Showing posts sorted by relevance for query ANIMISTIC CATHOLICISM. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query ANIMISTIC CATHOLICISM. Sort by date Show all posts

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

ANIMISTIC CATHOLICISM

Noche Buena: How Filipinos celebrate Christmas Eve with a traditional family feast


This file photo shows a folk procession called the Lubenas in Philippines' Pampanga province. (Gerald Gloton)

Samantha Beltran
December 24, 2024
ARAB NEWS

Noche Buena is the dinner that follows the last evening mass of the Christmas season

In Philippines’ Pampanga province, some Christmas celebrations take place from Dec. 24 to Jan. 2

MANILA: For many Filipinos, the time-honored traditions of Noche Buena, or Christmas Eve, is the most awaited part of this holiday season, when dinner tables across the country are filled with a hearty selection of traditional dishes.

Noche Buena, which is Spanish for “the good night,” is the dinner that follows the last evening mass of the season, known as misa de gallo or simbang gabi.

The multi-generational feast features staples like queso de bola, a ball-shaped Edam cheese wrapped in red wax coating, or lechon, the popular roasted pig dish that often gets the spotlight in most Filipino festivities.


But it is the classic hot chocolate that Noelle Lejano looks forward to the most, as her grandmother makes it extra special and only at this time of the year.

“Hot chocolate holds a deeper sentimental value because my lola (grandmother) makes it only once a year, every Noche Buena. It’s the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had, and it makes the celebration feel extra special and nostalgic,” the 24-year-old writer and brand strategist from Manila told Arab News.

Her family mixes it up between classic and more modern fare for the occasion, from the tried-and-tested favorite Christmas ham to a charcuterie board that she makes with her mother.

“These dishes aren’t just food — they’re traditions that bring us together and make the holiday feel like home,” Lejano said.

“Noche Buena is a highlight, especially with everyone gathering together and making the rounds to greet and hug each other as the clock strikes midnight. To pass the time before midnight, we play games, which keep the energy alive and the laughter flowing.”

Noche Buena is also celebrated in Latin America, reflecting a unique mix of Catholic traditions, indigenous folk practices, and more recent American influences, the late food historian Doreen Fernandez wrote in her 1994 book “Tikim: Essays on Filipino Food and Culture.”

For people in Pampanga province, about 80 km north of Manila, the deep-seated Catholic and Spanish influences are reflected in their culinary fare.

In Gerald Gloton’s household, Noche Buena is a time to indulge in their provincial roots, which includes serving sopas, or Filipino chicken soup, from the morning of the 24th all the way into Christmas morning.

They also serve an array of other beloved dishes, such as the ube halaya, a rich purple jam made from boiled and mashed ube and thickened with milk, rice cakes, and menudo, a stewed pork and tomato dish.

“We gather for sumptuous meals, exchange gifts, and attend Mass to celebrate the birth of Christ, reinforcing our shared faith and family values,” Gloton said.

The celebration of Noche Buena, which comes after Midnight Mass, has been “customary and required” for food anthropologist and writer Ruston Banal, who was raised in a devout Catholic household and is also from Pampanga.

“It’s significant because, in my situation, it marks the moment when the entire family gets together. Some of my siblings are already employed elsewhere, but they still make an effort to honor this custom by coming home,” he said.

In his hometown of Guagua, Christmas is an extended celebration that begins from Dec. 24 all the way to Jan. 2, where celebrations are centered on food.

“It’s all about the food; some of my relatives even spend a lot of money to prepare a lavish feast for other relatives who visit us,” he said.

Every year, the occasion turns into “a quiet competition among family members,” as they try to make the greatest dishes, ranging from bringhe, a local version of the Spanish paella made with sticky rice, chicken, sausage, vegetables and coconut milk, to kaldereta, a hearty tomato and liver stew made with leghorn chicken with carrots, potatoes, and bell peppers.

“Food is an extension of themselves,” Banal said. “(They cook like) a person in love, giving it their all.”

Monday, January 13, 2025

ANIMISTIC CATHOLICISM

Filipino Catholics pray for good health and peace in huge procession venerating Jesus statue

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The procession marks the feast of Jesus Nazareno and is a major annual Catholic event in Asia.



Joeal Calupitan and Teresa Cerojano
January 13, 2025

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — At least 1.8 million mostly barefoot Catholic worshippers marched Thursday in an annual procession in the Philippines that venerates a centuries-old black statue of Jesus. Some said they prayed for good health for their families, an end to tensions in the South China Sea, and for incoming U.S. President Donald Trump to be kinder to Filipino immigrants.

The procession marks the feast of Jesus Nazareno and is a major annual Catholic event in Asia. The image was previously called the Black Nazarene, but church officials appealed for a change, saying the former name was not founded in history and evoked a racial slur.

The procession in Manila began before dawn Thursday, lasting nearly 21 hours as it crawled along the 6-kilometer (3.7-mile) route. The statue was finally brought inside the Minor Basilica and National Shrine of Jesus Nazareno, also known as Quiapo Church, at 1:25 a.m. on Friday.

Brig. Gen. Anthony Aberin, director of the capital region’s police, said the crowd was estimated at around 1.8 million at one point in the afternoon.

Last year, at least 2 million devotees joined the 15-hour procession, with some estimates of the crowd as high as over 6 million.

Reverend Father Robert Arellano, a spokesperson of Quiapo Church, said this year’s procession is slower compared to last year because of an increase in the number of participants and some jostling devotees climbing the glass-covered carriage housing the image.

Shouts of “Viva, viva,” rang out as the image passes by, with devotees clutching at ropes pulling the carriage and raising white towels in jubilation. The procession typically draws massive numbers of largely poor Catholics who pray for the sick and a better life.

Gaspar Espinocilla, a 56-year-old Manila city employee and a devotee of Jesus Nazareno for the last 20 years, said he is praying for his family, including his sister who has ovarian cancer. He is also praying for an end to tensions in the West Philippines Sea, a part of the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines, where China has been harassing Filipino fishermen and coast guard vessels.

“I hope China will ease up on us, they cannot seize everything as theirs,” said Espinocilla, who was wearing a maroon T-shirt printed with the face of Jesus Nazareno. “It is ours, not theirs.”

Renato Reyes, a garbage scavenger who has been a Jesus Nazareno devotee for more than three decades, said he prays for a better life for his family, for the Philippines to be free from calamities, as well as for wars overseas to end. He also said he will include in his prayers Filipinos who may be affected by Trump’s planned mass deportation of illegal immigrants.

“I hope they will not implement that because our countrymen are there just to earn a living for their families,” he added.

Officials said some 14,000 police and plainclothes officers were deployed, along with soldiers, fire fighters, prison staff and volunteers. Many nearby roads were closed and cell phone signals were blocked.

More than a dozen devotees were seen being carried away on stretchers. The Philippine Red Cross said that 467 people were given first aid or other medical assistance for mostly minor complaints like dizziness, difficulty breathing and nausea. At least 15 patients had to be brought to hospital. Police reported 604 people suffering minor injuries as of Thursday afternoon.

The statue of Jesus carrying the cross was brought to the Philippines from Mexico on a galleon in 1606 by Spanish missionaries. The ship that carried it caught fire, but the charred statue survived, according to some accounts. Church historians, however, said the statue’s color owes to the fact that it was carved out of mesquite wood, which darkens as it ages.

Many devotees believe the statue’s endurance, from fires and earthquakes through the centuries and intense bombings during World War II, is a testament to its miraculous power.

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

Thursday, November 17, 2022

From Pagan Animism to Alienation

How Monotheism and Capitalism Create Disenchantment

Orientation: the politics of the sacred

The word “pagan” is one of those words that has been worked over by monotheists and secular rulers so that it has many meanings, mostly  negative. This has been the case except for the past fifty years when Neopaganism has made a comeback, thanks mostly to the women’s movement. In his book Being Pagan, Rhyd Wildermuth writes that:

Being pagan means being of the land, rural villager, rustic. In modern terms, being a peasant or being a country bumpkin as opposed to the city (39) …

Rhyd tells us that Frankish or German people were called “heathens” by missionaries, meaning “dweller of the hearth”. Heathen lands were the most uncultivated places not suited for large-scale farming such as moors, scrubland and sparse forests.  This land is better for small grazing animals like sheep and goats or for hunting small game. Because of the lack of large scale land productivity, politically it tended to remain independent of urban control far longer than other agricultural people who became dependent on cities.Heathens also more easily resisted Christianization and were made fun of by Christian and urban people because of this resistance.

In addition, my own stereotypical picture of pagans is that we are:

  • Materialistic
  • Overly sensual
  • Have sacred presences that are carnal and undignified
  • Violent
  • Racist (heathens or Nazi’s)
  • Uncivilized

Rhyd writes that when people ask him what being Pagan means he points to the flooding, the droughts, the melting icecaps, the extinctions and the plagues in the world today. He writes that in pagan animist societies people took care of the land because being an animist means everything is alive and nothing is inanimate. If we lived as animists, terrible ecological circumstances would never have been possible.

When the Christians strove to take over Celtic lands, they created stories by which old pagan presences were conquered, driven out or demonized by magical or miraculous means. The stories of Graoully, Coulobre and La Tarasque are examples and these stories were widespread in France, Spain and Germany.

Scope of this article

Rhyd Wildermuth in his book Being Pagan outlines a high contrast between our alienated existence in monotheist, industrial capitalist society while taking us back in time to when we are not alienated, in pagan animistic societies. He does not specify what kind of societies these are. My best guess is he was mostly talking about hunter-gatherers, various kinds of horticulturalists and simple, small-scale farming societies. He contrasts differences in how time and place was conceived. He shows us how the treatment of the land, including fruits, vegetable, trees, plants and animals was radically different in animistic societies

One of his most interesting contrasts was how the body and mind were thought to be related. He points out that in industrial capitalist societies the mind drives the body. In animistic societies bodies drove minds. More on this later. In current times, those who are monotheists believe they have a soul that transcends death. What did pagans prior to monotheism think about this? For them, connection to the ancestors was part of the same ecological networks that connects us to rocks, rivers, plants and animals. Today, at least in Yankeedom, ancestors don’t matter. What happened and why did it happen?

Rhyd says that pagans do not believe in the supernatural. But if pagans populate the sacred worlds with gods, goddesses, earth spirits and ghosts how can they not be supernatural?

Years ago Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that language is an organ of perception. If animists think that everything is alive, how does this translate into language? We will see how it affects the proportion of nouns and verbs used, along with the proportion of tenses to indicate the past, present and future.

Because we live in a global age, all sacred traditions have to face the problem of mixing. Monotheism has been impacted by globalization, but Christian monotheism in Europe has a clear developmental trajectory: Catholicism and Protestantism. For pagans the problem is deeper because Neopaganism has had about 150 years of eclecticism. Its history has been broken up, gone underground and resumed. Should Neopagans mix with native traditions in the United States or in African societies? Should Neopagans incorporate Shintoism? Some say this is “cultural appropriation” while others say mixing traditions has always been part of polytheism.

For most of this article I will be analyzing the book Being Pagan. However, I will also be adding my own material to fill out his argument, and hopefully make it better.

Process “becoming” philosophy vs being “static” philosophy

When verbs become nouns

Rhyd points out that every known language has two primary kinds of words: nouns and verbs. They also have two secondary categories, modifiers, which are adjectives and adverbs.

  • A noun is the name of something specific
  • Verbs describe actions
  • Adjectives describe a noun
  • Adverbs describe an action

He points out that languages spoken by indigenous peoples and by ancient cultures use more verbs than nouns – especially animist cultures. Modern languages like English and French, both products of monotheism, employ more nouns than verbs. In addition, every language has a certain proportion of words devoted to describing tenses: the past, present and future.

For industrial capitalist societies, once the present is over it becomes past, and pasts are connected to things like documents, statues, relics. For animist cultures, everything is alive and moving. The present tense is part of a never-ending act of becoming. For Western monotheists today, there are people who personally are lost in the past or the future. The inability to concentrate on the present is so bad that people take meditation classes to force them to live in the present. Animist cultures have no problem living in the present.

Furthermore, it is no accident that industrial capitalist societies are more “thing”-oriented because they have writing. Writing freezes thoughts into words and words become objects. In oral animistic cultures what people say is more in the service of social-psychological interaction. On the other hand, thoughts have a short shelf life when the conversation is over. With the introduction of writing, language becomes more static and words become things frozen on a page.

Time of the moon

We are all familiar with the calendar and tracking our time in relation to days of the week? But how far back does this go? For most of the history of social evolution it was the light of the moon and its  rhythm of the new moon, half-moon and full moon which set the course, the patterns and meaning of everyday life. For pagans, the moon isn’t only visible at night, but with careful training we can see it is also visible during the day. Activities were tracked according to changes on and during moons cycles over the course of a month. Rhyd points out that the origin of the word month comes from the moon. In terms of tracking human time, at the beginning there was the month, long before there were days of the week.

There is nothing spiritual or supernatural about the moon. The tides come and go twice a day, pulled by the gravity of the moon. The tides sweep in and out daily n rhythmic patterns, twice out twice in, pulled by the moon’s gravity. The moon has different phases. During the full moon or the new moon the tide sweeps further inland and returns further from the shore than at other times. Knowing the phases of the moon is a very practical affair. It tells us when we are more likely to find fish that might be scattered on the shore. All an animist would have to do is look at the moon’s face to know when food might be more plentiful and what the conditions were best for a boat entering the ocean.

Research shows that many animals are more active during the night of the full moon. People sleep later during the full moon and longer during the new moon. Before the invention of electric lighting which enabled humanity to have the night permanently lit, people who hunted did so by using the light of the moon. Early pagans knew which phase the moon was in and they acted accordingly.

Rhyd describes how this impacts him personally:

I always feel my absolute lowest when the new moon is new and just before it is new… Noting how certain things are easiest to complete as the moon wanes, because I know that I am often more tired and feel less intuitive during new moon, I try to avoid scheduling too much for that time and instead try to rest. I find my life much more grounded and anxiety is rarely something that can overwhelm me. (22-23)

Knowledge of the moon only appears as superstitious to people living in industrial capitalist countries because they are those who are blinded by city lights, and the lack of need to hunt and fish for food. They have stopped paying attention to the moon. Until the mechanistic phase of clocks, we scheduled activities looking at the moon as well as the time we go to sleep. We city Neopagans are encouraged to look at the moon, find out where it is and what phase it is in, as well as where it has arisen and where it has set. Like anything else, it takes practice for our eyes to become sensitized to the moon and its movements. In modern city-life these sensitivities are deadened. For us, each night seems like the next and we go to sleep at the same time regardless  of the moon or whether it is wintertime or summertime. We have lost our rhythm.

Cyclic time to clock and linear time

It is not just the moon that waxes and wanes. The yearly seasons change throughout the years depending on the zones around the earth. Plants and animals follow the seasons, going through developmental cycles of growth and death. Different animist cultures follow suit, dividing their cycle of the year according to the temperate or polar regions. Those who have four seasons in temperate zones divide their years into four quarters. The “time of land” tells us when berries or tomatoes are ripest. On the other hand, upper-middle class people living in industrial capitalist societies, especially Yankeedom, have come to expect the same fruits and vegetables to be available all year, regardless of the season.

Rhyd  says the land has character just like human temperaments do. She is gruff, grizzled, hearty, stoic, or lush. The combination of minerals are different in some places than they are elsewhere. She is shaped by the rocks, the wind, the cold, heat and the humidity. Rhyd points out local lands themselves have a unique taste. Whether wild or domesticated, those same plants and animals taste differently depending on the quality of land they are grown and live in. By saying pagans are of the land it just means understanding basic ecological dynamics: how it works on humanity and how humanity works on it.

This natural time was the enemy of Protestants anxious to abolish the seasonal holidays, and capitalists who wanted to discipline workers to punch a time clock and work long hours regardless of the seasons or the phases of the moon. They wanted disciplined workers to accept clock time. In animist time, when people worked, they also slept during the day. Even as late as in early modern Europe, when artisans were given an order by merchants, they took breaks when they wanted to. They controlled the pace of their work. In the early Industrial Age capitalists were insensitive to workers being sick or tired. If they didn’t continue working they would be replaced.

Keeping time has a long history deep into ancient civilizations. They used the sun dials, water clocks and hour-glasses. But these were not precise and they were not used by artisans or peasants. Clocks were used by the upper classes as a luxury item. They were used by alchemists in cooking the elements or by astrologers for casting the horoscope of great political figures. Bell towers were used to remind people to pray or to announce foreign invasions or fires.

In addition, as cities rose and farming declined the drive to see time cyclically waned. Cyclic time was replaced by linear time. Capitalists hate the past because the past is a reminder that their system is historical. Linear time is laid out like a straight line moving from past to present to future. Once the past is over, unlike cyclic time, it never returns. But capitalists need to display the future as always open, and where anything can happen. This feeds into the ideology that any person can become a capitalist if they have the right psychological state.

Becoming Body

One of the most interesting arguments in this book is the relationship between the body and the mind. Rhyd says we do not have bodies, we are becoming bodies. This means that:

  • There is no getting out of being a body
  • We are becoming bodies. This connects to the difference between process and static philosophy that we touched on earlier.

For example, Rhyd points out that hunger and thirst were not something you were or had, but something you did. Being thirsty is passive state, a condition that needs to be resolved. It is something that has happened to you. On the other hand, thirsting for water is an active state. It is not happening to you. It is something you try to do something about. But then you expend energy at work and you become thirsty again. The body is constantly reproducing itself with needs, satisfaction and new needs.

How we came to have bodies

Just as we have externalized and reified our language, we have externalized our bodies and separated them from ourselves, making them something we have rather than something we are. This negative attitude about the body is not unique to Western monotheism. In the East we hear we are “trapped in the body” or we are “a prison of flesh” that needs to be escaped from. Occultists claim we “are inhabiting different bodies”. Teenage girls “hate their bodies”. To say we have a body implies that there can be a state without one. What’s left? Minds without bodies, a product of patriarchal sacred traditions, not paganism.

According to Wildermuth, the reasons for this anti-body orientation include the development of Christianity with the separation of the soul from the body. Secondly, Descartes added to this by claiming the mind can be separated from the body. Lastly, capitalism insisted on the discipline of the body during capitalist production to conform to the pump and lever in Early Modern Europe. Later, human bodies are disciplined again as a reflection of the complex machines and the steam engine in the second half of the 19th century. In the early 20th century the bodies of workers were subjected to the time and motion studies of Taylorism.

Ecological networks are bodies

In pagan understanding, everything that exists is in terms of living bodies. Ecological settings are bodies too. Having a body is like seeing a body mechanically, seeing a body as a collection of separate things. Imagining having bodies has negative ecological consequences. Seeing the forest as a collection of separate beings rather than a body leads to:

  • Killing off of species of insects
  • Hunting too many of the birds and animals
  • Felling too many trees
  • Damming a river or taking too many fish from a lake which can turn the entire system into something unlivable for everything there

Doing this to our ecology is like removing an organ from a human body and expecting it to work right. It is only possible for us to do such destructive things to the natural world because we do not see it as body, but rather separate things unrelated to each other. Rhyd tells us that:

Over the last 100 years alone, 543 species of terrestrial vertebrates (reptiles, birds and mammals) have gone extinct worldwide, a rate of disappearance that would have historically occurred  over 10,000 years. That is, the rate of extinction is occurring 1,000 times faster for such beings now. (91-92)

Alienation from trees

Rhyd points out that oaks are special trees for pagan people. Oaks are more likely than shorter species of trees to be hit by lightning and are more likely to survive a lightning strike. It is no accident that oaks were associated with the gods of thunder. Oaks also protected other trees from storms and high winds. Many oaks grow very old, outlasting the rise and fall of civilizations. When oaks die they are put to sacred use as shrines or temples by Celtic and Germanic peoples  An oak struck by lightning became a political ritual site, often becoming a place for major decisions. The importance of oaks to pagans was not lost on monotheists who ordered the cutting down of oaks dedicated to Thor to make the conversion of pagan peoples to Christianity easier. The Christians then built Cathedrals from the oaks.

Alienation from other animals

In my diet, much of my protein comes from eating chicken and fish. I know two women vegans who insisted I watch documentaries of what goes on in slaughter houses and chicken factories. I watched part of one and then turned it off. I didn’t want to know my eating habits were linked to so much suffering, but I continue to buy chicken at the supermarket. I’m confident I am not alone. We buy meat in packages at the supermarket but we rarely know anything about the process by which these dead animals arrived there. Rhyd points out that the flesh of these beings:

is processed by machines into forms that would be unrecognizable to people even a hundred years ago. Cows, pigs, chickens live in settings that look much more like factories than the pastoral landscapes. (93)

Contrary to all this, animist views see all living forms to include not just plants and animals, but rocks and rivers are also connected to the ancestors. Animists are engaged in reciprocal exchange of gratitude. When humans killed an animal, they apologized to the animal and made sure that future hunts were conducted in ways that did not thin out the species they hunted. This contrasts to monotheists who tell humanity we have “domain over nature. It is there for us to do what we want”. It is easy to see how this domain would directly link up to the scientific exploration of the 17th and 18th centuries and capitalist exploitation of land through colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The importance of ancestry for pagans

Today, especially in the United States, ancestry is not anything that is taken seriously. For the most part, people can’t trace their genealogy beyond their grandparents. Sure, there is new interest in tracing genealogical trees but in my opinion this is a fad. Whatever value and meaning this has, it is certainly not pursued with the same level of building a serious sacred connection. Most Yankees do not hope to have their ancestors come to them in their dreams, in their homes or giving them direction. Our relationship with ancestors is thin. In part, this is because we didn’t live near them because capitalist enclosures drive communities apart. This has been widened even further in the 20th century by capitalists. Geographical industrial specialization drives people to work in different parts of the country. In addition, the rate of change in industrial capitalist societies is so fast that the wisdom of the ancestors dries up quickly because the world has changed so much between generations. As gaps between generations grow, political differences emerge as to how to handle the change. Ancestry is marginalized as race and class identities replace them.

Pagans on the other hand, because they were not displaced, lived in the same location for many generations and they could trace their ancestors well beyond their grandparents. Secondly, because the rate of change was slow, the knowledge of the ancestors was respected knowledge that did not change much between generations. This means their politics are similar. Lastly, since tribal societies did not have classes and groups, ethnic composition was similar. There was no class or race identity to compete with ancestry. In many cultures a common truth is that the dead speak to us in our sleep.

Scale of pagan presences

According to Rhyd Wildermuth, in most pagan societies there are four levels of scale.

At the bottom and the smallest level there are shrines to the home. On a larger scale there are rituals to the ancestors. On the third level there are community festivals which include arts and crafts. Lastly, there are offerings to a god a few times a year. It’s important to understand that these scales are not hierarchically organized. In other words, the gods do not control the community rituals, ancestors or shrine presences. What is true is that they are organized in terms of the frequency with which they are enacted, beginning with the shrines in the home. In animistic societies when something is strange or has gone wrong, the spirits are not seen as evil but in the wrong place. The job of the shaman is to understand the problem and resolve it.

What happens when monotheism arises? Shrines are marginalized and in the case of Catholicism, replaced by pictures of saints in the house. Ancestors lose their connection to the rocks, rivers, plants and animals along with their wisdom. Community rituals and outdoor places are replaced with patron saints. The pagan gods, whether dragons or giants, are demonized and replaced by a single monotheistic deity.

Are spirits, ancestors and gods internal to us or external?

The key to understanding the difference between animalism and monotheism centers on where the sacred source originates. For animistic people, consciousness is diffused so that spirits, ancestors and even gods are inside our psyche and project outward. This is based on the unconscious intelligence of the body. Under monotheism, our alienation from the body is an important obstacle to our understanding of magic. As a result, for monotheists both spirits and God are external, objective and have little to do with our psychology

Magic is the unconscious intelligence of the body

Rhyd has a very interesting although strange definition of magick. He argues that magick is the unconscious perceptual wisdom of the body that is constantly reacting to the real world, which we have forgotten to notice in our modern world. Our bodies are constantly steering us in everyday life. When we speak of the unconscious, partly what we really mean is everything that our body knows and senses.

A very simple example is body memory. It is a process by which you find your way through a dark room that you know very well. Another example is being able to drive down a familiar road where your motor skills take you home while you are zoning out on music. Another example is if you are playing the outfield and you know how far back to go for a fly ball just by hearing the sound of the bat. In the case of baseball, that body knowledge has never been consciously processed. We know things we don’t realize we know. A pagan definition of magick is aligning consciousness to the body in order to enact change. Consciousness is the servant of the body. It is the directed focus of the body. Magick means giving attention to what the body is telling us and acting consciously in accordance with it.  Our conscious attention, including our minds or our egos, is not the true seat of knowledge.

Meditation is not magick. Rhyd says:

In most forms of meditation a person stills their thoughts in order to have better control over consciousnessand the ways in which it was directed. (158)

Magick is not about quieting our thoughts in a disembodied way. It is about listening to how those thoughts are related to the sensations of our body.

Eudaemons and genii’s vs the eternal soul and permanent genius

In animistic societies people recognized that benevolent protective presences entered into the person at birth and left the body at death. Even as late as the time of the Greeks such presences were called eudaemons. The Romans called them genii’s and made shrines for them. This was too much commotion for monotheists, and St. Augustine replaced these fluid presences with a noun like eternal soul. Long after monotheism, in 20th century intelligence testing, we have the same noun – like genius – which is permanently attached to the eternal soul. For pagans, people were not geniuses themselves but had a particularly helpful genii to whom they listened.

Left and Right Sacred

In the early days of animism, from hunter-gatherers 100,000 years ago up to the Bronze Age civilization of 5,000 years ago, animists kept to their local identity and did not try to mix cultures. The great civilizations of the ancient world certainly traded enough so that pagan people became aware of other pagan people. Did they keep separate or did they mix? Their answer was always to mix and to synthesize. With the rise of globalization, the knowledge across cultures became even more intense. However, in the last 50 years, Neopaganism arose as part of the women’s movement. Because Neopaganism has a broken and suppressed history rather than a single stream leading all the way back as monotheists do, it has to determine what it will mix and match with. A new problem emerged for Neopaganism as the New Age emerged in England and the United States. A significant number of New Age organizations were small capitalists who have overridden Neopagan resistance to commercialization.  New Age organizers have offered people courses that have drawn from native cultures (from the United States and Africa) and have turned a nice profit. Some native cultures have fought back against this. So pagan mixing cross-culturally has become politicized because of the ravenous nature of capitalists for profits.

There are two tendencies within paganism. Right-wing pagans think that the sacred should be orderly, that there should be separation between the sacred and the secular and the sacred traditions should be kept pure, based on exclusion and supposed genetic ancestry. These are represented by far-right groups who are nationalist, some neo-Nazis. They say white people should only involve themselves with European gods.

The left-wing pagans care less about order and are more interested in continuing the historical paganistic mixing. The socialist wing is very aware of the exploitation of cultural appropriation but they don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. They want to trust spontaneously mixing, multiplying and adding. They do not want to keep the sacred and secular separate, but are committed to expanding the sacred into the secular. We do this, not because we want an animistic theocracy, but because sacred pagan life will challenge the capitalistic control over secular life.

What is ironic is the so-called social justice movements that demand that cultures don’t mix because they think mixing is inherently exploitative. Yet they wind up on the same side as the right-wing sacred pagans. They also want to keep things pure but for different reasons than right-wing pagans.

Criticisms

I do not disagree with anything that was said in Being Pagan. However, the contrast between rural tribal paganism and monotheism and capitalism is too severe and some transitions need to be at least suggested. For example, there is nothing said about the city paganism of the Greeks and Romans, the Alexandrians of North Africa or the city magick of Renaissance Italy. At least a few pages of some of the differences between city and rural paganism would have been very helpful along with some references. This is especially important  since today the overwhelming number of Neopagans live in cities.

As I said earlier, the kind of animism described is overwhelmingly tribal. But in between tribal societies and industrial societies are agricultural states where the goddesses and gods predominate. Had this been included, there would be an evolutionary sense of movement from animism to industrial capitalism. As it stands now, Rhyd’s description of alienation would have come about gradually. Without that alienation seems to come out of nowhere. A few  pages about the polytheism of agricultural states would have thickened history and minimized abrupt changes.

Third, it was disappointing to me to have the word “god” introduced along with land spirits and ancestors and used interchangeably. Typically, the word “god” is used to indicate a degree of power that is more powerful than ancestors or land spirits or nature nymphs, yet this distinction is left out. A good example is the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses who were superior to humanity in scope and scale. Why introduce the word god at all unless it was used to refer to something different than other sacred presences?

Fourth, In his book All That is Sacred is Profaned, Rhyd claims to be a Marxist. His purpose is to introduce Marxism to Pagans. But in Being Pagan there is no mention of Marxism. Given that Marxism denies the ontological existence of a spiritual world, it would have been helpful to explain somewhere, either in the preface or an epilogue, how he squares a Marxist denial of the sacred world with the paganism he espouses in Being Pagan, especially in his chapter “The Fire of Meaning”.

Fifth, the definition of magick is limited to tapping into the unconscious wisdom of the body. This is an important addition to pagan practice. But why call it magick? Why not call it “body” knowledge? Furthermore, magick is often defined as changing consciousness through the use of imagination along with saturating the senses though the use of theatre and the art as in “Tree of Life” magick. There is no mention of any of this.

Lastly, ritual descriptions are disappointingly skimpy and it makes it seem as if all pagan rituals are private. This ignores the fact that most pagans practice magick in groups. There should be at least some description of group rituals to see how his animism would be practiced.• First published at  Socialist Planning Beyond CapitalismFacebookTwitter

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. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.

Friday, March 22, 2024

 

Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part II

Summary of Part I 

The second part of my article focuses on how monotheistic beliefs and dramatization have the same parallels in nationalization processes. The categories include the destruction of intermediary institutions, the commitment to expansion and the importance of both origins and future destiny in history as opposed to mythology. In both nationalism and monotheism founders are mythologized. Both nationalism and monotheism use the arts (painting, music and literature) for altering states of consciousness.

Coming Attractions

In this article we will be discussing the social-psychological and psychological techniques by which both monotheism and nationalism promote loyalty. These include means of transmission (writing as opposed to oral), how social time (holidays) is marked throughout the year as well as individual time (rites of passage). We find that marking geography (territory and cityscapes) is crucial to both monotheism and nationalism. Each demands self-sacrifice, either as religious martyrs or soldiers. Each requires a conversion process. Membership is usually lifetime. Each has processes of exclusion and its members are purified through wars. Membership is sustained over time through fear of being exiled.

Next, I show that both nationalism and monotheism support individualism (as opposed to collectivism) for different reasons. I provide six reasons why each supports individualism. Lastly, I provide two qualifications. First, I pose the question of why the monotheistic religion of Islam is not included. After all, Islam began as a world religion hundreds of years before the rise of nation-states. It would seem to have had plenty of time to connect to the emergence of nation-states around the world. Why didn’t it? Secondly, in the 21st century we have a nation-state that is very powerful (India) that is founded on Hinduism, a polytheistic rather than a monotheistic religion. How do I explain that?

Marking Time: Special Occasions 

The ability to recognize patterns is one of the adaptive skills that allowed the human species to survive in competition with other species. We live most of our everyday lives as problem solvers. But at the same time we need to be socialized to rise, metaphorically, from the ground level and examine long-term patterns to assess where we have been and where we are going.

In pagan traditions, sacred patterns involve the changing of the seasons. In Catholicism they include Christmas day, Easter, Lent, feast days and saints’ days. At the same time, at the micro level, the rites of passage in the life of an individual are linked to spiritual traditions through the sacraments. In Catholicism, the sacraments include baptism at birth, confirmation during adolescence, marriage in adulthood, and the last rites just before death. Further, a Catholic is expected to attend mass at least once a week and to go to confession. Lastly, monotheists – whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim – make pilgrimages. What does this have to do with socialization into nationalism? Like monotheism, nationalism has its special days, including Independence Day, various presidents’ days, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. There are pilgrimages to Washington, DC and trips to Mount Rushmore all of which support nationalism.

Marking Places: Geographies of Loyalty

Socialization takes place in physical spaces. Pagan societies built mounds and temples to spirits or deities. In caste agricultural civilizations like Egypt and Mesopotamia, physical buildings of monumental proportions made of impenetrable materials had a psychologically intimidating impact that was not lost on those in power. Likewise, Christians, Jews and Muslim elites build churches, synagogues and mosques, not just to pay homage to their deities, but to propagandize the lower classes into following them since they are God’s representatives on earth. Sacred sites are not limited to places of worship. Streets and buildings are named after saints. In the case of nationalism, we have gargantuan state buildings in Washington, streets named after presidents, and monuments at Bunker Hill, the Statue of Liberty, Plymouth Rock, and Mount Rushmore.

Creating Atmosphere: Literature and Painting

For most “people of the book,” hearing stories from sacred texts like the Bible or the Koran begins at a very young age. This upbringing is strengthened by studying, as with learning the Catholic catechism in grammar school or preparing to read an excerpt from the Old Testament as part of a Jewish bar or bat mitzvah. The most logical parallel to nationalism would be reading or even memorizing the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. However, since this is rarely done, a very important source of nationalistic literature is novels about the American West.

Animistic hunting and gathering societies used cave paintings, amulets and totems) long before monotheists to socialize (Lewis-Williams, 2002) their members. In the case of Catholicism in the 17th century, baroque paintings were epically dramatized to overwhelm the population with monumental scale. Furthermore, music has perhaps been the most compelling of the arts in creating an immediate emotional reaction. Hymns such as “Amazing Grace” help the faithful sing their way into submission.

Nationalist socialization may come about when the population is being exposed to patriotic paintings such as Washington Crossing the Delaware. Music such as the “Star-Spangled Banner”, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, and “God Bless America” are bound to rouse even the most reluctant patriot.

Social Action: Fulfilling Destiny Through Sacrifice

As we have seen, both monotheism and nationalism must use the past in order to justify the present. However, each must also organize in the present by referring to the future. This is done through the expectation of sacrifice of the participants to life itself.

Anthony Smith (2003) points out five instances in which fulfilling destiny through sacrifice is depicted in paintings.  In Jean-Simon Berthélemy’s painting Manlius Torquatus Condemning His Son to Death, we see the conflicted determination of a Roman father’s loyalty to the state in executing his own child for disobeying his order to not engage the enemy in combat. Though torn by the clash of the demands of state and family, Torquatus overcomes his paternal feelings and refuses to listen to his son’s appeal, despite fervent pleas for mercy from friends and family. He maintains legal impartiality and values the state’s welfare over his personal interests. His right hand is publicly outstretched in the preservation of justice while his left hand clutches privately at a father’s agonizing heart.

According to Smith, the painting The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, Jacques-Louis David chose the moment when an anguished Brutus, returning home after the execution of his own sons, hears the cries of his wife and the swooning of his eldest daughter as the bodies of his sons are brought to his house. Having driven out the Tarquin and helping to institute the Republic, Brutus was elected consul in 508 BCE only to discover a monarchial plot fostered by his wife’s family and supported by his two sons. He saw it as his duty to suppress all enemies of the republic, including his own sons.

In 1778 Johann Heinrich Füssli was commissioned by the Zurich council to paint Oath on the Rütli, the cornerstone of Swiss unity and independence. This painting depicts three towering figures who represent the three original forest cantons swearing “an oath of everlasting alliance in the Rütli meadow”. Smith argues that it expresses defiance, struggle, unification, and sacrifice for freedom. In its thrusting defiant male figures embody the ideal of willingness to die for the freedom of the nation.

About a century later, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s painting Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII also conveys the ideal of self-sacrifice as struggle in the service of a higher cause. In 1770 Benjamin West painted The Death of General Wolfe, an epic depiction of the British general who was mortally wounded at the height of victory over the French in Quebec in 1759.

Lastly, Smith points out that during the French Revolution:

On the occasion of Marat’s murder in July 1793, art and ritual proceeded hand in hand. Marat’s friend David was immediately urged by the assembly to paint his portrait. Marat’s assassination shows with great veracity the ‘Friend of the People’ dying in his bathtub, with a Christ-like wound in his right lung…

David also had to supervise the lying in state and funeral of his friend. Marat’s corpse was exhibited on a high dais in the Cordeliers Church, above the bath and the packing case, with a smoking incense burner as the only light. The funeral…which lasted six hours took place to the accompaniment of muffled drum-beat and cannon… Girls in white with branches of cypress surrounded it, and they were followed by the entire Convention, the municipal authorities and the people of Paris. (Smith, 237)

These examples show how the political religion of nationalism draws upon Catholic traditions and uses them for national ends in order to evoke a sense of sacred communion with the glorious dead.

Sacrifice Choreographed in Festivals, Monuments and Song

The Napoleonic Wars were a catalyst for the process of cementing a sense of national identity not just among the French but for those societies under attack. French nationalism was answered by a growing German nationalism, which was at first cultural but soon became politicized with the Prussian defeat at the Battle of Jena in 1806. The War of Liberation of 1813 and the return of aristocratic regimes after Napoleon’s defeat stimulated collective expressions of national sentiment in the form of festivals and monuments.

Smith informs us that in 1832 the Germans held their first mass festival in the same alleged place where the ancient German tribes had held their meetings. There was a procession to the ruins of the castle ruins in which patriotic songs were sung and people wore ancient German dress. The later 19th century saw greater efforts to invite people into the sacred communion of the nation through mass celebrations. This began with the songs of the volunteers for the armies of the French Revolution.

Dancing and Military Drills

Sustaining nationalist and religious loyalties is not just about getting lost in mystical symbols and myths or engaging in altruistic actions. Building political loyalty to a nation or a religion also involves acting collectively in a very structured way. In his very provocative book, Keeping Together in Time, William McNeill argues that building community involves “muscular bonding”: community dancing, communal work, singing, religious rituals and military drills. In community dancing, moving and singing together tends to dissolve group tensions, reminding community members that they have more in common than they have differences. In the area of work, singing and moving together makes otherwise boring work more creative. The great large-scale architectural projects of ancient civilizations could never have been built without workers singing and moving in sync. McNeill points out that the rise of religious dervish orders at the beginning of the 11th century was so powerful in altering states of consciousness that they came close to being declared heretical.

In addition, McNeill argues that military muscular bonding, specifically close-order drilling, creates altered states. In his book The Pursuit of Power, McNeill concluded that the victory of European armies over non-European armies was largely due to well-drilled troops who were more efficient in battle. Soldiers moved in unison while performing each of the actions needed to load, aim, and fire their guns. The volleys came faster and misfires were fewer when everyone acted in unison and kept time to shouted commands. The result was more ammunition projected at the enemy in less time.

However, it was not only the superiority of weapons or efficiency in using them that made Europeans victorious. Drilled troops created deep social-psychological altered states. McNeill suggests that many veterans report that group effort in battle was the high point of their lives. Just like the boundary loss of whirling dervishes, the individual merges with the platoon.

By inadvertently tapping the inherent human emotional response to keeping together in time, military drills helped create obedient, reliable, and effective soldiers with a spirit that not only superseded previous identities – ethnicity, region, religion – but also insulated them from outside attachments. Soldiers could be counted on to obey their officers predictably even when fighting hundreds or thousands of miles away from their home base.

McNeill describes witnessing soldiers marching in step as both awe inspiring and terrifying. No twitches, twists, mutterings nor distractions could be seen or heard in the ranks. On the one hand, soldiers were perfectly composed, calm and moving to music. But on the other hand, they were completely poised to destroy human life or be destroyed by it.

For most of human history, the ruling classes understandably had reservations with arming the lower classes for fear they might recognize their class interests. However, the group experience of altered states that resulted from prolonged drills made soldiers loyal and devoted far beyond any class loyalties. In the 17th century, for poverty-stricken peasant recruits and jobless urbanites recruited from the fringes of an increasingly atomized, commercialized society, the military created a new artificial primary community, providing camaraderie that prevailed in good times and bad, where old-fashioned principles of command and subordination gave meaning and direction to life. It became safe to arm even the poorest classes, pay them a regular wage and expect obedience. In a time of domestic conflict, European soldiers were even willing to fire upon their own social class.

Before the drill, in the standing army of kings, obedience was extracted through fear of punishment. But the coming of the drill created a lively spirit between soldiers that was less prevalent than before. Now, instead of standing armies of subjects to a king, the citizens’ army shared the collective emotional identity of the nation. For soldiers who received regular pay, there was a good reason to not break ranks.

It would be an overstatement to say that drilling caused nationalism. The military revolution occurred hundreds of years before the rise of nationalism, which I said came about at the end of the 18th century. But there is no question that military drills helped sustain nationalism once it appeared. Other military formations such as the cavalry couldn’t create such a solidarity among those fighting.

Conversion and Exile

The last part of socialization to nationalism is the unusual time when a person either joins through conversion or departs in an imposed or self-imposed exile. Typical examples of conversion for monotheists are the moment when Moses was on Mount Sinai or when Saint Paul was on the road to Damascus. The Great Awakenings in the United States in 1725 and 1780, though starting out as Protestant religious revivals, had nationalist implications, according to Wilbur Zelinsky (1988). A nationalist counterpart of conversion is the indoctrination immigrants or refugees receive upon becoming U.S. citizens.

Neither monotheists nor nationalists tolerate rejection lightly. For both, membership is expected to be lifetime. For national states, registration at birth and death is compulsory. What becomes of people who decide to leave? In the case of Catholicism, there is excommunication. In all monotheistic religions, there are attacks for such deviations as apostasy, heresy, blasphemy, inquisitions and witch hunts. Nonbelievers are attacked in religious wars as godless atheists. So too, in nationalism, expatriates are feared, ostracized and shunned. They are considered unworthy, traitorous or treasonous. In the case of political opposition, such people become the targets of CIA spying and assassination attempts. As for countries that oppose the nationalist vision, they are subject to state terror, world wars and torture. Please see my summary table at the end of this article.

Monotheism, Nationalism and Individualism

Both monotheism and nationalism support individualism in the following ways:

  • Each focuses the attention of the individual on a single source of loyalty in the objective world: in the case of nationalism it is the nation, and in the case of monotheism it is a single deity.
  • Each marginalizes and undermines intermediate loyalties between the individual and the single, ultimate source. In the case of monotheism, it is earth spirits, ancestor spirits, totems or gods and goddesses. Similarly, nationalism demands that citizens subordinate regional, class, ethnic and even religious loyalties in favor of the state. The individual must have one and only one loyalty: the state. So with religion, the second commandment of the Bible reads, “I am the Lord Thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me”. This not only applies to religion, but also holds as an expectation that the state demands of its citizens. Both nationalism and monotheism are large-scale emulsifiers that hold together and paper over class or religious conflicts, which monotheists and nationalists tell us will grow and spread otherwise.
  • Each replaces customs and community traditions with written laws. In the case of nationalism, it is the constitution; in the case of monotheism, it is the sacred text of the Bible or the Koran.
  • The relationship between the individual and the nation or the religion is presented as a freely chosen association or a covenant. In the case of monotheism, individuals are proclaimed to have free will, with the choice for whether to obey God. In the case of the nation, individuals are free to renounce their citizenship and go elsewhere.
  • Each binds strangers together as opposed to kin groups, clans or neighborhoods.
  • Both have extremely violent ideologies. Monotheism has been responsible for more deaths than any other group membership. After the military revolution in the 17th century, nationalistic wars at the end of the 19th century (and, of course, the 20th century) show that the state has been at least as violent.

I hope to have shown that it is a mistake to think of individualism as either anti-social or a withdrawal from social relations. Individualism does mean a weakening of particular kinds of loyalties: kin group, village, regional or estate. But it also means a connection with a de-sensualized community, made possible by the printing press and newspapers.

While the forces of modernization may have weakened religious beliefs, the doctrines, myths, rituals, and entire architecture of religion (specifically monotheism) were reorganized and used in the name of a secular political religion: nationalism. Beginning in the 19th century, individualists were expected to renounce loyalty to class, ethnicity, and region – not so they could be “free as a bird,” but also to become bound to a new secular community of strangers serving the state. Citizens may gain political rights, but that is far from the end of the story. The socialization into nationalism has been an enormously successful project of the 19th-century ruling classes. Individualists were mobilized to fight and die in wars to prove their patriotism. The reality is now that stateless individuals are not allowed to exist anywhere in the world.

Please see my table at the end of this article.

Qualifications: What About the Place of Islam in Nationalism? 

It might have crossed your mind that I did not include Islam in my monotheistic roots of nationalism comparisons. Certainly, Islam is monotheistic. Furthermore, when we look at Islamic fundamentalism, it would seem that surely there is fanatical nationalism at work. But a closer look shows that Islam has a similar internationalism as the Catholics. Being fanatical about your religion so that you will kill and die for it is not necessarily nationalism. Why did Islam not develop a nationalism the way the Jews and the Christians did: There are at least the following reasons:

  • Western nationalism was inseparable from the development of industry.While Islam went through a “merchant capital” phase of capitalism, they never initiated an industrialization process that capitalism did in the West. Industrialization is very important in pulverizing intermediate loyalties which is crucial to the emergence of nationalism.
  • Nationalism in the West was not built by one country at a time. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 created a system of states that became the foundation for nationalism at the end of the 18th century. There was no system of states that existed in West Asia at the time. Predominantly what existed were sprawling tribes, kingdoms or empires, not nation-states.
  • In the 19th and 20th  century, Islam has become a religion of the oppressed. European nation-states were not fighting against imperialism when they arose in England, France, the United States and Holland. Their development was not shackled by fighting defensive wars. West Asian nationalism could not develop autonomously, but as a reaction to being colonized

Qualification: What About the Presence of a Polytheistic Nationalism in India? 

It would seem that when we look at the nation-state of India today, it would constitute a clear exception to my argument that only monotheism develops nationalism. Here we have the polytheistic religion of Hinduism as the guiding religion of Modi’s India. How can this be?

The title of my article is the monotheistic roots of nationalism. As we know, the origin of anything (monotheism) does not guarantee destiny (what something becomes in the future). New processes can take place later in time which are independent of their origin. My two previous articles on nationalism only went as far as the beginning of World War I. The events in the 20th century that went beyond the monotheistic roots of nationalism were two World Wars, a depression, fascism and national liberation movements especially after World War II.

In Europe as far back as the Middle Ages there were other political formations long before there were nation-states. There were tribes, city-states, federations, principalities, provinces, kingdoms and empires. With the exception of some empires, all these formations were decentralized. These forms of political organizations continued to exist all over the world even after nation-states emerged. But the effect of political mobilization first in World War I and then World War II, pulverized these earlier formations. The Ottoman and Hapsburg empires did not survive World Wars. Tribes, federations and city-states were too weak to survive two world wars and became hammered into nation-states. It is no accident that at the end of World War I, the new global mediator was the League of Nations not the League of provinces, kingdom or empires. After World War II it was the United Nations that was promotedAfter that it is very difficult to have any political standing in world politics without being organized into a nation-state.

In the case of India, revolutionaries had to build up and centralize their states if they were to fight the British. They succeeded. After World War II Indian religions continued to compete – Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism to name three. As India (as many nations in the 20th century) turned politically to the right over the last thirty years it needed a religious justification for its shift. Hinduism, as the oldest Indian religion, was championed. So, in the case of India, Hinduism did not help to form nationalism as Western monotheism helped nationalism. It was a reaction after a political nationalism that had already formed.

Something similar happened in the African liberation movements after World War II. African centralized states had to form in order for those revolutionaries to overthrow the colonizers. This has not been easy for those states as tribal and ethic loyalties in parts of Africa were fierce. Islam proved to be a better unifying force as a world religion than various decentralized pagan magical traditions. In the case of Africa Islam, though itself not a religion that helped nation-states to form prior to the 20th century, became one. Again, we have the case of a religion not being the cause of nationalism but a secondary reaction.

Commonalities Between Monotheism and Nationalism in the Socialization Process From Birth to Death

Monotheism (Judeo-Christian)Category of ComparisonNationalism (United States)
Written Scriptures (Bible) interpreted by priests or rabbisMeans of TransmissionWritten Constitutions interpreted by courts (judges)
Special occasions throughout the year: Christmas day, Easter, Lent, feast days, saints daysMarking Social timeSpecial occasions throughout the year: Independence Day, President’s Day, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day
Rites of passage: Baptism, confirmation, marriage, anointing of the sick and last ritesMarking Individual Time Rites of passage: Cub scouts, boy scouts, girl scouts, draft registration
Sunday school, private religious schoolsEducational TrainingPublic school civics classes on American government and history
Detached from territory: Cosmopolitan (early prophets) Attached to Territory: Promised land, Zionists-Palestine, Christians-BethlehemMarking Geography (territory)Attached to territory: (Promised land) Swiss Alps, U.S. Western frontier
Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, Vatican, streets named after saints, religious statuesMarking geography (urban landmarks)Federal and state buildings, Streets named after presidents, Monuments: Bunker Hill, Statue of Liberty, Plymouth Rock. Mount Rushmore
Pilgrimages to Mecca, Jerusalem, BethlehemMarking Geography (movement)Pilgrimages to Washington DC
Sacrifice self (religious martyrs)SacrificeSacrifice of self in patriotic wars (Tomb of Unknown Soldier)
Community dancing ritualsCollective Bodily OrchestrationMilitary drills
Moses on Mount Sinai, St. Paul on the road to DamascusConversionGreat Awakening in America (1725), Second Great Awakening (1780), Naturalization ceremony with immigrants and refugees receiving citizenship rights
To be free every individual must belong to a religion (no pagans or atheists)Loyalty and ExclusivityTo be free, every individual must belong to a nation (no nationless individuals)
Religious warsAttitude Towards NonbelieversState-to-state wars
Usually lifetimeLength of MembershipState membership usually lifelong (compulsory registration of birth, death)
Collective solidarity, comfort, propaganda,Violence: Fear, terror, torture, witch trials, inquisitionsMeans of Sustaining MembershipCollective solidarity, comfort structure, propaganda,Violence: fear, state terror, assassination, torture
Excommunication, religious apostasy, accusations of heresy, blasphemyExileFear, ostracism, shunning of ex-patriots, accusations of treason

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

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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.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Dead Weight Of The State

Michael Taussig is one of the few Marxist Anthropologists to study magick. Over twenty years ago I came across his book;The devil and commodity fetishism in South America"; which deals with the beliefs of Bolivian Miners about the devil living in the caves they mine. Many of these miners are children as documented in the film;The Devils Miner.

And they are of course indigenous peoples, enslaved by their Spanish colonizers hundreds of years ago to mine for the old Empires of Europe. They have transfered the belief in animistic spirits from their earlier native religions, to the god forms of their adopted religion; Catholicism. As with most colonized peoples the old gods become the devils of the new religion.

Commodity Fetishism and the Devil had a major influence on me in looking at a historical materialist/dialectical interpretation of magick.

I recently came across an interview with Taussig, about his book The Magic Of the State and his comments are worth reprinting here, in light of my post on Gothic Capitalism.

In The Magic of the State, you write about the relation between traditional magical rites and rituals of spirit possession and the workings of the modern nation-state. You base this book on fieldwork on a magic mountain in the middle of Venezuela, where spirit possession is practiced, and where theres something about spirit possession which is amicable toward hierarchy, stratification, and maybe even the State.

This book concerns spirit-possession on the mountain of Maria Lionza in central Venezuela in the 1980s and 1990s, where pilgrims in large numbers become possessed by the spirits of the dead under the rule of an imaginary spirit queen, Maria Lionza. Especially important are the spirits of the Indians who allegedly fought the Spanish in the sixteenth century and the independence soldiers of the early nineteenth century, including many black foot soldiers as well as white officers, most notably Simón Bolívar—as highlighted in the state’s school textbooks, in the unending stream of state iconography from postage stamps to wall murals on bus stops and outside schools, from the standardized village, town, and city central square, the naming of mountain peaks, and of course in the physiognomy of authority wherever it be.

The dead are a great source of magical élan, grace, and power. This has been present in many cultures since the first burial. Indeed Georges Bataille (to whose ideas The Magic of the State is greatly indebted) argued from archaeological evidence and physical anthropology that the corpse is the origin of taboos, respect for the dead being what separates the human from the animal... Just imagine, then, the power that can accrue to the modern state, that great machine of death and war!

People today gain magical power not from the dead, but from the states embellishment of them. And the state, authoritarian and spooky, is as much possessed by the dead as is any individual pilgrim. The current president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, is the embodiment of this. In a sense he was predestined by this mystical foundation of authority as writ into the post-colonial exploitation of colonial history. The success of the Patriot Act and of the current US administration owes a great deal to this, too, after 9/11.

However my argument is that such spirit possession is a dramatization not only of the Great Events but also of the more subtle imageric- and feeling-states present in the artwork of the state any and everywhere, from the traffic cop and tax clerk to the pomp and ceremony of national celebrations, from a Latin American pseudo-democracy to the US and Western European states as well. Hobbess Leviathan is mythical yet also terribly real. This is where the rationalist analysis of the state loses ground. Foucault was amazingly short-sighted in dismissing blood and the figure of the Ruler.
It is not only the capitalist state which rules based on the rites of the dead but capitalism itself as Marx reminds us.

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
Karl Marx
If Capitalism is vampiric then the modern Terror State and its perpetual State of Terror (an extension of the Cold War) is very much a Zombie state, a state that has created a fictional monster; the terrorist, who once upon a time was the Anarchist of the 19th Century and today is Islamic Jihadists. Terrorists/Zombies are everywhere, they are out to get us, they are going to overwhelm us in shopping malls. The popularity of modern Zombie culture is a reflection of the cultural terror created by the politics of fear.


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