Review: "Youth Without Youth" by Mircea Eliade

When I saw the Coppola adaptation of this book I somewhat understood why the movie had received so many negative reviews: it was not the action-packed, World War II movie that it's setting might have lent itself towards. Instead, and in true fashion to Eliade's work, the movie dealt primarily with the metaphysical, spiritual, and even paranormal possibilities lurking behind every age, when the aging Romanian professor Dominic Matei is struck by lightning and suddenly rejuvenated, not just physically but with an hypermnesia that allows him to know anything he desires. However, I was somewhat displeased, as much of this came off as slightly removed from the action of the story itself, as if the plot was but an ill-fitting coat hanger for the ideas presented.

As far as Eliade's novella, there is perhaps even less action and drama, and more focus on the possibility of ideas, including a random side adventure into Ireland to witness the Committee to Celebrate the Centennial of the Commemoration of the Death of Irish Poet, Magus, and Irredentist Sean Bran, a scene that seems entirely unrelated to the rest of the book, was dropped from the movie, and yet is one of the more enjoyable sections. "Youth Without Youth" reads more like a synopsis than a fleshed out work of fiction; one could easily imagine it expanded into a tome much like his masterful "Forbidden Forest." However, it also seems possible (the notorious "death of the author" aside) that as this was written at the end of Eliade's life he may have been slightly more concerned with getting the ideas down rather than developing them. If anything it could be a dying scholar and storyteller's wish to have one more chance at life to complete his work, while at the same time realizing the futility of that desire, here cast in terms of Chaungtzu's butterfly parable. Dominic Matei, perhaps Eliade himself, is an old man dreaming that he is a young man dreaming that he is every man, eventually falling into Eliade's spiritual catch-22 of the Eternal Return, bringing the still youthful Matei full circle to die where he had originally desired to commit suicide, having still not completed his life's work but learned to love life in the process.

Library of Unique Experiences

As a writer and avid reader it often worries me that in this hyper-modern world literature is becoming a rather insular art form: those who read read, and the rest, the majority, don't. This is one reason why I am fascinated by book lists such as these lists of the 50 best cult books or banned and challenged books. Hell, I even geek out over lists on Amazon, because sometimes these kinds of arbitrary collections can point me to books I ought to read, and even more importantly, suggest the extreme influence literature has had, and still has, on individuals.

For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.

Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.

Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.

Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.

Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.

Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.

Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.

Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.

John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.

J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.

Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."

Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.

Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.

Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.

Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.

Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.

Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.

Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.

Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.

Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.

The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”

The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”

After recalling that he does not know when he died, the narrator in Samuel Beckett’s “The Calmative” says that he needs to tell himself a story in order to calm down. While he could tell a modern story, the narrator insists that he has to tell his story “in the past… as though it were a myth, or an old fable” (Beckett, 28). Though the narrator’s mental state does not seem to resolve to one of calmness by the end of the story, his choice to utilize a mythic form of storytelling suggests that he may find this kind of narrative potentially more calming than depictions of modern life.

In order to discuss the use of myth in “The Calmative” we must first make a distinction between the popular use of the term myth, which designates something as being untrue, and the more traditional use of myth as a narrative form. Though there are many, and often conflicting, characteristics of what makes a story mythic, the myth-theorist Mircea Eliade gives a generally accepted definition of the term: myths are narratives that a particular culture believes to be true, which often use the adventures of supernatural beings to explain the foundation of and make sense of that culture’s reality (Eliade, 5-6).
While Beckett’s narrator is not necessarily telling a cultural story dealing with supernatural beings, it is important to note that nor is he telling a deliberate falsehood. The narrator’s myth draws on certain forms and themes that can be found in cultural mythologies, which he points to within the text of “The Calmative.” The story must take place in the past, the narrator needs “another age, that age to become another age in which I became what I was” (Beckett, 28). This somewhat circular passage seems to suggest Eliade’s definition of a foundational story; the narrator’s story takes him back to the time in which his reality was made. If we take this reality to be the narrator’s present state of death, then we might expect his myth to recount the events or adventures leading to his demise.

Beyond this somewhat “autobiographical” function of myth, or of stories set in the past tense, Beckett’s narrator also points to certain narrative forms that are common to mythology, which he attempts to use within his calming story. The narrator remarks that his story has to be like the one his father used to read him, the adventures of a boy named Joe Breem, or Breen, who swam for miles through the night “out of sheer heroism” (Beckett, 30). It is suggested that the narrator must go on a similar heroic adventure, one including the plot elements of “the setting forth, the struggle and perhaps the return” (Beckett, 30). This structure of the heroic journey is common to mythic narratives, and has perhaps been made most recognizable by Joseph Campbell, who discusses it in similar terms of the departure, the initiation, and the return (Campbell, ix). The narrator even recognizes the literary tradition of using this mythic motif when he recalls the woods at the mouth of hell, an allusion to, and perhaps a suggestion that he is inhabiting, the journey of Dante’s “Inferno.”

The other mythic form that Beckett’s narrator attempts to calm himself with is that of a fall and redemption, a theme commonly found in Christian mythology. Early in the story the narrator mentions that he fell, called for help, and it came, perhaps within the series of events leading to his death. This is echoed near the end of the story when the narrator actually does fall. For a moment he is “sated with dark and calm” (Beckett, 45), and with the redemptive courtesy of not being touched by the throng that he thinks surrounds him, before this is swept away and he continues on his journey. While the structure of this mythic form is less clearly articulated within the text than that of the hero’s journey, a number of references to the mythology of Christ are sprinkled through the story. From the “Shepherd’s Gate” and “bats like flying crucifixions” to the “colours of the Virgin” in the butcher’s window (Beckett, 31, 44), it seems that the narrator is striving to find a similar mythic calmative as that found by Christ: a redemptive death.

Having established the devices by which the narrator of “The Calmative” hopes to tell his story, we can now turn to the question of how this mythic form of storytelling may be capable of calming him. Beckett returns to the story of Joe Breem, or Breen in the first text from his later collection, “Texts for Nothing,” where it is further elaborated that this story “began unhappily and it ended happily, every evening, a comedy” (Beckett, 79). Drawing on the elements of comedic drama, in which the narrative resolves positively for its protagonists, this suggests that the story told by the narrator of “The Calmative” might have a calming effect because it too can resolve. Looking at the mythic narrative forms discussed above we see that these each have that possibility of reaching a positive ending; a fall can be redeemed, a journey can be returned from, a story told as if in the past can ideally reach the present. The narrator hopes that by telling a mythic story he can reach the calm of a definitive ending.

Another calming element of this mythic form of storytelling is suggested in “The Calmative” by looking at what specifically in his father’s story calms the narrator. It is not enough that his father tell him the story, but it has to be read “evening after evening” (Beckett, 30), without missing a single word or picture. What is calming in this story is its repetition, its familiarity. In “Texts for Nothing” the narrator says that he is “all ears for the old stories” (Beckett, 78); what makes his father’s story familiar, and consequently his own, is that they can draw on the repetition of familiar elements throughout the history of literature and myth. It is calming for the narrator to cast himself in the role of Dante or Christ because he knows these stories, and in them he can hope to find a similar ending for his own. The pictures in the story of Joe Breem, or Breen were already pictures of the narrator. By identifying with these “supernatural,” or at least heroic, literary beings from his cultural tradition, it appears that Beckett’s narrator may indeed be telling a myth in the full scope of Eliade’s definition. Telling his story as if it was a myth allows the narrator the calming effect of existing within an established cultural narrative.

But, having chosen to tell his story in this particular form, what makes a mythic narrative more calming for the narrator than a story set in modern times? What makes him long “for the tender nonesuch” (Beckett, 41), and for the shade of his wood far from the terrible light of the city? Though the narrator attempts to tell his story as if it were in another age, he admits that what he tells “this evening is passing this evening, at this passing hour” (Beckett, 28). He lives in the modern present, where “houses and factories darken the air, trams go by, and under your feet wet from the grass there are suddenly cobbles” (Beckett, 28). If a story set in the past is calming because it can hope to reach towards and explain the present, the present must be anxiety provoking because it can only continue moving forward without allowing the narrator to rest in a specific point in time. With the “scarcity of passers-by” and the “extraordinary light shed by the streetlamps” (Beckett, 38), the narrator is left to ask everyone he encounters what time it is, as if being able to fix himself in a specific moment will calm him. But when he finally is told a time it leaves him just as anxious as before. Even his father’s greatcoat, which would fix his story in the 1900s, has become a sleeveless cloak, perhaps indistinguishable from those worn throughout the ages.

The anxiety causing and alienating effects of modernity echo throughout “The Calmative.” The trams and busses run “as if underwater” (Beckett, 31), the houses and factories, even the people lurking behind their windows are described as if in a dream. Like in his fruitless quest to determine what time it is, the narrator describes these elements of modern life as being unrecognizable, unfamiliar and thus unsettling. Mythic narratives can be calming by presenting a repetition of familiar scenes and characters, but a modern story can only present the nameless goatherd and salesman, people sunk into themselves and all moving in the same direction. Even more unsettling is the narrator’s inability to locate the Shepherd’s Gate and constellation of the Bears. Without these recognizable, mythic elements, the narrator is unable to find his way out of the modern city into the calm of a familiar story. Though the narrator attempts to place himself in the woods of the chronicler d’Aubigné, or the posture of the poet Walther, no element of a modern story can replicate the familiarity of a literary tradition. It is only with the passage of time that stories become culturally accepted, and so the narrator is left to wander through a story that even he is not yet sure how it will end.

The strongest blow to the possibility of a calming modern story is its inability to achieve the structure of myth (though perhaps this also signals the narrator’s inability to tell his story as if it were a myth). The story does not have a recognizable beginning, instead of setting forth the narrator suddenly finds himself in a wood in which “no trace remained” (Beckett, 28) of his previous passage. Nor is there a struggle or initiation. The narrator says, “this evening something has to happen… as in myth and metamorphosis” (Beckett, 29-30), but despite his attempted interactions with the other characters no real heroic action takes place that might calm him. Even when the salesman grabs him the narrator claims that nothing has changed, and he wanders on looking for his moment of redemption.

As for a narrative return, the story “ends” with the narrator still wandering lost through the city. This lack of resolve can be taken as symptomatic of modern stories, because the present still continues to move forward without foreseeable end. In contrast to the contained form of the myth, Beckett presents us with what might be considered a definition of a modern story: the salesman’s story of a life that is “brief and dense, facts, without comment” (Beckett, 40). Though the narrator finds this story almost fairy-like in places the salesman corrects his mistake by explaining that he left his lover Pauline, who will only grow old and die. We do not find here the happy ending of a comedy, such as that ascribed to the story of Joe Breem, or Breen. There is no typical comedic ending of a wedding; there is no rebirth, no happily-ever-after. In this modern story of a life there is only divorce and then death.

Of course, for the narrator of “The Calmative,” a happy ending might be one that ends in his being able to die. But this kind of ending may only be possible in a story told through the traditionally familiar, positively resolving, and foundational elements of mythic narratives. The calming effect that the narrator seeks is otherwise unattainable in the anxiety-ridden and never-ending stories of modern life.


Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. “The Calmative” and “Texts for Nothing.” Stories and Texts for Nothing. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967
Campbell, Joseph. “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968
Eliade, Mircea. “Myth and Reality.” New York: Harper & Row, 1963

On Transcendence

I have been thinking much lately about what has been a lifelong desire to transcend or escape from what has otherwise felt like a mundane and often painful reality. I have desired true miracles, magical occurences, other realities, even yesterday I was looking at some buildings on campus and thought that if I walked past them I might find myself in another set of places that do not exist except in my dreams. I have longed for this since I was a child, and my twin and I used to walk up and down the beach creating an imaginary mansion between us that we would inhabit whenever life was just too little to hold our attentions. I have always sought the irreal, and all my arts, rebellions, highs (of which there have been many), have just been a part of this desire. And yet I still don't know why. Was there some buried crises or trauma from my childhood thjat forced me to want to escape reality? Was there instead no such crises? Was this just a product of my overactive imagination, precocious reading, social ostracization, and somewhat spiritual upbringing? Am I really just a "recovering Catholic," in that I've sought for all manner of spiritual and liminal experiences because God never showed himself to exist?

I have been equally fascinated with magic from a young age, and have been involved over the years with all manner of ritual and religious behaviors. And though many irreal and seemingly miraculous things have happened in my life, whether by my own actions or not, never has anything occured that has completely surpassed my expectations of what is possible. Even my "meeting with God" in '03 can be attributed to the liminal or shamanic state induced by the San Pedro I had consumed, and thus reduced to chemicals in the brain and the powers of imagination. The clouds did not open up while I was walking down the street and angels step out to greet me. It was only ever the sunset, and the only angel I've met is, despite her immense powers, only all too human. I never woke up from a horrendous nightmare to find myself metamorphosized into an enormous insect. It has instead only been a feeling, a metaphor. I think of my younger brother, supposedly kidbnapped by aliens. Did this really happen? Is it only psychological? Is there any difference between the two if reality is indeed some holographic simulation, as scientists currently theorize? Was I abducted too, and have I just repressed it and continually sought out proof, justification? Instead am I merely jealous that it was not me? I used to take the garbage out, and look up at the orange sky in delirious fear that this time they were actually coming to get me. I did not long for it. And the time I was in Oregon and looked up to see that one point of light doing loops in the sky unlike a star, plane, or satelite before speeding off. I was almost relieved, accepted it, perhaps because it was so far away, so inconsequential to verge on the meaningless and thus not a threat to my reality. And I was also stoned.

Show me a sign! I want to cry out, distraught that this glaring lack of a true miracle or magic really does disprove God, the transcendent, forgetting perhaps the miraculous complexity and improbability of the ultimately real, which has yet to reveal anything more than that. It is these thoughts which occasionally lead me to the question of intentionally going mad, in order to see the spirits that we feel must lurk on the other side of the real, forever taunting us with thir elusive presences. It is the lure of the voices, the visions, the unrectifiable break from the Real. And of course, even that insanity is reducible to a state of mind, as is all perception.

Perhaps we can never quite let ourselves experience, or even just see, that which is beyond our conception of the possible. Perhaps there are miracels walking amongst us all the time, and it is just easier, safer to function, to stick to our patterned realities and not let any of that in. We wouldn't know what we were looking at anyway, and would walk right past, the way I couldn't see those peculiar rose-like mushrooms growing in the forest until a friend had pointed them out to me. And then I saw them everywhere. I want to learn, like Rilke's character Malte, to look, and to look again. I think of all the gods, the faeries, Eliade's hierophanies that filled past ages, and I suspect that these were seen because they were then not beyond what was possible, what was expected. We now just have other things that are possible, that are expected, in which the irreal holds very little socio-cultural value. I could only roughly begin to ask why that is.

For all the looking I've done, for all I've tried to extend my perceptions and conceptions of what is possible, for all the incredible things I've actually seen (and if you'd have only seen what I've seen with these eyes), I am still waiting for something that is yet a hundred percent outside of my expectations. I am still waiting for reality to break open, for the time when I will walk over that hill and find myself in that other place that I can only vaguely go to in my dreams.

Dreams on the Cave Walls

There's a great essay over on the Dream Studies Portal about the prehistory of lucid dreaming. It seems that many of the kinds of designs found on the walls of paleolithic caves, from spirals and grids to monsters and sex organs, are the kinds of images that are said (by Eliade) to occur in connection with shamanic trance states, but they also occur to the modern, and perhaps prehistoric, dreaming mind, suggesting that our earliest ancestors may have been practitioners of dream-work. Having fallen to sleep to hypnogogic visions of radiant grids dancing in my head, I can identify with the suggestion that this kind of imagery is perhaps somehow hard-wired into our nervous systems. However, I am also sure that many of these kinds of images have appeared in my dreams, whether or not I have been lucid or in any shamanic trance kind of states, and perhaps there is something endemic about the geometrical and fantastic to our experience of reality itself.

The other alternative seems to suggest that we are really just disembodied brains floating in space. All things being equal, science suggests that reality is very, very unlikely to create a universe as complex, organized, and well, as pleasantly skinned as our own. Chances are that we exist in a much more chaotic manner, sans bodies, and more frequently than not, that monstrosity in your nightmares is more real than you are!

The biggest challenge is that is just as highly improbable that time only moves in one direction, and sooner or later someone will find out that it doesn't. Personally I already think that this is the case, for how else could we explain ancient artifacts that defy our concepts of history, such as ancient carvings of dinosaurs, prehistoric metal spheres, and batteries from the dawn of time? I suspect that time is just a subjective paradox, the deeper we look into the past (or the future for all you sci-fi fans), the more we are likely to find ourselves and our desires reflected in that distant eon. I'm almost surprised someone hasn't found a prehistoric car yet.

Review: Eliade's "The Forbidden Forest"

Last summer, watching me struggle through the symbolisms of my dreams, Sophie recommended that I look into the work of Mircea Eliade, who she had heard of in reference to a class on narrative she was taking. I immediately picked up a copy of "The Sacred and the Profane," which while presenting some interesting theories struck me as being somewhat meandering in tone and content. In the fall, during my Myth Symbol and Ritual class, I had a greater chance to look into Eliade's writing, and began to appreciate the depth of his scholarship and research into the field of comparative mythology and symbolism. However, as my teacher pointed out, while Eliade is known in America primarily for his work as the "founder" of the study of the history of religions, in Europe he is perhaps better known for his novels. In fact, some of his critics argue that Eliade's academic work is marred by a rather literary mindset, in which he seeks to present his material like a labyrinthine narrative more befitting of the magical realism of Marquez or Borges, and that his theories on mythology, and in particular the idea of the eternal return and the terror of history, were highly shaped by Eliade's youth in Romania between the World Wars. All this somewhat delighted me, and I was quite pleased to find in the school library a copy of Eliade's fictional masterpiece, "The Forbidden Forest."

Set in Romania and other parts of Europe in the years leading up to and through the second World War, this is the story of Stefan Vizeru, a man who desperately seeks to escape from the clutches of time, as his county and life are destroyed around him. Eliade presents this through startling psychological portraits of characters who all desperately attempt to live in their own personal mythologies, while furthering his own specific theories of hierophanies, the eternal return, etc. The Romanian title of the novel roughly translates as "The Night of Saint John," and the tale opens with Stefan meeting a young woman Ileana, named after a princess in Romanian folklore, who he searches for throughout the next twelve years until he meets her again on that same night in the same forbidden forest. Stefan is obsessed with finding experiences that are more real than real, such as a car that he believes the girl arrived in, or the mysterious woman Zissu whose name is mentioned while he is listening through a wall. Again and again, Stefan returns to the same characters and places, so that the whole novel, and all the historic events that take place in it, feel that they are really a dream lived between the two meetings in the forest. While many modern (or post-modern) novels try to make use of mythology, they often end up using stale tropes, whereas Eliade's exhaustive work on the subject is instead woven masterfully into his character's lives, so that they end up living out their own versions of the classic myths. Similarly, Eliade seems aware that he can only fully depict someone trying to escape from time by accurately depicting them in a historical setting, and the places where that "real world" seems to stop functioning and another time breaks through. On the whole, this novel bespeaks of a masterful grasp of symbols, storytelling, and a desire to break through the real world into a time that may indeed seem more real to those who seek to live it.

Review: "A Short History of Myth"

In her brief but compelling book, "A Short History of Myth," the historian of religion Karen Armstrong presents a succinct introduction to mythology. She traces its function and development for human society from the dawn of history up to the modern scientific view of myth as false, and the absolute need for a return to mythic thinking in the post-modern world. While her introductory definition of mythology draws heavily on the work of Mircea Eliade and his notions of hierophanies and the "eternal return," as well as the ever-popular monomythologizing of Joseph Campbell, it does not however fall pray to the faults of either a rabid comparative mythology that refuses to acknowledge the importance of distinct cultural contexts in the development of myth, or the even more insidious notion that mythology represents a primitive mentality and un-rational explanation of natural phenomena. Instead, Armstrong describes myth as an art form or "counter-narrative," which allows man to "cope with the problematic human predicament" and "live more intensely" in the world (1-6). As such, her definition of myth harks more towards the idea that myth describes not history, but a symbolic or metaphoric relationship that orients mankind in reality. Looking at the earliest examples of religious expression in Neanderthal graves, Armstrong posits five important aspects or functions of myth: they are rooted in the experience and fear of death, are inseparable from ritual actions and re-creations, force their participants to go beyond the extremes of their experience, prescribe how humans ought to behave, and speak of a transcendent reality that mankind is always seeking for in order to affirm their existence (4-5). Starting from the earliest religious myths of hunter-gathering societies, replete with shamanistic behavior and supreme sky gods, Armstrong takes us through the violent mother deities and dying consort gods that accompanied the discovery of agriculture, the cyclic wars and floods that described the conquest of the gods of order over chaos during the rise of the city-states, the blossoming of the ethical sages and religions around the axial turn of the first millennium, the immanent descent into the historical doctrines and mysticisms of the big three monotheistic religions, and the inevitable death of myth at the hands of Western rationalism and science in the modern age. While her discussion of this history of mythology once again relies on Eliade's own theories in his "Patterns In Comparative Religion" and "Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries," Armstrong's glance at the modern uses of mythology strikes home, critiquing fundamentalists who would interpret the Bible literally, the lack of stories that help us understand the nihilistic despair of modern warfare and terrorism, and the misplaced worship of pop-culture icons, suggesting that "myth must lead to imitation or participation, no passive contemplation" (135), or worse, sterile rationalization. In order to offer some sense of hope, and to suggest a place where myth may indeed be thriving, Armstrong wraps up with a discussion of the use of mythic themes in modern literature and art, from T.S. Elliot to Malcolm Lowry. While she laments that the modern novel is at best profane and far removed from the spiritual and ritual context that engendered mythology, she suggests that reading can still be highly transformative and orienting, and that "if it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another..." and that if "professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, [then] our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world" (148-9). Despite this pronouncement that myth is primarily dead it may however be possible that we still live under the thrall of mythological tropes even today, in the guise of movie action heroes, the need for an edenic eternal youth, the desire to demonize our strangers and enemies, even in the scientific quest itself to know all that there is to know and build all that there is to build. But nonetheless, mankind seems to want to remain blissfully (or brutally) unawares of this eternal return to the mythic condition, and it may indeed be as of yet unwritten works of literature, and art, that could allow us to once again understand our selves in this world.

Active Dreaming

Among other fantastic images like last night's flying fish, I have been dreaming for the past week about climbing up the endless stairwells of an enormous tower, traveling to space, and trying to find a way to unlock a solitary window at the end of a long hallway. Certainly these symbols, and the often comic ways they are framed, have some relation to things I have been paying attention to in my waking life recently, and if not, could be considered dream signs akin to attempting to turn on a light. However, I am not trying to psychoanalyze myself, or have a lucid dream, but to have an active dream (or as I might jokingly put it, to go on a dream quest), dreaming of symbols and narratives of ascension in order to dream myself to the heaven of my mythological dream world, much the way that last year I used descension narratives to dream myself "to hell and back." This original idea had come after years of studying techniques of dreaming and symbolizing, Campbell's hero's journey monomyth, Géza Róheim's "The Gates of the Dream," James Hillman's "Dream and the Underworld," and some of the classics of epic and mythology wherein a character journey's to the underworld in order to bring back some family member, lost idea, etc... Having dreamt myself to my own personal hell, to face my deepest unconscious fears head on before getting back into school and moving on with my life, I figured it was time to continue the journey in the other direction, especially since the question of gods and spirituality has been a much larger, imminent unknown for so much of my life.

In order to do this, I have been giving my focus to symbolisms that surround such mystical or shamanic ascents (cf. Eliade's writings on the topic in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries and Images and Symbols): climbing ropes, stairs, towers, the cosmic tree, birds (and angels), the spheres of the heavens, rainbows, etc... visualizing these kinds of scenes each night before going to bed, and attending to such images as they might turn up in my waking life. So far I have had a rather stunning success finding myself working my way up through the tower of sleep (always a potent symbol in my dreaming), but I also know that I could get stuck here, that some other image is needed, like a puzzle that needs its key in order to move on. During the early stages of my descension dreaming I found myself similarly confronted with and stuck in scenes reminiscent of the accompanying narrative symbols I was trying to evoke until I finally realized that one of the dream characters was asking me for three coins, much like those given to the ferryman by the dead. Consequently I took three coins with me into the next dream (under my pillow, with other similar dream tools), and was finally able to descend to the depths I had sought. Of course, I'm not quite sure what sort of similar symbol or tool accompanies ascension narratives, perhaps being much less familiar with the literature, but my dreams keep suggesting that music might unlock the window so that I can leap out and fly.

The Future of Religious Studies

I just had my last talk with Dr. Clothey before the end of the semester and his return to retirement. He mentioned that he has a few more books left in him, including a collected essays on mythology that sounds intriguing, and we debated a little about boundary situations, the need for religious studies to branch into other fields such as literature and music (as well as into other cultures than the current fascination with Hindu and Judeo-Christian religions), modern atheism vs. spirituality, and the necessity of balancing historical vs. comparative studies (a topic that has been increasingly engaging my mind as I struggle to figure out just how it is possible to still give credence to the occurrence of religious phenomena for a particular people while at the same time attempting to understand deeper structures or meta-symbols that may occur throughout human spiritual experience). While Clothey seemed particularly glad of my interest in this field he seemed a bit saddened by the state of Religious Studies both at Pitt and through other Universities. Though many of these programs are growing, most of the interesting journals no longer exist, and any of the really interesting people to study under are either retired or retiring. Furthermore, he suggested that it might be difficult to get a job in the field without a specialization in some particular culture, and even then it's certainly not something to do for the money. Of course, I'm not fascinated by spiritual narratives because I think anyone will pay me to look at them, rather because I think there is something of inestimable value to be learned that may still be useful to understanding human experience, even if this means having to puzzle through all this myself. Thank goodness there are libraries.

Before our talk I checked out "The Forbidden Forest," Mircea Eliade's epic novel which weaves together in a narrative many of his thoughts on myth and symbol, and was quite pleased to find these thoughts in his introduction, which seem to sum up so much of my own desire to study narratives of dreams and beliefs:

"...literature is, or can be, in its own way an instrument of knowledge. Just as a new axiom reveals a previously unknown structure of the real (that is, it founds a new world), so also any creation of the literary imagination reveals a new Universe of meanings and values. Obviously, these new meanings and values endorse one or more of the infinite possibilities open to man for being in the world, that is, for existing... The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and in his own interior world. That it is a matter of a structure of the human condition is shown, inter alia, by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales...

"Quite as revealing in my view are the experiments carried out... in connection with the psychology and physiology of sleep... they confirm the organic need of man to dream- in other words, the need for "mythology." At the oneiric level, "mythology" means above all narration, because it consists in the envisioning of a sequence of epic or dramatic episodes. Thus man, whether in a waking state or dreaming... has need of attending upon adventures and happenings of all sorts, or of listening to them being narrated, or of reading them. Obviously, the possibilities of narrative are inexhaustible, because the adventures of the characters can be varied infinitely. Indeed, characters and happenings can be manifest on all planes of the imagination, thereby making possible reflections of the most "concrete" reality as well as the most abstract fantasy...

"...man- is continually fascinated by the chronicling of the world, that is, by what happens in his world or in his soul. He longs to find out how life is conceived, how destiny is manifest- in a word, in what circumstances the impossible becomes possible, and what are the limits of the possible. On the other hand, he is happy whenever, in this endless "history" (events, adventures, meetings, and confrontations with real or imaginary personages, etc.) he recognizes familiar scenes, personages, and destinies known from his own oneiric and imaginary experiences or learned from others."

Vivid Wanderings: The Gunwinggu Rainbow Serpent as Symbolic of Indigenous Australian Life

Vivid Wanderings: The Gunwinggu Rainbow Serpent as Symbolic of Indigenous Australian Life

Throughout Indigenous Australian belief systems there consistently arises the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent, a mythological being known by various names to individual tribes but generally linked with water (Berndts, World 251). In other cultures, the rainbow has often symbolized a connection to the heavens, whereas serpents may serve as intermediaries to the unmanifest, chthonic realms; though both these symbols occasionally share a common connection to water, it is perhaps solely in Indigenous Australian myth that rainbows and serpents are portrayed in one entity (Cowan 22). According to the anthropological studies of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Rainbow Serpents were generally depicted as living in deep waterholes and are responsible for rainbows, rain, and the quartz crystals used by Indigenous Australian medicine-men (19). While the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent may have its source in natural phenomena, it was far more than just a rainbow or a snake (Eliade 115). Ngaljod, the Rainbow Serpent of the Gunwinggu tribe of west Arnhem Land, was portrayed with a host of other meanings. She was attributed with the creation of the landscape, animals, and spirit-children, and was associated with certain religious rituals and socio-economic taboos (Mountford 78-9). These characteristics of the Rainbow Serpent were more common in northern Australia, but there was often disagreement over the sex and number of Rainbow Serpents, and occasionally other creatures would take on roles attributed to these iridescent ophidians (Maddock, Introduction 2-5). Such cross-continental ambiguity makes it difficult to assign an ultimate meaning to the Rainbow Serpent for all Indigenous Australians. By placing the phenomenon of Ngaljod first in its specific socio-cultural context, and then in contradistinction to the diffusion of Rainbow Serpents across the continent, it may be possible to offer a hermeneutical interpretation of what this symbol meant for the whole life of the Gunwinggu tribe, and why, despite its variations and current cultural degradation, the multivalent symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent spanned Indigenous Australian belief.
As the Indigenous Australians did not keep historical records beyond their myths, it is difficult to date their culture or its specific symbols. Based on scant archeological evidence it is believed to be possible that they settled in Australia roughly 30,000 years ago (Berndts, World 4). However, traces of red ochre found on skeletal remains from that period imply that there was already a substantial spiritual tradition, placing the date much earlier (Cowan 7). Either way, linguistic lineage suggests that the first Australians migrated from Southern Asia and reached the continent by sea (Cowan 9), eventually landing on the northwest coast (Berndts, World 2-3), which could explain why the Rainbow Serpent picks up cosmogonic connotations in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land regions.

The Gunwinggu were one of over 500 distinct tribes that existed in Australia prior to European contact (Cowan 68). Their traditional territory was on the western and southwestern side of what is now the Arnhem Land Reserve in northern Australia, a coastal environment well supplied with natural resources and water (Berndts, Man 1-3). Like the other Indigenous Australian tribes, the Gunwinggu had a minimum of material goods, did not live in permanent houses, and hunted and collected their food with the aim of sustaining their natural environment (Berndts, World 7-8). The tribe was bound by actual or implied genealogy and common rules for behavior and language (Berndts, World 32-6), but in the typical Indigenous Australian pattern, lived in small, dispersed foraging groups that occasionally coalesced into larger units for religious ceremonies and trade (Berndts, Man 105). Unlike most tribes, matrilineal descent was primarily used by the Gunwinggu to establish social and marriage relationships (Berndts, World 61), though patrilineal decent was effective in delineating land ownership and religious responsibility (Berndts, Man 111). Typically men hunted and performed the rituals while women collected food and raised children (Berndts, World 119). Tribal economy relied on these natural resources, and was based on reciprocal gift exchange and trade (Berndts, World 132), but magico-religious beliefs served as the major focal point of their culture and life (Berndts, Man 112).

Though Indigenous Australian life has been characterized by cultural isolation and the rejection of outside influences (Cowan 19-20), the Gunwinggu have had a long history of interaction with others (Berndts, Man 1). Not only did they trade goods and ideas with other tribes, but also there was sustained contact with Indonesian traders whom they called Macassans, and later with Japanese pearling fleets. A group of unidentified islands to the northwest called ‘Macassar’ became the vague point of origin for both these traders and the Gunwinggu’s mythological characters (Berndts, Man 4).

The Indigenous Australians explained their origins through long myth-cycles variously translated as the Eternal Dream Time, or the Dreaming, which described a time before mankind when supernatural beings or ancestral heroes appeared and wandered across the land, creating life and culture in the process (Eliade 42-3). The Dreaming was the most fundamental aspect of Indigenous Australian life, and offered much more than an account of creation. The myths described how the supernatural power of the ancestral heroes was embodied in the Australian landscape, as well as in the social precepts and rituals of the Indigenous Australians in a way that made those powers available for current life (Charlesworth 9-10). The Dreaming conjured an immediate or eternal present where the actions of the mythic beings were still occurring, particularly during ceremonies (Cowan 26), thus setting a precedent for all human action and relationship (Eliade 43).

Like the other Indigenous Australian tribes, the Gunwinggu myths did not tell of the creation of the earth or sky. The land was already in place when the first people arrived, and after altering the featureless landscape and preparing it for human habitation, the mythic beings left their spiritual essence or djang behind (Berndts, Man 18), often in sacred sites which marked their final resting place (Eliade 45). A djang also lived in every representative of a given species (Berndts, Man 114), in ritual objects, as spirit-children that women found at waterholes in order to become pregnant, and as the men in which these ancestral beings were presently incarnated (Eliade 49-50). This Indigenous Australian belief, generally called totemism, allowed man to express his direct spiritual connection to the world and the Dreaming (Cowan 39). In a totemic fashion, the Gunwinggu considered any rainbow to be the original Ngaljod serpent, and men could summon her great floods by smashing a rock associated with the serpent’s djang, which in myths was performed as an act of revenge or suicide (Berndts, Man 114, 27). As opposed to the ancestral heroes who created man and culture, only those beings connected to a local site were considered djang, except the Rainbow Serpent, who was both a creator and a local spirit (Berndts, Man 19).

The Gunwinggu word for rainbow, mai?, generally included a class of living beings; animals, reptiles, and birds that were biologically male, but when referring directly to the rainbow the term was affixed with the feminine prefix ngal- (Berndts, Man 20). The Rainbow Serpent Ngaljod, also known as Ngalmud or Ngaldargid, was often credited in the myths with giving birth to the first humans as the archetypal Mother (Berndts, Man 20). She came underground from ‘Macassar,’ carrying spirit-children inside her; she made humans’ feet, hands, and eyes, her urine became water, she taught men how and where to dig for food and what to eat, explained the djang and myths, and gave breath to children in the womb (Berndts, Man 117-8). Furthermore, Ngalmud was the Gunwinggu word for the Dreaming, the timeless spiritual quality that all djang share with the Rainbow Serpent (Berndts, Man 75). The fertile Mother was a widespread mythological character throughout Indigenous Australian belief, spanning form the Victoria River District in the east to the western Kimberley Range (Berndts, World 256). As a predominantly matrilineal tribe, it makes some sense that the Gunwinggu might have expressed this Mother figure in relation to the more terrifying symbol of the Rainbow Serpent. Many of their myths are concerned with Ngaljod as being both a protective and destructive mother (Berndts, Man 147), particularly in relation to maintaining the environment and social structure.

As their myths prescribed a spiritual connection with the land, the Indigenous Australians saw themselves as an integral part of their environment (Berndts, Man 113). Most Indigenous Australian myths described how the ancestral beings wandered from one waterhole to the next, naming and commemorating these sites as sacred places (Berndts, World 137), and almost every rock, spring, or waterhole was connected to mythic events (Eliade 57). The Indigenous Australians mapped every detail of their territory (Cowan 12), but some sites were more important because of religious associations or prohibitions (Berndts, Man 12). These places were set apart as potentially dangerous for women and uninitiated men (Charlesworth 11). Though people moved freely over the land belonging to other tribes, they did not trespass on their sacred sites without permission (Berndts, World 141). In the Gunwinggu tribe these sites existed in territories called gunmugugur, which were associated with and protected by units of patrilineal descent (Berndts, Man 54). Like other Indigenous Australian tribes, the Gunwinggu were semi-nomadic, but the men spent most of their time in and around their gunmugugur, where they were intimately familiar with the natural resources and sacred features (Berndts, Man 101, 107-8), including which waterholes may have housed Rainbow Serpents.

Throughout Indigenous Australia, the immense Rainbow Serpents were thought to inhabit certain waterholes. Men would take great care when drinking or bathing from these sites to obey strict laws and taboos out of fear that the serpents would create storms and drown them (Mountford 23). The Gunwinggu similarly feared the Rainbow Serpent, who might swallow them and spit out their bones, thereby making the site taboo for water and food (Berndts, Man 20-3). These stories were often connected with food taboos, and nearly all Gunwinggu myth contains some reference to cooking, gathering, or eating (Berndts, Man 43). Stories warn against cooking animals on sandy banks or rocks near the river, which may have been unstable places to cook, but the sizzling noise would surely bring the Rainbow Serpent (Berndts, Man 50). Occasionally an orphan child cried for food and the noise summoned Ngaljod, a common theme in myths throughout the region that may have served as an example to not spoil children (Berndts, Man 21-3). In another myth, a man eats secretly, and as a result the Rainbow Serpent drowns his tribe (Berndts, Man 45). Though there were no public sanctions against going to and eating in certain places, these taboos and prohibitions were unequivocal and may rarely have been broken. The Gunwinggu did not take the religious retribution of the Rainbow Serpent lightly (Berndts, Man 28). While the myths set out land ownership and a responsibility for specific resources by particular groups, it seems that the food taboos symbolized by Ngaljod may have encouraged the sharing and proper division of resources that would have been necessary to survival (Berndts, World 142-3), and the Rainbow Serpent’s feminine aspect may have related to the fact that the food collected by women was the most dependable part of the Gunwinggu diet (Berndts, Man 109). The supply of resources varied over place and season, and these prohibitions based on age, sex, locality, and ritual helped define what foods were socially considered available (Berndts, Man 35).

Ngaljod was also feared for bringing the rains and floods, an aspect of the Rainbow Serpent particularly dominant during the wet season, which lasted from November to March (Berndts, Man 144, 31). Throughout the dry season Ngaljod was depicted as a colorful, whiskered serpent living in the local waterholes, but when the rains struck she appeared in the sky as the rainbow (Mountford 71). The central feature of the wet season in northwest Australia was the monsoon, which pelted the coast and inlands with occasional cyclones and became the point of reference for marking the year (Berndts, Man 32). During this season the Gunwinggu migrated to higher ground, where their camping sites were based on mythological precedent; even if they were not djang or ritual grounds, they were most likely the richest in resources, and served as meeting places for the tribe (Berndts, Man 106-9). Throughout the monsoon season, jira songs were sung to pacify the Rainbow Serpent and ward off the harsh weather, while also narrating accounts of the first rains (Berndts, Man 144). Like other Indigenous Australian stories, these myths may have impressed upon the Gunwinggu the responsibility for keeping the land fertile (Eliade 50). Faced with having either too little or too much rain to make the most use of their resources, many of their myths and rituals reflected a strong interest in maintaining the balance of nature (Berndts, Man 51). The threatening aspects of nature symbolized by the Rainbow Serpent mythology may have reinforced this feeling that the land was sacred, but it was primarily through elaborate rituals that man could recapitulate and sustain his environment (Berndts, Man 207, 108).

Indigenous Australian ritual governed all transitions in life (Cowan 53), and allowed mankind to assure the continuation of their world (Eliade 65). The Gunwinggu ritual cycles were related directly to their territories, showing a concern with the cyclical progression of life through ritual intervention, and the three major rituals, the ubar, maraiin, and kunapipi, were dominated by the figure of the Mother (Berndts, Man 115, 117). In each of these ceremonial initiations, the men symbolically entered the Mother’s womb in the shape of the sacred ground, and though she was here symbolized as the Rainbow Serpent, Ngaljod took on a background role in the rituals, intermediated by other mythic beings (Berndts, Man 147, 227). In the ubar ritual a male serpent, Yirawadbad traveled over the country, and in the maraiin the Rainbow Serpent followed Lumaluma the whale and was later stolen by the Laradjeidja brothers (Berndts, Man 119-23). Though many of these rites were performed for the increase of animal and human species, they also formed a basis for economic obligation and moral action (Brendts, World 291-2), and most served as initiations where sexually maturing men were removed from their family orientation and placed in dependence to the older men of the tribe (Hiatt 50). Gunwnggu initiation did not include practices of circumcision or subincision like other Indigenous Australian tribes, and instead focused on the teaching of myths and ritual actions in association with food taboos that emphasized the sacred quality of the initiatory state (Berndts, Man 115). In the ubar ritual men poked the ground with sticks to ward off the Rainbow, and if the initiates ate certain foods Ngaljod would eat them (Berndts, Man 130-1). However, this “pre-enactment” of death, symbolized by being swallowed and reborn into the community, was the central aspect of the rituals (Berndts, World 167), and the snake, which appears to die when it sheds its old skin, was perhaps a fitting symbol for this transitional period of initiation (Turner 237). The last of the Gunwinggu initiation rituals, the kunapipi, began with the swinging of bullroarers, whose sound symbolized the Rainbow Serpent calling the initiates into the sacred ground to be swallowed, and thus reborn (Berndts, Man 139).

The Rainbow Serpent was an integral part of the Gunwinggu kunapipi ritual, but many sections of it resembled the eastern Arnhem Land kunapipi myths of the Wawalag or Wauwalak sisters, and the Gunwinggu themselves recognized the rites as an imported cult (Berndts, Man 122-3, 139). In the stories of the Murngin tribe, the Rainbow Serpent is Yurlunggur, who, enraged by the smell of blood, caused storms and ate the sisters after one of them gives birth (Eliade 101). Like Ngaljod, Yurlunggur was a harbinger of rain and fertility and becomes pregnant after eating the sisters (Eliade 109, 103), but the Rainbow Serpent of east Arnhem Land was more clearly symbolic of the penis, which the initiates had incised during the ritual (Cowan 101). Yurlunggur was the Great Father who called the young men to the sacred ground and served as a cosmic intimidation beyond that of their human fathers (Hiatt 50). Despite the ambiguity in the Rainbow Serpent’s sex, both versions of the kunapipi contained serpents and female mythic characters that ultimately assured fertility (Eliade 100), and signified the transition from the dry season to monsoonal flooding (Berndts, Man 228). Furthermore, the depiction of parental figures as monstrous beings may have shocked the initiates into a deeper understanding of social and environmental relationships (Turner 240) and the Gunwinngu association of Ngaljod with the Mother may once again have been due to their greater focus on matrilineal descent. Either way, the kunapipi ritual itself was from further south, and though undergoing a slight shifting of identities, found suitable mythologies in both Arnhem Land territories for its expression (Berndts, World 286).

It is worth noting that much of Gunwinggu mythology did not belong to them originally but came from outside tribes or from the Macassan traders (Berndts, Man 124), so it is difficult to offer definitive interpretations for any one symbol within an individual tribal context. Each local group was responsible for particular mythic episodes and rites associated with stops the ancestral beings made in their wanderings (Eliade 60). No one tribe “owned” a whole myth cycle, just those parts associated with their territory (Berndts, Man 243). Even within the tribe, there were as many versions of a myth as there were men telling it, and full details were often omitted (Berndts, World 242). Outside of a ritual context myths were told informally, and their main themes were elaborated, cut short, or omitted altogether depending on the speaker and situation (Berndts, Man 17, 40). Often it was the men who controlled the religious sites and rituals whose version were considered the most authoritative (Berndts, Man 16-7), but even then they often kept certain parts of the myths to themselves (Berndts, World 241). Women did not have knowledge or access to the secret-sacred myths and rituals, and it is possible that they took accounts of what happened on the men’s sacred ground as factual or symbolically true (Berndts, Man 16, 287). The myths also gained validity through contemporary experience such as the more portentous accounts of floods and monsoons (Berndts, Man 50). It is possible that depending on when or with whom anthropologists collected their material, they would have been given highly different versions of Indigenous Australian mythology, which could explain not only the multivalence of the Rainbow Serpent symbolism within the Gunwinggu tribe, but its diffusion across all of Australia.

Though there was no central Indigenous Australian authority or religion, a strong resemblance existed between the myths, rituals, and languages of the 500 distinct tribes (Charlesworth 7, Berndts, World 21). Each tribe kept mostly to themselves, but tribal territories were highly flexible (Berndts, World 22, 33), and local traditions were vivified by transmission from neighboring clans (Maddock, World 87). During intertribal ceremonies people met to exchange both goods and religious ideas, and there was a constant movement of both material and spiritual capital along trade roads that crossed the whole continent along waterhole routes (Berndts, World 16, 128). It is possible that the Dreaming tracks left by the migrating Rainbow Serpents along these routes represented a potential network of communications for the Indigenous Australians (Berndts, World 243). The anthropologist Charles P. Mountford suggests that the myths of the Rainbow Serpent reached Australia through the Cape York area in the northeast, becoming more complex in the eastern and northern coasts where external influence was greatest (93). It seems equally possible that these myths started in the northern and northwestern territories, such as the Arnhem Land region inhabited by the Gunwinggu tribe, from where external influences may have eventually diffused through the rest of the continent (Berndts, World 21).

Looking at a broad selection of Rainbow Serpent beliefs from a variety of different tribes, primarily collected by Mountford in his essay, “The Rainbow-Serpent Myths of Australia” (see Appendix One, Rainbow Serpent Types), it is possible to divide the symbol into several main functions that roughly correspond with certain geographical regions of Australia, though these are by no means clear cut distinctions. As mentioned previously, Rainbow Serpents in the north and northwest are often credited with the creation of the land, life, and culture during their mythic wanderings. In the east and northwest the symbol is associated with the powers and quartz crystals of medicine men. For the northern to west-central desert tribes the Rainbow Serpent is primarily a harbinger of rain, living in deep waterholes, and in southern Australia other mythic creatures such as the bunyip replace the serpent symbol altogether.
Like Ngaljod, many of the northwestern rainbow serpents arrived from off-shore and wandered into the middle of the continent leaving spirit-children at waterholes, but further into Australia this path is reversed; Jarapiri, the Rainbow Serpent of the Winbaraku tribe of Central Australia creates life as he migrates from the mountains to the sea, perhaps retracing the Indigenous Australians’ own migrant origins (Cowan 31-2). Kunukban of the northwestern Wardaman tribe was also credited with the creation of culture, but unlike the Gunwinggu Ngaljod who gave birth to mankind, this Rainbow Serpent stole culture from another ancestral being, Ekarlarwan, whom he chased across the continent (Cown 31-4). In myths from the Murinbata tribe in the Northern Territory the Rainbow Serpent Kunmanggur created animals and spirit-children only after a flying fox or his son speared him for stealing women (Maddock, Introduction 5-7, Moutnford 79-80), bringing up potential sexual taboos not present in the Gunwinggu’s mythic focus on food. Perhaps the most interesting variation on the Rainbow Serpent creation theme occured among the Unambal and Ungarinyin tribes who neighbored the Gunwinggu in the Kimberley Range area to the west. Here the Rainbow Serpent Ungud dreamt of the faceless figures called wondjina, who are painted on rocks throughout the region and are representative of rain (Eliade 69), and after raising the land from the sea laid these spirits as eggs across the country (Maddock, Introduction 14-6). Ungud however is only credited with the creation of nature and faded into the mythic background, while the wondjina are held responsible for the active creation of culture (Eliade 73, Mountford 84-5), a division of roles the motherly Gunwinggu Ngaljod does not express.

Another distinction between these two beings is that Ungud was also responsible for giving the mekigar medicine men their powers and quartz crystals (Cowan 36), a role often found in east and northwest Australia (Mountford 93). Each tribe had these “men of high degree” who played a central role in the rituals, healed the sick, defended the community from black magic, and were the only ones who could really see and converse with mythic beings like the Rainbow Serpents (Eliade 128-9). Often in shamanic initiation, magical objects such as crystals and a magic rope-snake were inserted into the medicine man’s body (Eliade 149); these objects were thought to represent magical power bestowed by the Rainbow Serpent (Cowan 86-8). Kanmare, the Rainbow Serpent of the Boulia District tribes of Queensland in the northeast, would drown men and make them sick before bestowing its magical powers (Radcliffe-Brown 19); men from the Wiradjuri tribe of New South Wales in the east would follow the rainbow to waterholes were the Rainbow Serpent Wāwi would teach them new songs for the rituals (Eliade 155). Targan, the Rainbow Serpent in Brisbane, Queensland, vomited quartz crystals when it rained, and the medicine men would know to look for them where the rainbow ended (Radcliffe-Brown 20-1). The Gunwinggu tribe also contained medicine men, some of whom had personal Rainbow Serpents that they could summon at will (Berndts, Man 146), but there was no connection between Ngaljod and quartz crystals, perhaps because these magical objects were not available in the Arnhem Land region.
Moving further south and west, the symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent became more concerned with its relationship to rain and waterholes, as well as with physical descriptions of distinct, terrifying beings. The Kajura of the Ingarda tribe and Wanamangura of the Talainji tribe, both in west Central Australia, are connected primarily to the rain totem (Radcliffe-Brown 22), and Unurugu, the Rainbow Serpent of the western Broome tribe, caused rainstorms if it was killed (Mountford 35). In the tribes around Perth in western Australia the Wogal is a winged Rainbow Serpent that lives in waterholes and is dangerous to approach (Radcliffe-Brown 22), and in the Central desert waterholes live many Wanambi who fly into the air and attack intruders with whirlwinds and rainbows (Mountford 52-3). Like many Rainbow Serpents these are depicted as being multicolored and bearded, with large eyes and long ears (Mountford 40). Some, like the Wollunqua of the Warramunga tribe in the west Central area, were so huge that they could touch the skies and had a reach of over 150 miles from their waterholes (Mountford 36). While the Gunwinggu Ngaljod also lived in waterholes and bore these kinds of physical characteristics, she also had a distinct and metaphysical quality that is missing from the western and southern Rainbow Serpents. Ngaljod was certainly associated with the monsoonal rains in Arnhem Land, but in the barren deserts it seems that the Rainbow Serpent symbolism is stripped of all other qualities besides those of maintaining the potable water necessary for survival.

In southern Australia, particularly in the Victoria region, beliefs in the Rainbow Serpent were superceded altogether by a variety of beings that lived in waterholes and drowned trespassers (Mountford 26), though rarely were they associated with religious structures or socio-economic taboos. Generally these beings were called bunyips, and they could take various forms depending on local sites (Mountford 30). Perhaps most Rainbow Serpent-like was the Myndie from the Melbourne District, a large serpent that would attack both people who broke laws and those who didn’t (Mountford 31-2). Other ferocious beings were the Gourke, a swamp-dwelling emu, and the Turden, an enormous dingo, who also attacked the Indigenous Australians of the Victoria region (Mountford 32-2). Similarly, on Groote Eylandt and Bathurst Island off the Northern Coast the beings associated with bright colors and rain were not serpents but the Ipilja-ipilja geckos and Maratji lizards respectively (Mountford 86-8), and it seems what was a highly developed Rainbow Serpent symbolism for the Gunwinggu tribe may eventually have lost most of its deeper significances with either distance or cultural isolation. But the question still remains of what the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent actually meant.

The theorist Paul Riceour suggests that unlike signs, which often have a one-to-one correlation with the things they represent, symbols conceal their meaning in a “double intentionality” that invites thought and reflection between the primary and latent meanings like a curtain drawn back at the theater (2-3). The symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent may have held much more than just this two-fold meaning behind the symbolic curtain, for the Gunwinggu tribe used it to express many facets of their life: their mythic origins, their relationship to land, food, and seasons, and their socio-economic structures and taboos. For Riceour, to offer a hermeneutic interpretation of a symbol one must start with the phenomena itself, but unlike comparative religious studies that seek to place a symbol in a larger homogenous system, it is only possible to bring out the truth of a symbol if one becomes personally involved in the life of that one symbol in its original context (8). The Rainbow Serpent has been compared to many mythological beings outside Australia, such as the naga of India, taniwah of New Zealand, water serpents of the Kalahari Desert (Mountford 92), the Babylonian Tiamat (Eliade 80), or the Chinese dragon, which is associated with moisture and iridescent pearls (Radcliffe-Brown 25). One might also look at the Biblical rainbow given to man as a covenant after the flood (Boyer 17); or at the Norse juxtaposition between the heavenly rainbow bridge Bifrost and the two serpents that live in the waters and under the world tree, Iormungund and Niddhog (Sturluson 15-26), whose names bear a slight phonetic resemblance to the Arnhem Land Rainbow Serpents Yurlunggur and Ngaljod. However, as Radcliffe-Brown points out, such comparisons may only be valid after intensive cultural studies in each separate belief system (25), and the radical diversity of Rainbow Serpent symbolism within the unique cultural milieu of Indigenous Australia already offers more than enough material for consideration.

Even within the context of Australia, many of the theorists and anthropologists looking at the symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent have tried to draw broad, abstract conclusions from all the instances in which it is portrayed, while perhaps neglecting many of its individual distinctions between tribes. Ronald and Catherine Berndt interpret the serpent as the male counterpart of the uterine All-Mother (Maddock, Introduction 2), and Géza Róheim also suggests a psychosexual interpretation in the penile fear of being swallowed back into the womb (Hiatt 46-7). Both Radcliffe-Brown and Kenneth Maddock view the Rainbow Serpent as a striking representation of the creative and destructive forces in nature (Maddock, World 94-6) though Radcliffe-Brown reduces the possibility that there were many distinct Rainbow Serpents into one symbolic being (Maddock, Introduction 3). Mircea Eliade, in line with his own theories of interpreting symbols, claims that the Rainbow Serpent is a religious structure that unites opposites (Eliade 79). Religion certainly dominated Indigenous Australian life, and while the various serpents portrayed ambiguities between many and one, male or female, living above or below the ground, or being either anthropomorphic or zoomorphic creatures (Maddock, Introduction 8), it is possible that Eliade, and the majority of these theorists, are projecting their own systems of classification on what is most likely not a homogenous totality or abstract symbolism. It is clearly evident from anthropological accounts that even after European contact, the Indigenous Australians had a very strong belief that these seemingly mythological serpents were real beings that still inhabited the country’s waterholes (Mountford 58). Though they were both characters in mythic narratives and symbols in a metaphysical system of thought (Maddock, Introduction 10), it is necessary to not disregard the Indigenous Australians’ own lived fear that the Rainbow Serpents actually existed, perhaps as cryptozoological survivors of Australia’s ancient mega-fauna. Even the earliest European settlers seemed to have some real belief in these mythological monsters (Mountford 26). As Riceour notes on the process of interpretation, “You must understand in order to believe but you must believe in order to understand” (9).

A morphological comparison of distinct Rainbow Serpent beliefs reveals that this symbol was generally connected with water and often feared by the Indigenous Australians unless certain rites were performed, but for the Gunwinggu tribe the Rainbow Serpent nearly achieves the status of a supreme being (Mountford 76, 94). Ngaljod was connected to their location on the hospitable and accessible northern coast, their focus on matrilineal descent and economic division of resources, and their interest in ritually maintaining the seasonal and social landscapes. As one of her names, Ngalmud, referred to the Indigenous Australian concept of the Dreaming that underscored their whole existence, it is possible to see how the Gunwinggu conceptualization of the rainbow, as an overarching and omnipotent serpentine mother, allowed them to articulate and organize all of the multifaceted aspects of their life into one vividly striking symbol.

However, even recognizing the Rainbow Serpent’s ability to unify the various levels of reality for the Gunwinggu tribe is not enough to offer a thorough hermeneutic interpretation (Riceour 8). The Indigenous Australian way of life, in which the Dreaming served to interconnect the past and present of their land, myths, and socio-cultural contexts, is radically different from the modern Western conception of reality. Due to the sheer depth with which this symbol is rooted in the interconnectedness of Gunwinggu life, an adequate interpretation of the Rainbow Serpent may require a much more thorough analysis of their culture than is possible with the amount of information available. Even then it may not be possible to bridge the cultural gap, and truly enter into the kind of emotional and critical relationship that Riceour suggests is necessary in order to understand how a symbol was actually lived. Furthermore, European contact essentially stripped the Indigenous Australians of their land and traditional way of life (Berndts, World 497-8) so that many of the myths and rituals surrounding the Rainbow Serpent may no longer be available for further anthropological study. Though such studies have recorded these oral beliefs and made them available to the rest of the world, this was only possible due to European contact, and has come at the expense of the entire culture under question.

In the traditional perspective, if the sacred rituals were neglected, the world would regress into the chaos that existed before the Dreaming and the ancestral beings, which is precisely the crisis faced by the Indigenous Australians in the present era (Eliade 65). What was once a distinct and vibrant way of life, that allowed the Gunwinggu tribe to articulate such a colorfully multivalent symbol as the Ngaljod Rainbow Serpent, has been all but decimated by policies of assimilation, Methodist missionaries, and the modern world-view in general (Berndts, Man 199-200). Though there is some current interest in reviving the ancient traditions, and Gunwinggu mythology had always adapted to outside influences in the past, these stories may no longer be relevant to a people who have lost their spiritual connection to their land (Berndts, Man 205-7). The Rainbow Serpent may have represented the vital and dynamic connection that the Gunwinggu had between their sacred history, physical environment, socio-economic structures, religious rituals, and whole manner of being in the world; but as that traditional world-view passes out of existence, so too does that vivid living symbol of the Rainbow Serpent become yet another mythological landmark in the static burial grounds of religious history.

Bibliography

Berndt, Ronald M. and Catherine H. “Man, Land and Myth in North Australia: The Gunwinggu People.” East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970

--- “The World of the First Australians: Aboriginal Traditional Life: Past and Present.” 5th ed. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988

Boyer, Carl B. “The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987

Charlesworth, Max. “Introduction.” Religion in Aboriginal Australia: An Anthology. Ed. Max Charlesworth, Howard Morphy, Diane Bell, and Kenneth Maddock. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1984

Cowan, James G. “The Elements of the Aborigine Tradition.” Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element, Inc., 1992

Maddock, Kenneth. “Introduction.” The Rainbow Serpent: A Chromatic Piece. Ed. Ira Buchler and Kenneth Maddock. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978

--- “Metaphysics in a Mythical View of the World.” The Rainbow Serpent: A Chromatic Piece. Ed. Ira Buchler and Kenneth Maddock. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978

--- “The World-Creative Powers.” Religion in Aboriginal Australia: An Anthology. Ed. Max Charlesworth, Howard Morphy, Diane Bell, and Kenneth Maddock. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1984

Eliade, Mircea. “Australian Religions: An Introduction.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973

Hiatt, L. R. “Swallowing and Regurgitation in Australian Myth and Rite.” Religion in Aboriginal Australia: An Anthology. Ed. Max Charlesworth, Howard Morphy, Diane Bell, and Kenneth Maddock. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1984

Mountford, Charles. “The Rainbow-Serpent Myths of Australia.” The Rainbow Serpent: A Chromatic Piece. Ed. Ira Buchler and Kenneth Maddock. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. “The Rainbow-Serpent Myth of Australia.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 56 (1926): 19-25

Riceour, Paul. “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection.” Attribution Unknown. 21pp.

Sturluson, Snorri. “Edda.” Trans. and ed. Anthony Faulkes. London: Everyman, 1987

Turner, Victor W. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites De Passage.” Reader in Comparative Religion. Eds. Lessa and Vogt. Harper and Row, 1979

All You Need Is Love

The other night Sophie and I went to go see the new movie "Across the Universe," a love story set in the turbulence of the 60s and narrated through the songs of the Beatles. Though the use of visual overlays in some scenes was a little cheesy, the selection of songs was impressive, and for most of the flick I was close to tears, which I will admit takes a really good movie to bring me to.

The movie also brought up my interest of looking for modern mythemes, as the Beatles' cultural influence has been coming up recently each time I play them at work. The Beatles clearly represent one of the largest modern set of culture heroes, especially in the 60s. Not to downplay the works and influence of Leary, Kesey, et al., but the Beatles' popularity and rise to fame had a dramatic effect on American youth, and was perhaps paradigmatic of the ideals of that generation. That four "lads from Liverpool" could rise to international stardom not only exemplary of the American mytheme of 'rags to riches,' but may also have created that mythic idea of bands "making it" from humble, anonymous beginnings, certainly not an easy task, as any musician can tell you. Not only that, but the Beatles' whole aesthetic, politics, etc. had deep repercussions on fashion, social consciousness, and, though maybe not an enormously positive effect depending on your stance, the use of mind-altering substances. When the Beatles began experimenting with psychedelics, when they went to India to learn transcendental meditation and incorporated such Asiatic sounds and styles in their own feel, they took American youth along for the ride. How many peace activists may have been moved to non-violent protest after hearing "You Say You Want a Revolution?" Of course, it's hard to say whether the Beatles caused these changes themselves, or were just the most visible public figures riding the waves of social change, but as they were such figureheads, their actions fed-back on culture, became an example of what was possible in the world. That it was possible for a "small group of dedicated individuals"(to quote Margaret Meed) to sing "All You Need Is Love," and mean that enough to make a difference.

As Mircea Eliade and Charles Long both discuss, new myths and hierophanies come into affect by being truer 'over against' older, worn out social and sacred realities, and many were tired of the social staidness of the post-World War fifties. Whose to say that a hundred, a thousand years from now the Beatles might not be mythologized as the Heroes who through the magic of song defeated the demons of war, social mores, etc.? If they are not already attributed with these epic victories. Perhaps the only other band who comes close to this role, for me at least, was Crass, whose political stance against the Thatcher administration, and rejection of the colorful, commodified punk look of the 70s I suspect became the model for the resurgence of Anarchism asa valid modern youth movement in these decades following the 80s. But this influence is more contestable than that of the Beatles, whose sheer legacy of hits and continued mass appeal assures their heroic place in the cultural imagination.

Ironically, it was precisely this inordinate mass appeal that turned me off from the Beatles' music for a long time. My parents had been hippies back in the 60s and I vividly recall my father playing both "Rocky Raccoon" and "Cry, Baby, Cry" to us on his guitar when we were children. Though from my childhood intimately familiar with most of their material, I always associated it first as "something my parents listened to," and then with all the stoned, tie-dye clad hippies I knew in high school, as being just too weak and feel-goody, in contrast to the aggressive and directly political music I was listening to then. It wasn't until many years later, after performing in many bands and intentionally broadening my musical horizons to anything remotely influential, that I realized how effective the Beatles' music really was. Even on just a compositional level they still blow away any other rock/pop band before or since. Not to mention the effect those songs had in helping shape the beliefs of an entire generation, and many of the generations since. No overtly political punk band can boast to having such a deep effect on culture, not by directly singing about what they were against, but by singing about love, and coming together.

The Beatles continue to be the biggest selling band of all time, with movies, toys, and even a circus show in Las Vegas dedicated to their legacy. Despite this commodification, the reason why they continue to serve as an paradigm is that their music was just that good, and still speaks with just as strong a voice these forty years later.

Manifesting Power: Indra’s Slaying of Vṛtra as Kratophany of the Vedic Kings

Manifesting Power: Indra’s Slaying of Vṛtra as Kratophany of the Vedic Kings

The Ṛigvedic myth from pre-Hindu India in which the god Indra slays the dragon Vṛtra has been considered the most important myth of the Vedic Indians (Frawley 31). However, even the oldest Indian scholar Yāska, writing shortly after the final collection of the Ṛigvedic texts in 600 B.C., was uncertain how to interpret this epic victory (Dandekar 142). For scholars since then, the slaying of Vṛtra has symbolized the release of rains or rivers, the Āryan tribes’ conquest of their enemies, or the creation of the world out of Vṛtra’s body (O’Flaherty 148). Though the socio-cultural context of the Ṛigveda indicates problems in each of these interpretations, they all may point to Indra as being a manifestation of creative power for the Vedic Indians, as embodied in their nobility. Mircea Eliade’s theory of kratophanies has the potential to elucidate why the Āryan tribes may have needed such a multivalent expression of power during their migration into India.

For Eliade, myth is a sacred history that narrates through the acts of supernatural beings how some aspect of reality came into existence, establishing a paradigm for all human actions (Myth 5). In this story, most prominently depicted in hymn I.32 of the Ṛigveda, Indra wields his divine weapon, the vajra, against the demonic Vṛtra, who is holding the waters prisoner on the mountains. After a legendary battle, the god slays Vṛtra, freeing the waters and in the process bringing forth the light. While supernatural beings and the origin of waters and light are clearly present, it is unclear what sort of paradigm this myth might represent without looking closer at Vedic culture.

Though there is some disagreement over the exact age of the Ṛigveda (Griswold 67-9), most of the hymns seem to have been composed by 1000 B.C. at the latest, by many families living around the Sarasvatī river in the Punjab region of India (Gonda 1). Before their migration, the Indo-European clans may have primarily been cattle-breeders divided between nomadic and settled life with no formal political unions, though they would usually act together in times of war (Griswold 7-10). By roughly 1500 B.C. the pre-Āryan tribes split from the Iranian branch and their shared Varuṇa-religion (Griswold 22-3) and began moving southeast from Central Asia in what is generally characterized as a “mission of conquest and colonization” (Dandekar 169). The scholar H. D. Griswold suggests that the Āryans migrated in multiple bands over several centuries, entering India through waves of both peaceful penetration and armed force against the dark-skinned natives; and though they certainly fought against the aboriginal Dasyus, the Āryan tribes may frequently have warred amongst themselves (34-6). The Ṛigveda mentions five Āryan tribes, to all of whom the god Indra belonged, and it is possible that the hostile Dasyus halted the Vedic Indians in the Punjab region until the five tribes had banded together with enough strength to make the final push towards the Ganges river (Griswold 45-7).

Vedic society eventually settled into a caste system centered around two main classes, the noble or warrior class of the Kṣatriyas, and the priestly Brāhman class (Frawley 101-2). The Vaiśya class contained the rest of the Āryan subjects, common farmers and merchants, while non-Āryan peoples under Vedic rule were relegated to the Śudra class at the bottom of the social structure (Griswold 51). However, the Ṛigveda and its accompanying religion belonged solely to the higher castes, while the masses remained spectators of the rituals (Oldenburg 206). The Vedic monarchy had been strengthened by war against the Dasyus, and many of the Vedic gods may have been patterned after the nobility, especially Indra (Griswold 47). War was portrayed as a struggle between good and evil, but it was often the priestly prayers and mantras that were thought to determine victory (Frawley 102). This is clearly shown by Indra and Vṛtra’s use of magic in the myth. Though the main rituals were already established when the Vedic tribes migrated into India, the hotar, or chief priest, composed most of the Ṛigvedic hymns under contract to the wealthy Kṣatriya class (Griswold 48). The rituals were performed in exchange for a dakṣiṇa, or sacrificial fee (Griswold 49), wealth won by the nobility in battle (Frawley 103), which sets up an interesting relationship between the warring rulers and the conception of the religious texts.

The Ṛigveda primarily focuses on the main gods and the Soma sacrifice (Oldenburg 5), and was a priestly textbook written with the practical interest of serving this ritual (Griswold, 55-6). Jan Gonda contests this view however, positing that many of the hymns were used on other religious occasions (2). Regardless, the Soma offering was the main sacrificial ritual of the Vedic Indians (Macdonell 7), and Indra was considered the main god of that ritual. The hymns praise Indra as the drinker of Soma above all the other gods and the noon Soma pressing was dedicated to him alone (Oldenburg 241). In the myth, Indra drinks three vats of Soma before confronting Vṛtra, a practice the Kṣatriya may have picked up in order to banish fear and restore vigor before battle (Dandekar 176). In brief, the ritual consisted in a portion of milk, meat, vegetables, or Soma being offered into the sacred fire with the rest consumed by the sacrificer (Heesterman, Inner 89). Fixed and spontaneous prayers accompanied the offering (Oldenburg 232) with the purpose of mediating between the sacred and profane worlds (Smith 173). J.C. Heesterman claims that battle and catastrophe had originally belonged to the essence of the sacrifice, including the slaying of Vṛtra as part of the Soma ritual (Inner 86-7), which allowed the Vedic Indiands to enact “the periodical regeneration of the cosmos, the winning of life out of death” (Inner 26).

There seems to be little evidence to connect this specific myth directly to the Soma ritual, though the immense number of hymns composed in Indra’s honor attests to his importance in the Vedic religion (Gonda 3). The Ṛigvedic text clearly shows that Indra-worship was rapidly succeeding the earlier Varuṇa-ruled religion (Dandekar 179). Beyond the offering of sacrifice before battle, in which the priests presumably called on Indra for help, the god was also invoked to bring rain, crops, cows, and strong children (Griswold 43, 207). The sacrificial poems of the Ṛigveda were recited by the hotar in order to celebrate the deeds and splendor of the god as well as to narrate the wishes of man (Oldenburg 214, 235). This praise sought to confirm or strengthen the deity (Gonda 77) and to give him the pleasure of performing new acts inspired by memories of former deeds (Oldenburg 234). Though the first stanzas of the Ṛigvedic poems often invoked the gods to the sacrifice, Gonda sees hymn I.32 as being instead a commemoration of that mythic conflict and an appeal for the god to reiterate his heroic deed (6, 11, 102). Scholars have offered varied perspectives on what Indra’s deed may actually have meant for the Vedic Indians, but like all myths this meaning may remain dependent upon subjective interpretation.

The most prevalent school of interpretation treats the Ṛigvedic mythology as a set of primitive belief that all phenomena of nature are animate and divine (Macdonell 2). From this perspective, Indra is a storm god, and Vṛtra is the withholder of rain (Griswold 88), either a personification of the droughts or dust storms that afflicted the Punjab region before the summer monsoon season (Griswold 33). The vajra is the lightning bolt (Macdonell 55) with which Indra frees the rains from the bellies of the cloud-mountains (Griswold 182). In another naturalistic interpretation, Hermann Oldenburg sees the myth as the freeing of seven earthly rivers from the earthly mountains (76). This theory relates the mythic rivers to actual geography, as the most prominent feature of the Punjab region is its seven rivers (Griswold 30), which the Vedic Indians must have relied upon to support their life in the arid Indian climate. Conversely, Alfred Hillebrandt argues that Vṛtra was an ice-giant and Indra a sun god who freed the waters from the grip of winter, making this an older myth from a northern climate, later developed into a rain mythology (vol. 2, 112-26, Griswold 181). From yet another set of perspective, B. G. Tilak considers the winning of the light to be a yearly myth reflecting the relation of the sacrifice to the solstices (Frawley 33), and in the later ritual texts of the Brāhmaṇas, Vṛtra is the moon swallowed by Indra as the sun during the new moon ritual (Macdonell 159). The Brāhmaṇas also describe Vṛtra as the darkness cleaved by sunrise (Heesterman, Ancient 100).

Problematic to these natural interpretations is that Indra’s name does not seem to designate any phenomenon of nature (Macdonell 54). There were already both a rain god and a sun god in the Vedic pantheon, called Trita Āptya and Sūrya, although Indra gradually took over their functions in his rise to prominence in the Vedic texts (Dandekar 151-6). Furthermore, the Ṛigveda does not refer explicitly to the phenomena of either rain or snow (Oldenburg 76-7), and descriptions of the vajra as metallic and four or hundred-angled may be too specific to be symbolic of lightning (Dandekar 147). Though sacrifices were performed to bring rain, it seems likely that the Vedic priests and nobility had more pressing social concerns to express in their mythology.

The second major school of interpretation considers Indra as a war god conquering the foes of the Āryans. As we have seen, Indra was invoked for success in battle, and in the myth, Vṛtra is called Dāsa, another name for the dark-skinned aboriginal inhabitants of India (Macdonell 64). In this perspective, Indra represents an embodiment of the imperialistic tendencies of the Vedic Indians, and his vajra is a weapon suggestive of ruthless might (Griswold 177-8). Other hymns of the Ṛigveda describe Indra as being a warrior from birth, and as having been born for the purpose of slaying Vṛtra (Macdonnel 56, 158). R. N. Dandekar even suggests that the Ṛigveda portrays Indra’s physical characteristics and excessive drinking of Soma in such human terms that the god may originally have been a Vedic hero or warlord later elevated to godhead for his miraculous deeds (160-2). This seems unlikely though, as Indra was already a deity in the Varuṇa-religion of the earlier Indo-Iranian period (Griswold 23). Regardless, Indra’s chief epithet is Vṛtrahan, the ‘Vṛtra-slayer,’ and though Vṛtra’s name may have derived from the root vṛ, ‘to encompass’ (Macdonell 60, 159), it may also have derived from the root var, ‘to resist,’ making Indra a divine power called upon to overcome enemy resistance (Dandekar 173).

A major challenge to this sociological interpretation may be in determining what waters and lights freed from the mountains may have signified for a war god. In other Ṛigvedic hymns addressing this myth, Indra is said to shatter Vṛtra’s ninety-nine fortresses when he slays the dragon, which may either refer to storm clouds (Macdonell 60) or to river bends in which Vṛtra lays (Oldenburg 75). Vṛtra is sometimes related to the mythic Dāsa warlord Śambara (Oldenburg 83), whose his ninety-nine mountain fortresses Indra destroys with a flood (Frawley 115-6). As such, the fortresses may have been river-dams built by the native peoples (Dandekar 183), but this does not fully explain why a war-god would be concerned with freeing the waters or winning the light.

In antithesis to this interpretation of Indra as a war god, the deity is often called Maghavan, ‘bountiful’ (Griswold 207), and functions to bestow fertility on the Vedic Indians just as much as to destroy their enemies (Hopkins 244). Even in the myth, Indra is compared to “a bull bursting with seed,” and the bull is sacred to the god as exemplary of his virile powers (Hopkins 243). Hymn I.32 relates the freeing of the waters to another of Indra’s deeds, in which he rescues stolen cows from the hostile tribe of the Paṇis (O’Flaherty 152). Cattle may have symbolized both fertility and wealth for the Āryans (Frawley 119), but the Vedic texts display a tendency of drawing playful connections between disparate entities (Smith 30), which makes it difficult to tell what is actually being referred to in the myth. Cows were occasionally homologous to rain clouds and sunbeams (Macdonell 59), mountains or fortresses (Frawley 119), and to Vṛtra’s mother Dānu (Macdonell 158), making it difficult to tell just what Indra freed or where he freed it from, or more importantly, what this heroic action meant for the Vedic Indians.

While the varied interpretations of the myth as portraying natural, martial, or fertile themes each might have some validity, Gonda asserts that Indra’s slaying of Vṛtra is now essentially viewed as cosmogonic, or at least demiurgic (4): “In the beginning was Vṛtra, who covered over all that the Universe needed,” both the cosmic waters and embryonic sun prior to creation (Brown, Creation 91). In this perspective, Vṛtra is cast as the shell of the cosmic egg, and Indra’s slaying of the demon breaks the shell and forces Heaven and Earth apart, allowing the sun to shine and creation to begin (Brown, Creation 96-8). The Brāhmaṇas state that after the battle, Vrṭra’s eyes become ointment and the overflowing waters become darbha grass used in the Soma ritual, while the vajra is the bow held by the sacrificer to symbolize the rebirth of the sun (Heesterman, Ancient 100). In these later texts the freeing of waters and lights disappears entirely from the myth, and it is the gods Agni and Soma whom Indra frees from Vṛtra’s belly with the use of a sacrificial cake (Hillebrandt, vol. 2, 134-6). As Agni and Soma are the two other deities connected with the sacrifice (Macdonell 20), the myth may have eventually been interpreted as a discovery of the ritual (Heesterman, Inner 49). Other hymns of the Ṛigveda equate Agni directly with the fire and sun, and Soma with the flowing waters (Macdonell 91, 107). Indra also recovers both Agni and Soma during his various exploits (O’Flaherty 108, 128). Though these deeds are only briefly alluded to in hymn I.32, the Vedic priests may already have considered Indra’s slaying of Vṛtra as an origin of the sacrifice when the Ṛigveda was being composed.

If this myth indeed revealed the ritual and Indra’s victory was sometimes spoken of as a sacrifice in itself (Brown, Theories 26), it is possible to see how its recitation may have allowed the Brāhmans to reiterate the cosmogonic act. The Ṛigveda however describes Paruṣa as the sacrificial giant from whom the Universe is made, and later Prajāpati becomes the cosmic man (Macdonell 12-3), though Indra may have taken over this role as well during his period of fame. Norman Brown suggests that while some may have taken this demiurgic creation at face value, the sophisticated Āryans saw in the myth “Potenitality striving to overcome Inertia by the aid of Power… in the Universe” (Theories 24). The Kṣatriya may not have paid the Brahmans to indulge in this level of philosophic speculation while wars and society remained disorganized, but it is also possible that the nobility may have benefited from comparison to such manifest creative power.

Having examined the myth through its sociological origins and a variety of interpretations, the application of Eliade’s theories may offer yet another perspective. As stated previously, the myth may have been cosmogonic, and may also have represented a model for how the Vedic Indians acted towards the natural, social, cosmogonic, and ritual worlds. For Eliade, the sacred and religious stand opposed to profane and secular life, but are expressed in historical moments through what he calls Hierophanies (Eliade, Patterns 1-2). “Everything unusual, unique, new, perfect or monstrous at once becomes imbued with magico-religious powers and an object of veneration or fear,” an ambivalence even more clearly expressed when the sacred is revealed as a kratophany, a manifestation of power (Eliade, Patterns 13-14). As opposed to having an anthropological approach that might place the myth in the context of a specific people, Eliade is primarily concerned with how myth brings out certain patterns of meaning (Strenski 105). Theorists such as Malinowski and Lévi-Struass are more concerned with the cultural functions of myth (Malinowski 19) and its linguistic structure (Lévi-Strauss 206-7), in contrast to Eliade, who relies on the development of generalized cross-cultural comparisons that are ungrounded in sociological contexts (Strenski 105). Regardless, Eliade’s concepts may still be useful for establishing what this particular myth meant for the Vedic Indians.

Eliade at first suggests a natural interpretation, treating Indra as a sky-god concretized into the dynamic force of the storm (Eliade, Patterns 52-3). However, Hierophanies of the sky can never be reduced to meteorological phenomena and instead become expressions of power and sovereignty, epiphanies of force and violence upon whose energy life depends (Eliade, Patterns 59, 83). As such, Indra is the epitome of all energy: his weapon denotes strength, his symbol is the bull, and he rules over the Vedic gods and humans as king (Hillebrandt, vol. 2, 99). Indra governs rainfall, fertility, the fields and plough, and the inexhaustible power of generating life (Eliade, Patterns 85). While his name has uncertain meaning for any particular phenomenon of nature (Macdonell 54), it is commonly thought to derive from indu, ‘drop,’ suggesting not only drops of rain and pressed Soma but also the virile power of semen (Dandekar 186). Indra may not directly make the Universe, but he is a personification of the cosmic and biological energy necessary to keep life in motion (Eliade, Patterns 84-6). Of course, it may be difficult to ascribe this role of cosmic progenitor to the sky-gods of other religions, much less to the Vedic religion, without studying the specific socio-cultural contexts. Furthermore, Eliade’s theory operates on the assumption that as a hierophany, myth reveals the sacred, a concept generally viewed as being transcendent and ineffable. While a culture’s mythic expressions of its daily rituals and need for origins may have arisen from functional and creative desires, it seems impossible to prove that all members of that society subjectively viewed these myths as being a manifestation of an inexpressible reality, without asking them in person.

As the progenitors of the Ṛigvedic Indra mythology, the Vedic Kṣatriya may have found it easier to rule their subjects and lead them through the hostile natives into India if their noble strength was perceived by these subjects as vital for the continuation of social and cosmic life. While trying to unite the Vedic tribes in the Punjab region, the emerging nobility may have commissioned the Brāhmans to compose new hymns to the deity who most portrayed these desirable characteristics of courage, virility, and bounteousness. Thus Indra was hailed as the Kṣatriya of the gods, and he gradually took over other deific functions that would grant him the ultimate sovereignty that the nobility required to rule.

In his role as divine king, Indra could bring the rains and daylight, win battles against the Dasyus, make the fields, cows, and women fertile, reveal the sacrificial ritual, and through all these continually recreate the cosmos for the Āryans. Hymn I.32 of the Ṛigveda, the epic commemoration of Indra’s slaying of Vṛtra, is exemplary of this godly will to power because it concentrates all of Indra’s creative functions into one heroic deed. The god’s victory is not simply over a draconic representation of drought, darkness, Dasyu foes, or cosmic disintegration, but may have revealed to the Vedic people that their leaders could overcome any obstacle hindering their growing civilization’s rise to power.


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