VVV: The Crowley and the Profane

[Mark Kohut]

Thanks Kai. I was hoping an expert like you would give us some Durkheim insight. 

I believe Otto's The Idea of the Holy came up during our C of L49 read and I believe there is a major
pynchon wiki post elaborating on it. It speaks to Pynchon's themes, fer sure or it helps expound
his themes if he never read it. (I remember it was a cheap paperback in the sixties even and would bet he did).
 
"Otto starts The Idea of the Holy by arguing that the non-rational in religion must be given its due importance, then goes on to introduce and develop his notion of the numinous. As a kind of first approximation for the wholly new concept he is giving us, Otto characterises the numinous as the holy (i.e. God) minus its moral and rational aspects. A little more positively, it is the ineffable core of religion: the experience of it cannot to be described in terms of other experiences.
[Note that the German heilig can be rendered as either holy or sacred. The translator had to make a choice and chose holy. So in the context of Otto, for holy it is possible to read sacred: the religious experience he discusses is the experience of the sacred.]

Eliade, it seems, starts his Sacred & Profane from Otto's notion and stresses this throughout the rest of his life's work: the holy, the numinous is what we humans want so even fully secularized we have just grounded the numinous somewhere in life not beyond. VERY important for AtD, at least, I suggest, that
book full of transcendance yearning yet dissing transcendance for .....something else, I suggest.
 

 


----- Original Message ----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sat, June 12, 2010 7:15:07 AM
Subject: VVV: The Crowley and the Profane


Now, the crucial point is that Émile Durkheim considered religion as kinda
early proto-sociology (here most def in the tradition of Comte) or, as Steven
Lukes has it in his still recommendable classic on Durkheim from 1973, a 
"mythological sociology". So Durkheim gives the following definition:

"A religion is a solidarity-system of believes and practices which refer 
to holy (this means: separated and forbidden) things, believes and practices,
which in one and the same moral community (you could also say: 'church')
unify all people who belong there."

Émile Durkheim: Les formes élementaires de la vie religieuse [1912].

The scholar to whom Eliade also refers to in this context, hasn't been 
mentioned here yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Otto


Anxiety of Influence?

KFL

_______________________________________________________
>
> My quick online study sez Durkheim thought man was not naturally religious but it grew from 
> dividing
> the world into what was profane.......the rest was sacred and could be a kind of animism.........
>
> Eliade seemed to think religious feelings came first universally.....
>
>