Comparative Mythologies: The september 11th terrorist attacks


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Comparative Mythologies: The september 11th terrorist attacks

  1. 1. Comparative Mythology Comparative mythology is the comparison ofmyths from differentcultures in an attemptto identify shared themes and characteristics.[1]Comparative mythologyhas served a variety of academic purposes.For example,scholars have used the relationships between differentmyths to trace the developmentof religions and cultures,to propose common origins for myths from different cultures,and to supportvarious psychological theories. Comparativists versus particularists The anthropologist C.Scott Littleton defines comparative mythologyas "the systematic comparison ofmyths and mythic themes drawn from a wide variety of cultures".[1]By comparing differentcultures'mythologies, scholars try to identify underlying similarities and/or to reconstructa "protomythology" from which those mythologies developed.[1]To an extent, all theories aboutmythologyfollow a comparative approach:as the scholar ofreligion RobertSegal notes,"by definition,all theorists [of myth] seek similarities among myths".[2] However, scholars ofmythology can be roughly divided into particularists,who emphasize the differences between myths,and comparativists,who emphasize the similarities.Particularists tend to "maintain thatthe similarities deciphered bycomparativists are vague and superficial".[3] Comparative approaches to mythology held great popularityamong eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars.Many of these scholars believed thatall myths showed signs ofhaving evolved from a single myth or mythical theme.[4] For example,the nineteenth-centuryphilologistFriedrich Max Müller led a school of thoughtwhich interpreted nearly all myths as poetic descriptions ofthe sun's behavior.According to this theory, these poetic descriptions had become distorted over time into seeminglydiverse stories aboutgods and heroes.[4]However, modern-dayscholars lean more toward particularism,feeling suspicious ofbroad statements aboutmyths.[5]One exception to this trend is Joseph Campbell's theoryof the "monomyth", which is discussed below. Approaches to comparative mythology Comparative mythologists come from various fields,including folklore,anthropology,history,linguistics,and religious studies,and they have used a variety of methods to compare myths.These are some important approaches to comparative mythology. Structural Some scholars look for underlying structures shared bydifferent myths. The folklorist Vladimir Propp proposed thatmanyRussian fairytales have a common plotstructure,in which certain events happen in a predictable order.[7]In contrast, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss examined the structure of myths in
  2. 2. terms of the abstractrelationships between its elements,rather than their order in the plot. In particular, Lévi-Strauss believed thatthe elements ofa myth could be organized into binary oppositions (raw vs. cooked,nature vs. culture, etc.). He thoughtthat myth's purpose was to "mediate"these oppositions, thereby resolving basic tensions or contradictions found in human life or culture.[8] Psychological Some scholars propose thatmyths from differentcultures reveal the same,or similar,psychological forces at work in those cultures.Some Freudian thinkers have identified stories similar to the Greek story of Oedipus in manydifferent cultures.They argue that these stories reflectthe differentexpressions ofthe Oedipus complexin those cultures.[9]Likewise, Jungians have identified images,themes,and patterns that appear in the myths of many different cultures.They believe that these similarities resultfrom archetypes presentin the unconscious levels ofevery person's mind.[10] Some mythological parallels Comparative mythologyhas uncovered a number ofparallels between the myths ofdifferent cultures, including some very widespread recurring themes and plotelements.Here are some examples. The Flood Cultures around the world tell stories abouta greatflood.[11] In many cases,the flood leaves only one survivor or group of survivors.For example,both the Hebrew Bible and the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh tell of a global flood that wiped out humanityand of a man who saved the Earth's species bytaking them aboard a boat.[12] Similar stories ofa single flood survivor appear in Hindu mythology,[13] Aztec mythology,[14] in the Greek myth of Deucalion as well as in the Quran. The creative sacrifice Many cultures have stories aboutdivine figures whose death creates an essential partofreality.[15][16] These myths seem especiallycommon among cultures thatgrow crops,particularly tubers.[17]One such myth from New Guinea tells of a miraculously-conceived girl named Hainuwele,whose murdered corpse sprouts into the people's staple food crops.[18]The Chinese myth of Pangu,[19] the Vedic myth of Purusha[20],and the Norse myth of Ymir all tell of a cosmic giantwho is killed to create the world.[15] Similar is the Christian myth of Christ,whose death refashions the world. The dying god Many myths feature a god who dies and often returns to life.[21] Such myths are particularlycommon in Near Eastern mythologies.[22]The anthropologist Sir James Frazer compared these "dying god" myths in his multi-volume work The Golden Bough.The Egyptian god Osiris and the Mesopotamian god Tammuzare examples ofthe "dying god", while the Greek myths of Adonis (though a mortal) has often been compared to Osiris and the myth of Dionysos also features death and rebirth.[23]Some scholars have noted similarities between polytheistic stories of"dying gods"and the Christian storyof Jesus ofNazareth.[24] Awareness of these similarities goes back to the early Christian era,when the church father Justin Martyr discussed them.[25] The structure of hero stories A number of scholars have suggested that hero stories from various cultures have the same underlying structure.Otto Rank, who began his career as a follower of Sigmund Freud,argued that the stories of heroes'births have a common Oedipal structure.[26]Other scholars,including Lord Raglan and,more recently, Joseph Campbell,have also suggested thathero stories share a common structure.[27]Some comparative mythologists look for similarities onlyamong hero stories within a specific geographical or ethnic range. For example,the Austrian scholar Johann Georg van Hahn tried to identify a common structure underlying "Aryan" hero stories.[28]Others,such as Campbell,propose theories abouthero stories in general.According to Campbell's "monomyth"theory, hero stories from around the world share a common
  3. 3. plot structure.[29]Because ofits extremely comparative nature, the monomyth theory is currently out of favor with the mainstream studyof mythology.[5] Axis mundi Many mythologies mention a place that sits atthe center of the world and acts as a pointof contact between different levels of the universe.[30]This "axis mundi"is often marked by a sacred tree or other mythical object. For example,many myths describe a great tree or pillar joining heaven,earth,and the underworld.[31] Vedic India, ancientChina,and the ancient Germans all had myths featuring a "Cosmic Tree" whose branches reach heaven and whose roots reach hell.[32] Titanomachy Many cultures have a creation myth in which a group of younger, more civilized gods conquer and/or struggle againsta group of older gods who representthe forces of chaos.In the Greek myth of the Titanomachy,the Olympian gods defeat the Titans,an older and more primitive divine race, and establish cosmic order.[33][34]In Hindu mythology, the devas (gods) battle the asuras (demons).[34]And the Celtic gods of life and lightstruggle againstthe Fomorians,ancientgods ofdeath and darkness.[34] This myth of the gods conquering demons - and order conquering chaos - is especiallycommon in Indo- European mythologies.Some scholars suggestthatthe myth reflects the ancientIndo-Europeans'conquest of native peoples during their expansion over Europe and India.[35][36] However, non-Indo-European cultures also have such myths.For example, manyNear Eastern mythologies include a "combatmyth" in which a good god battles an evil or chaotic demon.[37]An example is the Babylonian Enuma Elish.[38] The deus otiosus Many cultures believe in a celestial Supreme Being who has cutoff contact with humanity.Historian Mircea Eliade calls this Supreme Being a deus otiosus (an "idle god"),[39] although this term is also used more broadly, to refer to any god who doesn'tinteract regularlywith humans.In many myths , the Supreme Being withdraws into the heavens after the creation of the world.[40] Baluba mythology features such a story, in which the supreme God withdraws from the earth,leaving man to search for him.[41]Similarly,the mythology of the Hereros tells ofa Sky God who has abandoned mankind to lesser divinities.[42]In the mythologies ofhighlycomplexcultures,the Supreme Being tends to disappear completely,replaced by a stronglypolytheistic beliefsystem.[43] Founding myths Many cultures have myths describing the origin oftheir customs,rituals,and identity. In fact, ancientand traditional societies have often justified their customs byclaiming thattheir gods or mythical heroes established those customs.[44][45]For example,according to the myths of the Australian Karadjeri,the mythical Bagadjimbiri brothers established all ofthe Karadjeri's customs,including the position in which they stand while urinating.[46]
  4. 4. The September 11th Terrorist Attacks as an Attempt to Escape Through a Hole in the World Dome An Essay by John David Ebert Simulated Accident At 8 am on the morning of September 11th , 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston Logan International Airport, headed for Los Angeles. About fifteen minutes into its flight, the plane was hijacked by five members of al-Qaeda, including Mohammad Atta, a man with college degrees in urban planning who held that the building of skyscrapers in Middle Eastern cities like Cairo and Aleppo had ruined those cities by taking away privacy and dignity from its inhabitants and creating unattractive skylines. At precisely 8:46 am, Atta crashed the plane into the north face of the World Trade Center’s North Tower between the 93rd and the 99th floors. Everyone above the 92nd floor, a total of 1,344 people (658 of them employed by Cantor Fitzgerald) would die. At 8:14 am, meanwhile, United Airlines Flight 175, also bound for Los Angeles, took off from Logan Airport just a few minutes after Flight 11. Carrying 56 passengers and 9 crewmembers, it too, was hijacked by five members of al-Qaeda approximately 30 minutes into its flight. Making a U-turn over New Jersey, the hijackers then crashed it into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 am between the 77th and 85th floors. Of the 7,000 or so people working in this tower, approximately 6,000 of them had evacuated the building safely by 9:30, and of the one thousand or so who remained, about 600 of them would perish. At 8:20 am, American Airlines Flight 77 took off from Washington Dulles Airport in Virginia. It, too, was bound for Los Angeles, and was hijacked by five al-Qaeda members approximately 35 minutes into its flight. Carrying 58 passengers, the plane crashed into the west side of the Pentagon at 9:37 am, travelling at 530 mph and laden with 5,300 gallons of fuel. 189 people were killed, 64 on the plane and 125 inside the Pentagon. At 9:59 am in Manhattan, meanwhile, the South Tower, rendered unstable by fires burning from 10,000 gallons of jet fuel–fires which were hot enough to weaken the columns and cause the floors to sag, pulling the perimeter columns inward–collapsed in on itself in a cloud of gray dust and ash composed of asbestos, lead, glass fibers, dioxin, PCBs and toxins from thousands of vaporized com puters. The collapse occurred in a mere 20 seconds. Earlier that morning, United Flight 93 had taken off at 8:42 am from Newark International Airport in New Jersey, bound for San Francisco with only 37 passengers and 7 crewmembers. At 9:28 am, it was hijacked by four al-Qaeda members; however, during a wrestle with a group of passengers, the plane was wrenched to the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 am. Its likely target was the United
  5. 5. States Capitol building. Then, at 10:28 am in New York City, the North Tower collapsed, killing 624 people, 343 of them New York firefighters. The number of fatalities in New York was 2,763 people: this comprised 1,466 in the North Tower and 624 in the South.[1] 157 people died onboard the two planes. The total number of people who died at the hands ofal-Qaeda terrorists on that day was justunder 3,000. The whole ordeal had transpired over the course of a mere hour and forty-two minutes. Inside or Out? The first thing to notice about the attacks – and it is a point that seems almost too obvious to mention – is the degree to which they reveal the vulnerability of the modern city dweller to a sudden surprise attack from out of the blue. No one saw the planes coming – not the aviation authorities, not the military, not air traffic control — until it was too late. The nakedness and exposure of the modern city dweller to catastrophe that is here revealed is almost unbearable, so unbearable, in fact, that it spawns conspiracy theories as a means of erecting defense mechanisms against the cosmology of randomness that it implies. 9/11 conspiracy theories are hugely popular, more so than perhaps any other conspiracy theory, and that is because they disguise the ontological terror that lies hidden beneath them: if the attacks were an inside job, then at least they weren’t random. Somebody was in control of them, even if their intentwas malicious. The reality, though, is much harder to bear, for it is tantamount to admitting that we moderns stand naked beneath a world that is open and unprotected – both ontologically and cosmologically – all around us. Anything can fall out of the sky and come crashing into our cities at any time. The truth is that we simplyhave no means ofdefending ourselves againstthis possibility. And, in fact, cosmologically speaking, we have been living under the absence of a protective world ceiling ever since the natural scientists of the seventeenth century dismantled the outer spheres-within- spheres apparatus turned by the angels which had been in place since the days of the Greeks, protecting, surrounding and enclosing the human being in a comforting universe of limited and very narrowly defined dimensions. But when that cosmic immune system was shattered about the year 1600, our cities were still protected– militarily speaking–by walls. Cities, since the earliest days of their inception in ancient Mesopotamia, had always been surrounded by walls which demarcated them cosmologically from the world of nature “out there.” This nature / civilization polarity ran parallel to an ontology of interiors vs. exteriors for thousands of years, years in which the human being was always inside something somewhere and hence, protected.[2] But with the advent of gunpowder and cannons in the fifteenth century, first used by the French on their rampages through Italy, the ancient curvilinear walls of Medieval cities had to undergo a structural transformation with the advent of the star-shaped city: the rounded turrets at the corners of the
  6. 6. battlements had diamond points added to them, and these triangular points soon grew into arrow - shaped bastions that the city thrust out to protect itself from cannonfire in a 360 radius. Cannons could be loaded onto these bastions and a ditch dug around the city made it very difficult of approach for sieging infantry. The success of the star-shaped city spread from Italy throughout Europe and it became a basic staple in the designs of all utopian architecture until the nineteenth century when, with the advent of high explosive shells, such urban geometries were rendered obsolete. From henceforth, Europeans and Americans lived in cities without walls, and their vulnerability to attack from the air was demonstrated copiously by the aerial bombardments of two world wars. Our cities have lain naked and exposed to the heavens ever since. But with the launching of Sputnik in 1957, something else happened, a singularity that restructured the world society in a novel way. With the cluttering up of the Thermosphere by geosynchronous telecommunications satellites in the ensuing decades, the old archaic world ceiling of the ancients – dismantled around 1600 – was retrieved, plugged in and turned on. The world ceiling was reconstituted by currents of electricity which were shot through it in the form of electric pulse signals beaming from satellite to satellite in a complexgrid that ensheathed and enclosed the earth. In the ancient world, each city, isolated from the others by the presence of a wall, was a kind of hermetically sealed terrarium with its own world ceiling invisibly cast over it, a ceiling that was contiguous with the architecture of its walls. Nowadays, however, our cities no longer have walls and stand unprotected beneath the sky, but they share the same roof: all of our cities are protected and enclosed inside a gigantic world dome that has been rendered possible by satellite technologies. Thus, the old cosmological dichotomy of interior vs. exterior has been rendered obsolete, for there is now no longer any place on the planet that can be considered to be outside this world dome of globalization. We are all on the inside of a vast world sphere composed of digital information sent beaming around the globe in the air above us and around us at the speed of light. The realm of 1’s and 0’s, of high finance, of capital and information, has captured us and taken us prisoner. We all dwell inside the belly of the whale of global digital capitalism. But it turns out that not everyone is happy with this situation ontologically speaking. Islamic fundamentalists – Islamists – to name one group,wish to be on the outside of this world dome. The World in Between In the ancient world, each city was its own polisphere, bounded by its own wall, encompassed and contained inside of its own world ceiling. Indeed, there were as many world ceilings as there were cities. But the spaces in between these cities was another matter: that was the realm of the smooth space of the nomad, the Bedouin, the Berber, the Arab and his camel, a realm beyond the reach of the laws of the cities or its taxes or its complicated, anti-tribal system of social machinery. The world of the nomad is unbounded and it is not contained by any world ceiling except the dome with the stars written upon it. The smooth spaces of the nomad in his primitive dromosphere – be it desert dune or Asiatic steppe – is a world that is beyond the codes and coding processes of the cities. It is a realm, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it, of decoded flows. Cities are striations in the midst of these smooth landscapes of the Midworld, striations that code, check, freeze, capture and arrest the motions of the dromosphere
  7. 7. through all manners and means. Now, there have been two constitutive aspects of Arabian society since the days of its founding. Indeed, the great philosopher ibn Khaldun built an entire philosophy of history out of the opposition between what he called the Bedouin and sedentary societies.[3] The Bedouin tribe – including under this term the Arab nomad – is bound together by what ibn Khaldun terms “asabiyyah,” a sort of mystical social glue shared by people of a tribe descended from a common ancestor. But with the formation of sedentary societies by such nomads, this asabiyyah is gradually depleted and wiped out by new social configurations which are hostile to tribal formations. Eventually, sedentary societies are inevitably ruined by vices, greed, the taste for luxuries and social laxity, etc, and are soon conquered once again by other nomadic societies. These two social formations – the stateless society of the nomad and the sedentary life of the city dweller – comprise the structural history of Arabian civilization down to the coming of Western modernity in the 20th century. The pastoral nomad, according to Albert Hourani, disappeared from Arabic society in the 1920s with the coming of the automobile, the paving of new roads and the expansion of these cities with new quarters to accomodate a wealthy new middle class bourgeoisie.[4] At just about the same time, however, the first of the Islamist societies was formed in Cairo by Hasan al- Banna who, in 1928, created the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna’s friend and rival Sayyid Qutb, meanwhile, upon returning from a visit to America in the 1940s, created the basic ideology of the Islamist world view in a series of books and essays, an ideology which perceives the West – with its loose ways, its immorality, sexual concupiscence, equal rights for women, and especially its separation of church and state – as a corrupting influence upon Islam.[5] Thus, not only do the Islamists represent the Muslim counter-culture – a culture that counters the too secular and modernizing ways of Egyptian and even Saudi ruling regimes – but it also retrieves and reconfigures the ancient Arabic social formation of the nomad who exists outside the state apparatus as such. Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, Sheikh Abdul Rahman: all of these men led nomadic existences outside the confining boundaries of their respective states, drifting hither and yon throughout the Middle East and back and forth across state lines. The mujahideen, once the war with the Soviets in Afghanistan had ended, found themselves a more or less stateless people, since none of their original countries,perceiving them largelyas social rejects to begin with, wanted them back. But of course, these Islamists do not want to be on the inside of anything. They are a neo-nomadic social formation and they thrive on existing in the interstices between cities, worlds and states. The whole problem, and the basis of their whole rejection of Western modernity, is one of exteriors: they wish to be outside the world dome of global digital capitalism. This was the basis of Osama bin Laden’s wish to have the Americans withdraw their military presence from Saudi Arabia after the First Gulf War, for with them out of the Holy Land,a step could be taken toward existence outside this world dome. But, of course, on a planet in which there is no longer any such thing as a world exterior since we are all equally encompassed by the world dome of capitalism – the only way to get outside of it literally speaking would be to travel to outer space beyond the Thermosphere – the question then becomes, how to get out of the belly of the beast. And amongstall the various Islamistfactions,itwas al-Qaeda which came up with the answer.
  8. 8. Cosmic Axis But to understand the nature of this answer, we have to look back for a moment at ancient cosmology. All the traditional societies envisioned the heavens in one way or another as a lid or a roof or a ceiling – whether analogized to a tent or temple – which, like the pillars of a temple, had to be supported by something. The Egyptians imagined the sky being held up at the four quarters by the four sons of Horus, and the Scandinavians by four dwarves. But in some cases, the world ceiling was held up by a single pillar, known to comparative mythologists as the axis mundi, a pillar which was variously depicted as either a tent-pole, central column, pyramid or cosmic mountain. Sometimes in these ancient myths an assault upon this central axis took place as a means of knocking the world out of order and off its axis. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, there is the episode when he and his hairy companion Enkidu chop down the Sacred Cedar tree in the forest. As scholars point out, though, this is no ordinary tree, but a cosmic one, for as the result of cutting it down, a cosmic catastrophe results in an earthquake which forms the Beqaa Valley in central Palestine as a ridge that runs right on down through the Rift Valley in East Africa. In Chinese myth, likewise, there is the story of the war between the god of fire, Zhu Rong, and the god of water, Gong Gong, in which the water god hurls himself at Mount Buzhou, the cosmic pillar, and knocks it down. As a result, he tears a hole into the world ceiling through which demons and monsters from the world beyond begin streaming through. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center thus become, in the archaic imagination of al- Qaeda, modern equivalents of this celestial cosmic axis holding up the world ceiling. Thus, if you want to bring down the world ceiling – like Samson pushing out the twin pillars that brings down the roof of the temple on the Philistines – then you have to assault the pillar(s) that support it. In doing so, you will cause the capitalist world dome of digitized information speeding around us to collapse. Once this collapse has taken place, you can then find the hole in the sky and make your way to the outside. And it is, of course, precisely on the outside where al-Qaeda wants to be. In the ancient world, when armies attacked a fortress, they mounted up into the dromosphere on the backs of their horses and camels and hurled at the city different kinds of siege engines: catapults, trebuchets, onagers, testudos, galleries, etc. But with the now vanished world of the nomad, substitutes for this dromosphere must be found, and the nearest equivalent are airplanes which indeed reconfigure the nomadic plane of smooth space, free of striations, around the world. (You cannot assault a modern city with camels and donkeys). Thus, the hijacked airliner is immediately transformed into a dromospheric technology of ballistics, a missile which can be hurled at the fortified city in a manner that will effectively break it to pieces. Ancient cities, on the other hand, were fortresses based upon technologies of obstruction designed to freeze and arrest such dromospheric assaults with battlements, turrets, archers, moats, parapets, bastions, etc. Nowadays, these technologies of obstruction have disappeared from our cities in physical
  9. 9. form but they have reappeared as electronic obstructions in the form of computer profiling, X-rays, baggage searches, identification, passports, etc. al-Qaeda’s genius lay in its ability to move through this new world of spatial striations using simple, mechanical means: box cutter knives, convincing white collar clothes, proper IDs, etc. No one suspected them because they were effectively invisible, concealed in plain sight. This even extended to the realm of images, for the attacks, as played on CNN, had the look of an accident of some wayward, catastrophic kind. Indeed, most people assumed the first plane to hit the North Tower to be an accident; after all, a B 52 bomber had once collided with the Empire State Building. Thus, al-Qaeda very cleverly made use of the semiotics of an aviation accident as a means of disguising their attack. Images, nowadays, have to be taken into account as a basic part of the strategy of any attack, since the mediascape is ubiquitous. No attack can afford to take place without first calculating whatsemiotics the image will initiallyconvey. So, in reconstructing the Prophet Mohammad’s attack using siege engines on the city of Ta’if in 630 AD as an attack on a modern global cosmopolis like New York, al-Qaeda’s intent was to bring down the world ceiling of capitalism by destroying the twin axial pillars which held it up. In doing so, they could then find the hole and climb out, where they would be, at last, on the outside of the world dome. There, they would be free to live, like Osama bin Laden often did, in ramshackle farm houses and compounds with no running water or electricity, but at least they would be beyond the reach of the juridical order of the polisphere. It is the pace of modernity, then, which al-Qaeda was trying to slow down, paradoxically by hurtling the fastest moving objects in the contemporary dromosphere at the rapidly streaming realm of global high finance incarnated in its modern architectural temple. Beneath this modern catastrophe, and organizing it as though by a palimpsest,there exist some very ancientcivilizational structures. Of course, al-Qaeda’s plan backfired, since the world dome is now in process of tightening down all the more securely around them. Indeed, the global hypersphere of capitalism has swallowed up all other societies, whether they like it or not. They all now find themselves on the inside of capitalism’s worldspace. The question now before us,then, is:how long will the dome hold? Notes [1] Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan,The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden (NY: Ballantine Books,2011),74. [2] See “Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself About the Poetics of Space by Peter Sloterdijk,” which can be found online at [3] Ibn Khaldun,The Muqqadimah:an Introduction to History(Princeton University Press,1967),43. [4] Albert Hourani,A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge,MA: Belknap Press,1991),334. [5] Lawrence Wright,The Looming Tower:Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 25.