A few thoughts on Kill BIll

A publicity shot from Kill Bill 1 in which the Bride
fights the Crazy 88s with her Hatori Hanzo sword

Have you ever been mad enough to kill? I had a friend who had been badly betrayed by someone she loved. She told me had to confront that feeling--the absolute fury that rose up as the desire to kill her betrayer, a physical urge so strong that it was all she could do not to act on it.

I had never seen the Kill Bill movies until this past weekend (December 9-10, 2023). It has recently been streaming on Amazon Prime so I watched through both parts 1 & 2. As I was watching the last half of Kill Bill 2, my wife was in the room wrapping Christmas presents. This is not her kind of movie, so she had her back to the screen although she couldn't help turning around now and again to watch. After it was over, she asked "What is the movie about?"

Well, that is a good question.

Back in the early 2000s, Kill Bill had made its way into Evangelical discourse on the culture wars. They weren't asking "what is this movie about," but instead told us that it signaled the moral bankruptcy of "the world," the godlessness of American society that had kicked God out of the culture and lost its way. 

Kill Bill was released in 2003, I was pursuing my MDiv at that time at a conservative Christian seminary and leading the youth group at a very traditional southern baptist church in rural Kentucky, neck deep in evangelical culture. I vaguely remember hearing about the movie and I am sure that I even talked about it in a sermon or a teaching lesson something in which I held up Kill Bill as a sign of moral depravity, the example of how bad the culture and our society was becoming, a moral cesspool of vulgarity and violence. I don’t remember where I heard this or picked this up specifically- on the internet, in someone’s sermon, a book on youth culture, classes at seminary? I’m not certain. But I picked it up somewhere and then just mindlessly repeated it -- there is no doubt in my retrospective memory that I was part of the Evangelical echo chamber, parroting this nonsense about Kill Bill, a movie I hadn't seen and knew nothing about. No doubt it simply a way to fit into the tribe, to feel certain and self-justified about how better “we” were than the rest of the world. This is the average Evangelical approach to cultural critique - talking about media that you really don’t know anything about or haven’t thoroughly investigated; ignorantly repeating the sound bites, what you’ve heard just to signal that you are as morally righteous as the next guy, that you are some sort of spiritual expert, by reducing complex things to stereotypes and simplicities.

Why didn't these Evangelicals pick up on the theme of family? Isn't this a pro-family movie, though embedded in a violent (and cartoonish) revenge story?

Now after watching Kill Bill on Amazon Prime, I think the real reason that Evangelicals had such a knee-jerk reaction to the movie had more to do with Evangelical misogyny and sexism than anything else. 

The movie is about a woman who has escaped an abusive, controlling, manipulative relationship. She is pregnant and about to be married to new, seemingly loving if somewhat common, man. All she wants to be is a mom and a wife (the character's name is the Bride). But instead she is attacked, left for dead, abused and violated in horrific ways, betrayed and abandoned. The opening sequence accentuates her forsakenness and helplessness in the face of violent betrayal. In her desperate condition -- no one --  no one is there to support, comfort, or help her. There is no compassion towards her at all. Every other character simply wants to cause her pain and kill her. She is all alone. Scene after scene in these movies elaborate on the social violence and misogyny against women that we tolerate. (Only the retired sword maker Hatori Hanzo comes to her aid and treats her with dignity, and empowers her for revenge.)

And this Evangelical critique also shows no compassion. These pastors and youth pastors who denigrated this movie could instead have come to the side of the Bride. The critique could have been and should have been thus: "No woman should be treated this way. We repent of our own misogyny and abandonment of women. We no longer want to be part of the problem, but will support and serve women instead of abandoning and abusing them."

When one is abandoned, betrayed, and forsaken, when one's power and dignity has been taken--one has to stand up for herself. I am just thinking of my friend who was also alone in her betrayal. So the Bride's acts of revenge are her attempts to acknowledge the wrongs done to her. She will not be put aside, eliminated, buried alive. She will hold others accountable for their sins and try to make some justice for herself since there is no one to help. The Bride's savagery is the wrath of God enacted on the wicked.

But a strong woman fighting back against her suffering, against her abusers, against the unfairness of the society woman that has used and abandoned her -- I think that made Evangelicals uncomfortable. 

The Revival of Else Christensen

Ancestral altar for Else Christensen, Baldrshof

In the 1980s, the early Odinist and Asatru groups picked up steam. 

The leaders were male, very charismatic, high energy people who took up the mantle (so to speak, that's a Christian metaphor I guess) and pushed the movement forward. Meanwhile, Else Christensen was aging, becoming more isolated after her time in prison. Gradually her significant role in organizing, networking, and influencing the movement declined. 

The Folk Mother faded into the background. You could find her picture on the internet. Occasionally she was mentioned in passing in the writings of the Odinist organizations that grew out of her influence, like the Odinic Rite and the Asatru Folk Assembly. 

Both of these organizations developed a more religious framework for Odinism.  Both these organizations adopted Christensen's approach of subterfuge--being indirect about their white supremacist racial/political leanings. While maintaining Christensen's racial orientation and political aspirations for developing white-only communities, their discourse was much more religion-focused. Direct talk about race and racial politics was pushed into the background, out of public view.

At the same time, this second generation was truly more religious in their interests and focus.  McNallen was a committed ritualist for whom the Norse Gods were very real. He developed a great deal of the early Asatru religious ritual material. Heimgest of the Odinic Rite was a committed esotericist, who used the esoteric reading of Norse myth, meditation, and other magical techniques in the development of a mystical approach to enhancing the Aryan consciousness and folk soul.

An interesting development is the recent revival of Christensen's legacy by the new Asatru Folk Assembly under the guidance of Matthew Flavel. In 2019 the organization announced a more official recognition of Christensen, raising her profile as an ancestor of faith and founder of the movement. In 2021, the AFA launched a day of remembrance for Else Christensen. Spear-headed by the Baldrhof district, the day of remembrance involved simultaneous ancestral blots to Christensen. In the past two years, these efforts have grown into a larger event called Elsefest. Elsefest is a weekend dedicated to building up Christensen's legacy as the Folk Mother among the members of the AFA and especially with the new generation of children. Elsefest involves teaching sessions about her philosophy, crafting memorial objects about her, and performing rituals in her honor. This is clearly part of the shift towards a more Odinist orientation under Matthew Flavel's leadership--as in, more clearly and directly racially oriented and leaning toward the racist radical right. The day of remembrance puts the AFA forward as an Odinist organization. It reconnects and realigns the AFA more explicitly with Christensen's mission to revitalize the Aryan spirit through developing white-only communities and "tribal" cultures.

Odinism and Else Christensen

If we take Alexander Rud Mills as the progenitor of modern Odinism, let's look at the "Folk Mother" Else Christensen and her legacy. 

In the mid-1960s, Else Christensen discovered Rudd Mills' pamphlet "The Call of our Ancient Nordic Religion" (Gardell, Gods of the Blood, 167). I briefly discussed the pamphlet here. 

Rud Mills seeems to have been a source of inspiration for Christensen that focused her work through this Norse lens. She came to see the pre-Christian European past as the source of values and ideas that would foster white/Aryan renewal. 

Or more precisely - attaching her political/social critique to Odinism had a legitimizing effect on her work for her audience -- imprisoned white men and far right activists. But incidently, it also tapped into the burgeoning Pagan movement although this wasn't her initial target audience. 

She did more than retrieve Rudd Mills from obscurity. She was influential in bringing together a new socio-political-religious confluence of ideas that created American Odinism (Calico, Being Viking, 141). In addition to tapping into Mill's writings and his dream of an Anglo-Saxon Church of Odin, she was in dialogue with Francis Yockey's Imperium and the Traditionalist and European New Right movement that included Julius Evola and Oswald Spengler. She also brought Odinism in touch with the radical right politics of the United States including the American Nazi Party and its leader George Lincoln Rockwell. These various tributaries shaped Odinism as a new white racial politics that saw the West threatened with cultural and spiritual degradation and sought to revive the Western, European, "white" soul through a spiritual awakening to its pre-Christian roots. 

Odinism from its very start presented itself as a superior alternative to Christianity. This stance goes back to Rudd Mills. While the racial opponent was the Jews, the ideological opponent of Odinism has always been Christianity--Christianity is the foreign (Middle Eastern) ideology that seduced white people, Europeans, into a racial and spiritual confusion that has resulted in the decline of the West and the dilution of Ayran superiority. This position comes through to the contemporary period, even in the Odinist critique of the Black Lives Matter movement. (See my paper "Heathenry and White Nationalism" on Academia.edu.)  As Gardell puts it, Odinism was "a vehicle for racial rejuvenation" (Gods of the Blood, 171). A significant part of Odinism has always been the fight or "struggle" they might say for Aryan rights, Aryan religion, Aryan self-determination, etc. Odinism stands up for the white race and they would claim everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Hitler as heroes in that racist cause (Gods of the Blood, 172) 

Blot at Else Christensen's grave,
2021 AFA Day of Remembrance

The early American Asatru movement in the 1970s was substantially influenced by Else Christensen. Many of the early founders of Norse Pagan groups had personal relationships with her.  If a group recognizes Else Christensen as the Folk Mother - they are working with this tributary we could call Odinism. This includes Stephen McNallen and the AFA; the Asatru Alliance led by Michael J Murray aka Valgard Murray; Heimgest and the Odinic Rite under his leadership; Max Hyatt and Wodan's Kindred and Wodanesdag Press. 

Christensen's influence was embedded in the ideology of Odinism through her personal relationships with these early leaders, her voluminous personal correspondence, and her newletter The Odinist. According to the Heathen History podcast, The Odinist was published in 151 issues from 1971 - 1992 and was focused mainly on right-wing racist political and social analysis and commentary on current events. "Very little content that you could actually call religious." It seems that Christensen was simply not very religious and was much more interested in social and political questions of "Aryan spiritual liberation." However, her writings comprise a large body of ideas that circulated through the early years of Norse Paganism. In addition, she began her Odinist Fellowship as a prison ministry by establishing study groups in three Florida prisons. Through her correspondence, visits, and newletters, Odinism began spreading within the US prison system--a religion or at least a philosophy of white empowerment inspired by an imagined Norse-inspired past. 

It may be important to point out that Odinists are not Pagan Reconstructionists. Reconstructionists try to recover the practices and worldviews of ancient Pagan peoples in order to provide a type of authenticity and legitimacy to contemporary Pagan religions. Reconstructionists study the ancient primary texts, often using the original languages, and make use of current academic research and archaeological discoveries to better understand what the elder or arch-Pagans thought and did. 

This is definitely not what Odinists are doing. Odinists are inspired by a particular imagined Pagan past, often an era of Viking battle glory. We should note that the sources used by Odinists are often from the Völkisch movement--the racial German nationalist movement from the turn of the 20th century that also invoked a romanticized version of the Germanic & Norse pagan past to legitimize Germanic military expansion and the genocidal repression of non-Germanic people.

As the Heathen History podcast points out, her ideas and influence were quite broad - while all of it came from the racist perspective of white supremacy, she critiqued globalism, believed in the importance of smaller "tribal" human communities and economies, was concerned with environmentalism, and valued individual freedom and self-expression. Odinism - as developed by Else Christensen looks like a philosophy, a social critique, and a socio-political agenda.

Several scholars, including myself and Being Viking, are quoted in this wikipedia article on Else Christensen.

The Roots of Odinism in the writings of Alexander Rud Mills

So I did this interview about Odinism with WISHTV News in Indianapolis on September 19, 2023. You can read about it here. After hearing about the interview, my mentor said “So . . . you went on record that Odinism is a thing.”

I heard that more as a question and it sounded like this: “If Odinism is a thing, what kind of thing is it?”

That’s a really good question. 

I want to write a few posts that try to give an answer. I think that Odinism can be three things:

• a movement with specific history, idealogues, and groups, 
• a meme, a set of ideas that flow through the cultic milieu, and/or
• a monster, an imaginary onto which we project our fears

So here is Part 1: The Roots of Odinism in the Writings of Alexander Rud Mills

We can argue that Odinism begins with the Australian Alexander Rud Mills, 1885-1964. He was sympathetic to and influenced by Nazism and had met Hitler. He was aligned with and participated in pre-WWII British fascist groups as well as the nationalist Australia First Movement. He was detained by the Australian government during 1942 for his Nazi connections, fears that he supported a Japanese invasion of Australia, and because of his outspoken Odinism which he maintained his entire life even after his incarceration. Among Odinists, this imprisonment in an WWII Australian internment camp only adds to his allure as a Folk hero and the Father of Odinism.

Rud Mills has several works that have been influential in the development of Odinism. Let's look briefly at his pamphlet “The Call of our Ancient Nordic Religion” published in 1957. This is the most widely read of his writings. In this short book, he sketches out the ideological framework for Odinism,

The key move he makes is to detach his new Odinist religion from German nationalism – the German völkisch movement was closely tied to German nationalism, German identity, and German expansionism. Nazism was as well – Nazism, rooted in the German politics post-WWI was not so interested in uniting a pan-national “white race” as it was committed to advancing German superiority and subjugating all other nations under German dominance. In this pamphlet, Rud Mills separated his philosophy from the specific cause of German nationalism by looking farther back into the past. Odinism, he said, was the religion of all those with Nordic ancestry. He writes about “our Nordic ancestors,” and “our forefathers” referring to these ancient Nordic people. This shift made Odinism into a race-based international movement that can sell as well in Australia as in Britain and the United States.

What are the other seeds of this ideological framework found here?

• Nordic or Aryan superiority: In chapter two he claimed that Nordic or Aryan people were the progenitors of all the great civilizations from Greece, to Egypt, to India. “They built up fine and noble civilizations . . . [and made] wonderful contributions to the achievements of mankind.”
• Anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity: In chapter 3, he sets this Nordic faith up against both Judaism and Christianity. He writes that “'Greek' Christianity has made the people Jew-following nations. Christian preachers teach Jewish history, they call the Jews God's chosen people, and by so doing depreciate the history and spiritual values of their own nations. Even Chinese and Negroes are taught that Israel is the 'Holy Land'.”
• Esotericism: Odinism includes a strong esoteric component with practices involving the elevation of the mind to higher states of consciousness taking Odin's ordeal on the World Tree as a model, and the raising of oð, the psychic power of Odin, the frenzy and inspiration that is Odin within the practitioner. In chapter five, Rud Mills hints at Odinic esotericism when he writes, “The WONDERFUL Norse Gods - It is beyond the powers of man to conceive and wholly understand the great Being and Vitality, in whom and by whom man lives. Some men can understand more than others.”
• Centrality of Odin: In chapter five, he centers the All-Father as the heart of the Odinist spiritual pursuit,  “The All-Father was the great conception of the Nordic or Norse religion.” And Odin, he suggests, is the entity or the archetype by which humans understand and connect to the All-Father, “The greatest of the 'family' of the All-Father was Odin, Woden or Wotan. Odin was that of the All-Father which man in some measure may understand. . . ." He goes on to discuss other gods and the goddesses, such as Thor, the Mother Freyga who was embodied in Nature, and Tyr.
• Politics: Odinism offers a radical social critique of modernity. In chapter six, Rudd Mills outlines a sprawling worldview and ethic. He implies a sort of political autonomy that could be the basis for the tribalist philosophy that later Odinists developed as a model for an ideal Nordic society. “The ruling of one person by another person grows less under our Odinist direction, even as such ruling grows greater under religions which tend to make men 'robots and soulless automatons, ruled by ruthless non-spiritual men.” In his earlier writings, he leans more explicitly toward a fascist-type of organic statism or perhaps a caste system, “the endeavor under Odinism is to have every man in that place which is best for him and his gard in God, and best for that wider community of which he is a part,” (from his 1933 The Odinist Religion Overcoming Jewish Christianity). We also see here the incipient critique of modernity as a system that homogenizes humans, sucks the spirituality and vitality out of them, and reduces them to materialists and passive consumers. 
• Warrior Ethic: Odinism often talks tough, threatening direct and violent action to instigate a radical overthrow of what it sees as a sick modernity characterized by the homogeneity of globalism, spirituality-denying consumerism, and the weakness of democracy.  Rud Mills signals the warrior ethic of Odinism when he writes that “Force must be used, if necessary, to check and defeat the powers of Evil. The Son of Odin fought to the death. Tyr gave his right hand in the service of his fellows.”
• The Folk Awakening: Odinists and other folkish Heathens believe that Odinism is "in the blood" of white people, those with Northern European descent. It is an archetype that is imprinted in the minds of Northern European people, a structure of their brains and DNA. Drawing on Jung's Wotan essay, they believe that this archetype can be awoken or activiated--and that white people will return to their "native" religiosity and true nature. This idea draws on Jung's Wotan essay in which he describes Wotan as a "psychic force," that can be stirred back to life "that an ancient god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, should awake, like an extinct volcano, to new activity." In chapter eight, Rud Mills also forecasts the “Nordic Awakening” that so many Odinists and folkish Asatruar talk about. Once there were great men, noble and heroic, called Sons of Odin, “What men were ever so great as these men? What men ever thought so beautifully or so truly?” This nobility was obscured and lost by the coming of Christianity. That darkness, he writes, is coming to an end, "but the seed which those men, our very fathers, sowed is awakening again. The new day comes, because it is of the nature of Being that it comes. And we have seen, thanks to our Odinist forefathers, a light in the darkness which beckons us on to safety and to life.” Odinists tend to believe that this new awakening is occuring now and seek to call white people into white-only groups, united by Odinist religion, and organized to resist modernity its attack on "traditional Western culture."  
• Anti-Equality: In chapter nine, he forwards the argument against human equality - another core Odinist talking point. Odinists argue for the saliency of difference: differences among the "races" and differences between the sexes. They are quick to defend and maintain these distinctions as good and natural. Rud Mills states, "One resultant of the Plato-Socratian error is found in the constitution of the United States of America which states that, 'It is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal.' A stentorian conclusion too pathetic to laugh at. It is a logical consequence from an untrue source, and flatly contradicts all the experiences and the senses of man given him by God. In one aspect, it is a spurning of God's gifts to man. And what at first may appear laughable becomes tragic”.
• Anti-Miscegenation: Odinists believe that Western, aka European, society is being diluted, weakened by "race-mixing," for which Rud Mills uses the awful term "mongrelization." These days, Odinists call it "white genocide." White genocide is a conspiracy theory holding that the "white race" will soon cease to exist because of a deliberate plot involving immigration, multiculturalism, interracial relationships, and declining white birthrates. He writes that this belief in equality wars against human nature and leads to “human mongrelism” and an equality “measured by the most deficient unit of the species.” In his earlier collection of pamphlets, The Odinist Religion Overcoming Jewish Christianity, he writes, “Odinists do not marry persons racially distant from them. They understand the dangers of mongrelism and the mating of opposites.” He also includes a chilling pamphlet on eugenics. This makes the racist basis of this movement very plain. Odinism is a religion grounded in white supremacy.
• Race Mysticism: Chapter nine ends with an explicit call to racial consciousness. Judaeo-Christian dominance, he writes, “has almost destroyed our connection with our own Father Spirit in God, our creator and our source of strength and life. Many of our people are unaware of their racial origins, and are taught to believe that race and breed are of no value as far as mankind is concerned. They are ignorant of their specific Gard or Place in God - in the scheme of things. Breed, they are taught,  is valuable regarding horses, cattle and animals but is not valuable for mankind.”

Odinism and the Delphi Murders: My Interview with WishTV news

On September 19th, 2023 I did a quick interview with Kody Fisher, a reporter with Channel 8 WishTV news in Indianapolis about Odinism. See the video below. 

The Delphi murder case is a horrible and tragic story. One of my students who is from southern Indiana said that she grew up with these murders as part of the trauma of her childhood world. 

So my heart goes out to the families of these young women, all those who were impacted by these murders, and who continue to live without resolution through the legal process of this case. 

Two young teenage girls, Libby and Abigail, had gone for a walk on Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi, IN on Feb. 13, 2017. They disappeared from the popular trail and were found murdered in the woods the next day. One of the girl's cell phones was recovered with a "43-second video that showed Abigail walking on the Monon High Bridge toward Libby while a man wearing a dark jacket and jeans walks behind her. The man can be heard ordering the girls 'down the hill.'"  

The case has gone unsolved, but in October 2022, a man named Richard Allen was arrested in connection to the case. There is significant evidence that points toward Allen's involvement including his own confessions, security video placing him and his vehicle at the scene, and a bullet recovered from the scene which matches a handgun found at Allen's home although they believe a knife was used for the murders.

The twist in the case - and the reason for my interview - occurred on September 18, 2023 when Allen's defense team released a 130+ page memorandum alleging that the murders were part of an Odinist ritual human sacrifice. According to Fox News, the defense memorandum claims that "overwhelming evidence in this case supports the following … Members of a pagan Norse religion, called Odinism, hijacked by white nationalists, ritualistically sacrificed Abigail Williams and Liberty German." 

Religion professor breaks down Odinism and its connection to the Delphi murders

So the reporter reached out to me because of my book Being Viking and my expertise in this area of Norse Pagan Heathen religion. He wanted to know what Odinism is - the defense memorandum uses the term "Odinites," which is a term I've never encountered and showed a glaring lack of familiarity. And he wanted to know if Odinists could have ritually sacrificed these girls as part of a religious rite of human sacrifice.  

I don't particularly want to be defending Odinists, but here I was giving an interview and finding myself pushing back against unsubstantiated allegations that "Odinites" had ritually sacrificed two young white girls years ago in Indiana.

On the surface, the evidence seems to weigh against Heathens. The reporter kept coming back to the fact that Heathens do make sacrifices as part of their ritual cycle. There is both textual and archaeological evidence that ancient Pagans engaged in some human sacrifice.  And he was really interested in Reconstructionism--contemporary Heathens and Pagans who want to restore or revive ancient religious practice as closely as possible for contemporary times. I discuss reconstructionism throughout Being Viking, check the index, but specifically on pages 38-44. Additionally in the last few years Odinists have been tied to various acts of violence and murder. Therefore, as the reporter implied, why not human sacrifice?

The most obvious answer to this question is that Pagans have universally and explicitly rejected human sacrifice. Please see my essay "Do Heathens Practice Sacrifice" in the upcoming release from Equinox Press, Pagan Religions in 5 Minutes, edited by Suzanne Owens and Angela Puca. Reconstructionists have been clear that some things from the past should be left there and not revived. Human sacrifice is at the top of that list. Heathens and Pagans of all stripes have roundly rejected the sacrifice of human beings.

Heathens do make offerings to spiritual beings: Gods, ancestors, spirits of nature. Almost universally, these offerings consist of libations of mead, an offering of sacred beverage charged with the prayers of the faithful, and poured out in honor of the Gods. While the term "sacrifice" may be used, and the Norse religious term "blot" is more directly connected to sacrifice, Heathens and Pagans are more likely to call these gifts or offerings. And while some Heathens have engaged in animal sacrifice, this has been practiced only rarely and with the greatest ethical care. For more on animal sacrifice in Heathenry, see Being Viking: Heathenism in Contemporary America, chapter 6, "Animal Sacrifice and the Blot."

As odious as Odinism is, there is simply no evidence that Odinists in America have ever practiced ritual human sacrifice. Odinism has been around for a hundred years, if you start counting with Alexander Rudd Mills. And in all that time, Odinists have not practiced or advocated for ritual human sacrifice. Odinism does use warrior imagery and presents an aggressive picture of itself. Some Odinists have perpetrated criminal acts of political and racially motivated violence and murder. In fact, if you told me that there was another report of an Odinist attacking a Muslim woman on a train somewhere, I wouldn't be shocked. But to engage in ritual human sacrifice - that would be an aberration even for Odinists. 

Now, as one of my mentors told me, "Never say never." After pushing at all these different angles, the reporter finally said, "But you can't rule it out, right?" That is where he quotes me saying "There are crazy people everywhere." People have excused their heinous actions by claiming that "God told me to do it." The larger context of that quote is this: If someone wanted to claim that Odin told them to sacrifice a human being, then there would be resources in the historical record of Norse Paganism that they could make use of. Just as the Bible and the Qur'an have passages that could be and have been used by criminals and immoral people to justify violence, murder, and mayhem. But that act would not be in keeping with the norms for the contemporary religious practice of Heathenry. That person would be a criminal - not someone living out a religious practice in a socially acceptable way. 

The Peripatetic Tradition

As part of the Revisiting Religion and Place summer institute at UVA, we read Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism. Berry also came to the institute one day, spending a couple of hours with our group in thoughtful discussion about his book and related topics. He was richly and generously conversant with the group and it was a fun afternoon.

Early in the book, Berry brings up the topic of walking. I love to walk - it is a daily ritual of mine. And I walk for all sorts of reasons -- to take the dog out, to get my heart rate up, to go places around campus, to engage in solitude and contemplation. Walking has become a widely practiced ritual, associated with a healthy lifestyle. There were so many people who took up walking during the COVID lockdowns. I would see so many people walking in my neighborhood during that time. While it has fallen off as a practice again, everyone understands walking as part of a healthy lifestyle. Berry describes it as a "cult of walking" promulgated by doctors, public health officials, and fitness gurus as a practice promising "health, happiness, and wholeness to those who take up the ritual" - which suggests a type of religious or spiritual practice (56).

Walking is a practice that has been intertwined with religion - or at least reflection and contemplation - since Aristotle's Peripatetic school (Devoted to Nature, 49). Berry writes that walking has been "one of modernity's primary contemplative techniques" and lists Western philosophers--from Hobbes to Thoreau--whose walking was "integral to their thinking" (50). They developed a particular type of walking: rambling "disassociated from the pursuit of fixed goals and free of any agenda" (51). This sort of walking engages the body while freeing the mind - without a goal in mind and without the constraints of time, one's thoughts wander freely, stimulating new ideas and fresh ways of thinking.

Berry contrasts this philosophical rambling with the medieval pilgrimage. These pilgrimages were a type of scripted walking, he suggests. A pilgrimage is a walk structured around a purpose, a story or narrative,  a specific way, and a destination. Not only that, it was "often carefully managed and hierarchically organized" by ecclesiastical authorities (51). That is, many pilgrimages may have originated as spontaneous popular responses to highly charismatic people and powerful events, such as miraculous healings or events of martyrdom, but were often quickly routinized and monetized as packaged religious experiences. Of course, that does not preclude their importance as personal and meaningful religious experiences. 

While it was a vital part of medieval Christian practice, pilgrimage has long been practiced in many religious traditions. The Islamic Hajj may be the most well known - but Shiites have their own pilgrimage routes in Iraq and Syria. There are many, many piligrimage routes in Hinduism from Amarnath to Varanasi. Buddhism has its own routes including Bodh Gaya of course and the Japanese Shikoku pilgrimage among others. Jainism has its own peripatetic tradition of wandering saints. And pilgrimage continues in new contemporary forms as a secular practice of self-discovery, healing from trauma, or making a transition in life.

All this got me thinking about types of religious and spiritual walking. What are the religious ways of walking? In addition to pilgrimage, what are other ways that walking has been utilized for religious or spiritual ends?

• Walking meditation - regularly used in Zen practice, Thich Nhat Hahn made it a central practice in his teaching.
• Circumambulation - around Buddhist stupas, or as part of a Hindu puja
• Fire walking - for instance, the Thimithi Fire-Walking Ceremony in which devotees of Draupadi from the Mahabharata walk across beds of red-hot coals
• Labyrinth walking - in the medieval Catholic tradition and revived in the contemporary spirituality movement
• Conversion -  "walking the sawdust trail" in Protestant revivalism
• Processions and parades - think of Holy Week processions in which the statue of a saint is processed through a European town, or a murthi of Durga is taken to a body of water and immersed at the end of Navratri. In Germania, Tacitus described the Heathen wagon procession of the goddess Nerthus and I described a contemporary wagon procession of Thor in my book Being Viking
• Protest marching - think of religiously inspired Civil Rights marches, nuclear protest marches, peace marches, etc 

I would love to hear about other examples of distinctive religious types of walking!

Monsters and Perfection in Guardians of the Galaxy 3

What is far better than an evil genius, the High Evolutionary, tinkering with perfection and thereby creating monsters who are worth nothing - who can be incinerated without a second thought - the High Evolutionary treats them as valueless in comparison to the perfect ideal being that he is seeking.

"There is no god! That's why I stepped in!" the High Evolutionary exclaims. In Guardians 3, there is no god - just this pseudo-god, a sort of twisted demiurge, whose hubris and obsession with a vision of perfection turns him into a monster. And there is nothing worse than a powerful monster who demands nothing short of perfection, who cannot accept flaws, who is incapable of seeing or valuing the goodness of what falls short of his standard. 

In contrast to the hatred for all that falls short, the horrors - the monsters who are also victims - he has created as experiments by torturing and disfiguring their bodies  - they create something like a peaceable kingdom in their prison cages. These "monsters" - Floor the rabbit, Teefs the walrus, Lylla the otter, and Rocket the raccoon - extend humaneness (wrong word because they aren't human) to each other--the camaraderie of suffering. They are actually beautifully kind and caring. They extend value and intrinsic goodness to each other. They become friends and family. They give themselves names, refusing to be just numbers or barcodes to each other. They build a sort of happy life in each other's company, playing games, laughing, dreaming of a future together where the sky goes on forever.  

In a world without a beneficient god, it is this friendship that prevails. What is far better than the High Evolutionary's Counter-Earth is the companionship of the misfits, the monsters, in the real world. What we see emerge in the prison cages of the lab is also embodied in the Guardians. Even the evil ferocious battery eating beasts, the Abilisks, are called Mantis' "babies" and join the new society. Mantis says "they eat batteries, not people." In the midst of battle, she reenvisions the abilisks as "not-a-threat" - not enemies. She chooses to see the monster in a different humane way - transforming the monstrous into something relatable, someone who can be touched and empathized with - as persons with value. 

While the High Evolutionary was trying to create a "perfect race" and a perfect society - in the Arete lab - Arete is Greek for "excellence, perfection, virtue" a word given to something that is the ideal or fulfillment of its type. It is the Noah's ark of the Guardians Knowhere that all these misfits and monsters come together in friendship and companionship, caring for one another, that the real utopia emerges, symbolized in the dance party at the end of the movie. Even when things are far from perfect, happiness and joy can emerge by loving, being connected, choosing each other, caring for one another.

Two Types of Attachment

 

In The Battle for Yellowstone, Justin Farrell describes two types of attachment to places. 

These are two different ways that we “ascribe meaning to places, imbuing them with emotion and feeling, making them much more than the bundles of matter that they are, The individual attributes of a space emerge into something much more culturally meaningful: a neighborhood becomes the self-identity of a people a national park becomes for some visitors a lasting source of positive emotional attachment; a farm becomes more than fields and crops but the site of family ritual passed down to future generations.” (239)

The first is place attachment, which he explains as “members’ connection to the biophysical attributes” of a place, (Farrell, Battle, 239). Place attachment in his definition involves connection to the land. It doesn't necessarily have to do with social relationships, but concerns a deep attachment to the environment. People become attached to a landscape in various ways, through work, story, recreational experiences, etc. There is a significant body of literature on place attachment theory that is worth exploring.

The second is community attachment, which I am defining as "members’ connection to the social-relational community of a place." In this sense, attachment comes primarily through one's relationship to people, to a community of people who may also reside in a certain geographical locality--thus there is some conflation with place attachment. It is about social bonding.

Community attachment involves two factors. Group identity is about feeling connected to a group's purpose or character. An example might be identifying as a Corbin Redhound (our local high school mascot) - a strong sense of connection to this local school-based identity because one feels connected to the football team, or the band and their purpose. The other factor is interpersonal relational bonds between community members--real, lived relationships between members of this community. While group identity can be somewhat abstract, interpersonal bonds are very concrete and involve friendships, kinship, and other intimate personal connections between specific people.

"Community attachment relates to a person's sense of fit or belonging in a locality, which creates a sense of loyalty. . . . community attachment and community satisfaction should not be automatically equated with each other. People can be very attached to their community and yet highly dissatisfied with it." Ralph B. Brown "Community Attachment" in the Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, edited by:Karen Christensen & David Levinson. SAGE Publications, 2003.

I am trying to think about this in relation to Appalachia and other parts of Kentucky. I think you often have community attachment without a strong place attachment. This may be what Harry Caudill is pointing to when he writes about the woods, "The hill people probably know as little about their native heath as any folk on earth . . . . Today, a typical eastern Kentuckian cannot tell a black oak from a black gum or a hickory from a hornbeam. Though the people of China will pay more than sixty dollars for a pound of dried ginseng root most Kentuckians can walk past it without recognition" (Caudill, Darkness at Dawn, 38, 41). I see this exemplified in my wife's life – she has a strong attachment to the relationships and the relational network of extended family and friends that she grew up with in her small town. These are social bonds that have been forged for generations of living together. But she doesn’t have a strong connection to the land and its features, the environment and ecology of her local area. She doesn’t know the land or the geography, nor spend any time in it.

Now some of her family also has place attachment, which was formed through years of hunting, fishing, and farming the land.

Another issue of place attachment is that it might be super-local – families might be very attached to their holler or their mountain, but not so attached to the other side of the mountain. Families forge these sorts of super-local place bonds by generations of living in one certain place, the family holler or farm. Thus a very powerful place attachment might coincide with a negligent attitude toward environmental destruction someplace else. This sort of super-local place attachment for one’s own property but not the property of another fails to appreciate the interconnection between these “properties” defined by deeds rather than an interconnected landscape. It makes it more difficult to build joint or communal action to protect a landscape.

"Too Special to Drill"

In The Battle for Yellowstone, Justin Farrell writes that "some areas are ‘too special to drill,’ and some areas are not. Some ecosystems we plunder with impunity, and some ecosystems lead us to pause and reflect on repercussions" (Farrell, 238-39).  

I couldn't get my mind off this idea that in the history of industry in Appalachia, there was no place "too special to drill" - no place that shouldn't be logged, mined, or stripped. In Appalachia, no place was treated as "special." There were no sacred places, no sacred mountains. Every landscape, every mountain was devalued as "overburden."  

For instance Harry M. Caudill writes about the passivity, negligence, and complicity of local officials who handed over the rich Appalachian landscape to the rapacious machines of the logging and mining industries. "Kentucky mountaineers . . . transferred legal title to [the land] to 'furriners,' [foreigners] then routinely elected judges and legislators who steadfastly sided with the coal owners in all clashes between their rights and those of the resident population. These officials stood by while mining mangled mountains, ruined streams, and made broad areas into wastelands" (Caudill, A Darkness at Dawn, 46)

He further notes that "Appalachia's absentee landlords have had many willing helpers within the region. Their greed has been more than matched by that of local entrepreneurs who were, and are, all too willing to plunder their homeland and impoverish their kinsmen for profit" (Caudill, Darkness, 31)

Chad Montrie notes that some local Appalachian people supported and defended the destruction of the Appalachian environment, perpetuating the falsehood that Appalachia was a poor land, "not worth a plug nickel." As Caudill writes, all powerholders from legislators to educators "continued to spread the worn myth that Appalachian people are poor because their land is poor and, by implication at least, that the wisest course is to leave. Thus indifference on [college] campuses combined with greed in boardrooms to work the ruin of one of the fairest and most promising parts of the globe" (Caudill, Darkness, 43)

In a perverse logic, those complicit with the mining industry actually argued that Appalachia was improved by strip mining. They "defended surface coal mining as good for miners, the local economy, and even the land" saying, "it gives people work and the land that we strip is in 50 percent and a lot of times 100 percent better condition that it was when we came in there." Montrie writes "On one job they paid a man to mine a part of his property that ‘wasn’t worth a plug nickel,’ leveled it off flat and sowed grass all over, ‘'and now he’s got a pasture out there.’’ Other operations had created flat land for a college and an airport, which [was] believed to be a better use of the land" (Montrie, Making a Living, 89). 

Farrell asks “But what makes something more ‘special' than something else? Where do those moral boundaries come from?” His answer is "the stories we tell about a place"--pointing to the role of sacred story and myth, both personal and communal, that instills certain places with a sense of the sacred. People, individuals, and communities construct sacred places through these narratives that create attachment to places. “We rarely think about them explicitly, but these deep narrative and commitments that are inscribed in our identities and cultures inform what we judge to be more ‘special'" (Farrell, Battle, 238).

So where are the sacred stories of the Appalachian landscape? This is the chilling line from Caudill, "The lack of an Appalachian land epic made the hill people willing collaborators in the destruction of their own region" (Caudill, Darkness, 31, emphasis added). 

What are the sacred stories, myths, narratives, and folktales that enchant or re-chant the Appalachian hills? That's what I am looking for.  

Sources

Caudill, Harry M. A Darkness at Dawn: Appalachian Kentucky and the Future. University Press of Kentucky, 1976.

Farrell, Justin. The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict. Princeton University Press, 2015.

 

Montrie, Chad. “Degrees of Separation: Nature and the Shift from Farmer to Miner to Factory Hand in Southern West Virginia.” In Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, 71–90. University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Barrow, AK and Indigenous Lifeways

I've been thinking about my time on the North Slope, AK since reading Michael D. McNally's Defend the Sacred. 

McNally does a good job of expressing the way that religion is diffused into a sacred way of life that is multifacted. Religion is not just a discrete part of life, an activity (although many Inupiaq people in Barrow did go to church) but a comprehensive way of life in relationship to the ecosystem--the land, animals, and seasons. I was privileged to see some of that sacred way of life firsthand--although perhaps at the time I didn't understand exactly what I was witnessing. I remember families leaving town during the summer for weeks at a time, from my perspective, they would disappear into the tundra to fish and hunt and gather-- going away to their summer cabins, somewhere in the tundra. They were perfectly at home, navigating through what seemed to me to be trackless tundra but to them was a landscape well and thoroughly known. 

In addition to their familiarity with camping, fishing, hunting sites, there may have been other sacred or holy places out there in the landscape--sacralized by stories and historical events that I did not know about. The one special or sacred spot that I knew about was a section of land called the Ukkuqsi archaeological site on the coast just on the edge of town in Barrow, AK where there had been a very old Inupiaq settlement. It is protected--the cliff there is slowly eroding into the sea and archaeological artifacts are occasionally exposed, so no one was supposed to go there or disturb that area. The story I was told about the place was that an ancient body of a shaman had been discovered there mummified by the tundra. A team of scientists were preparing to excavate the body and take it to a museum. But the night before they were to remove the body, a storm came in and washed the body out to sea. The deceased shaman, it seems, was still powerful enough to call up the storm in order to escape the clutches of the scientists--the sea claiming the shaman's remains before the scientists could get to them.

The Whale Hunt

Gordon Brower and whaling crew

The story of subsistence whaling on the North Slope of Alaska is a long story that includes traditional culture and knowledge, as well as fighting for cultural survival. Inupiaq people and their cultural predecessors known as the Thule culture have been hunting whales for thousands of years. There is evidence of bowhead hunting by the Saqqaq culture in Greenland four thousand years ago. The Nature article describes harpoon points for hunting warlus in Alaska found from 1000 BCE and states that "Systematic whaling with large umiak boat crews became a central economic feature of the Thule culture that migrated into the Eastern Arctic and Greenland around 1200–1400 AD." This would be similar to the whaling methods that continue to be used by Inupaiq whaling crews on the North Slope of AK. 

In the modern period, commercial whaling dramatically reduced the whale population. According to the website Cultural Survival: 

In 1977, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned the harvest of bowhead whales by Alaska Eskimos because of a report erroneously estimating the Bering Sea stock of bowheads to between 600 and 2,000 whales. The Eskimo hunters were notified of the ban in June 1977, which was the first they had heard of the IWC's concern. The whalers responded quickly and established the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC) to fight the ban, organize the whaling communities, and manage the hunt themselves. At a special meeting of the IWC in December 1977, the ban was replaced with a quota for 1978 of 18 whales struck or 12 landed, whichever was reached first (this quota was later raised to 20 struck and 14 landed). This compromise followed much work by the hunters who lobbied the U.S. government to recognize their right to whale.

While I was on the North Slope, I participated marginally in one full whaling season. During the spring whaling season, the whales are hunted from camps out on the sea ice. The whaling crews live out on the sea ice where a lead--a break in the ice--opens up. Once a whale is taken, the body is pulled up onto the ice.  It takes a large number of people to pull the whale up with ropes and block and tackle, and then many to help with the flensing of the whale. The work goes on for many hours and is an example of interdependency that remains a core value in the Inupiaq culture.

In Defending the Sacred, McNally writes about the Makah whale hunt, revived briefly in 1999, (241-246). And so much of what he writes is spot on with what I observed in Barrow, AK. He mentions how the whale was harpooned "with a force aided by ancestral strength" - a theme I know is part of Inupiaq whaling culture as well, felt also in this traditional whaling dance performed by the Barrow Dancers in 2011.  A ceremonial welcoming was held for the whale as it was brought to shore. A feast for the whole community was held and "meat, blubber, and oil were distributed to reservation families who tasted, many for the first time, their Makah soul food" and how the harvesting and sharing of traditional cultural foods unites, heals, and transforms the community.   

In this video by the New York Times "A Sacred Whale Hunt Continues," Edward Itta describes whaling as a sacred activity. You can sense the register of the sacred in the "togetherness" described by whaling captain who says, "It knits the community. You know we help each other. If we get a whale, the whole community eats." The whale is precisely butchered or flensed and the meat and other parts distributed. The baleen is shared with artists and traditional craftspeople. There is a specific section of the meat called the Tavsi or belt from the rear of the whale that is reserved, prepared, and served to the community. In Barrow, when a whaling crew takes a whale, this portion of the meat is prepared that day by the captain's household. The whaling crew's flag is raised about the house and all the Native people line up with baggies to get their portion of the prepared meat. 

Another section of the whale, called the Itigruk from the tail section is prepared and served at the spring whaling festival called Nalukataq. This festival, which I attended in 1994, happens in June and is associated with the summer solstice. The entire community turns out, sitting on the ground, and is served a variety of foods including soup and different types of whale meat like maktak (blubber generally boiled) and fermented meat that is dark and slimy in consistency. There is traditional dancing as well as the famous blanket toss. I was literally right there helping to pull the blanket but was too nervous to actually get tossed.

Great article that describes much of this "Inupiaq Traditions: The Gift of the Whale" and here is another from Alaska Magazine, "Inupiaq Whaling: Life, Identity, and Survival."

A note on aesthetics: The fall hunting season, there is no sea ice. Hunting is done from motorized boats and the whale is pulled up onto the beach. It looks something like this. I had pictures that I took of fall whaling when I was living there, but who knows where they are now. When people see these images, they often have a negative response - it often looks just like a bloody mess to them. For people unused to butchering an animal and unfamiliar with this process in Inupiaq culture, that visceral response masks what is actually a ancient and familiar practice that requires much cultural expertise. It is a spiritual and cultural high point of the year for Inupiaq people and represents hundreds perhaps a thousand years of cultural continuity. A visceral response of revulsion causes us to misinterpret the significance of the moment. I wrote about this at the beginning of chapter 6 in Being Viking. 

Spirituality vs Covenant

In Defend the Sacred, Michael D. McNally does a lot to clarify for readers what Native religions are and how they work. Part of this discussion involves the long story of how Native religions have been folded into or coopted into the contemporary category of Native American Spirituality.

The Holy Mountain, San Francisco Peaks

Spirituality, as it has come to be understood since the late 20th century, is an approach to meaning and identity that is individual - not tied to a community or a specific place; subjective - internal and emotional, based around experiencing feelings of awe or ecstasy for instance, and eclectic - it involves seeking a sense of fulfillment from a wide range of experiences. He writes that spirituality is a type of "piety whose authenticity relies on the self's ability to range freely across religious and cultural boundaries to find its fulfillment" --a spiritual marketplace coupled with the therapeutic turn in American religion "from communal norms of self-disciplines to individual possibilities of self-fulfillment" (106).

McNally argues that defining Native American religion as spirituality distorts and misrepresents it in ways that are detrimental to Native American religious freedom. He is quite disparaging of this approach, at one point calling it an "alchemy" (97) that denatures and mangles the factual claims of Native people about their beliefs and practice. He quotes a law case about the San Francisco Peaks that reduces the Peoples' relationship (Hopi, Navajo, and others) to the mountain as "the profound integration of man and mountain into one." McNally caustically responds, "Where does such a construction come from if not straight out of some bookstore's New Age Spirituality shelf" (111). 

I wonder how often in World Religion classes around the US, Native American religion has come across in this ambiguous and universalized way, as a glowing and sentimental feeling of emotional bliss that all nature is sacred? McNally helpfully emphasizes that the point "is not to be in a mystical union of man and mountain, but rather to discipline one's thought and behavior to conform ritually and ethically and doctrinally to the narratives, ethical teachings, and ritual duties of discrete religious traditions" (111-12).

There may indeed be significant differences in how people come to be attached to or in relationship with a locality, a particular land - this is Jonathan Z Smith's locative religion. There is a significantly different historical arc for how the Cherokee, for instance, and the small farmers of Kentucky's Knobs region and the Cumberland Plateau of Appalachia came to have a relationship with the land. And significant differences in how they would understand it and speak about it and live it out. 

But as Wendell Berry and others have shown--in communities where families have farmed the same place for generations, a profound relationship can emerge. 

Wendell Berry raking hay with horses

Like Native American religion, the relationship to place described by Berry is based on knowledge, duty, obligation, and discipline. While "spiritual experiences" of awe or transcendence might emerge at times - the relationship with the land is not primarily subjective (internal and emotional). Rather it is covenantal - a word that McNally himself uses several times. Covenant describes a relationship of commitment built upon knowledge and lived out through discipline and obligation. As Berry would say, to respect and to love a place is to know it and understand it as only deep generational knowledge can do, and then to live in and with it's ecology in a careful and disciplined way. Before using a plow, one ought to know when and where to use it, what it will do, and how the land will respond lest you end up making a mess that cannot easily be remedied. And again as Berry repeatedly points out, at its best this is not an individual pursuit but a collective lifeway in which a community embodies, protects, and passes along its accumulated discipline and knowledge of its environment and how to live well in it.

It is in this way that the world described by Berry is similar to that of the Navajo and Hopi. McNally writes that "the religious significance of the San Francisco Peaks is not primarily an individual matter of internal states but a collective matter of duties, ceremonies, peoplehood" (114).  Native American religions have embodied this covenantal relationship. "Traditional Native American religions are profoundly local, tied to particular places not simply through deep feeling and aesthetic appreciation, or through religious practices that take place on them, but also through a whole range of narratives, ritual disciplines, and sophisticated moral codes relating to specific places" (108). 

This statement so closely tracks with the relationship with land described by Berry in the small agrarian communities of Kentucky in the early half of the 20th century. Of course, all that is gone now. As Berry points out, the predominantly evangelical Protestant religion of the small farmers of Kentucky since the 2nd Great Awakening struggled and failed to include a covenantal relationship to the land in its tenets and practices. Thus, what was tenuous was easily lost.  

An interesting note might be to compare the relationship with land and the family farm exemplified by Joe Brown in Crystal Wilkinson's novel The Birds of Opulence. There is a connection of ancestral animism that binds Brown to the land through memory, ritual, and power.

The Home as American Sacred Space

Towards the end of the introduction  in American Sacred Space, Chidester and Linenthal ask "What is American about American sacred space?" (25) 

This is a great question. After all, in many ways sacred spaces are similar in their features and characateristics. We can use the same set of concepts and tools to examine and analyze sacred space no matter where they are.   

They suggest that these spaces have been distinctively shaped by the American historical experience. They go on to discuss several feature of the American historical experience that have been particularly influential in shaping these spaces. These include:

• the frontier situation
• the American legal system
• a managerial ethos involving the federal bureaucracy
• commodification and property rights
• revolutions of information technology
• a national orientation and patriotic sacrality
• American civil religion

One new and interesting idea they bring to the analysis is that of "home." While homes are ubiquitous, they write "At first glance, the home might seem the locus of the ordinary, the everyday, or the mindane in American symbolic life. However, domestic space in America has also been set apart as a special, sacred site of religious significance" (22). They go on to mention the "cult of domesticity" that has ritualized and regulated family relationships as been a compelling force in shaping public and political life. American politicians have long wanted to extol their familial virtues and present their families in performances of the virtuous and happy Christian family. 

This may indeed be a distinctive (though not exclusively) American sacred space. Thinking about this, I was struck by the sheer number of homes that have been turned into sacred sites. In fact, we will be visiting one of these during the summer institute - Monticello.  All the "founding fathers" have their domestic shrines, most famously George Washington's Mount Vernon. But there are so many more throughout the American landscape--almost every community has preserved and maintained homes as a form of sacred space from the Ernest Hemingway Home in Key West, FL or Graceland in Memphis, TN, a full-blown shrine to a mythic figure.  In Kentucky we have Ashland the home of Henry Clay in Lexington, KY and the William Whitley home established in the frontier near present-day Crab Orchard the hometown of my wife. And there are so many others, almost uncountable. Why do Americans create shrines and sacred sites out of homes? What do these say about the American home as a sacred site, the "cult of domesticity", the Christian home and family, and the "great men" who built and ruled over these homes? 

What are the layers here? "Home" is in one sense a place constructed by and for the family. The home is the ultimate "built environment" - the site of meticulous energy, control, supervision, maintenance of a very personal nature and its own family culture. And the home is the location of private religious observance from Passover to Advent wreaths to ancestor altars. Of course some families have more autonomy and agency here than others. The home raises the whole question of what is family anyway? What are the religious and cultural forces that have acted to create this idea of home?  These have been interpreted as monuments to a man's greatness-but this perspective is now actively contested. In one sense, the domestic is in tension with and contrast to the political. Andrew Jackson's home in Nashville, TN was called "Hermitage" as if it was an escape from the political man, a place of privacy and sanctity. And George Washington longed to escape politics and the District of Columbia and return to the freedom and leisure of civilian life at Mount Vernon. A leisure, we might add, built on the labor of enslaved people. But at the same time, domesticity "the family man" has long been source of legitimacy for politicians in American.  And the family photo has been an inescapable aspect to political campaigns. 

The Substantive view and the problem of "Exclusive Humanism"

Heathen Godpole, photo by author

For the Revisiting Religion & Place Summer Institute, we are reading David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, "Introduction," from their influential book American Sacred Space.

The introduction presents their argument for a shift from the poetics of sacred space to the politics of sacred space. The poetic approach takes sacred spaces as places of power to which we respond. It depends on a romantic imagination that appeals to "mythology of place and person," a sense of "mystical intuitionism" about the inherent supernatural power of sacred place (6-7). In contrast, the politics of sacred space examines the ways that sacred spaces are constructed by human agents through ritualization, interpretation, and contestation.

The poetic approach arises from the "substantive" idea of sacred space, which identifies a special quality to sacred spaces, a position best enunciated and represented by Mircea Eliade. Eliade discusses three characteristics of sacred space: 1) it is set apart from ordinary/profane space; 2) as an axis mundi, it gives access or allows for passage between different levels or states of reality; 3) it irrupts or manifests itself into space - it is a hierophany. Religion and spirituality recognize and are responses to how this sacred power positions itself in the world.

Chidester and Linenthal critique the substantive idea of sacred space. They write that the substantive position "erases" the cultural labor of sacralizing a space (ritualizing, interpreting, and contesting) but "attributing all the action to "holy places" and "gods and spirits" (17). It merely "announces a mystical theology of sacred space" and shuts down analysis. They call this "analytical naivete" that either takes the form of theological dogmatism or mystical intuitionism. 

I agree with their argument and find this shift in perspective to be important. They go on to provide important foundational concepts and analytic tools for understanding the "situational" i.e. constructed and contested character of sacred space. However, I don't want to let go of the poetics with the same absoluteness as they seem to in this introduction, which seems to smack of "exclusive humanism." I want to take issue with their assertion that sacred spaces cannot have agency.

In her article "Uncanny Ecologies," Mayanthi Fernando, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, describes Charles Taylor's term "exclusive humanism." This was a "new sense of self" that emerged in the Enlightenment and formed the basis of secularity. It rejected the old medieval view of a world open to supernatural powers, and posited a human self that was individual, autonomous, closed, directed only by its own will. In contrast, posthumanist scholarship, like the new animism, the ontological turn - she calls it multispecies scholarship - "recognizes the agency of nonhumans" and "extends notions of personhood and agency to other-than and more-than humans." (Fernando, "Uncanny Ecologies: More-Than-Natural, More-Than-Human, More-Than-Secular," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 42.3, 2022.) 

The posthumanist perspective of new animism or what I am calling "the relational turn" proposes that other-than-human beings and even places may exhibit some sort of agency and relationality. In part, this is the recognition of Indigenous ways of knowing. In this sense, a "place" may act on us; it is more animate than we have given credit from our position of exclusive humanism. But it also factors in new scientific knowledge about the ways that other-than-human beings like animals and plants learn and communicate.

It seems to me that the idea of other-than-human agency or relationality is not quite the same as the substantive perspective. That perspective locates a special quality in the place itself. But the relational perspective looks at the relationship between the sacred place/being with other actors, such as human beings.  Whatever is distinctive is located in the relational aspect not necessarily or solely the thing-in-itself.

Space and Its Characteristics

In The Location of Religion chapter 1, Kim Knott discusses key concepts that characterize space and help us to locate religion within space. These include configuration, simultaneity, extension, and power (Location, 21)

Configuration - in a social space, entities are in relationship to other entities and arranged in space in certain ways ( configured) in relation to each other.

Extension - locations or places are extended temporally in the past and the future. Think about how communion extends back into the past and future - imagining for many Christians the Last Supper of Jesus as well as the eschatological "marriage supper of the Lamb" in Revelation 19. But are also connected to or extended into other locations and into virtual spaces. Think about how a church service might be streamed online and extended in this way into a cyber-space. Or if I use Youtube to take a video tour of a college campus or a cathedral or Stonehenge, my home or my location--wherever I am engaging in the electronic tour--extends into these other geographical distant locations. 

Similarly, an imaginative extension - how salat extends a local masjid imaginatively to Mecca, or the Passover extends imaginatively to Jerusalem, "next time" says the participant. How the 14 Stations of the Cross in every Roman Catholic church extends that space to the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. 

I am touching on both of configuration and extension in my world religions class in which I have the class take objects and rituals and think about how they are configured in relation to other thins, people, objects, groups. How they extend in time and imaginatively into other locations past, present, and ideal - such as the eternal return to the powerful creative mythic age of Changing Women in teh Apache Sunrise ceremony. 

Simultaneity  - This is an interesting idea that space confronts you with the now, "a present space given as an immediate whole complete with its associations and connections in their actuality" (quoting Lefebvre, 23). But within that present, every space is stratified, layered with past iterations, meanings, connections, containing "within its fabric many phases of building." In her analysis of the left hand, Knott also raises the possibility of comparative simultaneity - two different but related systems existing together. She discusses the Western and the Tantric traditions of the left hand. But for my world religions class, an example might be the Apache Sunrise Ceremony and perhaps the identity of young girls communicated in schools or in the broader culture of girl's empowerment. The religio-cultural identity of the Apache Woman communicated in the Sunrise Ceremony stands and exists in possible tension with other sorts of contemporary identities available to young girls, like scientist or coder, the sorts of progressive identities that are expressed in American culture.

Power  -- The idea here is that space is full of power. And that things in space are in relations of contestation or "force relations" (77).  Power struggles are played out in space. "The spaces that religion occupies and participates in are spaces of power -- and the challenge will be to discover the relationship between religion and power in any gvien space." We see power playing out in hierarchal relationships, as well as hegemonic and colonial relationships.  One way we see it is through exclusion. Sacred spaces are often created through boundary-making, control, and exclusion. 

In the World Religions class this semester during a presentation on the hajj, we had a discussion of  Mecca being off-limits to non-Muslims. The Haram is marked by exclusion of non-Muslims, but also the transformation of Muslim bodies from unclean to ihram through washing, changing clothing, through mental/emotion focus, and through recitation of the talbiya or labbayka, which interestingly enough places one in space and in spatial relationship to God. "Here I am, oh God." We went on to discuss the ancient Israelite Temple in Jerusalem which was bounded by courts of Gentiles, of Woman, of the exclusion of Jewish men from the Temple itself, and even all the priests except the High Priest one time a year from the Holy of Holies- boundaries and exclusion create this sense of holy space. We hear of an act of transgression against these boundaries in Acts 21:28-29 when Paul is accused of  bringing Greeks into the temple and defiling the holy place.  In a similar way, we talked about our field trip to the Roman Catholic cathedral and how the sanctuary was a raised platform in the center of the church bounded by a railing. Only the priests enter this space. "Did we go into that space?" I asked the class and you could feel the light bulbs turning on as they all shook their heads no. (Although in a previous tour of the church, the priest did bring our group up to inspect the altar close-up. But I didn't bring that up, haha.)

Names of places also reveal power struggles. Here is how I opened my 2021 AAR presentation "Land, Property, Asatru": "Let’s imagine that we are together in a place now called San Antonio in a land sometimes called Texas. Where are we? What do we name this place? What story do we tell about this place? Who belongs in this place? Is it America? The United States? El Norte? Turtle Island? Is it Vinland? Each name is a vision of place and a claim to belonging."

Now, thanks to Kim Knott, we could see these different names as representations of space, symbolic markers of positions within a field, contesting and struggling with each other.