Some Uses for Comparative Mythology July 7, 2009
Posted by Ian in African Diaspora, Community, Comparative Religion, Heathenry, History, Modern Polytheism, Myth, Religion and Faith, Shango, Thor.add a comment
I have had this bouncing around in my head for a little bit, thinking about how we compare mythologies and parsing out the different methods employed to establish comparisons. Comparisons, even fairly easy ones, are fairly complicated things, and it seems worthwhile to consider what sort of elements compose the process.
Comparative mythology doesn’t really sit in any one field of study and, moreover, has a very robust life outside of the academy and its fields of study. When I talk about comparative work, I don’t just mean folks like Dumezil and Levi-Strauss, Jung and Campbell. I mean to include the sort of thing that happens when a Wiccan meets a Yogi, when a Catholic meets a practitioner of Lucumi.
In fact, I’m more interested in comparative mythology as a way to facilitate the social encounter between different traditions than I am in comparison in the abstract.
That’s a pretty big domain, so you should expect some equally broad categories from me, things that just begin to differentiate the domain, untidy and overlapping.
The trouble with words July 4, 2009
Posted by Ian in About This Blog, Community, Education, Ethics, Foucault, Philosophy (General), Religion and Faith, Skepticism.add a comment
I’ve not been posting much. There seem to be cycles of not posting for me, often having to do with just how much time I have available to sit and write out my thoughts. This feels a little different than that, though. I have become, of late, less and less enamored with writing. It’s not that I’ve given up on it, but I am less sanguine about it.
Historical Force, Differentiation April 20, 2009
Posted by Ian in Africa, African Diaspora, Comparative Religion, History, Modern Polytheism, Myth, Oshun, Oya, Plato, Religion and Faith, Santeria, Structuralism, Yemaya, Yoruba.add a comment
The structuralists make a very good point about human societies: they tend toward increasing differentiation. They develop and fix categories that orders the world in which they find themselves. Moreover, once established, such categories become generative: they are extended to deal with new (in an absolute or relative sense of the term) and in doing so tend to become even more intensely differentiated.
The understanding they provide also forms the basis for action, and especially within the cultural world. Those actions form habits, not just for individuals but for groups, and so the categories become the basis for introducing new things into the environment. The habits ‘justify’ themselves (sometimes in a very strong sense of ‘justify’).
Why history? April 8, 2009
Posted by Ian in Africa, Anthropology, Community, Comparative Religion, Education, Heathenry, History, Modern Polytheism, Religion and Faith.add a comment
So, I’ve been enjoying reading and thinking about things kind of historically lately. You know one of the things I enjoy most about reading history? Because it helps me remain intellectually humble. When you read good historical accounts of religious movements, you discover how diverse they are, how much variation lies between and within them.
Better yet, you start to get a sense that those movements and what they serve aren’t all that stable. They change, in relation to other movements (religious and otherwise) and in relation to the life experience of their members, especially of their clergy. The variation isn’t alien to devotion, but proper to it, the natural result of each person, each group, living the truth of their encounters with the divine.
What’s with the ‘eternal’? April 7, 2009
Posted by Ian in Comparative Religion, Merleau-Ponty, Myth, Religion and Faith.add a comment
All this talk of eternity is just another way for coming at mythological rationality, mythological ‘reality.’ I really suspect that the mythic is one of the primary means available to express the eternal in temporal circumstances.
Of course, myths are temporal, even if they open a path toward the eternal. Through them the divine nourishes the temporal, but the difference between the two is really important. If you start conflating myths with eternity itself, then you begin to over-inflate the temporal elements of myth.
You know, I am thinking about just using simpler sounding words like the invisible and visible world. I tend to avoid that formulation because it makes it sound like there is this ‘other’ world like our own that we just can’t see . I don’t like that, it feels a little too much like the ‘old man in the sky’ concept of divinity.
However, it does sounds more ‘natural’ to my ears than some of the formulations I have developed in its place. I’ll think about it.
Divination in the Present April 5, 2009
Posted by Ian in Community, Divination, Education, Healing traditions, History, Religion and Faith.add a comment
What role ought divination to play in this picture?
Well, any divination that treats time as fixed, set, immutable, as something to be looked at but not engaged, is ut wrong-headed and unethical. It actively nurtures an unhealthy passivity on the part of its participants.
Reclaiming a living present also demands that we reclaim eternity. The difference between the eternal and temporal needs to be sustained, nurtured, as one of the sacred mysteries. We ought not, as some neoplatonists, try to dissolve the temporal into the eternal, to make the temporal a passing image of some aspect of eternity.
Divination can be all about the inclination of the temporal toward the eternal, but only if it remains clear that the eternal stands apart from the temporal, copresent but not identical with it. It ought to be an exploration into the potential of the temporal to manifest the eternal, extending well-beyond fortune-telling into memory (history) and ritual.
How to imagine the present April 5, 2009
Posted by Ian in Community, History.add a comment
The present is pregnant with posterity.
Which is to say: the present is full of the past, but not in order to repeat it, but to remake it in a new way. It is not full of the past for the sake of the past, but for the sake of a future to which it bequeaths itself as a legacy.
Which is to say nothing new, but to reinvigorate a healthy appreciation of the present as a living moment and not just as a dead point in a dead eternity or infinite line.
