Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton

Author:Lawrence Lipton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2015-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

The Gospel According to Anthropology and Prehistory

On the bookshelves of the beat pads you will usually find one or more of the books of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Ernst Cassirer, Susan K. Langer and Maud Bodkin, in paperback editions or expensive hardcover copies that were purchased at the sacrifice of food, perhaps, or filched from bookstores or borrowed from a public library and never returned. Some of the beat are familiar, from college courses or library reading, with Oesterly and Elie Faure, Konrad von Lage, Andrew Lang, Franz Boas, Paul Radin and Melville Herskovits. They all have paperback editions of the books of Margaret Mead and Penguin books like those of Gordon Childe on prehistory and ancient cultures are on their shelves and Leonhard Adam on primitive art.

Not a few among them have had the experience of going back to the Church—it is usually Catholicism—in their search for the numinous, but they have always come back to the anthropologists, who occupy among the beat today much the same position that the writings of Freud did among the Secessionists of the twenties. From their reading of church history they know that the sacred dance was banished from the Church, just as Athens imposed similar bans and restrictions on the goat plays and the mystery religions. Just as the dancing prophetic bands of Israel were viewed with suspicion and hostility by the priests. Official historians and scribes “glossed” the myths into false history and turned the sacred dance into temple pageantry. Robert Graves has made a career of such historical-literary-mythological detective work and his books are widely read among the younger generation of today, both here and in England.

The so-called Cambridge School of classical anthropologists were among the first in our time to give some attention to the role of art and the artist in relation to myth and ritual. The ethnographer with his pencil poised to note the symbolism and the psychological implications of tribal dances, verbal rituals and music also contributed to our knowledge of the subject. Bronislaw Malinowski is perhaps the most perceptive of these chroniclers, although the approach, if not the methods, had already been employed by H. H. Marett who, more than E. B. Tyler and J. G. Frazer, deserves credit for the first clear insight into ritual and myth. H. H. Marett approached “the sacraments of simple folk” as something to be learned, not something to be dissected and classified with scientific detachment or, as has too often been the case, with Protestant Christian bias. To possess what you inherit you must earn it, Marett said, and some of the investigators in this field have emulated his humility. Malinowski, reminding us that religious ritual “does something infinitely more than the mere sacrilizing of a crisis of life,” that it transmits to the initiated not only a knowledge of his duties, privileges and responsibilities but “above all a knowledge of tradition and the communion of sacred things and beings,” goes so far as to add that anthropology should also be a study of our mentality in the light of Stone Age mentality.

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