Finite Gods

4 Comments September 1, 2016 Steve A. Wiggins

Just how many gods are there, anyway? Well, that’s not really a fair question. For one thing, do I mean “real gods” or gods that people believe in? Do I mean “believe in” or made up? Do I mean “made up” or intentionally fabricated? And the nesting questions could go on and on. Over the years in my professional capacity as an erstwhile teacher, I accumulated books listing the deities of various cultures with brief descriptions. I once even argued that using “god/goddess of” (the divine-genitival construct) as a phrase distorted ancient concepts of divinity. The fact is people have believed in many gods in many different ways. As modern scholars of religion we’ve only begun to reach the heavens (or underworld, or anywhere in between, for deities may be found anywhere). This issue comes to mind because a friend recently shared a story from IFL Science about a new Etruscan goddess. The piece by Ben Taub mentions a stone recovered from Poggio Colla, a site in Italy, written in Etruscan. The stone seems to mention a new “fertility cult” goddess. And once again religion and science have met, but not quite kissed each other.

Photo credit: Jastrow (2006), Wikimedia Commons

Let’s begin with the Etruscans. Before the Romans, Etruscans lived in Italy, giving Tuscany its name. We know very little about them, as their language (Etruscan) is rarely found and imperfectly understood. Some of the classical gods may go back to Etruscan originals, and the Etruscans seem to have known of at least some of the cultures of the ancient Near East, or ancient West Asia. We have no idea how many deities the Etruscans recognized. Polytheism, for all its heathenish exuberance, never had a problem with adding more gods. Interestingly, the “new” goddess mentioned here, Uni, is someone I used to talk about in my Rutgers classes on ancient Near Eastern religion some five-plus years ago. Pardon my crowing—I seldom get to suggest I was ahead of my time.

What really interests me here is that websites that advocate science still take an interest in religion. Although belief is relegated to inferior minds (generally) science does admit, from time to time, that it’s interesting. The study of religion, in at least some schools, is a scientific enterprise. No, we don’t put gods under microscopes (telescopes might be more useful) but we use the same techniques as empirical studies of nature use in order to try to draw some conclusions about religion. Despite the fact that the vast majority of humans on the planet are believers, higher education has consistently under-funded or disbanded departments who apply rational thought to religion. We suppose that someone else can pick it up and study it, coming to useful conclusions without putting in all the homework. Don’t mind me, though. I’m just basking in the light of having known about Uni years before she was discovered.

The Wars of the Worlds

2 Comments October 30, 2014 Steve A. Wiggins

Just as it is appropriate for news sources to carry religious stories without ridicule in weekend editions, October is the month when strange things might be reported with a degree of seriousness. I have often noted in the past that “paranormal” (think X-Files) phenomena are closely related to religion. Since our ruling paradigm is one of belittling the intellects of those willing to consider evidence beyond the accepted, news stories featuring the unexplained do so with a generous helping of scorn. I was amazed, then, when my wife sent me a story on the BBC News Magazine from the World Service Sport section. (Which is near enough to paranormal, as sports fail to interest me in the least bit.) A story by Richard Padula is entitled “The day UFOs stopped play.” Near this date in 1954 in Florence, Italy, a soccer game stopped as UFOs appeared above the stadium. Former World Cup players stared upward instead of at the ball. The event was documented and never explained. I kept waiting for the jowl-waggling punchline. It never came. Here was a news story from a reputable source taking something strange at face value.

Paranormal activities and religious experiences are in the same category when it comes to a materialistic universe. They can’t exist and so the superior mind must laugh them off, stating they are an illusion, hallucination, or hoax. They still happen, nonetheless. Some world governments are beginning to announce to their citizens that they recognize unexplained arial phenomena exist and—truly astounding for government rulers—they have no explanation. Something weird is going on. It was on Halloween Eve in 1938 that Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, was invaded, according to an Orson Welles radio play. Since the inexplicable panic that came following that broadcast, extraterrestrial visitors have been laughed off the serious news page into the comic section. News stories have never taken it seriously since.

A sports writer, casting about for an interesting story, might well focus on an event of such Fortean dimensions. Some highly respected people present at that game were interviewed with utter seriousness and traces of physical evidence were even gathered. A substance whimsically called “angel hair” was found all over the city, and despite the chemical signature, was declared to be the webs of a massive spider invasion (who needs aliens to be scared?) by many scientists who didn’t witness it. Laugh and the world laughs with you. The BBC doesn’t seem to be laughing in this story. Tomorrow is Halloween, when many improbable things seem possible, if only for a short time. Weather balloons, swamp gas, and Venus notwithstanding, sometimes people of normal intellect turn their eyes to the sky and wonder.

Sacred Herstory

Leave a comment May 31, 2013 Steve A. Wiggins

Have you ever read a book thinking the author was a woman, but later learned that it was written by a man? Or vice-versa? This creates a disturbing kind of cognitive dissonance, and I suspect that it is hardwired to our communal instincts. We want to know whether it is a man or a woman who is talking to us. Expectations of gender are deeply embedded in all societies, and they become problematic when they ossify into rules. Gender roles, in earliest societies, were a matter of biological necessities. In a modern, urban context such roles are obsolete, and certainly damaging—especially to women. Craig A. Monson’s Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art and Arson in the Convents of Italy raised this issue to a conscious level once again. Christianity, always very sensitive to issues of sexuality, had developed in a social context of women as property. In the Middle Ages, where dowries were expected, families couldn’t afford to marry off all their daughters, and convents provided an easy, if not always spiritual, solution. Monson’s book, although not filled with salacious tales, illustrates the point well. In a society where wage-earning was limited to males, females had few options.

Monson narrates the stories of five different convents where a nun (or sometimes groups of nuns) refused to play by the rules established by the male hierarchy. The infractions, viewed from the twenty-first century, seem minor: playing with magic, singing, producing art work, wanting to go outside the cloister walls, visiting (gasp!) an opera! (There are a few more complex issues too, such as arson and the love that dare not Ave Maria its name.) In each case, the masculine authorities were called in to investigate, punish, and restore order. The end result is, although fascinating, somewhat melancholy. These willful women were often acting against boredom. Their lives had no impact beyond the convent wall, and, ironically, I learned, even their enclosures had prisons. A nun could be moved from her cell to the cell. And sometimes the only crime was wanting to hear a professional singer perform.

Nuns Behaving Badly is a clever title for a book. As I read the histories, however, I became increasingly convinced that those behaving poorly were not the nuns. A society fabricated on the premise that men are the divinely ordained masters of their universe is no stellar example of men behaving well. Even the occasional bishop, archbishop, or cardinal who sided with the accused had to bow to the will of the Holy Inquisition. The victims, although not physically tortured, were women who had thrown their entire futures into the service of the church, in one of the few roles allowed females in an era already pressing into the early modern age. The nuns were not behaving badly. They were simply being human. The truly bad behavior came in the form of a male hierarchy that brooked no dissent.

The Idea of a University

1 Comment July 7, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

I have to admit that my sense of justice has been a bit offended by the loss of reputation of my chosen field. Seeing how universities are fast becoming job-training institutes, I fume about what once had been and no longer shall be. History is the lens through which I view the world (a subject many industrialists consider “useless,” but to their cause actually “dangerous”). Historians dispute which university was the earliest, although something similar to the idea of a university was developed in Bologna, Italy, around 1088. The University of Paris was also very early, as were Oxford and Salerno. While “business” as it was then known could be studied to some degree, a primary function of early universities was the training of clergy. No doubt, paranoia concerning heterodoxy and heresy helped spur on the idea that future clergy required extensive training. As universities caught on, many centers for the studying of theology (indeed, a branch of religious studies) sprang to life. It could be argued that this was a “trade mentality,” but very quickly this became an academic point. Who else but a theologian would every worry about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin?

Science was incorporated into theological studies from the beginning. We all know about the antagonistic relationship between the Church and Galileo, but less often do we hear about the religious thinkers who were trying to put it all together into a workable system. Often the university was among the few places where such abstract and critical thought could occur. Some of the great universities in the United States began as seminaries: Harvard, Yale, Boston University—they started as places to train clergy. How often do graduates of the Harvard Business School toot that particular horn? Permit me the privilege of a mournful sigh as I watch the torch pass from abstract thought to the abstract symbol of the gold standard. Money only possesses the value we assign to it. Currency can be measured in less material avenues as well—the ability to think clearly and precisely and compassionately; these abstractions, I would lament, have inherent value. Alas, the heart of the university has gone another direction. I have undergone the heartache of breakups before, and always one needs a little time to adjust to the loss.

The University of Virginia’s recent object lesson to higher education should perhaps serve as a warning tap on the brakes to those who would see higher education kneeling abjectly before the towering statue of commerce with its head of gold. Maybe there is more to life than money? Maybe education for its own sake is what sets civilization apart from life in the savage jungle. Those who castigate our great institutions of learning seldom turn down the offer of an honorary degree. While these academic niceties require neither coursework nor dissertation, they do offer a kind of credibility that the rich seldom find on their own. So what is the idea of a university? Is it a place to learn a trade? Sometimes. The humble request those of us deemed useless make is that the university not forget its humble origins as a place of speculative thought in the service of religious thinking. Critical thinking. Otherwise it will be more than irony that the city that gave us higher education is also the one that also gives its name to baloney.

from Wiki Commons

Artifacts or Theodicy?

1 Comment June 4, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

Last week the Huffington Post ran a story that ties archaeology, religion, and monsters together in a package too neat for some researchers. Digging in a sixteenth-century grave for plague victims (something that strikes me as being so foolhardy as to be religious) archaeologists found a corpse with a brick in its mouth. The preliminary conclusion? Sixteenth-century Italian plague-weary society was attempting to stop a vampire. The find has, of course, been disputed. Other archaeologists, the story notes, claim that a loose brick could have fallen into the cadaver’s agape mouth just making it resemble the little-known technique of stopping a vampire by bricking its mouth open. This story, written with Huffington Post’s usual pluck, raised an issue I quite often encountered as a doctoral student in ancient Near Eastern religions: anomalies are generally categorized as religious.

When my wife first pointed this story out to me I thought I might learn something of vampire lore—itself inherently religious—from the sixteenth century. The fact is, however, that artifacts (including people) under the ground accumulate a lot more than dirt. Mystery attends the lives of yesteryear, and the further back we go in time the less we understand. It was a standing joke among those of us in the textually-based field of religious studies that any artifact for which no function could be discerned would most certainly be labeled “religious” by archaeologists. When no logic attends an action, call it religious. This might be a motto for academics and their approach to the study of religion. There are some who claim religious studies is not a proper field of inquiry at all. Excuse me, but where are you intending to fly that plane?

Vampire scares (whether or not that’s what was found in Italy) do, however, follow their own logic. Although early scientists may have made connections implicating rodents (and their fleas) as carriers of plague, the average citizen would have only seen the supernatural dimension. Morbidity on the scale of the Black Death is almost inconceivable and as Europe suffered through periodic outbreaks of plague it seemed that a good God couldn’t be behind it all. Evil creatures, such as vampires, get God off the hook. They are a device of theodicy. “Theodicy” is the jargon for the theological justification of God in a world full of suffering. When God’s goodness effaces to such a point that people grow frightened, well, isn’t it just easier to say a vampire is behind it all? The conclusion that logic draws is quite different. Nevertheless, I think I’ll be replacing the garlic on my nightstand with a brick. What will the archaeologists of the future say?

Crossing Italy

Leave a comment March 21, 2011 Steve A. Wiggins

“Poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be king, and a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything” – sage words of a young Bruce Springsteen. Of course, “man” may well apply to institutions as well as individuals. According to a recent story in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, the European high court has ruled that it is appropriate for public schools in Italy to decorate their classrooms with crucifixes. While this may not seem unusual for the heavily Roman Catholic nation, indeed, the homeland of the church itself; nevertheless it reveals much of the nature of religion. Religions, like Springsteen’s human characters, want to take charge of everything. Partial rule just isn’t good enough in a business that deals with absolutes.

Not every citizen in Italy is Roman Catholic. Some are not even Christian. State sponsored schools bearing the insignia of the church’s glory days send a message that can be heard from the highways to the backstreets: Christianity rules! If we wheel the world around a few degrees further we will find similar rhetoric in nations like Iran, only the specific brand of religion has changed. The message is distressingly familiar: Islam rules! There was a time when the church could likely be called the only true superpower in Europe. We remember that time now as the Dark Ages.

As campaigns for next year’s elections in the United States are pumping up, we are hearing quite a bit about candidates’ religious convictions. That which used to be a private affair has become an emblem emblazoned on a flamboyant flag declaring “Gott und Ich” to the world. Worse, the religions are being used to score votes. Once in office, that religion will return to its flaccid state and politics will be business as usual. The populace, however, has trouble seeing through this. Religion is injected with such emotional freight that leaving it out of elections – or classrooms – is like abandoning a helpless infant. As they nail their crucifixes to the walls of public schools in Italy, I’ll be over here with Bruce surveying these badlands.

Utopia

7 Comments September 15, 2010 Steve A. Wiggins

In a rare moment of free time I stumbled across the website of Damanhur, a planned eco-society physically located in Italy but with branches in other (mostly European) nations. The Federation of Damanhur is dedicated to the spiritual, artistic and social development of humankind. It is probably most famous for the hand-carved temples deep within a mountainous location in northern Italy. The Temples of Humankind are, from web pictures anyway, quite stunning, often earning the hackneyed accolade of the “eighth wonder of the world.” The temples are dedicated to Gaia, the earth, and humanity (often, unfortunately, its greatest enemy). The Temples contain a hall of waters, hall of earth, hall of mirrors, hall of metals, hall of spheres, a labyrinth, and the Blue Temple. Begun in 1978 as the vision of Oberto Airaudi, a tunnel was excavated and the temples were carved from the rock. A moving account of how government officials, determined to shut down this clandestine operation only to emerge from the temples emphatically stating that they must be preserved, came to the aid of the Damanhurians is presented on their website.

Like other utopian movements, the Damanhur society seeks a better world. Their vision of a planet in sync with rather than warred upon by humans is compelling. Their achievements are admirable. Still, it remains a sad commentary on the world that greed and capitalism have constructed. Every day self-satisfied faces of wealthy politicians glare out from the newspaper or Internet declaring that they know a better way. The evidence of our world belies their claims. Damanhur and other similar societies only thrive when they are small. Once paradise opens its doors, entrepreneurs enter.

The religion of Damanhur is far from orthodox. It is, however, peaceful and sensitive to the connection that binds all of earth’s inhabitants together. The society promotes education – a simple commitment that seems beyond the will or ability of many state governments in this wealthy, fully industrialized and technologized society. I wish the Damanhurians well. They have constructed a beautiful world for themselves. If they fare better than most utopian societies, perhaps they can continue to be a light for a world that sees only veins of potential bankable wealth inside mountains.