Reply to muddy thinking
Extracts from chapter fourteen of "Primitive Materialism".
This [the ideas of Robert Graves] is an exaggerated idealisation of the Mother Goddess, wilfully blind to the negative aspects of the archetype. Yet Robert Graves spells out in explicit detail what worship of the Goddess entails: ritual human sacrifice of men, ranging from the symbolic act of self-castration to being torn limb-from-limb in a cannibalistic orgy by women that include one’s mother, sister and female relatives. Next to the reality of human sacrifice, the endorsement of incest that may be hinted at in “sons and lovers” is another expression of moral stupidity. He, bard like, will witness and sing the praises of men thus slaughtered. He begins by identifying poetry solely with one theme.
"The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for the love the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird. All true poetry – true by Housman’s practical test[1] – celebrates some incident or scene in this very ancient story, and the three main characters are so much a part of our racial inheritance that they not only assert themselves in poetry but recur on occasions of emotional stress in the form of dreams, paranoiac visions and delusions."[2]
The theory is relevant, the morality fatuous. The rise of patriarchy was the necessary moral correction to the ethical impurity of matriarchy. Humanity had to overcome ritual human sacrifice – the thousands of babies slaughtered by the Carthaginians – not just slaughtered but burned alive.
[1] “Does it make the hairs of one’s chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving?”
[2] Graves, Goddess, Op. Cit., p.24.
"The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for the love the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird. All true poetry – true by Housman’s practical test[1] – celebrates some incident or scene in this very ancient story, and the three main characters are so much a part of our racial inheritance that they not only assert themselves in poetry but recur on occasions of emotional stress in the form of dreams, paranoiac visions and delusions."[2]
The theory is relevant, the morality fatuous. The rise of patriarchy was the necessary moral correction to the ethical impurity of matriarchy. Humanity had to overcome ritual human sacrifice – the thousands of babies slaughtered by the Carthaginians – not just slaughtered but burned alive.
[1] “Does it make the hairs of one’s chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving?”
[2] Graves, Goddess, Op. Cit., p.24.
Questions
1. Is Robert Graves guilty of moral stupidity?
2. Is it true that "Humanity had to overcome ritual human sacrifice"?
2. Is it true that "Humanity had to overcome ritual human sacrifice"?
Second extract
Like Robert Graves J.G. Frazer horribly flattens the text, treating all mythological elements as manifestations of a single idea, the belief in sympathetic magic. His work is subtitled A Study in Magic and Religion. The only religion in question is that of sympathetic magic, that like affects like. Every religious motif is taken to be timeless illustrations of one and the same concept. To a degree he traces evolution of ideas and social forms, but because he recognises no historical evolution, he adduces as evidence any number of contemporary or near contemporary observations of anthropologists of living or recently extinct tribes. The work is very long, and the flattening of the text makes the reader feel bludgeoned – as if being beaten with a prehistoric mace, and with every stroke there cried out, “They committed ritual human sacrifice because they believed in primitive magic.” Despite his disingenuous chapter, Our Debt to the Savage, Frazer’s work is patronising. He is a scientific rationalist, condemning the inferior beliefs of pre-scientific man.
Question
1. Is Frazer's interpretation of myth impoverished by his implicit scientific rationalism?
Third extract
Archetypes are very important; the sense of archetypes is the best explanation for the enduring, mesmerising appeal of Greek myth. In the fruition of Greek religion in its Olympian apotheosis, Greek myth became the language of the Western psyche: one may find oneself living a myth. Heroic battles, overcoming the negative anima, the impossible quest, the superman myth, unrequited love, impossible moral situations, insanity, female bitterness, entrapment, double identity, obsessive self-love, dumb mutilation finding a voice, and homecoming – find archetypal expression in the myths of Bellerophon, Perseus, Jason and the Argo, Heracles, Apollo and Daphne, Orestes, the madness of Heracles, Medea murdering her children, the Labyrinth, Theseus and the Minotaur, Narcissus, Philomel and Procne, and Odysseus. The number of situations encompassed by Greek myth is endless. Archetypal situations outgrow any one single pattern.
Question
1. Is it correct to call Greek myth "the langauge of the Western psyche"?