Clive wrote:I know it is poo pooed but actually we need to look again at sacred kings or priest kings. Dare I say the name? J G Frazer?
Why is xianity not another tale of priest kings? I am the bread of life. I am the vine.
What actually is the problem with xianity being a quite ordinary set of myths and rituals gone big?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Nemorensis
Frazer,
Golden Bough (1890). What a crazy Romantic! What he was doing was common in the late 19th century, that is, was reinterpreting history through the plot of "Romance", one of four main literary interpretive frameworks that developed as a result of the enlightenment. In other words, he has made "history" (the historical factoids, as I call them) intelligible in his own age.
Hayden White (
MetaHistory, 1974) came up with a general outline to categorize and correlate the tropes, plots, argumentative strategies and ideological implications common in European literature (which includes history) since the 19th century or so. This 4x4 table sort of sums up his thinking:
TROPE: Figures of speech that deploy words in such a way as to turn or translate meaning. Operates at the deep level of human thought in the sense of 1) creating meaning through binary opposition (Saussure) or 2) otherness, or difference in any historical period (Foucault). As used by White, becomes a means to distinguish the dominant modes of historical imagination (in 19th century Europe in his case). By extrapolation to the cultural level, identifies the figurative structure that underpins the surface tiers that are employed to describe its historical imagination. Can be extended to include creation of large-scale metaphors (such as the base-superstructure metaphor of Marx) that rely upon the basic relationships of part-whole/whole-part that serve that in turn as models used as the basis of a total explanation of historical change. |
EMPLOTMENT: Story line or plot structure that imparts meaning to a historical narrative. A technique that relates a sequence of events with their contextual or colligatory connections. Turns a sequence of events into a story of some kind. Either employed to discover the meaning, or imposing a meaning, on that sequence of events. White conceives this tier as the historian's vehicle(s) of historical explanation. |
ARGUMENT: A set of premises and the conclusion drawn or inferred from them. An argument is "valid" (although not necessarily true) if the conclusion follows either inductively of deductively from the premises. |
IDEOLOGICAL IMPLICATION: Ideology is a coherent set of socially produced ideas that lend or create a group consciousness. Time and place specific, ideology represents the dominant mode of explanation and rationalism that saturates a society, transmitted through various social and institutional mechanisms such as media, church, education and law. Some commentators find ideology imbedded in all social artifacts such as narrative structures (like written history), codes of behavior and patterns of belief. Can be viewed as a means employed by the dominant class to maintain its dominant position by obscuring the reality of its economic exploitation of other classes. Suggests to readers the import of the Author's studies of the past for the comprehension of the present: |
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| Four Predominant Means of Communication: |
Four Main Archetypical Plot structures: |
Four Main Theories of truth: |
Four Main Ideologies: |
| METAPHOR: Word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them. Represents the similarities between objects. Representational. |
ROMANCE: Imagines the power of the historical agent/hero or protagonist as ultimately superior to his/its environment. Unfolds as a quest where the final success, redemption or transcendence is assured. |
FORMIST: Identifies the unique atomistic or dispersive character of events, people and actions in the past. Permits historians to graphically represent vivid individual events from which it is possible to make significant generalizations. |
ANARCHISM: Demands rapid, perhaps even cataclysmic, social change in order to establish a new society. |
| METONYMY: Use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute of, or of which it is associated. Reduces an object to a part or parts. Reductionist. |
TRAGEDY: Imagines the agent/hero or protagonist as engaged in a quest where final success is eventually thwarted by fate or by a personality flaw. |
MECHANIST: Identifies events, people and actions in the past as subject to deterministic extra-historical laws, usually cast in the form of equivalent part-part relationships. Tends to be reductive rather than synthetic. |
RADICALISM: Welcomes imminent social change, but are more aware of the effects of inherited institutions, and are thus more exorcised by the means to effect change than are anarchists. |
| SYNECDOCHE: A part is put for the whole, or the whole for a part. Integrates objects by stressing their similarities or essences. Integrative. |
COMEDY: Imagines an agent/hero or protagonist as moving from obstruction to reconstruction, achieving at least a temporary victory over circumstances through the process of reconciliation. Often ends with rejoicing over the coherence or consensus a heroic figure achieves between groups of men, women, races, nations or classes. |
ORGANIC: Identifies past events, people and actions as components of a synthetic process in a microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship whereby a single element or individual is just one element among many. Tends to be integrative. |
CONSERVATISM: Oppose rapid change by supporting the evolutionary elaboration of existing social institutions. Are most suspicious of change than the other ideologies. |
| IRONY: Negates literal meaning. Negational. |
SATIRE: Imagines the agent/hero or protagonist as inferior, a captive of their world, and destines for a life of obstacles and negation. |
CONTEXTUAL: Identifies events, people or actions in the past by their presumed connections to others in webs of colligatory relationships within an era, or with a complex process of interconnected change. Tends to be moderately integrative. |
LIBERALISM: Prefers the fine tuning of social institutions to secure moderately paced social change. |
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This is a generalized picture of clear-cut literary conventions in 19th century European literature, but he thinks the way he has them ordered (by row) tend to be characteristics that are often found together. If one goes by this, a "Romantic" Frazer does seem to fit the characteristics of Trope, Plot and Argumentative Strategy, and less so with his/her Ideology. Can't win them all. However, a really complex author/historian could go against the norms White had correlated together, and use any combination of the above characteristics to effect his communicative magic with the reader.
Frazer's book has been resurrected to an extent in modern times by Freke & Gandy,
The Jesus Mysteries (1999). I have posted a review of their book in the net, probably only on a couple discussion boards. Some of the criticisms of their approach may equally apply to Frazer's.
Another case where examples of Romantic emplotment are taken as workable data is the Rank-Raglan criteria.
They are all imaginative reconstructions determined by their times and not scientific by any means.
DCH
DCH
