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The Rags of Lordship: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the Reenchantment of the World Volume 11 Number 3 Article 9 Winter 2-15-1985 The Rags of Lordship: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the Reenchantment of the World Peter Lowentrout Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Lowentrout, Peter (1985) "The Rags of Lordship: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the Reenchantment of the World," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 11 : No. 3 , Article 9. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol11/iss3/9 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Sees a movement at the leading edges of our culture away from the desacralized world and back toward the mythic. Sees the genres of science fiction and fantasy providing aesthetic windows to the sacred. Along with science and religion, they participate in a resynthesis of our culture’s assumptions, pointing toward individuality within fundamental unity and broader notions of causality. Additional Keywords Fantasy—Moral and religious aspects; Fantasy and culture; Science fiction—Moral and religious aspects; Science fiction and culture This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol11/iss3/9 MYTHLORE 41: Winter-Spring 1985 Page 47 lho Rags of Lordship Science Tiction, Tantasy, and the 'Reenchantment of the World Peter Lowentrout The steady denythologization of our culture over countless hearts in its inevitable dislocations of the past centuries has been both enriching and culture and spirit. Such a loss of innocence is a impoverishing — a necessary precursor to greater painful thing, and has it not been with pain-dimmed insight and yet all too often psychically and eyes that we have for long been examining the spiritually debilitating. As the powerful assumptions possibilities for belief that remain to us? In losing which have underlain the main currents of scientific one faith, we have for a time lost them all. From our and humanistic thought have penetrated into even the ancient prehistory to our present, we have lived a farthest recesses of our culture, we have been brought great enantiodromia. Swinging from one extreme to up short time and again, discovering to our dismay but another, we have moved from a simple faith in our also our delight that our old beliefs and our old ways relation to and importance for cosmic process to a have been too narrow, too naive. lack of faith in all but a radical relativism which at its worst enervates, and which denies us reasonable This epochal process of demythologization has led access to the sacred. Look beyond the feverish many of us into grave difficulties; it has led to that concerns of our day and you will find a world most haunting experience of demythologized humanity — painfully wrenched free of the myths that once the experience of a world emptied of its meaning. Our sustained it and bound it up in common cause with all universe has become vast, cold and objective. Our creation, a world filled too. full with weightless and values and moral precepts have fragmented; sure and frightened people. effective action are undercut by a seemingly inevitable relativism. Too often, we reduce ourselves But if history is any guide, our culture will not to objects, subjectivity becomes suspect and the zest for long remain viable without a faith, a myth, an for living ebbs. experience of the sacred. Nor is it too likely that it will need to do so. Whatever the ultimate Is this too stark an evocation of our modern metaphysical status of the sacred, at least twanty "spiritual crisis?" Sadly, it is not. Certainly, thousand generations of humans bear witness to its people have been throwing off their culture's reality. Religion is among the most persistent embodiments of the sacred for as far back into history elements of human culture and experience, and it is as we can see. Most often, however, this was done to likely that our current disillusionment, however deep, move on to other, seemingly more adequate myths. If must finally open up as many and perhaps even more the rare person did indeed choose to stand alone, sacred possibilities than it has closed off. Indeed, agnostic on the nature of his or her connections to many today seem to-be shaking off the numbing effects the cosmos, it was at the least a personal choice. of the past centuries' loss of faith, the "melancholy, Today, hundreds of millions of us seemingly have long, withdrawing roar" of Matthew Arnold, and are little choice; never in history have our inherited perhaps catching the first movements of a faith that myths of the sacred seemed so out of joint with our has at once the vigor and spontaniety of youth and the accepted (i.e.— scientific) understandings of the balanced penetration of a deeper maturity. world. Mircea Eliade, the great historian and And just as religion has waned, so, too, have phenomenologist of religion, has noted this gathering those systems of thought and belief that for a time movement toward new religious possibilities, and served as its surrogates. Freud's ego psychology, writes of the "nostalgia" of modem people for "real Marx's dialectic, Hegel's Universal History — how (i.e.— mythic) experience".2 This nostalgia, he many among us remain convinced by these? Those forces believes, is seen in a deepening of nythic themes in which have weakened our hold upon the sacred have at our fantasies and arts as well as in the striking the last done the same for all our faiths, however amount of attention we give them. dilute and secularized a shadow of the old they may be. In a desacralized world such as ours, the W.B. Yeats put a name to these "forces" in one of "sacred" is present and active chiefly in the most quoted poems of the twentieth century, his the imaginary universes. But imaginary "The Second Coming"; experiences are part of the total human being, no less important than his Turning and turning in the widening gyre diurnal experiences. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Our modem attempt at the "denystification" of the Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, cosmos is, Eliade believes, destructive of the human The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere spirit and ultimately futile — the deep patterned The ceremony of innocence is drowned; flows of the psyche can be debased, but never The best lack all conviction, while the worst destroyed. Our sacred myths are more than simple Are full of passionate intensity.1 fictions facilely invented by our ignorant ancestors to explain natural phenomena. Rather, they are deeply The ceremony of innocence is drowned? Indeed, just true, fundamental expressions of our psyches, here is our problem — a loss of innocence on a grand transrational structures around which we organize scale, stretching out over the centuries and consuming ourselves. Without nyth, we have no hope of access to MYTHLORE 41: Winter-Spring 1985 the subliminal center of our being, no hope of like certain rare dreams, sensations we anything but to live out disjointed parodies of true never had before, and enlarge our life. conception of the range of possible experience. Hence the difficulty of In our deepening nostalgia for the real, the . discussing them at all with those who mythic, Eliade discerns a "demystification in refuse to be taken out of what they call reverse"4 in progress in the arts, the sciences, 'real life' — which means, perhaps, the religion and philosophy that he hopes will lead to a groove through some far wider area of revalorization of our cosmos. possible experience to which our senses and our biological, social, or economic Two of the great fantasists of our century, C.S. interests usually confihe us. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, shared Eliade's belief in humanity's need for a healthy mythos, as well as his With Eliade and Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien believed belief in the efficacy of our imaginary universes in that our imaginary universes could evoke in us a real evoking in us a true experience of myth and the experience of myth and the sacred. In poetic response sacred. to a critic who had described the creation of myth and fairy-story as "breathing a lie through silver," "It is not difficult to see," Lewis wrote once Tolkien wnrote: of science fiction, Dear Sir, Although now long estranged, why those who wish to visit strange Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed, regions in search of such beauty, awe or Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned, terror as the actual world does not and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned: supply have been increasingly driven to Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light other planets or other stars...the less through whom is splintered from a single White known- the real world is, the more plausibly to many hues, and endlessly combined your marvels can be located near at hand.
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