The idea that the web of correspondences constitutes a foundational element in a society was recognized and accepted in the most rigorous academic circles at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the essay by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, “De quelques formes primitives de classification” (1903). But a confusion immediately began that reflected the two-headed nature of that paper, the result of a collaboration between a born analogist (Mauss) and a born determinist (Durkheim), related through family ties (Mauss was Durkheim’s nephew). That was the beginning of the tendency to affirm that first came society and then correspondences. Which were therefore determined by the social structure. The realm of analogy was certainly recognized, but was considered as a consequence of the main cause, which was society itself. And so it came about that the most formidable investigator and identifier of correspondences—Marcel Granet, who followed in the tracks of Mauss—could declare on several occasions, almost as if to close the matter, that there was no doubt that every form of thought was dependent on and subject to the structure of society.
It was, in fact, a vicious cycle that could never be resolved: correspondences presuppose society, but society presupposes correspondences. Thought and society are fashioned and shaped insofar as (and thanks to the fact that) they are each based on the other.
In 1933, exactly thirty years after their essay on the primitive forms of classification, and now free from Durkheim’s guidance, Mauss went back to express his own view on correspondences (the realm of analogy). And he did so in one of those marginal and preliminary writings of his where he often expressed his most radical thoughts. Intervening in a session where Granet had delivered his enlightening study “La Droite et la gauche en Chine,” Mauss used the occasion to make an undisguised and blatant retraction. He said: “Wrongly we have been too ritological and too worried about practices.” This had originally been Durkheim’s error, since the practices (basically: the rites) offered secure ground, insofar as they were established and rooted in society, whereas all the rest (especially myth) could also disappear among the mists of beliefs and folk tales. But now, Mauss added, the scene was changing: “The progress made by Granet consists of introducing some mythology and some ‘representation’ into all this.” Continuing in this vein, Mauss arrived at other surprising conclusions, which could be glimpsed between the lines. First of all by firmly shifting the sphere of research in the Durkheim school, to which he had never denied belonging: “The great effort we have made on the side of ritology is unbalanced because we have not made a corresponding effort in mythology.” Here Mauss introduced a word (ritology) that has become particularly valuable today, and he attacked the very bases of the anthropological work that he and his colleagues had carried out in Paris over the previous thirty years. And that criticism could just as well have been applied to English anthropology over the same period. Thus he gave advance warning of what years later would be referred to as a change of paradigm. And, as a last coup de théâtre, to represent it he named someone who had never apparently questioned the school’s precepts—Marcel Granet. Mauss now wished to make him into something highly suspect: a mythologist. Mauss wrote: “But we have one mythologist left, and this is Granet.” The reference, though unstated, was to the masterpiece that Granet had published seven years earlier: Danses et légendes de la Chine ancienne, an unsurpassed example of how mythology can be put into practice.
Mauss was concerned about something else in these impromptu comments. That was correspondences. This vast subspecies of classifications has acted in a whole variety of ways in giving meaning to the world, from the very earliest times up to the plates of signaturae in Athanasius Kircher and Robert Fludd, at the height of the seventeenth century, which is to say up until very recent times. “These ways of thinking and at the same time of acting are, besides, common to a very large mass of humanity,” wrote Mauss—introducing another extremely important phrase (what do the whole of the Brāhmaṇas speak of if not of “ways of thinking and at the same time of acting”?). But how to unravel the immense tangle that had been formed well before all documented history? Here Mauss intervened with his mythopoetic power—and deliberately referred to the fact that, for him, the key did exist: it was a small jade plaque, gray or dark green in color, that the Maoris call hei tiki, and that their noblewomen wear around their necks as a talisman. Tiki was also their name for the Progenitor of the human race, their Prajāpati. What do these enchanting small objects represent? “They depict a fetus—highly stylized—, the most beautiful ones with a red stone eye.” But not only that: “These tikis also represent the phallus, the first men, the act of creation; these tikis are above all depictions of the macrocosm and of the microcosm, of God.”
Each time that Mauss has occasion to speak about these jade plaques we can feel his mind vibrating, as if he were holding the very first cell of correspondences, condensed into these tiny, untarnishable objects, which Western invaders had simply taken for ornaments and resold as exotic trinkets.
Mauss had come across an illustration of Tiki while working with Hertz at the British Museum one day, in a plate attached to the first volume of John White’s Ancient History of the Maori, with the list of correspondences connected to individual parts of its body: “We copied carefully: Tiki… was a little man with a tuft of hair, naked, his virile member modestly hidden. Inserted immediately into their place are the names of the gods to his right and to his left, the god of war and the god of peace. Also, the gods of intelligence, of dreams and of the sky that are on his head, the gods of feet and of magic… etc. This we found immensely interesting.”
But the story doesn’t end here. Years later, Mauss presents a paper on Tiki at a conference on anthropology and he decides to go back to the British Museum, he says, “to have another look at the text I had cited. Then, to my great amazement, thirty years later, I found myself in front of something that went far beyond what I had noted down. I had before me an enormous folded plate, which had been drawn by experts and summarized the sayings of the high priests of New Zealand, for White, in obedience to Grey and White’s instructions. They are documents dating back to the years 1859–1886. Consequently, they are completely beyond all contamination on the part of professional ethnography, ethnology and all the sociologies you care to imagine [it is impossible not to express a note of admiration and delight for that “all the sociologies you care to imagine”]. Around all the limbs of Tiki, and all the body parts of Tiki, on this large folded illustration, is set out the complete classification of the world, that of times and spaces and of all the species of things with the gods that rule over them. It is therefore the picture of the microcosm, together with the complete development of the macrocosm, and I am not the one who has made it! There is no possible doubt, it is much clearer than all the texts of the great theorists of divination, of Antiquity and of the Renaissance. With these words, I deliver this fact to the materials of René Berthelot. The Maori priests have outlined the macrocosm and the microcosm.” This scene of recognition, in which first Mauss and Hertz, then Mauss alone, bent over the plate of a book, come across the subject matter that was to occupy their most intimate and constant thoughts, was recounted by Mauss in 1937, during a discussion that followed Paul Mus’s lecture “La Mythologie primitive et la pensée de l’Inde” at the Société Française de Philosophie. On that occasion, Mauss did not say so explicitly, but seemed to suggest that Prajāpati, the Puruṣa, the lone figure that dominated the scene of the Brāhmaṇas, might have a counterpart farther east in New Zealand, in those jade pendants that Maori noblewomen wore against their skin, while the Vedic Prajāpati had left no tangible image of himself. Everything, in India, began and ended with fire.
The underlying significance of the tiki had been more fully stated four years earlier, in response to Granet’s lecture (the occasion remains important, establishing the link between Mauss and a particular scholar). Mauss had stated in clearest detail what was implied in the question of the tiki, and where—very far indeed—it might lead. The tiki, wrote Mauss, “is literally the world picture, a sort of barbarian version of one of the fundamental notions of East and West, that of macrocosm and microcosm in a human figure. Because, as in our ancient systems of signaturae, the limbs of the tiki and of man ‘correspond’ to beings, things, events and parts of the world. Everything is divided between ‘powers and natures’ not only to left and right, but also above and below, to front and back, in correlation with a center.” We can still feel, in those lines, the excitement of someone convinced he has finally found—and, we might say, actually touched—the “barbarian version” of an immense, multifaceted text of thought. Indeed, not only of thought, but of all experience. He says here, in a few words, that in East and West—and therefore with no geographical limitation and in spite of all the sacred principles of anthropology—a certain way of thinking had guided “a very large mass of humanity.”
A wide and variegated procession of beings had populated the vast realm of analogy, from the jade plaques of the Maoris to the plates of signaturae in the books of the last pansophists of seventeenth-century hermetism—and onward, up to Baudelaire’s web of correspondances, where “fragrances, colors and sounds respond to each other.”
What was all this about? Thought—but certainly a kind of thought no trace of which was to be found in the histories of philosophy, except on odd occasions. Why? Mauss never posed the question, but he gave one of those brilliant answers that we find scattered among his dispersed writings: “Philosophy leads to everything, provided there’s a way out of it.” It is a phrase applicable to all times—to the past as well as to what would be the future when Mauss wrote it (in 1939). It was tacitly assumed by the leading anthropologists of the twentieth century that philosophy—at least in the form it had assumed at universities after the French Revolution—is not thought itself, but only one of many forms of thought, a kind of springboard. An assumption, however, that should never be declared. Such an idea was well respected up until Lévi-Strauss. But it was Mauss himself who revealed the hidden goal in his conception of anthropology: “I will even go as far as saying that comprehensive anthropology could replace philosophy, because it would include within itself the very history of the human spirit that philosophy presupposes.”
If a jade pendant that adorns the breast of a Maori noblewoman can gather within itself all the heavens, all the worlds, and all the gods, and even God—as Mauss ventured to suggest—then what would come of the various distinctions between primitive and civilized, between people who had no writing and those who did, between simplicity and complexity? Things would have to be thought out and described in another way. For the French anthropologist, who had grown up in a period and atmosphere of positivism, that “little man” of hard stone which he had discovered in a large folded plate at the British Museum would become a talisman, as it was already for the Maori noblewomen. It could be said that Mauss’s whole body of work, his tireless, ragged, ramified inquiry toward a “comprehensive anthropology,” had found its demon protector in that small being.
If the Maoris, whom Mauss’s predecessors had regarded as exemplifying primitive man, had developed “a complete classification of things of a type no less clear and incisive that any of the other cosmological mythologies produced in the ancient world,” then in what way might those systems of correspondences be judged? First of all, the Maoris were placed on the same level as not only ancient China and the Mesopotamian civilizations, but also the Hermetic tradition in Europe. It brought together a prodigious mix of times, places, and circumstances. And a problem immediately arose: how, by what criteria, can systems of correspondences be evaluated? The usual answer among anthropologists, that those systems were to be judged according to their social function, was not enough. It was clear that, in their subtlety and intricacy, they went far beyond any application in society. In them was an irreducible superabundance of thought. Exactly as in the prescriptions of the Vedic ritualists. Those systems were a mode of thought. They were the substance of thought—and that thought was waiting only to be recognized as such: in the same way as the thought of Spinoza or Leibniz is considered or judged. At this point it seemed clear what a subversive gesture Mauss had made toward the traditional way of thinking when he placed himself under the protection of Tiki. And perhaps it could now be seen what really lay hidden behind some of his apparently innocuous phrases. Such as these: “Philosophies and sciences are languages. Consequently, it is a matter only of speaking the best language.”
The first step, when considering systems of correspondences, is to recognize their vastness, complexity, precision, subtlety, and their arrangement on multiple levels. The second is to ask why, in such different situations and times, thought has felt it necessary to take on these forms. Mauss also tried to get to this second step, but made only the gesture of doing so. Only newly accepted into the Société de Philosophie (the circumstances are always telling in Mauss’s life), he found himself—in his own words—“paying for it [that honor] by immediately providing the spectacle of two sociologists savaging each other.” The incident involved Lévy-Bruhl, who had just read a paper, “La Mentalité primitive,” and Mauss, who then proceeded to attack him.
For Lévy-Bruhl, the word that opens all doors was participation. And this was what Mauss found objectionable. Not because the word did not point in the right direction. But because Lévy-Bruhl used it with a vagueness and haziness that he suggested, wrongly, was part of the notion itself. And this gave Mauss the chance to touch a central nerve: “‘Participation’ is not only a confusion. It presupposes an effort to confuse and an effort to make things similar. It is not a simple resemblance, but a homoíōsis [assimilation]. From the very beginning there is a Trieb [a drive], a violence of the mind on itself in order to overcome itself; from the very beginning there is the wish to bond.”
Using for once, quite strangely, a Freudian word such as Trieb, Mauss is pushing toward the source of the bandhus, those “nexuses” that make up the web of correspondences. And, with this desire to connect, he discovers a violence of the mind toward itself. A moment of suspense, astonishment, fear, as if he were setting foot in forbidden territory. Here we were approaching the childhood amnesia of knowledge, a barrier of fire and darkness. Mauss said no more on that occasion. But he resorted to an ethnographical object, as he would do with the Maori tikis. When he found himself at a crucial junction in knowledge, which threatened to overturn it, Mauss adopted a peculiar strategy, without declaring it: he abandoned the role of anthropologist and took on the role of a museum guide pointing out various exhibits. This time it was not jade jewels but masks: “At the Trocadéro museum there are certain North-West American masks on display on which totems are carved. Some have a double shutter. Open the first and behind the public totem of the ‘shaman-chief’ appears another smaller mask which represents his private totem, and then the last shutter shows highest-ranking initiates his true nature, his face, the human and divine and totemic spirit, the spirit that he incarnates. For, let us be clear, in that moment it is supposed that the chief is in a state of possession, of ékstasis, of ecstasy, and not just of homoíōsis. There is rapture and confusion at the same time.”
Mauss does not stop to indicate the implications of his argument through imagery. But those repercussions go a very long way. First, because they point to a knowledge arranged by strata, on various levels, as if passing from one face concealed in the mask to the next. And each of these levels is firmly connected to the other, since they are the faces of the same shaman: an eloquent example of the firmest correspondences. But there is another point: in referring to the use of the shamanic mask, worn at ceremonies marked by possession, Mauss suggests that the homoíōsis, the process of “assimilation” through which the mind relates like with like, would not be the first act of thought, but almost the consequence of a state: a state of possession. Thus the rapture, the fusion of like with like, find their driving force in an upheaval of the psyche. On the other hand, the notion that possession is the origin of knowledge was the very foundation of Delphi. And Mauss, though telegraphic in style, goes further. If Lévy-Bruhl’s “participation” goes back in the end to possession, it is not just because this is a rudimentary (Lévy-Bruhl himself would have said “prelogical”) form of knowledge. But also the saintly Reason of Kantian and Comtian instituteurs (well represented by Durkheim) would come from the same origins. And here Mauss dealt the hardest blow to his readers, to his discipline, and to his illustrious uncle, while maintaining an impeccably neutral formulation: “‘Participation’ thus implies not only a confusion of categories, but it is, from the beginning, as it is for us, an effort to identify ourselves with things and to identify things among themselves. The reason has the same deliberate and collective origin in the most ancient societies and in the most incisive forms of philosophy and science.”
It is a delightful irony that Marcel Mauss, at the beginning of his academic career, was appointed to the Chair of History of Religions of Uncivilized Peoples. And already on the eighth line of his inaugural lecture the new professor declared, stressing the words in italics: “Uncivilized peoples do not exist.” Mauss had been appointed to teach a subject that he declared did not exist.
Thirty years later, at the beginning of a course at the Collège de France, Mauss would go as far as not only avoiding all reference to that annoying expression “uncivilized,” but also abolishing a more obstinate word: primitive. Explaining: “All the rest of humanity, who are called primitive and are still living, deserve instead the name archaic.” Having cleared away those ungainly remnants of the positivistic and progressive vision, it remained to be seen what dignity and power of thought was to be given to the archaic. For even the archaic could be considered a crude rehearsal for something to come or as a chaotic repertory upon which, having become compos sui, history would later draw. This is how Durkheim explained his interest in studying religion, which he would otherwise have been embarrassed to admit—and he said it in the true manifesto of the French school of sociology, the 1898 Preface to the Année sociologique: “Religion contains within itself, from the very beginning, though in a confused state, all the elements that, in dissociating themselves, in determining themselves, in combining themselves together in a thousand ways have given birth to the different manifestations of collective life.” Underlying Durkheim’s words, and very difficult to erode, is the conviction that the complex is explained through the simple, the superior through the inferior, the perfect through the imperfect. If there is a dogma people today are not prepared to do without, it is precisely this one. It needed the lucidity of Simone Weil to throw sand—a deadly sand—into the workings of that speculative machine: “The imperfect proceeds from the perfect and not the other way around.”
***
Hidden among the reports of the Annuaire de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études—usually put together as a pensum to explain the academic curriculum—a few words announce the fact that, for the 1934–1935 course, “the Director [Mauss] has managed to procure White’s Ancient History of the Maori (six volumes plus one volume of plates),” and so lectures were to be dedicated to the study of Maori cosmology. Some highly revealing words then followed, despite the limited importance of that publication: White’s work contained “one of the most coherent bodies of cosmogonic myths that we know.” For example, the Tiki cycle, “macrocosm and microcosm, great male god, phallus and fetus, creator of All,” is now presented as being “most important and best coordinated, and in the end almost better documented than any other cycle of any other known mythology.” A statement brimming with implications. What was glimpsed here was a Copernican upheaval: no longer was it a question of Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian, or Vedic mythology offering opportunities for understanding certain aspects of rudimentary and obscure Maori mythology, but—on the contrary—perhaps the immense and well-articulated corpus of Maori mythology was capable of holding within itself the mythological systems of more advanced civilizations, as particular examples and extensions. And even arranging them indeed in their proper place, as part of an ordered sequence. Or at least this seems to be the implication of an extremely bold sentence: “All the themes of the great ancient cosmogonies have found their logical place there.”
Words that were enough to explode the basic assumptions of anthropology, then and now. Here the mythologies are presented as one single tree—a tree-forest, consisting of countless other trees, arranged in logical and consequential relationships with each other. And the closest possible approximation, in seeking to perceive this tree-forest to its full extent, would be found in the evidence of Maori mythology. So New Zealand, always cited as an example of a lost island, a place unconnected with advanced civilizations, would be the place to which some of the greatest mythological and cosmological systems could be traced, as if to a matrix. Mauss could in no way publicize this idea, since it would certainly have caused problems with his colleagues. But he must have thought about it very often: the figure of Tiki and of the tikis—of the god and of the jade pendants that depict him—continued to appear in his papers, including one of 1937–1938 now lost.
Mauss always used rather fewer words than the required minimum. And so his declaration on Tiki and tikis is like the outline for an essay. He could have developed it more or less along these lines: mythology is a particular and irreducible modality of knowledge. Its materials are pictures, stories, and combinations of them, in the same way that Newtonian science is a particular modality of knowledge that uses numbers, functions, methods of calculus as its materials. But, unlike Newtonian science, which is practiced every day, mythology is something that has fallen into disuse. Its images, its history have become “empty words.” What, then, is the anthropologist’s task? Exoterically: to investigate the inextricable link between all living forms and the society that holds them, obeying one single principle: “Myths are social institutions.” An easy task, that Mauss was able to perform brilliantly. Yet at the same time he used it as a cover for what was most important to him: an esoteric inquiry that sought to trace the elements of that lost knowledge found in the evidence of scattered fragments of mythologies, rites, and systems of correspondences. This time it was an extremely difficult, almost hopeless, task. It drove Mauss to make sad admissions: “We are still at the stage of preparing the materials of a mythology and very often we are only in a position to demonstrate that the myths are social phenomena.” At this point, Mauss found himself doing two jobs: on the one hand, that of a strict scientist of society—this all-embracing entity that had never before been studied in all its ramifications; on the other, that of a shaman or medicine man of an extinct tribe, trying to reconstruct its doctrines step by step. And it is through this very superimposition of roles that Mauss’s work still transmits a secret energy that anthropology itself, in its various schools and branches, seems to have lost.
Mauss could also be brusque when discussing Tiki. What could the West offer, in comparison? Hesiod’s Theogony. But if the two texts were put side by side, what would be the result? “Comparisons have been made with Hesiod’s Theogony. The Maori version (and the Polynesian version in general) appears more coherent, better developed, closer to living institutions than that sort of Greek compilation.” What effrontery… Not only are the Maoris and the Greeks presented on the same footing. But here indeed the crude, formless text is Hesiod’s—or “that sort of compilation” which is passed off under his name. It was a subversion of Wilamowitz’s conception of classical antiquity, a liquidation of all claim to European hegemony in matters of the spirit. But where was this epoch-making event declared? In Mauss’s (half-page) course summary for the year 1937–1938, describing “relations between certain games and certain ancient cosmologies” in the Annuaire du Collège de France. Not many people noticed it.