Book Review: An Altar In the World by Barbara Brown Taylor

I spotted this book in, of all things, an Internet sidebar ad, and when I clicked on the ad it took me to the Harper-Collins website where I could read the prologue in PDF. Now that's how to advertise online. I put a hold on it at my local library right away; it came in last month.

The introduction made it sound like, well, the most pagan "Christian spirituality" book I've ever come across, and I'm pleased to say I wasn't wrong. Oh, it's still a very Christian book; Taylor is a former Episcopalian minister, and she writes as though to a universally lapsed-Protestant audience, supporting her ideas with Biblical scriptures and stories. But the Christianity she's advocating in An Altar In the World is not the kind of "reward in Heaven" Christianity that's chased off so many people; in fact, she's not necessarily advocating Christianity at all. (She makes clear in her introduction who her audience is -- that large population that self-defines as "spiritual not religious.") What Taylor is advocating here is love of the world, and love of God through love of the world. Pagans should be familiar with that.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a single practice that is designed to enhance what you do in the name of religion rather than what you believe -- another popular Pagan idea, but one that I've heard people advocating in all kinds of paths. The first four chapters, in fact, are exactly the practices that always appear in Paganism 101 books. These are Vision (seeing the divine in everything), Reverence (often described in Pagan books as Attention), Incarnation (seeing the divine in yourself), and Groundedness (a walking meditation). I loved reading about these in this book in a way I don't in Paganism 101 books, possibly because Taylor writes about these practices in terms of how she discovered their value, rather than writing about them because that's what you put in this part of the book. Taylor gives a wonderful sense of revelation -- she's not teaching you what to do as much as she's saying, "Look at this nifty thing I found!"

Later chapters are even more interesting, because they address issues that don't come up in the Pagan literature, or they come at them from a different way. Wilderness, for example, smacks a little of the traditional "God works in mysterious ways" line, but also addresses the importance of failure. Sabbath is a reminder of the difference between "not doing work" and "doing nothing." My favorite chapter is the second-to-last, Prayer. I'm not sure any description could do it justice; Taylor's descriptions of her prayers, candlelit, wordless, and heartfelt, are immensely powerful.

In many ways this book has helped me a lot in the project the Universe seems to have decreed for me this summer; the project of learning what orthopraxy really means. It's been a hard lesson for over-intellectual me, who spent her whole life with everyone believing she'd have a career in academia because, well, I'd just fit. I probably would. But I've been learning (slowly, but learning) that ideology is pretty cold compared to actions, and that ideas are still awesome, but they don't have a lot to do with ideology. Taylor absolutely puts that into practice here -- while she quotes Christian scripture to support her arguments, one doesn't get the sense that she's arguing that Christianity contains the best or most truthful realization of these practices, but that look, here is something many people including probably you agree is important that says this too. I aspire to one day be able to use the structures of my own religion in the same way.

I'd recommend this book to just about anyone.

Book Review: The Other Side of Virtue

I finished reading The Other Side of Virtue by Brendan Myers sometime in August, and I just couldn't write it up at the time. Now I'm back in school and back into the swing of writing about difficult things, so here goes.

I'd heard good things of Brendan Myers before in my poking around at various forms of Celtic Neo-Paganism, so when The Wild Hunt did a writeup of this book, I was intrigued. For people who want books that go beyond Paganism 101: this is one of the guys to keep your eye on. (Though you could argue that an ethical structure ought to be part of 101, in reality, it pretty much isn't.)

What Myers has written here is more a theoretical book than a practical guide: not a criticism, but an observation, for people who might want to pick it up. It's a work in progress, a starting point for other Pagans to look at and start figuring out how to make it work in real life. Fair enough. I hardly expect any one person to come out with a synthesized Theory Of Pagan Ethics just like that.

I'd caution against using it as an only source for an ethical system, though. (I'd caution against using anything as an only source for anything.) The first section of the book is dedicated to historical examples of how people have theorized ethics and virtue, from the heroic model of chiefdom societies like the Celts to the social model of Classical Greece and Rome, up through the Romantics and Humanist ideas of The Good Life. It's an impressive span to cover, and you can see where his specialty is -- that is to say, it's not in anthropology, which is my specialty, and every once in a while Myers makes some broad sweeping statements that made me cringe. Overall it's a pretty good analysis, but it's better if you keep in mind the idea of ancient Greece instead of trying to equate Heroic Greece with Celtic society in general.

This is also not, I repeat, not the book to read if you're currently struggling with depression. "I recognize that depression is a medical condition," he writes on page 222, "not a deficiency of character. But I do wish to suggest that an ability to imagine a future, an ability to discern a purpose for one's life, can have a therapeutic effect on those who find their lives very difficult to bear." I've never been suicidal myself, but I have been profoundly, awfully depressed, and that sounds a lot like "just snap out of it" to me. That, coupled with the "Spirit" passage starting on 193, was what put me off this book for several months.

That said, what I do think Myers does very well is present a vision of virtue that doesn't exclude people. That doesn't mean he's come up with a way to look at the world that means that everyone is virtuous: far from it. But he's come up with a way to look at the world that means that people who disagree, people who are in active opposition, hell, even people who flat-out hate everything that the other stands for, can both be virtuous at the same time. Virtue, in Myers's conception, is in the way you look at the world, not in the ideas you have about it. Virtue is when you look at the world and think, "That is so fucking awesome. I have got to be a part of that." And that, I think, is an excellent place to start.

Book Review: The Shark God by Charles Montgomery

I bought this book – it must have been June, because I'd decided to buy myself a book for my birthday, and after I'd picked something out from the highly unsatisfactory collection of Patrick O'Brian novels, I wandered back into the history and travel section. This is always a bad idea for me. I have a terrible weakness for good history and travel memoirs. So when I saw The Shark God on the shelf – memoir, travelogue, and Melanesian syncretism – what was I supposed to do?

The Shark God is the story of Charles Montgomery's search for adventure, magic and family history in the chaos of culture, religion and politics that is Melanesia. His grandfather had been a Protestant missionary there in the late 19th century, and as a boy Montgomery had invented great stories about his grandfather's exploits, risking life and limb to bring Christianity to the poor, brown natives of these islands. As an adult, Montgomery knows that his childhood imaginings are probably unrealistic and definitely more than a little bit racist – and he's left Christianity in the meantime – but he feels a connection to the place and wants to learn more. So, as a travel writer, he does the only reasonable thing: he gets a contract to write a book.

Montgomery admits that the thing that intrigues him most about Melanesia is the apparent paradox of Christianity and native belief still existing side by side. Although almost all Melanesians are Christians of some stripe, a number of pre-Christian traditions and beliefs still have a great deal of influence on peoples' daily lives. They believe in witches and curses, in magic stones and dances, in ancestor spirits and shark gods.

I think my favorite thing about this book was that Montgomery never really seems to get it. He has a genuine interest in the religious situation, and he does his best to empathize with the people and understand what's going on. He learns that his English Protestantism is far from the only valid form of Christianity, and he really believes in at least some of the magic that he meets. But he never gets syncretism, never seems to be able to move beyond “but that's not how Christianity works” and “but that can't really be real,” even though he obviously really, really wants to. The epilogue tries to come to some kind of conclusion, but it's patently false and too much like a moral.

There are no morals through the rest of the book, just stories that mean something. Like the Anglican Bishop who lives in a house with a constantly shifting population of locals who refuse to let him live alone, because that's no kind of life at all. The priests who use the magic of Christianity to fight the magic of evil sorcerers and exploitative criminals alike. The spectacular moment when, having talked a group of rebellious young men to take him to see the famous thunder stones on an isolated island, Montgomery makes it rain.

Overall, I think what makes The Shark God a success is that (excepting that awful epilogue) it's a book written with compassion, respect, and a genuine attempt at understanding. Montgomery knows that he doesn't know better than the people he's talking to – or the people he's writing to – and while he's looking for answers that makes sense to him, he doesn't discount the answers that seem to make sense to everyone else.

Book Review: Savage Breast

Savage Breast is a complicated book to describe, part personal revelation, part historical and archaeological description, part feminist theory and gender studies. It was a book that obviously took a lot of personal courage to write, and for that Tim Ward deserves praise; I couldn't write something like this on my Livejournal, much less publish it as a book. The book follows Ward and his girlfriend (later fiancee, still later wife) through a trip around the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, Greece and Minoa, Turkey, and even a bit up into Central Europe, while Ward attempts to relate to the Goddess in all her forms and try to understand just what's wrong with the way he relates to the human women in his life.

First off I want to apologise for the archaeology rant I had in my last post; while I stand by my theory, I don't really think it had anything to do with Savage Breast in the end. By the time I reached the end of the book, I realized Ward had repudiated most of the arguments I was disagreeing with so vehemently while I was reading the first half of it. That said, I do still think there's a problem with the structure of the book in that sense. Savage Breast is a story of personal revelation, but where that structure works brilliantly -- and very subtly -- for conveying opinions about gender, social status, and one's own shortcomings, it works less well when discussing scientific and historical theories.

Might as well get my issues with the science out of the way, then; I do still have some problems with the way the archaeology and history are treated in the book. Ward has, for one thing, an overwhelming tendency to universalize that I think does a disservice to the cultures he's writing about. Again, this isn't key to the book but it's a pet peeve of mine. People are always using the past to validate themselves and their ideas, but every time the past is simplified in order to make a point it makes understanding what *really* happened that much more difficult. It boils down to a philosophical question of science: would we rather be able to decipher the genuine past or just use it as a metaphor for contemporary life? As I said, this has hardly anything to do with the actual content of Savage Breast and isn't nearly as drastic as I'm making it out to be here, but it did distract me enough that it was practically all I could think about until I sat down and got the rant out of my system.

Now for the book itself. This was a hugely difficult book to read. It is fundamentally a very personal book. Ward isn't addressing just a generic male relationship to the Goddess, here; he's addressing, directly and sometimes with uncomfortable frankness, his own relationship with women in general, one woman in particular, and Goddesses both generic and specific. And sometimes that's just profoundly depressing. When he contemplates joining the monastery of Athos (so sacred to Mary that no females are allowed on the island) in order to escape the troubles of (sigh) women, I considered doing the same myself. I'll move into Macha's caves in the west of Ireland, I thought, and pray for the Curse of the men of Ulster to fall on the whole world. The book is written toward men, to a certain degree; particularly in the Hekate and Artemis chapters, there's a kind of boy's-club, conspiratorial sense of, "Aren't women weird and scary?" Well, no. But it's never meant meanly, and though there's real hostility there's also an understanding of the unfairness of it all that makes it bearable most of the time. As someone who's never come face-to-face with a lot of sexism in my own life, maybe it was exceptionally shocking -- not surprising, but really like feeling a physical blow -- to hear a man articulate some of these things. Maybe it would always hurt to hear ideas like that expressed. I don't know.

Because it's so personal, there are a lot of points of view missing from this book, and it can sometimes seem a bit gender-essentialist, but after all, two people (really, mostly one) can only give so many perspectives. That's not a failing of this book so much as a failing of the general lack of books like this in the world. And as I said, I still take serious issue with some of the historical and archaeological information. But despite and because of its failings, I do think this is an important book, although I shy away from actually recommending it on a Pagan blog. (Were this a feminism blog, I'd be bashing you all over the head with it telling you to read it.) If nothing else it provides some serious and occasionally profound food for thought.

Please, not that again

I'm trying to read Tim Ward's new book, Savage Breast. (I even got my library to buy a copy!) It sounded fascinating when I heard of it: a man with a personal history of mysticism and religious seeking tries to unpack the problems with his relationships with women through attempting to understand the Feminine Divine. And as far as that part of the book goes, it's great. Unfortunately, he's using as a basis of the book something that's driving me insane. Let me try to explain it without sounding like an anthro term paper.

Although Ward does admit that the actual evidence for ancient matriarchies -- that's societies ruled by women, not egalitarian ones or ones where women bestow lineage -- is scant to nonexistant, he nonetheless uses this theory as the dominant paradigm throughout the book. (Of course, he is focusing on the Hellenic pantheon, which is a great example of goddesses being shoved aside in favor of gods at a later date -- but that's not evidence of a matriarchy, just evidence of more patriarchy.)

What always annoys me about the matriarchy hypothesis, though, is that it feels like giving in. I mean -- rule by women is not inherently better than rule by men. (Look at Margaret Thatcher.) Matriarchy is just patriarchy in reverse; you're still keeping somebody down. Assuming that there must have been a matriarchy before there was a patriarchy, to somehow "balance things out," is dualistic and wrong-headed, and it sounds to me like a theory made up by people who can't think of any other reason for the patriarchy to exist: either men really are better than women, they seem to think, or there had to be a matriarchy first. Why else do all societies that exist today or that we have any evidence of at all tend to privelige men above women? (They do, unfortunately. Even in societies where there are practically no stable status differences, men have higher status than women as a general rule. Sad but true.)

Okay, so how does that make sense, if no one is inherently better than anyone and it's not a matter of men banding together to overthrow a vast feminine monopoly of power? Well, how about this -- In waaaay ancient times (possibly, based on recent evidence, going back as far as Neanderthals and early Homo erectus), there's no such thing as permanent status. If you're good at one thing, you become the Important Person for that one thing, say you're a good singer so you always lead prayers and dances and things. Doesn't make you a priest, just means you're the best at it so that's what you do. Similarly, there's no difference between men and women, so far as status; everyone does what they're best at.

Probably the women take care of childcare. After all, a child definitely belongs to its mother, but only maybe (or probably, if you're monogamous) belongs to its father, and besides, the bottle and formula hasn't been invented yet and Mom has a better shot at breastfeeding the kid. So women are handling the children. And one of the fundamental tasks in a society like this is to gather food; you need to eat. You're probably omnivores, you eat lots of plants and nuts and growing things but also some game. Gathering growing things, that's safe, predictable work, not necessarily physically easy, but not hugely dangerous either. Hunting, on the other hand, is high-stress, high-danger, relatively low-yield work -- it can involve staying away from camp for a long time, and you run the risk of being attacked by whatever you're hunting (or whatever else is hunting it). It makes sense for the women to gather plant food, which they can do while taking care of the children who depend on them, and for men to do the more dangerous stuff; after all, the men are slightly more expendable. Of course, some women might have been hunters because they were good at it, and some men might have been gatherers because they were good at that. But as a general rule.

But then, as the society grows more complex (for whatever reason, environmental change, population growth, charismatic leadership, there's a whole body of literature on the subject of why complexity happens) status becomes more sticky -- instead of just being the Important Person for what it is you do well, doing something well causes you to become an Important Person. And as previously mentioned, gathering work is predictable, varying little from one instance to another -- it has to be, otherwise you'll deplete all the resources and starve to death. So while one person might be better at gathering than another, there'll never be a huge difference between them. One hunter, though, might come back with a squirrel while another kills a mastodon that'll feed the clan through the whole winter. A hunter might kill a dangerous predator and save dozens of lives. The potential status differential in hunting is huge.

And over time, since the majority of hunters are men, the few high-status female hunters lose their importance, and then finally the direction status flows switches again: instead of men being high-status individuals because they're good hunters, hunting becomes a high-status job because men do it (and gathering becomes low-status because women do it). Ta-da! Patriarchy -- and we haven't even gotten to agricultural societies yet.

This status-flow switching, the change between what just is high-status and what bestows high status, isn't necessarily hugely logical -- but it is how our brains work. Language evolves in exactly the same way; we see a pattern and we continue it, and we don't much care whether we're extending it in the right direction or not. (Yargh, now I can't find the citation for the book I recently read that made this point. I'll get back to you on it.)

So patriarchy isn't about fairness, or about who's "better" than who; it's about uncertain parentage and who's more likely to get stepped on by a mastodon. I'm not necessarily attacking Ward specifically for espousing the ancient matriarchy theory, because it's been pretty popular, with everyone from Victorians fond of trying to prove that society is constantly improving to modern-day feminists who are more interested in politics than evidence. (I have nothing against feminism! I am a feminist! But like all other movements, some of its adherents are silly.) I do think that the ancient matriarchy theory is damaging, because it skews our view of both history and the future. Does one gender really have to rule over another? Is the only way we can manage rights for women to put them in charge of everything? Status, remember, is not a finite resource: you don't have to be stepping on someone else's neck to have status and power. If we're going to idealize any ancient practice (that may or may not have existed), let's go back to the free-floating status model, not one that's just what we have now only backwards.

So the second part of my paganism and feminism post is taking a little longer than I thought it would (that's always the way, isn't it; the rant comes easy, but the thinky bit is hard) and then I also realized that I had read Patricia Monaghan's The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog ages ago and never properly wrote a review of it like I intended to.

It's a hard book to classify; part travelogue, part memoir, part mythology and folklore. It's very much a book about Ireland, but at the same time, she covers a lot about how we relate to our world and how people live their lives and their religion in general. It was also hugely moving; I only have notes on the first half of it, because by the second half I was so wrapped up in the stories she was telling and the images she was invoking that I just completely forgot. (I had to stop reading it at work because I hate crying in front of people.)

Monaghan divides the book into five sections, one for each of Ireland's provinces, and digs into the local mythology, history, politics, and people in each one. A couple of months later, many of the details of the stories are escaping me, but I remember two very vividly -- her chapter on Brigid and the Brigidine Sisters of Kildare, with the story of how Brigid's Flame was accidentally relighted at a Candlemas ceremony, and the mention of this stone in Loughcrew Cemetary.

That stone right there -- the pointy one in the middle foreground. The memory of the afternoon we spent at Loughcrew came back with a really shocking vividness at her one-sentence description. I could pick out the stone she mentioned immediately; I remember sitting next to it to take pictures of the cairn. (I also have a picture of a Goth girl standing in that stone circle that's one of my favorites from that trip, just for what it represents.) I remembered hiking up the long hill path, observed by uninterested sheep. I remember looking out over the countryside, modern farms on one side and old stone fences on the other, trying to spot the Hill of Tara. I more than remembered it, it was like a gut-punch, a flood of emotions and a sense of connection -- we had touched that same stone, she and I, and wondered about the people who put it there. This must be what the big deal is all about, I thought.

The main focus of The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog is locality -- what it means to be from a particular place, to know it intimately enough to recognize that particular stone from one sentence on a page and a year's distance in time, and not just that stone, but every stone and tree and hill. In Ireland, Monoghan describes, everything has a name. That bend in the road, that tree on the hill, that stone circle, that well, that grassy spot that doesn't look like much of anything to outsiders. It makes the landscape...not bigger, but more. It gives it depth and shape in directions that storyless landscape doesn't have.

I've never really felt that way about a place. Oh, I get a little thrill of recognition when people mention my hometown, and for a week I told everybody about the Harlan Ellison story where he mentions the town I went to college in, but it never really meant anything to me. I think that's why I've always been a little blah about this talk of connection to the land that crops up so often in Paganism. I understand it intellectually, but it doesn't have a lot of emotional resonance for me.

Except, apparently, for Loughcrew Cemetary.

Monoghan actually confronts that issue reasonably well; she talks about how Americans -- or rather, all non-Native-Americans -- have a tough time relating to land in that way because we don't always feel like we really belong here. We don't know the stories about every nook and cranny of land, because they've never been told to us, and even if they were, they would be slightly alien, because stories that old come from a culture that is not ours. She skips a point that makes me feel uncomfortable about both her book and my reaction to that Loughcrew stone, though. Modern Irish culture is, quite possibly, just as alien to me as pre-colonial Native-American culture. To say that I "naturally" have a stronger connection to the Irish landscape because my great-great-grandfather emigrated from there is nonsense. I know more about it, and I know it in a way that makes sense to me, but that's all.

Besides, I'm not so sure a lack of that kind of deep connection to the land is an inherently bad thing anyway, or a thing that is lacking in spirituality. There is something to be said for abstraction, too. No, not abstraction -- I'm looking for a word that isn't liminality, but it's such a good word, you'll have to keep it. :) A state of not-belonging, of not-knowing, of being questionable and questioning and having one's relationship with the Universe being constantly negotiable. When Victor Turner first coined the term he didn't think it was possible to exist in a liminal state for long periods of time, but he's been shown to be wrong. (Maybe the time frame is off and we're looking at a society in a liminal period?) But I have that kind of emotional connection to liminality that so many people seem to have to land and place and locality. I can't articulate it, but it makes me happy, and it makes the world seem like a bigger place, in much the same way Monoghan describes that kind of locality doing for land-based people.

Bridget Cleary part two: The Insult of Belief

Part one is here.

In writing about Bridget Cleary's death, Angela Bourke is obviously working at least partially within an anthropological tradition which tries to establish the validity of all the beliefs involved in a situation, while explaining why they were incompatible, which makes each side seem irrational to the other. To Michael Cleary, who had gone to the physician and the priest to look for help for his sick wife, and been basically turned away by each of them, an older tradition of healing would have been the only sensible option left; to the police and the magistrate, holding a sick woman over the fire and forcing her to drink medicines of herbs boiled in milk would have only looked like torture. Unfortunately, Bourke doesn't quite manage to be as even-handed as she might have liked: while she is generous towards the fairy beliefs of the townspeople, she doesn't seem to be sympathetic to it, and in fact gives the impression that she doesn't think they really believed in fairies at all.

It's a problem I had with plenty of my anthro classes (though not, to her credit, with the professor teaching them), that while we were expected to treat all beliefs fairly and with as much objectivity as possible, there was always this undercurrent of "but we know their magic doesn't really work; we know they're just justifying it to themselves when it doesn't; we know better, because we are the scientists." Bourke's book is particularly blatant about this, especially when discussing why people might participate in fairy exorcisms even if they don't believe in fairies (she actually states early on that she isn't sure that anyone ever truly believed in fairies or the supernatural, which is pretty drastic even for a skeptic to claim). She talks about how such rituals are acts of social condemnation, reinforcing ideas of conformity and "keeping in one's place;" and while it's true that lots of communal rituals and beliefs, particularly those dealing with creatures or people who live on the boundaries of things, do serve a social function like that, it's stretching it quite a bit to say that anyone was acting out these rituals with only that in mind -- putting an uppity woman in her place -- while not really believing in any of the supernatural elements.

There's a passage toward the end of the book where Bourke talks about how the case was discussed in official police documents, and how the word "superstition" was thrown around. When used between equals, she says, "superstition" can explain away personal quirks and beliefs we don't necessarily share with one another, but when used from a person with power against someone without, it's an insult, and frequently dehumanizing -- "they're so stupid they don't even know that fairies don't exist; obviously we shouldn't let them govern themselves." In her eagerness to disassociate herself from this position, though, Bourke seems to go too far in the other direction, as though she thinks that saying they believed in fairies would be an insult, when of course it's the attitude one takes towards their belief in fairies that makes it insulting or not.

As to Bridget Cleary's death, Bourke eventually says that she doesn't believe that it was malicious, that Michael Cleary merely snapped under the strain of his wife's illness and the attitude of the villagers toward them (they were not well integrated into the local society, for a number of reasons I've glossed over in order to not make this any insanely longer than it already is) and fell back on an older pattern of belief. Even with just the evidence prevented in this book, and apparently this is a case that has been written on extensively, I can't agree. Firstly, I find it interesting that Bridget's death actually occurred after the ritual of the exorcism was over, when Bridget's health was improving and everyone else who had been participating was getting back to normal. Also, as Bourke points out through the book, of all the people involved Michael Cleary was the most modern, the most literate, the least likely to retain what was considered an old-fashioned and dangerous form of belief. It looks to me much more like a man taking the opportunity presented to him by others, particularly the fairy doctor who seems to have been the first to suggest a changeling, to find an excuse to murder his wife.

Reading this book gave me one of what I call my "worldview instances:" moments in time when I realize just how differently I look at the world than whoever I'm talking with or reading from. Not so much involving the murder case itself -- although I did disagree with Bourke's reading of the evidence -- but in her general assumptions about mystical belief. Bourke really does seem to feel that saying that these people took action on a real person because they believed in fairies, an Otherworld, and in changelings would be insulting and demeaning to them. She comes, really, from the same basic assumptions as the colonial administrators who thought that belief in fairies showed signs of a childish mind: belief in magic is childish, but these people were rational adults, therefore they could not have believed in magic, her train of thought seems to go. I'd like to say this train of thought is unusual in anthropology, but I think it's just more blatant here than elsewhere. It's one of the reasons I find myself reluctant to look at graduate schools in anthropology. I'm pretty sure searching for a department based on "is not atheist to the point of religious intolerance" would be more than a little difficult.

Book Review: The Burning of Bridget Cleary

I've finally started to get to work on my amazingly long to-read list, and yesterday morning I finished up The Burning of Bridget Cleary, an immensely complicated book by Angela Bourke about an immensely complicated situation in an immensely complicated time. (Please, don't let that sound as if it's hard to read: it's delightful, particularly if you like social history. But there are a lot of threads going through this narrative, and it hasn't got easy answers.)

Even the original story itself isn't all that straightforward, partially because of the layers of interpretation that get built into it. At the turn of the twentieth century, in Co. Tipperary in Ireland, a young woman named Bridget Cleary fell ill, possibly with pneumonia, and suffered for about a week and a half before her husband, who had become convinced that the dying woman in his house was not his wife but a fairy changeling left in her place, organized a ritual to drive the changeling out. Almost a dozen people were involved, including a fairy doctor from the region and friends and relations of the couple, and most of those people seem to have participated in questioning the woman (she was asked to swear her identity three times, on two separate occasions) and in holding her over the grate of the fire to drive out the fairy. The next day she seemed to be improving, got out of bed and dressed herself for the first time in over a week, but after an argument with her husband, with most of the previous days' participants still in the house, he became enraged, threw her down on the floor and threatened her with a burning stick from the fireplace, and finally threw paraffin oil on her and burned her alive. He buried the body in a bog nearby and told his friends that he would be waiting at the fairy hill with a black-handled knife to cut his wife's bonds and bring her back from the fairies. He served fifteen years with hard labor for murder, and most of the others served somewhat shorter sentences as accessories to.

Bourke takes this incident and ties it into the changing cultural landscape that was Ireland at the time -- one of a long series of Home Rule bills moving through Parliament; tensions between laborers, tenant farmers and landlords still high after the recent Land War; colonial and Victorian rationalist rhetoric in opposition to the local and Catholic ideals of much of the population; and, of course, the long, slow death of the pre-literate Irish oral culture that the fairy belief seems to have come from. (One problem, of course, with discussing the origin of these beliefs is the simultaneous Irish Renaissance, in which Yeats and Lady Gregory were making fairies popular again. The oral culture which does still exist has assimilated a lot of the later material, too, and it's almost impossible to tell what is genuinely ancient or pre-literate and what comes from a later, more romanticized origin.)

The first thing that struck me about this was its similarity to an exorcism case in Wisconsin we discussed in one of my anthro classes when it happened -- an 8-year-old autistic boy named Terrence Cottrell died during an attempt led by a local minister and some of the parishioners and his family to drive the demons out of him. And I have to admit, I found it easier to consider Bridget Cleary's death in a more sympathetic way, a function of my own biases. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that deaths caused by religious practices shouldn't be prosecuted as murder -- only that the fundamental difference in worldview between the religious practitioners and the law is important, and ought to be looked at.

The second thing this reminded me of was the fate of the attempted regicide Damiens in 1757. (No, wait, there's a connection, I swear.) Foucault gives a rather grotesque description of the punishment for regicide in the decades just before the French Revolution; I'll spare you the gory details (though they're in Discipline and Punish if you really want them), but basically, he was drawn and quartered, badly; pulled with pincers; hacked to pieces; and finally burned. It was an insane amount of overkill, even for people who wanted to make an example. And that was what they were doing, of course: no one had been drawn and quartered in decades, possibly centuries, because a more modern form of law-enforcement made it easier to punish more criminals more leniently than a few criminals more strictly, as used to be done. But the possibility that someone might try to kill the king was so frightening that the establishment reacted by reaching into their past for the most socially condemning punishment they could find, even if they didn't quite know how to go about it. Even in the days when people were drawn and quartered, Damiens' death would have been considered grotesque.

Bourke tells us that, although changeling belief has been recorded in Ireland since such records were kept, very few deaths were ever recorded as consequences of trying to get rid of changelings, and Bridget Cleary is the only adult ever recorded to have died from a fairy exorcism. Bourke doesn't make much of this point, but I think it's key to her entire argument. When the old order runs up against the new, something has to happen, and it's usually when worldviews are dying out that they become their most damaging. When a belief is common, it doesn't need to be reinforced in order to be effective: it stands on its own. When a belief is dying out (like a belief in changelings, or a belief in the moral necessity and superiority of a king) it needs that extra power of blood and death in order to really stick. To say that Bridget Cleary's death is a result of fairy belief isn't an insult to people who believe in fairies, it just shows how beliefs were changing at the time and to what degree they were coming under stress from Victorian rationalism.

For all her attempts to treat the fairy beliefs with respect, Bourke ultimately comes down against them, more often implying that no one actually believed that they were driving a changeling out of Bridget Cleary's place. But this stance seems to me to be even more disrespectful: while I can understand (if not condone) torturing a changeling to force it to reveal itself, I have a harder time with the idea that nearly a dozen people tortured a woman in order to impress social conformity upon her.

And now this post is getting ridiculously long, so it will conclude (with more of the meat of the point I wanted to make) tomorrow.

Hutton and Duotheism

I rather thought that once I finished Hutton's Triumph of the Moon I'd be able to write a review post about it, but I've been trying and it turns out there are just too many things I want to say about it. So. One thing at a time --

One of my favorite things -- well, two, technically -- were the chapters entitled "Finding a Goddess" and "Finding a God," in which Hutton describes how a religion claiming to be a direct continuation of pre-Christian polytheistic religion came to be duotheistic itself. I admit, having never worked in a formal tradition myself, I never really thought of Paganism as being duotheistic. I guess I tended to see all the references to a single Goddess and God as an unfortunate shorthand of the way different pantheons sometimes get squished together in the search for the deity most suited to this week's magic spell. But then, I came to Paganism through a love of mythology, and I was always enthralled by the idea of an entire pantheon of gods to get to know.

Hutton does a brilliantly detailed job of knitting together the history of literature, anthropology, religion, and history itself to explain how the Victorians came up with the idea of a worldwide, pre-Christian Goddess culture -- it was, after all, the predominant popular and academic view of ancient religions for quite a long time. Hutton explains the development of this theory in terms of romanticism and over-generalization, based on things like the Venus figurines and ideas that people like James Frazier had about the importance of fertility to early religions.

In my History of Anthropology course, we took a cultural-religious perspective on the same thing: the Garden of Eden myth was so firmly entrenched in the cultural subconscious that it was generally assumed that degeneration was the only way most cultures changed, and since monotheism was seen as the highest, most philosophically sound form of religion, it was decided that all observable polytheisms must have degenerated from an early monotheism that was, nonetheless, inferior to Christianity: a Goddess-centered religion. It was, of course, all these factors and more that contributed to the Goddess-culture mythos, which was actually still a reasonably popular idea in the culture when Gardner pulled it out of its theoretical setting and made it a practice.

The distillation of a Pagan God, as Hutton describes it, is something I know less about -- he finds the process mostly in literature, as the Romantics appropriated Pan as their particular patron. (Of course, Romanticism has a cultural component, too -- massive industrialization made the idealization of a rustic country life much easier, and closer to Gardner's time, the effect of the Blitz on London probably contributed significantly to the idea of the countryside as a place where nothing ever changes.)

Like I said, I never particularly thought of Paganism as duotheistic, but Hutton makes it pretty obvious that duotheism is one of the primary characteristics of Wicca, and almost all forms of modern Paganism owe at least a little something to Wicca. And also like I said, duotheism has never really done it for me. I find this culture's love of binaries a little annoying, really -- and while Wicca gains a few points over Christianity for placing the binary of Goddess and God at the center instead of the binary of Good and Evil, it's still nowhere as interesting as having a multitude.

Which means that now I've identified this niggling problem I have, I now feel obliged to fiddle with my carefully-constructed eclecticism again, throw a couple more ropes around the wobbly bits, and see if I can find another solid place to nail some bits on. (Tangentially, have y'all seen Howl's Moving Castle? I only just did, and Howl's castle is a brilliant visual metaphor for my religion. If only I could find a way to incorporate hydraulics --) Because there are a lot of lovely Wiccan rituals that I quite like and have been using for quite some time. Full moon rituals are easy to change from the generic to the specific, but what about the Charge of the Goddess? Do I have to abandon the entire idea of drawing down the moon? What about initiation rituals -- addressing only my patroness seems excessively specific there, but how to generalize within a pantheon?

I appear to have some fairly significant rewriting to do. Fortunately I have never been one of those people who has a problem with paradox, so I suppose it's entirely possible I'll continue using duotheistic Wiccan rituals because they are beautiful and they are a part of a common culture I do want to belong to. I have, after all, been trying to squish a polytheistic worldview into them for several years, while I didn't understand why it didn't quite fit. Who knows, maybe now that I understand what the problem is I'll be able to make it work. Or eventually I'll accept that Paganism is even bigger than I thought it was, that even paradoxical eclecticism can only stretch so far, and I'll have to give them up. Still, it's nice to finally know what the problem was.