Balance

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Psych!  Yesterday was actually the vernal equinox.  And speaking of psychs, it was about the coldest morning jog I’ve had all winter.  (The equinox itself didn’t occur until 5:24 p.m., which is way it was the 20th instead of the 21st.  And I honestly can’t understand how that works since don’t you need 24 hours for night and day to be equal?  There’s a reason I went into the humanities.)  Interestingly, in the pagan Wheel of the Year, it was Ostara.  And the similarity of that title to Easter isn’t really coincidence.  (By the by, I discuss this to some extent in The Wicker Man, due out in September.)  Easter is, in essence, a spring holiday.  Ēostre, a germanic goddess of spring, seems to have been its namesake. 

First light comes suddenly, for those awake early enough to see it.  I keep a close eye on the diminishing darkness so that I can get out and jog in the twilight.  It will be too dusky to see and then suddenly it’s not.  Sunrise is like an epiphany each day.  From now on light will increase both morning and evening until the summer solstice, or Midsummer.  Between Ostara and Midsummer lies May Day, or, as it was also known, Beltane.  Beltane is the fuel behind The Wicker Man, or so I argue in my book.  Holidays are important.  More of them should be recognized.  If the pandemic taught us anything it’s that most of us probably work too hard.  At any rate, spring is now here.

The mornings are still below freezing, at least around here.  The winter never got very cold and we had very little snow.  Some would argue that it was more like an extended, chilly spring.  The light, however, was missing.  I spend a lot of time awake in the predawn hours.  There’s a stillness to that time that’s a daily gift.  Yesterday was a brief moment of balance.  Soon it will be time to start mowing the lawn and to do the endless weeding of summer.  Those will last until long after the other equinox, awaiting in September.  Climate change has assured us that the weather will be erratic, but the waxing and waning of the light is as old as the spinning of this weary planet.  We’ve entered the light half of the year.  Equinoxes remind us that balance is rare and should be appreciated when it arrives.  It’s worth making into a holiday once more.

All About Blurbs

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A book recently arrived.  It was unexpected, but when I saw the return address I knew what it was.  My young colleague Daniel Sarlo from the University of Toronto had kindly asked me to blurb his book The Solar Nature of Yahweh.  I’ve known Dr. Sarlo virtually for many years.  He’s engaged me a number of times on issues surrounding my research on solar worship in ancient Israel and Ugarit.  I had a book project in the works on the latter topic when other colleagues suggested going with something biblical for my next book, thus Weathering the Psalms was born.  Books, particularly academic ones, are in constant conversation with one another.  I’ve been writing on horror and religion now for over five years but my material on ancient West Asian religion is just now starting to get noticed.  It’s a funny old world.

One day I stumbled across a blurb lifted off my website for a book from Johns Hopkins University Press.  I was impressed.  First of all, that some author or editor had found my remarks on their book from this blog and that they’d liked them enough to cite them.  Getting blurbs can be a difficult task these days.  Academics are under a lot of pressure and time for such things is at a premium.  The payment is generally a copy of the book.  For some of us, though, it’s a thrill just to see yourself cited at all.  Once you’re no longer an academic you’re easily forgotten.  It has been a number of years since I’ve researched Yahweh and the sun, but someone, at least, still remembers.

Like book reviewing, reading a book for a blurb is one of those things you really can’t talk about pre-publication.  Book production is a slow process.  Like most things in life, it takes a complicated chain of events to lead to something as humble as a printed book.  And you need things like blurbs well before the release date.  As an author you often worry that—even in a field like ancient West Asian studies—your book will be outdated before it’s even published.  Some new find, or new idea might invalidate all that you’ve worked for.  Higher education should be one of the best venues for building humility in a person.  Your great learning is only one example among myriads of other scholars.  It’s a great accomplishment to get a book published in the midst of all that.  And this one, as the blurb indicates, is well worth reading.

For the Eyes

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A Welsh horror film?  Lately Euro-horror has caught my attention.  European sensibilities give horror a distinctive flavor, and The Feast doesn’t pull the usual horror tricks.  And reading the subtitles keeps you on your toes.  It’s more a slow build that manages to be unnerving from the start.  A family of four—parents and two boys in their late teens or early twenties—is hosting a feast.  A local girl, Cadi, is hired to help cater the affair.  The family is really seeking to get a neighbor to allow exploratory mineral drilling on her land.  She refuses, horrified when they mention that they’ll only drill on the rise.  The neighbor, aghast, says they know better because they’ll awaken “her.”  The unnamed her is a goddess who is within the rise and who’s been disturbed by the family’s drilling on the land adjacent to their neighbors’ property.

A number of aspects push this beyond Euro-horror.  The goddess, treated as superstition by the family, introduces religion into the horror.  (Cadi, as it turns out, died on her way to the house and the goddess inhabited her body.)  The remote location and role of the countryside also bring this into the folk horror realm.  Having an underlying ecological message, the film is eco-horror as well.  As such it has a positive message, even as all those at the feast, apart from the uncompromising neighbor, die before the evening is out.  Gods will express their wrath.  Although there’s gore, the concept is intelligent and possessed Cady’s unwillingness to speak throughout much of the film adds to the tension.

Horror films with subtitles sometimes don’t work, but The Feast manages pretty well.  Much of the disturbing atmosphere comes from the house.  A modern construction, built over what had formerly been the family’s farm, stands in stark contrast to the natural world all around.  As is often the case in eco-horror, the land is waiting to take its revenge.  It’s a message appropriate for a time when we fail to live up to our own environmental standards, and consider the checks and balances of nature itself as “superstition.”  Maybe a goddess will not awaken and kill everyone at the dinner party, but the wealthy will not be spared, as the movie prophesies.  We share the planet and the earth allows us to survive.  There’s a sense that we deserve to be reminded that living on a finite planet requires careful stewardship of it all.  If you’re going to throw a feast, at least make sure it’s not at the expense of nature.  Some goddesses are best not aroused.

Not Relic

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Someone somewhere sometime recommended The Relic to me.  I can’t recollect who, where, or when, so I’m not sure in which direction to point the blame.  (Or maybe they recommended Relic…)  Weekend afternoons are drowsy times, and rather than sleep, I prefer to watch movies.  Those on my wish-watch list don’t often coincide with what’s on the streaming services available to me, so I try to recall those recommended to me at some point.  I mean, The Relic sounds like it should be good: a Meso-American god that’s part lizard, part beetle, and part mammal rampaging through a major museum?  Well, what’s not to like?  Monsters are usually fun.  This one requires hormones from the hypothalamus to survive, so it beheads people to get at their brains.

Now, if you’re not a fan this will sound goofy to you.  The thing is, in the right hands such a film could be very good.  I hear that the novel upon which it’s based is.  Unfortunately the script and the acting don’t really hold up.  The sciencey explanation doesn’t make sense—the evolution from eating certain leaves is too rapid, outpacing even the monsters in Evolution.  And when we learn that the mammal DNA comes from a human, it raises the question of whether indigestion was mistaken for evolution.  Of course, the monster—shown a little too early—is a chimera.  Since it’s part bug and part gecko it can walk up walls, which is admittedly pretty cool.  But the holes in the plot don’t ever really get filled so it’s a lot of running through tunnels in the dark with flashlights.

When I read the description that it involved a god-monster I thought I’d figured out why it’d been recommended.  Religion and horror share gods and monsters, so I thought maybe something would’ve been made of this.  The scenes where the carving of Kothoga is being prepped make no sense—you use carving tools to excavate fossils, not statues—and we learn nothing of this intriguing deity beyond that it was released to eat your enemies brains and when it ran out of brains, it dies.  Of course, it can eat leaves as well.  Ironically and paradoxically, the film makes me want to read the novel to get a fuller explanation.  The combination of gods and monsters is rich territory to explore and when those making a movie credit the audience with enough intelligence to make this work, it might be enough to keep you awake on a drowsy weekend afternoon.  Or it might keep you awake even if they don’t.

Seasonal Viewing

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Any movie that begins with an excommunication ought to be good.  Especially with its list of stars you’d think To the Devil a Daughter might’ve turned out better.  Still, it is a good example of religion and horror mingling together.  I’ve never read any Dennis Wheatley novels, but reputedly he didn’t like this film adaptation of his book.  It certainly has a convoluted plot.  So an excommunicated priest has started a new religion that worships Ashtaroth.  He has to baptize a child, now 18 (three-times-six, don’t you see), with the blood of the demon so that she can become his (Ashtaroth’s) avatar.  This is apparently the eponymous daughter to the Devil.  She was baptized initially by her mother’s blood at her birth.

The girl’s father, who survived her birth—unlike his wife—has decided at the last moment to save his daughter.  He appears to be independently wealthy yet he talks an author of occult books into doing the saving for him.  The girl, it turns out, is a nun in this satanic religious order and is only too willing to do what she can to serve “our Lord.”  The way that all of this plays out is confusing and Byzantine, but it does raise a serious question: what if a child is reared in a bad religion?  (And there are some.)  Who has the right to decide if a religion is good or bad?  Children are easily indoctrinated and not too many question the faith in which they were raised.  Yes, we all think the religion we believe is the right one.  The problem is everyone else thinks the same thing.

One of the things this movie got right is that the “heretics” are portrayed as sincerely believing that their religion is for the improvement of the world.  Calling themselves Children of the Lord, they believe Ashtaroth is good.  And a good lord wants what is best for the world, right?  This is the dilemma of exclusive religions that teach only their own outlook can possibly be the correct one.  Otherwise you have to give adherents a choice and another religion may be more appealing.  Or worse, they may reason out that if you’re given a choice that means your own religion is also merely one of many.  Historically religions have gotten around this by valorizing true believers who never question anything.  To the Devil a Daughter isn’t a great movie.  It’s not even a very good one.  Nevertheless, it raises some questions that lie, of course, in the details.

Monster Gods

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“I would go to Catholic Church and the saints made no sense.  But Frankenstein made sense, The Wolfman made sense, The Creature from the Black Lagoon made sense.  So I chose that as my religion.”  Famed writer/director Guillermo del Toro said these words.  They’re not exactly gospel but they do demonstrate the connection between religion and horror that is only now beginning to be explored.  Del Toro and I are of the same generation, and some of us in that time frame found meaning in the monsters we saw as kids.  They were coping techniques for living in an uncertain and difficult world.  A world with hellfire on Sundays and often hell for the rest of the week.  Fears of bullies and alcoholic fathers and lack of money.  Fears of an unknown infraction sending you to eternal torment, even if you didn’t know or mean it.

Image credit: Manuel Bartual, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, via Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t choose horror as my religion.  I didn’t grow up Catholic like del Toro either.  I haven’t seen all of his movies, but he does evince a kind of religious devotion to his monsters.  Pan’s Labyrinth was distinctly disturbing.  Pacific Rim was intense.  Crimson Peak is one it’s about time I watched again.  The Shape of Water offered a lovable monster.  Many of these films don’t follow standard horror tropes.  They’re thoughtful, emotive, and often wrenching.  These are, of course, traits shared in common with religion.  I suspect my own attempts to articulate this would benefit from conversation with someone like del Toro.  There’s no doubt that monsters give me the sense of Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Religion and horror share a common ancestor.  Fear is an emotion that we apparently share with all sentient beings.  How we deal with it differs.  While a bunny will run away a rattlesnake will strike.  Horror is a way of dealing with fear.  So is religion.  We can’t avoid fear because, honestly, there’s much to be afraid of.  Many choose to believe their clergy, taught by people like me, and assume religion has all the answers.  Others, like del Toro, seek wisdom elsewhere.  When the credits roll at the end, you know it was all just a show.  When you walk out of the church, synagogue, or mosque, you know daily life awaits with its peaks and valleys.  Some may substitute one for the other, while others require the support of both.  And both, as odd as it may seem, can be addressed with conviction.  If you don’t believe me, just ask Guillermo del Toro.

Kings and Gods

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Kong has never been my favorite monster.  Perhaps because it is more of a sad story than a scary one, and in movies of gigantic animals, there always seem to be scaling problems.  The monsters are only reacting to the circumstances in which they find themselves and humans prove to be the real problem.  In ways nearly impossible to conceive, less than a century ago films like the original King Kong shocked and stunned audiences.  Humans are such visual creatures and no similar spectacle had been seen before.  I recently watched the 1976 reboot for the first time.  I’d seen clips, of course, and kids in junior high were talking about it back when it came out.  For me it was more like “if you know the story already, why see another attempt to tell it?”

Visually, there is a lot of nice cinematography in the film.  We’re all used to CGI so the animatronic Kong isn’t really believable, but nevertheless, our emotions map onto his with the prolonged shots of the gorilla’s facial expressions.  That part was effectively done.  Much of the rest of the movie left too many questions for belief to be suspended.  The heartlessness of corporations was too real and perhaps the scariest part of the movie.  Watching any movie with explosions on the twin towers brings back a kind of post-traumatic 9-11 reaction.  Prolonged, nearly Russian-length, death scenes personally don’t do it for me.

The reason I was watching, however, was for the religious aspect.  This is underplayed, but the islanders clearly worship Kong and consider him a god.  (I did wonder what he ate since no giant fruits were shown, but the immense snake tells us not all was revealed.)  In one reflective moment on the oil tanker back home, Jack Prescott says that they’ve taken the islanders’ god and their society will fall apart.  Western enterprising does have much blood of this kind on its hands.  And no matter how it’s dressed up King Kong always appears to be a racist story.  Some critics say the 1976 version isn’t horror, but instead a kind of bizarre love story.  While I don’t think much thought went into the implications—it seems the movie was a showcase of state-of-the-art animation for the period (otherwise the long scenes of Kong changing faces and blowing on Dwan make little sense)—that accidentally play into tropes of gods falling in love with women.  Maybe there’s a reason I haven’t watched any of the other reboots.

Roman Mythology

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A recent game of Redactle led to a family discussion of Roman mythology.  I had to flex some muscles unused since my last full semester at Rutgers, but I was pleased that the old learning is still there.  One of the first things people notice about Roman mythology is its lackluster nature.  Rather like current-day politicians, the Romans mostly lacked imagination when it comes to compelling stories.  Roman religion consisted largely of cult—that is the enacting of sacrifices and learning how to read omens.  They had no “Bible” and really no other collection of myths, apart from what they borrowed from the Greeks (who borrowed, in turn, much from Semitic mythology).  They mapped their various gods—some from the Etruscans—onto the Greek pantheon and made do with other peoples’ stories.

Rome’s native myths largely focused on their own history and human characters—again, the parallels with Republican sanitized American history are apt—but also deal with serious issues.  In the words of T. P. Wiseman, “How does well-meaning authority turn into murderous tyranny?”  (I resist footnoting blog posts, but this is from the preface of his book The Myths of Rome.)  Like modern politicians, they believed their origins were divine.  The gods had chosen them to be a superpower.  We might scratch our heads and ask ourselves where the Roman Empire is today, even as Italy elects hard-right leaders.  We learn nothing from history.  Nothing.

So let’s turn to mythology instead.  Or at least religion.  Roman religious writing was often kept secret—the purview of priests only.  Some of this survived into early Roman Catholic ideas about keeping Scripture to the priests.  Religious writings are dangerous if they get out there among hoi polloi (or “hot polo” as my autocorrect suggests).  Ironically, those of us sent off to specialized schools to learn this stuff are, in these days, generally ignored.  Roman officials were often anxious to know what oracles said.  Today televangelists and their ilk seem to be the ticket.  Anyone can be an expert if they talk loud enough.  And yet the Romans admired the Greek intellectual life.  The creativity with which they handled their gods.  There was much to be emulated there.  Roman Jupiter was the protector of the military (budget, one is prompted to write—forgive me if my Muse is a little unruly this morning).  And yet it was the Roman authorities who crucified Jesus.  We may indeed still learn something from Roman mythology.

Hebert James Draper, The Lament for Icarus, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Pure Fear

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At work we have the opportunity to say a little about ourselves on a shared document for our teams.  This is a fairly new thing, so people I’ve worked with for years have no reason to look at it.  A couple of new hires, however, have noted that I watch horror movies and this has led to some budding friendships.  Since we’re all remote workers it’s mostly a matter of a line or two in an email about whether I’ve seen this or that film.  One of those recommended was the Hulu original Pure.  It’s actually pretty good.  The idea is a bunch of teenage girls are brought to a retreat center for a purity ball with their fathers.  This kind of thing can get very creepy very fast, given the incestuous overtones for such a thing.  Not only is it a religious event, it’s based on the story of Lilith.

Collier’s Lilith

The pastor preaches his first sermon about Lilith, but the girls from cabin 4 sneak out at night to meet some guys.  (Their presence is explained at the end of the movie.)  That night the girls summon Lilith, whom the minister’s daughter says is a demon.  The summoning works.  Lilith begins to interfere with services as the girls are tempted by the guys who are hanging around.  At the end, Lilith “possesses” Shay (the lead girl) and frees them from being controlled by the men in their lives.  The message is a refreshing one, and Lilith ends of being, well, somewhat as Shay puts it, “One man’s demon is another’s angel.”  

Religion and horror make a good couple.  I’ve never seen a movie that features the story of Lilith before.  The thing is, she’s not the scary part of the movie.  The religious believers, the fathers who try to control their daughters rather than giving them support after listening to them, are.  Parenting is tough, no doubt about that.  None of us are born into life with all the answers.  We quite often find ourselves not knowing for sure what we should do.  I couldn’t imagine being a parent claiming to have the solutions for all problems.  I’m a guy who watches horror for a form of therapy!  What I do think, however, is that we can try to be reasonable, loyal, and supportive.  I learn as much from being a parent as I teach.  The same was true of being a professor.  Humility, along with a willingness to continue learning your entire life is the only way that makes sense to me.  Although not a major studio production, this was one of the scariest movies I’d seen in a long time.

Forgotten Goddess

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It’d’ve been nice if someone had told me.  If you’re not a professor, though, you’ve lost your importance.  I’ve only written a book on the subject, after all.  Grousing aside, the headline from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (“The Land”) read “7,500-year-old Burial in Eilat Contains Earliest Asherah.”  Since my dissertation and first book and several articles were on Asherah, I do still have an interest in the old girl.  I’m curious when new material shows up, even since I wrote my book.  Professors, you see, have the time and resources to keep up with things like that.  When your job is acquiring books in a different field, well, who has the time?  I do keep an eye out for headlines, though.  Skimming a newspaper article now and again I can still manage.

So what’s going on in the resort town of Eilat?  According to the article by Viktoria Greenboim Rich, a rescue operation for expansion going on in the city, led to the discovery of a pre-Israelite burial site.  Among the artifacts discovered was the stump of a juniper tree, upright in what appears to be a cultic setting.  In case your chronology’s even rustier than mine, the Israelites show up on the scene roughly 3,300 years ago.  This sanctuary has been carbon dated to nearly twice that age.  We don’t know a ton about what asherahs (lower case) were, other than that they were made of wood, they stood upright in sanctuaries, and they angered Yahweh.  So was this an asherah that was found?  Are they really that old?

It’s an intriguing question.  Writing hadn’t really been invented that long ago.  There were some rudimentary efforts in that direction, perhaps, but Sumerian, the earliest attested written language, wouldn’t show up for a couple of millennia yet.  That means artifacts are unlabeled and there aren’t any texts to describe what they are when we find them.  Did Asherah have a prehistory that early?  We just don’t know.  The trend even since before I was researching the goddess has been to suggest any upright wooden object found in a cultic context is an asherah.  You can hardly blame archaeologists for suggesting that, since wooden objects don’t survive that well in the levantine climate.  We naturally like to fill the gaps.  If this is an asherah then it would’ve been called by a name we don’t know.  Hebrew hadn’t yet evolved by then, as far as we’re aware.  But why else, so the thinking goes, would anyone stick a tree in the ground before telephone poles (those modern asherim) had even been invented?

Looking North

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As organized religion continues its slow decline, mythology remains.  Indeed, it seems to be growing in interest.  The problem with many mythologies, for monolinguals, is that they come in languages other than English.  Translation always loses something, which is why, I suspect, Neil Gaiman was tapped to retell the Norse myths.  A very talented story-teller, Gaiman has written about gods before.  He knows their literary potential.  Norse mythology is rather odd in the canon of western thought.  The stories feature gods with as many foibles as humans and with conflicting motivations.  In some ways they are more believable than the monotheistic tradition.  They are both fun to read and poignant.

At the same time Norse Mythology is a somewhat perplexing book.  It’s difficult to tell, without being an expert, what is Gaiman and what is ancient.  In fact, the book sits next to another one with the exact same title on my shelf.  That one is labeled nonfiction, and it’s a bit more academic.  Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard that I tend to want to approach mythology in original languages, if possible.  I’ve never studied Nordic tongues and it would be a little difficult to justify starting now, with all the other things I’ve got to do.  It’s not that I don’t trust Gaiman, it’s just that every retelling is an interpretation.  Still, I’m sure the book gives the flavor of the records that survive.  One of the fascinating features of Norse mythology is that gods die.  Since it ends with Ragnarok, that seems inevitable.

Many mythologies have the world ending with the establishment of the happy reign of a singular deity.  Ragnarok, which Gaiman (and perhaps the originals) sets in the past, sees the gods dying on the battlefield against Loki and the giants.  As the earlier myths make clear, however, death in battle is the most glorious way for the Norse to end their lives.  (And seeing how it has led to a pretty peaceful adult nation, one wonders if the mythology had a calming effect.)  I’ve not read extensively in other versions of Norse mythology so I don’t know if Gaiman’s ending with Balder returning and the world starting anew is his innovation or part of the original.  Having gods who die, however, seems like a potential leveler for humans who suffer from greater powers.  There’s a sobriety to it that lends gravitas to the whole.  And like all good books, Norse Mythology has left me hungry for learning more.

Spring Forward

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Spring officially arrives in the northern hemisphere today.  Days will be longer than nights for six months after this and many pagans will be celebrating Ostara.  Named after Ēostre, the goddess who apparently gave Easter its name, Ostara is an amalgam of the various equinox feasts and observations of antiquity.  The ancient Celts, as far as we know, held four particular holidays that fall roughly halfway between the solstices and equinoxes, with February marking Imbolc and Beltane yet to come in May.  We don’t know that they celebrated the equinox, but we don’t know that they didn’t either.  Equinoxes are a bit difficult to measure precisely with the sun’s position overhead, but we know the clever folks responsible for Stonehenge and Maes Howe could do such things, even in antiquity.

Ostara, maybe

According to Bede the Anglo-Saxons had several feasts for the goddess Ēostre.  Luckily (from his perspective), Christians had Pascha (Easter) some time near the equinox.  It’s late this year, however, since we just had the full moon (the “Worm Moon”) on Friday.  Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.  So today we’ve got Ēostre.  We know little of her beyond Bede.  Ancient Germanic peoples, like the ancient Celts, didn’t keep extensive written records.  Their religions, based on what we know of most ancient religions, were likely lively affairs.  Spring is a celebratory season and already buds and blossoms are appearing around here.  Goddess or no, there’s a feminine wonderment about the season.  It’s difficult not to feel at least a little hopeful.

Ancient deities have long been a source of fascination.  Eclipsed by an aggressively political Christianity, many of them vanished without leaving us many traces at all.  The human mind seems inclined to create gods to explain this strange but wonderful world we inhabit.  It’s clear that it wasn’t made just for us.  The birds and insects, and even the elusive reptiles and amphibians, are beginning to reappear.  Many mammals and some birds rough it through the cold hoping to emerge again into the warmth of spring.  We’ve had some warm days already, but there are likely more cold ones to come.  As the pagan gods, as Ēostre remind(s) us, transitions come in fits and starts.  Setbacks are part of progress.  Many of us believe the moral arc of the universe tends toward what is good and right.  It may take a long time to arrive, but the equinox, in its very name, bears the clue.

Getting Your Goat

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I have to confess to having known very little about goats.  Although one book does not an expert make, I still feel that I know quite a bit more now than when I started Sue Weaver’s masterful The Goat: A Natural and Cultural History.  I can’t convey it all to you here (that’s what the book is for), but I can offer a few highlights.  I do have to say that books that measure animals by the human exploitation of them tend to bother me a bit.  There’s something about reading how they make good pets but then they taste good too.  Especially since one of the takeaways is just how intelligent goats are.  I suspect even smart animals wouldn’t hang around if they knew their owners were licking their chops behind their backs.

Goats were very early among the domesticated species.  People do keep some breeds as pets, kind of like herbivorous dogs.  Goats require stimulation and tend to be playful and curious.  And they put up with humans quite well.  They climb.  You can find goats in trees in some locations since they do like to ascend whatever they can.  I remember seeing goats on the roof of a restaurant in Wisconsin (I can’t remember the name of the place, but I do recall the goats were supposed to be there).  Having not grown up on a farm I’ve never been too close to goats, but this book does make me interested in knowing more.

The book is heavily illustrated and it describes several varieties of goats as well as general goat physiology and behavior.  In fact, it answers that age-old question of how to tell the sheep from the goats.  Behaviorally they’re quite different, with goats being more individually minded and not always acting as a herd.  More individualistic, they nevertheless crave company.  And it is this difference between the sheep and the goats that starts to give the latter a bad name, perhaps because of their willfulness and individuality.  Goats are good followers, but on their own terms.  Sheep apparently don’t think much about it.  They follow any leader.  Historically, and unfortunately still, in some locations, goats have been preferred sacrificial animals.  Indeed, some gods, such as Pan, are portrayed with caprid qualities.  It is the intelligent, it seems, that are often targeted by the gods.  In any case, goats have long had associations with the divine in human minds.  And Weaver’s book parses goats in great detail.

Incorporeal

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I’ve been struggling with the concept of incorporeality.  Well, not me personally, but in how it fits into demon movies.  Specifically the Conjuring universe.  I’ve recently been watching the series through again and the corporeality of demons strikes me as problematic.  As spiritual entities demons don’t have bodies—that’s why they possess people.  Yet in these films they can be contained by blessed spaces, or objects.  The doll Annabelle, in particular, has to be kept in a locked glass case to prevent the demon (apparently Valak) from gaining its full power.  Annabelle Comes Home discusses this directly.  After the priest blesses the doll, Lorraine Warren says it’s not enough.  The evil has to be encased in another layer.  In this case, glass from “Trinity Church” which has, ironically, been torn down.

Watching the entire series, as it currently stands, Annabelle appears in four of the eight films and is named in a fifth.  Annabelle: Creation implies that the demon in the doll is Valak (a.k.a. “The Nun”), and she has her own movie as well.  In each case the demon has to be contained within a sacred space.  Once out, it manifests in corporeal form with the ability to harm, or even kill, human beings.  Now, I know this is movie magic.  I also know these movies have been carefully pieced together.  The corporeal/incorporeal question is a standard of seminary training.  While the topic of ghosts, and demons for that matter, was never raised in the curriculum, we did have to deal with God and angels and what it means for a being without a body to become incarnate in one.  These movies could use some seminary.

Is it like this?

In Holy Horror, and especially Nightmares with the Bible, I wrote quite a bit about The Conjuring and the universe it’s building.  I’ve seen demons physically attacking characters, and even taking on classic demon shape.  The viewers wants to see the monster.  If they’re truly incorporeal they can cross between glass cases, doors, windows, and walls.  Some of them do, when it suits their purpose.  Yet they can be quieted by being locked into a glass case, as long as it’s been blessed.  Of course, I’m trying to figure this out on my own.  There are entire fandom wikis out there based on the films and they probably have much more detail than I could ever find on my own.  But then, in a sense, information on the internet is, well, incorporeal.

H. P. Luca

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Disney has a lot of cash lying around, which means they can buy things.  One of those acquisitions, some years ago, was Pixar.  In my mind Pixar is now Disney, but in fact it does have a different aesthetic.  One of Pixar’s recurring themes is acceptance of those who are different.  Luca is Disney with a touch of Lovecraft.  This Pixar animation feature is about sea monsters acclimating to human culture, only they turn back into sea monsters when they get wet.  Kind of a combination between The Little Mermaid and Splash.  Even the Italian village in which Luca and his friend Alberto show up looks like the Imboca of Stuart Gordon’s Dagon (yes, I know Imboca is in Spain and I also know it’s fictional).  The villagers are, predictably, terrified of sea monsters since they earn their living from the sea.

In Luca once sea monsters come onto land they become human.  In fact, their culture below the surface is pretty much like human culture above.  The Lovecraftian element comes in the sea “monsters” (those in Luca are generally cute) coming to live among humans.  Lovecraft was, somewhat infamously, a racist.  While there’s no excusing that, there’s also no question that his fear of “the other” often develops the creepy atmosphere for which he became posthumously famous.  Cthulhu and many of the other great old gods dwell beneath the sea.  Human interactions with them generally lead to the humans becoming insane because of the implications.  Here Pixar adds its own twist—maybe humans are insane already.  What we permit in our societies is often less than humane.  At least with Lovecraft we could blame monsters.

Monsters are a reflection of humanity.  We take what we least like about ourselves and project it onto often fictional creatures that dwell beyond the bounds of human habitation.  We fear those who are different.  In more current thinking, that means humans should be accepting of other humans who don’t conform.  Those who think different, or, more especially, those who look different.  Sea monsters, at least hominid ones, hold great symbolic value.  They live in a world we barely know and to which we have little access.  Their lives under the great pressure of all that water must be very different from ours.  It’s only when we get beyond seeing them as monsters that we grow as humans.  If you follow the Creature of the Black Lagoon series to the end you see this playing out in black and white.  Sea monsters have much to teach us.