An Introduction to Caillois’ Stones & Other Texts

“As a member of a species, the human species which is late-coming, temporary, and transient—it will not even last as long as the dinosaurs lasted —I am doomed to error.”

Roger Caillois, 1978.
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The work of Roger Caillois (1913-1978) tends to defy classification. In fact, one might suspect that Caillois consciously cultivated a professional persona based on a peculiar combination of scholarly brilliance and intellectual obliqueness—sometimes bordering on the perverse or provocative—and an idiosyncratically disparate choice of subject matter. Described in 1974 by journalist Hector Biancotti as “the last Encyclopedist,” Caillois wrote on such diverse themes as insect behavior, myth, war in ancient China, science-fiction, festivals, the octopus, Hitler, masks, the detective novel, dreams, Montesquieu, the periodic table, poetry, unicorns, Lucifer, and stones.

Flint Magazine’s new translation of Caillois’ 1966 publication Pierres is something of a landmark in the slow progress of disseminating the author’s work to an Anglo-American readership. Despite his election to the prestigious Académie française in 1972, however, those special characteristics of Caillois’ work—its eclecticism, erudition, and challenging language and style—have also rendered his œuvre relatively eccentric within the canon of twentieth-century French lettres. Even Caillois’ best-known work reveals his unorthodox locus as a writer and critic à rebours. As apparent in the structure of Stones, with its sections titled “Mythology,” “Physics,” “Metaphysics,” “Ethics,” and “Testament,” Caillois’ erudition and the fluid complexity of his mature writing, melding poetic reverie, arcane histories and mineralogical insight, demands of his reader (and not least his translator) both sustained attention to philosophical undercurrents and a capacity to drift through intricate layers of descriptive imagery. As neither exactly science nor entirely poetry, much of Caillois’ work tends to confound readers who require clarity of genre. But that kind of isolationist attitude to thought and classification was exactly what Caillois baulked against. Caillois’ encyclopedic drive was rooted in his affinities with surrealist and romantic thinking, in challenging the strictures of classification, not out of a sense of unruliness but, on the contrary, from the basis of a critique which sought to throw into question received ideas and given assumptions about the relations between the stuff of the world.

The paradoxical character and highly-developed eclecticism of Caillois’ writings can in some ways be traced to his formative influences, ranging from surrealism to high academia. In the 1930s he was for a few years a passionate member of André Breton’s Paris surrealist group and after that a founding member of the College of Sociology, the militant collective dedicated to the sociological study of the sacred that he established alongside Georges Bataille and former surrealist-turned-ethnographer, Michel Leiris. Alongside these avant-guard engagements, Caillois simultaneously developed a promising academic career at the École pratiques des hautes études, mentored by the sociologist and anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, and the mythographer and historian of comparative religion, Georges Dumézil. So promising, in fact, that, according to his friend and art historian André Chastel, Dumézil (later a mentor to Michel Foucault), acclaimed Caillois as “the genius of
our time.”

Caillois’ network of engagement during this decade was hugely influential in developing the idiosyncrasy of his method and the thematic focus of his studies. While his avant-garde apprenticeship with Breton and Bataille nurtured his prodigious intellectual boldness (he was only 21 years old when Breton hailed him “the mental compass of surrealism”), through his academic training Caillois developed a keen sense for underlying and inter-connecting structures, whether related to society, myth, games, poetry, the imagination, or the affective character of the natural world. If one reads closely enough, Caillois’ Stones draws together the threads of many such concerns. While the above-mentioned figures influenced the structural and methodological facets of Caillois’ writing, then two other formative twentieth-century figures influenced his style and development as a writer. First, the philosopher of science and the imagination, Gaston Bachelard, who Caillois met in 1934, and whose thoughts about the phenomenology of imagination greatly influenced his writings on stones and his generalizing approach to the poetic relationship between mind and nature. Second, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who Caillois met while living in Buenos Aires between 1939 and 1945, and of whose work he became the first French translator. Indeed, Caillois’ books might even appear like some of those that inhabit the curious libraries or old houses found in the uncanny fictional labyrinths of the Borgesian universe.

The unusual combination of interests and influences that developed the broad scope of Caillos’ œuvre were already reflected in his early publications. For example, his implacable interrogation of the assumed status of art and poetry as claiming a subjective value beyond rational analysis, Art on Trial by Intellect (1935); his essays in the surrealist periodical Minotaure that drew disturbingly uncanny relations between deathly insect behavior and human psycho-sexual complexes, titled “The Praying Mantis: from Biology to Psychoanalysis” (1934) and “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (1935); and the sociological publications Myth and Man (1938) and Man and the Sacred (1939). These early interests would extend in numerous directions following Caillois’ move to South America, prompted by his distance from Paris and his experience of the vast scale of the natural landscape and cultural complexities of the Americas. Not long before the outbreak of war in Europe, Caillois was invited to Buenos Aires by Victoria Ocampo (editor of the vanguard literary hub of South America, the magazine Sur), and through the 1940s became a celebrated intellectual ambassador of socio-political critique and a lynchpin for French writers and artists in exile. In 1945, he returned to Paris and maintained his links with South America both by founding with the publisher Gaston Gallimard Le Croix du Sud, a series of Ibero-American literary publications, and by joining UNESCO in 1948 in a cultural role which enabled him to travel extensively and took him back to the Americas.

It was during his war-time exile in South America that Caillois had his first memorable encounter with minerals, as he recounts in his autobiographical work Le Fleuve Alphée (The River Alpheus, 1978) during a visit to a mine in Belo Horizonte in 1942. In the sorting area of the mine, at the time a source of trade in quartz for radars between Brazil and Great Britain, Caillois was invited to choose from the rejected prisms scattered over the ground and picked out a beguiling lump of phantom quartz. On his return to Argentina, however, the rock was confiscated by customs officials who regarded it as “strategic material,” despite Caillois’ protestations that the only reason he was allowed to take it was owing to its impaired quality. Although he claims to have been mortified at losing such a fascinating object, Caillois did not at this point begin to write on stones and minerals. It was not until his first book dedicated to the subject some twenty-five years later—this book—that Caillois would implicitly evoke his first mineral seduction through his clear and uncharacteristically warm identification with the Chinese artist and Imperial functionary, Mi Fou, with whom he shared “the same reverence for stones.”

Occasionally in his writings, Caillois acknowledged some cool intellectual fraternity with a historical figure, suitably eccentric or surprising: the pessimistic Blaise Pascal of the Pensées, for example, or the terrifying young militant of the French Revolution, Louis Antoine de Saint-Juste; the irascible Stoic philosopher Diogenes (after whom Caillois named the UNESCO-funded interdisciplinary journal he founded in 1952), or Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist and inventor of the marvelously economical Periodic Table. Caillois’ identification with Mi Fou, however—who he refers to as a “fraternal maniac” and whose name would no doubt have appealed to his surrealist sensibility, suggesting in French “half mad”—is relatively passionate. Clearly relating in Stones to the Chinese poet-official when he describes him as “intolerant and foolhardy, scornful of beaten tracks, keen on enigma, contradiction and challenge,” Caillois’ account of the theft of Mi Fou’s favorite stone recalls his personal distress at the hands of Argentine customs: “I share Mi Fou’s despair. I feel his irreparable loss and I imagine he never recovered from it. Across centuries and meridians, despite the differences in character and destiny, I feel a special sympathy for him, unlike any other.”

Stones, then, is in some way a personal homage to Mi Fou. It expresses his rapport with the significance of stones within Buddhist practice and to the meditative, philosophical, and also modest way in which stones figure in the artistic, intellectual, mythical, and sacred realms of historic Chinese culture. In Stones, as in his other writings on natural phenomena, Caillois follows a conviction that human art—in no way proffering exceptionalism to the species—is but a weak branch of nature’s genius. The reference at the very end of Stones to Chinese artists signing slabs of marble is an acknowledgement of how, long before it became a theorized intention of modern European artists, non-European cultures had a highly nuanced sense of natura naturans, of working in the spirit of nature rather than vainly attempting to copy it. It is also, however, a rather cheeky innuendo that disparages the legendary reputation of his compatriot, Marcel Duchamp, and the conceit of the Occidental avant-garde in thinking that one of their own was the first to sign an object he had not himself made.

As well as drawing upon highly affective or philosophically engaging examples of stones and minerals in oriental culture, Caillois was drawn to the enigmatic image of the polyhedron in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, for example, and recognized another affinity in the depiction of crystals in the metaphysical paintings of the Czech artist, his life-long friend Josef Šíma, which hinted at the formative architectonics underlying and unifying all aspects of nature. Caillois was also drawn to the ways in which stones seemed to provoke an imaginative response in humans which in some way made them difficult to conform to strict systems of classification. Caillois’ writings on stone are nourished by the lyrical tendencies of natural histories which reflect the wonder and confusion of classical and early modern scholars in the face of the hallucinatory pictographic forms of stones and their convergence of the brutal, energetic laws of nature with the play of chance. Throughout Stones, Caillois reveals his love of these kinds of paradoxes, defining stones as a ubiquitous and yet utterly marvelous phenomena. He explores how, through history, stones have fascinated human minds with their host of ambiguities, seeming at once animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, mineral and vegetal, useful and useless, the stuff of poetic reverie and cultural symbolism as well as raw material, the access to which marks the technological advance of human civilization. Stones for Caillois are both an ancient source of human ingenuity and unchained imagination, both finalized by accident during some inhumanly distant epoch and forged according to certain inflexible laws of nature.

For those who might be familiar with his sociological writings on myth, the sacred, and games, Caillois’ writings on stones, and this seemingly distinct efflorescence from the 1960s onwards of what he referred to as his “material mysticism,” might seem a bizarre development. However, although this apparent turn away from the analytical study of the social to a study of the natural realm and its affective force upon the human imagination might seem to separate his writings on stones from earlier work, there are surprising continuities. Caillois himself drew attention to these continuities in numerous publications, such as The Squares of a Chessboard (1970), the title of which signifies his preoccupation with relations between parts and whole and introduced texts he had collated in a way that would alert the reader’s attention to what he called the “interstitial tissue” of his writings. Between his first publications of the 1930s, in the context of surrealism and his encounter with Bachelard, and his later writings on stones, Caillois maintained an understanding of the poetic and imaginary as objectively grounded within deep and fixed relations between mind and world. “Nothing is a stranger to anything. Meaning, that the laws which govern the mind of man are not fundamentally different from those which determine the graphic structure of stones, etc. These laws are the same: simply, they adapt differently to the order—mineral, vegetal or animal—to which they belong.”

Caillois’ turn to stones as his main preoccupation in older age can, then, be read in a number of ways. One way to approach his mineral fascination is to underscore how it relates to his life-long interest, nurtured by his encounter with surrealism, with the idea of a system of encyclopedic knowledge that could incorporate what science and positive analysis necessarily leave out: the poetic, mythical, sacred, emotional, unconscious, oneiric, vertiginous, and imaginative. Caillois makes clear in the first pages of Stones that he is not speaking of their practical utilization: “I overlook mineralogy, ignoring the arts that give stones a purpose.” Nor is he interested in the kinds of stones considered precious in terms of their market value. Such a rejection of utilitarian and economic interests is typical of Caillois’ entire œuvre, influenced as it was by the critical analysis of the over-estimation of restricted economy by Mauss and Bataille. Through this rejection, Caillois aimed to expose the narrow rationalism that overdetermines such concerns and to accentuate the importance of other values and impetus within human life and of other forces that shape societies and cultures.

In Stones and other texts on minerals, Caillois pays homage to various characters who are significant for their innovative, critical, and imaginative development of the kind of expansive and holistic knowledge that he sought to develop. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, for example, who dedicated the final two works of his thirty-seven volume Naturalis Historia to stones, is a latent presence within Caillois’ text. Following Aristotle and the Stoic philosophy of nature, Pliny’s incorporation of stones and other natural objects according to their significance in historical and mythical tales and their valuable and useful properties for humans contributed enormously to the genre of the encyclopedia that developed in the middle ages with the work of church scholars like Albertus Magnus through that of early modern scholars like the sixteenth-century natural philosophers Conrad Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi and Giambattista della Porta.

The highly eclectic epistemological scope of the early encyclopedias, with their myths, folklore, moralizing, and magic, offered a richly imaginative model for Caillois’ notion of “diagonal sciences,” the method he proposed for developing a transversal and ambitiously coherent picture of universal knowledge. He was, however, also influenced by the advancement of the more properly scientific developments of the Enlightenment, notably the radical political, materialist, and atheist character of the eighteenth-century Éncyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert (compiled between 1751-1780), which had already provided an insurgent encyclopedic model for Bataille’s heteroclite periodical Documents (1929-30). Into this already heady mix, Caillois introduced the German romantic passion of the poet and geologist Novalis, whose ardent vision of an encyclopedia of everything within the realms of both science and poetry was sketched in his Das Allgemeine Brouillon (Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, 1798-9). While impressed with Diderot’s Éncyclopédie, Novalis wanted to go beyond the individual distinctions of this model and desired to unify phenomena and our way of thinking them, an approach which would reflect the romantic conception of the profound unity of the world. “A science is perfected,” wrote Novalis, “if it is applicable to everything […] if everything is applicable to it.” Inspired by this romantic pursuit of a vast system of coherency, Caillois thus combined in his work Novalis’ zeal for a universal “encyclopedistics” with the more structuralist approach developed by his tutor, Mauss, and his inter-relational model of the “total social fact.”

Caillois doggedly rejected the anthropocentric view of human preeminence and exceptionalism, declaring in Le Fleuve Alphée:

Man can less and less doubt that he is only an excrescence of nature, with which he remains co-substantial and to the laws of which entirely submitted. Yet he has been so successful in domesticating the energies within reach that he is naively persuaded that nature belongs to him, while he knows very well that it is he who belongs to nature and that he is an extension of it, far from having been parachuted in by some God.

Moreover, he also rejected the idea of human culture as in some way distinct from nature as a whole. Throughout his work, Caillois undermined the economically and utilitarianly rationalized interpretation of what connects humans to nature at large; a view that, according to many contemporary natural scientists and ecologists, has been crudely and often perniciously extrapolated from evolutionary theories. Relegating such supposedly dominant principles of “survival” or “self-preservation” within nature, Caillois argued that the natural world reveals other motives, including those that humans express through art, poetry, the imagination, excess, risk, and intoxication. He thus sought to create links between the human and non-human realms which might open out a less conservative understanding of nature and, concomitantly, a more measured revision of the human place within it; one that would promote such “inadmissible similarities” as to show humans, in fact, to be closer to stones than to any deity. This ambition thus prompted Caillois to pursue his great range of studies and directed his encyclopedic concerns into disparate terrains in search of unexpected similarities that might serve to bridge scientifically-constructed and misleading distinctions between natural realms. His general aim, he wrote, was “to trim back the perceptible universe in order to reveal the correlations, networks, crossroads and regularities” which are normally obscured by isolated modes of research.

While historical analogies in the West between humans and the natural world have tended to draw resemblances between perceived personalities within the animal and vegetal realms or the structures of insect life as productive socio-economic models, for example, Caillois characteristically developed a far more oblique and unusual set of comparisons, of which his identification with the inert, inorganic mineral realm is perhaps the most extreme. Before writing on stones, Caillois focused on establishing “inadmissible similarities” between humans and insects. Nonetheless, we can trace his route to stones through these earlier disquieting or fantastical forays into natural history, especially his attention to perceived visual resemblances in natural forms. Caillois was not only interested in the ways in which marvelous natural objects or creatures “mobilized the imagination,” as he put it, but also, and more challengingly, was riveted to the question as to whether there are detectible patterns or even laws behind the ways in which the human imagination responds to certain natural phenomena. In a text published in The Squares of a Chessboard, titled “Apotheosis of Humiliated Matter,” Caillois expressed his romantic and in fact quasi-ecological conviction of the unity encompassing humans and the natural world through the question of whether there exists a distinction between the notion of beauty (a notion which on the whole held little interest for him) in art and nature. He writes of art as revealing “another proof that the one who looks and that which is looked at are of the same sort, belonging to the same universe, and that the idea of beauty is like a sap which circulates between them in the unity of their substance and which ties the one to the other by new bonds.”

Following Bachelard’s phenomenological approach, Caillois argued that the logic of poetry and the imagination works—not through subjective causality—but through what Bachelard called in The Poetics of Space the “trans-subjective.” Like Bachelard, Caillois argued that the logic of the imagination can be studied objectively, just like any natural phenomenon, and that its force of conveyance through poetry and myth owes nothing to accident but rather—as with the realms of the social, the sacred, and the natural—derives its power of communication, across time and place, through the regularity of laws that may well be mysterious but are not entirely indecipherable. In a way, then, we can see Caillois’ writings on stones as a continuation of Bachelard’s phenomenological studies from the 1930s and ‘40s of an elemental imagination reflected in mythical and poetic thinking about fire, water, and earth. Writing in The Octopus: Essay on the Logic of the Imaginary (1973), Caillois—like a kind of Captain Nemo of the imagination—claimed to be pursuing the “grid of established analogies and discreet connections which constitute the logic of the imaginary,” asserting: “If mystery affects us, if the unusual enthralls us, if poetry is possible, it is only because of the complex and disconcerting correspondences which disperse the unity of the cosmos.” Indeed, for Caillois, the laws which govern the human imagination are not even exclusive to the species but run through the vital, informing processes of the natural world as a whole. He developed this conviction through his notion of “generalized poetics,” declaring in an interview from the early 1970s, for example: “The fantasies of man, the imagination itself are only a prolongation of the general laws of the universe.”

Caillois’ evocative analogies between the formations of minerals and other natural realms—the vegetal and human in particular—are rooted in natural histories, from ancient to modern, which draw attention to paradoxes of classification, ontological slippages and confusions, that reveal the limitations for knowledge in strictly separating the poetic from the scientific. The spell of visual resemblance which Caillois conveys in Stones, was originally initiated by his interest in insects, specifically his early fascination with the apparent form of a skull on the thorax of the Death’s-Head Hawkmoth (Acherontia atropos), which he saw as an uncanny simulacrum or a hallucinatory blazon of deathly morphology. Like his fellow surrealists André Breton and Salvador Dalí, Caillois was compelled to natural objects which appeared to resemble other things, especially if they appeared to transgress an apparently rigid classificatory law: the vegetal appearance of coral, the “masks” worn by insects, the apparition of a human figure, a pine-forest or a Florentine landscape embedded in pictographic stones, and other such visual analogies that have not only been central to mythic, folkloric and poetic thought, but also, as Michel Foucault discussed in The Order of Things (1970) to the world view of early modern natural philosophy in Europe. Caillois came to refer to this perceptual-cognitive impulse to resemblances as “the demon of analogy” (borrowing the term from Stéphane Mallarmé), and in Stones he allows himself the liberty to elaborate upon the endlessly rich poetic chimeras experienced through the mineral realm.

When Caillois writes in Stones “I felt myself taking on parts of the nature of stones,” his identification with the most primeval of matter verges on mystical self-dissolution. There is certainly a melancholic resignation to the process of ageing and inevitable mortal disappearance in Caillois’ writings on stones. While personal, however, this melancholia links the limited human span in terms both ontogenetic and phylogenetic, and—as if meditating through the relative immortality of stones themselves—defines the human in various texts as an “imposter,” describing the species as “transient,” “ephemeral,” and an “episodic species doomed to distinction.” Expressing these views in an interview not long before his death in 1978, Caillois admitted: “From the instant that one situates mankind as a precarious species, it is difficult to escape a certain moroseness.” Thus, Caillois’ writings on stones reflect a kind of philosophical pessimism that seeks a preparatory detachment from the human realm and embraces stones as an “antidote” to the inherent failings of the human, his human being. In terms, though, of the continuity of theme and focus throughout Caillois’ œuvre, this “moroseness” and his general identification with stones can be interpreted through his life-long obsession with detecting an ill-defined instinct within the human towards annihilation and fusion, even at the risk of self-erasure. Caillois pursued evidence for this multivalent impulse in his sociological studies of the sacred, war, and festival, and also through his fascination with the perennial feature of masks in ritual, myth and nature, as exemplified in the mimetic attributes of insects. He connected this impulse to human psychology, drawing, for example, on Sigmund Freud’s notion of the “death instinct” or in Pierre Janet’s theory of psychasthenia, which Caillois interpreted as an inability to sufficiently inhabit a well-defined ego, an urge to assimilate into space or into one’s environment, and a desire to merge from the animate into the inanimate realm.

There is also, however, a kind of evolutionary mythopoesis in Caillois’ reverie on stones that, paradoxically, in spite of their otherworldly and inhuman nature flows from the mythical imaginings of stones as generative and related to human birth and ancestry. Through an ultra-monistic sense of evolution, Caillois sees stone as an original substance within which humans are prefigured; the willo-the-wisps of their forms appearing like hallucinatory and uncanny premonitions within some impersonal and cosmic imagination millions of years before the advent of the species and the development of its compulsive “demon of analogy.” Humans haunt the stones which precede them, and stones haunt the evolutionary event of homo sapiens, our primal matter and the laws which determined our development. For Caillois, stones manifest what humans lack: “Men envy their longevity, their severity, their intransigence and their radiance, their smoothness and impenetrability, and their capacity of being full even as they are shattered.” They also represent what humans aspire to be and to achieve, yet with even the best of their abilities only ever barely approaching their order, structure and brilliance or the concrete pictographic wonder of the forces that formed them.

Donna Roberts
[6] Flint Magazine Issue 1+2
06/2018

https://sensatejournal.com/

Butterfly Wings

THE WINGS OF butterflies and moths, their shape, patterns and colours, continue to be a sort of eternal enigma. I do not think anyone really knows the purpose of so much splendour. It is possible that the colour is of use but not the pattern (with one exception).

The lungs of butterflies are contained within a narrow and rigid framework. In order to fly, these creatures need an additional respiratory surface, which the extended wings provide, and thus serve to absorb oxygen and light. Both are more easily obtained the darker the wings are. I agree. But once more, why the patterns? Plain wings, of the shade suitable to supply the insect with energy, would serve as well or better and I dare say with greater economy of effort. Of course it is affirmed that the striking or soft colours are useful in both cases: the soft colours to make the insect invisible and confuse it with its background, the striking colours to act as obliterating colouring, that is to dazzle the retina of a predator just that fraction of a second which is enough to ensure the escape of the insect. But the patterns are not explained by this. A vivid colour, all over, without a pattern, that the escaping insect shows and then immediately hides, as in some grasshoppers, would serve equally well. For these reasons I dare to advance the opinion that the patterns and the colours of the butterfly wings are insects’ ‘‘paintings”’.

However I do not maintain that a Lepidopter has anything in common with an artist. Still less do I say that a butterfly paints its wings or that one of its far-off ancestors conceived or willed this form at some point in the evolutionary process and that they have been the same ever since and will be transmitted unchanged for many centuries to come. Even using the word “ painting” for the fixed positioning of the small scales that make up the wing is a flagrant abuse of language. I must not overlook any of the points in which a painting differs from a butterfly-wing. But I notice—this is my task— that these differences are just those that separate insect and man, so in a certain sense they are expected and reinforce the view that the argument is well founded. Here are two kinds of surfaces both having coloured parts, brilliant or soft, forming a whole. The two things moreover are both equally useless. They cannot really be compared: nevertheless they are homologues.

The wings owe nothing to the intervention of consciousness, of will, of free choice; they arise through the working of uncontrollable animal mechanism. There are patterns but no plan. They are always the same and have been for thousands of years in all the members of the same species: they seem to be those things that would have been created had some ideally perspicacious spirit, in the undeviating insect world, made in advance the objects which were going to become man’s paintings.

On the other hand, the other surfaces—the paintings —are original things by very definition. The artist’s personality is shown in every one of them. He does not carry them about with him as he does his finger nails, his hair or eyes (but he has colour in his eyes and hair). He alone is responsible for every shade and every stroke in the picture. If a free and capable being, able to work outside himself, started spreading colours on a surface so as to get something like a butterfly’s wing and if you allowed him to use any colour he liked, so as to get the best possible result, he would invent painting, more precisely abstract painting, the geometrical patterns of baskets, pottery and embroidery.

To sum up, the theory leads one to believe that there is with living creatures in general a tendency to produce coloured designs and this “tendency” shows itself particularly in the two evolutionary extremes—a butterfly’s wings and an artist’s paintings. I would not dream of denying—indeed I am stressing—the vast differences which separate the painting and the wing, but I think that these differences are already implied in the all too evident fact that the wing is part of the butterfly whereas the artist invents and carries out his picture himself. It follows from this statement that it becomes interesting to try and determine the singular reasons for man’s achieving a very different destiny from that of other living beings.

This is usually explained by man’s erect posture and the fact that his thumb is opposite his fingers. Neither one of these reasons is completely convincing. ‘The erect posture has not helped the penguin or the kangaroo very much. The lobster and crab do not make much use of their claws to hold before their eyes objects arousing their curiosity. As for monkeys, who stand up when they want to and have the use of four hands, it is clear that they have not profited much from this plurality and abundance. It would seem that the advantages put forward are less decisive than is claimed.

Perhaps the approach to these problems could be helped by making a more exact record of what is gained and what is lost. Man, by assuming the erect posture, sacrificed his running speed and thus became an easier prey for swift predators. On the other hand he liberated his front limbs. Thereafter the conception of the hand became possible. But the selection of the hand with its opposing thumb and gripping fingers was once more to sacrifice some possible alternative such as the hoof or claw. Each time it was as if man “chose” a solution which was at first harmful to him, but which was soon to reward him with additional powers. Man seems to have advanced by a series of successive eliminations. In a way he impoverishes himself and denudes himself to the extreme, finally to gain a greater diversity of useful gifts. At the same time he has “avoided” any too specialised organ, such as the wing or fin, wonderfully adapted as they are, but only to one use. The fur-covered mammal has ‘“‘invented”’ its fleece to protect itself from the cold; the crab its carapace and the mollusc its shell for protection against predators. Man has invented clothes and armour, which he can take off and put on according to his need, always for the purpose of protection or self-defence. His policy is therefore to avoid any organic solutions which would involve a modification of the body, for they have the fault of being permanent and incompatible with each other. Man makes solutions which are external and, as a result, capable of an infinite number of combinations. This is a general principle. The crayfish “chooses” its armour-plating, the bird its wings; but there are no flying crustaceans nor any armour-plated birds, whereas, for man, the construction of an armoured aeroplane—a flying fortress— presents only one difficulty to be overcome, a new relationship to be established between the total weight of the machine and the power of the engine which drives it. The electric eel “invents” its electric discharge and equips itself with a sort of internal accumulator. Man makes use of virtually all the possible applications of electricity.

Another example and not the least. Man does not have that faculty possessed by bees and ants of being able to orientate himself practically infallibly. He has invented for his own use a compass independent of his body, which does not simply help him find his own home but gives him direction over the entire planet.

There is no need to labour the point. It is well known that man differs from animals in that he makes tools, weapons and machines. He has no claws or talons nor natural suckers, but if he needs them he manufactures as many of them, and makes them as powerful and as intricate, as he wants: he sets himself up with a mass of varying articles which he possesses all at the same time and which he can use in turn.

We are, however, dealing with insects. The intention of this brief digression is to show how commonplace my observation is in as much as it does not extend the case beyond the objectives already stated, ones which, I am afraid, are more obvious and superfluous than paradoxical and controversial. However, the opposite happens as soon as I try to suggest the least connection between a butterfly’s wings and an artist’s paintings, although the relationship is the same. On reflection it is no more and no less acceptable in either case. The only difference that I can perceive between the two series of analogies is that the first concerns organs, machines or useful functions: the second superfluities the usefulness of which is obvious.

I have used butterfly’s wings as a special example. I could have chosen others from all the spheres of nature and might have given preference to crystals, flowers, the skins of certain mammals or the scales of numerous fish. These recurring patterns—for the most part it is not a question of anything more than just regularities—simply reveal the principle of distribution which governs living matter. Examples are the allotment of seeds in a pod or the shape of a starfish. Other schemes progress in a modulated rhythm, as the spiral of a shellfish. ‘These geometric patterns, which are easily discerned by man, please him and he is led to speak of beauty. In fact he is only noting equilibrium or symmetry, that is to say, neat arrangements. If the butterfly’s wings seem to present a special case, it is, I think, for two reasons: in the first place the outline and the pattern would appear under the circumstances to be a superfluous ornament which has been arbitrarily added to the organism of the insect and would not appear to be an essential part of its make-up; further, the patterns are often very complex, whereas the symmetry of butterflies—strictly lateral —is reduced to the most simple shape possible—as is the case with the human body. Geometry and simple regularity seem in this case to give way to a richer composition, free of the laws which govern the balanced economy of living matter.

Can we then speak of art? In the human sense of the word, certainly not. But a new principle has appeared over and above geometry. I will explain what I mean. Geometry is a constant principle of the universe, and the universe has examples of it at far from elementary levels. Life, in a way which one might call altogether abstract, at times, develops what could be called polyhedral structures, similar to the perfect bodies which Plato, in the Timaeus, regards as the only things worthy of divine construction.

The Radiolaria are remarkable collections of spherical bodies formed of regular polygons united to each other. Slender spikes radiate from the centres or the angles of the polygons, like rays of light frozen into immobility. In his work E. Hackel¹ alone amassed several hundred types. I shall only quote two examples of these, chosen from among the most simple because they seemed to be complementary to each other. The Circorrhegma dodecahedra (Hackel plate 117, 2) with twelve faces and twenty spines and the Circogonia isocahedra (Hickel plate 117, 1) which has inversely twenty faces and twelve spines. From the depths of the warm seas they appear like a set of delicate tiny models predating the ideal solids deduced by Plato, who knew nothing of these natural prototypes.

At times the central sphere, as is the case with Tuscaretta globosa, remains empty and uninhabited, the eight animalcules which secreted it in common remain suspended from the perforated surface spread out like the eight corners of a phantom cube.

There exists, therefore, a geometry which derives more spontaneously from life and which is considerably more developed than that which is apparent in a spider’s web, a ring of petals, the distribution of leaves on a stem, the spiral on a seashell or the shell of a sea-urchin. I do not intend to enthuse over the alleged wonders of nature.

On the contrary it seems to me completely natural, or rather, more probable and foreseeable than the contrary, that the intelligence of mankind and the purely biological phenomena of calcification among the lower orders of life have, in spite of the abyss which separates them, a deep-seated relationship. However I must stress one point: however many varieties of Radiolaria there are, it is the organic geometry which, in spite of the flexibility of sap and lymph, is important and which shows itself to be limited and unchangeable, without possibilities of development. And it is rigorous reasoning that enables man even to go as far as to operate in a medium without properties and to create there logical entities which the imagination itself cannot represent and which can only be understood on a mathematical basis. Taking the Radiolarians, with their symmetrical forms unchanged since their origin, as prototypes, I am thinking of an endless series of models made of string and wire. Man needs these puzzling fragile constructions in order to make for himself a very rough and almost symbolic representation of the flow of the abstract surfaces which his mind is able to conceive.

The design of corollas and the rhythms of growth are perhaps in accordance with the Law of Golden Proportion, of which the Pythagoreans made such great play. Why should it not be so? The Golden Number is a formula for the perfect use of resources. The symmetrical placing of the Radiolaria spines can be seen to end by giving a creature in which the available resources are used to the best advantage. A simple law of inertia should be able to explain this so economical use of resources. If sand is poured, it forms a regular shape, a cone, which, barring external intervention, keeps the form which its weight gives it. Alain expressed no surprise at the great age of the pyramids: monuments - which, when they were built, were already the natural shape they would be in decay.

Let us return to the butterfly’s wings with their spots, streaks and piping, crescents, seed-like dotting, cameos, scalloping and ocelli vying one with the other, in the display of designs which, on the single wing, in this case owe nothing to symmetry. There is no less fantasy, richness and variety in the colours. What is more, they are not just flat colours. They are greatly enriched by various physical qualities which make them deep or glistening, metallic or moiré. Thus there is the black or brownish velvet of the great ornithoptera, the electric blue of the Morpho, the fiery reflections and variegation of the Uranus and Arcturus, the enamel, mother-of-pearl and mica of numerous species, the light which flickers on the wing whenever the grains which make up the scales have a different index of refraction. Their shapes are elongated, jagged, crenellated, slashed or whole. The wings of Actias are prolonged by its enormous stiff tails which appear to be starched. With the Hypolycena’ they are thin, downy and rolled up in coils. In this mass of shapes, patterns and colours, there is an excess all the more surprising in that it appears to be in complete contradiction to the consistent discipline which has just been operating to make the best distribution of a valuable jelly quivering with life.

This consistency would doubtless give rise to harmony, but only because harmony is a property common to mathematics and aesthetics. A rose window in the form of a corolla is drawn by a compass. In speaking here of beauty man equivocates and is satisfied to designate by an all-embracing and ambiguous name a pleasure which, springs directly from a harmonious division of space. He might with as much right (and lack of propriety) speak of justice.

On the other hand, with butterflies’ wings there is a genuine beauty in the broadest sense of the word. They are a biological creation combining most pleasing shapes and colours which cannot be wholly explained in practical terms. Therefore it is reasonable to speak of art, and more particularly the art which concerns itself with the relationships of shapes and colours, that is, painting. Of course it is important to remember the differences which I have stressed above: on the one hand the external pictures resulting from the inventions of a free imagination; on the other hand, the internal and unalterable pictures, created without conscious invention by the change taking place inside the chrysalis, when the organs and tissues of the caterpillar dissolve and rearrange themselves into the wing of the particular species. The individual has no choice in this matter. Here each species is the artist. The picture, repeated indefinitely, gives all the individual members of each species the livery which they bear in perpetuity from season to season.

Samivel described the insect as an “introverted technician”. He says that they have become “their own machinery, forming the details of their own structure with a view to a particular use”.¹

Thus, by the simple fact that the function creates the organ, what was primitively merely a paw has become “a fin, a weapon, a musical instrument, a burrowing shovel, a spring mechanism, etc.". It would be easier to lengthen this list than to exhaust its possibilities. By contrast in this field which is by definition characterised by superfluity it cannot be a question of the function creating the organ. With butterflies I imagine everyone would be willing to agree that flight developed the wing, but it could just as easily have developed a transparent wing like the dragonfly’s or the bumble-bee’s, the strong wing of the stag-beetle, the cockchafer, the water-beetle or the rose-chafer’ which, with a minimum lifting-surface, carries a far heavier body. Besides in this last case the concealment of the closed, supple wing under its sheath contrasts with the “vanity” of the butterfly who plays with his wings, slowly opening and closing them on a flower, by a stretch of water or on the pebbles of the road.

Therefore, if so many insects appear to be introverted technicians, might not the Lepidoptera be the artists, the introverted painters. In the same way that the others transform parts of their own organisms into specialised tools—hooks, knives, pincers, scissors, borers, syringes or siphons—they, by means of the incredible chemistry of necrosis, produce on themselves a rich and distinctive display less like a picture than a flag or armorial bearings, but armorial bearings so rich and detailed that they suggest not so much heraldry in the human world as painting.

In my opinion this unusual proposition comes up against two major difficulties: the first is that stated by Samivel in connection with the tools and utensils so perfectly adapted by these introverted engineers, when it comes to supposing them created by the insect technician’s decision, even a confused one, a choice, however rudimentary, or a foresight, however obscure. “It is hard to believe that creatures who are in the majority of cases incapable of modifying their own behaviour would be endowed with the extraordinary power of shaping their own structure.” From this he derived a hypothesis which is, to say the least, daring. If one systematically neglects in this instance the theory of natural selection, is it possible to imagine that insects or certain types of insects, ants for example, were, at some given time, intelligent beings, in the sense which we give this term, that is, endowed with a mystique, philosophy, art, science and technology? And that after a mysterious avatar—who knows?—perhaps as the result of a voluntary physiological conditioning brought about by methods similar to ours but further perfected, they have become, by virtue of an unalterable consequence, what they now are, that is to say, machines for living, nothing more, nothing less??

This problem of initiative in the construction of their own selves, the problem of the original decision, even in the weakest sense of that term, would, if it were just a question of any number of purely mechanical consequences brought on by the repetition of one phenomenon at the cellular level, still remain mystifying in the extreme; in fact, unfathomable, to a point where it is perhaps ridiculous to imagine it, because it has no meaning when applied to man. Man’s progress is in the opposite direction, for he, who can fabricate everything externally, is, by way of compensation, virtually unable to modify his own organic structure.

The second great objection arises from the assimilation of useful qualities and attributes of no use. A doctrine of natural selection readily admits or even postulates the pliability which produces the fin of the Hydrophilus, the mantis’s jagged harpoon and the mole-cricket’s excavator, but it refuses by the very nature of its theories to conceive of a similar mechanism for the pattern and colour of the butterfly’s wings. The opposition between the necessary and the superfluous seems here to be decisive. It is argued that anything serving no definite purpose cannot be a determinant. Any non-utility of characteristics cannot be admitted. In other words anything which is superfluous is a priori inexplicable.

I maintain that there is here what I call a “deep anthropomorphism". At all costs people want to avoid talking of art or beauty, blazonry or pictures when considering butterflies’ wings, for these are words which only make sense in relation to human emotions or to human history and little does it matter that anyone who uses these words in this connection takes care to emphasise the differences and contrasts. To avoid the forbidden words it is commonly held preferable to exalt the concept of utility, that is, of survival, as all-important. However, if we stop projecting our human reactions on to the non-human part of nature we find that an immense squandering of resources is the rule there. It is a world where there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to indicate that an ostentatious outpouring of resources, with no intelligible end, may not be a wider and more universal law than the strict vital interest, the imperative of the survival of the species.

Thus man remains convinced that nature does nothing in vain. Just about everything in it suggests the opposite, but he does not cease to believe, if not in the best of all possible worlds, at least in one with the least loss of energy. For me it seems dangerous to accept such a theory.

I wonder at least to what criterion it would be legitimate to resort, to give here a clearly defined meaning for the expression “in vain’’. In the last analysis, I fear, the discrimination is purely human. Herein lies, I suspect, the final anthropomorphic error. Indeed, I have no doubt that it is I who will be accused of delirious anthropomorphism: what could be more ridiculous than to dare compare butterflies’ wings to the works of painters?

However, it could be that my system of references might show itself to be the least distorted of all: for it also provides a presentation of a painter’s pictures as the human equivalent of the butterflies’ wings.

What could such a relationship indicate if not that there appears to be an autonomous aesthetic force in the world of biology in general? This force, doubtless inexplicable, shows the impossibility of going any further in this progression of causes and effects, in certain cases a final goal just as imperious and tyrannical as the sacred survival of the species. It happens that, in different conditions, the most divergent paths lead to the same end: the interplay of shapes and colours. Both men and insects, knowing nothing of their hidden docility, obey the same organic law of the universe. This law, like the law of economics, wherever it reigns, reigns absolutely, without any half-measures, at least when there are no forces to counteract it. A butterfly, which has no consciousness or insight, would not be able to make for itself a wing that was ugly, for it has no power to erect obstacles to this development of forces which produce harmony and beauty naturally. This is too little: I should have said to this natural expansion by which harmony and beauty define themselves, because man (an integral part of this same nature) necessarily perceives harmony and beauty, in conformity with that great canvas which determines the shape of crystals, shells, leaves and corollas and which cunningly suggests to him the relationships wherein he imagines, not without some presumption, that he is exercising his personal genius.

Man is free, clumsy, and wicked on occasions. Without knowing anything about it, and as the result of an incomprehensible metamorphosis, the Lepidopter makes gaily-coloured wings out of the dull paste with which the pupa is filled. Between himself and his work man sets the risk of a decision taken deliberately which may be of doubtful value. He also has to carry out what he has conceived. He calculates and then makes it real.

Each time he risks making a mistake. His reward is to be the true creator of his pictures; but on the other hand an unsuitable choice or bad workmanship by this one fallible being can result in bad painting. It is a far cry from the age-old norms, whose works, being repeated indefinitely, could not help but have a cold and unchangeable perfection about them.

The Mask of Medusa
Roger Caillois

WHETHER THE WINGS of butterflies do, or do not seem to be paintings, it must be admitted that history shows no painter with a special preference for these shimmering surfaces, where his work has already been done. On the contrary painters seem to avoid them, and never reproduce a butterfly-wing except as a minor element in a still life. For instance, they never take part of a wing of some butterfly, enlarge it to the full size of their canvas, all the time most carefully keeping the wing’s pattern, proportions and colours. I put this down without comment. I suspect, however, that this arises from the fact that the artist already sees the wing as a picture and that to paint it would not be to paint a picture but to duplicate an existing work.

[From the next chapter NATURA PICTRIX]

Sacrum & the choice of a supreme end

INTERNALIZATION OF THE SACRED

With the rise of civilization, with the beginning of the division of labor, still more with the rise of the city and the state, festivals lose importance. They symbolize less and less the magnitude and total character that made the ancient efferves­ cences a complete suspension of institutional interaction and a basic challenge to the universal order. A more complex so­ ciety does not tolerate such a break in the continuity of its functioning. It insists upon the gradual abandonment of the alternation between phases of debility and paroxysm, of dis­persion and concentration, of regulated and unrestrained ac­tivity, which is the rhythm of development at a time when collective life is less differentiated. Individual labor can be interrupted, but public services must not be stopped. General disorder is no longer admissible. At best, only a facsmile is tolerated.

Social life in its entirety tends toward uniformity. More and more, flood and draught are channelized into a regular and even flow. The multiple needs of profane life tolerate less and less the simultaneous reservation of the same time for the sacred by everyone. Also, the sacred becomes fragmented, be­comes the specialty of a sect that leads a semi-clandestine exist­ence, or in the majority of cases, becomes the concern of a specialized group that celebrates its rites in a remote place and remains in office for a long time. Sooner or later, its divorce from the state is consecrated by the separation of the spiritual from the temporal. Then the church no longer coincides with the city, and religious and national boundaries no longer are the same.

Religion soon becomes dependent upon man, no longer upon the collectivity. It becomes universalistic, but also, in correlative fashion, personalistic. It tends to isolate the indi­vidual by confronting him with a God that he then knows less through rites than through a diffusion of personalized inti­macy. The sacred becomes internalized and no longer attracts only the mind. The importance of the mystical increases and that of the cult diminishes. Any external criterion seems in­adequate, from the moment that the sacred becomes less an objective manifestation than a pure attitude of mind, less a ceremony than a profound sensation. It is with reason under these conditions that the word "sacred’' is used outside the properly religious domain to designate that to which each de­votes the better part of himself, that which is of utmost value and is venerated, that for which he sacrificed his life.

Such is, in fact, the decisive touchstone that permits the unbeliever to distinguish between the sacred and the profane.

That being, object, or idea is sacred for which man departs from routine, that he does not allow to be discussed, scoffed at, or joked about, that which he would not deny or surrender at any price. For the lover, it is the woman he loves; for the artist or scholar, the work that he pursues; for the miser, the gold that he amasses; for the patriot, the welfare of the state, the security of the nation, and the defense of its territory; and for the revolutionist, the revolution.

It is absolutely impossible to distinguish these attitudes from those of the believer, except in the way they are applied. They demand the same self-denial, and they presuppose the same unconditional personal involvement, a similar asceticism and spirit of sacrifice. Without doubt, it is convenient to at­tribute different values to them, but that is an entirely separate problem. It is sufficient to note that they imply the recognition of a sacred element surrounded by fervor and devotion, of which one must avoid speaking, and which one must try to conceal, for fear of exposing it to some sacrilege (insult, ridi­cule, or merely a critical attitude) on the part of the indiffer­ent, or one’s enemies, who would not respect it.

The presence of such an element entails a certain number of sacrifices in the ordinary course of life, and, in the event of a crisis, the sacrifice of life itself is agreed to in advance. Every­ thing else is considered profane, is used without excessive scruples, is evaluated, judged, doubted, and treated not as an end but as a means. Some subordinate everything to the pres­ervation of life and property, and thus seem to regard every­ thing as profane, taking the greatest liberties they can with them. Of course, self-interest or the pleasure of the moment governs them. For them alone, it is clear that the sacred exists in no other form.

THE CHOICE OF A SUPREME END

On the contrary, those who rule their conduct by com­plete devotion to some principle tend to re-establish about them a kind of sacred environment, which excites violent emotions of a special kind that are capable of assuming a char­acteristically religious, ecstatic, fanatical, or mystical quality. On the social level, these emotions give rise directly or indi­rectly to dogmas and ritual, to mythology and worship. If con­temporary examples must be cited, it would be sufficient to point out as a type of secular liturgy, the ceremony of the eter­nal light at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe, and as a model of secular mysticism, the char­acteristic attitudes of party militants, which demand unquali­fied obedience of their members.

In a general way, the different values that elicit total dedication and that are basic to every issue have their partisans and martyrs, who serve as models for the believers. Real or legendary, most often drawn from history and exemplifying rather than engendering a mystical theme, they furnish precept and example. Stories of their lives and deaths inspire everyone and impel one to identify with them privately and, if need arises, to imitate them.

It is impossible either to trace the major trends in the history of the sacred or to analyze the forms that it assumes in contemporary civilization. At best, it can be noted that it seems to become abstract, internalized, and subjective, attached less to beings than to concepts, less to acts than to intentions, and less to external manifestations than to spiritual tendencies. This evolution is manifestly tied to the most important phe­nomena in the history of humanity—such as the emancipation of the individual, the development of his intellectual and moral autonomy, and the final triumph of the scientific ideal.

The latter is an attitude hostile to mystery, demanding sys­tematic skepticism, a deliberate lack of respect. In considering everything as an object of knowledge or a matter of experience, it leads to everything being regarded as profane, and conse­quently viewed as knowable, with the possible exception of the passion for knowledge itself. In addition, it is certain that these new conditions of the sacred have led to its assuming new forms. Thus, it invades ethics and transforms such concepts as honesty, fidelity, jus­tice, and respect for truth and promises, into absolutes. Bas­ically, everything happens as if it sufficed to make an object, being, or cause sacred, that it be dedicated and consecrated to a supreme end. One’ s time, energy, interests, and ambitions are devoted and sacrificed to its demands. One publicly attrib­utes great prestige to it and shows that he renounces the most commonly esteemed goods in its favor, those most greedily pursued and conserved. In this situation, the dichotomy of sacred and profane no longer seems bound to the concept of the order of the universe, to the rhythm of its aging and regeneration, and to the opposition between neutral or inert objects, energies that animate or destroy them, that inherently attract or repel.

It has not been able to resist the transformation of social life that has brought about the increasing independence of the individual, freeing him from every psychic constraint and protecting him from others. Moreover, the sacred persists to the degree that this liberation is incomplete, that is to say, whenever a value is imposed as a reason for being upon a com­munity and even an individual. The sacred is now revealed as a source of power and contagion.

The sacred remains whatever stimulates respect, fear, and trust. It is imbued with power yet involves existence. It always appears as that which separates man from his fellow-men, re­ moves him from vulgar preoccupations, makes him win out over the obstacles and dangers that most beset him. It intro­ duces him into a harsh world. His instinct is to flee the sacred, even while attracted to it. In that world, the rule is no longer to preserve achieved status or to keep any status permanent. Stability is no longer regarded as the highest good, nor are moderation, prudence, or conformity to established usage re­garded as among the highest virtues. Security, comfort, a good reputation, and honor are no longer deemed as most desirable advantages.

In fact, the profane attitude always implies a kind of ab­dication. It restrains man from the wanton gratification of his desires. It diverts him from using his mind wastefully, and places him on guard against perilous and ruinous instincts that incite him to countless expenditures. At the same time, it surrounds such insatiable heroes as Faust or Don Juan— who dared to assume these decisive risks, braving the infernal powers, or entering into a pact with them—with a halo of prestige.

These mythical figures, exemplars of destiny, live in the imagination as concrete symbols of the kind of grandeur and perdition reserved for those who violate taboos and are im­ moderate in feeling, intelligence, and desire. These damned ones have been lost by their very intrepidity. Theirs is the glory of not having accepted any divine or human limitation when it was a question of satisfying one of the unquenchable appetites of feeling, knowing, and dominating. These were condemned by Saint Paul, who referred to them as libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, and libido dominandi.

To these three lusts, there are no comparably opposing taboos. The latter are only an obstacle, a kind of challenge that exists only as a function of the courage that sets it off. What makes these ambitions their true and worthy counter­part are the inverted ambitions, such as the renunciation of sanctity, the joyous acceptance of chastity, ignorance, and obe­dience, the desire to feel nothing, to have nothing, to acquire nothing, even to desire nothing, and the taste for giving in place of the taste for taking. Thus, everywhere in the profane environment of conservation and economy, outside of every rite and every external manifestation, the fundamental am­biguity of the sacred is rediscovered. The dreaded world of sacrilegious conquests and the blessed world of sanctifying abandon are both consecrated by an equal disdain for the common condition, by a similar basic dissatisfaction, to which beatitude or damnation alone can put an end.

TIME AND DESTINY

Without doubt, it is out of place to outline the meta­physics of the sacred in ending this work, but at least, it can be indicated at what point the antagonism of the sacred and the profane is identified with the cosmic interaction that, in order to form future or past, to give life to being, comprises stability and variation, inertia and movement, mass and force, matter and energy. The nature of these oppositions involves more than their content. The relationships of solidarity and collaboration that they establish between the terms they simul­taneously dissociate and associate are more significant than the way in which they are or are not conceived. Through the diversity of appearances, the continuity of the universe seems to result from the combination of the poles of obstacle and ef­fort that can never be perfectly isolated. It is impossible to last without wear and tear or loss, and impossible to become motionless. To be so, it would be necessary not to live but to be as the “sleepers” in stories, deep in a magic sleep during which others grow old and are transformed, but from which they awaken, identically as they were, to a world they no longer recognize. They are no longer part of a world of meta­morphosis, simple expenditures, and total activity. This can not occur without lassitude, scars, or nostalgia for annihila­tion, this taste of fatigue and death that victory and the exalta­tion of triumph convey.

It would not be difficult to find, in the organic, and even the inorganic world, this solidarity of death and life, of the resistance seeking to paralyze all effort and the effort seeking to annihilate all resistance. However, it becomes exhausted by its very success, by the fact that in evolving action it also develops a force that checks it. The laws of biology, chemistry, and physics offer as many examples as desired of this mech­anism on all levels of existence. Under these conditions, it is remarkable that it can be utilized as a key for the comprehen­sion of the principal problems concerning the statics and dy­namics of the sacred that have been formulated and examined in the course of this work.

The profane must be defined as the constant search for a balanced or just environment that permits living in fear and moderation without exceeding the limits of the allowable. One is content with a gilded mediocrity, which manifests the precarious collaboration of the two antithetical forces that as­ sure the perpetuation of the universe through reciprocally neutralizing each other. The departure from this tranquillity, from this place of relative calm in which stability and security are greater than elsewhere, is equivalent to the entrance of the sacred into the world. Then man is abandoned to the pursuit of the only tyrannical component that in all life calls for concerted action. That is to say, he has now already con­ sented to its loss as he takes the divine path of renunciation to the magical path of conquest, as he wishes to be saint or sor­cerer, and as he unreservedly devotes himself to these activities.

In seeking for the principles of life, the energies of the sacred, which sustains and interferes with him, the being (ob­ ject, organism, mind, or society) approaches it yet remains at a distance. The pages in which Saint Theresa of Avila de­scribes her ecstasy must be read, in this regard. If one is care­ful to ignore the expressions that are too parochially Christian, it will be seen how the confidences of the saint illustrate this paradox, how contact with the sacred inaugurates a sorrowful conflict between the intoxicating hope of definitely falling into a deep abyss and the kind of sluggishness with which the pro­fane weighs down every movement toward the sacred. Saint Theresa herself attributes this to the instinct for self-preserva­tion. Returning the being that dies to life, so that it should not die, this sluggishness seems like the exact counterpart of the ascendancy exercised by the sacred upon the profane. It always tries, for its part, to renounce time in favor of a leap to ephemeral and extravagant glory.

The sacred is what gives life and takes it away, it is the source from which it flows, and the estuary in which it is lost. But the sacred is also that which one would not know how to possess simultaneously with life. Life is wear and tear, and waste. It vainly strives to persevere and to refuse every ex­penditure so as to be preserved. Death lies in wait for it.

There is no artifice that is as good. Everything living be­ing knows or senses it. It knows the choice remaining to it. It dreads giving of itself, sacrificing itself, and is aware of thus wasting its very being. But to retain its gifts, energies, and re­sources, to use them prudently for all practical and selfish goals—as a consequence, profane—saves no one in the final analysis from decrepitude and the tomb. Everything that is not consumed rots away. Furthermore, the abiding truth of the sacred resides simultaneously in the fascination of flame and the horror of putrefaction.

From the book Man and the Sacred by Roger Caillois 

The Circus

The circus is a natural part of the traveling fair. This is a segregated society with its own costumes, pride, and laws. It comprises a population jealous of its special character, proud of its isolation, and endogamous. Its professional secrets are transmitted from father to son. As far as possible, it settles its own differences without resorting to the courts.

Lion tamers, jugglers, equestriennes, clowns, and acrobats are subjected to a rigorous discipline from infancy. All dream of perfecting their numbers to the least detail in order to assure success and— in an emergency— safety.

This closed and rigorous universe constitutes the austere side of the fair. The decisive sanction of death is necessarily present, for the lion tamer just as for the acrobat. It forms part of the tacit agreement that binds the performers and the spectators. It enters into the rules of a game that anticipates a total risk. The unanimity of circus people in refusing the net or cable that would protect them from a tragic fall speaks for itself. It is necessary  for the state to impose such safety devices against their stubborn resistance, but this falsifies the totality of the wager.

For circus people the big top represents not merely a profes­sion but a way of life, not really comparable to sports, casino, or stage for champions, gamblers, or professional actors. In the circus there is added a kind of hereditary fatalism and a much sharper break with ordinary life. Because of this, circus life, strictly speaking, cannot be regarded as synonymous with play.

And yet, two of its traditional activities are literally and sig­ nificantly associated with ilinx and mimicry. I allude to the tightrope and the universality of certain kinds of clowning.

The Tightrope

Sports is the profession corresponding to agon; a special way of courting chance is the profession or rather the denial of a profession associated with alea; and the theater is comparable to mimicry. The tightrope is the profession corresponding to ilinx. In fact, vertigo is not merely an obstacle, difficulty, or danger on the tightrope. The flying trapeze goes beyond mountain climbing, forced recourse to parachute jumping, and those oc­ cupations requiring the worker to do his job high over the earth. On the high wire, the very heart of prowess and the only aim is to master vertigo. The game consists expressly in moving through space as if the void were not fascinating, and as if no danger were involved.

An ascetic existence is necessary to obtain this supreme skill. It involves a regime of severe privation and strict continence, ceaseless exercise, continuous repetition of the same movements, and the acquisition of impeccable reflexes and faultless re­sponses. Somersaults are performed in a state bordering upon hypnosis. Supple and strong muscles and imperturbable self-control are necessary conditions. To be sure, the acrobat must calculate the effort, time, distance, and trajectory of the trapeze.

But he lives in terror of thinking of it at the decisive moment, when it nearly always has fatal consequences. It paralyzes in­ stead of aiding, at a moment when the least hesitation is dis­astrous. Consciousness is the killer. It is disturbing to his som­nambulistic infallibility and compromises the functioning of a mechanism whose extreme precision cannot tolerate doubts or regrets. The tightrope walker only succeeds if he is hypnotized by the rope, the acrobat only if he is sure enough of himself to rely upon vertigo instead of trying to resist it. Vertigo is an integral part of nature, and one controls it only in obeying it.

These games are always comparable to the exploits of the Mexi­can voladores, affirming and exemplifying the natural creativity involved in mastering ilinx. Aberrant disciplines, heroic feats accomplished to no purpose or profit, disinterested, mortally dangerous and useless, they are of merit in furnishing admirable witness, even if not generally recognized, to human perseverance, ambition, and hardiness.

Quote from the book Man, Play and Games (Roger Caillois)

Roger Caillois - The Corruption of Games

Where the problem is to enu­merate the characteristics that define the nature of play, it ap­pears to be an activity that is (1) free, (2) separate, (3) uncertain, (4) unproductive, (5) regulated, and (6) fictive, it being understood that the last two characteristics tend to ex­clude one another.

These six purely formal qualities are not clearly related to the various psychological attitudes that govern play. In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the inference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.

At this point, it may be of interest to ask what becomes of games when the sharp line dividing their ideal rules from the diffuse and insidious laws of daily life is blurred. They certainly cannot spread beyond the playing field (chess- or checkerboard, arena, racetrack, stadium, or stage) or time that is reserved for them, and which ends as inexorably as the closing of a parenthe­sis. They will necessarily have to take quite different, and on occasion doubtlessly unexpected, forms.

In addition, a strict and absolute code governs amateur players, whose prior assent seems like the very condition of their participation in an isolated and entirely conventional activity. 

But what if the convention is no longer accepted or regarded as applicable? Suppose the isolation is no longer respected? The forms or the freedom of play surely can no longer survive. All that remains is the tyrannical and compelling psychological atti­ tude that selects one kind of game to play rather than another. 

It should be recalled that these distinctive attitudes are four in number: the desire to win by one’s merit in regulated competi­tion (agon), the submission of one’s will in favor of anxious and passive anticipation of where the wheel will stop (alea), the desire to assume a strange personality (mimicry), and, finally, the pursuit of vertigo (ilinx). In agon, the player relies only upon himself and his utmost efforts; in alea, he counts on every­ thing except himself, submitting to the powers that elude him; in mimicry, he imagines that he is someone else, and he invents an imaginary universe; in ilinx, he gratifies the desire to temporarily destroy his bodily equilibrium, escape the tyranny of his ordinary perception, and provoke the abdication of conscience.

If play consists in providing formal, ideal, limited, and escapist satisfaction for these powerful drives, what happens when every convention is rejected? When the universe of play is no longer tightly closed? When it is contaminated by the real world in which every act has inescapable consequences? Corresponding to each of the basic categories there is a specific perversion which results from the absence of both restraint and protection.
The rule of instinct again becoming absolute, the tendency to interfere with the isolated, sheltered, and neutralized kind of play spreads to daily life and tends to subordinate it to its own needs, as much as possible. What used to be a pleasure becomes an obsession. What was an escape becomes an obligation, and what was a pastime is now a passion, compulsion, and source of anxiety.

The principle of play has become corrupted. It is now neces­ sary to take precautions against cheats and professional players, a unique product of the contagion of reality. Basically, it is not a perversion of play, but a sidetracking derived from one of the four primary impulses governing play. The situation is not unique. It occurs whenever the specified instinct does not en­ counter, in an appropriate game, the discipline and refuge that anchor it, or whenever it does not find gratification in the game.

The cheat is still inside the universe of play. If he violates the rules of the game, he at least pretends to respect them. He tries to influence them. He is dishonest, but hypocritical. He thus, by his attitude, safeguards and proclaims the validity of the conven­tions he violates, because he is dependent upon others obeying the rules. If he is caught, he is thrown out. The universe of play remains intact. Neither does the professional player change the nature of the game in any way. To be sure, he himself does not play, but merely practices a profession. The nature of competi­tion or the performance is hardly modified if the athletes or comedians are professionals who play for money rather than amateurs who play for pleasure. The difference concerns only the players.

For professional boxers, bicycle riders, or actors, agon or mimicry has ceased being a recreation intended as a relaxation from fatigue or a relief from the monotony of oppressive and exhausting work. It is their very work, necessary to their sub­sistence, a constant and absorbing activity, replete with obstacles and problems, from which they properly find relaxation by play­ ing at a game to which they are not contracted.
For the actor also, a theatrical performance is mere simula­tion. He puts on make-up and costume, plays and recites. But when the curtain falls, and the lights go on, he returns to reality. 

The separation of the two universes remains absolute. For the professional bicycle rider, tennis or football player also, the con­test, match, and track remain regulated and formal competition. 

As soon as the contest ends, the audience runs for the exit. The champion returns to his routine responsibilities, where he must protect his interests, devise and apply a strategy that will assure him a successful future. As soon as he leaves the stadium, velodrome, or ring, the perfect and precise rivalries in which he has pitted his strength under conditions as artificial as possi­ble give way to rivalries that are formidable in quite another way. The latter are insidious, incessant, and implacable, and permeate all of life. Life, the comedian off the stage, is now again part of the common lot, removed from the closed-off space and the privileged time ruled by the strict, gratuitous, and indisputable laws of play.

Outside of the arena, after the gong strikes, begins the true perversion of agon, the most pervasive of all the categories. It appears in every conflict untempered by the rigor or spirit of play. Now competition is nothing but a law of nature. In society it resumes its original brutality, as soon as it finds a loophole in the system of moral, social, and legal constraints, which have limits and conventions comparable to those of play. That is why mad, obsessive ambition, applied to any domain in which the rules of the game and free play are not respected, must be de­ nounced as a clear deviation which in this case restores the original situation. There is no better example of the civilizing role of play than the inhibitions it usually places upon natural avidity. A good player must be able to contemplate with ob­jectivity, detachment, and at least an appearance of calm, the unlucky results of even the most sustained effort or the loss of large sums. The referee’s decision is accepted in principle even if unjust. The corruption of agon begins at the point where no referee or decision is recognized.

In games of chance, there is a comparable corruption of the principle as soon as the player ceases to respect chance, that is, when he no longer views the laws of chance as impersonal neutral power, without heart or memory, a purely mechanical effect. With superstition, the corruption of alea is born. It is indeed tempting for one who submits to fate to try to predict the outcome, or at least influence it in his favor. The player finds special significance in all kinds of phenomena, encounters, and omens, which he imagines to be forebodings of good or bad luck. He looks for talismans that will protect him most effica­ciously. He abstains from anything unlucky, as revealed by dreams, forebodings, or presentiments. Finally, in order to be rid of unlucky influences, he indulges in various magical prac­tices.

Such an attitude is only aggravated by games of chance. It is found to be quite prevalent, even if subconscious. It is not re­stricted to the habitues of casinos or racetracks and the pur­chasers of lottery tickets. The regular publication of horoscopes by daily and weekly newspapers transforms each day and each week into a kind of promise or menace for their readers, who are thus kept in suspense by the heavens and the dark powers of the stars. These horoscopes most often reveal the daily lucky num­ber for readers born under the different signs of the Zodiac. Each one can then buy the lottery tickets corresponding to these num­bers: some ending with that number, some in which that number is contained several times, and some with a succession of numbers that add up to it— thus applicable to all to some degree.1 0 It is significant that the most popular and most obvious superstition of this type is directly associated with games of chance. And yet it must be admitted that it is not limited to games of chance.

Upon waking up in the morning, everyone is supposed to find himself winning or losing in a gigantic, ceaseless, gratuitous, and inevitable lottery which will determine his general coefficient of success or failure for the next twenty-four hours. Decisions, new enterprises, and love affairs are all considered. The astrologer is careful to point out that the influence of the stars is exerted within quite variable limits, so that the oversimplified prophecy could scarcely turn out to be entirely false. To be sure, the reac­tion of the majority of the public is to smile at such puerile pre­dictions. But it still reads them. And more important, it keeps on reading them. At this point, many begin reading the astrological section of their newspaper. It seems that newspapers with large circulations do not readily risk depriving their readers of this satisfaction, the importance or prevalence of which should not be underestimated.

The more credulous are not content with the summary articles in papers and general magazines. They have recourse to special­ized periodicals. In Paris, one of these has a circulation of more than 100,000. The adept often visit a fortuneteller with some regularity. The figures are quite revealing: 100,000 Parisians consult 6,000 diviners, seers, or fortunetellers daily. According to the Institut national de Statistique, 34 billion francs are spent annually in France on astrologers, magicians, and other frauds. 

In the United States, for astrology alone, a 1953 investigation counted 30,000 professional establishments, twenty specialized magazines with a circulation of 500,000 readers, and 2,000 periodicals that publish horoscopes. It was estimated that $200 million are spent annually for no other purpose than seeking answers from the stars— this not including other methods of divination.

Numerous indications of the association between games of chance and divination are easily found. One of the most con­ spicuous and immediate is that the very same cards used by players in trying their luck may also be used by prophets to pre­dict the future. Seers only use special games in order to enhance their prestige. Ordinary dinner plates may be used, newly in­ scribed with naive legends, impressive illustrations, or traditional allegories. At every point there is a quite natural transition from chance to superstition.
As for the avarice today observed in the pursuit of good for­tune, it probably compensates for the continuous tension in­volved in modern competition. Whoever despairs of his own resources is led to trust in destiny. Excessively rigorous com­petition discourages the timid and tempts them to rely on ex­ternal powers. By studying and utilizing heavenly powers over chance, they try to get the reward they doubt can be won by their own qualities, by hard work and steady application. Rather than persist in thankless labor, they ask the cards or the stars to warn them of the propitious moment for the success of their enterprises.

Superstition therefore seems to be a perversion, i.e. the appli­cation to reality of one of the principles of play, alea, which causes one to expect nothing of himself and leaves all to chance. 

The corruption of mimicry follows a parallel course. It is pro­duced when simulation is no longer accepted as such, when the one who is disguised believes that his role, travesty, or mask is real. He no longer plays another. Persuaded that he is the other, he behaves as if he were, forgetting his own self. The loss of his real identity is a punishment for his inability to be content with merely playing a strange personality. It is properly called aliena­tion.

Here, too, play is a protection from danger. The actor’s role is sharply defined by the dimensions of the stage and the dura­tion of the spectacle. Once he leaves the magic area, the fantasy ends and the most vainglorious histrionics and the most eloquent performances are brutally constrained by the very necessity of passing from the dressing-room of the theater to the resumption of his own personality. Applause is not merely approval and re­ward. It marks the end of illusion and play. The masked ball ends at dawn and the carnival is only for a short time. The costume is returned to the store or the wardrobe. The old per­sonality is restored. The sharp limits of play prevent alienation.
Alienation occurs toward the end of profound and continuous labor. It takes place when there is no sharp dividing line between fantasy and reality, when the subject has gradually donned a second, chimerical, and all-pervasive personality which claims exorbitant rights with respect to a reality with which it is of necessity incompatible. The time arrives when the alienated one — who has become another— tries desperately to deny, subdue, or destroy this new self, which strongly resists, and which he regards as inadmissible, inconceivable, and irksome.

It is remarkable that in agon, alea, and mimicry, the intensity of play may be the cause of the fatal deviation. The latter always results from contamination by ordinary life. It is produced when the instinct that rules play spreads beyond the strict limits of time and place, without previously agreed-to rules. It is permissi­ble to play as seriously as desired, to be extremely extravagant, to risk an entire fortune, even life itself, but the game must stop at a preordained time so that the player may resume ordinary responsibilities, where the liberating and isolating rules of play no longer are applicable.

Competition is a law of modem life. Taking risks is no longer contradictory to reality. Simulation also has a role, as in the case of confidence men, spies, and fugitives. As a compensation, vertigo is almost absent except for those rare professions in which the task is to control it. The risk of sudden death is also present. At fairs, special precautions are taken to avoid acci­dents on the various rides that stimulate vertigo artificially. Acci­dents nevertheless happen even on equipment designed and con­structed to assure complete safety to the users, through having undergone careful periodic checks. Physical vertigo, an extreme condition depriving the patient of protection, is as difficult to attain as it is dangerous to experience. That is why the search for unconsciousness and distortion of perception, in order to spread into daily life, must assume forms very different from those ob­served on contraptions that gyrate, speed, fall, or propel and which were devised to stimulate vertigo in the closed and pro­tected world of play.

 These costly, complex, cumbersome installations are scarce except for amusement parks in capitals or when erected periodi­cally by traveling carnivals. In their very atmosphere, they be­long to the universe of play. In addition, the thrills they provide correspond point for point to the definition of play: they are brief, intermittent, calculated, and as discrete as games or suc­cessive encounters. And finally, they remain independent of the real world. Their influence is limited to the duration of the ride.

It stops as soon as the machine stops and leaves no trace in the rider except for his being fleetingly stunned until his usual equi­ librium is restored.

To adapt vertigo to daily life, it is necessary to substitute am­biguous chemical power for clear-cut physical effects. The de­sired stimulus or sensuous panic, which is brutally and brusquely provided by the amusements at a fair, is now sought in drugs or alcohol. But this time the whirling is no longer outside or separate from reality. It is imbedded and generated there. If this intoxication and euphoria can temporarily destroy clarity of vision and motor coordination, free one from the burden of memory and from the terrors of social responsibilities and pressures, just as in the case of physical vertigo, nevertheless its influence does not cease with the passing of the seizure. The organism is slowly but permanently changed. Given a permanent need, there is created an unbearable anxiety. This is in complete contrast to play, which is always contingent and gratuituous activity. Through intoxication, the pursuit of vertigo makes increasing inroads into reality, all the more extensive and per­nicious in that it creates a dependency which constantly presses against the threshold across which the desired disorder is found.

Even on this point, the case of insects is instructive. They find a source of pleasure in games of vertigo, illustrated by the whirling mania of whirligig-beetles which transform the surface of the quietest pond into a silvery carousel, if not by moths flitting about a flame. Yet insects, especially the social insects, also exhibit the “corruption of vertigo” in the form of an intoxi­cation that has disastrous consequences.

Thus, one of the most prevalent types of ant, Formica sanguinea, greedily licks up the fragrant exudates of rich ether secreted by the abdominal glands of a small coleopterous insect called Lochemusa strumosa. The ants place its larvae into their nests, feeding them so meticulously that they neglect their own young. Soon the larvae of Lochemusa devour the ants’ offspring. 

The ant queens, badly cared for, will no longer give birth to any but sterile females. The anthill dies and disappears. Formica fusca, which in a free state kills the Lochemusae, spares them when it is enslaved by Formica sanguinea. To indulge its taste for fragrant grease, it permits Atemeles emarginatus, which is no less a peril to its safety, to enter its hive. Moreover, it will de­stroy this parasite if it is enslaved by Formica rufa, which does not tolerate the parasite. Thus, it is not a case of irresistible attraction, but of a kind of vice that can disappear under certain circumstances. Servitude, in particular, sometimes stimulates it, and sometimes makes it resistible. The masters impose their habits upon the slaves.20 These are not isolated cases of voluntary intoxication. An­ other species of ant, lridomyrmex sanguineus of Queensland, seeks the caterpillars of a small grey moth in order to drink the intoxicating liquid they exude. The ants press the juice flesh of these larvae with their mandibles in order to extract the liquid. 

When they have drained one caterpillar, they move on to an­ other. It is unfortunate that the larvae devour the eggs of lridomyrmex. Sometimes the insect that produces the fragrant exudate “is aware of” its power and entices the ant to its vice. 

The caterpillar of Lycaena arion, studied by Chapman and Frohawk, is provided with a sac of honey. When it encounters a worker of the species Myrmica laevinodis, it raises the anterior segments of its body, inviting the ant to transport it to its nest. 

There it feeds on the larvae of Myrmica. The latter has no inter­est in the caterpillar during the periods in which it does not produce any honey. Lastly, a Javanese hemipter, Ptilocerus ochraceus, described by Kirkaldy and Jacobson, has in the middle of its ventral side a gland containing a toxic liquid which it offers to ants that are partial to it. They hasten to lick it up at once. The liquid paralyzes them, and they thus become an easy prey for Ptilocerus.' The aberrant behavior of ants does not prove the existence of instincts harmful to the species, as has been maintained. It proves rather that the irresistible attraction for a paralyzing sub­stance may neutralize the most powerful instincts, particularly the instinct for self-preservation which causes the individual ant to guard its safety and directs it to protect and feed its offspring.

The ants, so to speak, “forget” everything because of the drug. They behave most disastrously, submitting themselves or aban­ doning their eggs and larvae to the enemy.
In an oddly analogous way, the stupidity and drunkenness produced by alcohol lead man down a road where he is insidi­ously and irrevocably destroyed. In the end, deprived of the freedom to desire anything but his poison, he is left a prey to chronic organic disorder, far more dangerous than the physical vertigo which at least only momentarily compromises his ca­pacity to resist the fascination of oblivion.

As for ludus and paidia, which are not categories of play but ways of playing, they pass into ordinary life as invariable op­posites, e.g. the preference for cacaphony over a symphony, scribbling over the wise application of the laws of perspective. 

Their continuous opposition arises from the fact that a con­certed enterprise, in which various expendable resources are well utilized, has nothing in common with purely disordered move­ment for the sake of paroxysm.

What we set out to analyze was the corruption of the princi­ples of play, or preferably, their free expansion without check or convention. It was shown that such corruption is produced in identical ways. It entails consequences which seem to be in­ ordinately serious. Madness or intoxication may be sanctions that are disproportionate to the simple overflow of one of the play instincts out of the domain in which it can spread without irreparable harm. In contrast, the superstitions engendered by deviation from alea seem benign. Even more, when the spirit of competition freed from rules of equilibrium and loyalty is added to unchecked ambition, it seems to be profitable for the daring one who is abandoned to it. Moreover, the temptation to guide one’s behavior by resort to remote powers and magic symbols in automatically applying a system of imaginary correspondences does not aid man to exploit his basic abilities more efficiently.
He becomes fatalistic. He becomes incapable of deep appreci­ation of relationships between phenomena. Perseverance and trying to succeed despite unfavorable circumstances are dis­couraged.

Transposed to reality, the only goal of agon is success. The rules of courteous rivalry are forgotten and scorned. They seem merely irksome and hypocritical conventions. Implacable com­petition becomes the rule. Winning even justifies foul blows. If the individual remains inhibited by fear of the law or public opinion, it nonetheless seems permissible, if not meritorious, for nations to wage unlimited ruthless warfare.

Various restrictions on violence fall into disuse. Operations are no longer limited to frontier provinces, strongholds, and military objectives. They are no longer conducted according to a strategy that once made war itself resemble a game. War is far removed from the tournament or duel, i.e. from regulated combat in an enclosure, and now finds its fulfillment in massive destruction and the massacre of entire populations.

Any corruption of the principles of play means the abandon­ment of those precarious and doubtful conventions that it is always permissible, if not profitable, to deny, but the arduous adoption of which is a milestone in the development of civiliza­tion. If the principles of play in effect correspond to powerful instincts (competition, chance, simulation, vertigo), it is readily understood that they can be positively and creatively gratified only under ideal and circumscribed conditions, which in every case prevail in the rules of play. Left to themselves, destructive and frantic as are all instincts, these basic impulses can hardly lead to any but disastrous consequences. Games discipline in­ stincts and institutionalize them. For the time that they afford formal and limited satisfaction, they educate, enrich, and im­munize the mind against their virulence. At the same time, they are made fit to contribute usefully to the enrichment and the establishment of various patterns of culture.

from the book Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois