The Confusions of Seasonal Renewal
...the effects
of the psychological elements of fear in furthering the Islamization of the
conquered lands cannot be emphasized too strongly. The population fled before
the instability created by the spread of nomads, who set ambushes, killed or
ransomed villagers, and carried off women and children.[1]
The
concept of folklore is a difficult one to sustain today because it grew up in a
context of nineteenth-century racism and colonialism, with the “folk” being a
left-over remnant of inferior stages of civilization at the same time as being
a national people who rooted the modern population in the invigorating
blood-soaked soil of the homeland.[2]
It was the counterpart to anthropology, that equally ambiguous study of curious
peoples in new worlds, who were also left-overs from social and political
development, tribes without history because they were just as they were before
history began, The folk, however, were not completely out of history;[3]
they were caught in circumstances that slowed down their development or forced
them to regress to earlier stages of the process. Folklore was seen therefore
as at once an exotic feature of civilized history to be nurtured and a
dangerous subversive force likely to break out into irrational riots or
fanaticism.
Peasants
and villagers could be dressed in festival garments, taught archaic-sounding
songs, and instructed in controlled local celebrations. Like children, idiots
and mad people, the folk were thought to act out unconsciously the essential
and defining identity of the nation, but in a purified, spiritualized and
superficial way. The juridical, violent, and sexual aspects were downplayed or
denied. But it was important to foster country celebrations for the life of the
bourgeois portion of the population because it allowed seasonal or sporadic
relief from the tensions and restrictions of civilized life. In the borderlands
of Europe, between the Roman West and the Slavic-Greco East, between
Christendom and Islam, and in some periods between Catholic and Protestant
boundaries, hidden in narrow valleys, marooned on islands not fully integrated
into incipient nation states, and high in the mountains, the folk were the
designated others among the bourgeois, normative us. In their own
experience, the festivals they celebrated were based on pre-Christian,
pre-national and pre-urban laws, morals and religious beliefs, sometimes almost
consciously maintained as a mark of identity and protection of the local social
structures and personality types.
When
the invaders came—whether Romans, Magyars, Muslims, or modern Europeans from
the cities—the folk of Southeastern Europe returned to the dark forests or
mountain caves. In more recent centuries, when they were made to wear the
overlord’s costumes to mark their dependence and subservience to the great
estates, they transformed the political meanings into more archaic senses. Even
within the last two hundred years, when they were frightened by natural
calamities, epidemics and instability of the markets, they drew into themselves
and danced and chanted and masqueraded to hold back the deepest, darkest fears
inside themselves. One of the most bizarre features of folk life reported by
the collectors and scholars of the nineteenth century, even in England and
Scotland, was that when things got out of hand—wild drunkenness, rape, murder,
destruction of property—and the police or army was called in to restore order,
amongst those folk arrested and brought to trial were not just itinerant farm
workers, day-labourers in subsidiary crafts, and run-away daughters engaged in
promiscuity, but shopkeepers, skilled tradesmen, even lawyers, doctors and
clergymen.
A
late nineteenth-century mythographer and psychologist, Tito Vignoli (1829-1914),[4]
comes close to setting out the contours of mythology in the development of
human personality, society and intellectual, as well as aesthetic
achievements. But he is always just out
of focus in regard to our modern ways of thinking. Note, for instance, how he tends to
hypostasize the idea of myth into a timeless, universal force shaping all human
minds no matter where or when or under what specific conditions
The
genesis of myth, in its development, the specification and integration of its
beliefs, as well as the several intrinsic and extrinsic sources from which it
proceeds, will assign to it a clear place among our obscure recesses of psychic
facts; they will reveal to us the connection between the facts of consciousness
and their antecedents, between the world and our normal and abnormal physiological
conditions; they will show what a complex drama is performed by the action and
reaction between ourselves and the things within us, and also will declare the
nature of the laws which govern the various and manifold creations of forms,
imaginations, and ideas, and the artificial world of phantasms derived from
these.
Vignoli,
while not able to reconcile the origins of myth both in the normal workings of
the human experience as it comes to consciousness as a species in the world and
the dysfunctional and even morbid experiences of traumatized individuals and
groups, sees it as more of a therapeutic phenomenon than an evolutionary stage
in world history.
These
phenomena, so closely connected with physiological disturbances which are
beyond the control of our personal will, will inform us of the biological
relations between consciousness and thought on the one side, and our organism
on the other.
Yet
this play of tensions between the unconscious mind’s anxieties, fears and
drives and the conscious ego-will remains connected deeply within the
physiological senescence of our so-called “primitive” animal natures (what
Freud thought of as the id), the
repressed, irritable memories of pain and of hurts too unbearable to be allowed
into consciousness (the aspects of ego
censored below the level of self-awareness or distorted by censorship into
neurotic or psychotic surrogate symptoms) and the internalized voices and
forces of repression itself (the superego). Therefore, rather than being spontaneous and
fixed within the structures of the mind, the faculty of myth-making is subject to
changing styles, accumulating knowledge, and institutionalized limits; what is
deep within the personalities of all participating members of the group—and the
group conceived of as Lloyd deMaus’s psychoclasses, generations that share
child-rearing patterns of trauma—are the “sparks” of energy produced by these
original stresses and strains, exacerbated by subsequent abuse and neglect, and
eventually articulated into festival occasions. Such sparks may be rhythmic
sounds, fleeting glimpses of light and colour, recognizable shapes in the
visual sphere, movements, gestures, and other pre-symbolic and certainly
pre-linguistic experiences. Their
connections constitute the episodes of narrative, the steps of a ritual dance,
the sounds that begin to cohere[5]
as words and eventually, gaining syntax and grammar, language, and eventually
moments of self-consciousness, the group dynamics of social interaction and the
individualized emotions of personality.
In a sense, they are a manifestation of the imagination, or as Vignoli
puts it, “the faculty which creates excited
phantasms in man,” it is “not, as is erroneously supposed, the primary source
of myths, but only that which in a secondary degree elaborates and perfects
their spontaneous forms…”
Like
Blaga’s sense of styles and the repeating patterns of folklore and folk-art,
these ephemeral sparks, emerging as phantasms, like the wil’o’the’wisp (Irrlichten) or orblute,
at once combine to formulate myths and rituals, and at the same time, when
triggered by immediate crises among some or all of the participants, break the
convention restraints of the festival and cause anti-social acts of violence.
Bulgarian Rites
Even
in the early twenty-first century, Bulgarian villagers perform their
traditional folk plays, as much perhaps for the tourists as for themselves. The
so-called kukeri, according to a newspaper report at the beginning of
2011, “are men wearing goat-hair costumes made to a design that is centuries
old.” They pass through a village, sweeping way soot, fighting amongst
themselves, and performing other rituals that are supposed “to scare away evil
spirits as well as provide a good harvest and happiness to the village.”[6]
Vague as these words are they do suggest the basic dynamic of the tradition,
dialectic of cleansing the community of dangerous pollutants and bringing in
positive powers of fecundity and fellowship. The frightening, grotesque masks,
with their mixture of animal and human faces, their disguising of all identity
in the natural world, and the quasi-military uniforms that suggest the
ferociousness of young unmarried men charged to guard the archaic rights of the
village point towards the way in which, as we have already noted, the pogrom in
Rusçek was not merely a spontaneous hate-crime in the modern sense. The changes
in the city, politically, economically and socially, create a sense of
discomfort and disorientation to the original inhabitants and those who migrate
in from the countryside; modernization seems strange and threatening, even as
it presents new opportunities and challenges.
The
question remains in a state of controversy as to whether there is a
relationship between rituals, with their archaic patterns that outlast changes
in external style and rationalization, and art which, on the contrary, seems to
be open, free and playful , and yet is also transformative and subject to the
limitations of custom. Ellen Dissanayake,
for example, theorizes that
Because
of the many connections between art and ritual, I first wondered whether art could
be a derivative of ritual, much as I had earlier thought art as a derivative of
play. After struggling to make sense of
how and why this might have happened, an idea came to me: art was not a variety
of play or ritual, but like them it was concerned with a special order, realm,
mood, state of being. In play, ritual, and art things were not ordinary—they
are less real or more real than everyday reality.[7]
There
are several points of disagreement I have with Dissanayeke’s argument, though
it is profoundly rich in suggestions as it brings ritual into alignment with
art and play. In the first play, as
should be evident already in this essay on the archaic patterns of
anti-Semitism sparked into violent action by East European rituals of purgation
and punishment, the playfulness easily slides from creative and apotropaic
actions to destructive and suicidal events; in the second, rather than always
seeking to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary or the profane into the
sacred, these rituals of blood and justice can also seek to break out of
terrifying and oppressive periods of crisis into illusions of control,
self-assertive returns to a dreamed-of order and stability, and sweep away the
sense of being weak, unclean and on the verge of mental, moral or psychic
collapse. For these reasons, more than
just desperate reactions to unbearable stresses and strains in the environment,
such rituals can seem to provide a temporary relief in what may be taken
folk-artistic performances—with communal cooperation, nostalgic and symbolic
costumes, and encouraging audience participation. Dissanyake’s limits to these games are set by
her horizons of practicality and immediacy of results.[8] She also draws too strict a boundary between
individual and group feelings and actions whereas the effect of ritual—like
play and art—is to enhance individuality within the collective, and even to
generate a sense of individuality itself out of ordinary archaic (one is
tempted to say “primitive” in the sense of early childhood of each human or
evolutionary development of the species), so that language and consciousness
begin to emerge in the performance of festive rites and remain temporary until
complex institutional structures evolve.
Some
of the institutional forms of play, ritual and art, however, become
hierarchical and persecutory, preventing most members of the society from
participating in the free range of rational thought or the exercising of
open-ended artistic creativity. Sudden,
periodic or artificially induced crises may also induce regressive states of
mind susceptible to hypnotic, hallucinatory or alienated passivity—through
debilitating anxiety, fears of expulsion from the group, and self-doubt as to
the meaning or value of one’s own longing to be free.
It
is easy to transfer this anxiety and self-doubt outside to the traditional
scapegoats of Christian culture, that is, the Jews. The other outsiders—whether
Germans, Russians or Turks—have nations and armies close by to retaliate in
case of troubles; the Jews have no one to protect them, or even to speak up on
their behalf. In the season when archaic rituals permit young men to gather in
bands and dress in disguise, to act out the daemonic roles of guardians of
natural justice and ancient rights, they gather, urged on by priests and
teachers, perhaps by parents and community leaders,[9]
to sweep away the filthy, unhealthy, unwanted foreigners, to beat them up,
break the windows of their houses, kill them if necessary, and restore at least
a moment of calm and joy to the place where all live. But to better gauge the impact of such
archaic carnivals of blood and justice on our own day, it is best to examine
how the literary mind perceived such performances, beginning at what seems a
distant medieval example; but one that precisely because of its chronological
distance highlights the epistemological abyss between the literate and the oral
mentality.
[2] This may be too strong and
sweeping a statement. Folklore is
related to the study of rural customs and beliefs, to local dialects, to the
politics of the industrial and the agricultural revolutions and to the transformation
of the countryside by modern transport and communications. In more recent times, folklorists have turned
their attention to urban folk and also drawn on studies of what used to be
called antiquities. It therefore may be
possible to see how the discipline of Popular Culture often replaced Folklore
in some universities in the last quarter of the twentieth century. That readjustment to the epistemology of the
discipline means that cinema, television, digital communications and social
networks fall within its ken—and requires refinement of many older terms
associated with pre-literacy, orality, juridical rites, etc.
[3] This takes “history” in the
sense of a literate conceptualization (historiography) and memorial
institutionalization of these formal, rationalized versions of the past; and
goes back to the ancient sense of historia
as the arguments used by lawyers in a court of law to persuade judges and
juries of their “narratives”. For this
reason, psychohistory properly conceives of its subject as a series of
evolving, developing and constructed actions, the places where such memories
become “memorable”, the ”energizing vividness” (enargeia) of the words and
images used to persuade listeners and spectators of their induced illusion of
truth content, and the transformative consequences of such events in the
rhetorical space of the judicial theatre.
[4] Tito Vignoli, Myth and Science: An Essay, 3rd ed. (London: Kegan
Paul, 1883): The International Scientific Series, Vol. XXXVIII. Project
Gutenberg.
[5] Vignoli calls this process entificare, to entify, that is, “a fundamental law of our mind” that “generates
the idea of a subject,” gives it a recognizable cognitive and affective form. This is not the same thing as metaphor or
metonym, figures of speech and thought, that are conventionalized and
consequently repeatable. The phantasms are perceivable, audible, conceivable
and memorable, but always as something new and vaguely familiar, and hence an
uncanny or unheimlich occurrence. When order, coherence and meaning are
attempted by extrapolation—myths, rituals, speeches, dances, etc.—they can be
claimed to be eternal and global only by denial of their individual volatility
and spontaneous appearance.
[6]
A brief unsigned report and
a series of three photographs by Amos Chapple accompanying it appeared on the
Backpage of The New Zealand Herald on Wednesday, 9 February 2011.
[7] Ellen Dissanayake, “The Core of
Art: Making Special” Journal of Canadian
Association for Curriculum Studies 1:2 (2003) 21.
[8[ Dissanayeke, “The Core of Art”
24. This is like the archaeologists who
search for Darwinian advantage in evolution behind every manufactured tool,
human-shaped geographical feature, and symbolic mark on permanent material.
[9] The nature of propaganda and
ideology,. And their relationship to public myth-making and private fantasies
derived from infantile and childhood trauma have already been touched upon and
will be expanded further in this essay.
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