A blogger who’s posts I admire wrote what he called “sketch for a short story” a while back. In this story, a credible construction from an indo-european perspective of the sort of things that may have been practiced and believed by the original druids, although in and of itself wholely a work of fiction, the two central characters (a Roman and Druid) talk through a rite that lasts for a period of weeks, when it becomes the task of the druids to take over from the Gods in the making and recreating of the world. The sense conveyed in this short sketch was very powerful, describing an unstable world eternally teetering on the edge of chaos, and fearful rituals needed when the Gods withdrew once every nineteen years in order to maintain existence and prevent its plunge into the abyss of howling monsters.
On one level, it got me thinking that we do indeed continually maintain our reality, if only in sustaining and maintaining that sense of stability and continuity that defines our sanity. And if we do this on a personal level, through the development and unfolding of a continuous personal and mythic narrative, how more so do we do it on a community or social level… what rituals we enact, what proscribed and prescribed patterns of behaviour and what stories we tell and develop to create and maintain our consensus sanity?
One after the other, each ‘owner’ would then sing his stretch of the Ancestor’s footprints. Always in the correct sequence.
“To sing a verse out of order”, Flynn said sombrely, “was a crime. Usually meant the death penalty.”
“I can see that,” I said. “It’d be the musical equivalent of an earthquake.”
“Worse,” he scowled. “It would be to un-create the Creation.”
Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (p58)
More recently the issue of taboo came up on a forum that I participate in. Actually, this is an issue that has come up over the years on several forums I have been involved with, and again it gets me to thinking about this relationship between proscribed behaviour, narrative and the maintenance of the experience reality.
To me, a taboo is not an inherently religious issue, but it does seem to be an inherently deep psycho-spiritual one. As a culture, we tend to use the term to describe things that it are good to break in some sort of iconoclastic sense… “the last taboo” is always a media favourite… or we use to to describe comparatively trivial transgressions. But the real taboos… the actions that place the transgressor “beyond the pale”… are actions that unmake the world. The phrase, beyond the pale, would have meant beyond the stake, or outside of the fence… cast out of society, outlawed.
In engaging with our community there are rules, expectations. Some of these are so deeply enculturated that it is almost impossible to articulate them, as hard to perceive as the air that we breathe or the light that we see by. We have contracts, agreements that are unconsciously extended and accepted, between us, that require us to refrain from certain behaviours that would threaten that fabric of consensus stability. Those who break those contracts we have need to weave into our narratives as monsters, to place them outside, howling with the other demons threatening to destroy the world. In doing so though, I wonder what it is that we become in our attempts to deny the truth of our own monsterhood?
