Clivedurdle

I do tai chi in a church hall. They have photos on the wall about pilgrimages to walsingham- Anglican but heavily anglo catholic.

One picture shows the priest holding the wafer up and kissing it.

What is fascinating is that his body language and position is identical to the way we bow at the begining and end of the session.

Now there might be a direct connection. Jesuits spent a long time in China and studied other cultures carefully. They would have seen monks doing these sorts of mvements and copied them. They may even have improved catholic worship by incorporating this stuff consciously or unconsciously. There is an awful lot of theatre in catholic ritual and lots is deliberately taught - your body movements, voice, smells and bells do have direct psychological and emotional effects.

Now IKEA also wants to have psychological effects - getting us to part with our dosh!

So I would argue there are real connections, and it is not just chance pattern forming - both IKEA and the Eucharist are theatrical events intended to get us to do something.

And getting back to fruit, eating is fundamentally important, so a ritual which uses bread and wine is something predictable humans woukd do.

gstafleu

Gamera, I'm getting confused here. Are you essentially saying that you can never compare story elements between any two stories?

Gerard Stafleu

Gamera

Of course you can make a structural comparison between any texts. The point is where does that get you. Structural analyses that purport to "explain" texts with references to other texts are part of the modernist "grand narratives" thesis which has pretty much been debunked by postmodernism.

The postmordern critique of modernism is that the reader will always be able to find the structures that support his agenda. If Freud is the reader he will find structures that support his various theses about the subconscious, and apply them to texts across time and culture (we have a huge body of such analyses). In your case (or Campbell's case, who is the most popular in this genre of mythic interpretation), you have an agenda to show that the Jesus narrative derives from prior mythic narratives, and so you find the appropropriate structural similarities.

A Marxist can do the same, focusing on patterns of economic relations. And so on.

Postmodernism has deconstructed all this verbiage to show these structures are a product of the analyst's agenda, not any preexisting quality of the texts.