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2.
Cults Ancient and Modern
Tens
of thousands of young people in the American sixties drifted or
broke away from parents to explore alternative world-views and lifestyles.
A minority actually joined communes or cults. These varied in philosophy
and regime from the mild to the extreme. The true cults that proliferated
in the American sixties and early seventies resemble those of the
Hellenistic and imperial Roman eras. Such phenomena are symptoms
of cultural fracturing in cosmopolitan periods of rapid expansion
and mobility. Consisting of small groups of the disaffected or rootless,
cults are sects that may or may not evolve into full religions.
Hence, the cult phenomenon even at its most bizarre demonstrates
the sociological dynamic of the birth of religions, as they flare
up, coalesce, and strengthen or sputter out and vanish. A cult is
a foster family that requires complete severance from past connections-kin,
spouses, friends. Membership in cults may begin with a sudden conversion
experience where an individual feels that ultimate truth has been
glimpsed. This may lead to zealotry, the conviction that the cult
view is the only possible view, which therefore must be promulgated
to the benighted or is too refined to be understood by others. A
persecution complex and siege mentality may result: cult members
feel that the world is the enemy and that only martyrdom will vindicate
their faith.
During the Hellenistic and imperial
Roman periods, transnational mystery religions competed with the
established state religions of the Olympian or civic gods, whose
official worship was public and often located in city centers. The
mammoth dissemination of Olympian images in sculptures and artifacts
has resulted in Greco-Roman religion, from the excavation of Rome at the Renaissance, being portrayed by
neoclassicism as stabler or more uniform than it was. Mystery religions,
which generally produced fewer and less monumental stone or chryselephantine
idols, offered personal salvation through initiation into an enlightened
group bound by some special secret, often involving the promise
of an afterlife, a recompense for present miseries. Hence mystery
religions had great appeal to the powerless and dispossessed.
The major Mediterranean mystery religions-of
Dionysus, Demeter, Isis, and Mithras-anticipated, influenced, or
vied with Christianity. Compared to the sometimes dryly contractual
veneration of the Olympians, mystery religion was characterized
by a worshipper's powerful identification with and emotional connection
to the god. Christianity, based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth,
one of many itinerant preachers in Palestine, emerged from a proliferation of splinter
sects in Judaism, among which were the Essenes, who left the famous
Dead Sea Scrolls in jars found just after World War II in caves near Qumran
in Israel. The Essenes, ascetic and celibate hermits
with an apocalyptic theology, were a cult by any modern definition.
The American sixties, I submit, had a climate of spiritual crisis
and political unrest similar to that of ancient Palestine, then under Roman occupation. But this
time the nascent religions faltered under the pitiless scrutiny
of modern media. Few prophets or messiahs could survive the deglamourizing
eye of the invasive TV camera.
Yet a major source of cultic energies
in twentieth-century America was the entertainment industry: the Hollywood studio system, cohering during and just
after World War I,
projected its manufactured stars as simulacra of the pagan pantheon.
Frenzied fans (a word derived from the Latin fanatici,
for maddened worshippers of Cybele) had already been generated by
grand opera in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when
castrati sang female roles and were the dizzy object of coterie
speculation and intrigue. Modern mass media immensely extended and
broadened that phenomenon. Outbursts of quasi-religious emotion
could be seen in the hysterical response of female fans to Rudolph
Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles. Eroticism
mixed with death is archetypally potent: there were nearly riots
by distraught mourners after Valentino's death from a perforated
ulcer at age thirty-one in 1926. The rumor that Elvis
lives is still stubbornly planted in the culture, as if he
were a demigod who could conquer natural law. Tabloids have touted
Presley's canonization as the first Protestant saint. The same myth
of surviving death is attached to rock star Jim Morrison, whose
Paris grave has become a magnet for hippies of
many nations.
Cultism of this demonstrative kind
is persistently associated with androgynous young men, half sweet,
half surly, who like Adonis are sometimes linked with mother figures.
Presley, for example, sank into depression and never fully recovered
from his mother's unexpected death at age forty-six in 1958; after
long substance abuse, he died prematurely at age forty-two in 1977.
Rock music, even at its most macho, has repeatedly produced pretty,
long-haired boys who mesmerize both sexes and who hauntingly resemble
ancient sculptures of Antinous, the beautiful, ill-fated youth beloved
by the Roman emperor Hadrian. It's no coincidence that it was Paul
McCartney, the "cutest" and most girlish of the Beatles, who inspired
a false rumor that swept the world in 1969
that he was dead. Beatles songs and album covers were feverishly
scrutinized for clues and coded messages: I myself contributed to
this pandemonium by calling a New Haven radio station to identify mortuary lines
from King Lear submerged
in the climactic cacophony of "I am the Walrus." In cultic experience,
death is sexy. The hapless McCartney had become Adonis, the dying
god of fertility myth who was the epicene prototype for the deified
Antinous: after Antinous drowned in the Nile in 130 AD,
the grief-stricken Hadrian had him memorialized in shrines all over
the Mediterranean, where ravishing cult statues often showed
the pensive youth crowned with the grapes and vines of Dionysus.
The evangelical fervor felt by many
heretical young people in the 1960s was powered by rock music, which
at that moment was becoming an art form. The big beat came from
late-forties and fifties African-American rhythm and blues. But
the titanic, all-enveloping sound of rock was produced by powerful,
new amplification technology that subordinated the mind and activated
the body in a way more extreme than anything seen in Western culture
since the ancient Roman Bacchanalia. Through the sensory assault
of that thunderous music, a whole generation tapped into natural
energies, tangible proof of humanity's link to the cosmos.
"Flower power," the pacifist sixties
credo, was a sentimentalized, neo-Romantic version of earth cult,
which underlay the ancient worship of Dionysus. In the Bacchae, Euripides saw nature's frightful, destructive side, but that
perception was gradually lost over time. Bacchanalia is the Latin term for the Dionysian ritual orgia (root of the English word "orgy"),
where celebrants maddened by drink, drugs, and wildly rhythmic music
went into ecstasy (ecstasis,
"standing outside of"), abandoning or transcending their ordinary
selves. Hence the association of Dionysus (called
Lusios, the "Liberator")
with theater. The Bacchanalia arrived in Southern Italy from Greece in the fifth century BC and eventually spread to Rome. Celebrants decked with myrtle and ivy
danced to flutes and cymbals through city parks and woods in festivities
that became notorious for open sexual promiscuity and opportunistic
crime. After repeated outbreaks following the Second Punic War,
the Bacchanalia were declared a threat to public order and officially
suppressed by the Roman Senate in 186 BC. But their influence persisted, as
attested by Dionysian designs on sarcophagi and the walls of private
villas. In the ruins of Pompeii, the hedonistic resort destroyed by a volcanic
eruption in 79 AD, there is evidence that
the Bacchanalia had evolved into private sex clubs. This process
of secularization, where sex divorced from cosmology becomes permissively
recreational, can also be seen in the transition from the hippie
sixties to the manic seventies and early eighties: sex detached
from Romantic nature cult withdrew to glitzy urban discos, bathhouses,
and sex clubs like Plato's Retreat.
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