Category: Philosophy/Religion

B.S. alert. If you’ve come for enlightenment, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The strange soundtrack of home

“Suddenly, subtle variations in the tone and rhythm of that whistling phrase seem laden with expressive intention, and the two birds singing to each other across the field appear for the first time as attentive, conscious beings, earnestly engaged in the same world that we ourselves engage, yet from an astonishingly different angle and perspective.”
David Abrams (see extended quote at end of post)

Living out here in the woods as I do, it’s sometimes easy for me to forget just how strange I’ve become. I read the above quote and thought, “What does he mean, ‘for the first time’? Doesn’t everybody hear bird songs that way?” But apparently most people’s first reaction is to think of birds as pre-programmed music boxes – when they hear them at all. Many folks, of course, don’t have the luxury of waking up and falling asleep to the songs of birds as I do (although there is an interstate highway right over the ridge, and it can be pretty loud sometimes). I guess it also helps that I spent my teenage years listening to 20th-century and avant-garde classical music, which was probably pretty good preparation for appreciating natural sound. The really weird thing is that I used to be a total music junkie, but over the last several years, without ever consciously intending to I’ve become so attuned to natural sounds that I find it difficult even to listen to recorded music for longer than a half-hour at a stretch.

For a fan of natural soundscapes, the months of May and June represent the year’s musical climax. Many mornings I’ll forgo an extra hour of sleep just so I can be out on the porch by first light. The dawn chorus begins a few minutes after 5:00 with the first tentative calls from song sparrow, titmouse and cardinal – the same birds that anchor the avian chorus in January. Almost immediately, however, a wood thrush tunes up, joined by a great-crested flycatcher and a common yellowthroat. Over the next two hours, these calls will be blended with a number of others: phoebe, red-bellied woodpecker, field sparrow, catbird, red-eyed vireo, Baltimore oriole, scarlet tanager, towhee, pileated woodpecker. A background of more-or-less continual chips and buzzes from chipping sparrow, worm-eating warbler and other more distant, interior forest species such as the cerulean warbler and ovenbird, makes up a sort of sonic horizon or drone effect.

But it’s the wood thrush’s song that, for me, provides the main focus of musical interest. Though less ethereal than the call of its close cousin the hermit thrush, the wood thrush’s song is variable enough to hold my attention for many hundreds of bars. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website – which include a wav file of the sound recording – describes it as follows:

Wood Thrushes are justly famous for their beautiful flute-like voices that may combine two notes at one time. The song is composed of three distinct parts. The first, often inaudible unless the listener is close, consists of two to six short low-pitched notes such as bup, bup, bup. The middle part is a loud phrase often written ee-oh-lay, and the final part is a sometimes ventriloquial, trill-like phrase made up of nonharmonic pairs of notes given quite rapidly and simultaneously. Each bird has a repertoire of songs based on combinations of variations of the three parts, and the songs are often repeated in order. The bup, bup, bup phrase is also heard as a call, which is given louder and at a greater frequency when the bird is agitated.

I’m not sure I agree with the cliched comparison to a flute. What they call the second and third parts combine woodwind and bell-like qualities. Setting aside the introduction and considering the rest of the song as one unit, I particularly admire the way the thrush modifies the bittersweetness of the main melodic lines with a shifting array of grace notes. These strike me as more light-hearted afterthoughts. A rough translation of thrush song might be something like, “The world can break your heart, you know. Drink up!”

We are blessed with the presence of this archetypal Neotropical migrant for barely three months of the year. Like the scarlet tanager and the cerulean warbler, its population has been steadily declining in recent years, due mainly to the loss and fragmentation of suitable nesting habitat by roads, highways and suburban and exurban sprawl. Last year, especially, thrush numbers seemed to be down here in Plummer’s Hollow, but this year they appear to have rebounded – at least around the houses. The old tenant house where I live apparently straddles the border between territories of two male thrushes, which means that I always have one if not both singers well within earshot.

*

It was bioacoustician Bernie Krause who first documented the existence and integrity of natural soundscapes, which he likens to symphonic compositions. (I prefer to think of them more as jazz improvisations, given that neither a composer nor a conductor is in evidence.) Krause discovered through studying sonograms that every song or call occupies a distinct aural niche. He hypothesizes that, as part of their adaptations to (and alterations of) specific habitats, species adjust their calls so as to complement rather than to compete with the calls of other species. This seems highly plausible, especially where passerines are concerned, since there is such a high degree of flexibility in the way they learn and transmit calls. As Krause and other birdsong collectors have found, calls can vary considerably within a species, displaying not only regional and local ‘dialects,’ but individual signatures as well. (The better part of these differences will be inaudible to humans.) One can easily imagine subtle shifts in songs as new aural niches open or close due to slow, bioregional shifts in ecosystem composition.

My friend the Sylph e-mailed late last week with a query about the mockingbird that had kept her awake the night before. (I’m not quite sure why listening to the mockingbird go on and on and on prompted her to think of me!) “What’s the source of their ‘creativity’?” she asked. “Do they remember songs of other creatures? Or are they just wired to improvise or mimic? The various riffs were in mostly threes and twos and the songs were not just of other birds but also frogs. So what’s up with the mockingbird?”

I said it’s uncertain how and whether creativity is “wired,” for mockingbirds as for other sentient species (including humans). There’s little doubt that some birds possess good memories – far better than humans, in fact. Although a few scientists do still believe that episodic memory is unique to humans, behavioral experiments with seed caching species such as Western scrub jays “show evidence in birds of mental time travel both backward and forward,” as Science News reported back in February. (Susan Milius, “Where’d I Put That? Maybe it Takes a Bird Brain to Find the Car Keys,” Vol. 165, 103-105.)

As for mimicry, the term itself carries unwarranted connotations of mechanical imitation, denying the considerable role of intelligence in shaping the calls of highly innovative species such as mockingbirds, catbirds and brown thrashers. And if we accept recent findings about mimicry, it seems to me that almost all passerines may be considered mimics to one degree or another. That is to say, everything they sing has been learned, not simply inherited, though it’s true that most seem predisposed to learn the songs of their own species. One set of experiments with juvenile white-crowned sparrows showed that they will learn the songs of whichever species they are caged with, which included tutors from a quite distantly related, Asian species, the red avadavit (yes, that’s really its name!). One of the birds most prized for its ability to mimic human speech in captivity, the hill mynah, doesn’t imitate other species in the wild at all. However, its calls do display distinct variations in dialect over quite short distances, which leads me to suspect that its extreme vocal flexibility represents an adaptation to a highly variable native soundscape.

Other experiments have substantiated fears about the effects of anthropogenic noise on birdsong transmission. The harmful “edge effects” of the interstate on the other side of the ridge from me include not only increased depredations of edge-dwelling predators, but severe impairment of avian soundscapes, as well. For many songbirds – especially interior forest specialists with relatively quiet calls – highway noise can disrupt courtship and territorial singing for hundreds of yards in either direction. And even when courtship and breeding are successful, researchers have discovered, quite often the young adults can’t properly learn their species’ songs. Birds raised near highways may be unable to defend a territory or attract a mate, because their songs are too incomplete – or may be missing altogether.

*

The Acoustic Ecology Institute website archives a number of great essays on soundscapes. (However, the site evidently hasn’t been updated for some time; it contains a few broken links.) I’ll close with a fairly lengthy selection from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Pantheon Books, 1996) – an excellent read, by the way. According to Abrams, human beings are mimics par excellance.

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils–all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams–these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.

For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus on. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied–whether with sounds, or through movements or minute shifts of mood. The color of sky, the rush of waves–every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting–with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.

Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. . . . We need to know the textures, the rhythms and tastes of the bodily world, and to distinguish readily between such tastes and those of our own invention. Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us. . . .

If we listen, first, to the sounds of an oral language–to the rhythms, tones, and inflections that play through the speech of an oral culture–we will likely find that these elements are attuned, in multiple and subtle ways, to the contour and scale of the local landscape, to the depth of its valleys or the open stretch of its distances, to the visual rhythms of the local topography. But the human speaking is necessarily tuned, as well, to the various non-human calls and soundings that animate the local terrain. Such attunement is simply imperative for any culture still dependent upon foraging for its subsistence. Minute alterations in the weather, changes in the migratory patterns of prey animals, a subtle shift in the focus of a predator–sensitivity to such subtleties is inevitably reflected not just in the content but in the very shapes and patterns of human discourse.

The native hunter, in effect, must apprentice himself to those animals that he would kill. Through long and careful observation, enhanced at times by ritual identification and mimesis, the hunter gradually develops an instinctive knowledge of the habits of his prey, of its fears and its pleasures, its preferred foods and favored haunts. Nothing is more integral to this practice than learning the communicative signs, gestures, and cries of the local animals. Knowledge of the sounds by which a monkey indicates to the others in its band that it has located a good source of food, or the cries by which a particular bird signals distress, or by which another attracts a mate, enables the hunter to anticipate both the large-scale and small-scale movements of various animals. A familiarity with animal calls and cries provides the hunter, as well, with an expanded set of senses, an awareness of events happening beyond his field of vision, hidden by the forest leaves or obscured by the dark of night. Moreover, the skilled human hunter often can generate and mimic such sounds himself, and it is this that enables him to enter most directly into the society of other animals. . . .

If one comes upon two friends unexpectedly meeting for the first time in many months, and one chances to hear their initial words of surprise, greeting, and pleasure, one may readily notice a tonal, melodic layer of communication beneath the explicit meaning of the words–a rippling rise and fall of the voices in a sort of musical duet, rather like two birds singing to each other. Each voice, each side of the duet, mimes a bit of the other’s melody while adding its own inflection and style, and then is echoed by the other in turn–the two singing bodies thus tuning and attuning to one another, rediscovering a common register, remembering each other. It requires only a slight shift in focus to realize that this melodic singing is carrying the bulk of communication in this encounter, and that the explicit meanings of the actual words ride on the surface of this depth like waves on the surface of the sea.

It is by a complementary shift of attention that one may suddenly come to hear the familiar song of a blackbird or a thrush in a surprisingly new manner–not just as a pleasant melody repeated mechanically, but as active, meaningful speech. Suddenly, subtle variations in the tone and rhythm of that whistling phrase seem laden with expressive intention, and the two birds singing to each other across the field appear for the first time as attentive, conscious beings, earnestly engaged in the same world that we ourselves engage, yet from an astonishingly different angle and perspective. . . .

From such reflections we may begin to suspect that the complexity of human language is related to the complexity of the earthly ecology–not to any complexity of our species considered apart from that matrix. Language, writes Merleau-Ponty, “is the very voice of the trees, the waves, and the forests.”

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Green

Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
Y el caballo en la montaña.

Federico García Lorca, “Romance Sonambulo”

Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship upon the sea
And the horse in the highlands.

These very famous lines, with which the ballad begins and ends, may be taken to connote love of both literal and figurative greenness. It’s hard to show this in the translation, but perhaps we could have the first line say:

Green, how much I love your greenness . . .

But for me, what’s important is that the beloved remains unspecified. One wants/loves this greenness in the sea, in the mountains, one searches for the beloved in every green thing.

AFTERTHOUGHT (afternoon):
In Sufism, the ‘unseen guide’ is Khidr, the Green One. Though comparable to the figure of Elijah in Judaism, in fact, scholars assert, he is none other than Adonis in a new guise.

According to the Wikipedia, “Green is the traditional color of Islam . . . because of its association with nature. Muhammad is reliably quoted in a hadith as saying that ‘water, greenery, and a beautiful face’ were three universally good things.” The Quran compares the divine word to a green tree planted in the heart.

The Wikipedia article points out two further connotations of green: envy and go. Green may be associated with both peace and warfare. Truly, a color with a split personality!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Marginalia: on a quote from Thoreau

Dave,

Let me know your thoughts on this:

“Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa – it turns the man of science to stone.”
– H. D. Thoreau, quoted by William Hamilton Gibson

Why? Because it’s all too marvelous? Because it’s impossible to fully comprehend and partial comprehension is all we’ll ever get? The beauty will distract from/distort the science?

The Sylph

***

Sylph,

I’d want to know the context of this remark before saying exactly what I thought he meant. But of course the wonderful thing about isolating a quote is that it opens up multiple possibilities for interpretation – it frees the mind to explore it in ways the author may never have consciously intended. In this way, merely by cutting it loose, a brief passage of prose may be converted into something very like a poem.

This is of course a roundabout way of saying, “I don’t know!” You could take this a number of ways. I suppose HDT was indulging in a bit of sarcasm at his more “scientific” colleagues’ expense. (Didn’t “naturalist” meant “scientist” at the time?) But perhaps he meant to include himself in the criticism – I can’t tell.

Dave

***

Dave,

Yes, you’re probably on to something there. Our [recently deceased] friend George spent many a day with his nose in his works by HDT in search of the context of this quote . . . I’ll try googling, as you probably already did.
~
I found it in Spirit in Nature, from Vol. 5 of the Journals (March, 1853 – November 1853). Not much context, just stuck in there by itself.

The Sylph

***

Sylph,

I don’t think this arrangement of quotes, “Spirit in Nature,” originated with Thoreau. Thanks for the link though – a lot of good stuff! I thought the following was especially telling:

“He is the richest who has most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life. If these gates of golden willows affect me, they correspond to the beauty and promise of some experience on which I am entering. If I am overflowing with life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry – all nature will be fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth. The man of science, who is not seeking for expression but for a fact to be expressed merely, studies nature as a dead language. I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant.”

I find the egotism here a little nauseating. Nature as raw material makes me think of the ideology of resourcism – maybe an inescapable way of talking about Nature in the 19th century. Hell, I don’t think we’ve emerged from its shadow even today. Nevertheless, the bit about scientists and dead languages has the ring of truth about it.

Dave

***

Sylph,

Got it! Thanks to a full citation in an essay by Scott Slovic, I was able to locate the original entry in the journals (we have the Dover complete edition). A shame George didn’t use the Internet – though perhaps the prolonged and fruitless search carries its own rewards, e.g. in discovering nifty things along the way? The quote was indeed only a fragment; here’s the whole paragraph. (This should strike a chord with you, given your recent experience with lichens.)

“Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone. I feel I am dissipated by many observations. I should be the magnet in the midst of all this dust and filings. I know the back of my hand against a rock, and as I smooth back the skin, I find myself prepared to study lichens there. I look upon man but as a fungus. I have a slight, dry headache as the result of all this observing. How to observe is how to behave. O for a little Lethe! To crown all, lichens, which are so thin, are described in the dry state, as they are most commonly, not most truly, seen. Truly, they are dryly described.”

This is very strange to me. HDT evidently believed enough in science to think that its dry methology did constitute a form of direct seeing, and he rejected that – or at least felt that it must be tempered by the imagination. This puts him very far from the via negativa.

Dave

***

Dave,

Yeah – he’ll only study lichens if they’re growing on him. They could never get his interest otherwise, the dried up crispy crusts of hardly knowable matter that they are (without optical aids) . . . Yet his interest in man as fungus is via-negativistic in spirit, is it not? I suggest that the pre-‘easily-obtained-optical-aid’-age contributed to his indifference vis-a-vis the lowly lichen.

Sylph

***

Hi again,

Just out walking to the Far Field, gazing in wonder and some sadness at the profusion of Canada mayflower and Solomon’s seal inside that tiny ten year-old deer exclosure – and bare ground everywhere outside it.

Not to beat a dead naturalist, but the Thoreau quote does remind me of reactions I’ve had myself. For example, on wildflower outings I am always insisting on the common names; the Latin strikes me as it evidently struck Thoreau – too dry. Why should a dead language be the language of first resort to describe a living being? The common names are imprecise, yes – precisely because they are part of a living language that is constantly in flux.

Dave

***

Living language, yes. Actual communication? Almost impossible. The species names are dry to me too, but the genus brings a mental image – a gestalt of the plant in question. So many times when I’m trying to communicate with someone about a certain plant and they know only the popular name, it’s nothing but frustration. Common names have regional patterns, duplicate applications, historical meanings – it’s just a mess. I used to feel the way you do about it but if the mission is communication, the advantage of each species having its own name can’t be beat. I too worship Linnaeus. Trying to discuss the properties of plants without getting specific IS seeing nature with only a sideways glance. It doesn’t always matter – in fact, it usually doesn’t. But remember, these little entities have evolved their separateness. Their tiny histories, which led to what they are this minute, are rich food for the imagination. If you let yourself get wrapped up in not only Linnaeus but Darwin too, natural history is far from dry. A dead language is PERFECT for use as a labeling language. Hats off to Linnea!

Must get to work here now . . .

S.

***

I’m thinking maybe we ought to give a listen to what Scott Slovic has to say about it, since he situates the quote within the much larger context of Thoreau’s entire life and work. His estimation of St. Henry is more charitable than mine, though he does acknowledge Thoreau’s “frequent haughtiness of tone.” (That’s definitely the major thing keeping me from becoming a rabid Thoreauvian!) From Marginality, Midnight Optimism, and the Natural Cipher: An Approach to Thoreau and Eiseley:

“By seeking the wholesome margins of civilization, Thoreau achieves the clarity of spirit necessary for full appreciation of his existence. From this position of voluntary exile from society, whether for a brief walk in the woods or for a two-year habitation of the shoreland near Walden Pond, he gains both emotional health and insightful perspective. In the essay ‘A Winter Walk,’ he argues that life itself is ‘more serene and worthy to contemplate’ when he is ‘standing quite alone, far in the forest’ (Natural History Essays 59). So it is not merely the observer’s perspective that improves through marginality, but his very life.

“Yet the appreciator of the natural cipher must take care, if he is to enjoy fully the mysteries and beauties of nature, to rely on an appropriately marginal way of seeing. On March 23, 1853, Thoreau notes in his journal that ‘man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye.’ Direct scrutiny of the natural world, he writes, ‘is fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone’ (5:45). By learning to observe from the margins, Thoreau manages to contemplate the meaning of things without becoming distracted, even paralyzed, by their surface appearances. On November 5, 1857, he proclaims:

Sometimes I would rather get a transient glimpse or side view of a thing than stand fronting it – as those polybodies. The object I caught a glimpse of as I went by haunts my thoughts a long time, is infinitely suggestive, and I do not care to front it and scrutinize it, for I know that the thing that really concerns me is not there, but in my relation to that. That is a mere reflecting surface. (10.164)

“The subtle suggestiveness and sense of relation far outweigh the visible qualities of the object itself for the man who is poetically or divinely alive. And marginal glimpsing allows such an observer to avoid the glare of directness and savor the delicate meaningfulness of his experience. Marginality, for Thoreau, is both a kind of environment and a method of observation – and both contribute to his awakening.

“What Thoreau desires in this marginal existence is a general sense of meaning, not a tightly (if deeply) spelled out typological system like the Puritans’ or a Linnaean catalogue of facts (disparaged by Emerson in his section on language in Nature, 1836). Thoreau wants simply to experience the immediacy, the multiplicity, and the beauty of the natural world. He is a lover of details, even details without broader meanings and metaphorical equivalents. In the ‘Thursday’ chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he writes:

When compelled by a shower to take shelter under a tree, we may improve that opportunity for a more minute inspection of some of Nature’s works. I have stood under a tree in the wood half a day at a time, during a heavy rain in the summer, and yet employed myself happily and profitably there by prying with microscopic eye into the crevices of the bark or the leaves or the fungi at my feet. (A Week 300)

“The pleasure of such activity results not from the ability to identify and explain all the observable phenomena. No, Thoreau, like Mather with his strange occurrences in the heavens, realizes the necessity of looking ‘through and beyond’ nature (5:45) – he peers microscopically only to savor the magnificent minutiae, not to rationalize and categorize them. . . .

“The perspective of the traveler – marginal, estranged, freshly alert – is just what Thoreau desires, only without having to cover vast stretches of land and water. ‘To the sick,’ he notes, ‘the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world’ (320). Yet little of the actual world is needed if the observer manages to maintain a marginal perspective.”

(Weber Studies, Winter 1992, Volume 9.1)

AFTERTHOUGHT: Artists and thinkers aren’t the only ones who know how to exploit “the wholesome margin of civilization.” Literal and figurative margins are also a very fruitful terrain for merchants and capitalists. The seizure of marginal lands – as commons, an essential element (though not always a large one) in the subsistence economy – resulted in the marginalization of hundreds of thousands of people, who would then comprise the disposable human resources for the Industrial Revolution. One man’s margin is another man’s profit. And this process continues: for example, when a pharmaceutical giant obtains the patent rights on a people’s traditional plant medicine, what is that but the enclosure of the commons in a slightly new guise? We are not so much a nation of immigrants as we are a nation of displaced and uprooted people – people alienated from Nature in a far more violent manner than the modern would-be transcendentalist would care to imagine.

Gary Nabhan has a good essay on refugees and land-hunger (focusing on the Middle East) in the current issue of Orion, abridged for the web version.
__________

SEE ALSO the entry for February 11, “Some quotes on the art of seeing.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ten thoughts about possession

1. People don’t actually own anything.

2. Ownership of land may seem obvious to us, but it wasn’t to American Indians. They thought they were selling usufruct rights. And given that one can own surface rights without owning subsurface rights, possession of land can become effectively mooted by the conversion of soil into “overburden” to be scraped away and dumped elsewhere.

3. Possession is inherently ephemeral – and again, the law reflects this. Eminent domain provides for the use of property for the “public good,” though that concept can mutate almost beyond recognition. Most new highways, for example, will not do the land or the public any long-term good. And in some parts of the country, it’s becoming an accepted practice for local governments to condemn private property and turn it over to real estate speculators – with the justification that, for example, private residences do not constitute the “highest and best use” of land in cases where retail or industry might be more profitable and would return higher tax revenues. In times of war, virtually any private property may be seized for any reason. Finally, the existence of inheritance and estate taxes (an indirect subsidy of real estate speculators and private contractors) suggests that the privacy of property is little more than a useful fiction; everything ultimately belongs to Uncle Sam.

4. Do we own ourselves? Clearly not. There is no constitutionally recognized right to privacy. The government can institute a draft at any time, which means it retains the ultimate power of life or death over its citizens, despite what the Bill of Rights may say. Even more tellingly, it’s a crime to kill yourself, and a crime to kill others unless you are in uniform and following orders from the government. (Very few murders by police are ever prosecuted. And the U.S. government goes to great lengths to ensure that its soldiers may not be prosecuted by any international court for crimes committed while in uniform.) We do not own our own freedom: we cannot engage in so-called victimless crimes, such as ingesting certain banned substances. Given that the main reason for banning these substances appears to be societal discomfort with the alteration of the consciousness, we must conclude that our minds are not free, either. And individual liberty of movement – what imprisonment robs ones of – seems intrinsic to self-ownership. (If imprisonment were recognized as a form of slavery, the United States would probably be the world’s second-largest slaveholding society, right after China.)

5. Are there any limits to possession? How you answer this question depends on whether you believe anything can truly be known. If even an idea can be copyrighted or trademarked, nothing is safe. Consider that access to drinking water is being privatized around the globe. In Texas, an entire underground aquifer is owned outright. And life forms can now be patented – a blasphemous notion if there ever was one! Probably only the fear of adverse publicity prevents someone like Monsanto or Microsoft from patenting the human genome.

6. Are there any historical precedents for reversing categories of ownership once they have been admitted? Yes. At one time, it was assumed that owners of land had full rights to everything on it. Then market hunters wiped out wildlife populations in large sections of the East. Now, game species are recognized as being held in common, by the citizens at large. Endangered species and migratory birds are subject to national and international regulation respectively. Under the Clean Water Act, the regulation of wetlands belongs to the federal government. The animal rights movement seeks to extend legal recognition to nonhuman species; the wildlands movement advocates recognition of the self-willed (“wild”) and self-owned qualities of the land itself.

7. What does it mean to own something? If legal titles can be revoked – or voided by the overthrow of governments – then surely we must look beyond the law. “Possession is nine tenths of the law.” This implies that if/when the concept of possession is universally recognized as illusory and absurd, the practice of law will wither. What will remain? Without ownership – which is to say, without unique and unequal privileges to the earth’s bounty and to products of human labor – what promises would still be so critical that people might need special protection against their violation? Murder, incest and rape would not stop being wrong; what would likely fade is the societal appetite for retributive justice, once these types of crimes were no longer seen as crimes against a form of property.

8. What does it mean to be possessed? I venture to suggest that possession inevitably entails abuse, to owner as well as to the thing owned. There may well have been one or two benevolent slaveholders in the Old South, but human nature being what it is, I doubt there were many more than that. Because, in the first place, what is possession? I maintain that, at one level, Possession is the power to do with another anything we wish. This definition strikes me as perhaps little more than one half of a tautology, however, because power and possession do seem to be two sides of the same coin. Can we understand possession apart from power, or power apart from possession? Only if the self/other distinction can be dissolved through various forms of ecstasy (including death).

9. Wouldn’t complete self-sufficiency also render the need for power over others obsolete? The need, perhaps, but not the reality. The reality is that we are all completely interdependent. This points to a second, more basic definition of possession: it is a human, cultural abstraction of bodily consumption. The violent assimilation of foreign matter into one’s own body for conversion into energy and waste products is unavoidable. As we consume, so shall we be consumed. In this light, Death appears as the ultimate owner. But paradoxically, in death we also sense the potential for self-transcendence. In rebelling against the authority of death, we determine to live in truth – whatever that means. Every culture, every language grapples with this problem a little differently. In the West, we have traditionally talked about grace and about love. Both concepts partake of the aura of the gift.

10. This, I would argue, is what lies at the root of human experience: the intuition of mortal being/becoming as a gift. Power and possession, I suggest, are much more recent abstractions. To become fully aware is to recognize one’s own incommensurability with that portion of life and time one has been granted. Without such an awareness, the relationship between self and Self will begin to resemble the relationship between two parties in an economic transaction. Priests assert ownership over gods, gods assert ownership (“possession”) over priests. This may be inevitable. But it is a mask; and behind that mask lies the leering death’s head. The unadorned truth seems to be that from the beginning everything shines with its own light. Beauty, like truth, is intrinsic – which is another way of saying that things or beings ultimately resist all forms of calculation or manipulation. Consumption in the beginning is an innocent act; only when we cling to forms – when we try to possess things – does life appear tragic.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What goes wrong

We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good. . . . The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire, and the man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death.

He has advanced beyond all horizons. There are no directions left in which he can travel. This is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.

That’s Thomas Merton, from New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961), which I’m re-reading for the first time in close to ten years. (As luck would have it, Beth at Cassandra Pages has been reading Merton also.) I remember being impressed before, but this time I am blown away. Merton summarizes and synthesizes the Christian mystical tradition like no other author I’ve read. I like being challenged when I read, and this book constitutes the perfect challenge for me right now.

As delighted as I am by the profundity of his reflections, however, I still cannot (yet) bring myself to accept that there is a permanent escape route from existential sorrow and pain. I hope to convince nobody of my views – please, if you are a person of true faith (as Merton defines it), do not let me dissuade you from your idealism! Here’s a passage that exemplifies some of what I have a problem with. I fancy that many of my readers will, in fact, identify strongly with the sentiments here, and wonder why I do not.

“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls. In His love we posses all things and enjoy fruition of them, finding Him in them all. And thus as we go about the world, everything we meet and everything we see and hear and touch, far from defiling, purifies us and plants in us something more of contemplation and heaven.

“Short of this perfection, created things do not bring us joy but pain. Until we love God perfectly, everything in the world will be able to hurt us. And the greatest misfortune is to be dead to the pain they inflict on us, and not to realize what it is.

“For until we love God perfectly His world is full of contradiction. The things He has created attract us to Him and yet keep us away from Him. They draw us on and they stop us dead. We find Him in them to some extent and then we don’t find Him in them at all.

“Just when we think we have discovered some joy in them, the joy turns to sorrow; and just when they are beginning to please us the pleasure turns to pain . . . ”

Yep. So?

Back in the early 70s, Doonesbury poked fun at the conservative reaction to the “Me generation” in the person of Mark Slackmeyer’s dad, who once memorably opined that “Life is not meant to be enjoyed. It is meant to be gotten on with!” That’s putting rather too strongly a sentiment I do feel a bit myself. The funny thing is, I remain a social and political idealist: there’s nothing inherently difficult about building just, peaceful and ecologically sustainable societies, in my view. This strikes me as being well within our capacities as human beings.

I don’t even have a quarrel with the truth claims in the preceding passage. As regular readers of Via Negativa have probably noticed, I’m simultaneously attracted to and repelled by religious utopianism – the comic worldview. On the other hand, a great deal of existence strikes me as inescapably tragic. On the third hand (oops, shades of Hinduism!) it is barely possible that, in rejecting the appeal of what seems most attractive about religion – joy, freedom from pain, personal salvation – I may be setting myself up for some kind of authentic religious experience. But I doubt it.

More likely I have simply entered what Molly Ivins calls “dour old fartitude” a little prematurely. Alternatively, I may actually be more cheerful than the average person, more easily sustained by whatever scraps of truth and joy happen to come my way.

I mentioned Harry Humes the day before yesterday. Here’s a poem of his that might have some bearing here, I think. This is from his book Butterfly Effect (Milkweed, 1999). My only quibble with it is that he doesn’t make the occasion quite clear enough: is he describing something he saw on TV, read in the papers, or heard from a friend? But I like the way he tries to ground the news in his own experience through synchronicity. This makes the concluding question more personal, more urgent.

GRIZZLY COUNTRY
by Harry Humes

Before she crawled into her sleeping bag,
she ate a cold supper,
had no small fire for comfort,
hoisted her pack into a tree,
did not wash her hands or face,
did not hum or whistle.

The bear found her anyway,
came quietly down some scree,
crossed the stream,
and took her out of the tent.

This evening, only a few hours past
the winter solstice, I wonder
where I was when the bear lifted
its snout into the sky.
Did I look at first snow over Hawk Mountain?
Or at my daughter?
Did I hear something beyond the blue spruce?

What is it goes wrong with our knowing?
What is it we don’t hear right away,
or ever, that comes fully grown,
silver guard hair brilliant on its shoulders,
not clumsy, but stunning
in its moves, so beautiful
one might love its approach?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

A confused chorus

.
To a Lonely Hermaphrodite

Know
thyself.

John M. Burns, Biograffiti: A Natural Selection, Norton, 1975

“Most European languages have two verbs with the sense of ‘to know,’ one meaning to know a person in the sense of friendship or acquaintance (French, connaitre; German, kennen; Spanish, conocer, Russian, poznakomit’), and other meaning to know facts (French, savoir; German, wissen; Spanish, saber; Russian, znat’).”
Curtis Brautigam

And Adam knew (yada’) Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
Genesis 4:1

“Yada’: a primitive root; to know (properly, to ascertain by seeing); used in a great variety of senses, figuratively, literally, euphemistically and inferentially (including observation, care, recognition; and causatively, instruction, designation, punishment, etc.) (as follow):–acknowledge, acquaintance(-ted with), advise, answer, appoint, assuredly, be aware, (un-)awares, can(-not), certainly, comprehend, consider, X could they, cunning, declare, be diligent, (can, cause to) discern, discover, endued with, familiar friend, famous, feel, can have, be (ig-)norant, instruct, kinsfolk, kinsman, (cause to let, make) know, (come to give, have, take) knowledge, have (knowledge), (be, make, make to be, make self) known, + be learned, + lie by man, mark, perceive, privy to, X prognosticator, regard, have respect, skilful, shew, can (man of) skill, be sure, of a surety, teach, (can) tell, understand, have (understanding), X will be, wist, wit, wot.”
Strong’s Bible Dictionary

“The verb yada’ (‘to know’) exhibits a wide array of meanings in biblical Hebrew. In various contexts yada’ and its cognates may denote sense perception, intellectual apprehension, possession of facts and information that can be learned and transmitted, practical skill, discriminating judgment, even physical intimacy. However, when yada’ has God as its object, it implies far more than simple ‘acknowledgment.’ Nahum Sarna writes:
In the biblical conception, knowledge is not essentially or even primarily rooted in the intellect and mental activity. Rather, it is more experiential and is embedded in the emotions, so that it may encompass such qualities as contact, intimacy, concern, relatedness and mutuality (Exodus, JPS Torah Commentary, p. 5).”
Commentary Press

Know thyself. (Gnothi seauton)
“ATTRIBUTION: Delphic Oracle. Inscription on the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, Greece, 6th century B.C.
“The words are traditionally ascribed to the ‘Seven Sages’ or ‘Seven Wise Men’ of ancient Greece, and specifically to Solon of Athens (c. 640-c. 558 B.C.).”
The Columbia World of Quotations

“The Greeks were always careful to solicit approval from their gods before setting out from home, whether for commercial voyages or colonization. The god most frequently consulted about sending out a colony was Apollo in his sanctuary at Delphi, a hauntingly beautiful spot in the mountains of central Greece. The Delphic sanctuary began to be internationally renowned in the eighth century B.C. because it housed an oracular shrine in which a prophetess, the Pythia, spoke the will of Apollo in response to questions from visiting petitioners. The Delphic oracle operated for a limited number of days over nine months of the year, and demand for its services was so high that the operators of the sanctuary rewarded generous contributors with the privilege of jumping to the head of the line. The great majority of visitors to Delphi consulted the oracle about personal matters such as marriage and having children. That Greeks hoping to found a colony felt they had to secure the approval of Apollo of Delphi demonstrates the oracle was held in high esteem already as early as the 700s B.C., a reputation that continued to make the oracle a force in Greek international affairs in the centuries to come.”
Thomas R. Martin, An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander

“Reality and rhetoric are becoming confused. The means through which the United States pursued its Cold War goals – world leadership, global responsibility, strategic alliances, declaratory morality, and so on – have become ends in themselves. Geopolitical analysis is taking second place”.
Jonathan Clarke, “America, Know Thyself”

“Apollo ritually purifies Orestes after the murder of his mother Clytemnestra. The ritual cleanses Orestes of guilt for having committed matricide. The pig’s blood symbolically absolves him from his crime. Delphi became associated with ritualistically cleansing moral pollution; thus, it became a place of exile for those who committed murder or other morally questionable deeds.

“Apollo returned to Delphi in the form of a dolphin (hence, the name Delphi). The Delphic oracle, known also as ‘Pythia,’ would be seated on a tripod (Apollo’s symbol of prophesy) in a trance. Scholars believe that the tripod might have been situated above a fissure in the floor of the temple from which arose the vapors. The oracle would also chew laurel leaves.

“The laurel is an important symbol for Apollo. Eros made Apollo fall in love with the nymph, Daphne, because Apollo mocked his archery skills. Daphne rejected Apollo and fled him. When he caught her and just as he was embracing her, she turned into a laurel tree. Thus, to commemorate his love for Daphne, Apollo made the laurel his sacred tree.

“The Pythia, in a trance state, would only mumble her answer, which a high priest would translate into Apollo’s prophesy. Everyone involved in the ritual had to be ritually washed in the springs. An animal would be sacrificed and, if conditions were favorable, the petitioner could then enter the sanctuary. The question, which had been previously written, was handed to the priest, who in turn asked the Pythia for Apollo’s answer. The priest would translate into hexameter verse.

“The Omphalos, literally the navel, sits in the middle of the sanctuary at Delphi. Pausanias refers to it as the center of the Earth. According to myth, Zeus, trying to determine the middle of the Earth, sent two eagles, one flying east and another flying west. They met at Delphi. It became an important symbol of the prophetic arts.

“Cassandra, a figure in the Oresteia, also is associated with Apollo. Apollo made overtures to Cassandra. She agreed to be with him if he gave her the gift of prophesy. After he taught her prophesy, Cassandra refused Apollo. There is some disagreement as to whether she outright refused him or she did not bear him any children. Nonetheless, to exact revenge, and since he could not take back his gift of prophesy, Apollo cursed Cassandra. All her prophesies, though true, would not be believed or understood. Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War with Cassandra as his concubine. She foretells his death and the Orestes’ revenge on Clytemnestra to a confused chorus.”

Angie M. Kenna, “Apollo: Background, Mythology and Images”

“I absolutely cannot believe that the U.S. is bombarding a mosque in Iraq. The stupidity, arrogance, and total lack of comprehensive thinking – not to mention foresight about the consequences of their actions – the administration is exhibiting are so appalling that there is nothing to say; one listens, reads the headlines, and goes away slack-jawed and stupified, and –shaking that off — desiring nothing more than to climb to the top of the highest building and shout ‘WAKE UP!!!’ But what would come back? A giant, empty echo?”

the cassandra pages (April 7, 2004)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

More on compassion

Studies of giving patterns among Americans show that it is only the well-off who can afford “compassion fatigue.” In proportion to their income (and their free time), poorer folks donate much more time and money to charitable causes than the rich.

I believe this pattern is repeated around the world. I was just reading the family blog of some Palestinian-Iraqis, A Family in Baghdad, where the mother, Faiza, wrote:

Today I was driving my car to work and a convoy of American military vehicles passed to my left. We remained cautious and slowed down because we were afraid to come near them. I always pray that they return safely home because I’m a mother and I think with a mother’s heart not with a man’s cruel fighting heart.
They have another way in dealing with life and its problems.
************************

I was thinking what would happen if they got attacked right now? where will it be from? it’s a sunny day.
Just as I was thinking I saw in front of me a cloud of smoke first then a sound of explosion that remained in my ear for over an hour. The birds were frightened and flew away . . .

She is not quite so charitable toward the leaders, however.

Bosh and Sharon made a press conference in the evening; they buy and sell other people’s countries and ignoring the struggle of Palestinian people that lasted for the last fifty years.
The powerful evil always stand in front of the camera smiling, and forget that there is a god in the skies up there, who has rules and justice, that he implements it in his way, and defeats the stupid evil when he wants.
“Let them play till they face the promised day” God says in Quran.

Cue up Black Sabbath, “War Pigs.”

But if the war pigs have their way, the possibility of compassion from our side will become virtually impossible – because machines will do all the killing. Conn Hallinan wrote recently about the U.S. Department of “Defense” plan “to make one third of the military’s combat vehicles driverless by 2015.” This is part of an overarching strategy for fully mechanized warfare that would include “unmanned combat aircraft, robot tanks, submarines, and a supersonic bomber capable of delivering six tons of bombs and missiles to anyplace on the globe in two hours.”

If this plan is carried out, it will also deprive Iraqi mothers – and other kind-hearted souls among the lucky millions targeted for “liberation” – of any souls to pray for among their “liberators.” No one for her or her God to be merciful towards. No one to show mercy.

(Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The origins of Easter (part 4)

Fun fact #9: In naming the paschal holiday for Ostara, the goddess of spring, Anglo-Saxon Christians recognized the original character of Passover as a springtime rite of passage

The original, combined holiday of Unleavened Bread and Passover amounted to, in William H.C. Propp’s estimation, “a rite of passage from season to season and from year to year. The weeklong celebration is what [anthropologist Victor] Turner calls [in The Forest of Symbols] a ‘liminal’ period, a transitional interval set apart from quotidian activity. Throughout the Near East, both equinoxes were times of fate and danger, evoking special rites of purification and protection. In the lunisolar calendar, months were intercalated at the equinoxes – a procedure that strikes us as routine, but in antiquity was fraught with significance.”

Propp continues with a detailed analysis of the multiple parallels between Massot/Pesach and Sukkot/Yom Kippur, the other Jewish New Year festival associated with an equinox. “Both . . . are liminal periods involving evacuation of the house. For the former, one removes all leaven; for the latter, one removes oneself, to live in a temporary shelter (Lev 23:42). Again, time must be punctuated: to live perpetually in a house or to keep yeast alive indefinitely would be unnatural.” Thus, both festivals emphasize ascetic practices and the healing return to primitive Creation/wilderness.

Both festivals involve blood rites beginning in the evening, and “each in some manner placates a supernatural malefic agency: a demon or the Destroyer at Pesah, the demon (or death god) Azazel on the Day of Expiation . . . Both rituals have undertones of purification and vicarious offering played down by the Biblical authors . . . Since Pesah is a domestic rite, while Yom hakippurim is a national rite, the two equinoctial observances annually cleanse the nation at the micro- and macro- levels.”

One should keep well in mind that, however loosely we may now use the term “rite of passage,” for most pre-modern and indigenous peoples such rites were fraught with danger. To this day, initiatory rites for young men in some societies remain sufficiently grueling as to ensure that not all will survive. The paschal rite appears to have grown out of widely practiced ancient Middle Eastern sacrifices of atonement and purging, in which “blood from the slain beast is applied to humans, animals, the ground, a pillar, a domicile – or a doorway.” In folk beliefs prevalent among Middle Eastern Christians, Jews and Muslims to this day, “demons are attracted to and powerful against those undergoing major life transitions.” Blood is used to distract the malevolent spirit, to trick it into thinking its intended victim has already died.

This use of blood from a sacrificial victim which is then consumed in a fellowship meal distinguishes Passover (and the analogous Muslim rite called fidya) from an ordinary sacrifice, where the animal is completely consumed by fire “in a ritual of pure substitution,” Propp notes. “Arguably, sharing food creates fellowship both among celebrants and between celebrants and the demon or deity at whom the rite is directed. Ingesting the meat may also reinforce, or even actuate, the fictive equation of victim and sacrificer underlying vicarious sacrifice.”

An additional nuance in the Biblical account arises from the fact that the Destroyer is identified as an aspect of Yahweh himself. The rigorous monotheism of the Hebrew Bible propels an identification that may or may not have been present in the folk beliefs from which the festival grew. By the time that Yeshua ben Yosef was ready to give himself up as a paschal lamb to try and prevent what he probably foresaw as the imminent destruction of his people, the Devil had, of course, developed into an autonomous figure. But as we have seen, Yeshua’s teachings emphasized that only God has power over life and death. And if we allow “the fictive equation of victim and sacrificer underlying vicarious sacrifice,” we begin to see what may have been the original meaning of the role of “the Jews” in Jesus’ crucifixion. But first, a little more background.

Fun fact # 10: In the original conception of Passover, the blood of the goat or sheep – and the blood of the first born Egyptian – is intended as a vicarious substitute for God’s first-born son, Israel

According to the Torah (e.g. Lev 17:10-14), blood must never be eaten by human beings. That’s apparently because it was viewed as a highly charged, ambiguous material. “It is the current of life,” says Propp. “Its quasi-magnetic bipolarity both attracts and repels the divine, removing and causing impurity.” The blood of circumcision averts Yahweh’s attack of Moses in Exodus 4:24-26. This demonic attack by a God who had just revealed himself to Moses and appointed him prophet and deliverer of Israel has puzzled many commentators. Propp offers the sensible suggestion that the attack was more-or-less automatic upon Moses’ return to the land of Egypt, prompted by the blood guilt he had incurred years before, when he slew the overseer. Recall that in the Bible’s very first murder, Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, land, people and blood are closely identified.

The gospels make the connections between Yeshua’s cruxifiction and the apotropaic rites of Passover as explicit as possible: even the herb used to sprinkle the blood of the lamb on the doorposts in Exodus – marjoram or hyssop – is recalled in John’s account of Jesus’ final drink. The passage builds upon an incident also reported in Matthew and Mark, and alludes to a passage from the Psalms (69:21) popularly associated with the Messiah:

For my food they gave me bitterness,
and for my thirst they gave me sour wine.

In both of the other accounts, this wine is offered to Jesus at the beginning of his crucifixion, and he refuses. It is described as a medicinal wine, infused with myrrh. One might suppose he refuses it because the crucifixion alone is to be his medicine. And in fact, Yeshua himself does envision the crucifixion as a form of bitter medicine: “Let this cup pass from me,” he prays on the Mount of Olives (Luke 22:42). Thus, only as he prepares to die (John 19:28) does he ask for a drink. In Willis Barnstone’s translation:

After this Yeshua, knowing that all had been done to fulfill the words of the Psalms, said, I am thirsty.
A jar filled with cheap wine was lying there. So they put a sponge soaked with the vinegar on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.
Then when Yeshua had taken the wine, he said, It is ended.
And bowing his head he gave up his spirit. (John 19:28-30)

The identification of this wine with Yeshua’s own blood is reinforced by the incident immediately following, in verse 34: “But one of the soldiers stabbed his side with his spear, and at once blood and water came out.” And the hyssop/marjoram in this passage has more than one antecedent, as the Epistle to the Hebrews (9:18-20) points out: Moses used the herb to sprinkle the sacrificial blood of the bulls in the original covenant of Yahweh with Israel.

The participation of Romans in this national sacrifice would seem to parallel the role of the Egyptians in the Exodus story. But if there were ever any implications in earlier versions of the gospels that the Romans should have been punished as the Egyptians had been, they were, perhaps wisely, edited out. In any case, I don’t think that the Christological interpretations should blind us to the likelihood that Yeshua himself understood his sacrifice as the paschal rite writ large.

If the reader will permit me to speculate just a little, I think it is important to remember how a Jewish messiah would have perceived himself: not as the literal son of God – much less the second person of the Trinity – but as a very human being who would willingly sacrifice himself on behalf of his people. The author of Exodus 4:22-23 embeds quote within quote within quote when he has Yahweh command Moses (in Propp’s Anchor Bible translation):

And you will say to Pharaoh, “Thus has Yahweh said: ‘My son, my firstborn, is Israel. And I have said to you, “Release my son that he may serve me.” And if you refuse to release him, see: I am going to kill your son, your firstborn.'”

“The firstborn of man and beast are holy to Yahweh,” Propp notes. The book of Numbers depicts the Levites as Israel’s figurative firstborn; the holy Nazarites Samson and Samuel are both first sons dedicated to Yahweh at birth. This conception of divine sonship seems to me the most obvious origin of the phrase “earthly son” or Son of Man, which is how Yeshua describes himself in the gospels. Of great significance for anyone interested in what Jesus may have thought as a good Jew, he never refers to himself as the son of God. We infer that he thought that way only from later tradition, and from the fact that he addresses God as “Father” – a term of intimacy probably not uncommon among teachers in the neo-Nazaritic tradition who wanted to emphasize their independence from the official, priestly cult.

The popularity of the term “earthly son” for the messiah in intertestamental texts recovered from the caves at Qumran suggests how universalized Israel’s sense of divine mission had become by Yeshua’s time. If Yeshua indeed saw himself as God’s annointed, his use of the term “earthly son” probably meant that he viewed his attempt to avert the destruction of Israel as something done on behalf of all the children of Adam (whose name literally means “earth”).

In the paschal symbolism of the crucifixion, the cross now performs the liminal function of the doorpost/altar. Potent symbolism of varied origins and great antiquity could thus be marshalled to construct a message of unmistakable import to the greatest empire the world had even known: no farther. The ambiguity of the cross must have seemed the most effective magic against such a confounding enemy: whatever its sponsoring Power, it was told, Here. Let this cup pass. For (says Propp in reference to the Exodus account) “the paschal blood may not divert the Destroyer by its own virtue. Rather, it may create a zone of ritual purity attractive to Yahweh’s presence . . . God then protects (psh [possible root of paschal]) the household from his own demonic side.”

This interpretation seems obvious, yet it was not the one the gospels foregrounded, probably for the simple reason that the sacrifice failed: the temple at Jerusalem was destroyed a generation after Yeshua’s death. The charm was broken; instead of the “fictive equation of victim and sacrificer,” the followers of Yeshua began to blame their fellow Jews for the catastrophe. What was the charge? It would have been absurd to blame anyone but the Romans and/or Yeshua himself for his sacrifice, and in any case the sacrifice had been thought necessary to try and avert God’s wrath. The strongest biblical antecedent was of course the binding of Isaac by Abraham. No one would have accused Abraham of treachery – he was simply following orders. And so, in a sense, was the disciple known simply as Yehudah (Judas), “the Jew.”

But the story of Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac reminds us of one salient fact: the followers of Yahweh had always placed a great emphasis on the inner intention of the worshipper. Abraham is rewarded for his unquestioning faith. Perhaps, thought the Yeshua-Jews, the crucifixion of the Messiah failed because too few of their fellow Jews had “circumcised their hearts” in the required manner. Perhaps their refusal to participate in the new, reinterpreted paschal rite triggered the national disaster.

O.K., I have no idea how Jews of 2,000 years ago would have thought. But this line of speculation does sort of suggest how all that Near Eastern mythology about the dying and resurrecting god got in there: it was needed to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the original justification for Jesus’ death. From the Annointed One of Israel, Yeshua ben Yosef transmogrifies into the cosmic Lamb of God. Mithraic and Magian worldviews, dominant throughout the region, impose a much sharper dualism than normative Jewish theology would ever allow. God is now all good; no dark side is permitted. (By contrast, in rabbinical Judaism evil is generally explained as a consequence of human free will and/or as an outgrowth of that aspect of the godhead that favors strict judgement. The sayings attributed to Jesus suggest he would have endorsed this view.) For the early Christians, God is now responsible only for life; death becomes the devil’s domain. Sin is generalized to the human condition and read back into the Genesis account, in which the serpent is now interpreted as Satan. “I am the light and the life,” proclaims John’s Jesus. Conspiratorial fantasies about Yeshua’s death pit the few righteous against the many damned, in history as in eternity. Christian dualism and anti-Semitism grow up together.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The origins of Easter (part 3)

The books are piling up on the table beside my computer. I had thought maybe I would end this compendium with yesterday’s post, but that would have left unexplored too many fun and/or obscure facts about the origins of Easter. A couple of points with direct relevance to the via negativa need to be raised. Plus, I just remembered that my parents’ library includes, in addition to most of the Anchor Bible volumes published thus far, a complete set of the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Have I mentioned that my father is a retired reference librarian? It’s mainly his bibliophilia that we have to thank (blame?) for the extension of this series well beyond the limits that prudence and decency would impose.

Fun fact #7: the entire account of the Passover plot in the gospels is probably fiction

Most New Testament scholars accept at least the core of the story: that Jesus was turned over to Romans for execution by Jewish religious leaders. And that may be so; who knows? But given the sort of violence and hatred this story has inspired over the centuries, I tend to agree with Willis Barnstone (The New Covenant, Commonly Called the New Testament, Volume One: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse, Penguin, 2002) that scholars and religious leaders of all stripes should strongly repudiate the entire thing. There’s simply no need for it. The Eucharist and the resurrection are already mysteries; surely an admission that the circumstances leading up to the crucifixion of the Christ are equally obscure will do no damage to the Christian faith.

Most people by now are probably already familiar with the key elements of this argument from reading numerous critiques of The Movie: that the authors of the gospels were competing with the rabbis (Pharisees) for converts, and that they were eager to curry favor with Rome. Hence the absurd and ahistorical depiction of the Roman authorities as basically blameless, and the construction of “the Jews” as somehow separate from Jesus and his small band of followers.

Barnstone’s translation is, for my money, the best and most surprising modern English version to date – better even than the Three Gospels by the novelist Reynolds Price. One of the things that makes it so surprising is Barnstone’s insistence on re-Aramaicizing names wherever possible. This seemingly minor adjustment really throws the reader off-balance, calling into question aspects of the text that had seemed most comforting and familiar. (Herein lies a most fruitful paradox: to come up with such a re-vision you probably need a professed agnostic like Barnstone. But this revisioning process, if it allows one to “read the Bible again for the first time,” ought to advance rather than threaten the faith of its Christian audience. What is the ideal balance between comforting familiarity and unsettling strangeness in a religious text, I wonder? The popular success of The Movie leads me to suppose than many more Christians want to be challenged, even shaken, than the folks in the pulpit on Sunday morning are generally willing to acknowledge.)

Here’s Barnstone: “Because the gospels arrive before us from unknown origin, we have only some ‘negative’ facts. It is certain that the authors . . . are unknown by name or person, that no alleged eyewitness accounts survive, that no intermediary texts exist in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, or Latin – the languages used in areas of early Judaism and Christianity. Where did the evangelists, who were not witness to these events, obtain their information? There is no knowledge about this void. What is known is that a rabbi, whose name was probably Yeshua ben Yosef, was crucified by the Romans for the political crime of conspiring against Rome.” Barnstone insists upon a fact that should be obvious but is commonly overlooked: “Outside the gospels we have no information on the specific nature of the political crime of sedition – whether it was his actual opposition to Rome or a plot by his Jewish opponents to convince Rome of his opposition – that persuaded the prefect Pilate to make a public example through crucifixion. Scholars who routinely blame the Jews for setting up Yeshua’s death founder on [this fact], which is the unverifiable conspiracy scenario.”

Barnstone quotes E.P. Sanders (Jesus and Judaism): “It is hard to believe that a formal court actually convened on the first night of Passover, as Matthew and Mark have it. Luke, we should note, states that Yeshua was taken to the Sanhedrin only after daybreak (Luke 22:66). John does not depict a trial before the Sanhedrin at all. . . . The Gospels are all influenced by the desire to incriminate the Jews and exculpate the Romans. The insistence of the crowd that Jesus be killed, despite Pilate’s considering him innocent, shows this clearly enough.”

Barnstone concludes: “The story of the Jews at Passover, who kidnap Christian children to perform ritual murder on them to use their blood to prepare the matzoh, a tale that exists in virtually every language of Europe, is not heard today. Yet the source of the satanization of the Jews, leading to such tales, lies in the New Covenant, and . . . has not faded; and so the venom, of Jew-hating and Jew-killing, has not vanished. The Jew-hating will not disappear for a reader of the New Covenant as long as Yeshua and all his cast continue to have their true identity as Jews interacting with Jews obscured.”

Fun fact #8: the silence attributed to Yeshua during his trial reflects, among other things, an ancient Jewish rejection of civil authority

Setting aside what has just been said about the fictive qualities of the account of Yeshua’s trial, let’s look briefly at how his purported behavior accords with Jewish tradition.

On trial for his life, before the Sanhedrin and before Pilate, the eloquent rabbi is largely silent. He breaks this silence only to deflect a question; he gives no real answers. He is wordiest in John, the most prolix of the gospels. Pilate, after getting a “where did you get that question?” answer to a query about his kingship of the Jews (18:33-34), asks (18:35) “What have you done?” In the King James version: “(36) Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. (37) Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. (38) Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?”

To that last question, significantly, Jesus gives no reply. As Jacques Ellul points out in Anarchism and Christianity (Eerdmans, 1988), he has no teaching to impart to Pilate. However, Jesus’ silence and the riddling nature of his few replies seems consistent with the hermetic nature of his teaching, which employs parables to prevent the misuse or misconstruing of his words by those incapable of grasping them.

As narratives, the gospels – especially Mark – remain compelling even for non-religious readers, largely because of their abundant foreshadowing of the dramatic and tragic end. In their mastery of the narrative art, the evangelists simply imitated the Hebrew Bible – just as the eventual redactors of the New Covenant imitated the pattern of the Old in placing conflicting accounts side-by-side, trusting that the intelligent reader would be able to pick and choose among them. The text was meant be read both reverentially and critically; Jesus’ use of parables shows as well as anything how acutely aware Jewish and early Christian teachers were of the limitations of language to convey truth. The job of a well-told tale is to enchant, to draw the listener or reader into a willing suspension of disbelief, as Coleridge famously observed. But naive trust, in the Biblical worldview, is but the beginning of faith – the first step in a pilgrimage that leads one through a series of transformations in perception, behavior and understanding.

Thus, the outermost, exoteric truth of the gospels is that “Jesus died for our sins.” In this light, Jesus’ behavior at his trial seems merely fatalistic: he had to die in this way because it was foreordained, foretold, foreshadowed. The logic of the narrative – which purports to be the logic of history – demands it. But at another level, God operates apart from the mundane world, in contradiction to human expectations, outside of history. To have faith in this God is to assimilate one’s own will to His – in absolute freedom. Thus, the believer cannot escape the great paradox of human free will in a universe where all events and outcomes are ultimately up to God. According to the terms of this paradoxical reality, Jesus was killed not by the Jewish authorities and/or the Romans but by an act of his own will – and his death was ultimately illusory, because God cannot die. This is the level of the divine comedy, the passion plays annually performed by European Christian communities for hundreds of years. The self-sacrifice of God is a timeless and re-occurring act.

Another dimension of the Easter drama is more didactic. The practice of nonviolence and non-cooperation with authority constituted one of Yeshua’s core teachings. His ministry only began when he successfully resisted the temptations of the devil, which culminated in the offer of absolute, dictatorial power (Matthew 4:8-9 and Luke 4:6-7). “According to these texts,” Ellul notes, “all the power and the glory of kingdoms, all that has to do with politics and political authority, belongs to the devil. It has all been given to him and he gives it to whom[ever] he wills. Those who hold political power receive it from him and depend on him . . . This fact is no less important than the fact that Jesus rejects the devil’s offer. Jesus does not say to the devil: it is not true. You do not have power over kingdoms and states. He does not dispute this claim. He refuses the offer of power because the devil demands that he should fall down and worship him. This is the sole point when he says: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and you shall serve him, only him’ (Matthew 4:10). We may thus say that among Jesus’ immediate followers and in the first Christian generation political authorities – what we call the state – belonged to the devil and those who held power received it from him. We have to remember this when we study the trial of Jesus.”

So the same Easter story that leads to centuries of anti-Jewish persecution also fuels the radical anti-authoritarian strain in Christian tradition – and here we can speak most truthfully about a Judeo-Christian tradition. Wrestling with authority, civil as well as divine, goes back to the very origins of Judaism as an iconoclastic cult, where at best an uneasy détente prevailed between the inspired nebiim (“prophets”), the priesthood of Aaron and the House of David. The Bible’s “historical” books describe the period before the institution of kingship as a freer, if not more God-fearing, time. When the people beg the aging religious leader Samuel to anoint a king “so we can be like other nations,” Samuel informs them that this is an act of apostasy.

Thus, even in a text from an era before the character of the devil had firmly coalesced, the desire for an earthly ruler was portrayed as irreligious, equated with the desire for idols (1 Sam 8:7-8). Speaking to the people in God’s stead, Samuel proceeds to enumerate all the evils they will suffer under a king (11-18) – the most unsparing criticism of kingship from the ancient world this side of Zhuangzi.

Yeshua’s teachings about resistance to authority are among his most subtle. Should the people pay taxes? His answer: Bring me a coin. “And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar’s. And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him.” (KJV, Mark 12:16-17) This follows the flattery of his insincere questioners: “You do not look at a person’s face but rather teach the way of God in accordance to truth,” in Barnstone’s translation. Yet in his response he does draw attention to the face on the coin – the preeminent sign of ownership in a largely illiterate society. The coin is already Caesar’s; give it back to him if he asks for it. But keep in mind that God retains ownership over life and death, because human beings are made in His image.

Ellul calls attention to another saying of Jesus, in Matthew 20:25-28, which builds upon the familiar “suffering servant” motif from Isaiah. Here’s Barnstone’s translation. Yeshua tells his disciples,

You know that the rulers of the gentiles
lord it over the people
and the high officials tyrannize them.
It will not be so for you,
for whoever among you wishes to be great
will be your servant,
and whoever among you wishes to be first
will be your slave.
So the earthly son [“Son of Man”] did not come to be served
but to serve
and to give his own life for the redemption
of the many.

In this teaching and others, the followers of Yeshua are urged to serve each other – to become each other’s messiah, as it were. This is the proper role for all the sons and daughters of the earth; any other form of coercive power is illegitimate. Temptations to power must be completely repudiated – including the temptation to match wits with the authorities – because power is deeply ambivalent. To take up a weapon is to subject oneself to the rule of weapons (Matt 26:52). To pass judgement on others is to condemn oneself (Matt 7:1).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The origins of Easter (part 2)

Fun fact #4: the “bitter herbs” of the Passover meal were probably lettuce

William Propp translates Exodus 12:8: “And they will eat the meat in this night, fire-roasted; with unleavened bread and bitter lettuce they will eat.” He points out in his notes that Biblical botany is notoriously difficult. The Vulgate translates the word in question “as lactucae agrestes, ‘lettuce of the field,’ and Samaritans still eat wild lettuce for Pesah . . . the linguistic cognates point in the same direction.” The Mishnah permits lettuce, endive and chervil.

As Propp points out, whatever it may have originally denoted, the term employed here became synonymous with bitterness in general, for example in Lamentations 3:15. “Late Jews invariably saw the bitter herbs of Pesah as recalling the Hebrews’ travails in Egypt . . . This might be a very ancient tradition.” But any element possessing such symbolical significance is bound to have more than one meaning. Other scholars cited by Propp believe that this wild lettuce might have had a magical function in warding off misfortune.

Lettuce is a weed: that is to say, it’s a quick-growing annual that flourishes in disturbed ground. The wild form is edible only for a very brief period in the spring – two or three days – before it turns bitter. It occurs to me that this might help explain its use in a festival where everything is supposed to be prepared and eaten in haste. “If the species in question sprouted in the springtime,” Propp observes, “it may simply have been part of the holiday’s seasonal symbolism. Or lettuce may have been a pungent condiment that ultimately became canonical.” Given that the lunar and not the solar calendar determined when the holiday would fall, it seems extremely unlikely that it would regularly coincide with the period of greatest edibility for wild lettuce. Thus, this characteristic of fleeting non-bitterness likely remained merely part of the symbolic gestalt.

But bitterness, which so lends itself to ascetic uses, may also possess more meanings than Propp admits. Bitter herbs such as wormwood were revered throughout the ancient world for their preservative and medicinal effects. Properties traditionally ascribed to lettuce include calmative, hypnotic, sedative and analgesic effects. The milky sap of wild lettuce is said to possess mild opiatelike effects – effects enhanced by its addition to beer or wine. According to Maude Grieve (A Modern Herbal, Dover, 1971 [1931]), “The Ancients held the lettuce in high esteem for its cooling and refreshing properties. The Emperor Augustus attributed his recovery from a dangerous illness to it, built an altar to it, and erected a statue in its honor.”

So here’s the narrow thread by which I connect wild lettuce with Easter: the common practice in the ancient world of using bitter herbs as preservatives and additional inebriants in wine and beer (we still use hops in this way). The wine of the new covenant, which the followers of Yeshua incorporated into Christianity’s central, theophagic rite, may well have been brewed with the “herbs of affliction.” But in that case, isn’t “affliction” a mistranslation?

Not necessarily. Prepared in stronger doses, metheglins (herbed wines) served as medicines for specific ailments. Such medicine would have been both bitter and welcome at the same time – which is largely how the ancient Hebrews understood the figurative medicine that their national deity doled out when needed. Bitter herbs were part of a whole complex of ascetic ritual elements, and the fact that they grew best wild – cultivated lettuce has much weaker properties – must’ve strengthened their association with the practice of a periodic chastising/healing/renewing return to original creation (“wilderness”).

Fun fact #5: the identity of the deity (Christ) with the sacrificial animal (lamb) has ample precedent in the ancient Near East

In The Hills of Adonis (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1968), the very erudite travel writer Colin Thubron sheds some light on the ancient Yahweh-followers’ taboo against eating pork. “The most complex of the animals holy to Astarte was the pig, which the Phoenicians called alpha, ‘the cruel.’ It is thought that during the cutting of the corn a wild swine taking refuge in the dwindling sheaves may have been hailed as god of the harvest; whatever the reason, swine and harvest are linked, and Adonis, at some early stage, perhaps embodied both. In primitive times, it seems, a boar was consecrated as the god and worshipped by a chorus of women who impersonated sows; each year the boar was killed and torn in pieces, his death mourned and his resurrection hailed in the deification of a new boar. Early man saw little distinction between the deity and his sacrifice. A god-king was killed and replaced, and his successor after him. Thus if Adonis was a boar as well as a vegetation spirit, he must suffer death from a boar; and from this mystery – the offering of the god to himself – the classic legend crystallized.”

This illuminates the whole incident of the golden calf and the altar (Exodus 32): recall that the covenant between Israel and Yahweh was performed with the blood of twelve bullocks, one for each tribe. But scholars also note that the Holy of Holies in the ancient temple in the northern kingdom of Israel was topped by the statue of a bull, just as the ark in Solomon’s temple was topped by an anthropomorphic couple, the seraphim (who by the way were probably portrayed in the common position of the hieros gamos – that is to say, in a lovers’ embrace). In Israel, the spirit of Yahweh was envisioned as resting upon this statue of a bull. Thus the story about the golden calf (like many others in the Pentateuch) was intended as a smear against Judah’s rivals. But in fact, this use of bull or calf symbolism borrows directly from the religion of Baal. The story of the golden calf reflects genuine discomfort about the ever-present danger of identifying Yahweh with the sacrificial animal – anathema to followers of his fanatically iconoclastic cult.

Needless to say, the notion of sacrifice as expiation is as Jewish as it is pagan. But the identification of God with the sacrifice represented a radical break with tradition. Christianity departs most fundamentally from its parent religion in the notion of divine incarnation, deicide and resurrection.

The authors of the New Testament were as vicious in their use of propaganda to slight their rabbinical rivals as the priestly redactors of the Torah had been against the practices of the northern kingdom; the fact that the ritual murder of God is fathered upon “the Jews” is the cruelest stroke of all. But it’s interesting that, while the accounts of the trial, crucifixion and resurrection vary widely from one gospel to another, the details of the Eucharist are nearly identical. Most New Testament scholars conclude from this that they represent Rabbi Yeshua’s own midrash; it’s too original, they say, to have plausibly originated otherwise than in the manner described. Pesah is above all a day for remembrance. This, says Yeshua, is how we are to remember him. Not on the cross but in the cup, in the breaking of bread.

What does it mean to incorporate the flesh of god into our own bodies? What does it say about a god that his flesh can be so consumed?

There’s considerable scholarly disagreement about the origin of the fish symbol in Christianity; the ancient Near Eastern dieties Atargatis and Dagon were both worshipped in fish form, and the grounds of their temples included ponds with sacred fish which were periodically consumed by the priests in a theophagic rite. But nearly every element of the Christ myth has ancient antecedents; perhaps they were necessary (the believer thinks) to prepare people’s minds for the coming of Christ. To the skeptic, the prior existence of such themes colored what people saw and how they remembered it. In any case, the most likely direct source for the popularity of the fish symbol can be found in the logical identification of the Eucharist with that other memorable feast of the gospels: the loaves and fishes of Matt 14:13-21. The disciples had been promised that they would become “fishers of people” – and they feed the people with the miraculous wine and bread and fish that permit unending consumption.

This story clearly embodies the transcendent, utopian dimension of the sacral feast. Aside from those who question the historical existence of Yeshua altogether, scholars are unanimous about his eschatology. Whatever else he may have believed, the idea that the utopian “kingdom of god is at hand” almost certainly formed the core of his teaching.

When we eat the sacrifice, we share a meal with God. But to people who believe that God enters into the sacrifice, eating the sacrificial flesh is an entheogenic experience. The Gospel of Thomas, older than the four canonical gospels, attributes the following saying (#3) to Rabbi Yeshua: “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father.”

I quoted this same passage in a post last December (see there for the citation), which also dealt with the book’s explicit treatment of the intoxicating qualities of Yeshua’s teaching. Intimate knowledge of the godhead is not merely nourishing; it is mind-altering. “Because you have drunk,” says Yeshua (Thomas 13), “you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring which I measured out.” We can of course argue about how literally this image might have been meant. It’s worth remembering that the worship of Dionysius included the sacramental use of hallucinogenic mushrooms, while the Eleusinian mysteries apparently involved consumption of a non-toxic extract of ergot, which would’ve been similar to LSD in its effects. However, like the Plains Indians, the early Christians seem to have been more interested in the use of sensory deprivation, pain and starvation as routes to achieving altered states of consciousness.

Fun fact #6: the image of the Messiah astride a donkey echoes very ancient Middle Eastern practices and (possibly) Egyptian beliefs about enlightenment

Matthew 21:5 quotes Zech 9:9, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.” According to the renowned scholar W.F. Albright, in the notes to his translation, with C.S. Mann, of Matthew for the Anchor Bible (1971), the very same language about donkeys was found in the Mari text, a cuneiform tablet from the Mesopotamian city of Haran dating back to the 18th century B.C. “It speaks of the donkey sacrifice as ratifying a treaty between the Apirus (=Hebrews) and various local kings. The figure of the donkey, in the same three words as in the Mari text, occurs again in Gen 49:11 as well as in the text of Zech 9:9.”

The context in Zechariah is explicitly Messianic, referring to the blood of the covenant in v.11, which becomes transformed into wine by v.17: “The Lord of hosts will protect them, and they shall devour, and tread down the sling stones, and they shall drink and roar as if drunk with wine, and be full like a bowl, drenched like the corners of the altar.” In Genesis, the context is Jacob/Israel’s blessing of his sons; it is Judah who is described as “Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice vine; he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes.”

But if the Middle Eastern milieu shaped the imagery of the Bible, Egyptian theology was the major source of its core teachings (including monotheism; Memphite theology was functionally monotheistic, despite frequent claims to the contrary). The nearly 4,000 year-old Egyptian text contained in Berlin Papyrus 3024 contains the dialogue of a man with his soul, or as Bika Reed translates the title: Rebel in the Soul: A Dialogue Between Doubt and Mystical Knowledge (Inner Traditions, 1987). The despairing protagonist cries out to his soul,

But in this body, which is yours,
I am the progeny of the great ass Iai!
In you I call forth the Other
O Soul unawakened!
I am the progeny of Iai,
A fire which will never cool
I cause the Other to burst forth
O soul in flame!

Reed notes that “IAI, the Great Ass, is an aspect of the sun ‘god’ with ass’s ears. We find his image in the Book of the Gates . . . [which] depicts the progression of the sun through the night. The twelve hours of the Dark Night are depicted as regions of the Underworld. Each region is an ‘hour’ of the Night and has its gate. To pass the gate, one has to know the name of its Guardian.
“The consciousness moves through the Underworld in a process of slow animation. . . . Iai is found in the section known as the Ninth Hour. In this Ninth Hour, a crisis threatens the progress of the boat [of the Sun]. A double monster, half snake, half crocodile, Shes-Shes, faces the boat.” Iai is offered as bait. “Without the self-sacrifice of Iai, the Barque of the Sun will never traverse the night to the light of dawn.”

As in the story of Balaam’s ass (Num 22:21-33), the donkey is identified with a form of recalcitrance that leads to understanding. Reed riffs: “The act of awakening is inseperable from the act of rebellion. Iai rises, symbolizing the sun circumscibed by ass’s ears. He confronts the Abyss, portrayed as a double monster: His own static, fathomless duality unreconciled. As a double being, sun and ass, Iai is the embodiment of an opposition of forces: a cross. Iai is a cross in human form. The sun is confined between the ears of the rebellious and traditionally recalcitrant ‘Ass.’ In the Gospels, Christ appears mounted on the Ass. It is the Ninth Hour: and about the ninth hour, Jesus called with a loud voice, ‘My God, My god, why hast thou forsaken me?'”