Slapšak, Svetlana – Ancient mythurgy: Women

Slapšak, Svetlana – Ancient mythurgy: Women

2013, 310 pages

Price: 800 dinars

Svetlana Slapšak is Professor of Anthropology of the Ancient World, Gender Studies and Balkanology (since 2002) and Coordinator of Studies at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH) in Ljubljana. Her recent books include: Toward an Anthropology of the Ancient World (Sudentska založba, Ljubljana, 2000), Female Icons of the Twentieth Century (Biblioteka XX vek, 2001), Female Icons of the Ancient World (Biblioteka XX vek, 2006), and Little Black Dress: Essays on Anthropology and Feminism (Centar za ženske studije, Beograd, 2007).

INTRODUCTION

Mythurgy, or Volume II of Female Icons of Antiquity

         „Daddy, you are a myth.“—Laura. I saw a memorial notice with this text on the notice board of a small church outside the town of San Severino, in the Italian province of Marche, in September 2009. Laura informed everybody who read the notice, a well as her deceased father, that he had become a myth. He qualified to be a myth by virtue of the fact that he died. Butt hat is not the only possible interpretation: it is also possible that Laura’s father had already been a myth before he died, and that he had to be reminded of it after his death. Or that he did not know that he was a myth and that it was time, at last, that he be informed. In any case, death is the most important, and possibly the only, condition for entry into myth – but to actually accomplish entry it is necessary to have the help of the person who announces and legitimises the entry. The informer, or if you prefer the legitimator, is therefore the main figure in the creation of myth. Laura’s intervention is essential if we understand myth as a set of everyday gestures of remembrance, in which the individual participates freely and criteria are not imposed. In any event, this anthropological datum is consistent with the approach of the most prominent schools of thought on myth and mythology, in particular the two authors who I consider to be my main teachers on the topic, Roland Barthes and Jean-Pierre Vernant.                         

         Roland Barthes fundamentally grasped the concept of myth, because he drew the connection between the everyday manipulation of myth and the dominant and prescriptives modes of (mythic) narration. [1]  By doing so he opened up the possibility of tying together the everyday production of myths with the modes of myth production in the past. Unfortunately, specialists in ancient mythology do not make use of this possibility. For the most part they have remained in the theoretical fields that operate with elevated ideas about mythology: mythology as the source of collective identities in the worst case, or in a somewhat better case mythology as a source of knowledge about early civilisation ort he history of consciousness.  Jean-Pierre Vernant was sharply critical of this type of thinking, on the ground that a thinker and researcher looking from the point of view of the present in the absence of self-reflexivity constitutes the negation of a critical perspective: the object of his criticism in particular was Mircea Eliade and his psychoanalytical approach. He did not draw associations to Barthes’ conception of everyday production of myth. The intervention by Barthes is broader, and takes the traumas of the modern age as given. For his part, Barthes understands myth as a constant, permanent psychologigal inscription of myth, by way of which culture is necessarily transformed into „nature,“ and the person of western culture (whatever that may mean) is attributed a kind of anthropological universality, in the form of an insistent and highly stereotyped abuse on the part of discourses connected with power. Barthes distinguishes three types of readings of myth: there is the orientation toward the empty signifier, when the signified regains meaning in the form of a symbol – this ist he construction of myth through the search for a form for an exiting concept; there is the orientation toward the full signifier.

Barthes distinguishes three types of readings of myth: 1) orientation toward the empty signifier, where the signified acquires meaning in the form of a symbol – that is construction of myth by means of seeking a form for an existing concept; 2) orientation toward the full signifier, with a clear differentiation between form and meaning, in which the signified becomes an alibi – that is decoding or analysis of myth; 3) orientation toward the mythological signifier, as a unity of form and meaning, when the signified becomes the presence of the concept, which is precisely the reading of myth. With regard to the ambivalence of the idea of the „mythological signifier“ it would help to consider the anthropological context: I would add „reading myth aloud.“ Speech and performance are essential for any establishment of meaning in myth. On this point Vernant and Barthes meet: this sounds comical, because they taught at the same institution, the College de France, which does not award degrees and where all lectures are open to the public.

         The authority to speak myths in a certain sense bring us back to Laura. Unfortunately, we cannot identify easily the anaonymous narrator of myth in antiquity, not only because there is little to none of  the kind of evidence that Laura left, but also because research into antiquity began very late, only in the second half of the twentieth century, to „stoop“ to notice and interpret the cases of possible ancient Lauras. Beyond that part of the problem, there remains the massive field of the relationship between body and speech, and our lack of understanding of the meaning of the oral in different periods and contexts of the ancient worlds. An ancient grave inscription, or Laura’s memorial message, share the same goal: that the passerby read the name of the deceased aloud, and that by that act of memory return him to the world of the living. This can take the form of a name or of a longer text about the deceased. Graves by the roadside, or at the entrances of cities, in antiquity were places for the human voice and conversation; today they are places of silence.[2] Silence as a form of bodily behaviour made possible the practice of quiet, internal prayer, the idea that it is possible to communicate with God „within oneself.“ Those are all innovations which were introduced and refined by Christianity, and which we continue to pracice in post-Christian cultures, unaware of what is inscribed in our bodies. The first Christians prayed silently for subterfuge: that near-revolutionary and certainly conspiratorial silence was easily transformed into submission or obedience, which are still today considered desirable characteristics of a Christian. The „interior monologue,“ for example, is something that would sound absurd an many ancient cultures; prayer to God would be considered as having no meaning if it were not dialogic, that is a part of social behaviour toward gods, with negotiation, trading, bargaining, and constant risk. Another concept that would be understood with difficulty in the ancient world is „faith.“[3] Paul Veyne addressed this question with an outstanding structural analysis that responds to both problems. (Ancient) Greeks did, and simultaneously did not, beilieve in their myths and gods, but faith in all its forms, maybe even more so in the Roman republic than in the Athenian democarcy, was inscribed in politics, that is in the public behaviour of citizens.[4] John Scheid, in his research on Roman faith, in great measure supplemented, deepened and clarified Veyne’s innovative thesis: the Roman citizen, by carrying out the rituals of expected, prescribed, or chosen cults demonstrated that he was a citizen, and in that regard the question of whether he „believed“ was perfectly irrelevant.

When the crucial transformation to silent internal prayer was made it is difficult to specify; some acts of ancient cultures cannot be imagined with audible speech – the production of books, in which one person dictates and slaves transcribe, by which means in  few sessions twenty copies can be made, or work in libraries or in schools, or any teaching of literacy. But these perennial exceptions do not change much the status of the spoken word and voice. This relationship was described by Jack Goody, one of the most prominent contemporary antropologists.[5] However, one of the deepest and most anthropologically persuasive accounts of speech and the body was published by Jesper Svenbro[6]: he finds the beginnings of reading occurring relatively early, seeing them in the advancement of historical prose, and seeing in reading aloud (particularly of the inscriptions on grave markers) traces of the ritual practices of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls.

Writing without speech is a figure that derives from a rich anthropological and historical practice: this figure has been used in feminist theory with the concept of women’s writing, which was prominently used in the 1980s, by French authors in particular. At the centre of this idea is not placed biological gender, that ist he question of who writes (with dubious techniques for determining gender in the absence of evidence), but rather the idea that all writing is female, othered, culturally subordinate, because the person who writes does not speak and is a woman, regardless of gender. This extraordinarily productive current of research faded out in the 1990, but as it was a signifying badge of contemporary Yugoslav feminism it has not lost meaning for me. I regard it as highly useful for the understanding of mythological stories with predominantly female characters, and that is why my first two books on mythology are dedicated to female figures.

In his last major work on mythology, Jean-Pierre Vernant[7] concentrated on the figure of the mythographer, the professional who invented, combined, recorded and sold myths. The „specialist“ of myth was a necessary figure to establish where and how the telling of myths would not coincide with rituals, cults, beliefs, philosophy, in short with the higher spheres of thought, but would rather, from this point of view, resist all forms of higher authority. He presented his new theory of myth in Ljubljana, at the lectures of the programme fort he anthropology of ancient worlds at ISH, the postgraduate school for the humanities, in 1996.[8]. Vernant returns the telling of myth to its social context.

In the introduction to the first volume in this series (published by the same publisher in 2006) I resolved my doubts about placing myth in other contexts (genres, arts, discourses) in order to justify my reading of mythology and to persuade readers of the endless freshness and usefulness of myths. The selection of myths in that book is also adapted to the goal of bringing of myth into the contemporary environment and showing the suitability of myth to the most varied moments, while at the same time developing a critical sensitivity to the abuse of myth. Now I would like in this introduction to draw attention to what I call mythurgy, that is to the steps in the making, or more precisely the refinement of myth.[9] The term has been accepted by some colleagues: at the second of our meetings on the theme of mythology, which are held in Trieste and Ljubljana, Ezio Pellizer used the term in the title of the conference. After that three annual meetings used the term mythurgy, and it has become a term to identify a specific approach to the reading of mythology. For his part Pellizer has for years led the šroject on mythology whose extraordinarily interesting results, in the form of new interpretations of ancient myth, can be found on the internet site of the University of Trieste.

The term mythurgy originates from the approach to myth introduced by the French school of anthropology of ancient societies. If I had to define it, it differs from the simple assessment that myth deals with telling stories in the sense that it seeks to integrate a network of negations: myth is a story defined by context and techniques of listening and reading, and which does not explain, impose norms, legitimate, direct or teach, but rather leads and instructs the audience to retelling and to thinking. This means grasping myth out of the hands of Plato, who first used the term mythology and who created all of the confusion about myth which still run through the fields of philosophy, ethics, politics and culture. „Deplatonifying“ mythology seems to be as necessary as ever, considering that we can no longer believe that enjoyment prevents abuse.

It seems to me that with this sort of understanding af ancient mythology I open a few inconvenient „boxes“ from which anything could emerge: one of those monsters is a certain abuse of myth in the recent history of the region where I was born. In this context the telling of ancient myths has most of all a therapeutic function: it opens an incomparably wider, intellectually more challenging and interesting space for mythurgy. It remains an open question how much this therapeutic communication through storytelling is possible. This question has been posed in Western popular culture: in the episode „Darmok“ of the popular science-fiction series Star Trek: The Next Generation (episode 2, season 5, 1991), the crew of the spaceship encounter a culture whose entire discourse is based on familiarity with myths, which are quoted in speech in order to form meanings. The crew and Captain Picard have great difficulty with this culture, until the captain of another ship succeeds in bringing Picard to a planetoid inhabited by an electrical beast, so that they can together experience the key story about friendship and cooperation – the story of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, in which they use joint effort to slay a monster. Captain Picard slowly begins to understand the means of communication, and tells Darmok, who has been fatally wounded by the monster, the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Relations between the Federation and this unusual culture are thus established, and Picard wonders whether he would himself be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to make a connection with another. In a series which in any case has an identifiable rhetorical and ethical substructure, this example of exit from the autism of national mythology did not reach the context to which it so clearly belonged, in another part of the world, right at that time. Mythology as a language, especially as a language of freedom, is something that European culture know well, beginning with the point that even the flimsiest mythological reference has been taken as sufficient reason to permit the display of the naked human body, from the Renaissance onward. But in either case, there is a requirement to know the language, that is the mythological story. That ist he basic goal of this book.

There remains the task of completing a book in which there will be men – gods and mortals, animals, monsters, plants and places. Let’s hope it comes out soon.