The Ur Beachmaster & His Meaning to the Tribal Horde...

Ritual Precedes Myth

Myth Justifies Ritual

We don't perform rituals to honor stories, we tell stories to rationalize rituals.

"When Willard reaches the end of his descent into Humanity's cognitive Origins, he finds not just brutality, but ritual... or the expressionof Humanity's deep-seated desire to impose order on the unknown, and to try to make sense of the world and our place in it. According to Fraser, this desire led to the development of sympathetic magic, which in turn birthed the concept of metaphor as a means of transferring meaning between domains. The metaphor of the Dying God, for instance, was used to explain the cycle of nature. An initial reading of "Apocalypse Now" is that despite our pretentions to progress, the brutality of our Origins rears its head whenever we go to war. But a perhaps more nuanced reading is that Willard's journey is a descent from myth to Ritual, revealing our reliance on metaphor to indulge our Primal yearning to make sense of the world. The trappings of civilization: culture, surfing, music, celebrities, military decorum, even the idea of national identity can, for Fraser, be traced back to the initial collective human impulse of sympathetic magic, where imagination was wielded to exert control over a chaotic World."

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The desire to control and influence the world is the same driving force that propelled Humanity from the stages of Mythology, to religion, and ultimately to Science, he [Fraser] said. Magic, like Science, assumes a certain established order of nature on which man can surely count, and which he can manipulate to his own ends. While "The Golden Bough" has faced criticism since its publication, its' core message remains powerful, that humankind abhor uncertainty, and the imagination will go to extraordinary, even horrifying lengths, to convince ourselves that we can conquer it. Whether that producing beautiful things like movies, or less beautiful things like ritual sacrifice, the "horror" that Kurtz laments at the end isn't merely the savagery at the heart of humanity, it's the abyss of the unknown and the Monstrous potential of the human imagination to fill that dark chasm. "Apocalypse Now", a stone cold capital 'M' Masterpiece, is both a testament to the beauty of the imagination and a reminder of the utter horror it can unleash... "the horror, the horror".

The Ur Super-Ego Dominating the Horde