To a Fallen Goddess

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One of my favorite places to visit in New Jersey is Grounds for Sculpture. Over the past several years that we’ve domiciled here, we’ve had the opportunity to take several friends and family members to see the whimsical, creative, and inspirational park over in Hamilton. When my daughter graduated from high school, she requested a visit to Grounds for Sculpture, and, since family were near at hand, we took the opportunity to see it again.

I’ve always been aware of the religious aspect of creativity. Perhaps it is because I like to flatter myself into thinking that I’m the creative sort, despite my years of academic training, or perhaps it is the kind of pipe dream for which the liberal-minded are easily accused. In either case, I have always found that the best art evokes something similar to a religious experience. There is an element of wonder, emotion, and awe here. Not every piece of art conjures it, just as a single god isn’t sufficient for the whole of humanity. As I wander the grounds, I grow convinced that this or that sculpture had a vision akin to what I’d call religion, that led to the creation of such a trenchant piece. I always leave feeling blessed.

Photo credit: Grounds for Sculpture, postcard

Photo credit: Grounds for Sculpture, postcard

On this most recent visit, a very conscientious relative found, and later sent, a postcard of a sculpture I’d never seen. (It is possible that the sculpture is not currently on display, as the Grounds are continually evolving.) The piece is entitled “Excerpts of a Lost Forest: Homage to Ashera,” by Tova Beck-Friedman. Several of my relatives have me to blame for their awareness of Asherah; she is, after all, a relatively obscure goddess in the Hebrew Bible. The sculpture, however, speaks to me of the continuing ability of even extinct gods to inspire artists. Just as Asherah occupied several years of my academic life, I suspect she also haunts the work of sculptors who’ve come to realize that not all gods must be male, and not all gods must be real to be important. Quite the contrary, the collective deities of our heritage may still be found where art thrives.

Cultural Religion

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The National Museum of Scotland, like many museums in the British Isles, is free to visitors. Such museums are repositories of national pride and provide a sense of the scope of a nation’s history. While penurious grad students (as opposed to plain penurious, as best describes those long unemployed), my wife and I would wander over to Chalmers Street and pop in for an hour or two of inexpensive culture. During the last minutes of my recent trip to Scotland, I ducked into the newly—well, it has been nearly two decades, I have to admit—expanded museum for a gander. I was naturally drawn to the history of Scotland section—you can see dinosaurs and robots in the US, after all—and was struck at how very religious it was.

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It’s not that the Scots are any more pious than other peoples, but it is the nature of religious artifacts to receive special treatment, and therefore, to survive time’s greedy decay. No one dares to anger the gods. Beginning with the Stone Age Picts, and flowing through contact with the Romans and eventually to the Celtic culture now associated with Scotland, religion is obviously preserved. Prehistoric Picts, by definition, didn’t leave written accounts of their religion, but the treatment of special artifacts in a gritty, harsh world shows where social values were to be found. Christianization, with its apocalyptic earnestness, only accelerated the process. Celtic crosses, case after case of precious metal sacramental artifacts, and a large display of the Reformation denominated the more secular displays, or so it seemed. (The working steam engines and large looms, however, gainsay a bit of my enthusiasm. And swords seemed to be everywhere.)

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While there is a genetic base for some sense of nationhood, it is not unusual to hear a person of African or Indian heritage speaking with the familiar Scottish brogue. Surely they are Scottish too. Culture clearly ties disparate peoples together into a “nationality.” In this museum that reaches back to the dinosaurs and beyond, a great deal of the history involves people of similar ancestry who come into contact repeatedly with those of other heritages. What gets left behind after those encounters, when it’s not swords, is religious. The religions themselves then clash, fracturing into a new stage of cultural development. Even in today’s secular Europe, some of the most notable buildings are the cathedrals. And in its own way, the National Museum of Scotland is a cathedral to all who wish to understand what makes us human.

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Monument to Madness

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Reflections on the implications of my recent trip to the United Kingdom will likely continue to filter into conscious expression over the next few days. Jet lag will inevitably fade, and some concepts will shake down and settle into place as the reality known as work once again demands its pound of flesh per day. One of the realities that struck me during my time in St Andrews was how violent the Reformation was when it came to Scotland. Truth holds the world hostage, since everyone wants to believe they own it. And it’s my word against yours unless one of us can pull in a larger authority—and who is larger than God? There was a lot of credibility riding on the Reformers’ certitudes. And resistance was strong. Fatal even.

Reform is nearly never gentle, especially religious reform. After the Society of Biblical Literature’s meeting disbanded last week, I wandered around the old, medieval section of St Andrews, trying to get a sense of what such conviction must have been. One of the participants narrated to me more of the stories of those who’d died in the course of conversion. Patrick Hamilton, it turns out, may have been the first victim of the Reformation, but he was not the last. Walking along on a sunny afternoon in a country where several religions consciously coexist (I was, as an American, surprised to see so many large mosques in the UK), it seemed difficult to believe that humane individuals would torture someone to a horrendous death by burning just because of religious differences. The killing times seemed so long ago. Or perhaps our killing has just become more subtle.

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Following the directions I’d been given, I came upon the Monument to the Martyrs. Not wishing to belittle the atrocity of undeserved deaths, I could not help thinking of the pillar as a Monument to Madness. Is the need to feel right so great that others must be made to die for it? After all, among those generally considered to be sane, we all believe that we are right. Who consciously accepts untruth as reality? In such circumstances the best, the only reasonable response is to agree to disagree. I can let you accept your truth, if you’ll let me accept mine. And perhaps such tolerance would serve our planet well. Even the number of trees spared had autos-da-fé been forbidden provides a silence to the wisdom of allowing difference to thrive.

Am I Famous Yet?

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Sweat is running down my back and my chest.  The sun beating down on my head feels like a hammer of the gods.  East 42nd Street is clad with a wide, red carpet and drivers are honking in a way that assures you that they are seriously irritated.  I step out into Second Avenue when the little white person appears on the crosswalk sign; it is 93 degrees and I’m due back at work.  A motorcade stops me as three tour buses cascade by, and an NYPD officer waves mere pedestrians back to the baking pavement to wait another rotation of the lights.  Helicopters high overhead fail to stir this heavy, hot air.  Hazily I wonder if the president is in town, or royalty of some kind.  It’s clear that the plebeians are of less importance this afternoon in New York City.  Then I spy a banner-the All-Star Game.  I’m being broasted on this street corner for a bunch of baseball players, not one of whom I can name.  This is such a facile way to learn your place.

Chance often enters my thoughts.  There are those who become rich and famous because they are driven to it, but they happened to be in the right syzygy of circumstances to take advantage of that opportunity.  There are some who would say that attaining greatness is an act of God, and others who claim it is only fate, or luck.  The fact is, the only reason some people are more special than the rest of us is that they were offered an opportunity that opened a gate.  I’m not suggesting that hard work’s not involved, but hard word alone doesn’t suffice.  You need to have a leg up to get to ride in that air-conditioned luxury bus down Second Avenue while your fellow citizens, and not a few seriously sweating fans, step aside for you.

I’m sure it’s just sour grapes. Like most little boys I really enjoyed playing baseball. I never considered it a job, though. We were far too pedestrian in my neighborhood for that kind of thought. My goal was to be a janitor. It was only when I reached beyond this calling appropriate to my state that I ran into difficulties. The marionette dancing at the end of the strings of puppet-masters who had better opportunities than I. Sour grapes and hellish city streets—what wine will ferment from this alchemy? There go the All-Stars. In many parts of the world, as in my head, their names are unknown. Today, however, one of the busiest streets in Midtown Manhattan is stopped just for them. We’re all in the same oven, but some are in air-conditioned coaches while others are melting on the sidewalks. The red carpet is not for the likes of us.

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Before Twilight

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Despite the summer with its long, languid days, The Telegraph reported on vampires last week. In an article entitled “Polish archaeologists unearth ‘vampire grave,’” Matthew Day narrates how archaeologists have uncovered skeletons buried with their heads—decapitated, obviously—on their legs. This was apparently a not uncommon medieval practice for ensuring that suspected vampires stayed safely in their graves. Interestingly enough, Day comments that the practice mainly began after the Christianization of the pagan cultures that had preceded them. Even pagans, he suggests, ran the risk of being accused of vampirism, a broadly defined threat in the Middle Ages. Of course, the Twilight series had not been written then so that the safe, Mormon cast of vampire was unknown.

Vampires represented a couple of concepts terrifying to people before the scientific revolution: they were a source of draining an individual of some life essence, and they were the problematic undead. The decapitation, in Tim Burton-Sleepy Hollow style, was intended to prevent the vampire from being able to locate its head after death. Unable to find the business end of its vampiristic corpus, the undead might remain just plain dead. Of course, staking works, if the tales of the Highgate vampire, near whose grave I recently stayed while in London, are to be believed.

The belief in vampires, or at least fascination with them, has been very hard to shake. One of the earliest horror films made was Nosferatu, a rip-off of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that was nearly obliterated because of copyright violations. Nosferatu continues to be ranked among the scariest of horror movies, and the Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake is a classic in its own right. The Shadow of the Vampire was an even more recent movie about the filming of the F. W. Murnau original. Among the earliest of the Universal monster movies was Tod Browning’s Dracula, which forever identified the face of Bela Lugosi with the infamous Count. No matter how deeply we bury them, the vampires keep coming back to stalk our nights and nightmares. When future archaeologists uncover the detritus of our civilization, no doubt they will conclude that we too, in a secularized world, feared the undead.

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To Be, Or

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Science and Nonbelief

Science is, according to Taner Edis, ambitious. While Science and Nonbelief is somewhat sympathetic to the religiously minded, Edis demonstrates how science aggressively tackles the issues steadfastly claimed by religions, and ultimately triumphs. Interestingly enough, early on in the book Edis notes that “truth” is a philosophical concept, and science operates on the principle of the best explanatory theory of the moment. So far I am in complete agreement. I guess the part that gives me the most trouble is the assumption that reason is the only way of knowing. Perhaps I’m just not enough of a scientist to know such things, but it appears to me that all “lower” animals appear to get along very well in the world without great doses of “reason” that supposedly catapult humanity far above the other species. Scientific observation would seem to confirm that many animals feel emotion—after all, what is fight or flight if not an emotional response? And since we are animals, I reason, have we lost something when we leave feeling aside as a way of knowing?

Edis is quite fair-minded. He notes that science has no way to prove or disprove the existence of a deity, or deities, but he also states that the empirical method is so successful that a spiritual world is no longer required. He may be correct. The vast majority of the people in the world feel he is wrong, however. I may state this since we know, statistically, that most people in the world believe in some form of religion. Rational or not, here they come! It would seem that evolution has endowed us with religion, or an awareness of something we feel rather than reasoning out. And yet, we are told, science takes no prisoners.

I often ponder the fact that no one person has all the answers. Part of the human condition involves possessing limited resources for specializing in too many fields. Polymaths become rarer each year as specialists grow more and more precise. In this great mix of human learning, science often steps in and claims all the marbles belong to it. The rest of us have lost ours, apparently. There’s no denying that applied science has been very successful in bettering our understanding of our universe and our lot in the world. That doesn’t mean that all will believe in it. The title of Edis’ book is apt; belief is the real issue in attempting to fit religion and science into the same world. It is quite clear that religion doesn’t explain much in the way of the natural world. I wonder, however, if science is really capable of encapsulating all of what it means to be human.

Check Mace

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In the medical sciences building of the University of St Andrews stands a glass display case cradling a mace. The mace, a symbol of smiting authority that goes all the way back to Old Kingdom pharaohs, has a long tradition in academia as well. In all the pomp and glitter of an academic processional, a dean, provost, or chancellor carries a symbolic mace, as if to keep an unruly faculty in order. (I am sure that most of them have wanted to use that mace a time or two in reality, but have been constrained by both convention and the rule of law.) Medical science is among the fields of research quickly moving away from the spiritual mumbo-jumbo of medieval superstition. We are, after all, simply soft machines, doing as nature has programmed us. What more could there be to it?

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Looking more closely at the mace, I see on its ornate base, a flanking ring of winged oxen. Perhaps obscure to medical students, the winged ox is the symbol of the putative Gospel writer, Luke. Each of the Gospels emphasizes different aspects of Jesus, and the symbol assigned to Luke has been the ox. If the wings didn’t give it away, the explanatory placard on the wall nearby confirms my analysis. Eyes traveling up the silver shaft, the crown of the mace houses yet another saint, this one an apostle. St Andrew (of course) tops the mace, holding his X-winged cross. Underneath is an amorphous structure for which I need to turn to the placard to have explained. The fountain of healing waters, it tells me.

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From tip to tale, then, the mace of medical science is inherently religious. My reading of late has been from scientists claiming that, in the words of the old commercial, “parts is parts.” There is no underlying life-force or animating principle. Life is biological robotics, so I’m told. So as I stood in St Andrews last week, considering this metallic mace, I was poised on the edge of science and symbol. There is no biological need for such symbols—indeed, the mace was originally a weapon to inflict grievous bodily harm. Now, chased with silver, intricately ornate, it begins and ends with religious implications. I can’t help wonder what the robots make of that.

Hansel and Regretel

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HanselGretelHansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters was on offer on the trans-Atlantic flight. Since I missed it in theaters, I decided to watch it on my mini-screen inches from my face. Witches, among the classical monsters, have a strange longevity into the world of science—like van Helsing (of movie fame) the protagonists have steam-punkish gadgets to destroy the naturally invincible foes. What’s not to like? I could not help but be disturbed, however, at what seemed to be the inherent misogyny of the film. Perhaps it was the lighting on the plane, but I saw only one male witch among the monstrous hordes of females who were battered, shot, and burned with apparent sangfroid. Women were guilty, it seemed, until proven innocent. And Mina, the white witch, again underscores that women who are “clean” are still potential witches underneath. Naturally, she dies before it’s over, but in a noble way.

The witches in the movie are strangely removed from a traditional, satanic context. They derive their power, like modern wiccans, from nature and strange mixes. The source of their magic is never explored very deeply, but when they catch trespassers in their forest, their queen states that even God himself fears to go there. Bewitching bravado, to be sure, but where does this image of God originate? A god afraid of the very nature that (in a film such as this, certainly) “he” created? The sacrifice of children is a good biblical trope, but seems to do little more here than to build the tension.

Monster movies, I realize, are “guy flicks.” Something about all that testosterone seems to be energized by images of ordinary people fighting monsters, against incredible odds. The monsters here, however, are barely distinguishable from regular women. Folklore has a deep well of traditions about witches from which the savvy might draw to write an intelligent, entertaining tale of witch-hunters. After all, the real antagonist, traditionally, is the male devil. He is, in medieval tradition, the source of witching magic. By removing Satan from the picture, we are left with strong women who must be repressed, and the world is really no safer when Hansel and Gretel are done. In fact, the end of the movie implies that they will never be finished. An opportunity for a subtle shift of paradigm was missed in this film, and, as usual, it is women who end up paying the price.

Caledonia Dreamin’

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“Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream.” So penned poet Hugh MacDiarmid with sentiments that could’ve been composed by H. P. Lovecraft. My association with Edinburgh seems accidental, but there is little in my life that compares to this mad god’s dream. The Gnostics used to believe that there was nothing in divinity that precluded a kind of divine madness. Philosophers, back when they still considered god a postulate, argued about whether the deity was good or evil. If they’d come to Edinburgh, I suspect, the debate would’ve taken on a whole new cast. In his poem “Edinburgh,” MacDiarmid captures the untamed nature of a city that has never been given the accolades of Paris, London, or New York, but is just as edgy and twice as beautiful.

Dreaming gods, of course, are nothing new. Vishnu, according to some strains of Hinduism, is the god whose dream is the universe. In the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, it is a dream that reveals to the ancient god El that Baal has returned from the land of death. And, of course, Cthulhu lies dead but dreaming in the city of R’lyeh. To me, Edinburgh is a wonderful alchemy of divine dreams. I was a young man, still so very naive when I moved here. Looking back at those old photos, I see a much younger face from the past, telling the camera that yes, he’d found paradise, the very place of God’s dreaming. Our human politics, however, trump divine dreams every time. Although I never wanted to leave, I was not permitted to remain. Yes, the camera does, at times, capture the soul.

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I am on the train that will take me from Edinburgh, having seen it anew through my daughter’s eyes. I came here penniless some twenty-four years ago, but with a head full of dreams. Life has taught me the cost of dreams since that time, and I have had to pay with wrecked careers and uncertain futures, trusting that the god who is dreaming all this is mad indeed. Nevertheless, like the gods, I refuse to stop dreaming. As much as Hugh MacDiarmid captures the spirit of Edinburgh, as I sit here, with a wee bit of mist in my eyes, my mind is on the words of another poet, Baroness Nairne. To her I will have to leave the last words, from this south-bound train. “Fareweel, Edinburgh, where happy we hae been.”


Reflections on a Ruined Cathedral

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On my final day in St Andrews, the symbol of its ruined cathedral weighs upon my mind. In a world both increasingly secular and religious, it is the latter that led to the fall of this house. I’ve toured many impressive cathedrals in my time, from Chartres in its gothic splendor to the plain majesty of Durham. These engineering feats of medieval “superstition” still draw theists and atheists alike, in wonder. In crass terms, they represent a large economic investment. It terms of spirit, they are sublime. Under the duress of ecclesiastical prestige, those who couldn’t really afford the resources nonetheless stretched their stonework toward God. In secular Europe, some of the best known sites are sacred.

St Andrews Cathedral fell victim to the Reformation. Religions are notoriously selfish in this way. When a new divine regime takes over, the wonders of the previous god become spoils. Hagia Sophia (which I’ve never seen) went from basilica to mosque, and Roman Catholic St Andrews became an eviscerated shell at the hands of Protestant thinkers. Even in ancient Israel the temple of Jerusalem was build atop a site of even more ancient heathen shrines. We conquer to stoop.

St Andrews, named for the patron saint of Scotland, is better known for its golf than its god. The divine may have built this city, but the divot has captured its heart. Priorities change with time—we call this progress. Not far from the crumbling cathedral lies a ruined castle. Not the haunt of royalty, the castle was build to house powerful bishops and archbishops. Some of these were the warrior bishops who were knights as well as prelates. Some, like Alexander Stewart, led troops to war. And yet the cathedral could not survive the change of religious climate. If we can’t have it, then it must be destroyed. The great cathedral, once the largest church in Scotland, and among the largest in Europe, perhaps represents the fate of all acts of faith, when something more insistent comes along. Or maybe I just don’t want to leave.

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Whose Reality?

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It was a groggy, foggy morning when I stepped off the bus in St Andrews. I’d been here before, but it had been over two decades ago, and with my wife, who is my navigator. I knew the International Society of Biblical Literature meeting was here, but I didn’t know where. Instinctively, I headed toward the medieval part of town. A religion conference, I reasoned, would best fit there. Seeing no signs of the inimitable professorate that I associate with the Society, I finally stopped into a university office where a dubious-looking receptionist peered at the conference letter and shook her head. The she spied a familiar address on the letterhead. “Ach, that’ll be doon this way, past the second roond-aboot.” Having lived in Scotland for over three years, I understood. I suppose if I’d just read the materials sent ahead more closely, I would’ve known that we were meeting in the newest part of Scotland’s oldest university.

A religion and science reunion came in the form of the physics and maths building where the meetings were being held. Science grad students, somewhat bewildered by so many biblical scholars, pushed open their lab doors with a sense of wonder—and perhaps disbelief. Could so many educated people seriously spend their time on the Bible? Science, after all, now has cornered the market on truth, hasn’t it? What hath Jerusalem to do with St Andrews? Ancient universities were generally founded to study theology. In 1413, when St Andrews opened its academic doors, God was the undisputed arbiter of truth. Now high-tech fighter jets scream overhead in nearby Leuchars, and we are secure in the ability of science to save us. And still biblical scholars, like the horseshoe crabs, come together in huge numbers on the beachhead of the human psyche every year.

To the student trained in the sciences, I have no doubt that we appear superfluous. Nevertheless, without religious belief, or the Bible, our society would not be where it is today. Although now it seems that science and religion bear deep hostility to one another, they actually grew from the same root and have a similar goal—to discover the truth. Science finds no evidence beyond the material, but religion declares the material as the perennial under-achiever. Scholars of the Bible from around the world, many of them not religious believers, expend their limited resources to come to one of the more inaccessible tourist destinations of Scotland and meet in a clean, modern, comfortable sciences building. Across town, in the heart of the old, medieval district, stand the remains of a once grand cathedral. Still majestic in its glorious decay, the church towers over a town once ruled by religion where now science and golf define the new reality.

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Burning Faith

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1528. February 29. St Andrews, Scotland. 24 year old Patrick Hamilton was burned to death for espousing the teachings of Martin Luther. St Andrews University is the oldest of Scotland’s four ancient centers of higher education. Heterodox religious teaching was considered a very dangerous thing in those days, especially in the halls of academe. Once infected with Lutheranism, like a zombie, you had to be burned so that the rest of the world could be safe, the virus contained. Only the problem in this case was an all too human one—difference of opinion regarding religion. The Thundering Scot, John Knox, would’ve been all of about 14 at the time, and reformation for the Catholic Scotland was still years in the future. Now, one of the largest European cathedrals, in St Andrews, lies in ruins because of that very reformation.

Religious bickering has a tendency to move beyond the ridiculous to the insane. Burning young men, after decades of burning hundreds of young and old women alike throughout Europe, was one of the most heinous symptoms of a horrid madness that had grown from religious fervor and fear. Religion itself is not to blame as much as the human tendency to use it as a weapon against those who are perceived as different. Some five centuries later and the physical stakes are gone but the fervor and fear are as strong as ever. As we hear politicians and televangelists lash out against those of whom God disapproves, the smoke still rises from the spot where Patrick Hamilton, late of the University of St Andrews, was sacrificed for his faith.

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Ironically, as I sat on the quiet morning train from Edinburgh to Leuchars, from the headphones on the young man behind me wafted AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” Was Patrick Hamilton aware that he was on a literal highway to hell as he returned home to Scotland? Did he have an inkling that his own people would torture him to death because he taught such dangerous ideas as salvation by faith alone and Scripture as the instruction for that salvation? Could anyone have guessed that the then teenaged John Knox would introduce what was to become an even less forgiving form of Christianity to Scotland by the time young Hamilton should’ve reached his dotage? Religion is funny that way. Even those who give their all to defend it easily become its victims. And a few yards down the road the Society of Biblical Literature meets in a university building dedicated to the sciences. History’s ironies never end.

The Importance of Being Honest

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JohnGrayContinuing our quest to be a family out of sync with the modern world, we used part of our free day in Edinburgh to take the Book Lover’s Tour. Edinburgh has a long literary history that includes such writers as Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A more recent star in that constellation is J. K. Rowling. The tour we took was led by the redoubtable Allan Foster, a geology student turned literary psychopomp. Although not associated personally with Edinburgh, Oscar Wilde had an unusual connection that made for an interesting tale. One of his male lovers, John Gray (a model for the eponymous Dorian) eventually became a Catholic priest, and lover of a wealthy Russian poet, Marc-André Raffalovich. When the Gray was assigned to St. Patrick’s in Edinburgh, Raffalovich was appalled at the state of the building and offered to finance a new church with the provision that his friend be appointed priest in charge. Thus the new building came to be and still stands on Cowgate.

Of course, nowhere is the priest or his lover, benefactor of the parish, mentioned in the church literature. Morality often parades as self-righteousness. Secret lives are not restricted to the clergy, of course. The fact is that people everywhere are human, and people are complex. So complex that we will sometimes carry on a charade to ensure religious respectability, to the point of having political candidates endorsed by clergy for issues that run counter to the very sources of their funding. Righteousness can be very costly, but self-righteousness comes cheap. Religious systems that demand standards that they can’t uphold either collapse or excel in duplicity.

When the tour was over, we walked by St. Patrick’s church. I wondered how many of the patrons knew the history of the lovely building they use for worship. Should they take a literary tour and learn the background of the church, would it make any difference? Ethics can be a matter of convenience, particularly when it is a matter of sexual propriety. Somebody else’s sexual propriety, that is. The real business of religion should be helping to improve authentic lives. Today it has often become the business of supporting the political system that bankrolls the special interests nearest to one’s heart. And reading, especially of unapproved materials, only gets in the way.

Persistence of Memory

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I’ve posted before on sacred geography—the idea that a place is holy for some reason or other. That holiness is very personal, and although some locations seem to draw national, or even international, veneration, special places are intensely individualized. Edinburgh is one of those places for me. I haven’t been here for 21 years, after a stint as a post-graduate that lasted for three years and three months. Walking into Edinburgh from Waverley Station yesterday was overwhelming. Of course, it helped that the sun was shining (somewhat a rarity in these latitudes) and that my daughter was seeing it for the first time. Edinburgh is one of the truly beautiful cities of the world, but in my case, it is also invested with my personal history here. Once I called this city home.

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Wandering about, noticing the changes—Edinburgh has always drawn tourists during the summer—it was clear from the many languages and accents that people from all over the world were exploring the main touristed areas: the Royal Mile, Greyfriars Bobby, Princes Street Gardens-for me the experience seemed to run deeper. They will leave, I hope, with only positive memories of this mystical town, for a fair bit of medieval magic still hovers about it. For those of us who experience Edinburgh as sacred, however, there is good and bad mixed. I not only laughed here, but I cried, I worried, I was frustrated, sad, elated, depressed. I poured myself into a life here that I knew was ephemeral, temporary, destined to pass in the short hours that define one’s young adulthood. How could I have ever left? How can I ever leave again?

Away from the tourists, we wandered back to the places we used to live. How is it even possible, I wondered, staring up at the windows of our old flat, that I was ever bored there? Even the sacred, with constant exposure, becomes profane, I guess. And it requires an absence—perhaps two decades is far too long—to bring it back into focus. I am bursting open here. Some tourists are, I’m sure, busy falling in love with Edinburgh for the first time. For me, it is returning to an old friend. Twenty years of being heartlessly bounced about from job to job make the place I was born seem far less inviting than the streets and alleys that inspired Harry Potter and Waverley. This is the Nunc dimittis of my soul at this very moment. It comes to mind, Faust-like, whenever one enters paradise, knowing it will last for a few moments only.

Like Virgins

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If you are reading this, I have safely arrived in the United Kingdom, courtesy of Virgin Atlantic. Given the lens through which I view everything, I somehow supposed that Virgin Atlantic was named after one of history’s two most famous Madonnas—the Blessed Virgin Mary, or just plain Madonna. It turns out that I was wrong on both counts. Virgin Atlantic, famously under the leadership of Richard Branson, borrowed its name from its older sister company, Virgin Records, also founded by Sir Branson. Virgin Records, I had supposed, was named after the only musical Madonna, but again, not so. The record company, new to an inexperienced Branson, was named by a colleague who noted that they were business neophytes, like virgins. The original logo showed an Eve-like virgin with a snake and everything.

Steve Fitzgerald's pic from WikiCommons

Steve Fitzgerald’s pic from WikiCommons

While in the UK I always call on Nick Wyatt, one of my doctoral advisors and now a good friend. As my mentor in Ugaritic, we always joke that I fly Virgin Atlantic because of the Virgin Anat, Baal’s famous warrior sister and sometimes lover. Anat was, of course, not the first perpetual virgin. The Mesopotamians had the idea that a goddess could be a perpetual virgin and still have kids, and what led up to said motherhood. Virginity is a status marker, still unfairly applied to women. I suspect a good part of it is biology (and if this seems weird, blame it on the jet lag), because the essential male reproductive function occurs whether or not a female is present, and even the most saintly men can not, from time-to-time, barring very extreme measures, avoid it. It is difficult to measure virginity in men, so why the double standard?

In this early morning haze (or is it really afternoon?), I suppose it comes down to not wanting to support somebody else’s child. Looks are at best a lackluster proof of paternity, and in the days before effective birth control, the only way you could be absolutely sure was to make sure your spouse was a virgin. Goddesses could get away with sex and still retain their purity. It was less sanguine for the human woman. Thus the Virgin Mary is accorded a special, but not unique status. But it turns out that none of this really matters because the Virgin I fly is merely a business virgin. And with a bit of experience, provides some of the best care in the air.