Anthropoetics XXII, 1

"More Skilled Practitioners of Wanting": Buddhism and Romanticism in the Market World

Anthropoetics XXII, no. 1 Fall 2016

2016 Conference Issue

Kiyoshi Kawahara and Matthew Taylor - Introduction to the 2016 Conference Issue

***

Kinjo Occult Research Group - A Door to another World: The Imagination in Japanese Folkways and Religion

Aya Ryusawa - Mastering the Visualization of Heroic Narratives within Daimyō Families: The Illustrated Scroll of Shutendōji in the Edo period [Japanese version]

Kenshin Kirihara - The Birth of a Myth: Civil War and Sacrifice in Early Meiji Japan [Japanese version]

Shoko Komatsu - The Haunted Mansion and : Otherworldly Apparitions in the Modern Cities of Japan [Japanese version]

Ian Dennis - "More Skilled Practitioners of Wanting": Buddhism and Romanticism in the Market World

Edmond Wright - How to read religious poems anthropoetically (using examples from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Kobayashi Issa)

Magdalena Złocka - Dąbrowska - Cratos as Cognition: Gans and Dumézil in Dialogue on Language and Violence

Benchmarks

Download Issue PDF Subscribe to Anthropoetics by email Anthropoetics Home

Anthropoetics on Twitter Anthropoetics Journal Home Subscribe to Anthropoetics RSS

Return to Anthropoetics home page

Eric Gans / [email protected] Last updated: 07/24/48763 19:06:10

index.htm[10/16/2016 5:20:03 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

Anthropoetics 22, no. 1 (Fall 2016)

"More Skilled Practitioners of Wanting": Buddhism and Romanticism in the Market World

Ian Dennis

English Department University of Ottawa Ottawa, ON Canada, K1N 6N5 [email protected]

"The Buddha," notes R. F. Gombrich, "was not an essentialist. [He] . . . was interested in how things worked rather than in what they were."(1) Buddhism, many commentators have argued, is pragmatic.(2) It teaches us how to live better, how to see more clearly; how, in the words of David Webster, to "become more skilled practitioners of wanting."(3) Generative anthropologists may well hear in this last phrase the human project writ large—certainly the project of any and all of us who seek or at least entertain the possibility of human progress. The most consequential of all human innovations, the sign, is very precisely a praxis of safer and more productive wanting, a means of accommodating ever more wanting, and more having. More having and more wanting, of course, are not the terms in which Buddhist doctrines have traditionally been framed, to say the least, and to use GA to inquire into the nature of the skills Buddhism might be offering is to ask, in effect, how it co-exists with, or whether and in what ways it might contribute to, the ethical development of our own epoch.

Buddhism’s trajectory through modernity, through a world increasingly dominated by the structure and practices of the market, does resemble those followed by other great faiths. Comparison—invidious or liberating as the case may seem—has irrevocably intervened. Where once, from the security of their discrete, pre-modern domains, the major religions offered means by which to apprehend the human condition in its ostensibly universal character, and the communal comforts and protections to be derived from such an apprehension, they have now been required to take their places as particularist options—individual and proprietary paths to salvation—or in more familiar terms, attributes of identity, postures of difference in a global market. Not, we should of course add, that any of them have ceased at the same time to be experienced by substantial populations in older or more fully embedded ways, in societies passing through a long transition which need never, in principle, be considered complete.(4) But even in the most isolated or defensive places, the brilliance of erstwhile certainty is shaded by, if not fully "gone gray" from the breath, the various breathings, of the Other.(5) Buddhism’s position is notable, however, in that it seems never to have been the sole religion in the countries in which it has been practiced—it has always been in competition and debate, which may have bearing on its eventual posture in the modern market. Where Constantine imposed,(6) Asoka famously tolerated, and indeed this most significant of early Buddhist converts may even be seen as anticipating the modern pluralist state with his doctrine of religious diversity, his aversion to sacrificial violence, and his conception of the role of political power as facilitating rather than restraining human desire.(7) And ever since, though it has had its reverses, Buddhism has been more adaptable than most,(8) its successes including the penetration of the Western reaches of that market, to which it has offered a prestigious, which is to say, effective set of differences.(9) Above all, and this is fairly widely understood, its particularly forceful rejection of worldly desire has modelled a potent serenity from within which to dominate modern humanity’s feverish struggles to avoid subjection.

Prevailing in those struggles, fashioning a posture in that market, has also been the pragmatics of the set of practices and ideals generally referred to as Romanticism. And many more commentators have worked to understand and define the connections and commonalities between Buddhism and the Romantics than have, for example, those between the Romantics and Islam, or the Romantics and Confucianism. Indeed, this has been true more or less from the beginning of the relationship between the Western world and Buddhism,

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

whose most important texts arrived in Europe during the Romantic period, and were indeed, by some accounts a crucial determinant of what Raymond Schwab memorably proclaimed its "Oriental Renaissance."(10)

Very broadly speaking, then, Romanticism and Buddhism have both offered modernity desirable postures or identities through a strategy of resisting desire or, more properly, as René Girard characterized it, resisting the mimetic contagion, the universal gravitational pull of the desires of other human beings.(11) In both cases, resistance has proceeded by a process of at least ostensible demystification, the assumption of a position of superiority and control, a personal denial of the power of desire.(12) This strategy, too, framed as paradoxical or, less sympathetically, as hypocritical or deluded—Girard’s mensonge romantique—has been quite widely understood. Not that it has always been given its due, by Girard or by others. The strategy can surely be characterized as having been genuinely productive of human good, as having reduced our suffering, whether we attribute that suffering to mediated or unmediated desire itself, or to the violence produced by desire. It has arguably contributed, in particular—and for all that some more radical confrontation with the truths of desire has been called for by the sages or ascetics—to the easing of anxieties and distresses attendant on the advent of market structure, and done so by charting a path which the Buddha called a "middle way" or Romantics often characterized as a striving to be in the social world, but not of it.(13)

The case for the parallels, as well as differences, between the two would doubtless benefit from a fuller demonstration than is possible here, but let us offer a couple of hopefully suggestive comparisons. There might at first glance seem few less similar figures than the bodhisattva of compassion and a Byronic hero like the imperious Manfred of the English romantic poet’s 1819 play of the same name. Such a bodhisattva, as for example Avalokiteśvara in the Mahayana tradition, delays his own ascent to enlightenment until it can be shared by all humanity.(14) Indeed, their "awakening, or Bodhi . . . enables bodhisattvas to ‘leave the world’ while still remaining in it and to work with compassion towards the salvation of all beings."(15) Lord Byron’s heroically alienated and transgressive protagonist, meanwhile, loudly and repeatedly proclaims his difference from the "herd" of other human beings. But in his famous final words, having found at last the mortal transcendence he has been seeking, Manfred turns back to the representative of the rest of us (an Abbot) not with his usual disdain, but with an expression and a gesture of surprising comfort. "Old man," he says, taking his hand in unprecedented fellowship, "’tis not so difficult to die."(16) This might, of course, be more vaunting, but may also be, more potently, an offer, a modelling of serenity and confidence, even an altruism. Here, let me show you: if you can finally purge yourself of socially mediated desire, if you are willing to stake all on the cause of autonomy, you too can be free, both of such desires and of the fears that always accompany them. Truly to live, to be in the world, is to be prepared thus to leave it, as I authenticate for you now with my own self-willed extinction.

Or one might see the two postures combined, after a fashion, in Rudyard Kipling’s one great novel (of 1900): the Tibetan Buddhist lama who turns back from his own ostensible salvation, his long-sought sacred stream, to remain with and guide that other if later romantic seeker, that equally paradigmatic child of the global market, the "friend" indeed "of all the world," its eponymous hero Kim. That the modern novel’s necessary irony whispers to us that Teshoo Lama’s belief is but a foible, a charming feature of an identity picked out of the world’s rich pageant of differences, doesn’t finally so much undercut as somehow amplify the nobility, the generosity of the action, and the value of its prospective human outcomes.

There is a case, in short, for a deep and pragmatic compassion in both Romanticism and Buddhism. There are reasons to believe, however the effects are to be measured, that they have indeed offered operative ethics, better ways of wanting.

All this we take, with the reader’s indulgence perhaps, as given, grounds for further inquiry. The remainder of this essay will look more closely at the approach to desire in both systems, their ethics, using the heuristic offered by GA. In particular, we will try to test an intuition that the core praxis or technique offered by both Buddhism and Romanticism is what might be called an aestheticization of experience.

Many disclaimers are of course due, especially with regard to the scale of such generalizations. It should quickly be admitted that a deep familiarity with historical Buddhism, through the study of original texts or lived experience of Buddhist culture, is unavailable to the present discussion—we must work largely from

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

easily accessible or common knowledge. And there are many Buddhisms, with a number of major streams of thought and practice—we must try to confine ourselves to features consistent to all or most of them, most particularly as they are received and able to exercise influence in the modern world. This perhaps amounts to conceding that we will deal here with something close to what Bernard Faure denigrates as "Neo- Buddhism," a "sort of impersonal, flavorless and odorless spirituality" (139).(17) In justification for such a procedure, we can only appeal to the minimality of the GA hypothesis, as permitting one to ask at least the most basic questions about human experience of any kind. GA, too, is concerned with how things work. Human things.

The aesthetic, like every other fundamental category of fully human experience, is established on GA’s hypothetical originary scene, as is human desire (as distinct from the appetitive impulses experienced across the sensate spectrum). Eric Gans defines aesthetic experience as "the oscillation between the contemplation of the sign representing the central object and the contemplation of the object as referred to by the sign."(18) Aesthetic contemplation, however brief, aesthetic pleasure, however fleeting, contributed crucially to the deferral of appropriation and violence that enabled the human. Fully human desire is the primordially appetitive attraction to that object as mediated by the sign. Such mediation, even as it qualifies, defers and ultimately intensifies the appetitive or appropriative, refracting it into the broad spectrum of human wanting, is never entirely divorced from it, from mere appetite.

Appropriative desire is thus, at least as hypothesized by GA, always part of the aesthetic experience; the aesthetic experience is always involved, paradoxically, with the desire to have. Paradoxically, because only by not—yet—having, may one experience beauty, but only that which can be experienced as beautiful, is desirable, ultimately or imaginably susceptible of appropriation. The human experience of such paradox is an unstable, restless shifting of attention, an oscillation. To end paradox, to achieve complete serenity let us say, is, must be, to still this oscillation, to abolish it. The experience of beauty is productive of pleasure but, in its paradoxical contingency, its alluring inaccessibility, it is also troubling. The greater the beauty, the more troubling. But might the experience of a beauty so great that it abolishes itself be different?

It is perhaps useful to remind ourselves here that the distinction between the sacred and profane is also a product of the originary scene. The sacred center is established by the shared sign, in contrast with the profane periphery from which the sign is issued. Sacrality is a result of the competing desires for the object at the center, and of the potential violence inherent in those desires—experienced as a repulsive force exerted by the center. The experience of sacrality resembles but is distinct from the aesthetic experience in that the latter is of the inseparability of the sign and the object of desire—the object is at some level understood to be desirable in its connection to and because of the sign, and unattainable for the same reason—as Gans puts it, "oscillation between imaginary possession and recognized inviolability is characteristic of all aesthetic experience."(19) The path to literal appropriation of that which occupies the sacred center runs through ritual, and culminates in the sparagmos or sacrificial feast, which enables appropriation but leaves memorable the locus of sacred centrality for re-deployment in deferring and then reconciling the potentially antagonist wantings of the future, in the community the completed process creates. But appropriation ends the aesthetic effect, which is inseparable from a suspended wanting that the sign intensifies as it sustains.

I think this distinction matters when we turn our attention to Buddhism, where the question of sacrality as opposed to what I’m calling aesthetic contemplation has often seemed basic, even to the point where it has been debated whether Buddhism is indeed accurately to be called a religion at all.(20)

Musashi Tachikawa helpfully conceptualizes the relationship of sacred and profane as that between "two poles of single unity . . . between which electricity flows. Even in the simplest religious phenomenon there exists the ‘direct current’ of human action in the form of the movement of energy between these two poles . . . . The ’voltage’," as he ingeniously extends the metaphor, "varies according to the form assumed by a particular religious act." However, when there is no flow, no sense by anyone that the poles are different, one may no longer speak of a religious phenomenon.(21) And it is the character of Eastern thought, and Buddhist thought most rigorously, to deny a fundamental difference between sacred and profane, between, for example, delusion and enlightenment, man and Buddha, or conventional and ultimate truth.(22) Furthermore, "The sacred and profane are meaningless in the absence of human action."(23)

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

Into an intensified, oppressive but diffuse atmosphere of competition, frenzied appetite and impending violence, the emission of the first human sign flashes, the aborted gesture of appropriation, establishing a great and lasting polarization. This is the GA hypothesis, its version of what Mircea Eliade calls "hierophany"—the manifestation of the sacred.(24) The production of that sign, that pointing, is the first human action, creating the meaningful distinction between sacred and profane, activating the circuit. The alternating human actions of sign production and literal, sparagmatic appropriation sustain the polarity, keep the current of human experience running—we cannot do without the sacred, in the GA analysis, even where the word or concept designating it is absent.(25) Wherever there is centrality—that which converging human desires and the signs that create them designate—there is sacrality. Wherever there is centrality, there is a periphery, the profane. Wherever there is centrality, we may say, a wheel turns. Even the aesthetic oscillation of attention, repeating in individual consciousness the pulse of deferral and appropriation which animates the human scene, may be thought of as an action, virtual and invisible as it may be. The end of that action, again, is the end of oscillation. And because it is the action of the human mind created by the human sign that establishes them, the abolition of all differences, not merely the foundational difference of sacred and profane, is the necessary condition or indeed consequence of the end of all distinctly human action.(26)

It is in this broader sense that I think we must understand the pursuit of unity that both Buddhism and Romanticism mandate, rather than merely, as it has often been framed, as a rejection of an arid Western philosophical dualism. Although no doubt the contention does play out in the philosophical dimension as well. But as with paradoxical aesthetic experience itself, the value or ethical productivity of this pursuit may lie in its processes rather than in any measurable achievement of its ostensible or formal goals.

Romantic demystification involves the rejection of the validity, the centrality, of the public scene.(27) It denounces that scene as mere form, mere spectacle, in favour, for example, of Hamlet’s famous claim that "I have that within which passeth show."(28) Lord Byron, one of the Danish prince’s better-known progeny, echoes his prototypical words in one of his own most celebrated passages, identifying even more explicitly the antagonistic character of the struggle between the public flow of desire and the private centrality of individual experience, whose power and authenticity is guaranteed by suffering, isolation, and victimhood.

But I have lived, and have not lived in vain: My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire, And my frame perish even in conquering pain, But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire; Something unearthly, which they deem not of, Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre, Shall on their softened spirits sink, and move In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.(29)

Victorious victimhood, that is; heroic, not tragic suffering; towering, indeed commanding isolation. Of course, in a grammatical turn which has become almost the emblem of market society, there is no explicit antecedent for the pronoun "they" in this passage. None is needed. They, them, other people. Us. And indeed, don’t we love him now? We appreciate him, not in resentful rivalry as at first we might have done, but as remembered music, the tones of a lyre just now fallen mute. We see his beauty. We see the beauty of his posture. We too can have that beauty, the rapt aesthetic appreciation of others. That confidence, that serenity.

The Byronic posture does not, of course, exhaust the range of Romantic responses to desire and the market world, of Romantic demystifications and denials. These have been fairly widely discussed, however, and we perhaps need not tarry here.(30)

The Buddhist resistance, as noted, also proceeds through demystification. But Buddhism does not see the operation of desire in the socially mediated way that Hamlet and Byron, or for that matter, Girard and GA do. "They" do not feature so openly in its diagnosis of the human predicament. Rather, desire is deemed part of a broader illusion that Buddhism approaches through the foundational concept of dependent origination (paticca-samuppadda in Pali). This is, of course, an idea of great, indeed, potentially engulfing complexity.

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

The Buddha, pragmatist that he was, warned against the attempt to formulate it in any metaphysical way.(31) For present purposes, perhaps the crucial element is the doctrine’s denial of causation, or at rate of any singular or distinguishable relations of cause and effect. Conditions, rather than agents, allow for the arising of other conditions.(32) Causation proceeds, can only proceed, from one unity to another—in one metaphor, "multiple fruit from multiple causes."(33) Dependant origination is thus a vision of innumerable successive unities, a process, that permits no meaningful distinctions, no consistently extant things, no identities, only relationality. Buddhists plausibly point to the way this view of things anticipates developments in modern physics.(34)

The ethical and aesthetic significance here is that in Buddhism desire, too, is denied any specificity of cause, very much—if implicitly—including the social nexus of mediation. Other people don’t cause desire, either in Girard’s vaguely osmotic way or, as GA has it, through the mediation of the sign. Nor, we might add, is there a first cause of desire, as GA’s punctual theory of human origination insists. Rather, there is a constant co- dependency, as it were, of such elements as ignorance, consciousness, sensation, craving, clinging—with a numerological referent of twelve: twelve nidanas, twelvefold path—but suggestive of indefinite extension.(35) These are sometimes called a "chain"—at least for the purposes of ordinary human consumption (and motivation), in the language of "conventional truth," the Buddha’s compassionate concession to the limitations of human understanding.(36) But there are hints of the deeper or "ultimate truth" in their illustration as positions around the rim of the bhavachakra or symbolic wheel, with all its implications of motion without displacement, activity without fundamental change, a constant condition of birth and rebirth, of self-reinforcing human experiences, all recurring endlessly.

Rather than a counsel of despair, however, dependant origination offers, in the very grasping of its totality, potential transcendence. This transcendence, however, the route to nibbana (or nirvana), is once again not something to be theorized and abstracted, but a matter of seeing and experiencing. One sees when one is no longer distracted by what GA might call the rivalries of identity, of mediated desire, by any or all of the mendacious and distracting inducements to craving and sensation. One sees when one is able to ignore the temporality implied by linear cause and effect, or for that matter, by deferral and appropriation. Transcendence involves, in the familiar exhortation of both Romantic and Buddhist, living in the present moment. Escaping the wheel.

One may meditate. At any rate, action ceases. Wanting ceases, and thus also both explicit and imagined sacrificial appropriation. "In Buddhism," points out Raffaele Pettazoni, "one suppressed the sacrifice to retain only the vigil."(37) One waits and watches. Life itself suspended, or almost, one sees in a qualitatively different way, as in the paradigmatic lines of another important Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, surely evoking a liminal condition closely analogous to that sought for in Buddhism:

. . . that blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.(38)

With a "quiet" eye one sees, in Buddhism itself, not isolate causes and effects, but the autonomous creativity of everything at every moment. "Each dhamma," asserts Nolan Pliny Jacobson, making what will perhaps seem to us now the inescapable comparison, each moment "inherits along innumerable lines, synthesizing the relevant qualities into a world that is creative in every cell. Each such organic unity is like a work of art in the wholeness it confers on every part, and the serenity the Buddhist finds in such ‘pulsations of experience’ is the same serenity the art lover finds in great art. The movement in this process of the ‘many’ into the eminent ‘one’ of the fulfilled now is the rhythm of the universe as an organic whole."(39)

"We Japanese," according to one Buddhist of that nation, "do not believe in religion. We enjoy it!"(40)

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

But in GA’s conception of the human, as we have said, such pleasure, such serenity or joy, is only one phase of an oscillation, at least in our encounter with human art, even the greatest we have thus far known. No doubt the apogee of religious experience, in any tradition, approaches and/or imagines transcending the limits of the human. And while GA may leave undecidable, as Eric Gans has repeatedly made clear, the question of our origin in either the human gesture or the divine word, on the originary scene the hypothesis is emphatic about the ineluctability of the paradox of aesthetic experience.(41) The trouble of art, that inviolability, definitively prevents a complete embrace of the moment-as-artwork, prevents the absolute "fulfillment" of now. One recalls the potent longing awakened by art-works which strongly affect us, a longing for the absolute and impossible fulfillment of the world of possibility they evoke, a longing for the art-work to continue, never age, never end—that dying strain, that beloved human face, that magical kingdom—even as we intuitively understand that such continuation, such violation of form, would destroy the beauty that awakened our desires in the first place. Not that originary thinking doesn’t allow us to develop important differences of degree. GA distinguishes between the poles of high and low art—the former emphasizing, or lengthening the contemplative phase of oscillated attention, the latter the moment of imagined consumption or appropriation of the object designated by the sign. Perhaps meditation is the experience of the highest of high arts, and nibbana the ultimate degree of art, an art that abolishes itself. Perhaps indeed art and even aesthetic experience itself are to be thought of as functioning like the raft, in the Buddha’s famous image for his teachings, which allows us to cross the river but is to be abandoned once we do.(42)

Doubtless, then, the sign itself must also be left behind. For the important early Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, the profane is to be associated with "linguistic proliferation."(43) As Tachikawa summarizes his position, "action and mental defilements arise from ‘discriminating thought’. . . born of linguistic proliferation . . . the ‘division’ into diverse elements that is unavoidable in verbal expression." Language, in short, is a system of differences, and if this sounds familiar, so also does Nāgārjuna’s "method of refutation," which "was to negate the validity of propositions . . . by bringing to light the contradictions into which these propositions, expressed by language inevitably characterized by ‘expansion’ had to lapse," leading the philosopher to such oracular or shall we say proto-deconstructionist utterances as "things do not arise" and a "traverser does not traverse."(44) This second-century Derrida’s "relentless . . . determination to exhaust the subject under discussion is overwhelming" but, we are assured, "at the conclusion of this long and gruelling process to completely extinguish linguistic proliferation there awaits the perspective of a vision of emptiness in which ‘nothing exists (or everything is empty)’."(45) Il n’y a pas de hors-texte?(46)

In GA’s history of the human, of course, that first sign does nothing but proliferate, and the project Nāgārjuna pursues sounds in GA terms like the determined rolling back of that process, back and back, perhaps to the mere ostensive itself, and then to the pre- or post-human condition of stilled oscillation, the unified sacred and profane, the end of desire.

Buddhism seeks, as other commentators on Nāgārjuna consistently assert, "to set free the sense of the real from its moorings in abstractions"(47) and the sign is, of course, the first and most consequential abstraction, inflicting in its deferral of appropriation that wound, that division or alienation from the intuitively "real," mourned ever after in myriad ways by a humanity thus imprisoned in its own wanting. This is at bottom a mourning—we alluded to it above in the form of aesthetic longing—over the ineluctability of that which we may finally also call the paradox of desire, or broadly summarize, extending Freud’s great insight, as "the human condition and its discontents."(48)

How, then, to conclude, would or could an experience of beauty be so great as to abolish itself—or to abolish at any rate the paradox which makes it troubling? We must surely answer: by ceasing to oscillate. By becoming an experience exclusively of sign or, what may finally be no different, of referent. The problematic of inaccessibility is of course overcome when sign and object merge—when one can have the object as easily and completely as one possesses the sign, on one’s internal, virtual scene. Or, when the object’s solidity guarantees the satisfactions once merely beckoned to by the sign. One might add, the cessation of oscillation implies or must be accompanied by the cessation of human community, or at any rate, human community as understood as an ethical praxis necessitated by the mimetic and rivalrous character of desire. René Girard, contemplating the inexorable and to his mind inevitably violent operation of mimetic desire, once spoke of a community with no scapegoat, no outsiders, an entire society "with no outside" as the only possible solution.(49) A return, or leap forward, to a Christian universalism. The end of oscillation which

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

would seem to be the final goal of Buddhist pilgrimage might also imply such a world. A community—if that is still the word—with no boundaries, nothing which is not and nothing which is the community. A world of process and no things, process and nothing.

How might seeing or seeking this contribute to human betterment in the market world we currently experience? Can the model of an individually experienced transcendence of oscillation, call it even a personal "aesthetic apocalypse," replace the communally acknowledged sacred in its life-preserving work?

Eric Gans, in his own recent reflections on Nāgārjuna and Buddhism, does not put this question in explicitly aesthetic or oscillatory terms. Rather, the idea of Buddhist enlightenment at the end of linguistic proliferation demonstrates a "truly minimal" faith:

Whereas in the West we insist on the object of consciousness (Husserl’s "consciousness is always consciousness of something"), Buddhism understands that the scene of representation itself, although it can only come into being occupied by a sacred object, does not need such an object to maintain itself. On the contrary, it is as an empty scene that it reveals itself in its minimal essence. Buddha-like understanding of the sacred is the enlightenment that empties, whether it be through paradoxical thought or meditation or the repetition of a mantra or by some other means, the phenomenal world of words and their meaning, leaving only the universal faith in shared meaning itself that connects all humanity. (Chronicle 516)

This perspective, Gans generously suggests, in contrast with that of the ostensibly more violent West in the midst of its present convulsions of victimary resentment, might provide the market world its very means of survival, modelling the "solution of putting our object-desire away from us to let everyone share the universal human scene that offers humanity its one remaining chance of salvation."(50)

No doubt any thoroughgoing renunciation of mediated human desire, whether offered by Buddhism, Girardian Christianity, or Romanticism, if carried, universally, to its logical or literal conclusion, would indeed save humanity. Short of that, one would need to enter into comparative calculations of efficacy, measuring relative incidences of human violence, and trying to understand more fully than now we do the causes both of the continuation and, where it unquestionably has happened, of the diminishment of such violence.(51) This work too is well beyond the capacity of the current essay, and its prospect must bring us to a pause.

We might only add that prominent amongst our premises has been the conviction that originary thinking is not apocalyptical thinking. As we note above, GA does not have a version of the human without sacrality, without the current running between the poles, without language, or the community of shared attention. It contemplates no replacements, only a long and perhaps never to be completed transition, a steady shifting of balances, emphases, experiences of mediation. A pursuit, a praxis that leads to the relative or even near- perfect attainment of serenity it can certainly comprehend, though. It must watch and weigh and indeed celebrate the contributions made by both Buddhism and the many strands of Romanticism to the safety and peace of modern human culture. It must treat with respectful agnosticism the experiences of transcendence to which they attest, confident that even at the utmost remove from the originary scene representations of such experiences continue to perform the functions of protecting and developing the human. From its minimal set of presuppositions, that is, originary thinking needs to remain maximally receptive to the variety of human solutions to the ever-changing problem of desire. This, we would argue, constitutes—is the extent of—the "faith" GA itself is able to offer the present world. Notes 1. Quoted in David Webster, The Philosophy of Desire in the Buddhist Pali Canon (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 173. (back)

2. See for example, the "Culama-lunka sutta" in which a man wounded by an arrow seeks answers to the question of its origins, its pedigree, its trajectory. Meanwhile, dryly observes the Buddha, he dies. J. P. Pathirana, Pragmatism in Buddhism (Nedimala, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Cultural Centre, 2003), 6. (back)

3. The Philosophy of Desire in the Buddhist Pali Canon, 145. (back)

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

4. "Human history may be described as the never-completable transition from the ritual system of distribution inaugurated on the originary scene to the market system, where no central authority is necessary to mediate between human beings beyond the universal human order of representation through signs." Eric Gans, "The Free Market" (March 16, 1996), http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/view34.htm. (back)

5. "O gods dethroned and deceased," somewhat histrionically mourned Swinburne. He would certainly not be the last or the most bitter thus to greet a putative End of History. "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has gone gray from thy breath." "Hymn to Proserpine" (1866). In the Buddhist context, one might note, amongst many others, the view of the noted philosopher Keiji Nishitani: "At present Buddhism exerts practically no influence on life in society . . . . [It] has turned into social habit, and has fallen into a state of inertia." Quoted by Jan Van Bragt, in On Buddhism, Trans. Seisaku Yamamoto and Robert E. Carter (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), viii. It is not the intention of the present essay to dismiss these and the multitude of other similarly themed laments accompanying the advent of modernity. We will, however, focus on that which still may be operative in our era. (back)

6. Admittedly, the record is complicated, and Constantine seems to have been more transitional a figure than Christian memory usually presents, with one foot still in the pagan world and permissive of some variety of religious practice. Still, this "murderous egotist" as Jacob Burkhardt memorably called him, (The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas, 1949, New York: Vintage, 1967, 293.) exhibited rather a Stalinist strain and actively intervened in theological debate, convening the Council of Nicaea and enforcing the Nicene Creed. The longer outcomes are also to be considered. The modern version of the empire he ruled is certainly still more Christian than Asoka’s India remains Buddhist. Holloway, R. Ross, Constantine and Rome (Yale UP, 2004), Ch. 1. (back)

7. For a more detailed treatment of Asoka’s principles, see Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India (London: Penguin 2002), 200-204. (back)

8. For details of some of Buddhism’s historical adaptations, see Bernard Faure, Unmasking Buddhism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 20-22. Or, "compromises": 37. (back)

9. In support of the claims made in the last two sentences, one might point, from amongst numerous possible examples, to the capacity of one representative spiritual seeker of the late 20th-century, Leonard Cohen, simultaneously to engage Buddhism to the point of being ordained a monk, remain a practising Jew, and embrace the role of hyperbolically self-indulgent pop star with all the usual sexual, pharmaceutical and financial benefits. (For the typically messy details various sources might be consulted. For example, Ira B. Nadel, Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen; Toronto: Random House, 1996; chapters 10 and 13.) This gifted celebrity-poet, one might say, emblematically incorporates the "various positions" of the modern market into a single, highly successful identity. But a significant source of his power has been his ability to remain detached from the commitments of desire, romantic or political, to which he at the same time has borne eloquent witness. At times this has involved the crafting of elegant rationalizations for the "me generation," but at its best it has offered a profoundly humane perspective on the fervours of our day. (back)

10. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, 1950, Trans. Gene Patterson-King and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). (back)

11. The image is Jean-Michel Oughourlian’s. The Puppet of Desire, trans. Eugene Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 4. (back)

12. Eugene Webb usefully links the Girardian and Buddhist critiques of desire. "The goal of Buddhist practice is not to eliminate desire as such; it is to acknowledge it (to ‘note’ it as Buddhists sometimes say) without grasping and clinging, that is, without identifying with the desire . . . . Buddhist thought connects on a deep level with Girard’s, since Girard’s also has at its center the problem of identification." Webb also points, however, to a crucial difference, the absence in Buddhist thought of an emphasis on the mimetic character of desire. "Girard, Buddhism, and the Psychology of Desire" in For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

Truth, ed. Sandor Goodhart et al (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009), 153-54. (back)

13. "I stood," proclaims Byron’s paradigmatic Childe Harold, "among them, but not of them; in a shroud / Of thoughts which were not their thoughts." Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III, Stanza 137 (1816). (back)

14. For a brief description, see Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 176-78. Faure also provides a useful overview: Unmasking Buddhism, 34-35. (back)

15. Faure, Unmasking Buddhism, 42. (back)

16. Manfred: A Dramatic Poem, Act 4, Scene 3, 151. (back)

17. Faure, amongst others, deplores exactly our procedure, calling it a "refusal to take the diversity of Buddhism as a living tradition seriously." He distinguishes at least three fundamental forms: "Tibetan Buddhism, Zen and Theravāda." Unmasking Buddhism, 7. At other points he speaks of a "Buddhist nebula" (18) and details the ways historical Buddhism has most frequently been experienced over its long tradition— versions in many ways at odds with the more philosophical and ascetic system encountered by Western students and devotees, and the main subject of the present essay (59-82). (back)

18. Originary Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 117. (back)

19. Originary Thinking, 118. (back)

20. For a summary of this debate, see Faure, Unmasking Buddhism, 27-34. (back)

21. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nāgārjuna, Trans. Rolf W. Giebel (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1997), 9-10 (back)

22. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nāgārjuna, 6. (back)

23. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nāgārjuna, 10. (back)

24. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nāgārjuna, 7. (back)

25. ". . . we cannot simply go without sacrality. . . . Sacrality, properly understood, is nothing other than the reverence for the personhood of what cannot simply be appropriated by our appetite." Eric Gans, "On Celebrity" (September 6, 1997), http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw108.htm. (back)

26. For the seventh-century Tibetan Buddhist scholar Candrakīrti, Tachikawa notes, "it was impossible to attain to nirvana as long as the world remained an object of cognition." An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nāgārjuna, 186. (back)

27. "With the metamorphoses of the neoclassical esthetic into the preromantic, the public scene inherited from ritual loses the sacred aura through which it had recalled to life the originary crisis. The romantic replaces the esthetic primacy of the public scene with the private." Originary Thinking, 164. For definitions and development of the idea of the public and private scene, see the earlier chapters of this work. (back)

28. Hamlet (1600-1601) 1.2.85. Gans (Originary Thinking 156-57) and Richard van Oort (Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016; 57-96) have both illuminated this significant moment using a GA heuristic. (back)

29. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), Stanza 137. (back)

30. Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, to pick one example out of many, call Romanticism "opposition to capitalism in the name of precapitalist values" ("Figures of Romantic Anticapitalism" in G.A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins, eds., Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods; Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990; 26). For a GA-inflected discussion of the particular case of

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

Byron, readers might consult the present author’s Lord Byron and The History of Desire (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009). (back)

31. Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu, Paticcasamuppada: Practical Dependent Origination (Nonthaburi, Thailand: Vuddhidhamma Fund, 1992), 3-6. (back)

32. For one fairly clear account of this difficult concept, see Harvey, 65-73. (back)

33. Webster cites the fifth-century scholar Buddhaghosa, 148. (back)

34. For a brief summary of the parallels, see Nolan Pliny Jacobson, Buddhism and the Contemporary World (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 59-61. The connection has not been without its controversies, however, as the debates following upon the publication of Fritjof Capra’s 1975 The Tao of Physics and other works following it its train might remind us. The fraught relationship between Buddhism and the enthusiasms of the "New Age" is worth a study in itself, and one for which GA might provide an ideal heuristic. But this exceeds our current purposes. (back)

35. See Harvey, 66-67, for versions of the concept that continue "beyond link twelve." This same author provides a brief summary of the nidanas, or "conditioning links," 66-72. (back)

36. The distinction between conventional and ultimate truth in Buddhism is foundational and discussed in many sources. One brief account is Harvey, 118. Faure applies the distinction to the present subject matter in a similar way: Unmasking Buddhism, 42. (back)

37. Cited in Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 69. Eugene Webb raises the possible cultural and historical context of Buddhism’s non-sacrificial character, 154. (back)

38. "Tintern Abbey" (1798), 37-49. (back)

39. Jacobson, 43. This author devotes a full chapter (65-83) to "Nirvana: The Aesthetic Center of Life." Despite protestations to the contrary, the experience described seems, certainly by comparison to that articulated by GA, largely of a mystical character, by definition unmediated by other human beings, and unambiguously joyous. In short, it imagines the goal of human progress as the capacity to remain forever in the contemplative, non-appropriative phase of the aesthetic. To escape desire completely. (back)

40. Jacobson, 51. Emphasis added. (back)

41. I am indebted, in the reflections immediately above, to Eric Gans for remarks made in Nagoya after the presentation of the first version of this essay. (back)

42. Webster, 166. (back)

43. Tachikawa, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nāgārjuna, 6. (back)

44. Tachikawa, 25. (back)

45. Tachikawa, 25. (back)

46. The similarity of Nāgārjuna and Derrida is indeed something of a truism. Faure, however, makes the comparison instead to Wittgenstein. Unmasking Buddhism, 31. (back)

47. K. Venkata Ramanan, Nāgārjuna’s Philosophy: As Presented in the Mahā-Prajñāpāramitā-Sāstra (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1966) 329-30. Also cited in Jacobson, 56. (back)

48. See Civilization and its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), 1930. (back)

49. "Interview with René Girard" by Bruce Bassoff, Denver Quarterly 13 (Summer 1978), 38. (back)

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Dennis - Buddhism and Romanticism

50. "Nagarjuna and Zeno: Paradox East and West II" (July 9, 2016), http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw516.htm. Readers will want, of course, to assess the entire argument, as well note the personal way Gans has framed this final insight, using a detail from his uncle’s funeral. (back)

51. The causes proposed by Stephen Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011) seem partial at best, inadequate at worst, even as his fundamental claim concerning the phenomenon itself is firmly supported by a broad array of research. (back)

Anthropoetics subscribers may copy or download this text from the network, but its distribution or publication shall constitute an infringement of the Author's copyright.

Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology

Volume XXII, number 1 (Fall 2016) ISSN 1083-7264 URL: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2201/

2201dennis.htm[10/16/2016 4:46:12 PM] Kawahara and Taylor - Introduction

Anthropoetics 22, no. 1 (Fall 2016)

Introduction to the 2016 Conference Issue

Kiyoshi Kawahara and Matthew Taylor

Kinjo Gakuin University Nagoya, Japan

We are pleased to serve as guest editors for the Fall 2016 conference issue of Anthropoetics. We would like to thank Eric Gans for this opportunity even as we acknowledge his very extensive assistance in preparing the issue.

The 10th annual conference of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference was held at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan in June, 2016 under the theme "Cultural Universals, Cultural Specifics, and Globalization: On the Applicability of General Anthropology." It was a very significant event for participants, a cross-cultural exchange truly worthy of the name. There was consistent excellence not only in the guest lectures, panel, symposium, and regular presentations, but also in the discussion periods and in the dialogue that continued into breaks and lunchtimes.

We hope some of that spirit is captured in this issue. All papers herein were submitted by conference presenters. In fact, the number of papers submitted by participants was too large for a single issue, so several will be appearing in the Spring 2017 issue. Please note also that the text of Eric Gans’s brilliant plenary lecture, "Nagarjuna and Zeno: Paradox East and West" has already been published in two parts as Chronicles 515 and 516 in Chronicles of Love and Resentment.

This issue puts the spotlight on papers with cross-cultural topics close to the conference theme. We are especially pleased in this issue to present submissions (the first bilingual contributions to the journal) from three participants who are professors in our own Department of Japanese Language and Literature. They represent the "Kinjo Occult Research Group," an interdisciplinary association that pursues unconventional topics and regularly presents and discusses them in an informal setting on campus. Their participation in our conference, with insightful explorations into the mimetic dimensions of their research, was one of its highpoints—certainly the most impressive visually. Their studies are very welcome contributions to Anthropoetics.

Aya Ryusawa examines the heroic narratives of scroll paintings from the Edo period, a mythology of the monstrous by which a local branch of the ruling Tokugawa clan sought to further legitimize their rule. Kenshin Kirihara presents an analysis of sacrificial dimensions in the foundation of modern Imperial Japan in the Meiji period, wherein state Shintoism was born. Military victims in this "peaceful" transition to modernity were selectively enshrined in what is now known as Yasukuni Shrine, which is now a continual point of contention in East Asian politics. Shoko Komatsu extends the mimetic analysis to folklore and modern urban legend as she examines the link between ghostly apparitions and victimization in the "Okiku" legends; behind many a ghost story, it seems, lies a tale of persecution.

Our other three contributors are rooted in generative anthropology, nicely balancing the issue and reflecting the reality of the conference, which had a nearly equal focus on generative anthropology and mimetic theory. (René Girard’s memory was honored in a series of lectures generously supported by Kinjo Gakuin University’s Institute for the Study of Christian Culture.)

Magdalena Złocka-Dąbrowska covers a vast range of myth and history (East and West) as she draws out points of contact between the anthropological vision of Georges Dumézil and Eric Gans. The prolific and equally wide-ranging Edmond Wright offers playfully serious reflections on language and religion before focusing on the luminous religious poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Issa Kobayashi. Ian Dennis, one of

2201intro.htm[10/16/2016 4:49:42 PM] Kawahara and Taylor - Introduction

generative anthropology’s leading lights, weaves together profound ruminations on Buddhism, romanticism, and the problematic of desire. His paper, focused as was Eric Gans’s lecture on the philosophy of Nagarjuna (via the study by Musashi Tachikawa, one of our featured lecturers), should perhaps be considered its equal in scope and insight.

We hope that readers can enjoy and profit from these highly original papers, each in its own way extending mimetic theory or generative anthropology in new directions. We also remind readers to follow up this issue with the complimentary "sister" issue to appear in spring, which will feature several more papers from our Nagoya conference.

Anthropoetics subscribers may copy or download this text from the network, but its distribution or publication shall constitute an infringement of the Author's copyright.

Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology

Volume XXII, number 1 (Fall 2016) ISSN 1083-7264 URL: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2201/

2201intro.htm[10/16/2016 4:49:42 PM] Kinjo Occult Research Group

Anthropoetics 22, no. 1 (Fall 2016)

Kinjo Occult Research Group

A Door to another World: The Imagination in Japanese Folkways and Religion The three papers in this section were presented by the Kinjo Occult Research Group at GASC 2016. Our group sets out to engage in interdisciplinary study without relying on a narrow definition of "occult". We research how people in Japan, South Asia, and Oceania have verbalized and visualized awesome or terrifying presences which cannot be seen. In this session, three members of the Kinjo Occult Research Group who specialize in Japanese culture presented on the interaction between people in "this world" and presences in "another world", such as monstrous figures or the dead. 異界への扉：～日本の民俗と宗教に おける想像力～

本稿は、 2016年 6月 18日に行 われたGASC2016 におけるセッシ ョン「異界への扉：～日本の民俗 と宗教における想像力～」の 報告 である。 本セッションは、金城学院大学 オカルト研究会のメンバーによっ て行われた。「金城学院大学オカ ルト研究会」は、主として日 本、 南アジア、オセアニアを対象に、 狭義の「オカルト」の語義にとら われず、本来目には見えないとさ れていた恐怖/ 畏怖の 対象が言 語化され、可視化されていった過程 を追う学際的な研究会である。本セ ッションでは、異界や死者との交流 をテーマと して、日本文化研究に携 わる3 名が発表を行った。

2201KOR.htm[10/16/2016 5:07:18 PM] Ryusawa - The Scroll of Shutendōji

Anthropoetics 22, no. 1 (Fall 2016)

Mastering the Visualization of Heroic Narratives within Daimyō Families: The Illustrated Scroll of Shutendōji in the Edo period

Aya Ryusawa

1. Introduction

This presentation will focus on the reception of the Shutendōji emaki in the 17th century. Originating in medieval Japan, the original “Shutendōji” story recounts how Minamoto Raikō and his retainers quelled the tale’s namesake monster. This story was pictorialized as scroll paintings (emaki) or as illustrated books. Many daimyō warriors in the Edo period owned such renditions, as did the Owari Tokugawa family, the lord of Nagoya castle, who possessed a number of books and scrolls of the “Shutendōji” narrative. This presentation will show how those painted versions were valued by the Owari Tokugawa in the Edo period (1603–1867).

2. About the Shutendōji emaki

The Shutendōji emaki in the collection of the Tokugawa Art Museum is comprised of three scrolls, believed to have been made in the early Edo period (17th century)【fig.1, 2】(1). They were transmitted in the Owari Tokugawa family. As for the oldest surviving example, that would be the Ōeyama emaki (an alternate title for the same legend), made in the 14th century and currently held in the Itsuō Art Museum. The scrolls in Suntory Museum of Art may be the most famous, as they are painted by the distinguished painter Kanō Motonobu in the 16th century. In Edo period, the story of Shutendōji came to proliferate through woodblock printing. Finally, I should note that the demon queller, Minamoto Yorimitsu 948-1021 (otherwise pronounced Raikō), was a real historical warrior who died in 1021.

The story is as follows. In Kyoto, the daughter of the court noble Ikeda Chūnagon goes missing. Through divination, it is discovered that she was abducted by the monster of Ōeyama. Chūnagon informs the emperor, who then orders Raikō to go subdue this demon. Before his quest, Raikō and his retainers (Watanabe Tsuna, Sakata Kintoki, Usui Sadamitsu, Fujiwara Yasumasa, and Urabe Suetake) go pray for victory at the shrines of Kumano, Sumiyoshi, and Iwashimizu Hachiman. So that their identities would not be divulged, they disguise themselves as mountain priests (yamabushi). In Tanba they meet up with three elderly men, who reveal to them that the monster is called Shutendōji, and that to defeat him, they should hold a drinking party, as he loves to drink. To this end, they give Raikō and his group a flask of magical sake and a helmet. In fact, these old men are the gods of Kumano, Sumiyoshi and Iwashimizu Hachiman. As they climb further into the mountain, by the upper reaches of a river, they encounter a woman. The old men disappear at this point, as they inquire about the woman, about seventeen or eighteen years old. It turns out that she is the daughter of the Hanazono Chūnagon. There by the river, she is washing a blood-stained robe. She tells them that the Shutendōji drinks the blood of girls as sake, and eats their flesh as dishes. This bloody robe belonged to the daughter of the Horikawa Chūnagon, who had just been eaten that morning, she tells them.

After inquiring about the whereabouts of Shutendōji, Raikō and his team arrive at an iron gate. There Shutendōji’s monsters keeping guard welcome them because the demons plan to eat them. They finally meet Shutendōji, who as his name implies, has a face that is child-like, but a pale red, gigantic, grotesque body. Raikō tells Shutendōji that they are yamabushi. For shelter that night, Raikō proposes, he would prepare some good sake. Shutendōji agrees, then holds a banquet. Raikō and his retainers pretend to eat so that they would not to be suspicious 【fig.1】.

2201Ryusawa.htm[10/16/2016 5:13:14 PM] Ryusawa - The Scroll of Shutendōji

Fig. 1 Reproduced with the permission of Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Raikō then offers Shutendōji the magical sake, and the monster gets completely intoxicated by the delicious wine. Now is their chance. As the team rushes into the monster’s bedroom, the three gods reappear, shackling Shutendōji’s arms and legs in chains 【fig.2】.

Fig. 2 Reproduced with the permission of Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The gods tell him to take his head. Turning into a demon himself, Raikō attacks Shutendōji, chopping off his head. The severed head flies up, then swoops down, taking aim at Raikō. Thanks to gods’ helmet, he escapes harm. The team then rescues the captive girls and return to the capital, where they are received

2201Ryusawa.htm[10/16/2016 5:13:14 PM] Ryusawa - The Scroll of Shutendōji

with honor and are given awards by the emperor.

Shutendōji’s residence represents the supernatural realm, beyond the normal world of human beings. To express its supernatural quality, there are several telling features. While not depicted in this scroll’s painting, in the text, the Shutendōji’s residence is revealed to have a garden in which the four seasons are concurrently present, symbolizing an immortal world in which there is no passage of time. Moreover, in Shutendōji’s bedroom, the sliding screens have images of turbulent seas, as they are a symbol of another realm at the bottom of the sea.(2) Such evocative motifs were one technique by which the painter, in his visual medium that combined text and image, vividly communicated to his viewers the otherworldliness of Shutendōji’s domain.(3)

3. The Owari Tokugawa Family and their Emaki

Many daimyō warriors in the Edo period owned emaki or illustrated books that pictorialized the “Shutendōji” narrative.(4) The Owari Tokugawa family, the owner of this version, was one of the most important branch families, from which the shogun could be chosen if the main line lacked heirs. It was established by Tokugawa Yoshinao, Tokugawa Ieyasu’s ninth son. That samurai would be interested in a story about heroic warriors defeating a monster is not surprising. Still, the Owari Tokugawa fascination with “Shutendōji” was exceptional: the inventory of their collection shows five sets of “Shutendōji” scrolls or books in the span of the 18th and 19th centuries.(5) This number outstrips other narrative books, underscoring their special relationship with this work. I contend that “Shutendōji” had particular meanings for the Tokugawa family. Of course, not all of these scrolls were owned by one person, and they were acquired over the course of many generations. But they do demonstrate some conscious preoccupation with this story over others, as these gorgeous scroll paintings were especially prepared for festive occasions, such as births or weddings in the lord’s family. In fact, in light of these occasions centered on the family, I argue that the selection of “Shutendōji” reflected the samurai’s concern over lineage. It is well known that Tokugawa Ieyasu positioned himself as a descendant of the Seiwa Genji. Minamoto no Raikō, who subjugated Shutendōji, was also from this lineage. Therefore, for the Tokugawa, this story, despite its fictionality, was not simply some fairy tale about defeating a monster, but had significance as the glorification of a heroic ancestor. Furthermore, the Owari Tokugawa collection houses other works that feature the heroism of the Genji, such as The Tale of the Heike, or the “Rashōmon emaki,” which features Watanabe Tsuna, a member of Raikō’s group. These stories were not simply captivating for the eyes, but were treasured as records of the family’s ancestors and their brave exploits.

4. Conclusion

In Japanese culture, the image of the demon (oni) has often been used to represent the Other, such as violent pirates, yamabushi, entertainers, or foreigners, who were all in some manner seen as resisting the social order.(6) The “Shutendōji” can also be read as the story of a forcible pacification of a being who had evaded the social order. In this respect, the tale evokes Girard’s ideas about those who “can be slayed without the risk of retaliation.”(7) For the samurai, who claimed the mandate to rule, stories that demonstrated the pacification of other lands, including the realm of the fantastic, had status as origin myths that validated their lineages. As such, for the samurai of the Tokugawa clan, the quelling of the demon then acted as a vicarious experience, making the viewing of the scroll a ritualistic performance that linked the character of Raikō to themselves. The Shutendōji emaki was therefore a vital work to possess, as its viewing legitimized and asserted the sovereignty of this ruling family.

Translated by Takeshi Watanabe Bibliography Girard, René. Bouryoku to Seinarumono. Trans. Yukio Furuta. Tokyo: Housei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1982. Trans. of La Violence et le Sacré. Paris: Grasset, 1972.

Baba, Akiko, Oni no Kenkyū. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1988.

2201Ryusawa.htm[10/16/2016 5:13:14 PM] Ryusawa - The Scroll of Shutendōji

Komatsu, Kazuhiko, ed. Oni -Kaii no Minzokugaku 4. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2000.

Kuroda, Hideo. “Emaki no Naka no Oni: Kibi Daijin to Oni.” Oni -Kaii no Minzokugaku. Ed. Kazuhiko Komatsu. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 2000. 335-362.

Ryūsawa, Aya, “Daimyōke no Ehon Jukai to Emaki Eirihon Seisaku no Ryūsei ni Tsuite.” Setsuwa Bungaku Kenkyū, 49 (Setsuwabungaku-kai, 2014) 4-13.

Ryūsawa, Aya, “Owari Tokugawake Denrai ‘Rashōmon Emaki’ ni Tsuite.” Kinshachi Sōsho, 36 (Tokugawa Reimeikai, 2010) 43-70.

The Tokugawa Art Museum. Momoyama-Edo Kaiga no Bi. Nagoya: The Tokugawa Art Museum, 2008. Notes 1. For more on this scroll painting, see: The Tokugawa Art Museum, Momoyama-Edo Kaiga no Bi (Nagoya: The Tokugawa Art Museum, 2008) 87, 156. (back)

2. In the Imperial Palace, there are similar screens depicting turbulent seas. Even though the Heian-period version does not survive, in Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, she describes these screens as depicting long- legged, long-armed, fearsome monsters in rough waters. (back)

3. The scroll’s texts do not describe the screens, but in the Nō play, Ōeyama, the libretto (in the Hōshō tradition) makes explicit mention of the screens as the “araumi no shōji.” (back)

4. For more on the 17th-century reception of the “Shutendōji” illustrated books, see Aya Ryūsawa, “Daimyōke no Ehon Jukai to Emaki Eirihon Seisaku no Ryūsei ni Tsuite,” Setsuwa Bungaku Kenkyū, 49, 10 (2014) 4-13. (back)

5. For more on the various works in the Owari Tokugawa collection, see Aya Ryūsawa, “Owari Tokugawake Denrai ‘Rashōmon Emaki’ ni Tsuite,” Kinko Sōsho, 36 (Tokugawa Reimeikai, 2010) 43-70. (back) 6. For an overview on “Oni” in Japanese culture, see Akiko Baba, Oni no Kenkyū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1988) and Kazuhiko Komatsu, ed. Oni -Kaii no Minzokugaku 4 (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 2000). Hideo Kuroda pointed out that the Other including foreigners was regarded as Oni. See Hideo Kuroda “Emaki no Naka no Oni: Kibi Daijin to Oni,” (Kazuhiko Komatsu, ed., Oni -Kaii no Minzokugaku 4 (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 2000) 335-362. (back)

7. René Girard, Bouryoku to Seinarumono (Tokyo: Housei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1982), trans. Yukio Furuta. trans. of La Violence et le Sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972) 22. (back)

Anthropoetics subscribers may copy or download this text from the network, but its distribution or publication shall constitute an infringement of the Author's copyright.

Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology

Volume XXII, number 1 (Fall 2016) ISSN 1083-7264 URL: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2201/

2201Ryusawa.htm[10/16/2016 5:13:14 PM] 大名家における英雄譚絵巻の所有――江戸時代の酒呑童子絵巻 龍澤 彩 （金城学院大学 教授）

１．はじめに この小論では、日本の中世に成立した物語『酒呑童子』を視覚化した絵巻の、近世における受容をテーマとする。近現代文化の中で発展した「オカルト」という概念を、前近代の文 化事象にあてはめることには慎重にならなければならないが、本論で触れる『酒呑童子』という物語は、異界や異類（人間以外の存在）との関係、交渉の有り様を描いているという 点で、生成人類学会における本セッションおよび発表者が参加している「オカルト研究会」が扱うテーマと関連性があると考えている。 『酒呑童子』の物語は、「酒呑童子」と呼ばれる鬼を、源頼光ら武士達が退治するという物語で、多数絵画化され、絵巻や絵本として享受された。江戸時代の大名家のコレクション の中にはしばしば「酒呑童子絵巻」が含まれており、尾張徳川家の蔵品目録にも複数の「酒呑童子絵巻」が記録されている。本論では、徳川美術館が所蔵する「酒呑童子絵巻」を取 り上げ、江戸時代に、この絵巻が尾張徳川家でどのような意味を持っていたかについて考察する。

２．「酒呑童子絵巻」概要 [1] 本絵巻（図版１・２）は、制作年代は江戸時代（17世紀）と考えられる3巻の絵巻で、尾張徳川家に伝来し、現在は徳川美術館が所蔵している 。 『酒呑童子』は、酒呑童子の住処を、大江山とする「大江山系」と、伊吹山とする「伊吹山系」とがあり、それぞれ複数の伝本が知られている。最古本としては、鎌倉時代（14世 紀）に作られた逸翁美術館所蔵「大江山絵巻」があるほか、著名な絵巻としては「伊吹山系」のテクストをもつ狩野元信筆「酒呑童子絵巻」（サントリー美術館所蔵）が知られてい る。江戸時代に木版刷りの絵入本として出版された「渋川版」と呼ばれる御伽草子23編の中にも収められ、物語は広く流布した。本論でとりあげる徳川美術館所蔵の「酒呑童子絵 巻」は、鬼の住処を大江山とする大江山系である。鬼退治に出かける源頼光（948-1021）は実在した人物で、1021年に歿している。物語のあらすじは次の通りである。時は平安時 代。京の都の公家、池田中納言の見目麗しい一人娘が姿を消した。娘を探す中納言が占いの博士に占わせると、大江山の鬼にさらわれたのだろうという。中納言が帝に奏聞すると、 帝は源頼光を召して、鬼退治を命じる。頼光は、郎党の渡辺綱、坂田公時、碓井貞光、藤原保昌、卜部季武とともに討伐に出かけることにし、熊野大社、住吉大社、石清水八幡宮の 神に戦勝祈願をする。一行は山伏に姿を変えて、笈に具足兜を入れて出立、丹波国で、翁三人と出会う。翁達は頼光達の鬼退治の話を聞くと、鬼は酒呑童子であり、酒盛りをして退 治すべしと教え、酒とともに兜を授ける。実はこの翁達は三社の化身であった。翁はさらに一行を導いていき、さらに河上へと登れば、ある貴婦人がいるので、委細を聞くように教 え姿を消す。川の上流では、十七、八の女が泣きながら血染めの衣を洗っていた。聞けば、花園中納言の一人姫だという。娘が言うには、鬼は女性を捉えたのちは、その血を酒に、 肉を肴にするという。この衣は、今朝餌食となった堀川中納言の姫のものだと言う。娘に鬼の住みかを聞き、頼光達が進んでいくと、話の通り、鉄の門があり、鬼が番をしていた。 鬼達は取って喰おうと、一行を招き入れる。邸で一行を出迎えた酒呑童子は、色薄赤く背高く、大格子の織物に紅の袴という異形の姿である。頼光は、自分逹は山伏であり、これも 役行者の引き合わせ、宿を貸してくれたら持参の酒で、酒盛りをしようといって謀る。酒呑童子の酒盛りは世にも恐ろしく、肴は人肉、酒は血であった。頼光たちは、怪しまれない よう、盃を空ける（図版1）。頼光は、続いて、三神から賜った酒を出し、酒呑童子は美酒を喜び、酌をさせようと池田中納言・花園中納言の姫を召す。じきに、鬼達は醉いつぶれ てしまう。頼光は、酒呑童子に捕らえられていた姫君達に委細を聞き、今こそ鬼を討つ時と支度をする。鬼の寝所にいざ突入というとき、三神が現れ、鬼の手足は鎖で繋ぐので、頼 光は鬼の首をとるよう教える（図版2）。鬼の形相に姿を変えて臥している酒呑童子に、頼光は襲いかかり、首を落とすと、首は天に舞い上がり、頼光めがけて落ちてくるが、神に 授けられた兜のおかげで、難を逃れる。頼光達は、鬼の残党とも戦い、捕らえられていた女性達を探し出し、都に凱旋する。池田中納言も出迎え、娘と感動の再会を果たす。頼光は 帝から褒美を賜る。 酒呑童子の住処は人間にとっては異郷である。本絵巻には描かれないが、四方四季の庭を持ち、不老不死の世界とされた。また、鬼の寝所の襖絵には荒波が描かれている。荒れる 海は、古くは『古事記』『日本書紀』に記された「海神の宮」や、仏教で説かれ、『浦島太郎』の物語でも知られる龍宮のような、海中の異界を連想させるモチーフである。『酒呑 童子』に取材した能の曲「大江山」の謡本（宝生流）でも「荒海の障子押しあけて。」と記されており、絵巻に描かれたこの「荒海の障子」は、鬼の居所を「異界らしく」見せる工 夫であると考えられる。視覚的イメージを伴う絵巻は、視覚的イメージを伴うことによって、テクストのみの本に比べてさらに生々しく、酒呑童子の棲む異界の様子を人々に想像さ せる媒体であったと言えよう。

2201RyusawaJ.htm[10/16/2016 5:14:08 PM] ※図版の無断転載を禁じます。

３．尾張徳川家と絵巻 [2] 『酒呑童子』の物語を絵画化した絵巻や絵入り本は、この絵巻の他にも多数制作されており、大名家に伝来したものも少なくない 。本絵巻も、尾張徳川家伝来である。尾張徳川家 は、徳川家康の九男義直を初代とする家で、名古屋城主であった。勇猛な侍が鬼退治をする『酒呑童子』の物語が武家で好まれたとしても不思議はないが、尾張徳川家には、この絵 [3] 巻を含む５点もの『酒呑童子』の絵巻や本が伝来していたことが、同家の蔵品目録から判明する 。他の物語類（特に御伽草子）と比しても、単に物語の面白さのみで選ばれたと考 えて看過するには点数が多く、この物語が尾張徳川家で重視されていたと見るべきであろう。もちろん所用者は一人ではなく、全てが一度に同家に入ったものでもないが、特に「１ 点物」の絵巻は当時としても高価なものであり、誕生や婚礼等、節目に際して誂えられたり、贈答に用いられたりするケースも多かったと考えられ、この蔵書目録の記載は、特に 『酒呑童子』が好んで選ばれていたことを示している。背景としては、武士としての血統の意識があったのではないかと思われる。徳川家康が自らを清和源氏の系譜に位置づけたこ とはよく知られているが、酒呑童子を退治した源頼光もまた清和源氏であり、尾張徳川家にとって『酒呑童子』は、フィクションでありながらも、単なる鬼退治譚ではなく、先祖の 英雄譚として享受されていたのではないかと考えられる。このほかにも、尾張徳川家には、源氏の武将が活躍する『平家物語』に取材する作品や、頼光とともに酒呑童子を討った渡 辺綱を主人公とする「羅生門絵巻」などが伝来している。それらは、単に目を楽しませるためのみならず、自らの存在につながる「源氏の武将の物語」として大切にされていたもの と思われる。

４．まとめ 日本文化においては、徒党を組んで乱暴狼藉を働く山賊、山伏や芸能民など、体制に従わない人々や体制を逸脱した存在、あるいは異国人などの「他者」がしばしば鬼のイメージ [4] と重ね合わされることがあったと指摘されている 。『酒呑童子』の物語もまた、共同体から逸脱した存在を力で調伏させる物語として読むこともでき、ジラールが述べるところの [5] 「報復の危険をおかすことなく叩き殺すことのできる」供犠 の存在を想起させる。帝の命という大義名分をもった武家が、武力によって、異界をも含む世界を平定するという物語 は、権力者たる「家」という一つの共同体にとっての「神話」であるとも言えるだろう。また、そのような物語を描いた絵巻が鑑賞される場合、武家、とりわけ徳川家においては、 絵巻を見る者は頼光に自らを重ね合わせ、酒呑童子討伐を「追体験」するという意味において、絵巻を「見る」という行為そのものが、ある種の儀礼性を伴っているとも言えよう。 こうした絵巻を所持し、「見る」ことは、為政者としての血統の正統性を、一族の中で再認識するための、象徴的な意味をもっていたと考えられる

※図版の無断転載を禁じます。

[1] 徳川美術館編『桃山・江戸絵画の美』（87頁・156頁、徳川美術館、2008年）。 [2]

2201RyusawaJ.htm[10/16/2016 5:14:08 PM] 17世紀の大名家における絵本受容については、龍澤彩「大名家の絵本享受と絵巻・絵入本制作の隆盛について」（『説話文学研究』49号、2014年10月）で論じている。 [3] 尾張徳川家の目録記載の作品については、龍澤彩「尾張徳川家伝来「羅生門絵巻」について」An illustrated handscroll of The tale of the Rashomon, owned by the Owari Tokugawa Family （『金鯱叢書』第36輯、徳川黎明会、2010年）で紹介した。 [4] 日本文化における「鬼」の概念および研究史については、馬場あき子『鬼の研究』（筑摩書房、1988年）、小松和彦編『鬼（怪異の民俗学4）』（河出書房新社、2000年）に詳し い。異国人を含む共同体以外の存在を鬼と見ることについては、黒田日出男「絵巻のなかの鬼 吉備大臣と＜鬼＞」（前掲『鬼（怪異の民俗学4）所収、335-362頁）で言及がある。 [5] ルネ・ジラール（吉田幸男訳）『暴力と聖なるもの』法政大学出版局、1982年、22頁。

2201RyusawaJ.htm[10/16/2016 5:14:08 PM] Kirihara - Civil War and Sacrifice

Anthropoetics 22, no. 1 (Fall 2016)

The Birth of a Myth: Civil War and Sacrifice in Early Meiji Japan

Kenshin Kirihara 1. “Sacrifice” and “Gisei” In Japanese, the English word “sacrifice” is also expressed with a classical Chinese word “gisei (犠牲).” These words are a perfect match. It is because “犠gi” which is composed “牛 (cow) + 羊 (sheep as the most common offering) + 我 jagged spear to kill the offering ” means “a cow killed with a jagged spear as an offering to the Divine”, and then “牲sei” which is composed “牛 (cow) +生 (live)” means “a living cow for offering to the Divine.” It can be said that “gisei” is truly an appropriate word to translate“sacrifice.”

However, in contemporary Japanese, “gisei” means not only “sacrifice” but also “victim.” This usage, which differs from the original meaning, appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. For example, when a Japanese newspaper reported that the Chinese emperor sent a personal telegraph to the German emperor to grieve over the death of a German minster who had fallen a victim to the daggers of the Boxers (義和団) the year before, the article used “gisei” for “victim.”(2)

It is clear that this “gisei” was not an offering dedicated to a divinity. In this way, its “我” shape primary meaning in modern Japanese, which is different from the original meaning as “a spear(1) sacred offering” to something great, is “the unfortunate death” of the blameless.

2. The birth of the modernized “gisei” One of the reasons the meaning of “gisei” changed essentially was due to the inundation of “gisei”

in modern Japan. It could be called “the transformation of quantity into quality” (F. Engels)(4). Modern Japan suffered numerous civil wars and foreign invasions, such as the following: the Boshin civil war (1868 - 1869) between the pro-Shogunate army and the imperial New-government army, the Satsuma Rebellion (1877) which was the greatest and last civil war of the The hall of worship in Yasukuni- shizoku (the former samurai class), and jinja Shrine several armed conflicts with GOSEDA, Hōryū “March-off China in Taiwan and Korea which resulted in the First Sino-Japanese war of the General Prince (1894 - 1895). These wars caused a number of casualties such as Japan Ninnaji”(3) had never experienced in the previous two centuries. Subsequently, fallen soldiers were regarded as brave men who had offered their lives on the altar of their country, and their spirits were enshrined together as a “Divine”(5) in Tokyo’s Shōkon-sha (東京招魂社) shrine (currently Yasukuni-jinja [靖国神社] shrine) by the

2201Kirihara.htm[10/16/2016 4:56:06 PM] Kirihara - Civil War and Sacrifice

Meiji State (1868 - 1945). They were literally “gisei” or “sacrifice” for the nation.

However, in reality, the Meiji State had no firm code of religious principle regarding this tutelary deity of the Empire of Japan. Not only Meiji statesmen but also Shinto priests had no concrete image of what this Divine was or what power it had. Furthermore, many Japanese intellectuals who had meritoriously contributed to establish the Meiji State were skeptical of religion, or firm atheists. The new tendency appeared among Shinto priests. For example, the priest Bisei Fukuba (福羽美静: 1831 - 1907), who had erected the first shrine (currently Kyoto Ryōzen Gokoku-jinja [京都霊山護国神社] shrine) for the spirits of loyalists in 1862, was involved in the following episode. FUKUBA Bisei(6)

In 1868 when Emperor Meiji moved out of Kyoto to Tokyo, imperial families, nobles, and citizens of Kyoto were mostly opposed to this campaign. However, Fukuba strongly asserted a supporting argument, because he thought that the Emperor had to leave this old Capital to establish a new state. One evening, he received a letter from Ise-jingū (伊勢神宮) Shrine (enshrining Amaterasu-ōkami [天照大神] or the Divine ancestor of the Imperial Family) via Jingi- kan (神祇官: Department of Divinities), which read as follows: “the head of a torii (鳥居: an archway of Shinto shrine) in front of Inner Ise Shrine (内宮: Naikū) fell down. I [a priest of Ise-jingū] believe that this may be a sign because it happened just before the Inner Ise Shrine(7) departure of His Majesty.” Because Fukuba guessed that it was a protest by adversaries, he disregarded this letter and said “essentially, there is no need to be afraid of the torii’s head falling. It was only an accident!”(8) What he was afraid of was not incurring Amaterasu’s displeasure due to having carried out this campaign but the disturbance of the people due to the suspension. He was quintessentially political.

Two Hierarchies under the Emperor in State Shintoism

Such priests, who thought and acted politically, founded State Shintoism, which was one of the important pillars of the Meiji State which encompassed religion as a means of dominating the Japanese people. After all, what was honoured in the Shōkon-sha shrine was the act of dying for their country, not the person as an individual. Therefore, it served neither as comfort of the dead nor for the salvation of souls.

2201Kirihara.htm[10/16/2016 4:56:06 PM] Kirihara - Civil War and Sacrifice

Because the Meiji State founded State Shintoism with a political rather than a religious consciousness, the tendency of religious apathy appeared throughout the whole of modern Japanese society. Thus, “gisei” as a common word lost its original meaning to be given a new one as an unfortunate death which was nobody’s fault.(9) However, in modern Japan, “gisei” as “sacrifice” did not fade away; there were a lot of invisible “scapegoats” to maintain the community.

3. True “Sacrifices” It’s the simplest thing; there is no warfare without opponents. Hence, there were fallen soldiers in hostile country, but State Shintoism in modern Japan did not worship these spirits. This was an extraordinarily exceptional phenomenon in Japanese history. Traditionally, Japanese people had worshiped any spirits from either side after wars, because they believed that these worshiped spirits would bring not evil but good from ancient times.

For instance, in 1191, Emperor Gotoba (後鳥羽) built a temple(10) to mourn the spirits of the Taira clan (平 氏), who had been defeated in the Genpei War (源平合戦: 1180 - 1185)(11). Such acts could be found not only after civil wars but after foreign wars. In fact, a temple(12) was erected for the fallen soldiers of the Mongolian Amy which attacked Japan twice in the late thirteenth century.

However, after the Boshin civil war resulting in the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, those who were enshrined were only fallen soldiers of the winning camp; the souls of defeated soldiers were ignored by the Meiji State. Several decades after the war, some memorials for these obscure spirits were erected around old battlegrounds by relatives, but these memorials were completely different from the Shōkon-sha shrine and the spirits were forced to be social outcasts in the end.

The Meiji State encouraged Japanese people to offer their lives to the Emperor by eliminating the spirits of adversaries as a warning to others. It can be said that these spirits which had been branded as “death in vain” contributed to establishing and maintaining the Meiji State in the background or literally in the underground. On this very spot, they were exactly “gisei” as scapegoat. It is through such sorting out and rejecting of spirits that the Meiji State spun a new myth as the ideology of the modern Tenō (Imperial) system.

Closing remarks A monument sacred to the memory of Toshizō The following sentence appeared in the speech of U.S. President Barack Obama Hijikata (erected in who visited Hiroshima in May, 2016. 1958)(13)

Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats. But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.(14)

There still remain countries or groups which treat the war dead as “sacrifices.” However, true “sacrifices” who are really offered to the Divinity called Nation are none other than those who are “oppressed and dehumanized” because of being “different.” The nation-state was founded on such a myth inscribed with “sacrifices” whether visible or invisible.

2201Kirihara.htm[10/16/2016 4:56:06 PM] Kirihara - Civil War and Sacrifice

Bibliography Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima Books

Engels, Friedrich. Dialektik der Natur. 1883. Marx , Karl & Friedrich Engels Werke. Berlin (DDR): Dietz Verlag, 1962. Band 20.

Tōyōbunka-kyōkai [Society of the Eastern Culture]. The eighty years’ chronicle: Bakumatsu, Meiji and Taishō Japan. Tokyo: Tōyōbunka-kyōkai, 1933-1937. in 24 volumes. (東洋文化協会『幕末・明治・大正回顧八 十年史』東洋文化協会、1933-1937年、全24輯)

Yakumo, Tsuruma. An introduction of the national holidays. Osaka: Yaegaki-shoin, 1923. (八雲都留麻『大祭 祝日略説』八重垣書院、1923年)

Articles

Fukuba, Bisei. “Arguments against the transfer of the capital to Tokyo.” Taiyō. Vol.4. No.9. 1898. (福羽美静 「御東幸の反対論」、『太陽』4巻9号、1898年)

Newspaper articles

“Personal telegrams between the German Emperor and the Chinese Emperor” the morning edition of Asahi- shinbun. Octorber 24, 1900. (「独帝清帝の親電応酬」『朝日新聞』1900年10月24日東京朝刊) “Visit to Hiroshima: the full text of [U.S.] President Obama’s statement” the morning edition of Yomiuri- shinbun. May 28, 2016. (「広島訪問 オバマ大統領の声明全文」『読売新聞』2016年5月28日東京朝刊) Notes 1. Photo by ©Tomo.Yun: “No.5307 A bronze ware of ancient China [China/Beijing],” http://www.yunphoto.net/jp/photobase/yp5307.html, Retrieved August 13, 2016. (back)

2. “We are deeply grieved at the death of your Majesty’s Minister who fell a victim to a sudden uprising in China which our officers had not been able to suppress.” (“Exchanges of personal telegrams between Germany and Chinese Emperors” the morning edition of Asahi-shinbun. October 24, 1900. p. 2.) (back)

2201Kirihara.htm[10/16/2016 4:56:06 PM] Kirihara - Civil War and Sacrifice

3. Tōyōbunka-kyōkai [Society of the Eastern Culture]. The eighty years’ chronicle: Bakumatsu, Meiji and Taishō Japan. Tokyo: Tōyōbunka-kyōkai, 1934, vol.3. frontispiece 2. (back)

4. “Des Umschlagens von Quantität in Qualität” (Friedrich Engels. Dialektik der Natur. 1883. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels Werke. Berlin (DDR): Dietz Verlag, 1962. Band 20. S. 348.) (back)

5. The reason why Divine is a singular form is that all their spirits were apotheosized not as a person but in one Divine. Therefore, each of their spirits is a part of a guardian deity of the country, and their personalities as individuals were effaced completely. (back)

6. Tōyōbunka-kyōkai [Society of the Eastern Culture]. The eighty years’ chronicle: Bakumatsu, Meiji and Taishō Japan. Tokyo: Tōyōbunka-kyōkai, 1935, vol.17. p. 430. (back)

7. Yakumo, Tsuruma. An introduction of the national holidays. Osaka: Yaegaki-shoin, 1923. p. 90. (back)

8. Fukuba, Bisei. “Arguments against the transfer of the capital to Tokyo.” Taiyō. Vol. 4. No. 9, 1898. (back)

9. Of course, the warfare was started by the government, especially The Constitution of the Empire of Japan (1889) prescribed in Article 13 as following; “The Emperor declares war, makes peace, and concludes treaties.” However, it was difficult for Japanese citizens to inquire into the responsibility of the government or Emperor in the Meiji State. (back)

10. This was called Amida-ji Temple (阿弥陀寺: Shimonoseki City, Yamaguchi Prefecture), which is well- known as a stage of “Hoichi the Earless” in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan. However, it was destroyed due to “the Ordinance Distinguishing Shinto and Buddhism” (神仏分離令: 1868), and the Meiji State built a new shrine called Akama-jongu (赤間神宮) at the same place. (back)

11. The warfare between the Taira clan and the Minamoto clan (源氏). After that, Minamoto no Yoritomo (源頼朝) established the Kamakura Shogunate. (back)

12. This is Engaku-ji Temple (円覚寺: Kamakura City, Kanagawa Prefecture), which was a center of the movement to modernize Zen Buddhism in Japan. For example, Shaku Sōen (釈宗演: 1859 - 1919) went to U.S. to engage in missionary work, and his disciple Suzuki Daisetsu (鈴木大拙: 1870 - 1966) wrote numerous books in English to introduce Japanese culture, including Zen Buddhism, overseas. (back)

13. Toshizō Hijikata (土方歳三: 1835-1869) was a great swordsman, the vice-commander of Shinsen-gumi (新撰組: Guards of Kyoto in Bakumatsu Japan). He joined the pro-Shogunate army, becoming an officer ranking with the army magistrate (陸軍奉行), and fell in the battle of Hakodate, which was the last stage in the Boshin civil war. This monument was moved to its present location in 1992. (back)

14. “Visit to Hiroshima: the full text of [U.S.] President Obama’s statement” the morning edition of Yomiuri- shinbun. May 28, 2016. p.14. Incidentally, in the Japanese version of this speech translated by this newspaper, “gisei” appeared six times, although the U.S. President had used the word “sacrifice” once. This serves to show how ambiguous “gisei” is. (back)

Anthropoetics subscribers may copy or download this text from the network, but its distribution or publication shall constitute an infringement of the Author's copyright.

Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology

Volume XXII, number 1 (Fall 2016) ISSN 1083-7264 URL: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2201/

2201Kirihara.htm[10/16/2016 4:56:06 PM] 神話の誕生――明治初期における内戦と犠牲（日本語訳） 桐原 健真 （金城学院大学 教授）

１．「Sacrifice」と「犠牲」 日本語では、英単語の “sacrifice” はおおむね「犠牲」という古典漢語で表現する。これらのことばは、まことによく適合 している。なぜならば、「犠」は、「牛＋羊（もっとも一般的な供物）＋我（供物を殺すためのギザ刃の矛）」で構成され ており、また、「牛＋生」から構成される「牲」は、神に捧げる生きた牛を意味するからである。「犠牲」は、 「sacrifice」を翻訳するためにあることばだと言ってよい。 しかしながら、最近の日本語では、「犠牲」は「sacrifice」だけではなく「victim」も意味する。こうした原義とは異なった 用法は、19世紀末に現れた。たとえば、義和団の凶刃によって命を落としたドイツ公使の死を悼むために中国皇帝がドイツ [1] 皇帝へ親電を送ったことを、ある日本の新聞が報じた際、その記事は、「victim」に「犠牲」を用いている 。 この「犠牲」が神々に献げるためのいかなる供物でもないことは、明らかである。このように、現代日本語におけるその第 一義は、偉大なる何者かへの「神聖な供物」という原義とは異なって、罪無き者の「不幸な死」なのである。

２．近代化された「犠牲」の誕生 「犠牲」の意味が本質的に変化した一つの理由は、近代日本における「犠牲」の氾濫のせいである。それはまさに「量から 質への転化」と言うべきものであった。すなわち近代日本は、以下のように、繰り返し内戦と外征を繰り返している。曰 く、佐幕軍と新政府軍とのあいだによる戊辰戦争（1868～1869）、最大にして最後の士族反乱である西南戦争（1877）、そ して日清戦争（1894～1895）に結果した数次にわたる台湾や朝鮮での中国との武力衝突。これらの戦争は、日本がそれまで の二世紀において経験したことのないほどの死傷者を生んだ。そして戦死者たちは、みずからの命をその国家に供した勇士 [2] として取り扱われ、彼らの魂は、明治国家（1868～1945）によって、東京招魂社（今日の靖国神社）の「神」 として合祀 された。彼らは、文字通り国家のための「犠牲」あるいは「sacrifice」であった。 しかしながら明治国家は、実際には、この大日本帝国の守護神についての確固たる宗教的教義を有していなかった。政治家 だけではなく、神官たちもまたこの神がいかに存在し、またいかなる力を有しているかということについてしっかりしたイ メージがなかった。しかのみならず、明治国家の樹立に著しく貢献した日本知識人の多くは、宗教に対して懐疑的、あるい は強固な無神論者であった。このような傾向は、神官たちの間にもみられた。たとえば、1862年に、勤王の志士の魂を祀る ための神社（現在の京都霊山護国神社）をはじめて設けた神官の福羽美静（1831～1907）には、次のようなエピソードがあ る。 明治天皇が、京都を離れて東京に行こうとした1868年、皇族・貴族、そして京都市民たちは、ほとんどがこの計画に反対し た。しかし福羽は強く支持を表明していた。なぜならば、彼は、新国家建設のためには、天皇がこの古都を離れなければな らないと考えていたからである。ある晩のこと、彼は神祇官を通して、伊勢神宮（天照大神つまり皇室の祖先神を祀ってい る）からの一通の書簡を受け取った。そこには、次のように記されていた。「内宮前にある鳥居の笠木が落下しました。陛 下の出立直前にこのことが起きましたので、わたくし〔伊勢神宮の神官〕は、これは何かの兆しではないかと信じるもので ございます」と。これは反対派の抵抗であると福羽は考えたので、彼はこの書簡を黙殺し、そして、次のように言った。 [3] 「そもそも、鳥居の笠木が落ちることを恐れる必要はない。これは単なる偶然である」と 。彼が恐れていたのは、この計 画を実行したことによりアマテラスの不興を招くことではなく、中止することによる人心の混乱であった。彼はまさに政治 家であった。 このような、政治的に思考し、行動する神官たちによって、国家神道は基礎付けられた。そしてこの国家神道は、宗教さえ も日本人民を支配するための手段とみなしていた明治国家における重要な柱の一つであった。結局のところ、招魂社で顕彰 されたのは、国のために死ぬという行為であって、個人としての人間ではない。したがって、それは慰霊や魂の救済ではな かったのである。 明治国家が、宗教よりは政治的な意識のもとに、国家神道を打ち立てたがゆえに、近代日本における社会全般に、宗教的無 関心の傾向が現れた。かくて一般的なことばとしての「犠牲」は、本来の意味を失い、誰の罪にも帰することのできない不 [4] 幸な死という新たな意味を与えられたのである 。だが、近代日本において、「sacrifice」としての「犠牲」が消え去った わけではない。そこには、共同体を維持するための目に見えぬ数多くの「scapegoats」が存在したのである。

３．真の「Sacrifices」 非常に当たり前のことだが、敵対者がいなければ戦争は存在しない。したがって敵国にも戦死者は存在したのだが、近代日 本の国家神道は、これらの魂を祀ることはなかった。これは、日本の歴史において極めて例外的な現象であった。日本人は 戦争が終わると双方の魂を祀ってきた。なぜならば、彼らは古えより、これら祀られた魂が、災いではなく、福をもたらし てくれるであろうと信じていたからである。 [5] [6] たとえば、1191年に後鳥羽天皇は、源平合戦（1180～1185） によって滅亡した平氏の霊を弔うために寺院 を建立して いる。こうした行為は、国内戦争のあとだけではなく、対外戦争のあとにもみることができる。実際に、13世紀後半に日本 [7] を二度にわたって攻撃したモンゴル軍の戦死者のために、寺 が建てられているのである。 だが、徳川幕府の滅亡をもたらした戊辰戦争ののちに祀られた人々は戦勝軍の戦死者だけで、敗軍の兵士たちの魂は、明治 国家によって無視されたのである。戦後数十年を経て、隠れていたこれらの魂のために、いくつかの慰霊碑が、縁者の手 で、古戦場の周辺に立てられたが、これらの碑は、まったく招魂社とは異なるものであり、結局は日陰者とならざるを得な かった。 明治国家は、見せしめのために敵対者の魂を排除することで、日本人民にその命を天皇に捧げることを奨励した。「無意味

2201KiriharaJ.htm[10/16/2016 4:56:55 PM] な死」という烙印を押されたこれらの魂は、見えざるところで、あるいは文字通り地下から、明治国家を打ち立て、維持す ることに貢献したと言えよう。まさにこの点で、彼らはまごうことなきスケープゴートとしての「犠牲」であった。魂に対 するこうした選別と排除を通して、明治国家は近代天皇制イデオロギーというあらたな神話を紡いでいったのである。

４．おわりに 2016年5月、広島で演説したバラク・オバマ米国大統領の演説に、次のような一文がある。

国家は、犠牲と協力のもとに国民を結束させる話をしながら勃興し、注目に値する功績を成し遂げることもあるが、こ [8] れらはしばしば、自分たちと異なる人々に対する抑圧や人間性を奪うものとしても使われる。

戦死者を「sacrifice」として取り扱う国々や集団は、いまなお存在する。しかしながら、ネイションと呼ばれる神へと本当 に献げられる真の「sacrifice」は、「異なる」という理由で「抑圧や人間性を奪われた」ものたちにほかならない。国民国 家は、こうした可視または不可視の「sacrifice」によって叙述された神話によって基礎付けられているのである。

[1] 「陛下の公使が突然清国に勃起し、朕が官寮〔ママ〕の鎮圧する能はざりし暴動の犠牲となりしは、朕の深く哀悼に禁 へざる所なり」（「独帝清帝の親電応酬」『朝日新聞』1900年10月24日東京朝刊、2頁） [2] 神が単数形である理由は、すべての戦死者の魂は、個人としてではなく、一箇の神のうちに祀られるからである。した がって、彼らの個々の魂は、国家の守護神の一部であり、また彼らの個人としての個性は完全に失われるのである。 [3] 福羽美静「御東幸の反対論」、『奠都三十年：明治三十年史・明治卅年間国勢一覧』博文館、1898年（『太 陽』4巻9号、臨時増刊） [4] もとより、戦争は政府によって始められる。とりわけ『大日本帝国憲法』（1889）は、その第13条に次のように規定し ている。曰く、「天皇は戦を宣し、和を講じ、及び諸般の条約を締結す」と。しかしながら、明治国家において、政府や天 皇の責任を追及することは、日本の市民には困難なことであった。 [5] 平氏と源氏とのあいだの戦争。こののち、源頼朝が、鎌倉幕府を開いた。 [6] これは、阿弥陀寺（山口県下関市）と呼ばれ、ラフカディオ・ハーンの『怪談』に収められた「耳無し法一」の舞台と して知られている。この寺は、「神仏分離令」（1868）のために破却され、明治国家は同じ場所に赤間神宮と呼ばれる新し い神社を設けた。 [7] これが円覚寺（神奈川県鎌倉市）である。ここは、日本における禅仏教の近代化運動の一つの中心地であった。たとえ ば、釈宗演（1859～1919）は、布教のために米国へ赴き、その弟子である鈴木大拙（1870～1966）は、禅仏教を始めとする 日本文化を海外に紹介するための多くの著作を英語で著した。 [8] 「広島訪問 オバマ大統領の声明全文」『読売新聞』2016年05月28日東京朝刊、14頁。ちなみに、この演説の同紙による 日本語版には、「犠牲」が6回出ているが、米国大統領は「sacrifice」という語を1回しか使っていなかった。このことは、 「犠牲」の多義性をよく示している。

2201KiriharaJ.htm[10/16/2016 4:56:55 PM] Komatsu - The Haunted Mansion

Anthropoetics 22, no. 1 (Fall 2016)

The Haunted Mansion and : Otherworldly Apparitions in the Modern Cities of Japan

Shoko Komatsu

1. A Synopsis of “Sarayashiki” (aka “Dish Mansion”) Folklore

Okiku, the heroine in Bunko Baba (1718-1759)'s Sarayashiki Bengiroku (aka "Sarayashiki" or "Dish Mansion") (1758), along with Oiwa from Nanboku Tsuruya (1755-1824)'s Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (aka "Ghost Stories of Yotsuya") (1825), Kasane and Otsuyu in Encho Sanyutei (1839-1900)'s Shinkei Kasanega Fuchi (aka "The Ghost of Kasane") (1888) and Kaidan Botan Doro (aka "Tales of the Peony Lantern") (1861), are all regarded as typical portrayals of Japanese ghosts. The folklore on which Sarayashiki Bengiroku was based is roughly summarized below.

A young girl has entered a samurai house as a maid. The girl is commonly known as “Okiku”(1). Okiku’s master was bewitched by her beauty even though she continued to turn down his advances. Feeling rejected, the master grew hateful toward Okiku and decided to take vengeance on her with his equally jealous wife. One day, they accused Okiku of breaking one of the ten dishes which, as a set, had been a valuable family heirloom. As a punishment, the couple first gave her a violent beating then tossed her into a well in the garden after slashing her to death. From that day, the ghost of Okiku would rise from the depth of the well at night-time, counting “one dish, two dishes...” before disappearing again while shrieking the words “nine dishes!” The haunting drove the master and his wife to madness, and others to scatter. Eventually, the house became nothing but a deserted ruin.

The essence of this folklore is inarguably embodied by the very scene of a brutally murdered ghost maid who appears nightly from the well to count dishes. Such depiction can be found in many Ukiyo-e (color paintings) from the Edo period, and has since become a conventional way of personifying Japanese ghosts(2).

Sarayashiki, the Ghost of Okiku by Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (1839-1892) from Shinkei 36 Kaisen, 1889-1892

2. The Propagation Pattern of “Sarayashiki”

As evident in “Bancho Sarayashiki” from Tokyo and “Banshu Sarayashiki” from Hyogo, a number of regions in Japan have also conceived their own versions of the “sarayashiki” story(3).

This nationwide propagation could have been spurred by the word “sarayashiki,” which had originally meant “a brand-new house.” In other words, these ghost stories may have been inspired by the idea of an ominous

2201Komatsu.htm[10/16/2016 5:03:59 PM] Komatsu - The Haunted Mansion or cursed house that people created based on the fact that houses built on damp and barren lands do not last long.

As Japan is indeed a country with an abundance of damp lands, such reasoning does appear to justify the wide dissemination of haunted mansion folklore. However, it offers no insight into why the image of a “dish- counting girl”(4) was also popularized. Hence, this presentation will focus on establishing a conceptual link between a and a in an attempt to fill in this theoretical void.

3. An Analysis of “Sarayashiki” Folklore - and

First, it should be noted that almost all of these stories are set in a samurai house. During the 17th century when “sarayashiki” folklore emerged, it was common for a samurai house to employ young girls from rural villages as maids. These girls were made to observe strict etiquette while carrying out a variety of laborious household and personal chores for the master. The resentment felt by a maid toward her master as a result of such class division and gender inequality has most likely given rise to “sarayashiki” folklore.

Second, a well is a product of modern cities(5). It was a means to extract underground water on private or community land so that livelihood could be preserved in a densely populated urban area where the river had been contaminated. Therefore, by setting “sarayashiki” folklore in a samurai house, which is normally located in a city, a symbolic reference to urban civilization can be drawn.

Furthermore, history has shown that, before the 8th century, ancient society performed rituals at wells, believing they were passages for Gods/Goddesses. In this sense, "sarayashiki" folklore could also be seen as a variant of “human pillar” tales. This so-called "human pillar" is a form of human sacrifice in which a person is buried alive at the foundation of a bridge or a house to prevent collapse. Traces of such black magic can be found throughout the ages in many different countries. For instance, England's popular Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme, "London Bridge is Falling Down" has been thought to contain "human pillar" connotations. In other words, in order to safeguard the prosperity of the samurai house, a maid must be offered as a sacrifice on its ground along with a piece of heirloom. It is only unfortunate that, in this particular case, the intended "guardian angel" turned into an "evil spirit." Also, when wells were used as ritual grounds in ancient society, people would also toss in some pieces of earthenware as sacred treasures. The use of a “family heirloom” in “sarayashiki” folklore is perhaps an apparatus to bring resonance to this distant memory.

In any event, folklore in the form of a ghost story can be seen as the manifestation of a rebellion against class division and gender inequality, and the idea of "offering up a woman as sacrifice to house Gods" found in Japanese folk culture could very well be echoing the concept of "ritual sacrifice" described by René Girard. This prominent local pattern can be seen as manifesting what Girard defines as "a close relation between sex and violence, which is a common heritage of all religions" (56).

Seiu Ito (1882-1961) “Nihon Keibatsu hu-zoku zushi,” 1951. Tokyo: Kokusho Kankokai, 2010

4. “Sarayashiki” Folklore and the Haunted Mansion

One might consider “sarayashiki” folklore, in which a ghostly voice counting “one dish, two dishes…” may be

2201Komatsu.htm[10/16/2016 5:03:59 PM] Komatsu - The Haunted Mansion

heard throughout the household, to be a variant of poltergeist tales. This is because the presence of a young woman is an essential element in popular depictions of a house haunted by poltergeist events. Young women are thought to possess hidden spiritual power which has the ability to conjure up spirits of the land. This supernatural undertone is made even stronger by "Okiku," a name feared and avoided in pre-modern Japan as it can be shortened to “Kiku” (same pronunciation of “to listen” in Japanese language) and carries the meaning of "listening to the voice of Gods." Hence, "sarayashiki" folklore is a justifiable form of poltergeist tale as it portrays a young woman with strong spiritual power being thrown into the passage to the Gods, who then comes back as a ghostly medium to haunt the entire household with her voice.

Incidentally, another example of poltergeist tale can be found in a Tokyo urban legend, "Women of Ikebukuro," which circulated up to the 1960s. The legend claims that whenever an investigation is carried out in a haunted household, one of its occupants was always a female from Ikebukuro. Haunting would be said to cease as soon as that particular female occupant is driven out of the house. The name “Ikebukuro,” meaning a “pocket-shaped pond” in Japanese, immediately lends itself to the imagery of a damp land. Even though it is now a busy metropolis, Ikebukuro was only a small town on the outskirts of Tokyo up until the 1960s. Having to struggle for survival in a big city like Tokyo, people believed that the hardship endured by these young women from a rural town may have unintentionally woken the spirit of the land and led to poltergeist events. As such, “Women of Ikebukuro” can be regarded as a modern version of “Okiku” from “Sarayashiki.”

In recent years, haunted mansions have become a popular attraction in amusement parks across Japan. Themes from “Sarayashiki,” for example, the visual effects of a ghost appearing from a well or the sound of the ghost counting dishes are still widely utilized in these haunted mansions, as they represent a deep and fundamental horror to most Japanese people. It is also a reflection that this tale of resentment, in which a is sacrificed in a violent manner to the , can still find sympathy among the general public today. Notes 1. Apart from “Okiku,” names such as “Kame,” “Omasa,” and “Hana” were also used in other similar stories across Japan. The name “Okiku” had only garnered more recognition after Bunko Baba’s Sarayashiki Bengiroku (1758), which was set in Bancho in Edo, had become famous. See Yokoyama et al. and Ito. (back)

2. A common depiction being a young beauty without feet rising from a well or a pool of water surrounded by ghost fire. This imagery is still used in modern sub-cultures. (back)

3. An "Okiku Ido" ("The Well of Okiku") can also be found in Himeji Castle, which is a World Heritage site, but this well is considered to have no actual connection to the "sarayashiki" folklore. (back)

4. Some regional versions of the “sarayashiki” folklore do not involve a ghost that counts dishes. However, in order to explore the most typical portrayal of a Japanese ghost, this presentation has limited its scope of discussion to “Sarayashiki” with a “dish-counting girl.” (back)

5. See Akita 169. (back) Works Cited Akita, Hiroki. A Cultural History of Objects and Humans 150: The Well. Tokyo: Housei University Press, 2010.

Girard, René. Bouryoku to Seinarumono [Violence and the Sacred]. Trans. Yukio Furuta. Tokyo: Housei University Press, 1982. Trans. of La Violence et le Sacré. Paris: Grasset, 1972.

Ito, Atsushi. Sarayashiki [aka “Dish Mansion”] Folklore. Tokyo: Umitori Shuppan, 2002.

Yokoyama, Yasuko, Yosiyuki Iikura, Hidekazu Imai, Hajime Kurujima, Daisuke Washiba, and Tomonobu

2201Komatsu.htm[10/16/2016 5:03:59 PM] Komatsu - The Haunted Mansion Hirosaka. Sarayashiki―the Ghost of Okiku and the Dish and the Well. Tokyo: Hakutaku Shuppan, 2015.

Anthropoetics subscribers may copy or download this text from the network, but its distribution or publication shall constitute an infringement of the Author's copyright.

Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology

Volume XXII, number 1 (Fall 2016) ISSN 1083-7264 URL: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2201/

2201Komatsu.htm[10/16/2016 5:03:59 PM] 化物屋敷と〈女〉――日本の近代都市に出現する異世界 小松 史生子 （金城学院大学 教授）

１．皿屋敷伝承の梗概 馬場文耕(1718～1759)『皿屋敷弁疑録』（1758）のヒロインお菊は、鶴屋南北 （1755～1829）『東海道四谷怪談』（1825）のお岩、三遊亭円朝 かさね かさね （1839～1900）『真景累ケ淵』（1888）の累、同じく円朝『怪談牡丹燈籠』 （1861）のお露と並んで、日本型幽霊の代表例とみなされている。『皿屋敷弁 疑録』の元となった伝承の梗概は、だいたい以下のとおりである。 ある武家屋敷に、若い女が女中奉公に雇われた。女の名前は、一般的に「お [i] 菊」とされている 。美人だったので、屋敷の主人に気に入られ可愛がられた が、お菊は主人の誘惑を退け続ける。横恋慕を拒否された主人と、お菊に嫉妬 した主人の正妻とが、結託してお菊を憎み、ある時、家宝の十枚揃いの貴重な 皿の一枚を割った罪をお菊に被せ、激しい折檻をしたあげく、切り殺して屋敷 の庭にあった井戸の中へ放り込んだ。その夜から、毎晩お菊の幽霊が井戸から 現れ、「一枚、二枚……」と皿を数えては「九枚」と叫んで消えるという怪異 現象が起こった。これに悩まされた主人と妻は発狂し、その家は断絶。屋敷跡 は荒れ放題となった。 この伝承のメインは、なんといっても、主人の無体によって惨殺された女中の 怨霊が毎夜井戸から現れ皿を数えるシーンである。江戸時代には浮世絵にもた [ii] びたび描かれ、日本型幽霊のパターン を顕著に示す典型となった。 月岡芳年（1839～1892）「新形三十六怪撰（皿やしき於菊乃霊）」（1889～1892）

２．皿屋敷の伝播図 土地と結びついた皿屋敷としては、東京の「番町皿屋敷」と兵庫の「播州皿屋 [iii] 敷」が有名であるが、この伝承は実は日本全国各地に数多くみられる 。 全国各地に伝承が伝播している理由として、「皿屋敷」とは「更屋敷」という言葉が転化したものと考える説が挙げられ る。すなわち、もともと湿気が多く土壌もゆるい不毛の土地にいくら屋敷を建てても長続きしないという事実があり、そこ からその土地は不吉な場所、呪われた場所であるというイメージが発展し怪談化したという解釈である。 この解釈は、湿気の多い風土である日本列島各地に化物屋敷伝承が存在する説明とはなるが、なぜに「皿数えする女」と [iv] いうイメージ が伝播したのかの説明にはもの足りない。そこで、論点を〈女〉と〈家〉に絞って考察していきたい。

３．皿屋敷伝承の分析――<女>と<家> まず、事件が起こったとされる舞台は、ほとんどが武家屋敷であることに注目したい。皿屋敷伝承が発生した17世紀当 時、武家屋敷には田舎の村から出てきて奉公する女中の存在があった。彼女達は、行儀見習いという体裁を取りつつ、主人 の雑用や家の切り盛りに使役される労働力であった。皿屋敷伝承の背景には、こうした主人と女中、すなわち階級格差およ びジェンダー格差のルサンチマンがあると推測される。 [v] また、井戸とは、近代都市の産物である 。人口が密集する都会で自然の川が汚染され、そこから生活用水が汲み取れな くなったため、人々は家の敷地あるいは共有地に井戸を掘り地下水を汲み上げて飲料に用いた。皿屋敷伝承の多くが武家屋 敷を舞台にしているのは、武家屋敷が都市に位置し、都市を象徴するものであることと無縁ではない。 その一方、8世紀以前の古代社会において、井戸が神の通り道として認識され、祭祀の場として機能していた歴史を鑑み ると、いわゆる人柱伝承の一変形として皿屋敷伝承をみることもできる。人柱とは、主に橋や家などの建築物を建てる際、 その倒壊を防ぐため、土台部分に人間を生き埋めにする呪術である。古今東西に 見られる呪術で、イギリスの民謡『マザー・グース』に収録された「ロンドン 橋」も人柱を唄ったものと解釈されている。つまり、その武家屋敷の繁栄を守る ために、家宝の皿と一緒に女中が敷地内の一角に供犠として捧げられた。しか し、〈家〉の「守り神」となるはずだった女中の霊魂が、「祟り神（怨霊）」と 変じてしまった、というわけである。古代社会において、井戸を祭祀の場として 機能させる場合、掘った穴の中に土器を神器として投げ入れることもあったとさ れる。皿屋敷伝承で、女中が惨殺される理由が「家宝の皿」であると語られるの には、こうした井戸と祭祀の遠い記憶が響いているのかもしれない。 いずれにせよ、ここには階級格差およびジェンダー格差によって虐げられ続け てきた側からの反抗心が、都市伝説という怪談の形を取って表明されているとみ ることができると同時に、ジラールの述べる「供犠」の概念が、「家の神に捧げ られる供物としての女」という日本民俗の中の人柱伝承と呼応している可能性が みとめられる。ジラールの述べる「性と暴力の緊密な関連は、あらゆる宗教の共 通した遺産」（『暴力と聖なるもの』法政大学出版、1982、56頁）という定義に ついての、ローカル・パターンが顕著に表れているのだ。

伊藤晴雨（1882～1961）『日本刑罰風俗図史』（1951）（国書刊行会、2010）

2201KomatsuJ.htm[10/16/2016 5:05:16 PM] ４．皿屋敷伝承と化物屋敷 「一枚、二枚～」と皿を数える声が屋敷の敷地から聞こえるという皿屋敷伝承は、ポルターガイストの一変形として考え ることもできる。一般に、ポルターガイストという現象が起こる家には、必ず若い女の存在があるとされる。若い女性が潜 在的に有している霊力が、その土地に宿る地霊を呼び覚ますという解釈だ。「お菊」という名前は「キク」に通じ、すなわ ち「神の声を聴く」という意味とされ、近代以前の日本では忌まれていた名前でもあった。そもそも地霊の通り道である井 戸に投げ込まれた霊力の強い若い女性が、自らが霊媒となって屋敷を揺るがす物音をたてるわけで、皿屋敷伝承を一種のポ ルターガイストと解釈してもおかしくはない。 ところで、このポルターガイストの一例として、東京には「池袋の女」という俗信が、1960年代頃まで信じられてきた。 家の中で様々な怪異現象が起こるので調べてみると、必ずその家の中に池袋出身の女性がいたというものだ。試しにその女 を家から出してみると、怪異現象はぴたりと鎮まったという話である。池袋は、その地名からも連想できるとおり、湿気と 無縁ではない土地柄だ。また、池袋は今でこそ大繁華街だが、1960年代当時までは辺境に位置する街として認知されてい た。そうした田舎の土地から東京という大都会にやってきた若い女性が、生き辛さを感じながら日々を過ごすうちに、無意 識に地霊と感応してポルターガイストを起こす。「池袋の女」は、皿屋敷のお菊の現代版といえよう。 現在、日本各地の遊園地やアミューズメント施設において、お化け屋敷の見世物は大人気である。皿屋敷の見世物は、井 戸から出てくる幽霊という「ヴィジュアル」と皿数えという「音響」を伴うことから、もっともわかりやすい恐怖の展示と して現代でも頻繁に活用されている。暴力的な形で〈家〉に捧げられた供犠としての〈女〉が、守り神にならず怨霊になる というルサンチマンの物語は、未だに共感を持って人々に受容されているのである。

[i] 全国の例では、お菊以外に、亀、おまさ、花など多岐にわたるが、江戸の番町に舞台をとった馬場文耕『皿屋敷弁疑録』 （1758年）のお菊が評判となったため、以降はこの名前がもっとも知られるようになった。 [ii] 足の無い若い美人の姿が井戸すなわち水の中から鬼火とともに出現するという一定の構図。現代のサブカルチャーで も、この構図は有効である。 [iii] 世界遺産である姫路城にも「お菊井戸」なるものがあるが、この井戸はそもそもは皿屋敷伝承とは関係がないものと考 えられている。 [iv] 各地の皿屋敷伝承の類似型には、皿数えをしないバージョンもある。しかし本発表では、日本型幽霊の典型となった 「皿数えする女」が登場する怪談として皿屋敷を扱う。 [v] 秋田裕毅『ものと人間の文化史150 井戸』（法政大学出版局、2010年）169頁.

2201KomatsuJ.htm[10/16/2016 5:05:16 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

Anthropoetics 22, no. 1 (Fall 2016)

How to read religious poems anthropoetically (using examples from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Kobayashi Issa)

Edmond Wright

[email protected]

I have my own hedgehog, namely, the analysis of the linguistic Statement that I have accepted as the most likely, that of a succession of linguists, sociologists, philosophers and literary theorists. Let me list just a few to show you how varied, how interdisciplinary it is: Giambattista Vico, Ludwig Feuerbach, Alexander Bryan Johnson, Augustus De Morgan, William James, Josiah Royce, Fritz Mauthner, Wilhelm Dilthey, Alfred Schutz, George Herbert Mead, Roy Wood Sellars, Sir Alan Gardiner, Mikhail Bakhtin, C. I. Lewis, F. C. S. Schiller, George Herbert Mead, Theodor Adorno, Gregory Bateson, Cornelius Castoriadis, Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ragnar Rommetveit, Herbert Blumer, Harold Garfinkel, Aaron V. Cicourel, Erving Goffman, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Richard H. Brown, Randall Collins, John Shotter, Siegfried J. Schmidt, Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. So, briefly, what is the Erinaceus europaeus, the Common Hedgehog, the analysis which they all recommend?

Initially I might take William James’s dictum that ‘we all trade on each other’s truth’ (James, 1967, 433), a homely enough metaphor but one which goes to the heart of the linguistic enterprise. ‘To trade on’ sums up one essential in the interaction of a market, that there is an exchange in which, ideally, differing values, one of goods and one of money, allow both participants to feel that they have gained — hopefully a bargain for both, as we call it. Recall the common habit of shaking hands over a bargain as if a balance, an equivalence, has been achieved? We are all well aware that there are common exceptions to this ideal — the buyer might think that the commodity is not up to the standard expected, and the seller might think that too low a price was arrived at, but the mutual hope is that each feels satisfied: a strange ambiguity is tolerated as if there were no such thing, for how can both take away the sense that their desires were achieved and their loss cancelled by the same act?

It is no surprise that language is like money, in that its symbols can vary in value according to the way the bargains are going. Just as on Wall Street the value of the Dollar goes up and down depending on what bargains were enacted, so too the accepted meaning of our words are adjusted by their use day by day, in what we ought to call an evolution of meaning. That language has evolved is generally recognized: what is not is that the principle of language itself — and thus of the human — is essentially evolutionary.

Evolution has a particular similarity to a game. Two members of the same species face an environmental challenge, apparently the same challenge to both of them — but it wasn’t, for one of them could meet the challenge while the other could not, and thus survived. Note again how this is parallel to a bargain or a joke or a story or a game. This is the key resemblance between language and a game (as was noted before, this is what Wittgenstein missed when he called language a game: there is more than a ‘family resemblance’ across languages). The resolution of ambiguity by perceiving something newly relevant is the tonic essence of a game. The position, velocity, and direction of a ball may be seen by many among the spectators, and hopefully by the striker of the ball, to constitute the certain winner of a point (equivalent to the initial tentative agreement), but the defender perceives something newly relevant, namely, a weakness in the ball’s speed and line of motion— just as a contestant in judo can use the very momentum of his opponent’s attack to upset its balance. Wittgenstein should have called the essence of language, play.

It should be no surprise then that the evolutionary nature of language is disguised from us since the course of every informative statement that succeeds goes from an imagined agreement through a gestalt-switch to a newly adjusted imagined agreement. A mutual agreement thus begins and ends the Statement, although

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

the one at the beginning is not the same as that at the end. Easy to miss this. The evolution has been successfully performed (we hope) so why should we trouble our minds with how it was done?

I shall save time here by not producing an actual example (my favoured one, about the silhouette of some leaves being seen as a bird can be read in my Anthropoetics article of 2008 on Gregory Bateson, paragraph 6). Bateson quotes the lines from Tennyson’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’ (Bateson,1980; 223):

The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

a quotation that seems to disengage ‘God’ from the idea of an eternal logical order, but here we can rather see that order as what must be mutually postulated but not believed. At the beginning of a would-be informative statement, Speaker and Hearer collude in a reference being the same for both of them: this is to enable the Speaker to update the Hearer so that he or she now has a new perspective on the region of existence, of the Real, in question (a question, after all, is an expression of a wish to be updated about the Real). I usually quote the sociologist Alfred Schutz, who has the useful phrase for the initial step in a statement, ‘the Idealization of Reciprocity’, but, having quoted one ally, William James, I now move to another, the psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit.

He is known for having scientifically demonstrated that no one has the same set of criteria as someone else for the application of a word (Rommetveit, 1974, Ch. 4). He describes the initial, strictly false, hypothesis of mutual agreement — that is, what it is that allows Speaker and Hearer to get a rough superimposition of their differing takes on the region of the Real in question — in the following way: ‘We take a perfect intersubjectivity for granted in order to achieve a partial one’ (Rommetveit, 1978, 31), one in which the practical outcomes appear to confirm both sets of expectations. My own way of describing this trick has been to say ‘It is by a PRETENCE of complete success that we partially capture the REAL’ (Wright, 1978, 538). Notice the near-paradoxical clash in what Rommetveit says, that we have to take something for granted that we should both know perfectly well is not the case!

Not so difficult to do as you might expect, for it is what all of us do when we read a story, watch a film, use a trope ( e.g. a ‘header’ in football) or act in a play. Someone who can’t do this isn’t acting. On TV recently I saw a little girl who was exceedingly annoyed with her father: he was supposed to be acting the Big Bad Wolf, but he was giggling! The Child is Father of the Man. Good actors don’t let their acting slip: they pretend seriously.

Notice that it provides one likely assessment of the Parmenides- Heraclitus controversy (that emerged later as the Plato-Aristotle one). Parmenides gives pride of place to the taken-for-granted agreement in reference that founds the Statement, as do all later ‘conservatives’. In Parmenides’ metaphysics, existence was a system of entities that endured without any change. It appears to him and his like as authorizing the objective view of the world, giving priority to established law and obedience, and thus keeping anarchy at bay. It is an attitude that seems to guarantee simultaneously the certainty of knowledge and the order of society, and thus is a turning of the hypothesized agreement (necessary for an informative statement to be set under way) into a literal fact. They were taking a myth we have to play to talk at all as something we have to believe literally, a conclusion which is frankly superstitious. One could say that they were disinclined to play the language-game because of the risk to identity, plus their unconscious ignoring of the ever- present dangers — and unexpected benefits! — that the Real can suddenly present us with. Their disinclination is a refusal to evolve.

On the other hand, Heraclitus’s well-known adage that ‘you never step into the same river twice’ draws attention to the Statement in its evolutionary phase; that the Speaker, hopefully, updates the Hearer in the predication part of the Statement — to match Schutz’s formulation, one has to add that two people never step at the same time into the same river, otherwise the Speaker could never update the Hearer. Some later ‘liberals’, thus, conversely, see themselves as having the priority because they are correcting what they view as highhanded, out-dated, authoritarian. The trap they can fall into matches that of the Parmenideans in taking their part of the speech-process to its extreme, thus rejecting, not only all that has been so far established, but also the fundamental ethical bond implicit in engaging with a speech partner. The Right and

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

the Left have to play together: it is best to accept that democratic parliaments must therefore never lose their theatrical character. The Tyrant and the Revolutionary are both obdurately serious. That ‘seriousness’ is traceable to an inner fear of the Real, both outside and inside them.

One recalls that old rhyme about what a bride has to wear: ‘Something old, something new’ — Apply it to Rommetveit’s dictum: the ‘perfect intersubjectivity’ that we adopt, the completely agreed logical ‘Subject’ of the Statement, is the ‘old’, what has so far been taken for granted as its referent; the ‘partial intersubjectivity’ is what the logical ‘Predicate’ of the Statement achieves, that which updates our understanding of ‘the’ referent, a ‘new’ choice from the Real. So every informative statement has to have ‘Something old, something new’; ideally, the old brings the Speaker’s and the Hearer’s perspectives into a rough overlap, the new tweaks the Hearer’s perspective to align it with the Speaker’s. No wonder the wedding jingle put old and new together: it is what the husband and wife will discover about each other and themselves!

One can also notice here that this is the hidden ground of Karl Popper’s proposal that science advances best by falsification (Popper, 1999); falsifiability became the test of a good hypothesis. Rommetveit’s analysis of the Statement makes every attempt to inform someone a rendering doubtful of the received wisdom, which is a democratic, as well as a (hopefully) evolutionary, use of language. Popper, who did take an evolutionary view, was indirectly drawing attention to what all informative communication, the essential criterion of the human, consists of. We ‘falsify’ in each successful statement. We enter into a riddle; riddles are solved when a shift of context transforms a core ambiguity, which is precisely the game-play of language.

Worth adding here that this makes the actual grammar of our speech in actual use is much more fluid than has been assumed. The early 20th century logician, John Cook Wilson, made a clear distinction between the logical and grammatical features of a sentence. He illustrated his point effectively by pointing out that the substantial meaning of a sentence in use, that is, an actual statement, depended on the question in the mind of the Hearer, whether openly expressed or not or even not in mind at all. For example, let us suppose that before the informative statement ‘The cat is on the mat’ by a Speaker, the Hearer had asked (1) ‘Where is the cat?’ Then the new information is contained in the words ‘is on the mat’, which makes ‘The cat’ both the logical and the grammatical subject of the sentence, and ‘is on the mat’ both the logical and the grammatical predicate (Wilson, 1926, 123-6). But suppose that the Hearer had asked (2) ‘What is on the mat?’ In that case the new information is contained in the words ‘The cat’, with the result that the logical subject is now ‘is on the mat’, and the logical predicate is ‘The cat’ (while the grammatical subject and predicate remain as before, grammatical subject ‘The cat’, and grammatical predicate ‘is on the mat’.) Note that the very intonation of the Speaker’s answer would differ in answering question 2, for, instead of the stress being on ‘is on the mat’, it would be upon the informing words ‘The cat’. So the whereabouts of the update in a statement does not necessarily match the grammatical predicate. We can add to Cook Wilson’s insight the fact that the speaker may have no idea what question is in the mind of the hearer (because, if you think about it, even with this simplest of sentences more questions are possible), so meanings are not bound to ideas believed to be beyond question. It is more evidence that Schutz’s Idealization of Reciprocity cannot but be an unreal idealization, a faith-supported mutual act of play.

This analysis of the Statement leads to a defensible account of the origin of language (see my earlier article in this journal on Gregory Bateson, Wright 2008). The fact that a wish to inquire into the origin of language used to be regarded in linguistics as naïve, even cranky, is further evidence of the prejudicial fear mentioned above. At the same time the analysis (Wright, 2005, ch. 5) offers a novel view of logic, rhetoric and grammar, giving an explanation of the Synchronic/Diachronic distinction, of the nature of the Joke, the Riddle, the Story and the Trope, advances in science (see Thomas Kuhn, 1962), and such logical conundrums as the Ship of Theseus and the Cretan Liar.

Music falls within its scope: every succeeding bar is together a repetition of what preceded it and a possible transformation of it; the melodic pattern of repetition and transformation can extend over the form of many bars. The brain is only exercising the same performance it employs in language. No wonder music has been found by educational psychologists — and Daniel Barenboim — to facilitate education, a fact that the M’Choakumchilds with their insistence on the certain memorizing of facts, have not woken up to. And look at the extraordinary transformation in people’s lives that, in Britain, Gareth Malone has produced in his choirs, matched by the achievement of the choirmaster Yutaka Sugino in Sapporo in Japan.

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

If the linguistic agreement that is required to initiate a statement (though not necessarily to begin one) is in the nature of a strictly false mutual hypothesis, we cannot logically count on our entire understanding of our partner in dialogue. This raises a key question: if one is supposed to be taking into account all the motivations of our partner in language, there can be no guarantee, either for the promiser or the promisee that subsequent happenings may bring something quite unexpected to light. This is why, in language, blind trust is utterly inadequate as an ethical stance: it amounts to an ignoring of the responsibility which is of the essence in speech. To insist on a final truth in one’s personal initial understanding of the linguistic agreement is to betray your partner in language, for it assumes that any unexpected sacrifice can only be the partner’s burden. There is a narcissism in this that can be hidden from speakers and hearers. There are possible outcomes that may be beyond the implicit, for neither of you may have known that a responsibility to sacrifice something may emerge that is a demand upon you or them or both of you or members of your family or society. You may have hoped that all eventualities had been mutually foreseen, but there is nothing in the original ‘taking-for-granted’ that could have taken account of everything that might happen. If it could, there would be no point at which evolution could enter. Schutz, who used the homely metonym ‘standing in someone else’s shoes’ for the Idealization of Reciprocity, should have warned against the narcissistic implications if it was taken to mean an exact match of understandings.

This is why love trumps trust, why those who have meditated upon faith, including many a person within a religion, have refused to remove the presence of risk from faith. However, in everyday life we have come by force of habit to accept what are, in the last analysis, only differing hypotheses being seen as a single truth. The psychologist Richard Gregory argued that all of our percepts have the character of hypotheses (Gregory, 1997), a claim that has been ignored because it is thought to be on the slippery slope to solipsism. The flows of the real do seem to countenance so many of our collaborative guesses for most of the time, but it will be recognised, from the structure of the compact between speaking partners, that the inescapable mismatch never goes away. We can here take Ernst von Glasersfeld’s comment as relevant, that ‘all our percepts are [only] viable’ (1984, 25), in that many have served us reasonably well. That viability includes, not only all the reassuring furniture of so-called ‘reality’ that we have surrounded our-‘selves’ with, but also that our own intimate notion of our-‘selves’. However, being only ‘viable’, that reassurance is no guarantee of a final ‘objectivity’ in those hypothetical sortings from the indubitable Real that we call ‘entities’, and that is why, to evolve is to keep up with the flowing convolutions of the Real.

If we say ‘an entity’, the etymology of the two words gives us ‘one existent’, which can be interpreted to mean one part or portion of what exists (‘an’ meaning one, and ‘en’ meaning being). Its singularity is an achievement of human collaboration, marking the matching of two or more sensings in different bodies that have enabled human beings to bring their actions into providing sufficient co-operation to achieve what is judged to be a ‘common’ task. All one can say is that the Real frequently tolerates our measurings and objectifications, but we have no final certainty because every measurement and objectification is the result of a human settlement between two or more observers, them-‘selves’ subject to the inescapable method, plus the fact that evolution could not keep up with the flows in the Real if we could not continually readjust.

What is of relevance here to the reading of a religious poem is that the initial act of agreement required for speech has commonly led to a tempting misconstrual of its function, similar to that of Parmenides. Recall what its function is: namely, to bring two differing selections from the real into enough of an overlap to permit an action to be carried out by the speech partners together to their current motivational satisfaction. This habitual mindset in both partners has implications beyond their immediate concern; there is an unavoidable sense of extending the presupposed common purpose into the future, towards a horizon of indefinite reach. This was dealt with at length in the article in Anthropoetics cited earlier (2008), using an insight of Joel Feinberg’s: that, whatever the purpose of an act, one can always for a further purpose that underlies it: thus ‘to idealize one’s reciprocity’, to use Schutz’s terminology, is implicitly to envisage a culminating point at which all motivations converge, a summum bonum. No wonder that the metaphor used for the completion of logical and mathematical equations is ‘satisfied’.

Language is taken to be evolving towards a final match to the world, a virtual state of omniscience for all, the True and the Good forever synonymous — which as you will readily see, involves a paradox, for, if all were in a state of omniscience there would be no point in speaking as no one would need any updating! All the countless human acts that have brought languages to their present state, and what are referred to by

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

them, whether particular things, persons, selves or qualities, seem to be the creations of an all-powerful god. Since those myriad collaborations arrived at what use they have by incessant test and adjustment, they have gathered to themselves an habitual respect, strengthened by the awe that inevitably attended nature, considering its power over us. Those collaborations have settled into a reassuring shell of so-called ‘reality’, what the philosopher Edmund Husserl called the ‘Lifeworld’, held tentatively, experimentally, over the Real underneath it. It, nevertheless, as well as awe just spoken of, bears the mark of the efforts of our ancestors, especially the fossil strength of the faith that created and sustained it.

As I mentioned before, blind trust cannot be to the satisfactory ethical basis of the initial agreement, only a faith that does not rule out unexpected sacrifice for others, nor the possibility of a radical reshaping of one’s own identity (see Charles Dickens’s Pip as one who was prepared to accept such a reshaping). What we customarily call ‘truth’ and ‘sincerity’, in spite of their impossibility, have accrued the aura of sacredness that really derives from the acceptance of the risk in faith. Don’t we expect in games people to be good losers? One really is a ‘loser’ in the sense given it in the metaphor of the current vernacular if one cannot have the courage to face the chance of literally being one, that is, a fortiori in the language-game? Since language can been taken to be the defining mark of the human, it should be no surprise that the act of play that is an essential part of a statement is a part of the key foundation of its grandeur. It is similar to the aura of imaginary authority that surrounds a monarch of the powerless, symbolic, kind. It can be said to be the ground of the Christian emphasis on sacrifice and on loving one’s enemy, strong reasons for the resilience of the creed throughout history.

But there is an unfortunate paradox here. This very aura is owing to the acts of genuine faith that have characterized the origin and continuance of the language in use, as well as to the acts of imagination that were essentially interfused with them. There are two misconstructions which prevent this aura from being seen for what it is, that induce a slide from authentic play.

Firstly, there arises a suspicion of the fictive in the words of one’s language partners, for the latter’s interpretations did not (and could not) perfectly match one’s own. This can become sensed as betrayal. Think of those religious sects that banish fiction on the ground that stories are lies.

Those philosophers who hold to Direct Realism are sadly in the same boat. When a philosophy professor of the analytic persuasion, Robert Kirk, said to me, "You’re not going to tell me that that is not the sun up there!", I replied, "All you are doing is exhorting me to share the basic, poetic trust of language with you, and I will, for unless we treated our co-reference as a perfectly singular reference, I could never update you about the Real, such as now by saying that, strictly speaking, that bright disc of light is not the sun, for the actual sun is invisible some degrees further down the sky!" The Direct Realist at this point will set about an argument for showing how objectivity can be pursued back through time, and I could do the same with the theory of language of this article, but that is not primarily why I have quoted Professor Kirk here. I would rather you noticed how he began his attack with the words "You’re not going to tell me . . ." That is a frank prohibition of my speaking at all, that I can have nothing telling to say, that I am forbidden to update him with something that could transform his notion of ‘the sun’. I regard this as a performative self-contradiction, in that, in the middle of speech he is denying both me and himself the dialogic right to try to alter another’s understanding of a region of the Real, in this case human dialogue.

Secondly, and out of sight, there lurks a shaken sense of identity, strongly coupled with a weakening of communal feeling, that goes along with that suspicion. It is as if the risk in the faith needful in the language- game, a risk indeed to the current version of one’s identity, a risk that is a real and inescapable source of concern within the game, is misapprehended as a threat from others from without. No wonder autocrats busily stir up fear of the foreigner, declare that the nation must build walls against them, for it encourages the idea that they alone, the Führers, speak ‘the truth’, and can thus protect them. Sacrifice becomes only a service to them.

One strength as a religion that Christianity does possess is its emphasis on sacrifice, as notably evidenced by its central symbol, that of the Cross. Yet what is curious is that the Church has asked us to take it as to represent Christ suffering for our sins, so that our guilt, in not obeying the dictates of the Church, can be foregrounded — and ultimately assuaged by our future obedience. This is a clever rhetorical ploy in that it leaves the ‘commandments’, the authority’s laws, its program, as outside criticism. As a child brought up on

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

the Roman Catholic Church, I never understood why Christ’s ‘suffering for our sins’ resulted in our being forgiven by God; it was as if Christ were suffering on the Cross outside our prison knowing that we prisoners would be released by God the Father when he had suffered enough. A further disturbing implication was that every sin of our own made Christ suffer. My mother, whose religious commitment was all the stronger for her being a convert, would always talk of ‘each of us bearing our own cross’. In my child’s mind that didn’t seem to fit with Christ redeeming us, his ‘taking away the sins of the world’. Of course, we were never allowed to think that the ‘sin’ might be that of the god himself in asking too much of bodies, an ‘original sin’, not of ours, but of the program. Bodies, after all, differ from computers in that (1) they have the ability to change the program; (2) are that for which the program exists; and (3) can change the mode in which they them-‘selves’ and ‘selves’ of others are mutually to be defined. The third, notice, rules out the possibility of solipsism as implicit in this argument.

If you are within the Church as a priest, the commandments are naturally believed by its members to apply with especial force. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a convert himself, was, as a Jesuit priest, deeply committed to Catholicism, and thereby had to accept the rigid discipline of his order. In the last years of his life he suffered under the weight of a depressive illness. His first act in joining the Jesuits had been to burn all the poems that he had so far written, taking them to be evidence of self-indulgence. Later, having read the mediaeval theologian John Duns Scotus, he gave up this self-denial, and began to write poems in praise of natural objects insofar as, in his view, they enable us to apprehend the divine. The fear of self-indulgence was thus rendered inert, and Hopkins permitted himself to explore the beauty of the sensuous and attribute it to God. He refrained from interpreting it as a crude pantheism: instead, what he borrowed from Scotus was the belief that the created order of beings retained the mark of a holy purpose through their sharing in a marvellous characteristic of their Maker.

That characteristic was haeccitas, which can be accurately rendered (from the Latin haec, ‘this’) as ‘thisness’, its unique individuality. Hopkins’ invented word for it was ‘inscape’, and for the power that kept it in place, its ‘instress’. Here Scotus, and his disciple Hopkins, are oddly echoed by someone, an old atheist, who would have been disturbed to be ranged with such theological figures. This is Bertrand Russell, who, in analysing the logic of language, declared that ‘in the real there can be no such thing as vagueness or precision; things are what they are there’s an end of it’ (Russell, 1997 [1926], 62). In fact he treated the word ‘this’ as itself a kind of existent logical atom — as it certainly is, within the game. Russell was drawing attention to the apparently pure act of referring when two partners in language single out what we call a ‘particular’, a singular entity. But this is what, as has been explained above, we have mutually to imagine when we are trying to bring our differing acts of referring into a supposedly common focus if the game is to be played. Compare agreement about the rules of chess, compared with the hidden disagreements between players about the state of play which gives winners their opportunity: there is the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ all over again.

What we often achieve is a sufficient overlap to allow our supposedly commonly wished-for action to be carried through. If this happens we are obviously disinclined to pursue any differences which seem to have no bearing on the action in question, so that together we are so satisfied with the partial singularity thus achieved that we take it to be the logically complete one we mutually hypothesized. That faith might have to come to deal with unintended mismatches is frequently out of the current view for those involved in this collaborative selection from the real: they, as explained above, do not want to view their collaborator as suspect!

Hopkins, however, takes singularity to be a divine characteristic. Listen to this poem, a sonnet the title of which is the first four words ‘As kingfishers catch fire’.

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

Í say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. (Hopkins 1953, 51)

Now this is a remarkable evocation of the delight that the achievement of the blending of focus across minds can bring. It is an essentially linguistic pleasure in which Hopkins offers to us, blessing that pleasure with the evocation of the aura of sacredness that our sharing can bring. It heightens the imagined solidarity that we enjoy when those around us home in with us on a portion of the real and show it to be, not a threat, but a source, not only of sensuous pleasure, of an evocation of that faith-play that constitutes our human being. Not for nothing did the sociologist Benedict Anderson describe nations as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991). It is the real source of what we call ‘the spiritual’, for the spiritual, being sustained by the fictive, by the play of imaginations, appears to be outside ‘reality’.

We can also here perceive the reason why science has been loth to ask scientific questions of poetry and drama: it would bring to the surface the fact that the whole would-be logical edifice that we have taken it to be would be revealed for what it is at its best, a mutually maintained, dramatic act of faith — and, ironically, one acknowledging that no total explanation, no ‘theory of everything’, can be forthcoming (though there is a Theory of Every-‘Thing’, namely the one you are reading now).

The outstanding difference from a stage play lies in the obvious fact that the words and actions performed have no immediate motivational consequences: in a stage play, as was noted above, no one suffers or dies or enjoys sensory delight (this is why one could hardly be attending to the film if one is wondering whether Angie McDowell and Hugh Grant in the Four Weddings and a Funeral film were enjoying their kisses, or whether the guests at the banquet in Macbeth like their food and drink). The theory also suggests why the superstition of physical danger in acting Macbeth exerts a strange hold over the feelings of some actors.

This theory renders harmless Gilbert Ryle’s jibe about there being ‘the soul’ being a ‘ghost in the machine’ (Ryle, 1949, 15-16), since we are metaphorically ‘machines’ that are making real ‘ghosts’, that is, the dramatic projections of everyone including our ‘selves’. This is why there has been talk of the ‘spiritual’ nature of the ‘soul’. Many a theorist has regarded ‘the soul’ as invisible, outside measurement, impervious to experiment, and non-scientific, and thus ‘unreal’. You could say the same of the characters in a play being performed, but ‘they’ are undeniably a part of the real as a mutual projection, and, as certainly therefore, a justifiable subject of scientific study.

Notice what is performed in this play with haeccitas. Take the first line of the sonnet: the simple wonder that the mind cannot but share, a childlike play of attention upon two examples of rapid animal flight, the kingfisher’s and the dragonfly’s, both enhanced by the subtleties of colour as they sweep by. The very words perform the linguistic trick by which we are referring to them. We can pick out the rhythm of the triple alliterative patterning of /k /, /d/ and /f/: ‘kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame’, as well as the assonance of /ai/ in ‘fire’ and ‘flies’, and /æ/ in ‘catch’ and ‘dragonflies’. Each of these performs what we do together when we refer as speakers of a language, namely, bind together two separate sequences of words with something they have in common — which in this case is their haeccitas, the play of singularity which our mind projects onto the flows in the real from which by this projection become a satisfying play of recognition, and the word ‘play’ is here significant.

Scotus and Hopkins both misconstrue this human method, this performance of our humanity — and the attendant sensory delight — and take it to be something bestowed by a divine being, but this is only a metaphor for the endless past history of the skill and delight of those forebears who have handed them on to us, the hidden myriad of those who reached through to the genuine faith that language really requires.

One could take the virtuosic onomatopoeia of the lines about the stone falling in the well, the plucked string, and the resounding bell as further performances in parallel to the meaning of the words, a play in which the word-sounds become the very sounds being referred to by the meaning. And we must not miss Hopkins’ use

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

of the words ‘tells’, ‘tongue’ and ‘name’ to remind us of the humanly linguistic pleasure. Not for nothing is the metonym within the word ‘linguistic’ from the Latin for ‘tongue’, lingua; as so often, the body asserts itself in our speech.

But ‘tells’ gives us a hidden key to the dynamic of this poem of which Hopkins was not consciously aware. Indeed, he would probably have objected on the ground that ‘God’ did create the unique entities Hopkins numbers here. ‘To tell’, especially in ‘to tell a story’, is to change the perceptions of the hearers by showing how, inside the story itself, is a demonstration of just how understandings are transformed. This is the key criterion of a story as I set out to establish in my book on narrative (Wright, 2005). To quote from the close of J. K. Rowling’s impressive Commencement address at Harvard in 2008, her quoting in turn from Seneca: ‘As a tale, so is life.’

It is plain in every joke, for jokes are mini-stories. The reason is that in a joke there is always something that the statement seems to take as having a fixed meaning and then subverts it. Take David Pope’s cartoon on the Charlie Hebdo massacre, which has the jihadi murderer standing by one of the corpses saying "He drew first." There is a common meaning we give to the word ‘drew’ in the context of guns, namely, pulled his gun from its holster. But change the context into that of drawing a critical cartoon and we see how humour is casting a new light on the intention of the killers. We end up with the taken-for-granted meaning being replaced by a satirical comment on the killers’ misconception.

Consider this joke, highly topical, from the Edinburgh Festival of 2016, listed as among the best produced by the comedians performing there:

The reason that pandas are so popular is diversity — They’re black, white, and Asian.

I shall leave the reader to pick out (a) the ambiguities on which its success relies; (b), the portion that contains the ‘idealization of reciprocity’ (the ‘something old’); and (c), the clues to other contexts (the ‘something new’) — for there are more than one — that effect the transformation, one that has wide resonance in the state of the world today.

So how did Hopkins view ‘each tucked string tells’? He wanted to say that every individual thing was marked by its uniqueness, the haeccitas that performed the Oneness of God Him-‘self’. God has often called ‘the One’ in theological discourse, the One of whom nought may be said, lying outside human language (and we have seen how He in His omniscience requires no language as He is omniscient). What Hopkins does not see is that oneness is the ideal of our co-reference that impels its own transformation in the Statement. It bears witness to the faith and imagination that co-reference must involve if the language-game is to be played correctly, tellingly, that is, not taking it literally as the superstitious do, and not through blind trust, which is a form of narcissism, as was shown earlier.

Hopkins shows himself sensitive to the accusation that the over-emphasis upon uniqueness might lay itself open — within Christian morality — to the encouragement of ‘selfishness’. In the line in the sestet ‘Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is’, he implies that God, the omniscient, knows all aspects of the soul’s ‘oneness’ and so is aware of what that soul could be. This at once raises the freedom/determinism question for all those for whom words have certain meanings, for whom ‘justicing’ is the application of rigid law. Hopkins obviously wants ‘the just man’ to embody justice and ‘keep grace’, becoming godlike in his own right. ‘Grace’ is a vital concept in Catholic theology; in one of its theological senses it does apportion to God a vein of mercy, assistance and forgiveness. From the point of view of the present theory, this is an acknowledgement of the inability of the grand social playscript to specify all that a body does, that justice and law are open to adjustment, to ‘adjusticing’. The free will / determinism problem cannot arise when the ‘laws’, moral and physical, are viewed within the scope of the play of language.

Nor can there be a self before symbolic interchange with another — for a child does not have to wait for actual speech. Pro-life protestors are mistaken in thinking the human can precede engagement with symbolic action, facial or gestural, from another. Once in the program then each of us can play ‘Self’ and thus contribute to the program, ‘selving’ as we go. The pro-lifers’ belief that the self begins with the sperm entering the ovum are, paradoxically in effect, not giving animal life outside the installing of the program the respect it deserves: we are still animals throughout life and the program exists at base for their happiness

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

within society, however impossible in its final achievement.

In addition, the self does not have an invulnerable being, for others can change it, as we them. That is part of the game. What we ‘deal out’ in the game of word-playing-cards is not some ‘soul’ that has been with God and has now entered the world to be tempered by its fires. Evolving selves do ‘dwell’ within bodies and thus have the right to alter the program that gave rise to them — hence, the good sense of democracy. Hence, also comedy and tragedy, which are both actual possibilities in life, for there is no guarantee that some contingency might not set a mind on a paradoxical course.

Can one not regard the line of the poem third from the close as an unrealised acceptance of the theory?

— for Christ plays in ten thousand places

The word ‘plays’ could not be escaped by Hopkins. It is an astonishing giveaway. It presents God Him-‘self’ as engaging in the language-game. What could this mean at the level of the present theory? Why, that His part is His being the trope of the Idealization of Reciprocity and the true faith that has to be at its heart, for that is the foundation of the idea of God, imagined so that language can proceed with its evolution in our minds. It means, as was emphasized before, that

(α) the literal interpretation of the poetic, mythical symbols of God is superstitious, a failure to face the risks of the Great Drama, and a failure to realize the dramatic value of those symbols;

(β) also, that in trying to ignore the Idealization of Reciprocity, the old-Atheists put them-‘selves’ in a self-contradictory position as they try to speak without admitting one cannot do so without that Idealization, without the poetic transformations with which we construct language;

(γ) the only satisfactory stance is the one recommended here, the Faitheist one, the one courageous enough to accept that the mismatches entail what faith has to, a love that reaches outside the Drama to confront the sacrifices that arise beyond ‘one’s’ current assessment of one’s-‘self’ and society (Wright, 2012).

To those who might object to finding the origin of the concept of God in something so mundane and habitual as our speech forget that the core of speech — and speech is what makes us human — in its worthiest form is faith. That fact that speech is used for deceiving others, for sustaining a weak self with superstition, for issuing brutal commands, for buying and selling, and so forth, gives the impression that it is utterly neutral from the ethical point of view, and, true, it is misused in these and other unethical ways. Nevertheless, genuinely to enter into the play of speech, even at the humblest level, is to be led to the demand of faith and the possibility of sacrifice. Within every utterance, obvious or hidden, is the reference to mutual choosings from the Real, not only of material ‘things’, but of your-‘self’ and those of others around you that the faith of our forebears has bestowed to aid your body and mind in its journey inside the Real. This is nothing mundane or mindlessly habitual. No wonder the idea of a god came into being; no wonder that many sustain their loyalty to a creed by arguing that, because it is to be found in all societies in one form or other, there must be a god! Well, there is! — as a poetic way of speaking of the faith and sacrifice that speaking requires. The answer to the question of the existence of God lies, literally as well as metaphorically, under our noses; hence, our failing to solve it.

If you go along with this Faitheist explanation of the origin of God, you can never fall into the superstitious error of thinking that ‘God’ created the universe: easy to see now that it was all those acts of faith of our forebears that created the words that enable us to talk of the Real as divided into re-cognizable ‘entities’. Creationism misconstrues the whole process. If we say "Look at that star", it is because long ago some human enabled another to select that portion of the Real for some human purpose. Both the ‘singular portion’ we call ‘a star’ remains an extraordinary combining of countless, subtly differing perceptions from the Real, for our countless, subtly differing purposes, a combining that allows an evolution of meaning through time. So Nietzsche and the rest were under a misapprehension when they spoke of ‘the death of God’: ‘He’ was never alive, though what ‘His’ poetic ‘Self’ refers to does go on in the acts of faith that, at its best, originate and maintain our speech. That constitutes His dramatic reality in the language-game. If now we use the word ‘spiritual’ in the sense arrived at above, as testifying to our skillful and imaginative playing

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

of the language-game, we can see every word, every utterance as a spiritual challenge without committing ourselves to any occult dogma.

It is worth applying this unprecedented conclusion to the first two of the positions listed above:

The superstitious old-religious distort the Idealization because they cannot play it; they are like the little girl’s father who couldn’t be the Big Bad Wolf because of his mistaken fears of not inhabiting his current ‘self’- hood for a while. They want a cast-iron assurance of a certain knowledge in the world and a certain reward after death, which is to lack faith; those ‘martyrs’ who do die for God or Allah are not, in the best sense, religious, or do they fully understand what ‘spiritual’ actually means.

Equally ‘self’-defeating are the old-atheists, for, if they repudiate the ‘spiritual-as acted’, which embraces both the ‘imagined community’, and the hypothesized ‘self’, they are like people on the stage in a play who don’t know where the script is going and their responsibility for writing it. One can find a parallel in Stephen Fry’s recent old-fashioned-atheist dismissal of God (in an interview on Irish TV) as 'capricious, mean-minded and stupid’. Treat God with the same play-seriousness as Santa Claus and we can give Him a role in the great social drama without superstitiously believing in Him — or Her or It or Them — at all! Fry is like the know-all children who say there can’t be a Santa Claus because he couldn’t possibly get round to all those chimneys in one night‘: those children must be told how to play the game of ‘Santa Claus’. Fry also shares Snug the Joiner’s misunderstanding (in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) of how to participate in drama, a misunderstanding evidenced in Snug’s warning to all the ladies in the audience that they should not be scared because, in spite of his disguise, he was not a real lion. One undoubtedly good thing to be said in Fry’s favour is that he said that he could not believe in a god who created a world that allowed children to die of bone cancer, because this remark can be viewed as evidence of his recognition of the demand for love.

Fry’s reaction can be usefully aligned with that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who, commenting on the shootings in Paris, said that it made him doubt the ‘presence of God’. Within Faitheist theory, which takes ‘God’ to be a needful focus imaginarius, held to in a mutual act of faith, the Archbishop’s fear is evidence of a lack of faith. Those ancient Chinese who used actors in their religious ceremonies were on the right track. This is what gods and monarchs and popes and Supreme Leaders have always been and it is time to acknowledge it. We want little girls and others to be somewhat like the boy on Hans Anderson’s parable, with the exception that they should complain, not about the absence of the Emperor’s Clothes, but about his neglecting to put on a perfectly good Stage Costume that everybody tacitly understands as a costume in the national drama. All that ritual and ceremony surrounding queens and kings is not ‘flummery’ to be abandoned as soon as may be: it is the justifiable poetic and dramatic accoutrements of powerless monarchs who have part of the task of unifying the nation as an Andersonian ‘imagined community’. Sad to see in some countries that same kind of ceremony surrounding the public appearances of powerful dictators; there it is undoubtedly worthy of the word ‘flummery’.

To conclude, a look at a haiku of the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa:

Tsuyu no yo wa Tsuyu no yo Nagara sari nagara

A world of dew Is but a world of dew — And yet, and yet . . .

Now it is plain that the possible interpretations of this poem are innumerable. Just to glance at one of them. It could be taken as the thoughts of someone who has lost in love in some way: that the love, though indescribably sweet, being at the mercy of the Real, has proved to be transient. Nevertheless, later, on occasion, its power over feeling still asserts its old force. The progression of feeling in Emily Brontë’s poem ‘Remembrance’ matches that of Issa here.

However, the relevance of this haiku to our present topic could hardly be passed by. The first two lines can

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

be taken as a metaphor for the Schutzian Idealization, in that the logical subject, it seems, is agreed without question as a tautology. And what is agreed is that the world around us (and ourselves) is as blankly material and no more than that, and remains as fleeting as the morning dew, so that we have to accept its disappearance into the Real, the ‘Heraclitean fire’, as Hopkins calls it in another poem (Hopkins, 1953, 65-6). Nevertheless, the last line with a most delicate uncertainty, asserts a value that outfaces that transience. Something of ‘the old’ survives in the continuing Great Drama, in a ‘new’ form a form that is certainly not a bizarrely ‘eternal’ immortality, but persists in the influences we have left behind.

Let us give up once and for all this pointless fear of death and the ‘undiscovered country’ that is supposed to lie beyond it. The only thing to be fearful about, apart from the obviously possible sufferings in the process of dying (and apart from the morbid lust for torture and execution in some countries) is whether or not you have helped us, and even that was not wholly ‘your own’ doing. What matters is what we have brought to the Great Drama and, as was emphasized above, what will survive of our words and deeds in how it continues, our influence on others, and ‘the wicked’ have their effect as much as the good (which is why most religions make the wicked as ‘immortal’ as the good). When the American historian David Blight discusses the ‘legacy’ of the Civil War (Blight 2001), finding it in habits of body and language, in ideology, attitudes, traditions, and more, he is exploring such influences. Raymond Tallis, in his new book on death (Tallis, 2015), has also explored these ‘ripples’, as he calls them, that we make, consciously or otherwise, in the scenes of the great play that are to succeed us, and these make up what constitutes our ‘immortality’. In future, when parents and teachers and friends are instilling/installing the ‘program’, this widening continuation of our deeds ought to be foregrounded (and not that notion of immortality that involves bugaboo hells and childish rewards). The speech made by Prospero as he throws away his magic wand shows no pointless regret at the end of life on this planet: we too ought to see that apocalypse as a curtain coming down on a play that, at last, is over.

References Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Bateson, Gregory (1980). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. London: Fontana.

Blight, David W. (2001). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

Glasersfeld, Ernst von (1984). ‘An Introduction to Radical Constructivism’, in Paul Watzlawick, ed., The Invented Reality. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 17-40.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1953). Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Selection of his Poems and Prose. W. H. Gardner (ed.). London: Penguin Books.

James, William, (1967). The Writings of William James, ed. John McDermott. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Popper, Karl (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Rommetveit, Ragnar (1974). On Message Structure: A Framework for the Study of Language and Communication. London: John Wiley & Sons.

Rommetveit, Ragnar (1978). ‘On Negative Rationalism in Scholarly Studies of Verbal Communication and Dynamic Residuals in the Construction of Human Intersubjectivity’, in Michael Brenner, P. Marsh and Marilyn Brenner (eds.), The Social Contexts of Method. London: Croom Helm, pp. 16-32.

Russell, Bertrand (1997, orig. 1923). ‘Vagueness’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, Vol. 1, 84–92. Reprinted in R. Keefe and P. Smith (eds.) Vagueness: A Reader. Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Wright - How to read religious poems

Press, p . 61–68. (The page reference is to the reprint.)

Ryle, Gilbert (1949). The Concept of Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Schutz, Alfred (1962). Collected Papers, Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Tallis, Raymond (2015). The Black Mirror: Fragments of an Obituary for Life. London: Atlantic Books.

Wilson, John Cook (1926). Statement and Inference, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1967 [1953]). Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Wright, Edmond (1978). ‘Sociology and the Irony Model’, Sociology, 12, 523-43.

Wright, Edmond (2005). Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.

Wright, Edmond (2008). ‘Gregory Bateson: epistemology, language, play and the Double Bind’, Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology, Volume XIV, number 1 (Summer 2008), ISSN 1083- 7264. See URL: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1401/

Wright, Edmond (2012). Avatar-Philosophy (and –Religion) or FAITHEISM. Exeter: Imprint Academic.

Anthropoetics subscribers may copy or download this text from the network, but its distribution or publication shall constitute an infringement of the Author's copyright.

Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology

Volume XXII, number 1 (Fall 2016) ISSN 1083-7264 URL: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2201/

2201wright.htm[10/16/2016 5:17:37 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

Anthropoetics 22, no. 1 (Fall 2016)

Cratos as Cognition: Gans and Dumézil in Dialogue on Language and Violence

Magdalena Złocka - Dąbrowska

Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

This paper will consider two complementary visions of culture and language: those of Georges Dumézil and Eric Gans. The mythographer Dumézil’s ideas mediated between ancient Indo-European writings and their linguistic and mythological universe, while Gans’s Generative Anthropology (GA) sees the deferral of violence through the exchange of signs as the essence of the human. Dumézil operated in the trans-disciplinary space between Indo-European comparative linguistics, comparative religion, a "new comparative mythology"(1) and half-a-dozen specialized philological disciplines. But it can be argued that in spirit his work is also close to anthropology. In turn, Gans’s anthropological understanding of the fundamentals of human culture helps deepen Dumézil’s vision. Indeed, I will argue that Gans’s scene of origin and the concept of the deferral of violence at the beginnings of culture and language, find their reflection in the textual forms collected, interpreted, and analysed by Dumézil.

The central place in Dumézil’s discourse is held by his famous theory of the three social functions, a tripartite structural formula present already in his earliest articles(2), and later(3) developed into a fuller religious and social system that served as the primary instrument of his analysis of the Indo-European cultural tradition. Dumézil argued that throughout the Eurasian linguistic community, religion and society manifested a tendency to organize themselves into three functional categories: 1) sovereignty, subdivided into legal and magical types; 2) violence, force and military power, especially that of warriors; and 3) a more diffuse category, concerned with material well-being, the production of resources (to sustain life and abundance), sensual pleasure, wealth, food, and the flourishing of life. One may also define this system using notions from medieval tripartitio,(4) where the first function is that of the social group identified as oratores (that is: rulers, priests, kings and aristocracy in general). The second function would then refer to so called bellatores (that is knights and "military men"), while the third would be that of laboratores (meaning the servants and craftsmen; the lowest social groups related to the productive and economic sphere).

Dumézil pioneered the insight that these priestly, warrior, and producing classes in ancient Indo-European societies saw themselves as ordained to fulfil particular tasks by virtue of their mythological origins. As in every other cultural tradition, that is, there was a mythological foundation, a set of narratives that announced and justified the presence of violence. These were to be found in the various generic spaces listed by one of Dumézil’s most important commentators, Jöel H. Grisward: "Myth and roman ! Myth and epopee! Myth and history!"(5)

This paper will connect and compare the visions of Dumézil and Gans by reference to the concept of Cratos. We will associate Cratos first of all with the generative human cognition related to violence, and with violent actions themselves. Cognition, we will remind ourselves, is something deeper than knowledge, something hidden in human thoughts and minds, but at least partly discoverable (according, for example, to cognitive anthropology) through analyses of language and texts. Cratos, of course, is present as a myth in such texts as those of Hesiod and Aeschylus, and must also be thought of as a metaphor, a symbol or manifestation of cognition. But it is specifically a metaphor for violence and power, and for the knowledge of violence in the world.

We will attempt to further unfold and define this broad, powerful but admittedly multidimensional concept in

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

its various aspects as we proceed. Certainly, Cratos is everywhere, omnipresent in human actions, in all kinds of knowledge of the world (and thus in many texts). But its deepest layer is that of generative cognition, the starting point of all human cognition. Cratos, even as defined in ancient myths, generates all human activities, including the creation of language and culture.

Generative cognition represents the primary human mind, and its existence in statu nascendi makes it reproducible, allowing for the production of particular knowledge about the causal structure of the world. It is the initial state of the mind and is programmed for the protection of human existence through representation, in the perennial situation which Gans describes as the "disparity between totality of culture, religion and representation on the one side and violence on the other."(6) In response to the threat of mimetically generated violence, in the GA vision, humans protect themselves by deferring violence through a sequence of signs, a process prolonged indefinitely by imitation. To put this another way, reciprocal relations of the generative function of cognition built on violence and responding to its existence create cultural representations. These representations can then be sequenced according to Dumézil’s interpretation of the Indo-European mythical tradition. We shall therefore look for Cratos and its deep function of generative cognition in both Gans’s originary scene and in Dumézil’s trifunctional hypothesis. We will aim to show the basic arguments in Dumézil’s narratives in the context of Gans’s ideas, remembering that through the latter’s work and previously that of René Girard, violence became a scientific issue with regard to language and religion, even if it had already been an object of sustained inquiry in neighboring areas of the humanities and also distinctly in the works of Dumézil.

Cratos in Human Culture

Cratos, as we noted above, may be understood as a metaphor, specifically as a metaphoric figure of human violence and power, including military power. Indeed, we may term it a Conceptual Metaphor,(7) which shapes not just human communication, but also the way we think and act.(8)

According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, metaphors may be easily transferred from the physical world to the realm of abstract reasoning and argumentation(9). In this context Cratos as a metaphor has a central position in human life. Indeed, Cratos as a metaphor directs and governs the content of the myths presented by Dumézil. Moreover, the myth of Cratos may be understood as a myth of experience, a result of the interactions of humans with their physical environment and other people. For Lakoff and Johnson, such myths imply comprehension and understanding—in fact ‘myth’ explicitly means self-comprehension and social understanding. It is worth noting that these ideas unite in Ward Goodenough’s approach, known as cognitive anthropology, where culture is understood as a conceptual system "one has to know or believe" and indeed to "learn." Such a system is the end product of learning: "knowledge, in a most general, if relative, sense of the term." Goodenough, a major player in the development of anthropological theory explains that "it is rather an organisation … of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating and otherwise interpreting them."(10) In other words, myth as one of the oldest forms of culture is the representation of human knowledge and at the same time a form of human cognition.

Lakoff and Johnson also assert that human nature forces human experience (which is repeatable) into the creation of such categories as human communication, mutual understanding, ritual, esthetic experience, and politics.(11) Such a causal sequence is comparable to Gans’s theory of myth in the origin of cultural representation(12) and in his scene of origin.(13) However, myths are understood by Gans as "narrative explanations" and elements "whose plausibility is derived from real experience."(14) The word myth derives from the Greek mythos, which has a range of meanings from "word," through "saying" and "story," to "fiction." We may note that the first two of these definitions work well with Gans’s theory that the origins of culture are coeval with the advent of speech and language, which indeed can be seen in many mythical scenarios, and notably in those cited by Dumézil. Dumézil creates his own narrative space by combining various analyses of Indo-Europeans myths, but this does not interfere with the view that mythical narrations are provided with their own dramatic structure and are passed on for ages from one generation to another, through what we usually know as popular knowledge. Myth is thus fundamentally important for the transfer of the long-turn structures and resultant social organization distinguished by Dumézil. It is perhaps worth recalling here Paul Ricœur’s observation that the mythical consciousness in primary civilizations is almost the same everywhere.(15) It expresses an "active memory," that uses knowledge of the past to give significance

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

to the present.(16) Ricœur also argues that a myth is not a false explanation by means of images and fables, but a "traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men of today and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world."(17) This sense of myth as a traditional narration is also present in Dumézil’s works and could actually be understood, in Ricœur’s terms, as reflecting a universal mental state and as a cultural code defining the most basic actions of human beings.(18) We may add that myth hides something related to Heidegger’s concept of truth, which helps "the essence of the truth (aletheia) to be preserved and unforgotten,"(19) something deeply present, that is, in human cognition.

Cratos, then, is a multivalent figure of myth occupying a realm intermediary between ordinary life and the ideal world, a dimension of particular significance to anthropology. In classical Greece, the myth of Cratos is quoted most frequently in the narratives of Hesiod(20) and Aeschylus(21) and can be related to the core idea of Gans’s theory and his analysis of the basic behaviors in which violent appetites, rivalries and conflicts are constantly present—latent, but potentially operative—but contingently capable of deferral by language and other cultural forms. Hesiod’s Theogony tells the origin of Cratos this way: "Styx, Ocean’s daughter, mingling with Pallas, bore Zelus (Rivalry) and beautiful-ankled Nike (Victory) in her house, and she gave birth to Cratos (Supremacy) and Bia (Force), eminent children [who are all] seated next to deep-thundering Zeus." (22) Hesiod writes that "eternal Styx came first of all to Olympus with her own children . . . and Zeus honored her and gave her exceptional gifts. For he set her to be the great oath of the gods, and her sons to dwell with him for all their days."(23) The siblings of Cratos, children of Pallas and Styx have significant features. Zelus is zeal but personifies emulation, eager rivalry, envy, and jealousy. Bia directly expresses force. All of them are wrestling with evil forces and all of them accompany Zeus to the end of their days. So I presume that Cratos among them is symbolically involved in the struggle to master the forces of evil— violence and hatred in different variants. In the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus Cratos appears, indeed in the first line of the play, in a double structure, the pair Power and Violence (Bia and Cratos). (24) As Hesiod indicates in the Theogony, Cratos and his siblings live permanently with Zeus,(25) whom they follow wherever he leads them,(26) embodying his absolute power over the universe. In the version of Aeschylus, Bia and Cratos are even understood as fulfillments of the commands of Zeus.(27) The status of Cratos with regard to the enslavement of Prometheus, according to the will of Zeus and the other gods, is special. He mediates between the divine and humanity as the mastermind of the enslavement of Prometheus, in what became an allegory of violence itself, equated paradigmatically with human nature and active in social interactions since the beginning. One might well recall here the biblical phrase adopted by René Girard, in just this context: Cratos too represents something "hidden since the foundation of the world."(28)

Cratos had a much wider role in ancient Greece than that played by the deity Kratos. The Indo-European roots of Kratos (craft, crafty, Kraft, etc.) are well established, the word dealing always with the control of forces or power or violence. Kratos as kratu and kratia represent a semantic core of Cratos. The Greek (but also Germanic, and Slavonic) mythology speaks of the problem of controlling violence, deceit, and related forces. In Hellenistic Greek the verb krateô meant "getting a grip" and already was used by Homer in the sense of "control" (control of one's emotions, eyes, and so forth). Still in Greek as kratu, it is the "power," "authority," even "the state" or what could be understood as the control of society by institutional violence. However, the main meaning was "getting power" (mainly in political sense). There is also another dimension of Cratos, where its lexeme appears in the notion of democracy (from demo-cratos), being connected to "order" and "rule" but with the sense of powerful authority rather than explicit violence. The word kratos (usually translated as "power" or "force") is present in Vernant’s and Naquet’s Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece,(29) where we find a passage from Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women : " the idea of kratos can be seen to oscillate between two contrary accepted meanings, unable to settle for the one rather than the other. On the lips of King Pelasgus kratos, associated with kurios [‘figure of authority’], refers to a legitimate authority, the control rightfully exercised by the guardian over whoever is legally dependent upon his power. On the lips of the Danaids [the Suppliant Maidens of the title], the same word, drawn into the semantic field of bia [‘violence’], refers to ‘brute force,’ constraint imposed by violence, in its aspect that is most opposed to justice and right."(30) So we may suppose the main idea of Cratos to be involved with the struggle between brute force itself, and the control of it through legal authority, which is, however, also a form of suppressed violence.

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

Even if Dumézil does not treat Cratos openly, he does deal with the issues we have been developing. First of all, his trifunctional system is "violent in its nature," as a system of hierarchical order, a system of subordination of the second and the third function to the first. In fact, Cratos becomes a semantic link between the first and the second function, in other words it is power that is structured into authority in the process of social stratification. This means that Dumézil’s three-functional order is an expression of violence, controlled by the power of the first function and the power of all three functions in their unity. Dumézil speaks about trifunctional structure as an abstract prototype, a pattern for social relationships. He notes, for example, in the context of the development of Iran, that in order to rule royal power needs to control and arrange the three functions in harmony to produce a final syntheses,(31) "an ideal model [or] an easy and typical résumé of social relations."(32) Here we may recognise the controlling function of power which builds the metaphoric image of Cratos. Dumézil’s theory stresses a rule of gradual transition from myth to the three functions, then finally to the establishment of the system of law. This is ultimately an explication of the process of creating a culture, and as such it shares much with the narrative of human social development suggested in Generative Anthropology.

Dumézil in Gans’s World

What we may call a search for "cognition from Cratos" as part of a "generative constitution" is implicit in both Gans’s and Dumézil’s discourses on language and culture. Cratos we may indeed see as the most general category in Dumézil’s study of Indo-European narratives, encompassing and cumulating most of his examples. And while cultural attempts to liberate humans from the powers of Cratos may be said to be the focus of Gans’s theory of the deferral of violence, they are also present, as I shall try prove, in Dumézil’s analysis of Indo-European civilizations. Noting how both of them thus open up lines of mutual reference, I will consider the deferral of violence as the human ontology that encompasses language and culture, understood from an anthropological perspective, and which replaces abstract philosophical analyses and comes closer to the foundations of the human. Actually, what Gans has elaborated as a Generative Anthropology affords new perspectives in a variety of fields in the humanities. His "originary thinking" and scenic logic can be applied to a great number of Dumézil’s analyses of Indo-European "textual survivals," for example, notably at the beginning of his career, where he discussed many legends with constitutive elements of violence, analyses in which we may see strong commonalities with the approach charted by Gans.(33)

Violence as a mythical construct, adopting various forms of expression, is present in many of Dumézil’s analyses of Indo-European texts. These cover distant languages and civilizations(34) dating back as far as Vedic, Zoroastrian, Greek, Roman and Old-Nordic times. Udo Strutyński argues that Dumézil thus "tries to resuscitate the consciousness of dead civilizations, to regain the truth in the old sense."(35) This "great system-builder of past centuries,"(36) turning back to the most ancient preserved texts of human culture, becomes a "universalist of a sort"(37) who refers many times to the origins of Indo-European languages and civilizations.(38) Indeed he is, Strutyński notes, an "explorer of our origins."(39) Gans for his own part writes about man’s "mysterious desire to know his own beginnings," as a desire that "motivates [man’s] worldly interests."(40) A return to our origins, furthermore, establishes conditions for a dialogue about the human itself.(41) However, for Gans these origins are in the statu nascendi of human language and culture and start with the emission of first human sign and the aborted gesture of appropriation. Dumézil is concerned rather with the earliest texts of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and with further ancient texts of their descendants, masterpieces of sacred and mythological narration. These texts already form an advanced narrative system and thus contain considerable potential for linguistic communication, corresponding to what Gans calls "Higher Linguistic Forms."(42) Gans describes discourse as "the chief vehicle of culture and the most reliable witness of its historical achievements."(43) All the texts analyzed by Dumézil—sacred lore, epic mythologies or legends—are examples of what Gans calls "discourse proprement dit [which] draws us into the domain of cultural-historical opacity in which the temporal nature of social experience must be lived out, albeit in reduced form, in the discursive-literary or philosophical-model."(44) Dumézil’s analyses express the presence of social experience in a discursive-literary model, which Gans distinguishes as a cultural discourse from his minimal anthropological theory by affirming, for the purposes of his exposition, a choice of theory over discourse "or more precisely of human science over cultural hermeneutics."(45)

The foundation of Dumézil’s works is provided by a linguistic model,(46) constructed on the base of verba

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

exponentia, and their social meanings. Verba exponentia are chosen by Dumézil to represent the Indo- European textual tradition and may constitute names of personal gods (e.g. Mithra, Varuṇa, Indra, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite), names of heroes (e.g. brothers Pandava, Camillus, Cuchulain), terms describing positions in society (e.g. rắj, rex, brahman, flamen Dialis, flamen Martialis, flamen Quirinalis, in the case of ordo sacerdotum), or all those, in short, who "had some importance for the [particular] community"(47) and for the whole Indo-European cultural matrix. Dumézil presents different lexemes involved in the process of ongoing, constantly performed comparisons of Indo-European categories from socio-religious-mythical spaces which are, according to their meaning, juxtaposed and structured in his trifunctional order, a conceptual structure often manifested in hierarchized terms (as we noted above). This results in a huge narrative edifice, explaining and commenting upon—that is to say analyzing—a great collection of Indo- European textual output, interpreted and schematized in a cultural discourse, which for Gans is "central, not marginal to human society."(48) Moreover, Dumézil’s holistic comprehension of Indo-European culture involves a new, mediated discourse, modified however into an entelechy, an entirety of great complexity,(49) a constant, never-ending comment upon comments. Dumézil’s Indo-European Summa thus comprises an enormous discursive space united by the theory of trifunctional order and related to both social and divine worlds. These worlds define social strata, composed by three social functions, and according to their architect, form a great linguistic family. Dumézil’s research output starts with language, operates in language and composes a symbolic space of logos, specific to the humanities of his time. In Dumézil’s introduction to Mircea Eliade’s treatise on the history of religions, logos becomes a key notion of research where he declares that "it is under the sign of logos that research stands today."(50) This symbolic confirmation of the central place of language in his discourse on culture corresponds to the key role of linguistic consciousness in Gans’s originary scene.

Dumézil’s collection of old texts from the "Great Tradition"(51) equates to "high culture" as defined by Wilhelm Halbfass:(52) first of all Vedic, than Avestien, Roman, Greek, German (Celtic, Scandinavian, and Old-Nordic ). These constitute Dumézil’s logos, beginning in the Sanskrit and Hurrian language, extending to the Greek myths of the Aegean Sea and other legends collected in his field studies. Dumézil created two worlds: one which classified the oldest mythological systems of the Indo-European area based on religious and epic literature, and another elaborated by Quechua linguistic data he collected himself in the Peruvian region of Cusco or Caucasia (Nartes). He based his analysis mainly on ancient sources as well as, more rarely, on his own personal fieldwork. This resulted in interpretations mostly of sacred and normative texts, which represent "high cultures" and constitute a transformed version of previous oral tradition.(53)

Strutynsky has claimed that Dumézil, being an analyst and master of synthesis, recognizes "inherently manifesting characteristic of Indo-European traits, traits that are structurally complex and display a conscious socio-religious ideology …."(54) I want to deepen this perspective and add that Dumézil’s Indo- European narrative system, while containing the Indo-European ideological traits mentioned by Strutynsky, also presents mythology and theology(55) as basic components of Indo-European civilizations. His theory of three social functions, distilled from them, exposes the fact that social violence is deeply rooted in Indo- European societies. First of all we find these three functions clearly overlapping with the historically established social hierarchy, which also exists in divine societies, stratified in classes like a human society, where one group dominates the other groups, yet where a coherent entirety is formed. Such societies secure their existence through the hierarchical subordination of one class to the others.(56) The concept of social stratification and division into social classes is the epitome of violence itself. Upper classes rule, which always and everywhere means that mechanisms of control (understood in the widest sense) are used, while rivalry (inside each class and with the other classes) is constantly present. The very idea of dividing society into groups, fractions or classes involves violence in various more or less refined aspects and forms. But although subordination itself is violent by definition, at the same time it prevents total violence, Hobbes’s war of all against all.(57) To call a social position by a name is to give an original sign of its designation to the society.(58) It is to indicate a function for the members of the society and to give a sign to the society that stratification is already established. One may say that this "minimal violence" of giving a name assigns a meaning to particular social classes, protecting society from general, even total violence. In this sense, the theory of three social functions is the core and essence of the Indo-European cognition, of social-self- consciousness. For Dumézil, this "trifunctional" cognition applies in all Indo-European societies, which all imitate and repeat the same pattern. And the tripartite division has been inherited by contemporary societies, making Dumézil’s work a universal and a living theory. In the contemporary world, that is, we see the mimetic repetition of the three social functions—a legacy of its primary model—along with their inherent

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

control of violence through violence. The best example of its relation to Gans’s (as well as Girard’s) concepts is the embodiment of violence itself in the nature and prominent role of the second function. I want to underline how deeply the violence is imbedded there and indeed to argue that the second function is violence itself.

In Dumézil’s work we find numerous examples to help us understand the concept of Cratos in association with the second function, representing all kinds of violence and power but especially its military form. Dumézil found the second function of such a great importance that he devoted a considerable portion of his output to it. The function is a prevailing theme in, for example, Les mythes et dieux des Germains : Essai d’interprétation comparative (1938), Aspects de la fonction guerrière chez les Indo-Européens (1956), Les Dieux des Germains. Essai sur la formation de la religion scandinave (1959), Heur et malheur du guerrier: Aspects mythiques de la fonction guerrière chez les Indo-Européens (1969), and Archaic Roman Religion (1970). Nor may we forget the synthesis in Mythe et Épopée I.II.III (1995).

Gans writes of the birth of literature as coinciding with regression in ancient social organization or economic decline.(59) Perhaps all epics in the Indo-European tradition, including those considered by Dumézil, are coincident upon such decline or disruptive change. In Mythe et Épopée I.II.III(60) Dumézil, as he surveys the Indo-European universe, spends considerable space on the "ideology of three social functions" with a particular emphasis on the median and central position of the second one. This is evident especially in his analyses of such epics as the Hindu Mahābhārata and Rāmäyaṇa, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Scandinavian Heimskringla, Poetic Edda and Prose Edda (by Snorri Sturlusson) and Gesta Danorum (by Saxo Grammaticus), but also in Cicero’s Republic, the Scythian legends, the Nart sagas and many others.

In Dumézil’s analyses, the second function prevails in such texts and, in its metaphoric layer Cratos is central. I propose to find in Dumézil’s narrative collections two main categories representing the Cratos: 1) specific figures and 2) specific events. Perhaps Dumézil, as he concentrates on facts(61) in Durkheimian style, may be called, to use Bruno Latour’s words, one of the "Factish Gods."(62) In any case, whatever the origin of these facts—and despite Latour’s notion of "factishes" which explores a way of respecting the objectivity of facts by reference to fetishes—Dumézil is convinced of their existence, and we want to show the power of these facts/fetishes as they manifest as figures and events.

1) Figures. The most representative figures, as regards Cratos, are heroes and divinities. They include Mars (in Rome, the most prominent of the military gods in Roman religion; he is the power that drives wars—but ideally, wars that result in secure peace);(63) Thor (in Scandinavia, the god who wields the hammer, the bane of giants: he starts off as the "thunder-master");(64) Indra (in India as a personification of a king of gods, but also of the warrior class);(65) Varuna (the sovereign as attacker, solemn, inspired, violent, awe- inspiring and military);(66) and Vayu ("brutal boxer", representing the warriors-kṣatriya in India and Iran).(67) There are also a number of early Roman military leaders like Horatius (participant in the "superfluous violence of war"(68)); Tullus Hostillus, third king of Rome and a first conqueror, thus militaris rei institutor;(69) as well Marcus Furius Camillus, a wartime leader who held several military triumphs, was victorious against enemies whenever "the battles occur at daybreak," and who was a dictator five times, granted the title of "second founder" (70) of Rome and, according to Tacitus, was "a member of the Furius family [who] had achieved military fame."(71)

2) Events. The second category representing Cratos are events connected with war and its violence. Many examples are to be found in the whole domain of the Indo- European linguistic and cultural area, beginning with Mahabharata, an epic modeled on Vedic patterns. Dumézil finds in this work "a mythical transposition of broad system of representation into the human world."(72) Specifically, it features a transposition of myth into the narration of a great, almost mortal world crisis,(73) where we find a confrontation of "forces of Good and Evil up to destructive paroxysm"(74) and countless military conflicts.

Other examples are related to some of the "principal events of Roman history."(75) These include Rome’s first war, involving Romulus (a warrior king) and Remus, the twin sons of Mars and their fraternal rivalry over the establishment of the future town (The familiar narrative of this conflict involves the naming of the new town, the number of auspicious vultures seen, the murder of Remus by Romulus, the rape of the Sabines and a war with neighbours, when Titus attacks Rome,(76) with its final reconciliation when life regains harmony and a new, united society is created.)

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

Parallel to these rich Hindu and Roman scenarios is the Scandinavian mythical tradition. Here too one may find a fully elaborated presentation of the three social functions, with the second function prevailing. This tradition brings us to the subject where I especially seek union of the concepts of Dumézil and Gans, and therefore warrants a fuller examination.

The Scandinavian Example

In Dumézil’s Indo-European mythical narratives we find also another sort of event: the "war of foundations."(77) Such events exemplify a concentration of violence in tempore illo with the purpose of justifying human conflicts. These wars provide the "grounding" for new societies and make clear that there are no foundations without war. This kind of war shows up as a repetitive "formula" found in many different cultural areas(78) and expresses a cumulative explosion of acts of violence, usually as a longer process. The violence of such war is noted already in the first of Dumézil’s books to detail the three social functions : Mythes et dieux des Germains (1939),(79) and in its more elaborated version published in 1959, Les dieux des Germains.(80) It may be also indicated in some other books, including a collected version of differentiated, selected, mythical stories, published after Dumézil’s death. It is in Esquisses de mythologie,(81) however, that we find Dumézil’s fullest analyses of Scandinavian mythology, on the basis of The Poetic Edda and The Prose Edda . The second, military function, with a military code of violence, is present everywhere there, even in a description and remarks on the Scandinavian thing or governing assembly, the center of their cultural space. It is important to note that Dumézil shows us a picture which transmits the Edda’s logic: that war is a kind of "bloody thing" and the "thing in the period of peace also resembles war," that indeed the "debating population [in the thing] looks like and behaves as a fighting army."(82) This clearly indicates that conflicts and fights as violent actions are always present in the social assembly, an insight that we can directly relate to Gans’s scene of origin. Violence, in short, defines social behavior—even a debate remains a fight. Discussing this issue, Dumézil refers to the findings of Jan de Vries, who shows the identity of the "god of battles" and "the god of law"(83) and strengthens the position of the second function, where battles and war become a law and constitute the social rule, on the pattern of rights prevailing among the society of Germanic gods.(84)

Gans claims that the "literary texts of a society are very nearly the only effective source of our intuitive grasp of what life in such a society might have been like" and that "this intuition is a privileged path to anthropological truth."(85) According to Dumézil, myth turns into epic and history, performing not a simple registration of facts, but a fixation into narrative form of the key values ​​of the group.(86) So for Dumézil, as for Gans, it is texts, stories, extracts from great, mythical narratives telling us about epochal events—all kinds of wars, but especially foundational and eschatological wars—which reveal anthropological truth. Narratives of warfare establish what Gans describes as "the most primitive condition of value, [creating] a competitive arena in which individuals are measured against each other and where their usefulness to their social group knows no other ethical limitations."(87) Likewise, in the mythical Indo-European literature assembled in Dumézil’s interpretative schemata (grouped into his second category), we find a sequence of military heroes who accumulated such value, creating, in Gans’s terms, a "market" for individual talent.(88) I would call it a "market" for signs of Cratos, in the sense that these extraordinary individuals are in many different ways correlated with violence, and as practitioners of the second function they expect and are given privileged places in society. They use or prevail over violence in accordance with the limits established by their society, limits designed to protect that society from chaos and disorder and to preserve a state of equilibrium, something which is of the first importance in Dumézil’s model, and which he expresses as a "harmony of three social functions."(89)

Dumézil analysed the Prose Edda (c. 1220 CE) of the Scandinavian patrician and erudite, Snorri Sturluson, who wanted to "rescue a store of images and periphrasis" of a "pagan mythology."(90) Dumézil relates this text to Scandinavian eschatology, using a story which articulates the "god’s destiny,"(91) a global war of Ases and Vanes,(92) an example of violence in its extreme form. Snorri’s text speaks of constant wars intertwined with times of peace, during which preparations for the ultimate conflict are continuously made. This final war is called, Ragnarök ("the twilight of gods"), an event without winners and losers, but rather a time of cosmic destruction.(93) After Ragnarök "the world will be born again, full of brightness and greenery."(94) This "first war of two armies in the world,"(95) was to be a war involving gods of magic and warriors (Ases), and gods of fecundity and peace (Vanes ),(96) where (as usual) the first two functions fight

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

with the third one.

Dumézil was persuaded of the reference of myths to actual geographic space, so he played the consonance of "Ases" in the mythical tale into the continent "Asia," believing that the origins of Ases and Vanes were connected to the shores of the Black Sea and the Don River. He assumed that an actual war was fought there, where the migration began which eventually led to Scandinavia.(97) In his three functional optics, Dumézil attempts to explain mythical episodes, in their close conjunction. For him, the conflict between the Ases and Vanes is not a war in the "human sense," but most of all a conflict between peoples of the same size, between two divine groups with different but complementary functions. He sees here the quest for reconciliation between representatives of different functions as a result of their previous separation. Reconciliation, indeed, is a powerful force in Dumézil’s interpretation of Scandinavian mythology.(98) In Gans’s terms, this force can be seen in the passage from the extreme of violence to the extreme of peace, an abrupt cessation of violence so memorable that it takes on the character of an event of special creative power.(99) "Generalized violence," for Gans, "can only be experienced as crisis—a crisis practically unknown to the animal world—and the sudden end of this crisis, as an event, the reproduction of which in ensuing crises could not be other than a sedimentary form of representation because this reproduction involves at the very least the renewal of the presence of the community to itself."(100)

Looking at the text of the Prose Edda more specifically, we may note the passage quoted by Dumézil, from Snorri’s Ynglingasaga, "history of Ynglingar dynasty" (Chapter IV) about "Odin’s war with the people of Vanaland [on the each side of Don],"(101) which Dumézil names in his analysis as a "Decapitation and cutting up [of] Scandinavia." The passage focuses on the violent war, the appearance of a victim and at the same time, the presence of sparagmos—an indispensable element of Gans’s anthropology:

Odin went out with a great army against the Vanaland people; but they were well prepared, and defended their land; so that victory was changeable, and they ravaged the lands of each other, and did great damage. They tired of this at last, and on both sides appointed a meeting for establishing peace, made a truce, and exchanged hostages. The Vanaland people sent their best men, Njord the Rich, and his son Frey. The people of Asaland sent a man called Hone, whom they thought well suited to be a chief, as he was a stout and very handsome man; and with him they sent a man of great understanding called Mime. On the other side, the Vanaland people sent the wisest man in their community, who was called Kvase. Now, when Hone came to Vanaheim he was immediately made a chief, and Mime came to him with good counsel on all occasions. But when Hone stood in the Things or other meetings, if Mime was not near him, and any difficult matter was laid before him, he always answered in one way - "Now let others give their advice"; so that the Vanaland people got a suspicion that the Asaland people had deceived them in the exchange of men. They took Mime, therefore, and beheaded him, and sent his head to the Asaland people. Odin took the head, smeared it with herbs so that it should not rot, and sang incantations over it. Thereby he gave it the power that it spoke to him, and discovered to him many secrets. Odin placed Njord and Frey as priests of the sacrifices, and they became Diar of the Asaland people. Njord's daughter Freya was priestess of the sacrifices, and first taught the Asaland people the magic art, as it was in use and fashion among the Vanaland people.(102)

There are some points in this narrative to which I would call attention. In the first part of the above citation we find the classical motive of war between two groups of gods, which constitutes an example of the above- mentioned "war of foundations" in mythical, Scandinavian society. In reference to this motive, Dumézil assumes that we are not dealing with war in a human sense of the word but with a conflict between two groups with "different and complementary functions."(103) This statement confirms his obvious conviction of the importance of social functions in Indo-European societies, but also reveals that conflict is itself inscribed in the nature of those functions, however "complementary" or even "harmonious" they may sometimes be. Following Gans, we might in fact recognize here a war in the "human sense," with its displays of primarily military valor, reflecting "the first and most primitive criterion of value employed by the heroic society."(104) As related to the world of the gods, however, the war described in the passage also contains elements of a kind of positional game, played out in the space of conflict and rivalry inherent to the hierarchical order of the three functions.

The story shows us two societies who fight with each other, do considerable damage to each other’s

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

countries and then, when they have had enough of destruction, exchange hostages. The exchange of hostages between two groups of gods remains the mechanism of uniting two communities, a principle described in theories of the gift articulated by Marcel Mauss and Bronisław Malinowski.(105) In this context Dumézil himself speaks about a "fusion" which generates a "complete community,"(106) and can be seen in operation throughout Scandinavian mythology. The next important narrative element involves the Vanaland ambassador Hone, and his helplessness in the management of the Ases: he is able to solve difficult matters only with help of his companion Mime. Hone’s noticeable and unacceptable behavior shows a disorder in the structure of governance in his society. First of all, a hostage (Hone) becomes a commander, which reverses the normal hierarchy and then secondly, Hone doesn’t perform his duties correctly. Both of these anomalies demand sanction, and the Vanes react by decapitating Mime. It seems that all the participants in this mythical scenario didn’t respect the superior rules that might have been available to them in a market-based system of ethical values.(107) The Vanes claimed that they sent to the Ases their most distinguished people for the exchange, while the Ases maintained that they also sent somebody who had everything needed— except this clearly wasn’t true. Gans argues that in ancient societies the modelled exchange occurs according to an "ethical structure" which precedes the exchange of goods, and encourages "the indefinite accumulation of values."(108) But here such values—embodied in the choice of hostages—have been flouted. The choice of Hone suggests indeed a veritable abandonment of ethical values, undermining social order and finally demanding a sanction from society in the form of an act of extreme violence, a decapitation. In Dumézil’s terms this choice (and Hone’s subsequent abdication of the task of taking decisions) also means a violation of the ethical values of the first function, whose duty is to govern, as well as to control and observe the rules. Consequently, the improper behavior of a leader who could not fulfill the obligations of his adopted function has generated resentment, a source of violent action, and a prominent feature of Gans’s depiction of the human scene.(109) Resentment is visible in the behaviour of the Vanes in the irritation caused by the supposed deception of the Ases and explains the violence committed against Mime. Moreover, a victim, in this case Mime, becomes, as Gans notes, "a suitable outlet for purely destructive mimetic aggression,"(110) because of some visible sign of vulnerability.

The next episode important for us involves an effect of the use of violence by the Vanes, a group defined by Dumézil as "gods of fecundity and peace". After the decapitation, the detached head of Mime is given to the Ases, the "gods of magic and warriors." In René Girard’s terms, we may understand Mime as being "selected as a single victim, on whom the violence of the entire group would be concentrated,"(111) a victim, or "scapegoat," thus of mimetic rivalry and of the unanimity of murder/sacrifice, even if it is actually, in Gans’s modification of Girard's scenario, the "pure form" of the language or sign that designates him that is "the only necessary element of the origin."(112) In mythical narratives this unanimity constitutes a condition of the social order which emerges after an act of violence and may be restored again. In mythical terms, the death of this victim is thus a "founding murder." The Vanes as a collective murdered the victim, initiating a passage from violence (also previously a "general" condition during the time of war) to a state of peace.(113) The reconciliation of the collective could have appeared, finally, as a grace bestowed by the victim.(114) Moreover we may call this murder an "original murder" related to—as Gans says— the "original event of culture" and at the same time the "origin of representation," that which "gives a cognitive […] significance to […] the original victim. [It ] is the origin of […] the linguistic sign, the first instance of which occurs precisely in the representation of the victim within the original communal presence."(115)

Our story says that Odin took the decapitated head before the reconciliation of divine societies has started, rubbed it to protect it, uttered magic words over it, and gave it power to speak many secret words to him. We may suppose that this action establishes the collectivity of Vanes "as a community by giving it a language."(116) Here, the decapitated head of Mime performs the function of the body of a victim who represents, as Gans says, a "sign" "created by the collectivity . . . at the same time creates it as a community."(117) Furthermore, the veneration of victim’s head is a ritual behavior present already in the first moment after an act of violence immediately accompanied by another act, an act of speech. Odin’s speaking of magic words to the decapitated head, shows the primary position of speech as an "ostensive act" (as in Gans’s hypothesis of the originary scene) but also as a primary moment of return to life, a demonstration indeed of vital energy, and at the same time an manifestation of representation. Gans notes that "the scene of representation itself founds only one institution, that of language,"(118) but we may also characterize the emission of speech here as an affirmation of existence, and a ritual uttering of magic formulae. The episode illustrates Gans’s point that for primal societies (in anthropological sense) "all social interactions are mediated by cultural (that is ritual forms)."(119) But all such interactions, Gans argues, also

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

recapitulate the original event. In this case, we can see how the originary scene is enhanced by ritual veneration, where Odin appoints Njǫrđr and Freyr as sacrificial functionaries, together with Freya, Njǫrđr’s daughter. Violence and ritual integrate the community and allow the whole system to be reborn. Dumézil calls this story a "myth of foundation,"(120) and calls Mime’s decapitated head the "head of the most wise man," which was revived miraculously and kept its linguistic function.(121) Dumézil’s remark about the head coming back to life confirms Gans’s concept of scenic logic. The text narrates a repetition of a primary human function: what was first human—ritual sacrifice—is then displaced into, or figured as, a narrative of divine activity. If we call this verbal communication a discourse, we find a confirmation here too of the relationship between ritual and discourse, as described by Gans: "Discourse in its origin is not a rival, but a supplement to ritual."(122) This relationship will also develop, however. Discourse will slowly replace ritual, and begins by providing a more satisfactory catharsis for its consumers by means of its representations and the explanations they can offer.(123)

From the point of view of Girardian anthropology, the Scandinavian mythical tradition, discussed above, presents the victim, as "the first object of the attention of the community, […] the signifier of the entire process of crisis and resolution."(124) At the start of his earliest monograph on Generative Anthropology, Gans summarizes Girard’s transcendental hypothesis as including: 3) "The event. Choice of an "emissary victim"; 4) "The victim’s body as the first signifier of the sacred" and 5) "The reproduction of the sign."(125) While Dumézil theorizes his three social functions as embodied in Indo-European myths, Gans at this stage eschews such an approach, declaring that he "can make no attempt to deal with mythographical and ethnological evidence."(126) But in his next book he is already elaborating his hypothesis through an analysis of the Iliad and Odyssey.(127) These are of course points of reference for all literary epistemology (but presumably for mythography as well), and Gans uses them to isolate two opposing formulae for sublimating resentment,(128) features also present in many other mythological variants. The epics and all their components belong, Gans tells us, to the era of what he calls "high secular culture,"(129) which arises as soon as differentiated social structure begins to generate what he describes as resentment.(130) Epic episodes presented by Dumézil, however, also display an enormous number of actions generated by just such resentment. For Gans, "high culture becomes possible, not to say necessary, as soon as resentment comes to be perceived as a necessary social phenomenon."(131) Greek secular culture, for example, "accepts the necessity of resentment as definitive."(132) This analysis, we may say, directly complements, or indeed may explain Dumézil’s concentration on his trifunctional system, which controls and limits resentment through its hierarchy and the specified range for each function, creating a set of strongly protected boundaries and differences. This inherently violent stratification is policed by the violence of the second function and to a lesser degree by that of the first as well—violence is ultimately controlled by violence. Dumézil, like Gans, is nonetheless describing the human pursuit of harmony and peace, the need for which generates social structure itself.(133)

All the events presented above show the inseparability and interrelation of many of the elements of Gans’s scenic model operating under the auspices of Cratos: the presence of total violence, the violence of the victim/sacrifice component, and the violence to be deferred by the appearance of speech acts and by the communal participation in ritual. As Gans concludes, commenting on Girard, "ritual sacrifice arises as a re- presentation of the original event."(134) The original event includes the appearance of language, but by language Gans means all cultural forms of representation, basic and developed, elementary and matured. The term refers also to form embodied in a shape of poetry. That is why the last episode we will analyze, important from the point of view of Gans’s theory, is connected with an appearance of poetry as a developed form of language representation. Let us focus on another part of Dumézil’s analyses of the afore-mentioned Prose Edda of Sturlusson, entitled "Bragarœður" and often translated as "On Poetic Diction." This part of the text relates to a sequence of events subsequent to the war between Ases and Vanes, where we find a significant conversation. An Aslander asks Bragi, "Where does the art of poetry come from?" and Bragi provides the following answer:

These were the beginnings thereof. The gods had a dispute with the folk which are called Vanir, and they appointed a peace-meeting between them and established peace in this way: they each went to a vat and spat their spittle therein. Then at parting the gods took that peace-token and would not let it perish, but shaped thereof a man. This man is called Kvasir, and he was so wise that none could question him concerning anything but that he knew the solution. He went up and down the earth to give instruction to men; and when he came upon invitation to the abode of

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

certain dwarves, Fjalar and Galarr, they called him into privy converse with them, and killed him, letting his blood run into two vats and a kettle. The kettle is named Ódrerir, and the vats Són and Bodn; they blended honey with the blood, and the outcome was that mead by the virtue of which he who drinks becomes a skald or scholar. The dwarves reported to the Æsir that Kvasir had choked on his own shrewdness, since there was none so wise there as to be able to question his wisdom.(135)

Æsir and Vanir have met to put an end to the war between them and a treaty of peace has been agreed to and ratified by having each party spit into a jar. As a lasting sign of the amity thenceforward to subsist between the parties, the gods form Kvasir out of this spittle, and endow him with special attributes described. However, the dwarves Fjalar and Galar murder him, clearly motivated by resentment of his superiority—their explanation to Æsir speaks volumes—but nonetheless create a magical mead from his blood, carrying his gifts into futurity. Poetry is henceforth called "Kvasir's blood."(136)

In this mythical scenario we may recognise not just a modelled scene of the origin of poetry, but also one of the origin of language and culture more generally, conditioned by the presence of violence and the omnipresence of Cratos. For Girard, this would doubtless be a clear-cut example of scapegoating and the subsequent transmutation of the victim into transcendent spiritual form. Gans, with his focus on the role of the sign and of representation, would perhaps take the analysis further, as poetry constitutes a developed form of representation and thus one of the means of deferring violence. Dumézil, who includes episodes from the war of Aslanders and Vanes in his general analysis of myths of violence, points out that a reconciliation and fusion of divine societies constitute proof of the existence of a "theory of composition,"(137) in the sense of an interconnected arrangement or composition of social structures, the function of which is to inhibit violence. Where it exists, in effective balance, texts will speak of a human or divine "harmonious society," with peace and unity.

Peace and unity, for Generative Anthropology, is expressed more modestly as a deferral of violence, a temporally limited state of harmony, originated and strengthened by poetry as part of a system of representation which was developed out of an initial violence. Let us recall that poetics comes from the Greek word poein which means "to make." What was destroyed by violence is constructed, or reconstructed, by poetry. It is interesting to note that Martin Heidegger contends that "the essential beginning of poetry is "Mnemosyne," i. e. "the primordial free salvation and preservation of Being, without which poetizing would even lack what is to be poetized."(138)

Conclusions

The above considerations were intended to present the concept of Cratos as a cognitive and metaphoric understanding of human culture as originating in a deferral of violence and power. Dumézil’s selection of mythic narratives suggest that Cratos has been present in human consciousness from the very beginning. Its dominant meaning is confirmed by Greek tradition and its code is also present in early Scandinavian mythology, connected to even more ancient Indo-European cultural roots. Dumézil describes and analyzes events recorded in ancient mythology, which tend to corroborate Gans’s generative theory of culture. The comparison importantly reminds us that the origination of signs and the taming of violence are to be understood as parts of a cultural process that is transmitted and reflected in myth. Through his selection of texts and his interpretations, Dumézil gives myths a crucial place in our understanding of human development, from the scene of origin to the Indo-European world, with potential implications for every other culture world as well.

Each myth discussed above reproduces the initial situation of the appearance of language and culture. It turns out that Gans’s scenic scheme appears deeply embedded in Dumézil’s chosen texts, texts which refer constantly to the problem of violence and power. From his assembled evidence, Dumézil outlines the three social functions, and registers the extra significance, prominence and strength of the second, the military function. He thus answers, albeit intuitively, important questions about the way violence is inscribed in the idea of hierarchy and about the domination of one function over the other. The social structure constituted by the three functions confirms Gans’s conceptual framework in Generative Anthropology: language and culture, ranging from the simplest to the most complex forms, is consecutive to the appearance of violence,

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

whether immediately present, or deferred along with its associated inherent power. One has had to wait for Gans to elaborate the hidden message of Dumézil’s work.

Dumézil presents a trifunctionality in which the second function of military violence is an intriguingly common factor. How could both violence and its wise control in the form of Cratos simultaneously co-exist in authority (or power)? He finds his answer in an ethical code that underlies the three functional formulae and expresses intuitive understandings embedded in long-term structures transmitted from ancient times. This is comparable to the ethical developments Generative Anthropology traces in the narrative of human history, where ancient principles of balance—of the egalitarian moral imperative established by the sharing of the first sign—are worked out in the ethics that respond to changing circumstances, as means are devised to try to keep the ever-present threat of rivalrous violence from destroying the human project.

Cratos as violence and power is inscribed in human consciousness and cognition. From the beginning of humanity up to the present times, this consciousness/cognition has resulted and continues to result in the production of signs, language and culture, all of which contribute, paradoxically enough, to the deferral of violence. This works even with the simplest meanings, and even with those which thematize violence itself.

Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet said of Aeschylus that the great tragedian "was out to dramatize not history, but the present."(139) This, too, is the goal of Generative Anthropology, even as it seeks the very earliest moments of human history. Contemporary culture does not lack for expressions of Cratos, the perennial symbol of controlled violence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_(God_of_War)

Such simulacra of violence and power, exemplifying the cognition of the 21st Century but referring back to the ancient linguistic roots of kratu, thus gesture to a problem as old as human time, and to the ever- changing solutions to it we continue to devise.

Notes 1. C. Scott Littleton names Dumézil’s research fields as "The New Comparative Mythology". See C. Scott Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1966. (back)

2. See. Georges Dumézil, "Soukhmanti Odykhmantievitch, le paladin aux coquelicots", [in]: Mélanges publiée en l’honneur de M.Paul Boyer, Paris Librarie Honoré Champion, 1925 p. 280-288. (back)

3. See id.: "La préhistoire indo-iranienne des castes". Journal asiatique, CCXVI, 1930, p. 109-130 and " La préhistoire des flamines majeurs", Revue de l’histoire des religions, CVIII, 1938, p. 188-220 , and his first book explicitly discovering three functions: Mythes et dieux des Germains. Essai d’interprétation comparative, Paris 1939. Most of books published throughout his career relate in one way or another to the theory of three social functions. (back)

4. Dumézil retains a Germanic model of Rígsþula (rex-magnus, bellatores, laboratores) which was first adopted by Francs and later transposed by Alfred the Great to Anglo-Saxons in the form of : rex/oratores, bellatores, laboratories). See Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, Édition Gallimard, Paris 2003, p. 261. (back)

5. Jöel H. Grisward, Introduction. Il était trois fois [in] : Mythe et épopée, I,II,III Gallimard, Paris 1995, p. 16. (back)

6. Eric Gans, The Origin of Language, University of California Press, Berkeley, London, 1981, p.14. (back)

7. Udo Strutynsky, introduction : G.Dumézil, Camillus. A Study of Indo-European Religion as a Roman History, University of California Press, 1980, p. 2. (back)

8. See George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Metafory w naszym życiu,Wydawnictwo Altheia, Warszawa 2010, p. 29. (back)

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

9. Ibidem p. 48-49, 119-128, 211-213. (back)

10. Ward Goodenough, "Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics" : [in] Report of the Seventh Annual Roundtable Meeting on Linguistics and Language Study, edited by Paul L. Garvin, Washington , DC, Georgetown University, 1957, p. 167. (back)

11. George Lakoff , Mark Johnson , Metafory w naszym życiu, , p. 296-297. (back)

12. See Eric Gans, The End of Culture. Toward a Generative Anthropology. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1985, p. 125-126. (back)

13. Ibidem. (back)

14. Ibidem., p.142. (back)

15. Paul Ricœur, Symbolika zła, Instytut Wydawniczy Pax, Warszawa, 1986, p.162. (back)

16. Danièle Chauvain, Mémoire et myth : Questions de mythocritique. Dictionnaire, D.Chauvain, A. Siganos, Ph. Walter (ed.), Editions Imago, Paris 2005, p. 232. (back)

17. Paul Ricœur, The Sybolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan, Beacon Paperback ed., Boston 1969 , p. 5. (back)

18. See. Klaus Eder, "The cultural code of modernity and the problem of nature: a critic of the naturalistic notion of progress "[in]: Rethinking Progress. Movements, Forces and Ideas at the End of Twentieth Century, ed. by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Piotr Sztompka, Unwin Hyman, London 1990, p.67-89. (back)

19. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (transl. by A.Schuwer, R.Rojcewicz), Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1992, p. 11. (back)

20. Hesiod, Theogony, transl. by Richard S. Caldwell, Focus Classical Library, 1987, line 385-387. (back)

21. Aeschylus, Prometheus, ed. by Bound, David Green and Richmond Lattimore, The University of Chicago Press, 1991, line 1-80. (back)

22. Hesiod, Theogony. Works and Days Testimonials, ed. and transl. by Glenn W. Most, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London 2006, lines 383-404. (back)

23. Ibidem. (back)

24. Aeschylus, Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Suppliants, Prometheus Bound, edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, London 2008, p.445-455 (line 1-85). (back)

25. Zeus is pantocrator himself. (back)

26. Hesiod, Theogony. Works and Days Testimonials, ed. and transl. by Glenn W. Most, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London 2006, line 388. (back)

27. Ibidem, p. 445. (back)

28. Matt. 13 :35. René Girard, Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde. Recherches avec Jean- Michael Oughourlian et Guy Lefort, Grasset 1978. (back)

29. Simon Goldhill, The language of tragedy: rhetoric and communication [in]: The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy , ed. by P.E.Easterling, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 136. (back)

30. Ibidem. (back)

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

31. Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, Éditions Gallimard, Paris 2003, p. 1089. (back)

32. Ibidem. (back)

33. See, for example, Dumézil, Le crime des Lemniennes. Rites et légendes du monde égéen, P. Geuthner, Paris, 1924. To do more than gesture to the ways in which his and Gans’s studies reinforce each other, however, would be too much to undertake here. (back)

34. Georges Dumézil speaks about " Indo-European civilisation" or "Indo- European civilisations" as an entity in the meaning of "Indo-European culture" or "cultures". (back)

35. Udo Strutynsky, Introduction to : Georges Dumézil, Camillus. A Study of Indo-European Religion as Roman History, Berkeley 1980, p. 1. (back)

36. Ibidem., p. 2. (back)

37. Ibidem. (back)

38. Georges Dumézil is mainly concentrated on language origins in the context of the Indo-European linguistic family and the internal relations of particular Indo-European languages ( Entretien avec Jacques Bonnet et Didier Pralon : Georges Dumézil, Paris 1981, p. 16). (back)

39. « Georges Dumézil : explorateur de nos origines », entretien recueilli par Alain de Benoist, présentation de Jean Varenne, Le Figaro-dimanche, 29-30 avril, 1978. (back)

40. Eric Gans, The Origin of Language, , p. 251. (back)

41. Eric Gans, Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1997, p. 6. (back)

42. Eric Gans, The Origin of Language, , p. 126. (back)

43. Ibidem., p.207. (back)

44. Ibidem. p. 208. (back)

45. Ibidem. (back)

46. Dumézil was primary a philologist, inspired by linguistic studies of Michael Bréal, Ferdinand de Saussure, Antoine Meillet, Joseph Vendryes and also Émile Benveniste. He became a proponent of social understanding of linguistic facts. See J.-C. Milner, « Le programme dumézilien », in Le Magazine littéraire, N°229, avril 1986, p. 22 ; F. Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme, tome I : Le champ du signe, 1945-1966, Paris 1991, p. 56. (back)

47. Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1970, p. 103. (back)

48. Eric Gans, The Origin of Language, , p.249. (back)

49. Udo Strutynsky, Preface: Georges Dumézil, Camillus, , p. 3. (back)

50. Ibidem. p. 7. (back)

51. Milton Singer, When A Great Tradition Modernizes. An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilisation, New York : Praeger, 1972 , p. 55-67. (back)

52. See the definition in depth in Halbfass’s Indie i Europa, Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog, Warszawa 2008, p. 233. (back)

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

53. See Wilhelm Halbfass, Indie i Europa, Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog, Warszawa, 2008. (back)

54. Udo Strutynski, Preface: Georges Dumézil, Camillus. A Study of Indo-European Religion as a Roman

History, Berkeley 1980, p. 34 . (back)

55. See Chapter II : Magdalena Złocka-Dąbrowska, Analyse de l’œuvre de Georges Dumézil, un maître à penser, Wyd. Naukowe GRADO, Toruń 2013. (back)

56. Joël Grisward, Introduction. Il était trois fois…,: Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée, Quatro, Gallimard, Paris 1995, p. 10. (back)

57. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (ed. von Klenner, Hermann), Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 2005, p. 673. (back)

58. See Eric Gans, The Origin of Language, p. 49. (back)

59. Eric Gans, The End of Culture. Toward a Generative Anthropology, p. 239. (back)

60. Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée I.II.III, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1995. (back)

61. See Georges Dumézil, L’héritage indo-européen à Rome, Paris 1949, p. 30; Heur et malheur du guerrier, Paris 1985, p. 11; Mythes et dieux des Indo-Européens, p. 16. (back)

62. See Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Duke University Press, 2010. (back)

63. See especially : Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus I (Paris 1941), Naissance de Rome. Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus II (Paris 1944), Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus IV (Paris 1948), L’héritage indo-européen à Rome (Paris 1949), Déesses latines et mythes védiques (Bruxelles 1956 ), Idées romaines (Paris 1969). (back)

64. See especially : G. Dumézil, Mythes et dieux des Germains, Paris 1939 ; Les dieux des Germains, Paris 1959; Myth et Épopée I.II.III, Éditions Gallimard, Paris 1995. (back)

65. Already in 1934, Georges Dumézil described Indra as a "warrior of massacre" opposite to Varuna but as a royal god (Georges Dumézil , Ouranos-Varuna. Étude de mythologie comparée indo-européenne, Adrien- Maisonneuve, Paris 1934, p. 40) and in the next works Indra is presented as a warrior ( Georges Dumézil, L’idéologie tripartite des Indo-Européense, Bruxelles, 1958, p. 39-40 (back)

66. Georges Dumézil, Mitra Varuna. Essai sur deux représentations indo-européennes de la Souveraineté, Press universitaires de France, Paris 1940, p. 44. This book elaborated already in 1937, before announcement of the theory of three social function ( in 1938) presents a concept of bi-partition of sovereignty but image of Varuna is also related to the second function. (back)

67. Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée I.II.III,op.cit., p. 75. (back)

68. Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, vol. I, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1970, p. 206. (back)

69. Georges Dumézil, Aspects de la fonction guerrière chez les indo-Européens, Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1956, p. 15-61, L’idéologie tripartite des Indo-Européens, Latomus, Bruxelles, 1958, p. 83-86, Heur et malheur du guerrier, Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1969, p. 11-50. (back)

70. Georges Dumézil, Camillus. A Study of Indo-European Religion as a Roman History, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1980, p. 43. (back)

71. Ibidem., p. 1. (back)

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

72. Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée I.II.III, op.cit., p. 246. (back)

73. Ibidem. (back)

74. Ibidem., p. 266. (back)

75. Dumézil refers to the French Huguenot, Louis de Beaufort, tutor to the prince of Hess-Homburg and member of the Royal Society of London, who in a book published at The Hague in 1738 coordinated and amplified Roman sources and expressed all his doubts in this area. Dumézil bases his notices on Dissertation sur l’incertitude des cinq premiers siècles de l’histoire romaine ( new ed). With introduction and notes, by A. Blot (Paris, 1886); See: Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion with the Appendix on the Religion of the Etruscans, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1970, p. 3. (back)

76. This story has many other explanations, including male-female conflict and competition what we may call as well a rivalry. (back)

77. This subject belongs to the area of René Girard studies. See also the discussion on de origine regni by Jacek Banszkiewicz in : Polskie dzieje bajeczne mistrza Wincentego Kadłubka, Wydawnictwo Leopoldinum, Wrocław 1998, pp. 5-45. (back)

78. Known from Scandinavian, Indian and also Slavic mythical history described in the early medieval chronicles (See. Jacek Banaszkiewicz, Polskie dzieje bajeczne mistrza Wincentego Kadłubka, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, Wrocław 2002). (back)

79. Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1939. (back)

80. Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1959. English translation: Gods of the Ancient Northmen, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1973. (back)

81. Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, Quarto Gallimard, Paris, 2003. (back)

82. Georges Dumézil, Bogowie Germanów, Oficyna Naukowa, Warszawa 2006, p. 84-85. (back)

83. Ibidem. p. 83. (back)

84. See Georges Dumézil, L’idéologie tripartie des Indo-Européens, Latomus, Bruxelles, 1958. (back)

85. Eric Gans, The End of Culture. Toward a Generative Anthropology, p. 228 (back)

86. Jacek Banaszkiewicz, O Dumézilu i jego badaniach- bardzo krótko [in]: Georges Dumézil, Bogowie Germanów, Oficyna Naukowa, Warszawa 2006, p. XIII. (back)

87. Eric Gans, The End of Culture. Toward a Generative Anthropology, p. 241. (back)

88. Ibidem., p. 240. (back)

89. Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, p. 867. (back)

90. Ibidem. (back)

91. Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée, I.II.III, p. 250. (back)

92. This particular story appears many times in Dumézil’s books, already mentioned in: Mythes et dieux des Germains (1938, p. 93-105), Les dieux des Germains( 1959 ), p. 16-20, but also in Esquisses de mythologies (2006, p. 868-878). The above phrase comes from : Bogowie Germanów (2006, p. 16). (back)

93. It has its Indian (Mahabharata) and Iranian (Avesta) equivalents. (back)

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

94. Anna Załuska- Strömberg, Wstęp : Edda poetycka, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wrocław 1986, p. XXVI. (back)

95. Georges Dumézil, Gods of the Ancient Northmen, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles , 1973. p.16 Georges Dumézil, Bogowie Germanów, Oficyna Naukowa, Warszawa 2006, p.84-85. (back)

96. Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, Éditions Gallimard, Paris 2003, p. 867. (back)

97. Ibidem., p. 868. (back)

98. Ibidem. (back)

99. Eric Gans, The Origin of Language, p. 14. (back)

100. Ibidem., p. 13. (back)

101. Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, 867. (back)

102. Ynglinga Saga, or the Story of the Yngling Family from Odin to Halfdon the Black, Saga I, Chapter IV, [in] : The Heimskringla or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway ( translated from the Icelandic of Snorro Sturleson by Samuel Laing, ESQ), Vol I, Longman, Brown, Green-Longman, London 1844, p.218-291. French version of the same text : Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, p. 869- 870. (back)

103. Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, p. 869. (back)

104. Eric Gans, The End of Culture, p. 240. (back)

105. Voir especially: Marcel Mauss, Szkic o darze [in] Socjologia i antropologia, Wydawnictwo KR, Warszawa 2001, p. 182-190, and Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauci Zachodniego Pacyfiku: relacje o poczynaniach i przygodach krajowców z nowej Gwinei, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa, 2005. (back)

106. Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, op.cit., p. 869. (back)

107. See Gans’s explication of these principles in The End of Culture, , p.240. (back)

108. Ibidem. (back)

109. Ibidem., p. 227-300. (back)

110. Eric Gans, The End of Culture, p. 14. (back)

111. Ibidem, p. 13. (back)

112. This distinction is, at bottom, what differentiates Gans from Girard, for whom the victim himself was sufficient. The Origin of Language, p. 36. (back)

113. Ibidem. (back)

114. Ibidem. (back)

115. Ibidem., p. 267. (back)

116. Ibidem. (back)

117. Ibidem. p. 20. (back)

118. Eric Gans, The End of Culture, p. 40. (back)

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

119. Ibidem., p. 228. (back)

120. Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, p. 873. (back)

121. Ibidem. (back)

122. Eric Gans, The Origin of Language, p. 228. (back)

123. Ibidem. (back)

124. Ibidem., p.13. (back)

125. Ibidem., p. 10. (back)

126. Ibidem., p. 13. (back)

127. See Eric Gans, The End of Culture, pp. 226-268. (back)

128. Ibidem., p. 254. (back)

129. Ibidem., p. 239. (back)

130. That is to say, social or explicitly human resentment, as opposed to the originary resentment of the first scene, which was directed at the suddenly unattainable object of desire itself, rather than at other members of the nascent community. (back)

131. Ibidem. (back)

132. Ibidem. (back)

133. Ian Dennis points out the similarity here to Girard’s analysis of the ancient system of sacred differences and boundaries, which is also founded on violence, indeed on "scapegoating." Both Girard and Dumézil offer clear-eyed depictions, in short, of the "oppressive" measures earlier human societies deployed to restrain rivalrous violence, and both scholars have been rewarded, in an era where human culture has developed the capacity to manage much freer movements of desire, with accusations of a sympathy for fascism. Such accusations are entirely unfair. Girard, for his part, attributes exactly our ability to see—and develop beyond —this system to the influence of Christianity. Dumézil and Gans offer comparable narratives. (Personal communication, August 2016.) (back)

134. Ibidem, p. 12. (back)

135. The Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál, Snorri Sturluson, The Poesy of the Skalds, Poetical Diction, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, 1916. Guðni Jónsson edition, Chapter I. French version of the same text in Georges Dumézil, Esquisses de mythologie, p.870. (back)

136. Ibidem., p. 870-873. (back)

137. "La guerre puis la fusion des Ases et des Vanes illustre une théorie de la composition, donc de la formation d’une société harmonieuse quelle qu’elle soit, humaine ou divine." (Esquisses…p.874). (back)

138. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1992, p. 127. (back)

139. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, Zone Books, New York 1990, p. 259 (back)

Anthropoetics subscribers may copy or download this text from the network, but its distribution or

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Zlocka-Dabrowska - Cratos as Cognition

publication shall constitute an infringement of the Author's copyright.

Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology

Volume XXII, number 1 (Fall 2016) ISSN 1083-7264 URL: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2201/

2201MZD.htm[10/16/2016 5:10:42 PM] Benchmarks XXII, 1

Anthropoetics XXII, 1 Benchmarks

About Our Contributors Kenshin Kirihara is Professor of Japanese culture at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. He teaches Japanese Intellectual History especially after the nineteenth century. He has written works on Shōin Yoshida (1830-59: an anti-shogunate activist in Bakumatsu Japan), studied the relation between religions and anti- religion movements in modern Japan, and co-authored books on the history of economic thought in Japan from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

Shoko Komatsu is Professor of Japanese culture at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. She teaches Japanese culture & literature, especially after the nineteenth century. She has written works on Ranpo Edogawa (1894-1965) and modern Japanese mystery novels, and also researched Japanese folklore.

Aya Ryusawa is Professor of Japanese culture at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan after serving as a curator at The Tokugawa Art Museum. Her specialty is the history of Japanese art. She researches narrative paintings primarily of the 16th and 17th century in Japan, including pictorializations of The Tale of Genji.

Ian Dennis is Chair of the Department of English at the University of Ottawa and Secretary-Treasurer of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference. He is the author of four novels, of the Girardian study Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997), and of Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Delaware 2009), a work of literary criticism making substantial use of both mimetic theory and generative anthropology. He was the chief organiser of the 2009 GA conference in Ottawa, and co-organiser in 2013 at UCLA.

Magdalena Złocka-Dąbrowska is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynsky University in Warsaw, and a member of GASC since 2015. She is the author of a book, Analyse de l’œuvre de Georges Dumézil, un maître à penser (Toruń 2013) and articles that include "Puja. Hindu Temple Rituals"; “Comprehension ethnologique de l’oeuvre de Georges Dumézil”; “Metaphors, Simulacrum and European Imagination”; “Conception de la tripartition: Georges Dumézil et l’ensemble indo-européen” and others. Her current projects, "Consecutio Modorum: Mediation Between Two Concepts of Culture, Analog and Digital", “Cratos as Cognition: Gans and Dumézil in Dialogue on Language and Violence” and “Generative Anthropology in the Cosmic Realms of the Mahabharata”, enter into the pathway of originary thinking and scenic logic.

Edmond Wright’s books include Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith (Macmillan, 2005) and Faitheism (Imprint Academic, 2011); and four edited collections, The Ironic Discourse (Poetics Today, 1983), New Representationalisms: Essays in the Philosophy of Perception (Ashgate, 1993), Faith and the Real (Paragraph, 2001), The Case for Qualia (MIT Press, 2008); and a volume edited with Elizabeth Wright, The Zizek Reader (Blackwell, 1999). He has also published over 70 articles in the philosophical journals, as well as two volumes of poetry.

Return to Anthropoetics home page | Return to Anthropoetics XXII, 1

Eric Gans / [email protected] Last updated: 07/17/48763 04:33:12

2201bench.htm[10/16/2016 4:44:26 PM]