The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Maurice Godelier
of Syria and Arabia, as well as the king of Judah after taking Jerusalem (597), proclaimed himself King of Kings and decreed that the god Marduk, with whom he had made a pact and who had led him from victory to victory, was the paramount god,2 what is a professional historian to do with these real events that rest on belief in the existence of imaginary beings and worlds?
Here we have a paradox. If Nebuchadnezzar II really believed that the god Marduk had led him from victory to victory, we find ourselves in the domain of religious beliefs and forms of political power associated, or even fused with, one religion or another. The paradox, then, is that the imaginary that underpins and informs these religions and forms of power is never conceived or experienced as imaginary by those who believe. On the contrary, this imaginary is conceived and experienced as even more real than the realities people experience in their daily lives. That particular imaginary, more real than the real, is superreal, surreal. But once again, what is the real? And could we espouse Lévi-Strauss’s threefold affirmation that in myth, ‘the real, the symbolic and the imaginary’ are ‘three separate categories’?3 This may be true of myths – and we will return to the question – but it is no longer true when it comes to ritual, sacred objects, temples, et cetera, which clearly attest to the reality, and therefore to the truth, that gods or God exist, not to mention spirits and ancestors. And everything that attests to this truth is at the same time the symbol of this truth. Once again, we find ourselves in the realms of belief and of the symbolic, which plays a paramount role in believing. How, then, are we to distinguish the real from the symbolic, or the imaginary from the symbolic? Might symbols be more real than what they symbolise?4 But what is the symbolic, and can it help us distinguish the real from the imaginary? Perhaps not, if the symbolic function is a prior condition for any form of activity and thought that has meaning for people. This is because the symbolic function is the wellspring of all possible forms of signifiers, which enable humans to signify as much what they think and do as what they are unwilling or unable to think or do.
The symbolic thus extends beyond thought and the mind to fill and mobilise the entire body, its gaze, gestures, postures, as well as everything that projects outside individuals the meanings they have given to the world – temples, palaces, tools, foods, mountains, the sea, the sky and the earth – as they think and feel them.
Of course, language is at the heart of the symbolic function since words are symbols and designate that which is not themselves. But language is not the whole of the symbolic and does not exhaust it. If the symbolic is present in every form of activity or thought, then symbols cannot have the same content or play the same role in mathematics, art and religion. And, it seems that when symbols are invented for the purposes of religious beliefs, some of them change their nature and undergo a veritable transmutation. Once masks, icons, sacramental formulae, and so on have become sacred objects, they seem also to contain in themselves the invisible beings they designate. It is as though these invisible beings appropriate for their own purposes the symbols people have made in order to communicate with them and to bid their presence. These are the areas we will attempt to explore and steps we will follow to do so.
A final word: it should be remembered that, as an anthropologist, I will be analysing primarily imaginaries that are ‘shared’ by the members of a given society or the followers of a religion.
To inquire into the nature and role of the imaginary and the symbolic is to attempt to account for the basic components of all societies. But because the two are connected, it is also to attempt to explain the essential aspects of the human way of life, aspects which, in every instance, form a large portion of the social and private parts of our identity. To shed some light on our endeavour, I will cite a few examples of imaginary and symbolic material that form part of the social fabric and the way of life of those living in a society, while stressing that such a list, however long, can never be complete.
The worlds that spring from the imaginary are, first of all, the founding myths of religions, or those that have legitimised political systems or other power regimes that have emerged throughout history. Two examples: the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven, which legitimised one man’s right to become emperor; or that of the God-given right invoked by the Catholic king Louis XIV in exercising his absolute power over his kingdom’s subjects. But in addition to religions and political systems, we should not forget that there are many other social relations built on an imaginary component.
The assertions that humans ‘descend’ from each other either solely through men or solely through women are two purely imaginary postulates, each of which acts as a departure point and mental framework for the formation of kin groups organised according to a patrilineal or a matrilineal descent rule. We find ourselves here at the heart of kinship, with the full consequences of these imaginary postulates weighing, for instance, on the asserted or denied role of semen or menstrual blood in making children. The same postulates justify the appropriation of offspring of unions between members of these societies by adults, who have different rights and duties with regard to these children according to whether they are maternal or paternal kin.
In fact, there can be no religion, power system, kinship system or other social relations without the support and effectiveness of numerous symbolic components that not only express the nature of these relations but cause them to exist socially, collectively, and within the mind and body of all those who must reproduce them daily through their acts and works. For religions, these symbolic elements include rites, places of worship – totemic sites, mosques, temples, sacred mountains, et cetera – as well as offerings, sacrifices, prayers, invocations, chants, songs, dances, and attitudes and gestures, whether prescribed (prostration, genuflection) or proscribed (blasphemy), concerning the gods, spirits and ancestors. In the case of political systems, we can mention palaces; fortresses; big, chiefly houses; sceptres; thrones; insignia of rank within military or administrative hierarchies; and commemorations of moments that founded a new society (for the French, the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and the song ‘La Marseillaise’, which became the national anthem).
However, the distinction between religion and politics is recent in the history of humankind and present in only a few societies. For thousands of years, religion and politics were inseparable and even fused. Jupiter was Rome’s first citizen (primus civis). The Chinese emperor, the Wang, was ‘the Unique Man’, the only one capable of uniting Heaven and Earth (the components of the character Wang), and therefore the only one qualified to celebrate the great cosmic rituals for the benefit of the peoples of the Empire.
The tu’i tonga, or Polynesian paramount chief, whose power was said to extend over a hundred islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, claimed to descend directly from Tangaloa, one of the major gods in the Polynesian pantheon, who had infused into the chief’s body a component of his divine force – the most powerful ‘mana’, which no other man could possess. As a consequence, when the tu’i tonga celebrated the rites of the passage of seasons, his mana was believed to make the women’s wombs fertile and multiply the riches of the sea and the land.
In order for these ancestors, spirits and gods, normally invisible to the human eye, to become present when not incarnated in the body of a man or a woman, carvings, paintings and masks would lend them form and matter. Did not the goddess Athena, patron of Athens, dwell in the Parthenon in a body sculpted by Phidias in the fifth century BCE? Did not Johann Sebastian Bach put his talent to work composing the Saint Matthew Passion (1729) and El Greco his to painting The Holy Trinity (1577) on the altar screen of the Monastery of Saint Dominic in Toledo? And, countless works of art have been dedicated to glorifying the power of the powerful among men; I will choose only one, the Portrait of Louis XIV, painted by Rigaud in 1701, a theological-political representation of the king of France as ‘absolute’ monarch.
But imaginary and symbolic creations are by no means the monopoly of religious and political systems, of kinship systems or of any other social relationship that gives rise to a collective identity and practices that must be manifested and celebrated. They pervade the even-larger