Lyfing
12-31-2008, 01:06 AM
Volume One of The Masks of God can be found here (http://www.archive.org/stream/masksofgodprimit008825mbp/masksofgodprimit008825mbp_djvu.txt)..
Obviously the human female, with her talent for play, recog-
nized many millenniums ago the power of the supernormal sign
stimulus: cosmetics for the heightening of the lines of her eyes have
been found among the earliest remains of the Neolithic Age. And
from there to an appreciation of the force of ritualization, hieratic
art, masks, gladiatorial vestments, kingly robes, and every other
humanly conceived and realized improvement of nature, is but a
step or a natural series of steps.
Evidence will appear, in the course of our natural history of the
gods, of the gods themselves as supernormal sign stimuli; of the
ritual forms deriving from their supernatural inspiration acting as
catalysts to convert men into gods; and of civilization this new
environment of man that has grown from his own interior and has
pressed back the bounds of nature as far as the moon as a distil-
late of ritual, and consequently of the gods: that is to say, as an
organization of supernormal sign stimuli playing on a set of IRMs
never met by nature and yet most properly nature's own, inasmuch
as man is her son.
...
No functioning mythological system can be explained in terms of
the universal images of which it is constituted. These images are
developed largely from such infantile imprints as those that we
have just reviewed and constitute merely the raw material of myth.
They carry the energies of the psyche into the mythological context
and weld them to the historical task of the society, where the sym-
bols function, not in the way of a regressive recall of the spirit to
the joys and sorrows, desires and terrors of little Oedipus, or of
the earlier bambino, but rather as releasers and directors of the
energies into the field of adult experience and performance. My-
thology, that is to say, is progressive, not regressive. And the rites
themselves, through which the new sign symbols are impressed on
the minds of the growing young in such a way as to recondition
the entire system of their innate releasing mechanisms, constitute
one of the most interesting and crucial foci of our subject. For it
is precisely here that we confront directly the problem of the
meeting of the general and the particular, of the elementary and
the ethnic, in the field of myth. The initiation rite is the caldron
of their fusion.
Later,
-Lyfing
Obviously the human female, with her talent for play, recog-
nized many millenniums ago the power of the supernormal sign
stimulus: cosmetics for the heightening of the lines of her eyes have
been found among the earliest remains of the Neolithic Age. And
from there to an appreciation of the force of ritualization, hieratic
art, masks, gladiatorial vestments, kingly robes, and every other
humanly conceived and realized improvement of nature, is but a
step or a natural series of steps.
Evidence will appear, in the course of our natural history of the
gods, of the gods themselves as supernormal sign stimuli; of the
ritual forms deriving from their supernatural inspiration acting as
catalysts to convert men into gods; and of civilization this new
environment of man that has grown from his own interior and has
pressed back the bounds of nature as far as the moon as a distil-
late of ritual, and consequently of the gods: that is to say, as an
organization of supernormal sign stimuli playing on a set of IRMs
never met by nature and yet most properly nature's own, inasmuch
as man is her son.
...
No functioning mythological system can be explained in terms of
the universal images of which it is constituted. These images are
developed largely from such infantile imprints as those that we
have just reviewed and constitute merely the raw material of myth.
They carry the energies of the psyche into the mythological context
and weld them to the historical task of the society, where the sym-
bols function, not in the way of a regressive recall of the spirit to
the joys and sorrows, desires and terrors of little Oedipus, or of
the earlier bambino, but rather as releasers and directors of the
energies into the field of adult experience and performance. My-
thology, that is to say, is progressive, not regressive. And the rites
themselves, through which the new sign symbols are impressed on
the minds of the growing young in such a way as to recondition
the entire system of their innate releasing mechanisms, constitute
one of the most interesting and crucial foci of our subject. For it
is precisely here that we confront directly the problem of the
meeting of the general and the particular, of the elementary and
the ethnic, in the field of myth. The initiation rite is the caldron
of their fusion.
Later,
-Lyfing