Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Mar 12, 2005 12:02:25 GMT
Jim Morrison as Hero and Myth: An Anthropological Perspective
By Patricia Fournier Doors fan & Professor of Symbolic Anthropology, Nacional School of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, Mexico.
Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy, around the demi god a satyr play; and around God everything becomes what? Perhaps a ‘world’? (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)
In Paris, the cemetery of Père Lachaise is a major place for tourists, who gather at the tomb where the Lizard King was buried in 1971.
The music recorded by Jim Morrison and The Doors between 1966 and 1970, is played throughout the world and the generations that experienced those times still listen to it and remember the Lizard King.
However, a surprising social phenomenon is that the generations that were not part of the turbulent 60’s are attracted to the music of that period and admire, almost with a cult behavior towards a hero, the figure of the leader of The Doors. Symbolic Anthropology provides a theoretical framework to interpret this phenomenon. Based on this perspective, a hero is a man who is located in the realm of myth, defined as a story where popular people are involved, dealing with actions and events about the natural world and with historical events. Heroes refer to the vocabulary of mythology and, therefore, to the Anthropology of Religion, but also to the vocabulary of morality, politics, theater, literature, and poetry.
Thus, it is possible to consider Jim Morrison not only as a rock singer and poet but also as a modern hero, since a heroic figure is a type of symbolization through which society tries to understand its own history, without identifying itself completely with history; a hero summarizes simultaneously an order and an anti-order, a solution and a problem, an example of what it is possible to think and a model of what it is impossible to think.
Even though Morrison did not intend to become a hero, many of his fans as well as the followers of the music of The Doors have created identification and communication mechanisms.
Events and actions that fans carry out individually or collectively, demonstrate that Morrison left a legacy that is not limited to his music and poetry, but that goes beyond that -impacting history, symbolizing and ordering it, leading to locate a fragment of it in space and time, and investing history with sense and necessity. Jim Morrison as a hero mirrors the shadows and the anguishes of our time and summarizes an historical period. Moreover, Morrison, either as a premeditated visionary or as an accidental player, went beyond the limits assigned to the common man. Jim was compared with the gods of classic mythology, representing the conflict between Dionysus and Apollo.
Both his poetry and his performances reflect his knowledge about shamanism; through altered states of consciousness, Morrison followed the route of a heroic shaman traveling to different cosmic levels in a state of ecstasy, and later he communicated his experiences to the youth of his time, who considered him a guide. In Morrison, the figure of the hero breaks the linear and homogenous time of history and opens the possibility of feeding the present with the past.
The guild-like groups who admire him, consider him a cultural hero and even a martyr destroyed by the American authoritarian system.
In life, the hero is defined and transformed through narrations that oscillate between apologies and negative criticisms; after his death, a process of posthumous cult starts to develop:_ his death invest him with the stature of a hero through continuous retrospective references, therefore establishing a relation between the present, past, and future.
By Patricia Fournier Doors fan & Professor of Symbolic Anthropology, Nacional School of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, Mexico.
Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy, around the demi god a satyr play; and around God everything becomes what? Perhaps a ‘world’? (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)
In Paris, the cemetery of Père Lachaise is a major place for tourists, who gather at the tomb where the Lizard King was buried in 1971.
The music recorded by Jim Morrison and The Doors between 1966 and 1970, is played throughout the world and the generations that experienced those times still listen to it and remember the Lizard King.
However, a surprising social phenomenon is that the generations that were not part of the turbulent 60’s are attracted to the music of that period and admire, almost with a cult behavior towards a hero, the figure of the leader of The Doors. Symbolic Anthropology provides a theoretical framework to interpret this phenomenon. Based on this perspective, a hero is a man who is located in the realm of myth, defined as a story where popular people are involved, dealing with actions and events about the natural world and with historical events. Heroes refer to the vocabulary of mythology and, therefore, to the Anthropology of Religion, but also to the vocabulary of morality, politics, theater, literature, and poetry.
Thus, it is possible to consider Jim Morrison not only as a rock singer and poet but also as a modern hero, since a heroic figure is a type of symbolization through which society tries to understand its own history, without identifying itself completely with history; a hero summarizes simultaneously an order and an anti-order, a solution and a problem, an example of what it is possible to think and a model of what it is impossible to think.
Even though Morrison did not intend to become a hero, many of his fans as well as the followers of the music of The Doors have created identification and communication mechanisms.
Events and actions that fans carry out individually or collectively, demonstrate that Morrison left a legacy that is not limited to his music and poetry, but that goes beyond that -impacting history, symbolizing and ordering it, leading to locate a fragment of it in space and time, and investing history with sense and necessity. Jim Morrison as a hero mirrors the shadows and the anguishes of our time and summarizes an historical period. Moreover, Morrison, either as a premeditated visionary or as an accidental player, went beyond the limits assigned to the common man. Jim was compared with the gods of classic mythology, representing the conflict between Dionysus and Apollo.
Both his poetry and his performances reflect his knowledge about shamanism; through altered states of consciousness, Morrison followed the route of a heroic shaman traveling to different cosmic levels in a state of ecstasy, and later he communicated his experiences to the youth of his time, who considered him a guide. In Morrison, the figure of the hero breaks the linear and homogenous time of history and opens the possibility of feeding the present with the past.
The guild-like groups who admire him, consider him a cultural hero and even a martyr destroyed by the American authoritarian system.
In life, the hero is defined and transformed through narrations that oscillate between apologies and negative criticisms; after his death, a process of posthumous cult starts to develop:_ his death invest him with the stature of a hero through continuous retrospective references, therefore establishing a relation between the present, past, and future.