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X. India and the Mythopoetic Mind of Man (1967) Lecture given by Heinrich Blücher Bard College, April 27, 1967 "Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet Der Mensch auf dieser Erde." Hölderlin. That means: "Full of merit, yet poetically, is man living on this earth." Yet Poetically! The first impact the world makes on man is received collectively. In the time of myths then, we find collective consciousness. We can get an idea of what this means if we look closer at our own manipulators of public opinion, (the press, the media, and so on), for they too are really inventors of legends and myths. They have given us the myth of America, the myth of this, the myth of that, and they are also trying to build a collective consciousness. In a way this would be ideal for them, because in a collective consciousness consensus would indeed be in, automatically, so to speak, hence the time of myth is always a time of consensus, because collective consciousness is really there. Why? Man, in the beginning, does not live alone. He is born into a tribe and he is disciplined by the tribe. That is the mythical time. He organizes this tribe, and everything, every principle of organization that is needed to make this tribe stick together is identified with nature. He needs this, to be able to defend himself against nature. Here we see the strange sociological phenomenon of a group consciousness that is identical with natural consciousness. We now have to see where this leads. It leads first, to the most primitive steps in the direction of world consciousness and self consciousness imaginable. The fact that man is a being born with world consciousness, that he insists on world consciousness and a little later on self consciousness; this fact is first visible in the mythical world schemes that we can today control by science. Even today we can discover the strangest myths among savage tribes that we meet. Newer ones, bigger ones, some of them crazy and some of them very funny. But if we go back historically (and we can go back very far), we find that when man first appears on the globe he appears in groups. This means that group experience is the first experience he necessarily has, and it is to this that we refer, when we speak about the development of collective consciousness. The time is oral. The tradition is oral. But before it becomes oral it is present in the form of remembrance, and the first remembrances are dramatic, are more showing than talking. Every rain dance, every ritual, every world of rituals, every performance that is made in accord with nature, is repeated again and again and again. The last movement of a dance is remembered forever, and man develops his memory first according to rituals. Then, and only then, comes speech. So when we analyze myths we find that almost all the time, at the basis of them lies a dramatic performance. There are no representative powers in myths. Everything is real, or believed to be real. If professor Cassirer thinks he can explain myths symbolically, then the explanation is not valid, because mythical people never do anything symbolically. If they could, then they would already be in the logical age. Their rituals are performed immediately and according to the assumption that they are imitating reality and the world. Now this is strange, isn't it? This insistence of man, even in the earliest times, on getting hold of a kind of world picture. No other creature, no other animal, seems to want that. The world for them is just an environment. Sometimes it is a small environment, at other times it is a large one, but however that might be, their principle task is to orient themselves in these environments. Man, on the other hand, is a funny being who insists on considering everything he observes. He insists that he experience a world, which, in itself, hangs together. It is a poetical idea. Any time that you create a poem, every element in it must be related to every other element. The poem must form a perfect whole if it is to be a good one. Everything in it must hang together, and so that is why we often call myths and mythical thinking, mytho-poetic thinking. This is so, because it is clear that the main roots of mythical thinking lie in poetry, and it is a very strange kind of poetry. It is a kind of poetry that pretends to truth. It wants to teach the truth, and so it takes itself to be the entire reality. It is not self consciously poetical. Rather, it just is. This is so, because the first means by which we relate everything to everything else, is strangely enough, not the symbol, but the metaphor. Any poet well knows that with the help of a good metaphor you can unite the most divergent experiences into one. We do that all the time, so in a way poets must know how it feels to make myths, although in reality myths are never made by individuals, only by collective peoples. It is only later that individuals start to make myths (the myth of the Nazis, of the Communists, of the Americans). We call them myths, but we should make a distinction here, because although they start with individuals they are almost always made out of plain lies. They can say, as Picasso once said about his art, that they first invent a lie and then make it stick. That is easy, because in art one does not start with a lie, but only with an experience. But to make a lie stick in politics very hard work. You need the whole machinery of propaganda, but it can be done. It was done in Germany, to make one so called metaphysical lie stick, and the consequence of this was endless murder. They, (the political ideologists) are not really mythical people. They rather misuse the idea of myth, because it promises absolute unity, and they preach unity and nothing but unity. So we have a race myth, a class myth, and God knows what other kinds of myth. Georges Sorel, a French philosopher, who was also a kind of socialist, once wrote a book about violence, and he said that the socialists would never arrive at anything unless they could invent a new myth. The myth he proposed was the myth of a general strike. If the majority of workers could be brought to believe in the infallible power of a general strike, then the whole of society could be changed. In Russia and later China, we saw the emergence of a similar myth, only the man who gave it was not Marx, but Trotsky. His myth, was the myth of a permanent revolution, and you have that right now in China. They are trying to create a permanent revolution, and God only knows how long the poor Chinese people can go on. Human beings are not like that. Somehow, things must go back to normal, or otherwise everything will be ruined. So (these ideologists) proudly call themselves myth makers. They have nothing whatsoever to do with real myth. Myth, is an original belief and faith in the world. It is almost as if man says to himself: "My God. I am presented with a world, and I
know this is my world. We start to see one invention after another taking place. At the basis of each of them lies a metaphysical assumption. These are the first metaphysical assumptions ever made. What do I mean by a metaphysical assumption? During the time of myth there is no science, and so science is ruled out. Every metaphysical assumption contains as much factual thinking (real experience) as it contains willful, or wishful and hopeful thinking. It means that man (metaphysically speaking) uses all of his capacities (to think realistically, wishfully, willfully, and hopefully) in the creation of some organic scheme. That makes for the denseness and infinite interpretability of myths. In every piece of myth we analyze we find ourselves first, in a poetic world, then, in a pre-scientific world of cold observed facts, and finally, in a world of plain wishful thinking where the whole scheme no longer seems understandable. We can go on endlessly this way, unless we discover a metaphysical common denominator that will make the entire invention comprehensible. This metaphysical common denominator is the first world view of man. The first answer that man gives to the tremendous impression that the world makes upon him is a protective one. He uses as much of his free imagination as he can possibly mobilize in order to create an overall meaning to what he is confronted with. How does he proceed? Today, with the help of science, we can analyze many myths. Typology helps us tremendously. Psychology also helps as well as other sciences, and what ever the explanations that they give at least one thing is certain. There is no unity in them. In our own analysis we will consider one big example, and we will handle only this one. That is the example of Indian myths. The world of Indian myths: What a strange phenomenon. It is the only civilized country (as against tribes that live in isolated areas) where myth still survives. They have been refined into the most subtle kind of religion, a kind of mythical religion. India is the most holy country in the world. It is full of holy men (or holy bums as Kipling once said) and they run all over the country like the cows who are sacred to them. These cows cannot be slaughtered, and so the holy men live in misery for lack of nourishment. The myths that they develop go farther and farther. On each new day newer features are added to this tremendous mythical invention, and there is a good reason for that. Because they could never make the turn to change the world. They have always lived under the same conditions, as kind of slaves. They had to protect themselves against the world, and so they escaped from it. They are surrounded by a jungle society of iron clad castes. They are fenced in by them, and so the imaginative world in which they live is as rich as none other. |
