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. 

Lefebvre's Spatial Triad

In Kim Knott's The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis, she introduces Lefebvre's spatial triad. This was new to me and I am thinking through it.

Lefebvre introduces three interrelated conceptualizations of space:

Representations of Space - I understand this as the official and technical plan of space, top down - it is abstract, planned - "conceived space" - the building as it is designed by the architect, for instance

Spaces of Representation - how people (and perhaps other-than-human people) actually live in space - "lived space" - as one article put it "The lived space concerns how human beings use the space and, most importantly, retrofit and mold the space for their own use." 

Spatial Practice - this is still confusing  - It seems to be the everyday ways that people use, perceive, and navigate space  - ordinary everyday practices "from minute, repeated gestures to the rehearsed journeys from home to work and to play" (39). These are the patterns and "paths" that emerge from everyday use. They "encounter and have at times to acknowledge the conceived order, but they form their own stories that are inaccessible to planners and scientists." And they connect to the lived order.

Trying to think about the spatial triad in relation to Barrow, AK:

Representations of Space - this was a city planned and built by white Americans and incorporated in 1958 to settle nomadic Inupiaq people. In this sense it is a city space as conceived and imposed by non-Inupiaq. It has the official pattern of what a city or town is supposed to be, based on American and European precedents. A city must have a post office, a city hall, a school, a hospital, roads laid out in blocks, single-family dwellings. It is small town USA - set down 327 miles above the Arctic circle. Knott writes "Always embedded in such representations are ideology, knowledge, and power" (36), 

Lived Space - Spaces of Representation - All of this is then imposed on 1) the Artic Tundra and 2) on Inupiaq people and culture. So the place "distorts" or changes the idealistic model of small town USA, forcing it, bending it into new directions based on the realities of the place and the culture. So "main street" becomes an ice road in the winter that melts into muddy ruts during the summer. The houses (which are American Lower 48 style houses that are heated, and would warm the tundra beneath them) have to be built on pilings - again because these are houses that are not conceived in relation to the space, its environment and ecology. The Inupiaq also built homes - but these were very different from the homes of the lower 48, the "average American home," because they were built in relationship to the environment. Then there are the meat drying racks outside each home, which is an adaptation by Inupiaq culture trying to live, it fits its lifeways in these spaces. There are the summer camps out on the tundra to which families travel and stay living off the land, hunting, fishing, gathering berries, pushing out against the residential model, deconstructing and subverting the idea of a home in town and the suburban American ideal.

Kim Knott writes that "Such lived spaces, imbued with distinctively local knowledge, often run counter to spaces generated by formal, technical knowledge" (37). These lived spaces can "disrupt the dominant order, through their association with the clandestine and underground side of social life."

Spatial Practice - this seems to be how someone actually perceives a space that they look at or encounter. This perception is mediated by the person's cultural perspective? So one person - say a white person from the outside, or someone who drives a car - looks at Barrows and sees the "offical" planned roads and perceives these as the way to move around the city.  And I did too -- until I got a snow machine or a skidoo. After I began to ride the skidoo around town during the winter, I perceived for the first time a myriad of skidoo trails that twisted around and through the town - through "yards" and around homes and buildings (and therefore subverting the idea of planned roads, space conceived of as private property and homes with "lots." The trails created a new map of shaped by a different perspective on space and the technology of the snow mobile. The trails threaded their way through back spaces, secret spaces that I had never seen before. These trails were used primarily by Inupiaq people. This was a completely different way of perceiving the space and navigating through the space - it paid no attention whatsoever to the "roads" but built a system of trails that mapped out a different world of Inupiaq places and relationships. 

The Pop Culture Epiphany of the Super Bowl Goddess

Elevated sixty feet in the air, the nine-time Grammy award-winning artist Rihanna took the field--or rather levitated above it--at Super Bowl LVII for her first live performance in seven years.

Choreographed by Parris Goebel, Rihanna’s show was visually stunning. Surrounded by swirling dancers in white attire, Rihanna shone in layers of red on red. High tech platforms lifted and lowered performers into the air in a three dimensional extravaganza that some viewers compared to the Super Smash Bros video game.

Howard Stern’s accusation of lipsyncing was just one of many criticisms that came pouring in assailing the show in all the ways we have come to expect. Other commentators expressed disgust over the show’s overt sexuality, a criticism with a long racist history of the exploitation of black women that has been aimed at any number of successful Black female artists from Beyoncé to Cardi B. Conspiracy theorists were intrigued when Rihanna briefly flashed a triangle allegedly signaling to the Illuminati. Meanwhile some voices from the Christian Right fulminated against what they saw as a satanic ritual enacting the fall of Lucifer and his angels in the middle of the nation’s biggest sporting event.

Despite that, the show was a celebration of Rihanna’s second pregnancy with her baby bump on joyful display throughout. Religion scholars Leah Payne and Brian Doak insightfully noted that Rihanna provided a moment of transcendence in the midst of the Super Bowl’s hyper-masculinity and violence. “Here she is, overlooking the entire crowd, churning with life” exclaimed Payne in an episode of their podcast Weird Religion.

Where others saw angels and demons, Payne and Doak’s commentary hinted at the deeper religious overtones of the show. Themes and images of Goddess religion were woven throughout the performance. In three different moments, Rihanna’s poses, songs, and costumes expressed classic images of the divine feminine, presenting Rihanna as a pop culture theophany of the Mother Goddess. As Carol Christ writes, “more than anything else the Goddess symbolizes a new and fierce love of women for ourselves that has the power to change the world.”[i] That certainly expresses the theme of this halftime show.

Rihanna Callipyge

Let’s look at these three moments in a little more detail, beginning with a sequence 4:15 minutes into the show in which Rihanna echoed the callipygian Venus, the goddess of the shapely buttocks. 

In the segment, the camera moved along a platform lined with dancers. The choreography was highly charged and energetic, trios of dancers popping and flowing around the camera as it moved steadily through them with a sense of anticipation. Suddenly the last dancers parted, peeling off to the sides as Rihanna was revealed. She stood perfectly still looking over her shoulder at the viewers, the perfect image of the callipygian Goddess. The pose asserted a sense of confidence, sublime yet sexual even as the dancers continued their ecstatic choreography around her. The sexually charged song lyrics matched the dance–playful, inviting, flirtatious, even raunchy by some standards.

Rihanna Fertility Goddess

Several minutes later, 6:46–7:35 minutes into the performance, Rihanna sat down on a slightly raised platform--let’s call it a dais as if she was holding court, placing her body on view again, posed now to emphasize her pregnancy. In this seated position, her pose was strikingly reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf or the Venus of Hohle Fels with her legs slightly open, her pregnant belly and breasts accentuated by a red bodice. The flirtatious callipygian Goddess had matured into a more profound presence, a Mother Goddess enthroned in her fullness and power, relaxed and resplendent. Like the Paleolithic Goddess figurines, this moment emphasized the life-giving dimensions of sexuality—the potential of fertility, pregnancy, and birth.

Rihanna Celestial

As the show arrived at its penultimate number “Umbrella” Rihanna had donned a red oversized parka-like coat. Visually, the coat symbolized a robe with its train of thick folds spilling out around her on the floor. Enrobed as a queen, her sexuality was not muted so much as transmuted into something regal.

As the final brash and confident beats of the “Umbrella” anthem faded, a brief hush fell across the stadium. Rihanna’s platform throbbed with light and began to rise upward. Her white-clad entourage stood still for the first time, beholding the ascension in orans posture, elbows held close to their sides, arms raised, palms up—the ancient religious posture of prayer, supplication, and adoration. The words of her song “Diamonds” resounded through the stadium, “Shine bright like a diamond”--a hymn to the possibility of human life transfigured by beauty and power. Resplendent in her solitude, she was elevated into the air above the crowd, the dark stands filled with specks of light like the stars in the night sky. She became a singular glittering figure, suspended in the heavens, crowned with light, celestial and transcendent, the Queen of Heaven in a starlight background. The drone shot of her ascending and levitating in the immense void of the stadium was truly stunning—a clear and powerful moment of pop culture apotheosis.

Rihanna’s show didn’t challenge gender identity. There was no moment of woke-ism or gender fluidity. Instead, she drew on long-standing images of the Goddess to assert a divine femininity. The show harkened back to Carol P. Christ’s essay “Why Women Need the Goddess.” As Christ writes in that essay, “The simplest and most basic meaning of the symbol of Goddess is the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of female power as a beneficent and independent power. . . . The strength and independence of female power can be intuited by contemplating ancient and modern images of the Goddess.”[ii] In the performance, Rihanna gives viewers a chance to do just that—contemplate a contemporary pop culture image of the Goddess and acknowledge her power.

While God, country, and football have long been the celebrated trinity of the Superbowl’s vision of American civil religion, Rihanna used the spectacle of the halftime show to insinuate the Goddess into that civil religion. For fifteen minutes, the militant imagery of war and masculine violence was muted by this appearance and self-assertion of the divine feminine, claiming the viewers’ respect, veneration, and worship. The clashing of male bodies on the field was briefly overshadowed by one woman ascending above the throng for a transcendent moment, holding out a vision of sexuality, fertility, and life.

In the Weird Religion podcast, Brian Doak asks “Is this the ultimate woman flex? To be like ‘I am pregnant. I am a billionaire. I am in the halftime show. I am doing whatever I want.” Carol Christ would agree that “as women struggle to create a new culture in which women's power, bodies, will, and bonds are celebrated, it is natural that the Goddess would reemerge as symbol of the newfound beauty, strength, and power of women.”[iii] As a pop culture halftime Goddess, Rihanna presented this new religious possibility to the Superbowl audience through song, dance, and camera angles. The show framed Rihanna’s own personal power, charisma, and autonomy in the images of the Goddess. The apotheosis of Rihanna beckons viewers into a world in which women’s sexuality is no sin, their fertility is assertive power, and their presence a proclamation of a new era of triumphant femininity.

All references and time-stamps for Rihanna’s halftime show refer to the official NFL video released on Youtube February 15, 2023, “Rihanna’s FULL Apple Music Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show” https://youtu.be/HjBo--1n8lI

[i] Carol P. Christ, “Why Women, Men and Other Living Things Still Need the Goddess: Remembering and Reflecting 35 Years Later.” Feminist Theology, 20(3): 2012, 242–255. https://doi.org/10.1177/0966735012436897

[ii] Carol P Christ. “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections.” In Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader on Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 273-287.

[iii] Christ, “Why Women Need the Goddess.”