MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3

 At the end of MIND 2.5 I wrote:

But for now it's more important to move on to the matter of why the presence of the magic-accepting society is as important to the category as the magic itself-- as I shall convey in Part 3.

I started this essay-series with the question, "is there something that sets the genre we usually call 'fantasy' from all other genres with metaphenomenal content?" I established that I believed that the dominant colloquial usage of "fantasy" concerned a particular subgroup of metaphenomenal narratives I have now dubbed "magical fantasy stories." From this category I have excluded narratives which are complicated by the presence of competing forms of wonder-rationale (as discussed in Part 2.5), OR by the absence of the proper kind of magic-welcoming society. I also mentioned that my desire to set aside the unique appeal of "magical fantasy stories" due to my own personal response to the fantasy-genre. I do not automatically assume that my response is characteristic of all fantasy-readers. But I also do not automatically assume that there is no relevance even if no other person has ever made the correlation I will now make.

I have reviewed, in three linked essays, one of the earliest breakthrough works of religious historian Mircea Eliade, 1957's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. My second essay provides the most detailed look at what Eliade sought to say in that book, though I should stress that he wrote only of religion, and not, as I do, of literature and folklore.

The first chapter, "Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred," explores many of the ways that religious people around the world have sought to endow specific objects or locales-- trees, stones, temples, or entire cities-- with a sacred quality that transcends the everyday interactions of the profane world. Given the chapter's concern with space, it's logical enough that Eliade leads off with a quote from Exodus: "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Eliade cites numerous other cultures-- Vedic Indian, Algonquin, Australian aborgine, Roman, Egyptian-- in order to support his claim: that "homo religiosus" shows a supervening tendency to formulate spaces in which the sacred can enter to banish the profane, which Eliade defines, albeit only briefly, as all those contingent factors involving "man's vital functions (food, sex, work and so on."

Now on this blog I've repeatedly discussed both the similarities and differences between the dynamics of religion and the dynamics of art. And I've always concluded that the differences are less significant than the similarities. The sense of constricting, "profane" ordinariness that religion banishes for the believer can also be banished by the "shadows of imagination" that audiences enjoy through art. The stories I deem "magical fantasies"are not any better or worse than any other stories in terms of potential ability to dispel dull care. But because magical fantasies create the feeling of a world imbued with magic, the worlds in those fantasies come closest to duplicating the dynamic Eliade describes:

...the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator's hands.

But such a cosmos is not defined only by space, but also by time. So quite logically, Eliade follows up his chapter on "sacred space" with one entitled "Sacred Time and Myths." Profane time, Eliade says, is "ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without religious meaning have their setting." In contrast, sacred time "represents the re-actualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past."

Now, I have not implied that magical fantasy stories, which belong to literature rather than religion, share religion's purpose of recapitulating the sacred stories of any particular culture-- though some stories do draw upon such established stories. Kelly Cipera, the essayist cited in Part 2.5, mentions that the Arthurian myths, which are not technically religious narratives, have their appeal in what *I* consider depicting events outside the scope of "profane time."

We recognize all of the ingredients of high fantasy is stories such as Le Morte d’Arthur, or the story of Arthur, Camelot and the search for the Holy Grail, a legend of Welsh origin. It is a hero’s tale — Arthur, who has no control over whether or not he can pull a sword from a stone or not, does, and suddenly kingship is thrust upon him. Matters beyond him and magic turn his life, which would have been otherwise dull and ordinary, into the stuff of legend.

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important to a given author's creative priorities, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

And that, for now, is my conclusion as to the special appeal of what I term "magical fantasy stories." I imagine that in future weeks I might be able to write as much as I have over these two days on all of the stories that don't convey this Eliadean sense of sacred exoticism.

ADDENDA: I will note that what Eliade calls a "pure and holy cosmos" often includes, in many religious cosmologies, all sorts of significant transgressive actions-- Odin slaying Ymir to make the world out of the giant's bones, or Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise. So the nature of religious purity and holiness does require some meditation to account for the significance of transgressive actions in molding a cosmos.