Dreaming the Future Closer

This is just one more note, a sketch, toward a more substantive thinking out of this matter.  Nothing here is intended to be taken as a final statement of the matter but as an experiment arranging one possible solution to a complicated question. 

The question: how can we engage in comparative religious work without taking ourselves constantly outside the spiritual world that is our ‘home’?  In other words, how do we engage in comparative work that doesn’t end up being one long list of correspondences or, worse, substitutions?

Much of this relies on our approach.  We need to choose our ground, the mode of thought from which we intend to look out on the spiritual world.  We don’t need to commit ourselves to it forever and ever, but we should be on the lookout for that mode of thought that speaks so truly to us that we want to commit ourselves to it in that way.  The important thing, though, is that we begin on some sort of stable ground.

concretely: We want to begin with a pantheon, a family of gods whose relationship are conceptually worked out in myths.  This ought to be a fairly extended sense of the term ‘pantheon,’ too.  If, say, your ground is Norse myth, then remember that this system is itself plural and diverse, spread across a wide geographic area and containing geographic variations (among many other kinds of variations).

From there, it’s a matter of letting our intuition work alongside our (ideally, historically educated) intellect.  Our intellect provides the tools to amplify our search beyond our immediate proximity, brings us examples to compare to our ground.  Our intuition lets us know when we have stumbled across a comparison that speaks to our ground.

This step is fraught with difficulty.  It’s very easy to let the impatience replace intuition.  The telltale marker of this, for me, is that I begin to force correspondances, stretch them out, and begin to identify rather than complicate what is being compared.

concretely: let us imagine that Thor is the occasion for the comparison and you are studying a range of thunder gods in other pantheons.  You come across the Chaaks in Mayan myth, their trademark lightning axes evoking a powerful sense of resonance. 

Driven by impatience, what you are likely to do is to establish simple relationships that posit the identity of the three figures and, in turn, posit a relationship of those figures to other figures in their pantheon that are identical.  Guided by intuition, you want to let those seeming identities ‘resonate’ and let them illuminate differences as well as identities.

concetely: the Chaaks have a close relationship to the Bakabs, giant figures who hold up the world, who will drop the sky to end this age.  Thor has a powerful relationship with giants, also bound up with bringing an end to this age.  However, the Chaaks do not fight with Bakabs (and sometimes even are treated as Bakabs). 

We can find folktales of ‘lightning boys’ who go to the mountains to gain supernatural powers.  These boys, after using their powers for their community, must return to the mountains because they are now to dangerous for the community.  A very different image than that of Thor, who ventures out to giants only to return to his society.

The important element of this comparison is that it (1) lets knowledge of one sort of pantheon illuminate our examination of another and (2) lets the study of that other pantheon illuminate our ‘ground’ pantheon.  It remains ‘conversational’ or, more technically, ‘dialogic.’  At no point is one term replaced for another, but they are allowed to inform each other.

concretely: Thor’s relationship with giants cues us to look for parallel relationships with similar forces, even as a closer examination of those relationship differentiates them from Thor’s.  We look for giants, for ties to massive ‘natural’ forces because we know those exist for Thor, but we don’t then expect the relationship to be identical.

We start to get a sense for the different ways in which the relationship between these different kinds of forces are related conceptually, which in turn suggests how they might be related differently ritually.  We get a sense for different ritual strategies, different ways to relate to and work with those powers.  Those differences, in turn, begin to illuminate why one pantheon speaks to us more than another, why one mode of religious thinking is primary, while others are ancillary, if at all important.

This is why the grounding part is so key.  A pantheon ought to give us a map for how we can interact ritually with the world of spirit and if we do not choose a ‘primary’ mode, we are likely to fall into an endless comparative inaction or, perhaps more problematic, mere fiddling with different modes, settling into no one mode, gaining little stability because our fiddling choices can easily counter and frustrate each other.

Conversion remains an open possibility, but that is a matter of switching grounds, not of abandoning ground altogether.

Of course, grounded, it’s also possible to incorporate those different strategies into the primary ritual system, as ways of filling out a fuller picture of how to relate ritually to these forces.  This can be especially important in ritual systems that we have only fragments of. 

This is not so different from two swordsman sharing techniques.  Their primary style remains dominant in their fighting, but they can tease ‘tricks’ out of their interaction with each other.  Or, less soldierly, we can imagine two farmers who grow different sorts of crops, they might discover that one crop leaves the soil more fertile for the other’s crop, leading them to develop a secondary planting practice that enhances the success of their primary planting practice.

Of course, those metaphors reveal something else quite important to me.  They illustrate how thinking in this light gives us the tools to talk to each other about our ritual practice without trying to lay claim to another’s ritual practice.  It allows us to open ‘trading zones’ between diverse ways of thinking about spiritual life.  We can inform and educate each other without expecting to come to some final agreement, some final point of convergence.