Feeling Elephants

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There’s an old story about an elephant (the noble kind).  It involves visually impaired men—they always seem to be male—feeling said pachyderm and coming up with different ideas of what it is they’re touching.  I’m sure you’ve heard this before—it’s repeated constantly.  The other day I was reading yet another author using this analogy and he specified that there were three blind men.  I stopped.  Scratched my head.  Where did he come up with three?  An elephant has lots of parts and you need someone to touch at least the trunk, the tusks, the legs, and the tail.  At least.  So I decided to find out where this story came from.  This particular author said it was from India, which seemed likely enough.  And so I went looking.

Image credit: From The Heath readers by grades, D.C. Heath and Company (Boston), p. 69, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

It turns out that the earliest rendition of this story is a Buddhist text from the sixth century BCE.  In case you’re biblically oriented, the sixth century is the era of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, as well as Deutero-Isaiah.  Things were happening, that is, religiously.  While the prophets were busy dealing with the fall of Jerusalem, someone during the lifetime of the Buddha was writing this story into the Tittha Sutta (the story spread to Hinduism and Jainism as well).  Now I’m quick to admit that I’m no specialist on Buddhism.  I know a few Buddhists, but they don’t talk to me much about the tenets of their religion.  Still, I marvel at how much our culture has been influenced by the religions of India, including Buddhism.  So how many men are there? I hear you ask.  Well, the most usual answer is “a group.”

A typical early version had men feeling the trunk, ear, leg, side, tail, and tusk—double the three I’d just read about.  But you see, literalism is the problem here, as it generally is.  Nobody has suggested, at least in my limited research on the topic, that an actual group of visually impaired males found an actual elephant to feel up.  And that these men weren’t curious enough to reach beyond the trunk to the head, or feel along its side.  The story is told to make a point, not to establish history.  And like all stories, it changes over time.  So much so that when innocently reading about something else, I discovered that somebody had heard that there were three men.  Rather like wise men, I expect, who are numbered by their gifts rather than Scripture.  Instead, wouldn’t it be best to feel the whole elephant and find out what it really is?

Not What It Seems

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Now for the local news.  The ironic thing is I know very few people locally and even though folks are friendly around here nobody really wants to get to know you, it seems.  But that’s not unique to this area and it’s off point.  No, locally some months ago The Satanic Temple (which I’ve written about before) tried to start an after school club in an eastern Pennsylvania school in response to an explicitly Christian after-school club receiving sponsorship.  Of course it caused local furor.  That’s what the Satanic Temple intends to do.  The members do not believe in, let alone worship, Satan.  They exist to try to counter Christian hegemony, often in the form of courthouse lawn Christian imagery, or, as in this case, biased treatment to Christian groups wanting to use public property, such as school facilities, to promote their religion.

The reason I’m bringing this up is to show how the Christian agenda raises your taxes.  According to the ACLU, this school district, after challenged in court, has agreed to pay $200,000 and it must allow the Satanic Temple to meet if it allows Christian groups to meet.  That hefty chunk of change (enough to buy a house in this area) has to come from taxpayers because the school board (until a recent election) was controlled by a right-wing group that played the Christian narrative and apparently supposed the Satanic Temple was really a Satan-worshipping group.  It’s not.  The Satanic Temple is a national organization whose goal is to maintain freedom from religion in government and publicly funded spheres.  “Satanic” causes shock and panic and the sheep scatter.  And local citizens foot the bill.

Although I understand what they’re doing, I really don’t like to see my taxpayer dollars having to be spent to coddle the egos of groups who spread the narrative that Christianity is the only religion allowed in America.  In fact, one of the truly fascinating things about this country is the wide varieties of religions that exist in it.  Although the melting pot metaphor has fallen on hard times lately, I’ve always felt this was one of America’s biggest charms.  We’re a Frankenstein’s monster of a nation that’s just like the creature—not really a monster, but not like anything else you’ve seen.  Cookie-cutter populations seem to lead to wars and hatred.  Celebrating difference, indeed, encouraging it, leads to peace and shared prosperity, if we’ll let it.  It’s only when we want to keep all the good stuff for ourselves that things begin to break down.  And your local taxes go up because a faulty narrative is on the agenda.

Biggest Book

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As a bibliophile it’s kind of embarrassing to admit that I’ve only just learned about the world’s largest book.  If you’re like me you’re probably imagining an enormous tome that required acres of trees and fifty-five-gallon drums of ink to print.  But that’s not it at all.  This particular book is located in Mandalay in Myanmar.  If I say it’s a religious text you might be clued in that it represents the Tripitaka, or Pali Canon.  These are Buddhist scriptures.  They are extensive, as scriptures tend to be.  I’m certainly no expert on religions in that part of the world, but it’s clear that the world’s largest book, as a monument, required a massive amount of effort to put together.  Housed at the Kuthodaw Pagoda, the texts were inscribed on stone housed in 729 stupas that are stunningly beautiful.  (Take a look for other photos online—it’s impressive!)

Photo credit: Wagaung at English Wikipedia, published under GNU Free Documentation License

The monument was completed in 1868.  When the British invaded southern Asia, however, there was much looting and damage was inflicted on the shrine.  It was eventually repaired and still stands as the largest book in the world.  It’s no real surprise that this honor would be relegated to a religious text.  Bibles of all sorts become symbols and their symbolic nature often supersedes what’s written inside.  The idea of the sacred book has an unyielding grip on the human psyche, whether we think the book comes from God or an enlightened human being.  Indeed, the sacred itself is an integral part of being human.  When one group wants to dominate another, it often goes for its sacred artifacts.  Cathedrals as bombing targets in the Second World War demonstrate that well enough.  Ironically, we’ve ceased paying much attention to the sacred but we still revere it.

Books represent the best of our civilizing nature.  They’re ways of coming to see the point of view of others.  It really is a privilege to read.  Banning books is, in its own form, a crime against humanity.  Those who ban almost inevitably end up promoting yet more sales of the offending book.  I often see books that make me angry or upset.  My knee-jerk reaction is to want to deface them—this is a human enough response.  But taking time to reflect, I realize that these writers are entitled to their opinions, benighted though they may be.  A civil exchange of ideas is essential to getting along in a world with billions of different opinions.  Every nation should have a monument that shows its love for books.

Not Grant

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Grant Wood’s painting, “American Gothic,” is undoubtedly his most famous work.  The image is so evocative and suggestive that countless interpretations have been offered for it.  The idea of debilitating isolation suggests itself.  An unhappy self-reliance that has taken its toll on an aging couple (some say the woman is his daughter) often comes to mind.  For some it suggests a movie.  Normally I like horror films from the seventies and eighties.  There’s almost an innocence to them that gets lost in the new millennium.  On a rainy weekend afternoon when I couldn’t be mowing the lawn I found American Gothic on Amazon Prime and it had received four stars and even IMDb showed it as better than average.  The longer I watched the more I was inching toward “bad movie” territory, but I had to see how it ended.

Six young people, four of whom are distinctly unlikeable, have plane trouble and get stranded on a lonely island in the Pacific northwest.  They discover a house furnished from the twenties and it turns out there’s an older couple there who don’t really cotton onto strangers.  As the plot unfolds it turns out they have three adult children who think they’re still adolescents.  And—this is the good part—they are a very religious family (in part.  Again, as often happens in such films, the writers really don’t understand religion).  In any case, the predictable killing off of the kids starts to happen when they continue to be rude and insult the family.  Since we’re in slasher territory here, there’s a final girl—one of the two sympathetic women—who ultimately takes over the house.

Part of the problem with the film is the utter paranoia with which it treats mental illness.  The family clearly has problems and, in a way typical for the genre, they turn toward killing.  Ironically, Pa, when he finds his family has been killed by the one mentally ill visitor (everyone with psychological problems in this movie turns to murder), renounces God and sells himself to Satan.  Interestingly, he doesn’t survive long enough to do anything about it.  Reading about this movie after watching it I came across a new word: hixploitation.  Exploitation movies are familiar to anyone who watches much in this genre, but I’d never considered that Deliverance and company exploit “hicks.”  It’s all about how others look at you.  And, as a movie made in Canada and the UK, it shows us what others see when they look at us.  There’s some ground to explore here in a sequel to Holy Horror. 

Calculating Christians

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I know some calculating Christians.  I use “Christian” as religion scholars do—it is the way people identify themselves, not necessarily what they are.  For example, I grew up learning that Christianity was God’s excuse for throwing a bunch of unknowing people into Hell.  Laughter all around!  Then I did something radical.  I started reading the Bible.  Spoiler alert: as you start to get near the end, you learn that Jesus and his early followers (except maybe Paul) promoted the idea that God is love and the only correct response to that is to love other people.  Of course, a religious founder, deity or not, can’t control what his/her followers will do.  Christianity quickly became judgmental.  “I’m going to Heaven and you’re not!”  Laughter all around!  In my life I’ve been the recipient of calculating Christians more than once.

Calculating Christians are those who, like ein U-boat Kapitän, try to figure out the best way to do the most damage to those they don’t like.  They will destroy your career—torpedoes away!—and then get on their knees to thank their vengeful god for sinking a satanic vessel.  And all the lives of Christians onboard are counted as collateral damage.  God’s good at sorting things out.  Laughter all around!  I’ve also known “Christians” who will target a family member when he’s down, and stressed out to the max, only to tell him he’s going to Hell and they’re just fine with it.  Laughter all around!  They do this without ever asking about the two seriously ill people in a family of three, or how you’re doing with that therapy you’ve had to start.  Jesus would do no less than kick a confessing sinner when he’s down.

There’s a reason Christianity is developing a bad name.  With the first compassionate Pope in centuries we find doctrinaire Catholics condemning his compassion.  Among the Fundamentalist camp we find those who would gladly die for the most hate-filled politician ever elected on these shores.  Calculating the end of the world is, after all, a tiring activity.  No matter that you’re wrong (you never consider the possibility and you never, ever try to weigh the facts), you calculate how to blow it up for everybody.  Laughter all around!  The only thing that keeps me sane, I believe, is knowing that many actual Christians out there know that such actions are taking God’s name in vain.  And that, they know, is against the commandments so prominently placed on courthouse lawns.

Pietro Perugino, The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John, Saint Jerome, and Saint Mary Magdalene [middle panel], public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Dental Dawn

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Someone knowing my interest in religion and horror recommended Teeth.  A comedy horror film based on the concept of vagina dentata—an idea I first encountered in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash—it begins with a purity event.  Dawn, a teen leader in the abstinence movement, addresses other adolescents about the importance of maintaining, well, purity.  They all wear purity rings and vow themselves to chastity until marriage.  As might be expected, not all of them are able to uphold their pledges.  Being inexperienced, when Dawn finds herself in a compromised position with her boyfriend she learns she has, um, teeth.  Other guys, even when warned, can’t resist an opportunity and they too pay the price.  The point of the film seems to be female empowerment, but it’s also pretty funny.

After boyfriend number one has disappeared, Dawn again addresses the purity group only to have them quote Genesis 3 at her, clearly intimating that sin is the fault of women.  The Bible is there by implication and the sermonizing of the adult leader after Dawn has to leave the stage again takes up the religious outlook.  The underlying concept of purity movements is distinctly Christian.  While all religions have something to say about sex, generally the most negative about it is Christianity.  That’s not because other religions lack for spirituality, but Christianity tends to denigrate the body, and in the process tends to make natural things sinful.  This gives plenty of fuel to a movie like this where a woman has to make her own way in a man’s world.

What’s really interesting here is that no punches are pulled when it comes to the origins of patriarchy.  The Bible clearly views males as the standard of humanity and females as an adjunct.  That idea has had a death-grip on western society, particularly in America, from the beginning.  Teeth was written and directed by a man.  I suspect that the presumably well-intentioned use of an old mythical idea that makes females into monsters may not appeal to women writers or directors, empowering as it may be.  Nevertheless, if taken with the fun obviously intended from the opening playful music to the comically terrified responses of Dawn’s adolescent victims, the movie can still convey a positive message to women who might watch it.  Horror is often a repository of social commentary.  Not taken seriously by the mainstream, it nevertheless puts good messages out there.  And sometimes it bares its teeth.

Rocks and Philosophs

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Porphyry is, apart from being a cool word, a kind of purplish stone that was prized for statue-making in antiquity.  It is also the name a Syrian philosopher gave himself in the third century of the Common Era.  Now, if you read widely about antiquity, as some of us have done, you’ll encounter the name Porphyry from time to time, but those of us who focused on older materials don’t pay him much mind.  I was reading about Porphyry recently, however, and did a little poking around to discover that he’d written a book called, in translation, Against the Christians.  Some historians speculate that Porphyry may have once been a Christian himself, but whether or not that’s true, he developed an antipathy to the sect.  I was curious about what his beef may have been only to discover that this book is lost.

Now lost works in antiquity are the rule rather than the exception.  Literacy may not have been widespread, but those who could write did write, and often prolifically.  Human history was very well documented.  But tonnes of it went missing.  Wars have been part of that history and wars are notorious for destroying written records.  Also, much writing was on perishable materials that, well, perished.  That wasn’t the case with Against the Christians, however.  Porphyry’s work was purposefully destroyed.  By this point Christianity had taken over the Roman Empire.  Rather than accepting the challenge of a philosopher, officials censored and destroyed his work.  Ironically, all that survives are quotes from books of theologians who were trying to refute him.

This made me reflect on the book bans that are currently all the rage among some “Christian” politicians.  Such rearguard actions belie the confidence that imperial religions showcase.  A religion that’s afraid others might see the holes raises many questions, does it not?  It seems to come down to the idea that nothing has changed in two millennia, even though Jesus didn’t have a cellphone—not even one of those old flip-open kind—and much of what we know of nature was still many centuries in the future.  The fact is that we only try to silence those who disagree when we fear them.  Book bans pretend that they can hold the hands of the clock still and that all will remain as it was decades ago.  Learning, however, is a genie let out of the bottle.  Back in Porphyry’s day powerful bishops and emperors ordered his book banned and destroyed.  And we are all the poorer for it.

Whence We Are

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Rootless.  Or perhaps a better word is “wandering.”  Although I was born in Pennsylvania, neither of my parents were and back another generation, few of the grandparents stayed where they were born.  Being an American mutt also means not having terribly strong ties to a parent-land.  But still, I’m surprisingly attached to Pennsylvania.  It’s a fascinating place.  One of only two colonies to actively promote religious freedom, it seems an ideal place for spiritual seekers such as yours truly.  I’m driven by an obsession to find the truth and this takes me to some pretty strange places.  Pennsylvania has an interesting religious heritage.  Founded by Quakers who nevertheless wanted diversity (or at least permitted it), my home state attracted a wide range of—particularly German—religiosities.  Not only were there Lutherans, there were also Moravians (pietists),  Mennonites and mystics.

Rural Germans kept many superstitious practices alive.  Many early Americans did, actually.  Daniel Leeds was a banished Quaker.  Now, without doing a ton of research (for which I don’t have time at the moment) you can’t find out much about Daniel Leeds (i.e. he has no Wikipedia article).  He was a rival printer to Benjamin Franklin, and a bit of a freethinker.  His family was later literally demonized as being the origin of the Jersey Devil.  Leeds was influenced by the mystic Jacob Boehme (who does have a Wikipedia article).  Böhme, as his friends knew him, also influenced Johannes Kelpius, and thereby Johann Conrad Beissel, a couple of good Pennsylvania German mystics.  Leeds began to have ideas too outré for the Quakers, and, I like to think, inspired future Pennsylvania mystics.  Leeds died in 1720 and deserves at least a Wikipedia piece.

Pennsylvania housed some pretty interesting religions over the years.  The Germans with their folk beliefs (Benjamin Franklin didn’t care for Germans) would go on to influence a number of American folk traditions.  I often wonder whether, if Pennsylvania had not displayed religious tolerance, things would’ve developed radically different in the early United States.  It does happen that, although a mutt, much of my heritage is teutonic, and I seem to share the religious curiosity that these folk displayed over time.  Upstate New York also had its fair share of new religions as well—beating out their southern neighbor and longest border sharer.  Of course, I have ancestry in upstate as well.  Perhaps it was inevitable that, being born in Pennsylvania, I would turn out the way I did.  Wandering and all.

Christian Horror

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Following the lead of a friend (I don’t regularly read Christianity Today on my own), I found “How Horror Uncovers Our ‘Holy’ Hypocrisy,” by Sara Kyoungah White.  It seems that some evangelical Christians have begun to notice the popularity of horror movies.  This isn’t the same as condoning, of course, and this article took me back to the writing of Holy Horror.  One of the reasons for the book was that, at the time, few people (very few) were exploring religion and horror.  Web searches inevitably brought up the question “is it okay for Christians [subtext, “evangelicals”] to watch horror?”.  Since that time I’ve been exploring why the connection of horror and religion is so appealing.  If you’re a daily reader here, no doubt you’ve noticed it before.  I read on, noting that White has a difficult time finding anything redeeming in horror, apart from trying to stretch it to cover the usual evangelical concerns.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

Some of us, however, are seeking a kind of holy grail—an articulation of how horror contributes positively to spirituality.  That it does is beyond question.  The real puzzle is why.  It might help if we had a better definition of spirituality.  What exactly do we mean by that?  Even some of my Unitarian friends are put off by the word.  Still, it’s part of the human make-up.  You might call it “mind,” “psyche,” “personality,” “spirit,” “consciousness,” or “soul”—or any of a host of other words—but there’s something about people that makes us reflect on realities outside ourselves.  Some of do it with a great deal of awareness that we are undertaking such a quest.  Others may seldom or never think of it consciously.  We all do it, however.  We don’t all use horror to help us think through, or experience it.

I have long used movies for therapy.  It’s only been in the last several years that I’ve begun to notice that horror puts me into a spiritual frame of mind more than other movies tend to.  White notes “nearly every one of the top horror movies of all time deal with some kind of Christian theme or portray a Christian character.”  Some of us have noticed that in the course of our exploration of the genre.  Of course, that depends on how we decide on “the top horror movies of all time.”  The list she cites is the ever-shifting IMDb “Top 50 Horror Movies” list, which has far too many recent films on it.  Still, her claim holds if you go back to the classics and move forward.  There’s definitely a connection there, and, I suspect, it has nothing to do with the showcasing of our sins.

America the Religious

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One of the truths that doctoral work teaches you is that if you look closely at something, minute differences appear.  Those interested in historical subjects write up syntheses that cover over many of these minute differences until somewhat of a false impression might occur.  Consider Puritan New England.  The image is a familiar one to the American imagination.  Rigid, pious, fearful church-goers predominated.  Stern, often acerbic, ministers were voices of authority.  But in actual fact, maybe a third of those eligible to be so in Puritan New England were church members.  Many lived in remote locations and used folk traditions (what the church would condemn as “witchcraft”) to meet their spiritual needs.  This was DIY religion.  And yet, the overall picture is of an uptight, strict, Calvinistic world.  That’s only part of the story.

Controlling the narrative is a powerful thing.  For example, the religious right has often flouted the idea that America was very religious from the beginning.  The “falling away” from the church is only the result of modernism.  Before that, they claim, pretty much everybody was religious.  This is patently untrue.  But if the narrative is believed, it becomes powerful.  Historians face a dilemma here.  Not every single little detail can be written about anything.  If you read a history of, say, the United States, do you think everything is in those thousand pages?  No, not by a long shot.  Entire books written about a single individual don’t cover everything.  The temptation is to present an approximation that covers the general trends.  Those of us who study religious history have an extra hurdle—what people say they believe and what they actually believe might be quite different.

Demographic studies that show only a third of New Englanders were church members indicates that two-thirds of the story remained untold.  The city on a hill may have been an ideal, but most of the people lived in the valley.  People prefer a happy story, of course.  That’s natural enough.  When we look for facts sometimes the story can grow a little confused.  Shrink that history of the US down to a single state and it’s still unwieldy.  Even a single city.  Choices have to be made and approaches have to be decided.  What really happened?  You can bet your bottom dollar that it was a lot more complex than any history book indicates.  People prefer mythological national narratives to naturalistic ones.  When we buy into simple materialism we often mistake our mythic past for a factual one.

Seminary Daze

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It’s surprisingly easy to throw away an expensive career that once held much promise.  It really involves just a two steps: spend thousands of dollars earning a Ph.D. in religious studies, and take a job in a seminary.  It’s disheartening to watch colleagues going through this as seminaries contract, then close.  I know how it feels personally.  You’re suddenly aware that your years and years of training have made you practically unemployable.  If you do find a job it won’t pay as well.  Chances are you won’t enjoy it either.  Having taught in a seminary will mark you in academia as one of those “uncritical believers,” and, well, nobody wants to touch one of those.  While I would’ve taken a regular seminary job after my doctorate, my wife remembers me lying awake at night asking “Am I cutting off my career if I take a job at Nashotah House?”  The answer: yes.

I’ve been watching colleagues have their worlds torn apart as seminaries try to figure out how to stay open when institutional churches are dying.  Megachurches don’t require a seminary degree to run—natural grifters do it quite well with no advanced education, thank you.  But mainstream churches have been losing members, and therefore financial support, for years now.  And seminaries supply a commodity no longer in demand.  This may have been a trend when I started out back in the eighties.  If so, nobody told me about it.  I walked into this career naive and came out jaded and cynical.  My motives were to help other people.  It’s getting harder and harder to find jobs where you do that any more.  At least while being able to keep body and soul together.

Thing is, it takes years to earn the degrees you need to teach in a seminary. You have to think ahead.  When I started out, trends suggested a huge glut of jobs in the teaching market.  That never panned out, of course, as human predictions seldom do, and the decline in jobs has been pretty steady over the past thirty years.  Back in the eighties seminaries were doing okay.  Growing, even.  I do hope it didn’t have anything to do with me, but I hit this surprisingly fragile market at just the wrong time.  After having been overboard without a life preserver myself, it pains me to watch colleagues facing the same fate themselves.  Religion hasn’t disappeared—it’s simply taken on new forms.  Those forms don’t require seminary. Those of us who followed the rules on how to teach religious studies, however, somehow find ourselves in disposable careers.

Curious Valley

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Another of my guilty pleasure reading categories is local history, written by locals.  As a genre these books may not always go back to primary sources, and they may get a fact or two wrong, but still they’re endlessly fascinating and I always learn something (which is the point of reading, after all).  I enjoyed Allison Guertin Marchese’s rambles along the Hudson Valley.  I’d encountered some of these tidbits before, but most of them were new to me and show just how interesting a place this particular river valley is.  Living in a strange world is so much more beguiling than a prosaic, predictable place.  Still, you’ve got to accept that anything can happen.  Unlike many such books, Hudson Valley Curiosities does not focus on paranormal, although ghosts and UFOs turn up a time or two.

Since this region is about 145 miles from end to end, the book divides it into lower, middle, and upper regions and gives about equal time to each.  The curiosities range from mastodons to prohibition busters, from shipwrecks to Shakers.  I’d never made the connection with the Shakers and the Hudson Valley before.  While the Shaking Quakers had their origins in England, they eventually migrated to the New World, settling in the northern end of the Hudson Valley.  The book points out that they were noted inventors, living by their own means as they did, they came up with their own solutions to problems.  Another aspect of these curios is the number of them that involved women who took on the cause of women’s rights.  The first female candidate for President of the United States, Victoria Woodhull, is discussed, as is Deborah Sampson, the woman who dressed as a man to fight in the Revolutionary War.

Marchese provides a helpful bibliography as well.  As someone trained in historical method, I like to go back to the sources.  Of course, that means assessing both publisher and author, and taking into account what passed for facts at the time.  History is an endlessly fascinating enterprise.  Many historians, however, leave out the controversial or questionable materials that a local historian is inclined to leave in.  That’s what makes books like this such a guilty pleasure.  Who doesn’t like to look behind the curtain now and again and see what’s happening out of the public eye?  And it’s helpful to keep in mind that by far the most of history takes place far from the headlines.  That’s where real life happens, no matter how strange.  And it’s a guilty pleasure to read about it from a local who finds, gathers, and preserves the stories.

Devil Talk

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Around here, an after-school Satanic Temple club, prompted by an after-school evangelical club, led to a lawsuit where our tax dollars are being wasted.  Many local people wondered what was going on and I knew I had a book on my shelf that would help to answer that but I had to find the time to read it.  Joseph P. Laycock has been writing fascinating books for a few years now.  I picked up his Speak of the Devil: How the Satanic Temple Is Changing the Way We Talk about Religion just after it was published, but it always takes some time for me to get to books that I know I’ll have to spend time with.  I was right about spending time—there’s a lot packed in here that requires some thought.  I was vaguely aware of what the Satanic Temple is but had difficulty distinguishing it from the Church of Satan.  (I have a book on the latter, but it’s quite big and I haven’t found the time for it yet either.)  Laycock spells it out clearly.

The book begins by discussing how the Satanic Temple entered public consciousness in 2013.  Yes, it’s only been about a decade.  If you think it’s more than that, you may be confusing it with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan.  They are different organizations.  One thing they have in common is that neither promotes belief in a literal Satan.  Both also rely on shock tactics to get their point across.  The Satanic Temple is a socially conscious organization that reacts to provocations of conservative Christian groups to try to establish their brand of Christianity as the officially sanctioned state religion.  And the evangelical groups have been making in-roads for years.  Playing the innocence card, “We’re just mainstream America saying what everyone’s thinking,” they put religious monuments in public spaces, start public meetings with Christian prayers, and receive state funding for their programs.  Often unchallenged.

Laycock’s not discussing evangelicals, but rather how the Satanic Temple arose in response to efforts to establish one form of Christianity as state sponsored.  There’s a ton of information in this book.  Among the many takeaways for me was the discussion of how good and evil are determined.  This is obviously directly relevant when Satan is involved, especially since the Devil is a post-biblical development.  The Satanic Temple, which doesn’t teach that there’s a literal Devil, attempts to counter the standard narrative by doing good deeds in the name of humanism.  You might be able to guess the conservative Christian response to that.  If you can’t, this book will help to spell it out for you.

Mystical

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I would never have experienced Tibetan singing bowls were it not for a family member’s cancer diagnosis.  Something you quickly learn is that many resources are available to help you cope.  One of those local to this area was/is Tibetan singing bowls.  I had no idea what to expect, but as a lifelong explorer of religion, I had gathered that the session would likely involve ways of thinking more common in East Asian cultures.  I was taken, however, on a spiritual journey.  In a darkened room with twenty-to-thirty cancer survivors, on our backs on the floor, we experienced sound.  Now, my musical training and ability are quite limited.  I could not identify most of the instruments (I kept my eyes closed), apart from the singing bowls which I had heard in other, western religious contexts as well.  I’ve had mystical experiences before, but I don’t know you well enough to tell you all about them.

Photo by Magic Bowls on Unsplash

The first thing I noticed this time was the color blotches in my closed eyes.  Everyone sees those kinds of things, but as the sounds increased the colors began to range outside their usual purple into whites and yellows.  It was almost like a segment from Fantasia.  The colors then began to take shape, some forming into flowers.  I knew my imagining mind had taken hold when images began to appear.  Although it was my usual bedtime by this point, I was fully cognizant of being awake.  There was no real storyline, but I was conscious of losing my sense of individuality and becoming part of the greater whole, which is what being a being on a small planet is all about.  As the sound meditation wound down, I realized that it had been many years since I’d put myself into such an environment.  It took some time to reorient myself.  When we arrived at home I was, paradoxically, too relaxed to fall asleep.

One of my college professors warned me against mysticism.  Mystical experiences are rare, in my life anyway, but unforgettable.  If you live long enough and pay the right kind of attention, however, you can find them.  They leave you with a profound sense of hope.  I’m not about to go off and join a Buddhist monastery, but Thomas Merton reminds us that Buddhism and Christianity are perfectly compatible.  This particular college professor was afraid, I surmise, that spiritual experience might outstrip dogged devotion to a single book.  Mysticism can take you to places that convince you what passes for reality is not all that’s real.  Being with lovely people who’ve had to face cancer is a spiritual experience in its own right.  Why shut out the light inside?

Pagan Fear

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We still fear pagans.  Religion and horror are often tied up together, but when it comes to monsters we trust Catholics and fear pagans.  Of course, when Startefacts recommended The Ritual it was in the context of five pagan horror movies you should see.  I’d seen three of the others, so The Ritual seemed the next logical step.  Four friends are hiking through Sweden to honor the wishes of a fifth friend killed during a robbery.  When one of the them injures his knee, they decide to take a shortcut through the forest where a combination of the Blair Witch Project and Midsommar and Antlers takes place.  After finding a freshly gutted elk in a tree, they take shelter in an abandoned cabin surrounded by runic signs on the trees.  Soon they’re being hunted by a huge creature they can’t see clearly.

The final two are captured by a pagan group that worships one of the Jötnar—the monster that’s been hunting them.  The final boy escapes by getting out of the forest, where the Jötunn can’t go.  The choice of a Germanic monster is a bit different, and the creature design is fascinating.  Jötnar apparently straddle the line between gods and monsters, being a kind of frost giant.  The pagan group sees it as a deity that keeps them safe in return for sacrifices.  Given the number of bodies in the trees, other hikers had decided the shortcut was worth taking in the past.  But still, the pagans are cast as the bad guys.  This is in spite of the fact that the friend whose death started the whole thing was killed in England.

The religious convictions of the English robbers aren’t made clear, but they were raised in a Christian context and are every bit as brutal as the pagans.  In fact, the pagans, although they sacrifice strangers, do try to talk kindly to them (at least if they have the mark of the Jötunn on them).  Not just the pagans are savages.  At least they have a moral reason for what they’re doing, in their own minds.  The criminals are in it only for themselves.  We still fear those of other religions, although they’ve come to their beliefs in a way similar to how we’ve come to ours.  Whether born into it or converted, believers generally come to their conclusions honestly.  In the world of the film, this Jötunn is real.  And, until the end, it protects those who worship it.  So yes, this is a pagan horror film, but it makes the viewer wonder whence the horror really comes.