Anthropoetics VI, 1 Anthropoetics VI, no. 1 Spring / Summer 2000 ISSN 1083-7264 Table of Contents 1. Thomas F. Bertonneau - Monstrous Theologies: The Theme of Anti-Sacrifice in the Sci-Fi Pulps 2. Jeffrey Spisak - Fear, Pity, and the Master: Rousseau and the Status of Mimetic Structures 3. Scott Sprenger - Balzac as Anthropologist 4. Eric Gans - The Sacred and the Social: Defining Durkheim's Anthropological Legacy 5. Benchmarks Return to Anthropoetics home page Eric Gans /
[email protected] Last updated 6/4/00 http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0601/ap0601.htm [12/15/2000 3:35:29 PM] Bertonneau - Sci-Fi Anthropoetics 6, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2000) Monstrous Theologies The Theme of Anti-Sacrifice in the Sci-Fi Pulps Thomas F. Bertonneau Department of English Central Michigan University Mount Pleasant MI 48859
[email protected] When human life lay groveling in all men's sight, crushed to the earth under the dead weight of superstition whose grim features loured menacingly upon mortals from the four quarters of the sky, a man of Greece was the first to raise mortal eyes in defiance, first to stand erect and brave the challenge. Fables of gods did not crush him, nor the lightning flash and the growling menace of the sky. Rather, they quickened his manhood, so that he, first of all men, longed to smash the constraining locks of nature's doors. (Lucretius, De rerum natura, Book I, 29) It is not certain whether Lucretius accurately represents Epicurus's opposition to stellar theology when he says that it was motivated by the danger that the gods might return to the world, the possibility of a relapse in antiquas religiones, into the mythical consciousness of dependence on unlimited powers.