Myths to Live By
Page 6
[Discuss]
III—The Importance of Rites
Fig. 3.1 — Hopi Priest
III
The Importance of Rites
[1964]1
The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth. In ancient times every social occasion was ritually structured and the sense of depth was rendered through the maintenance of a religious tone. Today, on the other hand, the religious tone is reserved for exceptional, very special, “sacred” occasions. And yet even in the patterns of our secular life, ritual survives. It can be recognized, for example, not only in the decorum of courts and regulations of military life, but also in the manners of people sitting down to table together.
All life is structure. In the biosphere, the more elaborate the structure, the higher the life form. The structure through which the energies of a starfish are inflected is considerably more complex than that of an amoeba; and as we come on up the line, say to the chimpanzee, complexity increases. So likewise in the human cultural sphere: the crude notion that energy and strength can be represented or rendered by abandoning and breaking structures is refuted by all that we know about the evolution and history of life.
Now the structuring patterns of animal conduct inhere in the inherited nervous systems of the species; and the so-called innate releasing mechanisms by which they are determined are for the most part stereotyped. From animal to animal, the responses are consistent within a species. Moreover, the intricacy of some of the fixed patterns of performance is amazing: the nest-building of certain birds—the oriole, for example, fashioning its delicate hanging nest; or among insects and arachnids, the miracle of a spider web. Were we not so used to such things, we should be overcome with incredulity and wonder at the sight of the mathematical regularity and balance of a shimmering web perfectly suspended between selected twigs at the side of some forest trail, conceived and realized (as we should say of any comparable human work) with an infallible sense for the strength of materials, tensions, balances, and so on. All such little architectural marvels—beehives, anthills, nautilus shells, and the like—are produced according to inherited skills ingrained in the cells and nerve systems of the species.
Our human species, on the other hand, is distinguished by the fact that the action-releasing mechanisms of its central nervous system are for the most part not “stereotyped” but “open.” They are susceptible, consequently, to the influence of imprintings from the society in which the individual grows up. For the human infant is born—biologically considered—some ten or twelve years too soon. It acquires its human character, upright stature, ability to speak, and the vocabulary of its thinking under the influence of a specific culture, the features of which are engraved, as it were, upon its nerves; so that the constitutional patternings which in the animal world are biologically inherited are in the human species matched largely by socially transmitted forms, imprinted during what have been long known as the “impressionable years,” and rituals have been everywhere the recognized means of such imprinting. Myths are the mental supports of rites; rites, the physical enactments of myths. By absorbing the myths of his social group and participating in its rites, the youngster is structured to accord with his social as well as natural environment, and turned from an amorphous nature product, prematurely born, into a defined and competent member of some specific, efficiently functioning social order.
This altogether extraordinary prematurity of the birth of the human infant, so that throughout the period of its infancy it is dependent on its parents, has led biologists and psychologists to compare our situation with that of marsupials: the kangaroo, for example, which gives birth to its young only three weeks after conception. The tiny unready creatures crawl instinctively up the mother’s belly into her pouch, where they fix themselves—without instruction—to the nipples and remain until ready for life, nourished and protected in, so to say, a second womb. Evolution beyond that stage, in the mammals, involved the biological innovation of the placenta, which makes it possible for the young to remain within the mother until nearly ready for independence; so that mammals can generally take care of themselves almost immediately after birth, or at least within a few days or weeks. In the human species, with its great brain requiring many years to mature, on the other hand, the young are again born too soon, and instead of the pouch we have the home, which is again a sort of external second womb.
Now it is during this life stage of the home that all the basic social imprintings are established. They are there associated, however, with an attitude of dependency that has to be left behind before psychological maturity can be attained. The young human being responds to the challenges of its environment by turning to its parents for advice, support, and protection, and before it can be trusted as an adult, this patterning must be altered. Accordingly, one of the first functions of the puberty rites of primitive societies, and indeed of education everywhere, has been always that of switching the response systems of adolescents from dependency to responsibility—which is no easy transformation to achieve. And with the extension of the period or dependency in our own civilization into the middle or even late twenties, the challenge is today more threatening than ever, and our failures are increasingly apparent.
A neurotic might be defined, in this light, as one who has failed to come altogether across the critical threshold of his adult “second birth.” Stimuli that should evoke in him thoughts and acts of responsibility evoke those, instead, of flight to protection, fear of punishment, need for advice, and so on. He has continually to correct the spontaneity of his response patterns and, like a child, will tend to attribute his failures and troubles either to his parents or to that handy parent substitute, the state and the social order by which he is protected and supported. If the first requirement of an adult is that he should take to himself responsibility for his failures, for his life, and for his doing, within the context of the actual conditions of the world in which he dwells, then it is simply an elementary psychological fact that no one will ever develop to this state who is continually thinking of what a great thing he would have been had only the conditions of his life been different: his parents less indifferent to his needs, society less oppressive, or the universe otherwise arranged. The first requirement of any society is that its adult membership should realize and represent the fact that it is they who constitute its life and being. And the first function of the rites of puberty, accordingly, must be to establish in the individual a system of sentiments that will be appropriate to the society in which he is to live, and on which that society itself must depend for its existence.
In the modern Western world, moreover, there is an additional complication; for we ask of the adult something still more than that he should accept without personal criticism and judgment the habits and inherited customs of his local social group. We ask and we are expecting, rather, that he should develop what Sigmund Freud has called his “reality function”: that faculty of the independently observant, freely thinking individual who can evaluate without preconceptions the possibilities of his environment and of himself within it, criticizing and creating, not simply reproducing inherited patterns of thought and action, but becoming himself an innovating center, an active, creative center of the life process.
Our ideal for a society, in other words, is not that it should be a perfectly static organization, founded in the age of the ancestors and to remain unchanging through all time. It is rather of a process moving toward a fulfillment of as yet unrealized possibilities; and in this living process each is to be an initiating yet cooperating center. We have, consequently, the comparatively complex problem in educating our young of training them not simply to assume uncritically the patterns of the past, but to recognize and cultivate their own creative possibilities; not to remain on some proven level of earlier biology and sociology, but to represent a movement of the species forward. And this, I would say, is in a particular
way the special charge of all who are living today as modern Occidentals; for it is this modern Occidental civilization which, since about the middle of the thirteenth century, has been—quite literally—the only innovating civilization in the world.
One cannot help remarking, however, that since about the year 1914 there has been evident in our progressive world an increasing disregard and even disdain for those ritual forms that once brought forth, and up to now have sustained, this infinitely rich and fruitfully developing civilization. There is a ridiculous nature-boy sentimentalism that with increasing force is taking over. Its beginnings date back to the eighteenth century of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with its artificial back-to-nature movements and conceptions of the Noble Savage. Americans abroad, from the period of Mark Twain onward, have been notorious exemplars of the idea, representing as conspicuously as possible the innocent belief that Europeans and Asians, living in older, stuffier environments, should be refreshed and wakened to their own natural innocencies by the unadulterated boorishness of a product of God’s Country, our sweet American soil, and our Bill of Rights. In Germany, between wars, the Wandervögel, with their knapsacks and guitars, and the later Hitler Youth, were representatives of this reactionary trend in modern life. And now, right here in God’s Country itself, idyllic scenes of barefoot white and black “Indians” camping on our sidewalks with their tom-toms, bedrolls, and papooses are promising to turn entire sections of our cities into fields for anthropological research. For, as in all societies, so among these, there are distinguishing costumes, rites of initiation, required beliefs, and the rest. They are here, however, explicitly reactionary and reductive, as though in the line of biological evolution one were to regress from the state of the chimpanzee to that of the starfish or even amoeba. The complexity of social patterning is rejected and reduced, and with that, life freedom and force have been not gained but lost.
Fig. 3.2 — Starry Night
It is in the fields of the arts that the reductive, life-diminishing effect of the loss of all sense of form is today most disquieting; for it is in their arts that the creative energies of a people are best displayed and can best be measured. One cannot help comparing the case today with that of the arts in ancient, aging Rome. Why is it that Roman works of architecture and sculpture, for all their power and facility, are less impressive, less moving, less significant formally than the Greek? Many have thought about this problem, and the other night an answer came to me in dream that I would offer now as a major illumination. It is this: that in a small community like Athens the relationship of the creative artist to the local social leaders would be forthright and direct, they would have known each other since boyhood; whereas in such a community as, say, our modern New York, London, or Paris, the artist who would be known has to go to cocktail parties to win commissions, and those who win them are the ones who are not in their studios but at parties, meeting the right people and appearing in the right places. They have not been quite enough engaged in the agony of solitary creative work to press beyond their first acquisitions of marketable styles and techniques. And the next consequence is “instant art,” where some clever individual with as little formal agony as possible simply renders something unforeseen—which is then criticized and either advertised or suppressed by either friendly or unfriendly newspaper folk, who have also had a lot of socializing to attend to and, with insufficient time for extracurricular study or experience, find themselves baffled before anything really complex or significantly new.
I recall with unmitigated loathing the reviews that appeared of Finnegans Wake in 1939. It was not enough that that truly epochal work was dismissed as unintelligible: it was dismissed with highfaultin disdain as an arrant hoax and waste of everybody’s time; whereas two years later Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, which is based entirely, from beginning to end, on the inspiration, themes, characters, plot motifs, and even incidental details drawn directly, obviously, and unashamedly from the great Irishman’s Finnegans Wake, was awarded the journalistic Pulitzer Prize as the greatest American play of that blessed season.2 Practically without exception the significant modern work has, in the first place, an extremely difficult time coming to public notice at all, and, in the second place, if it ever does appear, the so-called critics will almost certainly knock it out. Is it not interesting, for example (to return to the history of James Joyce), that in the whole length of his career this greatest literary genius of our century was never awarded the Nobel Prize? Or is it any wonder that at the present moment we have no known creative work at all to match the requirements and possibilities of this fabulous period of ours—post-World War II—of perhaps the greatest spiritual metamorphosis in the history of the human race? The failure is the more calamitous, since it is only from the insights of its own creative seers and artists that any people has ever derived its appropriate, life-supporting, and maturing myths and rites.
Let me recall at this point Nietzsche’s statements regarding classic and romantic art. He identified two types or orders of each. There is the romanticism of true power that shatters contemporary forms to go beyond these to new forms; and there is, on the other hand, the romanticism that is unable to achieve form at all, and so smashes and disparages out of resentment. And with respect to classicism likewise, there is the classicism that finds an achievement of the recognized forms easy and can play with them at will, expressing through them its own creative aims in a rich and vital way; and there is the classicism that clings to form desperately out of weakness, dry and hard, authoritarian and cold. The point I would make—and which I believe was also Nietzsche’s—is that form is the medium, the vehicle, through which life becomes manifest in its grand style, articulate and grandiose, and that the mere shattering of form is for human as well as for animal life a disaster, ritual and decorum being the structuring forms of all civilization.
In my own experience, I came to appreciate most vividly the life-amplifying service of ritual when, in Japan some years ago, I was invited to a tea ceremony of which the host was to be a distinguished master. Now if there is anything in this world more demanding of formal accuracy than the procedures of a Japanese tea ceremony, I should like to know what or where it might be. There are in Japan, I am told, people who have studied and practiced Tea all their lives without achieving perfection, so exquisite are its rules. And needless to say, in the tiny teahouse I was myself the proverbial bull in the china shop. In fact, the one outstanding general experience of the foreigner in Japan is that he will never be quite right. The forms have not been bred into his bones; even his body is the wrong shape.
Fig. 3.3 — Tea Ceremony
And the tea ceremony, which is the quintessential distillate of the whole formal wonder of that exceedingly formal civilization, comes to its own formal culmination, after a number of ritualized preliminaries, in the highly stylized act of the tea master stirring and serving his tea to a very small number of guests. I shan’t go into detail, and actually couldn’t, if I would. Suffice to say that every gesture and even tilt of the head is controlled; and yet, when I later talked with the other guests, they spoke with praise of the spontaneity of this master. The only term of comparison I could think of at the time was the poetic art of the sonnet; for there too is a very demanding form; yet the poet acquires within it a force and range of expression that he could never have gained without it, and thereby a new order of freedom. I had the privilege of observing in Japan the styles of a number of tea masters and learned to see how each was actually relaxed and free in performance. The ritual of the civilization had become organic, as it were, in the master, and he could move in it spontaneously with expressive elaboration. The effect, in its own way, was like that of a beautiful Japanese garden, where nature and art have been brought together in a common statement harmonizing and epitomizing both.
Do we have anything of the kind in our present North American civilization?
The other evening I turned on my television set and chanced upon a beautiful
track meet that was then taking place in Los Angeles. It was the first such meet I had beheld since I had myself been a competitor back in the middle twenties—a lapse of about forty years, during all of which time I had paid no attention to the sport, mainly because it aroused in me more emotion than I wanted to have to control. What I had chanced upon was a mile race of six glorious runners, a really beautiful thing. But when it was over, the commentator pronounced it disappointing. I was amazed. The race had been run in four minutes, six seconds, with the next two runners within two seconds of the winner; whereas the fastest mile ever run in my own day had been just under four minutes, fifteen seconds, and I recall the excitement of that achievement. The record is now under four minutes. Reflecting, I thought: Well! where the game is played really seriously, and doesn’t involve cocktail parties and the like, but confronts directly the honest challenge of the field, we still have form, and we have it in grand style! Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West defines “culture” as the condition of a society “in form” in the sense in which an athlete is “in form.” The way in which one holds one’s arms, the angle at which the body is pitched: every detail of athletic form functions as a furthering agent for the flowering of a moment of life in fulfillment. And so it is also in the highly tuned style of a society “in form,” a Japanese tea master “in form,” the social decorum of a civilized people coming together “in form.” The destruction of form will not produce a winner either in the field of a mile race or in the field of culture competition; and this being, finally, a serious world, it will be only where top form is maintained that civilized life will survive. Nor when a race is lost, can it be ever rerun.