![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mircea Eliade, thou should’st be living at this hour.
In 1987, I wrote to a friend that the fact that Mircea Eliade had died without writing more than ten pages of the final volume of A History of Religious Ideas meant that we were going to have to write that fourth book instead. The three-volume fragment we now have ends with Renaissance hermetism and Tibetan Buddhism, more by chance than by design. Eliade had originally intended to have only three volumes, and split the final one into two parts when it became evident that it was all going more slowly than he had ever envisioned.
Ioan Culianu cobbled together two very different fourth volumes, one in German by various contemporary scholars, the other in English by an assortment of Eliade’s former students. He turned in the English-language manuscript to Eliade’s publisher but was assassinated soon afterward, and the publisher then killed the book for reasons never explained. At the time, Eliade was being accused of having been an Iron Guard Fascist as a youth, and the discipline of history of religions was revolting against his long methodological dominance, of which the volumes of A History of Religious Ideas were the summation and symbol. Culianu had his own divergent opinions, and his early death closed off conversations that have never been reopened, or even remembered.
But I find myself remembering Eliade essays like “History of Religions and Cultural Fashions” when I read things belatedly like Erik Davis’ 1994 “Gods of the Funny Books” interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack, on Davis' splendid techgnosis.com website. (If you don’t know Erik Davis’ Techgnosis, the book, look at it; I hope, at some future date, to write about his new book on California, The Visionary State.) I long for Eliade’s take on this because he appears to have had experiences whereof he was too wise to speak; Tom Altizer’s memoir absolves Eliade of the missing-the-point intellectualizing of which Pollack accuses him in the Davis interview.
Davis is just one of the unconventional purveyors of theory to whom I would direct the folks at the Mythic Imagination Institute (www.mythicjourneys.org), for whose online Mythic Journeys magazine I recently wrote a piece regarding DJ Spooky and the transmutations of myth in the age of digital reproduction. The May 2006 issue of Mythic Journeys contains, surprise, an essay by William Doty on Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
The 1994 Gaiman-Pollack interview goes on to discuss art, religion and ritual not as abstract symbol but as overwhelming direct experience, in terms that make clear why this generation of comics shaded off into graphic novels and took up so many of the strategies of traditional fine art, while also incorporating an amazing amount of ethnographic information in the plot lines.
The interview ends with Davis quoting an extended passage from William Blake’s prose, so apropos to everything that had been said previously that I begin to think I shall have to re-read Blake, not to mention the huge amount of revisionary material that has come out since the days of Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition. Or perhaps at least revisit the web designer who runs the idiosyncratic Institute of Imagination in the South Molton Street building where the Blakes once had digs. He seems to have discarded his Blake-in-the-21st-century website, and the current one is a cryptically concise pitch for IOI memberships.)
So here, finally, are a few of the words available now for well over a decade (originally published in Gnosis magazine, the intellectually serious brainchild of another veteran of the alternative-comics scene). This quote should be well within the limits of fair use for scholarly enterprises, which I hope this blog counts as. (Re Gaiman’s wisecrack about faerie, see Diane Purkiss’ history of the evolution of the topic, At the Bottom of the Garden.)
“GAIMAN: If you going to write about real things, or real things that many people don't believe to be real, you have to write about all of it. Just picking the sweet bit and the gentle bits is always untrue to the source material. Any mythos that is genuine and real, any system of belief that is genuine and real and not some artsy-fartsy little construct, has depths. They go down a long way and there are things moving in those depths, and very often you walk down to the depths before you can get back. That's one of the deals. Otherwise, you wind up with the late Victorian attitude to faeries: flitter-flutter things that come in and go "Are you misewable, Wachel? Now you will be happy." But the further you go back in faerie lore, the stranger and the darker—and very occasionally, the brighter—they get. You have to take both.
POLLACK: In The Unquenchable Fire, God appears in the form of a chocolate-chip cookie salesman on seventh avenue, and the heroine has an argument with him. He tells her that the only things that exist in the universe are ecstasy and suffering, and that human beings choose suffering because it's less frightening than ecstasy. She says, love exists, and he says, love is a form of suffering. And the she decides that God is insane, because God is not mortal, and not being mortal cannot understand human experience.
So whenever I see these ads for shamanic weekends, I'm always suspicious. Because shamanic ecstasy is terrifying.”
Shamanism takes us off into territory explored in depth by my late mentor Daniel C. Noel, and into the very strange realms written about by Daniel Pinchbeck. About whom I have written previously, albeit in an Art Papers essay not currently available online.
In 1987, I wrote to a friend that the fact that Mircea Eliade had died without writing more than ten pages of the final volume of A History of Religious Ideas meant that we were going to have to write that fourth book instead. The three-volume fragment we now have ends with Renaissance hermetism and Tibetan Buddhism, more by chance than by design. Eliade had originally intended to have only three volumes, and split the final one into two parts when it became evident that it was all going more slowly than he had ever envisioned.
Ioan Culianu cobbled together two very different fourth volumes, one in German by various contemporary scholars, the other in English by an assortment of Eliade’s former students. He turned in the English-language manuscript to Eliade’s publisher but was assassinated soon afterward, and the publisher then killed the book for reasons never explained. At the time, Eliade was being accused of having been an Iron Guard Fascist as a youth, and the discipline of history of religions was revolting against his long methodological dominance, of which the volumes of A History of Religious Ideas were the summation and symbol. Culianu had his own divergent opinions, and his early death closed off conversations that have never been reopened, or even remembered.
But I find myself remembering Eliade essays like “History of Religions and Cultural Fashions” when I read things belatedly like Erik Davis’ 1994 “Gods of the Funny Books” interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack, on Davis' splendid techgnosis.com website. (If you don’t know Erik Davis’ Techgnosis, the book, look at it; I hope, at some future date, to write about his new book on California, The Visionary State.) I long for Eliade’s take on this because he appears to have had experiences whereof he was too wise to speak; Tom Altizer’s memoir absolves Eliade of the missing-the-point intellectualizing of which Pollack accuses him in the Davis interview.
Davis is just one of the unconventional purveyors of theory to whom I would direct the folks at the Mythic Imagination Institute (www.mythicjourneys.org), for whose online Mythic Journeys magazine I recently wrote a piece regarding DJ Spooky and the transmutations of myth in the age of digital reproduction. The May 2006 issue of Mythic Journeys contains, surprise, an essay by William Doty on Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
The 1994 Gaiman-Pollack interview goes on to discuss art, religion and ritual not as abstract symbol but as overwhelming direct experience, in terms that make clear why this generation of comics shaded off into graphic novels and took up so many of the strategies of traditional fine art, while also incorporating an amazing amount of ethnographic information in the plot lines.
The interview ends with Davis quoting an extended passage from William Blake’s prose, so apropos to everything that had been said previously that I begin to think I shall have to re-read Blake, not to mention the huge amount of revisionary material that has come out since the days of Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition. Or perhaps at least revisit the web designer who runs the idiosyncratic Institute of Imagination in the South Molton Street building where the Blakes once had digs. He seems to have discarded his Blake-in-the-21st-century website, and the current one is a cryptically concise pitch for IOI memberships.)
So here, finally, are a few of the words available now for well over a decade (originally published in Gnosis magazine, the intellectually serious brainchild of another veteran of the alternative-comics scene). This quote should be well within the limits of fair use for scholarly enterprises, which I hope this blog counts as. (Re Gaiman’s wisecrack about faerie, see Diane Purkiss’ history of the evolution of the topic, At the Bottom of the Garden.)
“GAIMAN: If you going to write about real things, or real things that many people don't believe to be real, you have to write about all of it. Just picking the sweet bit and the gentle bits is always untrue to the source material. Any mythos that is genuine and real, any system of belief that is genuine and real and not some artsy-fartsy little construct, has depths. They go down a long way and there are things moving in those depths, and very often you walk down to the depths before you can get back. That's one of the deals. Otherwise, you wind up with the late Victorian attitude to faeries: flitter-flutter things that come in and go "Are you misewable, Wachel? Now you will be happy." But the further you go back in faerie lore, the stranger and the darker—and very occasionally, the brighter—they get. You have to take both.
POLLACK: In The Unquenchable Fire, God appears in the form of a chocolate-chip cookie salesman on seventh avenue, and the heroine has an argument with him. He tells her that the only things that exist in the universe are ecstasy and suffering, and that human beings choose suffering because it's less frightening than ecstasy. She says, love exists, and he says, love is a form of suffering. And the she decides that God is insane, because God is not mortal, and not being mortal cannot understand human experience.
So whenever I see these ads for shamanic weekends, I'm always suspicious. Because shamanic ecstasy is terrifying.”
Shamanism takes us off into territory explored in depth by my late mentor Daniel C. Noel, and into the very strange realms written about by Daniel Pinchbeck. About whom I have written previously, albeit in an Art Papers essay not currently available online.
