ONLINE TEACHING - LECTURE #4

Dear all,
I'm evaluating options to continue our classes online. I will be announcing shortly which of the available online teaching/conference platforms I will be using.
In the meantime, please find below an impromptu draft of my lecture for today.
Please use the "Follow" option/button and post comments (at the end of this post you have a button for that) should you have questions. I will be available from 16-18 h. to answer them in real time.
Until soon,
B. Ș.

LECTURE #4 (ONLINE)

THE REDISCOVERY OF MYTH
AND MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE

CONTINUITY

The main argument of the course is that the major contributions to and innovations in, 20th c. art in Britain and elsewhere in Western culture occur under the sign of irrationalism (i.e., a distrust of reason and rationalism, intellectualism, logic and analysis, common sense etc.).

 This stand was foreshadowed by the Romantic revolt against reason/rationalism and materialism/the empirical (viz. the utilitarian, pragmatic, and materialist bent of Western modernity).

Examples: Blake was a mystical, prophetic artist and he saw Newton as an arch-villain whose mechanistic rationalized account of the universal laws of physics he called “single vision and Newton’s sleep”. Blake protested that there is no corporeal existence, and “mental things alone are real”. In fact, all English Romantics dwell in an inner universe of imagination and mystery, reverie, intuition, empathy or melancholy, purged of the insufferable reason (Wordsworth called it “our meddling intellect”) and free from the material.

LECTURE 4.

One such strand of irrationalism in 20^th-century Western thought and art is the rediscovery of irrationality in mythical imagination and in mystical experience. The intellectual climate that proved influential in the realm of the arts leading to a renewed awareness of the irrational included a number of anthropological, theological, philosophical, psychoanalytical works which reached the educated public in Britain and Europe.

One example of a work that whetted the appetite for myth and non-Christian approaches to the divine was the anthropological study by Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough. It was published from 1890-1915 in 12 successive volumes and in 1921 the one-volume abridged edition came out, which, although heavily criticized by the experts, was the text that became more readily available to non-specialized readers and influenced the cultural elites. Frazer set out to conduct a minute comparative survey and provide a (speculative) interpretation of the recurrent image or theme (today you might call it an archetype) of the golden bough. His comparative approach to diverse mythologies suggests that there may be one and the same sacred story behind various myths from apparently unrelated cultures. It also hints that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ may be no more than one of many variants of the same myth of the death and rebirth of nature, of the (human) sacrifice required for a new cycle of life to begin and for fertility to be restored.

Frazer discusses the nature of magic as embodied by primitive/pagan mythology in relation to religion (Christian) and modern science. Magic works by a misuse of the law of association, through similarity and contiguity (proximity and/or contact). As opposed to magic, science can verify its conclusions, its finds by induction of laws against reality. But both magic and science believe in the existence of immutable impersonal laws governing nature; they both use the laws of association/associative thinking in their logical deductions and inferences. By contrast, religion believes that the course taken by nature is elastic, unpredictable as dictated by the unforeseeable powers of divinity that may change reality and produce unexpected turns of events. In magic and science, the powers are subordinated to the human will and knowledge (they can be predicted, controlled, and used), in religion you can only propitiate, win over the grace/favors of the supernatural being to whom you are inferior.

Frazer was not very sympathetic to mythology and the mystical, he was a scientist with a rational, analytical, detached approach to his object of study, which he felt was the product of superstitious, uneducated minds that have not been exposed to the beneficial effects of science. Still, Frazer’s book is an invaluable investigation of mythology especially since he introduces comparative techniques and ventures beyond Classical mythology and Christian faith into hitherto unstudied mythologies and religious beliefs.

In spite of the controversy the work generated and of its unsympathetic critical reception amongst other scholars, The Golden Bough inspired the creative literature of the period. Frazer’s survey documented the complexity and wealth of mythical representations of divinity, well beyond the Christian culture, and thus stirred the imagination of many a writer. Examples include William Butler Yeats’ reference to the golden bough in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium", T. S. Eliot’s acknowledged indebtedness to Frazer in the first note to his poem The Waste Land, Robert Graves’ study on poetry, ritual, and myth, The White Goddess (1948), where Frazer's concept of the royal sacrifice for the good of the kingdom is adapted to the romantic idea of the poet's suffering for the sake of his divine Muse. The substantial list of cultural personalities influenced by Frazer’s book may also include writers like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, David Herbert Lawrence, Ezra Pound, as well as psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, the Cambridge ritualist anthropologists or comparatist and myth critic Joseph Campbell.

Frazer’s contemporary, German theologian and scholar of comparative religious studies Rudolph Otto, had a totally different attitude towards religious experience and human representations of the divine. He, too, set out to study religious culture and imagination through a scientific and comparative methodology, but, unlike Frazer, he was not unsympathetic to his object of study.  Influence on Paul Tillich and Mircea Eliade (viz. The Sacred and the Profane).

His most influential book is Das Heilige - Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (1917, translated into English as The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, 1923), which claims that a rationalist approach is counter-productive in understanding divinity/the sacred. He believes that orthodox religious views have been reduced to a merely rational account of divinity which is insufficient and inappropriate for understanding the true nature of the divine. Therefore, Otto sets out to propose that the irrational is, in fact, the essence of the divine. This is not an entirely new notion in the Christian tradition, as one of the Fathers of the Christian Church (Tertulian) famously pronounced “Credo quia absurdum est” (I believe because it is absurd). He may have meant that if something makes sense to the limited human understanding, then it cannot be divine. If we can produce a perfectly intelligible explanation of divinity, then it must be unfaithful to the incommensurability and, therefore, the incomprehensibility of the divine, which no human intellect can contain. But if something looks absurd to us and incomprehensible, then it must surely come from God.

To demonstrate this, Otto invokes the old concept of arethon (Gk. ‘ineffable’), unspeakable reality and proposes the “numinous” (from Lat. numen meaning "divine will or power"), an awe-inspiring presence of a non-representational supernatural reality, devoid of a definite shape. He argues that the divine cannot be perceived, therefore the holy is more of a sentiment, a sense of the sacred best captured by the phrase mysterium tremendum, a feeling of grandeur, of infinite energy, of an implacable and incomprehensible will (omnipotence).

The mystery is nurtured by the very ineffability of the numinous. Yet, Otto posits that the numinous can be somehow “transmitted”, though a more apt way of putting it would be to say that it can only be “awakened… induced, incited, and aroused”. The direct expression, the passing from mind to mind of this peculiar form of consciousness can only be done by means of empathy, intuition or communion (“a penetrative imaginative sympathy with what passes in the other person’s mind”). There are also indirect means of expressing this inexpressible numinous inner reality by means of a host of images of holy dread or fear, as well as by the holy languages and vocabularies of religious ceremonies.

But Otto’s analysis becomes especially relevant to literature when he talks about “means by which the numinous is expressed in art”. Unsurprisingly, given the long cultural tradition of the notion, Otto feels the artistic mode best equipped to express the numinous is “the sublime” which he associates with the symbolic architecture of Stonehenge or the pyramids. One is reminded both of Hegel’s discussion of the symbolic nature of Egyptian architecture in his (Lectures on) Aesthetics, as well as of Edmund Burke’s treatise On the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) where the English thinker claims, like Otto, that the sublime is the human reaction to the incomprehensible experience of the transcendental, something that goes beyond our understanding, beyond the quantitative and qualitative limits of our human condition. The two authors also coincide in believing that the transcendental can only be experienced through feelings of awe or fear (horror sacrum). Otto also mentions the “magical” and the Gothic as predilect modes of artistically expressing the numinous, but he insists that art has more direct means of representing the numinous, and these are Darkness (more precisely, the crepuscular or “semi-darkness”), Silence (euphemía or avoidance of inappropriate language), and, for oriental art, Emptiness.

In 1932, another of Otto’s influential books came out in English, Mysticism East and West. A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism (the German original was published in 1926 - https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.281152/page/n7/mode/2up).

Another important charge against reason and rationalism came from psychoanalysis, a discipline which impacted artistic and critical circles in the West considerably. Psychoanalysis proposed, among other things, that the human mind is dominated by the irrational mechanisms of the unconscious which are at play in all cultural fields, including religion, myth, and the arts. Although chiefly concerned with the individual unconscious, Sigmund Freud was not oblivious of the irrational nature of cultural practices such as mysticism, myth-making, and religion. He published Totem and Taboo (1913) and Moses and Monotheism (1939) where, like Frazer, he also broaches the question of regicide from the perspective of the Oedipus complex (patricide, therefore), of trauma and of guilt.

Freud admitted to having been prompted to write Totem and Taboo by the works of James Frazer and of Carl Gustav Jung, another famous and influential personality who undertook to study the sacred. Jung proposed a larger explanation of the psyche than Freudian psychoanalysis, which was his starting point. To that effect he resorted to the notion of the “collective unconscious” and postulated that this type of irrational but trans-individual unconscious activity takes forms which he called “archetypes”. Archetypes are innate (part of racial memory) and internal (i.e., not available to our sense-perceptions in the external world), but they are the structuring psychic principles behind the symbolic manifestations that become available to us. Like Otto, Jung found these mental manifestations to be indeterminate, elusive, ineffable. An archetype is “an irrepresentable unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time”.

The major archetypes that Jung talks about include the ego (the rational and willful core of one’s consciousness manifested through images, metaphors, themes), the shadow (the dark, negative, repulsive part of the unconscious), the persona (a fragment of the collective unconscious superimposed on the individual psyche), the animus - anima pair by which Jung explains the human psyche to be bi-sexual (the core of an individual’s unconscious is the principle of the opposite gender—anima for a male, animus for a female—which we project onto the outside world), the child (preconscious of the collective soul), the spirit (the opposite of the child and represented as a wise old man), the androgene (containing both sides/principles/energies of the world), the self (a totalizing representation of both the conscious and the unconscious and a harmonizing of contraries).

Jung was an avid student of myth(ologies), of the esoteric traditions, and of western and eastern mysticism and his thoughts on these matters became influential in England after the publication in 1916 of the English translation of his Psychology of the Unconscious (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido) and then again starting with the 1930s. In fact, Jung and English literature acted as reciprocal influences: like Freud, Jung drew some of his intuitions and found confirmation in Shakespeare’s dramas (e.g., Hamlet, Macbeth) and he tried his hand at a… Jungian interpretation of Joyce’s Ulysses. D. H. Lawrence confessed to being impressed by Jung’s work and so were literary critics like Herbert Read and Maud Bodkin.

Starting with the 1950s, a renewed interest in myth grew in the United States and, generally, in the English speaking literary world with the help of literary critics like Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1946, The Masks of God, 1959-1967) and Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism, 1957) or philosophers like Ernst Cassirer (Language as Myth, 1953). In conclusion, the more popular contributions of anthropology, the comparative study of religions, and psychoanalysis/Jungianism, together with literary criticism and philosophy have sparked and entertained a constant fascination with the world of myth and mystical imagination which lay beyond the reaches of our rationalizations. Throughout the century, writers kept tapping onto the notion that literature might be a modern(ist) avatar for the myth-making creativity of the human imagination which challenges modern man’s rationalist and materialist understanding of the world. The next (our fifth) lecture will be looking at some examples of twentieth-century writing in this category.

Suggested readings:

Steven Connor, “Modernity and Myth”, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, edited by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pages 251-268.