SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Sergio Zenere
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT. CONSIDERATIONS ON THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE EXEMPLUM AS A RORSCHACH TEST.§*#αβ With Incorporated Reading Selection
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
§ * # α β
1
The symbol “” denotes a quotation. The symbol '' denotes emphasis: “so to speak”. Some portions of this text may recur in other publications and/or writing by the same author. All translations from a third language into English are free translations. Notes labeled “extnote” are the present writer's, and do not originally belong in the text being quoted. The present writer is not licensed in any jurisdiction to diagnose, treat or otherwise assess anything. This writing does not constitute professional or licensed advice, but is fiction intended for mere entertainment purposes. The author disclaims any and all liabilities, direct or indirect, resulting from this writing, and how people might (mis)understand, (mis)use or (mis)quote it. This writing shall not be construed as promoting or demoting any particular party, agenda, or item whatsoever. This writing constitutes a personal notebook of literature in the relevant field, and it is made public only as food for thought on an individual basis.
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
INTRODUCTION
Speaking firmly concerning your own path, what opponent here would you take as a fool? You'd simply bring quarrels on yourself if you said your opponent's a fool with an impure doctrine. Taking a stance on your decisions, & yourself as your measure, you dispute further down into the world. But one who's abandoned all decisions creates in the world quarrels no more. (Gautama Buddha, Cula-Viyuha Sutta). Just as when a person whose turban or head was on fire would put forth extra desire, effort, diligence, endeavor, undivided mindfulness, & alertness to put out the fire on his turban or head, in the same way the monk should put forth extra desire, effort, diligence, endeavor, undivided mindfulness, & alertness for the abandoning of those very same evil, unskillful qualities. (Gautama Buddha, Maranassati Sutta). For the Zeitgeist of every age is like a sharp east wind which blows through everything. You can find traces of it in all that is done, thought and written, in music and painting, in the flourishing of this or that art: it leaves its mark on everything and everyone. (A.Schopenhauer). We hoped for the best, but it turned out as usual (V. Chernomyrdin, former Russian Prime Minister). I hate the great, I hate their status, their harshness, their prejudices, their pettiness, and all their vices, and I would hate them even more if I despised them less (Rousseau to Malesherbes in 1762). A winner has a thousand fathers but a loser is an orphan (variations are credited to several public figures, including Napoleon, John F. Kennedy, G. Ciano etc). The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. ( Deuteronomy 28:18). 2
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you successed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. (Machiavelli, The Prince). The first to state his case seems right, until his opponent begins to cross-examine him. (Proverbs 18:17). To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." (P.J. Proudhon). Is there any virtue in telling true stories as opposed to false ones? Why do news more and more often read/look like (clumsily) planned ad campaigns or third-rate reality shows? Why does emphasis invariably seem to fall on tides of emotion (both positive and negative, to praise or to blame) that play center-stage whereas truth, veracity, statistical probability and plausibility are by far not necessary ingredients and are -in all cases- superseded by 'emotional truth'?
Does this go back to the very core of the human mind, to 'neuralgic
3
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
points' whose stimulation invariably guarantees a given knee-jerk reaction? Do ageold myths play any role in this? This essay will explore all the above. However, it may not be possible to give all the answers, as theorists' opinions differ, and the last word seems to be highly individual and/or 'political' in nature.
The section 'Any good books, news or movies lately' introduces the debate wondering over why popular culture products (books, music bands, movies...) seem to follow certain patterns. Is there any relationship between the inner working of the mind's neuralgic points and the hoax as a phenomenon? The 'scientific' cases of The Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man and Archeoraptor are presented, among others.
The section 'Psychic unity of mankind' presents the theory according to which the same myths and beliefs recur the world over, with minor local variations. These myths, situations etc can trigger the 'neuralgic spots' of the human psyche, thus causing inescapable reactions.
By all accounts, myths are very pliable, though, and can be easily politicized; there may be different versions of the same myth, or large inconsistencies in the received, most ancient corpus of literature expounding it. People are thus free to embrace some and reject other variants or interpretations according to whimsical opportunism:�All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia�. 4
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Many ancient myths, mythical figures and their contemporary variations are mentioned: the hero's journey; the meek, persecuted, rejected and slain/crucified savior-god-hero, and so forth. The concept of “pseudo-sanctity� is introduced; the pliable nature of myth from the dawn of time is explored.
The section introduces 'The Barnum effect' in relation to the debate at hand: the present writer ponders people's reaction to parallels drawn between ancient myths and established systems of power.
The pliable nature of the myth is discussed again, and examples are given to make the point: the same elated speeches, similes and archetypal images can be used to loathe and exalt, blame and praise just about anything and anybody. Myth can support or condemn just about anyone/anything according to the moment's (person's/era's) petty priorities.
Star Trek and Leonard Nimoy's insider's opinion about its founding values are mentioned; the impact of hybridism - along with Mr. Spock's mythical predecessors- is examined. The 'if...then' apology method that is used to hide double standards or inconsistencies in the 'myth that becomes fact' is introduced: Madeleine Korbel Albright, Mussolini and Brigham Young used it, among others: narrating is never innocent. The pivotal role the concept of hybridity plays is discussed at various junctures as well.
5
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Following the previous section's lead, the section 'Make it as you go along' focuses on the commodious, often fraudulent manufacture of situations that allow the persuader to trigger the 'neuralgic points of the human mind' to his advantage, when nothing better is at hand: truth and plausibility are just accessory element to myth.
'The sleeping/resurrected hero', 'the Messiah' are presented as recurring figures in history. Detailing various hoaxes helps to put the commodious and politicized nature of myth and emotion into perspective; some cases of “pseudosanctity” are explored to understand the concept better. The insightful opinion of famous hoaxers clinches the debate: “people wanted to be taken in”.
'Long lived' is a section that delves into how long lived all those 'tricks', mental associations, 'image banks' and myths may be. Major myths aside, minor stories have been around for centuries if not millennia. The 'contamination' motif haunted the human psyche throughout history: a few cases are explored to see how atavistic fears unfold, which hoaxers can easily take advantage of. Which proof can the present writer offer that posh mythicist -such as D.M. Murdoch, Jordan Maxwell, David Icke etc- mostly rehash old Belle Epoque scholarship by literally lifting ideas and concepts from long-forgotten books of the past?
'The salesman's tragedy' section considers how salespeople, spin-doctors, hoaxers and others take notice of how the 'neuralgic points' of the human mind 6
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
work: trail-blazing Edward Bernays used -in his own words- the same array of techniques to manipulate the “stupid” masses according to his employers' war- or peace-time priorities, with equally exceptional results.
The exemplum and the Roman mos1 sit at the core of argumentation: “And mos requires neither deliberation, nor judgment, but praise or blame”; a few more examples detailing the 're-branding of myth' follow. The concepts of catharsis and anagnorisis -derived from ancient Greek tragedy- are linked to the debate at hand.
Furthermore, professional wrestling's antics are employed as a useful thermometer detailing the activation of the mind's 'neuralgic points' in a 'staged tragedy' destined to the general public. The power to manipulate the 'neuralgic spots of the human psyche' is a necessary virtue for aspiring salesmen and international policy makers in the form of emotional intelligence; more hoaxes are exposed to make the point.
The section 'More of the same' discusses the quintessential discourse of judging foes according to their deeds, and friends according to their intentions. The figure of the turncoat is introduced in its various incarnations. Some mythologies are indeed pliable, as discussed further in the case of the 7800 crates of gold the leftwing Spanish government transferred to the USSR via France: theft or 'safekeeping'? 1 Slightly similar to Confucian li in China:”In sum, li is to make space for reverence in all things, treating seemingly ordinary interactions as if they were sacred ceremonies”. (Prothero 2010:46).
7
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The importance of the achronotopos and of the 'second coming' of various historical and pseudo-historical figures. The myths of primeval oneness, world government, general will and congredi are discussed. The medicalization of erstwhile sins and the ensuing exchange of verdicts of mental (in)sanity as political token follow.
Various hoaxes are mentioned again: rewriting history for political purposes. The 'broken record' effect of public myths, or the achronotopos revised ensues: shall Socrates toe the party line, or shall Antigone defy it? Why does the audience's reaction look like that of the public of sport video games? To simulate a living crowd, the audience randomly cycles through a few reoccurring moves:
Finally, it should be remembered that the Surrealist montage still leaves undecided the imagistic nature of the final artistic product: the shock effect of decontextualized and recontextualized material objects does not, for the Surrealists, depend upon the construction of an image from out of the assembled fragments; rather, it arises from the tension inherent in the relationship of the mounted fragments to one another -...-.Literature submits to montage as the feuilleton [=�talk of the town� genre]. All these products are on the point of entering the market as commodities. But they linger on the threshold. From this epoch derive the interieurs, the exhibition halls and the panoramas. They are residues of a dream world. (Pensky in Ferris 2004:186,196). Benjamin was particularly interested in the potential of montage, a technique made famous by the European avant-garde of his time. For Benjamin, montage was not only a style but a philosophy of history: it entailed focusing on the discontinuities separating past and present, and emphasizing a utopian rather than progressive notion of historical transformation, as a way to preserve a reservoir of hope in otherwise damaged life (Cohen in Ferris 2004:200). 8
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
'The problem of truth' questions the plausibility of what has previously been discussed in terms of political opportunism that transcends possible brute facts: Hume's law. Rhetoric strategies possibly look all alike, yet often what is right for the goose is not right for the gander.
The strategy of Jimmy Guieu -and that of other 'mythicists' and proponents of UFO and paranormal doom- is discussed. Recurring mythical archetypes follow. The dilemma posited by the Sokal affair and ensuing scandal is discussed: quantum mysticism. The problematic relationship between science and politics is put in succinct perspective since the Victorian era.
The 'Conclusion' will summarize the debate and conclude that, as far as public reception goes, there is no difference between telling true and false 'stories':”[The public] only wanted one thing from [a given public figure]: a story. He told it so well that we forgave him almost everything. ”;“[it] helped people to believe.”;”We want -...- original content regardless of its validity. We're here for the scare, not for the plausibility”.
9
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5 ANY GOOD BOOKS, NEWS OR MOVIES LATELY?
Why is it, exactly, that the two main sparring characters in the 1990 scifi movie Robot Jox are played by actors, whom many casual observers describe as -respectively- a Kurt Russell lookalike (the 'bad guy'), and a J.C Van Damme lookalike (the 'good guy')? Why does the main villain in the movie Karate Kid III (1989) wear his hair in a horsetail? Why -exactly- does he seem to imitate action movie actor Steven Seagal, then at the peak of his acting fame?
When physique superstar Steve Reeves (among the world's highest paid actors of that period) starred in a series of movies as Hercules, a row of now forgotten 'men with bodies' brought on-screen Goliath, Ursus, Samson, Maciste...Much later, other physique superstars (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno) did try their luck as Hercules: why?
Shortly after Madonna introduced her 'lusty virgin' persona, German singer Sandra introduced her variation: Maria Magdalena. Why did C.T. Chaney, the famous interpreter of The Wolf Man (1941), choose the screen name Lon Chaney (or Lon Chaney, Jr.)?
What made possible for third-rate Italian showman Edoardo Costa to fraudulently pocket in excess of euro 500.000 running a children charity? How could an unknown, lone hoaxer with petty criminal records mount a scare that 10
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
triggered massive public support? Why are there so many hoaxers just like that? Why do saviors, heroes and psychopaths look so similar, yet are treated so differently? Is the 'good guy' (patriot, hero...) just a hooligan with a nice excuse? History seems to suggest he is, more often than commonly thought. Why do some researchers suggest temporal lobe epilepsy might be the 'secret' of many holy men and prophets the crowd finds irresistible?
On which ground could The Piltdown Man and The Archeoraptor
-taken as epitome of an entire category rather than as unique cases- enter the realm of the most advanced science of their time? On which premise did The Cottingley
Fairies enter the realm of popular culture?
Why was Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet so similar to Ovid's Pyramus
and Thisbe? On the cusp between myth and history, the bloody English XV century dynastic War Of The Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster ended as a Lancaster heir married a York heiress to settle the dispute for good. Alexander the Great married -and encouraged his Graeco-Macedonian subjects to marry- into the nobility of the Persian Empire he had conquered: 'the thing' had been in the air all along.
A simple answer might be that Chaney was trying to capitalize on his father Lon's2 fame, while the decision makers behind Robot Jox and Karate Kid III 2 Lon Chaney was a silent movie star.
11
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
most likely wanted to give their public the 'Kurt Russell', 'Van Damme' or 'Steven Seagal experience' without incurring the ensuing financial and logistic hurdles that 'the real thing' might have entailed.
After all, most people already know what is coming when newspapers announce the release of a new “actioner” or “chick flick”, much as they roughly know what to expect when actor so-and-so is billed as 'the bad guy', or when a new Hercules (Maciste3, Ursus, Samson...) movie used to hit the screen and so on: that's how reliable these 'image/expectation banks' are.
It is the same logic in action behind obscure 'tribute' music bands barnstorming the outback not only playing their muse's songs, but also imitating the appearance, lisps, dress code and mannerism of the more famous star. The same can be easily politicized: 'Christian', '[insert group here] pride' and so forth bands.
Is it by Frank Herbert's sheer creativity that the serialized Dune books have as main hero 'The House of Atreides'? Or has it anything to do with The
Mycenean Saga, also called The House of Atreus? How comes Dune's main heromessiah Paul Atreides probes the secret of 'travelling without moving'? Is that Frank Herbert's creativity again, or has it anything to do with an oft-given definition of the difference between Maha- and Hinayana Buddhism 4? Or perhaps with the 3 Interpretations of etymology vary. Possibly one of Hercules' nicknames. 4 Broadly put, Mahayana (great ferry boat) buddhism allows the possibility for a social and civic life, which Hinayana (small ferry boat) challenges to the benefit of strong ascetic practice. The Mahayanists solve the paradox claiming the non-dualism of the Buddhist realization allows the faithful to both be 'here' (the other
12
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Upanishadic definition of Brahma that pre-dates Buddhism?
Why do people in Dune use cocktails of 'magic drugs', and the main storyline recounts the rebellion of desert people? Is that Herbert's imagination, or just the poorly disguised landscape of the 1960s (the Algerian war, Arabic influences5, the hippies, the oriental fad, the drug culture...)?
Why does Dune include a caste of psychic priestesses running a selective breeding program? Is that Frank Herbert's artistic vision, or just some clumsy conflation of other fads of the 'swinging sixties' (feminism, sexual revolution, the Esalen institute, psychic crazes...)? Is the visionary truly gifted, or is he offering a contemporary period drama using sci-fi costumes?
In Dune, this caste of psychic priestesses also possesses a secret code by which communication by gesture is made possible:
In Ghana -...- The bride undergoes a rite of passage. The village women teach the secrets of marriage. Some girls even learn secret codes and languages, enabling them to communicate with other married women if such is needed (Miller Nixon 2007:181).
Dune's fictional desert people also built a (secret) network of underground water basins and canals, just as real people in the barren northwestern Chinese deserts did at the Turpan oasis. In both the real world at Turpan -and in shore, nirvana, the realization of impermanence, etc ), and 'there' (samsara, the world of delusion and dualism, civil society...). 5 Someone compiled an interesting list of Arabic and Islamic themes in Dune that drives a few more nails in originality's coffin, if there ever was any. Arabic And Islamic...2004: no page.
13
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Herbert's fictional world- such canals are called Qanats 6: divine coincidence.
Also, Dune's fictional desert people carry peculiar knives called Crys, just like peculiar real-life ritual Malay and Indonesian knives -also called Kris- masters of the craft manufacture on special occasions only: quantum entanglement, indeed. Real-life Sikhs and Scottish clansmen may also carry ritual knives; tribal kinsmen from Yemen carry ritual daggers.
The supposedly gifted visionary's talent comes down to what looks more like scraps from a Discovery Channel cutting room session than anything else. How many people are likely to know in today's information age? How many were likely to know in 1965 when the purported “greatest science fiction novel of all times� was released? Readers shall take their guess.
It is also opportune to emphasize that as certain motifs, myths, allegories etc get lost in particular places or settings, they immediately catch on like wildfire as soon as they're re-introduced. Even people who do not particularly like 'serious' documentaries are mesmerized by a salad bar of items randomly lifted from the same under the pretext of diversion and evasion, not education.
Similarly, Shakespeare rose to immortal fame, whereas Frank Herbert generated a cult picking the brains of long deceased authors, probably counting on
6 Of Persian origin several centuries BCE.
14
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the fact the masses would have no idea what they had been up to.
Piramus et Tisbé exists in twenty-two MSS, which fall into two distinct groups: (1) nineteen MSS, dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of the early fourteenth-century Ovide Moralisé (OM), a vernacular adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and (2) three autonomous MSS from the thirteenth century. The author of the OM introduces the tale by saying that he will present the story .just as another has told it, without adding to it, changing it or leaving anything out. The very close resemblance between the OM MSS and one of the autonomous versions confirms that the OM poet simply incorporated a pre-existent Old French poem into his work when he reached Book IV of the Metamorphoses. (Eley 2001:7, emphasis added). In the fourteenth century, the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer took Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe and placed it in his Knight’s Tale. This popular story was also known to Shakespeare, who would have been well aware of the famous Chaucerian version written in Middle English. Shakespeare probably was also familiar with Ovid. The myth of Pyramus and Thisbe is repeated in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream produced in London in 1596. (Meineck 2005-1:80). It is not surprising that 'the English bard' who died in 1616 had heard of a story that had been subject to reworking and propagation for centuries well before him. By all accounts, Ovid's story is infinitely shorter (7pp in some editions) than the French variations, and devoid of most pathetic imagery and plot contrivances modern readers associate with the tale.
That's not confined to idle hacks in the pursuit of diversionary literature. Della Santina7 comments that Mahayana Perfection Of Wisdom sutra exists across several Buddhist traditions in different versions, whose length
increases
7 ME6102 no date: lecture 10.
15
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
exponentially from one page upwards: 8.000 lines; 25.000 lines; 100.000 lines 8. Since the public has never enough of such narratives, opportunists are ready to oblige spinning the same old, stale imagery to unimaginable length.
Siegel9 remarks how story-lines of TV cop-courtroom shows went from a single story per episode with no particular gore or violence in the black&white TV times to a tangled web of multiple garbled stories peppered with violence, sexuality and other graphic details to keep the viewer hooked so that s-he won't switch to another channel.
A study (in Heath&Heath) compared the yield in food donations from two groups of students tracked for their past behavior: more charitable (“saints”), and less charitable (“jerks”). When a generic letter was sent asking for food donations, only 8% of saints donated, whereas when a detailed letter -with a map and so forth- was sent, 42% of the saints, and 25% of the jerks did: details hence multiply as people relish “the flow”.
Movies are no different. Starcrash (1978) is one of the many Star Wars sci-fi copycats. Besides Star Wars items (paranormal powers; galactic smugglers; star-ships that take ages to travel across the screen; light sabers; the rescue of a prince marooned on an uncharted planet; an an arch-villain dressed in black leather named Zarth Arn...), Starcrash includes a Barbarella (1968) angle (scantily leather 8 Hirakawa 1990:277. 9 2014:Befriending Fear, Worry, And Anxiety.
16
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
clad heroine on a cosmic mission); gun-slinging sentient robots (as found in The
Black Hole, 1979); murderous troglodytes (The People That Time Forgot, 1977); neutron stars ( a hot commodity receiving increasing scientific validation in the 1970s); warring amazons; fight scenes; giant robots, and so on and so forth: an hyperreal (abridged, novelized, condensed...) story.
The Humanoid (1979) offers another Star Wars salad bar, this time with a mad, Frankenstein-style runaway scientist, a Chinese-Italian kid playing a composite, paranormal character: a Tibetan lama/ siddha10 dressed in Luke Skywalker style11. Of course, a quintessential bad guy in dark leather and helmet on a cosmic domination binge is present: he strives to overthrow his brother (“big brother� in the movie, the twin/doppelgaenger motif), the meek ruler of a nonviolent civilization.
The 2014 remake of Robocop looks sinisterly like the last Batman movies, and so does the 2013 re-take (The Tiger Mask) on popular Japanese cartoon
Tiger Mask (1969-71): quantum entanglement, indeed. To capitalize on success of low-budget blockbuster Bloodsport (1988), Van Damme tried a more polished, bigger budget copycat movie that mixed the tournament motif with romanesque undertones in 1996 The Quest.
10 In Hindu/Jain philosophy, an accomplished spiritual practitioner imbued with paranormal powers. 11 A white garment very similar to those Japanese Zen monks wear beneath their overgarment and monastic robe.
17
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
2013 music video Run Boy Run won accolades. A 3m36s sort of
Neverending Story unfolds on screen as a boy engages in a initiatory, oniric run towards an ivory city atop the clouds. Ever bigger trolls spring from the soil to run after him: some bestow upon him a horned helmet and a sword as a frigate flies by: a mythologist couldn't have delivered a better condensed, novelized and abridged cargo of myths.
For all that matters, even wrestler Don Muraco can spin the gnostic yarn delivering
a
pseudo-philosophical
tirade
(deepities=statements
that
sound
supercharged with meaning but are intellectually hollow, faulty and/or ambiguous ) before a 1983 steel cage wrestling match against Jimmy Superfly Snuka: “a form of knowledge flowing from the heart in a mysterious, intuitive way” 12;”A symbol is talking to you and, whether the head knows it or not, the heart knows it.”13. Luminary of Chinese Confucianism, Mencius (IV century BCE) also thought Heaven (a deity representing positive values, order etc) dwelt within the human heart: an interface to an organized cosmos.
Anything that reads or sounds remotely like immemorial literature -such 12 “Esses são os três estados alterados de consciência que criam condições para a irrupção da gnose, um conhecimento que brota do coração de forma misteriosa e intuitiva. Dentro do filme gnóstico, estes três estados vão orientar os protagonistas na busca pela Verdade. São verdadeiras transformações íntimas, salvações individuais. É importante salientar que as provações que os protagonistas vão enfrentar não são decorrentes de pecados, erros ou transgressões. Ou seja, a jornada de sofrimentos e dificuldades não se constitui em castigo. É aqui que temos uma diferença fundamental entre o filme gnóstico dos outros tipos de filme: o protagonista não passa por uma expiação, mas está em busca da salvação através do conhecimento espiritual.” (Vieira Ferreira 2009:46). 13 Campbell&Boa 1989:49.
18
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
as the Vedas- may do the trick:�Mythologies are not invented: they are found� (Campbell). Muraco's tirade is fit for any hero-savior approaching his Calvary: he is just putting his belt on the line in a wrestling match everybody knows is prescripted, however.
The lyrics of 1986 song Hold On To The Vision14 take the public on a gnostic journey along with the momentarily disgraced hero who doesn't give up, refuses to accept negative criticism, fights and ultimately wins. Drout 15 explains rhetorical craft used to alter the order of discourse in order to lend credibility to the same, as if the same discourse were a biblical passage or a famous quotation people chanced not to know.
The Vedic hymn reflex mentioned above steals the day:
I'm a scholar. I read. I remember my friend Alan Watts once asked me, "Joe, what is your yoga?" And I said, "My yoga is underlining sentences." Old Will Rogers used to say, "All I know is what I read in the newspapers." Well all I know is what I read in books-with a little bit more added. (Campbell&Boa 1989:67). in epiphanies, prose fiction comes closest to the verbal intensity of lyric poetry ( most modern lyrics are in fact nothing but epiphanies); so epiphanic description is likely to be rich in figures of speech and sound (Lodge 1992:148). expressing the inexpressible is a current running throughout mystical poetry. Herein is a unique function of poetry that differs from the conventional usage of language utilized in rational discourse. A functional difference between poetry and prose is 14 Used as soundtrack for the Karate Kid rip-off movie No Retreat No Surrender. 15 2006:Figures Of Speech I.
19
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
that while prose relies strictly on the meaning generated from words to express a given statement, poetry can – in a sense – lift one above the page, invoking an imaginative space, a newfound and creative semantic field. (Hyam 2009:36). McDonald16 ran “a text mining analysis of religious texts”:
The Book Of Mormon;
The Greater Holy Assembly;
The King James Version;
The Popol Vuh;
The Quran;
The Rig Veda;
The Tao Te Ching.
The noun category17 overlap between such antipodal sacred texts never goes below 39%. (Un)surprisingly -according to the present writer at least- overlap between the Popol Vuh18 (sacred text of the Maya from Guatemala) and -say- the Book Of Mormon
16 No date. 17 McDonald no date:9. 18 The present writer supposes this sacred text is the least likely to have influenced the rise of other religious traditions.
20
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
and the Quran19 is 55% (average is 53%). In the verb category 20, the Popol Vuh overlaps 72% (Book Of Mormon), and 59% (Quran), with an average of 64%.
As Joseph Campbell21 put it, myth(ologie)s are lies when applied to the 'real' world, and truth when applied to the inner, spiritual, psychic world; or -as he put it elsewhere- myth(ologie)s are to be considered as poems, and not as news reports of eye-witness accounts22:
When Housman writes that "poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it," and when he states again "that the intellect is not the fount of poetry, that it may actually hinder its production, and that it cannot even be trusted to recognize poetry when it is produced," he is no more than reaffirming and lucidly formulating the first axiom of all creative art—whether it be in poetry, music, dance, architecture, painting, or sculpture—which is, namely, that art is not, like science, a logic of references but a release from reference and rendition of immediate experience: a presentation of forms, images, or ideas in such a way that they will communicate, not primarily a thought or even a feeling, but an impact. (Campbell 1960:42). Myths come from where the heart is, and where the experience is -...-. The myth is not pointing to a fact; the myth is pointing beyond facts to something that informs the fact -...-: a myth is a metaphor that points beyond the image to a mystery (Campbell&Toms 1988:vol.6). Freud repeatedly describes the transference as -...- an “artificial illness”, and as a “new edition or reprint” of an old text. And of course, the word transference itself is merely the latinate version of metaphor (Brooks 1994:41-2). all shamanic practices are visionary, and it is a redefinition of the 19 The Quran (Islam) and the Book Of Mormon (LDS) are sacred texts that arose roughly ten centuries apart in different continents. 20 Ibid.:11. 21 1986. 22 1972.
21
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
imagination. Shamanism is apparently an imaginative practice. The imagination in shamanism is considered to be limitless, and it is not considered a place of fantasy and fabrication. It is considered to be possibly a place of fantasy and fabrication if you are fantasizing and fabricating. But if you are not, the imagination is used as an unlimited visionary gateway that allows you to interact with spirits and to travel (Souther 2012: no page). the origin of the mythological symbols is not pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historical -...- they [=mythological symbols] are not the consequences of observations; they are the consequence of observations misinterpreted through projections from the human psyche (Campbell 1972-2:The Function Of Mythology.) Image does not refer to the result of sense impressions,it has no referent beyond itself, 'neither proprioceptive, external nor semantic: "images don't stand for anything".. they are the psyche itself in its imaginative visibility; as a primary datum image is irreducible'. -...-Since the soul, made of images, mediates between matter and spirit, image is the mediator, and is therefore, in itself 'im-mediate'. (Angelo 1992:157-8). Popular culture is never far behind, again. The Project Enigma23 -led by Romanian artist Mihai Cretu- took the music world by storm in the 1990s with their albums: an instant planetary success. Enigma – soon imitated by many- is worth pausing over, as they tried to engineer products that -indeed- sounded like a Vedic hymn, yet tailored to accommodate the parameters of modern disco dance.
Drout24 explains that -according to his analysis of popular music over time- cliches and borrowed phrases abound: “the formulaic density of top 40 songs -...- approaches 85% [as it typically recurs ] -...- in oral traditional material“.
23 http://www.enigmaspace.com/ 24 2006:Subtleties.
22
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Although very critical of formulaic density, Drout 25 surprisingly hails some speeches as rhetorical triumphs: Winston Churchill's discourses26.
Enigma offered a salad bar of plentiful nods (Vedic, gnostic, Jungian, New-Age, Hippie...assuming one could tell the difference) with vocalizations (=the 'scream' mytheme that obsesses the human mind 27) in unknown, purportedly mystical languages such as Latin, and tribal languages such as Mongolian. The melodious, high-pitched human voice calls millions of Muslims to prayer every day the world over.
Acclaimed Italian singer/songwriter Lucio Dalla proposed in 1986
Lunedì Cinema, a song in which he only executed vocalizations without any meaning, yet that many mistook for a fabulous language: “speaking in tongues”, what a favorite commodity. In 2003, the soundtrack of sci-fi mini-series Children
Of Dune (based upon the chapter in the Dune series) included songs sung in the language of Dune's desert people. In spite of being as eerie as totally fictitious, it sounded as good as any Project Enigma gnostic song.
Sarah Brightman's 2003 song Arabian Nights also delivers a cargo of pseudo-Vedic, gnostic motifs: 25 2006:Rhetorical Train Wrecks And Triumphs. 26 A casual reading of Churchill's discourses reveals they're literally stuffed with so-called formulaic density, platitudes and hymn-like stuff. When the socially acceptable, and politically opportune enter the scene, however, the result is obvious. 27 Screams are everywhere. Do singers not often emit a long howling, screeching or other noise (=vocalization= phatic act) to enrapture the listener? Are screams not a core component of 'slasher movies'?
23
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Melodies unspoken Flowing from the lotus of my heart Ending where we start Promises unbroken Promising a never-ending fire Of love beyond desire Ending where we start Of course, the precious human soul loves the melodious human voice when it's trilling, whereas when it's emitting groans, whimpers, and the like, it induces sulks, pain and stupor.
Christian Pentecostal denominations offer their variation on the theme: the faithful, whom the holy ghost has (purportedly) descended upon, speak in tongues following the biblical tradition. Hindu Transcendental Meditation devotees28 also speak in tongues and indulge convulsion fits:”it's like a madhouse” comments an ex TM governor as guest of 1984 Christian documentary Gods Of The
New Age :
And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in other languages, as the Holy Spirit gave them this ability. At that time there were devout Jews from every nation living in Jerusalem. When they heard the loud noise, everyone came running, and they were bewildered to hear their own languages being spoken by the believers. (Acts 2:4-6)29. “Now I Aggivessana, am aware that when I am teaching Dhamma to companies consisting of many hundreds, each person thinks thus about me: ‘The recluse Gotama is teaching dhamma especially for me'” (Gautama Buddha, Maha-saccaka-sutta. M.1.249, emphasis added). 28 A form of “sacred sound” meditation the “Beatles guru” Maharishi Mahesh Yogi introduced in the 1950s. 29 “It is a terrific passage, mysterious, moving, and powerful. It is one of the passages used by Pentecostal Christians to show that Jesus's followers will be able to speak in unknown "tongues," as happens in their own services of worship; and it is the principal passage used by groups of "Appalachian snakehandlers," who till this day take poisonous snakes in their hands in order to demonstrate their faith in the words of Jesus, that when doing so they will come to no harm. But there's one problem. Once again, this passage was not originally in the Gospel of Mark. It was added by a later scribe.” (Ehrman 2005:66).
24
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
And how, if Phoebus [Apollo] did not cause Plato to be born in Greece, did he [Plato] heal human minds with letters? For even as the divinely begotten Asclepius is a healer of the body, so Plato is of the immortal soul. (Diogenes Laertius, Lives Of Eminent Philosophers 3.45). This is a subtle trickster attribute. The trickster has the ability to communicate effectively across markedly different cultures. (Hansen 2001:106). If you are useful the rich will exploit you, if you go bankrupt he will desert you. Are you well off? - he will live with you, he will clean you out without a single qualm. Does he need you? - he will hoodwink you, smile at you and raise your hopes; he will speak politely to you and say, 'Is there anything you need?' He will make you feel small at his dinner parties and, having cleaned you out two or three times over, will end by laughing at you. Afterwards, when he sees you, he will avoid you and shake his head about you. Take care you are not hoodwinked and thus humiliated through your own stupidity. When an influential person invites you, show reluctance, and he will press his invitation all the more. Do not thrust yourself forward, in case you are pushed aside, but do not stand aloof, or you will be overlooked. Do not affect to treat him as an equal, do not trust his flow of words; since all this talking is expressly meant to test you, under cover of geniality he will be weighing you up.(Catholic Bible, Sirach 13:4-11). In antiquity as well, new magic words ( voces magicae, contextual meaning and no semantic sense30) were coined for various purposes:
[nos papiros mágicos gregos]Muitos contêm desenhos, que deveriam ser copiados na areia e no pó. Outras vezes, as mesmas fórmulas mágicas são transcritas com a intenção de formar figuras, gerando sons incompreensíveis, chamados de voces magicae 31 (Nunes de Sousa&Cazotto Terra 2008:90).
30 Example a contemporary reader might grasp are: alkazaam (=contains the name of Allah); abracadabra (mimicks the letters of the alphabet), etc. 31 Many (magical Greek scrolls) contain drawings to be copied onto sand or dust. At other times, the same incantations are inscribed so as to draw figures, which generates meaningless sounds, which are called voces magicae.
25
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Apollo's oracle at Delphi talked in terms of voces magicae, which priests later interpreted in poetic form; the garbled responses earnt Apollo the surname “the oblique�. Christian gnosticism also names the Luminaries 32 (divine emanations in a chain of interrelated gods) as Harmozel, Oroajael, Deueithal, Eleleth: voces
magicae that remind one of medieval hermetic or kabbalistic demonology or angelology. The mind magic crowd also relishes all sorts of charms, rituals and meditations that ought to help one forthwith to attract one's ideal romantic partner, business associate, income level etc.
Juvenile Japanese (counter)culture lulls itself with English lyrics that often are just a bunch of disconnected English words that make no sense whatsoever (contextual meaning and no semantic sense): it looks so worldly, though.
Mythologies not only feed on hymn-like stuff. One of Berlusconi's many claims in 2013 was that he would leave the country (=the hero might go away dejected in spite of being deep down the best among us all), and change name should he not win an upcoming election, and keep his many promises. Renzi, secretary of the former Communist Party and now Italian Prime Minister, follows suit in 2014: should the tax cuts, reforms and investments he promised not materialize soon, he would acknowledge to be a buffoon 33. Of course, taxes rise under Renzi, and Berlusconi remains at home in spite of losing the elections. 32 Just like the four evangelists, these spirits minister to the Self-Originate, or Christ. 33 ANSA, March 13, 2014.
26
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
After cashing a good electoral return by promising a euro 80 monthly bonus to low-income families -alongside the usual massive subsidies and tax cuts-, in June 2014 the Renzi government puts the much awaited bonus on hold for a number of previously included categories, and tackles a row of possible tax increases to fund the faltering budget: inheritance tax, gasoline tax, stamp duty tax, farmland, tobacco&liquor tax...Renzi's faux-pas has immediate electoral consequences: Renzi's party performance drops on second ballot elections.
Still ruminating upon his electoral defeat, Sarkozy in 2013 34 vows to relocate to England (=the disgraced hero goes away) for tax purposes, yet in 2014 he suggests he might seek re-election. In 2015, Sarkozy pockets electoral successes, and announces his run for President in 2017, just as all those action movie Rambo, Rocky and so forth characters renounce voluntary exile (retirement...) in order to set things straight again, and again, and again.
In 1976 Napoli Violenta (an Italian copycat movie with a Charles Bronson vigilante cop character), a righteous vigilante cop resigns in disgust, but changes his mind upon seeing a young boy crippled in a mafioso attack that had killed the boy's father:�burnin' with determination to even up the score�.
Popular physique superstar Steve Reeves (1926-2000) -among the highest-paid actors in European cinema for his roles as Hercules in the 1950-60s34 Mailonline, January 22, 2013.
27
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
presented to the public in 1997 a food supplement for aspiring bodybuilders. It allegedly was an industrial rendition of a 'secret' recipe of his from the good old days, which Reeves would formerly prepare for his own personal friends exclusively35.
Reeves assured the product would trigger impressive fat loss, energy bursts and muscle growth (=the politician's tax cuts and subsidies), “or my name isn't Steve Reeves”, he quipped:
Scarcity and exclusivity boost word of mouth by making people feel like insiders. If people get something not everyone else has, it makes them feel special, unique, high status. And because of that they’ll not only like a product or service more, but tell others about it. Why? Because telling others makes them look good. Having insider knowledge is social currency. (Berger 2013:33). Always get to know something about every person you hope to persuade. In this case, it is better to receive (information)than to give. The person with the most information about the other holds the biggest set of cards in the game of persuasion. (Lakhani 2005:101). Psychopaths eventually guide you into believing that the two of you are unique, very special, and destined to be together. They portray themselves as the perfect friends, employees, or business partners. This may take considerable time and effort on their part, and the grooming will be subtle. The sad truth is that the psychopathic bond is a sham; it does not exist except in your mind. You now are potentially open to psychopathic use and abuse. (Babiak&Hare 2006:280-1). 35 Jesus personally handed out food to his close disciples in the Last Supper. Christians the world over can nowadays partake of that exact mystical meal no longer reserved to Jesus' inner circle. The Eleusynian Mysteries, which Demeter had instituted in a time before time for the inner circle of her devotees, were later extended to the world at large.
28
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Hulk Hogan relayed how the sale of vitamins associated with his image sharply declined when it was made public he (had) assumed performanceenhancing drugs. This is an excellent demonstration of how ethos -opposed to logos and pathos- may work: celebrities wouldn't put their reputation (=synonymous for
ethos) at stake suggesting a fraudulent (rigged, unworthy...) product to the meek public that places so much trust in what they say.
In reality, reputation is not in there at any point in time: a transaction (whether in terms of checks to clear, exposure, public profile, ballot-box or cashcounter returns...) takes place instead. Renzi and Berlusconi -like Hulk Hogan and Steve Reeves- act just like another celebrity marketing another espresso coffee or malt liquor brand in the form of 'great causes' the human mind finds so irresistible.
Jesuit scholar King has to acknowledge36 the immense impact of ethos (=questions of credibility): a famous athlete, or a person opportunely attired shall do the trick. In Burma, it is forbidden to touch Buddhist monks' robes, while in the Italian Brianza of the past it was customary to preface gossiping about Catholic clergymen with the phrase “salvandogli l'abito” (saving [the clergyman's] robe):
Surveying megachurches in 2005, the architect and writer Wytold Rybczynski found them, like Lakewood, “resolutely secular” in design. He wrote of Willow Creek Community Church, outside Chicago, for example, that “it doesn’t look like a place of worship, but what does it look like? A performing-arts center, a community 36 1994:God And The Secular World.
29
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
college, a corporate headquarters? . . . Inspiring it’s not. It’s the architectural equivalent of the three-piece business suit that most nondenominational pastors favor.” (Ehrenreich 2009:378). Exotic sages enjoy a widespread popularity in the West, band congregations, mesmerize masses, hobnob with emotionally deprived celebrities, and typically amass financial fortunes: they are barely capable of expressing themselves in the host country's language, if at all. How could they effectively transmit the intricacies of samadhi, nibbana or satori if they are unable to even fluently talk about the day's press? Perhaps because ethos is all there is.
How is the standard lay person going to decide, if not on the basis of commodious credibility issues, emotional truth, and fleeting political opportunism? This emotional arc leading to emotional truth is typically based upon logos, or rational account, extrapolation of the law:”Finally, the use of example and maxim to form the enthymeme in each fable completes the logical appeal of Logos.”37; ethos, or priority given to the credibility of the speaker and/or circumstances:”the fable enables the speaker to find common ground, or Ethos as Aristotle labeled it, with the audience.-...-Thus, Ethos, or moral appeal, was key to the form of fables.”38.
Finally, pathos surfaces through bandwagon and emotional appeals: an emotional identification with the narrative. Alternatively, pathos rests upon sentimentality as a feeling based on thoughts:”Pathos, or emotional appeal, was 37 Bonniksen 2006:6. 38 Ibid.
30
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
inherent in the fable's form, manipulating the audience to cheer for the underdog, empathize with someone in pain, be outraged at injustice, and rejoice in that which was beautiful and pure.”39. Obscenity (=life as it is=authenticity) represents the negation of sentimentality. As the sweet horde in fusion warmly empathizes, weeps or moans, the heart of darkness makes an obscene gesture as s-he chortles.
That's how secret service operatives and interest group informants direct many extremist groups and blacklisted parties: they look so authentic to their membership (logos-ethos-pathos). In a (supposedly) leaked email to his FBI overseers, 'racist' U.S radio host Hal Turner clinched gleefully regarding his enthused votaries:”Once again, my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy. ”:
The investigation quickly focused on Roy Bullock, a paid ADL operative and well-known figure in the gay community who had possession of an extensive ADL "enemies list" of some ten thousand individuals and 1,000 organizations. -...-Other information developed that there were Bullock and Gerard "clones" positioned in or close to police departments throughout the country. (Wilcox 1994:10). In his profane quest for the Grail, Parsifal gets his first attempt wrong. A secular hermit forewarns him nobody gets a second chance at entering the Grail castle, yet Parsifal goes ahead undaunted, and ultimately succeeds. It sounds an awful lot like what happened between Neo and the Oracle in the Matrix movies:
39 Ibid.
31
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The Gnostic signal must penetrate the thick interference of the world, a world that is not only flawed but ruled by a conspiracy of ignorance-of noise. -...-The Logos that saves the prince is an informing light embodied in a technology of communication, and its transmission echoes the archetypal scenario of information theory: a sender, a receiver, and a message that must protect itself from the demon of noise-the "children of Babel" against which the king's letter is sealed.”. (Davis 1999:98). Both Socrates and Ben-Shahar40 think that the greatest insight comes from within, whatever they happen to be talking about:
As gnosticism would have it, everything we need is already within us (Vieira Ferreira 2009:46)41. Again, the Katha Upanishad aims at the knowledge of Immortality and enjoyment of Immortality, but it focuses on the psychological complex of man and on the cause of death and not only on what happens after the death but the entire complexity of all that is immortal which needs to be known in order that immortality is realized. It points out that the supreme reality, which is immortal is seated in the deepest cave of the heart as the Purusha which is not larger than the thumb of a man and that one has to know from the very close the Jiva, the individual Soul, who is the eater of sweetness, and it is also the self within our being that is lord of what was and what shall be. (Varma, MAISI031: unit 2:6). The personal myths of Jungian psychology have little enough in common with the classical language of faith , and nothing whatever to do with the language of modern science. Because it offers no criteria of validity, other than the therapeutic experience of conviction, Jungian theory amounts at once to a private religion and an antiscience. For this reason, and despite its downright unreadability, Jung's theory has held out some comfort for contemporary literary humanists who, bored by the bread-making miracles of modern science, need to be reassured that man cannot live by bread alone. Jung developed a fresh rhetoric of spirituality, without the bother of 40 2005-6a:lecture 6. 41 Cfr. the text of Hold On To The Vision:”Nobody told you, that you've face the truth alone.But you got the power to begin. Let yourself wonder that your spirit find a way And reach for the power from within ”.
32
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
churches or the imposition of consequential ethics. His therapy was a theogonic process: the gods remade to populate a charming cosmos, full of interesting people (Rieff 2006:98). Gnostic solutions appear everywhere in very similar fashion. Brutus, the father of the Roman Republic (VI century BCE)
accompanies the sons of Tarquin to Delphi and hears an oracle foretell that the first man to kiss his mother will inherit Rome. Brutus pretends to trip and secretly kisses the earth. -...- [After he had overthrown the King and introduced a Republic] Brutus learned that his two sons had become embroiled in a plot to restore the Tarquins. Like a true noble paterfamilias, he epitomized the new spirit of the Republic by personally condemning his own sons to death. In so doing, he severed his claim to any kind of hereditary aristocracy and became the first pure symbol of Republican Rome, where duty to the state came first above all. (Meineck 2005-1:55-6). Alexander is required to loosen the mythical Gordian knot, in order to be granted divine boons according to a prophecy (victories, glory, rule over Asia, descriptions vary). When he realizes he can't untie the knot, he severs it with his sword.
Brothers Ganesha and Muruga42 are required to circumnavigate the Earth (or the universe, descriptions vary) in order to determine who shall get married first. Muruga takes off astride his celestial peacock: heavy Ganesha is left dejected with the mouse (=the human ego) that serves as his vehicle. That is when Ganesha has the decisive insight: he circumambulates his parents Shiva and Parvati (=the 42 Again: in one of the many renditions, for in some Muruga and Ganesha (or Shiva, Parvati and Muruga) aren't even related.
33
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
universe or the Earth), thus winning the contest.
Shiva loses all his attributes, including his loincloth, to Parvati in a ruthless game of dice after the sage Narada lures Shiva and Parvati into the game as they split from the androgynous form Ardhanarisvara. Thanks to Vishnu, Shiva later wins his attributes back.
Culture heroes and hero-founders such as Brutus, Alexander and Ganesha are very often liminal figures (such as Brutus=”stupid”; upstart Alexander; heavy, elephant-headed Ganesha). Even Gilgamesh, the great Mesopotamian hero, whom many take as an historical King of Uruk, was 2/3 divine according to the lore. He was the son of a goddess and a priestly King (=old Semitic-Mesopotamian motif). Interesting is to ponder that this priestly King
( lil-la) meant -according to
Contenau- “an imbecile”.
Culture heroes break taboos, flaunt the socially acceptable, and go as far as 'the great cause' requires to get the job done scoffing at collateral damage:
Disruption, loss of status, transition, deception, disregard of moral boundaries, and a prominent role for the supernatural are typical aspects of cultural change, and they are also all part of the trickster constellation. (Hansen 2001:85). This result suggests that we humans have a weakness for altruistic cheating, even if we barely know the person who might benefit from our misbehavior. (Ariely 2012:112).
34
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
“Going as far as required scoffing at the rest” can take all sorts of garbs: medieval knights go on all sort of assignments to win a dame's favor; adults make themselves ridiculous trying to entertain or win a small child's attention; groupies, zealots and devotees clip edges, tell tall tales and cut corners to put their 'great man' or 'great idea' in good light; defendants tell the story-line of another cable TV movie as purported autobiographical narrative detailing the indignities they suffered as they groan, gasp, have neurological or gastrointestinal syndromes in order to court leniency from the justice system.
CEKA/NKVD, GESTAPO or Khmer Rouge thugs commit mass murder on political grounds:”This is the general outline for an answer to why pollutions are often used in renewal rites.”43; ”things that give deep passions are your sword; rules and regulations have no meaning anymore ”44; “Permission gives absolution”45.
Several tales across several cultures rely the riddle an illustrious personage (knight, prince...) met by happenstance (on the road, in the woods...) presents to a wise commoner (fisherman, herdsman, peasant girl...). The commoner is to meet the acquaintance at a designated time and place neither dressed, nor undressed; neither riding, nor on foot. The commoner solves the dilemma wearing a fish net, and riding a small goat, and s-he is thus rewarded: the peasant girl marries the prince; the fisherman becomes a nobleman in the prince's retinue... 43 Douglas 1966:164. 44 Lyrics from Rocky IV (1985) soundtrack Hearts On Fire. 45 Lakhani 2005:132.
35
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The commoner also displays stereotypical heroic -or psychopathictraits46: being “cool under fire”; “talking one's way out of situations”: nomadic and/or thrill-seeking, confident, exuberant, bold, deft at “managing impressions”, and at “chatting people up”. Of course, the psychopathic hero (or heroic psychopath) can hardly be told apart from an emotionally intelligent door-to-door salesman:
If you ask a psychopath if he or she has ever worried about leaving the stove on after leaving the house, you will get this blank expression I am referring to. Psychopaths have no concept of what worrying like this is like. Psychopathy and OCD [obsessivecompulsive disorder] are at opposite ends of the spectrum. (Kiehl 2014:140). Contrary to what the present writer argues, professor of management Roberto47 sharply disclaims the possibility to draw the typical leader's personality profile. It is enough -the present writer argues- to take the stereotypical profile of the quintessential 'man of destiny' (any M.L. King or Gandhi one wishes), and to reverse the polarity.
What about some rabble rouser a la Tom Metzger 48 or G.L. Rockwell49 rallying Fascist skin heads to march in favor of a segregated society? A fundamentalist Christian pastor marching against the sin of homosexuality, perchance? No matter how non-violent, polite or otherwise legitimate, such protest becomes unthinkable, a taboo, with good peace of all the underlying arguments that 46 47 48 49
Behavioral, not clinical, statement of compatibility with current definitions of psychopathy in research. 2011:Portrait Of A Transformation. Founder of U.S radical right-wing group White Aryan Resistance (W.A.R). Founder of U.S radical right-wing American Nazi Party. He was shot in 1967.
36
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
serve only as preposterous fig leaves for petty political advocacy.
As author Sam Vaknin puts it, psychopaths bring color to the victim's otherwise black&white life. Research psychologist Dutton quips:”But there’s evidence to suggest that psychopathy, in small doses at least, is personality with a
tan—and that it can have surprising benefits.”50. As 1988 Kim Wilde's hit You Came exemplifies:”You came, and changed the way I feel. No one could love you more Because you came and turned my life around. No one could take your place ”.
While pencil-necked sweat-hogs and other drones join the rat race at 6h45AM, the hero -or psychopath- manages to “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”51. Mass-men thus idolize the heroic psychopath -or psychopathic hero- as paradigm of the new humanity they yearn to join someday:
And so, as mentioned, psychopaths, on average, blink slightly less than the rest of us—an autonomic artifact that may well contribute to their intense “reptilian” aura. On the other hand, however, it’s also been speculated that psychopaths’ intense gaze may reflect enhanced, predatory concentration levels: like the world’s top poker players, they are continually psychologically “frisking” their “opponents” for key emotional tells-...-.Hare suggests that it’s probably a little of both: that psychopaths, right now, are on a bit of a roll, and that the more of a roll they get on, the more normative their behavior becomes. (Dutton 2012:30,93). In myths the snake is a frequent counterpart of the hero -...-. For example, the hero has eyes like a snake (C.G. Jung). If psychopaths “are on a roll”, faceless drones they blight have also to be 50 2012:11. 51 Walden, Thoreau 1854:no page.
37
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
co-dependent (=abetters, accomplices), another form of personality disorder that contemporary society eagerly cultivates in the population at large. Co-dependency may hide under patriotic “independence or death” slogans; “better dead than red” gospels; romantic comedies and songs that preach “you are my everything”.
People scramble to excuse yet another pedophile Catholic priest, genocidal freak, 'just war', corrupt politician or lusty oriental spirituality guru in the name “of one's everything”. Knights bow in front of the only one true King; soldiers die and make others die in the name of the only true 'great cause'...
Environmental change creates this rigidity -...-. When a change takes place in the external environment, we perceive it as a threat often. And threat seems to lead to this restriction of information and constriction and control in organizations: a rigid response on the part of people, groups and organizations. And typically, that rigid response entails a focus on well-learnt, dominant response pattern from the organization's past. And these well-learnt patterns of behavior may have been appropriate in the past, but they're typically not appropriate for the new environment. (Roberto 2011:Resistance And Reactions To Change). Mythological riddles embody often a national-popular version of a Grail or Oedipal quest52. An “open Sesame” narrative, perchance? Do some Buddhist traditions not rely on riddles ( koan) in order to trigger spiritual awakening? ”riddles play with boundaries, but ultimately to affirm them”53. Adventitious details vary enormously (a Scottish fisherman; an Italian peasant girl...); the main topic may consist in one or several riddles etc. 52 Oedipus had to answer the Sphinx's riddle; Parsifal had to ask the Grail King the right question. 53 Maranda 1976:131.
38
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The answer to a riddle may be replaced with some sort of kind act towards some great man incognito (=wandering gods incognito bestow trials upon mankind): that single act (for example Jason helps an old lady -or Hera in disguisecross a river) is worth immense rewards (a person in a past animal life paid homage to a Buddha, and he's now reborn a man to attain sainthood):
"And the King will say, 'I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!' (Matthew 25:40). [the angel Raphael said]When you did not hesitate to get up and leave the table to go and bury a dead man, I was sent to test your faith (Catholic Bible, Tobias 12:13). Also: a tricky situation may be the riddle to solve. In the Egyptian Tale
Of The Eloquent Peasant (about 2.000 BCE), a foreman tricks a traveling peasant into losing his possessions. The resilient peasant refuses to give up, then argues his case in front of a nobleman: the King himself, however, reads transcripts of the peasant's arguments. In the end, having pleased authority figures, the peasant is promoted to foreman, and the foreman is fired (=trickery=role reversal):
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . . . (Kristeva 1982:4). Fast cash and hefty windfalls are a long time favorite of the human mind. Most will be familiar with Michael J. Fox's rag-to-riches 'American dream' movies. 39
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Immemorial Buddhist Cullasetti Jataka sees a dejected lad who follows the hint of a noble sage he overhears proffering a prediction.
In just four months, the crestfallen youth has amassed such wealth to receive approval from the sage who initially proffered the prediction, who weds his daughter to him, and entrusts his princely estates to him as well. Michael J. Fox couldn't have done better on film, since the youth in the Buddhist tale started up by...picking up a dead rat.
The internet offers stories about this chap or that gal who begun trading disposable items, and ended up with a brand new sport car or the like: the hero's journey with his trials and ultimate boons. The famous “Subway diet” story about this morbidly overweight guy who went back into shape by eating only at Subway (fast-food company) generated a revenue increase of 18 and 16% for Subway in the two-year period it was introduced in 200054.
Since the 1990s, every product online that has anything to do with shape (diets, supplements, food, exercise, cosmetics...) includes “before and after” photos of very overweight people with very blemished appearance turning into fit, tawny centerfold material with an awesome complexion. For those who cannot be bothered with hero's journeys gobbling down slimming fast-food, doing push-ups, or applying creams there is photo retouching software that works like a breeze. 54 Roberto 2011:Making Change Stick.
40
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Contemporary readers may scoff at it quickly, for nobody really cares about preposterous stories relating about Bronze Age peasants, or fictional knights riding in imaginary woods. The same blueprint lives on, however, in all respectable romantic comedies -or hero movies like the various Rambo, Rocky, Karate Kid etcthe public elatedly digs. According to perfect Aristotelian prescriptions, do romantic comedies not revolve around meeting the true only one love, much as in the lore one meets -equally by happenstance- the true only one King -or god, knight...-?
Do romantic comedy's characters not get into misunderstandings at first, impose trials upon each other ( Non Son Degno Di Te, 1965; Pretty Woman, 1990...) much as folkloric Kings and peasants do? Is that not the umpteenth time a frail little creature is pushed to the brink, only to be 'rescued' (loved, married...) at the last moment, and nursed back to happiness (living happily ever after, etc)?
Isn't the forest (meadow, river etc) of lore an allegory for the conundrum of life enmeshed in the web of time? Do contemptuous, married medieval dames not impose trials upon their suitors? “The celebration of courtly love [consisted in] how to get the lady's name into the poem without her husband recognizing it. �55.
Do characters in the lore not live happily ever after? The peasant girl marries the prince; the fisherman becomes a nobleman in the prince's retinue; the tramp marries the millionaire; the peasant becomes the foreman; the street bum 55 Campbell 1989:A Noble Heart.
41
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
marries the daughter of a wise millionaire. Isn't it what people in romantic comedies do?
Popular culture also delivers another contemporary substitute to medieval courtly romance. Sit-coms since the 1950s see husbands -the equivalent of ancient lords of the manor- as bumbling chumps their wives ridicule and/or outsmart without them ever realizing what's going on: an infomercial's storyline.
One might prefer hero movies like Rambo, Chariots Of Fire, Rocky or
Karate Kid: hasn't Rocky to suffer indignities before the triumph? Is lore false, and are romantic comedies -or hero movies- true? Isn't action movies' blueprint (Rambo, Bloodsport, Karate Kid, Rocky ...) much the same as that of hero movies not involving express violence such as war and/or contact sports ( Chariots Of Fire, The
Man Without A Face,Victory56, Days Of Thunder... )?
Renewal through struggle may take the form of a death tournament: in
Bloodsport, the Van Damme character has to defeat the world's most skilled and vicious martial artists. Is that not the umpteenth time a frail little creature is pushed to the brink (=the various training montages), only to be 'rescued' (awarded the black belt, etc) at the last moment, and nursed back to happiness (winning the tournament, defeating an opponent, delivering the virgin...)?
56 It is true the movie is set during a fictional WWII. Nevertheless, the movie's pivot is the game of soccer, not contact sports or war as such.
42
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment of the 1960-70s showed that children who can delay gratification -eating one marshmallow (cookie etc) now, or two after a fixed delay of say 15 minutes- tended to have better life outcomes measured in a variety of ways (from SAT scores to BMI). Just like those action movie, folklore or romantic comedy characters who go through excruciating riddles, challenges, training montages etc before the final reward, modern science just reiterates what folklore had been pointing to all along.
Conmen, banksters, politicians and other 'emotionally intelligent authentic leaders' are too glad to oblige. Mountains shall soon turn to polenta; oceans to lemonade; hefty subsidies and investments shall match drastic tax cuts very soon...
Roberto57 points out that high-power leaders tend to succumb to “the planning fallacy�: failing to take possible worst case scenarios into account, and acting on the spur of rosy, best case illusions that lead them to behave as hypocrites because they're unable to evaluate the situation properly.
While the world awaits epochal change, morbidly co-dependent people are requested to immediately comply (=immediate compliance&deferred boon shtick): there is a candidate to vote; a war effort to support; a party to make excuses for; a Ponzi scheme to subscribe to right away in order for streets to be paved in 57 2011:Power.
43
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
gold tomorrow...or some other day.
In 1955, J. Kubitschek was elected President of Brazil with the slogan “50 years of progress in 5 years”. He would build the architectural wonder of Brasilia -the new capital- in the wilderness of central Brazil scoffing at logistic and financial hurdles. Politics and history become thus hyperreal:
Novelized (Brasilia as “the capital of hope”);
Condensed (50 years of progress in 5 years);
Abridged (a new capital in the wilderness).
Instead
of
storming
government
buildings
demanding
regime
overthrows, or banding lynch mobs to avenge the insult added to the injury, people congratulate themselves over passing the Marshmallow Test with flying colors.
It's the well-known infantile dynamic. Young child throws a temper tantrum because s-he wants spun sugar right now. A parental figure pressures the child to delay. S-he cannot have spun sugar right away, but s-he will definitely have it when uncle comes to visit; tomorrow, or some other day:
Love your enemies! Do good to them. Lend to them without expecting to be repaid. Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as children of the Most High, for he is kind to those who are unthankful and wicked. ( Luke 6:35, 44
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
emphasis added). Doesn't that rather amount to punching at human mind's ghosts that -indeed- have remained the same across regimes, ages and continents as they found an outlet in multifarious myths and legends? “Any image termed archetypal is immediately valued as universal, transhistorical, basically profound, generative, highly intentional and necessary ”58. British scholar J.E. Carpenter had expressly recognized already in 1880 on which ground similarities between Gautama Buddha and Jesus could subsist:
That a life of self-devotion thus conceived and fulfilled should remind us almost at every stage of the life which we have hitherto regarded as the highest type of self-sacrifice, is not perhaps after all so remarkable. The needs and cares, the desires and fears of men, do not change from land to land, or from age to age (Cit. in Almond 1988:69). Truth (statistical probability, consistency, verisimilitude...) is not a necessary ingredient when success with the public is to be measured.
Contemporary popular culture hasn't forgone the item of flaunting the socially acceptable and breaking taboos while taking advantage of windfalls:”things that give deep passions are your sword; rules and regulations have no meaning anymore ”59. The imagery has perhaps changed, yet it is enough to have a cursory look at the cover of national-popular 60 magazines or talk-shows replete with such 58 Archetypical Psychology Lecture 2007: no page. 59 Lyrics from Rocky IV (1985) soundtrack Hearts On Fire. 60 Some translate voelkish as racist. The NSDAP Bavarian newspaper was named Voelkisher Beobachter (nationalpopular observer). While the national-popular stratum in Germany did indeed shelter segments and groups
45
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
tantalizing articles hinting at magical shortcuts, 'secret' steps towards instant gratification of monetary, social, sexual or emotional nature. Hyperreality -condensed, abridged, novelized- steals the day.
Does that not amount to flaunting quintessential societal norms by breaking taboos? Does the golden rule not prescribe meticulous, 'honest' hard work, 'training montages' and delayed gratification before the reward (pay increase, black belt, killer body, promotion, sexual encounter...)?
Yet -in the fairy tale magazines conjure up- the chap – the magazine's timely buyer; the spam mail's lucky recipient, or talk show's serendipitous viewerwho follows the 'secret' steps teleports ahead to the moment of reward: the killer body, the princely income, the irresistible sex appeal...No trace is left of training/bricolage montages, extenuating diets or workouts etc.
It is impossible not to hear the inspirational lyrics of 1982 hit song (and
Rocky movie soundtrack) The Eye Of The Tiger:
Did my time, took my chances Went the distance Now I'm back on my feet just a man and his will to survive So many times, it happens too fast You trade your passion for glory Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past You must fight just to keep them alive
with racist, chauvinistic or 'magic' tendencies, the entire concept cannot in fairness be reduced to racism. The present writer prefers to refer to German lower middle-class imagery. Suffice is to say that for a time the nationalistic-militaristic side orchestrated a short-lived, but for a while seemingly momentous, reaction to NSDAP in the form of Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet, the soldier's helmet), which later disbanded. Naturally, as common in Italy in 1919-21 (biennio rosso, red two-years), even left-wing parties had their own militias.
46
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
All this (gnostic mysticism, screenplays of action movies...) may be just worth two cents in many people's book. Yet scholars such as Ben-Shahar 61 repackage the item as resilience, and -quoting peer-reviewed studies-, show us how resilient people triumph in spite of negative circumstances through faith, role models, forward-thinking, and an however small support network. DeWall dubs resilient people self-control masters62.
If all those trials and tribulations see the hero-savior as “man of sorrows� who ultimately triumphs due to resilience, in turn gage of some 'inner x quality' that signposts a manifest destiny (=obsession with finding patterns=ascribing patterns to intelligent agency) soon to unfold, potential teachers, offhand gurus, and other personality coaches pandering to the hopeful shall have 'what it takes', namely a list of trials and tribulations impressive enough to qualify as mentor:
First, you must experience those sorrows as your own sorrows, and then, when you have affirmed those sorrows, you come into bliss. Anyone can try it. It's to find where your pain is and by saying "yes" to it, the whole new consciousness will suddenly be experienced. You'll be "saved" as they say. (Campbell&Boa 1989:107). Jack Kornfield recounts the (presumed) violence he witnessed at home as a child63. Later, Kornfield also claims he was brought up to be compassionate and 61 2005-6:lecture 2. 62 2013:Self-Control Successes And Failures. 63 He says (2005) that his father would beat his mother routinely up, throwing her downstairs etc. Also, when they'd go on a (presumably reconciliatory) car rides, his father would push on the brake so that his mother would hit the windshield hard. As this writing contends, a Tom&Jerry cartoon, and a frail little creature's (presumed) 'log from hell' read alike.
47
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
understanding: his family members would always comfort him when he was distressed. The two accounts are as irreconcilable and inconsequential as the characterization of any almighty in the lore:”God is a righteous judge, a God who displays his wrath every day.”(Psalm 7:11);”Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy. ”(Micah 7:18).
They are the acorn that eventually blossomed into a powerful oak: the wimp became a macho 'alpha male'; the bum who used to sleep under a bridge now lives in a mansion; Rocky the lunkhead won the belt; Forrest Gump the lamebrain became a sport superstar, war hero, millionaire, and so forth.
Yatsenko explains that the fixation with 'endless potentialities' goes back to the Rig Veda64:
For in the idea of the Rishis a world is primarily a formation of consciousness and only secondarily a physical formation of things. A world is a loka, a way in which conscious being images itself. And it is the causal Truth, represented in the person of Surya Savitri, that is the creator of all its forms. For it is the causal Idea in the infinite being,—the idea, not abstract, but real and dynamic,—that originates the law, the energies, the formations of things and the working out of their potentialities in determined forms by determined processes. Because the causal Idea is a real force of existence, it is called Satyam, the True in being; because it is the determining truth of all activity and formation, it is called Ritam, the True in movement; because it is broad and infinite in its self-view, in its scope and in its 64 XV century BCE or older.
48
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
operation, it is called Brihat, the Large or Vast. ( MAISI018 no date: unit 1:7). What length wouldn't such people go to attract prospects is one's guess, but a Jewish-American therapist based in the UK probably obliterates competition literally; heroes and saviors of lore look like dilettantes in comparison:�Always already under a kind of erasure, the past becomes an evacuated space ready to be filled with wonders, ghosts, and other signs of the counterfactual and pathological�65.
She claims to have personally experienced:
1. utter and abject poverty;
2. a violent and abusive father;
3. a drug-addicted mother who'd take her to drug parties where she
4. would be routinely tortured and sexually assaulted so that she withstood
5. multiple personality disorders and suicidal tendencies,
6. three failed marriages,
7. more episodes of rape and abuse than she could count,
65 Uebel 2002:48.
49
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
8. the loss of an infant son.
Paul Hegstrom -the noted Christian mental health professional- follows suit: he was routinely subjected to sexual assault since the age of 3, beside a host of other indignities. With the notable exception of sexuality, a Tom&Jerry cartoon, and a frail little creature's (purported) 'log from hell' read just alike.
On one hand, people laugh; on the other, they freeze aghast, or scream in participatory rapture:
Some emotions, like anger and anxiety, are high-arousal. When we’re angry we yell at customer service representatives. When we’re anxious we check and recheck things. Positive emotions also generate arousal. Take excitement. When we feel excited we want to do something rather than sit still. The same is true for awe. When inspired by awe we can’t help wanting to tell people what happened. (Berger 2013:59). Horrors and indignities are not the only crucible from which mentors may arise. Mentors may at any rate be conventional people who 'went native'. H. Souter (an anthropology graduate) tells how he lived for years in the deep Peruvian jungle before, during and after his apprenticeship to become an entheogenic master shaman under the guidance of native medicine men.
Other personality coaches have gone native among indigenous people in Mexico or Mongolia. Oriental spirituality coaches have often gone native by serving as Buddhist monks; by joining Hindu ashrams; or through apprenticeship to a
50
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
master of traditional Hindu or Chinese medicine.
Gerrig gives a suspiciously similar description of another peculiar lot: hallucinating schizophrenics who -in a controlled experiment- “ can't differentiate what's happening within the environment from what's happening inside their head”66.
No doubt many 'great men' of history do fit the description perfectly: this does not exclusively apply to some oddball on the 'wrong' political side in huge disfavor with the dominant interpretive community (masters of acceptable discourse, hierophants67 etc): “hard to find are those beings who can claim to be mentally healthy for even a moment except for those [arhats] whose mental cankers are destroyed” (Gautama Buddha, Roga Sutta).
Put more succinctly, there are more sociopaths among us than people who suffer from the much-publicized disorder of anorexia, four times as many sociopaths as schizophrenics, and one hundred times as many sociopaths as people diagnosed with a known scourge such as colon cancer. (Stout 2005:8). Consider also that the prevalence of psychopathy in our society is about the same as that of schizophrenia, a devastating mental disorder (Hare 1993:2). The potential for ‘possible’ psychopathy was much higher. In the corporate group, nearly six percent of the subjects qualified as potentially or possibly psychopathic (in addition to the four percent who clearly appeared psychotic), compared to just 1.2 per cent of the population as a whole. Psychopaths can and do get ahead. Of 66 1992: lesson 7. 67 =high priest, or “he who shows what's sacred”.
51
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the nine people with the highest scores for psychopathy, seven were already managers. Two were vice presidents, two were directors, two were managers or supervisors, and one had another management position. (Can You Identify...2014:no page). Heroes, founders, and saviors are 'men of sorrows', indeed. Jealous brothers sell legendary Hebrew patriarch Joseph into slavery: he manages to become the most powerful man in Egypt next to the Pharaoh. He also manages to marry Egyptian princess Aseneth, who had dared to turn down even the Pharaoh's own son: does it sound a bit like the Cinderella story, perchance, whereby the servant harsh step-sisters (=Joseph's step-brothers) humiliate rises to the rank of a princess?
Aseneth may have countless high-ranking suitors, whereas Cinderella may be the belle of the ball competing with many dames for a prince's hand: one and the same. Just like Buddha, Padma Sambhava and others left behind footprints devotees could worship (=the mythology of the foot), so Cinderella leaves a crystal shoe behind68: one and the same, again.
Campbell69 explains that “often the hero in many of the mythologies is called the thrown-away”; “Jesus looked directly at them and asked, "Then what is the meaning of that which is written: "'The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone'?” (Luke 20:17).
Aseneth is worth pausing over a little: 68 Losing one shoe might as well be construed as breaking past duality. 69 1968a.
52
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
4. Now there was in that city a man, a satrap of Pharaoh; and this man was the chief of all Pharaoh's satraps and lords extnote. 5. And he was very rich, and wise, and generous, and he was Pharaoh's counsellor, and his name was Pentephres; and he was the priest of Heliopolis. 6. And Pentephres had a virgin daughter of about eighteen years of age, tall and beautiful and graceful, more beautiful than any other virgin in the land. 7. And she was quite unlike the daughters of the Egyptians, but in every respect like the daughters of the Hebrews. 8. And she was as tall as Sarah, and as beautiful as Rebecca, and as fair as Rachel; and this virgin's name was Aseneth. 9. And the fame of her beauty spread through all that land, even to its remotest corners; and all the sons of the lords and of the satraps and of the kings sought her hand in marriage, young men all of them. 10. And there was great rivalry between them because of her, and they began to fight among themselves because of Aseneth. (Cook 1984: no page). Is this description from apocryphal Hebrew scriptures ( Joseph And
Aseneth70, between I century BCE and I century CE) any different from all the e xtnote As this writing contends, almighties have lords and (regional) Kings (=satraps) ministering to them. It seems quite reasonable to infer how celestial hierarchies of lore have been derived from the lore of (semi)omnipotent Mesopotamian and Egyptian monarchs. Almighty father-god has lord Jesus and angels ministering to him; Apostles and Kings in turn minister to lord Jesus. In the same way, the almighty Pharaoh has lords and Kings ministering to him through his second in command. The same shtick recurs elsewhere. Almighty Vishnu has lord Rama -or Krishna- (Vishnu's own incarnations) who minister to him. In turn, Kings and princes -such as semi-divine Arjuna (son of Indra) and his brothers- minister to/assist/engage with lord Krishna. Sun goddess Amaterasu was seen in Japanese Shintoism as the Imperial family's antecedent. The divine Emperor of Japan, then, had the semi-divine Japanese people ministering to him, much as he ministered to Shinto gods as high priest. A similar idea can be conveyed about the Emperor of China, also a divine high priest (son of heaven). “Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me. ” ( John 12:26);”Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” (Matthew 19:28). In Biblical scholarship, questions arise regarding the verbiage. “Worship” to be devoted to Yahweh (later to Jesus) may both mean worship devoted to an high god, or solemn deference devoted to an earthly authority figure of supreme import: Joseph's brothers bow down before him as an Egyptian authority figure, for example. Passages in the Hebrew Bible as well commingle imagery related to the Kings of Israel (=anointed ones=messiahs) with divine imagery in perfect Mesopotamian and Egyptian fashion:”For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6). A title such as “lord” could easily shift from deities such as Yahweh, Baal, Adonis and Thammuz to conventional monarchs (note of this writer). 70 Some contend this Jewish-Hellenistic Greek text was born in order to make sense of the process of religious conversion among traditional Jews facing -until the rise of Pauline Christianity that shall win the race because more accommodating- an important number, percentage-wise, of both converts and friends of Judaism (=godfearers). Among scholars, figures vary considerably. It is possible to hypothesize how Jews might have represented about 10% overall of the Roman Empire's population in the I century, with more Jews in the
53
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
superlative royal virgins of myth? Greek Helen (Leda, Europa, Semele...)? Hindu Savitri, Shakuntala or Sita? Aren't such superlative royal virgins myth's essential ingredient as possible mothers of future heroes; trophies for heroes squabbling over them; and/or as dynastic matriarchs?
In most -if not all- cases, such royal virgins are the transmogrified image of primeval goddesses (Sita as incarnation of Lakshmi, for example; Semele as granddaughter of Zeus; Europa as a sort of Hathor counterpart) mixed with inconsistent bits and pieces of something else.
Isn't this endless description of superlative qualities and possessions (and...and...and)71 another more or less dysfunctional ego-trip into the land of surfeit (=chain of fortune) that looks like brags so popular over the internet, where liars lie to themselves?
In other words, are mythical characters and story-lines not of the same alloy as characters online telling this story about their (presumed) income, physical prowess, attractiveness, position, connections, sex life, and so forth? Of course they are. Just like larger-than-life characters of myth -whether historical, pseudohistorical and anything in between- such as Gautama Buddha, Alexander, Caesar,
Empire's Eastern half then in the Western. By Constantine's time -and after the Jewish wars and diaspora-, the 10% estimate shall represent Christians, not Jews; expectedly, other sources claim Christians then represented 5% of the Empire's population. The text exists in several variations that may not entirely overlap. 71 In other circumstances the endless list shall represent horrors, torments and indignities the hero was subjected to.
54
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Ganesha, Hercules and so forth, they want to mirror the Renaissance man, to span the quadrants of Jungian psychology. People love to be equally proficient at playing the king, the trickster, the warrior, the magician and the lover.
Naysayers may sneeze at the wretched, stone broke fellow who brags online. He -on the other hand- relishes the folkloric fantasy of being one of the gods or royalties of lore who wander incognito to test earthlings: will mortals dare to thumb their nose in the Almighty’s direction?
The fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the beasts of the field, every creature that moves along the ground, and all the people on the face of the earth will tremble at my presence. The mountains will be overturned, the cliffs will crumble and every wall will fall to the ground -...-declares the Lord GOD (Ezekiel 38:20-1). Even ascetic sage Gautama Buddha in the lore won military art contests (=warrior); stories exist to recall his sexual effervescence before he renounced the world (=lover). Buddha was also a prince (=king); he went around in a world full of supernatural wonders (=magician), and used skilled means, and what Mahayana schools refer to as “accommodated truths” (=trickster), to lead people towards ultimate liberation.
Characters
like
Ganesha,
Alexander,
Caesar,
Louis-Napoleon
Bonaparte72, Berlusconi, Shiva and so forth play the part of Renaissance man pretty 72 He became the Emperor Napoleon III (=king); he had a string of love affairs in different countries (=lover); he led successful military campaigns, and wrote acclaimed military art manuals (=warrior); unexpected twists of fate favored him (=magician); he evaded from prison, and orchestrated a succesful putsch to reinstate the Empire in France (=trickster).
55
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
well in the lore:”You should already be in persona and ready to tell your story”73, or “jokes work best in the first person”:
The secret, unquestionably, was context. It wasn’t about being a psychopath. It was rather about being a method psychopath. About being able to step into character when the situation demanded it. But then, when the exigency had passed, to revert to one’s normal persona. (Dutton 2012:119). 27 centuries of literature—from Homeros to James Joyce; that is, from the Homeric Ulysses to the Ulysses of Joyce—originate in the "function fabulatrice," the urge to write and read fiction, creating personae whose stories we narrate to ourselves. (Fischer 1994:16). The gilded podium of politics or lore resembles another, equally hyperreal, place: Disneyland. People who impersonate Disney characters to entertain visitors must perfectly:
look the part;
talk the part;
act the part;
sign autographs according to character rules;
know everything about their character, and related universe;
ignore realities external to the fictional Disney world.
73 Lakhani 2005:165.
56
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
That's not different from all those cardboard cut-out “mister homeland security”; “mister immigration amnesty”; “mister stateless community” etc. Delcorno specifies that in antiquity paradigmatic identification took place between exemplary mythic figures and the individual or action being considered, thus re-enacting a predetermined judgment meant to either condemn or justify 74:”A symbol is talking to you and, whether the head knows it or not, the heart knows it.” 75. It is not by chance histrionic politicians (Berlusconi, Clinton, Putin, Strauss-Kahn, Blatter...) also appear in the news as Lotharios, bricoleurs etc; of course, 'great men' prefer to see themselves as 'simply irresistible'.
Just as Disney impersonators, all those people are supposed to think “in character” at all times, and to be oblivious to realities outside their fictional world, such as asking about how ethical the next 'just war' might be; or where exactly should resources for huge tax breaks, investments and subsidies come from:”Virality is most valuable when the brand or product benefit is integral to the story. When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it.”76.
The U.S Pullman company was for ages a synonym for comfortable travel by rail vehicle and trolley bus; so much in fact that even in Italy a bus can be called “ Pullman”. Politician so-and-so proves irresistible to an electoral segment 74 1984:51. 75 Campbell&Boa 1989:49. 76 Berger 2013:18,101, emphasis added.
57
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
because his image is coterminous with homeland security, immigration amnesty, Catholic renewal and so forth:”It's hard for me to separate who I am from what I want to do and what I am doing”;”A symbol is talking to you and, whether the head knows it or not, the heart knows it.”77. Just as the Pullman company embodied comfortable rail vehicle travel, so politician so-and-so “is” free trade, immigration amnesty, huge tax breaks and subsidies, a State for the stateless community.
Gautama Buddha said:”Whoever sees the Dhamma sees me; whoever sees me sees the Dhamma ”; ”Jesus replied, "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and yet you still don't know who I am? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! So why are you asking me to show him to you?” ( John 14:9). Politician so-and-so then says “whoever sees me sees homeland security (home rule, free trade etc)”.
Just as Jesus, Romulus, Buddha or Krishna descended from the heaven of high gods to bring salvation, so mister so-and-so truly embodies homeland security, welfare state etc. Zoroastrians anticipate the coming of a divine prophet born of a virgin because Zoroaster himself prophesied:”May righteousness be embodied”.
As Boothman78 would have it, “people one likes can do no wrong”. What can one like more than all the gnostic flumadiddle about Platonic forms taking flesh? Elementary ideas and exempla tend to sell well irrespective of situational 77 Campbell&Boa 1989:49. 78 2004.
58
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
factors. Homeland first gobbledygook works irrespective of the regime at hand being a Communist, Fascist or military dictatorship; or a vanilla western massdemocracy. Christ-figures sell well before one makes choices regarding which sort of Christ is at hand: a meek fakir, a lusty rabbi planting offspring here and there, a dying and rising mystery cult godhead, an affluence monger, or a rabid Che Guevara figure.
Commoners who stand in line at the supermarket's cash counter are most likely to wind up in their futile attempts at personal mythologization as
Naked Gun or Police Academy79 -and not Charlton Heston80- characters. “Jokes work best in the first person”, but often the person is the biggest joke, although people probably think -alongside deceased wrestler Dusty Rhodes and his resilient underdog persona- that “There were two bad people. One was John Wayne and he’s dead, brother, and the other’s right here”.
People are indulging ongoing mild -or not so mild- schizotypal crack-ups as they try -online, for example- to conform to obtuse allegories and petrified mythologies. Most people relate to those fossilized stories, which they may have gotten from a cable TV series for all that matters, as if those folkloric accounts were forensic reports, and not 'sentimentalized and prettified' vestiges of the schizotypal
79 Grotesque parody comedy movies. 80 Famous U.S lead actor (1923-2008) renowned for his parts as larger-than-life characters in blockbusters such as Julius Caesar (1950), The Greatest Show On Earth (1952), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), El Cid (1961), Planet Of The Apes (1968) etc.
59
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
crack-up someone else experienced and rationalized in a bygone age:
As he [=Virgil Hinshaw, future philosophy professor] neared the house. he shed his clothes. Upon attaining the yard, he climbed up the side of the porch to the roof. With the delusion that he could fly, and with grand thoughts of making a statement that Hitler and fascism can and must be stopped. he jumped to the yard and walkway below. -...- Yet my father continued to hold irrational beliefs and to hear voices -...-. I also find it provocative that , during his 1945 hospitalization, he had the delusion that he was being housed in a concentration camp. He doubtless felt, at some level, as alone and cut off from hope as those who were warehoused, tortured, and executed overseas in those obscene settings. Did he wonder whether he would be strong enough, or lucky enough, to survive? Was he still identifying with victims of fascism? Despite their clear irrationality, psychotic symptoms can reflect real world issues and concerns. (Hinshaw 2002:35,45,194). Aseneth repents, and vows herself to the Hebrew god. An angel brings about celestial bees to feed her celestial honey as heartfelt conversion's token: she can then marry Joseph the dutiful Hebrew patriarch. Honey, or the Hebrew equivalent of nectar, persists as matrimonial token of good fortune. Celestial bees foretell the grandeur of XII century Ethiopian Christian Saint and King Lalibela.
The image bank of divine nectar cathected with -or as metaphorical proxy for- gnostic or theosophic qualities is as old as man:
the extraction of Somaextnote [=elixir of immortality] is mentioned as the three pressings of Savitar [=the creator]. He gives them a secured space within this insecure manifestation where they can engage themselves in pressing out Soma for the Gods. Soma is the e xtnote Soma at some point in Vedic literature is identified with the Moon, another symbol of death and resurrection through its phases and the periodical shedding of the shadow much as snakes shed their skin (note of this writer).
60
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
product of Savitar’s pressingextnote (Yatsenko on the Rig Veda, MAISI017: lecture 5:10). Sikhs drink holy water (nectar) which they call amrit (=elixir of immortality) when they enter the militant order Khalsa: the god of Sikh monotheism is also compared to nectar in Sikh devotional hymns:”The Word is the Guru and the Guru is in the Word; all nectars are contained in the Word ”;”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ”81.
Honey also recurs in the Hittite myth of Telepinu 82 as supposed antidote against the god's sulky retreat: he embodies fertility, and the world withers in his absence. In Ethiopia, certain Christian churches may serve regular bread and honey -or honey water- as sacrament. Traditional Greek marriages still see relatives feeding honey to the bride about to go on her...honeymoon, or the time span the lore requires (=one moon) so that the groom may be satisfied the bride – whom the lore requires to be a virgin- be carrying his child, and not someone else's.
The Hindu Vedas (XV to V century BCE) portray an archetypal creation thus: “Pour on us your honey, O Heaven and Earth, you are dripping with honey, being milked with honey, whose law is honey itself”83. Does this happen by mere
e xtnote The allegory of the sacred blood a divine figure is caused to shed in order to grant eternal life recurs endlessly (note of this writer). 81 John 1:1. 82 Between the XV and XIII century BCE. 83 MAISI002 no date:lecture 5:7.
61
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
happenstance, or is it the symptom of something else going on behind the human mind's curtain?
For a more adult public the present writer recommends Conan the Barbarian (possibly inspired to real-life fate of the Avar people 84) as a Cinderella story: sold into slavery after a carnage, he rises to the rank of warlord and King... Filmmaker Bernard suggests:
Just as you want your protagonist to have a worthy goal, you want him or her to have a worthy opponent. A common problem for many filmmakers is that they portray opponents as onedimensional; if their hero is good, the opponent must be bad. In fact, the most memorable opponent is often not the opposite of the hero, but a complement to him or her. (2007:26). Ben-Shahar
repeatedly
repackages
this
concept
borrowing
from
the
transcendentalists: “a beautiful enemy”.
As the 1986 soundtrack Hold On To The Vision ( movie No Retreat No
Surrender) urges to “hold on to the vision in your eyes -...- never surrender to the clouds inside your mind”, ”Silent darkness creeps into your soul and removes the light of self-control ”85: what an inspiration. Harvard teacher Ben-Shahar 86 extols the importance of the “vision”, which he correlates with long-term success. That's exactly what the various Rocky, Top Gun, Ip Man, Matrix, Bloodsport, Karate Kid 84 Once ruthless warriors that threatened the Byzantine into surrendering huge treasures to avert attacks, later became sedentarized craftsmen. Pepin's expeditions (VIII century) in search of treasuries obliterated this people from the map. 85 Lyrics from Hearts On Fire, Rocky IV (1985) soundtrack. 86 2005-6a:lecture 11.
62
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
etc fictional heroes are all about.
Windfalls can take up all sorts of garbs. For the layman, it would be hard to trace the antecedents of the nowadays popular so-called 419 scams (or Nigerian scams): a multi-millionaire worldwide web of confidence trickery and financial fraud.
The blueprint is more than (in)famous: deposed dictators/deceased bankers/murdered chieftains and their ilk left behind in some exotic location (most likely Africa, as many of those scams are rumored to originate from Nigeria) a colossal fortune after they perished in a generally known event, revolution, transportation or natural disaster etc.
Some relative/bank official etc thus offers (typically through mass-email or some device of that sort) to share it with the victim in exchange for some small contribution or service that invariably leads to the hopeful being swindled. As well, some people are allegedly reported as missing after traveling to some exotic location in order to chase after the elusive boon, and the shady chaperons.
As this writing contends, myths tend to coalesce. Instead of a deposed dictator, the fabulous boon may be offered courtesy of another category the human mind loves: FBI undercover agents87 with badges and related paraphernalia, or the
87 As news site KTNV published on August 17,2011.
63
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Men In Black:�You have permission to make this decision because if it is the wrong one you can still have absolution. You have a guarantee.�88.
It is the old story of gods, heroes and saviors in disguise visiting men to somewhat test them for some higher purpose. Angels and gods are here replaced by their equivalent in the modern day: millionaires, celebrities, secret agents with badges, deposed caudillos. Badges signal hyperreality (novelized, abridged, condensed); hyperreality prompts synchronicity (=things start happening 89). To name just one example, on a crowded expressway, badges (insignia, regalia etc) mean preferential access to emergency lanes; a right to jump in front of the line; a right not to pay toll; the right to break speed limits...
If angels' sexual identity was a matter of contention in traditional medieval Catholic circles, the sex of visitors from outer space (Men In Black etc) is often disputed as well: Guieu talks about such outer space agents as impossible to identify clearly as either female or male.
Explorers, royalties and renegades had for centuries been on the lookout for the Eldorado, mythical colonial 'nowhere' of fabulous wealth:
In 65, Nero was for a time the willing dupe of a deranged North African knight named Caesellius Bassus, who claimed that the hidden treasure of Queen Dido of Carthage had been revealed to him in a 88 Lakhani 2005:128. 89 In a way, the present writer argues that hyperreality may be synchronicity without the mystical or paranormal baggage.
64
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
dream: a mass of gold bullion lying in a great cave under his estates. Without checking either the source or the story itself, Nero dispatched an army of treasure-seekers. After a long and frenzied search nothing was found, and Bassus killed himself. But during the weeks and months of waiting, gold fever consumed the capital, rumors flew, and the emperor was alleged to have spent vast sums recklessly, in the anticipation that his treasury would soon be replenished. (Champlin 2003:126). The discovery of Florida was brought about as Spanish conquerors in the Caribbeans heard natives tell tall tales of an overseas Eldorado called Bimini. Many Spaniards met a horrendous fate fighting to dispossess belligerent American-Indians in Florida as they searched for Bimini, which didn't even exist. Fabulous lands of plenty might meet Jauja, a real Aztec -and later Hispanic- city famous for its fabled Inca warehouses.
Since the XVI century, swindles are reported under the name of 'the Spanish prisoner's'. A Spanish prisoner dies in captivity in some place or another; he leaves behind a treasure map that the distraught owner pressed for cash is ready to sell to the hopeful in a circular rendition of the Jacob and Esau twins 90 myth (selling one's birthright for some food91).
That compounds with some historical facts, as well as with the fixation
90 The doppelgaenger mytheme. Broadly put, the doppelgaenger is a category, person, concept or attitude from which the principal person, category, concept or attitude tries to draw legitimacy from. Quite similar to the “significant other” of Mead's personality theory, the doppelgaenger -in the present writer's understanding- is a “significant other” already catechted with deep emotional, political, moral, spiritual etc values or characteristics as war propaganda best epitomizes. The doppelgaenger may also come to mean an harbinger of entropy, disharmony, chaos. The term doppelgaenger possibly first appeared in 1796 in a story by J.P. Richter. 91 Genesis 25:29ss.
65
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
with maps. For example, some ancient maps seem more accurate than the day's technology allowed; others seem to chart Antarctica, unknown at the time; some claim Christopher Columbus, Magellan etc followed one such map in their trips. The hopeful stars as the new hero getting to that fabulous nowhere full of thrill and treasures thanks to this map, inscription, necklace and all the rest: all the characters in these narratives are fossilized, and belong to the exemplum genre.
The exemplum is -finally- the way to exert appropriate pressure on those 'neuralgic spots' of the human mind to trigger the desired answer; a way to seize a 'mystery' that couldn't otherwise be understood so simply; a particular case that embodies a general law in a classificatory kind of approach; the “good myths� 92 become facts again and again.
Still on the topic of more or less hidden treasures, in the France on the verge of financial collapse in the late XVIII century, a rumor circulated detailing the crown's immense wealth that would easily avert the impending disaster. In our day's Italy, newspapers tell of fabulous gold reserves 93, which easily support the weight of the world's third largest nominal public debt (after the USA and Japan) and ensuing crises; naturally, different equally mainstream sources quote disparate gold reserve figures in sharp disagreement with one another 94.
92 Zorzetti 1980:40. 93 110 billion euros, third largest after the USA and Germany, according to Petrini (2011: no page). 94 The World's Biggest Gold Reserves, no date: no page.
66
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The gold fever is evergreen. In 2009, the illustrious nation of Italy almost solves its dire financial problems. On two separate occasions, police takes into custody foreigners (Japanese and Filipinos) allegedly trying to illegally export to Switzerland 131 billion (yes, billion) U.S dollars (government bonds) in one case, 180 billion (yes, billion) in another case (about the debt of a country like Brazil). If the great nation of Italy could appropriate only a fraction of that amount, there would be no limit to social alchemy: oceans would finally turn to lemonade, and mountains to polenta. It all turns out later to be a blurry hoax.
As the next row of tax and due diligence provisions is possibly upcoming to burden even more the increasingly decrepit Italian economy, journals detail a fabulous stream of gold (146 tons in 2012, +22% compared to 2011) being exported legally to Switzerland, as to give credit by extension to a shadow amount being exported illegally from the great nation of Italy. The proof is in the pudding: one Italian had been recently arrested trying to export illegally 110kg of gold bullion 95.
8 billion euro -or 200 tons of gold- is the amount of precious metal funneled in Italy through a mushrooming network of specialized shops 96. Penjockeys for hire in the media can also emphasize mind-boggling amounts of foodstuff Italians would routinely waste, as they proclaim in the same breath the need for -yet again- more taxes because mass consumption slowly but steadily 95 Chiellino 2013: no page. 96 Teramo News, March 10, 2014.
67
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
decreases due to epidemic crises, thus yielding lesser tax returns.
Now that the free press has informed them, can people look inside, and say extra taxes are not well-worth bearing in the perspective of the (social) sacrament of (collective) reconciliation? After all, the great nation wastes all that foodstuff, and exports all that gold...
In such cases, however, the currency at stake is central bank currency taxpayers shall provide, and not only elusive emotional currency based upon the equally sanctimonious trading of accusations and apologies floating atop a stormy sea of tears, groans, gasps, whimpers, screams and moans.
In spite of presumed social distress, and alleged economic meltdown, Italy floats atop a sea of gold that can be promptly tapped into to ignite this, that or another social alchemy scheme, if newspaper accounts are the epitome of honesty, and can be taken at face value, of course. People -as Rousseau argued- shall be 'forced to be free':
Les hommes ne se gouvernent pas ainsi par des vues abstraites; on ne les rend heureux qu'en les contraignant à l'être, et il faut leur faire éprouver le bonheur pour le leur faire aimer : voilà l'occupation et les talents du Héros ; c'est souvent la force à la main qu'il se met en état de recevoir les bénédictions des hommes qu'il contraint d'abord à porter le joug des lois pour les soumettre enfin à l'autorité de la raison. (1821:147) Some claim that the people of the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores
68
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
sit atop the fabulous wealth of innumerable colonial ships having sunk in their waters with cargoes often involving precious metals. If only a minute percentage of the same could be recovered, Portugal's dire financial predicament would be over.
At other times, sky-high figures of (hypothetical) tax evasion are conjured up as soon to be recovered by the ever peeping and inquisitive taxman courtesy of yet another law, thus ushering in a new golden age of social alchemy and ensuing oneness.
Celebrities may also be thrown to the mob in the tabloids to buttress the comedy of equality that obsesses postwar regimes. The ever inquisitive and peeping taxman apparently nailed Fabio Capello (Italian celebrity soccer coach), Valentino Rossi ( Italian world-champion motorbike-racer), GĂŠrard Depardieu (French actor), Dolce&Gabbana (Italian fashion designers) and others in what looks like a giant infomercial about the tax system's efficiency. Most often, though not always depending on sociopolitical conjunctures 97, celebrities quickly fade from the tabloids' radar (Depardieu receives a Russian passport and Russian residency; an high court acquits Dolce&Gabbana previously sentenced for tax evasion, for example), whereas the common man has no way out.
The fantasy of the Eldorado still haunts human minds: fast cash; diamonds as big as pumpkins hiding undiscovered under the dust behind one's 97 Tax litigation jeopardized the financial standing of U.S comedy duo Abbott&Costello so popular in the 19401950s. Costello died in 1959, and Abbott in 1974 in complete financial dejection after his troubles with the IRS.
69
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
outhouse; never before seen treasures -locked up in undisclosed secret government facilities- that will avert bankruptcy; investment schemes stolen from 98 the powerful and wealthy shall allow average Joe online to turn ten dollars into one thousand literally overnight.
Why would anyone give away such miracle method instead of keeping it for oneself? Mythology provides us with a reason: ultimate goodness...providing one complies with modest requirements: voting a certain party; joining a congregation; wiring euro 19,99 (29,99...)...
Savior-heroes, politicians and con-men behave exactly alike: all fidgety in the rapture of disinterested oneness and ultimate compassion until you sign the investment contract, vote/join the party, buy the book or enter the congregation. Then the golden age they promised turns into Pinocchio's carnival: everybody becomes a jackass.
In Italy in August 201499, a mysterious company named Bank Of Fuel floods the country with letters making an irresistible offer. They propose to buy packages online (euro 99 upwards) that should entitle one to receive euro 140 (and upwards) in fuel thanks to a prepaid Mastercard card Bank of Fuel is to mail directly to the applicant at a later date (=immediate compliance&deferred boon shtick). 98 Readers may guess it's the old shtick about trickster gods -such as Isis- stealing or appropriating “secrets� from senior deities -such as Ra-. 99 Il Tirreno, August 28, 2014.
70
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The platinum offer entitles one to euro 470 in free fuel paying only euro 299. As soon as Mastercard presses charges, critics set the internet ablaze with warnings: a new swindle is possibly in progress. Bank Of Fuel mysteriously stops enrolling applicants, and declares to be out of stock: synchronicity, indeed.
How exactly could Bank Of Fuel afford to bestow such unparalleled boons upon applicants? The hopeful soon to be swindled cannot be bothered with such trifle. The savior-god promises eternal life; the politician prospects huge subsidies and tax cuts; Bank Of Fuel offers about 40% off the price of fuel at any gas station nationwide: one and the same.
In September 2014, two people are reportedly investigated for fraud and copyright infringement relative to the Bank Of Fuel affair. The website is suspended by judicial order: the new 'opportunity' reportedly claimed over 100 victims.
Hopeful fur ranchers introduced South American rodent nutria to Italy in the late 1970s-early 1980s through rogue MLM networks. Oblivious to the ecological disasters the animal had wrought on waterways in other countries, legions of hopefuls strapped for cash started breeding what they thought would be a new cash cow yielding fabulous profits.
Everybody would soon be wearing nutria furs, already popular among jet-setters; and everybody would soon relish nutria meat, already a favorite in South
71
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
America, or so the (unverified) story went. Again, how exactly could that come to be was trifle the hopeful fur rancher couldn't be bothered with. The MLM people promised it after all: everybody would start raking in profits like hay very soon after an initial investment (=immediate compliance&deferred boon shtick).
When the umpteenth fast cash scheme soon collapsed, distraught hopefuls the MLM scheme had deserted after the swindle released animals into the wilderness, thus starting an ecological catastrophe ongoing to this day: animal rights activists oppose the drastic eradication of the noxious mammal.
One might as well mention leprechauns who -when opportunely charmed- will surrender their pot of gold that lies at the end of the rainbow...one and the same. Immemorial lore had already appropriated the concept of a fool's gold mixed with blurry colonial exoticism in the Italian rhyme: sono diventato ricco
grazie all'oro del Giappone che da noi si chiama ottone : I have become wealthy thanks to Japanese gold, which we call brass.
Fantasies of hefty windfalls can be coupled with any other obtuse allegory or petrified mythology. When wrestler AndrĂŠ The Giant put his career on the line (1985) in a match with Big John Studd, Studd allegedly put fifteen thousand dollars in cash on the line. When Andre defeated Studd, he was awarded the bag of cash; he opened it and started throwing money at the public, just after risking his career (=his death as a wrestler). The same scene would be replayed time later 72
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
(1990), as wrestler Jack The Snake distributed to the public money an unconscious Million Dollar Man had lost on the canvas.
That's what voters expect after nearly every election: drastic tax cuts, fabulous subsidies and/or investments. Even the most discredited mountebank can put up a facade, and have people believe all sorts of improbable absurdities by triggering human mind's vortexes, such as the omnipotent patriarch imagery, who can promise all he wants, and make it happen.
Roberto100 rhapsodizes about leaders with grand visions tagged -just like another product for sale- to memorable slogans. Of course, even Amin, Bokassa, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh and so forth had grand visions earmarked with momentous slogans.
Nobody bothers inquiring how or where does Santa Claus get all the things we beg him in order to obtain. All people know is there is a (semi)omnipotent, immortal, all-knowing father-god figure with a flowing beard who can fly, whose job is to make one's wishes come true by delivering gifts to good children as he frolics around with a retinue of supernatural creatures. The rest is as unimportant as the source of funding that ought to allow this politician to afford drastic tax cuts alongside huge investments and subsidies.
1002011:Phases Of Transformation.
73
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Is this imagery so much different from the myth of the German messiah who ought to have rescued Germans from rampant hyperinflation and economic collapse after WWI? Windfalls can take the form of restored/reworked quintessential covenants, either mostly political (Douglas MacArthur pledged to restore western mass-democracy; Fascists hoped to restore patriotic values...), or merely quantitative in nature.
A legend says the god Pan approached Pheidippides before the crucial battle of Marathon (490 BCE): Pan wanted to be honored at Athens. Awed Pheidippides pledged to him about future worship, and Pan in exchange (=covenant=deference&demeanor shtick) terrorized (=panic fear) the invading Persians so that Athens could win the battle (=unexpected windfall): Pan was thenceforth honored in Athens.
Melanesian cargo religions posit the advent of a U.S soldier-messiah who -like the German one- ought to herald traditional values (=the routinely re-worked eternal covenant), and bring about the docking of cargoes packed with goods to delight oppressed or dispossessed Melanesians; this may easily mesh with WWII or hero motifs.
If most savior-heroes posited as grantors of their redeeming role this almighty, or that spirit, John Frum's grantor is the almighty U.S government:
74
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.” The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. -...- I remind him that not only does he not have an outboard motor from America, but that all the devotees’ other prayers have been, so far, in vain. “John promised you much cargo more than 60 years ago, and none has come,” I point out. “So why do you keep faith with him? Why do you still believe in him?” Chief Isaac shoots me an amused look. “You Christians have been waiting 2,000 years for Jesus to return to earth,” he says, “and you haven’t given up hope.” (Raffaele 2006: no page). Belief in Christ is no more or less rational than belief in John Frum, and it is worthwhile remembering that Christianity emerged as an anti - colonial movement with strong elements of rebellion , heresy , millenarism and charismatic devotion to a phrophetic Saviour (Worsley, cit. in Bohane 2007:11). Just as Melanesians -or Germans after WWI- were oppressed, subjected to shortages (the blockade of Germany during WWI lasted for eight months after the armistice in order to exert political pressure to accept the harsh peace treaties), and/or dispossessed, so is/was the toiling community.
That's why the 'scientific' doctrine of Marxism posited the messianic 75
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
advent of a belligerent vanguard that would usher in times of reversed social roles, oneness and oversupply:�absurd Marxian idea, which is simply the old testament in secularized form with also a kind of scholastic notion that there was a revealed book, namely Das Kapital�101. In Marxist lore -or what for decades was considered the pinnacle of political science and economy-, a paradise of the working class was finally located here on Earth: the Soviet Union.
Oneness -as any other such images that obsess the human mind- can be put to any use with equally good results. Italian supermarket chain COOP (cooperative companies the Communist party controlled by proxy) introduced a slogan that resulted in a marketing success: la COOP sei tu (COOP it's you).
COOP thus resurrected the old polemic against thieving middlemen that impose extortionate mark-ups on the exploited final consumer. Friendly tovarishi, not greedy bourgeois, operated jumbo corporation COOP meekly passing the best deals onto the final consumer, or so the story went: the same ideology lurked behind peasant revolts in Germany in the XVI century.
The sky is the limit when the horn of oneness is tooted. Drout elatedly exalts M.L. King's speeches, which -Drout claims- “might sound like a cliche now, but 101Campbell 1968a. The present writer needs to add that Marxism is no more -and no less- absurd than all other petrified myth(ologie)s that present the same salad bar of abstruse allegories. The present writer concurs in Campbell's statement (1968c) as he identifies Marxism as the other great religion coming from Levantine sources. Campbell goes on to identify the main themes: endorsement of the world (Hinduism); renouncing the world (Buddhism); reforming the world to bring it in line with one's pre-set assumptions (Marxism, and -the present writer adds- Christianity).
76
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
when King used it -...- it didn't work as a cliche at all -...- you realize it worked very, very effectively to -...- bind people together”102:
Since black and white, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics are usually considered opposites, King’s usage in this case further develops his idea of all people. He is not just saying the word “all”; he is illustrating it. (Drout 2006:50). People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive extnote, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about, and that's what these clues help us to find within ourselves. (Campbell&Moyers 1991:12). many psychopaths come across as having excellent oral communication skills. -...- They make use of the fact that for many people the content of the message is less important than the way it is delivered. A confident, aggressive delivery style—often larded with jargon, clichés, and flowery phrases—makes up for the lack of substance and sincerity in their interactions with others. (Babiak&Hare 2006:37-8). Again, it is out of either intellectual dishonesty on political grounds, or commodious bad faith that people can point fingers exclusively at Hitler rallying the German pack as one against Jewry; Amin rallying the various African ethnicities as one against Asian-Ugandans; the Khmer Rouge, Jacobins or Bolsheviks rallying a diverse horde of resentful minorities, adolescents and have-nots as one against an equally diverse lot of presumed royalists, religionists, bourgeois, hoarders, and reactionaries. 1022006: Figures Of Speech I. e xtnote Buddhism rephrases this concept as the compulsion to be happy. Baudrillard reframes the impulse as the need for hyperaesthesia (note of this writer).
77
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Newberg's103 examination of neuro-theology brings to light different kinds of powerful spiritual experience in traditional religious settings; as a result of taking mind-altering substances; as a result of trauma. Most of these experiences have a recaptured oneness of bliss at their core. Oneness with (a) god for the believer; oneness with the universe or sentient beings for others.
Varma magisterially captures this dynamics:
So in the first case [ western paradigm] you are consolidating a part of your identity which gives you a sense of being separate but at the same time of being effective through that separation [through achieving mastery over the world outside]. The second movement [oriental paradigm] is a movement where you merge with something larger of which you are a part and though the word ‘surrender’ is used, actually it leads to empowerment. When you merge with something which is much larger than you then you have a higher access to energies and forces which are part of that larger self or that larger whole. (MAISI032 no date: unit 1:9) Fantasy and imagination is a product of the body. The energies that bring forth the fantasies derive from the organs of the body. The organs of the body are the source of our life, and of our intentions for life, and they conflict with each other. Among these organs, of course, is the brain. And then you must think of the various impulses that dominate our life system—the erotic impulse; the impulse to conquer, conquest and all that; self preservation; and then certain thoughts that have to do with ideals and things that are held up before us as aims worth living for and giving life its value and so forth. All of these different forces come into conflict within us. And the function of mythological imagery is to harmonize them, coordinate the energies of our body, so that we will live a harmonious and fruitful life in accord with our society (Campbell no date-1: no page). Freud the 'customs official' and Jung the crusading Knight, highlight 1032012.
78
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
two contrasting approaches to image. On the one hand suspicion about what the images are concealing, on the other, exploration of where the images might lead. Although both point beyond image, it is in different directions, Freud to biology and explanations, Jung to spirit and 'the Quest'. (Angelo 1992:89). The same stale cliches, obtuse allegories and miserable mythologies are at work on whichever segment of the political spectrum one might choose, with all that ensues. The wonderful human mind never stops minting three-dollar bills.
Alas, time already passed its verdict on the French monarchy and its fabulous but elusive treasures. What are those ideas, exactly, if not age-old trickster tales under official letterheads? The archetypal trickster of folklore -in fact- is famous for his bottomless appetites and resources.
People who convince themselves they are successful tricksters are mostly self-important frauds:
Here is the logic: if you are aware that you used the answer key in the previous test to artificially inflate your score, you would predict that you would correctly solve the same proportion of questions as you solved unassisted in the first test (four out of eight, or around 50 percent). But let’s say you started believing that you really did answer six questions correctly on your own and not because you looked at the answers. Now you might predict that in this next test, too, you would correctly solve a much larger percentage of the questions (closer to 75 percent). In truth, of course, you can solve only about half of the questions correctly, but your self-deception may puff you up, crablike, and increase your confidence in your ability. The results showed that participants experienced the latter sort of self-puffery. The predictions of how well they would perform on the second phase of the test showed that participants not only used the answer key in the first phase to exaggerate their 79
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
score, but had very quickly convinced themselves that they truly earned that score. Basically, those who had a chance to check their answers in the first phase (and cheated) started believing that their exaggerated performance was a reflection of their true skill. -...-Even with a financial incentive to be accurate, they still tended to take full credit for their scores and overestimate their abilities. Despite having a strong motivation to be accurate, self-deception ruled the day. (Ariely 2012:74). Tricksters in the myth got the biggest penis of all, they managed to capture the biggest fish of all or to jump farthest than all...Greek tragedy follows with its never-ending gallery of superlatives, both good and bad: excess and largeness are what matters essentially, irrespective of moral or material scales. Professor of management Roberto quips that the same tactics (=”power and politics”) can be indifferently used for good or bad ends 104. Newberg describes105 rituals based upon myths as a “morally neutral technology” to attain oneness within the group.
Archetypal tricksters are ubiquitous in myth(ologie)s:
Divine deceit raises problematic theological questions. J. J. M. Roberts of Princeton Theological Seminary published an article entitled “Does God Lie?” (1988). His conclusion was: sometimes, yes. Following that lead, Nancy Bowen, a graduate student at that seminary completed a dissertation entitled “The Role of YHWH as Deceiver in True and False Prophecy (Old Testament)” (1994). She showed that Near Eastern texts from antiquity recognized the un-trustworthiness of the godsextnote in divine-human communication. The ancients realized that prophecy and divination were not always reliable. Bowen explicitly drew upon analyses of the trickster, and the abstract of her dissertation states that those ancient writings “share a view that 1042011:Power. 105 2012:The Brain And Religious Rituals. e xtnote Apollo, the Greek god of prophecy was hailed as “oblique” because of his garbled oracles lending themselves to multiple interpretations (note of this writer).
80
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
YHWH acts as deceiver in a time of social and historical transition and that YHWH’s deception serves as a means to disrupt the present social situation in order to bring about a transformation of the social order.” (Hansen 2001:30). Now, that trickster trait turns up in deities like Yahweh. Yahweh's a trickster. He lets people build a building, and then because it gets to be three stories high and he's afraid it's going to wreck heaven, he comes down and floods the world. That's a trickster stunt. That's a ridiculous act. We think it quite normal for a deity, while if a human being behaved that way we'd send him to a lunatic asylum. The trickster represents the deity coming through as the destroyer, the disrupter of programs. Yahweh is full of this kind of thing. (Campbell&Boa 1989:89). Psychopaths are notorious for not answering the question posed them or for answering in a way that seems unresponsive to the question. (Hare 1993:139) Moses talked to God “mouth to mouth” while Jesus claimed to be the son of God—testimonies that nowadays would certainly result in psychiatric admission. (Polimeni 2012:183). God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill? (Numbers 23:19). O daughter of Babylon -...-Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks! (Psalm 137:8-9). Subaltern countries simply restyle their predictably deferential policies as 'magisterial trade-offs': they serve the best of all causes, and the great godfatherally shall grant hefty contracts, a 'percentage of the spoils', 'cheap oil', or something to that effect.
Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia...all lands
81
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
of plenty, whose reconstruction would get 'the good guys' rich -to both a spiritual and worldly extent-, as the godfather-ally is going to divide the spoils -as a new Agamemnon- among his retinue.
In March 2014106 following political turmoil in the Former Soviet Union, Obama -in very ambiguous terms- pledged U.S intervention to counter European dependency from Russian gas supplies. What some media present as the valiant godfather-ally supplying subaltern countries with more or less cheap gas is in reality just a footnote in the broader scheme of the usual jumbo economic agreement possibly to be underwritten in a more or less distant future.
Former Italian Prime Ministers Berlusconi (right-wing) and D'Alema (former Communist party), Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping (in 1979), Napoleon before his desperate Italian campaign, and recruiters soliciting Japanese and Italian emigrants to sail towards XIX century Brazil, all urged their followers to “get rich quick� (fazer America in the case of Brazil). Already in 1843 Guizot, a French statesman, had uttered the same words (enrichissez-vous): magic of the mind.
The dejected Italian and Japanese fleeing from the agrarian servitude of their backward countries found in Brazil the hard toil of coffee plantations, where they replaced freed African slaves, and not the Eldorado of eternal spring, where 106Fox Business, March 26, 2014.
82
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
gold dust replaces sand, and diamonds replace cobbles.
Even earlier, Brazil had experienced a frantic gold rush in the XVIII century as huge gold deposits surfaced in the Ouro Preto (black gold) region. In his writings, French litterateur Sade echoes the fabulous wealth of Brazilian gold. So delirious was the gold rush that the Portuguese government had to apply administrative controls -such as mandatory passports- lest Portugal's entire population emigrated to Brazil.
Jesus could be restyled as Che Guevara's doppelgaenger who brooked no inequalities according to liberation theology - originally in Latin America, but also adapted as Black liberation theology or pretres ouvriers (working-class priests) in France-. The line of thought went back to early XIX century and U.S abolitionism, whereby transcendentalist clergymen like Channing explicitly linked Jesus as rabid reformer to abolitionism, and impassioned harangues Antigone-style 107.
The same restyling had already happened in antiquity with the Cynics, another breed of unkempt, bearded reformers of customs: did Cynics condone (and/or practice) temple theft108? Jesus -like Buddha, Pisacane, M.L. King, Castro, Khomeini, Zoroaster, Mujica, Chavez, Darwin, Marx and so many others- is but “a
107As this writing contends, however, such impassioned pleas, petrified images and sentimental chicanery can swiftly lend themselves to any and all political (per)versions. It is not far fetched to imagine the various Zundel, Strugnell, McGowan, MacDonald, Richwine, Zemmour,Faurisson, Churchill etc holding the same position. 108An extreme form of sacrilege in the ancient world that attracted the gods' wrath. Temples were used as treasuries, and stored politically supercharged donations and objects.
83
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Rorschach test of ever changing sensibilities” (to paraphrase Prothero).
Jesus could as well be restyled as harbinger of financial affluence and prosperity (prosperity theology) renewing with a tradition of intermingling Protestantism and capitalism – as Weber famously outlined in 1904-. The Center
For Spiritual Awareness (Sacramento, USA) offers prosperity theology courses, and a surefire way to “dissolve one's debts” by pledging donations to the Center for US$ 495.
Prosperity theology represents a Christian re-working of so-called XIX century New Thought (Quimby and others): a primordial soup of transcendentalism, theosophy, Freemasonry, mesmerism etc that saw the mind (=attitudes etc) as the root cause of man's misfortunes and ills. Because over time mesmerism lost most of its thrust as healing method due to the rise of modern allopathic medicine, mind magic was redirected towards making one rich.
The present writer suggests that had already happened with the Cathars, Albigensians and so forth (XII-XIV century) extending from southern France to Northern Italy and Catalonia well before Weber's Protestantism. Although Cathars (=pure ones) preached frugality and asceticism, they were also welcoming towards the region's mercantile and wealthy milieus, whereas the dominant Catholic Church still stigmatized wealth.
Occitan nobility protected the Cathars from
Catholic persecution to the point the Pope launched a crusade against Southern 84
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
France:
I have a funny thought about the Jewish-Christian tradition. It all has to do with sin and atonement, with debt and payment. This is merchant stuff. When St. Paul preached to the Athenians they laughed at him, but when he went to Corinth, which was a merchant community, he could establish a church-the Epistle to the Corinthians. Now, I see Judaism and Christianity as translations of the universal mythology into the vocabulary of merchants. It all has to do with sin and atonement, debt and payment, and the very word redemption has to do with redeeming pawn from a pawnbroker. St. Gregory brought this up. Satan got man in his keep by deceiving him in the Garden of Eden and God, to get man out of the devil's keep, offered his son as redemption. Now, this is good basic Christianity. That's one way of reading the crucifixion. Why did Christ have to die on the cross? What's that got to do with anything? Well, one reading is that Christ is offered to the devil in redemption for the pawn that the devil had in his keep of man. The other is the atonement idea that God was so angry at this sin he could not be atoned. Man wasn't capable of atoning because man wasn't of a value comparable to that of the offence and so God Himself becomes man to rescue man. These two ideas, redemption and atonement, have to do with payment, and this is a merchant's reading of the great myths . Fantastic! All you have to do is read it back. This doesn't mean the merchant reading is wrong. It says simply that it's only one way of inflecting the myth (Campbell&Boa 1989:102-3). Buddhism followed a similar path 109 that -according to the present writer- shall be seen not as a form of superiority or insight on the part of any religion or sect, but as mere expediency to take root and make converts in a particular socio-political configuration. Catharism didn't exert the historical 109“The rational qualities of Buddhism matched the needs of such people. In addition, when merchants traveled to foreign countries, they had to be able to associate freely with peoples of different nationalities and social classes.The strict caste system of Hinduism made it an inappropriate religion for such merchants. (Farmers, in contrast, were strongly tied to Hinduism.) Since Buddhism did not recognize the caste system, it was especially attractive to merchants.� (Hirakawa 1990:107).
85
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
influence Protestantism did only because the socio-political conjuncture was unfavorable: Cathars and their protectors among ruling elites were wiped out as the Kingdom of France reached southwards.
Even Communist Maoism in China during the hectic years of the civil war at times temporarily co-opted the middle classes (non-ruling elites) in its fight against ruling elites, only to routinely rouse the rabble against those very middleclass collaborators. According to accounts, Maoism repeated this exploit in Tibet, first co-opting non-ruling elites against Tibetan theocracy, then sending such new elites to the dock as another class of greedy hoarders and exploitative bourgeois Communism needed to do away with.
The new prosperity covenant -coming to the fore in the U.S since the 1950s- shall shower with bounty those who keep faith, a positive attitude and -most important- consistently donate to such Christian ministries. Much as the Bible offers passages that (seem to) support Jesus' role as another Fidel Castro figure -such as
Luke 1:49ss; Mark 19:16ss; John 2:14ss; Matthew 25:31ss; Leviticus 25:35ss etc-, so the holy book offers passages that (seem to) support prosperity theology, namely 2
Corinthians (8:9), John (14:13-14), Mark (10:30), Malachi (3:10), Deuteronomy (8:18) etc.
As of late, arguments have been made to grant Jesus would support the U.S Tea Party movement opposed to oppressive big government and taxes: 86
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
That Robinson Crusoe never was says nothing about whether capitalism can be overthrown. Similarly the mere representation of werewolves is not a political act, nor even a cultural/political act. Reading fictions about creatures that do not accord with a culture’s conception of what there is does not challenge the cognitive status quo, and, most assuredly, it does not challenge the status quo. One may describe the creatures of horror and fantasy as subverting cultural categories in the sense of not fitting them; but to regard this sense of subversion as politically significant is a species of equivocation. (Carroll 1990:178). Excess and overabundance are not confined to age-old folklore, and online confidence trickery. The more or less apparent similarities between natural landscapes and food items (for example, the Moon as possibly made of cheese) have been human psyche's long-time favorites.
Jain mythology tells of a circular return of a golden age when waters would turn to wine, soil to sugar, and magic trees would yield superlative bounties of all sorts. Fourier (1772-1837) -the eccentric and influential French Utopian Socialist- foretold of a future golden age reform shall bring about in which the oceans would turn to lemonade; Orietta Berti's Italian folkloric song Polenta E
Baccalà (1972) wished “mountains were polenta110 and seas were gravy, what a tasty meal”. In Vietnam, a legend explains that in a time before time, heaven routinely delivered a hefty supply of rice to every doorstep: due to an oversight, people were forced to grow and harvest rice.
Beside mountains made of polenta, and oceans of lemonade, there is the 110 Northern Italian dish consisting in a thick porridge of maize or other kind of flour.
87
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
ever present sexual satiety item. How many virgins, celestial nymphs or otherwise shall be granted to each faithful undergoing the supreme sacrifice? Countless. The proof often is in the pudding, that is the fabulous number of offspring more or less legendary patriarchs, hero-founders, millionaires and their ilk sired: “You made their children as numerous as the stars in the sky ”111.
16 million men are likely to be the genetic descendents of Genghis Khan112; mythological Hindu King Sagar had 60.000 sons; to punish sages who underwent ascetic practices with no love of god, Shiva seduced their wives, thus generating 48.000 sons born without pain (=virgin/prodigious birth mytheme); Louis XIV of France had so many illegitimate children a crisis in the hierarchical system of nobility was opened. Central-African dictator Bokassa (1966-79) also sired dozens of children.
Mormon Prophet Smith, and other early Mormon leaders, married dozens of women, and sired dozens of children. The sons Hercules begot on the 50 virgin daughters of King Thespius were so many they colonized Sardinia under Iolaus (son of Hercules' step-brother) in mythological times. A mental patient confided in the analyst how he had “slept with 15 million women.”113.
Genesis (24:60) contains the blessings upon Rebekah that her 111Nehemiah 9:23. 112 Wade 2003: no page. 113Polimeni 2012:198.
88
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
descendents may increase:
“to thousands upon thousands; ” (New International Version).
“many millions! ” (New Living Translation).
“thousands of ten thousands, ” (English Standard Version).
“thousands of millions, ” (King James Bible).
“tens of millions! ” (International Standard Version).
“thousands of myriads, ” (Young's Literal Translation).
Mormonism begs to agree:
Celestial marriage would ensure Mormon exaltation; a plurality of wives, and their many children born on earth and in heaven, would increase the familial kingdom and thus elevate the Mormon patriarch to higher and higher degrees of glory. The prophet Abraham had "received promises concerning his seed and of the fruit of his loins," promises of eternal expansion: "both in and out of this world should they continue as innumerable as the stars; or if ye were to count the sand upon the seashore ye could not number them." All those who sought a "fulness" of glory were ordered to go and "do the works of Abraham." Their many wives and children would "multiply and replenish the earth," fulfill the divine promise made "before the foundation of the world," and ensure "their exaltation in the eternal worlds." In Utah in the 1850s celestial marriage would be identified with plural marriage, only to be separated again after the Manifesto setting aside polygamy in 1890. (Brooke 1994:255).
89
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Popular culture couldn't be far behind. An Italian ad on air in July 2014 presents a matronly old lady. She doesn't know how many grandchildren she might exactly have...28...30...a pitch to sell cheap phone calling plans. Today's welfare States might present an highly inhomogeneous citizenry as a result of internal and international migrations. The ongoing cycles of societal disintegration, divorce and remarriage may give birth to what some term “vertical polygamy” 114. The item of myriads of descendants still ensorcells the frazzled masses of today's diverse societies.
In Acadia (French-speaking portion of the Canadian province of New Brunswick), XIX century Francophone leadership hailed “la revanche des berceaux” (the cradle's revenge), whereby high birthrates among Francophones could be a boon to foster future political goals Francophone lobbies would score against the English-speaking majority. Paxsons informs:”[some] states have presented women with awards for the patriotic duty of producing very large families — Mothers of the Nation— in Israel, awards to “Heroine Mothers” (10 kids) was stopped after it
114 MacNeill writes “Beginning in 1990 and ending in 1995, I performed a pilot study into the dimensions of vertical polygamy in the United States. Data collected were almost entirely derived from questionnaire and interview results. Subjects were chosen using random sampling techniques. Unfortunately, difficulties in collecting data meant that the sample size was insufficient to draw conclusions applicable to the United States population as a whole. However, the correlations were sufficiently strong to suggest the following -...Reproductive rates of females and males approximate those of polygamous Mormons in nineteenth-century Utah, although with lower overall numbers of offspring. • The degree of reproductive asymmetry (“skew”) is greater among twentieth-century Americans than among nineteenth-century Mormons.This is paradoxically because people have fewer children now than in the nineteenth century.Therefore, every child represents a larger percentage of the total today than in the nineteenth century. -...- These mating patterns are correlated with the disintegration of the nuclear family, the relative impoverishment of women (compared with men), and increased social pathology (especially in urban areas).” (2010:77-8).
90
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
became clear that Arab women were winning most of the awards ”115.
Priyadarshana116 tells that “Sinhala [Sri Lankan] women fear barrenness most -...-. As a result of performing kalukumāra baliya, the victim, (barren woman) is concerned by the society as a patient affected by [demon] kalukumāra. And on the other and kalukumāra is to be blamed here for the victim’s barrenness.”.
The obsession with the begetting of children, hence marriage, is omnipresent. In Japan, distraught parents bring to shrines dolls attired in a matrimonial scene to memorialize younger relatives who died unmarried. Earlier still, a statue celebrating ” the unmarried Phrasikleia [who] must have died very young, [whose] situation bore special comparison with that of Persephone, and the grief of her bereaved parents to that of Demeter ”117.
Readers may contrast the forgotten pain of obscure Bronze Age
Parents who placed a wedding lourrophoros on the tomb of a child who died before marriage -...- trying to make the child's cut-off life more complete and happy, affirming that the regular stages of maturity and marriage had been at least potential in his interrupted career (Vermeule 1979:55). with the megalomania of a grandstanding princeps : “ Within four months [Nero's] baby died-...-: the baby girl became the Goddess Claudia, diva Claudia,
1152006:Nationalism, Reproductive Politics and Gender. 116 ME6210:chapter 6:5-7. 117 Phrasikleia's statue is dated at around 550 BCE. Wood in Textual Sources 2010:284ss.
91
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
with a temple and a priest ”118.
Khmer warriors, Muslim crusaders or suicide bombers, all look(ed) forward to sexual surfeit. Islamic commentaries describe at great length paradise's sensual delight to be enjoyed thanks to “penises that never soften” servicing “appetizing vaginae”. Spiritual accomplishment and tabloid reports about profligate celebrities could never look more alike. Islamic celestial nymphs are even more wonderful as urinating, defecating, menstruating and having children is not part of their nature.
Researchers deliver a darker picture when they analyze the impact having children has on one's life:
But the warnings for prospective parents are even more stark than ‘it’s not going to make you happier’. Using data sets from Europe and America, numerous scholars have found some evidence that, on aggregate, parents often report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness -...-. Why do we have such a rosy view about parenthood? One possible explanation for this, according to Daniel Gilbert (2006), is that the belief that ‘children bring happiness’ transmits itself much more successfully from generation to generation than the belief that ‘children bring misery’. The phenomenon, which Gilbert says is a ‘super-replicator’, can be explained further by the fact that people who believe that there is no joy in parenthood – and who thus stop having them – are unlikely to be able to pass on their belief much further beyond their own generation. It is a little bit like Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. Only the belief that has the best chance of transmission – even if it is a faulty one – will be passed on. -...-To imagine what it might be like to be a mother or a father to our 118 Champlin in Textual Sources 2010:154.
92
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
children is not much different to imagining what it might be like to live in California. We are likely to focus more of our attention on the good things about being a parent and less so on the bad things about being a parent, perhaps because of the belief that children bring happiness. (Powdthavee 2009:no page). Even Gautama Buddha ( Nanda Sutta) promises -as a teaching detour- to his half-brother Nanda:
"What do you think, Nanda, who is more beautiful, more fair to behold, and more alluring — that Sakyan girl, the loveliest in the land, or these five hundred pink-footed nymphs?"."Revered sir, compared to these five hundred pink-footed nymphs, that Sakyan girl, the loveliest in the land, is like a mutilated she-monkey that has had its ears and nose chopped off. She does not count; she is not worth a fraction compared to them; there is no comparison. These five hundred nymphs are far more beautiful, more fair to behold, and more alluring."."Rejoice, Nanda, rejoice, Nanda! I guarantee that you will obtain five hundred pink-footed nymphs."."If, revered sir, the Lord guarantees that I will obtain five hundred pink-footed nymphs, I shall be content in living the holy life under the Lord." -...- Then the Venerable Nanda was humiliated, ashamed, and dismayed by his friends calling him "hireling" and "menial." Living alone, secluded, diligent, ardent, and resolute, he soon realized even here and now through his own direct knowledge that unequalled goal of the holy life for the sake of which sons of good family rightly go forth from home to the homeless state, and entering into it he abode in it. And he knew: "Finished is birth, lived is the holy life, done is what had to be done, there is no more of this state." And the Venerable Nanda became one of the arahatsextnote. Just to show what the lore is all about, senior Buddhist monastic in the Tibetan tradition G. Churinoff tells the same story with Rahula (the Buddha's son) as main character instead of Nanda. The storyline is also different in Churinoff's rendition (beautiful goddesses anticipate Rahula's rebirth in heaven, a narrative unit extnote Arahat (=estinguished one): A person of superior spiritual accomplishment -though lower than that of a Buddha- and free from the cycle of rebirth. (note of this writer).
93
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
also present in other Buddhist stories); and so is the punchline (the goddesses grieve because if Rahula doesn't practice Buddhism, he might not be reborn in heaven to meet them).
The lore, then, represents a “pictorial representation of psychic processes”, and not the forensic account of what happened to someone somewhere: a person and a place over which scribes are in sharp disagreement in spite of professed eye-witness reports:” Mythology is basically pictorial: it's visions; and the language is to elucidate the pictures, or to communicate a story of pictorial transformations”119.
Modern surveys and statistics about married couples typically show that a very significant percentage of people of either sex -and for different reasons that do not change the outcome- experience issues -whether physical, psychological or both- that impair or make sexual intercourse impossible.
As the Kinsey institute cautions, “having sex” may mean different things to different people who -all- answer positively to questionnaires about frequency of sexual intercourse: 45% people the Kinsey institute interviewed saw manual-genital stimulation as “having sex”. As usual, snapshots from real life are infinitely less glamorous than the self-aggrandizing (unrealistic and fraudulent) portraits people paint of themselves as their overexcited minds punch at human psyche's ghosts. 119 Campbell&Toms 1988:volume 1.
94
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Many deities and hero-saviors deal with one breed of cattle or another as their favorite to guard, herd, steal, tend to etc. Romulus and Remus are associated with a pecker and a she-wolf; Zeus with the goat Amaltheia that -just like Romulus and Remus- nursed him. Cattle raiding may co-exist with -or be replaced by- the abduction, rape or conquest of women on equal footing.
Campbell120 calls this the recurring “theft motif� (fire theft, bride theft, boon theft...): he concludes how ultimate reconciliation is not present in this motif. On the contrary, adverse powers shall wage battle against the thieving hero (=unresolved psychological complexes): Prometheus is chained to a rock; Romulus and Remus are hunted down; Sabin men attack Rome and so forth:
Shamans sometimes served as spirit mediums contacting the other world. They crossed the boundary between life and death (a binary opposition), and shamans were often seen as tricksters. Priests mediated between God and man; they were required to undergo purification rituals. Funerary rites assured that the dead moved to the next world and did not stay to haunt the living. The life-death distinction needed to be strengthened. Crossing from one status to the other (e.g., child to adult, living to dead) required rituals for purification and protection. The middle area goes by several labels: liminality, interstitiality, transitional space, betwixt and between, anti-structure. These are dangerous positions, situations, and statuses. They break down categories, classifications, and boundaries. Violation of the boundaries was taboo and brought the wrath of the gods. There was a price to be paid. Yet during some liminal periods, taboos were deliberately violated in order to obtain magical power. (Hansen 2001:21). This suggests that images are needed to give awareness of boundaries. 120 1968a.
95
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
(Angelo 1992:119). Special cattle belonged to the Sun 121; Hercules acted as migrating shepherd after stealing Geryon's cattle; cows are sacred to Krishna, etc. Cattle rustling is part of either rites of passage, and/or of the deeds of mythical herofounders in various myth(ologie)s122:
the cattle- raiding theme is known among all people who keep cattle, appearing in such versions as the struggle of Nuer and Dinka, Masai and Kikuyu, or David's raids while living among the Philistines. -...Given this enormous importance of cattle within the socio- economic order, it comes as no surprise that the Indo-Europeans were always interested in preserving the cattle they had and in procuring more. Their prayers are filled with requests for cattle” (Lincoln 1976:44,63). Usha herself is the Truth, sunrita, and the mother of Truths. These truths of the divine Dawn are called her cows, her shining herds; while the forces of the Truth that accompany them and occupy the Life are called her horses. Around this symbol of the cows and horses much of the Vedic symbolism turns; for these are the chief elements of the riches sought by man from the gods. The cows of the Dawn have been stolen and concealed by the demons, the lords of darkness in their nether cave of the secret subconscient. (Yatsenko, MAISI002 no date:lecture 4:2). The whole of Earth, a good cow, became impregnated with Heaven’s fine semen (Sumerian Debate literature, III millennium BCE). The seated yogi among the beasts wears on his head a curious headdress with a high crown and two immense horns, which, as Heinrich Zimmer has pointed out, resembles to a striking degree one of the most prominent symbols of early Buddhist art, the sign of the 121 Ulysses' men slaughter cattle belonging to the Sun, thus attracting divine retribution ( Odyssey XII:338ss). The imagery goes back to Hindu Vedas at the dawn of civilization, and well before Homer:”This Seer-Will becomes the guardian of the illuminations of knowledge—herds of the Sun that graze in the pastures of life secure from the Sons of division and darkness, protected by the warrior force of the Will that knows.” (Yatsenko, MAISI003 no date: lecture note 2:4). 122 Meineck 2005-1:Greek Myths And The Romans.
96
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
so-called "Three Jewels" (symbolizing the Buddha, the doctrine, and the order of the Buddha's followers), which is in the form of a kind of trident. The Hindu god Shiva [also accompanied by the snake and the bull (nether world symbols)] carries a trident also (Campbell 1960:436). Animals 'are like images', because 'they just show themselves', and 'don't have to tell stories' (ie have biographies). This spontaneity makes them an image of beings who have achieved that direct imagining which I earlier identified as im-mediate perception. 'Animal' is a favourite word for several reasons, partly I think because animals-as-images seem to provide the powerful, instinctual animus energy and vitality which 'animates' the anima without dwelling on those human, masculine virtues which would be in danger of reinstating the heroic ego. 'Animal' is also the basis of animism, which Hillman identifies as the heart of that 'esse in anima' which means living in the world via the soul, and sensing the soul in the world (Angelo 1992:173). Bulls ( also lunar symbols123 of death and resurrection) equally symbolize virility. Egyptian monkey god Babi (=bull of the baboons) is associated both with the nether world, and with bottomless virility and ferocity. Each deity of AfroCaribbean Santeria is associated with an animal to be offered in sacrifice. In Zoroastrianism, the ox-soul is the soul of the original bull from which all other animals came, and to which their essence shall return in the end.
Ancient people “danced with bulls� at Crete in the Bronze Age (bullleaping); vestiges survive in today's Spain ( recortadores) and France (course
landaise; course camarguaise). In Portugal, bull-fighters (forcados) grapple with 123 Campbell (1989:episode And We Washed Our Weapons In The Sea ) discusses the Catal Huyuk Turkish archeological site (about 7.000 BCE) and the presence of 'mother goddess' figures in various postures, even giving birth to bull-headed figures to mean rebirth in a lunar cosmology (the horns of the Moon; the Moon's cyclical rebirth, etc).
97
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
bulls charging against them (pega): the bull is held by the horns ( pega de cara) and subdued. At Rosais in the Portuguese Azores, tourada Ă corda takes place during festivities for Nossa Senhora Do Rosario (Our Lady Of The Rosary). Villagers spar with bulls, whose horns have been made inoffensive, and that might be held back with a rope (corda) if they tried to exit the tourada (bullfight) precinct (=sacred space mytheme):
The bullfighter is wearing a brilliant shining garment and represents the solar power while the bull, of course, represents the moon power. In the bullfight, the point of danger which leads to the coup de grace is the act of going in over the horns of the bull, which represent the crescent moon. (Campbell&Boa 1989:84). At Potosi (Bolivia), a local corrida requires to fetch a piece of cloth nested between the bull's horns. In Southern India, kambla is the breakneck speed ride of men with buffaloes in muddy waters. Nothing is really new: people run with bulls in Hispanic countries (encierro), and even Southern France. They follow an immemorial tradition of heroes (Hercules, Gilgamesh, Cadmus, Theseus, Jason, Perseus...) wrestling with -or killing- prodigious bulls. Durga also fought prodigious shape-shifting demon Mahisasura, son of a buffalo woman and a king demon124.
In Hindu mythology, the cow is associated with motherly imagery: the primeval twin goddesses of the Vedas (XV-V century BCE), Dawn and Night, are 124 Favorite mythemes adorn this legend, too. Mahishi (the buffalo woman) was abducted. Her husband tried to rescue her but was killed in the process. She threw herself on her husband's pyre while pregnant. The gods (as in the legend of Semele, Zeus and Bacchus) saved the unborn child. From the mystical pyre fire Mahiasura was born.
98
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE compared to motherly cows full of milk;
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5 also, the mystic fire, quintessential
creative principle, is hailed as “The bull of the thousand horns”. Egyptian Pharaohs were also known as being “born from the womb of dawn”125.
At Al'Ubaid (Iraq, about 3.500 BCE), the main temple complex resembles a cow's vagina; sacred cattle associated with a goddess were also present 126. Egyptian goddess Hathor's many forms included a cow's, and Pharaohs were often hailed as “mighty bull”127.
Even heroes, founders and saviors generally perceived as meek and asexual may reveal the usual trickster's characteristics. Fragments that hint at a potentially 'lusty', 'pesky' or 'sexy' Jesus might be what survives of this trickster's rendition of the 'great man' after liturgical sanitation:
Buddhaghosa -...- compares the Buddha’s penis to those of elephants or bulls and says that the sheath looks like the pericarp of a golden lotus.Similarly, the Flower Array Discourse states that the Buddha’s “testicles are well-hidden within a sheath, sunk deeply and fully covered, just like those of a thoroughbred elephant or a thoroughbred stallion.” Even though this is presented as the perfection of a man’s private parts, the text claims that no one—woman, man, boy, girl, elderly person, middle-aged person, or even the lustful or potentially lustful— could possibly conceive thoughts of sexual desire when viewing the Buddha’s genitalia because his past practice of celibacy has produced a body so transcendent that people cannot imagine having sexual intercourse with him (the “out of my league” syndrome). As we will see, however, in other texts women who 125 Cross-referenced in Isaiah 14:9-15:”How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! ”. 126 Campbell (1989:episode And We Washed Our Weapons In The Sea). 127 For example on the limestone wedding scarab of Amenophis III (XIV century BCE).
99
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
see the Buddha are overcome with desire, while others swoon when in his presence. (Powers 2009:13). In the next story Jesus is said to be walking through his village when another child runs up to him and accidentally bumps him on the shoulder. Jesus is irritated and says to the boy, “You’ll go no farther on your way.” And the child falls down dead.-...Joseph takes Jesus back home with instructions to Mary: “Do not let him out the door; for those who anger him die.” (Ehrman 2011:264). A 'lusty' or 'sexy' Jesus is -in some apocryphal narratives- also required -just like it is the norm with all those swashbuckling founders and tormented heroes- to leave descendents behind: Rabbi Jesus.
Hera, Greek Zeus' wife, and image of the mother goddess, was “coweyed”, and associated with the cow; Europa, too, possibly represented a version of goddess associated with the cow. Horns took up all sorts of symbolism, both lunar and solar128. Longhorn Miao (a Chinese ethnicity) women wear wooden horns in their hair to conjure the strength of an ox up. Horns excite human mind's vortexes. 128 Zeus-Ammon is not the only god the horns allude to, for example in the case of deified Alexander. The Sun god (Helios) is another candidate:”As Alexander-Helius he was represented with the corona radiata symbolizing the sun.-...- A parallel to this is furnished by Moses in Exodus XXXIV, 29, 30, 35, Hebrew having the same word for horn and ray. Michelangelo in conceiving his Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli took these horns literally according to the Vulgate of St. Jerome, and reduced them to two, with the loss of their luminosity -...-.In passing we may note that the name Two-horned, by which Alexander was known in later days, is the literal translation of -...-one of the titles of Amen-Ra -...-. The horns of Alexander therefore have had a varied symbolism. They represent him as a god, as a son of a god, as a prophet and propagandist of the Most High, as something approaching the role of a messiah, and also as the champion of Allah. They represent him as a world conqueror, who subjugated the two horns or ends of the world, the lands of the rising and of the setting sun. Also they are represented as something of which he was ashamed and which he sought to conceal, or whose traces he sought to conceal after removal; they appear as variations on angels, or as wings or as locks of hair or as ears, and in one instance the latter mark him as the son of the devil, himself a devil. ” (Anderson 1927:1001,122). The horns as symbol of irresistible royalty were borrowed both by some among Alexander's Hellenistic successors, and Roman Emperors. During Victorian/ Belle Epoque neo-pagan revivals, horned gods were also resurrected: a horned god serves as counterpart to the mother goddess in Wicca, a mid-XX century neo-pagan set of beliefs.
100
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
In Italy, the “gesture of the horns” with a hand constitutes an apotropaic countermeasure against bad luck.
The horn can also constitute “a negative phallus that instead of generating, it kills”129. Everybody's familiar with the stereotypical image of the Viking wearing a horned helmet:
Down [Lascaux caves] there a large bison bull, eviscerated by a spear that has transfixed its anus and emerged through its sexual organ, stands before a prostrate man. The latter (the only crudely drawn figure, and the only human figure in the cave) is rapt in a shaman-istic trance. He wears a bird mask; his phallus, erect, is pointing at the pierced bull; -...- and there is still practiced in Australia a lethal phallic rite of magic known as the "pointing bone," -...- And finally it should be noted that the curious horns of the weird wizard beast in the upper chamber of the great cave, among the wonderful animals of that happy hunting ground, are exactly the same in form as the pointing sticks worn in the manner of horns by the performers in many of the Australian ceremonies of the men's dancing ground (Campbell 1960:300-4). Parallels continue: in ancient Crete, and in our day's U.S Bible belt, people manipulate snakes: the famous Cretan figurine of a priestess; the “celebration of the snakes” (festa dei serpenti) in honor of Christian Saint Domenico di Sora at Cocullo in the Abruzzo region (Italy), a custom going back to pre-Christian and preRoman Marsi; equally, in India offers are presented to living cobras.
Some U.S Christian Pentecostal congregations “handle snakes” as well:
129Campbell 1989:Origins Of Man And Myth.
101
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well. (Mark 16:18)130. The snake is identified with the phallus In many cultures -...-Since the Archaic Period, beginning around 800 B.C., the snake was identified In art and literature with the male hero, a man who bad been elevated to semi-divine status after death. He was worshipped and appeased with offerings by his fellow citizens and their descendants. -...-The explosive, non verbal violence of the poor [U.S] southern rural whites, who work al poor-paying jobs under horrible conditions and tend to be rigidly conservative and opposed to all change -...-. Many turned to an ecstatic branch of Pentecostalism -...- [funded by] George Went Hensley -...-[who in 1909] climbed a mountain in Tennessee, found a big rattlesnake, prayed for “the Power”, and picked up the snake(Rousselle 1984:477-8,482). Miscarriage is also understood in the science of exorcism (bhutaciditā) as a malign act of [demon] kalukumāra. Therefore, Umayaṅgana baliya is called upon here as a treatment [in Sri Lanka]. This event is highly decorated and fascinated with vigorous dance by acrobats with twisting, turning, whirling and somersaulting. The main object of this ritualistic performance here is the figure of a woman and a snake made of clay. Priyadarshana, ME6210 no date:chapter 6:8). 1980 blockbusting movie Flash Gordon sees fictional prince Barin impose a dare on Flash Gordon: he has to slip his hand into a crack where a poisonous beast rests. That's a sacred rite in the fiction, and an equally sacred rite near the Balinese temple of Tanah Lot: people test their luck slipping their hand towards a poisonous snake resting in a crevice. Life Magazine reported in 1940131
130“It is a terrific passage, mysterious, moving, and powerful. It is one of the passages used by Pentecostal Christians to show that Jesus's followers will be able to speak in unknown "tongues," as happens in their own services of worship; and it is the principal passage used by groups of "Appalachian snakehandlers," who till this day take poisonous snakes in their hands in order to demonstrate their faith in the words of Jesus, that when doing so they will come to no harm. But there's one problem. Once again, this passage was not originally in the Gospel of Mark. It was added by a later scribe.” (Ehrman 2005:66). 131March 4:12.
102
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
about a Burmese priestess at Kenzi village luring a 12 foot 132 cobra from its cave in order to kiss it on the head three times (=sacred number) in a fertility ritual, which Joseph Campbell describes as a rain ritual.
Yatsenko explains thus images from Hindu Rig Veda (XV century BCE or older):
We can engage with the divine luminous forces from above, bestowing luminous gifts from heaven and earth and with the forces of the Inconscient, the coiled Python at the bottom of things -...-Invoking the divine powers and the Python from the bottom of the Inconscient was to bring them to the battlefield, within the Soul and the Nature of Man, where the divine powers crush the anti-divine resistence of all kinds (MAISI018 no date:unit 3:5-7). It doesn't really matter which variant of the same obtuse allegory one (group, sect, era, civilization...) embraces. It may be human Adam and Eve in Judaeo-Christianity; semi-human beings like Chinese Fu-Xi and Nuwa; or any other semi-divine hero-founder. Today they just replaced Adam and Eve with mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam: mankind's (purported) forensically determined genetic ancestors.
Today the cradle of the world is no longer mythological China, Judea (or any place ancient mythology designated as sacred), but Africa: the electronic microscope (culture dish, FMRI...) -and not a presumed sage suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy133- (purportedly) demonstrates it. 132Other printed sources refer to the cobra in the same footage as being 15 -not 12- foot long. 133 Newberg (2012:Religion And Brain Dysfunction ) challenges such argument - which he defines a gross
103
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
In today's French RĂŠunion island, genealogy proves to be a hobby of choice. In spite of the island's truly diverse background (Africans, Indians, EastAsians, Europeans immigrated to an once uninhabited island), families love to trace their lineage back in time to common ancestors, and to hold gatherings -just like old Acadian or Scottish clans- that reunite people across all the provinces of the ethnic, religious and skin color spectrum.
This constellation of images may serve as backdrop for fantasies of world government; hippie images of cosmic healing; Buddhist tirades about tears of compassion raining all over while simpletons (=artificial kin members acting as one) reach for their wallet in order to contribute to this, that or another noble cause, emergency relief fund or hallowed charity. Prigs and dolts are also always ready to hurl themselves in the defense of whichever purported frail little creature (foundling etc) might exist in a possible universe: they are 'not the kind of person' to do otherwise.
Reconciliatory hugs and brotherly kisses might be the norm, except when the routine outbursts of war, mass-murder and violence erupt. The frail, little, generalization- along different lines. For example, seizures are a lifelong characteristic, and aren't limited to certain periods. People routinely suffering from seizures have problems functioning normally in everyday life and are not the leaders, captains or rabble rousers religious lore presents to us. Newberg suggests powerful religious experiences might represent a supernormal functioning of the brain. A supercharged brain might then get in tune with the spiritual realm. Newberg's objections shall be registered, but fail to explain how the supercharged brain able to tune in on the spiritual realm relays different -if not antipodal- signals. While similarities are staggering, differences are staggering as well when a powerful religious experience purportedly takes place in a Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and so forth milieu. In other words: is the supercharged brain beaming back a supposed reality from a spiritual realm, or isn't it rather beaming back a jumble of societal factors, biochemical factors, neurological factors, cultural and political factors?
104
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
endearing, diminutive creatures are then clubbed to death, lynched, or frogmarched to the killing field and concentration camp: what a burst of hyperaesthesia (=abnormal increase in sensitivity to sensory stimuli).
Popular 'positive psychologist' Csikszentmihalyi admits:
The Marquis de Sade perfected the infliction of pain into a form of pleasure, and in fact, cruelty is a universal source of enjoyment for people who have not developed more sophisticated skills. Even in societies that are called "civilized" because they try to make life enjoyable without interfering with anyone's wellbeing, people are attracted to violence. Gladiatorial combat amused the Romans, Victorians paid money to see rats being torn up by terriers, Spaniards approach the killing of bulls with reverence, and boxing is a staple of our own culture. Veterans from Vietnam or other wars sometimes speak with nostalgia about front-line action, describing it as a flow experience. (1990:69). Sade's fictional libertines experience hyperaesthesia indeed as they subject frail little creatures to all sorts of horrors and indignities, much as Jacobin, Bolshevik, NSDAP and Khmer Rouge brutes did in real life. Later, prigs and dolts 'couldn't possibly have know'. If proof exist they knew, then "All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!" (John 8:7).
Frenzied bedlamites -whether lone individual or entire countries- all look alike: beautiful souls and murderous psychopaths inhabit the same bodies. At Cosenza (Italy), a 17yo man is arrested134: he strangled his mother, then hurled her
134 La Stampa, May 13, 2015.
105
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
body downstairs to simulate an accident. After the murder, he tatooed on his body:“ Not even death shall keep us apart. I love you mom” ( Nemmeno la morte ci potrà
separare. Ti amo mamma).
An article from a Jewish Studies handbook states:
Over the past couple of decades, and particularly since the fall of communism in 1989-1990, Europe has seen the growth of a phenomenon whereby the 'Jewish phenomenon' -anything to do with Judaism, Jews, Jewish culture -...- has been increasingly recognised as part of national history and culture and embraced by the mainstream, on both the official and the personal levels. As part of this trend, Jewish culture, or what passes for Jewish culture, or what is perceived or defined as Jewish culture - has become a visible and sometimes highly visible component of the popular public domain, including popular culture, in countries where Jews themselves now are practically invisible. In one form or another, this is a Europe-wide phenomenon, observable in countries whose people were the perpetrators as well as the victims and bystanders of the Second World War -...-. It is manifested in a wide variety of ways, from the scholarly to the superficial: numerous conferences are held each year on all aspects of Jewish history, culture, and tradition, and numerous academic study programmes, courses, or lecture series on Jewish topics have been established in many countries since the mid to late 1980s. -...- Jewish exhibitions, festivals, and workshops of all types abound. Some are organised by Jewish communities; but many are sponsored by local authorities, or sponsored jointly by Jewish bodies and non-Jewish public or private bodies. -...- Jewish cultural events that took place between May 2000 and April 2001 in four countries with small Jewish populations -- Italy, Belgium, Sweden and Poland.. Researchers counted well over 700 events -...- In addition to largescale festivals, numerous readings, lectures, seminars, talk shows, and films spotlighting Jewish issues, as well as articles and programmes on Jewish subjects are given frequent and prominent space in newspapers and magazines and on primetime TV. -...- Private volunteers and civic organisations clear up abandoned Jewish cemeteries and place plaques on empty synagogues. Local and state governments help fund the restoration of ruined or abandoned synagogues. New Jewish museums 106
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
are opening their doors -often in towns where no Jews have lived for decades . -...- Jewish-theme tourism, meanwhile, has become a wellestablished niche in the vast tourist market, promoted on the private level and also strongly backed by state, city, or regional authorities. -...- In the mid 1990s, sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann described the specific manifestation of this phenomenon in Germany as the emergence of a 'Judaising terrain' made up of converts to Judaism, of members of joint Jewish-German or Israeli-German associations, and of many 'professional almost-Jews' outside or even inside the apparatuses of the Jewish organisations and [Jewish communities]. -...this emergence of a 'Judaising terrain' and 'Judaising milieu' in all their widely varied, conscious and unconscious manifestations, as a .filling. of the Jewish space which encompasses the creation of a 'Virtual Jewishness', a 'Virtual Jewish World' by non-Jews - 'Virtual Jews'. -...-Some non-Jews go so far as to wear stars of David around their necks, assume Jewish-sounding names, attend synagogue, send their children to Jewish schools, establish twin cities relationships with Israeli towns, in addition to championing Jewish causes. (Gruber 2002-3:1-5). Arendt came to the conclusion that philosophers were absolutely incapable of "seeing" the political as anything but a means to their end: making the world safe for philosophers. Arendt does not say this, but an argument could be made that Heidegger, like Esau, was only too willing to sell his birthright (i.e., "office" and "calling") for next to nothing in order to be incorporated into a mass movement with radical-revolutionary language, no personal responsibility, and the chance to transition from public servant to something truly heroic: a master of the master race. (Ferguson 2006:108). Today the masters of acceptable discourse who pull the wires of – and ventriloquize behind- the ongoing puppet show are so-called scientists and their microscopes or culture dishes, whose verdict is true. Rabbis, mandarins, scribes are so out of fashion with their fairy tales about prophets and deities frolicking around as they write down divine truths. What remains is the schizophrenic -and schizogenic- obsession with oneness and its grantors: hyper-fertile -thus hyper-
107
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
sexed- patriarchs.
Is the difference between scientists and scribes (rabbis, bhikkus etc) resting on more than mere appearance? Neuroscientist -and associate professor of radiology- A.B. Newberg opens video lectures sitting at a desk (the physician's desktop) with what look like a prescription or diagnosis notebook in front of him and...a stethoscope, or the quintessential physician's trappings. The white-as-purity lab coat is absent, but one might ponder how similar that might look to religious specialists of various traditions coming on stage -altars, pulpits etc- attired in their religion's trappings, whichever they might be. In fact, a neuroscientist and professor of radiology taping an online lecture on neuro-theology may have little to no use for a stethoscope.
Animal slaughterhouses require the presence of a specialist in charge of verifying the absence of impurity that might threaten the horde in fusion. One has a choice: medical professionals (physicians, veterinarians...) in the increasingly agnostic West; mullahs and rabbis in more traditional Muslim or Jewish religious settings; Seventh Day Adventists also follow a vegetarian diet that allows dairy products: the legendary corn flakes (patented in 1895) were born in an attempt to save America through dietary changes.
All specialists come attired in their trappings: white lab coat, stethoscope, culture dishes etc for the medical specialist; religious regalia for the 108
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
spiritual specialist. All -again- are busy detecting, and getting rid of impurity, whether ritual or bacteriological, in the name of the pack's oneness.
Both religious and secular specialists belong to fraternal orders transcending the individual in the name of quintessential values or standards to enforce: bar associations, medical boards, religious orders...one and the same. Such orders may include specific sets of vows, pledges, prohibitions or oaths.
Certification regarding the status of mass processed food as compliant with Muslim or Jewish law is in most jurisdictions handled by corporate bodies that employ religious specialists. In some cases, concern is so great that high security – such as chains of seals to be applied or broken according to procedure- is paramount. Both religious specialists and new-age foodies elatedly emphasize that we are what we eat. Some speak out of metaphysical, others out of merely physical concern:”"My food," said Jesus, "is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” (John 4:34).
As a new geiko (=geisha) -nowadays very rare- enters the profession at Kyoto, she embraces tradition by touring traditional tea houses in the geisha district she belongs to seeking informal approval: not a fraternal order, but very close. Lawyers and physicians -like clergymen- may utilize a specialized language that eludes the outsider: geikos as well are to learn a particular dialect:”whereas when in
109
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
a sacred language, the [words'] pitch is as if it were heavenward� 135.
If clergymen, lawyers, physician and suchlike train in specialized, controlled-access higher education institutions (seminaries, law/medical school...),
maikos start their training as prospective geikos in a controlled-access boarding house (okiya) under peculiar rules and authority, just like a medical school or a seminary.
Social-communist regimes pursued a classless, levelled society of equals that would over time overflow with abundance and welfare (=surfeit) due to automation, technology, and a fairer labour structure that would by itself gradually free people from alienation and toiling, thus opening up horizons of endless human enjoyment:
This was the Golden Age that, without coercion, without laws, spontaneously nurtured the good and the true.-...-they lived safely without protection. The earth herself also, freely-...- produced everything from herself. -...- without needing renewal, the fields whitened with heavy ears of corn. Sometimes rivers of milk flowed, sometimes streams of nectar, and golden honey trickled from the green holm oak (Ovid, Metamorphosis I:89-112) He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; (Deuteronomy 26:9). In that day, a person will keep alive a young cow and two goats. And because of the abundance of the milk they give, there will be curds to eat. All who remain in the land will eat curds and honey. ( Isaiah 7:2122). 135 Campbell&Toms 1988: vol.4.
110
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Earth happily bore abundance —exuding sweet beer and honey (Sumerian Debate literature, III millennium BCE). Ovid writes about the decadent age of iron:
The land that was once common to all, as the light of the sun is, and the air, was marked out, to its furthest boundaries, by wary surveyors. -...- wealth that incites men to crime -...-They lived on plunder (Metamorphosis I: 125-150). Regarding this matter of immemorial cycles spanning through eons separated by a flood or catastrophe, Campbell 136 discusses numbers given in the lore according to ancient Hindu, Hebrew and Germanic sources that would allude to ongoing cycles timed according to Earth's precession of the equinox.
Couldn't Ovid's imagery come from some XVIII or XIX century pamphlet against inequalities, wealth and ownership? Even earlier, the peasant revolts in Germany in the XVI century had already made wholesale recourse to the slogans later appropriated by Social-communist agitators and intellectuals.
Besides, some contend mythologies of golden ages simply represent a bequeathal
from
primordial
hunting-gathering
societies,
whereby
the
overabundance of spontaneous natural bounty up for grabs clearly doesn't even begin to compare with the toiling associated with urban life, farming and raising livestock. Because of the ensuing epidemics and ills, Diamond referred to the introduction of agriculture as “the worst mistake in the history of the human 136 1971/5.
111
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
race”137.
It doesn't make much difference whether the same old fables have in more recent times been dressed up to appeal to the industrial society in search of affluence. Much as proponents of oriental thought offer quantum physics as scientific validation, Social-Communists offer the jargon of economics and industry to validate what otherwise amounts to the evergreen fantasy of the land of plenty,
cuccagna, cocanha, cocagne...derived from ancient imagery coupled with medieval longings and obsessions.
Demerson138 elucidates the main points of this imagery of the land of plenty:
1. mirage compensatoire d'une économie rurale dominée par la famine. Tout y est organisé en vue des délices colossales du transit alimentaire, de l'ingurgitation à l'expulsion : les monts y sont de bouillie ou de fromage mol, les chevaux pondent des oeufs, les mules fientent des figues; le seul travail des habitants est de remplir leurs bedaines «à jambes rebidaines» aux fontaines d'hipocras ou de malvoisie. 2. L'abondance alimentaire n'est pas seulement paradis de gloutons, mais victoire sur la mort : Cocagne comporte comme merveille centrale la Fontaine de 137 Several examples are cited, such as “Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of health changes that occurred when a.hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A.D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show that these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor.” (Diamond 1987:92). 138 1980:75.
112
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Jouvence, ou un tonneau de malvoisie ressuscitative, voire un arbre à bébés; dans ce pays où ruisselle la vie, à côté de cochonnets farcis et rôtis qui trottent bien vivants avec, planté dans le dos, un couteau à découper, on rencontre des arbres féez dont les fruits sont des hommes. 3. Mais le trait le plus notable est la facilité avec laquelle chacun satisfait ses désirs sans cesse sollicités par des offres succulentes. 4. Enfin, à Cocagne, la merveille n'est pas miracle : les biens ne sont pas cadeaux d'une Providence attentive, bienfaits d'un héros évergète, ni récompense d'une bonne action ou d'une conduite habile : les victuailles sont là, font partie du cadre d'existence : le vin coule en rivières, les flans chauds tombent en pluie tri-hebdomadaire à Coquaigne, et dans la Grande Confrérie des Saouls d'ouvrer, il suffit de «parer les épaules» pour que les habits «incontinent saultent dessus». Isn't this the imagery of the future Social-communist society? Isn't this the fixations that Lenin hastened to put on indefinite hold upon the establishment of the USSR in the real world? Swashbuckling vanguards and governments shall ultimately wither away leaving the former pariahs to enjoy the immeasurable and inexhaustible bounty while indulging their every desire, as every wish of theirs is catered to right away.
The reserve of delicacies never gets exhausted, but the more people consume, the more it replenishes, just as mythology tells us:
When the Prince of the Lonesome Island had remained six nights and days on the golden couch with the sleeping Queen of Tubber Tintye, the couch resting on wheels of gold and the wheels turning continually—the couch going round and round, never stopping night or day—on the seventh morning he said, "'It is time for me now to leave this place. So he came down and filled the three bottles with water from the flaming well. In the golden chamber was a table of gold, and on the table a leg of mutton with a loaf of bread; and if all 113
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the men of Erin were to eat for a twelvemonth from the table, the mutton and the bread would be in the same form after the eating as before. -...- The motif (derived from an infantile fantasy) of the inexhaustible dish, symbolizing the perpetual life-giving, formbuilding powers of the universal source, is a fairy-tale counterpart of the mythological image of the cornucopian banquet of the gods. (Campbell 1949:159-60, emphasis added). The imagery of post-war welfare and nanny providence States isn't much different. The bourgeois and capitalists, however, are not summarily executed or dispossessed, but -thanks to dirigisme, and relentless progressive measures of equalization, Robin Hood rhetoric, taxation and social alchemy- shall gradually join everyone else in a headache-gray affluent middle class that shall never know the miseries, endemic penuries and shortages of the Soviet or Maoist world.
The lore already chastised those unwilling to surrender everything to saviors, heroes and the like:
All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. -...-that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need. -...-But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and kept back some of the price for himself, with his wife's full knowledge, and bringing a portion of it, he laid it at the apostles' feet. -...-But Peter said, "Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back some of the price of the land? "While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God." And as he heard these words, Ananias fell down and 114
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
breathed his last; and great fear came over all who heard of it.… (Acts 4:32ss) Chronicles are also filled with instances of politicians, prophets, gurus, saviors and their lot riding fleets of limousines, amassing slush funds offshore, and delighting tabloids with their bohemian lifestyle. The meek masses join their hands enacting irresistible myths:”[Jesus said]do this in remembrance of me ” (1 Corinthians 11:24).
Parricidal King Ajatasattu of Buddhist lore made a visit to Gautama Buddha (Samaññaphala Sutta) with a retinue of five hundred of his women (=not his entire harem), riding five hundred elephants, not to mention other servants. Showing the arch-transgressor is so much better than all of us, and an ideal companion of Saints, King Ajatasattu became the patron of the I Buddhist council. The surfeit's extent can be rightly appraised if readers consider the war of 305 BCE between Hellenistic Seleucia, and the Mauryan Empire of India, whereby Seleucus I Nicator (358-281 BCE) reached a peace with Chandragupta. Seleucus would relinquish the control of the far eastern provinces to Chandragupta, who -in turnwould compensate him with five hundred war elephants.
500 appears a popular number in Buddhist lore: 500 arhats attended the I Council; various elders (Purana, Mahakassapa, Sariputta, Moggallana...) travelled with a retinue of 500 monks even during the Buddha's lifetime. Jesus, too, “After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 115
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
” (1 Corinthians 15:6).
Mythical Ajatasattu and his fabulous wealth fade into insignificance when compared with Gautama Buddha's previous lives. In Silavanaga-Jataka, the Bodhisattva (=Gautama Buddha going through the endless cycle of rebirth in order to attain enlightenment) is born as an elephant. As the case warrants, not an ordinary elephant is born, but the most awesome that ever was. This elephant King Goodness has not 500, but 80.000 elephants on his service: surfeit, indeed. According to Buddhagosa, the III Buddhist council under Asoka's patronage saw 600.000 monks reunited in just one of the many meetings: more surfeit 139.
It is difficult to part the lucubration of reformers and prophets from infantile fantasies, whereby improbable comic-book or cartoon characters stumble upon -raid, appropriate- giant fridges or cheesecakes, the likes of which none has ever seen, such as the biggest cheesecake that ever was for an Italian comic-book critter.
Alternatively, sensational tabloids report about celebrities, parvenus,
mafiosi, 'new Russians' and oil sheiks buying bottles of beverages worth thousands of euros, only to shatter them on the floor; renting entire five-star hotels; or leaving princely tips in the thousands of euros, gold watches as heavy as melons to just 139“The Third Council is not mentioned in the literature of the other schools. Thus, if it was held, it apparently involved only the Theravada School.” (Hirakawa 1990:109). Huge inconsistencies among sources subsist even regarding the presumed date of such council.
116
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
about everybody.
Myths can coalesce. The 'incoming patriarch' motif can coexist with the providential windfall/Santa Claus motif. If bohemian celebrities, and exotic millionaires, can impersonate Lady Luck, so can supreme hierophants acting as good Samaritans, or another variation upon the 'foundling'/frail little creature mytheme: Pope Francis I sends an euro 1.000 cheque 140 to a casual underdog who had poured his heart out in a letter to the Pontiff.
American-Indian potlatch; traditional Hindu marriages; the 15-year anniversary for girls in some Hispanic cultures such as Cuba, Mexico or Colombia, and countless other tribal events -and their modern western adaptations consumerism fosters presenting them as something of a completely higher orderare typically associated with entertaining the largest possible number of guests with the amplest possible display of means.
Traditional Mexican weddings may also include an invitation “a todo el pueblo� (to the entire village) to join the wedding reception; access to the wedding meal is also open to most people in a traditional Balinese wedding; traditional Hindu marriages may include processions. In South Korea, guests can be hired to enhance appearances.
140ANSA December 23,2013.
117
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Among people in Indonesia, corpses are held at home -often for ages 141until the family can afford a lavish funeral with a funerary precinct to gather, entertain and feed as many guests as possible with the amplest display of means (=animal sacrifices). As in American-Indian potlatch, the premises built to host the funerary ceremonies shall vanish after the event. Among both traditional Chinese communities, and indigenous Mexican groups, the deceased are celebrated sharing food and a ritual meal at the graveside.
Even in Communist Cuba, it is common for families to (over)spend in order to offer their 15 year-old daughters a birthday ceremony as lavish as possible according to individual circumstances. The girl dresses up as a princess; visits picturesque places to take pictures; tours her neighborhood with great pomp aboard a leased car; entertains the largest possible number of guests with dances and meals.
Some argue the Cuban Communist regime not only tolerates but encourages such irresistible proclivities of the human mind in order to broadcast an image of affluence and well-being to the outside world despite obvious issues in the society at large, such as chronic shortages of essentials. The rite – with echoes in the Catholic sacrament of Confirmation, and Hebrew Bar-Mitzvah- is probably what remains of ancient rites of passage linked to the transition through puberty to adult roles such as marriage, hunting etc.
141 As it was the norm in Catal Huyuk (about 7.000 BCE), the dead were buried at home.
118
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
It is difficult -other than under socio-political presumptions- to part the natives from castaway tribes sporting lots of stuff in their ears, noses or around their necks as forms of social distinction from the average westerner revving the engine of his half-paid, 250 km/h sport car up in order to attract attention while rolling at 30km/h in order to negotiate concrete speed bumps, holes in the street pavement, and to avoid speed traps and overzealous police. All the attention he might get consists in passing glances from oblivious gawkers even more in debt than he is, in turn busy trying to showcase their own new half-paid gadgets:
And still, after all allowance has been made, it appears that the canons of pecuniary reputability do, directly or indirectly, materially affect our notions of the attributes of divinity, as well as our notions of what are the fit and adequate manner and circumstances of divine communion. (Veblen 2007:84, emphasis added). charitable giving can be a socially acceptable signal of wealth. -...-That’s consistent with the idea that people -...- use information about tiers to calibrate what they want to give, based on the status they want to signal. (Huettel 2014:132). Careless (intended as lordly) waste of resources -often driving hosts to financial insolvency- is supposed to reinforce the host's positional identity -within the broader group or settings- as well-to-do, trendy or any other term that may be used (=surfeit). Sikhs offer a meal to whomever visits their temples at the appointed time, and so do some Hindu ashrams. It is easy enough to guess commoners are trying to enter the myth.
The mythical Prester John had in 1165 written to the Byzantine 119
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Emperor:
At our table, thirty thousand men, besides occasional visitors are daily entertained; and all there partake of our bounty whether it be for horses or other expenses. The table made of the most precious emeralds is supported by four amethyst pillars; by virtue of which stone, no person sitting at the table can become inebriated. Every month we are served in rotation by seven kings, sixty-two dukes, and two hundred and sixty-five counts and marquises, besides those who are sent on various missions in our interest.(Cit. in Brooks 2009:254). And it should be added that this wealth which is held sacred is valued primarily for the sake of the good repute to be got through its conspicuous consumption. -...-So that it will hold true in a general way that fashions are least stable and least becoming in those communities where the principle of a conspicuous waste of goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among ourselves. -...- The prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful. This is due partly to the relief it affords in being different from what went before it, partly to its being reputable. -...- Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each added or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense. (Veblen 2007:80,116-7). Even surfeit has its inverted doppelgaenger. If positive surfeit conjures mind-boggling figures up relative to positive items, whether it be the number or size of pianos, children, mansions, virgins, acres, gold coins one possesses, negative surfeit conjures up equally mind-boggling figures related to foul items or bad deeds such as episodes of debauchery, number of victims, and so forth:
Ultimately, manipulators are discovered, hated, and in many cases prosecuted. Excellent persuaders are revered and loved because they can move the people around them and make them experience wonder as a result. (Lakhani 2005:146, emphasis added). 120
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
American Zen attracts people looking for something, or somebody, to make them whole. It attracts damaged people. Of course, all people are to some extent damaged, and all religions attract some seekers looking to salve their psychic wounds.(Oppenheimer 2014:no page, emphasis added). In the Book Of Mormon, mythical pre-Hispanic civilizations in the Americas clash; millions are slaughtered:
He saw that there had been slain by the sword already nearly a two million of his people, and he began to sorrow in his heart; yea, there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and their children. (Ether 15:2). That's as old as man: a 'great war' shapes our consciousness for all ages in circular remembrance.
In Buddhist lore, Angulimala -for example- killed 999 people all on his own; again, the number of monks and Saints Dharmaruci killed by arson is so large it remains unknown; King Nimrod killed seventy thousand children in fear of the birth of the celestial baby Abraham: an amount that matches the mind-boggling number of victims contemporary dictators leave behind.
Asked about how many eons had elapsed, Gautama Buddha described the round of rebirth's immeasurable duration thus:
“It is possible, Brahmin,” the Blessed One said. “Imagine, Brahmin, the grains of sand between the point where the river Ganges originates and the point where it enters the great ocean: it is not easy to count these and say there are so many grains of sand, or so many hundreds 121
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
of grains, or so many thousands of grains, or so many hundreds of thousands of grains. Brahmin, eons have elapsed and gone by are even more numerous than that. It is not easy to count them and say that they are so many eons, or so many hundreds of eons, or so many thousands of eons, or so many hundreds of thousands of eons. For what reason? Because, Brahmin, this samsāra is without discoverable beginning …. It is enough to be liberated from them.” (SN II,183-4) (Somaratne, ME6101 no date :Theravada Cosmology). The confrontation in Syria between the Assad regime, and 'Arab spring' forces professedly crossed all boundaries:
Syria's government is waging "a war of extermination" against its own people, the prime minister of Qatar said Tuesday, according to state media, hours after a failed four-day ceasefire during a Muslim holiday left hundreds dead. -...-What is happening in Syria is not a civil war but a genocide, a war of extermination with a license to kill by the Syrian government and the international community," he said, according to the official Qatar News Agency. ( Quatar Accuses...2012: no page). "For more than 20 years, the eastern populations have fallen victim to war and insecurity - in 2010, the victims numbered six million dead, and the toll continues," the bishops from the Democratic Republic of the Congo's eastern South Kivu province declared. ( Catholic Online, June 1, 2015). On August 21, 2013, Italian News agency ANSA reports the Assad regime in Syria (assertedly) attacked rebels with poison gas resulting in a slaughter of children, with attached photographic reportage. France threatens a military intervention, and Nobel peace prize recipient Obama pledges to eventually strike: the wrath of the righteous...“gotta be a man, can't let it slide”,”burnin' with determination to even up the score”,”God is a righteous judge, a God who displays
122
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
his wrath every day.�142: synchronicity, indeed.
Readers shouldn't be hard-pressed to identify a bundle of cherished motifs. Much as it was the case with Libyan caudillo Gaddafi, even Syrian caudillo Assad used to frolic around with the world's hierophants in posh settings. The same hierophants who are now denouncing him as another Hitler on scene...of course, now that they know, how could it be otherwise?
This obsession with surfeit may find legitimacy under the cover of religion, folklore or politics, but it's still typically considered a mental disturbance -more or less mild or paraphilic- in those who compulsively pursue, collect or amass certain
items
(fetishists,
voyeurs...),
or
experiences
(sadists,
masochists,
paraphiliacs...) in the greatest amount possible.
When bare facts are considered, it is difficult to part the superlative hero unrestrainedly enjoying a well-stocked harem of heavenly virgins (nymphs, etc) from the bottom-feeding womanizer, rapist or purported sex addict newspapers pilloried last week.
It is confusing to part the righteous vigilante or gallant war hero, who single-handedly obliterates a mind-boggling number of foes, from the sociopathic cult leader, serial killer or mass-murderer who -incidentally- thinks to be on a
142Psalm 7:11.
123
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
mission, too; paradoxes of doubleness:
I have always been puzzled by the strong attraction that many people feel toward criminals. -...- These "liberated" souls often become folk heroes or role models for people too inhibited to act out their own fantasies of "badness . " -...-Perhaps the most bizarre example of deadly attraction is found during and after the trial of a notorious killer: the emergence of a host of courtroom groupies, pen pals, avid supporters, and love-struck fans. For these "desperado junkies, " the most powerful attraction of all is to psychopathic serial killers whose savage crimes are sex-related . -...-In such cases, notoriety is confused with fame, and even the most callous criminal is turned into a celebrity . We now have serial-killer comic books, boardgames, and trading cards, the latter once reserved for sports heroes. -...-What is clear, however, is that these devoted admirers are often victims of their own psychological hang-ups. Some participate because of a romantic need for unrequited love, others because of the notoriety, titillation, or vicarious danger they experience, and still others because they see a cause worth fighting for, such as abolition of the death penalty, a soul to be saved, or the firm belief that the crimes were an inevitable result of physical or emotional abuse in childhood . (Hare 1993:149-50). Breivik, a Norwegian freemason and right-wing maximalist on a selfproclaimed crusade to rid Europe of the Islamic threat, killed dozens of people on a murdering spree. According to British The Sun143, he then called the police to report:”This is Brigadier Breivik, mission accomplished”.
In 1987, singer George Michael delivered a pungent critique of Reaganite America with Hand To Mouth. Is Michael's unnamed pariah hero any different from Breivik with the sole exception of commodious political motives? Both thought they had a possible “rendezvous with destiny”. Bin Laden also thought he 143 30 July 2011.
124
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
had a “rendezvous with destiny” much as W. Churchill or Breivik did.
Jimmy Got Nothing made himself a name With a gun that he polished for a rainy day. A smile and a quote from a vigilante movie Our boy Jimmy just blew them all away. He said it made him crazy Twenty five years living hand to mouth. Would an identical song with a Jimmy the Aryan character ( Jimmy the Mormon; Jimmy the Pentecostal, etc) going after equally anonymous foes (sodomites, adulterers, “border hoppers” or “welfare hogs”, perchance?) invite cheers from a crowd on a guilt trip, or the process server with lawsuits in his hands while the crowd jeers, and Luke Skywalker howls in emotional agony?
Of course, as hobos, progressives and their ilk are busy chuckling as they listen to George Michael's song,
I believe in the gods of America I believe in the land of the free But no one told me That the gods believe in nothing it escapes them how Michael was/is another brick in the wall of hyper-affluent consumerism, whether reaganite or otherwise.
Michael laughs all the way to the bank as lefty hobos, progressives and their ilk worship another “god who believes in nothing”, or the stereotypical counter-cultural bohemian (sinner, felon, underdog, bastard, half-wit, prostitute, thrown-away...) that all religions posit as primeval vanguard:
125
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Flattery, if it can be built into a doctrine, will always attract those who succeed in finding themselves there. The successful of the seventeenth-century world of business managed to associate themselves with Calvin's idea of the elect. (Rieff 2006:149). Exclusivity is tied closely to identity. Your clients or people that you hope to persuade want to be distinguished in a certain way. They go well out of their way to be sure people know who they are and for what they stand. -...-The more exclusive you can make someone feel, the more likely they are to be persuaded. Exclusive groups are easier to persuade than generic groups. Exclusivity is one of the keys to building a cult, whether a cult of customers or of brands. Exclusivity is closely tied to identity. Reinforce the tie between people’s identities and the exclusivity and you move them much more quickly and easily to your point of view. (Lakhani 2005:106,110). Readers shall individually determine the real difference between garden variety sociopaths and the bumbling cartoon characters of action movies who have the crowd rise ecstatic to a standing ovation:”burnin' with determination to even up the score”. Referring again to the relationship between myth(ologie)s and what schizophrenic patients experience, Campbell 144 quips that the schizophrenic experience is a “hero voyage manqué [botched/failed]”:
mens sana in fabula sana: mental health is a coherent life story, neurosis is a faulty narrative. -...- the narrative chain, with each event connected to the next by reasoned causal links, marks the victory of reason over chaos, of society over the aberrancy of crime, and restitutes a world in which aetiological histories offer the best solution to the apparently unexplainable (Brooks 1994:49). The connection between schizotypal crack-ups and religious epiphanies is compelling. Bodily ascent (or descent) to heaven, hell, the spirit world etc can be
1441968a.
126
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
interpreted as schizotypal fugues, prompted by either temporal lobe epilepsy, or some other psycho-physical disturbance.
Hamilton Souther and Paul Hegstrom tell how their religious epiphany came about after a difficult life spent struggling with unresolved conflicts and emotional baggage:
I honestly felt that I would be unable to abuse my wife if I were a pastor. I thought there would be accountability to the church leadership and so on. But there were many Sundays when I would scream and yell and slap the kids around and push, shove or hit Judy and maybe an hour later I would be in the pulpit. -...-A key turning point for me was one night when I was wrestling with God in prayer. I remember screaming at God in the middle of the night until I had no more tears and no more voice. It was then that I heard God say "Paul, you don't have a teachable spirit." I knew immediately that we had hit pay-dirt! I knew that I did not have a teachable spirit. All of my life I had been an authority to myself. No one could give me any kind of input. So, I started to pray "God teach me to be teachable." That was the beginning of the change for me. (Hegstrom 2006:no page). I recall an emergency room encounter with a patient who was beginning to believe he was Jesus. I pressed for clarification; was he or was he not Jesus? There was a long pause and finally the patient replied that he wasn’t sure. I persisted with this line of questioning: “If you are truly the Messiah, why would you seek psychiatric treatment?” He glossed over the query but did point out that he had been treated successfully with medications the last time he thought he was Jesus. (Polimeni 2012:3, emphasis added). So they said to each other, "Weren't our hearts ablaze within us while [Jesus] was talking with us on the road and explaining the Scriptures to us?" (Luke 24:32).
127
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Souther relays how he had visited his mother in order to somewhat mend the relationship. The meeting predictably escalated into an argument fueled by unresolved issues, after which Souther claims he turned to the wall screaming to the top of his lungs to the spirits how he didn't want his life any longer. Then he cried: some time later “the spirits came for me”145.
Hegstrom later became an acclaimed Christian mental health professional who swears by the healing power of finding Jesus in one's life. Souther went on to become a maestro ayahuascero in the tradition of Peruvian shamanism after apprenticeship: he found “the spirits” instead.
Souther and Hegstrom offer the public a possibility to make the experience for itself: seminars and retreats for Hegstrom; seminars and retreats to the Peruvian jungle to try psychedelic experiences drinking entheogenic concoctions through Souther and his tour company Blue Morpho. Of course, elusive shamanistic spirits (for Souther), or the Hebrew godhead (for Hegstrom) represent an individual response to the crack-up; other might have preferred Zoroaster, Poseidon, Krishna, Santeria Orishas, and so forth...
Trail-blazing Jewish-American health theorist Antonovsky axes his theory of salutogenesis (=how to create/improve one's health) around manageability, meaningfulness and comprehensibility. Salutogenesis may also be referred as 145 2013.
128
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
igniting one's life with a sense of meaning, a “dynamic feeling of confidence”. In turn, some superpose this sense of meaning and purpose with the concept of “being in the flow” (=”optimal experience”). Antonovsky -in academic jargon of coursegives a description146 that very much recalls the xeroxed heroes of all those Star
Wars, Rocky, Matrix, Bloodsport, Karate Kid, Rambo and so forth movies.
Myths thus unfold according a pre-scripted series of high points -for example the call to adventure, the threshold guardian who flanks the doors of all temples147, the helper etc- several scholars have detailed (Olrik, Rank, Propp, Raglan, Campbell...). Roche148 aptly draws tables placing the Star Wars and Harry
Potter movie along the high points Rank (Birth Of The Hero), and Campbell (The Heroic Adventure) supplied: the shoe fits, indeed.
It just follows that heroes (perceived as) authoring their own meaning (pursuit of ultimate boons; unfolding of manifest destinies...) may indeed be experiencing “the zone”, “the flow”, “aesthetic arrest”, hyperaesthesia etc as they scoff at collateral damage quite often. School Of Business Professor Freeman 149 extols
1461987:19. 147Campbell writes:”The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond, above, and below the confines of the world, are one and the same. That is why the approaches and entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silences within. They are preliminary embodiments of the dangerous aspect of the presence, corresponding to the mythological ogres that bound the conventional world, or to the two rows of teeth of the whale. They illustrate the fact that the devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis. His secular character remains without; he sheds it, as a snake its slough.” (1949:84-5). 1482003:16-18. 149 2014:Credibility And Rapport.
129
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
“the power of rapport. The ability to build a connection -...- to convince [people] to take seriously what you say”:
Despite our stresses, we tend to live within a fairly manageable window of arousal, neither unbearably overstimulated nor understimulated-except for sociopaths. People who are sociopaths report that they crave extra stimulation almost continually. (Stout 2005:186). pragmatic endorsement of the principles and practices of mindfulness—though not, necessarily, of the precise existential variety that a distinguished Oxford professor might extol—is typical of the psychopath. Their rapacious proclivity to live in the moment, to “give tomorrow the slip and take today on a joyride” -...-is well documented—and at times (therapeutic implications aside) can be stupendously beneficial. (Dutton 2012:116). Many cults and religious groups adopt 'love bombing' to seduce potential adepts, that is showering them with love and care...whether sincerely felt, or merely feigned it's not the point when measuring results:
[Psychopaths] typically attempt to overwhelm their victims with flattery, feigned concern and kindness, and phony stories about financial dealings and social status. Cracks may soon begin to appear in the mask they wear, but once you are trapped in their web of deceit and control, it will be difficult to escape financially and emotionally unscathed . (Hare 1993:211). Tannen150 explicitly argues that acts of contrition shall look authentic 151
150 2004:Apologies In Private And Public Contexts. 151 As with many other instances, the emphasis is on looking -acting, sounding- authentic, not in actually being sincere in one's self-chastising pantomimes, harangues or routines. Tannen emphasizes this as professional advice to medical practitioners trying to control damage in malpractice suits. While it is difficult to generalize across all possible cases, Tannen elucidates the ritualistic character of such interactions. The present writer adds that many religions explicitly incorporate atonement, contrition, and reconciliation rituals precisely for this reason.
130
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
in order to work, which brings back all the pathetic and emotional claptrap routines this writing discusses at several junctures; Tannen also quips that, although we may believe we can tell when someone's lying, in actuality we can't according to research. Babiak&Hare beg to agree:”It is difficult, except in the most blatant situations, to tell whether someone has purposely pushed your hot button or has inadvertently done so without any particular intent to manipulate or use you.”152.
Salespeople who can remember returning clients' names correctly attract higher volumes of sales153. A variant of love bombing, or making the other person feel special (attended, listened to...), ranks high to determine a leader's charisma -such as Bill Clinton's154-. NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and advertisement specialist Boothman is adamant:”Specific compliments usually come across as being more sincere than general compliments. -...-take the trouble to go into detail”155. Boothman156 also advises to “be a chameleon”, and to make people feel as if they had known one for a lifetime: the skeleton key to closing any sale.
Many people today identify caregiving relationships as providing experiences so real that, in contrast to more shallow pursuits, they are what make life worth living. A lovely cosmetics ad from Eckerd.com shows a happy little girl running through the grass, with lipstick in the form of a kiss on her cheek. The ad continues, "I vow to spend less 152 2006:273. 153 Brown (2013:Selling And Being Sold) extols the virtue of (giving a convincing impression of) caring in matters of influence. Salespeople and politicians alike (for those who can tell the difference) may especially profit from remembering a given target's name, and some trivia to match. People love to remember, be remembered and to commemorate such remembrance 154 Ben-Shahar 2005-6a:lecture 16. 155 2000:108-9. 156 2004.
131
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
time looking for ruby red lipstick and more time leaving it behind." The copy continues with this promise: "You'll find just what you need quick and easy-so you can get back to something more important ... like living." (Mark&Pearson 2001:214). A petitioner likes attention to his words better than the fulfillment of his request (Ptahhotep, Egyptian vizir, XXV-XXIV century BCE157). [The] advice? Make any settlement offer you want, but first let the store owner blow off steam -...- then discuss the numbers (Freeman 2014:The Other Negotiator158). Studies find that the more a salesperson talks, the less she tends to close sales. The more she lets the customer talk, the more she wins the sale159 (Freeman 2014:The Art Of Skilled Listening). Unfortunately, many people we deal with in our personal and professional lives are so self-absorbed and narcissistic that they rarely see our persona because of the preoccupation they have with their own. Finding someone who pays attention to us, who appreciates or actually “sees� us, is refreshing; it validates who we are and makes us feel special. The psychopath quickly fulfills this need. (Babiak&Hare 2006:75, emphasis added). The United States is currently suffering from an epidemic of narcissism. -...- In data from 37,000 college students, narcissistic personality traits rose just as fast as obesity from the 1980s to the present, with the shift especially pronounced for women. The rise in narcissism is accelerating, with scores rising faster in the 2000s than in previous decades. By 2006, 1 out of 4 college students agreed with the majority of the items on a standard measure of narcisstic traits. (Twenge&Campbell 2009:9). I fear you may think I am suggesting that respect and rapport-building are just cynical games: they needn't be that at all (Freeman 2014:Knowledge Is Power)160. 157 Cit. by Goldman 2003:Wisdom Literature. 158 Advice a consultant gave New York tax authorities about going about to collect a notoriously unfair city tax. 159 What is an integral part and parcel of this attitude, however, is that the salesperson -politician, fundraiser etcshall endeavor to make the other 'feel special'. 160 Roberto (2011:Influence) reiterates the same concept.
132
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
High points are an universal feature. According to Buddhist
Mulasarvastivada Vinaya, Gautama Buddha instructs about the way to fill in for sacred text details monks may have forgotten:
The Blessed One said: “Upali, those who forget the name of the place, etc., must declare it was one or another of the six great cities, or somewhere where the Tathagata stayed many times. If he forgets the name of the king, he must declare it was Prasenajit; if the name of the householder, that it was Anathapitpada; of the lay-sister, that it was Mugaramata (cit. in Kuan 2008:134-5). “A great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last ”. Linguistics professor Tannen161 relates that her studies documented how stories told in a way to emphasize one's feelings and personal experience give greater satisfaction than stories that lack that aspect.
In fact, videos crafted to convey a message on popular Mormon Channel are typically someone's hyperreal (abridged, novelized, condensed...) life story:
cultural disconnection, to hyperreality, a culture that is transient and recyclable (it reassembles units or particles which are all the same). (Gane 1991:144). Such “units or particles which are all the same” can be pericopes, or narrative units, of the New Testament. These episodes in which Jesus acts can float freely, and can be theoretically arranged in different order without altering the gnostic import of the same (= how “great” the “great man” actually is). For example:
161 2004:Conversational Style.
133
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
did Jesus heal a blind beggar as he was leaving (Mark 10:46-52; Matthew 20:29-34) or entering (Luke 18:35-43; John does not mention the episode) Jericho?
Such hyperreality closely matches what popular culture portrays as neardeath experience -or entheogenic trip- scenarios: one looks back at the hyperreal tracking shot of one's lifetime:
how are certain conceptions of human experience in time or an encompassing view of history presented in a condensed way, sometimes requiring personifications, sometimes requiring an appeal to juxtapositions or to the montage principle left as a legacy by the historical avant-gardes? (Xavier in Miller&Stam 2004:361). Popular culture relishes hyperreality that is as abridged, novelized and condensed as any rewritten history book chapter. Yahoo Movietalk relays on April 15, 2013:
‘Flashdance,’ 30 Years Later: B-Boy Recalls Girling Up for Final Scene. Breakdancer Crazy Legs, left, doubled for Jennifer Beals in 'Flashdance' .What started as an inner-city pastime became a global phenomenon when a 90-second breakdancing scene appeared in the hit 1983 film "Flashdance." ."So many people went back to the theater just to see that one scene," Richard Colón, aka Crazy Legs, told Yahoo! Movies. Colón, one of breakdancing's foremost pioneers, was just 16 years old when he and some of his Rock Steady crew appeared in one of the most memorable sequences in the film. "It's been a great experience," Colón recalled. The breakdancing in "Flashdance" wasn't just limited to Rock Steady's scene. The film's lead character also busts out a breakdance move during her iconic final dance sequence, set to Irene Cara's "What a Feeling." A not-so-well-kept secret about lead actress Jennifer Beals is that she had a lot of help when it came to the memorable moves of her feverishly dancing character, Alex Owens. Most of her dance scenes were done with the help of a body double, French actress 134
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
and dancer Marine Jahan. But it was Beals's final scene wherein she got the most help. Jahan performed most of it, but certain moves required specialized expertise. Gymnast Sharon Shapiro performed the flips, and one certain breakdance move was done by a male breakdancer -- Colón himself. "Being the first person in hip-hop to dress in drag -- I had to deal with that for years," the 47-year-old joked. Hatsune Miku (the Japanese virtual singer, 2007) and Max Headroom (virtual TV host, 1985) also probed both hyperreality, and the “uncanny valley”, a term Japanese scholar Mori introduced in 1970 to denote the feeling of unease artificial humanoids trigger as they approach a seemingly -yet not absolutelyperfect replica of human features: the “shaking of a prosthetic hand” dilemma.
Popular culture just copies what ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Graeco-Roman incantations and magic amulets included: a historiola, a condensed and abridged mythical tale that propelled the wish: narrative magic; or a carved image that indicated the historiola.
Gordon&Simon162 also mention:”the idea that finger-rings with mythological images may have been intended (also) to act as amulets, on the principle of the implicit historiola, the mythic narrative applied as a statement of a norm to a specific moment of adversity or calamity.”.
The Mormon Channel aptly supply hyperreal messages with historiolas. In several such messages, young Mormon women are urged to practice chastity and 162 2010:33.
135
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
modesty. For example, a dress they wear ought to be modest. How modest? A
historiola clinches the argument: modest so that Jesus would accept to be in their company. In another Mormon message, a young man leaves competitive sports behind so that -the historiola helps- the Holy Spirit might be with him as he attends seminary163. Some abstruse point of war propaganda and 1960s balderdash might suffice for those who are not spiritually inclined.
Whether Mormon lore; war propaganda, or any other item, such recondite 'gnostic punchlines' can be tagged to almost everything with equal success. Gnosticism is but the regalia of spiritual bypassing, or -as R.A Masters put it- “avoidance in holy drag�.
Offhand
cult
leader, corrupt
politicians, banksters, and other
entertainers as well hide their psychopathology, power-drive, murderous tendencies, abuse and debauchery behind a barrage of spiritual, gnostic or elevatesounding images:
Insofar as we want to get away from difficult personal issues and emotions-all the sticky, messy things that keep us rooted right here, we may try to use spiritual practice to do that. I have come to call this tendency to try to avoid or prematurely transcend basic human needs, feelings, and developmental tasks. "spiritual bypassing." Spiritual bypassing may be particularly tempting for individuals who are having difficulty making their way through life's basic developmental stages, especially at a time when what were once ordinary developmental landmarks-earning a 163 The Holy Spirit kicks in later: the young man makes the competitive team, and wins a medal.
136
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
livelihood through dignified work, raising a family, keeping a marriage together-have become increasingly difficult and elusive for large segments of the population. While struggling with becoming autonomous individuals, many people are introduced to spiritual teachings and practices which come from cultures that assume a person having already passed through the basic developmental stages. The result is that many people wind up trying to use spiritual practice to meet their personal needs or establish their identity, and this just doesn't work. Many of the so-called "perils of the path"-such as spiritual materialism, narcissism, inflation, groupthink – result from trying to use spirituality to make up for developmental deficiencies. (Welwood 1984:64-5). Which stories can truly be about everyone, if not stories that revolve around those elementary ideas164 (Hindu marga), petrified mythologies and obtuse allegories? Ethnic ideas165 (Hindu desi) then represent the facade people can grasp, and actually hold onto.
Aurobindo explains:
every Scripture must necessarily contain two elements, one temporary, perishable, belonging to the ideas of the period and country in which it was produced, the other eternal and imperishable and applicable in all ages and countries (in MAISI014: unit 1:5). the life of Rama and Krishna belongs to the prehistoric past which has come down only in poetry and legend and may even be regarded as myths; but it is quite immaterial whether we regard them as myths or historical facts, because their permanent truth and value lie in their persistence as a spiritual form, presence, influence in the inner consciousness of the race and the life of the human soul. (in MAISI014: unit 4:6). 164 According to definition Adolf Bastian, XIX century Germany ethnologist, coined. 165 According to definition Adolf Bastian, XIX century Germany ethnologist, coined.
137
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
from the Book Of The 24 Philosophers, an hermetic text of the twelfth century -...- god is an intelligible sphere, whose circumference is nowhere, and center everywhere -...-.This is not only an inward knowledge, it's a metaphysical realization; and I find things like that, sayings like that, all over the place when I'm reading the words that have been taken from these non-learned sages (Campbell&Toms 1988:vol.9). Alternatively, Sallust's (Roman historian, I century BCE) definition of myth is:�what never happened, but always is� (De Diis Et Mundo) unfolding in a time beyond time (illud tempus for Eliade). In recent decades, similar concepts have been proposed as purported new insight under the label of meme and memetics as Dawkins proposed an evolutionary and Darwinian model of cultural heritage and processes.
For example, the great hero covered in sacred blood as he throws the grenade of victory might be an elementary idea. Sarvadekar comments thus on the gist of Hindu Gita:
Therefore the Lord [=Krishna] bids him [=Arjuna] once again to rise and face the army, be a warrior, slay the enemy and win the war. It is the call to the hero of humanity. (MAISI014:lecture 5:5). The exact, historical identity of such hero, his gods and anti-gods, and his armband's color are a matter of ethnic ideas, reviled in one era, extolled to the sky in another. Theorists in recent decades have intermingled the two concepts into that of cultural schemas to avoid taking sides between the cultural (relativist) side (ethnic ideas), and the more universal side (elementary ideas).
138
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
In other words, the elementary idea is the gist of the story, the big picture:”observations misinterpreted through projections from the human psyche ”. The ethnic idea is the detail that may vary across renditions. Jesus -as some Christian scholar may emphasize to control damage- was this charming guy with a beard who had a heavenly father, and went around consorting with outcasts, performing miracles and preaching niceties only to be torn apart in death to save us from spiritual doom. That ought to make one's heart melt in gnostic rapture.
Whether Jesus was actually crucified the day before or after Passover is an irrelevant detail (=ethnic idea) a person who's choking or sobbing upon hearing about the scourging and crucifixion won't even be able to compute: the gist (=elementary idea) steals the day.
What is more like to bridge across eras, continents and cultures? Byzantine details none really cares about; partisan truths momentarily a matter of political dogma; or the imagery of gastrointestinal and neurological syndromes, screams, gasps, whimpers and moans repackaged to mean “suffering makes us one”, or some other obtuse 'gnostic' punchline to that effect?
Such chicaneries shall be considered authentic by default: artificial kin members would never fail their common humanity fellows by faking groans, gasps, screams; or by telling preposterous indignity or child-abuse related stories they lifted from cable TV dramas:”Make them like you and make your plights familiar 139
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
and similar.�166. Of course, as even the most unobservant news reader might object, the opposite often applies.
An entire industry rests upon the commodification of gastrointestinal and neurological syndromes:
Porter wanted to know if participants exhibiting higher levels of psychopathy would be more adept at disguising the true nature of their feelings than their lower-scoring counterparts. The answer, unequivocally, was yes. -...- Psychopaths were far more convincing at feigning sadness when presented with a happy image, or happiness when looking at a sad image, than were non-psychopaths (Dutton 2012:77). The answer might be that the vast majority of people practice oblique morality and play games of pretense almost on a continuous basis for all sorts of reasons. By giving credit to whatever scene might be on at a given moment, no matter how preposterous, they reestablish their own psychological integrity, and -to an extent- whitewash their own incoherence and misery.
Calling attention upon the artificial, commodious nature of all that sentimental chicanery and emotional claptrap obviously puts one's own protestations of common humanity and sentimental authenticity into question: that is frankly unbearable. War propaganda's meticulous dissection and grand exposure of Fascist regimes' duplicity and misdeeds soon backfired as protesters on the left quickly applied the template to the misdeeds and duplicity of their domestic 166 Lakhani 2005:150.
140
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
regimes.
There is at least some merit in at least some theories Ben-Shahar's overview of positive psychology explores. Nevertheless, one might reasonably ponder whether this, that or another theorist or clinician did really provide a 'scientific breakthrough' through FMRI, statistical analysis etc, or whether they are not rather punching at human mind's ghosts that -indeed- have remained the same across regimes, ages and continents as they found an outlet in multifarious myths and legends.
For example, aren't positive psychology's “self-concordant goals� the same as Roman gravitas (sibi congruere, being true to one's beliefs)? In other words, is it the verdict of the FMRI or electronic microscope people are really reading, or is it just a repackaged version of the Ulysses shtick as Ringo, or whichever other resilient hero with a vision one might choose? Is it by chance the two look alike?
Popular culture never stops repackaging the item, for example in Rozalla Miller's167 1992 hit Believe In Yourself. The movie Over The Top (1987) contains a monologue, whereby the father -a bumming truck driver- explains life to the son he has just been reunited with in the terms that life is not coming to meet anybody half way (=difficulties have to be faced for what they are). Just to drive the point across, an eponymous, fabulous song accompanies the fantastic movie. The same concept 167 Black singer/performer originally from Zambia: an hyperreal -although talented- co-ed doppelgaenger of Whitney Houston enjoying passing popularity in the 1990s.
141
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
(=taking responsibility and facing difficulties as nobody's coming to rescue) is repackaged as the pinnacle of clinical research in Branden's 1995 Six Pillars Of Self-
Esteem, which Ben-Shahar extols168.
Professor of psychology DeWall advises that -in order to recharge one's mind, and to replenish one's reserves of self-control energy- one ought to engage in daily psychological and metabolic practices such as pondering one's own core beliefs and values, and having a good breakfast 169. Professor of management Brown 170 suggests “responsibility transfer” as a coping mechanism to diffuse anxiety -and to increase confidence, thus net results-: one places oneself “in the hands of” an image of choice, whether it be a divine or an earthly figure.
That's precisely what major religions have done since time immemorial as they prescribed prayer before meals, or surrender to god: hardly something statistical analysis or the FMRI might claim to have discovered. The same oneness of the pack, homeland first slogans and rally cries recur(red) both in Communist Cuba, Bolivarian Socialist Venezuela, Brazil under military rule and Fascist Italy often verbatim. Mujica, President of Uruguay, transited from nationalist to radical left-wing tendencies as leader of guerrilla party Tupamaro.
For all that matters, Senior Scholar of Communications Kehoe 171 impels 168 2009: lecture 3.1. 169 DeWall 2013:Why Is It So Hard To Do What We Should? 170 2013:Characteristics Of Influential Agents. 171 2011: Leadership, Appreciation, and Productivity.
142
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
entrepreneurs to tap into their subordinates' bottomless potential for enthusiasmdriven productivity: the brand or company shall be presented as homeland; rally cries axed around productive oneness might prove expedient:
This salesman describes an Amway sales rally as something like a rock concert: Waves of reciprocal chanting sweep back and forth over the hall, one side shouting, “Ain’t it Great!” and the other answering, “Ain’t it Though!” In a regional event, thousands flick their Bics, or other brand-name propane lighters (Amway does not yet manufacture one) and whirl the flames in a circle to symbolize the mystical force of the [company’s current sales] Plan. Slogans and circles are flashed on a huge video screen at the front of the amphitheater (Ehrenreich 2009:286-7). Consensus arose among Belgian parliamentarians visiting Communist North Korea172 regarding how youth indoctrination in that country -with ensuing homeland first slogans and so forth- resembled that of NSDAP Hitler Youth.
Against its root tenets, Marxism has been wed against nature to the struggle of stateless communities (Basques, Catalans, Quebec...) in spite of its materialist and historical nature that predicates the auspicious advent of empires that shall supersede small societies and their tribalism.
This tells readers more about human mind's eerie, circular proclivities than about those brigands on the right awash in the blood of the innocent, and those nice chaps on the left who stand up for equality, or whichever emotive spin one might want to put on the issue. Is this a comment in poor taste? Hardly. That's 172 Dutilleul 2004.
143
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
precisely the 'red thread' within French boutique documentary La Guerre Perdue
Du Vatican173. With the ambiance of a comic book, two factions wage war within the Catholic Church since the Vatican II Council: liberals and traditionalists.
Traditionalists are at best obscurantist creeps; at worst crypto-Nazis (a la Williamson); pedophiles (too many to count); money changers; Fascist offshoots (such as Opus Dei). A diverse cohort of red priests and liberals on the left might be involved with liberation theology, sport Che Guevara's portrait or have joined leftwing revolutionary governments: nice chaps who stand up for the poor and the oppressed.
What about the mind-boggling universe of genocidal prison camps, famine, chronic shortages, political repression and so forth that some associate with Social-Communist regimes as they actually exist/ed? �'There will be some innocent victims in this fight against Fascist agents -...- We are launching a major attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.'�.
No impolite link is established between gauche caviar living room revolutionaries, their guerrilla heroes and the many victims of Social-Communist regimes; the topic of what lefties do with their money, influence or sexuality is left 173 Benquet 2012.
144
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
alone: best of all causes oblige. Judge some according to their deeds, and others according to their intentions.
Professors of management Roberto174 and Brown175 wholeheartedly agree with NLP and persuasion author Lakhani:”the only real differentiator between manipulation and persuasion is intent.”176. Of course, defining “intent” beyond frivolous political advocacy can be tricky. Obviously, a nice Dalai Lama, Ayatollah, Church President or Pope might be on call to let the masses know whether the thunderclap might mean god (dis)approves of anything in pursuit of some greater good. Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler and so forth certainly didn't think thunderclaps meant genocidal barbarity was bad.
This is why 'my guy' (with the right ax to grind) gets to make a documentary for prime-time TV, whereas 'the other guy' (with the wrong chip on the wrong shoulder) doesn't: freedom of the press, what a boon to mankind.
Going to a rabbi, medicine man, astrologer, brahmin, pastor or bhikkhu for advice regarding life's ultimate concerns may nowadays look so demode. Since 'spirituality' is such a hot commodity to pass, however, even confession rituals find their postmodern adaptation: accountability partners/groups. A venue to have one's actions measured up to a set of standards in a sort of self-help therapy. 174 2011:Key Levels Of Power. 175 2013:The Dark Side Of Influence. 176 Lakhani 2005:2.
145
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Contemporary consumerism has an hyperreal replacement for all those folkloric ideas now so passe:”Our Certified Life-Cycle Celebrants promote the use of personalized ceremony to mark the moments and milestones in the lives of individuals, families, communities and organizations. Celebrancy began in Australia in the early 1970s. Presently there are more than 3000 Celebrants worldwide ” claims online the Celebrant Foundation&Institute.
U.S conflict resolution specialist Deidre Combs -whose clients include IBM, USDA, U.S Postal Service etc- openly includes world myths, gratitude exercises, rituals -whether based on existing traditions or just invented at the moment- and poetic allegories as proxies to help with her intercultural conflict resolution strategies:”why don't we celebrate?”.
So now it's the trendy psychologist, social worker or personality coach -and not only a movie-maker, singer or a pedlar- who tells us the hero route is the way to go, as forefathers told our ancestors 20 or 40 centuries ago with the various Shepherd-gods, Gilgamesh, Hercules, Romulus, Bacchus, Orpheus, Osiris and so forth:“pictorial representation of psychic processes”177.
Mankind easily passes from psychical processes everybody shares (=elementary ideas) to the embodiment of such “pictorial representation of psychic processes” in a given historical or pseudo-historical figure or circumstances (=ethnic 177 Jung, cit. in Angelo 1992:74.
146
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
idea).
In common parlance, Hitler -though not Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao or any other such figure- came to be associated with absolute evil. Localized versions also exist, such as various African dictators (Amin, Mobutu, Bokassa...). The image of Filipino dictator Marcos and his clan was usually associated with that of aswang, a terrible demon of Filipino folklore. Former Peruvian President Fujimori also came to embody unrighteousness in the local psyche.
It is by now hopefully evident enough how each culture inflects collective unconscious' paradigms according to local rules. Most may be familiar with the concept of embodiment of absolute evil in a public figure. But very few -if any- outside the Philippines may have an idea who the members of the Marcos clan might be, or what an aswang exactly is.
Shamans might have a ceremony and a psychotropic vegetable cocktail to help you commune with the godhead, to overcome the fear of death, or to reach an higher level in whichever respect one might choose: folkloric intoxication, and tribal hallucination. Doctors in white-as-purity lab coat and stethoscope may prescribe designer medications to overcome anxiety, re-establish sex drive, and so forth: cosmetic pharmacology.
147
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Ben-Shahar178 also lampoons the entire business when he declares he used to receive from his mother in his youth much of the same distilled advice he later came to associate with distinguished positive psychologists. Professor of Communication Dues tracks this development:
Many organizations find that retaining an ombudsman is a costeffective way to resolve conflicts. In some organizations, an informal ombudsman, referred to as a “priest,” may emerge. This is an individual who has been with the organization for a long time and has built a reputation as being wise, trustworthy, and willing to listen to and help others. (2010:66). “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them ”179. What the positive psychologist may be hiding -or he wouldn't be all that positive to start with- is the downside:
"With the decline of organized religion, people are shifting their faith from the god of their fathers and mothers to themselves, and in the business world the phenomenon is intensified," says Ralph Whitehead, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor and a critic of popular culture. -...-“Corporate downsizers fire every third person and then put up inspirational posters in the halls to cover the psychic wounds.” (Davis 1994:no page). Mythological thinking, however, with its disgraced heroes who eventually triumph; its calls to vindicate manifest destinies; its windfalls etc is a double-edged sword. The NSDAP or Khmer Rouge regimes in fact thought in mythological terms as did the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. 1782009: lecture 6.3. 179Walden, Thoreau 1854: no page.
148
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
It is possible to choose a fairly apolitical example so that 'best of all causes' won't get in the way.
After winning one of the biggest shows of my career, the 1994 Musclemania, I watched the national television broadcast by myself. That doesn’t sound like much of a celebration, does it? I did the same with a videotaped version of Musclesport USA’s showing of my 1998 NPC Team Universe overall victory. You don’t see all of those things when you see my picture in one of the international bodybuilding magazines, do you? No matter how glamorous my lifestyle may seem on the outside-...- there’s a price to pay. You may not know what that price is, but trust me, the bigger the reward you receive, the bigger the price you pay! (La Cour180 no date:129). "I experienced what we in the profession call the silent scream" of pain, drugs and loneliness, says wrestling legend "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, 49, who has been in the business more than 30 years. "You're in your hotel room. You're banged up, numb and alone. You don't want to go downstairs to the bar or restaurant. The walls are breathing. You don't want to talk. Panic sets in and you start weeping. It's something all of us go through." (Swartz 2004:no page). A safe bet is to say everybody pays the price -such as injuries, lifestyle deprivations, possible drug (ab)use in bodybuilding and wrestling-, yet only a remotely limited percentage gets to the top (whatever that may mean in one's opinion), delivers the virgin or any other example one might use. There may have been some evolutionary or genetic advantage to this hero attitude when it was all about foraging for food, running after a gazelle, or from a lion; or in the Bronze Age. In the modern world things are a bit different, perhaps.
For each one who turned one dollar into ten chasing that new stock180 Skip La Cour was an accomplished bodybuilder.
149
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
market tiger, countless lost everything in the recurring crashes and swindles. It turns out the very occasional (percentage-wise) awesome stock-market profit was in fact made possible by the countless who either experienced more or less significant losses, or negligible returns.
People who have been financially wiped out in their first divorce may think of themselves as those xeroxed heroes who fail all the way to ultimate success, which -unfortunately- is less often the case than commonly believed: there is about 34% (25yo & older) and 47% (25yo and younger) chance a second marriage in the U.S will also end in divorce within 10 years181.
In the fabulous 1987 inspirational movie Over The Top, a bumming truck driver bets all his wealth on his (slim) chance to win an arm-wrestling tournament...and finally wins.
People who – like the fictional Over The Top
character- recklessly chased after hefty returns specialized newspapers prophesied about real-estate investments may -as recession periodically hits, and market value plummets- realize they have possibly jeopardized their savings in order to 'feed the societal machine' (taxes, jobs, services...).
People may have pictured themselves as another Van Damme character winning the death tournament of life: renewal through struggle. As newspapers show, though, it all typically ends for most in a disaster a judge eventually settles at 181 Last data this study was based upon were from 1995 ( Bramlett&Mosher no date:25).
150
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the participant's high personal cost: loss, anger and futility.
There are countless ways to lure people into being “another brick in the wall” with negligible returns, or bearing significant losses:
In other words, only a small percentage of Americans attend college, graduate, and use their degree in a relevant field. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics -...- “there are 115,000 janitors, 83,000 bartenders…and 80,000 truck drivers [in the United States] with bachelor’s degrees.” Not only have recent college graduates earned degrees they don’t use (after having taken out hundreds of thousands dollars in loans to pay for them) but the labor market is moving in a surprising and perhaps unanticipated direction. (Doherty 2012: no page, emphasis added). More than 40 percent of recent U.S. college graduates are underemployed or need more training to get on a career track, a poll released on Tuesday showed. The online survey -...- also found that many graduates, some heavily in debt because of the cost of their education, say they are in jobs that do not require a college degree. (Reaney 2013:no page). According to negotiation expert Gavin Kennedy, as many businesses go under because they strike bad deals as those that fail to strike enough dealsextnote -...-. Barry Nalebuff, a professor of management at Yale, [offered] rather surprising advice to young entrepreneurs: Don’t start a new business. According to Nalebuff, it’s possible to get 99 things right and 1 thing wrong in a business deal and find you are ruined. (Freeman 2014:79-80). 60% of all mergers fail by various measures (Freeman 2014: Measuring Success And Walking Away). Studies find that about 75 percent of all jobs in the United States are filled through connection, referral, and internal promotion (Freeman 2014:155). e xtnote ...and those businesses who realize they have to strike more deals endeavor to do so. Sooner or later the fateful bad deal comes, and they go under as well. (note of this writer).
151
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
I asked them to find out how winners of one business school competition [choosing a prospective business plan most likely to succeed], a top one, had actually done five to fifteen years later. -...about 20-25% were showing real promise -...- about 20% were threading water -...- and the rest -...- were missing in action, or dead, or never got started -...-. By the way, plans that came in second place had a failure rate of about 75%. (Freeman 2014: Healing The Troubled Deal). 61 of the 100 original firms [from the original 1917 “top 100” Forbes company list] had ceased to exist by 1987. Only 18 firms remained in the top one hundred seventy years later (Roberto 2011: Portrait Of A Transformation). Ben-Shahar182 also takes exception at the noted Minnesota Twin Study that predicted trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller. Ben-Shahar rejects the notion of average, and focuses on the top, the cream of the crop who succeeds. Lyubomirsky183 takes a more reasonable approach and concludes happiness is determined by a genetic set point (50%), external circumstances (10%), and intentional activity (40%):
The ADL reported a 15 percent decline in anti-Semitic incidents in 1982 from the previous year, and out of 829 incidents, only 197 involved vandalism at Jewish synagogues, temples and community centers. The Wiesenthal Center, on the other hand, claimed a total of over a thousand vandalism cases, asserting, for instance, that in the last three years 57 percent of the synagogues in New York had been vandalized. These are not trivial differences. (Wilcox 1994:7). Of course, all those 'scientific studies' are easy to debunk, because to a Darfur peasant, a homeless or unemployed person under a New York, Delhi or Paris bridge “external circumstances” matter more than a cursory 10%; studies after all 182 2009: lecture 3.2. 183 2005.
152
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
target elusive “averages” peculiar to specific cultures (U.S or western culture typically). Yet the public (=those likely to buy the book, tape, or entrance to the conference) loves those fancy -and scientific-looking- little diagrams.
For each dream relationship just like that movie or novel exemplify, how many experience toxic relationships, 'quiet desperation' (“learnt helplessness” in the scientist's jargon), litigation, divorce and break-ups? After all, this disheartening reality is what propelled since time immemorial a row of neurotic 184 fantasies about lands of plenty, absolute redress, unflinching fairness, children and concubines as numerous as one's treasure chests, surfeit, eternal youth, and health for all indiscriminately.
Such neurotic fantasies are routinely repackaged to suit the moment's taste. For example, personality coaches promise to increase one's romantic success exponentially. Once one has learnt the personality coach's lesson, s-he may practice joining one of the countless venues offered for that purpose: singles' bars, online and offline dating and marriage agencies, dating and interest clubs and websites...
Is positive psychology a product of the late 1990s -as Ben-Shahar contends-? What about M. Fordyce, his research in the 1970s and his eponymous 1981 Psychology Of Happiness video series? Readers would be hard-pressed to find 184 Such statements shall be intended as behavioral, not clinical statements. The present writer is not a licensed mental health professional, therefore such statements shall be meant as implying “compatibility with” current descriptions of said clinical conditions in relevant literature.
153
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
general concepts from Fordyce's book (1987ss) 185 and series that do not recur in BenShahar's courses (2005-9).
What about the self-help waves from the XIX century, among which Pelmanism?186 Pelmanism was a training system devised in the 1890s -and still on
185 For example Fordyce's “14 fundamentals”:” 1. Be more active and keep busy. 2. Spend more time socializing. 3. Be productive at meaningful work. 4. Get better-organized and plan things out. 5. Stop worrying. 6. Lower your expectations and aspirations. 7. Develop positive optimistic thinking. 8. Get present-oriented. 9. WOAHP -- work on a healthy personality. 10. Develop an outgoing, social personality. 11. Be yourself. 12. Eliminate the negative feelings and problems. 13. Close relationships are #1 source of happiness. 14. VALHAP [Value Happiness]-- the "secret fundamental". ”. (2000:no page). 186 A search on popular Google Scholar in October 2013 for “Pelmanism” as title returned only six results, all unrelated. An ad for Pelmanism ran on British periodical Street&Smith's Unknown in November 1939. The Pelman Institute at London offered serving members of H.M Forces the full course and guidance for half the price. The full-page ad reads like a positive psychology course synopsis. “Brings out your hidden talents”;”Are you half the man you ought to be?”;”I never thought I had it in me”;”your confidence brings success”;it sweeps away”forgetfulness, depression, indecision, moodiness, mind-wandering, unnecessary fears”;”The intention of every word in the Course is to make clear to men and women the means by which they can develop their powers to the fullest extent so that they can live more happily and be more successful.”. Brown profiles Pelmanism thus:”Pelmanism enjoyed the most extraordinary range of endorsements from the good and the great of British life -...-The claimed scale of the uptake was truly astonishing, and explains the ability of its promoters to afford weekly full-page adverts in so many newspapers. But the advertisements did not actually spell our what was being offered. -...- Despite its claims to the contrary. there was a mystery about it, deliberately cultivated in these massive and frequent advertisements. In the midst of war the churchgoing middle classes were enticed by these oblique, mysterious advertisements to see in Pelmanism a new sciencebased discovery of something that would be of special interest to those interested in spiritual matters and was endorsed by some leading religious figures. -...- In reality, Pelmanism was something very simple. It was a system for improving memory using playing cards placed face down on a table and memorising their positions, and it is still used by some educationalists today. But the way it was branded and advertised during the Great War helps us to understand how religion rested in popular culture. Pelmanism was advertised primarily through religious newspapers, and claimed mostly men as its devotees. Its advantages were the acquisition of rapid promotion, bravery and honours. By implying some linkage to religion, it was acquiring a certain status with men, appealing to them as a religious ' thing' with scientific credentials. This alerts us to the increasingly popular notion in the 1910s that religion was being understood (not disproved) by science. Religions, including Christianity, were being understood increasingly in terms of links with science, with testing, with proof and
154
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the market to this day- offering the equivalent of strength training for the mind, just like the Dune books of later decades imagined would be the case in a far-flung future187: quite a coincidence again.
The gnostic current that gives [Scientology founder and sci-fi writer] Hubbard's tech its peculiar zap. Sounding like an Extropian battle plan, Scientology claims "to increase spiritual freedom, intelligence, ability, and to produce immortality." Once the Emeter has erased all the instincts, memories, and pains that define our personalities, we are left with what Hubbard calls the "thetan," an immortal essence that he defines as the incorporeal part of us that is "aware of being aware." -...-In fact, Hubbard's cosmology reads like "The Hymn of the Pearl" as filtered through Darwin and paranoid science fiction. (Davis 1999:140). One positive psychologist writes:
I started by telling him that positive psychology draws on ideas from many esteemed sources ranging from ancient Greek philosophers, to hallowed religious traditions, to modern-day writers and thinkers. What’s more, I went on, the principles and theories are then empirically tested and validated. So while some of the ideas espoused by positive psychology may very well be common sense, it’s the science behind them that makes them unique and valuable. (Achor 2010:136). Of course, “science” today replaces the holy ghost of yore, whose impact is certain, yet that works in slightly -or not so slightly- different ways depending on who's telling the story ( much as one would talk about god's grace 188, Chi, Ain Sof, with discovery.” (2006:102-3) 187 Pelmanism's jargon about the training of the mind also suspiciously resembles that of Tibetan Buddhism. 188 God's grace (Isaiah 40:28ss) seems to act just like mystical Chi (China), Num (Ju people of the Kalahari), Mana ( Pacific island cultures), Haché (Afro-Cuban Santeria), Prana (India), Pneuma (Ancient Greece), Ain Sof (Hebrew Kabbalah) etc in traditional healing systems:”Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. -...-but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary,
155
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Prana, Haché, Pneuma, Num, Mana etc). Jesus said:”And so I tell you, every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.” (Matthew 12:31).
It turns out even Hindu Upanishads (several centuries BCE) agree that “denying the manifestation -...-the whole life energy falls blank -...- we become not interested in manifestation, we believe in karma [=fatalism]” 189. It ensues that sinning against, disregarding or misusing such elusive mystical 'x forces' – whether science, Mana or god's grace- results in the most serious consequences.
In 1956, Aurobindo's sidekick190 and successor announced “the descent of the supermind”. The fact that a woman purported to be the embodiment of quintessential spiritual values acts as vehicle for the descent of some divine consciousness looks increasingly like a restyling of manifold messianic doctrines about royal virgins giving birth to superhuman heroes: one and the same.
The “mind of god” (providence etc), too, has found a contemporary
doppelgaenger as its replacement: the (more or less) free and self-regulating market economy and its 'invisible hands' and inner dynamics. If the market replaces god, then all else follows. The curve towards sinfulness and moral decay shall trigger a they will walk and not be faint. ”. 189 Yatsenko, MAISI011 no date: lecture 2. 190 Mirra Alfassa, known as “the mother” in Aurobindonian circles“India's (Jewish) mother -...- How Mirra Alfassa went from being a French bohemian to an Indian goddess -...-The de facto goddess of this town is a Sephardic Jew from France. ” (Goldberg 2010: no page). In Hindu ashrams (=religious communities), the male chief philosopher was often accompanied by a female counterpart called “mother”.
156
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
fire-and-brimstone judgment day when god shall reward the meek and punish the evil.
Marxists say that the curve towards the decrease of profit and so forth shall inevitably trigger the implosion of the capitalist system. A vanguard of proletarian have-nots shall then enact judgment day against a cohort of greedy bourgeois and their lackeys. One scenario is the province of the ill-educated: opium to pacify the gullible. Another is the 'scientific' forecast of the 'political economist': both look so alike only political expediency makes differences count.
In fact, positive psychologists are in sharp disagreement over very precise points, in spite of allegedly deriving them from the 'unbiasedly scientific' verdict of electronic microscopes, FMRI scans or statistical analysis. To give a trivial example, Ben-Shahar and Morin claim counting one's blessings (=gratitude exercise) daily sorts the best effects, whereas Lyubomirsky emphasizes the exercise works only if performed once a week. In perfect Bernays style, we may say that regular gratitude exercises do show positive results: filling the gaps of this wide statement is left to the reader.
At a conference191, Cialdini emphasized his six principles that shall invariably lead one to become markedly more influential in one's circle:
191 2001.
157
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
1. Reciprocation.
2. Social Proof.
3. Commitment and consistency.
4. Liking.
5. Authority.
6. Scarcity.
Answering a question, however, he has to refer to a study, and to concede that the priority of his principles varies enormously across cultures: USA (reciprocation comes first); China (authority); Spain (liking); Germany (commitment and consistency). This possibly amounts to debunking Cialdini's own surefire method to start with, at least to the present writer, for those 'magic principles' are not magic at all.
They are simple list of ingredients a successful outcome is based upon, such as baking a great cake. Having all the raw materials in the world (the best oven, eggs, sugar, flour etc) at one's disposal along with a detailed recipe from the best cook in no way guarantees one's cakes are invariably going to be top of the line.
Buddhist monks and new-agers in fact shroud Indian thought in the jargon of quantum physics. Scholars categorically promise they'll teach you how to 158
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
be(come) “happier” ( Ben-Shahar) or “undoubtedly more influential” (Cialdini) in a scientific way quoting peer-reviewed studies, yet Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard has been dubbed “the happiest person in the world”. Experienced Buddhist meditators like Ricard and jailed psychopaths 192 furthermore share a startle response rate much lower than average:
Matthieu Ricard, French translator and right-hand man for the Dalai Lama, has been the subject of intensive clinical tests at the University of Wisconsin, as a result of which he is frequently described as the happiest man in the world. It's a somewhat flattering title, he says, given the tiny percentage of the global population who have had their brain patterns monitored by the same state-of-the-art technology, which involves attaching 256 sensors to the skull, and three hours' continuous MRI scanning. (Chalmers 2007: no page). Not the good life but better living is the therapeutic standard. (Rieff 2006:48). Such commandments as the “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do”193 by popular author, speaker and psychotherapist Amy Morin look suspiciously like Buddhism reworked to go on air as a crowd-pleasing show. Agony aunts with letters after their names coach people following 'scientific principles', not shamanic gnostic bunkum from the axial age...for those who can tell the difference.
If quite a few Buddhist monks have been empirically shown to be “much 192 “psychopaths have a very small startle response.” (Kiehl 2014:225). 193 From Morin's website (http://www.amymorinlcsw.com/mentally-strong-people/):1. They Don’t Waste Time Feeling Sorry for Themselves;2. They Don’t Give Away Their Power;3. They Don’t Shy Away from Change;4. They Don’t Waste Energy on Things They Can’t Control;5. They Don’t Worry About Pleasing Everyone;6. They Don’t Fear Taking Calculated Risks;7. They Don’t Dwell on the Past;8. They Don’t Make the Same Mistakes Over and Over;9. They Don’t Resent Other People’s Success;10. They Don’t Give Up After the First Failure;11. They Don’t Fear Alone Time;12. They Don’t Feel the World Owes Them Anything;13. They Don’t Expect Immediate Results.
159
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
happier�, why does the average person need positive psychologists, and their 'science'? Perhaps because the average modern man is not one easily swayed, gullible Tibetan or Cambodian peasant, nor one emotionally hollow hippie, but a man of science? What a powerful statement to make about oneself. Another possible explanation is the slow but steady rise in effectiveness of psychotropics, which has rendered many positions in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy etc obsolete. Failed or unemployed psychologists and their ilk would then turn to new-age pursuits, and vague oriental mysticism.
The same gist recurs in all sorts of garbs. In the XVIII/XIX century, most depictions or accounts of backward or non-mainstream/western societies -typically in a colonial context- are marked by either emotive (personalization=dispositional factors= traits) depictions of rituals, threatening or bloody display of physicality, or both, to signify how those cultures ranked much lower on the supposedly ascending ladder towards depersonalization.
Of course, today's civilized man would never resort to such icky, tacky, gratuitous brutalities, and odd superstitions: white collar lawfare; 'intelligent' incendiary bombs; ecologically friendly killing fields; sanitary gas chambers; wellordered concentration camps might do. If those accursed regimes had survived long enough, they would probably have published 'studies' to extol the virtues of such friendly, ecological, sanitary, orderly policies, much as new studies make a strong
160
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
case for more speed traps, albeit comparing pocket pickers with murderers is a hasty generalization indeed.
The ultimate depersonalization (=situational factors) of treatment avowedly reflects moral maturity that shuns revenge/emotivity in favor of more or less clinical, industrial disposal/retribution:
the true functional relationship today has resolved all tension. The `functional' service relationship is no longer violent, hypocritical or sado-masochistic; it is openly warm, spontaneously personalized and definitively pacified. We find it in the extraordinary, vibrant atonality of the announcers at major airports or on TV; in the atonal smile, so `sincere' and calculated (though, ultimately, it is neither of these things for it is no longer a question of sincerity or cynicism here, but of `functionalized' human relations, cleansed of all temperamental or psychological aspects, cleansed of all real, affective harmonics, and reconstituted on the basis of the calculated vibrations of the ideal relationship -- in a word, freed from any violent moral dialectic of being and appearance, and restored to the simple functionality of the system of relations). (Baudrillard 1998:163-4) People in Indian call centers are trained to imitate weird drawls from the U.S South to give a nearly perfect service to the often unsuspecting user.
Well, Buddhists possibly squabble about the exact path to liberation among Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana and other traditions, but so do scientists with the diverse, often conflicting, verdicts they squeeze out of FMRI scans, electronic microscopes and all.
Finally, much as there is a cottage industry of more or less instant
161
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
salvation offering a salad bar of philosophies for immediate gratification, so there is a cottage industry run by 'scientists'. There are mouths to feed, sport cars to buy and mortgages to pay everywhere: just one possible explanation among many.
Quantum entanglement and synchronicity are hot commodities indeed. In Italy in the 1980s, studies after studies proclaimed the need for medical prevention in many respects, which the nanny State would offer to all in the pursuit of the greater good. In recent years, studies after studies indict, censor and bemoan carelessness in prescribing superfluous medical exams and interventions, the false positives that invariably result, and the exercise's overall futility, just to reinforce the stern cuts in welfare services that the collapsing budget of the faltering providence State can no longer afford: quantum entanglement, indeed.
In Italy in recent times, the hydra of the nanny State's regulatory and public agencies has put the industry of electronic cigarettes under overzealous scrutiny: legal restrictions have been passed, shops have been raided and so forth. Studies have started censoring and bemoaning presumed risks associated with the former boon to mankind's health: electronic cigarettes as the alternative to carcinogenic tobacco.
News agency ANSA reports ( on 22 April, 2013) how official figures report a significant decrease in State revenue from the sale of tobacco products (-132 million in the first 2 months of 2013 as compared with 2012 ). ANSA also anticipates 162
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
lawmakers are considering further clampdown against the booming business of electronic cigarettes. MSN Notizie reports (May 25, 2013) how the loss of revenue from the sale of cigarettes shall reach 700 million euros in 2013 allegedly because of electronic cigarettes: regulators are frantically at work.
According to Italian news agency ANSA ( August 25, 2013) as clampdown hits the industry once again, one of Italy's biggest players in the electronic cigarettes niche instantly loses half of its turnover: the entire industry collapses. Readers shall individually appraise which 'best of all causes' may be at work in the case at hand: synchronicity, indeed.
Naturally, the fans of this, that or the other author mentioned here may make all sorts of objections and demand proof to their standard of satisfaction that shall be valid in all possible universes: the final verdict rests with the reader. Costa and various hoaxers simply made very generic claims, and the general public -including authorities, media and so forth- reacted like well-trained lab animals carried away in an orgy of melodramatic compassion.
Simply saying ravens are black invites the challenge to prove that all ravens in all circumstances and possible universes are black. One exception suffices to cripple or invalidate the entire argument; and even if that one exception happens not to be available at the moment, well it just might be the case later, so nobody could really tell. 163
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The point isn't entirely removed from everyday life. Around the year 2000, it was common practice among fraudulent dating agencies and I.T providers to claim that their due diligence code required an often undisclosed number of official complaints in order for them to terminate the activity of hackers and spam gangs, or impersonators, scammers and swindlers operating behind their facade without violating their civil rights. It was especially humorous as such providers claimed they still had to receive the final complaint they needed in order to terminate a certain activity that had been rumored to occur about all over the internet for weeks or maybe months at a time.
Yet it isn't just about individual sensationalized studies or pleas. The
Piltdown Man ( remains of the cranium of a supposed “missing link” between humans and apes, discovered in 1912 ), the Nebraska Man (1917-27, another presumed “missing link” among hominids), and the Archeoraptor (remains of a supposed “missing link” between dinosaurs and birds, discovered in 1999 ) are among the many gross mistakes or forgeries in paleontology or archeology, spanning several decades and different levels of technological sophistication: ( many ) prominent Belle Epoque194 scientists ( field experts in the context of the contention ) were fooled in 1912, yet equally fine scientists were fooled in 1999.
Given all the many anatomical incongruities in the Piltdown remains, 194 Opinions differ about the time span Belle Epoque may have covered. The present writer superposes it with the ballet/theater performance Excelsior in Italy; this extremely elaborate, lavish, popular extravaganza remained on stage from 1881 (in 1913 a movie would be filmed) to the beginning of WWI.
164
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
which of course are glaringly obvious from the vantage of the present, it is truly astonishing that the forgery was so eagerly embraced, by much of the British establishment at least, and by some notable North American anthropologists, including Henry Fairfield Osborn. The forgery was perfectly tailored, not technically but theoretically, and in the timing of the series of discoveries too. For instance, the first discoveries announced included parts of the obviously humanlike cranium and the equally obviously apelike jaw. But there was no canine tooth, which was a subject of some considerable interest because of the unusual wear pattern it might bear. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward predicted publicly what he thought such a tooth would look like, and within a few months one was found. His prediction was vindicated to the finest detail (Lewin 1987, no page, emphasis added). The frauded skull was freely accepted as genuine by a trusting public and scientists, who, as a matter of course, trusted other scientists' findings, and who were eager to discover that the cradle of the world's civilization was Britain. (VonRosenberg 1996:2). When finds are made they are inevitably incomplete, to the degree that some posited missing links consist of nothing more than a single bone. The dangers of this were demonstrated by Nebraska man, a find in 1922 which was comprised of only a single tooth. It was originally thought to be the tooth of an ancient human, from which an entire species was constructed, complete with artist’s graphic reconstruction, but by 1927 it had been established that the tooth was actually that of a peccary, a close relative of the pig, and Nebraska man was no more. As such, Nebraska man serves as an example of the power not of fossils, but of the beliefs we attach to them, beliefs which can extract an entire species from a single tooth. Though obviously an extreme example, the case demonstrates how flimsy the relationship between theory and evidence can be in palaeoanthropology. The incompleteness of fossils is a recurring problem in the search for a missing link, and a regular source of controversy (Goulden 2009:29). Despite the lack of evidence, however, there have been various claims that psychic phenomena can be used to understand the past. One of the most prolific was Edgar Cayce, who used “self-induced hypnosis” to enter a trance and thereby access psychic sources of information. This earned him the title of the “Sleeping Prophet.” Some of his sources were supposedly people who had lived before, including refugees from Atlantis -...-. He also invoked Atlanteans after the 165
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Piltdown skull was found (more about that later, too). Cayce’s sources told him that the skull was from one of a group of ancient Atlantean settlers who had reached England. By the time the Piltdown skull was definitively proven to be a fake in the 1950s, Cayce had died, so he never found out that his psychic sources were apparently in error (Johnston 2010:47). In other words, if later, second-, third-, or fourth-century orthodox Christians agreed with the views found in the book of Colossians and decided that it should be included in the Bible, then its author was an honest forger. Other authors, however, who espoused views that later Christians rejected, were dishonest forgers. And how would the authors themselves know that centuries later their views would be accepted or not? Well, obviously, they’d have no way of knowing. (Ehrman 2011:138). Archeoraptor in 1999 was examined by x-ray/scan/imaging experts in the realm of archeo/paleontology (not just one's skilled local hospital x-ray technician ). In spite of all this, the two forgeries were believed to be genuine for about 40 years (the Piltdown Man ), and months (in the case of the Archeoraptor ).
Of course, nowadays it is fashionable to pillory those Victorian hoaxers who wanted to turn England into the cradle of civilization to satisfy self-absorbed White supremacists. After all, Wirth -the intellectual and head of SS Ahnenerbe -a NSDAP division in charge of substantiating the presumed German ancestral legacyhad been caught supporting such preposterous and outlandish theories, which even NSDAP Minister Rosenberg shunned and blacklisted.
Today everybody knows Africa is the cradle of civilization; that poses no political dilemmas, and is in no way suggestive of 'strategies': it's just what the
166
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
electronic microscope and compass tell us, too bad for those who irrationally object:
Second, it is no wonder that the sheer irrationality of white racism generated, in return, writings that can be ‘sometimes quaint, sometimes fantastic ’extnote. Third, arguments for the blackness of the Ancient Egyptians were lent topicality by prejudiced assumptions that, by definition, black Africans could not be creators of ‘ civilization ’ either in the past or in the present day. In the United States, moreover, such arguments were taken up ‘at a time when ‘‘one drop of Negro blood’’ was enough to make even the whitest person a Negro’. None the less racial classifications of, say, nineteenth-century America cannot be transferred to ‘Neolithic Egyptians or Ethiopians’. Fourth, the body of ideas now labelled ‘Afrocentric’ has a long and complex genealogy, in which white (often Jewish, like Franz Boas and Melville J. Herskovits) and black (and ‘mulatto’) scholars have all participated. (De Moraes Farias 2003:327-8). While the above explanations might be good enough, it is not clear why it should be so in such a precise way: conclusions are always foregone.
Also, the routine is performed nearly verbatim from all provinces of the political spectrum: it is difficult to part devil advocacy from the far left from that of the far right. The same goes back to medieval -in turn an elaboration of GraecoRoman- strategies: the Aristotelian (qualitative=answering the question why) versus the (neo)Platonic (quantitative=mathematical=answering the question how) worldview, or the contemporary divide between rapport talk (qualitative) and report talk (quantitative). Rapport strategies focus on why-questions, hence on mind-reading and emotional connotations, whereas report strategies focus on howquestions, denotations (=dictionary definitions) and matter-of-fact statements. e xtnote It is possible to appreciate how this author juxtaposes “sheer irrationality of white racism” to “writings that can be ‘sometimes quaint, sometimes fantastic”: quite a difference (note of this writer).
167
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
168
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5 PSYCHIC UNITY OF MANKIND
Well before Freud's disciple Jung195 popularized the item, a German ethnologist and physician, Adolf Bastian, had already conducted extensive field research on aboriginal societies distilling the concept of collective unconscious and 'psychic unity of mankind' (around 1868). Psychic unity of mankind has nothing in common with other streams of thought positing a primeval prehistoric religion as bedrock for all the others; neither is it similar to conspiracy theory such as Hislop's, who published in 1853 an anti-Catholic book denouncing Catholicism as a continuation of Babylonian religion:
Watch Tower writers [=Jehovah’s Witnesses] do often cite various historical works, but as they do with the Bible itself, they tend to use them as a basis for prooftexts. Thus it is that they maintain a so-called biblical chronology which is demonstrably false, and they usc a curiously outdated speculative 'history' such as Dr Alexander Hyslop' s The Two Babylons or Papal Worship which is still quoted in many Watch Tower publications as though it were the Gospel itself. Interestingly, the society never bothers to tell the Witness community that The Two Babylons. one of their major sources of ' true hi story,' is a long-standing Plymouth Brethren publication." So by Witness standards, the Watch Tower Society is borrowing a source from Babylon the Great (false religion) to study about the role of Babylon in world history, All of this leads, then, to the maintenance of what amounts to a kind of nineteenth-century, fundamentalist history which ignores the last hundred years of scholarship in the field. (Penton 1985:183).
195As always in such cases, some even dispute any affiliation between Jung and Freud beside the fact of being “colleagues”, let alone discipleship.
169
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The same myths and beliefs recur in distant and unrelated cultures, with less important local variations; those very concepts were 'in the air' in the Victorian era:
It is generally assumed that the unconscious was discovered--that it is a dependable concept upon which various hermeneutics and critical narratives may be reliably grounded. In contrast, I argue that the unconscious was a cultural invention. I support this thesis by showing the nineteenth-century roots of the unconscious in novelists such as Hawthorne, Trollope, Charlotte Bronte, and Dickens, and in the narrative based philosophy of Hegel, Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. During the nineteenth-century, the "unconscious" (or what theorists now retrospectively refer to as the unconscious) was a mode of emplotment used to organize meaning in a world that was increasingly losing its foundations. This establishes the groundwork for my interpretation of Freud. I reinterpret Freud's alleged discovery of the unconscious as an effort to give a formal and quasiscientific understanding to the sorts of stories and plots that had emerged during the preceding century. By linking Freud's project with the narrative-work of the nineteenth century, I also challenge the common belief that modernist novelists discovered the unconscious-either under the influence of, or simultaneously with, Freud. Modernists, I suggest, were often aware of the fictive nature of Freud's effort. (Lindberg 1999:iii-iv). In the nineteenth century, certain general themes occupied much of the German-speaking world, and none more so than the will and the unconscious. These themes may well have reached their highest development in Freud, as many have suggested, but they did not begin with him, nor even with Nietzsche. To find their origins and first clear articulations, we have to go back at least as far as the strange misanthropic philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. In the latter we find not only an anticipation of some of Freud's most characteristic ideas but a surprisingly complete articulation of them. It is general knowledge, of course, that Schopenhauer anticipated Freud to some extent (we examine some discussions of the link below). Indeed, Freud himself acknowledged this, though with a curious ambivalence to which we will return later. (Young&Brook no date: no page).
170
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The theoretical and conceptual schemes represented in Freud’s Discontents are found to bear a remarkable similarity to Nietzsche’s Genealogy on a number of highly specific points. It is suggested that “das Es,” “Uber-ich,” and “bad conscience,” concepts central to Freud’s moral theory of mind, are at least partly derived from Nietzsche. Moreover, Freud’s phylogenetic theory of guilt is based upon premises found in Nietzsche, as are specific details relating to ideas on human prehistory and the ancestral family. (Greer 2002:303). Maupassant's 1884196
story Garçon, Un Bock! portrays the fateful
encounter between two classmates after a long time. The main character -as the title implies- is an alcoholic who wastes away drinking beer in unsavory beer-halls. He's no ordinary hobo, but the scion of a noble and wealthy family. While “the repressed” comes back circularly (“Garçon, un bock!”), the anti-hero finally tells his story. His life suddenly changed as he casually saw in his childhood his father as he used violence against his mother over money the father needed in order to -so the person says- finance his exploits as a womanizer.
Next day, things were apparently back to normal, yet the child's life had been changed forever: his psyche had been destroyed 197. In 2152 words in 1884 Maupassant magisterially delivers a cargo of myths, motifs, melodrama, pathetic fallacies and psychological narrative that puts to shame -for its craft and brevity- all the politicking bunkum, oracles replete with jargon and petty advocacy scribomanic pundits would write about in the thousands of pages in decades to come. 196Freud started publishing his theories in the 1890s. 197“"Eh bien, mon cher, c'était fini pour moi. J'avais vu l'autre face des choses, la mauvaise ; je n'ai plus aperçu la bonne depuis ce jour-là. Que s'est-il passé dans mon esprit ? Quel phénomène étrange m'a retourne les idées ? Je l'ignore. Mais je n'ai plus eu de goût pour rien, envie de rien, d'amour pour personne, de désir quelconque, d'ambition ou d'espérance” “ says the character.
171
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The present writer wishes to liken certain images/situations -no matter whether one may read about in a book, press article or 'watch about it' in a movie etc- to 'neuralgic points' of the human psyche; if pressure is applied in a certain way to certain spots of the human body (the Hindu marma198 principle), a spontaneous reaction -inherent to the very nature and structure of the human body- ensues, whether or not the subject consciously or otherwise wills it:
the symbol works as an automatic button -...- an energy-releasing and directing image (Campbell 2002:Society And Symbol). When archetypes are active, they evoke deep feelings. Sometimes those feelings have a spiritual resonance. -...- Archetypes ennoble life by highlighting its meaning. -...-Brands that are associated with each of these archetypes will feel right and comfortable to the people who express them and lend meaning to their lives in some interesting way. (Mark&Pearson 2001:20-1,32). So many famous authors (Bastian, Olrik, Rank, Raglan...) listed such strategies' ' successful ingredients' (Olrik's epic laws; Propp's functions; Raglan's score...) that the 'secret' is well known, which hasn't hampered its potential in the least. The very idea of a generalized collective unconscious (=Bastian's elementary ideas, Hindu marga) overarching humankind, and of localized manifestations (=Bastian's ethnic ideas, Hindu desi) comes back circularly.
The present writer loves to take a lesson from Bastian's approach in terms of a genealogy of mythology. What is the difference between a history and a 198 Traditional healing technique antecedent of acupuncture. It consists in the pressure the therapist applies to specific points of the human body to relieve specific ailments.
172
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
genealogy? First, discontinuity – or the apparently dominant role of ethnic ideasplays a major role against all sorts of providential blueprints and immanent actualizations. Second, there is a reversal of perspective to embrace a subaltern and marginal point of view, community or reality instead of a dominant one.
Conventional politicized narratives are not essential. Cosplayers impersonate imaginary and improbable cartoon, video game or comic strip characters with an emotional investment (=the emotionally supercharged statement about oneself) that parallels that of any electioneering drone.
Alternatively, cosplayers shun the headache gray uniformity of the mainstream by embracing another tentacle of the societal hydra video games, cartoons and comic strips represent:”Hence the incidents are fantastic and "unreal": they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs”;”I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”.
Again, the shaking of fists, the gasping for breath, the feeling of oneness, the heart-warming fallacies, shifting goalposts and multiple standards take center stage (=marga=elementary idea) irrespective of who or what are people supposedly at one with, shake fists at or gasp for breath about in that individual instance, particular place, defined historical period (=desi=ethnic ideas). 173
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
NLP and advertising specialist Boothman is adamant: “synchronization” (=doing the same thing) lies at the core of any human being, and -as far as Boothman is concerned- can allow one to close a sale fast199:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms-in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are wom out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins (Nietzsche 1873 in Kaufmann 1954:46-7). A great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last (John Steinbeck). When you see someone who has fallen on hard times, overwhelmed with hard times, you should conclude: 'We, too, have experienced just this sort of thing in the course of that long, long time.' (Gautama Buddha, Duggata Sutta). There is pity for the human sufferer – who is actually a counterpart, in this context, of oneself. (Campbell no date:no page). what kind of knowledge do we hope to derive from reading novels, which tell us stories we know are not “true”? -...- the novel, therefore, can offer us more or less convincing models of how and why people act as they do -...-. We continue to value novels, especially novels in the classic realist tradition, for the light throw on human motivation. (Lodge 1992:182-3). When you see someone who is happy & well-provided in life, you should conclude: 'We, too, have experienced just this sort of thing in the course of that long, long time.' (Gautama Buddha, Sukhita Sutta). Now I Aggivessana, am aware that when I am teaching Dhamma to 199 2004.
174
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
companies consisting of many hundreds, each person thinks thus about me: ‘The recluse Gotama is teaching dhamma especially for me'” (Gautama Buddha, Maha-saccaka-sutta. M.1.249, emphasis added). Jung's idea of the "archetypes" is one of the leading theories, today, in the field of our subject. It is a development of the earlier theory of Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), who recognized, in the course of his extensive travels, the uniformity of what he termed the "elementary ideas" (Elementargedanke) of mankind. Remarking also, however, that in the various provinces of human culture these ideas are differently articulated and elaborated, he coined the term "ethnic ideas" (Völkergedanke) for the actual, local manifestations of the universal forms. Nowhere, he noted, are the "elementary ideas" to be found in a pure state, abstracted from the locally conditioned "ethnic ideas" through which they are substantialized; but rather, like the image of man himself, they are to be known only by way of the rich variety of their extremely interesting, frequently startling, yet always finally recognizable inflections in the panorama of human life. (Campbell 1960:32, emphasis added). It is also opportune to emphasize that as certain motifs, myths, allegories etc get lost in particular places or settings, they immediately catch on like wildfire as soon as they're re-introduced. As soon as oriental thought started to make inroads west in a more or less coherent form 200 since the XVIII century201, it put the minds of the Romantics and especially Transcendentalists on fire. Is that proof this, that or another philosophy, idea or mytheme are “right” (whatever one may mean by it)? Isn't it rather proof of the human mind's circular proclivities that have remained the same across ages, regimes and continents?
Buddhism had existed in Western writing for a long time before 200 Reports from Christian missionaries to faraway lands – such as the Americas or Japan- were also popular in the XVI and XVII century. 201 Anquetil du Perron edited the first translation of a part of the Avesta (sacred texts of Zoroastrianism) in French in 1771. Around 1801, he also published selections from Hindu Upanishads.
175
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Hegel examined it. Strabo, Marco Polo and Peter Bayle had discussed it; John Toland talked about "the religion of Fo" (Buddha); the travel writer Richard Hakluyt published pictures of yogis (certain kinds of practitioner), though whether they were Hindu or Buddhist is not specified. The Annual Bibliography of English literature lists about forty citations about Buddhism, Tibet and the Dalai Lama in Romantic-period poetry. Thomas Moore, for example, wrote about mantra, Buddha, and Tibetan Lamas. Hegel's direct sources for his view of Buddhism are, primarily, the work of Samuel Turner (1749—1802), an English researcher who had gained access to the court of the Dalai Lama and his associate the Panchen Lama (the findings were published around 1800); and the sixth and seventh volumes of the encyclopedic Allgemeine Historie on Buddhism (1750) (Morton 2007:no page). 1987 movie Angel Heart mixed the hero's journey, the detective angle, and the Oedipal quest for an arch-sinner that turns out to be oneself: it was a success in spite of recycling the same old devices as countless other narratives. Truth (statistical probability, consistency, verisimilitude...) is not a necessary component of any strategy wanting to capitalize on the above, but 'what feels emotionally true' is: the quintessence of every religious experience.
Both
Mormonism
and
Christian
denominations
that
denounce
Mormonism as a cult preach the ultimate power of revelation through prayer: the warm, fuzzy feeling that either one has a personal relationship with Jesus (Jesus entered one's heart, etc); or that god's true revealed covenant is Joseph Smith's.
Depending on someone's possible religious beliefs, sociopolitical climate, political leaning or affiliation, personal background and other dangling variables, some of these comparisons may be rejected at first sight, or retained in the form of 176
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
just one of the possible interpretations.
Rejecting -or revering- the concept of psychic unity of mankind does not make the contention go away about images or concepts copycatted the world over across continents, ages, and levels of social and technological sophistication. For example, disembodies body parts serving as quintessential fetish (eyes, phalli, hands...) abound, mother goddesses with child, dying and rising savior-heroes, glittering cities atop hills, weapons with the supernatural power to invariably hit what they are aimed at such as Karna's spear in the Mahabharata, and Hercules' bow.
An
unlikely
source
describes
the
quintessential
savior-hero
perfectly:�savior of the universe -...- he'll save everyone of us -...-king of the impossible -...- he's for everyone of us -...- just a man, with a man's courage -...- but he can never fail -...- the pure in heart�: the soundtrack of 1980 blockbusting Flash
Gordon.
Doane devotes extensive checklists to the comparison between Jesus and Chrisna202, and between Jesus and Gautama Buddha203. Cooper writes an entire book exploring The Horus Myth and Its Relation to Christianity 204; Massey205 lists 2021884:278. 2031884:289. 204 1877 . The specification Gautama Buddha indicates the founder of Buddhism, as in some traditions there are several Saints called Buddha. 205 1907:906ss. As with most works that engage in such detective feats, reactions may go from uncritical endorsement to indignant accusations of the basest of crimes, of the most abject incompetence and of jaded
177
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
similarities between the lore of Jesus and that of Horus206. In 1928, Brown writes:
In this study I make no effort to exhaust the endless number of later Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Christian, and African legends exemplifying walking on the water. I confine myself to the material bearing directly upon my problem, most of which is of pre-Christian antiquity. (v). Christian propagandists such as Chris White go into conniptions denouncing such line of thought, then conveniently resume it with no feeling of incoherence when they are to denounce Catholic conspiracies, or the fact that -to name one- positing December 25th as Jesus' birthday is a late, commodious addition Catholics of the early centuries concocted to either absorb, or work a deal with paganism.
Catholicism -the only mainstream form of Christianity for over 10 centuries- would thus be -according to White and his ilk- just a reworking of equal parts of Biblical and pagan items -such as Sun worship- orchestrated by the likes of Constantine and
early Church figures alike. It won't escape readers how the
statement they restrict to Catholicism (=a hybrid hodgepodge of pagan, Hebrew and Christian beliefs) is precisely the accusation leveled against Christianity by the same authors they get into conniptions to avowedly refute.
Magical trees are everywhere. Pottery from the Samarra culture (Iraq, around 4.000 BCE) shows gazelles circumambulating (=common mytheme) a sacred judgment. One of this essay's contentions is about the highly politicizable nature of myths. 206 Horus' mother Isis in fact is among the oldest representation of the mother goddess nursing her child.
178
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
tree. Pre-hispanic America notably honored the Ceiba tree; the Gwiti of Gabon honor the Iboga tree; the Iroco tree -and relative orisha- is associated with Yoruba mythology; the Kepa (sacred graveyard tree) exists in Bali; the Yggdrasil appears in Nordic mythologies; the sacred olive tree appears in Athens; the laurel tree was sacred to the Eleusinian mysteries; young Dionysus plants a fig tree at the entrance of his cave as he was stranded ashore at Vrasies as an infant; Moses approaches the burning bush; Vergil compares Aeneas to an oak tree. The Sakaki tree branch is offered during traditional Japanese Shinto ceremonies such as marriages, and branches of other trees (pine, plum, bamboo) are offered at other times.
The basket in which infant Romulus and Remus floated atop a river comes to rest underneath a fig tree; the infant Dionysus rests beneath a tree, on which -just like in the Biblical story- a serpent climbs; Gautama Buddha is born, enlightened, and dies beneath a tree; Shiva as world teacher sits below the divine tree facing south; Judas commits suicide in some version by hanging himself from a fig tree; Mahayana Bodhisattva Manjusri teaches in the sala tree grove. Japan's possibly biggest Shinto sanctuary at Ise is located in a lush groove.
Jesus sulks on the Mount of Olives ( Luke 22:39) in a doubt and redemption shtick (=the hero as frail creature just like us), much as the forbidden trees of Eden find their vindication in Jesus as the “holy root” ( Romans 11:16-24)207. 207 Examples to the contrary are present:”the body must not remain hanging from the tree overnight. You must bury the body that same day, for anyone who is hung is cursed in the sight of God. In this way, you will prevent the defilement of the land the LORD your God is giving you as your special possession. ( Deuteronomy
179
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Jesus as well curses a fig tree for bearing no fruit off season: the tree withers ( Mark 11:12-25). Joseph Smith meets a spiritual revelation during a walk in the woods.
According to Campbell208, Jesus, the holy root, being crucified at the “place of the skull” (Golgotha), sends his blood down onto Adam's skull as a token of forgiveness towards humankind in a blurred edition of another vegetation myth. From Adam's skull the cross as holy tree sprouts with Jesus on top:”It is almost like a reflex in another medium of the same thing, the same story. Instead of corn, or maize, it's a coconut.”209. A wonderful tree grows around Osiris surreptitiously trapped into a sarcophagus.
The cross - present in Egyptian lore as well- could also be interpreted as a sort of tree. Besides, the cross also represents the axis of the world, crossings and crossroads (Hercules at the crossroad), places sacred in both the Graeco-Roman and Hindu world: the Buddha's relics were placed in temples at crossroads 210.
The Hebrew garden of Eden imagery of Adam and Eve being kept by armed angels from re-entering the garden after disobeying god recurs in Buddhism, too211. At Nara (Japan), or many other (Mahayana) Buddhist temples, two fearsome 21:23).” 208 1972-2:Man&Myth Through The Ages I. 209 Campbell&Moyers 1991:87. 210 “Immediately after the Buddha's death, laymen divided his remains (sarira) into eight parts and constructed burial mounds (stupas) for them. These stupas were constructed at the intersections of major roads (DN, vol. 2, p. 142) where large groups of people could assemble, not at the monasteries where monks lived” (Hirakawa 1990:105). 211 Campbell 1967a.
180
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
guardians (desire and fear) flank the threshold to the temple, in the interior of which Gautama or some other Buddha sits beneath the tree of enlightenment with a welcoming gesture.
A Japanese kendo (Japanese sword mastery) gymnasium was located in a Buddhist Soto temple at Hyogo (near Kobe, Japan) in the 1970s; the temple abbot presided over training session monks taught: the place where one cultivates young sprouts was the name of the place. The obsession with agricultural or horticultural metaphors goes back to Mesopotamia and Zoroastrian imagery at the dawn of civilization.
Hale212 links gardening with precepts in Zoroastrian religion that exalted the agricultural lifestyle as opposed to an herding and nomadic one. Gardening (=cultivation) has of course metaphysical or political connotations as well. Persian Achaemenid Kings called themselves gardeners. Sargon, the legendary King of Akkad (XXIV century BCE), was assertedly raised by foster parents. He became a gardener before the goddess Ishtar granted him her love, and ensuing royal power.
Mythological threshold are all over: Romulus kills his brother Remus after he jumps past a threshold Romulus had dug. An eruv is a ritual enclosure Jewish communities trace to encompass several properties into one domain for the purpose of observing the precepts of the Sabbath. According to Greek etymology, 212 2009:Tending Zoroaster's Sacred Fire In Iran.
181
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the very word temple denotes a sacralized, ritual enclosure.
Historical figures of all sorts are often associated with trees: George Washington and the cherry tree213; Guatemalan Saint Hermano Pedro and the Esquisuchil tree he sowed, and so forth. At times, trees and famous people become one: U.S President Jackson (Old Hickory); physique superstar, actor and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Oak)...
If miraculous trees are everywhere, so is related fabrication:
We know that this story [= Washington and the cherry tree] never happened, because the person who invented the tale later admitted to having done so. He was a Christian minister named Mason Locke Weems, usually known as Parson Weems. As a later biographer of Washington, Parson Weems confessed that he made up the story, even though he once had claimed that he received it from a credible eyewitness (a nice paradox: he “told a lie” in this story about not lying). Here, then, is a story that we know is nonhistorical. But we still tell it to our children. Why? Not because we are trying to teach them about the facts of colonial history, but because we think the story conveys a “truth” that we want our children to learn. (Ehrman 2011:53). In Italy, it was mandated that burial grounds had their viale delle
rimembranze to commemorate soldiers fallen during WWI. Even small villages had one: a tree was typically planted to commemorate each soldier. St. Mary often appeared in proximity to trees. Madonna Della Quercia (St. Mary of the oak) is a version of Mary honored with equal fervor and originality in various parts of Italy:
213 In the lore, Washington as a boy confessed he had chopped down his father's cherry tree.
182
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Roma, Viterbo, Pitigliano, Rieti, Civitavecchia, Calabria: miracles multiply everywhere.
Vergil establishes links between trees and human heroes in the Aeneid; in the Odyssey, princess Nausicaa (VI:160-169) is compared to a superb palm tree growing at Apollo's temple at Delos. Sikh devotees pledged to plant trees to commemorate Sikh victims of a period of civil unrest and inter-religious clashes in India in the early 1980s.
During a trip to the holy land in June 2014, Pope Francis I plants an olive tree -a symbol of peace- in collaboration with Israeli leader Peres, Orthodox Patriarch Bartolomew and Palestinian leader Abbas: a few weeks later the vicious cycle of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli cities, and Israeli military reprisals begins anew.
Similarities may come in bulk. It is possible to see how Jain Saints Mahavira, “the great hero�214, (VI century BCE215) and Bahubali216; Indian (later Tibetan) Buddhist Saint Atisha (X-XI century CE) had a life very similar to Gautama Buddha's: prodigious pregnancy, princely upbringing, mystical vocation, rejection of worldly ties and ministry preaching doctrines similar to Buddhism. Buddhist Tantric
214 Just in case doubts remained about the intertwined role savior and hero figures play. 215 As with all these ancient figures, their lives are mostly shrouded in mystery; different scholars may situate them in more or less different time periods. 216 Mythical prince victorious over his brother. Bahubali then gives up his kingdom and pursues a spiritual path. Son of a sage who purportedly had 100 sons. Bahubali's life may be seen as a Jain answer to the Mahabharata.
183
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
master Śubhākarasiṃha (637-735) also shared many high points: princely birth; retreat after a succession struggle with siblings; miraculous and wandering ministry...
St. Francis of Assisi's (XII/XIII century CE) birth wasn't prodigious, nevertheless he went through most of the high points: birth in an affluent family, more or less dissolute youth, conversion, severing of worldly ties, religious ministry, hardships/rejection, extensive travels, sainthood.
Popular culture couldn't be far behind. 1988 comedy Coming To
America, also portrays an exotic Prince (in that case, African) living a life of sheltered indulgence, which he leaves behind (=hero's journey; Gautama Buddha leaving his palace) with his attendant (= Gautama Buddha and his charioteer) to trail the path of both a modest amount of gnostic insight, and a Cinderella story in AfroAmerican sauce. 1983 Italian comedy Un Povero Ricco sees an industrialist leaving comfort behind in order to treat his irrational fear of getting broke: gnostic experiences and a love story await him.
Peter Waldo (the medieval heresiarch, 1140-1218 CE) also went through many high points217. Apollonius of Tyana's (40-120 CE) life also went through the high points of the godly man ( theios aner in Greek): a prodigious pregnancy; a lofty inheritance he renounces in order to pursue a mystical vocation; celibacy; itinerant 217 Wealth he forsook in pursuit of mysticism; itinerant ministry; rejection/persecution; posthumous fame...
184
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
ministry; rejection and persecution by wicked Emperors such as Nero and Domitian; miracles; ascent to heaven; posthumous appearances etc.
Ascents to heaven can take the form of a sort of journey, or it may be construed as possibly growing taller:”He hath gone up the heights of earth and heaven ” says Hindu Rig Veda (XV century BCE or older) about the god Savitar, the creator. In the Gospel Of Peter (I/II century CE), two angels escort Jesus out of the tomb as he resurrects: their height reaches up to heaven, yet Jesus' height reaches well beyond heaven.
In Buddhist Yamaka Sutta, Sariputta corrects Yamaka's wrong perception that sages attaining nirvana no longer exist after death: they're indeed transcendental. Payasi Sutta presents a similar text: monk Kumara-Kassapa convinces a prince who staunchly disbelieved in karma and the afterlife to embrace right views. Apollonius appears in a dream to a disciple who doubts (=doubting Thomas of Christianity) immortality, and convinces him that Apollonius is indeed immortal, and so will the disciple be.
Peregrinus Proteus (95-165 CE) – a Christian and later Cynic philosopher-, throws himself on a pyre to die in imitation of Hercules. In some accounts, he is rumored to have ascended to heaven, and to have appeared posthumously. Peregrinus also goes through many of the great man's high points: an inheritance he donates to his city's people; ministry, persecution etc. An evil King 185
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
tries to burn Tibetan Buddhist Saint Padma Sambhava alive on a pyre. After the Saint's transfiguration, the fire becomes lake Rewalsar (India).
India's Kabir (1440-1518) is a Saint dear to Muslims and Hindus alike. When he dies, his Hindu and Muslim devotees quarrel over whether Kabir's remains ought to be treated according to Hindu or Muslim customs; that's when they realize his body had mysteriously vanished leaving only flowers behind. The same story with additional twists 218 is told of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism; Baba Sri Chand (Nanak's son) also vanishes at his death.
Supremely accomplished Tibetan Buddhist masters may attain “the rainbow body�: their body allegedly disappears at death leaving only fingernails and hair behind. Chinese Taoist master and alchemist Wei Boyang ( Biographies Of
Immortals, IV century CE) feeds an elixir supposed to bring immortality to a dog, which dies on the spot. A faithful disciple and Wei himself also die upon ingesting the same compound. Two remaining disciples leave the mountain retreat to fetch coffins for their comrades; when they return, they find no corpses, but telltale signs that Wei had indeed become immortal.
These -and other stories mentioned herein- constitute variants of the 'empty tomb' narrative device used to lend credit to the superhuman exploits of this, 218It was decided that both Muslims and Hindus would place garlands around Nanak's body. The group, whose garland would next day be found still fresh, would take care of the master's body. Both groups' garlands were found intact the next day.
186
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
that or another 'great man'.
The 'empty tomb' narrative enjoys wide popularity, yet its inversion (the occupied tomb) is also popular. Various places and reliquaries have been rumored to contain the tomb/remains of the Magi who visited the infant Jesus; of Prester John; of Jesus (professedly buried at different places in the Middle East, India or even Japan); of Hercules (buried in Andalusia, Spain). The lapis niger219 (black pavingstone) in the Forum Romanum at Rome is seen as Romulus' tomb; in the IV century BCE, Romans identified a VII century BCE tomb as Aeneas' tomb.
If ancient Romans identified a VII century tomb as Aeneas' (a supposed Bronze-Age hero from a time before time), the Catholic Church identified a graveyard under St. Peter's basilica as the apostle's tomb, who assertedly was located right beneath the altar: quantum entanglement, indeed.
The opposite might also chance to apply: The Catholic Church brushes aside an alleged I century sarcophagus with an inscription of Peter's name and patronymic. Because the tomb is located in Jerusalem, thus going against Catholic tradition, the evidence shall be considered as describing some other unrelated person who chanced to bear the same name and patronymic.
A woman220 claims to have been raped by an individual resurfacing in 219 At Mecca, the Kaaba is the seat of the sacred black stone the angel Gabriel brought to Abraham as a symbol of the covenant. 220 Christina's...no date:no page.
187
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
her life repeatedly: as as a family friend; as a business partner; as her church's vicar221. The discombobulated account -which the woman wanted to memorialize in writing as so many 'people of sorrows' from mythology did- also rests upon a serious car accident that -as the woman bitterly acknowledges- was not recorded and left no trace: the tomb is empty. The 'empty' or 'occupied tomb' narrative is terribly in demand. A mental patient confided in the analyst that:” he had a premonition about lottery tickets, “I won but lost the ticket.””222.
The tomb might be neither empty, nor occupied. Leon Degrelle- the accursed Belgian Fascist leader and Waffen SS General223- was born in Belgium in 1906. Technically, however, he never died. The corpse that was assertedly cremated in 1994 belonged to a Spanish citizen named J.L. Ramirez Molina.
If Degrelle technically never died, some died more than once. In 1942, some Benito Albino Bernardi died in a psychiatric hospital in Milan where he had been detained since 1935. He was also known as Benito Albino Dalser. Bernardi -officially a telegraphist with the Italian navy- also appears missing in action at sea in 1941 during WWII. Before a name change, however, Benito Albino was known under another family name: Mussolini, the first born son of Benito Mussolini and 221 The storyline of 1996 movie Sleepers sees the former member of a camarilla of sodomite cops resurfacing as a deeply religious person. 222 Polimeni 2012:196. It won't escape readers how similar this story is to that of Gilgamesh. The hero secures a magical plant that gives youth back, but falls asleep: a serpent thus eats the plant depriving Gilgamesh of the opportunity of being young again. 223 Although the promotion rightfully appears in his military paper as granted by Himmler, many consider that invalid, as Hitler had stripped Himmler of his command short earlier.
188
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
his first wife Irene Dalser, who also died in a psychiatric hospital after bickering with powerful Benito.
What one does with the (anti)hero's body is the stuff of legend. The body of Hong Xiuquan, Chinese insurrectionist leader, self-proclaimed brother of Jesus, and “heavenly King” of an ephemeral “Heavenly Kingdom Of Great Peace” (=prince of peace mytheme) between 1851-64, was exhumed to insure his death; he was cremated, and his ashes were scattered from a cannon to insure eternal damnation.
After being shot, being scourged by the crowd, and being hung upside down in public, specialists autopsied Mussolini's corpse publicly in order to reassure the masses he was truly dead under the pretense of some due process of law clause. A (diagnosed) psychopathic inmate claims he raped the corpse of one of his victims224.
The obsession with the (anti)hero's tomb is apparent, as token of the (anti)hero's (un)godly qualities. Chinese Imperial authorities had to be sure Hong was dead; In Jesus' case,
"Therefore, give orders for the grave to be made secure until the third day, otherwise His disciples may come and steal Him away and say to the people, 'He has risen from the dead,' and the last deception will be worse than the first." Pilate said to them, "You 224 Kiehl 2014:77.
189
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
have a guard; go, make it as secure as you know how." And they went and made the grave secure, and along with the guard they set a seal on the stone. (Matthew 27:64-6). The hero and his doppelgaenger the anti-hero go through similar experiences. In October 2013, Italy witnesses a squabble around the funerals and burial of E. Priebke, a German officer during WWII involved in a slaughter of civilians in a military reprisal; he was extradited from Argentina and sentenced to lifetime in prison at age 85. Priebke's wartime fatherland, Germany, apparently turned requests for burial on German soil down, and so did several Italian cities; police authorities also forbade public funerals.
As the private funeral unfolds in the night, “psychotics who identify themselves with the mythological image” rush to attend: right-wing nostalgists, and left-wing protesters alike. A rioting mob attacks the hearse carrying Priebke's coffin, which security forces225 later direct to a military airport (= similar to what happened in Jesus' and Hong's case): German sources hypothesize an unmarked grave for Priebke (=the negation of the topography motif).
President of Regione Lazio Zingaretti -a lifelong left-wing activist belonging to Partito Democratico, or the former Communist party- saluted the mob as “righteous”. It appears Priebke's remains shall end up anonymously at a secret location226: the topography motif gets inverted, just as it was the case with Hong. In 225 ANSA, 16 October 2013. 226 ANSA, 20 October 2013.
190
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
2015, Zingaretti -who couldn't have known, of course- sinks into a corruption scandal that involves mafia and a rogue web of service cooperatives hoovering princely appropriations up, which political minions granted. With symbolic acts, the most discredited party can easily turn into an Ozymandias as the public elatedly claps away.
The same (mis)treatment applies to vampires, zombies and various demons of folklore, for they, too, pervert the natural order, and relate to their death in unspeakable ways. Instances are also reported of mobs 'dealing with' the corpses of ordinary people who were believed to either have become undead, or were classified as potential victims of such curse.
Christian Saints, too, relate to their death in ways that challenge the natural order: intact bodies, and so forth. In the apocryphal Acts Of John (II/III century CE), Jesus levitates off the ground; never leaves footprint; never blinks his eyes just as evil Planet X alien invaders of 2004 Japanese sci-fi movie Godzilla Final
War.
This co-exists with the sacred nature of tombs in the Graeco-Roman world. Cicero informs that a violatio sepulchri (violation of a tomb) was a punishable offense in Rome: tombs were considered locus religiosus (sacred place) after dedication and sacrifices.
191
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Defixiones (ritual curses) were often engraved on tombstones to invoke divine retribution against those who would violate the tomb. A slab of stone with a Greek inscription (Nazareth Inscription, beginning of the common era) from Palestine publishes Caesar's order that whoever tempered with, moved or desecrated tombs would do so under pain of death.
Some Christian apologists take this as a proof Jesus existed as the Roman government was reacting to the empty tomb narrative; whereas skeptics take it to mean how common tampering with graves, and moving corpses around might have been, thus casting the shadow of suspicion on what happened to Jesus' body.
Alternatively, crop circles or a pound of ashes are found in a field: that's the proof extraterrestrials have landed aboard their their anti-matter or zero-point energy powered flying saucers. An ancient manuscript mentions this chap with this terribly common name: that's the proof the son of god was born of a virgin, performed miracles, died to redeem the world from sin, then ascended bodily to heaven: the tomb is occupied.
The godly man's path can be threaded by all sorts of people. Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte -the future Napoleon III- forsook his royal rank to join revolutionary groups; Carlo Pisacane relinquished his rights as Duca Di San
Giovanni in order to become “propaganda of the deed's� first theorist, and a revolutionist ultimately torn apart in death serving Italian irredentism: the noblest 192
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
of all causes.
Heroes, founders and saviors are difficult to pinpoint: the same blurred imagery takes on each garb alternatively. The worldly clones of the saviors, founders and heroes of lore in like manner try to walk the thin rope between each incarnation.
Constantine tried to steer the Hebrew heresy he had chosen as religion for his Empire; French Kings informally led the domestic Catholic hierarchy (gallicanisme); English Kings formally established a branch of Christianity under their control as supreme hierophants (Anglicanism); the Sultan of Brunei and the Saudi King also claim an exalted religious role.
Central-African dictator Bokassa flirted with Islam, but ended his life in exile claiming to be the XIII Christian apostle; the NSDAP regime tried to establish an eccentric, neo-pagan system of worship with Hitler as supreme hierophant, and
Mein Kampf as sacred book. Marxist regimes had a revealed book (=Marx's Das Kapital), upon which regional regimes (in Moscow, Belgrade, Havana or Peking) engineered local interpretations. Marxism even had an earthly paradise everyone could visit presto: the Soviet Union, a workers' paradise.
Saviors, founders and heroes appear to share other uncanny, copycatted
193
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
similarities. Zoroaster (scholarly dates differ between XVIII and VI century BCE 227), Jesus, Ezekiel (Hebrew228 prophet, VI century BCE ), Nanak (founder of Sikhism, XV/XVI century CE), Mahavira, Gautama Buddha etc all received their main calling (revelation etc) at about the age of 30, and possibly in connection with water.
Mythicists and enthusiasts squabble to either affirm -or deny- this connection with (flowing) water as constituting baptism. Again, terminology is important not to pave the way to futile polemics:
2.—A. declares that the Peace of 1814 gave back their independence to all the German towns of the Hanseatic League. B. gives an instance to the contrary by reciting the fact that Dantzig, which received its independence from Buonaparte, lost it by that Peace. A. saves himself thus: “I said 'all German towns,' and Dantzig was in Poland.” (Schopenhauer 2004:8). Jesus' baptism takes place in a river; Buddha sits in meditation close to a river; Ezekiel sees visions of god by the Kebar river; Nanak is spirited away for three days (=common mytheme) while bathing in a river; Mahavira's insight is reached in proximity to a river. Oracles of Apollo at Delphi and Klaros presented sacred springs in enclosed crypts that exhaled intoxicating fumes rich in ethylene that helped presiding priests reach a communion with the godhead.
In pre-Khmer Laos (V century CE), Vat Phou -now ruins of a Buddhist 227 When approaching this kind of date, one ought to exert great caution. It is in fact possible to find different -often very divergent- dates proposed in research regarding any event or character from a past this remote. Academic, religious and political traditions and agendas may also muddle the waters further. Readers are advised to regard such dates as informed estimates only. 228 Historically, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah derived from the Hebrew tradition.
194
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
place of worship- was a temple dedicated to Shiva: a sacred spring – still considered holy to this day- flew through the temple complex bathing a lingam: Shiva's anaiconic representation (lingam) is generally believed to represent an erect phallus, or -by Eck229- the world's axis. Devotees sprinkle the holy water on their heads to this day as an auspicious gesture: baptismal suggestions?
Mikvah is the ritual bath required in Judaism to restore purity (during conversion ceremonies; to attain ritual purity; to purify women after menstruation etc): a pool or running water may serve for the purpose according to different instances and interpretations. At Kumano (Japan), people chosen to present sacred sake to the gods are required to bathe in a sacred spring at dawn. At the Ise Shinto sanctuary (Japan), the Izuzu river supplies water for purification.
Lake Rewalsar (India) is sacred to Hindus (Krishna, Shiva), Sikhs (Govind Singh, X and last Sikh guru) and Buddhists. An evil King tries to burn Tibetan Buddhist Saint Padma Sambhava alive on a pyre; after his transfiguration, the fire becomes lake Rewalsar.
Mormon founder Joseph Smith allegedly found the golden plates at Cumorah hill in New York. The Book Of Mormon describes a mythological Cumorah thus: “And it came to pass that we did march forth to the land of Cumorah, and we did pitch our tents around about the hill Cumorah; and it was in a 229 1994.
195
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
land of many waters, rivers, and fountains ” (6.4). “in the Quran -...-Paradise is a garden of cool shade, comfortable couches, full-breasted virgins, abundant fruit, and, above all, rivers: rivers of water, of milk, of wine, and of honey.”230.
Hindu Svetesvatara Upanishad (IV-II century BCE) advises prospective ascetics to find a place:”where the sound of water and the beauty of the place help thought and contemplation”. Christian apologist St. Justin Martyr (100-165 CE) met a man along the seashore, which led him to conversion. Zoroaster's vision near a river unfolded thus:
According to tradition Zoroaster was thirty, the time of ripe, wisdom, when revelation finally came to him . This great happening is alluded to in one of the Gathas (Y 43), and is tersely described in a Pahlavi work (Zadspram XX-XXI) . Here it is said that Zoroaster, being at a gathering met to celebrate a spring festival, went at dawn to a river to fetch water for the haoma-ceremony. He waded in to draw it from midstream; and when he returned to the bank - himself in a state of ritual purity, emerging from the pure element, water, in the freshness of a spring dawn - he had a vision. He saw on the bank a shining Being, who revealed himself as Vohu Manah 'Good Purpose' ; and this Being led Zoroaster into the presence of Ahura Mazda and five other radiant figures (Boyce 1979:19). The imagery of water is omnipresent. Water is present at the entrance of Catholic churches, mosques, Zen and Shinto temples. Among the most ancient pieces of machinery, in Graeco-Roman Alexandria (Egypt) temple contraptions distributed holy water consecrated to one of the countless gods honored in the city against a coin the devotee had inserted. In both Buddhism and Orthodox 230 Prothero 2010:24.
196
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Christianity, holy water serves as a panacea.
Water is used to bathe statues of the Buddha, and -in Thailand or India (Holi festival)- is object of a true religious festival. At Nova Milanese (Italy), asking for rain in bygone ages took the form of a procession, whereby children would sprinkle with water San Domenico's statue.
Both Afro-Brazilian religions and Latin-American Catholicism share events in which masses of water play a pivotal role, being either worshiped alongside icons, or being sprinkled on the faithful, such as in the celebration of
Santa Barbara in the Pelourinho (old town) of Salvador (Brazil): Christian Santa Barbara -patroness of firefighters-, and Iansa, goddess of Afro-Brazilian candomblĂŠ, are one. In Ethiopia, Christian Timket (epiphany) celebrations end with a collective baptism: the faithful bathe in water blessed by a cross as the clergy officiates.
Popular culture couldn't be far behind. Many popular Japanese giant robots of the 1970s also retain an association with bodies of water: Grendizer (artificial waterfall); Mazinger Z (pool); Astroganga (underwater volcano); Daitarn III (1978: underwater base); Great Mazinger/ Ufo Diapolon/ Gaiking (ocean); Steel Jeeg (lake). Although secret contraptions, caves and tunnels make that possible, giant robots often seem to appear from nowhere.
Secular leaders may be associated with bodies of water as well: George
197
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Washington crosses the Potomac, and is caught praying devoutly on a small river's bank231; Caesar crosses the Rubicon; Napoleon campaigns on the Nile; Alexander reaches the Indus...
Water -in turn- is likened to Dao (Taoism); to Dharma (Buddhism); Hindu Vedas (about XV to V century BCE) explain that:”From the Night the Waters of the Inconscient came into being.”. Jung -quite like the Veda millennia before him- posits water as paradigm of the unconscious; Mahayana Buddhism's mind-only (Yogacara) school posits the imagery of a stormy sea as explanation for man's being in the world.
Various prophets (such as Moses and Mohamed) get water in miraculous ways (from a rock for Moses; from his fingers for Mohamed). Another Saint in his quest to introduce Buddhism in Tibet, Padma Sambhava, assists the King of Tibet by miraculously providing water supplies. A story circulated about U.S. troops finding “the miracle well” -assertedly so dubbed by General Charles Krulak, marine corp - during their 1991 desert 'arrival' as an answer to prayer.
In 172 CE, Marcus Aurelius -under siege at the Empire's Danubian frontier- obtained a miracle from the god Hermes Aerios an Egyptian priest named Arnouphis had in some versions summoned. The god granted rain to the Emperor's thirsty and exhausted soldiers, and scattered the enemy army with storms and 231 Fears 2011:Heroes, History, And Myth.
198
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
thunderbolts: a column was carved; coins minted and dedications inscribed to attest to another 'miracle'. A Christian version of the event also exists: the Christian god rescued a legion of Christian soldiers.
While the identity of Gen. Krulak as genuine military man is not questioned, other dates and circumstances in his bio -according to some mythicists and enthusiasts at least- seem possibly ambiguous. It is probable contemporary audiences may be more interested in the tale being spun according to the 'patriotic' register of an actual military crusade than in the esoteric garb of mythical Saints entangled in byzantine questions of protocol with obscure Kings of pre-modern bygone ages; the basic plot remains identical, however.
A song (Goldorak Et L'Enfant, 1979) related to the merchandising of a Japanese cartoon detailed how a child going for a walk with his dog 232 “along the seashore� spots the superhero aboard his luminous giant robot who's coming home after the battle and waves to him. First, the seashore imagery, which -some Hindu might say- is the place where the five cosmic elements of nature converge. This explanation seems preposterous, yet it is enough to ponder how often -and not only on film as a matter of scenery- have shores been set as pivotal narrative backdrops.
The present writer adds that both Orpheus and Gautama Buddha underwent a temptation incident through which opponents threw objects at them 232 Puppies and children: what a favorite imagery.
199
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
(arrows, stones and so forth), which refused to hit them when entering the mystical field of their divine being.
The legendary Egyptian Christian Saint Anthony The Great (II/III century CE) also underwent temptations that very closely resemble Gautama Buddha's. A staple of Anthony's predication was the necessity to contemplate the human body's inconsequence, much as Buddhism prescribes (contemplations of foulness).
In the Legenda Aurea, Anthony and his piglet233 (=animal ersatz234) descend to hell to save souls -just like Mahayana Buddhist deity Ksitigarbha-, then bring back fire to kindle a pyre. Both Christian Saint Anthony and Mahayana Buddhist Ksitigarbha are depicted as monks with a staff. Firefighters in Japan honor Jizo (Ksitigarbha in the Japanese incarnation) as their protector: the same fire connection found with St. Anthony. Parallels are endless. If Anthony is associated with a piglet, Ksitigarbha is often associated with a dog (the Bodhisattva's mother from a previous life).
In Anthony’s honor -the purveyor of fire- bonfires are lit, despite the fact that Anthony lived in historical times, and not in a time before time like Prometheus, Maui (Polynesian culture hero), Aswang (demon of Filipino folklore), 233 Pig fat was used to treat illnesses associated with Saint Anthony ( fuoco di Sant'Antonio): ergotism (poisoning from a parasitic, hallucinogenic fungus that infects crops) , and herpes zoster. 234 “In the case of Aesculapius, we are presented with a god depicted in art most often as a man accompanied by a serpent, but in literature he often takes the form of a sacred snake.” (Rupp 2006:25).
200
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
and other mythical purveyors of fire. It won't escape readers how adventitious, localized priorities (Christian devotion to a thaumaturge Saint) shape immemorial images -such as the fire or the katabasis motif- by interpolating a figure of choice into a petrified narrative: Ksitigarbha represents a Mahayana version.
The immortality of Balder235, too, was tested by throwing things at him; the central-African hero Mwindo was also thrown spears at, in turn continuously deflected. Ovid236 writes about Orpheus:
The next missile was a stone, that, thrown through the air, was itself overpowered by the harmony of voice and lyre, and fell at his feet, as though it were begging forgiveness for its mad audacity. -...- After catching these up, and ripping apart the oxen, that threatened them with their horns, the fierce women rushed back to kill the poet. As he stretched out his hands, speaking ineffectually for the first time ever, not affecting them in any way with his voice, the impious ones murdered him. But the novels are not the only narratives of the interplay of men and gods, and it is important to glance now beyond their confines at other forms which tell of this interplay and which present the stories of persons uniquely blessed or cursed by the gods. It is only in that larger narrative context that it makes sense to inquire about the novel as in any way a type of religious literature. The road out from the narrower confines of the novel proper leads in two directions, one to aretalogy, the other to the biography of god-like or holy men -...- The latter comprises works of more or less the same scope and weight as the novels, the former pieces of altogether shorter compass. (Beck in Schmeling 1996:137). In one of those recurring illumination moments, Balder dies because -like Siegfried, Achilles and so many others- trickster Loki makes it so that the sole 235 A Germanic god. 236 Metamorphoses XI:1-66.
201
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
thing is unwittingly thrown at him, which he has no protection against (Siegfried's shoulder, Achilles' heel, etc):
It is always some little fault, some slight yet critical symptom of human frailty, that makes impossible the open interrelationship between the worlds; so that one is tempted to believe, almost, that if the small, marring accident could be avoided, all would be well. (Campbell 1949:191). Murphy237 finds enough materials to devote an entire book to the parallels between Jesus and Harry Potter. Doniger238 suggests
The fact that the Harry Potter books are an amalgam of at least three familiar genres works for, not against, their spectacular success. (In December of 1999, the three books occupied the first three spots on the New York Times best-seller list, where they had been ensconced for 50, 25 and 11 weeks, respectively.) Myths survive for centuries, in a succession of incarnations, both because they are available and because they are intrinsically charismatic. Rowling is a wizard herself at the magic art of bricolage (LĂŠvi-Strauss's metaphor for mythmaking): new stories crafted out of recycled pieces of old stories. -...- A fight has been waged by parents (some of whom identify themselves as "born-again Christians" and are known to others as the Mullahs of the Midwest) -...- Apparently their astonishing popularity is taken as evidence of a Faustian bargain (Doniger 2001: no page). It is quite curious how Doniger thinks opportune to lash groups very critical of the series from their religious perspective as irrationally delving into conspiracy theories on discredited premises. What for? To defend the next billion another mountebank made on the 'better premises' of peddling another salad bar of petrified myths and obtuse allegories thus catering to the hollow cravings obsessing 2372011. 2382001:no page.
202
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
prigs and dolts? In what way, exactly, would that be more spiritually elevated (productive, etc) than the the agenda of any “Midwest mullah”?
Analyzing the Harry Potter books from a self-proclaimed Christian perspective, pastor dr. Killinger concludes the books -which other Christian leaders have publicly loathed as an abomination- fit nicely within the Christian worldview; Killinger writes:
There has been only one great plot engine for all fiction since the coming of Christ, and that is the struggle of good to overcome evil. Before Christ, in the eras of great Hellenistic and Roman literature, this was not true. There was struggle in The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, but it was not about the conflict between good and evil; this essential ingredient in all great Western literature (and even many of the lesser writings) is derived from Hebrew and Christian theology, and especially from the Gospels, with their portrayal of the battle between Christ and the forces of darkness (2002:35, emphasis added). The theme of the struggle between (broadly put) light and darkness has been a staple of mythology (or the rational account of a story originally handed down by word of mouth ) all along, as part of the 'hero's journey' motif. According to Aurobindo, participation in the mystical endeavor is described as “Our yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure”. Many lay Mormons also refer to life as an “adventure” as well. The 'journey' is the opiate that triggers a more or less deep or instantaneous trance state in the recipient. Jack Kerouac's fame entirely rests upon his literary travelogues.
203
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The imagery of the journey gets extended to travel imagery: the famous Brazilian song Encontros E Despedidas likens life to a crowded railways station;
yana in Buddhism is the 'ferry boat' to get to 'the the other shore' of life's conundrum in the form of a river:”That day when evening came, [Jesus] said to his disciples, "Let us go over to the other side." ”( Mark 4:35). In Zoroastrianism -and much later in Islam- the soul in its retributive journey has to cross a perilous and narrow bridge. Buddhism also refers to rafts, crossings and yonder shores. The afterlife is often referred to as aldilà, au delà (beyond there).
Change (the side effect of the journey) is in fact the magic ingredient behind all sorts of 'high school reunion', 'coming of age' and similar narratives. If the Buddhist journey's secret is the realization of non-duality (this place and the yonder shore are the same239), the song Encontros E Despedidas tells much the same:”São só dois lados Da mesma viagem O trem que chega É o mesmo trem Da partida” (it's only two sides of the same journey: the incoming train is the same boarded to leave).
According to immemorial Hindu wisdom, life could be lived according to either the brahmana or sramana (=striving one) paradigms. The brahmana lived his life in four stages: as a student first, then as as householder, as forest ascetic, and as homeless spiritual wanderer in search of enlightenment. The sramana omitted the first three phases, and could since the beginning engage in austerities, penance and a 239This is the view of Mahayana Buddhism. Hinayana Buddhism, for example, rejects this conclusion.
204
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
life of wandering spiritual quest: the hero's journey is -as the Brazilian song implieseverybody's lot.
If the swashbuckling judges of Judge Dredd (1995) – in a nod to Hebrew tradition, whereby judges united judicial, political and executive functions in agreement with the patriarchal imagery-, are granted a last journey to civilize the wilderness outside the walled city, so Gautama Buddha critically ill, and approaching his death, embarks in a last journey after decades of itinerant ministry.
While it is difficult to infer reasoned knowledge of Buddhist (or oriental) thought in the lusophone audiences cheering the song, it is possible to argue how both the song and oriental thought provoke the human mind's very same weak spots.
The journey after exceptional boons that will reveal their superlative qualities once brought back to mankind may include material possessions (the golden fleece240 often meant to embody the grains; the pre-Columbian cities' gold; the golden apples of the Hesperides241...); spiritual legacies (such as the gradual recovery of the long lost teachings of Buddhist Saint Padma Sambhava; the oral
240 Well before the Greeks emerged from the Bronze Age, the Hittite -between the XV and XIII century BCEmyth of Telepinu, god of fertility, required that:”An interesting feature of the conclusion of the ritual is the erection of a pole before the god, from which the fleece of a sheep is suspended ” (Hooke 1963:102) much as the golden fleece of Greek myth hangs from an apple tree. 241 In one interptetation, King Arthur leaving for Avalon is in fact sailing towards the land of the Hesperides. The apple mytheme recurs also famously in the Bible as forbidden fruit; or as apple of discord at the wedding of Thetis and Peleos..
205
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Torah supposedly revealed to Moses on the mount Sinai 242), and anything inbetween: the apples of the Hesperides are not only made of gold, but stand for eternal life, wisdom, the symbol of the divine wedding between father sky Zeus and mother Earth Hera... Before disappearing on his journey astride a water buffalo, Lao-Tzu (“venerable teacher”) consigned his wisdom in the Tao-Te-Ching book.
A 2004 documentary243 showed how at the Takiwasi centre staffed with both traditional medical professionals and folk healers in Peru, some people try to overcome severe problems of substance abuse through paced healing practices that follow aboriginal methods -very similar to Hindu ones at that-.
Heavy usage of psychotropic herbal extracts is included. An entire religion (Santo Daime) -now spread around the world- has grown around the ceremonial consumption of entheogenic ayahuasca for the alleged purpose of spiritual development.
Ayahuasca -or other entheogens- supposedly trigger the awakening of one's own mythology through quintessential symbols (snakes, mother goddesses etc) climaxing through physical and metaphysical evacuation of one's own inner fears. At least one of the patients in the footage admits he's aware that in his visions he sees what he wants to see:”This is why a symbol has such power and brings a quality 242 The same divide between Hindu sruti and smriti: what is heard, and what is remembered, or oral and written form. 243 Bernardi 2004.
206
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
of awe when experienced (the numen). An image can therefore become a symbol if it makes this connection to the unknown.�244.
In a 1985 documentary245, South Carolina psychiatrist Mike Lampkin relates how -in order to treat 'irrational' patients obsessed with fears of the supernatural- he pretends to be a witchdoctor. He uses harmless drugs to change the color of the patient's urine -and so forth- in order to convince them that he's a true healer, and they are now well.
It isn't just a matter of sweet words used to pitch a sale fast, either. Professionals involved in both situations have to know occult sciences rather well, and have to play their role in the minutest detail, thus going along with complex folklore: it goes well beyond the conventional definition of placebo as inert substance assumed under the guise of powerful drugs. The 'magic spots' of the human mind are not just a hot commodity for hoaxers, salesmen and carpet-baggers.
In a not-so-subtle way, all great heroes -often (semi)gods and their ilkand saviors had their own katabasis (or accounts of trips to the nether world(s) ): Aeneas246, Baal, Dumuzi, Dionysus, Hercules, Inanna (who shall be back in three days), Izanami, Jesus of Nazareth, Krishna, Ksitigarbha Buddha, Mwindo (buried 244 Angelo 1992:79. 245 Clarke 1985:The Roots Of Evil. 246 The nostoi (returns, from which nostalgia=aching to return) that recounted the heroes' fate after the Trojan War, of which the most famous is the Odyssey, already featured Diomedes, Idomeneus etc who -by all accounts- shared a story almost identical to that of later Aeneid. Plot contrivances included wars on foreign soil; the foundation of cities etc.
207
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
alive as an infant, yet miraculously teleporting out of the pit), Nachiketa 247, Odysseus, Orpheus248, Osiris, Persephone, Pythagoras (son of Apollo according to Iamblichus; alternatively a descendant), Saint Anthony The Great, St. Peter Apostle249, Theseus, Zalmoxis (a Thracian dying-and-rising god of light and sky), Zoroaster and so many others250:
a relação existente entre a katábasis e o próprio itinerário intelectual do filósofo -...-Empédocles de Agrigento -...-o léxico da katábasis é usado analogicamente para representar o nosso mundo -...-Todas as descidas, toda as katábasis culminam, num momento fundamental, num locus narrativo de importância crucial para o pensamento ocidental: no diálogo “República”, de Platão. -...-O mesmo fogo, que é testemunho ritual da revelação e da sabedoria verdadeira no antro ideo, aqui, em “República”, se torna significativamente um momento essencial da inversão: no lugar de simbolizar a iluminação da sabedoria, é reduzido a dispositivo quase cinematográfico, que permite a mise em scène de um teatro de sombras e enganos. Assim, o filósofo desmascara o teatro, a enganação, com sua anábasis da caverna, movimento contrário à katábasis do ponto de vista gnoseoloógico: a verdade está na subida, não na descida. (Cornelli 2007:no page). Many cults -whether actual or ancient- incorporate(d) a katabasis ritual based on allegorical-metaphorical251 ' death and resurrection': 247 Upanishadic character (Katha Upanishad). He's a boy who journeys to the underworld as he wishes to learn from Yama, lord of death. Yama happens to be on a journey: Nachiketa waits for him three days (=common mytheme), Upon his arrival, Yama apologizes for his lack of hospitality, and offers to fulfil three of the boy's wishes (=common mytheme again). He opts for spiritual gifts over material possessions as he has met death already, after all. 248 Orpheus crucified (Orpheos Bakkikos) used to be a famous worship item. 249 Apocalypse Of Peter, II century CE. 250 The basic variant is: the hero goes to the nether world because he has 'what it takes' ( for example needs to fulfill a mission), and the descent and consequent ascent 'prove' he is all that people believe about him (for example a savior ); or the hero goes to the nether world for some less glamorous reason (such as Odysseus needing hints to find his way home), but is back ( nostos=return) to possibly show other men the 'lesson' he has learnt, thus showing he had 'what it takes' to begin with. 251 A rhetorical device used to comprehend a mystery that would otherwise elude men.
208
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Mythic narratives and rituals, in short, draw upon the same set of traditional images and patterns of action to convey their ideas, but the specific meaning of a given traditional pattern or image cannot be divorced from the way in which it is deployed within the narrative or ritual. A katabasis does not necessarily imply an initiation nor an initiation a katabasis. (Edmonds 2004:115). [Aurobindo explains]For, there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity… The other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness,… (in MAISI014:lecture 4:3). Greek temples and mystery religions featured artificial caves or tunnels into which the devotee was given the impression to descend through artful stage management. There, in the mystical womb of the divine, the devotee could commune with the godhead (for example Apollo, Artemis, Demeter or Aesculapius) through a variety of practices such as incubatio (sleeping in), oracles and mystery ceremonies.
The devotee was often required to crouch or go on all fours through passageways much as it often is the case today in Japan to reach the abode where the mystical tea ceremony takes place, or as it was the case to access the Neolithic Tomb Of The Eagles in Scotland (about 3150 BCE). At Bethlehem, contemporary pilgrims entering a Church complex descend into a cave presented as the authentic place of Jesus' birth:
and Christ, a Roman subject, was born in Bethlehem— according to tradition, in a cave associated by the local pagans with the 209
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
mythological birth of their annually sacrificed-and-resurrected deity Adonis. (Campbell 1960:299-300). Caves and spirituality go often hand in hand: the I Buddhist council took place in the Settapanni cave on Vebhara mountain (=the mountain mytheme) according to some accounts. Plato's allegory of the cave much resembles preexisting Buddhist teachings where darkness (in Vedic terms) replaces the cave:”It is as if, good Gotama, one -...- might bring an oil lamp into the darkness so that those with vision might see material shapes”252.
Wells may replace caves (=caves as chthonic places). On the island of Tinos (Greece), pilgrims crawl for two kilometers to reach a sanctuary where a Christian Orthodox icon of the Virgin resides. A holy spring (=water mytheme) flows underground, whose water pilgrims collect. That's a direct filiation from Graeco-Roman antiquity: Poseidon as healer -the god of seas, earthquakes and springs- was worshiped on the island as temple remains demonstrate. In Christian times, the Virgin has also been associated with healing, with her own procession, also an icon of Greek national identity.
In a curious doppelgaenger effect, the town of Besana (Italy), too, is said to have seven hills. Just like Rome again, Besana had a sacred grove where a holy spring was located. The grove was associated not with pagan gods, but with Christian San Giorgio. The miraculous spring was associated with the dead ( I morti 252 Cūlahatthipadopama Sutta,1.230.
210
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
di San Giorgio): chthonic imagery.
Such was the purpose of the 'mystical tomb' of the German
Eksternsteine: a hollow rock in which postulants lied in meditation to trigger their awakening, mystical death, second birth etc. The 'sacred' megalithic complex near Teutoburg was (incorrectly) rumored to consist of asteroids 253 fallen in a primeval age; In Muslim lore, even the sacred stone at Mecca fell from the sky.
Stones could fall the from sky for all sort of reasons. In medieval Italy, ritual battles consisting in an exchange of hails of stones ( sassaiole) between cities, brotherhoods, factions or boroughs was commonplace. In the southernmost region of then Imperial Korea, seokjeon (stone battles) were very popular in their painful consequences. Tinku (ritual battles) of the (pre)Incaic regions of South America also involve hails of stones: the blood of the ritual enemy to fertilize the earth. Some cultures in the past -or the present- prescribe stoning as retribution for certain categories of sin.
Just as Theseus had to pick a large stone up in order to appear before his royal father; just like Cyclops pulled large stones to seal the entrance to their caves, so in southern South Korea (Jeju) people engage in stone-lifting contests just like Scottish or Scandinavian strongmen do. In Jeju, the contest used to be a rite of passage to determine young men's ability to get married. Physique superstar, actor 253 The worship of celestial bodies made tangible -such as asteroid fragments and so forth- recurs in ancient mythologies.
211
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
and politician Schwarzenegger writes:
Every year, in the spring, a stone-lifting contest is held in Munich -...the stone weighs approximately 508 German pounds -...-[and I, in 1967] broke the existing record -...-. The press picked it up and wrote that Mr. Universe was the strongest man in Germany- which may or may not have been true (Schwarzenegger&Kent Hall 1979:84-86). The NSDAP regime included the Eksternsteine in its neo-pagan, panGerman mythology based on ancestral heritage:
Wolfram says Chretien didn't understand the story[=Grail romance cycle]. "I have," says he, "as my source the poet Kyot." We don't know who that was, but he had supposedly been in Spain, where he got the story from a Moorish alchemist. So there are alchemical themes in this story. His version of the Grail is a stone vessel, which was brought down from heaven. Now what he's doing is imitating the Muslim Kaaba, the stone at Mecca that was brought down from heaven. The Grail was brought down from heaven by the neutral angels. (Campbell 1989: In Search Of The Holy Grail). (Sacred) stones -with or without associated wells, groves, petroglyphs etc- are used to keep the dead from leaving the grave (=ritual function of many tombstones). Alternatively, they may keep some other chthonic or supernatural force from surfacing: Hercules buries the hydra's immortal head under a rock.
In Japan, at the Kasima Shrine, a first century CE Shinto temple, a sacred “Pivot-stone” is located. Referred to as one of “Kasima’s Seven Wonders,” the stone is described as projecting several inches above the ground, with a depression (cup mark?) on the top. According to Japanese legend, the stone holds down a “monstrous subterranean cat-fish, which is traditionally supposed to be the cause of earthquakes.” (Varner 2004:69).
212
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Sacred stones played a central role as founder Smith was shaping the new religion of Mormonism:
Nevertheless, the scribes and others who observed the translation left numerous accounts that give insight into the process. Some accounts indicate that Joseph studied the characters on the plates. Most of the accounts speak of Joseph’s use of the Urim and Thummim (either the interpreters or the seer stone), and many accounts refer to his use of a single stone. According to these accounts, Joseph placed either the interpreters or the seer stone in a hat, pressed his face into the hat to block out extraneous light, and read aloud the English words that appeared on the instrument. The process as described brings to mind a passage from the Book of Mormon that speaks of God preparing “a stone, which shall shine forth in darkness unto light.” ( Book Of Mormon...no date:no page). Pagan rituals such as incubatio were swiftly absorbed into Christian practice:
There were many other pagan traditions and practices that soon found Christian counterparts, such as incubation, the practice of sleeping in the precincts dedicated to a deity who could visit the suppliant in a dream for the purpose of physical or mental healing. This practice found soon its Christian counterparts. This was the case for the Athens Asklepieion, on which a church dedicated to Saint Andrew (patron of healing) was built before the end of the fifth century. Here we have conclusive evidence of transition from pagan to Christian healing. It is likely that this has happened with other pagan healing cults as well, although precise historical evidence is still lacking (e.g., the case of Saint Marina of Theseion in Athens). Yet the Christian practice of replacing or transforming pagan traditions and practices -...- was not entirely successful in eradicating the pagan past and the challenges it posed to the Christian world th at sprang from it. (Makrides 2009:1678). Come think of it, the very appearance on the earthly plane of any
213
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
savior-hero is a katabasis. Aurobindo Ghose describes thus his assistant/counterpart in his community of disciples:
In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. ( MAISF001 no date:Sri Aurobindo on the Mother). Alternatively, deities (angels, etc) may be wandering in disguise creating situations of poverty, danger etc to check how mortals act. It is a motif omnipresent in human culture, for example in Buddhism:
Then on the fifteenth day of each month, the Four Great Kings in person perambulate this world to see whether many folk among men pay reverence to mother etc. The texts say that if few be those among men who do these things, the Four Great Kings report the matter to the ruler of the gods of the Thirty-Three as they sit in the hall of righteousness. The gods of the Thirty-Three are displeased saying “Surely, sirs, the god-hosts will diminish and the Asura-hosts will be increased.” If the Four Great Kings report in positive terms then the gods of the Thirty-Three are pleased saying “Surely, sirs, the godhosts will be increased and the Asura-hosts will decrease . (Guang Xing, ME6208: Buddhist Attitude Towards Parents). In Mahayana Buddhism, the quintessential Buddha, too, can present himself under the appearance of all kinds of people (even foul or unworthy ones), and even things, in order to impart teachings that could otherwise not be equally well received. So people ought to better behave and mind 'the all seeing eye' of the gods, which today may also take the form of omnipresent surveillance cameras, etc. 214
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The motif can also have sexual undertones as 'bedtrick', or the sexual union between parties, of whom one completely ignores, and/or is mistaken about the partner's identity (Oedipus, Myrrha 254, Dharmaruci255 etc). Campbell describes Galahad's origins thus:
and the moral sense of this begetting of a saint [Galahad] upon a virgin [daughter of the Grail King] by a sinner [Lancelot] who supposed himself to be with someone else's wife [Arthur's wife] is not too easy to explain (1968:552). The bedtrick motif can extend to encompass demon-lover narratives: a conflation of folkloric and gothic atmospheres. An unaware human is lured into a sexual encounter or liaison with whom looks like another ordinary human. The thunder of illumination strikes as it appears the mystery lover was in fact a vampire, revenant or something of that sort: the perversion of fairy bride (or groom) narratives.
Long before amateurish 'Gettier cases' could easily get the tortoise of academic philosophy on its back, ancient myth – not to mention Hinduism and Buddhism- had been toying with equivalent epistemological problems for thousands of years. It remains open to consideration whether Gettier cases are the gem from a superior mind, whose creativity eludes the layman, or one of the countless Hindu or Buddhist similes groomed to sway easily impressed western pundits. Myths literally teem with cases of (mis)recognition and ensuing dilemmas (such as the rope mistaken for a snake in the dark, yet having been a rope all along), or endless 254 Greek myth. She seduced her father Cinyras unbeknownst of him. 255 Indo-Buddhist myth. His mother seduced him unbeknownst of him.
215
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
variation on the 'vision/stare' motif.
As Herodotus comments, Apollo gave Croesus King of Lydia (VI century BCE) an oracle regarding a possible war with Persia. Croesus misinterpreted the cryptic oracle, and destroyed his own kingdom. About to die atop a sacrificial pyre the triumphant Persians had prepared, Croesus would have screamed 256 what could stand for a slogan for the sweet human psyche:”Now I Get it, arti manthano [=the oracle's meaning]”.
The apocryphal Apocalypse Of Peter (II century CE) also delivers the same gnostic punchline:”And the men that were joined with them in the defilement of adultery were hanging by their feet, and had their heads hidden in the mire, and said: We believed not that we should come unto this place.”257.
The same 'lesson' is present in both Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism. One ascetic gets to share the cowshed with Gautama Buddha, whom he is in search of, but does not recognize him. In another Buddhist text, Gautama Buddha is about to enter a forest where three of his disciples dwell ( Chulagosinga Sutta). Not recognizing him, a junior disciple prays him not to enter the forest in order to avoid disrupting the group's harmony. Similar stories are told about a number of Tibetan Saints as well, whom people don't at first recognize. In another Buddhist tale, the 256 In one of the many versions, of course. In another version, Croesus sets the pyre up all by himself in order to avoid slavery. What matters here is the thunder of illumination strikes as he understands his foolishness. 257 Emphasis added. M.R. James translation, 1924.
216
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
ascetic Upaka scoffs at Gautama's bombastic proclamation of Buddhahood, and takes a bypath. What about Jesus?
Therefore I [=Jesus] speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. "In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says, 'YOU WILL KEEP ON HEARING, BUT WILL NOT UNDERSTAND; YOU WILL KEEP ON SEEING, BUT WILL NOT PERCEIVE (Matthew 13:13-14). "Son of man, you are living among a rebellious people. They have eyes to see but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a rebellious people. (Ezekiel 12:2). Mahayana Buddhism claims the innumerable celestial Buddhas cannot help, unless one has affinities with the same. Various tales recount how laymen (peasants, fishermen...) get to meet royalties (kings, princes, prophets...) more or less in disguise (for example a King disguised as a knight) but fail to recognize them:�But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands. � (Matthew 17:12).
One Chinese story reports the origins of one duck recipe, whereby a dejected student stole a duck, and cooked it a certain way by happenstance. The Emperor chanced to pass by; he also chanced to be hungry, thus he commandeered the student's duck, ate it, and was so satisfied that he gratified the student with an appointment as Prime Minister. Of course, in the end the ascetic recognizes Buddha; Buddha finally joins his disciples in the forest. 217
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The wonder of recognition unfolds, royalties make themselves known, and:”Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread. ” ( Luke 24:35). Folklore meets history: a misinformed peasant hails Napoleon at the isola d'Elba258 as the King of England, which prompts the deposed French Emperor's wrath.
Popular culture is never far behind. In 1968 western movie Hang 'Em
High, an innocent man survives lynching: he's soon back as a vigilante sheriff to do away with the culprits who -of course- cannot recognize him. In 1996 Sleepers, the now deeply religious former member of a clique of sodomite cops -who sexually assaulted young men in prison- finds himself in the dock with a prosecutor he cannot recognize as one of the youngsters he had brutalized in the past: he's finally arrested. Rambo, Ringo, Ulysses and Dionysus, too, aren't recognized at first, then they “even up the score” unleashing retribution upon their foes.
Following a terrible car crash in 2006, Whitney Cerak, a U.S student, is confused with co-traveler Laura VanRyn. Cerak is pronounced dead and buried, whereas the VanRyn family looks after a badly injured Laura for five weeks (yes, 5). In the end, a mistake is revealed: Cerak had been alive all along, and that's Laura VanRyn who had died: Cerak can at a later date celebrate her wedding in the same
258 When defeated the first time, Napoleon was exiled as King of such small island in central Italy, where he'd reign for nine months and 23 days, until his flight towards France, where he recaptured power for an ephemeral 100 days before the last military disaster, and the final deportation to St.Helena.
218
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
church that saw her funeral259.
Popular culture often meets myths: prevailing accounts considered execrable revisionist David Cole as being either “dead” or “missing” following heated controversies. The versatile Jewish-American, however, was alive and well as
David
Stein,
award-winning
producer
of
orthodox
genocide-themed
documentaries, and neo-con organizer of mainstream conservative VIP events. As it was the case with Buddha, Jesus, Ulysses or the Pandava brothers, none could recognize that Cole and Stein were in fact the same person, although most of Cole's heterodox audiovisual works had been hidden in plain sight over the internet all along.
It is often hard to pull folklore and popular culture apart. In 1983 awardwinning Italian singer and songwriter Artegiani wrote the song Il Sogno Di Un
Buffone (a court jester's dream), which recounts a court jester's unrequited love for a contemptuous Queen. The dejected jester goes away in tears and poetically forecasts his rebirth “from an oak” in the guise of a blond-haired, blue-eyed knight astride a flying horse wielding “a sword crafted by the sun”. He shall then return to utter his moral outrage “in the face” of a Queen who no longer recognizes him, yet she's so fascinated by his new self. Pushing the buttons of the mind never ceases to pay dividends, really.
259 Mailonline, May 21, 2012.
219
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
As with most of these atavistic fears, the 'stare' can be both benign (Horus' all-seeing eye, the deity's regard invoked in prayer or the godly guru's
darshan ), and malign (the evil eye260). The godly and evil stare intertwine:
A very interesting account of the netra mangalya, or ceremony of painting the eyes of images, as performed by craftsmen in Ceylon, has been published by Mr A. K. Coomaraswamy. Therein he writes that "by far the most important ceremony connected with the building and decoration of a vihara (temple), or with its renovation, was the actual netra mangalya or eye ceremonial. The ceremony had to be performed in the case of any image, whether set up in a vihara or not. Even in the case of flat paintings it was necessary. D. S. Muhandiram, when making for me a book of drawings of gods according to the Rupavaliya, left the eyes to be subsequently inserted on an auspicious occasion, with some simpler form of the ceremony described." (Thurston 1912:205-6). An important ceremony [in Sri Lanka] associated with the Buddhaimage is the ritual of painting its eyes (netra-pinkama), which is performed with much care on an auspicious occasion as the last item of its construction. Until this is done the image is not considered an adequate representation of the Buddha. (Kariyawasam 2013:no page). When the other perfections are completed by wisdom, They acquire their eye and fulfill their name, Just as a painting may be complete except for the eyes, But until the eyes are drawn, no wage is obtained [by the artist]. (Tsongkhapa, in ME6217 no date uniy 7:5) One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer--at three in the afternoon. Now a man who was lame from birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those going into the temple courts. When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter said, "Look at us!" -...-Then Peter said, "Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, 260That is why ancient ships often had eyes painted on. A legend recounts how the Byzantine set a barbarian horde running by exposing them to the 'evil eye' of their newly found savior.
220
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
walk." Taking him by the right hand extnote, he helped him up, and instantly the man's feet and ankles became strong. He jumped to his feet and began to walk. Then he went with them into the temple courts, walking and jumping, and praising God. (Acts 3:1-8, emphasis added). Always look at the person to whom you are speaking. If you are presenting to a group, look at different individuals throughout your presentation. (Lakhani 2005:30). A series of advertisements that offered to pay investors an absurdly high rate of return contained this statement, “Look us in the eye before you invest.” -...-.The ad, of course, was a cynical ploy to tap into the common but mistaken belief that intense scrutiny of the eyes will reveal deceptive intent. This belief is a powerful tool for con men, as are solemn “up-front” declarations of honesty and integrity. Consider, for example, this quote from Enron’s 1998 annual report: “We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance don’t belong here.” (Babiak&Hare 2006:232). A similar ceremony takes place in Taiwan to 'open the eyes' of images of various deities -thus making them effective in providing protection- at the hands of Taoist or Buddhist priests.
The Perseus myth recurs circularly, and the painting takes place behind some sort of curtain in Sri Lanka: “Then there was a curtain, and behind the curtain was the second room called the Most Holy Place. ” ( Hebrews 9:3). The same 'most holy place' was also present in Egyptian and Graeco-Roman temples (adyton, donot-enter place).
e xtnote The tactile element won't escape readers here. The sense of touch is as important as the vision:”Tactile experience ought to act -so to speak- as model for psychical experience -...- tenderness is thus tactile to begin with” (Fontes 2006:no page) (note of this reader).
221
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
After following detailed steps, and as the congregation of the faithful prays in attendance (=fusion of the horde), the Sri Lankan painter works looking at the statue through a mirror. Lastly, the painter releases impurities on an animal provided for that purpose, which mirrors exactly what the Hebrews of Biblical lore did in bygone ages:”But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to be used for making atonement by sending it into the desert as a scapegoat. ” (Leviticus 16:10).
Netra mangalya (ceremony of painting of the eyes) in Southern India requires auspicious times and rituals to paint eyes on the image of any god. In Hindu/Buddhist philosophy, the metaphor of the mirror often stands in for the human mind: no mirror without a reflection; mirrors reflect images but are neither the thing they reflect, nor the reflection itself; reflections are not the thing they represent, and so forth.
Spitting can be both benign and malign: Jesus, Vespasian and Egyptian gods cured with 'sacred spitting' (the same 'positive spitting' recurs in Dune, too), but it may also have malefic connotations:”The apotropaic significance of spitting is not totally absent”261.
Buddhist Mahayana Flower Adornment Sutra mentions an eccentric sage and healer: 261 Theissen in Sax 2010:60.
222
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
He just wrote the two words "living Buddha" on his head like a billboard. He told everyone to call him by that name, and they did. He jumped off a many-storied pagoda and did not even get hurt! If anyone was sick, all he had to do was touch that person or blow a breath of air on that person, and they would get well. Or he might have the sick person drink some of his saliva or the water he had washed his feet with, and they would get well. He called this water "Prajna soup!" (Chapter 8 no date: no page, emphasis added)262. At a recent healing ceremony of the Zulu tribe in South Africa, all 70 guests washed their feet in the same bucket of water before entering a traditional indlu, a circular building with a thatched rooftop. -...-The traditional healer, sangoma, instructs people to drink this water to cleanse themselves of their worries and their evil spirits. People line up to refill empty bottles they brought from their homes so they'll have enough of the magic foot water for later use. -...-“I know what you might be thinking,” my Zulu interpreter says. “But it really works.” (Skoch 2010a:no page). And when [Jesus] had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. (John 20:22). Mixing holiness with filth is an ongoing theme. As this writing contends, humankind has an irresistible, bipolar proclivity for gamboling -often literally rolling – in bodily waste, dung, ashes and other substances alternatively denounced as violating some schizogenic cleanliness requirement or another:
Saliva – even one’s own – is extremely defiling. If a Brahmin inadvertently touches his fingers to his lips, he should bathe or at least change his clothes. Also, saliva pollution can be transmitted through some material substances. These two beliefs have led to the practice of drinking water by pouring it into the mouth instead of putting the lips on the edge of the cup (cit. in Douglas 1966:34). Parallels continue. Garland263 explains ancient Greeks held that a pig's 262 This version is particularly tame. Other versions of the same text -as this writing contends- multiply the filthy details and disgusting feats. 263 No date.
223
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
blood was a powerful agent of purification. The sacrifice of a pig on a Hebrew Temple altar -in a region
Hellenistic monarch Antiochus IV (175-164 BCE)
controlled- added fuel to the Jewish Maccabean revolt (168-135 BCE).
In today's Vietnam, drinking a poisonous snake's freshly drawn blood along with the serpent's still beating heart is considered both a potent tonic, and a delicacy. Catholic liturgy ripostes: congregants drink Jesus' holy blood at Mass while adoring Jesus' Sacred Heart.
(Some) Tibetan lamas still use sacred spitting in order to heal, and so do Guatemalan priests of Maximon, or other santeria sects across Latin America264;
ayahuasceros from Peru also use sacred spitting (burping etc) as part of the ceremonies involving the consumption of entheogenic beverages to induce spiritual mind trips. Certain Tibetan Buddhist rituals also involve drinking sacraments from a human skull.
Mixing saliva and mud, Egyptian goddess Isis created a phallus for her husband Osiris, whose sex organs had been lost as his mystical body had been torn to pieces. Isis' bodily fluids (saliva and urine) are healing tonics; with his saliva, Egyptian god of wisdom and magic Thoth treated Horus' blind eye; filtered cow urine figures to this day among Ayurveda's cherished medicines. American-Indian Hopi myths tell that Spider Woman created man molding soil and her saliva. 264 Going back to Pre-Hispanic traditions, the smoke of a cigarro is also part of the ceremonies: pre-Hispanic natives considered tobacco sacred.
224
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Another American-Indian mythical figure, Navajo Old Age, spits on her hands, and gathers moisture from her armpits to make the Twin War-Gods young again.
At Aesculapius' sanctuary, sacred dogs' saliva was used; both Pliny the Elder (I century CE) and the physician Galen (II/III century CE) record saliva's healing properties. Prithvi Narayan Shah was the first King of Nepal. The god (sage, demi-god, descriptions vary ) Gorakhnath appeared to him and impelled the King to eat the god's vomit (or the binding of Isaac's foul version), which the King refused to do. Gorakhnath then proffered a curse: the royal house of Nepal would last only 10 generations.
India's Aghoras -possibly appearing in the XVI century- strive towards sanctity and liberation through the devotion to Shiva and extreme tamasic 265 rituals such as ritual consumption of human flesh, feces and urine as they often elect the charnel/cremation ground as their abode. The Nazca people of Peru (II century BCE- IX century CE) placed coprolites (=fossil human excrement) in their dead's mouths. Italian artist Pietro Manzoni (1933-63) in 1961 produced an exibit of his own boxed feces: a perversion of the reliquary compulsion? Such tin boxes were 265 “The first level is the tāmasic or the darkened state of inertia and utter resistance to change. Here, the law of the masses, the rules of the herd like a subconscious beast or a half-conscious man -...-In the primitive or the tāmasic stage there is not much conscious suffering to the individual, [there is a kind of lethargy, there is a kind of laziness, you don’t care much about moving forward, you don’t care much about progress, you don’t care much about anything] though he may be the cause of suffering to many others. The need for violent sensations to feel just a little alive drives some of these people towards alcoholism and violent acts and practices. [They need something; it is a kind of a drill to shake them out of it, at least temporarily.] Others simply sulk, as in depression, refusing to budge or outgrow their state. The second stage is one of fiery pleasures and equally swift swings to the blues. ” (Varma, MAISI032 no date:unit 4:5-6).
225
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
originally sold for their price in gold; box n.83 sold in 2008 at Sotheby for UK£ 97.000266.
Among the Tiv people of Nigeria, the obtainment of supernatural power (tsav) is through periodic scares linked to the practice of cannibalism and sorcery. Shamans and healers the world over purportedly extract with their fingers, or suck out with their mouth, impurities and affected tissues from their patients' bodies. Godly and ungodly people alike can be told apart considering which sort of food they consume, or how:”"My food," said Jesus, "is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” (John 4:34).
The Gorehabba ritual in southern India involves throwing cow dung at one another:
Cow dung, like the dung of any other animal, is intrinsically impure and can cause defilement – in fact it will defile a god; but it is pure relative to a mortal . . . the cow’s most impure part is sufficiently pure relative even to a Brahmin priest to remove the latter’s impurities (Harper in Douglas 1966:9). Isn't that the well-trodden path of sacred spitting, whose Saints excel in the trickster's “gastronomic, flatulent, sexual, phallic, and fecal feats” ( Drukpa Kunle, Living Buddha of Gold Mountain, Symeon...)?
Buddhist and Hebrew lore also flirted with similar imagery:
266 NSS Magazine, November 21, 2013.
226
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The four supports consisted of statements by the mendicant [Buddhist monk] that he would live as a monk by begging for his food, use discarded rags for robes, practice and sleep under the trees, and use the excrement of cows and discarded medicines to cure himself of illness. (Hirakawa 1990:67). They will be so hungry and thirsty that they will eat their own dung and drink their own urine. (Isaiah 36:12). [God said] I will punish your descendants and splatter your faces with the manure from your festival sacrifices, and I will throw you on the manure pile. (Malachi 2:3). [God said] Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel." ( Ezekiel 4:12). A milder version of Jesus' miracles recurs in Christianity:
These ritual devices triggered a tradition of healing in Early Christianity, which is somewhat different from the one associated with Jesus. According to the letter of James 5:13–16 the elders shall come togetherextnote if a member of the congregation is sick. Then they are to pray for him (though prayer was no part of Jesus’ healings), anoint him with oil (though oil was never used in the healings of Jesus), and heal in his name (though Jesus never used his or God’s name in his healings). The prayer probably substitutes the elders for Jesus, the oil for his saliva, and his “name” for his personal presence. -...-The charisma of Jesus is reified; it becomes independent of the personal quality of the participants. The collective act of forgiving of sins demonstrates in a ritual way the basic condition of all symbolic healing: the restitution of social harmony within the community. (Theissen in Sax 2010:51-2,62). Readers may here doubt whether such occurrences constitute either fossilized rituals, residual superstitions, culture-specific aberrations or rather -as this e xtnote The horde in fusion is assertedly therapeutic. Even among some Black tribes, the entire tribe shall convene (=the coming together/congredi/arrival motif) in order to heal a member through ritual dances, exorcisms etc.(note of this writer)
227
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
writing suggests- human mind's deeply ingrained fixtures. The Taiwanese restaurant franchise Modern Toilet -which is already expanding to mainland China- leaves customers in no doubt regarding what awaits them inside: “shit or food?” is their puzzling motto. Miniature urinals are used to drink; miniature cessbowls are used to serve Chinese food with an appearance to match: ice cream in the shape of excrement ends an happy meal.
Uttering sounds as well can be both malign and benign (bene/male
dicere=say good or bad about, benediction/malediction):”The most important means of healing is the miraculous word.”267. Specific rhythms are associated with individual spirits in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, very similar to AfroCaribbean Santeria; ceremonies axed around the consumption of vegetable entheogenic concoction ayahuasca include an array of songs and rattling ( ikaros) for various purposes, in turn associated with various spirits.
Hindu or Mahayana
Buddhist deities may be associated with “seed syllables” (=specific sounds).
Hindu Brahma, “perhaps its primary meaning is sound, or sacred sound -...- Brahma means the holy power of sound” 268. Varma tells about the Vedas:” In India mantra is that rhythmic expression which -when recited- produces a physical effect”269. Along the same line, charme (French) and charm (English) derive from the Latin carmen: poetry, but also ritual incantation, and magical power of sound. 267 Theissen in Sax 2010:60. 268 Eck 1994: The Upanishads. 269 MAISI031 no date: lecture 1.2.
228
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Mormons keep a portion of their liturgy in oral form as ceremonies to be held within the Temple's sacred boundaries only.
In Chinese Qi Gong, screams are used to tap into the reservoir of mystical energy Chi. Yatsenko quips:”Suddenly there is a wish -...- that intuition is that word of Savitar [=the creator in the Rig Veda] -...- and the word is the command -...- to express will of some kind”270.
Anthropologist Harner argues his extensive experience with traditional shamanism the world over suggests that “sonic driving” (drums, musical bows, rattles, songs and choruses) has been used -with or often without entheogens- to trigger deep trance and ensuing mystical, shamanistic experiences. Both Japanese Zen Buddhism and Eastern Christianity (Armenian, Syriac) use wooden objects to produce sounds conducive to religious meditation.
Modern disco dance probably follows the same principles, albeit for different purposes-: the power of sacred -or commercial- sound to alter brain waves in minutes. H. Souther, a maestro ayahuascero
in the tradition of Peruvian
entheogenic shamanism, also thins highly of rendering shamanic sounds and rituals in terms of modern disco dance:
The spellbinding power of magico-religious shamanistic leadership also has a lighter side, seen in modern popular music. 270 MAISI018 no date: lecture 2.1.
229
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Rock musicians often borrow elements of shamanism to enhance their mystique, whether it’s being mysterious like Prince, or sacrificially burning one’s guitar like Jimi Hendrix. However, the most shamanistic elements of pop music are contained in its lyrics. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan was among the first pop songwriters to utilize a stream-of-consciousness lyrical style which mimics the sort of loose associations often seen in psychotic ramblings. A typical Dylan line like, “The dead will arise and burst out of your clothes. . .” is both magico-religious and quasi-psychotic. (Polimeni 2012:187). All the ideas discussed so far present a picture of pure spirit descending to the world of matter and substance via temporary, localized concentrations of its energy.-...-What is striking is the fact that these esoteric and abstruse theories have been articulated in one of the most successful popular music albums of all time, Pink Floyd’s legendary Dark Side of the Moon -...-. The true visionaries of popular music have provided contemporary interpretations of universal ideas and themes, and presented them to an audience larger than the seers of antiquity could have imagined. It is now the task of the audience to sift the grain from the chaff, to differentiate between art of true creative expression and that of shallow market oriented packaging, and to allow the inspirational power of genuine creativity to reconnect the audience to its innermost self.(Soni 2001:34-5,230). Aurobindo Ghose271 quips about Hindu Vedas:”The language of Veda itself is šruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit for the impersonal knowledge. ”. Yatsenko concludes:
By expression then we create and men are even said to create the gods in themselves by the mantra. Again, that which we have created in our consciousness by the Word, we can fix there by the Word to become part of ourselves and effective not only in our inner life but upon the outer physical world. (MAISI003 no date: lecture note 4:2). 271 MAISI002 no date handbook: 10.
230
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Tibetan Buddhism is also referred to as mantrayana: the sacred sound vehicle.
Is this that people get fed back in so many words in Dune? The sacred power of sound recurs not only in Hinduism, but in Judaism as well: specially trained religious specialists (Sofers) recite the Torah as they write a new scroll down, or the congregation listens to the Torah being read in a prescribed manner on appointed occasions; in Tibet, wealthy patrons may contract a monastery to read the entire Buddhist canon (108 volumes). In Hindu Ayurveda, chanting hymns while preparing food according to prescriptions shall enhance the food's rejuvenating properties greatly. Muslim customs prescribe to invoke Allah's name over prospective food, such as animals soon to be slaughtered.
There is no limit to the ways these immemorial concepts can be repackaged:
This is, of course, the social world rather than the physical world, but words that change the social world can be amplified, through human ingenuity and effort, into changing the physical world as well. -...- so we will follow Austin in examining different categories of situations and the types of words that are used in them-...- the basis of what is now called Speech-Act Theory. The fundamental idea behind SpeechAct is just what the name implies: Speech is not just the communication of information, but also a kind of action that people perform and that therefore has social as well as communicative implications. -...-The person who uses a performative does something as well as says something. (Drout 2006:6-7). The anthropomorphism of assuming language in gods appears ineluctable: there is no religion without relationship, no relationship without significant communication, no significant communication 231
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
without language, and no language without likeness. For the most rudimentary communication, humans may gesture; but even gesture depends on human likenesses such as smiling, frowning, eating, and breathing. In any case, communication requires some commonality in context, in communicative system, and in content.(Guthie 1993:199). Sacred sound doesn't come without anxieties or its doppelgaenger: silence. Ben-Shahar emphasizes272 the importance of silence as a vehicle of teaching and insight, which immediately conjures images up of Muslim Sufi, Hindu or Buddhist sages -such as those from Desjardins' documentaries in the 1960-70s- who applied the same principle.
Diffidence towards speech, an otherwise hierophantic function, is found all over religious traditions. Buddhism includes precepts against false/divisive speech. Judaeo-Christianity explains that:
All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. (James 3:7-8). But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. (Luke 5:16). They make their tongues as sharp as a serpent's; the poison of vipers is on their lips. (Psalm 140:3). The Graeco-Roman world prescribes more or less the same:
This use of saophron is notable because to be silent, or to speak only briefly, was to become an important facet of sophrosyneextnote for women (and for young persons of either 272 2009: lecture 1.1. e xtnote �the Roman equivalent, Pudicitia, who was portrayed in images and portrait busts, as well as on the imperial coinage from the time of Hadrian� (North 1977:35). (note of the present writer).
232
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
sex) throughout Greek literature. -...- The concept was especially congenial to the Apolline morality with its emphasis on restraint, self-knowledge, and the acceptance of limits, imposed in some cases by the gods, in others by the state, and in the case of women by men. (North 1977:37-8). Often is man's best wisdom to be silent (Pindar, Greek poet, 518438 BCE). And so does Islam:”Wisdom consists in keeping silent, and those who practice it are few ”.
These myths and situation can unfold either in a sacred or a profane realm. People seeking holy people's healing touch, relic or stare may be replaced by groupies seeking the touch, relic or stare of their favorite music or movie star. An elated Chinese girl, who had been chosen to salute 'great helmsman' Mao on film, and to shake his hands, is surrounded by peers who want to shake her hand in turn.
If relics to adore are not present, they can be prepared on the spot. At Lugo (Italy) a nurse killed 'pesky' patients (possibly ten or more) with a lethal injection, then had photographs taken with the corpse 273:”Tactile experience ought to act -so to speak- as model for psychical experience”.
"Hurrah!" cried Coretti after the others. The king looked in his face and glanced for a moment at his three medals. Then Coretti lost his head and shouted: "The Fourth battalion of the fortyninth!" The king who had already turned to the other side, turned again towards us, and, gazing into Coretti's eyes, held his hand out of the carriage. Coretti bounded forward and shook it. 273 TgCom24, October 10, 2014.
233
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The carriage moved on. The crowd broke in and separated us from each other andwe lost sight of Coretti's father, but it was only for a moment. We soon found him again, panting, with his eyes wet, and he was calling his son's name and holding his hand lifted in the air. The son hastened to him, and he cried: "Here, little fellow, while my hand is still warm," and he laid his hand over his face, saying: "This is a caress from the king." (De Amicis 1918:113, emphasis added274). In Italy, (some) people of Naples bring supplications and children to the tomb of beloved comedy actor Totò (Prince Antonio de Curtis, 1898-1967). Carlos Gardel (1890-1935), the French-Argentinian tango superstar, still enjoys considerable attention and popular devotion at times bordering on paroxysm. Just as it is the case with Charlemagne, alternatively labeled French or German, Frenchborn Gardel is also rumored to have been born in Uruguay: whether forensically or just artistically is left unsaid.
In Rosario (Argentina) Iglesia Maradoniana
is a Church devoted to
living soccer celebrity D.A. Maradona. The Church's scriptures detail how soccer constitutes a religion, and how this religion's incarnate god is Argentinian Maradona:
Perhaps the most culturally revealing aspect of the Elvis phenomenon however, is his posthumous rise to become a semireligious figure. This deitific regard can be seen in the language followers use to describe Elvis and their feelings about him, the reverence with which they flock to Graceland, and the tales that recount his healings of illness, blindness, and sorrow through dreams and his music. The inscriptions written on the 274 It has to be emphasized De Amicis' book was entirely a work of fiction.
234
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
wall surrounding Graceland best sum up this quasireligious quality Elvis has achieved in American culture: “Elvis, we believe always and forever”; “Elvis, you are my God and my King”; “Elvis, every mountain I have had to climb, you carried me over on your back.”extnote (Carson Banks in Brunvand 1996:467). While many gods, saviors and their ilk (Emperors, Kings) cured with their touch, other religions might push the envelope further and claim their heroes cured with...their shadow, or simply by looking at or calling upon the sickly: Masaccio's famous painting (1425-8) depicts St. Peter's shadow healing various people, for example:
Buddha again told Lord Sakra [King of the gods] cautiously, "If someone could write this Dharani [=sacred invocation] and place It on the top of a tall banner, high mountain or in a tall building or even keep It in a stupa; Lord of Heaven! If there are Bhikshus or Bhiksunis, Upasakas or Upasikas, laymen or laywomen who have seen this Dharani atop the above structures; or if the shadows of these structures should fall on beings who come near to the structures, or particles of dust from the written Dharani are blown onto their bodies (Usnisa Vijaya Dharani Sutra). Healing can take superlative qualities when the patient is resurrected from death:
Asclepius (Apollo's son) resurrected people from death, and was
therefore struck by Zeus' thunderbolt for defying the natural order. Both Jesus (Jairus' daughter, Luke 8:41ss) and Apollonius275 professedly resurrected a recently deceased maid from a notable family: a consular family for Apollonius; the family of e xtnote Christian imagery is here swiftly applied to the sacramental cult of this rock&roll celebrity, much as pagan imagery had in a bygone age been swiftly adapted to suit the rising Christian religion and the likely figure of a Jewish preacher soon to be enshrined as god's only begotten son, just as Presley is transiting from the historical figure of a mundane celebrity to the supermundane figure of a pseudo-historical thaumaturge (note of this writer). 275 Chap.XLV in Philostratus.
235
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
a “synagogue ruler� for Jesus. In Mark's gospel, the synagogue ruler's daughter is dying (5:23), whereas in Matthew (9:18) she had just died.
Many savior-heroes defeat death, whereas others defeat forces of evil. Moses defeated the Egyptian priests in a magical contest; Elijah dispelled a drought, thus defeating the priests of Baal at mount Carmel 276; St. Peter defeated Simon Magus in a context of prodigies 277; Tibetan Buddhist Saints squared off repeatedly with Bon-Po sorcerers.
Squaring off with forces of evil may happen for peculiar reasons. The entire deluge of situations associated with chivalric/courtly literature, whereby heroes champion damsels in distress, was already present in ancient myths. Among others we could mention the deliverance of the virgin:
One is surprised that comparative mythology should have looked so indefatigably to meteorological phenomena for the explanation of such an immediate and perpetual motif as the deliverance of the virgin, which is the oldest of literary motifs and one which can never grow antiquated (Huizinga 1972:76-77). It seems highly probable, then, that the ambiguity of the Avestan words vantd and daenu allowed for a rationalization whereby a myth of cattle raiding became the myth of recovering abducted queens. 2761 Kings 18:19ss. 277 Apocryphal Acts Of Peter, II century CE. Prodigies included resurrecting a dried fish and making a dog talk (Peter). The apparent morale of the story is that crowds at Rome (including Christians) are in awe at Simon Magus and his miracles, pledging to follow him under a senator's lead. As soon as Peter (the great man) enters the scene performing other prodigies, the dull crowd is already switching sides (again...), including senator Marcellus who begs Peter to forgive him. The 'method' still works to this day. A wealthy individual related to the present writer how a minister of his (new Christian) sect had worked a miracle healing a woman in a wheelchair, and making her rise and walk again.
236
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
(Lincoln 1976:53)278. In book one of his History, Herodotus tells us that Phoenician traders visited Argos in Greece and carried off the king’s daughter Io to Egypt. In return, some Greeks from Crete called in at the Phoenician port of Tyre and carried off Europa, the daughter of the king. Then the Greeks under Jason stole Medea from Colchis. When the king of Colchis demanded reparation, the Greeks replied that none was due, as they had not received due reparation for Io. Then came the abduction of Helen of Sparta by Paris of Troy and the great Trojan War, a conflict that Herodotus attributes to the origin of Persian aggression toward Greece. -...- As the Romans became more and more embroiled in the Greek world, so the myth of Aeneas grew to become important political currency. When the Romans invaded Sicily, the Greek city of Segesta immediately went over to them, claiming to be of Trojan descent and ancestors of Aeneas. The Romans seemed impressed and granted Segesta the status of a protected and free city. In 237 BCE, the Acarnanians from western Greece appealed to the Romans for help against their neighbors, citing the case that they were not named in the Greek mythic tradition of having waged war against Troy. There is also an account, which may or may not be genuine, that the Romans put pressure on the Seleucid monarch of the near-eastern territory that controlled the Troad (the area around Troy) to free the inhabitants of the area of taxation.(Meineck 20051:13,31). The Trojan War and the Hindu epic of Rama are but another affair of heroes fighting over a woman, akin to the historical occurrences of medieval royalties laying siege to a heiress' castle to marry her and get possession of her domains. One of the foundational myths of the Roman Republic presented a similar scenario: the rape of Lucretia279. This explains the epidemic success of contemporary 278 Lincoln here explains the common Indo-European roots of the concept of cow and woman:” as Benveniste has shown, the word means nothing more than "one who lactates, gives milk," being derived from the verb "to give milk, nourish" (Skt. V/dhai-).As such, it may be used for the female of any species” (1976:53). 279 A son of ruling Roman monarch Tarquin coaxed the beautiful and virtuous wife of a member of the same family (Tarquinius Collatinus) into surrendering herself to him under threat of blackening her reputation spreading slander over her chastity to ridicule her husband. She gave in, but later made the outrage public, and committed suicide, thus sparking a wave of moral outrage that led to the monarchy's overthrow. In the preceding short paragraph an entire constellation of myth is present: the dramatic, untimely death; the choice
237
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
productions like Star Wars. Is Star Wars not about knights delivering or protecting a princess during a perilous journey?
Also, the 'rape' or abduction of the virgin/woman is another immemorial motif recurring the world over. Still to this day, vestigial abductions for bridal purposes may survive in Zanskar (Indian Himalaya); Southern Italy; Kirghistan; the Himba of Namibia; among the Mapuche natives of Chile; or may be part of recent history, such as in China well into the XX century, etc as a legacy of forefathers in prehistoric times exchanging women for mating purposes 280, or taking them as war loot (such as in the Iliad or in the myth of the Sabin women). that entails suffering mytheme; the harsh judgment mytheme; the heroes squabbling over a woman mytheme; the woman as beautiful and virtuous as none ever was; the horde in fusion rising as one to avenge ultimate wrongdoing; the belle and the beast mytheme, and so forth. Readers might notice entire portions of this myth seem borrowed from the “Potiphar's wife�mythological constellation. This time, however, Lucretia tells the truth, unlike Phaedra who tells a lie before committing suicide: this clearly proves mythemes can be mixed and matched to serve whichever adventitious socio-political or moralizing goal might be at hand. A slightly similar story recurs in the Orthodox/Catholic version of the Book Of Daniel. Two elders try to blackmail charming Susanna into having sex with them, threatening to accuse her of adultery. She refuses their advances, but the Prophet Daniel exposes her foes so that they are put to death instead. It won't escape readers how the various Lucretia, Susanna, Sita and so forth act in a sort of inverted Potiphar story. Namely, In the original Potiphar story -and the various Phedras-, the matron lies in order to defame an innocent victim. In the inverted tale, the matron becomes a set-up's innocent victim. The elderly pointed to two separate trees as the one tree under which they had supposedly seen Susanna committing adultery. 280 The entire constellation of 'Belle and the Beast' myths the world over feature this young woman who willingly gives herself up to insure her family's/ tribe's well-being (such as in the Native American myth of the Buffalo dance). Back at the origin of civilization, the same story-line unfolds in the Epic Of The Gods of the Ugaritic civilization of Canaan (XIV-XI century BCE). Sea dragon Yamm defies the chief god Baal (=Mesopotamian Marduk is also called Baal, or Lord). Baal's consort Astarte (=Inanna=Ishtar) tries to dissuade Yamm from battle, but he demands that she gives herself to him in exchange: naked Astarte visits Yamm. A sacred prostitute tames savage Enkidu. Saint Martha tames the Tarasque, a sort of dragon that haunted Provence (France). As Martha brings the tame monster to the city, inhabitants attack it: the monster (=the former bad guy who's now good) opposes no resistance, and dies. Saint Martha converts villagers to Christianity, and the inhabitants name their city Tarrascon after the redeemed monster they had unjustly slain. In the lore of Brianza (Italy), parasites of the cabbage could be magically kept at bay if naked virgins would visit the fields carrying brooms (=the witch connection) in a procession. Giant Thrym of Nordic mythology steals Thor's hammer, then demands the goddess Freya as consort. What he gets instead is Thor in disguise dressed up as a bride. At the nuptial banquet, Thor recovers his hammer and slaughters all the giants. A nuptial banquet turning into an occasion for vengeful slaughter recalls what happened with Ulysses and Penelope's suitors.
238
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Ancient Spartans seemingly practiced a sort of wedding by capture 281; in modern Russia, the groom's pals stage the bride's abduction in order to extract (symbolic) ransom:
Approximately one third of Kyrgyz women marry by means of non-consensual kidnapping, according to Russell Kleinbach, a sociology professor at Philadelphia University who has conducted extensive research into the custom of "kyz-ala kachuu," (or "grab and run") in Kyrgyzstan. (Skoch 2010:no page). In traditional Chinese weddings, it is the bride's family that theatrically tries to interfere trying to extract symbolic ransom as the groom shows up to fetch her. In traditional Mexican weddings, attendees to the wedding reception pass between the spouses as the spouses are held together ( la viborita, the little viper): the marriage shall last in spite of societal pressure. A similar ritual with a rope to the same effect (=the mythological threshold mytheme) unfolds in traditional Balinese marriages.
The Ramayana (IV century BCE) is also admittedly therapeutic: Hanuman could easily rescue Rama's wife Sita from the demon Ravana, but she declines stating that would amount to insulting Rama; in order to work its cathartic wonder, the 'screenplay' shall unfold in its entirety. Hanuman, too, doesn't just 281 “Spartan marriage customs were peculiar as well. Relations in fact seem to have been consensual for the most part,or as consensual as they were anywhere else, but in what appears to be a vestige of earlier customs, Spartan women were subjected to at least a sham marriage by capture, the details already worked out beforehand. And after marriage, or a first marriage, a wife ordinarily stayed in her new home while her husband continued, often for some years, to live in the barracks, sneaking in for marital relations by stealth at night, until at last, at about the age of thirty, he could join his wife at home full-time. The theory here was that making sex difficult would make it attractive, husband and wife both eager for contact and therefore all the more likely to produce vigorous children.� (Shutt 2009:33).
239
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
spirit Sita away because he is devoted to Vishnu's incarnation, who shall learn the entire lesson.
Even gods -such as Zeus' Hindu counterpart Indra- shall from time to time learn cathartic lessons; Shiva and Vishnu in disguise humble Indra who had become all too self-absorbed and ambitious. Vishnu – by proxy in his numerous incarnations as Rama, Krishna etc-, too, has to undergo the therapeutic human journey as well. Gautama Buddha, Jesus and other founders are in some milieus considered Vishnu's incarnations:
The AvatÄ r functions by not resorting to any supernatural powers. He is fully aware within Himself of His Divine Identity. However, he remains and acts exactly like a human being in ordinary circumstances. He has also to go through all that the humanity suffers from, for, unless he goes through it all, He cannot become the example of that He wants the humanity to be. (Sarvadekar, MAISI014 no date: lecture 4:4-5). The knight/hero-and-dame situations is often coupled with the labor situation: in order for the dame to love (marry, sleep with...) the hero, he has to go on one or several expeditions: Hercules' mother Alcmena would not allow her husband to consummate their marriage before he avenged her brothers.
It was during such expeditions that Zeus -disguised as Alcmena's husband- fathered Hercules during a night that lasted three days because he had ordered the sun to stand still: Hercules as another King Arthur 282, perhaps? Didn't 282 According to Joseph Campbell (1989: Where There Was No Path), archeology documents how Arthur himself was already object of devotion in the Pyrenees region during the first century CE. Elsewhere, he connects
240
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the sun stand still in biblical lore, too (such as Joshua 10:13; Habbakuk 3:11)? Perhaps one may prefer the eclipse Krishna -in the Mahabharata- caused in order to allow Arjuna to defeat Jayadratha.
The helpful crone and fairy godmother is a familiar feature of European fair)' lore; in Christian saints' legends the role is commonly played by the Virgin. The Virgin by her intercession can win the mercy of the Father.[American-Indian] Spider Woman with her web can control the movements of the Sun. The hero who has come under the protection of the Cosmic Mother cannot be harmed.The thread of Ariadne brought Theseus safely through the adventure of the labyrinth. This is the guiding power that runs through the work of Dante in the female figures of Beatrice and the Virgin, and appears in Goethe's Faust successively as Gretchen, Helen of Troy, and the Virgin. (1949:65, emphasis added). Isn't that a 'proof' that the deity being described is 'the real deal', and not just a figment of one's imagination? And what about the three 283 days? Hindu Sadhus (wandering monks) of different observances follow the prescription of not staying at the same place more than -once again- three days. In order to bind Isaac, Abraham's journey to mount Moriah lasts three days. In Zoroastrianism, the soul remains with the dead body for three days before embarking on its final journey. XII century Ethiopian Saint and King Lalibela visits god during three days: an attempt to poison him had rendered him comatose.
Arthur (Artute) with Artemis and bear cults. According to some etymologies, even Beowulf, the hero of the Anglo-saxon saga, is a circumlocution (=hunter of bees) denoting a bear. 283 Nugent (1995:What Is Myth) starts from Dumezil's idea of the tripartite nature of Indo-european culture (axed around three poles:culture, physicality and fertility) and explains at length the importance of the number three giving several examples. It shall be emphasized how “the law of three� was already part of Olrik's epic laws (1907ss). Other totem numbers are seven, five, twelve etc.
241
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
In ancient Egypt, Osiris was celebrated during a week (holy week?). In the last three days devotees first mourned Osiris' death, kept vigils, then celebrated the god's resurrection on the third day. “the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. But His parents were unaware of it -...-.After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” (Luke 2:43-6).
Buddhist monks are asked three times during communal confession whether they violated a certain set of rules. “Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, Peter--this very night, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny three times that you even know me."” (Mark 14:30).
In the Hindu Upanishads, Yama (lord of death) grants Nachiketa three wishes; again, Yama grants three wishes to Savitri, which is just what the proverbial genie in the bottle would do; Poseidon grants Theseus three arai (prayers or curses); three flights of stairs typically lead to Hindu temples...The number three, what a favorite.
The Moon also becomes invisible for three days in its cycles. Isn't that another mythical -possibly astrotheological- connection? In three days Jesus shall rebuild the destroyed temple (John 2:19); in three days Inanna shall be back from the nether world, too; as Jonah did, Jesus shall be back in three days (Matthew 12:40; Jonah 1:17); in her drunkenness after a fit of cosmic rage, Egyptian goddess 242
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Sekhmet sleeps for three days.
Synchretistic nod abounds. The Latin root for Jupiter (Iovis...) is the same as the Hebrew Yahweh; this syncretism 284 appears explicitly in the II century BCE Jewish-Hellenistic manifesto Letter Of Aristeas.
The Adonis cult was an early import from the Levant, probably via Cyprus, but while many of the outward forms remained the same, its cultural context and significance changed. Adonis was modeled upon Tammuzextnote, the consort of Ishtar whose death was annually lamented by women, and his name is a direct borrowing of the West Semitic adon, Lord. At Phoenician Byblos there was a sanctuary of “Aphrodite and Adonis,” that is, the city goddess Astarte and a consort who corresponded to Tammuz. (Larson 2007:124). There appear to be parallel, synchretistic incarnations of the same 'lesson', motif or cathartic experience across cultures. The story of Cupid, Psyche and Alcestis of Graeco-Roman myth are offered in mixed and inverted terms in the Hindu Savitri And Satyavan; parts of Savitri and Satyavan 285 replay in 1970 Love 284 “the God who gave them their law is the God who maintains your kingdom. They worship the same God - the Lord and Creator of the Universe, as all other men, as we ourselves, O king, though we call him by different names, such as Zeus or Dis. This name was very appropriately bestowed upon him by our first ancestors, in order to signify that He through whom all things are endowed with life and come into being, is necessarily the ruler and lord of the Universe. Set all mankind an example of magnanimity by releasing those who are held in bondage.' ” (The Letter...no date: no page). e xtnote Adoni appears to have been a title of the god Thammuz/Dumuzi etc (note of this writer). 285 Royal virgin Savitri (as beautiful and pure as Greek Psyche, Egyptian Aseneth of Hebrew lore etc) gets to choose her own husband as nobody dares asking for her hand. She chooses Satyavan, the ascetic, penniless son of a blind King in exile, although she knows he's bound to die within one year. He eventually dies, but Savitri – like Alcestis- can wrest his life back from the Lord of death Yama, in addition to other boons, such as the recovery of sight and crown for her father-in-law, and the promise of 100 sons for her and her father (=the surfeit item). Aurobindo explains:”Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save” (MAISI003 no date:lecture note 5:5). Nobody dared to ask for Savitri's hand because who -after all- can marry (=live with) divine truth?
243
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Story, and Autumn In New York (2000).
As this writing contends, the international mainstream and its anglicized pidgin spawn a series of copycats in the farthest reaches of the Americanized intercontinental empire. The same story-line recurs in fact in L'Ammiratrice (The Female Admirer, 1983), an Italian movie of the subcultural genre sceneggiata
napoletana (Neapolitan drama). Female journalist chases male celebrity singer hoping for a scoop; they fall in love instead: she finally dies in a hurricane of tears, and melodious canzoni napoletane (a subcultural genre of Italian music similar to Portuguese fado). It is difficult to tell the real difference -in all but details- between the heroes of folklore, their 'lessons', and the main story-lines of the various Rocky,
Star Wars, Harry Callaghan, Karate Kid rip-off movies.
Is this explanation too infantile or preposterous? It is enough to ponder how Zoroastrianism posited the final victory of the god of righteousness Ahura Mazda against Ahriman, but only after excruciating struggle. Ahriman can be construed as “evil mind” (evil propensities) that are humankind's lot, and shall be overcome.
Wrestlers Papa Shango – a voodoo sorcerer figure – and The Undertaker – with a manager named Paul Bearer (=pallbearer)- equally seemed to gather power from supernatural or demonic forces (voodoo in one case, a funerary urn in the other), much as 'real American' Hulk Hogan's slogan axed around prayers, vitamins 244
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
and “the old glory”286 on the side of the good.
Is this empty gnostic bunkum? Then perhaps people might like it better in the Hegelian -later Marxist- framework of thesis, antithesis and final synthesis (=Janusian thinking=reconciliation=great reunion etc). The grand day of the proletarian revolution and ensuing bounty and oneness shall indeed come after due intermissions that include repressive dictatorships and exploitative bourgeois regimes. Isn't Marxism one's cup of tea?
What about immemorial, traditional upanishadic or Hindu literature that detailed such philosophical approach -elusive universal spirits actualizing on the earthly plane according to a certain foreplanned blueprint etc- about twenty centuries before Hegel (1770-1831) had his stroke of genius?
Of course, German philosophy might not satisfy all equally. What about the New Testament, which happens to say the exact same things? ”And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. ”( Romans 8:28). Centuries before the New Testament, Sophocles' Oedipus At Colonus (V century BCE) celebrates the arch-sinner -now the hero of suffering- with these last lines:”All is ordered for the best”. Like Jesus again, Oedipus going into the sacred groove to disappear among thunderclaps tells Theseus:”Oh, touch me not, but let me all alone Find out the 286 A way to designate the U.S flag.
245
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
sepulcher that destiny Appoints me in this land”287.
That's precisely why the hero of any action movie cannot simply go there, shoot the bad guy and bring the girl home. Rocky has to suffer indignities and defeat before victory, yet action movies are eminently fictional and do not suffer – at least directly- the limitations of what Marxists termed modes of production, structure and superstructure. In other words, nothing forbids the storyline to consist in the 'good guy' who just goes there, kills the 'bad guy' and brings the girl home; yet it'd make a very short movie, and it's human psyche's circular obsessions filmmakers -producers, distributors, sponsors...- cater to.
Jesus has to suffer scourging and crucifixion; Romulus has to be torn apart in death before his apotheosis as Quirinus; the Communist resistance fighter has to be executed as a bandit – and/or bayoneted steak tartare style- before a new regime name streets after him. In Hindu rituals, clay statues of god Ganesha and goddess Durga are dissolved in water after celebratory rites on appointed occasions: the gods offer themselves for sacrifice as the dissolution of their effigy marks the dilution (dissolution, purification...) of their devotees' noxious karma accumulated in the round of death&rebirth.
That's why Hulk Hogan couldn't hyperventilate right away, drop the leg288 and get the belt, but had to suffer reversals of fortune and agonies; no public 287 F. Storr translation, 1912. 288 One of Hogan's finishing moves.
246
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
would pay to watch a three-minute wrestling match 289: the human psyche places certain demands on the surrounding world.
Pilgrims to contemporary high places where this or that semi-god is rumored to appear to a few selected seers also relate anomalies in the sun's behavior or trajectory; if two deers came to worship the wheel of doctrine that Gautama Buddha's enlightenment put in perpetual motion, or if the god of war's elephant bowed before him, so contemporary pilgrims relate animals' equally prodigious behavior in Medjugorie or some other place: it is difficult to assume they may be nodding at Buddha's story or otherwise.
The 'invisible' demi-gods -whose work or powers affect men's world in fantastic ways- is also alive in the Icelandic lore of the Huldufolk (secret people).
Huldufolk, too, are visible only to selected few (druids, seers...) but are often reported as both benign (saving people from imminent danger, for example) and nasty (provoking accidents, especially in excavation or public works' sites that endanger or disturb their dwelling quarters inside rock formations):
Sacred stones have long had an association with buried treasure. This is a worldwide belief that, perhaps, dates back to when rich offerings were given up to sacred rivers, lakes and forests. It also appears to be associated with legends of Faery and Trolls and other underworld spirits that were 289 There are instances of such matches: newcomer King Kong Bundy defeated mid-carder S.D. Jones in nine seconds at Wrestlemania I in 1985. That match was meant to groom Bundy as a sensation. Besides, the public was entitled to watch a series of matches as part of Wrestlemania. During the 1988 Summerslam, the Ultimate Warrior defeated Honky Tonk Man in 31 seconds; there again, the public could see all Summerslam matches.
247
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5 believed to reside in and around these places and guarded vast treasures. People searching for such nonexistent treasure have vandalized many of the ancient cairns in what is now the United State and elsewhere. Other megaliths, including some dolmens, were actually blown up in the 19th century by people who were certain that they could uncover such treasures. Some of these beliefs may have been founded in fact, if we consider Estonian folklore. Tvauri noted, “according to oral heritage, people had buried silverware near a cup-marked stone in Viljandi parish.” Silverware — but not gold treasure (Varner 2004:56).
Prodigies and divine interventions always accompany the hero-savior. In order to leave exile and reappear before his royal father, Theseus has to pick up a large stone, and recover the sword and sandals his father had left for him. Scholars agree that Theseus' myth was just a version of the Hercules myth scaled down to the human level.
The worship of the Bull now confined to India was once common over the entire Pagan world. This, the zodiac, at whatever period it be surveyed and among whatever nation fully demonstrates. Of the symbols which compose it Taurus or the Bull is the most conspicuous inasmuch as it is supposed to have once been the leading constellation but chiefly inasmuch as the superstitions connected with it have deeply coloured the whole stream of antient mythology. Most of the conquests of animals ascribed to heroes belong to Hercules under other names as Jason, Theseus, Cadmus, Perseus. They originate most probably in Egyptian illustrations of the zodiac or mystical paintings of the sun passing through the signs which were misunderstood or misinterpreted by the Greeks In Grecian fable. Hercules was represented as conquering the Elean bull In Persia he was pictured as Mythra Victrix grasping a bull with one hand and in the other holding a sacrificial knife. Jason the Argonaut who killed the bull with brazen hoofs and thereby obtained the golden fleece. Cadmus whom a bull conducted to the site of Thebes and Theseus who slew the Minotaur (the Grecian Apis) are only modifications of the same story which describes the Grecian Hercules as triumphing over the Elean bull. The 248
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
mysteries of Apis as this sign was called in Egypt were the oldest in the world and entered into the religious dogma of most if not all of the primeval nations. The antient Persians pictured the first man with a bull's head. The Hindoos autiently and still venerate the same character. One of the Hindoo avatars pictures the bull man perishing in the flood. A bull headed human form is frequent among Javanese monuments and agrees precisely with similar figures of those of Egypt. (Malcolm 1826:245, emphasis added). Once Theseus became very popular, look-alikes sprung up all over:
Like Phlegon of Tralles’ story of Idas, Parthenius’ tale is full of folktale motifs. The tokens in a wax tablet remind us of the sandals and sword that served as tokens to identify the young Theseus, while Penelope’s actions recall those of Medea, who attempted to kill her stepson Theseus when he turned up in Athens, or Phaedra, whose false accusations against her stepson Hippolytus caused Theseus to bring about his death. Parthenius draws no moral, but presumably any poet who used this narrative could. (Woodard 2007:247). Why do commentators usually omit consideration of the substantial parallels between Homeric and O[ld]T[estament] myth? Modern audiences may, even without realizing, project their beliefs onto how they read ancient texts. Given the long dominance of Christianity and Judaism in theWest, a majority of modernWestern audiences, whether consciously or unconsciously, may, on the basis of their faith, regard biblical and Homeric narratives as opposites, seeing the former as “true” or “real,” but the latter as “false,” “unreal,” or “fictional.” -...-The Near Eastern parallels also serve as a challenge to the theory that Homeric epic descends from an Indo-European prototype, or largely reflects or conforms to an Indo-European inheritance (Louden 2011:5-6). Parallels don't end there. Hercules performed twelve 290 exceptional feats (dodekathlon); Samson of Hebrew lore also performed twelve remarkable exploits; Buddhas, too, go through twelve notable deeds. According to Welsh historian
290 The list of the notable deeds may vary according to the source.
249
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Nennius (VIII century, Historia Brittonum), Arthur – in this variant as dux
bellorum, warlord- won twelve great battles against either Picts, Scots or Saxons in the chaos that followed Roman withdrawal from Britain between 383 and 410.
Founder of the royal Tudor dynasty of England, Henry VII is also immortalized in a novelized biography as a new Hercules ( The Twelve Triumphs Of
Henry VII, 1497, in Latin) performing twelve labours. The Italian house of De' Medici (wealthy bankers, and future rulers of Tuscany) also claimed Hercules as Florence's mythical founder, and the house's towering antecedent.
Twelve houses are in the the wheel of the zodiac; twelve apostles surrounded Jesus; Ulysses' twelve ships, and twelve axes 291 he has to shoot an arrow through; twelve months are in a year; twelve tribes of ancient Israel exist; in Mahayana Buddhism, twelve sectors in the Wheel Of Life portray the twelve links of (inter)dependent origination...a remainder of the sexagesimal arithmetic system ancient Sumerians and Babylonians adopted: 60 minutes in an hour; 360 degrees in a circle; 24 hours in a day, and so forth.
Is Theseus King Arthur or the fictional Luke Skywalker? After all, “skywalker” ( airy one etc) is an epithet of Loki, the trickster-god of Nordic mythology.
291 Rama (Vishnu's incarnation and hero of Hindu epic Ramayana) also performs notable deeds with a magical arrow in order to win Sita's hand, much as Ulysses' feats with the bow grant his position as Penelope's husband. The ax was a symbol of power in Cretan civilization. The ax as symbol also went back to megalithic civilizations, and the neolithic revolution (ax=phallus). The Fascist French regime of Vichy also adopted the double ax as emblem.
250
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Melanesian secret society males who raise ritual pigs to a certain standard 292 also receive the name of “he who walks on clouds� 293, and can act as proxies for the solar hawk.
Swords and stones cropped up all over: Galgano Guidotti da Chiusino was an Italian nobleman who -after a youth of complete libertine indulgence- first became a knight to obey a celestial vision, then for the same reason became a religious hermit. To signify his renunciation, later Saint Galgano -who died in 1181thrust his sword into a rock (where it still stands today) to turn it into a cross.
That's not new, either. Myths and mythologized history teem with figures of warriors or warrior-Kings professedly turned pious: Tibetan dharma King Song-Tsen Ganpo (VII century CE); Indian Kings Chandragupta and Asoka (IV-III century BCE); Kushan King Kanishka (II century CE); Roman Constantine (274-337 CE); Vietnamese King Tran Nhan Tong (1258-1308; he thwarted a Mongol invasion before ordaining and attaining sainthood), etc. Asoka and Kanishka are associated with Buddhism, whereas Chandragupta is associated with conversion to Jainism.
As repeatedly pointed out throughout this writing, the same story repeats itself: Roman Emperor Constantine (274-337 CE), Frankish King Clovis 294
292 The pig's lower tusks shall be allowed to grow in a loop thrice (=common mytheme). 293 Campbell 1972-2:Man&Myth Through The Ages I. 294 Some contend that Christianity in the form of Arianism was already present among the Franks and that Clovis was -in fact- already an Arian Christian. Some disclaim it and affirm the Franks transited from paganism to Catholicism.
251
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
(466-511 CE) and -among others- (Saint) King Edwin of Northumbria (586-633 CE) accept Christianity after a prayer grants them victory on the battlefield, much as Alexander had proclaimed himself son of Zeus before his victory at Gaugamela (331 BCE).
Positive psychologists, religionists and personality coaches of all walks of life invariably predict that unmistakable signs shall come to those intelligent enough to follow what they say. Christian chronicles expounding to doubting Muslims the benefits of conversion through uplifting stories coexisted with medieval Muslim chronicles addressing potential Christian converts in almost the same terms.
Apples and arrows, too, cropped up all over:
Far less familiar, even among Welsh people, is a similar story found in a Welsh manuscript (Peniarth 13i), now at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. According to this Madog, son of Gruffydd Maelor (+ i191), a Welsh chieftain who had been dispossessed of his lands in Breconshire by William de Breos, son of William de Braioze and nephew of Earl Roger of Hereford, was ordered by Matilda (Maud) de St Valery, Countess of Breconshire and wife of William de Breos to shoot an apple from the head of his youngest son (he had five), also called Madog, a feat which he successfully accomplished.-...- Researchers into the story of William Tell suggest that a mythological marksman and an impossible bailiff bearing a historical name have been joined with confused and distorted reminiscences of events of 1245-7 in which the names of many real persons have been inserted and many unauthenticated acts attributed to them (Williams 1961:317-19) After this, it is not surprising to find that no two authors who describe the deeds of William Tell agree in the details of topography and chronology. -...- The Danish account of Tell is given as follows, by 252
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Saxo Grammaticus -...- But the story appears not only in Denmark, but in England, in Norway, in Finland and Russia, and in Persia, and there is some reason for supposing that it was known in India. In Norway we have the adventures of Pansa the Splayfooted, and of Hemingr, a vassal of Harold Hardrada, who invaded England in 1066. In Iceland there is the kindred legend of Egil, brother of Wayland Smith, the Norse Vulcan. In England there is the ballad of William of Cloudeslee, which supplied Scott with many details of the archery scene in "Ivanhoe." (Fiske 1872:1-6, emphasis added). Even today, many religions involve vestigial 'hero's journeys': Tibetans circumambulate famous temples; Muslims make of certain pilgrimages the high point of their religious life, circumambulating the Kaba to partake in god's holiness; Catholics go on foot to this or that sanctuary; Japanese Buddhists imitate master Kukai (founder of Shingon Buddhism, VIII/IX century) as they go on the Shikoku Pilgrimage visiting 88 temples over 1.200 Km 295; proponents of the drug/protest culture liken 'acid trips' to ways to unlock the door towards inner/philosophical discoveries296; according to prof. Clive Ruggles, the famous Nazca lines were designed to be walked along in a sacred pilgrimage:
Our land doesn't speak to us of the divine. Divine land is only over there in the Middle East. We make pilgrimages to the Holy Land, or people go there to claim it from another people and make it their own again. This is a historical misinterpretation of spiritual symbols. The Holy Land isn't in some other place. (Campbell&Boa 295 Pilgrims usually wear white robes: ancient funerary garments of those who risked their life going through the pilgrimage. At every temple, pilgrims may receive stamps and seals confirming -just as it is the case with Christian Compostela- the visit. Many also wish to be buried with their pilgrimage booklet. 296 Seal's 1991 worldwide hit song Crazy specifically connects religious experience with acid trips: In a church by the face He talks about the people going under Only child know A man decides after seventy years That what he goes there for Is to unlock the door-...- Miracles will happen as we trip -...-In a sky full of people only some want to fly Isn't that crazy
253
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
1989:28). The relative comfort that assists modern pilgrims shall not obfuscate the fact that many pilgrimages used to constitute mighty endeavors putting one's life at potential risk. To this very day pilgrims routinely die circumambulating mount Kailash (52 km). People in backward areas of Romania still circumambulate graves with incense to seal them and insure the dead won't come back to haunt the living.
This 'pilgrimage' item (a variation of the journey motif) shall not be trivialized, as nearly all key events in human history, whether actual, mythical or anything in-between, deal with many different people convening from all over to discuss and deliberate about quintessential matters shifting the course of later human history.
At the dawn of myth, Mesopotamian gods ( Enuma Elish, possibly XVIXVIII century BCE ) in council decide to punish humankind with a flood; at Mecone, gods and mortals decide the proper way to sacrifice to the gods; judges convene to put the god Ares on trial, bringing about modern justice; the godly Rishis reunite in the Himalayan region to create the healing system of Ayurveda at the dawn of time; Maitreya (the Buddha of the future) shall hold three assemblies to announce his doctrine.
The American Revolution, the French Revolution down to the Nuremberg trial were based on Congresses ( congredi, come together), Assemblies or 254
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Conventions (convenire) that follow the mystical journey/pilgrimage blueprint and represent the restored oneness after the confusion, strife and plurality visited upon the people as result of the gods' wrath, false doctrines, the English Crown's arrogance, the collapse of French absolutism or some other 'zero hour moment' in tune with the circumstances.
The congredi myth can be easily politicized. Ben-Shahar 297 elatedly points out how, “in order to save the free world”, the 'great nation' of the USA brought together the greatest minds of all to build the atomic bomb during WWII in the name of a shared “vision”. 1981 Victory sees interned soccer players from all over German camps convene to defeat a German soccer team during a fictional WWII; much on the same pace, 1981 Chariots Of Fire sees athletes convene from all over the world to compete in the 1924 Olympics.
A politicized salad bar of psychological complexes, political statements, training montages, providential masters, and related paraphernalia is offered. The
congredi myth can also be inverted, whereby special people (apostles, knights, sailors etc) depart from one single place to accomplish their mission of evangelization, discovery etc.
Mythemes (=building blocks of myth) tend to coalesce: the vision, journey, congredi, topography, arch-trickster, impending doom, honest war, free 297 2005-6a:lecture 11.
255
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
world etc can coexist. It is not without irony how “saving the free world� would then be turned after WWII against the USSR, possibly the greatest contributor to Fascist defeat. Truth, consistency, verisimilitude and even statistical probability are not necessary ingredients when a story's success with the public is to be measured.
The equality many emoting social alchemists and reformers are obsessed with since time immemorial goes well beyond habeas corpus, equality before the law, or equal wages for equal units of work to chase indefinite primeval oneness. Robespierre's blueprint of the perfect regime was initially to merely overcome feudalism, to dethrone nobility, and to bring about a form of legalistic democracy. It was soon apparent, however, that the meek reformer under his philosopher's powdered wig was another maximalist obsessed with the concept of 'virtue'.
In a mayhem that recalls the later Pol Pot regime, the factions within the revolutionary party ended up sending one another to the guillotine:
Within a year and a half, 5 of the 15 [Soviet] Politburo members, 98 of the 139 Central Committee members and 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates from the Seventeenth Congress had been arrested [during Stalinist purges]. (Sebag Montefiore 2004:237). Why social alchemy? Well, alchemy can be construed (as the etymology implies) as chemistry, technical knowledge of the inner workings of nature allowing the practitioner to turn one thing into another seemingly unrelated.
Medieval alchemy -a mixture of craft manuals (recipe literature) and 256
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Islamic alchemical texts in translation- went gradually underground as both political and moral problems led to Church -or secular- interdicts against the same. Alchemists thus shrouded their originally artisanal practice in gnostic concepts derived from religious -mostly biblical- imagery. In the XIX century (again), a revival interpreted such gnostic veneer literally as the alchemist's mystical voyage towards self-transformation or spiritual heights.
Yet, the greater part of the alchemist's power came from his beliefs, his inner convictions, the precise identity of his gods and anti-gods, the exact color of his armband, what he (did not) want the world to be like, which in no way resembles how modern day's chemists operate. That is how theories spring up: Marxism, feminism, Leninism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism and so many others, whose strong point is people know beforehand what the theorist is going to gripe or bellyache about.
Theories then take the minute step to become theologies (or top-down theories that explain too much): Chicano, African, Genocide, Women, GLBT and so forth studies. What in an opponent constitutes circular mono- or mythomania becomes otherwise a scientific approach yielding damning and exact results:
The Mormon cosmos would include three heavens, and the Mormon faithful would rise as gods to the highest heaven, reproducing the doctrines of universal salvation and divinization that ran through many of the movements influenced directly or indirectly by the writings of Boehme, Paracelsus, and Hermes. 257
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Mormon divinization would be achieved by the "sealing powers of Elijah" restored to the Mormon priesthood, powers that, like the sacred experiments of the alchemical magus, put divine grace into human hands. And like the Quakers and Muggletonians, the Mormon leadership in Utah would labor long and hard to establish and to maintain a firm boundary between their theology and the story of occult influences deeply embedded in their early history. (Brooke 1994:29). As such, the quest to know, and through knowing to become "as gods," becomes a leitmotif of Gnosticism. (Davis 1999:99). As with all utopians, the social alchemist's mind is the sole to roam completely free in the fictional nowheres (utopia=no place) s-he conjures up:� justice for everyone -...- bliss and justice -...- we seem to love justice -...- justice means getting what we want -...- everybody should be treated fairly “ 298. Lobotomized masses -going circularly through the stale motions of petrified civic rituals and ostensible allegiances- inhabit the gilded megalopolises sheltered from impurity.
The social alchemist's inebriated mind obsessively carves every miniature to adorn infinite temples dedicated to what s-he holds up as virtue; it serves as juror in ongoing posthumous trials of tyrants of bygone ages; it polishes every doorknob; it endlessly rewrites history books; it frantically maps new details of convoluted topographies; it compulsively monitors every speech or exchange to insure conformity; it collapses in anticipation of the day the entire world won't be able to be told apart from its morbid fantasies of social and/or spiritual uplift: 298 Baumann 2008:Introduction.
258
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Myths are stories told to answer to some human need, so we should not feel overly surprised if they respond more faithfully to such needs than to the demands of abstract logic, of science, or even of morality. Myths are fictions, and like all fictions achieve precision in one domain at the expense of imprecision or even laxity in another. And, of course, precision is not accuracy. The question of truth remains. But myths arc as prominent in modern, industrial cultures as they were in ancient cultures, and as powerful as they remain in tribal cultures. If their presence is not evident, that is partly because one's own myths are less noticeable as myths than exotic or archaic myths are. But that is not the only reason. Myths in situ are still living. And recognition of a myth as a myth, that is, as a fiction, can radically diminish its power. (Goodman 1993:107). It thus finds opposition and dissidence irksomely intolerable as unfathomable blasphemy against which it publishes countless edicts, whose every word gets commented upon in volumes:”hyper reality that exists without permitting a question to arise”299; “to the point that they cannot imagine not sharing your opinion.”.
What in an opponent amounts to logorrhea and scribomania, in turn signposting dubious mental health, here become the elation for the most justified of all causes:
The delusional system of an insane person is like a myth in which he celebrates his own greatness. There are insane persons who assert themselves to be some particular, famous, historical person -...without further ceremony quite as we are wont to do in dreams. (Abraham 1913:40). Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us. 299 Gane 1991:138.
259
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
-...-All the traits of the soul and the encyclopaedic knowledge of the mind can be placed within an imaginal structure. An inner temple of fantasy was built, and in it stood statues of mythical figures. (Hillman, cit. in Angelo 1992:151,185) La monarchie n'est point un roi, elle est un crime; la république n'est point un sénat, elle est la vertu. Quiconque ménage le crime veut rétablir la monarchie et immoler la liberté. (Saint-Just)300. Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike. (Campbell 1949:28). a specific neurological condition known as temporal lobe epilepsy produces psychological states that are similar to the religious experiences of people like Joan of Arc and St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Temporal lobe epilepsy is different from other forms of epilepsy in that temporal lobe epilepsy seizures do not involve convulsions, immobility, or loss of consciousness. Instead, a person having a temporal lobe epilepsy seizure notices a change in sensory perception, often involving changes in smells, sounds, tastes, and phantom sensations in the skin. Some people also experience cognitive changes such as déjà vu or jamais vu during a temporal lobe epileptic seizure, and a significant fraction of these people also experience a heightened sense of “religiosity,” including the sensation of an unseen, supernatural presence. -...-Geschwind described a clinical syndrome (called Geschwind syndrome) characterized by hypergraphia (the tendency to write long, detailed arguments and descriptions, often on religious subjects), hyper-religiosity, fainting spells, mutism (the inability to speak in certain social situations), and pedantism (the tendency to discourse at length on obscure subjects, especially the definitions of words and the fine points of grammar). Geschwind hypothesized that this syndrome is a manifestation of one form of mild temporal lobe epilepsy and suggested that it might explain the behavior of some hyper-religious historical figures. -...-such interpretations were just that: they were not the causes of such experiences, but rather were the cognitive means by which people who had experienced such seizures explained their sensations to themselves. In other words, the sensations came first, followed by the religious explanations. -...- They studied these correlations using brain scans and other measures of brain activity using subjects trained 300A monarchy isn't at all about a king: it's a crime. A republic isn't at all about a senate: it's a virtue. A criminal is anybody who wants to re-establish the monarchy by sacrificing liberty.
260
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
in Eastern and Western meditative traditions: monks, nuns, and priests. They found that such subjects had consistent patterns of brain activity that were different from those of non-religiously trained people, and that these patterns of brain activity were correlated with specific meditation and religious practices. In particular, they found that repeated simultaneous stimulation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems (which normally produce diametrically opposed effects, one preparing for “fight or flight,” and the other for “rest and digest” activities) produced paradoxical brain activity patterns indicating simultaneous arousal and relaxation. (MacNeill 2011:47-9). Rather, human societies during the past 4,000 years have almost always been led or influenced by dominant individuals in the form of military rulers, religious leaders, explorers, and scientists. Highly dopaminergic individuals may be among the 2 percent or so of highachievement individuals described by Toffler (1970), who are seemingly well-adapted to the environments of modern societies and who are in most cases its leaders. However, even highly successful individuals may be prone to hyperdopaminergic syndromes such as hypomania (Goodwin and Jamison, 1990) and obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders such as workaholism, excessive risk-taking, and sexual addiction, and these individuals also may be part of families in which hyperdopaminergic disorders are common (Previc 2009:130). It was John Price who figured out how to reconcile the theories, suggesting that shamans and prophets could be two phenotypic versions of a schizotypal personality.(Polimeni 2012:123). What is the institute of the United Nations, exactly? A tribune and venue for all nations to discuss and bargain? Another variation on the congredi myth? A club for peaceniks or philanthropists?
A new phrase, the United Nations, slipped into the world's vocabulary. Editorial writers and military commentators used it glibly. And last week they began to wonder what, exactly, it meant— that pact by which 26 nations bound themselves fortnight ago not to make a separate peace with their Axis enemies. It would be a long time before the full story of the pact's signing came out. What was 261
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
known was that by New Year's Day the wrinkles had been ironed out of the draft drawn by Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and his assistant Carlton Savage. Britain's Churchill, Russia's Litvinoff and China's T. V. Soong were called into conference at the White House that evening. Maxim Litvinoff had won one big point. This limited the pledge of the signers to a promise to make war to the end only on the enemies with whom they were already at war.-...- The United Nations agreement was a brilliant gesture, but not even its loudest applauder claimed that it organized the anti-Axis world for war or peace. Easy acceptance of the words might make people forget that only the painful drudgery of international cooperation and the abnegation of selfish nationalism could unite the united nations. That was yet to come. So far the only concrete form that unity had taken was in a common determination of 26 nations to beat the Axis. But for the people of the Axis countries that fact could not be other than sobering: 26 nations—count them—26, all determined that Hitler and his tyranny shall be destroyed. (Time 1942: no page, emphasis added). As the Time columnist puts it, the will to beat another group of nations was all there was. Setting aside fitful hecklers -who lament unspeakable allegiances lurking under every critique while a dirge plays in the background, dolts gasp for breath, and the crowd jeers-, it is possible to see another circular mythology at work that masks concrete political ambitions and pretenses under vague references to the usual bunch of more or less obtuse emotive cliches.
With surprisingly no sense of ridicule, U.S Christian fundamentalist groups denounce the U.N as a sort of facade preparing the world for the impending demise of Christianity the advent of a second Hitler would bring about ushering in world government based upon Fascist doctrines. The fact that the U.N were the byproduct of the bizarre commingling of Soviet and Anglo-American wartime propaganda escapes them just so that may dodge inopportune political thorny issues. 262
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
It is (not so) surprising that a song became popular in 1939 detailing how three political figures were marching side by side sharing the same will and faith to save and restore European civilization for the salvation of mankind...who are they? “The most powerful forces of good ever assembled -...- dedicated to truth, justice and peace for all mankind”301?
Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. Hanna&Barbera
Superfriends' headquarters is the Hall of Justice; in Buddhist Anguttara Nikaya, the assembly hall of the gods is called the Hall of Righteousness: what a coincidence.
Even boat-people immigrating illegally are bestowed “pseudo-sanctity” upon by comparing their all too mundane and opportunistic journey to mythic journeys (Ulysses; Aeneas; St. Thomas Apostle who allegedly founded a Christian community in India that exists to this day as Mar Thoma Margam; St. Patrick; Sao Brandao who evangelized Brazil302 in mythical times; San Gaudioso who was set sailing dinghy by a vengeful Visigothic King, thus ending up in Naples...).
Pope Francis I303 also lionizes the endless stream of (illegal) immigrants by comparing them to the Holy Family seeking refuge in Egypt. Pope Francis clearly shows how the day's politicized agenda shall be seen through the prism of one's
exempla or myths of choice that supersede -in an emotional hurricane pushing towards gregarious compliance- all frivolous states of affairs. Greek drama already
301 Actually the opening presentation of the U.S cartoon The Superfriends. 302 Brasil (or Hy-Brasil) was a mythical island present on ancient maps and at times identified with modern day Brazil. 303 MSN Notizie, December 29, 2013.
263
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
prescribed the attitudes towards the traveler:”and no one’s here to give me the reception that I expected: open doors, and smiles to welcome the returning pilgrim home.”304.
The opposite might also apply: Catholic clergyman Librizzi, president of Trapani's (Italy) Catholic welfare agency CARITAS, is arrested: he allegedly blackmailed powerless illegal boat people into sexual encounters as they were under CARITAS' tutelage305. Readers shall come to their own conclusions.
An interesting -if stale- twist on the subject is filtering the topic at hand through the pink glasses of sexual innuendos. Shakira's famous 2006 song Hips
Don't Lie melts the hero's journey (“Refugees run the seas 'cause we own our own boats ” ) motif over a jumble of 'progressive' innuendos (“Why the CIA wanna watch us? Colombians and Haitians ”) interspersed with forthright sexual references (“She's so sexy every man's fantasy a refugee like me back with the Fugees from a 3rd world country ”;”I never really knew that she could dance like this She makes a man want to speak Spanish ”). The jumble turns into a junk yard when the extent of the interest in Hispanic culture is made clear (“Como se llama (si), bonita (si), mi casa (si, Shakira Shakira), su casa Shakira, Shakira ”). Even the reference to the 'other' as 'animal' is not that bad after all (“Oh boy, I can see your body moving Half animal, half man ”). 304 Theseus in Euripides' Hippolytus, 880-883. 305 ANSA, June 24, 2014.
264
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
This panoply of left-wing motifs is hardly any different (third world refugees as willing and ready sexual animals one must not miss due to 'bad CIA's' interference...) from the least refined, bandwagon far-right panoply that is usually accused of being shallow, and of indulging in various stereotypes that polite company typically shuns.
Presenting the next wave of more or less illegal immigrants as sexual bounty has -again- been applied to all and sundry. It's an old story: Hitler promised all German women would have a husband if NSDAP came to power. The common (wo)man shall also find instant sexual and/or matrimonial gratification on the part of highly undemanding, accommodating and hyper-sexed Priapi and Geishas under the exogamic auspices of Belle Epoque nation-States smiling upon the hubbub as 'it feeds the societal machine '.
Fly-by-night entrepreneurs shall also find an oversupply of -againhighly undemanding and accommodating workers to slave away at whichever midsummer boom-and-bust 'opportunity' might be there offering lower paychecks.
Furthermore, exogamic communities are less prone to nativist escapades that -if staged in any way- soon collapse in farce -as the Italian Lega Nord case epitomizes- because there really are few or no natives to start with. As Lega Nord clearly showed, the old idea of recapturing bygone ages (of ethno-cultural purity; of a lost statehood that never existed...) can enjoy a success as predictable as fleeting. 265
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The “NSDAP comeback� that distraught opponents pinned on the equally short-lived Haider experiment in Austria, soon collapsed in a farce orchestrated by astute bohemians and professional politicians (often mere informants) eager to build their personal fortune rather than some fantasy land of ethno-cultural triumph based upon role-reversal and oneness.
In Taiwan, the central government tried to solve the problem of tribal societies and their grievances in peripheral islands by encouraging immigration from mainland Taiwan: exogamy might prove an apt solution after fruitless rows of bargaining and logrolling.
The shtick is applied to all and sundry: the world is pretty much the same, but there is one race, group or culture (alternatively: malt liquor brand, politician, fast food product...) so unlike all the rest, which abides by moral, sexual or cultural standards (alternatively the 'grandma quality' of that fast food product; this politician's honesty and good conduct) that stopped being the norm two or more generations ago: wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura was a noted Asian women enthusiast.
Mesopotamian Kings of Kings on the cusp between the Bronze and Iron age also enacted policies of massive deportations -from which the Hebrew accounts of captivity derive- in order -so claim some scholars- to replenish their domains endemic epidemics and warfare routinely ravaged: 266
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
around the second millennium B.c., the early or middle times of the second millennium B.C. Yahweh tells them to go in and let nothing be left alive when you're through with it. Then the Assyrians got the idea that when you wipe everybody out, you don't have anybody left to work for you. So, instead of wiping the people out, they transferred them to another place and brought people from that place into this place. This caused an enormous shuffling of people in the Near East so that all roots were broken. And, if this system had not been in effect when Jerusalem fell in the sixth century B.C., the Jews would have been wiped out. Instead they were moved to Babylon. (Campbell&Boa 1989:116). Humankind's beloved myth(ologie)s tell what typically happens next to a recurring migration or deportation event:
While Israel was staying in the Acacia Grove, the people began to have sexual relations with the women of Moab. The women invited them to the sacrifices for their gods, and the people ate and bowed in worship to their gods. So Israel aligned itself with Baal of Peor, and the LORD's anger burned against Israel. (Numbers 25:1-3). You engaged in prostitution with the Egyptians, your neighbors with large genitals, and aroused my anger with your increasing promiscuity. (Ezekiel 16:26).
Giornale Di Arona306 runs a special on immigration: official sources claim exogamic relationships are on the rise: 8,8% of all weddings/unions registered in Italy in 2012 are mixed couples including immigrants.
The alternative to a flamboyant Mardi Gras of opportunity, sexual or otherwise, remains mostly unexplored. Could crime rates and health hazards possibly be on the rise? Unproven speculations, as bereft Soviet cheerleaders would
306 6 December 2013:2
267
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
have it.
Of course, as news reports have it, South Africa with its garden cities transited from a first world reality in the 1960s (for example setting the pace in matters of organ transplants) to a developing country with one of the world's highest rates of crime and societal disintegration oppressing Beirut-style cities: enthusiasts brush this off as lesser evil of societies in transition.
The alternative to Beirut-style, diverse megalopolises are city like Yubari in orderly Japan. Founded in 1943 as a thriving coal-mining center in full population growth, in recent decades the city sunk to the rank of a deindustrialized, depopulated (from about 100.000 to about 10.000 residents), financially bankrupt ghost town full of deserted schools and planked buildings.
A few elderly people only roam reminiscing about a bygone past of civic effervescence: more societies in transition.
The temptation for someone with a psychopathic personality to join a new, fast-paced, competitive, and highly effective “transitional� organization, especially one with few constraints or rules, is too great, and the personal rewards too significant, to be ignored. The effect of these things is that psychopaths are more attracted to work for businesses that offer fast-paced, high-risk, high-profit environments. (Babiak&Hare 2006:ix). Zimbabwe, for a while the land of the rising sun for a diverse cohort of leftists, peaceniks and progressives, has slowly but surely slipped into the limelight
268
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
as epitome of ethnic warfare, crime, corruption, economic meltdown and
caudillismo: more societies in transition, and lesser evils of a different sort, perhaps. Of course, if the pendulum swung in an inopportune political direction, readers may guess what would happen to the doctrine of lesser evil and societies in transition.
The journey mytheme is very powerful as anticipatory of a transition. Mussolini and Mao, too, incorporated a journey element in the foundation of their regimes. Gandhi marched 390 Km in 1930 to collect salt from the sea in violation of the law English colonizers had imposed. Joseph Smith and early Mormon communities journeyed across the USA, being recurrently prosecuted, persecuted and expelled. Smith himself was lynched while in prison; alternatively, he died in a gunfight firing back at his foes: it all depends on who tells the story. M.L. King coled the “March On Washington� in 1963.
Mohamed journeyed and fought across the Arabian desert: his first companions and converts thus constituted a privileged group within the community of the Muslim faithful; Mohamed's flight from Mecca to Medina is considered as the Muslim calendar's founding year. Lenin's journey back to Russia could also be mythologized, for example in the catchy legend of Lenin's journey taking place
269
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
aboard a “sealed train”307: Liulevicius reports the legend as fact308.
Leon Degrelle narrates the excruciating march of non-German Waffen
SS volunteers across the Soviet Union during WWII. North-Korean children apparently march every day to celebrate the progression of deceased leader Kim IlSung as he was about to free the country during WWII.
Some wrote about Simon Bolivar's epic marches in his quest to wrest Latin-American independence from Spain:
The length of the march, the poverty of the country; their inadequate equipment; the loss of all their saddle and pack animals; intense heat and penetrating cold every twenty-four hours ; a region infested with malaria ; a season of torrential rains on the llanos and snow, ice and hail in the paramo ; a route across flooded rivers, over burning plains, into tropical jungles, and finally over a mountain pass thirteen thousand feet high. Add to these the fact that they were half starved, their only food for weeks at a time being freshly killed beef, and they were approaching an enemy that outnumbered them and one can not but marvel at their courage and admire the tenacity of purpose that upheld them. (Lemly 1923:183) Ottoman nationalist leader Enver Pasha led the Empire into WWI launching expeditionary wars against Tzarist Russia in the Caucasus. After the Empire collapsed, Enver Pasha orchestrated political cabals in various directions, then perished as he orchestrated an expeditionary war purportedly meant to unite Muslims
307 Apparently Lenin had demanded that the train aboard which he -and other prominent Russian revolutionaries- travelled be granted extraterritorial status. The obvious high security measures that characterized the secret operation lent credit to the legend. Trotsky mentions “the legend of the “sealed train””(2008:212). 308 2003:Total War.
270
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
of Turkish stock against Soviet oppression in central Asia ( Basmachi Revolt, Turkestan). In Brazil in 1925-7, rebels against the oligarchical government joined the
coluna Prestes (Prestes309 column, also Coluna Invicta, invincible column) journeying thousands of kilometers in the Brazilian interior before reaching Bolivia.
Such cases are countless. In 1931, Australian aboriginal girls escape from compulsory schooling: they journey 1.200 miles
back home. Legendary, godly
Chinese monk Xuan Zhang (epic Journey To The West) journeys to the West in search of original Buddhist texts to educate his compatriots with; his abetters (in a sort of Robin Hood's merry men) include the superhuman Hanuman-copycat Monkey King.
Legendary Xuan Zhang is possibly based upon a real travelling monk (VII century) by the same name, much as the legendary sea expedition to the West of sterling Chinese admiral Zheng He (1371-1433) took place in real life. A temple exists in China, where Xuan Zhang's remains professedly rest alongside texts he would have brought back from India.
The 'journeying founder' motif recurs the world over, as many cultures in turn claimed to originate from mythical predecessors on the run from evil or natural disasters (Arcadia, Aztlan, Atlantis and so forth); or journeying in search of their true origin (Theseus in Attica, for example). 309 L.C. Prestes, Communist leader.
271
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Jesus might have escaped crucifixion and wandered all the way to Japan, where he preached, married, and died at 106 years of age being buried at Shingo village310. A similar story is told about Jesus relocating to Kashmir, where he (once again) preached, got married, begot children thus -just like at Shingo in Japanleaving direct descendants behind: another Da Vinci Code narrative. Allegedly, ancient documents exist -or used to exist- in support of both story-lines.
Dido (=the wanderer) Queen of Carthage was both in flight from Phoenicia, and the mythical founder of Carthage; she died atop a funeral pyre -like Hercules- where she fell on a sword -like Ajax-.
The first Emperor of China (III century BCE) -another founder on a warring journey- bestowed upon himself the title of divine ancestor. In preConfucian China (divided in various States), rulers were typically seen as wielding power or authority various deities -in perfect Mesopotamian fashion- had entrusted upon them in a sort of cosmic filial relationship (=the Chinese Emperor as Son of Heaven; the Japanese Emperor as descendent of Sun goddess Amaterasu; Hellenistic monarchs as “god made manifest�; Roman Emperors seen as incarnations of gods, typically Apollo ). 310 According to news (Jesus Is Buried...1998:44-5), clues exist to support this hypothesis. An old scroll in ancient Japanese supposedly documenting the issue (The Last Will And Testament Of Jesus Christ, the same title as a host of unrelated Christian writings) was discovered in 1935: it had been in the custody of local families since time immemorial. The Japanese government allegedly spirited the scroll away in Tokyo, where it disappeared during WWII. Also, apparently the seal of the Sawaguchi family -Jesus' purported descendents- was a star of David; parents have painted crosses on newborns' foreheads for ages; words from the local dialect might come from Hebrew, and villagers around the burial site have for ages held rituals, whose wording might come from Hebrew.
272
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Meineck informs how
There’s a direct link with the myth of Hercules and Geryon and the new Greek colonies founded in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE in Italy. • Hercules trudges through the hot sun of North Africa, where the Therans established a colony at Cyrene in 630 BCE. • He stole the cattle from Geryon and drove them through Spain, where the Phocaeans had a trading colony aptly named Emporion.• As he traveled through the south of France, he would have passed the sites of the Phocaean cities of Massalia (Marseilles) and Nicaea (Nice). • Even his earlier expedition to the realm of the Amazons reflects the colonization by Miletus of the Turkish coast, the Bosphorus, the Danube, and the Black Sea coast. (2005-1:20). That is not something fit for campfire stories told in archaic ancient Greek only, though. Stallone's 1987 movie Over The Top is precisely the literal travelogue of a boy -raised by his millionaire maternal grandfather- who meets his father -a bumming truck driver- for the first time.
The 'coming of age' story ends with the boy growing up, and with the reconciliation (= great reunion etc) between the outcast father - now arm-wrestling champion- and his father-in-law (=authoritative patriarch):
Atonement [with the father] (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster—the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself; and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy. Therewith, the center of belief is transferred outside of the bedeviling god's tight scaly ring, and the dreadful ogres dissolve. (Campbell 1949:120). Authoritative (often authoritarian) patriarchs -or the Jungian puer-senex 273
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
dyad- are a dime a dozen in both folklore and popular culture as providential masters (Bloodsport, Karate Kid); commanding officers (A-Team); drill Sergeants (Starship Troopers; An Officer And A Gentleman ); family members (Greedy; Over
The Top); corporate overseers (Knight Rider); bosses of underground patriotic cabals (MacGyver; Remo Williams).
In ancient myth, Hera bestows countless trials upon Hercules. When he finally ascends to heaven, he reconciles with the celestial matriarch, and marries her (and Zeus') daughter Hebe, goddess of youth and pardon.
The 'great reunion' shtick never ceases to pay dividends; the 'great reunion' brings about reconciliation, hence a new beginning:�then I felt as though a hand had pushed my shoulder, and I found myself in his arms. He kissed me and said:
No more quarrels between us! No, never! Never! Never! I answered.�.
Contemporary
new-age
shame
shamans
and
personality
coaches
restyle
reconciliation -an odd piece of Catholic jargon- as healing: one and the same.
Popular culture couldn't lag far behind. The Expendables movie franchise (2010, 2012, 2014...) sees the great reunion of old glories of actioners of the 1980-90s in another action movie that promises to bring the rugged Eighties back with a vengeance against the inexorable aging process that gnaws at both viewers and celebrities.
274
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Adoring moviegoes can thus savor being 12, 17, 20 or so year old again as they were when the nonesuch starred in his first actioner. Like Zoroaster, Mahavira, Jesus, Nanak, Gautama Buddha, the hero is always portrayed at around the age of 30: duration wins over linear time.
Once again, popular culture easily appropriates the motif of circular duration. James Blunt's 2007 international hit song 1973 recites:�Your journey's been Etched on your skin -...- I will always be In a club with you In 1973 Singing "Here we go again" -...- And though time goes by I will always be In a club with you In 1973 �. Swee'Pea (Popeye's adopted son) is always a toddler in the comic book in spite of being around since 1929.
Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas delight viewers with action-packed cinematic extravaganzas as
The Expendables: swashbuckling, patriarchal arch-tricksters armed to their teeth are on the move.
The journeying founder/unifier hence puts order into chaos, restoring the lost oneness that was jeopardized by inept wartime governments; abominable regimes; the wrath of a god that destroyed the mighty tower; nature's wrath that caused a natural disaster etc. In fact Knight Rider (1982-6), Star Trek (1966-9),
Galactica (1978-9), Star Blazers, The A-Team (1983-7) and many other successful 275
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
serials consisted in the travelogue of character(s) who got involved in all sorts of tricky situations (the 'labor' motif) to restore order.
At times -such as in the 1979 Japanese cartoon Star Blazers, one of the few to enjoy popularity in western countries in that period-, the higher good to pursue is planet Earth's ultimate safety from either nuclear pollution, or an interstellar catastrophe alien foes unleashed. The star-ship Yamato (in the original Japanese) was renamed Argo in western adaptations. One lone ship embarks on a perilous intergalactic journey upon which Earth's fate rests: Jason and the Argonauts simmer in sci-fi sauce.
Nods were plentiful. In spite of taking place in a meta-historical year 2199, spaceship Yamato (=the mystical embodiment of Japan) looked like a ship from WWII Imperial Japanese navy. The weapon once on the service of '...ism' is now reborn as savior of mankind, much as Bon-Po deities in Tibet and Nats (the spirit gods of pre-Buddhist Burmese religion) were reborn as Buddhist deities' acolytes.
Finally, how many 'tournament-style' action movies are there? The tournament is such an overpowering image that has been restyled into meritocracy. Ordinary people seek jobs, appointments and positions literally competing in a multi-level sort of tournament. Of course, the best places and appointments finally go to the usual suspects, with or without perfunctory homages paid -once again- to 276
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the 'great values' of yet another savior-hero-founder torn apart in a more or less mythological past.
The journeying busybody in pursuit of higher good(s) mirrors the main difference between the Judaeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman idea of god. The Judaeo-Christian god - whether the brash, irascible patriarch of the Old Testament, or the meek, compassionate savior of the New- is irresistibly drawn to meddle in day-to-day affairs. He subjects the Hebrews, later the Christians or the entire world, to uninterrupted surveillance, for the greater good, of course.
China also had its own version of this meddling divinity: the family god presiding over the hearth was expected to keep an ongoing file on the family's behavior to later report through a divine bureaucracy the Jade311 Emperor headed.
It is difficult not to see eerie resemblances with the Belle Epoque model of Western mass-democracy and its Mesopotamian, Chinese, Egyptian, and later Hellenistic antecedents ruled by (semi)omnipotent, all-seeing divine Kings pulling the wires of an endless chain of inspectors going on surprise visits, and aptly named -in the Persian Empire- “eyes” or “ears” of the King.
In Japan, nobleman Mito Komon (1628-1701), a member of the 311 In China, and among some Pre-Hispanic civilizations, jade represented what gold represents in Western societies. In some Buddhist variants, this King of the gods -also called Sakka- received Buddhist ordination after witnessing the brilliance and purity Buddhist practitioners radiate when they reincarnate in heaven to reap their good karma.
277
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Tokugawa family and deputy Shogun, loves to disguise himself as a humble peasant (pensioner...descriptions vary). As bodyguards accompany him undercover, Mitsukuni Tokugawa tours his territories, thus uncovering the misdeeds of local administrators who have run afoul of the law. After his exceptional bodyguards rout the local mafioso's henchmen, the patriarch announces his identity. His symbol of authority is thus displayed (=the badge syndrome) so that he may sit in judgment over transgressors. A true Renaissance man, Mito Komon was also a litterateur, patron of the arts, and a real foodie.
Egyptian goddess Hathor herself unleashed her fury as Sekhmet (the lion goddess) in her capacity of “the eye of the Sun god Ra� 312 to avenge offenses against her father Ra313, who sulked in retreat (=the retreat mytheme).
Graeco-Roman gods -on the other hand, as coalescing in civilizations that emphasized self-direction and participatory regimes- live a life eminently of their own. Although they frequently take sides or interfere in human affairs, that isn't their circular call at all times on a universal scale. Some gods may steadily monitor natural phenomena; other minor ones may monitor affairs in the household, country or clan they preside over.
As the Book Of Job exemplifies, Yahweh is free from the consequences 312 A connection again between Sekhmet as the wrathful lion goddess and the Sun (=lion=sun). 313 The Deliverance Of Mankind From Destruction , a myth found in inscriptions in royal tombs at Thebes between the XIV and XII century BCE, but probably much older.
278
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
of his actions, whereas other gods -from Zeus to Shiva, Ra or Indra- have to grapple with the aftermath of their decisions or actions.
When Ganesha, one of the most powerful gods of the Hindu pantheon, defeats and swallows the demon Analasura, whom even Indra can't overpower, his stomach gets on fire. He becomes very ill despite attempts to provide help: Indra uses the moon to cool Ganesha's burning forehead. Thanks to blades of durva grass -nowadays an ayurvedic indigestion remedy- a sage provides, Ganesha is finally healed.
The Graeco-Roman world, however, did join the clapping retinue of (semi)omnipotent monarchs. It all begun with Alexander and -after the Republican intermission in Rome- ended with Roman -then Byzantine- monarchs expressly hailed as dominus ac deus (lord and god), basileus in Greek -precisely the title of Persian monarchs-, from the dominatus314 period after the III century crisis:
Then [Jesus] said to Thomas, "Reach here with your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand and put it into My side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing." Thomas answered and said to Him, "My Lord and my God!"‌ (John 20:27-28). Then a few voices began to proclaim Romulus's divinity; the cry was taken up, and at last every man present hailed him as a god and son of a god, and prayed to him to be forever gracious and to protect his children. (Livy 1.16). 314 As some put it, the definitive transition from principatus (princeps) to dominatus (dominus) is one from the hegemony of one to absolute monarchy or despotism. Nero and Domitian were also considered domini, but the ultimate transition happened after the III century crisis.
279
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Ma torniamo alle parole di Plinio appena citate : esse sono interessanti anche in quanto se ne ricava l’implicazione che la differenza fra domini e princepes è anche una differenza fra governanti che meritano odio oppure sostegno e amicizia extnote (l’amicitia infatti è dominationis impatiens ; il princeps può essere certo odiato da alcuni, ma ciò avviene inique : 85, 3-4) : stavano a dimostrarlo le vicende di imperatori quali Caligola, Nerone, Domiziano, che si erano voluti far domini in luogo di principes e per questo erano stati vittima di congiure (come Cesare). (Mosconi 2007:56, emphasis added). Roman jurist Ulpian (170-228 CE) aptly encapsulated the shift: quod
principi placuit, legis habet vigorem (whatever the Emperor esteems good, that shall constitute a law). Of course, Jupiter, Yahweh, Baal, Marduk or some other irascible patriarchal god might play the part, for what they esteem good also constitutes a law:
Hierarchized, continuous, and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical "inventions" of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owed its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it. By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an "integrated" system, ' linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practiced . It was also organized as a multiple, automatic, and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network "holds" the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised . The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery . And, although it is true that its pyramidal organization gives it a "head," it is the apparatus as a whole that produces "power" and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field . This enables the disciplinary power to be both e xtnote “The implication that the difference between domini and principes is also a difference between rulers who deserve to be hated (domini), or to be wholeheartedly supported (principes)”.
280
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
absolutely indiscreet, since it is everywhere and always alert, since by its very principle it leaves no zone of shade and constantly supervises the very individuals who are entrusted with the task of supervising; and absolutely "discreet, " for it functions permanently and largely in silence . (Foucault in Rabinow 1984:192). To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." (P.J. Proudhon). Busybodies are always on the move: Magnum P.I. (1980-88) drives a Ferrari; the Riptide (1984-6) team lives aboard the eponymous yacht; an itinerant Buddhist monk tours Belle Epoque U.S frontier with his Kung-Fu (1972-5) skills solving problems; felon turned 'progressive' lawyer Kazinski (1978-9) often operates out of a mobile home...In order to be there when it's most needed, Spiderman and Superman camouflage as reporters.
Busybodies can be on the move either individually, or in more or less large groups. The Acoma American-Indians in the U.S, the Dogon people from Mali and the Hebrews -among others- share as their culture's foundation a mythical,
281
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
perilous journey their people undertook to reach the promised land:
In-group paranoid delusions would contribute to dispersal, and there were also delusions of something better elsewhere— ideas of “making the desert bloom” (one of my patients), of a “land without evil” across the mountains (common in Brazilian prophets) and other descriptions of a “promised land” (e.g., Abraham). (Price, cit in Polimeni 2012:124). The NSDAP imagery also included different versions of a preposterous mythology related to a conquering march to the East. As U.S General Schwarzkopf 1990 Iraqi campaign commanding officer-
claims his role-model to be Alexander
the Great; or – as Fears would have it 315- W. Churchill found inspiration in the Victorian novelization of Roman Republican myth. People are then supposed to melt before the cute imagery of the 'good guys' who journey as far as required to set things straight: imperialism, puppet states, slaughter and carpet bombing as sacramental acts to foster higher goods.
Journeys happened for all sorts of reasons. On a more commodious level, all colonial metropolises encouraged emigration to their overseas possessions in the glamorous, often mixed and contradictory terms, of either the establishment of the homeland's twin settlement -as some German settlements in Latin America show-; or of an unregulated Eldorado of opportunities and fast riches offering a fresh start to those both wanted and unwanted home.
315 2011:Lays Of Ancient Rome.
282
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
This mindset didn't end with the XVIII or XIX century, but was well present into the XX century in Italy's late and checkered colonial expansionism, whereby barren Libya first, and backward Abyssinia later were portrayed as lands of plenty.
The journey can be restyled as the frontier: another myth obsessing the human mind. Fears316 relates how the quintessential U.S myth was that of the frontier. The NSDAP also pushed a German variant of the frontier myth: the Drang
Nach Osten (thrust eastwards), or the demented attempt to dispossess Slavic people in imitation of what -according to NSDAP pseudo-historical lore- had happened to mythologized warring predecessors in a fanciful version of the Middle Ages.
Fears also explains what was so good about the U.S frontier, this never ending search for greener grass: one could fail and start over from scratch again and again. The present writer suggests it sounds suspiciously like another cherished myth: the circular sin-atonement-reconciliation shtick, or -more likely- a dissociative fugue.
Livingston identifies four main stages in renewal ritual, also
similar to what happens in most action movies: mortification, purgation, invigoration, jubilation
Fears317 also rhapsodizes about honor being quintessential to the swashbuckling U.S frontiersmen; NSDAP SS also had honor as their motto, although 316 2011: Davy Crockett And The Myth Of The Frontier. 317 2011: The Alamo.
283
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
it might prove highly hazardous to an academic to croon about that.
Dan Gilbert in 1989 crafted a Sequential Operation Model, whereby people tend to automatically attribute dispositions (=traits=personalize the situation), and only later -in a controlled way- they make room for situational corrections (=depersonalize the situation). So 'the opposite applies' refers to situational corrections (constrains, explanations...) replacing the attribution of dispositions and (personality) traits.
For example, certain minorities may rank high in crime statistics, but that shouldn't be construed as group trait, yet as merely situational reaction to exploitation, ...ism etc. Along with wrestler Ted DiBiase -and his arrogant millionaire persona- one might say: there is nothing they have done that each of you wouldn't do in the same situation (=we are all as tainted as everybody else= everybody is a potential arsonist, homosexual, thief...): shame shamanism.
The dream of (nearly) matching the ubiquity of the gods of immemorial myth grows closer, yet stays the same as every epoch offers variation upon the theme. During the Victorian era, complex networks of pneumatic dispatch tubes were built to support nearly instant delivery of mail, such as in London in 1853/5 318: 318 Such a system was set up to establish communication between the offices of the International and Electric telegraph companies in London, where the pneumatic network grew from about 17 miles in 1875 to 33 miles in 1885:�In 1875, the Central Telegraph Office in London, for example, housed 450 telegraph instruments on three floors, linked by sixty- eight internal pneumatic tubes. The main office in New York, at 195 Broadway, had pneumatic tubes linking its floors but also employed "check-girls" to deliver messages within its vast operating rooms.� (Standage 1998:98). Homologues surfaced in Berlin in 1863; in Paris in 1866 and later in New York,
284
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
A six horsepower steam engine in the basement of the Central Telegraph Office created a partial vacuum in front of the carrier, and it took about half a minute to draw each one down the tube from the Stock Exchange. Even when the carriers were not fully loaded, this system was much faster than sending the messages by telegraph, which could only send about one message per minute. Once a carrier arrived at the Central Telegraph Office, the forms were unloaded and the messages telegraphed to their destinations in the usual way. (Standage 1998:95). Even this technology could prove irresistibly bewitching. At Berlin, under the financially crippled, decadent yet effervescent Weimar Republic (19191933):
Mostly patrons came to the Resi for its promiscuous atmosphere and helpful technology. On 150 tables and 50 balcony stations, numbered telephones allowed celebrants to dial up complete strangers from across the palace and converse in naughty wordplay or whisper instructions which bar to meet at. Additionally, an ingenious pneumatic system, built into the Resi handrailings, allowed guests to send small goodies to potential comrades-ofthe-evening. (Gordon 2006:76-7). From unprecedentedly fast delivery of mail to unprecedentedly fast dispatch of troops to the battlefield. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 triggered the collapse of the French Empire, and blazed a trail in modern warfare: Prussian advanced railway logistics, mass mobilization and improved weaponry. Vienna, Rio, Prague, Rome, Milan, Dublin, Naples etc.�One of the most ambitious systems was installed in New York, linking many of the post offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn. This system was large enough to handle small parcels, and on one occasion a cat was even sent from one post office to another along the tubes.-...-the Paris network was extensive enough that many local messages could be sent from sender to recipient entirely by tube and messenger, without any need for telegraphic transmission. -...-Faster than the post and cheaper than sending a telegram, this network provided a convenient way to send local messages within Paris� (Standage 1998:97,100). The U.S post office department considered a large scale adoption of the same as outlined in a 1891 report (postmaster general Wanamaker). The U.S post system mostly discontinued the pneumatic transmission system in 1918 as motor vehicles had taken over. The U.S post office department formally and completely suspended the pneumatic system in 1953.
285
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The networked society, the terminal-man and his ubiquity did not begin with droll Blues Brothers characters in the Matrix movies, or with 1983 Wargames. The Belle Epoque saw the rise of théâtrophone, which French Clément Ader, an executive of recently nationalized Société Générale Des Téléphones (National phone service), pioneered.
Théâtrophone appeared in Paris (1881), then was groomed at the 1889 expo as the response to the crisis striking the sector. In 1884 Dom Luis, King of Portugal, arranged the transmission of the opéra Laureana to his Ajuda palace; Queen Victoria was later a subscriber to electrophone (the UK version of théâtrophone, in operation since 1895). In 1885, famed Portuguese theater San Carlo broadcast his entire season via théâtrophone to cities relatively far from Lisbon: the first immobile traveler device (as Pisano dubs it)?
Théâtrophone served to relay broadcasts (theatrical performances, commercials...) to an unspecified number of remote users through telephones via théâtrophone networks -Paris, Nice, Budapest (1893) 319, London (1891-5), Sweden (1887), Belgium (1899)...-:
Sound devices made it possible to establish the concepts conveyance of sounds , listening post , immersion , the interaction of body and machine, the illusion of seeing the invisible through acousmatic listening, and the illusion of capturing reality by “canning” and staging it. These sound concepts have visual correspondences in 319 The Hungarian version (Telefon Hirmondo) reached around 6.000 subscribers in some estimates.
286
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
devices ranging from the magic lantern to the kinematograph and, later, cinema in its analogue and digital forms. In many respects, the listener who marvels at the “magic” sounds of the Théâtrophone foretells the future “homo cinematographicus” described by Gian Piero Brunetta -...-. The Théâtrophone cleared the path, long before the kinematograph, radio, cinema, or present-day systems ranging from the iPod to satellite transmissions in movie theaters, to the ubiquity of the spectator .(Pisano in Gaudreault et alii 2012:81-2,86). The most innovative use of the telephone as a vehicle for mass communication was the Telefon Hirmondo in Budapest, Hungary, designed by a Hungarian engineer who had worked for Thomas Edison. From [1891-]1893 until radio broadcasting replaced it [around 1925], this service gave a daily schedule of programs to thousands of subscribers, who tuned in by picking up an earphone. This wired radio could also be heard in such public places as hotels, hospitals, restaurants, and dentists' waiting rooms. The daily fare offered news reports of various kinds, music, a calendar of events around Budapest, a children's concert on Thursday evenings, and even commercials tucked in here and there, a full generation before it was tried in radio broadcasting. -...-the concept failed to spread much beyond Budapest with the curious exception of a brief venture in Newark, New Jersey, which went out of business in a few months. (Fang 1997:86-7). The telephone starts appearing in literary productions such as Paston's A
Writer Of Books (1894), and Kipling's Finest Story In The World (1891). By 1910, portable handsets in cars could be connected to outdoor telephone wires: the alliance between phone and motor-vehicles coalesced, or the dream of speed and quasi-ubiquity.
New technology was literally saturating the intellectual atmosphere, just as Darwinism (evolution etc) had done in earlier decades:
In this study I shall explore some of the ways in which evolutionary theory has been assimilated and resisted by novelists who, within 287
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the subtle enregisterment of narrative, have assayed its powers. With varying degrees of self awareness they have tested the extent to which it can provide a determining fiction by which to read the world. The book is concerned with Victorian novelists living, in relation to evolutionary theory, in the phase when ‘a fact is not quite a scientific fact at all’ and when ‘the remnant of the mythical’ is at its most manifest. (Beer 1983:2). In September 1914, the French army -in a difficult moment during WWI- calls up 600 Paris taxis (Taxis de la Marne) to orchestrate a propaganda operation. Taxis with soldiers aboard are dispatched to the Marne region awaiting confrontation with the advancing German army: speed and technology on the proud nation's service. When back in Paris, the government pays cab drivers according to the taximeter.
Writing in 1898, Mee rhapsodized:
There is, indeed, no element in our social life which will be unprovided for, and if, as it is said to be not unlikely in the near future--the principle of sight is applied to the telephone as well as that of sound, earth will be in truth a paradise, and distance will lose its enchantment by being abolished altogether. (no page). a toast proposed by Edward Thornton, the British ambassador [in 1858], emphasized the peacemaking potential of the telegraph. "What can be more likely to effect [peace] than a constant and complete intercourse between all nations and individuals in the world?" he asked. "Steam [power] was the first olive branch offered to us by science. Then came a still more effective olive branch this wonderful electric telegraph, which enables any man who happens to be within reach of a wire to communicate instantaneously with his fellow men all over the world."-...Bored and lonely operators would also play checkers over the wires, using a numbering system to identify the squares of the 288
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
board that dated back to the chess games played over the Washington- Baltimore line in the 1840s. Some telegraphers in remote outposts even preferred online contact with other telegraphers to socializing with the locals. (Standage 1998:90,132). If most associate (long) distance romance with the internet revolution, the Belle Epoque had its ersatz: newspaper matrimonial ads. “Postal fiction� had already captured public attention. Uniforms and imagery associated with the UK postal service gradually saturated literature, and scandalized the mainstream with the disrepute of homosexual brothels:
the 1889 Cleveland Street Affair that turned post-boys into rentboys and suggested an institutional likeness between the Post Office and the brothel-...-while the Cleveland Street Scandal has been much analyzed in gay histories, its postal implications have gone unmarked. Governmental investigations into the goings on at the Cleveland Street brothel revealed that this was no isolated incident: the Post Office had been aware for some time that the young boys in their employ regularly turned tricks, and that the specific conditions of postal employment made them desirable and available. The pleasures of procuring and buying the sexual services of these doubly employed boys, in other words, was specifically bound up in their status as uniformed postal deliverers — intermediaries between both hetero- and homosexual interlocutors. (Thomas 2012:35). Love at a distance made possible through technology had already entered popular culture, as the 1880 novel Wired Love epitomized: a young female telegraph operator falls in love at a distance with an unseen stranger met through her job, with all the perplexities and contrivances one might expect:
But collectively, the world's telegraphers represented an online 289
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
community encompassing thousands of people, very few of whom ever met face-to-face. And despite the apparently impersonal nature of communicating by wire, it was in fact an extremely subtle and intimate means of communication. Experienced operators could even recognize their friends merely from the style of their Morse code something that was, apparently, as recognizable as an individual human voice. Each operator on a particular telegraph line also had a two-letter signature, or "sig," with which to identify themselves on-line (Standage 1998:130). Technology proved irresistibly alluring. At Berlin, under the financially crippled, decadent yet effervescent Weimar Republic (1919-1933):
Telephone-Girls. Child prostitutes, ages 12–17, who are ordered by telephone and then delivered to clients in limousines or taxis. Usually given the names of stage or film stars, like Marlene Dietrich or Lilian Harvey, that described their prepubescent physical features. Often billed as “virgins.” Extremely expensive. Estimated numbers: 3,000 -...-Lonely Cavaliers telephoned one of six or seven agencies to purchase the services of the “child-star,” who was whisked in a waiting motor vehicle to his domicile. What would appear to be a rather singular perversion among the Berlin’s high society was in fact a favored divertissement. Theatricality, pederasty, star-fucking, and technology all meshed in ways that would have likely startled the wizened fleshpeddlers of Nineveh and Shanghai. (Gordon 2006:32,46). Furthermore, the Belle Epoque also saw a teeming market for courtship, etiquette and correspondence manuals meant to turn the spinster (female) and the slouch (male) into irresistible relationship material, just as one might find it to be the case over the internet today.
Again, as some extolled the decline of patriarchy, social barriers and ensuing arranged marriages, the Eldorado of marriage agencies, and so forth, 290
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
supposedly based upon love and free choice teemed with ads preoccupied mostly with income, property, profession and -last- appearance.
A new breed of social climbers and frauds soon appeared, very similar to the gold diggers, ringers and braggarts so popular in today's internet dating: so much about love versus money. Belle Epoque observers also took turns either lampooning, or pointing out the dangers of forays into a land where fraudulence was the norm.
At a later time, Italian Fascism would exploit the futuristic imaginary and threw its gauntlet to the old world of liberal demo-plutocracy through speed and technology D'Annunzio's and Balbo's aerial prowess epitomized.
In other words, the same gnostic bunkum and elated, pseudophilosophical tirades and new era imagery that gets today's public on its feet by mentioning virtual reality, computers, the internet or the like had found an early
doppelgaenger in the technology the Belle Epoque had spawned: motor vehicles; telephone; (trans-oceanic)telegraph; industrial warfare: heavy-armor dreadnought warships and their steam turbine propellers; the German WWI “Paris Gun”, a cannon with a 130 km range.
Speed might be the hallmark of Victorian times. From the speed at which steel was milled, to Prince Albert's bewilderment when Queen Victoria's husband had travelled by train for the first times:”Not quite so fast next time, Mr
291
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Conductor, if you please "320. In the 1890s -before modern cinema emerged- a series of machines (Mutoscope, Kinetoscope321) allowed individuals to see short films -flip-book style- through peepholes.
The speed at which land was plowed easily passed from 1 to 20 acres per day with the introduction of steam engines in the Victorian era, thus literally working out of business many agricultural workers and their horses. Between 1868 and 1880 the Cragside mansion of industrialist lord Armstrong in the UK was first to have its own hydro-electric system, and in-door electric amenities -such as a telephone, a lift and light bulbs-.
As a result of what a sound running of railways implied, (only) in 1845 did the British Parliament abolish local times (time differences between major UK cities) in favor of standardized time across the UK:”Avec le développement du capitalisme, le temps irréversible est unifié mondialement. ”322.
Popular culture couldn't lag far behind even in our time. The Riptide guys really are on the move: their home base is on a yacht, and they operate an helicopter and a speed boat in their adventures. In Knight Rider, futuristic robot-car KITT can easily exceed 300 MPH in speed.
Much as speed offers travelers new views every passing instant, so 320 Reported in British journals in 1842. 321 In New York and London the first Kinetoscope parlours opened in1894. 322 Debord 1967:point 145 (As capitalism develops, linear time gets synchronized on a world scale).
292
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
London and Paris literally overflowed with exotic goods from all over the world. Much as Prince Albert was impressed with speed, so countless middle- and upperclass buyers marveled at the choice that the globalized Victorian economy offered through an unparalleled commercial network literally saturated with products:
Railway travel gave rise to panoramic vision. Unable to focus on immediate foregrounds, passengers were forced to look out at a broad sweep of scenery, which most felt they were “flying” by. Wolfgang Schivelbusch asserts that this experience helped prepare rail travelers for their ultimate destination: department stores, which required panoramic vision for scanning vast spaces filled with goods on display. (Kornhiser 2010:13). Moreover, we will find that a classic descriptive mode of Victorian fiction, the sweeping, panoramic survey of a scene that appears so often in Hardy, Dickens, and Eliot, is in fact derived from a mode of landscape description that developed in connection with two forms of Victorian travel: the virtual travel embodied in the experience of viewing the massive panoramic displays that were so popular in the middle of the century, and the physical experience of balloon travel, whose similarly disorienting, bird’s-eye perspective felt almost fictive. -...- The attraction of the virtual travel experience was the opportunity it provided for disorientation and self-reflection. The places visited seem largely incidental.(Byerly 2013:13,22). By the early 1870s, the Victorian Internet had taken shape: A patchwork of telegraph networks, submarine cables, pneumatic tube systems, and messengers combined to deliver messages within hours over a vast area of the globe. New cables were being laid all over the world. Malta had been linked to Alexandria in 1868, and a direct cable was laid from France to Newfoundland in 1869. Cables reached India, Hong Kong, China, and Japan in 1870. Australia was connected in 1871, and South America in 1874.In 1844, when Morse had started building the network,there were a few dozen miles of wire and sending a message from, say, London to Bombay and back took ten weeks. But within thirty years there were over 650,000 miles 293
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
of wire, 3o,ooo miles of submarine cable, and 30,000 towns and villages were on-line and messages could be telegraphed from London to Bombay and back in as little as four minutes. "Time itself is telegraphed out of existence," declared the Daily Telegraph of London, a newspaper whose very name was chosen to give the impression of rapid, up-to-date delivery of news. The world had shrunk further and faster than it ever had before. -...-By 1880, there were almost 100,000 miles of undersea telegraph cable -...- "intra- imperial telegraphy" was seen as an important means of centralizing control in London and protecting imperial traffic from prying eyes. The result was a separate British network that interconnected with the global telegraph network at key points.(Standage 1998:101-2, 103). In 1838 opened at Paris the department store Le Bon Marché: from 300 square meters to 50.000 by 1877. The department store soon entered popular culture. In 1883 Zola published Au Bonheur Des Dames, a story with a shopping mall as a backdrop; he had previously gathered impressions at Le Bon Marché itself.
If manly imagery of military prowess in the age of intercontinental Empires had its steel dreadnoughts and mitrailleuses, the rising acquisitive society had its steel cathedrals as well. Le Bon Marché department store was rebuilt with an impressive steel mega-structure under the supervision of visionary engineer Eiffel.
Thanks to pioneering industrialist I. Kobayashi, railways in Japan were the purveyor of a truly panoramic experience in the very early XX century 323. Near train terminals shopping malls, hot spring spas and suburban settlements for the white collar class appeared in the Japanese outback: speed in leisure, housing, travel
323 Kobayashi founded a private railway line in 1907.
294
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
and shopping all combined.
The first iron cast bridge had appeared in the UK over the river Severn between 1779-81. In the late XIX century, steel cathedrals appeared everywhere. Brazil -which was experiencing the economic boom of the rubber industry- also had its steel cathedral: the giant open markets at Belem and Recife. In Porto (Portugal), 1886 saw the opening of Dom Luis bridge in Eiffel style across the Douro river.
In Lisbon, 1902 saw the presentation of a steel structure Eiffel style: an elevator (Elevador De Santa Justa) to this day joins Baixa (lower Lisbon) with Bairro
Do Chiado (Chiado neighborhood). In 1907 Mercado Sur (Southern Open Market) was built in Guayaquil (Ecuador): another steel cathedral in perfect Eiffel style. In 1935, Guatemala City saw the building of steel Torre Del Reformador, a 71 meter tall rough copy of the Eiffel tower to commemorate local reformer ( reformador) Barrios.
Man -just as it happened to post-human icons like Robocop or The Six
Million Dollar Man – would embrace steel as an extension of his own body: steel helmets are introduced during WWI (late 1915 onwards) to provide tentative shelter against a deluge of metal splinters, balls and fragments cannons, howitzers, and other devices, projected at supersonic speed against human flesh. After WWI, crowds of amputees would literally embrace steel as they donned prosthetic limbs of all sorts manufactured for the first time on an industrial scale. 295
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Youth, speed and steel that found such a crucible in WWI echo in two icons of modernity: the undead and the terminal-man:
The vampire is literally an insatiable consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, while the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its juvenescent flesh. -...-The historical roots of the theoretical connection between the vampire and the cyborg can be found in Karl Marx’s Capital, where he develops his understanding of industrial automation as the objectification of human labor—a process that, as he envisions it, is both prosthetic and predatory (Latham 2002:2-3). Selfridges -a chain of department stores- made its motto clear as it announced the opening of a new store at London in 1909:”all are welcome”; it might have borrowed such slogan from one of the countless savior-hero-founders. The
Belle Epoque nation-State lurked behind all the previously unimaginable proximity that department stores forced upon women of all classes.
Women rubbed elbows in the indulgence of their acquisitive whims, much as men had increasingly seen this proximity been forced upon them through military service and the acculturation brought about through the food processor of the nation-State with its imagined community rhetoric.
Jingoism would soon appear. Between the late XVIII century and the XIX century -roughly between the U.S independence and the Civil War- once perfectly acceptable practices such as permutation (= paying a fee to avoid being drafted into the army) and substitution (= hiring someone to be drafted in one's
296
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
place into the army) not only stopped being permissible, but turned into a taboo (=draft-dogding). Much as the nation-State food processor worked towards thorough homogenization of cultures, so in the department store it was increasingly difficult to part high-society dames wearing tailor-made haute couture garments from middle-class ladies wearing mass produced copycats bought in department stores at a fraction of the cost.
The coin had two sides, however. Kleptomania became widespread; some women -akin to their contemporary counterparts- resorted to prostitution in order to finance their acquisitive frenzy. The proximity between women of all classes ignited the suffragette movement that -in a telling example- found sanctuary and endorsement at Selfridges.
The heedless spendthrifts feeding the magic show of consumerism started to be generally characterized not as reckless wastrels buried under a heap of dishonored bills, but as honest hard-workers making the world a better place, just like Hercules, with each promissory note they sign; or each time they refinance: the unsung heroes of that tournament movie called life:�the motive of adornment -...under the guidance of the law of expensiveness�. If most people in the department store's early times wished to be entitled to vote, their great-grandchildren in the 1980s and following wanted a credit card, not a voter's ID.
Credit cards, cheques, promissory notes, mortgages, and related debt 297
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
paraphernalia are popular for a reason:
When we pay—regardless of the amount of money—we feel some psychological pain, which social scientists call the “pain of paying.” This is the unpleasantness associated with giving up our hardearned cash, regardless of the circumstances. -...- [credit cards, promissory notes etc are offered as an alternative] And because when we sign up for these financial or insurance services we certainly don’t plan to miss an insurance payment, bounce a check, skip a credit card payment, or go over our debit card limit, we often don’t even look at the terms of the penalties, thinking they do not apply to us. But when “stuff happens,” the banks are lying in wait and we end up paying dearly. Given this modus operandi, is it any wonder that many of the people who took subprime mortgages (by definition those who were not doing well financially) defaulted on their credit card payments, walked out on their mortgages, and even declared bankruptcy? (Ariely 2009:139,163). Saviors, heroes and founders are on the move often for a reason: the Jean Valjean324 shtick being one example. The episode from Les Misérables where Valjean is actually forgiven by the clergyman he had robbed is also present in various folk tales, of which one Zen tale involving a Japanese hermit called Nonoko 325. After transgression -just like Hercules and Yoruba god Ogun- Valjean embarks in a journey of redemption.
Another Buddhist tale coming well before XIX century politicking hacks is that of the anger-eating monster, or a monster that grows bigger as people loathe and confront him, and smaller with every act of kind acceptance. Cherokee lore 324 From Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. 325 Nonoko meditates alone in a hut. A brute brandishing a sword breaks in demanding money. Nonoko gives him all he has. The thief also steals a precious vase. The next day the entire village complains about burglaries, but Nonoko nonchalantly comments he just gave a vase and some money to a complete stranger.
298
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
propose the tale of a struggle between two wolves for the control of man's soul. Which one is going to win? The good or bad one? The one people feed. The shtick was so popular to surface in Star Trek episodes.
Akin to Valjean, Kazinski, the A-Team, Bulldozer etc are on the move because 'bad guys' or overzealous policemen won't forgive them, or let go of transgressions they committed in the past. Nasty policemen also harass the former military men, now private eyes, in Riptide for no real reason.
It is just a retelling of immemorial myths: Gilgamesh is persecuted by Inanna; Orestes is in flight from the Furies; Hera relentlessly persecutes Hercules much as Poseidon persecutes Ulysses, and fate drives Oedipus to his doom...
In other words, 'bad guys' are unwilling to shift from report mode (=depersonalized=facticity=quantitative326)
to
rapport
mode
(personalized=transcendence=qualitative327). Alternatively, they commit the sin of denying reconciliation the frail human mind yearns for.
A rogue reporter hounds Dr. D.B. Banner ( The Incredible Hulk, 197882), who would love to be just left alone with his predicament. Stallone's 1989 Lock
326 Just to make the point: s-he stole one apple...threw three stones...burglarized five homes...raped six people...and must therefore pay for that. 327 Just to make the point: s-he might have very well stolen that apple, robbed those millions, burglarized those homes, yet look into those soulful eyes; listen to those heart-rending 'secret causes'; hear those groans; touch those salted tears... there is nothing s-he might have done that any other wouldn't do, thus isn't about time to get in one another's arms for one of those unforgettable reunion scenes? “the spontaneous act of a noble heart�.
299
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Up transposes the Valjean motif behind bars; meek and redeemed inmate about to be paroled is persecuted by rogue prison manager he had slighted in the past. Van Damme's 1990 Lionheart portrays a noble deserter who wants to help his family while police is after him; the movie ends when policemen finally recognize his motives, and leave him alone.
As skilled pastry cooks know, only imagination sets limits to how many layers of sentimental molasses can be piled up (=chain of misfortune routine). Valjean suffers from other people's misjudgment, yet he as well -albeit indirectlycooperates in Fantine's misfortunes, for the single mother is fired -which later causes her to turn to prostitution to support her child Cosette- by harsh superintendent madame Victurnien. Madame Victurnien's motives to ruin Fantine's life -as she discovered she's a single mother after all- are dissected explaining (ch.VIII) how the superintendent was the widow of a monk having escaped from cloister.
Even in 1862 -when Hugo wrote Les MisĂŠrables and well before Freud (psychoanalysis), and Boas (radical cultural pluralism)-, we are all latent homosexuals, '...ists', thieves etc indeed. We are all so tainted and unaccountable (not so) deep down that we (=all of us down to the last one in all possible universes) ought not to cast judgments about anyone, no matter which transgression that frail, precious soul may have chanced to commit.
300
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
This theory can be adapted from all and sundry. The identity of Hitler's grandfather was unknown; Hitler's grandmother was a working class single mother from a remote village in Austria. While this indeed casts a shadow on Hitler in light of NSDAP racial purity laws, many jump to conclusions about a petty case of village shame to announce Hitler's elusive grandfather was in fact a Jew.
While a garden variety Jew might suffice for some, others need no less than a member of some great Jewish house, whether a Rothschild or otherwise. By the same token, Israel's nemesis, Iran's (former) President “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [is] revealed to have Jewish past� 328. Again and again, arch-enemies Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader; Parsifal and Feirefiz; Karna and Arjuna discover the be close blood relatives: opposites always coincide.
Hugo -in a portrait of the turncoat that outperforms war propagandaalso recounts how Victurnien was on exceedingly good terms with the Catholic establishment: connecting the dots may be inevitable at times. Magraw describes thus the situation in France in the period between the revolution and the coup that would restore the Empire:
Merriman's claim that the emerging 'police state' of 1848-51 effectively broke the back of the Dem-Soc [radical left] movement, echoes Marx's assertion that bureaucratic repression inevitably demoralized a politically immature peasantry. Election meetings were banned. By December 1850, 185 newspapers had been prosecuted. 328 The Daily Telegraph, October 3, 2009.
301
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Leftist by-election gains provoked the May 1850 law disenfranchising over 30 per cent of the electorate, including migrants and 'criminals', meaning in the village context, anyone with a poaching or forest conviction. Mayors were dismissed, municipal councils and National Guard units dissolved, teachers sacked. The purge extended down to the Allier postman, whose dog's red collar and white tail ribbon was taken to symbolize the victory of socialism over royalism, and to the Yonne schoolgardener sacked for growing red flowers! Links between the national, departmental and village cadres of the Dem-Soc movement were broken. With Limoges heavily garrisoned, dozens of mayors sacked, radical politicians hounded by the police, the Limousin, which had voted heavily for the Dem-Socs in 1849, failed to resist the 1851 coup. (1983:149, emphasis added). Of course, fundamental shifts in the party line loomed on the horizon of Victorian Catholic France (II Empire):
After 1876 municipalities took their ritual revenge, asserted their right to ring church bells to signify republican victories or, as in one Isere village, ceremoniously removed crucifixes from school walls and hurled them down the school lavatory! (Magraw 1983:334). Liberal and later Fascist propaganda never stopped clamoring for Italy's place under the sun (posto al sole) in colonial terms, and the right of Italy's impoverished peasant masses to seek greener grass under national tutelage: could opponents look inside, listen to their heart, and say that was not a honest war?
Last, the hero-savior shall in most cases be opportunely equipped and attired for the journey. Hale329 suggests that the idea of death as journey appeared at the time of the megaliths (7.000-4.500 BCE). The dead had to be opportunely equipped, and mausoleums served as landmarks denoting a sense of land ownership. 329 2009:Mysteries Of The Megalyths.
302
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
People were also sacrificed and buried to consecrate new buildings among pre-Roman Celts; in today's Romania, a thread corresponding to the height of the occupants is buried as a new home is built: human sacrifice by proxy?
Remus may also have been a human sacrifice, either as part of the Lupercalia tradition in which a boy is offered up for death, or as a foundation sacrifice. Excavations at the remains of the Temple of Victory in Rome have unearthed a grave under a wall that may indicate this type of human sacrifice, in which the victim is buried in the foundation. Evidence of actual human sacrifice in Roman culture is rare but does exist, usually connected with the foundation of cities. In Greek culture, the grave of a dead hero could bring great benefits to a community. (Meineck 2005-1:39). At the site of Tiwanaku, political and ceremonial center of a prehispanic state that influenced much of the South American Andes for several centuries (AD 500–1150) -...-.Ritualized dedications involving llamas or humans were important in the ‘life-cycles’ of construction, renewal or closing of building complexes throughout Tiwanaku. Burying fetal llamas or humans was an important part of building or re-flooring a residential dwelling or compound. A fetal or juvenile llama was interred under each of several residential buildings dating to the Tiwanaku Period in the Akapana East barrios, just outside the ceremonial core (Janusek 2004). In one sector, Akapana East 1M, a human infant was placed in the foundation of a compound wall upon its construction. Today in the altiplano, households imagine their dwellings and compounds as scaled micro-cosmic domains with vital dimensions, and laying their foundations is likened to ‘planting roots’ in the ancient rock of the earth (Arnold 1992). Fetal llamas and human placentas are important elements in rituals dedicated to these foundations. Just like similar offerings do today, the Tiwanaku dedications were most likely elements in long sequences of libations and rituals intended to ensure the social regeneration and well-being of the group who inhabited the built environment. (Blom&Janusek 2004:123-6). Burial ships or chariots proliferated in many cultures: the journey made 303
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
manifest. Even today in upper Egypt, festivals to commemorate Muslim Saints turn into a Mardi Gras extravaganza that includes the display of the immemorial barge of the dead. In Bronze Age times in both China and Mycenae, warlords with flat funerary masks were buried alongside their chariots.
In many cases, the 'hero's journey' is indistinguishable from a strongman’s feat, typically associated with brute strength, such as pulling the sword out of the stone. In Sri Lankan mythology, demon Kalu Kumara is born 330 the son of a laundress. The King of Anuradhapura adopts him after he amazes people with supernatural feats of strength, such as putting a mythical club upside down (=power inverted): a feat only the King had previously accomplished. In the Ramayana, Rama wins Sita in marriage after he not only handles, but breaks a divine bow as he tries to stretch it in the nuptial contest.
Popular culture delights viewers accordingly: the Van Damme character in Bloodsport is required to perform a spectacular karate move in order to join a death tournament. Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote:
Every year, in the spring, a stone-lifting contest is held in Munich -...the stone weighs approximately 508 German pounds -...-[and I, in 1967] broke the existing record -...-. The press picked it up and wrote that Mr. Universe was the strongest man in Germany- which may or may not have been true (Schwarzenegger&Kent Hall 1979:84-86). In Peru, indigenous people in the Ayacucho region carry enormous logs 330 In one of the many versions, of course.
304
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
over a fixed distance; at Viterbo (Italy), devotees carry the macchina di Santa Rosa, a 29 meter tall tower in honor of Christian Saint Rosa since the XIII century; Japanese
(matsuri) folklore also prescribes to pompously take large objects (Japanese portable temples or omikoshi) along a fixed trajectory (=topography), or the Calvary mytheme. In Kerala (India), Kavadis are ritual bows – up to 8 meter tall, easily weighting up to 150kg- individual devotees carry on their shoulders to honor the god Muruga:
El dogma cristiano obligaba a concebir el mundo medieval de acuerdo con las Sagradas Escrituras y, en consecuencia, forzaba a sustituir conocimientos cientificos por quiméricas localizaciones de los escenarios biblicos. (Chimeno Del Campo 2006:137)331. Left-wing hippies, and proponents of the drug/protest culture walking the streets of the mystical Orient could hardly be told apart from the domestic Sadhu, the wandering monk of Hinduism; from the Fakir ( fakir/fokara, poor) who epitomized the wandering Sufi sage; from the equally divinely unkempt saviors, and apostles, of the conservative, patriarchal and belligerent cults cropping up in the Siro-arabian deserts, or from the fictional Sandokan on television for that matter: “do not judge a book by its cover lest you later repent”.
Della Santina332
recognizes Mahakassapa (one of Gautama Buddha's
prominent disciples) is characterized in very different -possibly antithetical- ways 331 The Christian dogma forced to conceive the medieval world in accord with sacred scriptures, thus replacing scientific knowledge with chimerical discoveries of biblical situations. 332 ME6102:lecture 9.
305
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
according to different Buddhist traditions: an outré, unkempt forest ascetic (Sarvastivada), and a dutiful monk, and mainstream practitioner (Theravada). The portrait of the 'historical Jesus' historians such as Crossan have delivered very much resembles that of a beat generation/hippie icon: the clownish Sandokan figure and the savior figure eerily co-exist.
It all was a 'honored' tradition going back several centuries BCE not only in India, but in the Graeco-Roman world as well. The stereotypical cynic philosopher in fact represented the quintessential unwashed prophet -as philosophy was typically understood as a call from the gods- going around flaunting commonly held beliefs -or what others may call 'reforming customs'- in a rough cloak, and wearing sandals, long hair and a beard: he gives his wake-up call to -and scolds- the misguided masses333.
Endless variations subsist. Sikhs believe uncut hair and beards ( Kesh) to be a source of strength -akin to Samson 334 of Hebrew lore-, and a gift from god; some American-Indian tribes also attach gnostic value to long hair. In Japanese tradition, hair was also reputed as possessing a sacred life force: cutting a samurai's hair would bring much dishonor, and sumo wrestlers cut their hair as they retire.
By the same token, in Southern India it is common to shave one's head as 333 Johnson 2002:The Charlatan. 334 “So [Samson] told her everything. "No razor has ever been used on my head," he said, "because I have been a Nazirite dedicated to God from my mother's womb. If my head were shaved, my strength would leave me, and I would become as weak as any other man." ” (Judges 16:17).
306
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
an ex voto to the gods; Buddhist monks also shave their heads. Hitler's and Stalin's mustaches have become an household item, much as Kaiser Wilhelm's mustaches were popular in the Belle Epoque. Various urban tribes sport peculiar hairstyles: shaven skinheads (both left- and right-wing); rockabillies sport Elvis Presley's hairdos...
An entire constellation of situations concerns women and (body) hair. Among Muslims, women are either strongly urged, or required by law, to cover their body, especially their hair. Brides across the traditionalist Jewish diaspora veil themselves, and/or cut their hair, possibly after the consummation of marriage.
When a young woman graduates from the status of maiko (apprentice, dancing girl) to that of geiko (artist, geisha) according to traditional Japanese customs, she gets an haircut: upon marriage, tradition requires that a geisha retire. In the past, Japanese children up to the age of three were required to keep a shaven head: a custom now replaced by the Shichi-Go-San ritual. Shamanic ceremonies of Hispanic Shipibo Indios (Peru), require women performers to cut their hair. Peter the Great the Russian Tzar cut in 1698 the beards of Russian boyars as he was committed to embracing European modernity.
Even in Italy in the early XX century, and in backward Southern Italy still in recent decades, women typically wore head scarves to cover themselves. Maltese women of bygone times wore the traditional Faldetta (Ghonella) of 307
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
unknown origin to veil their figure. Various ethnicities in Asia wear distinctive headdresses and/or hairdos. The lore is replete with people 'doing things' with their body hair, and cathecting the same with gnostic values.
The blank stare of the proponents of the drug/protest culture with their crack pipes (and what not) looks sinisterly similar to the stare of the 'traditional' sage having attained samadhi or ecstasy. The role that 'sacred' hallucinogens played in shaping the most ancient and basic spiritual (religious) experiences is commonly attested, still actual in our day. A barley drink was sacred to the Greek Eleusinian mysteries, possibly because psychotropic ergot grew on barley.
Seal's 1991 worldwide hit song Crazy specifically connects religious experience with acid trips:
In a church by the face He talks about the people going under Only child know A man decides after seventy years That what he goes there for Is to unlock the door-...- Miracles will happen as we trip -...-In a sky full of people only some want to fly Isn't that crazy Is the allegory of unlocking a door an invention of the creative artist of color? Probably not. Muslim mystics called Dervishes practice Sama, a dancing ritual, supposed to reflect the divine sound of the doors of Paradise: the entranced faithful crosses the mythical threshold (=door, from which Dervish comes) towards god's realm.
As Campbell said, the difference between the mystic and the lunatic is 308
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
that the lunatic fell in waters he cannot swim in, while the mystic can 335. Do they look like any old acquaintance?
Thus, in Symeon, we find two prototypes, Diogenes and Christ. This double legacy of the “fool for Christ’s sake” remains the most puzzling insight of our investigation. In his concern to rid urban life of vice and nonconformity, Leontius constructed a Saint who in Emesa’s public and commercial spaces performed his most unSaintly deeds. In front of the urban laity of Emesa, Symeon dances licentiously with whores (p. 156) and gorges himself on cakes in the middle of Holy Week (pp. 156–57). Here too, Symeon defecates and eats foods which will cause him to fart (pp. 148, 152–53). Obviously, in creating such episodes, Leontius has not modeled Symeon’s actions on those of Jesus. Instead, in these episodes, as we have seen, Leontius models Symeon on the figure of Diogenes of Sinope. What then is the significance of Leontius’s construction of Symeon as an alter Diogenes in addition to an alter Christus? -...-The Cynic references work for Leontius because the figure of Diogenes challenges human systems of categorization, revealing through his antics that distinctions which people make between polite and impolite, public and private, appropriate and inappropriate, and pure and impure are nothing more than human conventions. (Krueger 1996: no page). It is the desire to maintain distance from those structures, to call them into question and to change them that marks the person of authenticity (WD, 221). Authenticity is therefore a subversive power that destabilizes the orderly categories and certainties that constantly tempt us. It is not a stable state of being that one might achieve. Rather, it lurks in the shadows of our lives, waging guerilla warfare on the manifold forms of bad faith.4 Vulgarity, likewise, represented to Sartre a defiant revolt against bourgeois good taste and "bad faith." For this reason, he turned toward vulgarity as a vehicle of authenticity within personal identity. (Charmé 1991:7). One might not think that much direct contact occurred between the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome and ancient India. The civilizations lay thousands of miles apart, a vast distance for men who traveled by foot or horse. But in fact, we have much evidence, both 335 Campbell 2002:Mythic Literature.
309
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
material and literary, for rather extensive contact – economic, military, and cultural – between the ancient East and West. One of the most interesting interactions, in my opinion, was the intellectual exchange between the West and ancient Indian philosophers, sages, and religious thinkers. Fortunately, we have a great body of extant ancient Western literature – primarily in Greek – that provide numerous accounts and descriptions, historic, pseudohistoric,and fictional, of Indian wise men and their interactions with the West. This body of literature particularly focuses on portrayals of Indian ascetics who lived a very frugal lifestyle, scorning most material needs, in the pursuit of knowledge. These Indian ascetic sages seem to have particularly impressed Western authors. Indeed, many authors seem to see Indian ascetics as paragons of self-sufficiency and other virtues. In some of the literature, authors use accounts of Indian ascetics to support moral or rhetorical treatises, emphasizing, eliding, or even changing certain details about the Indians as befits the particular argument. Over time, this creates an image of Indian sages that is progressively more distorted, but nonetheless these literary Indian sages often retain at least some of the features of their historical counterparts. (McVane 2011:1). Asceticism, then, along with other common threads of individualistic soteriology in Greek and Indic thought during the Hellenistic period formed the foundation of the subsequent synthesis; these interactions were brought into direct contact following Alexander the Great's forays in India, and in the Greek colonies of the Mauryan, GrecoBactrian, and Indo-Greek kingdoms which succeeded him. This, coupled with pre-Hellenic interactions and coalescence with Indian thought by way of Persia, and common ancient influences of Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture, provided a container for the amalgamation of Greek and Indian culture via the medium of the Buddhist philosophy and religion. (Schmidt 2008:5). Hercules the divine swashbuckling founder on a journey in his trickster's extravagance resembles closely iconic Tibetan Buddhist Saint Drukpa Kunle. When Saint Tsongkhapa gave him a blessed thread as a gift for him to wear, Kunle had no better idea than to wear it around his penis.
310
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
In another story, Kunle exorcised a powerful demon with the display of his hyperpotent penis that unleashed the lightning of wisdom 336. Penile versatility, after all, and unnatural sexual or genital configurations are quintessential trickster characteristics.
Although in Pali and Sanskrit texts composed prior to the tantras the Buddha is always represented as completely celibate following his attainment of buddhahood, he sometimes employs his penis for other purposes. In the Discourse of the Ocean-Like Meditation of Buddha Remembrance, for example, he uses it to convert heretics. His aid is requested in three instances: (1) to defeat the daughters of Mara; (2) to combat prostitutes in Sravasti who had become enormously wealthy and were corrupting the youth of the city; and (3) to convert a group of naked Jain ascetics. He and his disciples reportedly performed various miracles, including transforming Mara’s daughters into hags and inflicting various torments on them, and the Buddha and his disciples also conquered the prostitutes and rescued the city. The culmination of their efforts is a scene in which the Buddha converts skeptical Jains: he creates a mountain like Mount Sumeru surrounded by water and lays on his back next to it. He begins to emit golden rays of light, and his penis emerges from its sheath, winds around the mountain seven times, and then extends upward to the heaven of Brahma.extnote Alexander Soper comments that the text declares that “the Buddha was not a eunuch and so naturally exempt from sexual temptation. He possessed, rather, a male member that was normally kept retracted, like a horse’s; but that for purposes of demonstration, to quell disbelief, could be marvelously expanded.” (Powers 2009:13-14). Hercules had already enjoyed a second birth as homo salvadego (savage man) during Christian times in the Alps: an unwashed, hirsute brute (a sort of alpine
336 A similar motif recurs in Polinesian lore. Here's a taunt one hero of lore directs to another:” "Oho!" cried Maui. "Just let him catch one glimpse of the lopsided end of my phallus, and he'll go flying out of the way!" ” (Campbell 1960:193). e xtnote A story similar to the Hindu myth of the quarrell between Vishnu and Brahma. Shiva appears as a fiery pillar, and Vishnu and Brahma go in search of the opposite ends of such pillar (note of this writer).
311
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Enkidu) with a club, and an animal skin:”St. Francis was renowned for his communion with nature, particularly with birds. Tricksters and liminality also share this feature.”337.
This alpine version of Hercules can be restyled as San Cristoforo (III century martyr) in his human and zoomorphic image (dog-headed). San Cristoforo (in the Legenda Aurea) -just like homo salvadego- meets a child who asks him to be carried to a river's other shore (=the crossing mytheme). In spite of his strength, the giant barely makes it to the other shore: the child reveals he had been carrying the world on his shoulders. In the Christian version, the child is identified with Jesus.
Savior-founders and their ilk not only travel and/or retreat in solitude, but often climb mountains. Yatsenko 338 claims about the Vedas that “to the ancients, the mountain was a symbol of the path of yoga”. Voth 339 describes the importance of mountains as quintessential sacred space in various religious traditions.
Many savior-hero-founders are associated with specific mountains. For example, Zalmoxis retreats on mount Kogaion for three (=common mytheme) years; Romulus appears atop the seven hills; Buddhist patriarch Mahakassapa at Gurpa; Buddhist Saint Nagarjuna at Sriparvata; Gautama Buddha preaches at Vulture Peak; Mohammed prays at Hira; Jesus delivers “the sermon on the mount”; he is 337 Hansen 2001:55. 338 MAISI002 no date:lecture 1. Discussing Hindu Vedas. 339 2010:The Places Of Myth, Mountains.
312
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
transfigured on a high mountain, and appears at the mount of olives or on Golgotha (=”the place of the skull”); John the Baptist as heavenly child is spirited away to the White Mountain:
While Buddhists sought to become bodhisattvas or Buddhas, Daoists now sought to become immortals (aka “transcendents”), who according to legend distinguished themselves from the rest of us through all sorts of astonishing powers. In keeping with the Daoist romance of reclusion, these exemplars were said to live on high mountains, in secluded grottoes, or on faraway islands. According to Dutch Sinologist Kristopher Schipper, the Chinese word for immortal (hsien, or xian) is made out of the characters for “human being” and “mountain,” so immortals were human beings who traded in stale society for the vital rhythms of the natural world (Prothero 2010:101). Achilles is associated with mount Pelion; Japanese Buddhist Saint Nichiren with mount Senko; Japanese Buddhist founders Shinran and Kukai with mounts Hiei and Koya; Aeneas and Zeus with mount Ida; Elijah with mount Carmel; Chinese insurrectionist leader Hong Xiuquan (Taiping Rebellion, 1850-64) with mount Zijing; incarnate gods, the Dalai Lamas resided atop the Potala hill at Lhasa, a proxy for mythological mount Potalaka, where Buddha Avalokitesvara resides; Abraham binds Isaac at mount Moriah (probably today's Temple mound at Jerusalem), and so forth.
According to Mayahana Pure Land Buddhism, the four great Bodhisattvas (in the Chinese tradition Di-Tzang, Guan Yin, Wen Shu Shi Li, Pu Xian) are associated with four mountains; other Buddhist lineages also record four
313
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
mountains as sacred to different Bodhisattvas. At Lhasa, three hills are associated with three Buddhist deities: Manjusri, Vajrapani, Avalokitesvara.
Navajo sand paintings often include the four sacred mountains (North, South, East, West). In China, five mountains are especially sacred to Taoism, and one of them (Tai Shan, 7.000 steps to the top) saw the presence of several Chinese Emperors, Confucius and Mao as well, and so on.
Samaritan Hebrews340 considered Jerusalemite Temple worship as a corruption of Judaism. They thus worshiped god on mount Gerizim, or the mythical Bethel, where Jacob allegedly saw the ladder to heaven. Zephon (high mountain of the North: mount Aqraa in Syria) is the abode of Ugaritic chief god Baal -known in Mesopotamia as Marduk- much as Kailash is Shiva's abode, and Olympus Zeus'.
Popular culture is never far behind. Some famous Japanese giant robots of the 1970s are also associated with mountains: Getter Robot and mount Asama; Mazinger Z and mount Fuji, and so forth. In the end of an inspiring training montage, Rocky (Rocky IV) reaches a mountaintop, and screams his rival's name.
Some suggest:
The fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions, among many other revelation experiences, had 340 A tradition that developed from common Hebrew roots in Hellenistic times. Samaritans adopted a different set among Hebrew scriptures. In 111 BCE John Hyrcanus, a Maccabean King, destroyed the temple on mount Gerizim in favor of Jerusalemite worship.
314
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
occurred on a mountain. These three revelation experiences share many phenomenological components like feeling and hearing a presence, seeing a figure, seeing lights, and feeling of fear. In addition, similar experiences have been reported by non-mystic contemporary mountaineers. The similarities between these revelations on mountains and their appearance in contemporary mountaineers suggest that exposure to altitude might affect functional and neural mechanisms, thus facilitating the experience of a revelation. Different functions relying on brain areas such as the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex have been suggested to be altered in altitude. Moreover, acute and chronic hypoxia significantly affect the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex and both areas have also been linked to altered own body perceptions and mystical experiences. Prolonged stay at high altitudes, especially in social deprivation, may also lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions such as low resistance to stress and loss of inhibition. Based on these phenomenological, functional, and neural findings we suggest that exposure to altitudes might contribute to the induction of revelation experiences and might further our understanding of the mountain metaphor in religion. (Arzy et alii 2005:841). Le fantastique est d’abord une affaire de vision, il s’élabore au plus près du processus de l’apparaître, il a trait à la sortie et l’entrée dans l’ombre, il suit ce visible qui à la fois se tapit dans sa cache d’invisibilité et va se rendre au plus haut point visible. Il remet en cause toute univocité régulière, il rend caduque la rationalité positive de la vue. Le fantastique transforme la perception. -...- on doit étudier le fantastique à travers ce qu’il propose : la thématisation et le réseau philosophique du voir, de l’apparition, de l’invisible. Cette perspective peut ainsi projeter le fantastique sur le champ de la vision. Du coup, l’image ne se contente plus de deux dimensions ; elle prend le relief que laissait pour compte l’amblyopie de la narratologie. (Dubreuil 1999: n.p). Paranormal experiences often involve the imagination; they are also frequently associated with deception. The paranormal and deception are two constituents of the trickster constellation, and this suggests that the imagination shares some of its properties. There is another component of the trickster constellation—sexuality. I have not addressed the sexual imagination, but it is a powerful force. So here we have the trickster elements of deception, sex, and psi, which are all closely associated with the imagination. (Hansen 2001:295). 315
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
A recent documentary (2007) details some western Buddhists' pilgrimage to Tibet's holy places: the famous Oracle lake at 16.000 feet. Pilgrim-narrator Steven Dancz341 relates how
-throughout the final part of the journey - most group
members suffered from altitude sickness; Dancz also reports the mystical experiences (dreams, visions etc ) many had. In Mwindo's myth, the central-African hero spends one year in heaven (a hostile place ruled by weather extremes) to later bring new laws to his people.
After an arduous trek astride a mule, at 12.000 feet spiritual seekers in Peru are offered a concoction of the powerful hallucinogen mescaline from the San Pedro cactus sacred to local Inca people since time immemorial: they thus enter the spirit world while experiencing neurological and/or gastrointestinal syndromes. Pilgrims also bathe in the ice-cold water of nearby lake laguna Shimbe (black lake) as shamans officiate.
Readers will notice how myth's beloved ingredients are present, such as the hierophant; the hero's journey; the sacred drink; the body of water and sacred ablution; the taking off of clothes element; the neurological and gastrointestinal syndrome cathected with gnostic values; the communion with an higher power, and so forth.
In 1970, Osho Rajneesh introduced the “dynamic meditation�: frantic 341 An academic with the University of Georgia.
316
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
movement, scream, cry and laughter outbursts interspersed with catatonic moments as a way for devotees to reach the godhead. Readers shall individually determine how different that might be from western dance floors, or frantic Yoruba dances exported worldwide through the Black African diaspora:”it follows that symporeia (collective movement) has a particular role to play in human cognition and emotional intelligence, beyond its usual role of creating social cohesion and reinforcing group identity.”:
The setting was the Sixth International Positive Psychology Summit, held in the majestic Gallup Organization building in downtown D.C. -...-The audience was instructed to stand, do a few shoulder rolls and neck stretches, shake their bodies, and then utter a big collective “Aaaah.” When we were loosened up, we were treated to the pounding beat of Ricky Martin’s “Cup of Life,” and the women on stage began to dance along in an awkward, choreographed way, while some in the audience boogied freestyle and a few of the older men stamped around as if putting out fires. I told Seligman I had liked the energy break well enough, not bothering to mention how closely it resembled the audience exercises undertaken by motivational speakers at the National Speakers Association. (Ehrenreich 2009:466-7). Enthusiasm -in tune with the etymology of sacred Bacchic frenzy- may turn into convulsions. Cases of French XVIII century Jansenist convulsionnaire mystics-; of contemporary Christian Pentecostals; of India's and Bali's frenzied mystics at religious festivals and processions are emblematic.
Gastrointestinal
and/or neurological syndromes are indissociable from mystical or spirit world imagery. In antiquity, epilepsy was dubbed morbus sacer (sacred illness) because it implied spirit or divine possession. 317
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The main character in The Time Machine (and the countless times such device has been employed) appears to his guests exhausted, unkempt, wounded:
He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me greyer—either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually faded. His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it -...- For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light. Then he came into the room. He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps -...- . I thought of the Time Traveller limping painfully upstairs. I don’t think any one else had noticed his lameness. (Wells 1895:19-21). The journey had been etched on his skin. The same approach is often employed in narratives related to UFOs and paranormal activities: Chilean corporal Valdez in 1977 was said to have gone missing for fifteen minutes in conjunction with a hypothetical UFO sighting, only to reappear with a dense beard having professedly lived five days in another dimension -or some other explanation of that kind-.
Irrespective of any issue altitude sickness poses, divine Shiva retreats to mountain-tops to meditate, and so do Orpheus, Milarepa etc; the five, inseparable -often likened to the five senses342 or to the five sheaths343 that surround atman (soul)- Pandavas344 (in the Mahabharata, each son of a quintessential Hindu god) 342 The number five -like seven, twelve, three etc- is a totem number. Gautama Buddha and his five early companions. The five elements; the five precepts or the five aggregates of Buddhism and so forth. 343 According to Vedantic philosophy they are:Anamayakosha, food;Pranamayakosha, breath;Manamayakosha,mind; Vijanamayakosha, wisdom; Anandamayakosha, rapture. 344 In the Mahabharata, two sets of cousins fight for supremacy. The same myth comes back in Rome in the duel between two sets of male triplets, The Horatii (championing the city of Rome), and Curiatii (championing the city of Alba Longa) vie for supremacy. Horatius survives alone: upon his triumphal return to Rome, he kills in a fit of patriotic rage his sister, who was in tears as she had been bethroted to one of the now deceased Curiatii. Sentenced to death as a result (=the hero bears the consequence of actions performed in order to bring the ultimate boon back), he appeals to the people alongside his father (=patriarch) and is thus acquitted. Horatius'
318
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
suffer several years of exile in the wilderness.
Gautama Buddha, too, practices asceticism with five companions – five like the fingers of a hand, the five senses, or the Upanishadic koshas that envelop the atman or soul- before enlightenment: the Buddhist response to either Vedantic philosophy, or the Mahabharata quest. Govind Singh (X and last Sikh guru ) chooses five men as first members of militant order Khalsa; each man is given the name of a virtue.
Jesus retreats to fast in the desert, where he contends with the devil 345. Gautama Buddha fasts 49 days meditating under the Banyan tree:
father pleads that he not be left childless, and the Roman people acquiesces in a sort of Saving Private Ryan (1998). According to legend, the duel took place in the VII century BCE under mythical Roman King Tullius Hostilius. Meineck clinches:”The myth is set against the backdrop of a bitter war between the two cities, a war that in reality probably took place much later in the late fifth century BCE ”(2005-1:45). Central-African dictator Bokassa explained in this fashion how he had overthrown his own cousin in a golpe:”l'interest national prime le sentiment familial” (national interest supersedes family ties) he declared on tape in 1965. 'Great men' all behave alike:”However, he was battling a lost cause. Yakov Was captured. Stalin found out about it when he received a package from the Germans that included a picture of his son. "The fool-he couldn't even shoot himself" an angry Stalin complained to his younger son, Vasily. German authorities proposed a trade. They expected the Soviet leader would welcome his son's return. A message was sent to Stalin that said the Germans would release Yakov if the Soviets freed a German officer. Stalin refused. "I cannot do it," Stalin said. "War is war." This decision would cost Yakov his life. Some historians believe the Germans killed Yakov, but others think he committed suicide. According to the official report, Yakov died in Apri l 1943, after running into an electric fence surrounding the camp where he was held. Apparently Stalin never felt any remorse regarding his son's capture and death. "I have no son named Yakov," he was reported as saying after Yakov's capture.” (Haugen 2006:10-11). Once captured behind enemy lines, the hero is left alone as the horde back home disowns him. CEKA-NKVD, Khmer Rouge and GESTAPO squads were alternatively busy executing fellow countrymen. 345“Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. ” (Matthew 4:1-2). 40 (=a number of completeness) also represents the years the Hebrews wandered in the desert; the days it rained during the deluge; Moses is up mount Sinai for 40 days; Lent lasts 40 days before Easter... during the Black Plague epidemics, ships and their crews at Venice were isolated for 40 days (quarantena) in order to help stop the contagion. The customs was also extended to other kinds of infections such as cholera. It might mean a period required until the time is complete in order to accomplish what's at stake in any particular instance.
319
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
[ St. Paul wrote] Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to consult with those who were apostles before I was. Instead, I went away into Arabia, and later I returned to the city of Damascus. (Galatians 1:17). Fictional Rocky Balboa retreats first to an ethnic ghetto ( Rocky III), and later to the polar Siberian wilderness ( Rocky IV). Bud Spencer's character in the xeroxed movies Bulldozer (1978) and Bomber (1982) is a champion who retreats as a lone seaman disgusted with backstage deals in the sport he loves so much, yet he's later coaxed into mentoring/training youth in problematic situations. As it behooves any respectable savior, such youth are the scum of the earth: drifters, petty smugglers, three-card monte crooks, pickpockets, muggers etc. The providential master, however, holds no grudges: he recruits a mugger who had threatened him at gunpoint as well.
“Real American” Rambo (Rambo III, 1988) retreats in solitude among Buddhists only to be back with a vengeance: “I feel strong about right and wrong, And I don't take trouble for very long”; Superman's polar abode is aptly named “fortress of solitude”. It is difficult not to recall Gilgamesh's retreat to the wilderness (away from civilization) as he seeks the secret of eternal life346.
The retreat/exile can be either elective or compulsory. Imprisonment was a very important element of medieval Christian hagiography, soon absorbing the gnostic value of a spiritual initiation:
346 For example, Sun goddess Amaterasu retreats to the depth of a cave in order to sulk.
320
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Dans les textes hagiographiques médiévaux, l’emprisonnement peut donc être associé à la fois aux conventions du récit hagiographique (l’histoire du martyre) et à la valeur discursive de la prison en tant qu’espace où pouvaient s’exprimer des leçons sur les tendances libératrices de la foi. (Cassidy-Welch no date:57). He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. -...- Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand. (Isaiah 53:3-4,10). As difficult as it might be to appreciate this experimental support for the practice of Opus Dei, the results suggest that purification through the pain of self-flagellation might tap into a basic way we deal with feelings of guilt. Perhaps recognizing our mistakes, admitting them, and adding some form of physical punishment is a good recipe for asking forgiveness and opening a new page. (Ariely 2012:125). But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. (Luke 5:16). Chavez, Castro, De Valera, Tsipras, Mujica, Havel, Khomeini, Mandela, Hitler, Walesa, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Smith and countless other leaders from all provinces of the political spectrum were imprisoned and/or prosecuted for more or less extended periods of time. Most of them fled (or were exiled from) the country -just like Jesus and Krishna- for some time to avoid retaliation. Castro toured the USA; Khomeini found sanctuary in Paris; Havel was 'exiled' to work in a brewery; Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte grew up in Switzerland:”Historical ‘heroes’ are ten-a-penny”.
In prison, Hitler allegedly wrote Mein Kampf, the future regime's 321
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
blueprint. Mandela, Mujica, Smith, Havel, De Valera, Walesa, Khomeini, Castro were touted to have developed -thanks to prison terms and maltreatment - the insight and gnostic potency that would later cause them to spearhead the overthrow of an accursed regime and its foolish utopias: apartheid in South Africa; Communism in Poland and former Czechoslovakia; overthrowing discredited Cuban
caudillo Batista; toppling the Shah's regime in Iran, the brutal British rule in Ireland, or the inept II Republic in France; restoring the Jesus covenant in the new promised land of America; introducing welfare State to Uruguay...
The homo novus of the radical left, the Greek Tsipras, takes part in clashes with police as radical left-wing extremists try to enter Italy at Ancona to disrupt violently the G8 meeting 347 in 2001. Just as the screenplay demands, Tsipras, just like fellow left-wing radicals Mujica, Castro and Mandela, is hailed as austere: a real 'man of destiny' who shuns pomp. As Tsipras is appointed to lead Greece, he once more shows that the clown and the savior figure literally intertwine. The operetta tentative to set the world rolling towards some Da Vinci Code doomsday scenario collapses in farce as Tsipras first bombastically resists, then totally acquiesces to exaction international finance demands of Greece.
Other 'great men' barely escape death as a gage of future greatness: the future Pope John Paul II paralyzes a Soviet executioner 348 with his therapeutic stare. 347 Mailonline, June 22, 2015. 348 Il Giorno, April 6, 2014:9. The former Soviet executioner telling the story is Vassili Sirotenko, now deceased.
322
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
A story almost identical to what happened to the now beatified Wojtyla in 1945 is told about Adolf Hitler: a British soldier would have spared a wounded -and forever grateful- Hitler (just as a forever grateful Wojtyla) during WWI in France. In another variant of the same story, Hitler was not even wounded. Some historians contend Hitler never served in that region of France to start with: a possible propaganda con game?
Be as it may:”THEIR eyes met across the battlefield in what would turn out to be the final weeks of the First World War. The wounded German corporal was trying to escape but realised he was in the rifle sight of a British soldier.” 349. Fascist leader -and Waffen SS General – Degrelle also had a therapeutic stare. He relays that during a stay as a fugitive in a hostile country after WWII, a political foe from the past recognized him; their eyes met, but the foe didn't alert the police.
In both Wojtyla's, Degrelle's and Hitler's story, both parties (the potential victims and executioners) are absolutely sure -in spite of decades passing after the fleeting encounter- of their respective identities. Assertedly, a hired gunman was so mesmerized by Gandhi's speech that he forsook his plan, and later confessed his intention while bowing to the great man: these stories all read alike.
“Historical ‘heroes’ are ten-a-penny”, indeed. Roman general Vespasian barely eschewed death: he had fallen asleep during one of Nero's theatrical 349 Warren 2014: no page.
323
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
performances, thus irking the cantankerous Caesar. Prophecies announced Vespasian, too, “had a rendezvous with destiny”:
[Vespasian] is also suitably modest when asked to heal the sick: reluctant to act, he takes professional medical advice first ( H. 4.81.4).Thus when [Tacitus] mildly notes in the opening to the Histories that ‘we only took on board the predictions and signs connected with Vespasian after the event’, Tacitus is not exercising a cynicism that these signs were ‘really’meaningless or fabricated: he is signalling what was probably the only sensible position that could be taken at the time. Even Vespasian did not associate the various signs with empire ( H. 2.78.2) and, after all, Galba and Otho also had imperial destinies to fulfil. When three of four candidates are fated to win the throne, how are we to decide in which order they will do so? Or for how long? Galba, though told by Tiberius that he was destined to rule decades previously, had subsequently lived through the reigns of Caligula, Claudius and Nero. And signs could easily be misunderstood: Vespasian himself thought the signs had already been fulfilled. Why should the senate think otherwise? Galba and Otho are both testaments to the wildly unnavigable outcomes of fata when enacted in their human context. (Davies 2004:174-5). Supernatural interventions assertedly allowed deposed Cuban dictator Batista to evade his Castrist pursuers: Batista was known for his devotion to Santeria spirits. As Castro was inaugurating the new Social-Communist regime in Cuba, a white dove landed on his shoulder: Santeria spirits had shifted allegiance by appointing the (new) man of destiny. The same white dove shtick recurred in 1989 as Castro celebrated the 30th anniversary of power: manifest destinies never stop unfolding.
Karol Wojtyla plotted a trajectory very similar to Vespasian's: starting 324
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
from humble beginnings350, he ascended to the throne; he barely eschewed death; Aurobindo, too, purportedly “attained the supermind”, was active within anticolonial insurrectionist cabals, and tussled with colonial authorities.
Wojtyla was gradually rumored to have brought about the implosion of the Communist block all by himself, just as Vespasian had routed a powerful revolt in Judea. In Aurobindonian circles, Aurobindo is credited with a decisive role in Hitler's defeat:
All traditions have warned against the use of spiritual powers, the reason being that they might cause an inflation of the ego and turn the subject away from his path. But an effort like the one by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother demanded a constant battle against the powers which dominate the earth. Against the use of black magic by the Black Forces there was no other option than the use of white magic by the White Forces. -...-And, writing again in the third person, [Aurobindo] disclosed about himself: “In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened whenever necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action … It was this force which, as soon as he had attained to it, he used, at first only in a limited field of personal work, but afterwards in a constant action upon the world forces”. (Van Vrekhem 2012:no page). Wojtyla was also reputed to have grown gradually more spiritual over time, until he was bruited about to have been a supernatural healer all along, just like Vespasian; Aurobindo's mystical attainment is the stuff of legend among devotees.
Now that the Polish Pope has become a Saint, scores of supposed eye350 In Catholic circles, stories circulate describing Wojtyla as a sort of “miracle baby”: his mother would have contemplated an abortion, but Wojtyla's 'rendezvous with destiny' caused him to survive.
325
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
witnesses from all over raise their hands to testify that John Paul II was -indeed- the man of destiny, and a clairvoyant thaumaturge:”Contaste-mo tu, ou terei sonhado que o contavas? [Did you tell me that for real, or was it in a dream that you told me about that?]”.
Devotees regard Aurobindo as some sort of messiah, and Vespasian was deified as temples were dedicated to him:”we only took on board the predictions and signs connected with [the great man] after the event”;”These things His disciples did not understand at the first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written of Him, and that they had done these things to Him ” (John 12:16);”Because it made people feel like insiders.”351.
Popular culture couldn't lag far behind. Filmed when J.C. Van Damme was still an unknown striver, No Retreat No Surrender was marketed in Europe after Van Damme's global rise in popularity as a full-fledged Van Damme title role movie, although Van Damme merely plays third fiddle in No Retreat No Surrender.
In Italy, the 1986 movie No Retreat No Surrender was titled Kickboxer,
Vendetta Personale as a nod to worldwide 1989 Van Damme hit movie Kickboxer. Myth(ologie)s are all over the place: the distortion of the timeline (a 1986 movie presented as a sort of sequel to a 1989 movie); ”we only took on board the predictions and signs connected with [the great man] after the event” ( a movie 351 Berger 2013:32.
326
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
where Van Damme appears for under fifteen minutes is billed as a full Van Damme title role movie).
'Great men', 'good causes' or schizophrenic societal taboos are no necessary ingredients, however. People raise their hands to testify in support of anything and everything. A homemade YouTube tear-jerking video recounts this story about a chap who was embarrassed because his mother had just one eye. The video ends with the explanation that the mother -now deceased- had given her eye to the now ungrateful child once he had lost his in an accident:”Making people feel like insiders can benefit all types of products and ideas.”352.
People in sentimental rapture rush to articulate their emotional agony in the comment section; a few remark how it is medically impossible to transplant eyeballs; at least one person, however, claims the story to be a true one because s-he read about it elsewhere: s-he even saw pictures of the mother, and so forth.
This was the reaction to a crummy video some lightweight posted online. Readers may come to their own conclusions about crucified Canadians and bayoneted babies narratives media heavily promote as lawyers are ready to serve those who voice disagreement should evil eyes and shame shamanism fail to successfully deter:”Even if such claims had merit -...- [people] cannot ethically stand by this [statement] whose end result can only be furthering discrimination under 352 Berger 2013:34.
327
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the guise of academic discourse.”.
Da fome sabes alguma coisa: já viste uma bandeira negra içada na torre da igreja.(Contaste-mo tu, ou terei sonhado que o contavas?) (José Saramago, Carta Para Josefa, 1968). (You know a thing or two about famine: you could see a black flag on the church's tower. Did you tell me that for real, or was it in a dream that you told me about that?). Just as government informants may direct an extremist party; or a PR firm may orchestrate a bayoneted babies scare, so online comments, too, can be part of an orchestrated campaign:
[A psychopathic con man discloses how he operates]Then you can get to work—not right away, you need to be patient. -...- You modify whatever it is, whatever the hell they’ve told you—you tend to know instantly where the pressure points are—and then tell the story back as if it were your own. Bam! From that point on, you can pretty much take what you want. (Dutton 2012:75). Just as new malt liquor and espresso coffee brands are groomed from time to time, it seems that Pope Francis I is also being primed to play the part of man of destiny as the Catholic Church faces endemic crises. Whether demi-gods truly whisper providential blueprints of destiny to the ear of a 'great man', or a propaganda con game may be on is left to readers to decide.
To name just a couple incidents, the Bishop of Limburg (Germany) Tebartz Van Elst is transferred after he allegedly spent euro 31 million to refurbish his palace; he purportedly spent euro 15.000 on his new bathtub alone 353. Cases the 353 Il Mattino, March 26, 2014.
328
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Catholic hierarchy 'couldn't possibly have known about nor prevented' are many: Bishop Scarano, former accountant of a division in charge of managing Catholic Church's estates (APSA, Amministrazione Patrimonio Sede Apostolica) is arrested in January 2014. It appears Scarano was at the center of a rogue network made of fraudulent charities maneuvering to launder money through the Vatican bank IOR354: the judicial system impounds princely estates and multi-millionaire bank accounts.
26 women write Pope Francis I 355 they are a sample from a peculiar lot: women in a 'romantic relationship' with a Catholic priest; they urge the Church to revise its position on the matter. S.M. Cavalletti, a Catholic clergyman, is arrested at Milan during a cocaine party for selling and possessing drugs 356:"All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!" ( John 8:7). Cavalletti, however, had already been sentenced for fraud; he had tricked an old lady into surrendering euro 22.000 to him: he was still serving as a Catholic priest. Rumor also has it that Cavalletti might co-own a night club:�The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.� (Matthew 11:19).
Jozef Wesolowski357, a former Polish Archbishop, is put under house
354 NoiSalerno, January 21, 2014. 355 TgCom24, May 18, 2014. 356 TgCom24, July 16, 2014. 357 TgCom24, September 23, 2014.
329
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
arrest at the Vatican for episodes of pedophilia while he was serving as a Vatican diplomat in Santo Domingo: a Vatican tribunal had already stripped him of his religious status after a trial in June 2014:"All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!" (John 8:7):
Religious belief groups, open to new members joining their group from all lifestyles, readily assume that those who join them hold similar beliefs and values, and tend to focus on professed beliefs and values and to forgive past transgressions. These noble qualities, unfortunately, make them easier targets for manipulation by unscrupulous fraudsters. (Babiak&Hare 2006:90). The Catholic Church still has a few aces up its sleeves, however: after the sanctification of stupendous Popes John XXIII and John Paul II, another fabulous Pontiff plots the same trajectory: a miracle is officially recognized as Paul VI's, soon to be Blessed358.
When the savior-hero comes back from his retreat, he's no longer the same. Rocky proceeds to summarily defeat Black boxer Clubber Lang (who had previously vanquished him in Rocky III), and Soviet 'wrecking machine' Ivan Drago (Rocky IV); young Jason (No Retreat No Surrender), too, is unstoppable.
What
most
see
as
the
godly
byproduct
of
gnostic
insight
(training/bricolage montages, bodily ascent to heaven or descent to hell...) looks suspiciously like a mental disorder: a dissociative fugue. Just as people experiencing
358 ANSA, May 6, 2014.
330
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
a mental breakdown can leave everything behind to run away in order to start a new life under a new identity elsewhere as the past gets erased from conscious recollection, so the hero comes back with a new self.
Garden variety psychotics do it all the time online: they make one of their identities die; they often announce the excruciating death posing as friends, relatives etc of the departed, only to resume their chicanery anew under another moniker elsewhere online: multiple personality disorders, and (virtual) dissociative fugues.
Popular culture couldn't lag far behind. Personality coach Nancy Showalter promises online to teach one how to “Become Empowered, Unstoppable and Inspired to Action�. She also suggests religious practices that involve an eclectic mix of self-proclaimed aquarian beliefs, theosophical ascended masters, quantum mysticism and so forth.
The five Pandavas (Hindu Mahabharata) have to be back in disguise (=the Ulysses shtick); nobody shall be able to recognize them, lest they want to suffer another period of exile. When the seven (Christian) sleepers (from the
Golden Legend) wake up, they find the world has changed, and their formerly prosecuted religion is now the prescribed cult.
Even Hebrew patriarch Joseph's brothers -who had earlier sold him into
331
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
slavery- no longer recognize him -just as the Hindu Pandava brothers, Ulysses, Buddha, Jesus and so many others aren't recognized in turn- as the dew of reconciliation rains all over:
When Joseph came home, they presented to him the gifts they had brought into the house, and they bowed down before him to the ground. -...-Then Joseph hurried from the room because he was overcome with emotion for his brother. He went into his private room, where he broke down and wept. (Genesis 43:26-30). O[ld]T[estament] myth’s relevance is evident in the close parallels three well-known myths offer to the Odyssey. Joseph, separated from his brothers and father for virtually the same length of time Odysseus is away from Ithaka, meets with them unrecognized, submits them to various painful tests, before revealing his identity to them. The recognition scenes serve as the climax to his narrative, as do Odysseus’ recognition scenes with Penelope and Laertes. The parallels suggest a highly developed form of romance, with intricate recognition scenes, is a mythical genre common to both Greek and Israelite culture, as explored in Chapter 3. Odysseus’ crew, confined on Thrinakia for a month, in revolt, sacrificing Helios’ cattle in a perverse ritual, offers extensive parallels to the Israelites’ revolt against Moses, and perverse worship of the gilded calf in Exodus 32. The myths of Jonah and Odysseus suggest that Greek and Israelite culture both have a genre of myth we might think of as the fantastic voyage. (Louden 2011:9). He approached me; I raised the ruler. No, Enrico, said he, with his kind smile, putting aside the ruler with his hand, let us be friends again as before. I was stupefied for a moment, then I felt as though a hand had pushed my shoulder, and I found myself in his arms. He kissed me and said: No more quarrels between us! No, never! Never! Never! I answered. (De Amicis 1918:103). In 325 CE at Nicaea, (some) Christian leaders maimed during prosecutions in recent decades could receive converted Constantine's brotherly 332
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
embrace: the tide had turned forever. Noted historian Toynbee adopted this dynamic as his “law of withdrawal and return” to explain civilisational cycles.
Solitude need not to be found at high altitude or in the wilderness, either. Mid-way between the extremes of elective and enforced exile/retreat stands Joseph Campbell's. The mythologist explains how he retreated unemployed to a log cabin in order to read and ponder for five years during the Great Depression.
Awesome father figure, war veteran and karate master Miyagi (from The
Karate Kid movies) serves as unobtrusive handyman working in the back yard, much as legendary intergalactic hero Obi-Wan Kenobi lives as a lone hermit. Cinderella and Snow White toil away in the background as their beauty and noble heart remain unrecognized. Young Jason (No Retreat No Surrender) retreats to an empty house -which happens be stand right down the corner from where he livesin order to train in the martial arts. Belaboring the same petrified set of obtuse allegories, The Last Starfighter (1984) sees the adolescent hero of an upcoming intergalactic clash of civilizations drudging away as petty handyman in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere.
The fabulous adolescent heroes of all the serialized clutter on cable TV hide a sinister -yet recurring- aspect:”Remembrance in its paradigmatic form is permanently adolescent, and proceeds as if gravitationally drawn to suffering, conflict and sacrifice.”;”The adolescent, in a word, is an impatient idealist who 333
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
believes that it is as easy to realize an ideal as it is to imagine it. ”359. Before entering his final battle, Arjuna's 16yo son Abhimanyu utters lines worth of an actioner of the 1980s:”I can fight Indra himself, mounted on his Airavata, along with all the gods! Why, I can fight in a battle even Lord Rudra himself, to whom the entire world of beings pays homage! ”.
Things were not so different at civilization's dawn. In Hindu Rig Veda (XV century BCE or older), Savitri (“the day-bringer 360”) is hailed in terms precisely fit for all those mimeographed divine savior-heroes of later ages:
Thou hast come down into a struggling world-To aid a blind and suffering mortal race, -To open to Light the eyes that could not see, -To bring down bliss into the heart of grief, -To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven; .If thou wouldst save the toiling universe, -The vast universal suffering feel as thine: -Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal; -The day-bringer must walk in darkest night. (MAISI018:unit 4:3, emphasis added). Popular culture is -again- never far behind. Irene Cara's soundtrack for box-office hit movie Fame (1980), recites:”You ain't seen the best of me yet -...- I'm gonna live forever. I'm gonna learn how to fly -...-I feel it coming together. People will see me and cry -...-I'm gonna make it to heaven Light up the sky like a flame -...-Remember my name”. 359 Elkind 1970:13. 360 It is not surprising to find Jesus and Horus (“O Morning Star, Horus of the Duat, divine falcon ”) at times associated with the morning star imagery. “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this message for the churches. I am both the source of David and the heir to his throne. I am the bright morning star. ” ( Revelation 22:16). Mahayana lore has it that even Gautama Buddha saw the morning star just before his enlightenment. Japanese Shingon Buddhism also practices “the morning star meditation” to commemorate the mystical union with the universe Buddha had experienced.
334
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The rag-tag Khmer Rouge Communist militias that announced the year zero of the Cambodian new era of social alchemy, equalization and oneness included a bulk of adolescents: useless massacres were perpetrated in the name of a passing regime, and its utopias soon to disappear:
the nexus of psychology and spirituality -...-In religion and spirituality, the experience at this locus is called by names such as oneness, unity, interbeing. In psychology, it is called conscience or the moral sense. (Stout 2005:215-6). Vandals heralding Mao's Communist cultural revolution by defacing Chinese cultural heritage were mostly elated adolescents. Swarms of elated adolescents insurrectionist forces had enlisted took part in deliberate and systematic terror, pillage and mutilation campaigns across Black Africa. Fascist and Communist regimes alike hastened to set up official youth organizations:
A key question is whether adolescents are developmentally competent to make decisions about risks. In principle, barring temptations with high rewards and individual differences that reduce self-control (i.e., under ideal conditions), adolescents are capable of rational decision making to achieve their goals. In practice, much depends on the particular situation in which a decision is made. In the heat of passion, in the presence of peers, on the spur of the moment, in unfamiliar situations, when trading off risks and benefits favors bad long-term outcomes, and when behavioral inhibition is required for good outcomes, adolescents are likely to reason more poorly than adults do. Brain maturation in adolescence is incomplete. Impulsivity, sensation seeking, thrill seeking, depression, and other individual differences also contribute to risk taking that resists standard risk-reduction interventions, although some conditions such as depression can be effectively treated with other approaches. (Reyna&Farley 2006:1). 335
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Both in ancient Sparta, and among the Bara people of contemporary Madagascar, rites of passage among juveniles include deeds of bravery such as stealing cattle in Madagascar, or killing slaves at work in the fields at Sparta. Rites in New Guinea required youth soon to get married to go on a secretive hunt, and fetch a human head. This head would ritually preside over the marriage ceremony (“the seed of the child he's going to beget”): “the sign of his having brought death into the world so that he can now beget”361.
On the Arcadian Mt. Lycaeon was an altar to Zeus. -...- Ancient authors such as Plato and Pausanius report a grisly tradition of human sacrifice and that participants in the rites ate human flesh and were turned into wolves. -...- There was a Greek mythic tradition of a band of athletes who lived as wolves for ten years and regained their human form only if they did not eat human flesh. They would then go on to win all athletic contests. Anthropologists and classical scholars have seen a parallel between this mythic tradition and the cultural institution of the ephebe, or the Spartan Krypteia, where young warriors were made social outcasts for a period of their military training in order to develop hunting and survival skills before being reincorporated into society and entering manhood. (Meineck 2005-1:24-5). Adolescent heroes typically find real-life masters, yet in No Retreat No
Surrender (1986), carbon-copy of Karate Kid362, young Jason recruits as a master no 361 Campbell 1972-2:Man&Myth Through The Ages I. 362 A salad bar of then commonplace elements are added. The title apparently borrows from a song by popular rockstar Bruce Springsteen: No Defeat No Surrender. There are a mean Russian foe named Ivan (Rocky IV, 1985); young Afro-American 'disco freaks' dressing as Michael Jackson's clones, and a crime syndicate trying to take over karate gyms ( similar to The Way Of The Dragon, 1972). The main character also dresses as a John Travolta clone in many training montage segments. It is also obvious filmmakers were making it as they went along trying to pack as many nods, and so forth, into the movie as possible: the Russian foe in the end titles is billed as “Kurt”, not Ivan. Something of that sort had happened with Karate Kid, too. In the original script, Daniel's family name is Weber, not Larusso. Someone had thought opportune to board the Italo-mania bandwagon that fostered Italo-Americans into the mainstream (the various Travolta and Stallone characters).
336
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
other than legendary Bruce Lee's ghost. If Karate Kid and No Retreat No Surrender aired in the rugged Eighties, another copycat ( Never Back Down) hits the screens in 2008:�The circumstances seem changed but the cliche is in one's psyche�363.
Jason's father happens to be an accomplished karate instructor, yet psychological complexes, and the providential master item, are too good to pass:
It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are fantastic and "unreal": they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs. Even when the legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds of victory are rendered, not in lifelike, but in dreamlike figurations; for the point is not that such-and-such was done on earth; the point is that, before such-and-such could be done on earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we all know and visit in our dreams. (Campbell 1949:27, emphasis added). Before Jason becomes unstoppable, Bruce Lee's ghost impels him to perform a complicate move. Jason retorts he won't be able to perform as required, and the ghost instructs him about the power of visualization: Jason finally performs the move, and the ghost vanishes in a white light.
In Rocky III, Rocky's wife helps him to overcome his psychological complexes during a discussion on the beach (=the shoreline where all the elements sun, water, air, earth and sky come together): the imagery is almost identical, thus vindicating Campbell's hypothesis. The providential master/mentor can also turn 363 Campbell&Toms 1988:vol. 4.
337
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
out to be the last opponent (like Drona and Arjuna in the Mahabharata), or a secret enemy.
Positive psychologists and personality coaches of all walks of life extol the virtues of mind magic as well. Mind magic -or synchronicity as some might prefer- is also indissolubly associated with tricksters:
Pelton even notes that “Eshu [West-African Yoruba trickster ] is pure synchronicity.� Thus the link with the paranormal is explicit, and these passages contain direct mentions of transition states, divination, synchronicity, and mediation. All are recurring themes in this book (Hansen 2001:28). Christian apologist David Marshall sees in synchronicity -which he calls miraclesthe elusive signature of the Christian god silently helping devotees along. Of course, (Many) Buddhists see a Buddha's elusive signature behind miracles, and Muslims Allah's...
Another peculiar lot is awash in (presumed) synchronicity: patients experiencing a schizophrenic (psychotic) crack-up. They routinely see themselves as passive agents of synchronicity as extraterrestrials, Men In Black, gods, ghosts etc haunt them; or active agents as -once again- spirits, deities, Men In Black, outer space beings 'choose them' for some higher purpose by bestowing paranormal boons or insight of one sort or another upon them. This is what the various Icke, Maxwell etc are all about; and what all the '...ist menace' scares are all about, too.
338
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
How are those providential masters characterized? There is much in common between the various Miyagi ( Karate Kid), Mickey (Rocky), Sargent Foley (An Officer And A Gentleman), Sargent Hartman (Full Metal Jacket), Sargent Zim (Starship Troopers), Bud Graziano (Bomber), Xian Chow (Kickboxer), and their countless clones and imitations. The brash drill Sargent figure was so popular it trickled from movies down into infomercials: after a ten second training montage, a drill Sargent of color awards recruits their pair of designer jeans.
Ben-Shahar is a scholar who led one of Harvard's most popular classes; he introduces U.S educator Marva Collins, and her programs that helped disadvantaged kids succeed, much as the various Sgt. Foley, Yoda ( Star Wars) and so forth did. It turns out Ben-Shahar approvingly characterizes Marva Collins -with the adjustments the situation requires- as a blend of all those fictional providential masters.
Again, Ben-Shahar's sterling educator of the socially disadvantaged (Collins), who imparts lessons commanding our attention, as substantiated through peer-reviewed
research,
is
almost
indistinguishable
-with
due
collateral
adjustments- from her fictional counterparts: tough love. Venerable Wuling 364 extends this interpretation to the cohort of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas: they plant boons, misfortunes and trials on our path to help us progress towards possible ultimate liberation. 364 Pure Land Buddhist monastic.
339
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The human psyche just loves these items; the rest is just a matter of detail nobody really pays attention to. Bulldozer revolves around American football,
Bomber around boxing, but it could have easily been rowing, judo or table tennis; the Karate Kid movies (1984ss) -in fact- present a very similar storyline using karate as a commodious pivot.
Serialized mass-media products often copycat immemorial myths in order to send the oblivious masses into a trance. The story Hardy recounts 365, involving a general and an elusive old sage in ancient China, looks uncannily similar to the shtick in Eastwood's 1986 movie Gunny366, with minor adaptations. Recruits in Gunny have to guess the color of the instructor’s t-shirt beforehand; the Chinese general has to guess the right time to be at the appointed place to meet the sage before the old man actually arrives.
Chinese generals and brash military men might not suit one's taste, perchance. In a series of folktales Brazilian litterateur Figueiredo Pimentel edited in 1896, O Companheiro De Viagem (the travel mate), a poor -but morally uprightcountry boy decides following a vision367 (=rendezvous with destiny) to enter a contest to win the hand of a superbly (=arch-virgins of lore) beautiful but cruel witch-princess (=fairy bride) who dares her suitors to guess her exact thoughts at an 365 2011:Sunzi And Han Feizi. 366 A slight copy of Twelve O'Clock High (1949). Instead of a WWII air squadron, in Gunny we have Marines in the 1980s. Once again, the gist steals the day. 367 In the vision his dead father announces he'd marry the most beautiful woman in the world. A mental patient confided in the analyst how he “believed that he was fated to marry a specific woman.” (Polimeni 2012:196).
340
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
appointed time thrice (=the number three), under pain of death: the lifeless bodies of countless (=surfeit that boggles the mind=tournament) suitors already lay amassed in the royal gardens. With the help of a mysterious travel mate (=hero's journey=merry men), the country boy (=outsider who saves the day) defeats the princess, marries her (=taming of the shrew=Pygmalion motif) and lives happily ever after thanks to a magic potion the travel mate 368 also supplied.
The shadow of Tibetan religious heritage – to name just one- loomed behind an array of right-wing, national-popular or aristocratic 'traditional' secret societies in the Victorian/ Belle Epoque era; and behind the left-wing, hippie crowds experiencing with drugs, protest and sexuality in the 1960s.
Pioneers of theosophy Olcott and Blavatsky were adepts of both Hindu and Tibetan spiritual practices. Blavatsky had allegedly received initiations from the VIII Panchen Lama369 Tenpai Wangchuck at a Tibetan Buddhist high place: the Tashilunpo monastery; others contend she either never visited Tibet, or did so in disguise to circumvent diplomatic restrictions.
Points of contact persist to this day: noted Tibetologist, teacher and practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism Mullin has led pilgrimages -and collaboratedwith the Theosophical Society In America since the 1980s. Highest authorities in 368 The travel mate revealed himself to be the soul of a poor man who had died in debt, whose corpse the country boy had literally bought from angry creditors who wanted to feed it to vultures. 369 High position in traditional Tibetan theocracy, second only to the Dalai Lama. The Panchen Lama is usually a teacher of a young Dalai Lama.
341
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the Tibetan Buddhist theocracy, the Panchen and the (XIV) Dalai Lama paid visits to the Theosophical Society while in India in the 1950s.
The XIV Dalai Lama also planned a few events under the Society's patronage across the decades:
Founders of Theosophy H. P. Blavatsky and H. S. Olcott became among the first Westerners to publicly take layman’s Buddhist vows while on a visit to Ceylon in 1880. They already had mixed elements of Buddhism into their new “hybrid religion,” a subcategory of syncretism historically and culturally unique to late-Victorian Britain. Olcott went on to become a champion of the Singhalese Buddhist revival in opposition to pressure by Christian missionaries, mostly Anglicans and Methodists. He wrote and distributed A Buddhist Catechism that still is used by Buddhists in Sri Lanka today, thereby creating a multi-hybrid of Buddhism mixed with his Protestant orientation and a Catholic genre. (Franklin 2008:9). Blavatsky's endless books are cut-and-paste collages of Freemasonry, Hermeticism, potted "Eastern" metaphysics, and her own science-fiction tales of telepathic Tibetan masters and Atlantean cataclysms. But as the historian Joscelyn Godwin argues, Blavatsky's group also represented Enlightenment values that had nothing to do with Buddha's claim to fame and everything to do with the freethinking spirit of progress. The Theosophists loathed conventional Christianity, embraced emancipatory social movements, and called for a new global politics of "universal brotherhood." They were the gnostics of modernism. (Davis 1999:51). The Victorian/Belle Epoque era was also a paradise for drug (ab)use: opiates370 were widely available in all sorts of formats for cheap over-the-counter 370 Bruno Bauer (German philosopher, 1809-1882), equated the effects of religion with those of opium. Concept often incorrectly attributed as originally from Marx. Rather than the elusive gem from a superior intellect, the opium metaphor might just reflect -once again, as this writing contends- then contemporary fixations with opium's widespread use:”Glenn Sonnedecker has chronicled the emergence of the concept of opiate addiction.
342
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
consumption, whence Marx's polemic use of the term opium. For a while, opiate addicts seemed a better social alternative to alcoholics: such addicts were generally perceived as shy and withdrawn, unlike alcoholics who were busy beating their families, brawling and breaking the law.
While western travellers to Asia in the sixteenth century and after noted the continuous consumption and enormous doses taken in those lands, the concept of addiction eluded them. Not until the mid-19th century was this phenomenon recognized widely. -...- [it] suggests that the problem was at least fairly comnion by the end of the 17th century in England. -...-What is surprising today is the absence of concern among 17th- and 18thcentury medical writers over habitual use of opium. -...- medically initiated addiction became an increasingly frequent phenomenon. -...-The trend toward extensive, careless use of opiates which had developed over these two centuries was to continue into the 19th.� (Kramer 1979:385-9). “In the first half of the nineteenth century, opium preparations were freely on sale to anyone who wanted to buy them, in any sort of shop; they were carried about the countryside by hawkers, sold in grocers' and general stores and on market stalls -...- Turkey. It was freely imported (with a decreasing amount of duty); actual quantities varied in the first half of the century from 12,000 Ibs. of Turkish opium in 1834 to 177,000 Ibs. in 1839, out of overall import totals of 48,000 Ibs. and 196,000 Ibs. respectively.Turkish opium, noted for its strength and high quality, usually provided between 80 and 90% of Britain's total import of the drug, only losing some of its preeminence in the late seventies and eighties when the Persian variety was more widely imported -...- In general it was used, or recommended, at one time or another to treat almost every disease and condition imaginable. Up to 2o% of all prescriptions dispensed by pharmacists in Islington and Holloway in the period between the 184os and 186os contained opiates -...- A growing official uneasiness about opiate use did develop, however, and eventually found expression in the restrictions of the 1868 Pharmacy Act and in changed attitudes toward the drug. Certainly there was a public health case for concern about the way in which opiates were used. This element should not be underestimated as part of the increased concern. From the late 183os and early 184os, opiate use became a significant, if minor, part of the general public health cause. The welter of statistics and information produced by government investigations and enquiries and by newly established government agencies, the Registrar General's Office in particular, revealed a situation which appeared worrying in its implications. Import statistics, and in particular the amount of opium entered for home consumption, were rising. In 1829, 23,000 lbs. were retained in the United Kingdom; in 1839, 41,000 lbs. -...- Statistics on opiate deaths caused concern too the publication of coroner's returns of deaths by poisoning in England and Wales in 1839 revealed that 186 out of a total of 543 such deaths were the result of opium poisoning -...-Around a third of all poisoning deaths in the decade were the result of the administration of opiates, and the relatively high accidental, rather than suicidal, death rate from opiates bore witness to the drug's easy availability -...-. There were possibilities too of the criminal use of opiates. Although the published figures were minute, it was said that prostitutes in the East End of London used to add laudanum to sailors' beer and rob them of both clothes and money while the sailors were in a "state of total stupefaction." Such tales could simply have been attempts at self-justification by sailors who had made fools of themselves (similar rumours circulating at the time of the cocaine "scare" of 1915-16 were found, on investigation, to be groundless), but opium was used in this way in other circumstances -...Anxiety about opiate use had deeper roots than simple humanitarianism. Uneasiness was connected too with fundamental shifts in nineteenth-century society. Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, the creation of rough and raw manufacturing towns, and the strikes, violence, crime, and political unrest which appeared endemic in such areas evoked a feeling of fear and unease. This found expression in the establishment of myths about working-class habits such as the widespread belief in official, public health, and "respectable" circles in
343
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
It is nowadays common to exonerate scientists of the time by claiming addiction was either scientifically unknown or misunderstood (=we are all as tainted=it could happen to everybody), whereas ancient physicians -such as Erasistratus (304-250 BCE) and Galen (II/III century CE)- had already issued warnings about poisoning and addiction related to opium (ab)use also rampant in antiquity.
This persisted until -in the Belle Epoque and considering the United States for a change- eerie links were systematically established between drug abuse and various unwelcome categories such as the Chinese -and other immigrant communities-, and Afro-Americans as harbingers of crime and other ills such as White (female) slavery371.
In Brazil in the interwar period, the progressive rise of an increasingly centralized state peaking under the Fascist Vargas regime also saw the rise of policies of prohibition and war on drugs. It was a long an honored tradition: in the XVI and XVII centuries, psychoactive compound used in indigenous ceremonies were denounced as causing drunkenness, a root cause of idolatry, across Hispanic America (Peru, Mexico).
general, that working people were accustomed to use opiates for "stimulant" or "recreational" purposes, as an alternative when drink was too expensive - a fundamental distortion of popular patterns of opiate use. ”( Berridge 1978:438-446). 371 “The outstanding feature of nineteenth-century opium and morphine addiction is that the majority of addicts were women.” (Courtwright 2001:36).
344
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
After exploiting a booming market first with the (mostly British) opium trade of earlier centuries, and later with the “patented medicine” (mostly undisclosed opiate compounds) craze of the late XIX century and ensuing taxation, The Belle Epoque nation-State Moloch was ready to step in the ring as clampdown loomed on the horizon. It is highly ironic that China had fought the first 'war on drugs' on moral(istic) grounds, being opposed -and defeated- by the English and the French in the Opium Wars (1839-42; 1856-60).
Westerners were illegally importing and marketing opium in China. What may be morally good there and then might prove reprehensible here and now: situational ethics.
[A] mix of questionable statistics and pseudoscience was instrumental in persuading Americans that addiction was both pervasive and malignant. During the decade 1910 to 1920, the crucial period for the formulation of American narcotic policy, public opinion concerning opiate addiction was profoundly influenced by inaccurate and even falsified data. (Courtwright 2001:33). Narcotics and other artificial stimulants were essential ingredients for Berlin’s sex life [under the Weimar Republic, 1919-33]. Both pimps and sexologists believed that they were powerful aphrodisiacs for women. (Gordon 2006:242). Mythological “ascended masters” of theosophical or masonic lore coexist with outer space/extra-dimensional masters:
Each Master occupies a specific position within the hierarchy, and administers a closely delimited sector of the workings of the cosmos. 345
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Each Master is embodied in a human vehicle, which is cast aside when the passage of time has made it too frail. Specific Masters may therefore be known under a number of different manifestations. -...the Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul is the reported source of practically all [of Blavatsy's] teachings -...- Angels and Archangels have also been the purported sources of various messages. -...- The Swedish Christian esotericist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) claimed to have spoken with spirits from other planets. Scattered among the varied contents of his magnum opus, Arcana caelestia, Swedenborg reveals details of life in the solar system.(Hammer 2004:385,387-8). Ascended masters could as well become descended masters. A supreme earthly sage finally ascends to heaven by virtue of his divine inner nature ( theios
aner shtick); or a divine emanation of the almighty god -so popular in Hebrew theology as hyposthases- takes flesh descending from the most exalted position in heaven.
Jesus does so in The Ascension Of Isaiah (I-II century CE). Isaiah is taken up to heaven: he witnesses Christ's majesty as he's told how Christ -in heaven with father god- was to literally, gradually, and sort of alchemically, descend through the heavens to assume the identity of Jesus (ch. IX/X) 372 on earth. The god Proteus descended to incarnate as Apollonius; Vishnu descended many times to incarnate as Krishna, Rama, etc.
Savardekar explains the “divine descent” is an old concept, indeed:
The term “avatār” is derived from the Sanskŗt word ‘ avataraņ’ meaning ‘descent’. By the literal meaning itself, one is led to the 372 From the version R.H Charles edited in 1900 considering the various versions.
346
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
deep sense of this term which is used to refer to the Divine’s Birth. The concept of Avatārhood is not unheard of in India, which is a land of traditional and mythological stories and incidents, all having their significant relevance in the course of the human evolution. -...-”For whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I [=Krishna] loose myself forth into birth -...-For the deliverance of the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of the Right I am born from age to age ” -...-For, there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity… The other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness,… It is that new birth which Avatarhood and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve (MAISI014 no date: lecture 4:2-3). It shall noted how Blavatsky (the Theosophical Society); the Transcendentalists (philosophers like Emerson, Thoreau); German luminaries such as Mueller, Schelling and Schopenhauer, and American scientists like Lowell (nicknamed “Boston Brahmin”,1855-1916) in the XIX century were all interested in Eastern/Indian thought (Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism...) being systematically translated -and adapted- for the first time for a Western audience since the late XVIII century after the scattered encounters and occasional reports missionaries and explorers used to send home in earlier centuries.
Schopenhauer commented in 1818 that the influence of Hindu scriptures (from his time onwards) would prove as significant as the Renaissance revival of ancient Greek culture. Personalities from all the provinces of the political spectrum -such as Gandhi, Emerson, German national-popular virtuoso Von Liebenfels, and NSDAP SS leader Himmler- held Hindu classic Gita in the highest esteem.
347
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Eastern/Indian influences were not in name only; Thoreau wrote to Blake in 1849 he saw himself as a yogi, and fellow transcendentalist Conway referred to Thoreau as a “pious yogi�:
Particularly given their focus on "universal religion," without Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism for reference, the late Transcendentalists could not have written as they did, and as we shall see, Emerson and Thoreau wrote many of their works with the Bhagavad Gita, the Laws of Manu, the Puranas, and poets like Saadi for reference. In short, without "Oriental religions," many Transcendentalist works could not exist in the same form, and much second-generation Transcendentalist work would not exist at all. -...-Schleiermacher's "inner fire" was in any case discovered by Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801), whose philosophical aphorisms and poems bear a striking resemblance to the doctrines of the Upanishads and of the Vedantic teachings of Shankaracarya, as more than one commentator has pointed out. (Versluis 1993:10,20). Rather than trace the reformative impulse behind Spiritualism to the idea of spirit communication, I believe it is better and far more easily attributed to a broader interest in invisible causation. -...-In fact, in giving the empirical nature of spirit communication such prominence in the minds of all nineteenth-century American Spiritualists, Moore misread what Philosophical Spiritualists understood to be the revolutionary and reformative implications of their faith.(Morita 1999:100,101). On the one hand, the rise of Freemasonry over the eighteenth century, compounded by the Romantic revival of the occult in the 1780s and 1790s and fused with a renewed millenarianism and dispensationalism, carried the promise of the restoration of ancient truths and even Adamic powers. These influences, borne on a proliferation of secret societies and textual reformulations of Renaissance and Reformation hermeticism, may be seen as a sphere of hermetic purity in a broader field of hermetic culture. This chapter quickly examines their emergence and potential lines of transmission to the world of the divining cults of postrevolutionary America. (Brooke 1994:91).
348
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
It is easy to superpose Aurobindo's extensive and deep thought with the diverse Victorian primordial soup made of theosophy, occultism, world government, spiritual and physical breakthroughs supposedly ascended masters had heralded.
Aurobindo Ghose was an Indian nationalist, and an important scholar of immemorial Hindu literature. The fact that Aurobindo's thought resonates so well with Victorian fads such as theosophy, transcendentalism, Darwinism, Hegelianism and so forth while being rooted in the scholarly examination of immemorial Hindu literature ( Vedas, Upanishads, Gita etc) clearly shows human mind's irresistible proclivities at work.
Such concepts -moving westwards through literary indebtedness and 'awakenings' in waves since antiquity- caught like wildfire precisely because human minds find them irresistible:
early on [Emerson] was introduced to the Orient through articles in popular journals, and not surprisingly, he did not care for the "ritualism," the "superstitious cruelties" depicted as characteristic of Hinduism and Buddhism. (Versluis 1993:52). Buddha began to emerge as a distinct religious figure and Buddhism as a distinct tradition during the 1840s and l850s, and a lively and widespread conversation about the nature and value of Buddhism was initiated in American books, lecture halls, and magazines around 1844. This public conversation intensified after 1879 and peaked between 1893 and 1907. Buddhism even became a "live option" for the spiritually disillusioned during the late-Victorian period as Protestant Christianity became increasingly problematic for a number of Western intellectuals. In this cultural context tens of thousands of Americans of 349
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
European descent read about Buddhism or attended lectures about the tradition and several thousand even considered Buddhism seriously. Contrary to the presuppositions of American historians, most of those who expressed some interest in the tradition were either rationalist inheritors of the Skeptical Enlightenment or Esoteric inheritors of an Occult tradition and not New England Romantics filled with an aesthetic and mystical spirit; and, although they and their Christian critics did not recognize this, Euro-American Buddhist sympathizers and adherents were cultural consenters as well as cultural dissenters. (Tweed 1989:iv). Even professor of marketing Berger –an expert who studies how stories, ads etc “go viral”- acknowledges success in 'going viral' (news, rumors, products...) is proportional to how in tune the campaign is with the still mysterious way the human mind is put together and works.
To name one instance, the concept of mystical Dawn in the Vedas has transited to serve
in a similar capacity
freemasonic, theosophic and Social-
Communist lore: it is enough to ponder how many Social-Communist regimes or parties embraced the symbol of the rising sun.
Yatsenko373 conveys the metaphysical wonders described in the Rig
Veda through the image of an “everlasting day”, possibly an echo of the terror darkness triggered in prehistoric men, which was in a later period “sentimentalized and prettified” in the form of evil forces, goat-headed demons and so forth.
The cult of Dawn (as Mater Matuta in early Rome, possibly VI century 373 MAISI018 no date: RV 5.81.
350
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
BCE) was also associated at Rome with the foundational myth of Hercules and Cacus374: Hercules rising at dawn connects him with earnest and hard toil, an association still present in our day's proverbs such as:”the early bird gets the worm” etc:“Just as Hercules is worshiped for saving Italy from Cacus, so too is Augustus celebrated for saving Italian citizens from war.”375.
As this writing contends, 'awakenings' were often mere fads, however widespread and long-lasting: in most cases a commodious, instant gratification for one's need for mysticism, inclusiveness, urgent social reforms and so forth. A row of fickle, spiritually deprived radicals helped themselves halfheartedly to the salad bar of world literature in order to – and only as long as it helped them to - buttress their fantasies of social alchemy and reform.
In other words, radical-chic litterateurs and other living room revolutionaries thought a smattering 376 of oriental thought might facilitate their commodious agenda:
Because his was a literary religion, Thoreau finally left it behind; the experiment could not be sustained for a lifetime. Literary religion is 374 The swashbuckling founder on a journey -like Theseus or Ganesha- delivers the people from unsavory characters: here the foe is the giant robber and cannibal Cacus, son of Vulcan. Meineck (Meineck 2005-1:Greek Myths And The Romans) also explains Cacus might be a transposition of the story of Polyphemus in the Odyssey (semi-divine cannibal giant who herds flocks, lives in a cave, and so forth). 375Barden Dowling 2006:128. 376 Emerson famously saluted Hindu Gita as “renowned book of Buddhism”, which clearly shows how superficial and misguided his appraisal was. The Gita in fact, a portion of Hindu Mahabharata, which pre-dates Buddhism and belongs to another tradition. This also shows Emerson and his ilk were quick to appropriate any 'therapeutic capital' they could think of in order to serve their adventitious political goals without much afterthought.
351
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
not religion. Much has been made of the book collection sent to Thoreau by his British friend Thomas Cholmondeley in 1855 -...-which some have termed the largest collection of Orientalist volumes in America in private hands at that time -...- [yet Thoreau] was no longer vitally interested in reading them (Versluis 1993:95). This explains Jung's interest in Oriental religions as resources of mythic raw material, to be transmuted, by religious psychology, into therapeutic capital for the production of Occidental satisfactions. That he could not extract Oriental autoplastic religious motifs from their historical and sociological contexts, for grafting onto quite another culture configuration did not occur to Jung as a serious obstacle. He is innocent of sociological interest. (Rieff 2006:113). The recourse to “therapeutic capital” borrowed from oriental wisdom recurred across all the provinces of the political spectrum: the NSDAP heavily embraced orientalist lore.
No matter how peculiar, the same salad bar of more or less improbable
Belle Epoque concepts was a direct filiation from pre-Victorian tendencies such as romanticism, transcendentalism etc. Emerson -an ordained Christian Unitarian pastor between 1829 and 1832- in 1841 introduced “the over-soul”, over which transcendentalist Dall lectured in 1895:”God is the Over Soul; above all, through all,
under all, as well.”377. Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), the Indian thinker and nationalist, offered a similar concept:”The overmind is the rarely attained summit of human consciousness, It is a cosmic consciousness but without the loss of the Individual”378. Readers shall make of these similarities what they see fit.
377 Cit. in Myerson 2000:676. 378 MAISF001 no date:The Planes Of The Mind.
352
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Professor of religion Prothero379 talks about Buddhism in America in terms of successive “awakenings�: the 1880s (Theravada Buddhism), the 1950s (Zen Buddhism), the 1990s (Tibetan Buddhism), although -as seen earlier- various traditions coexisted within the same 'awakening'.
It turns out that today's very popular vipassana meditation in its many schools is not an ancestral practice of a primeval Buddhist dawn preserved more or less intact, but a Belle Epoque product of the interplay between oriental sages and practitioners -such as the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw-, and western enthusiasts and scholars having their fill of another Buddhist awakening. They sought to adapt Buddhist meditation discarding the ceremonial, esoteric and committing element.
Vipassana has allegedly sorted good results with inmates in various countries; vipassana has been admitted as rehabilitative practice mostly because it has severed and lost most -if not all- connections to Buddhism as both a philosophy and a religion. The same repackaging of immemorial spiritual lore never stops.
Kehoe380 elatedly quotes positive psychologists in order to urge listeners to carefully analyze their emotions: hardly different from vipassana or zazen in existence several centuries before the positive psychology fad of the 1990s. Equally, these Victorian-Belle Epoque intellectuals interested in Indian thought were also often interested in occultism, spiritualism and the like ( the English Society For 379 2005:74ss. 380 2011: The Conscious Mind And Emotion.
353
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Psychical Research included several prominent scientists; Aurobindo is nowadays mostly remembered as a mystic):
As R. Laurence Moore puts it, “Scarcely another cultural phenomenon affected as many people or stimulated as much interest as did spiritualism in the ten years before the Civil War and, for that matter, through the subsequent decades of the nineteenth century." There are not nearly as many believers in Modern Spiritualism today as there were at its peak in the 1850s, but the Spiritualist seance has entered the vernacular. -...-Before Spiritualism could burst upon the world-...-the ghost had to become a mobile spirit, free of earthly bonds -...- Any spirit could be summoned from any sitting room. These were the qualities essential to making Spiritualism both comforting and compelling -...-Most literature by Spiritualists, however, consists largely of anecdotes about the amazing events in the lives of particularly gifted mediums -...-.the afterlife was largely accepted both by Spiritualists and their most vehement detractors. The issue was whether the spirit rappings constituted proof. Empiricism is such a central part of the American worldview that for a hundred years many interesting questions about Spiritualism as a cultural and social phenomenon could not be asked(Pimple in Walker 1995:75,79,82,84). That's not a trend that died with the 1930s, either. Harvard leadership teacher Ben-Shahar381 repeatedly quotes Transcendentalist thinkers. On a lecture tour in Boston in 1842, Dickens was made aware that “whatever was unintelligible would certainly be transcendental �. Contemporary positive psychologists seem to love transcendentalism for a reason.
If the government controls what you want to do, they control what you can do. If you are under the impression that death exists, and you fear it, you do anything to avoid it. (This is the 381 2005-6a:lecture 6.
354
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
same way pain operates. Naturally we strive to avoid negative emotion/pain.) You allow yourself to fear death! -...- I'm here to help you realize/ understand that you will live no matter what! It is up to you people to open your hearts and minds. There is no such thing as death. The people I've dismissed from this reality are not at all dead. The lines above would sound just great in any gnostic movie of one's favorite flavor. As CNN USA would have it382, however, a sociopath slipped the letter above in a mailbox he had also prepared so that it would explode with a pipe bomb when opened: gnosticism, what a favorite. The alleged perpetrator of a series of mailbox pipe bombings in the U.S Midwest, Lucas Helder, has been detained in a mental health facility since 2004 as currently unable to stand trial due to mental illness.
Davis clinches that “Gnosticism is such a fragmentary and suggestive patchwork of texts, hearsay, myth, and rumor that you can label almost any contemporary phenomenon "gnostic" and get away with it.”383; “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”; “whatever was unintelligible would certainly be transcendental ”. Abbott&Costello “7x13=28” routine makes as much sense as the “unintelligible”, “cloudy vagueness” that goes under the blanket of gnosticism.
The concept Jewish-American trail-blazing psychologist Maslow expounded in 1971 could have been lifted verbatim from Indian mystic Aurobindo (deceased in 1950): 382 May 7, 2002. 383 1999:93.
355
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Stated simply, such a concept holds that the function of education, the goal of education- the human goal, the humanistic goal, the goal so far as human beings are concerned-is ultimately the "self-actualization" of a person, the becoming fully human , the development of the fullest height that the human species can stand up to or that the part icular individual can come to. In a less technical way, it is helping the person to become the best that he is able to become. (Maslow 1993:162). Become such as you are, having learned what that is (Pindar, Greek poet, 518-438 BCE). If one is really in tune with the pack, free of 'impure' interferences, the fusion shall happen spontaneously. Isn't the Catholic article of faith about “the Communion of the Saints”? isn't Communion (=the taking of the holy host) becoming one with Christ? Isn't communion another form of fusion of the pack in spiritual terms? Buddhism is no different:”just as various rivers flow into the ocean and lose their names, so do those who enter the order abandon their social classes and lay names to be called only "disciples of the Buddha" or "monks"”384.
In 1994, Berlusconi's party's official song preached: “Forza alziamoci. Il futuro è aperto, entriamoci. E le tue mani unite alle mie, energie per sentirci più grandi”( Let's get up. The future is an open possibility, let's seize it. My hands folded with yours, an energy that makes us feel stronger). The beloved at-onement with the pack is eminently tactile:”Third World tactile villagers pass directly into the global village of subtle yet tactile electronic culture.”385.
Myth(ologie)s can coalesce: the horde in fusion (an endless chain of 384 Hirakawa 1990:61. 385 Gane 1991:49.
356
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
folding handshakes) can mix with the quintessential hero's mystical or apocalyptic return such as in a dedication to Evita Peron:”Cuando se junten sus manos, volveré y seré millones. ”386 (When [the people's] hands will fold, I shall come back and I shall be millions). Italian comedian turned politician Grillo rises against alleged backstage political deals and -according to news agency LaPresse on April, 20 2013- thunders: “E' in atto colpo di Stato, dobbiamo essere milioni” (A coup is underway. We shall be millions [to march against it]”).
On his 45th birthday, Michael Jackson addressed his innumerable fans thus:”Over the years we became a family, all of us. You are my family -...-It was you, on a worldwide basis who supported me as my army, my soldiers of love. You were always there. You are always loyal and I love you forever”. Folklore relates how Krishna at the Yamuna river multiplies in order to dance with each and every of his followers. Alternatively, Gautama Buddha multiplies in the sky.
Gnostic truths (“a form of knowledge flowing from the heart in a mysterious, intuitive way”387) consist in anything that remotely resembles a Vedic
386 Phrase originally attributed to Indigenous cacique Tupac Katari in 1781. Beside appearing in a 1962 homage to Evita, the phrase is also credited to Evita on her deathbed, which is most likely not the case. The tactile oneness motif won't escape readers here. 387“Esses são os três estados alterados de consciência que criam condições para a irrupção da gnose, um conhecimento que brota do coração de forma misteriosa e intuitiva. Dentro do filme gnóstico, estes três estados vão orientar os protagonistas na busca pela Verdade. São verdadeiras transformações íntimas, salvações individuais. É importante salientar que as provações que os protagonistas vão enfrentar não são decorrentes de pecados, erros ou transgressões. Ou seja, a jornada de sofrimentos e dificuldades não se constitui em castigo. É aqui que temos uma diferença fundamental entre o filme gnóstico dos outros tipos de filme: o protagonista não passa por uma expiação, mas está em busca da salvação através do conhecimento espiritual.” (Vieira Ferreira 2009:46).
357
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
hymn:”That thought, may I be many, may I grow forth ”,”He desired, may I be many, may I grow forth” declare the Hindu Upanishads.”God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. ” ( Genesis 1:28).
Jack Kornfield, the acclaimed contemporary psychologist and speaker in matters of Buddhism and spirituality, can seamlessly mix quotes from the Dalai Lama, Kabir, Rumi, M.L. King, Mandela, Gandhi and so many others in his talks: it makes perfect gnostic sense. Various dabblers in oriental spirituality of Jewish background can smoothly intersperse their Buddhist or Hindu jeremiads with Yiddish punchlines, Torah passages, and Talmud witticisms: it works like a charm with no sense of incoherence.
The explanation in antiquity was that “only a god” could have fathered -or sent- such a “great man” capable of saying wonderful things that “heal each and every soul specifically”: the shtick applied to Gautama Buddha, Plato, Pythagoras and so forth centuries before it applied to Jesus, Mohamed, Guru Nanak or Joseph Smith:
And how, if Phoebus [Apollo] did not cause Plato to be born in Greece, did he [=Plato] heal human minds with letters? For even as the divinely begotten Asclepius is a healer of the body, so Plato is of the immortal soul. (Diogenes Laertius, Lives Of Eminent Philosophers 3.45). Not to mention the (post)modern incarnations of the theios aner: 358
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Napoleon, Churchill, Hitler,, Lenin, Mussolini, M.L. King, Lincoln, down to Berlusconi, Renzi, Tsipras, Mujica, Chavez, Castro, the Dalai Lama etc...:”no ordinary person indeed”.
Also, traditional Greek literature is full of people likened to gods, and/or sporting god-like traits:
You may be a good man in a fight, Achilles, And look like a god (Iliad I:140388); Standing beyond him is Idomeneus, Like a god, with his Cretan commanders (III:246-7); Machaon's heart was pounding as he made his way Across the crowded sand and through the troops Until he came to where Menelaus lay wounded, All the army's best gathered around him In a circle, into which he stepped like a god (IV:223.227);”On their side Ereuthalion, a man like a god,Stood forth as champion,” (VII:145-7); “You will win from them. They will honor you [=Achilles] Like a god.” (IX:305-6); “When Patroclus stood in the door, more like a god Than a man.” (XI:686-7);”Melanippus went with him, moving like a god” (XV:583); “And he moved ahead, with Meriones, Who himself moved like a god, in his wake” (XVI:662-3);”Besides Patroclus? He had a will like a god's” (XVII:493); “and Talthybius, Whose voice was like a god's,” (XIX:264-5);”Briseis stood there like golden Aphrodite” (XIX:299);”[Achilles] leapt on the Trojans like a god” (XXI:236);”[Achilles] rose like a god and addressed the Greeks” (XXII:417);”Not Hector, who was like a god among men” (XXIV:275). In more recent times, “destiny” or “providence” may replace god: the providential man. Both Gautama Buddha389; a Hebrew “servant of the lord”390, and 388 S. Lombardo translation. 389 Just like in the Jesus story, the tempter demon god Mara resorts to several strategies (= kama=sensual pleasure; mara=fear; dharma=social duty) to distract Gautama Buddha from his meditation towards enlightenment. Finally, Mara claims Buddha's seat for himself as gage of spiritual accomplishment greater than Buddha's; Mara's demons supported their lord bearing witness. Buddha then touches the Earth, which roars in support of Buddha; Mara and his armies disappear. 390 “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will bring justice to the nations.” (Isaiah 42:1).
359
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Jesus391 appear as emissary of cosmic forces: thundering voices from heaven, or Mother Earth herself support 'the great man'.
'Great men' are not alone in their 'man of destiny' shtick as they claim superhuman status for themselves:
[ An inmate who scored high on the psychopathy checklist] turned his photocopy of the Psychopathy Checklist score sheet around and started to scribble. He crossed out the word Psychopathy from the top of the page and then wrote in big block letters SUPERMAN. He turned to show me his creative work and then said: “I’m no psychopath. That’s the wrong term for me. I’m renaming this the SupermanChecklist. And now I’m Superman.” (Kiehl 2014:104). Ben-Shahar peppers his positive psychology lessons with both academic studies, and stand up comedians delivering punchlines: it works equally well irrespective of who's being quoted at any given moment. No wonder then that the simple mention of such abstruse -hence generic- concepts sends the dull masses into a fitful trance of immediate compliance at the behest of whoever sees fit to minimally restyle such lore to serve the moment's purpose.
According to Zimbardo, deindividuation (= fusion of the horde, or whichever other term might be used) unfolds according to the following that -incidentally- recur also at every rock concert or other mass entertainment event:
1. Anonymity that minimizes concern for social evaluation, which brings unaccountability about. 391 “And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased."” ( Matthew 3:17).
360
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
2. Arousal and consequent uninhibition. 3. Large group. 4. Time distortion. Past and future blur in favor of an eternalized present moment. Memory of actions performed may be reduced. 5. Sensory overload (lights, music, chanting, noise, heat, smell...). 6. Altered states of consciousness (possibly accompanying the consumption of alcohol, drugs and so forth). This peculiar state -in both its negative and positive connotations- has been categorized in different ways, such as mindfulness, hyperaesthesia, “being in the flow”, (Buddhist) meditative concentration 392, “aesthetic arrest”, “cosmic consciousness”, the sublime, “ being in the zone” (positive); or “going on autopilot” (commuter's amnesia), deindividuation etc (negative):
it turns out that bomb-disposal operatives aren’t the only ones who experience a drop in heart rate when they get down to business. Relationship experts Neil Jacobson and John Gottman, -...- have observed identical cardiovascular profiles in certain types of abusers, who, research has shown, actually become more relaxed when beating up their partners than when they’re lounging in an armchair with their eyes closed.-...-In 2011, Martin Klasen at Aachen University discovered that moments of flow possess a unique physiological profile. Using fMRI to observe the brains of video game players in action, he found that periods of heightened focus and concentration are accompanied by a reduction of activity in the anterior cingulate cortex—the brain’s error-detection and conflict-monitoring hardware—indicative of an increase in attention and the suppression of distracting and non-task-relevant 392 For example as Buddhist monastic ven. Wuling (Pure Land Buddhism) described. Gautama Buddha ( CulaSunnata Sutta) describes emptiness with words that later authors refer to the sublime, aesthetic arrest, being in the flow etc:”even so, Ananda, a monk — not attending to the perception [or mental note] of village, not attending to the perception of human being — attends to the singleness based on the perception of wilderness. His mind takes pleasure, finds satisfaction, settles, & indulges in its perception of wilderness. ”.
361
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
information. But that’s not all. A similar pattern has also been found in the brains of criminal psychopaths. (Dutton 2012:26,124). The group factor is also optional, for aesthetic arrest, being in the zone or in the flow, going on autopilot and experiencing the sublime happen mostly to individuals. Also, eminent positive psychologist Csikszentmihalyi claims that “being in the flow” makes people “better”, thus cathecting a 'new' concept with the same mystical properties as immemorial states of religious elation.
My Cosmic Consciousness event -....- occurred unexpectedly while I was alone one evening and was watching a particularly beautiful sunset. -...- The Cosmic Consciousness experience began with some mild tingling in the perineal area, the region between the genitals and anus. The feeling was unusual but was neither particularly pleasant nor unpleasant. After the initial few minutes, I either ceased to notice the tingling or did not remember it. -....-Along with the light came an alteration in mood. I began to feel very good, then still better, then elated. While this was happening, the passage of time seemed to become slower and slower. The brightness, mood elevation, and time slowing all progressed together-....-. It is difficult to describe this feeling, but perhaps it would be better to say that there was no time, or no sense of time. Only the present moment existed. My elation proceeded to an ecstatic state, the intensity of which I had never even imagined could be possible. -....-There was no separation between myself and the rest of the universe. -...-To say that subject merged with object might be almost adequate as a description of the entrance into Cosmic Consciousness, but during Cosmic Consciousness there was neither “subject” nor “object.” -...-Perhaps the most significant element of Cosmic Consciousness was the absolute knowingness that it involves. This knowingness is a deep understanding that occurs without words. -...-Eventually, the Cosmic Consciousness faded. The time changes, light, and mood elevation passed off. When I was able to think again, the sun had set and I estimate that the event must have lasted about twenty minutes. Immediately following return to usual consciousness, I cried uncontrollably for about a half hour. I cried both for joy and for sadness, because I knew that my life would never be the same. (cit. In Tart 2012:236-7). 362
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
There I feel that nothing can befal me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. (Emerson 1836, cit. in Myerson 2000:127-8). As this writing contends, such bundles of emotional and sensory images are vehicles that can be adapted to all and sundry: the dewdrop merges into the sea. The experience above might be that of a sentimental soul watching a sunset alone; that of the moth merging with the flame as allegory of mystics merging with god; that of a rock concert attendee's; or that of any artificial kin member marching, sulking, loathing...
People are busy consecrating or desecrating bodies or corpses...They adoringly listen as 'the great man' bloviates. He's possibly tomorrow's massmurdering tyrant or pathetic buffoon, whose dead body the masses shall tear apart in contempt:”These findings indicate that the boldness associated with psychopathy is an important but heretofore neglected predictor of presidential performance, and suggest that certain features of psychopathy are tied to successful interpersonal behavior. ”393.
What if I was to tell you that the arsonist who burns your house down might also, in a parallel universe, be the hero most likely to 393 From the abstract of a 2012 scientific study by Lilienfeld et alii ( Fearless Dominance and the U.S. Presidency ) that examined the biographies of U.S Presidents up to Bush, jr.
363
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
brave the flaming timbers of a crumbling, blazing building to seek out, and drag out, your loved ones? Or that the kid with a knife in the shadows at the back of the movie theater might well, in years to come, be wielding a rather different kind of knife at the back of a rather different kind of theater? Claims like these are admittedly hard to believe. But they’re true. Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless, and focused. (Dutton 2012:18). Mindfulness (being “in the zone”, “in the flow” etc) is also routinely perverted politically. Peer/social pressure -if not legal pressure- is exerted in various degrees to ensure one addresses various categories the right way. One has to be “mindful” to insure the right carnage with the liturgical description is attributed to the appropriate arch-tyrant.
The horde in fusion is assertedly therapeutic:”Thus, the well-being of the individual was dependent on his full participation in the community. Unification, in this sense, is integral to one’s health, since the individual’s completeness resides in the community.”394. In traditional Balinese funerals, a long thread relies the coffin soon to be cremated with the procession accompanying it to the burning ground. At Anuradhapura (Sri Lanka), Buddhist devotees carry a very long flag, and fold it around the Ruwanwelisaya Stupa (140 BCE), where Buddha's relics are said to rest. Lieberman (Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences) declared in 2013 that:”If Facebook were a religion, it would be the third largest Religion in the world ”395;”’identification à la vie apparente sans profondeur ”. 394 Castronova 2004:53-4. 395 Lieberman probably doesn't take into account the various regional Facebook clones going under different names.
364
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Popular culture couldn't lag far behind. Browsing across the internet in 2014, one's browser is peppered with pesky pop-ups that advertise this or that meek upstart who desperately needs the public to do something (push a button; fill a survey; add one to his social network; dial a toll number...) so that the unassuming striver may possibly hit it big by winning an online contest (=tournament motif) as a video gets voted up.
The public acts as a fairy godmother who may help destitute Cinderellas (=ugly duckling motif) be(come) the belle of the ball with a click of its magic mouse (or wand); or dialing a toll number in to vote a particular contestant. How many “audition tournament� programs are there on TV? Ordinary bozos and mass-men try to mesmerize an audience with their presumed talent.
This imagery does not concern exclusively the armies of brutes marching on a new country every season in order to enact the foolish dictates of their utopian schemes of choice culled from long-dead hacks, whatever the color of their armband happens to be. Positive psychologists emphasize the important of socialization and commitment, too.
Being part of the horde in fusion would thus amount to a therapy of commitment, whose healing properties are manifest:
Ritual participation is an extreme form of commitment therapy. But, what ritual participation is to the group, mysticism is, functionally, to 365
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the individual. Operationally defined, mysticism is always a form of unification with a saving agency. The mystic inclines to achieve his self-awareness by coming as close to a condition of inaction as he can. Historically, Oriental moral demand systems such as Buddhism have exalted the mystic as a therapeutic type. The tendency to inaction itself has a supportive value, for once the mystical union with the saving symbol, and with the community that stands behind it, has been achieved, a climax of inner stability has been reached; there is no place to go further except down, so to speak, toward alienation from the integrative god-term with which the mystic has been infused. (Rieff 2006:60). Every mysticism performs this operation, claiming only to restore the original profundity of the parent tradition by interpreting it nonliterally. The Sufis, Philo, and others made such claims, but how plausible are they? Usually such hermeneutical attempts are really efforts at modernizing an outmoded faith that has become an embarrassment to its latter-day adherents. Was the belief of the Stoics really older than that of Homer and Hesiod? I doubt it. (Price 2008:111). Professor of psychology and spirituality R.L. Moore addresses 396 the Heaven's Gate397 cult mass suicide suggesting that people -in the case of any cult such as Branch Dravidians at Waco- ought to -literally- invite cult members over for coffee in order to discuss their involvement in socially uplifting activities such as assistance to micro-credit or the homeless: love-bombing as a redemptive strategy, or Freud's “disposable libido� reconsidered.
Others in turn explain how such groups are born because society at large rejects some or most of their core beliefs and assumptions: who would 396 1997:part 5. 397 About 40 group members committed suicide in 1997 in the hope of reaching a spaceship their religion preached was following the comet Hale-Bopp. Aboard said spaceship they would assertedly reach some fabled evolutionary next level.
366
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
sincerely care to mingle with those weird people who sport all-out beliefs in UFOs, or in approaching fire and brimstone doom? Beliefs people are drawn to in the attempt to soothe their internal feelings of societal alienation, inadequacy and dissonance to start with. One may try to steer their manic attention towards socially acceptable purposes with a game of pretenses: what if the game of pretenses at some point falls apart?
The final scene of the 1986 movie Crocodile Dundee offers one example. Set aside another grotesque rendition of the bewildered country boy in visit to the city, the final scene sees the girl who repents and wants to tell her Romeo she loves him...in a New York subway station during rush hour. After relaying messages to and fro as the two are apart, the packed crowd -composed of people of all races and walks of life- spontaneously and enthusiastically volunteers to serve as doormat; bystanders cheerfully encourage doubting Romeo (or Tarzan, as he's called in the movie) to literally walk on their shoulders/heads to be reunited with his Juliet (or Jane).
Carlyle relays this anecdote from the French Revolution. Patriotic masses are building the Champ-De-Mars,
Thus too a certain person (of some quality, or private capital, to appearance), entering hastily, flings down his coat, waistcoat and two watches, and is rushing to the thick of the work: "But your watches?" cries the general voice.−−"Does one distrust his brothers?" answers he; nor were the watches 367
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5 stolen. How beautiful is noble−sentiment: like gossamer gauze, beautiful and cheap; which will stand no tear and wear! (1837:no page).
In Superman II398 (1980), the peeping crowd 'becomes one', ires and marches in order to avenge beloved Superman brutish compatriots have momentarily overpowered, only to be rendered powerless by Superman's evil
doppelgaengers:
Holy subtexts abound within the popular cinema. Superman: The Movie (1978) and Superman II (1981) were examined as a protracted secular analogue of the Jesus story. The literature was reviewed and twenty Superman-Jesus parallels plus eight Christic personalistic traits were explicated. It was concluded that Superman is not only a legitimate Christ-figure, but the American pop culture movie Messiah. (Kozlovic 2002: no page). The pack in fusion supports Superman: the 'great man' in fact wears -just like Wonder Woman, Captain America and other fictional heroes- the colors of 'the old glory': he's a walking cathedral with the U.S flag on top, whom meek party liners worship.
Alternatively, fusion may occur between two parties. Zen martial artists claim the Buddha's spirit fights within them; St. Paul wrote:�I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the 398 The storyline of high-budget blockbuster Superman 2 strongly resembles that of an episode of Space 1999. In Space 1999 (End Of Eternity episode, 1976), they mistakenly free whom they think is an eccentric visionary dressed in black, unjustly imprisoned in an asteroid. The visionary soon turns out to be a murderous psychopath with superhuman powers on a domination binge, who had been confined because of his earlier crimes. Stills from, and a description of the episode may be found at http://www.space1999.net/moonbase99/eternity.htm . In Superman 2, the domineering sociopaths both dressed in black, and with superhuman powers escaping from confinement are three. Readers shall come to their own conclusions.
368
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. � (Galatians 2:20). Gawain champions a child-lady, whose castle was under siege because her older sister had refused a King in marriage, as the child assures him the two of them would be(come) one. Feirefiz and Parsifal are -indeed, as half-brothers in battle- one.
Popular culture couldn't let this gem pass unnoticed. In the Japanese cartoon Astroganga (1972-3), a boy named Charlie fusions in body and spirit with a sentient giant robot to fight invaders from outer space. Another hero of Japanese giant robots, Takeshi (Ufo Diapolon, 1976), fusions with three (=ternary principle) giant robots to fight evil foes from outer space.
Myth's beloved ingredients are all there:
1. Prodigious birth. Although he's an orphan on Earth, Takeshi is in reality the son of a mighty god-king from another planet evil foes overthrew. Charlie is the son of a female runaway scientist from outer space stranded on Earth, and of an earthling (much like Achilles, Aeneas etc).
2. Prodigies galore. Takeshi's godly father takes him up to heaven along with Takeshi's friends (=the merry men motif) so that his manifest destiny might unfold. Charlie's giant robot Ganga is born in an underwater volcano.
3. Wise mentors with a flowing beard. A scientist for Takeshi; an old man for 369
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Charlie.
4. Mythological chases. After various failed attempts, Takeshi rescues his captive mother. Charlie has to fulfill the mission of his deceased parents; Charlie's mother stranded on Earth also lived on borrowed time.
5. The savior holds no grudges: not only does Takeshi save Earth, but his enemy planet as well, which he restores after an ecological catastrophe.
The “fusion” item can stew in as many sauces as one sees fit. In the Catholic Mass the priest recites:
Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church and, recognising the sacrificial Victim by whose death you willed to reconcile us to yourself, grant that we, who are nourished by the Body and Blood of your Son and filled with his Holy Spirit, may become one body, one spirit in Christ. The boons of commitment are endless. Vajrayana Buddhist nun and speaker Robina Courtin suggests to take one or more Buddhist pledges. Even if that sounds hard, and even if we end up breaking the vow often, nonetheless we make merit for all the rest of the time we are not actively breaking it: the vow somewhat acts as barrier to deter our behavior. Professor of psychology DeWall shuns religious fairy tales and refers to the exact same thing as the scientific “implementation intention”399.
399 2013:Self-Control Successes And Failures.
370
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Indian thought -whether Upanishadic or Buddhist- has been warning against excessive maximalism, and in favor of self-contentment, for ages. Political scientist H.A Simon posited satisficing in 1956: self-contentment as a form of optimization that balances sets of constraints.
In 1971 Brickman&Campbell introduced “the hedonistic treadmill”: striving and getting more -or less- is no guarantee of a stable -or incrementalincrease in lasting (dis)satisfaction, which over time tends to float around an average. Again, Upanishadic and Buddhist thought had already eviscerated the conundrum of greed, hatred, doubt, sloth, torpor and delusion ages before the 1970s: Mahayana Buddhism posited emptiness as key to existence.
Costa Rica's folkloric song canha dulce rhapsodizes about the contentment of a modest life of hard toil in the countryside in these terms: “y seré como esos reyes -...- que no envidian ya nadita. -...-esta vide noble y buena, pasaré sin un rencor.” ( I shall be like one of those Kings who don't covet anything, and I shall live this wholesome and noble life without any resentment whatsoever).
Naturally, the consequences of the 'horde in fusion' go often beyond middle-aged prats in third rate comedies, or flying heroes in cape and tights wearing lots of brilliantine. The “August madness” of 1914 is another example, whereby -contrary to the propaganda and lucubration of Social-Communists and pacifists alike – the masses spontaneously embraced patriotic causes in a nationalistic spirit at 371
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the outbreak of WWI.
Clinical professor of psychology Siegel nicely clinches:
you will learn that there are many parallels between Western psychotherapies and the traditions from which many mindfulness practices come. But they diverge in the understanding of the self— the ultimate goal. However, the practical differences may not really be so profound, because traditional students of mindfulness may have full enlightenment of their ultimate goal. But that ultimate goal is rarely attained. Instead, in ways that would be quite recognizable to Western health professionals, students of mindfulness become more mature and balanced. (2014:33). Popular culture readily hijacks mindfulness and “living in the eternal present”. Radio stations invite listeners to participate in a game show. If chosen to receive a random phone call from the radio staff, the listener will have to be tested in order to successfully prove on air to have paid attention to the radio's broadcasts.
Political parties recurrently put the concept on oneness to good use. Italian party Lega Nord portrays a faceless horde of bare-footed hobos in rags running berserk carrying the party's symbols 400. In our day, some people buy Tshirts inviting to arrange a meeting between the Taliban and their god; or to catch two birds with one stone by killing pregnant Muslim women in the Middle East: the perversion of the beloved myth of the pregnant woman's ordeal401. 400 One image is available at: http://colico.leganord.org/documenti/nordsfruttato.jpg 401 For example the Greek myths of Ariadne (at times assimilated to Aphrodite), and Cupid&Psyche. The Hindu myth of King Dushyanta and his pregnant lover Shakuntala. The Judaeo-Christian myth of aspersions being cast upon Mary as she conceived the divine child Jesus while a virgin, etc. Aspersions were also cast upon Sita: Rama thus abandoned her while she was pregnant. Anxieties of this kind recur also in Icelandic lore, whereby human women have at times intercourse with huldufolk (secret people) portrayed as more gallant and charming than
372
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
On the opposite end of the political spectrum, the NSDAP motto was: one people, one country, one leader. In 1939-40 Italian crowds drowned then neutral Mussolini's speeches urging him “to march on Paris”; in 1943, a roaring German crowd cheered Goebbels' rhetorical question whether they wanted to go for total war.
Self-esteem disturbances leading to aggressive, and/or antisocial behaviour arise when dependent self-esteem (=dependent on external approval) prevails; such disturbances would also accompany huge swings in self-esteem levels402, which in turn mirrors the horde in fusion's ebbing and flowing (they alternatively ire, loathe, sulk, covet...) mood as the masters of acceptable discourse spin their yarns to keep the masses on their seats:
Interpretive communities are groups of people whom we trust to determine whether things are right or wrong. They can be official or ad hoc; they can have credentials or just be people we trust, people whom we end up trusting, who are somehow authorized to determine things, or who have the power—like the umpire at the baseball game —to make final determinations. But the point is that you get your argument accepted by convincing the interpretive community -...-.The important point is that the interpretive community sets the rules, the discourse conventions (Drout 2006:14,19). Ben-Shahar403 discusses self-esteem, which research links on an equal
the stereotypical Icelandic male of the rough times when such stories were crafted. Also, huldufolk may help women with unwanted pregnancies by raising the child themselves. This constellation of myths is but another variation upon the 'choice that entails suffering', 'frail little creature', or 'rash judgment' motifs: one and the same. 402 Ben-Shahar 2005-6:lecture 21. 403 2009: lecture 23.
373
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
footing to both pro- and antisocial behaviors. It is not surprising. What in one group -or person- amounts to a healthy degree of self-esteem in the pursuit of selfconcordant goals according to a vision, in another group or person – doing basically the same thing- it amounts to self-absorption, conceit and violent compulsions. Is a thrifty person a penny-pincher? Is the braggart just self-assertive?
Are patriotic muscle-heads in any of those xeroxed Rambo patriotic action movies displaying a civilized sense of social cohesion all should possess? Aren't they rather acting like a Khmer Rouge, CEKA-NKVD or GESTAPO thug? On which basis can the much sought after sense of social cohesion become chauvinism? Is the recourse to illegal foreign objects to win a wrestling match a shame or an heroic remedy?
It doesn't really matter to the masses whether their dragon in a jar is a rubber dummy; whether the eye-witness who saw the elusive but ever-present Canadian crucified on the Western Front is a non-existing soldier of a unit stationed in India during WWI; whether the next hero-victim of '...ists' is both mentally unstable, and/or with criminal records; or whether the Kuwaiti incubator babies murdered en masse existed only in the mind of hired advert specialists, whose princely salary was even made public.
Cultural or mediating priming easily unleashes human mind's inner
374
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
proclivities. According to data mentioned in Jadri et alii 404, the prevalence of hallucination cross-sectional studies suggest to be the case for the general population hovers around 11-13% (USA); 20% (France); 21% (UK-Germany-Italy) etc:
A large study of patients at Kaiser Permanente, a health maintenance organization, was designed to assess childhood exposure to multiple types of adverse events, including abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and serious household dysfunction (such as substance abuse). They derived an adverse childhood event (ACE) score, with one point for each major category of abuse. Twothirds of the patients reported at least one ACE, with 26 percent experiencing one event, 16 percent experiencing two events, and 27 percent experiencing three or more events. And that doesn’t include traumas that happen after childhood. They found that trauma has a huge impact on well-being, with higher ACE scores corresponding to more life problems. Compared to persons with an ACE score of 0, those with an ACE score of 4 or more were twice as likely to be smokers, 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, 7 times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs.(Siegel 2014:116-7). What matters is to be one with the artificial kin group (brethren, compatriots, tovarishi, comrades, common humanity fellows...): “the mystical union with the saving symbol”. It doesn't matter how misguided, silly, fabricated, implausible etc anything/one might be, for it's human soul's wonderful warmth we celebrate.
The kinship item is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. The rise of the industrial society and Belle Epoque nation-States soon crisscrossed with internal 404 2013:45.
375
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
and international migratory lines brought about the mass man:“which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else. ” as Ortega y Gasset put it in 1930. Only 1 in 8 average westerners is likely to correctly remember the names of his great-grandparents, if any at all.
The fusion of the horde does no longer take place along the lines of more or less extended clans or bloodlines, but along the administrative lines of the increasingly composite pacified zones that are so-called nation-States.
Togetherness through belief -say- in a common religion was gradually replaced by regional variants with the Reformation ( Gallicanisme, Anglicanism...). Then -starting with the late XVIII century- with increasingly deistic -or even atheist- versions of the nation-State: belief in isolation. Freemasonry influenced prominent members of the U.S constitutional movement: Washington, Franklin and others405. Convulsions in the opposite direction were frequent -such as Jacobin 405 “Thomas Paine makes the interesting point, in his essay on freemasonry, that there was evidence that the earliest forms of freemasonry were a religion totally unconnected to Christianity.However, it seems that it was from the early 1700s and onward that freemasonry slowly became a group publically promoting naturalism and deism.Modern freemasons could even be said to have been putting into practice the principles of the Enlightenment. Jon Butler, author of Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 , agrees with Jacob and states that colonial freemasonry (meaning Modern Masonry, as the official organization of the Ancients had not occurred yet) “emphasized mystical as well as rational sources of human knowledge and an ethics that transcended traditional Christianity.”-...-Whalen even goes so far as to state that all American freemasonry, from its very inception, was anti-Christian and that in order to “get a solid footing in a professedly Christian nation” it had to adopt a “Christian disguise.” Whether this disguise for some modern masons came in the form of “Ancient” masonry or not, we cannot say, but one important point is clear however:“Modern” freemasonry, as it originated at London’s Grand Lodge in 1717, would be more useful in propagating the ideas of the Enlightenment then the values of Christianity. -...-Deists of the Enlightenment believed in a few core ideas: “the existence of one God, often conceived of as architect or mechanican…and the obligation of men to virtue and piety.”” (Ayers 2008:12-13).
376
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
secular cults, or NSDAP neo-pagan ones-, albeit short-lived.
As Belle Epoque nation-States gradually -albeit surely- decompose, new loyalties arise: commercial brand loyalty; team sport loyalty that first arose in the USA as a nationwide phenomenon in the 1920s (the rise of football) thanks to increasing nationwide radio and press coverage.
Statements from Markovits -as a mere example- may help clarify the point. He writes:
While such things are nothing new in the worlds of the extreme Right and left in Europe and have been commonplace since the Six-Day War in June of 1967, they were not part of Europe's accepted political discourse until the 1990s After all, many people have been rightfully upset with many a country's policies. But in virtually no case has that led to the questioning of the very worth of that country's [Israel] existence. Slobodan Milosevitc's Yugoslavia became the bogeyman of Europe's publics -...- but even this atrocity never led any British, French, German or Italian diplomats or journalists writing for these countries' papers of record to question the very right of Yugoslavia to exist as a country. -...- The Jews are not "off limits" anymore in Europe (no date:91). Although coming from intellectuals at the top of the intellectual chain, the above statements merely serve the purpose of fostering unity among artificial kin members on the common ground of partisan advocacy and emotional righteousness.
First off all, opponents are characterized in bulk as fringe lunatics serving opposite -but coinciding- disused ideologies from all corners of the political 377
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
spectrum. Second, Yugoslavia did cease its geopolitical and juridical existence in spite of any claim to the contrary; Yugoslavia's successor state, the federation of Serbia and Montenegro also vanished as Montenegro gained independence, and Kosovo seceded in 2006.
The fact that Russia – to name one- may lay claims to represent the USSR's legacy does not change the fact that the USSR no longer exists mainly because of Russian intransigence. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, East Germany and the USSR ceased both their geopolitical and juridical existence in recent decades; South Vietnam disappeared as well, certainly not spontaneously.
Sudan and Ethiopia also fractured in two separate countries in 2011(South Sudan) and 1993 (Eritrea) respectively after bloody civil wars. Only time will tell whether from Ukraine will ultimately secede two or more distinct zones under Russian control. In 1965, Singapore splintered off from the Malaysian Federation. The staunch opposition of certain classes and groups did indeed play a telling part in the process.
It is enough to remember how any number of States since the XIX century have been designed as 'sick men' of their geopolitical area, whose dismemberment or otherwise geopolitical and/or juridical cessation was clamored for: the Austrian Empire, the Chinese Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Regno Delle Due Sicilie, the Papal States... 378
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The Austrian Empire was especially berated as inconsequential “prison of peoples�. Even a cursory social-ethnological and historical overview allows to see that Italy, the USA, the USSR, Spain, Great Britain, Yugoslavia etc are (were) equally composite pacified zones where a bundle of heterogeneous groups reside(d). When Italy was created in 1861, only 2% of the population could speak Italian: imagined communities of one sort or another reveal their crassly commodious and manufactured nature.
It is enough to mention that by 1919 the Ottoman and Austrian Empires would cease their juridical and geopolitical existence, whereas the Chinese (1911), Russian (1917) and German Empires would cease their juridical existence in a geopolitical catastrophe similar to the one the French Revolution had once wrought, yet (this time) without any hope of Restoration. The item is too good to let pass, so people and their bards of choice in the media are still musing which 'sick man' is going to fall next, among the former post-war welfare paradises of western massdemocracy: Italy, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Iceland...
Much as cessation and dismemberment were the option of choice of the past, today various cats are still in the social alchemist's bag: fiscal compact, Tobin tax, or a host of other possible measures for the good of the irresponsible flock that brought this all upon itself after all:
When people have become sufficiently frustrated or stressed about 379
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
a particular problem or event, they are very keen to grab onto a solution, any solution, and they find great emotional release in finding that solution. (Lakhani 2005:89). It therefore begs a few questions to peremptorily state that questioning one State's right to exist is something so unheard of and particularly vicious, irrespective of how anyone might individually appreciate any particular situation. All this regardless of how out of control political confrontation does get on any single topic; and irrespective of 'points' on whichever side of any contention that do not belong here and are best left to individual consideration.
Alternatively, it is argued that people leave behind regimes that cross this or that boundary in matters of ethics or performance. The Socratic assumption is easily challenged. If so, the routine trillionaire economic disasters postwar regimes get into; the rows of 'necessary wars'; stratospheric deficits on the rise; corruption, profligacy and ineptitude etc, should have exiled such regimes to the margins of history.
The staunchest partisans of the Social-Communist block were those westerners who dreaded spending in the “workers' paradise� more time than required to pompously tour a 'showroom precinct' in Moscow or Leningrad. When a lie or fabrication is exposed (such as the famous Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), no angry mob of righteous artificial kin members -who couldn't possibly have known earlier- marches into town to demand regime overthrows: accidental
380
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
falsehood.
The Socratic dilemma (to know the good is to do the good) is yet another idea endlessly repackaged across ages, regimes and continents. Discussing the eclectic jumble of eastern and western Belle Epoque motifs that constitute Aurobindo's thought -which he extols as unrivaled-, professor of psychology Varma writes:
This individual soul, called the psychic being, is an important key to our psychological well-being. The psychic being is our true being, the secret divinity in us. Its very essence is peace and harmony and joy. It has a natural attraction for the true, the good, the beautiful. -...-We also wish to see in others the perfection that we secretly desire but have not yet arrived at. -...-the outer conflicts of man are the reflection of his inner conflicts [of course also voiced in the GÄŤtÄ ]. -...-This is the evolutionary aspect of life which can be best termed in modern parlance as ascent and integration leading towards a greater and greater degree of wholeness. -...-From another point of view we may simply see them as inevitable evolutionary challenges to assist in our growth by throwing upon us an obstacle to be overcome [all problems are basically evolutionary challenges]. (MAISI032: unit 5:24). It is not difficult to detect a salad bar of Hegelian, Darwinian, Freudian, Hindu and other concepts that possibly anticipate Jung. Even (Mahayana) Buddhism has a version of primeval radiant reality as Buddha-nature. The concept -like the noble eightfold path- might have been borrowed from older literature such as the
Rig Veda:
in the strength of the ideal super-mind they attain to the same infinite amplitude of right becoming, right action and right 381
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
knowledge. -...- This also is in us a creation, although in reality it only manifests what already exists but was concealed by the darkness of our ignorance,—just as the realms of the physical earth are concealed from our eyes by the darkness, but reveal themselves as the sun in his march follows the Dawn and measures them out one by one to the vision. (Yatsenko, MAISI018 no date: unit 1:9). One citizen who was caught in the lie of Orson Welles' phony 1938 radio broadcast about a Martian invasion confessed later:”The contents of the broadcast were inherently unbelievable -...-[yet] CBS had never lied to me before”406. None of the several regulatory agencies ever took any steps; police didn't arrest anybody; no lawsuit was adjudicated. Welles and his confederates followed the trajectory of so many hoaxers on good terms with the system 407: they basked in their glory, which begs the question whether it all was another experiment in mind control Bernays style.
Confederate Houseman did, in fact, use his 'expertise' to serve the U.S government in radio operations during WWII. Jewish-American Confederate Koch enjoyed Hollywood fame (for example Casablanca), yet he ended up on a black list during the red scare after WWII: synchronicity, indeed.
In hoaxes, trickster motifs appear: e.g., deception, comedy, and a loss of status by victims. There is often a general air of disreputability and unsavoriness surrounding them. Those fooled are seen as gullible, the perpetrators as untrustworthy. Even skeptics who investigate come to bear a bit of the taint, as their colleagues tend to see their efforts spent on rather inconsequential matters. (Hansen 2001:180). 406 Franz no date: lecture 4. 407 Welles had lambasted Fascist regimes in his plays.
382
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
In spite of being labeled a clumsy, happenstance lark, the experiment was fated to enjoy long-lasting reputation. Jewish-American director and screenwriter Polonsky was blacklisted during the red scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, yet:
In 1953, CBS television sought to adapt a hit radio program that recreated historical events from around the world as if they were breaking news stories. They enlisted a young Walter Cronkite to star as the “news anchor” of each program. Unknown to Cronkite and CBS officials at the time, the producer Charles Russell and director Sidney Lumet secretly employed three blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters—Walter Bernstein, Abraham Polonsky, and Arnold Manoff—to write the teleplays. These writers relied on impostors to deliver their scripts to CBS and to pretend to be the writers in meetings with the station managers. The writers found the format presented a huge opportunity. “History,” Polonsky later recalled, could “serve us well.” He continued,taking and we happily … took them.…“We had no need to invent conflicts to serve our purposes. They were there for the taking and we happily … took them.… (Monoson no date:31-2). In any event of false claims being laid to solicit the public in the name of any 'good cause', the opportunity to parade one's being on the right side of the myth shall be praised even if a blatant lie occasioned it, and more so. Truth, consistency, verisimilitude and even statistical probability are not necessary ingredients when a story's success with the public is to be measured.
Even in the ancient world, incredulity could at times be equated with ignorance because literary deception -or any deception, whose motives were noble according to the moment, society and circumstances- was staged for the reader's 383
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
own ultimate good:
Whereas the lie in words is in certain cases useful and not hateful; in dealing with enemies—that would be an instance; or again, when those whom we call our friends in a fit of madness or illusion are going to do some harm, then it is useful and is a sort of medicine or preventive -...-. How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke—just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city? What sort of lie? he said. Nothing new, I replied; only an old Phoenician tale of what has often occurred before now in other places (as the poets say, and have made the world believe), though not in our time, and I do not know whether such an event could ever happen again, or could now even be made probable, if it did.(Plato, Republic:1035, 1067.). If then, Socrates, amid the many opinions about the gods and the generation of the universe, we are not able to give notions which are altogether and in every respect exact and consistent with one another, do not be surprised. Enough, if we adduce probabilities as likely as any others; for we must remember that I who am the speaker, and you who are the judges, are only mortal men, and we ought to accept the tale which is probable and enquire no further. (Plato, Timaeus: 909). The invention of arguments by probability has always been associated with the rise of rhetoric itself as an art. -...- It appeals to a general common sense warrant, in this case that according to everyday experience no action will be reasonably attempted without the prerequisite means. -...- Yet in practice it appears that the truly predominant field of employment of eikós-arguments was judicial oratory, only to a lesser extent political oratory. Moreover, even within judicial oratory, their favourite domain appears to be argumentations that concern what later rhetorical theory would call the conjectural status, i.e. the issue whether or not a certain crime was in fact committed by the defendant. -...- In such cases, naturally the initial dissensus between the two opposing parties is complete and fundamental. There can be no way of meeting half-way. The objective of each party must therefore be to gain as much common ground as possible with the judge or jury, and to prevent the other party from doing so -...-. They basically appeal to ideas of common sense. But common sense makes common ground. -...- As we have seen, early 384
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Greek eikós-arguments are not based on the idea of likeness to truth, nor do they operate by any notion of statistical probability. Instead, they make their claim acceptable to the audience by pointing out a certain coherence and congruence of the speaker’s own narrative with the audience’s pre-established set of convictions (Kraus 2007:1-11, emphasis added). So many centuries later, and so far away from the Graeco-Roman world, Japanese intellectual lady Murasaki (X-XI century CE) opined that:
To dismiss all these types of fiction as so much falsehood is surely to miss the point. For even in the Law that the Buddha in his great mercy bequeathed to us there are parts known as Accommodated Truths (Expedient Means). As a result we find certain seeming inconsistencies, especially in the Vaipulya sutra,which no doubt give rise to doubts in the minds of the unenlightened. Yet in the last analysis these Accommodated Truths tend to the same aim as all the rest of the sutras. (Morris, cit. in The Vocabulary Of...no date: 202). Quite surprisingly -as he comes from an engaged Christian milieu- Kramer indignantly reiterates persuaders ought to never lie (cook their facts/sources etc) 408, yet he elsewhere409 explains how persuaders should take into decisive account a myriad of variables that define their audience.
Of course, how many edges is opportune to clip -and to which extentbefore it all starts getting inappropriate is left to individual readers to determine. At the dawn of civilization, the Rig Veda ( XV century BCE or older) explained:
It is falsehood only on the surface of its being, in the depth it is the luminous Truth hidden by the darkness; therefore falsehood can act on the basis of truth only. (Yatsenko on the Rig Veda, MAISI017 no 408 No date:The Christian And Ethics. 409 No date: Tools In Speech Making.
385
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
date: unit 3:6). The clannish atmosphere is apparent. There invariably shall be a valiant artificial kin member resorting to heart-warming fallacies, and skilled in wielding reassuring double standards in the defense of the stupendous covenant: best of all causes oblige.
In that case, an attitude prevails that matches the condescending wonder typically displayed when small children tell little lies, or spin some fantastic yarn about Santa Claus, Superman or Donald Duck. It would be perceived as highly insensitive -not to mention perfectly irrelevant- if a grown-up tackled, dissected and exposed a child's lie about having flown the night before aboard Flash Gordon's rocket to a distant planet warring pink elephants inhabited. In that case, the loving, condescending adult who behaves appropriately shall play along and ask the child how fast was Flash Gordon's rocket going, for example.
As existentialists noted ( for example Heidegger), people are busy making stories, weaving webs around and lining the otherwise thin “self� with narratives they believe -or hope- to be at least passably coherent while schizogenic anxiety (nausea for Sartre) propels a perpetual dialogue with the obtuse allegories and petrified myth(ologie)s this writing discusses at least in part, which people are alternatively busy diving in, running from, consecrating or desecrating.
The pendulum frantically oscillates between neurotic extremes: the 'kind 386
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
of person' people (do not) want to be:
When man gathers together all that he is, there remains behind a pile of all that he is not. This latter category, what man is not, is left to the monsters. This is perhaps the most important cultural role that monsters fulfill. By providing an image of man's opposite, they allow man to better define himself. To put it simply, a person can assure himself that he is a human by listing how he is not a monster. -...-Men are rational and monsters are not. (Kovatch 2008:5,8). I argued elsewhere that in a world where wild men and monsters exist, there is no conceptual space for race (Seth 2010:185). When it comes time for the subject to justify his behavior, the left brain passes from professed ignorance into unknowing dishonesty. One example: the command walk is sent to a man’s right brain, and he complies. When asked where he’s going, his left brain, not privy to the real reason, comes up with another one: he’s going to get a soda, he says, convinced. Another example: a nude image is flashed to the right brain of a woman, who then lets loose an embarrassed laugh. Asked what’s so funny, she gives an answer that’s less racy than the truth.Michael Gazzaniga, who conducted some of the split-brain experiments, has said that language is merely the “press agent” for other parts of the mind; it justifies whatever acts they induce, convincing the world that the actor is a reasonable, rational, upstanding person. It may be that the realm of consciousness itself is in large partsuch a press agent — the place where our unconsciously written press releases are infused with the conviction that gives them force. Consciousness cloaks the cold and self-serving logic of the genes in a variety of innocent guises. The Darwinian anthropologist Jerome Barkow has written, “It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker).”.One could go further and suggest that the folk psychology itself is built into our genes. In other words, not only is the feeling that we are “consciously” in control of our behavior an illusion (as is suggested by other neurological experiments as well); it is a purposeful illusion, designed by natural selection to lend conviction to our claims. (Wright 1994:189-90). Details are of situational concern. Are people busy evading (the concept 387
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
of ) death as Heidegger would have it410? Are people an “agglomérat de solitudes sans illusions” (a jumble of disillusioned solitudes) as Debord would have it? Or aren't they rather chasing the elusive “ motive of adornment -...- under the guidance of the law of expensiveness” as Veblen would have it? Situational concerns.
Any exaggeration, inaccuracy, or any possible benefits third parties may reap as a consequence of mafioso or clannish opinion-leading shall be seen through the good cause's prism, such as tales spun to dissuade children from harming themselves. The lying hoaxer shall be left alone with his conscience (bank account, war declaration or any other undue advantage s-he secured etc) supporting the burden of the haunting image of the public s-he so basely duped and its swollen eyes after so much crying, sore feet after so much marching, thinner wallet after taxes, contributions etc.
The same applies to apolitical circumstances. When this or that celebrity the public came to associate with a given brand through extensive ad campaigns is caught -accidentally or maliciously-
using a different brand, the public feels
betrayed, although the media had previously relayed how that name brand was negotiating with several different possible testimonials: everybody knows it's 'just an ad'. Actress Miley Cyrus almost lost her contract after posing for bawdy pictures that countered her affable, family-oriented Disney channel persona Hannah 410 “For even Herakles died; everyone dies. These images acknowledge that in memory it is the quality of life and death that survives and is worthy of commemoration and remembrance.” (Koortbojian 1995:39).
388
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Montana.
If an individual celebrity may be associated with a brand, individual celebrities may also become a brand in themselves. M.L. King, Berlusconi and J.F. Kennedy became household names for a set of values they championed on air (in print, on screen...) in spite of not scoring very high in terms -to name one- of personal integrity, whether sexual or otherwise.
People become brands just like another canned food product or aftershave lotion:”Virality is most valuable when the brand or product benefit is
integral to the story. When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it.”. It is therefore normal that human mind's schizophrenic quirks tend to associate individuals with abstract qualities that are thus personified.
Ingredients may be junk laced with noxious chemicals, yet it's unfathomable to suggest one's local supermarket or theater hall not carry the most popular soda brands; or that new snack who has Hollywood faces swear it's “grandma quality”. In the same way, spirituality shamans, political hacks and wellintentioned frauds all point to J.F.K, M.L. King etc irrespective of the fact M.L. King may -or may not- have “fucked for god”. After all, the top-shelf soda brand contains as much junk as the discount brand selling for half the price: at least one may look trendy and posh sipping it in public, or the boon of social currency. 389
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Mature individuals surmise that 1920s grannies in a basement are not those who cook that canned food according to secret recipes, and that this aftershave lotion most likely won't turn wimps into machos, yet the ad storyline is so inspiring...
There may be more to the shepherd/sheep allegory that haunts metaphors of religion and government than the remote heritage of herding IndoEuropean tribes at the dawn of time:
And thus he grew stronger and stronger, collecting and driving back to man all the herds of knowledge which were stolen from him over the ages by those who confine it and hide in the cave of Darkness. Recovered by Agni [=mystic fire] this knowledge cannot be stolen again (for it becomes selfconscious, as it were). (Yatsenko, MAISI003: no date: lecture note 3:29). Meineck411 mentions how ancient Greeks “performed something called the comedy of innocence”412 before sacrificing animals to signify the animal agreed to be slaughtered, so that humans could get the meat, and the gods their part, too. This strategy goes back to paleolithic times and began with honoring dead animals killed for sustenance in the 'covenant' that they would thus be back according to the greater cycles of nature to be killed again. Possibly the neolithic ancestor of karma theories, such covenants with animals required token sacrifices on the part of man:
411 2005: Religion And Society. 412 What existentialist Sartre terms “bad faith”, or claiming one couldn't possibly have acted otherwise. Of course, Sartre ought to have heeded his own witty advice as he obliquely campaigned for -and excused- left-wing regimes: the immoral and the obscene do not exclusively apply to Fascist regimes and their cronies.
390
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5 The first important voice in our culture against sacrificing animals was that of Zarathusthra, who saw this as an act of barbarism. In any real sense of the sacrifice, you must sacrifice some aspect of yourself, and, if it becomes concretized in an animal, then, instead of sacrificing your own animal nature, you sacrifice an animal. (Campbell&Boa 1989:86).
As the fatal blow had just been blown, attending Athenian women uttered a ritual scream or ololyge: the scream mytheme, what a favorite. Celts screamed to the top of their lungs in order to scare enemies on the battlefield. Characters in so-called slasher movies scream all the time. Iacchus (Iacchos) was a demi-god in Demeter's retinue ( a sort of Dionysus doppelgaenger)
who presided
over the ritual scream in the Eleusinian mysteries. On the island of Sumba (Indonesia) folkloric rites include ritual lance battles that may end with the occasional killing, which the crowd salutes with a howl.
Campbell413 relates how paleolithic paintings from Africa (15.000 BCE) present a woman uttering a scream as a man is killing an ostrich, much as in recent decades Pygmies on the service of White explorers would do to propitiate a hunt.
They414 would draw a gazelle on the soil, then hit her with an arrow on the neck at dawn: the sun had symbolically killed the animal, just as the lion (a solar symbol) bites his prey at the neck. Once the real gazelle had been killed, Pygmies would fetch the animal's blood and hair to the drawing, which was then to be destroyed. Man -Campbell quips- is therefore not a self-serving murderer, but the 413 1972-1. 414 Campbell 1972-2:Man&Myth Through The Ages I.
391
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
proxy for unavoidable cosmic cycles. Hunting-gathering Pygmies have thus lots in common with psychopathic heroes enacting providential blueprints of destiny as they blight their kin.
Maori perform(ed) Haka (posture dances) for both friendly and unfriendly situations:
among the Marind-anim of Dutch South New Guinea -...- until the final night, when a fine young girl, painted, oiled, and ceremonially costumed, is led into the dancing ground and made to lie beneath a platform of very heavy logs. With her, in open view of the festival, the initiates cohabit, one after another; and while the youth chosen to be last is embracing her the supports of the logs above are jerked away and the platform drops, to a prodigious boom of drums. A hideous howl goes up and the dead girl and boy are dragged from the logs, cut up, roasted, and eaten (Campbell 1960:170-1). Campbell415 relates how Pygmies on the service of White explorers in recent decades created paintings to propitiate a hunt, went on a hunt, then brought back hairs of the gazelle they just killed, which they made a part of the pre-existing propitiatory painting, which was at sunrise to disappear. Pygmies thus intended their life not as emanation of whimsical human agency, but as projection of an higher cosmic order. Contemporary cultures do so not in terms of a gazelle's hair, but in terms of '...isms' of one sort or another, imagined community flapdoodle, etc.
Of course, modern readers are not interested in animal sacrifices that belong to obscure, archaic cultures. In the greater scheme of politics, however, it 415 1972-1.
392
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
might be the mass grave(s) invariably discovered to damn this or that regime, about which 'the good guys' knew nothing up to that fateful moment. It might also be Luke Skywalker, young Jason or other cinematographic heroes who scream.
Altering the teleplay (wrong dramaturgical act, social impropriety or whichever other term might be used) is perceived as the vilest act of barbarism; as the 'proof' of unspeakable allegiances or connections that threaten the entire community with 'impurity', and must be uprooted:
The whole repertoire of ideas concerning pollution and purification are used to mark the gravity of the event and the power of ritual to remake a man – this is straightforward. -...-Pollution can be committed intentionally, but intention is irrelevant to its effect -...-. Pollution rules, by contrast with moral rules are unequivocal. They do not depend on intention or a nice balancing of rights and duties. -...-However, as we look more closely as the relation between pollution and moral attitudes we shall discern something very like attempts to buttress a simplified moral code in this way. (Douglas 1966:97,114,131 emphasis added). Langloh Parker wrote in 1905 about the Australian aboriginal Euahlayi tribe, its rites of passage, and what happened to those who did not conform:
With the Boorah spirits whistling and whizzing all round them, spears were pointed at them. Their skins were scratched with stone knives and mussel shells. Hideously painted, fiendish-looking creatures suddenly rushed upon them. Should they show fear and quail at the Little Boorah they would be returned to their mothers as cowards unfit for initiation, and sooner or later sympathetic magic would do its work, a poison-stick or bone would end them. Or if one of the initiates was considered stupid and generally incapable, having been brought to the Boorah for that purpose, he was now, after having been made to suffer all sorts of indignities, such as eating filth and so on, 393
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
bound to the earth, strapped down, killed, and his body burnt. When the trials were over and the old wirreenuns said to the boys who had not quailed, 'You are brave; you shall be boorahbayyi first and afterwards yelgidyi, and carry the marks that all may know.' Then they made on the shoulder of each boy a round hole with a pointed stone; this hole they licked to feel no splinter of stone remained, then filled it with powdered charcoal. After this, leaving the boys there, the men went back to the Bunbul ring. The bodies of the Boorah victims were cooked. Each man who had been to five Boorahs ate a piece of this flesh, no others were allowed even to see this done. Then the bones and what was left of the bodies were put into the middle of the fire, and all traces of the victims so destroyed. (no page, emphasis added). Of course, today's civilized man would never resort to such icky, tacky, gratuitous brutalities: white collar lawfare, 'intelligent' incendiary bombs, ecologically friendly killing fields, sanitary gas chambers and well-ordered concentration camps might do; the ultimate depersonalization (=situational factors) of treatment allegedly reflects moral maturity that shuns revenge in favor of more or less clinical, industrial disposal/retribution.
One humorous way to ponder the inoculation of conformity -and what happens to those who don't go along- is through De Amicis' 1886 book Cuore. For decades compulsory reading in Italian schools, it enjoyed considerable success abroad in translation as well. Presented (implausibly) as the diary of an elementary schoolchild, it constitutes a jumble of Victorian motifs: patriotism, progress, fantasies of interclass healing; social oneness based on sentimental socialism, and a fair dose of social fatalism and paternalism. Some criticized the book because of the absence of an explicit religious angle, yet a landslide of sentimentalism supplies a 394
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
handy surrogate. It is also likely the absence of a well-identified religious angle contributed to the book's cross-cultural success.
In the book, school child Franti (with his “bold” and “ugly” face) is the perturber of order, unity and oneness. Even in Buddhism, perturbing the group's oneness (introducing divisions) is a quintessential sin:
1. While the class saluted the flag, “Franti laughed in the face of a soldier who was limping.” (p.31). 2. “I detest Franti. He is a coward- When the father of a boy comes to the school to reprove his son, he rejoices over it; when one cries, he laughs.” (p.65). 3. “He was suspended from school for three days, but he returned more insolent and wicked than he was before. Derossi said to him one day: "Do stop that ! do you not see how the teacher suffers ?" And he threatened to stick a nail into Derossi's stomach.” (p.66). 4. “they say Franti will not trouble us any more, as they are going to put him in the reform school.” (p.96)416. Beyond the tasteless figure of a petty problem child, Franti is the archoutcast who deserves all the worst for defiling the pack's oneness. Devadatta (Gautama Buddha's cousin), Satan, Set, Ahriman...most religions identify an archconfounder of truth and harmony.
Popular culture is never far behind. Dano-Norwegian author Sandernose in his 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks offers the fictional utopian city of
416 De Amicis 1918.
395
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Jante with its ten rules 417 favoring oneness against individualism. In the 1920-40s paternalistic statism ( Mussolini, Vargas, Hitler, Roosevelt, Salazar...) was all the rage in regional interpretations418.
Points of contact are ubiquitous: Henry Ford (the only American apparently mentioned in Mein Kampf) in 1938 receives the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle on his 75th birthday, the highest honor for a foreigner: Hitler apparently admired both Ford and his innovative entrepreneurial style.
Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, especially in its earliest phase, resurrected much of the war welfare state. The New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps, which assembled unemployed youths in army recruiting centers and put them to work under military supervision, was a peacetime version of World War I army camps, complete with uniforms, tents, and military bugle calls. -...-Like the war welfare state, the New Deal used intellectuals to formulate and carry out its policies, and like their predecessors during the First World War, the New Deal intelligentsia regarded the crisis of the Great Depression as an opportunity to test their ideas and turn them into government programs. New Dealers tinkered constantly, changing or abandoning programs, building one organization on 417 You're not to think you are anything special. 1. You're not to think you are as good as us. 2. You're not to think you are smarter than us. 3. You're not to convince yourself that you are better than us. 4. You're not to think you know more than us. 5. You're not to think you are better than us. 6. You're not to think you are good at anything. 7. You're not to laugh at us. 8. You're not to think anyone cares about you. 9. You're not to think you can teach us anything. 418 According to Romanian Fascist leader Codreanu, Fascist regimes were associated with slightly different priorities: mysticism and religiosity (Romania and -the present writer adds- Belgium), statolatry (Italy), blood laws (Germany).
396
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
top of another, acting much as the Wilson administration had acted in the early, indecisive state of mobilization. The people who operated Roosevelt's programs, like the wartime Wilsonians, mixed incentives with compulsion—hedging farmers and businessmen about with restrictive laws and bureaucratic regulations -...-.Still, the centrally managed society of World War I both presaged and contributed to the rise of federal power in the 1930s. And it also foreshadowed much of what happened in the decades after the New Deal as the United States entered a long era, as Wilson had foreseen, of warfare and continuous preparation for war. (Schaffer 1991:214-5,217). This historical dissertation investigates the international proliferation of Fordism in politically illiberal settings during the 1920s and 1930s. Based on American, German, and Soviet primary sources, it is the first archive‐based study of this process. The dissertation’s main finding is that the implementation of Ford’sideas and practices was a key component of illiberal modernization drives – that is, projects of state‐led economic growth which explicitly fashioned themselves as alternatives to Western liberal capitalism. This point of view is a departure from previous accounts of the global success of Fordism, which subsume the story under the spread of American market capitalism or portray it as a process of quasi‐selfexplanatory technology transfer. It is also distinct from the well‐known approach in history and the social sciences that describes Fordism as a specifically capitalist production regime (in distinction to a later post‐Fordism). -...[Here we] reconstruct the Nazi and Soviet motorization effort in the wake of Ford’s model, and examine the transfer of Ford’s mass production techniques to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The empirical results show that motorization and productive efficiency, both associated with Ford’s innovations, became hallmarks of illiberal modernization efforts in these countries. (Link no date 12). Equally, such arch-villain is often the doppelgaenger of the righteous counterpart: Set and Osiris, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman are brothers much as Jesus and Satan are in the apocryphal tradition; Buddha and Devadatta are cousins. The same old, hardly original plot device of ancient myths: ills or epidemics befall 397
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
transgressors.
Long before Semitic messianism,
the mystery religions of the Near
Orient had their crucified419 savior: Orpheus. To examine just this example, the divine musician (invariably son of a Muse and either Apollo or some other deity) was at the center of a mystery religion that had its own Orphic Bible420 containing many precepts modern readers may be familiar with, such as the prohibition to lie, the precept of 'doing unto others...' etc. Although a son of two deities, Orpheus was human; myths are vague or silent about why it should be so, but the present writer identifies the motif of the savior descending to his flock's level in order to offer himself up for sacrifice, thus bringing salvation.
One day the sulking politician goes through his political calvary tendering his resignation (=political death); another day he seeks re-election (=political resurrection). Then French President Mitterrand revealed he was ill with terminal cancer as a major popular vote approached to possibly sway voters: that's how useful the motif is. Announcing he would not run as Prime Minister candidate, Berlusconi claimed in October 2012 he was making “una scelta d'amore” (a choice based upon love), much as any of the countless savior-heroes could have said.
A choice Berlusconi promptly reversed some time later claiming he 419 According to Joseph Campbell, the swastika “represents the four points of the compass, the cross of the Earth in movement” (1989: episode And We Washed Our Weapons In The Sea), discussing Mesopotamian pottery. 420 It is highly interesting how in July 2011 a search on Google Scholar returned only nine results regarding “orphic bible”.
398
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
could not bear standing back as he was made aware of the country's dire situation, whose extent had been previously kept hidden from him (=Socratic dilemma). In hiding in the shrinking pockets of 'red' guerrilla in Cambodia, where he'd die in 1998, former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot also claimed the barbarous genocide his regime (1975-9) perpetrated had been committed unbeknownst to him.
Savior-heroes also typically are either a dynastic product (=sons of gods; sons of David etc), the patriarchs of new dynasties, or both. Unconfirmed reports had in 2012 suggested Berlusconi's daughter might possibly replace him as leader of party PDL421 in a time of crisis. Berlusconi (re)introduced the possibility in mid2013. Such cases in Italy abound. The Letta family represents both left and rightwing interests as members lead both PDL and PD. In the 1970s, the opposite ends of the political spectrum (left-wing Partito Comunista and right-wing Democrazia
Cristiana) were led by two Sardinian cousins: Cossiga (at some point Head of State), and Berlinguer. In Shia Islam, the schism arose because some devotees granted a preeminent leadership role to Mohamed's physical descendents.
The Sarkozy and Bush families may represent other abodes of dynastic power:
Roman emperorship was officially non-dynastic, and Roman law did not allow political offices to be hereditary. Still, in practice heirs to the throne were frequently close male relatives. Indeed, ancestry was 421 The successor of Forza Italia.
399
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
occasionally forged to make dynastic claims by usurpers, and there is no example of a son of an emperor who survived and did not himself become ruler of Rome -...-. Dynastic succession did more to safeguard an emperor against usurpation than any other type of succession. Sometimes, rulers even claimed divine descent to legitimate their position (Emperors And Ancestors no date:2). The problem here lies not so much with the worn-out contention about 'whether Jesus is just Horus' (Mithras, Osiris, Apollo...) so dear to campaigning atheists, homo- and xenophiles 'progressives' and their ilk. Certainly it is not the case that -to name one- Samson and Hercules are 'the same person', as if one could have recorded the fingerprints of those two individuals to realize they were actually the same.
Again, Starcrash (1978) is not Star Wars; nor it is Barbarella, The Black
Hole, The People That Time Forgot or any other movie parts of which are mimicked: it is a conflation of all the above. It would be unwise to argue that The
Bionic Woman is not a variation upon The Six Million Dollar Man; or The Next Karate Kid a variation upon Karate Kid only because women play the main role instead of men: the gist, however, steals the day.
As it is the case with King Arthur, William Tell, Jacques Nu-Pieds, Ned Ludd, Robin Hood, and a host of such characters, the best one might say is that possibly -though not certainly- some character might have historically existed, whom the legend grew around over time.
400
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
This character might have be an individual, or -as argued about Robin Hood, William Tell, Jacques Nu-Pieds etc- the more or less congruent conflation of several unrelated folklorized historical reminiscences. The projection of collective leadership related to a constellation of unrelated popular uprisings coalesced under the names of Ned Ludd (Britain, XVIII/XIX century) or Jacques Nu-Pieds ( France, XIV century).
This kind of folkloric euhemerism recurs endlessly: miracles, superhuman feats and supernatural wonders have been associated with such recent historical figures as John Paul II, Gandhi, Sathya Sai Baba, various Tibetan lamas born after WWII, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung (Korean Communist leaders)...
The theological clash between a gnostic/Pauline Christianity, which seems to allude to Christ (=anointed one) as to a sort of spiritual principle 422, and conventional Christianity, which sees Jesus as an ordinary godly savior (Krishna or Buddha-style) who descended among men to bring deliverance unfolds precisely across the spectrum of euhemerism.
The problem lies with image banks -in turn recurring the world over since time immemorial- that never cease to pay dividends no matter the context, and the detail that may differ as the stories of Ulysses, Rambo and Ringo (seemingly) differ. 422 For example:�Now if he were on earth, he would not even be a priest, because other men offer the gifts prescribed by the Law. � (Hebrews 8:4).
401
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
The ad guy and the PR gal next door are as likely to stir these stale images to get the public into conniptions as the next politicking group, filmmaker strapped for cash, or lone heckler on a mission are.
Italian singer&songwriter Claudio Chieffo's (1945-2007) career spanned four decades; his songs were a favorite of Demo-Christian youth rallies, and of Christian sub-culture to this day. He sung soppy songs about people screaming in the night; about fatherly embraces upon homecoming; about slaughter; about meek hearts who only want to love you, etc: myths never cease paying dividends.
The 'death and ordeal' shtick works as well to groom possible religious saviors as it does political or entertainment heroes. An Officer And A Gentleman (1982), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Braveheart (1995), The Passion Of The Christ 423 (2004), and hundreds of other mass products, capitalize on the same narrow situations and characters belabored to death in all possible twists and variations, then some more: people 'love that story'.
Chick flicks, actioners and westerns look increasingly alike irrespective of who plays the 'bad guy'. Formula films sell irrespective of who exactly goes in video in the overt sexuality, strong language or car chase segment: people just love 423 In a 2004 interview, Prothero explains how -in spite of claiming otherwise- the movie is not principally based upon the gospels, but on the supposed visions of German mystic nun and stigmatic A.C. Emmerich (1774-1824) beatified in 2004:”devout fiction” and “well-intentioned fraud” are definitions of the movie in the interview footage. While the gospels mentions the crucifixion ( John 19:17ss; Matthew 27:33ss;Mark 15:22ss;Luke 23:33ss), they supply very few details about the actual scourging and crucifixion: hardly enough to supply a script for Gibson's long and bloody snuff movie.
402
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
that stuff:
The body count in prime-time television these days rivals that of a war zone. -...-During the last week of September [2005], there were 63 dead bodies visible during prime time on the six broadcast networks. That's up sharply from the 27 bodies counted during the same week in 2004. (Associated Press, 21 November 2005). To the top-shelf product of international and cross-cultural renown, readers shall add copycat products targeting local or niche markets, such as Indian B-ollywood and T-ollywood industries. If Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood vigilante movies were famous internationally, Italy had an equally charismatic Maurizio Merli playing the same parts in the 1970s. Sicilian comedy duo
Franco&Ciccio delighted the Italian masses in the 1960-70s with their specialty: clumsy parodies of international blockbusters: kung-fu movies; mafioso or spy movies; horror, peplum or James Bond movies...
If the international mainstream had the Karate Kid movies, Italy had Il
Ragazzo Dal Kimono D'Oro (1987ss) recycling much of the same storyline, complete with the hero's journey -to the Philippines in Il Ragazzo Dal Kimono D'Oro; to Seattle in No Retreat No Surrender424; to California in Karate Kid...-. Trials and tribulations are bestowed upon the future hero (an uprooted teenager) by an illassorted bunch of juvenile delinquents, thugs and mafiosi. 424 The movie is possibly never actually filmed in Seattle. Jason's father in the footage works as a bartender at Brandelli's Brig, supposedly in Seattle. Brandelli's Brig, however, was owned by the Brandelli family (Brandelli being a boxer famous in the 1930s) until 1997: it was located in Venice, Los Angeles. T he item of the hero's journey is too good to pass, however. All the rest is a detail nobody really pays attention to.
403
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Is this confined to fiction? In her advice directed to those wanting to produce “stronger and more dramatic nonfiction films�, filmmaker Bernard suggests:
Weather, illness, war, self-doubt, inexperience, hubris—all of these can pose obstacles as your protagonist strives to achieve his or her goal. And just as it can be useful to find an individual (or individuals) through whom to tell a complex story, it can be useful to personify the opposition. Television viewers in the 1960s, for example, at times seemed better able to understand the injustices of southern segregation when reporters focused on the actions of individuals like Birmingham (Alabama) Police Chief Bull Connor, who turned police dogs and fire hoses on young African Americans as they engaged in peaceful protest. (2007:26). The same dynamic is at work considering how each religion borrowed heavily into the time's intellectual climate, thus ending up in the presentation of much the same imagery, which works because it provokes human mind's schizophrenic (=a behavioral, not clinical statement here) cravings and circular propensities.
Punching holes in the Jesus myth, patriotic extravaganzas and lefty charades is of no notable consequence until human mind's innermost psychotic (=a behavioral, not clinical statement here) tendencies are properly understood as root of all that provokes, unleashes or tantalizes the same.
The very contention of the historicity of this, that or another savior-hero among many loses thus most of its importance. In a trivial example, so many people online get into all sorts of extortionate claims about their income, looks,
404
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE connections,
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5 sex appeal, status and property. Incidentally, this addictive-
compulsive recourse to extortionate claims is often linked to psychopathology.
While such charlatans are historical (=real) figures (=there is someone typing those claims somewhere in the world), it does in no way necessarily follow that the claims -individually or as a whole- are to be taken seriously. All hoaxers this writing mentions were 'real', yet their claims were absolutely groundless.
It is uncomfortably curious how Chris White -and the like-mindedpursue the same line of thought. First, they jokingly remark how 'Christ myth' theories cropped up mostly during the Enlightenment, then claim Jesus ought to have been real, for none disputed his existence until the Enlightenment. By the same token, Osiris, Zeus, Neptune, Ceres, Orpheus etc ought to have been real historical figures because for centuries nobody challenged their existence, and so many scrolls, papyri, statues, temples and inscriptions refer -or were dedicated- to them.
The fact that some person might -or might not- have existed as real historical figure -whether as single individual or as a tradition conflating different historical characters/events a la William Tell- says nothing about the claims to divinity, miracles and supernatural feats upon which a(ny) religion rests.
Alexander and his successors (Ptolemies, Seleucids...) were historical
405
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
figures: should one therefore believe their supernatural claims to divinity their titles (savior, god made manifest...) alluded to? There are so many people at UFO conventions claiming they have seen or experienced things in connection with UFO and paranormal phenomena: is that true, then?
Is this limited to semi-literate groupies at UFO conventions, or unwashed desert fakirs peddling their new religion? What about the case of Katyn? Academic cronyism doesn't seem free from error and bias, either. When it's about beheaded bodies and stolen bullion, they shall keep the official record in order to tell the masses how they are expected to react, with scorn or an emotional meltdown; frothing at the mouth in agony or anger, or smugly punching holes in otherwise inconsistent narratives.
The Soviet academic canon -former gem of progressivism extolled for decades across a section of academia- has almost entirely been discarded as worthless political exercise, with the exceptions of strands of revival in Soviet and Stalinist propaganda in contemporary Russia, and of fallacies and bandwagon appeals in 'progressive' circles: again a political exercise. The Fascist academic canon had been discarded even earlier as worthless exercise in foul political advocacy.
The human mind seems to have an irresistible tendency to stretch whichever issue, fact or event, no matter how trivial, to -at least theoreticallyoverlap with the obtuse allegories, xeroxed myths and petrified images that 406
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
circularly recur in mythologies the world over:
From this it follows that not only is the psyche made of images, but that it proceeds imagistically rather than conceptually. This means reasoning 'by way of myth and metaphor' rather than propositional thinking. Concepts are translations of image, 'coined and negotiable values', whereas 'images are life' (Angelo 1992:73). The circumstances seem changed but the cliche is in one's psyche (Campbell&Toms 1988:vol. 4). This maze of obtuse allegories and petrified mythologies acts as potent treatment to whitewash anything/anybody. It is false to think that the investigation of droll myths sinking into the well of the past is something best left to amblyopic savants or litterateurs in dusty libraries, whose knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew or Sanskrit did not cause them to make it in the affluently mainstream religious, legal, medical or financial professions.
Critics are divided on the 'real' meaning/purpose (thus on the level of effectiveness ) of such literary devices and on the truthfulness and dependability of the same. Let's examine folk tales, for example: Lipson 425 argues that the Grimms' fairy tales were fertile ground for and precursors to NSDAP racism and antisemitism, whereas Fitzgerald426 mentions how such tales were easily absorbed to 425 2001. 426 “ Initially after 1917, fairy tales were banned. However, it became clear after a short time that it was impossible to stamp out fantasy in children and the Russian fairy tales were adapted to further the aims of the Socialist state in subtle ways: the fairy tale, with its positive hero, became a disguised political tale in which the child’s emotional life was linked with political ideas of heroes. Adaptations were not confined to Russia: the tales of Eastern European countries were also adapted so that, for example, Grimms' Tales in East Germany became very different from Grimm’ Tales in West Germany. In other words the familiar framework and format of the fairy tale were used to circumvent distrust and to facilitate identification.“ (Fitzgerald 2006:13).
407
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
serve the USSR's cultural goals. Reuss's 427 doctoral thesis American Folklore And
Left-Wing Politics could be published only posthumously due to the touchy subject. In turn, some argue about the immemorial Indo-European origin of folk tales 428. Some argue in favor of their eminently cross-cultural nature 429, or their universality430 , whereas others431 see folk tales as coded messages to pass on cultural values related to mating habits (in Zipes' examples ) or to “ obedience training and cultural complexity�432.
Of course, much as there is a Muslim tradition related to Jesus, or several so-called apocryphal gospels that mainstream Christians do not make their own, there were different versions of the Orpheus myth; he was said to have taken part in the expedition of the Argonauts, or to have turned to pederasty after his wife's death, for example. The motif of Orpheus crucified was so popular that some contend it was 'borrowed' when Julius Caesar died, and the Roman imperial cult begun.
Some as well argue that the similarities between Jesus' and Caesar's lives are staggering:
According to canonical and apocryphal Christian sources, an immense 427 1971. 428 Folk Tales, 1875; Fitzgerald 2006. 429 Jobling 2001. 430 Roberts 1963. 431 Zipes 2008. 432 Roberts 1963:198.
408
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
cataclysmic event occurred during the Crucifixion of Jesus, including the long darkness from the sixth hour. While theological and spiritual interpretations are easy to devise, and abound in modern literature, today’s scholars have seemingly given up on trying to explain the cataclysm’s true origin and nature, and meanwhile place it in the realm of Christian fantasy. In this article we apply the novel textual critical method of the Gospel as a Julio-Caesarian hypertext. Thereby we are able to substantiate that all incidents and properties found during this catastrophic event in the Christian texts were diegetically transposed from the Roman sources about the death of Julius Caesar. (Eickenberg 2010-11:no page). The supporting argumentation leads from the Roman imperial cult via the Athenian Iobakchoi of the second century A.D. as well as the Roman poets and Cultores Liberi of the Augustan era back to the funeral of Julius Caesar, where his wax effigy, which closely resembled the ‘crucified figure’ in the Orpheos Bakkikos engraving, was affixed to a cruciform tropaeum and shown to the people. On these grounds we establish hypotheses that explain both the application of the Orpheos Bakkikos stone as a crucifixum signum on the apex of the flamen Divi Iulii, which has been preserved on the Papal and Patriarchal headdresses, as well as the origin of the articulated crucifixes, which were handed down from Antiquity and are used during the Holy Week to this day. (Carotta &alii 2009:1). The Orphic mysteries also belong(ed) to the cultic province of Bacchic mysteries, with ties to primeval cults of the Mother Goddess 433 and agricultural fertility, which in turn shared heavily with Egyptian myths. The Orphic variant 'civilized' the Bacchic religion by taming the orgiastic component.
The present writer suggests to extend to this dichotomy the Hegelian categories of drive (irresistible compulsion of physiological undertones needing satisfaction or release=Bacchic) and desire (psychological chase after the elusive 433 For example, the mysteries associated with Demeter, 'the divine mother': 'de' as in the root of Zeus, Dios...; and meter, mother.
409
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
merger of subject and object=Orphic ).
Something similar happens in India with Krishna. As Krishna starts playing his flute (a sort of Pied Piper of Hamelin situation), all women become enraptured, and instantly quit whatever they're doing to join him in a frantic dance along the Yamuna river (=the water motif once again). On his part, Krishna multiplies so that he can dance with each and every of his followers.
While prurient motives have been argued (=an orgy in the forest), Krishna's intentions were chaste; the civilization of Bacchic components (Dionysus was often associated with India) is an ongoing phenomenon. Each follower has thus 'a personal relationship' with Krishna (in some Indian dialect pronounced Krishta434), much as Jesus feeds each and every one of his followers with only five loaves of bread and two fishes (Mark 6:40ss).
In Christianity, the 'personal relationship' item is often thought to be a contribution of XVII century German pietism emphasizing Bible studies and personal religious experience. According to Garland 435, however, from the I century CE, polytheists were increasingly in search of a personal relationship with one of 434 Some contend Krishta means actually Christ, as supposedly given in old Sanskrit lexikons. Uncanny confluences are common:�Fr. T. Stevens, an Oxford educated Jesuit missionary who landed in Goa in 1579, lived there for forty years, mastered the Marathi language. compiled its grammar and wrote in it an epic poem of 11,000 strophes titled Krishta Purana on the life and teachings of Christ. The letters of Stevens to his father in England. which were later published, are believed to have contributed to the growing British interest in India. roused already by legends of Portuguese adventures.� (Eraly 2007:37). Jean Sedlar also suggests the possible interplay between Krishnaism and Christianity. 435 No date.
410
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
the gods of the pagan pantheon (=the Hindu concept of Ishta Devata, personal deity). Aesculapius the divine healer was an ideal candidate, as Garland compares him to Jesus: both divine, compassionate and suffering in the flesh like men.
Aurobindo explains the appeal of “chosen deities” or “personal saviors” (=the Hindu and Christian rendition of the same concept) exert:
Impersonal integral works are the first indispensable means; but a deep and large adoration, to which a relationless Unmanifest, an aloof and immovable Brahman can return no answer, since these things ask for a relation and an intimate personal closeness (in MAISI015 no date:lecture1:2). Hale436 establishes a relationship between the rise of Christianity, Paul and mystery religions: one of the hotbeds of Mithraism 437 was in fact Tarsus, Saul's home town. Hale also discusses the edge revealed religions (mystery cults, Christianity...) had at Rome against established Graeco-Roman paganism:”chilly, uninvolving, depersonalized”. 436 2009:Taking Religions Underground At Rome. 437 Mithraism also involved baptism; sacred meals; seven degrees of initiation by ordeal associated with the seven planets; eternal salvation; the redeeming power of blood and sacrifice; the belligerent attitude of soldiering on for the good against evil, hence popularity among Roman soldiers. The concept of soldiering on recurs in both Christianity (“Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. ” Ephesians 6:11); and Tibetan Buddhism (Tsonhgkhapa writes about”armor-like joyful perseverance”). Mithraea (sanctuaries of Mithras) were either natural or artificial caves, a possible symbol of the cosmos. The Mithraic congregation was also led by a hierophant called pater (father). As Christian evangelists are associated with animals (Matthew as a man (humanity); Luke as an ox (toil); Mark as a lion (royalty); John as an eagle (divinity)), so Mithras was associated with the dog (=man's quintessential friend in the Zoroastrian tradition); the snake (=evil to the Zoroastrians), and the scorpion (noxious creature, also associated with Serapis, Isis, Mercury, Artemis; or associated with the Sun as harbinger of good fortune and abundance according to Macrobius; Campbell also associates the eagle of the Evangelist with the scorpion). Regarding the four Evangelists, Campbell quips:”[Evangelists] are representatives, really, of four signs of the zodiac. And these four signs, in the fourth millennium BC, were the signs of spring, midsummer, autumn and winter” (Campbell&Toms 1988: volume 1).
411
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
This image bank is as old as man. Yatsenko comments on the Rig Veda:
O Savitar, amend this mistake and make us sinless here [on earth] among gods and among men. To be sinless (true, direct) among gods and among men simultaneously is the goal of the realization of the Dynamic Truth, Ritam. It means that all things, divine and human, are already in Harmony. For how can one be sinless or true in the context of heavenly and earthly life at the same time? Moreover it seems that there is no truer harmony of things is possible. The heaven and earth have to be ‘equal and one’, as they were at the beginning of Creation in its Supramental Unity. (MAISI017 no date: unit 5:8). Also, revealed religions had a more personal -and personable- side. In revealed religions – Zoroastrianism, mystery religions, Judaism and its many clones...- the almighty of good enlists fickle, frail humans called to soldier on in defense of good against evil (=progressive betterment of a fallen world): piacular rites that invoke a sense of distress as the group -or the individual- reaffirm their persistence and solidarity around totemic values formerly imperiled.
Personalization as a phenomenon recurred circularly:
Young explained that Darwin did not affect such a rupture in the cosmology of Victorian belief as previously supposed. Rather, On the Origin of Species (1859) merely placed God at a greater remove. While God created the universe, henceforth he acted only through secondary causes (e.g., natural selection). Darwin did not kill God; he merely altered his modus operandi. At the same time, as if by way of compensation, Victorian faith became a matter of personal experience. “Knowledge” (or experience) of God was had not by the head but by the heart. (Rechtenwald no date:16, emphasis added). A phenomenon similar to Jesus being removed from the bulk of
412
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
scriptural baggage -and related practices and austerities- in born-again/evangelical Christianity coalesced in earlier ages in Buddhism. Amitabha Buddha (Buddha of immeasurable radiance, whom some connect with pre-existing sun/fire worship 438), and Pure Land Mahayana Buddhism appeared around the II century CE.
Amitabha was a post-card sized, non-judgmental sweet Buddha savior people could have a personal relationship with. He was removed from the bulk of Buddhist scriptural baggage. Devotees could anchor their hope of salvation in Amitabha's saving grace:
Especially in the east if you look at Sufi poetry, the middle east and you come to India and look at the Sufi poetry or you look at bhakti poetry, you will find that there are a lot of references to deeper experiences. This is not even going to the scriptures, the Upanishads or any such classical scripture. This is looking at folk experience. What you hear in the Sufi poetry and bhakti poetry is often a reflection of the people which is captured through the poetry of these special people. In this poetry you will often find references to intoxication, references to bliss and how people have this experience of their deeper identity. (Varma, MAISI032 no date: unit 1:12, emphasis added). a commentary on the Dasabhumika attributed to Nagarjuna, exists in Chinese. Its discussion of how faith in Amitabha Buddha can lead to 438 The Jesus Sutras (VII to XI century) expound a mixture of Nestorian Christian, Confucian, Daoist, Mahayana Buddhist doctrines in Chinese milieus. The Nestorian Stele (781 CE) celebrates the alleged establishment of Christianity all over China under the name of “the luminous religion of the Roman Empire”. Readers may notice the fire/solar connection (=light), which was also present in the Amitabha Buddha religion, and earlier still in the characterization of Gautama Buddha (=”the lion (=solar symbol) of the Shakya clan”) and Jesus (“the lion of Judah” or “the chief corner stone”). Zoroastrian gods also have luminous faces that mortals cannot bear to behold. Gods and Saints the world over – and by extension powerful rulers- were often portrayed with a halo around their heads: the luminous face. The Jewish apocryphal Book Of Enoch (III-I century BCE) also details Enoch's ascension to heaven. With god's favor, Enoch becomes like one of the angels. His face shines so bright he can't behold it. At the dawn of civilization, Hindu Rig Veda (XV century BCE or older) also claims brilliance and luminosity to be attributes of the gods who naturally shine like gold.
413
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Buddhahood, a path of easy practice, has been particularly influential in East Asia. -...-Even a bodhisattva with inferior faculties and without the strength to observe the precepts or meditate can quickly attain a stage of spiritual progress from which he will not backslide by relying upon Amitabha's vows. Consequently, belief in Amitabha was called a path of easy practice (Hirakawa 1990:281,289). Śrī Kŗşņa goes further to explain that those who worship the Unmanifest and those who worship Him, both ultimately attain the same goal. But those who worship Him, as the manifested Avatār choose an easier path; for, the path of the unseen, transcendent and unmanifest Divinity is much harder to pursue (Sarvadekar, MAISI015 no date:lecture 1:3).
The same path of devotion removed from the bulk of scriptures and related practices and austerities had surfaced several centuries before the rise of Mahayana Buddhism: the Gita epitomized it, as Krishna (incarnation of almighty Vishnu) had (supposedly) revealed to Arjuna in a time before time.
Both Luther (the inventor of European Protestantism) and Shinran (XIIXIII century Japanese Buddhist monk) thought faith alone could save man ( sola
scriptura; sola fide; sola gratia; soli Deo gloria; solo Christo ). Both Buddhism and Protestantism may be broadly considered as theologies of personal motives. Shinran -like Luther- broke existing traditions and started a lineage of married, meat-eating Buddhist monks devoted to Amitabha Buddha: the True Pure Land Sect ( Jodo
Shinshu). Shinran's legacy survives in the Monshu, or the founder's lineage still present to this day.
Bodhisattvas are construed in Mahayana Buddhism as enlightened beings with miraculous powers -although not Buddhas yet- who forsake the heavens 414
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
and/or ultimate bliss and extinction out of compassion for all sentient beings.
It won't elude readers how that resembles the various Jesus (not quite a father god but full of love for mankind), Orpheus (mortal unlike his father Apollo, and full of empathy for all), and so forth. Demeter also presided over the growing of agricultural crops (her Latin name was in fact Ceres, from which cereal derives), much as Hindu-animistic goddess of fertility Devi Shree presides over in Bali.
The mother goddess Demeter was said to have ventured in search of her daughter Persephone ( whom Hades had brought to the underworld as a bride). Demeter therefore represented another early rendition of the Saint Mary motif of exemplar motherhood entitled to a divine child who meets with untimely death and later resurrects at Springtime:
This whole disappearance and reappearance of Persephone is the same elementary idea as we have in the death and resurrection of Jesus-dying to your mortality and being resurrected in your eternal character. (Campbell&Boa 1989:100). The egg, a reminiscence of the cosmic egg, is often associated with these fertility and creation cults. Breaking (painted) eggs is popular in the West, but also among Orthodox Christians, Kurdish Yazidi, and Zoroastrians. Eggs and their parts may be useful as divinatory implements: in Hispanic Santeria, China, the Khasi people of India, in the Philippines, Ireland, and in Italy (Brianza and Abruzzo for example).
415
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
In fact, although presumed mystics and their ilk claim to have interacted with Saint Mary at different points in history, the figure they describe looks invariably like the widespread and popular Madonnas of the Renaissance painters – in turn influenced by apocalyptic imagery- that have sunk in the collective unconscious, and not like a I century working-class Hebrew woman.
Kwan Yin439 was born pure and devoted to motherly love and compassion for all, which enraged her noble father. As a result, she had to endure trials and tribulations very similar to the Cinderella story. Kwan Yin barely escaped death as she was spirited away to a remote island in the way of many heroines of Graeco-Roman myth. Furthermore -like Magdalene- Kwan Yin is often depicted with the vial of the dew of compassion; and -like Mary- she is often depicted with an infant.
Following other mythical heroes, she willingly sacrifices her bodily integrity440 to benefit her evil father. Buddhist deity Tara is also similar: she embodies absolute compassion -like the great mother goddess- for all, and is alleged born from the tears (a pool of tears, or one single tear according to versions) of the celestial Buddha Avalokitesvara as he contemplated sentient beings' plight.
Some argue Mary Magdalene anoints Jesus in a procedure that mixes last 439 Another embodiment of the Buddha of compassion Avalokitesvara. 440 The ten perfections of Buddhism are divided into 30 according to the level of practice (ordinary, great and greatest). According to the “great level” ( Upa Parami), one gives away his limbs. In modern times this has been interpreted as endorsement of donations of blood, organs and tissues.
416
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
rites with the anointment of a King, and first recognizes him after the resurrection. It isn't difficult to see in the versatile and supercharged figure of Magdalene 441 with her jar (box, vial etc) of perfume (oil, balm etc ) a variation on the theme of the equally supercharged mythical figure of Pandora and her box (jar etc) 442. More generally, Magdalene's case epitomizes an entire category so dear to the human psyche, or the arch-transgressor who happens to be so much better than oneself. So much better, in fact, that godly savior-heroes willingly associate themselves with him/her, thus ushering in sainthood of one form or another.
Bindumati the courtesan -often just “an old prostitute”- can perform an act of truth (=if so-and-so is true, then let so-and-so happen) that causes the flooding Ganges to recede in the presence of the Emperor Asoka. It turns out nobody else – among the attending commoners, priests and warriors - can answer Asoka's call to perform an act of truth, thus saving the city. The fictional story of the Dutch boy and the dam also reiterates the inner power of the powerless, and so does a commandment under the Italian Fascist regime: la patria si serve anche facendo la
441 Others contend the woman who anoints Jesus and Magdalene are two completely different persons. There is controversy in literature about which character Magdalene really is:”A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. ” (Luke 7:37). 442 The box/jar repository of evil mytheme is quite common. Well before the Greek emerged from the Bronze Age, the Hittite myth -between the XV and XIII century BCE- of god Telepinu, god of fertility, narrates that the god retreats in disgust from mankind (=retreat mytheme), falls asleep (=sleep as death mytheme), is awaken, goes on a murderous rampage (=cosmic rage mytheme), and only later resumes his benign aspect after the gods reconcile with him in a complex ritual that explicitly mentions:”Down in the dark earth there stand bronze cauldrons, their lids are of abaru metal, their handles of iron. Whatever goes in there comes not out again; it perishes therein. Let them also receive Telepinus’s rage, anger, malice, and fury! Let them not come back!’ ” (in Hooke 1963:101-2).
417
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
guardia a un bidone di benzina (standing guard over a barrel of gasoline rightfully means to serve the fatherland).
Furthermore, Bindumati informs a wondering Asoka that her act of truth could turn the heavens upside down, if she so wished. Bindumati -the archtransgressor who's so much better than all those attending warriors, priests and commoners- can be intended to epitomize either upanishadic wisdom (=she performs dutifully as her caste and station in life demand); Buddhist wisdom, as in one variant she's a faithful, whose act of truth consists in recalling the Buddha's perfections; or pudor meretricum: the prostitute (courtesan etc) as exemplum
pudicitiae (epitome of modesty):
el tema de la cortesana arrepentida y disinteresada, es decir, honesta es un motivo de la literatura universal -...-con multiples ejemplos en la literatura de todos los tiempos” (Galan Vioque 1999:175 443). The name Faustulus [Romulus and Remus' foster father] may be an allusion to Faunus, either the mythical king of the Arcadians who emigrated to Italy or the god Faunus, the Roman spirit of the wild who is equated with the Greek god Pan. The name Faunus is also linked to the term “Faustus,” which means lucky. Faustulus’ wife was called Acca Larentia [Romulus and Remus' foster mother], a minor Roman goddess connected with the rites of the dead and the Underworld. In some traditions, she was regarded as a prostitute and was said to have bequeathed her property to the people of Rome. Also, the term “lupa” (wolf) was a common slang term for whore. -...-There was another myth that named her as Fabula, another common name for prostitutes. This tradition related her to the Fabula who was the lover of 443 “The motif of the courtesan who reforms, and is thus reputed honest, is a motif recurring in world literature with many examples coming from across the ages.”.
418
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Hercules, apparently his prize after he won a game of dice. (Meineck 2005-1:38-9). Things may not be so clear cut, however, and the dew of forgiveness might be another hot commodity traded within a system of power where 'the opposite' could chance to apply at any moment:
A primera vista , pudor y meretrix pueden parecer términos antitéticos, opuestos. Sin embargo, hemos visto que hay ocasiones en que no sin ironía las meretrices son retratadas con rasgos positivos y se las considera irónicamente ejemplos de pudor frente al comportamiento sexual depravado de ciertas mujeres , como en el caso de Ovidio y Marcial, pero también hombres, como en el caso de Séneca . Propiamente se trata de un motivo de la literatura misógina por el que se ridiculiza y se trata de refrenar la libertad sexual de la mujer dejando en evidencia una falta de recato o pudor que produce escándaloextnote. De hecho, ello responde, según Longino (1980: 44-45), a una reacción psicológica espontánea por la que, cuando una mujer participa en un acto sexual que un hombre considera pornográfico (recuérdese la raíz griega de esta palabra), se la desprecia comparándola con una prostituta, es decir, con una mujer que recibe dinero por hacer lo que el hombre quiere. (Galan Vioque 1999:181, emphasis added). The scum of the Earth ranks higher on any scale (=the ugly duckling motif) than the law-abiding average schmuck, who is (not so) deep down an hypocrite, a pharisee, a closeted transgressor: a real bore. Even the Mormon Channel adopts the ugly duckling tale to foster values unique to that religion. The story is so pliable and effective that almost any constituency might use it to propel its values.
e xtnote “It is a motif that recurs in misogynous literature in order to ridicule and restrain the sexual liberty of women by pointing out a lack of restraint or modesty that scandalizes. “.
419
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Italian writer De Amicis in the Italian version of his international bestseller Cuore delivers the portrait (Il Piccolo Patriotta Padovano) of a “small patriot” his parents had sold into slavery to traveling acrobats. After years of itinerant ordeal (=the journey mytheme) with the troupe, the child (=the child motif) escapes to come back home (=the nostos/return mytheme) thanks to the Italian consul (=the horde as one shall rescue retainers).
Aboard a ship, he tells his story of torments (=suffering makes us one), so that moved foreigners give him a tidy sum of money he might start his life anew with (=boon mytheme). Yet, later the “small patriot” overhears them deprecating 444 the great nation of Italy, so he indignantly throws the money back in their faces: he wants nothing to do with “chi insulta il mio paese” (whoever insults my country).
An illiterate traveling acrobat (= the last and meek mytheme) acts as vanguard teaching the patriotic gospel. This constitutes a statolatrous theodicy. Much as all the blatant evil, injustice and disaster in the world cannot tarnish the reputation of one Abrahamic god or another, so the Belle Epoque nation-State is intrinsically worthy of veneration and allegiance irrespective of whatever might come to pass to retainers.
Just to set the record straight, De Amicis445 presents another scene in 444 How could an illiterate Italian beggar understand them is a completely different issue. In Cuore, the nasty foreigners speak Italian. 445 1918:171.
420
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
which patriotic communion proves therapeutic indeed. Marco (a fictional character in the book) is traveling alone (=hero's journey) to Argentina (=colonial nowhere) in search of his mother (=search after one's true self): she serves wealthy Argentinians abroad. Upon his arrival, he finds out a distant relative that served as a proxy had died, and his mother had moved to another city (=chain of misfortune) in Argentina.
He's thus penniless, and an acquaintance (=magical helper) takes him to meet a group of Italian emigrants for help:
“[Marco] has not the shadow of a cent. He is here alone and in need. I know him; he is a boy full of heart; let us think a little. Can't we find enough here to pay for his ticket to Cordova so that he can find his mother? Shall we abandon him here like a dog?" "Never in the world !" "That shall never be said !" they cried together, striking their fists on the table. "A countryman of ours!" "Come here, little fellow." "We, too, are emigrants here !" "See what a fine rogue." "Out with your money, comrades !" "Good boy ! He came here alone. He has lots of pluck !" "Have a drink, compatriot !" "We will send you to your mother, never fear." If the patriotic communion is therapeutic, fictive Marco soon finds himself stranded among foreigners; the sweet human soul screams away:
His fatigue was growing and the ill-treatment increased [=passion mytheme]. One morning [Marco] was slow in carrying the water, and in the absence of the leader one of the men beat him. After this example, they began to beat him habitually; when they were giving him an order they would strike him, saying: "Take that, vagabond! Take that to your mother!" [=scourging of the hero] His heart was almost broken. He fell sick and remained for three days [=common mytheme] in the wagon, with a cover over him [=symbolic death] 421
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
-...-. Then he began to recover [=resurrection], owing to the care of the leader [=godly patriarch]. (1918:179). In her travels Demeter had morphed into a bird, and served as a nurse for a child prince she had tried to make immortal by dipping him into fire. The earlier Egyptian goddess Isis had done pretty much the same searching for her deceased husband Osiris. Even odd details match: both Isis -and Demeter many centuries later- sulked near a well. Maidens from the royal house in both cases meet the matron at the well, and invite her to be the young prince's nurse.
Isis had fed the child prince milk through her finger, much as Sikh sage Baba Sri Chand -the eldest son of Sikh founder Guru Nanak- nursed his nephew giving him milk from his big toe. Isis has the divine child in her lap, and so do Night and Dawn, primeval twin goddesses of Hindu Vedas: the gods yearn for that privilege. Isis offering her breast to the divine child survives in such Christian depictions as the Portuguese Nossa Senhora Dos Remedios.
Isis also survives in St. Mary's lore
There was a time in the history of the Church when the expressions in the Book of Canticles ( Canticum Canticorum, the Song of Songs) were applied to the Mother of God, while in Revelation ‘there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’. Mary was seen as Stella Maris, as was Isis; Rose of Sharon (roses were important in Isiac ritual, as Lucius Apuleius makes clear); the Lily among Thorns; the Tower of David (Isis was a Tower, a lighthouse, as Isis-Pharia); the Mountain of Myrrh and the Hill of Frankincense (both significantly Isiac in that they are associated with the rites of the dead, and with 422
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
embalming); the Garden enclosed, the Spring shut up, the Fountain sealed (springs, fountains, and gardens were also Isiac);the Palm-Tree (a significantly Egyptianising motif);-...-. She was Queen of Mercy, Mother of Mankind, our Life, Hope of All, Refuge, Help and Asylum, Propitiatory of the World, Queen of Heaven and of Hell, Dispenser of Graces, City of Refuge, Patroness, Protectress in Death (particularly Egyptian, and reminiscent of the connection between Seth and Isis), Ladder of Paradise, Gate of Heaven, Mediatrix, Omnipotent, Peacemaker, Intercessor, Advocate, Redeemer, and Saviour. (Curl 2005:62-3). At the same time, Christians showed no reservations about borrowing from the pagan world other elements to articulate their own sacred figures.They adapted pagan paint ing styles and techniques, as well as forms and materials. The iconographic motif of the Mother of God holding Jesus Christ in her arms became widesp read in Byzan tium, but it actuallyhad pagan antecedents: the goddess Isis giving virgin birth to Horus, an ancient Egyptian god, and suckling her son at her breast," or the god Hermes holding the infant Dionysus.Even the attributes given to the Mother of God in Christianity have antecedents in Hellenic religion, -...- meaning the one who rears and brings up boys. Christians continued, further, the tradition of deities as protectors of cities by replacing them with patron saints. That the cult of the Mother of God in Constantinople went on to enjoy great popularity and a rich devotional status was no accident: it was really a gradual replacement for the preexisting cult of the pagan goddesses Tyche (Fortuna) and Rhea, who during the fifth century rivaled her worship. Additionally, there exist striking parallels between pagan pastoral deities and Christian saints as shepherd and sheep protectors (Makrides 2009:167). Sacred breastfeeding mothers are ubiquitous: myths can coalesce. In Argentina, people go on pilgrimage to honor difunta Correa (the deceased Correa) who -during the Argentinian civil war- had ventured into the desert in search (=the gnostic search mytheme) of her husband (=true love mytheme) at war, thereby dying of exposure between 1840 and 1850. Miraculously enough, when her corpse was found, her baby was still alive being fed at her breast. Even Graeco-Roman 423
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
goddess Latona had been through an itinerant ordeal as she was first carrying then nursing Jupiter's twin (=twin mytheme) sons Apollo (=Sun) and Diana (=Moon).
Another Egyptian parallel may exist446; as Demeter sulks longing after her lost daughter, a bizarre creature named Baubo (alternatively princess Iambe) exposes her private parts to the goddess in a bawdy dance, which causes Demeter to laugh: an allegory of how intertwined sacred and profane might be. In the
Contendings Of Horus And Seth (1147-1143 BCE), goddess Hathor plays the same trick to lure back her father the god Re (Ra), who was sulking in retreat from the quarrel447. Such parallels abound.
The famous Hebrew Book Of Job -and the quintessential dilemmas it poses- had already been expounded in Mesopotamian writings -such as Ludlul Bel
Nemeqi, the so-called Babylonian Job– about ten centuries older than Hebrew sources; or the Babylonian Theodicy (VIII century BCE). Similar accounts are also present from China in times of upheaval. The Chinese Shi-King (Classic Of Poetry, XI-VII century BCE) recites:
Why was not this time before me, or after me ? The people will be reduced to servitude ; they look to Heaven, but all is dark. But let Heaven will, and none can resist. Does the great God hate any one ? -...-O great Heaven, how hast thou shut up thy love ! Compassionate Heaven, arrayed in terrors ! why revealest thou 446 Morris in Schneider&Szkpakowska 2007:197ss. 447 A similar episode takes place in Oriental myth as Sun goddess Amaterasu sulks in retreat incensed at her brother's behavior. Goddess Uzume then performs the same bawdy dance. Hathor exposing her private parts to her father includes an oedipal element that is very common in myths.
424
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
not thy care ? Leaving criminals aside, who have but paid just penalty, the innocent are involved in the same ruin. Why will he not listen to justice ? Why,O Officers, will ye not respect each other, nor stand in awe of Heaven ? (Cit. in Johnson 1877:543). You are as steadfast as the earth, but the plan of the gods is concealed, seek then the grace of your god ( Babylonian Theodicy, cit. in Goldman 2003:Wisdom Literature). Also, suffering constitutes the ultimate currency: that's why heroes and savior-gods are routinely scourged and gruesomely torn apart; suffering burns bad karma, or brings people closer to god. Mythologized slaughter also heralds new eras.
Currid448 approaches the question of Biblical parallels (=same story in the Bible and in the lore of other civilizations ) thus:
1. It proves “the historicity and truthfulness that such an event has occurred” (for example the flood).
2. The
same
terminology might
be in
place -for example identical
characterization of Canaanite god Baal (=lord), and Hebrew Yahwah (also referred to as “lord”)- yet Biblical accounts are “taunting” polytheists (=polemical theology), for Yahweh is “true”, whereas Baal is not.
3. Parallels between Mesopotamian and Hebrew creation stories exist because the Mesopotamians “bastardized” the reminiscence of “true events”, whereas the Hebrews “preserved” the recollection as “revealed to Moses”. (2013). 448 Professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary.
425
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Joseph Campbell449 discusses one of several incarnation of the mother goddess sitting on a throne, wearing a crown resembling the walls of a city; the same image (several centuries BCE) recurs in the Isis myth: Isis is wearing the throne as a crown, where her beloved child the Pharaoh sits in real life.
At the Chartres cathedral, a Madonna is the throne, and the infant Jesus sits thereupon; Montserrat's Black Virgin also presents the infant Jesus likewise. The mother goddess wearing the city walls as a crown recurred in Roman mythology (magna mater/ Cybele), and is still present these days as the personification of the Italian State (donna turrita, in Roman mythology mater turrita). In Penang (Malaysia), a statue presents Queen Victoria with four great felines.
The obsession with the throne (=State) embracing oneself like a mother would (or the Pharaoh as the good shepherd) is kept alive in all the contemporary
449 (1989:episode And We Washed Our Weapons In The Sea ) discusses the Catal Huyuk Turkish archeological site (about 7.000 BCE) and the presence of 'mother goddess' figures in various postures, even giving birth to bullheaded figures to mean rebirth in a lunar cosmology (the horns of the Moon; the Moon's cyclical rebirth, etc). Vandiver (2000:Culture, Prehistory And The Great Goddess ) broadsides the idea of the existence of mother goddess figures using various arguments, such as that female figurines etc are common but we cannot be really sure what their meaning or use was; that even if all those figures represent deities, we cannot assume it was the same goddess; that the mother goddess is a rather modern invention catering to the needs of disgruntled feminists and others; that the transition towards the reign of male sky gods unfolds in Mesopotamia, too, were no Indo-european invasion took place, etc. Johnston summarizes (2010:61):”Of course, just because there are, say, goddesses, does this mean that women have high social status? Kali, a Hindu deity, is one of the scariest figures I know, and yet the status of women in India is not usually considered high. And there are figures of Mary in many countries where no one would argue that women are in charge, so the correlation isn’t always true. And what if they aren’t religious, but rather toys? Or secular art? Or models to demonstrate childbirth? All of these have been suggested, and they are all possibilities. This doesn’t mean that women didn’t have high status in some ancient societies, but it does mean that we really don’t know.”. It isn't necessary to assume all that much, however, about these primordial cultures. Of course, female figures giving birth to bull-headed figures show that snake god(dess) figurines are not unique, as proponents of the UFO/Alien invasion theories suppose. Naturally, 'bull-headed aliens from planet X' sounds less appealing than snake-headed aliens.
426
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
regimes preaching social alchemy and 'cradle to grave' welfare, or the omnipotent
Belle Epoque nation-State shepherding its flock:
Also we have another mother image which occurs after the rise of cities. Here you see goddesses with a crown on their heads which represents the walls of the city. The walled city is our mother, the mother of our civilization, the mother of our life. So the culture is also our mother. (Campbell&Boa 1989:63). A slightly different iconography associates other countries with mothergoddess figures: Marianne (France) is a personification of the vaguely atheistic beliefs of the Enlightenment. As Marianne appears in 1775 as “liberty” (alternatively “goddess reason” and suchlike), she gains prominence during the radical phase of the French Revolution (1792ss).
The Brazilian Republic (1889ss) also had a mother-goddess (with a radiant triangle as a halo) as embodiment. Britannia (UK) is another Celtic mothergoddess who came to embody the blossoming British Empire, thus gaining prominence when the crowns of Scotland and Britain merged: in a 1858 painting by E. Armitage, a bare-footed, muscled up Britannia grabs a Bengali tiger by the throat while she thrusts her sword in Retribution (the painting's title) against the bloody Indian rebellion of 1857-8. In the Bengali or Indian nationalist movement, the goddess Kali became Mother India raging against White colonizers.
In his journey, the hero requires many talents (Hercules wrestles, uses bow and arrows, plays the lyre; Oedipus' logic defeats the eerie Sphinx, thus halting 427
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
an epidemic; Theseus ends Athens' subjugation to Crete...): the archetypal trickster is also an archetypal bricoleur.
Rambo is irresistible in hand-to-hand combat; when he operates a helicopter, a machine gun or a bow. With a five second upload, heroes in The
Matrix movies master any and all crafts; Robocop as the ultimate terminal-man has no problem locating criminals, whom he forthwith routs...
But instead, what is ordinarily attested in conversion-scenes are responses to demonstrations of superhuman power: perceived as miracles, in turn they were perceived as proofs of genuine divinity attaching to whatever deity was invoked and credited -...-. Perhaps the post-Constantinian authors of the gesta were aware of the imaginative power of the miraculous, and wished to ensure that it was firmly tethered to an acceptable Christian message.(Cooper, no date:30). Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. (Isaiah 35:6). Then he asked them, "Where is your faith?" The disciples were terrified and amazed. "Who is this man?" they asked each other. "When [Jesus] gives a command, even the wind and waves obey him!"(Luke 8:25). Naturally, these talents shall square with the kind of ambiance and tone appropriate to the narrator's goals and “popular morality”, “free-floating folk beliefs”, “explanations or interpretations usually put forth”, “only an old Phoenician tale of what has often occurred before now in other places”, “prevailing cultural
428
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
trends”, “the audience’s pre-established set of convictions”, mos450 and suchlike academics may ceaselessly restyle (“the generalized other” according to Mead in 1934451). Obviously, a candidate to Christian sainthood won't be sung naked as he strangles a lion with his bare hands, or as he beds fifty girls in one night, nor immortalized as a giant brute with a club and an exorbitant, erect penis.
Such images live on in the multifarious knights of medieval inspiration and in their contemporary imitators. The Spartan King Leonidas (V century BCE ) fought the Persians with 300 men as his guard, yet Romulus (VIII century BCE), too, “maintained, in peace as well as in war, a personal armed guard of three hundred men, whom he called Celeres – ‘the Swift’. ”452.
Tarquin [overthrown King of Rome] continued to make trouble, organizing a revolt of the Latin League that was defeated at the battle of Lake Regillus -...-.The date of the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud is traditionally placed as 510 BCE. The very same year that Hippias, the son and successor of the tyrant Pisistratus, was driven from Athens. He later returned with the Persian invasion [ much as Tarquin had summoned the Etruscans] of Darius that was defeated at the battle of Marathon in 490. The date is therefore spurious and seems part of the general tradition of borrowing from Greek sources in constructing Roman myth. But 450 A precise definition of Weber's traditional form of authority with no need for neologisms. 451 The pressure the horde in fusion ( mos or whichever other term might be used) exerts, and the methods employed to maintain conformity can be showed in this dialogue. Stalin is arranging the disposal of former Soviet honchos Zinoviev and Kamenev:”'You think Kamenev may not confess?' Stalin asked Mironov, one of Yagoda's Chekists. 'I don't know,' replied Mironov. 'You don't know?' said Stalin. 'Do you know how much our State weighs with all the factories, machines, the army with all the armaments and the navy?' Mironov thought he was joking but Stalin was not smiling. 'Think it over and tell me?' Stalin kept staring at him. 'Nobody can know that, Joseph Vissarionovich; it is the realm of astronomical figures.' 'Well, and can one man withstand the pressure of that astronomical weight?' 'No,' replied Mironov. 'Well then ... Don't come to report to me until you have in this briefcase the confession of Kamenev.'” (in Sebag Montefiore 2004:190). 452 Livy 1960:33-51.
429
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
it does seem that some time around 500 BCE there was a shift from tyranny to a republican system of government (Meineck 2005-1:59). Mussolini for one rode cars, flew his own plane, fenced, danced, officially addressed foreigners in their own language. According to Suetonius 453, Nero:�Because he was thought to equal Apollo in music, and the sun in chariotdriving, he resolved also to imitate the achievements of Hercules. And they say that a lion was got ready for him to kill, either with a club, or with a close hug, in view of the people in the amphitheatre; which he was to perform naked. �.
Italian PD's secretary Renzi -who transited from the Catholic activism in his youth to being the leader of the former Communist party- is also serenaded 454 as leader since the beginning as a scout in elementary school. Renzi happens to be fantastic at whatever he chances to be doing: playing soccer; riding a bike; dressing in formal or informal clothing; mingling with diverse crowds; operating an excavator or a cellphone...
British The Guardian enshrines Renzi comparing him to a 1970s TV icon, the character Fonzie from Happy Days, just as Italian politician Grillo had mockingly done in December 2013 (calling him Renzie)455.
453 Nero:53. 454 ANSA, 9 December 2013. 455 As this writing contends, the same myths and allegories can be (ab)used to indifferently promote or demote anything or anyone. Grillo in fact wanted to ridicule Renzi as an effete sit-com character of no political consequence.
430
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5 [Renzi] told the Guardian last year that Tony Blair was a role model for him -...-. Renzi, meanwhile, was continuing his celebrity-like political career. He was photographed, Fonzlike, in a leather jacket and dark glasses and appeared – but, this time, did not compete – in a television talent show. For those who were concerned that he was simply too charismatic, telegenic and image-conscious to be reliable, these actions were all the confirmation they needed: Renzi, they cried, was a kindred spirit of Berlusconi, and too slick to be serious. (Davies 2014: no page.).
The 'Renaissance man' shtick never stops paying dividends. Rather than a manifesto showcasing Greek Bronze Age excellence, the entire campaign looks like the promotion of a new aftershave lotion. The new product finally hits the shelves: Renzi dons the patriarchal robe as he's appointed new Prime Minister 456.
Will irresistible Renzi and his honest men 'save' the great nation? Problems soon loom on the horizon. A few of Renzi's 'honest men' are investigated for various wrongdoings: the government hails due process of law and presumption of innocence457.
“Honest men” who turn out to be as tainted as those they denounce are a dime a dozen. L. Diana, former PD parliamentarian and former member of
Commissione Antimafia in Italy is investigated. It appears Diana, a hero sung in the press for his engagement against mafia, was possibly a member of a mafioso network operating to direct public contracts to companies mafia controls 458. 456 February 22, 2014. 457 IlSole24Ore, March 5, 2014. 458 IlSole24Ore, July 3, 2015.
431
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
One is spoilt for choice, indeed. If Renzi is not the irresistible one, will “the Bergoglio459 effect” change Catholicism forever as many elatedly announce? It seems that Francis I might be making history already. John Paul II (whom many already nickname The Great) assertedly brought about the fall of the iron curtain all by himself:
The surprise announcement came at the end of 18 months of secret talks that produced a prisoner swap negotiated with the help of Pope Francis and concluded by a telephone call between Mr. Obama and President Raúl Castro. The historic deal broke an enduring stalemate between two countries divided by just 90 miles of water but oceans of mistrust and hostility dating from the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill and the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis. (Baker 2014:no page). Will Francis I over time prove be be a thaumaturge, and a saintly healer with a therapeutic stare just as Saint John Paul II? Is Pope Francis I not playing along with fads of medieval vintage about an apocalyptic “angelic Pope”?
Even neo-elected Italian Head of State Mattarella poses as personable savior-hero: he wants to appear austere as he shuns State pomp and apparatus. He also delights to rub elbows with the have-nots by boarding ordinary transportation means such as trains and airplanes destined to the general public.
When the men came to Him, they said, "John the Baptist has sent us to You, to ask, 'Are You the Expected One, or do we look for someone else?'" -...-And He answered and said to them, "Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the BLIND RECEIVE 459 Pope Francis I.
432
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
SIGHT, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the POOR HAVE THE GOSPEL PREACHED TO THEM (Luke 7:20-22). [a psychopath said:]You see, I figured out pretty early on that, actually, the reason why people don’t get their own way is because they often don’t know themselves where that way leads. They get too caught up in the heat of the moment and temporarily go off track. At that point, the dynamic changes. That’s when things become not just about getting what you want. But about being seen to get what you want. About winning. (Dutton 2012:111). [Augustus] takes pains to remind posterity of powers and titles he never took -...-. He is elusive on the subject of what he accepted. -...- What makes the refusal ritual more striking is that it had not been previously thought of, let alone practised. -...- Equally important, there is nothing republican about the practice of refusal. Honours were fought for tooth and nail and did not fall into the laps of the unwilling. -...- Refusal is not republican: it is a gesture designed to substantiate an elaborate pretence that things are not as they seem. (Wallace-Hadrill 1982:37). Men of destiny may not heal the blind, but they (on paper) pledge to deliver drastic tax cuts along with massive subsidies, public works, foreign policy accomplishments or adventurism etc: the hero of mythology bestows boons.
Let's take Prince Harry, for example. The British aristocrat has often been caught in compromising situations involving the disgraceful (ab)use of drugs, alcohol, sex and what not. An easy way out of embarrassment was to restyle the mundane bohemian, and his bawdy exploits that delight tabloids, into another orderly marionette of the stylized patriotic imagery.
The valiant prince is thus busy routinely saving lives, and “servicing”
433
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
(the accredited euphemism for killing) Taliban rogues in Afghanistan: isn't this sufficient cause to let bygones be bygones? A more family-oriented version might help, perhaps, as the bohemian aristocrat champions charities. What is the typical reaction going to be in a casual reader? Woody Woodpecker's outburst of laughter, a standing ovation, or Luke Skywalker's tortured realization?
Putin was a martial arts champion, and saved a TV crew from an Amur tiger:
Some of Putin's adventures have purported scientific connections, such as putting a tracking collar on a polar bear tranquilized in the wild and shooting a crossbow from a boat to get a tissue sample from a whale. Last year, Putin was caught short when one of his scientific events was revealed to be a set-up. He was shown scuba diving and bringing up fragments of ancient Greek amphorae, but his spokesman Dmitry Peskov later admitted the artifacts had been planted on the sea floor for Putin to grab. The stunts irritate Putin's opponents, who regard them not as benign political entertainment but as part of an establishment of a cult of personality lionizing an authoritarian leader. (Putin Leads... 2012:no page.). The A-Team members or MacGyver (1985-92) manufacture(d) instant solutions to tricky situations (=an ersatz of training montages in other action movies), etc. The archetypal trickster is back in his capacity as quintessential
bricoleur: Lancelot or Achilles couldn't have done any better. In fact, modernist fables circulated narrating Mussolini's (Hitler's, Mao's...) exploits. Short clips of magisterial feats anticipated the entrance of wrestler Curt Hennig: the 'Mister Perfect' gimmick.
434
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
This does not constitute light-hearted, escapist campfire fare only. The routine economic collapses -none could foresee, of course-, and the occasional bankster who plea-bargains as child molestation made him unfit to stand trial, are occasions for the potential lay off candidate to be a trickster-bricoleur just like MacGyver on TV.
Construction workers shall retrain as hospitality workers; engineers as plumbers; plumbers as bakers while keeping a positive attitude that shall 'make things happen':
As anthropologist Charles N. Darrah put it, the white-collar worker had become a “bundle of skills . . . who can move freely between [workplace] settings, carrying his or her skills like so much luggage.� (Ehrenreich 2009:313). North Korean Communist leader Kim Jong-Il apparently overshadowed all savior-heroes one might think of:
Even before his birth, the future leader of North Korea was triggering miracles. Official biographers say his birth in a cabin on the slopes of Baekdu Mountain in February 1942 was foretold by a swallow and heralded by a double rainbow. When he was born, a new star appeared in the night sky. * The first time he picked up a golf club, in 1994, Kim reportedly shot a 38-under par round on North Korea's only golf course, including 11 holes-in-one. He then decided to retire from the sport for ever. * Kim has the ability to alter the weather simply through the power of thought. * The fledgling leader was a genius as an infant, with official North Korean biographies stating that he had learned to walk at just 3 weeks and was talking at 8 weeks. * As a junior high school pupil in Pyongyang, he corrected and chastised his teachers for their incorrect interpretations of history. * Kim wrote six full operas in two years, "all of which are better than any in the 435
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
history of music," according to his official biography. * He designed the Tower of the Juche Idea, a 170-metre tower in the east bank of the River Taedong in central Pyongyang that is topped by a glowing red flame. * Kim's official biography also claims that he wrote 1,500 books during his time at Kim Sung Il University, from where he graduated in 1964. * According to the Korea Central News Agency, Kim is an expert on all aspects of the film industry and "improved the scripts and guided the production" of the movie "Diary of a Girl Student." His favourite movies are reportedly "Friday the 13th," "Rambo" and anything starring Elizabeth Taylor. * Kim reportedly employs a servant to inspect every grain of rice that is served to him. Any with the most minor of flaws is discarded. (Ryall 2011: no page). It won't escape readers how this kind of aggrandizing treatment of whomever chances to be at the top at any given moment is part of the 'child prodigy' motif that was put to use to cook self-important biographies of an endless stream of both historical and pseudo-historical leaders: from Jesus to Castro; from Buddha to Kim Jong-Il; from Apollonius to Hitler...
Many rulers were rumored to actually never sleep. Hitler used to stay up most of the night, due to bizarre habits and sleep disturbances. Once Mussolini overheard how popular that had become, ordered to keep his office's light always on to play along with the psyche's obsession with heavenly, (semi)omnipotent fatherfigures relentlessly at work shepherding -and thus monitoring- the brutish, unaccountable flock.
Italian Prime Minister Renzi seems to have learnt the lesson: he (or his associates under his name) posts tweets online at 6h43 (27 February 2014) to
436
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
announce he's already tackling urgent matters 460. In history, 'great men'461 sleep very little:
Leonardo (1,5-2h);
N. Tesla (2-3h);
T. Jefferson (2h);
T. Edison (5h);
I. Newton (3-4h);
Napoleon (4h);
B. Franklin (2-4h);
W. Churchill (5h).
Pope Francis I goes even further as he announces that some churches in Rome shall stay open until late night (28 March 2014) to celebrate Lent under the sign of the sacrament of reconciliation. Berlusconi 462 also declares he is in the lifelong habit of working until 2h30 AM. Likewise, Pope Francis I allegedly wakes up every day at 4h45AM in order to pray. The Pope has been relentlessly at work 460 ADNKRONOS, February 28, 2014. 461 Great People...2015:no page. 462 ANSA, April 27, 2014.
437
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
since his election: insiders -just like in Renzi's case yet with understandably less drama- think he's putting his health in jeopardy463.
The legitimate pre-war French Parliament voted father-figure Marshal Petain in full power to 'save' France from the defeat suffered at the hand of Germany. Father-figure Jack Tunney (figurehead president of wrestling promotion WWF) stepped in as soon as Hulk Hogan lost the belt to The Undertaker in dubious circumstances, ordered a rematch, and assured he'd be at ringside to insure a fair match.
Petain wanted to run the Fascist Vichy government in an authoritarian way that contradicted the backstage deals (“bourgeois d'affaires aveuglés par leur égoïsme trusts avides de retrouver leur hégémonie -...-Je n'admets ni le doute, ni les surenchères, ni les murmures d'où qu'ils viennent.”, August 30, 1942), careerism ( “professionnels de l'éléction” as Petain termed it August 30, 1942), ineptitude (“administrations souvent passives, sinon hostiles ”, ibid.) and confusion the common man associated with the defeated Republican regime.
Imposing father figures are often summoned to save the day in fiction: the Emperor in Dune (1984); the deputy mayor in Ip Man 3 (2010); military men in
Rambo (1982) and the rip-off Indio (1989).
463 OnlineNews, June 9, 2014.
438
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
All are grown-up versions of infantile fantasies/fears pivoting around the threat directed to disobedient children of “wait until your father [or any other comparable authority figure] gets home, then you'll see”. An inverted form of such shtick comes together in narratives that have frail little creatures being frightened with oblique threats of impending harm (the Russian roulette situation: “maybe tomorrow you'll be executed”).
Late XVIII and early XIX century constitutions, notably the Brazilian (1824) and Portuguese (1826) Constitutions created a poder moderador (moderating power, the Emperor of Brazil/King of Portugal) as fourth power (in addition to the legislative, executive, judiciary branches) to defuse and rectify possible conflicts within the State apparatus: a father-figure as bulwark against anarchy and demagogy.
France's first revolutionary monarchical Constitution also turned the Crown into a sort of poder moderador. The Brazilian Emperor could appoint -and dismiss- officials in the executive and judiciary branches in his capacity of “defensor perpétuo desse Imperio” (unrelenting defender of this Empire).
Although the role is in no way present in the Italian Constitution, Heads of State Scalfaro and Napolitano did play poder moderador, a role also associated in different ways with the actual Thai and Cambodian monarchies. Depending on who's telling the story, the Nepali and Bhutanese monarchies overstepped a few 439
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
boundaries, which led to regime overthrow (Nepal), and abdication (Bhutan): the rose of moderação is not without thorns.
The same fascination with constitutional patriarchal figures is also present in the current U.S and French Constitution. Furthermore, Sun Yat Sen (1866-1925) -the Chinese revolutionary and statesman- as well added not one, but two extra branches (examination in charge of recruiting civil servants in the tradition of Imperial China; an overseeing body with the ability to censor corruption and disorder) to the customary three: the same ideas were very popular cross-culturally.
In ancient (and contemporary) China, Zapotec milieus; Greece, Hebrew kingdoms, Rome, Mesopotamia, India etc, the figure of the patriarch was key. At several points in time law codes indexed offenses towards patriarchal authority (=the embodiment of values the horde in fusion worships) under sharp penalties such as death (for example China at some point).
While the role of (semi)omnipotent patriarchal figures is important, there is no need to get enthralled, for this imagery is just another form of hierarchy (=order of holy beings) with a particular form of hierophant; in today's terms it means those who control the conversation, masters of acceptable discourse, interpretive communities- that represents the value(s) the hierarchy embodies, subject to change. 440
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
Authoritative patriarchs are not the only recurring hot commodity. The 'crucified' hero-savior was such a hot commodity that resurfaced as one of the most famous wartime propaganda hoaxes of World-War-I:
Like so many other stories, this one underwent considerable changes and variations. The crucified person was at one time a girl, at another an American, but most often a Canadian. "Last week a large number of Canadian soldiers, wounded in the fighting round Ypres, arrived at the base hospital at Versculles. They all told a story of how one of their officers had been crucified by the Germans. He had been pinned to a wall by bayonets thrust through his hands and feet, another bayonet had then been driven through his throat, and, finally, he was riddled with bullets. The wounded Canadians said that the Dublin Fusiliers had seen this done with their own eyes, and they had heard the Officers of the Dublin Fusiliers talking about it." (" The Times," May 10, 1915. Paris Correspondent.) -...-. The story went the round of the Press here and in Canada, and was used by Members of Parliament on the platform. Its authenticity, however, was eventually denied by General March at Washington. It cropped up again in 1919, when a letter was published by the Nation (April 12th) from Private E. Loader, 2nd Royal West Kent Regiment, who declared he had seen the crucified Canadian. The 'Nation' was informed in a subsequent letter from Captain E. N. Bennett that there was no such private on the rolls of the Royal West Kents, and that the 2nd Battalion was in India during the whole war. (Ponsonby 1928:chapter XIII, emphasis added.). The Path Of Orphism. What we encompass in this term is a most amazing evolutionary sequence of cognitive maps, myths, rituals, and paradigms. This path spans, in one continuous sweep, the late paleolithic to the present. In spite of being the subject of an enormous scholarly literature spanning two thousand years, it is little known today. (Abraham 1990:39). At any rate, people hostile to his teachings crucified Orpheus (Orpheos
Bakkikos), as set forth in iconography and art:�The cross is a basic symbol for the 441
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
world and the center. The four points of the compass, and the fifth point in the middle, which is the transcendent point” 464. The Chakana (Inca squared cross) symbolizes the Southern Cross, and is associated with mother goddesses Saramama (mother Corn) and Kukamama (mother Coca).
The present writer wishes to liken certain images/situations -no matter whether one may read about in a book, press article or 'watch about it' in a movie etc- to 'neuralgic points' of the human psyche; if pressure is applied in a certain way to certain spots of the human body (the Hindu marma465 principle), a spontaneous reaction -inherent to the very nature and structure of the human body- ensues, whether or not the subject consciously or otherwise wills it.
Orpheus was often depicted as 'the fisherman'466 or 'the good shepherd '467: a “lord of the beasts”468 like Christian St. Francis. Caesar Augustus as well was a 'lord of the beasts'. As an infant, he ordered frogs at his grandfather's country house to be quiet: they obeyed him, according to Suetonius. John the Apostle ( Acts Of
John, a non-canonical text possibly from the II century) is another master of the 464 Campbell&Toms 1988: vol. 2. 465 Traditional healing technique antecedent of acupuncture. It consists in the pressure the therapist applies to specific points of the human body to relieve specific ailments. 466 Eisler 1921. The 'fish' metaphor is present in ancient mystery religions as meaning one's quest to overcome ignorance: the fish finally gets out of the water of ignorance. 467 “We may well believe that the mere human spell of a living and sinless personality would go far to keep the Saviour from danger. In the catacombs and on other ancient monuments of early Christians, He [Jesus] is sometimes represented as Orpheus charming the animals with his song. All that was true and beautiful in the old legends found its fulfilment in Him, and was but a symbol of His life and work. ” The Temptation, n.d. 468 Many gods -such as Hindu Rudra and Gaulish Cernunnos- were hailed as “lord of the beasts”. Under Roman prosecutions, Christians were fed to wild beasts to amuse the public, thus being the lord of the beasts' inverted representations.
442
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
beasts:
Now on the first day we arrived at a deserted inn, and when we were at a loss for a bed for John, we saw a droll matter. There was one bedstead lying somewhere there without coverings, whereon we spread the cloaks which we were wearing, and we prayed him to lie down upon it and rest, while the rest of us all slept upon the floor. But he when he lay down was troubled by the bugs, and as they continued to become yet more troublesome to him, when it was now about the middle of the night, in the hearing of us all he said to them: I say unto you, O bugs, behave yourselves, one and all, and leave your abode for this night and remain quiet in one place, and keep your distance from the servants of God. And as we laughed, and went on talking for some time, John addressed himself to sleep; and we, talking low, gave him no disturbance (or, thanks to him we were not disturbed). But when the day was now dawning I arose first, and with me Verus and Andronicus, and we saw at the door of the house which we had taken a great number of bugs standing, and while we wondered at the great sight of them, and all the brethren were roused up because of them, John continued sleeping. And when he was awaked we declared to him what we had seen. And he sat up on the bed and looked at them and said: Since ye have well behaved yourselves in hearkening to my rebuke, come unto your place. And when he had said this, and risen from the bed, the bugs running from the door hasted to the bed and climbed up by the legs thereof and disappeared into the joints. And John said again: This creature hearkened unto the voice of a man, and abode by itself and was quiet and trespassed not; but we which hear the voice and commandments of God disobey and are light-minded: and for how long? (no page). Birds are said to have rested undisturbed on the head of both Kodo Sawaki (Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist master) and Karl Jung (Swiss psychoanalyst): lords of the beasts.
Orpheus shares many visual, devotional and philosophical attributes
443
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
with Jesus:
Christianity shares many characteristics with other mystery religions of antiquity, which are called mystery religions because of their concern with the fundamental mysteries of human existence: life and death, questions about god, the soul, and the afterlife. Also, these mysteries involved secrets revealed only to members of the religious group, the initiates. (The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice, n.d). Various texts show how the Church, in its attempt to overpower Orphism, tried to merge Orpheus with Jesus and to turn them into one being. This is further reinforced in De Laudibus Constantini by Eusebius, who compares the ‘Logos’ which tames mankind, with Orpheus who tames wild animals (Ovadiah 1991:477). Christ Jesus is also represented in early art as the “ Good Shepherd,” that is, as a young man with a lamb on his shoulders. This is just the manner in which the Pagan Apollo, Mercury and others were represented centuries before (Doane 1882:202-3). The 'good shepherd' allegory goes way back to ancient Egypt (as early as the 11-12th dynasties, 2050-1080 BCE), whereby several gods -such as Ammon; the Sun goddess, and by extension the Pharaoh 469- were hailed as “shepherd of humanity”. In Zoroastrianism, Zoroaster is called the shepherd (guardian etc) of oxen; Geshu Urvan is a Zoroastrian angelic being hailed as defender of oxen.
If early Christians hid –in order to avoid prosecution- behind the symbol of the fish, which in Greek supplies the letters for the slogan Jesus Christ Son Of
God [and] Savior, contemporary right-wing hobos hide behind the code-word 88, which covertly alludes to the letter H (as in Heil Hitler); the masses melt in sorrow
469 Wilson specifically examines “The King As The Good Shepherd” (1951:125-154).
444
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
ruminating about the former, and shake fists at the latter.
Human beings have an irresistible drive to look for psychological states everywhere. Common humanity fellows may be angry, hurting, tense, happy or distraught, but so can animals, commonly reputed inanimate objects such as trees, chairs or houses, or the weather be. People are on the lookout for faces everywhere:
By adulthood, people have an "extraordinary ability to recognize a face as that of a human being. They can accurately recognize objects as faces even in poorly focused photographs, in badly degraded computer images, and in rudimentary schematized drawings."However, since we also see faces in mountains, clouds, and automobiles, the ability to see faces in degraded or rudimentary images is not just a sensitivity to actual faces. Rather, it is a predisposition to see faces whether they are there or not. Our models of faces—whether acquired or innate—are powerful for good reason: "no other object in the visual world is quite so important to us." Consequently, face and other human schemata emerge early. Throughout life, they cause us to find human features everywhere we look. -...-Although the pathetic fallacy has been in critical disfavor since the midnineteenth century, some scholars call it "almost unavoidable." Indeed, Frye says all of literature is an attempt to find a human face in nature and that civilization itself is the "process of making a total human form out of nature. -...-The admitted inability of religious writers, despite their apparent desire, to extricate religion from anthropomorphism suggests there is nothing much to extricate. -...-That religion cannot be extricated from anthropomorphism suggests that anthropomorphism is more even than its matrix. Rather, religion looks like anthropomorphism,part and parcel.(Guthrie 1993:105,124,179, 185 emphasis added). When observing faces, the system Yarbus devised to track the saccades showed how the eye looked mainly at the eyes and mouth, and then moved on to scan the outline of the head. His findings showed that people look intently at facial expressions, searching for emotional markers, and when they survey an entire scene they will always alight on a human figure even when the surrounding environment dwarfs it. If one looks at a good image of the Pronomos vase, it is the faces of the 445
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
performers and their masks that draw the eye, especially those of the principal actors. The eyes and mouths of those masks are particularly noticeable, and the gaze direction of the eyes of both masks and performers seems more apparent from a distance that when looking close up. (Meineck no date-2:5). Patterns don’t have to be in time. When we look at a mesa on Mars and see a face, that’s because our brains are interpreting the collection of cliffs and plateaus as a face-like pattern. We’re particularly good at seeing faces in almost anything. (Huettel 2014: Randomness And Patterns). Jane Goodall described a very interesting episode which struck me, and I bring it forward as a little suggestion. She was seated on a hill slope, observing through glasses a number of her chimpanzee friends over on the opposite slope of the valley. There were half a dozen males, and females of about the same number, and a few of the little ones. It was pouring rain, and suddenly there was a prodigious thunderclap and the males went bananas. They started charging displays one after another. When I heard that I recalled that the philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) had suggested that the first notion of the godhead arose out of experiencing the voice of the thunder. (Campbell 1989:In The Beginning). Faces can of course be happy, angry, sad and so forth. Newberg 470 mentions the above and explains brain scans of people involved in conversational prayer with god show activity pattern associated with everyday conversation with people: an anthropomorphic god exists within our reach.
It is not by chance how billions of people endorse religions that are either primarily animistic, or feature important animistic components: everything got a soul, or Ruskin's pathetic fallacy (emotional tags ascribed to inanimate objects in a merely figurative way= anthropomorphic metaphor): 470 2012:How The Brain Changes God.
446
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
A comprehensive and currently popular theory of the evolution of the capacity for religious experience as an epiphenomenon is based on the idea that religious experiences and perceptions are the result of selection for “agency detectors” in nervous systems of our ancestors (agents are entities that have intentions). In the context of evolutionary adaptation, agents include potential mates and partners, but also potential predators and enemies. Being able to identify agents and infer their intentions therefore has extraordinarily important fitness implications.-...- Investigations into the cognitive dimensions of agency detection have indicated that humans (and possibly many other animals) have an innate hyperactive agency detector. This detector is essentially an evolved psychological mechanism that exists in the mind (that is, it is wired into the nervous system) in such a way as to facilitate the detection of intentional agents in our surroundings, and to infer their intentions as accurately as possible. Our innate hyperactive agency detectors are “tuned” in such a way as to generate almost no false negatives—selection would have eliminated individuals that could not detect agency in potentially fatal encounters. This means that those same detectors are prone to generating false positives: actions and entities that do not have intentions or plans, but appear to us to do so. -...- One side effect of the operation of such detectors is the tendency to see “faces” (especially threatening ones) in natural objects, such as clouds, rocks, and foliage.(MacNeill 2011:54-5). In short, animism and anthropomorphism stem from the principle, "better safe than sorry." -...- "Anthropomorphism" also is used in two ways. In theology, it means attributing human characteristics to God or gods. More inclusively, it means attributing human characteristics to nonhuman phenomena. In my terms, it is the class of apparent instances of humanity that have proved illusory. Just as animism is universal in perception generally, so anthropomorphism is universal in human perception. -...- Instead, anthropomorphism stems principally, as does animism, from Pascal's strategy: faced by uncertainty, we bet on the most significant possibility. If we are mistaken, we lose little, while if we are right, we gain much.(Guthrie 1993:5-6). The main soundtrack hit linked to 1976 Italian blockbusting TV drama
Sandokan recurs amply to the pathetic fallacy: blood flow and wind storms; the
447
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
sunshine and physical strength; the daylight cycle and the renewing of strength. Miguel BosĂŠ in 1982 (Bravo Muchachos) follows in the footsteps glorifying an entire generation as collective culture hero: fate as wind; the strength of a generation portrayed as a tide and a volcano; a generation birthed from hell pictured as a sharp winter471:
People who study poetry have been aware of personifying since forever. It is an art and the images are personified. In this way you can enter into a conversation with the feeling as separate from yourself. You can negotiate with the feeling and work with it. -...Personification creates space around the emotion. Persona/ personify, it is a double-edged sword in terms of engaging with affect. (Archetypal Psychology Lecture 2007: no page). Isn't one of mythology's great lessons to refrain from rash acts, judgments etc lest one repents later? Should one not cast the first stone because s-he very well is as potentially tainted as those s-he denounces? Doesn't this square with both popular wisdom (beware of what you wish for, lest you may get it), and posh science (quantum entanglement, synchronicity etc) that seem to establish an eerie link between psychical states and external events outside of causal chains? Isn't the evil eye traditional cultures warn against the world over a proof that mental or psychical states do have effects?
Isn't this -in turn- the hazy and undifferentiated (enmeshment) universe of the newborn, who struggles with parting his own body from the surrounding
471 BosĂŠ originally dedicated the song to people born like him in 1956, famous for a sharp winter.
448
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
world -including the mother-? Does the infant not superpose his emotional states with an animistic world at large? She cries because she's hungry, which brings about feeding, or he cries because his diaper is soiled, yet he's left alone unattended for a long time, or all conflicting situations one might conjure up.
Isn't the infant's animistic vision -in turn- the drive behind the pathetic fallacy that haunts litterateurs since time immemorial (I am happy=the world is happy, too; I am upset/frustrated/angry... and so is the world...)?
Scholars find anthropomorphism—though most call it personification or the pathetic fallacy—throughout literature. Morton Bloomfield, for example, says personification, giving "general characteristics of an individual human being [to an] inanimate notion or object," has "universal power and long-lived popularity," and in the "whole range of Western literature from Homer down to today [is] one of the most popular of all literary modes." (Guthrie 1993:123). It is opportune here to pause over what French theorist Lacan terms the triad of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic 472. Once again, Lacan proposes here 472 Zizek explains:”This simple, although unexpected, thesis encapsulates the way Lacan reads Freud. Freud uses three distinct terms for the agency that propels the subject to act ethically: he speaks of ideal ego ( Idealich), ego-ideal (Ich-Ideal) and superego (Ueberich). He tends to identify these three terms: he often uses the expression Ichideal oder Idealich (Ego-Ideal or ideal ego), and the title of the chapter III of his booklet The Ego and the Id) is "Ego and Superego (Ego-Ideal)". Lacan introduces a precise distinction between these three terms: the "ideal ego" stands for the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, I would like others to see me); the Ego-Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and propels me to give my best, the ideal I try to follow and actualize; and the superego is this same agency in its revengeful, sadistic, punishing, aspect. The underlying structuring principle of these three terms is clearly Lacan's triad Imaginary-Symbolic-Real: ideal ego is imaginary, what Lacan calls the "small other," the idealized double-image of my ego; Ego-Ideal is symbolic, the point of my symbolic identification, the point in the big Other from which I observe (and judge) myself; superego is real, the cruel and insatiable agency which bombards me with impossible demands and which mocks my failed attempts to meet them, the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the more I try to suppress my "sinful" strivings and meet its demands. The old cynical Stalinist motto about the accused at the show trials who professed their innocence ("the more they are innocent, the more they deserve to be shot") is superego at its purest. ” (no date: no page).
449
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT
SERGIO ZENERE
ISBN 978-1-329-44282-5
his Freudian variation upon another tripartite (=the “laws of three” in Olrik's epic laws) division.
Mahayana Buddhism developed the idea of the three ages of Buddhism (mappo in Japanese) which -like all the declining series of ages in various culturesoutlined a period of “right doctrine”, followed by an age of “semblance of doctrine”, and lastly the present age of decline of Buddhist doctrine.
Comte's (1798-1857) presented the “law of the three stages”. Comte suggested mankind moves through three stages: the theological stage -in turn divided
in
fetishism,
polytheism,
monotheism-;
the
metaphysical
stage
(=impersonal, abstract explanations); the positive stage (scientific reasoning and experimental approach). Aurobindo, too, offered a version of man's development in four stages (infra-rational, rational, subjective and spiritual).
The present writer suggests the real is the province of cultures of little intellectual sophistication living more or less in the 'here and now'; the imaginary is the
province
of
animism,
totem-building
and
similar
practices
(=superstition=deference towards invisible and often unnamed 'x forces'); the symbolic is the higher province of most complex religions. For example, primitive people finding the water of a well turned red might balk thinking about the elusive influence of mysterious gods or spirits they represented in their totem poles (=imaginary). A symbolic interpretation is to see the fountain turning red as symbol 450
A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT