(no subject)
So I'm reading um Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning by Edward Carpenter, and there's a very good bit early on where he talk about trends in mythography:
Probably one of the coolest parts of academia is when we are called to step back from where we are, and look at a concept from the outside. Examples of this include Judith Butler's "before we can do feminism, we should ask ourselves 'what is a woman?', and that turns out to be rather complicated", and Alex Niven's "England? I think that's fake and imaginary"
What I love about this quote is the thinking it prompts. Firstly, giving me an awareness that there even are trends in history-of-religion; and secondly, reminding me to reflect on where writers (modern and historic!) are in a taxonomy of ideas. My paganism includes four of those stages: sun gods, phallism, euhemerism and earth and nature spirits. Because of course it does; man is not an island, my ideas are influenced by the ideas of others which I guess go all the way back to Carpenter and his colleagues.
The next stage after becoming aware that an idea has been constructed/arranged is "can we arrange it differently?".
Carpenter is talking about trends in historical research, but we could easily contemplate them as "trends in neo-paganism". Writing in the age he did, Universal World Mythology was still a popular concept; in my lifetime, both reconstructionist paganism & conversations about cultural appropriation have dominated as part of a response to that, emphasising the importance of specificity. The wheel is ever-turning! One wonders where we will travel next.
I want to finish this one with Carpenter's footnote about Richard Taylor's book 'The Devil's Pulpit':
#goals
- A hundred and fifty years ago, and since the time of Rousseau, the "Noble Savage" was extremely popular; and he lingers still in the story books of our children.
- Then the reaction from this extreme view set in, and of late years it has been the popular cue (largely, it must be said, among "armchair" travelers and explorers) to represent the religious rites and customs of primitive folk as a senseless mass of superstitions, and the early man as quite devoid of decent feeling and intelligence.
- Again, when the study of religious origins first began in modern times to be seriously taken up—say in the earlier part of last century—there was a great boom in Sungods. Every divinity in the Pantheon was an impersonation of the Sun—unless indeed (if feminine) of the Moon. Apollo was a sungod, of course; Hercules was a sungod; Samson was a sungod; Indra and Krishna, and even Christ, the same. C. F. Dupuis in France (Origine de tous les Cultes, 1795), F. Nork in Germany (Biblische Mythologie, 1842), Richard Taylor in England (The Devil's Pulpit, (1) 1830), were among the first in modern times to put forward this view.
- A little later the PHALLIC explanation of everything came into fashion. The deities were all polite names for the organs and powers of procreation. R. P. Knight (Ancient Art and Mythology, 1818) and Dr. Thomas Inman (Ancient Faiths and Ancient Names, 1868) popularized this idea in England; so did Nork in Germany.
- Then again there was a period of what is sometimes called Euhemerism—the theory that the gods and goddesses had actually once been men and women, historical characters round whom a halo of romance and remoteness had gathered.
- Later still, a school has arisen which thinks little of sungods, and pays more attention to Earth and Nature spirits, to gnomes and demons and vegetation-sprites, and to the processes of Magic by which these (so it was supposed) could be enlisted in man's service if friendly, or exorcised if hostile.
Probably one of the coolest parts of academia is when we are called to step back from where we are, and look at a concept from the outside. Examples of this include Judith Butler's "before we can do feminism, we should ask ourselves 'what is a woman?', and that turns out to be rather complicated", and Alex Niven's "England? I think that's fake and imaginary"
What I love about this quote is the thinking it prompts. Firstly, giving me an awareness that there even are trends in history-of-religion; and secondly, reminding me to reflect on where writers (modern and historic!) are in a taxonomy of ideas. My paganism includes four of those stages: sun gods, phallism, euhemerism and earth and nature spirits. Because of course it does; man is not an island, my ideas are influenced by the ideas of others which I guess go all the way back to Carpenter and his colleagues.
The next stage after becoming aware that an idea has been constructed/arranged is "can we arrange it differently?".
Carpenter is talking about trends in historical research, but we could easily contemplate them as "trends in neo-paganism". Writing in the age he did, Universal World Mythology was still a popular concept; in my lifetime, both reconstructionist paganism & conversations about cultural appropriation have dominated as part of a response to that, emphasising the importance of specificity. The wheel is ever-turning! One wonders where we will travel next.
I want to finish this one with Carpenter's footnote about Richard Taylor's book 'The Devil's Pulpit':
(1) This extraordinary book, though carelessly composed and containing many unproven statements, was on the whole on the right lines. But it raised a storm of opposition—the more so because its author was a clergyman! He was ejected from the ministry, of course, and was sent to prison twice.
#goals