[Marxism] joseph campbell on primitive mythology

[Max Clark <poeticaleconomy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Just picked up Joseph Campbell's on point The masks of God: Primitive Mythology 
and read the following in the chapter on the cave-paintings of Lascaux:

'The man wears a bird mask and has birdlike instead of human hands. He is 
certainly a shaman, the bird costume and the bird transformation being 
characteristic','of the lore of shamanism to this day throughout Siberia and 
North America. Furthermore, in our Polynesian story of Maui and the monster eel 
we have learned something of the power of the magician's phallus; and there is 
still practiced in Australia a lethal phallic rite of magic known as the 
"pointing bone," one variety of which has been described by Geza Roheim, who 
writes:

"Black or hostile magic is poredominately phallic in Australia.... If a man has 
been "boned," his dream will show it. First he sees a crack, an opening in the 
ground, and then two or three men walking toward him within the opening. When 
they are near they draw a bone out of their own body. It comes from the flesh 
between the scrotum and the rectum. The sorceror, before he actually "bones" 
his victim, makes him fall asleep by strewing in the air some semen or 
excrement which he has taken from his own penis or rectum. The man who uses the 
bone holds it under his penis, as if a second penis were protruding from 
him....."

....

"Women also make evil magic," Dr. Roheim continues, "through the agency of 
their imaginary penis....." 

....'

And so on. I hope this gives some context for the use of words like 
"phallocentrism" in authors like Derrida and Cixous. Further, I often feel the 
traces of shamanism preserved within capitalism. Hyper-chremasto-shamanism. 
Hypothesis: schizophrenia is shamanic. All this just by way of defending the 
mentally ill community against the divide and rule ideologies of capital 
stigmatizing them. Madness is divine -- I would be so voluntarily if I were 
allowed. --St. Max 

http://clarkmax.blogspot.com/



      


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu