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From Pantheon to Presley: Changes in Urban Symbolism
Publication Date:199203
Book title: MEDIA, CULTURE, AND EDUCATION IN JAPAN [A COLLECTION OF PAPERS]
Publisher : National Institute of Multimedia Education
The people of the Shang dynasty China (1400 B.C.), especially its priests, wrote questions pertaining to all affairs of life on a piece of animal bone, burned it in a fire, and read the resulting oracle through the patterns of cracks, which appeared on the surface of the bone. Among many other questions, archeologists found that the people of Shang often asked Heaven about the building of a new city. The question was written as "The making of a city. Does Heaven approve?" Only when the divination from Heaven was positive would people start to build a city-state; a city-state with the support of Heaven could enjoy prosperity and security.
At the center of a city-state of Shang, there was the shrine of a King's ancestor, and many offerings and sacrifices were dedicated there. The King of a Shang city-state was supposed to be a descendant of Heaven, and, therefore, was called "son of Heaven. " The worship of Heaven was synonymous with ancestor worship, and the ancestor-god was the guardian god of a Shang city.
Quite similar developments of cities are found in other parts of the world. For instance, a "Tel" (city) of ancient Sumer was essentially the place where the guardian god of the Tel resided. Ur was the city of Nannu, the moon god; Uruk was the city dominated by goddess Ishtar; and the god of air, Enlil, who was the central figure in Sumerian mythology, had his temple in the city of Nippur. The entire Sumerian civilization can be seen as one great pantheon. Vast numbers of offerings were presented at each temple to console its god, and every city was supposed to be the property of its god. The secular ruler of the city, called Enki, was nothing more than the obedient agent of the guardian god, acting at his instruction, as interpreted by the priest class.
In the case of ancient Egypt, there was no temple-city similar to Sumer or Shang, but it may be safe to say that pyramids, which each Pharaoh commenced constructing at the time of his enthronement, were special types of "cities, " because each Pharaoh established his office near the pyramid into which he would enter after his death, thus temporarily establishing the Egyptian capital at each pyramid site.
The emergence and function of the cities in Greco-Roman civilization also were extremely religious and mythological. Greek cities, needless to say, were the headquarters of gods who were worshipped as the symbolic guardian spirits of each city. Delphi was th city of Apollo, Ephesus belonged to Artemis, and Cyprus was the seat of Aphrodite. Of course, Zeus, the highest among the Greek gods resided on Mount Olympus, the great home of all the deities. Each individual household worshipped Vesta, a goddess of fire, Penates, the family gods, and so forth. The head of a family conducted religious rituals every morning as a token of respect to such gods. These same deities presided over Roman cities.
The historical situation was quite similar in Japan. Japanese urban civilization emerged in the early 6th century as the result of the conscious efforts of Princess Shotoku, who built Shitennoji and Horyuji. Beginning with the establishment of these Buddhist temples, urban culture flourished in the Nara basin. Before Emperor Genmei announced the official inauguration of the city of Nara, priests had made divinations regarding the direction and location of the city, and the Emperor followed the old rituals of the Shang and Chou dynasties of China in selecting the site. A number of temples were near the new city site--such as Kofukuji, Yakushiji, and Horyuji--and, to commemorate the new capital, a now-famous, gigantic sculpture of Buddha was constructed. The city of Nara prospered as a cathedral city, a perfect example of the fact that ancient Japanese cities emerged with Buddhist temples. Indeed, as Arnold Toynbee said, "Every city--or it might be more accurate to say, every city before the present age of mechanization--has been, among other things, a holy city in some degree."
In these ancient holy cities, the lives of inhabitants were full of religious rituals and ceremonies. Dionysia, for example, was a festival initiated in Athens in the 6th century B. C. As the name indicates, its purpose was to entertain Dionysius, and as a part of the entertainment, competitive performances of tragedy and comedy were staged. The citizens of the cities of Greece and Rome were able to maintain spiritual solidarity with the gods through their participation in the festivals such as this, which formed the origin of the theatrical arts in the West.
In his interesting book, Magic, Myth, and Money, William Desmonde points out that the sacrificial bull offered to deities in Greek cities had to be shared by all citizens of the community, and only citizens were allowed a "ration" out of the sacrificial bull. Sports in Greece, also, were dedicated to holy gods, and the winners of the events were toasted with a cup of blood extracted from the sacrificial bull. The trophy cup which is the prize in many athletic competitions today obviously is a continuation of this tradition.
In Rome, too, similar religious rituals were observed. In the policy decisions of Rome, priests and augurs who made divinations through bird-watching played an important role, and all the sports events on the holy days had as their primary purpose the entertainment of deities,. In the early stage of the Roman Republic, there were 66 holy days; toward the end of the Empire, there were 135.
The people of Shang also dedicated their whole lives to their ancestor spirits. A joint feast of gods and men was held on all ceremonial occasions, and the people shared the sacrificed bull, cereals, and wine offered at the shrine after the ceremony. Recent archeological research revealed that both music and dancing were offered along with food and drink in Shang cities, and such festive ceremonies became more sophisticated during the Chou dynasty.
Ancient Japan was no exception. According to Kunio Yamagata, a folklorist, the verb "matsyru" (to worship) is akin to another verb "matsurau," meaning "to be at the service of . . . . " The implication is that man's worship consists of service to the gods. On every special occasion men shared their meals with gods. Yamagata said,". . . in Japanese festivals, the way to entertain gods has been quite similar to the way to host the very important human guest--at the meal time, the best food and drink are prepared with extra care, and men tried their best to prolong the pleasant hours for the guest." People gathered around the fire and exchanged wine cups with the gods. In Greece and Rome, music and sports were presented in front of a shrine to entertain the gods. In Japan, Sumo, or Japanese wrestling, originated as a ceremonial sport at the shrines.
Whether these similarities in the city life of East and West were the result of cultural diffusion or independent parallel development may be an interesting historical and anthropological question. But the important thing here is that in many areas of the world cities have been perceived by human beings as inseparable from superhuman deities. A city belonged to its god, and the citizens of that city were the servants of his temple. The integration as well as reorganization of ancient cities resulted from holy efforts. For instance, Enlil, the master deity of Sumer, was amalgamated with Marduk, the almighty god of Babylonia, and became Bel-Marduk when Babylonia was unified by Hammurabi. The unification of the Babylonian people took place because gods of the city states had decided to be unified. The secular world was only an expression of the heavenly worlds inhabited by the gods.
As we have seen, the people of cities were in constant touch with the gods by means of priests' mediations or joint feasts. This process was more than "communication" between human beings and deities: it was a holy communion. And to be a citizen in an ancient city was to be continuously in holy communion with the guardian deity of the city.
It is clear, then, that one of the basic historical characteristics of cities, both in the East and West, was the fact that they were established by gods as sacred places and operated as sacred places. Of course, there were many other functions in a city; commercial, industrial, and educational functions were also important. But among these functions, religious ones were fundamental, and the architecture of every ancient city demonstrates its religious nature through pantheons, temples, and shrines.
A good example is the city of Cologne. In the middle of the 13th century, this city, with a population of 25,000, decided to build the greatest church in the world. It was a fantastic idea. But the people of Cologne started the construction in the 15th century, and for a period of four hundred years, they worked continuously. Petrarch visited the city at the very early phase of construction and was skeptical that the ambitious project would be completed, but when Goethe visited the same spot 400 years later, he saw that the church was almost completed.
At last, in 1842, the Cathedral was accomplished. Even today, a traveller along the Rhine can see the gigantic building from a distance of 10 miles and in the city, the Cathedral overwhelmingly dominates the whole area. As the developmental map of Cologne prepared by Schneider shows, the history of the city has been integrally tied to the successive construction of churches. The city grew with the increase in the number and size of church towers. It has been a well-known historical fact that Greeks did not pay much attention to the style of their own residences, yet they worked hard on their pantheons. The enthusiasm of the citizens of Cologne in the past reminds us of classic Greek devotion to deities.
Not only in Cologne, but also in many cities of medieval Europe, the citizens displayed a great zeal for jumbo-size cathedrals. The people of Ulm, in the mountains of southern Germany, worked five hundred years for their church, and finally succeeded in building the highest church tower in the world(161 meters--5 meters higher than the one in Cologne). Similar religious towers and cathedrals are found among Islamic and Buddhist cultures, too. In Japan, the time and energy devoted to such fantastic temples of Kyoto as Toji or Chionin are beyond any realistic measure.
Of course, the world's great religious architectural structures--from pyramids to the Toji temple--were designed and financed by the ruling class of the day, and it is true that people of the cities were exploited through taxes and their labor for the construction projects. But at the same time, it should be noted that a cathedral had an absolute symbolic and spiritual value to the minds of these city dwellers, and they were really happy to participate in such great ventures. Just until yesterday in the history of mankind, a city was the place for communion, rather than communication. At least every historical city evolved out of such holy communion with the gods.
As we have seen already, in Rome, there were up to 135 "holy days" a year, and each "holy day" was filled with particular ceremonial events; indeed, according to D. Jame's historical account , the earlier calendar of Rome was nothing but a list of these festivals.
For example, in Rome, since before the days of Caesar, March was the beginning of the year, and the month was dedicated to Mars. To entertain this great god of war , chariot races were held at Campus Martius, north of the city of Rome. A parade of armored warriors was another major event of the month.
The 21st of April in Rome was a holy day called Parilia, a day for purification of the pasture and animals at the beginning of the spring season. Farmers washed their livestock as well as themselves with water, and swept the floors of their barns with laurel trees. Sulphur was burned with olive leaves, and the smoke was poured over the animals for purification. Cakes, cereals, and milk were offered to Pales, the pastoral goddess, and after such offerings were made, animals were released over the pastures. When all these complicated rituals were completed, farmers were assured of good fortune and a good harvest that year. Romulus later assimilated this festival into the city life of Rome as the founding day of the city.
On the 9th, 11th, and 13th of May--the Lemuria--the evil spirits of the dead came back to the earth, and in order to avoid them, Romans had to follow subtle rituals. First of all, the head of each family had to rise very early in the morning, wash his hands, and walk around the house in his bare feet, throwing beans over his shoulder, without looking behind him. Then he washed his hand again, and all of a sudden made a loud noise. The evil ghost would disappear as the result of such rituals.
Every holy day of Rome was accompanied by very intricate procedures through which people displayed their respect and goodwill toward the deities. A holy day, in other words, was a day which man devoted to his gods.
The situation was identical in Japan. One good example is the Gion Festival of Kyoto. Historical documents show that this festival, a ceremony performed for the god of the Yasaka Shrine, originated in 869 A. D. by order of the Emperor to drive away an epidemic which had attacked the city. The priest of the shrine performed a special prayer to drive the evil spirit of disease into a pond in the center of the city. In the 10th century the Imperial court added horse races and music to the festival ritual, thus making it one of the major annual events of Kyoto. The holy day tradition still exists in the city. Every year, millions of people gather to celebrate the festival, and most of the local businesses, including banks, are closed. The shrine also is famous for its New Year's festival, known as Okera. In former times, every household of the city was supposed to visit the shrine at midnight on December 31st to obtain the holy fire produced at the shrine and to cook the ceremonial meal of the New Year's day by the fire. Even in recent years, more than one million people would came to the shrine with match-cords in their hands so that they could bring holy fire back to their kitchens. The solidarity of the citizens of the city was achieved through everybody sharing the same holy fire of the city god. Festivals of the city were socially defined in the West, as Max Weber points out, the basic life style of the protestant ethic was "pray and work." Sundays were the days for prayer, and the hours were sacred.
The "holy day" tradition, however, has become transformed gradually since the medieval period. According to Kunio Yanagita, the decisive change in the meaning of Japanese festivals took place with the emergence of "spectators." For example, in the festivals of Japanese shrine, every inhabitant of the city used to participate in the ceremonial occasions. The Mikoshi, a mobile shrine, had to be carried by the hands of the citizens, and everybody had to visit the shrine to pay his respects to the deities. These were the imperatives imposed upon members of any city. However, over the years, a new group of people emerged; the "spectators." The spectators were outsiders to the festival, and therefore, to the community. They came to festive occasions not to be involved in communion, but to have fun at the festivities of the urban life.
As Weber further notes, the shift from "participation" to "spectator-ship" may be defined as the "secularization" of " holy days." Religious festivals began to lose their significance and become secular entertainment. A "holy day" became a "holiday" in the contemporary sense. The more the cities developed, the less the religious functions of the cities were felt by the people, and finally the basic integrating process in the city life--communion--became forgotten, Significantly, in ancient cities, the temple was located in the center of a city, with commercial and industrial areas often in the peripheral sections; but the priority has reversed both in the East and West. Handlin has said that this reversal took place in western Europe after the 16th century. Now the center of a city is dominated by commercial firms and banks, and traditional churches and temples are sandwiched by the bigger new office buildings. In Frankfurt, many traditional "holy days" of the city were observed until the 18th century, but with the rapid industrialization most of the festivals just disappeared. "Holy days" were transformed into "holidays" or "leisure," and "holy events" became "entertainments."
If we reflect on the history of our contemporary public "leisure" activities and "entertainments," we are struck by the fact that they have, without exception, religious origins. According to Reuel Denney, football in England developed from religious competitions between communities; as we have seen, Japanese Sumo also came from sacred sports. Kabuki, Japanese traditional art, was founded in the 17th century by a woman named Okuni, who originally was a shaman attached to Izumo shrine. She secularized her talent and attracted spectators to the city of Kyoto. Horse racing, a universal spectator game, needless to say, has another religious origin and music in general has been religious, too.
Indeed, Western music until the Baroque period was essentially church music, and even the composers of the Romantic and Impressionist era did not forget to write church music.
Commerce is another area connected with sacred events. Both in the East and West, the market place originated at religious festivals. Even today, Ennichi--temporary, small retail shops--are open in the yards of Japanese temples and shrines; the term "Ennichi" simply means "holy day market."
Probably the most striking example of the shift from sacred events to leisure activities is the changes that have taken place in traveling. For instance, take some of the temples of Kyoto. As was discussed earlier, some shrines of the city were the residences of local city deities, but some others, such as Honganji or Myoshinji, have been the headquarters of various Buddhist sects with nation-wide organizations of memberships which reached millions. The fact that the headquarters is there means that the members of the sect should visit the temple at least once in their lifetime. Since the 15th century, the Buddhist worshippers belonging to such sects have tried their best to come to their headquarters temples in Kyoto.
For a while, a trip to Kyoto was a sacred pilgrimage. But historically speaking, the period during which people traveled purely because of religious motivation was extremely short; the visit to the city quickly came to mean "fun" for most of the people. Of course, upon their arrival in Kyoto, they visited the temple. But after they finished their rituals, they came to spend more time on sightseeing, and a reversal of the goals-and-means relationship took place. In the earlier stage, the sightseeing part of the travel was permissible pleasure which came with religious pilgrimages. But soon, the pleasure became the major purpose of travel. People traveled to Kyoto for fun, and, in that context, the visit to the temple was a good means of justifying it. The temple visit, indeed, was a psychological compensation for the feeling of guilt at having pleasure and fun. In the case of the Yasaka shrine, for instance, though its Gion festival was a religious occasion, as soon as the shrine became famous, it became surrounded by entertainment facilities. Today, Gion, the name of the neighborhood of the shrine, is associated with a prosperous amusement zone with hundreds of teahouses. Very few people would associate Gion with the shrine and practically nobody knows the name of the god and all the historical and religious background of the shrine.
The secularization of holy experiences has been going on with amazing speed. The places of worship have been transformed into objects of sightseeing and holy days have become holidays. The quality of the time-space relationship in cities has completely changed. A visit to any cathedral in the world--Notre Dame of Paris Canterbury Cathedral, the Temple of Dawn in Bangkok, or Chionin of Kyoto--would be sufficient to see the changes in sacred time and space in the past two hundred years. Of course there are still monks, priests, and other people of holy professions in these holy places. There has been no change in their service in the cathedral in the past several hundred years. Changes have taken place, however, in the nature of people who visit the famous cathedrals. A few hundred years ago, the people who went to a church or temple were those who participated in sacred services. But today, most of the people inside the church are tourists poured out of guided city tour buses. They take pictures of each other in the church yard, with the gigantic architecture as their background, and they are approached by many vendors who try to sell small souvenir items of the holy place. The cathedral is not a place of communion, but a place of petty commerce in postcards and tiny replicas of religious icons.
While most of the tourists are happy merely to see the cathedrals and to take pictures of their pleasant tour, there remains an ambiguity in their minds. On the one hand, the sacred places are perceived as "something to see," but on the other, they are still regarded as somehow sacred, regardless of their affiliation or non-affiliation with particular religious sects. This ambiguity gives people an uneasy psychological experience, which perhaps forms the basis for certain continuities in the sacred timespace complex which can be seen in contemporary cities. One example of this is the architectural style of the central part of many cities.
Take a five minute walk in the center of a city, practically any city in the world, and you will find that the major governmental buildings such as government departments, courts, the capitol, as well as financial buildings such as banks, are built exactly following Greco-Roman style. Wide and dignified steps in front of the buildings, Ionian or Dorian pillars surrounding the buildings, decorative sculpture of deities, Latin inscriptions--these form the standard and universal architectural style adopted for the central buildings of the cities, at least until the 1950s. And interestingly enough, such a style has been adopted even in countries like Japan, which has no Greco-Roman tradition.
Money reveals another continuity. According to Desmonde, the origin of coins can be traced back to Greek city-states where people inscribed the image of a sacrificial bull on a piece of metal, and he notes that with the secularizing trend of the Roman period, the sacred bull image was replaced by the image of great power symbols such as Julius Caesar. This ancient symbolism has persisted in money, even though economic systems have become more complex. Indeed, Desmonde said, in reference to an aspect of the monetary symbolism of today; ". . .we can notice upon one side of the five-dollar bill a picture of Abraham Lincoln, partially framed in two sprays of wheat, and on the other side a depiction of Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C. This. . .is in the architectural style of the Greek temple. Surrounding the building are thirty-six columns, surmounted by state seals. . . . On the pedestals alongside the steps in front of the memorial are tripods holding a bowl, and dimly under the great pillars we can make out Lincoln himself, seated in majestic pose."
The sprays of wheat, needless to say, have been the symbol of "prosperity of the land" since the time of Greece, and the bowl in front of the monument is an exact replica of the "paterae" used to hold sacrifices. As we have seen, Greek citizens shared their sacrificial bull through this utensil. The United States, while it has historically shown other discontinuities from Greco-Roman tradition, certainly has inherited a successor of Greek style. As a matter of fact, the Capitol building is more similar to the Greek Pantheon than to any architecture in American style.
It is quite probable that the heroes after the time of Caesar were the new gods of each city, society, and period. It may not be too rude to say that, in spite of all obvious differences, there is little psychological distance between the people who worshipped the Big Buddha of Nara ten centuries ago and the contemporary Americans who have looked up to the statue of Lincoln in his memorial as a symbol of national unity.
The cities of the world seem to have been very conscientiously replacing old gods with the new. For example, we notice many new sacred memorials in such big cities as Paris or London. The Arch of Triumph in the center of Paris is a memorial, again following Roman tradition, to commemorate Napoleon Bonaparte. There are the Revolution Memorial, Republic Memorial, National Plaza, statues of Henri 4 and Joan of Arc, and numerous other memorial objects in the city. In London, Admiral Nelson looks down on Trafalgar Square, and the Marble Arch is at a corner of Hyde Park. Not only these two cities, but also most of the cities in the world in the modern period have been building new memorials and towers, and this process may be seen as the metamorphosis of "sacredness," if not religion.
Modern cities of Japan have not been exceptions. Tokyo, which emerged as the new capital of Japan in the middle of the 19th century, especially has been trying to establish new sacred place, following the models of western Europe. The Yasukuni shrine was built to commemorate the souls of those who died in the successive wars from the 1860s to the second World War, and Emperor Meiji has been worshipped at the Meiji shrine. Heroes of the Meiji Restoration, such as M. Ohmura and T. Saigo, have inspired memorial parks. The nation's capital was in need of new gods for the nation as well as for the city. And exactly as the gods of ancient cities were worshipped, these new gods have been perceived as the sacred core of the city. Especially in the case of Tokyo, because of the sudden shift of the capital from Kyoto, new gods--including the Emperor himself-- had to be invented instantaneously.
The relationship of a city to its deities, old and new, can be demonstrated rather easily if one takes a sightseeing bus of that city, because in such tours one visits the various shrines of the city. The cities where sightseeing tours are prosperous are those with many shrines and sacred places; Paris, Rome, Kyoto, and London, to mention a few. In cities which do not have any pantheon--such as Los Angeles-- there are practically no sightseeing tours. The stereotypic images of cities as represented by postcards are another indication of urban symbolism in connection with sacred places. Most of the historical cities have many sacred places and can make many kinds of postcards, but newer cities with practically no sacred background have little material for postcards.
As we have seen, the prototype of the holiday was the festival day, accompanied by many kinds of ceremonies and rituals in the sacred place. Such sacred places also provided the prototypes for leisure space. As the festivals were secularized, the places which had been the most holy spaces in the cities were transformed into secular spaces for recreation. Historical cities, such as Kyoto or Paris, contain many plazas and parks in their central parts, and the origin of such space can be traced back sometimes to the 15th or 16th centuries. It is interesting to note that the old Japanese "Jokamachi," or castle cities, where the feudal lords constructed their huge castles, converted the castle or the castle site into a recreation park, and very often the festivals of the modern city, such as the cherry-blossom festival, take place at the castle site. Of course, there are more spectators than participants, but in the case of the "Awaodori" of Tokushima or the Gion Festival of Kyoto, one can still see the total mobilization of a city devoted to the festivities. Despite the metamorphic cycles of gods, there has been continuity in the time-space complex of sacred festivals as far as most of the historical cities are concerned.
From what has been discussed, it seems that cities traditionally have been places for symbolic interactions, starting as communion with the gods and continuing as interpersonal human communication mediated by the sacred. It may be safe to say that at any stage of city development, to live in a city was to be exposed to an extremely complicated symbolic environment, and city people have been characterized by their readiness and willingness to participate in symbolic interaction rather than to deal with substantive environments. Indeed, they have wanted more symbolic sophistication all the time. Voltaire observed that the citizens of Paris were happy with the presence of aristocracy because through the literate noble people, common man could learn better language and better manners; still today, cities are admired, in spite of all their difficulties, for their "cultural" values--i.e., better schools, museums, concert halls, and so on.
A city, for man, is something to be experienced. It is an agent for special types of socialization. People learn and develop their ability in symbolic interaction by living in cities. Urban people often seem to be a special human species with their own peculiar traits and social characters developed through constant exposure to symbolic environments. "City people," in other words, specialize in the production and consumption of symbols rather than substantive objects. Of course, the nature of the symbols they have worked with has changed from sacred to quasi-sacred to secular, but the city life has remained filled with huge amounts of symbols throughout the past 10,000 years. Further, with the rise of modern communication industries, the city experience became even more symbolic. It is so symbolic that it is almost impossible for a man living in contemporary cities to cope with anything substantively. His experience is essentially symbolic and his symbolic experiences must substitute for his would-be direct experiences.
For example, in the past few decades, the nature of children's play in cities has undergone tremendous change. When cities were still developing, there remained small lots in the city where children could play baseball, ride bicycles, and simply run around: they could be physically mobile. But when cities developed and overdeveloped, children could no longer enjoy such physical movement. Some parks might have remained, but they could not accommodate the ever-increasing population of children. In the big urban areas in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, children's leisure activities are restricted. As the physical density of indoor space has been getting tighter, even the size of the toys children play with has become smaller. More and more, the toys have been miniaturized. The prosperity of "matchbox" automobile models (whose size is actually smaller than a real matchbox) may be attributed to the very limited space children can use in their homes. Children in the past could enjoy bicycle riding, but in cities like Tokyo, the only way children can spend their leisure time is to play with "matchboxes" and other similar miniature toys. In contrast to the children who achieved motor sensory development through direct physical movement, today's urban children have, through their imagination, a pseudo motor sensory development. In this sense, children's play in contemporary cities is extremely symbolic. Indeed, a simple inventory of toys sold at toy departments over the past 30 years--especially the past 10 years--reveals the trend toward miniaturization of toys. And thanks to the technological innovations in electrical engineering, adult entertainment equipment, such as radio, has also become miniaturized. One must now spend his leisure within a "mini-space" with "mini-instruments."
Not only space but also the concept of time has changed in modern industrial cities. With the adoption of the modern working-hour system, workers in contemporary cities have fragments of "off" hours. A worker, white collar or blue collar, can enjoy an hour to two in the morning and evening on every work day as well as institutionalized weekly holidays. And the uses of these fractions of "time" form another aspect of contemporary city life. In other words, a symbolic experience, within a small limited space on a fragmented time scale, is one of the basic characteristics of city experience today.
In this context, the invention of TV achieved a new era in urban communication. As a matter of fact, there seems to be a mutual cause-and-effect relationship between high-density, overpopulated urban life and the success of TV. The TV screen is very small, but yet there are constant movements going on all the time, with many kinds of sounds. In that tiny screen, one can experience the vast plains of the American West, where hundreds of Indians gallop on horseback, or can feel as if he where in a spaceship from which he can see the infinite extension of outer space. With the manipulation of a simple switching device, one can go to a baseball stadium, a race track, a concert hall--all these and more are at one's disposal. Living in a confined space made of steel and concrete, people can experience all kinds of scenes and places through this small bright box. Furthermore, the time module is very flexible. A person can watch TV for 10 minutes or 60 minutes, even 24 hours if he wants to. TV seems to be a magical box which has introduced us to an expandable time-space continuum. In the 18th century, when urban problems became explicit, city inhabitants put paintings of ponds, birds, and mountains in their surroundings to compensate for their loss of contact with a substantive natural environment. TV has now become decisive in this continuum of symbolic compensation. In reality, there is no physical space left in the cities, but symbolic space is plentiful. Physical density in the cities has already passed the saturation point, but there is practically no saturation point to symbolic experience.
These thoughts, in the light of historical experience, lead us to suspect that the heroes whom we see everyday through the TV screen may be the gods of our age. The classic deities were replaced by newer gods called Kings, Emperors, and Generals. But in an age when even the statutes of these new gods are decaying and melting through increasing exposure to sulphurous acid gas, the metamorphosis of the gods has come into another cycle, and the new gods have brilliantly made their debut on the 20-inch screen of every household.
Indeed, it is quite symbolic and significant to see that the ultramodern "cathedral towers" of the industrial age--such as the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and Tokyo Tower--are being used to transmit television waves, In the past, people communicated with each other through their shared experiences, through identification with their church tower; but today, our shared experience is watching Elvis Presley, whose image is transmitted to our living room TV screen from our new "cathedral spire"--the TV transmission tower. Isn't Elvis our god? Isn't our holy day an occasion to celebrate Elvis?
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