Since I finished Steppenwolf, I've gotten back to reading a li'l Joseph Campbell. I'll try and finish him up this weekend.
He's talking about shamanistic traditions and how these compare to priestly rituals. In these shamanistic rituals, he mentions, clowns are sometimes included. For example, among the Pueblo indians clowns would be striped with white/black clay and would dance and make a mockery of the medicine men throughout the ceremony. I read something similar in Black Elk Speaks about Sioux traditions.
Campbell says that they represent "the chaos prinicple, the principle of disorder, the force careless of taboos and shattering bounds." This carries over to Western tradition as well, such as in the "Feast of Fools" (featured in Disney's Hunchback) and the "Ass Festival" (where the congregation ends mass by braying like donkeys).
There is more involved here than humor. I believe that--at a fundemental level--we understand the importance of chaos. In Medeival times, the court jester was allowed the right to make fun of court proceedings and even the king; by doing so, he could contradict the king in ways that even the highest officials wouldn't dare. In football, the ref flips a coin to see which team gets first possession of the ball: chaos allows for an even playing ground. As children we start games with "Eenie-Meanie" or "Ink-a-Bink" to select which child is "It"; and even now, as adults, we play "Rock, Paper, Scissors" to resolve ties.
Without chaos, life becomes crystalline and rigid. Imagine if males only produced a single sperm and women a single egg. Our gene pool would become dangerously homogenous. Our reproduction cycle creates billions of sperm and hundreds of eggs with billions of genetic combinations and then lets chance and natural selection determine which genetic combination earns the right to reproduce.
And think about how many scientific discoveries owe their existence to random events. Vulcanized rubber was invented when Charles Goodyear left it cooking on the stove too long.
Even within organized religion, chaos is essential. God could not exist without Satan. Good cannot exist without evil. God may have created Adam and Eve, but they would never have left the Garden of Eden without Satan. In Greek mythology, it was Prometheus who gave the creative force of fire to Man, stealing it from the Gods. The chaotic, anti-god is found in many religions and under a variety of names: Loki, Coyote, Anansi, Hermes, Set, Maui and, of course, Lucifer.
7 years ago
3 comments:
Another interesting post. In regards to "God could not exist without Satan": I was just going to paraphrase this, but I had it handy. It's from C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.
"The two powers, or spirits, or gods--the good one and the bad one--are supposed to be quite independent. They both existed from all eternity. Neither of them made the other, neither of them has any more right than the other to call itself God. Each presumably thinks it is good and thinks the other bad. One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and mercy, and each backs its own view. Now what do we mean when we call one of them the Good Power and the other the Bad Power? Either we are merely saying that we happen to prefer the one to the other--like preferring beer to cider--or else we are saying that, whatever the two powers think about it, and whichever we humans, at the moment, happen to like, one of them is actually wrong, actually mistaken, in regarding itself as good. Now if we mean merely that we happen to prefer the first, then we must give up talking about good and evil at all. For good means what you ought to prefer quite regardless of what you hapen to like at any given moment. If 'being good' meant simply joining the side you happened to fancy, for no real reason, then good would not deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right.
"But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of them, and He will be the real God. In fact, what we meant by calling them good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in a right relation to the real ultimate God and the other in a wrong relation to Him."
I don't think this refutes the main thrust of your post, the importance of chaos, a point you made quite well and which I agree with. I'm just not sure that good vs. evil is equivalent to order vs. chaos.
Wonderful comment. I'll respond in my next blog entry...
I'm anxious to hear what you have to say. I agree with Dan that you can't exactly equate good with order and chaos with evil, but I agree with you that the there are two sides to every coin, and binaries like order and chaos, good and evil, et cetera, cannot exist without their counterparts, at least as far as our divisionary perspectives are concerned.
As for random events and stumblings upon various inventions, I don't know if I'd equate those with chaos either, unless your definition of chaos suggests that any order of events that doesnt fit into humanity's methods of cognition are chaotic. Maybe it comes down to that: semantics and perspective...how we view the world.....then agian, that just locks us back up in that frustrating jail cell of solipsism.
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