Simple Gifts

Leave a comment

During my many years of studying religion I learned about the Shakers.  It was many years ago and my knowledge isn’t extensive.  I was caught off guard when my wife suggested we see The Testament of Ann Lee.  I hadn’t heard of it and knew nothing about it, but she had me at “Shakers.”  This is a most unusual and engaging movie.  I didn’t realize it was a musical until after it was over.  (It had been a long day and I did, a time or two, think, “hey, this is like a musical, the way characters break into song.”)  The thing is the songs are all diegetic; they fit into the plot and the Shakers were known for their music as well as for their furniture.  The movie follows, in broad outlines, the life of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the sect.  It made me curious to learn more.  

The Shakers emerged during that period of intense religious foment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  They settled in upstate New York where numerous other sects came into the world, such as the Mormons and the Millerites.  The Shakers had their origins among the Quakers, but it is unclear if Ann Lee’s family were members of the latter denomination.  In the movie an encounter with George Whitefield awakens Lee’s spiritual curiosity.  Historically, Whitefield was one of the first trans-Atlantic superstars, drawing rock-concert-sized crowds to hear his outdoor preaching.  In my head much of this was muddled during the film—it had been a long and disappointing day and I was totally unprepared for it.  I’m glad to have watched it, however; it rekindled my interest in American sects.

I have on my shelf an unread history of the Shakers.  It has consequently been moved to my “to read” pile.  I read, a few years ago, a history of the Oneida community in Upstate, and also a biography of William Miller.  The Oneida community practiced open marriage and eventually became known as the producers of flatware—Oneida silverware is still easily found.  Shakers, on the other hand, believed in celibacy, meaning that they could only grow through conversion.  The many Shaker communities founded by Mother Ann Lee dwindled and now appear to be down to three members.  The movie, which is quite good, is unlikely to lead to a resurgence of celibacy and revival of the Shakers.  They did have an outsized influence, not only for their furniture (think Oneida) but also for their music.  Add to that now, a musical.

Million Air

2 Comments

Life is strange.  While I was in Boston for the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting in November, something unusual happened.  For a few days back then this blog was getting a lot of traffic.  I mean, a lot.  For me.  In fact, I posted about when I finally shot past a million hits.  I couldn’t figure out why.  Well, things have settled back to their usual trickle and I figured it was just “one of those things.”  Pleased but not obsessed, I went back to my usual blend of observations about life, dark academia, and horror movies.  Then, and I can’t recollect exactly how I saw it, I noticed that my old blogging buddy Dan McClellan had, about that time given me a shoutout on his social media.  Then I remembered that I’d run into Dan at the conference and we’d had a brief chat.

The pieces began to fit together.  (Thanks, Dan!)  I’ve known a few fairly well-known people over the years.  Most of them are academics, and a few of them clergy.  Occasionally an author who has made a name for him or herself.  Some of them sometimes give me shoutouts but I’d never seen the numbers tick up like they had after this particular one.  I can’t figure out blog stats.  During the early years of this blog I had quite a bit of traffic.  I remember that in 2015 my views plummeted precipitously.  They’ve stayed at that low level ever since.  Until last year.  Now they’re headed back to normal, post 2015-levels.  I’ve tried some other platforms such as YouTube, but they take a lot more time and lead to limited hits.  Some influencers suggest I should try podcasting again.

I do have plans to bring the podcast back.  It takes several hours to make such an entry into internetdom.  I started podcasting when I began this blog (well, actually the blog was started by one of my nieces when a family member suggested I should podcast).  What happened?  I lost my job at Gorgias Press and I had to spend the next five years trying to find full-time employment in a stable environment.  By the time stability returned I figured podcasts were dead because everybody was watching videos.  I may have done a Mark Twain there.  Podcasts are still popular.  When I can get a chunk of time, and a nip of courage, I may rush back into the fray again.  At this point, I had my maybe fifteen days of fame in someone else’s shadow.  Life is strange.

Spring Halloween

Leave a comment

Being a lifelong fan of Halloween, it’s only dawning on me now that Walpurgis is almost precisely half-a-year from its October sibling.  This occurred to me this year for a couple of reasons.  Someone from Sweden emailed me on April 30, noting that Walpurgis was still celebrated there.  (In an amazing, almost superhuman, show of restraint I did not mention Midsommar).  I tucked that away.  Then one of the very few Facebook groups I follow (Halloween Madness) had lots of posts over the next day or so noting that Halloween is only half-a-year away.  The penny finally dropped.  Walpurgis is Halloween in April.  Well, not exactly, but it could be.  The idea of the autumn being a spooky time of year may trace its roots back to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” as I point out elsewhere.  Traditionally, the scary season was around the winter solstice, now known as Christmastime.

Walpurgis Night in Sweden; image credit: David Castor, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Now, I enjoy Christmas a lot.  It is family time.  It is time off work.  It is hunkering down cozy time.  I read a lot and watch movies without having to interrupt everything to stare at the computer for eight or more hours every day.  I also take a bit of horror with my holiday.  There are Christmas ghost stories from before when Christmas became a capitalistic enterprise, giving the warm glow of childhood memories of gifts and such.  I try to keep that tradition alive, without spoiling things for my family.  But things can also be spooky in the spring.

My strange schedule of awaking around 3 a.m. to do my writing means that I always wake up in the dark.  I jog when it is just light enough to see.  Yes, it can be spooky in April.  And the weather, which is still far from certain—the Germans have a saying, “April does what it wants”—can be downright scary.  And there is an extant tradition of a scary spring holiday.  Walpurgis Night (Walpurga was actually a saint) was the commemoration not only of Walpurga, but the driving out of pestilence, various diseases, and witchcraft.  Its spooky potential was realized by Disney in its first Fantasia, but it hasn’t really taken off here in the States as the second Halloween.  It is celebrated in some European countries and it seems to me that it could make a useful addition to paid holidays where Christmas is fueled by the lucre we labor to give to others all year.  If I can remember, I will try to post more about Walpurgis Night in a more timely way next year.

Eh Aye Jesus

Leave a comment

Have you ever wondered just how bizarre it can get?  At work I’ve been receiving push notifications for AI Jesus.  This is a software platform for exploring “the Bible,” “life questions,” and “guided reflection or therapy.”  No Jesus required.  Apparently tech has evolved to the point of addressing spiritual questions.  This is ironic since one thing AI simply doesn’t, and can’t, understand is religion.  Religion is not exactly a rational response to the world.  Often emotion is deeply, deeply involved.  Emotion is something AI knows nothing about.  I recently sat through a webinar promoting AI with the presenter listing problem after serious problem that AI poses.  The presenter optimistically saw no problem with continuing to use a flawed tool.  I would never advise crowdsourcing spiritual guidance.  Those of us who’ve spent lifetimes exploring it hesitate to put ourselves out there as experts.

The problem with AI is that we’re no longer being given a choice about it.  If you buy a new device, AI is there waiting for you.  If you do a web search, AI will offer the first answer, even if it’s often wrong.  Some of us with very human jobs are being told that we should be exploring how to use AI for efficiencies.  As if none of us were really doing a good job before.  I’m personally insulted.  What can AI know about how Jesus thought?  We have four gospels with sometimes contradictory sayings.  And it seems likely that the Gospel of Thomas has legitimate sayings as well.  Even so, that’s not enough data for an LLM (large language model, which is what generative AI tends to be).  They need massive amounts of information.

The human mind conjures its own image of Jesus.  Some think of a mild and meek shepherd of souls while others see a political firebrand with hopes of breaking the Roman hold on Judea.  Some think of Trump.  And everything in-between.   And how we think of Jesus informs the way that we interpret the sayings attributed to him.  I studied Bible in college for just this reason.  In seminary, aware of what textual criticism could do, I focused on the Hebrew Bible instead.  I grew up with the Doobie Brothers telling me that “Jesus is just alright with me.”  I’ve lived long enough to see a sitting president present himself as the parousia (look it up).  And now I’m being told that AI can subvert the carpenter from Galilee.  Just how strange can it get?

The tempter urges Jesus to use AI; image credit: Ary Scheffer, The Temptation of Christ (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

First, Kings

1 Comment

Recently I sat down to read 1 Kings.  Of course, I used to teach Hebrew Bible so I have more than a passing familiarity with it.  This time, though, I was reading it through the lens of Game of Thrones.  I wonder how much George R. R. Martin drew inspiration from the biblical book.  Indeed, a movie could be made from it—sex, conspiracy, battles, deception, it’s all there.  Perhaps someone should novelize it.  If you read it without knowing that it’s holy writ, you might be surprised to learn that it is.  Of course, having been edited by the Deuteronomists (so it’s supposed), it’s a bit preachy, but the action is pretty much the same.  In fact, Game of Thrones has quite a few biblical tropes in it.  And 1 Kings, if excised from the Bible, with its chapter and verse format, is pretty gripping itself.

Another thing that occurred to me is how little politics has changed over the millennia.  Powerful families want to retain power and privilege.  They aren’t too concerned with religious niceties but they rely on the backing of religious authorities.  (The priesthood and monarchy were always a tag team for keeping power in “the proper place.”)  And a number of the characters are quite colorful, even if you wouldn’t want them in the Oval Office.  Outside that context they can be quite loved, or at least people love to hate them.  Immature boy kings, seductive queens, and armed conflict at the slightest provocation are parts of the story across the ages.  The truth of power in powerful families plays out even in democracies.  Consider father and son presidents from the Adams and Bush families, husband and wife (nearly), in the Clintons, and countless powerful families represented in the senate or in the house.

Politics never change. Image: Saul threatening David, by José Leonardo, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Biblical tales are often more earthy than they might be supposed.  Viewed through the lens of faith, we’re willing to excuse behavior that wasn’t even condoned in that day: David’s adultery, (ahem) or literal political assassination (ahem).  Alas, poor Uriah.  The problem arises when these earthy texts are taken for something magical.  People still believe in magic.  Widely so.  This belief drives much of politics in two related nations far apart but bound together by a book.  Reading 1 Kings is a useful spiritual, and practical exercise.  We can learn much about how people behave.  The Good Book isn’t shy about the motivations either.  Sex, power, and fame drove leaders of antiquity even as they continue to do so today.  The Bible tells me so. 

Shopping News

Leave a comment

It’s one of the perils of the online age.  You order something online and the company (which has more money than a mere individual) asks you to pay for their mistake when the send the wrong thing.  This has happened to me a few times.  Once I ordered a used book.  The vendor got the author right but sent the wrong title.  When I explained this they still wanted me to pay to ship their mistake back to them.  I explained the illogic of the situation to them: You said you would send me a certain book and you did not.  In order to refund me I have to pay for the shipping, which sets me back a few bucks without having the right book at all, which I will have to reorder.  They were not happy, claiming it was my responsibility to get the book back to them.  I asked them to pay for the shipping.  They refused.  Eventually they said “Just keep it.  But this time only!”  I do not order from them now.

More recently Amazon, which, for all its issues, is pretty good about getting the right item to you, sent me a defective book.  I noticed as soon as I unpacked it that the cover wasn’t printed correctly.  Words were cut off on the right-hand side, and the spine was printed on the front.  I would’ve accepted it as a fluke, but opening it up I saw that the interior was for a completely different book.  Likely the printer hadn’t properly cleared out the covers from the last printing job before starting the new project.  Amazon didn’t fuss about replacing it.  They did, however, require me to return the defective one.  They’ll pay for the shipping, but I have to pay for the gas and time to drive to one of their preferred vendors.  It’s the same problem on a smaller scale.  Amazon made the mistake (actually the printer did but nobody checked) and I had to pay something to make it right.  This seems off to me.

I worked in retail for a few years and one of the messages management always emphasized is “the customer is always right.”  Sometimes they weren’t, but most of the time we had to resolve any disagreements as if they were.  Online ordering takes the face-to-face out of it.  The person who receives something other than what they ordered, for which they’ve paid the agreed price, has been wronged.  It’s a mistake unlikely to happen in an actual bookstore.  There’s a price to be paid for the convenience of ordering online.  And that price is paid by the customer.

Accidentally Backward

Leave a comment

I watched Regression by accident.  “How is that possible?” you might ask.  Well, I don’t read up about movies before watching them.  These days I try to save money by streaming on services I pay for anyway, such as Amazon Prime.  I had identified The Tractate Middoth as a movie that I could see without knowing anything beyond that it was based on an M. R. James story and that it was only about half an hour long.  I clicked on it.  It struck me as strange that it began with a “based on true events” intertitle, but people will do anything to sell a movie, including saying fiction is fact.  Then I noticed that the production values were pretty substantial.  I began to wonder if there were two movies by that title.   About forty minutes later, I’m needing to take a restroom break and I’m thinking, this movie should be done by now but it feels like we’re in the middle of things.

After I flushed and clicked back in, the title “Regression” flashed across the top of the screen.  Well, that explained a lot.  I didn’t recall having read any M. R. James stories like what I was seeing.  Clearly my initial click had been off and I’d hit the movie next to, or above or below, the one I wanted to see.  With that level of investment, I figured I might as well watch the rest.  It wasn’t bad but it took me a while to reassess my expectations.  Regression is about how the Satanic ritual abuse scares of the 1990s were fueled by, well, regression therapy.  A girl in Minnesota is identified as having been ritually abused.  Her story convinces police, who use a therapist to do hypno-regression to uncover what “really happened.”  Soon even the cop in charge is seeing Satanists coming after him in his own house.

The movie isn’t great, but it’s not bad either.  It has enough Bible in it to have made the cut for Holy Horror (or Holy Sequel).  And it is religion-based horror.  It wasn’t what I was expecting to see, of course, but that can’t be blamed on the movie.  The Satanic panic was real and unfortunate.  The movie is probably more of a thriller than horror, and yes, I can accept that it was based on real incidents because the panic is well documented.  There is no Devil here.  There are also no Satanists.  The real culprit, the film implies, is the fundamentalist minister who first suspected the abuse.  It is something to think about, but it was no Tractate Middoth.

Second Friday the 13th

Leave a comment

It’s a measure of how regimented my life has become.  The 9-2-5 workday is ruled by the calendar in a way teaching wasn’t.  But on this, the second Friday the 13th of 2026 I figured I’d reveal something that only repetitive calendar watching taught me.  It’s so simple many children probably know it, but it is something that being a drone taught me.  Ready?  Unless it’s a leap year, the dates in March are the same as they are in February.  Mathematically (and I don’t think that way) this makes perfect sense.  February’s 28 days are evenly divisible by seven, something that isn’t true of either 30 or 31.  That means in three years out of four, March begins on the same day of the month that February does.  So if February has a Friday the 13th, so does March.  

Photo credit: Andreas F. Borchert, Wikicommons

I’ve confessed to being interested in holidays and significant dates.  Last month we had Friday the 13th before St. Valentine’s Day on the 14th, and the following Monday, the 16th, was Presidents Day.  A special long weekend.  This kind of syzygy always catches my attention.  I knew even then, however, that Friday the 13th would recur in March.  The only extenuation, in this case, is that St. Patrick’s Day is on Tuesday.  Now, I have some Irish ancestry and Tuesday always vexes me a bit.  Well, the coming Tuesday, I mean.  Green isn’t really my color.  I have a green sweater that doesn’t really fit anymore, but I try to wear it just about every year.  (I’ve had it since high school.  I can still fit into my college clothes—those that I still have, but alas, nothing green.)  I keep clothes until they literally wear out.  I can’t donate them because they’re rags by the time I’m done wearing them.  I grew up poor and that shows.

So here I am on Friday the 13th wondering if I should buy something green to wear on Tuesday.  You see, I take holidays seriously.  One of my unpublished books was about holidays.  I ended up using some of it in The Wicker Man, but May Day is still a ways off at this point.  Friday the 13th isn’t really a holiday, except for horror fans.  I’ve only seen the first two movies in the franchise—slashers have never been my favorites.  So this is just another Friday at work for me.  It feels sort of like the movie Groundhog Day.  The calendar just keeps telling me it’s a work day.  But at least on Tuesday I’ll be wearing green.  And if I decide to act on my impulse, contrary to my usual practice, and spend money on a sweater instead of books, maybe it’ll even be something new.

Funerals

Leave a comment

Attending the funeral of a teen is a somber experience.  I can’t even begin to imagine what tempests the parents are facing.  After having given my condolences last night, I became reflective.  My thoughts went back to my teenage years.  First of all, there was that disturbing song, “Seasons in the Sun.”  The Terry Jacks rendition was popular during my teen years and it haunted me even then.  Perhaps more influential in my own life was Alice Cooper’s album Welcome to My Nightmare.  And the context.  I was a somewhat sickly child.  Raised in the Fundamentalist camp, I thought about dying quite a lot.  I became comfortable with the idea.  In seventh grade I missed a lot of school, having come down with the flu, then chicken pox, then a flu relapse.  And yet another bout.  Lying at home, feeling sick, having had pneumonia as a kid, I’d listen to Cooper repeatedly and read the Bible.

One of the lines from that concept album that stood out to me was one of the spoken interludes.  “I don’t want to see you die, but if that’s the way that God has planned you…”  God has planned you.  There was a fatalism there that in the context gave me a strange sort of hope.  I listened to it over and over again.  Our teenage years are when we’re just starting to get a sense of what our lives might be.  Most of the time our expectations don’t match reality, and sometimes reality is simply outside of our hands, such as a with an incurable disease.  Back to “Seasons in the Sun.”  I found myself without the words I felt I needed to console the parents.  I realize my view is the odd one out.

Early in my own life, I found myself of a philosophical bent.  I wanted to know what the meaning of life was.  I guess I was looking for instructions.  Probably my senior year in high school I discovered existentialism.  I identified with that school, especially after learning that Søren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist.  That seemed to mean it was okay.  Existentialists believe “existence precedes essence”—we make our own meaning.  Life has been a lesson in that as I studied and worked in religion, which should be some consolation, for over half a century.  The skies are silent regarding the meaning we attribute to our lives.  The song on Welcome to My Nightmare continues, “You’ve only lived a minute of your life.”  And those words come back to me now.

Unsolved

1 Comment

Strange as it may seem, the world of academic religious studies can have high drama.  On May 21, 1991, Ioan Petru Culianu, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago, was followed into a men’s room and shot through the head.  The murder was never solved.  Culianu was protégé and, many thought, successor to Mircea Eliade, perhaps the most famous religion professor of the last century.  Eliade was a Romanian American, and in his youth supported a fascist political movement, his connection with which he later covered up.  A bit of necessary background: the University of Chicago is a powerhouse school of religious studies.  Its graduates are nearly as influential as those of Harvard.  And Eliade trained many of them.  Including Bruce Lincoln.  Secrets, Lies, and Consequences is a fascinating book, even if it gets into the weeds.  You’ll learn a lot about early twentieth-century Romania if you read it.

Like many Chicago grads, Lincoln has had a distinguished career.  Even though I worked in different areas of religious studies than he does, I knew his name.  I read this book because it is full of intrigue, but also because, until I heard of it, I’d never known anything about Culianu or his unsolved murder.  A scholar’s scholar, Lincoln taught himself Romanian to be able to write this book.  (This is what I miss about being a professor, the freedom to undertake such Herculean tasks and have it be considered “normal” on-the-job behavior.)  The end result is a brief, complex, and wonderful book.  This isn’t a proper whodunit, though, and although Lincoln has some suspicions about what might’ve happened to Culianu, there is no smoking gun.  His murder took place while I was a doctoral student in Edinburgh, whence, as far as I could tell, the news never reached.

Eliade was a towering figure.  He wanted to put Romania on the intellectual map and he succeeded.  His work is still studied and analyzed.  He wrote novels as well as monographs, and some of his ideas have become standard fare in religious studies.  Few figures in the discipline cast a longer shadow.  I was in seminary when he died, but some of his works were recommended reading by that time.  This little book got me thinking about at least two big things: how some people become academic superstars, and how cancel culture sometimes brings them under the microscope.  Humans are raised in a culture and sometimes our young ideas, not fully formed, come to define our entire biological trajectory on this planet.  And sometimes we have regrets.  This is a fascinating study of one such case.

Not Again!

Leave a comment

The only reason I heard of Repossessed is because my wife read about it in a local newspaper.  This is true although I’d written a book about the Bible in horror movies and a book about possession movies.  This one’s been buried deep.  Although not a straightforward parody of The Exorcist, it travels the same territory with Linda Blair reprising her role as the possessed girl—now a mom with two adolescent kids.  The movie was critically panned, but I have a soft spot for bad movies and it was much better than The Exorcist II.  What saves the film is the acting on the part of Blair and of Leslie Nielsen, as the exorcist.  Nielsen is pretty funny most of the time, but the gags fall short here time and again.  The humor tends toward the sophomoric, but some jokes are good; the Chappaquiddick one was unexpectedly funny.  And having a false Donald Trump show up to try an exorcism was an added bonus.  These horror tropes classify this as a comedy horror, and it has a kind of cuteness to it that make it worth seeing.

So Nancy Aglet (Blair), after being exorcised by a young Father Mayii (Nielsen), settles down with a family until a televangelist pair—a clear send-up of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker—actually cause a demon to come through the television.  It  possesses, or repossesses, Nancy.  Since the original movie spends a lot of time in the hospital, she goes to the doctors who can’t figure out what’s wrong.  Nancy knows she’s possessed, however, and tries to find a priest to help, Father Mayii having retired.  The world’s religious leaders gather as the televangelists fail to cast the demon out on national television, but it’s only when Mayii joins the crew that the Devil is driven out.  Not through the rite, but because he can’t stand rock-n-roll, which the religious leaders perform.  It’s rather silly, of course.

There is an aesthetic to bad movies and Repossessed is a good example of that.  Despite its failings, it’s one of those movies that you’re (mostly) glad to have watched.  At least in my experience.  Largely, as I say, because of the performances of the leads.  Although some people today find The Exorcist itself funny, and although some aspects do open themselves to parody, it takes talent to make fun of it.  This film doesn’t do it particularly well.  Ironically, Ted Kennedy couldn’t run for president because of Chappaquiddick but Donald Trump, despite having a much more sordid past, could and did.  Those two moments in this 1990 movie give me pause.  And the fate of the televangelists in it gives me hope.

Super Human

1 Comment

There’s a line in the musical 1776 where Stephen Hopkins says “Well, I’ll tell you. In all my years, I never seen, heard nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about.”  Of course, there are many things that can’t be talked about; some of them so obvious that children can see the truth of the matter.  One of those subjects is what Jeffrey Kripal calls The Superhumanities.  Most of academia laughingly calls this the paranormal and dismisses it.  I have been following Kripal’s work since first encountering Authors of the Impossible, back in late 2011.  He is a brave scholar who argues that since encounters with the impossible have happened throughout human history, and still happen, we should study them.  Mainstream science, which is necessary and good, proceeds by discounting anomalies.  That doesn’t mean anomalies aren’t real, just that if you try to account for everything, well the engine stalls.  Because of this, most academics have followed the general public in ridiculing these things as magical thinking.

That doesn’t stop people worldwide, however, from seeing ghosts.  Or UFOs.  Or experiencing things that just shouldn’t happen.  Many of us are taught to brush off things like disappearing object phenomenon, precise coincidences that happen in a striking series, or episodes of picking up the phone to call someone you haven’t talked to in years only to have the phone ring and it’s that person calling you.  We tell our friends but generally conclude that it’s just “one of those things.”  Moreover, we don’t dismiss family or friends when they tell us about such things.  We know them personally and trust their integrity.  If a stranger walks in, however, we laugh about the event.  Kripal makes the case that something is going on here.  And we ought to pay attention.

The main idea of this book is that humans are “super.”  In order to rescue the humanities, which Kripal teaches at Rice University, we need to acknowledge them as superhumanities.  There’s a lot to ponder in this book.  It’s not an easy book, but it is an important one.  Kripal engages philosophers on their own terms, displaying an incredible depth of comprehension.  I almost didn’t finish the book because it’s so closely argued that I had to put it down for a few months.  It had become literally buried under a stack of other books I had in my to read pile.  I’m glad I picked it up again.  This is a profound book with important, essential conclusions.  It includes dangerous ideas, but, like Hopkins, I believe there should be nothing that can’t be talked (or written) about, especially in the academic world. Ridicule is never good debate.

Halloween in December

Leave a comment

The wind was frigid.  We were still in the cold snap that layered the northeast in its gelid blanket for the first part of December.  We had advance tickets for Christkindlmarkt, a Bethlehem tradition.  As we wandered through the tents I was thinking of one of the few Facebook groups I follow, Halloween Madness.  Most of the posts are repurposed from the internet but the last few weeks, since Thanksgiving, the offerings have been blending Halloween and Christmas.  Most people don’t stop to think how closely related the two holidays are.  (I devote a chapter to Halloween in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, where I explore this connection in a preliminary way.)  But in this bleak December—we’ve seldom seen the sun for more than a couple hours at a time since the aforementioned Thanksgiving—my thoughts emigrated towards horror.

For those of you who’ve never been to Christkindlmarkt, it’s a germanic themed market consisting of four (or more) large tents, full of vendors.  Many of them are Christmas themed, but not all.  Those that are Christmas themed tend toward the Currier and Ives version of the holiday, but some consider the more ghostly side of the season.  Although I didn’t see any booths explicitly devoted to horror themes or monsters, a few of them had a bit of this aesthetic to them.  I’m no fan of capitalism, but I have to wonder if this isn’t a missed opportunity.  I think there’d be some fans.  I do enjoy Christmas for its symbolism and optimism and coziness.  I really do.  But when I have a few free moments in the holiday season I sneak in reading a scary book or watching a horror movie.  There is a connection, but you have to study the holidays to see it.

I fear that this year I was trying pretty hard to preserve any bodily warmth between the tents and didn’t really have much time to think about it until the next day.  I’m always mindful that Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is set in December.  And that both Charles Dickens and M. R. James associated Christmas time with ghosts.  I suspect most people, however, prefer the cheerful, happy side of the holidays.  I don’t blame them.  Life can indeed be harsh, as harsh as this windchill, for much of the rest of the time.  There are some of us, however, who do find a little lift by peering into the darker corners, even at this festive time of year.  And with natural light in such short supply, there are a lot of shadows about this chilly December.

No FOMO

Leave a comment

Some fringe websites (of course I do!) present the case for reincarnation via past lives memories, particularly of children.  You see, adults hear/read/see a lot of things as the years weigh down and we might misremember something we encountered somewhere else.  Children have less exposure and therefore make more credible witnesses.  I know perfectly rational adults who believe in past lives as well.  I must confess, however, that this is one of the scariest things I can imagine.  I’m glad to have lived, most of the time, and I’m not in a hurry to end it prematurely, but the thought of doing it all over again is terrifying.  Even if it’s a different and better life.  You see, I entered life with a lot of questions and I have to say, over six decades later, I’m still uncertain about many of the answers.

If reincarnation means starting from scratch all over again, that scares me.  I’ve spent much of my life building walls to protect myself from the things that hurt me.  I avoid overly risky activities.  I handle sharp objects with great care.  I spend quite a bit of time by myself.  I don’t like being hurt.  That may be one reason that I watch horror movies.  They help to desensitize that particular phobia.  Still, I have to think of all the hard lessons I’ve learned in this life and have to think about how I might improve upon it all with another go-round.  In religions of East and Southeast Asia, where belief in reincarnation is common, the idea is often that you want to break out at the end.  Nirvana.  The place were you don’t have to queue up again.  Even Plato thought reincarnation might explain a lot.  But the very thought makes me feel weary.

If you could be rebooted with the knowledge of your previous life intact, that’d be one thing.  The idea of one day finding myself in another mother’s arms, not knowing anything, learning each microsecond, well, it’s frightening.  My parents weren’t educated people.  They taught me the blue-collar hard knocks of life (which I don’t want to have to learn again).  The white-collar hard knocks are sometimes even worse.  I tried to live this life as a clergyman, but that never really panned out.  I sometimes wonder if the Abrahamic religions/monotheistic traditions, didn’t develop Heaven and Hell out of fear of reincarnation.  The idea certainly makes sense, in some contexts.  And it’s one of the scariest things I can imagine.

Final Rites?

Leave a comment

The Conjuring: Last Rites, aka The Conjuring 4, is more of the same.  Reusing tropes that have ceased to be scary, it draws Annabelle back into the story and sets up the possibility of future films by getting the Warrens’ daughter Judy involved.  It is kind of a downbeat to pick up the Smurl haunting since this is widely considered to have been a hoax.  And the movie pulls out all the stops.  Levitation, upside down crosses, and demonic faces suddenly appearing have all been done before.  The conceit that a demon is using ghosts to torment the Smurls is familiar from earlier films in the series.  The franchise, however, remains quite Protestant despite its Catholic trappings.  The somewhat heavy-handed suicide of Father Gordon once again demonstrates the lack of deep comprehension of how Catholicism operates.  It is meant to parallel the suicide that starts the movie, but really adds nothing to the plot beyond shock.

The film tries to do too much and loses any pathos among the Smurls because of the strong subplot, if not the main plot, of the threats against Ed and Judy Warren.  To do this they had to make the real life Judy much younger than she is in real life and cast the unnamed demon threatening the Smurls back to an attack on Lorraine, while pregnant with Judy, in the 1960s.  This allows for a Stranger Things aspect of the 1980s for the action.  It also strangely misrepresents Pennsylvania.  The script seems to presume West Pittston is near Pittsburgh (it’s not, but rather close to Scranton) and it shoots the location in England, obviously for cinematic reasons.

There’s a lot of insider knowledge presumed here—you need to know the fictionalized backstory the series has been building up over eight films.  This comes to a head in the revisiting of actors from the past Warren cases at Judy’s wedding.  Perrons, Hodgsons, and a Glatzel attend, valorizing the often controversial work of the Warrens.  (They were ejected from the Perron house and visited the Hodgsons for maybe part of a day.)  The other movies in the series tend to hang together better but the lack of deep understanding of Catholicism remains perhaps the largest hurdle.  Interestingly, at the box office this has been the highest performing film in the franchise so far.  Since the Conjuring universe is encroaching on 3 billion dollars (2.7 at the moment) gross profit, clearly it strikes a chord.  And there’s every reason to suppose, prequel or sequel, it’s not really the last rites after all.