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Transformations at the Heart of Myth: Dawning, Order, Apocalypse
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12535 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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7 / 1987 |
7,787 Words |
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David Carrasco
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On October 26, 1982, an extraordinary intellectual and social event took place at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The location was the Glenn Miller Ballroom in the University Memorial Center, scene of college dances, the famous "Trivia Bowl," public lectures, registration line, and Buddhist assemblies. But this night's event transformed the quality of the room. Professor Mircea Eliade, the seventy-five-year-old Romanian-born novelist and the world's leading historian of religions, delivered a brilliant lecture to a standing-room-only crowd of over one thousand people. The central ballroom, with a giant photograph of Glenn Miller and his trombone on one wall and an imposing musical score of his song "Miller's Tune" on the other, had been set with five hundred chairs in expectation of a large turnout. But by half past seven, a half hour before the lecture was scheduled to begin, all seats were taken. The huge moveable doors on both sides of the ballroom were opened to accommodate the growing throng. Another five hundred chairs were set up. Eliade, in a faculty seminar the next day, humorously referred to the opening of the giant doors as a "cosmogonic act." By eight o'clock, all seats were occupied--latecomers stood along the back walls.
The lecture, which has never been published, demonstrated Eliade's capacity to reconsider the historic enterprise of religions and think anew about their roles in the modern era. Concise in its points and amazing in its scope, the lecture included some of Eliade's most profound reflections on the role of myths and mythic structures in human culture and their relation to the human quest to create, decipher, and renew meaning and value.
Eliade demonstrated the persistence (sometimes camouflaged) of mythic experience and thought in contemporary society in forms such as rock music, novels, secret societies, movies, and the sinister models of an impending apocalypse which permeate our daily news. Young people flocked to the presentation to see and hear the old man who helped make the terms "myth," "shamanism," and "archetype" a living part of their vocabulary. The lecture had the appropriate and ironic title "Waiting for the Dawn."
One of the underlying themes of Eliade's presentation, and indeed of a significant amount of research and writing by anthropologists, historians of religion, and journalists today, was the way in which myths, mythic thoughts, and religious symbols have been used to organize and revitalize communities and to integrate the experience of individuals. This interest in the role of myths in culture is very old, as Western thinkers from Plato to Gianbattista
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