LITMIR.BIZ

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has turned into its opposite, scientific determinism

      In proportion as man, by the development of economics, discovers more and more of the nature of reality, magic sets itself bolder and more elaborate tasks, and more and more is corrected by experience. It proposes to man phantastic possibilities, which man realises. But he does not realise them by magic. Without the absurd ambitions of the shaman and the impossible hopes of the alchemist, the modern chemistry which fulfils them would not be. Always the magician is defeated by “fate”, by the inexorable determinism of things, and it is precisely when he has become conscious of that determinism, and magic has turned into science, that he is able to do in reality the things magic only feigned. Illusion thus plays into the hands of reality. Magic, promising freedom by a blind pressure of the affects, is realised when the emotional content vanishes, when the magician’s eyes are opened, and he becomes conscious of the passionless causality of reality.

      Magic can only exist, as a confused perception of outer reality, because man is himself confused about his relations with it. He has not distinguished himself from his environment—subjective affects are confused with objective qualities How does he clear up this confusion? Not by mere contemplation, refusing to handle the pitch lest he become soiled. He separates himself consciously from his environment by struggling with it and actively interpenetrating it, in the course of the development of economic life. When man has grasped the nature of outer reality by his constant struggle with it in economic production, then he understands clearly the distinction between environment and self, because he understands their unity. He learns that man, as a machine, is subject also to necessity, and that the universe, as a process, is the theatre of free development.

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      How can we separate religion from poetry in the childhood of the race? Both have an economic function and a social content.

      We can distinguish them because we find in poetry, in all ages, a characteristic we do not find in religion the more and more clearly it emerges as “true” religion. Poetry is productive and changeful. The poetry of one age does not satisfy the next age, but each new generation (while appreciating the old poetry) demands poems which more peculiarly and specially express its own problems and aspirations. Thus we have the constant generation of a mass of songs, stories, myths, epics, novels, as a peculiarity of poetic life, which reveals art as something organic and changeful, a flower on the social plant developing and growing with the plant as a whole, because it sucks the same sap, and performs an office that benefits the whole plant

      This incsessant change of poetic art is only possible because the appreciator accepts the illusion as illusory. He accepts the phantasy as expressing objective reality while immersed in the phantasy, but, once the phantasy is over, he does not demand that it be still treated as part of the real world. He does not demand a correspondence of all stories and all poetic statements as he demands a correspondence between the experiences of what he calls his real life

      The world may be fairyland in one story, hell in another. Helen may be seized by Paris in one epic, in another she may elude him and die an honoured death in Egypt. Because of this the poet and his hearer are not faced with the problem of integrating the mock worlds of poetry with the real world of everyday existence on the basis of the logical laws of thought—which by no means implies that no integration of any kind takes place. But the poem or novel is accepted as an illusion. We give to the statements of poetic art only a qualified assent, and therefore reality has no vested interest in them. Because of this there is no barrier to the fluent production which is the life of art in all ages.

      This too is the characteristic of religion, but only in the early stage, when it is still merged with poetry. Religion is then mythology and shows all the spontaneous investments and recklessness of self-contradiction which is characteristic of mythology.

      Why does mythology show this organic characteristic? Because it is organic. Because it is still organically connected with society, penetrating every pore. Native races who see an aeroplane presently have a great white bird figuring in their mythology. Early Christianity shows the same insurgent proliferation of mythology so characteristic of art.

      A new form of religion begins when the mythologising era ends. The mythology is taken over, but it ossifies. Religion has become “true” religion.

      It is plain that mythology, because of the contradictions it contains, can gain only a special kind of consent from the primitive. It demands from him assent to the illogical. So far Levy-Bruhl is correct. But this same illogical assent is given by twentieth-century man to the productions of poetry and literary art. Hamlet lives for him. So do the Furies. So does the Inferno. Yet he does not believe in an after-existence in hell or in personal agents of retribution.

      True, the assent is not of the same strength with twentieth-century man. The gods live for the primitive in the collective festival and the collective emotion. Because so little division of labour exists, because society is still so undifferentiated, the collective world of emotion in which the gods live penetrates every hour of the individual’s life. Not so with the worlds of the theatre or the novel, which segregate themselves from the more complex social life of men. The world of twentieth-century art is more withdrawn—so much so that philosophers continually conceive of it as entirely separate, and advance “purely” aesthetic criteria—art for art’s sake.

      But though the strength of the assent differs, the quality is the same. The world of literary art is the world of tribal mythology become sophisticated and complex and self-conscious because man, in his struggle with Nature, has drawn away from her, and laid bare her mechanism and his own by a mutual reflexive action. Mythology with its ritual, and art with its performances, have similar functions—the adaptation of man’s emotions to the necessities of social co-operation Both embody a confused perception of society, but an accurate feeling of society. Mythology, it is true, has other functions. But we are concerned here with the poetic content of mythology, which afterwards separates itself out as a distinct sphere.

      Because mythology so interpenetrates the daily life of the primitive, it demands no overt, formal assent. No Holy Inquisition rams it down people’s throats, because in the collective festival it rises vividly from their hearts. Therefore it is flexible. It yields and changes as the tribe’s relation to the environment or itself changes. The incursion of an aeroplane or a conqueror produces a corresponding adaptation of the collective mind by a recasting of the always fluid mythology. Hence mythology has a “self-righting” tendency; it remains on the whole true; it reflects accurately the collective emotional life of the tribe in its relations with the environment to the degree in which the tribe’s own interpenetration of its environment in economic production makes accuracy possible.

      Why does the age of mythology as a real organic growth give place to the age of dogma and “true” religion when, because the mythology must now be accepted as true, it ceases to reflect the continual movement of reality and tends to become ossified and dead? Mythology ceases to grow and change and conrtadict itself, and is set up as something rigid and absolutely true. Faith, a virtue unknown to the primitive, is necessary for its acceptance. Faith was not necessary to the primitive because of his simple direct experience in the world of collective emotion. Faith is not necessary to the novel-reader, because of his immediate direct experience in the world of art. Faith becomes necessary when mythology ossifies into “true” religion. Faith and dogma are the signs of lack of faith and suspicion of doctrine. They show that mythology has in some way separated itself from society.

      How has this come about? Only because society has separated itself from itself; because the matrix of religion has become only a part of society, stranding in antagonism to the rest of society. Because of this, religion becomes isolated from the rest of society. “True” religion marks the emergence of economic classes in society. The end of mythology as a developing thing is the end of undifferentiated tribal life.

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      Marx has explained how the division of labour demands a class of overseers, village headmen, managers of irrigation works, etc, whose supervision, as differentiation proceeds, gradually passes from administration of the social means of production

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