In the Beginning was the Trance
If the myth of the primitive is a fantasy that modernity has about itself, one of the scholarly sources for this myth is Lord James Frazer’s stupefying and monumental book The Golden Bough.
Field anthropologists tend to hold in disdain those persons who make anthropological claims without getting their boots dirty and Lord Frazer is often dismissed as an “armchair” anthropologist; he didn’t go anywhere but the library. He would even brag that he had “never seen a savage”—go figure. Running to 22 volumes the book is a wall of ethnographic facts that revolves like a giant cyclone around the still image of Virgil’s golden bough—an image symbolic of “the dying god” and the transportation to and from the underworld. Lord Frazer stupefies the reader with his thesis that the old age of magic, before christ, was benighted and ignorant, primitive—in the modern sense of the word—misbegotten and hallucinatory; but it is a world much closer to our civilization than we suppose. The book was a runaway best seller in the early 20th century and everyone read it, particularly the stars of literary modernism, T.S. Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Hemingway, etc.
Freud read Frazer closely and cites him in Totem and Taboo at least 95 times. While Freud’s book of speculative anthropology was likewise written in the library, we can perhaps allow Freud more credibility; he got his boots dirty by the practice of psychoanalysis. It is from Frazer that Freud reinforces his notion of individual human development repeating the development of the species—as in the old evolutionary axiom that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. So Freud, following Frazer, proposes three phases through which both the species and the individual human person must traverse: magic, religion and science.
From Totem and Taboo:
The animistic (magic) phase would correspond to narcissism both chronologically and in its content; the religious phase would correspond to the stage of object-choice of which the characteristic is a child's attachment to his parents; while the scientific phase would have an exact counterpart in the stage at which an individual has reached maturity, has renounced the pleasure principle, adjusted himself to reality and turned to the external world for the object of his desires (1913, SE V. XII p. 90).
From this we can see that Freud, like some new atheist, considers the mature ego to be a scientist. Animism here is Freud’s name for Frazer’s “sympathetic magic,” (what a later theory would name mimesis, but that may be just an acute mode of identification). I would suggest that, for Freud, the state of animism is no different from that of oceanic feeling and his book-length analysis of it can be applied retroactively to mysticism as a critique: mysticism is ultimately childish and un-scientific. But the child, of course, is not without “fullness and delicacy of feeling” (1913, p. 98); what finally gives credibility to the primitive human, and the child alike, is endopsychic perception; that is, they are aware of the unconscious in ways that baffle the modern adult.
Now, childhood aside, let us suppose—as I have explored recently on this channel—that Virgil’s golden bough, upon which Frazer was so fixated, is in fact a psychoactive bough. Freud quotes Frazer: “the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity." For Freud, this older sacrement is sacrafice of the primal father. If only he, or Frazer had know that this far older sacrement is in fact a super-placebo. We can assume then that what Frazer named the age of magic should be characterized less by magical thinking and superstition, than by radically altered mental states. It is symptomatic that, for all his encyclopedic literacy, Lord James Frazer—like a virgin who refuses to think of sex—remained totally ignorant of pharmakeia; it is a stance that is all too typical in the squarest of square fortress-castle of academia.
But in the long dawn prior to civilization, it is now becoming obvious that more than a few persons (if not everyone) spent time and energy transgressing the limits of the psyche with a whole host of techniques: whether by substance, as in ayahuasca or the psychedelic kukeon of the Greeks (the original eucharist), or by practice, such as kundalini yoga, or living in the darkness of a cave for weeks at a time. I can only imagine that such techniques, far from being mere intoxication, allow special access to profound realities that are otherwise inaccessible to everyday consciousness—as in the ancient definition of ecstatic: to stand outside oneself. From this centripetal standpoint the ubiquitous and prevalent existence of these primitive ecstasies throughout the ancient world undoes Freud’s analysis of the primitive as narcissistic; the primitive ecstasies become the very magnetism of culture, the origin of myth and meaning.
Instead of Freud’s pronouncement at the end of Totem and Taboo: that “In the beginning was the deed.” We might say rather: in the beginning was the trance.
Dionysius and his ecstatic retinue, Krater-Psykter vase, 500 BCE
