OK, Now SkepChick Is the Greatest

blog... ever. Or at least has publish'd the greatest reader comment ever.

Is There, Possibly, Hope... Possibly?

I just read that as late as 1978 Allen Ginsberg had to be told by Chogyam Trungpa, his Teacher, to "Be doubtless. Go ahead and do it, and [don't] be hesitant about what you're doing."

I guess we all have to learn these lessons over and over. I guess it doesn't make me a Bad Student or a Bad Person that I didn't ascend to godhood the first time I chanted the Gayatri mantra. I guess the fact that I worry, get scared, and feel awkward doesn't mean I have about the same chance of "getting there" that a flea has of spontaneously evolving into a racehorse.

Because there is no "there."

Here is there, and the more I am here, the more I am Her.

Sad Yet Cool

One of my favorite books, one you've heard me rant about for years, is now effectively in the public domain on Scribd.

I can only assume, given Scribd's new, uhh, commitment to the concept of intellectual property, that Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality appears there with its author's blessing. I know that, despite this book's wit, brilliance, and insight--it is truly an important work--it has never topped the charts and Harpur has had trouble "keeping it out there."

If you want a nice summary of Daimonic Reality, read Dr. Snake's interview with Harpur.

But I think you should read the whole book.

This Is Why I Like SkepChick

At least one of their writers thinks it's possible to be religious AND a skeptic (!!!!!!!∞).

As I never tire of saying (sorry, loyal and Cherish'd Readers), skepticism is the one requirement on the spiritual path, if a person is going to make genuine progress without going insane, dropping by the roadside into a ditch of bitterness (or hubris, if there's a difference), or getting took by some Sally League Jim Jones.

You don't have to believe in anything, you should practice incessantly but you will need breaks now and then, you don't have to subscribe to any single religion or world view, but you need to doubt. Your doubt will sustain you. Your doubt, in the pages of your spiritual journal (OK, there are two requirements) and in your heart, will blossom into some kind of transcendent faith, and even if that faith is in yourself or the laws of physics and you leave all gods behind-- if it is a faith that births the world every day, like the flooding of the Nile or the waxing of the moon, then it is the faith you need.

Even atheists have their Holy Guardian Angels.

Exorcism Update: The Twain Have Met, Dammit

via Pharyngula:

Don't get a massage, don't stand on your head, and for Christ's sake don't read Twilight.

I can get behind that last churchly demi-commandment, but for different reasons that those offered from the Archbishoprick of Sydney by "auxiliary bishop" Julian Porteous.

The whole teen vampire connection is left rather vague, but as far as "yoga, reiki massages, and tai chi" go, them there things "all come out of religious traditions of the East and [therefore] people can ... find themselves in the grip of demonic forces." Apparently Satan invented the East so he could ensnare innocent white Chrustians, especially those who, like Australians, are unfortunate enough to have East to the right of them, East to the left of them, East in front of them...and lots of Eastern immigrants.

It's OK, though: Sydney will soon have a new exorcist and presumably Satan's going to have to go back where he came from.

Scroll down in the article for unusually direct commentary by a god-hatin' liberalcommiefag English professor. I don't mean "unusually" for a prof, since you hear this sort of thing in the hallow'd halls all the time, but it's unusual for the news media to quote someone like this, since they prefer that their experts give more boring, more considered, more unwittingly-supportive-of-the-status-quo commentary.

OMG-- am I advocating "incivility"???

Previously on WiHW: The Rite by Matt Baglio

The Student Council of Trinity High Proudly Presents...

...a useful, if staid, list of blogs about religion ... and mucho commentary about mucho things, mostly from profs, including crapophilic spokesmodels like Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor.

The Immanent Frame.... oh dear... the Social Science Research Council's look at the religious world. It's a monochromatic mosaic of varied perspectives that all sound the same (as my fellow academics would suspect), but just because it's scholarly doesn't excuse the drabness, the mistaking of what people are excited about for what matters.

The Framers are very serious. They write, with high seriousness, about a vitally serious topic: religion and "the public sphere." And listen up, yahoos: "The Immanent Frame is a forum marked by civil discourse," with "a high standard of intellectual exchange."

Reading The Immanent Frame is like being teleported back to that high-minded, browline-glasses churchological epoch of the mid-60s, as if Mary Daly, Robert Anton Wilson, and Anne Lamott never happened. We're all earnestly sifting doctrine and seeking relevance and reading Krishnamurti and fretting over our lentils... OK, swap Žižek for Krishnamurti (they're fairly interchangeable) and you're there.

I'm just being--terribly unfair. No one reads this stuff because they're looking for God, any more than people read agronomy journals when they get a taste for mangoes. It's shoptalk, and shopkeepers have a right to talk, right?

Yeah, but this kind of funerary treatment of religion helps define the whole discourse on religion. That list of of around 90 religion blogs? It's going to be linked and meta-linked and forwarded and is going to Stand for Something, and--take a deep breath--it's got one pagan blog, one feminist blog, one spiritual autobiographer, no Hindu blogs, no LGBT blogs, no mystical blogs, no indigenous/Native American blogs, no recovery blogs, and ... five Buddhist blogs, nine Muslim blogs, and twenty blogs by or about conservative Christians. As usual in the American Mall of Religions, Buddhism and Islam stand for all the exotic off-brands, the weird-costume and squiggly- alphabet crowd who haven't yet accepted Jesus.

Naturally (whew) I'm not begrudging anyone's inclusion on this list or the compiling of such a list, which is actually nice to see. It is damned difficult to find decent religion blogs of any stripe, and God knows there are more folks out there wanting to read about Jesus and Mohammed than there are wondering about the latest developments in shamanism. It's encouraging to see Slacktivist on this list--he and the lone pagan are the oddest of this very Wonder Bread lot, and their voices, in their ringing individuality, are much more the kind I associate with the God-kiss'd. I've discovered a couple of interesting writers I'd never heard of from browsing the links, and for this I'm glad.

But... we all see the world through some lens or other, some--frame. The Frame's frame, social science, isn't any worse than any other, but social science is always the science of deviance and fads, and so the squeaky wheels and Squeaky Frommes of jihadism and jesusism end up getting the attention-grease they crave. Religions are boiled down to lists of beliefs that animate little chess sets of believers posted on the various grids of nationality, SES, and political affiliation. The actual experience of religious faith-- presumably what keeps packin' 'em in at the churches, mosques, zendos, and whatever you call the places those other people worship-- is curiously absent. Oh, sure, it's social science and we're all into medians and modes and not individuals, but the Frame has no trouble talking up ethics, politics, the psychology of belief, and all kinds of phenomena that bear on the individual. On the lived experience of religion, however, the Frame reminds me of Monty Python's wink wink, nudge nudge guy, who after all his slinkily self- referential patter finally blurts, "What's it like?"

And they do ask, once in a while. Check out this interview with Ann Taves, whose work sounds absolutely fascinating and addresses exactly this problem of experience that I've just been bending your ear about. A couple of years back, the Frame had a whole seminar on the "cognitive revolution" in religious studies, with quite a bit of excellent material. So they don't suck. But-- damn, people. Sack the professional bloviators and lighten up. "Critique" won't save the world any more than will prophecy or any of that other top-down stuff. Top-down is done.

A Pirate Looks at Infinity

Few in our time have lived Emerson's words better: "Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imaginations of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil."

Especially that "men" part...

Mary Daly's riposte to Emerson comes in the unforgettable line from her spiritual autobiography Outercourse (don' t you love that title? Say it out loud... I like saying it... ): "I wanted to throw my life as far as it would go." And, shot-put style, reader, she did.

I'm looking back at Emerson's "Divinity School Address" for a class I'm teaching and I'm seeing Mary on every page, seeing her there with Jesus, with Ramakrishna, with Andrew Harvey and Walt Whitman and my dear Guru, She of laughingdark Assamese eyes... Mary thought a cat could be a spiritual teacher--I'm pretty sure the one she's petting in the photo is Ailleolg, her [male] prankster and guide who used to chase bottle tops in the bathtub as single-mindedly as Mary chased etymologies in Skeat's. She acquainted us with divinity at first-hand, Mary did, as provocateuse, as questioner, as pain in the ass (she called Boston College her "little laboratory of patriarchy")... as philosopher, as Witch: magic happened around Mary, coincidences piled up, breakthroughs and breakdowns and double-takes dropped around her like snowflakes.

I knew Mary Daly and I feel compelled right now--by her spirit or by the force of memory-- to tell you something: it bugged the shit out of her that people constantly quoted Beyond God the Father. "That was so long ago," she'd lament, and I must say to you, as quotable as that book is, go read another if you're of a mind to see what radical feminism or old-school (the only school) feminist spirituality are all about. Mary considered BGF a transitional work, not yet "post-Christian" enough and not nearly as incisive as what came after: Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust and the Wickedary--my vote for her best and one of my absolute favorite works of philosophy.

And yeah, Gyn/Ecology, about which a reviewer wrote that reading it was nearly as torturous as the injustices it documented. Mary Daly seems to have been surrounded by such telling ironies, by critics whose words told more about them than they did Mary's books, by the vociferous "yes, but!"s whose vigor reveals that there really are no buts about it: we still live in a patriarchy and supporting and sponging off that patriarchy is easier than most of us want to admit. Naming the game got Mary in trouble--the mere phrase "African genital mutilation" spawned dozens of brainless screeds accusing her of racism, as if all those other woman-mutilating cultures at which Mary leveled her rage meant nothing-- as if slicing up women and girls exists on a cultural par with basket-weaving and kente cloth.

Reading Emerson and thinking about Mary has led me to consider what it really means to Be-Speak, Mary's term for speaking and writing powerfully, life-changingly... "radically," she might have said, til the word got so over-used that at least one academic applied it to chewing gum under theater seats. Emerson can still disturb, so deeply does he confront what we think we know, while most writers, especially the most controversial, wear their expiry dates like Miley Cyrus's tattoo. I've no idea what names Emerson got called, but Mary got called, incessantly, a "man-hater," which she manifestly was not-- and the epithet could not have been more transparent code for "this lady makes me squirm because she just doesn't buy in to the whole sterile, pinky-extended pseudo-intellectual trip the rest of us are on." Turn on to your own gynergy, Mary said, tune in to feminism, and drop out of the whole "phallocratic mind-fuck."

[Speaking of discomfort-spawned distorted perceptions: a women's studies classmate of mine fairly wailed in class one day, "How many times did she have to say 'phallocratic mind-fuck' in this book [Outercourse]?!?" The magick of Google now reveals the answer: once.]

She did make us see the world differently, whether in paranoic defensive shades or glorious auroric hues... and this is the true function of the Seer, the Witch, whether or not we agree with him or her point-for-point, for chants like Pure Lust or "Circles" are not editorials, are not liner notes but symphonies, fantasias, concertos of thought. They disrupt our habits of mind just enough to show us Other worlds, Other possible realities and selves. This is why they're dangerous and must be domesticated, as Emerson was, or damned, as Mary was.

And ya know, I'm just re-membering something: one night years ago, probably 1995 or '96, way back before it could have made sense to me, Mary said on the phone quite earnestly "We need angels." Jolted, I sputtered out some kind of incredulity; I may have even said "What in the hell are you talking about???" Whatever my reaction, it was enough that she very calmly and patiently--despite how scrappy she could be-- repeated, "We need angels. Don't you know-- angels are real. I'm not talking about those tame, churchy ones..." and in my cluelessness I tuned her out and I thought, Well, Mary's finally gone off the deep end. Angels!--sheeeit. But she was right, and if a pagan, radical feminist Pirate can be right about angels, what else could she be right about?

And hadn't I already seen Them around her? Hadn't we-- a grad school friend (atheist, btw) and I, as Mary Be-Spoke onstage at the Tightassed Baptist College we'd accompanied her to? And hadn't we been spooked? Yes, we'd seen two Angels, or spirits, or-- hovering around her as she spoke, as she made us cackle and made the Baptists cringe... and yeah, knowing me as you do, you know I tried to dismiss these Angels as stage-light artifacts, as products of set and setting, of "the power of suggestion" ... substituting one set of magic formulae for another.

Except--why hadn't I seen anything like them before? I'd been to plenty of readings, heard plenty of enthralling words from plenty of powerful talkers on plenty of stages under plenty of lights, and--no Angels. W.S. Merwin hadn't had any, nor had Dorothy Allison nor Angela Davis nor even Kamau Brathwaite. But Mary'd had. And Vanessa, my friend, was no fool, either, and she, too, was dizzied by Whatever or Whoever'd hovered 'round Mary as she spoke into the aether and ravished our souls the way Emerson must have, so long ago, in another America before another war as the children of another Moloch either tuned him out or turned their ears prickling to his new tongue.

Dream, 2/6/10

I'm in a rather large, old apartment that is furnished and decorated in the spare, 1950s-never-died look of genteel European poverty. A Roma family lives there, and the grandfather and some other members of the family are engaged in some kind of magic ritual. They have soaked a piece of cloth in saliva or urine, and they're burning something, I think, and then the cloth has to be laid across the rest of the ritual items and buried.

At the end of the ritual I can feel a change in the air, I can feel the power of what they have unleashed and I exclaim, "Wow, that was a kick-ass ritual!" I admire the gypsies' skill and discipline, yet feel apart from them, not a member of the clan.

In a living room that starts out as part of the same apartment, but gradually morphs into a room much more doily-nostalgic (now it's American genteel poverty), an old Black woman, very old, is lying on a chaise longue. In the dream she is my fiancée's mother. I walk up behind her, seeing her quaint, Victorian dressing gown and the grey in her hair. I am afraid of her, I feel tremendous, inhuman power and wisdom sizzling all around her and yet know she wants me to reach out to her in love and trust. I put my hand on her shoulder and she reaches back and takes my hand in hers. I feel an immense love from her, feel at home and at peace and free from all want.

* * *

Obviously: Black mother, scary yet loving = Kali. Her domestic, peaceful setting isn't as exciting as the gypsies' magick household, but for my admiration of them I know I'll never belong with them and so don't think of their life as an option for me. This is some kind of dream about my present life of domesticity with Kali's daughter, Sophia--wandering has ceased, the magick is more subtle, but the ocean-deep power is there, all around. If nothing else, the dream has reminded me to be grateful. I don't know what else it might mean. The gypsies' apartment looked like it could be part of "the Ocean place," a dreamscape I frequented in the early 90s, but it didn't have that realm's odd yellow light and it lacked the Ocean place's anachronisms; it felt firmly 2010.

---

* * *
Sophia as "fiancée" means I have to keep courtin' Sophia in order to have the best marriage with her.

Dream may have been a product of reading Emerson, whose "Self-Reliance" I [finally] see is the supreme Holy Guardian Angel text, containing all of Nietzsche, of Crowley, of evvvvAAHHreeBawdy ever to comment on the True Self...