're saying doesn't make sense. On one hand, you're criticizing modern society for lacking ritual. On the other, you're saying that ritual emulates modern victim mentalities.

He's saying modern society lacks meaningful rituals, connecting man with nature and his nature and his past - reviving, reinvigorating him.
Instead meaningless rituals [codifications of behaviour - hello, how are you, I agree to disagree = philosophy], pre-set, pre-acknowledged empty gestures fill the void of any meaningful, enriching activity.

He wrote on his facebook, "Existential solitude is negated by the "myth" of intimate communion".

Modern victimhood is a ritualized automatic response to any harsh reality because of modern sheltering that creates these bubbles to keep the 'chaos/reality' out. These protective rituals regulate it through selling dreams of love, intimacy, one humanity, brotherhood, etc.
It automates responses and leaves one stunted within these, never having to experience existentialism at the level of a purifying or ennobling crisis.



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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyThu Apr 18, 2013 8:41 pm

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1. Continuous Propaganda:
"Successful propaganda will occupy every moment of the individual's life: through posters and loudspeakers when he is out walking, through radio and newspapers at home, through meetings and movies in the evening. The Individual must not be allowed to recover, to collect himself, to remain untouched by propaganda during any relatively long period, for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand- It is based on constant impregnation.
It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition. It must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges. And to prevent him from finding external points of reference, it protects him by censoring everything that might come in from the outside. The slow building up of reflexes and myths, of psychological environment and prejudices, requires propaganda of very long duration. Propaganda is not a stimulus that disappears quickly; it consists of successive impulses and shocks aimed at various feelings or thoughts."

-

"Sloterdijk, concerned primarily with the role of the mass media in societal concord, makes the following assertion about difference in The Contempt of the Masses:

"However, because [...] all distinctions are made on the basis of equality, that is, an already pre-determined indistinguishability, all modern distinctions are threatened, more or less acutely, by indifference. The cult of differentiation in contemporary society, as it spreads from fashion to philosophy, has its reason in the fact that all horizontal differences are perceived, and rightly so, as weak, revocable, and constructed. Through vehement emphasis they are vocally brought to the fore, as if the law of the survival of the fittest now also counted for distinctions. But these maneuvers are not really effective [...]."

...In either case, the indistinguishability of differences—in itself a reformulation of the “anything goes” critique that has been around for half a century now—is related to a weakened perceptive and cognitive ability on our part. As a result, there is a ritualistic, cultish fetishization of difference per se; the positing of difference as an absolute,... plays into what Sloterdijk disparagingly calls a “Differenzkult.” ...the overvaluation of difference...
In Sloterdijk’s view, a mass is by definition indivisible and undifferentiated (without “Unterschiede”), and also incapable of making the discriminatory judgments (“Unterscheidungen”), which would enable it to rise above itself or, more accurately, subdivide into units that had a less homogenous aspect. As such, the cult of difference is a compensatory, mythologizing mechanism, which hides a lack of discriminatory capacity under the hyperbolic glorification of difference.

In Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, Freud argues that our behavior necessarily requires the repetition—albeit in distorted form—of seminal events lying in our onto- and phylogenetic prehistory. In a sense, this compulsion to repeat is tied to the character of ritual. Ritual for Freud, as it is for Girard in the later twentieth century, is directly related to the expression of symptoms that have arisen from our regress to a past shrouded in unconsciousness. Of course, every ritual is by definition repetitive, occurring at distinct intervals. If a symptom moves according to the pattern “trauma—defence—latency—outbreak”, as Freud states in Moses and Monotheism, so does victimhood and victimization.
Another action (“substitutive satisfaction”), repeated with regularity, becomes the surrogate outlet for these unsatisfied wishes.
“All the phenomena of the formation of symptoms may justly be described as the ‘return of the repressed’ " [Freud].
This return of the repressed signifies nothing other than the re-emergence of tradition.
...They give rise to the person’s “obsessional impulses” (“Zwangsimpulse”) and thereby create a subterranean set of habits and customs—the “tradition” (“Tradition”) to which the person remains tied despite its adverse or constraining strictures.
... Victimization is thus coupled with the creation of any tradition that has transmuted compulsive influences." [Naqvi, The literary and cultural rhetoric of victimhood]



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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyWed Apr 23, 2014 6:08 pm

Once ritual has acquired a normalizing aspect, it repeats without having to adhere to the original intent.
In church worshipers go through the motions but have no idea what they mean, or what they are supposed to symbolize.

In open societies, modern ones, homosexuals may try to become normalized by this repetition of a common ritual, such as marriage.
The ritual has lost its original intention, its purpose, and is now repeated as part of becoming part of the social norm.

Lesbian and Gay marriages tend to diverge along sexual lines.

Lesbians are low key, monogamous, emphasizing loyalty, as one would expect from the female sex, with its evolutionary background.
It may have lost its original intent, but now adopts substitution, remaining true to the genetically programmed behavior.

Gay, as in male homosexual unions, tend to be more open, promiscuous, mostly for show and for economic and social reasons.
Male, homosexual unions, rarely have a reproductive element, and if they do they remain sexually open, essentially offering a stability from which the couple can continue living the typical gay lifestyle.

Pop-Culture emphasizes the elements required in reproductive unions, selling the idea that homosexuality can be just as normal as any other relationship.

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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyFri Nov 21, 2014 11:05 am

Satyr wrote:
I've been reading a book by Brian K. Smith [b]Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion.


Staal, Frits wrote:
When the nomads began to settle in the subcontinent and established lasting relationships with the indigenous inhabitants, the expedition receded to the background and the accompanying activities lost their accompanying functions...Thus ritual was the sole survivor and all other activities were ritualized...Rituals tend to absorb everything that has gone before and has lost its original function.


According to Staal, as Smith understands him, is that rituals are disconnected from reality and have lost their meaning.


Smith, Brian wrote:
Staal does not allow for the possibility that "obsolete" activities acquire new meanings over time by being ritualized, but he concludes that by losing their original meanings the activities must carry no meaning for those who ritualized them.

Then Smith points to an inconsistency in Staal's reasoning.


Smith, Brian wrote:
Faced with these texts, Staal reverses his quasi-historical argument. instead of claiming that a meaningless ritual arose from formerly meaningful activity, the theorist now (or in addition) wants to say that originally pure and meaningless activity is over time encrusted with meaning:

Staal, Frits wrote:
Much later, when ritual was contrasted with ordinary, everyday activity, its meaninglessness, became patent and various rationalizations and explanations were constructed. Ritual became deeply involved with religion, which always stands in need of the mysteriuos and unexplained....In the course of time rituals, instead of remaining useless and pure, became useful and meritorious.


The author goes on to explain how rituals arose and what purpose they served, and how they became disconnected from reality.
I agree with his analysis.

To cut to the chase, he claims that rituals arose from a primitive relationship between predators and prey, or between static homesteaders, farmers, and the wanderers, the raiding warrior clans, who took advantage of them, and cites Heesterman on this.
According to this explanation, the ritual arose as a formal display of nature's chaos, placed within controlled circumstances. The Ritual was an ordering of nature's, chaotic, brutality. It also became an apeasemnt of guilt, by the one who succumbed to need and killed, in order that he may survive; knowing that he too will be preyed upon.
A way of making amends and acknowledging the cycles of nature, by recognizing the prey's pain and suffering.
In current popular spirituality, the identification with the sufferer becomes the central theme, leading to the Cults of Vcitims so popular in our culture.
The sacrifice became this reenactment of predation, and a recognition, by the predatory, that they too are part of this cycle.
By giving back, so to speak, they stemmed back the time when they would have to become the eaten.
The ritualized slaughter, reflected the messiness of nature, in contrast to the ordered form the ritual took.

In time, the slaughter became symbolic, the priest becoming the slaughtered, and so was disconnected from the reality of life/death, which the ritual was, originally, supposed to represent.
The disconnection increased, losing, in time, all meaning....by having no reference to anything perceptible.
It became stylized, and abstract, to the point where the participants could not find anything useful in it.
They repeated it, mechanically, because it became a part of the tribal, cultural, bonding practice.  

This got me thinking about how we, in modern environments, repeat, ritualistically, certain practices and beliefs, with no understanding of them and without knowing the meaning.
Religion, in our time, is highly ritualized and detached.
We repeat traditional practices with no connection to them. They attach us to the group, but not to the origins of the practice itself...in nature.
The explanations are rationalized but they remain detached from what is experienced.

I would call it institutionalization.
The ritual, the practice, the tradition, is repeated, not because it refers us to some perceptible world, but because it refers us to the group, who then cut us off, protecting us for our own good, from the perceptible world.

We repeat, for instance "Hello, how are you" without any connection to the practice.
Most repeat the practice without knowing why.
We go to the same movies, drink the same drinks, value the same things, each in his own way, s if we were involved in a social ritual that never ends.
A ritual turned to a routine.

I dare to go as far as to believe that our positions on etiquette have become ritualized.
Our categories and how we feel about them are ritualized.
Our thinking is ritualized...made rigorous.
When speaking of philosophy we must go through the appropriate ritualistic avenues, using the precise terminology and the right deference to the priests of philosophical discourse in our time.

I became aware of this when trying to converse about reality with others on the internet.
The idea of "rigorous philosophy" had acquired, for most, this ritualistic style to it.
What was considered "serious" was what made the idea complex, using the words the authority figure used, and trying to remain true to him, rather than true to some conception of the world around us.
Ideas were not simplified, but were ritualistically made elaborate, to make it appear like something more was occurring than an exploration of the immediate, and the sensually perceived.
Concepts no longer refereed us to a shared sensual world, but, via some priestly figure, to some detached, transcendental, point, with little reference to the world.
The obsessive commitment to all-inclusion, and to politeness, facilitating the first, has also taken on a ritualistic angle.  
Most do not know why more is better, nor why not hurting another is preferable than being honest, but they hold both as being true, because not doing so would exclude them from the order the shared ritual has placed them within.
Thinking is contained within parameters, and lowered to the lowest, of all possible lows, point of communion.
This point is inevitably animalistic, because the term "human" refers to a sexual practice and has no meaning outside of it.
But, as ritualization has detached us from the original purpose, the meaning is lost in some repeated, mystical definition, which none can defend, but repeat automatically.
The illusion of transcending the base is preserved by repeating the mantra and then placing it in a symbolic, controlled, environment, where the concepts are given new labels, turning them more complex than they are.
In the Greek Orthodox faith, Scripture is still recited in the ancient Greek it was written in, when the crowd does not understand it.
Repeating the same in Modern Greek or in English exposes it as what it is.
The ancient tongue and the Latin of the Catholics gives the text an air of mystery and transcendence.
 
The average mind does not know why "human" is less judgmental, why it is less discriminating, and why it is less simplifying than the concept "race," but he repeats the belief, as if he were repeating a text from some religious book.
Like all rituals, the repetition, offers this sense of order, within the chaos of the world, and the individual by adhering to this order, and perpetuating it, feels relief from the unpredictable unknown.



Quote :
"‘By courtesie and humanitie’, William Martyn wrote in Youths instruction, ‘all societies among men are maintained and preserued . . . society is nothing else but a mutual & a reciprocal exchange of gentlenes, of kindnesse, of affabilitie, of familiaritie, and of courtesie among men’.

The Christian tradition of courtesy had always emphasised the fact that the body was the outward reflection of the soul – ‘this outward honesty of the body cometh of the soul well composed and ordered’, as Erasmus had put it. In the Renaissance notion of civil courtesy a much greater emphasis was placed on the exterior – decorum.

In civil courtesy the content of the conversation could be negligible as long as decorum was maintained. Philibert excused his total concentration on good grace and outward behaviour by claiming that man’s character is ‘too bee knowne by the gesture and outwarde countenaunce of the bodye’. According to him, ‘wee commonly iudge others by theyr outwarde signes’. Civil conversation was by definition purely courteous and thus empty of propositional content.Thispointis brought out with particular adroitness by Philibert’s satirical presentation of the courtesy theory. In his characterisation of the courtier, the worst mistake was precisely to forget this empty courtesy and to venture one’s sincere opinion. Philibert could not, as he put it, ‘forget the ignorance and brutishnesse of the people, who in feasts, banquettes,and assemblies, gouerne and order themselues, not according to the maner of the Court whiche is the best rule: but according to theyr particular pleasures and opinions’.

It followed, as Cleland for instance argued, that there could be a considerable discrepancy between surface and reality in conduct or speech and that dissimulation was an integral part of civil conversation. Honest dissimulation was thus justified because social life took precedence over innerlife. This is ofcourse central to Castiglione, who pointed out that ‘it is not ill for a man that knoweth himselfe skilfull in a matter, to seeke occasyon after a comelye sorte to showe hys feat therein, and in lykecase to cover the partes he thynketh scante woorthye praise, yet notwithstandinge all after a certeine warye dyssymulacion’. Whereas for Erasmus and others courtesy was an outward sign of the soul, for Castiglione and his followers it was largely a means to repress outward indications of inner feelings. As Philibert put it, ‘dissimulation...we affirm to be of so great force in our Philosophie’. And some English writers followed suit. According to George Puttenham, ‘the credit . . . and profession of a very Courtier . . . is in plaine termes, cunningly to be able to dissemble’. The courtier, Puttenham wrote, should be able to ‘dissemble his conceits as well as his countenances, so as he neuer speake as he thinkes, or thinke as he speaks, and that in any matter of importance his words and his meaning very seldome meete’. Du Refuge’s A treatise of the court was even more openly advocating dissimulation and flattery.

Della Casa had already accepted flattery as a necessary component in courtesy in his discussion of ceremonies. He opened his discussion by claiming that ceremonies are almost like ‘lyes & dreames’. They were ‘but vaines he wes of honour and reuerence, towardes him to whome they be doone: framed of semblance and wordes touching their titles and courtious offers’. They were ‘vaine’ because, although ‘we honour men to their face’, we do not necessarily ‘reuerence...in deede, but otherwise contemne’. Ceremonies, in other words, were such that the words involved had lost their actual meaning and had received a figurative one instead. These ceremonies, Della Casa asserted, ‘though so fayre and gallant without’ were ‘altogether vaine within’; they consisted ‘in semblance without effect, & in wordes without meaning’. No matter how empty the ceremonies were, it was misleading to assume that  they were dispensable. First of all, they were faults of the times rather   than of particular gentlemen, and gentlemen were thus bound to follow them. Moreover, ceremonies performed an important social task. Even a ceremony for profit (a flattery done ‘to the ende wee should doe them some pleasure, for it’) was ‘by reason of custome sufferable’, although Della Casa hastened to add that it was hurtful and thus unbecoming for a gentleman.

A ceremony for duty was a different matter altogether. It might fulfil the general definition of ceremony (being utterances where the words have lost their connotative meaning), but ‘we must not leaue them vndone any wise. For he that faileth to doe them, dothe not onely displease, but doth a wrong to him, to whom they be due.'  From a perspective that emphasised manners rather than matter, identity was to be derived from external behaviour and social indelicacy was a most serious vice.

Sociability and the usefulness of civil conversation implied that in conversing with other people we should focus on what was said rather than how it was said. According to Guazzo, ‘in money we doe not chiefly consider the fourme, and the stampe, but the weight, and the matter whereof it is made, so in speach wee ought not to looke so much to the grace and finenesse of it, as to the grauitie and goodnesse of it’. But it also meant that men were supposed to express their thoughts and feelings. Civil conversation, according to this interpretation, entailed a close correlation between ‘the inward affection of my heart’ and ‘outward signes & tokens of goodwill’. ‘He’, Guazzo wrote, ‘then that will be haue himselfe well in ciuile conuersation, must consider that the tongue is the mirrour & (as it were) the Image of his minde. ’It followed that‘ by the sound of words, we gather the inward qualities and conditions of the men.

All this did not mean, however, that Guazzo failed to pay attention to the theatricality and superficiality of civil conversation. As we have seen, he emphasised again and again that the primary aim of civil conversation was to please one’s interlocutors and that therefore one had to eschew everything which was ‘lesse delightfull’ for them. The term ‘civil’ referred to ‘manners and conditions’ rather than to one’s moral character. Given the fact that the end was to please other people and to gain their approval and esteem, it should be of no surprise that a gentleman was required above all to accommodate his ‘manners and conditions’ to other gentleman’s manners. ‘To be acceptable in companie’, Guazzo insisted, ‘we must put of as it were our owne fashions and manners, and cloath our selves with the conditions of others, and imitate thems of arre as reason will permit.

As Guazzo put it, ‘but touching the diversitie of the persons with whome we shall be conuersant,we must alter our selues into an other’. Underlying this conviction was a more general principle that exterior was more important than interior – that ‘we take more pleasure to seeme than to bee’. Guazzo agreed with Castiglione that ‘the dutie of a perfect Courtier...is to doe all things worth carefull diligence, & skilful art’, but ‘so that the art is hidden, and the whole seemeth to be done by chaunce, that he may thereby be had in more admiration’.

Guazzoalso concurred with Della Casa’s analysis of the importance of ceremonies.Of course, it was possible to argue that many‘ professe themselues mortall enemies to those ceremonies’. But on closer inspection this was not the case and even those who ‘openly detest’ ceremonies, in fact, ‘secretly desire them’. The reason was not far to seek. ‘Ceremonies’, Guazzo maintained, ‘displease no bodie’, because ‘they are doone in signe of honour, and there is not he, who is not glad with all his heart to be honoured’. The conclusion was obvious: ‘these worldly ceremonies purchase vs the goodwill of our friends and superiours, to whome they are addressed and make vs knowne for ciuile people’." [Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour]

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[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
Har Har Harr
Lyssa

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Join date : 2012-03-01
Location : The Cockpit

Ritual Empty
PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyFri Dec 12, 2014 10:40 am

Freud wrote:
"Taboo’ is a Polynesian word. It is difficult for us to find a transla- tion for it, since the concept connoted by it is one which we no longer possess. It was still current among the ancient Romans, whose ‘sacer’ was the same as the Polynesian ‘taboo’. So, too, the ‘agos' of the Greeks and the ‘kadesh’ of the Hebrews must have had the same meaning as is expressed in ‘taboo’ by the Polynesians and in analogous terms by many other races in America, Africa (Madagascar) and North and Central Asia.

The meaning of ‘taboo’, as we see it, diverges in two contrary directions. To us it means, on the one hand, ‘sacred’, ‘consecrated’, and on the other ‘uncanny’, ‘dangerous’, ‘forbidden’, ‘unclean’. The converse of ‘taboo’ in Polynesian is ‘noa’, which means ‘common’ or ‘generally accessible’. Thus ‘taboo’ has about it a sense of something unapproachable, and it is principally expressed in prohibitions and restrictions. Our collocation ‘holy dread’ would often coincide in meaning with ‘taboo’.

Taboo restrictions are distinct from religious or moral prohibitions. They are not based upon any divine ordinance, but may be said to impose themselves on their own account. They differ from moral prohibitions in that they fall into no system that declares quite generally that certain abstinences must be observed and gives reasons for that necessity. Taboo prohibitions have no grounds and are of unknown origin. Though they are unintelligible to us, to those who are dominated by them they are taken as a matter of course.

Wundt (1906, 308) describes taboo as the oldest human unwritten code of laws. It is generally supposed that taboo is older than gods and dates back to a period before any kind of religion existed.

‘Properly speaking taboo includes only (a) the sacred (or unclean) character of person or things, (b) the kind of prohibition which results from this character, and (c) the sanctity (or uncleanness) which results from a violation of the prohibition.

Taboo is originally nothing other than the objectified fear of the “demonic” power which is believed to lie hidden in a tabooed object. The taboo prohibits anything that may provoke that power and commands that, if it has been injured, whether wittingly or unwittingly, the demon’s vengeance must be averted.’ [Ibid., 308.]

Little by little, we are told, taboo then grows into a force with a basis of its own, independent of the belief in demons. It develops into the rule of custom and tradition and finally of law. ‘But the unspoken command underlying all the prohibitions of taboo, with their numberless variations according to the time and place, is originally one and one only: “Beware of the wrath of demons!” ’ [Loc. cit.]

Wundt informs us, then, that taboo is an expression and derivative of the belief of primitive peoples in ‘demonic’ power. Later, he tells us, it freed itself from this root and remained a power simply because it was a power—from a kind of mental conservatism. And thereafter it itself became the root of our moral precepts and of our laws. This is surely not tracing back the concept of taboo to its sources or revealing its earliest roots. Neither fear nor demons can be regarded by psychology as ‘earliest’ things, impervious to any attempt at discovering their antecedents. It would be another matter if demons really existed. But we know that, like gods, they are creations of the human mind: they were made by something and out of something.

Wundt has important views on the double significance of taboo, though these are not very clearly expressed. According to him, the distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘unclean’ did not exist in the primitive beginnings of taboo. For that very reason those concepts were at that stage without the peculiar significance which they could only acquire when they became opposed to each other. Animals, human beings or localities on which a taboo was imposed were ‘demonic’, not ‘sacred’, nor, therefore, in the sense which was later acquired, ‘unclean’. It is precisely this neutral and intermediate meaning—‘demonic’ or ‘what may not be touched’—that is appropriately expressed by the word ‘taboo’, since it stresses a characteristic which remains common for all time both to what is sacred and to what is unclean: the dread of contact with it. The persistence, however, of this important common characteristic is at the same time evidence that the ground covered by the two was originally one and that it was only as a result of further influences that it became differentiated and eventually developed into opposites. [Ibid., 309.]

According to Wundt, this original characteristic of taboo— the belief in a ‘demonic’ power which lies hidden in an object and which, if the object is touched or used unlawfully, takes its vengeance by casting a spell over the wrong-doer—is still wholly and solely ‘objectified fear’. That fear has not yet split up into the two forms into which it later develops: veneration and horror. [Ibid., 310.]

But how did this split take place? Through the transplanting, so Wundt tells us, of the taboo ordinances from the sphere of demons into the sphere of belief in gods. [Ibid., 311.] The contrast between ‘sacred’ and ‘unclean’ coincides with a succession of two stages of mythology. The earlier of these stages did not completely disappear when the second one was reached but persisted in what was regarded as an inferior and eventually a contemptible form. [Ibid., 312.] It is, he says, a general law of mythology that a stage which has been passed, for the very reason that it has been overcome and driven under by a superior stage, persists in an inferior form alongside the later one, so that the objects of its veneration turn into objects of horror. [Ibid., 313.]" [Totem and Taboo]



David Hawkes wrote:
"One convincing theoretical rebuke to Western pretensions was provided by the method of analysis known as ‘structuralism’. This discipline was inaugurated by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, whose lecture notes were collected after his death as the Course in General Linguistics [1916] (1972). In outlining his definition of linguistics, Saussure pointedly refuses to make any qualita- tive distinction between human languages: ‘Linguistics takes for its data in the first instance all manifestations of human language. Primitive peoples and civilized nations, early periods, classical periods, and periods of decadence, are all to be included’.

Saussure’s method does not presuppose that ‘civilized’ languages are the most sophisticated, or the best suited to the expression of complicated ideas. He insists that synchronic and diachronic linguistics must be kept separate, claiming that the study of a language’s ‘diachronic’ development through time is a quite different area from the analysis of its ‘synchronic’ structure at any particular time. However, these two methods ‘are not of equal importance. It is clear that the synchronic point of view takes precedence over the diachronic, since for the community of language users that is the one and only reality’.

The synchronic approach reveals that words acquire meaning, not through any intrinsic correspondence with the objects they represent, but through their place within the linguistic structure. Saussure thus suggests that representation is autonomous and that, in fact, signs produce the objects they designate. He finds that this ‘arbitrary nature of the sign’ pertains in every society:

"any means of expression accepted in a society rests in principle upon a collective habit, or on convention, which comes to the same thing. Signs of politeness, for instance, although often endowed with a certain natural expressiveness (prostrating oneself nine times on the ground is the way to greet an emperor in China) are none the less fixed by rule. It is this rule which renders them obligatory, not their intrinsic value."

Saussure’s linguistics, then, indicates that meaning is not inherent in the sign, but is arbitrarily produced out of a structured system of signs. This is an idea with extremely radical implications. If the significance which any given society attaches to certain signs is indeed a matter of arbitrary convention, then it becomes difficult for any particular society to claim that its ideas are inherently truer than those of any other, no matter how ostensibly primitive they may seem.

Saussure thus claims that all aspects of social life, to the degree that they are significant, are structured like a language. Since he believes that linguistic meaning is arbitrary, it therefore follows that all social behaviour is merely conventional. The inescapable conclusion is that, in the words of the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘man has always thought equally well’, and that there can be no grounds for dismissing the thought systems of other societies as more ‘primitive’ than our own. In The Savage Mind [1962] (1966), Lévi-Strauss applies Saussure’s method of analysis to the kinds of ‘magical’ systems which Freud studied in Totem and Taboo. As we might expect, he is led to very different conclusions. He refuses to call magic a more ‘primitive’ mode of thought than reason:

"These are certainly not a function of different stages of the development of the human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination: the other at a remove from it."

The definitive characteristic of modern science is that it separates itself from the object studied, thus reflecting and confirming the splits between subject and object and between matter and spirit. In post-Baconian empiricism, the subjective condition of the observer is supposed to have no influence on the objective data being observed. Like Freud, Lévi-Strauss noted that ‘primitive’ societies do not recognize these dichotomies, but conceive of subjective ideas as inherent in their objects. Unlike Freud, however, Lévi-Strauss does not regard this as a superstitious error; rather, he perceives in it an insight which the Enlightenment does not achieve until Hegel: ‘it is in this intransigent refusal on the part of the savage mind to allow anything human (or even living) to remain alien to it, that the real principle of dialectical reason is to be found’.

‘Primitive’ societies, in other words, have not succumbed to the fatal divorce of subject and object which constitutes the central problem for Western philosophy. Of course, for Hegel and Marx this split is itself illusory, and testifies to a mode of fetishism which is no less superstitious than the animistic world-view. While capitalism objectifies the subject, animism subjectifies the object. The result is a strange convergence between ostensibly distinct modes of thought, so that animistic beliefs can be used to make sense of the ideological effects produced by market capitalism. In The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980), Michael Taussig examines the response of South American peasants to encroaching capitalism, and finds that they can readily interpret the changes in their lives within their pre-existent systems of thought. The places where the newly proletarianized peasants work, and the products of their labour, are invested with the properties associated with the evil spirits, or ‘devils’, of their ‘superstitious’ religions. As Taussig demonstrates, this is a perfectly logical transposition:

"If we ‘thingify’ parts of a living system, ignore the context of which they are part, and then observe that the things move . . . as though they were alive . . . reification leads to fetishization. . . . The devil in the Bolivian tin mines offers spellbinding testimony to the fidelity with which people can capture the transformation of fetishization while subjecting it to a paganism that will capture it."

Structuralist linguistics and anthropology thus opened up the possibility of studying the constitutive role of ideology. All societies represent and give meaning to the lives of their inhabitants by constructing systems of ideas about them. These systems are not optional extras, but constitute the lived reality of the people. It follows that the ideological representations by which we, in advanced capitalist countries, bestow significance on our surroundings, are by no means ‘natural’ but are instances of the Aristotelian, man-made ‘second nature’. It is characteristic of ideology, however, for this second nature to pass itself off as the ‘first’ nature, so that what has been constructed by human beings is fetishistically regarded as eternal and unchangeable.

The danger for structural analyses of signs is that, by focusing on the formal relations between the various elements of linguistic or semiotic codes, they will exclude or render nugatory the influence exercised on these signifying systems by external reality. Poststructuralist theory often takes the autonomous, constitutive role of representation for granted, or even celebrates it as a ludic liberation from dour referentiality. A salutary warning against this tendency was sounded in one of the earliest responses to Saussure, V.N. Volosinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [1929] (1973). Volosinov attacks Saussure’s assumption that the structure of language is inherently imprinted on the human mind, and he points out the heritage of this idea in Cartesian rationalism:

"The idea of the conventionality, the arbitrariness, of language is a typical one for rationalism as a whole. . . . What interests the mathematically minded rationalists is not the relationship of the sign to the actual reality it reflects or to the individual who is its originator, but the relationship of sign to sign within a closed system already accepted and authorized. In other words, they are interested only in the inner logic of the system of signs itself, taken, as in algebra, completely independently of the meanings that give signs their content."

Saussure and his followers, that is to say, take account of neither the individual subjective origin nor the objective referent of signs. Like Descartes, Saussure suggests that the material world is constructed by certain universal properties of the human mind.

Thus Volosinov criticizes the polarizing, essentialist tendencies of idealism and materialism alike. In these approaches, he says, ‘The individual consciousness . . . becomes either all or nothing’:

"For idealism it has become all: its locus is somewhere above existence and it determines the latter. . . . For psychological positivism, on the contrary, consciousness amounts to nothing: it is just a conglom- eration of fortuitous, psychophysiological reactions which, by some miracle, results in meaningful and unified ideological creativity. . . . However, the ideological, as such, cannot possibly be explained in terms of either of these superhuman or subhuman, animalian, roots. Its real place in existence is in the special, social material of signs created by man."

The analysis of this process of constructing ideological meaning, as was foretold by Saussure, has come to be known as semiology.

Representation becomes indistinguishable from reality to the degree that the commodity form obscures the true nature of things. One way of defining ‘the postmodern condition’ is as the state of mind which results from the final triumph of the commodity, the ultimate victory of exchange-value, and thus the elevation of representation over reality." [Ideology]

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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Ritual Empty
PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyFri Dec 12, 2014 10:47 am

Quote :
"The tradition of Enlightenment has been finally and completely abandoned. For the eighteenth century, to be mad was to be under the sway of illusion; now it is just in the conviction of a certain kind of conventional illusion that we can claim to be sane. We cannot defend this sanity by a sincere appeal to ‘reason’; it has deserted to the other side. In constituting itself as a system of signs ‘detached’ from the impurities of immediate experience, reason discovers in itself an analogy to the ‘primary process’. Reason, that is to say, as pure ‘mediation’, enjoys the unlimited freedom of transformation among arbitrary signifiers. Being wholly abstract, reason accepts no practical limit upon the range of its internal self-reference.  And, as pure ‘relation’, it avoids the compromises and contradictions of empirical reality. Sanity exists, however, in tolerating the contradictions, inconsistencies, and incompleteness which has been expunged from the life of reason. Our ‘signatures’ are composed from just such impoverished and imperfect materials. Insanity, therefore, is as much a temptation to reason as a resurgence of the primary process. Both tendencies are visible in the abundance of modern psychopathology. In using their inner freedom, perversely, to refuse the consolation of ‘signatures’, the insane become transparent to us.  Defenceless before the world, they act as passive recording devices of all its most fundamental processes. There is an appalling directness in the gesture of the insane. It is the truthfulness of their symptoms which frightens us, their helplessness as signifiers.

The neurotic, burdened with partially discarded wishes, is too honest to accept the cunning of conscious memory and too demanding to be satisfied with the intermittent pleasure of spontaneous recollection. The assumption of continuity, implicit in the operation of conscious  memory, is too great a leap of faith for the neurotic.  The neurotic tries to live without the illusions of time. Experience is decomposed into discrete moments accidentally occurring as a linear series
. Each moment might be the last. None carries the promise of a successor which, should it materialize, might do so in some unimaginable way. Equally, however, as their lives are only ‘gestures’ to the truth, the neurotic tries to coexist with a conventional world in which he cannot believe. There is no escape to the playfulness of the instant The work of inhibition proves irreversible. Instead, therefore, of a release into the atemporal paradise of fun (the primary process), the neurotic suffers the torment of anxiety, which is simply a fear of time. Anxiety manifests itself in the ‘freezing’ of movement. It is an inability to act. Each moment, heavy with doubt and possibility, threatens both to appear or not to appear. The neurotic’s defensive gestures, the ritualization of behaviour, symptomatic obsessive acts, endless preparations for actions which never take place, prolong the present beyond its ‘normal’ duration.  Anxiety, like play, is open before the world of infinite possibilities. But whereas in play each momentary metamorphosis is without consequence, in anxiety each instant becomes an absolutely decisive choice. Reason is helpless; only the biographical fiction of an extended ‘self, projected into the future by a reflex of the will, can guide the subject through such fearful discontinuities.

‘Hovering above existence’, the neurotic in a sense retains an ideal humanity. Refusing to become one person rather than another, he contains, crammed into the anxiety of each timeless moment, the unalienated essence of endless possible identities.  The neurotic, to put it crudely, cannot make up his mind; or, more accurately, tries too hard to make up his mind. In attempting to ‘think ahead’, the neurotic suffers from a surfeit of reason as well as an excess of sensuousness.  He cannot ‘realize’ himself in spontaneous action because his ‘self exists as a kind of volatilized essence desperately leafing through a catalogue of its own future. In seeking to be led by reason, the neurotic comes to a standstill, unable to decide upon the correct path.

The neurotic cannot rid himself of childhood. Endless metamorphoses, interiorized and made anxious, circulate within him. Attempts to ‘solve’ the problem (avoidance rituals, obsession, hysterical symptoms), rather than crystallizing from the flux of subjectivity a fixed personal identity simply make him more ‘nervous’. It is tempting to interpret these signs as an appeal to be ‘looked after’. But there is no hypocrisy here. Neurotic helplessness is more a measure of seriousness than irresponsibility.

The neurotic is all terrified openness, unable to pick his way through the overwhelming complexity of the object world. For the psychotic the moment of choice lies irretrievably in the past. Everything is settled and complete. He must set about conforming the object world to his decision. He has traversed the entire length of the road upon which the neurotic cannot set out. He has become the unique individual which is said to be the goal of rational self-development. He has an absolutely clear and determined identity which ‘reality’ must vindicate. The psychotic withdrawal from the world is a logical transformation of the neurotic’s anxious sign-system.

The psychotic ‘illness’ is primarily a disease of space. The literature reveals a truly formidable variety of examples. The object world is dissolved into a plastic medium from which can be created, effortlessly, an entire cosmos to confirm and threaten the psychotic’s chosen identity.  Not simply unique among other unique beings, the psychotic leads a solitary existence. He is the only  individual, the sole survivor of a cosmic catastrophe. Empirical reality is a deceptive appearance populated by the ‘fleetingly improvised’ creatures ‘miracled’ up by his enemy.  He is con tinually threatened by the world he creates, which appears to him as the macabre invention of a demiurge. Spatial relations are arbitrarily transformed. He finds himself stretched across vast reaches of space. Distant stars are felt as the pores of his own skin.  But he might just as easily shrink to nothing. The interior of his body becomes a laboratory of hideous experimentation. It is metamorphosed into a series of mechanized contraptions. Schreber’s description of ‘miracles’ perpetrated on his body is the most ample of modern pornographies. All those distinctions normal to the developed ego, self/other, inside/ outside, body/world, melt away.  If he  is wholly ‘objectified’ and fixed, then all else must be ‘subjective’, malleable, and transitory. The world is dangerous because it is never still; each contact with it threatens the frozen personality of the psychotic. Space itself is dangerous and must be contained. Where the neurotic seeks safety in the abolition of time, the psychotic, fearful of everything other and therefore beyond himself, annihilates extension. He takes the cosmos into himself and attempts physically to master it.  Nothing should be ‘left over’, no place remain uncolonized by the psychotic’s expanding soul. But realizing that he cannot succeed, he fears that the cosmos will master him, that he will be ‘absorbed’ by it, that already every other human being has been sucked into some hideous machine of destruction.

The fear of time and the fear of space constitute the fundamental axes of psychopathology, the signs of insanity.  
In this respect confirming the judgement of the Enlightenment, the unreasonableness of the insane is manifest in disturbed consumption. The neurotic is too anxious to consume. He cannot bear the doubt of selection. He wants everything and has nothing. The psychotic, having already swallowed the cosmos, can find nothing else to consume and becomes a voracious anorexic.

Gabel ingeniously argues that these opposing tendencies can be readily conceived as respectively an underestimation, and an overestimation of the level of alienation characteristic of ‘normal’ social relations.70  We cannot tolerate the truth of capitalism. We resist, psychologically, the fact of our alienation into ‘objective’ relations and live instead under the illusion of personality.

The neurotic goes too far in this refusal. He insists upon the real individual humanity of everyone he sees. He cannot act in a partial or fragmented fashion. He cannot accept the facility of stereo types. His is a disease of sensitivity. Burdened with the duty of authenticity in a wholly unalienated world, he is overwhelmed by its plenitude. The psychotic, on the contrary, does not resist enough. In accepting the present reality of alienation, he refuses to accept the comfort of an imagined past His life is absorbed into the general process of production. As the last human survivor, he realizes his predicament when it is already too late, and shrinks from a world whose touch would transform him into a lifeless commodity. Neither can tolerate the superficial inconsistencies of sanity.

Our normal personality is ‘opaque’. It reaches towards the ‘primary process’, retracing its own path of ‘development’ by an indirect route. It exists in the small delusions of a personal ‘signature’. By comparison, the ‘gestures’ of the insane are ‘transparent’. Insanity, then, like childhood, comes to enjoy a privileged status, not as some exotic deviation, but as an exemplary instance of the life of reason.

Signatures are ‘rational’ illusions, gestures ‘rational’ disillusions.

The neurotic is, literally, excessively excitable. He does not consume because every potential ‘object-choice’ has aged before it can be possessed. The ‘cathexis’ has become so superbly mobile that it keeps too far ahead of the ego and is distributed too ‘thinly’ over the object world, which consequently takes on a uniformly drab and uninspiring appearance. The psychotic, conversely, is not excitable enough. The ‘cathexis’ never leaves the ‘muffled interior’, and he remains indifferent to any possibility. The psychotic consumes himself; the neurotic lacks the self with which he might consume the world. As types, they serve to define a model of regulated insatiability; the ideal modern consumer or, better, the ideal consumer of modernity. In their open acceptance of the ephemeral and insubstantial, they celebrate the ‘arbitrary, fleeting and transitory’ as the accidental relationship of selfhood." [Harvie Ferguson, The Science of Pleasure]


"The neurotic’s defensive gestures, the ritualization of behaviour, symptomatic obsessive acts, endless preparations for actions which never take place, prolong the present beyond its ‘normal’ duration. The neurotic cannot rid himself of childhood. 

The Neurotic annihilates time, the Psychotic annihilates space..." - Ferguson above.


Freud explains the Neurotic as the paranoid who annihilates time ['Father' kronos]...

Modern Ritual is the Enforcement of Prohibitions built around a sacred or central value Code(s), after the elimination of the very Reference that Was Power - father, order, etc.  

In other words, Modern Ritual is a shift from authoritarian Preventions [the power to maintain power-relations] - to - dictatorial Prohibitions [the erection and sanctification of codes in the absence of the power that maintained power-relations].

From Prevention - to - Prohibition.
From Father - to - System.
From Author-itarianism  - to -  Total-itarianism...

[Note also how the ideals of Courtesy and related terrorism, libertarianism revolve around this Ritual aspect].

Once the Author-ity is eliminated, reference is set free from the Symbol, any Sign, any Code can now take the place of that Author-ity...

"Reason, that is to say, as pure ‘mediation’, enjoys the unlimited freedom of transformation among arbitrary signifiers. Being wholly abstract, reason accepts no practical limit upon the range of its internal self-reference.  And, as pure ‘relation’, it avoids the compromises and contradictions of empirical reality. Sanity exists, however, in tolerating the contradictions, inconsistencies, and incompleteness which has been expunged from the life of reason." [Fergusson]

The result is modern Narcissism and Schizophrenia.



Freud wrote:
"The attitude of primitive peoples to their chiefs, kings and priests is governed by two basic principles which seem to be complementary rather than contradictory. A ruler ‘must not only be guarded, he must also be guarded against’. (Frazer, 1911b, 132.) Both of these ends are secured by innumerable taboo observances. We know already why it is that rulers must be guarded against. It is because they are vehicles of the mysterious and dangerous magical power which is transmitted by contact like an electric charge and which brings death and ruin to anyone who is not protected by a similar charge. Any immediate or indirect contact with this dangerous sacred entity is therefore
avoided; and, if it cannot be avoided, some ceremonial is devised to avert the dreaded consequences. The Nubas of East Africa, for instance, ‘believe that they would die if they entered the house of their priestly king; however they can evade the penalty of their intrusion by baring the left shoulder and getting the king to lay his hand on it.’ [Loc. cit.] Here we are met by the remarkable fact that contact with the king is a remedy and protection against the dangers provoked by contact with the king. No doubt, however, there is a contrast to be drawn between the remedial power of a touch made deliberately by the king and the danger which arises if he is touched—a contrast between a passive and an active relation to the king.

For examples of the healing power of the royal touch there is no need to resort to savages. The kings of England, in times that are not yet remote, enjoyed the power of curing scrofula, which was known accordingly as ‘the King’s Evil’.
The stories which follow are evidence of the fearful effects of active contact made, even unintentionally, with a king or anything belonging to him. It is not to be wondered at that a need was felt for isolating such dangerous persons as chiefs and priests from the rest of the community—to build a barrier round them which would make them inaccessible. It may begin to dawn on us that this barrier, originally erected for the observance of taboo, exists to this day in the form of court ceremonial.

But perhaps the major part of this taboo upon rulers is not derived from the need for protection against them. The second reason for the special treatment of privileged persons—the need to provide protection for them against the threat of danger—has had an obvious part in creating taboos and so of giving rise to court etiquette.

The need to protect the king from every possible form of danger follows from his immense importance to his subjects, whether for weal or woe. It is his person which, strictly speaking, regulates the whole course of existence. ‘The people have to thank him for the rain and sunshine which foster the fruits of the earth, for the wind which brings ships to their coasts, and even for the solid ground beneath their feet.’ (Frazer, 1911b, 7.)

These rulers among savage peoples possess a degree of power and a capacity to confer benefits which are an attribute only of gods, and with which at later stages of civilization only the most servile of courtiers would pretend to credit them.

It must strike us as self-contradictory that persons of such unlimited power should need to be protected so carefully from the threat of danger; but that is not the only contradiction shown in the treatment of royal personages among savage peoples. For these peoples also think it necessary to keep a watch on their king to see that he makes a proper use of his powers; they feel by no means convinced of his good intentions or conscientiousness. Thus an element of distrust may be traced among the reasons for the taboo observances that surround the king.

‘The idea’, writes Frazer (1911b, 7 f.), ‘that early kingdoms are despotisms in which the people exist only for the sovereign, is wholly inapplicable to the monarchies we are considering. On the contrary, the sovereign in them exists only for his subjects; his life is only valuable so long as he discharges the duties of his position by ordering the course of nature for his people’s benefit. So soon as he fails to do so, the care, the devotion, the religious homage which they had hitherto lavished on him cease and are changed into hatred and contempt; he is dismissed ignominiously, and may be thankful if he escapes with his life. Worshipped as a god one day, he is killed as a criminal the next. But in this changed behaviour of the people there is nothing capricious or inconstant. On the contrary, their conduct is entirely of a piece. If their king is their god, he is or should be also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make room for another who will. So long, however, as he answers their expectations, there is no limit to the care which they take of him, and which they compel him to take of himself. A king of this sort lives hedged in by a ceremonious etiquette, a network of prohibitions and observances, of which the intention is not to contribute to his dignity, much less to his comfort, but to restrain him from conduct which, by disturbing the harmony of nature, might involve himself, his people, and the universe in one common catastrophe. Far from adding to his comfort, these observances, by trammelling his every act, annihilate his free- dom and often render the very life, which it is their object to preserve, a burden and sorrow to him.’

Some of the taboos laid upon barbarian kings remind one vividly of the restrictions imposed upon murderers. Thus in West Africa, ‘at Shark Point near Cape Padron, in Lower Guinea, lives the priestly king Kukulu, alone in a wood. He may not touch a woman nor leave his house; indeed he may not even quit his chair, in which he is obliged to sleep sitting, for if he lay down no wind would arise and navigation would be stopped. He regulates storms, and in general maintains a wholesome and equable state of the atmosphere.’ The same writer says of Loango (in the same part of the world) that the more powerful a king is, the more taboos he is bound to observe. The heir to the throne is also subject to them from infancy; their number increases as he advances in life, till at the moment that he ascends the throne he is positively suffocated by them.

Our space will not allow nor does our interest require us to enter further into a description of the taboos associated with the dignity of kings and priests. I will only add that the principal part is played in them by restrictions upon freedom of movement and upon diet. Two examples of taboo ceremonials occurring in civilized communities of a far higher level of culture will serve to show, however, what a conservative effect upon ancient usages is exercised by contact with these privileged personages.

The Flamen Dialis, the high priest of Jupiter in ancient Rome, was obliged to observe an extraordinary number of taboos. He ‘might not ride or even touch a horse, nor see an army under arms, nor wear a ring which was not broken, nor have a knot on any part of his garments; . . . he might not touch wheaten flour or leavened bread; he might not touch or even name a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans, and ivy; . . . his hair could be cut only by a free man and with a bronze knife, and his hair and nails when cut had to be buried under a lucky tree; . . . he might not touch a dead body; . . . he might not be uncovered in the open air’, and so on. ‘His wife, the Flaminica, had to observe nearly the same rules, and others of her own besides. She might not ascend more than three steps of the kind of staircase called Greek; at a certain festival she might not comb her hair; the leather of her shoes might not be made from a beast that had died a natural death, but only from one that had been slain or sacrificed; if she heard thunder she was tabooed till she had offered an expiatory sacrifice.’ (Frazer, 1911b, 13 f.)

The ancient kings of Ireland were subject to a number of exceedingly strange restrictions. If these were obeyed, every kind of blessing would descend upon the country, but if they were violated, disasters of every kind would visit it. A complete list of these taboos is contained in the Book of Rights, the two oldest manuscript copies of which date from 1390 and 1418. The prohibitions are of the most detailed character, and refer to spe- cific actions at specific places at specific times: the king, for instance, may not stay in a certain town on a particular day of the week; he may not cross a certain river at a particular hour of the day; he may not encamp for nine days on a certain plain, and so on. (Frazer, 1911b, 11 f.)

Among many savage peoples the severity of these taboo restrictions upon priestly kings has led to consequences which have been important historically and are of particular interest from our point of view. The dignity of their position ceased to be an enviable thing, and those who were offered it often took every possible means of escaping it. Thus in Cambodia, where there are kingships of Fire and Water, it is often necessary to force successors into accepting these distinctions. On Niue or Savage Island, a coral island in the South Pacific, the monarchy actually came to an end because no one could be induced to take over the responsible and dangerous office. ‘In some parts of West Africa, when the king dies, a family council is secretly held to determine his successor. He on whom the choice falls is suddenly seized, bound, and thrown into the fetish-house, where he is kept in durance till he consents to accept the crown. Some- times the heir finds means of evading the honour which it is thought to thrust upon him; a ferocious chief has been known to go about constantly armed, resolute to resist by force any attempt to set him on the throne.’
Among the natives of Sierra Leone the objection to accepting the honour of kingship became so great that most tribes were obliged to choose foreigners as their kings.

Frazer (1911b, 17–25) attributes to these circumstances the fact that in the course of history there eventually came about a division of the original priestly kingship into a spiritual and a temporal power. Weighed down by the burden of their sacred office, kings became unable to exert their dominance in real affairs and these were left in the hands of inferior but practical persons, who were ready to renounce the honours of kingship. These, then, became the temporal rulers, while spiritual supremacy, deprived of any practical significance, was left to the former taboo kings. It is familiar knowledge how far this hypothesis finds confirmation in the history of old Japan.

If we take a general survey of the relations of primitive men to their rulers, we are left with an expectation that we shall have no great difficulty in advancing from a description of them to a psycho-analytic understanding of them. Those relations are of a complex kind and not free from contradictions. Rulers are allowed great privileges, which coincide exactly with the taboo prohibitions imposed on other people. They are privileged persons: they may do or enjoy precisely what other people are forbidden by taboo. As against this freedom, however, we find that they are restricted by other taboos from which common people are exempt. Here we have a first contrast—a contradiction, almost—the fact, that is, of the same individual being both more free and more restricted. Again, they are regarded as pos- sessing extraordinary powers of magic, so that people are afraid of coming into contact with their persons or their property, while on the other hand the most beneficial consequences are expected from that same contact. Here there seems to be another, particularly glaring, contradiction; but, as we have already seen, it is only an apparent one. Contacts originating from the king himself are healing and protective; the dangerous contacts are those effected by common men upon the king or his belongings—probably because they may hint at aggressive impulses. Yet another contradiction, and one not so easily resolved, is to be found in the fact that the ruler is believed to exercise great authority over the forces of Nature, but that he has to be most carefully protected against the threat of danger—as though his own power, which can do so much, cannot do this. The situation is made still more difficult by the fact that the ruler cannot be trusted to make use of his immense powers in the right way, that is, for the benefit of his subjects and for his own protection. Thus people distrust him and feel justified in keeping a watch on him. The etiquette of taboos to which the king’s whole life is subjected serves all these protective purposes at once: his own protection from dangers and the protection of his subjects from the dangers with which he threatens them.

The technique of psycho-analysis allows us to go into the question further and to enter more into the details of these various impulses. If we submit the recorded facts to analysis, as though they formed part of the symptoms presented by a neurosis, our starting-point must be the excessive apprehensiveness and solicitude which is put forward as the reason for the taboo ceremonials. The occurrence of excessive solicitude of this kind is very common in neuroses, and especially in obsessional neuroses, with which our comparison is chiefly drawn. We have come to understand its origin quite clearly. It appears wherever, in addition to a predominant feeling of affection, there is also a contrary, but unconscious, current of hostility—a state of affairs which represents a typical instance of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The hostility is then shouted down, as it were, by an excessive intensification of the affection, which is expressed as solicitude and becomes compulsive, because it might otherwise be inadequate to perform its task of keeping the unconscious contrary current of feeling under repression. Every psychoanalyst knows from experience with what certainty this explanation of solicitous over-affection is found to apply even in the most unlikely circumstances—in cases, for instance, of attachments between a mother and child or between a devoted married couple. If we now apply this to the case of privileged persons, we shall realize that alongside of the veneration, and indeed idolization, felt towards them, there is in the unconscious an opposing current of intense hostility; that, in fact, as we expected, we are faced by a situation of emotional ambivalence. The distrust which provides one of the unmistakable elements in kingly taboos would thus be another, more direct, expression of the same unconscious hostility. Indeed, owing to the variety of outcomes of a conflict of this kind which are reached among different peoples, we are not at a loss for examples in which the existence of this hostility is still more obviously shown. ‘The savage Timmes of Sierra Leone’, we learn from Frazer, ‘who elect their king, reserve to themselves the right of beating him on the eve of his coronation; and they avail themselves of this constitutional privilege with such hearty goodwill that sometimes the unhappy monarch does not long survive his elevation to the throne. Hence when the leading chiefs have a spite at a man and wish to rid themselves of him, they elect him king.’ Even in glaring instances like this, however, the hostility is not admitted as such, but masquerades as a ceremonial.

Another side of the attitude of primitive peoples towards their rulers recalls a procedure which is common in neuroses generally but comes into the open in what are known as delusions of persecution. The importance of one particular person is immensely exaggerated and his absolute power is magnified to the most improbable degree, in order that it may be easier to make him responsible for everything disagreeable that the patient may experience. Savages are really behaving in just the same way with their kings when they ascribe to them power over rain and sunshine, wind and weather, and then depose them or kill them because Nature disappoints their hopes of a successful hunt or a rich harvest. The model upon which paranoiacs base their delusions of persecution is the relation of a child to his father. A son’s picture of his father is habitually clothed with excessive powers of this kind, and it is found that distrust of the father is intimately linked with admiration for him. When a paranoiac turns the figure of one of his associates into a ‘persecutor’, he is raising him to the rank of a father: he is putting him into a position in which he can blame him for all his misfortunes. Thus this second analogy between savages and neurotics gives us a glimpse of the truth that much of a savage’s attitude to his ruler is derived from a child’s infantile attitude to his father.

But the strongest support for our effort to equate taboo prohibitions with neurotic symptoms is to be found in the taboo ceremonials themselves, the effect of which upon the position of royalty has already been discussed. These ceremonials unmistakably reveal their double meaning and their derivation from ambivalent impulses, as soon as we are ready to allow that the results which they bring about were intended from the first. The taboo does not only pick out the king and exalt him above all common mortals, it also makes his existence a torment and an intolerable burden and reduces him to a bondage far worse than that of his subjects.

Here, then, we have an exact counterpart of the obsessional act in the neurosis, in which the suppressed impulse and the impulse that suppresses it find simultaneous and common satisfaction. The obsessional act is ostensibly a protection against the prohibited act; but actually, in our view, it is a repetition of it. The ‘ostensibly’ applies to the conscious part of the mind, and the ‘actually’ to the unconscious part. In exactly the same way, the ceremonial taboo of kings is ostensibly the highest honour and protection for them, while actually it is a punishment for their exaltation, a revenge taken on them by their subjects.

Even in late classical times ritual prescribed in many places that the sacrificial priest must take to flight after performing the sacrifice, as though to escape retribution. The idea that slaughtering oxen was a crime must at one time have prevailed generally in Greece. At the Athenian festival of Buphonia [‘ox-murder’] a regular trial was instituted after the sacrifice, and all the participants were called as witnesses. At the end of it, it was agreed that the responsibility for the murder should be placed upon the knife; and this was accordingly cast into the sea. [Smith, 1894, 304.]

In spite of the ban protecting the lives of sacred animals in their quality of fellow-clansmen, a necessity arose for killing one of them from time to time in solemn communion and for dividing its flesh and blood among the members of the clan. The compelling motive for this deed reveals the deepest meaning of the nature of sacrifice. We have heard how in later times, whenever food is eaten in common, the participation in the same substance establishes a sacred bond between those who consume it when it has entered their bodies. In ancient times this result seems only to have been effected by participation in the sub- stance of a sacrosanct victim. The holy mystery of sacrificial death ‘is justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred cement be procured which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union between the worshippers and their god’.1 (Ibid., 313.)

This bond is nothing else than the life of the sacrificial animal, which resides in its flesh and in its blood and is distributed among all the participants in the sacrificial meal. A notion of this kind lies at the root of all the blood covenants by which men made compacts with each other even at a late period of history. [Loc. cit.] This completely literal way of regarding blood-kinship as identity of substance makes it easy to understand the necessity for renewing it from time to time by the physical process of the sacrificial meal. [Ibid., 319.]

The clan is celebrating the ceremonial occasion by the cruel slaughter of its totem animal and is devouring it raw—blood, flesh and bones. The clansmen are there, dressed in the likeness of the totem and imitating it in sound and movement, as though they are seeking to stress their identity with it. Each man is conscious that he is performing an act forbidden to the individual and justifiable only through the participation of the whole clan; nor may anyone absent himself from the killing and the meal. When the deed is done, the slaughtered animal is lamented and bewailed. The mourning is obligatory, imposed by dread of a threatened retribution. As Robertson Smith (1894, 412) remarks of an analogous occasion, its chief purpose is to disclaim responsibility for the killing.

But the mourning is followed by demonstrations of festive rejoicing: every instinct is unfettered and there is licence for every kind of gratification. Here we have easy access to an understanding of the nature of festivals in general. A festival is a permitted, or rather an obligatory, excess, a solemn breach of a prohibition. It is not that men commit the excesses because they are feeling happy as a result of some injunction they have received. It is rather that excess is of the essence of a festival; the festive feeling is produced by the liberty to do what is as a rule prohibited.

What are we to make, though, of the prelude to this festive joy—the mourning over the death of the animal? If the clansmen rejoice over the killing of the totem—a normally forbidden act—why do they mourn over it as well?

As we have seen, the clansmen acquire sanctity by consuming the totem: they reinforce their identification with it and with one another. Their festive feelings and all that follows from them might well be explained by the fact that they have taken into themselves the sacred life of which the substance of the totem is the vehicle.

Psycho-analysis has revealed that the totem animal is in reality a substitute for the father; and this tallies with the contradictory fact that, though the killing of the animal is as a rule forbidden, yet its killing becomes a festive occasion—the fact that it is killed and yet mourned. The ambivalent emotional attitude, which to this day characterizes the father-complex in our children and which often persists into adult life, seems to extend to the totem animal in its capacity as substitute for the father.

They hated their father, who presented such a formidable ob- stacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too. After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been—for events took the course we so often see them follow in human affairs to this day. What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves, in accordance with the psychological procedure so familiar to us in psycho-analyses under the name of ‘deferred obedience’. They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their father...

Totemic religion arose from the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that feeling and to appease the father by deferred obedience to him. All later religions are seen to be attempts at solving the same problem. They vary according to the stage of civilization at which they arise and according to the methods which they adopt; but all have the same end in view and are reactions to the same great event with which civilization began and which, since it occurred, has not allowed mankind a moment’s rest." [Totem and Taboo]

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyFri Dec 12, 2014 10:59 am

Totemism, to quote Frazer's classical definition, "is an intimate relation which is supposed to exist between a group of kindred people on the one side and a species of natural or artificial objects on the other side, which objects are called the totems of the human group." Totemism thus has two sides: it is a mode of socialism and as religion, it expresses primitive man's interest in his surroundings to possess control over valued resources. Malinowski had remarked that what formed the staple food of the clan, certain plants and animals thus came to be regarded in totemic reverence. And so what we witness in ancient totemism is really a utilitarian anxiety about necessary resources. This formed the sphere of the sacred. The totemic attitude of the mind, was most near to reality and to the immediate practical life.

Do you think capitalism has rendered that totemic attitude towards things obsolete? Or does our society still have its own kind of totemisms?
If so, what forms do these take today?

How did the schism between the sacred and the profane under modern capitalism disappear, if it did?

We witness a breakdown of our reverent attitude to necessary resources that marked Totemism.

In this sense, it strikes me that the profanity of modern capitalism can also be argued as it being so non-utilitarian, and that's one of views I find so fresh in relation to ancient totemism, given how today, normally capitalism and exploitation is generally associated together.

We have lost that reverent attitude to the objects and resources and tools that gratify us. Proper utilitarianism of which capitalism emerged as its off-shoot has disappeared; it has become cancerous.

Egalitarians, aware of the failure of their projects of justice and humanitarianism, paint their opponents in demonising terms. A new non-egalitarian vision of the world will have to present itself as concretely philanthropic, i.e. philos-anthropos, where egalitarianism is only ideally humanitarian...
Not to the extent Bataille went with his notion of the gift as philanthropy, an orgy of sacrificial gift-giving, but a balance and a reverence.


“Whenever a truth threatens, man hides behind a thought.” but also: "whenever a thought threatens, man hides behind the truth." (Canetti)

To Freud and Marx, totems and fetishes memorialize and defend against anxiety. They act as screens against memory - totems for social memories, and fetishes for the personal. In Marx’s terminology, totems and fetishes take the form of political economic institutions and commodities; they defend the status quo concealing reality.
"What is sacred is obviously something that may not be touched. A sacred prohibition has a very strong emotional tone but has in fact no rational basis." (Freud)

Totemism and its later religious derivatives, according to Freud, carries the power of prohibition through symbolic effect — that is, it forces the ego to inhibit action toward a desired aim, through meaning. For example, to forestall continual intra-group warfare, brothers in a family took several steps. They erected a totem, a representation of the father, and accorded it a sacred character. The totem is erected to ward off anxiety about castration and deflect guilt for the imagined crime of killing the father.

Their force is represented by the totem, a kind of fetish for the inhibited drives and around which later religious embellishments build their doctrines. Through this logic, Freud built his conclusion that religion is a neurosis.

Marx elaborated on the social front, the function of the fetish, what Freud highlighed about the totem on the personal front.
Totems and fetishes represent ways people try to ward off anxiety, and they function as building blocks of illusions.

Religion ritualises re-enactments of shared oedipal experiences. The primal father, threatening, and adored plays out regularly in ordinary social life.
What is threatening is made repetitive and emptied of danger, the repetition lending an order and a sacred character.
For Freud, fetishism is a perversion that avoids neurosis of repetitive regularity. The fetish symbolizes the overthrow in the regularity.

This is how commodity fetishism goes hand in hand with the totemism of the market. The market is treated as a sui generis or an exclusive kind of thing; everyone must worship the totem of the market else they starve.
Capital is the master fetish where the chief totem is the market, the institution.
The market is the order and capital is what constantly mocks, deposes, and ruptures that order through incessant innovation...
"Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." (Marx and Engels)

Risks are no longer probabilities of dangers or losses, but narratives serving to modify human behavior, totemic like religion.
The "war against terror" is the new totemic narrative, to ward off the neurosis of sickly civilization and the primal rage against killing, and the fetish that is terrorism.
At all costs, the institution is sacred and instituionalization rendered sacred.

But how does a thing come to be so sacralized, it becomes a totem?

What would render the totem so respected?

If I go with Foucault, I would have to ask, contra freud, do fetishes reinstate the totem?

For eg., does the slander through humour sacralize the object mocked?


Capitalism is the mobilization of oppositions and organizing them on some dimension, i.e. "around" something - that "around" is the Totem.

Xt. and the murder of Jesus was the sacrifice to end all sacrifice - the Church and its neurotic Civilizing was founded on this Prohibition;

Freud wrote:
"Totemic religion arose from the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that feeling and to appease the father by deferred obedience to him. All later religions are seen to be attempts at solving the same problem. They vary according to the stage of civilization at which they arise and according to the methods which they adopt; but all have the same end in view and are reactions to the same great event with which civilization began and which, since it occurred, has not allowed mankind a moment’s rest." [Totem and Taboo]

If society is to survive, the Father should not be killed - "around" him, the 'aura' of his sacrality, the competition of the brothers are regulated, the regulation of their freedom is totemic. - This is the Libertarian contract. It is a continuation of that Xt.

Build further. And you have institutionalization.

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyFri Dec 12, 2014 5:16 pm

With Institutionalization, you have new Priests taking over the Author-ity of the Father.

Some say Science is the new priest, but its rather the new absent god.

Some priests and Revealers will Implant and Invent Need in you first - as Baudrillard has been showing,,, and then pretend to be exposing/revealing these "Idols" and "showing the way" from "false idolatories".

To distinguish the Revealer who reveals human nature,, from the False Priests who Invent and Reveal intentions and needs they themselves have implanted in you in the first place, and explaining to you who you are and producing your subjectivity for you, needs Cold discrimination.

There are many Idols and Idol-makers in the Market-place; beware.

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptySat Feb 21, 2015 10:01 am

Profane: pro fano = out of the temple

Sacrifice: sacrum facio = the making of things sacred

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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyTue Apr 07, 2015 6:50 pm

Quote :
"In usual form, we’ll analyze the emergence of the formation of the mass consciousness through mass media from its ritual and cultic connections, paying close attention to the pop symbology, but this time around, we shall consider ritual itself. Let us travel out of the media circus for a moment to the realm of liturgy, or communal ritual working. Comparative religion luminary Mircea Eliade sheds light on this primal art in the following section of his The Sacred and the Profane:

Quote :
…[S]ince religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred, we must expect to find large number of techniques for consecrating space. As we saw, the sacred is preeminently the real, at once power, efficacy, the source of life and fecundity. The religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact his desire to take up abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in real and effective world, and not in an illusion…But we are not to suppose that human work is in question here, that it is through his efforts that man can consecrate a space. In reality the ritual by which he constructs a sacred space is efficacious in the measure in which it reproduces the work of the gods. (pg. 28)

Eliade is invoking the primal urge in man to consecrate sacred space – a space where the gods of old come to communicate meaning, morality and telos to mankind, where upon the high places, the heavenly realm of celestial intelligences might make a theophanic manifestation to shape earth into the form of the above, imposing order upon unruly chaos. Yet modern man is no longer superstitious, we are told, and with the dawn of the “Age of Reason,” he abandoned ritual and liturgy for the reasonably rational life of being an “informed citizen” of his Enlightened Democratic Republic, intimately involved in forming and shaping his local, social-contracted propositional government covenant. However, if we reflect a little further on Eliade’s comment, we begin to see that space age man is just as religious, if not more so, than ignorant, savage ancient man. The difference emerges as merely one of form and medium, not substance.

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Most of us do not seek out the village shaman or hierophant for messages from the spirit realm, yet do we not daily gaze into our handheld magical mirrors and screens that transmit the messages of the priests, shamans and ascended media masters, with little opprobrium? The liturgical icon of old is now become the moving icon of the vivacious info-babe and the holy mothers of Channel 5 Monastery. From the towering cathedrals of the major films studios, CNN and Fox, the word of the gods issues forth to guide the supplicant masses with a bevy of tales on the lives of new patron civic saints and mythologies of Hollywood heroes who subsist in the realm of the unattainable forms.

Our new gods do not always issue messages of hope and salvation, unfortunately. Our devas are very much gods of wrath and vengeance, inflicting upon the mass psyche a continual barrage of spells and incantations geared toward confusion and hysteria. Just as the priest’s ritual dagger divides the sacrifice, so the priests of our day divide the psyche on the edge of the ritual athame, channeling endless streams of fear and destruction. As the sacrifice is cut in half and “doubled,” the mass psyche is divided into incoherent double-mind and double-think.

Rather than concern for the virus of media mythology and mind control, the populace is concerned about a few cases of so-called viral Ebola. Few are those concerned with the virus of programmed liturgical psychodrama by which their magical mirror screens enchant them as they are lulled under the voodoo spell of the zombie. It should never be forgotten that the zombie mythology arises from the shaman’s ability to drug the unlucky victim, causing the unwitting to become subject to the suggestions of the shaman’s new narrative – that he is under the shaman’s mind control. In this regard, the explosion of the zombie phenomenon the last decade is a manifestation of this divine revelation from our rulers on high – you are under the spell, under the thumb of the obeah, a doll for the media voodoo worker’s nefarious machinations. Shamanic Network, Inc.’s designs are not the mystical unknowns of a deus absconditus: the zombie is a parasitical entity that feeds on the living. The designs of the media papacy are to divide and slaughter your psyche, transforming you into a zombie who in turn divides and consumes his fellow man. Thus, the zombie is under the spell that death is life, that parasitism will grant power, that sex is death, when in reality zombies are death feeding their own death, the fullest blossoming of the covenant of death, which is self-destruction.

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Eliade illustrates this well with an example from African comparative religion:

Among the Mandja and the Banda of Africa, there is a secret society named Ngakola. According to the myth told to the candidates during their initiation, Ngakola was a monster who had the power of swallowing men and then disgorging them renewed. The candidate is put in a hut that symbolizes the monster’s body. There he hears Ngakola’s eerie voice, there he is whipped and tortured, for he is told that he is now in Ngakola’s belly and is being digested. More ordeals follow; then the master of the initiation proclaims that Ngakola, who had devoured the candidate, has disgorged him. (Ibid., 192)

There is no Ngakola – he is the invention of the deviant priest-class that sought total mind control over his candidate through the ritual psychodrama of torture, deprivation and (I feel sure) drugging. The “secret society” of priests exercise their control of the tribe through dividing the psyche of their supplicants and devotees with the very same ritual psychodrama the mass media mavens of our day utilize, only our ascended Hollywood hegumen are more technologically sophisticated. For them, the wires and waves of electrical signals and currents are the medium for their message, and the medium’s message is the medium – to further its own existence as the source of meaning through its faithful presentation of its own mystagogical psychodrama.

With that in mind, and the intelligence agencies’ associations with media have long documented, think now of ritual. Liturgical ritual is the continual re-presentation of some primal event of timeless significance, and for this reason mass media is our new liturgy, re-presenting the self-perpetuating mythos that it is our source of meaning and gnosis. Is it not all one and the same process? The drugs of today’s obeah are not the poison of a blowfish, but the tinctures and potions of big pharmaceutical pharmakeia. Its saints and monastics wear suits and sing the chant of the TaylorSwiftianGagaMileyCyresian serpentine doxological refrain.  Its [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

While we gaze into our screens and await the latest download and update from our overlords on what the orthodox consensus reality is, let us not forgot it is a ritual psychodrama that is playing out, lest we be swept up into the religious rapture of the beatific television. The iconography of the screen is the crafted narrative and mythology of the establishment’s choosing. It is the cacophonous echo chamber of the Holy Mammon Foundation and is under the think-tank theologians’ purview.  Its ritual is the one in which we daily tithe our time and thoughts and attention, as we await with mystical gaze for the new revelations Olympus will dictate from its metallic stellar satellites. Its present soothsaying word from beyond is that of viral doom and zombie programming, a flagellant torture and scourge as it howls the eerie voice of Ngakola. What is the solution? The realization the real virus is the psychical belief that for truth and meaning to be obtained, we must gaze at the gods of mass media and kneel as neophyte communicants at the tele-altar techno-theatrical cathedrals, like zombies or sorcerer’s apprentices. Modern man is far from being irreligious. He has, as Foucault said, simply changed his old priests and gods for new ones."

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptySun Aug 16, 2015 7:44 pm

Kafka wrote:
"Leopards break into the temple and drink the contents of the sacrificial vessels; this happens over and over again; eventually it can be reckoned with, and it becomes part of the ceremony."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyThu Sep 24, 2015 3:59 pm

Satyr wrote:
Karma is social repute.

Image matters in public rituals.

Quote :
"Evidence shows that people tend to behave prosocially when they are in the presence of images depicting eyes. There are two proximate causes of the eyes effect. One involves positive motivation to gain future reward and the other involves negative motivation to avoid violating a norm. Although several studies have suggested that positive motivation is a strong candidate, these studies were unable to distinguish between adherence to norms and prosocial behavior. We investigated the watching-eyes effect in an experimental setting to determine whether the tendency of humans to violate norms voluntarily could be understood as prosocial behavior. We compared the tendency to tell “prosocial lies” in the presence of a depiction of stylized eyes (eyes condition) with that involving no such depiction (control condition). Under the control condition, participants tended to tell lies that benefitted others, whereas the tendency toward prosocial lying disappeared under the eyes condition. This suggests that the desire to avoid violating norms by being honest is stronger than the desire to pursue a good reputation by demonstrating generosity when such violation might lead to serious costs."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyThu Sep 24, 2015 4:04 pm

It makes sense when the motive is inclusion.

Philosophy being the discipline of dealing with reality, makes philosophers the isolated monsters, nobody likes and nobody can ignore.

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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyFri May 20, 2016 5:33 am

Rene Girard wrote:
"Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, in their "Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacri­fice," adduce the sacred chacacter of the victim. Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him - but the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed. Here is a circular line of reasoning that at a somewhat later date would be dignified by the sonorous term ambivalnce.
Per­suasive and authoritative as that term still appears, it has been so extra­ ordinarily abused in our century that perhaps we may now recognize how little light it sheds on the subject of sacrifice. Certainly it provides no real explanation.

Once aroused, the urge to violence triggers certain physical changes that prepare men's bodies for battle. This set toward violence lingers on; it should not be regarded as a simple reflex that ceases with the removal of the initial stimulus.

Violence itself will discard them if the initial object remains persistently out of reach and continues to provoke hostility. When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vul nerable and close at hand.

There are many indications that this tendency to seek out surrogate objects is not limited to human violence. Konrad Lorenz makes refer­ence to a species of fish that, if deprived of its natural enemies (the male rivals with whom it habitually disputes territorial rights), turns its aggression against the members of its own family and destroys them.

There is no question of "expiation." Rather, society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent vic­ tim, a "sacrificeable" victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect.

The qualities that lend violence its particular terror - its blind brutal­ ity, the fundamental absurditv of its manifestations-have a reverse side. With these qualities goes the strange propensity to seize upon surrogate victims, to actually conspire 'with the enemy and at the right moment toss him a morsel that will serve to satisfy his raging hunger. The fairy tales of childhood in which the wolf, ogre, or dragon gob­bles up a large stone in place of a small child could well be said to have a sacrificial cast.

Cain is a tiller of the soil who gives the fruits of his labor to God, whereas Abel is a shepherd who regularly sacrifices the first-born of his herds. One of the brothers kills the other, and the murderer is the one who does not have the violence-outlet of animal sacrifice at his disposal. This difference between sacrificial and nonsacrificial cults determines, in effect, God's judgement in favor of Abel. To say that God accedes to Abel's sacrificial offerings but rejects the offerings of Cain is simply another way of saying - from the viewpoint of the divinity-that Cain is a murderer, whereas his brother is not.

A frequent motif in the Old Testament, as well as in Greek myth, is that of brothers at odds with one another. Their fatal penchant for violence can only be diverted by the intervention of a third party, the sacrificial victim or victims. Cain's "jealousy" of his brother is only another term for his one characteristic trait: his lack of a sacrificial outlet.

According to Moslem tradition, God delivered to Abraham the ram previously sacrificed by Abel. This ram was to take the place of Abra­ham's son Isaac; having already saved one human life, the same animal would now save another. What we have here is no mystical hocus-pocus, but an intuitive insight into the essential function of sacrifice, gleaned exclusively from the scant references in the Bible.

Another familiar biblical scene takes on new meaning in the light of our theory of sacrificial substitution, and it can serve in turn to illumi­ nate some aspects of the theory. The scene is that in which Jacob receives the blessing of his father Isaac.

Isaac is an old man. He senses the approach of death and summons his eldest son, Esau, on whom he intends to bestow his final blessing. First, however, he instructs Esau to bring back some venison from the hunt, so as to make a "savory meat." This request is overheard by the younger brother, Jacob, who hastens to report it to his mother, Re­ bekah. Rebekah takes two kids from the family flock, slaughters them, and prepares the savory meat dish, which Jacob, in the guise of his elder brother, then presents to his father.

Isaac is blind. Nevertheless Jacob fears he will be recognized, for he is a "smooth man," while his brother Esau is a "hairy man." "My father per adventure will feel me, and I shall seem to him as a deceiver; and I shall bring a curse upon me, not a blessing." Rebekah has the idea of covering Jacob's hands and the back of his neck with the skins of the slaughtered goats, and when the old man runs his hands over his younger son, he is completely taken in by the imposture. Jacob re­ceives the blessing that Isaac had intended for Esau.

The kids serve in two different ways to dupe the father - or, in other terms, to divert from the son the violence directed toward him. In order to receive his father's blessing rather than his curse, Jacob must present to Isaac the freshly slaughtered kids made into a "savory meat." Then the son must seek refuge, literally, in the skins of the sacrificed animals. The animals thus interpose themselves between fa­ther and son. They serve as a sort of insulation, preventing the direct contact that could lead only to violence.

Odysseus and his shipmates are shut up in the Cyclops' cave. Every day the giant devours one of the crew; the survivors finally mana. ge to blind their tormentor with a flaming stake. Mad with pain and anger, the Cyclops bars the entrance of the cave to prevent the men from escaping. However, he lets pass his flock of sheep, which go out daily to pasture. In a gesture reminiscent of the blind Isaac, the Cyclops runs his hands over the back of each sheep as it leaves the cave to make sure that it carries no passenger. Odysseus, however, has outwitted his cap­tor, and he rides to freedom by clinging to the thick wool on the underside of one of the rams.

A comparison of the two scenes, one from Genesis and the other from the Odyssey, lends credence to the theory of their sacrificial origins. In each case an animal intervenes at the crucial moment to prevent violence from attaining its designated victim.

The victim is not a substi­tute for some panicularly endangered individual, nor is it offered up to some individual of particularly bloodthirsty temperament. Rather, it is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire com­ munity from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.

The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric. Everything else derives from that. If once we take this fundamental approach to sacrifice, choosing the road that violence opens before us, we can see that there is no aspect of human existence foreign to the subject, not even material prosperity. When men no longer live in harmony with one another, the sun still shines and the rain falls, to be sure, but the fields are less well tended, the harvests less abundant.

The classic literature of China explicitly acknowledges the propitiatory function of sacrificial rites. Such practices "pacify the country and make the people settled.... It is through the sacrifices that the unity of the people is strengthened'' (CH'U YU II, 2).

Even in fifth century Greece-the Athens of the great tragedians­ human sacrifice had not, it seems, completely disappeared. The prac­tice was perpetuated in the form of the pharmakos, maintained by the city at its own expense and slaughtered at the appointed festivals as well as at a moment of civic disaster. If examined closely for traces of human sacrifice, Greek tragedy offers some remarkable.revelations. It is clear, for example, that the story of Medea parallels that of Ajax on the sacrificial level, although here we are dealing with human rather than with animal sacrifice. In Euripides' Medea the principle of human substitution of one victim for another appears in its most savage form. Frightened by the intensity of Medea's rage against her faithless hus­ band, jason, the nurse begs the children's tutor to keep his charges out of their mother's way:

"I am sure her anger will not subside until it has found a victim. Let us pray that the victim is at least one of our enemies!"

Because the object of her hatred is out of reach, Medea substitutes her own children. It is difficult for us to see anything resembling a reli­ gious act in Medea's insane behaviour. Nonetheless, infanticide has its

place among ritualistic practices; the practice is too well documented in too many cultures (including the Jewish and the ancient Greek) for us to exclude it from consideration here. Medea's crime is to ritual infanticide vihat the massacre of sheep in the Ajax is to animal sacri­ fice. Medea prepares for the death of her children like a priest prepar­ ing for a sacrifice. Before the fateful act, she issues the traditional ritual announcement: all those whose presence might in any ·way hinder the effectiveness of the ceremony are requested to remove themselves from the premises.

Medea, like Ajax, reminds us of a fundamental truth about violence; if left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overflows its con­ fines and floods the surrounding area. The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into "proper" channels.

Ajax has details that underline the close relationship between the sacrificial substitution of animals and of humans. Before he sets upon the flock of sheep, Ajax momentarily contemplates the sacrifice of his own son. The boy's mother does not take this threat lightly; she whisks the child away.

In Euripides' Electra, Clytemnestra explains that the sacrifice of her daughter lphigenia would have been justified if it had been performed to save human lives. The tragedian thus enlightens us, by way of Oytemnestra, on the "normal'' function of human sacrifice.

If we look at the extremely wide spectrum of human victims sacrificed by various societies, the list seems hetero geneous, to say the least. It includes prisoners of \Var, slaves, smaJI children, unmarried adolescents, and the handicapped; it ranges from the very dregs of society, such as the Greek pharmakos, to the king himself.

Is it possible to detect a unifying factor in this disparate group? We notice at first glance beings , who are either outside or on the fringes of society: prisoners of war, slaves, pharmakos. In many primitive soci­eties children who have not yet undergone the rites of initiation have no proper place in the community; their rights and duties are almost nonexistent. What we are dealing with, therefore, are exterior or mar­ ginal individuals, incapable of e;tablishing or sharing the social bonds that link the rest of the inhabitants. Their status as foreigners or ene­ mies, their servile condition, or simply their age prevents these future victims from fully integrating themselves into the community.

But what about the king Is he not at the very heart of the com­ munity? Undoubtedly-but it is precisely his position at the center that serves to isolate him from his fellow men, to render him casteless. He escapes from society, so to speak, via the roof, just as the phar­makos escapes through the cellar. The king has a sort of fool, however, in the person of his fool. The fool shares his master's status as an outsider-an isolation ·whose literaJ truth is often of greater signifi­ cance than the easily reversible svmbolic values often attributed to it. From every point of view the fool is eminently "sacrificeable," and the king can use him to vent his own anger. But it sometimes happens that the king himself is sacrificed.

It is clearly legitimate to define the difference between sacrificeable and nonsacrificeable individuals in terms of their degree of integration, but such a definition is not yet sufficient. In many cultures women are not considered full-fledged members of their society; yet women are never, or rarely, selected as sacrificial victims. There may be a simple explanation for this fact. The married woman retains her ties with her parents' clan even after she has become in some respects the property of her husband and his family. To kill her would be to run the risk of one of the two groups' interpreting her sacrifice as an act of murder committing it to a reciprocal act of revenge. The notion of vengeance casts a new light on the matter. All our sacrificial victims, whether chosen from one of the human categories enumerated above or, a fortiori, from the animal realm, are invariably distinguishable from the nonsacrificeable beings by one essential characteristic: between these victims and the community a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail an act of vengeance.

Sacrifice is primarily an act of violence without risk of vengeance. \Ve also understand the paradox -not without its comic aspects on occasion -

"For the act they were about to commit elaborate excuses were offered; they shuddered at the prospect of the sheep's death, they wept over it as though they were its parents. Before the blow was struck, they implored the beast's forgiveness. They then addressed themselves to the species to which the beast belonged, as if addressing a large family clan, beseeching it not to seek vengeance for the act that was about to be inflicted on one of its members. ln the same vein the actual murderer was punished in some manner, either beaten or sent into exile."

By incorporating the ele­ment of reprisal into the ceremony, the participants are hinting  broadly at the true function of the rite, the kind of action it was designed to circumvent and the criteria that determined the choice of victim.

If our own system seems more rational, it is because it conforms more strictly to the principle of vengeance. Its insistence on the pun­ ishment of the guilty party underlines this fact. Instead of following the example of religion and attempting to forestall acts of revenge, to mitigate or sabotage its effects or to redirect them to secondary ob­ jects, our judicial system rationalizes revenge and succeeds in limiting and isolating its effects in accordance with social demands. The system treats the disease without fear of contagion and provides a highly effective technique for the cure and, as a secondary effect, the preven­tion of violence.

The judicial system and the institution of sacrifice share the same function, but the judicial system is infinitely more effective. However, it can only exist in conjunction with a firmly established political power. And like all modern technological ad­vances, it is a two-edged sword, which can be used to oppress as well as to liberate. Certainly that is the way it is seen by primitive cultures, whose view on the matter is indubitably more objective than our own.

If the function of the system has now become apparent, that is because it no longer enjoys the obscurity it needs to operate effectively. A clear view of the inner workings indicates a crisis in the system; it is a sign of disimegration. No matter how sturdy it may seem, the apparatus that serves to hide the true nature of legal and illegal violence from view eventually wears thin. The underlying truth breaks through, and we find ourselves face to face with the specter of reciprocal reprisal.

Religion shelters us from violence just as violence seeks shelter in religion." [Violence and the Sacred]


Rene Girard wrote:
"The word katharsis refers primarily to the mysterious benefits that accrue to the community upon the death of a human kathanna or pharmakos. The process is generally seen as a religious purification and takes the form of cleansing or draining away impurities. Shortly before his execution the pharmakos is paraded ceremonially through the streets of the village. It is believed that he will absorb all the noxious influences that may be abroad and that his death will transpose them outside the community. This is a mythical representation of what does in fact almost take place. The communal violence is indeed drawn to the person of the surrogate victim, but the final resolution cannot be described as the expulsion of some substance. The interpretation thus approaches the truth but fails to attain it because it fails to perceive three essential facts: the mimetic nature of reciprocal violence, the arbitrary choice of the victim, and the unanimous polarization of hos­ tility that produces the reconciliation. To view violence as an impurity or blemish that is located in a physical substance is to materialize violence once again. When the shaman draws forth from his patient an object he identifies as the sickness itself he is transferring and trans­ forming this mythical interpretation into yet another form-that of a small, insignificant object.

In addition to its religious sense and its particular meaning in the context of shamanism, the word katharsis has a specific use in medical language. A cathartic medicine is a powerful drug that induces the evacuation of humors or other substances judged to be noxious. The illness and its cure are often seen as one; or at least, the medicine is considered capable of aggravating the symptoms, bringing about a salutarv crisis that will lead to recovery. In other words, the crisis is provoked by a supplementary dosage of the affiiction resulting in the
expulsion of the pathogenetic agents along with itself. The operation is the same as that of the human kathtrrma, although in medicine the act of purgation is not mythic but real. The mutations of meaning from the human katharma to the medical katharsis are paralleled by those of the human pharmakos to the medi­cal pharmakon, which signifies at once "poison" and "remedy." In both cases we pass from the surrogate victim or rather, his represen­tative-to a drug that possesses a simultaneous potential for good and  for bad, one that serves as a physical transposition of sacred duality. Plutarch's use of the expression kathartikon pharmakon seems mean­ingfully redundant in this context.

Katharma and katharsis are derived from katharos. If we wished to group together all the themes associated with these terms, we would find ourselves with a veritable catalog of the subjects discussed here under the double heading of violence and the sacred. Katharma is not limited to the victim or the surrogate object; it also refers to the supreme efforts of a mythic or rragic hero. Plutarch speaks of the pontia katharmata, expulsions that purified the seas, with reference to the labors of Heracles. Kathairo means, among other things, "to purge the land of monsters." Its secondary meaning, "to whip," may appear puzzling in this context, until we recall the practice of whipping the pharmakos on the genitals.
It is worth noting that catharsis is used in connection with purifica­tion ceremonies that form part of the "mysteries" initiation rites; the word is also sometimes used to designate menstruation. Such usages make it clear that we are not dealing here with a heterogeneous collection of references, but rather with a unified system, to which the surrogate victim holds the key." [Violence and the Sacred]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Ritual Ritual EmptyFri May 20, 2016 5:35 am

Rene Girard wrote:
"If the gap between the victim and the community is allowed to grow too wide, all similarity will be destroyed. The victim will no longer be capable of attracting the violent impulses to itself; the sacrifice will cease to serve as a "good conductor," in the sense that metal is a good conductor of electricity. On the other hand, if there is too much continuity the violence will overflow its channels. "Impure" violence \viii mingle with the "sacred" violence of the rites, turning the latter into a scandalous accomplice in the process of pollution, even a kind of catalyst in the propagation of further impurity.

Euripides' Heracles contains no tragic conflict, no debate between  declared adversaries. The real subject of the play is the failure of a sacrifice, the act of sacrificial violence that suddenly goes wrong. Heracles, returning home after the completion of his labors, finds his wife and children in the power of a usurper named Lycus, who is preparing to offer them as sacrificial victims. Heracles kills Lycus.

After this most recent act of violence, committed in the heart of the city, the hero's need to purify himself is greater than ever, and he sets about preparing a sacrifice of his own. His wife and children are with him when Heracles, suddenlv seized by madness, mistakes them for his enemies and sacrifices them: Heracles' misidentification of his family is attributed to Lyssa, god­dess of madness.  

The sacrifice contemplated by the hero succeeded only too well in polarizing the forces of violence. Indeed, it produced a superabun­ dance of violence of a particularly virulent kind. As Amphitryon sug­ gested, the blood shed in the course of the terrible labors and in the city itself finally turned the hero's head. Instead of drawing off the violence and allowing it to ebb away, the rites brought a veritable flood of violence down on the victim. The sacrificial rites were no longer able to accomplish their task; they swelled the surging tide of impure violence instead of channeling it. The mechanism of substitu­ tions had gone astray, and those whom the sacrifice was designed to protect became its victims. The myth of Horatius, as explicated by Georges Dumezil, illustrates this theme: Horatius kills his sister before any ritual purification has been performed. In the case of Heracles the impurity triumphs over the rite itself.

Ethnologists are not unaware that ritual impurity is linked to the dissolution of distinctions between individuals and institutions.

In some primitive societies twins inspire a particular terror. It is not unusual for one of the twins, and often both, to be put to death. The origin of this terror has long puzzled ethnologists.

Twins invariably share a cultural identity, and they often have a striking physical resemblance to each other. Wherever differences are lacking, violence threatens. Between the biological twins and the socio­ logical twins there arises a confusion that grows more troubled as the question of differences reaches a crisis. It is only natural that nvins should awaken fear, for they are harbingers of indiscriminate violence, the greatest menace to primitive societies. As soon as the twins of violence appear they multiply prodigiously, by scissiparity, as it were, and produce a sacrificial crisis. It is essential to prevent the spread of this highly contagious disease. When faced with biological twins the normal reaction of the culture is simply to avoid contagion. The way primitive societies attempt to accomplish this offers a graphic demon­ stration of the kind of danger they associate with twins. In societies where their very existence is considered dangerous, the infants are "exposed"; that is, abandoned outside the community under conditions that make their d eath inevitable. A ny act of direct physical violence against the anathema is scrupulously avoided.

The Nyakyusa maintain that the parents of twins are contaminated by "bad" violence, and there is a certain logic about that notion, since the parents are, after all, responsible for engendering the twins. In reference to the twins the parents are designated by a term that is applied to all threatening individuals, all monstrous or terrifying creatures. In order to prevent the spread of pollution the parents are required to isolate themselves and submit to rites of purification; only then are they allowed to rejoin the community.

The primitive concept of a link between the loss of distinctions and violence is strange to us; but we need only consider the calamities primitive people associate with twins to perceive the logic of this concept. Deadly epidemics can result from contact with twins, as can mysterious illnesses that cause sterility in women and animals. Even more significant to us is the role of twins in provoking discord among neighbors, a fatal collapse of ritual, the transgression of interdictions­ in short, their part in instigating a sacrificial crisis.

In the primitive societies where twins are not killed they often enjoy a privileged position.

Two brothers need not be twins for their resemblances to arouse anxiety. We can assume almost a priori that in some societies the mere fact of familial similarity is cause for alarm.

A community cannot categorize a majority of its inhabitants as proba­ tionary criminals \\'ithout creating an intolerable situation. Neverthe­ less, the phobia of resemblance is a fact. Malinowski's The Father in Primitive Psychology offers formal proof. The study demonstrates how the phobia can perpetuate itself without disastrous consequences:

"In a matrilineal society, as in the Trobriands, where all maternal relatives are considered to be of the "same body," and the father to be a "stran­ger," we would naturally expect and have no doubt that the facial and bodilv similarity would be traced to the mother's family alone. The contrary is the case, and this is affirmed with an extremely strong social emphasis. Not only is it a household dogma, so to speak, that a child never resembles its mother, any of its brothers or sisters, or any of its maternal kinsmen, but it is extremely bad form and a great offence to hint at any such similarity'. . . ."

Malinowski's description demonstrates that a paternal resemblance is perceived by the Trobriands, paradoxically enough, in terms of differ­ences. It is the father who serves to differentiate the children from one another. He is literally the bearer of a difference...

If the Oedipus myth does not explicitly set forth the problem of differences, it nonetheless manages to resolve the problem in a matter both brutal and categorical. The solution involves patricide and incest. In the mythical version of the story the issue of reciprocity-the identity of Oedipus with the others - never arises. One can assert with lotal con­viction that Oedipus is unique in at least one respect: he alone is guilty of patricide and incest. He is presented as a monstrous exception to the general run of mankind; he resembles nobody, and nobody resembles him.

[Yet] Patricide represents the establishment of violent reciprocity between father and son, the reduction of the paternal relationship to "fraternal' revenge.

When it has succeeded in abolishing even the traditional father-son relationship, violent reciprocity is left in sole command of the battle­ field. Its victory could hardly be more complete, for in pitting father against son it has chosen as the basis of their rivalry an object solemnly consecrated as belonging to the father and formally forbidden the son: that is, the father's wife and son's mother. Incest is also a form of violence, an extreme form, and it plays in consequence an extreme role in the destruction of differences. It destroys that other crucial family distinction, that between the mother and her children. Between patri­ cide and incest, the violent abolition of all familv differences is achieved. The process that links violence to the loss ofdistinctions will naturally perceive incest and patricide as its ultimate goals. No possibility of difference then remams; no aspect of life is immune from the onslaught of violence.

Oedipus's monstrosity is contagious; it infects first of all those beings engendered by him. The eses ntial task is to separate once more the two strains of blood whose poisonous blend is now perpetuated by the natural process of generation. Incestuous propagation leads to formless duplications, sinister repetitions, a dark mixture of unnamable things. In short, the incestuous creature exposes the community to the same danger as do twins. These are indeed the manifestations, real and transfigured, of the sacrificial crisis always referred to by primitive societies in connection with incest. Indeed, the mothers of twins are often suspected of having conceived their children in incestuous fashion.

Sophocles attributes Oedipus's incest to the influence of the god Hymen, who after all is directly implicated in the affair as the god of matrimonial laws and the regulator of family distinctions.

"Hymen, 0 Hymen, to whom I owe my binh, and who, having engen­ dered me, employed the same seed in the same place to cast upon the outraged world a monstrous commingling of fathers, brothers, sons; of brides, wives, and mothers."

Patricide and incest thus play the same role in the Oedipus myth as do the other mythical and ritual motifs considered previously. They serve to conceal the sacrificial crisis far more effectively than they reveal it. To be sure, they manage to express both aspects of the crisis, both reciprocity and forced similarities; but they do so in a way that strikes terror into the beholder and suggests that they are the exclusive responsibility of a particular individual. We lose sight of the fact that this same reciprocity operates among every member of the community and signifies the existence of a sacrificial crisis.

Another thematic device, in addition to patricide and incest, cloaks the sacrificial crisis in parallel and inverse fashion: the motif of the plague or epidemic.
Even if Sophocles had in mind the famous Athenian plague of 430 B.C., he clearly did not mean to limit his reference to one specific microbiotic visitation. The epidemic that interrupts all the vital functions of the city is surely not unrelated to violence and the loss of distinctions. The .oracle itself explains matters: it is the infec­tious presence of a murderer that has brought on the disaster.

The responsibility for the events is evenly distributed among all.
If the crisis has dropped from sight, if universal reciprocity is elim­ inated, it is because of the unequal distribution of the very real parts of the crisis. In fact. nothing has been truly abolished, nothing added, but everything has been misplaced. The whole process of mythical formu­ lation leads to a transferral of violent undifferentiation from all the Thebans to the person of Oedipus. Oedipus becomes the repository of all the communitv's ills. He has become a prime example of the human scapegoat.

He assures them that all the evils abroad in the community are the sole responsibility of the surrogate victim, and that he alone, as that victim, must assume the consequences for these ills:

"Believe me, you have nothing more to fear. My ills are mine alone, no other mortal is fit to bear them."

Oedipus is indeed the responsible party, so responsible that he frees the community from all accountability. The concept of the plague is a result of this situation. The plague is what remains of the sacrificial crisis when it has been emptied of all violence. It calls to mind the passivity of the "patient" in the modern world of medicine.

In Romantic literature, in the animistic theory of primitive religious practices and in modern psychiatry, the tenn double is perceived as essentially unreal, a projection of the imagination. I mean something different here. Although doubles, in my use of the term, convey cer­tain hallucinatory associations, they are in themselves not at all imaginary-no more than the tragic symmetry of which they form the ideal expression is imaginary.

If violence is a great leveler of men and everybody becomes the double, or "twin," of his antagonist, it seems to follow that all the doubles are identical and that any one can at any given moment be­ come the double of all the others; that is, the sole object of universal obsession and hatred. A single victim can be substituted for all the potential victims, for all the enemy brothers that each member is striv­ ing to banish from the community; he can be substituted, in fact, for each and every member of the community. Each member's hostility, caused by clashing against others, becomes converted from an individ­ual feeling to a communal force unanimously directed against a single individual. The slightest hint, the most groundless accusation, can cir­culate with vertiginous speed and is transformed into irrefutable proof. The corporate sense of conviction snowballs, each member taking confidence from his neighbor by a rapid process of mimesis. The firm conviction of the group is based on no other evidence than the unshak­ able unanimity of its own illogic.

The universal spread of "doubles," the complete effacement of dif­ ferences, heightening antagonisms but also making them interchange­ able, is the prerequisite for the establishment of violent unanimity. For order to be reborn, disorder must first triumph; for myths to achieve their complete integration, they must first suffer total disintegration.

Where only shortly before a thousand individual conflicts had raged unchecked between a thousand enemy brothers, there now reappears a true community, united in its hatred for one alone of its number." [Violence and the Sacred]


Doubles.

Girard wrote:
"In the collective experience of the monstrous double the differences are not eliminated, but muddied and confused. All the doubles are interchangeable, although their basic similarity is never formally ac­knowledged. They thus occupy the equivocal middle ground between difference and unity that is indispensable to the process of sacrificial substitution-to the polarization of violence onto a single \ictim who substitutes for all the others. The monstrous double gives the antag­ onists, incapable of perceiving that nothing actually stands between them (or their reconciliation), precisely what they need to arrive at the compromise that involves unanimity minus the victim of the gen­ erative expulsion. The monstrous double, all monstrous doubles in the person of one-the "thousand-headed dragon" of The Bacchae­ becomes the object of unanimous violence :

Appear, great bull !
Come, dragon with a thousand heads!
0 come to us, fire-breathing lion!
Quick, quick, you smiling Bacchant, and cast your fatal net about this
man who dares to hunt you Maenads!

We can now appreciate the atmosphere of terror and hallucination that accompanies the primordial religious experience. When violent hysteria reaches a peak the monstrous double looms up everywhere at once. The decisive act of violence is directed against this awesome vision of evil and at the same time sponsored by it. The turmoil then gives way to calm; hallucinations vanish, and the detente that follows only heightens the mystery of the whole process. In an instant all extremes have met, all differences fused; superhuman exemplars of violence and peace have in that instant coincided. Modern pathological experiences offer no such catharsis; but although religious and patho­ logical experiences cannot be equated, they share certain similarities.

In The Bacchae, the monstrous dou­ ble is everywhere. As we have seen, from the opening of the play animal, human, and divine are caught up in a frenetic interchange; beasts are mistaken for men or gods, gods and men mistaken for beasts. Perhaps the most intriguing instance of this confusion occurs during the encounter between Dionysus and Pentheus, shortly before Pen­ theus is murdered-that is, at the verv moment when the enemv brother is due to disappear behind the frorm of the monstrous double.

And that is exactly what happens. Penrheus has already fallen prey to Dionysiac vertigo; he sees double:

Pentheus: I seem to see tv.·o suns, two Thebes, with two rimes seven gates. And you, you are a bull walking before me, with two horns sprouting from your head.

Dionysus: You see what you ought to see.

In this extraordinary exchange the theme of the double appears ini­ tially in a form completely exterior to the subject, as a double vision of inanimate objects, an attack of dizziness. Here we are dealing solely with hallucinatory elements; they are undeniably a part of the experi­ ence, but only a part, and not the essential one. As the passage unfolds, so too does its meaning. Pentheus associates the double vision with the vision of the monster. Dionysus is at once man, god, and bull. The reference to the hull's horns links the two themes: doubles are always monstrous, and dualitv is alwavs an attribute of monsters.

Dionysus's words are arresting : "You see what you ought to see." By seeing double, by seeing Dionysus himself as a monster bearing the double seal of dualitv and bestiality, Pentheus conforms to the im­ mutable rules of the game. Master of the game, the god makes sure that events take their course according to his plan. The plan is identical to the process we have just described, with the monstrous double making his appearance at the height of the crisis, just before the unanimous resolution.

These lines become even more intriguing when read in conjunction with the passage that follows. :1\;ow we have to reckon not with hal­ lucination or vertigo but with real flesh and blood doubles. The identi­ cal nature of the antagonists is explicitly formulated:

Pentheus: Tell me, who do I look like? Like lno, or like my mother Agaue?

Dionysus: You seem the very image of them both.

Surely it is the similarity of doubles that is being suggested; that of the surrogate victim and the community that expells it, of the sacrificed and the sacrificer. All differences are abolished. "You seem the very image of them both" : once again it is the god himself who confim1s the basic principles of a process initiated by him and \vhich, in fact, comes to seem a sign of his presence.

The subject watches the monstrosity that takes shape within him and outside him simultaneously. In his efforts to explain what is hap­ pening to him, he attributes the origin of the apparition to some ex­ terior cause. Surely, he thinks, this vision is too bizarre to emanate from the familiar country within, too foreign in fact to derive from the world of men. The whole interpretation of the experience is domi­ nated by the sense that the monster is alien to himsel f.

The subject feels that the most intimate regions of his being have been invaded by a supernatural creature who also besieges him with­ out. Horrified, he finds himself the "victim of a double assault to which he cannot respond. Indeed, how can one defend oneself against an enemy who blithely ignores all barriers between inside and outside? This extraordinary freedom of movement permits the god-or spirit or demon-to seize souls at will. The condition called "possession" is in fact but one particular interpretation of the monstrous double." [Violence and the Sacred]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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