more on religion and violence and Frazer (with taco-tantra-strewn PS)

[Michael Lee Bailey]

Mark Kohut 
>    For those--you know who you are---who have led the way in exploring Magic >in TRP.
>    From the same essay by Segal:   'The bulk of The Golden Bough is devoted >to an intermediate stage between religion and science---a stage of magic and >religion combined.
>        "Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or rather >supplemented, by
>         a religious theory."...
     
>    Does this apply to Pynchon's vision?......any How and Why?

Like Durkheim, this is a suggestion that makes sense,
but I'm not all that familiar with the reference.

I'm a bit more familiar with the Golden Bough stuff,
actually, than with Durkheim...it falls into the desirable "weird
shit" category by my criteria...so I've lounged over it
for a few hours, I think the same slacker summer of 1980 that
I skimmed Bullfinch's Mythology...but didn't do any serious study...
(great summer for reading, that...)

I brought away impressions like,
"on a hillside overlooking the remote hamlet of
Beavershire in western Codswallop-by-the-Sea, every
midsummer since the Roman occupation, the eligible
bachelors of the town dance around a bonfire 
wearing antlers"...sort of idly wondering if those
traditions survive from Frazer's* time to ours...

they did make it into one of P.G. Wodehouse's
Jeeves stories, and I seem to remember, one of
the wonderful PBS renditions thereof

more to the point here,
that whole "kill-the-king" thing, would seem to
be pertinent - in fact, (getting exciting) you
could map both murders in ATD into the Eliot-Waste-Land
kill-the-king thing if you knew a boatload more about
Eliot, the Waste Land, and traditions than I do...

*** tangent ****
* Fraser, Frazier, Frazer....woolgathering to
"friseur" (German for "hairdresser" which is one
of those words in German class that you go "yeah! -
cause the Friseur deals with the Frizz...
..."barber rebarbed" (and how construction
guys use the term "rebarb")...

sort of like the skein
of associations I've been playing with, this morning
in the Taco Bell -- egad, they open at 9am - who'd
imagine people wanting tacos @ 9am yet there I was --
w/r/t Glenn's taco metaphor...

there's a column in the free weekly here called "The
Mexican" which recently used the term "pink taco"
for female pudendum.  That would abet the tantric
thrust;  yes, "bun" isn't appropriate here, but
"shell" works nicely (Venus on the Half-Shell),
and what's wrong with "juevos refritos" - the "refried"
reference conjuring Nietzsche's "eternal return"?

The shredded beef evoking the bullfight and
the sacramental killing/sacrifice
The salsa red and flowing (all too often onto
new shirts, but not today!) like Christ's blood, or menstrual blood,
again referring to sacrifice.
The green of the shredded lettuce evoking the
"grass" of Sandburg's poem ("I'm the grass"
something like "I grow over battlefields, let me work")