Lang was by no means the only, nor the most important, figure to adopt a sociological approach. Emile Durkheim, one of the greatest sociologists of all time, also advocated that perspective. He and his colleague and nephew, Marcel Mauss, illuminated totemism in their book Primitive Classification (1903). One of their major points was that we classify things because we live in groups and not the other way around, which argues that we live in groups because we classify things. Living in groups (i.e., the social) is primary. Durkheim expanded the ideas in his classic The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), devoting well over a hundred pages to totemism, and saying that “the fundamental notions of the intellect, the essential categories of thought, may be the product of social factors … this is the case with the very notion of category itself.” Making categories is fundamentally, and above all, a social process. Categories, distinctions, and classification schemes are not just mental models stored in our brains. They have far deeper foundations; they are encoded in our social structure, in our statuses and relationships. Although some now consider Durkheim’s original premise as overstated, it remains a very good first approximation.
Durkheim’s ideas are not fully grasped by most sociologists. This was true historically, and it remains so today. Roscoe Hinkle noted the “exasperated incomprehension” that early American sociologists found when reading Durkheim. The problem persists, and even French sociologist Raymond Aron frankly admitted that he had “a great deal of difficulty entering into Durkheim’s way of thinking.”19 Most people implicitly assume a psychological viewpoint and try to analyze society as a collection of individuals, each having a brain, and a mind arising from that brain. In such formulations social forces are mere secondary, theoretical abstractions.
In contrast, sociological paradigms assert that mind arises from social interaction. They argue that the very development of self emerges from society. Thus self is an emergent property of the group rather than the other way around. George Herbert Mead, in his Mind, Self & Society (1934), came to similar conclusions, and his work formed the basis of the symbolic interactionist perspective in sociology.
Jungian psychiatrist M. Esther Harding took this general approach in her The ‘I’ and the ‘Not-I’ (1965). Harding was particularly interested in the emergence of individual thought from that of the collective, and she drew upon the writings on the primitive mind by Lucien Levy-Bruhl (discussed shortly). She pointed out that development of ego and separation from collective thought takes not just a few months or years, but is a lifelong process.
Those who adopt such perspectives recognize that we humans are so pervasively influenced by social interactions, relationships, and statuses that we are unaware of it. We actually make very few fully conscious, reasoned decisions. The vast majority are foreordained by our roles and positions in the social order. This has led several theorists to assert that “the unconscious is the social.” This is compatible with notions of group minds, a concept now anathema in virtually all of academe.21 The individualistic rationalism of Frazer’s time continues to hold sway.
Sigmund Freud was also drawn to the problem of totemism, and in 1913 he published Totem and Taboo. In many circles this is undoubtedly the best known book on totemism, and it’s one of the most severely flawed. Freud could hardly ignore totemism and its connection to exogamy because the Oedipus complex was central to his theories. By definition, violation of rules of exogamy is incest, and it is associated with taboo. The first chapter of his book was entitled “The Savage’s Dread of Incest.” Freud understood that the strong emotion of dread is a consequence of taboo. It was associated with things sacred
and consecrated but also with the “uncanny, dangerous, forbidden,
and unclean.”22
Freud knew that totemic beliefs posited magical connections between things, and he frankly admitted that they were beyond his comprehension. Totemic classification schemes seemed confused, to be irrational, and Freud compared them to neurotic and infantile thought. In fact the subtitle of his book was Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. All this gave him entree to address religion and the sacred. In order to explain all these entangled issues, Freud invented an ingenious story about the primal horde. He claimed that our primate ancestors lived in small groups dominated by a strong father, who did not allow other males to have sexual congress with females in the group. one day, the other males banded together, killed the father, and ate him. Then out of guilt they renounced sexual contact with group’s females, thereby establishing exogamy. Although bizarre, this is a remarkably clever formulation. It ties together motifs of religion, sacrifice, sexuality, and exogamy. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support it, and anthropologists quickly recognized it to be a myth of origins, another just so story.
Despite the shortcomings, Freud’s ideas are still useful. He understood that boundaries, limitations, and restrictions are required for social life, and that they must be enforced. Taboo accomplished that. The male-female binary opposition established categories fundamental for society. Different rights and responsibilities were assigned to males and females. Freud correctly saw that sexual relations and restrictions had parallels with other domains of primitive life. Other boundaries had to be maintained. There was a similarity between sexual prohibitions and others, but taboo involved issues far removed from the sexual sphere, and Freud’s formulation was insufficient. It didn’t work to reduce all thought and behavior to sexuality. Edmund Leach’s essay “Magical Hair” (1958) pointed out that Freud’s perspective often provided insights compatible with ethnographic findings, but it also led to ludicrous mistakes.
The question remains: just why was Freud compelled to invent the bizarre story of the primal horde? The primitives knew that taboo violations could unleash supernatural forces, and Freud probably feared that there might be something to that. He revealed his anxiety to Carl Jung. Jung tells how Freud said to him “’My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.’ He said that to me with great emotion, in the tone of a father saying, ‘And promise me this one thing, my dear son: that you will go to church every Sunday.’ In some astonishment I asked him, ‘A bulwark—against what?’ To which he replied, ‘Against the black tide mud’—and here he hesitated for a moment, then added—’of occultism.’”25 Jung pointed out that the choice of words “bulwark” and “dogma” showed Freud to be suppressing doubts on a highly emotional issue. There is no question that Freud was markedly ambivalent on the paranormal. One can find statements demonstrating his belief and about an equal number denying it. In his 3-volume biography, Ernest Jones included a 33-page chapter “Occultism” describing Freud’s extreme vacillation on the topic.
The occult provokes uneasiness. That it did so in someone as insightful and influential as Freud emphasizes the importance of the problem, even if it was unresolved. His attempted resolution led to errors and excesses. Freud and his followers readily embraced a shoddy myth of origins rather than fully address the sacred. In his own way, Freud signalled the danger of the sacred; he established a taboo. The potential ridicule and derision of being labelled neurotic or infantile is still sufficient to keep rational, academic, status-conscious scholars from approaching the supernatural too seriously. Even Ernest Jones expressed a condescending attitude toward Freud’s interest in the occult.
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, a French philosopher who made substantial contributions to anthropology and sociology, was another who grappled with totemism and primitive classification. As a philosopher, his interest was more in primitives’ thought than in their institutions. His first book on the topic, How Natives Think, was published in 1910 but not translated until 1926; it was followed by Primitive Mentality in 1922 and several others.
Levy-Bruhl’s work was poorly regarded for some decades. His choices of terms, particularly “prelogical” and “mystical” seem to have confused some r
eaders, and others took offense at them. Many mentions of Levy-Bruhl are so short that they are misleading. In reality, he was an exceptionally deep thinker, and fortunately there has been some rehabilitation of his reputation. Rodney Needham dedicated his book Belief, Language, and Experience (1972) to his memory. In 1985 Princeton University Press reprinted How Natives Think with a superb introduction by C. Scott Littleton, explaining the importance of Levy-Bruhl’s ideas to relativist perspectives in anthropology.
Levy-Bruhl posited that primitive thought was governed by what he called the law of participation. For the primitive, all things in the universe had mystical interconnections. In our view, this confuses categories, and there are many examples. For instance, the primitive conception of death is drastically different than that of the modern academician. Levy-Bruhl pointed out that “To us, a human being is either alive or dead: there is no middle course, whereas to the prelogical mind he is alive in a certain way, even though he be dead,” and also “To them, there is no insuperable barrier separating the dead from the living.” The primitive not only communicates with the deceased, but the dead can harm the living and vice versa. To us, the life-death binary opposition is sharply drawn, but not so for the primitive. In addition, Levy-Bruhl pointed out that divination practices displayed similar confusion of categories.
He also said important things about abstraction in relation to the law of participation. He understood that “classification … takes place at the same time as abstraction and generalization.” In discussing our Western mode of thinking, he noted that “Our wealth of social thought is transmitted, in condensed form, through a hierarchy of concepts which co-ordinate with, or are subordinate to, each other.”29 In contrast, primitive thought is not so condensed, and “in prelogical mentality memory plays a much more important part than it does in our mental life.”30 Levy-Bruhl underscored the importance of exceptional memory found among primitives, and he cited a number of examples. Abstraction was less important for them, because they had comparatively little need of it. He noted that many early cultures did not count beyond two or three, yet they had methods to designate and remember much larger quantities. For instance they sometimes counted by using points on the body, each point being associated with a positive integer. This form of abstraction was linked to the concrete. Both concepts and numbers were designated by concrete symbols.
Levy-Bruhl did not analyze the thought of religious mystics, and he avoided discussing Christianity and Judaism, perhaps to not give offense. In fact he went so far as saying “I shall make use of this term [mystic]—not referring thereby to the religious mysticism of our communities, which is something entirely different.”31 On this point, Levy-Bruhl was wrong. There is an essential similarity between the primitive and mystic; both display a relatively low level of abstraction, as pointed out by Victor Turner.
The law of participation is difficult to communicate in abstract terms, and Levy-Bruhl admitted it. He realized that “It is useless to try and explain the institutions and customs and beliefs of undeveloped peoples by starting from the psychological and intellectual analysis of ‘the human mind’ as we know it. No interpretation will be satisfactory unless it has for its starting-point the prelogical and mystic mentality underlying the various forms of activity in primitives.” The primitive mentality is essentially incommensurate with rationalistic academic discourse.
Levy-Bruhl drew attention to the differences between the primitives and us, and some saw that as disparaging earlier cultures. He clearly did not mean it that way, and the charges of ethnocentrism hurled at Levy-Bruhl were misdirected. in fact his critics were far more guilty of it. Littleton pointed out that their rationalist assumptions made it impossible for them to really grasp the primitives’ perspectives. Those same assumptions also made magical practices incomprehensible. Littleton astutely recognized that mystical participation is still found today, and he cited Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, which covers modern-day witchcraft and Robert Ellwood’s Alternative Altars which discusses Theosophy, Spiritualism, and the like. Few academics have any comprehension of those magical practices, despite the fact that a number of their neighbors and students engage in them. The academy denounces magical thought as infantile; yet magic still flourishes. Since the time of Levy-Bruhl, the incomprehension among academics has only grown, and now they don’t even recognize their own failure (which, at least, Freud, Frazer, and Levy-Bruhl acknowledged). In a somewhat attenuated form, the same pattern is seen in academe’s treatment of religion. A consideration of religious scholarship can throw light on the issues of magic and the supernatural, and we will now turn to it.
The writers mentioned above concerned themselves with primitive cultures, but the fundamental issues are not limited to those; the irrational appears in the major religions of today. This matter is widely avoided, but one who directly addressed it, and its innate paradoxes, was German religious scholar Rudolf Otto.
Otto’s classic work, The Idea of the Holy, first appeared in 1917. That book primarily drew upon religious scholarship of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also some from Eastern thought. Otto cited almost no ethnographic data. Yet the issues he dealt with were surprisingly similar to those of Durkheim, Freud, Weber, Frazer, Lang, etc. The core issues were in the air during the first two decades of the twentieth century. His work, derived from modern religions, can be compared with that on the primitives, and the striking overlap demonstrates an important part of the human condition.
The “numinous” was one of Otto’s key concepts. He used it to designate, in the words of his translator, “that aspect of deity which … eludes comprehension in rational … terms.” The numinous evokes an awe or dread that is unique to religion, and there are two parts to it: the supreme goodness and majesty of God on the one hand, and God’s wrath on the other. This wrath is irrational, and for illustration, otto cited the Book of Job saying that “it is concerned with the non-rational in the sense of the irrational, with sheer paradox baffling comprehension.”35 Here paradox is underscored, and that calls forth the trickster. He is a paradoxical, irrational character, who played a central role in the religions of many primitive societies. It is no accident that Stanley Diamond’s introduction to Radin’s The Trickster was primarily concerned with the Book of Job.
Otto had much to say about the numinous, and among other points, he stated: “Its antecedent stage is ‘daemonic dread’ (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive offshoot, the ‘dread of ghosts’. It first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny’, ‘eerie’, or ‘weird’. It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history. ‘Daemons’ and ‘gods’ alike spring from this root, and all the products of ‘mythological apperception’ or ‘fantasy’ are nothing but different modes in which it has been objectified.” These, of course, refer to real experiences that many people now call “paranormal.”
Freud raised some of the same issues in Totem and Taboo. He didn’t use the term numinous, but he did refer to holy dread. He understood the dual aspect of the divine and commented that “taboo branches off into two opposite directions. on the one hand it means to us, sacred, consecrated: but on the other hand it means, uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean.”37 Freud also recognized the feeling accompanying it and stated “our combination of ‘holy dred’ would often express the meaning of taboo.”38 Freud’s followers essentially explained these as infantile thought, though Freud included qualifications. At any rate, as explained earlier, this interpretation itself establishes a taboo.
Emile Durkheim also addressed the numinous and holy dread, though he did not use those terms. He noted that primitives divided the world into the sacred and profane, and that rituals were needed to keep them separate. The sacred had a contagious quality that could infect the profane world and cause destruction. For instance, animals were not allowed to be killed with weapons made from wood of their
totem group (e.g., certain woods were sacred vis-à-vis certain animals). If they were, a taboo was violated, supernatural powers unleashed, and ritual purification was necessary. The forces needed to be contained “Since, in virtue of this extraordinary power of expansion, the slightest contact, the least proximity, either material or simply moral, suffices to draw religious forces out of their domain.”
The primitives’ awareness of this extreme danger is discussed at length by Durkheim, and he commented that “Owing to the contagiousness inherent in all that is sacred, a profane being cannot violate an interdict without having the religious force, to which he has unduly approached, extend itself over him and establish its empire over him. But as there is an antagonism between them, he becomes dependent upon a hostile power, whose hostility cannot fail to manifest itself in the form of violent reactions which tend to destroy him.” This describes the irrational power of the sacred.
Durkheim recognized that those undergoing initiation were particularly endowed with this supernatural quality and said: “The initiate lives in an atmosphere charged with religiousness, and it is as though he were impregnated with it himself.” He also noted that the dead were similarly imbued with the power. Both initiates and spirits of the dead are liminal beings; they are found at the boundary between the rational and irrational. They are surrounded with rituals and strictures, and “What makes these precautions necessary is the extraordinary contagiousness of a sacred character.”
Durkheim, Freud, and Otto were all speaking of the same fundamental phenomenon. Otto’s formulation was a bit more restricted because he primarily addressed Western religions. He perhaps did not fully appreciate the extent to which taboo, the numinous, and holy dread operated throughout primitive societies. Their world had a much wider realm considered sacred than is so in ours. The numinous was more pervasive.
The Trickster and the Paranormal Page 43