Journal articles on the topic 'Religions. Mythology. Rationalism'

The structuralist André-Weil–Claude-Lévi-Strauss transformation formula (CF), initially applied to kinship systems, mythology, ritual, artistic design and architecture, was rightfully criticized for its rationalism and tendency to reduce complex transformations to analogical structures. I present a revised non-mathematical revision of the CF, a general transformation formula (rCF) applicable to networks of complementary semantic binaries in conceptual value-fields of culture, including comparative religion and mythology, ritual, art, literature and philosophy. The rCF is a rule-guided formula for combinatorial conceptualizing in non-representational, presentational mythopoetics and other cultural symbolizations. I consider poststructuralist category-theoretic and algebraic mathematical interpretations of the CF as themselves only mathematical analogies, which serve to stimulate further revision of the logic model of the rCF. The rCF can be used in hypothesis-making to advance understanding of the evolution and prehistory of human symbolic behaviour in cultural space, philosophical ontologies and categories, definitions and concepts in art, religion, psychotherapy, and other cultural-value forms.

In literary, cultural and historical study of mythology, Johann Gottfried Herder is often portrayed as the bridge between the Enlightenment and the Romantic age. Myths for Herder were not only material for poetry, but the essential content of religion. Herder&rsquo;s new understanding of myth and religion did not, however, signify a rejection of the Enlightenment principle of rationality. On the contrary, this understanding expanded and transformed his understanding of rationality. Herder regarded man&rsquo;s mythopoetic activity as a genuine and natural form of man&rsquo;s cognitive appropriation of the world. The personification of natural forces in the cultural creation of gods did not denote a return to irrationalism, but an extended form of rationality. According to Herder, the Bible had to be read as a human mythopoetic creation. The Old Testament, which depicts the special relation of God to His people, was in Herder&rsquo;s <em>Vom Geist der ebr&auml;ischen Poesie</em> (1782&ndash;1783) the result of a poetic worldview characteristic of nomadic societies. Herder did question the validity of the Old Testament as a true source of religion and its usefulness even for modern man. Mythology did not have to be rejected as untrue imagination. Old Testament monotheism could be related to Spinoza&rsquo;s pantheism and the Law of Moses could be seen as a precursor of the modern constitutional tradition.

This paper explores the thoughts of Sutan Takdir Alisyahbana (STA). STA is referred to as a cultural practitioner, because it discusses more the cultures that enter Indonesia, such as Indian, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and native Indonesian culture, even it also discusses western culture. He also wrote a lot such as poetry, novels, philosophy books and he was among the first to make Indonesian terms, so he was called a writer. This research is a type of library research (library research) by presenting qualitative-interpretative data. The purpose of this study is to reveal the fact that the religion of Islam in Indonesia is a religion that does not dichotomize between the reality supported by invoices and spiritual reality because Islam today is deeply engrossed in the history of the development of Islam in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, also today Islam is shackled with religious myths, so as to be able to resolve Islam in Indonesia, it cannot develop and is anti-Western rationality. STA thinking is rooted in the humanist understanding that developed in Europe from the Renaissance to the rise of new-positivism. Its humanism is built on human liberation from the shackles of mythology and religion.

The article analyzes the main ideas of Alan Gilbert Nixon, a contemporary sociologist of religion and researcher of the new atheism movement. The subject of the study is the ideology of the new atheism movement as a special anti-religious worldview associated with the work of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, which arose in 2006. Nixon himself, studying this movement, uses an original methodology, which he calls ‘grounded theory’ and explores the development of a new atheism in the actual contextual space of interaction between participants and the prospects of this interaction. The methodology of the authors of this article is based on the principle of the unity of the historical and logical interpretation of the key concepts and positions of A. Nixon in the process of a systematic analysis of historical background, ideological foundation, self-presentation of representatives of the new atheism movement. In addition, in the context of this study, a number of social changes (the globalization of capitalism, the development of the Internet and the related “leaps of communication”, the religious renaissance) are considered as a necessary context for the formation of a special “narrative mythology” of the new atheism, expressed in the idea of the greatness of Nature and Science. and suggesting a kind of piety within the worldview of the new atheism. As the main result of the presented analysis, one can single out the conceptual design of key aspects of the existence of a modern anti-religious worldview: hyperskepticism in the knowledge of the world, nihilism and the denial of classical metaphysics of rationality, criticism of the values of religious morality; a postmodern paradox that erases the boundaries between religious/non-religious and cancels the very possibility of discrimination on religious grounds, which nullifies the confrontational logic of the new atheism; the emergence of secular non-religious missionary work as a result of the process of competition of ideas in the space of “multiple modernities”; and, finally, the fact that the new atheistic message is gaining adherents because the anti-religious worldview is subject to the cultural logic of late capitalism with its postmodern spread of pluralism of cultures, discourses, organizations.

The author analyzes the transformations of Hellenic theologys content and forms in the epoch of early antique classics (1st half of the 5th century B.C.). The general orientation of such transformations is the generalization of mythological gods meanings into the abstract implications of the Absolute, which is not yet sacral in its full sense and not transcendent. Besides, this period is the end of the decentralization of consciousness. Cognitive limitations to the development of abstract conceptual thinking and the rational component of consciousness are removed. This processs main points transform mythology into artistic and aesthetic creativity (folklore, mythopoetic epic, etc.), religious consciousness, and theology. Rationalism is always critical. Critical rationalism inevitably leads to historicism. Therefore, the formation of a historical attitude strengthens at the sight of the critical approach. The world's mythological image is increasingly being questioned (first in parts, and then in general). Its content is being transferred to the past. Finally, the era of early classicism comes into play. It is a time when theology becomes a field of philosophical and theoretical reflection on myth and an area of its artistic and aesthetic experience. The most influential form of such an understanding of myth was the theater. The ancient theater served as a spiritual and practical form of ancient theology, a subject embodiment of theology in stage action.

The paper explores the genre of scarcely studied play by Russian minor writer Alexei V. Timofeev (1812-1883) Rome and Carthage (1837). Timofeev’s contemporary literary critic Osip Senkovskii treated like poet’s failure his use of romantic techniques in the play on ancient plot. Taking into account this opinion the paper analyzes the paratextual elements in the play, the way of describing characters, the division of the play into acts, the connection of the plot events with historical facts. The paper argues that the play approaches the kind of romantic drama, which the author suggests to call “historical fantasy” Its main feature is the coexisting in the plot mythology and religious tradition, on the one hand, and historical events, on the other, the heroes of historical chronicles and the heroes of folk legends, belief in miracles and rationalism. The goal of historical fantasy is to produce a generalized image of the time, to convey the spirit of the epoch while the dramatic action takes a secondary place. Samples of the genre were given in the works of Alexander A. Shakhovskoi, Alexander I. Gertsen, Apollon N. Maikov. Timofeev’s play was just in the way to this kind of drama.

The main research narratives of the article are: the influence of artistic strategy on the political communication in the condition of post truth; political imagination and regime of post truth; art and regime of truth; rationality of illusions in the political communication; the techniques of artistic suggestion in public dialogue. It deals with the principle of reliability, the legitimacy rituals in the hunting for the voters. It is analyzed the mythological transformation, imitative mythology of the modern medias. It is discerned the technological integration of art in religion and politics, communication actions that make its “generic” feature and the “generic” burden at the same time. Such notions as poetry, art and technology are connected with the unfolding of the technological refinement in all spheres of human activity. The author explains the need of the mythological distortion as the basis for the building of reality. It deals with the PR- technology transformation as the particular case of the cultural-political project into undeniable social value. It is defined the role of the artistic and political projects as the communicative prosthesis. Simultaneously the author traces the ouster of illusion in public communication. He analyzes the modalities of the communicative practice and communicative experience reduction in the socialization process as well as the technological perfection in the mythological representation. The special features of the mythological absorption as the negation of law and social subject are determined here. It is also defined the sense of the law rationality regarding the rationality of myth.

The universe is full of mystical things. Since ages, the belief that God became the Universe is a theological doctrine that has been developed. Evolutionary biologists and Modern scientists still believes in Big Bang theory. Many thinkers, theologians, philosophers, and scientists are unable to confirm the exact process of the origin of the universe. Hence, this paper focuses on analyzing the history of theologians, mythologists, philosophers, cosmologists and scientists research evidences, insights, theories, and rationales to find out about the origin of the universe. The study uses metaanalysis of universe origin scriptures, research, insights, and bibliographies which was put forth by theologians, philosophers, cosmologists, and scientists. The study found that as per Bhagavad-Gita, God is the source of all spiritual, intellectual, and material world. In 1996, Pastor Bob Burridge of the Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies reveals that as per Christian theology, God becoming the universe is not accordant with it. In the 1940s, Charles Hartshorne identified pandeism as a possible model of God’s nature as God is capable of changing. In 2001, Scott Adams surmised that an omnipotent God annihilated himself in the Big Bang. This is considered as per mythologist’s world created from dead deity physical substances. All Catholic scientists reported that God’s light and love revealed his creation. Physicist Bernard Haisch in his book entitled “The God Theory” concluded that the deity became the universe. Alan Dawe's (2011) book titled “The God Franchise” concludes that human knowledge is a briefly separated piece of God’s skill. Raphael Lataster (2013), Australian religious studies Scholar, projected that "Pandeism is the future God-concept of all". There is a long list of Catholic scientists who in their quest for learning maintained God at the origin of all existence. Theology and mythology proofs are not conforming with both science and philosophy. The Evolving God concept is also a wrong idea of metaphysics. If it is so, man would have been found under developed state. Jafree Ozwald explains that based on human request, the universe is not able to fulfill it but God does. The universe is not God. God is God. The study concludes that God created the universe from nothing and He is yet to manifest Himself. God is a supernatural power and has a divine holy nature that is omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. The study suggests that the sharing of knowledge, debate, discussions, and consensus based on their evidences and perceptions among theologists, philosophers, mythologists, and scientists on the universe origin is a future task.

Was Grundtvig’s New Discovery in 1832 A Tragic Event?By Bent ChristensenThe title of this lecture for the Degree of Divinity has been given its provocative wording by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. In his thesis for the Degree of Divinity, published in 1987 and reviewed in Grundtvig Studies in 1988, Bent Christensen has described and evaluated Grundtvig’s attitude in the field of church policy over the years from 1824 to 1832, a critical period of time for himself, in such a way as to give the reader the impression that the writer regards the attitude taken by Grundtvig in the comprehensive Introduction to his ’’Norse Mythology”, 1832, towards the thoughtful people of his time, as a step backward compared to the attitude taken by Grundtvig in his great autobiographical poem, "New Year’s Morning", 1824, and in the preface to it. In this preface Grundtvig wrote that the goal which God "surely wants to be achieved" is "the revival of the heroic spirit of the North to Christian deeds in a direction suited to the needs and conditions of the time."In a book "The Land of the Living 1984", a series of lectures held in the 200th anniversary of Grundtvig’s birth, Professor Aage Henriksen proposed the view that the poem "New Year’s Morning” is the crowning achievement in Grundtvig’s writings. However, already in 1963 Dr. Kaj Thaning had advanced the idea that the Introduction to "Norse Mythology", 1832, was a decisive turningpoint in Grundtvig’s literary career since, from 1832 onwards, human life and the human world acquired an entirely different position and importance in his understanding of Christianity than was the case before that crucial year. Bent Christensen is inspired by both these writers, but adopts a critical attitude to Kaj Thaning.In part 1 of his lecture Bent Christensen describes the entire progress of his Grundtvig studies and the problem he has posed: What is it really that the Introduction has which was not already present in the inspiration behind the poem "New Year's Morning’? In the answer to this question he particularly emphasizes the sermons from 1823 to 1824, which are influenced by Irenaeus, and which are imbued with the thought that man was created in God’s image and has preserved this image of God also after the Fall. According to Bent Christensen they represent "a Grundtvig who is at least as good as the Grundtvig we got".Next he asks "if the ’Grundtvig of 1832* is in any way better than the ’Grundtvig of 1824’"? - Before he answers this question he presents a survey of the development from 1824 to 1832. He agrees with Thaning that "the deeds came to nothing". There was a general atmosphere of stagnation, but in the meantime the situation in the Church came to a head: members of a so-called "godly assembly" in Funen were positively persecuted. And at the University of Copenhagen the popular Professor H.N. Clausen propagated his "Protestant Christianity", diluted beyond recognition. In opposition to this, Grundtvig pointed to "the real Jesus Christ’s Church on Earth" and published his "The Rejoinder of the Church" against Professor Clausen’s latest book. "This was where the tragedy began. For instead of entering into an ecclesiastical discussion, Professor Clausen brought an action for libel against Grundtvig!" According to Bent Christensen the full extent of the tragedy was that the country had a state church which everybody had to be a member of, and which was bound to Lutheran Christianity, but in reality it also had a clergy whose leading circles represented a rationalism and idealism, which was completely at variance with Christianity. This was the situation which Grundtvig described as "the legal Hell", Bent Christensen says. He describes Grundtvig’s writings on church policy in this situation as a development consisting of 3 phases:1. The time from the discovery of the Apostles’ Creed in July 1825 and the Rejoinder in September 1825 until his resignation from office in May 1826. At this time Grundtvig thought that the anomaly could be redressed once it was clearly pointed out.2. The time from September 1826, shortly before the sentence was pronounced, until winter 1830/1831, when Grundtvig presented various proposals for church organization with a Christian state church, while those who did not want to join such a church could leave it in complete freedom of religion.3. The time from April 1831 when Grundtvig declared himself willing to be in charge of the organization of a free-congregation church, thus agreeing to the ’’amicable settlement” which, towards the end of February 1832, led to his permission to function as a free evensong preacher in Frederick’s Church.During the time up to this "amicable settlement”, Grundtvig had worked his way through the numerous drafts for the Introduction to his new ”Norse Mythology”, and in the process, according to Bent Christensen, ’’had managed to construct an entirely new model of church policy”, characterized by peaceful coexistence and competition between the real Christians and those Grundtvig called the "Naturalists”, "within the framework of what Grundtvig continues to term a ’’church”, but what is in reality a common, public religious service system". In the same year he drafted his proposal for "sogneb.ndsl.sning" i.e. abolition of the obligation to use the vicar in the parish where one is a resident, for all church ministrations.According to Kaj Thaning, Grundtvig had now finally "found himself, having learnt to distinguish rightly between what is "human” and what is "Christian”, so he could now call off the ecclesiastical controversy and instead throw himself into a cheerful effort to turn his new view of life to practical use”. ”In my opinion, I have invalidated this evaluation," Bent Christensen says. Grundtvig’s concept of Christianity was optimistic already in 1824, as was the factual distinction between the intrinsic value of life and the salient feature which is Christian salvation. The question now is what it was that Grundtvig managed to free himself from in the years 1831 to 1832. Bent Christensen’s thesis is that he 1) managed to free himself from the ecclesiastical controversy that he could not win, and 2) from the feeling of obligation to be in charge of an illegal organization of free-congregation churches which would isolate him from ordinary public and cultural life.In the context of church policy, Bent Christensen describes what happened with the Introduction to "Norse Mythology" as an emergency solution. - But is this the same, then, as "a tragic event”? - No, he answers. The tragedy was that Grundtvig’s dream from ’’New Year’s Morning” did not come true, but was on the contrary followed by the nightmare of the libel lawsuit and the church controversy. ”But there is another tragedy which we suffer from even today – namely the failure of influential circles to properly understand what it was Grundtvig found himself obliged to do in 1832, so that it has almost come to be regarded as the only right way to practise church organization! In that perspective what happened in 1832 may be seen as a tragic event, Bent Christensen claims in the conclusion of part 1 of his lecture.Part 2 of the lecture is a discussion of key passages in the two main texts, "New Year’s Morning” and the Introduction to ”Norse Mythology”. The intention is to show that the fundamental ideas in the Introduction (and in The Rejoinder of the Church) have been anticipated in the great poem from 1824: ’’Indeed, themythical-biographical descent of this poem through Danish history to the Land of the Living ... stands out as a great "a human being first!'"What the Introduction has ... to a fuller extent and in a clearer form than ’’New Year’s Morning" is the fully developed view of evolution and explanation and the scientific programme connected with it. Thus the Introduction provides a unique contribution to the understanding of what it means that the world exists, and that we exist in it as human beings!”In the concluding part 3 of his lecture, Bent Christensen poses the question "whether what happened in 1831/32 really and truly meant that Grundtvig gained himself, or whether it meant that he lost at least part of himself’. Like Aage Henriksen, Bent Christensen considers "New Year’s Morning" to be a culmination in Grundtvig’s writings, and incidentally the point from which Grundtvig’s comprehensive influence on the Danish people stems, and he sees the Introduction as a point, from where Grundtvig moves on by leaving something behind. Aage Henriksen blames Grundtvig that from being a personal poet he changed into a reformer. Bent Christensen asks instead "from the point of view of the church - whether it was after all the right programme with which Grundtvig attempted to save his dream that had been crushed by the outside world."The alternative he mentions is that Grundtvig could have left the Church with whoever wanted to follow him, and could have worked with unflagging solidarity on this basis for the public life of the people as well as for "universalhistorical scholarship". At least he did not have to make quite so much good fortune of necessity - with the tragic consequences for the Danish Lutheran Christian congregation’s self-conception that it has to this day.He concludes by emphasizing a passage towards the end of Grundtvig’s book, "Elemental Christian Teaching" (Den Christelige B.rnel.rdom), where Grundtvig imagines the situation that church and state were completely separated. In that case the Christians would have to establish their own educational institution for clergymen. But this would have to be a "Christian high school", i.e. a whole university. Bent Christensen finds there is good reason to turn one’s attention to this thought from 1861 - as well as to Grundtvig’s dream from 1824, when one seeks inspiration in Grundtvig.

The Way from Force to Freedom in Grundtvig’s Life and WritingsBy William MichelsenAs it was shown by Kaj Thaning in Grundtvig Studies, 1981, Grundtvig, in 1825, made the discovery, new at the time, that the Christian church is older than The New Testament. He utilized the discovery to claim that the Apostolic Confession is the criterion of genuine Christianity, and the same year, in .The Rejoinder of the Church., he used it against H.N. Clausen, Professor of Theology, in an attempt to force him to lay down his office if he did not admit and apologize for his ‘scandalous teaching’. However, Grundtvig was charged instead, and, in 1826, received a sentence for libel of Clausen, and therefore resigned his office as a clergyman himself. Nonetheless, from 1832 to his death in 1872, Grundtvig became the most unswerving supporter of freedom in Danish spiritual life. The standpoint is clearly expressed in .Norse Mythology., 1832, and the same year Grundtvig was permitted to preach in the state church, from 1839 until his death as a vicar of Vartov Church. How can this change of attitude on Grundtvig’s part be explained?The assertion of the present article is that the apparently dramatic changes in Grundtvig’s attitude to freedom are consistent on a more fundamental level, partly depending on his religious development, partly on his concept of freedom which differed from the usual philosophical thinking of his time.Already before his birth, his parents had decided that Grundtvig was to become a clergyman, and in 1810, when his father demanded that he should make a personal application to the King for permission to be his father’s personal curate, he consequently felt force to submit, though it had always been his own wish to be a historian. So he saw himself as obliged through his ordination to defend genuine Christianity against any kind of Rationalist falsification - first on the basis of Luther scripturalism, and from 1825 on the basis of the Apostolic Confession. When H.N. Clausen did not lay down his office, Grundtvig had to lay down his.How then can it be explained that already in 1831 Grundtvig admitted that one must allow one’s opponent the same freedom to speak as one demands for oneself - the following year, even within the same state church. The explanation is to be found in Grundtvig’s experiences from his journeys to England, perhaps in particular from a conversation with Clara Bolton in 1830. More particularly the present article claims that his attitude rests on the assessment of John Wesley’s withdrawal from the state church, proposed by Grundtvig in his ‘Prospect of the World Chronicle’, 1817: it was not necessary because Wesley was not - like Luther – ‘excommunicated’ from the church, but only ‘excluded from the office of teaching’ - the same situation as Grundtvig felt he was in from 1826 to 1832.Grundtvig’s characteristic concept of freedom can be traced as far back as to 1814 (cf. Grundtvig Studies, 1986, pp. 8-9): Man is created with a will of his own, which may be either obedient or disobedient to the will of the Creator, and which is therefore free. Man, however, is not an independent being in the universe. Grundtvig was an opponent of the usual notion that the human personality is free by virtue of his reason.

The Young Grundtvig and NorwayBy Gustav AlbeckThis article is a revised and extended version of the lecture given by Professor Albeck on April 30th 1984 at the annual general meeting of the Grundtvig Society in Oslo. It describes Grundtvig’s close relationship to a number of Norwegian friends he made during his residence at the Walkendorf hostel in Copenhagen in the years 1808-11; this circle of friends lasted and widened to include other Norwegians in his later life.Grundtvig was 67 before he set foot on Norwegian soil, but from his early youth he had familiarised himself with the Norwegian landscape and history through Norwegian literature. His feeling of kinship with the spirit and history of Norway was for a time stronger than his consciousness of being Danish. In his youth Norway and the Norwegians played a major role in opinion-making in Denmark, and in this respect Grundtvig was no different from his contemporary Danes. But the idea of Norway’s future continued to concern him long after his youth was over. The lecture, however, confines itself to the way certain Norwegians regarded Grundtvig between 1808 and 1811.When Grundtvig returned to Copenhagen from Langeland in 1808 he had no friends in the capital. But at the Walkendorf hostel he met first and foremost Svend B. Hersleb, a Norwegian theologian, to whom he addressed a jocular poem in the same year, revealing that Grundtvig now felt himself young again and among young people following his unrequited passion for Constance Leth. Otherwise we have only a few witnesses to this first period of happiness, with Grundtvig gaining a foothold on the Danish parnassus through his first Norse Mythology and Scenes from Heroic Life in the North.The fullest accounts of Grundtvig’s relationship to the Norwegians in the period following his nervous breakdown and religious breakthrough in 1810 come from the journals of the Norwegian-Danish dean and poet, Frederik Schmidt, made during various trips to Denmark. These journals were published in extenso between 1966 and 1985 in three volumes, the last of which includes a commentary by the editors and a postscript by Gustav Albeck. Many of the valuable notes about Grundtvig are repeated in the lecture. Frederik Schmidt was the son of a Norwegian bishop; he became a rural dean and later a member of the first National Assembly at Eids voll in 1814. He was a Norwegian patriot but loyal to the Danes and in fact returned to Denmark in 1820. His descriptions of Grundtvig’s conversations with Niels Treschow, the Norwegian-born Professor of Philosophy at Copenhagen University, give an authentic and concentrated picture of Grundtvig’s reflections on his conversion to a strict Lutheran faith, which for a time threatened to hinder his development as a secular writer. Schmidt found their way of presenting their differing views “very interesting and human”, and Grundtvig’s Christian faith “warm, intense and sincere”. “In the animated features of his dark eyes and pale face there is something passionate yet also gentle”. When Schmidt himself talked to Grundtvig about a current paper which stated that in early Christianity there was a fusion between Greek thought and oriental feeling, Grundtvig exclaimed, “Yet another Christianity without Christ!” A draft of a reply to one of Schmidt’s articles shows that at that point, April 1811, Grundtvig did not believe in the working of “the living word” in its secular meaning. The draft was not printed and Grundtvig does not appear to have discussed it with Schmidt. There is a very precise description of Grundtvig’s appearance: “There is... something confused in his eyes; he sometimes closes them after a tiring conversation, as if he wants to pull his thoughts together again.” Schmidt in no way agrees with Grundtvig’s point of view, which he partly puts down to “disappointed hopes, humbled pride and the persecution... he has been subjected to...” But he does find another important explanation in Grundtvig’s “need for reassuring knowledge” and his conviction “that the misery of the age can only be helped by true religious feeling”.There are also descriptions of Grundtvig in a more jovial mood, for example together with Professor George Sverdrup, where Grundtvig repeated some rather unflattering accounts of the playwright Holberg’s behaviour towards a couple of professors who were colleagues. The same evening he and Schmidt set about attacking Napoleon while Treschow and Sverdrup defended him. Schmidt considered Grundtvig’s little book, New Year’s Eve, “devout to the point of pietist sentiment”, but thought the error lay rather in Grundtvig’s head than his heart. Lovely is the Clear Blue Night (Dejlig er den himmel blaa), published in April 1811 was even read aloud by Schmidt to a woman poet; but he criticised The Anholt-Campaign.After 1814 Schmidt adopted a somewhat cooler tone towards Grundtvig’s books. He was unable to go along with Grundtvig’s talk of a united Denmark- Norway as his fatherland. He criticised the poems Grundtvig published in his periodical, Danevirke, including even The Easter Lily for its “vulgar language”, which Grundtvig appeared to confuse with a true “language of power”. It is impossible to prove any close relationship between Schmidt and Grundtvig, but he was an attentive observer when they met in Copenhagen in 1811.With the opening of the Royal Frederik University in Christiania in 1813 Grundtvig became separated from his Norwegian friends, as Hersleb, Treschow and Sverdrup were all appointed to the new Norwegian university. They were keen for Grundtvig to join them as Professor of History. Sverdrup in particular was captivated by his personality, and in a letter dated April 21st 1812 he informed Grundtvig that he was among the candidates for the post proposed by the commission to the King. But Grundtvig himself hesitated; he felt “calm and quietly happy” in Udby “as minister for simple Christians”. To his friend, the Norwegian-born Poul Dons, he wrote, “... something in me draws me up there, something keeps me down here.” The fact that he never got the job was in many ways his own fault. His World Chronicle (1812) could not but offend scholars of a rationalist approach, in particular the prediction at the end of the book about the new university’s effect. It is linked to Grundtvig’s interpretation (1810) of the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, which are seen as a prediction of the seven great churches in the historical advance of Christianity.“It was an idea,” says Albeck, “which in spite of its obvious irrationality never left Grundtvig, and as late as 1860 it found poetic form in the great poem, The Pleiades of Christendom (Christenhedens Syvstjerne).” Grundtvig “was in no doubt that the sixth church was the Nordic, and that it would grow out of the Norwegian university, the new Wittenberg.” In 1810 Grundtvig felt himself “chosen to be the forerunner of a new reformer, a new Johan Huss before a new Luther.” From a scholarly point of view there is no reason to reproach the Danish selection panel for the negative judgment they reached regarding Grundtvig’s qualifications as a historian. His name was not even mentioned in the appointments for the new professorships. He had caused quite a stir not long before by writing a birthday poem for the King in which he directly expressed his wish that the new university might become a Wittenberg. The poem took the form of a series of accusations against Norway and the Norwegians, and in particular against Nicolai Wergeland, who in a prize-winning essay on the Norwegian university entitled Mnemosyne had stuck a few needles into Denmark and the Danes. Grundtvig accused the Norwegians of ingratitude to Denmark and unchristian pride. Even his good friend Hersleb reacted to such an attack.From the diaries of the Norwegian, Claus Pavels, we know how the Norwegian poet, Jonas Rein, wrote and told Grundtvig that “a greater meekness towards people with a different opinion would be more fitting for a teacher of Christianity.” Grundtvig replied that he had had to speak the truth loud and clear in a degenerate age. The Bishop of Bergen, Nordal Brun, also considered Grundtvig’s views as expressed to the King “misplaced and insulting”. He was particularly hurt that Norway “should have to thank Denmark for its Christianity and protestantism”. When Grundtvig printed the poem in Little Songs (Kv.dlinger) in 1815, Nicolai Wergeland was moved to write Denmark’s Political Crimes against the Kingdom of Norway, published in 1816.For Grundtvig’s Norwegian friends it was a matter of regret that he did not come to Norway, not least for Stener Stenersen, who in 1814 became a lecturer and in 1818 a professor of theology at the Norwegian university. His correspondence with Grundtvig from 1813 is now regarded as a valuable source for Grundtvig’s view of Christianity at that time. In his diary entry for August 27th 1813 Pavels notes that Stenersen had proposed that the Society for the Wellbeing of Norway should use all its influence to get Grundtvig to Norway. In his proposition Stenersen asked who possessed such unity and purity of thought as to be able to understand fully the importance of scholarship; he himself had only one candidate - Grundtvig. From a contemporary standpoint he had won his way to the Christian faith. But the rationalist Pavels, the source of our information, was far from convinced that “no man in the whole of Norway” possessed these abilities in equal measure to Grundtvig”. He therefore had misgivings about “requesting him as Norway’s last and only deliverer”.When Grundtvig heard of Stenersen’s proposition he sought an audience with the King on September 8th at which he clearly expressed his desire to become Professor of History at the Norwegian University. Two Danish professors, Børge Thorlacius and Laurids Engelsto. found it strange, however, that Treschow, Sverdrup and Hersleb could “deify Grundtvig”. And his great wish was never fulfilled. Nonetheless he did not give up. On November 15th he saw that the post of curate was being advertised at Aggers church near Christiania and applied for the job. From his book Roskilde Rhymes (published on February 1st 1814) it is clear that he believed that it was there that his great work was to be accomplished. But in those very days Frederik VI was signing the peace of Kiel which would separate Norway from Denmark, and Grundtvig from his wish.In the preface to Danevirke (dated May 1817) he realised that he had deserved the scorn of the Norwegians, for he had expected too much of them. But he never forgot his Norwegian friends. He named one of his sons after Svend Hersleb, and another son married Stenersen’s daughter. When he himself visited Norway in 1851 he was welcomed like a prince.

Abstract The paper aims to investigate the thesis of the so-called Neue Mythologie within the fragment entitled “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” [“The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism”]. The latter presents a revolutionary project of social pedagogy linked to the use of the aesthetic character of myth and poetry in the formation of the conscience and the intellect of the people. The program, therefore, formulates a fertile dialogue between the emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment and Jena Romanticism, in that it proposes a re-evaluation of feelings and Sinnlichkeit [sensuousness] in connection to modern rationality and freedom. The links between the rational mythology of the program and Hegelian philosophy will be explored, starting from his early writings, which are strictly concerned with the importance of a popular and sensuous religion (Volksreligion). Secondly, the work will retrace the same sensuous externalization of philosophical ideas within the relationships between art, religion and philosophy in the mature system, addressing the problem of Hegel’s change of heart regarding art and mythology between the two phases of his thought. In the end the value of symbolical mediation of concepts and idea will be established.

Adam Mickiewicz’s Hermeneutics of “the Religious”: An Attempt at a Postsecular ReadingThis article synthetically presents the hermeneutic attitude revealed in Mickiewicz’s work (poetry as well as lectures and journalism). It is analyzed from a post-secular perspective. The poet opposes the reductive secularism of the Enlightenment and its secular humanism. He also encourages preserving “the religious” and reviving religious concepts. However, this should not be a simple return to the past (conservatism), but rather a rethinking of religion with consideration to the new, secular conditions. Mickiewicz follows the scattered interpretations of the traces of transcendence or sacrum in various traditions and different ways of thinking: from mythology, pagan practices and folk piety to sophisticated mysticism and complicated theosophy. This Romantic thinker appears as a dialogue mediator between various religious languages, as well as between opposite beliefs and discourses (the ritualized religiosity of the official Church, rationalist Enlightenment philosophy, simple and sensual folk religiosity). The aim is to renew the broken relationship (‘union’) that connects man to God and creation, and to rebuild the community. In “the religious” he tries to find the common basis or extract the universal truths. In his opinion, Christianity is what connects and summarizes all religious traditions. According to this poet-politician, the revival of the religioncentered spirit is associated with the freedom revolution (the abolition of slavery, equality of women, emancipation of nations). He believes that the transcendent perspective of human history is the main guarantee of social change and true community. In a broader context, the hermeneutic strategy of this Polish Romantic can be interpreted as a post-secular stance,mas it urges us to rethink and internalize all levels of religion, which should be continuously and constantly updated in one’s life. Mickiewiczowska hermeneutyka „tego, co religijne”. Próba lektury postsekularnejArtykuł w syntetyczny sposób prezentuje ujawniającą się w twórczości Mickiewicza (zarówno poetyckiej, jak i wykładowej czy publicystycznej) postawę hermeneutyczną, która analizowana jest w horyzoncie myśli postsekularnej. Poeta dyskutuje z redukcyjnymi przejawami oświeceniowego sekularyzmu i jego świeckim humanizmem. Zachęca do zachowania „tego, co religijne” oraz do odnowienia religijnych pojęć. Nie chodzi jednak o prosty powrót do tego, co było (konserwatyzm), lecz o przemyślenie religii na nowo – w zmienionych warunkach po sekularyzacji. Mickiewicz śledzi rozproszone interpretacje śladów transcendencji czy tropów sacrum w rozmaitych tradycjach i sposobach mówienia o tym: od mitologii, folkloru, praktyk pogańskich, pobożności ludowej, po wyrafinowaną mistykę czy skomplikowaną teozofię. Romantyczny myśliciel jawi się jako dialogujący mediator między różnymi religijnymi językami, a także zderzającymi się przekonaniami i dyskursami (religijność zrytualizowana Kościoła urzędowego, racjonalistyczna filozofia oświeceniowa, sensualna w swej prostocie religijność ludowa). Celem tych działań jest odnowa zerwanej więzi („spójni”) łączącej człowieka z Bogiem i stworzeniem oraz odbudowa wspólnoty. W „tym, co religijne” szuka tego, co wspólne, wyłuskuje prawdy uniwersalne. Tym, co łączy i podsumowuje wszystkie okołoreligijne tradycje jest, jego zdaniem, chrześcijaństwo. Odrodzenie ducha religijnego poeta-polityk wiąże z rewolucją wolnościową (zniesienie niewolnictwa, równouprawnienie kobiet, emancypacja ludów). Wierzy, że transcendentna perspektywa dziejów ludzkości jest gwarantem zmian społecznych oraz źródłem prawdziwej wspólnoty. W szerokim kontekście strategię hermeneutyczną polskiego romantyka można odczytywać jako gest postsekularny, gdyż namawia do przemyślenia i uwewnętrznienia wszystkich poziomów religii, by poprowadzić ją dalej, nieustannie uaktualniając w swojej biografii.

Humanity gradually shifted away from religion and the sacred in the modern age, but in the postmodern age, people have discovered that science and reason alone cannot satisfy them. As a result, people returned in various ways to mythology, religion, and the mystical. Cinema, one of the most popular arts of the visual age, could not possibly ignore this move. Religious themes and elements are prevalent in films. Humanity has lost confidence in metanarratives thanks to postmodernism, and is shown to be on a different quest for meaning, particularly in science fiction and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic films. In many films, this quest evolves into a quest for the transcendent. People contemplate the beginning and the end; they speculate about their origins and their future directions. Postmodern viewers are drawn to the holy, mystical, mythological, and transcendental quests offered in movie theaters. As a result, the film business, which is capitalist in nature, uses this tactic to produce stories that are transcendental, sacred, mythological, mystical, magical, supernatural, and, generally speaking, religious. This essay explores the attempt of postmodern man to use cinema to re-enchant the demystified universe. The postmodern man is tired of extreme rationalism and is on a philosophical quest. The study analyzes five science fiction movies, which are also referred to as apocalyptic movies. These are Avatar (2009), Interstellar (2014), Prometheus (2012), War of the Worlds (2005), and I Am Legend (2007). The article argues that in these movies, post-modern man’s quest for meaning is addressed with some sort of transcendence, his modern identity is developed into a postmodern one, or a postmodern identity is brought forth, and his worries about the end are mostly appeased with a postmodern uncertainty.

In world philosophical practice, yoga is given great attention: courses are given at leading universities of the world, various kinds of projects are being opened to study this type of spiritual technique, research in history continues, and of course, there are a number of scientists who associate knowledge about it as a scientific character. , and with its practical application in modern culture. Unfortunately, in domestic literature not enough attention paid to such an ancient and relevant philosophy in the modern world. In the article we set the task to analyze this aspect of multifaceted human life from the standpoint of the modern European researcher. Eastern culture can be viewed in the context of art, religion, mythology, but the question arises: can it be viewed and evaluated in the context of mental, rational discourse? On the basis of ancient texts, on the basis of works of famous Indologists, modern European philosophers, an attempt was made to describe the rationality of yoga and give it a definition. The author goes to the general nature of the rationality of the East, represented by a cosmological-mythological worldview. He concludes that for a man of the East there are other norms and criteria of rationality than for a European-oriented worldview. The author also analyzes the nature of the design thinking of a person with this form of worldview. For a person of the East, there are other norms and criteria for rationality than for a European-oriented worldview. The rationality of the philosophy of yoga should be the basis for research practices and technologies of yoga. It can be given a conditional definition, but its meaning is deep and rooted in hoary antiquity, and requires careful and thorough analysis. The union of all ascetic practices and religious teachings takes place in the Gita, so without analyzing its texts, it is impossible to understand the rationality of yoga. Yoga rationality is mythological and cosmological in nature: it is an a priori scheme of man’s perception of the world and himself, in which ideas about karma and nirvana were central to world orientation and activity, and the mystic of cosmic and biological emphasized the polyvalence of these apriorisms. Such rationality allows the yogi to mentally move from the world of carnal beings into the world of gods and into the world of transcendental gods. The last world appears as an intermediate between the phenomenal world and the non-world of nirvana. Various Indian practices, techniques, and methods aimed at freeing the spirit through separation acquired their followers, because after the “Upanishads” the rejection of life due to socio-political structures and history became the most worthy soteriological solution. Hence the orientation of the yogi to internal self-improvement and indifference to the outside world. Moral decency and cosmic order here are concepts of the same level, starting with the moral positions of the individual soul, which is akin to the spiritual essence of the Cosmos, and Good and Evil act as metaphors for the rhythmic nature of life, both of Cosmos and of Man.

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation.Surprising to many, Aboriginal Australian mythology includes at least one truly vampire-like entity, despite Althans’ confident assertion that the Bunyip is “Australia’s only monster” (16) which followed McKee’s equally fearless claim that “there is no blackfella tradition of zombies or vampires” (201). Gelder’s Ghost Stories anthology also only mentions the Bunyip, in a tale narrated by Indigenous man Percy Mumbulla (250). Certainly, neither of these academics claim Indigeneity in their ethnicity and most Aboriginal Australian scholars will happily agree that our heterogeneous Indigenous cultures and traditions are devoid of opera-cape wearing Counts who sleep in coffins or are repelled by crucifix-wielding Catholics. Nevertheless, there are fascinating stories--handed down orally from one generation to the next (Australian Aborigines, of course, have no ancestral writing system)--informing wide-eyed youngsters of bloodsucking, supernatural entities that return from the grave to feed upon still living blackfellas: hence Unaipon describes the red-skinned, fig tree-dwelling monster, the “Yara Ma Yha Who […] which sucks the blood from the victim and leaves him helpless upon the ground” (218). Like most vampires, this monster imparts a similarly monstrous existence upon his prey, which it drains of blood through the suckers on its fingers, not its teeth. Additionally, Reed warns: “Little children, beware of the Yara-ma-yha-who! If you do not behave yourselves and do as you are told, they will come and eat you!” (410), but no-one suggests this horrible creature is actually an undead human.For the purposes of this paper at least, the defining characteristics of a vampire are firstly that it must have once been an ordinary, living human. Secondly, it must have an appetite for human blood. Thirdly, it must have a ghoulish inability to undergo a permanent death (note, zombies, unlike vampires it seems, are fonder of brains than fresh hemoglobin and are particularly easy to dispatch). Thus, according to my criteria, an arguably genuine Aboriginal Australian vampire is referred to when Bunson writes of the Mrart being an improperly buried member of the tribe who has returned after death to feed upon the living (13) and when Cheung notes “a number of vampire-like creatures were feared, most especially the mrart, the ghost of a dead person who attacked victims at night and dragged them away from campsites” (40). Unfortunately, details regarding this “number of vampire-like creatures” have not been collated, nor I fear, in this era of rapidly extinguishing Aboriginal Australian language use, are they ever likely to be.Perhaps the best hope for preservation of these little known treasures of our mythology lies not with anthropologists but with the nation’s Indigenous creative writers. Yet no blackfella novelist, apparently, has been interested in the monstrous, bloodsucking, Aboriginal Undead. Despite being described as dominating the “Black Australian novel” (Shoemaker 1), writer Mudrooroo--who has authored three vampire novels--reveals nothing of Aboriginal Australian vampirology in his texts. Significantly, however, Mudrooroo states that Aboriginal Australian novelists such as he “are devoting their words to the Indigenous existential being” (Indigenous 3). Existentiality, of course, has to do with questions of life, death and dying and, for we Aboriginal Australians, such questions inevitably lead to us addressing the terrible consequences of British invasion and genocide upon our cultural identity, and this is reflected in Mudrooroo’s effective use of the vampire trope in his three ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels, as they are also known. Mudrooroo’s bloodsuckers, however, are the invading British and Europeans in his extended ‘white man as ghost’ metaphor: they are not sourced from Aboriginal Australian mythology.Mudrooroo does, notably, intertwine his story of colonising vampires in Australia with characters created by Bram Stoker in his classic novel Dracula (1897). He calls his first Aborigine to become a familiar “Renfield” (Undying 93), and even includes a soft-porn re-imagining of an encounter between characters he has inter-textually named “Lucy” and “Mina” (Promised 3). This potential for a contemporary transplantation of Stoker’s European characters to Australia was another aspect I sought to explore in my novel, especially regarding semi-autobiographical writing by mixed-race Aboriginal Australians such as Mudrooroo and myself. I wanted to meta-fictionally insert my self-styled anti-hero into a Stoker-inspired milieu. Thus my work features a protagonist who is confused and occasionally ambivalent about his Aboriginal identity. Brought up as Catholic, as I was, he succumbs to an Australian re-incarnation of Stoker’s Dracula as Anti-Christ and finds himself battling the true-believers of the Catholic Church, including a Moroccan version of Professor Van Helsing and a Buffy-like, quasi-Islamic vampire slayer.Despite his once revered status, Mudrooroo is now exiled from the Australian literary scene as a result of his claim to Indigeneity being (apparently) disproven (see Clark). Illness and old age prevent him from defending the charges, hence it is unlikely that Mudrooroo (or Colin Johnson as he was formerly known) will further develop the Aboriginal Australian vampire trope in his writing. Which situation leaves me to cautiously identify myself as the sole Aboriginal Australian novelist exploring Indigenous vampires in his/her creative writing, as evidenced by my 312 page novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance!, which was a prescribed text in a 2014 Indiana University course on World Literature (Halloran).Set in a contemporary Australia where disparate existential explanations including the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholicism, vampirism and atheism all co-exist, the writing of my novel was motivated by the question: ‘How can such incongruent ideologies be reconciled or bridged?’ My personal worldview is influenced by all four of these explanations for the mysteries of life and death: I was brought up in Catholicism but schooled in scientific methodology, which evolved into an insipid atheism. Culturally I was drawn to the gothic novel and developed an intellectual interest in Stoker’sDracula and its significance as a pro-Catholic, covert mission of proselytization (see Starrs 2004), whilst simultaneously learning more of my totem, Garrawi (the Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo), and the Aboriginal Dreamtime legends of my ancestral forebears. Much of my novel concerns questions of identity for a relatively light-complexioned, mixed ancestry Aboriginal Australian such as myself, and the place such individuals occupy in the post-colonial world. Mudrooroo, perhaps, was right in surmising that we Aboriginal Australian authors are devoted to writing about “the Indigenous existential being” for my Aboriginal vampire novel is at least semi-autobiographical and fixated on the protagonist’s attempts to reconcile his atheism with his Dreamtime teachings and Catholicism. But Mudrooroo’s writing differs markedly from my own when it comes to the expectations he has regarding the audience’s acceptance of supernatural themes. He apparently fully believed in the possibility of such unearthly spirits existing, and wrote of the “Maban Reality” whereby supernatural events are entirely tenable in the Aboriginal Australian world-view, and the way these matters are presented suggests he expects the reader to be similarly convinced. With this Zeitgeist, Mudrooroo’s ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels can be accurately described as Aboriginal Gothic. In this genre, Chanady explains, “the supernatural, as well as highly improbable events, are presented without any comment by the magical realist narrator” ("Magic Realism" 431).What, then, is the meaning of Aboriginal Gothic, given we Aboriginal peoples have no haunted castles or mist-shrouded graveyards? Again according to Chanady, as she set out in her groundbreaking monograph of 1985, in a work of Magical Realism the author unquestioningly accepts the supernatural as credible (10-12), even as, according to Althans, it combines “the magical and realist, into a new perspective of the world, thus offering alternative ways and new approaches to reality” (26). From this general categorisation, Althans proposes, comes the specific genre of Aboriginal Gothic, which is Magical Realism in an Indigenous context that creates a “cultural matrix foreign to a European audience [...] through blending the Gothic mode in its European tradition with the myths and customs of Aboriginal culture” (28-29). She relates the Aboriginal Gothic to Mudrooroo’s Maban Reality due to its acting “as counter-reality, grounded in the earth or country, to a rational worldview and the demands of a European realism” (28). Within this category sit not only the works of Aboriginal Australian novelists such as Mudrooroo, but also more recent novels by Aboriginal Australian writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, who occasionally indulge in improbable narratives informed by supernatural beings (while steering disappointingly clear of vampires).But there is more to the Aboriginal Gothic than a naïve acceptance of Maban Reality, or, for that matter, any other Magical Realist treatments of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Typically, the work of Aboriginal Gothic writers speaks to the historical horrors of colonisation. In contrast to the usually white-authored Australian Gothic, in which the land down under was seen as terrifying by the awestruck colonisers, and the Aborigine was portrayed as “more frightening than any European demon” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10), the Aboriginal Gothic sometimes reverses roles and makes the invading white man the monster. The Australian Gothic was for Aborigines, “a disabling, rather than enabling, discourse” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10) whilst colonial Gothic texts egregiously portrayed the colonised subject as a fearsome and savage Other. Ostensibly sub-human, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the Aborigine may even have symbolised the dark side of the British settler, but who, in the very act of his being subjugated, assures the white invader of his racial superiority, moral integrity and righteous identity. However, when Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away, readers witness the Other writing back, critically. Receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately ‘Gothicised’: eroded and made into the Other, the villainous, predatory savage. In this style of vicious literary retaliation Mudrooroo excelled. Furthermore, as a mixed ancestry Aborigine, like myself, Mudrooroo represented in his very existence, the personification of Aboriginal Gothic, for as Idilko Riendes writes, “The half caste is reminiscent of the Gothic monstrous, as the half caste is something that seems unnatural at first, evoking fears” (107). Perhaps therein lies a source of the vehemency with which some commentators have pilloried Mudrooroo after the somewhat unconvincing evidence of his non-Indigeneity? But I digress from my goal of explicating the meaning of the term Aboriginal Gothic.The boundaries of any genre are slippery and one of the features of postmodern literature is its deliberate blurring of boundaries, hence defining genres is not easy. Perhaps the Gothic can be better understood when the meaning of its polar opposite, the Fantastic, is better understood. Ethnic authorial controversies aside and returning to the equally shady subject of authorial intent, in contrast to the Aboriginal Gothic of novelists Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright, and their accepting of the supernatural as plausible, the Fantastic in literature is characterised by an enlightened rationality in which the supernatural is introduced but ultimately rejected by the author, a literary approach that certainly sits better with my existential atheism. Chanady defined and illustrated the genre as follows: “the fantastic […] reaffirmed hegemonic Western rational paradigms by portraying the supernatural in a contradictory manner as both terrifying and logically impossible […] My examples of the fantastic were drawn from the work of major French writers such as Merimee and Maupassant” ("Magic Realism" 430). Unfortunately, Chanady was unable to illustrate her concept of the Fantastic with examples of Aboriginal horror writing. Why? Because none existed until my novel was published. Whereas Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright incorporated the Magical Realism of Aboriginal Australian mythology into their novels, and asked their readers to accept it as not only plausible but realistic and even factual, I wanted to create a style that blends Aboriginal mythology with the European tradition of vampires, but ultimately rejects this “cultural matrix” due to enlightened rationality, as I deliberately and cynically denounce it all as fanciful superstition.Certainly, the adjective “fantastic” is liberally applied to much of what we call Gothic horror literature, and the sub-genre of Indigenous vampire literature is not immune to this confusion, with non-Australian Indigenous author Aaron Carr’s 1995 Native American vampire novel, The Eye Killers, unhelpfully described in terms of the “fantastic nature of the genre” (Tillett 149). In this novel,Carr exposes contemporary Native American political concerns by skillfully weaving multiple interactive dialogues with horror literature and film, contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations, postmodern philosophies, traditional vampire lore, contemporary Native literature, and Native oral traditions. (Tillett 150)It must be noted, however, that Carr does not denounce the supernatural vampire and its associated folklore, be it European or Laguna/Kerasan/Navajo, as illogical or fanciful. This despite his “dialogues with […] contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations [and] postmodern philosophies”. Indeed, the character “Diana” at one stage pretends to pragmatically denounce the supernatural whilst her interior monologue strenuously defends her irrational beliefs: the novel reads: “‘Of course there aren’t any ghosts,’ Diana said sharply, thinking: Of course there were ghosts. In this room. Everywhere” (197). In taking this stock-standard approach of expecting the reader to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the Undead, Carr locates his work firmly in the Aboriginal Gothic camp and renders commentators such as Tillett liable to be called ignorant and uninformed when they label his work fantastic.The Aboriginal Gothic would leave the reader convinced a belief in the supernatural is non-problematic, whereas the Aboriginal Fantastic novel, where it exists, would, while enjoying the temporary departure from the restraints of reality, eventually conclude there are no such things as ghosts or vampires. Thus, my Aboriginal Fantastic novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! was intended from the very beginning of the creative writing process to be an existentially diametric alternative to Magical Realism and the Aboriginal Gothic (at least in its climactic denouement). The narrative features a protagonist who, in his defeat, realises the danger in superstitious devotion and in doing so his interior monologue introduces to the literary world the new Aboriginal Fantastic genre. Despite a Foucauldian emphasis in most of my critical analysis in which an awareness of the constructed status and nature of the subject/focus of knowledge undermines the foundations of any reductive typology, I am unhesitant in my claim to having invented a new genre of literature here. Unless there is, undiscovered by my research, a yet-to-be heralded work of Aboriginal horror that recognises the impossibility of its subject, my novel is unique even while my attitude might be decried as hubristic. I am also cognizant of the potential for angry feedback from my Aboriginal Australian kin, for my innovative genre is ultimately denigrating of all supernatural devotion, be it vampiric or Dreamtime. Aboriginal Fantastic writing rejects such mythologies as dangerous, fanciful superstition, but I make the (probably) too-little-too-late defence that it rejects the Indigenous existential rationale somewhat less vigorously than it rejects the existential superstitions of Catholicism and/or vampirism.This potential criticism I will forbear, perhaps sullenly and hopefully silently, but I am likely to be goaded to defensiveness by those who argue that like any Indigenous literature, Aboriginal Australian writing is inherently Magical Realist, and that I forsake my culture when I appeal to the rational. Chanady sees “magic realism as a mode that expresses important points of view, often related to marginality and subalternity” ("Magic Realism" 442). She is not alone in seeing it as the generic cultural expression of Indigenous peoples everywhere, for Bhabha writes of it as being the literature of the postcolonial world (6) whilst Rushdie sees it as the expression of a third world consciousness (301). But am I truly betraying my ancestral culture when I dismiss the Mrart as mere superstition? Just because it has colour should we revere ‘black magic’ over other (white or colourless) superstitions? Should we not suspect, as we do when seated before stage show illusionists, some sleight of (writing) hand? Some hidden/sub-textual agenda meant to entertain not educate? Our world has many previously declared mysteries now easily explained by science, and the notion of Earth being created by a Rainbow Serpent is as farcical to me as the notion it was created a few thousand years ago in seven days by an omniscient human-like being called God. If, in expressing this dubiousness, I am betraying my ancestors, I can only offer detractors the feeble defence that I sincerely respect their beliefs whilst not personally sharing them. I attempt no delegitimising of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Indeed, I celebrate different cultural imaginaries for they make our quotidian existence more colourful and enjoyable. There is much pleasure to be had in such excursions from the pedantry of the rational.Another criticism I might hear out--intellectually--would be: “Most successful literature is Magical Realist, and supernatural stories are irresistible”, a truism most commercially successful authors recognise. But my work was never about sales, indeed, the improbability of my (irresistible?) fiction is didactically yoked to a somewhat sanctimonious moral. My protagonist realises the folly and danger in superstitious devotion, although his atheistic epiphany occurs only during his last seconds of life. Thus, whilst pushing this barrow of enlightened rationality, my novel makes a somewhat original contribution to contemporary Australian culture, presenting in a creative writing form rather than anthropological report, an understanding of the potential for melding Aboriginal mythology with Catholicism, the “competing Dreamtimes, white and black” as Turcotte writes ("Re-mastering" 132), if only at the level of ultimately accepting, atheistically, that all are fanciful examples of self-created beyond-death identity, as real--or unreal--as any other religious meme. Whatever vampire literature people read, most such consumers do not believe in the otherworldly antagonists, although there is profound enjoyment to be had in temporarily suspending disbelief and even perpetuating the meme into the mindsets of others. Perhaps, somewhere in the sub-conscious, pre-rational recesses of our caveman-like brains, we still wonder if such supernatural entities reflect a symbolic truth we can’t quite apprehend. Instead, we use a totemic figure like the sultry but terrifying Count Dracula as a proxy for other kinds of primordial anxieties we cannot easily articulate, whether that fear is the child rapist on the loose or impending financial ruin or just the overwhelming sense that our contemporary lifestyles contain the very seeds of our own destruction, and we are actively watering them with our insouciance.In other words, there is little that is new in horror. Yes, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is an example of what I call the new genre of Aboriginal Fantastic but that claim is not much of an original contribution to knowledge, other than being the invention of an extra label in an unnecessarily formalist/idealist lexicon of literary taxonomy. Certainly, it will not create a legion of fans. But these days it is difficult for a novelist to find anything really new to write about, genre-wise, and if there is a reader prepared to pay hard-earned money for a copy, then I sincerely hope they do not feel they have purchased yet another example of what the HBO television show Californication’s creative writing tutor Hank Moody (David Duchovny) derides as “lame vampire fiction” (episode 2, 2007). I like to think my Aboriginal Fantastic novel has legs as well as fangs. References Althans, Katrin. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film. Bonn: Bonn UP, 2010. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Bunson, Matthew. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books, 1993. Carr, Aaron A. Eye Killers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1995. Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Chanady, Amaryll. “Magic Realism Revisited: The Deconstruction of Antinomies.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (June 2003): 428-444. Cheung, Theresa. The Element Encyclopaedia of Vampires. London: Harper Collins, 2009. Clark, Maureen. Mudrooroo: A Likely Story: Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007. Gelder, Ken. The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Halloran, Vivien. “L224: Introduction to World Literatures in English.” Department of English, Indiana University, 2014. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/undergradCourses_spring.shtml›. McKee, Alan. “White Stories, Black Magic: Australian Horror Films of the Aboriginal.”Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia. Eds. Dieter Riemenschneider and Geoffrey V. Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (1997): 193-210. Mudrooroo. The Indigenous Literature of Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997. Mudrooroo. The Undying. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1998. Mudrooroo. The Promised Land. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000. Reed, Alexander W. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1999. Riendes, Ildiko. “The Use of Gothic Elements as Manifestations of Regaining Aboriginal Identity in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart.” Topos 1.1 (2012): 100-114. Rushdie, Salman. “Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta and Penguin Books, 1991. Shoemaker, Adam. Mudrooroo. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1993. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Keeping the Faith: Catholicism in Dracula and its Adaptations.” Journal of Dracula Studies 6 (2004): 13-18. Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012. Tillett, Rebecca. “‘Your Story Reminds Me of Something’: Spectacle and Speculation in Aaron Carr’s Eye Killers.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 33.1 (2002): 149-73. Turcotte, Gerry. “Australian Gothic.” Faculty of Arts — Papers, University of Wollongong, 1998. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60/›. Turcotte, Gerry. “Re-mastering the Ghosts: Mudrooroo and Gothic Refigurations.” Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo. Ed. Annalisa Oboe. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (2003): 129-151. Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Eds. Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, 2006.

Prometheus, chained to a rock, having his liver pecked out by a great bird only for the organ to grow back again each night so that the torture may be repeated afresh the next day must be the quintessential image of masculinity in crisis. This paper will consider Promethean myth and the issues it raises regarding 'creation' including: the role of creator, the relationship between creator and created, the usurping of maternal (creative) power by patriarchy and, not least, the offering of an experimental model in which masculine identity can be recreated. I argue that Promethean myth raises significant issues relating to anxieties associated with notions of masculinity and gender, which are subsequently transposed in Shelley's modernist recasting of the myth, Frankenstein. I then consider 'Promethean' science fiction film, as an area particularly concerned with re-creation, in terms of construction of the self, gender and masculinity. Prometheus & Creation Prometheus (whose name means 'forethought') was able to foresee the future and is credited with creating man from mud/clay. As Man was inferior to other creations and unprotected, Prometheus allowed Man to walk upright [1] like the Gods. He also stole from them the gift of fire, to give to Man, and tricked the Gods into allowing Man to keep the best parts of sacrifices (giving the Gods offal, bones and fat). Thus Prometheus is regarded as the father and creator of Mankind, and as Man's benefactor and protector; whose love of Man (or love of trickery and his own cleverness) leads him to deceive the Gods. Prometheus's brother, Epimetheus (whose name means 'afterthought'), was commissioned to make all the other creations and Prometheus was to overlook his work when it was done. Due to Epimetheus's short-sightedness there were no gifts left (such as fur etc.) to bestow upon Man – the nobler animal which Prometheus was entrusted to make. Prometheus, a Titan, and illegitimate son of Iapetus and the water nymph Clymene (Kirkpatrick, 1991), helped fight against the Titans the side of Zeus, helping Zeus seize the throne. More than simple indication of a rebellious spirit, his illegitimate status (albeit as opposed to an incestuous one – Iapetus was married to his sister Themis) raises the important issues of both legitimacy and filial loyalty, so recurrent within accounts of creation (of man, and human artifice). Some hold that Prometheus is punished for his deceptions i.e. over fire and the sacrifices, thus he is punished as much for his brother's failings as much as for his own ingenuity and initiative. Others maintain he is punished for refusing to tell Zeus which of Zeus's sons would overthrow him, protecting Zeus' half mortal son and his mortal mother. Zeus's father and grandfather suffered castration and usurpment at the hands of their offspring – for both Zeus and Prometheus (pro)creation is perilous. Prometheus's punishment here is for withholding a secret which accords power. In possessing knowledge (power) which could have secured his release, Prometheus is often viewed as emblematic of endurance, suffering and resistance and parental martyrdom. Prometheus, as mentioned previously, was chained to a rock where a great bird came and tore at his liver [2], the liver growing back overnight for the torture to be repeated afresh the following day. Heracles, a half mortal son of Zeus, slays the bird and frees Prometheus, thus Man repays his debt by liberation of his benefactor, or, in other accounts, he is required to take Prometheus's place, and thus liberating his creator and resulting in his own enslavement. Both versions clearly show the strength of bond between Prometheus and his creation but the latter account goes further in suggesting that Man and Maker are interchangeable. Also linked to Promethean myth is the creation of the first woman, Pandora. Constructed (by Jupiter at Zeus's command) on one hand as Man's punishment for Prometheus's tricks, and on the other as a gift to Man from the Gods. Her opening of 'the box', either releasing all mans ills, plagues and woes, or letting all benevolent gifts but hope escape, is seen as disastrous from either perspective. However what is emphasised is that the creation of Woman is secondary to the creation of Man. Therefore Prometheus is not the creator of humankind but of mankind. The issue of gender is an important aspect of Promethean narrative, which I discuss in the next section. Gender Issues Promethean myths raise a number of pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality. Firstly they suggest that both Man and Woman are constructed [3], and that they are constructed as distinct entities, regarding Woman as inferior to Man. Secondly creative power is posited firmly with the masculine (by virtue of the male sex of both Prometheus and Jupiter), negating maternal and asserting patriarchal power. Thirdly Nature, which is associated with the feminine, is surpassed in that whilst Man is made from the earth (mud/clay) it is Prometheus who creates him (Mother Earth providing only the most basic raw materials for production); and Nature is overcome as Man is made independent of climate through the gift of fire. Tensions arise in that Prometheus's fate is also linked to childbirth in so far as that which is internal is painfully rendered external (strongly raising connotations of the abject – which threatens identity boundaries). The intense connection between creation and childbirth indicates that the appropriation of power is of a power resting not with the gods, but with women. The ability to see the future is seen as both frightening and reassuring. Aeschylus uses this to explain Prometheus's tolerance of his fate: he knew he had to endure pain but he knew he would be released, and thus was resigned to his suffering. As the bearer of the bleeding wound Prometheus is feminised, his punishment represents a rite of passage through which he may earn the status 'Father of Man' and reassert and define his masculine identity, hence a masochistic desire to suffer is also suggested. Confrontations with the abject, the threat posed to identity, and Lacanian notions of desire in relation to the other, are subjects which problematise the myth's assertion of masculine power. I will now consider how the Promethean myth is recast in terms of modernity in the story of Frankenstein and the issues regarding male power this raises. Frankenstein - A Modern Prometheus Consistent with the Enlightenment spirit of renewal and reconstruction, the novel Frankenstein emerges in 1818, re-casting Promethean myth in terms of science, and placing the scientist (i.e. man) as creator. Frankenstein in both warning against assuming the power of God and placing man as creator, simultaneously expresses the hopes and fears of the transition from theocratic belief to rationality. One of the strategies Frankenstein gives us through its narrative use of science and technology is a social critique and interrogation of scientific discourse made explicit through its alignment with gender discourse. In appropriating reproductive power without women, it enacts an appropriation of maternity by patriarchy. In aligning the use of this power by patriarchy with the power of the gods, it attempts to deify and justify use of this power whilst rendering women powerless and indeed superfluous. Yet as it offers the patriarchal constructs of science and technology as devoid of social responsibility, resulting in monstrous productions, it also facilitates a critique of patriarchy (Cranny Francis, 1990, p220). The creature, often called 'Frankenstein' rather than 'Frankenstein's monster', is not the only 'abomination to God'. Victor Frankenstein is portrayed as a 'spoilt brat of a child', whose overindulgence results in his fantasy of omnipotent power over life itself, and leads to neglect of, and lack of care towards, his creation. Indeed he may be regarded as the true 'monster' of the piece, as he is all too clearly lacking Prometheus's vision and pastoral care [4]. "Neither evil nor inhuman, [the creature] comes to seem little more than morally uninformed, poorly 'put together' by a human creator who has ill served both his creation and his fellow humans." (Telotte, 1995, p. 76). However, the model of the natural – and naturally free – man emerges in the novel from an implied pattern of subjection which demonstrates that the power the man-made constructs of science and technology give us come at great cost: "[Power] is only made possible by what [Mary Shelley] saw as a pointedly modern devaluation of the self: by affirming that the human is, at base, just a put together thing, with no transcendent origin or purpose and bound to a half vital existence at best by material conditions of its begetting."(ibid.) Frankenstein's power expressed through his overcoming of Nature, harnessing of technology and desire to subject the human body to his will, exhibits the modern world's mastery over the self. However it also requires the devaluation of self so that the body is regarded as subject, thus leading to our own subjection. For Telotte (1995, p37), one reflection of our Promethean heritage is that as everything comes to seem machine-like and constructed, the human too finally emerges as a kind of marvellous fiction, or perhaps just another empty invention. Access to full creative potential permits entry "into a true 'no man's land'…. a wonderland...where any wonder we might conceive, or any wondrous way we might conceive of the self, might be fashioned". Certainly the modernist recasting of Promethean myth embodies that train of thought which is most consciously aiming to discover the nature of man through (re)creating him. It offers patriarchal power as a power over the self (independent of the gods); a critique of the father; and the fantasy of (re)construction of the self at the cost of deconstruction of the body which, finally, leads to the subjection of the self. The Promethean model, I maintain, serves to illuminate and further our understanding of the endurance, popularity and allure of fantasies of creation, which can be so readily found in cinematic history, and especially within the science fiction genre. This genre stands out as a medium both well suited to, and enamoured with, Promethean reworkings [5]. As religion (of which Greek mythology is a part) and science both attempt to explain the world and make it knowable they offer the reassurance, satisfaction and the illusion of security and control, whilst tantalising with notions of possible futures. Promethean science fiction film realises the visual nature of these possible futures providing us, in its future visions, with glimpses of alternative ways of seeing and being. Promethean Science Fiction Film Science fiction, can be seen as a 'body genre' delineated not by excess of sex, blood or emotion but by excess of control over the body as index of identity (Cook, 1999, p.193). Science fiction films can be seen to fall broadly into three categories: space flight, alien invaders and futuristic societies (Hayward, 1996, p.305). Within these, Telotte argues (Replications, 1995), most important are the images of "human artifice", which form a metaphor for our own human selves, and have come to dominate the contemporary science fiction film (1995, p11). The science fiction film contains a structural tension that constantly rephrases central issues about the self and constructedness. Paradoxically whilst the science fiction genre profits from visions of a technological future it also displays technophobia – the promises of these fictions represent dangerous illusions with radical and subversive potential, suggesting that nature and the self may be 'reconstructable' rather than stable and unchanging. Whilst some films return us safely to a comforting stable humanity, others embrace and affirm the subversive possibilities advocating an evolution or rebirth of the human. Regardless of their conservative (The Iron Giant, 1999, Planet of the Apes, 1968) or subversive tendencies (Metropolis 1926, Blade Runner 1982, Terminator 1984), they offer the opportunity to explore "a space of desire" (Telotte, p. 153, 1990) a place where the self can experience a kind of otherness and possibilities exceed the experience of our normal being (The Stepford Wives 1974, The Fly 1986, Gattaca 1997 [6]). What I would argue is central to the definition of a Promethean sub-genre of science fiction is the conscious depiction and understanding of the (hu)man subject or artifice as technological or scientific construction rather than natural. Often, as in Promethean myth, there is a mirroring between creator and creation, constructor and constructed, which serves to bind them despite their differences, and may often override them. Power in this genre is revealed as masculine power over the feminine, namely reproductive power; as such tensions in male identity arise and may be interrogated. Promethean (film) texts have at their centre issues of what it is to be human, and within this, what it is to be a man. There is a focus on hegemonic masculinity within these texts, which serves as a measure of masculinity. Furthermore these texts are most emphatically concerned with the construction of masculinity and with masculine power. The notion of creation raises questions of paternity, motherhood, parenting, and identification with the father, although the ways in which these issues are portrayed or explored may be quite diverse. As a creation of man, rather than of 'woman', the subjects created are almost invariably 'other' to their creators, whilst often embodying the fantasies, desires and repressed fears of their makers. That otherness and difference form central organising principles in these texts is undisputable, however there also can be seen to exist a bond between creator and created which is worthy of exploration, as the progeny of man retains a close likeness (though not always physically) to its maker [7]. Particularly in the Promethean strand of science fiction film we encounter the abject, posing a threat to fragile identity constructions (recalling the plight of Prometheus on his rock and his feminised position). I also maintained that 'lack' formed part of the Promethean heritage. Not only are the desires of the creators often lacking in Promethean care and vision, but their creations are revealed as in some way lacking, falling short of their creator's desire and indeed their own [8]. From the very beginnings of film we see the desire to realise (see) Promethean power accorded to man and to behold his creations. The mad scientists of film such as Frankenstein (1910), Homunculus (1916), Alraune (1918), Orlacs Hande (1925) and Metropolis (1926) and Frankenstein (1931) all point to the body as source of subjection and resistance. Whilst metal robots may be made servile, "the flesh by its very nature always rebels" (Telotte, 1995, p. 77). Thus whilst they form a metaphor for the way the modern self is subjugated, they also suggest resistance to that subjugation, pointing to "a tension between body and mind, humanity and its scientific attainments, the self and a cultural subjection" (ibid.). The films of the 1980's and 90's, such as Blade Runner (1982), Robocop (1987) Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1994), point towards "the human not as ever more artificial but the artificial as ever more human" (Telotte, 1995, p.22). However, these cyborg bodies are also gendered bodies providing metaphors for the contemporary anxieties about 'masculinities'. Just as the tale of Prometheus is problematic in that there exist many variations of the myth [9], with varying accounts capable of producing a range of readings, concepts of 'masculinity' are neither stable nor uniform, and are subject to recasting and reconstruction. Likewise in Promethean science fiction film masculine identities are multiple, fragmented and dynamic. These films do not simply recreate masculinities in the sense that they mirror extant anxieties but recreate in the sense that they 'play' with these anxieties, possibilities of otherness and permeate boundaries. We may see this 'play' as liberating, in that it offers possible ways of being and understanding difference, or conservative, reinstating hegemonic masculinity by asserting old hierarchies. As versions of the myth are reconstructed what new types of creator/creature will emerge? What will they say about our understanding and experiences of "masculinities"? What new possibilities and identities may we envision? Perhaps the most significant aspect of our Promethean heritage is that, as Prometheus is chained to his rock and tortured, through the perpetual regeneration of his liver, almost as if to counterweight or ballast the image of masculinity in crisis, comes the 'reassuring' notion that whatever the strains cracks or injuries the patriarchal image endures: 'we can rebuild him' [10]. We not only can but will, for in doing so we are also reconstructing ourselves. Footnote According to Bulfinch (web) he gave him an upright stature so he could look to the Heavens and gaze on the stars. Linking to Science Fiction narratives of space exploration etc. (Encyclopedia Mythica – [web]) -The liver was once regarded as the primary organ of our being (the heart being our contemporary equivalent) where passions and pain and were felt. Both physically constructed and sociologically, with woman as inferior lesser being and implying gender determinism. This is further articulated to effect in the James Whale film (Frankenstein, 1931), where 'Henry' Frankenstein's creation is regarded as his 'first born' and notions of lineage predominate, ultimately implying he will now pursue more natural methods of (pro)creation. Frankenstein is seen by some as the first cyborg novel in its linking of technology and creation and also often cited as the first science fiction film (although there were others). For example in Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997), the creation of man occurs through conscious construction of the self, acknowledging that we are all constructed and acknowledging that masculinity must be reconstructed if it is to be validated. Patriarchy has worked to mythologise our relationship to (mother) nature, so that the human becomes distinct from the manufactured. What is perhaps the most vital aspect of the character Vincent in Gattaca is his acknowledgement that the body must be altered, restructured, reshaped and defined in order to pass from insignificance to significance in terms of hegemonic masculine identity. It is therefore through a reappraisal of the external that the internal gains validity. See Foucault on resemblance and similitude (in The Gendered Cyborg, 2000). See Scott Bukatman on Blade Runner in Kuhn, 1990. The tale of Prometheus had long existed in oral traditions and folklore before Hesiod wrote of it in Theogeny and Works and Days, and Aeschylus, elaborated on Hesiod, when he wrote Prometheus Bound (460B.C). Catchphrase used in the 1970's popular TV series The Six Million Dollar Man in relation to Steve Austin the 'bionic' character of the title. References Bernink, M. & Cook, P. (eds.) The Cinema Book (2nd edition). London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1999. Clute, J. Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopaedia. London: Dorling Kindersley, 1995. Cohan, S. & Hark, I.R. (eds.) Screening the Male. London: Routledge, 1993. Hall, S., Held, D. & McLennan, G. (eds.) Modernity and its Futures. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press in association with The Open University, 1993. Jancovich, M. Rational Fears: American horror in the 1950's. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Jeffords, S. Can Masculinity be Terminated? In Cohan, S. & Hark, I.R. (eds.) Screening the Male. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Kirkup, G., Janes, L., Woodward, K. & Hovenden, F. (eds.) The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Kuhn, A. (ed.) Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London and New York: Verso, 1990. Sobchack, V. Screening Space. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press 1999. Telotte, J.P. A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Telotte, J.P. Replications. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995 Bulfinch's Mythology, The Age of Fable – Chapter 2: Prometheus and Pandora: (accessed 21st March 2000) http://www.bulfinch.org/fables/bull2.html Bulfinch's Mythology: (accessed March 21st 2000) http://www.bulfinch.org.html Encyclopaedia Mythica: Greek Mythology: (accessed June 15th 2000) http://oingo.com/topic/20/20246.html Encyclopaedia Mythica: Articles (accessed 15th June 2000) http://www.pantheon.org/mythica/articles.html

Culture is a mercurial concept -- volatile, contested, and somehow, less than the sum of its parts. Its anthropology, it can be argued, was rooted in an exoticising scholarship typical of the late 19th-century colonialist ruminations on all things "other"; in contemporary terms of course, this exoticising tendency would be termed, as it should, "Orientalist". Still, there is something more than merely residual in the persistence of a notion of culture as a summary, as a package of knowledge and practice, as a name for identity, or even politics, all of which draw clearly from the well of Edward B. Tylor's bold attempt to terminologically and conceptually capture "the most complex whole", a people's entire way of life (albeit non-white, non-literate, non-western people) from what we can trust were the considerable comforts of his armchair. This Tylorean notion of culture, as Clifford Geertz once suggested, leads to a "conceptual morass" that "obscures a great deal more than it reveals" (4). Another definitional foundation of culture for consideration is the philosophical tradition of German Idealism. Culture as a process of aesthetic education was for Friedrich Schiller a means of progressing from a state of nature to a state of reason without the destruction of nature. Schiller offered a critique of Kant's account of the development of reason (the achievement of the state of rationality as key to the education and progress of humanity) as necessarily predicated on the containment and ultimately, the destruction of nature (against the chaos and moral abyss that is nature). Schiller argued for the capacity of art to infuse nature with morality, to serve as an intermediary of sorts, between chaotic nature and the structures of pure reason. It is the cultivation of moral character -- Bildung -- that is the foundation of this capacity, and that defines the nature and purpose of "culture" as a process of aesthetic education. There were two influential trajectories that seem inspired by this philosophical source. First, there was an important sense from the German Idealists that culture was a determining principle of nation (the nation-state is achieved through Bildung, through cultivation), and accordingly, culture was understood as the source of nationhood. Second, culture took on the sense of moral authority, an Arnoldian equation of culture with high culture and a concomitant mistrust of all things democratic and popular, which debase and ultimately threaten the authority of high culture. Raymond Williams's reinterpretation of culture merits attention because of its departure from previous traditions of defining culture, and because it is a useful foundation for the view of culture proposed later in this discussion. Williams offered a detailed historical analysis of the reasons for the under-theorisation of the British labour movement, and the glaring dislocation of the English proletariat from the ideas, the concepts, the political theory of capitalism. Actual working classes in Britain, the "lived culture" of workers, fit neither into broad political theoretical currents, nor into an examination of workers as elements in a historical process -- this lived culture defied the embrace of political analysis. Williams argued for a more anthropological view of culture, and decisively shifted the concept away from the British literary-cultural tradition, away from Arnold's "high culture", to a view of culture as a whole way of life, and open to the vision and the possibilities of social integration, popular classes, and popular struggles in ordinary, everyday life. Williams argued compellingly for the "ordinariness" of culture. As Bill Readings notes, "Williams's insistence that culture is ordinary was a refusal to ignore the actual working classes in favor of the liberated proletarians who were to be their successors after the revolution" (92). In this sense, culture confounds political theory -- or to stretch the point, culture confounds systematic theorising. In a similar vein, and in a classic of anthropological inquiry, Clifford Geertz argued that the analysis of culture was "not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning" (4). Such an "interpretive" project demands above all, that that the analyst is also a participant in a dimension of the culture she/he is describing. I want to consider two of Geertz's assertions in his interpretive theory of culture to frame my proposal for a concept of culture-as-action. Geertz maintained that cultural analysis is guesswork rather than systematic theorising, which he regarded as a manipulation or reconstruction of reality through analytical practices in search of elegant schemata. Cultural analysis is "guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape" (20). Clearly, Geertz trained his critical sights on anthropological trends to extrapolate from material data singularly coherent, even symmetrical systems, orders, properties, and universals in a method that wants to imitate, but is not science. Interpretation resists scientism. In a second assertion, Geertz argued that any sustained symbolic action -- the stuff of culture -- is "saying something of something" (448-53). While this assertion appears disarmingly simple, it is profound in its implications. It points to the possibility that cultural analysis, if it is to grasp and interpret layered, textured, and often thoroughly complex significations, must attend to "semantics" rather than "mechanics"; the representation of the substance of culture, its symbolic expressive forms and its unfolding action, rather than the insinuation, or even the bold declaration of systems and formulas, however elegant, of cultural patterns and process. The concern in interpretation -- a form of representation -- is that "a good interpretation of anything -- a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society -- takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation" (18). To describe culture is to attend to action -- actual and resonant -- and such descriptions representations have responsibility; specifically, they must seek to grasp and portray social discourse and its possible meanings in ways that allow symbolic action -- the vocabulary of culture -- to speak on its own behalf. We arrived back in Lahore after a day's journey by jeep over the bone-dry and dusty roads of rural Punjab. The air was a toxic soup, and the heat was crushing, as it always is in Pakistan in monsoon season. The interior of the vehicle was an oven, and I was feeling sealed and cooked, even with all the windows open. My friend and driver, Ashicksahib and I were soaked with sweat from the journey, and we were eager to finally get out of the jeep as we pulled into the city in the late afternoon. I had been through a half dozen bottles of water, but I still felt dizzy with dehydration. I knew that this day was the celebration of Mohammed's birthday, and while I expected many people on the streets, I was unprepared for the magnitude of the event that was taking place. The crowds consumed us. We crawled along until we couldn't continue. The jeep had to stop as the sea of celebrants became denser and denser inside the city, and Ashicksahib shrugged his massive shoulders, smiled at me from under his thick white moustache, wiped his neck with a sodden cloth, and said in Urdu, "That's it, we cannot move, there's nowhere for us to go. We must be patient." I had never seen this much humanity gathered in a single place before. There were only boys and men of course, thousands and thousands of them moving along in joyous procession -- on foot, piled on platforms of flatbed trucks, stuffed into rickshaws, two or three sharing scooters and bicycles. The usual animal multitudes -- herds of water buffalo, goats, some camels, the ubiquitous miserable and thread- bare donkeys with their carts -- all stood passively in the midst of the chaos, too exhausted or too confused to register any instinctive response. Blasting loudspeakers competed from a hundred different directions, chants and patriotic music, prayers and devotional declarations, the staccato delivery of fundamentalist pedagogy and the improvised reveries of individuals with small bullhorns. The soft drink vendors shouted to the crowds to make way as they spun their carts around over and over again, and darted off into fray. I brought out my camera, and because the noise was deafening, I mimed to Ashicksahib my intention to take some photos from the roof of the jeep. He motioned with an affirmative sweep of his hand and the typical and essential south Asian head roll, and I pried open the door and squeezed out against the celebrants pressed up to the side of the jeep. I hoisted myself onto the roof and sat cross-legged to steady myself for some wide- angle shots of the celebrations. I had some concern over my obviousness -- white and western -- but everyone who saw me shouted greetings in Urdu or Punjabi, waved and smiled, and young boys ran up very close to the jeep to see what I was up to. I heard Ashicksahib laughing, and all seemed safe -- until the squadrons of Sunni fundamentalists caught sight of me as their trucks crawled by in a formation that seemed remarkably disciplined and militaristic in the direct contrast to the emotionalism and formlessness of the event. Like the wave in a sports stadium, the young men stood up one by one on the back of the trucks, their green turbans cut into the indefinite wash of a grey, polluted sky, their eyes searching until they fixed on me, now exposed and vulnerable on the roof of the jeep. And quickly they leapt from their trucks like a SWAT team responding crisply to a crisis, precise and efficient, jaws clenched, cocked for action. I saw them first through the lens of my camera, and uttered an expletive or two appropriate to the situation. I knew I was in trouble, and clearly, I had nowhere to go. The turbans formed a green ribbon winding through the mass. As they approached, the eyes of the militants were trained on me with the focus of a predator about to take down its prey. I slipped back into the jeep through the window, and motioned for Ashicksahib to look over the crowd and see the slow and steady movement of the green turbans toward us. His smile vanished instantly, and he readied himself for confrontation. When the first militant reached the jeep's window, Ashicksahib's entire body was taut and urgent, like a finger twitching on the trigger of a pistol. "American! American! No photo! No photo!" The leader of the group shouted at me in English and began to bang the side of the jeep. Ten or twelve young men, eyes flaring under their turbans, screamed at me and joined in the assault on the jeep. Ashicksahib had waited for a particular moment, it occurred to me later, a certain point in the rising arc of tension and emotion. He opened his door, but did not leave the jeep. Instead he stood on the step on the driver's side, half in and half out, slowly unfurled his considerable frame to its full height, and began his verbal assault. He stood on his perch above the action and in a play of passions, he shouted his opponents into submission. There were a few physical sorties by the militants, attempts to kick the door of the jeep into Ashicksahib, but these were displays, and Ashicksahib kicked back only once. And suddenly they wavered, an erosion of spirit evidenced in their eyes, a bending to the force roaring above them. They gave up their attempts to grab my camera, to gain entry to the jeep, and with a swift gesture of his hand, the leader called his small army into retreat. This same festival that mobilised great masses of people in celebration, that enacted the inextricableness of nationalist and Pakistani Muslim commitment and identity, that on the surface appeared to articulate and demonstrate a collective belief and purpose, also dramatised conflictive divisions and the diverse interpretations of what it means to be a Pakistani, a Muslim, a Punjabi, an Indus person, a Lahori, a poor person, a person of means, and numerous other identities at stake. As an obvious westerner in the midst of the event, I was variously ignored, warmly greeted as a friendly foreigner, or accosted as an unwelcome interloper, each interaction unfolding within a broader and deeper passionate ritual which for some meant play and celebration, and for others meant a serious and forceful demonstration of affiliation, faith, and nationalism. I had been working in both village and urban contexts on issues and strategies around communication/education and advocacy with South Asia Partnership-Pakistan, a non-government organisation based in Lahore that was engaged in front-line work for social change. The organisation was driven by the pursuit of the principles of civil society, and on a daily basis, it contended with the brutal contradictions to those principles. Its work was carried out against a bulwark of poverty and fundamentalism that seemed impenetrable, and this moment of imminent confrontation resonated with the complex historical, cultural, and political dynamics of identity, religion, nationalism, colonialism, and a seething cauldron of south Asian geopolitics. As Paulo Freire argued that world views are manifested in actions that offer insight into broader and prevailing social and political conditions, so Geertz maintained that societies "contain their own interpretations". This was not essentialism -- there were none of the conceits or romanticism of essentialist readings of the commonplace as encapsulated social and political axioms. Rather, these views were a call for analytical honesty, a participatory and political dimension to cultural analysis that works to gain some access to these "interpretations" by encountering and apprehending culture in forms of action. Cultural analysis becomes a kind of trial-by-fire, a description from a viewpoint of participatory engagement. By "participatory", I mean everything that the bloodlessness and obfuscation of so much of Cultural Studies is not -- an actual stake in action and consequence in a real world of politics. The interpretation of culture is valuable when it attends to action rather than theoretical insinuation; to cultural volatility and contingency, and the broad determinants of social discourse rather than schemata and structure as critical ends. Interpretation has a participatory dimension -- an involvement, an engagement with culture described and interpreted -- which eschews the privilege of theory unimpeded by empirical evidence. References Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth. Penguin, 1972. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Schiller, Friedrich. Notes on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Customes. 2 vol. New York: Henry Holt, 1877. Williams, Raymond. "Culture is Ordinary". Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. Ed. Robin Gable. London: Verso, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Martin Laba. "Culture as Action." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api- network.com/mc/0005/action.php>. Chicago style: Martin Laba, "Culture as Action," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/action.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Martin Laba. (2000) Culture as action. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/action.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Music scholarship across genres is often concerned with music's metaphysical and ephemeral effects on individuals, communities, and society. These scholarly framings constitute a concept that we refer to here as “the magic of music”. Using this framing, this article addresses the ways that the magic is undermined by a range of worldly, non-magical realities, using the case study of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and their devastating effects on the previously thriving live music industry in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. The magic of music includes such aspects as the intangible sounds of music, the mysterious practice of creative music-making, and the transformative effects on audiences and others who participate in music culture. We begin with a broad discussion of the sonic properties of music as a form of magic—a common rhetoric that has been used across the world regardless of genre or cultural origin. Next, we turn to the social contexts surrounding music, such as live music settings. De Jong and Lebrun argue that “the power of music” can create “moments of rare, intense and direct interactions between individuals” that are often described as magical, and that “magic is, in this sense, understood as a perfectly natural and plausible, and not supernatural, experience, even if its intensity and rarity in one's life makes it extra-ordinary” (4). We use this framing of “music as magic” in our consideration of the specific context of Australia’s music industry from 2020 to the present. We posit that the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside government-sanctioned lockdowns, cultural shifts such as an increased focus on poor working conditions and risk in music work, and detrimental arts funding policies worked together to effectively break the spell of “music as magic” for industry and patrons. Finally, we draw on key examples from popular music studies, industry reports and new government policies, to call attention to recent proposals to rehabilitate the magic through a re-enchantment of music and the music industry. Feels like Magic: The Social Context of Music Music is a form of organised sound and silence that people across cultures, history, and places, have articulated as possessing magical properties (Nettl). Music is not only sound waves but also a social category, thus the notion of magic extends beyond sound into everyday discourse in the social realm of music, which will be the focus of this article. Audiences/listeners may describe their own response to music as a magical feeling, stemming from the performer’s ability to convey emotion and provide a performance that “mirrors the performer’s [own] deep connection to the music” (Loeffler 19). Such ‘magical moments’ of deep connection among audience members and between audiences and performers may be elicited in various ways. Examples include the sense of emotional self-recognition found via personal lyrics, resonance with unique vocal timbres, or the shared sense of belonging that develops with fellow audience members, including strangers, during musical events (Anderson). For the latter, the magic (or “magick”, a spelling associated with stagecraft) of ritualised music performance is a common element of Paganism in music performance, with some popular music artists implicitly “appropriat[ing] the Pagan subculture's symbols for artistic inspiration and commercial gain”, presenting themselves as contemporary conduits that reconnect audiences to old magics (Sweeney Smith 91; see also Weston). When it comes to these sorts of ideas about magic and music, performers and audiences routinely make claims about magical musical powers such as “talent”, an idea deployed to describe the skills and charisma of certain musicians, and “creativity”, a “magic ingredient” (see McRobbie) that people who write or produce music are supposed to possess in order to perform their craft (Gadir 61–4; Gross and Musgrave 10, 22; see also Nairn). Music of all forms can provide profound affective experiences, regardless of how it is made and who plays it. There is also a magical discourse present in popular music that has reached millions of people in a globalised musical world dominated by recordings. For as long as music has had a mass market, its magic properties (as articulated in multiple ways across history) have been a selling point for musicians, records, and concerts. The recorded music industry’s very selection process is rooted in the idea that “creativity is based on ‘little bits of magic’ and that success is down to luck and timing” (Gross and Musgrave 140). Music writing (scholarly, criticism, journalism) tends to focus on these magical properties: from the sublime nature of a musical work and its form to the phenomenology of sound and affective experience of music, and even the inexplicable, elusive ‘talent’ of particular musicians. Jimi Hendrix labelled his music work “completely, utterly a magic science” (Clarke 195), while Joni Mitchell “consistently referred to Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter, and Jaco Pastorius as ‘magicians’ and ‘shamans,’ thereby conferring a susceptibility to the miraculous upon the musicians she most respected” (Lloyd 124). As we show below, this conflation of magical and religious concepts is evident elsewhere in discourse on the intangibility of musical talent. Some genres of music have emphasised the idea of music as magic more than others. For example, scholarship on electronic dance music (EDM) has embraced the concept of “DJ as shaman” (Brewster and Broughton 19; Luckman 133; Rietveld “Introduction” 1; Rietveld This Is Our House) and the nightclub as a “pseudo-religious pilgrimage site” (Becker and Woebs 59), extending Benjamin’s argument for art’s origins in service of ritual (24). Miller has further alluded to a mystical DJ craft, both as a performer quoted in music media (Gallagher) and in his own academic writing: “gimme two records and I’ll make you a universe” (DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid 127; Miller 497). Shamanism is also explored in rock music discourse (see Kennedy 81–90). Notions of musical magic extend beyond performances and personalities into the recording studio. Music mastering is commonly labelled a “dark art” (Hepworth-Sawyer and Golding 241; Hinksman 13; Nardi 211), and the music studio as a site where magic is made (Anthony 43, 194). Rolling Stone magazine has even deployed a recurrent editorial phrase—“the magic that can set you free”—to distinguish the authenticity of rock from pop music (Frith 164–5). We argue that two key ruptures of the last few years—namely, widespread lockdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, and emerging discussions on poor working conditions and harms in the music industries—have had the effect of breaking the magic spell of music. There has been a groundswell of musicians, commentators, and scholars pausing to query (and in some cases overturn entirely) some of the illusions that the music industry constructs around musicians. We use the city of Naarm/Melbourne in Australia to draw out some of these trends. When the Magic Dies: Breaking the Spell of the Music Industry The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in lengthy lockdowns in the city of Naarm/Melbourne. In total, over a two-year period, the city spent 262 days in home confinement under strict orders from the government, with limited travel and no access to the usual amenities of the city, including all public in-person entertainment (Jose). This had a profound effect on the state’s musicians and the music industries that service them. It completely closed the city’s music venues for an extended period, driving musicians into alternative, virtual modes of performance (Vincent) and driving other music workers into non-music-related employment. For a city often touted as “the live music capital of Australia” (see Homan et al.), the lockdowns effectively broke the spell of music as a key employer and as a driver of arts practice and social experience in Melbourne. Quite suddenly, the lockdown periods revealed the precarious lives of musicians away from the stage. Once stripped of the “magical” quality of live performance, musicians’ work and practice appeared both more complex and more routine. The COVID-19 pandemic broke the spell of music that takes place in social settings. At the start of 2020, live music was one of the first activities to be banned. Live music relies on people being near one another, often in enclosed spaces. It often involves people on stage and in the crowd singing, an activity identified early in the pandemic as an effective method of spreading the virus. These attributes, together with its status as “entertainment” rather than as an essential activity, meant that live music gatherings became entirely illegal (Strong and Cannizzo). Even as lockdowns were lifted, live music was one of the last activities to be reinstated, albeit with access restricted in various ways. People continued to engage with music via other means, for example, through virtual live-streamed performances and platform-based audio streaming. Globally, there was an increase in people listening to older, nostalgic music (Yeung)—an indicator that music was still being used for its magical self-soothing capacities, alleviating the worst pandemic anxieties. However, the closure of the Victorian live music sector drew attention to the material conditions of music making in new ways (“Losses Continue”). Many musicians and music workers could not take advantage of government schemes to support workers who had lost their income during the pandemic (Triscari). This highlighted what was already known to music industry workers: that their work was insecure. It also revealed the contradictions within government music policies: on the one hand, music’s utility for city branding, on the other, little regard for what support and resources are required for it to take place. As more and more musicians used the pandemic to draw attention to their already existing labour conditions, the precarious and mundane aspects of music-making became foregrounded in broader discussions (see Strong and Cannizzo). These included the overall degree to which musicians are exploited (see Nairn), whether musicians can earn a living wage, pay their rent, or receive other workplace benefits including safe working environments. These problems exist in stark contrast to the historically mythologised portrayals of musicians as concerned about their art and Dionysian social experience above all else, regardless of their physical or material conditions. In reality, live music work has always included mundane activities and routine labour. The historical mythology of the “star”, regardless of genre, tends to depict the lives of performers as exotic and removed from everyday life. In this sense, performers are perceived as magical as much as the music they make. The everyday world, within this mythology, is something akin to “a fearful, life-threatening condition that could ensnare you in its grasp … as relentless routine and the marker of social distinction” (Highmore 16). Audiences tend to view musicians as committed to alternative ways of being, and music performance as an escape from the everyday, wherein work becomes interchangeable with leisure and touring provides a nomadic lifestyle. However, in recent years, popular music studies research, together with musicians, fans, and media, have called these ideas into question. A career in live music performance appears to offer no escape from responsibility—something at the heart of fearful representations of everyday life. Inside of a music practice, new responsibilities emerge. Leisure becomes labour with all its attendance downsides. Close-knit familial-style relationships are formed, often based on financial and creative partnerships, including the risk of gender-based abuse that exists within such relationships (Fileborn et al.). The nomadic life of a performer involves its own cramped and confining aspects (a life of group transit and service entrances). This combines with an already in-progress push towards making the vicissitudes of this work more visible—afforded by social media, cultural formations such as #MeToo, and a significant upswing in research showing the harms of music work (Gross and Musgrave; Strong and Cannizzo)—to significantly undermine the myth of live music’s magical properties. In Naarm/Melbourne, prior to the pandemic, this myth was brittle. After years of lockdown, it arguably shattered. The emotional devastation wrought by an abrupt and almost complete cessation of live music activities also had flow-on effects on recorded music. For example, it prevented activities such as tours that support album releases, recording sessions, or rehearsing new musical material. Already existing mental health issues in the music industry were highlighted and amplified by these circumstances (Brunt and Nelligan). Together with the aforementioned financial disadvantage experienced by musicians, research had already shown for years before the pandemic that mental health was poor in this sector (Gross and Musgrave). Such mental health issues are due in part to the relationship between music work and conceptions of self and identity, where success or failure are felt as intensely personal (a by-product of the idea that music possesses magical qualities). Mental health problems are also associated with exclusion, bullying and harassment, which are not only widespread but have been normalised and even celebrated for decades. Pre-existing pressures such as these were exacerbated dramatically by the pandemic lockdowns, which spurred on further discussions about them (Strong and Cannizzo). During the pandemic, the magic of music had been disrupted in several ways: the ability of music to connect people to one another in live settings had been curtailed or removed, and the narratives of the creation of music being magical had been replaced with a vision of mundanity, hardship, and underappreciation. If the magic did not set musicians or music workers free, why should they return to long working hours for little pay in an industry that was frequently unsafe and that left them feeling bad—especially when they discovered that when the chips were down, they would be left out of the support offered to others? Re-Enchanting Music: Conjuring a Different Kind of Magic Weber used the term “enchantment” as a means of explaining the magic within worldly (empirical) phenomena. By contrast, he argued that disenchantment was the removal of magical experience from the real world and that this was the result of replacing the “supernatural” exclusively with rationality and calculation (Koshul 9). The easing of lockdown conditions heralded what we call here the “re-enchantment” of the music industry. An industry that is re-enchanted refers to a world which is “susceptible again to redemption” and is “reimbued not only with mystery and wonder but also with order [and] purpose” (Landy and Slalor 2). During the early post-lockdown period, the aim of government, patrons, and the entertainment industry was to rekindle the pre-COVID levels of audience engagement with live music. Audiences themselves were eager to return to live music and were prepared to spend money on concert tickets and music festivals, according to findings from the Australia Council’s Audience Outlook Monitor (Patternmakers). However, this report also showed that restrictions, fears of further outbreaks, and lockdowns were still looming in the minds of audiences and event organisers. This was compounded by a lack of investment in the creative industries broadly by the Australian Federal government during lockdowns and a staggered reopening, particularly in the state of Victoria, where lockdowns continued well into 2021. The road back to ‘normality’ would require putting audiences, industry, and, indeed, the government, back under the spell of music. Reaffirming the idea that music has a fundamental value in society and culture was the first step. The election of a federal Labor government in 2022 started this process, after a decade of conservative Liberal leadership that had actively worked to devalue and defund the arts. The new government quickly launched a consultation process around the arts in Australia, and launched the resulting policy, titled Revive: Australia's Cultural Policy for the Next Five Years, in mid-2023. This policy not only reaffirmed the central place of the arts, including music, in Australia's social life, but went further than any previous government in acknowledging some of the disenchantment in the industry. They committed to establishing Music Australia (Creative Australia) as a body dedicated to ensuring the prominence of music in arts activities, and the Centre for Arts and Entertainment Workplaces, a body that would, among other things, deal with complaints around workplace misconduct of various types. This later body was created partly in response to the Raising Their Voices report documenting widespread bullying and sexual harassment in music spaces. In addition to this, Australian state governments implemented various measures to encourage the re-normalisation of concert attendance. For example, the Victorian State Government’s Always Live funded programme was launched with a regional, one-off gig by the Foo Fighters. Initiatives such as these on the state and federal level served to bolster the struggling industry. An initially slow return to live shows, followed by a spate of visually spectacular, large-scale, sold-out shows by Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, indicate a return to a form of ‘business as usual’ for top-tier international touring artists. Although top-down policy can send a message that music work is valued, much of the ‘magic’ of music is created by communities and within grassroots spaces. In Naarm/Melbourne, the announcement that the iconic live music venue the Tote Hotel was being put up for sale has provided a flashpoint moment. The venue’s current owners have become emblematic of the problems in the industry, reportedly failing to provide proper benefits to their staff over a long period (Marozzi). The owners of the Last Chance Rock and Roll Bar have since announced a fundraiser for three million dollars to buy the Tote, which they have framed in terms of protecting the value of music to the Naarm/Melbourne community. The owners promised to not only protect music-making on the site but also to “leave the Tote to the bands and future generations for the rest of time” by “putting the building into a trust that will legally protect the Tote from being anything other than a Live Music Venue” (“Last Chance to Save the Tote”). References to the (dark) magic of this situation is visible in the designs for the t-shirts given out for contributors to the funding campaign: two zombies crawling from the grave of the Tote, beers in hand, ready to keep on rockin’. The zombies are indicative of a venue risen from the dead through the Naarm/Melbourne music community’s magical effort. The response of the public and commentators that have followed the achievement of this fundraising goal is akin to the wonderment of an audience seeing a magician perform an impressive trick. Notably, the community-led and community-focussed approach of the Tote draws on the magic of connection built around music scenes, not only corporate interests. This includes exploring how venues can be owned by the communities that use them (Wray), schemes that provide artists with a universal basic income (Caust), and “safer spaces” strategies that work to increase the accessibility of music for everyone (Hill et al.). Conclusion In this article, we have outlined the ways that Naarm/Melbourne, which has been celebrated as one of the world’s best live music cities, temporarily lost the magical allure of its musical life in the eyes of many, and subsequently started to regain it through a fragile process of rejuvenation. Traces of ideas about live music’s ineffable magic can clearly be found in recovery stories that now circulate. Moreover, such stories are articulated against a backdrop of new mythologies forming around the city’s music branding and practice. The especially long pandemic lockdown period in Naarm/Melbourne has brought into sharper focus the hard realities of music-making and performance—as labour, local culture, and policy. The post-COVID city is now tasked with selectively rebuilding itself as a music city, unifying the magical potency of the old with a more clear-eyed, unromantic analysis of the present. References Anderson, Benedict. 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Introduction Magic has a long and controversial history grafted through the occult, entertainment, and cultural mythology. Its agency, when thought of as a mechanism of storytelling, reconciles an oscillation between natural and unnatural phenomena in as much as magic has historically been weaponised against “society’s most marginal members” (Marshall). Yet there is no substantial investigation of magic in metamodern theory that considers the nature of magical power a critical component of a metamodern affect in contemporary art. As such, this article will argue that magic in this regard positions the idea into the affectual state within two structures of experience. While metamodern thought prescribes an ontological approach through what Vermeulen prompts as a structure of feeling (Vermeulen 2017), this article proposes a more complex assessment of affect in metamodernism by adding a ‘structure of reason’ where both assessments of an oscillation between singularity and relativism are determined from magic. In this, where a structure of feeling is assessed through an ontological approach to interpret an emotional affect, a structure of reason uses an epistemological approach to establish a knowledge-based affect. Further, this article proposes the affectual considerations of magic as a magical power from affect to invite new ways to consider both reason and feelings within the subject, most notably through recent contributions of UK artist Damien Hirst and Australian artist Shaun Wilson. From witches to vampires, and sorcerers to wizards, these actors of magic, across the state, institution, and local partisan, have historically conjured fear and trepidation (Flint), and fascination (Leddington): most recently in popular cinema, literature, and gaming of magical realism. Yet the comprehension of magic in contemporary society, from films to books to fashion, has integrated, on the one hand, a commercialisation of branding magic through popular culture, and, on the other hand, the socialising of magic, whether festive or occult-based national holidays, celebrations, cosplay, and other socially orientated gatherings. These, of course, hark back to the narrational elements of folklore firmly integrated within cultural social practice. Yet how can magic and affect be thought of as acting together in contemporary art outside of associations from the occult and unnatural powers? Affectual discussions after modernism from Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida, and after postmodernism from Gibbons, van der Akker, and Vermeulen, connect a similarity by way of agreement that affect is a relational phenomenon prompted by experience. Whether this be a postmodern, post-structuralist, deconstructionist, or even a post-postmodern context, magic as a condition of affect offers a way to understand affect from a different perspective than previously debated. However, there are several considerations for magic in affect that this article will address throughout that affords a suitability for metamodernism than, say, other branches of modernity such as postmodernism, which structurally lacks the ability for the arts to consider magic as an affectual experience in ways that metamodernism can accommodate. Herein exist three variations of magic for metamodernism: the magician who engages such power as an affectual actor; the presence of a magical power as an affectual state; and the condition of a magical power as an affectual experience. In this sense, magic is a term that this article will argue is about the condition of a magical power in metamodern affect, as represented in Figure 1. As relativism and singularity surmount an affectual structure, magic is argued to be a conduit between affect and an assessment of a metamodern oscillation, which is between an ontology and an epistemology. Fig. 1: A diagram of Metamodern Affect and Magic. (Used with permission) Furthermore, the inclusion of magic into the modelling of metamodern affect as a formalism achieves two key points. The first is to reconfigure the term from its semantic heritage to otherwise be part of an affectual process. The second is to examine this process to understand magic as a condition of affect, which enables what kind of assessment such mechanisms will determine the affectual structure through experience. If, say, magic was thought of as an agent of experience from an oscillation, then magic in this sense functions as the effect of an oscillation, but not as a starting point or, to be precise, an unrelated stand-alone mechanism. For magic to exist in this modelling proposal, it needs to be a condition from an oscillation to a structured assessment of experience. If accepted debates (Gibbons) about affect after postmodernism indicate that a structure of feeling, and, for that matter, metamodernism, is indicative of how an assessment of feelings can be derived through lived experience, an epistemological reading gives an assessment of reason through experience that, in art, enables the viewer to justify emotions through logic to form an understanding of knowledge from experience. Debates across other fields, such as psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and critical theory, have located magic in these three affectual areas paramount to emotions, non-reality, and reason. R.G. Collingwood, for example, argued that “magic is the evocation of emotions needed for practical life” (Collingwood 77). Collingwood’s “magic in the basic phenomenological sense” is one that “refers to any practice in which we evoke and sustain emotions for a practical purpose” (Greaves 277). Likewise, Sartre also referenced two key terms, which differed between “magic” and “magical image”, and contrasted between images imprinted through imagination, which he describes as “caught in its own snare” (Sartre 76-77). Similarly, the Sartrean perspective of magic identifies as the acts of imagination to be enacted through reality in a sense of totality from freedom. Other perspectives, such as both Patrick and Chin’s discussion of magical realism and Morton’s causality of realist magic as an object-oriented ontology, or OOO for short, typifies the extent of recent academic debates surrounding magic favouring ontological structures. Yet for metamodernism, work such as Kapferer’s claim that “magic, sorcery and witchcraft are at the epistemological centre of anthropology” (Kapferer 1) offers insight into considering both ontological and epistemological structures in a metamodern affect, where his debate gives a nod to how a structure of reason can offer artists a way to create work with magic as a condition that detaches from archetypal representations of magic; that is to say, causal narrative associations such as ‘a witch cast a spell’ or ‘the apple made Snow White sleep’, thus discussed in mainstream thought about magic. Moreover, an epistemological and ontological reading of magic reconciles the differentiation of the agent, the effect, and the condition through an affectual experience. An example of an ontological assessment will be considered in recent works of the former Young British Artist (YBA) Damian Hirst, who mines an ontological approach to art through a type of aesthetic-driven meta-romanticism. As Vermeulen describes the YBAs as “concerned first and foremost with dominant discourses of the present, such as capitalism, consumerism, patriarchy, institutional racism, simulation and mediation” (Vermeulen, “Snap!”), Hirst, the leader of the movement from the early days of his 1988 student exhibition Freeze, imbued issues of life and death, mortality, consumerism, and irony in his art none more postmodern than his 1999 goliath sculpture Hymn, an upscaled bronze “exact replica of Humbrol Limited’s Young Scientist Anatomy Set” (Davis). Yet an affectual turn in art gestated since the 2000s warrants a different reading of Hirst's work outside of a late postmodern assessment of the “end of history” (Fukuyama). His return to painting in the late 2010s through the Veil and Cherry Blossom series abandoned the once critique of consumerism and the ironic to become what Hirst describes as the need to “make paintings that were a celebration” (Hirst). In particular, within postmodern art, there are no capabilities of ‘celebration’ in assessing the subject, and this is what this article argues as the affectual turn for Hirst to create dialogue of an oscillation from a metamodern ontology and, thus, an affectual condition of magic. Prior to the recognised debates of Metamodernism in the 2010s, assessment of Hirst’s work was described as “post-romanticism” (Moscovici), while Luke White’s Marxist considerations in 2009 argued that “Hirstean sublime marks the return of the disavowed violence inherent to capital” (White 2), further adding that “it is subject, not to an ontology, but to a Derridean hauntology” (White 59). Yet neither of these comments address what we now understand as a metamodern oscillation, and thus remain in contrast to the turn of Hirst in later series, making the point that there are two eras of Hirst – before the affectual turns of 2015 and afterwards. While the staples of critique about Hirst’s work continue to focus on, mainly, financial conversations and the artist's personal wealth, these considerations, in fact, have nothing to do with the artefacts produced as subjective art forms, and as such will be ignored altogether. In the context of metamodernism, the Hirst critique as retrograde protests about his wealth and success are more like the whining about a perceived banality of late postmodern conceptual art than they are about a critique of the artefacts themselves. Moreover, this article considers the dearth of arts critique about Hirst’s work since the late 1980s as limited at best in establishing commentary about affect – ranging from arguments from a Marxist, critical theory, phenomenological, and postmodern perspective – and instead argues that a metamodern reading of his art forms provides a more sober contextualisation of the subject, and by and for the subject. Insofar as magic has a place in this debate, the access of experience by the subject from oscillation contextualises an affectual condition, placing the viewer of Hirst’s recent art as both the magician and the witness to magic from an affectual experience. Hirst’s 2021 Sea Paintings series of photo-realistic monochromatic oil on canvas paintings splattered with free-throw gestural marks depict representations of photographs of specific coastal sites in Britain. On reading these works, there is a direct relationship with the wider seascape tradition in painting, especially familiar in examples of maritime romanticism. Fig. 2: Damian Hirst, Okta. (Used with permission) The melancholic drama of seascapes such as Turner’s Snow Storm – Steam Boat of a Harbour’s Mouth, August Friedrich Kessler’s Seascape 1866, and Ivan Aivazovsky’s Shipwreck all play into a history of schools of thought that propel Hirst into the same kind of historical ontology. The cataclysm of nature’s power over human activity enacts a commonality among seascape traditions, where the Sea Paintings series remove human form to continue the tragedy and drama of the seascape's formalism. When considered through oscillation, of drama and isolation, absence and presence, and history and post-history, these meta-references loaded within the seascape tradition impact on the experience from magic to derive an ontological assessment as a structure of feeling. By virtue of the tradition it represents, Sea Paintings are a deeply ontological experience where both the magical power as an affectual state and a magical condition as an affectual experience play out as a process embedded between the subject and the viewer. This demonstrates a way to consider magic as a procedural step in defining the experience of contemporary art as a metamodern exchange from oscillation to a structure of feeling. Fig. 3: Shaun Wilson, The Black Period Cantos XIII. (Used with permission) In similarity, an epistemological assessment from magic to a structure of reason is considered in Shaun Wilson’s 2022 monochromatic The Black Period Cantos video artworks. They represent part of the wider series The Black Period, which includes video and painting art forms as digital combines of both physical and non-fungible token artworks of the same image. “All [of these] exist as a multimodal mechanism, but simultaneously function independently of each other’s influence without dominance” (Wilson, “Affordances” 3). Each Canto takes their subject from the ongoing slow cinema series 51 Paintings Suite, which recreates the poses of characters from black plague-era German religious paintings as a collective of twenty short-form videos, composited with roundel and rectangle shapes reconfigured from individual paintings from other The Black Period series artefacts. Like the Sea Paintings, echoes of romanticism form the compositional subject but are contrasted by the intervention of the roundel and diptych paintings as if ‘block heads’ of the depicted characters. The epistemological reading of this assessment is supported by the artist’s statement “to contribute to current Metamodern debates by creating a structure of reason through an epistemological approach to metamodern affect” (Wilson). The contested artworks forgo an ontological structure of feeling to instead create a structure of reason. This article argues that the difference in reading such an assessment is prompted by the interventions of the roundel and rectangle shapes, which contrast with the surrounding cinematic frame. While Hirst also uses interventions of paint splatters randomly flung at the Sea Paintings, these interventions still warrant a structure of feeling. First, the contrast between these gestural marks and the photo-realistic backgrounds is of the same aesthetic, and second, by the intentions of the artist “to make paintings that were a celebration” (Hirst). Learning from this, aesthetic disruption is a determining factor of magic when connecting to either a structure of feeling or reason. These disruptions in The Back Period Cantos enable magic to be assessed at an epistemological level, where the properties of reason enable a jolt for the viewer out of romanticism and into a state of reason. If, say, the cinematic backgrounds were void of colour field disruptions, the emotive response to such images then would lend itself ontologically to a romanticism, given that much of the composition and characters reposed from the German source paintings imbue the hallmark ontological signposts of sincerity, tragedy, and, in the case of the German Romanticism school of painting, reference material to medieval representation. Yet by the disruptions of the colour field images at a disruptive sublimity of aesthetic consideration, and the meta-references of the shapes being appropriations of the physical enamel on linen paintings made in the wider The Black Period series, the presence of meta references in the compositions moves away from feelings as an ontology, but instead to epistemological reason and knowledge by this contrasted aesthetic merger. Here, magic derives an affectual structure to reason based on aesthetic, contrasting in as much as it does by the introduction of meta disruptions. Conclusion This article has discussed the metamodern affect in terms of a process that builds on existing debates about ways to experience art through the subject. It has established two key points. First, that magic is a term that moves away from its semantic history to be a mechanism that prescribes both ontological and epistemological assessments of metamodern affect to experience art. Second, that these assessments are derived from a condition of metamodern affect, represented in the recent art of Damien Hirst and Shaun Wilson. These mentioned artefacts are discussed in a way that has demonstrated a reading of these artworks that connects metamodernism to an ever-evolving understanding of how the subject can be assessed, and thought about when considering feelings and reasons to inform the subject through creative practice. Where existing metamodern literature has focussed on ontological readings of this process, especially through a structure of feeling, this article has expanded such debate by also considering a structure of reason in these assessments. Simultaneously, such assessments are proposed to include magic as a central condition from oscillation, which signifies a more complex and broader understanding of how affectual structures in metamodernism can process the experience of art. Magic in this sense becomes a condition of metamodern affect, like a magical power, yet without the mechanical mythology of unnatural phenomena or the agency of magical beings. The broader implications for magic when used in this type of semantic still respect the historical legacy of its heritage, while simultaneously distancing this history by a plausible theoretical application used to model metamodern thought. The assessment by which magic has been discussed throughout this article brings about an understanding of its history and rational application, capable of considering a robust way to explain contemporary art through emotive and rational structures that otherwise would be disparate in both thinking about and approaches to art. Metamodernism in this regard provides a contemporary debate in oscillation by which magic has been employed to amplify these differences without dominance or influence from one or the other. Magic, when thought of as a mediator from this condition, becomes a useful mechanism to engage with that this article considers enabling a better way of assessing art in contemporary times. The oscillation of relativism and singularity as ‘before affect’ and the affectual structures as ‘after affect’ are regulated by magic, which the working model of metamodern affect in Figure 1 demonstrated through a grounded conceptuality. Looking beyond such would certainly invite further discussion into other affectual structures for the metamodern, in what future discussion could derive from other philosophical branches for metamodernism, including phenomenology, axiology, and ethics that I will further explore in future research. The inclusion of magic into metamodern thought brings a new way to understand magic, which, whilst still a condition of experience, detaches from its historical understandings and assumptions. Viewers of metamodern art, in this sense, are both the magicians and witnesses of magical powers through affect. Both identities engage the structure of experience by using magic as a procedural step in this condition. What this signifies is a new way to understand magic and art within metamodern affect. In the work of Hirst and Wilson, there are numerous connections to affectual magic, as previously discussed, that integrate ways of assessing affect to create a more enriching way to experience these artefacts. Readings of Sea Paintings situate magic in the ontological experience from an assessment of a structure of feeling based on the ontology of the British and German seascape traditions. Readings of The Black Period Cantos demonstrated the use of affectual magic as an epistemological assessment of a structure of reason from the interventions of colour field abstractions and meta references disrupting the romanticised cinematic subject. 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