The 2015 essay I promised to post

"History of Religions and Cultural Fashions Revisited," with a new introduction

[Multiple cautionary notes on this one. I have been informed that Gmail will post “Message clipped” once the content exceeds a certain length, so to get the whole thing, my loyal subscribers will have to go to the website address. The essay is being provided at all because I said I would do that. Many of you may not find it sufficiently relevant to your interests, but here it is.]

I promised to post this essay to Summations, after the side foray into the British Surrealists and the impulses behind them (about whom and which the legendary zoologist Desmond Morris, perhaps the sole surviving member of the original British Surrealists, has just published a modest biographical survey: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/books/review/the-british-surrealists-desmond-morris.html). My essay, the title of which alludes to a 1966 essay by Mircea Eliade, appeared in a strangely titled compilation edited by Mihaela Gligor, From Influence and Confluence to Difference and Indifference, available only as a free e-book from a university press in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. ( http://www.editura.ubbcluj.ro/php/download.php?f=1850&ex=pdf ) For those who are not inclined to seek out the book itself, here is an idiosyncratically formatted set of page proofs of my chapter. (See the “cautionary note” below.)

I was charmed by the idea of being asked (after having been recommended by the far better known professor who turned down the request) to write for a book publisher in the city then famous for having produced a globally famous group of artists who were being cited as demonstrating that the art world was now truly global and top-selling painters could live in cities like Cluj as well as New York or Berlin (so long as they maintained additional studios in one of those cities). I decided to test the hypothesis by leading off the essay with a discussion of the work of the most discussed of the Cluj artists and then filling the essay with comments about artists who were illustrative of the “cultural fashions” of 2015 that I was discussing. All of the artists in question just happened to live and work in Atlanta.

Of course, one of my unmentioned points of the essay was that if I had wanted to ensure minimum impact for my comments on cultural fashions and the history of religions, an excellent way of doing it would have been to publish them in an e-book that was never sold on booksellers’ websites (the downloads being free of charge, the book was unmarketable by any other venue) and never advertised by the university that produced it. As with my print-on-demand books from lulu.com, I liked the idea of making things as difficult to stumble across as possible, since I always seemed to stumble across exactly the improbably obscure books I needed at exactly the time when I needed them, and saw no reason to make my own efforts any more aggressively accessible than that.

I should note, though, that had it not been for the invitation from Cluj-Napoca, this essay summing up the intellectually respectable parts of The Story Thus Far As Of 2015 would never have been written at all. I remain deeply grateful to Mihaela Gligor, and to the well-known professor who suggested to her that I would be happy to take up the task he had no time to perform.

Incidentally, it is a strange coincidence that this essay begins with a reference to Donna Haraway, whose work was being discussed extensively yesterday at Swan Coach House in guest curator Lisa Alembik’s conversation with artist Douglas Baulos, at his exhibition “Night’s Hand on Your Shoulder.”

Cautionary note: This text version is a real mess, because in translating it from the PDF it proved too difficult, if not impossible, to extract the footnotes and reformat them. They now appear right in the middle of the body copy, interrupting sentences in an extremely odd way, but if you find this too irritating to skim through, you can always download the entire book, using the URL cited above.

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From Influence and Confluence to Difference and Indifference

Studies on History of Religions

History of Religions and Cultural Fashions Revisited

Jerry CULLUM

In Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,1 Sigmund Freud famously wrote that humanity had suffered three wounds to its narcissism - Copernicus had demonstrated that humanity did not dwell at the center of the cosmos, Darwin had demonstrated that humanity had descended from the same line of speciation as the primates, and Freud had demonstrated that the vaunted individual self was subject to unconscious forces. Donna Haraway has recently proposed that the possibility that human intelligence can be not only supplemented but supplanted by digital technology constitutes a fourth narcissistic wound.2

The Darwinian and Freudian wounds have transmuted and merged in recent decades through the flood of unsettling discoveries and hypotheses being presented by evolutionary psychology and neuroscience of the brain. This information has been spread to a broad audience, bit by bit, via digital media and occasionally by mass-market print publications. The news has transformed popular culture even when it has been treated with

1 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, tr. James Strachey (Liveright: The Standard Edition, reprint 1989), p. 353. 2 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 12.

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indifference by the larger part of the population. In the United States, it has frequently been received with open hostility.

We are thus at a moment in history in which the “narcissistic hurts” - even the Copernican in some cases - are denied by a substantial percentage of the earth’s population, ignored by perhaps an even more substantial percentage, and thought of simplistically by most of the rest. In spite of that, sufficient evidence has now been assembled for a fresh debate on the nature of humanity.

The difficulty is that few if any cross-disciplinary scholars have a sufficient grasp of the constantly shifting state of research and of the broad sweep of the human achievement in art, literature, and religion across something like 40,000+ years of human creativity and across the entire planet. The academic discipline of the history of religions is intrinsically interdisciplinary, and perhaps in a position to contribute particularly useful insights to the dialogue across academic boundaries.

This essay is intended to present a very thin slice of cultural responses to our contemporary condition, and to suggest a few possible resources for analysis of them.

The Romanian Pavilion of the 2015 Venice Biennale is dominated by a suite of paintings by the celebrated Cluj,- Berlin-, and London-based artist Adrian Ghenie, titled Darwin’s Room. This body of work focuses on Darwin’s figure and surroundings, and has as its conceptual background Ghenie’s belief that while currently regnant neoliberal ideologies of unrestrained competition can be traced back to Darwin’s picture of the struggle for existence, other models of human society and the human

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condition may be arising in today’s competition between modes of thought.3

These paintings, and Ghenie’s related installation The Darwin Room,4 exhibited in London in 2014, are only the latest additions to a long list of artworks indebted to or paying homage to Darwin’s legacy. Also in London in 2014, Koen Vanmechelen’s Darwin’s Dream is derived from a 15 year, 18 generation experiment of cross-breeding chickens to produce the same sort of spectacular diversity of plumage that Darwin produced in pigeons. A curators’ note in the exhibition catalogue describes the purpose of this collection of photographs and sculptures evoking the findings of a decade and a half of work as

suggest[ing] a substantial sense of human-animal shared destiny that emerges where through this symbolic partnership, man can acquire answers to adaptive needs.5

More importantly for the purposes of this present essay, the University of Ghent professor Rik Pinxten wrote in the accompanying “Koen Vanmechelen: Art and science,”

Both science and art are wonderful and indeed powerful forms of human invention and creativity.

3 http://darwinsroom.ro/project/, accessed July 30, 2015; Adrian Ghenie,Darwin’sRoom,HatjeCantz,2015.

4 http://www.pacegallery.com/london/exhibitions/12671/golems, accessed July 31, 2015.

5 James Putnam and Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, “A Word from the Curators,” Darwin’s Dream, Guy Pieters Gallery, 2014 (on the occasion of an exhibition at the Crypt Gallery, London, November 15 - December 14, 2014), p. 10.

http://www.pacegallery.com/london/exhibitions/12671/golems, accessed July 31, 2015.

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Personally, I think that this may probably be the ultimate, although gradual, distinction between humans and other animals: by means of the faculty of fantasy and imagination we add a dimension to the determinacy of nature.6

Both these exhibitions were focused on the work that led to Darwin’s The Origin of Species. But Darwin postponed his most explosive proposals until some years later, when The Descent of Man placed human beings firmly among the primates.

Thus primatology has long been concerned with contemplating and researching the origins of human behaviors by studying primate behaviors. Some years ago, the aggressiveness of bands of chimpanzees was taken to explain the innate human tendency to compete and engage in violent combat. More recently, the discovery that the closely related bonobo engages in cooperation and erotic reconciliation after conflict has led some primatologists to observe that humanity shares genes with both chimpanzees and bonobos, derived from a common ancestor that may have been more complex than previously imagined.

Frans de Waal’s 2011 book The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates recounts experiments that indicate that bonobos are capable of making judgments of fairness (including fairness to a partner) and expressing empathy to an injured or wronged member of the species. More controversially, de Waal extrapolated from this evidence to questions regarding human morality and religion. Suggesting that religion may be well nigh selected for by

6 Rik Pinxten, “Koen Mechanlen: Art and Science,” Darwin’s Dream, p. 73.

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evolution, he imagined what a bonobo might tell a fervidly evangelizing atheist if the two were able to engage in a dialogue. (As translated by de Waal, the bonobo’s remarks would be a witty summation of the major points of de Waal’s book, beginning with an admonition to stop “sleeping furiously,” in bonobo metaphor, and be less superfluously upset by a being that the atheist regards as nonexistent.)7

The notion of a dialogue is not total fantasy; while de Waal carries out his own research at the Yerkes Primate Center of Atlanta’s Emory University, the Language Research Center of Georgia State University (also in Atlanta) has worked to create a type of linguistic communication between chimpanzees (and bonobos) and humans. Given a series of pictorial symbols that they are taught to manipulate to form sentences, the chimpanzee/bonobo test subjects have been able to express not only requests but pleasure and displeasure, often combining symbols in a sort of metaphoric reach that seems to indicate that they associate the images not just with objects but with emotions.8

The Atlanta artist Craig Dongoski “collaborated” (perhaps without the questioning quotation marks) with one of the test subjects on works of art that he insists offer insight into the origins of written language. Although the marks that the chimp named Panzee made in notebooks appear random, they were written in straight lines, separate and distinct rather than overlaid, and some of the

7 Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, W. W. Norton, 2011, p. 236. 8 See: http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwlrc/3476.html for information on the Language Research Center’s projects.

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marks resemble ideograms and the rudiments of an alphabet. Dongoski created his own artworks based on enlargements of these marks.9

Dongoski’s art explored the behavior that may represent a precursor to symbol-making in more ways than one; the linear arrangement of the marks may be some version of the human propensity towards forms of compositional arrangement that is one root of aesthetic experience; another root, the form of aesthetic arrest that seems to connote either awe or emotional enchantment, leads to both art and religious experience - but is not the complete explanation of either. This latter “awe and wonderment at natural events,” as de Waal notes, is almost incontestably present in the primates with which he works.10

The existence of what seem like metaphors in chimpanzee/bonobo-human communication suggests the possibility of the roots of storytelling among the primates. But there is, to my knowledge, no evidence of counterfactuals combined with the subjunctive (“if this were true, then that would be possible, but it isn’t”) - although the visualization of solutions to a problem never before encountered has been demonstrated many times, and not only in primate species. In any number of species, problem-solving involves something like picturing possible scenarios without the intervention of

9 For details of Dongoski’s project, see Jerry Cullum, “Two Shows - Digital Collages and Primate Marks - Produce Artistic Meditations at Whitespace and Whitespec,” ArtsATL, May 27, 2014, http://www.artsatl.com/2014/05/whitespace-craig-dongoski-charlie- watts/. See also Whitespace Gallery’s Dongoski page, “Exploration Between the Written and the Spoken Word,” http://whitespace814.com/artists/craig-dongoski/, both accessed July 31, 2015.

10 The Bonobo and the Atheist, pp. 199-200. 106

language; the roots of fantasy are in images rather than words. Whole dramas play out in our heads without language intervening, but those scenarios typically depend on prior knowledge imprinted through stories expressed in language. That dialectic between image and word is perhaps the only feature of humanity that still distinguishes homo sapiens from all other creatures on earth; bonobos may well make for themselves pictures of facts (I am making the joking reference to the English version of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus with full knowledge of the implications), but as far as we know, they have no mythology.

As far as we can determine, narrative is the distinctive feature of human beings. Many animals dream, and many play, even as adults. We now know that chimpanzees can learn symbol systems, and communicate not only requests but emotions to humans by using the symbols they have been taught. We can see the bases of metaphor and the ability to picture possible situations. But as far as we can tell, neither bonobos nor chimpanzees have anything like the ability to tell a sequential counterfactual story, or a factual one for that matter.

Narrative, as I’ve just said, can be visual and gestural as well as verbal,11 and makes possible storytelling of types that range from folktale to religious mythology. The evolutionary leap has been explained by two diametrically opposed hypotheses: that storytelling confers such distinct evolutionary benefits that natural selection led to its creation and elaboration, or that storytelling came about as an accidental feature of other brain developments. As

11 Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 131.

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Jonathan Gottschall’s recent popularizing book puts it, “[...] nothing so central to the human condition is so incompletely understood.”12 However it came about, it is generally recognized as deriving from a combination of language and play... and it is obvious that it frequently leads to narratives taken with fundamental seriousness.

It also is both culturally specific and shaped by a common human biology, but recently it is difference that has been uppermost in scholarship in history of religions as in the other academic disciplines devoted to the human sciences or the humanities. The emphasis on cultural difference has, until recently, prevented any fresh attempts at the sort of comprehensive cross-cultural accounts undertaken half a century ago by Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God or Mircea Eliade in A History of Religious Ideas.13 Campbell’s attempt, in the opening pages of Primitive Mythology, to provide an evolutionary basis for myth is particularly dated, and in need of rethinking, though not necessarily of complete rejection.

The trend towards difference is itself a cultural fashion that is now passing. The cross-cultural functions of story as shared human experience, however, have not yet been sufficiently explored anew by historians of religion. There are excellent reasons for this. However similar the overall impact may be in varying contexts, the forces of globalized economics and digital technology are received differently in each culture. In Globalizing the

12 Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Mariner Press, 2012), p. xiv. 13 The Masks of God was published in four volumes between 1959 and 1969. Three of the intended four volumes of A History of Religious Ideas were published in English between 1978 and 1985, although the French originals appeared earlier, beginning in 1976.

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Sacred, an astonishingly ambitious survey of 21st-century religion across the Americas, Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardt note that the premodern, modern, and postmodern (the last-named term already out of fashion as a descriptor) merge as well as collide, and in very distinct ways. Even a globalized “hybridity all the way down”14 is not always the same hybridity. Difference makes all the difference, and the new realizations of commonality have not had anything like consistent effects in academic disciplines, any more than they have in the cultures that are insistently meeting, mingling, and mixing despite the best efforts of defenders of tradition or presupposed cultural purity.

It would be interesting, in a more comprehensive version of the course of action I am suggesting, to re-read a book like Robert N. Bellah’s Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World,15 which contained disparate essays addressing the then-contemporary religious situation in East Asia, the Islamic world, and the United States, and contemplate the differences and similarities between how things were thought to be then and how they have turned out to be in the fifty years since those essays were written. It would be even more interesting to juxtapose Bellah’s approach with the revisionary method of Vásquez and Marquardt, who attack the assumptions of various reductionisms while acknowledging their validity when considered differently;

14 Manuel Vásquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardt, Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 60. 15 Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post- Traditional World (Harper & Row, 1970).

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they write that it is their intent to “rematerialize the study of religion in a nonreductive fashion,” making it

possible to preserve Eliade’s anti-reductionist impetus without denying that religion is inextricably entwined with social and historical processes,

so that what they study is

how religion is imagined and experienced by individuals, groups, and institutions embedded in multiple realms of activity.16

I am proposing, somewhat similarly, that attitudes towards religion are being molded by new realms of knowledge according to the degree in which those realms of knowledge are disseminated, but that the reception of those realms of knowledge is affected by the prior cultural situation of the groups and individuals receiving it. They interpret them according to cultural categories that vary enormously, even though the intrinsic similarities of human beings across the planet guarantee that the interpretations will often be in some ways even more similar than simplistic reductionism would lead us to expect, and in others even more different. Hence this essay proposes the value of studying cultural fashions, which are often both local and global, as one mode of entry to the problem.

Such longtime interpreters of shared cultural experiences as Marina Warner (whose Phantasmagoria17

16 Globalizing the Sacred, p. 8. 17 Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, And Media Into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2006). See also

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ought to be included in a longer contemplation of culture and consciousness) continue to offer adroit summaries of the multiple functions of such perdurable phenomena as fairy tales or the linked tales of frame-tale collections.18 More recently, fabulists themselves, from Salman Rushdie to Neil Gaiman, have felt impelled to theorize upon the functions and nature of stories, and the reasons for their persistence across generations and centuries.

Gaiman’s fantasy stories, ranging from graphic novels to a classic re-imagining of religious history in the novel American Gods,19 have established his reputation among a huge popular following as a typically ironic, sometimes cynical teller of both new tales and old themes updated for a bitterly skeptical era. It is thus particularly significant that he chose to bring the results of two and a half years of research to an online audience in the seminars of the Long Now Foundation with the lecture “How Stories Last.” Since his research and speculation were both undertaken responsibly, much of what Gaiman had to say has been said previously by others. But his poetically expressed summations are noteworthy in and of themselves:

http://www.marinawarner.com/publications/bookdetailsnonfiction/pha ntasmagoria.html, accessed July 31, 2015. 18 See: Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tales (Oxford University Press, 2014), and http://www.marinawarner.com/publications/bookdetailsnonfiction/once uponatime.html, accessed July 31, 2015, and/or Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Harvard University Press, 2012), and http://www.marinawarner.com/publication,s/bookdetailsnonfiction/stra ngermagic.html, accessed July 31, 2015.

19 Neil Gaiman, American Gods: A Novel (William Morrow, 2001). 111

Pictures, I think, may have been a way of transmitting stories. The drawings on cave walls that we assume are acts of worship or of sympathetic magic, intended to bring hunters luck and good kills, I keep wondering if, actually, they’re just ways of telling stories: ‘We came over that bridge and we saw a herd of wooly bisons.’ And I wonder that because people tell stories - it’s an enormous part of what makes us human. [...] A lot of stories do appear to begin as intrinsic to religions and belief systems - a lot of the ones we have have gods or goddesses in them; they teach us how the world exists; they teach us the rules of living in the world. But they also have to come in an attractive enough package that we take pleasure from them and we want to help them propagate.20

When one of the most popular storytellers in Britain and America feels impelled to explore the roots of story, it is indicative of how far the awareness of our nature as storytelling beings has permeated the culture. But awareness of epochal discoveries regarding our neurological makeup and our parallels with other species has also spread widely; and although the situation is less widely acknowledged, academicians have grown aware of the difficulty of examining the human condition with analytical tools that are themselves subject to cultural fashions and the limitations imposed by unconsciously received cultural stories. As the title of a memorable work by Atlanta-based photographer Beth Lilly has it, “The story is trying to tell the story.”21

20 Accessed July 31, 2015 at

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/16/neil-gaiman-how-stories-

last/. 21

See: http://www.bethlilly.com/wp-content/gallery/esoosits/beth- lilly_the-story-is-trying-to-tell-the-story.jpg

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Telling the story of all the aforementioned stories is more than one essay can possibly accomplish. But a half- century-old lecture by Mircea Eliade (it was delivered on May 2, 1966) suggests a possible method of approach: The published version of “History of Religions and Cultural Fashions”22 leaps in its 14 pages from the topic of a doubtfully true tale repeated throughout 19th century scholarship to the then-popular French magazine of fantastic realism Planète to Teilhard de Chardin to structuralism, finding in all of the contemporary cultural vogues a shared “protest against the pessimism and nihilism of some recent historicists.”23

Fifty years later, this judgment appears accurate even if one were to take issue with the lecture/essay’s other characteristically Eliadean terminology regarding them. But it is the succinct and fast-moving quality of Eliade’s argument that I wish to imitate, for I am attempting to deal with amorphous cultural transformations that are planet-wide and sufficiently immense to demand a lengthy, and probably unwieldy, book.

Eliade famously insisted that, as Robert Segal summarizes it, “religiosity is innate to human beings and, more, that it is as insatiable a drive as hunger.”24 Today, it is easier to argue that religion, art, and storytelling all derive from the same complex of innate biological predispositions modified by culture. As Gaiman’s lecture

22 Mircea Eliade, “History of Religions and Cultural Fashions,” reprinted in Mircea Eliade, Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (Crossroad, 1985), pp. 17-31. 23 “History of Religions and Cultural Fashions,” p. 29.

24 Robert A. Segal, “Are There Modern Myths?” in Bryan Rennie, ed.,

Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade

(State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 25. 113

indicates, it is difficult to find a human group completely indifferent to religion, art, and storytelling alike. It is, however, possible to find a cultural fashion determined to demonstrate their irrelevance to the human future, and I wish to begin my not quite arbitrary survey of a handful of cultural fashions by addressing the presuppositions and practices behind this impulse. Afterwards, I shall turn to a body of fiction that has been put to contrary uses by contending cultural fashions, then to contemporary and recent religious practices bound up with the problem of narrative, and an approach to the history of religions that attempts to meld an awareness of story with an awareness of all the other factors influencing the shaping of contemporary consciousness. I shall conclude with a brief discussion of a few provocative examples from contemporary art.

Apart from a few cases, the cultural fashions I shall be discussing are primarily American, even when they derive from other cultures. We live in a world of what Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid modernity, in which the world’s cultures and communities are mingling with a rapidity that calls local pieties into question no matter where they are situated.25 But the context in which structurally similar dramas play out, as I have said, is always local. I do not presume the universality of the cultural fashions I shall discuss.

The cultural fashion of transhumanism is by no means limited to Americans - after all, Yuval Noah Harari’s best-selling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, originally published in Israel in Hebrew in 2011, is finding a broad international audience. It

25 Zygmunt Bauman, Culture in a Liquid Modern World (Polity Press, 2011).

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concludes with a resonantly transhumanist affirmation that the evolution that began with the cognitive leap that transformed “an animal of no significance” 70,000 years ago has now led to a sentient creature who

stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.26

But the Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil has, for many readers, become the dominant voice of the movement,27 and his insistent view that technology will soon transcend the human condition altogether bespeaks an optimism, perhaps excessive and/or based on arguable premises, that has always been part of the American character. Certitude regarding the trajectory of future events has been part of the American mythos almost from the days of the founding colonists. (Ironically, the Technological Singularity, the notion for which Kurzweil is best known, is a coming event horizon beyond which

26 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harvill Secker, 2014), p. 415. 27 The book with which Ray Kurzweil is most associated at present is probably The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking Press, 2005), although The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Viking Press, 1999) would run a close second. He has written five other books, the most recent of which is the much-criticized How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Viking Press, 2012). See, among other critiques regarding Kurzweil’s “pattern recognition theory,” Colin McGinn, “Homunculism,” New York Review of Books, March 21, 2013, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/21/homunculism/, accessed August 1, 2015.

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lie outcomes we cannot imagine. But Kurzweil is adamant that its imminent arrival is inevitable.28)

Transhumanism is not a single consolidated doctrine, but the cultural patterns that characterize it form a set of shared interests that coalesce into an implicit story. “Story,” however, is usually as of little interest to transhumanism as religion or aesthetics - by and large, cutting-edge transhumanists take pride in being indifferent to what they regard as the animal side of our nature, which is slowing down our computational intelligence. This emphasis on the computational function of the brain apart from emotional contamination is part of what Yuval Noah Harari described as “the decoupling of intelligence from consciousness”29 but only part. As a perusal of the entries in R. U. Sirius’ and Jay Cornell’s playfully titled Transcendence: The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity reveals, transhumanists explore the possibility of personal immortality through medical advances, the uploading of individual consciousness into endlessly replicable machines (this is one of the oldest dreams of transhumanism), simple performance enhancement through chemistry, and a multiplicity of other topics including “cosmism,” which is

a positive, far-reaching... attitude toward science, technology, life, the universe, and everything [note that

28 See the discussions, especially Ramez Naam’s dissenting view, in “The Singularity,” R. U. Sirius and Jay Cornell, Transcendence: The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity (Disinformation Books, 2015), pp. 214-219.

29 Daniel Kahneman and Yuval Noah Harari, “Death Is Optional: A Conversation,” March 4, 2015, http://edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahneman- death-is-optional, accessed July 30, 2015.

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the joking allusion to Douglas Adams’ novel demonstrates the punningly pseudonymous R. U. Sirius’ systematically serious unseriousness] ... focused on enthusiastically and thoroughly exploring, understanding, and enjoying the cosmos, and being open to all the possible forms life and mind may take as the future unfolds.30

The encyclopedia also discusses “transhumanist TV, film, and games,” along with “science fiction,” although many transhumanists’ fascination with the possibilities revealed in the plausible imaginary does not connote an interest in how the tales are put together. (Presumably the writers of these tales-for-transhumanists do worry about this, albeit probably more often on a practical rather than philosophical level.) Interestingly, although the X-Men series is among the films and fictions listed, “mutation” is not an entry in the encyclopedia; presumably an accidental enhancement of humanity or one not guided by human intelligence is of no interest to transhumanists except in the context of entertainment.

It may, however, not remain merely the imaginative province of persons with such preferences; on July 16, 2015 Dirk Breure suggested that transhumanism might become “the final religion.”31 Breure proposes that some of the hypotheses of transhumanists land them in regions previously cultivated only by Christian apocalypticists

30 R. U. Sirius and Jay Cornell, Transcendence: The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity (Disinformation Books, 2015), p. 52. 31 Dirk Breure, “Transhumanism: The Final Religion?” IEET: Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, July 16, 2015, http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/bruere20150715, accessed July 30, 2015.

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and Gnostics. (He seems unaware of the Jewish background of apocalyptic literature, but his degree, after all, is in physics. What counts is that a committed transhumanist is discussing such questions, concurrent with the spread of transhumanist topics into popular culture. Rick Searle’s Utopia or Dystopia blog, utopiaordystopia.com, cited below, is rife with discussions of far more bizarre syntheses of transhumanism and religion.)

Transhumanism is far from the only movement beyond traditional humanism; David Roden’s Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human suggests at least three options: transhumanism in the present-day sense (which he regards as merely an extension of humanism, with a more powerful anthropos in the anthropocentric middle of things); critical posthumanism, which challenges the lingering philosophical claims to centrality of the human subject; and speculative posthumanism, which claims that “we have never been human,” as Donna Haraway puts it in phraseology that imitates Bruno Latour’s “we have never been modern.”32

This last is less concerned with dethroning the human subject and more with examining the ways in which human beings have always been part of the system of an environing world, and are about to be plunged into a

32 Bruno Latour’s On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Duke University Press, 2010) introduces neologisms that operate as strange puns: “fact” combined with “fetish” to form “factish,” “icon” combined with “clash” instead of “-clasm” to form “iconoclash.” Latour’s treatment of religion and science together as sites in which fetishes are broken and then repaired and icons are set in motion and “freeze-framed” (as in movie stills) is vertiginous; everything we have inherited from the great narrative of modernity is being revealed to be inadequate at best, outright wrong at worst.

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world in which humanity is subjected to thoroughly uncontrollable forces that humanity itself has generated.33

Roden’s proposal, put this baldly, sounds remarkably like taken-for-granted suppositions in the natural sciences and human sciences; the insertion of humanity into the object-world around it has been accomplished long since in fields of endeavor not deriving from the traditions of Euro-American philosophy, even if the mind-body dichotomy has lingered in academicians’ consciousness as what David Chalmers named as “the hard problem,” a 1995 description that has had staying power.34

Given the evident comforts of story, it is not altogether surprising that while some humans bereft of religion have found consolation in the knowledge of the insignificance of human existence, others have found it in the realms of conscious fiction; in “The Danger of Using Science as a God Killing Machine,”35 Rick Searle writes

33 David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (Routledge, 2014), pp. 9-11. 34 Chalmers, D.J. “Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap.” In T. Alter & S. Walter, eds. Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism (Oxford University Press, 2006), cited in “The Hard Problem of Consciousness,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer- Reviewed Academic Resource, eds. James Fieser, Bradley Dowden, et al., http://www.iep.utm.edu/hard-con/, accessed July 30, 2015. Tom Stoppard has written a thought-provoking play that combines the consciousness conundrum with the question of the existence of God: The Hard Problem (Faber & Faber, 2015).

35 Rick Searle, “The Danger of Using Science as a God Killing Machine,” March 30, 2014, http://utopiaordystopia.com/2014/03/30/the-danger-of-using-science- as-a-god-killing-machine/ This essay is found in Searle’s blog Utopia or Dystopia under the tag “God” at the page for March 30, 2014, which as of July 30, 2015, was located at http://utopiaordystopia.com/category/dystopia/page/7/

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that author Jennifer Percy abandoned the science that her father used as a way of fleeing from the “messy realm of human existence” whereas she, as she puts it,

found the brutal immensity of the universe frightening. [The family home’s reading matter consisted of] physics books and Stephen King books. Both were terrifying. So we had to choose what kind of fear we liked best - my brother chose Stephen King, and I chose Stephen Hawking.

However, she eventually abandoned a career in physics because

the language of science was unsatisfying to me. Unlike a science experiment with rigid, controlled parameters, our lives are boundless and shifting. And there’s never an end to the story. We need more than science - we need storytelling to capture that kind of complexity, that kind of incomprehensibility. 36

What sort of story, however, appeals to those for whom the rigor of controlled experiment or software code remains a way of life? Curiously, for many of them it might be a writer who was something of a hybrid between Stephen King and Stephen Hawking and an 18th-century

under the category “Dystopia,” a rapidly growing set of essay-length blog posts that, perused at length, is likely to alter the reader’s consciousness in ways and directions that the reader never even remotely anticipated.

36 Joe Fassler, “‘Life Keeps Changing’: Why Stories, Not Science, Explain the World” (interview with Jennifer Percy), The Atlantic, online edition, January 21, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/01/life-keeps- changing-why-stories-not-science-explain-the-world/283219/, accessed July 30, 2015.

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rationalist, a once-neglected writer of fiction who, according to V ictoria Nelson’ s admittedly personal impression in Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural, was formerly the purview mostly of “an initially adolescent male culture of sensitive, literate boys who... grow up to be scholars or filmmakers.”37 T oday H. P . Lovecraft’ s stories have spawned, among many other things, a work of homage by one of France’s most controversial novelists, a work of philosophy by an advocate of one of America’s most contested philosophical movements, and a range of plush toys based on Lovecraft’s monstrous alien creatures,38 as well as multiple anthologies of the stories themselves in a welter of disparate formats.39

The fiction of Lovecraft had begun to spread beyond a minimal fan base as long ago as the 1960s, when, as Eliade noted in “History of Religions and Cultural Fashions,” Planète dealt with, among other things, “H. P. Lovecraft and American science fiction.”40 So it is thus somewhat less surprising that Michel Houllebecq began his writing career with the 1991 book translated as H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (presented to American readers in 2005 with an introductory essay by Stephen King).41

37 Victoria Nelson, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 62. 38 See, among an astonishing range of types and sales outlets, http://www.toyvault.com/cthulhu/index.html, accessed August 1, 2015. 39 Among the astonishing variety of annotated editions and selective anthologies, the definitive imprimatur of cultural recognition is surely H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, ed. Peter Straub (Library of America, 2005).

40 “History of Religions and Cultural Fashions,” p. 23. 41 Michel Houllebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, tr. Dorna Khazeni (McSweeney’s, Believer Books, 2005).

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Houellebecq celebrated, enthusiastically, Lovecraft’s singularly alienated lifestyle, but for many contemporary American devotees Lovecraft’s singularity inheres in the fact that, as Michael Saler puts it, “Following Nietzsche, Lovecraft enjoying piercing illusions even as he used them consciously to re-enchant the world.”42 As Erik Davis summarizes it, Lovecraft cultivated what Lovecraft himself called a “cosmic indifferentism”:

the metaphysical background of Lovecraft’s tales is a ‘cosmic indifferentism’ rooted in the nihilistic and atheist materialism that Lovecraft professed at great length in his fascinating letters. This lifelong philosophical stance led Lovecraft to embrace the disillusioning powers of science, but also to pessimistically anticipate science’ s ultimate evisceration of human norms and comforts. His weird tales were imaginative diversions from this nihilism, but their horror reflected it as well.43

Lovecraft constructed piecemeal what his devotees later chose to call the Cthulhu Mythos, in stories in which a protagonist or narrator slowly comes to understand that the Earth has once been ruled by great, horrifying alien creatures who now lie in subterranean lairs, largely powerless without the cooperation of humans who have throughout the ages regarded these creatures as gods and done their bidding. They range from the tentacle-faced

42 Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 140. 43 Erik Davis, “The Magick of H. P. Lovecraft,” The Occult World, Routledge, 2014, posted at http://techgnosis.com/h-p-lovecraft/, accessed July 30, 2015.

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Cthulhu to the Fungi from Yuggoth, sentient plant-like organisms from the then newly discovered planet Pluto.44

The point is that Lovecraft did not believe that any such history had ever happened, but that it was perfectly plausible to believe that something of the sort had happened or could happen - that material creatures from elsewhere in a fundamentally meaningless cosmos could arrive with malevolent intent, and manipulate humans to carry out intentions beyond human comprehension. This is an ironic pseudo-religion designed for skeptics, delivered in stories skillfully constructed to create a pleasurable sense of surprise and fright, and I must surmise that part of the pleasure for the irony-minded admirers of Lovecraft lies in extending the Mythos into such unterrifying genres as children’s plush toys, signifying that the myth always was only a game, like so much else in the world at large.

Other Lovecraft fans, however, take their Mythos seriously, and are uninterested in learning from Graham Harman’s Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy45 just how Lovecraft artfully arranges sequences of syllables and alluring metaphors to seduce the reader as compellingly as

44 The Lovecraft mythos has passed into the scientific lexicon; a geographic feature on Pluto has been provisionally named Cthulhu alongside others designated by names taken from world mythology, but the name was proposed by members of the public, not scientists, who chose it for its memorable sound. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of- science/wp/2015/07/14/new-data-reveals-that-plutos-heart-is-broken/ and http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/mount-spock-new-horizons- pluto-name-list-includes-star-trek-n388091

45 Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Zero Books, 2012).

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the creatures of the Mythos seduce their worshippers. Victoria Nelson divides these latter pursuers of fantasies that range from Lovecraft’s Mythos to the imagined world of the film Avatar into Secondary Believers, “right at the edge of, if not erasing, that critical line between imagination and belief” as they act out aspects of their chosen fantasy, and Primary Believers who are “creating a spiritual practice or worship that attempts to connect to a nonmaterial dimension of reality.”46 As she notes,

For those outside the pale of orthodoxy, Gothick pop culture products such as Great Old Ones, vampires, Klingons, and orcs offer the only easily accessible bridge to the transcendental. As the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has said about watching horror movies, ‘Believing in supernatural things allows you to actually have a spiritual experience in a time when you cannot do that in [an] uplifting way without sounding somewhat foolish.’47

Nelson’s whole study of the world of present-day Gothicka ranging from H. P . Lovecraft to vampires, zombies, and new genres of Christian fiction deserves extended critical perusal, along with Michael Saler’ s somewhat differently focused analysis quoted above.

I should point out in passing a delightfully funny but conceptually challenging contribution to the Cthulhu genre by a contemporary Atlanta-based artist, E. K. Huckaby, whose Brer Cthulhu sculpture outfits the monster in the work clothes associated with the imaginary

46 Gothicka, p. 58. 47 Gothicka, p. 71. The del Toro quotation is found in Patt Morrison, “Guillermo del Toro: Monster Mash,” Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2010.

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African-American storyteller Uncle Remus, whom Joel Chandler Harris created as the vehicle for his retelling of traditional folk tales.48 As in so much of Huckaby’s work, the hybridization of different levels of historically transmitted story contains volumes of potential reflection on the changing function of narrative in an evolving society.

But the Lovecraft mythos was not the only one taking shape in the waning decades of the 20th century; in the American South, self-taught artists were birthing strange space creatures from visions as vivid as any of Lovecraft’s dreams in the witch house or colors out of space in the similarly titled stories.

Eddie Owens Martin, who later renamed himself St. EOM, developed a hybrid mythology of Pasaquoyanism that owed a great deal to the books he perused in the New York Public Library before returning home in the mid- 1950s to a rural part of the American state of Georgia, but still more to a visionary experience he had during an illness, in which a gigantic figure informed him that he would be permitted to recover if he could follow the figure’s spiritual directives. He proceeded to build a remarkable piece of visionary architecture, which has been preserved, sometimes tenuously, in the three decades since his death.49

48 Donna Mintz, “E. K. Huckaby - poet, saint of the obsolete, savior of the discarded: at MOCA GA,” ArtsATL, November 12, 2014, http://www.artsatl.com/2014/11/review-e-k-huckaby-poet-saint- obsolete-savior-discarded-at-moca-ga/, accessed July 30, 2015.

49 Tom Patterson, “St. EOM,” BOMB magazine 19, Spring 1987, http://bombmagazine.org/article/902/, accessed August 1, 2015. Tom Patterson, St. EOM in the Land of Pasaquan (Jargon Society, 1987).

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In the mid 1970s, a heterodox Baptist preacher and bicycle repairman further north in Georgia reportedly had a vision in which a face appearing in the paint on his thumb commanded him to “paint sacred art.” Over the course of a quarter century, Howard Finster did so to the point of some fifty thousand individual artworks, accompanied by another piece of visionary architecture he named Paradise Garden. Many writers have published accounts of Finster, but most relevant for the purposes of this essay is Envisioning Howard Finster: The Religion and Art of a Stranger from Another World, a 2015 book by the historian of religions Norman Girardot, who documented Finster’s art and his many reported subsequent visions over the course of a quarter-century.50

Girardot’ s book elucidates many previously unanalyzed aspects of this self-taught artist whose reputation was enhanced by appearances on national television and only slightly diminished since Finster’s death in 2001. Not least of these is an in-depth discussion of Finster’s hundred-page book Howard Finsters Vision of 1982. This allegory based on what Finster insisted were real visions - and indeed, John F. Turner once photographed Finster slipping into a trance, after which he described the planet he had been visiting51 - recounts Finster’s visionary travels on a spaceship through multiple planets, a trip requiring three generations to complete

50 Norman Girardot, Envisioning Howard Finster: The Religion and Art of a Stranger from Another World (University of California Press, 2015). An extract from the book has been published as Norman Girardot, “The Finster Mythos,” Raw Vision 86, Summer 2015, pp. 22- 27, http://rawvision.com/articles/finster-mythos, accessed August 1, 2015.

51 Envisioning Howard Finster, p. 138. 126

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before the ship and Finster’s descendants arrive in the Christian Heaven, where they and Finster are reunited.

This may well derive from a combination of 1950s science-fiction movies and Saint Paul’s assertion in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 that he knew a man in Christ who was caught up to the third heaven - the multiple levels of heaven being an inheritance from mystical Judaism that is left unexplained in the New Testament. Whatever the sources, Finster was a shaman-like figure who was regarded as anomalous by his fundamentalist Christian neighbors, not least because of his willingness to greet all who might be in need of compassionate company. Unlike the fundamentalists around him, he never engaged in faith healing, but his acceptance of the troubled homosexual art student Robert Sherer led Sherer from the brink of suicide to an internationally recognized art career. More than simple charity, this act was a reflection of Finster’s belief in the untapped inner potential of every person on earth:

if the peoples on this planet Earth would bring out the hidden man of the heart, there’s no tellin’ what’s in some of ’em. Some of ’em could have been a President and they’ve never been hardly anything because they never did bring out what was in them.52

In many ways (and Girardot discusses some of them), both St. EOM’ s and Finster’ s belief in otherworldly visions are fundamentally shamanic, if not Gnostic - even though Finster sought to win souls to Christ, his version of the Christian faith was far from orthodox in its reliance on immediate experiential inward knowledge.

52 Envisioning Howard Finster, p. 124.

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All this is evidence for literary critic and sometime “religious critic” Harold Bloom’s assertion that the true American religion is Gnostic - despite the widespread insistence on Biblical literalism in American culture, the distinctly American faiths have arisen from a belief in the acquisition of inward knowledge of the divine, or the intrinsic divinity of the self. Bloom, of course, does not assert that any of these faiths are aware of their kinship with the various Late Antique religions described as Gnostic, nor even of the divergence of their core beliefs from historic Christianity.

There are tens of millions of Americans whose obsessive idea of spiritual freedom violates the normative basis of what once was considered Christian doctrine. ...The larger irony behind this is that the American Religion, which is nothing if not a knowing, does not know itself. Perhaps that is a permanent and general American irony, which would have been much appreciated by Nietzsche; we may be uniquely the nation where the knowers cannot know themselves.53

Bloom’ s determinedly heterodox interpretation of American religion, like his unique re-reading of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, is the bane of more cautious historians, and Bloom has long been regarded as something of a contemporary cultural fashion himself.

And yet. There is something playful about Bloom’s somber insistence on causing outrage, and definitely something playful about St. EOM’s combination of ethnographically inspired architecture and performance art. Finster grew angry when it was suggested that he had

53 Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post- Christian Nation (Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 263-264.

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“a good imagination”54 but Girardot rightly suggests that Finster’s entire life and revelation-inspired artistic oeuvre must be approached with neither

feigned acquiescence [n]or flippant skepticism... . Given the increased confusions about human consciousness and other possible paranormal ‘ghosts in the machine’ in the increasingly reenchanted post- postmodernist sense of things in the academy, such matters are more or less up for grabs.”55

Girardot’s deliberately idiomatic remark is based on a growing realization among anthropologists and historians of religion that the world of religious experience is open to multiple interpretations both by scholars and by the religious themselves. The anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann points out that the approach of American evangelical Christians to the experience of God is remarkably similar to “being engrossed in good magical fiction of the Harry Potter kind.” The authors of a popular evangelical book, The Sacred Romance, actually embrace a fictional approach to an intimately loving God Who cannot be captured in human concepts anyway:

‘If we try to relate to God as Author’ - the being who is ultimately responsible for the misery and unfairness we see in our world - ‘we will go mad or despair.’ Instead, they say, you have to see God as a character, a hero in the story he has written.56

54 Envisioning Howard Finster, p. 65. 55 Envisioning Howard Finster, p. 66. 56 T. R. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (Knopf, 2012), p. 84.

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Luhrmann’s experiences as participant observer in the communities she studied left her personally unsettled regarding the exact parameters of the phenomena she studied and explicated. Immediately after a discussion of how the experience of God her subjects of study have had might arise from the fact that “the radical technological innovations of our time have fundamentally altered the conditions of our perception and the way we experience with our bodies,”57 probably “mak[ing] us more comfortable with intense absorption experiences,”58 she admits that

I do not presume to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of this journey, in my own way I have come to know God. I do not know what to make of this knowing. I would not call myself a Christian, but I find myself defending Christianity.59

Luhrmann’s evangelicals practice prayer for healing (with the attendant difficulties when prayers remain unanswered) but do not attempt the miraculous “signs following” that some (not all!) churches in Appalachia discovered just over a century ago - handling snakes and drinking poison to fulfill the prophecy of Mark 16:17-18, which also promises recovery from sickness for those on whom believers lay their hands.60 (The passage was apparently a later addition to the original Gospel of Mark, but believers in scriptural inerrancy are unaware of this

57 When God Talks Back, p. 323. 58 When God Talks Back, p. 324. 59 When God Talks Back, p. 325. 60 A classic study of this phenomenon is Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1995).

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likelihood.) For that matter, Howard Finster never engaged in any of the practices associated with Appalachian religion except for fulfilling the prophecy of Joel 2:28 that “your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” Finster claimed to be a man of visions from another world; he never claimed to be a miracle worker.

The history of mysticism, on the other hand, is full of miracles as well as visions. Historian Jeff Hollenback, like Luhrmann, believes in the testimony of observers of mystics, and ascribes bystanders’ experiences to mystics’ “imaginational empowerment,”

a symbolic process that makes what was merely ‘imaginary,’ evanescent, and insubstantial into something more concrete, sometimes to the extent that peculiar kinds of psychosomatic or even paranormal mind-over-matter phenomena become manifest. Techniques of meditation or yogic concentration, methods of recollective prayer, trying to stay awake while entering the dream state, hypnosis, collective rituals that focus the participants’ attention by drumming, dancing, clapping or singing - all these are various methods of generating trance-like states of highly focused attention that are especially likely to empower the imagination and generate mystical states of awareness.61

“Imaginational empowerment,” if it exists, would be something more than individual hallucination, but even that exists in a neurological twilight zone (I pun on the name of

61 Jeff Hollenback, “What’s Wrong With Symbols? Revisiting Mircea Eliade in the 21st Century,” Archaeus, XV, p. 178.

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the once-popular American TV series telling ironic stories of supernatural occurrences) that contains unexpected depths of complexity. In his 2012 book Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks describes doublings of the self, loss of embodiment, and the appearance not only of absurd visual and auditory illusions, but of vividly physical cautionary figures (including a guardian angel appearing to a child who had been raised atheist and who was thereafter terrified that the figure would return) that suggest, at the very least, that the unconscious mind is even more independent of our conscious wishes than we had supposed.62 Most of Sacks’ reported phenomena have lately been explained satisfactorily by neurological researchers, in studies that the popular-science writer Anil Ananthaswamy recently summarized in The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations into the Strange New World of the Self.63 Others apparently remain in the realm of speculation.

Now, of course meditational traditions in religions have long been aware of the existence of hallucinations - Buddhist masters warn novices of the obstacles to enlightenment posed by makyo, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity is full of cautionary tales about the hallucinations brought about by prelest. In both cases, what appear to be genuine instances of paranormal phenomena are also cited as annoying roadblocks on what poet Theodore Roethke called “the long journey out of the self.”64 Practitioners in shamanic traditions complicate the picture still further by acknowledging the role played by

62 Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (Vintage Books, 2013), pp. 216-217. 63 Anil Ananthaswamy, The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations into the Strange New World of the Self (Dutton, 2015). 64 Theodore Roethke, “Journey Into the Interior,” from “North American Sequence” first published in The Far Field, 1964. Available online at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/journey-into-the-interior/.

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fantasy in the accomplishing of preternatural intentions; anthropologists have recorded situations in which entire cultures are quite aware that the shaman employs tricks to give the illusion of miracles, but insist that the miracles that actually occur cannot happen unless the tricks are performed well.65

At least one neuroscientist has refused to rule out the possibility of miracles having some objective, even if misunderstood, reality. David Eagleman has famously declared himself a “possibilian,” refusing to rule out all but the most ludicrous possibilities regarding the nature of reality when it comes to “ideas that we don’t have any way of testing right now.”66 Writing in The New Yorker in 2011, Burkhard Bilger reported from his conversations with Eagleman,

we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. ‘And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.’67

65 Michael Taussig has developed an entire dialogical theory based on such anecdotes. See his “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic,” pp. 221-256 of Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), published in revised form in Taussig’s Walter Benjamin’ s Grave (University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 121-155.

66 David Eagleman interviewed by Lynn Neary, “‘Afterlives’: 40 Stories Of What Follows Death,” NPR Talk of the Nation, July 17, 2011, http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist= false&id=100778241&m=100778231&live=1, accessed August 1, 2015.

67 Burkhard Bilger, “The Possibilian,” The New Yorker, April 25, 2011, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian, accessed August 1, 2015.

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Story, as we have seen previously, is something of which we have become self-aware; in fact, novelists were writing self-aware fictions decades before neuroscience began to tell us how story might compose the sense of self.68

The popularity of Eagleman’s book of short fictions, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives69 (translated into 27 languages and a bestseller in many of them) is in some ways a result of this altered function of storytelling and its discontents. Eagleman’ s fantastic visions of many incompatible possibilities of what happens in life after death implies, for many readers, that not only are these tales obviously untrue, but that just as Nietzsche believed, the entertainment provided by beautiful falsehoods known to be false allows us to avoid perishing of the ugly truth. This is not Eagleman’s stance at all. Many fictions about what we cannot know remain possibilities, even if extremely remote ones. But given what we now know about the story of storytelling, what exactly is the function of fantastic stories like the ones he tells in Sum? Eagleman admits the satisfactions provided by his creative side but has chosen not to analyze them.

Another historian of religion, Jeffrey J. Kripal, has analyzed the relationship between the fictional and real fantastic, including whether “fictional” and “real” have any substantive separation. His Mutants and Mystics70

68 See, for example, the novels of John Barth and Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, and...but the list goes on throughout the range of European languages and non-European ones as well. 69 David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Pantheon, 2009).

70 Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (University of Chicago Press, 2011); see also the press’ descriptive blurb,

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studies the dialectic between fantasy fiction and actually reported paranormal experience in the United States from early 19th century potboilers to present-day superhero movies, paying particular attention to the fascination with mutation as an explanation of superpowers in what he calls the American superstory. (This is an extension of his earlier encounters with the topic in writing his history of the Esalen Institute and reflecting on such nonfiction works as Michael Murphy’s The Future of the Body - all of them intrigued by the possibility of evolutionary leaps in the physical body more than transhumanism’s assumption that technology will be required to do the trick.71) “We are not who we think we are. At all,” Kripal writes in his website survey of the meaning of his oeuvre.72

Kripal finally sees “theosis” or deification as the goal of humanity (but, interestingly, he doesn’t seem to pay much attention to Eastern Orthodoxy’s use of that term as the goal of humanity.73) “Like Foucault,” he writes in his

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5892347.html, accessed August 1, 2015. 71 Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2007); Michael Murphy, The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature (J. P. Tarcher, 1992).

72 Jeffrey J. Kripal, “Introductory Essay,” Jeffrey J. Kripal website at Rice University, http://kripal.rice.edu/essay.html. 73 Even more interestingly, the Cypriot émigré professor of sociology Kyriacos C. Markides has spent decades investigating heterodox New Age mages and Orthodox monks and monasticism on Cyprus and Mount Athos, and produced a body of work that is simultaneously scholarly analysis and personal testament; his most recent report is Inner River: A Journey to the Heart of Christian Spirituality (Image Books, 2012). Markides approaches the topics Kripal is exploring from the standpoint of a skeptical believer.

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website’s introductory essay, “I suspect that a new anthropology, a new form of mind, a new ‘episteme’ is taking shape, as the previous understandings of the human disappear, like figures written into the sand on a beach.” Even though he has been known to use the word “transhumanism,” his understanding of that new anthropology is almost diametrically opposed to the machinic models of the techno-transhumanists. For him, as for the founders of the Esalen Institute, the future of humanity lies in a transformed physical body, not in a digitized and uploaded mind.

Kripal quotes French philosopher Aimé Michel’ s suggestion that future humans, characterized by “la pensée surhumaine ou non-humaine” would find it as difficult to communicate with present-day humans as an owner communicating with his pet dog, or human beings

trying to communicate with chimpanzees. The latter image is the closer analogy, he believed, since what appears to separate la pensée surhumanine from la pensée humaine of the present is an evolutionary leap.

But (leaving apart the recent advances in communicating with chimpanzees) this evolutionary leap does not seem to have much in common with the expectation that modified genetic structures will grant human beings immortality, or that an understanding of neurons will permit them to be replicated in non-carbon- based technological formats. In fact, according to Kripal they seem to be bound up with human sexuality, in ways that Freud no more than occasionally admitted.

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Kripal has most recently incorporated this perspective into an introductory textbook, Comparing Religions,74 that represents an attempt to make the point that the multidisciplinary practice of history of religions needs to be even more multidisciplinary - and that while, as it is currently in fashion to point out, religions meet the needs of societies and individual psychologies by providing stories and behavioral maxims, they also arise from extraordinary experiences that are far beyond the simple need to explain the workings of everyday natural occurrences. The truth of the origins of religious belief and practice is far more complex and subtle than the naïve suppositions of 18th-century Enlightenment savants that religions arose to explain storms, vivid dreams, and the movement of the stars, a mistake that was amplified by the invention of priestcraft to support the tyranny of kings - opinions that have remained constant for three centuries even as the terminology has been updated to reflect contemporary vocabularies. (Kripal doesn’ t deny that such things went into the making of the world’s religions, but insists that, of the many strange and extraordinary events reported throughout religious history, some of them happened exactly as reported, whether or not we choose to reject their standard interpretation.)

There have been other voices in the history of religions that have dared to suggest that the discipline’s turn towards the sociological and skeptical and away from an exploratory and open phenomenology may have been a turn that requires a return (or re-turn) to examine missed opportunities. Some of these opinions were expressed as

74 Jeffrey J. Kripal, with Ata Anzali, Andrea R. Jain, and Erin Prophet, Comparing Religions (Wiley Blackwell, 2014).

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early as 2001 in an anthology, edited by Bryan Rennie, of writings debating the legacy of Mircea Eliade.75

Eliade famously predicted that a new humanism would arise out of the cross-cultural encounter of postcolonial societies, and that this new humanism could and should be embraced and enhanced by historians of religion, who could bring unique perspectives to the encounter. His 1961 call for this was repeated in 1969 in a revised and expanded version of the essay in The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion.76 Writing of the possibilities of imaginative encounter “with the ‘others’ - with human beings belonging to various types of archaic and exotic societies,” Eliade expresses confidence that this “meeting with [...] the unknown, with what cannot be reduced to familiar categories”77 would be as productive for a creative hermeneutics of religion as the encounter with non-W estern art or Freud’ s discovery of the unconscious was for modern artists.

Apart from the assault on almost all of Eliade’s presuppositions over the past 30 years, the optimism of this document regarding the fruitfulness of cross-cultural encounter became less and less plausible, as a less reflective version of what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion” became engrained in the culture at large. The phenomena we have discussed heretofore are symptoms of this pervasive sense of mistrust of all our inherited categories, including the

75 Bryan Rennie, ed., Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade (State University of New York Press, 2001), previously cited. 76 Mircea Eliade, “A New Humanism,” The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 2-11.

77 The Quest, p. 3.

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notion of “the human,” of the subject for whom a new humanism might be possible.

This sensibility is not, of course, dominant except among a minority of the global population - in fact, various simplistic literalisms are regnant in large parts of the planet. But the pure encounter that Eliade envisioned between hermeneuticians and the world’s “creative acts of the spirit” has failed to occur. Ironically, the parallel between literary and religious works that he cited - autonomous works that “exist on their own plane of reference”78 is precisely what later scholarship was inclined to deny both in works of literature and “religious data.”

The more recent return to the problem of narrativity and the recognition of neurologically founded psychological depth offer openings to the historian of religion that the discipline has scarcely begun to explore, much less exploit. Writing of the dubiously divergent aftermath of Eliade’s call for a new humanism, Wendall Charles Beane suggests that

if with all our scholarly monographs, we have not understood the species so much better, it may be because we have shied away from where the evidence has been leading us. Not willing to consider the possibility ... that the term sacred refers to an experienceable Unknown, as well as the ‘hierophanic’ known, we have hesitated to make even tentative philosophical religious generalizations; not willing to consider that ‘homo faber was equally homo ludens, sapiens, and religiosus’ (Eliade), we have shied away

78 The Quest, p. 4.

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from making tentative philosophical-anthropological valuations of the nature of human nature.79

Eliade’s neglected call to recognize that religious practice might reflect borderline experiences as well as the functional needs of society was taken up in a transgressive mode by Kripal, who took seriously Eliade’s suggestion that, understood as an uncanny and paranormal mode of experience, “‘the sacred’ is an element in the structure of consciousness, not a stage in the history of consciousness.”80

A continuing dilemma with any revision or re- visioning of religious experience or of paranormal experience is that the experiences cannot be reliably replicated under rigorous experimental conditions. This is not particularly unusual in the sciences; Frans de Waal points out that the much-discussed phenomenon of mirror neurons has not been demonstrated in human brains, and has been documented only in the brains of macaques. Researchers take on faith here the overlap between simian and human brains, because overlaps have been demonstrated elsewhere even though in this case “to confirm their presence would require inserting electrodes, which is rarely done.”81

In similar fashion, choices of areas for research is grounded in prior assumptions that old-fashioned sociologists of knowledge would call plausibility

79 Wendell Charles Beane, “Methodological, Pedagogical, and Philosophical Reflections on Mircea Eliade as Historian of Religions,” in Changing Religious Worlds, p. 185. 80 Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, 1: From The Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries (University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. xiii.

81 The Bonobo and the Atheist, p. 135.

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structures.82 In spite of having written an entire book about the state of research into the neurological construction of the self, Ananthaswamy confessed to radio interviewer Terry Gross that he had had no direct experience of any of the unusual neurological conditions under investigation, which made it difficult to enter into relationship with them in spite of their undeniable existence as phenomena in the world.83 It is even more difficult to undertake research into topics that one’s entire worldview denies a priori, and in his several books Kripal has had to expend considerable effort in trying to demonstrate why, even if most such experiences are demonstrably illusory, their structural underpinning should be investigated.

Popular culture, on the other hand, has no such difficulties. Mike Cahill’s 2014 film I Origins is a thriller in which a thoroughly skeptical molecular biologist is led to investigate the unlikely possibility of the existence of reincarnation after his laboratory assistant remarks, regarding a set of “statistically insignificant” anomalous data, that if I drop a pencil vast numbers of times and it falls to the ground, but that once, just once, it hangs in the air for no apparent reason, the reason for that statistically insignificant anomaly is worth investigating.84

82 See, for the original use of the term, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s classic The Social Construction of Reality: An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge (Doubleday, 1966). 83 Anil Ananthaswamy interviewed by Terry Gross, NPR Fresh Air, July 28, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/28/426753409/a- sense-of-self-what-happens-when-your-brain-says-you-dont-exist, accessed July 31, 2015.

84 See such reviews as Michael O’Sullivan, “The Eyes Have It. Or Do They?” in the Washington Post, July 24, 2014,

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Other parts of American popular culture continue to churn out replicas of previously successful variations on the theme of mutation: A 2015 television series, The Messengers, delivers a tried-and-true plotline, described as follows by New York Times reviewer Neil Genzlinger in an April 14 piece originally titled “Touched by a Meteor” (a pun on the long-running TV series Touched by an Angel):

Disparate, geographically scattered characters who are touched by a supernatural experience gradually realize that they have changed somehow and are drawn together. In this case the transformation is wrought by a meteor that slams to Earth in New Mexico and sends out a silent blast wave that affects a scientist working nearby named Vera (Shantel VanSanten), as well as four other people who are far more distant. These five aren’t sure what exactly has happened to them, but by episode’s end they have begun to demonstrate that they now have extraordinary powers, and they seem destined to converge on Houston.85

Needless to say, there are artists who regard all of this as egregious nonsense. The Atlanta duo performing as Metatronic (a pun on the name of the angel Metatron) produce zines and events that satirize various forms of

http://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/i-origins- movie-review-the-eyes-have-it-or-do-they/2014/07/23/4cd92818-11b1- 11e4-8936-26932bcfd6ed_story.html, or Peter Debruge, in Variety, January 29, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/film/markets- festivals/sundance-review-i-origins-1201064458/, both accessed July 31, 2015.

85 “Review: The Messengers,” New York Times, April 15, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/arts/television/tv-review-cws-the- messengers.html?_r=0, accessed July 31, 2015.

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religion,86 and their gallery represents an artist, Michael Germon, whose work is devoted to a somewhat more serious meditation on the paradoxes presented by religion, science, and occultism. His 2015 show “Archaeomancy”87 featured a collage entitled Our Lady of Enlightened Petrifaction and a Ouija board in which the periodic table of chemical elements replaces the alphabet.

Another two-person artist collaborative, a Florida- based couple self-described as queer-feminist and working under the name MANDEM, is producing unsettling paintings that reinterpret religious themes in light of present-day gender instabilities and looming environmental apocalypses. Such works as The Usury of God (Translating Theotokos)88 demonstrate the aptness of their self-description as “makers, rule-breakers, tricksters, and storytellers.”89

It might well be assumed that all such artists are youthful, but the spirit of skeptically inquisitive play and utterly serious spiritual analysis is shared by an internationally recognized Atlanta book artist who began her career some 40 years ago; Ruth Laxson’s 2008 Ideas of God, “an opuscule of tiny mirrors seeking a single grand image,” contains such image-surrounded aphorisms relevant to our previously discussed cultural fashions as: “play is key... put play into play.” “This study would be lop-sided if we don’t include animals.” “but hold on just a

86 https://www.facebook.com/events/479082058917811, accessed July 31, 2015. 87https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mike-Germon- ARTIST/293521267365123, accessed July 31, 2015.

88 http://mandemic.com/currentpaintings.html, accessed August 1, 2015. 89 http://mandemic.com/ , accessed July 31, 2015.

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minute, we‘re all part of the matrix & (I’m) no more magnificent than a blade of grass.” “But at least now we know that knowledge does not necessarily need minds.”90

A colophon in Laxson’s unpaginated book reveals that it makes use of Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals91 by philosopher John Gray, whom Rick Searle takes to task in his June 21, 2015 essay “John Gray and the Puppets of Gloom” for having oversimplified the problem of what Heinrich von Kleist, two centuries ago in “On the Marionette Theatre,” named as “the last chapter in the history of the world”: a denouément in which the decoupling of intelligence from consciousness would be fully accomplished - by ideal marionettes or by instinctual animal responses in Kleist’s 1810 allegory,92 and today by artificial intelligence that “as currently constructed... manifests intelligence more akin to puppet show illusions ... than the intellect of a mind.” Remarkably enough, Searle also states that Gray’s 2015 book The Soul of the Marionette

makes the case that the philosophy behind much of modern technology is a modern form of Gnosticism. In

90 Ruth Laxson, Ideas of God, 2008, n.p. See also Jerry Cullum, “We Are Not Danes in Denmark: Displacement and the Liquid Self in Atlanta Art, 1961-2011,” in Jerry Cullum, Catherine Fox, and Cinqué Hicks, Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape (Possible Futures, 2011), pp. 54, 80-81.

91 John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007). 92 Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre” exists in multiple editions and translations; see, for recent English-language examples, Idris Parry’s translation at http://www.southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm, or Thomas J. Neumiller at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgradua te/masters/modules/panromanticisms/kleist_marionette_thatre.pdf, both accessed July 31, 2015.

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this case Gnosticism means the belief that the world is somehow ill constructed and that through our knowledge and efforts we can fix it.93

In other words, it seems clear that the problems, symbols, narratives, and topical obsessions inherent in the various cultural fashions described in this essay remain lively memes, as the disciples of evolutionary psychologists have long called them - and they are evolving almost month by month in the United States and across many other parts of the planet. I do not venture to say “all parts” - William Gibson’s almost overly familiar 2003 remark remains painfully true, “The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed.”94 But the spread of internet technology to all but the most inaccessible parts of the globe makes endless surprises possible when the dissemination of cultural fashions is the subject of investigation.

In 2014, the well-known French director Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, The Professional) contributed to the transhumanist mythos in several different symbolic registers with Lucy, a film in which Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman play out a drama in which Lucy, an unwilling drug mule for a Taiwan-based global dealer in

93 Rick Searle, “John Gray and the Puppets of Gloom,” Utopia or Dystopia, June 21, 2015, http://utopiaordystopia.com/2015/06/21/john- gray-and-the-puppets-of-gloom/, accessed July 31, 2015. Searle’ s definition of Gnosticism recalls the definitions used by Eric Voegelin and other philosophers inclined to extend the reach of Gnosticism into political and social realms far past antiquity.

94 Gibson made the remark orally sometime prior to 1992; see its probable history, with reported confirmation from Gibson, at http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/, accessed August 1, 2015.

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biomorphic substances, mutates into a superwoman capable of using 100% of her brain’s capacity.95 (Besson exploits the commonly held misperception that we ordinarily use only a tiny percentage of our neural network for day-to-day affairs.) Johansson’s character, Lucy, interacts with the neuroscientist played by Freeman in an improbable human-to-machine-to-information conclusion that reworks transhumanist tropes alongside evolutionary time travel. It is Kripal’s American superstory at biochemical warp speed, and transferred to a global stage as Lucy’s final transmutation carries her in moments from today’s Paris to the American West of a century and a half ago to the Olduvai Gorge for a brief encounter with her namesake ancestor from whom all humanity is descended.

Astonishingly (given the lag time for film editing), the credits for Lucy roll to the accompaniment of a soundtrack that includes a song, “God’s Whisper,” that a then 18-year-old Atlantan known as Raury had recorded and self-released only a few months before the film’s release date. He subsequently released Indigo Child, commercially available but still available as a free download to those who attain a sufficiently high score on a video game on the website indigochildproject.com. This

95 Xan Brooks, “Luc Besson’s cerebral sci-fi is set to overload,” The Guardian, August 23, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/24/lucy-film-review- scarlett-johansson-luc-besson-morgan-freeman; Geoffrey MacNab, “Scarlett Johansson will blow your mind in Luc Besson’s complex thriller,” The Independent, August 22, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/lucy- film-review-scarlett-johansson-will-blow-your-mind-in-luc-bessons- complex-thriller-9684523.html, both accessed July 31, 2015.

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website assigns the player an Indigo Child96 name (“Birdie Maison,” “Moon’s Pull” - the name is generated differently each time the site is accessed anonymously), appropriate to the song’s claim of building a self- generated transcendent community of spiritual mutants. In a March 3, 2014 Billboard interview,97 Raury explained,

When they see a person like me, ... following through the school system, they look down upon me. They think I’m nothing. But they have something coming because I hear God’s whisper. That means, my intuition, my natural calling in life is what God’s whisper is. When I say, 'I am the savior,' I'm spreading that message to others. You have that whisper to you. You have your intuition. You have your own natural calling that you have to trust and follow.

His remarks thereafter elucidate the chorus “I am the savior” in terms of revealing this intuitive truth to a generation ready to receive it:

96 The title alludes to a common New Age meme, expressed in these terms at http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/11-traits-of-indigo- children/, accessed August 1, 2015: “An ‘indigo child’ is a term used to refer to a special class of souls that incarnated here. They possess high degrees of intelligence and creativity, and have wisdom from beyond their years. [...] Some many have what appear to be psychic and intuitive abilities, while others may suffer from social conditions and learning disorders. These children have nothing wrong with them, they just need a system that is better designed to harbor their creativity.” Since the first trait of an indigo child that is listed on this site is “May be strong-willed independent thinkers who prefer to do their own thing rather than comply with authority figures/parents,” the relevance to Raury’s own biography and self-chosen mythology is obvious.

97 http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/the-juice/5923066/raury- premieres-new-song-gods-whisper-talks-indigo-child-album, accessed July 31, 2015.

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With us growing up with the internet, as kids we learn so much so fast. We’re exposed to so many things to the point where we become more open- minded and naturally have tolerance for race, sex, gender... We aren’t limited to our cities around us. I think those walls of regionalism are about to change.

Harold Bloom’s American Gnosticism has entered the digital age in the person of an African-American youth from Stone Mountain. Signed to a contract that appears to accommodate his self-released mp3 downloads, he followed up “God’s Whisper” with a cautionary, visionary “Devil’s Whisper” that NPR World Café host David Dye praised on July 28, 2015 for its mind-bending lyrics and genre-bending intensity: “hip- hop is next to folk next to some kind of funk next to rock, and somehow it all makes sense.”98

Mircea Eliade wisely wrote many years ago that “the scale creates the phenomenon”;99 it would be as foolish to interpret Raury in terms of simplistically mythic categories as it would be to reduce his work to mundane politics when it so clearly incorporates New Age tropes of vision-possessing indigo children as a mode of transformation for alienated youth. But as one of the newest manifestations of an unruly collection of diverse cultural fashions - of which I have here described only a few - his work cries out for history-of-religions interpretation.

98 http://www.npr.org/2015/07/28/423603470/heavy-rotation-10-songs- public-radio-cant-stop-playing, accessed July 31, 2015. 99 The Quest, p. 7. Eliade is extrapolating from a maxim by Swiss physicist Charles-Eugene Guye.

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Author’s Bio

Jerry Cullum studied with Mircea Eliade in the University of California at Santa Barbara’s M. A. program in religious studies, and holds a doctor of philosophy degree from Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. A longtime art critic and freelance curator whose essays and reviews have appeared in Raw Vision, Art in America, and many other publications, he held several different editorial posts at Atlanta- based international journal Art Papers. He has continued to publish history of religions reviews and essays in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Material Religion, boundary 2, and others.