20120130

Pulling yourself into a new existence.

Thanks to a friend of mine, who dragged me into this with enthusiasm and conviction, and the wonderful people at Wings of Desire. I had a new experience yesterday, and I can't quite use my academic training to quantify it. This is nothing new, it happens to a lot of people, and I dare say more and more people consciously seek it out.

Have you ever taken a look at commercials from way back? I mean a real look and not just looked at the way women are portrayed as servants, but how so many of them were about selling modernity as well as a specific product. Sleek modernist design, machinery, science and urbanity were selling points in the year after the second world war. There was an air of progress, safety and techno optimism after the dark irrational forces of fascism had been vanquished. Take a look at the beatiful schematics of the washing machine here for instance. Nothing mystical about it. Nowhere, no how.

Compare this to how we sell shampoo today. It's all about emotions, and ethereal unquantifiable orgasmic experiences. Interesting huh?

Unless you're blind and stupid you've probably noticed a few social trends that fit in this very context: getting married is back, the catholic church is growing in protestant countries, along with new age, occultism, buddhism, hinduism and islam, and television shows are increasingly concerned with mystic experience, parapsychology and alternative religions - in a positive way.

Yesterday I was suspended by two hooks lodged in my back. I'm not a member of some Amazonian tribe where things like this is done to prove manhood, nor am I particularly masochistic - and yet I chose voluntarily to have my skin stretched and chance all my weight on two steel hooks and a small patch of skin.

Though I like to see myself as an individualist and not some follower of trends it would be naive not to notice a pattern here. Especially considering my other interests: ritualism, occultism, buddhism, symbology, mythology and so forth ad nauseam.

Traditionally something like this would have been a rite of passage, in the Arnold Van Gennep school of thought, and he makes some very interesting points. Rites de passages is highly readable today and perhaps one of the few books on ritualism that has really stood the test of time. His theory of course concerns moving from one type of existence into a new one - or crossing of thresholds.

This is not necessarily evident though, and I actually think modern ritualism (in this particular context) is both a result of and a continuation of a fragmentation of traditional ritualism. By result I mean antithesis: modernity has rationalized society to the point where people lack content for their lives. We are born, we live, we die, we rot and if there's anything in between that puzzles us we turn to psychiatrists with chemical explanations - and for some reason we don't feel fulfilled by this. Like there is something missing. For this reason many of us crave entry into a world of irrational thought. Perhaps even initiatory experiences (though I feel a need to point out that this initiatory experience and use of traditional ritualism should not be likened to the rather outdated "sect" called traditionalism).

Personally I am an academic, scientifically minded person who prefers Houdini's open minded debunking to Blavatsky's fraudulent bullshit when mysticism is involved, and still I find a great deal of meaning in this kind of ritualism.

And ritualism it certainly is. Structurally it even parallels the classical outline of Golden Dawn rituals. You start with a cleansing, followed by an invocation of inner strength, you perform the act, and end it with a new cleansing. (While many occultists are moving away from this somewhat rigid pattern I personally prefer it, and it works well.)

There's a reason why rituals are constructed this way - and you'll notice the very same structure even in a boring protestant church - by singing songs and playing the pipe organ. The first ritual sets the stage and clears it for the content of the main ceremony. This is done by creating a barrier between the profane and the profound. (In Jewish temples this is physically underlined by the famous veil, which separates the two spheres.) By doing this we signal that we are in a deeper and more spiritual mode, and receptive. After the main body of the ritual we need to return to the profane world, and we use more rituals to signal that we're no longer talking to the gods and our souls, and that we're once again primarily concerned with the material world. It would be anticlimactic and maybe even exhausting not to be allowed to come down after the spiritual journey you've been on.

So this is how we frame the ritual, but what do rituals contain? The answer is of course pure myth. These rituals, while being traditional types of rituals, they have been appropriated, recontextualized and cleansed of content - to the point where you can fill them with personal experience (which is why I say it's a continuation of the modernist experience). Where they were primarily initiatory experiences pre-modernity they have now become primarily personal experiences. Of course, the initiatory aspect is still present: by doing this you pass a threshold into a new understanding of yourself. You're building personal myth so to speak. It's an experience you'll always remember, and the growth you experience is something you carry with you. (Additionally there is of course the subcultural element and the obvious initiatory aspects of that, but I'll leave that alone. This is a fairly superficial blog after all...)

I feel personally enriched by the experience, in a very different way than from my earlier experiences in the field of body modification. I have a tattoo, it was great fun, doing it again. I have a scarification, even more fun, not doing it again though. I've pierced myself a jillion times, great fun, got bored, took them all out after walking around with a mask for 15 years. But this was a different camel altogether. It was the proverbial leap of faith actually.

I hoisted myself up, and the moment I let my feet off the ground was like stepping out of a reality and into a new one. The resolve I needed to muster came from somewhere very deep. While there was hardly any pain involved the mind just doesn't want to trust that this is in fact safe. Despite having seen other people do it. After that it was all about flying.

It's a completely irrational experience, and I loved it. Doing it again. Definitely doing it again. Thank you Anette. :)

Read more here:
wings of desire

20120127

Fire and the myth of the New Flesh!

One of the most central myths in human history, told by what is probably every single culture to ever have existed is the myth of fire. The most well known is of course the myth of Promethevs who stole the fire from the gods. You've all heard it.

There are several reasons why these myths are so powerful, depending on the myth itself of course, but also inherent in the common theme. Obtaining fire is about freedom to decide one's own fate, civilization, mastery of nature, predictability and about connection to the profound. Most significantly, fire was a step on the tool making evolutionary ladder which allowed humans to control a force of nature and thereby paved the way for technological innovations that came later. It's up there with the first knife, the wheel and the jar and other significant early achievements.

Mythically speaking the most significant trait of these stories would be man's ability to rise into the sphere otherwise occupied by the gods (the Sun most prominently of course). By mastering the art of fire man was no longer a slave to the gods, but master of his own destiny. Even, by mastering the gift from the gods we are able to construct a new religion and approach divinity in a new way. The innovation of fire supposedly coincided with the approach of sun worship and patriarchy, at least on some level.

The various fire myths around the world are complex, and despite following some common structure they also differ vastly. Claude Levi Straus goes into some of these in great detail, but I'm going to leave that be for now. My understanding of the symbolic meaning of many of the details, and my knowledge of mythical structures is nowhere near as impressive as his. One common theme for fire myths is that after initially obtaining fire the gift is lost, or stolen from man, and a hero must regain it for the good of his people, by going on a quest of some sort.

The movie La guerre du feu (English Title: The quest for fire) from 1981, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud concerns this exact portion of the fire myth, and it's one hell of a story, with briliant production values and direction! (Also, it's the first feature film appearance of Ron Perlman, whom some of you probably know better as Hellboy or from that horribly overrated film by Caro and Jeunet).

I first saw this film when I was about seven or so, and it made a lasting impression. The film starts out with a small tribe of stone age people who have fire, but don't know how to make it. The entire structure of the tribe is therefore geared towards caring for and guarding the kindle they carry with them, and guard with their lives. Consequently when this kindle is accidentally lost after a fierce battle with a competing tribe life takes a turn for the worse. (The competing tribe fills the role of what Lévi-Strauss called the Trickster, somewhat simplified.) It's decided that three of the tribe's members will go out and search for a new source of fire, while the rest of the tribe try to survive without it.

Wile I am certain things like this happened in real life it is evident that this is no historical drama, but a compression of cultural and technological evolution into a myth complex for retold in the language of "modernity". The stone age tribe coexists with tribes that are significantly more advanced technologically, juxtaposing the "primitive" tribe on the first step of the evolutionary ladder with the more civilized tribe - capable of creating fire, as well as other technological gizmos. Also, the cult venerated by the more advanced tribe is seemingly more complex than the fire-seeking tribe, though this is not a significant theme in the tale.

This film is of course a redux of the so called "cave man" genre, which was immensly popular back in the fifties and sixties, before nearly dying out. (The most long lived memory of that genre would probably be the Flintstones though.) Despite the name the cave man films were mostly about hot cave WOMEN, as you can witness in films like "The Wild Women of Wongo" (1958), or even better, you can drool over "the first bikini in pre-history" worn by Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (1966). The latter is a masterpiece in its own right, produced by Hammer Films and completely historically accurate. ;)

Structurally and thematically La guerre du feu has interesting similarities to the Welch film. Both films are of course laden with sexual imagery, and both films portray someone going on a quest and returning to their tribe after encountering a woman from a more advanced tribe, and in turn also bringing new technology to their own. (Classical Campbellian monomyth.) Also, in both of these films the advancement of technology and civilization is portrayed as relatively unproblematic, naturally, seen with our mythical hind sight. The dissemination of fire (and such) was a prerequisite for the rise of modern man, and it's hard to see how anyone could really resist such progress or feel fear in it's face.

Compare this to another and vividly different piece of modern mythology: the New Flesh as portrayed by David Cronenberg in Videodrome (1983). Videodrome is similar to La guerre du feu in that it concerns the adoption of new technology and civilization on a significant threshold (also they were released almost at the same time). They are different in that Videodrome portrays this as something we fear, while La guerre du feu sees only positive progress. Fire is something we crave, while television is a more dubious matter alltogether - somewhere between a malign tumor and The New Flesh. The New Flesh is a term Cronenberg uses to describe technology that is so intimately woven into our everyday lives that it becomes almost organic to us. Such as fire has been for millenia, and television has been since the sixties. And as we all know, and smart phones, iPads, apps and stuff like that proves: there are early adopters, late adopters and resisters.

I have no idea how humans several thousands of years ago approached fire, but the repercussions to society must have been a great deal more tumultous than the introduction of televised mass media, cable TV, video and violent pornography as in Videodrome, and I can easily see how some people must have been sceptical and even afraid of this innovation.

The interesting bit is of course how our mythic structures change over the years. Films are still portraying electronics with some level of fear, while emphasizing how intimate we are with these dodats. Think of Japanese horror films such as Ringu and One Missed Call. In fifty years time this will seem as quaint as the mechano-horror of the luddites is to most people today. Even further into the future imagining resistance against mobile phones will be as difficult to portray as resistance to fire, the wheel, iron, steel, pottery, granaries and democracy is today.

As load bearing structures of meaning myths say a great deal of the changes a society is going through, and also what's consistent, and what's important in our common psyche. I really wish there were more films out there concerning classical myth material in a "realistic" context. La guerre du deu is as good as it gets, and worth seeing. Even if you're only interested in brawny cavemen battling fierce beasts and making the beast with two backs with painted women. Atleast it's far superior to that Darryl Hannah flick...