Dreaming the Future Closer

I’m thinking of this as a ‘throat-clearing’ post.   There’s a lot that I have been thinking about, but it seems to be all running together in my head.  What I want to do is think through the issues that define the blockage and untangle them a bit.  If you, dear readers, come away with a clearer picture of my goals, all the better.  It will probably take more than one post.  First. before I forget, the cut.

(more…)

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?

(more…)

Just something I ran across last night:  

The Dahomean believes, and will say with conviction, that each narrative “history” is fixed and unique, both in form and content.  We tried the experiment of reading to a cult head two different versions of the myth giving the quarrel of the two brothers, Sogbo, the Thunder, and Sagbata, the Earth….The unhesitating reply was that the gods do not reveal the same things to everyone, and that each narrator was telling “true history” according to the way the vodun have given it to him.—Melville J. & Frances S. Herskovits, Dahomean Narrative (18)

(more…)

This post has been brewing in my head for a while.  I keep meaning to sit down and let it out, but until now that hasn’t happened.  For all the time brewing, I’ve not had tons of time or energy to rework the underlying ideas, so take it for the rough piece of work it is.  It ends up a good deal more vague than I would prefer.

(more…)

I’ve been reading Jacques Soustelle’s Daily Life of the Aztecs.  Besides making me sorely miss the days when scholars wrote with an easy, thorough learnedness, it provides a fascinating snapshot “of a civilization in in full progression,” of a city that was not “one of those rich, sophisticated and ossified cities which are the elegant tombs in which their own civilization stiffens as it dies” (33-34). 

It’s vibrant, but tangled, the unsettled problems of its ascension visible in its social structure.  What Soustelle details is not a unitary society joined by common interest, but a patchwork slowly being sewn together with conquest.  Of greatest interest to me at the moment, is the religious dimension of it. 

There’s a powerful war machine driving the empire, no doubt, with Uitzilopochtli, “solar god of war” (52-53), at its heart.  Like a proper war machine, though, it does not just serve the Mexica tribe at the center of the empire. It serves to bring in new blood (literally and figuratively) by granting any man within the expanding empire an opportunity for wealth and honor by serving the empire in war, by bringing captives for sacrifice. 

But then there Tlaloc, “the old rain-god and god of the farmer’s plenty” (53), who serves as the center of the agricultural world on which the military one depends.  Tlaloc is, symbolically at least, Uitzilopochtli’s equal, a second center around which the empire organized.  We see in Tlaloc’s presence the shape of the early empire, of the truce between soldier and peasant, even if at times that may have been a truce in the heart of a man who was both soldier and peasant.

More fascinating still, though, is the religious diversity that exists outside these two poles, in traditions that were maintained through lineage rather than warrior prowess.  The pochteca, the traders affliliated with largest corporate commercial ventures, “had their own gods, their own feasts, and they worshipped in their own manner, for during their long journeys they had no priests but themselves” (61).

The craftspeople, from diverse and sometimes recently conquered cities, in turn held their own traditions.  The goldsmiths had “Xipe Totec” with his own temple, “Yapico” (67).  The featherworkers, too, “held their own feast…of their local god and of the four other gods and two goddesses of their guild” (68). 

The spiritual diversity reflected a cultural diversity, the relative independence of different ritual practitioners from each other a sign of the relative degree of integration of the group within the empire.  But what I find most interesting is that the most intensely imperial face of Aztec religion was also the most open, the most permeable, the most ‘democratic.’

The imperial religion, embodied most clearly in Uitzilopochtli and Tlaloc were democratic, open and appealing to the citizenry as a whole.  A commoner, dedicated to the flowery war of Uitzilopochtli, could rise up in the society.  Tlaloc’s worship, for those who did not gain military fame and wealth, supported their basic life’s work: working the land. 

They also served as two centers around which the worship of other gods and goddesses became imperial.  The temple quarter of Tenochtitlan saw the two temple overseeing a much larger network of worship that was, through its association with the growing administrative complexity of the city, more ‘democratic.’  The imperial religion, like the society as a whole, became less about a shared blood lineage than about a shared investment in the success of the empire.

I suspect, in contrast, the less integrated, less imperial, aspects of religion, the lineage-centric faiths of the traders, of the craftsman, were not thereby static by comparison.  But they could only grow through an extension of kinship, of marriage and adoption (and the many variations of fictive kinship).

And yet, in the wake of the Aztec Empire’s rapid demise, it is not the imperial faith that survives.  It’s the local faiths, the faiths of isolated tribes never conquered by the Aztecs, and the faith of the lineage lines, that remain and survive. 

The dwindling traditionalism described by Stanzione in Rituals of Sacrifice has clear ties to the sort of religion Soustelle describes among the pochteca.  Because it is smaller, because it depends less on the success of an empire, it endures beyond it.  Many such traditionalisms did just die out, like the Aztec’s imperial faith, but, still, some did not.  Some survived and adapted.  And yet, the empire’s existence provided an important, perhaps essential, medium through which to proliferate.

There’s something really interesting there, though I’m not quite ready to make sense of what that is.  I just want to flag that, set the bookmark to come back to this. 

To every age its false idols, right?  We have to take care, of course, because the term comes loaded with implications, but its rich for that context.

We also need to be careful because, as much as I like the easy periodization, it’s not the case that one false idol simply disappears to be replaced by another.  The problem is more one of quality, of certain kinds of false idols playing a more prominent role in some times, in some places, than others.

One of our premier false idols: objectivity.  The idea of objectivity is noble and high, but the idol that has been made of it can be ugly, seductive, and destructive.  As an idol, those who rally to it believe they can lay claim to an objective truth proven by others that they can apply, almost without thought, to any situation.

Objectivity in its true, noble, form, is all about the struggle to extract from our personal struggles a lesson, a counsel, which we can offer up to another person.  It is about finding what is not just personal in our lives.  But that objectivity is passionately aware of how situated its counsel is.  It does not rule but speaks wisely.

Because being objective demands attempting to identify, to the best of your capacities, the real place from which and in which you speak.

Good science is objective in this way: here are these experiments, here are these labors, learn from them, learn how and when their lessons can be best applied.

False objectivity takes on the voice of absolutism, not speaking to but giving orders, imperative.  Those who follow this idol do not listen but demand to be listened to, they cite sources without reflection, trying to bolster their authority by proving their loyalty to their idol, objectivity.

Because false objectivity does not attempt to objectively understand its own position.  In not looking at its real place, it cannot appreciate the possible limits of the advice it comes to offer.

For this reason, false objectivity tends to swing between two kinds of lies: it either manically overapplies the advice it has to offer, conflating its truths for Truth or it veers into depressed nihilism, nothing is true or everything is true relativism.

It shows when we find people who claim to be counsellors speaking to those they counsel from scripts, when we find them working upon those who come to them, rather than listening to them, offering up what people have distilled into scripts, and then talking beyond those scripts.

We find it in the rabid atheist who denies others their experience of the divine, who reduces it to what is only one account of what goes on in the brain.  We find it in the fanatic who refuses to hear the sincerity, the humility, of someone who worships differently than them.  We find it among technicians who cannot see beyond the mechanics of their domain to the society it serves. 

Deleuze is fond of the phrase, “to be done with the judgment of God.”  This does not necessarily entail being done with either judgment or divinity.  It demands only that we cease to project ourselves into the position of “God.”  More than one soul who has abandoned God has not abandoned the position of absolute judgment.

And, luckily, we have those who, honoring the immensity of the divine and sacred world, have abandoned the judgment of God, but not judgment.  Who, mindful of their small but real place in the world, have set out to speak truly, to judge according to their wisdom, aware that their wisdom is only informed by the divine, not identical to it.

So, before the 19th century got a hold of the term, ‘pantheon’ was an innocuous enough term.  The traditional reference to a temple in which all the Greek divinities were honored was all well and good.  It’s even theologically interesting, but I’ll leave that aside.

Slowly, though, it became a common term for a cultural grouping of deities more generally.  In that use, it’s still got some use, but it’s edging closer to the bad place I want to avoid.

Over the course of time, though, it acquires increasing theoretical strength.  The pantheon becomes a substitute for the all powerful monotheistic deity.  Because divinity (in the omnipotent, omnipresent monotheism of Christian scholars fashioning the pantheon concept) contains all things, the task of scholars is to divvy up that omnipotence between the many spirits.

This creates a notion of the pantheon that borders on the corporate.  Each deity within it ‘does a job.’  Overlap between such ‘jobs’ gets minimized because it doesn’t seem to make sense.

Since the Greeks were idealized as a particularly rational people and their influence so important to scholarship throughout Europe, the Greek pantheon became the ‘default’ pantheon through which others were measured. 

A scholar, looking at Norse myth, implicitly looked for those sorts of cuts.  They looked for gods of storm, death, witchcraft, war, and agriculture.  They ascribed to each their domains and proceeded to treat them as metaphoric expressions of those domains.

At this point, spirits just become primitive categories.  Myths are, at best, primitive codes about nature and lessons in how to behave.  C. G. Jung, Claude Levi-Strauss are both interesting exemplars of where this sort of thinking can lead, both in terms of its virtues and its problems.

But that model of the pantheon is dangerous for those of us who believe in actual spiritual entities.  It reduces spiritual experience to conceptual ones and conceals the way in which members of a pantheon exceed their ‘jobs’ to shine through as personalities.

It encourages us, too, to become overly cloistered in our spiritual pantheons, ignoring how many pantheons emerged from the interaction of ‘communities’ of divinities.  They are records of how our communities and our spirits came together, for better or for worse.

Some cloistering is absolutely necessary, to appreciate the tastes and preferences of the spirits within a ‘pantheon’ group.  They have been together and inform each other like old friends. 

Excessive cloistering, though, closes our eyes to the modern situation in which it is absolutely necessary for us as groups to interact with each other in new and more respectful ways, on a broader scale.  Just as in the past, I cannot help but think that the spirits will want to make their way into that situation with us.

That situation is dangerous, too.  Just like it’s dangerous to rely too much on the concept of the pantheon, it can be dangerous to break too far from it.  A simple mingling risks making the devotee’s taste and not the taste of the spirits primary.  It risks disrespect.  It demands a keener attentiveness to the spirits, a careful progress forward.

Fate conspires toward this project and now it seems more open and inviting than ever

I’m not sure how long it will take me (probably quite a while), but I want to start working on a larger scale intellectual project.  It’s been a long time coming and I am just about at the place where I can do justice to it.

The basic goal: to lay the groundwork for what I affectionately call open theology.  At its most basic, it is an effort to talk about spiritual experience in its fullness and diversity without reducing that diversity to some posited (false) simplicity.

The motivations for this project come from a few different sources.

First, reading theologically-minded modern philosophers like Gabriel Marcel and Walter Benjamin.  Their insights into the spiritual are clear, powerful, with much to tell us about the appropriate attitude to take toward modernity.

Yet, the work is flawed by a blatant Christian and monotheistic bias.  I can almost pinpoint, for example, when the spark of truth departs Marcel’s reflections when he feels compelled to assert that he speaks, ‘of course,’ of civilized modern Christian faith.

Second, I have spent some time reading contemporary ‘(neo)pagan’ discourse about divinity.  I have found much that smacks of monotheism (”all just expressions of the one god(dess)”) and much that smacks of outright psychologism (”all just ways of expressing human experience”).  The reduction that entails seems untrue to the actual experiences of many faithful and conceals more than it reveals.

In that same arena, though, I have come across a kernel of ‘hard’ polytheists who endorse an account that opposes all such reduction.  They defend the notion that Hera and Frigg, for example, are not simply expressions of the same figure (be it the ‘goddess,’ ‘hearth goddess,’ or ‘archetypes of wifeliness’) but distinct beings.

This attitude strikes me as sound, but I have some concern for the way some hard polytheism seems attached to ‘hard’ traditionalism that makes often overstates the coherence of a pantheon. 

That tendency privileges one of two problematic (not wrong, but fraught) positions of power:  (1) an outsider perspective that makes the spirits a peculiar property of a culture they objectify or (2) an insider perspective invested in centralizing and organizing the worship of spirits, often staking claims of the authority of certain worshippers over others.

Third, I have spent a fair share of time reading up on modern anthropological and historical accounts of religions.  I have found many useful models, many people starting to struggle with the interpenetration of cultures that so much 19th-century driven work elided.

However, despite the cultural insights, I remain dissatisfied with the way in which they cannot address the spiritual concerns I have. 

It is not the fault of the anthropologists, whose discourse conventions and personal attitudes prevent them from going further.  It is a problem, though, for those of us whose spiritual practice does include that personal dimension.

The anthropological and historical texts are having a profound influence on spiritual communities.  There is a growing ‘anthropological’ attitude that undermines faith from within the spiritual community.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, I have grown more committed to my own spiritual path in the Lucumi religion. 

This has placed me in personal contact not just with fellow practitioners, but with the orisha.  The experience of their personalities, their individualities, has been a moving and powerful one, that has put solid ground beneath my feet.

It has also put me in contact with the most pointed version of the question raised by the divergence found in the (neo)pagan community.  In the diaspora, there are several faiths closely bound together and it is far more difficult to separate out where we find separate spirits or just the same spirit under different names.

I realize that the problem there is not so unique.  While there has been much effort to divvy up spirits and divinities according to ethnic lines, in truth their existence was always more blended and cosmopolitan, and have only become more so in the contemporary context.

Which leads me to think that there must be a better way to talk about all this than having to (1) start reducing one kind of spiritual being to another, (2) retreat into narrow ideas of religious culture, or (3) rely on foreign modes of discourse like anthropology to provide answers.

I have grown fond of talking about religions in terms of their kinship—so we can say that Haitian Vodou and Cuban Lucumi are sister or close cousin religions.  It also allows me to talk about spirits moving between the two, just like people move between families through marriage and adoption.

While there are surely limits to that approach, it is one that starts us out on the right path.  I want to follow that path even further, see what can come of it.