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.

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* * *
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...

Girl Groups and the Apocalypse

Just came across this interview with David Tibet of Current 93, one of my artistic heroes... it's a good one, containing, among other things, the astonishing fact that there are people who never figured out that he's a Christian [!!!!!], the story behind the making of Black Ships Ate the Sky [my least favorite C93 album, but I need to give it another listen], and Tibet's rather low opinion of finnegans wake and Ulysses... and this marvelous take on 1960s girl groups (shout out to Sophia! ♥):

Pitchfork: Finally, I have a question a friend of mine supplied. Someone at her college had a radio show called “Songs of the Apocalypse”, and she was curious what would be on your show, if you put together something called “Songs of the Apocalypse”.

DT: Funny, instead of the obvious choices, the song that immediately comes to mind is "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes; that and “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” by the Shangri La's. I love girl groups-- I particularly love Ronnie Spector-- and the idea of apocalypse, the original Greek word meaning, “unveiling,” is where everything is revealed. Now, of course, it has the sense of Armageddon and total destruction, but I still look at it as a total unveiling, the taking off of all masks, and the return, perhaps after the Armageddon, to that state of pristine purity and innocence and love, which is the natural human condition.

When I listen to "Be My Baby" I hear such yearnings and such love and such beauty-- that absolutely simple, uncynical love that can and should exist between people-- it makes me think of everything [being] stripped away. It's an absolutely naked, heartbreaking plea for love.

Kid Buddha

So it's 6:15 in the morning and Sophia's daughter is shrieking in anguish upstairs. Her mother has cruelly, cruelly told her for the 29th time to please get out of bed and come down and eat.

Molly is very sweet and is miraculous in uncountable ways, but she doesn't do mornings. Well, she does 'em, but she does 'em the way Mitch and Murray do a sales meeting, the way Republicans lose an election, the way Al Capone chats about baseball.

The shrieks continue. James, 7, is already at the table. He says, in a calculated tone of (mock?) compassion, "That's her level of consciousness."

Did I Say "Nuance"?

Well, not every song is a hit. I do like Sam Harris, but here's his dumb-assed response to a Karen Armstrong piece in Foreign Policy--which also has its problems, but is that any excuse for this kind of sub- college newspaper schmuckality?

After all, it would be absurd to criticize witchcraft as unscientific, as this would ignore the primordial division between mythos and logos. Let me see if I have this straight: Belief in demons, the evil eye, and the medicinal value of a cannibal feast are perversions of the real witchcraft - -which is drenched with meaning, intrinsically wholesome, integral to our humanity, and here to stay. Do I have that right?

Dude! That's all, uhh, philosophical and shit! Are you like, an English major?

Predictably, the boys in the dorm are slappin' the Sam-meister on the back--yeah! YAYuh! Go us! Karen Armstrong's a day-um cannibal!

It's true that she's the new whipping girl for the Skepticism Lite™ crowd, who, like delirious drunks at a pep rally who glimpse the straw effigy of the Bad Guys' mascot, are whoopin' and hollerin' for blood... well, Blood Lite™, as is obvious from the passage above. Like gridiron combat, it's blood sport for couch-jockeys... but Foreign Policy??? Didn't that used to be sorta like a wonk analogue of Masterpiece Theatre??? But it's all turning into NFL Fox Sunday, the whooooole culture...

Oh: Armstrong never mentions witchcraft. Or cannibalism. Or the evil eye. Or mythos, or logos. But you knew that.


UPDATE: I just got around to reading Armstrong's response to Harris. She makes the very good point (one we apparently will have to repeat until Doomsday, or after) that "To identify religion with its worst manifestations, claim that they represent the whole, and then demolish the straw dog thus set up does not seem a rational or useful way of conducting this important debate."

And then, unless I'm having a very bad dream, Armstrong asserts, of Harris's admittedly wacko screed, "Historically, this kind of attack only serves to make religious fundamentalists more extreme." Um--like they need someone to "make" them "more extreme"?

I think I get what she's saying... I know she's not saying that critics of religion are responsible for the excesses of fanatics, that cartoonists whose homes are invaded by would-be axe murderers actually invited the attack... is she? The Atheibots are united in their claim that Armstrong sometimes blames the victims of religious extremism, but she doesn't really... does she? She's not unwittingly agreeing with atheists that religious people are mindless hosts to mental viruses... is she?????????

UPDATE: Brain Doc Diary Does Boffo Biz

Carl Jung's The Red Book, a compilation of journal entries and artwork concerning his HGA experiences that began c. 1913, is apparently selling quite well--considering: the thing is a monstrous 11.6 X 15.4 inches, weighs a staggering 9.6 pounds, and lists for a humongous $195.00. You can get it for less--if you can get it. The first three print runs sold out, and even the fourth printing is getting scarce. I'm glad I reserved mine early, but I've barely even looked through it, so busy have I been or so preoccupied with other reading matter...

Sophia said today, after reading of the purges at the Washington Times, "I guess the Zeroes were the last gasp of the newspaper industry," and certainly it's a little disturbing to see Old Media toppling like so many Ozymandiases. Then comes a boutique title like this one, something only a geek could love, with painstakingly reproduced color drawings and a scholarly introduction, and, saith the Times (NY), said tome is "partly hand-bound" and "uses two different kinds of custom-made paper." The Red Book, despite the ascendancy of POD and the pdf, is, for now, the kind of artifact only an old-school commercial publisher could have created...and no, as the Times points out, its sales aren't anywhere near, not in the same galaxy as the sales of schlock icons such as Dan Brown and Sarah Palin. But their books would lose nothing on a Kindle or as a pdf or e-book, while The Red Book's complexity could only attain accessible form as a -- real book.

Hmmm... maybe instead of running away from irrelevance, book publishers should try embracing it more often.

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Earlier on WiHW: Jung's HGA Diary