And so let me now cite, in illustration of the high service of ritual to a society, the very solemn state occasion that followed, in Washington, D.C., the assassination of President Kennedy. That was a ritualized occasion of the greatest social necessity. The nation as a unit had suffered a shocking loss, a loss that had been shocking in depth—in a unanimous sense. No matter what one’s opinions and feelings politically might have been, that magnificent young man representing our whole society, the living social organism of which ourselves were the members, taken away at the height of his career, at a moment of exuberant life—suddenly death, and then the appalling disorder that followed: all this required a compensatory rite to reestablish the sense of solidarity of the nation, not only as an occasion for us, here, within the nation, but also as a statement for the world, of our majesty and dignity as a modern civilized state. I count the splendid performance of the radio and television companies at that critical time an integral part of the ritual of which I speak: it was one of the spontaneous, living aspects of the occasion. For here was an enormous nation; yet during those four days it was made a unanimous community, all of us participating in the same way, simultaneously, in a single symbolic event. To my knowledge, this was the first and only thing of its kind in peacetime that has ever given me the sense of being a member of this whole national community, engaged as a unit in the observance of a deeply significant rite. For it has not been fashionable during the past twenty or thirty years to raise the American flag. That has been supposed to put you dangerously on the John Birch side of the aisle. But here at last was an occasion when—I should think—it would have been difficult for anyone not to have felt his own life and character magnified through participation in the life and destiny of the nation. The system of sentiments essential to our survival as an organic unit was effectively reactivated and evoked, emotionally and tellingly represented for and to us, during that weekend of unanimous meditation.
Fig. 3.4 — Riderless Steed
But there ran also through my mind, as I watched those burial rites unfold, certain extra thoughts of somewhat broader reference, in relation particularly to the symbolism of the gun carriage bearing the flag-draped coffin, drawn by seven clattering gray steeds with blackened hoofs, another horse prancing slowly at their side bearing an empty saddle with stirrups reversed, also with blackened hoofs and conducted by a military groom. I saw before me, it seemed, the seven ghostly steeds of the gray Lord Death, here come to conduct the fallen hero youth on his last celestial journey, passing symbolically upward through the seven celestial spheres to the seat of eternity, whence he had once descended. The mythology of the seven spheres and of the soul’s journey from its heavenly home downward to its life on earth and, when that life was done, then upward again through all seven, is as old in this world as our civilization itself. The steed with riderless saddle, stirrups reversed, prancing by the dead young warrior’s side, would in the ancient days have been sacrificed, cremated along with the body of its master in a mighty pyre symbolic of the blazing, golden sun door through which the passing hero-soul would have gone to its seat in the everlasting hero-hall of warrior dead.
For, again symbolically, such a steed represents the body and its life, the rider, its guiding consciousness: they are one, as are body and mind. And as I watched that noble riderless beast of the cortege with its blackened hoofs, I thought of the legend of the young Aryan prince Gautama Śākyamuni’s noble steed, Kantaka. When its master, having renounced the world, rode away and into the forest to become there the Buddha, the mount returned to the palace riderless and in sorrow expired.
Those ancient themes and legends surely were not known to many of the modern millions who, on the occasion of their dead young hero’s burial, watched and heard the clattering hoofs of the seven gray steeds in the silent city and saw the noble riderless mount going by with stirrups reversed. And yet those themes and legends were not merely background; they were the presences in those military rites, and their presence worked. That is my thesis. In addition, they brought echoes of another moment in our own American history: the gun carriages of the Civil War and the funeral of Lincoln, who also had been assassinated and was carried in exactly this manner to eternity. The force of the contemporary rite was enormously enhanced by these symbolic overtones—unheard by outward ears, perhaps, yet recognized within by all—in the slow, solemn beat of the military drums and the clattering black hoofs of those horses of King Death through the absolutely silent city.
To my mind there came, still further, as I watched those rites resounding with antique as well as with contemporary themes, considerations of the open nature of the human mind, which can find the models for its consolation in such mystery games as this of imitating the passage of the soul from earth through the ranges of the seven spheres. It had been many years before that I had encountered in the works of the great culture historian Leo Frobenius an account and discussion of what he termed the paideumatic or pedagogical powers by which man—the unformed, uncertain animal in whose nervous system the releasing mechanisms are not stereotyped but open to imprinting—has been governed and inspired in the shaping of his cultures throughout history. In the earliest periods, as among primitives today, man’s teachers had been the animals and the plants. Later on, they became the seven heavenly spheres. For it is a curious characteristic of our unformed species that we live and model our lives through acts of make-believe. A youngster identified with a mustang goes galloping down the street with a new vitality and personality. A daughter imitates her mother; a son, his father.
In the now long-forgotten millenniums of the paleolithic Great Hunt, where man’s ubiquitous nearest neighbors were the beasts in their various species, it was those animals who were his teachers, illustrating in their manners of life the powers and patternings of nature. The tribesmen assumed the names of beasts and in their rites wore animal masks. Among those dwelling in tropical jungle environments, on the other hand, where the spectacle of nature was predominantly of plants, the human game of imitation was rather of the vegetable world, and, as we have seen, the basic myth was of a god who had yielded his body to be slain, cut up, and buried, whence the food plants arose for the sustenance of the people. In the rites of human sacrifice common to all planting cultures, this primal mythological scene is imitated literally—ad nauseam; for, as in the vegetable world life is seen to spring from death and fresh green sprouts from decay, so too it must be in the human. The dead are buried to be born again, and the cycles of the plant world become models for the myths and rituals of mankind.
In the great and critical period of the rise in Mesopotamia, ca. 3500 B.C., of the earliest civilization of city-states, the center of fascination and model for society shifted from the earth, the animal and plant kingdoms, to the heavens, when the priestly watchers of the skies discovered that the seven celestial powers—sun, moon, and five visible planets—move at mathematically determinable rates through the fixed constellations. A new realization of the wonder of this universe was epitomized then in the concept of a cosmic order, which immediately became the celestial model for the good society on earth: the king enthroned, crowned as the moon or sun, the queen as the goddess-planet Venus, and the high dignitaries of the court in the roles of the various celestial lights.
Fig. 3.5 — Constantine
In the fabulous court of Christian Byzantium, as late as the fifth to thirteenth centuries A.D., the imperial throne was surrounded by all sorts of amazing paradisal sights: lions of gold that wagged their tails and roared; birds of precious metals and gems, twittering in jewel trees. And when the ambassador of some barbaric tribe who had just passed through dazzling marble corridors, long lines of palace guards and bedizened generals and bishops, arrived before the imposing, motionless, silent figure of the monarch, solar-crowned on his radiant throne, he would cast himself in genuine awe prostrate before the Presence—and while he remained there, face down, a machine would lift the whole throne aloft, so that lo! when at las
t the astounded visitor rose, he would find his monarch with vestments totally changed gazing down upon him, like God, from a spangled sky. Saint Cyril of Alexandria in his letters to the Emperor addressed him as the Image of God on Earth. It was all a bit extreme, perhaps, but hardly very different from the pantomime of an imperial court today, or of a papal mass.
Monkeyshines of this kind still have an effect. They represent the projection into the daylight world—in forms of human flesh, ceremonial costume, and architectural stone—of dreamlike mythic images derived not from any actual daylight-life experience, but from depths of what we now are calling the unconscious. And, as such, they arouse and inspire in the beholder dreamlike, unreasonable responses. The characteristic effect of mythic themes and motifs translated into ritual, consequently, is that they link the individual to trans-individual purposes and forces. Already in the biosphere it has been observed by students of animal behavior that where species-concerns become dominant—as in situations of courtship or of courtship combat—patterns of stereotyped, ritualized behavior move the individual creatures according to programed orders of action common to the species. Likewise, in all areas of human social intercourse, ritualized procedures depersonalize the protagonists, drop or lift them out of themselves, so that their conduct now is not their own but of the species, the society, the caste, or the profession. Hence, for example, the rituals of investiture of judges, or of officers of state: those so installed are to function in their roles, not as private individuals but as agents of collective principles and laws. And even in private business exchanges, the patternings of deeds and contracts, bargainings and threats of recourse to law constitute the ritual rules of a recognized game, relieving the confrontation—to some extent, at least—of personal accent. Without such game rules no society would exist; nor would any individual have the slightest idea how to act. And it will be only by virtue of the game rules of his local social group that anyone’s humanity will unfold from the void of undefined potentials to its one and only (temporally, spatially, and temperamentally delimited) actualization as a life.
And so let us now ask what the proper source of awe might be for the race of mankind today. As pointed out by Frobenius, it was first the animal world, in its various species, that impressed mankind as a mystery, and that, in its character of admired immediate neighbor, evoked the impulse to imitative identification. Next, it was the vegetable world and the miracle of the fruitful earth, wherein death is changed into life. And finally, with the rise in the ancient Near East of the earliest high civilizations, the focus of attention shifted to the mathematics of the seven moving cosmic lights, and it was these that gave to us those seven gray steeds of the cavalcade of King Death and the resurrection. However, as my historian has also remarked, our most immediate mysterious neighbor today is not the animal or the plant; nor is it any longer the heavenly vault with its wonderfully moving lights. Frobenius points out that we have demythologized those through our sciences, and that the center of mystery now is man himself: man as a Thou, one’s neighbor; not as “I” might wish him to be, or may imagine that I know and relate to him, but in himself, thus come, as a being of mystery and wonder.
It is in the tragedies of the Greeks that one finds the earliest recognition and celebration of this new, immediately human, center of awe. The rites of all other peoples of their time were addressed to the animal, plant, cosmic, and supernatural orders; but in Greece, already in the period of Homer, the world had become man’s world, and in the tragedies of the great fifth-century poets the ultimate spiritual implications of this refocusing of concern were for all time announced and unfolded. James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has succinctly defined the essential qualities of the Greek tragedy through which the ways are opened to an essentially mystic dimension of humanistic spirituality. Citing Aristotle’s Poetics, he reminds us of the two classically recognized “tragic emotions,” pity and terror, noting also, however, that Aristotle had not defined them. “Aristotle has not defined pity and terror,” his hero, Stephen Dedalus, declares; “I have.” And he proceeds: “Pity is the feeling that arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling that arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.” The secret cause of all suffering is, of course, mortality itself, which is the prime precondition of life, and so is indeed “grave and constant.” It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed. Yet, along with the affirmation of this precondition, there is pity for the human sufferer—who is actually a counterpart, in this context, of oneself.
In those rites of burial of which I have just spoken, it was this classical and modern Occidental accent on the human object that most distinguished the occasion; and this is not what would have been experienced in any traditional Oriental event of equivalent magnitude. The reference there would have been through the human being to a supposed cosmological circumstance. Anyone who has ever had the experience of attending such an Oriental rite will surely have noticed that the human sufferer as an individual was in effect wiped out by the ceremonies, whereas in this instance everything was done to point up the value of the person. The old bottles carried a new wine, the wine of individual personality, and specifically, of course, that of this very special young man and what he represented, not in the timeless rounds of recurrent aeonian cycles, but in current historical time. And yet there was something of the symbolism of that older order present and effective still in those seven clattering horses of the gun carriage and the riderless steed at their side. The old imagery now carried a new song—of the unique, the unprecedented and induplicable human sufferer; yet equally a sense of the “grave and constant” in our human suffering, as well as a holy intimation of the ungainsayable “secret cause,” without which the rite would have lacked its depth dimension and healing force.
And so now, in conclusion, let me conjure into final focus the prospect of unfathomed wonder to which all myths and rites—in the way of great poetry and art—introduce and unite us, by quoting the eloquent lines of a brief poem that deeply inspired me when I first read it some forty years ago, and which has steadied me in my thinking ever since. It is by the California poet Robinson Jeffers, sent to us from his watchtower on the Pacific shore, whence he had watched for years the sublime flights of pelicans winging down the coastline, heard the wet, friendly barking of the seals, and behind him the encroaching purr of increasingly numerous motors. The name of his poem is
Fig. 3.6 — Natural Music
NATURAL MUSIC
The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger-smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child’s; or like some girl’s breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.3
[Discuss]
IV—The Separation of East and West
Fig. 4.1 — Kālī astride Śiva
IV
The Separation of East and West
[1961]1
1.
It is not easy for Westerners to realize that the ideas recently developed in the West of the individual, his selfhood, his rights, and his freedom, have no meaning whatsoever in the Orient. They had no meaning for primitive man. They would have meant nothing to the peoples of the early Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, or Indian civilizations. They are, in fact, repugnant to the ideals, the aims and orders of life, of most of the peoples of this earth. And yet—and here is my second point—they are the truly great “new thing” t
hat we do indeed represent to the world and that constitutes our Occidental revelation of a properly human spiritual ideal, true to the highest potentiality of our species.
I draw the main line dividing Orient from Occident vertically through Iran, along a longitude about 60 degrees east of Greenwich. This can be thought of as a cultural watershed. Eastward of that line there are two creative high-culture matrices: India and the Far East (China and Japan); and westward, likewise, there are two: the Levant or Near East, and Europe. In their mythologies, religions, philosophies, and ideals, no less than in their styles of life and dress and in their arts, these four domains have remained throughout their histories distinct. And yet they do group significantly in two orders of two: India and the Far East, on one hand; the Levant and Europe, on the other.
Now the Oriental centers, separated by great mountain wastes both from the West and from each other, have been for millenniums largely isolated, hence in a very deep way conservative. The Levant and Europe, in contrast, have been forever in fructifying conflict and commerce with each other, wide open not only to massive invasions but also to exchanges of both hard goods and ideas. The prodigious spiritual as well as physical upheavals of the present turbulent hour derive in no small measure from the fact that the isolating walls of both India and the Far East have been not merely broached but dissolved; and the world is faced in fact with the problems mythologically represented in the Bible legend of the builders of the Tower of Babel, when the Lord so confused men’s tongues that they had to abandon the building of their secular city and scattered, as the book tells, “abroad, over the face of all the earth.” Only there is no room today into which we might scatter away from each other; and just there, of course, is the rub and special problem of our age.
Myths to Live By Page 7
