Stations, Everyone

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Station11There has been a movement, of late, among some sci-fi authors, to envision a more optimistic future. I have always been a fan of dystopias, myself. Perhaps it’s the working-class mentality backed up by being raised in poverty speaking, but sometimes I feel that collapse is more fair than progress. What passes for progress, anyway. Maybe I’m thinking this way because I just finished Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. This book has been on my radar for some time since it is one of the more hopeful dystopias out there. The story of a group among the very few who survive banding into a traveling troop of musicians and thespians is about the most hopeful outcome I can imagine. Not a day passes when I don’t feel the effacement of humanity that has been slowly taking place since I first became aware of the world. Sure, I do appreciate the strides made in medicine. Of this internet, which is the only place anyone ever really sees me, I’m less sanguine. It has its benefits, but even Mandel mentions the cell-phone zombies that are all too real and as omnipresent as an omnipotent deity used to be.

Station Eleven has, as many dystopias do, a religious sect that emerges after society collapses. This element of bleak futures is actually very accurate, I anticipate. We’re constantly being told by the “intellectuals” of the public variety that religion is for weak-minded dreamers with milquetoast aspirations for fantasy. The fact is the vast majority of people in the world are religious. The numbers are nowhere even near close. If a pandemic were to wipe out all but one percent (and hopefully it wouldn’t be the one percenters that survive) those who remain would, without doubt, turn to religion. People are easily led in this area of life. Mandel gives us The Prophet. His vision of the world is not helpful, but he has no trouble gathering a following. He’s also somewhat messianic: child of a single parent, raised in Israel, he comes to bring a sword to a nation already prostrate in the dust. This is powerful stuff.

Societies that try to rebuild themselves after traumas quite often rely on religion. This is hardly surprising as civilization itself began as religions coalesced into temples and their priesthoods. What is surprising is that so many intelligent people today can’t see just how important religion is to our species. As I suggested before, part of this is that religion defies simple definition. It’s easy to belittle “magical” thinking when it’s assumed religion has to do only with the supernatural. Religion, however, reaches into whatever we believe. Some ideas in modern cosmology, derived from physicists and their mathematics, can look sort of religious when viewed from a certain angle. As those who write dystopias know, religion is complex. It may lead to massive destruction. Chances are, however, that if there are any human beings left to crawl out of whatever pit we dig, they will do so with religious ideas in their heads. As usual, the writers have foreseen it.

:-D

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Technology runs amok. I confess to being born before earthlings landed on the moon. I remember a world where Purelle boogers simply did not exist. A time when to read the Bible meant opening that black leather with gilt edges that suggested some unknown bovine had paid the ultimate price to wrap those red-lettered words. Then came the LOL Cats Bible. The Lego Bible. Now the Emoji Bible. Emojis are made possible by the demand of cell phone users to express that which otherwise requires considerable wordsmithing. They’re popular. So much so that Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year is the unpronounceable 😂. I’m not even sure if you’ll see it on your screen. If not, imagine a yellow circle laughing until it cries. Or crying until it laughs. There’s some ambiguity there. In any case, bibleemoji.com offers to translate your favorite Bible verses into emojis.

A naughty little boy, I suspects, lurks inside many of us of my particular gender. So I opened a new tab and went to biblegateway.com. There I looked up Ezekiel 23.20, in the King James, of course, and copied and pasted it. The results were somewhat 😒. “4 she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, & whose issue is like the issue of 🐴s.” I don’t know about you, but I see several missed opportunities there. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand 📚. Is there an emoji for “words”? Can there be? I’m trying hard to keep within my word quota here, so please bear with me.

I’m hoping against hope that unicode has kept up with my puerile fascination with rebus writing. It seems likely that all writing began that way. Draw a picture of what you mean and, with a little luck, others will understand. The capital A, for example, represents the head of an ox. It’s easier to see if you flip it upside-down. Better yet, just write it this way: 🐮. The ancient Egyptians, one gets the impression, would’ve been proud. After all, we call their labor-intensive communication system hieroglyphics, or “sacred writing.” It was inevitable that what some consider holy writ would eventually come down to the lowest common denominator. Still, I’m somewhat disappointed. When I dragged my mind to more lofty verses all I found were simple textual changes to my requests. Perhaps it’s for the best. When I tried “Jesus wept” I got “jesus wept” rather than the expected 😭. 😦

Man’s Best Fiend

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While reading the Hull Daily Mail (don’t ask), I came across an article entitled “Rock legend Alice Cooper ask questions about the Beast of Barmston Drain.” Apart from that lovable Britishism of making groups into grammatical plurals, this brief article gave me much to wonder about. After all, Paul Simon’s most recent album features a song entitled “The Werewolf,” (about which I recently wrote) and here is another rock performer from my youth raising the question about a similar beastie. According to the piece by Amy Nicholson, the Beast of Barmston Drain is a new urban legend about a creature half-man and half-dog. No doubt, werewolf reported sightings have been in the ascendent over the past few years, but how such an insignificant beast drew the attention of Alice remains unknown.

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Many who know me—and those are few—are shocked to learn that I grew up listening to Alice Cooper. A fundie kid listening religiously to the father of shock rock? Songs about monsters, spiders, female maturation, and necrophilia? Perhaps it was because Welcome to My Nightmare just summed my childhood up rather nicely. Whatever the reason, to this day Alice Cooper is the only big name rock act I’ve even seen in concert. And that was only about six years ago, when I was still teaching at Rutgers. I had trouble hearing student’s questions in class on the next Monday night. Alice and werewolves in the same headline feels so much like yesteryear that it makes me want to believe in shapeshifters all over again. No wonder Hull is set to be the City of Culture. (Hey, Glasgow had it’s turn, so fair’s fair.)

To me, werewolves reveal much about a culture that strives to be far too civilized. We suppress our inner animal to become tie-wearing, wine-swilling sophisticates only to wonder where the wonder’s gone. And we start seeing werewolves lurking in culverts and drainage ditches. At least people are getting out at night. I’ve followed American tales of the dogman for years now, reading all of Linda Godfrey’s books on the subject. Even if it doesn’t exist, we stand to learn much of the creature that just won’t go away. Of all the transformations people talk about, that to the wolf is the most compelling, and among the most ancient. It may only be a dogman that people are seeing at the moment, but given some time it will evolve back into the wolf from which the story had its very beginnings. The answers, as always, probably lie in our childhood.

Holy Castle

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ManHighCastleReading about Philip K. Dick prompted me to read one of his novels. But which one? Some Amazon pick-up lockers on the way to work are painted with a mural of The Man in the High Castle. I haven’t seen the series, but there was the paperback, facing out, at the local independent. It’s been a while since I’ve read Dick, so I have to find my legs for his style. I’m surprised at just how much religious language he uses. Our cultural biases tend to insist that intelligent people aren’t hoodwinked by religion, but it does, nevertheless, appear. The premise of Dick’s novel is based largely on I Ching, the “Book of Changes.” Indeed, the conclusion of the novel relies heavily upon it. Along the way, however, Dick shows his sacred mettle when it comes to Judaism and Christianity as well. His prose is sprinkled with biblical quotes.

More than just a surface awareness, The Man in the High Castle offers some deep reflection for the reader. Mr. Baynes, seated on the rocket to San Francisco, ponders the Nazis who’ve won the Second World War. Reflecting on their hubris he considers how they’ve come to think of themselves as divine. “Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.” This gave me cause for pause. Apart from Dick’s narrative, the idea of divine anthropophagy is in keeping with much human experience. We often consider ourselves masters of our own fates. Many, however, find themselves dangling like a spider from a web over the fire. Not that of Edwards’ Hell, but simply that of human circumstance. The Nazis didn’t win the battle, but listening to today’s political rhetoric, they may have won the war.

Nobusuke Tagomi explains to Baynes how I Ching, a 5000-year-old book, is alive. “As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive.” Far from poking fun, Dick suggests there may be something to all this mumbo-jumbo after all. We are conditioned to mock, dismiss, and ignore religion in this world where rationality leads to presidential races such as this one we’re currently suffering. Follow the trail back, I suggest. Look for clues. Philip K. Dick isn’t the only secular writer who knew more than the average person about what fascism looks like, and about the role of religion in its downfall. The novel may not be easy to read. It demands much of those who approach it. Nevertheless, it preserves the truth that many books, indeed, are alive.

Mythisotry

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Positivism takes no captives. I’m not talking about the philosophical system—not necessarily—but about the phenomenon of assuming absolutes are available for human consumption. Some physicists, for example, assume that because our five senses can detect reality only the perceptions of those senses can be considered real. Material. Nothing more. Nothing less. A similar view plagues those who believe history is the telling of “what actually happened.” No historical event has ever been fully explained. All stories are told from a perspective. This is particularly dangerous when religions get involved. Many mistake historical veracity for “truth.” If it didn’t occur just as “the Bible says” then we should throw out the whole shebang. No point in believing in half truths. This is a myth.

This point was reinforced when a friend send me an article about the production of “The Hollow Crown” on the BBC. Apparently a local politician tweeted that having a Nigerian of Jewish descent (Sophie Okonedo) play Margaret of Anjou, a French queen, didn’t match history. As proof he provided a downy white Medieval illustration of the queen. In a rare moment of academic cool, an historian quickly pointed out that the illustration came from a manuscript that claimed Margaret descended, Leda-like, from a swan. Her whiteness, thus, belonged to her avian DNA. As the story makes clear, history is the modern mythology. We assume we know what happened, but we will only ever have part of the picture.

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Prejudice seldom worries about historical accuracy, unless, of course, it helps to uphold the bias. I used to caution my students about taking history as a statement of fact. Certainly there are events with factual elements, but when everything is interconnected we can never untangle precisely what happened. When we “believe” history, we are choosing to accept a certain viewpoint of things. One person’s manifest destiny is another person’s genocide. Peculiar institutions are very peculiar indeed. History, as we’ve come to know, reflects the point of view of the historian. It must be read and evaluated as the opinion of the writer and not as the absolute truth. For me, I rather like the idea that some people are descended from birds. It certainly helps to make more sense of what I see in the behavior of those who claim to be making history today.

The Werewolf in Summer

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It must be incredibly difficult to write a truly scary song. I don’t mean the kind of scare that most heavy metal can innately deliver, but I mean the kind of thrill that a classic horror movie gives. I’m constantly looking for the movie that can recreate the chills without getting blood all over the carpet. Music, however, soothes the savage beast. I remember when Michael Jackson’s Thriller came out. Now, nothing about Jackson’s musical style shows any hint of being scary. It’s too upbeat. In the end the ghost will be a mere reflection in the mirror, and the zombies will fade with the sunrise. I had some people tell me back then that it gave them the chills just listening to it. Amateurs. A couple weeks back I wrote a post on Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch.” It’s kind of scary, but it doesn’t keep me up at night. I haven’t heard Paul Simon’s new album Stranger to Stranger, but when I learned from NPR that it has a track called “The Werewolf,” I knew I’d eventually add it to my growing stack of MP3s.

Like Thriller, the musical style of the song isn’t inherently scary. The organ in the final minute is pretty effective, though. What’s scary about “The Werewolf”? The lyrics. Simon is, to this child of the sixties, the foremost lyricist of his genre. Rich, complex, nuanced, his words tell a story and that story is scary. While I prefer my werewolves with different baggage, it’s pretty clear that like most shapeshifters the werewolf stands for hunger. There’s violent rage, of course, but like the wendigo, hunger drives those who can’t fulfill their desires in human shape. The Howling, for example, shows how lust can make a werewolf. There is a lust more dangerous than that of the flesh, and that is the greed that leads to societies with one-percenters who just can’t stop eating.

When we see Trump-clones who pay no taxes at all, due to the good that being uber-rich offers the economy, we should listen for howling in the night. Too many an April has rolled around where those of us called “middle class” stare in wonder at just how large a cut our government takes. The werewolves don’t wait for October to come around. No, those who are hungry eat all the time. I don’t find Simon’s music to be particularly scary. The tempo is upbeat and his voice just can’t feel threatening. Still, I’m shivering after listening to “The Werewolf” even though the shortest night of the year is fast approaching on padded paws.

The Found World

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LostWorldChallenges will make you do funny things. One enjoyable dare has been Modern Mrs. Darcy’s Reading Challenge. With a modest twelve books in twelve months goal, the specific target is to read the types of books laid out. Into one of those categories, for me, fell Michael Crichton’s The Lost World. It’s sad that I feel I need so many disclaimers—I never really outgrew my love of dinosaurs—such escapist literature is indeed a guilty pleasure. Crichton could write a quick read, not bothering to pause for literary hindrances, and this novel fits the bill. It always surprises me when at the end of a traumatic story where friends die (this time ripped apart by reptilian carnivores) that the protagonists escape and never mention the dead. They joke, explain holes in the story, and generally look forward to a better, raptor-free future. There is, however, some food for thought here, among the lucre-grubbing sequel to Jurassic Park.

The first religious element that caught my attention was resurrection. Ian Malcolm rather convincingly died in Jurassic Park (and even an unconvincing death works for most people). In The Lost World he’s suddenly back again, with a barely disguised deus ex machina, and is as diffident as ever. The other former protagonists know better than to return to an island full of dinosaurs. Resurrection is a time-honored literary trope. So much so that it’s sometimes difficult to believe that death is in any way permanent. Well, come to think about it, the dinosaurs too are resurrected. Do reptiles have souls? Crichton’s dinosaurs seem to.

Then, just over halfway through the story, I was stunned. The chapter, or section, called “Gambler’s Ruin” explains how science and religion (or the humanities in general) are really the same. I couldn’t believe that a bestselling novel actually took the point of view that scientific objectivity is just as fraught as post-modern literary theory. There is no way to observe without influencing. When a conscious presence enters the equation, the facts have to counterbalance in return. Many, of course, would disagree in principle. Still, this unexpected bit of profundity stopped me in mid-chomp. Materialism, beguiling as it may be, doesn’t explain Heisenberg or Schrödinger. It takes a resurrected mathematician to do it. No wonder chaos abounds in this world where dinosaurs still rule the earth.

Omen, O Man!

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Of the unholy trinity of late-60s to mid-70s horror movies Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976), the last always seemed the least effective to me. Having recently read about the Devil in American popular culture, and having a rainy Friday evening alone, I decided to give it a try again. Based as heavily on Hal Lindsey as it is, once one outgrows dispensationalism it is hard to be frightened by the idea of biblical end times. Everything from making up verses in “Revelations” to utterly bogus Holy Land geography (Megiddo is north of Jerusalem, not south—did the writers not even own a map?) contributes to a set of untenable tenets, even among the bibliterati. The film relies mostly on shocks and startles to earn its horror stripes, and after you’ve seen the movie once, these lose their power in subsequent viewings. Nevertheless, on this rainy May night, so close to June 6, I noticed new ways in which the movie undermines its own message.

The premise, of course, is that Damien, the son of the Devil (who apparently has a thing for bestiality), is plotting to take over the world through the means of politics. Having been watching the events of the past few months I have to wonder how the Devil could improve on progress through such channels. But I digress. His step-father Robert Thorn, US ambassador to London, discovers his “son”‘s identity and tries to kill him. With a strong anti-Catholic bias (the Antichrist is born in Rome, the seat of the church, and is protected by Roman clergy) the film nevertheless spawns sympathy for the Devil. As a child, Harvey Stephens hardly appears diabolical. Maybe it’s just because my brothers and I also spilled goldfish from their bowl once, but it seems to me he acts just like most little boys do. Who really wants to go to church at that age? As the movie approaches its climax, he’s represented as the biblical good-guy.

Thorn has to confirm Damien’s satanic identity. Like Delilah, he creeps up on the sleeping boy and cuts his hair. Convinced by a man who introduces himself “I am Bugenhagen” that he has to stab the boy, Thorn in a white car outraces police (so there might be a bit of prophecy here after all) to sacrifice the child on the altar. The movie casts Damien as both Samson and Isaac within a few short minutes. Apart from the film’s use of violence against women’s bodies (Thorn won’t allow an abortion, Kathy seems to have a penchant from falling from high places in slow motion, Baylock gets a fork in the neck) it actually seems ambivalent about the evil of the boy. An unfortunate birthmark does not a devil make. We’ve made it through the change of the millennium and many other hazards, yet dispensationalism is still with us, as is its anticlimactic Antichrist, Damien. He’s less scary than the real politics of an entirely secular age.

High Castle Blade Runner

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DivineMadnessGrowing up evangelical, one of the popular topics of conversation was crypto-christians. (My spellcheck insists that this is a lowercase expression.) Crypto-christians are people, generally famous people, who might be secretly “Christian.” You see, despite stereotypes most evangelicals really do want people to go to heaven. In fact, they tend to be obsessed with it. And besides, it can’t hurt to have a celeb backing your claims. One name that never came up in my circles was Philip K. Dick. I grew up reading science fiction. My reading patterns (which haven’t changed much) involved reading what I could find among used books at Goodwill. We were poor, and besides, there were no bookstores in our town. Like many people, I’m sure, I learned of Dick by watching Blade Runner. I occasionally heard others discussing the movie, but I hadn’t seen it myself and thus continued blithely unaware until I began teaching. I then read how Blade Runner is a possible Christian analogy, and curious, I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Since then Dick, who never made it big in his lifetime, has become a staple of the sci-fi diet. In The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick Kyle Arnold explores the now famous 2-3-74 episode. Dick, in addition to being over-medicated, had mystical experiences. The “big one” took place beginning on the date implied in its title. This vision, while not orthodox by any standard, is clearly religious. Critics tend to think that Dick may have either faked it or that he underwent some kind of schizophrenic episode. Arnold, a clinical psychologist, has the chops to demonstrate that these latter explanations are off base. Dick had a legitimate visionary experience—something even neuroscientists can’t access because the experience is subjective and personal. It had a large impact on his life, but it did not make him mentally ill.

Arnold is not, as far as I can tell, a crypto-christian hunter. He is a psychologist attempting to understand a most complex and tormented writer of superior science fiction. What becomes clear, however, is that Dick was well-informed about Christianity. He imagined himself a secretive first-century Christian in an oppressive Roman Empire. This aspect of his life tends not to emerge in pop culture discussions—how Christian can you be and still be cool? Certainly Dick was not a conventional believer, but religious imagery and even actions became some of the most important moments of his life, according to his own recollections. Philip K. Dick was clearly a haunted man. And one of the specters haunting him was an often undiagnosed religion.

Devil’s Workshop

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SatanInAmerSome of us prefer taking our monsters neat. With Old Scratch, however, we have a slippery, protean beast. This is amply demonstrated in W. Scott Poole’s Satan in America: The Devil We Know. Not only the Devil, but vampires, demons, and the human minions known as Satanists and witches populate this study of American culture. The Dark Lord is difficult to pin down. This is true even concerning his obscure biblical origins. As I’ve noted before, there is no Devil in the Hebrew Bible. By the time of the Gospels he’s alive and well and on planet earth. Or at least what passed for planet earth in those days. Tempter, father of lies, prince of the power of the air—he was a pretty ambitious fellow, seeking like a lion those he might devour. Those were early days, however, and Poole focuses specifically on his development in American culture. It is, as he shows, a rich culture indeed.

Beginning with the colonial era, with the Matherses, Jonathan Edwards, and their ilk, and bringing the figure up through fairly contemporary times, Poole shows us how the Devil defines America, in many ways. Please don’t misunderstand; Poole does not say America is evil or Satanic, only that our culture has had an undying fascination with Satan. Not everyone agrees, of course, with who he is or how to interpret him. Although theologians have largely left the Devil in the dust, polls tend to show about half of the American population believes in the Beast (yet another character in the mixed martini of evil Poole serves up), or more properly, Satan. It really might help to have a diabolical score card here: is the Antichrist the Devil? Is he the same as the Beast? What about demons? As a child I was taught there is only one Devil, but lots and lots of demons. Legions of them, in fact. There can be only one morning star, one Lucifer.

One thing we can say for certain about Satan, at least in the context of Poole’s study, is that he is evil. Not that some haven’t had sympathy for him. Popular culture has helped to keep the character alive. Sometimes comically, sometimes with dead seriousness, novelists, cartoonists, film-makers, and playwrights come time and time again to the font of the inexplicable evil we all seem to sense, in some sense, exists. The evidence is all around us. Whether conceived as an external agent of supernatural origin, or as some inborn tendency for—at least some—committing atrocity, we do have to explain evil. Satan has been a convenient way of doing so for centuries. But, as Poole intimates, it might be a defense mechanism. Perhaps we need to take a closer look at ourselves. Perhaps trumping our exceptionalism in the face of a world in need is a symptom that requires a serious exorcism.

Beg to Differ

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“What do you burn apart from witches?” “More witches!” Earning a doctorate is kind of like learning how to get lost. It certainly doesn’t make you either cool or employable, but it allows you a few years to accumulate enough debt to keep you out of trouble for awhile. One of the things I learned along the way is that you should always follow the crowd. I look at the schools that only hire Harvard grads and there can be no doubt. I look at all the Trump supporters and I know there can be no question. Yes, the ayes have it. So, I never learned to tell which bands were truly worth listening to until I learned to follow the critics. I never studied music. Like most people, I know what I like but I can’t say why. I only discovered Radiohead in the last few months. Some of my critics claim my complaint of lack of time is only an excuse, but I don’t listen to music unless I can really listen to music. It can’t be pure filler. Put on Beethoven’s seventh and you’ll see what I mean.

In any case, my wife alerted me to the new Radiohead song “Burn the Witch.” And you can’t listen to a new song without watching it as well. This time it’s worth it. The claymation video accompanying the song (conveniently found here on NPR) is a reprisal of “The Wicker Man,” one of the truly intellectual movies in the horror genre. Of course, that’s something I picked up from the crowd. We’re told by the most powerful and charismatic bigots of our age that life is all about acquiring stuff. Were I to argue with that, well, I guess I’d be the witch to be burnt. Before listening to/watching the Radiohead song, do yourself a favor and watch “The Wicker Man” (the original, please, accept no substitutes). Go on, everybody’s doing it.

The most dangerous thing in the world is an independent thinker. No, I didn’t learn that at Harvard. On my first walking tour through Edinburgh with one of my doctoral advisors he pointed out the part of town where they used to kill witches. He was truly an original thinker (still is) and taught me to be one too. Problem is, I should’ve been following the crowd all along. You want people to pay attention to you? Go to Harvard! Want people to vote for you? Clearly show you’ve got what it takes (money). Give a man a little cash and anything will do for brains, to paraphrase one of the smartest movies of all time. The only way forward is to do what everyone else is doing. And pick up some kindling along the way—you’re going to need it.

Comic Culture

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KrakowKryptonPerhaps the most obvious deviancy in my otherwise conservative childhood was MAD Magazine. I honestly suspect my parents didn’t know that it wasn’t just another comic book. I read it—like I read everything—religiously, and I was fluent enough in the lingo to discuss it intelligently with my sixth-grade teacher, a fellow fan. Having made that admission, my reading of comic books was muted since we lived in a town with no literary aspirations or conveniences. There was no book store, or even magazine shop, let alone a public library. We were one of the towns Carnegie left behind. Still, I was draw to MAD contributor Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books. Over the past few years I’ve been reading academic treatments of comics as, with my beloved monsters, the high-brow academy has come to view low-brow as “culture.” (I learned the term “high-brow” from MAD, by the way.) As I grew into an Episcopalian, I tended to leave these markers of my shameful past behind, but now I’ve come once again to embrace them.

One of the odd things I’ve noticed about Jewish (and other “outsider”) analyses is just how deeply felt the anti-semitism of our culture is. This always strikes me as odd as, although it is hard to believe, I was raised to be non-prejudicial toward anyone else. (Poor folk are often that way; we know our place, beneath others.) I never felt superior to Jews, African Americans, or women. I was in awe of them. Maybe MAD helped. As Kaplan points out in his treatment, much of the comic industry was Jewish in origin because so many Jews were kept out of other businesses in New York. (Well, there is Diamond District, but let’s stick to publishing.) With few options, poor immigrant kids turned to cartoons. As a child in a humble household I often took out my frustrations by making my own comic books. I can understand the catharsis.

With the current glut of superhero movies, it may be hard to imagine a time when comic books and their denizens were considered utter foolishness. Now they’re big money. It’s not so much that the mighty have fallen than it is the humble have been exalted. I haven’t really read comic books since I was maybe fourteen. Up to that point, however, they got me through many a difficult time with the belief that there was someone out there watching over me. No superheroes ever delivered me from my troubles, but belief was sometimes all I needed. I can understand why those who are discriminated against would turn to this medium for release. Faith and fantasy share more than an opening syllable, for those with eyes to see.

Game of Thrones

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IMG_2763I risk my already flagging street cred by admitting this, but I don’t watch Game of Thrones. In fact, I started to read the first book a couple years back and I just couldn’t get into it. Well, only 80 pages into it. The fault is, I’m entirely sure, my own. I lack some gene or enzyme that makes life without Game of Thrones impossible. Still, I have to admit curiosity. A story on the Washington Post, by Ishaan Tharoor, suggests “The ancient Persian god that may be at the heart of ‘Game of Thrones’” is Angra Mainyu, aka Ahriman. This managed to catch my attention. Zoroastrianism is a religion that seems to lie behind quite a bit of modern religious thought. Although dating Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, is notoriously difficult, concepts from his religious system show up in Hinduism—one of the earliest forms of religious expression about which we know a fair deal—as well as in Judaism and therefore Christianity and Islam. In fact, many of the ideas you may associate with the central tenets of Judeo-Christo-Islamic tradition may go back to Zarathustra.

One of the certainties about Zoroastrianism is that it was a dualistic religion. Good and evil are engaged in a constant struggle for control. The good god, Ahura Mazda (which sounds like a blend between Star Trek and a Japanese auto maker) struggles constantly against Angra Mainyu. Mazda’s website states that the car line is named after the deity (according to Wikipedia, I note, losing the last vestige of cred), pushing his reach even further east. With this incredible pedigree, it is no wonder that George R. R. Martin may have tapped into it. This kind of dualism is ripe for the picking.

My friend K. Marvin Bruce wrote a satire about the Persian gods, in fictional form, that was published a couple years back in Calliope, a small circulation literary journal. He told me he even won third place in a contest for it. The idea was that a disgruntled professor wanted to start the apocalypse (a Zoroastrian idea) by summoning Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu to earth to try to start a fight between the two. It was a fun story, but the point, if I may speak for my friend, is serious. Warring religions stand the best chance of beginning the end of times. We don’t even need the gods to do it, really. Although I don’t watch Game of Thrones, I can’t help wonder if Martin had the same idea in mind. If you want the answer to that, don’t ask me. I’m not even a hundred pages into it, and I don’t have triple play.

Come Sail Oy Vey

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Nothing says unorthodox like a headline that reads “Smart Jews? Thank the Extraterrestrials.” Breaking Israel News ran the story recently and, being constitutionally unable to pass up anything so strange, I had to take a look. The article, by Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, is really just a half-century retrospective of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?. I remember fifty years ago—not well, mind you, I was only three—but even when I was a teenager and the book had its second (of many ordinal) gasp(s), and a movie came out. People, even those not traditionally labeled as “crazy,” flocked to theaters to see it. The book went through multiple printings. The era of “ancient astronauts” was born. Von Däniken, it seems, is alive and if not exactly kicking, still making people uncomfortable.

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In this news story von Däniken suggests that Jews are more intelligent because of their alien DNA. Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure that was the plot line of the X-Files season 10. Isn’t Fox Mulder Jewish? Maybe I’m getting myself mixed up in some kind of plot here. I have to admit, however, to having a touch of nostalgia for Chariots of the Gods?. There was a kind of innocence to it. Nobody seemed to be inseminating anyone else, or stealing babies. It was good, clean fun.

Something bothers me, however, about the assertion that aliens are, indirectly perhaps, responsible for holy writ. I remember thinking through the implications of this idea (already floated four decades ago) that God might be more Captain Kirk than Jesus Christ. It is inherently disturbing. Especially when von Däniken says in the interview that the Jews are the chosen people, but they just got the chooser wrong. ET instead of I AM. The really interesting part is that ancient astronauts have become a somewhat accepted cultural trope. I don’t know whether they were there or not (I wasn’t around at the time), but they sure do make Saturday afternoons much more interesting. One wish I hold is that people writing about this old idea might find a new opening bit. Ezekiel seeing the wheel has been done to death. Surely a bit of creative thought might suggest a new, undiscovered ancient truth.

What’s the Message?

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I said I’d come back to Bono. A story in the New Boston Post heralds a new documentary on Bono and Eugene Peterson. Both are famous in their own way, but no doubt Bono has the bigger name. Peterson, a pastor, is noted for his book The Message, a contemporary translation of the Bible. The documentary, “Bono and Eugene Peterson: The Psalms,” focuses on the book that brought rock star and scholar together, according to the story. The Psalms have a way of surprising people. In a day when the Bible is treated with considerable suspicion (how Bible scholars must feel, learning now that they are really rouges!) it’s sometimes easy to forget just how readable many of the Psalms are. The collection is, of course, uneven. Some are wonderful. Others are frightening and express immoral, if very human, sentiments. It is difficult to treat the Psalms as a whole.

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Having researched the Psalms in some depth, I found them to be one of the most challenging books to teach. We tend to have preconceived notions about the Psalter. That they are poems written by either David or God (neither of whom signed them). That they are comforting. That they are appropriate for any occasion. The reality is that Psalms is a most difficult book. Some of the poetry is sublime. Even up to the lifetime of yours truly, it could be assumed that many in secular society could recite Psalm 23 from memory. Not all of them are, however, quite so nice. Those that advocate murdering the babies of your enemies as less easy to consider holy writ.

The Psalms are generally a collection of human poetry. As I used to tell my students, whereas laws, and even narratives, are often top-down, the Psalms are one of the few places in the Bible where people are allowed to speak. There is joy in the Psalter, but there is also bitter frustration. Not all of the poems have happy endings. We seem to think that once a document becomes sacred it can no longer retain human fingerprints. The lie is given to this position in the Psalms. They are a most human book. Maybe the documentary will say why Bono finds this particular collection of poetry so inspirational. His is, after all, a human voice. There may be a message here since the Psalms are so fallibly human. And if nothing else, humans are experts at seeing the same thing in different ways.