Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)
Eliade was educated as a philosopher. He published extensively in the history of religions and acted as editor-in-chief of Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Religion. The influence of his thought, through these works and through thirty years as director of History of Religions department at the University of Chicago, is considerable.
Eliade's analysis of religion assumes the existence of "the sacred" as the object of worship of religious humanity. It appears as the source of power, significance, and value. Humanity apprehends "hierophanies"--physical manifestations or revelations of the sacred--often, but not only, in the form of symbols, myths, and ritual. Any phenomenal entity is a potential hierophany and can give access to non-historical time: what Eliade calls illud tempus (Latin for 'that time,' I tend to think of it as 'yon time'). The apprehension of this sacred time is a constitutive feature of the religious aspect of humanity. www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/eliade/mebio.htm
Mircea Eliade recounts in his books the brilliant use of ashes made by old men initiators in Australia, Africa, the Near East, South America, the Pacific. Initiation says that before a boy can become a man, some infantile being in him must die. Ashes Time is a time set aside for the death of that ego-bound boy. The boy between eight and twelve years of age, having been taken away from the mother, passes into the hands of the old men guides who cover his face and sometimes his whole body with ashes to make him the color of dead people and to remind him of the inner death about to come. He may be put into the dark for hours or maybe days, introduced to spirits of dead ancestors. Then he may crawl through a tunnel-or vagina- made of brush and branches. The old men are waiting for him at the other end, only now he has a new name. The mothers in some cultures feel so strongly about the importance of the ritual that when reunited to their sons, they pretend not to recognize them and have to be reintroduced. The mothers participate joyfully in this initiation.
The gold-obsessed man, whether a New Age man or a Dow Jones man, can be said to be the man who hasn't yet handled ashes.
The word ashes contains in it a dark feeling for death; ashes when put on the face whiten it as death does. Job covered himself with ashes to say that the earlier omfortable Job was dead; and that the living Hob mourned the dead Job. But for us, how can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determinded to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, poverty, lethargy or misery? Disneyland means "no ashes."
Despite our Disneyland culture, some men around thrity five or forty will begin to experience ashes privately, without ritual, even without old men. They begin to notice how many of ther dreams have turned to ashes. A young man in high school dreams that he will be a race driver, a mountain climber, he will marry Miss America, he will be a millionaire by thirty, he will get a Nobel Prize in physics by thirty-five, he will be an architect and build the tallest building ever. He will get out of his hick town and live in Paris. He will have fabulous friends...and by thirty five, all these dreams are ashes.
At thirty -five his inner stove begins to produce ashes as well. All through his twenties, his stove burned with such a good draft that he threw in whole nights until dawn, drinking parties, sexual extravagance, enthusiasm, madness, excitement. Then one day he notices that his stove doesn't take such big chunks anymore. He opens the stove door and ashes fall out on the floor. It's time for him to buy a small black shovel at the hardware store and get down on his knees. The ashes fall off the shovel and onto the floor, and he can see the print of his bootsoles in the ashes.
Robert Frost said of the "Oven Bird":
The question that he frames in all but words
is what to make of a diminshed thing
Some habitual error we keep making in our relationships produces more ash than heat. A number of men around thirty-five have told me that they are afraid to go into a new relationship for fear it will end as the last ten or twelve have ended, in "ashes." But young men can't get enough ashes. Enlightenment addicts think they want ecstacy from their association with their guru, but they may really want the ashes. Having no kitchen fire to sit beside and no Wild Man to send us there, the young man smears soot on his face and hopes that his own mother will not recognize him.
Pablo Neruda says:
Out of everything I've done, everything I've lost
everything I've gotten unexpectedly,
I can give you a little in leaves, in sour iron...
here I am with the thing that loses stars, like a vegetable, alone. (from "Brussels, Trans. by Robert Bly)
Ashes present a great diminishment away from the living tree with its huge crown and its abundant shade. The recognition of this dminishment is a proper experience for men who are over thirty. If the man doesn't experience that diminishment sharply, he will retain his inflation, and continue to identify himself with all in him that can fly: his sexual drive, his minds, his refusal to commit himself, his addiction, his transcendence, his coolness. The coolness of some American men means that they have skipped ashes.
Franklin Roosevelt found his ashes in his polio; Anwar Sadat in his prison; Solzhenitsyn in the gulag. Some of our liveliest writers--John Steinbeck, William Faulker, Thomas McGrath, Tillie Olson, David Ignatow, Kenneth Rexroth--found their ashes in the poverty of the Depression.
Katabasis and ashes are a little different. We could say that a man finds katabasis only through dropping, poverty, abrupt change in social class; and prison is a traditional place to experience both katabasis and ashes. But a man may keep his job and famly and still experience ashes if he knowns what he is doing. From Robert Bly, Iron John, Vintage Books, New York, 1992, p. 80ff(To be continued)
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