Saturday, July 16, 2011
Friday, July 1, 2011
Thursday, June 30, 2011
The French Grail and the Dark Madonna: Post # 7 of Beyond Religious Conflicts
The French legendary history that interests mystery writer Milt Walters in Deepest France: A Novel of the French Grail and in Mysterious Days: Return to Deepest France affirms that the Grail was/is a woman. It is not a cup made of expensive metals.
In the two novels (now in production) the woman is Mary from Magdala. This Mary is said to be imperfect in the same sexual way the Gnostics' Sophia is flawed, but just as Sophia brings the divine spark of philo-Sophia into the world, Mary carries the divine blood of the sky gods from the eastern Mediterranean to western Europe. In contrast to sky gods in general, she does not command men, or women. But her fundamental humanity nonetheless commands their respect.
In the legend, Mary was the disciple and consort of (perhaps) the least patriarchal of the sky gods, Jesus. In competing versions of the account, she is either pregnant by him at the time of the crucifixion or assists him in escaping the crucifixion altogether (probably by having the Cypriot Simon, from Kyreni, not only carry the cross but take Jesus' place). In the second version (the 'Laughing Jesus' version), during their stay in Egypt she conceives a daughter named Black Sara(h). In both versions, Mary then travels on to Marseilles to join the sizable Jewish community living there in the first century AD. Sara's offspring eventually mix their 'divine' blood with the royal blood of the Visigoths in the south of French just north of the Pyrenees. Finally they marry into the Merovingian royal line, thus giving a literal meaning to the so-called Divine Right of kings. Although the Merovingian royalty was thought to have been eliminated by the forces of Charlemagne, members of the royal group survived and passed on their blood to a family that still lives in the region and in other parts of France--and is the focus of the events portrayed in Deepest France.
Both the French Grail legend and the English Grail stories attempt to bridge the gap between the earth and the sky. The Anglo Grail consists of metals found in the earth that are refined to gleam like celestial bodies. In the French version, Mary is a biological vessel created by one of the fundamental human acts, sex, which in this case allows the living blood of a deity to reside in a (despised?) woman's body for nine months before it becomes an ordinary human.
Rather than re-fashion a metal to suggest sky entities, Mary Magdalena brings the sky down to the earth in a form totally familiar to humankind. The degree to which this familiarity brings great comfort is apparent in the type of Madonna known as the Black Virgin. In the numerous churches of the Black Virgin scattered about the earth, many in France, the Blue Sky Virgin of the Roman church has often been blackened by the soot from candles burned in her devotion. When the priests threaten to clean her up, make her white as new, the parishioners are said to rise up against the effort. Apparently they find the Black Virgin more comforting to them because she is more human and flawed, closer to themselves. The same impulse seems to exist for those African and Asian parishioners who prefer their Mary (and their Jesus) to be made of dark materials or colored with dark paints.
The Madonna that impresses Milt Walters in Mysterious Days resembles the African versions made of dark materials. But she is a special case. She is carved in a dark wood that has long lain in the earth. And she holds a dark child in her lap. Because she seems to mirror his own parental and sexual drives, he feels she is the necessary antidote to the madness of all the high-minded infanticides in the novel. Since the church where Walters sees her lies so close to Rennes-le-Chateau's church of Mary Magdalena, he suspects this is a statue of that Mary with Black Sara, whom some view as her daughter. In the midst of a desperate search for a missing child, Walters finds the two figures very comforting.
Sara, however, has her own heritage in addition to that she received from Mary and her consort. Gypsies who gather at the shrine of the Three Maries in the Camargue, in the delta of the Rhone river, call her Kali and observe rituals that their ancestors in India devoted to Kali-Durga. Like her 'mother,' Mary, Sara represents the wisdom, the philoS-ophia, the often-affirmed, ancient 'wisdom of the serpents,' which comes from the earth. Since she was conceived in Egypt, some feel she also possesses the healing energy of Isis.
Although Walters knows nothing of the Kali, Sophia, and Isis connections, he nonetheless senses she is a mighty, syncretic symbol who combines the forces and values needed to remedy the evils of the particular idealists who in their confusion seem responsible for the atrocities occurring in Deepest France. For him, she is a necessary fiction--and one of the comforting forces in the two novels.
In the two novels (now in production) the woman is Mary from Magdala. This Mary is said to be imperfect in the same sexual way the Gnostics' Sophia is flawed, but just as Sophia brings the divine spark of philo-Sophia into the world, Mary carries the divine blood of the sky gods from the eastern Mediterranean to western Europe. In contrast to sky gods in general, she does not command men, or women. But her fundamental humanity nonetheless commands their respect.
In the legend, Mary was the disciple and consort of (perhaps) the least patriarchal of the sky gods, Jesus. In competing versions of the account, she is either pregnant by him at the time of the crucifixion or assists him in escaping the crucifixion altogether (probably by having the Cypriot Simon, from Kyreni, not only carry the cross but take Jesus' place). In the second version (the 'Laughing Jesus' version), during their stay in Egypt she conceives a daughter named Black Sara(h). In both versions, Mary then travels on to Marseilles to join the sizable Jewish community living there in the first century AD. Sara's offspring eventually mix their 'divine' blood with the royal blood of the Visigoths in the south of French just north of the Pyrenees. Finally they marry into the Merovingian royal line, thus giving a literal meaning to the so-called Divine Right of kings. Although the Merovingian royalty was thought to have been eliminated by the forces of Charlemagne, members of the royal group survived and passed on their blood to a family that still lives in the region and in other parts of France--and is the focus of the events portrayed in Deepest France.
Both the French Grail legend and the English Grail stories attempt to bridge the gap between the earth and the sky. The Anglo Grail consists of metals found in the earth that are refined to gleam like celestial bodies. In the French version, Mary is a biological vessel created by one of the fundamental human acts, sex, which in this case allows the living blood of a deity to reside in a (despised?) woman's body for nine months before it becomes an ordinary human.
Rather than re-fashion a metal to suggest sky entities, Mary Magdalena brings the sky down to the earth in a form totally familiar to humankind. The degree to which this familiarity brings great comfort is apparent in the type of Madonna known as the Black Virgin. In the numerous churches of the Black Virgin scattered about the earth, many in France, the Blue Sky Virgin of the Roman church has often been blackened by the soot from candles burned in her devotion. When the priests threaten to clean her up, make her white as new, the parishioners are said to rise up against the effort. Apparently they find the Black Virgin more comforting to them because she is more human and flawed, closer to themselves. The same impulse seems to exist for those African and Asian parishioners who prefer their Mary (and their Jesus) to be made of dark materials or colored with dark paints.
The Madonna that impresses Milt Walters in Mysterious Days resembles the African versions made of dark materials. But she is a special case. She is carved in a dark wood that has long lain in the earth. And she holds a dark child in her lap. Because she seems to mirror his own parental and sexual drives, he feels she is the necessary antidote to the madness of all the high-minded infanticides in the novel. Since the church where Walters sees her lies so close to Rennes-le-Chateau's church of Mary Magdalena, he suspects this is a statue of that Mary with Black Sara, whom some view as her daughter. In the midst of a desperate search for a missing child, Walters finds the two figures very comforting.
Sara, however, has her own heritage in addition to that she received from Mary and her consort. Gypsies who gather at the shrine of the Three Maries in the Camargue, in the delta of the Rhone river, call her Kali and observe rituals that their ancestors in India devoted to Kali-Durga. Like her 'mother,' Mary, Sara represents the wisdom, the philoS-ophia, the often-affirmed, ancient 'wisdom of the serpents,' which comes from the earth. Since she was conceived in Egypt, some feel she also possesses the healing energy of Isis.
Although Walters knows nothing of the Kali, Sophia, and Isis connections, he nonetheless senses she is a mighty, syncretic symbol who combines the forces and values needed to remedy the evils of the particular idealists who in their confusion seem responsible for the atrocities occurring in Deepest France. For him, she is a necessary fiction--and one of the comforting forces in the two novels.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Walters and the Dark Madonna Beyond Religious Conflict, Post # 6
Post # 5 ended with mystery author, Milt Walters, standing awed in a nearly forgotten cathedral of southern (deepest) France staring at the statue of a woman with a dark complexion and a royal gown. He supposes she is the Black Madonna and that the child on her lap may be the Black Sarah of French 'legendary history'. The question that went unanswered there was what brought him to feel such awe before this figure. Post # 5 also described the likely effect that the cosmos revealed through the Hubble telescope will have on the religious sensibility of aware humankind.
Although Walters has not himself been staring via the Hubble through both time and space back to the murderous explosion of galaxies that followed our universe's origin in the Big Bang, he has witnessed another kind of horror on the human scale. This horror causes him to sense that the Dark Madonna before him could be an antidote to the violence around him. In the present posting, I want to explore reasons this may be the case for Walters as he is portrayed in two novels that should appear later this summer. At the same time I must resist giving too much of the linked stories away.
Twenty years earlier in the five sections of DEEPEST FRANCE: A NOVEL OF THE FRENCH GRAIL, Walters and his daughter Anthi became involved with a family in which an imaginative, seemingly brilliant boy was brutally murdered. Now, in MYSTERIOUS DAYS: RETURN TO DEEPEST FRANCE, Walters confronts a greater evil since numerous very young boys and girls are turning up murdered in a seemingly senseless way. In the course of seven days, Walters comes to associate these atrocious events with a pattern central to our culture since its beginnings in the crimes commanded for Abraham and Agamemnon to carry out, murders which were to involve Isaac and Iphigenia as victims. For Walters such murders on the human level arouse the dismay, even existential terror, that one might feel when looking far enough into the sky to witness the pattern of violent creation and explosion that rules the heavenly stars and galaxies. Just as the galaxies and the contemplated crimes of Abraham and Agamemnon have been said to be controlled by sky deities so are the murders surrounding Walters in MYSTERIOUS DAYS found to be motivated by the highest ideals--about which I cannot say more here for risk of giving away too much of the novel.
In opposition to such 'heavenly' pursuits, the Dark Madonna seems to bring Walters back to earth. She grounds him in the simple concerns of the planet on which he lives and embodies the values that make life possible here and sustain it. She is of the soil itself, not the sky. She is dark and impure rather than a glowing bright light and inhumanly pure; such light surrounds her, but, like her white gown, it only emphasizes her dark complexion. She simply IS. She commands nothing, least of all the atrocities committed for the noble ends of control, power, and perfection. She is not the Black Swan of controlled perfection but the Black Madonna of human and sexual imperfection. She is not heavenly and impossible but earthy and possible.
In the language of the Neo-Psycho-Polytheism (NPPT) with which these blogs began, she comforts Walters by mirroring his need to protect the ordinary children born on this planet rather than to pursue the inhuman ideals of ruthless rulers over nations, lords of industries, and, in the language of math, those $n + 1 billionaires for whom the 1 is always a few billion more, just to out-do their billionaire neighbors. She seems closer to Parvati and Ganesha, than to the sky gods. For Walters, she provides the antidote to the boundless, transcending pursuits that destroy the earth and its children.
And she figures in legends of the Grail, as we will discover in the seventh, perhaps last, of our postings here.
Although Walters has not himself been staring via the Hubble through both time and space back to the murderous explosion of galaxies that followed our universe's origin in the Big Bang, he has witnessed another kind of horror on the human scale. This horror causes him to sense that the Dark Madonna before him could be an antidote to the violence around him. In the present posting, I want to explore reasons this may be the case for Walters as he is portrayed in two novels that should appear later this summer. At the same time I must resist giving too much of the linked stories away.
Twenty years earlier in the five sections of DEEPEST FRANCE: A NOVEL OF THE FRENCH GRAIL, Walters and his daughter Anthi became involved with a family in which an imaginative, seemingly brilliant boy was brutally murdered. Now, in MYSTERIOUS DAYS: RETURN TO DEEPEST FRANCE, Walters confronts a greater evil since numerous very young boys and girls are turning up murdered in a seemingly senseless way. In the course of seven days, Walters comes to associate these atrocious events with a pattern central to our culture since its beginnings in the crimes commanded for Abraham and Agamemnon to carry out, murders which were to involve Isaac and Iphigenia as victims. For Walters such murders on the human level arouse the dismay, even existential terror, that one might feel when looking far enough into the sky to witness the pattern of violent creation and explosion that rules the heavenly stars and galaxies. Just as the galaxies and the contemplated crimes of Abraham and Agamemnon have been said to be controlled by sky deities so are the murders surrounding Walters in MYSTERIOUS DAYS found to be motivated by the highest ideals--about which I cannot say more here for risk of giving away too much of the novel.
In opposition to such 'heavenly' pursuits, the Dark Madonna seems to bring Walters back to earth. She grounds him in the simple concerns of the planet on which he lives and embodies the values that make life possible here and sustain it. She is of the soil itself, not the sky. She is dark and impure rather than a glowing bright light and inhumanly pure; such light surrounds her, but, like her white gown, it only emphasizes her dark complexion. She simply IS. She commands nothing, least of all the atrocities committed for the noble ends of control, power, and perfection. She is not the Black Swan of controlled perfection but the Black Madonna of human and sexual imperfection. She is not heavenly and impossible but earthy and possible.
In the language of the Neo-Psycho-Polytheism (NPPT) with which these blogs began, she comforts Walters by mirroring his need to protect the ordinary children born on this planet rather than to pursue the inhuman ideals of ruthless rulers over nations, lords of industries, and, in the language of math, those $n + 1 billionaires for whom the 1 is always a few billion more, just to out-do their billionaire neighbors. She seems closer to Parvati and Ganesha, than to the sky gods. For Walters, she provides the antidote to the boundless, transcending pursuits that destroy the earth and its children.
And she figures in legends of the Grail, as we will discover in the seventh, perhaps last, of our postings here.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
The Persistence of Religions, Post # 5
How can we explain the strange persistence of religions given that the sciences have eroded most of their explanatory powers and nation states have gradually replaced much of their former power to provide order and social structure?
In earlier posts here we noted the ability of the Homeric religion to explain what happens in the hidden interiors of plants, animals, and humans using myths of deities and an assortment of minor divinities. We also mentioned the importance of Roman Christianity in supporting imperial might and structural order. We have to admit that the rise of modern science, state religions, and multiple independent nations have vanquished the importance of centralized Christianity and damaged its explanatory authority.
In post # 4, we observed the shift of religious focus and definition among the Enthusiasts, Kierkegaard, and Rudolph Otto to an emphasis on extraordinary emotions, whether comforting or terrifying and awe-inspiring. I then wondered how any religion centered on a patriarchal sky god in a cosmos centered on man, the earth, or even the sun could possibly come to terms with the violent, immense, exploding universe we have recently discovered using the cosmos-splitting Hubble telescope. It is surprising that an evangelical president like George W. Bush did not order the Hubble program squashed the way he did stem-cell research. The Hubble universe has room for many extraordinary things, but an omnipotent anthropomorphic male deity in charge is probably not one them. The Hubble sky is not a realm in which we can seek much human reassurance. No sky god in that cosmos would have much time or energy to waste on this insignificant planet or its human inhabitants. It would be just as grandiose for us to think otherwise as it was for anyone in the age of Galileo and Copernicus to cling to visions of a geocentric universe.
Yet religions persist. One may wonder why.
In my forthcoming novel, Mysterious Days, a writer of murder mysteries, Milt Walters, stands beyond an absurdly but magnificently arrayed female statue in an all but abandoned cathedral in the French Pyrenees and stares at her dark face and the dark child before her. He reads an account of how this statue was discovered by a local plowman centuries before when his plowshare struck it. The plowman took it to his hut for the night, but when he woke it was gone. He went back to where he'd found it, and there it was again. Walters ponders the figure before: "Milt knew the story he was reading did not explicitly account for her most salient characteristic, the color of her skin. For him as for others in past centuries, the dark Madonna had taken on ever deeper meanings, ones he hesitated even now to share with this daughter. In his reflections, she was more of the earth than the blue sky, more of the red flesh than the bodiless spirit, more in the realm of the feminine than the blue Madonna, who belonged to the father’s sky. The dark Madonna always seemed more completely human in her sexual being than the divine mother who for centuries had caused humans to long for the inhuman sky—for the transcendent state realized in death. ... The pair represented no ordinary Madonna and child. It showed in her serene face, free of the terrible split between the sky and the earth, and in her extraordinary complexion. Her color did not derive from pale clouds but from the olive hue of earth, bark, and countless fruits and nuts. She had to be the dark Madonna he had pursued for decades . . .."
As Mysterious Days points out, "The Black Madonna is found in over a hundred churches in France and in several hundred more around the globe." Again one has to ask why. Walters, who himself creates fictions, realizes that the legendary history of the Black Madonna is probably another fiction and has absolutely no "authority" nor makes any claim to impose either social or spiritual structures of order. In itself, it lacks explanatory powers. In fact, it asks more questions than it answers, questions that you as a reader of this blog might want to address before I explore them from Walter's point of view in the next posting. I hope you will.
In earlier posts here we noted the ability of the Homeric religion to explain what happens in the hidden interiors of plants, animals, and humans using myths of deities and an assortment of minor divinities. We also mentioned the importance of Roman Christianity in supporting imperial might and structural order. We have to admit that the rise of modern science, state religions, and multiple independent nations have vanquished the importance of centralized Christianity and damaged its explanatory authority.
In post # 4, we observed the shift of religious focus and definition among the Enthusiasts, Kierkegaard, and Rudolph Otto to an emphasis on extraordinary emotions, whether comforting or terrifying and awe-inspiring. I then wondered how any religion centered on a patriarchal sky god in a cosmos centered on man, the earth, or even the sun could possibly come to terms with the violent, immense, exploding universe we have recently discovered using the cosmos-splitting Hubble telescope. It is surprising that an evangelical president like George W. Bush did not order the Hubble program squashed the way he did stem-cell research. The Hubble universe has room for many extraordinary things, but an omnipotent anthropomorphic male deity in charge is probably not one them. The Hubble sky is not a realm in which we can seek much human reassurance. No sky god in that cosmos would have much time or energy to waste on this insignificant planet or its human inhabitants. It would be just as grandiose for us to think otherwise as it was for anyone in the age of Galileo and Copernicus to cling to visions of a geocentric universe.
Yet religions persist. One may wonder why.
In my forthcoming novel, Mysterious Days, a writer of murder mysteries, Milt Walters, stands beyond an absurdly but magnificently arrayed female statue in an all but abandoned cathedral in the French Pyrenees and stares at her dark face and the dark child before her. He reads an account of how this statue was discovered by a local plowman centuries before when his plowshare struck it. The plowman took it to his hut for the night, but when he woke it was gone. He went back to where he'd found it, and there it was again. Walters ponders the figure before: "Milt knew the story he was reading did not explicitly account for her most salient characteristic, the color of her skin. For him as for others in past centuries, the dark Madonna had taken on ever deeper meanings, ones he hesitated even now to share with this daughter. In his reflections, she was more of the earth than the blue sky, more of the red flesh than the bodiless spirit, more in the realm of the feminine than the blue Madonna, who belonged to the father’s sky. The dark Madonna always seemed more completely human in her sexual being than the divine mother who for centuries had caused humans to long for the inhuman sky—for the transcendent state realized in death. ... The pair represented no ordinary Madonna and child. It showed in her serene face, free of the terrible split between the sky and the earth, and in her extraordinary complexion. Her color did not derive from pale clouds but from the olive hue of earth, bark, and countless fruits and nuts. She had to be the dark Madonna he had pursued for decades . . .."
As Mysterious Days points out, "The Black Madonna is found in over a hundred churches in France and in several hundred more around the globe." Again one has to ask why. Walters, who himself creates fictions, realizes that the legendary history of the Black Madonna is probably another fiction and has absolutely no "authority" nor makes any claim to impose either social or spiritual structures of order. In itself, it lacks explanatory powers. In fact, it asks more questions than it answers, questions that you as a reader of this blog might want to address before I explore them from Walter's point of view in the next posting. I hope you will.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
The Sense of Divinity, Post # 4
Thomas in his comment on Post # 3, NPPT, said he was waiting for discussions of the divine and the comfort it provides.. In my response I wrote that in as much as all the posts here have dealt with deities, each has addressed forms of the divine in the ways each deity offers its believers comfort. Here I wish to elaborate on this notion that NPPT widens the net of divinity to include more comforts than we might expect as members of western culture. For Homer, his deities, as we discussed them, furnished the comfort of 'science' in as much as they were used to explain what is going on in the realms of nature and human nature. Other religions the posts have covered, from Hinduism through Greek, Jewish, and Islamic religions, provided comforts in the ways suggested earlier.
Even within the dominant western faith, Christianity, the sense or feeling of the Divine has varied greatly. Roman Christianity may have begun among poor or enslaved people in the catacombs but Emperor Constantine recast it as an imperial religion that combined political power with hierarchies of social authority and order. To reconcile contradictions in Christianity between the comfort the downtrodden had found in Jesus and what Constantine sensed as the power of its god, the Nicaea council of 325 AD fell back on the practices of older religions when it restored a variation of poly-theism by establishing a trinity of deities: a powerful father figure, a gentle son, and a spirit. It is also possible to consider the three as 'avatars' of a single deity, much the way Hindus viewed the transcendental Brahma and the incarnated Atman as one being..
Reformers of the 16th century, including Luther, Calvin, even Henry VIII of England, broke with the Roman church's structures of central authority and created other views of the divine that included a more immediate access for individuals to a transcendent deity.
In 18th century England, the Enthusiasts (who would become the Methodists) sensed they were 'en-thused', that is, inspired or possessed by divinity, the very presence of a god, and they expressed this comforting feeling with exuberant energy and joy.
From a less sanguine perspective, Kierkegaard, in 1843, wrote of the divine sense as the Fear and Trembling, the anxiety, that Abraham must have felt when commanded by his god to sacrifice his only son, beloved Isaac. A similar awfulness figures in the numinous Idea of the Holy that Rudolph Otto put forth in 1917. For Otto, the numinous quality of the holy combined a demonic terrifying power with the fascinating total otherness of the deity. As with Homer, the divinity provided a type of mysterious intuition of the noumenon, "an unknowable reality underlying all" phenomena.
In 1930, when Freud tried to describe the "true source of religious feeling," he spoke first of "a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded---as it were 'oceanic'." He dismisses this mother-like sensation as a "purely subjective fact," then goes on to locate the true source in a "feeling of infantile helplessness" that leads to a "longing for the father" and the "need for a father's protection." Drawing on this need for the patriarchal, Freud elaborates a convincing discussion of the conscience, the superego, as the cause of the Discontent we experience as we become adults adjusted to the demands of our Civilization.
In the 21st century, as we stare through the Hubble telescope at where it all came from, it is difficult to connect the Enthusiasts' union with the divine, Abraham's cozy relationship with his god, or even Freud's cosmic family romance to the remnants we see hurdling towards us from the source, the Big Bang. We ponder Orion's Belt until it is no longer a cluster of stars but a great womb of bright galaxies spewed out into the darkness of space and time. All the anthropomorphic notions of the caring divine seem to fall away as we stare into the mighty and violent universe in which stars--no, whole galaxies--are created and blown apart before our eyes. Granted that there are black holes in the sky; there must also be 'white holes' like Orion's Belt from which what has been sucked into the vortex erupts forth recreated in new colors and forms of astounding size.
To acknowledge this awful power can become a tremendously humbling experience, one closer to the feelings described by Kierkegaard and Otto than the family feeling that connects us to any of the anthropomorphic sky deities. Once humbled thus, we may accept the process the way Lao-tzu in the 6th century BC accepted the Tao as the Way of things, the energy that is like a well, "older than God," that is "used but never used up." Or, to bring that comfort closer to home, we may embrace it the way Dylan Thomas did, as "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower."
It is in domesticating this continuous power once again that we arrive at the French Grail and the Dark Virgin that figure in the forthcoming novels, Deepest France & Mysterious Days..
Even within the dominant western faith, Christianity, the sense or feeling of the Divine has varied greatly. Roman Christianity may have begun among poor or enslaved people in the catacombs but Emperor Constantine recast it as an imperial religion that combined political power with hierarchies of social authority and order. To reconcile contradictions in Christianity between the comfort the downtrodden had found in Jesus and what Constantine sensed as the power of its god, the Nicaea council of 325 AD fell back on the practices of older religions when it restored a variation of poly-theism by establishing a trinity of deities: a powerful father figure, a gentle son, and a spirit. It is also possible to consider the three as 'avatars' of a single deity, much the way Hindus viewed the transcendental Brahma and the incarnated Atman as one being..
Reformers of the 16th century, including Luther, Calvin, even Henry VIII of England, broke with the Roman church's structures of central authority and created other views of the divine that included a more immediate access for individuals to a transcendent deity.
In 18th century England, the Enthusiasts (who would become the Methodists) sensed they were 'en-thused', that is, inspired or possessed by divinity, the very presence of a god, and they expressed this comforting feeling with exuberant energy and joy.
From a less sanguine perspective, Kierkegaard, in 1843, wrote of the divine sense as the Fear and Trembling, the anxiety, that Abraham must have felt when commanded by his god to sacrifice his only son, beloved Isaac. A similar awfulness figures in the numinous Idea of the Holy that Rudolph Otto put forth in 1917. For Otto, the numinous quality of the holy combined a demonic terrifying power with the fascinating total otherness of the deity. As with Homer, the divinity provided a type of mysterious intuition of the noumenon, "an unknowable reality underlying all" phenomena.
In 1930, when Freud tried to describe the "true source of religious feeling," he spoke first of "a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded---as it were 'oceanic'." He dismisses this mother-like sensation as a "purely subjective fact," then goes on to locate the true source in a "feeling of infantile helplessness" that leads to a "longing for the father" and the "need for a father's protection." Drawing on this need for the patriarchal, Freud elaborates a convincing discussion of the conscience, the superego, as the cause of the Discontent we experience as we become adults adjusted to the demands of our Civilization.
In the 21st century, as we stare through the Hubble telescope at where it all came from, it is difficult to connect the Enthusiasts' union with the divine, Abraham's cozy relationship with his god, or even Freud's cosmic family romance to the remnants we see hurdling towards us from the source, the Big Bang. We ponder Orion's Belt until it is no longer a cluster of stars but a great womb of bright galaxies spewed out into the darkness of space and time. All the anthropomorphic notions of the caring divine seem to fall away as we stare into the mighty and violent universe in which stars--no, whole galaxies--are created and blown apart before our eyes. Granted that there are black holes in the sky; there must also be 'white holes' like Orion's Belt from which what has been sucked into the vortex erupts forth recreated in new colors and forms of astounding size.
To acknowledge this awful power can become a tremendously humbling experience, one closer to the feelings described by Kierkegaard and Otto than the family feeling that connects us to any of the anthropomorphic sky deities. Once humbled thus, we may accept the process the way Lao-tzu in the 6th century BC accepted the Tao as the Way of things, the energy that is like a well, "older than God," that is "used but never used up." Or, to bring that comfort closer to home, we may embrace it the way Dylan Thomas did, as "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower."
It is in domesticating this continuous power once again that we arrive at the French Grail and the Dark Virgin that figure in the forthcoming novels, Deepest France & Mysterious Days..
Sunday, May 8, 2011
NPPT, Neo-psychopolytheism: Source and Uses: Post # 3
Sula Anne has asked for more information about NPPT.
The term came to me after publishing my first book, when I was asked to fill out a biographical form for a serial dictionary or encyclopedia of America authors. I had just answered the political affiliation question with a label I lifted from The Education of Henry Adams. As I recall, Adams said he was a Radical-Conservative, which to my 1970s ears sounded like an oxymoron affirming the man's open-minded pragmatism.
Next came the survey's religious affilation question. Having grown up in one protestant denomination and married in a second before next trying out Unitarianism and the Ethical Humanism (is there any other kind?), I wanted a label, since some label was required, that might seem as playful and thoughtful as Adams's political one. Much the way Adams thought psychology might one day frame politics, I sensed psychology could provide similar assistance in comprehending religions. I figured that "psycho" might add a descriptive but lighter touch to the polymorphic thing that the world's religions became when seen from an open-minded point of view. The term came from this light-hearted source.
NPPT morphed from this beginning into a very personal concept that slowly became more and more useful to me. I learned from E. R. Dodds that psychology offered great help in understanding the functions of the Homeric religion in all the Greek texts I taught. In fact, for Homer, I gradually realized that the myths were not only the psychology of The Iliad, but also its zoology, botany, and physics. In short, the myths constituted the science of the 8th century BC. They provided hypotheses about the motivations of the characters and about the causes of events occurring in the hidden interior of plants, animals, planets, stars, the sun itself.
Whether 'Homer' viewed these explanations as useful hypotheses or as 'truth' is a difficult debate to settle. By the time that the Greek mind produced Aeschylus, however, we note that Orestes sees the Furies (the conscience figures) before anyone else can see them. In short, they are psychological forces before they become dramatically useful personifications visible to other characters and the audience of The Oresteian Trilogy.
Even more convincing evidence that two of the three great Greek tragedians were early psycho-polytheists comes from Euripides's last and most powerful play, The Bacchae. In college, we learned that Euripides was the least theistic of the trinity of tragedians. Even so, his final play employs the god Dionysos to explain why a group of women who do not believe in him can be hypnotized for (or by) their unbelief into crazy dancing, dangerous snake-handling, and ultimately into ripping King Pentheus into pieces. As a dramatist, Euripides was not only obliged to show respect for the god of tragedy but to recognize the supra-human power of repressed emotions that can grow strong enough to drive people to criminally insane acts. And, in Dionysos' case, the same god is able to transport those who accept his clearly trans-human powers into an ecstatic joy. In other words, Euripides 2500 years ago pre-figured and portrayed Freud's notion of repression by using religious figures rather than imagery Freud would borrow from 19th century hydraulic science. After Euripides, Plato replaced Zeus with the abstraction, Logos, and the deities with archetypes, thus preparing the way for a Greek-educated Paul/Saul and a Greek-using John.
To apply NPPT to another religious system, Hinduism, I use the essential part of NPPT, its sympathetic imagination (a term applied to Shakespeare), its empathetic vicarious-introspection (Heinz Kohut's term), each time I visit the upper floor of the Asian Art Museum on Larkin street in San Francisco. There I take photos of the deities with animal attributes, especially the elephant-headed god of good fortune and wisdom, Ganesha, and of his parents, strong Shiva and voluptuous Parvati. Those Hindus who showed respect for these three were, I speculate, appreciative of the agricultural world around them in which elephants, the iron oxen, and other animals played a vital role. They must also have been at ease with their bodies, as providers of pleasures and children, to acknowledge the sexuality of the parent deities with such openly erotic art. From the Hindu rooms I wander back and forth to art devoted to Buddha who with the Eightfold Path directs his followers to destroy the desire that causes sorrow that is life. I sense that India must have fallen on very difficult times to have embraced a transcending perspective built on such rejection. I also note that this evolution from many deities parallels the centralizing of control we earlier noted in the West's later movement from polytheism's diversity to an order-focused monotheism.
Of course there is much more to Hinduism and Buddhism than the empathetic approach of NPPT has uncovered. But the elements revealed go beyond doctrinal differences that produce true/false, good/evil arguments. NPPT attempts to put us in the emotions and minds of the believers and understand why they might feel the way they do about major elements of their faiths.
NPPT's imaginative sympathy also prepares us to understand why legends as far from the mainstream as the French Grail, the Black Madonna, Black Sarah, the French career of Mary Magdalena and her daughter could have enough emotional importance to underlie a variety of contemporary books, including Deepest France & Mysterious Days, two eccentric mysteries I plan to publish in next few months. It also explains why someone educated in the western intellectual and literary traditions, especially American and contemporary fiction plus Darwin, Freud, Sartre, Jung, and Kohut would want to write these non-orthodox novels.
So, thank you, Sula Anne for asking your question.
The term came to me after publishing my first book, when I was asked to fill out a biographical form for a serial dictionary or encyclopedia of America authors. I had just answered the political affiliation question with a label I lifted from The Education of Henry Adams. As I recall, Adams said he was a Radical-Conservative, which to my 1970s ears sounded like an oxymoron affirming the man's open-minded pragmatism.
Next came the survey's religious affilation question. Having grown up in one protestant denomination and married in a second before next trying out Unitarianism and the Ethical Humanism (is there any other kind?), I wanted a label, since some label was required, that might seem as playful and thoughtful as Adams's political one. Much the way Adams thought psychology might one day frame politics, I sensed psychology could provide similar assistance in comprehending religions. I figured that "psycho" might add a descriptive but lighter touch to the polymorphic thing that the world's religions became when seen from an open-minded point of view. The term came from this light-hearted source.
NPPT morphed from this beginning into a very personal concept that slowly became more and more useful to me. I learned from E. R. Dodds that psychology offered great help in understanding the functions of the Homeric religion in all the Greek texts I taught. In fact, for Homer, I gradually realized that the myths were not only the psychology of The Iliad, but also its zoology, botany, and physics. In short, the myths constituted the science of the 8th century BC. They provided hypotheses about the motivations of the characters and about the causes of events occurring in the hidden interior of plants, animals, planets, stars, the sun itself.
Whether 'Homer' viewed these explanations as useful hypotheses or as 'truth' is a difficult debate to settle. By the time that the Greek mind produced Aeschylus, however, we note that Orestes sees the Furies (the conscience figures) before anyone else can see them. In short, they are psychological forces before they become dramatically useful personifications visible to other characters and the audience of The Oresteian Trilogy.
Even more convincing evidence that two of the three great Greek tragedians were early psycho-polytheists comes from Euripides's last and most powerful play, The Bacchae. In college, we learned that Euripides was the least theistic of the trinity of tragedians. Even so, his final play employs the god Dionysos to explain why a group of women who do not believe in him can be hypnotized for (or by) their unbelief into crazy dancing, dangerous snake-handling, and ultimately into ripping King Pentheus into pieces. As a dramatist, Euripides was not only obliged to show respect for the god of tragedy but to recognize the supra-human power of repressed emotions that can grow strong enough to drive people to criminally insane acts. And, in Dionysos' case, the same god is able to transport those who accept his clearly trans-human powers into an ecstatic joy. In other words, Euripides 2500 years ago pre-figured and portrayed Freud's notion of repression by using religious figures rather than imagery Freud would borrow from 19th century hydraulic science. After Euripides, Plato replaced Zeus with the abstraction, Logos, and the deities with archetypes, thus preparing the way for a Greek-educated Paul/Saul and a Greek-using John.
To apply NPPT to another religious system, Hinduism, I use the essential part of NPPT, its sympathetic imagination (a term applied to Shakespeare), its empathetic vicarious-introspection (Heinz Kohut's term), each time I visit the upper floor of the Asian Art Museum on Larkin street in San Francisco. There I take photos of the deities with animal attributes, especially the elephant-headed god of good fortune and wisdom, Ganesha, and of his parents, strong Shiva and voluptuous Parvati. Those Hindus who showed respect for these three were, I speculate, appreciative of the agricultural world around them in which elephants, the iron oxen, and other animals played a vital role. They must also have been at ease with their bodies, as providers of pleasures and children, to acknowledge the sexuality of the parent deities with such openly erotic art. From the Hindu rooms I wander back and forth to art devoted to Buddha who with the Eightfold Path directs his followers to destroy the desire that causes sorrow that is life. I sense that India must have fallen on very difficult times to have embraced a transcending perspective built on such rejection. I also note that this evolution from many deities parallels the centralizing of control we earlier noted in the West's later movement from polytheism's diversity to an order-focused monotheism.
Of course there is much more to Hinduism and Buddhism than the empathetic approach of NPPT has uncovered. But the elements revealed go beyond doctrinal differences that produce true/false, good/evil arguments. NPPT attempts to put us in the emotions and minds of the believers and understand why they might feel the way they do about major elements of their faiths.
NPPT's imaginative sympathy also prepares us to understand why legends as far from the mainstream as the French Grail, the Black Madonna, Black Sarah, the French career of Mary Magdalena and her daughter could have enough emotional importance to underlie a variety of contemporary books, including Deepest France & Mysterious Days, two eccentric mysteries I plan to publish in next few months. It also explains why someone educated in the western intellectual and literary traditions, especially American and contemporary fiction plus Darwin, Freud, Sartre, Jung, and Kohut would want to write these non-orthodox novels.
So, thank you, Sula Anne for asking your question.
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