The Quantum Cat: A Campaign For Science And The Culture Of Reason – OpEd

November 12, 2025 
By K.M. Seethi

Image: From the author’s file

As the world’s technological frontiers race ahead of our collective understanding, science today stands both indispensable and contested. The twenty-first century has brought incredible progress in quantum computing, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence, even as it has witnessed a resurgence of pseudoscience, denialism, and the ideological distortion of knowledge. The real challenge before modern societies is not simply to multiply discoveries, but to safeguard the very spirit of inquiry that makes discovery possibl

In the first week of November 2025, as the United Nations marks the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ 2025), the South Indian state of Kerala has added its own creative turn to the celebration. The Centre for Science in Society (C-SiS) at the Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) in collaboration with the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) has launched the Quantum Cat campaign — a science exhibition and outreach movement that travels across ten districts. The exhibition opened on November 7 at CUSAT and will run through December, bringing to schools, colleges, and communities an experience of the “quantum century.”

But this is not just another science event. It gets underway at a critical moment when anti-science attitudes and pseudoscientific beliefs are gaining ground, encouraged by a political climate that seeks to rewrite knowledge through ideology. The Sangh Parivar’s attempts to dilute and distort scientific theories in curricula and promote mythical claims at official science events reflect a major crisis — the erosion of scientific temper, a constitutional duty that India once proudly upheld. Against this background, the campaign acquires crucial social meaning – it defends reason itself.

KSSP President Meera Bhai told this author that the initiative “seeks to promote science and scientific inquiry from the school level onwards,” continuing a long tradition that began with the Parishad’s legendary Halley’s Comet campaign in 1986. Then, too, KSSP fought superstition by turning fear into curiosity. Today, as irrationality resurfaces in new forms, such as astrology apps, miracle cures, WhatsApp “Vedic science,” the Quantum Cat becomes a new mascot of rational inquiry. Recent findings from Kerala Padanangal 2.0, KSSP’s statewide social survey, show that one in three people in Kerala still depend on astrology to make life decisions — a surprising figure in a state known for high literacy and human development. This coexistence of reason and belief, science and superstition, is precisely the paradox the campaign seeks to address.

The Century of Quantum Science

The International Year of Quantum Science and Technology commemorates a hundred years since the birth of quantum theory, the most successful and puzzling scientific framework ever devised. When Max Planck proposed in 1900 that energy comes in discrete “quanta,” he began a revolution. Einstein used that idea to explain light as particles, Bohr built his model of the atom, Heisenberg introduced the uncertainty principle, and Schrödinger described matter as waves. Together they showed that at the subatomic level, nature defies common sense. In the quantum world, particles exist in multiple states at once — a phenomenon called superposition — and remain mysteriously connected across vast distances through entanglement. Observation itself determines outcomes, making the observer part of reality. This radical idea — that measurement changes what is measured — has transformed every field of science.

Today, quantum principles underlie technologies that define modern life, from lasers, semiconductors, to solar cells, and GPS. They are now driving quantum computing and quantum communication, promising faster problem-solving and unbreakable data security. In chemistry and biology, quantum mechanics explains the structure of molecules, the efficiency of photosynthesis, and even how birds sense magnetic fields.

For some scientists, quantum mechanics defies classical explanation, operating in a realm where causality is uncertain and probability replaces determinism. Physicist Babu Joseph, former Vice-Chancellor of CUSAT, explains it more precisely: “The Schrödinger’s Cat captures the essence of quantum mechanics, which asserts that there is no observer-independent reality. The standard binary — exist or not — isn’t true. There can be combinations of varying degrees of possibilities until the observer interacts with the system.” That insight lies at the heart of the superposition principle, the backbone of quantum mechanics, he told this author.

Quantum science thus transforms how we see both matter and meaning. It teaches that reality is not fixed but relational, not given but discovered through interaction — a lesson as relevant to society as to physics.

The Cat in the Box: From Paradox to Possibility

Erwin Schrödinger’s famous cat was never real. Conceived in 1935, it was a thought experiment to expose the absurd implications of early quantum theory. In Schrödinger’s imaginary box, a cat’s life depends on a random atomic event. Until someone opens the box, the cat is both alive and dead — a paradox meant to question how far quantum laws can extend into the visible world.

Modern physics resolves the puzzle through decoherence: real cats interact with their environment, collapsing the ambiguity long before observation. However, the Quantum Cat survived in imagination, literature, and popular science — precisely because it dramatises the central mystery of observation and reality. It asks a timeless question: Can we know the world without changing it? For KSSP’s campaigners, this cat is a metaphor for scientific curiosity. It provokes questions — How can something be alive and dead at once? What does observation mean? — and in doing so, it invites thinking, reasoning, and dialogue.

The cat also teaches humility. It reminds us that nature does not always obey our common sense, and that our perceptions are limited. In a society where superstition often pretends as wisdom, such humility is a moral necessity. As Meera Bhai noted, “KSSP’s science campaigns have always connected wonder with reason — from Halley’s Comet to the Quantum Cat — to make people see the beauty of questioning.”

Used symbolically, Schrödinger’s cat bridges imagination and logic. It tells students that science is not dry or distant but full of wonder and paradox. It shows that curiosity and creativity belong together. And in public life, it becomes a counter-symbol — against fatalism, dogma, and blind belief.

The Quantum Imagination

Over the past century, quantum ideas have travelled far beyond the laboratory, shaping the way philosophers and social scientists think about knowledge, perception, and reality. Just as a quantum particle can exist in many states until observed, societies too can contain multiple, often contradictory realities — rational and irrational, secular and superstitious, progressive and reactionary — coexisting beneath the surface. These contradictions persist until some event, such as an election, a protest, or a crisis, forces them into view and “collapses” them into a single, visible outcome.

In this sense, Schrödinger’s Cat has become more than a symbol of physics; it is a metaphor for social life itself. People may believe in science yet rely on superstition, or support equality while practising exclusion. Sociologists have long explored such tensions. Émile Durkheim described societies as combining both mechanical and organic solidarity; Georg Simmel’s “stranger” is simultaneously near and distant; Karl Marx’s theory of alienation shows workers as both creative and estranged. These examples illustrate that ambiguity and coexistence, not clarity and uniformity, often define modern life.

Thus, quantum metaphors remind us that uncertainty is not the absence of understanding but a sign of complexity — and that observation itself, whether in science or society, changes what is observed. To recognise this is to accept responsibility: the act of looking, questioning, and interpreting is also an act of participation. In this sense, the observer effect is not limited to physics. Every social study, every public debate, every act of journalism alters what it observes. Recognising this responsibility — the role of agency — is a vital part of both scientific and civic inquiry. The Quantum Cat, seen in this light, becomes a symbol of reflective citizenship: one that questions, observes, and acts, knowing that observation affects reality.

The link between science and society defines KSSP’s legacy. Founded in 1962, it has grown beyond a science club into a people’s science movement connecting empirical reasoning with social progress. Its campaigns on environment, energy, health, and education have always sought to make knowledge democratic and life-oriented. The Quantum Cat campaign continues this mission, using a global scientific breakthrough to renew Kerala’s commitment to rational thought. From Halley’s Comet to Quantum Cat, the message remains the same – science belongs to the people. In 1986, KSSP volunteers explained that comets were celestial bodies, not omens, and forty years later, they travel again, showing that the cat is a metaphor for observation and reason. The persistence of astrology and pseudo-science reveals that education alone cannot ensure enlightenment. What is needed, as KSSP calls vijnanabodh, is the consciousness of science as a way of life—anchored in curiosity, scepticism, and empathy.

Toward a Culture of Reason

The Quantum Cat campaign, therefore, is not just a celebration of physics. It is a cultural intervention, telling that science and democracy share the same foundation – reasoned freedom. In an era when faith is marketed as fact and propaganda as knowledge, the defence of reason becomes a moral act.

Quantum theory offers a powerful metaphor for today’s struggle between reason and unreason. It shows that reality is not binary but a field of probabilities influenced by interaction, just as social progress depends on participation, dialogue, and openness. The spirit of quantum thought underlines democratic inquiry. In this sense, KSSP’s Quantum Cat invites young minds to look into the “box” of their own world, to question, observe, and think freely. It tells us that curiosity is not disobedience, doubt is not weakness, and imagination is part of knowledge.

As Babu Joseph says, “The Newtonian cat is either dead or alive; the quantum cat is both—until you look.” So too with society, it holds both reason and prejudice until we choose which to see. The campaign restores science’s humane meaning, not as apparatus but as a way of knowing that dignifies life and keeps curiosity alive amid ideological darkness.

K.M. Seethi

K.M. Seethi is is Director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE), Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU), Kerala. He also served as ICSSR Senior Fellow, Senior Professor of International Relations and Dean of Social Sciences at MGU. One of his latest works is "ENDURING DILEMMA Flashpoints in Kashmir and India-Pakistan Relations."

Bad Bunny vs. MAGA’s Bigoted Vision of America

The hatefulness and histrionics of Trump’s allies exemplify how the ill-formed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves.


Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny attends the premiere of "Caught Stealing" at the Regal Union Square in New York on August 26, 2025. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP

Ediberto Roman

Ernesto Sagás
Nov 08, 2025

Common Dreams

The selection of musical megastar Bad Bunny to headline the Super Bowl’s halftime show has ignited a storm of controversy among conservative circles. The ostensive reason is that Bad Bunny (born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) is a Puerto Rican who sings in Spanish, and thus according to his MAGA critics, he does not represent “America.”

For the new form of conservativism known as MAGA, the vision of America and Americans is narrow, and does not include the likes of Bad Bunny. Newsmax host Greg Kelly, for instance, claimed Bad Bunny “hates America, hates President Trump, hates ICE, [and] hates the English language!” Fox News host Tomi Lahren, meanwhile, claimed Bad Bunny is “Not an American artist.” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson not only mislabeled Bad Bunny as “Bad Bunny Rabbit,” he argued Bad Bunny was not a role model, calling for replacing him with someone with “broader Appeal,” like 82-year-old Lee Greenwood.

The Bad Bunny controversy raises the question: what is America and how should it be represented?

The histrionics of MAGA leaders exemplify how the ill-formed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves. For instance, the trope that Bad Bunny is not American demonstrates profound ignorance. Bad Bunny was born in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. As such, he was a United States citizen at birth. Puerto Rico has been a US possession since its conquest in 1898, and its residents have been US citizens since the passage of the Jones Act in 1917.

As for Bad Bunny hating America, this claim is nothing short of odd. Though Bad Bunny did not support candidate Trump in 2024, and disagrees with ICE roundups, 75 million Americans did not vote for President Trump (something that residents of Puerto Rico cannot do), and we suspect millions of others, including the authors here, do not support mass ICE roundups. Such free speech stances, which are at the core of the First Amendment of the Constitution, in no way reflect any disdain for this country. As James Baldwin poignantly taught decades ago, and is the case for millions of others today, it is our love for this country that leads us to question it in order to push it towards our laudable goals of freedom and equality.

Further, Bad Bunny singing in Spanish in no way means he hates this country or its dominant language, English. Bad Bunny is fluent in English but prefers to sing in his native tongue of Spanish. While Trump proclaimed English as the country’s official language, such a declaration does not carry the weight of law. That edict also appears to run afoul of a host of US Supreme Court decisions embracing our multicultural and multilingual country, including Meyer v. Nebraska, which held invalid efforts to forbid teaching foreign languages, and Lau v. Nichols. holding that failure to provide non-English instruction violated students’ civil rights.

The United States of America is a multicultural, multiracial nation made up of the descendants of immigrants from all over the world, as well as Indigenous nations and other lands that were conquered during a period of US imperial expansion in the 19th century. Puerto Ricans have fought bravely and died valiantly in America’s wars since WWI, and they contribute in numerous ways to make America great. So, why being a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican makes of Bad Bunny less of an American in MAGA cohorts?

For months now, we have been witnessing a whitewashing of the American experience spearheaded by the Trump administration. Museums, colleges and universities, and even our very diverse military have all been forced to scrub references to the valuable contributions made by women, people of color, and immigrants (except for white ones).

Puerto Ricans, a Spanish-speaking, Latin American people of color (who also happen to be US citizens), do not fit the MAGA mold, and Bad Bunny’s fame is a reminder that our nation, based on the principle of E pluribus unum (Out of many, one) can be proudly represented by many people in many ways.

Previous Super Bowl halftime performers, many of them foreign-born, have reflected our nation’s best (and diverse) talents, but suddenly, a Puerto Rican is not American enough? Turning Point USA’s “All American” alternative halftime show is quite revealing of MAGA’s cultural whitewashing attempts by promising “Anything in English.”

This piece was first published in the Miami Herald.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Ediberto Roman
Ediberto Roman is professor of Law & Director of Immigration and Citizenship Initiatives at Florida International University.
Full Bio >

Ernesto Sagás
Ernesto Sagás is Professor of Ethnic Studies at Colorado State University. He has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Florida with a concentration in Latin American studies.
Full Bio >

Bad Bunny and Puerto Rican Muslims: How both remix what it means to be Boricua

(The Conversation) — Like Bad Bunny’s music, Puerto Rican Muslims’ lives challenge ideas about race, religion and belonging in the Americas.

The Mezquita Al-Madinah in Hatillo, Puerto Rico, about an hour west of San Juan, is one of several mosques and Islamic centers on the island. 

Ken Chitwood
November 6, 2025

(The Conversation) — Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is more than a global music phenomenon; he’s a bona fide symbol of Puerto Rico.

The church choir boy turned “King of Latin Trap” has songs, style and swagger that reflect the island’s mix of pride, pain and creative resilience. His music mixes reggaetón beats with the sounds of Puerto Rican history and everyday life, where devotion and defiance often live side by side.

Bad Bunny has been called one of Puerto Rico’s “loudest and proudest voices.” Songs like “El Apagón” – “The Blackout” – celebrate joy and protest together, honoring everyday acts of resistance to colonial rule and injustice in Puerto Rican life. Others, like “NUEVAYoL,” celebrate the sounds and vibrancy of its diaspora – especially in New York City. Some songs, like “RLNDT,” mention spiritual searching – featuring allusions to his own Catholic upbringing, sacred and secular divides, New Age astrology and Spiritism.

As a scholar of religion who recently wrote a book about Puerto Rican Muslims, I find echoes of that same strength and artistry in their stories. Although marginalized among Muslims, Puerto Ricans and other U.S. citizens, they find fresh ways to express their cultural heritage and practice their faith, creating new communities and connections along the way. Similar to Bad Bunny’s music, Puerto Rican Muslims’ lives challenge how we think about race, religion and belonging in the Americas.

Bad Bunny performs during his ‘No Me Quiero Ir De Aqui’ residency on July 11, 2025, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Stories of struggle

There are no exact numbers, but before recent crises, Puerto Rico – an archipelago of 3.2. million people – had about 3,500 to 5,000 Muslims, many of them Palestinian. Economic hardship, natural disasters such as hurricanes Irma and Maria, and government neglect have since forced many to leave, however.

As of 2017, there were also an estimated 11,000 to 15,400 Puerto Rican Muslims among the nearly 6 million Puerto Ricans and nearly 4 million Muslims in the United States.

Like any Puerto Rican, these Muslims know the struggles of colonialism’s ongoing impact, from blackouts and economic inequality to racism. For example, in the viral 23-minute video for “El Apagón,” journalist Bianca Graulau outlines how tax incentives for external investors are displacing locals – a theme reinforced in Bad Bunny’s later song, “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii.”

The video for “El Apagón” includes a short documentary about gentrification on the archipelago.

Converts to Islam also face unique challenges – and not just Islamophobia. Many are told they are “not real Puerto Ricans” because of their newfound faith. Some are treated as foreigners in their own families and friend groups, often asked whether they are abandoning their culture to “become Arab.”

To be a Puerto Rican Muslim, then, is to negotiate being and belonging at numerous intersections of diversity and difference.

Still, some connect their Muslim identity to moments in Puerto Rican history. In interviews, they told me how they identify with Muslims who came with Spanish conquistadors during colonial times. Others draw inspiration from enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean. Many of them were Muslim and resisted their condition in ways large and small: fleeing to the forest to pray, for example, or living as “maroons” – people who escaped and formed their own communities.

Many ways to be Puerto Rican

Puerto Rican culture cannot be neatly mapped onto a single tradition. The archipelago’s religion, music and art blend together influences from Indigenous Taíno, African, Spanish and American cultures. Religious processions pass by cars blasting reggaetón. Shrines to Our Lady of Divine Providence stand beside U.S. chain restaurants and murals demanding independence.

Bad Bunny embodies this fusion. He is rebellious yet rooted, irreverent yet deeply Puerto Rican. His music blends contemporary sounds from reggaetón and Latin trap with traditional “bomba y plena.” It all adds up to something distinctly “Boricua,” a term for Puerto Ricans drawn from the Indigenous Taíno name for the island, “Borikén.”

A mural in San Juan, Puerto Rico, photographed in 2017, says, ‘We don’t understand this democracy.’
Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images

Puerto Rican Muslims wrestle with what it means to be authentically Boricua, though. In particular, their lives reveal how religion is both a boundary and a bridge: defining belonging while creating new ways to imagine it.

Since Spanish colonization in the 1500s, most Puerto Ricans have been Roman Catholic. But over the past two centuries, many other Christian groups have arrived, including Seventh-day Adventists, Lutherans and Pentecostals. Today, more than half of Puerto Ricans identify as Catholic and about one-third as Protestant.

Alongside these traditions, Afro-Caribbean traditions such as Santería, Espiritismo and Santerismo – a mix of the two – remain active. There are also small communities of Jews, Rastafari and Muslims.

Even with this diversity, converts to Islam are sometimes accused of betraying their culture. One young man told me that when he became Muslim, his mother said he had not only betrayed Christ but also “our culture.”

Yet Puerto Rican Muslims point to Arabic influences in Spanish words. They celebrate traces of Islamic design in colonial and revival architecture that reflects Muslims’ multicentury presence in Spain, from the 700s until the fall of the last Muslim kingdom in Granada in 1492. They also cook up halal versions of classic Puerto Rican dishes.

Like Bad Bunny, these converts remix what it means to be Puerto Rican, showing how Puerto Rico’s sense of identity – or “puertorriqueñidad” – is not exclusively Christian, but complex and constantly evolving.

A member of the Council in Defense of the Indigenous Rights of Boriken, dressed in Taino traditional clothing, sounds a conch during a march through San Juan, Puerto Rico, on July 11, 2020.
Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images


In solidarity

Many Puerto Rican converts frame their faith as a counternarrative, rejecting the Christianity imposed by Spanish colonizers. They also resist Islamophobia, racism and foreign domination, with some converts drawn to the religion as a way to oppose these forces. Similar to Bad Bunny’s music, which often critiques colonialism and social constraints, they push back against systems that try to define who they can be.

To that end, Puerto Rican Muslims also build connections with other groups facing injustice. In reggaetón terms, they form their own “corillos” – groups of friends – united by shared struggles.

They demonstrate on behalf of Palestinians, seeing them as another colonized people without a nation. The first Latino Muslim organization, Alianza Islámica – founded by Puerto Rican converts in 1987 – emerged out of the era’s push for minorities’ rights around the New York City metro area. And after the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting, where about half of the 49 victims killed were Puerto Rican, and the mosque attended by the shooter was intentionally set on fire, Boricua Muslims joined with LGBTQ+, Muslim and Latino communities to grieve and demand justice.

Pro-Palestine supporters attend a rally to end the war on Nov. 12, 2023, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Miguel J. Rodríguez Carrillo/VIEWpress via Getty Images

In these ways, Puerto Rican Muslims remind me that notions of community, identity or justice do not stand on their own. For many people, they are linked – parts of the same fight for dignity and freedom.

That is why, when I listen to songs like “NUEVAYoL” or “El Apagón,” I think of the Puerto Rican Muslims I know in places such as Puerto Rico, Florida, New Jersey, Texas and New York. Their stories, like Bad Bunny’s music, show how being Puerto Rican today means constantly negotiating who you are and where you belong. And that religion, like music, can carry the sound of struggle – but also the hope of one day overcoming the injustices and inequalities of everyday life.

(Ken Chitwood, Affiliate Researcher, Religion and Civic Culture Center, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; Bayreuth University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)


The Conversation religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The Conversation is solely responsible for this content.

 

Seeds of Catholic Totalitarian Rule Against Pagans

by Bruce Lerro / October 7th, 2025

LONG READ

Catholic Hysteria Against Pagans

 What is wrong with a sacred tradition that attempts to predict the future? What dangers lurk for those who host feasts are not under Church approved? What is wrong with making images of gods and goddesses? What will happen to you? Why not use chemical hallucinogens to heal and create altered states? Why is it so terrible to leave food and clothing for those who died in case they need them? Why not plot and scheme with elves, dwarfs, giants and trolls? Why must there be only one soul and not two or three? These beliefs and practices were so dangerous that the Catholic Church saw fit to smash images, burn down libraries, and torch forests to keep people from practicing these things? In my article, I link the reactions of the Catholic Church to totalitarian practices centuries before what anti-communists accuse Stalin of. In spite of centuries of effort, pagan practices persisted through the Middle Ages. What was it that a pagan life continued to offer people that the Catholic Church could not destroy? The image of the Alexandrian library before it was destroyed by Christian mobs.

The characteristics of totalitarianism
In my last article, “Dancing with the Devil,” I briefly defined totalitarianism as a loaded political vice word that the CIA saved mostly for the Communism of the Soviet Union and fascism in Germany. Usually the charge of “totalitarianism” includes at least the following:

• abolition of the right to freedom of speech, assembly and religious worship
• elimination of all political parties other than the ruling party;
• subordination of all economic and social life to structural control of the single party bureaucracy;
• liquidation of free enterprise;
• destruction of all independent trade unions and creation of labor organizations servile to the totalitarian state;
• establishment of concentration camps and the use of slave labor;
• utter disregard for an independent judicial system;
• social demagogy around race and class;
• expansion of the military;
• reduction of parliamentary bodies to rubber-stamp status;
• establishment of a system of nationwide espionage and secret police;
• censorship of the press and media;
• disregard for the rights of other nations and disregard of treaties; and
• maintenance and encouragement of fifth columns abroad

Claim of the article: The manner in which the Catholic Church treated pagans have totalitarian seeds
In my last article, I argued that the charges of totalitarianism against the Soviet Union were ridiculous. By comparison, the Catholic Church had a much more expanded and integrated totalitarian system.  Over the centuries they destroyed pagan sacred texts, shattered sacred groves around springs, cut down sacred forests and killed and ate their sacred animals. Their process was to:

• Reshape external collective behavior – public confessions
• Reshape external individual behavior – secret confession annually to a priest
• Internal individual behavior – importance of conscience.

This article is based on three books, two by Claude Lecouteux including Return of the Dead and Witches, Werewolves and Faires as well as The Pagan Middle Ages edited by Ludo Milis.

Forbidden Pagan Practices
In the book The Pagan Middle Ages the author names the following practices as forbidden:

• soothsaying – fate, astrology (as opposed to having faith and assuming free will)
• sorcery (as opposed to praying to God);
• unapproved feasting outside the church;
• reverence for statues (instead of praying to an imageless God;
• using charms against disease; using chemical stimulants like chewing laurel leaves for altered states or herbs such as mandrake, poppy, henbane and nightshade to stimulate the nervous system and cause hallucinations; Catholic rulers  approved of  states including self-flagellation and sleep deprivation and the use of holy unctions, confession and penance;
• saturating the senses (as opposed to sobriety);
• burying the dead with important grave goods or with luxurious clothing (the spiritual world needs no material things);
• placing food in the graves (the spiritual world needs no material things);
• animal sacrifice;
• use of remedies;
• too much leisure as opposed to hard work;
• imagining divinity could exist outside a single god. Lower forms beings —dwarves, giants, trolls, elves and white witches – were much harder to fight against than gods and goddesses because they were seldom paid great attention to.
• believing in the return of the dead (as opposed to going to heaven, hell or purgatory);
• venerating the ancestors;
• believing in the existence of two or three souls instead of one; and
• enjoyment of sex.

Between the fifth and the twelfth centuries books of penance were compiled as judgment guides about sex:

• distinctions made between adulterous men and adulterous women;
• age categories introduced;
• whether the offender was a cleric or a laymen, freeman or self;
• area where adultery took place;
• when sex took place (sacred holidays, menstruation);
• the sexual position; and
• the number of partners.

These are the very things for which the so-called totalitarianism of Russia would be attacked for. Let us see what the pagans believed.

Strategy of the Catholic Church
At first, the small numbers of the Church forced it to be selective in their approach. They went first to the rulers. The rulers had to grant permission to preach in his territory. Furthermore, before converting, the ruler had to be sure they had the support of nobles. They only went after the slaves or serfs or the peasants at the end. Finally, the missionary could not easily invent new words. They had to use existing native words but give them a new meaning.

The Importance of the Ancestor’s Pagans in the Middle Ages
What happens to people when they die? Catholics say you get a one-way ticket to heaven, hell or purgatory. But can you come back? People in the Middle Ages definitely believed you could return from the dead. In fact, they had no fear of death; they dreaded the dead. The true destiny of a dead person was to become an ancestor—to reincarnate or resurrect – to continue to live among his them. Reverence for the ancestors was of great importance to paganism. The dead are connected to their land, the place where they spent their life and they do not want to be separated from it. The dead need the help of the living. In the Middle Ages, the center of all activity remains the farm, and the family is not limited to the living. The tomb was placed within the borders of the farm. There was no reason to separate the dead from the familial community. These pagans lacked all knowledge of the idea of solitude of we moderns. For them the worst penalty was not death but expulsion of the group. The Church worked very hard to suppress this belief that the dead could return. They only partly succeeded. Why did the church not want the people and the ancestors to have a relationship? What benefits does the Church receive from these spiritual politics?  Le Goff in his book The Birth of Purgatory showed the profound metamorphosis that the dead underwent in the 11^th and 12^th century.

Where, When and Who of the Dead Returned?
Claude Lecouteux tells us that for as long as humans have existed they have spoken of shades of the departed who return to trouble the living. In fact, in pre-Christian and even Christian times pagans and their peasant base said the dead could come back, either of their own volition or by being evoked. Castles clinging to the tops of peaks of mountains, forests covered in fog are places where we are likely to see apparitions of the dead. We are likely to see them in rural areas rather than in cities. The mountains were understood as an intermediary between humans  and gods. Pagans claimed to have seen them on the longest nights of the year. The mountain dweller and the sailor have experienced ghosts and believed in them because mountains and water were believed to be bodies that are bridges between the material to the spiritual worlds.

Not everyone comes back from the dead. It is those souls who have not integrated well into the community that are claimed to return. Claude Lecouteux tells us a Polish ethnologist analyzed 500 cases of dead people who became revenants and drew up the following demographics about who came back.

The Dead	Number of cases	Percentages
Drowning victims	101	20.2
Unbaptized children	90	18
Abortions	55	11
Suicides	43	8,6
Spouses who died on their wedding day	40	8
Dead fetuses	38	7.6
Those dying in violent or unnatural deaths	15	3
Women who died after giving birth but before they arose from the same bed	14	2.8
Fiancées who died right before the wedding	14	2.8
Women who died in labor	10	2
Other cases	42	8.4
Total	500	100

How far do revenants travel? Usually not far. They are mostly attached to their homes and manifest across their lands (affecting the growth of crops). It is rare for one to attack directly the members of their family. Revenants lived in oral and folk tradition anchored firmly in local culture. They would return and wander as apparitions.

Fear of the Dead
In Rome the deceased were regarded as impure and dangerous. It was necessary to gain the good graces of the dead if they would commit more than one misdeed. The deceased were believed to be the cause of epidemics and cases of madness and possession. In Germany the dead were bound before burial. Why? To prevent them from leaving their tombs. The mounds were solid. Earth and good-sized stones were piled up on top of a wooden chamber framed by standing stones as if it were necessary to keep the dead from leaving. Discoveries made in Scandinavian peat bogs had revealed bodies covered with branches, and logs of stones to prevent escape.

Preparation and Handling of the Body
For those preparing the body, it was necessary to protect themselves from evil and to protect the dead person’s spirit from leaving the corpse. The blindfold over the eyes protected those present from the evil eye. The nostrils and the ass were corked with wax. Nails were hammered into the feet of a corpse to prevent any roving after they died. The custom of keeping vigil over the dead is ancient. Vigils were accompanied by singing, spinning and dancing.

Who Were the Revenants?
Claude Lecouteux wrote that revenants are believed to return from the dead in physical form. The revertant dead man is able to intervene physically in the world of the living. He fights like a man and eats and sleeps like a man. Revenants continue on sensuously into the next world. They are believed not to decay and they continue to meddle in people’s lives. Revenants were not evanescent. They were not images or mists, but flesh and blood individuals. They were imagined to be large, alarming, sometimes black in color and more harmful. They inhabit mounds and are unable to find their peace through return. The strengths of the dead were greater than when they were living. When a body was disintegrated in order to be destroyed, it very often seemed as large as an ox.

When the revenant walks on top of a roof, it is imagined to barely avoid collapsing the structure. The mental powers of the dead are thought to be increased. Lecouteux claims people  have also encountered revenants in animal form such as an ox and seal. The revenant seeks to attract people outside. They stay on the roof and do not seem capable of operating inside the house. The house was considered a good refuge for the family if the door was closed. Revenants can avenge themselves. The dead who caused harm did not get off when they died. The revenants were connected to fertility. They ravaged farms and could bring death to most of the household. They can cause harm to neighbors’ farms and make attacks on herdsman. In other words, whenever a revenant raged, the earth became a dessert, the earth no longer bore fruit.

The Challenge of Revenants to Christianity
The undead who have returned can be divided into two large categories depending on whether they had appeared to people in dreams or while awake. They are:

• corporal 3 dimensional – awake who are called revenants; and
• evanescent immaterial beings are known as ghosts – they can be ectoplasms, reflections, or images – rather than being physical, ghosts come only in dreams.

Revenants offer a challenge to the Christian division between the kingdom of the dead and the living. They open a third way with respect to existence beyond the grave. They create a challenge to Catholicism that installed a simple reward  or punishment with three places – hell, purgatory and heaven.

Why Does the Study of Revenants Matter?
Revenants should be understood as far back in time as possible before its mutations and transformations due to the intrusion of the Church. The record of where these events is clearest is in Scandinavian society because Christianity penetrated there much later. More than any other people, Icelanders have preserved sagas that give us foresight of beliefs and practices in other places before the Church disrupted things. Claude’s work seeks to dissipate those shadows by letting the people speak of a bygone age for themselves again. In other countries Christianized earlier and with Christian suppression and the marginalization of paganism, the stories of revenants is difficult to sort out. Therefore, Lecouteux decided to study revenants in the Germanic countries from the 10th to the 13th centuries. In the north there was a transition – co-habitation of pagan and Christian and the coherence of the non-Christian culture were still distinguishable after the 13th century.

Christian Repression and Marginalization
Wanted revenants dead or alive!
Christians want to slam the door on reverence of the ancestors whether they are revenants or ghosts. Christianity encountered in Germany wished to exile the dead to a cemetery around the church starting in the 12th and demons and later became the site where witches were thought held century because of its pagan character.  The mountains became the abode of the fairies their sabbaths. Around 1000 BCE, Burchard of Worms prohibited what was called “singing diabolical songs” as well as playing games and capers in the presence of the dead because they were pagan customs. Revenants were stripped of all physicality. All that really appeared were images, reflections and true copies that would later be called ghosts. Directives served to eliminate the reverence of the dead, a core feature of paganism. Whenever possible the saints replaced the ancestors and liturgical feasts replaced pagan festivals.

Controlling perception
At the same time the causes of the perception of the dead were all nailed down by Christianity. Everything had to come from God. There was no independence for ghosts or reverends. They were either:

• interventions from God in the form of miracles;
• diabolical acts of the devil including the creation of delusions;
• the untrusty nature of the senses due to idolatry or magic; and
• everyday untrustworthiness of the senses.

The theologians who played the most important role in the history of ghosts and revenants are Tertullian and St. Augustine. For the church, the deceased must have a time and a place, and there could be no wandering around. It was difficult for Christians nourished by the Bible and the church fathers to accept that people could reappear after their death. For them they went to either heaven of hell. When purgatory was established in the 13th century, this third place naturally became the residence of the dead who were not resting peacefully. With purgatory, the dead were banished into the beyond. The evolution that transformed revenants and ghosts into souls undergoing punishment for their sins. Please see Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory. 

As for dreams, pagans passed on to the Middle Ages a very elaborate dream decoding system where regular dreams were distinguished from visionary dreams. Under Christianity, this system was reduced to the rank of idolatry and was forbidden by the Church in 789 AD.

Spiritual politics of the Church
Now Lecouteux drew up a brief overview of the means the Church used to resolve the problem of revenants:

• they were discarded and their wandering nature and attributed to it to demons;
• human perception was implicated because the senses had been blinded;
• revenants were stripped of all physicality and became ghosts;
• little by little they were destined to be dismissed as fantasies, illusions or superstitions; and
• Revenants were gradually repressed into the realm of witchcraft.

The Church transformed the evil-doing dead into demons- for whom tutelary spirits and revenants were pagan devils. The harmful dead became trolls. These clerics had an excellent linguistic tool at their exposure. They only had to erase certain portions, details of the story to make the word draugr (living dead) disappear and replace it with troll. History would then concern itself only with the battles between man and a demon. There was a totalitarian desire to put everything in its place – to shut out the world between here and the beyond.

How Many Souls?
For Catholics, people have one soul. But for most of human history all the way back to the shamans, people had at least three. The soul is borrowed from the old Saxon German word “seele.” Soul did not exist in the Norse language. The idea of a single individual soul is foreign to Germanic paganism. Ancient Egypt religion speaks to us about the ka; the Greeks speak of daimon; the Romans tell us that every man has a genius and every woman a Juno.

The root of the belief in more than one soul is squarely painted in shamanistic concepts of the soul. The soul is a triple entity:

• lower soul dwells in the bones and leaves humans only at death;
• the second is not so solidly fixed in the body…it can leave the body during sleep without the sleeper’s awareness; and
• the third soul separates itself from the body at the time of death and appears to humans in the form of ghost.

These texts suggest that there are two ways of the soul leaving the body. One is involuntarily through sickness. The body must be in a critical state in order for the soul to become free. The second way is voluntary – through asceticism such as fasting sleep deprivation, discipline, mortification and exposure to cold.

The soul was more than the spirit. It was perceived as being reserved for ecstatic voyages to the next world. Stories claim that clerics rarely noted the wounds an individual brought back from an ecstatic voyage as a revenant because they didn’t want to see it. For Christians the soul cannot be marked in any way. The clerics wished to make people believe that ecstasy was a uniquely spiritual phenomenon. For pagans the other world was less the world of the gods and more the world of the dead. It is the reservoir of potentialities of each individual and each family. To the pre-Christian mindset, sleep permits the free movement of genies, spirits and doubles where distance is no obstacle. As long as the corpse of the dead had not completely decomposed, the double does not disappear. When the double is absent the body is extremely vulnerable. It must not be moved or touched or it would lead to death.
There is at least three types of souls in the Scandinavian sagas.

• Fylga
• Hamr
• Hugr

The fylga literally means female follower. She appears as a tutelary genie attached to the man and his family. A person can have several fylgas. It is closely linked to destiny in the Scandinavian tradition. Its primary mission is to protect the person to whom she has attached herself. It has a corporeity and it appears that the animal nature of the

She is linked to sleep and trance and they can travel. She cannot act physically. The fylga takes leave of a man before death while the hamr (see below) remains attached to the body until total disintegration

The hamr is the physical double. Certain individuals were born with the ability to double themselves. However, when the alter ego travels it runs risks, most notably that of not being able to reenter the body. The physical double—hamr is skilled at metamorphosis. The hugr roughly corresponds to the animus and spiritus. It is more or less independent of individuals. The following is a table which contrasts pagan practices with Christian interpretations.

Pagan practice	Category of comparison	Christian Interpretation
A person is able to double themselves	Belief in doubles	An evil spirit takes him over
A person isolates himself from the community and has a vision quest	Meaning of out-of-the-way places	A demon throws them in an out-of-the-way place and abandons him there as if he were dead
Their double takes the form of a wolf	Place of the wolf	A demon puts themselves inside of the wolf
The person knows he has a wolf double at his disposal	Knowledge of this process	The human believes the wolf is an external being
The double reenters the world	Re-entrance into the physical world	The human is possessed and the holy man frees him by Christian exorcism

Pagan Resistance
As hard as the Catholic Church tried, its hold was less complete than it was generally assumed. What is not true is that paganism disappeared because it was superstitious. Like any sacred tradition paganism had its superstitious wing and its more reasonable wing. The policy of the Church was to destroy pagan images while taking over and consecrating the temples.

In spite of everything, paganism could still seep into the spiritual landscape because it fulfilled certain religious functions for which Christianity was not concerned with:

• how to spur their husbands to more love;
• how love can be activated or reactivated;
• how sickness in loved ones can be cured;
• processes for venting hatred on enemies;
• how can childless produce children; and
• how to prevent a plague.

19th Century Decline of the Ancestors

The denser the communication network, the stronger the industrialization process became and the more widely pagan beliefs became marginalized. In addition to Christianity, breakup of the family unit during the 19th century helped to lead to less interest in the fate of the ancestors. Today a dead man is just that, a dead man and his wishes were no longer important. In England, the good man’s field was allowed to survive into the 17th century. This was a piece of land that was never plowed or planted and was left instead to be left fallow. No one harbored any doubt that it was reserved for some spirit or demon.

• The dead were expelled into the underworld;
• their decedents no longer felt responsible for meeting the requests of the dead ancestors; and
• The family no longer included the dead and the living in a single community.

Industrialization dealt a blow by shattering of the old familial structures and uprooting individuals. Oral transmission is weakened further. People no longer died at home surrounded by family, but in hospitals and hospices from where they are taken to stone gardens on the periphery of the community of the living and are no longer huddled around a church. They are no longer cherished as before. Cemeteries are no longer meeting places where people go to share the latest news with the dead. People would sit in the cemeteries when important decisions were made. The door to the otherworld has closed and the beyond keeps our elders for eternity.

The Rise of Neopaganism
The Catholic Church and industrial capitalist society did not have the last word. The Romantic movement of the 19th century rebelled against both Christianity and the industrial revolution. Poets, artists and intellectuals sought to bring back Pan and pantheism. At the end of the 19th century there was great interest in renaissance magic and Western mystery tradition. This continued into the 20th century. After World War II interest in witchcraft and covens emerged first in Britain in the 1950s and then in the United States in the 1960s. Today Neopaganism is thriving in both countries.

The Bitter Totalitarian Harvest  of the Catholic Middle Ages

Catholic totalitarianism attempted to control people by anxiety, fear and hatred of life. Let us return to the sixteen characteristics of paganism at the beginning of this article and try to understand the Church. In the first place there is a hatred of life. There is a condemnation of the celebration of leisure, feasting, saturating the senses and sex. Anything this-worldly is forbidden or looked at suspiciously. Secondly, there is a radical separation between spirituality and the material world. The use of charms or hallucinogens is condemned. When pagans buried their dead and feasted on the Day of the Dead, they left food and implements for the dead. This says that for pagans the veil between this world and the next is fluid, a matter of degree rather than kind. For the Catholic Church there is an absolute separation. Thirdly, the heads of the Catholic Church were obsessed with control. They could not tolerate any kind of independent flow between human beings and other spiritual beings. Soothsaying, sorcery, and the use of charms all suggest that spirituality is horizontal, plural, competitive and chaotic. The Church insisted that people narrow their focus to a single God and have faith that there is a time and place for everything. People go to heaven, hell or purgatory. They do not wander around independently. The Church insisted on having faith in an invisible God far away. Altered states of consciousness were only permissible if it made themselves miserable (flogging, sleep deprivation) in the process. Finally, Catholicism insisted that there could only be one soul rather than three, moving in and out of doubles. One soul stayed in one place until told to move on.

Why did people tolerate such a miserable set of beliefs and practices that the Catholic Church advocated? For one thing, the material life in the Middle Ages was difficult. Food production was erratic, disease was rampant, travel was difficult and feudal lords were selfish with had no social vision. The Catholic Church simply presented a spiritual cosmology that explained why people were miserable but the spiritual authorities wanted also to control the peasants and artisans because of the material  resources they provided. On the other hand, pagan life in Greece and Rome was better for both artisans and peasants. It makes sense that a more life-affirming way of sacred life would go with better material circumstances.

Conclusion
I began this article by naming thirteen characteristics of what Cold War anti-communists accuse the Russians of under Stalin. After dismissing this as ridiculous I argue that the Catholic Church over the centuries is a much better candidate for a totalitarian rule. My claim in this article is the way Catholics treated pagans in the Middle Ages have totalitarian seeds. After naming sixteen characteristics of paganism that the Catholic Church objected to, I focus my article on three: return of the dead, veneration of the ancestors, and the plurality of souls. I describe how the Church’s obsession with controlling people insisted that there was to be no open gateway between life and death. The dead could not return. Instead they were assigned either heaven, hell or purgatory. So too, people did not have three souls but one a single one. There are no souls wandering around in astral life or the underworld. When pagan people claimed the contrary they were told they were deluded or fooled by the devil. Pagan beliefs became demonic.

I close my article by claiming that the Church’s attempt at totalitarian control was only partly successful and I argue for the loopholes in the Catholic assessment of people’s needs that allowed pagan beliefs to continue to survive on the margins of the Middle Ages. I also point out the rise of Neopaganism out of Romanticism created a renaissance of interest in paganism that has expanded through today. I ask why people allowed themselves to commit themselves to such an otherworldly, life-negating, hateful, narrow set of beliefs and practices. My answer is that at least as far as the Middle Ages it was the difficulty of material life. We could ask why people continued to let themselves be controlled by the Catholic Church even when life got better in the High Middle Ages. The answer is partly that the Church became less life-denying which made it possible to stay in the Church. In fact, it was the materialistic nature of the Catholic Church that partly explains the emergence Luther’s and Calvin’s protestant opposition.

FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.