Sacred Mobilities by Avril Maddrell Alan Terry

Author:Avril Maddrell, Alan Terry [Avril Maddrell, Alan Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Geography, Business & Economics, Industries, Hospitality; Travel & Tourism
ISBN: 9781317060314
Google: sU6rCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-03T02:52:58+00:00

Conclusions

The aura of the crop circle, the movement of the holy statue or image, and things that go bump in a haunted house, sensed as distant communication from mythical otherworlds, may be contrived by a delicate balance of complicity and collusion, psychically insulated from everyday reality within a perceptual field. Framed in terms of a sacred economy, expectancy is important because this kind of activity invites a peculiar attitude of receptivity, and reciprocity on the part of recipients. The kind of modern myths I have discussed here survive by the movement of their localisation not only in relation to place but also context. This is grass roots legend politics, and its cultural mutability is itself a form of mobility.

Peirce’s observation of how semiosis occurs ad infinitum throughout communicative processes whenever truth and fiction, fantasy and reality come into contact echoes the semiotic dynamic described in Turner and Turner’s analyses of pilgrimage, and the performance of and responses to the semiotic or social object as a ‘vehicle’ (Peirce n.d., cited in Hartshorne and Weiss, 1931; Turner and Turner, 1978: 143) carrier of story. This suggests a kind of mobility that is not normally associated with pilgrimage but which, I would argue, applies to the folklore of Christian and other established religious cultures as much as it does to New Age and paranormal legendry. Metaphor, movement and flow are integral to mythical intervention, and to the ways in which Trickster-like behaviour mediates between opposites, activity that is consistent with early Greek notions of flux and poïesis, articulating relations between make-believe (mythos) and ‘rational’ logos, in an effort to open new ontological vistas.

Parallels may be found in Indian storytelling tradition. Legends are not intended to conform to ordinary truth-values. Indeed, in both Indian storytelling and legend-charged environments, the more fanciful the telling and retelling of the legend the more ‘true’ it seems to become (inasmuch as it represents underlying truths, and anxieties, that bind its believers, thus maintaining the gap between everyday truths and ‘the mythical realm of the imagination [where] what is important is the truth as we see it’ (Stevens, 1951: 147). This may also be likened to the conditions of a séance, where a non-event would be a rare event indeed. The same inversions can be observed in both religious pilgrimage and legend trip, where legendeers enter legend environments – a shrine; a haunted house; a prehistoric landscape – in anticipation of encountering legendary semiotic objects. Hearing the stories that ensue, one senses an underlying challenge that is also evident in the Indian tradition: ‘How far can I take my tale before it is disbelieved?’ In legend environments, the most outlandish stories are often the most socially binding, while disbelief can mean alienation. As such, the art of legend telling – orally or by action – may be regarded as a systematic filtering of disbelief, leaving a sediment of the willing to seek, and believe in, that ‘third thing’ (Eco, 1989: 49), which is indigenous to the gap, connecting disparate realities.

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