Religion and Retributive Logic : Essays in Honour of Professor Garry W. Trompf [1 ed.] 9789047441151, 9789004178809

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Religion and Retributive Logic

Numen Book Series Studies in the History of Religions

Series Editors

Steven Engler (Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada) Richard King (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, U.S.A.) Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Gerard Wiegers (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands) Advisory Board

b. bocking (london, uk); f. diez de velasco (tenerife, spain); i. s. gilhus (bergen, norway); g. ter haar (the hague, the netherlands); r. i. j. hackett (knoxville, tn, usa); t. jensen (odense, denmark); m. joy (calgary, canada); a. h. khan (toronto, canada); p. p. kumar (durban, south africa); g. l. lease (santa cruz, ca, usa); a. tsukimoto (tokyo, japan); a. t. wasim (yogyakarta, indonesia)

VOLUME 126

Religion and Retributive Logic Essays in Honour of Professor Garry W. Trompf

Edited by

Carole M. Cusack and Christopher Hartney

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Cover illustration and frontispiece: Elizabeth Connor (2003). This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Religion and retributive logic : essays in honour of professor Garry W.Trompf / edited by Carole M. Cusack and Christopher Hartney. p. cm. -- (Numen book series, ISSN 0169-8834 ; v. 126) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-17880-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Religions. 2. Melanesia-Religion. I. Trompf, G. W. II. Cusack, Carole M., 1962- III. Hartney, Christopher. IV. Title. V. Series. BL25.R275 2009 200.92--dc22 2009032493

ISSN 0169-8834 ISBN 978 90 04 17880 9 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Introduction ........................................................................................... 1 Tribute ..................................................................................................... 13 In Memoriam ......................................................................................... 15 PART ONE

MELANESIA Jakarta and Jayapura: the Dialogue of Religions and ‘Papua, Land of Peace’ ..................................................................... 19 John D’ Arcy May Working Out of Two Mindsets: Critical Methodology and PNG Village Traditional Ways ....................................................... 43 Patrick F. Gesch A Samo Theology of Mediumship: A Case Study of Local Theologising and Global Reflection .................................... 65 R. Daniel Shaw Dema as Religious Symbol in Papua New Guinea ............................ 81 Ennio Mantovani Cargo Cults and Cognitive Science: The Dynamics of Creativity and Repetition in the Pomio Kivung .......................... 101 Andrew Lattas Placing and Dis-Placing the Dead ...................................................... 131 Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart PART TWO

ANCIENT WORLD Towards an Understanding of Mani’s Religious Development and the Archaeology of Manichaean Identity .............................. 147 Iain Gardner

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Some Duties and Responsibilities of a Bishop(?) in Late Antique Egypt ...................................................................... 159 Alanna Nobbs Per Saturam or Performance? Seneca’s Initium Saeculi Felicissimi: Ritual Hilarity and Millenial Closure in the Apocolocyntosis ................................................................................. 167 Christopher Hartney Consequences of Bilingualism in Paul’s Letters ................................ 187 Vrasidas Karalis PART THREE

PHILOSOPHICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS The Religious Thought of Francis Bacon ........................................... 209 John Gascoigne Rudolf Otto, the East and Religious Inclusivism ............................... 229 Harry Oldmeadow The Theme of Conversion in Sartre’s Early Ethics ............................ 245 Paul Crittenden Approaches to the Problem of Dualism in Heidegger and Indian Yogacara Buddhism ............................................................. 267 Peter Oldmeadow PART FOUR

HISTORIOGRAPHY ‘And End History. And Go to the Stars’: Terence McKenna and 2012 ............................................................................................ 291 Wouter J. Hanegraaff Cyborgs and Chakras: Intersubjectivity in Scientific and Spiritual Somatechnics .................................................................... 313 Jay Johnston

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Religious Studies in New Zealand: A Wrong Direction? ................. 323 Paul Morris Religion, Sexuality and Retribution: Placing the ‘Other’ in Sydney ........................................................................................... 347 Carole M. Cusack and Jason H. Prior Contributors ........................................................................................... 369 Index ....................................................................................................... 377

INTRODUCTION Associate Professor Carole M. Cusack Dr Christopher H. Hartney If one were to sum up in a few words the career of Emeritus Professor Garry Winston Trompf, one could say he has dedicated his life to seeing how ideas come alive in people and how they have been transferred from person to person through the ages. This is a fitting summary of the work of a labourer in the field of the ‘History of Ideas’, but, of course, wide and deep reading of the corpus of ‘Trompfiana’ reveals a much deeper emotional commitment to the academic enterprise. As an act of loving kindness Garry has sought to know how others see the world. His talent for empathy has not only informed his analytical skills, it has propelled his relations with others. The force of goodwill that accompanies Garry as he moves around the University of Sydney is generated by the care, curiosity and courtesy he directs to students and colleagues alike. He meets all inquiries for help with a laugh, some consideration, and sees how the subject raised fits into a number of fields he is acquainted with. These encounters often lead the enquirer off on tangents he or she may have never before envisaged, but the full breadth of Garry’s interests opens to all of us the infinite possibilities of the human enterprise. His tangential and speculative thinking makes for fascinating and rambling intellectual excursions; but where it counts, Garry’s prose in hundreds of articles and dozens of books strikes the reader with its startling clarity. Garry has served the academy nobly and it is a pleasure to celebrate his commitment to learning with the humble offerings that follow. Garry Winston Trompf was born on 27 November 1940 in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne, to a family that can trace its roots through the recent Australian past and back to a Dutch heritage and a long connection to Königsberg. He grew up in the majestic Australian bush around Sassafras in the Dandenong Ranges north of Melbourne, the son of a paint and wallpaper merchant and nephew to the commercial artist Percy Trompf, whose iconic images of Australia were used on publicity material to sell the nation overseas. Garry attended Wesley College in Melbourne before arriving at the prestigious University of Melbourne in 1959. He was awarded a first class honours degree in History with a thesis entitled ‘The Political Standpoint of the Historical Jesus.’ This was followed by a Master of Arts at Monash University, awarded in 1967

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(with a thesis ambitiously entitled ‘The Origins of the Comparative Study of Religion’), and a second Master of Arts (in Theology) from Oxford in 1974. Finally, Garry was awarded a doctorate from the Australian National University in 1975, with a thesis that later transformed into one of his more famous works, ‘The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought.’ To this point in his life, Garry was focused on teaching the history of ideas in a strongly Western context focusing on Renaissance, Reformation, and seventeenth-century European history. Although Garry had taken visiting professorships at the University of California (1974–5) and at the State University of Utrecht (1984), since 1972 he had been working in Papua New Guinea at the University of Papua New Guinea (also at the Holy Spirit Seminary in Bomana variously between 1977–2002, and at Goroka Teacher’s College in 1977). His interest in Melanesia flourished during these years and much of the scholarship in this volume on this region has come from significant colleagues Garry made contact with at this time. During this hectic period Garry began to settle into life in Sydney with an appointment to the newly created Department of Religious Studies (now Studies in Religion) in 1978. In the house in Wahroonga where the Trompfs settled, regular soirées were held on a vast range of issues as Garry’s five children came of age, and where his five grandchildren still visit. Between 1983 and 1985 Garry served as Professor of History at the University of Papua New Guinea, but thereafter focused on his position as Associate Professor at Sydney. Between 1995 and 2005 he held a personal chair in the History of Ideas, from which he retired in December 2005. He was elected by the University Senate as Professor Emeritus from 2007. Garry’s publications constitute much of his scholarly fame. The most recent, a bibliography of Melanesian Religions, worked on with significant help from Dr Friedegard Tomasetti, required a demanding amount of painstaking research to complete, and made use of Garry’s profound familiarity with this field. It was a familiarity demonstrated in Melanesian Religions (1994) and the classic work that attempts to explain a vital reflex of world religions, Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions (2004). Working with Aboriginal expert and former colleague in the Department of Studies in Religion at Sydney, Tony Swain, Garry provided the most accessible text on the indigenous religions of the region, Religions of Oceania (1995). The remainder of Garry’s books are in the tradition of Western historiography: these include Early Christian Historiography (2000), and his masterwork The Idea of Historical

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Recurrence in Western Thought (1979). This is but the first volume; as the second volume of Recurrence is being completed as this Festschrift goes to print. The last two outstanding monographs are more of interest to students of religion than the general historian; but for that reason they are well-loved in our Department and amongst our students. These are: In Search of Origins (1990), a broadly based investigation into the academic study of religion; and a brief treatment of the thought of Friedrich Max Müller (1978), arguably the founder of ‘comparative religion.’ Given the breadth of Garry’s scholarly interest, this volume is divided into four sections. The opening section, ‘Melanesia,’ is the lengthiest, containing six chapters exploring a number of crucial issues in both Melanesian indigenous religions and Melanesian Christianity. John D’Arcy May’s ambitious ‘Jakarta and Jayapura: The Dialogue of Religions and “Papua, Land of Peace” ’ speculates on how the varieties of Indonesian Islam and Indonesian Islamic self-understanding that have emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries impact upon the varieties of Christianity and Christian self-understanding of the people of West Papua. D’Arcy May’s investigation is informed by sensitivity to the patterns of tolerance of and enrichment by local cultures which typify both Indonesian Islam and Papuan Christianity, and by a sense of the urgent need to record a historical snapshot of West Papua at a time of great change, change which is chiefly brought about by the introduction of large numbers of Indonesian Muslim migrants into the province. Affinities with the work of Garry Trompf are evident throughout, particularly D’Arcy May’s concern to recognise difference and local conditions, his acute awareness of the political dimensions of religion (and the complex interrelationship between political and theological notions of ‘freedom,’ ‘tolerance,’ ‘democracy,’ and so on), and his commitment to the process of interfaith dialogue. Patrick Gesch was Garry Trompf ’s doctoral student in the department of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney in the late 1970s, and Trompf ’s refusal to classify Melanesian modes of thinking as ‘primitive’ or ‘illogical’ lies at the heart of Gesch’s ‘Working Out of Two Mindsets: Critical Methodology and PNG Village Traditional Ways.’ With a wealth of empirical detail, Gesch demonstrates how modern Papua New Guineans interpret the world through the ‘Critically Methodological’ and ‘Traditional Village’ mindsets, but never in a way that is not rational or explicable in terms of their experience. Gesch characterises the Village Traditional mindset as essentially religious, assigning agency to beings and powers outside the human realm, where

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the Critical Methodological mindset implies a commitment to ‘objectivity’ and to self-correcting ‘epistemological rules.’ Gesch’s five casestudies demonstrate the living role of magic and the supernatural in village life vividly, while allowing that modern medical and technological innovations nevertheless play a significant role. Methodologically, Gesch applies Robin Horton’s ‘intellectualist’ theory of conversion in a novel way, and (in concert with Trompf) is insistent that local customs enhance, rather than compromise, Melanesian Christianity. R. Daniel Shaw’s ‘A Samo Theology of Mediumship: A Case Study of Local Theologising and Global Reflection’ explores the theological understanding of Christ as medium among the Samo of PNG’s Western Province. Samo cosmology, based on the struggle in the spirit world between the good ancestors (kogooa) and the evil spirits (hogai) greatly assisted their acceptance of Christianity, as it matched the Christian worldview of the struggle between Christ the redeemer and Satan, the embodiment of evil. This paper is enriched by liberal use of Shaw’s field notes of his residency among the Samo, and its interpretation of Samo theology in terms of the Samo worldview, scripture, and the Christian tradition, is congruent with Trompf ’s pioneering work on Black theologies in the Pacific. Shaw’s careful investigation of Samo theology explains how this deeply indigenised Christianity avoids heresy and is truly Biblical. The central image of the paper, Shaw’s witnessing of the Samo community singing for the recovery of a sick member, is transformed from its traditional religious context to a fully Christian manifestation; a rich example of Melanesian contextualised theology. Ennio Mantovani’s chapter, ‘Dema as Religious Symbol in Papua New Guinea,’ considers how the researcher’s process of understanding Melanesian religions has changed over a generation. Mantovani revisits a PNG pig-killing ritual and reassesses its significance through the related paradigm of the ‘Dema,’ of which he was unaware at the time of his first witnessing. Here he seeks to move this ritual out of a comparison with general assumptions of ancestor worship and, instead, adopts a sacrifice-exchange model. The Dema complex, encoded in various PNG mythologies, celebrates the connection between one mythic figure and his or her mythic relation, who agrees to be a sacrifice to effect social transformation. Thus, Mantovani avers, sacrifice becomes key to demarcating a social movement from a disturbed state to equilibrium. Stressing that, constitutionally, Papua New Guinea recognises itself as both a Christian and a ‘traditional’ nation, Mantovani proposes that his reworked assessment of the ritual demonstrate that overlapping concepts

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of sacrifice leading to transformation serve as a common area of understanding between traditional beliefs and Christianity, allowing a positive path for future mutual respect and development between these two competing religious systems. Andrew Lattas’ ‘Cargo Cults and Cognitive Science: The Dynamics of Creativity and Repetition in the Pomio Kivung’ criticises cognitive science approaches to cargo cult rituals, which tend to view creativity and repetition as diametrically opposed. Lattas connects his interpretation of the Pomio Kivung in New Britain to Garry Trompf ’s fieldworkbased rejection of Harvey Whitehouse’s dualistic framework classifying Melanesian religious forms as either featuring sensuous ritual and imagistic thinking or repetitive ritual and doctrinal thinking. Rather, Trompf viewed some ‘cargo cults’ like the Kivung as emergent Melanesian churches, indigenised Christianities. Lattas’ later fieldwork in New Britain emphasises the political and economic dimensions of the Kivung message. This chapter contains detailed descriptions of Kivung mythology and ritual, and a fascinating analysis of the political activities of Kivung leaders, who participate in PNG government in order to accelerate the arrival of the millenarian Heaven Polity Government (composed of the ancestral dead). Gender issues are also explored, in the person of Margaret (the movement’s leader since the death of her husband in 1994). The Kivung established a ‘Novena church’ around 2000 and has experienced declining influence since that date. Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart’s chapter ‘Placing and Dis-Placing the Dead’ attests to the vital importance of the dead and specific places associated with them, a theme noted by Garry Trompf in Melanesian Religion (1991). Strathern and Stewart focus on the Duna of the PNG Highlands, while utilising Maurice Bloch’s (1971) analysis of the categories present among the Merina peoples of Madagascar. The difference between the pre-colonial Duna platform burials employed before the 1960s, and contemporary burials in underground graves is arguably minimal, as the principle that the bodily fluids or ‘grease’ must return to the earth is retained. Strathern and Stewart assert that for the Duna it is of cosmic significance that a person’s component parts be appropriately redistributed after death. This chapter concludes with a section discussing the emplacement of the bodies of Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo in Taoyuan County outside Taipei, and the broader issues of death and burial in Taiwan. The conclusion, that dead bodies continue to be powerful, is uncontroversial, but here supported by excellent, culturally diverse case studies.

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Garry Trompf ’s interest in the Classical world, and the development from the Roman Imperial period of conditions necessary to the rise of various forms of monotheism in the Mediterranean and beyond, are reflected with sophistication in the second, ‘Ancient World,’ section. Iain Gardner’s chapter, ‘Towards an Understanding of Mani’s Religious Development and the Archaeology of Manichaean Identity,’ illustrates a historiographical concern for how knowledge of a particular religion develops and is recorded. He follows the move away from considering Manichaeism as simply a more diverse Christian heresy, and starts from a position of framing it as an alternate Christianity. Thus he argues against simple labels scholars have appended to this faith that suggest it is no more than a ‘syncretism,’ appealing in a multi-faceted manner to anyone who may be a possible convert. Gardner attempts to place various writings of this tradition in an historical order to demonstrate the way that religious ideas developed and accreted around the personality and personal myth of the prophet Mani. It is clear that Manichaeism adhered to a central core of beliefs, but also that as it grew it was influenced in turn by Syrian and Persian mindsets. As it moved further from its core understanding of the writings of figures such as Paul and Marcion, Gardner shows how these ideas became less relevant in the new cultural environments into which they moved. Moreover, he suggests that some ideas taken up in this development East from Christianity’s homeland could in fact be traced to Jain thought, a claim which opens up a significant new understanding in the history of ideas – a field so close to Trompf ’s work. In highlighting this shift and these influences, Gardner’s paper makes a fascinating comparison with the work of Karalis later in this section. Alanna Nobbs’ contribution, ‘Some Duties and Responsibilities of a Bishop(?) in Late Antique Egypt,’ is a short investigation into the linguistic conventions of several epistles attributed to Sotas, Bishop of Oxyrhynchus. Nobbs unearths a wealth of detail about the operation of this Egyptian Christian community in the late third and early fourth centuries. Nobbs examines what these epistles say regarding the activities of a bishop at this time and what assumptions lay behind the these letters concerning the operations of the community. She concludes that, when read as a group, the letters are not written in a sense of crisis or gloom, but show a church untroubled by insecurities and operating solidly at a grass roots level. Hers is a fascinating glimpse into a growing Christian community in Late Antiquity.

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With the theatricality of the text in mind more than reassessing its literary worth, Christopher Hartney’s ‘Per Saturam or Performance? Seneca’s Initium Saeculi Felicissimi: Ritual Hilarity and Millennial Closure in the Apocolocyntosis’ diverges from most approaches to Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis by illustrating how this text is merely the residue of a courtly event fit snugly between a number of seriously religious festivals taking place at Rome on the occasion of the death of the Emperor Claudius. Hartney focuses on the manner and timing of this performance and its pseudo-religious dimensions. In this he is aided by Trompf ’s work on Classical ideas of cyclical ages in The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought. By placing the festive and comedic events of Seneca’s only satire in context, he shows how the nexus between humour, religion and performance is often impossible to sever. Vrasidas Karalis’ chapter, ‘The Consequences of Bilingualism in Paul’s Letters,’ performs a deep examination of the structure of Paul’s language in an essay that demonstrates the overwhelming nature of this figure’s contribution to the universalisation of Christianity. Starting with the author’s fascination with the Septuagint and the effective transference of ideas from one cultural sphere to another, Karalis explains how Paul’s understanding of Greek and Hebrew and his knowledge of Aramaic and possibly Latin, enabled him to have the influence he did. Paul created a whole new vocabulary translating Jewish concepts into Greek by a deft understanding of the ambiguity of words and a sound knowledge of Greek philosophical terms, which infused early Christianity with Classical religious concepts. Paul’s talent for polysemic usage of Greek, Karalis suggests, would have caused some reaction against the novelty of his style for both Jewish followers and Christ and pagan converts, yet a close reading of Paul’s lingual ingenuity reveals this writer of epistles to be ‘…the first fully articulate trans-cultural personality in the history of Western Civilization.’ It is fitting that both Gardner and Karalis demonstrate the centrality of Paul’s texts both as a transmitter of mainstream Christianity and inspiration for the Prophet Mani, attesting to a sort of perennialism in this part of the world at this time. Section three, ‘Philosophical and Methodological Considerations,’ contains four chapters, and begins with John Gascoigne’s chapter ‘The Religious Thought of Francis Bacon,’ which seeks to realign Bacon’s religious thinking within a number of religious movements present at the time in England (Puritan, Calvinist, and Royalist). Francis Bacon was no doubt one of the great thinkers of the English Renaissance, and not

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only did the French encyclopaedists consider him ‘…the greatest, most universal, and the most eloquent of philosophers’, but also, ever since, readers have remained stunned at both his extensive political and literary achievements. Given that Bacon had a childhood coloured by Calvinist doctrine and was introduced early to Puritan thought, the way that he managed to steer a via media between these influences and the established church is at the heart of Gascoigne’s study. He problematises the work of writers such as Christopher Hill who see a direct link from Bacon to the flourishing of Puritanism during the English Civil War; but, of course, as a member of government, Bacon’s religious views needed, almost at all times, to be directed at settling rather than inciting further dissent within the church. Gascoigne deftly steers his subject through this maze by a close reading of his religious writings, showing how Bacon needed to step away from his Calvinist leanings as part of the machinery of authority in England, but through his Great Saturation, Bacon sought at the end of his life to transform the realm through the patronage of James I and via his significant re-cogitation of reality at that time. What is most startling about this deeply religious thinker is his ultimate insistence on refusing to profane Scripture by using it to understand the natural world. Here Gascoigne illustrates why Bacon’s stature remains in many ways undiminished, for, whatever he sought to achieve religiously, he argued compellingly for the separation of religion and the sciences. In Morocco in 1911 Rudolf Otto found himself in a synagogue in Essaouira, and the prayers moved him ‘…to the depths of my soul, with a mighty shudder exciting and calling into play the mystery of the otherworld latent within.’ Harry Oldmeadow’s ‘Rudolf Otto, the East and Religious Inclusivism’ recreates the German theological environment in which Otto developed his thinking, which was fascinating because of its rationality at that time. Otto’s great struggle against this tide of rationality forms the background to Oldmeadow’s picture of his subject overwhelmed by a Europe that repeatedly discounted the mystical passion of religion, and also the universal nature of the ‘Holy.’ It was little wonder that Otto began travelling to Africa and the East. In light of his early travels and taking up Söderblom’s idea that ‘holy’ is a more universal concept in religion than ‘god,’ Otto published his Idea of the Holy in 1917 to wide acclaim but, as Oldmeadow shows, it was not his only move towards establishing a sense of universal understanding when it came to the religions of the world. Otto, Oldmeadow shows, travelled extensively, seeking out religious experiences and artefacts. The artefacts were

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for a museum of world religions he established in Marburg; the experiences he collected contributed to his founding of an international religious league. The latter was closed down in 1933, but through the paradigm of the holy, Otto sought to unite the world and use the holy as a vehicle of peace. Thus this solid investigation of Otto’s career after Idea of the Holy allows Harry Oldmeadow to ponder once more the way religious studies are carried out: somewhere between the scientific approach of examining specimens of the holy in a laboratory-like environment, or using the academy to do little more than write theology by another name. Oldmeadow, recounting numerous instances where Otto visited and engaged with non-European religions, concludes by suggesting that Otto provides a saner, more engaged way of taking the issue of how to approach religions. Paul Crittenden’s ‘The Theme of Conversion in Sartre’s Early Ethics’ first provides a detailed overview of Sartre’s ethical developments. It seems as though there was an equal fascination and avoidance of this area all through the philosopher’s latter years. Crittenden trawls through a number of notebooks and half-completed manuscripts to trace the thoughts on ethics of his subject. In a fascinating reading of these documents, Crittenden shows how the idea of conversion to an ethical stance was viewed by Sartre and the religious structures and assumptions Sartre accepted as he sought to outline how one could become open to the ethical concerns of existence. The key term in this transformation of the self relies on the ability of the self to act with generosity for the sake of increasing the general good. Linking back to Sartre’s claims in Being and Nothingness, this generosity could only come from the individual’s commitment to the freedom of their life and to understanding what that freedom entailed. To this extent the author highlights a fascinating angle of Sartre’s humanist project – that flowing from his form of existentialism, prevailing religious attitudes still had a part to play in the foundational development of a future ethically-centred human existence. Peter Oldmeadow remembers well his discussions on methodological issues with Garry Trompf in the Honours programme of the Department of Studies in Religion and uses this recollection to open his chapter, ‘Approaches to the Problem of Dualism in Heidegger and Indian Yogacara Buddhism,’ a comparative examination of aspects of Heidegger’s thought and Buddhism, with a focus on Japanese philosophical concerns based on the Madhyamaka school of philosophical negation. Oldmeadow examines a number of concrete ways in which

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Heidegger interacted with Japanese culture, students and thinking, and draws these solid influences forward into a more speculative discussion on the approach to issues of dualism that Heidegger (as a Westerner) develops. The author shows that such a comparison, although occasionally endangered by great cultural gaps, still provides a valuable way to approach Heidegger’s philosophy. In fact, it could be that Madhyamaka thinking on dualism encouraged the German philosopher to approach the Western tradition of dualistic thinking with much scepticism, for just as Madhyamaka denies a dualistic approach to earthly existence and nirvana, so too did Heidegger deny a separation between absolutes (such as God) and the world. Oldmeadow fits this lineage of thinking from Japan to Germany into a much larger picture of Eastern philosophies influencing, over the last two centuries, Western thought. This chapter provides a new, important, approach to the thinking of this sometimes-oblique Western philosopher, Heidegger, in whom Garry Trompf has maintained an interest, chiefly through supervision of a number of doctoral projects. The fourth and final section, ‘Historiography,’ contains four chapters. Wouter J. Hanegraaff ’s ‘ “And End History. And Go to the Stars”: Terence McKenna and 2012’ connects directly with Garry Trompf ’s enduring fascination with millenarian and apocalyptic thought and with his interest in new religious movements. In the 1970s McKenna initiated a ‘speculative macrohistory’ that posited a world transformation in 2012. This millennial formula has since been adopted by New Agers, adherents of the interpretation of the Mayan Calendar taught by José Argüelles, and a broad range of alternative thought. McKenna and his brother Dennis were travelling in the Putumayo (Colombia) region of the Amazon in 1971, and their experiments with hallucinogenic mushrooms led to Terence’s apprehension of the ‘eschaton timewave,’ which, combined with the I Ching (Book of Changes) formed the basis of his 2012 millenarian vision. This was expounded in The Invisible Landscape (1975) and later critically refuted by the mathematician Matthew Watkins. Hanegraaff ’s chapter is a pioneering effort to assess McKenna academically as a contributor to the history of ideas, and is thus a significant original contribution to scholarship, as well as an apt and honourable tribute to his mentor and friend Garry Trompf. Jay Johnston’s witty chapter ‘Cyborgs and Chakras: Intersubjectivity in Scientific and Spiritual Somatechnics’ investigates the ways in which religious discourses, esotericism and post-structuralist feminist scholarship have approached models of intersubjectivity (the subtle body and

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the cyborg). After noting that the subject is not bounded by matter in either model, Johnston investigates the way in which the marriage of technology and of Eastern and Western esoteric anatomy can be used to reconfigure the concept of the divine and of humanity’s relation to it. This chapter is informed by Theosophical formulations of the subtle body, Donna Haraway’s model of the cyborg, and a broad engagement with the field of Western esotericism. Haraway’s use of alchemical language in her famous ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is probed, with Johnston suggesting that the use of such language points to the affinity between subtle bodies and cyborgs. This tribute to Garry Trompf ’s engagement with Theosophy and the Western esoteric tradition is playful and stretches the boundaries of the academic study of religion, as Trompf ’s own work has so often done. Paul Morris’ ‘Religious Studies in New Zealand: A Wrong Direction?’ is in part a response to Garry Trompf ’s survey articles, ‘A Survey of New Approaches to the Study of Religion in Australia and the Pacific’ (2004) and ‘Study of Religion: The Academic Study of Religion in Australia and Oceania’ (2005). Morris argues that the term ‘Religious Studies’ properly belong to the non-confessional academic study of religion and thus describes only certain programmes available in New Zealand universities. Morris revisits the intellectual legacies of Ninian Smart and Mircea Eliade, commonly termed the ‘phenomenology of religion,’ and traces a history of hope and enterprise in establishing of Religious Studies programmes from the mid- to late 1960s that has, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, waned and fallen into compromise (in many cases) with theology and other academic disciplines that have historically engaged with religious subjects. The detailed nature of Morris’ reminiscences, and the warmly engaged tone, have a force and truth that are undeniable. Whether, indeed, a wrong direction has been pursued, is left to the discretion of the reader. Carole M. Cusack and Jason H. Prior’s chapter, ‘Religion, Sexuality and Retribution: Placing the “Other” in Sydney,’ takes off from Garry Trompf ’s extensive work on ‘payback’ and the ‘logic of retribution,’ and his less well-known writings on multi-faith societies and multiculturalism. Cusack and Prior contrast two case studies, that of the Chinese community in Sydney in the late nineteenth century, and of the gay male community in Sydney in the late twentieth century, drawing out the common themes of fear of otherness (religious and sexual), rumours of disease and contagion, the violation of majoritarian standards, and the construction of specific built domains in ‘undesirable’ locations in which

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these groups could meet (the Yui Ming and Sze Yup Temples, respectively in Glebe and Alexandria, and Club 80 in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst). In both cases a violent witch-hunt erupted, fanned by ‘inspections’ and policing, which was reported gleefully in the popular press. These witch-hunts were effectively doused by a Royal Commission in both cases, which completely exonerated the allegedly deviant group and pointed to the possibility of a more open, tolerant society. The eighteen chapters of this volume attest to the broad-ranging scholarly interests of Garry W. Trompf. From space concerns we have not even mentioned the large number of books Garry has been involved with as editor, or even briefly touched upon the more than one hundred and twenty refereed articles he has written. Of all his achievements perhaps the most important to consider is the number of students who have been enabled to go on to significant research and academic careers of their own through Garry’s mentorship. The tally of undergraduates was never made, but the figures must be considerable, and the counting would have to take place across four continents. Garry himself estimates that he has supervised thirty-five masters students and nearly fifty doctoral candidates to completion. Perhaps there is no greater testimony than this. The editors of this volume also count themselves as grateful students of this man who has made such a vast contribution to the field of Studies in Religion, and are delighted to be involved in the production of this Festschrift. We would like to thank those colleagues and students of Garry’s who with forbearance aided us in getting the following pages to press. We particularly thank Dr Friedegard Tomasetti, who worked on this volume in its early months, but resigned from the editorship due to ill health. Other enthusiastic supporters of the project, to whom we are grateful, include Will Christie, Arvind Sharma, Jadran Mimica, Vassilios Adrahtas, Edward Crangle, Brikha H. S. Nasoraia, and Lee Miena Skye. Additionally, we would like to thank Professor Geraldine Barnes, the former Head of the School of Letters, Arts and Media (SLAM) at the University of Sydney, for financial assistance to this project, and Helen Young and Stephanie Downes for copy-editing the manuscript.1 Thanks are due to Maarten Frieswijk and Birgitta Poelmans of Brill for their smooth facilitation of the book production process. Sydney, May 2009 1 A local Festschrift for Garry W. Trompf was published in 2007. See Victoria Barker and Frances di Lauro, eds. On A Panegyrical Note: Studies in Honour of Garry W. Trompf. Sydney: Sydney Studies in Religion.

TRIBUTE TO A SCHOLAR AND FRIEND Friedegard Tomasetti With this Festschrift we honour a scholar who has achieved the height of his career at the University of Sydney, holding the position of Professor in the History of Ideas. Subsequently, after his retirement in 2005, the title of Emeritus Professor in this field was bestowed upon him. I feel privileged that I can call Garry a friend. I met him first in the early 1970s at the University of Papua New Guinea where we exchanged notes on Melanesian religions and missiological problems, or looked for interesting books in each other’s bookshelves. He was then teaching in the Department of History, and I was sorting out my options of field research and teaching. Our bond has weathered the tests of time, as we have shared some work in these fields for more than ten years, albeit from quite different positions. We occupy together a small room in the Department of Studies in Religion since Garry’s retirement, which meant for him a considerable change from his former large office where he could house many more of his books. To ease the situation, I have volunteered as office manager to give our space a female touch, mixed with the sweep of an iron broom, which he graciously accepts with signs of tolerance and forgiveness, and, sometimes, professing guilt. Incidentally, first-time visitors to the office may be astonished to seeing him kneeling in front of his computer instead of sitting on a chair (to avoid sciatica); he usually offers the explanation that he is on his knees in front of the written word. Generosity is definitely a dominant feature of his persona. This, supported by the immense knowledge in his chosen fields (loosely to be found between the pillars of the theory of retributive logic and the historical recurrence of ideas), still benefits colleagues and students alike, as Garry likes communicating on that which is important to him. This is the social side of his persona, carrying a special acumen of his scholarly integrity, as he has always been generous in sharing his knowledge and expertise, and particularly smoothing the path of whoever needs encouragement and help (though one can detect an ever so slight impatience with the ‘snail brigade,’ i.e., the slow ones).

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As with other scholars, the renewal of his intellectual alertness depends on a never-stilled enthusiasm for the subject under investigation, openness to critique, and an intrinsic curiosity about what one has not yet grasped (maybe missed) in one’s enquiries – an often painful path Garry seems to have always been prepared for. Since the scope of his academic work transgresses the conventional boundaries of disciplines, and he insists on pursuing the validation of his subject in situ (i.e., the socio-cultural condition) and finding the essential link to constellation of comparative culturo-historical interpretations, his work appears to promulgate a field of enquiry within boundaries. I would like to join all those who wish him well for his future.

IN MEMORIAM: PROFESSOR CRISTIANO CAMPORESI (1946–2008) With both men nursing a natural affinity for the concerns of methodology in the study of religion, it was natural that Garry Trompf should meet Cristiano Camporesi; and they did, in 1993. Professor Camporesi came to Sydney from his base at the University of Florence in that year, carrying with him his latest book, Max Müller: la malattia del linguaggio e la malattia del pensiero, a work that traced its heritage in part to Garry’s early work on Müller and this figure’s influence on the appearance of the discipline of Comparative Religion. The two gentlemen became eager colleagues and Cristiano would make regular visits to Sydney to the Department of Studies in Religion. He would make generous contributions to the methodology stream of the department’s Honours program and in corridor talk with Chris Hartney suggested that an international Festschrift be organised for his friend and colleague. Thus it is from Professor Camporesi that the impetus for this book first arose. Professor Camporesi was fascinated with the finer details of British Imperial thought and he traced with exacting scholarship nineteenthcentury ideas in Western European philosophy, thus his Entente cordiale: figure del realismo critico nell’educazione tra Francia e imperio britannico (1999) and his Scepsi scientifica: fenomenismo e agnosticismo nella filosofia Britannica dell’Ottocento (1985). Not only did Professor Camporesi’s work touch on fields that interested Garry Trompf, but, also, their explanation of overarching themes in the history of ideas often ran parallel. His examination of our understanding of time in Rigenerazione: l’idea sempiternal e l’ascesa verso l’assoluto-infinito (2003) draws instant comparison with Garry’s work in this area. Finally, although Cristiano’s planned essay was not finished in time for this book, the Professor had already penned his own detailed response to Garry’s work in ‘Teodicea e filosofia della storia: la visione ciclica di Garry Trompf ’ in Religioni e Società (No. 59, 2007). It was with consternation that we learnt late in 2008 that Professor Camporesi had died from heart complications. His work at the Dipartimento Studi Sociali at the Università degli Studi di Firenze and

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on his visits to Sydney regularly addressed the Philosophies of Belief, Language, Politics, and History. It’s not surprising, given their solid relationship that Professors Camporesi and Trompf were working jointly on research regarding theodicy. This work will now have to be completed by other means.

PART ONE

MELANESIA

JAKARTA AND JAYAPURA: THE DIALOGUE OF RELIGIONS AND ‘PAPUA, LAND OF PEACE’ John D’Arcy May Abstract Different varieties of both Christianity and Islam established themselves in parts of the Asia-Pacific region by interacting with indigenous cultures: examples would be the Islamisation of Indonesia and the Christianisation of Melanesia. Each tradition vigorously asserted an identity that was purportedly ‘universal’ in that it claimed to transcend localised or inherited ethnic and religious identities (Indonesia’s Hindu-Buddhist past and its indigenous cultures; Melanesia’s multiplicity of ethnicities and language groups) by participating in a global community and a uniform truth. Each ‘universal’ tradition faced a similar dilemma: elimination of or accommodation to these indigenous cultures? The danger envisaged in each case was that of syncretism. The ways in which the missionary churches in the Pacific Islands and the Islamic movements of Indonesia dealt with this problem contain many lessons for their situations today, involving tolerance of and enrichment by local cultures; but the tensions inherent in each faith’s constitutive attitude to religious ‘otherness’ are now emerging in forms which are commonly branded ‘fundamentalist’. Both the attempt to create a new ‘Christendom’ (Philip Jenkins) and a ‘global ummah’ (Olivier Roy) offer the attraction of a kind of religious globalisation, with the assurance of adhering to a uniform orthodoxy in a worldwide community of believers; but they are also prone to intolerance, conflict and violence, which is particularly evident when their interests clash (various parts of Indonesia, West Papua, increasingly Papua New Guinea). The paper will investigate Islam’s and Christianity’s resources for relating constructively to indigenous cultures to the point where this could become a bridge of communication between Islam and Christianity themselves – their ‘ecumenist’ potential. In particular, it will focus on the potential of modernising and ‘liberationist’ tendencies in Indonesian Islam to deal with the ethical dilemmas raised by transmigrasi and the exploitation of West Papua’s land and people.

Introduction: Islam in Melanesia In his masterly synthesis of a lifetime of research, Melanesian Religion, Garry Trompf took an innovative – not to say revolutionary – approach to the subject in that he devoted fully half his monograph to the advent of

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Christianity and its interactions with the peoples and cultures of Melanesia (Trompf 1991, Part 2, ‘The New Time’). Contrary to the bulk of opinion in anthropological circles, Trompf described this Melanesian Christianity – otherwise referred to as ‘assimilated’, ‘indigenised’ or ‘inculturated’ – as the Melanesians’ own religion, now standing in some kind of continuity with the cultures they inherit from their ancient past. The history of the Christian missions is part of this, as are the famous ‘cargo cults’, which he is careful to keep distinct from possible Christian influence, and he does not neglect the post-colonial phenomenon of secularisation in Melanesia. Whether or not the movements he describes in chapter 9 are independent churches in a sense similar to their African counterparts deserves further discussion, but they certainly illustrate the fluid boundaries between indigenous movements and imported institutions. At least two powerful themes emerge from this study: the political impact and ethical potential of Christianity in its Melanesian embodiment, and the beginnings of a Melanesian theology which would formulate the implications of the new faith for Melanesians in a way with which they can identify. These have been abiding interests of mine, too, since the years I shared with Garry in Papua New Guinea. But even then I was becoming aware of Islam as a growing presence on the Asia-Pacific scene, an awareness forced upon us by the systematic colonisation of what the Indonesians then called Irian Jaya, now Papua, but which its indigenous inhabitants refer to as West Papua in order to document its cultural continuity with the whole island of New Guinea and the rest of Melanesia. Islam, too, though Arabian in origin and thus quite foreign to the Malay cultural world of Indonesia, has interacted with Indonesia’s rich cultural heritage in many and varied ways. What interests me here is evidence of a creative interaction between Indonesian Islam and Melanesian cultures and a specifically Islamic response to the gross violations of human rights and ecological integrity perpetrated by Indonesia in West Papua for over forty years. In 1984 the Melanesian Institute in Goroka, Papua New Guinea, drew up a statement in response to a request from the World Council of Churches’ sub-unit on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths on Muslim-Christian Dialogue in Melanesia (Melanesian Institute 1985; references in the text are to the numbered paragraphs of this statement). It begins with a sketch of the religious situation in the Southwest Pacific which is still worth quoting over twenty years later: Melanesia is overwhelmingly Christian, thanks to more than a century of intensive mission work by most of the major Christian denominations in

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this area of the Southwest Pacific. There is tenuous contact between Melanesians and Muslims only at the two extremities of the region. Across the only land border in the whole of the South Pacific, Melanesia is contiguous with the largest Muslim nation on earth, Indonesia with its 150 million people, up to 90% of them nominally Muslim. In the racially and religiously divided island nation of Fiji, far to the east, citizens of Indian origin who were brought out as indentured labourers around the turn of the century, many of them (about 60,000, mostly Sunni) Muslims, outnumber Melanesians. Otherwise, apart from tiny expatriate minorities (e.g. the 12,000 Muslims from former French colonies in New Caledonia and the Islamic Society of Papua New Guinea, founded in 1978), Islam is an unknown quantity, although the Bahā’i faith, which derives in part from Islam, is becoming quite widespread in the South Pacific. (1)

The statistics would need to be updated. The population of Indonesia is now closer to 200 million, and the number of Muslims in Papua New Guinea is estimated to be in excess of two thousand, for whom a large mosque has been build in the Port Moresby suburb of Hohola with the assistance of the Muslim World League and the government of Indonesia. The Muslim Association of Papua New Guinea was established in 1981, and the first Islamic Centre was established in 1988 with the help of the Regional Council for Islamic Daawa in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, based in Malaysia, and the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs. There are now seven such centres throughout the country. In general, however, the situation remains much the same. After mentioning the different but not unrelated developments in Africa (3–4), the document goes on to note that the Indonesian and Fijian contexts have one thing in common: ‘neither is an Islamic state in the classical sense which still sets the pattern in the Arab heartland of Islam’ (5), for in each, irrespective of their religious presence, Muslims are political minorities. ‘Melanesian Christians are thus not immediately confronted by that peculiar identity of religious and political authority which European Christians have sometimes found so perplexing when dealing with Islam in its more traditional forms’ (5). The document warns that Islam has the potential to become a serious rival to Christianity in the Pacific, but that their relationship need not be seen only in these terms: ‘Islam may come to be seen, not merely as the rival and alien religion of the “enemy”, nor yet as a simple alternative to Christianity, but as a powerful spiritual and ethical force in its own right with which Christianity must reckon…’ (8). It is this possibility that I would like to explore in the particularly contentious case of West Papua. The Indonesian archipelago, with its more than 17 thousand islands, is the bridge between Asia and the Pacific, the point at which their multifarious cultures overlap and intermingle. As the largest Muslim

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country on earth, Indonesia’s unique blend of Islamic orthodoxy and indigenous traditions necessarily has a decisive effect on the role of Islam throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Just as Christianity in its various European forms has had to come to terms with the myriad cultures and incipient democracies of Oceania, so Islam is having to rethink its relationship to indigenous customs and the political philosophies implicit in its own rich tradition. The tensions involved all come to a head in West Papua, as thoroughly Melanesian in culture as Papua New Guinea and the other Melanesian states, yet jealously retained by Indonesia as an integral part of the very different cultural, political and religious sphere of its ‘unitary state’. West Papua is being ‘Islamicised’ and ‘Javanised’, but is this any more or less justifiable than the Christianising and Westernising of other parts of Melanesia?1 Building on Garry Trompf ’s work in analysing Christianity and secularisation in Melanesia, and on a previous paper (May 2005), I wish to approach this challenging topic in two steps: first, by trying to understand the role of Islam in Indonesia’s path to nationhood and democracy; second, by trying to correlate ‘progressive’ elements, that is, modernisation, tolerance, democracy, and freedom, in Indonesian Islam with Indonesian policies on West Papua, in an attempt to assess the potential of interfaith cooperation, involving Islam, for solving the seemingly intractable problem of West Papua’s future status. To the outsider, many of the factors involved are extremely hard to evaluate and, as journalists are banned from entering West Papua, reliable information is scarce. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the ethical problems involved are so important that it is worth taking at least some tentative first steps towards understanding the role of the religions in West Papua.

1. Jakarta: ‘Political Islam’ and Indonesian Democracy After a colourful colonial past (see Owen 2005, 53–55; Beck 2003, 11–38), we find the twentieth century in what was to become Indonesia beginning with a contest of identities: the retrieval of the islands’

1 According to Dr Neles Tebay, a West Papuan Catholic priest, journalist and academic, Islamisation is indeed proceeding rapidly, with mosques in every major town and the prospect of a Muslim majority in the foreseeable future (email communication, 15. 5. 2007). I am grateful to Dr Tebay for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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Hindu-Buddhist past and the reassertion of Islam against the growing influence of Christian evangelisation (Sarekat Islam, 1911); resistance by the indigenous pribumi against Dutch, Eurasian, Chinese and Arab elements; the rise of the Communist Party and Sukarno’s nationalists; and the influence of the much larger Muhammadiyah movement (1912). These stirrings of Islamic revival and incipient nationalism survived the conquest and division of the archipelago by the Japanese. In the struggle for control after the war, it was Sukarno’s concept of a secular republic based on Pancasila (the ‘five principles’ of 1. belief in one supreme God; 2. humanitarianism; 3. nationalism expressed in the unity of Indonesia; 4. consultative democracy; 5. social justice) that won out against both the Dutch and the political Muslims who wanted sharī’a law enshrined in the constitution. Though political parties proliferated and free elections were held in 1955, Sukarno regarded pluralist democracy as unIndonesian, and in 1956 he opted for the paternalistic alternative of ‘guided democracy’ (Demokrasi Terpimpin) based on ‘consultation’ (shura) and ‘consensus’ (ijmā) (for more detail, see Owen 2005, chapter 20; for the failure of Islamic parties to dominate Indonesian politics, see Effendy, 2003, chapter 8).2 It was in this context of assertive nationalism that Sukarno began his campaign to wrest West New Guinea (Irian Jaya) from the Dutch in order to complete the new Indonesian nation ‘from Sabang to Merauke’ (Owen 2005, 308–309). Sukarno, in short, was interested in the unified nation, not Islam, and the day after independence was declared (18 August 1945) he dropped the Islamist Jakarta Charter from the constitution. From this time on, the military began to assume the ‘dual function’ (dwifungsi) of maintaining national security and participating in economic and political life, which was eventually to make the armed forces, to all intents and purposes, the de facto government of the country and a major factor in business for much of the Suharto dictatorship (the Indonesian army must fund up to 75 per cent of its budget through its own business ventures; see Hefner 2000, chapter 3; Leith 2003, chapter 2). The stage was thus set for Muslims to play a significant part in the democratisation of a post-colonial state. Alongside the traditional ‘ulamā’ or legal scholars and in a certain sense as their rivals, Indonesian 2 Of eighty three parties contesting the elections, in which 91% of the population participated, only four attracted more than 16% of the vote: the Nationalist Party of Indonesia (22.3%), Masyumi (20.9%), Nahdlatul Ulama (18.4%), and the Communist Party of Indonesia (16.4%).

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Islam had already brought forth a number of extra-state organisations such as the rural-based ‘traditionalist’ Nahdlatul Ulama (1926) and the urban-based ‘modernist’ Muhammadiyah (1912), each of which had a very large popular base (some 30–40 million in each case) and carried considerable weight in that unique interplay of legal interpretation, religious ethos and political philosophy which characterises Indonesian Islam (for a detailed analysis of how philosophical and ethical reflection takes place in the medium of jurisprudence in such a context, see Hooker, 2003). Islam in Indonesia had always been plural, divided roughly along the lines of aristocratic priyayi religious culture deriving from the Hindu-Buddhist past and popular abangan mysticism, which translated politically into the ‘regimist’ Islam of Indonesian nationalists and the ‘Javanist’ Islam favoured at first but never empowered by Suharto’s New Order. Cutting across these was the tension between ‘secular nationalism’ and the ‘primordial solidarities’ (ikatan primordial) of ethnic traditions (these complex matters are lucidly discussed by Hefner 2000, 14–16, 50–53, 74–76; see also Geertz 1960, and Effendy 2003, chapters 2 and 7). At no time did this plurality of political forces result in Muslim ascendancy; indeed, The Soeharto New Order regime, at least in the period of the 1970s and 1980s, was not on good terms with Muslim political forces in general. In fact there was a lot of mutual suspicion and hostility between the two sides. Soeharto took very harsh measures against any expression of Islamic extremism (Azra 2003, 21).

But the question does arise whether the voluntary Muslim organisations located in the public sphere, which mediated between the household or village community and the state, already constituted the ‘social capital’ necessary for building civil society and pluralist democracy. There were continuing tensions throughout the 1950s and 1960s between adat or custom and sporadic attempts to introduce sharī’a, accompanied by the proliferation of pesantren or local Islamic boarding schools, but these broadly based popular religious movements also constituted an enormous political potential. It would take us too far to go into the story of Sukarno’s fall and Suharto’s rise to power by using the hostility to the Communist Party of Indonesia on the part of both the Muslims and the military, backing the army against a weakened state and inciting civilians (including members of Nahdlatul Ulama) to slaughter Communists. His abuse of power to enrich his family and his opportunistic tilt towards Islam eventually alienated his secular allies and fomented religious and

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ethnic discontent. ‘The repoliticization of religion and ethnicity’, Hefner concludes, ‘and the systematic drain on Indonesia’s social capital of tolerance and civility was to be the most tragic of Soeharto’s legacies’ (Hefner 2000, 72; the full extent of the patronage system under Suharto and the political corruption to which it gave rise is graphically portrayed by Leith 2003). What interests us here is the ways in which leading progressive-reformist Muslim thinkers have tried to come to terms with these tensions and whether their thought has had any bearing on the situation in West Papua. Islam, it must be remembered, ‘emerged as a point of identification among Southeast Asians in opposition to the Europeans who were identified as Christian’ (Federspiel 2001, 10), in Indonesia’s case, the Dutch, as evidenced in the Dutch-Acehnese War (1884–1911). Indeed, it was Dutch wariness about the potential of Islam to become a focal point of resistance that led to restrictions on the practice of Islam and the scope of Islamic law, thereby fostering the symbiosis of imperfectly understood Islam and local custom in village life (Federspiel 2001, 12–15). Nevertheless, the first movements of Islamic ‘modernists’ – meaning those who favoured exclusive adherence to Qur’ān and Hadīth over recourse to the medieval jurists – took shape around this time, with the Muhammadiyah founded by Ahmad Dachlan in 1912, while the Persatuan Islam (persis), founded in 1923 under the influence of merchants from Arabia, championed Islamic orthodoxy (Federspiel 2001, 25–32). There was thus scope for tension between orthodox pan-Islamists and emerging nationalists, with currents of opposition between faith and reason, modernism and traditionalism, Arab and Indonesian, Muslim and Christian running through the years leading up to the Second World War and the struggle for independence. While Sukarno, as we have seen, favoured a secular nationalism and the separation of Islam and the state on the model of Atatürk’s Turkey, the modernist Muslims gathered in the Persatuan Islam made their own preparations for independence, anticipating the Jakarta Charter which Sukarno eventually rejected and initiating the pesantren or Islamic boarding schools in 1936 (see Federspiel 2001, 35–36, 48, 82, 102–103, 115). persis was rigorist in its disapproval of established customs such as the festive meals (slametan) which were so much a part of village life, all forms of magic, soothsaying, amulets and, in general, ‘polytheism’ and ‘mysticism’, including the intercession of saints and Hindu theatre (see Federspiel 2001, chapter 3). It roundly condemned the Ahmadiyah movement and traditionalist Islam as un-Islamic, and its reaction to

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Christianity was defensive. Preaching was to be in Arabic where feasible, and Arabs were to be given special status in Indonesia. In short, the movement advocated ‘religion as the primary loyalty’ (Ahmad Hassan), and its main preoccupation was with Islam itself; sacred law was to be given priority over national law, and the hudūd punishments were to be upheld (Federspiel 2001, 176, 181, 305). Islam was assumed to be an ideology, a template for life, capable of replacing colonial governments with Islamic states. ‘Many Muslims had yet to be convinced of these concepts – some never were – and effort needed to be undertaken to bring about the reality of the concepts to the community of believers itself ’ (Federspiel 2001, 186). At independence, however, neither persis nor the other Islamic movements gathered in the umbrella organisation Masjumi made significant gains, and it was the army, the Communists and Sukarno himself who grew in power at the expense of the parliament. Most Muslims, except the radicals of Darul Islam, accepted the secular state. This left persis in a ‘radical-revolutionary’ stance, ‘wanting to change society to its very roots’ and ‘shatter the illness of the Muslims in a radical and revolutionary manner’ (1956 Manifesto). ‘This view can best be described as wanting the fundamentals of religion operative throughout society’ (Federspiel 2001, 262). Because of its intransigence, however, persis never achieved this goal, though it eventually came to accept democracy and even nationalism as compatible with it. With regard to its jurisprudence, ‘lacking in these [persis] fatāwā was any full discussion of the social problems presented by the technological advances and sociological developments of the previous century, and the impact of these trends on the religious life of Indonesian Muslims’; these could be accepted, but only if guided by Islam, because they emanate from the ‘unspiritual’ West (Federspiel 2001, 294, 296–298; on the role of fatāwā and the methodologies entailed in interpreting the rules of fiqh, see in detail Hooker 2003). ‘The world had become a complex place that needed sophisticated understanding. Persis writers were not up to that standard’; they were capable of no more than a reiteration of historic Islam (Federspiel 2001, 317, 328). persis, which left Masjumi in 1952 amidst polemics against NU, was not necessarily typical of Indonesian Islam, but nor was it without longterm influence on Muslim thinking. Like Muhammadiyah, it was basically a reformist movement dedicated to purifying Islam from corruption. But can there be any such thing as ‘pure’ Islam? It may be asked whether Java was ever wholeheartedly converted to an Islam cut off from the

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Arabic sources of orthodoxy and suppressed by the Dutch as a rallying point for resistance. Islam flourished in Indonesia, but in a heavily indigenised form (see Saleh 2001); the assimilation of Muhammad to the Ocean Goddess is a particularly striking example (Saleh 2001, 23), but popular customs, too, such as gamelan (Javanese orchestra), wayang (shadow puppet play), and ronggeng (Javanese dance), though forbidden, remain to this day (Saleh 2001, 41–42). This suggests that Islamic orthodoxy had to be redefined for Indonesian conditions, but the medium in which this occurred was practice rather than belief, law rather than theology. The consensus (ijmā) of the worldwide Muslim community (ummah) becomes tangible in the form of regulation (hukm) (see Saleh 2001, 47–50). We are dealing with what Saleh calls the ‘mainstream community’ (Ahl al-Sunnah wa’l Jamā’ah) of Sunni Islam, after which Indonesian Islam is patterned and to which Wahhabi advances were considered by the ‘ulamā’ to be a threat; hence the founding of the Nahdlatul Ulama (‘Resurgence of the Ulama’) in 1926, like the more textually orientated Muhammadiyah before it (1912). Both claimed to represent the authentic community, embracing both santri and abangan elements but stressing that each was legitimately santri, i.e. strictly traditional (see Saleh 2001, 63–73, 101–102). Underlying these tensions in the practical implementation of Islam was the ancient rivalry between the more rationalist Mu’talizite and the orthodox Ash’arite schools, and it was within these coordinates that the contemporary theologians of Indonesian Islam were constrained to move. For Mas Mansoer, all polytheism such as that implied in shamanism, dealings with the spirits of the dead and the sacred dread of ‘eerie objects and places’, was shirk, a denial of the unity of God (tawhīd); for the apologists of Persatuan Islam, such as Ahmad Hassan, the Islamic ‘Pillars of Belief ’ were revealed by God and could not be compromised (see Saleh 2001, 121–162). The debate reduced itself to the choice between free will (qadar) and predestination (qadā’): were they equally valid, or did exclusive emphasis on the former lead to libertinism just as the latter led to fatalism? (see Saleh 2001, 154–175). Rejecting this dichotomy, Amien Rais (b. 1944) developed the social dimension of tawhīd, advocating a Tauhid Sosial which tried to apply orthodox doctrine to society and seeing in traditional institutions such as zakāh (religious donations) and waqf (charitable foundations) ways of addressing social welfare according to the Qur’ān – a kind of incipient liberation theology (see Saleh 2001, 175–195). Otherwise, such thinkers foresaw a crisis of relevance and an increase of secularism unless Islam avoided politics, combated moral

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laxity and became involved in areas such as education and welfare. Harun Nasution went to the length of arguing for a reassessment of Mu’tazilism for contemporary Indonesia. ‘Time and again Nasution insisted that fatalism as a result of the people’s adherence to Ash’arite traditional theology has been the primary cause of Muslim inertia and backwardness’ (Saleh 2001, 233). The reform initiated by Muhammadiyah must move beyond jurisprudence (fiqh) and into theology (kalām) based on philosophy. Poverty and injustice, in Nasution’s view, went hand in hand with theological misconceptions – a view for which he was of course criticised, even by his own students. In Saleh’s judgement, thanks to Nasution ‘Islam has been made widely open as an object of critical enquiry’ (Saleh 2001, 235) and we see the beginnings of a ‘theology of the oppressed’ (Saleh 2001, 239, n. 88); but the approach also had its limitations: ‘Since the upholders of theological reform perceived the issue only from this point of view, they did not consider unjustified social structures as a determining factor and as an object of scrutiny’ (Saleh 2001, 238). These observations prepare the ground for an assessment of one of the leading thinkers of reformist Islam in Indonesia, Nurcholish Madjid, and for the possible application of this progressive thinking to situations such as that of West Papua. The difficulties for a Western observer become apparent, however, when we learn that Madjid and the student organisations from which he emerged, though they brought about ‘the most radical development in Islamic religio-political thought in Indonesia to date’ (Saleh 2001, 241), were in step with Sukarno’s New Order regime, which they saw as the guarantee of a stable and modern Indonesia. ‘They felt that the path to a modern and progressive Indonesia was being obstructed, among other factors, by the unenlightened religious life style of Muslims’ (Saleh 2001, 243). Though they were opposed by neo-modernist ‘scripturalists’, their aim was to combine the traditional and the modern through pluralist, non-sectarian education, using traditional interpretation (ijtihād) as a hermeneutic for today (see Saleh 2001, 244). Madjid took a stand for social justice and human rights and against the political instrumentalisation of Islam; within the framework of Pancasila he encouraged reinterpretation of the Qur’ān, tolerance towards other Muslims and non-Muslims, and interfaith dialogue; the antithesis of militant Islamism, he represented the ‘broader, non-political dimension of Islam’; yet for him ‘Islam-ness’ and ‘Indonesian-ness’ were equivalent (Saleh 2001, 250–255). His was a cultural rather than a dogmatic Islam, less ‘Arabised’, more universalist, and acknowledging

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growth, development and plurality by a more flexible use of ijtihād. Stopping short of syncretism, it envisaged indigenisation and contextualisation in a kind of Islamic cosmopolitanism, which was congenial to those Muslim intellectuals who had studied in the West rather than the Middle East (Saleh 2001, 259, 263–265, 277–279). Madjid’s approach demonstrated the new self-confidence of Islam as a contributor to the public well-being of the country while remaining authentically itself, not unlike that of Abdurrahman Wahid. Critics, however, such as Muhammed Arkoun, Muhammad al-Jābirī and Zayd Baso, saw in it a futile attempt to justify modern Islam from the past, offering an ‘ideal model’ of an urban civil society that is not valid for Indonesia: ‘Baso perceives Madjid’s ideas of inclusive, tolerant and plural Islam as merely intended to posit Islam as a dominant value system in Indonesia’ (Saleh 2001, 291; see 274–279, 281, 289; as a final irony, the new young ‘traditionalists’ opposed to Madjid’s ‘modernism’ are inspired by deconstructionism, 285, n. 190; 293, n. 205). A version of Islam which affirmed the New Order without suggesting an alternative to it would seem to be seriously defective as an instrument of social criticism and an advocate of human rights. From about 1990 Suharto threw his support behind the Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI) against both his former backers in the military and the pro-democracy movement. This cynical manoeuvre was denounced by the leader of NU, Abdurrahman Wahid, as sectarian and undemocratic, a stance which ended his friendship with Suharto. The ICMI, which incongruously combined business interests, social activists and Muslim intellectuals, was placed under the control of Suharto’s favourite son, B. J. Habibie, which did not prevent Muslim intellectuals of the stature of Nurcholish Madjid from exercising considerable influence in it, but in fact it amounted to ‘the return of sectarian factionalism to the ruling elite itself ’ (Hefner 2000, 140–142, see 128). Madjid became a spiritual leader in these circles, representing the ‘ “high politics” of political civility and principled pluralism’ and the ‘wider Islam’ of all believers, sanctioned by the Qur’ānic injunctions to protect the truth of other revelations. ICMI thus became an ‘open public sphere for discussion and exchange’ (Hefner 2001, 143; see 143–145), opposed to the ‘regimist Islam’ and ‘secular nationalists’ in the military, where there was tension between the ‘green’ (Islamist) and the ‘red and white’ (nationalist) elements, though this did not prevent the suppression of three influential weeklies in 1994 for criticising Habibie’s reckless development policies. It was in the course of these complex political

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manoeuvres that Abdurrahman Wahid emerged as the advocate of a pluralist Islamic democracy, criticising not only both factions in the military, but also the regime that played one off against the other in order to maintain itself in power. Wahid’s ‘ecumenical’ stance in opposing fundamentalists of all types called forth a campaign of slander against him from Suharto and even from within his own organisation, just as the nationalist Megawati Sukarnoputri and the leader of Muhammadiyah, Amien Rais, were also undermined, which left the pro-democracy movement confused and disorientated. ‘Civil society’ (masyarakat madani) itself seemed under threat. Hefner gives a detailed account of these developments (Hefner 2001, chapters 6 and 7), in the course of which, as Haidar Bagir, the ICMI’s publisher, put it, ‘Muslims and non-Muslims are getting lessons in democracy’ (Hefner 2001, 154); only a ‘watermelon Muslim’ – green on the outside, red on the inside – like Adi Sasono seemed able to survive in such a climate (Hefner 2001, 147). Suharto’s fundamental mistake was his failure to realise that the Islamists were not opportunists like himself, but actually wanted democratic reform (see Hefner 2001, 208). The emergence of civil society, however fragile, combined with the Asian economic collapse of 1997 and exacerbated by the ‘loss’ of East Timor in 1999, called forth nothing but violent repression and racist abuse from the beleaguered Suharto, who resigned on 21 May 1999. The regimist Muslims switched their allegiance to Habibie, but the prodemocracy Muslims stood firm: ‘That the bulk of the Muslim leadership rejected these antidemocratic feints bears eloquent testimony to their civil-democratic convictions’ (Hefner 2001, 208). These dramatic events should make us cautious about accepting the widespread assumption that Islam is culturally incompatible with democracy (see Azra 2004; Glancy 2007). The ‘public culture’ of autonomous agency mediated by civil organisations depends on ‘the creation of a civilized and self-limiting state’ in which a Muslim pluralism can flourish, and in creating broadly based civic associations ‘Muslims showed themselves second to none’ in Indonesia. The crucial factor is the temptation of conservative Muslims to ‘dissolve the wall between public and private, and force citizens to virtue’, but, by and large, Indonesia’s Muslim movements have succeeded in ‘drawing themselves down into mass society and away from exclusive elites’ (Hefner 2000, 215, 217). The problem then becomes, just as for Protestants and Catholics in early twentieth-century Europe and America – though it goes back to the Reformation itself in the case of the former, and to the medieval jurists

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in that of the latter – how to maintain religious allegiance while affirming the social relevance of religion. ‘In this setting, traditions laying claim to ultimate meanings face a common dilemma: how to maintain a steadied worldview and social engagement while acknowledging the pluralism of the age’ (Hefner 2000, 218–219). Paradoxically, ‘the absence of aliran [oppositional] politics in Suharto’s New Order administration enabled santri and abangan communities to converge religiously as well as politically’ (Effendy 2003, 203). It may help to put some order into these complex political and religious developments if we abstract from them the following three structural oppositions, which will also provide us with a terminology with which to analyse the equally complex situation in West Papua: 1. Indigenous (or ‘biocosmic’) vs universal (or ‘metacosmic’) religion (see May, 2003, 57–60, 121, 147–150), combinations of which characterise both Indonesian Islam, with its tension between adat and santri, abangan and agama (see below), and Melanesian Christianity, which tries to accommodate indigenous practice and thinking within a ‘contextualised’ theology. 2. Politics itself in its overlap with economic priorities and military prerogatives, vs religion proper as faith commitment, whether Christian or Muslim, which transcends politics (see May, 2008). 3. Ecumenism as an interactive pluralism which, while involving tolerance, goes beyond it to practise interreligious engagement, vs fundamentalism properly so called, which regards scriptural sources as inerrant and beyond criticism, while elevating religious certainty into an unchallengeable ideology. Along these three axes we shall now attempt to plot the interactions between religion and politics in West Papua.

2. Jayapura: Islam in West Papua – Collaborator or Critic? Among the fundamental issues which continue to determine the policies that affect West Papua today are the tensions between the ‘higher’ or ‘universal’ religion (agama) of the Islamic organisations and the ‘local’ or ‘customary’ religion (adat) of Indonesia’s numerous indigenous cultures, also expressed as the opposition between the orthodox or puritan (santri) Islam of the Javanese aristocracy and the ‘mystical’ or ‘traditional’ (abangan) Islam deriving from Sufism which is practised

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predominantly in rural areas. In general, these differences correlate with the contrast between Java with its refined hierarchical culture and what are seen as the more ‘primitive’ ways of life on the ‘outer islands’, the most extreme example of which, of course, is the Melanesian culture of the West Papuans. There is a scarcely-concealed racism in the way these are referred to by the central government, the army and police, and the internal immigrants who continue to stream into West Papua from poorer parts of the archipelago (in the context of the government policy of transmigrasi, as a result of which the ratio of indigenous to expatriate now stands at around 52% to 48%). ‘International and local human rights groups estimate that at least 100,000 Papuans have been killed by the Indonesian security forces’ – not counting possibly twice that number who have died from malnutrition and disease as a result of having to flee to the jungle – and ‘Indonesian soldiers can freely kill any Papuan at any time and in any place for any reason. Since they do not kill Papuans but separatists, who are considered to be enemies of the Indonesian state, they never feel any guilt’ (Tebay 2006, 6–7). All this is taking place in an all-pervasive culture of corruption and impunity in which violence is taken for granted as the way to solve problems. The theological developments in Indonesian Islam discussed above are undoubtedly significant in the wider context of the worldwide struggle between Islamic fundamentalists and progressive Muslims with their different attitudes to the relation between religion and the state (see Jansen 1997, who, while acknowledging Fahmī Huwaydī’s proposition ‘that the basic difference between Islamic and Western culture is the separation between religion and the state’, 7, concludes that ‘during the many centuries preceding the European conquest of the Muslim world, the world of Islam effectively knew a separation of politics and religion’, 12). They are superficially similar to the ‘socially engaged Buddhism’ emerging from other Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, but unlike the engaged Buddhists the progressive Muslims give the impression that Indonesian Islam seems perfectly able to ignore the glaring injustices taking place in West Papua and is mainly preoccupied with itself and its place within the polity of the ‘unitary state’. The resulting account of Islam seems to favour ‘Islamisation’ (santrisasi) rather than ‘indigenisation’ (pribumisasi) and provides no basis for criticising the collusion of the military and the police with the radical Islamists of Laskar Jihad or Jamaah Islamiya as they stir up trouble in Maluku or infiltrate West Papua. We therefore need to look more closely at religious and political developments in that easternmost part of the far-flung nation.

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West Papua has been heavily evangelised, the predominant Christian churches being Evangelical, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic. Evangelical Christianity with its discipline, ritual and biblical orientation is already regarded as ‘traditional religion’, especially in the mountainous interior, whereas in the urban context of the provincial capital Jayapura it is losing ground to the Pentecostals, who have no problems with a multi-ethnic membership and give leadership roles to women (Farhadian 2005, 111, 114). ‘Christianity has acquired the status of tradition among the Dani: the Dani insist that, “we are Christians” ’ (Farhadian 2005, 91), and ‘the urban church has been subsumed into Dani tradition’ (Farhadian 2005, 107), which would seem to confirm Garry Trompf ’s acceptance of Christianity as ‘Melanesian religion’ and the possibility of a fusion or synthesis of ‘biocosmic’, indigenous and ‘metacosmic’, universal religion which is not simply syncretism (see May 1991). In his study of the Dani of the Baliem Valley as they make the transition to the urban lifestyle of Jayapura, Farhadian finds that for them ‘the church is a new ritual’ which ‘serves as a functional substitute for traditional Dani ritual performance’ (Farhadian 2005, 113).3 This does not mean, however, that they do not have recourse to traditional practices such as sorcery which the missionaries encouraged them to abandon (see Farhadian 2005, 141). The Evangelical emphasis is on preaching – by male ministers – and there are cases where the expatriate missionaries live segregated from the indigenous city-dwellers in Western enclaves (Farhadian 2005, 90–95, describing Pos 7, a Dani settlement in the hills above Jayapura). By contrast, ‘Pentecostalism helps bridge diverse ethnicities by making common communication possible. It overcomes the limitation of expository, word-based (i.e. evangelical) worship’ (Farhadian 2005, 120). At the same time, ‘[w]hat is most compelling about the Bible for the Dani is that they see themselves and their own history recorded in its pages’ (Farhadian 2005, 116). The Catholics, for their part, have a strong tradition of social justice teaching to fall back on (see Tebay 2002, 2006; Ladjar 2004; Munninghoff 1995, as quoted by Farhadian 2005, 153–155). Farhadian is able to conclude:

3 Another striking example comes from just over the border in the westernmost part of Papua New Guinea, where the tiny mountain people of the Urapmin in the Telefolmin area of West Sepik Province voluntarily substituted Baptist Christianity for their traditional religion, see Robbins (2004).

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john d’arcy may The church occupies a unique position within society, for as a new community in the social realities of West Papua divided culturally (e.g. Papuan vs pendatang [‘straight hair’, i.e. Indonesian]), religiously (Christian vs Muslim), economically (rich vs poor), racially (e.g. Melanesian vs Austronesian), and educationally (educated vs uneducated) the church affirms that all are ‘one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3: 27) (Farhadian 2005, 106).

Of course, the freedom that is offered by the Evangelical churches is a purely spiritual freedom from sin, whereas the more immediate needs of indigenous Papuans in the urban situation are sufficient education and language ability to find jobs and avoid the temptations of drugs, alcohol, prostitution and violence. Education, however, tends to be Java-centred – ‘learning to be Indonesian’ (Farhadian 2005, 57, citing Karl Heider); Papuans are incited to look west to Southeast Asia rather than east to Melanesia, and they are openly regarded as ‘still stupid’ (masih bodoh), though their customs are found useful for marketing Indonesia as a tourist attraction (Farhadian 2005, 28, 36; in West Papua, he adds, ‘Two worlds and two visions met’, 29). The ‘silent history’ (syarah sunyi) of their ‘conspicuous subjugation’ deserves a much fuller account than can be given here (Farhadian 2005, 153, 25, and for moving testimonies of torture and intimidation, 151– 157; see also Tebay 2006, for numerous individual cases and general deficiencies, and Tapol, the London bulletin of the Indonesia Human Rights Campaign, for further evidence of human rights abuses). One effect of being thrown together with West Papuans of various ethnic backgrounds in the urban context is the realisation that they share a common history of suffering which in turn has given rise for the first time to a sense of ‘Papuanness’: ‘The experience of unity in suffering led to a burgeoning of feeling Papuan…’ (Farhadian 2005, 155–156; prior to the mid-1990s, he remarks elsewhere, the Dani ‘could say, “I’m Christian”, but they could not say, “I’m Papuan” ’, 176). It is thus not surprising that an indeterminate number of Christians became attracted to the West Papuan liberation movement OPM (Operasi Papua Merdeka) at the opposite pole to Evangelical abstention from politics. The OPM, ‘an ad hoc mixture of Christian ideas and local religious aspirations’, sought freedom from what Nicolaas Jouwe, one of the earliest resistance leaders, called West Papua’s ‘second Asian colonizer’ (the first being the Japanese, Farhadian 2005, 29, see 73; a Western informant is quoted as saying: ‘The same people that latched on to the gospel were the ones who latched on to the freedom movement’, 36; for an articulate example

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see Ireeuw 1987). Though the Indonesians had promised progress and prosperity, West Papuans had experienced the opposite; they now have the lowest living standard, not just in Indonesia, but in the whole of Southeast Asia (see Farhadian 2005, 41–42, and Tebay 2006, 21–22, for the alarming statistics).4 It is therefore no wonder than many of them – Farhadian calls them ‘enacted theologians’ – found God in the OPM, ‘the God of the Papuans, the God of Hebrews – our God’ (Farhadian 2005, 162–164). From having embraced a privatised Christianity of interior conversion, West Papuans were now being transformed by the brutal persecution of their people and the ruthless exploitation of their natural resources into agents of political resistance in the public sphere. According to West Papuan theologian Martinus Mawene, there exists among the Christian congregations of the Biak region a spirituality and theology of liberation, and one of its roots is the Mansren movement, first recorded in 1857 as one of the earliest known cargo cults (Mawene 2004; see Steinbauer 1971, 199–206; May, 2005, 207–210; Trompf 1991, chapter 4). In its present form the cult identifies Jesus with Manseren Koreri, i.e. the ‘Papuan Christ’ of the Koreri, or ‘Manseren Manggundi’, the Lord and Master, also known as the Morning Star and thus associated with the independence flag of West Papua (the link between Jesus and Mansren is reported as early as 1863; see Mawene 2004, 163–164). Another component of Papuan Christology, according to Mawene, is the identification of Christ as the ‘peace child’ (tarop tim), a child offered by a warring tribe to its enemies as a way of ending the cycle of payback killings. Having this special status, the peace child may not be harmed, but Jesus, as God’s ‘peace child’, was betrayed and executed. This demonstrates both the depth of human perversity and God’s desire to bring about the reconciliation of humankind (Mawene 2004, 168–171; the offering of a peace child to end conflicts was a practice of the Sawi people). For Mawene, the issue is whether a theology fed by both Papuan and Christian sources can be both ‘critical’ and ‘prophetic’ in the sense of ‘a critical statement containing the word of God’ (Mawene 2004, 178, see 175–178).

4 Highest infant mortality rate (70-200/1000); lowest life expectancy (50.3 years for women); highest HIV infection (20.4 per 100 thousand); ‘Approximately 40% of the HIV and AIDS cases in Indonesia are located in the province of Papua, even though that province has less than 1% of the population’ (Farhadian 2005, 41-42, quoting Butt et al.).

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There is another powerful influence at work, however, which complicates these developments still further. Together with forced Javanisation (Javanisasi) there has been an equally relentless Islamisation (Islamisasi) of West Papua (see Farhadian 2005, 25, 63, 81, 85). The transmigrasi programme, in practice, is for Muslims only, although Christians and others from different parts of Indonesia may migrate freely to West Papua, and the lines of demarcation between Muslim and Christian by no means coincide with those between Malay and Melanesian. Transmigrants, of whom there are estimated to be some 770 thousand in a total population of over two million, are given priority in every respect (see Farhadian 2005, 60, 197, n. 8; Tebay 2006, 16–17).5 In Jayapura, 80% of inhabitants are non-Papuan, while 90% of civil servants in the province are Muslim. Since 1980, the central government has actively supported Islam through the ICMI and dakwah or Islamic propagation groups, giving madrasahs and mosques an estimated ten times the funding available for Christian evangelisation (see Farhadian 2005, 72, 77, 81). It is becoming more common for women to wear the jilbab in public, there are tensions at markets between ‘curly hairs’ (Papuans) and ‘straight hairs’ (pendatang, outsiders, newcomers), and mosques are routinely used for public announcements, thus reinforcing the impression that the promised New Society is for Indonesian Muslims only (see Farhadian 2005, 80–81). There is a sense, however, in which Islam can be an attractive alternative for West Papuans, quite apart from the inducements offered to ‘rice Muslims’ to convert and notwithstanding the presence of extremist groups from elsewhere in Indonesia, such as Laskar Jihad or Jamaah Islamiya. There is confusion surrounding possible military support for Laskar Jihad and nationalistic militant groups (see Tebay 2006, 19–20). Laskar Jihad is considered to be, operating with consent by the Indonesian military. Papuans contend that since 2001 members of Laskar Jihad had been training on mosque properties throughout the province. It is important to note that Laskar Jihad … were not supported by the vast majority of Muslims living in West Papua (Farhadian 2005, 175, see 81–85; Tebay 2006, 37, estimates that 2% of Papuans are Muslim).

5 Statistics relating to West Papua are often approximate, but Tebay gives figures most likely to be reliable: total population at the end of 2002 was 2,387,427 (from 736,700 in 1960), of whom 1,241,462 (52%) were indigenous Papuans and 1,145,965 (48%) were non-Papuans or migrants. In towns and near large mines, however, the disproportion is more marked: 70% migrant to 30% indigenous in Merauke, 80% to 20% in Jayapura.

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Reciprocal conversions, in fact, contribute to the new experience of religious and cultural pluralism on both sides, and while Islam continues to exert pressure, a sense of ecumenism is growing among the Christian churches. A West Papua chapter of the Communion of Churches in Indonesia (PGI) was founded in February 2003, and ‘[a] growing body of educated Papuans and the emerging unity of the churches in Papua may represent hope on the horizon’ (Farhadian 2005, 176; see Tebay 2006, 37–38). The tension between ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘ecumenist’ modalities of Christianity becomes apparent at this point. These comparatively recent developments have led to what may justly be called a ‘peace offensive’ with the proclamation, in the face of continued military violence and all-pervasive racism, of ‘Papua, Land of Peace’. The expression originally chosen, ‘Zone of Peace’ (as cited by Farhadian 2005, 175), was rejected because it suggested a demilitarised zone alongside continued military occupation, whereas West Papuans wanted to stress their indissoluble unity not only among themselves but with the land as such (see Tebay 2006, 35–36). The Christian churches initiated the Forum for Reconciliation of the People of Irian Jaya (Forum Rekonsiliasi Masyrakat Irian Jaya, foreri) on 24 July 1989; it was the so-called ‘Team 100’ from this body who eventually met with President Habibie to ask for Papuan independence. A pastoral letter followed, issued by the three main churches (Roman Catholic and the Protestant GKI and GKII; for details see Farhadian 2005, 171–173). These were timely steps, because the promise of Special Autonomy for West Papua has been thrown into doubt by the subsequent announcement – without any apparent coordination or consultation – of the division of the territory into three separate provinces (only one of which, Irian Jaya Barat, has so far been established), a step which was vehemently opposed by both bodies. ‘Despite this rejection, the central government allowed West Irian Jaya province to conduct its own gubernatorial election on 11 March 2006’ (Tebay 2006, 25, see 22–25). The so-called Second Papuan Congress, i.e. after the abortive attempt to form an indigenous government at the first such congress in October 1961, was actually endorsed and part-funded by President Wahid (Farhadian 2005, 174). The supreme cynicism of the Indonesian military towards peace initiatives is documented by the murder of Theys Eluay, a leader of the Papuan Presidium Council (PDP), which was presenting itself as a non-violent alternative to the OPM, by members of the elite kopassus Special Forces unit immediately after a military dinner given by them in his honour in November 2001, even though he had been a long-time collaborator with

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the Suharto regime (on his convoluted relationship with his rival Tom Beanal, who accepted a seat on the board of Freeport Indonesia, which helped to fund the Papuan Presidium Council, see Leith 2003, 227–230). In response to these ‘continuing violations of human rights in West Papua, the Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist religious leaders have repeatedly issued joint statements calling for justice’ which, they insist, are ‘not motivated by any political interest’, a sentiment reinforced by a statement of Bishop Leo Laba Ladjar: ‘We reaffirm that this is a mission inherent in our faith and not one motivated by any political goal’ (Tebay 2006, 27). Understandable as these statements are, they illustrate the unresolved tension between politics and religion in such a situation. Calls for justice in a structurally unjust situation have unavoidable political overtones, and it must be assumed that the Muslim leaders who lent their voices to these affirmations of human rights in the face of blatant injustice were implicitly criticising those aspects of their own government’s policies which make forced Islamisation the vehicle of oppression in West Papua. Alongside economic empowerment, support for education and improved health care, Catholic, Protestant and Muslim bodies acknowledge growing plurality as a positive value but note ‘an absence of democracy’ (Tebay 2006, 32, see 27–32). Tebay warns that the churches and the growing religious pluralism can be manipulated by both the government and the separatist movement, and he notes that though ‘there have been no violent conflicts between adherents of the different religions in West Papua … [t]here is a lack of communication and coordination within and between religions … There is theological conflict within religions and a tendency to exploit religion for political purposes’ as well as ‘signs of the misuse of pluralism’ (Tebay 2006, 4, 18).6 As values they share in common, the religious leaders recognise plurality, justice, unity – on the understanding that ‘no particular religion or culture is taken as the foundation of unity or as a criterion of judgement’ (Tebay 2006, 39) – harmony, ‘with God, one’s neighbours and the whole of creation’, emphasising that ‘a harmonious relationship with nature is of fundamental importance for peace’, whereas ‘a damaged relationship with nature destroys not only the material and spiritual habitat of many people, the ecosystems of forests and resources such as food and water, 6 Tebay gives figures of 1,235,670 Protestants, 543,030 Catholics, 498,329 Muslims, 7,249 Hindus and 4,123 Buddhists.

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but also human life’ (Tebay 2006, 40–41), solidarity, togetherness, sincere fraternity and welfare (see Tebay 2006, 36–42 for a fuller description of these values). It is because ‘a lack of justice constitutes a threat to peace’ (Tebay 2006, 44) that interfaith collaboration becomes credible as a means of preventing violent conflict and drawing on cultural resources for building peace (Tebay 2006, 44–47). The religious leaders thus regard the ‘Papua, Land of Peace’ initiative as a platform for development and a rejection of militant fundamentalism, leading them to call for an independent enquiry on human rights violations, consistent implementation of the Papuan Special Autonomy law and the promotion of democracy. According to the Indonesian human rights organisation elsham, far from improving the human rights situation in West Papua, the introduction of Special Autonomy six years ago has facilitated local corruption and led to an increase in abuses, as documented by Tapol (No. 185, January 2007: 8–9; see also No. 186, April 2007: 9–11, on the depredations of the TNI in the interior: ‘The result is a military fiefdom, with all the illicit spoils of control over the mining and logging industries, as well as the broader economy, being the TNI’s reward’, citing Sydney University’s West Papua Project). They stress that in helping indigenous Papuans to become agents of development they are not advocating separatism: ‘The peace campaign in West Papua clearly has nothing to do with what the Indonesian government calls the “Papua separatist movement” ’ (Tebay 2006, 4; see 48–56 for detailed accounts of these positions). The statement issued by the religious leaders from a workshop on ‘Religions as Agents of Justice and Peace’ notes ‘the tendency to exploit religion for political purposes and the theological conflict created by government policy’, ‘the lack of any commitment to promote development in Papua’ and the prevailing ‘culture of corruption’: We strive to ensure that the people are made the actors in the process of development… We stress the importance of ethics in decision making as well as the importance of employing peaceful means and upholding human dignity in addressing problems (Tebay 2006, 65–68).

Each religious tradition has its cherished exhortations to peace, but in a situation as fraught with injustice as West Papua these cannot afford to remain mere platitudes. However, if they are to have any political effect they must be mediated to governments through civil society. To what extent is this actually happening in Muslim-dominated Indonesia? The criminal justice system is riddled with corruption and inconsistencies;

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the military derives about 75% of its revenue from business ventures, including security services to mining operations such as Freeport in West Papua; these in turn supply a major proportion of state income; and the government seems to have only limited influence on both the economy and the military. Leith (2003) offers the first comprehensive analysis of the extent to which the Suharto dictatorship fed off the willing collaboration of the Freeport McMoRan mining venture to fund its vast system of patronage, while the company paid the TNI to quell local resistance. As the mining industry accounts for approximately 14% of GDP and 20% of total export earnings (1999 figures cited by Leith 2003, 44), it is evident that no Indonesian government could contemplate ‘letting go’ of West Papua. In addition, the offer of Special Autonomy has effectively polarised resistance into an M-group (pro-independence) and an O-group (pro-autonomy), adding to tensions between factions in the OPM and between it and the Papuan Presidium Council (see Towey 2002, 47–48). The question remains whether the ‘social tawhīd’ of Indonesian theologians or the ‘liberation theology’ of West Papuan intellectuals are capable of being or actually are the driving forces behind initiatives which, while ecumenical in intent, are inescapably political. 3. Conclusion: ‘Fundamentalist’ and ‘Ecumenist’ Modalities of Christianity and Islam in West Papua Even though it seems obvious that both the Muslims advocating violent repression and the Christians in favour of violent resistance are tiny minorities in their respective religious and political communities in West Papua, it remains true that peace initiatives such as the more secular Papuan Presidium Council and the avowedly religious foreri have political implications, even if they are not directly political in intent. Human rights advocacy and resistance to exploitation imply radical changes in political structures, judicial standards and economic distribution in Indonesia. The religion that transcends politics may – but need not – issue in fundamentalist absolutism; it may just as easily inspire political commitment precisely as authentic faith commitment. This in turn may – but need not – take the form of an orthodoxy abstracted from localised cultural practices and mentalities, but it may also interact with these to yield a recognisably Indonesian Islam and Melanesian Christianity – and perhaps even an Indonesian Christianity and a Melanesian Islam? Only time will tell.

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One of the key transformations of both Christianity and Islam in West Papua has been their emergence from denominational isolation in the one case, and cultural homogeneity in the other, into the public sphere of a fragile civil society, where the experience of pluralism and the challenge of working for peace with justice have ‘objectified’ them in their own eyes and made them, whether they like it or not, ‘political’ factors in Indonesian public discourse. It is at this point that the bifurcation into ‘ecumenist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ modalities tends to occur, according to whether religious leaders and their communities willingly accept pluralism or retreat into the security of absolutism. The extent to which an accommodation with indigenous cultures has played a part in each tradition’s development would seem to exercise a crucial influence over this decision. It must also be asked whether the option for fundamentalism goes hand in hand with a preference for – or at least a toleration of – violence as a means of solving problems and maintaining stability, whereas the option for ecumenism deliberately renounces violence and seeks dialogue. A further issue concerns the definition of goals: autonomy or independence? Those engaged in ecumenical dialogue seem to be quite clear that they do not support separatism, though they insist on human rights and just economic development. If these really are the operative factors in ‘Papua, Land of Peace’, then the initiative by religious leaders in this remote and neglected province could turn out to be exemplary for the whole Asia-Pacific and beyond. Bibliography Azra, A. 2003. ‘Militant Islamic Movements in Southeast Asia: Socio-political and Historical Contexts’. Kultur: The Indonesian Journal for Muslim Cultures 3 (1): 17–27. —— . 2004. ‘The Challenge of Democracy in the Muslim World: Traditional Politics and Democratic Political Culture’. In Dialogue in the World Disorder: A Response to the Threat of Unilateralism and World Terrorism, ed. K. Helmanita, I. Abubakar and D. Afrianty. 203–214. Jakarta: Pusat Bahasa dan Budaya Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatulla Jakarta and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. Beck, H. 2003. Les Musulmans d’Indonésie. Turnhout: Éditions Brepols. Effendy, B. 2003. Islam and the State in Indonesia. Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press; Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Farhadian, C. E. 2005. Christianity, Islam, and Nationalism in Indonesia. New York and London: Routledge. Federspiel, H. M. 2001. Islam and Ideology in the Emerging Indonesian State: The Persetuan Islam (persis), 1923 to 1957. 2nd rev. ed. Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill. Geertz, C. 1960. The Religion of Java. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glancy, B. 2007. Liberalism without Secularism? Rachid Gannouchi and the Theory and Politics of Islamic Democracy. Dublin: Columba Press.

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Hefner, R. 2000. Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hooker, M. B. 2003. Indonesian Islam: Social Change through Contemporary Fatawa. Sydney: Allen & Unwin; Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Ireeuw, T. M. 1987. ‘An Appeal for Melanesian Christian Solidarity’. In The Gospel is Not Western: Black Theologies from the Southwest Pacific, ed. G. W. Trompf. 170–182. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Jansen, J. J. G. 1997. The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism. London: Hurst. Ladjar, L. L. 2004. ‘Different Religions United in Building a Culture of Peace in the Land of Papua’. In CIIR Round Table on Inter-Faith Collaboration for Peace and Development in West Papua and Mindanao, ed. T. A. Fernando and P. M. Josefa. London: CIIR. Leith, D. 2003. The Politics of Power: Freeport in Suharto’s Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Mawene, M. T. 2004. ‘Christ and Theology of Liberation in Papua’. Exchange 33: 153–179. May, J. D. 1991. ‘Syncretism or Synthesis? An Anticipatory Sketch of Religious Change in the Pacific’. South Pacific Journal of Mission Studies 1 (4): 18–21. —— . 2003. Transcendence and Violence: The Encounter of Buddhist, Christian and Primal Traditions. New York and London: Continuum. —— . 2005. ‘The Religions and the Powers in West Papua’. In Gottesgabe. Vom Geben und Nehmen im Kontext gelebter Religion. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Theodor Ahrens. 199–213. Frankfurt: Lembeck. —— . 2008. ‘Political Religion: Secularity and the Study of Religion in Global Civil Society’. In Religion, Spirituality and Social Science: A Reader, ed. Alia Imtoual and Basia Spalek. 9–22. Bristol: Policy Press. Melanesian Institute. 1985. ‘Muslim-Christian Dialogue in Melanesia’. Melanesian Journal of Theology 1 (1): 91–96. Munninghoff, H. F. M. 1995. Violations of Human Rights in the Timika Area of Irian Jaya: A Report by the Catholic Church of Jayapura. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/boyer/ fp/bishop-irian-jaya. Owen, N. G. ed. 2005. The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saleh, F. 2001. Modern Trends in Islamic Theological Discourse in Twentieth Century Indonesia: A Critical Survey. Leiden: Brill. Steinbauer, F. 1971. Melanesische Cargo-Kulte. Neureligiöse Heilsbewegungen in der Südsee. München: Delp. Tebay, N. 2002. ‘The Role of the Catholic Church in Defending and Promoting Human Rights in West Papua’. Jakarta Post, 25 April. http://pidp.eastwestcenter.org/pireport/2002/May/05–03-1.htm. Tebay, N. 2006. Interfaith Endeavours for Peace in West Papua. Aachen: Missio. Towey, O. 2002. Papua: An Analysis of a Conflict, its Origins and Outcomes. M.Phil. thesis, Trinity College Dublin. Trompf, G. W. 1991. Melanesian Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

WORKING OUT OF TWO MINDSETS: CRITICAL METHODOLOGY AND PNG VILLAGE TRADITIONAL WAYS Patrick F. Gesch Abstract The article sets out to describe two different ways of thinking and operating that are found in Papua New Guinea today. It seeks to put them in relationship to one another, and to clarify their areas of operation and validity. The different ways are termed the Village Traditional mindset and the Critical Methodological mindset. Although modern villagers are often charged with simply confusing aspects of the modern world by trying to react to them out of traditional premises, it is here proposed that the two mindsets are doing different things; they are trying to answer different questions put to reality. The village viewpoint seeks to account for social and personal values involved in a set of events. The critically methodological view wants to explain the events as separate from human involvement and as relationships established to exist among things in themselves. It is probably necessary to hold both views separately and alternately at the present time. The ideas of Robin Horton and experiences of dialogue between religious traditions are used to enlighten this discussion, and examples are given where the two mindsets function together.

Introduction It is a matter of daily concern in Papua New Guinea that citizens are working out of two different mindsets at the same time. I believe it is not difficult to work out of two mindsets at the same time. These viewpoints, however, do not rest easily beside each other, and today in educational and health circles, charges result that villagers are ‘ignorant’, ‘foolish’, ‘schizophrenic’, ‘hypocritical’ and ‘out of their depth in the modern world’. Such charges do not promote mutual respect and that is a great pity because it is obvious that the PNG lifestyle and tradition have a great attraction for their outside critics. The protagonists should have an even playing field, although describing the mindsets here is problematic. Let us try to nail down the two mindsets in discussion. When I sat at the feet of my Doktorvater, Dr Garry Winston Trompf, as the first doctoral graduate from the new Religious Studies Department at Sydney University at the end of the seventies, he would reach me

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down a slice of toasted cheese sandwich (made not by his own hands, but by one of his daughters engaged as child labour in the background), and say, ‘No, we haven’t nailed it down yet’ (cf. Trompf 2008, 9). In this article, I wish to say that the present state of working out of two mindsets is a stable state and that it is not at all difficult to live out of two mindsets at the same time.1 A mindset is not a profound epistemological account of knowing. It is a pragmatic way of thinking that operates at a certain level to get done the work of the world. Although it is based on highly ramified convictions about life and reality, it is that common sense which is ready to make compromises and take shortcuts for the sake of a successful outcome. We must be content with living in parallel worlds; this is not such a difficult thing to do. The problem and the task are like this: a Papua New Guinean astride these two mindsets today sees the world by selecting certain evidence as highlighted by the tradition and by modern times. The villager understands certain things and resolves to commit to action with the best lights that tradition and this modernity offer. My view is that these two mindsets are not commensurable; they cannot be integrated on a continuum except insofar as it is the same person who is drawing on both worlds, using the same basic human capacities in each sphere. I mean to produce evidence of the present reality rather than be prescriptive of anything. I am certainly not advising anyone to work out of worlds kept parallel and separate from one another, but it is the best we can do at times. In this paper I am concerned with two given mindsets as two different relations of thought to action. Both procedures are human activities which can be explained to each other in a piecemeal way. The fact that one side continually surprises or is outflanked by the other is an indication of a lasting difference in terms of the whole of culture. At this time each side must be granted its autonomy because the construction of a liveable personal and social meaning is at stake. The operations of human meaning making can be shown to be the same at times but the goals for which life is explained are different. We are not sufficiently masters of the two worldviews and we do not know enough about each mindset to compare them fully. A unity will be arrived at by the cumulative decisions of a society of operators living out of either mindset. 1 The satisfaction for stating this emerged from a conversation with Anthony Reagan when we were trying our best to consider how two different viewpoints work together in PNG.

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While it is my interest to identify how the traditional village mindset is operating when PNG people are dealing with my world, it is remarkable at the same time how European-type people jump to quick, false ideas of what PNGans are about. The rapid reification of PNG language about spirits and magic when spoken of by these Europeans is the most obvious case in point. 1. Evidence for the Mindsets A mindset is a personal and social living tradition of selected experiences, understandings and resolutions, which serves a purpose in living. It is oriented to explanation and action so that a person lives well and is in control of one’s own life as much as possible; it is an orientation in praxis rather than theory. The mindsets are described for their own limited coherence and usefulness. Let us start by identifying the two mindsets as PNG village traditional and the modern scientific, and present a couple of examples to show the rub between these mindsets. The basic task of this essay is to describe the two mindsets adequately, and to allow a place for their co-existence. The modern scientific mindset is characterised by applying epistemological rules which are cyclical and self-correcting; which value impersonal canons of experience, understanding and judgement; and which imply a commitment to objectivity in knowledge and practice. The village traditional mindset is here characterised by an essentially religious stance in which agencies disproportionate to and discontinuous with human reckoning and ability are expected to intervene or to have caused a state of affairs. It is mostly circumscribed by the interpersonal resources of the village world as it existed in traditional times. The ways of this mindset have been described at length in Gesch (1985). We will now illustrate the contrasts of the mindsets by a set of five cases: Case 1 In a remote mission station in Nuku, West Sepik Province, the sister-incharge and her nursing aids were told about a young woman who had carried a child and had had great difficulty in delivering the placenta. By the time the woman came to the station she was suffering from septicaemia and was in danger of death. The station clinic brought out all its supply of antibiotics, and radioed for supplies from the neighbours. The nurses went into Intensive Care mode and watched over the woman for

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two weeks, day and night. Finally it seemed she was turning the corner and would survive. At that time the villagers brought in an old man who had a reputation as a ‘bush doctor’ or glasman (Tok Pisin [henceforth TP]: a person who can discern meanings from events and appearances). The little old man came into the ward of the clinic, dressed in grubby clothes, yellowed from age and smoke—something of a health hazard himself in that antiseptic environment. The old man chewed some herbs, sprayed some juices from his mouth over the woman, circled her with some plants while speaking words quietly, and then left. After a couple of days the woman was well recovered and could walk around. The village community, in deep gratitude, gave the old man K100, but gave the clinic nothing. In this and the examples to follow we should see that the traditional village belief is operating as if in full possession of the field of understanding. The village people have little experience or vocabulary to deal with biomedicine and little development of a scientific understanding is taking place in this case. The most difficult thing in this case is to see the justice of the matter, when the clinical personnel invested so much of their resources of time and medicine for the woman, while the old man had only to address the spirits that he found to be active in this case. It is apparent, however, that the villagers valued the old man’s intervention highly, and were not so impressed with the value of the nurses’ work. A medical officer, on hearing this case, exclaimed: ‘They are ignorant.’ He meant this in the simple sense of saying that the villagers had no insight into and did not understand the agencies of infection. But such a label spontaneously becomes a smear on the whole traditional lifestyle. Case 2 A community from one village of the East Sepik Province were living together in Sisiak, in Madang, and making their living from carving articles out of wood. They were given a grant from the Tourism Office to build a house out of traditional local materials to display their goods. As members of the Church community, individuals told me that the opening of the display house was imminent, and invited me to come along to the opening event. I told them that I was most keen to be on hand and to take part. Suddenly, one Sunday morning, I was told that the building had already been opened. I was severely disappointed, as I knew that it must have been done with a lot of colourful dancing and symbols.

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I asked why I had not been informed and invited to the actual event. The answers were hopelessly vague. Finally one church leader gave the explanation: ‘The leaders of the community wanted to take no chances. This display house represents our livelihood and we need to influence tourists to come and purchase our products. So the leaders insisted on killing chickens at each of the carved posts of the house, and sprinkling the blood on the posts. They did not think that you, as the local parish priest, would like that, so we could not invite you.’ I felt doubly disappointed, that I had missed the opening and also the chicken killing ritual. The clash here is one of preferring sacrifice to spirits over Church belonging. In this case, members of other Sepik communities within Sisiak were quick to accuse the first community of being tubel (TP: ambivalent, or hypocritical in church contexts). They were trying to hold onto traditional village beliefs on the one side, while still identifying themselves as practicing Christians. Again, the traditional religious practices are being asserted as reliable. This was an important venture and no time to equivocate about the tried and true values of the tradition. There might be some novelty in the town enterprise, but the task of attracting customers and winning their approval for the goods on sale were well within village ability. Must we say these Christians are hypocrites, or can we acknowledge here two distinct feelings about what is religiously valid? Case 3 The villagers generally would like to think that deeds by fellow villagers in the townships are beyond judgement, saying that town and the present days are a matter of laik bilong wanwan (TP: you can do whatever you like). However, when I reported in the village that one of their young men had four wives in town, and did not feel restricted in any way, an older man commented quietly, ‘[y]ou can do that in town, but if it happened here in the village, you would die by sanguma’ (TP: witchcraft). Because one of the young man’s marriages is with a woman from a hostile Sepik village, the people in the home village are starting to demand K7,000 and seven pigs from this young man, because seven deaths are laid to the responsibility of the other village in past times. His own brother states strongly that if one of his children becomes mortally sick in town, then the woman from the other Sepik village will die by his hand and he will happily go to prison for nine years.

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This presents the force of witchcraft against the ideals of personal love. The ideas of an arranged marriage or of a proscribed marriage are not welcome thoughts in urban life. However, the main sanction comes from the history of killings between the villages, and is based on a conviction that close family relatives will be made sick and will die in the remote towns because of the judicial power of the sanguma agency exercised by village authorities as a group with complex rules and motivations. This situation is not to be taken lightly: a serious illness or accident on the part of family members might lead to the death of the other woman. The freedom of individual choice in urban life has received a hostile reception in the home villages. We could say that personal psychology was transformed by the utter seriousness of a legal determination from the community. The word for witchcraft here is not to be reified or personified too quickly by English speakers. When pressed for an explanation of the witches or spirits involved here, some men gave me the expression ‘samting bilong graun i kirap’ (TP, which I believe means: the stirring of a thing of the enduring earth), and others have told me to think of spirits as ‘samting bilong stori’ (TP, which I would translate as: a focus of many relationships). Case 4 A related example comes from the viewpoint of a villager who came to work in town and wanted to reap the benefits of the superannuation scheme into which he had been subsumed. He went to the office of the fund and showed his registration number and asked for his entitlements. The woman at the desk said that his name simply did not appear on the computer. He decided to go away and try again another day. Next time also, the woman entered the name and number he gave and it found no correspondence in the computer. The worker was not alarmed. He stated that the settlement people knew about these things and could take care of them. So he killed a chicken and gave it to one of his fellow villagers, a glasman. The blood was sprinkled around the settlement residence for the cooling of disputes that the family was involved in. The glasman went to sleep and had a dream in which his spirit went to the home village and wrestled with the offending ‘samting bilong graun’ (TP: ‘a thing of the earth’, which can be further interpreted as: a determination emerging from the home community). Next day the worker went to the superannuation office, gave his name and number and received directly the assurance that his benefits would be

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paid. The woman in the office was reported as saying that she had been forgetting to insert a ‘1’ as necessary prefix to the member’s registration number. But now she remembered to insert it and things functioned normally. The elaborate reliance on ceremonials from the traditional village here indicates that, even if computers were a novel context, the reality of the situation was to be seen in the operations of traditional religion. The preference here is given to dreams and magic over computer technology. The expatriate villagers asserted their worldview was more basic than modern scientific views of human-computer interaction. Their explanation based their difficulties on social disputes rather than operator error. They refused to be oppressed by technical systems of operation, and insisted that their views of social adjustment were useful in all human circumstances. Case 5 When I was new to a village an old man, Pasuan, came weeping to me as I was about to make my departure. I asked others what he was saying to me. They said, ‘[h]is thirteen year old daughter has died. He wants you to have a dream of her, take a photograph of her, and bring it to him so that he can ask her who killed her by sorcery.’ When I got to know them better over the years, these villagers told me that they had thought I was a dead man returned. ‘When we see new priests and sisters coming to the village, we look at their features and we say to one another, “She is your mother,” or “He is your kandere” (mother’s brother).’ From one side this is just a fanciful toying with the application of modern technology and race relations. However, it also represents entrenched village beliefs about the dead, their knowledge and ways of discernment, which are at the very heart of so-called magic. What the villagers want to know here are answers to their own set of traditional religious questions. The basic opposition here is between the spirits and cultural differences. It is not a bad thing to be closely identified with the family of new-found friends, but such a view does not accord with my own selfunderstanding. Nor do I believe that my dreams are so concrete as to be registered with camera technology. Nor do I attribute such personal reality to photographic images. But I see that sorcery has its own way of working and I feel it would be awful to live in the village with the idea that someone has wanted to kill me or my family out of hatred or cruel justice.

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In the Shadow of Garry Trompf I expect that Garry Trompf would be bemused to hear once more of the subversion of modern forms by living traditional systems. Even though he has often been a churchman, his hankering for sub-telluric forms has been just as obvious. I expect that his deep respect for traditions and their ideas would require him to pause at each of the cases here and consider their deeper payback elements (Trompf 1994). 2. What are the Two Mindsets? The holding of two mindsets does cause difficulties. From Australia, as I write, we hear the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, agreeing that three months of mourning for a dead person amongst Aboriginal communities is ‘bad workplace practice’ (Today Show, 7 July 2006). In PNG, extended families exhaust their collective financial resources to send the bodies of dead people back to the villages. Students must leave their colleges because their sicknesses become exacerbated by reports of envious disputes and ritual revenge on them from back home in the village. A cargo cult type movement lasting already more than a hundred years holds a deadly shootout with police.2 Hospital researchers uncover a traditional interpretation for nearly every patient in the hospital while they are enjoying the benefits of scientifically prepared drugs and treatments.3 What are the two mindsets we are trying to describe in PNG? 1. The Village Traditional Mindset The mindset we are trying to describe for Papua New Guinea (with particular reference to the Momase Region) is simply in possession of the 2 Front page, Papua New Guinea Post-Courier, 1st June 2006. The events belong to the context of the Black Jesus Movement of Steven Tari in the Amele District behind Madang. The unconfirmed belief in Madang is that a number of people were killed in the village in a raid by police. A list of 63 women and girls were taken to court and some jailed as ‘flower girls’ in the same event. The shameful abuse of this man when captured and the parading of his humiliation on the front pages of the newspapers made him a closely modeled Jesus figure, even to cries of ‘Crucify him, crucify him’ (editorial, The National, 19th March 2007). 3 PNG students from Divine Word University have conducted one-on-one interviews with patients in the hospital over the course of the past three years. My evaluation of these texts is that in roughly 60% of the cases they are spontaneously presented with interpretations of illness which would be classified as deriving from traditional village religious beliefs. The other 40% were simply not greatly concerned with their illness or were successfully recovering.

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field for everyone who takes their point of origin with the village, at least to the extent that they feel bound to their own traditional village. This would include most Papua New Guineans I believe, although it is possible these days for individuals and families to be estranged from the home village for a very long time, and by kinds of employment that leave little time for reflection on village realities. I have been happy to describe the four pillars of traditional village religion in terms which I find functional and useful (Gesch 1985): 1. magic is mostly a social discernment process 2. initiation delivers the demand for a personal conversion process 3. spirits present the key points of cultural foundation, personal and clan ownership and also personal conscience 4. new religious movements extend the initiation process into the needs of the modern mixed world. This functional view makes no attempt to deny or integrate traditional spiritual realities, but does account for such a great deal of behaviour that it makes conversation possible between emic and etic views of the tradition. This village traditional mindset comes from the intense world of the face-to-face village community with its awareness of historical antecedents and various forms of social links and networks. As Margaret Mead and the old anthropologists used to say: These villages represent unique laboratories in social engineering and have produced communities which have survived in a robust way for perhaps 50 thousand years or more in PNG.4 Considering that the Christian story goes back no further than four thousand years and the Internet has a history barely fifteen years old, it is well to be impressed with the depth of the perspective which applies in the PNG village. Robin Horton wrote a milestone essay on ‘the convergences of primal religion with the West and science.’ I would endorse what he gives as one of the basic keys for interpreting the worldview of the village: Personality is the basic category for interpreting life events. Since the overriding aim of explanation is to disclose order and regularity underlying apparent chaos, the search for explanatory analogies must tend towards those areas of experience most closely associated with such qualities … The human scene is the locus par excellence of order, 4 ‘The work of recording these unknown ways of life had to be done now – now – or they would be lost forever’ (Mead 1972, 137).

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The village person required to take action in response to a set of circumstances goes through a logical process of sorting evidence which they select as relevant and then seeking possible suitable theories to find a causal explanation and an appropriate course of action. One extended family I know suffered the loss of ten houses in a village fire. The strangeness of this event quickly went to witchcraft (sanguma) explanations. One of the big men in the clan was suspected because he had the motivation in seeking to be custodian of a little grandson. This was discussed for a while until people went back to the preferred explanation that a dead mother who had actually been struck by one of her sons before she died, must surely have put this grave offence before the sanguma of another part of the village. The fire was a consequence of that witchcraft. Later again it was decided that the evidence did not fit this explanation either, and the fire was simply the retribution demanded by the brotherhood (or sisterhood) of sanguma from the big man’s personal family for the others’ having helped him in sanguma work. The point here for us is of course not the content of the evidence and the arguments, but to see a process of careful argument based on selected evidence and an acceptable range of ideas. At the same time, if the modern scientific viewpoint were to ask for a journalistic account of the fire, it could readily be given: someone let an indoor fireplace burn unchecked; it was a hot dry season; the flames had already generated intense heat inside the first house before being seen from outside. It is just that these explanations do not go to the heart of the trouble and the pain felt by the householders who were left homeless. The village traditional view seeks out and propagates accounts of the world for things which are noteworthy and provocative, giving an answer in terms of how this affects a personality or which might accord with personalised motives, and this is done in an open-ended manner revised by evidence newly brought to bear. One account of a sickness which I was given began with the medical doctor’s view of the complaint, and a review of the procedures and medications which were prescribed. The account then went further over a range of village alternatives for causes and cures: tumbling into the place of a spirit; the warnings of dreams about the jealousies of others; the effects of sanguma – as discerned by the action of a bush doctor, who then had emetics and whispered spells to prescribe; moving into Christian prayer, and the actions of a prayer group. There is a whole menu of interpretations available,

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perhaps to be called upon one after the other. Although an agreed explanation is desirable, nothing really gets closed off. There is no doubt that the traditional view suffers at times from bad science5 and a lack of the critical methodology modern urban life demands. Storms are not reliably deflected by spells. Those called witches cannot on demand eat the contents of a tin without opening it. I, for one, do not expect spells to have a direct action on the malaria parasite or on conception of a child. But many concerns of persons overlap with strictly physical science. Christians too find it quite reasonable to pray in time of storms, barrenness and sickness without wishing to transgress against canons of the scientific method. Christians claim that their activities are essentially following and appreciating the works and the ways of the Lord, not anticipating them in any causal or predictive way. In a like manner the village traditional view can be put under the category of divination or discernment. The man who shouts at the storm to drive it off is involved in a group exercise trying to see the social and personal connections to be made with this event. So much of what goes under the title of ‘magic’ is the action of putting an event into the public arena, and trying to read meanings out of it. The bad science will be revised, but the meaning for us in the event still effects us. These days it is fashionable for young people to come back to the village from the towns and to express scepticism in village events: ‘What is the painankle speechmaker doing? He is wasting his time if he thinks he can effect some result.’ ‘Those people think they can affect the weather.’ They are betraying a good involvement in village beliefs on their own part, and searching for alternatives in a way that is more political than scientific. 2. The Modern Scientific Mindset The mindset that we wish to use in contrast to the village traditional is the modern scientific mindset as an approach to life, something of a prejudice usually. A few points taken from Horton might help to expand on what is meant here. Horton years ago in Africa presented an argument for continuity between two ways of thinking that roughly 5

While sitting at the seashore and contemplating dramatic seasonal tides, I stated that the moon was the cause of this. PNGans observed that the moon was still just rising, looked no different from other times and was being invoked to explain both our low tide and the high tide of people over the ocean, so the more likely theory was that winds caused tides. As an amateur cosmologist it would have been foolish of me to argue further, but I expect that one of us is using good science, and the other is using bad science. What exactly were our respective hypotheses trying to explain?

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correspond to what we have been calling village traditional and modern scientific mindsets. These do not simply correspond to a religion and science debate. Some of the basic theoretical positions shared by critical and traditional ways of thinking are that explanatory theory seeks for regularity underlying apparent anomaly, and that theory places things in a causal context wider than that provided by common sense. Other comparisons follow. The tradition does not turn to a religious explanation for everything, only in matters of serious concern, and the most reliable focus for attribution is persons and the social. Common sense does have a role everywhere, and the level of theory varies with context. Thus we get a hierarchy of religious explanations in the tradition. All theory analyses and abstracts the objects of common sense and then tries to put things together for better understanding. There are pluralities of spirits, but they can be proposed as collective categories according to the things attributed to them. Analogy and models are used for explanation, but these models are sometimes developed in ways that distort their simple forms. Spirits therefore gather distorted features as models in the effort to join together things attributed to them. These are points that I would endorse for an understanding of the PNG traditional and scientific mindsets. After bringing together science and village tradition on the level of their own theory and methods, Horton proposes the basic difference between the two. ‘What I take to be the key difference is a very simple one. It is that in traditional cultures there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically oriented cultures, such an awareness is highly developed. It is this difference we refer to when we say that traditional cultures are “closed” and scientifically oriented cultures “open” ’ (Horton 1967, 155).6 It is well to notice that Horton speaks of a developed awareness of alternatives in theory. This is not the same as saying that the villagers do not know alternative ways of doings things or alternative ideas and theories. It is rather to speak of an attitude to working with knowledge. I believe this view of Horton is a credible analysis of the relation between the two mindsets. The continuity that he champions is on the

6 I have read a review of a 1982 article of Horton in which Horton wishes to dispose of the ‘closed’ and ‘open’ terms of contrast as not sustainable. ‘Horton remains convinced, however, that “the basic comparative exercise itself stands vindicated. The continuity thesis is virtually undamaged” ’ (Penner 1986, 659).

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level of processes of human thinking rather than on the results of that as knowledge or as developed epistemologies. On the one hand he deals with the difference and the factual lack of global experience which is felt in the PNG village. On the other side he does not rule out a future where the two mindsets will have equal cultural status, developing while holding their discontinuities and differences. The modern scientific mindset thus becomes a human capacity shared between villager and urban scientist looking forward to cross-cultural and multi-cultural experiences which will build on village traditional common sense with the canons of method and criticism. Horton wants to explain his motive for choosing to live close to the village tradition where he has discovered ‘an intensely poetic quality in everyday life and thought, and a vivid enjoyment of the passing moment—both driven out of sophisticated Western life by the quest for purity of motive and the faith in progress’ (Horton 1967, 179). As needful as this purity and faith in science might be, they are joyless when exclusive or wholly dominant. 3. Need to Establish the Legitimacy of Both Existing Views I would like to give a little time to discussing the utter seriousness of giving space today to the views currently held by traditional village thinking. I would not like to be taken as presenting these ideas as a call for patience, that everything will eventually evolve and work out for the best, and that the PNG villager over time will think just like the scientist or the theologian of the towns. One developed Christian attitude to traditional religions at the present time is the call for dialogue. Since the dialogue between Christianity and the traditional village religion these days takes place within the lives and minds of the same persons, it must mean the promotion of the traditional village religion. There can be no dialogue where the motive is the extinction of the partner, or its absorption or subversion. Christians must do all they can to enhance, meet and rejoice in the events of traditional religion, because it is here that the encounter with the Holy is taking place. Some amends for the past might be made by way of the revival of cultures. No stronger case can be made for promoting traditional village religions than that made by George Tinker, a North American Indian, Lutheran pastor and academic. He is also engaged in revivalist practice, which has seen such as the following: a fifteen year old boy inserts hooks into the flesh of his back and drags a buffalo skull around the dance ground for days until the flesh rips open to give him release. He is

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praying for his father, who is destroying their family by his alcoholic addiction.7 Tinker makes his case for cultural revival in terms of cultural and religious genocide which North American Indians suffered at the hands of missionaries. He writes, To state the case baldly and dramatically, my thesis is that the Christian missionaries—of all denominations working among American Indian nations – were partners in genocide. Unwittingly no doubt, and always with the best of intentions, nevertheless the missionaries were guilty of complicity in the destruction of Indian cultures and tribal social structures – complicity in the devastating impoverishment and death of the people to whom they preached (Tinker 1993, 4).

He explains further his views on genocide: Cultural genocide can be defined as the effective destruction of a people by systematically or systemically (intentionally or unintentionally in order to achieve other goals) destroying, eroding, or undermining the integrity of the culture and system of values that defines a people and gives them life … In North American mission history, cultural genocide almost always involved an attack on the spiritual foundations of a people’s unity by denying the existing ceremonial and mythological sense of a community in relationship to the Sacred Other. Finally, it erodes a people’s self-image as a whole people by attacking or belittling every aspect of native culture (Tinker 1993, 6).

He even ventures to make the statement: ‘Cultural genocide is more subtle than overt military extermination, yet it is no less devastating to a people’ (Tinker 1993, 5). He gives the example of Fr Junipero Serra, beatified by Pope John Paul II, but a missionary who had to witness the wasting of his flock by 70% during his ministry. George Tinker is giving a warning to all indigenous peoples that loss of cultural and religious heritage can be utterly destructive for a people. What goes under the headings of village religion and magic, belief and ritual must remain unconditionally in the hands of the people, under their control as they develop these cultural goods, free from campaigns to belittle the system as a whole. For those more inclined to see cultural goods in terms of dollars and cents, there is further warning to be taken from contemporary events in Canada.

7 Personal communication, July 2003, Roger Schroeder of Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, witness to the revival.

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The Catholic Church in Canada has agreed to pay out nearly $80 million (£39 million) as part of a billion-dollar compensation package to native Canadian Indians who were said to have been stripped of their culture through the education they received from priests and Religious…. ‘The Government recognises the sad legacy of residential schools,’ said Jim Prentice, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, in announcing the £1.1bn deal in Canada’s House of Commons on 10 May (Ghosh 2006).

In the Canadian Statement of Reconciliation Tinker’s linkage of loss of traditional religious life, land and culture with the destruction of peoples is reinforced by the Government of Canada. As a country, we are burdened by past actions that resulted in weakening the identity of Aboriginal peoples, suppressing their languages and cultures, and outlawing spiritual practices. We must recognize the impact of these actions on the once self-sustaining nations that were disaggregated, disrupted, limited or even destroyed by the dispossession of traditional territory (Statement of Reconciliation).

Admittedly the North American situations are about the survival of a minority of indigenous peoples within an overpowering majority which is culturally other, and the compensation question has much to do with physical and sexual abuse of children separated from their families and cultures. However, the traditional village mindset derives from a whole way of life with religious and practical dimensions. We must fear systematic undermining of the traditional way of life in PNG. Examples of this are the ‘spiritual warfare’ undertaken by some churches against Sepik haus tambaran, or Christian students who have learnt to say that they cannot speak about traditional religion because it belongs to the ‘time of darkness’ and they now belong to the Light. Further examples of this are the opening of male initiation ceremonies to the tourist camera whether male or female; and business ideas which despise the wantok (here, communitarian) principle. These cultural institutions might need to be modernized, but on the owners’ terms. 3. Two Mindsets in One Body When I ask PNG University students to explain to me why sick people turn to bush doctors to discern sorcery and then, without pausing for a breath, seek the latest advances in malarial medicine from hospital doctors, their answers are generally no more profound than to say, ‘because they are there.’ For me there is an intellectual conflict in ranking

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everything from belief in sanguma, through bush rituals and biomedical practices, to belief in Christian prayer along the same continuum. The students obviously see good in all the available approaches. As one student said, ‘I was so sick at the time, that I would have said “yes” to anything anyone wanted to do to help me.’ Malaria does have that compelling way about it. The point seems to be that we have only the one body within which to exercise our choices, and in health matters before all, every recourse is welcome and is likely to be proven beneficial. My Australian relatives are very hostile when I seek causes for an illness in social contexts. In PNG this is often the first resort. What is the body that is being treated with spells to remove dead persons’ presences, and that is taking artemisin to kill parasites? Is it a machine where we tinker with the parts and apply remedies where it hurts, or is it a social voice which scorns the exclusive devotion to scientific purity that Horton speaks of? I have a very difficult time explaining to PNG students that I see how much dead people and spirits are constantly appearing as part of their social world guaranteeing rights, and yet I myself, as an Australian, cannot afford to let myself believe in the intervention of spirits, such that my dear departed mother might have any active directing role in my life. Australian barbecue humour asserts off-handedly that Australian Aborigines find sacred spirit sites with a Geiger Counter, meaning that there can be no possible belief in spirit places out of the range of economic scepticism. In health matters in PNG, all the influences converge on the one body which is understood as greater than a machine to tinker with. This problem of identifying the scope of the human body in its social world is shared by indigenous peoples throughout the world. The Constitution of Papua New Guinea encourages the thought of combining two mindsets in the one person: We, the People of Papua New Guinea • acknowledge the worthy customs and traditional wisdoms of our people – which have come down to us from generation to generation • pledge ourselves to guard and pass on to those who come after us our noble traditions and the Christian principles that are ours now (Preamble). There might be two ways of thinking, two worldviews, but they exist in the one person and the one people and must remain alive and honourable. The traditional and reflective methodological views can exist side

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by side once they agree that they are doing something different from each other. They need heuristic borders and to be taken as coherent wholes on their own separate terms. While their same overall goals of well-being might coincide, their views of what this well-being must consist in are quite different. What are the needs of people? In what does their identity and sense of wholeness consist? What is the remedy when things go wrong? The two mindsets are surely interacting with each other, but today they remain separate. As Martin Nakata warns academia in Australia: ‘Indigenisation’ is a strategy that seeks to define a space that is recognisably indigenous. At the level of knowledge, it works on a premise that if we just keep adding more and more ‘authentically’ Indigenous content in, we will build up a knowledge context that is more representatively ‘Indigenous’ and from this place we will somehow generate ‘Indigenous’ solutions to our problems that are couched in Indigenous meanings. But this is flawed thinking. In the academy, any Indigenous space is always circumscribed by, and in a sense implicated in non-Indigenous systems of thought. To ‘study’ Indigenous knowledges in a Western institution is a very different enterprise from ‘learning’ the deeply embedded cultural and social meanings of these knowledges in their own context (Nakata 2006, 270).

As a conclusion to this article, we will give a brief sketch of what the world looks like before two mindsets. Nakata urges the legitimacy of space for traditional worldviews working together with modern scientific views. He continues his argument about giving space to the tradition: If this were to be our starting point then the deeply cross-cultural encounters between different knowledge intersections that emerge every day in communities – in health, in education, in governance and so on - could be approached, not ambivalently as heralding further cultural loss, but more robustly as the source of new sets of negotiated meanings that may or may not look distinctly Indigenous but which connect with older traditions in ways which do not disrupt and alienate people from those traditions but continue them by enriching practices to produce much better outcomes (Nakata 2006, 273).

Let us take a look at various areas of modern life through the two different lenses. In all these areas we have to show that the mindsets are different but that they can inhabit one body in the same era. 1. Health As recounted earlier, the hospitals of PNG are filled with patients who gladly accept the latest advances in biomedicine, while re-interpreting

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all that they feel into the field of disturbed social relations. This takes place in the intimacy of the home of the sick person in the village as much as in the urban health facilities. One exemplary story tells of a boy who was bitten by a snake. With great urgency the boy was gathered up in order to rush him to the hospital by car. However, as a matter of even greater urgency, the father insisted that the family drive into the house of a bush doctor to see first whether the snake bite was a matter of sorcery against the father, before turning to medical help. Clearly the father had an awful feeling that a certain someone was taking radical action to injure him and his family. He was not expressing any doubt about antivenin because there were different problems to take care of in this event. In a more confrontational way, a hospital patient was very visibly suffering from a large goitre. He knew the point of view of the doctors, ‘The doctors say I have goitre. That is not true because I know it is the work of my in-laws in Popondetta who are disputing with me.’ Even without the element of conflict, patients are in the larger part guided in their curative behaviour more by their belief in traditional matters than by biomedical assertions. 2. Wealth Papua New Guinea is afflicted by fast money schemes. The infamous U-Vistract scheme run by Noah Musingku has been able to continue for many years, presumably because of ambivalence by some key figures in financial circles in PNG. Most of the participants in this particular scheme are from Bougainville. A Buka man of my acquaintance got in early: he invested K2,000 and soon got K4,000 back; he invested K3,000 and then got another K4,000 back; so finally he invested another K2,000 but got no return on this. He is happy with the feeling of success, although his net profit is only K1,000. At the same time he laughs because he has a clear intuition that it is all fraudulent. When the Ombudsman of PNG, Simon Pentanu, received K90,000 in an early return on his investment, it was a disgrace because he must have been aware of the nature of this pyramid scheme. There are many other such schemes, barely reasonable in their promises, but of sufficient plausibility to gather cautious investments of K20 at a time from settlement and village households. Some days a person collects K20 from everybody to hire a lawyer to get a large compensation for eviction from the settlements; other days a person will collect K20

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from the same people for the fund to re-establish the Kaindi-Wau-Bulolo gold mines of the 1930s for an unbelievably good return. These things are simply continuation of the cargo cult mentality and are acknowledged as such by the citizenry. A cargo cult promises a sudden and radical change to the world, surprising and excessive as a religious event. Perhaps pyramid schemes can be rationally explained to Albanians, but they present a more religious explanation in PNG. Recent unpublished research tells of a wealth cult among Christian Pentecostals in Port Moresby. Fast money is a matter of luck, feeling that blessing is running with you (cf. Laycock 1966, 1967 on card games). There are many men and women in the villages and the settlements who can spend 48 or 72 hours playing cards continuously, and at the end tell of the marvellous luck they had. The fact of a net loss means little in this mood. This is the thinking that fed the cargo cult-type movements: there is going to be a radical reversal of the values of the whole world, and it is going to happen all at once. A topic for research would be to discover the relation between this kind of venture capital and the thinking of wage earners. Wage earners living in the settlements scrutinise their pay slips very carefully and see that their pay rate of K1.62 has at last been raised by 4 toea. I cannot say whether the same people who are calculating so carefully can join in the luck binges while in the same frame of mind. I have a feeling that these two things do not go together in the same person at the same time, but they do come out of the same settlement community. They are two different mindsets operating out of the same village body. 3. Politics The PNG Elections of 2007 loomed as a most troublesome time. There were predictions on all sides of impending disaster, of bloodshed from many guns, of widespread corruption and vote-buying. Many steps were taken to counter-act these threats, but they were all in the realm of being reasonable and identifying the unreasonable. The village fact is that elections and campaigns are won on the basis of powerful spells. By way of example: a certain priest was an impassioned speaker on Sundays, but sometimes was tongue-tied by his own exuberance. Parish leaders came to me shaking their heads and pointing out that it is a common ability of village persons to work a spell to frustrate the efforts of others to talk. The priest would remain bound from speaking until the spell was removed in the village. That was also

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the reason why no kiaps were able to stay long in Yangoru. From the government side, Yangoru was seen as a staging area for young Australian kiaps emerging from bush ready to return home at the end of their tour of duty (Gesch 1985, 213). They were only meant to stay for a few months, but the villagers pointed out that it was because of a tanket planted at the station that no one was able to stay anyway. This was not to deny government planning, but to show the real reason why it was so – these people did not want that kind of development in the district. Politics of all kinds is a prime area for the two different mindsets to work simultaneously. 4. Sport I once went to encourage our parish team in playing soccer. I made the mistake of suggesting to others that they should be afraid of the abilities of our team. I was told quite solemnly, ‘We don’t like to play with you Negrie people because you have magic to break legs’. When the home team was challenged with this, they replied, ‘That is not true, we are good Christians and would not do such a thing. They see us washing our legs with water at the beginning of the game. These are not harmful spells but protective action against the ways of others’. Employing such resources did not change the need for training and exercise. There are various things you have to do to win at sport in the countryside of PNG. One is the familiar routine of building up one’s physical capacity; another is to employ religious techniques which are more result-oriented than sportsmanship would allow. 5. Land Knowledge of stories of the creation of the earth has ownership implications in PNG. In Yangoru the mountains were formed by scooping up earth from the plains by the spirits of myth, Konimpo and Rurun. At given locations for some villages, all peoples came out of the ground at these spots. In other places all peoples came out of the spirit woman’s birth canal, there at that tiny waterhole. In Riwo, Madang, it was Dudo who created the earth from foam that solidified in the sea, built up, and was then scattered to North, South, East and West as home for all peoples. Another village community identifies itself from the dream given to a man who wandered first into this area as he lay down to rest and was told to settle here by a spirit in the dream.

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In the light of all these beliefs how can land registration take place? How can the permanent alienation of freehold land from the days of early settlement be tolerated? The two mindsets are at conflict here in legal land matters as nowhere else but it is necessary for the villagers and the lawyers to work out of the two mindsets to make any progress. Conclusion It would be possible to develop further illustrations of the working of these mindsets in agriculture, education, family, religion and other fields, but we will end this review of the operation of the two mindsets here. What do we now have to say to the charge that villagers are ‘ignorant’, ‘hypocritical’, ‘thousands of years behind’ when they attempt to live out of two different mindsets at the same time? I have been living and working in Papua New Guinea for many years of my life. I stay because the land is spectacular and the people are spectacular to match. I have friends and acquaintances whom I find enjoyable, nearly always provocative in their interpretation of the world, breaking open the boundaries of what I thought life was all about. I am sympathetic with Reo Fortune’s claim that for life in PNG ‘it was not enough to say that cultures are different; the point was that they are “incredibly different” ’ (Mead 1972, 195). Despite this I meet people on the basis that they are the same as me. Tribal people employ very many rational procedures in their working with religion, procedures which are shared with what we think of as genuine scientific procedures. This is because the religious worldview and experience is a different experience from science, but the people acting are the same kind of rational people. In this way, my friends in PNG impress me continually that they are at least as reasonable as I am – in this we are the same, but they want answers to other kinds of questions – in this we are very different. Saying it simply: what is the difference? The traditional village mindset wants to answer the question: how do I think and work so that I stay together with all the people who are of value to me? The modern scientific mindset asks: how do I evaluate with sure knowledge the events and the plans of the world I live in? It is not difficult to live out of two mindsets at the same time. They have their own integrity and cannot be melded into a forced harmonious marriage.

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Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea. 1975. http://www.paclii .org/pg/legis/consol_act/cotisopng534/. Accessed March 25, 2007. Cooper, D. E. 1978. ‘Symbol and Theory. A Philosophical Study of Theories of Religion in Social Anthropology’. The Philosophical Review 87 (2): 319–322. Gesch, P. F. 1979. ‘Magic as a Process of Social Discernment’. In Powers, Plumes, and Piglets, ed. N. C. Habel. 137–148. Bedford Park: AASR. —— . 1985. Initiative and Initiation. A Cargo Cult-Type Movement in the Sepik against its Background in Traditional village Religion. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag. —— . 1996. ‘There can be Neither Black nor White. Relations between Missionaries and Sepik Villagers.’ Verbum SVD: 93–118. Goody, J., and I. Watt. 1963. ‘The Consequences of Literacy’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (3): 304–345. Gosselin, P. ‘The Judeo-Christian Cosmology and the Origins of Science’. http://www. creationism.org/csshs/v09n4p09.htm. Accessed October 30, 2006. Horton, R. 1967. ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’. Africa 37: 50–71; 155–187. Laycock, D. C. 1966. ‘Three Native Card Games of New Guinea and their European Ancestors’. Oceania 37 (1): 49–53. —— . 1967. ‘Three More New Guinean Card Games, and a Note on “Lucky” ’. Oceania 38 (1): 51–55. Mead M. 1972. Blackberry Winter. My Earlier Years. London: Angus & Robertson. Nakata, M. 2006. ‘Australian Indigenous Studies: A Question of Discipline’. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 17(3): 265–275. Ghosh, S. 2006. ‘£39m for “traumatised” Canadian Indians’. The Tablet, 20th May 2006, http://www.thetablet.co.uk. Accessed 20th May 2006. Penner, H. H. 1986, ‘Rationality and Religion: Problems in the Comparison of Modes of Thought’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54 (4): 645–671. Skorupski, J. 1983. Symbol and Theory. A Philosophical Study of Theories of Religion in Social Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Statement of Reconciliation on the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada,’ http://www.irsr-rqpi.gc.ca/english/reconciliation.html. Accessed March 22, 2007. Tinker, G. 1993. Missionary Conquest. The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. Today Show. July 7, 2006. EMTV and Channel 9 Australia. Trompf, G. W. 1994. Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. —— . 2008. ‘Traditional Melanesian Religion’. In Melanesian Religion and Christianity, ed. G. W. Trompf. 8–59. Goroka: Melanesian Institute.

A SAMO THEOLOGY OF MEDIUMSHIP: A CASE STUDY OF LOCAL THEOLOGISING AND GLOBAL REFLECTION R. Daniel Shaw Abstract Garry Trompf has devoted his career to studying, teaching, and writing about religion particularly in the Pacific region with a focus on Melanesia (1991). Over the years he has made a valuable contribution to religious and ethnographic studies by encouraging those among whom he has studied, as well as his students, to consider their relationships, both vertical (with the supernatural) and horizontal (among themselves and others). These relationships, so rich in the Melanesian context, present a need to understand and appreciate a hermeneutic that accounts for local values and traditions on the one hand, and their connection to two thousand years of Christian development via Europe, the enlightenment and contemporary mission on the other (Trompf 1990). This hermeneutical reflection, as encouraged by Trompf, has contributed to local theological development that gives non-Melanesians a new perspective of God (Trompf and Loeliger 1985). In this chapter I seek to demonstrate how an appreciation for Samo shamanism, which is closely tied to the concept of mediumship, has been appropriated by the Samo to enable a theological reflection on Christ as the mediator between God and human beings (I Tim. 2:5). Samo theologizing thus provides a case study for appreciating the human relationship with a creator (Gen. 1:26, 27) who in the end will receive honor and glory from the created (Rev. 7:9, 10). Rather than a contextualized theology, the Samo developed a biblical theology that answers the questions of their human concerns. Through this presentation I seek to add to Trompf ’s appreciation of ‘Black Theologies’ and ensure that, for the Samo, the gospel is not Western (Trompf 1987).

Introduction In his considerable writings, Garry Trompf has frequently shown the correlation between local and supernatural realities. He regularly draws attention to the fact that in the minds of most non-Western peoples, the two are not separated and, indeed, they meld to form an interrelated understanding of supernatural presence in the midst of the human condition. This implies that all peoples think about God in some way, thereby developing theological understanding in their response to the natural

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world around them. This was the focal concept behind his then foundational volume on what he called ‘Black Theologies’ (Trompf 1987). Essential to the development of what Robert Schreiter called ‘local theologies’ (Schreiter 1985) is the hermeneutical perspective of those who do the theology. Trompf makes this clear when he points out that while Western Christianity came upon Melanesia like a ‘tidal wave’, local thinkers have not turned ‘their backs on their own traditions’. Thus the influence of outside input such as a translation of the Bible serves as a means for local people to test the ‘claims’ of what comes as Christianity in light of what they consider important as they examine the new input (Trompf 1987, 7). As I hope to demonstrate in this case study, the Samo did exactly that. The Samo are semi-nomadic horticulturists living in the dense rain forest of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Contacted late in colonial history and only officially pacified in 1969 (from constant raiding that resulted in frequent cannibalism) they provide a fascinating opportunity for anthropological study (Shaw 1996, 1990), as well as a response to Christian mission through Bible translation. Their response to the Gospel was the result of anthropologically-informed Bible translation (Shaw 1988). In order to fully understand Jesus’ incarnation, they had to process the role of the indwelling spirit and the source of Jesus’ power. In their minds, this leads directly to an investigation of shamanism and the role of individual and ancestral spirits. The energizing spirit of each person comes from the pool of ancestors who continually recycle and provide human beings with a soul. Shamans, however, possess two spirits, one for living and the other for specific communication with the ancestors. Thus shamans are, by definition, mediums who manage communication between the ancestors who have gone before, and those who struggle in the natural realm to manage their affairs. An understanding of Jesus as the shaman who removes human beings from the on-going cycle of birth-death-rebirth, and connects them directly to God who created them in the first place, is very good news and energizes them to a theology of mediumship. This insight gives non-Samo a new appreciation for the power of the gospel from a Samo perspective. It is this cultural particularity in light of biblical universals, this local theological perspective that contributes to global understanding – what Paul Hiebert called ‘meta-theology’ (Hiebert 1989). Such awareness demonstrates the collectivity of human diversity on the commonality of biblical truth and is the focus of this chapter – a hermeneutical awareness that expands biblical understanding beyond cultural horizons. It captures a new

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appreciation for theological awareness of a biblical passage like I Tim. 2:5, and highlights Trompf ’s challenge that ‘all researchers in Melanesian social affairs should try to apprise themselves of theological issues, because they are going to become central to an understanding of changing Melanesian mentalités as the years proceed’ (Trompf 1991, 261). The Nature of Samo Mediumship Not long after establishing ourselves in Kwobi village, I experienced my first Samo kogooa fonlion,1 ‘spirit singing’. My journal records how I was awakened about 3AM one morning and went to learn about Samo mediumship: Awakened out of a deep sleep by the sound of singing from a nearby longhouse, I went to see what was going on. I was intrigued by the sound of a single voice singing a phrase followed by a chorus of voices repeating the phrase to create an antiphonal song that filled the chilly pre-dawn air. As I approached the longhouse, a few dogs greeted me and began to howl, but all the activity was inside. I stepped over the log barrier and entered the kitchen portion of the house where several women, busy preparing food for the guests, greeted me and waved me up the notched log stairway into the main section of the house, the hobooli monsoon, ‘dance room’. As I navigated the ‘stairs’ I was almost pushed back by the sound waves as the chorus exploded in their portion of the song. The room was lit only by resin burning on concave stones, the flickering flames barely penetrating 1 The sounds of the Samo language are pronounced much as corresponding sounds in English with a few notable exceptions. The sound symbolized by the letter /l/ can be either an [n] sound at the beginning of a word or when surrounded by nasalized vowels or the usual sound for [l] when found in the middle of a word. Thus the word to eat, nala, is orthographically symbolized as lanla. This brings up discussion of Samo vowels. There are six phonemic vowels, a, e, i, o, u, and É. For orthographic ease, É is represented by ‘o’ and o by ‘oo’. All vowels can be either oral or nasal (sound is forced through the nose). The nasalized vowels are symbolized using an ‘n’ after the vowel. A sound comparison chart with English looks like this: English: a b d e f g h i k l m o É s t u Samo: a b d e f g h i k l m o oo s t u nasalized vowels: an en in on oon un When spoken rapidly the transition from high to low vowels in diphthongs, e.g. ia, creates a [y] sound and from low to high vowels in diphthongs, e.g. ua, creates a [w] sound. These sounds are a normal part of speech flow and are, therefore, not symbolized in the orthography. For a detailed phonological description and orthographic decisions based on psycholinguistic testing see Shaw and Shaw (1977). The glossed meanings that accompany Samo words and phrases are translations based on meaning rather than a word for word translation.

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r. daniel shaw the darkness. In the far corner a large group of people were gathered around a hunched figure who proved to be the source of the single strain of the song – the kogooa oosoo, ‘spirit medium’. I was completely encompassed by sound, the thin voice of the medium and the antiphonal refrain, phrase after phrase as the singer and his chorus received the message from the ancestors (field notes, August 1971).

The Samo cosmology is organized in terms of a cosmic battle between the forces of good, represented by the kogooa, ‘ancestors’, and the forces of evil represented by the oosau, ‘the supreme source of evil’. The ancestors are represented on earth by shaman who assist their fellow human beings while evil is embodied in sorcerers who work against the well being of other humans. The cosmic conflict is between good and evil locked in a deadly struggle, with mere humans viewed as pawns in the framework of life upon the earth where their earthly representations of shaman and sorcerer counterbalance the influences of each other (Shaw 1996, 98–102). Shamans frequently find themselves pressed into service to alleviate suffering assumed to be caused by sorcery and evil influence epitomized by the hogai, ‘disembodied spiritual beings’, who inhabit the forest and do the bidding of oosau and sorcerers to wreak havoc on human activity. Despite the human emissaries the Samo believe that mere human beings are caught in this cosmic struggle and are basically consigned to their fate as the higher forces wage the spiritual battle. The best humans can hope for is to utilize their herbal remedies, charms and amulets, engage in their rituals and ceremonies and when all else fails call upon a shaman to mediate with the ancestors to ascertain the best course of action. In this, they are extremely pragmatic and experiential and to a large degree every Samo is a kind of self-informed shaman by virtue of being energized by an ancestor spirit (Shaw 1981).2 Thus the Samo view humans as being pretty much on their own in the cosmic struggle. They have to work things out for themselves and as a last resort they seek spiritual guidance from the ancestors through the assistance of a medium. In the stream of Samo identities shamans are men or women who have been singled out by the ancestors to help them interact with human 2

For the Samo, life is a finite manifestation of an infinite connection with the ancestors. Their cosmology provides an incarnational structure in which ancestors periodically recycle through life to energize a newborn baby, live, and die to once again assist those who live upon the earth in their constant struggle with evil (Shaw 1996, 97). Christ breaks this cycle. For the Samo, he becomes the link between the creation and eternity, with resurrection as the liberating power for eternal life.

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beings. These human ancestral messengers are endowed with a special spirit of mediation which, when required, is able to leave the shaman’s body and by means of astral travel arrive at the ancestral abode (beyond the tree tops) where it ascertains information on behalf of human concern and then returns to benefit ordinary people. Sorcerers in contrast, work against the best interests of human beings, often in association with the evil hogai. Like shamans, sorcerers, have an extra spirit bestowed by oosau, ‘evil personified’. This spirit is in touch with the evil forces who would do harm to human beings. Sorcerers take advantage of weakness, broken relationships, and other human frailties to bring destruction, to pull things apart. Shamans, by contrast, seek to hold things together. For all trans-human individuals, the source of their spiritual power is critical to human interaction. Power emanating from the ancestors in the case of shamans, or from evil for sorcerers, results in very different behavior patterns. As a medium, a shaman serves, in part, as a channel for the ancestors, who are assumed to be good and desire to assist their former relatives in dealing with the finite affairs of life. Thus the primary role of shamans is to serve as mediums between human beings and their ancestors. Sorcerers, in contrast, are manipulators of evil bringing hardship, sickness and even death often on request, sometimes by an enemy (Shaw 1990, 129ff ). What Samo Christians do is equate Christ with the good, ancestral side of the cosmic battle. For them, he is like the mediums who assist human beings on behalf of the ancestors. On the other side they associate evil with the work of the devil and his hosts in the earthly realm – the sorcerers and hogai. In other words, though not their intention, the Samo cosmology recognizes the reality of the struggle (established at the Fall) between Satan and the promised one. But for them this understanding comes out of their pragmatism, out of living and seeking survival in their jungle environment. When in need of cosmic assistance, the Samo call upon a medium in order to ascertain the will of the ancestors. Such an event takes the form described above; an all-night ‘ancestral sing’ during which the shaman exercises a medium’s role. My journal entry from that first experience continued: Later, as the dawn broke and the ‘song fest’ came to an end, I was able to interview some of those present to discover what was happening. A woman had been ill for a lengthy period and many rituals and ceremonies later was showing no response, so the family had finally sought the assistance of the medium. He had come to the house early last evening and sat in the

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r. daniel shaw corner most of the night. Finally about midnight, his kogooa spirit had left his body and gone to the ancestral abode where he had talked with the ancestors, a conversation evidenced by birdcalls and other non-human vocalizations. Once the medium’s spirit reentered his body, he began to sing and everyone had gathered around him in order to catch every phrase. These were the words from the ancestors, their response to the woman’s condition which the ancestors, in their over arching concern for the Samo along with their understanding of humanity born of their having been human beings themselves, were now able to pass on in order to assist in the wellbeing of the sick woman. The repeated song was the interpretation of the earlier glossolalia, a message that those gathered could now act upon to bring about restoration.3

When the spiritual conversation, evidenced by glossolalia, draws to a close the mediating spirit returns to the shaman’s body to ‘translate’ the cosmic message so ordinary people can act upon it. The resulting song transposes ancestral knowledge into appropriate human action, which it is hoped will bring about the desired result: restoring human relationship, health, and welfare, correcting wrongs, seeking out and destroying the sorcerer’s evil, or whatever is necessary to make amends and restore wholeness to the community. For the Samo, shamans do things openly and bring a spiritual message to the people so they can make a correction and restore unity. In contrast, sorcerers do things in secret and use their power against human well being. While shaman strive for the benefit of the community in the midst of the people, sorcerers work against the community in secret. This contrast turned out to be crucial in helping the Samo understand Christianity in general and Christ’s role in particular. It also had strong implications for developing leadership roles within the Samo church. Developing A Local Theology: A Samo Case Study God wants everyone to be saved and to know the whole truth, which is ‘there is only one God, and Christ Jesus is the only one who can bring us to God’. Jesus was truly human and he gave himself to rescue all of us (I Timothy 2:5, CEV). 3 I was able to record similar sessions later, in order to verify the role of glossolalia in Samo mediumship. The Samo view glossolalia as evidence of the medium’s conversation with the ancestors who impart information of use by human beings. Hence the importance of interpretation through the song, reinforced through repetition by the chorus of interested relatives.

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This passage of scripture, and others like it, focuses on Christ4 as the ‘mediator’ (King James language) between God and human beings. We can exegete the Greek words, intellectualize the concept of mediation, and theologize about it, but what does it mean? Despite my seminary training and advanced degrees, my experience with the Samo, deep in the virgin rain forest of the Western Province gave me new insight I would never have noticed had I not experienced life with them and come to appreciate their understanding of mediumship and its role in shamanism and the development of an ethnotheology that, in turn, gives new appreciation to this long debated concept of Christ’s role on behalf of humanity. With the above as background, we can now pose a theological question, ‘how will the Samo understand I Timothy 2:5 and similar passages that refer to Christ as the “mediator” between God and human beings?’ It is a theological question that must be answered on the basis of the Samo worldview, but must also be informed by biblical perspective and Christian tradition – all issues Trompf has discussed at length. Christ as a Samo Medium When the Samo become Christians, like all other believers, they put their faith in Christ. When Jesus came as the incarnation, the Samo assumed that his newborn body was energized by an ancestral spirit. They envisioned Jesus following through the expected series of life cycle events (nose piercing, initiation, and building relationships in keeping with his societal roles). This reflects Samo worldview expectations. Putting his crucifixion in the Samo frame of reference, Jesus died in a violent manner at a juncture the Samo would call the ‘prime of life.’ When he died, Scripture says that he was laid to rest. In other words, in the Samo view, he returned to the kogooa, ‘the ancestors’. But then God’s power was used to resurrect Jesus from the dead. This is crucial. It was not Jesus’ power. He was dead. It was the power of God or, we can

4 Given the theological issues and long debates surrounding the use of ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’, I will attempt to carefully reflect the impact of these outside theological debates on the Samo context, though they know nothing of these controversies at this juncture of their theological development. Hence, I will use ‘Jesus’ to reflect the earthly incarnation and pair that with the shamanic role of relationship with human beings and their temporal needs. Conversely, I will use ‘Christ’ to reflect the spiritual interaction in the heavenlies and pair that with the medium role which emphasizes interaction between heavenly and earthly bodies.

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say, the power of the Holy Spirit. So the risen Christ has two spirits: his own finlin, ‘life force or spirit’ and the Holy Spirit bestowed on him by God. In the Samo view of things, the only people with a plurality of spirits are shamans or sorcerers, individuals who engage spiritual forces beyond human ability. So, the question is, can the Samo talk about Jesus as the shaman who is a medium between themselves and God? Does their allegiance to Christ then remove the need for Samo mediums, i.e. can the Samo view Christ as the ultimate medium who in fact replaces all other mediums? And would such a view of Christ result in syncretism or even heresy? Romans 8:34, Hebrews 7:25, and I John 2:1 all deal with this idea of Jesus interceding for earthbound humans in the heavens. When the Samo hear that, they assume ‘mediumship’ and their conceptual text flashes ‘shaman’. Jesus is able to do particularly well in this capacity because of his incarnation. He lived on earth and is well acquainted with the human condition. At the same time he also ‘sits at God’s right hand’ and knows the heavenly world intimately. This sets up a potential theology for the Samo. Theological Implications of Samo Mediumship If the Samo receive Scripture and understand Jesus to be like their shaman, then they must determine what makes him different from earthly shaman. It appears that Jesus, like all other shaman, had an added spirit, a special ‘holy spirit’ that he utilized to communicate with God as well as other spiritual beings. He did his best to assist other people, and like all other human beings he died. However, the timing of his death is significant for the Samo because it came when he was reaching full productivity – the prime of his life and ministry. He died at the point when he could be the most help to the community – even his disciples were asking when he would bring in the kingdom (Acts 1:3-7). While the similarity between Jesus and the Samo shaman is clear, what is the point of contrast that makes Christ different from any human medium? The real difference that Scripture repeatedly points out is the resurrection. And it is precisely the resurrection that provides the answer for the Samo as well as the Christian church. It is Jesus’ entire life cycle capped by the resurrection and his return to the right hand of God that enables him to mediate on behalf of all human beings. His death is not the focus; his resurrection by the power of God’s Spirit is the point of Paul’s message to the Colossians and others. For the Samo,

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it is the resurrection that takes Jesus out of the constant cycle of death and re-birth. Without resurrection he would be like any other ancestral spirit and be expected to cycle back to energize another infant. But because of the resurrection he now becomes the ‘ancestor’ who has led the captives free, the one who sits at the right hand of the father to intercede on behalf of all human beings, including the Samo. What this means, then, is that Samo Christians no longer need a human medium. Rather, they can relate directly to God through Christ, the medium between God and themselves as human beings caught in the cosmic struggle (I Tim. 2:5). Jesus’ change of identity at death also fits Samo expectations. Because of a change in the person’s location, (with the ancestors) the terminology used to identify and discuss them changes as well. Death moves people into a different relationship with the living, and names and relational interaction all change accordingly (Shaw 1990, 125). Similarly, Jesus lived among us but now through the process of death and resurrection is in a different relationship that is acknowledged by using a new term, Kurios, ‘Christ the Lord’. Therefore, from the Samo perspective, Christ is now the died-but-alive medium, which is very different than the preChristian Samo understanding of shamanism. Jesus does not fit the usual conception of the ancestors who constantly cycle back to life. Yes, Christ will return, but it will not be to live this life over again, starting by energizing a new-born baby and cycling through life. Rather he will create a new life in a new place for all who give allegiance to him (Rev. 21). The power of the Holy Spirit in this process is also of vital importance to the Samo as they develop a theology of mediumship. It is God’s Spirit who activated Jesus and raised him from the dead. This same Spirit of God quickens human beings, including Samo. This power makes us believers. John 3:13-18 tells the Samo they become believers by virtue of accepting Jesus’ experience on their behalf. So faith and belief must be defined through participation in Jesus’ experience by virtue of the power of the Holy Spirit. This is not just personal experience, nor is it merely giving assent to a proposition, as in the enlightenment traditions of the West. The Samo must experience this power – it becomes an encounter that corresponds with what Jesus was telling Nicodemus. In John chapter 3, Jesus utilized a symbol that was familiar to the Jews. But for the Samo, the snake is not perceived the same way, especially since they do not understand sacrifice. For them, the symbol is no longer the snake but rather their concept of mediumship and the involvement with the shaman on behalf of human need. For Jews who understood sacrifice,

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holding up the serpent made sense, since they remembered the story of Moses lifting the brass serpent in the wilderness (Num. 21:4-9). For the Samo, a different symbolism is needed (though it violates the historicity of the Hebrew experience), and the symbols surrounding shamans serving as mediums provide a conceptualization that enables the Samo to process the meaning.5 The central issue here is human need. It is crucial for Jews and Samo alike. In order to help the Samo understand Jesus’ human experience we must bring Jesus into the Samo context and focus on their needs: sickness, survival in a hostile world, having enough food, and doing cosmic battle with evil forces. These are the very issues Jesus talked about and helped people deal with - issues that embody all of life. The symbols come out of life experience. They transcend both Jewish and Samo understanding (the historical and the particular), and impact all human beings (the global with its focus on human commonality). Jesus’ encounter with human experience becomes the focus. Can he do what he said he would do? The Scriptures say ‘yes’, and much of the narrative unfolds to communicate how Jesus answered those panhuman questions. Application of Theological Development The Samo use mediums to obtain information from the ancestors. This information, in turn, assists the Samo in daily living. As they once sought assistance through mediums, so they can now seek assistance by approaching Christ – the risen ‘ancestor’. They thus maintain the deep structure understanding of their ‘reality’ as it relates to survival. This is where Trompf ’s focus on the integration of natural and supernatural is important to the realities of people encountering life often expressed through ritual (Trompf 1991, 19, 22ff ). Avoiding Syncretism Christian Samo no longer think of mediumship in the same way as nonChristian Samo. It is a radically transformed conceptualization that is now focused on a relationship with a non-resident shaman who can be 5 In all of this processing of information, cultural symbolism – as Victor Turner (1970) makes clear – is of utmost importance both for the Jews of Jesus’ day and for the Samo today.

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brought into any situation at any time. The focus is on the believer’s relationship with Christ, calling upon God (the source of all things that goes back to a time before there were ancestors)6 for assistance in living life. A new understanding of I Tim. 2:5 emerges. It reflects traditional Samo values and concerns without violating the intent of the biblical text. The Samo are not on their own; they can work within Christian traditions that are themselves informed by Scripture. By bringing biblical critique to the Samo perspective, we can enable them to avoid heresy by ensuring that Christ is unique, though he is understood through the concept of mediumship. Because of the resurrection, Christ is different, more than a super-medium. Had they simply added Jesus to their other shamans, Samo Christians would have moved toward heresy. If that were the case, all the other shamans would be able to manipulate God on behalf of human beings and that would compound the problem theologically. Instead Samo Christians focus on their relationship with God through Christ who can perform his duties because of the incarnation (sharing the human condition) and the resurrection (being energized by God’s ‘Holy Spirit’).7 Together these views of mediumship as applied to Christ, give new insight to other Christians. God’s Word supports the Samo view, but Westerners never saw it that way before. Our respective perceptions of Christ thus inform each other and bring new insight to Western and non-Western, Christian and nonChristian. Application to Life Experience There are some interesting ramifications of this process as the Samo apply their developing theology to dealing with the reality of life in their

6 All Samo myths begin with the phrase omun koogwa, ‘before the ancestors’. By using this phrase they acknowledge their place in the human realm and the finiteness of their existence, both as a people and in relation to a bigger, more all-inclusive spiritual power that is beyond and more pervasive than their own ancestors. This opening line for myths proved useful in translating Genesis, and communicating God’s all pervasiveness as manifest though creation. Thus the Samo find themselves in a line of communal understanding that extends past their ancestors and connects them, spiritually, to all other human beings. It provides a rationale for appreciating who they are as people who have been created in the ‘image of God’. 7 This is an application of Hiebert’s concept of ‘critical contextualization’ with its focus on critique from above in order to ensure relevance below. The critique comes from a trusted, supernatural source and interrelates with local traditions, beliefs, and values which people must assess in light of their interpretation of the critical source (Hiebert 1987; Hiebert, Shaw, and Tienou 1999, 21ff ).

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corner of the world. I once was called to a Samo household where a group of Christians had met to pray for a sick member. As I entered the house I was reminded of the kogooa fonlion I had heard so long ago. The Christians were gathered around a sick man and the pastor, much as a shaman, was chanting while the congregation repeated the phrase in unison.8 As I listened, however, I realized that they were ‘singing’ scripture, as phrase by phrase they repeated God’s Word as they applied it to rejuvenating their sick comrade. I was amazed at the ingenuity of the process, maintaining the culturally appropriate symbolism of connecting with a supernatural source of assistance yet tapping their new-found understanding of Christ’s position in the heavenlies, interceding through the power of the Holy Spirit on their behalf. I was overwhelmed by God’s goodness in showing the Samo his plan for them and using their experience to instruct me into new and deeper understanding of God’s reality in any human context. This went far beyond exchanging forms for the same meaning. Rather it transformed God’s Word to a particular reality and appropriated that new awareness to the broader human context in which God is continually both affirming and critiquing the human perspective so it may be more in line with God’s expectations for those whom he created. Here was a direct application of Samo cultural knowledge to their interpretation of Scripture and appropriate living. Their cognitive environment interfaced with biblical truth to create a whole new approach to prayer for the sick. Having communicated with God through Christ, they needed to act on their understanding of God’s Word for the good of their sick relative and the betterment of the entire community. However, to follow through on the Samo understanding of shamanism, in effect, every Samo believer has a carnal spirit received at birth, and because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, have the Holy Spirit who energizes them spiritually. Therefore, like a shaman, they now have two spirits and can interact directly with Christ who intercedes for them and guides them into truth that makes sense and upon which they can take appropriate action (Shaw 1981). The Samo approach to shamanism impacts their approach to God. I find nothing in Scripture that gives reason to tell the Samo they should believe otherwise. In fact, given their worldview, there should be no 8 The shaman role is an ideal model for Samo pastors who remain very much part of the community and assist people at their point of need. However, that is the basis for another reflection that goes beyond the scope of this chapter.

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surprise either from the Samo or the biblical perspective. Here is a wonderful manifestation of the saints communicating with God and yet serving one another as a ‘priesthood of believers’ (I Pet. 2:9). This understanding gives a new dimension to Acts 1:8 – to the ends of the earth. This understanding gives a deeper appreciation of the missional role of the Holy Sprit who energizes the Samo, as well as all human beings, to faithfully witness to this power wherever they go. Samo theologizing thus provides a case study for appreciating the human relationship with a creator (Gen. 1:26, 27) who in the end will receive honor and glory from the created (Rev. 7:9, 10). Conclusion A local Samo theology connects with God’s Word to illuminate theological understanding at a much broader level. The Samo, in their particularity of dealing with the cosmic forces through the aid of mediums bring a new dimension to Scripture which, in turn, gives new understanding to others who have not seen those portions of Scripture that way before.9 The Holy Spirit provides the means of making God’s power available to the Samo in the context of living their lives. It is no wonder that over sixty percent of the Samo have turned their allegiance from human mediums who communicate with the ancestors to a focus on Christ and their relationship with God through him as both medium and ‘living ancestor’ – the resurrected ancestor who mediates to God on their behalf. Michael Cooper warns of the danger of giving too much ‘priority to the context of theology over theological content’ (Cooper 2003). By this he means allowing the context to dictate the theology. However, in the Samo case, their worldview provides the context which enables them to reflect on Scripture and draw the parallel to their circumstances. Rather than a contextualized theology, they developed a biblical theology that speaks to their human concerns. Of course, the Samo experience with Christ grows as they receive more Scripture. In keeping with models of

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This is reflected in the concept of the hermeneutical spiral in theological development and expanded by Charles Van Engen and myself in our book Communicating God’s Word in a Complex World (Shaw and Van Engen 2003). The reflexivity on human issues on the one hand and the particularity of the gospel in context on the other enable all human beings, who share in their commonality of creation in God’s image, to learn from one another. This has strong implications for learning from each other’s cultural understanding as it impacts biblical reflection which, in turn leads to theology.

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change, they will continue to adjust their understanding and further develop their theology. Hopefully they will maintain a balance between their worldview and the traditions of the Church. The way to protect against this process going awry is to revise their translation of Scripture in keeping with the rapid changes that encroach upon them both from the outside world and biblically as the Holy Spirit transforms their minds about those issues that work against God’s hope for the way they live their lives. Scripture must be seen as relevant, a reflection of the current worldview as well as the change process. Trompf agrees when he notes, It is a priority for the indigenous and contextualizing theologians to counteract the deadening forces of diehard paternalism and develop those lines of thought and action which root Christianity much more deeply in the socio-spiritual soil of the different regions [of Melanesia]. Only a species of social ill-health results if Christianity is left as a veneer, a magical sugarcoating which does little to transform everyday lives, or which only gives vague hope and no room for initiative to the average member of the populus fidelium (or congregation of the faithful) (Trompf 1991, 269).

As I have demonstrated, the Samo are able to reflect theologically on God’s expectations in light of their cultural experience while maintaining their identity as one community of believers (a hermeneutical community) in the larger body of Christ. In short, like all other human beings, they are able to theologize. Failure to do so will guarantee a nominal church in a relatively short time. The response to that nominality in the Samo context could well be super-mediums that place themselves with Christ, rather than under his Lordship. Instead of an objective theology that reflects only on a specific context, there needs to be a theology from the particular that impacts a theological pluralism (Clapsis 1993, 72, 73). In other words, the global benefits from the local; the Church as a whole learns from those who are part of it. An awareness of the Samo theological perspective of Christ as the medium who intercedes with God on behalf of human beings gives Christians everywhere a renewed sense of awe at the magnitude of God’s universal character and the role of the Holy Spirit in seeking out each human being. We are all not only unique in Christ, but also uniquely responsible for communicating to others the ‘wonderful things that God has done’ (Acts 2:11). As Trompf concludes, Both Christian and traditionalist will do well to work on the presumption that there were indeed ‘noble traditions’ in primal Melanesia … and so

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give a healthy honouring to each individual society’s worthier achievements. Theology engenders an appropriate respect for cultural pluralism (Trompf 1991, 264).

To which I add, may the Samo recognition of God’s ultimate authority as manifested by Christ’s role as a mediator through the power of the Holy Spirit, impact other Christians in their appreciation of who Christ is, the one who mediates on behalf of all human beings. Bibliography Clapsis, E. 1993. ‘The Challenge of Contextual Theologies’. The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 38 (1-4): 71-79. Cooper, M. 2003. ‘What is, and Who Defines, Evangelical Christianity?’ opensourcetheology http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/72 Hiebert, P. G. 1987. ‘Critical Contextualization’. International Bulletin of Missionary Research 11 (3): 109-110. —— . 1989. ‘Metatheology: The Step Beyond Contextualization.’ In Reflection and Projection: Missiology at the Threshold of 2001, ed. H. Kasdorf and K. Müller. 383-395. Bad Liebenzell: Verlag der Liebenzeller Mission. Hiebert, P., R. D. Shaw, and T. Tienou. 1999. Understanding Folk Religion: A Christian Response to Popular Beliefs and Practices. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House. Schreiter, R. J. 1985. Constructing Local Theologies. Maryknoll, NY.: Orbis Books. Shaw, R. D. 1981. ‘Every Person a Shaman’. Missiology 9: 159-165. —— . 1988. Transculturation: The Cultural Factor in Translation and Other Communication Tasks. Pasadena: William Carey Library. —— . 1990 Kandila: Samo Ceremonialism and Interpersonal Relationships. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —— . 1996. From Longhouse to Village: Samo Social Change. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace. Shaw, R. D. and C. E. van Engen. 2003. Communicating God’s Word in a Complex World: God’s Truth or Hocus Pocus? Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Shaw, R. D. and K. A. Shaw. 1977. ‘Samo Phonemes: Distribution, Interpretation, and Resulting Orthography’. Workpapers in PNG Languages 19: 97-135. Trompf, G. W. 1990. In Search of Origins. London: Oriental University Press. —— . 1991. Melanesian Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— . 1987. The Gospel is Not Western: Black Theologies from the Southwest Pacific. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Trompf, G. W. and E. L. Loeliger. 1985. New Religious Movements in Melanesia. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea and Institute of Pacific Studies. Turner, V. 1970. Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Nembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

DEMA AS RELIGIOUS SYMBOL IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA Ennio Mantovani Abstract This chapter revisits one aspect of the issue of Christianity in Papua New Guinea which had been discussed in a seminar at Goroka in 1976 in which Garry Trompf and the author took part. Mantovani had sought to demonstrate that what Melanesians were expressing in the pig festival was not an aspect of the veneration of ancestors, but the expression of a quite different religious experience that needed to be taken on its own merits, phenomenologically. It was a challenge to Christianity in its interpretation of the Christ event. In this chapter, thirty years later, the author presents and further defines the Dema figure, and discusses the Dema complex, its mythology and then its rituals, with a special focus on the pig festival. The analysis of the pig festival constitutes the central part of this chapter. In the last section of the chapter, after reflecting on the demise of the pig festival in the Simbu area, Mantovani considers the relevance of the Dema symbol for contemporary Papua New Guinea. It is concluded that within the Dema complex lies a chance for Melanesians to participate as equal partners in a dialogue, and confront the secular and religious West with their own Melanesian spiritual roots, challenging not only the secularized West but also the Western Christianity they adopted as part of their present identity.

Introduction In 1976 Garry Trompf (who was then a lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Papua New Guinea), along with a dozen others, was invited by the Melanesian Institute1 to reflect on and discuss the issue of Christianity in Melanesia. In that seminar I presented a paper, ‘A Fundamental Melanesian Religion.’ It argued that: the traditional religion of Papua New Guinea is not a deteriorated form of theistic religion. It is, rather, a different approach to the absolute. The absolute is seen in a different, though legitimate way [and] … Christ has to be understood in the light of that specific way. If not, the specific

1 The Melanesian Institute was launched officially in January 1969. It was originally a project of the Roman Catholic Church, but soon became an ecumenical body (Mantovani 1994).

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ennio mantovani Melanesian revelation remains a torso and Christ runs the risk of being misunderstood and rejected as ‘foreign’ because he does not fit into that primal revelation. [And further] is the Christ we Europeans announce, the answer to the culture of Papua New Guinea or to our Indo-European culture? Is Christianity simply monotheism in a more perfect form? … Christianity is determined by the reality of Christ. God who became man and gave us divine life through his death on the cross. This fact provides one definition of monotheism. It adds a whole new dimension to theism, a dimension which is typical of [the] religion of the agriculturists. A revelation the agriculturists understood much better than we, an aspect on which they based their whole religion (Mantovani 1977, 155–6).

Revisiting previous work permits methodological reflection; in that seminar I used theological language as I was speaking in a theological context. I used the term ‘revelation,’ while in the context of phenomenology of religion the appropriate term would be ‘religious experience.’ Further, theologically, I was writing in terms of a fulfilment theory, while phenomenologically I was using Frobenius’ terminology of ‘semantic depletion’ – experience (Ergriffenheit), expression, and application (Haverlund et al 1973). I used the term ‘agriculturists’ to refer to the Melanesians of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and in that company there was no danger of being misunderstood. It is now clear that a better term would have been ‘planters.’ My paper was significant in that it was the first time that the religious experience of the PNG planters was taken as a starting point for reflecting on PNG Christianity. In this chapter I revisit the issue of ‘fundamental religion’ and its relevance for contemporary PNG. I argue that my central contention still holds, but can now be better-supported by evidence of which I was unaware in 1976. One cannot separate religion from culture; the two belong together. On the other hand, one cannot ignore history, either. In its Constitution PNG calls itself a Christian country. Christianity is part of Melanesian culture, and social science and religious studies cannot ignore this fact if they wish to remain relevant. The issue of the relationship of traditional indigenous religious experiences with today’s PNG religions is therefore something of interest to both theology and the academic study of religion. While I remain interested in the theological and missiological aspects of this issue, this chapter is a contribution to the phenomenology of religion. It examines what can be seen of traditional religion, contextualised by what traditional stories2 say. I place these actions and 2 I use ‘story’ as being synonymous with myth. ‘Story’ is a term used by people who distinguish between true and simple stories.

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narratives in their cultural context, and evaluate them in terms of their meaning in that context. The aim is not comparative, but descriptive. Despite recent criticism of the phenomenological method (Flood 1999), there is much to be gained from this modest approach. In 1976 I argued that what Melanesians were doing in the pig festival was not an aspect of ancestor veneration but something quite different, an expression of a religious experience which had to be recognized and respected in its own right. Phenomenologically, the pig festival had to be observed and described, but not reduced to anything other than itself. My designation of this ritual as the ‘Fundamental Melanesian Religion’ upheld the phenomenological claim that religion is a sui generis category (Cox 2006, 122–125). Fundamental Melanesian religion was not theistic and should not be interpreted in theistic terms. Far from needing interpretation (and correction) in theistic terms – implying that it was wrong or inferior while the theistic was right and superior – such religious experience, assessed on its merits, could be seen to challenge Christianity in its understanding of the Christ event. The pig festival I examined belongs to what I call the ‘Dema complex.’ The term Dema had been first used by ethnographers in West Papua and later by theoreticians like Adolf Jensen. In this article I shall use ‘Dema’ in a slightly narrower sense which I will presently define.

The Dema Figure in the Academic Literature The author whose name is usually linked with the Dema is Adolf E. Jensen (1899–1965). Jensen was an exponent of the Kulturmorphologische Schule which traced its lineage to Leo Frobenius (1873–1938). Frobenius’ and hence Jensen’s core contention was that of ‘semantic depletion.’ Primal cultures, they asserted, move from a situation of Ergriffenheit, of a ‘gripping experience,’ to that of expression and eventually of application. In order to understand the life of primal people today one needs to go back to the original experience. It is in the light of such primal experiences that the life of a primal people, as documented by the ethnographers, will make full sense. Jensen’s work refers only to the tuber cultivators. Wilhelm Schmidt and the School of Vienna dealt primarily with the gatherers and the herders. Jensen questions the feasibility and validity of such a study and therefore concentrates on the planters, on cultures that were still flourishing at his time and could be studied (Jensen 1963a).

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Jensen proposed a theory of Melanesian religion, in which in the beginning the world was populated by divine beings called Dema. Dema are not creators in the full sense; the world and humankind already existed. They established practices that were culturally relevant to their communities. Some of them died violently and continued their life in the crops that originated from their slain bodies. The Dema continued their existence in the underworld to which those presently alive will return at death. This theory made use of ethnographic observation of rituals and beliefs associated with Dema (from the Marind-Anim people), and formulated an etic (outsider) understanding of Melanesian religion based on Dema as a universal category. According to Jensen all the mythical ancestors are Dema. Religion, according to Jensen, is the representation of what the Dema has done in principio. The many cultic killings of animals and humans as well are not sacrifices in the sense of a gift to a deity but re-enactments of the original slaying of the Dema. The second important scholar of Dema is Jan van Baal, the author of a monograph on the Marind-Anim of south West Papua, entitled Dema (1966). Van Baal states that the central concept of the Marind-Anim religion is that of Dema. He immediately warns his readers, however, that the term is not easily translated, hence the different renditions of the term by various ethnographers. It has been translated as power (mana), spirit, totem-ancestor, and spiritual being. Besides, the term is used both as a noun and as an adjective ‘indicating the supernatural essence of all things.’ Van Baal states that the term is surrounded by awe and mystery; Dema lived in mythical time and are the ancestors of the clans and subclans. Sometimes they are linked with totems either as creators, or because they transformed themselves into totems. Thus, Dema are regarded as the cause of everything of relevance in the life of the MarindAnim. Van Baal calls the Dema ‘story-folk’ figures; figures that populate the mythical stories. He makes it clear that the term Dema is not confined to the heroes of mythology, but can be predicated on other realities. It becomes a quality; it can refer to the uncommon, the extraordinary. It can be used also for intellectually disabled people. It denotes the supernatural, the extraordinary and the powerful. While the Dema belongs to the past, to a certain degree they are still active in the present. They are active in the sense that they are ‘used’ to obtain certain effects. Dema can cause sickness and death. Those who know how to deal with the Dema are the medicine men, the healerscum-sorcerers of PNG society. Van Baal stresses the fact that while there

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is a Dema cult, there is no specific veneration of the Dema (Van Baal 1966). My 1976 paper distinguished between mythical and historical ancestors, and argued that the pig festival had to do with the former and not with the latter. At that time, however, I did not have a special term to characterize those mythical ancestors who were at the centre of the pig festival. For me these figures were culturally too important to disappear in the anonymity of terms such as ‘mythical ancestors’ or ‘cultural heroes.’ As Jensen had borrowed the Marind-Anim term Dema to signify a broader phenomenon in Melanesian religion, I decided to apply the term Dema to specifically denote what the Simbu3 were celebrating in their pig-festival (Mantovani 1977). In my teaching and research I started using the term Dema to signify the complex – the story, the celebrations, and the accompanying ethics and world view – in which a relative asks to be violently killed by his/her kin and out of whose grave comes the symbol of the true life that the people were previously missing. This is the restricted sense in which I use the term in this chapter. This more restricted definition does not create problems; rather, it offers advantages. Jensen uses the term to denote all ‘cultural heroes’ or ‘mythical ancestors,’ bringing together different actors without distinguishing them. This creates confusion. In fact, as Jensen notes, there are ‘common’ Demas and ‘divine’ Demas; it is the former who kill the latter.4 For my purpose the symbol of Dema as understood by Jensen is too broad and too vague; thus here the term Dema is used specifically to designate those mythical figures who were willing to be killed, in order to provide their community with a ‘reality’ without which the life of the members of the community would remain incomplete and, ultimately, not worth living. The term Dema is not exclusively associated with Jensen, making my modification of its meaning both legitimate and functional. Thus, Eliade’s A History of Religious Ideas (Eliade 1978, 37–40) and Patterns in Comparative Religion mention Jensen’s work (particularly Das religiöse Weltbild einer frühen Kultur), without considering the term Dema. The advantage of using the term as I propose is that the reality that is celebrated in the pig-kill (and similar rituals in PNG) acquires a specific

3

In the past the region was called Chimbu. ‘Simbu’ is now the official spelling. Carl A. Schmitz had already suggested a further division of the Dema category (1960, 227). However, for theoretical reasons Jensen refuted it (1963, 145-186). 4

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term that sets it apart from the other mythical realities of the Melanesian stories and rituals. The Dema Complex In 1976 I knew that the Dema myths existed, but the people of the Southern Simbu among whom I was living seemed not to know them. They had heard stories about the pig festival, but these related only to the specifics of the festival as enacted, not its religious meaning. Eventually I found mention of the Dema myths in the ethnographic work of Pastor Wilhelm Bergmann on the Kamaneku of Kundiawa. The original myth was in the Kuman language with a German translation. Here is my translation of the myth, ‘Mondo and Gande’: Once upon a time there were two brothers who lived in heaven. They flashed up there and then came to touch down on the tip of the Kama shrub and then descended onto the ground. The elder brother’s name was Mondo and the younger’s name was Gande. They came and lived at Wonkama. The elder one made an arigl head gear, went to the bush, and stayed there till night. Then he came home and slept. The younger brother was wondering what the elder brother was doing in the bush all day long. Next morning the young brother followed the elder brother without being seen. So they went to the bush. As soon as Mondo arrived there he took off the head gear, drove into the ground a stick which had a fork on top of it and hung his arigl on it. He then bent down and started digging up the ground as pigs do. He kept digging till night. At dusk he took his arigl and put it on, but it kept slipping off his head. So he said, ‘Did Gande come that you act this way? Stay put!’ He then went home wearing his arigl. He came home where Gande was and asked him. ‘Did you come while I was away and did you see me?’ Gande said, ‘Yes, I came and saw you’. Mondo continued, ‘You saw where I hung my arigl. There you must kill me, and bury me too. Put a fence around the place. The Kungi grass will soon grow on the spot and when this happens go and look.’ So Gande took his brother to that place, killed him and buried him there. He put a fence around the place and then he went home. He kept an eye on the place and watched the Kungi grass grow, and within the fence there were several pigs of different colours – brown, yellow, white, black, and some with black spots and some with stripes. He went there with his parents and brothers and put ropes around their legs and took them home. Since that time we breed pigs and we eat them, we make arigl head gear and other decorations. If the man Mondo had not done this for us how could we have obtained the pigs, how could we have bred them? Gande saw them first there where he killed and buried his brother and therefore we do have pigs now (Bergman 1970, III, 32–34).

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The Dema is always related by blood to those who will profit from his or her death: brother (always older one), sister, or mother (but very seldom father). As a rule the ‘victim’ asks to be killed by his/her relative, though there are cases where the Dema is killed without the Dema specifically asking for it.5 He or she is then buried. Out the grave comes the symbol of what makes the present time much better than the former; that basic element that was missing in the former time. For want of a better term I term it the ‘full life,’ to contrast it with the ‘poor life’ the people were leading before.6 The Dema figure is special because he or she knows that his or her relatives are missing something very important in their existence. The relatives themselves are not aware of this fact, and though the stories often go out of their way to describe the pitiful situation of the relatives, they bear their lot without knowing of a different and better way of life. The Dema knows also the way to bring about this full life; he or she possesses the power to actualize it. The way is through his or her violent death. The Dema dies to bring about change; however, this person does not ask for anything in return, in the same way a parent would act.7 The symbol that grows out of the tomb varies greatly according to the culture. What comes out of the grave is not always a staple food, as the Simbu myth exemplifies. It is the cultural core of a radically changed life for the given group. It is the symbol of a better life, the symbol of their ‘full life’ compared with the ‘miserable’ one of the past. The Dema does not resurrect. Something new comes out of the grave. The Dema disappears, so to say, and is not venerated. This is what the stories tell us. The Pig-Killing Ritual The pig festival is not celebrated in contemporary PNG. In the twentyfirst century it is only a memory, and none of my present Simbu students have ever witnessed this ritual. As my original 1977 paper is not readily 5

‘Blood relative’ in these cultures means somebody who by definition has obligations towards the members of his/her group, who must and does care for his/her relatives. 6 To state that the staple food comes out of the grave is quite misleading as the Simbu myth shows. The staple food stands for something else; it is a symbol, not the reality of that which comes from the death of the Dema. 7 I was told that a father would not ask his son for this kind of reciprocity. I cannot disprove this statement and I put it down to an ideal embedded in this culture regarding the way a father – or a mother (?) – should act.

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available I shall describe here the main points.8 My exposition takes the pig festival among the Simbu as a case study, but draws on ethnographic records from among other PNG regions. The pig festival, or Pig-Kill, is said to be the most elaborate celebration to honour the spirits of the ancestors. My analysis of such a classical example demonstrates that, while the ancestors play a role in such celebration, the rites in the festival point towards something else. This fact not only makes another explanation possible, it postulates one if we are unwilling to admit that the greatest and most elaborate expression of Simbu culture is the result of pre-logical thinking. Before we can talk about religious celebration, however, we have to be aware of two stages in such celebration. The first stage is that of ‘expression.’ Participants feel a religious truth and express it through words or deeds. The second stage is that of ‘application.’ The participants use their religious experience to obtain a social good (Jensen 1963). When asking about the meaning of the pig festival, the answers point towards a stage of application. My aim, though, is to find out the religious core that was perceived and expressed in such celebration. Objections may be raised that I am idealising or essentialising this situation; that people do not think this way in the here and now. In answer, I contend that even if people are completely in the stage of application, such a stage takes its meaning and vitality from the initial religious experience. It is that experience we need to rediscover, to be able to better understand the traditional religion in its most complete way. This commitment to recovering the ‘initial experience’ makes explicit the phenomenological approach I bring to understanding Simbu religion. Classical phenomenology of religion has a commitment to epoché, which is defined as the bracketing of presuppositions, so as to be ‘present’ to the phenomenon under investigation, and to the eidetic vision, which as Sharpe notes ‘implies, given the acquisition of objective and undistorted data, an intuitive grasp of the essentials of a situation in its wholeness’ (Sharpe 1986, 224). Regarding the pig-killing ritual, I shall describe initially what was practiced until recently.9 Secondly, I shall examine sources which explain how this ritual was celebrated before compromises with Christianity 8 Written permission has been acquired from the Melanesian Institute to reproduce in part the material in my article from Point (1977). 9 The last pig-kill I witnessed was in 1983 in Mararoko, Southern Highlands. However, I do not feel competent to talk about that culture in this chapter.

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took place. Thirdly, I shall present two explanations: that given by the people themselves, and the explanation that seems to follow logically from what people are seen to do. I wish to note that in the area I am describing, only non-Christians and Catholics celebrated the pig festival. What is described is therefore a syncretic compromise between traditional PNG religion and the Roman Catholic brand of Christianity.10 The pig festival is an event that involves extensive preparations, both material and temporal. The festival is heralded to the community through initiated men, always in pairs, blowing sacred flutes at night. In daylight hours the gardens for the festivities are prepared and planted. When the food is nearly ready for harvesting new houses are built. In some places, these are only shelters for the time of the dances, but in others they are simply new houses that are going to be used afterwards as normal habitations. About two months before the actual killing the big dances start. The children open the dances and keep the stage for about a fortnight. Then the adult males take over. One or more marriageable girls take part. They do not sing with the men and are either in front of the group as a separate line, or on the sidelines if there are only one or two (Luzbetak 1954a, 1954b). Before the men’s dances commence, a pig is killed in secret by a ‘specialist’ and each dancer is given a piece of pork to ensure the success of the dance. A variant of this ceremony is to have a chicken crushed under the feet of the dancers to ensure the success of the dance. Either the day before the slaughtering of the pigs, or very early on the same day, a ceremony which is called blesim kruse (to bless the cross) takes place. I shall describe one that took place at Tabai within an extended family of the Girabiku sub-clan of the Kia clan, at Kelau in the Salt region. In a grove, a round space about three feet in diameter was fenced in, and a path which led to the enclosure was laid. Around the outside of the fence of the enclosure there are sweet potato runners, sugar, and taro, all ready to be planted. There are digging sticks, spades, axes, and ropes for tying the pigs. Women with their babies are present, as are money-boxes containing the money of the extended family. A cross was dug in the centre of the enclosure. A priest is asked to ‘bless’ the cross. This blessing varies: a Eucharistic celebration with a sermon linking the 10 The Lutheran Church decided not to take part in the pig festival because it was considered to be contrary to the Christian faith, while the Roman Catholic Church decided to participate in it after the people discussed the issue for many days (Schäfer, 1981).

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two events; a sermon followed by a long free prayer; or the praying of a formula, depending on the attitude and understanding of the priest, all may be considered appropriate. After the blesim kruse, the pigs are killed by clubbing. Before the clubbing, the name of the place where the pigs used to feed is called. The pigs are slaughtered around the enclosure and then lined up around or near it. At this point, the pigs are often given away and the new owners start cutting them up and cooking them. (Nilles 1950–51, 40–42). The Ceremony before the Compromise with Christianity We can note that before a compromise with Christianity the following points of difference can be observed. Firstly, the flutes were secret and only the initiated men could see and handle them. It was during this time of the pig festival that the boys’ initiation took place, and part of the ceremony consisted in showing the flutes to the boys (Nilles 1950–51: 36–38). Secondly, the main difference during the dance was the use of the boards or geruas worn by the dancers.11 Among the people of the Gumine area there are two types of geruas: the Sa-gerua (spirit-gerua) and the Ibal-gerua (men-gerua). The Sa-gerua was worn at the killing of the ‘little pigs’ that was done a few days before the big pig-killing, while the Ibal-gerua was worn during the dancing and killing of the ‘big pigs’. Not every nuclear family had a gerua, nor could everybody wear it. It had first of all to be given by a father to either the son or daughter of his choice. It was entirely up to the father whom he chose, but if one of his children requested a gerua, the father had to make the gerua or the child would die. If the gerua was given to a girl on the day of her wedding she would wear the gerua for the last time, then her father would take it back. After gerua were used they were placed in the cemeteries to rot. The custom of carrying gerua is extinct. Finally, the most striking difference takes place at the point of blesim kruse. I quote an authority on the traditional ceremony, Father John Nilles (1905–1993): Two or three days before the slaughtering begins the leading men put up a small building over the ancestor’s burial spot, the Bolim Inngu. This is done during the night and by men only. Women and children are told the 11 The gerua board is a piece of flat, cut wood, with geometrical designs. It can be small, about 20 cm by 8 cm, or large, over 150 cm by 50 cm.

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spirits of the ancestors have built the house. It is a round-shaped hut of about three metres in diameter. One post in the middle is called Ende Mondo and before being dug into the ground it is smeared with grease and blood from pigs killed at the cemetery the day before. The post Ende Mondo with its upper end shaped in a conical way reaches about 50 cm over the kunai roof. During the dance, one of the male dancers jumps on top of the Bolim house holding with both hands a large gerua perforated in the middle in the traditional lozenge pattern, the symbol of a vulva. In solemn and slow action he slips the gerua over the middle pole (Nilles 1950–51 passim; Nilles 1982, 250–251).

While it became the custom that all the pigs were killed at once, in former times it was quite different. I still remember, myself, that at first there was a killing of ‘little pigs’ (‘little’ had nothing to do with size as I found out, but with number), and a day or so later there was the big pig-killing. No real myth is remembered about the flutes themselves. The old men no longer know the meaning of the flutes. They only know that they are ‘strong’ in the sense that they can make the boys strong and therefore are shown to them at the initiation ceremony to change them from boys into men. The flutes are also believed to make the pigs grow. Because of this belief among the Yui people of the Salt region I saw the flutes being blown outside the pig festival during a girl’s initiation before the pigs were slaughtered. Yet how this ‘growth’ is achieved nobody seems to know. Tradition alone is invoked as reason for the use of the flutes for this purpose. The meaning and use of the dance during the festival is equally difficult to discern. Amamas (rejoicing) is usually stated by informants as the reason for dancing. But this is not the only reason. The dance has to be successful, and for it to be successful, it has to win many girls. The aim is to get the girls so entranced that they join the group and follow the men back home as wives. To that aim a ceremony takes place before the dance, to ensure its success. Married women will run away to them when nobody is around to prevent them from doing that. Regarding the geruas, if the pigs grow thin then the father will make a gerua for one of his children to wear while a piglet is slaughtered. Following that the pigs will grow fat. This suggests that the geruas, like the flutes, make the pigs grow. Remembering that if a gerua is refused when requested of a father by his child that child will die, the intimate relationship between geruas and fullness of life is confirmed. The blesim kruse ceremony has to ensure the growth of everything, including money.

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Many reasons are given for slaughtering the pigs: ‘We have been working hard for years, now we want to relax, eat pork,’ and so on. Or, ‘people have been working a lot and are skinny. Now we want to get strong again.’ Or, ‘we have a lot of pigs so we can enjoy them, call for our friends and share with them. We shall have a ‘big name.’ Why is it that a club is used to kill the pigs and not a spear or an arrow? ‘This is so that there is time to direct the “spirit” of the pig to the place we like it to go. There it will make the piglets grow big and fat.’

Meanings Extracted from the Ceremony Itself In general, it is admitted by participants that the ancestors play a role in such celebrations Firstly, we have to be clear about the term ‘ancestor.’ We must distinguish between mythical ancestor and the spirits of the other dead people of historical time. What confuses the issue is that historical ‘big men’ are mixed with mythical ancestors. There is a fundamental difference between ‘mythical’ and ‘historical’ ancestors. The mythical ancestor can be defined as the one who originated historical time. The historical ancestor can be very important and famous, but he will always manifest as a result of that mythical event brought about by the mythical ancestor. The mythical ancestor is not the creator but the ‘shaper,’ that is, the one who shaped the creation into the present historical form. The historical ancestor can be only the channel through which the historical form came to the clan. As the role of the mythical ancestor is not clear any more, an historical ancestor can be placed on the same level (Trompf 1991). It is necessary to analyse the steps of the ritual in detail. Firstly, in the case of the flutes, the explanation of the flutes remains problematic. Even if it were admitted that the meaning of the flutes was lost long before Christianity reached the Simbu region, that does not mean that the flutes lost their emotional value for the people, as in the subconscious, many things survive which are lost to the intellect. However, it is admitted that the flutes are ‘used’ to obtain growth. In the initiation the boys grow into men. Pigs grow big and fat. Often I had the impression that the ‘effect’ of the flutes was not on the future pigs, but on the pigs that were going to be slaughtered right away. The only verifiable link is to growth (Nilles 1950–51). With regard to dance, disregarding all the other aspects, the dance remains a fantastic display of manliness. One is reminded of the display

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of birds of paradise. Such a display is not by chance, and the ceremony before the dancing proves the intentionality of this phase of the ritual. The success is counted in the number of girls won over. The relation of dance-sexuality is not suggested in a solely erotic sense, but in the sense of marriage. It is no wonder, though, that one reads about a ‘claim of general licentiousness’ emanating from this ritual. In terms of the Blesim kruse ritual, for all who have witnessed a pig festival the blesim kruse ceremony (which replaced the Bolin ceremony as described by Nilles) is an integral part of the pig-killing. It is difficult to say whether the actual slaughtering is more important or the blesim kruse. I know of a case among the Koblaku sub-clan of the Golin clan, where the pig-killing was re-enacted (not on a substantial scale of course, as there were hardly any pigs left) because the blesim kruse ceremony was not felt to be strong enough. The ensuing growth could not be seen. That gives the idea of the purpose of the ceremony: to ensure growth of pigs, growth of the garden, of money, everything. Still the blesim kruse ceremony is a compromise. The aim remains the same, although the means are changed. The aim remains cosmic growth, cosmic life. Only now God is asked to do what the former rites achieved ‘magically.’ With regard to the Bolin ceremony, this shows quite clearly that the means which this cosmic growth or life were brought about by, was the sexual act. We have seen this relation to sexuality already in the dance, and now we see it explicitly in the Bolin act, the centre of the pig-killing. If it is to honour the spirits, what is the role of sexuality in such a festival? Is the increased sexuality during this festival just the result of so many people being together, or is there beside all that, a religious truth underneath? Is it the celebration of lust or the celebration of sacredness of sexuality in its relation to life? Here ‘life’ is taken to mean cosmic growth of everything, full existence of everything and everybody, historical ancestors included. If we remind ourselves of the custom of the Huli of having intercourse in the fields, then we come closer to the understanding of the nexus between sexual intercourse and cosmic life. We can feel the presence of something which has nothing to do with lust. The link is clearly with growth, fertility, life, and it does not go via ancestors but via sexual life (Clark 1997, 191–211). In terms of blood, one tends to think that the ancestors are honoured by the sprinkling of blood on their bones. The same ritual gesture is done on the sweet potatoes runners, on the digging sticks, and so on. Certainly in such a case we interpret the sprinkling as a fertility ceremony or as something that is intended to give vitality, growth, life to the

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garden and pigs. Why is it then that, when the same ceremony is performed on the bones, the explanation often tends to change? Why do we not accept the logic of the action and say: it gives life to the ancestors? (Here we see how necessary it is to give a clear definition of ancestors, i.e. one that provides a clear distinction between mythical and historical ancestors.) If ancestors are mythical, then the pig-killing has the meaning of cosmic renewal through repetition of the mythical act by which historical existence originated through the mythical ancestor. The other ancestors, the historical, exist only because of that life-giving event. They might be channels for us, but still they depend on that mythical event for life. They need life too. Their life is like ours, though on a different level of existence. The sprinkling of the blood is not to honour them, as we Europeans understand it, but to give them life – fuller existence – as they need it as much as we the living; remember the classical example of Odysseus giving blood to the spirits of the dead to give them live, to vitalise their senses, and so on (Odyssey, Book 11). As the ancestors are members of the clan, they are given their share of life-blood. So we have an issue that involves the ancestors, but in a different way than anticipated. They are not the centre, but participate with the living in a situation of need. What is celebrated is not the power of the historical ancestors but cosmic renewal. The historical ancestors do not give it; they receive it, they participate in it with the living members of the clan. It is a sociological trait that comes to the fore. The ancestors are an integral part of the clan. As we look after the old father here in this life, so we look after him and the other ancestors once they are dead. Further presupposed is the fact that the departed have the same feelings and reactions as when alive. We share with them the life as they need it, and have a right to it as clan members. They would vindicate themselves if excluded, like any other living member would do, if excluded. The relation to them is the same as the relation to the old men in the clan, but with an extra dimension. We can see the old men and please them before they get angry, but we cannot see ancestors, so we have to be more careful. Here there is both filial piety and fear. This ‘life’ that is given comes from the death of the pig, the blood being the natural sign of it, and the colour red, its symbol. There is a second point that should be considered: when the pigs are killed, the souls or spirits of the same are sent to the place where the pigs used to feed so they can enter the piglets and make them grow bigger. It looks as if the spirits of the pigs are not part of the rite itself, nor the centre of it. It is the killing itself that is of prime importance. The souls

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or spirits of the pigs are, so to say, a by-product and are simply sent back to other pigs. The situation changes dramatically when the pigs are slaughtered to honour a dead relative at a funeral or to placate the spirit of an angry dead relative. In such a case, the spirit of the pig is at the centre of the rite. It is not sent back into the other pigs, but is given as a present to the departed, who, pleased with it, will depart or return to the place of the dead. If the spirit of the dead is not pleased with the number of the pig-spirits, he will not go but remain present, make people sick and even kill to increase his number of pig-spirits. The difference in the two cases is obvious. Certainly the spirits of the dead are at the centre of funerals and certainly the spirits of the angry (and hungry?) dead relatives are at the centre of the pig-kill in case of some sort of sickness, but why is the same pattern not followed if the same spirits are at the centre of the great pig festival? Is the difference not hinting at the fact that the spirits are not at the centre in such a case? It would be more logical if they were not. The proposed theory would explain the difference: there is a special situation, where the spirits of the dead, as a tiny part of the cosmos together with us, the living members of the clan, and all the creatures, need life itself. That life is given through participation in the mythical event of the life-giving-death.

Stage of Expression of the Festival The reasons given by participants appear to indicate that the festival is used to attain cosmic life. But I intended to find the religious experience which is expressed in such a celebration. Could it be that the belief that celebrated here is the faith in the God-creator and Lord? Certainly in the traditional culture if God is not entirely forgotten (exceptions proving the rule), he became long ago a deus otiosus. He is not concerned about the people, nor the people with him. They are concerned only when he strikes (e.g. an animal sacrifice might be offered on the spot where lightning struck). What is at the bottom of the pig-killing ceremony must be something much more real than a deus otiosus. Analysing the pig festival, it seems that it is the expression of our total dependence on something which does not belong to us, but which we seek in developing society: the fullness of life. In the stage of application, it became a fertility rite, but in its stage of expression it is the religious expression of utter dependence on the fullness of life. This belief presupposes a cosmic solidarity. The whole cosmos participates in the situation of need of that

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life. There are two ways that full life can be attained, two means by which the cosmos can participate in it: sexual intercourse, and participation in the celebration of the life-giving-death of the sacred animal. The cultic killing in front of Archbishop Adolph Noser12 was not simply copied from Christianity. Christianity and some cargo cults, which are embedded in traditional religion, are fed from the same source - the faith of the cultivators that death brings life. The belief is the same, only the notion of life is different. It is spiritual life in Christianity and cosmic life in traditional religion. The other way is sexual intercourse. It is quite plastically expressed in the Bolin ceremony. This act brings cosmic life. If, as reported, during a cargo cult ceremony there is sexual intercourse, it is to increase the cosmic life and so to increase the cargo. If the Huli have intercourse in their gardens, it is because sexual intercourse gives life to the whole cosmos and so to the gardens too. If the Simbu say that one act of copulation is not enough to give life, such a statement was originally not a biological but a religious statement. The sexual act was seen not only as a biological act, but as a religious one giving life, providing growth. What those acts say, or what they try to express, is the belief of the absolute dependence of the cosmos on this full life. Life is what caught the imagination of the religious person in this culture. The absolute is felt to be not spirit and power, but life. Religion, subjectively, is expressed in the absolute dependence on that life (Mantovani 1976). The Demise of the Pig Festival Currently the pig festival seems dead. Probably there are many reasons that contributed to its disappearance. The main reason I was given was sociological (Mantovani 1988; Bogner 1984). The pig festival, which kept the traditional social system going, was in danger of destroying it. Or, put differently, society had changed so much that the pig festival had become not only irrelevant but also destructive. The obligations created by the festival were getting out of hand; creating impossible tensions

12 Archbishop Noser went to Halopa in the Madang district for a confirmation. In the welcome speech a local leader described the hopeless situation people were living in and the need for something to happen to get them out of it. In saying so he cut the neck of the catechist who was standing next to him. His death was supposed to bring about the needed change in their life.

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that could only lead to fights and tribal wars. Society was changing and the relationships created by the festival were counterproductive. Another pragmatic factor was that there were not enough pigs left for the festival because many pigs had to be used for compensations and also because each group celebrated a simpler pig-kill to farewell the old people of the lineage before they died; they anticipate the killing of pigs for their burial.13 People are invited to the feast, pigs are slaughtered and then the leader addresses the old people saying that they killed the pigs while they were still alive so that together they could enjoy the celebration; however, for their funeral they would not kill anymore pigs because they had done it already. As informants told me, more pigs are killed now for these ‘anticipated’ burial ceremonies than for the actual ones. Relevance of the Dema Symbol for PNG Today PNG, as already mentioned, declares itself to be a Christian country. In the Constitution it sees its future as based on two basic principles: the ‘Noble Traditions of the Ancestors’ and the ‘Christian Principles’ which it now regards as its own. PNG clearly does not intend to give up indigenous traditions, while admitting that there might be some that are not noble and others that can be challenged. Hence, Christian principles are regarded as relevant for the future. This intention, however, is challenged by the trends in the world PNG has entered. Garry Trompf, in his contribution to the workshop at the Melanesian Institute, pointed to the serious challenges coming from secularisation. Interestingly, he later engaged with my concept of the ‘fundamental Melanesian religion,’ arguing that the fundamental religion ‘usually amounts to a total wellbeing’ (Trompf 1988, 208) in which participants celebrate ‘prosperity and fecundity,’ ‘wealth’ and ‘a continual subsistence that will keep bodies from sickness and death in the ravages of famine and calamity’ (Trompf 1988, 208–209). The process of secularitation has gained momentum since that seminar in 1975. However, it has been counterbalanced by a proliferation of, and rapid increase of Evangelical and Pentecostal churches (Vincent 1993; Mantovani 1995; Zocca 1995, 2004; Gibbs 2004). While secularism erodes the so-called supernatural aspects of the ‘Noble Traditions’, the 13 For instance, in Ormilkoan, Gumine Subdistrict, on December 16, 1987, thirtyeight pigs were killed for the old people of the lineage.

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new churches, in general, do away with them altogether replacing them with their own brand of Christianity. The mainline churches, as the pig festival shows, follow different approaches regarding the ‘Noble Traditions’ in the sense that they use the ‘Christian Principles’ as they understand them in their own tradition to judge what is ‘noble’ and what is not of the PNG traditions. The 1976 article I am revisiting refers to and addresses this attitude of the mainline churches. The Christianity which came to PNG was Western; this is purely a statement of fact. Phenomenologically, the Christian religious experience was expressed through symbols derived from Jewish biblical traditions reshaped over the centuries by Western cultures. There was little awareness of the difference between the experience and expression and the symbols used to express the Christian experience. These were taken in an absolute way. Though the various denominational approaches varied greatly, basically the traditional Melanesian religious experience was largely ignored and its symbolism replaced by a Christian one. My paper on ‘A Basic Melanesian Religion’ questioned this approach, suggesting what has been called a process of inculturation (see Shorter 1988; Gallagher 2003). The Christian message must be presented and expressed through the cultural symbolism of the recipients. Anything short of that is wanting, because it does not respect the cultural, religious identity of the people and imposes one’s own convictions without any serious dialogue. The Dema complex, in my opinion, opens the possibility for Melanesian Christians to express the Christian faith they have embraced in a very Melanesian, traditional way, without detracting from the traditional Christian faith and providing an even deeper understanding of the Christ event. For Christianity, the symbol of the lamb that is sacrificed to take away the sins of the world is central in the sense that it expresses the conviction that Christ, like a sacrificial lamb, through his death freed humankind and the world from a disastrous situation. The Dema symbolism does not see evil in the world as the effect of human sin but as the natural situation in a world which is capable of improvement but has not reached that stage as yet; a world in a process of evolution, as sciences would say today. Further, the Dema symbolism interprets Christ not as the sacrificial lamb, who offers himself to a divinity, but as one of us who is more-than-human, who shows the way to a better future and dies to make it possible. Melanesians could rightly say the ‘Dema of God who gives us the full life.’

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Obviously, if Christianity insists on the uniqueness of her symbolism, then one could hardly expect the acceptance of a Melanesian symbol to express the reality of Christ. In the world of today, however, when interreligious dialogue is a significant concern in theological literature, when dialogue between religions is of vital relevance to the peace in the world, the Dema symbol would help not only the Melanesian Christians to find a cultural approach to the centre of their new faith, but it might help even other Christians to better understand the Christ event. Conclusion The planters of PNG have developed the Dema symbol and complex; it belongs to their cultural and religious roots. Today Melanesians call themselves Christians as they have accepted to make Christ part of their culture and religion. The use of the Dema symbol to interpret the Christ event could help to make Christ ‘Melanesian to the Melanesians.’ Garry Trompf in his contribution to the 1976 seminar expressed his concern about a type of secularization that would deprive PNG of her religious roots. ‘Is it the disenchantment of rootlessness we are working for? – a kind of “over-secularisation”, a resignation before the sheer fragmentedness and banality of life?’ (Trompf 1974, 219). My concern when writing my contribution to the workshop in 1976 and now revisiting it is not only the possible loss for Melanesian of their roots and identity in the process of the acculturation taking place in PNG, but also and especially the apprehension for a missed chance for Melanesians to stand up, as equal partner in a dialogue, and confront the secular and religious West with their own Melanesian spiritual roots, challenging not only the secularized West but also the Western Christianity they adopted as part of their present identity. This challenge to Christianity would not be a denial but a different way of understanding and expressing the Christian message by giving it a face which is not only typically Melanesian but which would offer Western Christianity something to reflect upon and to be enriched by. Bibliography Baal, J. van. 1966. Dema. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Bergman, W. 1970. Die Kamaneku. 4 volumes. Mutdapilly MS 126, Harrisville, Queensland, Australia. Bogner, P. 1984. In der Steinzeit geboren. Olten: Lamuv Verlag.

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Clark, J. 1997. ‘States of Desire: Transformations of Huli Sexuality’. In Sites of desire, economies of pleasure: sexualities in Asia and the Pacific, eds L. Manderson and M. Jolly. 191–211. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Cox, J. L. 2006. A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion. London and New York: Continuum. Eliade, M. 1978. A History of Religious Ideas. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Flood, G. 1999. Beyond Phenomenology. London and New York: Cassell. Gallagher, M. P. 2003. Clashing Symbols. An Introduction to Faith and Culture. London: Darton, Longman, Todd. Gibbs, P. 2004. ‘Growth, Decline and Confusion: Church Affiliation in Papua New Guinea’. Catalyst 34: 164–184. Haverlund, E. 1973. Leo Frobenius: an Anthology. Trans. P. Crampton. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag. Homer. 1998. The Odyssey, ed. Robert Fagles. London: The Folio Society. Jensen, A. E. 1963a. Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —— . 1963b. ‘Prometheus und Hainuwele-Muthologem. Eine Apologie’. Anthropos 58: 145–186. Luzbetak, L. 1954a. ‘The Socio-Religious Significance of a New Guinea Pig Festival’. Anthropological Quarterly, n. s. 2, 27 (4): 59–80. Luzbetak, L. 1954b. ‘The Socio-Religious Significance of a New Guinea Pig Festival’. Anthropological Quarterly, n. s. 2, 27 (4): 102–128. Mantovani, E. 1977. ‘Christ in Melanesia. Exploring Theological Issues’. Point 1: 155–6. —— . 1988. ‘Relationship to Ancestors. What is Happening Today?’ Catalyst 18: 75–80. —— . 1994. 25 Years of Service. The Melanesian Institute: Its History and its Work. Goroka: The Melanesian Institute. —— . 1995. ‘Musing on Winds of Change’. Catalyst 25: 36–44. Nilles, J. 1950–51. ‘The Kuman of the Chimbu Region, Central Highlands, New Guinea.’ Oceania 21: 25–65. Nilles, J. 1982. ‘Zu einigen Glaubensvorstellungen und Kulthandlungen der Simbu im Zentralen Hochland von Neuguinea’. Jahrbuch des Museums für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig Band 34: 237–259. Schäfer, A. 1981 [1959]. ‘Christianized Ritual Pig-Killing’. Catalyst 1(11): 213–223. Schmitz, C. A. 1960. ‘Die Problematik der Mythologeme “Hainuwele” und “Prometheus”.’ Anthropos 55. Sharpe, E. J. 1986. Comparative Religion: A History. 2nd ed. London: Duckworth. Shorter, A. 1988. Toward a Theology of Inculturation. London: Geoffrey Chapman. Trompf, G. W. 1977. ‘Secularization for Melanesia.’ Point: 208–225. —— .1988. ‘Salvation and Primal Religion’. Prudentia, suppl. no. 207–231. —— .1991. Melanesian Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vincent, D. 1993. ‘Religious Affiliation in Papua New Guinea. Reflection upon the 1990 Census’. Catalyst 23: 39–56. Zocca, F. 1995. ‘Winds of Change also in Papua New Guinea?’ Catalyst 25: 174–187. —— . 2004. ‘Religious Affiliation in Papua New Guinea According to the 2000 Census’. Catalyst 34: 41–56.

CARGO CULTS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE: THE DYNAMICS OF CREATIVITY AND REPETITION IN THE POMIO KIVUNG Andrew Lattas Abstract Garry Trompf ’s work has explored the creative forms Christianity has assumed in Melanesia, and the various ways Christianity has been localised. He studied popular forms of Christianity as emerging Melanesian theologies of sin, punishment and redemption, and as part of the development of independent Melanesian churches. Using ethnography on the Pomio Kivung, I analyse the inadequacies of recent cognitive science characterisations of repetition in cargo cult rituals. Focusing on local ontologies of oratory, ritual and mimesis, I analyse the contradictions faced by cult movements seeking mainstream acceptance whilst still experimenting with the millenarian mimetic promise of myths and rituals.

Introduction Melanesian millenarian movements, often called cargo cults, are well known both for their repetitive practices and for their inventiveness. Both can feature in cult myths, songs, dances, rituals, institutions, relationships and everyday practices (Williams 1923; Worsley 1957). Cult inventiveness does not necessarily stand in opposition to mimesis and repetition. For that inventiveness often involves producing novel ritual and mimetic practices that seek to copy, appropriate and surpass the transformative ordering power of western etiquette, hygiene, church liturgy, military-police practices, bureaucratic-government protocols and the cash economy. All may be merged in unorthodox ways with each other and with local customary practices and understandings of moralritual obligations to the dead. Recent cognitive science approaches to ritual and religion have used cargo cult ethnography to posit an opposition between creativity and repetition, which has been too quickly equated with another assumed opposition between imagistic versus doctrinal-discursive modes of thinking (McCauley and Lawson 2002). Ignoring the enormous philosophical work done on this problem by

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Cassirer, Deleuze, Kierkegaard, Lacoue-Labarthe, Langer and Nietzsche (to name just some), this dualistic cognitive model has drawn inspiration and credibility from Harvey Whitehouse’s (1995, 2000) ethnography amongst Baining followers of the Pomio Kivung movement in East New Britain. Whitehouse argues that different religions, ritual systems and cult movements can be characterised by their systematic use of sensuous, climactic, imagistic thinking (which is supposedly more egalitarian and maybe indigenous) versus repetitive rituals and doctrinaldiscursive thinking (which is supposedly more hierarchical and may be evidence of the influence of European church and state institutions). I will not reproduce the many criticisms of the Whitehouse dualistic comparative model made by anthropologists, religious studies scholars (including Trompf 2002) and even by some cognitive scientists (Alles 2004; Koch 2006; Knight 2003; Stewart and Strathern 2002). Instead I will use my own fieldwork in Pomio to question whether the mainstream Kivung movement can be characterised as just boring, unreflexive (uncritical), repetitive rituals and logical discourses lacking enigma or the cultivation of secrecy and mystery (Whitehouse 2000, 63–4; McCauley and Lawson 2002, 91). I believe Whitehouse seriously distorts his Pomio ethnography when he argues that climactic sensuous imagistic rituals promote reflexivity, whilst discursive-disciplinary rituals inhibit reflexivity (see Lattas 2006a).1 Cargo Cults and Christianity Having visited Pomio and written on the history and ideology of the Kivung movement, Trompf (1990, 1991) rejected Whitehouse’s dualistic comparative model of Melanesian religion as a reductionist oversimplification. Trompf ’s own comparative approach to Melanesian religion studied popular forms of Christianity from a phenomenological position that incorporated history and politics. More specifically, Trompf studied how different Melanesian villagers merged the logic of their own customary beliefs and practices with those of Europeans so as to localise and reclaim the processes of their Christianisation and modernisation. Throughout New Britain, cargo cults, such as the Pomio Kivung, systematised 1 Whitehouse (2002, 2005) has a very modern definition of reflexivity as doubt rather than as confession. For him, it is a quantitative question of more or less doubt, rather than, as Evans-Pritchard (1933) argues, the grounds and limits within which different kinds of doubt and questioning can be exercised.

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a popular rural Christianity, which was concerned with how God was a local ancestor. Often this local God runs away to Whites and gives them His knowledge, but one day He is expected to return (Blythe 1995; Pech 1991; Pomponio, Counts and Harding 1994; Lattas 1998). Different villages, clans and language groups in New Britain possess different versions of these stories or, more accurately, these myths of racial loss. The myths can localise different parts of the Bible: the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark, the Ten Commandments and Christ’s crucifixion. These myths of origin are hidden from Europeans and from netif priests and government officials. Underpinning local forms of solidarity, the myths form the pervasive culture of rural religiosity, which is read into the everyday poverty and suffering of villagers confronted with mainstream official versions of origins, morality and hope. In rural New Britain, popular forms of Christianity have existed not so much outside of mainstream churches but clandestinely within them. Whilst sometimes a clear line can be drawn between cult followers and mainstream Christian congregations, the two also share common myths, beliefs and practices which localise biblical narratives and Christian pastoral practices. Today, in the New Britain cult areas of Bali Island and Pomio, mainstream Christians and cult followers will form two distinct congregations. This polarisation is accentuated at election time when church leaders will campaign on behalf of political candidates. Today, the block vote of cult followers, especially on Bali Island, will be courted by politicians, but that block vote is also feared. Historically, educated Melanesians have sought to unify diverse Christian congregations through horror stories of pagan, demonic cult practices (Cabrido 2006). Today throughout New Britain, there is a resurgence of mainstream Christianity which is linked to an emerging class structure of educated Melanesians empowered by Western institutions. In coastal villages, many educated individuals who have spent years in high schools, the public service and private employment have returned home to become leaders of churches and local advocates of development projects such as timber logging. In New Britain, the current renewal of mainstream congregations coincides with declining cult followings and the rise of charismatic versions of Catholicism and Protestantism, which often paradoxically revoice the millenarian promises and apocalyptic warnings of the cargo cults that they often oppose (Eves 2000). Trompf visited two long running cults in New Britain with which I have done long-term fieldwork: Dakoa’s cult on Bali Island, and the

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Kivung in Pomio. He analysed both as emerging Melanesian churches competing with mainstream churches. Writing in 1990, about the Kivung’s highly organised pastoral practices, Trompf rightly concluded that the Kivung had yet to declare itself an independent Melanesian church though it was actively engaged in mainstreaming itself. When I arrived in 1995, the process of becoming a church was accelerated but at the expense of the Kivung’s political ambitions and its other mainstream objectives. By 2000, the Kivung’s headquarters of Salel had stopped its followers attending Catholic Church services, for it began its own Novena Church, which had its own prayers and church services, and even its own version of God, Jesus and Mary. These religious innovations damaged the Kivung’s following and its political power base. It further alienated the Kivung from mainstream church congregations and, more especially, from ex-followers who increasingly joined mainstream churches.

Money and Government: the Redemptive Economy of the Pomio Kivung Movement The Pomio Kivung started around 1964, which was when other major cults emerged in New Britain, such as Censure’s and Dakoa’s movements (Lattas 1998, 2001, 2005). This historical period introduced local government councils and was noted for official discourses promising future political, social, economic and cultural independence for Melanesians. These official discourses of Melanesian autonomy were appropriated and localised by the cults as a search for true national-racial independence through the dead and the landscape. Though the cults often criticised surface Whites for deliberately holding Melanesians back, the cults also expressed villagers’ ambivalences about being governed by educated Melanesian groups who were seen as incompetent, corrupt and full of sorcery (Lattas 1993). Throughout New Britain, cult followers invented their own alternative Whitemen, namely underground ancestors. They localised the moral governmental authority of whiteness into dead relatives whom they now wanted to come and govern them instead of native officials and priests drawn from foreign ethnic groups, such as the Tolai. The large cults that I have studied invariably claimed it was their ritual-moral work with the dead that delivered independence to PNG in 1975, but the true meaning of this independence was lost to educated Melanesians, who did not know how to work with the dead to realise truer Melanesian forms of government and church.

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The Pomio Kivung sought this true independence through the repetitive ritual-moral work of the Tenpela Lo. It is celebrated as a superior version of the Ten Commandments that is not just based on words or prohibitions, but requires regular ritual work such as confession, feeding the dead and working in communal gardens. The Tenpela Lo were received by Pomio’s first Member of Parliament, Koriam Urekit, from a mysterious white man who asked Koriam to call him Brata, and not the usual colonial term of Masta. Whilst Koriam was fishing in his canoe at his Kandrian home village of Abligi, Brata arrived in a large ship that turned into a humble canoe as it approached Koriam. When they both came ashore, Koriam befriended Brata with gifts of hospitality that included rushing off to find shelter, food, water and firewood for his guest. Later, Koriam is said to have gone missing for many years and was presumed dead. Many suspect he was secretly in Rome being schooled in the moral-ritual work of the Tenpela Lo, whose posts are carved in Roman numerals. For Kivung followers, the story of Brata exemplifies how procreative power and knowledge come from the outside and they must be bought and tied locally through gifts. A supporting paradigmatic example that followers give is a village with poor gardens which must give shell money to an outside magician to come and straighten its gardens. In everyday life, Kivung followers see themselves as accomplishing this same project by regularly offering food and money to the outside dead (to these special overseas white people) so as to obligate them with moral gifts. Followers also seek to seduce the dead through copying their perceived superior Western moral personhood and self-discipline. Thus all food offerings must be given in a certain place, on a certain day and at a certain time. They must be accompanied with moral cleanliness derived from obeying the Tenpela Lo and offering confessions and penance for any recent transgressions. Followers also emulate the aesthetic Western standards of their special white guests by setting the table with flowers, tablecloth, cutlery and plates. In everyday life, followers embrace the ideal white personhood of the dead by not chewing betelnut, which is regarded as the true forbidden fruit that introduced sexuality, sin and labour into the world. Local mythology tells how in the original garden, there were only two brothers until one placed volcanic glass into the trunk of a betelnut tree. He then tricked his brother into sliding down the trunk, which castrated him and turned him into the first woman. The resulting blood splattered the moon, which is why followers associate the red saliva from chewed betelnut with polluting menstrual blood. In Kivung sermons, betelnut is

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also associated with breaches of the Tenpela Lo (gossip, seductive flirting and sorcery) and also with the idleness, horseplay and nepotism that is blamed for making government in Papua New Guinea inefficient and corrupt (Foster 1992). Kivung followers must participate in the cleansing work of the Tenpela Lo each time they offer food to dead relatives in their private domestic houses and in their two communal feeding houses. Followers ensure the food offered is not just physically clean, but morally clean, by first ritually cleaning themselves of shame (balenge) and pollution (siluwa) derived from recent breaches of the Tenpela Lo. This penance requires followers to offer money and a silent confession to special jars or ‘bottles’ called Television (Lattas 2006a). This confessional money, along with its collection and disbursement, is called bisnis bilong Tenpela Lo. This ‘business’ is ethically celebrated over non-cult commercial activities such as tradestores and cash crops. Kivung leaders believe the soul (mirana) of followers’ confessional money travels in prayers to an underground government (gavman) of the dead whose allegiance and future help it ‘buys’. Every three months, the skin (patuna) of this confessional money is collected and taken to the Kivung’s headquarters, where it is counted and was previously banked. Such quarterly account keeping is seen to mirror the accounting practices of Europeans and was partly a ritual attempt to appropriate Western commercial practices for increasing money. Initially, the collected money was given to colonial officials who deposited it in the Australian government’s Commonwealth Bank. From there, Kivung money is believed to have travelled overseas as a gift to other countries where it continues ‘to buy out’ an alternative modernity not just for Kivung followers and Papua New Guinea, but the world. When Peter Avereh was still a mainstream Kivung leader at Matong village, he explained the confessional expiation of sin through money (toia) as money going to government and as money ‘working Government’: The main office will work it and take this money for it to go to the government … Today with the Association we clean ourselves with this something, with currency … When we work this cleaning with ten toia or twenty toia, this money that buys it [a wrong] goes and through it we work government. Before, Koriam told us: ‘You cannot work government with nothing. You must have toia belonging to you and you must carry it to the government, because money is a big something. Money is government.’

Here followers police and redeem themselves through the moral economy of money. Through regular confessions and monetary atonements, followers transform money into a moral governing instrument, which will seduce and ‘buy out’ a future government of the dead known as

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Heaven Polity Government. The repetitive cumulative debt of moral penance is rendered into a totalising ritual gift measured through the cumulative totalising powers of money. Here money operates as a cumulative memory, as a cumulative objectification of moral self-scrutiny. The transformative power of money carries forward the transformative promise of repetitive disciplinary moral-ritual work such that money (via the bisnis bilong Tenpela Lo) is seen as an instrument for intensifying processes of becoming. Moral atonement with money is done prior to feeding the dead in private domestic houses and also in weekly public rituals known as Sek, where followers silently confess and clean themselves prior to feeding the dead in public communal houses. In addition, in monthly Kivung rituals known as Baim Lo, followers offer money to clean away the sins of the dead. The soul of this money goes to an invisible world where it clothes the dead and buys them out of purgatory. This ongoing care for the dead buys their loyalty but also civilises them. Regular feeding has tamed the dead so when they now visit villages and houses, they are no longer angry destructive spirits but moral guardians of followers and bearers of a national-global promise. Though it emphasises the future millenarian promise of moral-ritualmonetary relations with the dead, like other cult movements, the Kivung advocates participation in surface world institutions (Trompf 1994). But whereas Dakoa’s cult advocates cash crops, the Kivung rejects smallscale development projects as the road to a true modernity and prefers politics and gavman for its millenarian project. Kivung followers have sought to seduce and release an underground government through, on the one hand, public participation in surface world government elections, practices and institutions and through, on the other hand, clandestine magical-ritual copying of national governmental forms. He we should note that public participation in surface world government practices was also secretly read as a magic-ritual appropriation of the transformative potential and promise of an underground future government of the dead. Gavman and Misin Since its inception, the Kivung has adopted a Western division of labour between gavman and misin, between its elected political representatives in the national parliament – Koriam Urekit, Alois Koki and Francis Koimanrea – and its local religious leaders – Bernard Balatape, Kolman

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Kintape and Joe Baikolalkia. When I first visited Pomio in 1995, it had two brothers as national MPs. Between 1979 and 2000, Koki replaced Koriam as member for Pomio, whilst Francis was Governor of East New Britain between 1995 to 2000, after having earlier been Minister for Health for about one year. Despite their political power and influence, both brothers often presented themselves humbly as blind (ai pas, matasu), as unable to see the invisible world of the dead or the future, and so in need of guidance from Kivung religious leaders, such as Kolman and his spirit child, Joe. Sometimes Joe would impose public fines on Koki and Francis for returning late from Port Moresby for important Kivung ceremonies such as that marking Koriam’s death on December 3. Both brothers paid the fines, whilst telling other followers how no one stood above the government of the dead. Politics was presented as subordinate, as encompassed and gaining legitimacy from a moral-religious source and its ethical projects. The sustained electoral success of Kivung politicians between 1964 and 2002 was attributed to their support of the moral work of the Tenpela Lo which gained them the backing of the dead. Indeed, the dead were said to vote alongside the living. Their votes secretly entered ballot boxes in the surface world to deliver success over anti-Kivung candidates. In 1998, when disgruntled Kol villagers came down from the bush to the coast, they threatened to desert Francis. He scoffed at needing their political support, telling them if they did not vote for him, the leaves, trees and grass would. Francis was referring to the dead in the landscape as his true political power base. Such use of allegories and metaphors (tok bokis, talk-box) is the mark of a true Kivung leader, which resonates and re-enacts the renowned cryptic oratory of Koriam, which is still recited at Kivung meetings (Trompf 1994, 91). Cultivated silences and intricate allusions to myths, proverbs and recognized allegories are evidence not just of individual intelligence but of the hidden influence of the dead. The charisma of an individual is attributed to the heaviness (maena) of their talk, which comes from the hidden presence of the dead inhabiting and steering their thinking into intricately crafted allusions that carry multiple hidden meanings. Here the alternative reality of hidden meanings incorporates the alternative hidden reality of the dead. A truly knowledgeable person hides not just other meanings and realities with cryptic references, but also him or her self. Thus Kivung politicians often cultivate a persona of humbleness, which for Francis meant maintaining a thatched-roof rather than a modern iron-roof house in his home village of Gugulena. Referring to

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traditional stories, Francis explained: ‘if you are a true saveman then you must hide yourself. How you relate to me will be different to how you relate to another man.’ Francis then pointed to how Kolman’s spirit children, Beri and Joe, did not openly reveal themselves but hid their importance and came disguised by possessing their mother’s lowly female body. For Francis and loyal Salel followers, this is the living being tested by the dead. Francis noted how when Nutu (God) was in Pomio, He hid Himself and His save from people.2 He revealed Himself differently to different groups of people, deliberately trying to confuse them. Later, He went to the land of Whites and again changed Himself: ‘this is just the way of all the truly true knowledgeable men. Their approach [appearance, form] has to change. With everything, Nutu hid His save and He confused all of us nothing-people.’ Here truth and power reside in deception. God distinguishes Himself through a duplicity that ordinary people cannot recognise. As Francis put it: ‘The way I see it, is that we humans are trying today to know about this man who changes his form … He is confusing us and He hides Himself, He hides Himself!’ Throughout New Britain, such understandings of trickery underpin local Melanesian theologies, which merge the Bible and Western culture with local origin stories about ancestral heroes who run away and become Jesus or providers of knowledge and morality in the land of Whites. Here trickery operates as an organising principle that can bridge disjunctures in space, time, narrative, power and identity. Searching for a more inclusive God, throughout New Britain, the cults often made him into a trickster (Lattas 1992, 1998). Trompf (2002, 2006) criticised cognitive science approaches which have characterised the Kivung as composed of boring repetitive rituals and logical doctrines that are divorced from empowering sensual imagery and a sense of mystery (McCauley and Lawson 2002, 91; Whitehouse 1992, 1994). The theory ignores local understandings of oratory and of how power and charisma reside in cultivated forms of secrecy. Kivung leaders are never just who they seem to be and this applies not just to the male spirit child Joe hidden inside his mother’s body but also to Kivung political leaders. They are paired with invisible doubles; their thoughts and talk are made heavy by invisible guardian spirits or malyav. Koki had the Boss of underground gavman, the late

2

Nutu is the Mengen word used for God but it is also used for bush spirits, respected ancestors and elders.

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Koriam, as his malyav, whilst Francis still has the Boss of underground misin, the late Bernard. The latter died so as to become the hidden future Pope of the world. Prior to the 1997 election, Koki displayed his malyav’s overseeing influence by becoming briefly possessed by Koriam. Prior to the 2007 election, a rival candidate against Francis sought legitimacy by claiming Koriam possessed his body. The Kivung headquarters refuted this candidate’s suggestion that he was the true candidate of the government of the dead. Instead, Salel claimed that when Koki died, both his spirit and that of his malyav, Koriam, became additional malyav to Francis. Indeed, Francis saw himself as gathering together in a potent historical force all the movement’s powerful spirits. This confidence underpinned Francis’ decision in 2000 to resign early as Governor to contest his brother’s seat of Pomio. Party colleagues and the Prime Minister strenuously sought to dissuade Francis, whose decision was guided by mediums at Salel. They claimed Koki was deliberately taken underground to boss the World Bank and that Koki’s death was part of a hidden plan by the government of the dead to move Francis into the prized seat of Pomio. Since Koriam’s time, Pomio has been expected to produce a Prime Minister who will liberalise strict national immigration laws, which keep out not just Europeans but also the multi-million dollar companies run by white dead people (Lattas 2006b; Whitehouse 1995). Their arrival will prefigure the establishment of Heaven Polity Government. Changing Theologies of Sacrifice and the Emergence of the Novena Church Under Kolman’s spiritual leadership (1975–95), the Kivung continued Bernard’s and Koriam’s practice of using secrecy and talk-box to foster processes of mainstreaming by hiding contentious millenarian beliefs (Trompf 1991, 1994). Seeking to protect itself from litigation by educated opponents, control by the Kivung headquarters was tightened and Kivung leaders were sent out to visit and reincorporate groups who had initially rejected Kolman and control by the Office at Salel. Pointing to their own influence in government, Kivung politicians threatened to have police arrest breakaway groups whose cult practices undermined the Kivung’s desire to be regarded as a respectable national association. Towards this goal of mainstreaming, the Kivung printed pamphlets about itself, anthropologists and a film crew were invited to study the

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movement, national politicians and international ambassadors were flown into Pomio, and educated Kivung followers wrote articles to national newspapers and even presented a paper at a national academic conference on Melanesian millenarianism which Trompf attended (Koimanrea and Balioenakia 1983, Walters 1981). Kivung doctrines and practices were also re-systematised to downplay differences between Koriam, Bernard and Kolman, who now were to be understood as implementing a common divine plan. After studying sociology textbooks in Port Moresby, in 1982, Francis introduced the practice of calling Bernard, Koriam and Kolman ‘charismatic leaders’. This was a public gloss for a clandestine theology of sacrifice uniting their deaths. For they did not just die, but were said to have voluntarily given up their lives to ‘buy out’ the new future world. Their deaths spiritualised them, that is transformed them into malyav, watchful intermediaries between God and His people. Peter described Nutu’s return as him giving the knowledge of the Tenpela Lo to Koriam, Bernard and Kolman, and then requiring their deaths. We cannot see Him, Nutu does not work at coming up to people, which is why we say that we ourselves must work Him. Now this Nutu of ours follows this talk here, these ten pieces of talk here (Tenpela Lo). Nutu gave these ten pieces of talk to the three of them and he said: ‘You three must take my place now … Now you three must sacrifice yourselves to me for all of your people.’ Now if we didn’t sacrifice them, then everything would be hard. This change will not come up.

God’s distance is overcome by reworking Him as talk; He is rematerialised as the Tenpela Lo and His Christian Holy Trinity is localised into the three charismatic leaders. Their death is turned around from being a threat to the movement, a historical source of instability and instead becomes a fulfilment of the movement’s promise. The sacrifice of Jesus gave Whites their living standard and in New Britain folklore the sacrifice of Akun in Canberra gave the Chinese in Rabaul their wealth (Lattas 2006b). According to Peter: ‘With all countries, there must be a man who sacrifices himself for his people. This must be a person who is not afraid.’ When Kolman left the surface world in 1994, it produced a crisis for the movement, its previous leaders had been male but now Kolman’s wife assumed control of the headquarters. Margaret was supported by Francis and Koki who helped fund major building renovations at Salel. Whilst Kolman was alive, Margaret had already become an important medium, who used possession by the spirits of the late Koriam and

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Bernard to consolidate her husband’s leadership and her own emerging reputation. After Kolman’s departure, Margaret’s possession by the spirits of previous male Kivung leaders allowed her to escape her lowly female status and to validate her claims to Kivung leadership, which was being contested also by Bernard’s influential younger brother, Lelparia. Those loyal to Margaret frequently call her the Body and believe she has made the ultimate sacrifice for the movement in allowing her personal identity to disappear under an onslaught of possessing spirits. One important spirit who stayed for many years in Margaret’s body and who constantly returns is Joe. He is a blut pikinini (miscarried child) who claims his father (Kolman) sent him to take his place and preside over the movement. Whilst possessing his mother’s body, Joe claimed to be nurtured and growing inside that body so that one day he could emerge, be born, as a new Jesus for Papua New Guinea, a Black Jesus, whose sacrifice would redeem Melanesian sins. At Salel, Joe was noted for empowering female mediums who used possession and dreams to support him, his mother and other members of the Kivung hierarchy. Joe justified his support for female mediums by criticising competitive male shamans who would dismiss his mother’s womanhood as a proper conduit for spiritual authority. According to Joe and his supporters, men lack the ethical temperament and discipline to be vehicles for today’s civilising spirits. Men are too prone to fighting, arguing and drinking and so violate the moral order of the Tenpela Lo. Otto Tokal, who helps administer Salel, argued women’s rise to Kivung positions of spiritual power was ‘marking’ that the pigheaded rule of men was coming to an end. Better spirits were entering women’s bodies because women were quieter and more peaceful. Male mediums were criticised for using their possessing spirits to acquire money for alcohol and for not allowing those spirits to control their disorderly behaviour. It is the moral possibilities of masculinity and male authority, which are criticised as subverting the utopian ethical world of the dead. Here colonial processes of pacification and missionisation, which sought to produce disciplined, ethical subjects, are displaced into quiet female mediums who embody the ideal of fully civilised Kivung subjects. I also interpret the rise of female mediums, particularly Margaret who will deliver the nation’s new Black Jesus, as marrying the procreative promise of womanhood to the procreative promise of that which is unique and which in transcending present worldly forms can inaugurate another world. Important female mediums who support the Kivung headquarters include Hilary, a deceased boy who inhabits his sister’s body.

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She resides at Salel and has married the secretary to the head office. Another medium is called Mama because when Joe possesses his mother’s body, Margaret’s spirit has to leave and it can then enter Tulalrea, a woman who is part of Salel’s female choir. When a new spirit possesses a Kivung follower, the headquarters will sek (check) it, interrogate it over who from the dead has sent it and for what purpose. If judged a good useful spirit, the office will give a ritual sekan (shaking hands with money) so as to ‘strengthen’ the spirit and ensure it stays and works in the surface world as a healer or diviner. When important or contentious issues arise at the headquarters, then the female mediums will often use dreams to bring information from the dead concerning the correct policy or decision. Some previous decisions include: whether Francis should step down as Governor to contest Koki’s seat of Pomio; is it legitimate to spend money in Kivung bank accounts; and should a village be fined for its breaches of rules about how to feed the dead. Here, mediums add the authority of the dead, and especially of the three charismatic leaders, to Joe’s decisions. The headquarters will ostracise mediums whose spirits and dreams can not be relied on for support. Today this includes Augustine in the Kol area, Thomas of Bain village and, more recently, Peter and Busa of Matong village. Though many ex-followers are angry with the Kivung headquarters, many nevertheless remain loyal to the memory, policies and ritual practices of particular Kivung leaders, especially Koriam and Bernard and, more contentiously, Kolman. Today, ex-followers will invariably criticise spirits running the headquarters, arguing the movement belongs to the living who need to increase their scrutiny of mediums. Those sceptical of Joe ask why, as Kolman’s deceased son, he needs to seek the advice of other spirits. They also question why female mediums possessed by the dead need to dream to find out something from the dead, for this is what the living need to do. Peter, whose father was a traditional medium at Matong, criticised Salel’s mediums for failing to display accepted gestures for being possessed, such as yawning, staring and shaking. Peter argued that, unlike Salel’s spirits, traditional spirits did not stay a long time; they would give their talk and leave. A big sickness was also necessary to become a shaman: ‘This charismatic power comes up from sickness … This sickness is like the power of this knowledge. If God gives you this knowledge then he must first give you a sickness.’ Prior to the 2002, when Salel’s female mediums were at their height, special books at the Kivung’s headquarters recorded their lukluk (visions). At Salel, important meetings consisted of different mediums

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recounting their dreams. Francis and Otto would then relate those dreams not just to each other and to previous dreams by other followers, but also to traditional mythology, the Bible, and Kivung stories, proverbs, beliefs and values. The Kivung headquarters seeks supportive mediums who will enter into alliances and elaborate on each other’s dream travels to the dead in ways that reinforce current policies. Sometimes the headquarters will play mediums off against each other. For example, Margaret’s spirit will leave Tulalrea’s body to go inside the body that Hilary ordinarily inhabits. This is used to punish Tulalrea to stop her gaining too much independence or assuming that she, rather than the headquarters, controls Margaret’s spirit. Just after 2000, Peter, who does not become possessed and is instead noted for his dreams, was seen as becoming too close to the rival leader, Lelapria. Female mediums were used to warn Peter and later to marginalise him. Mama publicly recited a dream where she saw Peter and herself racing in two separate canoes but suddenly Peter’s canoe turned upside down. The banis (headquarters) keeps a watchful eye on mediums. There are many who covet prized Kivung positions such as the control of public confession bottles, community houses for feeding the dead and communal Kivung gardens. When Joe wanted to punish Peter for not visiting Salel, Joe took away Peter’s control of Matong’s Mahagina jar, a public confessional jar that Peter had received as a gift from Kolman. This loss hurt Peter deeply and consolidated his break with Salel. The headquarters also claimed to have ended Peter’s power to see and know things through his dreams, through what Peter calls his ‘private television’ (Lattas 2006a). Angrily refuting claims his dreams and save had been stopped, Peter used his influence as a healer, diviner and orator to form a break away group at Matong headed by himself and Busa. Today both emphasise their reliance on dreams rather than possession for knowledge concerning the dead. Both claim spirits can not be trusted, their true purpose or mission can be concealed by them and the spirits may have been sent to test followers’ faith with misleading advice. For Busa and Peter, their opposition to Salel is partly a contest between rival modes of divination, the dreams of the living versus possession by the dead. A major blow against the authority of Salel’s female mediums was their inaccurate prediction that Francis would win the 2002 and 2007 national elections. Today the headquarters describes this as a major traim, a trial, where followers have had their faith strenuously tested by the underground. Today female mediums are only occasionally called upon by the headquarters to produce public dream reports and when

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they do, there can be embarrassed silence. Prior to the 2002 election, Peter was already a critic of Salel’s female mediums and his status as a leader of Matong’s breakaway group was consolidated by him predicting Francis’ election defeat. Matong was important to Salel as a source of funds, with money from timber royalties filtering through followers’ jars to the headquarters. Angry at Peter’s success in securing many of Matong’s followers, the spirit of Joe’s brother, Beri, came up and possessed their mother. Beri is known as a spirit of war who has fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Together with other Kivung leaders, such as Francis and Otto, Beri (in Margaret’s body) visited Matong to confront recalcitrant followers. Upon coming ashore, Beri went and hugged Matong’s Tenpela Lo post, treating it as a person and calling it his brother. He cried and sang laments to the post of how strong Matong had been but was now lost because of a disabled man (Peter). Later the Tenpela Lo came up as a spirit who possessed Margaret’s body and so did Number One Nutu, the first God who created the ground and the sea. He threatened to use His power to destroy Matong village through a cataclysmic earthquake or tidal wave. Claims to be possessed by God shocked onlookers from the Catholic Church and Seventh Day Adventist Church, and it further undermined Francis’ credibility among mainstream church congregations. This public display of cosmological power did not convince Busa and Peter to return to the fold, but it did bring back other important followers like Matong’s councillor.

The Routine of Ritual or the Ritualising of Routine? Beri’s above behaviour and indeed Margaret’s leadership of the Kivung do not readily fit the cognitive science model of the Kivung mainstream as dominated by boring logical oratory and repetitive ritual routines. The model is based on highly selected aspects of Kivung rituals divorced from their history, context and internal power struggles. Ironically, the model conspires with the headquarters to sustain an ideology of unchanging doctrines and rituals. When Joe was interviewed in the film Koriam’s Law, he was keen to present this image. It was meant to counteract the accusation of ex-followers that the movement has been usurped and corrupted by Kolman’s and Joe’s innovations. The current accusation levelled at Francis is that he has been fouled by spirits and has too readily supported and covered up recent changes in doctrine and ritual practice. Those loyal to Koriam emphasise the Tenpela Lo and

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that confessional money paid for moral transgressions should be banked to await the Australian government’s return so it can use the money to develop Pomio. Ex-followers condemn Joe for staging endless ceremonies using bank funds that they accumulated. They also criticise Joe for establishing a separate Novena Church, arguing that Koriam never prevented them from attending Catholic Church services. Recent Kivung changes are traced by ex-followers to the introduction of Novena prayer ‘bottles’ whose money does not have to be banked to await the future development work of gavman and misin. Ex-followers object to the way confessional ‘bottles’, like the Television jars through which the dead morally watch the living, have been superseded with Novena jars. Bernard started the practices of giving out Novena ‘bottles’, but it was to a few close leaders. Kolman expanded the practice and it produced a public conflict where Koriam accused Kolman of coving up his work of the Tenpela Lo with the work of Novena. When Koriam passed away, many followers left the movement, regarding Kolman and his wife as giaman (false) prophets. Supporters of Kolman claim Novena is a secret stolen from the Catholic Church, which it hides even from its own native priests. Kolman is praised for helping the Kivung move closer to recapturing the lost knowledge of koinapaga, which God ran away with but had first given to Pomio. In current Kivung theology, when Kolman left this world, he became Number Two Nutu (God) who replaced the first God belonging to Europeans. When Kolman was a child, Number One Nutu came up to him in a garden and He pressed His thumb into Kolman’s forehead and transferred His knowledge. Later Kolman also miraculously received a small prayer book that contained the magical talk of koinapaga which will one day be spoken through Novena prayer bottles. Joe, as the miscarried spirit child of Number Two Nutu, claimed to be a procreative fulfilment of this theology. Towards 2000, the Kivung increasingly established itself as a Novena Church with Joe as its Black Jesus. The concept of a Black Jesus was present in Kivung theology beforehand as a secret that referred to Bernard. It has now been redeveloped publicly around the blut pikanini, Joe. Under the previous leadership of Koriam, Bernard and Kolman, the Kivung used secrecy and talk-box to minimise confrontations with government and mission. The movement emphasised the importance of a karamap (gasi), a concealing cover or disguise of complicity within which followers hid contentious truths (Lattas 2006b). Kivung followers continued to attend Catholic Church services despite public church

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criticisms of their movement, which they reinterpreted as a hidden test or trial of their faith. What led Joe to break with the Catholic Church was not just a new wave of public church tirades against the Kivung, but also the role of native priests and other church leaders in organising political opposition to Francis in support of rival candidates linked with logging interests. The Kivung contributed to its political problems by alienating Catholic voters and, more especially, ex-followers when it publicly proclaimed Joe as the Black Jesus of Pomio and, indeed, of Papua New Guinea and the world. Religious conflicts came to the fore when Joe visited villages with large non-Kivung populations so as to perform Kivung ceremonies empowering new Tenpela Lo posts. Joe also started to replace Tenpela Lo posts carved with Roman numerals with signboards stating the laws in Pisin and tokples. During these ceremonies, Joe publicly destroyed and entombed traditional shell money and modern currency into the cement base of the new Tenpela Lo posts and signboards. He was demonstrating that both traditional and modern money would soon be worthless. Both would be replaced by a new One World Currency, featuring Koriam’s picture. It would be the new money of One World Government and One World Church. Koriam had predicted the future worthlessness of existing money and even ex-followers saw this as being realised in rapidly rising prices for store goods. To avoid the over 400,000 kina that (in 1995) the Kivung had in the bank becoming totally worthless, Kivung leaders agreed to spend it. Earlier Joe had taunted Kivung leaders with claims he had come to eat ‘as bilong bilum’ (the bottom of the basket) and that he must eat and eat until it was all finished. This demonic taunting of followers implied that he could become an angry spirit; and that he needed to be appeased and pacified. He needed to be domesticated through exchange and debt. The subsequent use of Kivung bank funds for renovations and ceremonies at Salel is something many ex-followers can never forgive. Whilst alive, Koki resisted such suggestions. Koki was committed to Koriam’s project that Kivung money must work with gavman, whereas Francis and Joe emphasised using Kivung money to create ritual debt relations with the dead. Like Koriam and his supporters, Koki regarded the banking of money from confession jars as a ritual cleansing act for establishing a moral relationship of debt with the government of the dead and with overseas countries. Indeed, Koki claimed confessional money had created the Vatican bank and the World Bank and one day the true profit from people’s confessional labours would return to Pomio.

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Francis and Joe spearheaded the controversial transformation of the Kivung into a Novena church with its own prayers, rituals and theology. The Kivung had always had a hidden theology of sacrifice, which included the death of certain ancestors and the death of the three charismatic leaders. From 1995, sacrificial images of Christ’s crucifixion and of the procreative relation of mother and child became important for framing Joe’s possession of his mother’s body. Joe would taunt Kivung followers that they had yet to cut his penis; they had yet to circumcise him. His full initiation into manhood required the spilling of his blood, which would allow him to leave his mother’s body (see Kempf 2002; Bynum 1992). Many saw taunts about needing to be circumcised as Joe needing to be crucified; that he too must die but so as to be resurrected as a living Christ. Joe promised to be the last Kivung spiritual leader. As a miscarried spirit child without earthly sins, Joe would be the ultimate Kivung sacrifice, a pure sacrifice to end all sacrifices. In 2000, there was great expectation of a new millennium and when it did not arrive, the contradiction was handled through Joe being replaced by his brother’s spirit, Beri. Joe returned to the underground where he was crucified and given his position of Jesus. Today the failure of Kivung prophecy and followers’ expectation of change are handled by new spirits, mainly deceased children and grandchildren belonging to Kolman and Margaret, entering Margaret’s body. These ongoing nominal changes in spiritual leadership have not helped the credibility of current Kivung leaders. Under Joe, the Kivung gave up the policy of secrecy and of cultivated disguises that protected its religious and political leaders. With the year 2000 and a new millennium coming close, the Kivung proudly proclaimed the creative promise of its Black Jesus and Maria. Instead of gaining expected converts, the Kivung lost supporters and increasingly alienated ex-followers not just from its spiritual headship but also from its political leaders, such as Francis, who was criticised for supporting theological innovations at Salel. The subsequent loss, since 2002, of all political representation has affected Kivung theology. Today, the Kivung’s language of sacrifice increasingly refers to Salel followers’ own poverty and humiliation. The loss of income from Koki’s and Francis’ parliamentary salaries, along with fewer followers, has affected the headquarters’ ability to provide gifts to help out loyal followers. Instead of being able to celebrate a national project of growing governmental power, the headquarters now articulates its millenarian ambitions around a religious project of poverty and hardship. The movement has revived

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customary myths of origin where loss, debasement and defilement carry fertile regenerative potential (Panoff 1970). References are often made to the old, snotty-nosed ancestress Samunsa who features in customary taro magic. Traditional myths tell of how she and her grandchild had first received from Nutu the magical knowledge of koinapaga, where by talking of something it would appear. Samunsa ‘bought’ this knowledge through a small gift of generosity to Nutu, who arrived as a stranger in canoe. This echoes how Koriam received the knowledge of the Tenpela Lo from his gift of hospitality to the voyaging stranger, Brata. Nutu gave koinapaga to Samunsa and her grandchild after Samunsa gave Him a string of shell money to compensate Him for helping her limping ‘rubbish’ grandson carry back taro. Earlier, Nutu gave the taro after watching the poor wretched boy collect scraps of taro left behind by ‘good’ (healthy, unimpaired) villagers who took away all the best taro sticks that Nutu had brought in his canoe. Later, Samunsa and her grandchild were killed by these ‘good’ villagers who envied the large taro gardens and the subsequent large feasts that came up from koinapaga. Today, loyal Salel supporters see Margaret as abused by ‘good’ villagers, by educated welldressed Melanesians, in a similar way as the original, procreative, snotty-nosed, old ancestress. In Pomio, Samunsa and her grandchild have a secret history of being equated as Mary and Jesus, which is why their pictures are secretly painted inside local Catholic Church buildings. Today, the new Kivung men’s house at Salel has three front posts carved so that the central post represents Kolman as Nutu whilst the two posts on either side are Samunsa and her grandson. When the men’s house was first opened, Margaret became possessed by Samunsa and lay inside, amongst the ashes and dirt, crying like an old woman. Since his election defeat, Francis often wears torn, raggedy clothes when he goes to wash at public springs near Salel. Sometimes, for many days, Francis will be prevented from washing by the spirits inside Margaret’s body who place similar taboos on their mother’s body. Followers are unsure why this is being done though they associate it with heat and a transformation of Francis (Panoff 1970). Francis’ and Margaret’s bodies are made to mirror each other’s state of defilement and the original procreative promise that lies in defilement (Douglas 1966; Lattas 1992; Strathern 1996). The current adverse circumstances of the movement are seen as a trial, a testing of faith and part of mytho-cosmic schemes (biblical and customary) where it is said that ‘something good always comes out of what is no-good’.

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The inventiveness of the Kivung has assumed four interrelated strategic forms. One strategy searched for radical change through novel events such as the arrival of new spirits, the use of female mediums, the formation of a new Melanesian church and the development of local theologies of sacrifice, loss and debasement. A second strategy sought to unearth true change through the progressive historical elaboration of repetitive, everyday ritual obligations read both as a disciplinary moral practice and as a cumulative debt. A third strategy sought to remake customary creative magical-ritual practices, which used a copy or virtual resemblance to seduce and capture the form and power of an absent or desired reality, such as an underground gavman. A fourth strategy searched for a logic of creativity within a logic of pairing where reality was always a structure of complementary opposites. Here doubleness could also be associated with the protective powers of duplicity. The relationship of reality to its image could be treated as a necessary form of coupling where a hidden reality or truth needed a public concealing disguise, which could also seduce and draw close that hidden reality. The Kivung headquarters is based in coastal Pomio where the movement originated among Mengen speakers who continue to dominate the movement’s leadership. Coastal Pomio is a region where the generative practices of kinship, marriage and rituals are organised around the binary logic of matrilineal moieties (Magagiana vs Maranna). The two moieties compete with gifts, yet recognise each other as complementary opposites who must marry and initiate each other’s children. Here the moral governing force of sociality resides in a binary logic, in complementary opposites. This pervasive sense of the world as organised around generative pairs is also deeply ingrained in Pomio mythology. For example, the two brothers in the original garden, numerous myths of competition and trickery between Liklik Nutu versus Bikpela Nutu, and myths that tell of inferior first forms of sugar cane, taro and ways of eating being replaced by second superior versions. This sense of history, narrative and social structure being organised around a binary logic is also deeply ingrained in the beliefs and practices of the Kivung movement, as in the dichotomy of misin and gavman. Initially there was a Kivung bank account for Government and its departments, but this was soon ‘balanced’ with one for Mission and its sacraments. When the feeding of the dead moved from secret bush locations to a public communal feeding house (Gigunga) in the village assigned to Bernard and misin, it

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was soon balanced with another communal feeding house at the cemetery assigned to Koriam and gavman. Likewise, the communal Paradise Garden (despite being started by Koriam) was soon assigned to misin and to Bernard but was then balanced with a second communal garden belonging to Koriam and gavman. Whilst Whitehouse (1995, 80) describes Bernard’s Garden and Bernard’s Temple (Gigiunga) as ‘extraneous to the overall ideological scheme,’ they are part of symbolic schemes that repeat generative interfaces; that continuously rediscover the procreative binary logic of moieties in modern ordering categories.3 Here innovation becomes the historical elaboration of new ritual practices as repetitive ethical obligations, which must mirror and balance two competing Western forms of juridisation, two institutions for producing being bound by law and moral scrupulousness. In the binary interface between misin and gavman, there is a search for a generative juridicism, a proper interface of legality with its doubles so as to intensify and transform the laws of ritual and ethics into a heavenly government. Here it is partly a question of Kivung rituals embracing Western models of law (kannane) as a redemptive utopian project involving a more complete ‘juridisation’ of human existence. The Kivung has always localised European models of law by assimilating them to local understandings of ritual laws governing relations with the dead. Known as Gavman bilong Ples this can involve the Tenpela Lo being policed by the dead who will make sick living relatives that shame them with their transgressions. The localisation of Western juridicism also occurs through treating the two dominant Western institutions of law (gavman and misin) as reproducing the balancing binary logic of a moiety system. This moral organising power of a binary logic is also inscribed in understandings that the self has to be morally balanced. Each Kivung follower is said to have a personal complementary opposite or invisible double, their sipona. It is an underground, white, spiritual twin formed at birth from an individual’s placenta. It watches over an individual’s moral behaviour and can also inflict illnesses for breaches of the Tenpela Lo.

3 Kivung groups such as the Kol and Baining who do not have matrilineal moieties nevertheless visit and have married coastal groups who do. They also often visit the Kivung headquarters or are visited by its representatives and are instructed in the logic of pairing and balance that organise Kivung practices. For example, even the Tenpela Lo are organised with three laws for God on the right hand side and seven laws for the all the people on the left hand side.

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Later, it is from this invisible twin that an individual will receive the knowledge to operate modern institutions and machinery. One’s sipona is not just a guardian angel but also an underground racial double who is the concealed future possibility of the self. The Kivung’s creative search for complementary doubles, for mirroring opposites, was also played out theologically as a search for improved local versions of the sacred. Whilst Europeans emphasise the singularity and individuality of God, Christ and Maria, the Kivung searches for second local versions. In the form of the Tenpela Lo, Koriam found a better Melanesian version of the Ten Commandments, namely ethical prohibitions supplemented by ritual work. In Koriam, the Kivung found its own future King, the King of Heaven Polity Government, whilst in Bernard it found the hidden true Pope of the world and of a new global church. In Kolman, the Kivung found Number Two Nutu, a Melanesian God who will preside over the Last Day of Judgment. Kolman’s wife and their miscarried child offer a Black Madonna and a Black Jesus for Pomio and ultimately for the world. The Kivung has also found a new form of virgin birth. Between 1995 and 2000, when Joe was at his height, his hidden body and powers were growing through him possessing and feeding off his mother’s body, from which one day he would emerge by stepping outside of it. This would be a new superior form of virgin birth, where Joe would not be born through the polluting vagina of women. Moreover, he would not be born as a child but as a fully developed adult. As Otto put it: ‘He is picturing another kind of creation that is not part of the body.’ According to Otto, the Jesus from before was born through the body of woman and so did not transcend suffering and could not take humanity beyond suffering. He (Joe) is picturing the new kamap (origin), the new creation as you call it and then there will be no pain and hard work … He is making come up the new kamap and this kamap is what mankind wants to go towards, for today they are all tired. They are tired of working cars and everything else and driving them. They just want to sit down and enjoy things, where we can talk and something will come up.

Here Otto does more than restate a popular Kivung belief that later women will not need to give birth or to raise children. For with Joe’s birth, the pain of woman’s labour is transcended as a way of transcending the pain of all labouring existence. It is the original garden of sin, where the origin of sexuality and childbirth was the origin of work, which Margaret promises to transcend with a new less polluting form of female procreation. Joe’s birth will escape the creative violence of the

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betelnut tree by merging traditional shamanism with the Christian Virgin Birth. The unique event of Joe’s birth will transcend the limits of the existing world so as to open onto the new utopian world of One World Government, which will offer an alternative modernity of plenty, peace and harmony. Other nations were said by Otto to be also dreaming of this, but they did not know the road. ‘We must create it. We must engineer it.’ This engineering requires a plan and ritual work, which the Kivung knows and which it will use so that Papua New Guinea as the ‘last country’ (to be civilised and developed) will school the world in the ‘last save,’ koinapaga.

Cognitive Science and Kivung Rituals: Routine versus Transgression With the death of each major Kivung leader - Bernard (1975), Koriam (1978) and Kolman (1995) – the Kivung lost followers and splintered into rival groups. Whitehouse (1995, 175) rightly argues that breakaway groups have helped to stave off a more rapid decline in the movement by tapping into local allegiances organised around language, culture and kinship. Using ethnography on the Baining, Whitehouse (1995) has proposed a cyclical theory of the relationship between peripheral cults based on images, mystery and sensuality versus the doctrinal ritualistic centre of the movement. Whitehouse never did sustained fieldwork at the Kivung’s headquarters. When he did briefly visit Salel, Kolman was still alive and Whitehouse (1995, 49) mentions how he interviewed Koriam who had possessed Margaret’s body. Whitehouse does not explore how this problematises his theory, for here in the cult’s headquarters, in what should be the centre for standardized logical doctrines and boring ritual routines, a female medium was playing a unique leadership role. She was possessed not just by a male spirit but by the head of the underground government of the dead and the future king of Papua New Guinea and the world. Whitehouse’s work has been systematised by cognitive scientists studying religion who have further stereotyped the Kivung ‘mainstream’ as comprised of boring repetitive discourses and rituals which lead followers to fall asleep in services (for criticisms, see Knight 2003; Trompf 2002, 2006). In contrast, the periphery cults are characterised as composed of charismatic practices where meanings are transmitted in intense sensual rituals that produce long lasting flash bulb memories. Trompf (2002, 2006) rejected Whitehouse’s reduction of Kivung rituals to the

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function of producing memory, and the cognitive model’s reduction of history and creativity to the need to overcome boredom. If mainstream followers sometimes fall asleep during meeting, it is partly because their commitment requires them to get up at 4AM to go to their gardens so as to be back by midday when they can wash, clean, cook, set the table and attend Kivung services. Followers need to dress up in their best Western clothes and to set the table properly with clean plates, knives, spoons, forks, cups, flowers and tablecloth befitting their invisible white relatives. The cognitive science model ignores how the colonial historical context gave redemptive racial meanings to moral dressage, to the transformative discipline of repetitive cult routines. Here, the Kivung merges rituals laws with Western forms of etiquette, hygiene, morality and jurisprudence so as to create new forms of governmentality, a government of the dead, which will fully realise the colonial utopian promise of the transformative power of pacification through juridisation (Lattas 2006a, 2006b). The cognitive science model assumes that charisma and institutionalised rituals always stand opposed. This ignores how processes of routinisation, law and governmentality can themselves become charismatic, merging religious potency with disciplinary promise. Here Western etiquette and hygiene help augment the creative promise of the Kivung’s juridisation of everyday life, for they become part of rituals that intensify the powers of repetition by merging the transformative power of Western modernity to the transformative power of the dead. Repetition becomes a transformative vehicle, a cumulative building up of power and wealth, where moral discipline builds up moral debt. In the Kivung, rituals and morality merge in a scrupulousness that involves what Ricoeur (1969, 135) calls the ritualisation of moral life and the moralisation of ritual. The religious aspects of Kivung rituals require regular self-cleaning through confessions and monetary penance so the food put out for the dead is clean. Throughout the Kivung’s history, the tables and the ritual etiquette for feeding the dead have been a crucial site of experimentation. Here minute passages to new ritual routines, to new disciplinary codes, evoke for followers a historical sense of intellectual-moral progress, that their past ritual scrupulousness has carried them into a new more potent ritual praxis. Initially the dead were fed on one table, but this changed so the Bosses were fed separately on their table and often in a separate room. Separate tables and plates were also allocated for ordinary dead men so they were not contaminated by the female pollution of dead women. The number of plates has also changed from being unspecified to ten, one for each Tenpela Lo.

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Later, three plates were allocated for the three charismatic leaders and seven plates for ordinary dead men and dead women. This mirrors the Tenpela Lo post which has three laws belonging to God on one side ‘balanced’ against seven laws belonging to the people on another side. In a break away movement based at Kaiton, it abolished the three separate tables and their ten plates, claiming to have progressed ritually to just one table with only three plates. When the Kivung headquarters criticised this ritual innovation, it was not for being fallacious, but it was not yet time for this ritual step. A sufficient debt of ritual repetition had yet to ‘buy out’ this step. Here ritual innovations are a slow progressive movement into more potent ritual forms that can redeem the cumulative debt of ritual discipline and moral scrupulousness through which followers articulate their new sense of an ordered, civilised self. Using the philosophical work of Deleuze, Kapferer (2004) has recently argued that repetition in ritual is not just a repetition of the same but an intensification of processes of becoming. Rituals accumulate transformative power through repetition. Here ritual repetition can slow down the experience of time so that fundamental structures in reality can be virtually engaged and manipulated. In the Kivung, this ritual intensification of becoming involves followers accumulating money and its transformative power. It also involves followers embracing and remediating the transformative civilising-disciplinary processes of their modernisation through ritual relations with the dead. In the course of Kivung history, these ritual practices have had their forms of repetition modified slightly, with the difference being essential for conferring on the creative powers of repetition a sense of history as cumulative progress. The latter was part of the dominant ideology of development, whose advocacy of patience and hard repetitive work on successive cash crops was displaced and repeated anew in successive Kivung practices that built on and carried forward each other’s cumulative promise. Whitehouse downplays what occurs both within and outside of the repetitive Kivung rituals that feed the dead, namely the stories and experiences of what is exceptional. Here what is exceptional is regarded as a reward for ritual discipline. Many followers can recount how in communal feeding houses, they heard money fall into a dish or saw the dead arrive as fireflies or as a python, others saw televisions which depicted the wrongs committed by villagers, whilst others were given dreams by the dead showing people’s sins (Lattas 2006a). At Matong, Peter was the kuskus (secretary) who sat in a small room to record and recount such activities. He claimed: ‘I didn’t tire of it. I had an interest in hearing all

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the different noises inside the house. I was interested in seeing the snakes and all the other things that use to come up, for they (the dead) would go and change into this.’ One afternoon, Peter came outside trembling with fear after he saw a huge wild dog, which disappeared after entering the room of ol Bos (all the Bosses). Followers concluded it was: ‘the dog of all the Big Men, of all the dangerous men, ol Bos (i.e. three charismatic leaders).’ Tavulio, who is scornful of both Kolman and Joe, was the ritual overseer of Matong’s Paradise Garden. He would sleep there overnight and in one report that he gave personally to Koriam, he told of seeing the Boss (malyav) of Paradise Garden, a man wearing long robes and accompanied by sheep. Other followers have experienced other signs from the dead, such as extra money in their confessional jars or teeth marks left in food for the dead. Followers also experience and live their personal ethical relations with the dead in everyday struggles to make crops grow, catch fish and game, and protect themselves and their family from illnesses and sorcery. In the good fortunes and misfortunes of everyday life, dead relatives produce moral scrupulousness by conferring benefits and punishments according to followers’ ethical behaviour to each other and their adherence to Kivung laws and rituals. In reducing ritual scrupulousness to the function of reinforcing memory, the cognitive science approach decontextualises Kivung rituals so that inside their domestic houses followers no longer feed a lost parent or grandparent. Many women feed their lost children. Contrary to Whitehouse (1995, 187) who uses gender domination in the Kivung to question women’s commitment, women are widely regarded as the most loyal of followers. Often when husbands leave the movement, wives remain to feed those who nurtured and loved them, and those they have nurtured, loved and lost. In the film Koriam’s Law, Magdeline speaks of her promise to her dying husband that she will remain faithful to Kivung work, that she will feed him and his clan. She never remarried. When Magdeline goes to her garden, she is occasionally accompanied by a bird that perches in a nearby tree and watches over her. It is her husband and he will cry out to tell her its time to return home, and this may be for some mundane reason, or because there are sorcerers around. Conclusion Such everyday experiences inform Kivung rituals and discourses giving them profundity and power. Whitehouse’s oscillating model of ritual change treats the internal tension of the Kivung as boring logical

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discourses and routine rituals relieved by the rejuvenating effects of sensual images and mystery provided by breakaway movements. I understand the Kivung as employing two paradigms of creativity and transcendence. On the one hand, it believes the new world will be delivered through cult discipline, through scrupulous moral obedience to laws and ritual details. On the other hand, the Kivung also believes the new world will come through what Trompf (2004) calls wondering about wonder, which is the discovery of a unique transgressivetransformative event that can bring the past and the future into the present. These two technologies of creation exist alongside each other, reinforcing each other, indeed they are possibilities of each other. Unique events such as Joe’s arrival or extra money in a confessional jar are a reward from the dead for followers’ discipline which the unique events seek to reinforce. Despite an ideology of just pursuing the stable moral work of the Tenpela Lo and of the three charismatic leaders, the Kivung’s headquarters has always invented new charges, jars and ritual protocols. Along with providing extra funds, this also creates for followers a historical sense of their disciplined etiquette as progressively ‘buying out’ a more powerful ritual technique for transforming themselves and the world. Here ritual repetition means (as in local mythology) to re-enact something but in a different form. This was also the case when repetition was used as a subversive tool, as a way of appropriating Western practices, institutions, symbols and narratives so as to re-perform them as part of new local empowering structures. Repetition took on the authority of the repeated so as to surpass its power. Sometimes this could involve, as in the example of a Black Jesus, the paradox of seeking to repeat what is supposed to be unique or singular so as to localise and re-disseminate its mythological generative potential. The dual paradox of creating new repetitive rituals whilst seeking to repeat unique creative-transgressive events cannot be analysed using simple cognitive models that oppose creativity and repetition. Instead it requires a sociohistorical focus on local ontologies of mimesis; that is, the various relationships of the virtual to reality as an ongoing praxis for engaging historical events and changing social structures. Bibliography Alles, G. 2004. ‘Speculating on the Eschaton’. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 16: 266–291. Blythe, J. 1995. ‘Vanishing and Returning Heroes’. Anthropologica 37 (2): 207–228. Burridge, K. 1960. Mambu. London: Methuen and Co.

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Bynum, C. W. 1992. Fragmentation and Redemption. New York: Zone Books. Cabrido, J. A. 2006. ‘Sketches for a Dialogue with the Pomio Kivung’. Catalyst 36 (2): 109–144. Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Eves, R. 2000. ‘Waiting for the Day: Globalisation and Apocalypticism in Central New Ireland, Papua New Guinea’. Oceania 71 (2): 73–91. Foster, R. 1992. ‘Take Care of Public Telephones’. Public Culture 4 (2): 31–45. Kapferer, B. 2004. ‘Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice’. Social Analysis 48 (2): 35–54. Kempf, W. 2002. ‘The Politics of Incorporation’. Oceania 73 (1): 56–78. Koch, A. 2006. ‘The Study of Religion as Theorienschmiede for Cultural Studies: A Test of Cognitive Science and Religious-Economic Modes of Access’. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 18 (3): 254–272. Koimanrea, F. and P. Balioenakia. 1983. ‘The Pomio Kivung movement’. Religious movements in Melanesia today (1). Point Series 2: 171–189. Knight, C. 2003. ‘Trauma, tedium and tautology in the study of ritual’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13 (2): 293–5. Lattas, A. 1992. ‘Skin, Personhood, and Redemption’. Oceania 63 (1): 27–54. —— . 1993. ‘Sorcery and Colonialism’. Man 28 (1): 51–77. —— . 1998. Cultures of Secrecy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. —— . 2001. ‘The Underground Life of Capitalism’. In Emplaced Myth, ed. A. Rumsey and J. Weiner. 161–188. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. —— . 2005. ‘Capitalizing on Complicity’. Ethnohistory 52 (1): 47–80. —— . 2006a. ‘Reseeing processes of seeing: the material poetics and politics of cameras, television, videos and dreams in New Britain’. TAJA 17 (1): 15–31. —— . 2006b. ‘The utopian promise of government’. JRAI (n.s.) 12 (1): 129–150. Lawrence, P. 1964. Road Belong Cargo. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Lawson, E. T. and R. N. McCauley. 1990. Rethinking Religion: Connecting Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCauley, R. N. & E. T. Lawson. 2002. Bringing Ritual to Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panoff, F. 1970. ‘Food and Faeces: A Melanesian Rite’. Man 5: 237–252 Pech, R. 1991. Manub and Kilibob. Point. Goroka: Melanesian Institute. Pomponio, A., D. R. Counts and T. G. Harding, ed. 1994. Children of Kilibob. Pacific Studies 17 (4). Sahlins, M. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Scott, J. C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stewart. P. J. and A. Strathern, ed. 2002. Review Forum. Review of Arguments and Icons, by Harvey Whitehouse. Journal of Ritual Studies 16 (2): 4–59. Strathern, A. 1996. Body Thoughts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Trompf, G. W. 1990. ‘Keeping the Lo Under a Melanesian Messiah’. In Christianity in Oceania: Ethnographic Perspectives, ed. J. Barker. 59–80. Lanham: University Press of America. —— . 1991. Melanesian Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— . 1994. Payback. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— . 2002. Book Review Forum. Review of Arguments and Icons, by H. Whitehouse. Journal of Ritual Studies 16 (2): 44–59. —— . 2004. ‘On wondering about wonder: Melanesians and the Cargo’. In Beyond Primitivism, ed. J. K. Olupona. 297–313. London: Routledge. —— . 2006. Book Review. Review of Modes of Religiosity, by H. Whitehouse. Oceania 76 (3): 320–321.

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Walter, M. 1981. Cult Movements and Community Associations. Port Moresby: IASER. Whitehouse, H. 1992. ‘Memorable Religions: Transmission, Codification and Change in divergent Melanesian contexts’. Man (n.s.) 27: 777–97. —— . 1995. Inside the Cult. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— . 2000. Arguments and icons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— . 2002. Religious Reflexivity and Transmissive Frequency. Social Anthropology 10 (1): 91–103. —— . 2005. ‘Emotion, Memory, and Religious Rituals’. In Mixed Emotions, ed. K. Milton and M. Svasek. 91–108. Oxford: Berg. Williams, F. E. 1976 [1923]. F. E. Williams: ‘The Vailala Madness’ and Other Essays. London: C. Hurst. Worsley, P. 1970 [1957]. The Trumpet Shall Sound. London: Paladin.

PLACING AND DIS-PLACING THE DEAD Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart Abstract As Garry Trompf has recognized in Melanesian Religion (Trompf 2004), relationships with ancestors and the dead in general often remain a vital part of religious ideas and ritual practices long after forms of Christianity have been introduced into and adopted by local communities. In this essay we argue that persistence in this sphere is linked to the connections between the dead and specific places which carry memories of them for their living relatives. This connection with place further explains why in some contexts there are struggles over where the dead should be buried. Christian practices have in some cases altered the spatial disposition of the dead also but in general have not altered the fundamental importance accorded to their emplacement within the landscape. In his book Placing the Dead on the Merina people of Madagascar, Maurice Bloch argued that in the cognatic kinship universe of the Merina the final kinship affiliation of persons was ‘achieved’ or determined only by their placement in a particular tomb shared with others. The ‘achievement of kinship’ was thus seen as a lifelong process. This was a valuable insight, to which we can add the point that such an achievement is sometimes a result of the agency of the living, who seek to make political statements out of the placement of the remains of persons of prominence. We look at materials from the Duna area of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea in order to explicate this point. In all cases placement of the dead is significant, and may be the focus of conflict. Such conflicts may involve the displacement of the dead from where they have been living to somewhere else; or a dis-placement of their stated wishes regarding their place of interment in order to make a political statement. Fundamentally, this is because the dead are seen as powerful, and their agency is thought of as capable of still affecting the living. The agencies of the living and the dead are thus conjoined symbiotically though attachment to places and the meanings that inhere in these places. ‘Place’ is thus revealed as a fundamental category of religious experience and ritual practice. We begin with a comparative exposition of Merina ideas as explained by Bloch (1971). We conclude our paper with an example from Taiwan which underlines the general significance of ‘placing the dead’.

Placing the Dead among the Merina Bloch’s arguments about the achievement of kinship among the Merina of Madagascar emerged out of his analysis of the Merina system of

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categories and practices in the spheres of kinship, descent, and locality, especially as these related to those Merina known as ‘white’, who are recognizably of the Malayo-Polynesian/Austronesian type in appearance and language affiliations (Bloch 1971, 3). These Merina recognized a number of ancient central territories to which their ancestors were said to belong, and they built elaborate permanent tombs in these territories, within which the bodies of dead persons, wrapped in cloths, were buried, and from time to time taken out for further ritual treatments. The ancestral territories, linked to particular named categories of people, were ranked, so that where a person was buried would indicate what category they belonged to and what their ranked status was (Bloch 1971, 107). Bloch calls the social categories associated with these ancestral territories demes (1971, 46–56), and he notes that these demes were in-marrying (endogamous), so that a person would marry only someone of the same overall rank. Genealogies were not the final means of reckoning membership in a deme. Bloch explicitly notes that ‘burial in a tomb is the ultimate criterion of membership’ (1971, 45). In practice demes were defined by in-marrying and shared residence (1971, 50). At the time of Bloch’s initial fieldwork in 1964–5 the older system of residence no longer held. People moved around to find a living, access to land, economic opportunities, and the like. Networks of kinship, Bloch notes, ‘can be thought of as webs of unenforced claims to land’ (1971, 57). People had much choice about where they lived in practice. Yet the idea of the ancestral territory where tombs were placed remained powerful. Only in the ancestral area or tanindrazana could a man describe himself as tompo-tany or ‘owner of the land’ (Bloch 1971, 106). Tany as a term for one’s place or land is clearly cognate with Indonesian tana and the terms vanua/fanua/fenua found widely in the Pacific. Those who can trace themselves to the same tanindrazana are described as of the same extended family or fianakaviana. After a woman had borne her husband three children, she had the right to be buried in his tomb. Arguments occurred about whether a man could be buried in his wife’s tomb (Bloch 1971, 115). Perhaps these ‘rules’ reflect arguments about the perceived rank of marital partners where the rule of endogamy was not followed. Bloch notes that in any case people had choices about where they could be buried: in general they could choose between their father’s and mother’s or in some cases a grandparent’s tomb; and they had to make a choice about this matter during their lifetime, because they had to help maintain the tomb (1971, 116–117), under the leadership of heads of tombs (1971, 118).

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So, a ‘tomb group’ was composed of all those who paid to maintain a tomb and thus had the right to be buried in it (Bloch 1971, 120). Tanindrazana, actually, ‘taken in one way means the land where the dead are put’ (Bloch 1971, 127). Large Christian churches were also built in these ancestral territories, and assiduous persons with kin ties to the territories would also try to attend services at these churches (Bloch 197, 133), and to hold baptisms and marriages there (Bloch 1971, 134). Bloch argues that the link with the tanindrazana ties people to an ‘apparently unchanging moral order’ in spite of the vagaries and fluidities of everyday existence (1971, 136). This kind of argument was one which Bloch subsequently followed through in many of his writings (e.g., in Bloch and Parry 1982). Arguments about entitlements to be buried in a particular tomb, or competing claims over a dead body, do not seem to have formed a significant part of Bloch’s exposition on Merina practices. Perhaps this simply reflects the ongoing consensus about ranked hierarchies of people among the Merina at that time. Yet in circumstances of historical change such as the Merina had experienced as a result of political upheavals and French colonial control (Bloch 1971, 3–36), one might expect that ambiguities and arguments over rank and eligibility to be buried in certain tombs might arise. The value of being buried in a particular tomb is portrayed as being a kind of value for the individual person as a means of finally claiming a certain rank in the society. When we compare this point with materials from our fieldwork in the Duna society of the Papua New Guinea Highlands which does not have the MalayoPolynesian/Austronesian principle of rank, we will note that in this highlands society a certain value was accorded by groups of kin to the bodies of dead persons. This meant that there were arguments about ‘placing the dead’, arguments that took place in a kinship universe that actually resembled the Merina situation in some respects, while differing in others.

The Duna: Claims Over Bodies in a Cosmology of Emplacment1 Duna-speakers live in an environment of steep limestone hills and escarpments, forested valleys and clearings, sinkholes, and swift-running 1

For many decades Dr Stewart and Prof. Strathern have conducted research in the Duna area with an early visit to the area in the 1970s by AJS. They have published widely

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rivers that at times run underground. It is a dramatic landscape that the Duna saw also as populated by categories of spirits to which they linked themselves by means of sacrifices, dances, and songs, and it is this living landscape that is the setting of what we call the Duna cosmos, the ordered but not unchanging symbiosis of humans and an environment imbued with interactive agencies (Stewart and Strathern 2000a, 2002b; Strathern and Stewart 2004b). The emplacement of the dead within this landscape is influenced by a number of key factors. In cultural terms (i.e., in terms of basic ideas and notions) one factor is the process by means of which the dead person’s attributes are distributed into the landscape itself. In social and political terms another factor is the framework of kin relations with its balanced emphases between paternal and maternally-derived ties. A third factor is the life-trajectory of the individual and its circumstances, which we call here ‘vicissitudes’. We will take these three aspects (cultural, social, and individual) and deal with them briefly in turn. When a person died in pre-colonial times (before the 1960s), the practice was to place their body on a platform, and to build fires, tended by women designated to do this, under the platform so that the ‘grease’ (i.e., bodily fluids) from the body would go back into the earth. Women sang wailing songs in which they told the spirit of the dead to fly like a bird up into limestone crevices in the hills of the forest and take up their abode there. After an initial placement within the garden area the bones of the body, freed from their flesh, were later taken up to the forest and laid to rest in rock caverns (see Stewart and Strathern 2005b). The embodied acts outlined here also derived their perceived potency from the place they held in a cosmos that included the people in a landscape that encompassed their whole environment. The important parts of the human body and person were bound up with the landscape, and humans and their environment together formed the cosmos. The dead remained integral to this cosmos along with other important categories of spirits. Embodied actions of sacrifice to these spirits

for many years on this work. Their materials cover topics such as yekea (courting ritual), Payame Ima (Female Spirit), palena nane (palena boys), palena anda (palena ‘cult’), pikono (balladic genre), witchcraft, fertility rituals, spells involved in various ritual practices, and the impact of change through Christian churches and colonial influences (see, for example, Stewart and Strathern 1999, 2002a, 2004, 2005a; Strathern and Stewart 2000a, 2000b, 2004).

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depended on the cultural knowledge about the spirits themselves and their powers. In our book Humors and Substances: Ideas of the Body in New Guinea (Stewart and Strathern 2001) we pursued the analysis of New Guinea ideas of bodily humors and substances extensively. While many authors have discussed the significance of ideas about blood, bones, bodily fluids, and the like in New Guinea ethnography, our book uniquely sought to relate such materials into a broader framework of humoral ideas, comparable to those found in geographic areas such as South America. The theory of embodiment that can be derived from such an approach is in turn related closely to a concept of people’s place in and identification with their environment and landscape, and hence their cosmos. Our basic argument in this book is available as a model for similar analyses of other ethnographic cases from New Guinea. When a person among the Duna died, then, their flesh or ‘grease’ was returned to the earth through the process of decomposition hastened by the heat of fires. The bones which remained were then collected, and a number of pigs would be sacrificed to mark this act. They wrapped the bones in a spathe from the black-palm (limbum) tree and transported them up to a rock ledge or cave above the level of human settlement. After this was completed, they held the sacrifice of the pigs. A part of the purpose of this sacrifice appears to have been the wish to send away the tini or life-force of the dead person up to the vicinity of the rock ledge where the bodies of the dead were deposited. The tini were spoken of as dwelling in the high forest where the edible wild nut pandanus trees grow (Stewart and Strathern 2005b, 39). In that area, where men went to harvest the pandanus nuts, they would not speak the names of the dead because the tini were there and might be disturbed or offended to hear their names and make the living sick in retaliation. The high forest was also seen as the domain of a male earth spirit, the Tindi Auwene (‘Ancestor of the land’) and a powerful female spirit of pools and watercourses, the Payame Ima, who was thought of as a custodian of the wild pandanus trees (Stewart and Strathern 1999). Out of respect for the tini of the dead and for these two great spirits, a special form of language had to be used when men went to gather the pandanus nuts; things and people were not referred to by their ordinary names. Instead special names were used exclusive to this context and presumably known only to those who ventured into the high forest domains. Notable here is the notion that the tini of the dead is reluctant to leave the sphere of human habitation. Women sang special songs to enjoin the

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tini to fly away up to the rocks where their bones were also deposited. The power to send the tini away inhered in these songs, as well as in the sacrifices of pigs. The tini were compared to forest birds, such as the ribbon-tail and sicklebill birds of paradise, or the raggiana bird of paradise – all beautiful, flashing, evanescent creatures of the wild. (For some song texts see Stewart and Strathern 2005b, 41.) Another feature of these songs is that they name the places where the living person has had their dwelling and then may go on to name the rock ledges and forest caves where the tini must fly away to. The trackways of the living and the memories they leave behind them in particular places are recorded here and the pathways of the tini are projected into the next world. While the flesh is absorbed into the ground – and this must notionally be ground to which the dead person has claims of affiliation – the bones are placed above the level of garden cultivation in the forest caves, and the tini is free to dwell in the forest area at large. The tini is the closest element to what we might call the ‘personality’ of the dead, the part that exercises agency in life. So the dead person is redistributed into the earth (impersonal dissolution), the rock shelters (commemoration of identity) and the wide forest (personal agency). The framework of kin relations into which these dispositions of cultural ideas are set is as follows (for details see Strathern and Stewart 2004b): among the Duna there is a complex balancing between maternal and paternal ties. While in terms of practical residence and land use, as well as daily cooperation, kin ties through either male or female links are freely exercised, each territorial area associated with a named category is defined by the agnatic descent of at least some of its leaders from a male founding ancestor. Agnatic ties therefore represent the ‘backbone’ of group structure. Because many people live outside of their agnatic areas, they may be buried in other places; but their agnates may also wish to lay claim to their bodies. Arguments about exactly where a person should be buried can easily occur between kin. The putative opinion of the dead person, expressed before death, may also be taken into account. A dead wife buried in her husband’s place may be thought to make her husband’s kin sick if her spirit is unhappy that her body is tied to his place rather than her own natal place. A brother may also want his dead sister to be brought back from her marital place, because, as one man put it, ‘Otherwise I might not be sure that she is dead, so I need to have her grave beside me in my own place’. Personal vicissitudes come into play according to a person’s history. In one case observed, a man went as a health worker (i.e., Aid Post

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Orderly) to an area far from his own agnatic land. Rumors came back that he had been attacked and killed there and his agnates prepared to go and take his body back. Issues of compensation can also be involved. In this case, once they had the body the agnates planned to demand compensation, and a local leader had even worked out the speech he would give to do so (recorded in ‘Speaking for Life and Death’, Stewart and Strathern 2000b). It turned out, however, that the man had not actually died, so the speech did not have to be delivered. In general, in such cases, argument is likely to arise between the people with whom a person has lived and that person’s agnatic kin, if these latter think it is important in terms of their group prestige to claim the body back. Although platform exposure ceased many years ago, the body is still important to kinsfolk of a dead person. In digging an underground grave they actually make a platform for the body to lie in, so that its ‘grease’ may still drip into the earth. And after a while they quietly remove the bones and put them in a rock shelter. The dead are thus ‘placed’ as they should be, much as they were prior to colonial influence in the 1960s. If we compare the Duna with the Merina case, it is obvious that the Duna do not have the distinctions of rank between groups that is so marked among the Merina. The Duna cognatic system of kinship and descent leads to the emergence of a pervasive notion of the agnatic ‘ancestral place’ (auwa rindi) that is comparable to the Merina idea of the tanindrazana. And while it is not so structurally important for a Duna person to be buried in their auwa rindi, there is still a notion that it is in principle desirable for this to happen. The core agnatic genealogy traced by leading members of each rindi ensures that the historical continuity of the group is validated without reclaiming all of the agnatic bodies that have ties with the group’s land. On the other hand, agnatic kin may themselves wish to claim a particular body, especially if it belonged to a prominent person. The reason for this relates to another set of Duna ideas about the cosmos: after a set number of generations it is said that an ancestor’s petrified heart may emerge from the ground as a black volcanic stone, and as such it may be gathered and used as a focus for sacrifices (this, at least, was the situation prior to the 1960s). Since a body may over time turn into an object of power of this kind, which represents the hyper-agency of an ancestor, long-term considerations of this sort can influence arguments about the emplacement of the Duna dead. The overall point of our treatment of materials here is that Duna concerns with where a person is buried and their remains are kept

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over time go well beyond a simple concern that the dead be emplaced somewhere. Of course, discussions about places of burial occur in many different cultural settings; and indeed this point is significant at the broadest level of comparison-making, because it shows that questions of the identity of the dead may continue beyond their decease and may actually be settled only after their decease; and the Duna case fits into this broad overall pattern. Specific features of Duna ideas and social patterns sharpen this overall concern, and this helps to explain why conflicts may occur between people over the emplacement of the dead. To understand the Duna case, as we have pointed out, it is crucial to recognize that emplacement is important because of the way the Duna perceive the cosmos. It is not simply that there is a proper place for the dead, such as, within a cemetery or a garden area, or a field on a farm, as may be the situation in many places. It is rather that each person is composed of specific substances that must be redistributed in a proper way at death so as to contribute to the ongoing process of renewal of the cosmos as such. We have explored the details of this point in previous publications (e.g. Stewart and Strathern 2002b, 2005b; Strathern and Stewart 2004b). Here we will review the main lines of our argument again. In precolonial times the Duna conceived of their cosmos as in a process of transformation during which, over a period of fourteen generations, the fertility of the earth would decline until the ‘ground would finish’ (rindi itaraiya). Rituals were performed to repair and renew the fertility of the earth and to stave off the time when it might finish. These rituals were known as rindi kiniya, ‘straightening the ground’, (Stewart and Strathern 2002b, 9, 14, 67, 70, 108, 111, 165). Although these rituals were separate from the rituals for placing the dead, these latter rituals can be seen to be consistent with the overall purposes of rindi kiniya. The substance of the person’s body is supposed to enter the earth as nggwani (‘grease’, fat, fluid) and thus renew its strength over time. The bones, however, do not dissolve so quickly, and are available as more permanent, locatable, markers of the persons’ identity. Hence their emplacement in rock shelters should be in accordance with the kinship identity of the person. In life persons have multiple networks of relationships and corresponding identities. Especially, as we have remarked earlier, persons can be affiliated through either maternal or paternal ties to the local groups (also known as rindi) with which they are affiliated. They may change their affiliations over time. If they are staying with their maternal kin, they do not thereby lose the potential of returning to their paternal

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place. But in death the body has to stay in one place, and possession of the body is possession of the person’s identity. As we have seen, there was in pre-colonial times an expectation that after a number of generations the petrified heart of a buried person would emerge as a stone of power (auwi) available for sacrifices and appeals for help with life problems. A dead body was thus a site of potentiality of life, not simply a site of decay and dissolution. The dead were also seen as possible sources of sickness to the living. In cases of sickness, divinations were conducted. Prominent as a practice in this regard was the custom ‘of “striking the pig ’s ” nose’ (ita kuma saiya), a descriptive term for clubbing a sacrificial pig and capturing its blood in a depression made in the ground. An expert looked into the blood and determined from shapes within it which of a person’s dead kin were unhappy and causing the sickness. The sacrifice was made to appease them, after which it was hoped that the sick person would recover. The dead are said to be concerned about the actions of the living, such as quarrels and unpaid debts, and their way of communicating their displeasure is seen as non-verbal, enacted directly on the bodies of their living kin. The consubstantiality of the dead and the living, even after the dead themselves had been transformed into noncorporeal spirits, clearly underlies this practice’ (Stewart and Strathern 2005b, 43–44). Ideas of embodied relationships between persons and places of this kind tend to be tenacious, despite overt changes in religious practices, such as a switch to Christianity or changes in political structure, such as incorporation into the nation-state of Papua New Guinea. Although in Christian teaching the soul is said to go to Heaven or Hell, it is evident from mourning songs and ritual practices that people still consider that the dead should be buried close by to the living in garden areas and their bones should later be transferred to rock ledges within the territory of their rindi as a permanent home for their tini. All this means that the emplacement of the bodies of the dead remains important. And, with regard to ideas about the petrified hearts emerging from the earth, the Duna viewpoint is essentially long-term: such signs of the ancestors might emerge at a later time, even if at present no-one is setting up new shrines to such entities within their rindi areas. The pre-colonial cosmography is still imprinted in the minds of the senior generations, and is deeply bound up with the idea of the importance of agnatic leading lines that legitimize the claims of all rindi members to the lands they occupy. In terms of agency and ideas of agency, then, it is the living who make

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claims to the allegiance of the dead by deciding where the dead will be buried. Subsequently, the living also interpret sicknesses or troubles as signs that the dead are disquieted and attention should be paid to them. Finally, in the longer run, a select few of the dead are expected to manifest themselves in the form of volcanic stones seen as petrified hearts and bearers of their power. Even if these were not recognized, they would remain in the earth as a latent source of such power, waiting to be identified and appropriated, religious objects ‘in the subjunctive mood’. We have been concerned here to explain the underlying logic of Duna cosmology in relation to the dead, a logic that explains its own extension in time through its relationship with embodied space and memory. The details of customary practices that underpin this interpretation can be found in our earlier ethnographic works (e.g. Stewart and Strathern 2002b, 2005b; Strathern and Stewart 2004b). But the account given here is also intended to give an overall indication of our argument, viz. that Duna concerns with the emplacement of the dead cannot be explained simply in terms of some universal human concerns. They may indeed evince such concerns, but they also have to be understood in their local specificity.

Re-placing the Dead: The Chiang Family in Taiwan The examples we have taken above from the Merina and Duna cases relate to highly localized political systems. But the issue of where a person of note is buried can take on an enlarged transnational signifi cance. General Chiang Kai-shek, after his struggle with Communist forces in Mainland China, brought the remnants of his army to Taiwan in the late 1940s and established control of it, after the defeat of Japan in World War II in 1945. Japan had ‘controlled’/occupied Taiwan from 1895–1945. Much earlier, Han colonists had settled in Taiwan from the fourteenth century onward. Chiang Kai-shek set up rule by martial law under the control of his Guomindang party, and this political arrangement continued under his son and successor Chiang ChingKuo, until the latter decided to lift martial law and allow a more free political process in 1986. At this time the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) came into being, and eventually gained the Presidency in 2000. Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo were buried and placed in mausoleums at the Tzuhu Presidential Burial Place in Taoyuan County

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outside of Taipei city. Their bodies were honoured by a Presidential Guard paid for by the state authorities. In Taipei city itself a massive hall was built and named the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. In 2007, in the latter part of the second Presidency of President Chen Shui-bian of the DPP Party, the President’s office made moves to rename the Memorial Hall as the Hall of Democracy, removing the association with Chiang Kai-shek, and also ordered that the Presidential Guard at the mausoleums in Taoyuan County be removed. These moves were a part of a systematic campaign leading up to elections for the legislature and the Presidency in January and March of 2008. They were also aimed against the KMT (Guomindang) Political Party, whose adherents continued to respect Chiang Kai-shek’s memory. In his lifetime Chiang Kai-shek had wished to recoup his losses in China and retake the Mainland for the ‘Republic of China’ (ROC). Instead of the ROC wishing to retake China, China now aimed to unify Taiwan under its control, and the KMT Party in Taiwan favoured rapprochement with the PRC (People’s Republic of China) rather than separation and independence for Taiwan. The KMT regained the Presidency in 2008. The DPP’s moves in 2007 were designed to foster opposition to Chiang Kai-shek’s memory and the association with China. The Chiang family, whose members were not always in agreement with one another, announced that they had agreed to send the remains of the two deceased leaders back to their original hometown in Zhejiang Province of China. Earlier, the family had asked for the remains to go to the Wuchitsan Military Cemetery in Taipei County and preparations were made for this to be done. Now they reversed that decision. Chiang Ching-kuo’s daughter-in-law, speaking for the family, was reported as saying that both men had wished to return peacefully to their hometown, and that if the present government did not wish to care for the bodies the family would now do so. Complex contemporary political conflicts thus crystallized around the issue of whether these two bodies should find their secondary burial place. The issue was a part of ongoing struggles between the DPP and the KMT Parties; and at the same time deep notions of ancestrality and the proper emplacement of the dead in cultural terms were inextricably involved in the conflictual opinions expressed. China was for these two bodies their equivalent of the Merina tanindrazana, and their emplacement in it would determine finally their affiliations, or could at least provide a powerful rhetoric regarding such affiliations (The Taipei Times December 24, 2007).

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The greatly expanded transnational issue of the bodies of Chiang Kai-shek and his son belongs in a broad sense to the more everyday practices of looking after the dead in Taiwan. On December 28 2007 we were able to visit the scene of an ongoing process of this sort on the edges of Taipei city and Taipei county. The occasion took place under a long freeway and a canvas tent area had been set up in which an altar was placed and just at the entrance an elaborately colored and decorated model paper house had been placed for the dead man’s spirit to live in after leaving the world of the living. This house was complete with paper figures of a manservant and a maidservant dressed in old-style Chinese clothing, and inside the courtyard a paper model of a Mercedes-Benz car and another one of a helicopter were placed for use in the next world. The house was also said to be air-conditioned. The man, who had died at 69 while on a visit to China, was depicted in a portrait on the front of the house. His body had been cremated in Mainland China and the ashes flown back to Taipei, where they were deposited in a ‘funeral home’. The man had died on November 30 2007, and the family would shortly take the paper house to an area on a mountain, fence this off for the spirit’s use, and burn the house so that it could go to the other world. A figurine of the dead man was set up at a small altar where incense sticks were burning. At its back the figure held a scroll which we were told was probably a land deed entitling the spirit to a portion of space in the Underworld. Hangings depicting numerous such Underworld levels were placed around the interior of the tent and further hangings with representations of Buddhas who could help the spirit on the journey were at the rear of the shrine. All of this paraphernalia, then, had to do with placing the dead, in this case placing the spirit and the bodily remains in different locations: the ashes in a funeral home, the house for the spirit on a mountain plot, and the spirit itself on a portion of land in the Underworld: multiple emplacements. Perhaps it is always like this: the dead must be emplaced, yet in another sense they are ubiquitous, as they are in people’s memories and dreams.2

2 Our thanks to Dr Chuen-rong Yeh of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, for taking us to this occasion and for helping to explain it to us.

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Conclusion: Placement and Re-Placement of the Dead Obviously, our two main cases here are not exactly co-ordinate. They share, however, something more than a generalized concern about where to bury persons. This is because in both instances the political interest and concerns – in short, the agency – of the living is involved. The spirits of the dead, and their expressed wishes, whether conveyed before death or after it by signs that the living interpret – are, of course, seen to be in play. In addition, the living have their own interests at stake. For the Duna, a body is the site of multiple potential identities, among which one becomes predominant after the death. In addition the composite of body, personality, and spirit that makes up the person is itself disaggregated and then re-aggregated into the environment or landscape via the concept of the rindi: flesh renews the vitality of the ground, bones are eventually placed in the mountains as a home of the tini, and memories of the person feed into dreams and manifestations of continuing agency from time to time, especially in contexts of trouble or sickness. This kind of appropriate dis-aggregation and re-aggregation is also found in the case history of a funeral from Taiwan. The history of conflict over the remains of Chiang Kai-shek’s family underscores the essentially political domain in which placing and re-placing the dead may take place when complex questions of power and history are involved. The Chiang Kaishek case writes large what is also written in small-scale political domains among the Duna: a dead body may still embody power. Bibliography Bloch, M. 1971. Placing the Dead. London: Seminar Press. Bloch, M. and J. Parry, ed. 1982. Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, P. J. and A. J. Strathern. 1999. ‘Female Spirit Cults as a Window on Gender Relations in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (3): 345–360. —— . 2000a. ‘Naming Places: Duna Evocations of Landscape in Papua New Guinea’. People and Culture in Oceania 16: 87–107. —— . 2000b. Speaking for Life and Death: Warfare and Compensation among the Duna of Papua New Guinea. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. —— . 2001. Humors and Substances: Ideas of the Body in New Guinea. Westport, CT. and London: Bergin and Garvey. —— . 2002a. Gender, Song, and Sensibility: Folktales and Folksongs in the Highlands of New Guinea. Westport, CT and London: Praeger Publishers. —— . 2002b. Remaking the World: Myth, Mining and Ritual Change among the Duna of Papua New Guinea. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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—— . 2004. Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— . 2005a. ‘Duna Pikono: A Popular Contemporary Genre in the Papua New Guinea Highlands’. In Expressive Genres and Historical Change: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Taiwan, ed. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern. 83–107. London, U.K. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. —— . 2005b. ‘Cosmology, Resources, and Landscape: Agencies of the Dead and the Living in Duna, Papua New Guinea’. Ethnology 44 (1): 35–47. —— . 2000a. The Python’s Back: Pathways of Comparison between Indonesia and Melanesia. Westport, Conn. and London: Bergin and Garvey, Greenwood Publishing Group. —— . 2000b. ‘Recent ethnological studies from the Highlands of Papua New Guinea’. Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology 25 (2): 271–285. —— . 2004a. ‘Cults, Closures, Collaborations’. In Women as Unseen Characters. Male Ritual in Papua New Guinea, ed. Pascale Bonnemere. 120–138. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. —— . 2004b. Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future, The Duna People of Papua New Guinea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Trompf, G. W. 2004. Melanesian Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART TWO

ANCIENT WORLD

TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF MANI’S RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MANICHAEAN IDENTITY Iain Gardner Abstract Over the last century and more, new discoveries and trends of scholarship have rescued the study of Manichaeism from the polemic of heresy, and identified it as a major world religion in its own right. It has even been claimed that it was the first real religion in the modern sense, in that it was (supposedly) created with its doctrines, practices, scriptures and institutions all in place.1 Nevertheless, debate continues about the core issues of Manichaean identity; and, in particular, its relationship to prior religions such as ‘gnosticism’ (sic), Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism.2 This paper will begin to explore some of these issues through a number of rather specific examples drawn from Manichaean thought and practice. No general theory will be developed, but rather the purpose is to show how an archaeology of Manichaean identity might be possible through an exacting examination of textual traditions. The ultimate purpose, of course, is to attempt to uncover the trajectory of Mani’s own religious self-understanding and development prior to the development of that scholastic tradition in the community which so fundamentally moulded and (I argue) altered its presentation.

The provisional thesis is that Mani regarded the community he led as ‘the holy church’ (see Evodius, de fide, V, 953. 2; P. Kell. V Copt. 31, 2–3; 1 The origins of this idea can probably be traced back to the early elaboration (found both in Coptic and Middle Persian) of ‘the ten advantages of the Manichaean religion’; thus M5794I + M5761 / kephalaion 151 (which was partially presented in the seminal study of C. Schmidt and H. J. Polotsky 1933). I myself have found it an attractive conceit, thus I. Gardner and S. N. C. Lieu (2004,1). As will be apparent here, however, I do not now believe this. Mani was not really different from other supposed religious ‘founders’ (such as Jesus), in that he saw himself within an established tradition where he had an especial call to interpret and present the true way. It was his followers, and a peculiar trajectory of development, (which would in many ways have astonished its originator), that led to the carving out of a discrete identity called ‘Manichaeism’, (similarly) ‘Christianity’, and so on. 2 Although Buddhism has generally been supposed the major tradition of influence from India, there are good reasons to look rather towards Jainism as the predominant candidate; see Gardner (2005), and R. C. C. Fynes (1996).

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32, 1–2; PsBk2 8, 25; 160, 17; Keph 24, 29), the true followers of his ‘good saviour’ Jesus Christ that he as apostle had been especially commissioned to lead; in his Epistles and his Living Gospel, Mani always introduces himself as an ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’. Whilst the contours of this tradition may well appear strange to those accustomed to the westwards trajectory of the catholic development, they must necessarily be comprehensible in terms of those movements that had established themselves to the east (including such as Marcion, Bardaisan and ‘the baptists’ of Mani’s youth). Thus, when this ‘living family, the fruits of the flourishing tree’ (e.g. P. Kell. V Copt. 22, 5–6), encountered that other ‘holy church’ on the borders of the Roman Empire it was a meeting between two Christianities; but of total miscomprehension.3 If the starting point is that Manichaeism is at first a misnomer for a community that thought of itself as Christian, the corollary is how and why did this so rapidly transform into something that was other, and in which Mani himself became the culmination of God’s purpose for human history. This thesis could be explored following a typology of ‘new religious movements’, where the words and status of the charismatic leader are taken and interpreted, systematised and re-presented by zealous followers; and the movement rapidly spins into new directions as it is exported into alien contexts (or by analogy with earliest Christianity as it reached out into populations that had no Jewish heritage, thus Marcion). If the core of Mani’s religious experience was the revelation of his Twin Spirit, very soon it was necessary that every apostle must have their counterpart, a spiritual companion to help safeguard from affliction and danger (thus Keph 36, 6–9). Thus the trajectory is from personal experience to scholasticism. In terms of an archaeology of Manichaean identity, we can establish a stratigraphy based on the Epistles and the Kephalaia. The first provide our fixed point in that we can be certain enough that they are by Mani’s own hand, written during his public mission until the last days in prison (c. 240–276 CE). The second purport to record his oral teachings as remembered and recorded by the faithful; but, even if the genre of this text dates back to the late third century,4 we already see the teachings rapidly being systematised and re-packaged. 3 This, broadly, is the theme of the recent collection of papers edited by J. BeDuhn and P. Mirecki (2007). 4 Thus the reference in ‘The Sermon of the Great War’ (Homs 18, 6). The Acta Archelai evidence that the Kephalaia were known in Christian circles already by the 340s. Nevertheless, it is best understood as an evolving genre rather than a fixed text, as

towards an understanding of mani’s religious development 149 A telling example is the role of the ‘Holy Spirit’. From the finds at Ismant el-Kharab, we have one of the best preserved openings to an Epistle; and it serves to introduce the nature of the text, Mani’s style and concerns: [Manichaios, the] apostle of Jesus Christ, and all the brothers who are with me; to -------s, my loved one, and all the brothers who are with you, each one according to his name. The peace (that comes) from God the Father, and our lord Jesus Christ, be upon you my loved one; and may it guard you and … you [in] your body and your spirit. He [is with you], namely the Father, the God of truth, the one in whom you (pl.) are saved all the time. I have sealed you all in him. I have [drawn you (?) to God]. His hidden things … so that he may perfect you, my loved one, in his Holy Spirit; in order that he will become for you an awakener, guardian, giver of remembrance …(P. Kell. Copt. 53, 12, 1–19).5

Here we find what I call Mani’s ‘authentic Christian voice’. Certainly it is somewhat derivative (as he has modelled himself on the Pauline Epistles); but it has its own power. Mani moves from the ‘seal’ to being perfected in the Holy Spirit (see II Cor. 1: 22, Eph. 1: 13 and 4: 30); and, although he speaks with an especial authority, the focus of attention is the Christian God. If we turn now to the Kephalaia, we find that the Holy Spirit is scarcely mentioned. It is indeed redundant in terms of the elaborate systematisations of the multiple gods that were developed by this scholastic tradition, and which became such a feature of Manichaean theology. Thus it has no place in kephalaion VII, with its full account of the evocation of the divinities; nor in XXVIII where are listed twelve gods as judges, nor in XXIX where they sit on eighteen thrones. Once the Mother of Life is termed ‘first Holy Spirit’ (Keph 43, 29);6 and once there is an echo of the new material could endlessly be added (as is apparent from the two extant Coptic codices and Iranian parallels). For a brief introduction to this see Gardner (1995). 5 This passage should be compared with the opening of the ‘Fundamental Epistle’, which concludes (as quoted in Augustine, c. Fel. 1, 16): ‘May the piety of the Holy Spirit open the secret places of your heart so that you might see your souls with your own eyes’. 6 Interestingly, this may well be an echo of the authentic (Syriac) Christian trinitarian tradition, which I am sure lies at the base of Mani’s thought (though largely erased in the developing Manichaean tradition); i.e. Father, Mother (= Holy Spirit), Son. Support for this is found in the Middle Iranian fragments of the Living Gospel (M17 and M172, tr. D. N. MacKenzie, in Gardner and S. N. C. Lieu 2004), i.e., ‘It was praised and is praised, the holy church, by the power of the Father, by the praise of the Mother, and by the wisdom of the Son … Let there be praise and honour to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost and to the holy book’.

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theme of the sin against the Holy Spirit (i.e. Mt. 12: 31–32, see Keph 104, 16–17).7 Elsewhere, in the most extensive summary of ‘the gospel story’ of the historical Jesus (which has a formulaic even creedal quality that would be worth investigating), he is raised and appears to the disciples and breathes into them ‘his Holy Spirit’ (Keph 13, 8). There are two passages however that give some extended treatment. In one Mani teaches that the Holy Spirit indwells the faithful catechumen and the faithful elect (Keph 188, 28–190, 6). In the context of the Kephalaia this strikes the reader as rather odd, as in terms of Manichaean systematics this role is taken by the Light Mind (as discussed in elaborate detail in XXXVIII). But it is the other passage that really gives a clue to what is happening here: Yet, now, authority has been taken from the sin in the organs of the body. The Living Spirit has become lord over all its limbs. It has bound them with a chain of peace, and sealed them with the seal of truth. It has opened the orifices of the body to the good, and because of this the good enters them through the ears and the eyes. It dwells in the heart. The Holy Spirit reigns. It does all that it pleases. It annuls the will of sin, the beginning and the end. [In contrast], the will of the Holy Spirit comes about, and the purpose of the Light Mind (Keph 143, 24–32).

In this fascinating passage we still see evident the link between the seal and the Holy Spirit, which goes back through Mani to Paul; but here it is developed into an elaborate account which is most familiar from other Manichaean texts as a description of the workings of the Light Mind. Indeed, this is indicated by the final clause which has been tagged on to the section to explain it in proper Manichaean terms. And we can note how the scribal tradition has been confused about the passage, as the Living Spirit clearly intrudes at the start as a scribal error for Holy Spirit. What we see then is a snap-shot of the process by which the Holy Spirit is erased from the tradition, as it came to have no place in Manichaean scholastic thought.8 7 There seems to be a more explicit discussion of the logion in (the unedited) Keph2 pl. 278, 12ff. 8 Of course, a more extensive study of the role/s of the Holy Spirit throughout Manichaean literature would be profitable. These comments here do not purport to be all-inclusive. There is an important reference by Faustus (Augustine, c. Faust. 20, 2), where he states that the Holy Spirit has its seat ‘in the whole circle of the atmosphere (i.e., the surrounding air). By its influence and spiritual infusion, the earth conceives and brings forth the mortal Jesus, who, as hanging from every tree, is the life and salvation of men’. This teaching may be unique to the Latin tradition of North Africa (certainly the ‘Jesus patibilis’ is commonly regarded as such); but it would be interesting to

towards an understanding of mani’s religious development 151 Something analogous occurs also with the concept of evocation. I have argued elsewhere that Mani’s ‘letter to Marcellus’, embedded in the Acta Archelai, contains authentic material (Gardner, 2007). Taking this to be the case, and thus an example of genuine Epistles material, we find Mani stating (with an allusion to Jn. 1: 18) that the only-begotten Christ ‘has descended from the bosom (kÓλпoV) of the Father’. Confirmation of the authenticity of the idea can be drawn from the ManiCodex: ‘(the Syzygos) disclosed the bosom of the pillar (tÒn kÓλпon toυ˜ kίonoV) and the fathers and the powers of great strength which are hidden [in it]’. If we turn to the Kephalaia however, we find no trace of this terminology, despite repeated discussion of these same issues (i.e. the evocation of the gods). I think this is because of the physical connotations of the term kÓλпoV (really ‘womb’). Instead, the neutral word tαmieῖon (‘storehouse’) is preferred, as follows regarding the Great Spirit being brought forth within the Father: He first sculpted her like this. He established her in his inner storehouses in quiet and silence. When they had need of her she was called and came forth of the Father … (Keph 70, 28–31).

Indeed, a careful reading of the Kephalaia evidences the remnants of a number of earlier ideas or terms in the process of being erased by the scholastic tradition. The Great Spirit herself, as a kind of pre-existent form of the Mother of Life, may well be one of these.9 So too, the ambiguity of the term Father of Life so often found for the Living Spirit. In this way, Manichaean identity as something ‘other’ is confirmed; and one of the features of that identity is the transformation of what were originally psychological insights into fixed entities in their own right. It is not clear to what extent this process may have begun with Mani himself; but it was certainly taken to a whole new level in the developing tradition. Thus, it has long been recognised that the elaborate discussions of the ‘old’ and the ‘new man’ ultimately stem from relate it to what the Kephalaia says about the living air (n.b. Keph 127, 16–23) and the light soul in fruit and vegetation generally (cf. the figures of the Cross of Light and Jesus the Youth). Of course, in that tradition the god who is enthroned in the atmosphere is the eschatological Judge; but this is something rather different to what Faustus is discussing. Certainly, the Acta Archelai 10.9 relates that (for the Manichaeans) the air is the soul of all living creatures; (equally the related text of Shenoute, cf. Gardner and S. N. C. Lieu 2004, 230). 9 One suspects that the term ‘Great Spirit’ itself disguises ‘Holy Spirit’; see the discussion supra on the trinitarian basis of Mani’s thought.

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the image used by Paul (Eph. 4: 22–24; Col. 3: 9–10) (cf. Schaeder, 1927, 93, n. 1);10 but they have become almost unrecognisable. Interestingly, we now know that the five virtues and the five intellectual qualities, so often elaborated in the Kephalaia, do indeed go back to Mani himself, for we find them in the Berlin codex of the Epistles: … on account of our good saviour, our god Christ Jesus, the one in whose name I have chosen you. I have gathered you in by his hope; I have made you to be woven together by his sign and his good; I have perfected you by his understanding; I have made you strong by his faith; I have made his wisdom and his knowledge shine through your teachings like the sun. He is this blessed name and this strong power. He is the one who can bless you all, my children, my loved ones: For he can place his love in your … [which] is the Light Mind; his great faith he can … in your guarding thought; his perfection he can establish [in your] good teaching; his long-suffering he [can] … in your good counsels; his wisdom … he can perform it too in your piercing considerations.11

Here again there is this characteristic focus on ‘our good saviour’ Christ Jesus; he is the one in whose name they are chosen. And, although the sets of virtues and qualities can be derived from the passage, it does not yet have the formulaic character attained in the Kephalaia, for instance: Once again the apostle speaks concerning [the advent of five fathers] from the Father, one after another. He speaks thus: The Ambassador came from his mind; the Beloved of the Lights [from his thought]; the Mother of Life from his insight; [Jesus] the Beloved from his counsel; the Virgin of Light from his consideration (Keph 76, 18–23).

One final specific example of attempting to unpack the kephalaic text, and to dig back to Mani himself, is to be found in number XCI. Mani’s scriptures are rarely mentioned in the Kephalaia (apart from two wellknown canon lists); but this is one instance and it provides important information. Mani is discussing the ideal catechumen: He is one who (with an allusion here surely to Mt. 6: 21) ‘has placed all his treasure in the elect men and women’ (Keph 229, 9–10).12 Mani then quotes I Cor. 7: 10

Of course, Schaeder’s great study is something of a model for my own limited efforts here. 11 From Berlin P. 15998 (editorial work in process by W.-P. Funk and I. Gardner). 12 It is interesting also to read this passage together with P. Kell. V Copt. 32 and its extended exegesis of Mt. 6: 19–20. I suspect that the (unknown) author of that Manichaean letter from ca. the 360s CE had a model in mind from Mani’s canon, probably enough the Treasure of Life.

towards an understanding of mani’s religious development 153 29–31 as (words) that the saviour (i.e. Jesus) has put in the mouth of the apostle (i.e. Paul). This does read much more like Mani himself (as in the Epistles passages quoted before) than the usual kephalaic style. And so it is perhaps no surprise that on the next page Mani is twice made to say that this is something he has written down in the Treasure of Life. Of course, without any copy of this scripture, we cannot be exact about its relationship to this passage. But the characteristic features are here: reference to Jesus as his saviour, exegesis of gospel logia and of Paul, moral instruction rather than elaborate schematisations. I believe that this passage brings us close to Mani’s authentic voice. I will turn now to another aspect of our theme, and one which is in a sense quite problematic. If the whole trend of scholarship for much of the last hundred years, at least since F. C. Burkitt in the 1920s,13 has been increasingly to situate Mani within the broader Christian tradition; then what is to be said about his very real contacts with other religious traditions? One thinks primarily of Iranian religion (Zoroastrianism and related movements such as Zurvanism) and those of India (principally Buddhism and Jainism, I think). Again, one needs to think very carefully about what actually can be established to have gone back to Mani. The crucial contribution of Burkitt, of course, was to establish that the earliest Manichaean missionaries entering the Roman empire from the Sassanian were Syrian rather than Iranian; here in contrast to the prevailing tradition of contemporary German scholarship (particularly R. Reitzenstein and the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule). No one would now characterise Manichaeism as a reform movement within Zoroastrianism, and the question becomes what advantage there was for Shapur I to promote (or at least protect) Mani and his revelation? Nevertheless, there remains the apparent problem that it has often been argued that the basic architecture of Manichaeism, as the religion ‘of the two principles and the three times’, is inherently Iranian;14 and there is ample evidence that this structure must be counted as Mani’s own. Thus it is clearly stated in the ‘fundamental epistle’:

13 Particularly Burkitt (1925); but one might well track back (for a crucial turningpoint) to Mitchell’s edition of S. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion and Bardaisan (1912–21). 14 However, P. O. Skjaervø takes issue with this, regarding the temporal division as ‘very general and quite natural’; and, in any case, not a distinctive feature of the Pahlavi literature (cf. Skjaervø 1995, 273).

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iain gardner (Frg. 5a) In the primeval beginning there were the two substances separated from one another. (Frg. 8b) For that is this Epistula Fundamenti, which your holiness knows well, which I too have quoted, because it contains the beginning, the middle and the end (Augustine, c. Epist Fund 13 and c. Fel, 2.1 quoted in Gardner and Lieu 2004, 168–172).

Still, there is a real problem about the religio-historical context for Mani’s dualism.15 It differs crucially from Zoroastrianism, in that matter is of itself evil; and equally from ‘gnosticism’ (whatever exactly that might mean), in that the construction of the cosmos is divinely and perfectly crafted for the purification of the light soul. Simply, the demiurge is good, whilst matter is evil. This issue has never fully been resolved; but the major influence may well be that of Bardaisan of Edessa (for whom also the demiurge is good), albeit with a more negative evaluation of matter and sex (as with Marcion). Certainly, it represents a fundamental shift from the thought of the baptists amongst whom Mani grew up. In fact, my thesis here is that what appears to be the core architecture of Mani’s thought came not directly to him from the Iranian environment, but was already mediated through earlier figures in the Syrian Christian tradition. We can begin to find analogous support for this by looking at Mani’s knowledge about Zarathustra. It is certainly remarkable, and a sign of Mani’s unique genius, that he broadens the list of true apostles beyond the biblical and Christian heritage to provide a consciously worldwide framework to revelation: Jesus to the West, Buddha to the East, Zarathustra to Persia.16 When, however, one examines what is actually said about Zarathustra in sources that can be attributed back to Mani with some certitude, it is very limited; indeed, little more than ‘when Zarathustra came to Persia to Hystaspes the king’.17 The early Coptic sources associate him particularly with Babylon, and know

15

Cf. W. Sundermann (2001a), and Koenen (1990) for a summary of the discussion. There is a substantial literature on this, of course, which I am here abbreviating in the shortest possible way; but the core idea certainly can be tracked back to Mani himself, see e.g. as he is quoted by al-Biruni (1879, 190). 17 This is the formula used in the relevant passages of the two Kephalaia codices (e.g. 12, 17–19 and Keph2 pl. 130, 12–14). When the passage is more extended (thus Keph2 pl. 137, 4–16) the pattern is simply that of all the apostles: Zarathustra preaches the hope and establishes a church, choosing his elect and catechumens. Of course, this adds nothing for our purposes here. See also the comments by M. Tardieu (1988, 164–166) (although I do not accept all his textual readings in this paper). 16

towards an understanding of mani’s religious development 155 something of his death too; but in good part this is formulaic, to provide a parallel to the Jews and Christ and Jerusalem, to Mani and his enemies the Magians and to his death.18 In fact, some of the information Mani has about Zarathustra may be mediated through Christian intermediaries (cf. W. Sundermann 1986, 461–482, esp. 462 + nn.). It would be really interesting to be able to track sources for the apparent references to Zoroastrian literature in the Kephalaia. Are these in fact genuinely Iranian, or rather belonging to the considerable ‘western’ tradition about Zarathustra that developed in antiquity (e.g. one thinks of a Nag Hammadi text such as Zostrianos)? As is generally known, kephalaion C discusses a teaching from ‘the laws of the Magi’ about a dragon with fourteen heads; but I have not seen any identification of this passage. Here I draw attention to an unedited passage from the Dublin codex that certainly deserves attention. On plate 278 there appears to be a discussion of sayings quoted as ‘written in (?) the law of Zarathustra (ⲥⲏϩ ⲁⲡⲛⲟⲙⲟⲥ ⲛˉZⲁⲣⲁⲇⲏⲥ)’. The following is clear enough from the facsimile to be quoted in the hope that its origin might be traceable: (in the law of Zarathustra): ‘Whoever says that the land of light does not exist, he is the one who will not see the land of light’ (Keph2 pl. 278, 6–8).

Of course, by the methodology as established in this paper, which has categorised the kephalaic text as a stratum well advanced on the trajectory for which I have argued, an identification of this passage would not of itself answer the question of Mani’s religio-historical identity. But I should very much like to know what was ‘the law of Zarathustra / Zoroaster / Zarades’ (the form we give the name is itself loaded). It would be ridiculous to assert that Mani knew nothing of Iranian religions. But the more he is located in the Syrian Christian orbit, and the more the core architecture of his ideas can be established and shown to concur with this identity, the more we shall be able to draw a coherent portrait of his identity. It must be remembered that this paper has argued for the rapid development of Manichaeism away from Mani’s basic religious experience of his ‘good saviour’ Jesus. Probably this already began in his lifetime, with success and adulation and a broadening of horizons.

18 Thus Homs 10, 28–11, 27; and see bema psalm 225 (and noting the Parthian text M42). Homs 70 appears to have an extended and otherwise unattested tradition about Zarathustra’s death; but unfortunately it is poorly preserved and difficult to interpret. See also D. A. Scott, (1989, 437 n. 2b); P. O. Skjaervø (1996, 615).

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It must be supposed that he had converts from the Zoroastrian religious community (Sims-Williams 1976, 48);19 and indeed the Dublin Kephalaia codex (whilst we remain aware of our own arguments) evidences Mani in dialogue with the Indian, probably Buddhist, sage Goundesh (Sundermann 2001c, 545).20 Perhaps, then, this is the solution to the issue. Mani must be firmly based within the Syrian Christian orbit; and, if some of the ‘core architecture’ appears Iranian or Indian, the similarity must either be superficial or it has been mediated to him through that tradition of which he is a part (Bardaisan of Edessa being especially important). This is certainly not to deny Mani’s ability for original thought, nor a particular openness to foreign ideas (and a kind of universalising tendency). Thus, Mani was successful in attracting adherents from outside of his home tradition, and in this success we can locate the beginning of that peculiar conjunction of religious cultures that so characterises the developed system. One notes that already Mani himself (i.e. in the Shabuhragan, his only work written in Middle Persian) tried to present his revelation in the language and garb suitable to the Sassanian court. Probably in the preparation of this work he had some help. In this process, however, there was inevitably a penalty as well as profit. Some of Mani’s Christian inheritance no longer had value (e.g. the Holy Spirit); and some (e.g. originally Pauline imagery such as the ‘Perfect Man’ of Eph. 4: 13) was so stripped of its original context, meaningless to these new followers, that it was developed in directions to become almost unrecognisable. The profit was the introduction of entirely new ideas, and thus ‘Manichaeism’ was built up. This sort of scenario helps to answer long-standing problems about Manichaean identity. To undertake an archaeology of the religion one needs to develop a precise stratigraphy; but, unfortunately, here we are still sorely lacking in vital samples. In particular, it is the loss of Mani’s own writings, and then a chronology of these texts, that is most problematic. One wants to know how far the process of the construction of Manichaeism took place in Mani’s own life-time, how much he sanctioned and promoted.

19

Although certainly he is not talking here of Mani’s own disciples. Goundesh appears also in the Iranian tradition, see the discussion and references by Sundermann 2001b, 307–308. 20

towards an understanding of mani’s religious development 157 To take one final example: I originally, rather naively, supposed that if there were Indian elements in early Manichaeism it would have been because Mani had learned those ideas on his journey to India in the early 240s. Now, I perceive a much more complex process of development and dialogue, with prior influence already in Mani’s heritage (particularly, again, through Bardaisan); Indian religious teachers and ideas present in the Sassanian empire and court (thus Goundesh); and Indian converts and disciples travelling back and forth even in Mani’s lifetime (thus ‘the great epistle of India’ is named third in an-Nadim’s list of Mani’s collected Epistles). This is important, because I think that there is a significant and largely unexplored strand of Jaina practice in Manichaeism. This is apparent in notions of rebirth, karmic dues, fear of harming the smallest living organisms.21 But, furthermore, all the issues about Manichaean alimentary discipline,22 the body as ‘an alchemical vessel’, concepts of the ‘subtle body’ and the ‘soul stuff ’ in the cosmos, need to be explored from this perspective. One would dearly like to know how much of these ideas were developed by Mani himself. When Augustine talks of ‘breathing forth angels’ (Augustine, Conf. III.x.18, IV.i.1)23 in the Roman North Africa of the 370s, how far had this idea travelled? Bibliography al-Biruni. 1879. The Chronology of Ancient Nations. Ed. C. E. Sachau. London: W.H. Allen. BeDuhn, J. 2000. The Manichaean Body. In Discipline and Ritual. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. BeDuhn J. and P. Mirecki, eds. 2007. Frontiers of Faith. The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in the Acts of Archelaus. Leiden: Brill. Burkitt, F. C. 1925. The Religion of the Manichees. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fynes, R. C. C. 1996. ‘Plant Souls in Jainism and Manichaeism. The Case for Cultural Transmission’. East and West 46: 21–44. Gardner, I. 1995. The Kephalaia of the Teacher. Leiden: Brill.

21 See Gardner (2005) for an introduction to this issue (which deserves a much more systematic study). 22 See J. BeDuhn (2000). This is a major and much needed study of Manichaean practice; but its concern is to recover how it worked, rather than what the antecedents might have been. 23 In kephalaion LXXXI we read more about the process, where a disciple recounts how he has joyfully calculated the numbers of angels engendered by the fasting of the elect in his community.

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—— . 2005. ‘Some Comments on Mani and Indian Religions from the Coptic Sources’. In New Perspectives in Manichaean Research: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference of Manichaean Studies, Napoli 2001, ed. A. van Tongerloo and L. Cirillo. Turnhout: Brepols. —— . 2007. ‘Mani’s Letter to Marcellus: Fact and Fiction in the Acta Archelai’. In Frontiers of Faith. The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in the Acts of Archelaus, ed. J. BeDuhn and P. Mirecki. Leiden: Brill. Gardner, I. and S.N.C. Lieu. 2004. Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koenen, L. 1990. ‘How Dualistic is Mani’s Dualism?’ In Codex Manichaicus Coloniensis – Atti 2, ed. L. Cirillo. Cosenza: Marra. Mitchell, C. W. 1912–21. S. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion and Bardaisan. London: Williams and Norgate. Schaeder, H. H. 1927. ‘Urform und Fortbildungen des manichäischen Systems’. Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg. Leipzig. Schmidt, C. and H. J. Polotsky. 1933. ‘Ein Mani-Fund in Ägypten. Originalschriften des Mani und seiner Schüler’. SPAW 1: 4–90. Scott, D. A. 1989. ‘Manichaean Responses to Zoroastrianism’. Religious Studies 25: 437. Sims-Williams, N. 1976. ‘The Sogdian Fragments of the British Library’. Indo-Iranian Journal XVIII: 43–82. Skjaervø, P. O. 1995. ‘Iranian Elements in Manichaeism. A Comparative Contrastive Approach. Irano-Manichaica I’ In Au Carrefour des religions. Mélanges offerts à Phillipe Gignoux. Leuven: Peeters Press. —— . ‘Zarathustra in the Avesta and in Manichaeism. Irano-Manichaica IV’. In La Persia eL ’Asia centrale. Roma: Academia Nazionale dei Lincei. Sundermann, W. 1986. ‘Bruchstücke einer manichäischen Zarathustralegende’. In Studia Grammatica Iranica. Festschrift Für Helmut Humbach, ed. R. Schmit and P. O. Skjaervø. München: R. Kitzinger. —— . 2001a. ‘How Zoroastrian is Mani’s Dualism?’ In Manichaica Iranica. Ausgewählte Schriften von Werner Sundermann, ed. C. Reck et al. Roma: Instituto Italiano per L’Africa e L’Oriente. —— . 2001b. ‘Iranische Kephalaiatexte?’ In Manichaica Iranica. Ausgewählte Schriften von Werner Sundermann, ed. C. Reck et al. Roma. —— . 2001c. ‘Manichaeism meets Buddhism: The Problem of Buddhist Influence on Manicheism.’ In Manichaica Iranica. Ausgewählte Schriften von Werner Sundermann, ed. C. Reck et al. Roma. Tardieu, M. 1988. ‘La diffusion du bouddhisme dans l’Empire Kouchan, I’Iran et la Chine, d’après un Kephalaion manichéen inédit’. Studia Iranica 17: 153–182.

SOME DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF A BISHOP(?) IN LATE ANTIQUE EGYPT Alanna Nobbs Abstract We have a number of Greek papyrus documents from Egypt in the late third and early fourth centuries dealing with the activities of Sotas, Bishop of Oxyrhynchus. This paper argues that these papyri form a cohesive archive and give us an insight into the day to day functions of an Egyptian bishop at this time. They also allow us to discuss issues of literacy and written communication in the early Egyptian church and their importance to the communities.

Five papyrus documents from Egypt datable to the late third or early fourth centuries refer to a Christian figure named Sotas. While he is not the only Christian Sotas of whom there is a papyrological record,1 there seems reason to argue here that the five documents to be discussed in this paper should be seen as a ‘dossier’ referring to the activities of the same Sotas.2 For convenience they have been numbered (i) PSI 9.1041); (ii) PSI 3.208; (iii) P.Oxy 36.2785; (iv) P.Oxy 12. 1492 and (v) P.Alex 29. This study will enable us to build up a picture of aspects of his work/life and to see something of the role of one who became a papas in Egypt at this time. Three of them are letters of recommendation by Sotas (noting the proviso that his name is restored in one), and one a letter of recommendation to him from the presbyteroi (priests) of Heracleopolis. Letters of 1

There are numerous examples of the name Sotas, including (apart from our instances) ten from Oxyrhynchus in the period 200–400 A.D. Worthy of note is PSI 14.1412 from Oxyrhynchus, dated to the late second or early third century, which refers to a ‘Sotas the Christian’ entrusted to deliver two talents on behalf of an Olympic victor named Sarapammon. For collation of these and other papyrological and linguistic references I am indebted to Rachel Yuen-Collingridge. This study is part of a wider collegial project on Christian papyri at Macquarie University. See website www.anchist .mq.edu.au/doccentre/PCE homepage.html. 2 (i) PSI 9.1041; (ii) PSI 3.208; (iii) P.Oxy. 36.2785; (iv) P.Oxy.12.1492 and (v) P.Alex. 29 (the name Sotas is restored here in l.4; no other plausible restoration has been suggested, though Treu who determined that no (iii) was to rather than from Sotas, was cautious about accepting the restoration of the name (Treu 1973, 629–636).

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recommendation in general are largely formulaic, and we have papyrus examples of these from several sources (Teeter 1995, 954–960; Keyes 1935, 28–44. Cf. Cotton 1981). What distinguishes those letters mentioning Sotas is the greeting formula, which gives an additional reason (not otherwise noted to date) to associate all five letters with the same Sotas. All five begin with the word caιˆre (greet) in the imperative, followed by the vocative case for the recipient, the nominative for the sender(s), then prosagoreύomen (I/we send best wishes). Nos i-iii, which are letters of recommendation, specify that the greetings are ‘in God’ or ‘in the Lord’: unmistakeably Christian expressions and reinforced by use of the abbreviation or nomen sacrum, characteristic of Christian scribes. No. v attaches the phrase ‘in the Lord’ to the ‘beloved brother’ to whom the letter is addressed. While our Greek papyrus letters (not unlike their modern counterparts) do begin with an (often conventional) greeting, the particular form of greeting in these letters using the imperative is an alternative noted only rarely from the first century AD onwards, perhaps indicative of a middle to high level of education (Koskienniemi 1956,164 ff.). Another factor which links these letters is the dating. Our nos i, ii and iv were dated by their original (and subsequent) editors to III/IV, with the letter to Sotas (iii) dated early IV. In P. Alex 29 (v), the name of the sender is fragmentary [ .. ]..az. Nevertheless it is highly plausibly, given all the similarities between the style and content, that it should be restored to ‘Sotas’. It is also best dated III/IV.3 Given that palaeography on its own cannot sharply distinguish within, say, 30–40 years since all the variables such as scribal age cannot be known, all our documents may well be from the same period, and if it is the case that the letter to Sotas should be dated palaeographically a little later, such a conclusion would indeed make sense as by this time Sotas is referred to as a beloved papas,4 having reached a venerable age. Although all these documents have not been decisively linked in print before, connections between them have been seen by a variety of scholars who have pointed out also that the handwriting is similar in at least three of the examples.5

3

Naldini 1998 rev., 127, puts it in III with some discussion. For the role of a papas, see Derda and Wipszycka 1994, 54–56. The title is reserved for clergy, and given in the papyri to Maximus, bishop of Alexandria 264–282. Though it often refers to a bishop, and examples are discussed in the article, it may also be used of other clergy. It does designate a function and is not simply an honorific (Derda and Wipszycka 1994, 56). 5 Winter 1933, 149, our nos i, ii and iv ‘probably the same gentle Sotas’; Koskienniemi 1956, 165, believes these three were written by the same scribe of middling to high 4

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While of course very little in the interpretation of the Greek papyrus letters from Late Antiquity can be stated with absolute certainty, there seems sufficient reason to look at these letters as a ‘dossier’ or ‘archive’, and see what, when they are taken together, we can infer about the possible activities of Sotas and those associated with him. The two letters of recommendation published in PSI (nos i and ii), both come from Oxyrhynchus, are written on parchment and appear to be in the same hand. Each has been dated palaeographically to III/IV, possibly the earlier end i.e. late III. The first reads: Greetings in the Lord, beloved / brother Paulus, / I Sotas send you best wishes. Our brothers / Heron and Horion and Philadelphus and Pe-/kusis and Naaroous, / catechumens amongst / those gathering (in church?) and / Leon, catechumen / in the first stage of the gospel, / receive (them all) as is fitting; / through them I and those with me / send best wishes to you and those with you / I pray for your / health in the Lord, / beloved brother.

The second has: Greetings in the Lord, beloved / brother Petros, I Sotas / send you best wishes. / Receive our brother / Herakles / according to custom; through him / I and all / those with me greet / you and all the / brothers with you. / I pray for your / health in God.

The opening addresses are the same (with the rather unusual imperative formula noted above); Sotas is in the first person; both refer, in slightly different Greek terms, to the custom of receiving visitors; one ends ‘in God’, the other ‘in the Lord’. What can we deduce from these about Sotas and his associates? Parchment is rarer and more expensive than papyrus, but also more durable; this could be important if the bearers carried the letters long distances, and presumably (?) returned them afterwards. This would certainly account for the fact that these and the most of the others were found at Oxyrhynchus. While the basic elements of the letters, as others have pointed out, are commonplace (cf. Teeter 1995, and Kim 1972),

educational level; Naldini 1998 rev., 151 ff., also thinks (not definitively) that they may belong to the same scribe, amd argues they are from a monastic community. This is criticised by Wipszycka 1974, 208 ff. J. Rea (1970, 84), the original P.Oxy editor, also thought our iii was probably the same Sotas as our iv and possibly the same as our i and ii. Treu (1973, 633), is not sure about the links between i and ii and our iii as he believes iii may be later. This paper argues that this is not unlikely, given the Sotas examples. He expresses caution about restoring the name Sotas in v.

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there is variation of expression and circumstance. Both Paulus and Petros are notably Christian names. The catechumens are of different grades, reflecting a progression through a hierarchy and also a gradual procession of access to the Eucharist. While Sotas does not give his own rank or that of Petros or Paulus, he is conscious of the grades of the catechumenate. The brotherly bonds and links between the different Christian communities probably reflect a time of comparative peace, so catechumens could receive their instruction in various places (cf Sozomen HE 5.16.3 for further comments on the custom). A known name, or a notable one, was needed to avoid possible abuses of Christian hospitality. Our no. iii, P.Oxy. 36.2785 was shown by Treu (1973) to be written to Sotas, probably at Oxyrhynchus where the letter was found. This time it is written on behalf of a woman, Taion, and reads: Greetings in the Lord, beloved papas / Sotas; the presbuteroi of Heracleopolis / send you very best wishes. / Receive in peace our / sister Taion who is / coming to you / and receive the person (Anos?) / undergoing instruction in Genesis. / for edification; / through them we and those / with us send best wishes to the brothers / with you. / We pray for your health / in the Lord, beloved papas. 204.

It ends with an isopsephism 204, possibly eἰrhnikά, a reference to peace, a theme of such letters.6 If palaeographically, as suggested above, this letter is a little later than the other two, we may see a progression in rank on the part of Sotas. As papas he would be revered, so his recommendation to a woman is all the more noteworthy (Mathieson, 2007:261–2, 278, 281). The second name, Anos, if it is a name and not an abbreviation for ἄnqrwpon (person), with a specific name to be filled in as required, could be a variety of the attested name Anous, or a woman’s name (ed. pr. and Martin, 1996:706 n. 256). The facilitation of travel, hospitality and study may be seen as one of the roles of a bishop, bishop’s assistant or Christian community leader at this formative time for the Church. The fact that any of these letters were written on parchment and some were kept may be indicative of their importance to the communities.

6 The suggestion of Llewelyn (1995, 125–27) and (1998, 172), based on analysing ‘all possible solutions of strings of up to five words generated from a computer reading of the Greek Bible’. This would characterise the letter as one of the subset of ‘letters of peace’ as a category proposed by Teeter (1995).

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In this context we should now consider P.Alex 29, possibly earlier than end of III and with the sender’s name restored (argued here to be plausibly seen as Sotas). This letter reads: Greetings [in the Lord], / beloved brother, / Maximus. / I, … -as, send you best wishes. / Receive in peace our / brother Diphilos who is / coming to you; / through him / I and those with me / send best wishes to you / and those with you. / I pray you / are well, / beloved / brother in the Lord.

The travelling brother is to be greeted in peace: a commonplace in several of the other papyrus letters of recommendation from III to the end of IV (Teeter, 1996: Appendix II, p. 960). If facilitating travel and study was a significant role for Sotas and his associates such as those named in it (whether or not they were actually part of a monastic community),7 what other roles are referred to in our dossier if we accept it as such? P.Oxy. 12.1492, our iv, is addressed to a ‘holy son’ Demetrianos who is part of a ‘house’ from Sotas, possibly once again reflecting his role as papas seen in no iii. It reads: Greetings, holy [son] / Demetrianus, I, Sotas / send you best wishes. / The common … / [is] manifest and our common / salvation … / for these matters are ones within / divine providence. If, therefore, / you have decided following the ancient / custom to give the land / to the topos, see that / it is marked out / so that they may use it, and however / you decide concerning the task(?), / be of good cheer. Send everyone / in your house – all of them – / greetings. I pray / for your (pl.) health / to God through everything / and in everything.

Topos is a word frequently used for ‘church’ at this time (Ghedini, 1921:337–38 and 1927:175. Cf. also Bernand, 1993:103–110 and Judge, 1977:81). Again, the stress is on community, brotherhood and a common faith seen particularly in the closing greeting. A gift of land is indicative of the growing accumulation of church property in the late third and early fourth centuries (interrupted of course by the confiscations of the Diocletianic persecutions).8

7 Naldini 1998, 151f., sees Sotas in our nos i and ii as head of a Christian community. Wipszycka (1974) is critical of that theory. 8 Possibly arable land for the church. See Bagnall 1993, 282, and discussion in Naldini 1998, 436. For papyrological evidence of confiscation of land during the Diocletianic persecutions, see P.Oxy. 33.2673 and Judge 1980. On the terminology of the letter see Nobbs, 1988, 59–63. Readers may like to note that the honorand of this volume also has an article in the Prudentia supplement: Trompf 1988, 207–231.

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In conclusion, these papyri taken as a group, though they cannot be dated precisely, do not appear to reflect a church troubled by persecution, insecurities or restrictions. They show a sense of community and fellowship, embracing males as well as females, and allow us to see how the church was beginning to operate at a ‘grass roots’ level during the time of transition in the late third and early fourth centuries. Bibliography Bagnall, R. S. 1993. Egypt in Late Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bernand, E. 1993. ‘TOPOS dans les inscriptions grecques d’Égypte’. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 98: 103–110. Cotton, H. 1981. Documentary Letters of Recommendation in Latin from the Roman Empire. Königstein: Hain. Derda, T. and E. Wipszycka. 1994. ‘L’emploi des titres Abba, Apa et Papas dans L’Égypte byzantine’. Journal of Juristic Papyrology 24: 54–56 Ghedini, G. 1921. ‘o tόpoz nel P.Oxy. 1492’/ Aegyptus 2: 337–38. —— . 1927. ‘Appunti e Notizie’. Aegyptus 8: 175. Judge, E. A. 1977. ‘The earliest use of monachos for >monk< (P.Coll. Youtie 77) and the origins of monasticism’. Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 20: 72–89. —— . 1980. The conversion of Rome. Ancient Sources of Modern Social Tensions. North Ryde: Macquarie Ancient History Association. Keyes, C. W. 1935. ‘The Greek Letter of Introduction’. American Journal of Philology 56: 28–44. Kim, C.-H. 1972. Form and Structure of the Familiar Greek Letter of Recommendation. Missoula, Mont.: Society of Biblical Literature. Koskenniemi, H. 1956. Studien zur Idee and Phraseologie des griechischen Briefes bis 400 n.Chr. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Llewelyn, S. R. 1995. ‘SD, a Christian Isopsephism?’ Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 109: 125–27. —— . 1998. New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity. VIII. Michigan, Cambridge, MA: Eerdmans. Martin, A. 1996. Athanase d’Alexandrie et l’église d’Égypte au IVe siècle (328–373). Rome: Ecole française de Rome. Mathieson, E. 2007. ‘The Perspectives of the Greek Papyri of Egypt on the Beliefs, Practices and Experiences of Jewish and Christian Women from 100 C.E to 400 C.E.’ PhD diss. Macquarie University. Naldini, N. 1998 rev. Il Cristianesimo in Egitto. Florence: Nardini. Nobbs, A. M. N. 1988. ‘The Idea of Salvation; the Transition to Christianity as seen in some Early Papyri.’ In The Idea of Salvation: papers from the Conference on the Idea of Salvation, Sacred and Secular, held at St. Paul’s College, University of Sydney, 22–25 August, 1986. Prudentia suppl., ed. D. W. Dockrill and R. G. Tanner. Auckland: University of Auckland. Rea, J. 1970. no. 2785. In The Oxyrhynchus Papyri 36, ed. R. Coles et al. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Teeter, T. M. 1995. ‘Letters of Recommendation or Letters of Peace’. In Akten des 21. Internationale Papyrologenkongresses, Berlin 13.-19.8.1995, ed. Barbel Krämer et al. Stuttgart: Teubner. Treu, K. 1973. ‘Christliche Empfehlungs-Schemabriefe auf Papyrus’. Zetesis. Bijdragen op het gebied van de klassieke Filologie, Filosofie, Byzantinistiek, Patrologie en Theologie,

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aangeboden aan Prof. Dr. Émile de Strijcker. Antwerp, Utrecht: Nederlandsche Boekhandel. Trompf, G. W. 1988. ‘Salvation and Primal Religion’. In The Idea of Salvation: papers from the Conference on the Idea of Salvation, Sacred and Secular, held at St. Paul’s College, University of Sydney, 22–25 August, 1986, Prudentia suppl., ed. D. W. Dockrill, R. G. Tanner. Auckland: University of Auckland. Winter, J. G. 1933. Life and Letters in the Papyri. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wipszycka, E. 1974. ‘Remarques sur les lettres privées chrétiennes des IIe-IVe siècles (à propos d’un livre de M. Naldini)’. Journal of Juristic Papyrology 18: 203–221.

PER SATURAM OR PERFORMANCE? SENECA’S INITIUM SAECULI FELICISSIMI: RITUAL HILARITY AND MILLENNIAL CLOSURE IN THE APOCOLOCYNTOSIS1 Christopher Hartney Abstract Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4BCE–65CE), banished under the lumpen Emperor Claudius, would have known first hand both the dramatic and comedic potential of this ‘rex et fatuus’ [king and fool], who haunted him for most of his middle years. He would have also known the sheer terror of being ruled by, of all people, an ex-historian and by those at the court who tolerated this ruler’s pedantry the better to encourage his cruelty. To deal with the aftermath of such imperial terror, it is not surprising that Seneca declared an initium saeculi felicissimi [the start of a most bountiful age] in a court satire hastily written for his patron the new emperor Nero. Yet this same text – Seneca’s only real comedic work – was not a mere political satire but the key event of a Walpurgisnacht-like series of events. The text, the Apocolocyntosis, is the literary residue of a court event designed to purge the ‘spiritus’ of the former emperor with laughter and chaotic play. Through the work of Bakhtin and Turner, the schema of the carnivalesque demonstrates why lower body humour predominates in this work, and we see Seneca present Claudius’ body as a site of purgation. This is especially so when the emperor’s ‘ultima vox’ [last word] is explained as coming from ‘illa parte, qua facilius loquebatur’ [that part from which he most easily spoke]! It is a theme that, as Graves suggested (after Suetonius), could indeed be reflected in the unique title that infers a deification de culo. Arguing against the too rigid thesis of Motto and Clark who read this text as a satire dependant on a circularity of action, I will instead argue that a more semi-religious process is taking place where laughter becomes an hysteria that purges the old age and ushers in a great golden period at Rome through a thinking that is relevant to concepts of millennialism prevalent at this time. To this extent I will seek to place the Apocolocyntosis not so much within the context of Roman letters and history, but within the context of purgation rituals, both annual and ad hoc that remain common around the Mediterranean to this day.

1 The Latin translations herein are the author’s own; thanks to my colleague Cassandra Wenman for aid with the Greek. The in-text references without year or author refer to the Apocolocyntosis text provided in Eden 1984.

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christopher hartney Introduction

Comedy seemed to be of little concern to the classical essayist, politician and dramatist Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4BCE–65CE). His moral essays are the work of an enlightened Stoic, his theatrical texts focus on rewriting Greek tragedy with what we might call today stunning ‘Gothic’ overtones,2 he served Nero well as minister during the first five years of the reign when the young Emperor proved most promising. Embroiled in a plot to dispatch his charge, Seneca killed himself by order of the emerging monster with whom he had so closely associated himself (Tacitus Annals XV, 60–65). Given this heritage, the riotously funny and scatological roller-coaster ride that is the Apocolocyntosis seems to have been attributed to the wrong man and appears ‘… too scurrilous for the dignity of the Stoic philosopher’ (Leach 1989, 197). The earliest extant manuscripts are entitled Divi Claudii APOQHOCIC … per saturam or ludus de morte divi claudii [Concerning the Apotheosis of the Divine Claudius by Satire or Play on the death of the Divine Claudius]. It is due to a passage by Cassius Dio more than one hundred years after Seneca’s possible authorship of these pages where we read that Nero’s counsellor composed a súggramma [a writing/composition] that was entitled apokolokúntwsin [apocolocyntosis]. Much ink has gone into examining this one occurrence in all Classical literature of this extraordinary word (e.g. Deroy 1951; Wagenwoort 1958; Currie 1962; Scarcia 1965; Athanassakis 1974; Städele 1975; Kilpatrick 1979; Eden 1984; Hoyos 1991; Ramelli 2001). Cassius Dio suggests that the second part of the word carries the force of a ‘deification’, the first part signifying something possibly vegetal. In English the title has been regularly translated as ‘Pumpkinification’ but, more appropriately, could be called a ‘Gourdification’ derived possibly from a courtly nickname for Claudius (Hoyos 1991, 69). If the text is Seneca’s – and there is no reason to believe that this exceptionally talented man could not turn his hand to hilarity (Marti 1952) – then there is much evidence in the text that shows it would have served as the script for a comedy delivered at the court of a newly-crowned Nero by the writer himself as the main voice of the work. It is the proposition of this paper that Seneca speedily wrote this work in order to expunge the atmosphere left by Claudius though

2

This is very much the case in Seneca’s tragic masterwork Thyestes.

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laughter and to celebrate the beginning of a great new age. Few modern commentators have sought to understand this unusual text as a performative device to section off, in the minds of a small but central coterie of the imperial court, one age from another through ritual hilarity and millennial closure. I admit that the work is much else besides and leaving aside the more profound dimensions of the work as literature (which is the standard approach adopted and well covered by Classicists), I would like to examine Seneca’s text as an event millennial in scope to the audience it was designed for; riotously entertaining, purifying in its ritual dimensions and further evidence of the tight connection between religion, performance and laughter. Laughter, one may gather, is no matter for students of religious studies in our solemn age yet it remains, amongst many other things, vitally important as a means of purgation for profound emotions (SantoroBrieza 2004, 74). The one significant study into the field of laughter and faith by Ingvild Gilhus (1997) forms a long list of junctures where laughter intercedes on clearly religious turf, but the author’s interpretive talents could be much expanded from what is a skeletal introduction to a vast field.3 If we turn to anthropological examinations of performance, ritual and hilarity we discover that there are yearly and occasional rituals that conform to the marking of ‘new’ times in festive ways. These markers are clearly needed at period of social, political and religious transformation. Modern examinations such as Hammoudi’s (1988) account of yearly profanation festivals in Morocco, which are clearly not Muslim, yet insinuate themselves into the Muslim calendar and become culturally indivisible from Moroccan Islam, find their corollary in a number of ‘carnival’ days around the world that integrate into whatever prevailing religious system is extant, and have something in common with Seneca’s court performance though it may have been a one-off performance. In all these events the privileging of lower-body language and a similar inversion of traditional authority for short periods permits the marking of ‘mundane’ time. Each of these performances conforms to the pattern identified by Mikhail Bakhtin in works such as Rabelais and His World (1965) and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984). This connection has been examined by a number of commentators – most effectively by T.Reiser (2007, passim) and Braund and James (1998, 299ff ). 3 As I write, the much anticipated work by Stephen Halliwell, his 600 page Greek Laughter, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, should make a significant contribution and start some deep thinking in this field from a clinical perspective.

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What they have failed to fully realise are the performative, ritual and millenarian aspects of the kind of laughter Seneca invokes. A theorist, however, could go further. When looking at the concept of ‘play’ Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens (1950, 14) places play, sport, theatre and ritual along the same continuum with nervous tension, one of the significant linking points between all these social ‘games’ that can manifest in spaces appropriated for specific timed performances parallel to, or disrupting, the practicalities of quotidian life. In some of these social spaces nervous energy is released in laughter or inner emotional catharsis, in others the tension is suppressed. The establishment of the temporary reality of a social game – most often in a space designed to accommodate this nervous energy – court, theatre, ritual altar – draws a corollary with Victor Turner’s concepts of ‘liminality’ and ‘social drama’ (Turner 1969, 96). Perhaps there is no more liminal a time in any social matrix as when both the age and the regime are in a state of obvious flux. This is clearly so around the accession of Nero. Drawing on Turner and Huizinga, I hope to show how Apocolocyntosis works to expunge, through laughter, the political tensions of the past reign of Claudius and of the events surrounding his death where, one could easily argue that ‘time seems out of joint’, and provide an emotional cleansing through laughter and also, through the invocation of the gods. Additionally, with Garry Trompf ’s fascination with the millennial in mind, I will highlight how the humour of this work is intensified by its millenarian heralding of a ‘most bountiful age.’ Our latter day image of Claudius is infected by popular culture. Robert Graves, rampaging autodidact as he was, nevertheless perceived high drama in the form of the Emperor Claudius and exploited this to the public’s delight – and no doubt his banker’s – with the highly popular historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. The lumbering hulk of the man, perhaps vivid in our minds from Derek Jacobi’s limping, dribbling, ever-quaking portrayal of him in the BBC television series (1976) shows us a confused figure asking ultimately for our sympathy.4 In an age when disabilities prevented a citizen from office, however, there was something both monstrous and other-worldly about this 4 A close reading of Suetonius (Book V, xff ) shows that Claudius seemed to be in all the right places during the assassination of his nephew Caligula. If we apply Cicero’s test of qui bono, it was obviously Claudius who benefited from the assassination, therefore it

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strangely-formed man. Speculations on his particular ailments are addressed in Ruth’s The Problem of Claudius (1924) and it is suggested that poliomyelitis or some form of cerebral palsy were behind his general appearance. On the other hand, Seneca would have known first hand, not only the comedic and dramatic potential of this ‘… rex et fatuus’ (I. 6) [king and fool] but also the sheer terror of being ruled by an historian (the emperor was once a student of Livy’s). Worse, Seneca would have known the terror that emanated from a court where those freedmen and wives who surrounded this monstrous anomaly to Roman manhood were able to manipulate their emperor by a series of deadly games played out intra cubiculum principis (Suetonius V, 29). Seneca’s banishment from Rome took place in 41CE: the year of Claudius’ succession. It is possible he was held away from Rome by the machinations of Claudius’ wife Messalina (Cassius Dio LX, 8.5). Once that wife was executed in 48CE; the next imperial wife, Agrippina, plotted contrariwise to have Seneca returned.5 As tutor to her son Nero, Seneca would have been part of an alternate inner court surrounding the young Nero. He would have also had a front row seat when the emperor would raise ‘… illo gestu solutae manus … quo decollare homines solebat [that gesture of a shaking hand accustomed to decapitating people] (6.13). The fool-king held the power of life and death, the comic and tragic were inexplicably mixed. To deal with such terror, it follows that for an ‘initium saeculi felicissimi’ (1.2) to occur Seneca had to present not just a simple satire6 but a kind of Walpurgisnacht ritual to expunge the previous age.7

is not unreasonable to suspect that he was more ambitious than is made out in a simple reading of Suetonius or in Grave’s depiction of a fearful stutterer being dragged to the throne unwillingly. 5 Seneca in exile on Corsica would have heard of the fate of his alleged paramour Gaius Caesar’s sister Julia Livilla, moved from one island to the next as Messalina sought to eradicate her. She was finally dispatched in 41 and Seneca would have wondered if he was next. See, Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book LX, 8.5 and Barbara Levick (2001, 56). 6 Used here in the sense of an entertainment ‘in a mixture of prose and verse.’ See M.D. Reeve, ‘Apotheosis…Per satvram’(1984, 306). 7 This term is appropriate in that the ideal Walpurgisnacht is a pagan revelry. Seneca’s court recitation of the Apocolocyntosis would have been heard in a similar spirit of gaiety. The most famous Walpurgisnacht occurs each May Day Eve on Mount Brocken in the Harz Mountains. Although the festival is supposedly named after Saint Walburga the ‘b’ has transformed into a ‘p’ (or perhaps always was a ‘p’) and thus contains (in German and English) a force of ‘purgation’ to it.

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christopher hartney The Form of the Apocolocyntosis

My contention is that the Apocolocyntosis should be treated as a script for a (possibly once-only) courtly performance around the time of Claudius’ funeral. The following analysis relies on this assumption and on a reasonable imagining of how that performance may have been presented. Before I argue this, however, let us examine a summary of this short work. The author first presents himself and reveals himself to be a serious historian, humour quickly follows when he petulantly declares that if he does not want to he shall not reveal his sources (1). He introduces the image of the dead emperor literally shuffling off his mortal coil along the Appian Way – the same path taken, as witnesses had previously claimed in their age, by Augustus, Tiberius and Gaius Caesar’s sister Drusilla. We then move backwards in time to the image of Claudius struggling for his last breaths (2/3). With a quick change of scene, Mercury appears to remonstrate with the Fates for extending the life of the emperor. Clotho concedes the point and ‘unplugs’ Claudius, while at the same time the Fates spin a Golden Age without end (3/4) and heap extra years onto Nero. We return to Claudius and find him watching some comic actors. He utters his last words and dies. The scene changes to Olympus where a monstrous being has arrived. Jupiter sends Hercules to investigate. The beast turns out to be Claudius whose form and speech amazes the gods (5). The goddess Fever gives a report of who he really is and Claudius orders that she be executed (6). Then, Hercules seems to be close to being won over by Claudius as his advocate (7). Sadly, there is an interruption in the text at this point. When the next section begins (8) we are already in a heavenly courtroom where Claudius’ divinity is being debated. Claudius is then sent out while the gods decide the issue (9). He, in fact, seems to be winning his case. The plan is thwarted, however, by the appearance of Augustus (10) who bewails the fact that so many of his family were killed by Claudius (11). Claudius is thrown to Hades. On the way Mercury leads the dead emperor past his own funeral. The scene is a carnival celebration that is said (ironically) to end the carnival reign of the fool emperor. In Hades, Claudius is able to meet all those whom he had killed. A debate begins about a fitting punishment for the deceased emperor (13). Finally he is handed over to Gaius Caesar (Caligula) to be a secretary to one of his secretaries. As one can glean from this summary, although the work is not set out as a play text, coming ultimately from one narrator conjuring various

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other voices and scenes, the plot of the Apocolocyntosis is strongly performative leaping from voice to voice and scene to bawdy, mocking scene. Weinreich (1923) who occasionally considers the work as a chamber piece and Momigliano, who writes more broadly on Claudius’ reign (1934), do much in these earlier works to place the text in its social context, but, for the latter, it is ultimately the political character of the text that the ‘reader’ should consider through the moral arguments of Augustus in 10.3ff. In these authors, if there is an audience, it is broad and up for moral instruction. Similar text-based approaches have been usual for Senecan studies, even to the point of denying the performability of his theatre scripts entirely,8 and this biased approach still fails to address a work such as the Apocolocyntosis as, predominantly, a performance. Metatheatricality One of the clearest ideas that Apocolocyntosis was intended as a performance first and foremost is its metatheatrical hints. As playscripts from the Classical world were written without stage directions, the author encoded staging in the script. In Plautus’ Curculio, for example, when Palinurus says to Phaedromus ‘tibi puer es, lautus luces cereum’ (I.9) [you are your own slave, lighting yourself with a candle]. It serves to show us Phaedromus’ love-lorn state, hinting as it does that slaves should carry the candle for him, but now he is desperate enough to carry his own. At a metatheatrical level, the mention of a candle is a reference for the stage manager to go out and buy an actual candle and include it in the performance. The candle also becomes an additional signifier that (although plays were staged during the day) audience and actors should ‘pretend’ for this scene that it is the middle of the night. As far as I know, no one has investigated the Apocolocyntosis for its metatheatricality, nor has it, unlike other works by Seneca been given a recent performance. Certainly as a performance piece read by a single voice, hints at props appear less often, but they are nevertheless present. There are also textual hints at voice-changes – and if the performer (Seneca) was half decent at impersonations, the figure of Claudius would prove irresistible. One can easily see that as the voice of the work introduces itself as an 8 This absurd proposition is discussed in the introduction of Florence Dupont, Les monsters de Sénèque, Paris, Belin, 1995, 9–20.

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historian ‘Quid actum sit in caelo … volo memoriae tradere. nihil nec offensae nec gratiae dabitur’ [What was done in heaven I wish to put on record, no concession will be made to umbrage taken or favour granted], then the ‘staging’ for the Apocolocyntosis would be set up, initially, as if an historian were giving a reading of his text, podium, tablets, benches and all. This was something Claudius himself did (Suetonius V.41) in a similar setting.9 It is not surprising then to find tablets explicitly mentioned as props in 11.4–5 when Augustus puts his motion to the gods, ‘atque ita ex tabella recitavit’ [and this is what he read from his tablet]. No doubt the tablet has been part of the performance all along. Space precludes me from continuing in this vein, but I direct the reader to the references to the ‘turpi fuso’ (4.1) [filthy spindle-see discussion below], Hercules donning a ‘tragicus’ 7.1 [that is, an aspect or possibly even a mask of tragedy] and, soon after, wielding a tree-trunk-like club, which for additional comedic effect could have been in actuality a very small and insignificant weapon wielded by the narrator. All these stage hints show up the theatricality of this ‘text.’ But if it was a performance rather than a considered text-based satire, who was the intended audience? The Audience Leach delineates, with reference to the tone of 1.2 and the informal use of qua scis [as you know] and other phrasings, a much narrower audience than Weinreich and Momigliano. From these immediate and personal words, the reader may understand several functions for his vicarious participation in the drama. He will be called upon to use his own historical memory. Sometimes he may want to intervene and question the account. Although he will remain dependant upon the narrator’s authority, he is, nonetheless, expected to be critical and discriminating in his judgement. The intimacy of the address also hints that his role will be confidential. Not only will he become a privileged witness to extraordinary events, but additionally he will be a private recipient of the narrator’s opinionated asides (Leach,1989, 204).

Leach, however, is still focused on a ‘reader.’ Can we imagine what the first audience would have looked like from hints within the text? It is Nauta who has succeeded in arguing that those to whom Seneca directed 9 Suetonius in Lives of the Caesars, V, xli, tells of one of Claudius’ readings where a fat man sits on and breaks one of the benches. This terminated the reading because Claudius could not get this sight out of his mind and laughter kept interrupting his reading.

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the Apocolocyntosis were a small band of courtly intriguers and Nero. This author posits primary and secondary receptions of the text. A later reading of the Apocolocyntosis after its first performance, by a Roman or a modern reader, is classified as secondary. The primary reception of the text is delineated by Nauta’s careful examination of the tone, literary and historical references. He concludes, The hypothesis here suggested, that the intended (primary) audience consisted of Nero and his associates … It is highly implausible that the Apocolocyntosis was meant for the ears (or eyes) of either senate or people. For the tenor of the work runs directly counter to the official attitude towards Claudius’ memory, devised by Seneca himself: in order that Nero might seem to outstrip Britannicus [Claudius’ real rather than adopted son] in filial piety and might style himself divi filius [the son of a god]… A politician can afford to laugh at his own politics backstage, but not in full view of the audience (Nauta 1987, 75).

Nauta’s political intent is debatable, but the initial audience seems well defined – the performance was for those ‘in-the-know.’ That is, it is a performance whose humour operates on complicity – those who know what took place in order to elevate Nero to the throne. Now that it is established that the Apocolocyntosis was a performative presentation directed at a small part of the new inner court, we still need to address the controversy of when it was put on. The Timing of the First Performance The how and the when of the Apocolocyntosis are intimately intertwined, but I should like to add a few comments on the timing of this piece in opposition to other scholars. Taking a literary, rather than performative approach to the Apocolocyntosis, commentators such as Leach most often position the text in a relation to Seneca’s other texts, especially De Clementia. The comparison is moot at a literary level because of numerous tropes that intersect in both pieces concerning rulership. Both works were directed at Nero to some extent. If, however, we place the Apocolocyntosis in its performative context, it must stand in relation to another performance text of Seneca’s that was clearly its twin. Here I refer to the encomium delivered by Nero at the funeral of his predecessor. Written, as Tacitus tells us, by Seneca, Die funeris laudationem eius princeps exorsus est, dum antiquitatem generis, consulatus ac triumphos maiorum enumerabat, intentus ipse et

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christopher hartney ceteri; liberalium quoque artium commemoratio et nihil regente eo triste rei publicae ab externis accidisse pronis animis audita: postquam ad providentiam sapientiamque flexit, nemo risui temperare, quamquam oratio a Se neca composita multum cultus praeferret, ut fuit illi viro ingenium amoenum et temporis eius auribus adcommodatum. Adnotabant seniores, quibus otiosum est vetera et praesentia contendere, primum ex iis, qui rerum potiti essent, Neronem alienae facundiae eguisse (Tacitus, Annals, XIII.3). [On the day of the funeral speech, the prince gave his exhortation. As long as he enumerated the antiquity of his [Claudius’] family, the consulates and the triumphs of his ancestors, he was taken seriously by himself and by others. Allusions, also, to his literary attainments and to the freedom of his reign from reverses abroad had a favourable hearing. But when the orator addressed himself to his foresight and sagacity, no one could repress a smile; though the speech, as the composition of Seneca, exhibited the degree of polish to be expected from that famous man, whose pleasing talent was so well suited to a contemporary audience. The elderly observers, who make a pastime of comparing old days and new, remarked that Nero was the first master of the empire to stand in need of borrowed eloquence].

Sadly, we do not have the full text of the funeral oration, but from what Tacitus tells us the laudatory sheen of this funeral performance barely holds together. The audience smiles at the mention of Claudius’ sagacity. While Nero speaks Seneca’s words, both speechwriter and speaker seek to find the correct level at which to praise Claudius. To some extent, both fail: Nero lacks his own words and this is worthy of comment, while Seneca sought to uphold the solemnity of the funeral, but in his fulsome laudations brought smiles to the faces of the mourners and, significantly, the funeral also takes place in the background to the Apocolocyntosis itself; thus, if the Apocolocyntosis is anything, it is a mirror performance of encomium: it is Seneca’s revenge turn designed to dispel in laughter the tensions created by the death of Claudius, his possible murder, and the feigned funeral performance and ‘distraught mourning’ of the court. There are also other possible performances taking place at the same time worth considering. Claudius was being deified in the provinces, especially at Colchester and, though Levick and Nauta argue that this it was only done to serve Nero’s glory, he was also deified at Rome in 54CE (Levick 2001, 187). Thus the process of the conferment of divine honours would have produced a performance in the Senate that amplified the funeral speech, it would have drawn more astonished laughter from the citizenry and so the Apocolocyntosis would

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have, again, worked as a performance to dispel in laughter the anxieties of those managing the greater performance of the state at this time. Additionally, if we are to believe Suetonius’ account of the emperor’s demise, yet another darker performance, is taking place, Mors eius celata est, donec circa successorem omnia ordinarentur. Itaque et quasi pro aegro adhuc vota suscepta sunt et inducti per simulationem comoedi, qui velut desiderantem oblectarent (Suetonius, V. 45). [(Claudius’) death was hidden until all the arrangements for the succession had been put in place. As if he were still unwell vows were offered for his safety and the pretence was maintained by leading in comic actors and making out that [Claudius] had wished to be entertained by them].

Here we have another mirroring of performances: while the actors carry out one farce, those close to Claudius carry out another as they treat the emperor as still living – performing something akin to the plot of the Hollywood comedy Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) where a corpse must be seen to be ‘alive.’ This explains a lot more behind the joke (4.2) ‘… expiravit autem dum comoedos audit, ut scias me non sine cause illos timere’ [… he stopped breathing while listening to some comic actors – so now you know why I am afraid of them]. In fact Seneca may very well have known of the entire plot to dispatch the old emperor and taken part in the imperial post-mortem subterfuge. This possibility is rarely conceded by commentators, but it contains some interesting ramifications. The narrator’s historian-like pronouncement at the start of the Apocolocyntosis to tell the whole truth, ‘haec ita vera’ would be a threatening kind of humour to those who knew the real truth. As would Seneca’s joking threat to ‘dicam quod mihi in buccam venerit’ [I shall say whatever comes into my mouth]. As a confidant of the throne, the point is he would never dare say this, but at least amongst friends, a looser tongue may jest. At least Nero and Seneca’s possible patroness Agrippina would know the full extent of these jokes. We may then add to Nauta’s schema that, although the Apocolocyntosis was designed for a small coterie at court, the jokes relayed by the speaker would have had an even deeper meaning for those ‘in the know,’ that is, those directly involved in managing the transference of power from Claudius to Nero. My proposition on timing, then, is that the Apocolocyntosis was performed very soon after Claudius’ death as a hilarious anti-obituary of sorts and that it mirrors and mocks the formal funerary speech and the senatorial deification process. Its humour, in the examples given above, is made sharper by this timing. The most notable inversion between the

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funerary speech and the Apocolocyntosis is Nero’s listing of Claudius’ family heritage which then ‘comes alive’ in the Apocolocyntosis with the dramatic arrival of the deified Augustus towards the end. My idea goes against Nauta’s proposition that the work was delivered around two months after Claudius’ death at the Saturnalia in December. Indeed there are references in the scene of Claudius’ funeral to the fact that ‘non semper saturnalia erunt’ (12.10) [it would not always be Saturnalia] – suggesting that the whole of Claudius’ reign was one of carnival misrule and that this would have tied in with the atmosphere of the Saturnalia proper. Yet Nauta seems to undercut the argument presented: if the Apocolocyntosis was designed for a small group at court – why did it need to coincide with a major public festival? In arguing for the earlier staging, I acknowledge that there are two significant points against this very early timing. The first is that such a complex piece of comedy would take time to compose. This argument can be dismissed in two ways. Firstly, Seneca’s talents as a writer were clearly not undeveloped and he may well have been able to churn out this work in a few nights. Secondly, with his close connection to Agrippina, Seneca may have had a ‘presentiment’ that the old emperor was soon to be despatched. As a figure who clearly becomes ‘master of ceremonies’ during the liminal period between Claudius’ demise and Nero’s establishment, and a powerful figure in the empire for some years thereafter, Seneca may have (and with some pleasure) imagined the demise and subsequent celebration that would accompany the passing of the man who had kept him in exile for so many years. Much of the Apocolocyntosis could have been written in Seneca’s imagination before the funeral and even before the death of its subject. The second argument about timing is a little harder to dismiss. Narcissus the powerful freedman of Claudius outlived his master, yet in Book 15 of the Apocolocyntosis he is waiting to welcome Claudius to Hades straight after the former emperor was kicked out of heaven and led through his own funeral. At the start of Book XIII of his Annals Tacitus explains, Nec minus properato Narcissus Claudii libertus, de cuius iurgiis adversus Agrippinam rettuli, aspera custodia et neccessiatate extrema ad mortem agitur, [Without delay Narcissus, the freedman of Claudius whose altercations with Agrippina I have already noted, was forced to kill himself by a harsh confinement as a final necessity,]

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Confusingly, Narcissus, Tacitus tells us, is not the first but the second significant death of the new reign. The first is Junius Silanus proconsul of Asia. We are told that he was killed by Publius Celer and the freedman Helius. Was he killed in Asia? If so, the logistics of this operation would have taken weeks. Was Silanus by chance in Rome? Was he dead before Claudius’ funeral? Possibly. It is also possible that Tacitus may have his deaths out of order. It is also possible, a darkly sadistic possibility indeed, that Narcissus, now yesterday’s man and out of the loop, was still alive when the performance occurred and that Seneca ‘predicted’ his demise. This would work well with the outrageous humour of this scene. I admit that these possibilities are slimmer than the received account, but admitting this concern, and the possibility that the Apocolocyntosis may have been performed at the time of the Saturnalia (but still sticking to my earlier timing) we can now investigate how the Apocolocyntosis operated as a demarcation ritual with millenarian intent. (E)scatology As the textual residue of a court event designed to purge the spiritus of the former emperor the scatological elements of the text are highly appropriate to a deflation of the immediate past. Claudius must not only be presented as a fool, but also as the thing that time shits out; he is the site of chronological and scatological excrescence. The emperor’s last words in 4.3 are hilarious, yet telling, ‘vae me, puto, concacavi me’ [oh dear, I think I’ve shat myself] to which the narrator quickly adds, ‘quod an fecerit, nescio; omnia certe concacavit’ [I suppose that he did – he shat up everything else]. Also in 4.3 we read of the graphic start of this purge when the emperor’s ‘ultima vox’ [last utterance] is explained as coming from ‘illa parte, qua facilius loquebatur’ [that part where he found it easier to speak] a theme that, as Graves suggested (after Suetonius)10 could indeed be reflected in the title as a deification de culo.11 10 Suetonius, Claudius, 44.3 ‘Nonnulli inter initia consopitum, deinde cibo affluente evomuisse omnia, repetitumque toxico, incertum pultine addito, cum velut exhaustum refici cibo oporteret, an immisso per clystera, ut quasi abundantia laboranti etiam hoc genere egestionis subveniretur.’ 11 Here I refer the reader to Athanassakis 1974, 12-13. Here he expands on Graves’ suggestion that the title refers to a purgative colocynth. Athanassakis takes Graves further suggesting a partial homophonic link to the Latin culus and the Greek àpòkólouthus; . ‘Seneca would have us believe that the travesty of Claudius’ deification starts de culo.’

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Here I refer the reader to Athanassakis (1974, 12). This author expands on Graves’ suggestion that the title refers to a purgative colocynth. Athanassakis takes Graves further suggesting a partial homophonic link to the Latin culus and the Greek àpòkólou. thus; ‘Seneca would have us believe that the travesty of Claudius’ deification starts de culo.’ In an earlier article Athanassakis (1973, 292–3) suggests in a long-winded way that as Claudius, over 64 years had ‘anima luctatur’ [struggled with breath] we meet a play on the word ‘anima’ which could also mean wind or desiring to fart. The subsequent reference to the ‘filthy spindle’ of Clotho (4.1) is a more subtle reference to this fate unplugging him from life and also literally unplugging his fart 64 years in the making. This may be slightly far-fetched, but we do have the possibility in Seneca’s performance that Claudius literally blew himself to heaven. Whether we buy this or not, I argue against the far-too-rigid thesis of Motto and Clark who suggest that this satire depends on a circularity of action, rather than a usual development (or de-development) of character; it is more fitting to see Claudius, as representative of his age; as a site of deflation. The Millenarian Aspect ….mirantur pensa sorores: mutatur vilis pretioso lana metallo, aurea formoso descendunt saecula filo. nec modus est illis: Felicia vellera ducunt et gaudent implere manus: sunt dulcia pensa. sponte sua festinat opus nulloque labore mollia contorto descendunt stamina fuso vincunt Tithoni, vincunt et Nestoris annos (4.1) [The sisters (the Fates spinning) were astonished by the stints, the shaggy wool was changed to precious metal, a Golden Age came down on the beautiful thread. There was no measure to it: lucky fleeces they drew out And they rejoiced to fill their hands, their stints were easy-moving. The work spun on of its own accord and with no labour The soft threads came down around the spinning spool Surpassing the years of both Tithonius and Nestor].

Robinson (2005) rightly illuminates the Apocolocyntosis as a document infused with references to time. Straight after the ‘historian’s’ introduction we have, as Eden (1984, 68) puts it, some verse that ‘satirizes, with ironic imitation, the bombastic circumlocutions of times of year and day beloved by poetasters.’ Robinson would point to this and other

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tropes in the work as examples of ‘the ambiguous afterglow of astronomical phenomena scavenged from the traditions of epic.’ Robinson seeks to show how these tropes effect the presentation of satire in Nero’s age. He concludes by suggesting that ‘abrupt transitions, shifts and temporal periphrases take over in the Apocolocyntosis … [and that Claudius and Nero] become part of the machinery of the Apocolocyntosis absorbed into its temporal collapse’ (2005, 254). This is well argued. For if there is a vacuous character lurking in this piece it is Nero. The heroic convention of linking the new emperor to a star is completely overdone, even given Disraeli’s injunction.12 Not only is Nero the morning star, but also the evening one and, Seneca adds, the sun as well. All this ‘exaggerated flattery of court literature’(1984, 78) as Eden has it, seems too much for a 16 year old with little reputation and in need of borrowed eloquence. Moreover, Nero’s position is undercut by the suggestion in 12.2 that ‘… Crassum vero tam fatuum ut etiam regnare posset’ [Crassus so truly a fool that even he could have reigned]. That is, all rulers are ultimately fools, a comment which links the theme of fatuus that pervades the work and is as applicable (though more obliquely so) to Nero as it is to Claudius. The line is delivered by Augustus. If one princeps, then, follows another, one fool following another, whither the Golden Age? In the text, if both Nero and Claudius are upstaged by anyone, it is Augustus, who, together with the narrator, serves as the chronological and moral axis of the piece. Chronologically Augustus represents the start of ‘imperial’ time in Rome (some inscriptions mark time through the years of emperors’ reigns rather than ab urbe condita), and he is also a heavenly immortal presented here as modestly biding his time amongst the gods. This is how Seneca would want it, for he depicts the outraged Augustus as a benchmark of eternal Roman morality.13 It is from Chapter 10 of the Apocolocyntosis that the spiritus of Claudius becomes truly vacuous. Augustus introduces a tone of outraged criticism that drives

12 That is, ‘Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.’ 13 The fascinating episode of the removal of Augustus’ statue lends an interesting dimension to this, ‘So great, indeed, was the number becoming of those who were publicly executed, that the statue of Augustus which stood on the spot was taken elsewhere, so that it should not seem to be witnessing the bloodshed or else be always covered up. By this action Claudius brought ridicule upon himself, as he was gorging himself upon the very sights that he did not think it fitting for even the inanimate bronze to seem to behold,’ Cassius Dio (LX, 13.3).

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the heavenly court scene (a fitting mirror performance to the Senate’s deification of Claudius). Claudius, like his predecessors, seems even more foolish and more maniacal because of Augustus’ gravitas; his is a modest and moral rectitude framed by his opening declaration to the gods that he knows his humble place: ‘…vos testes habeo, ex quo deus factus sum, nullum me verbum fecisse’ (10.2–3) [I have you as witnesses, that from the day I became a god, I have not uttered a word]. Augustus reveals a range of crimes carried out by Claudius, but focuses on family executions. In one sense Augustus is reiterating the narrator’s voice when he recalls themes of Claudius’ physical nature: ‘ad summam, tria verba cito dicat et servuum me ducat’ (11.14) [in short, if he can say three words quickly he can lead me away as his slave]. Augustus also brings to a close the running joke of mis-quoted or mis-interpreted Greek quotes that served to lend some dignity to Claudius’ intellect. Augustus quotes the unambiguous line from the Iliad 1.586. “riyε podòs tεtagwn apò bhlou qεstεsioio” (11.3) [taking hold of his foot he hurled him from heaven’s door]. With these dignified verses spoken, Claudius is flung from above. After Augustus speaks, Claudius, although he has been gesturing, mumbling and misquoting Homer constantly, falls almost completely silent. The Old Age is put behind Seneca and his audience. The presence of Augustus is invoked as a pointer towards the Golden Age. But how does this work as a sign of hope for the future? In 3.2 Seneca highlights the millenarian aspect of the piece with reference to those ‘mathematici’ or soothsayers who have for so long been predicting Claudius’ demise. Although it is a joke, it indeed underlines the fact that people’s expectations, including those at court, hung on the timing of an emperor’s demise and of imagining what would happen after his death. A process superstitious in its dimensions, yet not too far removed from the patterns of ages prevalent in the historical assumptions of many annalists in this early imperial period (as identified by Trompf 1979: 63ff ). The hilarious realisation by Seneca and his small ‘insider’ audience is that they now get to write what happens after Claudius: both as politicians (and in Seneca’s case) as an author. The Golden Age is worthy of hilarious celebration because it is Seneca’s age. Nero is indeed the nominal leader of the team, but he is also a 16 year old boy. The laughter of the Apocolocyntosis is driven by the need to scatologically expunge Claudius; but there is also about it the laughter of victory on their lips.

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Motto and Clark try to fit the Apocolocyntosis into an overall understanding of satire where ‘almost all satiric plots tumble or bounce gladsomely downwards – toward ineptitude, inertia or disaster’ (1983: 30) Athanassakis similarly suggests that the reference to a ‘gourd’ in the title links to how ‘Claudius is made the object of sport and passed from hand to hand much in the way in which a round object would be in a ball game’ (1974: 22). Instead it is truer to say that Seneca wants to completely drain all sense of quality from the hitherto fearsome fool. He wants to demote him down the chain of command so far that he is unable to be seen: this diminishment aids all the better Seneca’s promotion of the age of Nero and this Golden Age. Conclusion Victor Turner in the explanation of his schema of ‘social drama’ considers the nature of ‘redressive action’ created to address a social breach. The (possibly murderous) shift from one princeps to another required a series of rituals to cover over the breach in time and transmission from Claudius to Nero. The funeral, deification process, even the hailing of Nero by the Praetorian Guard were social performances that worked to redress possible breaches in Roman society. Turner explains, ‘mechanisms’ informal of formal, institutionalised or ad hoc, are swiftly brought into operation by leading or structurally representative members of the disturbed social system. These mechanisms may vary in type and complexity with such factors as the depth and shared social significance of the breech, the social inclusiveness of the crisis, the nature of the social group within which the breech took place, and the degree of its autonomy with reference to wider or external systems of social relations (1974: 39).

Similarly amongst these wider social performances, was the Apocolocyntosis, a ‘social drama’ that worked to redress breaches between those at court to whom the work was addressed, reminding them that their age had come, binding them through the same knowing laughter that also saw the Old Age expunged through a hilarious and scatological Walpurgisnacht of sorts, a purgation that relied on mythic figures for added comic effect, but also for additional gravitas through the figure of Augustus. Classical scholars have been too concerned with considering how the Apocolocyntosis works as a satire in the modern sense where Seneca is seen with the ‘general run of satirists, who tend to give the

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impression that life is not worth living (Turner, 1958:9)’. They will no doubt continue to struggle to fit this work into the literary genre of satire and discuss its reception amongst its ‘readers,’ but I applaud Nauta and others who also consider this work as the literary residue of a specific performance and I hope this article encourages similar such approaches. Bibliography Athanassakis, A. 1973. ‘Some Thoughts on Double-Entendres in Seneca Apocolocyntosis 3 and 4’. Classical Philology 68: 292–294. —— . 1974. ‘Some Evidence in Defence of the Title Apocolocyntosis for Seneca’s Satire’. Transactions of the American Philological Association 104: 11–22. Bakhtin, M. M. 1965. Rabelais and His World. Trans. H. Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T Press. —— . 1984. Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. C. Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Binder, G. 1992. ‘Schwester oder Wade des Augustus? Konser Vatives Zum Text Der Apocolocyntosis’. Mnemosyne 45 (3): 345–357. Braund, S.M. and P. James. 1998. ‘Quasi Homo: Distortion and Contortion in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis’. Arethusa 31 (3): 285–311. Cassius Dio LVI-LX. 1981. Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press. Coffey, M. 1976. Roman Satire. New York: Methuen. Currie, H. MacL. 1962. ‘The Purpose of the Apocolocyntosis,’ Deroy, L. 1951. ‘Que signifie le titre de l’Apocolocyntose?’ Latomus 10: 311–318. Dupont, Florence. 1995. Les monsters de Sénèque. Paris: Belin. Eden, P. T. 1984. Seneca: Apocolocyntosis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilhus, I. S. 1997. Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins: Laughter in the History of Religion. London and New York: Routledge. Graf, F. 2005. ‘Satire in a Ritual Context’. In Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, ed. K. Freudenburg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graves, R. P. 1990. Robert Graves: The Years With Laura Riding 1926–1940. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Graves, R. 1989. I, Claudius. London: Vintage. —— . 1989. Claudius the God. London: Vintage. —— . 1961. The White Goddess. London: Faber and Faber. Habinek, T. 2005. ‘Satire as Aristocratic Play’ In Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, ed. K. Freudenburg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hammmoudi, A. 1988. La victime et ses masques. Paris: Seuil. Hoeing, C. 1903. ‘Victa Pota’. The American Journal of Philology 24 (3): 323–326. Huizinga, J. 1950. Homo Ludens. Boston: Beacon Press. Korzeniewski, D. 1982. ‘Seneca’s Kunst der Dramatischen Komposition in Seiner Apocolocyntosis’. Mnemosyne 35 (1–2): 103–114. Leach, E. W. 1989. ‘The Implied Reader and the Political Argument in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis and De Clementia’. Arethusa 22 (2): 197–227. Levick, B. 2001. Claudius. London: Routledge. Marti, B. M. 1952. ‘Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis and Octavia: A Diptych’. The American Journal of Philology 73 (1): 24–39. Momigliano, A. D. 1934. Claudius: The Emperor and His Achievement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Motto, A. L. and J. R. Clark. 1983. ‘Satiric Plotting on Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis’. Emerita 51 (1): 29–40. Nauta, R. R. 1987. ‘Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis as Saturnalian Literature’. Mnemosyne 40 (1–2): 69–96. O’Gorman, E. 2005. ‘Citation and Authority in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis’. In Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, ed. K. Freudenburg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plautus. 1917. Casina, The Casket Comedy, Curculio etc. Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press. Ramelli, I. 2001. ‘L’ Apocolocyntosis come Opera Storica’. Gerión 19: 477–491. Reiser, T. 2007. ‘Bachtin und Seneca – Zum Grotesken in Der Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii’. Hermes 135 (4): 469–481. Reeve M. D. 1984. ‘Apotheosis…Per satvram’. Classical Philology 79: 305–307. Relihan, J. C. 1993. Ancient Menippean Satire. London: Johns Hopkins Press. Robinson, T. J. 2005. ‘In The Court of Time: The Reckoning of a Monster in the Apocolocyntosis of Seneca’. Arethusa 38: 223–257. Ruth, T. de C. 1924. The Problem of Claudius. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Santoro-Brieza, L. 2004. ‘On Laughter, Comicality, Homour’. Literature and Aesthetics 14 (1): 71–88. Schilling, R. 1980. ‘La Déification a Rome: Tradition Latine et Interférance Greque’. Revue des etudes Latines 58: 137–152. Suetonius. 1914. Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press. Tacitus. 1937. Annals IV-VI, XI-XII. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. —— . 1937. Annals XIII-XVI. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Trompf, G. W. 1979. The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought. Berkeley, University of California Press. Turner, P. 1958. Lucius or the Ass. London: John Calder. Turner, V. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Aldine Transaction. —— . 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wagenwoort, H. 1958. ‘Quid significet Apocolocyntosis’. Mnemosyne 4 (11): 340–342. Weinreich, O. 1923. Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis. Die Satire auf Tod, Himmel-und Hollenfahrt des Kaisers Claudius. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.

CONSEQUENCES OF BILINGUALISM IN PAUL’S LETTERS Vrasidas Karalis Abstract This paper examines Paul’s articulation of ‘Jesus the Christ’ through the specific linguistic configuration constructed by him in order to transmit the kerygma of his Church to the Hellenised populations of the Roman Empire. Linguistically, Paul’s narrative of Jesus was transferred and transported to the common language of the day, Greek in this case, with its philosophical connotations and theoretical underpinnings. Paul translated the tradition of the Hebrew prophets into the Hellenistic philosophical idiom which was syncretic and polysemic. The paper explores the various dimensions of such ‘translation’ and the ways in which ‘Hebrew meanings’ were re-signified by being transferred into ‘Greek words’. In Paul’s letters, colliding signifiers of both traditions seem to co-exist in an un-easy interdependence. Textually, his letters thrive on the polysemic usage of Greek terms and expressions addressing the questions of different audiences within the synagogues of the day. The paper focuses on various ‘strong’ terms, such as ecclesia, pneuma, and agape in order to explore the diverse connotations that such terms had to different groups in the Hebrew communities outside Palestine and later to the Greek-speaking believers of diasporic communities. It also addresses the fact that Jerusalem was the ultimate arbiter in settling the differences between the various groups of Diasporic Judaism and the changes that occurred after the destruction of the Temple (69/70 CE) when the ultimate authority for the conflicting interpretations was lost. Then Paul’s kerygma was passed on to a generation of Hellenised Jews without much contact with the traditional centre of scriptural and religious authority in Jerusalem. Paul’s bilingualism led to the re-grafting of his letters on to the existing religious philosophies of the late first century, appropriated by mainly Greek community leaders and thinkers who had no contact with Judaism. Paul’s bilingual thought established a tradition which refracted both Judaism and Hellenism towards a direction which seemed to include and yet contradict both. In the second century, Christianity could draw from both traditions without relying directly on them. Paul’s polysemic bilingualism established new audiences and places of interpretation which dominated Christian tradition until the canonisation of its doctrine by Constantine.

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Paul’s language is one of most enigmatic yet effective verbal structures in the history of religious communication. This statement does not refer simply to the historical efficacy of Paul’s letters and the way they defined the history of religious, political and philosophical thought in the Christianized world; it refers specifically to the actual semantic structure of his language, its tropes of articulation, its stratagems for framing meaning, its rhetoric of emotive response and finally its overall style of textualisation.1 More specifically within their linguistic tradition, Paul’s letters are, together with Plato’s, the most important specimens of their kind in the history of the Greek language; furthermore, one could argue that they belong to a singular genre of writing, a hybrid idiom combining both oral and written aspects of communication, juxtaposing dramatic, exhortatory and lyric logotypes, rhythmically arranged in climactic sentences, culminating in sublime epigrams and puzzling hyperboles. Paul’s language is so dense, metaphoric, and compressed that innumerable theories and hermeneutical models have been suggested in order to account for its continuing significance and semantic endurance. Yet on many occasions, the density of Paul’s idiom has been a considerable obstacle for the clear understanding of his ideas and sometimes, through its rather weak or one-dimensional translations in English, has contributed to the extremely bad reputation that Paul seems to enjoy amongst liberal Christians or independent philosophers. As it is well known, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche called Paul the ‘dysangelist’, arguing that he preached nothing else but the death of authentic spirituality. For decades also, Paul suffered from very bad publicity, as it were, because of the misunderstandings that his works have given birth to, juxtaposing the naïve idealism of Jesus to his own aggressive zeal. Only in our time, through the recent philosophical commentaries of Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, are we able today to rethink some of the parameters of Paul’s thought and re-contextualise his work within the realities of present day cultural and religious debates – to rediscover therefore his enduring semantic relevance. Yet there is a lot to be done in order to ‘liberate’ Paul from the traditionalist misunderstanding of his

1

The present essay is part of a longer book to be released by Eerdmans in 2010 on the semantic foundations of Paul’s theology.

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work as a misanthropic or indeed an latent anti-Semite reactionary: one could claim that Paul, more than any other Hellenised Jew of the period, radicalized Judaic tradition and thinking so much that in the end Judaism was not enough to contain his message. Such exegetical shifts account for this new perception, emerging during the last decades, which saw him migrating from a ‘Radical Jew’ (Daniel Boyarin) to ‘a Jew on the margins’ (Calvin J. Roetzel); it is obvious now that Paul, within the confines of his age, established a new ‘form’ of articulating experience that transcended the limitations of the cultural norms that produced it. One can argue, however, that the misunderstandings are justified to a certain degree; his own contemporary Peter warned against those who read his letters that ‘there are some things in them hard to understand’ (2 Peter, 3. 16). Even the most Pauline thinker of all, Marcion (cf. Gardner, this volume), suggested some wild interpretations of his work, establishing, as a later reaction, a pattern of cautious exegetical commentaries, such as we see in the commentaries by Origen, Pelagius and St John Chrysostom. Other causes for misunderstanding may also derive from the structure of each letter or even the authenticity of some of them. Indeed, it is rather obvious that the 2nd letter to the Corinthians refers to a number of different occasions, and it may be subdivided into two or even three fragments of other letters: the style of delivery is so strikingly different and the tone of voice so varied as to make it immediately obvious that it was written for different reasons and purposes – especially given the strange change in linguistic registers: the lack of uniformity may lead us in many ways to understand the various layers of meaning or fragments of disparate letters ‘stitched’ together by later redactors. Yet there is also something unitary in the whole structure of his texts. For example, the spurious 2nd letter to Timothy may contain fragments from Paul’s lost letters; the emotional strength of certain autobiographical passages is somehow at odds with the pastoral content of the remaining text: ‘As from me I am already poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me but to all who longed for his appearing’ (2 Timothy, 4. 6–8). Paul’s letters are highly personal documents presenting simultaneously the psychological development of an individual and the exploration of a larger theme; the contemporary reader must see both the writer and his theme evolving together throughout the epistolary text. The early Paul is struggling with the articulation of

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his faith while the later one is not: there is a distinct progress attested through his vocabulary that makes his letter to the Romans, standing somehow in the middle, such an elaborate and multidimensional document, replete with abstract notions, implied texts and esoteric debates, which we do not detected in his early letters. Yet, as Stanley K. Stowers stated, Paul’s letters ‘were addressed to specific communities, based on households, [and] were meant to be read to any who were in attendance at the community assembly, and were perhaps copied and circulated to communities in other cities before Paul’s death’ (Stowers 2004, 19). So, the character of Paul’s letters is determined by their audience and their reception at a specific place under the circumstances of their local realities. Abraham Smith, who employed the reader-response approach to the reading of 1 Thess, noticed: ‘Paul penned a work the aim of which was to help the community know how it could survive within its new philia network’ (Smith 1995, 102). This was the implied intentionality in most Pauline letters: strengthening bonds between the new community and establishing patterns of discourse which could function as a cohesive mechanism for a community still in search of its identity. Within this intentional scope we must understand their specific hybrid linguistic idiom and explain its effectiveness. Yet it would be anachronistic to believe that there was a sense of any unified perception about community practices at that time. The early Jewish Christian communities were still trying to define themselves and form distinct tropes of self-articulation: they existed suspended over three worlds, in a period of intense trans-culturalism and social mobility. One could claim that Paul is the first fully articulate trans-cultural personality in the history of Western civilization and that the main concern of his work is to form, within the confines of the early house churches, trans-cultural individuals equipped to deal with the challenges of the wider world of the Roman imperium. For this reason he never renounces his Judaism; while talking to Hellenised Jews or Hellenes he keeps stressing his Hebrew identity (Philippians 3, 5), while in the Acts he emphasises his city of origin Tarsus (21, 39) and boasts about his Roman citizenship (22, 28). To this one must add his knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy in order to see the various layers of identity that we see in his work. Paul’s position goes beyond the usual cosmopolitanism of Stoic thinkers (which indeed was a dominant frame of mind); it is a fully developed project of building trans-cultural believers so that the kerygma of his Evangelion could be as inclusive as

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possible, not simply at the tribal or ethnic level, but in the deepest structure of individual formation. Towards that goal, his letters also exhibit a trans-generic character by virtue of which the author employs a wide range of devices from all genres of epistolography in order to make his messages understood at the most nuanced levels of perception. So most of his letters start from the tradition of ‘letter-essay’, the diatribe, but incorporate also formal characteristics from other genres of epistolography. Stirewalt Jr stressed the very mixed character of this letter: ‘The letter to the Romans is a disclosure of Paul’s future plans, a spontaneous review of his ministry, and a resume of his ponderings to date concerning responses to his gospel and to his teachings’ (Stirewalt Jr 2003, 112). The transgeneric character of his letters reveals another characteristic of Paul’s personality: he attempts to abate conflict and generate cohesion amongst the members of his community; in essence what most of his letters were doing was establishing a common language for the shared experience of the early community of believers, something that Paul attempted by fusing together the very diverse forms of communicative codes employed by the believers themselves within the context of Second Temple synagogue or proseuchai. Furthermore, his letters work actively to establish an effective discourse which would function as a platform of convergence amongst the various groups within the early Christian community. This happened through the creation of a provocative hybrid idiom, which combined the cultural semantics of three worlds; Jewish, Greek, Roman and probably the varieties that had already developed between them. A. N. Wilson made the extremely generalized assumption that Paul thought in Greek. He wrote in Greek. Together with Philo of Alexandria, he is the great conduit through which Jewish concepts and stories and patterns of thought came to the Gentile world. As these ideas came through the channel, they passed into a new intellectual world; the attempt to translate Hebrew ideas into a Gentile setting, above all a Greek setting, meant using words either with new senses or with great boldness (Wilson 1997, 28).

But by claiming this, we have in mind the present day nationalistic monolingualism that has been enforced on the educational system by the post-Enlightenment nation-state. In Hellenistic antiquity, linguistic barriers were not so deeply entrenched, especially in the East. The construction of social reality and individual identity was not monolingual, but predominantly diglossic or even polyglossic. The knowledge of various languages informed the way

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that all of them were used and led to the simplification of syntax and the diversification of grammar. We will talk shortly about Paul’s diglossia; but the first element of such practice of diglossic practice is the constant cultural translation of notions and their relocation within the semantic fields of another linguistic practice. Because of this, Paul’s idiolect exhibits a striking and puzzling tendency towards metaphoric language. The Koine, as employed by Paul, was not really the language of the market. It was a highly sophisticated, nuanced and complex verbal scaffolding, indicating equally complex forms of experience and interaction between cultures and value systems. The co-existence of many linguistic varieties within Paul’s discourse engendered hybrid notions, originating from their traditional cultural pragmatics, but branching out to completely new semantic areas according to the receptive abilities and indeed conditioning of his audience. Paul was an acute observer of the psychology of his listeners; he knew that each expectation of his audience had to be met in a way that could provoke an immediate emotional response. Given that his audience was so diverse, Paul employed a dense semantic idiolect replete with a constant interplay of meanings that moved freely as events of individual conscience between cultures and classes. The process had certainly started with the Septuagint, as the first translation that re-signified Greek words and created new semantic connections between common linguistic signs. The Septuagint also changed the pragmatics of the Greek language by establishing references with texts that did not exist in the language; so sentences and words lost their immediate referential connection and gained a strong performative content: as a consequence, they framed a missing notional element which had to be re-enacted through other devices already existing within the language in order to become an active awareness. Philo of Alexandria chose allegory as the most functional trope which gave him freedom in interpretive references by association and by detaching them from pragmatic specifications. Paul followed him to a certain degree, and in Romans he repeatedly stressed the polarity kata sarka as opposed to kata pneuma: For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is matter of the heart – it is spiritual and not literal (2. 28–29).

He also used cautiously the allegorical method (Romans, 11. 13–24); but the main strength of his language can be found in the intense metaphors creating semantic changes based on similarities between a concept

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in the original Hebrew and another target concept in Greek. Concepts such as hamartia, pistis, agape, ecclesia, sarx, to name only a few, develop new cognitive meanings by blending together notions from different conceptual domains in his works. The relocation of such Hebrew notions establishes new ‘cognitive mappings’ of the experience and enhances anagogical reasoning (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Paul’s language is structured around such blended metaphors, causing new categories of meaning to emerge because of the existing asymmetries between languages. The level of abstraction leads to the invention of further layers of blended metaphors. In the end, the metaphors themselves develop a semantic ‘surplus’ which means more than its constitutive parts: his hamartia is not simply the Hebrew notions of hatta’t or awon or even pesa; it doesn’t either mean the tragic understanding of hamartia as excess. Indeed, all these notions are fused in his language because the semantic charges of the word, blending both the Hebrew and the Greek, create a new reference, a metaphoric meaning beyond both Hebrew and Greek. Paul’s metaphors defined the way Christian theology evolved through the tropes he introduced to express his new codification of the sacred. By disregarding the metaphoric language as cognitive mapping of the real, the reception of his letters has been somehow contradictory, used to justify both strict legalism and unconditional libertinism. Today, Bishop Spong holds him responsible for all the misfortunes of Christianity whereas Garry Wills presents Paul as a profoundly misconstrued thinker. It seems that, for theologians in particular, Paul’s ‘faith’ for example is an extremely ambiguous formulation containing elements of contradictory and somehow antithetical semantic fields fused together in a creative and unpredictable manner. Such antithetical fields caused a number of opposing interpretations and established the tradition that presented Paul as the antithesis of Jesus and the inaugurator of institutional authority within Christianity. The truth of course is that Paul’s language needs a closer examination without the theological accretions that have been superimposed on his works. Yet a synchronic reading of his letters will not be enough to explain his continuing influence; on the other hand, a diachronic understanding of his language may lead to an unhistorical reading of its signifying processes and therefore totally eliminate its reality. The present study stands somewhere in the middle: after the brief analysis of the background and the situations surrounding Paul’s letters it will briefly focus on Romans 13. 1–5 as the ultimate statement of Paul’s political nomocracy.

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We propose this term in order to explain how Paul tries to deal with the question of civil obedience or fidelity within a community or a subgroup; the term exousia (plural exousiai translated as ‘governing authorities’) in this specific context is a highly charged term indicating domination and submission, something which would have been incompatible with the ideas expressed in the letter to the Galatians – and indeed it has caused considerable unease to both his friends and foes, since at first reading it seems to justify and legitimise all forms of power. In the context of the early Jewish Christian community in Rome, however, the admonition could have had only a normalising and stabilising function for the assembly of its members. Pragmatically, it may also refer to the eschatological end of time expectation that we read in 13. 11: ‘for salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.’ Probably certain believers would have organised or prepared to organise some form of enthusiastic welcome for the end of time. Mark Nanos has put forward the idea that Paul was admonishing the Gentile members to obey the traditional Jews governing the Synagogue in Rome, in order to account for such a provocative and odd passage (Nanos, 1996, 289). On the other hand, Philip F. Esler argued that ‘Paul’s instructions extended beyond the boundaries of the Christ-movement’ (Esler 2003, 332). A close reading of the text shows that Paul’s language is at the same time both specific and somehow equivocal; one could claim that he conceptualised ‘power’ in such an ambiguous or polysemous manner that all parties involved would have felt equally uneasy by the novelty of the idea. His careful use of hypotassestho (in some manuscripts hypotasesthe) suggests an attempt to reconcile the warring factions within the community in order to deal with growing disaffection on the part of Gentiles outside, or even inside the community. It is a practical advice, indeed a very cautious admonition, by someone who didn’t even know the congregation to which he was addressing himself to, and had only second hand information about its polemics and psychodynamics within the group. Recently, on the basis of this passage, the concept of political theology, employed in regard to his political legacy, has raised some serious questions about Christian political activism. Paul’s community of the faithful soon started developing the self-perception of the other within the Jewish synagogue and the Roman society: ‘for here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come’ (Hebrews, 13. 14). But such self-perception also meant exclusivism and isolationism, a form of antisocial behavior completely incomprehensible to the assimilated Jews of the Diaspora. The letter to the Romans addresses the mixed

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audience of three overlapping communities: the Roman theosebeis, the traditional Jews and the Jewish Christians; it is a hybrid text employing the verbal practices of each one of them in order to teach and persuade, indeed in order to construct a parenesis accepted by all. So the letter produces a composite language of convergences in order to bring together different understandings of the ‘law’ and to admonish the faithful to act accordingly. What dominates its logic is the need for convergences amongst differing social practices and perceptions; and the whole structure of the letter examines precisely such social agendas in their interaction within a specific space. In a community still struggling to articulate itself Paul maps out the vocabulary of mutual affirmation. Within the community and its common ethics, a new sense of the self emerges: ‘Let all be fully convinced in their minds’ (14. 5). Paul ends his letter by naming these individuals, whom he sees as individuals and not as anonymous believers. Within the community each ‘psyche’ becomes an individual: it develops self-awareness through a new language of references and connections, introducing thus a new type of subjectivity unknown to both Hellenic and Hebrew cultural conditioning.

The Language Question The main points in this exploration are to discuss in what language Paul’s letters were written, then to understand its intentionality, and finally, to suggest what he wanted to achieve with his audiences. Contemporary rhetorical criticism, as it happened previously with stylometrics or with semantic criticism, is not in itself enough to propose a comprehensive interpretation of his statements and therefore a hermeneutical understanding of his world. Language as a form of lived reality provides frames of experiencing in specific spaces of events shared with others: indeed it links the totality of the experience in space, time and practice and establishes meaning as a result of all of them. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of ‘language as a form of life’ is extremely crucial in order to locate the three interconnected parameters we will discuss here: a) language as experience b) the space of the actualisation of that special experience and c) the affective influence of the shared vision created by the specific language used in this case by Paul. Paul’s experience of language belongs to that of Hellenised Jew who spoke Greek and expressed himself in Greek. It is known however that he could also speak Hebrew, and probably Latin (Acts, 21. 37–40). One

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could also add Aramaic and, if we judge from his discussions with the Greek philosophers in Athens, and his quotations from their poets, probably he had read classical Greek also. Paul’s language is associated with the space where his message would have been heard; the site of the synagogue or home churches. Georg Walser who studied the Greek used in the ancient synagogue argues that the Hebrew Pentateuch was translated into a rather heterogeneous form of Greek ‘within the polyglossic environment during the Hellenistic period’ (2001, 176), and concluded: ‘Yes, there was a distinct Jewish variety of Greek, viz., the Pentateuchal variety of Greek, and, yes, that variety was a quite natural element in the polyglossic spectre that characterized the ancient Greek language situation’ (2001, 184). His exploration gives us an idea about the modes of delivering public messages in the ancient synagogue, constituted by diverse linguistic users from different social backgrounds, who attended it not simply for worship, but also for the explanation of the law or the debating of many pressing issues. Jeffrey T. Reed brings the diversity within Paul’s letters to our attention and observes both a convergence and a divergence from the established dialects: Paul was faced with the problem of discoursing in a Jewish dialect (i.e. a language determined and created by various Jewish cultural norms) with non-Jewish people. To accomplish social change in his readership without losing them, so to speak, in the language, he had to change not only the language of Judaism but also the language of his readers (2000, 152).

The topos for the actualization of such a mixed and yet self-diverse idiolect was the meeting places of the Jews in the Diaspora, with their own specific customs and ways of reading the Torah. These traditions were articulated in a new form of Greek which was, as Jonathan M. Watt states, based on ‘metaphoric code-switching’ through which ‘the speaker uses (or imitates) another code in order to enhance his communication, provides a touch of poetry, humor or artistic realism’ (2003, 290). Therefore, the new message proclaimed by Paul not only employed a new variety of Greek in order to present the events of the Christ that constituted his euangelion but also re-signified existing Greek terms, phrases and structures in order to accommodate the disruptive and alien quality of its character. In this process his idiolect involves cross-spatial mappings of different topoi and a gradual integration of events: in his 2nd letter to the Corinthians he set out his major project in order to solve disputes: ‘We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ’ (2 Corinthians, 10. 5). This is an extremely important stage in the

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integration of his ecclesia: differences have to be re-interpreted according to the form of life accepted by the community of faithful. The arguments, pan noema in Greek, have to undergo ‘resignification,’ an intentional fusion of symbolic content from diverse contexts. Through this process, language, in its hybrid integrating function, ‘realizes a world, in the double sense of apprehending and producing it’ (Berger and Luckman 1966, 173). The debates involving conversations and discussions within the topos of the proseuche, create the sense of belonging by, actualizing of this realizing efficacy of language in the face-to-face situation on individual existence. In conversation the objectifications of language become objects of individual consciousness. Thus the fundamental reality-maintaining fact is the continuing use of the same language to objectify unfolding biographical experience (Berger and Luckman 1966, 173).

Paul’s hybrid language talks to everyone and with everyone; it becomes part of the lived situation within the common space of shared experience and thus functions as a cohesive catalyst to generate a deep sense of group identity and of personal legitimation, established by participation in common ritual practices (mainly baptism) and forms of common worship (singing hymns). As an example of this we can use the previously mentioned text from Romans. In the history of the Western world this passage (13. 1–5) has had immense implications on the prevailing form of political government, and informs to this day the murky political agendas of conservative Christianity. The question about this passage is about the relation between the community of faithful and secular authorities. As we have seen there are many theories about the very meaning of the famous statement. J.O.C. Neill even argued that it ‘is neither Christian nor Jewish in origin’, and suggested that ‘the passage [Romans, 13. 1–7] is made up of eight injunctions, collected together by a Stoic teacher and given Stoic philosophical grounding in the first saying’ (Neill 1975, 208). Stoic influence on Paul is of course quite noticeable; but this passage has established both political ethics and what has been called the ‘theology of the state’ which cannot be called properly Stoic. Indeed what surprises us is the strong imperative language of the passage which seems to echo similar expressions from the sophiological Jewish tradition (‘By me, kings reign and rulers decree what is just’, Proverbs, 8. 15) and at the same time the Roman perception, current at the time of the Principate, of the emperor as divus which can explain the idea of reigning authorities as ‘those that exist have been instituted by god.’ The

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apotheosis of the emperor took place after his death so one could also claim that Paul’s statement wanted to secure continuity and order in the governmental system of succession in the empire. Furthermore, the idea of giving up individual freedom (libertas) and retreating to the inner self or the solidarity of a closed group is a common Stoic act in its origin trend in this period. It was a process reflecting the deep transformation that had already occurred within the structure of the Roman political system: The late Republic developed towards the conflicts of dignitas rather than the fortification of libertas, until the conflicts issued in the Principate. Under the Principate the ruling law which had been the basis of libertas was in fact replaced by the will of the Princeps. Within the Roman community itself, the possession of libertas became a gift rather than a right, and, ceasing to be a right, lost what had been its essential quality (Wirszubski 1968, 171).

Paul acted as a supreme pragmatist accepting an established reality and trying to solve its dilemmas. One could claim that this ambiguous statement can be seen as an attempt to accommodate within the church the Gentiles, Roman god-fearers, who were forced to participate in the cult of the Emperor and didn’t want to renounce their allegiance to Rome, especially in times of crises. One could also argue that by elevating ‘secular’ authority to a divine institution Paul was trying to convince the Gentiles that they were not going to follow the priestly system of the Jerusalem Temple; or even further he wanted to exclude what we may call today the possibility of theocracy. He suggested this by linking one Jewish and one Gentile practice, and thus creating a fusion of expectations amongst them. Against the traditional system of elders governing the synagogues of the Diaspora, Paul raised the idea of an external ‘just secular authority’, which could function not simply as the judge on ethical behaviour, but as the catalyst for introspection and self-understanding: ‘therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience’ (13, 5). Paul connected civil obedience with a sense of interiority and self-criticism, and replaced the fear of the secular unjust authority with the solidarity within the ecclesia-as is obvious in the remaining verses of chapter thirteen. Indeed, as it has been suggested, Paul appropriates the language of the Empire and the idiom of the imperial cult and introduces a form of anti-language which is polyglossic and stratified and yet, because of its political relevance, leads to an empathic identification within the group of believers. As Halliday has stressed: ‘An anti-language is a met-

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aphor for an everyday language; and this metaphoric quality appears all the way up and down the system’ (1976, 576). Paul relocates the sources of psychological empowerment from obedience to an external authority to the inner conviction and belief in the Christ-event: the Christ-event is fleshed out through the language of the empire constructing thus its own basileia. His appropriation of the imperial language is connected with his own group of people who formed an alternative society within the domination of secular authorities. As Halliday intuitively noted again: ‘The early Christian community was an antisociety, and its language was in this sense an antilanguage’ (1978, 171). The antisociety existed on the margins of the Gentile and the Jewish worlds: it lived on the boundary between legitimacy and anomie. Paul’s language healed the rift by creating a sense of connectedness with both. By bridging the gap, Paul’s language completed both worlds and established the new idiom for the basileia that was to come. Until then, the community had to remain cohesive and strong. So, as Neill Elliott concluded: Against the keen eschatological tenor of his letters, Paul’s positive characterization of the ‘governing authorities’ here appears a foreign body. Within the rhetorical structure of Romans, however, these remarks have an important function: to encourage submission, for now, to the authorities, rather than desperate resistance; and thus to safeguard the most vulnerable around and among the Roman Christians, those Jews struggling to rebuild their shattered community in the wake of imperial violence (Elliott 1997, 203).

This controversial passage therefore had many recipients and this explains its polyglossic semantics: the Gentiles within the synagogue, the Jews governing it and the wider Roman society and political system, and, of course, the readers of the text in all communities throughout the Roman Empire. It employed the polyglossic rhetoric of blended metaphors and conceptual resignifications in order to foster group cohesion and individual identity while presenting the community simultaneously as being in conformity with the rules of the synagogue and the laws of the empire. Its hybrid character created the conflict of interpretations that developed around it throughout the following centuries, until the imperialisation of Christianity as an ecumenical movement and not as an anti-community. Indeed, its success in achieving all of its goals regarding the relation between authority and individual is beyond dispute to this day. Its very ambiguity secured its long-term effectiveness.

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vrasidas karalis General Observations on The Translation of Paul’s Bilingualism

Following the method proposed by G. W. Trompf in his monumental study on Early Christian Historiography and the narratives of retributive justice, the ‘primary subject matter’ of our study is ‘the mentalités of early Christian history-writers, their explanatory frames of reference, their meaning-building, even certain developing ideologies’ (Trompf 2000, ix). This brief essay addresses the same question in an attempt to understand the ‘meaning-building’ processes that we find in Paul’s language. As we have claimed, the approach to the problem of Paul’s language must be both linguistic and sociological. We chose Paul’s letter to the Romans but the same parameters can be applied to the rest of his existing works, genuine or not, because historically, as part of the overall Christian Bible, they have been the testing ground of almost all theories of metaphor, hermeneutics and translation. Indeed, we cannot understand translation without reference to the actual practice of translating the Bible from the early attempts by Jerome through Luther’s unitary meaning and to the modern practices of formal or dynamic equivalence. Yet the text itself is so charged with projected theological conceptualisations that in many instances translation replaces the original and creates a completely new perception of the meaning in the text, reflecting the political discourse of the day and the stage of cultural wars in a contemporary setting. The problem, however, with the translations of the New Testament and with Paul’s letters begins with the text itself: as we have noticed, the text itself is a form of translation both trans-lingual and intra-lingual; the work of bilingual or even trilingual writers who in many occasions translated their thoughts into the dominant idiom of their day refracted through the everyday idioms of mixed dialects. The New Testament text is a complex palimpsest of various ‘minor voices’ written in a variety of dialects and idioms. Today the printed text looks unified and univocal, and some translations do not even stress the stylistic differences between its various writers: from the careless and somehow awkward style of Matthew and Mark to the classicist formalism of Luke or the Euripidean dramatic idiom of the fourth Gospel. Theological concerns make it impossible to translate the ‘wonderful’ grammatical errors in the text of the Revelation into equivalently appealing errors in English. But Paul’s letters pose a specific problem. They were written by a bilingual, probably trilingual, person, who was struggling to translate notions of Hebrew religious tradition into another language with its own

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semiotic complexity. As we have seen, rhetorically his letters were written to be read aloud: the stylistic orality of his letters is usually lost in the translation and on same occasions is transformed into dull and flat legalistic indictments, losing the nuanced statement and the cautious advice. Socially, the letters were sent to different audiences: the various Jewish sects, non Jews and the god-fearers, who wanted to be instructed in the new faith. Paul’s letters are addressed to specific audiences with the complex awareness that he was dealing with different people who understood Greek in different degrees, from differing points of view and in different situations. Such a palimpsest of scripts dominated by the principle of oral enunciation is the dominant tone in Paul’s letters. I shall not elaborate on how such a variety of stylistic choices has been actually translated. But let us briefly discuss the processes behind the act of such triple translation, that we see particularly in Paul. First from Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek, then to the variegated Greek of the period, and finally to the literary Greek of the day. But the style of such ‘fused’ language produced something between Greek and Hebrew, and consequently was a highly flexible idiom of articulation recognized by both Hebrews and Hellenes. In the long run, the inaccurate translation became a literary model. Paul and the other writers of the New Testament employ only the Septuagint, elaborating further the hybrid idiom of conceptual articulation that we find there. We tend to underestimate the hybrid language in which Paul expressed his theological exploration of Judaism. Today, based on the contemporary discussions (brought together under the rubric of New Perspectives on Paul), we have been able to situate Paul’s thought within the Judaism(s) of his era and see the connection that exists between his ideas and those of central Pharisaic beliefs around the 1st century. However the more we investigate Paul’s debt to his native tradition and religion, the more challenging it becomes to understand his process of differentiation from it. Some Jewish scholars have argued that Paul simply misunderstood Jewish theology; others claim that he concocted a religion of his own based on mystery cults and the religious syncretism of the period. The New Perspective advocates that he was essentially trying to accommodate Gentiles within Judaism and that his main premise in this perspective was ‘justification by faith,’ an idea already debated in the Pharisaic traditions of the period but becoming dominant with him, as an attempt to freely incorporate Gentiles in the new movement. Our main argument is threefold: first Paul was theologically at odds with the dominant Jewish practices of his day; second, his diasporic

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identity gave him a different perspective on his Jewish heritage; and third, his Greek language led him to the formulation of statements extremely ambiguous for his audience, an ambiguity that later had to be re-interpreted by the communities of faithful who escaped the destruction of temple and the annihilation of the Jerusalem Church. The main characteristic of Paul’s language is its extreme ambiguity articulated through metaphors and blended concepts; if one studies the various translations in different languages, one will discover that on many occasions, crucial for the theological validity of his arguments, we are dealing with markedly different texts (as for example with the notion of predestination or even ‘double predestination’). Certainly we can’t identify with him and, following the Weberian verstehen method, reconstruct what was happening in his mind, through the meticulous collection of minute details of the period; the limits of Sitz im Leben are too well known in order to engage in the vain attempt to reconstruct the conditions in which the texts arose. Only by approximation and by inference, we can construct and make an informed guess about the actual reference of his statements, and be able to situate them in the intra-textual context of their content. Linguistically, every attempt to compare Paul’s propositions to other similar statements of the period have led to no conclusive results about his divergences from other Graeco-Jewish writers of the period, namely Philo or Josephus, let alone other Greek writers of the day. Some scholars in the past complained about his ‘poor vocabulary’ in Greek, whereas others have unreservedly praised his rhetorical skills in the language. Today we know that it has nothing to do with Paul’s vocabulary or rhetorical skills: his continuing importance refers to the ways he organized a highly diverse idiom in order to articulate trans-cultural notions through blended conceptual metaphors appealing to his whole intended audience since they were familiar to all of them.

Conclusion In this brief discussion we have tried to bring together both linguistic and historical/contextual factors – certainly the argument needs further elaboration and discussion. Paul’s Greek is a composite idiom of high oratorical dexterity made up of abstract notions, standard rhetorical tropes and everyday colloquialisms. Greek, as the language of culture, was to him (as it was to Josephus), an instrument of self-empowerment: the more effective he was in its mastery, the more successful he would be

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with his audience. So, as Philo before him, he tried to translate his Jewish faith into Greek terminology, by fusing his sentences with mixed and hybrid semantic variations. His semantic variations, despite their vagueness, were understood by the Greek-speaking audience of his day, who were in frequent contact with Jerusalem and of course with him personally. For example the expression en Christo (in Christ), pistis Christou (faith in Christ), nomos (law), dikaiosis (justification) or even agape (love) are so ambiguous that to this day Christian tradition has been bedeviled by mistranslations and creative misappropriations. For, en Christo might as well mean ‘from within Christ’, pistis Chistou, ‘fidelity of Christ’; and agape, ‘charity, agreement, unity, peace or even simply gathering’. This does not mean that Paul didn’t know Greek well, since Greek must have been his first language; or that his Greek language was so much influenced by his Hebrew knowledge that he lived in a constant confusion about the original meaning of the notions he employed. On the contrary, at the same time it means that Paul’s language was a creative elaboration of Greek and Hebrew and that the new form he devised engendered new semantic fields that did not exist before in either language. Paul, consciously or unconsciously, ambiguated meanings in Greek when he was infusing them with notions from Hebrew and addressing Gentile audiences; and as long he was alive, or later when his immediate disciples were, he could explicate and interpret the meaning to them, which is what most of his letters are about. However, during the crucial decade of 60 to 70, Paul’s death was followed by the destruction of the Jerusalem-based Jewish/Christian Church and the dispersion of the Temple Priests. So decades later (probably around the 80s or 90s), the first edition of his letters created an immediate impact on his readers who had lost contact with the older sources of authority and interpretation, namely the Temple or his immediate disciples. Paul’s ambiguation began to be more slanted towards the semantics of the Greek language and was easily adopted by rival schools of hermeneutics in Alexandria and Antioch. So Paul’s ‘Christian’ message has to be seen as an unfolding process, starting as a reform movement within Temple Judaism, but developing its own dynamic after his own death, especially after the destruction of the temple and the gradual formation of rabbinical Judaism. The demography of the early Churches outside Palestine in predominantly Greco-Roman areas re-signified the euangelion and transformed it into a new message outside Judaism – and in many occasions in opposition to Judaism. Furthermore, the loss of the institutional

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centre in Jerusalem liberated his texts from their ultimate hermeneutical authority and so were easily adopted in the second century by Greek philosophers who stressed the Hellenic layers of meaning in them by drawing the analogies with Greek philosophies. In the same period the evangelists and other early Christian writers inculcated Greek rhetorical tropes of self-articulation, which essentially substituted Hebraic logotypes and codes of representation. The process of enculturation transferred Hebrew ‘speech-acts’ to the common discourse of the day: so a radical trans-signification took place which completely changed the way the Jewish writings of Paul were interpreted and understood. Luke attempted the systematic transference of Paul’s language to the main stream Greek speaking philosophical and historiographical practice of his day. Luke and his school brought Paul’s thought to the Hellenic mainstream; John and his community revisited Jesus through Paul’s First Adam and Resurrected Messiah, around the end of the 1st century and the beginning of the 2nd. From the conflict of interpretations between rival communities we are led to the murky confusion of the Gnostic tendencies that dominated that transitional period until Origen affirmed his authority. By then Paul’s legacy was detached from its original sources and grafted onto other traditions. His message about the Christ became Christian with the Greek fathers of the second century, when the Hebrew and Jewish roots were discarded and became hostile to the institutional Church organized around the authority of the bishop. What the semantic interpretation of Paul’s letters shows is that meaning changes according to the communities reading a text as an expression of their own form of life. There is no such a thing as original meaning: the polyglossia of the text renders every attempt to reconstruct any original meaning void. Bibliography Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality, London: Penguin Books. Elliott, N. 1997. ‘Romans 13:1–7 in the Context of Imperial Propaganda’. In Paul and Empire, Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, ed. R. A. Horsley. 184–204. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International. Esler, P. F. 2003. Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Halliday, M.A.K. 1976. ‘Anti-languages’. American Anthropologist 78: 570–84. —— . 1978. Languages as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press (new edition with an Afterword 2003).

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Nanos, M. D. 1996. The Mystery of Romans: the Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Neill, J. C. 1975. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. London: Penguin Books. Reed, J. T. 2000. ‘Language of Change and the Changing of Language: A Sociolinguistic approach to Pauline Discourse’. In Diglossia and Other Topics in New Testament Linguistics, ed. S. E. Porter. 121–153. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Smith, A. 1995. Comfort One Another: Reconstructing the Rhetoric and Audience of 1 Thessalonians. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press. Stirewalt Jr, L. M. 2003. Paul, the Letter Writer. Cambridge: Eerdmans Publishing. Stowers, S. K. 2004. Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Westminster John Know Press. Trompf, G. W. 2000. Early Christian Historiography, Narratives of retributive Justice. London and New York: Continuum. Walse, G. 2001. The Greek of the Ancient Synagogue. An Investigation on the Greek of the Septuagint, Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament. Lund: Almquist & Wiksell International. Watt, J. M. 2003. ‘Language pragmatism in a Multilingual Religious Community’. In The Ancient Synagogue from its Origins until 200 C.E., ed. B. Olsson and M. Zetterholm. 277–298. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Wilson, A. N. 1997. Paul, The mind of the Apostle. London: Sinclair-Stephenson. Wirszbuski, C. 1968. Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and early Principate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .

PART THREE

PHILOSOPHICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT OF FRANCIS BACON John Gascoigne Abstract The object of this essay will be to explore the character of Bacon’s religious views within the larger context of his thought as a whole. By doing so it will examine some of the arguments put forward about the extent to which Bacon’s fundamental positions on the significance of science and the role that it could play in ‘the relief of man’s estate’ can be said to have been coloured by religious presuppositions whether Protestant (and, in particular, Calvinist) or Christian more generally. The essay will further consider Bacon’s views on the proper relationship between science and religion and, in particular, the relative importance of Scripture and natural law in the study of God’s Creation.

Ours is an age when there are increasingly shrill voices urging that modernity means secularism. The recent work done by intellectual historians such as Brooke (1991) to demonstrate that the path of the early scientific movement intersected significantly with the religious currents of the time has not penetrated far beyond the world of specialists. In the larger world the black and white certainties of nineteenth-century works like John Draper’s History of the Conflict between Science and Religion (1874) and Andrew White’s The Warfare between Science and Theology in Christendom (1896) continue to hold ample sway. In the secularist map of the past it follows that if modernity is about shaking off the shackles of religion than one should be able to find at least intimations of such a move to a religionless Weltanschauung among the key figures of the Scientific Revolution. This would apply particularly to the far-sighted Francis Bacon who in the early seventeenth century had the remarkable percipience to outline the possibilities of scientific progress for, as he put it, ‘the relief of man’s estate’. Surely the cool-headed Lord Chancellor, politically adept and almost literally a Renaissance man (since he had imbibed much of the humanist culture of the Renaissance), did not swallow fully the religious concerns that so preoccupied his contemporaries. Such a view of Bacon has, too, historical precedent. When the French Encyclopedists came to present their view of the classification of human knowledge – which was largely based on a marginalisation of theology

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and hence a more general secularisation – they did so by invoking the authority of Francis Bacon. As D’Alembert wrote of ‘The immortal Chancellor of England’ in the Preliminary Discourse (1751) to the Encyclopedia: ‘One would be tempted to regard him as the greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent of philosophers’ and, as he candidly acknowledged, ‘we owe principally to Chancellor Bacon the encyclopaedic tree’ (Schwab 1963, 74, 76) – the classification of knowledge with its subversive implications for the existing religious and intellectual order. So pervasive was Bacon’s influence that the Encyclopedists’ Jesuit adversaries accused D’Alembert of plagiarising his work (White 1963, 1849–69). The image of Bacon as at heart a secularist which the Encyclopedists had promoted took root: when De Maistre attacked the Enlightenment he also attacked Francis Bacon as one of the sources of its infidelity and when, in 1856, the German Kantian, Kuno Fischer, wrote an influential study of Bacon he characterised his religious views as nearer ‘to infidelity than to superstition, and equally removed from both genuine piety and hypocrisy’ (1857, 323). In its search for the origins of modernity, however, history has become less teleological and, like those restoring works of arts, historians increasingly see their task as peeling away the accretions of later ages to expose the work of the founders of the scientific movement in their original colours. The object of this work is to undertake a similar task in relation to Francis Bacon’s religious beliefs drawing on both his own works and a number of recent studies which underline the extent to which the attempt to pluck Bacon out of his religious setting is rather like Shylock’s vain task of cutting out the flesh without spilling any blood. One must begin with biography. Bacon was educated as a scion of a family which had benefited substantially from the Elizabethan Settlement and the definitive English break with Rome after earlier uncertainties. His mother, particularly, was committed to the Protestant order and being, like her queen, a highly educated woman, in 1564 translated from Latin into English the classic defence of the Elizabethan Protestant order, Bishop John Jewel’s Apologie of the Church of England. She strongly urged the need for further ‘right reformation’ and attempted, with very little success, to enlist the support of her powerful brother-in-law, Lord Burghley, in this cause (Anderson 1962, 25). Nevertheless, Bacon’s Cambridge education was entrusted to John Whitgift, master of Trinity College, 1567–77, who combined a strong adherence to orthodox Calvinism with an insistence on compliance with the Queen’s will – so much so that he became the chief royal ‘enforcer’ in checking the

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attempts by those who came to be known as Puritans to push the English church further down the path of reform. Such behaviour led Bacon’s mother to describe him as ‘the destruction of our church’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, VIII, 112). Overall, in religious matters Bacon appears to have been less the offspring of his mother than of his father, the judicious and politically adept Sir Nicholas Bacon, one of the architects of the Elizabethan religious via media (Collinson 1980, 255–73). Bacon’s stay at Cambridge was brief – from April 1573 (when he matriculated at the age of twelve years and three months) to March 1575 – but he was there exposed to the traditional Aristotelian-based scholastic curriculum laying the foundation for his lifetime aversion to the verbal philosophy of the scholastics. Along with the study of Aristotle, Whitgift’s tutorials account for Bacon and his brother, Anthony, taking up a considerable study of the Roman and Greek classics – in keeping with the belated spread of Renaissance humanism to England in the sixteenth century – and, inevitably, the Bible (Gaskell 1979, 284–93). The accounts do not contain the names of any theologians though one contemporary did report that Whitgift prescribed Calvin’s Institutes to ‘us students’ at Cambridge University (Tyacke 1987, 207). Even without such direct tuition by Whitgift in Calvinist orthodoxy or the earlier religious instruction at his mother’s knee, Bacon would have imbibed the chief tenets of Calvinism which formed part of the intellectual oxygen of the Elizabethan and Jacobean world – or, as Patrick Collinson writes of the Jacobean church, its ‘theological cement’ (1982, 82).1 One issue in any study of Bacon, then, is the extent to which his largely Calvinist upbringing left a lasting mark on his thought. It is a question which is given greater force by the way in which Bacon’s influence has been linked to the English Civil War and its revolutionary Puritan ideology which was deeply coloured by Calvinism. For Christopher Hill, Bacon formed part of the intellectual ancestry of those who overthrew the constituted order in church and state, and his Calvinist background provided much of the intellectual energy to make that possible. In his view, too, Calvinism lies at the heart of Bacon’s demarcation of the role of science and religion: ‘Bacon inherited from his pious parents’, wrote Hill, in his Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, ‘and imbibed

1 On the strength of Calvinist influences in the early work of Bacon, see Whitaker 1972, 45–46 and Milner 1997.

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from the world around him, Calvinist assumptions about the priority of faith over reason’ (Hill 1972, 91).2 The importance of Bacon’s work in providing the intellectual foundation for the English Revolution was subsequently underlined at much greater length in Charles Webster’s The Great Instauration (the very title of which derives from Bacon). This work also draws on the Merton thesis that Protestants were disproportionately represented in the early scientific movement – with Merton giving particular emphasis to the role of the Puritans, ‘the hotter sort of Protestants’. For Webster, ‘Bacon’s philosophical system evolved in the context of the Calvinist code of ethics’. ‘Bacon’s philosophy’, he writes in his conclusion, ‘seemed to be providentially designed for the needs of the Puritan Revolution. Indeed, this suitability was not accidental, considering that the philosopher had an intellectual ancestry largely in common with the English Puritans’ (Webster 1975, 25, 514). Though there is little doubt that Bacon’s intellectual formation in a largely Calvinist environment was bound to influence his work fundamentally there is little to suggest that he remained orthodoxly Calvinist and, still less, that he was Puritan inclined. His ‘Confession of Faith’ (written at the turn of the century), for example, does not follow Calvin and his followers by restricting the merits gained by Christ’s death to the elect Calvinists but regards them as ‘sufficient to do way with the sins of the whole world’ – though he promptly qualifies this by adding that the merits of Christ’s death ‘are only effectual to those that are regenerate by the Holy Ghost’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, VII, 224). If Bacon’s choice of friends is any indication, in later life Bacon was possibly sympathetic to the Arminian emphasis on good works and its reaction against the orthodox Calvinist emphasis on predestination. Bacon eagerly sought the views of Lancelot Andrewes on many of his works describing this major figure in the early Arminian movement as his ‘inquisitor-general’. It was to Andrewes that Bacon dedicated his ‘Advertisement Touching an Holy War’ (1622) ‘in respect of our ancient and private acquaintance; and because amongst the men of our time I hold you in special reverence’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, VII, 15). Another of his close

2 Hill’s view that there was a close connection between Bacon and the Puritan revolutionaries has been criticised on the grounds that Bacon was strongly committed to royal government and even the royal prerogative (Rabb 1969, 180). I am indebted to Prof. Rabb of Princeton University for fostering my interest in Bacon while a graduate student there.

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friends was the poet, George Herbert, a member of the Little Gidding community that was termed by the Puritans ‘the Arminian nunnery’. It was to ‘to his very good friend Mr George Herbert’ that Bacon dedicated his ‘Translation of Certain Psalms’ in 1625 (Spedding et al. 1857–74, VII, 275). Some of his work does indicate, however, that he was his mother’s son in at least retaining some sympathy for the Puritans or, at least, the belief that they could be won over by using more conciliatory methods. In the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign the young and ambitious Bacon was concerned enough at the effect of religious discord brought on by the repression of Puritan zeal to risk the displeasure of the mighty by writing around 1589 a pamphlet (unpublished until 1640 though it circulated in manuscript) which, while it was critical of the Puritans, also offered a critique of the way in which they had been treated. In this ‘An advertisement touching the controversies of the Church of England’ Bacon was a defender of the episcopal order against Puritan critiques though he viewed it pragmatically as being sensible and expedient rather than as being divinely ordained. The main concern, however, of this apprentice statesman was to restore order and he saw this as being imperilled by the inflexibility of the hierarchy. Overall, it was his view that ‘we contend about ceremonies and things indifferent; about the extern[al] policy and government of the church’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, VIII, 75). Bacon returned to such themes in 1604 immediately after the accession of James I in his ‘Certain Considerations Touching the Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England’ (1603), the chief aim of which was, again, as its title suggests, to promote the peace of the realm. He urged the new king to initiate a series of reforms which, he hoped, would do something to lessen the discontent of the Puritans. Predictably, the pamphlet did little to win him friends among the bishops and the tract was repressed by the chief episcopal foe of the Puritans, Richard Bancroft, bishop of London (Schwarz 1973, 47–61; Peltonen 2004). Nonetheless, Bacon’s pragmatic views on church government distanced him considerably from the Puritan position (which was largely inspired by the example of the Genevan Calvinist church order) that the church should be constituted solely in terms of what was explicitly laid down in Scripture. Bacon’s position was much closer to his mother’s bête noir, Archbishop Whitgift, who argued that ‘It is plain that any one certain form or kind of external government perpetually to be observed is nowhere in the Scripture prescribed by the Church’ (Cross 1979, 65). The

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same view was expressed in more ample and general terms in the great Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity by Bacon’s near contemporary Richard Hooker (c.1554–1600).3 For Hooker argued that, along with Scripture, it was possible to base religious practice on the Will of God as revealed through the laws of nature (Almasy 1978, 251–70). ‘Doth not the Apostle [Paul]’, wrote Hooker, ‘term the law of nature, even as the evangelist doth the law of Scripture … God’s own righteous ordinance? The law of nature then being his law; that must needs be of his which it hath directed men unto.’ Such was the underpinning of the power of the state which drew its authority from the law of nature and hence, ultimately, from God since, as Hooker wrote, ‘Nature therefore is nothing else but God’s instrument’ (Hooker 1993, 7.11.10 and 1.3.4; Gascoigne 1997, 27). Granting such power to the state was a fundamental challenge to the Puritan position that, in a world given over to sin and the Devil, the only secure path was to follow the verba ipsissima of God’s revealed will in Scripture – hence the Puritan determination to strip away from the Church of England everything (including bishops) which did not have explicit Scriptural foundation. They remained unconvinced by the arguments of Hooker or Bacon – and the two men may have influenced each other – that there was no prescribed Scriptural blueprint for the nature of church government and that, as a consequence, the state could require religious observances not specifically commanded in Scripture. Such an assumption followed from Hooker’s view that the state, like the church, derived its authority from the over-arching law of nature whose ‘seate is the bosome of God, her voice the harmony of the world’ (Hooker 1993, 1.16.8). In the political and legal realm Bacon had much in common with Hooker’s view of natural law. Underlying the laws of the state, Bacon’s overall argument runs, are the laws of nature which in turn reflect God’s will – the state is therefore divinely ordained as are the social divisions within it. In his The Advancement of Learning (1605) – the first of his published works that laid out his vision for a new intellectual order which would make possible ‘the relief of man’s estate’ – Bacon wrote: ‘For there are in nature certain foundations of justice, whence all civil laws are derived as streams’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 475). In his philosophical works, however, the concept of natural law plays a far more limited role, perhaps because Bacon did not feel the same need

3 Five of the eight books of the Ecclesiastical Polity appeared in Hooker’s lifetime: 1–4 in 1593 and 5 in 1597 (books 6 and 8 did not appear until 1648 and book 7 was published in 1662).

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to ward off potential social unrest by invoking divine sanctions. For Bacon qua philosopher natural law is a far less immediate, far more shadowy guide to the will of God than the drift of his writings on jurisprudence would suggest. Certainly, Bacon argues, God has placed His imprint on nature but this divine image is so partial and so inadequate that it alone cannot lead man to a full knowledge of the Deity. ‘The highest generality of motion or summary law of nature’, Bacon writes in his ‘Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature’ – a manuscript from 1603 which served as an early overview of his philosophical/scientific ideas – ‘God … reserves within his own curtain’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 220). Overall, Bacon takes the view that, since God has revealed Himself in Scripture, it is there rather than in nature that man should look if he truly wishes to come to an understanding of God’s will. Nonetheless, Bacon regards the study of nature as a truly religious activity, even though in the theological realm it plays a subordinate role to the study of Scripture. As he wrote in his great Novum Organum (1620) which brought to maturity the ideas outlined in his ‘Valerius Terminus’: But if the matter be truly considered, natural philosophy is after the word of God at once the surest medicine against superstition, and the most approved nourishment for faith, and therefore she is rightly given to religion as her most faithful handmaid, since the one displays the will of God, the other his power (Spedding et al. 1857–74, IV, 89).

Although the contemplation of God’s creation may not lead to positive knowledge of the divine in the manner of biblical theology, it can serve at least to convince human beings that a Deity exists. Natural philosophy may not be able to lead us to the divine presence but, as he argued in his The Advancement of Learning, it can at least point us in the right direction: ‘For as all works do show forth the power and skill of the workman, and not his image; so it is of the works of God; which do show the omnipotence and wisdom of the maker, but not his image’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 350–51). Bacon compares the study of Scripture with the study of the ‘book of God’s Creation’ – an image which Robert Boyle developed and made into a cliché among the next generation of scientists (Westfall 1958, 43). Since these two books were both ordained of God it therefore followed there could be no fundamental inconsistency between them, underlining Bacon’s more general view that faith and philosophy when rightly understood were in fundamental accord (Kelly 1965, 273). Thereby Bacon emphasises the dignity of the task of the philosopher (in our terms, the scientist) – no longer is nature, and the study thereof, given

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over to the kingdom of Satan; rather it is a means of directing human beings’ mind to God. When, in his ‘Preparative towards a Natural and Experimental History’ (1620), Bacon laid out the programme for collecting the basic empirical information on which scientific advance would be based he affirmed that: I want this primary [natural] history to be compiled with a most religious care, as if every particular were stated upon oath; seeing that it is the book of God’s works, and (so far as the majesty of heavenly may be compared with the humbleness of earthly things) a kind of second Scripture (Spedding et al. 1857–74, IV, 261).

Nevertheless, Bacon remains quite definite that there is in no sense a parity between the book of God’s revelation and the book of Creation. The gap between God and the human and the natural realm is so vast that only God’s self-revelation – Scripture – can give us a positive knowledge of God: ‘For if any man’, writes Bacon in his ‘Valerius Terminus’, ‘shall think by view and inquiry into these sensible and material things, to attain to any light for the revealing of the nature or will of God, he shall dangerously abuse himself ’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 218). It was a stance that underlay that radical division between philosophy and theology which lay at the heart of Bacon’s oeuvre (Gaukroger 2001, 94–95; Horton 1982, 493). In thus stressing the radical cleavage between human beings and God and therefore the disparity between the knowledge of nature and knowledge of the Divine, Bacon has more in common with the theology of Calvin than with Hooker, the architect of the Anglican via media. Through a study of God’s law in nature, Hooker argues, even a pagan can come to some knowledge of God: And therefore the laws which the very heathens did gather to direct their actions by, so far forth as they proceeded from the light of nature, God himself doth acknowledge to have proceeded even from himself, and that he was the writer of them in the tables of their hearts (Coolidge 1970, 13).

By contrast Calvin is rather less obliging to those ignorant of Revelation and writes in his Institutes of the Christian Religion: For since the human mind is unable, through its imbecility, to attain any knowledge of God without the assistance of his sacred word, all mankind, except the Jews, as they sought God without the word, must necessarily have been wondering in vanity and error (Calvin 1936, I, 84).

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This may then be an important instance of the imprint of Bacon’s upbringing in a largely Calvinist environment. At the same time, however, there are important differences between Bacon and Calvin even in matters directly pertaining to theology. Both view Scripture as the fons et origo of all positive knowledge of God but Bacon also places emphasis on the role of the church in interpreting the Word. In his utopian New Atlantis (1626), published a year after his death, Bacon depicts the devout inhabitants of that island as having been converted not only by the arrival of the Scriptures but also by church tradition in the shape of a letter from Saint Bartholomew (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 138). The authority of interpreting Scripture, Bacon saw as being based on the consent of the church. By contrast, Calvin regarded such a position as resting ‘the eternal and inviolable truth of God … on the arbitrary will of men’ (Calvin 1936, I, 86). The clash between these two views of religious authority is reflected in Bacon’s censure of the Puritanically inclined critics of the English Church in his ‘An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England’. In their attempt to ‘express Scripture for everything’ he saw them as having ‘deprived themselves and the church of a special help and support by embasing the authority of the fathers’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, VIII, 93). While the Puritans and Bacon might have disagreed on the role of church tradition in the interpretation of Scripture they did share the view that Scripture, however interpreted, was the only sure path whereby human beings could come to a positive knowledge of God. Since God’s self-revelation in Scripture transcends human reason Bacon argued that philosophy should not be mixed with the study of divinity. In his expanded Latin translation of The Advancement of Learning, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Bacon therefore resisted the impulse to extend his reform of philosophy to divinity since by doing so, I shall step out of the bark of human reason, and enter into the ship of the church; which is only able by the Divine compass to rightly direct its course. Neither will the stars of philosophy, which have hitherto so nobly shone upon us, any longer supply their light (Spedding et al. 1857–74, V, 111).

In his allegorical interpretations of ancient classical myths in his De Sapientia Veterum (1609) Bacon interprets Prometheus’s last crime, the attempt upon the chastity of Minerva, as the ancients’ metaphorical way of expressing the folly ‘of trying to bring the divine wisdom itself under the dominion of sense and reason: from which inevitably follows

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laceration of the mind and vexation without end or rest’. Not following such a precept could lead to ‘a heretical religion and a fabulous philosophy’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, VI, 753). His particular target here was probably those, like the Paracelsians, who attempted to read off the word of Scripture a fully developed system of natural philosophy (Manzo 1999, 125). Bacon’s conception of faith follows from this with its emphasis on the gulf between the human mind and that of God: ‘we ought not to attempt to draw down or submit the mysteries of God to our reason;’, he wrote in his The Advancement of Learning, ‘but contrariwise to raise and advance our reason to the divine truth’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 350). Such an accord between reason and divine truth might not, however, always be readily apparent and there is an element of fideism in Bacon that was quite in tune with his contemporaries. In his Religio Medici (1643) Thomas Browne rejoiced in the gulf between belief and reason: ‘I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, credum est, qua impossibile est’. Bacon’s friend, Bishop Andrewes, was also emphatic that ‘God is above all reason of man. And therefore we cannot come to God by reason’ (More and Crosse 1935, 217, 215). The separation of science and religion is a theme that echoes throughout all Bacon’s work. Bacon was concerned at the harm done to science by its being involved in the controversies of religion, and, without a doubt, that was one of the reasons why he was keen to insulate science from religion. At times, as in his manuscript, ‘Thoughts and Conclusions on The Interpretation of Nature or a Science Productive of Works’ (1607), there is a note of real anger at the way in which ‘In Superstition and in blind immoderate religious zeal Natural Philosophy has found a troublesome and intractable enemy’ (Farrington 1966, 77). But there is no sign that this was a mask for some deeper religious scepticism. He was not afraid to submit this work to Bishop Andrewes and both this text and letters expressing a similar opinion gained the approval of Bacon’s closest friend, Tobie Matthew, interestingly a Catholic convert who was ordained a priest. Nor was Bacon solely concerned with the ill effects of religion on natural philosophy; he does show some pre-occupation with the harm wrought by the opposite process. In all his writings one of Bacon’s objectives is to still the religious controversies which he believed were both discrediting religion and damaging society. By blending divinity and philosophy – particularly the ‘contentious philosophy of Aristotle’ – the

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number of theological controversies was increased. Therefore, argued Bacon, the separation served the interests of religion since ‘the fury of controversies, wherewith the church laboureth’ would be reduced. Bacon also took the view that using religion as an agent in gaining mastery over nature demeans its dignity – instead of being an end in itself, religion becomes a means to an end. His prime target here is the hermetic philosophy of the Paracelsan school – not only do they produce poor science but, as he wrote in the The Advancement of Learning, they also ‘much imbase them [the Scriptures]. For to seek heaven and earth in the Word of God … is to seek temporary things amongst eternal’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 481, 486). The chief offenders Bacon has in mind when he criticises those who mix philosophy and theology are the scholastics. By identifying Christianity so closely with a particular brand of philosophy, Bacon argues, scholasticism led to a critique of Aristotelian physics being interpreted as an attack on Christianity. Moreover, scholasticism led men away from the Scriptures: ‘The more you recede from the Scriptures, by inferences and consequences, the more weak and dilute are your positions’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 484). Calvin, too, was critical of scholasticism. ‘The sophistry and jargon of the schools concerning repentance’, he wrote, ‘is very remote from the purity of the gospel’ (Calvin 1936, III, Ch iv). This may, then, be another instance of the continuing influence of the Calvinist milieu in which he grew up. The Catholic Descartes, however, was equally impatient with scholasticism. Moreover, Protestantism soon after the reformation began to develop a scholasticism of its own, both in response to the need for systematising its own theology, and as a weapon in anti-Catholic controversy (Dillenberger 1960, 50 ff ). It was this Protestant scholasticism to which Bacon was exposed at Cambridge, and it is from his student days there that his anti-scholasticism dates. The chief religious opponents of Aristotle were the more ‘enthusiastic’ of the Puritans whom Bacon censured for their contempt of learning as ‘but carnal and savouring of man’s brain’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, VIII, 91), and whose objections to human wisdom were one of his targets in his The Advancement of Learning. One therefore cannot draw too direct a correlation between Bacon’s religious background and his anti-scholasticism. Where the Calvinist imprint on Bacon is perhaps clearer is the extent to which Bacon, like Calvin, emphasises the transcendent character of God. Bacon’s objection to the idea that human beings could come to a

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positive knowledge of God through a study of nature is based on his opposition to the suggestion that God can be identified with Creation. From this follows, too, his lack of sympathy with the view that natural law is in some sense God’s revelation immanent in nature. The natural order, in Bacon’s outlook, is not permeated by the mind of God, or any other intelligence, it is inanimate and has no intrinsic purpose or direction. In such a universe attempts to explain nature as permeated by a tendency to realize forms not yet existing – i.e. final causes – appear absurd (Collingwood 1945, 3–9). As he made plain in his Novum Organum, Bacon regarded the search for final causes, a cornerstone of Aristotelian natural philosophy, as not merely a waste of time but a positive hindrance to the march of science: although the most general principles in nature ought to be held merely positive, as they are discovered, and cannot with truth be referred to a cause; nevertheless the human understanding being unable to rest still seeks something prior in the order of nature … namely, on final causes: which have relation clearly to the nature of man rather than to the nature of the universe; and from this source have strangely defiled philosophy (Spedding et al. 1857–74, IV, 57).

Basic to Bacon’s position was the view that nature is amenable to rational investigation since it is not arbitrary and anarchic. Nonetheless, for him, the order in nature does not follow from some immanent principle such as the Aristotelian idea of nature being shaped by intelligent causes; true to the voluntarist tradition (which was strong in Calvinism) the laws of nature are seen by Bacon as having been imposed by the will of the Creator on the Creation. Natural objects form some sort of pattern not because there is an organic bond between them but rather because they are regimented into formation by an outside force (Whitehead 1948, 166–68). Scholastic natural philosophy was based on a belief in immanent natural law and took as its premise the assumption that all phenomena could be explained by a process of deduction from these basic laws. Bacon, however, held another view: objects have no inherent connections with each other and their interactions with each other cannot be predicted by metaphysically-based over-arching laws of being. Scientific investigation, he argues, must begin at the bottom floor rather than at the top and seek to establish laws of natural behaviour through a process of induction based on a patient study of as wide a range of discrete objects and natural phenomena as possible. Nature, then, is inherently anarchic, its rationality derives not from itself but from God who

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imposes on it laws which give it the regularity that makes scientific investigation possible. For Bacon order is a tribute to the majesty and power of God and a proof of his existence: ‘I had rather believe all the fables in Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran’, Bacon writes in his essay ‘Of Atheism’, ‘than that this universal frame is without a mind’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, VI, 413). So striking a manifestation of Divine power is the fact of nature’s regularity that Bacon is rather uncomfortable about miracles which contravene that order (Pons 1985, 308). God, he emphasises in his ‘Confession of Faith’, works primarily through the preservation of order rather than through miracles: That notwithstanding God hath rested and ceased from creating since the first Sabbath, yet nevertheless he doth accomplish and fulfil his divine will in all things great and small, singular and general, as fully and exactly by providence, as he could by miracle and new creation, though his working be not immediate and direct, by compass; not violating Nature, which is his own law upon the creature (Spedding et al. 1857–74, VII, 221).

In the Novum Organum he goes so far as to suggest that miracles should be investigated to see if they conform to any common pattern, which, by reducing miracles to a predictable order, comes close to explaining them away (Spedding et al. 1857–74, IV, 168). This is not to say that Bacon wishes to ‘demythologise’ Christianity. The Biblical miracles, he contends, gain in stature by being distinguished from false prodigies. Many Protestant theologians argued along similar lines in rejecting the postApostolic miracles of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, there are in Bacon the seeds of conflict between a belief in a God who actively intervenes in the workings of the universe, and a God who stands aside after having created a cosmos which works by laws as regular as clockwork. This tension was to become quite explicit in the Deist controversies of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In charting the route to the understanding of nature Bacon emphasises the fallibility of the human mind since it is so far removed from the counsels of the Almighty - as a consequence it is naturally prone to error and distortion. Human beings can only come to a knowledge of the Deity, and hence absolute truth, through God’s free self-revelation which takes place primarily in Scripture but also (even in a far more limited way) through Creation. Nature may not be imbued with the divine intelligence but it at least has the mark of its Creator’s signature. Bacon argues that natural philosophy has gone astray by relying primarily on human reason rather than on a detailed investigation of God’s creation which,

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however inadequately, bears the mark of its Creator’s hand. The result is that philosophers have projected on to nature the idols, or basic fallacies, of the human mind: ‘Be it known then’, he wrote in his Novum Organum, how vast a difference there is … between the Idols of the human mind and the Ideas of the divine. The former are nothing more than arbitrary abstractions; the latter are the Creator’s own stamp upon creation, impressed and defined in matter by true and exquisite lines (Spedding et al. 1857–74, IV, 110).

One of Bacon’s primary goals is to promulgate a new method of conducting philosophy which will overcome the natural tendency of the mind to contemplate its own navel instead of the works of God. We see through a glass darkly, Bacon insists in his The Advancement of Learning, since the mind does not reflect nature faithfully, nor can it be regarded as a microcosm of the universe with an intuitive grasp of the Cosmos’s laws: For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 394–5).

Bacon therefore sets out to make others conscious of the fallacies to which the human mind is prone by cataloguing its ‘idols’. One way of overcoming these innate biases is to subordinate human beings’ faulty intelligence to the discipline of a thorough study of Creation. Bacon contrasts such a method with that of the scholastics which was especially inclined to error since it emphasised dialectic at the expense of empirical investigation: but as in the inquiry of the divine truth, their [the Scholastics’] pride inclined to leave the oracle of God’s word and to vanish in the mixture of their own inventions, so in the inquisition of nature they ever left the oracle of God’s works and adored the deceiving and deformed images which the unequal mirror of their own minds or a few received authors or principles did represent unto them (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 287).

The character of Bacon’s attack on the scholastics’ theology along with their natural philosophy once again raises the question of the importance of his Calvinist background. Calvin also regarded the human mind as grievously flawed and naturally prone to turn from the true God to idols of its own creation:

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Every man’s understanding is like a labyrinth to him; so that it is not to be wondered at, that the different nations were drawn aside into various inventions, and even that almost every individual had his own particular deity. For, amidst the union of temerity and wantonness with ignorance and darkness, scarcely a man could be found who did not frame to himself some idol of phantom instead of God (Calvin 1936, I, 74).

Bacon’s choice of the religiously charged word ‘idols’ as his term for basic fallacies of the human mind further strengthens the parallel with Calvin. Classical scepticism and the attempts of the moderns, both Catholic and Protestant, to come to terms with Pyrrhonism appear to have played an important role in the development of Bacon’s epistemology. But he would not have gained from these sources an aversion to anything in the realm of thought which smacks of idolatry, or the sense of the alienation of the human mind from the divine intelligence which he shares with Calvin. Bacon parts company, however, with Calvin in the conclusion that he draws from this unflattering view of the human mind. Our present inadequacies, Bacon argues, serve to emphasise the powers we possessed before the Fall, and our unfortunate lot should not be so much a cause for gloom about human capabilities but rather should act as an incentive to win back the powers we have lost. The aim of his Great Instauration (of which the Novum Organum forms a major part), he tells us in his Proem, is to ascertain ‘whether that commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things which is more precious than anything on earth … might be restored to its perfect and original condition’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, IV, 7). If human beings will swallow the pride that distracts them from studying God’s creation and impels them instead to create worlds of their own, then they can set about regaining the mastery over nature which was originally granted to them by God but which was lost at the Fall: ‘Only let the human race recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest’, he writes in the Novum Organum, ‘and let power be given it; the exercise thereof will be governed by sound reason and true religion’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, IV, 115).4 Speculation and hypothesis-spinning only lead humans further from the works of God; the consequence, as Bacon wrote in the preface to his Natural and Experimental History, was that ‘our dominion over creatures is a second time forfeited’. Rather, he continued, human beings should ‘approach with humility

4

There is a similar motif in his New Atlantis (Preus 1979, 270).

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and veneration to unroll the volume of Creation; to linger and meditate therein, and with minds washed clean from opinions to study it in purity and integrity’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, V, 132). In the Novum Organum Bacon urged the need for the humility of a little child when entering ‘the kingdom of man, founded on the sciences, being not much other than the entrance into the kingdom of heaven’. At the beginning of the same work Bacon describes humanity as ‘the servant and interpreter of Nature’ since human dominion over it depends on subjecting his otherwise erring intellect to the study of the natural order. He later adds, ‘For we cannot command nature except by obeying her’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, V, 69, 47, 114). Dominion over nature, paradoxically, should be based on humility in the face of God’s creation. In coupling humility with natural philosophy Bacon is making an implicit criticism of many of his fellow natural philosophers. Bacon is not only censuring the scholastic withdrawal from empirical reality, but he is also criticising those natural philosophers (like the Paracelsians and Hermeticists) for whom the goal of science was the wresting from nature by a group of illuminati occult secrets which would give them semi-divine powers (Rossi 1968, 27). The Faustian myth, as Christopher Marlowe’s play, ‘The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus’ (c. 1592) indicates, was one that had a good deal of meaning for Bacon’s contemporaries, and the association of science with ‘forbidden knowledge’ was one against which Bacon had to fight (Willey 1962, 35–43; McKnight 2006, 60). The aim of science, Bacon insists in his The Advancement of Learning, is not the self-deification of human beings but ‘the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 294). Knowledge should not be kept as the esoteric property of a small coterie but should be used for humankind at large. The end of science is charity, not power for its own sake, and it is this that clears natural philosophy from any accusation of hubris or Satanic pride: In aspiring to the throne of power the angels transgressed and fell, in presuming to come within the oracle of knowledge man transgressed and fell; but in pursuit towards the similitude of God’s goodness of love … neither man or spirit ever hath transgressed, or shall transgress (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 217).

If science cannot arrive at a knowledge of God intellectually it nevertheless leads human beings to God through its ethical dimension (Anderson 1948, 324). While Jesus was on earth His miracles were designed for the benefit of humankind and Bacon conceives of those actuated by his

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principles as having a similar sympathy for the sorrows of their fellows. The philosopher/scientist in Bacon’s New Atlantis, for example, has ‘an aspect as if he pitied men’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 154). Science’s task of ‘relieving man’s estate’, Bacon argues in his Novum Organum, is obviously in sympathy with the Divine Will. It has ‘the character of good so strongly impressed upon it, [that it] appears manifestly to proceed from God, who is the author of good, and the Father of Lights’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, IV, 91). Bacon’s confidence in the divine character of his mission on occasions gives his work an almost messianic tinge: knowledge in the New Atlantis is described as ‘light’, one of the traditional attributes of God, and one group of philosophers in his Utopia bears the title, ‘Merchants of Light’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, III, 164). Bacon’s choice of title for his great project for redirecting the path of natural philosophy, ‘the Grand Instauration’, is also significant. The word ‘instauration’, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, means the ‘action of restoring or renewing’ and its first recorded use (in 1603) is in Thomas Cartwright’s translation of the New Testament text ‘restitutio rerum omnium’ (‘restoration of all things’), a phrase pregnant with chiliastic overtones (Farrington 1973, 146). The term ‘instauration’ also had the sense of re-edification, and for Bacon its connotations applied both metaphorically to the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple and to the rebuilding of the temple of knowledge which had been shattered by the Fall (Whitney 1986, 24). At base, Bacon’s goal was the restoration of human beings to the bliss they had once enjoyed in Eden – an aim, mutatis mutandis, that he shared with every millenarian movement. He also shared with other such movements the ambition not only of returning humanity to its prelapsarian condition but also that of instituting the kingdom of God on earth – a goal in which he saw England as having a particularly important role to play (McKnight 2006, 153). Vainly, he hoped that King James I would act as a patron of his scheme to usher in a new age characterised by the recovery of the knowledge of God’s Creation that had been lost with the Fall: as he wrote in the dedication of the Great Instauration ‘surely to the times of the wisest and most learned of kings belongs of right the regeneration and restoration of the sciences’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, IV, 12). Among its other claims to a leading role in the new order, England had been active in the accumulation of knowledge from new lands unbeknown to antiquity, another augury for Bacon of the coming of ‘the great instauration’. Such new sources of knowledge, along with other advances in the sciences, he described in

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The Advancement of Learning as being ‘ordained by God to be coeval, that is, to meet in one age’ – so much so that it prompted him to cite the classic chiliastic text from the Book of Daniel (12: 4): ‘Many shall pass to and fro, and knowledge shall be multiplied’ (Spedding et al. 1857–74, IV, 339; Guibbory 1975, 340–41). Religious motifs play such a large role in Bacon’s work and are so intimately bound up with his thought as a whole that one can draw no clear line of division between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’. Calvinism may well have coloured something of Bacon’s view of human beings and the world, but he had only limited sympathy with the more pronounced Calvinists who formed the backbone of the Puritan movement. It is difficult to identify Bacon too closely with any particular religious movement of his own time: in religion, as in everything else, he was an original thinker with a tendency to mould received doctrine into a distinctive pattern of his own. What is evident is the extent to which religious ideas were a major part of the matrix out of which was formed Bacon’s thought and his insistence that religion and science could work in amity (Briggs 1996, 174; Manzo 2006, 247). Given the importance of Bacon’s influence in shaping the modern scientific movement, it reminds us yet again that the origins of modernity cannot be readily equated with the origins of secularism. Bibliography Almasy, R. 1978. ‘The Purpose of Richard Hooker’s Polemic’. Journal of the History of Ideas 39: 251–270. Anderson, F. 1948. The Philosophy of Bacon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— . 1962. Francis Bacon: His Career and his Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Briggs, J. 1996. ‘Bacon’s Science and Religion.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. M. Peltonen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooke, J. 1991. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calvin, J. 1936. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. J. Allen, 2 vols. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education. Collingwood, R. G. 1945. The Idea of Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collinson, P. 1980. ‘Sir Nicholas Bacon and the Elizabethan Via Media’. Historical Journal 23: 255–273. —— . 1982. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coolidge, J. S. 1970. Pauline Renaissance in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cross, C. 1979. The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church. London: Allen & Unwin. Dillenberger, P. 1960. Protestant Thought and Natural Science. New York: Doubleday. Farrington, B. 1973. Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science. London: Macmillan.

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Farrington, B. 1966. The Philosophy of Francis Bacon. Chicago: University of Chicago. Fischer, K. 1857. Francis Bacon of Verulam: Realistic Philosophy and its Age. Trans. J. Oxenford. London: Longman. Gascoigne, J. 1997. ‘Church and State Unified: Hooker’s Rationale for the English PostReformation Order’. The Journal of Religious History 21: 23–34. Gaskell, P. 1979. ‘Books bought by Whitgift’s Pupils in the 1570s’. Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 7: 284–293. Gaukroger, S. 2001. Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guibbory, A. 1975. ‘Francis Bacon’s View of History: The Cycle of Error, and the Progress of Truth.’ Journal of English and German Philology 74: 336–350. Hill, C. 1972. Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution. London: Panther. Hooker, R. 1993. Of the Laws of Ecclesiatical Polity, ed. W. Speed Hill. New York: Folger. Horton, M. 1982. ‘Bacon and ‘Knowledge Broken’: An Answer to Michael Hattaway’. Journal of the History of Ideas 43: 487–504. Kelly, H. 1965. ‘The Development of Faith and Reason in Bacon’s Approach to Knowledge’. The Modern Schoolman 42: 265–285. Manzo, S. 1999. ‘Holy Writ, Mythology, and the Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Principle of the Constancy of Matter’. Early Science and Medicine 4: 114–126. —— . 2006. ‘Francis Bacon: Freedom, Authority and Science’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14: 245–273. McKnight, S. 2006. The Religious Foundation of Francis Bacon’s Thought. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. Milner, B. 1997. ‘Francis Bacon: The Theological Foundations of Valerius Terminus.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 58: 245–264. More, P. and F. Crosse eds. 1935. Anglicanism: the Thought and Practice of the Church of England, illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. London: SPCK. Peltonen, M. 2004. ‘Francis Bacon’. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pons, A. 1985. ‘Science, Religion et Politique dans la Nouvelle Atalantide de Francis Bacon.’ In L’Art des Confins: Mélanges offerts à Maurice de Gandillac, ed. A. Cazenave and J. Lyotard. 305–318. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Preus, J. S. 1979. ‘Religion and Bacon’s New Learning: From Legitimation to Object.’ In Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History: Essays Presented to G. H. Williams, ed. F. F. Church and T. George. Leiden: Brill. Rossi, P. 1968. Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Schwab, R. N. ed. and trans. 1963. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Schwarz, M. L. 1973. ‘Sir Francis Bacon: Lay Analyst of the English Church’. Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 42: 47–61. Spedding, J., R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath eds. 1857–74. The Works of Francis Bacon. 14 vols, London: Longmans. Tyacke, N. 1987. ‘The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered’. Past and Present 115: 201–16. Webster, C. 1975. The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660. London: Duckworth. Westfall, R. 1958. Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Whitaker, V. 1972. ‘Francis Bacon’s Intellectual Milieu’. In Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon, ed. B. Vickers. London: Sidgwick & Jackson.

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White, H. B. 1963. ‘The Influence of Bacon on the Philosophes’. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 27: 1849–1869. Whitehead, A. N. 1948. Adventures of Ideas. London: Penguin. Whitney, C. 1986. Francis Bacon and Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Willey, B. 1962. Seventeenth-Century Studies. London: Penguin.

RUDOLF OTTO, THE EAST AND RELIGIOUS INCLUSIVISM Harry Oldmeadow Abstract Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) is most familiar to scholars of religion as the author of The Idea of the Holy (1917), a work which exercised an immense influence in the inter-war years. Less well-known are Otto’s later writings on Eastern traditions and his efforts, both theoretical and practical, to fashion a new religious inclusivism and a spirit of harmonious cooperation amongst the world’s faiths. This paper focuses on Otto’s encounters with Hinduism and Buddhism, and on his work in the field of comparative mysticism. It also draws attention to his efforts to form the Religiöser Menschheitbund (Interreligious League) which aimed to bring together representatives of all the world’s religions to work towards international peace, social justice and moral progress. Finally, the paper foregrounds Otto’s reconciliation of Christian theology and religious universalism. It is argued that Otto’s ideas have a new pertinence and urgency in a post-modernist world torn by all manner of inter-religious tensions and misunderstandings.

Introduction It is now nearly three decades since I enrolled as a postgraduate student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney. The two dominant figures, at that time, were the late Eric J. Sharpe and Garry W. Trompf. The lectures and seminars over which they presided generated many provocations to the more searching and responsible study of religious phenomena. A theme which concerned both teachers was the modern collision of different cultures and religious traditions, and the part that scholars might play in the promotion of inter-religious understanding. This concern was particularly evident in Professor Trompf ’s lively courses on methodological issues in the study of religions and on Melanesian cargo cults, the latter arena being one in which all manner of strange and initially bewildering phenomena were to be observed. One of the works frequently invoked in our discussions was Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. After completing my studies at Sydney, and in pursuit of interests which Professor Trompf had helped to crystallize, I retained an interest in Otto and in the role that his ideas might

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continue to play in the troubled times in which we live. So, it is with ideals which were shared by Otto and Gary Trompf very much in mind that I dedicate this essay to my former teacher and mentor. In 1958 the appearance of the second English edition of Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy prompted The London Quarterly Review to commend the work as ‘an acknowledged classic’ (LQR quoted on back cover). In the previous year Mircea Eliade had written of the ‘extraordinary interest aroused all over the world’ by Das Heilege, following its initial publication in 1917 (Eliade 1959, 8). In the inter-war years it was indeed widely read and for a while Otto’s theological influence matched that of Karl Barth whose Römerbrief (Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, 1923) had taken Europe by storm. But since these acclamations Otto’s star has somewhat waned. Mark Twain observed that a ‘classic’ is a book which everyone praises and no one reads. This would now seem to be the fate of Rudolf Otto’s best-known work; as Eric Sharpe wittily observed, The Idea of the Holy is a book that nearly every comparative religionist imagines s/he has read (Sharpe 1975, 161). Less familiar are Otto’s later writings on Eastern traditions and his efforts, both theoretical and practical, to fashion a new religious inclusivism and a spirit of harmonious cooperation amongst the world’s faiths. After a brief survey of Otto’s life and works and some remarks about The Idea of the Holy, this article focuses on Otto’s encounters with Eastern religious traditions. It also draws attention to his efforts to form the Religiöser Menschheitbund (Interreligious League) which aimed to bring together representatives of all the world’s religions to work towards international peace, social justice and moral progress, and foregrounds Otto’s reconciliation of Christian theology and religious universalism. Rudolf Otto’s Life and Work Otto did not write about his life in detail but did compose an autobiographical sketch in 1891, recently translated and published as ‘My Life’ (in Otto 1996). He was born in 1869 in Northern Germany, into a strict Lutheran family, the twelfth of thirteen children. He describes the family milieu as ‘strictly burgherly and small town’ and his school education as ‘not so pleasant and delightful as it otherwise usually is’, due perhaps to his lack of friends and his ‘indifference’ to the activities of his school mates. At quite a young age he determined to become a pastor and took a keen interest ‘in everything ecclesiastical and theological that managed to appear within my narrow horizons’ (Otto 1996, 51–52). Otto studied

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theology, languages, music and art at the universities of Erlangen and Göttingen. The young theologian was disenchanted with the ‘ossified intellectualism’ of the prevailing rationalistic theology and was strongly attracted to Martin Luther’s insistence that the knowledge of God had little to do with the rational faculties (Wach 1951, 213). Indeed, Otto’s dissertation for his licentiate in theology was on Luther’s view of the Holy Spirit and he repeatedly returned to the Pauline maxim that ‘the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life’. Otto was also much influenced in his early years by Kant, Schleiermacher, Fries, Albrecht Ritschl and Ernest Troeltsch, each of whom provided a strong antidote to the regnant theological orthodoxies of the period. In 1899 Otto edited a centennial edition of Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion and a decade later published his first major work, The Philosophy of Religion based on Kant and Fries. Otto was swimming against the tide of enthusiasm for the theology of Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, a tide which ‘overwhelmed Otto at the pinnacle of his career, and resulted in a widespread rejection of his work among theologians’ (Alles in Otto 1996, 9). Nearly half a century later Karl Barth recalled this uncongenial climate: Everything that even from afar smelt of mysticism and morals, of pietism and romanticism or even idealism, how suspect it was and how strictly prohibited or confined in the straitjacket of restrictions (in Otto, 1996, 9).

In similar vein, Paul Tillich later recalled his years at Marburg in 1924–25: During the three semesters of my teaching I met the first radical effects of the neo-orthodox theology on theology students: cultural problems were excluded from theological thought; theologians like Schleiermacher, Harnack, Troeltsch, Otto, were contemptuously rejected; social and political ideas were banned from theological discussions (in Otto 1996, 4).

Otto trained for the Lutheran ministry and after two years in a theological seminary he traveled to the Middle East. In Cairo he was profoundly influenced by the Coptic liturgy, by some Jewish rites in Jerusalem and by a Dervish ceremony which he described as ‘unspeakable’. After these experiences, formative in his intellectual and spiritual development, he returned to Germany via the great monastic centre at Mount Athos where he spent ten days. This trip provided the catalyst for his great intellectual enterprise – the construction of ‘a methodology of religious feeling’. Otto’s professional life, apart from brief stints in the Lutheran ministry and as a member of the Prussian Parliament, was as an academic systematic theologian. He was appointed to a position at Göttingen University

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in 1898 where he worked before moving as a full professor to Breslau in 1915, and three years later to Marburg where he succeeded the illustrious Wilhelm Herrmann. He wrote on a wide range of religious subjects and lectured at many universities on both sides of the Atlantic. Joachim Wach has left us a vivid pen portrait of Otto in his later years: Rudolf Otto was an imposing figure. He held himself straight and upright. His movements were measured. The sharply cut countenance kept a grave expression which did not change much even when jesting. The colour of his skin was yellowish-white and betrayed past illness. Otto had contracted a tropical disease in India which forced him ever after to husband his strength strictly. His hair was white and clipped … A small white moustache covered his upper lip. His most fascinating features were his steelblue eyes. There was a rigidity in his glance, and one had the impression that he was ‘seeing’ something, as he spoke, to which his interlocutor had no access … An air of genuine mystery surrounded Otto. Familiarity was the last thing which a visitor would have expected of the great scholar or he himself would have encouraged. The students who followed his lectures tensely and with awe called him the Saint … neither before nor since my meeting Otto have I known a person who impressed one more genuinely as a true mystic. There was something about him of the solitude into which an intimate communion with the Divine has frequently led those who were favoured in this way (Wach 1951, 210–211).

Throughout his adult life Otto was engaged in a range of extra-academic activities – the movement for liturgical and ecclesiastical reform (including the creation of ministries for women), electoral change and efforts to establish an international Religious League. Ill health forced Otto’s early retirement in 1929. He died of pneumonia in 1937, shortly after suffering an almost fatal sixty-foot fall from a tower which he had climbed in Staufenberg. The last years of his life were marred by severe illness, morphine addiction, depression and perhaps more severe psychiatric disturbance; it is possible that Otto’s ‘fall’ was a suicide attempt (Almond 1984, 24–25). The inscription on Otto’s tomb in Marburg is ‘Heilig, Heilig, Heilig, ist der Herr Zaboath’, the sanctus which had taken on a particular resonance in his life and work. Nine of Otto’s books appeared in English in the interwar years but many of his essays have only recently appeared in English, thanks to the enterprise of Gregory Alles. Otto’s work falls quite neatly into two distinct periods: the early years of his professional life in which he was engrossed in teaching and writing about Protestant theology; and the later years in which his attention often turned Eastwards and towards more universal religious problems and themes. The Idea of the Holy is a

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kind of fulcrum between these two periods. Throughout his adult life he also wrote many articles on social and political themes. The Idea of the Holy Das Heilege appeared in 1917, in Europe a year of war, revolution, widespread dislocation, a mood of confusion, anxiety and nihilism. It was to become one of the century’s most influential books on the nature of religious experience, in some ways a descendant of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Soon translated into all the major European languages it was immensely popular in the decade after its publication, perhaps because it answered to something in the mood of the times (see Ludwig 1995, 139–141). The Idea of the Holy was an attempt to establish a category under which religious experience could be understood in its own right, free of any theoretical schema imported from outside. It was also an attempt to valorize the non-rational (as distinct from irrational) elements of religion. Otto’s work was attuned to the spirit of Pascal’s maxim, if one subjects everything to reason our religion will lose its mystery and its supernatural character. If one offends the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous … These are two equally dangerous extremes, to shut reason out and to let nothing else in (Otto, 1958, xix).

In 1913, Otto’s friend, the Swedish theologian Nathan Söderblom, had written, ‘Holiness is the great word in religion; it is even more essential than the notion of God’ (Söderblom 1913, 731). Otto’s purpose was to recuperate the full meaning of the word ‘holy’ and to take hold of the religious experience to which this word points. Otto believed the word had been contaminated by moral associations which were quite secondary to its fundamental meaning and turned to an old Latin word, numen, to signal the realm of the most profound religious experience. The holy, he wrote, ‘is a category peculiar to religion … [it] is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be defined’ (Otto 1958, 7) but only evoked on the basis of experience. To experience the numinous is to encounter the Mysterium Trememdum which is marked by an overpowering sense of otherness, of awefulness, majesty and energy but which is also fascinans – beautiful, alluring, captivating. This real presence, neither a phantom nor a projection of the

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sub-conscious but, in Christian terms, the ‘living God’, calls up ‘creaturely feeling’ and appears ‘in a form ennobled beyond measure where the soul held speechless, trembles inwardly to the furthest fibre of its being’ (Otto 1958, 17). In an Appendix Otto reproduces the thrilling passage from the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna ‘smitten with amazement’ beholds the manifold forms of Krishna, more dazzling than ‘the light of a thousand suns’ (Otto 1958, Appendix 2). Part of the book’s appeal, for both general reader and for the student of religion, was Otto’s understanding of religion primarily in experiential rather than creedal terms. At a time when ‘religion’ was often thought to hinge on belief and morality Otto turned attention to the religious experience, not to offer any reductionistic ‘scientific’ explanation but to affirm its mystery and power, and its centrality in religion. Comparative religionists were later to take up Otto’s interest in the holy (now more often than not termed ‘the sacred’) as one of the structuring principles of their inquiries. Unhappily, the very popularity of this germinative work has somewhat obscured Otto’s many other achievements, not least in the field of Indological studies and in the promotion of global interreligious understanding. Otto in Africa and the East In 1911, Otto travelled extensively in North Africa, the Middle East and India: his experiences were to be decisive in the gestation of The Idea of the Holy. In a now-famous passage in letter to a German church weekly he described the effect of hearing the Trisagion of Isaiah in the synagogue in Moroccan Mogador (now Essaouira): It is Sabbath, and already in the dark and inconceivably grimy passage of the house we hear that sing-song of prayers and reading of scripture, that nasal half-singing half-speaking which Church and Mosque have taken over from the Synagogue. The sound is pleasant, one can soon distinguish modulations and cadences that follow one another at regular intervals, like Leitmotive. The ear tries to grasp individual words but it is scarcely possible … when suddenly out of the babel of voices, causing a thrill of fear, there it begins, unified, clear and unmistakable: Kadosh Kadosh Kadosh Elohim Adonai Zebaoth Male’u hashamayim wahaarets kebodo! (Holy, holy, holy, Lord of hosts, the heavens and the earth are full of thy glory.) I have heard the Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus of the cardinals in St Peters, the Swiat Swiat Swiat in the Cathedral of the Kremlin and the Holy Holy Holy of the Patriarch in Jerusalem. In whatever language they resound, these most exalted words that have ever come from human lips always grip one

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in the depths of the soul, with a mighty shudder exciting and calling into play the mystery of the other world latent therein. And this more than anywhere else here in this modest place, where they resound in the same tongue in which Isaiah first received them and from the lips of the people whose first inheritance they were (Turner and Mackenzie n.d., 4).

Of this incident Ernst Benz has written, ‘It is particularly noteworthy that Otto came to know the experience [of the holy] not primarily from reading sacred texts but on a journey as a spontaneous religious experience in a Jewish synagogue in Morocco … ’ (Otto 1996, 61). The Asian leg of his journey also left an abiding impression on Otto. Soon after arriving in Karachi he was astonished when a newly-met young Hindu launched into an eloquent discourse on the philosophy of Kant. Otto sailed up the Indus river to Lahore and thence traveled to Calcutta and Orissa where he was lavishly entertained by a Maharajah in whom he found an attractive blend of European learning and Hindu piety. In India he had friendly encounters with Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Parsees. From India Otto traveled to Burma where he was much impressed by the vitality of Theravadan Buddhism. In Japan he visited universities, temples and monasteries and may have been the first Westerner to address a large gathering of Zen monks. He went on to China where he stayed for two months before returning to Europe through Siberia, accompanied by a collection of priceless religious artifacts for the Religionskundliche Sammlung (Museum of the World’s Religions) which he had established in Marburg. Despite poor health Otto returned to India in 1927, partly in order to gather materials for the museum in Marburg, partly to promote the Religiöser Menschheitsbund (see below). Otto visited many religious sites throughout the sub-continent; his letters evince a keen and sympathetic interest in the beliefs and practices of the Buddhists, Muslims and Parsees as well as the Hindus. A visit to Elephanta Island (near Bombay), like his earlier experiences in the Middle East, left the most profound impression on him. His oft-cited description: One climbs halfway up the mountainside on magnificent stone steps until a wide gate opens on the right, in the volcanic rocks. This leads into one of the mightiest of early Indian rock temples. Heavy pillars hewn out of the rock support the roof. The eye slowly accustoms itself to the semi-darkness, gradually distinguishes awesome representations – carved into the wall – of the religious epics of India, until it reaches the imposing central recess. Here an image rises up out of the rock which I can only compare with the great representations of Christ in early Byzantine

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harry oldmeadow churches. It is a three-headed form, carved only as far as the breast, in threefold human size … Still and powerful the central head looks down, with both the others in profile. Over the image rests a perfect peace and majesty … Nowhere else have I found the secret of the transcendent world, the other world more grandly and perfectly expressed than in these three heads … To see this place were alone worth a journey to India, while from the spirit of religion which has lived here, one may experience more in a single hour of contemplation than from all the books (in Almond 1984, 23–24).

The last sentence is a telling sign of Otto’s deepening conviction that ‘the spirit of religion’ transcends all formal boundaries and lies in contemplative experience, beyond the reach of ‘all the books’. (Two other Christians who experienced a similar epiphany at Elephanta were Fr Henri Le Saux, also known as Swami Abhishiktananda, and Fr Bede Griffiths. Accounts of their experiences can be found in Abhishiktananda 1998, 105–106; Stewart 1998, 81; and Griffiths 1982, 10–11.) Otto was by now an accomplished Sanskritist, had translated several early Vedic texts and had published his most important contribution to Western understanding of the Hindu tradition, Mysticism East and West (1926), in which he continued Schopenhauer’s association of Vedantic metaphysics and Meister Eckhart’s apophatic theology. Whilst not unaware of ‘manifold singularities’, Otto found in the mystics of both East and West ‘an astonishing conformity in the deepest impulses of human spiritual experience’, independent of ‘race, clime and age’ (Otto 1957, v). As Richard King has noted, Otto’s enterprise is coloured by his apparent intention to rehabilitate Eckhart’s standing within German Protestantism through the comparison with Sankara – an example of ‘the projection of Christian theological debates … onto an Indian canvas’ (King 1999, 126). Nonetheless, Otto’s work remains a pioneering work of remarkable acuity in the field of comparative mysticism. In The Idea of the Holy, Otto had already discussed the mystical dimension of religion in terms altogether consonant with the spiritual vocabularies of the East. Take this, for example: And as soon as speculative thought has come to concern itself with this … type of consciousness … We come upon the ideas, first, of the annihilation of the self, and then, as its complement, of the transcendent as the sole and entire reality. For one of the chiefest and most general features of mysticism is just this self-depreciation … the estimation of the self, the personal ‘I’, as something not perfectly or essentially real, or even as a mere nullity, a self-depreciation which comes to demand its own fulfilment in practice in rejecting the delusion of selfhood, and so makes for the annihilation of the self (Otto 1958, 21).

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After this second trip to India Otto wrote a good many scholarly works on the Vaisnavite tradition, translated several texts, including those of Ramanuja, the Katha Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita, with which he originally felt little sympathy but on which he was to write with considerable discernment. Otto also wrote another comparison of his own tradition and Hinduism, India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity (1928). A recent bibliography of Otto’s Indological writings runs to some seventy items (see Rollman 1979, 199–203). Much of this work served as a corrective to the Western preoccupation with Advaita Vedanta, often assimilated with the Hindu tradition as a whole. Of Otto’s imposing Indological work, Joachim Wach had this to say: All these studies not only bespeak an intimate acquaintance with the texts and the philological problems involved in their interpretation, not only a comprehensive knowledge of the theological and philosophical systems of India and of the outstanding Hindu thinkers and teachers, but also a deep understanding of Indian devotion (Wach 1951, 216).

Given Otto’s deep-seated interest in lived religious experience and his perception of the similarities between the theistic piety of the Abrahamic traditions and Hindu bhakti, it comes as no surprise that Wach should identify his understanding of devotion as one of the hallmarks of Otto’s Indological works. Amongst Otto’s most interesting and penetrating essays was one on Gandhi whom Otto recognized as a distinctly Indian type. True, Gandhi impresses us through his profound humanity, and we admire ‘the human’ in him. But he is an Indian, and it is as a great Indian that he is a great person… We misunderstand Gandhi when we attempt to understand the strong powers and virtues of this man simply in terms of a generalized humanity … ‘the great nationalist’, ‘the friend of the people’, ‘a clever politician’, ‘a born leader’. He is all these things, but he is so as an Indian sadhu [renunciate]. He is these things as a result of his situation, but if the situation were different, his character as a sadhu would remain the same and would find other ways to express itself (Otto 1996, 195–196).

He also discerned in Gandhi the beneficent influence of the various religions to which he had been exposed and to whose ethical teachings he was peculiarly receptive – Jainism, Islam and Christianity, as well as his own Vaisnavite tradition (Otto 1996, 203). Although Otto was most strongly attracted to Hinduism, especially its medieval expressions, he also wrote sympathetically about Buddhism of both the Theravadan and Mahayana traditions. His percipient essay (1924) on Zen Buddhism came at a time when it was virtually unknown

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in the West and followed his many suggestive references to Buddhism in The Idea of the Holy. (Arthur Waley’s essay ‘Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art’ appeared in 1923 and has been acclaimed as one of the first substantial European writings on Zen. Otto had already written on Zen, not at any length but with sharp insight, in The Idea of the Holy). Philip Almond tells us that Otto was the first German scholar of religion to visit Zen monasteries in Japan where he conversed with Zen masters, practised zazen, addressed Zen monks on the affinities of Christianity and Buddhism, and lectured at the Asiatic Society of Japan on parallels between the religions of East and West (see Almond 1994, 60). At a time when any amount of nonsense was being written in the West about Buddhism, Otto’s insights were penetrating indeed, and are still illuminating today. A simple example from The Idea of the Holy: I recall vividly a conversation I had with a Buddhist monk. He had been putting before me methodically and pertinaciously the arguments for the Buddhist ‘theology of negation’, the doctrine of Anatman and ‘entire emptiness’. When he had made an end, I asked him, what then Nirvana itself is; and after a long pause came at last the single answer, low and restrained: ‘Bliss – unspeakable’. And the hushed restraint of that answer, the solemnity of his voice, demeanour, and gesture, made more clear what was meant than the words themselves (Otto 1958, 39).

Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries Otto did not find Buddhism either ‘nihilistic’ or ‘pessimistic’ and in Zen discerned a radical mystical method, ‘almost torn away from all rational schemata’, aimed at a direct encounter with the numinous, the ‘wholly other’ (in Almond 1994; see also Otto 1924). In 1925 Otto wrote the preface to the first book on Zen in German, a collection of classical texts translated by Ohasama Shuei, entitled Zen: Living Buddhism in Japan. His later essay ‘Numinous Experience in Zen’ has also been heralded as an important work (see Dumoulin, 1992, 5). Otto wrote very little on Islam but even here one sees a remarkably plastic religious sensibility at work, one which allowed play to spontaneous aesthetic illuminations – a kind of sensibility not always to be found amongst academic theologians! How much of the spiritual economy of Islam Otto is able to evoke in a few deft strokes in his modest notes on ‘The empty in Islamic architecture’ (1932): Mosques are ‘empty’. This is often confused with austerity and attributed to the alleged rationalism of Islam and its cultus. To be sure, there are mosques that are very austere, but there are others in which the empty speaks so impressively that it puts a lump in one’s throat and takes one’s

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breath away … This high art works with space and through spaces that it orders, divides, and combines. At the same time it works with light, or rather, with half-light, which it wonderfully guides, gradates, mixes, augments, and interrupts. The use of both space and light makes the empty and the quiet meaningful and expressive. It does so without a word and more powerfully than cathedrals filled with images, figures and ritual implements that diffuse, refract, and establish meaning through the alltoo-significant and the all-too-conceptual (Otto 1996, 190–191).

In the same essay he describes Islamic calligraphy as ‘music with lines’ which ‘draws the words of the Qur-an back into the mystery from which they flowed’. Otto often derived his most acute insights from direct existential encounters rather than from his researches in the library. Would that we could say the same of many of today’s scholars of religion for whom the phenomena under investigation are just so many laboratory specimens! As the Rumanian philosopher E.M. Cioran remarked, ‘One does not imagine a specialist in the history of religions at prayer. Or if indeed he does pray … then he ruins his Treatises, in which no true god figures … ’ (Cioran 1991, 188). Otto’s intellect was as sharp as you like, his scholarship prodigious and his capacity for argumentation formidable indeed; but perhaps more important than all this, especially in his engagement with Eastern forms, was a kind of intuitive receptivity shared by some of the century’s most arresting Western commentators on Eastern religious traditions – one may here mention such names as Mircea Eliade, Thomas Merton and Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda).

The Interreligious League As early as 1913 Otto had conceived the idea of a Religiöser Menschheitbund (Interreligious League) which would bring together representatives of all the world’s religions to work towards international peace, social justice and moral progress. In the sorry aftermath of World War I Otto pleaded eloquently and passionately for the RMB: I hope that the misery which all nations suffer today will finally teach them what religion and ethics should have taught them a long time ago: that they do not walk alone. People of every land and nation must constantly bear in mind that they face great collective tasks, and that to accomplish these tasks they need brotherly collaboration and cooperation. By themselves, political associations cannot do what is needed … Will [the League of Nations] become anything more than a ‘limited liability

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harry oldmeadow corporation’ that actively pursues the special interests of whatever groups temporarily find themselves in power … In and of themselves, institutions, laws, decrees, and negotiations are powerless. They require the continual support of an awakened collective conscience …

After commending the efforts of his friend, the Swedish Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, to initiate a more lively and fertile Christian ecumenicism (eventually leading to the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948), Otto went on: But Christianity hardly encompasses all of humanity … What would it mean if perhaps every three years those who represent the consciences of individual nations – the most influential leaders and emissaries of all churches all over the world – assembled publicly to discuss issues of universal concern, to display personally their common feeling for all of humanity, and then to take home a heightened will to create a global community? In time this assembly would develop into a forum that would be completely independent of the struggles and limitations of diplomacy. It could discuss the great issues of the day.

Otto’s identification of those problems strikes a very contemporary note: … issues of public and international morality, social and cultural issues that all nations share, unavoidable clashes between different nations and how to alleviate them, issues of class, gender, and race … The same body would also provide a natural court of appeals for oppressed minorities, classes, and nations (Otto 1996, 145).

Under Otto’s leadership the RMB, established in 1920, actually flourished for a time and attracted participants from Asia and North America as well as many European countries. Otto’s trip to the subcontinent in 1928–29 was principally to gain support for the RMB, efforts which met with considerable success. It was dissolved in 1933 but was revived by Friedrich Heiler and Karl Küssner in 1956 and thereafter became the German branch of the World Congress of Faiths which had been founded early in the century by Sir Francis Younghusband (see French 1994). Whilst the RMB and its successors have not hitherto realized Otto’s lofty ideals, who is foolish enough to say that his vision has no relevance today? In a world riven with all manner of strife, much of it inter-religious, and at the end of the most blood-stained century in recorded history, perhaps it is timely to listen once again to Otto’s impassioned words, uttered in the aftermath of World War 1:

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If one could win the ‘churches’ of the great world religions and their leaders for the cause of the great, common tasks of humanity – ordering relations between nations, classes, races, and genders in accordance with basic human rights; peaceful collaboration instead of war and aggression; reason and orderliness instead of the interests of those who are temporarily in power; the deliberate shaping of destiny instead of blindly allowing nature and destiny to take their course – then there would be created, in universal conviction and united opinion, the spiritual soil from which would grow lasting forms of international law and powerful organisations of nations and classes (Otto 1996, 146).

Many will no doubt dismiss Otto’s vision as ‘sentimental’, ‘utopian’ and the like—that is the fate of visionaries! But an implacable fact remains: Otto’s appeal for the development of ‘a global conscience’, rooted in the recognition of ‘the binding force of right and justice as the supreme norms governing relations between individuals and communities’, and addressing ‘the great, collective moral tasks’ (Otto 1996, 149) of the age, cannot be indefinitely ignored without imperilling the very future of the human family and, indeed, of our planetary home. Religious Inclusivism Over the last century we can discern in the study of religion four distinct approaches, sometimes overlapping: the rationalistic perspective which treats religion as any other cultural phenomenon and strives for some sort of quasi-scientific ‘objectivity’ (actually chimerical – but that is a debate for another occasion); the theological outlook which views ‘religion’ and ‘religions’ through the lens of a particular religious viewpoint; the universalist approach which rests on the notion that behind myriad religious forms lies some sort of common core or essence; and the phenomenological method which sets aside all questions relating to ‘truth claims’ and seeks to allow the ‘phenomena’ to somehow speak for themselves. Needless to say there are all manner of variations and off-shoots within these broad general groupings. Rudolf Otto is one of the first of a small group of Christian theologians who have attempted to reconcile their own fervently-held religious commitments with a more inclusive and universalist approach in the study of religion. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr observed many years ago, as far as religiously committed scholars are concerned, The essential problem that the study of religion poses is how to preserve religious truth, traditional orthodoxy, the dogmatic theological structures

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harry oldmeadow of one’s own tradition, and yet gain knowledge of other traditions and accept them as spiritually valid ways and roads to God (Nasr 1972, 127).

Otto squarely faced the fact that Christian exclusivism must give way to a much more open approach to other religions. As early as 1912, he had struck a prophetic note with these noble words: We in the West now realize that we have no monopoly of religious truth. We must in honesty change our attitude towards other faiths, for our watchword must be ‘Loyalty to truth’. This changed attitude, however, does not weaken, but rather, instead, reinforces one’s faith in God, for He is seen to be not a small or partial being but the Great God who is working throughout all times and places and faiths (in Almond 1994, 69).

Here Otto anticipates the work of such later figures as W. Cantwell Smith, Klaus Klostermaier, Henri Le Saux, Bede Griffiths, William Johnston and Diana Eck, in each of whom we find a steadfast commitment to the Christian tradition hand-in-hand with the deepest respect for, interest in and openness to the spiritual modalities of other traditions. For them the religious encounter with the East presents itself as a challenge and an opportunity rather than as a threat to be repulsed. They represent those many serious-minded Christians in whom an awareness of Eastern traditions has penetrated quite deeply—one might say that the psyche of contemporary Christianity has been profoundly and irreversibly affected by the presence of the East. One sign among many is the revision of the Roman Church’s posture during Vatican II, evident in the decree Nostra Aetate. The comparative religionist Geoffrey Parrinder echoes many other thinkers when he suggests that the encounter with the East is ‘one of the most significant events of modern times’, amounting to another Reformation within the Christian world (Clarke 1997, 130). Whilst many Asian scholars and practitioners have studied in the West it is generally the case that most of the initiatives in interreligious dialogue have come from the Christian side. This may be related to the keener sense in this tradition of some deficiency which might be remedied by creative intercourse with Eastern traditions. Interreligious dialogue may also be felt, perhaps subconsciously, as a kind of atonement for the historical ignominies of missionizing triumphalism and Western colonialism, and as a counter to the evangelical excesses of current day fundamentalists. More positively it may derive from certain dynamic, outward-looking and frontier-seeking tendencies in Christianity and the Western mythos generally. On the other side, the comparative reticence of Easterners in sponsoring interreligious dialogue may stem

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from a post-colonial wariness of the colonizing and universalizing tendencies in Western thought whilst many Asian adherents feel no dissatisfaction with their own tradition such as might impel initiatives in this direction. These creative Christian responses to religious pluralism, pioneered by Otto (amongst others), should not be confused with the kind of ‘universalism’ which anticipates the creation of a new ‘super-religion’. Otto himself had no interest whatsoever in any kind of syncretism or admixture of religious elements in some sort of ersatz ‘universal’ religion: We most emphatically reject any form of cosmopolitanism in the area of religion … We maintain our religion and cherish its claims, at the same time that we allow others to advocate their own religion … We consider the propagation and spreading of our own religion to be one of our most sacred duties (Otto 1996, 148).

Conclusion Although Otto’s work has been strangely neglected in the Anglophone world over the last fifty years there is no doubting his influence on both theologians and comparative religionists. For many years Paul Tillich alone amongst German theologians really carried Otto’s banner in the English-speaking world but the climate today, in which ‘theologians now inhabit a world of religious pluralism, uncertain truth claims, and interreligious dialogue’ may well make Otto’s ideas congenial once again (see Alles in Otto 1996, 11). Amongst comparative religionists his legacy was perhaps most evident in the work of his compatriot Joachim Wach but Otto also palpably influenced figures such as Mircea Eliade, Friedrich Heiler, Gerardus van der Leeuw and Ugo Bianchi. In more recent years scholars such as Philip Almond and Gregory Alles have helped to revive interest in one of the twentieth century’s most interesting, imposing and attractive scholars of religion. There can be no doubting that the ideals for which Otto strived and the values he upheld, both within the Church and in the wider world, have lost none of their pertinence or urgency. Bibliography Abhishiktananda. 1998. Ascent to the Depth of the Heart: The Spiritual Diary (1948– 1973) of Swami Abhishiktananda (Dom Henri Le Saux), ed. Raimon Pannikar. Delhi: Indian Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.

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Almond, P. 1984. Rudolf Otto: An Introduction to His Philosophical Theology. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. —— . 1994. ‘Rudolf Otto and Buddhism’. In Aspects of Religion: Essays in Honor of Ninian Smart, ed. P. Masefield and D. Wiebe. New York: Peter Lang. Cioran, E. M. 1991. Anathemas and Admirations. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Arcade. Clarke, J. J. 1997. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought. London: Routledge. Dumoulin, H. 1992. Zen Buddhism in the 20th Century. New York: Weatherhill. French, P. 1994. Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer. London: Harper Collins. Griffiths, B. 1982. The Marriage of East and West. London: Collins. King, R. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial theory, India and ‘the mystic East’. London: Routledge. Ludwig, T. 1995. ‘Rudolf Otto’. In The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol 11, ed. Mircea Eliade. 139–141. New York: Simon & Schuster. Nasr, S. H. 1972. Sufi Essays. London: Allen & Unwin. Oldmeadow, H. 2004. Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions. Bloomington: World Wisdom. Otto, R. 1924. ‘Professor Rudolf Otto on Zen’. The Eastern Buddhist 3(2): 117–125. —— . 1957. Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism. New York: Meridian Books. —— . 1958. The Idea of the Holy. Trans. J. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— . 1996. Autobiographical and Social Essays ed. Gregory D. Alles. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rollmann, H. 1979. ‘Rudolf Otto and India’. Religious Studies Review 5 (3): 199–203. Sharpe, E. 1975. Comparative Religion. London: Duckworth. Söderblom, N. 1913. ‘Holiness’. In Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings. Vim 731. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Stewart, J. 2000. Swami Abhishiktananda: His life through his letters. Delhi: Indian Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. Turner, H. & Mackenzie, P. (No date). Commentary on ‘The Idea of the Holy’. Aberdeen: Aberdeen People’s Press. Wach, J. 1951. Types of Religious Experience, Christian and Non-Christian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

THE THEME OF CONVERSION IN SARTRE’S EARLY ETHICS Paul Crittenden Abstract In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre announced that he would devote a future work to ethics, taking up questions that follow on from ontology but go beyond it. This was the birth of an expectation that he never properly fulfilled, although he did write a good deal about ethics over the years and remained concerned with moral issues as a writer and a political activist. Finally, Sartre was drawn to reflect on ethical themes once again in the last years of his life in discussions with his young secretary Benny Lévy. The focus of inquiry was on the hope for a new social order marked by an ‘ethics of reciprocity’ particularly in the context of Jewish experience in history and Jewish beliefs about God, the afterlife, and messianism. Sartre took it as fundamental that ethics are secular, but he recognised that an understanding of ethics, certainly in the present epoch, had to respond to the religious framework in which it has long been situated. This he would attempt to do especially by drawing on religious metaphors and models and showing what force they might have in a secular context. My aim in this paper is to consider Sartre’s approach to ethics as found in the Notebooks for an Ethics, with particular reference to the theme of ethical conversion in this source. Although the later reflections on ethics, especially in the 1960s, are also of considerable interest, they lie beyond the scope of this paper.

Ethics as a Sartrean Project In the closing pages of Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre announced that he would devote a future work to ethics in which he would take up questions that follow on from his account of phenomenological ontology. This was the birth of an expectation that he never properly fulfilled, although he did write a good deal about ethics over the years and remained concerned with moral issues as a writer and a political activist. Looking back in 1972, in an interview with Simone de Beauvoir, he speaks of having written two ethics: Fundamentally I have written two ethics, one between 1945 and 1946, [in which I was] completely misled … and then some notes around 1965 on

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paul crittenden another system of ethics, with the problem of realism and that of morals (Beauvoir 1984, 25).

The first of these ethics was written in the first three or four years after the Second World War, with reference back to the ontological themes of Being and Nothingness. Over this time Sartre filled several notebooks with comments, notes, reflections, short essays, and longer pieces on ethical themes. But having become dissatisfied with the work as too abstract and idealistic, he set it aside and never returned to it again directly. Nonetheless he retained the notebooks as work that might be published posthumously as a text that, while forever unfinished, would nonetheless be a witness to a stage in the development of his thinking. A substantial selection from the notebooks was subsequently published not long after his death (Sartre 1983), appearing in an English translation some years later (Sartre 1992). Having set aside this initial search for an ethics, Sartre became more and more caught up with other concerns in the 1950s, including radical political activity. But he began serious work on ethics once again following on the publication of his second major philosophical work The Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960. This inquiry was an ambitious attempt to combine existentialist and Marxist themes in a comprehensive account of social structures across history, with particular reference to the conditions that shape and limit freedom. His concern in the light of the Critique was to go on to develop a system of ethics related specifically to socialism. As part of this new venture he presented a paper in 1964 at a conference in Rome on ‘Ethics and Society’ sponsored by the Italian Communist Party. Here he signalled his intention in the opening words: ‘Our meeting proves that the historical moment has arrived for socialism to rediscover its ethical structure’. In this spirit he embarked on a renewed attempt to work out a contemporary account of ethics. There was word, a year or two later, that the inquiry was well advanced and publication would be forthcoming. But once again, the promised work did not eventuate. What remains are two manuscripts: one of around 100 pages written for the 1964 lecture in Rome, and a set of notes on ethics prepared for a lecture series to be given at Cornell University in 1965, work that was left unfinished when Sartre withdrew from the engagement in protest over the war in Vietnam. Finally, Sartre was drawn to reflect on ethical themes once again in the last years of his life in discussions with his young secretary Benny Lévy, a once militant Maoist who had moved on to become a committed

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student of the Talmud. The focus of inquiry was the hope for a new social order marked by an ‘ethics of reciprocity’ particularly in the context of Jewish experience in history and Jewish beliefs about God, the afterlife, and messianism. It is hardly surprising that in a discussion of ethics led by a Talmudist, Sartre was drawn to take note of religious ideas. This was not, in fact, something new in his thinking about ethics. In his major ethical writings, first in the 1940s and later in the 1960s, Sartre took it as fundamental that ethics as philosophical inquiry is secular or non-religious. But he recognised that an understanding of ethics, certainly in the present epoch, had to respond to the religious framework in which it has long been situated. This he would attempt to do especially by drawing on religious metaphors and models and showing what force they might have in a secular context.1 My aim in this paper is to consider Sartre’s approach to ethics as found in the Notebooks for an Ethics, with particular reference to the theme of ethical conversion in this source. The later reflections on ethics, especially in the 1960s, are also of considerable interest; but they lie beyond the scope of this paper. Ethics concerns good and evil; its ultimate guiding principle, espoused by Sartre in the Notebooks, is that good is to be done and evil avoided. With reference to what is to be identified as good and evil, however, there is considerable dispute, enough to lead many to the relativist view that there is nothing firm or universally true in ethics. This was not Sartre’s standpoint. Contrary to popular opinion, he took an anti-relativist, or absolutist, view of good and evil. That is, he held that some things, forms of behaviour primarily, are morally good, and some are bad or evil. In taking this standpoint, he aligns himself, in general terms, with theistic ethics (and, for the most part, the classical Greek tradition). This comes out clearly in a conversation with Simone de Beauvoir in 1974. Asked about traces of God that might remain in his thinking, he replied: Yes. In the moral field I’ve retained one single thing to do with the existence of God, and that is Good and Evil as absolutes. The usual consequence of atheism is the suppression of Good and Evil. It’s a certain relativism – for example, it’s regarding morals as being variable according to the point on the earth’s surface at which they are seen (Beauvoir 1984, 439).

1 While my inquiry lies outside G.W. Trompf ’s primary fields of research, there is little in the history of ideas that is not of interest to him; specifically, he has long had an active involvement in the philosophy of religion, not least in the way in which themes with an original basis in religion can be exported into a secular domain.

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Morality, Sartre explains, is relative in the sense that it arises in one’s relations to others, but – properly realised – it is general and absolute in character, not by reference to God or a purely objective order that excludes the subject, but as set by what is fundamental in human existence and the self-other relationship. What is good, what is evil? Sartre’s response is characteristically Sartrean, albeit with connections to Kantian ethics. Good, he says, is properly defined as freedom and whatever is useful to freedom, evil as what is harmful to freedom. A critic might object that in this case good and evil are treated as relative notions after all, being determined by the free choice of each sovereign individual. Indeed, Sartre might seem to have endorsed this interpretation in the heyday of existentialist ferment, notably in his popular and influential 1946 lecture, ‘The Humanism of Existentialism’. There he takes the nonexistence of God as his starting point in the context of the Dostoievskian idea that if God did not exist then everything would be permitted: If God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimise our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses (Sartre 1977, 41).

His position is that we are ‘condemned to be free’ in being thrown into the world; beyond that, we are otherwise free and responsible for everything we do. In arguing that moral choice rests with the individual subject he considers the case of the wartime student who is faced with the choice of going to England to join the Free French forces or staying at home to look after his aging mother. He asks Sartre, his teacher, what should he do? In reply he is told that no general system of ethics, Christian, Kantian, or any other, can show him what is to be done. In the end, he says, I had only one answer to give: ‘You’re free, choose, that is invent’. This is an echo of the Sartre who says of values in Being and Nothingness: My freedom is the unique foundation of values and … nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values (Sartre 1996, 38).

Or the Sartre who, in his depiction of the human being as a ‘useless passion’ doomed to failure in the quest for self-sufficiency – in other words, the vain quest to be God – says: They are condemned to despair; for they discover at the same time that all human activities are equivalent … and that all are on principle doomed to failure. Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations (Sartre 1996, 627).

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How then could Sartre claim that he never subscribed to an ethics of indifference or ethical relativism? His response, I suggest, would run on the following lines. We are free subjects, we bear responsibility for our actions, and freedom is the ground on which values are possible. But it does not follow that pure choice makes whatever we do right, or that there is no truth of the matter in ethics, or that it is a matter of indifference what we do. The Sartrean case for truth in ethics would be that, since freedom is fundamental, to be wrong is precisely to choose forms of behaviour that are inconsistent with the responsible exercise of freedom whether for oneself or others. Similarly, it would be a mistake to think that he maintained that, ultimately, all activities are equivalent in that ‘all are on principle doomed to failure’. The point is that this diagnosis of failure in Being and Nothingness relates specifically to the situation in which our activity is directed to the futile quest of total self-sufficiency. So his statement about the equivalence of getting drunk alone or being a leader of nations is conditional in form: ‘If your goal is, in effect, to become God (understood as causa sui, totally self-sufficient being), then all activities are equivalent in being doomed to failure’. As for the young man in Sartre’s wartime story, either course of action in the specified circumstances would be compatible with the exercise of responsible freedom and hence would be good in principle. Sartre’s rhetoric of invention – ‘You’re free, choose, that is invent’ – is misleading, as if it were advice to do anything at all. In context, the advice is that it is up to the young man to choose between the specified courses of action. Since either choice would lead to a morally good outcome, the advice is compatible with thinking of good and evil in non-relativist terms. Reference to invention at this point is relevant in the sense that one makes oneself – invents oneself – through the particular choices one makes, especially at critical points of one’s life. In the ontology of Being and Nothingness human beings (‘for-itself ’/ conscious being) typically seek to escape the burden of freedom by living in bad faith. In addition, the individual ‘for-itself ’, though directly aware of the world and other conscious beings, is portrayed as isolated and self-centred, locked into conflict with others for control and possession of the world; but in this passion each of us is doomed to failure. This is the distilled burden of Being and Nothingness, a generally bleak text about bad faith, fractured human relationships, and futile effort. But into this gloomy world, which owes something to Kafka and the torn conditions of the time, Sartre admitted a ray of light in three short

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footnotes and a conclusion that look towards the promised work on ethics. In each of these places he speaks of the possibility of an ethics of deliverance linked with the prospect of a radical conversion that leads to self-recovery or authenticity. For instance, having explored at length the twin circles of self-other conflict in love and hatred, he writes in a footnote: These considerations do not exclude the possibility of an ethics of deliverance and salvation. But this can be achieved only after a radical conversion which we cannot discuss here (Sartre 1996, 412).

The idea of radical conversion and self-recovery in an ethics of deliverance subsequently became a central topic in the Notebooks for an Ethics. Ethical Conversion and Authenticity The topic of conversion, especially sudden conversion, interested Sartre. In a remark that would suggest that he was not familiar with William James’ work on the topic (or had forgotten about it), he says that these conversions, ‘which have not been studied by philosophers, have often inspired novelists’ (Sartre 1996, 475–6). In Words, his memoir of childhood, he notes how often characters in his plays and novels make their decisions suddenly and in crises – this, he says, is ‘because I make them in my own image; not as I am, I dare say, but as I have wanted to be’ (Sartre 1976, 148). Moreover, he was conscious of his own ethico-political conversion by the end of the war: conversion from the pre-war person who was ‘more or less Stendhal’s egotistical individualist’, to one caught up, like so many others in the war years, in the myth of (surrogate) heroism; finally to one who has seen the light in a commitment to socialism – ‘after the war came the true experience, that of society’ (Sartre 1979, 34). Sartre’s appeal to conversion in the ethical sphere manifestly drew on familiar biblical and religious sources. Conversion in the biblical sense, metanoia in Greek, is a change of mind and heart, a religious or moral transformation, a turning from a state of sin or estrangement to a new way of life in union with God. Typically this takes place at a time of crisis, or judgment, against a background of salvation history marked by an original fall followed in time by the promise of deliverance and salvation and leading to its full realisation at the end of time. Sartre’s account of (non-religious) ethical conversion in the Notebooks incorporates the main elements of this pattern. In these terms, the conflict-ridden world of Being and Nothingness has to be read historically; it is, he says, ‘an

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ontology before conversion’, dealing with an original, fallen human condition. The flight from freedom and authenticity into bad faith and alienation, and the sadism, masochism, and conflict portrayed in selfother relations in this book, thus constitute the natural attitude of the original fallen state. About human nature in this sense, he proposes: The very fact that Being and Nothingness is an ontology before conversion takes for granted that a conversion is necessary, and that as a consequence there is a natural attitude. How then do I explain nature, since man is free? I do not deny that there is a nature; that is, that one begins with flight and inauthenticity. But the question is whether this nature is universal or historical … Nature would be the historical fact that human beings have a nature, that humanity in choosing oppression to begin its history chose to begin with nature. In this sense the perpetual dream of an antiphysis would be the historical and perpetually utopian possibility of another choice. Nature is one’s choice of oneself in the face of other people’s oppressive freedom (Sartre 1992a, 6, 20, 37).

Flight and inauthenticity is essentially the attempt to escape the burden of freedom and responsibility. In this situation, freedom becomes negative in regard to oneself and oppressive in relation to others. Radical conversion, in its negative moment, is the overcoming of fallen nature, a turning from the dynamic of bad faith and oppressive social relations that constitute the natural condition. In its positive moment, it is a turning to intersubjectivity in the recognition of mutual freedom and responsibility and commitment to the need for ‘an ethics without oppression’. In Sartrian terms, conversion is a move from one form of (practical) consciousness to another, from the pre-reflective or lived project for control and appropriation of the world to a project of pure reflection in which one is actively committed to solidarity with others, especially the most oppressed: [Pure] reflection therefore is in no way contemplative, it is itself a project … With this, the existent in effect renounces being as in-itself-for-itself … (Sartre 1992a, 479). Conversion consists in renouncing the category of appropriation … in order to introduce into the internal relation of the Person the relation of solidarity, which will subsequently be modified into solidarity with others. There is a conversion from the project to-be-for-itself-in-itself and appropriation or identification to a project of unveiling and creation (Sartre 1992a, 482).

In terms derived mainly from Hegel, Sartre thinks of ethical conversion in relation to the domain of history, where history is conceived as a dialectical struggle to overcome original alienation and subsequent oppression. His argument is that without the postulate of ultimate

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ethical conversion there is no way of making sense of historical struggle. On the other hand, ethics needs history, for ‘no morality is possible without systematic action in some actual situation’ (Sartre 1992a, 471). What Sartre offers, in effect, is a secular model of salvation in time, embracing history as a whole and incorporating groups and individual within its scope. There is no place, of course, for invoking providence or a divine plan in this schema; nor does Sartre suppose that there is a necessary or internal finality within history towards the preferred outcome (viz. the realm of freedom, or the city of ends, in the Kantian phrase). The idea is something like the following. History can be understood best as the scene of ongoing struggle between oppressive and liberating forces, in effect between conditions that negate the ontological character of being human (authentic freedom) and those that promote its untrammelled development. The ethico-political struggle for freedom, for the individual and for humanity at large, confers sense on the process inasmuch as the goal expresses human ontology and has the value of the good. To engage in the attempt one needs optimistic belief in its possibility; but nothing guarantees the outcome. How does conversion come about in this ontological model of salvation-history? The first condition of action, according to Sartre, lies in the imagination, in our being able to envisage a future state of affairs that we can take steps to bring about. In place of the prophet in religious tradition, he looks to the ethicist as a historical figure to play the role of guiding others to conversion. The ethicist, he says, holds a privileged historical position that distances him the most from the oppressed and the oppressors; he shares in the condition of each, but standing at a sufficient distance from both, he is able ‘to conceive of the necessity of an ethics without oppression, hence to conceive of conversion’ (Sartre 1992, 9). Others might then respond to the message. More generally, he says that ‘conversion may arise from the perpetual failure of attempts of the For-itself to be’ – that is, to become self-sufficient, resulting in a relentless experience of failure that constitutes hell: Every attempt of the For-itself to be an In-itself is by definition doomed to fail. From this we can fully account for the existence of Hell; that is, the region of existence where existing means using every trick in order to be, and to fail at all these tricks, and to be conscious of this failure. (Sartre 1992a, 472).2 2

Sartre famously explored these ideas of ‘Hell’ in his play No Exit (Huis Clos), written around the time of the publication of Being and Nothingness and first performed in 1944.

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This is a hell from which escape may nonetheless be possible provided the For-itself can gather strength to ask itself ‘the pre-judicial question of the meaning of its acts and the reason for its failure’. Perhaps such conversion is the correlate of the the sinner turning away, in eventual frustration, from an unfulfilling life of wrongdoing. There is also the optimistic suggestion that conversion ‘is virtually possible among all the oppressed’ because awareness of oppression presages a grasp of the possibility of freedom. Even more generally, he suggests that the immediate needs of the oppressed encompass the idea of going beyond them: ‘the immediate needs of the oppressed … already encompass transcendence in its entirety as well as freedom. … in all human activity there is an understanding of the human condition and of freedom’ (Sartre 1992a, 471–2). The optimism in this standpoint is tempered nonetheless by the reflection that individual conversion presupposes general social conversion: ‘One cannot be converted alone. In other words, ethics is not possible unless everyone is ethical’ (Sartre 1992a, 9). Moreover, we cannot suppose that the envisaged universal deliverance will ever be achieved. The task of concrete ethics, he says, is ‘to prepare the realm of ends through a revolutionary, finite, creative politics. Conversely: that the realm of ends lies precisely in the preparation for the realm of ends’ (Sartre 1992a, 471). This suggests that the end-state, the realm of ends, can be realised in history but only ever in a limited, preparatory way. The struggle for an ethical society constitutes an ongoing struggle: history, and the need for ethics, does not come to an end; but in the light of the good, understood as a freedom, one can say that history nonetheless has a goal, that all people be set free. Sartre characterises ethical conversion as the ‘self-recovery of a being which was previously corrupted’, and this self-recovery he calls authenticity. More generally, he says that the modifications brought about by conversion are:

The play is famous for the line ‘Hell is other people’; but like Being and Nothingness, it too could be taken to reflect an ‘ontology before conversion’. In a spoken preface to the recording of No Exit in 1965 Sartre said that the statement has always been misunderstood and needs to be interpreted conditionally: ‘People thought that what I meant by it is that our relations with others are always rotten or illicit. But I mean something entirely different. I mean that if our relations with others are twisted or corrupted, then others have to be hell … Fundamentally, others are what is most important in us for our understanding of ourselves’ (Contat and Rybalka 1974, 99).

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paul crittenden A new ‘authentic’ way of being oneself and for oneself, which transcends the dialectic of sincerity and bad faith. A thematic grasping of freedom, of gratuity, of unjustifiability. A new relation of man to his project: he is both inside and outside (Sartre 1992a, 473).

Authenticity consists in going beyond bad faith (and its counterpart in a sincerity that serves as a related way of escaping responsibility); positively, it involves understanding the character of ‘for-itself ’ being (as free and responsible), and committing oneself actively and reflectively to the struggle for freedom. This is an admittedly vague ethical ideal, although it has sufficient content to constitute something more than a piece of jargon. In this vein, oppression in concrete areas of life, and the need to oppose it, is a recurring theme in the Notebooks – the imperative to overcome the oppression commonly exercised on children, the oppression of master in regard to slave, capitalist to worker, colonizer to colonized, male to female, and the oppression of those who have knowledge in regard to those who are denied it. In giving more specific ethical content to freedom as a value in the Notebooks, Sartre places considerable, almost exclusive, emphasis on the significance of generosity and creative activity. Elsewhere at the time, notably in Truth and Existence, he also stressed the importance of truthfulness. Freedom, generosity, creativity, truthfulness: these are all ideas closely linked to his ontology, constituting the basic themes in his plan for an ‘Ontological Ethics’. Freedom and the Ethics of Generosity In the Sartrean hierarchy of values, freedom appears ‘like a light above the plane of generosity’. It stands out because it defines what it is to be a conscious being in the world and is the irreducible ground of meaning and value. Nothing justifies me, but ‘it is me … who justifies myself inwardly’ by assuming my freedom and taking responsibility for what I do, but freedom as the mere power to initiate a course of action conveys nothing about value or the ethical good. Sartre recognises this in the remark that ‘Freedom per se is not lovable for it is nothing more than negation and productivity’ – that is, changing (negating) a given situation and bringing about something different (Sartre 1992a, 507). Assuming the power of choice, my freedom is a value precisely in so far I am drawn by it to bind myself by norms that enhance human good. Sartre illustrates this Kantian idea with the case of a person who

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falls seriously ill, let us say, with tuberculosis. The illness is a given that lies outside his freedom, it closes off a range of possibilities for action; but the ill person ‘has his range of possibles … he has to decide about his situation … he has to take responsibility for his illness’. Does the good lie simply in accepting the inevitable? There is something true, he allows, in an ethics that ‘places the greatness of man in his acceptance of the inevitable and of destiny’, but it is incomplete: Such an ethics is incomplete, for destiny has to be assumed so as to change it. It is not a question of adapting oneself to one’s illness, of installing oneself in it, but of living according to norms in order to remain a human being. Thus my freedom is a form of condemnation because I am not free to be or not to be ill and illness comes to me from the outside – it does not belong to me, it does not concern me, it is not my fault. But since I am free, I am constrained by my freedom to make it mine, to make it my horizon, my perspective, my morality, etc (Sartre 1992a, 433).

In this light one can ask, what norms in general govern authentic existence? What sort of ethical character would mark someone who, having escaped bad faith, is committed to overcoming personal, social and political oppression? Among moral qualities, Sartre’s focusses almost entirely on generosity – especially as linked with creative activity – and elsewhere on truthfulness. Each of these values, as already indicated, emerges on the ground of his ontology. As unselfish love, generosity constitutes a correlate of the Kantian idea of good will, something that can be called good without qualification. So in his plan for an ontological ethics, generosity stands at the head, ‘leading us to see like a light above the plane of generosity, freedom properly speaking’ (Sartre 1992a, 470). The being of being human, Sartre says, is entirely contingent or gratuitous, but out of nothing, so to speak, our being creates a world, or makes a world to be, in that we give meaning to the world through our free engagement with it. This basic activity, he suggests, has the form of an act of generosity inasmuch as we make a world to be shared with others. The model for this idea, very clearly, is the example of divine creativity in bringing the universe into existence out of unconstrained love. Generosity as the critical ethical value is thus linked to the gratuitous character of our being and, at the same time, to the idea of our way of being as involving free, creative activity and gift-giving. Generosity is thus portrayed as ‘the original structure of authentic existence’; it arises with reflective awareness of our gratuitous being (Sartre 1992a, 493–4); and reflection reveals its fundamental place in ethical life:

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paul crittenden Every creation is a form of giving and cannot exist without this giving. ‘Given to be seen,’ true. I give this world to be seen, and in this act I lose myself as a passion. Hence ethics here can only make exist for us what is already in itself, that is, lead us, with the help of nonaccessory [pure] reflection, to posit its implicit meaning as the explicit theme of our behaviour: absolute generosity, without limits, as a passion properly speaking and as the only means of being. There is no other reason for being than this giving. And it is not just my work that is a gift. Character is a gift. The Me is the unifying rubric of our generosity. Even egoism is an aberrant gift (Sartre 1992a, 129).

Sartre’s emphasis on concern for truth, or truthfulness, follows the same ontologico-ethical pattern that he identifies in connection with generosity. But, strangely, his treatment of the topic is reserved for the contemporaneous work Truth and Existence and hardly appears in the Notebooks. The human task, as manifested in generosity, is to create a world that we give to others as a reciprocal gift. Following Heidegger, he now explains in Truth and Existence that we create the world primarily through truthseeking activity in which we unveil or reveal the world for disclosure to others as a gift. Truth-seeking activity, in which judgment is an intersubjective phenomenon, is thus fundamental to our being. This goes with the view that truth, like ethical good, is absolute, allowing that it embraces subjects in time whose grasp of truth is characteristically provisional. Moreover, ‘the foundation of truth is freedom’: truth appears only to free projects and is the goal of free behaviour, even though one can always refuse the truth and choose ignorance or untruth (Sartre 1992b, 13). Fear of truth is fear of freedom, whereas to love the truth is to enjoy Being: To affirm [though truth-seeking practices] is to assume the world as if we had created it, to take our place in it, to take the side of Being (to side with things), to make ourselves responsible for the world as if it were our creation …To want the truth (‘I want you to tell me the truth’) is to prefer Being to anything else, even in a catastrophic form, simply because it is. But at the same time this is letting-it-be-as-it-is, as Heidegger says (Sartre 1992b, 30).

The concern for truth thus goes with generosity as a basic element of authentic (moral) existence. In speaking of generosity Sartre makes clear that it exists already, albeit in an aberrant form, in the ‘Hell of passions’ described in Being and Nothingness: ‘within this hell there is already generosity and creation. For in springing up within the world I give other For-itselves a new dimension of being’ (Sartre 1992a, 499). We are in the nature of the case bound to create: ‘the very structure of freedom imposes this on us’, for through

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the free act ‘something begins which was not’ (Sartre 1992a, 515). But in an unconverted world generosity (and truthfulness) exist in an aberrant, alienated form. With conversion, they achieve full expression. For Sartre, the favoured image of ethical generosity is to be found in aesthetic activity and the gift of a work of art: [Generosity as pure gratuity] is the only way of concretely reaching a freedom in its heart, insofar as it is subjective freedom … The work of art, for example, demands that its content be recognised materially by the freedom of a concrete public. It is a gift and a demand at the same time, and only makes a demand insofar as it gives something. It does not ask for the adhesion of a pure freedom but rather that of a freedom engaged in generous feelings, which it transforms … Relations among men must be based upon this model if men want to exist as freedom for one another: first, by the intermediary of the work (technical as well as aesthetical, political, etc); second, the work always being considered as a gift. The beautiful is a gift above all else. The beautiful is this world considered as given (Sartre 1992a, 141).

In the world of Being and Nothingness gift-giving is deeply problematic since it reflects the alienated framework of the struggle for power and control between self and other. Conversion to authentic existence changes this into a relationship of equals: ‘When the gift is given between equals without reciprocal alienation, the acceptance is free, disinterested, and unmotivated as the gift itself. Like the gift, it is freeing. This is the case in an evolved civilisation for the gift of the work of art to the spectator’ (Sartre 1992a, 370). The model for ethical behaviour in the ultimate realm of ends is thus presaged in the aesthetic order, in the work of art as both gift and demand. In going on to depict the change that comes with radical conversion, Sartre draws once again on biblical themes of creation and salvation, loss and gain: The authentic human being never loses sight of the absolute goals of the human condition. He is the pure choice of his absolute goals. These goals are: to save the world (in making being be), to make freedom the ground of the world, to take up creation for his own use, and to make the origin of the world absolute through freedom taking hold of itself … As soon as existence wells up, Being is called into question, perhaps lost, and has to be saved. Thus man attains himself in accepting losing himself in order to save Being (Sartre 1992a, 448).

One loses oneself in relation to the world (the in-itself) specifically by not seeking to be in-itself but serving to give the world particularity, thereby revealing it in truth:

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paul crittenden If the For-itself really does will to lose itself, that is, not be tempted to recapture itself as Being, not consider itself as its own end in the form of the Me/thing, then its task appears to it: through it Being is saved from Nothingness, Being manifests itself: the For-itself springs up so that Being may become Truth. In this way, the For-itself has a task of quasi-creation since it extirpates from the shadows of undifferentiatedness what in essence always falls back into them. The For-itself is the pure clarity of Being. It saves Being, which, in effect, will never be For-itself but rather for an existent that is for-itself (Sartre 1992a, 484).

Conversion effects above all a critical change in the character of selfother relations. In the world of Being and Nothingness the freedom of the other always appears as a threat to one’s own freedom and subjectivity: through the other, one becomes an object and one’s freedom appears perpetually frustrated. In the city of ends, by contrast, to become an object through the other is to be enriched precisely in the recognition of my freedom by the other: Through the Other I am enriched in a new dimension of Being: through the Other I come to exist in the dimension of Being, through the other I become an object. And this is in no way a fall or a threat in itself. This comes about only if the Other refuses to see a freedom in me too. But if, on the contrary, he makes me exist as an existing freedom as well as a Being/object … he enriches the world and me, he gives a meaning to my existence in addition to the subjective meaning I myself give it (Sartre 1992a, 500).

This opens up a new category of the unveiling of being-in-the-world in which one grasps, the pure freedom of others and acknowledges the goal of their activity. Typically, Sartre turns to the work of art to illustrate the idea: the contemplation of the work of art allows us to grasp how I can apprehend the Other’s goal: the work of art presents itself to me as an absolute end, a demand, a call. It addresses itself to my pure freedom and in this way reveals the pure freedom of the Other’ (Sartre 1992a: 500). This model of affirming the freedom of the other takes on general ethical force. One loses oneself in generosity to gain, in effect, a pearl of great price: The ego exists to lose itself – it is the Gift. Reconciliation with Destiny is generosity. In a society without classes it can also be love, that is, the project undertaken confident that freedom evaluated as such and willed as such will take up and transform my work and therefore my Ego, which will thus lose itself in the absolute dimension of freedom (Sartre 1992a, 418).

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Loving in this context, furthermore, is far removed from the unhappy ‘natural’ cycle of love as either masochism or sadism explored in Being and Nothingness: And loving here signifies something wholly other than the desire to appropriate. It is first of all an unveiling/creator: here too in pure generosity, I assume myself as losing myself so that the fragility and finitude of the other exist absolutely as revealed within the world (Sartre 1992a, 507).

The End of a Project In his portrayal of authenticity as an ethics of generosity, Sartre has moved far beyond the original ontology of Being and Nothingness to the ideal possibility of a stage of history in which alienation and oppression have been overcome. We are now, as he freely acknowledges, within the Kantian realm of ends, that is, the idea of an ideal city or community of virtuous agents, each an end in her own person, and each treating all others as ends.3 This is somewhat paradoxical given that Sartre’s concern in the Notebooks was to develop a concrete ethics that would address itself to the human situation in the mid-twentieth century and be directed to human liberation in this epoch. To that end, he stressed the need to focus on the conditions of a particular time rather than striving after an abstract goal: The project that the authentic human being is engaged in is never ‘the good of humanity,’ but rather in such and such particular circumstances, with such and such means, at such and such historical conjuncture, the liberation or the development of such and such concrete group (Sartre 1992a, 507).

In keeping with this, the Notebooks contain comment on a fair range of relevant social, political, and historical issues, but one could not say that Sartre went very far towards working out an ethics of liberation for the contemporary world. Rather, the ethical focus, constructed around

3 See Sartre (1992a, 500). The Kantian idea of the kingdom or city of ends is linked with one of his formulations of the categorical imperative, the ‘imperative of morality’: ‘Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, always as an end and never as a means only’ (Kant 1981, 47–52). Simone de Beauvoir, writing at much the same time that Sartre was working on the Notebooks, expresses solidarity with this principle in various manifestations: ‘It seems to us that the individual as such is one of the ends at which our action must aim. Here we are at one with the point of view of Christian charity, the Epicurean cult of friendship, and Kantian moralism which treats each man as an end’ (Beauvoir 1967, 133).

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generosity as the proper expression of our being-in-the-world inthe-midst-of-others, leaps beyond the present to an end-time (while allowing for its limited, anticipatory realisation in time). A distant focus of this kind is clearly important in ethics since the projection of goals sets standards relevant to the assessment of actual behaviour and real situations, but in the absence of more detail the emphasis yields an ethics that is largely programmatic and general. Sartrean conversion, the turning that would ensure authentic generosity, might thus appear as a magic wand. Perhaps one could say that any broad characterisation of an ethics is bound to be programmatic and general. The Kantian categorical imperative is of that order even in its most concrete form (in which it enjoins that one should act so as to treat humanity always as an end, and never as a means only); so too is the principle of utility in Utilitarianism; or the Aristotelian measure of acting in accord with reason and the moral virtues; or the religious injunction to love God first and your neighbour as yourself. Like these other ethical distillations, the Sartrean idea of an ethics of generosity, based on freedom, sets out a regulative ideal; but in contrast with the developed accounts of ethics in these other sources, Sartre seems unwilling to think about the ethical content that would support the ideal or to consider its implications for societies and individuals. This lacuna is related to others problems in the project as a whole. The basic thesis is that freedom, properly realized, will manifest itself in generosity towards other human beings and the world. By contrast, the freedom that shows itself in negative behaviour towards oneself or others is revealed, in effect, as a distorted way of being human. In these terms, Sartre’s idea of an ontological ethics might appear as a form of ethical naturalism, perhaps on Aristotelian or Stoic lines. The ground of such an ethics lies in an account of the basic characteristics of being a human being (an ontology), leading to an account of what would constitute human well-being or fulfilment (happiness) and what conditions, what qualities of character in particular, are needed to achieve this ideal (an ethics). In the name of freedom, however, Sartre rejects the attempt to base ethics on nature, for he supposes that this would mean that values are ‘written in things’ and are fixed independently of human subjects. The Aristotelian idea of nature, he supposes, is one of the ways in which freedom was alienated historically. This is not a convincing argument, in fact, for there is no reason to hold that talk of human nature inevitably means that values are fixed independently of subjects, nor for supposing

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that freedom would not count as fundamental to being human. Sartre’s contention is that to be free is not to have a nature. This is not convincing either, for it appears to treat freedom as unlimited by our specific bodily existence; in addition, it rests on the assumption that beings could have a nature only if the course of their existence were laid out in some determinate fashion as it is for ‘a patch of moss, a piece of garbage, or a cauliflower’ (Sartre 1977, 35–6). In any case, having driven out nature, by definition in effect, Sartre re-admits it by allowing that there is a ‘human condition’ embracing basic features of human existence (being a living body with certain generic powers, being in time, etc) that make freedom possible and set limits on its exercise. Suspicious of nature in the context of ethics, Sartre goes on to question related ideas such as character and virtue. Character, he suggests, is the product of an institutional and traditional society; as a stable set of relations with others and the world, character is therefore ‘nature’, arising ‘under the pressure of freedoms external to oneself ’ (Sartre 1992a: 6). As for virtue, he allows that there is a close kinship between the traditional virtue of charity ‘devoted to compensating for material injustices’ and his idea of generosity since each is a form of pure gratuity (Sartre 1992a, 141). Nonetheless, he insists that generosity is not a virtue (‘a habit marked by value’). Sartre’s objection to the idea of virtue arises on the ground of the ontology of Being and Nothingness and the problem of bad faith. In that ontology, the project to be something is the original fault since it involves the bid of the ‘for-itself ’ to be ‘in-itself ’ (to be an object rather than a subject). So the effort to be courageous, for instance, is diagnosed as ‘an original form of alienation’: Authenticity therefore leads to renouncing every project of being courageous (cowardly), noble (vile), etc. Because they are not realizable and because they all lead in any case to alienation. Authenticity reveals that the only meaningful project is that of doing (not that of being) and that the project to do something cannot itself be universal without falling into what is abstract (for example, the project to do good, always to tell the truth, etc., etc.) The one meaningful project is that of acting on a concrete situation and modifying it in some way … If the goal sought is to be courageous, the apparent and concrete end becomes a pretext for mystification … So, originally, authenticity consists in refusing any quest for being, because I am always nothing (Sartre 1992a, 475).

The sharp contrast presupposed here between doing and being seems spurious, for doing something presupposes having the powers, capacities, or dispositions for the kind of doing in question. As a rule, one who

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acts courageously has (and needs to have) courage. Moreover, the goal of acquiring the virtue is not to be courageous so much as to develop the disposition to act courageously as circumstances require. In the Notebooks, Sartre makes no reference to the treatment of the virtue of generosity (liberality) in Aristotle’s ethics. But neither does he refer to its central place in Descartes’ reflections on morality as a passion or feeling and subsequently as a virtue, or to its role as an ongoing affect of the mind in Spinoza’s ethics.4 What then is the ontological status of Sartrean generosity? Is it simply a passion or feeling related to concrete instances of behaviour that is somehow recurs, or is re-invented, from one action to another? But how would this be possible in the absence of a disposition, habit, or virtue, or something very like that? How would generosity otherwise hold as a stable feature of authentic existence? At key points, as the discussion has indicated, Sartre’s ethics of generosity has a Kantian character. This arises especially in the idea of the ‘realm of ends’ and the view that my freedom is a value in so far I am drawn by it to bind myself by norms that promote the good (by enhancing freedom, my own and that of others). Generosity, one is to suppose, is realized as a norm required by freedom: unlike the virtue of charity (as Sartre thinks of it) generosity is not ‘a gesture from the heart’, or something non-obligatory (Sartre 1992a, 141). But nothing more is said as to what generosity (and concern for truth) might imply in respect of further norms. Sartre is critical of the abstract character of Kant’s attempt to derive a substantial body of traditional morality from the formal principle of the categorical imperative.5 In this he is on strong grounds. His own view, reflecting perhaps an idealised conception of freedom, is that,

4 Aristotle (1984, 1119–1122b); Descartes (1987, 384, 388); Spinoza (2001, 144-45): ‘By generosity, I mean the desire by which from the dictates of reason alone each person endeavours to help other people and to join them to him in friendship’ (Ethics III, proposition 59, Scholium). The lack of reference to Descartes’ discussion is perhaps particularly disappointing (allowing that the Notebooks exist as a collection of notes, not a finished study of the topics). For Descartes too, in his own terms of course, treats free will as the highest realization of our being and thinks of the virtue of generosity – interpreted as appropriate self-esteem and thinking well of others – as arising in the recognition that nothing belongs to us more truly than freedom; he also sees generosity as the key to other virtues. In these terms, Descartes’ ethics of generosity might have served as an illuminating foil for Sartre’s own development of the themes. 5 Kant describes the categorical imperative, ‘the imperative of morality’, as one ‘which directly commands a certain conduct without making its condition some purpose to be reached by it’ (Kant 1981, 33). In its primary formulation he specifies it as: ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ (Kant 1981, 39).

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in general, norms cannot be set in advance (or made general). The free person who has undergone ethical conversion will know what to do – will know what generosity and freedom require – in any particular set of circumstances. This might be compared with Aristotle’s view that judgment concerning the morally good and bad lies with the practically wise person rather than some universal code of behaviour. In this case, however, the philosopher provides a considered account of practical wisdom and its connection with the moral virtues. Or perhaps Sartre’s appeal to generosity as the guide to behaviour carries an echo of Augustine’s advice in a Christian setting ‘Love, and do what you will’. But again, the Augustinian tradition also sets out in some detail what love demands and what it excludes. While Sartre’s ethics contains Kantian elements, he nonetheless rejects Kantian ethics, the ethics of duty, on the grounds that it too, like the ethics of virtue, involves alienation: ‘the freedom that for Kant upholds the categorical imperative is noumenal, therefore [it is] the freedom of another. … It is the projection of the Other into the noumenal world’ (Sartre 1992a, 139). The moral agent, in the Kantian account, is a self outside the world of empirical phenomena (the noumenal self), not myself as I appear to myself. Such a self, Sartre suggests, is not my freedom, but a projection of the Other as the source of duty. This ethics ‘presupposes ‘that each one should exist for the other’. But duty in this framework is the abstract presence of the Other; so rather than being an ethics of freedom, ‘the ethics of duty is the ethics of slaves’. Nor does it matter that the Master might be abstract or dead, for the demand is the presence of the past and ‘one still continues to demand things in his name’ – in other words, the Kantian ethics of duty is a metaphysical form of theological ethics in which duties are defined and imposed by God’s sovereign command (Sartre 1992a, 267–68). In wanting to go beyond a heteronomous ethics of duty, Sartre nonetheless insists on the foundational importance of recognising that (ethical) demand is an inter-human fact, that ‘demand, like prayer, leaps out of the situation and establishes pure freedom above the ruins of the real world’ (Sartre 1992a, 239). He thus agrees that any attempt to ground obligation (duty) on just the freedom of the subject is bound to fail. What he seeks above all in his ethics, therefore, is a way of acknowledging ethical demand among free subjects that does not involve alienation. His formula is that ‘individual freedom proposes its goals to itself in taking account of its situation’ (Sartre 1992a, 239-40). Supposing that the situation includes the demands that arise with the freedom of the

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other, what light does this throw on the nature of the ethical relationship and ethical obligation? In the Notebooks Sartre looks once again to the work of art as a model for ethical obligation beyond alienation. The work of art, he says, ‘demands that its content be recognised materially by the freedom of a concrete public; it is a gift and a demand at the same time, and only makes a demand insofar as it gives something’ (Sartre 1992a, 141). Again, ‘the work of art presents itself to me as an absolute end, a demand, a call; it addresses itself to my pure freedom and in this way reveals to me the pure freedom of the Other’ (Sartre 1992a, 500). Ethical obligation, he proposes, is like that: a demand that arises in relation to the other, but in a way that elicits my freedom while revealing the freedom of the other. In elaborating this theme more fully in What is Literature? he ends by placing aesthetic experience on the ethical plane of generosity and locates both ethics and aesthetics in the ideal Kantian kingdom of ends. With a focus on literary art in particular, he writes: Let us bear in mind that the one who reads strips himself in some way of his empirical personality and escapes from his resentments, his fears, and his lusts in order to put himself at the peak of his freedom. This freedom takes the literary work and, through it, mankind, for absolute ends. It sets itself up as an unconditioned exigence in relationship to itself, to the author, and to possible readers. It can therefore be identified with Kantian good will which, in every circumstance, treats man as an end and not as a means. Thus, by his very exigence, the reader attains that very chorus of good wills which Kant has called the City of Ends (Sartre 2001, 208–9).

It is clear that, in these terms, art can hardly illuminate ethics, for it has already assumed an ethical character, and aesthetics, along with ethics, has been swept up to an ideal level. The move to art is thus selfdefeating. In any case the demand that comes with the work of art does not place an obligation on anyone to take the slightest note of it if they so choose. This is quite unlike the unconditional demand that one assume responsibility for one’s own freedom and recognise the freedom of the other by respecting other persons as ends in themselves. One cannot be sure how Sartre might have developed his argument had he carried his work on ethics to completion. As it stands, however, he fails to provide a plausible account of ethical obligation or otherwise show why human beings have good reason to act generously, with a concern for truth and other moral values. Sartre also failed to meet his espoused aim of developing a concrete social ethics that would be general yet closely related to its time, one that

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would not fall into the trap of idealism and abstraction. Having set the terms, he failed to escape the trap. Towards the end of the 1940s Sartre recognised that he had arrived at an impasse and put the work aside as misconceived. A failed project may nonetheless be illuminating. Sartre’s reflections on an ontological ethics beyond God, but not beyond good and evil, uncover insights, call for thought, and provoke argument on almost every page.6 Bibliography Aristotle. 1984. Nicomachean Ethics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Beauvoir, S. de. 1984. Adieux, a farewell to Sartre. Trans. P. O’Brian. London: André Deutsch. —— . 1967. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York. Contat, M. and M. Rybalka. 1974. The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol 1. Trans. R. C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Descartes, R. 1987. The Passions of the Soul in The Philosophical Writing s of Descartes. vol 1. Trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. 1981. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. L. White Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Sartre, J.-P. 1976. Words. Trans. Irene Clephane. Harmondsworth: Penguinn Books. —— . 1977. The Humanism of Existentialism. Trans. B. Frechtman. In Essays in Existentialism, ed. Wade Buskin. Secausus New Jersey: The Citadel Press. —— . 1979. ‘The Itinerary of a Thought’. In Between Existentialism and Marxism. Trans. J. Mathews. New York: Morrow Quill. —— . 1992a. Notebooks for an Ethics. Trans. D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— . 1992b. Truth and Existence. Trans. A. van den Hoven. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— . 1996. Being and Nothingness. Trans. H. Barnes. London: Routledge. —— . 2001. What is Literature? Trans. B. Frechtman. London: Routledge. Spinoza, B. 2001. Ethics. Trans. W. H. White. Ware UK: Wordsworth.

6 Parts of this paper will appear in a revised version in chapter two of my forthcoming book, Sartre in Search of an Ethics. Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle-uponTyne, 2009.

APPROACHES TO THE PROBLEM OF DUALISM IN HEIDEGGER AND INDIAN YOGACARA BUDDHISM Peter Oldmeadow Abstract This paper examines the approach of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to the problem of dualism and explores the usefulness of his approach to comparative religion and philosophy in general and, more particularly, to the study of dualism in Buddhism. Heidegger was, of course, operating within a Western philosophical tradition and his focus was on Western metaphysics and its implications. His critique of the Western philosophical tradition, however, provides a clearing in which important aspects of other traditions and cultures may come to light. This is particularly so in the case of Buddhism, especially of East Asian Mahayana, with which his work has an obvious affinity. Analysis of the problem of dualism finds its clearest expression in Buddhism in the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism, which analyses the human predicament and our entanglement in the cycle of ongoing unsatisfactoriness in terms of subjectobject duality. This is not so much a radical new departure within Buddhism but rather a way of presenting core Buddhist ideas in the experiential or phenomenological framework which is tied to the soteriology of the Yogacara or Vijnanavada (doctrine of Consciousness) school. Heidegger, for his part, sees the dualist orientation in the Western metaphysical tradition as fundamentally distorting and a cause of cultural and personal alienation. He struggled against the effects of this heritage. In attempting a deconstruction of the dominant epistemological and metaphysical stance of the Western tradition Heidegger hoped that that the grip of the modern Western way of ‘enframing’ reality might be loosened and new attunement to Being might occur. This, in turn, opens up new ways of revisioning our past and understanding other worlds.

Introduction A prominent feature of the writing and teaching careers of Professor Garry Trompf has been his concern with methodology in the study of religion and its broader relation to the history of ideas. As an undergraduate in Religious Studies at the University of Sydney under the tutelage of Professors Trompf and E. J. Sharpe, I quickly realised the fundamental importance of the questions that methodology raised in epistemology and even ontology. The study of the history of Religious

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Studies and the social sciences threw light on our most basic assumptions. It became clear to me that much of the approach based on shared cultural assumptions or ‘common sense’ was questionable and actually an impediment to an adequate understanding of different religious and cultural universes and to different ways of being. This realisation led me to take up the academic study of philosophy and to an interest in comparative philosophy. Later, when I held a joint academic position shared between the departments of Religious Studies and Indian Subcontinental Studies at the University of Sydney, our common interests led to a particularly fruitful and enjoyable period in my teaching career when Professor Trompf and I co-taught, for some years, the Honours methodology course in Studies in Religion. This paper examines the approach of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to the problem of dualism and explores the usefulness of his approach to comparative religion and philosophy in general and, more particularly, to the study of dualism in Buddhism. Heidegger was, of course, operating within a Western philosophical tradition and his focus was on Western metaphysics and its implications. His critique of the Western philosophical tradition, however, provides a clearing in which important aspects of other traditions and cultures may come to light. This is particularly so in the case of Buddhism with which his work has an obvious affinity. Analysis of the problem of dualism finds its clearest expression in Buddhism in the Madhyamaka (‘Middle Way’) and Yogacara (‘Yoga Practice’) schools of Mahayana Buddhism. These rose to prominence as the most influential schools of Mahayana philosophy in India in the first half of the first millennium C.E. and remained influential in the spread of the Mahayana outside India. The main focus of this paper is on the Yogacara school. Although Yogacara’s early development is obscure its mature phase of development in India probably occurred in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. when it was systematised by the great scholarsages Asanga and Vasubandhu. Madhyamaka explores metaphysical dualism within a broader critique of substantialist ontology while Yogacara focuses on subject-object dualism within a more experiential or phenomenological approach. According to Yogacara, an erring of consciousness occurs through the split in our experience into a world of independently apprehensible objects (grahya) standing against an independent apprehending subject (grahaka). To take the two as independent realities is a fundamental mistake which the philosopher-sage strives to overcome.

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Heidegger, for his part, sees the dualist orientation in the Western metaphysical tradition as fundamentally distorting and a cause of cultural and personal alienation. He struggled against the effects of this heritage. His approach, which has its roots in phenomenology and which involves an existential analysis of Dasein as being-in-the-world, aims to overcome our entrenched dualistic mode of being. This dualistic mode, which is, according to Heidegger, only one possible comportment towards being, involves a constricting representation (Vorstellung) of things as objects (Gegenstände) which stand against us as subject. Heidegger also rejects the accompanying notion of truth as the correspondence between our ‘inner’ experiences and a reality ‘outside’ us. In attempting a deconstruction of the dominant epistemological and metaphysical stance of the Western tradition Heidegger hoped that that the grip of the modern Western way of ‘enframing’ reality might be loosened and new attunement to Being might occur. This loosening, in turn, can open new ways of re-visioning our past and understanding other worlds. The issue of dualism is not simply one of a number of possible points of comparison between Mahayana Buddhism and Heidegger. The problem of dualism is, for Heidegger, intimately tied to the investigation of what he calls ‘fundamental ontology’, the fundamental enquiry into the meaning of being. This investigation is not and cannot be the abstract investigation of a disinterested observer. It must be more fundamental than that and come prior to such a stance. However, we cannot begin this investigation with a ‘clean slate’, we are already ‘thrown’ into a world of meaning, a particular social and historical world, a world of particular possibilities. This does not mean that we must accept where we are. For Heidegger, philosophy or ‘thinking’ offers a path or way back to a more fundamental attunement (Stimmung) with Being, or openness to Being, which leads us into the mystery (Geheimnis) of Being where a more fundamental presencing (as opposed to representation) of beings can occur. Likewise, for Yogacara, dualism is present in all falsely constructed or imagined (parikalpita) worlds. It is intimately bound up with conceptuality (vikalpa) and cannot be overcome through abstract analytic procedures. Rather a more fundamental mode of being, or awakened awareness, which ‘precedes’ dualistic appearance (dvayapratibhasa), must be uncovered. In both Mahayana Buddhism and Heidegger a ‘remembering’, a going back, is involved. The dualism of subject and object, of perceiver and perceived, knower and known with which we are principally concerned here, is not the only form of dualism. Another well known kind is the dualism between

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absolute and phenomena. This can be envisaged as the dualism between God (or the Absolute) and the world. In some forms of Buddhism this kind of dualism can perhaps be seen in the dualism of nirvana (the unconditioned domain of liberation) and samsara (the conditioned world of birth and death). Heidegger and Mahayana Buddhism reject this kind of dualism. A third kind of dualism is linguistic or conceptual dualism: the dualism between black and white, left and right, night and day, good and evil, affirmation and denial. The third type of dualism is in fact related to the other two but will not be considered in this paper.1 Non-dualism does not necessarily imply monism and hence does not necessarily involve affirmation of the ‘the One’. Hindu Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism are both non-dualist but Advaita asserts the One and claims the sole ultimate reality of Brahman beside which no second exists (ekam advitiyam). Buddhism, in contrast, rejects dualism and, in most of its schools, also rejects monism. Reality for the majority of Buddhist is characterised as ‘not two’ (advaya) but does not require affirmation of the One. Heidegger also rejects monism in his approach to the issue of dualism. His approach affirms the importance of difference as does Buddhism with its emphasis on dependent origination (pratityasamutapada) or interdependence. The comparative exercise being undertaken here might be considered suspect or ‘controversial’. Such comparison is, admittedly, difficult and full of pitfalls. It is hard enough to compare closely related philosophers or systems such as Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism that share the same language and developed out of a common cultural milieu. How much more difficult then is it to compare philosophies across different times, languages and cultures? Sceptics might easily argue that comparative philosophy has often been been done to the detriment of understanding. It was common for Buddhologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to compare Buddhist thought with figures popular in the day such as Hume, Kant and Hegel. Stcherbatsky’s Buddhist Logic (1992) is a classic instance in which the incessant references to Kant and Hegel serve as much to obscure as to illuminate. Fashions of the later twentieth century have encouraged comparisons with Wittgenstein and more recently Derrida, with mixed results (Tuck 1990).

1

For a general discussion of different types of dualism see D. Loy (1988, 17–37).

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But are we to leave all cross-cultural philosophy comparisons behind? To accept such a position would suggest that no understanding across cultures is possible at all. But comparison always involves similarity and difference. As Dilthey (Dreyfus 1997, 10), one of the key figures in modern hermeneutics (along with Heidegger and Gadamer), observed, if things were identical there would be no point in comparison: there would be nothing to compare; if they were entirely different there would be no chance of understanding. Understanding involves both similarity and difference. In the case under consideration there are clear similarities in approach despite some differences. Philosophy, if it is not be sterile and academic, must remain rooted in concerns which have a basis in our humanity – in what it is to be human. Issues of existence and our own being are a concern to us. This is apparent in the approaches of Buddhism and Heidegger that eschew abstract philosophy and place our actual human existence at the centre of their investigations. The issue of existence for most people perhaps only becomes pressing in moments of despair, apparent meaninglessness or deep suffering. But more subtly, the angst or non-specific anxiety in which our finitude is present to us, points to the possibility of deeper questioning and awareness. Here Heidegger is far removed from the analytic and positivist philosophers and close to Buddhism for which the experience of duhkha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness), especially in the face of death, marks the beginning of the path, the inner journey. More positively, for Heidegger, the sense of astonishment or wonder at the mere fact of being can initiate the search into the question of being and the basis of our humanity. For Mahayana Buddhism, a glimpse or partial intuition of the openness or ‘emptiness’ of being (sunyata), can open the way to new possibilities in our understanding and mode of being in the world. It is certainly the case that notions of a clear divide between East and West are somewhat artificial. Even if there is something of a wall between East and West there has been constant traffic across it. Heidegger, while firmly based in the Western philosophical tradition, is in many ways an heir of the European Romantic tradition. The Romantics, especially the German philosophical romantics, were amongst the first to argue that the philosophical traditions of India had something to offer a Europe which they saw as becoming increasingly dominated by materialism and mechanism (Halbfass 1988, 69–83). August Schlegel (1767–1845), at the centre of German romanticism, inspired by his brother Friedrich, went on to become first professor of Sanskrit in Germany. The line of

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influence passes through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche (in his early days a follower of Schopenhauer) and others to Heidegger. Schleiermacher, a foundational figure of hermeneutics, was a member of the Romantic circle in Berlin. Again we see a lineage through Dilthey (who was also connected with Romanticism) to Heidegger. We thus see that forces influential in the very formation of Heidegger’s thought already involve India and Buddhism. As early as 1831 Hegel (Parkes 1996, 1) had written: ‘In Oriental systems and especially in Buddhism, nothingness, or the void [das Leere], is the absolute principle’. Heidegger himself had direct contact with Asian Buddhism. Members of the Japanese Kyoto school of Buddhist philosophy studied with him in Germany. In 1921 Yamanouchi Tokoryu who had been both a student and senior colleague of the foremost modern Japanese philosopher, Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945), went to Frieburg to study with Husserl and became probably the first Japanese student to study with Heidegger. In 1923 Tanabe Hajime, who along with Nishida is regarded as one of the founders of the Kyoto School, attended a lecture course given by Heidegger in Freiburg and also had private tutorials on German philosophy with him. In 1924 Tanabe published in Japanese the first serious commentary on Heidegger’s thought to be written in any language. Tanabe, at Husserl’s invitation, gave lectures on Nishida’s philosophy of ‘nothingness’ which Heidegger attended. Heidegger was himself offered a three-year post in Tokyo in 1924. In the 1930s Nishitani Keiji, who later as Chair of the Department of Modern Philosophy at Kyoto came to be regarded as leader of the School, spent two years in Germany where he attended Heidegger’s seminars and had many conversations with him. Details of these contacts and many others are given by Graham Parkes (1996, 79–117). As Parkes notes, by 1927 Heidegger had already engaged in philosophical dialogue with three of the greatest thinkers of twentieth century Japan and had had ‘ample opportunity to learn about the Buddhist ideas of nothingness, the affinity between Meister Eckhart and Zen and the basic ideas of Daoist thought’ (Parkes 1996, 97). The influence also runs from Germany to the East. It is perhaps not surprising that what Heidegger wrote about nothingness (das Nichts) in What is Metaphysics (published in German in 1929 and translated into Japanese in 1930) was, as Heidegger later wrote to a Japanese colleague, ‘understood immediately’ by its Japanese readers, in contrast to the nihilistic misunderstandings prevalent in Europe (May 1996, 25). Being and Time (Sein und Zeit 1927), the work that brought Heidegger to prominence, was translated into Japanese before any other language and

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has been translated into that language more times than any other. It has only been translated in English twice with the first translation only occurring in 1962. Although Heidegger in his public statements appeared ambivalent about the possibilities of East-West dialogue, he thought that by conceptualising the ‘clearing’ properly, Western and Eastern thinking could be brought into useful engagement, and that such an engagement could assist in rescuing the nature of human being from threats posed by technology and its manipulation of Dasein (Parkes 1996, 106). Heidegger was also in contact with members of the Eranos circle which included D.T. Suzuki, the most influential modern interpreter of Zen Buddhism, the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, Henri Corbin (who translated Heidegger into French), Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and others (Wasserstrom 1999). Quite apart from questions of influence or provenance of ideas, however, comparative studies may be mutually illuminating. In the present instance, aspects of Buddhist studies may throw light on parts of Heidegger’s thinking and Heidegger’s thinking may illuminate issues in Buddhist thought. In my own case, my interest in Buddhist ideas on emptiness and non-duality have been revivified by reading Heidegger: it has been possible to approach the Buddhist texts afresh. Clearly there are possibilities in the texts, in the writings of Nagarjuna and others, still awaiting exploration. Later Buddhist traditions did not take the only directions available in reading them nor are their interpretations exhaustive. Even within Buddhist traditions terms like sunyata (emptiness) have been constantly contested, and still are. The possibilities of using Buddhist thought as an avenue to understanding and interpreting Heidegger has not been given the consideration it deserves. This, in part, reflects the common dismissal of Asian philosophy by Western academic philosophers and questioning of whether philosophy, properly speaking, even exists in Asia (Halbfass 1988, 145–59). It also reflects the lack of expertise in Asian languages among academic philosophers and the difficulty of finding adequate terminology with which to translate Asian philosophical concepts (Parkes 1987, 5–6). Another reason is that the extent of Heidegger’s knowledge of and indebtedness to Buddhist and Daoist thinking is not generally recognised. This is partly because Heidegger never fully acknowledged it (May 1996). But these are inadequate reasons for more serious investigation. Heidegger’s thinking, like Asian philosophy, was long rejected by the analytic tradition as proper philosophy. Roger Scruton in his otherwise excellent A Short History of Modern Philosophy dismisses

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Heidegger as pompous and unintelligible. He writes: ‘the reader has the impression that never before has so many words been invented and tormented in the attempt to express the inexpressible’ (1984, 256). Only more recently has the importance of his work been widely recognised. Heidegger’s debt to Asian philosophy is now beginning to be betterunderstood thanks largely to the work of Graham Parkes (1987, 1996) and Reinhard May (1996). As Parkes notes, Heidegger’s revolutionary understanding of nothingness presented in Being and Time may owe as much to the influence of Buddhist and Daoist thinking as to his ‘destruction’ of the history of Western ontology (1996, 89). Surely the points of contact and resonances are worth investigating. Parkes relates that Heidegger’s eminent pupil, Hans-Georg Gadamer, in 1985 said to him that ‘Heidegger studies would do well to pursue seriously comparisons of his work with Asian philosophies’ (1987, 5). It is also the case that as Buddhism is transmitted to the West it must be ‘translated’ both in an obvious textual sense but also in the sense that it must be brought into relation with Western philosophical, religious, social and even political traditions. Because Heidegger’s thinking has affinities with Buddhism and yet is rooted in Western thinking his work may provide some useful tools for this endeavour. For understanding to occur there must be some framework or pre-understanding in which it is received. Of course, in the process a dialogue may occur and a dialogical process ensue, in which the framework itself may undergo change (Gadamer 1993). It is naïve to believe we should translate the texts before interpreting them.

Heidegger’s ‘clearing’ Heidegger has a double value in the present context. Firstly, in dealing with the dualist orientation of most Western metaphysics in he came up with formulations which resonate with Buddhist approaches to ontology and epistemology. This provides fruitful ground for comparison between Mahayana Buddhism and Heidegger’s thought. Secondly, Heidegger carried out a critique of the Western metaphysical tradition which provides a clearing wherein Buddhist (and other) modes of thought and understanding can be approached afresh. Significantly, Heidegger also articulated how the dominant modern philosophical way of understanding, first articulated by Descartes, but present in much modern philosophy up until his time, was characteristic of modernity

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in general. He also indicated, without fully elaborating the point, how this paradigmatic view of reality has been instrumental in the ‘Europeanisation of the earth and of man’ which has accompanied the spread of modernity (Heidegger 1982, 15). The investigation into the nature of being is fundamental to Heidegger. His other concerns – his interest in language, his approach to the history of philosophy, his hermeneutics, his philosophy of art, his understanding of science and technology, his approach to issues of authenticity, and other concerns – flow from it. This does not merely reflect Heidegger’s personal interest in ontology, but more importantly his conviction that the question of being (Seinsfrage) must precede all other philosophical questions. This is not a question about any particular being but about being as such, about that which makes any being possible, it is about the Being (Sein) of beings (Seiende). Unless we begin with this question we will not investigate the presuppositions which shape all our enquiries and which can determine the questions we ask and even the answers that make sense to us. Unless these assumptions are made evident and a more fundamental enquiry takes place the possibilities for our understanding, and even our way of being in the world, will be limited. Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, has taken centre stage in modern philosophy since its inception with René Descartes (1596–1650) and we are accustomed to start our investigations there. The epistemological approach is only possible according to Heidegger on the basis of a number of assumptions: assumptions concerning the nature of the subject, the objective world, the nature of thought, and so on. The questions framed often presuppose these unarticulated assumptions. For example, it is asked, ‘How can we be certain that our knowledge of the world is correct?’ Or, ‘How can we even be certain that the objective world exists!’ Such questions suggest a subject (the detached observer) separate from the object of enquiry (the world), and that correct knowing is rooted in the thought of the subject. In other words a strong subject-object dualism is presupposed in the framing of the question. According to Heidegger, a host of other mental constructs and suppositions are also involved. The idea of the detached observer is already present in Plato but finds its most extreme and characteristically modern expression in the philosophy of Descartes with its rooting of certainty in the subject and rational thought. Heidegger devotes particular attention to Descartes for, as Charles Guignon notes, it is in Descartes that ‘[t]he subject becomes the centre around which all other entities revolve as “objects” ’

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(1983, 17). The usual understanding of Descartes as clearing the ground, getting rid of old assumptions, and liberating philosophy by his radical doubting, his scepticism, and his search for the grounds of certainty is, according to Heidegger, a false picture. Why? Because Descartes not only presupposes the priority of the need for certainty in philosophy, he also presupposes the grounds for that certainty in the acceptance of mathematics as the foundation of thought and the measure of reality. This understanding of Descartes had been prefigured in Galileo’s ‘mathematical projection’ of reality (Guignon 1983, 162). Descartes says, ‘I think therefore I am’ (cogito ergo sum) but this is not a question of inference: ‘The sum is not a consequence of thinking, but vice versa, it is the ground of thinking, the fundamentum’ (Heidegger 1993, 302). The human subject becomes the ground of certainty only because mathematics is considered the basis of thought, and thought the essence of the human subject (res cogitans). As Heidegger says, ‘Because the mathematical now sets itself up as the principle of all knowledge, all knowledge up to now must be put into question whether it is tenable or not’ (1993, 301). Hume, Kant and others accept this priority of certainty, and take up the question of whether the subject has a true picture of the world: whether our ideas, perceptions and other ‘inner’ experiences correspond to the reality ‘outside’ us. The world, understood to be radically separated from the thinking subject (res cogitans), is, in line with Descartes’ method, reduced to one homogenous type, subject to measurement or quantification (res extensa). This does not involve the discovery of new facts but rather a new comportment towards being, a new way of standing separated from the world which is now reduced to the status of ‘object’. For Kant, who adopts this stance, the question of whether we can know the external world as it is (ding an sich) becomes central. For the grounds of that certainty he turns to mathematics and the method of Newton: ‘The true method of metaphysics is fundamentally the same as that which Newton has introduced into natural science, and which has there yielded such fruitful results…’ (cited in Schumacher 1978, 19). Heidegger, in interrogating the metaphysical tradition which preceded him, is not merely interested in providing a new ‘answer’ but in reawakening the question which he believed had been in large measure forgotten in Western philosophy and in Western culture more generally where the understanding of being has been increasingly determined by mechanisation and homogenisation, and by ‘technology’. He believed it is urgent that this question be reawakened for our understanding for

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ourselves as human beings and for the future of Western civilisation. More important than any abstract answer is the questioning. The questioning, the ‘way’ or ‘the path’, is as important as the destination. According to Heidegger the questioning is ‘the piety of thinking’ (Shih-yi Hsiao 1987, 97). Philosophy is as much about ‘uncovering’ or ‘recovering’ the question, as much about finding the way back to the wonder that accompanies the question, as it is about providing an ‘answer’. Heidegger had no time for those philosophers, such as the logical positivists, who regarded questions about the nature of Being as metaphysical nonsense caused solely by ambiguities in our use of the verb ‘to be’. For Heidegger there is nothing obvious about Being, and ‘common sense’ will not provide an adequate approach to these questions. According to Heidegger (Guignon 1983, 10), what is now taken to be common sense ‘is the shallow product of that manner of forming ideas which is the final fruit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’. What is ‘common sense’ or obvious in one time or culture is not necessarily so in another. In treading the path ‘back’ Heidegger opens possibilities for new beginnings in Western culture but also to new approaches to other cultures. Heidegger believes that the dualistic and objectivist stance that has dominated the sciences and social sciences does not reflect our most basic situation but rather represents a historical comportment towards being which has opened some possibilities – technology and technological civilisation, for instance – but has also gone hand in hand in the West (and now the globe with the ‘Europeanisation of the earth’) with a forgetting of being. This forgetting has been compounded by a further forgetting: we have forgotten the forgetting. Thus the forgetting involves alienation and a consequent loss of human possibilities. The way ‘back’ involves a ‘remembering’ of being; a reconstituting of a greater wholeness. The way can be aided by appreciation of other modes of being in the world preserved in other cultures – in Heidegger’s case through his interest in Taoism and East Asian Buddhism – and it can, in turn, facilitate a new appreciation of other cultural and spiritual traditions. According to Heidegger it is Dasein, our concrete being in the world, which makes meaning possible. But we do not simply exist in the world as do inanimate objects or as do trees, or even animals. Humans are unique in that we not only exist but also ek-sist in the sense that we have a mode of being in which we ‘stand out’ (ek-sist) or place ourselves outside ourselves in the world (Kochelmans 1972, 3–32). But consciousness does not simply create meaning or project meaning outside of itself. Nor

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do we find meaning in the world which we receive passively and then represent through our thought or through language. Rather by ‘stepping forth’ into the world Dasein makes something of itself and the world; by ‘stepping forth’ it gives meaning. Here Heidegger was indebted to Schelling who had revived this original sense of Existenz: ‘Ex-sitenz, what steps forth from itself and manifests itself in stepping forth’ (cited in Inwood 1999, 61). It is through our activities, which are often preconscious or pre-reflective, and through our interaction and dialogue with others, that we establish meaning. As Kockelmans says, humanity is not a res cogitans, a thinking thing, but ‘an ek-sisting originator of meaning’ (1972, 10). We do not add these meanings to an ‘objective’ situation. They are not added later. We are already ‘thrown’ into a world of meaning, a particular social and historical world, a world of particular possibilities. Since, according to Heidegger’s account, we are always involved in understanding and interpreting rather than in ascertaining what things are ‘in themselves’ in an objectivist sense, Dasein must be understood as hermeneutical, and hermeneutics must be understood as central to philosophy, and central to our humanity. As David Couzens Hoy notes, ‘Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein as being-in-the-world changes our understanding of understanding from a derivative phenomenon to the central feature, the keystone, of human experience’ (1993, 171). How we understand Being – that which makes any being possible – is inseparable from how we understand beings (things). Heidegger was critical of the Western metaphysical tradition’s understanding of both. This led him to critique the two forms of dualism flagged at the beginning of this paper: dualism between Absolute being and the world (or between beings and what makes them possible); and dualism of subject and object. One approach found in traditional metaphysics is to conceive Being as an ontological absolute. God, or the ground of being, is that through which everything has its being or foundation. All beings are dependent on one absolute Being. In this approach Absolute being is reified, taken as a thing or existent. It is another being, albeit a being of a superior kind. Heidegger rejects this. Being cannot be reified as something which is somehow separate or beyond beings. This introduces a dualism between the absolute and the world. Although we must distinguish between beings (Seiende) and what makes them possible (Sein) the answer does not lie according to Heidegger in the reified God of dogmatic theology or the eternal being of Platonism. Heidegger also rejects the dualism between the eternal and the transitory, between being and

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becoming, between eternity and time, and between appearance and reality. Heidegger is also critical of an approach to beings (things) – more typical of Aristotle and traditions that follow him – which explain beings in terms of substance or substantial existence. According to this view, substance is that which endures through time and affords things their substantial identity, e.g., substantial person, substantial horse, substantial table. In this view the substantial existence of things accounts for their separate existence, their individuality, their identity (inherent existence). Because things have separate existence they stand separated from each other and separate from the substantial subject who apprehends them by coming to know their qualities. Thus a strong dualism between the subject and the object, between the knower and object of knowledge is introduced. But, according to Heidegger, only in representational thought can things exist separate from each other and separate from the knowing subject. Heidegger rejects the subject-object mode of being as primary. For him, the essence of truth cannot be correspondence. More fundamentally, truth is a matter of revealing or ‘unconcealment’ (aletheia) which requires a ‘clearing’ (lichtung) in which the possibility of things disclosing themselves is realised. In the ‘clearing’, the presencing of entities takes place. If we take correspondence as the essence of truth, as the only way in which beings reveal themselves as they are, and take the subjectobject mode as the correct way to inhabit the world, we arrive at an impoverished understanding of truth, of the world, and of ourselves.

Buddhism The Buddhist path provides a way to move from delusion to awakened awareness. It takes as its starting point the experience of pain (duhkha) that categorises our normal mode of being in the world and provides a way of overcoming and realising the end of pain (nirvana). Buddhist philosophical endeavour always serves this soteriological aim. All Buddhist schools identify the three root causes of duhkha as greed, hatred and delusion. Delusion (avidya or moha), is the precondition for the operation of the other two. The Buddhist path, and more particularly Buddhist philosophy, aim to expose the nature of delusion and to eliminate it. All Buddhist schools agree that we are mistaken about ourselves and also about the world. We believe that we and ‘things’ exist in the world

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with an enduring identity when, in fact, we and ‘things’ are both impermanent and without essence or identity (anatma). Our attempts to grasp the world and find permanent satisfaction in it are as futile as our attempts to establish ourselves. This is because both ‘things’ and ‘ourselves’ are not separate substantive existents but are without self or individuality (anatma) or, in the language of Mahayana Buddhism, are empty (sunya) (i.e., empty of independent existence). The full implications of this and the specific question of the dualisms discussed in the first part of this paper were explored by the Madhyamaka and Yogacara schools of Mahayana philosophy. As noted at the start of this paper, Madhyamaka deals more with ontology; Yogacara focuses more directly on our way of experiencing, and could be said to have a more phenomenological orientation. The main focus of this section of the paper will be on subject-object duality as understood in Yogacara. However, first some consideration will be given to the critique made by the Madhyamikas (followers of Madhyamaka School) of absolutist approaches to ontology. The Madhyamikas investigate what the nature of being must be for anything to be possible, for anything to exist or arise at all. Nagarjuna (second century C.E.), the founder and foremost philosopher of the Madhyamaka school, following ideas presented in the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) Mahayana Sutras, argues that it is only because all things are ‘empty’ (sunya) that anything is possible. Or, to put it more abstractly, the ultimate or absolute nature of things is emptiness (sunyata). Without it nothing makes sense. If things had an essence and really were separate, according to Nagarjuna, they could not enter into any relationship at all. Nagarjuna says, if you postulate separate existence, ‘You will negate cause, effect, doer, means of doing, action, arising, cessation and result’ (Madhyamakakarika XXIV, 17). In asserting emptiness (sunyata) as the ultimate nature Nagarjuna brings to the centre a distinction, present in early Buddhism but not emphasised therein, between the relative (things or dharmas) and the absolute (sunyata). Heidegger makes a similar distinction when he talks of ‘ontological difference’: the difference between things or beings (Seiende) and what makes them possible, i.e., Being or the nature of Being (Sein). Both Heidegger and Nagarjuna argue that such a distinction is necessary but warn against the reification of Sein (Being) and sunyata (emptiness) respectively. Nagarjuna argues that sunyata, ultimate nature, is not a thing, not even one of the highest kind. It is more of the nature of a ‘nothing’ and is itself empty (sunya). The absolute must not be understood

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in a dualistic fashion as something separate from relative existence. Nagarjuna says that those who believe in separate existence of ordinary things have a problem but those who believe in the separate existence of sunyata (as some kind of thing, even the most universal or absolute one) are incurable! Likewise, for Heidegger, Sein (Being) should not be conceived as something separate and may better be understood in terms of nothingness (das Nichts) rather than as a positive entity. Heidegger (Dallmayr 1993, 210) writes, ‘Nothingness is neither an object nor anything that ‘is’ at all; it occurs neither by itself nor ‘apart from’ beings, as a sort of adjunct. Nothingness is that which makes the disclosure of being(s) as such possible for our human existence’. Nagarjuna also rejects the dualism of time and eternity. Following the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, Nagarjuna argues that nirvana (the goal of the Buddhist path) is empty and not to understood as beyond or separate to the world of birth and death (samsara). It is not an eternal realm lying beyond time and becoming. Once we abandon the notion of an absolute having independent existence we cannot place samsara and nirvana in opposition. Ontologically there is no distinction between them. Nagarjuna writes, ‘the limit of nirvana is the limit of samsara. Between the two there is not the slightest difference whatsoever’ (Madhyamakakarika XXV, 20). The difference is one of existential realisation, not ontology.

Yogacara Buddhism While the focus of Madhyamaka philosophy is on criticising substantialist ontologies, the epistemological error of subject-object dualism is tackled most directly by the Yogacarins. The term ‘Yogacara’ (lit. ‘yoga practice’) points to the importance of meditative practice within the tradition. Yogacara school is also known as ‘Vijñanavada’ or ‘doctrine of consciousness’ and this name points to an interest in the development of consciousness; in particular with how consciousness ‘hardens’ into an apparently independently existing subject on the one hand standing opposed to apparently existing objects on the other. These are rather graphically referred to respectively as grahaka (grasper/apprehender) and grahya (graspable/apprehensible). This subject (grahaka) is taken as standing outside the world of objects (grahya) which it believes it can control or master. This is not a neutral or disinterested process but is related to attachment and aversion, to the the attempt to appropriate

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what is desirable and avoid what is unpleasant. According to the Yogacara understanding this hardening, this apparent independence, is a mistake and leads to duhkha (pain). Yogacara is interested in how this comes about and also in undoing or reversing the process: in making the mind pliant, in dissolving the false duality of independent subject and object. This reversal or turning back involves a transformation of consciousness, a change from deluded dualistic consciousness (vijñana) to nondualistic enlightened awareness (jñana). How this is achieved relates back to Yoga practice. The doctrine of the three natures (tri-svabhava) or three characteristics (tri-laksana) is central to the Yogacara philosophical presentation. The three natures can be understood as three perspectives necessary to give an adequate account of reality: of the world and our experience of it. The three perspectives are intimately related and do not refer to different realities or different things. Nonetheless, unless we take account of all three we will fall into an unbalanced view and easily adopt some form of extreme view. We can fall into various forms of attribution (samaropa) if we attribute too much reality to things and into forms of negation (apavada) if we attribute too little reality to them. The first tends to various kinds of eternalism, the second to various kinds of nihilism. The Yogacarins aim to find the ‘middle way’ and avoid these extremes. The three natures or characteristics are termed: the imagined nature (parikalpita-svabhava); the dependent-on-others nature (paratantrasvabhava); and the perfected nature (parinispanna-svabhava). The parikalpita (imagined) nature indicates how we imagine the world to be, as characterised by an apparently independent subject (grahaka) and apparently independently existing objects (grahya). This is, according to the Yogacarins, a mistaken construction, an epistemological error. We do know the world correctly when we imagine it to be characterised in this way or to have this nature. The dependent-on-others (paratantra) indicates how things exist, i.e., in dependence on others. Its orientation is more ontological since it points to the mode of being of things. The third nature, the parinispanna (perfected) nature indicates reality as experienced by the enlightened person who is free of all the false constructions of a mistaken epistemology. Such a person has realised their soteriological objective and experiences things as they are (yathabhuta). If we take parikalpita (imagined) nature to be real we fall into the extreme of samaropa by attributing the ontological status of independent realities to subject and object. This attribution is, according to the Yogacarins, related to a conceptual elaboration (prapañca) of the

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world related to a mistaken belief in a direct correspondence between name (nama) and that which it signifies (artha) (Mahayanasutralamkara XI, 39). This apparent correspondence lends a credibility to the subject-object duality. Through understanding the parikalpita nature, knowing the nonexistence of these two as independent realities, we avoid the extreme of attribution (Mahayanasutralamkara XI, 23). Significantly, according to Guignon, Heidegger, in his critique of the Cartesian model, suggests that the subject/object picture of our ordinary epistemic predicament draws its plausibility from what we might call the ‘name-and-object’ model of the workings of language … When the name-and object model of language is disarmed, the aura of self-evidence that surrounds the subject/object model also tends to dissolve (1983, 32).

Heidegger is in line with Yogacara in arguing that it is only in representational thinking, that things are taken to exist objectively (i.e., in themselves). Representational thinking involves introducing a split between subject and object wherein things are abstracted out of the network of causes and conditions which constitute them. According to Heidegger, ‘things’ become present to us via our abstract thinking which involves representation (Vorstellung) of them as objects standing against us (Gegenstände). In the language of Yogacara, ‘(the imagined characteristic) is the appearance of an object in conformity with its name and the appearance of a name in conformity with its object’ (Mahayanasutralamkara XI, 23). But, according to Yogacara, things are not entirely non-existent; they do exist on the paratantra level, i.e., in dependence on others. The paratantra nature bears an obvious relation to dependent origination (pratityasamutpada). The texts explain dependence on others as meaning dependent on other causal conditions (anyapratyaya). The way we experience things as characterised by independently existing subject and object is mistaken according to the Yogacarins but we cannot deny things altogether. That would result in negation (apavada) or nihilism. The Yogacarins say experiencing, or the presencing of things, is going on; appearance or ‘presence’ (abhasa) is indubitable. In this sense, according to the Yogacarins, paratantra exists. This process is the basis (asraya) for error. It is in our attempt to get hold of or apprehend the experiencer and the things experienced as separate realities that we go astray: paratantra exists but not in the way we imagine it and wish to apprehend it. The texts say that paratantra exists but not in the way it is imagined: it is ‘empty of existence as [imagined] (tathabhavasunyata);

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it does exist with its own characteristic’ (Mahayanasutralamkara XIV, 34). By knowing the manner of its existence negation (apavada) or nihilism (ucchedavada) is avoided (Mahayanasutralamkara XI, 23). According to the Yogacarins, if we cease to grasp things as existing in the subject object dichotomy the parinispanna (perfected) nature can be realised. The realisation of parinispanna involves the cessation of false constructions of deluded consciousness and the realisation of awakened awareness. It is the realisation of the true nature (dharmata) of things as they are (yathabhuta), free of independent existence in the subject object duality. One might suppose that a real objective world lies ‘behind’ the conceptualised one of parikalpita, but according to the Yogacarins, no such ‘world’ exists or could exist. Apprehending subject and apprehended object are inseparable in experience, which exists as indubitable presence or appearance (abhasa). This means there is no ‘self ’ or ‘world’ but only experience (cittamatra) or presence (abhasa). ‘The appearance/ presencing (abhasata) of duality (dvaya) exists (asti) but the being of duality does not’ (Mahayanasutralamkara XI, 21). This presencing corresponds to the paratantrasvabhava. It is what Kennard Lipmann (1982) calls the ‘contextuality of experience’. Experienced ‘things’ cannot be said to exist independently of the context in which they occur but, according to the Yogacara, contextuality exists. To indicate that reality is not other than appearance, reality is sometimes referred to as cittamatrata, the fact or state (-ta) of experience only (without subject or object). This is the real nature (dharmata) of things. Cittmatrata is here equivalent to the parinispanna-svabhava, the perfected nature. To the Yogacarins, to speak of a ‘world’ independent of our experiencing it makes no sense. This does not mean that objects such as trees, houses and chairs are mind or mental, but rather that trees, chairs etc., to be constituted as objects in the world, must appear before a mind. To speak of ‘unconstituted’ chairs etc. is senseless. Objects are not just ‘there.’ In the elaboration of duality ‘things’ and our perception of them are always given together as one fact. What is denied is a correspondence or duality between, on one hand, the thing-in-itself (svalaksana) and, on the other, our subjective knowledge of it; between a name or concept (nama) and the object (artha) it signifies. The paratantra-svabhava, or ‘contextuality of experience’ as Lipman terms it, ‘precedes’ subject-object duality and provides the context or ‘horizon’ of meaningfulness. To assert or deny subjects or objects is only

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possible within this context. The ‘experience only’ or ‘mind only’ (cittamatra) of the Yogacarins has led many to label them ‘absolute idealists’ who allegedly assert the ultimacy of mind in an absolutist sense. The debate between idealism and realism in the West has taken place in the context of the issue of mind-body dualism. In attempting to overcome the problems of this dualism solutions have been put forward which abolish one or other side of the dichotomy. Alternatively, the struggle between subjectivity and objectivity has attempted to establish one as the ‘ground’ out of which the other emerges. There has been a tendency to impose these arguments on Indian and Buddhist material. Although Heidegger did not address this, his work provides a useful corrective. He struggled against the attempt to found philosophy, and existence itself, on either a ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’ ground. He is sometimes accused of being an idealist and, of course, ‘idealism’ comes in various guises. He accepts ‘idealism’ if it is taken to mean that reality cannot be fully understood in terms of entities and the relations between them but rather must be understood existentially. Heidegger (Guignon 1983, 203) says, ‘When Dasein does not exist it cannot be said that entities are, nor can it be said that they are not’. Heidegger rejects ‘idealism’ if it is taken to mean that the origin of things can be attributed to consciousness or to a subject (1973, 251–2). The Yogacarins take the experiencing/presencing process, the paratantra-svabhava,as the indisputable starting point to begin the investigation into the nature of being and existence, in something of the manner of Heidegger’s Dasein. They believe that subject-object duality is falsely attributed, imagined or conceptually constructed (parikalpita). For them it is something that comes afterwards and this cannot be a proper starting point for understanding existence. Likewise, for Heidegger, Dasein is not to be understood as world (as object) nor as subject but rather as the Being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein) which make the disclosure of world and subject possible. Dasein as Being-in-the-world is the space, the clearing, the ‘in-between,’ in which minds (subjects) and ‘objects’ reveal themselves. For Heidegger mind is neither ‘located’ in the brain nor is it apart from the world in some ideal domain. Thoughts, beliefs, etc, do not occur in the mind nor do they constitute the mind. ‘Rather,’ as Michael Zimmerman puts it, ‘a priori understanding of being makes it possible for us to encounter and to conceive of ourselves as ‘minds’ with ‘thoughts’ separated from the ‘external world’ (1993, 243). Many who have objected to the characterisation of Yogacara as absolute idealism (with an apparent assertion of the reality of the mind or

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the subject and a denial of the reality of the external world) have pointed out that the Yogacara texts negate not only the object (grahya) but also the subject (grahaka). When an object is no longer posited or reified as an independently existing thing then the subject which stands opposed to it is also dissolved. This results in the experience of non-dual awareness which recognises the emptiness of subject and object. The Mahayanasutralamkara puts it this way: ‘Having realised with his intellect that there is nothing apart from mind (citta) he realises the nonexistence of mind. The sage realises the non-existence of duality and abides in the sphere of reality (dharmadhatu) which is free of that mode’ (VI, 8). From Heidegger’s perspective, if we remain open to Being a more fundamental presentation (as opposed to representation) of beings can take place. In his later philosophy Heidegger talks of Gelassenheit, the ‘letting-be’ or ‘releasement’ from our willing, most importantly from the willing that finds expression in our attempt as ‘subjects’ to grasp ‘objects’ conceptually or by our representational thought. Only with ‘letting-be’ can the mystery (Geheimnis) of Being reveal itself and a more primordial way of being be realised. Conclusion This paper has identified a number of fruitful points of comparison between Heidegger and Mahayana Buddhism. The aim of the paper has not been to establish concordance between Heidegger’s philosophy and Buddhism. Neither has it been to deny that there are major areas of difference between them. It has not been my aim to suggest that either the Yogacarins or Heidegger were entirely successful in establishing their positions. Rather, it has been to show that Heidegger’s philosophy allows an approach to Mahayana Buddhist philosophical ideas from the vantage point of one who, while rooted in the Western tradition, has carried out an interrogation of its assumptions and history. With the Madhyamaka and Yogacara schools (and within those countries in which Buddhism took root) we find expression and further development of thinking which criticises ontologies based on the idea of enduring essential natures or reified absolutes. In the Yogacara school in particular we find an examination and critique of subject-object dualism. While Heidegger can offer an approach to Buddhism from a Western vantage point, Buddhism, in its turn, can provide ways to begin to approach Heidegger’s dense

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philosophy and the Western tradition from a Buddhist perspective. In the context of the ‘Europeanisation of the earth’, both can provide a clearing in which some light may shine on our existential situation. Bibliography Dallmayr, F. 1993. The Other Heidegger. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Dreyfus, G. 1997 Recognising Reality: Dharmakirti’s Philosophy and its Tibetan Interpretations. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications. Gadamer, H.-G. 1993. Truth and Method. Trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall. London: Continuum. Guignon, C. 1983. Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. Indianapolis: Hackett. Halbfass, W. 1988. India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding. Albany: State University of New York. Heidegger, M. 1973. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —— . 1982. On the Way to Language. Trans. P. D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row. —— . 1993. ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’. In Basic writings from ‘Being and Time’ (1927) to ‘The Task of Thinking’ (1964), ed. D. Krell, [translated from the German]. 267–305. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Hoy, D. 1993. ‘Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn’. In The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. C. Guignon. 170–194. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Inwood, M. 1999. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell. Kochelmans, J. 1972. ‘Language, Meaning and Existence.’ In On Heidegger and Language, ed. J. Kochelmans. 3–32. Evanston: Northewestern University Press. Lipman, K. 1982. ‘The Cittamatra and Its Madhyamaka Critique: Some Phenomenological Reflections’. Philosophy East & West 32: 295–308. Loy, D. 1988. Nonduality: a study in comparative philosophy. New Haven, Yale University Press. May, R. 1996. Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on his Work. Trans. Graham Parkes. London and New York: Routledge. Murti, T. R. V. 1960. The Central Philosophy of Buddhism: A Study of the Madhyamika System. London: G. Allen and Unwin. Parkes, G. 1996. ‘Rising Sun Over Black Forest: Heidegger’s Japanese connections’. In Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian influences on his Work, ed. R. May. Trans. G. Parkes. 39–117. London; New York: Routledge. Parkes, G. ed. 1987. Heidegger and Asian Thought. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Schumacher, E. 1978. A Guide for the Perplexed. Abacus: London. Scruton, R. 1984. A Short History of Modern Philosophy. London: Routledge. Shih-yi Hsiao, P. 1987. ‘Heidegger and our Translation of the Tao Te Ching’. In Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. G. Parkes. 93–103. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Stcherbatsky, Th. 1992 [1930]. Buddhist Logic. Delhi: Motilal Barnasidass. Tuck, A. 1990. Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship: on the Western interpretation of Nagarjuna. New York: Oxford University Press. Wasserstrom, S. 1999. Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Zimmerman, M. 1993. ‘Heidegger, Buddhism and Deep Ecology’. In The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. C. Guignon. 240–269. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART FOUR

HISTORIOGRAPHY

‘AND END HISTORY. AND GO TO THE STARS’:1 TERENCE MCKENNA AND 2012 Wouter J. Hanegraaff Abstract Terence McKenna (1946–2000) was a central figure in the underground New Age culture mostly referred to as ‘psychedelic shamanism’. In a book published together with his brother Dennis (The Invisible Landscape, 1975) he developed a grand macrohistorical theory called the ‘Eschaton Timewave’, which turns out to be at the very origin of the widespread contemporary movement of New Age millenarianism according to which the eschaton will arrive on December 21 2012. In this article I analyze the story of how Terence and Dennis McKenna developed their theory in an effort to make sense of a religious ‘revelation’ that happened to them during a psychedelic experiment in the Colombian Amazon in 1971; furthermore I analyze the theory itself, and the chain of reasoning by means of which it seeks to prove that a series of historical ‘cycles’ will all terminate in 2012. Although 2012 millenarianism has spawned a small library of popular literature since the mid-1980s, almost no research has been done into this phenomenon as such, its origins, its theoretical underpinnings, the authors responsible for it, or the current of alternative spirituality from his it has emerged. This article hopes to make a first contribution to correcting that situation.

Introduction If one takes a look at the extraordinary range of intellectual fascinations that characterizes Garry Trompf ’s scholarly oeuvre, Terence McKenna’s theory of the ‘eschaton timewave’ and the closely related grassroots current of utopian/millenarian expectation focused on the year 2012 surely seems a ‘Trompfian’ topic par excellence. When Garry and I first met, at the 1990 conference of the I.A.H.R. in Rome, we instantly became friends, and over the next days – walking through the city, eating pizzas out in the street, and, last but not least, on a memorable pilgrimage to James Frazer’s Lago Nemi – I was given a rapid introduction into his

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McKenna (1993, 92).

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mental universe, where such seemingly incongruous fields of study as Melanesian religions, the logic of retribution, millenarian expectations, new religious movements, macrohistorical models, early Christianity, gnosticism and new testament studies (the list is not complete) turned out to coexist and interact in ways which, for a young academic visiting his first major academic event, were both thoroughly bewildering and extremely exciting. With lesser minds, of course, each of these fields and attendant scholarly disciplines (anthropology, history of ideas, history of religions, biblical scholarship) would be more than sufficient for a lifetime; but over the following years, Garry merely kept adding further ones to the list, including my own field of research, Western esotericism. The protagonist of my present contribution, a contemporary esotericist named Terence McKenna (1946–2000), in fact shows some similarities to Garry in that he, too, was an omnivorous intellectual (although not an established academic) with an extraordinary breadth of interests, who dazzlingly combined a whole range of areas of research: in his case shamanism, alchemy, psychedelics, botanical research, ethnopharmacology, mathematics, millenarianism and utopianism, and, last but not least – macrohistory.2 2012 Millenarianism Although scholars of contemporary religion do not yet seem to have caught up to the fact,3 one could easily fill a small library with popular books focused on a major event of world-changing significance that is widely believed to be imminent in 2012, or more specifically, on December 21 of that year. Parallel to this flood of publications, numerous websites are devoted to the same type of expectation,4 and it is now quite evident that we are dealing with a widespread and influential current of

2 For Trompf ’s general ideas on ‘macrohistory’, see Trompf (1979a; 1979b; 1989). The concept is applied to Western esotericism in Trompf (1998; 2005). As for Trompf and millenarianism, at the time of our first meeting he had just published an edited volume Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements, which included a long article (Trompf 1990) partly devoted to the Brotherhood of the Sun: a Californian New Age organization which surely shared quite some concerns (such as UFOs) with Terence McKenna. 3 To my knowledge, the only academic publication about the 2012 phenomenon is a short article by Sitler (2006). In addition, I gratefully acknowledge the unpublished Masters thesis by my ex-student Sacha Defesche (2007). 4 The most comprehensive overview so far is Stray (2005) and his continually expanding website 2012: DireGnosis (http://www.diagnosis2012.co.uk).

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popular millenarianism. In recent years, it has become clear to me that fascination with the year 2012 is no longer limited to the circles of firmly committed ‘New Agers’: again and again, friends, colleagues or students mention it, and seem to seriously ponder the possibility that ‘something big’ is going to happen at that time. Most of the published and internet sources make reference to the ancient Mayan ‘Long Count Calendar’, according to which a Grand Cycle of 1,872,000 days will end on that date,5 and this connection between the Mayan Calendar and 2012 millenarianism can be traced quite precisely to the writings of the Mexican-American spiritual teacher José Argüelles, notably his Mayan Factor published in 1987. Argüelles and his book were at the center of what is known as the ‘Harmonic Convergence’, described as a period of 25 years of spiritual ‘cleansing and transformation’, the beginning of which was celebrated by thousands of people on august 16-17, 1987, and which will supposedly end on December 21, 2012. Although the year 2012 and the Mayan Calendar are now firmly connected in the popular imagination, we will see that, in fact, the idea that the eschaton will arrive in 2012 was originally based not on the Mayan Calendar but on a speculative macrohistory derived by Terence McKenna from the I Ching and inspired by a psychedelic revelation in the Amazon forest.6 By studying the historical origins of the ‘2012 phenomenon’, we discover not only a neglected key figure in the development of alternative spirituality since the 1970s,7 but are also alerted to a no less neglected dimension of that development as a whole: the importance, in what is broadly referred to as the ‘New Age movement’, of psychoactive substances as catalysts of new spiritual revelations.8

5 Sitler (2006, 25). Sitler points out that, in the original Mayan context, ‘this so-called Great Cycle was only a minor component in far larger chronological periods that theoretically extend infinitely backwards and foreward in time within a system of exponentially increasing temporal sycles that have no final beginning or ending points’. 6 See the analysis in Defesche (2007), and see also the short discussion in Wojcik (2003, 292-293). 7 So far, scholars of New Religious Movements or New Age religion seem to have paid little attention to McKenna. For good critical discussions see Letcher (2007, 253–274), Partridge (2005, II, esp. 113-120), and Kripal (2007, 369–375). Also worth reading are the discussions of McKenna by his most prominent successor as public intellectual of the psychedelic counterculture and prophet of 2012, Daniel Pinchbeck (Pinchbeck 2006). 8 For example, this dimension plays no role at all in my own large study of New Age Religion (Hanegraaff 1996). Since then, however, I have come to realize that the New Age emphasis on personal ‘spiritual experience’ is often inseparable from experimentation

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w.j. hanegraaff Terence McKenna and Psychedelic (Neo)Shamanism

Born in Paonia, Colorado, on november 16, 1946, the young Terence McKenna got introduced to geology by an uncle and developed an early hobby of fossil hunting.9 He attended high school in Los Altos, California, went on to study Art History at Berkeley, and ended up getting a Bachelor of Science degree in Ecology and Conservation from a pilot program at Berkeley, called Tussman Experimental College.10 Having read Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception in 1963 and arriving in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, he naturally got introduced to psychedelics and plunged into hippie culture. After graduating in 1969, he traveled widely through the far east, teaching English in Japan for some time, collecting butterflies for biological supply companies, and studying the Tibetan language in Nepal. McKenna’s passion for Tibetan painting had aroused an interest in the pre-Buddhist Bön tradition, and for some time his goal was to write a monograph proving that the fantastic imagery of Tibetan art had been inspired by the use of hallucinogenic plants in a shamanic context (McKenna 1993, 55–56). This connection between shamanism and psychoactive plants would remain central to McKenna’s work, and his writings and lectures eventually made him famous as an icon, perhaps second only to Carlos Castaneda, of contemporary ‘psychedelic neoshamanism’.11 In this regard

(mostly unacknowledged) with psychoactive substances. To give one example, Fritjof Capra opens his enormously influential Tao of Physics by relating how, while sitting by the ocean one summer afternoon, he had a powerful experience of himself and the universe participating in a ‘dance’ of energy which he referred to as the ‘dance of shiva’ (Capra 1993, 11). Capra does not mention psychoactive substances in this context, but the nature of the experience makes it likely that he had taken LSD, probably at the coast of Esalen. Elsewhere he does refer to the importance, to his personal development, of psychedelics, and immediately after the description of his ‘dance of Shiva’ experience he specifically points out how ‘In the beginning, I was helped on my way by ‘power plants’ which showed me how the mind can flow freely; how spiritual insights come on their own, without any effort, emerging from the depth of consciousness’ (ibid., 12). As far as I know, the psychedelic dimension has been overlooked or ignored by all scholars who have written on Capra and his physics/mysticism parallellism; but in fact we should seriously consider the hypothesis that psychoactive substances were a major catalyst responsible for his very concept of an intimate interconnectedness between ‘mind and nature’, and hence between physics and mysticism. 9 Wikipedia entry on ‘Terence McKenna’, accessed on December 12, 2007. 10 Kent, ‘Terence McKenna Interview Part 1’. http://www.tripzine.com/listing .php?id=terence1 11 The best way to get an impression of McKenna’s iconic status is by exploring the excellent portal site http://www.cmays.net/tmbib.shtml.

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I find it important to emphasize that the popular contemporary current (or spectrum of currents) known as ‘neoshamanism’ emerged during the 1960s from a heavily psychedelic context,12 but branched off into two relatively distinct directions in the wake of the new American drug laws of around 1970. There is a tendency among scholars to look only at the ‘safer’, legally unproblematic and therefore more publicly visible nonpsychedelic variety, which takes its inspiration mostly from Siberian and Native American traditions and uses techniques such as drumming to gain experiential access to other realities, encounter power animals, and so on. In fact, however, neoshamanism in its original psychedelic form did not vanish after 1970, but continued as a vital underground culture, which has become much more easily accessible again since the spread of the internet. It is within this specific esoteric milieu that Terence McKenna became a celebrated speaker and author. The Magnum Opus The foundational event in McKenna’s life, from which emerged his theory of the ‘Eschaton Timewave’, occurred during a long trip to the Colombian Amazon forest, which he undertook together with his younger brother Dennis and three friends in 1971.13 Quite like William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s,14 they were looking for the fabled visionary brew called ayahuasca, about which they had read in an

12 Although the evidence for this is quite straightforward, scholars of neoshamanism tend to underestimate or play down the psychedelic origins of neoshamanism, and describe it instead in terms of the literary and popular reception of Siberian and Native American spirituality (see e.g. the otherwise excellent book by Hutton [2001], von Stuckrad [2003], and to a lesser extent Znamenski [2007], who does have a chapter on the psychedelic dimension). Although all neoshamanism specialists acknowledge Carlos Castaneda as a major catalyst – von Stuckrad even calls his Teachings of Don Juan the ‘foundational document of modern western Shamanism’ (2003, 155) – they tend to not even mention the fact that Castaneda’s ‘shamanic’ experiences were described explicitly as induced by psychoactive ‘power plants’ (Hutton 2001, 156-159, von Stuckrad 2003, 153–155]). As for another foundational figure of neoshamanism, Michael Harner, the fact that his decisive initiation into ‘shamanism’ took place in the context not of Native American culture but by drinking ayahuasca in the Ecuadorian Amazon forest (Harner 1980, 1-19, and Harner 1973) is either not mentioned at all (e.g. Hutton 2001, 156–161), or mentioned as merely a preparation for the development of his ‘core shamanism’ (Von Stuckrad 2003, 157-158, Znamenski 2007, 233). 13 The events are described briefly in chapter 6 of McKenna & McKenna (1975), and in much greater detail eighteen years later, in McKenna (1993). 14 Burroughs & Ginsberg (2006).

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influential 1968 article by Michael Harner,15 and for a related but even more exotic shamanic hallucinogen that had been described by the father of ethnobotany Richard Schultes as Oo-koo-hé.16 McKenna’s account of the expedition, published in 1993 under the title True Hallucinations, may well be among the strangest books one will ever read: brilliantly written by what is evidently a highly intelligent author, its contents are nevertheless so weird that even McKenna himself seriously considers the possibility that, during their stay in ‘the devil’s paradise’ of the Colombian Amazon, he and his brother went temporarily insane. There is reason to assume that True Hallucinations was conceived as a counterpiece to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and was inspired in that regard by at least two other reactions to that novel: Francis Ford Coppola’s famous Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now (1979) and Michael Taussig’s anthropological classic Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987).17 Like Conrad and Coppola, McKenna describes a long boat trip down the river, a hallucinatory pilgrimage away from the terrors of ‘civilization’ that takes them deep into the heart of the forest, in search of a dark ‘mystery’ that is waiting for them at the very end.18 But unlike Conrad’s Congolese or Coppola’s Vietnamese/Cambodyan jungle, McKenna’s is located in the Colombian Putumayo region described by Michael Taussig. The first part of Taussig’s book evoked, in almost unbearable detail, the colonialist reign of terror during the period of the rubber boom, when ‘the devil’s paradise’ (see the subtitle of McKenna’s book) was turned into a living hell for the native Indians; and the second part was focused on the complementary practice of shamanic ‘healing’, largely by means of ayahuasca (locally referred to as yage). The pilgrimage of the McKenna brothers into ‘the heart of darkness’ was inspired by

15 Harner (1968), reprinted in Harner (1973, 15–27). The article is mentioned in McKenna & McKenna (1975, 85 and 88) and (1993, 95 and 98). 16 Schultes (1969); and see discussion in McKenna (1993, 7-9). On the various Virola species and their psychoactive use in Latin-American Indian contexts, see Rätsch (2005, 529–533). 17 Taussig’s book is mentioned in the bibliography of True Hallucinations. References to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can be found throughout Taussig’s book. I was pleased to find further confirmation of this connection in a laudatory book review of Taussig by McKenna, which emphasizes how ‘in the early years of this century – before mustard gas, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Cambodia – a remote and vast tract of the Upper Amazon became its own ‘heart of darkness’ ’ (McKenna 1987, 45). 18 In McKenna’s journal we find formulations such as ‘Moving toward the absolute center of the geography of the secret’ (1993, 23)

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utopian hopes of restoring paradise. They were dreaming of a shamanic cure that might heal ‘the horror’19 that modern Western civilization had unleashed upon the world: We were refugees from a society that we thought was poisoned by its own self-hatred and inner contradictions. We had sorted through the ideological options, and we had decided to put all of our chips on the psychedelic experience as the shortest path to the millennium, which our politics had inflamed us to hope for (McKenna 1993, 4).

Having arrived at their final destination, a settlement called La Chorrera, the original focus on ayahuasca and Oo-koo-hé was quickly abandoned20 in favour of Stropharia (nowadays Psilocybe) cubensis: a hallucinogenic mushroom that was growing there in abundance. The chain of events which would eventually lead to the ‘eschaton timewave’ and contemporary 2012 speculation began when, during one of these mushroom sessions, Dennis McKenna suddenly produced a strange, ‘very machine-like, loud, dry buzz’ (McKenna 1993, 53). In an effort to explain this vocal phenomenon, the two brothers embarked upon an increasingly complex and bizarre series of metaphysical/metapsychical speculation, circling around their conviction that the sound somehow meant that contact had been made with some alien dimension of reality. At one point, one of their friends described a hallucination of a strange, elf-like creature that was rolling a complicated polyhedron along the ground, each facet of which seemed like ‘a window onto another place in time or another world’ (McKenna 1993, 77). McKenna’s reaction is illustrative of his state of mind at the time, of the strong impact of hermetic and alchemical speculation on his thinking,21 and of the lengths of speculation to which he was willing to go: ‘It’s the stone!’ I breathed. I could almost see her vision of the lapis philosophorum – the glittering goal of centuries of alchemical and Hermetic speculation glimpsed in the Amazonian night, now seeming a great multi-dimensional jewel, the philosopher’s stone, in the keeping of a telluric gnome. The power of the image was deep and touching. I seemed to 19

I am referring, of course, to the famous closing lines uttered by Kurtz in Apocalypse

Now. 20 In 1981 Terence and Dennis took up the search again, and with success: they found Oo-koo-hé among the Witoto population in Peru, and Dennis eventually wrote his dissertation on it (Kent, ‘Terence McKenna Interview, Part 2’). 21 This aspect is evident throughout True Hallucinations. See also McKenna’s ‘Lectures on Alchemy’ given at Esalen Institute, a transcript of which is available online (http:// www.well.com/user/davidu/tmalchemy.html).

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w.j. hanegraaff feel the spiritual dreams of the old alchemists, the puffers great and small, who had sought the lapis in the cloudy swirling of their alembics. I could feel the golden chain of adepts reaching back into the distant Hellenistic past, the Hermetic Opus, a project vaster than empires and centuries; nothing less than the redemption of fallen humanity through the respiritualization of matter. I had never seen or imagined the mystery of the stone thus, but in listening to Ev’s description of what she had seen, an image formed in my mind that to this day remains with me. It is the image of the philosopher’s stone as hyperdimensional jewel-become-UFO – the human soul as starship. It is the universal panacea at the end of time, all history being the shock wave of this final actualization of the potential in the human psyche. These thoughts, these reveries, seemed to me then like the stirring of something vast, something dimly sensed that was stretched out over millions of years, something about the destiny of humankind and the return of the soul to its awesome and hidden source. What was happening to us? (McKenna 1993, 77–78).

These episodes led the two brothers to devise what they saw as a scientific ‘experiment’ for testing the nature and evolutionary potential of the strange sound that Dennis had been making. Dennis described it as a ‘psycho-audible warp phenomenon’ which should make it possible to ‘vocally generat[e] a specific kind of energy field which can rupture three dimensional space’ (McKenna 1993, 81). On the basis of an extraordinary series of speculations about psychedelics as alchemical mediators between matter and mind, the assumption was that by combining ayahuasca with psilocybin, it would be possible to replicate the sound, and this would open ‘a doorway out of historical time, back toward some sort of archaic completion nearly forgotten’ (McKenna 1993, 84). A quotation from Dennis’ notes may illustrate the kind of thinking behind this idea, and serve as a sample of the language in which it was expressed: The result will be a molecular aggregate of hyperdimensional, superconducting matter that receives and sends messages transmitted by thought, that stores and retrieves information in a holographic fashion in neural DNA, and that depends on superconductive harmine22 as a transducer energy source and superconductive RNA as a temporal matrix. This aggregate … will be composed of higher dimensional matter, i.e., matter that has been turned through the higher dimension via the process of canceling its electrical charge with a harmonic vibration, transmitting that vibration across space …, and then recondensing that vibration onto a superconductive template (the charged psilocybin in the mushroom), until the

22

One of the MAO-inhibitors in the vine Banisteriopsis caapi (see note 24).

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harmine-psilocybin-DNA complex condenses into a superconducting molecule (McKenna 1993, 83).

This sounds exactly like the type of technological jargon familiar from the Star Trek series, which is at the origin of the ‘warp’ terminology as well. There is no doubt that the two brothers took it completely seriously: as Terence formulates it, ‘Dennis felt he had figured out a way to blow the locked doors of paradise right off their hinges’ (McKenna 1993, 88). Indeed, they believed that the ‘experiment’, if successful, would be equivalent to the completion of the alchemical Magnum Opus, and would transform ‘the ontological basis of reality’ forever, ‘so that mind and matter everywhere would become the same thing and reflect the human will perfectly’ (McKenna 1993, 91). In short, the brothers believed they had arrived at ‘the history-culminating moment when humanity would march into the higher dimension’ (McKenna 1993, 93): There seemed to be an ideological lineage, the golden chain, whose collective task was the shattering of the historical continuum through the generation of the living philosophical lapis of hyper-carbolated humanity. All these visionary thinkers [i.e. Jung, Newton, Nabokov, Bruno, Pythagoras, Heraclitus] had performed their part in this project. Now, as the secret work of human history, the generation of Adam’s cosmic body, lost since paradise, neared completion, these shades stirred and pressed near to our Amazonian campsite. Our destiny was apparently to be the human atoms critical to the transformation of Homo sapiens into galaxy-roving bodhisattvas, the culmination and quintessence of the highest aspirations of starcoveting humanity.23

The Arrival of the Millennium Looking back at the La Chorrera experiment from the perspective of the early 1990s, Terence acknowledges that ‘our lives had become pure science fiction’ (McKenna 1993, 101). On the night of the ‘experiment’, they thought of their little thatched hut as a small spaceship, and felt as if all of them ‘were approaching hyperspatial overdrive’ (McKenna 1993, 106).

23 McKenna (1993, 95). See also Dennis’ notes (ibid., 100–101), which express his conviction that he and his brother would be the first human beings to be instructed in the use of ‘the stone’ (shorthand for the biochemical mechanism induced by psychedelics) by some ‘infinitely wise, infinitely adept fellow member of the hyperspatial community’, and their mission would be ‘to selectively disseminate it to the rest of humanity’.

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Having taken the psychedelic mixture,24 they began their ‘countdown toward an Omega that none of us could really understand: we were completely transformed by the expectation that we might witness the outbreak of the millennium’ (McKenna 1993, 107). And then, there came the moment when Dennis did, indeed, begin to produce the strange sounds they had been expecting. Afterwards there was a period of intense silence, in which came the sound of a cock crowing three times. Then Dennis pointed his finger at a mushroom standing on the raised experiment area, and both brothers saw how its cap was transformed into the tiny image of planet earth. That did it: “It is our world’. Dennis’s voice was full of unfathomable emotion…. ‘We have succeeded” (McKenna 1993, 109). In the aftermath of this vision, Terence tells us, he turned out to have developed a state of perfect telepathy with his brother, and moreover, any question silently formulated in his mind and addressed to Dennis was instantly answered by a voice in his head. Dennis told him that he was by no means the only one to experience this phenomenon: … he assured me that his effort had succeeded and that all over the world the wave of hypercarbolation was sweeping through the human race, eliminating the distinction between the individual and the community as everyone discovered themselves spontaneously pushing off into a telepathic ocean whose name was that of its discoverer: Dennis McKenna (McKenna 1993, 111).

With hindsight, Terence admits that he was obviously the victim of a cognitive hallucination, but at the time he was flooded with feelings of ecstasy at the realization that they had actually passed the Omega Point, that they were experiencing the first moment of the millennium, and that his own body was busy ‘metabolizing its way toward the resurrection body’ (McKenna 1993, 111–113). Both brothers believed that the global transformation was now making a twenty-four hour sweep around the earth 24 With hindsight, McKenna wonders whether they prepared the ayahuasca correctly (1993, 105–106), and this is very important in view of what was about to happen. Ayahuasca consists of two plants: a vine called Banisteriopsis caapi that contains socalled MAO-inhibitors, meaning that they temporarily neutralize MAO enzymes in the stomach, and admixture plants containing the psychedelic substance DMT, which becomes orally active only in combination with an MAO-inhibitor (without it, it is neutralized by the MAO enzymes). The combination of an MAO-inhibitor with psilocybin is known to greatly amplify the latter’s effects, which will last much longer and be much more intense. In addition, KcKenna admits that they may have picked the wrong admixture plants. If they did, there is no way of telling what the brothers had actually ingested that evening.

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along with the dawn line: ‘Throughout the world, traffic and factories were coming to a halt. People were leaving their homes and schools to stare into the sky, realizing that someone, somewhere, had broken through’ (McKenna 1993, 114). The voice in his head was confirming all this: You’ve found it. This is it. It’s all over now. There is no more. Within a few hours, the superstructure of earthbound, human civilization is going to collapse and your species will depart. First you will go to Jupiter and then to Alpha in Sagittarius. A day of high adventure dawns at last for the human beings (McKenna 1993, 116).

Terence first began to realize that something was wrong when he discovered he was the only one who heard Dennis in his mind: in fact, his friends were getting more and more alarmed at their behaviour and feared that they were going insane. Most members of the little group slowly came back to their normal consciousness during the next hours, but Dennis remained in a state of ‘eschatological hysteria’ (McKenna 1993, 120) for nearly two weeks, to the considerable concern of his companions.25 As for Terence, he kept hearing the voice in his head, which assured him that his brother would recover and that something of momentous importance was in fact occurring. In view of his later development of the ‘eschaton timewave’ theory, it is crucial to emphasize that, according to Terence in 1993, he kept hearing the voice ever since: ‘Its presence and persistence over the years since La Chorrera has been amazing’ (McKenna 1993, 134). In other words, we may assume that the theory as published in 1975 is based, partly at least, on the still poorlyunderstood phenomenon usually referred to as ‘channeling’.26 The Eschaton Timewave Terence McKenna admits himself that ‘the desire to make wishes come true was a wind ever blowing at my back’ (McKenna 1993, 150), and it is

25 As pointed out by McKenna (1993, 123) the MAO inhibition (cf. note 24) normally reverses within four to six hours, but the phenomenon of ‘irreversable MAO inhibition’ requires a period of nearly two weeks. If this explains the length of Dennis’s ‘shamanic psychosis’, it still does not answer the question why it affected only him, not the others who had drank the same mixture. 26 See Hanegraaff (1996, 23–41). Referring to the time in La Chorrera, McKenna points out that ‘the ideas I was producing were coming fully organized from somewhere else, and I was nothing more than a message decipherer, hard-pressed to keep up with a difficult, incoming code’ (1993, 134).

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easy to see his theory of the ‘eschaton timewave’ as resulting from a stubborn refusal to dismiss the La Chorrera revelation as no more than a temporary state of psychotic hallucination.27 To him and his brother, the experience had been simply too impressive and too ‘real’; one understands that deconstructing it as an episode without deeper meaning would essentially have destroyed McKenna’s worldview at the very core. Moreover, the voice in his head kept reminding him of the events, confirming that even if the eschaton had not actually arrived during the ‘experiment’, it was sure to arrive in the near future. While Dennis was recovering and coming back to normal, Terence for his part got wholly caught up in ‘an obsessive immersion, almost an enforced meditation, on the nature of time’.28 The final result was a book published together with his brother, and published in 1975 under the title The Invisible Landscape. After 1971 Dennis went on to build a successful academic career in ethnopharmacology, and although he never rejected the La Chorrera episode or the book published with Terence, his Preface to the revised and updated 1993 edition makes his reservations quite clear: ‘No one is more aware than myself that certain passages read like the musings of a scientifically untutored student, while others are perhaps more indicative of the associations of an unhinged mind’ (McKenna and McKenna 1993, xvii). Nevertheless, although he admits that much in the book is now outdated, he adds that other parts are now better supported by current scientific knowledge than was the case at the time of the first edition (McKenna and McKenna 1993, xix). As for Terence in his 1993 Introduction, he is perfectly aware that if december 21, 2012 will not bring the millennium, it will certainly be the day of judgment over his own life’s work: … it will be about nineteen years until the denouement that will surely be the acid test for this series of psychedelically inspired speculations. I have long struggled to maintain a suspended judgment on these matters, yet I’m also aware that if nothing at all comes of this extraordinary intellectual adventure, it will be a rather ironic comment on the idea that nature does nothing in vain (McKenna and McKenna 1993, xxv).

27

See the long discussion of this option in McKenna (1993, 137–149). McKenna (1993, 163) and see also ibid, 169: ‘My books, my public life, my private dreams have all become a part of the effort to feel and understand the new time that was revealed at La Chorrera’. 28

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So what is The Invisible Landscape all about? The book opens by programmatically juxtaposing ‘history’ against ‘paradise’: ‘The search for liberation, a paradisiacal state of freedom that mythology insists is the ahistorical root of the historical process, has always been the raison d’être of the human species’ conscious pilgrimage through time’ (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 3). The first part of the book consists of introductory chapters on shamanism, schizophrenia, organismic thought, holography, psychedelic pharmacology (a particularly long and technical chapter certainly written by Dennis), and a summary of the La Chorrera experiment. The tone is academic throughout, sometimes even to a pedantic degree. It is in Part Two that the theory of the ‘eschaton timewave’ is developed. The theory is based upon the hypothesis that the I Ching is related to an early lunar calendar. The reason for the hypothesis is that if one multiplies the number of hexagrams in the King Wen arrangement (64) with the number of lines of which each hexagram consists (6), the result is 384, which coincides almost exactly with the 13 × 29.53 = 383.89 days of the Chinese lunar year. The McKennas then introduce two assumptions: the I Ching system is based upon ‘hierarchical or resonance thinking’, according to which this procedure of multiplication can be repeated ad infinitum, resulting in ever greater numbers; and such procedures can be applied (and were applied by the Chinese) to ‘the idea of cyclical recurrence of events and situations on many different scales of duration’ (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 126). On these principles, they argue, the resulting numbers turn out to coincide with major astronomical units such as the average sunspot cycle, the Zodiacal Ages and the precession of the equinoxes (see table I in McKenna and McKenna 1993, 128). Furthermore, they point out, the calendar as such is more accurate than the traditional Chinese 360-day calendar by a factor of many thousands, and more accurate than our Gregorian calendar by a factor of well over one hundred (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 133). Be that as it may, this is only the beginning. In the next chapter, the McKennas seek to develop, on these foundations, a ‘general systems theory’ which (like all such theories: see Hanegraaff 1996, 132–139) treats mind and matter as integral manifestations of one and the same universal ‘Order of Being’. Of central importance to their project is that it should provide ‘a new model of the relationship of time to the ingression and conservation of novelty’ (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 140; not in McKenna and McKenna 1975, 138). The key to the theory of the ‘Eschaton Timewave’ is a series of three formal rules that turn out to govern the

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seemingly random arrangement of the 64 hexagrams comprising the King Wen sequence.29 As for this arrangement as such, the McKennas list for each hexagram how many of its lines have changed in relation to the following one; and in a next step, the resulting series of 64 numbers30 is graphically presented as in fig. 1A. Having done this, they furthermore state that ‘the nature of the first and last three’31 steps suggests that each number was meant to be paired with its opposite number in reverse sequence; the result of this mirroring process is given in fig. 1B. This second graph, then, turns out to be the basic structure of the ‘eschaton timewave’ resulting from its underlying formality. Applying the principle, mentioned earlier, of hierarchical resonance thinking applied to historical time, the McKennas suggest that this structure was ‘treated as the smallest unit in a series of hierarchical macro-hexagrams’ (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 145) that structure all smaller and larger cycles: We hypothesize that the wave description generated by this combining of the two graph lines is the simple form of a more complex wave that utilizes the simple wave of [fig. 1B] as the primary unit in a system of such units … We will argue that this more complex wave is a kind of temporal map of the changing boundary conditions that exist in space and time, including future time. Time, like light, may best be described as a union of opposites. Time may be both wave and, ultimately, particle, each in some sense a reflection of the other. We have called the quantized wave-particle, whatever its level of recurrence within the hierarchy of its duration, eschaton (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 146).

The chapter ends with a conclusion that, in nuce, contains the foundation for the 2012 prediction: Simply put, we are saying that the wave-hierarchy of energy that regulates the ingression of novelty into time thus constellates the world of our 29 The rules are given in McKenna and McKenna 1993, 141–143. Note that the passages on these crucial pages 140-143 in the 1993 edition are strongly revised and rewritten with respect to the 1975 edition. The first two rules have remained unchanged, but the third rule was formulated in 1975 as ‘all 3s were eliminated except where this would cause a value of 5, 6, 1, or double 3’, and reformulated in 1993 as ‘A three to one ratio of even to odd transitions was maintained’. 30 1, 2, 3, 4 or 6, for rule nr. 1 stipulates the absolute exclusion of the number 5. 31 This rather important reason is not further explained, but presumably they mean that these first three are special because it is only here that the mirroring process results in two lines (at the bottom) or one line (at the top) running together. This is a visual representation of what the McKennas call ‘concrescence’, a term adopted from Alfred North Whitehead and defined as ‘the growing together of the many into the unity of a one’ (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 167).

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w.j. hanegraaff experience in its entirety and therefore also in all of its possible subsets, so that in any span of time or space, if one can determine where to begin the generation of the wave description [my italics, WJH] space-time under examination will be quantified relative to an ideal zero state to as great a depth as one wishes to resolve the levels in the wave-hierarchy (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 150).

Simply put? Well, perhaps… A graphical representation of this structure of ‘cycles within cycles’ is given in fig. 2. But for the more practically-minded, the crucial question now surely becomes: how do we determine at which point in history any of these waves begins?

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The Birth of 2012 To answer that question it becomes crucial to compare the 1975 edition of The Invisible Landscape with the revised 1993 edition. In both, we read that ‘if the wave model is a valid general theory of time, it should be possible to show why certain periods or places have been particularly rich in events that accelerate the creative advance into novelty, and also to show where and when in the future such events might be expected to recur’ (McKenna and McKenna 1975, 168; McKenna and McKenna 1993, 170). In the 1975 edition this is followed by a passage of less than one page, which in the 1993 edition has been replaced by a newly written text of several pages long. The 1975 version says: We have chosen to position the graph relative to human history in such a way as to give terminal, and hence greatest, stress to the decades of the immediate future. We have done this because we believe that the selfevidently climactic modern situation is itself an event which could only occur very close to a major concrescence32 of the wave (McKenna and McKenna 1975, 168).33

In other words: the assumption that our own time is a period of terminal crisis, and hence must coincide with the ‘concrescence’ at the very end of a cycle, governs the McKennas’ decisions about how to position the graph. Reasoning backwards from our own time as the archimedean point, they state that the late 13th century was the last of seven large transitions that occurred on the level of the 4306-year scale (one of the major scales derived from their original calculations), and finally conclude that therefore ‘it becomes clear that we are now experiencing a similar period marked with extreme density of novel ingression’ (McKenna and McKenna 1975, 168). The circular logic of this argument is evident: its conclusion (we are at the end of the cycle) was actually the premise on which the whole reasoning was based! Having arrived at this conclusion, the next pages are devoted to some speculations about the idea of the ‘end of time’, culminating in the very first mention of 2012. On page 174, the McKennas describe a number of ever smaller cycles to which their graph can be applied, based upon their key number 64: 32

See note 31. Cf. McKenna and McKenna 1975, 195: ‘The nearness of a major concrescence to our own time seems a self-evident fact, implicit in the excesses of all sorts that characterize the history of the twentieth century’. 33

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w.j. hanegraaff - 1.3 billion year ago (beginnings of life, at least according to the theory) - 18 million years ago (‘closure of the next smallest level’, ‘at the height of the age of the mammals’) - 18.000.000/64=275.000 year ago (‘a time which corresponds well with the emergence of Homo sapiens) - 275.000/64=4300+ years ago (beginning of ‘what might properly be called historical time’) - 4300+/64=67+ years ago

And here we reach the crucial point as regards the reasoning that produced 2012 as the end of time. The question that must be asked is: ‘67 years ago’ counting back from which point in time exactly? The answer can be kept vague as long as were are dealing with cycles of thousands or millions, but clearly becomes crucial once we are dealing with a period of only 67 years. The internal logic of the argument implies that the point from which the McKennas are counting backwards will be the end of all the cycles listed above, and hence a moment of extreme ‘novelty’; and since we would surely have noticed if it had already occurred, it must lie somewhere in the near future. As it turns out, the McKennas decide upon this terminal date by making the assumption that the year 1945, with the end of the Second World War and the development of nuclear weapons, is surely an example of radical ‘ingression of novelty’ so strong that it cannot but have coincided with the end of a cycle and beginning of a new one. Ergo, counting 67 years forwards from 1945 we arrive at… 2012.34 It is possible that the McKennas eventually recognized the circularity of their original argument on page 168 of their 1975 edition (which really does no more than using the axiom that we are living in a time of crisis in order to prove that we are living in a time of crisis). As already indicated, in the 1993 edition the passage is replaced by a new one, which introduces us to two new elements: computer software and the Mayan Calendar. After 1975 a software program called ‘Timewave Zero’ was developed by Peter Meyer, which used the Eschaton Timewave calculations to create ‘time maps’ for any given historical period, and these maps are central to the new passage in the 1993 edition. Furthermore, in 1985 Terence McKenna had met José Argüelles and introduced him to his

34 The McKennas realize that the number is actually ‘67+’, and therefore write that the cycles will terminate ‘around’ the year 2012. No specific date is given within the year. Note that the year 2012 is mentioned one more time on page 184 of the 1975 edition, but without new essential information being added.

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eschaton timewave theory.35 Defesche (2007, 23) points out that although Argüelles claims to have learned about 2012 as the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar as early as 1953 (from the work of the specialist of pre-Columbian Maya civilization J. Eric S. Thompson [1898-1975]36), his 1984 book Earth Ascending already contained the first contours of his theory of ‘Harmonic Convergence’, but still without reference to a 25-year timeframe leading from 1987 to 2012. We may therefore assume that 2012 became central to Argüelles’ thinking only after his meeting with McKenna in 1985: it must have been a revelation to both men that the Eschaton Timewave and the Mayan Long Count calendar pointed towards the same year, and on the basis of Thompson’s work it was now even possible to establish a specific day, december 21. Accordingly, whereas the 1975 edition of The Invisible Landscape only mentions 2012 generally, central to the new section (pp. 170–174) of the 1993 edition is a computer-generated ‘time map’ for the period from January 1, 6000 BC to December 21, 2012. The McKennas mention the Mayan Calendar, but emphasize that they had arrived at the end date independently.37 In commenting on the time map for 6000 BC-2012, they emphasize that the graph shows high levels of ‘novelty’ for such times as the Old Kingdom pyramid building around 2700 BC, the consolidation of Mycenaean sea power around 900 BC and so on. Having further discussed some smaller and hence more detailed time maps of our own time and the immediate future (‘a portion of time that has yet to undergo the formality of actually occurring’ [McKenna and McKenna 1993, 173]), they conclude with a passage that brings us back to the very core motivation of the entire enterprise: the sense of global crisis and the ardent wish to find meaning in nature and time: Timewave Zero is … the broadcast output of the naturally superconducting experimental deoxyribonucleic matrix transceiver operating in 35 Argüelles 1987, 41. Argüelles correctly summarizes McKenna’s argument about the 67-year cycle leading from Hiroshima to 2012. 36 A sustainable correlation between the Mayan Long Count calendar, which works with cycles of 5125 years, and the Gregorian calendar was established as early as 1897 by the Mayanists Joseph T. Goodman and Juan M. Hernández. Eight years later Goodman correlated the ‘zero day’ of the Calendar with August 13, 3114, which implies December 21, 2012 as the end date. This correlation was validated by Thompson in 1950, and is known as the GMT correlation (Defesche 2007, 19–20). 37 As far as the year 2012 is concerned this is correct, as we have seen, but that they had even discovered the specific ‘end date’ of 21 December without knowledge of the Mayan Calendar is incorrect: that day was certainly derived from Argüelles resp. Thompson.

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w.j. hanegraaff hyperspace. We believe that by using such ideas as a compass for the collectivity, we may find our way back to a new model in time to reverse the progressively worldwide alienation that is fast turning into an eco-cidal planetary crisis. A model of time must give hope and overcome entropy in its formal composition. In other words, it must mathematically secure the reasonableness of hope (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 174).

What, exactly, might be expected to happen on December 21, 2012 ‘remains mysterious’ (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 194). The McKennas speculate about ‘a universe whose physical laws suddenly cease to operate’, an ‘ontological mutation from matter to photonic form, which represents tremendous freedom’ (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 184-185), or the appearance of ‘a hyperdimensional body, obedient to a simultaneously transformed and resurrected human will’ (McKenna and McKenna 1993, 188) – clearly a reformulation of the ‘galaxy-roving bodhisattvas’ and alchemically transfigured bodies imagined by Terence McKenna during the time of the La Chorrera experiment. End Game Sadly, Terence McKenna will not be there to witness the 21st of December 2012: he died of brain cancer on april 3, 2000. In the decades before, he had attained an iconic status as perhaps the foremost intellectual of the psychedelic counterculture, not least due to his often-praised brilliance as a speaker (many film recordings of his interviews and lectures can be found on the internet). As regards his Eschaton Timewave theory, we finally come to what has become known as ‘The Watkins Objection’, and McKenna’s reaction to it. On the basis of the Timewave Software and its source code (the mathematics in The Invisible Landscape itself were found to be ‘worryingly arbritrary … and mathematically clumsy’), a young mathematician named Matthew Watkins was able to formulate a detailed mathematical critique that thoroughly deconstructs the theory. Watkins discussed his objections with McKenna in person, and finally appears to have convinced him: By the final discussion he seemed to have fully grasped the nature of the problem, and had admitted that the theory appeared to have ‘no basis in rational thought’. He claimed (and this struck me as sincere) that he was only interested in the truth, and that someone ‘disproving’ the theory was just as a much of a relief to him as someone confirming its validity. He proposed that we collaborate on a piece provisionally entitled ‘Autopsy for

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a Mathematical Hallucination’ in which we would carefully take the theory apart and see what had gone wrong. He claimed that I was the first person to approach him with a serious mathematical critique of his ideas, partly explaining why such an unjustifiable theory had not only survived for so long, but also attracted so much interest and attention.38

So this is how the theory met its intellectual Waterloo, well before the arrival of the year 2012. From Watkins’ words one can only conclude that if McKenna’s ‘eschaton timewave’ has not stood the test of science, McKenna himself certainly passed the test of scientific integrity: it is no small feat of heroism to accept proof that most of one’s life’s work has been based upon a mistake. If history teaches us anything, however, the fact that the eschaton timewave theory was officially declared dead by its inventor will not mean that those who believe in the 2012 prediction will now abandon their faith. On the contrary, if the failure of McKenna’s prophecy causes any cognitive dissonance at all, we may expect that this will merely add new creative fuel to the contemporary millenarian imagination. Bibliography Anon. Terence McKenna Bibliography, http://www.cmays.net/tmbib.shtml Argüelles, J. 1987. The Mayan Factor: Path beyond Technology. Rochester: Bear & Company. Burroughs, W. and A. Ginsberg. 2006. The Yage Letters Redux, ed. O. Harris. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Capra, F. 1993 [1975]. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. London: Fontana. Defesche, S. 2007. ‘The 2012 Phenomenon: An Historical and Typological Approach to a Modern Apocalyptic Mythology’. M.A. diss. University of Amsterdam. Hanegraaff, W. J. 1998 [1996]. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press. Harner, M. 1968. ‘The Sound of Rushing Water’. Natural History 77:6. —— . 1980. The Way of the Shaman. San Francisco: Harper. —— .ed. 1973. Hallucinogens and Shamanism. London; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Hutton, R. 2001. Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination. London; New York: Hambledon and London.

38 Watkins, ‘Autopsy’ (n.d.). As for the date of 2012, Watkins confirms that the year 2012 was not calculated but selected in order to find a ‘best fit’. His conclusions confirm the circularity of the argument: ‘McKenna has looked at this timewave and agreed that it doesn’t appear to represent a map of “novelty” in the sense that the ‘real’ timewave is claimed to. It is possible that by changing the “zero date” Dec. 21, 2012, one could obtain a better fit, but there’s no longer any clear motivation to attempt this, as the main reason for taking the original timewave seriously were McKenna’s (often very convincing) arguments for historical correlation’.

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Kent, J. ‘Terence McKenna Interview, Part 1’, http://www.tripzine.com/listing .php?id=terence1 —— . ‘Terence McKenna Interview, Part 2’, http://www.tripzine.com/listing .php?smlid=96 Kripal, J. J. 2007. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Letcher, A. 2007. Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom. New York: Harper Collins. McKenna, T. 1987. ‘Into the Heart of Darkness’. Review of Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, by M. Taussig. Gnosis 5: 45. —— . 1993. True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise. San Francisco: Harper. McKenna, T. and D. McKenna. 1975. The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. New York: The Seabury Press. —— . 1993. The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. 2nd rev. ed. San Francisco: Harper. Partridge, C. 2005. The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture, vol II. London; New York: T & T Clark. Pinchbeck, D. 2006. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. New York: Jeremy Tarcher/ Penguin. Rätsch, C. ed. 2005. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and its Applications. Rochester: Park Street Press. Schultes, R. E. 1969. ‘Virola as an Orally Administered Hallucinogen’. Botanical Museum Leaflets of Harvard University 22 (6): 229–240. Sitler, R. K. 2006. ‘The 2012 Phenomenon: New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar’. Nova Religio 9 (3): 24–38. Stray, G. 2005. Beyond 2012: Catastrophe or Ecstasy. A Complete Guide to End-of-Time Predictions. East Sussex: Vital Signs Publ. Stuckrad, K. von. 2003. Schamanismus und Esoterik: Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. Louvain: Peeters. Taussig, M. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Trompf, G. W. 1979. The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, vol. I. Berkeley: University of California Press. —— . 1979. ‘The Future of Macro-Historical Ideas’. Soundings 62: 70–89. —— . 1989. ‘Macrohistory and Acculturation’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (4): 621–648. —— . 1990. Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. —— . 1990. ‘The Cargo and the Millennium on both Sides of the Pacific’. In Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements, ed. G. W. Trompf. 35–94. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. —— . 1998. ‘Macrohistory in Blavatsky, Steiner and Guénon’. In Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion, ed. A. Faivre and W. J. Hanegraaff . 269–296. Louvain: Peeters. —— . 2005. ‘Macrohistory’. In Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. W. J. Hanegraaff in collaboration with A. Faivre, R. van den Broek and J. P. Brach. 701–716. Leiden: Brill. Watkins, M. ‘Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination?’, http://www.fourmilab .ch/rpkp/autopsy.html Wojcik, D. 2003. ‘Apocalyptic and Millenarian Aspects of American Ufoism’. In UFO Religions, ed. Christopher Partridge. 274–300. London: Routledge. Znamenski, A. A. 2007. The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CYBORGS AND CHAKRAS: INTERSUBJECTIVITY IN SCIENTIFIC AND SPIRITUAL SOMATECHNICS Jay Johnston Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously (Haraway 1991, 149).

Abstract This essay considers two forms of somatechnics and their interrelations. The first is a form of esoteric anatomy – the subtle body – in which subjectivity is conceptualised as ontologically energetic, multiple and intimately interrelated with the divine. This conceptualisation of the self is found in numerous religious and philosophical traditions, as well as in contemporary Western alternative medicine. The second form of somatechnics considered herein is cyborgian subjectivity, interrelations of human–machine–nature, as proposed by feminist theorist of science and consciousness Donna Haraway. Both are radical forms of intersubjectivity. By juxtaposing these two seemingly disparate models of the self an understanding of their shared intersubjective dynamics – the technologies (and ‘bodies’) of interrelation – will be elucidated. In this analysis, particular attention is paid to the development of inter-relational aesthetics and ethics. The essay identifies both shared discourses and conceptual interrelations; aiming to develop a method and space for dialogue between contemporary feminist science and esoteric forms of spirituality.

Introduction This research is consciously situated at the periphery of credulity. It plays into the realm of academic oddities and niche knowledges comprising, as it does, an elucidation and analysis of two models of subjectivity that are both considered by dominant Western discourse at best as strategic curiosities, at worst as ludicrous propositions: cyborgs and subtle bodies. However, it should be noted that the general amused or derisory attitude towards these subjects does nothing to dampen the consumer appeal of these models of self, evidenced by the popularity of both sci-fi and New Age culture.

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Aside from the seditious joy of exploring these heretical body models there are significant and serious epistemological, ontological, metaphysical and political concerns that underpin their conceptualisation. In short, both these models of subjectivity constitute a radical refiguring of the bounded subject of Western modernity and biomedicine. The political and philosophical ramifications of Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg were made clearly evident in her now infamous essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist–Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ (Haraway 1991, 149-81); and I have elsewhere discussed the radical re-figuration of subjectivity inaugurated by subtle body models (Johnston and Barcan 2006; Johnston 2008). The aim of this paper is not to argue for either of the body models’ ontological or ethical innovation or their relevance for academic analysis per se; but to identify some similarities shared by these two seemingly disparate concepts of the self, considering that – with a rudimentary glance – one is designated to be a primarily spiritual view of the self (subtle bodies) and the other a scientific conceptualisation of self (cyborg). However, both are models of intersubjectivity that far exceed the limits of such disciplinary and epistemological classification. Exceeding limits is what they both do best. These types of bodies will be approached as somatechnic forms. That is, taking as a ‘ground’ the Post-Structural Feminist position that there is nothing ‘natural’ about bodies, that bodies are not neutral masses of inert material, but rather are actively lived, defined, conceptualised and affected by cultural discourses. The soma and the techne are inextricably and intimately integrated. Chakras: Subtle Body Nodes of Interpenetration and Exchange The term chakra has gained increasing use within mainstream Western culture with the thriving popularity of various styles of Yoga practice, and New Age adaptations of Hindu body schemas.1 The term denotes a part of the subtle body, the ‘wheels’ comprised of crossing energy pathways that constitute the subtle anatomy. In the Western Theosophical system, they are understood to operate as the interface between

1 There are thousands of book titles relating to chakras currently available. Many of these titles have integrated the Yogic and Tantric traditions with popular psychology in their exploration of this aspect of subtle bodies. For example, see Judith (1987).

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physical, emotional and spiritual ‘bodies.’ These are the subtle bodies, the numerous interpenetrating sheaths of matter–consciousness proposed to comprise the individual.2 In this scheme the physical body is understood to be but one – and the most materially dense – of a number of bodies. Therefore, attributing an individual with a subtle body form of subjectivity renders them multiple and extensive. Subtle bodies exceed the skin, inhabiting the space between ‘subject’ and ‘object.’ If the self is understood to be comprised of numerous extensive subtle bodies, largely unperceived, then the very boundaries of self – where the ‘I’ ends and ‘an/other’ begins – is blurred. Where and how does one draw the boundary of separation? The concept of the subtle body that has moved most prominently into Western New Age culture (primarily via the Theosophical Society (Hanegraaff 1998; Heelas 1996) proposes that the less dense ‘bodies’ (that is, any other apart from the physical or ‘gross’ body) can only be perceived by intuitive or clairvoyant perception. Following on from the Hindu and Buddhist heritage of the concept such sense capacity is understood to be gleaned through mind–body cultivation techniques such as meditation; or also, as with the ‘medium’ in the Spiritualist tradition, to be an innate capacity of a particular individual. In the modern Theosophical account, the various subtle bodies are differentiated due to the perceived composition of their matterconsciousness. They are ‘measured’ on a quality of density scale and described in tactile terms: coarse, refined, gross, ephemeral. They are also often described with reference to their dynamism, the rates of their vibratory motion.3 Such a concept of matter – consciousness (or matterspirit) is built upon a process philosophical perspective, with no ontological difference being ascribed to matter and consciousness. Emphasis is placed on the proposed shared ontological ‘substance’ comprising both. This shared ‘material’ is often referred to as an enlivening agent or energetic ‘substance,’ (and indeed the modern Theosophical Society’s concept of matter is strongly vitalistic). The rigid dualism between mind and body, flesh and spirit, is not sustained within this process perspective. Such a conceptualisation is also found in the work of French philosopher, Henri Bergson (1859–1941) who considered lived reality to be 2 The number of subtle bodies attributed to an individual differs depending upon the religious tradition or culture. 3 For detailed discussion of the role of individual subtle bodies in the Theosophical schema see Leadbeater (1969) and (1972).

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only a partial selection (by way of perception) of the whole of Reality which he termed durée (Bergson 1996).4 Similar to the type of extensive matter-consciousness comprising subtle bodies, from Bergson’s perspective, it is difficult to attribute clear delineations between subject and object: But the separation between a thing and its environment cannot be absolutely definite and clear-cut; there is a passage by insensible gradations from one to the other: the close solidarity which binds all the objects of the material universe, the perpetuality of their reciprocal actions and reactions, is sufficient to prove that they have not the precise limits which we attribute to them (Bergson 1996, 209).

The critique of the precision of allocated limits to subject and objects is a focal theme of this paper, and as the next section outlines, of critical importance in the designation and creation of cyborg subjectivities. Cyborgs: Individuals of Interpenetration and Exchange The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity (Haraway 1991, 151).

Donna Haraway’s conceptualisation of cyborg is articulated in relation to three sites of boundary breakdown: human and animal; human and machine and the physical and non-physical. That is, a cyborg subjectivity elides sharp distinctions between these categories articulating the ways in which the animal, human and technology are intermixed and interrelated to such an extent that the terms themselves start to loose any precise meaning. The boundaries which constitute and identify animal, human and machine as singular entities are eroded: no pure animal; no pure technology; no pure human. The constructed nature of each of these concepts (and the underlying concepts of nature and culture) sits at the heart of the cyborg’s ontology. Cyborgs for Haraway are ‘born’ of and inhabit these sites of boundary rupture. Defying the dualisms of dominant Western reason in a most obvious way, they are, 4

Bergson publicly displayed a keen interest in parapsychology, he was a member of a number of associations, including being elected President in 1913 of the Society for Psychical Research founded in Cambridge in 1882. Bergson also had exposure to the ideas of the notorious occult group The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as his sister, Mina (later changed to Moina) was married to one of its co-founders Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, although Eric Howe records that Mathers was disappointed in not being able encourage Bergson to join the esoteric fraternity (Grogin 1988, 75).

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according to Haraway, entities of dispersal and reformation, messy, mobile and fluid. Late twentieth – century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert (Haraway 1991, 152).

For Haraway, technology itself breaks down the binary system of Western epistemology. It messes up clear-cut demarcations between, for example, self-other, nature-culture, male-female, imagination-reality. Cyborgs are creatures of paradox and simultaneity, and they are, she argues, our contemporary subjectivity: ‘we are all cyborgs’ (Haraway 1991, 150). Although born of the ‘space race’5 as a mode of subjectivity, Haraway claims they are yet to be ‘coded’ and it is the production of this coding, that she identifies as the cyborg’s potential for challenging dominant discourse.6 Sharply critical of concepts of unified subjectivity and the ontological or metaphysical views that support them, Haraway celebrates the cyborg’s partial and terminally incomplete status. Having an ontology of their own (that can not be described as a variety of substance or process ontology), cyborgs ‘exist’ in tension to the binary options available for classification.7 Citing microelectronics and biotechnology, Haraway’s work emphasises the way in which the ‘human’ is simultaneously ‘technology’ (Haraway 1991, 153). The Scientific and Spiritual Expanse of Intersubjectivity People are nowhere so fluid, being both material and opaque (Haraway 1991, 153).

5 In a later lecture, ‘Birth of the Kennel: Cyborgs, Dogs and Companion Species,’ Haraway emphasises that when she employed the term cyborg in the Manifesto she was referring specifically to HAM one of the first ‘astronaut’ chimpanzees with the U.S. Space program: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/haraway/haraway-birth-of-the-kennel-2000.html. 6 ‘The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code’ (Haraway 1991, 163). 7 ‘The cyborg is a creature in a post–gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity’ (Haraway 1991, 150).

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Whether an expanse of subtle matter-consciousness or microelectronic data subtle bodies and cyborgs propose the individual self as unbounded by fleshy and perceptual constraints. They are conceived of as existing beyond the physical flesh and perceptive capacities of the five sense organs. Both body schemes challenge the binary logic of dominant Western ontology and both broaden the boundaries of individual subjectivity. In her suitably paradoxical definition of cyborgs, Haraway describes them as ‘ether, quintessence’ (1991, 153) and in doing so, she evokes a very close association with subtle bodies via pneumatological and alchemical relations.8 Quintessence (quinta essentia) is a term used in antiquity and medieval philosophy to designate celestial matter. It was considered by Aristotle as the fifth element (Haage 2006, 19), which was to be found in all things. In the alchemical traditions of Western esotericism9 procedures for extracting the ‘element’ were developed with the belief that it was possible to distil quintessence from within whatever matter held it. This is perhaps the source of its now rarely used verb form: ‘To take (out) of or from (something)’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989). Haraway’s use of a term that exists largely within the domain of alchemical theories and practice to designate the ontology of cyborg subjectivities can be considered as another example of scientific discourse utilising tropes derived from Western esotericism to represent new phenomena/concepts in dominant discourse. For example, as Mark S. Morrison skilfully relates, the emergence of radioactivity and atomic theories in the early twentieth century strongly utilised the tropes and images of alchemy. The new science of radioactivity and atomic theories was explained as ‘modern alchemy’ by many scientists, occultists and the popular press of the era.10 Of course, the work of Frances A. Yates in 8 Subtle bodies and alchemy are implicitly interrelated in Hindu religious traditions. For example see White (1996). 9 Bernard D. Haage defines alchemy’s purpose as to ‘produce noble metals, precious stones, the panacea, and above all the Philosopher’s Stone.’ The first recorded text in the Western tradition dates from the third century, and as Laurence Principle notes alchemy is not a singular monolithic tradition, but rather, there has existed numerous ‘alchemies’, theoretical and practical, that have been concerned with chemical and spiritual processes and medical cures (Hanegraaff 2006, 15-17). 10 Morrison is keen to point out that this was a reciprocal relationship. That is, that occultists used the new scientific discoveries in understanding and promoting their practices and beliefs while similarly scientists utilised the understanding of alchemy proposed by the modern occultists to interpret and explain their discoveries (Morrison 2007, 5).

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the mid-twentieth century has already made a significant impact in illustrating that the traditional boundary lines drawn between esotericism and science by the Academy were porous, by illuminating the influence of Renaissance Hermeticism in enabling the emergence of modern science (as well as raising the profile of Western esotericism as a viable discipline of academic study in its own right) (Yates 2002; von Stuckrad 2005, 3). Suitably, considering Haraway’s critique of dominant discourse, her use of quintessence invokes not only a discipline traditionally maligned by the academy as ‘dodgy’ but simultaneously references theories and practices considered as the ill-formed thought of ancient and medieval scientists and in modern times the realm of charlatans and spiritualists. However, contemporary research continues to show how alchemy actually informed the cutting edge science of the nineteenth and twentieth century. In short, that the boundary between science and alchemy is itself porous. Yet, there is an even richer association being conjured here, one that draws the two models of intersubjectivity being explored – subtle bodies and cyborgs – into a more intimate engagement at the ontological level. The term ‘ether’ simultaneously invokes the ether physics of Victorian science, the etheric realm and etheric body of the modern Theosophical subtle body. Significantly, it permits a pneumatological correlation. The Deity pours his spirit into the universe, like ‘ the blowing of mighty breath,’ and this breath ‘has formed with this aether an incalculable number of tiny bubbles, and these bubbles are the ultimate atoms of which what we call matter is composed’ (Leadbeater 1972, qtd in Morrison 2007, 85).

In the Hindu traditions, which the Theosophical Society drew upon in ‘constructing’ their subtle body scheme, a ‘vibratory power’ prana is at the most fundamental and ontological level understood to comprise the visible world (Feuerstein 1990, 266). Literally prana means ‘breathing forth,’ and correlations between it and the Ancient Greek pneuma have been drawn (Feuerstein 1990, 265). Although conceptualised in many different ways in Hindu traditions, prana is most usually considered to be a type of life force, and is able to be considered a correlate of the Theosophical vitalist, processural ontology including conceptualisations of animating ‘spirit’ (Feuerstein 1990, 266). Ether is both a type of ‘matter-spirit’ in Theosophical discourse and a particular subtle body. The etheric body is one of the seven subtle bodies, it is located ‘between’ – although interpenetrating and to a degree

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constitutive of both – the physical or ‘gross’ body and the astral body. It is understood to be comprised of matter–spirit drawn from the Etheric plane (Powell 1972; Richmond 1997, 23). As with other types of matterconsciousness delineated by modern Theosophists, ether is understood to be perceived by those who have developed their perceptive skills accordingly, a cultivation of mind–body considered a spiritual discipline. If cyborgs are, as Haraway defines them, ‘ether, quintessence’ (Haraway 1991, 153) they can be considered as forms of subtle subjectivity, or at least to share an ontological foundation found in esoteric anatomy across both eastern and western esoteric traditions. Further, Haraway has been rigorous in her identification of the way in which JudeoChristian tropes, especially those of salvation, inform the representation of Western science, the way in which the facts of scientific discovery are reported and narrated. Her articulation of the cyborg is consciously positioned as outside any covert or overt relation to divinity: ‘It is not just that “god” is dead; so is the “goddess”. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics’ (Haraway 1991, 162). Considering her own recourse to the nomenclature of ancient science and alchemy to represent cyborgs, it would seem that the divine is not annihilated but revivified in particularly esoteric form. It is a form that is immanent and extensive, animate and energetic. Science and the spiritual drawn tightly together. Both cyborgs and subtle bodies are forms of intersubjectivity concerned with micro-politics, ‘unseen’ selves with porous boundaries. They are esoteric, both in their relation to dominant discourse, their acknowledgment of ineffable or ‘subversive’ constituents, and the way in which they ‘operate’ like the ‘discipline’ of esotericism itself. Discussing the reasons why the Western esoteric tradition has historically been marginalised by the Academy, Antoine Faivre writes: ‘the transdisciplinary character of esotericism is hardly compatible with the separation of the disciplines, which resembles well labelled jars lining a pharmacy shelf ’ (1994, ix). The pharmacological metaphor is neatly utilised to present the corpus of Western esotericism11 as inherently transdisciplinary. A discipline, which like subtle body and cyborg models of self, exceeds 11 Although the typology that Faivre proposes as delineating the discipline’s corpus has been challenged. See, for example Hanegraaff whose definition of esotericism would enable the inclusion of Reformation spiritualism, and practical occult sciences, including contemporary New Age practices (1998, 402-403) and Stuckrad, who critiques Faivre’s typology as excluding ‘the ancient world, the medieval and modern periods; from the point of view of content, Jewish and Islamic esotericism, and for modernity

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the limits of dominant classification systems, and in doing so, call the boundaries maintained by these systems into question. Conclusion Cyborgs and subtle bodies are modes of individuality premised on an intimate penetration of the boundaries of self and other. This is no mere ‘all is one’ plenary of the New Age type. These forms of subjectivity have a significant accompanying ethics: ‘We are responsible for boundaries; we are they’ (Haraway 1991, 180). They call for a giving up of the dominant discourse of mastery – of self and other – so routinely signalled by acts of classification and they call for a revelation (both in knowledge and act of celebration) in ourselves as partial, unknowable, processural, subtle, fluid, heterodox, difficult and delusional boundary dwellers. Bibliography Bergson, H. 1996 [1908]. Matter and Memory. rev. ed. New York: Zone Books. Faivre, A. 1994. Access to Western Esotericism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Feuerstein, G. 1990. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Yoga. London: Unwin Paperbacks. Grogin, R. C. 1988. The Bergsonian Controversy in France 1900–1914. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Haage, B. 2006. ‘Alchemy II’. In Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. W. J. Hanegraaff et al. Ledien: Brill. Hanegraaff, W. 1998. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Albany: State University of New York. Haraway, D. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Heelas, P. 1996. The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnston, J. 2008. Angels of Desire: Esoteric Bodies, Aesthetics and Ethics. London: Equinox Books. Johnston, J. and R. Barcan. 2006. ‘Subtle Transformations: Imagining the Body in Alternative Health Practices’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (1): 25-44. Judith, A. 1987. Wheels of Life: A User’s Guide to the Chakra System. St. Paul, Minnesota: Llewellyn. Leadbeater. C. W. 1969. Man Visible and Invisible. Wheaton Il.: Theosophical Publishing House. —— . 1972. The Chakras. Wheaton, IL.: Quest Books. Morrison, M. 2007. Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

also Buddhism, which strongly influenced twentieth-century European esotericism’ (2005, 5).

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Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2nd editions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Powell, A. E. 1972 [1925]. The Etheric Double. London: Theosophical Publishing House. Richmond, M. T. 1997. Sirius. Mariposa: Source. von Stuckrad, K. 2005. Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge. London: Equinox. White, D. G. 1996. The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yates, F. A. 2002 [1964]. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London: Routledge.

RELIGIOUS STUDIES IN NEW ZEALAND: A WRONG DIRECTION? Paul Morris Abstract Religious Studies is taught at five of New Zealand’s eight universities, with a sixth university teaching a number of Religious Studies units under the auspices of its Faculty of Arts. Currently there are more than five hundred (equivalent full-time) students taking Religious Studies in the country. This article explores the development of the academic study of religion in New Zealand’s universities from the early 1970s to the present, presenting an alternative view of the discipline to those presented by Garry Trompf (2004, 2005) and Majella Franzmann (2007) in two recent survey articles of the field in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region. In this chapter I contend (contra Franzmann) that Religious Studies began at the University of Otago in the late 1960s with Albert Moore, fresh from studying with the University of Chicago’s Mircea Eliade; a little later at Canterbury University with Colin Brown; and with Lloyd Geering at Victoria University of Wellington, where he was appointed to the first Chair of Religious Studies in Australasia in 1972. Franzmann’s claim that Canterbury initiated the discipline of Religious Studies in 1962 within its Philosophy programme (2007, 221) is only sustainable if no distinctive intellectual lineage or methodological orientation is attributed to Religious Studies. This chapter asserts trenchantly that the intellectual legacy of Ninian Smart, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Mircea Eliade has marked out a distinctive, phenomenologically-oriented, non-confessional approach to the subject matter of religion(s) that separates Religious Studies from Theology or from units in History or Philosophy that treat religious subjects, such as the Reformation or the classical proofs for the existence of God. The three pioneers, Moore, Brown and Geering, played a national role in changing the appreciations of religion in New Zealand. This article traces the growth of the New Zealand university programmes in Religious Studies and the different approaches they have taken to the academic study of religion (with some comparative observations on the situation in Australia). The success of Religious Studies in New Zealand has led to a dramatic increase in staff and student numbers and areas of specialist teaching and research. Topics explored include the future of the ‘discipline’ in New Zealand; the nature of the area of study; the contribution of New Zealanders to the international field; the public role of Religious Studies academics; the relationship of Religious Studies and Theology; and the post-September 11 context of the academic study of religion.

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While I know Religious Studies in New Zealand quite well, one subtext of this chapter is comparisons with parallel developments in Australia. My knowledge of Australia is limited to short visits to a number of universities, and to a limited number of published survey articles. I was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Queensland for seven weeks, during which time I became acquainted with the programme and examined two PhD dissertations of University of Queensland candidates. The department at University of Queensland had a number of interesting staff with academic specialities ranging from the Ancient Near East, via biological determinism and Aboriginal spirituality, to seventeenth century rationalism and Buddhist Studies (Trompf 2005, 8769). The department struck me as strange, however, as the staff appeared to have little if anything in common intellectually or religiously. Battle lines, however, were drawn and staked out between staff, and while these might well have been methodological or ideological, they often seemed manifestly personal to me (and debates attending the academic study of religion were curiously absent from staff and student discourse). I have visited the University of Sydney four times, and was acquainted with the first Professor in the Department of Religious Studies (now Studies in Religion), Eric J. Sharpe (Sharpe 1985, 1986, 1990), as I had been a student at Lancaster University in the late 1970s. In preparation for these visits and teaching a new course on Religion in New Zealand and the Pacific, I became familiar with the publications of (now Emeritus) Professor Garry Trompf (Trompf 1979, 1991, 1994) and of a former member of staff, Tony Swain (Swain 1993; Swain and Trompf 1995). In recent years Trompf has authored two articles on the academic study of religion in Australia and the Pacific (2004, 2005). I have also made short visits to Monash University, Griffith University, University of New South Wales, Australian National University, La Trobe University and Deakin University. My first point of departure, an autobiographical one in an unashamedly autobiographical piece, is that while I might well concede along with the Norris-Hulse Chair at Cambridge, Professor Sarah Coakley, that Religious Studies is an excellent pluralistic environment in which to pursue theological studies, the reverse is not true at all. By Religious Studies I mean the non-confessional study of religions, much more rare than you might think, as opposed to Theology. Theology, as Maurice Wiles explains, is the contemporary re-statement of the Christian faith rather than a Humanities or Arts faculty subject undertaken at a secular

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university (Wiles 1976, 2). We have to be careful here. I tell my students that while we teach them what people believe we do not teach them what to believe (although an anthropologist friend reports that he constantly tells his students not to believe in any of that post-modern rubbish and to concentrate on learning fieldwork skills!). As an academic university subject Religious Studies is very new and really only dates from the late 1950s and early 1960s, even if it has now constructed its own sacred pre-history going back to Friedrich Max Müller, Émile Durkheim, or Rudolf Otto (Turner 1974; Almond 1994),1 and while none of this is quite true, it is useful, perhaps necessary, to create disciplinary myths of origin. Mircea Eliade, Ninian Smart and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, however, really did start something. What exactly, is, in retrospect, less certain. Religious Studies prospered during the Cold War in a world where free-world religion was opposed to atheistic communism, and in some quarters Religious Studies has been under pressure since 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism. This has, however, been somewhat less evident since September 11 2001, where Religious Studies, particularly in the areas of Islam and religion and politics has prospered (Lincoln 2003). In fact, considerable Religious Studies activity is now funded under the rubric of security and anti-terrorism budgets. Religious Studies: The Legacy of Ninian Smart and Mircea Eliade The English-speaking Religious Studies world in 1966 was split between two different versions of what was rather misleadingly called the ‘phenomenology of religion’ (Cox 2006). The first ‘school’ followed the first university chair in Religious Studies in Britain at Lancaster, Ninian Smart (1927–2001). He had been trained as a classicist at Oxford and did his Bachelor of Philosophy thesis there on the Scottish Enlightenment. On his way to becoming a liberal Christian with a growing interest in the comparative philosophy of religions, his views of the world were shaped by his military service in China and Ceylon, which led to a 1 So for example, it is the paperback reprint of John W. Harvey’s English translation of Otto that was important for Religious Studies; that is, the history of the ‘discipline’ was constructed retrospectively. Originally published as Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (Breslau: Trewendt & Granier, 1917) it was translated in 1923 as The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Nonrational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923; 2nd ed., 1950), and it was the second edition reprint in 1970 that largely impacted on Religious Studies.

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lifelong enthusiasm for Buddhism and more generally things Asian. This was followed up by studies in Sanskrit and Pali at Yale University. Smart’s phenomenology was a bracketing of truth claims (epoché) at a primary level of description that would allow for a worldview/weltanschauung to be discerned and appreciated prior to philosophical judgments being made, or as Smart insisted, ‘don’t judge a woman until you have walked a mile in her moccasins’ (Smart 1987, 9). It was not a very sophisticated philosophical position – his brother was J. J. C. Smart, the advocate of what has been called ‘Australian materialism’ (Smart 1961, 1963) – but Ninian’s phenomenology did have the advantage of creating a space for religious diversity and investigation. His textbooks were, and still are, widely used in the English speaking world and include Reasons and Faiths: An Investigation of Religious Discourse, Christian and non-Christian (1958); Historical Selections in the Philosophy of Religion (1962a); The Religious Experience of Mankind (1969), Background to the Long Search (1977); The Phenomenon of Christianity (1978); Beyond Ideology: Religion and the Future of Western Civilization (1981); Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Belief (1983); Religion and the Western Mind (1987); The World’s Religions: Old Traditions and Modern Transformations (1989); Christian Systematic Theology in a World Context (1991); Buddhism and Christianity: Rivals and Allies (1993); Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs (1999); and World Philosophies (2000). He also wrote approximately a dozen other books, mostly on religious education. Smart taught that religion and religious experience of the sacred were essential parts of our humanity, individually and collectively. The framework for the proper study of religion he called ‘The Seven Dimensions of Religion.’ These were: 1. experience – this is non-everyday ‘religious experience’; 2. social – where more than one person reports religious experience; 3. narrative – the stories of such experience for later adherents; 4. doctrinal – beliefs arising from experiences organised as a rational and logical system; 5. ethical – behaviours that are consistent with these beliefs; 6. ritual – repeated access to religious experiences; and, 7. material – manifestations of religious experiences in art and architecture. In 1986 Smart wrote the ‘Foreword’ to the new edition of Gerardus Van der Leeuw’s Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology (originally published as Phaenomenologie der Religion in 1933). Van der Leeuw (1890–1950), heavily influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey’s phenomenological hermeneutics and, in particular, his notion of understanding (Verstehen), insisted that phenomenological research was not an alternative

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to historical and textual work but built on them. Smart agreed with this characterisation of the phenomenology of religion and this led to Dimensions of the Sacred, his most systematic articulation of the framework and categories for the academic study of religion (Smart 1999) where he revisits and rethinks the work of the pioneering Dutch theologian. The second type of phenomenology was that of the Romanian fascist, Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) who with Joachim Wach from 1958 established what came to be known as the ‘Chicago School’ of the History of Religions under the auspices of the Chicago Divinity School. Eliade taught that all human experience is divided into the sacred and the profane. The sacred is revealed in hierophanies. His myth of eternal return contends that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate these hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually allow participation in them and the re-creation of mythical time. We are all familiar – perhaps too familiar – with his categories of sacred space, sacred time and so on. The Chicago School approach became influential and perhaps dominant in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Smart, Eliade was heavily influenced by Otto and van der Leeuw, and also by European romanticism concerning the orient and ‘oriental’ religions. Eliade was a prolific author, producing (among others) Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954); Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958); Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958); The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959); Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: the Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (1960); Myth and Reality (1963); Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964); The Two and the One (1965); A History of Religious Ideas, vol. I, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries (1978); A History of Religious Ideas, vol. II, From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity (1982); The History of Religious Ideas, vol. III, From Muhammad to the Age of the Reforms (1985); and the monumental Encyclopaedia of Religion (editor-in-chief) (1987). The Eliade mantle was not really passed on anywhere although a chair was named in his honour and later taken up by Wendy Doniger, a brilliantly idiosyncratic scholar who, unlike Smart and Eliade, was not trained as a philosopher. Her interests were in South Asia and in myth and narrative, both their cultural and universal import. She appears to have much less interest in religion in general and, in fact, sometimes seems hostile to some institutional forms of it. A number of her students display her wondrous predilection for the sacred as exotica, that is, a romantic celebration of extreme difference, such as secret societies,

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esoteric knowledges, and alien practices. Bruce Lincoln, also at Chicago, has worked out a number of Eliadean themes but again with little overview. He has developed a version of Eliadeism, that new religion developed by ‘the prophet’, complete with Indo-European originary stories.2 Students trained under Eliade, Cantwell Smith and other similar history of religion programmes fanned out across the United States and Canada to generate their own disciples, while Smart’s students returned to teach across the British Commonwealth, in Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Canada and elsewhere. Eliadeism proved to be of little ongoing value except as a first introduction to religion and, for a minority, to primordial faith itself. Smartian phenomenology turned out to be largely incoherent, and ‘bracketing out’ illl-conceived, with neutral value-free description an aspiration rather than a method. It did, however, have the merit of being a reasonably common sense approach to religions from a not-fully-acknowledged liberal Christian perspective; knowledge is good and knowledge of other faiths is essential for religious harmony in secular liberal democratic nation-states. In Smart’s later works this liberal bias led to a sort of evaluation of world religions, with historical Judaism only getting 4/10, but liberal Judaism receiving 8/10; fundamentalist Christianity only gets 2/10, along with traditional Islam, while modernist Islam gets an 8/10 and liberal Christianity full marks with 10/10. This is the same Smart who in the first edition of The World’s Religions inadvertently captioned a photograph of Australian Aborigines as Maori (both very – equally? – low scorers in the liberal Christian stakes). After a complaint from me, and I am sure others, this revealing error was, as promised, corrected in all later editions.3 Many will object 2 Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. See, among others Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Other People’s Myths: The Cave of Echoes (New York: Macmillan, 1988); and The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For Bruce Lincoln, see Priests, Warriors and Cattle: A Study in the Ecology of Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 3 See, especially Ninian Smart, The World’s Religions: Old Traditions and Modern Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The infamous photograph is on page 172.

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that the tale of Smart and Eliade is old news, that they have been toppled from their pedestals and are now despised by all (Dubuisson 2003 [1998]; Flood 1999) or, more humiliatingly, are simply unknown to contemporary Religious Studies undergraduates. Perhaps. But Religious Studies in New Zealand to this day consists in a considerable way of a series of footnotes to Smart and Eliade. To recapitulate, the Eliadeans acknowledged the archaic lost religious reality ready for contemporary retrieval, a sort of Heideggerian romantic concealed truth, whereas the Smartians looked, like Hegelians, to the future, where not-yet but very-soon the liberal truth would fully reveal itself to us all. The world of these two doyens has long passed. In the intervening years what has transpired has been a large rise in the number of doctoral candidates working on an ever-widening array of topics. The broad overviews about religion have largely given way to more specific studies creating a somewhat chaotic field when viewed as a whole. Students complete research in regional and area studies (South Asia, East Asia) with disciplinary or multidisciplinary training in sociology, anthropology or political studies. While specialization has increased, the scholarly agenda has largely been dictated from outside of the field with Religious Studies somewhat passively following the cultural and academic trends and intellectual fashions of the day. So, for example, second phase feminism was followed by a decade of studies of women/ gender in religion, or the post-modern sublime is refracted as the revival of mystical studies (often, of course, these are combined to give us studies of the sublime goddesses of tantra, kabbalah and so on). In the same light more recently, and rarely in very original ways, Religious Studies scholars have been obsessed with disciplinary practices, the body and embodiment. Another group of scholars have focused their energies on religion as subaltern resistance and/or as colonial instrument of oppression (McCutcheon 1997; McCutcheon 2003; Fitzgerald 2003). Religion is a thematic that often feels tagged on to contemporary discursive studies and one recent fashion has been to understand Religious Studies as but a sub-field of Cultural Studies. As the pressure mounts on the Humanities to recover its core in favour of area studies, we can expect scholars of religion to cut the Cultural Studies cord and to re-position Studies in Religion alongside Classics, Philosophy, English and History at the recently rediscovered heart of the Arts. The exponential growth in the different sections and subsections of the American Academy of Religion; the plethora of new specialist journals; e-journals; and, so on reflect this move to greater and greater

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scholarly specialisation. In Jewish Studies, for example, the nearly two thousands people at the American Jewish Studies annual conference are arranged into more than a dozen subsections, and the many thousands that attend the annual American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference into literally scores of specialist scholarly enclaves. Even the AAR plenaries and presidential addresses no longer seem to even try to put poor Humpty Dumpty back together again. At the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) congress in 2005 in Tokyo there were plenaries on the subjects du jour; terrorism and women. The Harvard Divinity School of 1992 with its eco-theology, gay and lesbian theologies, Hispanic and Black theologies was very different from that of 2000 where much more of a ‘zoo model’ is in evidence. This involves representative evangelicals (Sarah Coakley, now at Cambridge), Orthodox Muslims and Jews (Jon Levenson), and pious folk from across the religious spectrum, teaching their own faiths. All that seemed to be left of the identity politics of the recent past was Diana Eck and her pluralism project. This is a fascinating attempt to efface religious difference in the United States with parallel and different religions that just seemed to do what the majority do and believe in very much the same values that the majority of Americans believe in. Eck emphasises that the United States is ‘not only home but the hope’ of world faiths where all will liberalise to allow full women’s participation and so on. Eventually all Americans will subscribe to the same liberal values. At this point Eck comes very close to Smart’s views (Eck 1997, 2002). There are similar – scholar-adherent and one or more from each religion – models at Virginia, and at Columbia, where the professor of Jewish Studies has a number of Orthodox male ordained rabbis undertaking research in very traditional areas, and where a broader view of religion is much less in evidence. At Princeton the Religious Studies programme is consciously non-theological, led by Jeffrey Stout and including Martha Himmelfarb. Here there are powerful political agendas, characterised by John Gager as interesting people working together with a shared commitment to secular diversity (Zebrowski 2006). Other centres are admixtures. For example, University of California, Santa Barbara, where I taught for a while, or in the many smaller places where areas of interest are simply dictated by the specialist research interests of staff. The whole of Religious Studies is interesting across the social sciences and humanities fields but often seems huge, complex and coreless.

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Religious Studies in New Zealand Now let us turn our attention to the situation of the teaching of Religious Studies in New Zealand. New Zealand has a state university system consisting of seven universities and one technical university. There are Religious Studies courses at Otago, Canterbury, Victoria, Massey, Auckland, and Waikato, that is, at six of the seven universities. Until being disbanded at the end of 1961 there was a single university, the University of New Zealand, made up of a number of university colleges. The now separate universities, after being encouraged to compete with for students, a trend highlighted during the New Right 1990s (Morris and Janiewski 2005), are now being encouraged to collaborate with each other and focus on quality rather than solely on access and student numbers. The process of complete institutional separation has thus been arrested, and the current government is trying once again to develop a single national policy and high level administration for the universities; the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). The various university charters have secular clauses that prohibit the confessional teaching of religion. I am most familiar with the situation at Victoria University of Wellington where I have been both an undergraduate student in the 1970s, and a teacher from the mid-1990s and where I am currently the incumbent of Lloyd Geering’s Professorship. Religious Studies at Victoria formally began with a request from students to the Professorial Board in 1961 that there be courses in the different religious traditions. While the Board supported the proposal, Professors Munz and Hughes ensured that it was translated into a reality a decade later. Peter Munz was an atheist, German and Jewish by background, who taught medieval history and had written a number of original and interesting studies of religion, while George Hughes was an Anglican cleric, logician, and teacher of analytical philosophy.4 An international search led to the appointment of Lloyd Geering in 1971. This was the first chair in Religious Studies, as opposed to Theology, in New Zealand or Australia. The appointee was already a national figure having been subjected to two ‘heresy’ trials by the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand; in 1966 4 See Peter Munz’s pioneering Problems of Religious Knowledge (London: SCM, 1959), one of the first books on the historical philosophy of religion to draw on non-Western Christian illustrations. Also his Relationship and Solitude: A Study of the Relationship of Ethics, Metaphysics and Mythology (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964); and When the Golden Bough Breaks: Structuralism or Typology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), which develops a new model of understanding myth.

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over the historicity of the resurrection, and again in 1970 over the immortality of the soul (Franzmann 2007, 224). His ‘trials’ were huge events in New Zealand enhanced by them being televised resulting in the end of a sort of dogmatic slumber by the country; the end of the cosy role where the churches could make unquestioned appeals to biblical authority and to the Christian tradition. Geering went on to be a high profile public figure receiving a series of awards climaxing in the country’s highest honour, the Order of New Zealand, limited to twenty living New Zealanders. He is the most decorated of scholars and our first Religious Studies professor to boot! He became the darling of the liberal Left with his espousal of modernist Christian non-supernatural, and later Green, theology. Now ninety-one, he can still fill a lecture theatre and regularly does so. This enormous profile raised that of Religious Studies at Victoria and the Department (later the Programme) has continued to have a particular media and public dimension. Geering started as Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy, later establishing a separate Department of Religious Studies. His inaugural lecture ‘Why Study Religion?’, delivered in September 1972, give some indication of his views at the time (Morris and Grimshaw, 2007; 180–196). Chapter 14 of his autobiography Wrestling With God: The Story of My Life (Geering 2006, 201–220) ‘A New Kind of Professorship’ explains how he saw the role of Religious Studies in the secular university.5 In 1974 Kapil Tiwari was appointed to teach Asian religions. My first year began with Tiwari’s shameless introduction to the mystic East; the Vedas, the Upanishads, and then to the pinnacle of human thought, Advaita Vedanta. Later we travelled further East to China and Japan, where the focus was on Buddhism generally and Zen specifically, which turned out to be yet another form of Vedanta (Tiwari 1977, 1980, 1986). Tiwari’s worldview was influenced in particular by his teacher, T.R.V. Murti whose Central Philosophy of Buddhism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980) finds Advaita Vedanta at the very core of Buddhism and all Eastern spirituality. We loved it. I remember being totally absorbed in my first essay on the Upanishads and the ineffability of Brahman. Tiwari presented himself as a mystic Easterner who lived by feeling, as opposed to us poor Westerners bound and limited by doctrine and reason. This

5 See also Lloyd Geering, ‘The Place of Religious Studies in a Secular University, or R.S.D. in Search of Identity’. Journal of Christian Education 51,1974: 40–49.

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was followed by a second term of Geering on Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the impact on them of the modern world. My memories of Geering’s lectures were of an amazing clarity; complex histories and theologies perfectly compressed into four points each under four headings. After the introductory year we studied Religious Texts (Dhammapada, Bhagavad Gita, Genesis and St John’s Gospel) and Philosophy of Religion. The flagship course at the very heart of the Religious Studies major was Geering’s Religion and Change which led to his Faith’s New Age (London: Collins, 1980) and looked at religion in modernity through the eyes of Toynbee, Bellah and Jaspers (Morris 2006). In the final year I took Tiwari’s course on Mysticism (more Advaita) and Modern Religious Thinkers (Otto, Suzuki, Tillich and Buber). In retrospect, I now know that Geering’s teaching was much more akin to liberal Christian theological preaching than academic Religious Studies, but at the time his historical introductions were empowering and led us from Sunday school, or in my case Hebrew school, to an understanding of the liberal faith of modernity. Unfortunately, this was offered as a version of Benjamin’s ‘one way street’ with no alternatives, or at least no equal alternatives. The danger with this position is that the only explanation of fundamentalism, or even traditional belief itself, is the ‘wally theory of religion’, that these people have just missed the modernity boat and are wrong headed and/or confused or both. Geering’s view was that we had a responsibility to study and teach what people believe, and to recognise ‘students’ own existential concerns,’ by asking if it is true. As a teacher I am less certain than he was on this last point, even if I am mindful of Rousseau’s view that not to ask the veracity of another’s belief is potentially to use knowledge of another’s faith as a weapon again them. (Morris 1990) Jim Veitch, an Otago and Birmingham graduate, was the third academic member of the Department. He had studied under John Hick and Ninian Smart, and completed a thesis on revelation in world religions. Veitch lived and taught in Indonesia and Singapore before returning to New Zealand in 1978. His primary interest then was in Christian origins. After Geering retired, Elizabeth Isichei (a New Zealander who had completed her Doctorate of Philosophy at Oxford on the Quakers, and had become a specialist on religion in Africa, with a particular focus on Nigeria), became Reader in Religious Studies. In 1994 she went to take up the Chair of Religious Studies at Otago University. In 1994 I was appointed Professor of Religious Studies, after teaching for ten years at Lancaster University where I had completed my

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doctorate under the supervision of Ninian Smart. When I arrived there was only one member of the Department, Jim Veitch, and a relatively large number of students. Morten Schlutter, a Yale doctoral candidate from Denmark with a thesis on Chinese Buddhism during the Song Dynasty was appointed and was with us from 1995–1998; he now teaches at the University of Iowa. At the same time we appointed Kate Blackstone, a Theravada Buddhist specialist whose McMaster University doctorate had focused on Buddhist nuns. Blackstone, a Canadian, returned home to teach at the University of Manitoba. Schlutter was replaced by Tony Huber, a New Zealander with a doctorate from University of Canterbury on Tibetan pilgrimage. Huber taught courses on Buddhism, Tibet and pilgrimage. He is now Professor of Tibetology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Michelle Spuler, a University of Queensland graduate and expert on Buddhism in Australia, taught Buddhism and New Religious Movements for a couple of years before moving to Colorado and then back to Queensland. During the period up to 2000 our equivalent full-time students (EFTS) grew from 35 to over 150. In 2000 we appointed Joseph Bulbulia, a Harvard and Princeton graduate with a research interest in evolutionary psychology and religion (Bulbulia et al 2008); and Marion Maddox, an Australian with interests in religion and politics in Australia and New Zealand and religion and political theory. Marion Maddox left in 2008 to take up the post of Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion at Macquarie University (Maddox 2005). Since 2002 we have appointed Rick Weiss, a Tamil specialist and Chicago South Asia graduate; Art Buehler, a Harvard-trained Islam and Sufi scholar; Michael Radich, another Harvard graduate, a New Zealander whose teaching and research is in the early history of Chinese Buddhism; and Anna Gade, a Chicago graduate whose research is on Qur’anic recitation in Indonesia and who has published on Islam in Indonesia and Cambodia and is currently completing an introduction to the Qur’an. Gade replaced Jim Veitch who transferred to the School of Government to teach counterterrorism and security studies (Veitch 1996). Geoffrey Troughton has just joined us, a New Zealander and graduate of Massey University, to teach religion in New Zealand and religion and politics. Our eighth member of staff is Chris Marshall, a New Testament scholar who has a passionate interest in restorative justice. Marshall is the St John’s Associate Professor and is partially funded by St John’s Presbyterian Church. We now have over 220 EFTS and are focussing on developing our postgraduate programme. In 2001 the Department became the

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Religious Studies Programme within the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies. We are by far the largest programme in New Zealand and, I think, in Australia too. In the early days, my schema was introductory courses at the first year, tradition courses in the second (Christianity, Buddhism, Hindu Religious Traditions, Judaism, Religions of China and Japan), and thematic/comparative courses in the third and final year of the Bachelor of Arts (women, mysticism, sex, death, psychology of religion, pilgrimage, secularism, religion and politics). The staff changes have played havoc with this and we now have thematic and traditions courses at all levels. We teach five first year courses each year – one over the Summer trimester – catering to different student interests and a truly fascinating range of higher level courses ranging from religion and biology, religion and healing, the contemporary Islamic world, and global Christianity. We have bought in a variety of methodological approaches and specialisms, and it is now much harder to list what books students should have read by the end of three years, or even what they might know about religions. Increasingly, our range of courses allows students to create their own scholarly foci, but equally it reduces the number of students whose three years significantly overlap in terms of the courses taken. We have looked at this systematically and discovered that while there are discernible patterns there are also considerable differences. For 2008 I have introduced a new course, ‘Arguing About Religion’, recommended for all third years, which will begin to address the issue of an explicit framework to locate the various papers that make up a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies. This is designed to lead on to our compulsory methodology course at the Honours level. Our students have also changed in the last decade, with mature students down from 20% to less than 10%, chiefly due to costs and a buoyant job market. More and more school leavers means less and less other experience, including religious, and thus increases the weight of courses in shaping views on religions. Having Marion Maddox and Chris Marshall on board also led to higher numbers of committed Christian students who sometimes have other agendas (Morris 2004). The days of the comparative meta-theorists are helpfully over, but I lament the loss of frameworks – the disciplinary claim that we study something discrete and identifiable — as opposed to the current views that subsume Religious Studies into some generalised humanities (all humans have it) or cultural studies (religion is part of culture). And, while it is true that much of our work could equally be undertaken

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under different academic rubrics such as History, Anthropology, Sociology, Classics or Psychology, I like to think that we are linked by, at least, a Wittgenstein religion-game. It is probably true that there is something less and less distinctive about what we collectively do as we have become the victims of our own success – at four we could prescribe but at eight or nine! We have moved from Geering and the loss of the traditional God to something much wilder and more interesting, but less choate and defined. Turning to Religious Studies at Canterbury, in the early 1960s the University had rejected an Anglican Church plan to absorb the local theological college, although the compromise was a new course in the Philosophy of Religion in the Philosophy Department and Jim Thornton was appointed to teach it in 1963. Its popularity led to a second appointment in 1965, when Dr Jim Wilson, a Canterbury graduate, was appointed to teach Asian religions. In 1967, a third theologically-trained Christian scholar, Colin Brown, a liberal Anglican cleric, joined to teach Church History. A fourth scholar, David Brewster, also a clergyman, who taught Judaism and Islam, later joined them. In the 1970s this was the largest New Zealand programme in Religious Studies, although situated initially within the Philosophy Department and later in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. Interestingly, Colin Brown (who had an enduring interest in how Religious Studies should be pursued) cited the influence of Ninian Smart’s ‘Religion as a Discipline,’ (Smart 1962b, 48–53), and in particular the idea that religious claims about reality could be tested in the university and that the multidisciplinary study of the religious phenomenon would do much to broaden and revive Theology.6 With Brown the programme took its characteristic shape, with a focus on modern developments, although even in the 1970s Philosophy of Religion (or more accurately, of Western religion) was compulsory at second year and Contemporary Christianity at third year level. There was a theological dimension, in the Smartian sense above, to their Christianity courses but beyond that the approach was

6

See Colin Brown, ‘The Awkward Adolescent: Some Personal Impressions of Religious Studies in Universities and Colleges in the United States.’ Journal of Christian Education, Vol. 51, 1974, 28–39; ‘Teaching Religious Studies: The Canterbury Plan’, unpublished paper delivered at the New Zealand Association for the Study of Religion (NZASR) 1976; ‘Religious Studies in New Zealand: Whence and Whither?’ unpublished paper delivered at the NZASR 1992; and ‘How Should We “Do” Religious Studies? A Retrospective Glance’, unpublished paper delivered at the NZASR 1994.

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more mainstream Religious Studies, and included the comparative dimension. However, a Christian orientation was perceptible, with Wilson teaching Gandhi in a rather theological fashion. The Canterbury courses were popular, and in time William Shepard, a Harvard trained Islamic Studies scholar and student of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (and also a Christian cleric) came to replace Brewster teaching Islam and Judaism (Shepard 1996). Paul Harrison, with a doctorate from the Australian National University, joined in 1983 to teach Buddhism, and a little later Bo Sax, a graduate of the South Asia programme at Chicago arrived (Sax 1991). Neither of these last two was Christian or theologically educated. Shepard undertook pioneering work on the study of Islam in New Zealand. Bo Sax was famed for his Indian tricks, including a guillotine and a somewhat exotic approach to Hindu traditions, and made contributions to Anthropology and South Asian Studies. Sax is now Professor of Indian Studies at Heidelberg, Shepard has retired, and Harrison, a notable textual scholar, is now Professor of Buddhist Studies at Stanford University. Ghazala Anwar, with a doctorate from Temple, replaced Shepard teaching Islam, but was made redundant due to falling student numbers in 2005. Her interests were in identity politics, women in Islam, and Islam and development, with particular reference to Pakistan. When Brown retired, Jane Simpson was appointed. She retired early due to illness and Mike Grimshaw, an Otago graduate, was appointed. Aditya Malik, a graduate of Heidelberg, came to take Sax’s slot. Grimshaw and Malik were keeping the Canterbury Religious Studies flame alive, but in 2008 these two were transferred from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies to the new School of Social Science, where they are responsible for offering courses in ‘Religion.’ At the University of Otago, the person most associated with Religious Studies is Albert Moore (who recently died on January 23 2009, aged eighty-two). Moore was a graduate of Knox College, the Presbyterian Theological College in Dunedin, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. He completed his doctorate in New Testament Studies at the University of Manchester, where he had taken a paper in Comparative Religion. He followed this with a post-doctoral post at Marburg where he encountered the German version of the History of Religions. In 1963, a lectureship was established in the Phenomenology of Religion at Otago in the Faculty of Arts, at the instigation of the Theology Faculty (Trompf 2005, 8768). Moore took up this position in 1966, via a year at Chicago (1964–65), where he took courses with Eliade and Wach, and a year

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teaching at Indiana University, Bloomington. His salary for four years and a stipend for books were paid for by the Presbyterian Synod of Otago. The first course was taught in 1967 in the Theology Faculty, and the following year in the Arts Faculty (Jones 1980). By 1971 they had fifty students and by 1973 more than one hundred. In the Winter Term of 1973, the University’s Visiting De Carle Professor was Professor Ninian Smart. In 1974 a second academic was appointed, Kosuke Koyama (Koyama 1973), and in 1976 the major in Religious Studies was introduced. This was still a very Christian programme, although it did teach religions East and West and primal religions. Numbers continued to grow and in 1980 when Koyama returned to Union Theological Seminary, Otago graduate Malcolm McLean, who had studied Theology in India, was appointed to teach Eastern religion (McLean 1998). Douglas Campbell, whose doctorate was from Toronto, joined in 1989 and taught New Testament studies. Moore retired in 1992 and two years later Elizabeth Isichei was appointed to a Chair in Religious Studies (Isichei 1997, 2004). Gregory Dawes, a laicized former Roman Catholic priest, replaced Douglas when he went to Duke Divinity School in the United States in 1996.7 Albert Moore shaped a programme committed to a phenomenological approach to religions coupled with a largely historical methodology, that is, he bracketed truth claims, and as in his works on religious art, he subjected phenomena to description and far ranging analysis. In 1998 Religious Studies became part of the new Department of Theology and Religious Studies. Since then Dawes has become to part-time, teaching Judaism, Christianity and Islam; two new appointments have been made following the retirements of Isichei and McLean. Will Sweetman, a Cambridge doctoral graduate, teaches the Hindu traditions and Erica Baffelli, with a doctorate from Venice teaches on new religious movements, particularly in Japan. At Massey University, Religious Studies began with the appointment of Brian Colless in 1970 (Trompf 2004, 150). His salary was half paid by a local group of churches and half by the University, following the Otago model. This arrangement lasted two years and Peter Donovan, a lawyer and Anglican with an Oxford doctorate, was appointed in 1972. These two theologically-trained scholars offered a variety of courses alongside

7 Greg Dawes is currently enrolled in a doctorate in Philosophy at Otago. His subject is the fallacies of theological argument.

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Enid Bennett, a Methodist minister, first part-time and later full-time from 1977 until 1985. When she went to Auckland, Rene Turner was appointed. She was the first woman lecturer in Religious Studies in New Zealand to offer a course on Women in World Religions. When Turner left in 1988, Bronwyn Elsmore, a graduate of Victoria, was appointed. Elsmore taught Asian religions, woman and religion, and Maori religious traditions (Franzmann 2007, 235). Massey University was responsible for New Zealand’s extra-mural/distance education and in the 1980 there were hundred of enrolments for their distance Religious Studies courses, in addition to their students on the Palmerston North campus. With the retirements of Donovan, Colless and Elsmore, Christopher van der Krogt, a Massey graduate whose thesis was on Catholicism in New Zealand between the World Wars, and Douglas Osto, whose doctorate was from the School of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of London and whose expertise is in Buddhist Studies and Sanskrit, were appointed. The Religious Studies programme is small and both staff members are located in other academic programmes. The University of Waikato appointed the University Chaplain (Methodist, now Anglican), Douglas Pratt, whose doctorate is from St Andrews, in 1988 to a lectureship in Religious Studies. He had been teaching courses on the development of Christian Thought since 1985 under the rubric of General Studies. Religious Studies began as a Department in the Faculty of Social Sciences in the late 1980s, although it was relocated in the Humanities Faculty as part of the restructuring of 1990. In 1990 Joan Taylor, an Edinburgh doctoral graduate, was appointed as a contract lecturer alongside Dennis Green, a Master of Philosophy student and tutor. Dennis Green was subsequently appointed to a 75% post and Joan Taylor to a 25% position (Taylor, 193). Green later completed his doctorate on early Judaism. At the end of the 1990s Taylor moved to the United Kingdom and another tutor, Margaret ColdhamFussell, was appointed to a half-time lectureship. She is currently completing her doctorate at Waikato on spirituality, consciousness and the New Physics. Pratt has promoted encounter and dialogue in his courses and has developed an academic interest in Christian-Muslim relations (Pratt 2005). Dennis Green was made redundant in 2005 when the Department of Religious Studies was merged to become the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy. Currently there are one and a half staff members and they are awaiting further restructuring. There is a School of Theology at Auckland University with close links to the local theological colleges whose training it incorporates.

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In addition there are a number of Religious Studies-type courses offered, such as a unit on Islam taught by Indonesian Studies staff.

Conclusion Religious Studies programmes have, of course, changed everywhere. Lancaster, where I taught for a decade, used to have a series of requirements including the taking of at least one second or third paper in each of ‘methods, east and west’. This too has gone under the pressures of choice and the movement from single Honours to major subject area. External changes too can make a difference in self-perception. So for example, when the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was introduced in the United Kingdom, the government’s view was that Religious Studies, Theology/Divinity and Biblical Studies all belonged in a single category and henceforth would be known as ‘Cost Centre 35’. The evaluation panel was required to work under the new ‘combination; rubric and the future of our academic self-governance lay as bedfellows of our mirror images. The result has been many more combination programmes where Religious Studies and Theology are found not only evaluated but taught together and a deep blurring appears to have occurred at some level. Much the same is true in New Zealand where the Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) evaluations place Religious Studies and Theology together for research assessment purposes and the Humanities panel allows a single representative to guide their deliberations in these matters. I suspect that in the long term the distinction will matter less to us at all. In summary, currently in New Zealand Religious Studies is undergoing a transition. The programmes at Waikato, Massey and Canterbury are small and vulnerable. Canterbury’s restructuring of the Arts is still underway and it looks as if the two Religious Studies staff will have an ongoing separate identity, but may or will be subsumed as a minor part of a new school arrangement. At Massey, Religious Studies is a minor subject and again there are only two academics, although having the recent appointment of the second is a positive sign. At Waikato there are less than two people and a somewhat uncertain future as Arts and Humanities are subject to further reviews and restructuring. These two person shows raise the issue of a minimum size for a Religious Studies major, or even a minor subject area. Otago also has just over two people in Religious Studies, but as part of a department that includes a larger

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Theology programme. Victoria University of Wellington has eight academics and good student numbers, but Arts and Humanities at Victoria too are under some pressure. Victoria and Otago have just received a reasonably large government grant jointly to establish a New Zealand Centre for the Study of Islam and Muslim Cultures and are currently working together on this. The New Zealand situation was the focus of a special and somewhat bleak session of the NZASR conference at Rotorua late in 2008. There are many parallels with Australia, from Christian clerical domination to church funding as initial initiative for the teaching of Religious Studies, critical size, the so-called Humanities and Art crises, and the growing diversity of our populations (Franzmann 2007, 234–236). Looking back over the last forty years of Religious Studies in New Zealand it is clear that the take up across the country was amazingly high and reflected the level of student and public interest. The church origins of many of the programmes and the clerical trained personnel have also lost their natural audience, as the numbers of students from religious backgrounds decreases. This period has seen the introduction of student fees leading to vocational pressures on students who generate huge loans in order to fund their studies. All these pressures on the Humanities have led to talk of core and periphery with American Studies, Gender Studies and all sorts of these comparatively new area studies being marginalised. I am certain that the new New Zealand university regime promoting collaboration between universities will over the next few years foster greater linkages; joint postgraduate programmes, distance learning and the sharing of course resources and so on. My intention at Victoria was to promote the view that taking a Religious Studies paper or two or three was no different from taking History or Classics or Philosophy, and that Religious Studies was an integral part of any good Arts faculty, and nationally there is some evidence of this. New Zealand’s growing religious and cultural diversity is changing the student base and general interest as is our integration into the economic and politics of South East and East Asia, Religious Studies has a distinctively New Zealand future although the conceptual and institutional shape of this has yet to reveal itself. In conclusion, this chapter is a personal piece relying on autobiographical reflections to exemplify the trends and tendencies in the academic study of religion. The depth and detail of these reflections at least partly constitutes the originality of this contribution, as such published surveys as there are tend to be brief or to concentrate on Australia to the

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detriment of New Zealand. Further, both Majella Franzmann and Garry Trompf ’s recent writings on the academic study of religion are less committed to the ‘Religious Studies’ trajectory I have sketched here, and accord that classification to work that is, in my opinion, theology or history or philosophy, while admittedly dealing with religious content. The exposition of the legacies of Smart and Eliade is essential to give an adequate explanation of the origin, nature and legacy of Religious Studies in New Zealand. My title leaves a question mark hanging over the enterprise of Religious Studies in the universities of New Zealand; only time will tell whether ‘a wrong direction’ has been pursued.

Bibliography Almond, P. C. 1994. Rudolf Otto: An Introduction to His Philosophical Theology. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Brown, C. 1974. ‘The Awkward Adolescent: Some Personal Impressions of Religious Studies in Universities and Colleges in the United States’. Journal of Christian Education 51: 28–39. —— . 1976. ‘Teaching Religious Studies: The Canterbury Plan’, unpublished paper delivered at the New Zealand Association for the Study of Religion (NZASR). —— . 1992. ‘Religious Studies in New Zealand: Whence and Whither?’ unpublished paper delivered at the NZASR. —— . 1994. ‘How Should We ‘Do’ Religious Studies? A Retrospective Glance’, unpublished paper delivered at the NZASR. Bulbulia, J. et al eds. 2008. The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques. Santa Margarita: Collins Foundation Press. Cox, J. L. 2006. A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion: Key Figures, Formative Influences and Subsequent Debates. London: Continuum. Doniger, W. 1973. Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva. Oxford; London: Oxford University Press. —— . 1980. Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— . 1998. The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. New York: Columbia University Press. —— . 1988. Other People’s Myths: The Cave of Echoes. New York: Macmillan. —— . 2000. The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dubuisson, D. 2003 [1998]. The Western Construction of Religion. Trans. William Sayers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eck, D. 1997. On Common Ground: World Religions in America (DVD). New York: Columbia University Press. —— . 2002. A New Religious America. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Eliade, M. 1954. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— . 1958. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. —— . 1958. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Cleveland: World Publishing. —— . 1959. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —— . 1960. Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. New York: Harper and Row.

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Morris, P. and M. Grimshaw. 2007. The Lloyd Geering Reader: Prophet of Modernity. Wellington: Victoria University Press. Murti, T. R. V. 1980. Central Philosophy of Buddhism. London: Allen and Unwin. Sax, W. 1991. The Mountain Goddess. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Sharpe, E. J. 1985. The Universal Gita. La Salle: Open Court. —— . 1986. Comparative Religion: A History. 2nd ed. London: Duckworth. —— . 1990. Nathan Soderblom and the Study of Religion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Shepard, W. 1996. Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism. Leiden: Brill. Smart, J. C. C. 1961. An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. —— . 1963. Philosophy and Scientific Realism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Smart, N. 1958. Reasons and Faiths: An Investigation of Religious Discourse, Christian and Non-Christian. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. —— . 1962a. Historical Selections in the Philosophy of Religion. New York: Harper and Row. —— . 1962b. ‘Religion as a Discipline’. Universities Quarterly 17 (1): 48–53. —— . 1969. The Religious Experience of Mankind. Glasgow: Fontana. —— . 1977. Background to the Long Search. London: BBC. —— . 1978. The Phenomenon of Christianity. London: Collins. —— . 1981. Beyond Ideology: Religion and the Future of Western Civilization. San Francisco: Harper and Row. —— . 1983. Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Belief. New York: Scribner’s. —— . 1987. Religion and the Western Mind. Albany: State University of New York Press. —— . 1989. The World’s Religions: Old Traditions and Modern Transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— . 1991. Christian Systematic Theology in a World Context. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. —— . 1993. Buddhism and Christianity: Rivals and Allies. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. —— . 1999. Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs. Berkeley: University of California Press. —— . 2000. World Philosophies. London; New York: Routledge. Swain, T. 1993. A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swain, T. and Trompf, G. W. 1995. The Religions of Oceania. London; New York: Routledge. Tiwari, K. 1977. Dimensions of Renunciation in Advaita Vedānta. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Tiwari, K. ed. 1980. Indians in New Zealand: Studies in a Sub Culture. Wellington: Price Milburn. —— . 1986. Suffering: Indian Perspectives. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Trompf, G. W. 1979. The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought: From Antiquity to the Reformation. Berkeley: University of California Press. —— . 2004. ‘A Survey of New Approaches to the Study of Religion in Australia and the Pacific’ In New Approaches to the Study of Religion: Volume 1 Regional, Critical and Historical Approaches, ed. Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz and Randi R. Warne. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter. —— . 2005. ‘Study of Religion: The Academic Study of Religion in Australia and Oceania’. In The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones, 2nd ed., vol. 13. Farmington Hills: Thomson Gale. Turner, H. W. 1974. Rudolf Otto: The Idea of the Holy. Aberdeen.

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Van der Leeuw, G. 1963. Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology. Trans. J. E. Turner, 2 volumes. New York: Harper and Row. Veitch, J. 1996. Muslim Activism, Islamisation or Fundamentalism: Exploring the Issues. Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute. Wiles, M. 1976. What is Theology? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zebrowski, J. 2006. ‘Religion professor, active mentor, to retire.’ The Daily Princetonian, April 27, at www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/04/27/news/15433.shtml.

RELIGION, SEXUALITY AND RETRIBUTION: PLACING THE ‘OTHER’ IN SYDNEY Carole M. Cusack and Jason H. Prior Abstract Australia is a notably majoritarian society, where the ‘majority’ is defined as white, heterosexual and Christian. At crucial periods in Australian history tensions involving minorities that did not conform to majoritarian expectations have flared up. The late nineteenth century was rife with racist and religionist tensions, particularly focused on the Chinese community, which influenced the Federation (1901) agenda for Australia. This agenda, enshrined in legislation such as the Immigration Restriction Act (1901) and other Acts constituting the White Australia Policy, determined Australian immigration until the late 1960s. Sexual minorities, particularly gays and lesbians, have not generally posed the overt and public challenge to ‘Australian values’ that alien ethnic and religious groups have. However, there are important synergies between the two cases and the challenges they pose for mainstream Australia. What is central to majoritarian Australia is peripheral to them; what is normative is alien. Their communities gather in areas that are ‘undesirable’ or unwanted by the establishment, and their ‘deviant’ practices take place in mysterious, substantially hidden locations. This paper examines two case studies of communities that challenged majoritarian Australia, and the places and constructed spaces associated with them in Sydney. The first case study is focused on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese community and the two temples in which the Chinese carried on their religious life; Sze Yup in Glebe (1904) and Yui Ming in Alexandria (1909). The witch-hunt against the Chinese culminated in a Royal Commission in 1891, which exonerated them on all counts (opium addiction, sexual immorality, and stealing the jobs of whites). The second case study examines the police raids on Club 80, a gay male venue that was located at various addresses in the inner city suburb of Darlinghurst. This witch-hunt was the last gasp of a long campaign waged by conservative elements of society against homosexuals in Sydney. The first Gay Mardi Gras parade in 1978 and the ultimate failure to close venues like Club 80 signalled profound social change. This research is a significant contribution to scholarship in that it establishes important parallels between deviant ethnic religion and deviant sexuality, and raises questions concerning what is regarded as decent and indecent, central and peripheral, healthy and unhealthy, normal and abnormal, ‘other’ and ‘same,’ and safe and dangerous, in the Australian context. These issues are located within Australia’s emerging multiculturalism and multi-faith, post-Christian religious landscape, and Sydney’s emerging reputation as one of the premier gay cities of the world.

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A distinctive feature of Sydney’s urban environment in the early twentyfirst century is its diversity of cultural expression, and the provision of a multitude of places within it that provide opportunities for and foster a variety of cultural experiences. These places provide minority groups with a certain degree of ontological security, but may reinforce insecurity depending on the places’ perceived permanence or ephemerality. The present diversity of cultural expression within the city has been created out of and in spite of an exclusionary, homogenising and racist past. Sydney has been hailed as ‘a microcosm of the religious life of the world’ (Hartney 2004, 435) and as one of the world’s pace-setting, gayfriendly cities (Marsh and Galbraith 1995). This diversity of life-options within Sydney and its perceived stability or instability is the subject of broader public opinion and concern, in which diverse religions and ethnicities, cultures and sexualities, are interrogated to determine whether they support ways of life that are good, orderly, healthy and safe for the city, or whether they support ways of life that are dangerous, disruptive, unhealthy and disorderly to the city. Garry Trompf has emphasised the mythic nature of multiculturalism in ways that are relevant to this chapter. He drew attention to the utopic (placeless) quality that any vision of an open, tolerant society possesses, and the difficulties with implementing steps towards such a community (Trompf 1992, 317). This insight, coupled with his proposal that a ‘logic of retribution’ governs human identity construction, particularly in historical and religious contexts (Trompf 1979, 85–106, 155–181, 231–241, 283–291), provides the framework of interpretation for our analysis of the Sze Yup-Yui Ming and Club 80 case studies. We concentrate on the role and significance of cultural identity in the formation of the urban environment to explore how binary oppositions concerning otherness and sameness, periphery and centre, exotic and everyday, normal and abnormal, healthy and unhealthy, and safe and dangerous, are employed in relation to particular cultural groups. Trompf ’s ‘logic of retribution’ immediately reveals the potential for violent witch-hunts to emerge when such binary opposites are encoded with ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ values, setting the majority against minority communities. This is apparent in the intersection between ideas, images, and anxieties concerning the preservation of, and future of, ‘perceived ways of life’ and the way in which their urban form and space are regulated and governed by a variety of techniques, including vice laws, licensing, zoning, and land use planning.

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We offer a dual insight into this investigation, examining the imbrication of changing social attitudes towards cultural diversity as played out in the governance of the urban environment. This is done firstly through a sketch of the cultural landscape of Sydney in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a result of economic recession, racism and the transformation wrought by Federation. The focus here is the Chinese community and the two culturally-specific religious spaces it established; the Sze Yup Temple in Edward Street, Glebe, and the Yui Ming Temple in Retreat Street, Alexandria. Secondly, the paper examines the contestations between police, city planners, the gay community, and the owners of a gay sex club, Club 80, in Sydney in the early 1980s. These two case studies reveal much about changing social attitudes towards cultural diversity, and the retributive construction of the ‘other’. As Trompf has perceptively noted, ‘popular constructions of retributive logic will not go away … it is natural for humans to pass judgment’ (Trompf 1998, 73). Yet, positively, these case studies, played out against the invention, conception and regulation of particular urban spaces within Sydney at the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, both uphold the reality of minority groups’ experience above majoritarian stereotypes.

Case Study: The Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Sydney The date of the first Chinese contact with the Australian continent is unknown, although scholars have speculated that Chinese trading ships may have reached Australian waters as early as the late fifteenth century, and some suggest that contact may have been made early as the Han Dynasty (202BCE–264CE) (Fitzgerald 1997, 11–12). Of the early Chinese arrivals to the newly settled colony of New South Wales, Mak Sai Ying is perhaps the most famous. He arrived in 1818 as a free settler, purchased land at Parramatta, married an English woman named Sarah Thompson, and eventually became the licensee of a public house, The Lion (Fitzgerald 1997, 17). The first ship bearing indentured Chinese labourers arrived in 1848, and from that date ships were arriving in Sydney harbour carrying hundreds of Chinese. The discovery of gold led to the further increases in the numbers of Chinese workers arriving in Australia. This caused anxiety in the white Christian colony, evident in the change in tone in official records referring to the Chinese; where previously they were ‘docile’ farmhands, they became ‘undesirable,’ and ‘not suitable to the wants of the colony’ (Fitzgerald 1997, 22–23).

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This anxiety on the part of the white Christian colonial majority was fuelled by religious, racial and social prejudices. Chinese migration to Australia was restricted to men, and these men were best described as ‘commuter migrants,’ who remained members of their village despite being separated by great distances. They worked in foreign lands to make money to send to their families and would periodically return to maintain ties (Choi 1975, 13). There was widespread fear that these single Chinese men would prey upon white women. Further, the Chinese were highly efficient workers; on the goldfields ‘they could earn a living off fields abandoned by the whites as unprofitable … [which] earned the undying enmity of the diggers’ (Birmingham 1999, 91). Finally, they were not Christians and brought with them a religion that European Australians were ignorant of, and condemned as ‘idol worship’. They drew attention to their religion by erecting temples. Mark Singer notes ‘over 45 temples are now known to have been built among Chinese communities, from Darwin south to Weldborough in Tasmania. Additional evidence of other temples is suggested in rural folklore throughout Australia’ (Singer 1988, 97). The pre-Federation Chinese population of Australia peaked in 1881. At that time there were 38,533 Chinese; or 1.7 % of the population. The Chinese ‘originated mainly from the Siyi (Four Counties) and the Zhongsan localities in Guangdong’ (Chan 2005, 634). Apart from the desire to earn money, there were significant upheavals in China that intensified the desire of many to leave, including the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1964) and floods and famine (1849–1878) (Wang 1988, 197). The governments of the colonies began to pass anti-Chinese legislation in the mid-nineteenth century, and when in the last six weeks of 1878 the white workers of the Australian Steamship Navigation Company (ASN) went on strike, what started as ‘a fairly simple action to protect local jobs’ soon sparked on ‘a tinder-dry undergrowth of xenophobia’ (Birmingham 1999, 92). This strike is significant because represented a victory for the nascent union movement, and was ‘a catalyst for an antiChinese movement, which opposed not only specially imported cheap Chinese labour, but also spontaneous Chinese immigration’ (Curthoys 1978, 48). During the strike, parliamentarians, unionists, city council inspectors, and journalists participated in a series of public meetings that fuelled hostility amongst the citizens of Sydney and promoted the negative stereotype of the Chinese as ‘other.’ These meetings began in July of 1878 and continued to beyond the end of the strike on 2 January 1879. On 23 July

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a rally protesting against Chinese immigration was told that millions of ‘flat-faced, flat-footed heathen Chinese’ threatened the survival of the white race; and that the Chinese ‘were inherently immoral and a danger to the virtue of the city’s females’ (Birmingham 1999, 93–94). Ann Curthoys notes that in late 1878 there were 181 marriages between European women and Chinese men, and 171 couples cohabiting without matrimony, resulting in 586 Eurasian children. Angus Cameron, a Member of the Legislative Assembly, and Thomas White, the President of the Australian Seamen’s Union, respectively ‘expressed horror at the over-crowded dwellings and immorality of Sydney’s Chinese,’ and blamed Chinese merchants for outbreaks of pestilence (Curthoys 1978, 53). A Sydney city council Inspector of Nuisances, Mr Seymour, described his experienced of Chinese lodging houses in highly inflammatory terms (entirely neglecting to mention that many of the couples he surprised were legally married): [t]he Chinese live eight or ten in a room … I have gone into a room and found a small lamp in the centre, and a Chinaman with a woman between his legs, naked all but a petticoat, and another Chinaman in the same position on another part of the stretcher; in the next room the same and in the next the same. These were white women, some of them married women, and others women of the town. I have found another Chinaman lying with his arms around a woman, one hand on her bosom, and his other hand under her legs, pulling her parts about like a dog. In another place there was a Chinaman had a girl on the table, sitting up, with his trousers down, and one of the girl’s legs over his shoulder; she was under the influence of opium, and he was using her – having connection with her – and seven or eight Chinamen waiting at the door to do the same to this woman.’ (qtd in Birmingham 1999, 95–96).

A meeting of the Working Men’s Defence Association in August and a later meeting at Oddfellows Hall in Balmain reinforced this stereotype of sexual profligacy and drug-taking with accusations of dog-eating and ‘the slave-like qualities, the racial inferiority, of the Chinese’ (Curthoys 1978, 55). In terms of retributive logic, the white Christian majority were socially legitimating their ‘projections against an outside enemy … through a compelling righteous indignation’ (Trompf 1998, 73). The civil unrest engendered by the striking shipworkers, which extended beyond the mere fact that when ASN ships arrived in Sydney Newcastle and Brisbane their crews abandoned ship, exploded into street violence against the Sydney Chinese community throughout December. The colonial government was compromised and on 20 December Sir Henry Parkes and Sir John Robertson formed a new

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ministry. Parkes was known to be a strong opponent of the Chinese and ‘had stressed the need to protect the British character of the community’ (Curthoys 1978, 63). Three years later, legislation restricting Chinese immigration was passed and in 1888 these laws were further tightened. Parkes, however, also gave one hundred pounds to re-house a group of Chinese market gardeners in Alexandria whose homes had been destroyed by fire, stating that such aid was a ‘very proper’ thing to do (Fitzgerald 1997, 94). In 1891 the Royal Commission on Chinese Gambling and Immorality was established, possibly in response to the formation of an Anti-Chinese Gambling League (Markus 1979, 161). The Commission was chaired by the Lord Mayor, W. P. Manning (Anon. 1956, 27). One of the five commissioners was Mei Quong Tart (1850– 1903), a prominent Chinese businessman, married to an Englishwoman, Margaret Scarlett (Travers 1981). The Commission’s report was published in 1892. The Yui Ming Temple, Alexandria and the Sze Yup Temple, Glebe The report of the Royal Commission addressed the living conditions of the Chinese, which were definitely different from those of the white colonial majority. The market gardeners of Alexandria typically lived in little wooden huts in their gardens and the Commission suggested that these dwellings more resembled ‘an Arab town on the outskirts of an Egyptian city’ (cited in Fitzgerald 1997, 95–96). The Commission’s brief is given in the report as: to make a diligent and full enquiry with the view of ascertaining the undoubted facts in the matter of illicit gambling and immoralities among the Chinese residents in George-street North, in the said city of Sydney, and neighbourhood, and the alleged bribery or misconduct of any members of the Police Force in relation thereto; also to make visits of inspection to localities in the said city and suburbs occupied by the Chinese, and investigate and report upon social conditions, means of sanitary provision in the dwellings and workshops, the callings or occupations, and other circumstances affecting the well-being of such persons (New South Wales Government 1892, 19).

The Alexandria community was of particular interest to the Commission, because Retreat Street, the location of the Yui Ming Temple, was ‘notorious for its gambling, boarding houses and the shops that serviced the market gardeners’ (Rogowsky 2004, 99). The fertile soil of Alexandria attracted the Chinese settlers, but the area was regarded by whites as

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uninhabitable wasteland. Seven European women testified before the Commission and they insisted that their relationships with Chinese men were ‘mutually beneficial’ (Rogowsky 2004, 101). Sub-Inspector Lawless’ estimate of the occupations of the population of Alexandria is particularly useful: 190 gardeners, 14 rag-pickers, 113 hawkers, that is, those who go about hawking vegetables and other things, though mostly vegetables. There are 2 cooks and 1 man who makes fly-catchers, and also a wood-turner. Then there are 14 who sell pak-ah-pu tickets, and are always to be found about the gambling-houses. They are a kind of tout. I think, when you count those you will find that they make 375 (Rogowsky 2004, 102).

Despite this apparently unpromising social sample, the Commission concluded that ‘all the witnesses questioned upon the subject concurred in the opinion that the Chinese are, apart from their disposition to gamble, a singularly peaceable and generally law-abiding section of the community’ (New South Wales Government 1892, 22). The concern over sexual immorality was comprehensively dismissed, with the Commission concluding that the wives and mistresses of the Chinese men were welltreated and would probably be in worse straits without their partners (New South Wales Government 1892, 21). The decade between the Royal Commission’s investigation in 1891 and Federation in 1901 was a mixed one for the Chinese community of Sydney. The community staged its own event in honour of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and the Sydney Morning Herald reported that ‘the Chinamen proved themselves to be first class showmen and as great a “draw” as the international footballers, champion cyclists or English cricketers’ (quoted in Fitzgerald 1997, 109). However, 1901 saw the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act by the parliament of the new nation of Australia. This legislation was overtly racist, and until its repeal in the late 1960s it determined that Australia would remain white and Christian (Poon 1995, 53–54). The two surviving Sydney temples both date from the early twentieth century but both were pre-dated by earlier wooden structures. The significance of the temples as a focus for the religious and social life of the Chinese communities that congregated in them cannot be underestimated. The earliest records of the Yui Ming Temple date to 1870, when the Yui Ming Society recorded members in rural New South Wales, as well as in Alexandria. Stephen notes that membership is ‘based on common origins, from one or other of two districts … in the province of Guangdong (formerly known as Canton)’ (Stephen 1997b, 10). Retreat

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Street, ‘a nothing little lane of Alexandria,’ could be said to manifest the utopic nature of Chinese life in Sydney; Rogowsky poetically comments that the temple contains ‘traces of the memories, the secrets, and the legacy of early Chinese settlement in this area. This temple and the terraces which adjoin it, are the only remaining structural evidence of the history of the Chinese in a district that was arguably home to one of the largest concentrations of urban Chinese in Sydney (and Australia)’ (Rogowsky 2004, 97). The Chinese of Alexandria built an environment that was neither Sydney nor Guangdong, a ‘no place,’ where they could live in a way that defied majoritarian expectations. Amanda Jean describes the layout of the Yui Ming Temple as being in two blocks, one slightly higher than the other and with a sunken courtyard between each wing. While the temple would have seemed exotic to a white Christian of the Federation era, scholars note that the Chinese builders employed features of early twentieth-century architecture, so the ‘eaves of the ‘roof lantern’ are similar to the ventilated eaves of tropical Australian Federation buildings’ (Jean 1997, 32). The temple is in many ways typically Taoist, but embraces other religious elements, as syncretism (blending Taoist, Buddhist, Confucian and folk beliefs and practices) is typical of Chinese religion: [a] plaque inside the temple reveals that the three main deities honoured here are Cai Shen, Hong Sheng, Guan Di. As Hong Sheng/Hung Sheng was the local deity, it is most probable that the better known deities were added when the present temple was built. The choice of a particular god to worship is influenced by the worshipper’s own needs and beliefs (Chee and Tse 1997, 52).

Guani Di is the most popular deity known from all Chinese temples in Australia; Cai Shen is a deity of wealth; and Hong Sheng is a local rain deity, and indicates the dependence of the Alexandria market gardeners on the climate. There are also texts associated with Buddha and Guan Yi (the goddess of mercy) in the temple. In addition to the temple, the Yui Ming Society also erected a row of ten terraced houses, as housing for new arrivals and the elderly (Stephen 1997b, 13). The Sze Yup Temple in Glebe is of slightly later date, being originally built in 1898, after the land had been purchased by Johnny May Sing and Kung Fen in the previous year. The original structure was temporary, and the current temple, which again shows evidence of Australian architectural influence, resembling a row of Federation workers’ cottages, was opened in 1904. The Chinese community in

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Glebe was more open to the wider white Sydney community and the opening ceremony was described by the Sunday Mail as ‘a good show’ at which ‘roast pig galore’ was served to an appreciative audience (Fitzgerald 1997, 107). The temple is dedicated to Kwan Kung, a popular god of war and business, and Choy Bak Sing, ‘a god of good fortune wisdom and wealth’ (Chan 1989, 7). The temple was characterised by the same qualities of mutual help and social and religious support which have been observed at the Yui Ming Temple. One of the temple elders, Kip Fong, recalls that ‘only the men folk were here. They were coming here… to make a fortune hopefully, and the go back home… they had to help each other – so the temple was a sort of cultural meeting place and also a mutual assistance place’ (Chan 1989, 6). After Federation, the difficulties of the Chinese community in Sydney were magnified by accusations that they were responsible for the outbreaks of bubonic plague that occurred between 1900 and 1907 (Rogowsky, 2004: 104) and also for the presence of leprosy in Sydney (Markus 1979, 201–202). Chinese entry to Australia was severely restricted to economic migrants who were permitted to stay only temporarily (Inglis 1972, 269). The Chinese population fell from nearly thirty thousand in 1901 to less than ten thousand in 1947 (Chan 2005, 636). Those who stayed in Australia dressed in the Western fashion and led a double life which Ann Stephen states was ‘necessary in order to negotiate the fears of the foreigner’ (Stephen 1997b, 17). The Yui Ming and Sze Yup Temples fell into disrepair in the mid-twentieth century, as the younger members of the community integrated more with the majoritarian culture and had less time for traditional pursuits. In 1979 an extensive restoration project commenced, and in 1985 the New South Wales Heritage Council placed it under a preservation order. The Yui Ming Temple was similarly restored and both ‘are open to the public’ serving as ‘important historical landmark[s] for tourists and schoolchildren’ (Shum 1988, 210). The repealing of the White Australia Policy and a greatly broadened immigration intake in the 1970s altered the Sydney ethnic and religious mix. Yet retributive logic still may raise its head; in January 2008 the Sze Yup Temple was damaged by fire, and although police and community members were ‘unwilling to say if it might have been an ethnically-motivated attack just ahead of the Chinese New Year’ (Welch 2008), such an interpretation is clearly possible and perhaps probable.

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The diversity of expression of cultural identity – religious, sexual, ethnic – in the urban form of contemporary Sydney, is largely the result of a relaxation and transformation in the governance of urban space that has been brought about through broader acceptance within society of such processes as multiculturalism, secularisation, globalisation and liberalisation. These have increasingly redefined how culture is openly expressed within the city’s urban form since the 1960s, the decisions to restore the Yui Ming and Sze Yup Temples being a key example of this growing cultural openness. This increased diversity has been built on, and in spite of, an exclusionary, homogenising past that was not only racist, but also sexually normative. In the post-World War II years, Sydney was a city in reconstruction, guided by the first major attempts at metropolitan planning. When those in authority and the people they represented considered Sydney, they saw a city that had been neglected, ‘a city infected’ with ‘waning moral values, that needed to be controlled. These moves reflected an emerging social discourse in which ‘moralists and newspaper columnists condemned the “new immorality” [that accompanied the war], implying that social collapse was imminent because of this’ (Wotherspoon 1991, 101). A consequence of these concerns was a call for a return to what were perceived as earlier morals, standards, and norms. The early metropolitan plan was one tool in an arsenal of land based planning mechanisms that were used by authorities during the post-war period to gain back control of a city that was seen to be falling into chaos.1 The Honourable J. J. Cahill, State Minister for Local Government in New South Wales, discussed the need for the Act in the legislative assembly: [t]he need for adequate town and country planning machinery is now so insistent, having regard to the need for the orderly regulation of post-war development and for the correction of evils of the largely haphazard and uncontrolled development of our cities … in the past, that satisfaction of these needs can no longer be denied. This bill will provide the machinery (Anon. 1945, 1720).

1 Pt. XIIa ‘Town Planning and Country Planning Schemes’ was inserted into the Local Government Act, 1919, Assented to 22 December 1919 (The Statutes of NSW) creating the Local Government (Town and Country Planning) Amendment Act, 1945, Assented to 5 April 1945 (The Statutes of NSW).

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An image accompanying the so-called Cumberland County Plan depicted the vision of reconstruction (Spearritt 1988, 70). It presented a bleak picture of the existing city – overcrowded, polluted and unhealthy inner-city suburbs where factories existed alongside terrace houses – against new, orderly, planned suburbs unfolding around the existing city. In the promotional image, a planner overlooks the unfolding of these new suburbs, and behind him stand the occupants for whom this reconstruction is being designed: the ‘white, nuclear, male wage earning family’ that marked the post-war suburban housing boom (Lenehan 1996, 155–169). However, where these proactive planning strategies and controls on citizenship failed to manage the content of the city, they were supported by reactive and proactive policing which had a gamut of legislation at their disposal which gave them the right to ‘purify’ the city by extricating particular forms of habitation that were deemed to be potentially unhealthy, immoral, dangerous, and criminal.2 These post-war ‘purification’ processes of urban space were no were more evident than in the campaigns aimed at eliminating ‘the haunts of homosexuals’. Slowly at first, then escalating through the 1950s, homosexuality within the public discourse was increasingly seen as a threat to the city’s stability, and newspapers provided detailed coverage of the proactive Vice Squad’s campaigns to locate and eradicate homosexual haunts (Anon 1953, 5). These campaigns against homosexuals in the post-war period appeared in changes to criminal legislation, and the use of the Disorderly Houses Act 1943, which gave authorities the right to close ‘premises’ used by homosexuals within the city on the basis that those premises permitted ‘… disorderly or indecent conduct or any entertainment of a demoralising character’ [author italics].3 The Attorney General, Mr Sheadan, justified an amendment to the Crimes Act in 1955 that provided police with new powers to control homosexuality: 2 See, for example: Crimes (Amendment) Act, 1954, Assented to 14 April, 1954 (The Statutes of NSW); Crimes (Amendment) Act, 1955, Assented to 14 April 1955 (The Statutes of NSW); Vagrancy Act, 1902, Assented to 11 September 1902 (The Statutes of NSW); Disorderly Houses (Amendment) Act, 1943, Assented to 15 December 1943 (The Statutes of NSW); Vagrancy, Disorderly Houses and Other Acts (Amendments) Act, 1968, Assented to 22 October 1968 (The Statutes of NSW). 3 See, for example: Second Reading of Crimes (Amendment) Bill in Legislative Assembly, 23–24 March 1955, NSW Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), 3223–3260 and 3289–3302 at 3228; and Crimes (Amendment) Act, 1955, Assented to 14 April 1955 (The Statutes of NSW). See also Section three of the Disorderly Houses (Amendment) Act, 1943, Assented to 15 December 1943 (The Statutes of NSW) which enabled the closing of disorderly houses by way of the Inspector of Police obtaining a declaration from the Supreme Court of New South Wales.

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carole m. cusack and jason h. prior [t]he government has acted because it considers that the homosexual wave that unfortunately has struck this country – though not to the extent of continental countries – must be eradicated … [as he went on to say] … it is the government’s duty to protect the community, and especially its young members, who might become victims of the dirty behaviour of homosexuals (Prior 2004).

During the 1960s, sexual ‘deviants’ would continue to be considered as having a detrimental effect on the city, particularly its older innersuburbs such as East Sydney and Kings Cross, where the deviants were causing ‘decent’ and ‘normal’ people to retreat to the suburbs further out from the city’s centre. As Sydney’s urban landscape transformed in the post-war years, a dialectic emerged within popular discourse between the tainted older inner-suburbs and the new, ordered outer-suburbs of the Cumberland County Plan. From the 1960s the city began to witness, slowly at first, a period of considerable change in the expression of cultural diversity within its urban form as the result of the transformation of the post-war monoculture, through the combined forces of multiculturalism and liberalisation. An indication of these liberation processes was the creation of Australia’s first ‘homophile’ movement in the 1960s, similar to those that had been set up decades earlier in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. This official reform movement would be supplanted and eventually replaced in the early 1970s by the appearance of a gay political culture within Sydney. In the early 1970s the new gay culture was quickly absorbed into and modified the existing homosexual culture within the city. This reflected a change in the majoritarian culture, away from Christian-derived retributive narratives against homosexuals, to a more inclusive understanding of sexuality and lifestyle choice. Throughout the later twentieth century, the broader process of liberalisation and multiculturalism provided fertile ground for the development and tolerance of a highly visible gay culture within Sydney. The emergence of the gay commercial and residential districts and enclaves was reinforced by the annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, which first emerged as a protest but which has, over time, become a powerful symbol of the city’s international cultural identity (Marsh and Galbraith, 1995). The acceptance and support of these more visible manifestations of gay culture have been paralleled by the formal recognition of the importance of less visible material manifestations, such as gay bathhouses. This allowed the owners of establishments to abandon the demeaning charades they had adopted to hide from broader public

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visibility and the authorities. Important to this emergence were the confrontations over the policing of homosexual expression and presence at the Gay Mardi Gras in 1978 and the raids on the establishment Club 80 in the early 1980s. It was in the wake of these public protests that laws supporting police campaigns to close the city’s gay spaces were dismantled, firstly by the positive affirmation of homosexuality through antidiscrimination legislation, and secondly through the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The 1978 Gay Mardi Gras, a carnivalesque parade, was one part of the events that had been planned in Sydney to celebrate the International Day of Gay Solidarity that commemorated the ninth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that had taken place in Greenwich Village, New York on the weekend of 25, June 1969 (Truscott 1969, 1, 18). These riots had come to symbolise overt resistance to anti-homosexual policing that marked the birth of the gay movement. As Amanda Wilson stated, the Gay Mardi Gras was ‘to kick off a wave of activity over the next few months to marshal a reinforced front for the proposed visit of leading British anti-porn campaigner Mary Whitehouse’ (Wilson 1978a, 1). On 24 July 1978 at 11.30 PM the Mardi Gras carnival turned into a brawl. As Wilson recalled: Saturday was Gay Solidarity Day – a day when gays would celebrate, get together and have a good time. At 10.30 pm Australia’s first Homosexual Mardi Gras was in full swing, with 1000 people singing and dancing down Sydney’s Oxford Street … one hour later, the Mardi Gras had become a two-hour spree of screaming, bashing and arrests. In one incident, police took off their identification numbers and waded into the crowd of homosexuals. By early yesterday, police had made 53 arrests, several demonstrators and two police had been taken to hospital and Kings Cross was back to normal (Wilson, 1978b: 9).

The brawl following the Mardi Gras parade quickly became a symbol of resistance to homosexual policing in Sydney, a pivot around which to mount further resistance. This resistance was reinforced by a growing proportion of citizens who supported homosexual law reform (Blazey 1978, 9). What resulted from the event was a growing condemnation of a method of policing seen to be incongruous with civic society and the ‘good order’ that it was supposed to be maintaining. From 24 July, a series of protests led to further arrests and a ‘broad defence and homosexual rights campaign’ that targeted homosexual policing in the city in several ways (Johnston 1999, 26). Firstly, the campaign called for the charges of the arrested to be dropped. Secondly, the repeal of all

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anti-homosexual laws was demanded, and thirdly, the ending of the vilification and differential treatment of homosexuals by the police. A significant consequence of the 1978 Mardi Gras and the moves to curtail homosexual policing that followed was the development of a new sense of resilience to anti-homosexual policing within the city, which received broader support. What had previously seemed like a simple enactment of existing laws for the police had become a minefield. The Report of the New South Wales Police Department for the year ending 31 December 1978, described the sense of impossibility, even apathy, that the police faced in policing homosexuality, and what the police saw as an exponential proliferation of gay venues (New South Wales Government 1980, 18–19). Yet, contrary to the police report, the number of venues did not substantially increase. What did happen in 1978 was that gay premises, which included existing gay venues – such as gay bathhouses, backrooms and night-clubs – began to drop their veil of discretion and began to advertise overtly. Club 80: Between Anti-Discrimination and Decriminalisation Evidence suggests that certain individuals in the Council of the City of Sydney may have been tolerant of such advertising by overtly gay venues, as in the case of King Steam.4 However, others such as building inspector Bernard King O’Malley were not. Inspector O’Malley discovered the disparity between pseudonym and real usage in development applications for places such as the Barracks, a backroom at 7–9 Flinders Street, and Club 80, another backroom at 48 Little Oxford Street.5 Such information fed into the still-active campaign that the police conducted against premises used habitually by homosexuals. Three police raids on Club 80 took place in 1983. In contrast to the police raids in the 1950s which had received no opposition from within civic society, and in

4 Memo from City Planning Department to Roden for Development Application (DA) 11.02.1049, 128–130 Pitt Street, (Queer’s Club), 16 January 1980, The Council of the City of Sydney, Sydney, 11.02.1049. 5 DA for Use of Ground Floor as Meeting Room and First Floor for Storage by Silhouette American Health Center at 7–9 Flinders Street, Darlinghurst, 4 September 1980, The Council of the City of Sydney, Sydney, 44.80.1017. See also DA For Private Social Club at 48 Little Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, 24 March 1980, The Council of the City of Sydney, Sydney, 44.80.0247, and Bernard King O’Malley, Report of Inspection Regarding Unauthorised Club 80 at 48 Little Oxford Street, Darlinghurst at 9pm 6 July 1979, 9 July 1979, The Council of the City of Sydney, Sydney, 44.80.0247.

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contrast to the closure of homosexual establishments, such as the Barefoot Boy in 1970s, that received only minimal protest regarding the power of authorities to police homosexual spaces, the raids on Club 80 sparked broad civic condemnation that manifested itself in mass protest by gay activists and human rights groups. The confrontations surrounding the Club 80 raids acted as a catalyst for the decriminalisation of homosexual acts (Hunt 1999, 174). At the time of these raids, Club 80 was being harassed by two government authorities; the Council of the City of Sydney, and the police. Following legal action to close Club 80 at 48 Little Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, when the council discovered that it was being used for unauthorised purposes, the proprietors relocated the backroom to 19 Oxford Street, Paddington, and submitted a development application for a social club. As a result of a telephone tip, council inspector Bernard King O’Malley attempted an inspection of the premises at 11.45pm on 28 January 1983, to investigate the use of the premises. On arrival he was denied access and referred to a solicitor. The next day, at 1.20 AM after receiving ‘a complaint,’ the police conducted their first inspection (raid) of Club 80 at 19 Oxford Street (Coultan 1983, 3). An affidavit of Detective Sergeant of Police Noel Parkinson recorded the event: [a]t 1.20am I entered the premises with other members of the Vice Squad. I made the following observations: Second Floor Entry to the premises was gained by the second floor level. This was set out and being used as a coffee lounge and video theatre. This first floor area was very dimly lit, mainly by small red lights and red hurricane lamps. This floor was divided into a number of cubicles. Off this was a basement level divided into four open dungeons. The walls of some of the cubicles were made of rough slats of wood and resembled cages. Some other cubicles contained vinyl covered mattresses. About 100 men in various states of undress were located in this area. All were engaged in or watching … sexual acts. At the same time a number of male persons left via a rear door prior to the arrival of a number of uniformed police. Four male persons on the premises were charged with ‘indecent assault-male’ and ‘scandalous conduct’ (cited in Prior 2004).

The occurrence of the raid (inspection) so close to the release of the Homosexuality and Discrimination report (Anti-Discrimination Board, 1982), with its urgent recommendations for reforms to policing of homosexuality within the city, the enactment of anti-discrimination provisions for homosexuals in December, and at a time when bills to decriminalise homosexuality were being discussed within the New

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South Wales State Parliament, resulted in immediate ‘anger’ from within the ‘homosexual community’ (Coultan 1983, 3). It visibly manifested itself within the city through ‘rallies’ and ‘marches’ which called for the investigation of police actions (Anon. 1983a, 10). When a second ‘inspection’ (raid) took place at Club 80 at 19 Oxford Street at 1.15 AM on 26 February 1983, further arrests, similar to those in the first inspection, led to protests and objections to the policing actions being heard from within the broader society (like the Council of Civil Liberties and politicians such as Clover Moore). The Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby commenced a campaign against the Federal Labor Government, which was in the throes of an election, with the proposition that ‘the government must accept responsibility for the existing laws and their enforcement’. Further, it asserted that ‘The Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby will urge homosexuals throughout Australia to vote against the Labor Party in the Federal election unless the Premier, Neville Wran, promises to repeal anti-homosexual laws’ (Mercher 1983, 3). As a result of this protest, the candidate standing for the Labor Party in the seat of Wentworth, which includes the inner Eastern Suburbs, lost. Mostly unaware of the council’s involvement in Club 80, the attention of the protest from within the broader civic society focused predominantly upon the police. In the 1950s New South Wales Police Commissioner Delany encountered no real opposition to the raids he instigated against homosexual spaces within the broader civic society, unlike Detective Inspector Shepard, who was in control of the Vice Squad in the early 1980s. The protests described the raids not as a civic action, but as a personal campaign of the Detective Inspector, nicknamed the ‘Good Shepard’ because of his strong anti-homosexual Christian beliefs (Anon. 1983b, 5–6). As the newspapers reported: [t]he vice squad seems to be going to great lengths to prosecute gay men. This is part of a systematic and very deliberate homophobic campaign. Inspector Shepard is ‘against’ any sort of homosexual activity and is committed to enforcing the anti-homosexual provisions of the Crimes Act (Anon. 1983c, 3).

In the face of the broad civic condemnation following the second raid, both the council and police continued to harass Club 80. The council, which was commencing legal proceedings against Pobina Pty. Ltd., the owners of Club 80, contacted Detective Inspector Shepard who informed them that the premises was a disorderly house, where homosexuals

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‘committed indecent acts on each other’ [author emphasis].6 Rather than retreating, Pobina Pty. Ltd. fought the actions being brought by the council and police against Club 80 and instigated their own proceedings by engaging the solicitors Marsden Smith and Associates (Anon. 1983b, 5–6). The case instigated by Detective Inspector Shepard was brought before Justice Lusher in mid-April 1983. A representative for Pobina Pty. Ltd., asked for time to prepare a defence, given that the premises provided a service and fulfilled a need for the men of the now visible gay community within Sydney. The application was rejected, and Club 80 was declared a disorderly house pursuant to section 3(1) (a) of the Disorderly Houses Act in that ‘indecent acts’ were committed and drugs were supplied on the premises in April 1983 (Anon. 1983d, 1). However, this type of argument would gain acceptance in subsequent court cases concerning gay premises in the 1980s and 1990s. The emergence of AIDS into public visibility in the 1980s helped facilitate public fear of such venues as Club 80. In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, anti-homosexual campaigners, such as Reverend Fred Nile in Sydney, attempted to harness the fact that AIDS had only been found amongst gay men to reinforce the perceived connection between ‘homosexuality’ and ‘illness and disease’, which had been losing acceptance in the civic society for several decades. Retributiuve antihomosexual campaigns were reborn on the basis that this ‘gay plague’ (AIDS) was evidence that homosexuality was an illness, and that if it was not controlled it would infect an ‘innocent’ society at large. These campaigns in part focused on closing gay venues and helping to facilitate the raids on Club 80. Indeed, the fear of AIDS did surface during the raids. A detective was reported as commenting after the raids that ‘one of [the] main concerns [of the police involved] was not to catch AIDS’ (Anon. 1983e). The disease would add a new complexity to the tolerance and acceptance of homosexual spaces within the city. As a sign of resistance and defiance to the homosexual policing, the owners of Club 80 moved it back to its old premises at 48 Little Oxford Street from which it had previously been evicted by a court order as a result of proceedings instigated by council. Within two weeks of opening at the old address the police carried out their third ‘inspection’ (raid) on 27 August 1983 and again made arrests. This final raid was a catalyst 6 See notes in DA for Social Club at 19 Oxford Street, Paddington, 9 December 1982, The Council of the City of Sydney, Sydney, 44.82.0869.

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for the broad civic condemnation to be converted into action at the level of government. The New South Wales Privacy Commission began an investigation into the Club 80 raids with reference to the invasion of privacy and the Ombudsman launched his own Club 80 investigations, which would be tabled in parliament in 1986 and upheld many of the complaints made against the police (Anon. 1984, 4; Coulhart 1986, 1). The courts also began to dismiss many of the charges made against the men who were arrested in the Club 80 raids. One of the immediate actions of the Attorney General, Paul Landa, following the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between men, was to drop charges against people arrested during Club 80 raids. Amongst the first questions from many people following the amendments to the Crimes Act 1900 was whether this change would prevent the type of action taken in the past by the police against Club 80 and other malemale sex venues such as beats, gay saunas and backrooms? The answer to this question, as Lex Watson pointed out at the time, was that a myriad of other laws still existed relating to ‘obscenity’ and ‘indecency’ which could be applied to venues such as beats, gay saunas and backrooms because they were considered to be public spaces (Watson 1984, 6). Consequently, notions of what was acceptable to the public and in public spaces would determine whether any action or charges would occur in the future. The public protests surrounding the Club 80 raids would mark the last time in which the police would act proactively against a premises within the city because it was habitually used by homosexuals. While Club 80 had not won the legal action taken against it by either the police or the council, the Club 80 raids served as the catalyst for broad civic demand for changes to homosexual policing within the city, and the first contestation in which owners of gay venues fought back legally against the policing authorities. It provided the first instance of the surfacing of many of the arguments that would later be used to defend the right of many premises, habitually used for homosexual activities, such as backrooms and gay saunas, to exist within the city: most important among these arguments being the fact that the premises provided an important service and fulfilled a community need.

Coda The Chinese community of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Sydney was defined as ‘other’ to the white Christian majority. The

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principal communities, in Alexandria and Chinatown in the city (Teo 1971, 579–592), occupied areas that were regarded as undesirable, and the temples they erected for worship and to sustain them in exile were demeaned by the appellation ‘joss houses’ and deemed to contain ‘idols’ (Wang 1988, 201–202). The Chinese were accused of stealing white men’s jobs and women, and of spreading corruption (both physical diseases and social problems such as gambling and sexual immorality) in the broader community. The Chinese were a primarily male community in an alien host culture, who were forced to adopt duplicitous modes of dressing and communicating to diminish the anxiety that white businessmen and politicians felt towards them (Stephen 1997b, 17). The White Australia Policy rendered their existence in Australia only marginally legal and increased a sense of persecution and insecurity. The gay male community that patronised Club 80 and other gay venues in the early 1980s were defined as ‘other’ to the majoritarian heterosexual host community which surrounded them. The clubs, bathhouses and backrooms were secret and ‘undesirable’ locations to which they found their way (Cusack and Prior 2008). Their sexual activities were demeaned as perversions and when the panic concerning Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) broke, they were blamed for both the spread of disease and the moral corruption of society. Christian commentators, including the Reverend Fred Nile, invoked retributive paradigms of God’s punishment to justify denying homosexual rights and vilifying homosexual lifestyles. Prior to the decriminalisation, of homosexuality, their very identity was illegal, and after decriminalisation, it was legal but still open to vilification. The techniques of exclusion, the employment of binary oppositions, and the ever-present temptation to invoke retribution (Trompf 1998, 973), ensured the gay community of Sydney continued to feel beleagured and maginalised. Yet the two case studies testify to the utopic possibility of an open, tolerant society beyond the retributive narratives of a vengeful and intolerant majority (Trompf 1992, 317). The parallels between the 1892 Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Gambling and Immorality and the 1982 report of the Anti-Discrimination Board Discrimination and Homosexuality are unmistakable. The late nineteenth-century Chinese community and the late twentieth-century gay community were both the focus of a retributive witch-hunt, which accused them of sexual deviance and of being a source of ‘disease’ in an otherwise healthy, wholesome community. These two official reports exonerated

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the minority communities and called for more liberal treatment of diversity and culturally-specific life choices. The two case studies examined in this paper are both important milestones in Sydney’s development of the diverse and inclusive reputation that it enjoys in the twenty-first century.1 Bibliography Anon. 1945. Local Government (Town and Country Planning) Amendment Bill. In the Legislative Assembly, 8 February. NSW Parliamentary Debates, Hansard, 1719–1724. Anon. 1953. Vice Squad Ordered To Rid Sydney Of Male Perverts (Growing Cancer). Sunday Telegraph, 6 December, 5. Anon. 1956. Sydney Raged as Chinese Thrived on Fan-Tan, Pak-A-Pu and Opium. Daily Mirror, 13 December, 27. Anon. 1983a. News In Brief: Homosexuals March (in protest against police raid on Club 80 in Oxford Street). The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 February, 10. Anon. 1983b. The Good Shepard. Green Park Observer, 2 April, 5–6. Anon. 1983c. Gays Believe Raids Were Protection Payback, Inquiry Told. The Sydney Morning Herald, 13 November, 3. Anon. 1983d. Club 80 Declared Disorderly House. The Star (Sydney), 6 May, 1. Anon. 1983e. Adding Insult to Injury. The Star (Sydney), 9 September, 3. Anon. 1984. Ombudsman Launches His Own Club 80 Raid. The Star (Sydney), 1 November, 4. Anti-Discrimination Board. 1982. Discrimination and Homosexuality: A Report of the Anti-Discrimination Board in Accordance with Section 119(a) of the AntiDiscrimination Act 1977. Sydney: New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Board. Birmingham, J. 1999. Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney. Sydney: Knopf, Random House Australia. Blazey, P. 1978. Latest Poll in Favour of Gays. The Australian, 7 June, 9. Chan, C. 1989. ‘Sze Yup Temple in Glebe: The Oldest Chinese Temple in Sydney’. Heritage Australia 8 (2): 6–10. Chan, H. D. M.-h. 2005. ‘Chinese in Australia’. In Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, ed. C. Ember, M. Ember and I. Skoggard. New York: Springer. Chee, S. and Angus Tse, A. 1997. ‘Federation Feng Shui: Reading the Temple Objects.’ In The Lions of Retreat Street: A Chinese Temple in Inner Sydney, ed. A. Stephen. Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, Hale and Iremonger. Choi, K. H. 1975. Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia. Sydney: University of Sydney Press. Coulhart, R. 1986. Complaints on Gay Club Raid Upheld. Sydney Morning Herald, 4 September, 7. Coultan, M. 1983. Police Raid on Club Angers Homosexual Community. The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 February, 3. Curthoys, A. 1978. ‘Conflict and Consensus.’ In Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working Class, ed. A. Curthoys and A. Markus. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger. 1 The authors gratefully acknowledge the contribution of research assistant Alex Norman in locating material for, and editing, this chapter.

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CONTRIBUTORS Paul Crittenden is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and sometime Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney. He completed a doctorate in theology at the Catholic Institute (Sydney) in 1962, was a research student in the School of Divinity at Yale University, and subsequently undertook graduate studies in philosophy at Oxford University. Paul is the author of Learning to be Moral: Philosophical Thoughts about Moral Development (Humanities Press, 1990); he was editor of the journal Critical Philosophy, and has edited several books and published numerous papers in philosophy. His autobiography, Changing Orders: Scenes of Clerical and Academic Life, was published in 2008 (Brandl and Schlesinger). He writes mainly on topics in ethics and epistemology especially in relation to Greek, medieval, and recent European philosophy. He is currently vice-president of the Sydney University Arts Association and vice-president of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. Carole M. Cusack is Associate Professor of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include theories of religious conversion, northern European mythology and religion, medieval Christianity, secularisation and contemporary Western religious trends, and medievalism. She is the author of Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (Cassell, 1998) and The Essence of Buddhism (Lansdowne, 2001). With Christopher Hartney she is Editor of the Journal of Religious History. Iain Gardner is Professor of History of Religions at the University of Sydney, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He has published widely in Coptic and Manichaean Studies, including the standard The Kephalaia of the Teacher (E.J. Brill, Leiden 1995), Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (with S.N.C. Lieu, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004), and three volumes of papyri recovered from Ismant el-Kharab by the Dakhleh Oasis Project (in the DOP monograph series published by Oxbow Press, Oxford).

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John Gascoigne was educated at the Universities of Sydney, Princeton and Cambridge and is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was a colleague of Garry Trompf at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1977–78 and, since 1980, has been a member of the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. His first book (co-winner of the Australian Historical Association’s prize), Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1989), dealt with the relations between science and religion, as have a number of his subsequent works. More recently, he has focussed on the history of exploration and culture contact in the Pacific with a two-volume work on Joseph Banks and his most recent book, Captain Cook. Voyager Across Worlds (Continuum, 2007). Patrick F. Gesch SVD starts from Townsville, Australia. His schooling began in 1949 in Port Moresby. In 1962 he joined the Divine Word Missionaries and his priesthood training took him to the United States for seven years. His first appointment was to Papua New Guinea, where he has been based ever since, despite absences of a few years from time to time. East Sepik and Madang are his points of reference, having spent years around Yangoru and Torembi areas, and the past 25 years at Divine Word University where he is currently Associate Professor and Head of the Arts (PNG Studies) Department. His research interests are in traditional Melanesian religion, initiation and new religious movements. Email: [email protected] Wouter J. Hanegraaff (1961-) is full professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and related currents at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, President of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE; see www.esswe.org), and a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden 1996/Albany 1998), Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (Tempe 2005; with Ruud M. Bouthoorn), Swedenborg, Oetinger, Kant: Three Perspectives on the Secrets of Heaven (West Chester 2007), and numerous articles in academic journals and collective volumes. He is the main editor of the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Brill: Leiden 2005), editor of Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism and the ‘Aries Book Series: Texts and Studies in Western Esotericism’ (both Brill), as well as of five collective volumes on the study of religions and the history Western esotericism.

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Christopher Hartney is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney. He is an executive member of the Society for Religion, Literature and the Arts and specialises in the interface between literature and the religious. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Religious History (Blackwell) and the author of Cambridge Studies in Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Jay Johnston is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Religion, University of Sydney and also lectures in the Department of Art History and Art Education, University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research interests include cross-cultural philosophies of embodiment and desire; philosophy of religion; gender, sexuality and spirituality; Esotericism, Hermeticism, angelology, and alternative medicine. Vrasidas Karalis was born in Greece and studied at the University of Athens, where he received his Ph.D. in European literature. He lectured in various colleges and universities until he was appointed lecturer in Byzantine and Modern Greek studies at the University of Sydney, in 1991. He has published extensively in the areas of Byzantine aesthetics, Greek literature, cultural studies, translation studies, art history and Comparative Literature. He has translated Patrick White’s novels into Greek (Voss, 1995 and The Vivisector, 2001) ). He is the co-editor of the Modern Greek Studies Journal (Australia and New Zealand) and the president of the Association of Modern Greek Studies of Australia and New Zealand. He has published articles in scholarly journals on St Paul and the nexus between religion and power. He is the president of the Society of Literature and Aesthetics and has organised international conferences on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. He has edited the book Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living (2008). Andrew Lattas is currently employed as Associate Professor in social anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has published extensively on ethnicity and race relations in Australia and on masks, gender and millenarian movements in Papua New Guinea. His book, Cultures of Secrecy (1998), explores the history of cult movements in the bush Kaliai area and villagers’ experiments with Melanesian theologies and pastoral practices. More recently he has worked on long-term cult movements in New Britain, namely on Bali Island and in Pomio, and their transformation into Melanesian churches. In 2005, he shared in the RAI film prize for his participation in the film Koriam’s Law which documents the political structure and everyday pastoral practices of the

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Pomio Kivung movement. He is currently finishing a manuscript on the everyday folklore culture which sustains and articulates popular millenarian forms of hope. Ennio Mantovani was born in Italy, studied philosophy and theology in Vienna, Austria, and specialized in phenomenology of religion at the Gregorian University in Rome. From 1962 to 1997 he worked in Papua New Guinea. He was part of the original group that in 1969 founded the Melanesian Institute and, after serving part time while involved in his fieldwork, he joined the Melanesian Institute fulltime in 1977, researching, writing, and lecturing there for twenty years. In 1997 he was called to Germany as Director of the Anthropos Institute at Siegburg near Bonn, to move four years later to Nemi near Rome as the first Coordinator of the Anthropos Institute. In 2002 he returned to Australia where he had been a guest lecturer at the Yarra Theological Union, Melbourne, since 1982. He now belongs to the faculty of the Yarra Theological Union, lecturing on issues of culture and religion. John D’Arcy May (b. Melbourne, Australia, 1942). STL Gregoriana, Rome, 1969; Dr. theol. (Ecumenics) Münster, 1975; wissenschaftlicher Assistent at Catholic Ecumenical Institute, Faculty of Catholic Theology, Univ. of Münster, 1975–1982; Dr. phil. (History of Religions) Frankfurt, 1983; Ecumenical Research Officer with Melanesian Council of Churches, Port Moresby, and Research Associate at the Melanesian Institute, Goroka, Papua New Guinea, 1983–87; Director, Irish School of Ecumenics, Dublin, 1987–1990; Associate Professor of Interfaith Dialogue, ISE, Trinity College Dublin, 1987–2007; Fellow of Trinity College Dublin; Senior Research Fellow, ISE. Visiting Professor in Fribourg, Switzerland (1982); Frankfurt, Germany (1988); Wollongong, Australia (1994); Tilburg, Netherlands (1996); Australian Catholic University, Sydney (2001); Istituto Trentino di Cultura, Centro per le Studie Religiose, Italy (2006); Visiting Professor, Centre for Intercultural Theology and Study of Religions, University of Salzburg (2008); Research Fellow, Asia-Pacific Centre for Interreligious Dialogue, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne (2008–2011). His publications include: Meaning, Consensus and Dialogue in Buddhist-Christian Communication: A Study in the Construction of Meaning (Berne: Peter Lang, 1984); [ed.] Living Theology in Melanesia: A Reader (Goroka: The Melanesian Institute, 1985); Christus Initiator. Theologie im Pazifik (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1990); [ed.] Pluralism and the Religions: The Theological and Political Dimensions

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(London: Cassell, 1998); After Pluralism: Towards an Interreligious Ethic (Münster-Hamburg-London: Lit Verlag, 2000); Transcendence and Violence: The Encounter of Buddhist, Christian and Primal Traditions (New York and London: Continuum, 2003); and [ed.] Converging Ways? Conversion and Belonging in Buddhism and Christianity (St Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 2006). Paul Morris is currently Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington where he teaches courses on religions in the contemporary world, Judaism, death, spirituality, method and theory in the study of religion, and a new course for 2008, ‘Arguing about Religion’. Educated under Lloyd Geering at Victoria and Ninian Smart at Lancaster, Paul taught at Lancaster for a decade before returning to New Zealand. He has held visiting appointments at the Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations, UK; University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of Queensland; Boston University; and, Shalom College, University of New South Wales. His publications include: Prophet of Modernity: The Geering Reader (Victoria University Press, 2007); New Rights New Zealand: Myths, Moralities and Markets (Auckland University Press, 2005); Religious Diversity in New Zealand (UNESCO, 2007); Religion: Modernity and Postmodernity (Blackwell 2000); Detraditionalization: Identity in an Age of Cultural Anxiety (Blackwell, 1996); Longman Encyclopaedia of Religions (1994); Longman Guide to Living Religions (1993); The Values of the Enterprise Culture (Routledge, 1992); A Walk in the Garden: Iconographical. Literary, and Exegetical Studies of Eden (Sheffield Academic Press, 1992); and, two award-winning anthologies of New Zealand spiritual verse, Spirit in a Strange Land, and Spirit at Home (Random House, 2002, 2004). His current research includes a manuscript, The Globalization of God (forthcoming 2009); and, a study of modern moral discourse, provisionally entitled, An Immoral History of New Zealand. Professor Morris was a recipient of a Royal Society of New Zealand Marden research grant (2001–2004) and was awarded the International Council of Christians and Jews 2007 Gold Medal for Peace through Dialogue for his work on interfaith understanding. Alanna Nobbs studied at the Universities of Sydney and London, and now holds a personal chair at Macquarie University where she is currently head of the Department of Ancient History and co-director of the Ancient History Documentary Research Centre. Her main research interests are in the history and historiography of Late Antiquity

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and Early Byzantium and in the papyri which document the rise of Christianity in Egypt. Harry Oldmeadow is Associate Professor in Religious Studies at La Trobe University Bendigo. He studied under Garry Trompf in the early 1980s. His primary research interests are the traditionalist school of the perennial philosophy and its principal exponents, René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon, and Western engagements with Eastern religions. In 1981 he was awarded the University of Sydney Medal for excellence in research, and in 2004 the La Trobe University Bendigo Research Award. He is the author of Traditionalism: Religion in the light of the Perennial Philosophy (2000), Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions (2004) and A Christian Pilgrim in India: The Spiritual Journey of Swami Abhishiktananda (2008). He edited The Betrayal of Tradition: Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity (2005) and Light from the East: Western Encounters with Eastern Spirituality (2007). Peter Oldmeadow is retired Chair of the Department of Indian Subcontinental Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney where he taught Sanskrit language and Indian and Buddhist philosophy. He also has an interest in comparative philosophy and religion and how different perspectives can be mutually informing. His published articles cover Yogacara and Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, Buddhism in Western and global context and comparative studies. Peter likes to spend as much time as possible bushwalking in the Australian wilderness or watching cricket. He also travels regularly to his birthplace, the Indian subcontinent, which he regards as a kind of second home. Jason Prior is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, where his research and teaching draw on his interdisciplinary background in critical and cultural theory within urban planning and urban studies, architecture, geography, sociology, sexual studies, studies of the built environment, and critical theories of space. He has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbour and the Canadian Center of Architecture, Montreal. His recently awarded PhD from University of New South Wales, which focuses on the planning, construction and articulation of sexual spaces in the urban habitat, received recognition

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for its contribution to the knowledges of planning, architecture and urban studies when he was awarded the Byera Hadley Scholarship by the NSW Architects Registration Board. He has also published in edited collections and a series of journals including Australian Geographer, Commonwealth Journal of Local Government and Journal of Environmental Management among others. In early 2007 he co-convened the Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries Conference at the University of Technology, Sydney. Since completing his PhD, Jason’s work has moved in several directions expanding on a range of themes touched upon within his earlier research including a series of collaborative research projects exploring the relations among the built environment, sexuality and contemporary religious trends. Publications emerging from this collaborative work include ‘Ritual, Liminality and Transformation: Secular Spirituality in Sydney’s Gay Bathhouses,’ Australian Geographer Vol. 39, No. 3 (2008) pp. 271–281 and the chapter in this Festschrift. R. Daniel Shaw (Ph.D. anthropology) conducted fieldwork among the O’otham (Papago) of southwestern Arizona (1967–68) and the Samo of Papua New Guinea (1969–1981) where he served as a Bible translator. He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Translation at Fuller Graduate School of Intercultural Studies in Pasadena, California where he is the chair of the Doctoral Committee, and devotes his time to teaching and mentoring students from around the world. His two ethnographies on the Samo (1990 and 1996) have been widely read and provide illustrative material in his coauthored book on folk religion with Paul Hiebert and Tite Tiénou (1999) and his most recent book on hermeneutics with Charles Van Engen (2003), both of which have been translated into Korean. He appears in the International Who’s Who of Professional Educators, the Directory of American Scholars and in 2006 received the C. Davis Weyerhaeuser Award for Excellence (a peer voted award as Fuller Faculty of the Year). He is a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Polynesian Society, as well as a member of the Association for Social Anthropologists in Oceania, American Society of Missiologists, and the Pacific Studies Association. His personal friendship with Garry and the entire Trompf family has enriched his life experience. Pamela J. Stewart (Strathern) and Andrew Strathern are a husband and wife research team in the Department of Anthropology,

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University of Pittsburgh. They are also affiliated scholars at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland (RIISS) and the University of Durham, U.K. They have published over 34 books and over 150 articles on their research in the Pacific, Europe, and Asia. They are the editors of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series and the Medical Anthropology Series for Carolina Academic Press. They are the long-standing co-editors for the Journal of Ritual Studies and they are the Series Editors for the Anthropology and Cultural History in Asia and the Indo-Pacific Series with Ashgate Publishing. Their recent co-authored books include: Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip (Stewart and Strathern, Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future (Strathern and Stewart, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Their recent co-edited books include: Exchange and Sacrifice (Stewart and Strathern, eds., Carolina Academic Press, 2008), Asian Ritual Systems: Syncretisms and Ruptures (Stewart and Strathern, eds., Carolina Academic Press, 2007), and Terror and Violence: Imagination and the Unimaginable (Strathern and Stewart, Whitehead eds., Pluto Press, 2006). Their forthcoming writings include the following three books: Religion and Ritual Change: Cosmology and History (Stewart and Strathern, eds.), Self and Group: Kinship in Action (Strathern and Stewart, Prentice Hall), and Ritual (Strathern and Stewart, eds.). Stewart and Strathern have a wide range of research interests. Their work in Ritual and Religious Studies includes three edited volumes Millennial Markers (Stewart and Strathern, eds., James Cook University, 1997), Millennial Countdown in New Guinea (Stewart and Strathern, eds., Special Issue of Ethnohistory, Duke University Press, 2000), and Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity in Oceania (Robbins, Stewart and Strathern, eds., Special Issue of Journal of Ritual Studies, 2001). Currently, they are involved in the Shamanic Performances research group at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, and they are the co-organizers of the Landscape, Heritage, and Conservation: Farming Issues in the European Union 2008 conference at the University of Pittsburgh’s European Union Center of Excellence.

INDEX 2012 (year) 291–293, 297, 302, 304, 307–311 Abangan 24, 27, 31 Abhishiktananda, Swami 236 Adat 24, 31 Afterworld 131–44 Agama 31 Agency 30, 48, 131, 136–7, 139–40, 143 Ahmadiyah 25 AIDS 35, 363, 365 Alchemy 292, 318–21 Alienation 63, 223, 251, 257, 259, 261, 263, 277 Almond, Philip 232, 325, 342 American Academy of Religion (AAR) 329 Ancestors 65–79, 81, 84, 85, 88, 91–4, 97, 131–2, 135–7, 139 Andrewes, Lancelot 212, 218 Appearance and reality 269, 279, 283–4 Application (religious) 82–3, 88, 95 Appropriation, project of 251, 259 Argüelles, José 293, 308–309 Arigl 86 Aristotle 211, 218, 260, 262–3, 262n4, 279, 318 Arminian 212–3 Ash’aritism 27–28 Athos, Mount 231 Auckland University 331, 339–40 Augustine 157, 263 Augustus (emperor) 172–4, 181–3 Australia 347–66; Immigration 347, 349, 351, 353, 355 Immigration Restriction Act 347, 353 Multiculturalism 347, 348, 356, 358, 366 White Australia Policy 347, 355, 365 White (Christian) majority 347, 349, 350, 353, 355, 364 Authenticity 250, 252–7, 259, 261 Ayahuasca 295–298, 300 Baal, Jan van 84, 85 Bacon, Anthony 211 Bacon, Francis 209–228 Biography 210–11 Calvinism 211–2, 216–7

Laws of nature 214–5 Puritans 213–4 Scholastics 218–22 Works; The Advancement of Learning 214–5, 217–9, 222, 224, 226 ‘Advertisement Touching a Holy War’ 212 ‘Advertisement Touching the Controversies…’ 217 ‘Certain Considerations…’ 213 ‘Confession of Faith’ 212, 221 De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum 217 De Sapientia Veterum 217 Great Instauration 223 Natural and Experimental History 223 New Atlantis 217, 225 Novum Organum 215, 220–1, 223–5 ‘Of Atheism’ 221 ‘Preparative’ 216 ‘Thoughts and Conclusions’ 218 ‘Valerius Terminus’ 215–6 Bacon, Nicholas 211 Bad faith 249, 251, 254, 255 Baikolalkia, Joe 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116–8, 122–3 Bakhtin M. M. 167 Balatape, Bernard 107, 110, 116, 120–1, 122–3 Barth, Karl 230 Beanal, Tom 38 Beauvoir, Simone de 245, 246, 247, 259 n3 Being 256, 257, 258 project of 261; For-itself 249, 252, 254, 258 In-itself 261–62 Benz, Ernst 235 Bergmann, W. 86 Bergson, Henri 315–16 Bhagavad Gita 234, 333 Bible translation 66–7 Bilingualism 187, 195–7, 200–2 Bishop 159–65 Black Jesus Movement 50 n2

378

index

Blesim Kruse 89, 90, 91, 93 Bloch, Maurice 131–33, 143 Bodies 132, 133–40, 141–2, 143 Boyle, Robert 215 Brown, Colin 323, 336, 342 Browne, Thomas 218 Brunner, Karl 231 Buddha 154, 354 Buddhism 267–87, 326, 332, 335, 337 Chinese 334 Theravada 235–7 Yogacara 267–87 Zen 235, 237–8, 272–3, 332 Bulbulia, Joseph 334, 342 Bultmann, Rudolf 231 Burghley, Lord 210 Burroughs, William 295 Calvinism/Calvinist 209–213, 216–7, 219, 222–3, 226 Canterbury University 336–7 Capra, Fritjof 294 Cargo cults 50, 61, 96, 101–29 Cartwright, Thomas 225 Castaneda, Carlos 294–295 Catechumens 161–2 Catholic Church 57, 81, 89, 104, 115–7, 119, 221, 223 Catholics 30, 33, 89 Character 256, 261 Chiang Ching-kuo 140–2 Chiang Kai-shek 140–2 Chicago School of the History of Religions 323 Chicken killing 47, 48 Choice 249, 251, 254, 257 Christ 81, 82, 83, 98, 99 Kurios 65–79 Christian community 159, 162, 163–4, 163n7 Christianity 19–41, 55, 66, 70, 81–3, 8–90, 92, 96, 98–9, 139, 148, 187, 193, 197–9, 219–21, 237–8, 242, 292, 328, 333–8 Popular 102–3 Church 162, 163–4, 163n8 belonging 47 Chrysostom, John 189 Cioran, Emil M. 239 Claudius (emperor) 167, 172, 174, 176, 178, 181 Club 80 347, 348, 349, 359, 360–4, 365 Coakley, Sarah 324, 330

Cognitive science model 101–2, 109, 115, 116, 123–4, 126, 127 Common sense 44, 54 Comparative philosophy 270–1, 287 Concealment 108–110, 116, 120 Confession 105–7, 116–7, 124 Conflict, self–other 249–50, 251, 258 Conrad, Joseph 296 Contextualization 75n7, 79 Conversion, ethical 250–54, 257, 258, 260 Coppola, Francis Ford 296 Copying (see also mimesis) 101, 105, 107, 120 Cosmic life 93, 94, 95, 96 battle/struggle 65–79 evil 65–79 Cosmology 65–79 Cosmos 133–40 Cox, James L. 342 Creation 255–57 Cultural knowledge/environment 65–79 Cultural Studies and Religious Studies 329 D’Alembert, Jean 210 Dance 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 Dani 33–34 Dasein 269, 273, 277–8, 285 De Maistre, Joseph 210 Defesche, Sacha 292–293, 309 Dema 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 97–9 Cult 85 Complex 83, 86, 98–9 Definition 85 Demand, ethical 263–64 Descartes, Rene 219, 262, 274–6 Destiny 255, 258 Deus otiosus 95 Diglossia 192 Dilthey, Wilhelm 271–2, 326 Discernment 46, 51, 52, 53 Discrimination (legislative) Anti-Chinese 349–53 Anti-homosexual 356–64 Disraeli, Benjamin 181 Divination 52, 53, 114, 139 Divine Word University 50n3 Doniger, Wendy 327 Dostoievski, Fyodor 248 Draper, John 209 Dreams 49, 52, 62, 112, 113–4, 125 Dualism 267–87

index Duna 131, 133–40, 143 Durkheim, Émile 325 East Sepik Province 46 Eck, Diana 242, 330, 342 Eckhart, Meister 236, 272 Ecumenism 19, 31, 40, 41 Ego/egoism 256, 258 Egypt 159–65 Elephanta Island 235–6 Eliade, Mircea 230, 239, 243, 273, 323, 325–30, 337, 342–3 Eluay, Theys 37 Emplacement 131, 134, 137, 138–40, 141–2 Emptiness 271, 273, 280, 281, 286 Ends, realm of (city of) 253, 257, 258, 259, 259 n3, 264 Epistemologies 55 Rules, epistemological 45 Eranos 273 Eschaton Timewave 291, 295, 301, 303, 308, 310 Esotericism, 318–19 Ether 319–20 Ethics Absolutist 247, 248, 249 of duty 263 of generosity 254–59 of reciprocity 247 Ontological 254, 255, 260 Relativist 247–48, 249 Secular 247 Theistic 247, 263 Europeanisation 277, 287 Evangelicals 33–34 Expression (religious) 81–3, 88, 95, 98 Federation 347, 349, 350, 353 Fischer, Kuno 210 Fitzgerald, Tim 343 Flutes (sacred) 89, 90–2 Foreri 37, 40 Forest 133–4, 135, 136 Fortune, Reo 63 Franzmann, Majella 323, 332, 343 Frazer, James G. 291 Freedom 246, 248–9, 251, 254–8, 260–1, 263 Freeport McMoRan 40 Fries, Jacob F. 231 Frobenius, Leo 82, 83

379 Fundamental ontology 269 Fundamentalism 19, 31–2, 40–1, 333 Funeral 131–44 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 271, 274 Gandhi 237, 337 Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby 362 Geering, Lloyd 323, 331–2, 343 Generosity 254–64 Genocide 56 German romanticism 271–2 Gerua 90–1 Gesch, Patrick F. 45, 51 Gift-giving 256, 257–58 Ginsberg, Allen 295 Globalisation 356 Glossolalia 70 God 23, 27, 35, 65–6, 71–3, 75–8, 93, 95, 103–4, 109, 111, 113, 115–6, 122, 125, 148–52, 196, 214–26, 231, 247–9, 260, 263, 265 Good and evil 247–8, 265 Goodman, Joseph T. 309 Government 104, 106–8, 110, 116–8, 120–4 Graves, Robert 167, 170 Griffiths, Bede 236, 242 Grimshaw, Michael 344 Guignon, Charles 275, 276, 277, 283, 287 Habibie, B.J. 29–30 Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 291, 293, 301, 303 Haraway, Donna 313–5, 316–21 Harmonic Convergence 293, 309 Harnack, Adolf von 231 Harner, Michael 295–296 Harvard Divinity School 330 Hassan, Ahmad 27 Health 43, 59, 60 Hegel 270, 272 Heidegger, Martin 256, 267–87 Heiler, Friedrich 240, 243 Hell 252–53, 256 Herbert, George 213 Hermeneutics 271–2, 275, 278, 287 Hernández, Juan M. 309 Herrmann, Wilhelm 232 History as dialectical 251–52, 253 and ethics 251–2 Holy Spirit 72–3, 75–6, 77–9 Homosexuality 347, 356–64 Discrimination against 356–64

380

index

Hooker, Richard 214, 216 Horton, Robin 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 Hoy, David 278, 287 Human condition 251, 253, 261 Human nature 251, 260–61 Hutton, Ronald 295 Huxley, Aldous 294 I Ching 293, 303 Idea of the Holy, The 229–30, 232–34, 236, 238 Idealism 285 Identity 139, 348, 358, 365 Immigration to Australia 347, 349, 351, 353, 355 Imperative, categorical 259n3, 262, 262n5, 263 Inauthenticity 251 Incarnation 71–2, 75 Inculturation 98 India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity 237 Indifferentism (ethical) 249 Initiation 51 International Association for the History of religions (IAHR) 330 Interreligious dialogue 242–3 Interreligious League (Religiösser Menschheitbund) 229, 230, 239–41 Intersubjectivity 318–20 Invention (ethical) 248, 249 Inventiveness 101, 120 Isichei, Elisabeth 343 Islam 237–9, 325, 328, 333–41 in Indonesia 19–32, 36–8, 40–1 Islamic modernism 25 Jainism 153, 237 Jakarta Charta 23 Jamaah Islamiya 32, 36 James I 213, 225 James, William 233, 250 Jarekat Islam 23 Jenkins, Philip 19 Jensen, Adolf 83, 84, 85 Jerusalem Temple 198, 202 Jesuits 210 Jesus Christ 224 Jesus 109, 111, 112, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122–3, 127 Jewel, John 210 Johnston, William 242 Jones, Desmond 343

Kant, Immanuel 231, 235, 248, 254, 259n3, 260, 262–4, 270, 276 kerygma 187 King, Richard 236 Kivung Headquarters (Salel) 104, 106, 110, 111–5, 118, 120, 123, 125, 127 Mainstreaming 104, 110–1 Klostermaier, Klaus 242 Kockelmans J. 270, 287 Koinapaga 116, 119, 123 Koine, the 192 Koki, Alois 107–8, 109–110, 111, 113, 117, 118 Kolman 107–8, 110–2, 113–6, 119, 122–3 Koriam 105–8, 110–1, 113, 115–7, 119, 121–3, 126 Koyama, Koyama 343 Kripal, Jeffrey J. 293 Küssner, Karl 240 Kyoto School 272 Labor Party 362 Lancaster University 324, 325 Laskar Jihad 22, 36 Late Antiquity 159–65 Le Saux, Henri 236, 239, 242 Letcher, Andy 293 Lévy, Benny 246–47 liberalisation 356, 358 Liberation theology Christian 35, 40 Life (full) 85, 87, 91, 95–6, 98 Lincoln, Bruce 330, 343 Lipman, Kennard 284, 287 Love 250, 255, 258–60, 263 Loy, David 270, 287 Luther, Martin 200, 23–1 Macrohistory 292–293 Maddox, Marion 334, 343 Madhyamaka 268, 280–1, 287 Madhyamakakarika 280–1 Madjid, Nurcholish 28–9 Magic 45, 49, 51–3, 56, 62, 107, 116, 119–20 Mahayanasutralamkara 283–4, 286 Mani 147–58 Manichaeism 147–58 Mansoer, Mas 27 Mansren 35 Maori 328, 339

index Margaret (Kolman’s wife) 111–3, 114–5, 118, 119, 122–3 Marind-Anim 84–5 Marlowe, Christopher 224 Masjumi 26 Matthew, Tobie 218 Mausoleums 140–1 Mawena, Martinus 35 Mayan Calendar 293, 308–309 McCutcheon, Russell 329, 343 McKenna, Dennis 291, 295, 297–303 McKenna, Terence 291–311 Mead, Margaret 51, 63 Mediator 65–79 Mediums/mediumship 65–79, 110, 111–5, 123 Melanesia 19–143 Christianity in 20, 33, 40 Theology in 20 Melanesian Institute 20–1, 81, 97 Melanesians 81–3, 98, 99 Merton thesis 212 Merton, Thomas 239 Meyer, Peter 308 Migration and migrants 347–55, 364–5 Millenarianism 292 Mimesis 101, 106, 127 Mind in Buddhism 282–6 Mindset 43, 44, 54, 55, 57, 58, 62, 63 Minority communities 347, 348, 349, 355, 365, 366 Modern scientific 45 Moieties 120–1 Momase 50 Mondo 86, 91 Money 60–1, 91, 93, 104–7, 113, 115–7, 119, 125–7 Moore, Albert 323, 343 Morris, Paul 343–4, 332–6 Morrison, Mark, S. 318 Mu’tazilism 27–28 Müller, Friedrich Max 325 Muhammadiya 23–28, 30 Multiculturalism 347, 348, 356, 358, 365–6 Murti, T. R. V. 344 Musingku, Noah 60 Mysterium Tremendum 233 Mysticism East and West 236 Myth 62, 84–7, 91–2, 103, 105, 108, 114, 119–20, 127

381

Nagarjuna 273, 280–1 Nahdlatul Ulama 24, 26, 27 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 241–2 Nasution, Harun 28 Neoshamanism 294–295 Nero 171, 175, 176, 178, 181 New Age 291–293 New religious movements 51, 148, 292, 293, 338 New South Wales Government 353, 356, 360, 364 New Zealand 323–345 Nietzsche, Frederick 188 Nile, Reverend Fred 363, 365 Nilles, John 90, 91 Non-dualism 270 Norms (ethical) 254, 255, 262, 263–64 Noser, Adolph 96 Nothingness 272, 274, 281 Novena Church 104, 116, 118 Nutu (God) 109, 111, 115, 116, 119, 120, 122 Obligation (ethical) 263, 264 Ontology 245, 248, 249–50, 251–2, 261 Operasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) 34, 40 Oppression 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 259 Oratory 108–110, 115 Origen 189 Original fall 250, 261 Otago University 323, 337–339 Otto, Rudolf 229–44, 325, 325n Oxyrhynchus 161, 164 Pancasila 23 Papas 159, 160, 160n4, 162, 163 Papua New Guinea (PNG) 50, 65–79, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 97, 98, 99 Papuan Presidium Council 38, 40 Papyrus 159–160, 161–2, 164–5 Paracelsians 218–9 Parallel worlds 44 Parrinder, Geoffrey 242 Partridge, Christopher 293 Pascal, Blaise 233 Paul, letters of 187–205 Payame Ima 134 n1, 135 Payback 50 Pelagius 189 Penner, Hans 54n6 Pentecostals 33 Persatuan Islam (persis) 25–27 Personality 51 Pesantren 24–25

382

index

Phenomenology 268, 269, 280, 287 of religion 325–330 Philo of Alexandria 192, 202 Pig-festival 81, 83, 85–91, 93, 95–8 Pig-kill(ing) 85, 88–97 Pinchbeck, Daniel 293 Planters 82–3, 99 Plato/Platonism 188, 275, 278 Plautus 173 Politics 103–4, 107–8, 114–5, 118 Pope John Paul II 56 Priyayi 24 Protestants 30, 212 Psychedelics 291, 293–297, 300, 303, 310 Puritans 211–4, 226 Racial loss 103 Racism 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 353 Rais, Amien 27, 30 Rätsch, Christian 296 Reagan, Anthony 44 n1 Reflection (pure) 251, 255 Religion and Laughter 168, 169 Religious Studies 323–42 Renaissance 209–210 Repetition 101, 124–7 Representation, representational thinking 269, 283, 286 Responsibility 248–9, 251, 254, 264 Resurrection 68 n2, 72–3, 75–6 Retributive logic 348–9, 351, 355 Rindi kiniya 138–9 Ritschl, Albrecht 231 Ritual 102, 104–7, 115, 117, 120–1, 122–7 Roman Empire 148, 153, 167–84, 187, 190 Roy, Olivier 19 Sacrifice 111–2, 118, 122 Salvation 250, 252, 257, 258 Samo 65–79 Samunsa 119 Sanctus, the 232 Sanguma 47–8, 52, 58 Sankara 236 Santri 27, 31 Sartre, Jean-Paul Being and Nothingness 245, 246, 248, 249–50, 256, 257, 259, 261 Critique of Dialectical Reason 246 No Exit 253 Notebooks for an Ethics 245–65

‘The Humanism of Existentialism’ 248–9 Truth and Existence 254, 256 What is Literature? 264 Words 250 Saturnalia 178 Sax, William (Bo) 344 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 231, 272 Scholastics/Scholasticism 219 Schopenhauer, Arthur 236, 272 Schroeder, Roger 56 n7 Schultes, Richard 296 Scribes 160, 160 n5 Secondary burial 141 Secularisation 347, 356 Secularization 99 Seinsfrage (Question of being) 275 Self-recovery 250, 253, 258 Self-sufficiency 248–9 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 167, 171, 173, 176, 181–2 Sepik 57 Serra, Junipero 56 Shaman/Shamanism 65–79, 291–292, 294–295, 303 Sharpe, Eric J. 229–30, 267, 324, 326, 344 Shepard, William 344 Simbu 81, 85–8, 92, 96 Sitler, Robert K., 292–293 Smart, John Jamieson Carswell 328, 344 Smart, Ninian 323, 325, 328, 329, 326, 344 Smith, W. Cantwell 242, 323, 325, 328, 337 Söderblom, Nathan 233, 240 Sorcerer/Sorcery 57, 68–70, 72 Sotas 159–63 Spinoza 262, 262n4 Spirits 45, 47, 49, 51, 52, 54, 65–79 Spirit Singing 67, 76 Stonewall Riots 359 Stray, Geoff 292 Stuckrad, Kocku von 295 Subject-object dualism 267–8, 275–6, 279–86 Subtle body 314–316 Suetonius 170n, 174n Suharto 24–25, 29–31 Sukarno 23, 25, 27 Sunyata See “Emptiness” Swain, Tony 324, 344 Sydney, University of 324 Sydney 347–66

index Chinese community 347, 349, 353–5, 364, 365 Gay culture 347, 356, 358, 365 Racism, nineteenth-century 347, 348, 349, 350 Urban environment 347–9, 354–6, 362–4 Sze Yup Temple 347–9, 352–56 Tacitus 175–6, 178–9 Taipei 140–2 Taiwan 140–2, 143 Taussig, Michael 296 Tawhīd 27, 40 Tebay, Neles 22, 36, 38–39 Television 106, 114, 116, 125–6 Tenpela Lo 105–6, 107, 108, 111, 112, 115–6, 117, 119, 121–2, 124–5, 127 Tertullian 218 Theology 20, 27–8, 31, 35, 65–79, 111, 116, 118, 193, 197, 201, 209, 215–7, 219, 222, 229–32, 278, 332, 342 Local 65–79 Theosophical Society 315; 319–20 Thompson, J. Eric S. 309 Three natures (Tri-svabhava) 282–6 Tillich, Paul 231, 243, 333 Tini 135–6, 139, 143 Tinker, George 55, 56 Tiwari, Kapil 332–3, 344 Torah 196 Transmigrasi 19, 32, 36 Troeltsch, Ernst 231 Trompf, Garry W. 43–4, 50, 81, 97, 99, 102, 103–4, 109, 111, 123–4, 127, 170, 200, 229–30, 247n1, 267, 268, 323, 324, 344, 348–9, 365 Truth/truthfulness 256, 258 Turner, Harold 344 Twain, Mark 230

383

University of Queensland 324 Unveiling, project of 251, 256, 258–59 Upanishads, the 237, 332 Urban space 347, 348, 349, 356, 363, 364 U-Vistract 60 Values 248, 249, 254 Van der Leeuw, Gerardus 243, 326–7, 345 Varieties of Religious Experience, The 233 Vatican II 242 Vedanta 237, 270, 332 Veitch, Jim 333, 345 Victoria University of Wellington 323, 331–336 Vijnanavada 267 Virtue 261, 262, 263 Wach, Joachim 232, 237, 243, 327, 337 Wahid, Abdurrahman 29–30 Waikato University 339 Waley, Arthur 238 Watkins, Matthew 310–311 Weekend at Bernie’s (motion picture) 177 West Sepik Province 45 Western Province 66, 71 White, Andrew 209 Whitehead, Alfred North 304 Whitehouse, Harvey 383 Whitgift, John 210–1, 213 Wiles, Maurice 324–5, 345 Witchcraft 47–8, 52–3 Wojcik, Daniel 293 Work of art (in Sartre) 257, 258–59, 264 World Congress of Faiths 240 World Council of Churches 240 Worldviews 44, 58–9 Younghusband, Francis 240 Yui Ming Temple/Society 347, 348, 349, 352–55, 356 Zimmerman, Michael E. 285, 287 Znamenski, Andrei A. 295