I would like to thank
Phillipe Karsenty for reading a draft of this section of the long essay and for
making some perceptive comments. He also
pointed out that there was a staged funeral for Muhammed al-Durah. According to Karsenty, " The funerals were true but the problem was that they buried someone else than the boy who was acting in the France 2 film," and he adds, "They buried a [different] boy who arrived dead at the hospital the same day at 10 a.m. whereas the France 2 scene started at 3 p.m." This kind of carnival parade adds to the
build up of excitement and becomes a justifying memory to the scandal of the
charges brought against Israel and the hallucinatory trial against Karsenty.
Introductory Remarks
Antisemitism is much more than a cognitive error. It attracts by providing the deep-emotional
satisfaction of hatred, tradition, and moral purity.[1]
The essay has so far looked at the way in which anti-Semitic myths and
rituals, deeply embedded images and somatic stresses, break away from games
into outright violence, sometimes with and sometimes without political ends and
rationalizations.[2]
Mostly we have been concerned with situations in which children at the core of
the performances, at times as both perpetrators and victims. Now I want to turn to a very current incident
in which an alleged child martyr has become the occasion for a long, protracted
drama against someone who dared to point out the fantasy behind the murder and
thus became, like the young scholar in Apuleius’s classic book of magical and
sexual satire Golden Ass, the primary
dupe in a Festival of Laughter—a false accusation, a mock trial, and a pretend
execution. Television, film, video and
other digital advances in technology do not change the playing out of these
archaic rituals.[3]
Libels and Labels: Seeing is Not Believing
The little martyr who never died in the year 2000, except on French
television, Mohammed al-Dura,[4]
keeps returning to haunt the world,[5]
most recently[6]
when a good citizen Philippe Kersenty was convicted for the horrendous crime of
pointing out that the reporter for France-2 and the Palestinian cameraman who
presented an abbreviated version of the film he had taken and convinced the
journalist that what he was seeming was quite different from what actually
occurred.[7] The world-wide circulation of this
much-abbreviated video—cut from more than half an hour (to be precise: 27
minutes) to a mere eighteen minutes—has caused much harm to Israelis and
Jews. This harm was caused, first, by
inspiring the participants in the so-called Second Intifada to revenge the
martyr’s death by murdering as many of the monsters who kill children as
possible; second, by ensuring that vicious anti-Zionism would absorb all the
old libels and slanders of anti-Semitism that been slowly bubbling away since
the end of the Nazi Regime in 1945, give them a new twist, and so run rampant
through the Islamic lands and leak into the consciousness of sympathetic eyes
elsewhere in the world. This last
process even feeds the self-hating and
self-deluded minds of many Jews and Israelis who then help to bolster the
efforts to demonize their own fellow religionists and their hard-fought-for
homeland.
Most of all, in terms of our
current discussion of the dynamics of anti-Semitism, is the fact that
Karsenty’s new defeat in his case against the television network, its reporter Charles
Enderlin and so-called stringer or free-lance photographer,[8]
affirms the view that the alleged al-Dura shootings are part of an age-old
crime against humanity, namely, a Jewish lust for the blood of children. The trumped up charge against the IDF—that
piece of false reportage, manipulated television tape, and a French Jew’s
temerity in daring to question the integrity of all those responsible for
promoting the myths—is of a piece with all other acts of anti-Semitic violence.[9] It belongs to the same mentality that
created the Blood Libel against Mendel Beilis in 1913 in Czarist Russia,[10]
the completely false labelling of Alfred Dreyfus as a traitor and a spy in 1894
and a thousand other similar actions going back many millennia.[11] In each instance, insofar as we can find the
evidence to form a picture of the complete event and not just see one or two
fragmentary glimpses of who did what to whom and how, the scenario of a
festival of blood and justice runs its course.[12]
The Festivals of Hate, Denial and Demonization
As a festival, there must be groups of people, both as participants
and spectators, who gather together on specific occasions, aware to some degree
that they are coming together in order to take vengeance—that is, to administer
a form of public justice that gives violence for violence, humiliation for
humiliation, and grief for grief, sometimes with a collective laughter that
purges the avenging group from any guilt, separating them by their joyful
assertion of power over the other, the outsider, the pernicious and unwanted
perpetrator of the original crime. The
nature of that crime is also seen as a preliminary ritual. Its own nature and format can only be perceived
as such in retrospect as the festive audience and performers coalesce in a
designated place. Thus the two opening
acts—the murder by the Jews of some non-Jewish and therefore innocent child
victim, the crowd who come to mourn his loss and transform themselves into a
party of pursuers, judges and executioners—are followed by the constitution of
a second ritual act of violence, the arraignment, the trying and the punishing
by death of the perpetrators.[13]
The original crime, the one that
instigates the legal process and then the violent punishment, may either be a
minor event that is blown out of all proportions, a non-event used to entrap
the festival’s whipping boy, scapegoat or butt of humour (in a festival of
laughter), or an hallucination constructed by the enthusiasm of the crowd as it
gathers for some intended celebration of their unity, purgation and rescue from
moral and social collapse. The large
numbers of people who come together for this celebration egg one another on and
ensure that no one breaks the magic circle of those who are privy to the joke
being played on the real victim. The
more the individual or small outside group protest their innocence and ignorance
of the crime, or try to point to the culprits who have probably perpetrated
whatever crime he or they are confused of, the more the festival en masse feels their sense of
self-righteousness bolstered. Those
caught up in this mass hysteria interpret the awkwardness, anxiety and fears of
the scapegoat as proof the guilt they will soon punish.
Occasionally, there is a coda to
this three act ritual drama, one in which the violence to be meted out to the
central butt of laughter is deflected into a symbolic act and which, though it
also further humiliates the victim, also invites him to become part of the participatory
crowd, and then instead of a tragic conclusion—as in ancient tragedies, where a
real sacrifice to the cause of communal healing occurs—there is a comic return,
with the former victim celebrated as the bringer of happiness, peace and
health. In even rarer instances, the
primary target of the crowd’s trickery, who suddenly realizes what is going on,
seizes control of the occasion, and turns the tables on the performers, to the
chagrin of the audience who also are caught up in the new act of judicial
punishment, their shock, onset of fear and possibly even deaths transforming
the meaning of the whole festival.[14]
The Archaic Play at Netzarim Junction
Act 1 In the case of Muhamed al-Dura, there is
the opening event, a staged event, filmed in Pallywood style at the Netzarim
Junction on 30 September 2000.[15] What
is real, however, is the effect of the video images and the photograph stills
showing a little boy hunched over his father against a wall. All the rest is mendacious myth, a series of
deliberate lies that catch hold of the public imagination and spin out of
control. This leads to monumentalization
of the pictures and the incorporation into the name of the alleged child martyr
of all that is evil about the Israelis—the age-old libels against the Jews—who
murder children, deliberately targeting them.
Streets, buildings, and civic facilities gain his name, his name is
given to new born children to perpetuate his sacrifice, his image plastered on
wall posters, printed on postage stamps, and imprinted on the institutionalized
memory of vast numbers of school pupils who sing, dance and re-enact the
martyrdom—and they vow to avenge his death by the murder of as many Israelis
and Jews as possible. Elsewhere, as the
western reporters spread the good news and as millions of Europeans and
Americans seek for evidence of Jewish perfidy, the name, the image, and the
memory of the child martyr are taken up. Each new repetition cements the once vague
and incomplete imagery, creating an inexpungible “fact” of history, beyond
reasonable doubt or any doubt at all.
Act 2 The second act opens
with a series of questions being asked about the validity of the story being
concocted as to the meaning of the pictures exposed on television screens and
in other media, but continues to the challenging of those images all together. It is no longer an investigation into who
actually did the shooting of the little boy on that street at the crossing
between Israel and the Palestinian territories, but a demand to have the full
sequence of images taken on that fateful day, with the assertion being made by
a select few outside the cameraman and the television news organization that
insofar as those images are true they are only records of a rehearsed event—and
soon enough that there is no proof that the boy was shot, let alone killed, and
that what is at stake is the premises of what constitutes news at all. Leading these challenges is Philippe
Karsenty, backed up by journalists from Germany and other European
experts. The reporter, Charles Enderlin,
and his bosses in Paris begin to close ranks: they resist making the full tape
available. They turn the challenge
against Karsenty, accusing him of bad faith, and seek to gain the approval of
the professionals in the by now vast enterprise of slandering Israel and
demonizing all Jews. After many years, a
court in Paris takes up the case, demands the full evidence, and reaches a
conclusion that Karsenty has acted in good faith, but not that the truth is in
question. Instead of causing the
television news networks around the world, the newspapers, magazines and other
purveyors of supposedly objective truth about what goes on in the Middle East,
the legal victory for Karsenty goes almost unmentioned, at most a minor fleck
of dust on the spotless record of the perpetrators of the big lie.
Act 3 The third act, which
is probably still in progress, and may lead towards a coda over the next
several years, sees two other scenes unfold.
In one, thirteen years after the alleged martyrdom of little al-Dura the
Israeli government issues an official report which to all intents and purposes
backs up Karsenty’s claims,[16]
and then a second trial in Paris rescinds the previous court decision to give a
citizen the right to publicly challenge the integrity of France-2 and its
reporters. Karsenty is now found guilty
of slandering his opponents. He is thus
exposed to more than opprobrium and mockery for daring to question the
authority and professionalism of those who actually behaved in a most unethical
fashion, taking the words of an obviously biased Palestinian photographer, Abu
Rahman, who built up out of virtually nothing a vivid mistruth, and thus become
responsible for the large numbers of dead and injured in the long string of
terrorist attacks and assassinations that were the direct consequence of this
fabrication.[17]
Coda The coda is currently
underway with the fall-guy fighting back again against the forces of
obfuscation and arrogance. In the case
of Apuleius’s young student, once he had been made the butt of all the humour
in the city of northern Greece, he was praised for his endurance and offered a
statue set up in his honor. It was felt
that he was owed that much for helping the citizens feel better—externalizing their
sense of discomfort and inner moral filth.
In the case of Samson, once he had brought the house—the Temple of Dagon—down
upon himself and all the Philistines gloating over his defeat, his brothers
came to claim the body and give him a burial among the respected ancestors; and
he was finally declared to be one of the Judges of Israel. We must await the outcome of this protracted
struggle that Philippe Karsenty has undertaken against France-2 and the media
establishment in his own and other western countries.
Speculative and Temporary Conclusion
Putting aside the superficial explanations—the ideologies and the
philosophies—that are adduced to understand these supposedly political actions,
let me return to the unconscious and unperceived causations. There are several
hidden motives, those of psychohistory. They derive from both developmental
problems in the individuals who defy common sense and normal logic, ignore
historical contexts and misperceive their own behaviours.[18] For
mythologies do not, as rationalists and anthropologists in the past few
centuries thought emerge as putative answers to unknown forces encountered in
ordinary experience, such as display themselves as agricultural rites, calendar
formulas, or explanations for diseases and injurious accidents; but, putting
those aside as secondary or tertiary formations, the heart of the mythical
language of feeling, image and sound-pattern are deep dysfunctions in the
adjustment of the evolving personality in every individual and in the incoherent
reconciliation of communal customs and current political needs. For while Tito Vignoli could say near the end
of the nineteenth century,[19]
before articulate speech, for which man was adapted by
his organs and physiological conditions, was formulated into words for things
and words for shape, man like animals thought in images[20]
he missed out on the dynamic
depths of the pre-conscious workings of the mind, something that in human
beings overlaps only in a superficial aura of analogies with beasts; mankind,
being less conformable with and therefore less comfortable in the natural world,
struggles within his or her personality to find some means of coping with the
environment that indeed includes memories of events in the past and
foreshadowing of future possibilities. Hence,
it is more than a physiological distinction between a frustrated human mind and
the senescence of an animal, as Vignoli puts it:
In order to understand the primeval process of thought
by means of images, it is necessary to conceive such a picture as living and
mobile, and constantly forming a fresh combination of parts. Animals have not, and primeval man had not,
the phonetic signs or words which give an individual character to the images, and
so represent them that by combining these images in an articulate form, thought
may be represented by signs; and in and through these a universal and objective
mode of exercising the intellectual faculty of reasoning has been created.[21]
To begin with, to make a more
subtle and appropriate sense out of what the Italian philosopher says we must
remind ourselves that animals and humans are not opposite kinds of creatures,
their primary consciousnesses[22]
being mutually exclusive. Our own commonsense awareness, filtered through the
induced hallucination of the festive trance, overlaps, with that created by the
dynamics of the group. Moreover, because the crisis expands during
the excitement of the passionate event, we experience our consciousness as an
uncanny phenomenon, one that seems both inside and outside of ourselves, as
something tension-ridden and frustrated.
The excitement partly operates in a manner similar to the swarming
instinct triggered in social animals. To
a degree, we share such hormonally signalled communication as can be heard in
bird songs, or seen in choreographed rituals such as the mating dances of
ruminants. But in addition to these archaic swarming instincts, there are
significant qualitative distinctions which make our human languages symbolic in
graphically diverse forms without having to have innate or genetically encoded
parts of the brain dedicated to these features.
Our human imperfections in evolutionary formation provide the painful
but exciting dynamics of culture and civilization.[23]
Secondly, therefore, to get away
from simplistic analogies between human and non-human phenomena, feelings and
attitudes do not express themselves in a language that is symbolic, even if it
is not yet based on a natural syntactic and symbolic system; these affective
agitations in the mind, bombarding sensations off different inputs from
external events and internal neuronal patterns, help to create spontaneous but
recognizable gestures, signs and sounds that eventually can be recollected
outside the moments of crisis—danger, desire, pain, etc.—and eventually begin
to function in a more abstracted sense.
To call these universal implies
much larger populations that normally interacted in the course of single
lifetimes or within the time of intergenerational contact and memory; so that
small groups again and again came to points of a primeval (to use Vignoli’s term)[24]
recognition, even when they found carved, structured or painted signs hundreds
or thousands of years after the previous group had placed them there. What was not remembered was any specific
symbolic content; rather what was triggered by these recognizable objects and
markings was a process of emotional patterning.
In brief, no archetypal language of symbols, no collective consciousness
able to communicate across time and space, no pristine knowledge unchanged for
millennia waiting to be tapped into.
Triggers of vivid and lively sensations arise from each
individual and each psycho-class of shared upbringing experience in bursts of
ritual violence,[25]
“occasioned by the same tendency to animatedness
[sic] which is proper to the perception.”[26]
NOTES
[1]Eve
Garrard, “The Pleasures of Antisemitism” originally published in Fathom No. 3 (Summer 2013), later on 7 May 2013
expanded online .
[2]
This does not mean that I undervalue politics, nor war its natural extension
into violence between states, but that ideologies and reasons of state are
manifestations (or symptoms, if you like) of deeper psychohistorical
motives.
[3]
What has become more absurd because of the electronic means of communicating
and storing knowledge now is that the article that led to Karsety being found
guilty in November 2004 would today see him pronounced innocent in July 2013,
as the clarification of documents brought about by his defence team created a
new context for the charges the France-2
TV network being a hoax exist in the public domain; see Philippe Karsenty, “No
First Amendment Here: French Court Finds Me Guilty in Al-Dura Affair” Europe France World News, distributed
over the internet variously, but I first received this document via PJ Medioa
online at http//pjmedia.com.
[4] See my earlier
essay on “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Stay Dead” EEJH (24 May 2013) eejh@ yahoo
groups.com.
[5]
“Haunt” is not a mere metaphor drawn from magic, mystery and ghost stories; it
replaces modern psychological terms which have taken on a deterministic tinge
and goes along with other older words like “enthusiasm”, “impressions” and
“influence”. It comes into use where
George Sand, for instance, wants to find “le secret d’une individualité bizarre
ou remarkable” (the secret of a bizarre or remarkable individuality) and makes
possible the opening of a “cœur sanglant à l’expérimentation psychologique” (bleeding
heart to psychological experimentation); see the Préface to her Lettres d’un voyageur, 1869). The heart
(cœur) stands here for the mind in
its widest sense so as to include emotional, unconscious and unperceived external
forces. The sense of bleeding (sanglant) refers to the lack of rational and volitional boundaries
to the personality, its leaking out of hidden spirits and ghostly images of
forgotten and repressed persons and events.
Experimentation (expérimentation),
as we have pointed out earlier in this essay, represents an older sense of
conscious perceptions plus trial examinations of phenomena. For Sand, further, the imagination has become
an instrument of science, a microscope, that allows her to see deep within her
mind and to explore the aspects of the external world unavailable to the naked
eye or common sense (Epistle II in Lettres
d’un voyageur).In Epistle VI, she speaks further to this kind of
depth-psychology in the terms of fantōmes
(ghosts) or apparition magique
(magical vision); they are projections of the excited imagination and can be
seen as a flamme bleuâtre (blue
flame) hovering over normal objects transforming them into highly significant
and inspiring insights. This leads her
to interpret classical icons, ancient myths, and folk rituals in terms of
psychological forces, and what she in Epistle XI also speaks of a kaléidoscope d’idées (a kaleidoscope of
ideas).
[6]
Philippe Karsenty has put online the decision (arrêt rendu) of the Court of Appeals (Cour d’Appel de Paris) that was handed down on 26 June 2013. After a strictly technical review of the previous
decision, with no consideration of any substantive or moral issues, the judges
agreed that he had no right to question the people he charged with a hoax (his
case was a nullity!) and therefore that Karsenty had to pay a fine of 1000Ɛ.
[7]
One of the latest overviews of the case can be found in Simon Plosker, “Al-Dura Did Not Die in 2000
Shotting” Honest Reporting: Israel Report (20 May 2013) online at
honestreporting.com/Israel-report-al-dura-did-not-0die-in-2000-shooting.
[8]
Karsenty also points out in “No First Amendment Here” that the latest court
verdict of his “guilt” actually proves that no one at France-2, neither the
reporter, the stringer, or any of the directors has ever had any proof of their
position; their case rests on an assertion of trustworthiness, integrity, and
authority. Michel Onfray is cited to
show that “France-2 still doesn’t have a piece of evidence to substantiate
their al-Dura report. The judges had to
reverse the burden of the evidence—using the extremely restrictive French
defamation laws—to prevent France-2 from having to produce any evidence to
confirm the report’s authenticity, and to temporarily block the recognition of
the hoax.” These shenanigans clearly
point to the farcical nature of the spectacle.
[9] On
the history of how the video footage in question was first aired, perceived by
Israeli audiences, and then challenged by others than Philippe Karsenty,
see Naomi Ragen, “Consider This:
Fighting the Myth-Makers from Hell” Jerusalem Post (11 July 2013).
[10] See my review essay on Jay Beilis, Jeremy Simcha and Mark S. Stein,
eds, Mendel Beilis, My Life of Suffering (Chicago: Beilis, 2011) in Shofar 31:3 (2013) 150-153.
[11] See my review of Piers Paul Read, The Dreyfus Affair in East European
Jewish History (EEJH) online at eejh@yahoogroups.com. (30
March 2013). As well as my three books on Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus mentioned
elsewhere.
[12]
The basic structure of this argument derives from my study of Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice in
Biblical and Classical Literature
(London, Ont.: Sussco, 2008).
This argument is now expanded and deepened from later research and
thought. I am currently working on a
book about the Jewish imagination, able to challenge and change the world
through the midrashic imagination, and in which I call extensively on the
background of Any Warburg; for instance, here I would expatiate on a Seelendramatik (the dramaturgy of the
soul) wherein the Pathosformeln (formulaic
passions) take rise from, embedded in Lebensvollen
Getsalten (the forms of vital exuberance)
are further shaped and energized by a Stilisierung der Energie (stylization of energy); see George
Didi-Huberman, “Aby Warburg et l’archives des intensités” Etudes
photographiques No. 10 (Novembre 2011) pp. 144-158.
[13]
The locus classicus of this festival
of laughter occurs in Apuleius, The
Golden Ass, or The Metamorphoses; the chief example in the Hebrew Bible
appears in The Book of Judges when Samson is taken by the Philistines to be
mocked and scorned in the Temple of Dagon and in the New Testament in the
account of Paul’s invitation to speak in the Corinthian Areopagetica or Public
Debating Chamber.
[14] This kind of festival drama occurring in the midst of
a festival of hate, justice and blood should not be confused with a sociodrama
or psychodrama used in group therapy; see Eva Leveton, ed., Healing Collective Trauma using Sociodrama
and Drama Therapy (New York: Springer Publishing, 2010). Founded by J.L.
Moreno and his wife, pyschodrama seeks to provide a way for patients to express
their repressed pains, work out a means of relieving the built up psychic
tensions, and so rejoining society as a more healthy participant. Unscripted and spontaneous, such a
participatory game involves several patients and a directing therapist, the aim
being to overcome verbal blocks and emotional numbness. The rituals discussed in
this essay, however, are shaped and organized by traditional customs and
institutions, use conventionalized scripts and actions, and only in certain
crisis situations break apart the latest set of restraints and codes of
behaviour, thus releasing powerful, otherwise uncontrollable passions. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has shown in Carnival at Romans (1980) how unscrupulous, Machiavellian or strategic
politicians can seize on folk plays and festivals to subvert and transform
current structures of society; see Le Carnaval de Romans, 1579-1580.
[15] The full version of the video taken at the junction
purportedly showing the child shot at and killed actually shows him moving
about after his alleged death, just as it shows other people in the frames not
aired on France-2 rehearsing the scene.
For a long discussion on these techniques of faux-tography and
Pallywoodization of anti-Israeli propaganda, see Norman Simms “The Phantasmagoria of Anti-Semitism and
Anti-Zionism” Mentalities/Mentalités 24:2 (2010) 52-64.
[16] Report of the Government Review Committee,
“The France-2 al-Dura Report, its Consequences and Implications” (10 May
2013), State of Israel, Ministry of International Affairs and Strategy.
[17]
If the latest court verdict in Paris proved anything about the authenticity of
Karsenty’s claims of a hoax, it is that “the only witness of the al-Dura news
report—the France-2 cameraman does not have the images of the child’s
agony. Moreover, the Court of Appeals
agreed that France-2’s reluctance to show their footage makes their story
doubtful” (“No First Amendment Here”). But
the archaic farce continues because Abu Rahman contradicted Enderlin’s repeated
assertion that such footage from the rushes
or raw video-film did exist: there is no such image. How could there be when the little boy was
never shot at, not killed and then never buried? We are back in the realm of The Golden Ass where the student accused
of murder is finally let off when it is admitted that nobody was killed—at best,
a bunch of old stuffed sacks was stabbed.
[18] Anti-Semitism is a social disease, uses what Jean Maisondieu
calls “a dedicated mad person” in its scapegoating mechanisms, and operates in
groups through the archaic rituals described here. I have written about this phenomenon many
times, beginning in "Peasant Rebellion as a Folk Language", Mioriţa 3:1 (1977) 16-22; then "Ned Ludd's
Mummers Play" Folklore 89:2 (1978) 166-178; "'Scotch
Cattle': Una forma gallese di
spettacolo. Il dramma folkloristico alla luce
della storia del teatro in Europa", Biblioteca
Teatrale 23/24 (1979), 117-131. (Trans by Cesare Molinari.) and so on.
[19]
Remember I am citing this now nearly forgotten Italian thinker because he comes
so close to much modern thinking on mythology from a psychoanalytical and
anthropological point of view that his small infelicities of focus and somewhat
archaic terminology keep us on our toes, and help us avoid easy slides into the
clichés and deterministic paradigms of post-modernism.
[20]
Vignoli, Myth and Science, p. 76.
[21]Vignoli,
Myth and Science, p. 76.
[22]
The plural here indicates the complexity of the phenomenon in question: there
are at once degrees and kinds of consciousness, just as there are of
unconsciousness—from repressed traumatic memories, censored primary instincts,
embodied cultural codes, etc.
[23]
This is also the way in which those primary triggers of hysterical passion (Pathosformeln) are later articulated
into the styles and ideologies of civilized cultures, the Toposformeln (see Didi-Huberman, “Aby Warburg et les archives de
l’intensité”). In one specific way, these ideas fit with what Edward Cline
describes as taking place in music: “Music, after all, can evoke an image of
some thing, it can help to objectify
an idea or an emotion, even if it differs from what inspired a composer” (“Music, Movies, and Me” Family Security Matters (5
April 2013) online at
http:www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/music-movies-and-me.
[24]
And not “primitive” which has been spoiled by overtly colonialist propaganda,
yet both terms refer to something not so much simple or simplistic (savage) as
primary, original and previous to the familiar workings of our own minds and
societies, even if old fashioned. It is important to find a balance between an
outlook that deals with ritual and myth in evolutionary terms of development
and hence registered within historical terms—hence subject to human influence
and interference, however much outside of conscious awareness—and stages in
individual ontology from what can be discerned in neuro-anatomy, brain evolution
triggered by hormonal stimulation and inhibition in each individual from foetus
through infancy and throughout childhood, the genetic code having its effects
in the way specific patterns are articulated and thus subject to short-term
(from a matter of days or months to a whole lifetime) circumstances. In short, evolution does not occur in a
gradual, logical progression of elaboration and refinement but in spurts, is
reversible, and proceeds by a number of various, including contradictory,
impulses, often leading to dead-ends and creating bestial and deleterious
results, at least in potentia. It also occurs both for individuals, groups
and species.
[25]
These are the terms Vignoli repeats dozens of times per page as he explores the
nature of myth; Myth and Science,
Chapter VIII “Of Dreams, Illusions, Normal and Abnormal Hallucinations,
Delirium, and Madness—Conclusion,” pp.
90 ff. At one point even he speaks of “a
very very vivid character” (p. 98).
[26]
Vignoli, Myth and Science, p. 98.
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