Friendly Fear

Leave a comment

I opened my book Holy Horror with an epigraph taken from Apocalypse Now, a movie I recently watched again.  That quote was from Col. Kurtz: “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.”  I’ve been thinking quite a lot about how you can make any progress in a discussion with anyone who’s already made up his or her mind (i.e., no matter what you say to them they will not take it seriously.  Think your favorite Trump supporter).  People far smarter than I have noted that the only way to combat this unthinking adherence is to get people to think critically.  That may be correct, but to preserve democracy we need a more assured method in the short term.  That of Col. Kurtz.

Apocalypse Now was based on Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.  Both contain a vital truth—fear motivates people.  Democrats have been forward-looking in recent decades, but Republicans run on that fear playbook and it’s very difficult to defeat.  That’s because people are afraid.  It’s important to face fears, but to win elections, you need to seed them.  I know whereof I speak when it comes to phobias.  I was so riddled with fear as a young person that at times I could not leave the house.  At other times even the house didn’t feel safe to me.  I had multiple phobias and difficulty talking to other people.  I’ve grown out of many of these fears, but if I’m honest, I know they’re still with me.  I suspect many other people are also afraid.

Strong men (even if personally weak) appeal to the afraid.  They want someone who can protect them.  I tend to think Democrats think many Americans are better adjusted than they actually are.  You want their votes?  Make them afraid.  I’ve been writing books on fear and its many cinematic manifestations for several years now.  I grew up being afraid of everything.  I don’t advocate creating fear, but when a nation decides Hitler would be better than letting young people read, it’s reached a crisis point.  I do wish progressive political leaders would consider my humble observations.  When afraid people herd together and become the mob with torches.  And just such a mob became the mindless followers of Col. Kurtz.  Just saying.

Eschew Stupidity

Leave a comment

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a certified evangelical Christian.  His theology often feels a bit pat to some of us who work in religious studies, but there’s no doubt that Bonhoeffer was a brilliant man.   Bonhoeffer believed in Jesus but resisted Hitler.  In fact, that resistance cost him his life.  My brother recently sent me a Facebook Reels video on Bonhoeffer’s observations about stupidity, which Bonhoeffer believed was far more dangerous than evil.  I shared that video in my feed on Facebook yesterday, and it is well worth listening to.  Stupidity isn’t a badge most people would wear proudly.  We all do wear it from time to time since we’re only human.  The real problem, according to Bonhoeffer, is when crowds start becoming stupid.  We’ve seen it time and again.  We’re living in such a time right now.  The antics coming out of DC right now have thinking people everywhere wondering how this is even possible.  Listen to Bonhoeffer.

Photo source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R0211-316 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

I don’t take Bonhoeffer uncritically.  Some of us—generally without tons of friends—think critically by default.  (The women in college all broke up with me because “You’re too intense.”  I credit my wife with sticking with me, although she tells me they were right.)  Anyone can learn critical thinking.  The problem is, keeping the skill is hard work.  And the internet doesn’t help.  Whenever anyone makes a claim, personally, my default response is “How do they know?”  Yes, I do look up references.  With my particular brand of neurodivergence, I seldom trust other people to know something unless they’re experts.  (This is something the current administration is a bit shy on.)  I even question experts if their conclusions look suspect.  “Nullius in verba” is written in my academic notebooks.  Something, however, is obviously clear.  Bonhoeffer was right about stupidity.

I’m not sure what an unfluencer like myself hopes to gain by discussing this.  I do hope that folks will listen to Bonhoeffer if they have concerns about my thought process.  My deeper concern is that the church often encourages stupidity.  Unquestioning adherence to something the facts expose as untrue is often lauded.  It makes some people saints.  Churches require followers and often distrust critical thinkers.  That once cost me my job, sending my career into a tailspin.  This was well pre-Trump, but some in authority didn’t appreciate critical thinking on the part of faculty.  (Ahem, that’s what we’re paid to do).  I’m not anti-belief.  Anyone who really knows me knows that I believe very deeply in the immaterial world.  And I know that Bonhoeffer did too, right up to the gallows.

Step Far

Leave a comment

It made a bit of a splash when it came out, Longlegs did.  It took a while to get to a streaming service I can access, but I can say that it’s a movie with considerable thought behind it.  And religion through and through it.  I would’ve been able to have used it in Holy Horror, and it is one of the very few movies where a character corrects another, saying “Revelations” is singular, not plural.  Somebody did their homework.  Although the plot revolves around Satanism, you won’t be spoon-fed anything.  The connection’s not entirely clear, but it does seem to involve some form of possession.  The plot involves ESP and a literal deal with the Devil.  Things start off with a future FBI agent encountering Longlegs just before her ninth birthday.

As an adult, she’s forgotten the childhood encounter but a set of murders with a similar MO indicates that a serial killer, called Longlegs, is on the loose.  The murders are all inside jobs, and it turns out that a doll with some kind of possessing ability is responsible for inspiring fathers to murder their families.  No details of the connection between the dolls, Satan, and the reason for the killings ever emerges.  The movie unnerves by its consistent mood of threat and menace.  Satan, the guy “downstairs,” appears more properly to be chaos rather than a kind of literal Devil.  Satanic symbols are used and there are plenty of triple sixes throughout.  The Bible has a role in breaking the killer’s code, but talk of prayer and protection also find their way in the dialogue.  Longlegs uses a ruse of a church to get the dolls into his victims’ houses.

I’ll need to see it again to try to piece more of the story together, but Longlegs is another example of religion-based horror tout court.  Serial killers are scary enough on their own, but when their motivation is religious they become even more so.  Nicholas Cage plays Longlegs in a convincingly disturbing way, but there’s definitely some diegetic supernatural goings on here.  The art-house trappings make the plot a little difficult to follow, particularly early on.  Religion, however, shines through clearly.  The FBI agent, although psychic, has ceased believing in religion while trusting the supernatural.  Even as the credits rolled I had the feeling that I’d missed some important clues.  And those clues would be important, particularly if I ever do decide to write a follow-up to Holy Horror.

Saint Francis

Leave a comment

With the death of the most saint-like Pope in living memory, it feels a little like fate that I’d seen Conclave just three days before.  Francis was the only Pope I’ve seen, and am likely to see.  He cared for people more than dusty doctrines that still repress.  He laid hands on the sick and genuinely loved human beings.  Given the reactionary world of politics, I suspect his successor will be conservative, but I would be glad to be wrong.  All this seesawing on the way to progress makes me a bit seasick.  And Francis was a man who, from a humble background, understood the necessity of moving forward rather than pretending things always stay the same.  I already miss him.

It was on the rare occasion of being invited to a New York City church to offer a program that I saw him.  Since I’d be staying a couple nights in Manhattan, my wife joined me.  On the way to meet her after work on that Friday, I saw large crowds along 34th Street in Herald Square.  The buzz indicated that the Pope would be going this way on his way out of town.  The police refused to confirm that, but it seemed like a good bet.  I asked Kay, “Do you want to see the Pope?”  We found a place in the crowd (this was pre-pandemic, of course) where we had a good view of the street and eventually the motorcade rolled through, Pope Francis in his trademark Fiat, the window down, waving at the crowd.  And then he was gone.  

In New York City you see motorcades.  I’d seen President Obama’s go by once, on the way to the United Nations, I think it was.  But still, seeing the Pope was incredible.  Not shielded behind bulletproof glass, his care for the nameless crowds felt genuine.  I empathize with those raised in humble circumstances who manage just to survive, let alone become the head of the largest branch of Christianity.  I like to think he was a reluctant Cardinal, and a reluctant Pope.  Conclave is fiction, of course, but the idea of choosing someone who really doesn’t want the job is immensely appealing.  How different from world leaders we’re now burdened with!  Men (almost always) who see themselves as God’s gift to us, clawing at power.  At the same time, Francis, who was a divine gift, actually remembered what Jesus said and did.  The world is poorer for his death but richer for the lessons he taught by example.

Easter Gathering

Leave a comment

On Easter I’m thinking of Conclave.  My wife had been wanting to see it and we watched it on Good Friday—a work day, of course, in this “Christian” nation.  In any case, it’s fascinating for a couple of reasons.  One is that, as a drama surrounding the election of a new pope, it draws you in.  The politics and intrigue are, I assure you, quite real within in the church.  People are, in seems, incurably political.  Conclave is fiction, of course.  And in reality, very few people are ever admitted to the chambers where a world leader is elected by those priests who’ve risen to the highest levels of church hierarchy.  This fictional reconstruction may give a window into that.  The other reason that I found it so fascinating is that it was quite a box office success for being a movie about a religious subject that isn’t biblical.  Appropriate viewing for Easter weekend.

There were a few striking scenes.  Here’s the outline, though: a pope has died and Cardinal Lawrence is the deacon in charge of the conclave to elect a new one.  Four main candidates exist—one a staunch traditionalist, one a liberal, one an African who is conservative, and the last a moderate American who has a past.  The pope had appointed a new cardinal shortly before his death and some people think he’d make a good pope, despite his relative youth.  One of the striking scenes is Cardinal Lawrence’s homily to open the conclave.  He preaches against certainty.  Not only is this a powerful scene, for some of us watching he is absolutely correct.  Certainty is the death of faith.  That scene alone is worth watching the movie for.  Go ahead, it’s Easter.

The other striking scene is the twist ending, which I won’t reveal here.  Anyone who’s honest and who’s lived long enough to become a pope has secrets.  Not all of them reach to the level of scandal, but the movie also emphasizes that the pope is also a sinner but must be willing to seek forgiveness.  Indeed and amen.  The problem we face today is that, even and perhaps especially in Protestantism, many people look to condemn sinners without realizing their own faults.  The movie points out that even the holiest acknowledged person within Christendom can’t make any claims to perfection.  If we’d all admit that we’re doing the best we can not to offend deity or fellow human being, perhaps there really would be cause to celebrate this Easter.  Even without a conclave.

The Sin of Syncretism

Leave a comment

Syncretism may not be dead, but it should be.  What is it?  Well, in my field it means a religion that has been “corrupted” by the adoption of some element(s) of another religion.  The term was all the rage while I was working on my doctorate which involved, of course, comparative religions.  By the time I was being edged out of academia, there was a recognition afoot that the concept of syncretism was itself corrupt.  It depends on the idea that there is a “pure” form of a religion and that foreign elements debase it.  There is no pure form of any religion, and the more we learn of the history of religions the more obvious it is that religions influence each other, and have always done so.

What prompts this post is that I increasingly see clergy using the term “syncretism.”  Now, clergy tend to run behind scholars by a fair pace.  Those of us out there trying to figure out what religion is and how it works have a daily duty to analyze and reassess and theorize.  Clergy have many other things to do and read scholarly tomes as time permits.  Syncretism is now only used by conservative scholars who believe a religion (usually the form of their religion that they personally happen to believe) is pure.  Other religions are corruptions.  Ironically, I once heard a Unitarian Universalist minister use the term.  For a religion that accepts all other religions as valid, it struck me as odd.

Photo by Noah Holm on Unsplash

As I used to tell my students, nobody knowingly believes “the wrong religion.”  By far the majority of people accept the religion that their parents taught them.  Often without question.  I know I did.  Then I studied religion.  I began to realize things weren’t as simple as “that old time religion” pretended they were.  Fundamentalism borrows from other religions just as much as any other tradition does.  Religions don’t have sharp boundaries.  There are fuzzy edges between them.  Those edges are permeable and quite wide.  Syncretism was a concept that religion scholars used, often in the context of monotheistic religions, to show where impurities entered.  The thing is, impurities were there from the conception on.  If one religion were born fully grown from the head of Yahweh, it would be obvious, wouldn’t it?  The Bible describes the religion of Israel and how it borrowed and adapted from other traditions.  Thus it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.  The world would be a much better place if we made our peace with this and buried syncretism in the graveyard of obsolete ideas.

More Than It Seems

Leave a comment

One of the most fascinating mystical concepts is the idea that words and individual letters have some kind of magical power.  This is perhaps illustrated by the way certain words gather an aura of mystery that can be quite unlike their original denotation.  “Kabbalah” is one such word.  The reason I read Joseph Dan’s Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction is that I’d found myself growing increasingly confused by the usage of the word.  Given that this is me writing, it was a horror movie that got me wondering.  In one of the movies discussed on this blog (happy hunting and viewing!) one character tells another something like, “It’s the Kabbalah.”  This is said in reference to an ancient and mysterious book.  There is not ancient and mysterious book called The Kabbalah.  So what is it?

I’m not going to be able to give a satisfactory answer to that here.  Dan has about 30,000 words to describe it and he admits that’s not really sufficient.  Sometimes I think, if one could make a living doing it, I’d have been content to sit at the feet of rabbis to learn the depths of the many ancient books Judaism has given the world.  I first became aware of some of them in college, majoring in religion.  At each step of my education and career I’ve uncovered more and more.  Reading this little book added yet further examples.  Judaism, and its direct descendant Christianity, were full of books.  They still are.  And books are full of words and perhaps these words have some kind of mystical power.  But wait, the point of this brief tome is to suggest the word itself isn’t just about mysticism.

Kabbalah can refer to many different things, some of them hardly mystical at all.  For the modern usage of the word, which includes Christian as well as Jewish Kabbalah, we have to get to, well, modernity.  The concept stretches far back in Judaism and means basically, “what is received.”  The initial reference is to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Then there’s the oral Torah, codified in Mishnah and Talmud.  And books, so very many books!  The rabbi is one of those permitted to, and sometimes expected to, come to know these ancient texts and their modern applications.  That’s not to suggest Judaism is particularly mystical.  It can be, just as Christianity can be, but isn’t necessarily so.  It’s complicated.  If you’re curious, whether because of a horror movie or not, I can recommend this book.  It’ll give you plenty to think about, and even more to read and learn.

Learning Bunnies

Leave a comment

Although it was released during the first Trump administration, Jojo Rabbit was written before he was sharp bit of dust in the GOP’s eye.  Still, in the second debacle, it seemed like a good time to watch it.  Its message is appropriate for any time, but especially now.  Jojo is a ten-year-old boy who’s an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth.  So enthusiastic that he has Hitler as his imaginary friend.  He buys the party line without even thinking (he who has ears to hear, let him hear).  Jews are evil, according to the rhetoric.  Monsters even.  Jojo’s mother tries to help her son, missing his father, understand that love is the better way.  Then Jojo discovers something.  A girl his deceased sister’s age has been living in the walls of his sister’s room.  He quickly deduces that she is a Jew.  Were it not for her threats to implicate him and his mother, he would turn her in.

An unusual coming of age story, we see Jojo do something rare—he matures.  Getting to know Elsa he can’t reconcile what he sees with what he was taught.  She’s not evil.  She has no horns.  She’s not rich.  She fell in love with a guy and wants the same thing anyone wants.  The conflict faces Jojo every day as he decides he must learn about Jews to report this intelligence to the authorities.  The authorities, however, know Germany is losing the war.  It’s only a matter of days.  When Hitler dies by suicide, Jojo fully realizes that he has been simply following along instead of following the evidence.  His mother was hanged for not being loyal to the party and his father, he learns, was also helping the Jews.  In a moment of singular hope, Jojo grows up.

Movies can teach lessons.  Some are widely enough viewed to make a major impact on society.  Can any of us imagine a world without Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker?  In this era when sensible people seem to have forgotten that fascism is evil in its nature, films like Jojo Rabbit are important.  Thinking is not a crime.  Learning is not a crime.  Even if they’re being touted that way by the wealthy in order to protect their privilege.  We watched the movie for entertainment on a Friday night, but I received an education instead.  I wonder just when the message of love fell out of Christianity.  But then, I think it becomes clear when you think about particular movies and how we’ve come to be where we are.

What You Believe

2 Comments

This is an important and frustrating book.  I just can’t figure out if the black-and-white thinking is disingenuous or if it was really believed.  I don’t mean about the subjects of Daniel Dennett and Lisa LeScola’s Caught in the Pulpit.  I wonder that about the near-arrogance of the model they propose while exploring the very real problem of, as their subtitle says Leafing Belief Behind (for clergy).  You see, I’ve read, and even walked a little way with the “new atheists” (my private beliefs are private but one thing I will say is that beliefs constantly change for anyone who seriously seeks the truth.  If you want to know them, get to know me).  This book, which explores clergy and other religious folk who’ve lost their faith, addresses something very real and very important.  It’s just that the framing feels wrong.  I appreciate that the authors exhibit such sympathy for their subjects—it is difficult to change the religion in which you were raised.  But it it’s not black-and-white.

Apart from the “either/or” outlook, there’s also the fact that what many people interviewed lost was not so much a belief in God as it was a belief in the Bible.  These are different things.  No doubt, our love of Bible has caused quite a lot of damage.  Since many believe the Bible to be a magic book, losing that particular lens can make things blurry.  I guess that’s what I missed in this book—a sense of blurriness.  Scientism is a belief system just as fundamentalism is.  Interestingly, I keep coming back to something that should be obvious to scientists—our brains did not evolve to learn “the truth.”  Our brains evolved to help us survive.  There is much we still don’t know.  What’s wrong with being humble about it?  Perhaps it’s sour grapes since I was ousted from a religious career just when this study was taking place, but I didn’t qualify because I believed.  Not that they’d have found me, in any case.

Many clergy, I know, do not believe what their congregations think they believe.  As you go into theological education some things are revealed that it is in nobody’s best interest to broadcast.  It might be good, however, if it weren’t atheists trying to lead the charge.  I was pleased to see Dennett himself suggest this in the book.  I was also glad to see him admit that “the new atheists” do not struggle with the very real issues raised by theological education (whether in formal settings, or through private reading).  There is a very real disconnect here, and this book serves a valuable function in bringing it to public attention.  What’s missing is a solution.

Indigenous Gods

Leave a comment

Engulfed by capitalism, it is too easy to ignore the indigenous population of this country.  I grew up thinking, in some way, that American Indians were extinct (this was small town America, after all).  Then we visited a place—in upstate New York, I think, but the recollection’s hazy—where there were real Indians.  This was before exoticism was a bad word, and I thought them quite exotic.  Maybe it was the way I was raised, but I’ve never thought of myself as better than anybody else.  Certainly not on the basis of race or gender, or even personal worth.  In any case, there were still Indians.  I’ve always been an admirer of their culture.  Jennifer Graber’s The Gods of Indian Country is an informative monograph on, as the subtitle says, Religion and the Struggle for the American West.

My interest in American history is relatively recent.  Growing up, I always found European history of greater interest, and then, for many years, the ancient history of the states along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.  It was the antiquity of it all.  History feels safer when it’s at a great distance.  American history is not old.  When hearing that some of the events discussed by Graber took place in the 1910s, I kept thinking, “were we really that naive just over a century ago?”  Or was our nation willfully blind to the plight of the people who lived here before the Europeans arrived?  The narrative has changed.  And if it hasn’t, it must.  How would we like it if, say, aliens landed and assumed the right to take over capitalistic America?  It’s only our arrogance that prevents us from treating Indians better.

Religion, particularly Christianity, fueled many interactions with the Indians, as Graber ably demonstrates.  The assumption was that Indians had to assimilate to capitalistically-fueled Christianity.  Private ownership.  Free trade.  Otherwise the cultures could not share the land.  Treaties were broken because the “Christian” rules of the new overlords demanded it.  Graber also explores some Native American religious practices as well, chiefly among the Kiowa.  Since the book is fairly brief, it doesn’t include any kind of comprehensive coverage of Indian religion, nor, of course, of early American settler religion.  What happened is that religion and politics joined forces to justify stealing what belonged to someone else.  Those who study the history of religion recognize this pattern.  It isn’t a rarity, unfortunately.  Although my interest in American history is recent, it is growing.  What happened in your own backyard determines so much of how we’ve become who we are.

Firebrands

1 Comment

Although I’ve never lived there, I believe I have a fairly good idea of life in Ithaca, New York.  I’ve spent many, many days there over the past few years, often pondering how it is a city that would be an especially good fit for me, despite the fact I’m unhireable at Cornell and Ithaca College has never showed any interest.  It’s a liberal college town where even the street people appear to be educated.  The money of Ivy League students keeps it fresh and evolving.  And the shops in Ithaca Commons are set at eleven.  So it was that a headline in Publishers Weekly some months back caught my eye.  (I’m not behind only on movies, it seems.)  It showed a historical plaque for Firebrand Books, on the Commons.  The story stated that the plaque had to be placed on public land since the owner of the building where Firebrand started has a Christian prejudice against homosexuality.

I suppose I ought to take a step back and give a little history.  Firebrand was established as a feminist and lesbian publisher.  Its offices were on Ithaca Commons, but when the founder, Nancy K. Bereano, retired the press eventually found a buyer in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  (I have also lived in Ann Arbor, but for less than a year.  Likewise, it is the kind of place I felt instantly at home.)  Ithaca, meanwhile, wished to honor its contribution to literature and elected to put up a commemorative plaque.  The objection, however, was based on a particular reading of the Good Book.  (It must be stated that lesbianism is never explicitly forbidden in the Bible.)  To make a statement, the owner forced the plaque to the public domain.

We have a way of letting our prejudices become biblical.  I recently re-read 1 Corinthians—one of the infamous “clobber” texts for any number of people—and realized just how many of the words assumed to refer to “homosexuals” are words of uncertain Greek connotation.  King James, who seems to have preferred the company of gentlemen himself, was apparently not bothered by the text he had translated.  Of course, kings will be kings.  Our concern with sexual behavior is one of the hallmarks of our species.  We’re very concerned about how other people do it, even if it’s no business of ours.  And we consider it one of the highest moral concerns and a source of constant shame.  That was another thing that struck me while re-reading 1 Corinthians.  I wondered why Paul keeps coming back to it.  Maybe he was just being a firebrand.

Consciousness Conscience

Leave a comment

Not so long ago—remember, I read old books—living to 60 was considered a full life.  I’ve passed that and while I’m in no hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil, I often think of how improved medical practice has prolonged many lives.  This is a good thing, but it does make death a more difficult fact to deal with.  If there is any good that came from my Fundamentalist upbringing, it was that it taught me early on to think about death with some frequency.  I’m not a particularly morbid person, but since we all have to face this, avoidance seems to lead to grief, shock, and acute mental pain.  I tend to consider watching horror movies a spiritual practice.  Little reminders, in case I forget to consider my own mortality today.

Our faith in science is a little bit misplaced.  Sure, it helps enormous numbers of people live longer, healthier lives.  But it may also detract from the necessity of attending to our spiritual lives.  I don’t care if you call it consciousness, your soul, psyche, or mind, but we have a life we’re accountable to, and it’s not all physical.  Since consciousness feels neutral enough, let’s go with that.  We don’t know what happens to our consciousness after death.  There are plenty of theories and ideas about it, but no certain knowledge.  There may be faith, and there may even be some evidence, but it is always disputed.  It does seem to me that facing death squarely on may help take care of at least some of the anxiety.  Fear of the unknown is probably the greatest fear our species possesses, so pondering it may take the edge off a bit.

Some people claim to remember past lives.  Sometimes I wonder if they might be tapping into the great unknown: consciousness.  Perhaps consciousness survives without a physical body.  Perhaps it’s large—expansive—and encompasses far more than we can imagine.  Maybe some people can access part of that consciousness that includes the past lives of others.  We have no way of knowing, but it seems worth thinking about on this All Souls Day.  Of course, I have the advantage of having lived what used to be considered a full life.  In it I have set aside at least a little time each day to consider what happens after this.  Do I have a definitive answer?  No.  I do have faith and I do have beliefs.  And I’m always reflective on All Souls Day.

Frans Hals, Young Man holding a Skull (Vanitas), public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Pan Pandering

Leave a comment

The Greek god Pan has had a rough go of it.  And I don’t mean that his name is a homophone for an essential kitchen item in English.  No, Pan was mistreated by early Christians, made evil, and then good, before finally being largely forgotten.  We’ll start with the bad and move to the good.  As I discuss in one of my publications, Pan was considered evil by medieval Christians for a few reasons, apart from being a “foreign god.”  First, he was associated with nature.  Early Christians weren’t naturalists.  They were looking to escape the world (a trait that continues to be manipulated by politicians even today).  Not only that, but Pan had goat legs and horns.  While horns could be used to represent any deity, including Yahweh, the combination with goat legs suggested Pan might be demonic.

Image credit: Walter Crane, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Nobody knew what demons looked like.  They are incorporeal, after all.  As I point out in Nightmares with the Bible, the fact that the rarely used Hebrew word for demons is roughly translated to “hairy ones” added to Pan’s sins.  This was a common Hebrew phrase for goats, and over the course of many centuries, when people had the irresistible urge to draw the invisible, they gave Satan the Pan treatment.  Goat lower half and horns on his head.  In many esoteric groups the goat, i.e., Pan, became a symbol of demons.  All of this has a rich and detailed history and it literally demonized Pan.  Yes, he was all for free love, but he was a musician, after all.  Then something interesting happened.  

When the King James Version of the Bible was first printed, the biblical books each began with an illuminated letter.  The book of Psalms began with an L.  This letter was inscribed with an image of Pan.  What the devil was he doing in the Good Book?  Well, by 1611 Pan was considered a type (or foreshadowing, if you will) of the good shepherd.  And we all know who the Good Shepherd is, right?  Not only that but his name, “Pan,” translates to “all” in English.  Since Jesus is “all” to Christians, it was appropriate that he be symbolized by Pan.  This ancient force of nature had gone from being the Devil to representing God.  Indeed, he could, at the same time, be symbolic of both.  Now this is quite an accomplishment for any entity, let alone a rustic god who was never an Olympian.  Pan isn’t much discussed in Christianity today, but he had a fascinating place in its view toward goats, both bad and good.

May I?

Leave a comment

The thing about horror is that it’s an intensely personal preference.  Some people really like a movie while others find it, well, meh.  When the nights begin to lengthen you get lots of curated lists (I’ve never been asked to do any, but I’m working on one anyway) suggesting October viewing.  One such list that a friend sent me appealed to me because it was for movies on Netflix.  Since that’s one of the few streaming services to which I have access, it makes the movies seem free.  This particular list recommended May the Devil Take You, a 2018 movie from Indonesia.  The almost polite title suggests it wasn’t named in English.  In any case, I didn’t really find this one particularly scary and in part that was because of the apparent incongruity of the culture and the monster.  I knew that Indonesia was a highly Muslim majority country, and I know Islam also recognizes the Devil.  Still, Satanism feels kind of out of place here.

The story isn’t terribly deep: a man makes a deal with the Devil, through one of his dark concubines, to become rich, in exchange for the souls of his family.  His wife is the first to go, but he remarries a retired actress who has three children, two young adult.  His only biological child, from his first marriage, Alfie, feels herself estranged.  (It’s unclear to me whether the youngest daughter of the second wife was also biologically his, but it seems so.)  When the father falls into a serious, undiagnosed illness, the children, and actress, all converge on the house where the pact was made.  Of course they open the basement door—locked and with warnings posted—where the Devil’s concubine waits.  The actress becomes possessed and the two older daughters, Alfie and her stepsister, try to fight it off, only to have the stepsister become possessed.  She kills her brother and intends to kill Alfie and her own young sister as well, but the latter two manage to overcome her.

The plot is a bit convoluted but the basic story is maybe too familiar—make a deal with the Devil and all Hell will break loose.  I also wonder if some of the lack of real impact here comes from the subscript translation.  I don’t know how this is done, but I suspect it’s not dissimilar from Google translate.  That may be fine for academic purposes, but it does seem to lead to stilted dialogue among a group of twenty-somethings trying to fight the Devil in Indonesia.  My personal October list is more moody.  Seasonal.  And by no means complete.  The only way to find the movies, it seems, is trial and error via curated lists.

Word Undefined

2 Comments

It’s one of those amorphous, uncommon words that can be devilishly difficult to define.  It’s also a churchy word.  “Acedia” was considered both a sin and a demon by various monastics, although the basic idea is listlessness.  Kathleen Norris has made her mark as a spiritual writer, and my wife and I have read a few of her books.  Dakota, her first non-fiction, was stunning.  We just finished Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life.  It revolves around this concept of acedia and for a writer to admit it, it seems, takes courage.  But the question that remains unresolved for me is whether it really exists.  It seems that acedia was devised by monks to name their ennui with monastic existence.  When all you do is pray there comes a time when you just don’t want to.  Or can’t.  They called it acedia.

There is a rich vocabulary for such states, reminding me of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as well as the Existentialist literature I grew up reading.  I think of Kafka.  Of Kierkegaard.  Of angst.  Of boredom.  More to the point in Norris’ case, writer’s block.  This is a terribly personal book for her.  She describes the death of her husband and coping with widowhood.  And on top of it all, that dreaded block of inspiration that is a plague upon writers.  Interestingly enough, the book took me back to my Nashotah House days.  Norris, as do many monks, appreciates the slow reading of the Psalms.  One of the points of contention at Nashotah House—I kid you not—was how long to pause between the halves of the verses in the Psalter.  But is this a demon or only human nature?

“The noontime demon” was another common term for acedia.  This connects it to yet another of its aspects: depression.  We tend to think of depression as a clinical problem, but Norris explores the possibility that it’s a spiritual problem.  Some claim acedia as a sin, as I’ve noted, which shoves it back on the experiencer.  Norris has some interesting definitions of sin in her exploration.  Tellingly, in an appendix she presents the Webster’s Dictionary (1913) words related to acedia and there are over 100 of them.  And these words range from lust to world-weariness.  Is the word too promiscuous to be really useful?  For a writer like Norris, influenced by monastic practice, a poet by trade, and yet a writer of New York Times bestsellers, she makes the word fit.  There’s much to ponder here.