Symbolism and Theology and Process and

[kiya]

Last night I spent an excessive chunk of time rattling around reading blogs, in a weird compilation of some rereading of the things I wrote for last year's Pagan Values Month blogswarm thing, coming across someone sneering that of course Christianity didn't invent original sin, that's just a normal religion thing, and some discussions that are apparently related to Wiscon, and it got me thinking about structural stuff around religion again.


I'm pretty sure I'm told the story before of the first time I was talking to my father's wife about the state of pagan theology and why it irked me. She asked for a short explanation and I gave it, and she said:

"Oh. You're like Baptists."

"... how do you mean?"

And she explained that for a long time, Baptists explicitly rejected theological studies as being Tools Of The Oppressor, more or less, and beside that unnecessary because they Had The Holy Spirit.

Which is, well, pretty much just like the threads in modern paganism that reject theology as Tools Of The Oppressor (By Which We Mean Organised Religion, By Which We Mean Christians), more or less, and beside that unnecessary because they Had The Goddess.

And the thing is, there's apparently a group of Baptists who are now attempting to articulate a Baptist theology - not losing the experiential-ecstatic portions of their worship, but attempting to put together a coherent expression of what that means and what the consequences of that meaning might be.

So, yeah. Like Baptists.


Puppet religion exhausts me.

It needs its strings pulled all the time to make it move, you know? Tug at it, give it a semblance of life.

It's possible to build a religion, like one builds a marionette, but at some point the miracle has to happen, it has to move of its own, it has to be Pinocchio, and you have to let it go.


The ancient Egyptians believed in the self as a collective, a constellation of parts of identity. Death meant the risk of all of those bits falling off into independent existence, and by that independence, to isolation and annihilation. To be weary of heart was to have no pulse; to have no pulse means that the flow that unifies the body is stilled, and one must find something else to bring one's members into union.

That's what a lot of funerary literature is about. Pulling the pieces back together with a new medium so none of the bits get lost. The symbolism of the mummy wrap holding everything material together is not incidental.


The gods are not dead. Well, barring Wesir, but that is His job.

The old religion is, though.

We can't puppet it about and pull the strings and be in control. It is weary of heart; its blood no longer unifies its limbs.

And limbs are what we've got. The shells of temples, each the body of a god, but the rituals no longer flow through them to keep those members conjoined. The shells of rituals, too. The idea of Nisut without the nation to rule.

Diaspora is a word, a powerful word, and I think that if I tried to say it to the ancients they would have been fucking terrified. Sinuhe writ large, Sinuhe who was so afraid of being buried other than in his homeland, who accepted divine guidance and came home to where they knew how to bind his parts together, where he would remain an organic part of his community.

Diaspora, I whisper, and I know that my religion must come to embrace something that would have been a festival of horrors to its original adherents.

It must become something else.


Ba to heaven, khat to earth. Diasporic principles are part of the funereal literature, that each part went to its own place, but they still remained in relationship - and the ba needed the freedom to return to the body, to be its other, even if its natural realm was aerial, unbound, beyond the tomb.


(And I ponder, for the nonce, that I think the clan of my surname's seat is a ruin, and the head thereof is in, I think, New Zealand. This is not my umpty-great grandparents' Highlands. Diaspora, diaspora.)

The order that unified this religion before it departed was through the throne. The office and principles of kingship and the nature of the power flows in the state are what the beating heart circulated to keep everything working right.

Even if we maintain the throne - consider it not empty and set someone upon it - the body is different than it was before that heart was first weary. Khat to earth, that nation and its empire are gone under conquerors and time and several waves of new religion, and we will not bring those old ways back even if we wish it. The body of the new nation is of a completely different nature.

There are no rituals for this. We haven't written them yet.


I despair, sometimes. The theology needs to be done, because without the continuity this is the only way to map the vessels through which a living essence can flow again, and that's if theology isn't itself that unifying force that animates the members (which is a notion that occurs to me at times). The theology needs to be done and I do not see the work being done.

I see a lot of mystics, but mystics are members. Hell, I'm a mystic. I would fucking love it if I could just go and have transcendent spiritual experiences in a serene context, if I could love the gods and serve Neb.y and my Lady Mother and all of that stuff that's what I want to be doing. But I can't have my fucking serene context unless I build it, because all I have are parts parts parts and the heart of the religion is weary, weary, weary.

You want mystic? Last night it struck me that the job I am trying to do is servant to the throne. And that I should probably try to talk to Aset.

And I'm up to my fucking ears in funerary literature and I don't know if I'm even making sense because I don't know how to talk to anyone about this because I'm doing theology, and we've got the fucking Holy Spirit don't we, we don't need to think about how to breathe life and not be pulling the strings all the fucking time.

And I don't want to be doing this. Or, if I'm doing theology, what I want to be doing is shaking people and screaming "HUG YOUR CHILDREN SO THEY HAVE SOULS", which is, in the grand scheme of things, a fuckton more important than whether or not this shambling mass of parts manages to re-form a functional identity constellation, possibly with a nicely carved phallus and a bit of padding to full out the parts that caved in and got eaten by the fucking fish of time.

The whole grand unified theory shit, not a big deal. That one line, though, if I achieve nothing else in the world, I want that bit of theology to make it into someone's head other than mine, I want people living that, because that matters. (For the record, it is from the Pyramid Texts.) I want people understanding the consequences of this concept. Not state rituals, not politics over who's the god-king or whatever. Just. Hug your children so they have souls.

But whether or not I want to be doing the big picture crunching, it is my damn job to do it, or at least I can't do my job without doing it. I'm not even sure which anymore.

And I didn't realise that when I started writing this I was going to be going into the theology of that chunk of funerary literature. Certainly not like that. But you see. This is my job. For better or for freaking worse.




Shorter version: hug your children so they have souls. Thank you, goodnight.

Comments

[zeborah]

That's an awesome bit of theology.

And she explained that for a long time, Baptists explicitly rejected theological studies as being Tools Of The Oppressor, more or less, and beside that unnecessary because they Had The Holy Spirit.

Huh. I can see how that view would come about, and yet if any Christian tried to argue such a view to me I'd point out that the New Testament was written by people who Had The Holy Spirit, and at least half of that was attempts at practical theological studies.

The whole balance thing, though, trying to get a sensible/comfortable/useful balance between... hmm, theory and experience and practice -- that's frequently not easy.

[kiya]

Heh - which bit is awesome there? I'm ... full of angst and understanding and it's awfully hard at times.

It's a fascinating bit of ... denominational politics, I guess it could be called, isn't it? I think a lot of her stuents have a Baptist background (though i'm pretty sure she's ordained as a Presbyterian).

The thing with the modern paganisms is the way they are, in many ways, dominated by mystics. A lot of the people who get really vehement about new and reformed religion are godbothered in one way or another. But that doesn't bring the body together. It may well be the breath in that body, but it still needs organs.


Sigh.

I just want to tell stories, y'know? Tell stories, love the gods, and hold my baby close so she has a soul. But there's this other thing that needs doing too....

[zeborah]

"Hug your children so they have souls" in particular. It's so very True and practical and ought-to-be-universal.

But what you write about religion is always... for me like a window, whether into something unfamiliar to me and not easily grokked, and/or shining a light onto my own theological thoughts.

And. There's a passage somewhere in one of the Epistles, I forget which, but the writer is saying that not everyone is a natural preacher - everyone gets different gifts, some to preach, some to teach, some to prophesy, some to do this that and the other including supporting those who do these things which were then being more valued. Reading your post made me think of that and think... this kind of division of labour is a lot easier in a religion that has millions of members; in a religion that doesn't - like any smaller community - if everyone says "Well, someone else will [do that]" then it doesn't get done and things fall apart.

And is it a strength of smaller communities that members are more willing to do things they wouldn't otherwise be suited to for the sake of the community, or is it just that communities that don't have such members don't thrive? Either way it's hard on the members.

[kiya]

The actual line in the PT that that comes from goes something like, "And [God-the-creator] put his arms about [gods-the-first-children] like the arms of the ka, that his ka might be in them." 'Ka' being one of the souls - the icon on this comment, if you look at the glyphs behind the Dr. Seuss quote, reads H KA, so you can see what 'put his arms about them like the arms of the ka' would look like.



Because of joining FB I'm back in touch with a bunch of people I had really missed - one of whom is a Lutheran minister. And I commented to her when we were chatting on the phone that I really kind of envy you folks because you have all this shit worked out already, all the structure and support so that people can just do their work and do that division of labor thing.

The "hard on the members" thing is one of the reasons I've been going to the local UUs. So I can have somewhere where it's done already. Someplace where I can just let it be and not have to build the edifice.

But the "someone else will do that" thing is why I am doing it. Because the work I think needs to be done, I don't see anyone else doing. And I think the structures that are currently in place will not last a generation without this getting done. They're too dependent on things that are breakable, like individual human lives.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

(I have nothing terribly useful to say, but in case no one has said this yet today, doing important work that needs to be done makes you awesome.)

[uncledark.livejournal.com]

We talk of Pagan community, but that's the wrong word. We're a subculture. More than that, we're a subculture of a hundred disparate gangs of mystics with a real hate for orthodoxy.

We need to be communities.

Community is the adult version of "hug your children so they have souls."

[kiya]

Community is the adult version of "hug your children so they have souls."

In Egyptian terms, that is very precisely true, in fact. One Egyptologist defined the central ethic of Egyptian religion as "that force which brings people together into communities."

Same force for bringing all one's bits into identity, all one's relatives into family, because these are also communities.

[uncledark.livejournal.com]

It's true in most any terms. The word, religio, from which we get the word "Religion," was the name the Romans gave to their state religion, meaning this same thing. The Greeks felt similarly, in that participation in the religious rites was more important to community life than actually believing in the gods.

We do this together is a powerful force for binding communities.

[shefytbast.livejournal.com]

/delurks

I'm very curious about and interested in theology, but I never quite know how to grapple with it in any systematic way. It seems so broad, and so many things can be discussed under that heading--what are the general outlines of what's actually necessary, and what are paths of thought that might be interesting to explore but aren't intrinsic? Where does one even begin? (Somebody tried to engage me in a discussion of theology at one point, but it seemed to consist mostly of her asking me, "So what do you do?" without any real exchange on the context. Kind of a fail.) And it probably doesn't help that I'm more of a "pounce-on-the-shiny-and-synthesize-it-with-the-rest-of-the-hoard" thinker than an analytical thinker....

It sounds like it would be a brilliantly fascinating project if it weren't so stressfully urgent and so lonely for you. :/

[kiya]

Yeah, that's one of the big problems I have with trying to systematise what I want to do; I can't figure out where to start.

Theology was basically invented as part of Christianity, as I understand it; other ways of grappling with religious concepts use different processes, though at this point I'm pretty sure a lot of people in a lot of religions can do theological processing. But Christianity is different from a lot of religions, because there's this specific central thing to hang the central stuff on: that Jesus guy.

When the question is dealing with evolved rather than revealed religions, it gets harder. I mean, in one of my Egyptological books there's a bit where the author says, basically, "We don't know whether the ritual explains the significance of this bit of language use, or the language use gave rise to the ritual." Which means we can't say "Start from the language" or "Start from the ritual" and have everything flow; it's a body.

I love my projects, I hate my projects. It's this intensely emotionally complicated thing, really ....

[luellon.livejournal.com]

*Hug*

I really think this work is very important and I'm glad you're doing it.

If you need anything via Aset or otherwise, let me know.

It may help to look into ancient and/or indigenous religions and how they view or do or respond to theology than look at a more Christian or Abrahamic model.

[kiya]

Thank you. I will let you know if I can think of anything.

[pinkpolarity.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this is of any use to you, but I just stumbled across it and thought I'd leave it here for you-- something a wise woman once told me about Kemeticism :):

The insight He gave me: The Kemetic temples aren't currently alive.
There's no living, breathing tradition. What we have in Kemeticism
today is the embalmers working and trying to make up for a couple
thousand years of neglect, waiting to see if we can revive a
tradition and see it rise as an akh.

The Opening of the Mouth for Kemeticism has not been performed yet.

[kiya]

If that was me, it's nice to see my research upholds my gut impressions. Or something....

[ryanfirewitch.livejournal.com]

I have to say I seriously appreciate the work you're doing.

A lot of times I see something you've written that really pings something inside me.

At a literal level, I don't have any children. And, on another level, I do. I wonder whether the things you post that resonate with me are, in one sense, hugging me so I have a soul. And the people whose lives I touch, the people who I help open the way for, maybe that is me hugging them so they have souls.

Way opening. Hmmmmm.... Sounds familiar.... ;-)

[kiya]

The ka also carries gifts and offerings, sooooo....