I
Liberty
Freud's myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the primal, prehistoric horde is not a historical explanation of origins, but a supra-historical archetype; eternally recurrent; a myth; an old, old story.
Freud seems to project into prehistoric times the constitutional crisis of seventeenth-century England. The primal father is absolute monarch of the horde; the fe- males are his property. The sons form a conspiracy to overthrow the despot, and in the end substitute a social contract with equal rights for all. This anachronistic his- tory directs us to look for the recurrence of the archetype in the seventeenth century.
Cf. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 130-133, 188.
3
4
In the First Treatise of Cwvil Government, Locke attacks Sir Robert Filmer's defense of absolute monarchy, entitled Patriarcha. Sir Robert Filmer, like Freud, iden- tifies patriarchy and monarchy, political and paternal power. Filmer, like Freud, derives constitutional structure from a primal or prehistoric mythical family, from the paternal powers of our father Adam. Like Freud, Filmer attributes to the primal father unlimited power over his sons, including the power and propensity to castrate them.
Locke contradicts Filer's primal fatherhood-a "strange kind of domineering phantom, called 'the father- hood' he says, a 66 gigantic form 29 -with the postulate of all men in the primal state of nature free and equal. To vindicate liberty is to vindicate the children, liberi, the sons, against paternal despotism. Locke kills Filmer's fatherhood, lays that phantom. The battle of books re- énacts Freud' primal crime.
Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, 6, 7.
Liberty means equality among the brothers (sons). Locke rejects Filmer's rule of primogeniture, which trans- mits the full power of father Adam to one of his sons, and makes one brother the father of his brethren. How can a man get power not only over his own children, but over his brethren, asks Locke. «Brother, 29 he says, "is the name of friendship and equality, and not of jurisdiction and authority. " Against Filmer's fatherhood Locke cham- pions liberty, equality, fraternity. Locke has father Adam's property divided equally among all his sons. Liberty, equality: it is all a dispute over the inheritance of the paternal estate.
Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, 92.
5
But the equality of brotherhood is a leveling in the presence of a father; it is a way of dividing what belongs to a father- "the father's equal love." Locke's equality in the state of nature belongs to men as sons of God Liberty means sonship. To make all men free and equal in the state of nature, Locke allows no man the status of father, and makes all men sons of the Heavenly Father. The phantom of fatherhood is banished from the earth, and elevated to the skies. "The state of Nature has a law to govern it, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely Wise Maker, all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property. 97 Procreative power itself is transferred from the earthly to the heavenly father. The parents are only guardians of the children they had begotten, "not as their own workmanship, but the workmanship of their own Maker, the Almighty. " God is the "author and giver of life." Parents are only the guardians of their children: fathers are not even fathers of their children. Filmer's sons were subject to castration; Locke castrates the earthly fathers. Thus the defense of sonship turns into the dis- covery of another father, the "real" father; and the real question in politics is Jesus' question, Who is my father?
Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, 119-120, 143, 37; cf. 147.
Cf. Freud, Group Psychology, 89, 95.
Here is the inner contradiction in liberty, equality, and fraternity. Sonship and brotherhood are espoused against fatherhood: but without a father there can be no sons or brothers. Locke's sons, like Freud's, cannot free themselves from father psychology, and are crucified
6
by the contradictory commands issuing from the Freudian super-ego, which says both "thou shalt be like the father, and "thou shalt not be like the father, » that is, many things are his prerogative. Fraternal organization in the body politie corresponds to ego-organization in the body physical. As fraternal organization covertly assumes a father, ego-organization covertly assumes a super-ego.
Cf. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 44.
The dispute between fathers and sons is over prop- erty. In Filmer's patriarchal system paternal power is a property which is inherited and which consists in having property in one's own children. To be the subject of a king is the same as to be the son of a father; and to be a son is the same as to be a slave. But libertas is what dis- tinguishes the sons (liber) in the family from the slaves. Locke vindicates the rights of the sons, giving to each one the fundamental right of property in his own person, i.e., the right not to be a slave. At the root, liberty and personal property are identical, and identical also with sonship. But at the same time -the same inner contra- diction- property essentially belongs to a father. It finally turns out that the property holders Locke undertook to defend own nothing: it all belongs to the Heavenly Father. "However in respect of one another men may be allowed to have property in their distinct portions of the creatures, yet in respect of God, the maker of heaven and earth, who is the sole lord and proprietor of the whole world, man's propriety in the creatures is nothing but that liberty to use them' which God has permitted. 29 It. is God's ownership of us-who are therefore his slaves- which excludes slavery as a relation between men.
Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, 28.
7
Sonship, or brotherhood, freed from its secret bond- age to the father principle-sons after the order of Melchizedek, without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God--would be free from the principle of private property. And in the first form of Christianity the brethren had all things common Sons without fathers share everything and own nothing. The brethren, as Plato saw, should have all things in common, including wives. Locke's commitment to brother- hood is deep enough to produce another inner contra- diction: communism and private property. The world was given to the children of men in common, he says. In one sentence he affirms both principles: "Though the things of Nature are given in common, man (by being master of himself and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it) had still in himself the great foundation of property.
Hebrews VII, 3; Acts II, 44. Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, 138; cf. 136.
As in Locke and Filmer, so in Plato and Aristotle, the two giant forms, fatherhood and brotherhood, enjoy another incarnation and another phantom battle. In these reincarnations the archetypes wear different masks; in Plato and Aristotle we can discern fatherhood and brother- hood in the guise of the family and the division of labor as alternative principles of social organization.
Aristotle displays the state as the final and perfected expression of the same principle of organization which constructs the patriarchal family. First, "a house, and a wife, and an ox"; then a collection of households in a village, then a collection of villages (synoecism) into a
8
polis. The cement which binds the wider collection to- gether is the same which binds the family: "Kinship. 29 The patriarchal family supplies the primal model for political government: the first form of government is kingship, "because families are always monarchically governed"; the essence of government is domination, 'rule" _in the family the domination of male over female, parent over child, master over slave.
Cf. Aristotle, Politics, I, ü-v.
Plato hears a different drummer. In his analysis of the elements of social organization, he never even men- tions the family. Instead, his basic principle of social organization is the division of labor and professional specialization, "each doing the one thing for which he is naturally fitted, and united with others by mutual exchange and organic interdependence. And the perfect realization of the potentialities inherent in this principle of social organization, Plato's ideal state, requires the abolition of the family.
Cf. Plato, Republic II, 367E-372A.
In Plato the abolition of the family accompanies the abolition of property: property is patriarchal, communism fraternal. So also in Marxism: Engels connected the family with private property and the state; society has been patriarchal and will become fraternal. Marxism, in suc- cession to Locke, picked up the cause of brotherhood. The history of Marxism shows how hard it is to kill the father; to get rid of the family, private property, and the state.
What is the division of labor? Durkheim in his book on the division of labor saw two distinct principles, an-
9
tagonistic and complementary, as warp and woof of human social organization, which he called mechanical and organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity is union based on likeness; and it finds its clearest expression in kinship. Organic solidarity is union based on difterentia- tion and organic interdependence; its expression is the division of labor. Durkheim associates mechanical soli- darity not only with the family but also with the collective conscience and with criminal law as a repressive system in Freudian terms, the super-ego and the father. Or- ganic solidarity on the other hand he associates with the civil law which sustains persons, properties and contracts on the basis of equity and equality.
Cf. Durkheim, The Division of Labor.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud adumbrated the distinction between two archetypes of social psychology: the individual psychology which in the primal horde belonged to the father alone, and the group psychology of the sons, or brothers. Fatherhood and brotherhood are the archetypes brooding in the back- ground of such sociological abstractions as Durkheim's mechanical and organic solidarity; or Gierke's Herrschaft and Genossenschaft, the imperial and fraternal principles, which dialectically combine to weave the changing fabric of Western social corporate bodies. It is the specific gift of psychoanalysis to see behind these sociological abstrac. tions the human face; and their name is fatherhood and brotherhood.
Cf. Freud, Group Psychology, 92. Brophy, Black Ship to Hell, 73. Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, I, 12-16.
Locke suggests that the fraternity is formed not by birth but by election, by contract; Plato's fraternity based
10
on the division of labor excludes the family; Durkheim's organic solidarity is the opposite of kinship. This brother. hood is not made inside the family, nor by the father; is not born of the Hesh, but of the spirit; is not natural, but artificial. Rousseau would say it is based on will, in the vocabulary of Freud's Totem and Taboo it is totemic brotherhood. In totemic brotherhood the bond which unites the brothers is not family relationship or blood kinship. The totem clan is defined by a peculiar relation to its particular totem animal, plant, or object; by virtue of which they are of one body, and have one common totem ancestor. The body is mystical, and the ancestor mythical.
Cf. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, 56-57.
Only in the latest of his tellings of the story, in Moses and Monotheism, does Freud distinguish the brotherhood from the natural relation among the sons inside the family. In that version the brotherhood comes into being after the sons are expelled from the family, when they "club together" in the wilderness; the social contract perpetuates "the attachment that had grown up among them during the time of their exile. 29 They club together in the fatherless wilderness; it is a fraternity of young men in college, away from home. The artifice that makes the brotherhood, the social contract, is initiation.
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 131-132.
If the story is to be told in the form of anthropology, then the sons and brothers are to be found not inside the family, but in the clubs or fraternities or secret socie- ties, which are not merely outside the family but rather diametrically contradict it. In the family there is a natural symbiosis of those who have a natural need for each
11
other: male and female; parent and child. The fraternity, or club, or secret society strives to put asunder what is joined in the family--male and female, parent and child. In primitive secret societies, in puberty rites, in Alters- klassen und Männerbünde, the persistent tendency is to separate the sexes and the generations; to form homo- sexual and coeval groupings. Besides the natural union of the sexes in the family of which Aristotle speaks, there is also unconscious hostility between the sexes; "an ar- chaic reaction of enmity"; taboos which prescribe sexual separation, mutual avoidance; the castration complex. Without an understanding of the seamy side of sexuality there is no understanding of politics.
Cf. Freud, "The Taboo of Virginity, ," 234. Reik, "Couvade, 50; "The Puberty Rites of Savages, 22 154-155. Crawley, Mystic Rose I, 44-45: 54-55, 171. Blüher, Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies. Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männer- bünde.
Conventional Anglo-Saxon political theory, dismissing Nazism as an irrelevant aberration, a lunatic episode, in the history of the West, is all patriarchal. In the Greek polis, where it all begins, historians and philosophers see only fatherhood and the family. The theory is Aristotle's, modernized by Fustel de Coulanges. The minority oppo- sition to the orthodox line of patriarchal interpretation has clustered round the hypothesis of a contrary matriar- chal factor. There is a connection between matriarchy and fraternity, even as there is an alliance between Mother Earth and the band of brothers led by Cronus to castrate Father Sky. But Freud directs us to the idea that the true, the only contrary of patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity.
Cf. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, 869-871.
12
Fraternity, which is the governing principle of Plato's ideal state, was the governing principle of one real state -Sparta. And Aristotle's emphasis on fatherhood and the family corresponds to the reality of Athens. Just as the antithesis of Aristotle and Plato incarnates the battle of fatherhood against brotherhood, so does the antithesis Athens vs. Sparta. And Sparta is a constellation in the horoscope of Western culture as fixed, as recurrent, as Athens.
According to the current patriarchal orthodoxy, Sparta is a "]and-holding aristocracy, and then the great war is between progressive, democratic, and commercial Athens and reactionary, aristocratic, and agrarian Sparta. The truth is that the indispensable basis for a "land-hold- ing aristocracy -the house-and-land-holding patriarchal family--is lacking at Sparta. Fustel de Coulanges, with a candor and clarity not imitated by his followers, admits that his theoretical construction does not apply to Sparta. At the time of the Dorian invasion, he says, "the old rule of the gens had already disappeared. We no longer distinguish among them this ancient organization of the family; we no longer find traces of the patriarchal govern- ment, or vestiges of the religious nobility, or of hereditary clientship; we see only warriors, all equal, under a king.
Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, Book IV, ch. XIII, 459.
Warriors, all equal" is fraternal organization. The Spartan educational system sent the boys away from home at the age of seven, into the wilderness, to be initiated in boy scout or wolf cub packs, in which each boy lived, ate, and slept together with his coevals. The adult military organization prolonged these groupings and the principle of being boys together (the "peers" or homoioi) into a
13
total way of life. The mess halls, syssitia, where the Spartan warrior lived, ate, and slept together with his comrades, correspond to the primitive institution of the men's house. Spartan society was a hierarchy not based on either property or blood, but on graduated degrees of initiation--initiation into secret societies. Thucydides named secrecy as the distinctive principle of their polity.
Cf. Jeanmaire, Couroi et Courètes. Thucydides V, 68.
The men's house and the home are mutually antag onistic institutions; the Spartan bridegroom had to spend the night of his marriage in the men's house, and could visit his wife only if he could slip away from his comrades by stealth. One might expect the homosexual emphasis of fraternal organization to degrade the status of women; but it was at Sparta that women had freedom and dignity, while the women of the Athenian patriarchal family were degraded into nonentity. The fraternal style of sexual separation maintains a relation of mutuality, with equality and exchange, between the sexes. While the man spent his life in the men's house, the Spartan woman was mistress of the household: the fraternal style of sexual separation naturally results in a matriarchy of the house- hold as well as a sexual morality free from patriarchal jealousies. It is in this sense that we should understand the claim that there was no adultery at Sparta.
Cf. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, 255-260. Nilsson, spartanischen Lebens. "Die Grundlage des
The energy which builds fraternal organization is in rebellion against the family and the father; it is youthful energy. Ortega y Gasset can see that the primeval political association is the secret society, not the gray-bearded senate, because he is willing to acknowledge the youth-
14
ful, or sportive, or playful origin of the state. "It was 9) not. he says, "the worker, the intellectual, the priest, properly speaking, or the businessman who started the great political process, but youth, preoccupied with women and resolved to fight--the lover, the warrior, the athlete. The ideology of utilitarianism which in the origin of the state and everywhere in life sees only obe- dience to necessity and the satisfaction of elementary vital needs, is senile, and in politics sees only senatorial activity. Youthful energy has that exuberance which over- Hows the confines of elementary necessity, and rises above labor into the higher, or is it lower, sphere of play.
Ortega y Gasset, "The Sportive Origin of the State," 32.
Academic orthodoxy, senile and senatorial, is against fraternities; against Sparta; against Plato; against athletics; against play; against sex; against youth. "The fate of the 97 sons, says Freud, "was a hard one; if they excited the father's jealousy they were killed or castrated or driven out. " Virginibus puerisque canto. The Voice of the Ancient Bard, saying,
Youth of delight, come hither,
And see the opening morn,
Image of truth new born,
Folly is an endless maze,
Tangled roots perplex her ways.
How many have fallen there!
They stumble all night over bones of the dead,
And feel they know not what but care,
And wish to lead others, when they should be led.Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 131. Blake, "The Voice of the Ancient Bard, Songs of Innocence.
15
"Youth preoccupied with women and resolved to fight®: politics as juvenile delinquency. Ortega is think- ing, as Freud did also, of a connection between fraternal organization and exogamy, conceived as form of "mar- riage by capture. The band of brothers feel the incest taboo and the lure of strange women; and adopt military organization (gang organization) for purposes of rape. Politics as gang bang. The game is juvenile, or, as Freud would say, infantile; and deadly serious; it is the game of Eros and Thanatos; of sex and war.
To know the reality of politics we have to believe the myth, to believe what we were told as children. Roman history is the story of the brothers Romulus and Remus, the sons of the she-wolf; leaders of gangs of juvenile delinquents (collecta juvenum manu hostilem in modum praedas agere; crescente in dies grege juvenum seria ac jocos celebrare); who achieved the rape of the Sabine women; and whose festival is the Lupercalia; at which youth naked except for girdles made from the skins of victims ran wild through the city, striking those whom they met, especially women, with strips of goat- skin; a season fit for king killing, Julius Caesar, Act I.
Livy, 1, 4-5.
Politics made out of delinquency. All brothers are brothers in crime: all equal as sinners. "To expand the population, Romulus followed the model of other founders of cities: he opened an asylum for fugitives. The mob that came in was the first step to the city's future great- ness» "The remission of sins which makes us citizens of the Heavenly City was faintly adumbrated when Romulus gathered the first citizens of his city by providing a
16
sanctuary and immunity for a multitude of criminals." The Heavenly City is also only an asylum for fugitives. Or as social contract thinkers see it, the social contract establishes corporate virtue as an asylum for individual sin, making a moral society out of immoral men; men whose natural inclination, according to Hobbes and Freud, is murder. The social contract establishes the general will to counter the will of each-that general will which Freud called the super-ego. The super-ego is supra-individual; even as the crime, so also conscience is collective.
Livy, I, 7. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, V, 17.
Cf. Freud, Group Psychology, 80.
The foundation of the fraternity or state is itself a crime, or rather the primal crime. The brothers club together in a criminal (Catilinarian) conspiracy: "society was now based on complicity in the common crime. Freud says that the sense of guilt can be allayed only by the solidarity of the participants. Actually, it is the common crime that creates the solidarity. Athenian polit- ical clubs, which were organized as secret societies, guar- anted their own solidarity by common participation in religious sacrilege; as in the parody of the Eleusinian mysteries (a Black Mass) or the mutilation of the Hermae.
Freud, Totem and Taboo, 146.
Cf. Calhoun, Athenian Clubs in Politics and Litigation, 34-37.
The social contract, in the form of a sworn covenant, is itself such a socializing sacrilege. On the Day of Atone- ment the Jews, the people of the Covenant, repent and cancel all the covenants they will make in the coming year until the next Day of Atonement. The people of the Covenant know that covenants are crimes. In origin
17
and in essence the oath is a curse. An oath is a conditional curse; a suspended sentence. The oath mobilizes the powers of punishment by being itself a crime, a sin, a sacrilege; wherefore it is written swear not at all. An oath lays violent hands upon the power invoked; and so is blasphemy, or taking the divine name in vain. Thus every oath plays with fire- is an ordeal. Men swear by the greater, that is to say the father. Every oath is sacred sacrilege, like the primal crime itself. In ancient Syracuse the official oath they called "the great oath was taken dressed in purple and wielding a fiery bolt- a sacrilegious usurpation of the attributes of the all- father Zeus.
Matthew V, 34. Hebrews VI, 16.
Cf. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, 23. Reik, "Kol Nidre, 22 169- 195. Glotz, "Le Serment, 111. Goitein, Primitive Ordeal and Modern Law, 49. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 140.
Brotherhood is always a quarrel over the paternal inheritance. "After the killing of the father a time followed when the brothers quarrelled among themselves for the succession. Justice is the solution and the perpetuation of the quarrel; as Heraclitus said, justice is the strife. Equals are rivals; and the dear love of comrades is made out of mutual jealousy and hate. "Observation has directed my attention to several cases in which during early child- hood feelings of jealousy derived from the mother-com- plex and of very great intensity arose against rivals, usually older brothers. This jealousy led to an exceedingly hostile aggressive attitude against brothers (or sisters) which might culminate in actual death-wishes, but which could not survive farther development. Under the in- fluence of training-_-and certainly not uninfluenced also by their own constant powerlessness--these wishes yielded to repression and to a transformation, so that the rivals
18
of the earlier period became the first homosexual love- objects. Brotherhood is an agonal relation between com- peting brothers.
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 132; "Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy," 242.
The Rule of Law is the Rule of Force. Justice is Strife; and in the arbitrament of battle Ares is just. In the ordeal of battle is a divine judgment: Rome won world rule by ordeal, and hence by right; it was by divine will that the Romans prevailed in the athletic contest for world rule. Tehovah is a man of war; deeds of justice hath he loved. The question could only be decided by an appeal to heaven, that is, by war and violence. The vi- olence vindicates (vim dicare).
Cf. Dante, De Monarchia, Il, 8, 9. Goitein, Primitive Ordeal and Modern Law, 64. Hume, Political Essays, 57.
The fraternal principle of equality, the paternal prin- ciple of domination; division of power (federation) or monopoly; coordination or subordination; reciprocity (in- terdependence) or sovereign self-sufficiency. "Sinful man hates the equality of all men under God and, as though he were God, loves to impose his sovereignty on his fellow men. 22 Fraternity was the relation between the elements in pre-Socratic philosophy-_those antagonistic pairs, the hot and the cold, the moist and the dry; and then Anaxagoras brought back the paternal and monarchi- cal principle of nous. And at the same time Anaxagoras friend Pericles, nous in action, sought to establish a mon- archy among the Greek cities. In the archaic age, the age of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the sixth century B.C., the century of Spartan hegemony, the relations be-
19
tween cities were fraternal and agonal; a concordia dis- cors, out of opposites the fairest harmony. Like the balance of power in the old brotherhood of nations, or 66 "concert of Europe, " in which, Ranke said, "The union of all must rest upon the independence of each single one. Out of separation and independent development will emerge true 99 harmony.
Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XIX, 12. von Laue, Leopold Ranke, The Formative Years, 218.
Cf. Schaefer, Staatsform und Politik. Vlastos, "Equality and Justice in early Greek cosmologies.
The old agonal warfare was between brothers; con- ducted according to rules; limited in objectives, and limited in time, in a necessary alternation of peace and war; the brothers need each other in order to fight again another day. The new warfare is total: it seeks an end to war, an end to brotherhood.
The quarrel is over the paternal inheritance. Fraterni- ties are moieties, or segments, into which the body of the world is divided; giving to each a property, a lot (Moira); a system of provinces marked off by boundaries, i.e., fenced by taboo. The myths represent totemism as what remains of a diminished totality, or what results trom a separating out from each other of what was pre- viously united. Here is the origin of the division of labor something that Freud did not know. The division of labor is established by distributing the parts among the clans as their totems. " 'The plan, or order, which was carried out when all the people camped together, was that of a wide circle. This tribal circle was called Hu- dhu-ga, and typified the cosmos. . The circle was divided into two great divisions or halves* (the exogamous phratries). "The one called In-shta-sun-da represented the
20
Heavens; and the other, the Hun-ga-she-nu, denoted the Earth. Each of the two great divisions was subdivided into clans, and each of the ten clans had its particular symbol (totem) representing a cosmic force, one of the various forms of life on the Earth.?»
Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, 69; cf. 55-56.
Cf. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 26.
That is why the body politic, for example in ancient Athens, Rome, or Israel, is composed of artificially sym- metrical parts. According to Aristotle's scheme, rejected as "artificial" by the modern revisionists, the Athenians were distributed into four tribes, corresponding to seasons, each of the four tribes being divided into three parts so that there would be altogether twelve, corresponding to months, called trittyes or phratries; with thirty clans going to make up each phratry, as days make up the month. In Rome a mystic interplay between three and ten produced three tribes, thirty curies (the Roman equivalent of the Greek phratry), three hundred gentes, three thousand households each supplying one footsoldier. It is a military organization of Quirites; and when assembled, it con- sists of, and votes by, groups-comitia curiata-not in- dividuals.
Cf. Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, 208-209. Mommsen, History of Rome, I, 101-102. Sinaiski, La Cité quiritaire. Brandon, History, Time and Deity, 62, 73-74. Ortega y Gasset, State, 99 "The Sportive Origin of the 33-40.
The quarrel is over the paternal inheritance. But the paternal inheritance is the paternal body itselt. "All par- took of his body, 77 says Freud. The body of the world which is broken into pieces is the body of the god. As the Christians say: others bequeath to their heirs their
21
property, but he bequeathed himself, that is the flesh and blood of his body. The fall is the Fall into Division of the one universal man. Civil strife is dismemberment:
O let me teach you how to knit again
This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf,
These broken limbs again into one body.Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 131. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, V, in.
Cf. Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 77. Blake, Night I, 1. 21.
The body of the world which is broken into pieces is the body of the god. This is Freud's "cannibalistic act." "The 'native bear when slain is thus divided. The slayer has the left ribs: the father the right hind leg, the mother the left hind leg, the elder brother the right fore-arm, the younger brother the left fore-arm, the elder sister the backbone, the younger the liver, the father's brother the right ribs, the mother's brother of the hunter a piece of the flank. "The various totems were only the name given to the different parts of Baiame's [the Great Spirit] body. The body is divided equally: no one came away from the feast without his fair share. A Thyestean banquet: "the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers."
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 132. Harrison, Themis, 141; Epilegomena, XXXI. Ezekiel V, 10.
Fraternities are moieties or segments of one body. But the segments are sexes; "the prototype of all opposition or contrariety is the contrariety of sex." Fraternal organization is a separating out of opposites which must forever seek each other out: contrary and complementary halves; sexes. "The two exogamous sections are opposed
22
as male and female, since the male belonging to one phratry must marry a female from the other. This con. trariety is reconciled in marriage--the union of opposites." The marriage combines Eros and Thanatos, Love and Strite.
Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, 65; cf. 68.
Division, duality, two sexes; in a sense there are always two brothers. "There is in every act a sociological dualism; two parties who exchange services and functions, each watching over the measure of fulfillment and the fairness of conduct of the other. 99 Dual organization. There is something here that Freud did not know. There are always two fraternities, not one; and exogamy is not marriage by capture but part of the ritual of Eros and Thanatos in the dual organization. Totemism is not based on an analogy between man and animal, but on an analogy between the differentiation of men into fraternities and the differentiation of animals into species. Lévi-Strauss quotes Bergson: "When therefore they [the members of two clans] declare that they are two species of animals, it is not on the animality but on the duality that they place the stress." The resemblances presupposed by so called totemic systems is between two systems of differences—animals as a kingdom divided into species, and men as a kind divided into segments which are each one a species.
Malinowski, Crime and Custom, 25-26.
Cf. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 55. Hocart, The Progress of Man, 238-242.
MacLeod, Origin and History of Politics, 213-214, 218-219. Roheim, War, Crime and the Covenant, 99-100. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 95.
Dual organization is sexual organization. The struc; tural principle is the union of opposites. "The most general
23
model, and the most systematic application, is to be found perhaps in China, in the opposition of the two principles of Yang and Yin, as male and female, day and night, sum- mer and winter, the union of which results in an organized totality (tao) such as the conjugal pair, the day, or the year, The agon, contest, between winter and summer, night and day, is coitus. "The efficacy of the ceremonies seemed to depend upon the participants confronting each other face to face and performing alternate gestures. There must sit a party of hosts--here a party of guests. If some were supposed to represent the sun, heat, and summer, the principle yang, others embodied the moon, cold, winter, the principle yin. . . . The seasons were imagined as belonging to one or the other sex. Neverthe- less the actors were all men."
Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 89. Granet, Chinese Civilization, 169.
The prototype of all opposition or contrariety is sex. The prototype of the division into two sexes is the sep- aration of earth and sky, Mother Earth and Father Sky, the primal parents. The primal one body that was divided among the brothers was parental and bisexual--the two become one flesh--the parents in coitus; in psychoanalyt- ical jargon, the "combined object." The primal crime is also the crime of Cronus, the youngest of the brothers, severing the member that joined Father Sky and Mother Earth. The fraternity comes together, on a contract, or covenant, "when they cut the calf in twain and passed between the parts thereof." "It was an ancient custom for allies to pass between severed parts, that being en- closed within the sacrifice, they might be the more sacredly united in one body.
Jeremiah XXXIV, 18. Calvin on Genesis XV, 10.
Cf. Roheim. "Covenant of Abraham, 452-459; War, Crime and the Covenant, 19-20; "Some Aspects of Semitic Monotheism.
24
At this point we go beyond Freud, with Melanie Klein: the body that the brothers partook of was not the body of the father, but the body of the father and mother combined. '"In Peter's second hour my interpreta- tion of the material he had brought had been that he and his brother practised mutual masturbation. Seven months later, when he was four years and four months old, he told me a long dream. . "There were two pigs in a pig- sty and in his bed too. They ate together in the pig-sty. There were also two boys in his bed in a boat; but they were quite big, like Uncle G - (a grown-up brother of his mother) and E (a girl friend whom he thought almost grown-up).: Most of the associations I got for this dream were verbal ones. They showed that the pigs represented himself and his brother and that their eating meant mutual fellatio. But they also stood for his parents copulating together. It turned out that his sexual rela- tions with his brother were based on an identification with his mother and father, in which Peter took the role of each in turn. » Compare the case of two brothers, Franz and Günther, age five and six. "The brothers got on very badly together, but on the whole Günther seemed to give way to his younger brother. Analysis was able to trace back their mutual sexual acts as far as the age of about three and a half and two and a half respectively, but it is probable that they had begun even earlier. . An analysis of the phantasies accompanying the acts showed that they not only represented destructive onslaughts upon his younger brother, but that the latter stood for Gün- ther's father and mother joined in sexual intercourse. Thus his behavior was in a sense an actual enactment, though in a mitigated form, of his sadistic masturbatory phantasies against his parents. " The material of the anal- ysis; of Finnegans Wake; of World History.
Klein, Psychoanalysis of Children, 49, 167.
25
The brothers introject the parents in coitus, in a new coitus, a new covenant or coming together. In dual organ- ization, in exogamous phratries between whom there is intercourse and antagonism, the brothers perpetually re- enact in their mutual relations what Freud calls the primal scene; their wrestling is sexual as well as aggressive, in imitation of the parental copulation.
Cf. Calif, "Justice and the Arbitrator."
Moieties in reciprocal exchange are to each other as male and female; and also as mother and child. "We are here in the midst of a society which overcomes its retribu- tion anxiety by a kind of division of labor. ... The funda- mental idea common to all of the tribes is that the men of any totemic group are responsible for the maintenance of the supply of the animal or plant which gives its name to the group. . Each group by its ceremonial attitude serves as a guarantee for the permanent existence of good ob- jects' for the other group. " Each group is to the other a breast; but, as we know from Melanie Klein, the breast is equated with the penis. Thus copulation is always oral. One of Melanie Klein's discoveries in the world of the un- conscious is the archetypal- primordial and universal- fantasy of (parental) coitus as a process of mutual de- vouring- oral copulation; or rather, cannibalistic; and therefore combining in one act the two Oedipal wishes, parental murder and incest; and including sexual inversion, since the male member is seen as a breast sucked. The con- test or coitus is always a funeral feast (game) on or beside a grave; "A Christian Altar, by the requirements of Canon Law, should contain relics of the dead. » It is always Ham- let, Act I, Scene I:
The funeral baked meats
do coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
26
Freud's vision and Melanie Klein's finally meet and merge into one. Consummatum est.
Roheim, Eternal Ones of the Dream, 150. Jones, Anathémata, 51.
Cf. Klein, Psychoanalysis of Children, 68, 188, 213, 269; "The Early Development of Conscience, ' 273.
There are always only two brothers: Romulus and Remus, Cain and Abel, Osiris and Set; and one of them murders the other. Or rather they both accuse each other of fratricide and put each other to death for the crime; as the Christian identifies the Jew with Cain, for having killed Christ, and accordingly punishes the Jew with cruci- fixion. The mutual relations of the brothers reënact the primal scene, the cannibalistic intercourse, and the primal crime, the dismemberment. The brothers are brothers to dragons, dragon seed sown (Spartoi); that comes up as young men armed for a Pyrrhic dance in which they mow each other down. All fraternity is fratricidal.
Cf. Ambrose, Cain and Abel, I, it. Cornford, Origins of Attic Comedy, 19-20. Harrison, Themis, 23-25. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialec- tique, 455, 479. Warren, Brother to Dragons.
Was it (as it must look to any god of cross-roads) simply a fortuitous intersection of life-paths, loyal to different fibs, or also a rendezvous between accomplices who, in spite of themselves, cannot resist meeting to remind the other (do both, at bottom, desire truth?) of that half of their secret which he would most like to forget, forcing us both, for a fraction of a second, to remem- ber our victim (but for him I could forget the blood, but for me he could forget the innocence) on whose immolation (call him Abel, Remus, whom you will, it is one Sin Offering) arcadias, utopias, our dear old bag of a democracy, are alike founded:
27
For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand.
Auden, "Vespers," Shield of Achilles, 79-80.
The reason for the civil war that destroyed the Roman Republic is the one given by Horace. For the reality of politics, we must go to the poets, not to the politicians; and believe the stories we were told as children.
Sic est: acerba fata Romanos agunt
scelusque fraternae necis,
ut immerentis Auxit in terram Remi
sacer nepotibus cruor."The truth is that avenging furies plague the Romans, and the guilt of fratricide, ever since the earth was soaked with innocent Remus' blood, a curse on his posterity
Horace, Epodes, VII
Cf. Wagenvoort, "The Crime of Fratricide."
The fratricide which killed the Roman Republic was only the final fulfillment of the symbolic and attenuated fratricide which had been its life. Roman liberty--the fra- ternity carved out of the cadaver of royal despotism--is despotism divided and set forever at war with itself. The imperium of the republican magistracy is the same royal imperium, now subdivided in time (made annual) and divided between colleagues. "The collegiate principle, says Mommsen, 66 "assumed [in the case of the consuls] an altogether peculiar form. The supreme power was not en- trusted to the two magistrates conjointly, but each consul possessed it and exercised it for himself as fully and wholly as it had been possessed and exercised by the king. Each of the colleagues was legally at liberty to interfere at any time in the province of the other. When therefore supreme power confronted supreme power and the one colleague
28
forbade what the other enjoined, the consular commands neutralized each other." Mommsen thought that the legend of Remus was an etiological reflection of the institution of the double consulate. There is reflection, or rather recur- rence, of the archetype in the institution. Remus jumped over his brother's wall, and his brother killed him, saying, "So perish whoever else shall leap over my battlements." As we can see in any playground; or in Berlin.
Mommsen, History of Rome I, 323-324; cf. "Die Remuslegende."
Cf. Livy, I, 6.
As colleague confronts colleague, so also do the con- stituent orders of the Roman Republic: the sovereignty (imperium) of the magistracy confronts the sovereignty (majestas) of the people not on a line of vertical sub- ordination but horizontally coordinate (SPQR--Senatus Populusque Romanus). The Roman body politic is not one, but two. The two principles cannot operate except as they cooperate; so that, as Mommsen says, "law was not primarily, as we conceive it, a command addressed by the sovereign to the community as a whole, but primarily a contract concluded between the constitutive powers of the state by address and counter-address. The schism in the body politic known as the secession (not rebellion) of the plebs is only an aggravation of the inherent separa- tion of the constituent orders. The extraordinary institu- tion to which that secession gave rise, the tribunate of the people, with its veto over the acts of the magistracy, amounted to legalized, and institutionalized, civil war. Hence it was properly used later to bestow Republican legality on the actual civil war. In the end, in accordance with the Freudian law of the return of the repressed, the murdered father returned and put an end to the quarreling of the brothers; it came to a choice between libertas and
29
pax; omnem potentiam ad unum conferri pacis interfuit. Truly these were sons of Mars or of a she-wolf.
Mommsen, History of Rome, I, 111. Tacitus, Histories, I, i.
Like all good archetypes the story can also take the form of a comedy. As Karl Marx observed in the Eight- eenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, there is eternal re- currence in history; events and personalities reappear, "ON the first occasion they appear as tragedy; on the second, as farce." Like the satyr play after the trilogy of tragedies; or the modern dual organization, the two-party system.
Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Lowis Bonaparte, ch. I, ad init.
Political parties are primitive secret societies: Tam- many's Wigwam; caucus; mafia; cabal. The deals are still always secret, in a smoke-filled room. Political parties are conspiracies to usurp the power of the father, "a taking of the sword out of the hand of the Sovereign. Political parties are antagonistic fraternities, or moieties; a contest between Blues and Greens in the Hippodrome; an agon between Leather Seller and Sausage Seller to seduce and subvert Old Man Demos; an Eskimo drumming contest; organized not by agreement on principle, but by confusing the issues to win; in a primitive ordeal or lottery in which the strife is justice, might makes right, and the major is the sanior pars.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 202.
Cf. Heckethorn, Secret Societies. Schattschneider, Party Government, 39- 41, 44. Calhoun, Athenian Clubs in Politics and Litigation. Cornford, Origins of Attic Comedy. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. Headlam, Election by Lot, 19, 26, 33. Washington, Farewell Address. The Federalist, nos. 9 and 10. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 85, 65-67, 207.
30
It is the tale of Shem and Shaun in North Armorica. "Bostonians sometimes seemed to love violence for its own sake. Over the years there had developed a rivalry between the South End and the North End of the City. On Pope's Day, November 5, when parades were held to celebrate the defeat of Guy Fawkes famous gunpowder plot, the rivalry between the two sections generally broke out into a free-for-all with stones and barrel staves the principal weapons. The two sides even developed a semi- military organization with recognized leaders, and late the fighting had become increasingly bloody. In 1764 a child was run over and killed by a wagon bearing an effigy of the pope, but even this had not stopped the battle. Despite the effort of the militia, the two sides had battered and bruised each other until the South End finally carried the day. When Boston had to face the problem of nullify- ing the Stamp Act, it was obvious that men who fought so energetically over the efligy of a pope might be employed in a more worthy cause" -to dress up as Indians and hold a Boston Tea Party, the Finnegans Wake of American His- tory, the foundation legend.
Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 121.
Cf. Forbes, Paul Revere, 97-98.
The comic wearing of the Indian mask, in the Boston Tea Party, or Tammany's Wigwam, is the lighter side of a game, a ritual, the darker side of which is fraternal geno- cide. Indians are our Indian brothers; one of the ten lost tribes of Israel; the lost sheep we came to find; now un- appeased ghosts in the unconscious of the white man.
Cf. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 44-45. Allen, The Legend of Noah, ch. VI.
31
This could go on forever; there is eternal recurrence. Even on the other side of the Wall, in a one-party system. From the statement of the Chinese Communists on the sino-Soviet dispute:
It is a very very bad habit of yours thus to put on the airs of a patriarchal party. It is entirely illegitimate. The 1957 declara- tion and the 1960 statement clearly state that all Communist parties are independent and equal. According to this principle, the relations among fraternal parties should under no cir- cumstances be like the relations between a leading party and the led, and much less like the relations between a patriarchal father and his son . . . the attitude that Comrade Khrushchev has adopted is patriarchal, arbitrary, and tyrannical. He has in fact treated the relationship between the great Communist party of the Soviet Union and our party not as one between brothers but as one between patriarchal father and son.
The New York Times, September 14, 1963.
V
Person
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. XVI, "Of Persons, Authors, and things Personated".
The word Person is latine: instead whereof the Greeks have TóowTor, which signifies the Face as Persona in latine sig- nifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counter- feited on the Stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation.Hobbes, Leviathan, 133-134.
Personality is persona, a mask. The world is a stage, the self a theatrical creation: "The self, then, as a per- formed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature,
90
91
[[NEED!!]]
92
said- noun, none, nun. I'm a nomen or no man; my name is no man, Odysseus, Everyman, said.
Cf. Laing, Divided Self, 223.
Names are taboo; primitive man regards his name not as an external label but as an essential part of his per- sonality. Neurotics likewise: "One of these taboo patients of my acquaintance had adopted a rule against writing her own name for fear that it might fall into the hands of someone who would then be in possession of a portion of her personality. "Our children do the same. It is not that children, neurotics, and primitives are so stupid as to be unable to discriminate between words and things; it is that they are not so repressed as to be unaware that personality is a social fiction, and a name a magical invo- cation of a particular role in the social drama.
Freud, Totem and Taboo, 56.
The mask is magic. Character is not innate: a man's character is his demon, his tutelar spirit; received in a dream. His character is his destiny, which is to act out his dream.
When a boy is to be thus initiated, he is put under an alternate course of physic and fasting, either taking no food whatever, or swallowing the most powerful and nauseous medicines, and occasionally he is made to drink decoctions of an intoxicating nature, until his mind becomes sufficiently bewildered, so that he sees visions and has extraordinary dreams, for which, of course, he has been prepared before- hand. He will fancy himself flying through the air, walking under ground, stepping from one ridge or hill to the other across the valley beneath, fighting and conquering giants and monsters and defeating whole hosts by his single arm. . When a boy has been initiated, a name is given to him analogous to the visions he has seen, and to the destiny that
93
is supposed to be prepared for him. The boy, imagining all that happened to him while under perturbation to have been real, sets out in the world with lofty notions of himself, and animated with courage for the most desperate undertakings.
Roheim, Magic and Schizophrenia, 54-55, quoting Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, III, 395.
The dream-stuff out of which personality is made is not private, but social; a collective dream.
In each clan is to be found a set of names called the names of childhood. These names are more of titles than of cognomens. They are determined upon by sociologic and divinistic modes, and are bestowed in childhood as the verity names or titles of the children to whom given. But this body of names relating to any one totem-for instance, to one of the beast totems-will not be the name of the totem beast itself but will be names both of the totem in its various conditions and of various parts of the totem, or of its functions, or of its attributes, actual or mythical. Now these parts or functions, or attributes of the parts or functions, are subdivided also in a six-fold manner, so that the name relating to one member of the totem-for example, like the right arm or leg of the animal thereof-would correspond to the north, and would be the first in honor in a clan (not itself of the northern group); then the name relating to another member-say to the left leg or arm and its powers, etc.-would pertain to the west and would be second in honor; and another member-say the right foot-to the south and would be third in honor; and of another mem- ber-say the left foot-to the east and would be fourth in honor; to another-say the head-to the upper regions and would be fifth in honor; and another-say the tail-to the lower region and would be sixth in honor; while the heart or the navel and center of the being would be first as well as last in honor.
With such a system of arrangement as all this may be seen to be, with such a facile device for symbolizing the arrangement (not only according to number of the regions and their subdivisions in their relative succession and the succession of their elements and seasons, but also in colours attributed to them, etc.) and, finally, with such an arrange-
94
ment of names correspondingly classified and of terms of re- lationship significant of rank rather than of consanguinal connection, mistake in the order of a ceremonial, a proces- sion or a council is simply impossible, and the people em- ploying such devices may be said to have written and to be writing their statutes and laws in all their daily relationships and utterances.
F. H. Cushing cited in Mauss, "La notion de personne," 338-339.
The fund of personality, the fund of soul-stuff avail- able, is fixed and collective. The only soul is the group- soul, and this consists of nothing but group functions.
Cf. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, 95.
Personality is not innate, but acquired. Like a mask, it is a thing, a fetish, a fetishistic object or commodity. "I consent that Isis shall search into me, and that my name shall pass from my breast into hers." The real name of the god, with which his power was inextricably bound up, was supposed to be lodged, in an almost physical sense, somewhere in his breast, from which Isis extracted it by a sort of surgical operation and transferred it with all its supernatural powers to herself. In the famous pot- latch cultures of the Indians of the northwest coast, what is wagered, won, and lost, is personality, incorporated not only in the name but also in a variety of emblematic ob- jects; in masks; also blankets, and bits of copper.
Frazer, The Golden Bough, 261.
Cf. Mauss, "La notion de personne,", 342, 344-345.
The fund of personality types in a given culture is fixed and hereditary. "They never change their names from the beginning, when the first human beings existed in the world; for names cannot go out of the family of
95
the head chiefs of the numayms, only to the eldest one of the children of the head chief." "Earth-maker, in the be- ginning, sent tour men from above, and when they came to this earth everything that happened to them was uti- lized in making proper names. .. As they had come from above so from that fact has originated a name Comes- from-above... When they came, there was a drizzling rain and hence the names Walking-in-mist, Comes-in- mist, Drizzling-rain.. Now the thunderbirds come with terrible thunder-crashes. Everything on the earth, animals, plants, everything, is deluged with rain. Terrible thunder-crashes resound everywhere. From all this a name is derived and that is my name--Crashing-Thunder."
P. Radin cited in Mauss, "La notion de personne;" 342.
Fixed personalities; unchanging masks; character is carving. When Marcus Aurelius says, "carve your mask," he means "develop your character. Stereotypes. All per- sonality is rigid- "This is the way to do things, and this is the only way 22 -magical, and mechanical; a mechaniza- tion of a particular way of reacting"; a repetition-compul- sion. A compulsion to perpetuate an identity established in previous incarnations: character is karmic.
At the death of the human incarnation, the divine spirit transmigrates into another man. The Buddhist Tartars believe in a great number of living Buddhas, who officiate as Grand Lamas at the head of the most important monasteries. When one of these Grand Lamas dies his disciples do not sorrow, for they know that he will soon reappear, being born in the form of an infant. Their only anxiety is to discover the place of his birth... . When at last they find the child they fall down and worship him. Before, however, he is acknowledged as the Grand Lama whom they seek he must satisfy them of his identity. He is asked the name of the monastery of which he claims to be the head, how far off it is, and how many monks live in it; he must also describe the habits of
96
the deceased Grand Lama and the manner of his death. Then various articles, as prayer-books, tea-pots, and cups, are placed before him, and he has to point out those used by himself in his previous life. If he does so without a mistake his claims are admitted, and he is conducted in triumph to the monastery.
Frazer, The Golden Bough, 102-103.
Cf. Ferenczi, "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child," 66. Roheim, Magic and Schizophrenia, 81, 83.
Thus names and personalities are fixed by archetypal persons and situations; the voices coming through the masks are always ancestral voices. The masquerade or carnival is a danse macabre, a visit of ancestral spirits, represented by the authorized bearers of their persons. The life of the clan consists in the perpetual reincarnation of ancestors--a reincarnation achieved by magic, by imi- tation (identification), by dramatic representation.
Cf. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, ch. I.
Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly war- riors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis, every soldier a living corpse. The dead and the living who fought together at Marathon are indistinguishable.
Cf. Höller, Germanisches Sakralkönigtum, I, 160-167, 188, 220, 242.
Roheim, Gates of the Dream, ch. X, I. "Feralis Exercitus."
Larva means mask; or ghost. Larvatus, masked, a personality-_-larvatus prodeo (Descartes); it also means mad, a case of demoniacal possession. Larva is also "the immature form of animals characterized by metamor- phosis"; in the grub state; before their transformation into
97
a pupa, or pupil; i.e., before their initiation. Children are reincarnated ghosts.
Cf. Descartes, Cogitationes private, 213.
Among the Lapps, when a woman was with child and near the time of her delivery, a deceased ancestor or relation used to appear to her in a dream and inform her what dead person was to be born again in her infant, and whose name the child was therefore to bear. If the woman had no such dream, it fell to the father or the relatives to determine the name by divination or by consulting a wizard. Among the Khonds a birth is celebrated on the seventh day after the event by a feast given to the priest and to the whole village. To determine the child's name the priest drops grains of rice into a cup of water, naming with each grain a deceased an- cestor. From the movements of the seed in the water, and from observations made on the person of the infant, he pro- nounces which of his progenitors has reappeared in him, and the child generally, at least among the northern tribes, receives the name of that ancestor. Among the Yorubas, soon after a child has been born, a priest of Ifa, the god of divination, appears on the scene to ascertain what ancestral soul has been reborn in the infant. As soon as this has been decided, the parents are told that the child must conform in all respects to the manner of life of the ancestor who now animates him or her, and if, as often happens, they profess ignorance, the priest supplies the necessary information. The child usually receives the name of the ancestor who has been born again in him.
Frazer, The Golden Bough, 256.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on. "The alt- jira (ancestor of the mythical period), the ngantja ( hid- den double), the kuruna (soul), and the rella ndurpa (real person), are all identical in one sense though differ- ent in another. The altjira, the ancestors with whom we are identical, are "the people of the dream 29 or the Eternal
98
Ones of the Dream. And, "a father always "finds' his child in a dream. ... In his dream he sees the spirit child stand- ing on his head and catches it in his hand after which it enters his wife.
Roheim, Eternal Ones of the Dream, 98; ct. 149, 210-211; Gates of the Dream, 111; cf. 105, 112-113.
"A PERSON, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man. . . . When they are considered as his owne, then he is called a Naturall Person: And when they are considered as representing the words and actions of another, then is he a Feigned or Artificiall person." A person is always a feigned or artificial person, persona ficta. A person is never himself but always a mask; a person never owns his own person, but always represents another, by whom he is possessed. And the other that one is, is always ancestors; one's soul is not one's own, but daddy's. This is the meaning of the Oedipus Complex.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 133.
From the primitive mask to the modern personality, through three intermediate reorganizations of the theater: Roman law, Stoic ethics, Christian theology.
Cf. Mauss, "La notion de personne."
Roman law, the Roman jurists say, is concerned with three things only, persons, things, and actions. Roman law is a set of rules for a new theater of judicial and political process, the respublica or public realm. "The organization of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the city and physiognomically guaranteed by its law--lest the succeeding generations change its identity beyond recog-
99
nition—is a kind of organized remembrance. It assures the mortal actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and, generally, appearing before an audience." "Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history." "That is why the theater is the political art par excellence." Solon and Thespis, these two, are one: a new theatricality, a new histrionic sensibility.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 10, 767, 176-177.
Cf. Else, "The Origin of Tpayt$la,
Action is what takes place in front of the camera, with the lights turned on, to throw the rest of reality into dark- ness (scotomisation, repression); action takes place in Plato's cave. Those for whom not to be seen is non- existence are not alive; and the kind of existence they seek, the immortality they seek, is spectral; to be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered the ambition of the dead. The public realm is the stage for heroic action, and heroes are spectres of the living dead. The passport which grants access to the public realm, which distinguishes master from slave, the essential political virtue, is the courage to die, to commit suicide, to make one's life a living death. "One must pay dearly for im- mortality: one has to die several times while still alive."
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (The Portable Nietzsche), 660.
Heroic individualism is identification with ancestors in a new space and a new time: the new space is the public realm; the new time is history. Greek Tragedy is the imi- tation of an action; Roman real action, as opposed to the childish stage plays of the Greeks, is what takes place on
100
the stage of history. Identification with ancestors, instead of being an occasional ritual, is now a life destiny, is en- acted in a whole life (of public service). Instead of the cyclic recurrence of a temporary role, the historical per- sonage offers a continuous performance and achievès a continuous existence; not for a moment but for all time; an individual embodiment of the ancestral soul or dream.
Cf. Arendt, The Human Condition, 8-9. Roheim, Animism, 143. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, 81-83. Bentzen, King and Messiah, 32-38.
And in legal actions: Kant says, "If I look at public law and abstract from its matter or empirical elements, then there remains the form of publicity. The possibility of this publicity, every legal title implies. Without it there could be no justice, which can only be thought of as before the eyes of men. " The action, in the courtroom, or in the political arena, is a trial or contest, an agon, as in the Greek stage plays, in which "the parties litigant are not definite individuals, but abstract persons in the mask of plaintiff and defendant."
Kant, Perpetual Peace, 44-45. Thering in J. Frank, Law and the Modern Mind, 218.
Those entitled to stage an appearance in the public realm, the actors as opposed to the chorus, are juristic persons. A slave, the Roman jurists say, has no persona; the Greek jurists say he is without face (ampóowmos) and hence is represented--the Greeks say "characterized" by his master. There is a vestige of this distinction in the requirement of a property qualification for voters; "The true reason, " says Blackstone (quoted by Alexander Hamil- ton), "of requiring any qualification, with regard to property in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so
101
mean a situation, that they are esteemed to have no will of their own, " No substance, no soul, no suffrage. The ego is public relations.
Hamilton cited in Scott, Political Thought in America, 58-59.
The new juristic personality created by the Romans is, like a Kwakiutl mask, hereditary. Roman law showed subsequent civilizations how to accomplish the magical metamorphosis of living persons into reincarnations of the dead by new, even more binding methods. In the Roman law of inheritance, says Henry Maine, "the notion was that, though the physical person of the deceased had perished, his legal personality survived and descended unimpaired on his Heir or Co-Heirs, in whom his identity (so far as the law was concerned) was continued." This is the principle of "universal succession, 29 whereby the heir "is invested with the legal clothing of another, » is "instantly clothed with his entire legal person", so that "in the old Roman Law of Inheritance, the notion of a will or testament is inextricably bound up, I might almost say confounded, with the theory of a man's posthumous exist- ence in the person of his heir--the elimination of the fact of death." Compare Roheim: "What is the basis of inherit- ance? A retention of the past. The great man is not dead; his psychological identification with his son is taken to be real."
Maine, Ancient Law, 179, 181, 189-190. Roheim, Riddle of the Sphinx, 233.
The king never dies (Kantorowicz). "The temple of the Baganda kings, with their hereditary courts, keeping the past alive by perpetual reènactment. 29 "For purposes of Roman Testamentary Jurisprudence each individual citizen was a Corporation sole, like the English king.
102
Everything turns on the continuity of succession. The im- mortal corporation, the universitas juris of universal suc- cession, never dies: universitas non moritur. The legal fictions of the West correspond to the metaphysical fictions of the Fast. The immortal corporation corresponds to the immortal soul which carries the succession to the Grand Lama of Tibet. In both cases there is the man's posthumous existence in the person of his heir, the elimination of the fact of death. The Western legal fiction, with its fetishism (personification) of the property, its reification of persons, eliminates the facts more completely, by eliminating the moment of truth, the interregnum, the search for the new incarnation. Modern (Western) legalistic rationalism does not get away from magic: on the contrary, it makes the magical effects so permanent and so pervasive that we do not notice them at all. But only God can make an heir.
Maine, Ancient Law, 187, 182. Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy, 44.
Cf. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, chs. VI and VII.
"God planted in men a strong desire also of propagat- ing their kind, and of continuing themselves in their pos- terity"; this is the basis of inheritance, according to Locke. Patrilineal inheritance is not for the sake of the sons, but for the sake of the defunct father-_hereditas non heredis personam sed defuncti sustinet. This the classical Western patriarchy. In "universal succession " the family is a corpor- ation of which the paterfamilias is the representative, its public officer, or head. The paterfamilias in his own person incorporates the corporation, embodies its soul (dream) stuff. In patriarchy the living father is the incarnate an- cestors; praesens deus; an ever present godhead; an owner: for a king, to be a god is to own land instead of being merely the god's steward. The result is an immortal corpor- ation, with an ever present representative, and continuity of succession. "Immediately on the death of the father
103
ownership is, so to say, continued"; and the gloss on this passage of Justinian's Institutes says, "Father and son are one according to the fiction of the law" '_pater et filius unum fictione juris sunt. " Father and son are identified.
Locke, Treatise of Civil Government, 62. Kantorowic, The King's Two Bodies, 338.
Cf. Maine, Ancient Law, 184, 186. Noyes, Property, 101-104.
In fraternal organization, in the primitive mask cul- ture, the ancestors, the Eternal Ones of the Dream, are distinct from the living. The son is an ancestor reincar- nated, but not a continuation of his father; he is his grandfather (reincarnated), but not his father. The distinction between generations, the unity of the genera tions (the brothers) is preserved. The rhythm is not continuity but alternation (oscillation) between genera- tions; my son is my father reborn, and as such to be respected by me; the integrity of the separate generations is preserved. In patrilineal inheritance my son is a continu- ation of me; I incorporate him, swallow him (Cronus swallowing his children). In fraternal organization my son was my father; in swallowing him I have swallowed my father. So in patriarchy I become my own father, pater sui; by parricide; and deny the deed: the king never dies.
Cf. Granet, Chinese Civilization, Bk II, ch. V. Roheim, Riddle of the Sphinx, 233. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, 435-436.
The Stoic reorganization of the theater is contained in the word conscience; conscientia (ouveinors); literally, 66 "joint-knowing"; as in complicity; or witnessing. Conscience is what Freud in his later writings called the super-ego; which in earlier writings he more eloquently called the "watching-institution. » The construction of the super-ego moves the open-air theater indoors. Action, which is action
104
only if displayed, is now displayed to an internal obseryer; a super-ego looking down from above; the god in the gal- lery, watching his children play. In the primitive mask culture, the person makes visible the other that one is (is not), namely, ancestors. The super-ego is constructed by internalizing the ancestors. The self unifies itself with the other by splitting itself into both self and other; with- drawing the imitation of ancestors into its own invisible interior. And the process of withdrawing the external drama into the interior is itself dramatic. The process which Freud calls identification with parents, or incorpora- tion of parents, is an imitation of them, a mimesis of them. Freud says that the condition for giving up an external love-object is to make out of oneself a substitute for the lost object; part of the ego dresses up as father and says to the id, "Look, I am so like father, you can just as well love 99 me instead. So Roheim can say, "By personality we mean that each individual grows up by wearing a mask, by imitating one of his parents."
Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, 12; cf. Magic and Schizo- phrenia, 45.
Cf. Freud, "On Narcissism," 54n; The Ego and the Id, 37.
Some capital texts in the New Testament tell us that God is no respecter of persons-_où poowToNurns; "not taken by masks"; not captivated, not crazy about them; not taken in, not deceived by them. This is the God in whom "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye all are one in Christ Jesus. » This God cares not for visible distinctions; or visible achievements, outer works. The faith that saves is internal and invisible. Christian virtue, St. Augustine says, is of a kind that "cannot be displayed before men's eyes"; "take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them." Here is the deeper root of the Augustinian and Puritanical opposition to the theater. But the
105
theatrical is the political; this Christianity is subversive of the public realm. Hannah Arendt quotes Tertullian: nec ulla magis res aliena quam publica, no concern is more alien to us than the public concern or republic. My king- dom is not of this world: not of this world of outward ap- pearance, this vain show. It is a real kingdom, not a spectral theatrical show.
Acts X, 34; Romans II, 11; Galatians III, 28; Ephesians VI, 9; Colossians IlI, 25; Matthew VI, 1. Arendt, The Human Condition, 65-66. Au- gustine, De Civitate Dei, I, 28.
God does not go for personalities; nor does the Last Judgment consist in the award of prizes to personalities for the performance of their parts. The performance principle must go; the show must not go on. The parts are not real: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus; he is not your personal Saviour. In the Last Judgment the apocalyptic fire will burn up the masks, and the theater, leaving not a rack behind. Freud came to give the show away; the outcome of psychoanalysis is not "ego psychology » but the doctrine of "anatta" or no-self: the ego is a "me-fabrication (aham- kara), a piece of illusion (Maya), which disintegrates at the moment of illumination: "the self has been completely understood, and so ceases to be." And with the doctrine of no-self goes the doctrine of non-action: action is proper only to an ignorant person, and doing nothing is, if rightly understood, the supreme action.
Cf. Powell, Zen and Reality, 49, 69. Nikhilananda, Bhagavad Gita, 15. Durkheim, The Japanese Cult of Tranquillity, 88-89. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 44, 75, 89. Mauss, "La notion de personne, 348.
But I Samuel XVI, 7: "For Jehovah seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but Jehovah looketh on the heart." Christian virtue is dis- played to an even more exacting audience than the Stoic conscience. Jeremiah XVII, 10: "I, Jehovah, search the
106
heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings. » Chris- tian personality remains a self-dramatization of the son enacted before the eyes of the heavenly father. In the sight of this spectator, personality ceases to be a social or political role (we take from our earthly fathers to give to our heavenly father); all performers are immediate and unique; the distinction between public and private disap- pears; we are on stage all the time. Christianity will not be rid of the performance principle, will not become a pure principle of invisible grace, until it gets rid of the spectre of the Father, Old Noboddady, the watching institution.
The God who is no respecter of persons is yet himself God in three Persons. The Athanasian Creed says that we worship One God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. God is three Persons: the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord; So are we forbidden by the Catholic religion to say, There be three Gods, or three Lords. And of Christ it says that he is God and Man: God, of the Sub- stance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world; Who although he be God and Man--yet he is not two, but one Christ; One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by the taking of the Manhood into God; One alto- gether: not by confusion of Substance, but by unity of Person.
Cf. Schlossmann, Persona und Tpbowmov im Recht und im Christlichen Dogma.
107
The Athanasian Creed is a doctrine of representation, or impersonation. Hobbes: "A Person, (as I have shewn before, chapt. 13) is he that is Represented, as often as hee [sic] is Represented; and therefore God, who has been Represented (that is, Personated) thrice, may properly enough be said to be three Persons; though neither the word Person, nor Trinity be ascribed to him in the Bible. .. For so God the Father, as Represented by Moses, is one Person; and as Represented by his Sonne, another Person; and as Represented by the Apostles, and by the Doctors that taught by authority from them derived, is a third Person, and yet every Person here, is the Person of one and the same God. The Trinity is a doctrine of the masks of God. In this play God is one, but three actors take his part; and yet it is not a part but the whole of God that they represent.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 430.
The complicated dramaturgy of the Athanasian Creed is a new interpretation of the old story--the drama of the incarnation (or reincarnation) of God in Man. What it seems to assert is the mystical transformation of the actor into the part--the absorption of the Manhood into the Godhead; the Son into the Father (I and my Father are one); and the mystical transformation of the part into the whole. But if the actor is really transformed into the part, and the part is the whole; then mask is reality, and persona finally acquires the modern sense of the personality as the real self. Persona est substantia rationalis individua: cha person is a rational individual substance. Substance, Latin substantia, is what stands underneath (the mask); but also that which stands by itself or in itself and not in another. A person is a mask which has grown into the body, grown one with the body; which became permanent when the drama was internalized: which became indivisible from the
108
body when it became invisible; a part which is a whole. "some things can exist apart and some cannot, and it is the former that are substances" (Aristotle); an individual, a part which is a whole; that finite substance which Spinoza exposed as a nonentity.
John X, 30. Cassiodorus cited in Mauss, "La notion de personne," 358.
Cf. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, I, 63.
The black fellows of Australia, the rudest savages we know, make themselves a temporary personality by the simple application of "make-up, paint; and the mask is gone as quickly as it is made. Permanent masks, preserved as heirlooms, represent a deeper occupation of the individ- ual by ghosts, a deeper investment of the present by the past; but the mask is worn only on ritual occasions. The juristic personality never dies, and, incorporated in the property, never disappears. The invisible internal drama of conscience never ceases; and, finally, the mystery of Christianity is its abolition of the distinction between per- son and substance.
The incomprehensibility of the Athanasian Creed cor- responds to our unconsciousness of the magic in person- ality. "Where primitives have magic, we have the un- conscious magic which is personality 29 "What we fail to recognize is that all symptoms, defense mechanisms, in fact, personality itself, are a form of magic.... Primitives have magic in a conscious form, whereas with us it can function only (except in certain forms of neurosis or psy- chosis) if it is unconscious. 29 Except in certain forms of neurosis and psychosis: the insane are closer to the truth.
Roheim, Magic and Schizophrenia, 84; Gates of the Dream, 132.
VI
Representative
When the problem in psychoanalysis becomes not repres- sion, but symbolism; when we discover that even if there were no dream-censor we should still have symbolism; then personality (soul, ego) becomes not substance, but fiction, representation; and the primal form of politics be- comes not domination (repression), but representation.
Cf. Freud, General Introduction, 156.
Representation, or personality: for these two notions are one; for the Essence of the Commonwealth is (to de- fine it) "One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude, by Mutwall Covenants one with another, have made them- selves every one the Author." And "a Multitude of men are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Per- son, Represented. 29 Representation is the essence of the
109
110
social contract: "To conferr all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by a plurality of voices, unto one Will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one Man, or Assembly of men, to bear their Person. The essence of representation is the mysterious relation, "bearing the Person of them all."
Hobbes, Leviathan, 136, 143, 146.
"A Multitude of men are made One Person." The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation, and the idea of a corporation is the idea of a juristic person. "This is more than Consent, or Concord: it is a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person." Out of many, one: a logical impossibility; a piece of poetry, or symbolism; an enacted or incarnate metaphor; a poetic creation. The Common- wealth is "an Artificiall Man, 2› a body politic, "in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul; the Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts, 29 etc. Does this "Artificiall Man, this "Feigned or Artificial Person, 29 make "a real Unitie of them all'? Are the essence of the mode of legal statement which refers to corporate bodies." Is the shift of meaning real? Does the metaphor accomplish a metamorphosis? "The Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation. ." Or like that hoc est corpus meum, This is my body, pronounced by God in the Redemption. Is there a real transubstantiation? Is there a miracle in the commun- ion of the mortal God, the great Leviathan; a miracle
111
which gives life to the individual communicants also? For so-called "real." living, 99 "natural" persons, individual per- sons, are not natural but juristic persons, personae fictae, social creations, no more real than corporations.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 3-4, 136, 143.
Cf. Wolff, "On the Nature of Legal Persons. 22 Hart, "Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence."
The Commonwealth is a Person; the representative, or "Publique Person, is a person. But «A PERSON is he, whose words are considered, either as his own, or as repre- senting the words or actions of another man. . . a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in com- mon Conversation; and to personate, is to Act, or Represent himselfe, or an other; and he that acteth another is said to bear his Person, or act in his name; . and is called on diverse occasions, diversly: as a Representer, or Representative, a Lieutenant, a Vicar, an Attorney, a Deputy, a Procurator, an Actor, and the like." Political representation is theatrical representation. A political so- city comes into existence when it articulates itself and produces a representative; that is to say, organizes itself as a theater, addressed to a stage, on which their repre- sentative can perform. The "real Unitie of them all" iS made out of the identification of the group with the actor on the stage. In Hobbes's words, "it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One. » In Freud's words, "I have in mind the situation of the most ancient Greek Tragedy. A com- pany of individuals, named and dressed alike, surrounded a single figure, all hanging upon his words and deeds: they were the chorus and the impersonator of the Hero." "A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have substituted one and the same object for their ego
112
ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego. »
Hobbes, Leviathan, 133-134, 136, 359. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 155; Group Psychology, 80.
The stage produced by political articulation is the stage of history. "As a result of political articulation, we find human beings, the rulers, who can act for society, men whose acts are not imputed to their own persons but to the society as a whole." 22 Representation is "the form by which a political society gains existence for action in his- tory." The nations obtain access to the stage of history through their representatives, the kings who strut the stage. Vogelin illustrates from the History of the Lom- bards by Paulus Diaconus. The active history of the Lombards begins when the people decided that they no longer wanted to live in small federated tribes, and "estab- lished for themselves a king like the other nations. And the consequence of having a king is having a history, that is to say, wars; the purpose of which is to put down the historical action, the kings, of other peoples. First the Herules and next the Gepids were defeated and their power broken to the degree that king. 2) "they no longer had a Peaceful existence, existence without historical action, needs no kingship: the Alans and Suebes preserved their kingship in Spain for a long time, "though they had no need of it in their undisturbed quiet. 99
Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 37, 46-47, 49.
Theater is ritual; representation is a form of ritual Representation is the organizing principle in religion: "The guiding principle in redemptive history is the election of a minority for the redemption of the whole. Otherwise expressed, it is the principle of representation. 99 Political
113
representation and religious representation, these two, are one; being united in the archetypal pattern underlying both- divine kingship. All rule is royal in essence, and all royalty by grace of God. "Sacral or divine kingship is the accepted term for an institution, simultaneously of a re- ligious and a political kind, found in a majority of different cultural areas, and meaning that the king by the Grace of God' in his own person incarnates the god and in the cult plays the part of the god. At the same time, however, he also represents, in a special manner, the Collective, the Whole, the People, and so stands between man and god as the Mediator on whom everything and everybody depends.
Cullmann, Christ and Time, 116. Engnell in Bentzen, King and Messiah, 36.
Hobbes says, "The Kingdome of God is a Civil Com- monwealth, where God himself is Soveraign, by vertue first of the Old, and since of the New, Covenant, wherein he reigneth by his Vicar, or Lieutenant. The representa- tive of the people is the representative of God. The thrust of the social group to make itself visible on the stage of history is at the same time the thrust of a transcendent reality to make itself visible; to be represented on earth; to be impersonated, or incarnated; for, in the last resort, the transcendent reality is the social group itself. There- fore, in the social contract, which is the divine Fiat which incorporates the group, the vox populi is the vox dei; and this mythology is the only basis for popular suffrage. "The people make, and "only God can make, 99 a repre- sentative. It is precisely in the voluntary consent of the Governed that Government displays its divine origin (Cusanus); in the republican theory of American Puri- tanism, «There are not two several and distinct actings, one of God, another of the people; but in one and the
114
same action God, by the people's suffrages, makes such an one governor, or magistrate, and not another."
Hobbes, Leviathan, 393; cf. 357, 496, 499. Miller, American Puritans, go.
Cf. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, 47, 146.
Every king is an image of God; a representation on earth of the divine majesty. But, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Hobbes interprets the Second Commandment, "That they should not make any Image to represent him; that is to say, they were not to choose to themselves, neither in heaven, nor in earth, any Representative of their own fancying." In Locke, "the public person vested with the power of the law . . . is to be considered as the image, phantom, or representative of the commonwealth." In Locke royalty is reduced to mere effigy and show; revolutionary republicanism seeks to abolish effigy and show: "The old idea was that man must be governed by effigy and show, and that a superstitious reverence was necessary to establish authority"; "The putting of any individual as a figure for a nation is improper" (Paine). "Democracy has no monuments. It strikes no medals. It bears the head of no man on a coin. Its very essence is iconoclastic" (John Quincy Adams). The old idea was that man must be governed by effigy and show; the new idea is—modern representative government. An end to idolatry is not so easy.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 452. Locke, Treatise, 193-194. Adams, Memoirs, VIII, 433. Paine, Major Writings, II, 683.
Cf. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 99. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, 141.
A ritual approach is a historical approach. Ritual is, simply, a reènactment of the past. The great revolutions in human society are changes in the form of symbolic rep-
115
resentation; reorganizations of the theater, of the stage for human action. The matter remains the same: the "seasonal pattern of ritual'; the basic dream; the old, old story; old unhappy far-off things--the matter of Troy, or Brittany, or Britain--which are also familiar matter of today; as in Finnegans Wake. But the form changes, the form of the public enactment. In one of these great revo- lutions, the principle of representation itself emerges; there was a time before there were kings. "Up to this point we have been considering the seasonal ceremonies as rites performed collectively by the community as a whole. In course of time, however, the tendency grows up to concentrate them in a single individual who is taken to personify and epitomize the entire group. Conse- quently all the things which were previously done by the group as a whole in order to ensure and maintain its existence, now tend to be done representatively by the king. 99 The king incorporates the ritual; makes it a one- man show.
Gaster, Thespis, 48.
The (royal) representative needs a new space and a new time for his act. The sacred center is now incarnate, in the king: "His person is considered, if we may express it so, as the dynamical centre of the universe. 29 And from his own person sacredness radiates everywhere: «Poly- nesian chiefs, by extending the application of the taboo on their own persons, bring everything into the sphere of ritual." This extension of the realm of the sacred gives rise to the secular order: the king became the supreme judge in all matters throughout the land, thus embodying, enacting in his own person, the universal sun-order. The whole world becomes their sepulcher, or pyramid; the scene of their actions; their memorable actions. As an in- dividual embodiment of the group-soul, the royal per-
116
formance must be continuous; and must tell the whole story; in a whole life devoted to acting out the dream, the ritual, the ancestral destiny; and therefore obtaining individual immortality. When public dreaming is no longer limited to a restricted sacred space and time, but has become a full-time activity of our special representa- tive, ritual and myth are "historicized. » The ritual battle against the primal Chaos monster becomes an actual battle against the hordes of heathens. Often it is difficult to say whether a hymn celebrates a ritual "victory or an "actual" battle: the word for "heathens" is also the word for "devils. " History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.
Frazer, The Golden Bough, 168. Hocart, Kings and Councillors, 136-137; ct. 139, 153.
Cf. Bentzen, King and Messiah, 16-17, 30-33, 37-38, 57-59. Gaster, Thespis, 38-39.
The urban revolution in the Ancient Near East was to make a world fit for kings to perform in, the city of the great king; a city and a tower that would reach unto heaven. And in Oriental despotism is the origin of modern individualism. Those kings were the first historical embodiments of the group-soul, the first incarnations of the group-soul in an individual. The further revolution of the iron age in the West—in Greece, in Rome, in Israel—was to establish popular sovereignty, monarchy inverted; magistrates, among whom royal power was distributed; and a leisure class to take up the dreams, the holy sports of kings. The ceremonial life of royalty is diffused in bourgeois etiquette: every lass a queen (once a week, at any rate; or once in a lifetime); and every man an individual soul, entitled to royal immortality (Osirification).
Durkheim, Division of Labor, 195. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, ch. IX.
117
Political society articulates itself and produces a rep- resentative; and is then ready for history; tragedy; even as the chorus, the dance group, articulates itself and pro- duces the hero, the dying god. The chorus has a leader of the dance; the Couretes, the young men of the war dance, have a Leading Man. More and more they differ- entiate him from themselves, make him their vicar. Their attitude becomes more and more one of contemplation. More and more they become spectators, of his action. Theatrically speaking, they become an audience; reli- giously speaking, they become worshipers; he becomes a god. Gradually they lose all sense that the god is them- selves. "He is utterly projected.
Harrison, Themis, 46.
The hero is a "collective ego" of the same substance as the chorus. "A primary group is a number of individuals who have substituted one and the same object for their ego-ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego" (Freud); "By Covenant of every man with every man, in such a manner, as if every man should say to every man, I Authorize and give up my Right of Governing my selfe to this Man'" (Hobbes). The ego-ideal of every man is projected into the represen- tative, who becomes the "authorized bearer of their Per- sons"; the "publique Soule." The self-projection is a split in the self, or schizophrenia; a self-alienation, "to confer all their power and strength upon one Man 29 and "therein to submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgements, to his Judgement. » It is a mental alienation; a permanent reduction of the self to a condition of tute- lage, as in minors or madmen. And the madness is the self-commitment to an asylum. The representative body is an asylum for the soul-substance of the group; a safety deposit bank, "bearing the Person of them all. 29 "Primitive
118
man takes his soul out of his body and deposits it for security in some snug spot, just as people deposit their money with a banker rather than carry it on their persons. "Tf he should discover some place of absolute security, he may be content to leave his soul there permanently. The advantage of this is that, as long as the soul remains un- harmed in the place where he has deposited it, the man himself is immortal."
Freud, Group Psychology, 80. Hobbes, Leviathan, 143, 146, 287; cf. 507. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 668, 700.
And at the same time the self-alienation, like all self- alienation, is fraudulent; in bad faith. The Essence of Commonwealth is "One Person of whose Acts a great Multitude, by mutuall Covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the Author." In authorizing the authorities we are their authors. We own their actions: "Every one to owne, and acknowledge himselfe to be the Author of whatsoever he that so beareth their Person, shall Act"; "For that which in speaking of goods and possessions is called an Owner, speaking of Actions, is called Author. The boundary separating actor and spectator is a false one, concealing the deeper reality of the collective author- ship. The multitude is many Authors, of everything their Representative saith, or doth in their name; "Every man giving their common Representer, Authority from him- selfe in particular; and owning all the actions the Repre- senter doth."
Hobbes, Leviathan, 134, 137, 143.
The chorus is really the author. Their act is to re- pudiate responsibility; this is part of the net of lies in which they entangle the hero, their bull, their victim. This is what Freud calls their "refined hypocrisy, 29 as they
119
say, Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name. The hypocrisy of the chorus makes them too an actor (hypocrites).
Freud, Totem and Taboo, 156. Psalm CXV, 1.
The chorus identifies with the hero: he is their vicar; in whose actions they take vicarious pleasure. The hero is "created to perform deeds which the community would like to perform but which are forbidden to it." Their vicar also in vicarious punishment: their victim, the scapegoat, the lamb which takes away their sins; through whom they obtain vicarious redemption. Vicarious satisfaction: the deed is both theirs and not theirs. On this self-contradic- tion, this hypocrisy, this illusion, representative institu- tions are based.
Friedman and Gassel, "The Chorus in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus," 225.
In vicarious experience there is both identification and distance. The mediator is to keep reality at a distance, to keep the multitude in remote contact with reality. Hobbes saw the paradigm in Exodus XX, 18-19: "And all the people saw the thundering, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking; and when they saw it, they removed, and stood far off. And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die." Repre- sentative institutions depend upon the distance separating the spectators from the actor on the stage; the distance which permits both identification and detachment; which makes for a participation without action; which estab- lishes the detached observer, whose participation consists in seeing and is restricted to seeing; whose body is re- stricted to the eyes. Everything which is merely seen is
120
seen through a windowpane, distantly; and purely: a pure aesthetic experience. Representative institutions depend upon the aesthetic illusion of distance.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 453.
Cf. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, 40, 201-203, 209, 256. Richard, Mallarmé, 55.
The detached observer, who participates without ac- tion, is the passive spectator. The division of citizens into politically active and passive is the major premise of modern political (party) organization. The detached ob- server is also the major premise of the Lockean or Car- tesian mind, waxen tablet for passive impressions: "The mistake in empiricist theories of perception has been the representation of human beings as passive observers re- ceiving impressions from the outside.
Hampshire, Thought and Action, 47.
Cf. Schattschneider, Party Government, 52, 58. Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor, 205.
The detached observer: subject and object distan- ciated; the subject-object dualism. The dualism which distanciates subject and object, allows the subject only pictures; the first effect of the "influencing machine" to which schizophrenics imagine themselves plugged in- the Cartesian world as machine-_is to make the patient see pictures, "something like a diluted reel of film in my brain. " Pictures: spectral images on the inside, which rep resent external reality to the subject. Cognition then, as well as politics, is mediated through representative insti- tutions. Correspondence is then a relation of likeness, or copying, or imitation, between internal image and ex- ternal reality; instead of correspondence as sympathy, or action at a distance, or active participation; metheris and
121
not mimesis. "The principal reason which Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim and others assign for the fact that primitives do not perceive with the same minds' as ours, is that in the act of perception, they are not detached, as we are 99 Primitive participation, participation mystique, is self and not-self identified in the moment of experience. "Primitive mentality 2> involves participation; an extrasensory link between the percipient and the perceived; a telepathy which we have disowned.
Roheim, Magic and Schizophrenia, 110, 165. Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 31; cf. 32-34.
Cf. Tausk, 'The Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia."
The spectator whose participation is restricted to seeing, who is passive, is held in passivity by what he sees; he is spellbound or hypnotized. In Yeats's vision, "Locke sank into a swoon. The garden died"; McLuhan says, «The Lockean swoon was the hypnotic trance induced by step- ping up the visual component in experience until it filled the field of attention. Psychologists define hypnosis as the filling of the field of attention by one sense only. At such a moment, the garden' dies. That is, the garden indicates the interplay of all the senses in haptic harmony. The garden is polymorphism of the senses, polymorphous per- versity, active interplay; and the opposite of polymorphous perversity is the abstraction of the visual, obtained by putting to sleep the rest of the life of the body. The pure knowing subject of modern philosophy, winged cherub without a body, is in a swoon, or dream. Like the spec- tators in the traditional theater, as perceived by Brecht: "They sit together like men who are asleep but have un- quiet dreams. True, they have their eyes open. But they don't watch, they stare. They don't hear, they are trans- fixed. They look at the stage as if bewitched. » Or in liturgy, when participation consists in attendance at a spectacle
122
in which the priest enacts a dramatic representation of the Passion. In representative institutions there is always subjection to the visible image; idolatry.
McLuhan, Gutenberg Gallaxy, 17. Brecht, "A Little Organon for the Theater," 22.
Our representative keeps us hypnotized: "The com- mand to sleep in hypnosis means nothing more nor less than an order to withdraw all interest from the world and to concentrate it upon the person of the hypnotist. The power of the hypnotist is of the same nature as the mana or majesty of kings; it is based on the magical property of a look. "The hypnotist, then, is supposed to be in posses- sion of this power; and how does he manifest it? By telling the subject to look him in the eyes; his most typical method of hypnotizing is by his look. But it is precisely the sight of the chieftain that is dangerous and unbearable for primitive people, just as later that of the Godhead is for mortals. Even Moses had to act as an intermediary be- tween his people and Jehovah, since the people could not support the sight of God; and when he returned from the presence of God his face shone--some of the mana had been transferred on to him, just as happens with the intermediary among primitive people 99 Freud, Group Psychology, 96. Roheim, Animism, 149-150.
Identification with the representative person, whom we "look up to, takes place through the eye. In psycho- analytic jargon, the super-ego is based on "incorporation through the eye" or "ocular introjection"; it is the sight of a parental figure that becomes a permanent part of us; and that now supervises, watches us. In other words, the super-ego is derived from the primal scene. The primal scene is the original theater; parental coitus is the arche-
123
typal show; the original distance is between child and parent. "Theaters and concerts, in fact any performance where there is something to be seen or heard, always stands for parental coitus. " It is in the primal scene that we learn to take vicarious pleasure in events of which we are only passive spectators: "By means of the father iden- tification it is quite possible to preserve from the wreck of one's own capacity to love at least a vicarious pleasure in the relations between the father and the mother." "The child introjects the primal scene with all the pleasure of ideal participation and the prohibition of actual partici- pation. Hence the double structure of the super-ego: thou shalt be like the father, and yet not like him. » The father is the actor; but we as spectators may identify with him. In Blake, "Eritharmon's Orc, the great Selfhood or hero- Messiah whom we obey or watch perform. With the pleasure of ideal participation and the prohibition of ac- tual participation: shadows without substance; fantasies without reality; dreams; onanistic gratification.
Klein, "Infant Analysis, 112. Roheim, Riddle of the Sphinx, 222, 283. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 264.
Cf. Fenichel, "Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification," 378, 393.
The pleasure of ideal participation, and the prohibi- tion of real participation: a eunuch in the harem. The effect of the primal scene is to paralyze the spectator, even as the hypnotist's subject is paralyzed; the effect of the primal scene is castration. In the antagonism between actor and audience, the struggle for recognition is to castrate or be castrated; to be master or slave; male or female.
The actor is exhibitionist. To shew is to show the gen- ital; to fascinate; to make the spectator a woman. Even as
124
the hard look or phallic eye of the hypnotist (a Cyclopean erection) transfixes his subject.
Cf. Fenichel, "On Acting."
The spectator is voyeur. The desire to see is the desire to see the genital; and the desire to see is the desire to be one; to become what you behold; to incorporate the penis of another; to devour it through the eye. Participation is identification with a part, the all-important part, the penis; a part isolated, abstracted, cut off, castrated (taking ideal participation for real, i.e., pars pro toto). Partial participa- tion is to steal (or be) the penis of another; but only partially, not really: "She turns herself in phantasy into a man, without herself becoming active in a masculine way, and is no longer anything but a spectator of the event which takes the place of the sexual act. 29 The penis which still belongs to another; even as our super-ego still belongs to Daddy. The super-ego is borrowed strength; or a stolen trophy; a head cut off, a monument erected high in our house. To idealize is to idolize; to make an idol; to trans- late into a fixed image for contemplation; to turn into monumental form; to turn into stone. To concentrate on seeing is to turn into stone; Medusa's head; castration.
Freud, "'A Child is being Beaten,'" 196.
Cf. Fenichel, "Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification"; "Trophy and Triumph."
The outcome of the castration-complex is genital organization, the primacy of the penis, the identification of the whole person with the penis. The actor exhibits his whole person as a penis; but the exhibition exposes the castration. The whole person as a penis, a penis pure and simple, a penis tout court, is a penis cut off, a trophy, a severed head, Medusa's head cut off. The little hero, "the
125
poor child' with whom she sympathized so much was both the penisless creature and the penis." "It seems contradictory that the analyst is conceived on the one hand as a castrated man, and on the other as a penis. But this paradox is explained: the penis that the patient watches is a cut-off penis. And on the actor's side: «This patient's acting had the unconscious aim of stating by magic gestures: None of you has a penis. I, acting the part of a castrated person [on a deeper layer: acting the part of a penis which has been cut off], am showing you how you are supposed to look?" The actor, the hypnotist, the representative person, turns us to stone by showing us Medusa's head: a genital that is both female and male and castrated.
Fenichel, "Trophy and Triumph," 160; "On Acting," 360.
The exhibitionism of the phallic personality (the huge genital, the royal lingam) is fraudulent; an imposture, or imposition on the public; theater. The actor needs the audience to reassure him that he is not castrated: yes, you are the mighty penis; the Emperor's New Clothes. To force the audience to give this reassurance is to castrate, have coitus with, the audience: the phallic personality needs a receptive audience or womb. Separately, both actor and audience are incomplete, castrated; but together they make up a whole: the desire and pursuit of the whole in the form of the combined object, the parents in coitus.
138
a separate substance, the soul, which confronts the body as absolute sovereignty, or will. "They who compare a city and its citizens, with a man and his members, almost all say, that he who hath the supreme power in the city, is in relation to the whole city, such as the head is to the whole man. But it appears by what hath been already said, that he who hath such a power, hath a relation to the city, not as that of the head, but of the soul to the body. For it is the soul by which a man hath a will; so by him who hath the supreme power, and no otherwise, the city hath a will."
Hobbes, De Cive, VI, 19.
The divorce between soul and body takes the life out of the body, reducing the organism to a mechanism, dead in itself but given an artificial life, an imitation of life, by will or power: sovereignty is an artificial soul, giving life and motion to the whole body, Cartesian body, and the Hobbesian body politic, is not really body; it is inorganic res extensa. In the Middle Ages, centralizing tendencies in pope or emperor were opposed by the idea of mediate articulation, by virtue of which intermediate groups stood in graduated order between the supreme unit and the individual. On the analogy of the physical body, to avoid monstrosity, finger must be joined directly, not to head but to hand; then hand to arm, arm to shoulder, shoulder to neck, neck to head. Individuals were conceived not as arithmetic units or atomic particles in an undifferentiated res extensa, but as socially grouped and functionally differentiated. Medieval representative institutions are not mechanically planned, geometrically divided electoral districts; rather, "the constituencies are organic and corporatively constructed limbs of an articulated People.
Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, 66; cf. 28, 134-135.
Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction.
139
Hobbes uses the idea of representation to arrive at absolute sovereignty, which abolishes the represented- ness of the represented. There is a single contract by which each pledges himself to submit to a common ruler, who on his side takes no part in the making of the contract. This assumption destroyed, in the germ, any personality of the people: "The personality of the People died at its birth 92
Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 60.
Hobbes moves from representation to contract; from representation to ownership; via the intermediate notion of authorship. From authorship ("One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude have made themselves every one the Author"), to ownership ("Every one to owne, and acknowledge himself to be the Author of whatsoever he that beareth their Person, shall Act"). "For that which in speaking of goods and possessions is called an Owner, speaking of Actions, is called Author. From personality as theater ("A Person, is the same that an Actor is"), to personality as property ("A Person, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man. ... When they are considered as his owne, then he is called a Naturali Per- son"). And so, from Hobbes to Locke ("Every man has a property in his own person"). Corporate existence is dissolved into property relations; from representation to contract. In representation a person is both himself and another; in property relations a person is either his own or another's. Instead of the magic of personality, the fetishism of commodities. "The scepter no more to be swayed by visible hand," is what Blake saw in the French Revolution. What we got instead was the invisible hand of economic forces.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 133-134, 143. Blake, French Revolution, 1. 5.
Cf. Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, ch. V, sections 26, 44; ch. VII, section 94; ch. XV, section 173.
140
Instead of the head, the soul. Instead of organic differentiation, fission, or self-alienation; producing separate abstract homogeneous force (will, power), which gives life and motion to the whole body. There is the same revolution in William Harvey's physiology: instead of the heart as pars principans, the blood; instead of a representa- tive organ, an autonomous substance, in automatic circula- tion; giving life and motion to the whole body. Like blood is gold in the economic system; gold, says Hobbes, is like the blood in William Harvey's new theory: gold is concocted by "the reducing of all commodities to some- thing of equal value. "This Concoction is as it were the Sanguification of the Common-wealth." But the blood. says Harvey, "The blood is the genital part, whence the soul primarily results. » The blood or the soul is the seminal fluid. The fission, or self-alienation which produces this abstract substance, separate from the body but the life of it, is ejaculation. Ejaculation is fission, in the sense of an autotomy: "This discharge can be nothing else than the desire, in the sense of an autotomy, to cast off the organ under tension". a kind of self-castration. The body politic establishes absolute sovereignty in an orgasm, or death. The body gives up the ghost: "The personality of the People died at its birth; expires.
Hill, "William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy; 55. Hobbes, Levia- than, 214; cf. 215. Ferenczi, Thalassa, 29.
Cf. Roheim, Animism, 17-23, 252-253, 309-310, 381-386.
...
146
of it) had still in himself the great foundation of property; The boundaries of our property are extended by mixing our persons with things, and this is the essence of the labor process: "Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property."
Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, 130, 138, 206.
"Cain means 'ownership.' Ownership was the origi- nator of the earthly city." The crucial bit of property is neither nature (land) nor natural produce, nor factories nor manufactured products, but persons, our own persons. Free persons, whether in the state of nature or in civil society, are those who own their own persons. It is because we own our own persons that we are entitled to appropriate things that, through labor, become part of our personality or personalty. The defense of personal liberty is identical with the defense of property. There is a part of Karl Marx which attempts to base communism on Lockean premises. The Marxian proletariat is propertyless; they do not own themselves; they sell their labor (themselves) and are therefore not free, but wage-slaves; they are not persons. The case against the notion of private property is based on the notion of person: but they are the same notion. Hobbes says a person is either his own or another's. This dilemma is escaped only by those willing to discard personality.
Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XV, 17.
Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, 133.
The existence of the 'let's pretend" boundary does not prevent the continuance of the real traffic across it. Pro- jection and introjection, the process whereby the self as distinct from the other is constituted, is not past history,
...
150
imaginary; physical and mental. It gives us the divided world, the split or schizoid world--the "two principles of mental functioning" -in which psychoanalysis is stuck. Psychoanalysis begins on the side of imperialism, or en- lightenment, invading the heart of darkness, carrying bright shafts of daylight (lucida tela die), carrying the Bible and flag of the reality-principle. Psychoanalysis ends in the recognition of the reality-principle as Lucifer, the prince of darkness, the prince of this world, the governing principle, the ruler of the darkness of this world. The reality-principle is the prince of darkness; its function is to scotomize, to spread darkness; to make walls of thick darkness, walls of separation and concealment. Psycho- analysis ends here: Freud remained officially faithful to the principle whose pretensions he finally exposed. Really to go beyond Freud means to go beyond the reality-prin- ciple. And really to go beyond the pleasure-principle is to go beyond the reality-principle; for Freud himself showed that these two are one.
The reality-principle is an unreal boundary drawn between real and imaginary. Psychoanalysis itself has shown that "There is a most surprising characteristic of unconscious (repressed) processes to which every investigator accustoms himself only by exercising great control; it results from their entire disregard of the reality-test; thought-reality is placed on an equality with external reality, wishes with fulfillment and occurrence." "What determines the symptoms is the reality not of experience but of thought."
Freud, "The Two Principles in Mental Functioning, 20; Totem and Taboo, 86.
151
"Animism, magic and omnipotence of thought"-the child, the savage and the neurotic are right, «The omnipo- tence of thoughts, the over-valuation of mental processes as compared with reality, is seen to have unrestricted play in the emotional lite of neurotic patients. ... This behaviour as well as the superstitions which he practises in ordinary life, reveals his resemblance to the savages, who believe they can alter the external world by mere thinking. > But the lesson of psychoanalysis is that "we have to give up that prejudice in favor of external reality, that underestimation of internal reality, which is the atti- tude of the ego in ordinary civilized life to-day." That "advance, » that "adaptation to reality, 29 which consists in the child's learning to distinguish between the wish and the deed, between external facts and his feelings about them has to be undone, or overcome. "Mental Things are alone Real. 22
Freud, Totem and Taboo, 87. Isaacs, "The Nature and Function of Phantasy, " 82. Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgement, 617.
The real world, which is not the world of the reality- principle, is the world where thoughts are omnipotent, where no distinction is drawn between wish and deed. As in the New Testament: "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. 9) Or Freud: "It is a matter of indifference who actually committed the crime; psychology is only con- cerned to know who desired it emotionally and who wel- comed it when it was done. And for that reason all of the brothers [of the family Karamazov; or of the human family] are equally guilty.
Matthew V, 27-28. Freud, "Dostoevsky and Parricide, 236.
152
The outcome, then, of Freud or of Dostoevsky, is a radical rejection of government of the reality-principle. Freud sees the collision between psychoanalysis and our penal institutions: "It is not psychology that deserves to be laughed at, but the procedure of judicial inquiry. Reik, in a moment of apocalyptic optimism, declares that "The enormous importance attached by criminal justice to the deed as such derives from a cultural phase which is approaching its end." • A social order based on the reality- principle, a social order which draws a distinction be- tween the wish and the deed, between the criminal and the righteous, is still a kingdom of darkness. It is only as long as a distinction is made between real and imaginary murders that real murders are worth committing: as long as the universal guilt is denied, there is a need to resort to individual crime, as a form of confession, and a request for punishment. The strength of sin is the law. Heraclitus said, the law is a wall.
Freud, "Dostoevsky and Parricide," 236. Reik, The Compulsion to Con- fess, 155. I Corinthians XV, 56.
Psychoanalysis manages to salvage its allegiance to the (false) reality-principle by its use of the word fantasy to describe the contents of the unconscious ("unconscious fantasies"). It is in the unconscious that "we are members one of another, 22 "we incorporate each other." As long as we accept the reality-principle, the reality of the boundary between inside and outside, we do not "really incorporate each other. It is then in fantasy that we 66 project" Or "in- troject"; it is then purely mental, and mental means not real; the unconscious then contains not the hidden reality of human nature but some (aberrant) fancies, or fantasies. But the unconscious is the true psychic reality. The lan- guage of psychoanalysis becomes self-contradictory:
XII
Resurrection
I Corinthians III, 6: The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. Literal meanings as against spiritual or sym- bolical interpretations, a matter of Life against Death. The return to symbolism, the rediscovery that everything is symbolic- alles Vergängliche nur ein Gleichniss- -2 penis in every convex object and a vagina in every con- cave one- -is psychoanalysis. A return or turning point, the beginning of a new age; the Third Kingdom, the age of the spirit prophesied by Joachim of Fiore; or the second coming, the resurrection of the body. It is raised a spiritual or symbolical body; the awakening to the symbolical life of the body.
The return to symbolism would be the end of the Protestant era, the end of Protestant literalism. Symbolism in its pre-Protestant form consisted of typological, figural, allegorical interpretations, of both scripture and liturgy.
191
192
But the great Protestant Reformers were very explicit in their condemnation of the typological method: "The lit- eral sense of Scripture alone is the whole essence of faith and of Christian theology. Sola fide, sola litera: faith is faith in the letter.
Luther in Miller, Roger Williams, 34-35.
Protestant literalism: the crux is the reduction of meaning to a single meaning_-univocation. Luther's word is Eindeutigkeit: the "single, simple, solid and stable meaning" of scripture; unum simplicem solidum et con- stantem sensum. Compare Calvin on Galatians IV, 22-26: "But as the apostle declares that these things are alle- gorized, Origen, and many others along with him, have seized the occasion of torturing Scripture in every possible manner away from the true sense. Scripture they say is fertile, and thus produces a variety of meanings. I ac- knowledge that Scripture is a most rich and inexhaustible fountain of wisdom: but I deny that its fertility consists in the various meanings which any man at his pleasure may assign. Let us know that the true meaning of Scrip ture is the natural and obvious meaning, and let us em- brace and abide by it resolutely.
Cf. Holl, "Luthers Bedeutung für den Fortschrift der Auslegungskunst," 551. Hahn, "Luthers Auslegungsgrundsätze, 210.
Augustine had said: "What more liberal and more fruitful provision could God have made in regard to Sacred Scriptures than that the same words might be understood in several senses, all of which are sanctioned by the concurring testimony of other passages equally divine?" The Medieval schema of a fourfold meaning in everything-_the quadriga, the four-horsed chariot--how-
193
ever mechanical in practice, is at least a commandment not to rest in one simple solid and constant meaning. As in Blake also: Now I a fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me; "Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah's night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision and Newton's sleep! So also the psychoanalytic principle of over-determina- tion: "Psychical acts and structures are invariably over- determined." The principle of over-determination declares that there cannot be just one "true" interpretation of a symptom or symbol: it forbids literal-mindedness.
Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, III, 38. Blake, Letter to Butts, 22 November 1802. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 100.
Protestant literalism is modern scholarship. Parallel to the emphasis on the one true meaning of scripture there was an increase in Luther's interest in grammar and textual criticism; to establish the text, die feste Shrift, a mighty fortress; the authoritative text.
Cf. Hahn, "Luthers Auslegungsgrundsätze," 207.
Textual criticism is part of the search for the one true and literal meaning. The old spiritual or symbolical consciousness had not hunted that will-o-the-wisp, the one true text; instead it found symbolical meaning in every textual variation. Even the slips of the scribe were significant, as even the slips of the tongue become sig- nificant again for Freud. The early Luther, who, as he himself acknowledged later, was enthusiastic for symbol- ical interpretations, brought variant readings into happy
194
harmony by applying the principle of over-determination; '"Die Anwendung des vierfachen Schriftsinnes geht sogar so weit, dass abweichende Lesarten durch den verschie- denen Gebrauch der Sinne zur Ubereinstimmung ge- bracht werden.
Hahn, "Luthers Auslegungsgrundsätze," 200.
Modern humanistic, literary, and historical scholar- ship, Geisteswissenschaft, is the pursuit of the literal truth; and it was the commitment to a literal interpretation of the Bible that modernized scholarship. Modern humanistic scholarship is the Renaissance counterpart of Reforma- tion literalism.
Dilthey, "Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik," 324.
The basic assumption of modern hermeneutics, the organic unity of the document, is a commitment to univo- cation; and was elaborated by Protestantism to set up the one true meaning of scripture. Thus for example the Lutheran explicator par excellence, Flacius: "It was nO little obstacle to the clarity of Scripture and to the truth and purity of Christian doctrine, that practically all the writers and fathers in their interpretations and explica- tions of the sacred writings treated them as if they were a miscellaneous collection of sentiments, and not as an artistic unity conforming to correct principles of composi- tion. In sacred scripture, as in all works of literature, the true meaning depends on the context, on the purpose of the work as a whole, and on the organic relations which unite the parts as members are united in one body.
Flacius cited in Dilthey, "Das natürliche System der Geisteswissen-schaften, 118.
195
The crux in the reduction of meaning to a single meaning-both in scriptural and in literary exegesis- the crux in univocation, is the reduction of meaning to con- scious meaning: intentio auctoris, the author's intention. But the unconscious is the true psychic reality; and the unconscious is the Holy Spirit. The opposite of the letter is the spirit. "'The sensus plenior is that additional, deeper meaning, intended by God but not clearly intended by the human author
Brown, The Sensus Plenior of Sacred Scripture, 92.
Cf. Lubac, Histoire et esprit, 387, 408.
The spirit inspires (the god is Dionysus). The ortho- dox Protestant faith is Protestant fundamentalism; if meaning is restricted to the conscious intention of the author, then divine inspiration means that the holy spirit is literally the author; the holy scripture is literally in- spired. The inspiration of scripture is reduced to the infallibility of scripture, literally understood.
Cf. Hahn, "Die Anfänge
The identification of God's word with scripture, the written or printed word; somewhat to the neglect of the word made flesh. The book is a materialization of the spirit; instead of the living spirit, the worship of a new material idol, the book.
There is also the new hierarchy of scribes, controlling the interpretation, the higher scholarship. Since the one single and solid meaning does not in fact reveal itself, the commentary which does establish it becomes the
196
higher revelation. The apparent deference of the expert to the text is a fake.
There is another kind of Protestantism possible; a Dionysian Christianity; in which the scripture is a dead letter to be made alive by spiritual (symbolical) inter- pretations; in which meaning is not fixed, but ever new and ever changing; in a continuous revelation; by fresh outpouring of the holy spirit. Meaning is made in a meeting between the holy spirit buried in the Christian and the holy spirit buried underneath the letter of scrip- ture; a breakthrough, from the Abgrund, from the uncon- scious of the reader past the conscious intention of the author to the unconscious meaning; breaking the barrier of the ego and the barrier of the book. Spiritus per spi ritum intellegitur.
Cf. Müntzer in Holl, "Luther und die Schwärmer," 430, 437.
You said, "First came the wings and then the angel." We never noticed these words in Scripture, Holy Abbot. How could you have noticed them? Alas, your minds are still dim. You open the prophets and your eyes are able to see nothing but the letters. But what can the letters say? They are the black bars of the prison where the spirit strangles itself with screaming. Between the letters and the lines, and all around the blank margins, the spirit circulates freely; and I circulate with it and bring you this great message: Friars, first came the wings and then the angel!Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, 101-102.
Spiritus per spiritum intellegitur, Luther himself said. But for a Dionysian or enthusiastic Christianity we have to turn from Luther to Müntzer; to the Radical Reforma- tion; to the lunatic fringe; die Schwärmer, the madmen,
197
Luther called them. From Luther to Müntzer: from faith to spirit; from profession of faith, or doctrinal confession, to possession of spirit; not remote identification with an event in past history, but active participation in a living spirit here now. The fruit of the spirit is not only new revelations, but also new miracles: der Mut und die Kraft zum Unmöglichen. The natural man is transformed into superman: We fleshly earthly men are to become gods."
Luther in Holl, "Luthers Bedeutung für den Fortschrift der Auslegungs- kunst, 547. Müntzer in Holl, "Luther und die Schwärmer, 426, 429, 431.
Cf. Williams, The Radical Reformation.
The conflict between science and religion in the modern world stems not from Medieval obscurantism but from modern literalism; Protestant literalism and Catholic scholasticism; both exterminators of symbolism. William Whiston, New Theory of the Earth (166), dedicated to "Summo Viro Isaaco Newton": "The burden of the treatise was an attack on the allegorical interpretation of the Creation in Genesis and proof that the Mosaic account was literally true in the sense that the new astronomy and the new physics were completely harmonious with it. Its key proposition was: The Mosaic Creation is not a Nice and Philosophical account of the Origin of All Things, but an Historical and True Representation of the formation of our single Earth out of a confused Chaos, and of the successive and visible changes thereof each day, till it became the habitation of Mankind. The postu lata' which Whiston set down in this work were com- pletely acceptable to his patron. I. The obvious or Literal Sense of Scriptures is the True and Real one, where no evident Reason can be given to the contrary. . . ."
Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian, 143-144.
Cf. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 253-254.
198
A literal interpretation is a historical interpretation. Luther equates the simple, clear, and single meaning of the Bible with the historical meaning, historica sententia, and sees as the opposite of historical interpretation, sym- bolical interpretation (ego quidem ab eo tempore quo cepi historicam sententiam amplecti, semper abhorrui ab allegoris)
Hahn, "Luthers Auslegungsgrundsätze; '" 209; cf. 211, 218.
The modern historical consciousness is Protestant literalism. The aim of modern historical science is to estab- lish for historical events a single simple, solid, and constant meaning--what really happened; "Wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. ° Ranke's phrase, without his respect for the mystery of individuality, was what the American pro- fessors brought back from Germany; to become the motor of the Ph.D. factory, mechanical literalism in action.
The fetishism of the document: the historian believes that the document speaks, speaks for itself. It is Luther's principle of scriptura sui ipsius interpres; the integrity of scripture, or the historical document, or the literary text; '"in eine Urkunde nicht fremde Begrife hereintragen. 22 The principle that every document must be interpreted in its own terms was necessarily first established in the case of sacred scripture.
Luther in Holl, "Luthers Bedeutung für den Fortschritt der Auslegungs- kunst, 558; cf. 559-560.
But documents do not speak for themselves. And so there is an inner contradiction: The same man who says scripture is its own interpreter says also that we press
199
Christ against scripture; Christum urgemus contra scrip- turam. By Christ he means his personal conviction, his private inner light, his inner certainty or intuition. There is in both Protestant religion and modern scholarship a double standard (not the same thing as a twofold vision): they combine self-effacing objectivity with self-asserting subjectivity, a principle of subjective intuition (Dilthey's verstehen).
Holl, "Luthers Bedeutung für den Fortschritt der Auslegungskunst, 29 " 561.
Literalism does not get rid of the magical element in scriptural or historical interpretation. The Holy Spirit, instead of a living spirit in the present, becomes the Holy Ghost, a voice from the past, enshrined in the book. The restriction of meaning to conscious meaning makes his- torical understanding a personal relation between the per- sonality of the reader and the personality of the author, now dead. Spiritual understanding (geistiges Verstehen) becomes a ghostly operation, an operation with ghosts (Geisteswissenschaft). The document starts speaking for itself; the reader starts hearing voices. The subjective dimension in historical understanding is to animate the dead letter with the living reader's blood, his "experience"; and simultaneously let the ghost of the dead author slide into, become one with, the reader's soul. It is necromancy, or shamanism; magical identification with ancestors; in stead of living spirit, to be possessed by the dead.
Literalism combines fetishism of the book with sham- anism of the interpreter; science and subjectivity; pedan- try and soul; modern humanistic scholarship. Luther's method of scriptural interpretation was a combination of grammatical science and soulful intuition: "eine Verbin.
200
dung on grammatischem Begreifen und seelischem Ver. stehen. Faith and philology.
Holl, "Luthers Bedeutung für den Fortschrift der Auslegungskunst,' 558.
Instead of a living spirit, possession by the dead. The Protestant substituted for the ritual (magical) repetition of the past (Christ's passion), a purely mental invoca- tion; a historical commemoration. Instead of a dramatic reènactment a reanimation in the mind only_-the quest for the historical Jesus. But the Jesus of historical com- memoration can only be the ghost of Jesus- die Historie erreichet nicht Christi Fleisch und Blut, history reaches not Christ's flesh and blood. The Jesus of commemorative ceremony and historical reconstruction is the passive, not the active, Jesus. The active Jesus can only be actively recreated. The historical reconstruction is a spectral image in a passive viewer.
Boehme, De Incarnatione Verbi, II, vin, I.
Cf. Mowinckel, Psalmenstudien, II, 34. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 387.
To say that historical events have a single meaning is to say that historical events are unique (singular); univocation constructs unilinear time. And on the other hand to see symbolism is to see eternal recurrence. The figural interpretation of scripture, which the Reformers suppressed, is inseparable from the idea of prefiguration. And the idea of prefiguration is of certain events cor- responding to certain other events, as type to antitype; events anticipating other events; events which are pro- phetic of other events; events which are the fulfillment of earlier prophecies. At any rate where there is type and antitype, prophecy and fulfillment, there events are not unique and time not unilinear; rather we must say with
201
Tertullian, eternal recurrence is the universal law: nothing happens for the first time. Universa conditio recidiva est. nihil non iterum est.
Tertullian, De Resurrectione mortuorum, XII, 6; cited in Ladner, Idea of Reform, 133.
Nothing happens for the first time. There is nothing in the Old Testament which does not recur in the New Testament. This is the concordia scripturarum, the mysteri- ous correspondence between the two scriptures, to be seen by those who have eyes to see. Its effect is to make Old and New contemporaneous; to transform time into eter- nity; history sub specie eternitatis. Or history as poetry; prose goes straight forward without verses.
Cf. Benz, Ecclesia Spiritualis, 6.
Christianity is identified with unilinear time when Christianity no longer lives in expectation of a second coming. But if no second coming, then no first coming either; unless we are born again, we are not born at all. Nothing happens for the first time.
The Christian interpretation of history looks to a second coming, a recurrence of Christ; even as Christ was a return, a new edition of Adam. Leibnitz tells us that "M. Mercurius van Helmont believed that the soul of Jesus Christ was that of Adam, and that the new Adam repairing what the first had ruined was the same per- sonage paying his old debt.» "I think. adds Leibnitz, one does well to spare oneself the trouble of refuting such ideas. » It is time to turn from Leibnitz to M. Mer- curius van Helmont. The idea of incarnation is not sep
202
arable from the idea of reincarnation--Messiah, Moses redivious, Menschensohn. Matthew XVI, 14: "some say that thou art John the Baptist; some Elias; and others Jeremias, or one of the prophets.' In no other way can that which is knotted be undone, but by bending the loops of the knot in the reverse order: the knot to be undone has to be redone.
Leibnitz in Auerbach, "Figura, '° 236, n. 43.
Cf. Bentzen, Messias-Moses redivious-Menschensohn. Irenaeus in Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, 44. Daniélou, Origen, 124, 249: "The Incarnation is the principle coming of Christ, but only one of many."
Redemption is the second coming. Redemption is not in remote (historical) identification with a (unique) event in the past: Redemption is not vicarious. Redemp- tion is in the second coming, the reincarnation, his pres- ence in the present in us. Not by faith but by the spirit.
Redemption is symbolism. Pascal saw it all: "Proof of the two Testaments at once. To prove the two at one stroke, we need only see if the prophecies in one are ful- filled in the other. To examine the prophecies, we must understand them. For if we believe they have only one meaning, it is certain that the Messiah has not come; but if they have two meanings, it is certain that He has come in Jesus Christ. The whole problem then is to know if they have two meanings." The whole problem is to break with the doctrine of univocation. For if we believe that the Old Testament has only one meaning, it is cer- tain that the Messiah has not yet come. In Protestant literalism there are of course prophecies in the Old Testa- ment: but these are literal prophecies: what Luther called sensus propheticus literalis. The crux is univocation versus
203
reincarnation: the Psalms may refer either to David or Christ, but not both.
Pascal, Pensées, no. 641. Holl, "Luthers Bedeutung für den Fortschrift der Auslegungskunst, 546.
The Messiah has not yet come: Judaism. Literalism (the letter and the law) is Judaicus modus intelligendi. Protestant orthodoxy is Judaism. Unilinear time removes the idea of redemption from influence on the affairs (history) of this world. For all practical purposes, the Messiah has not yet come. Then there are no turning points in history; no periods; and no end. But the original Christian experience is of a turning, a turn; conversion, peripety, revolution. The word of God is revolutionary: sermo enim Dei venit mutaturus et innovaturus orbem, quoties venit; not to interpret the world but to change it.
Lubac, Histoire et esprit, 399, 438-439. Luther cited in Griewank, Die neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegrif, 83.
Christianity is a New Testament: behold, I make all things new. Real history is the history of renewals, revolu- tions; as in the Apocalypse of John. The theologian who thinks that "only this simple rectilinear conception of unending time can be considered as the framework for the New Testament history of redemption, » will also have to say that "the historical sense is completely lacking in the authors of the Primitive Christian writings. That is to say, the alleged New Testament sense of history is completely lacking in the New Testament.
Revelations XXI, 5. Cullmann, Christ and Time, 49, 94.
The experience of renewal impresses itself on the structure of history in the form of periodization. There
204
must be at least two periods, B.C. and A.D. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not the god of the philosophers. Not a philosophical but a his- torical God; a revolutionary God, who when he comes, comes again.
Periodization involves periodicity. The world's great age begins anew, the golden years return. Things come round full circle; a turn is a return, and a new beginning; and revolution also is circular. Compare Pascal: « Adam forma futuri. The six days to form the one, the six ages to form the other. The six days, which Moses represents for the formation of Adam, are only the picture of the six ages to form Jesus Christ and the Church. If Adam had not sinned, and Jesus Christ had not come, there had been only one covenant, only one age of man, and the creation would have been represented as accomplished at one single time. ° Redemptive history, which looks to a new heaven and a new earth, looks to a second coming, and sees at least two periods, the Old and the New, or three periods, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
Pascal, Pensées, no. 655-
Cf. Benz, Ecclesia Spiritualis, 10-11. Lubac, Histoire et esprit, 220.
Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 232-260.
Oldness of letter, and newness of spirit. Historical literalism takes the periodization out of history; in Pro- testantism, the loss of the sense of the difference between Old Testament and New; Old and New Testament are made consistent, forced into conformity, to reveal the same literal truth. And the Puritans in New England can embark on a literal reproduction of Israel in the wilder- ness. Bondage to the letter is bondage to the past. Roger
205
Williams' fight for symbolical understanding is his fight for freedom.
Romans VII, 6
Cf. Miller, Roger Williams, 38, 43, 107, 185-186.
The symbolic interpretation of prophecy makes the interpreter a prophet; spiritus per spiritum intellegitur. All the Lord's people to be prophets. Prophets, or poets: sing unto the Lord a new song. The song must be new, or it is no song; the spirit is the creator spirit, making new creations. The spirit is understood by the spirit; by the same spirit, i.e., in the same style. The proper response to poetry is not criticism but poetry.
Cf. Numbers XI, 29. Blake, Milton, Preface. Benz, Ecclesia Spirituals, 5.
The redemption of the Old does not abolish but ful- fills it; not to destroy but to fulfill. Symbolical conscious- ness finds the New in the Old, and the Old in the New; in veteribus novam, in novis veterem. The symbolical interpretation of the old makes it new; this is the flower- ing of the rod, Aaron's rod that budded; the bitter waters of Marah made sweet.
Matthew V, 17; Numbers XVII; Exodus XV, 23-25.
Cf. Benz, Ecclesia Spiritualis, 10-11. Lubac, Histoire et esprit, 309, 410-411. Richard, Mallarmé, 600, 602.
Newness is not the gift of a tabula rasa, but a resur- rection; or miraculous pregnancy. A virgin shall conceive, in old age, as in the case of Sarah, or the Roman Empire. Natural innocence is only an image of the real, the super- natural, the second innocence. After the fall; in old age: sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero
206
te amavi. Late I learnt to love thee, beauty as ancient as thou art new; late I learnt to love thee.
Augustine, Confessions, X, 38.
Cf. Ladner, The Idea of Reform, 237. Richard, Mallarmé, 600, 602. Bachelard, La Poétique de l'espace, 47.
Looking, therefore, upon sin, upon mortality, upon time flying by, upon moaning and labor and sweat, upon ages suc- ceding one another without rest, senselessly from infancy into old age_-looking at these things, let us see in them the old man, the old day, the old song, the Old Testament. But if we turn to the things that are to be renewed, let us find a new man, a new day, a new song, the New Testament- and we shall love this newness so that we shall not fear there any oldness. Augustine in Ladner, The Idea of Reform, 236-237.
Newness is renewal: ad hoc enim venit, ut renovemur in illo; making it new again, as on the first day; herrlich wie am ersten Tag. Reformation, or renaissance; rebirth. Life is Phoenix-like, always being born again out of its own death. The true nature of life is resurrection; all life is life after death, a second life, reincarnation. Totus hic ordo revolubilis testatio est resurrections mortuorum. The uni- versal pattern of recurrence bears witness to the resurrec tion of the dead.
Cf. Ladner, The Idea of Reform, 133-141, 155.
Resurrection after crucifixion, after our old man is crucified. "More vividly than ever before he realized that art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great,
207
genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John."
Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago, ch. 3, sub fin.
Cf. Romans VI, 6.
The dead letter. The dead metaphor. It is only dead metaphors that are taken literally, that take us in (the black magic). Language is always an old testament, to be made new; rules, to be broken; dead metaphor, to be made alive; literal meaning, to be made symbolical; oldness of letter to be made new by the spirit. The creator spirit stands in the grave, in the midden heap, the dunghill of culture (as in Finnegans Wake); breaking the seal of familiarity; breaking the cake of custom; rolling the stone from the sepulcher; giving the dead metaphor new life.
Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor, 26-27.
Symbolical consciousness begins with the perception of the invisible reality of our present situation: we are dead and our life is hid. Real life is life after death, or resurrec- tion. The deadness with which we are dead here now is the real death; of which literal death is only a shadow, a bogey. Literalism, and futurism, are to distract us from the reality of the present.
Colossians III, 3.
To make it new is to make it recur. In fulfillment is recurrence, recapitulation. Fulfillment gathers up the past into the present in the form of a recapitulation: that in the dispensation of times there might be a recapitula- tion of all things in Christ. Recapitulate, ävaxepadatovalat; with the metaphor of the bead in both the Latin and the
208
Greek words. It is a gathering up of time into eternity; a transfiguration of time; the transfiguration, in which Moses and Elijah, who are the past, appeared unto them as present, talking with Jesus. Symbolical consciousness makes figural interpretations in order to accomplish the transfiguration.
Ephesians I, 10; Matthew XVII, 4; Mark IX, 4.
Cf. Auerbach, "Figura, 42. Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, 23. Ladner, The Idea of Reform, 68-6g.
Recapitulation of the past in the present. Only where there is the experience that there is again here now an- other crossing of the Red Sea can we speak of a Christian experience; or a psychoanalytical experience- "I have conjectured that the Exodus was originally not from Egypt to freedom, but from youth to manhood. 27
Roheim, "Some Aspects of Semitic Monotheism," 173.
Christian typology; karmic reincarnation; the phy- logenetic factor in psychoanalysis. The thing that "hap- pened long ago" did not happen to you individually, but to the race archetypically; or, if you prefer, it happened to you "'in a previous incarnation. Blake insisted on innate ideas; Freud insisted on retaining the idea of memory- traces of our archaic inheritance; lacking a time scheme of recurrence, he retained the idea in the Lamarckian form of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. What psy- choanalysis can under no circumstances do without is the idea of regression.
Cf. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 158-159. Ferenczi, Thalassa, 50-51. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 23.
209
Another scheme of time, another scheme of causality. Prefiguration is not preparation. "When we speak of the relation between a new poetic image and an archetype asleep in the depths of the unconscious, we will have to understand that this relation is not, properly speaking, a causal one. " Archetype as cause, or Ur-sach: Erscheinun- gen können nicht Ursachen sein. Events are related to other events not by causality, but by analogy and cor- respondence. In the archetype is exemplary causality, causa, exemplars. In the Medieval system of fourfold causes, that goes with the four-horsed chariot of meaning, events are actualizations of potentialities eternally there- "their Forms Eternal Exist For-ever. " The potentialities are latent till made patent; asleep till wakened. The events sleep in their causes; the archetypal form is the hidden life of things; awaiting resurrection.
Bachelard, La Poétique de Tespace, 1. Nietzsche, Aus dem Nachlass, 456. Blake, Milton, pl. 32, 1. 38.
Cf. Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 88, 151. Daniélou, Lord of History, 130. Smith, J. G. Hamann, 97. Spengler, Decline of the West, I, 3-6.
In Freud, a primal crime, repeated in the death of Moses; in the death of Jesus; in every individual soul. In Christian typology, "For Origen the opposition of Agar and Sara is not the opposition of two historical peoples. It is rather the type of the intense conflict which goes on in each individual Christian. The historical conflict be- comes that of Jew and Christian which each of us bears in himself. Thus the history of nations becomes the history of the individual soul, a transposition along the lines of authentic typology. 29
Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, 141.
Cf. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 140-141.
210
Redemptive history (anthropology) is anamnesis; to remember again what we have repressed; to recapitulate the phylogeny; a recollection of previous incarnations. "In recollection all former births passed before His eyes. Born in such a place, of such a name, and downwards to His present birth, so through hundreds, thousands, myriads, all His births and deaths He knew. Not an objective and distant study of strangers, but discovering and embracing ourselves; collecting the previous incarnations into a unity with oneself; to constitute the collective self, the Son of Man. To recapitulate the phylogeny is to reconstitute the phylum, the unity of the human race; the atonement. The atonement of mankind, not the forensic justification of the individual believer.
Ashvagosha, Life of the Buddha, quoted in Evan-Wentz, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ixiv.
Cf. Williams, The Radical Reformation, 839.
Dismembered, remembered. Symbolical consciousness is to remember the unity; history as the history of one man. The unity is the invisible reality; the unconscious is collective. Literalism singles out a separate holy church or nation, but "Christ Jesus, at His so long typed-out coming, abolished these national shadows and erected his spiritual kingdom. " When literal kingdoms are seen to be only shadows of an invisible reality, "the partition-wall is broken down, and in respect of the Lord's special pro- priety to one country more than another, what difterence between Asia and Africa, between Europe and America, between England and Turkey, London and Constantino- ple. Literalism is to take pars pro toto; symbolism recon- stitutes the lost (hidden) unity.
Roger Williams in Miller, Roger Williams, 172, 150-151.
Cf. Freud, "Interpretation of Dreams," 370.
211
In any historical event, a repetition, reènactment, re- capitulation, of the whole story from Genesis to Apoc- alypse. Christian reformatio recapitulates the original formatio of creation; the illumination is an incarnation (reincarnation) of the original fat lux. Renewal is creation, and therefore deification.
Cf. Smith, J. G. Hamann, 98, 100. Ladner, The Idea of Reform, 170-172, 194.
In any event, the recapitulation of the whole story from Genesis to Apocalypse. In Ferenczi's apocalyptic the- ory of genitality the sexual act is a historical drama, a symbolic reenactment or recapitulation of all the great traumas in the history of the individual, of the species, of life itself. Psychoanalytic time is not gradual, evolutionary, but discontinuous, catastrophic, revolutionary. The sexual act is a return to the womb. But the separation of mother and child is a silhouette of the separation of life from the sea out of which it arose; and of the separation of life into two sexes; and of the separation of living from life- less matter. Birth really is from water; the womb really is an introjected, incarnate, ocean. «The mother would, properly, be the symbol of and partial substitute for the sea, and not the other way about. ." In copulation the penis really is a fish in water. Symbolism is "buried and otherwise inaccessible history. 29
Ferenczi, Thalassa, 54, 44.
Cf. Freud, General Introduction, 168. Roheim, Riddle of the Sphinx, 204.
Physical, or "real" birth is really rebirth, a repetition of an archetypal birth of the cosmos from the cosmic egg. Generation is only an image of Regeneration. In Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle; and in Ferenezi's Thalassa, a Theory of Genitality, there is a new apocalypse. Sym-
212
bolic consciousness is cosmic consciousness; and the proper object of psychoanalysis is the cosmos; psycha- nalyse cosmique. This is my body. The psychoanalysis of fossils as human forms; or mountains as mammals, Ontogeny recapitulates orogeny.
As, down among the palaeo-zoe he brights his ichthyic sign so brights he the middle-zone where the uterine forms are some beginnings of his creature. Brighter yet over the mammal'd Pliocene for these continuings certainly must praise him: How else, in his good time should the amorous Silvy to her sweetest dear her fairest bosom have shown? How else we? or he, himself? whose name is called He-with-us because he did not abhor the uterus. Whereby these uberal forms are to us most dear and of all hills the most august.Jones, Anathémata, 74-75.
Cf. Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion, 414. Bachelard, La Poéti- que de l'espace, 107-113. Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 7, 1. 65.
Dilthey has a brilliant page on the fundamental structure of modern Protestant Christianity, constructed on historical-critical-rational principles by humanists such as Occhino, Sozzini, Grotius. With them begins that re- markable period, in which Christianity, a subject of lively discussion in educated circles, still enjoyed solid accept- ance on the basis of historical and moral-religious argu- ments, while at the same time the substance of what was
213
accepted as proven was appreciably diminished. The in- articulate profundities accumulated in a great religious tradition were swept aside as mystical obscurantism, as the products of superstition or insanity. On the other hand, there was a reassertion of the Jewish-Christian belief in a Messiah whom God had signalized and evidenced in the miracles and in the resurrection. Thus out of a specific historical content arose a religious position which is no longer possible today. The validity of the holy scriptures and of Christianity was then for the first time made to depend on historical-critical proofs of the most important New Testament facts. The Resurrection was the corner- stone of the entire argument. The testimonies to the Resur- rection are such that either it is a historical fact, or else the disciples must have been crazy. The miracles were recognized even by Christ's enemies; and since Christ was also an enemy of the Devil, they cannot be explained as the work of the Devil. Thus the evidence gives us his- torical proof of the divinity of Christ; only after the New Testament facts have been historically established, can the validity of the Old Testament be inferred as a corol- lary.
Cf. Dilthey, "Das natürliche System der Geisteswissenschaften; 131.
The quest for the historical Jesus: it is either literally true, including literal miracles, or not true at all. The historical Jesus, a unique event in unilinear time, what has that to do with us here now? The very argument which establishes his miraculous divinity separates our human- ity from his divinity.
The second coming is the fulfillment of the first; and we are to look to the end, to the fulfillment; and not simply
214
look back at the first coming, by the power of faith, by historical consciousness. We must rise from history to mystery: ab historia in mysterium surgere. The resurrec- tion is to recur, to be fulfilled in us: it is to happen to his mystical body, which is our bodies; in this flesh. Along these lines Joachim transformed the resurrection from dead historical "fact" to a live historical, i.e., eschatological reality.
I Corinthians IlI, 13. Gregory the Great cited in Auerbach, "Figura, 29 47.
Cf. Cullmann, Christ and Time, 146. Benz, Ecclesia Spiritualis, 26.
To rise from history to mystery is to experience the resurrection of the body here now, as an eternal reality; to experience the parousia, the presence in the present, which is the spirit; to experience the reincarnation of the incarnation, the second coming; which is his coming in us.
Our life is as a fire dampened, or as a fire shut up in stone. Dear children, it must blaze, and not remain smoul- dering, smothered. Historical faith is mouldy matter-der historische Glaube ist ein Moder-it must be set on fire: the soul must break out of the reasoning of this world into the life of Christ, into Christ's flesh and blood; then it receives the fuel which makes it blaze. There must be seriousness; history reaches not Christ's flesh and blood. Es muss Ernst sein, denn die Historie erreichet nicht Christi Fleisch und Blut.Boehme, De Incarnatione Verbi, II, vil, 1.
XIII
Fulfillment
Fulfillment; from shadows to reality. Now for the first time fully real: the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the real likeness of the things. From shadows to reality, from symbols to reality; from type to truth. The axis on which world history turns is symbolism. From figura to veritas.
Cf. Hebrews X, 1. Auerbach, "Figura."
The axis of world history is making conscious the un- conscious. The Jews have an earthly cireumcision, and earthly ceremonies, which earthly operations have a hid- den virtue revealed in Christ. Jews have a mental veil in their reading of the Old Testament; Christ does away not with the Old Testament, but with the veil.
Augustine, Contra Faustinum, XII, 11.
215
216
The central feature of the human situation is the exist- ence of the unconscious, the existence of a reality of which we are unconscious. In Freud's words, "The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world. and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the re- ports of our sense-organs." In Pascal's words: "all appear- ance indicates neither a total exclusion nor a manifest presence of divinity, but the presence of a God who hides himself. ." And, he adds, "God being thus hidden, every re- ligion which does not affirm that God is hidden, is not true; and every religion which does not give the reason of it, is not instructive. Psychoanalysis passes the test.
Freud, "Interpretation of Dreams," 542. Pascal, Pensées, nos. 555, 584.
Symbolism is between consciousness and unconscious. A type conveys both absence and presence: "He must see enough to know that he has lost it. For to know of his loss, he must see and not see." Everything is symbolic, every- thing a parable; that seeing they might see, and not per- ceive; and hearing they might hear, and not understand.
Pascal, Pensées, nos. 555-677. Luke VIII, 10.
From shadows to reality. No fulfillment without dis- placement, as Jacob displaces Esau, or Isaac Ishmael. The letter, Judaism, must come before the spirit, Christianity; the blindness before the seeing. Symbolic consciousness is consciousness of transition, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began. In Deism and Enlightenment, on the other hand, there is no mystery, no symbolism, no revelation or revolution, no
217
transition periods. Self-evident truths of natural reason shine all the time and require no breakthrough, no break in time.
Cf. Mark I, 7; Romans XVI, 25. Pascal, Pensées, nos. 555, 565, 570, 576, 640. Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, 230.
Symbolic consciousness is between seeing and not seeing. It does not see self-evident truths of natural reason; or visible saints. It does not distinguish the wheat from the tares; and therefore must, as Roger Williams saw, practice toleration; or forgiveness, for we never know what we do. The basis of freedom is recognition of the unconscious; the invisible dimension; the not yet realized; leaving a space for the new.
Cf. Morgan, Visible Saints.
The unconscious to be made conscious; a secret dis- closed; a veil to be rent, a seal to be broke open; the seal which Freud called repression. Not a gradual process, but a sudden breakthrough. A reversal of meaning; the symbol- ism suddenly understood. The key to the cipher: the sud- den sight of the real Israel, the true bread, the real lamb
Cf. Pascal, Pensées, nos. 678, 680, 563.
A breakthrough from shadows to reality: daybreak. The day breaks, and the shadows fee away. Suddenly at daybreak; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye.
Song of Songs Il, 7. I Corinthians XV, 51-52.
It is always daybreak. Knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep. Adam, or Albion, "the
218
history of the world from its creation, which was part of his fall, to the Last Judgement is his sleep. The fall is falling asleep; the sickness a sleeping sickness. Repression keeps the human essence latent, or dormant; the maiden is not dead but sleepeth. Psychoanalysis began when Freud discarded hypnotism--hypnotism which makes world opin- ion; hypnotism which makes the world go round. "I real- ized that henceforth I belonged to those who, according to Hebbel's expression have disturbed the world's sleep. From shadows to reality; from lamplight to sunlight; the turn; out of the cave of dreams or shadows. Symbolical consciousness is the interpretation of dreams, of this life as a dream.
Romans XIII, 11; Matthew IX, 24; Acts IX, 40. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 125. Freud, "History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, 943.
Cf. Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, 190.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The infantile amnesia is the birth of the soul, the dreamer; and we are obliged to repeat what we cannot remember. This world is repetition-compulsion, is karma: the burden of the past, a future determined by the past, causality. This world is dreams, the present transformed into the past, the shadow of the past falling on the present. The awakening explodes the cave of shadows; it is the end of the world.
Cf. Freud, "Interpretation of Dreams," 497, 582; Outline, 124. Powell, Zen and Reality, 19, 24, 53. Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 267, 270. Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 195.
It is always daybreak. Suspended between first and second coming; between prophecy and fulfillment; be- tween presence and absence; between seeing and not see- ing; between sleeping and waking. The authentic psycho- analytical epiphany- -do I wake or sleep?
219
Sleeping and waking, to make these opposites one. I sleep, but my heart waketh. "For until the desires are lulled to sleep through the mortification of our sensual na- ture, and until at last the sensual nature is at rest from them, so that they make not war upon the spirit, the soul goes not forth to true liberty for the enjoyment of union with its Beloved. " In the sleep of desire delight awakes. In the sleep of soul the form awakes. "The more we con- centrate, the more we approach the condition of sleep. » As in poetry, which is dreaming while awake. In trance, in transit.
Song of Songs V, 1. St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, I, 1V, 2; cf. II, xiv, 11. Rieker, Secret of Meditation, 22.
Cf. Hartman, The Unmediated Vision, 104.
The fulfillment of prophecy is the end of the world Figures are always figures of last things; typology (sym- bolism) is eschatology. The rending of the veil, the break- ing of the seal, is the end of the world; history is fulfilled in its own abolition. II Corinthians IlI, 12-14: Seeing then that we have such a hope, we use great freedom of speech: And not as Moses, who put a veil over his face, so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly look to the end of that which is abolished: But their minds were blinded: for unto this day remaineth the same veil unremoved in their reading of the old testament; which veil is abolished in Christ.
We must look to the end. The Christian prayer is for the end of the world: that it may come quickly. The aim is to bring this world to an end; the only question is how. A mistake here might prove quite costly.
Revelations XXI1, 20.
220
There is a distinction between the first coming and the second coming; but ever since the first coming, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is close. The Christian sense of history is the sense of living in the last days. Little children it is the last hour. The whole Christian era is in the last days. The New Testament is the beginning of the end; the sense that the old is symbolical only is the sense that we are now in the time of fulfillment —in illis tem- poralibus figuras fuisse futurorum quae implerentur in nobis, in quos finis saeculorum obvenit. To see in past events figures of future events, to be fulfilled in us, who are confronted by the end of the world.
Mark I, 15; I John II, 18. Augustine, Contra Faustinum, 4, 2, in Auer- bach, "Figura, 41.
Cf. Daniélou, Lord of History, 186.
The kingdom of God is close: every passing minute brings it no closer. The delay in the arrival of the second coming exists for those whose expectations are in unilinear time and literal meaning. Millennial calculations make the end of the world a literal instead of a visionary reality. It is not a question of a temporal interval, short or long, but of a visionary breakthrough. The real meaning of the last days is Pentecost.
For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy: And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke:
221
The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come.
Acts II, 15-20.
Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; Freud. These are not drunken, as ye suppose. Wonders and signs. The sun turned into darkness and the moon into blood. Pentecost is madness. The god is Dionysus.
The last thing to be realized is the incarnation. The last mystery to be unveiled is the union of humanity and divinity in the body. The last gesture is, ecce homo. To turn from the letter to the spirit is to turn from the shadow of figures to the reality of body. De umbra transfertur ad corpus. Or, as psychoanalysis might say, from the abstrac- tions of sublimation to the reality of body. Colossians II, 16-17: Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a holy day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are the shadows of things to come; but the body is of Christ.
Tertullian in Auerbach, "Figura," 33.
Adumbration, and fulfillment. Antitype differs from type as body from shadow, truth from dream, sunlight from lamplight, body from shadow. The world of types is the world of the dreamer; Plato's cave. Platonic alle- gories, and sublimation, ascend from "sensibles" to "spirit- uals": for Platonism, the invisible and incorporeal things that are in heaven are true, while the visible and corporeal things on earth are copies of the true things, not themselves true. Symbolical consciousness--Christian, or psychoan-
222
alytical, or Dionysian--terminates in the body, remains faithful to the earth. The dreamer awakes not from a body but to a body. Not an ascent from body to spirit, but the descent of spirit into body: incarnation not sub. limation. Hence to find the true meaning of history is to find the bodily meaning. Christ, the fulfillment, is not an abstract idea but a human body. All fulfillment is carnal carnaliter adimpleri.
Tertullian cited in Auerbach, "Figura 1, 34.
Cf. Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, 190.
Incarnation is iconoclasm. Literalism is idolatry, tak- ing shadows for reality; taking abstractions, human inven- tions, unconscious projections of the human spirit, as autonomous powers; letting the metaphors go dead, and then, when dead, bowing down before them, taking them literally.
Cf. Barfield, Saving the Appearances.
The fulfillment dissolves the figure. Christianity is the destruction of the temple, the veil of the temple rent from the top to the bottom. Creative destruction, the life or historical process. Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
Cf. Matthew XXVII, 15; John II, 19.
To pass from shadows to reality is to pass from the external and material temple to the new temple, the true temple, which is the human body. "They dedicated to God themselves as a new temple, of which the old temple was but the earthly type. The temple of the holy spirit is your body. In the incarnation, therefore, the veil of the temple
223
rent from top to bottom; in the second coming, the destruc- tion of the temple.
Augustine, Christian Doctrine, III, vi. I Corinthians VI, 19.
Cf. Lubac, Histoire et esprit, 130. Matthew XXVII, 51.
Literalism makes the world of abstract materialism; of dead matter; of the human body as dead matter. Lit- eralism kills everything, including the human body. It is the spirit Blake called Ulro, which sees nothing but rock and sand, jostling together in the void; Whitehead's Mis- placed Concreteness: "Nature a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, end- lessly, meaninglessly. Literalism makes a universe of stone, and men astonished, petrified. Literalism is the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones; tables of stone and stony heart. The incarnation of symbols gives us a new heart, a heart for the first time human, a heart for the first time, or is it the second time, made of flesh. "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.
Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 69. II Corinthians III, 7.
Ezekiel XXXVI, 26.
Cf. Augustine, Christian Doctrine, III, xxxiv.
Literal meanings are spirits solidified into matter; anime become trees, like Daphne; or stone maidens, Caryatids.
Daphne shall break her bark, and run To meet the embraces of the youthful Sun.Cf. Carew, "The Rapture," 226.
224
Incarnation: the word made fesh. "Refrain from unit- ing with words, in order to unite with the word made flesh. » The abstractions idolized by literalism are words; words detached from the breath of living bodies; detached from the breath of life, the spirit, and hardened into inde- pendent reality; words written down, scripture, the dead letter; Latin litera, the letter; Greek gramma, the writing. The letter is alienated spirit; what Augustine calls the letter written outside the man. Symbolical consciousness restores the spirit to the man; and then the only scripture is the human body itself. I Corinthians IlI, 3: "Ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ, written not with ink but with the spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in the fleshy tables of the heart."
Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age, 61.
Cf. Augustine, The Spirit and the Letter, 29-30.
To return the word to the fesh. To make knowledge carnal again; not by deduction, but immediate by percep- tion or sense at once; the bodily senses.
Cf. Blake, Annotations to Berkeley's "Siris," 774.
From the letter to the spirit. The hidden meaning of the body is the spirit; but the spirit is not the ghost but life itself; not the soul or psyche but the breath of life, the creator spirit. Good-by holy ghost, veni creator spiritus. I Corinthians XV, 45: The first man Adam became a living psyche; the last Adam became a life-making spirit. Life is the power to make new life; the spirit is phallic, and fiery; the god is Dionysus.
Incarnation is not to be understood carnally, for to be carnally-minded is death; that is to say, the body is not to
225
be understood literally. Everything is symbolic, everything including the human body. To pass from the temple to the body is to perceive the body as the new temple, the true temple. The house is a woman; and the woman is a house, or palace
Ascending up with many a stately stayre,
To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre.The land is a woman, the virgin land; and the woman is a land, my America, my Newfoundland.
Spenser, "Epithalamion."
Cf. Romans VIII, 6; Donne, '"To His Mistress Going to Bed."
"The real apocalypse comes, not with the vision of a city or kingdom, which would still be external, but with the identification of the city and kingdom with one's own body." Political kingdoms are only shadows--my kingdom is not of this world--because the kingdoms of this world are non-bodily. Political freedom is only a prefiguration of true freedom: "The Bastille is really a symbol, that is, an image or form, of the two larger prisons of man's body and the physical world." Political and fleshly emancipation are finally one and the same; the god is Dionysus,
Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 431, 202.
Cf. Augustine, Christian Doctrine, II, XII. Pascal, Pensées, no. 682. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, 47.
My kingdom is not of this world. But metapolitics is not metaphysics, in another world, but a physiology of politics. Or a politics of physiology, as in the psychoanalyt- ical theory of the sexual organizations.
My kingdom is not of this world. It is not a literal kingdom; literal kingdoms are only shadows. The reality
226
is flesh. But flesh is a figure, the reality of which is yet to be unveiled. The reality of body is not given, but to be made real, to be realized; the body is to be built; to be built not with hands but by the spirit. It is the poetic body; the made body; Man makes Himself, his own body, in the symbolic freedom of the imagination. "The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, that is, God himself, the Divine Body, Jesus; we are his Members.
Blake, The Laocoön, 776.
Cf. Ephesians II, 21-22; IV, 12. Auerbach, "Figura, - 53, 72.
The body is plastic; the imagination esemplastic. The reality disclosed by the imagination is not the literal but the symbolical or mystical body. He took some bread and said, This is my body. Or Tat Tvam Asi, Thou art That" "Thou art the universal self; all things are Buddha things; the identity of thine inmost essence with the invisible sub- stance of the all." To find the kingdom in one's own body, and to find one's own body in the outside world.
Zimmer, Philosophies of India, 149; cf. 309, 361.
To find the kingdom in one's own body, and to find one's own body in the outside world. The body to be realized is the body of the cosmic man, the body of the universe as one perfect man. The word that is incarnate in Christ is the word that is incarnate in the universe by the creative fat; it is the logos of the universe now recapi tulated in the divine-human body. "To the enlightened man, however, whose consciousness embraces the uni- verse, to him the universe becomes his body. » As in schiz- ophrenia: "what happens to the person's own body... is identical with what happens in the universe."
Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 225. Storch, Primitive Archaic Forms, 4; cf. 86-87.
Cf. Daniélou, Lord of History, 191.
227
The body that is identical with environment. As in dreams the whole landscape is made out of the dreamer's own body; so in totemism the human essence is projected into animal or plant--the very act of unconscious symbol- formation. In conscious symbolism the alienated spirit returns to its human creator: "all the gods are in our body." Redemption is the reformation of the creator spirit in man; redemption is deification; we make a new heaven and a new earth.
Zimmer, "Indian Tantric Yoga, "° 30.
Cf. Roheim, Eternal Ones of the Dream, 243. Brophy, Black Ship to Hell, 437.
The fulfillment of symbols is in the symbolism of the body. In bodily experience, in the incarnation of symbols, it for the first time happens for real; and as the first real time, it can be also the last time. Allegory, discarnate symbolism, unconscious symbolism, is the world of eternal recurrence, the world of karma, of the repetition-com- pulsion. In the incarnation of symbols we move from alle- gory to eschatology, from eternal recurrence to eternity. The sacrifice of Isaac was not actually carried out: it is done in type or figure, and repeatedly done in figure. The sacrifice is really carried out in Jesus, for the first and for the last time; now once and for all to bring the world to an end.
Hebrews IX, 25-26: "Nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holy place every year with blood of others; for then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to abolish sin by the sacrifice of himself." Tertullian: "The high priest entered the Holy of Holies each year,
228
but did not remain there; this repetition shows that it is nothing more than a repetition, a representation, and not in any way the reality.
Tertullian, adv. Marcionem III, 18.
Cf. Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, 123; Lord of History, 144. Ed- wards, Images, No. 50.
The true paschal lamb. "Christ was anointed priest in his human nature, and offered no other sacrifice than that of his own body. - 22 The reality adumbrated in all sacrifice, in animal sacrifice, is human sacrifice, the sacri- fice of the human body, as an eternal truth.
Theodoretus in Daniélou, Lord of History, 194.
Cf. Pascal, Pensées, no. 680.
Daniélou says that in the general resurrection Christ's personal conquest, already effective in the souls of man- kind, will be extended over the whole physical world. But a conquest that is effective only on the souls of man- kind is not yet real; it is still shadow, not body. The second coming, the general resurrection, takes place not in our souls but in our bodies.
Cf. Daniélou, Lord of History, 191.
The interval between the first and second coming is the time of the church; in which the invisible reality of the body is foreshadowed in the church as a body, and in the sacrament of the body; but not in our bodies; and therefore figuratively, not yet really; and so there is still warfare between body and spirit. According to Joa- chim, the course of history continuously dissolves the sacramental forms in which the divine reality is revealed (concealed), so that the sacraments of the higher phase
229
both fulfill and cancel the sacraments of the preceding stage. In the second period Christ shows himself in the risen flesh only to a few; in the third period, all flesh shall see it together. In the third period, the priesthood is dissolved; the vicar of Christ, locum tenens in his ab- sence, is replaced by Christ himself. It is the transition from passive identification to active participation in the mystical body; from (distant) representation to real pres- ence: from shadow to body.
Cf. Daniélou, Lord of History, 140 et seq., 190, 272. Benz, Ecclesia Spiritualis, 9, 15-16.
From the sacred set apart to the holy whole. Hier- ophanies everywhere; no privileged times or places. Every book a bible; and books in the running brooks. "As for the continuous but invisible outpouring of the Spirit, Servetus was aware of it everywhere as the mundification of the divine substantia in all creatures, which could there- fore be considered full of divinity. Hence all things, from the heavenly bodies to the smallest flowers, could be looked upon as gods.
Christ the direct and omnipresent object of perception- Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.Williams, The Radical Reformation, 612. Hopkins, fire." "As Kingfishers catch
Cf. Hartman, The Unmediated Vision, 59.
At any rate he calls us to come outdoors; Dionysus calls us outdoors. Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. Out of the temple made with hands;
230
out of the ark of the book; out of the cave of the law; out of the belly of the letter. The first tabernacle in Jerusalem; the second tabernacle the universal Church; the third tabernacle the open sky. "Only when a clear sky looks down through broken ceilings will my heart turn again toward the places of God."
Song of Songs I, 10-12; Galatians ITI, 23. Zarathustra cited in Heller, The Disinherited Mind, 141.
Cf. Daniélou, Origen, 144. Benz, Ecclesia Spiritualis, 35-37. Augustine, Spirit and Letter, 24. Lubac, Corpus Mysticism, 218, 218n.
Hierophanies everywhere: the presence is not real until it is present everywhere. In the bread and wine of every meal; together with him this day in paradise.
Cf. Edwards, Images, no. 68. Luke XXIII, 43.
Bread and wine; or air, the air we breathe. The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we breathe-
Wild air, world-mothering air, Nestling me everywhere, This needful, never spent, And nursing element; My more than meat and drink, My meal at every wink—"Our breath to support life, a representation of our de- pendence on the spirit of God for spiritual life, says Jonathan Edwards; but our breath is not an image of a more divine thing: it is the divine thing, the breath of life, the creator spirit, which deifies us-
And makes, O marvellous! New Nazareths in us, Where she shall yet conceive Him, morning, noon, and eve.Hopkins, "The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we breathe." Ed- wards, Images, no. 208,
231
To reconcile body and spirit would be to recover the breath-soul which is the life-soul instead of the ghost-soul or shadow; breath-consciousness instead of brain-con sciousness; body-consciousness instead of head-conscious- ness. The word made fesh is a living word, not a scripture but a breathing. A line that comes from the breath, from the heart by way of the breath. Aphorism as utterance: a short breath, drawn in pain. Winged words, birds re- leased from the sentence, doves of the spirit.
Cf. Bachelard, La Poétique de l'espace, 179-180. Charles Olson in Allen, New American Poetry, 388-390. Duncan, Letters, XIX.
241
Upside down. Not the reality-principle but surrealism. Surrealism, a systematic illumination of the hidden places and a progressive darkening of the rest; a perpetual promenade right in the forbidden zone.
Cf. Carrouges, André Breton et les données fondamentales du sur- réalisme, 31.
Go down and stay down, in the forbidden zone; a descent into hell. "I can only conclude with the wish that fate may grant an easy ascension to those whose sojourn in the underworld of psychoanalysis has become uncom- fortable. May it be vouchsafed to others to bring to happy conclusion their work in the depth."
Freud, "History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, 977.
The revolution is from below, the lower classes, the underworld, the damned, the disreputable, the despised and rejected. Freud's revolutionary motto in The Interpre- tation of Dreams: Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acherunta movebo. If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will stir up the lower depths. Freud's discovery: the universal under- world.
Freud, "Interpretation of Dreams," 540.
Darkness at noon. A progressive darkening of the everyday world of common sense. Finnegans Wake. Sec- ond sight is the dark night. Night gives light unto night; the double dark, or negation of the negation. Admirable cosa es que, siendo tenebrosa, alumbrase la noche.
San Juan de la Cruz, Subido del Monte Carmelo, Il, ili, 5.
Cf. Hopkins, "The Habit of Perfection."
...
244
down; in the rough ground, the anomalies; not in the ex- planations. Search the scripture till you find a stumbling block; look for the slips of the tongue; the lapsus linguae, the fortunate falls. The truth is in the error. We slip out from under the reality-principle, into the truth; when the control breaks down. By great good fortune, gratis, by grace; and not by our own work or will.
Cf. Grant, Letter and Spirit, 35, 96. Benz, Ecclesia Spirituals, 37. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 46.
A treasure stumbled upon, suddenly; not gradually accumulated, by adding one to one. The accumulation of learning, "adding to the sum-total of human knowledge"; lay that burden down, that baggage, that impediment. Take nothing for your journey; travel light.
Cf. Luke IX, 4.
The original mistake in every sentence: metaphor. Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; "the presentation of facts of one category in the idiom appropriate to another." The original sentence, the original metaphor: Tat Tvam Asi, Thou art that; or hoc est corpus meum, this is my body. Making this thing other: "We already and first of all discern him making this thing other. Metaphor is mistake or im- propriety; a faux pas, or slip of the tongue; a little mad- ness; petit mal; a little seizure or inspiration.
Ryle in Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor, 12, 24. Jones, Anathémata, 49. Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b.
Cf. Black, Models and Metaphors, 33, 36.
Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, break- ing the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.
245
The original sense is nonsense; and common sense a cover-up job, repression. Psychoanalysis, symbolic con- sciousness, leads from disguised to patent nonsense Wittgenstein, surrealism, Finnegans Wake.
Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 133.
This is my body. Mistake, or magic, or madness; or child's play. This is a house and this is a steeple.
Wisdom is wit; in play, not in work; in freedom, not in necessity. A vast pun, as in dreams, in the neologisms of schizophrenia, in Finnegans Wake, in the Old Testament prophets.
Wisdom is in wit, in fooling, most excellent fooling; in play, and not in heavy puritanical seriousness. In levity, not gravity. My yoke is easy, my burden is light.
Cf. Matthew XI, 30.
The God of Delphi, who always spoke the truth, never gave a straight answer, in the upright Protestant way; he always spoke in riddles, in parables; ambiguities, temptations; that hearing they might hear and not under- stand. To teach is not to tell, is not-to-tell; like Heraclitus, the obscure. The god knew how to lie; and so did not deceive his countrymen. The real deceivers are the literalists, who say, I cannot tell a lie, or, hypotheses non fingo.
Cf. Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor, 23-24, 51.
It is a game of hide-and-seek: "The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out;
246
as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God's playfellows in that game.
Bacon in McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 190.
Literal meanings are packaged commodities for passive consumers: in symbolist poetry the reader is incorporated into the work, actively participates in the poetic process itself—"the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself." All the Lord's people become prophets.
Ruskin in McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 266; cf. 38, 217, 276-277.
Cf. Numbers XI, 29. Blake, Milton, Preface.
It cannot be inculcated, or imposed, from without. Like faith or love, it cannot be forced. The spirit is free love.
Enigmatic form is living form; like life, an irides- cence; an invitation to the dance; a temptation, or irrita- tion. No satisfying solutions; nothing to rest in; nothing to weigh us down.
Meaning is in the play, or interplay, of light. As in schizophrenia, all things lose their boundaries, become iridescent with many-colored significances. No things, but an iridescence, a rainbow effect. Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben. An indirect reflection; or refraction; broken light, or enigma.
Strindberg in Storch, Primitive Archaic Forms, 62. Goethe, Faust II, I. 4727.
...
254
enlightened man, the universe becomes his body: "YOul never enjoy the world aright till the Sea itself foweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars." Anima est quodammodo omnia, as in schizophrenia: what happens to the person's own body is identified with what happens in the universe.
Traherne, Centuries of Meditations I, no. 29.
Cf. Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 225. Storch, Primitive Archaic Forms, 4, 86-87.
Fusion, mystical participation. Primitive animism is suffused with the unconscious identification of subject and object: participation mystique. Civilized objectivity is nonparticipating consciousness, consciousness as separa- tion, as dualism, distance, definition; as property and prison: consciousness ruled by negation, which is from the death instinct. Symbolical consciousness, the erotic sense of reality, is a return to the principle of ancient animistic science, mystical participation, but now for the first time freely; instead of religion, poetry.
Cf. Ferenczi, "'The Scientific Significance of Freud's Three Essays, 256; Thalassa, 2-4.
Psychoanalysis began as a further advance of civilized (scientific) objectivity; to expose remnants of primitive participation, to eliminate them; studying the world of dreams, of primitive magic, of madness, but not participat- ing in dreams or magic, or madness. But the outcome of psychoanalysis is the discovery that magic and madness are everywhere, and dreams is what we are made of. The goal cannot be the elimination of magical thinking, or madness; the goal can only be conscious magic, or conscious madness; conscious mastery of these fires. And dreaming while awake.
Cf. Roheim, Magic and Schizophrenia, 83.
255
There is a marriage (in heaven) between psycho- analysis and the mystical tradition; combining to make us conscious of our unconscious participation in the creation of the phenomenal world. "Neither nature nor man will ever be understood, though certainly physical nature- and perhaps physical man, too- -may in the meantime be very skillfully manipulated, until we accept that nature is the reflected image of man's conscious and unconscious self » To become conscious of our participation in the creation of the phenomenal world is to pass from passive experience- perception as impressions on a passive mind -to conscious creation, and creative freedom. Every per- ception is a creation "when we see physical objects we are makers or poets. 29 Or gods; the world is our creation.
Turbayne, Myth of Metaphor, 135. Barfield, "The Meaning of the Word 'Literal," " 56.
Cf. Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 88-89, 100-101, 126-131.
All flesh shall see it together. Apocalypse is the dis- solution of the group as numerical series, as in representa- tive democracy, and its replacement by the group as fusion, as communion. As in totemism, we participate in each other as we participate in the object.
Cf. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, 391; cf. 386-395
Sleepers, awake. Sleep is separateness; the cave of solitude is the cave of dreams, the cave of the passive spectator. To be awake is to participate, carnally and not in fantasy, in the feast; the great communion.