Deadly Powers by Ehrenreich Barbara. Trout Paul A

Author:Ehrenreich, Barbara.,Trout, Paul A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publisher Services

OUR MONSTROUS IMAGINATION

As should be clear by now, the mythic imagination is cursed by the unsettling irony that it has the power not only to express and vent our primal fear but also to intensify and add to it. It is because of its power to imagine monsters that the mythic imagination is itself monstrous.

The mythic imagination is not governed, unfortunately, by some sort of psychic rheostat that shrewdly limits the production of “monsters” to a suitably therapeutic number. Since the mythic imagination has no built-in constraints, it is able to create more and more monsters until it fills the mythic and mental landscapes with them. When the mythic imagination is not held in check by other cultural institutions, it can trigger a runaway feedback cycle: the more monsters, the more fear, the more fear, the more need of monsters to vent that fear. Belief in and fear of monsters can become so intense that they negatively affect the survival of both the individual and the group.

The example of the Inuit is instructive in this regard. The Inuit are an extremely ingenious—indeed creative—people, managing to solve life-threatening problems with minimum technology. But their active imagination has engendered an array of intimidating and dangerous monsters: dwarves and mermaids that entice and then kill people, huge worms that squirm their way toward the villages to crush them, giant predatory birds able to carry off their victims, immense lake fish able to swallow a human with a single bite, ten-legged polar bears, and all manner of malicious ghosts and cannibal sprits that cause illness or death.56 “There are spirits of snowdrifts, valleys, ice hummocks, rapids, forests; they have jurisdiction over those locales, and many places are named for sprits.”57 In tale after tale, the Inuit, to survive, must battle these strange and dangerous creatures.58

The Inuit are so afraid of the very monsters they themselves have conjured into existence that they impose upon themselves rigorous taboos—formal and sacred instructions—designed to keep them from encountering or offending the very monsters they have imagined. As anthropologist Richard Edgerton explains in Sick Societies,

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