The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions 1469662833, 9781469662831

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The Th i ng abo ut R eli gio n •••

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T he T h ing a b o ut R el ig io n •••

An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions

•••

Dav i d M o r ga n T he Univ e r si t y of N ort h Ca r o lina P r e ss Chapel Hill

This book was funded in part by the Warren Roman Catholic and the Dennis and Rita Meyer Endowments in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University. © 2021 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Set in Miller by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Cover illustration: (front) John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886 © Tate Images; (back) © iStock.com/bushton3. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Morgan, David, 1957– author. Title: The thing about religion : an introduction to the material study of religions / David Morgan. Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020044340 | ISBN 9781469662824 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469662831 (pbk. ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469662848 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Religion and culture. | Material culture—Religious aspects. | Space and time—Religious aspects. | Religion—Study and teaching. Classification: LCC BL65.C8 M65 2021 | DDC 200—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044340

[ Con t e n t s ] •••

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: How Materiality Matters to the Study of Religion 1

Pa rt I . T he o r i e s a n d D e f i n i t i on s Chapter 1. How Some Theories of Religion Dematerialize It 27 Chapter 2. What Is the Material Study of Religion? 54 Chapter 3. How Religions Happen Materially 77 Pa rt II. St u dy in g Mat eri a l Re l i gi o n Chapter 4. The Power of Things: A History of Magic Wands 101 Chapter 5. Notre-­Dame de Paris: Religion and Time 129 Chapter 6. Words and Things 155 Conclusion: Things, Networks, and Agents 181 Resources for Classroom Use 187 Primary Texts, Key Terms, and Online Resources 187 Writing Guide 195

Bibliography to Support Student Research 199 Notes 207 Index 233

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[ F i gu r e s ] •••



1 Amilcare Santini, Head of Michelangelo’s David1 2 Virgin of Paris, Notre-­Dame de Paris 11 3 Shiva Lingam 12 4 The Black Stone of the Kaaba 14 5 Buddhist monks, Rangoon, Burma 16 6 Crest from the Escrain de Charlemagne 17 7 Boudhanath Stupa, Kathmandu, Nepal 21 8 Detail of carved capitals, cloister of the abbey church of 28 Saint-­Pierre, Moissac, France 9 Main hall with spirit tablet displayed before the figure of 31 Confucius, Temple of Confucius, Jiading, China 10 G. Mauraud, “Burning the Prayers—Chinese Superstitions” 34 11 Altar of the Three Generations, Burial Chapel of Jan van Arkel, bishop of Utrecht, Domkerk, Utrecht 39 12 Jan Saenredam, after Cornelius van Haarlem, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave41 13 José Ferreira Thedim, Our Lady of Fátima52 14 Roman altar 55 15 Frontispiece, William Hurd, A New Universal History63 16 An Orthodox Jewish teacher distributes prayer books among 71 five-­year-­old boys at the Temple Mount, Jerusalem 17 Prayer at Jumma Mosque, Delhi, India 74 18 Jewish men apply tefillin at the Temple Mount, Jerusalem 80 19 Francisco Rizi, Auto-­da-­Fé on the Plaza Mayor of Madrid84 20 Funeral portraits of the children of Aline from Hawara, Egypt 87 21 Romeyn de Hooghe, “Frontispiece of the Old Testament” 90 22 Andrea Pozzo, Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius, ceiling fresco of 93 the church of Sant’Ignazio, Rome 23 A Hindu priest performs yajña, a sacrificial fire, Calcutta, India 96 24 Schoolgirls tie paper fortunes to a trellis for disposal, Sensoji 98 Temple, Tokyo 25 Kylix depicting Priestess Themis as the Delphic Oracle 102 with King Aegeus before her

26 Annibale Caracci, Ulysses and Circe, Farnese Palace, Rome 103 27 Attributed to Tithonos painter, lekythos with image of Hermes 105 28 Moses and the Burning Bush, Exodus 3:2 108 29 Opening of the mouth ceremony, Egyptian Book of the Dead 109 30 Moses Divides the Red Sea, synagogue fresco, Dura Europos, Syria111 31 Sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus, Rome 112 32 “The Brazen Serpent,” from The Common Book of Prayer113 33 Gabriel Ehinger after Johann Jacob von Sandrart, Moses and 114 Jesus on title page, German Bible 34 John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle116 35 William Wynn Westcott in ceremonial garment of the Rosicrucians119 36 Pamela Colman Smith, “The Magician” 121 37 Émile Bertrand, Cendrillon124 38 Wandrille de Préville, Notre-­Dame de Paris in flames 130 39 Île de la Cité, 1609 133 40 Jean Jouvenet, Mass of the Canon de la Porte141 41 Charles Nicolas Cochin II, Grand Funeral at Notre-­Dame de Paris for Elisabeth Therese of Lorraine142 42 “Festival of Reason” 144 43 The Emperor Swears the Oath of the Constitution at Notre-­Dame146 44 Consecration of Napoleon and Coronation of Josephine by Pope Pius VII148 45 Panoramic view of Notre-­Dame and the Seine 151 46 Polynesian creator deity, A’a, from Rurutu 158 47 Great marae of Temarre at Papeete, Tahiti 159 48 “The Family Idols of Pomare” 159 49 “Destruction of the Idols at Otaheite” 163 50 Marae of Tane, at Maeva, Tahiti 166 51 Aeolian harp, from Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis167 52 Presentation of tapa-­wrapped deities to LMS missionaries at Rarotonga172 53 Museum of the London Missionary Society 174 54 Interior view of the Cabinet of Curiosities, Boston 176 A section of color plates follows page 116

[ Ac k n owle d g m e n t s ] •••

My sincere thanks to Elaine Maisner, executive editor at the University of North Carolina Press, for her support from the genesis of this project to its completion. And to Birgit Meyer, University of Utrecht, for assembling a group of students and faculty to workshop much of the manuscript. My visit to Utrecht and the days meeting with the group were instrumental in improving the book. Birgit and her colleagues were not only careful readers of the text but outstanding conversation partners. Thanks, too, to a number of colleagues who offered helpful comments: Larissa Carneiro, Joyce Flueckiger, Andreas Gregersen, Mohsen Kadivar, Hwansoo Kim, Leela Prasad, and Pooyan Tamimi Arab. I would like to acknowledge the journal Kunst og Kultur, where a portion of chapter 6 first appeared. And for assistance in publishing this book, I wish to express my gratitude to the Warren Roman Catholic and the Dennis & Rita Meyer Endowments in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University.

[ ix ]

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The Th i ng abo ut R eli gio n •••

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[ I n tr o d u ct i o n ]

H o w M ater ial i ty Matt er s to t he St ud y o f R el i g i o n •••

Figure 1. Amilcare Santini, Head of Michelangelo’s David, 1960s, cast polymer, height 6 in. Photo by author.

This bust of David (fig. 1) was modeled by a twentieth-­century Italian sculptor named Amilcare Santini after Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece. The object was purchased by my mother sometime in the late 1970s at an estate sale and placed on a shelf in my childhood home. I passed it each day and admired its indignant glare and thick mane. From a college art history class, I recognized that its origin was the nude figure [ 1 ]

Introduction

Michelangelo had been commissioned to carve for the Florence Cathedral in 1501. When it was completed, the massive figure was instead placed in the city square of Florence, where the statue’s determined look was trained defiantly on any enemy of the fledgling Florentine republic.1 I also liked my mother’s bust of David because it was a creamy resin cast that resembled ivory, a warm, glossy material that was mounted on a simple dark plinth. It recalled the classical busts that middle-­class homeowners proudly displayed in their overstocked Victorian interiors. My mother used the weighty bust as a bookend to hold in place five decoratively bound volumes of works by Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius. But when she spoke of the bust, my mother did not refer to classical sculpture or Greek or Roman philosophy. In fact, she never read the books. She was interested in the ornamental accent of their bindings, not their contents. And the bust for her was a classical embellishment with the added value of its subject: the Bible story of a divinely favored shepherd with his meager sling facing a Philistine colossus whom the boy defeated by virtue of a pure heart and divine plan. My mother also told me that she thought the head was handsome. Indeed, the pile of hair towering above the face recalls publicity stills of Marcello Mastroianni in the classic film La Dolce Vita (1960). Perhaps Santini was influenced by glamour shots of the actor. Figure 1 is not an expensive work of art. It is not a work of art at all, really, but rather a decorative rendition of one. The bust is available today on eBay for as little as thirty dollars. It is a copy of a clay original by Santini that has been reproduced thousands of times in a variety of media and in different sizes and colors. Whatever might be said of Santini’s original work, this figure is clearly a commodity, an inexpensive ornament purchased by those who want to display it in their homes for its artistic reference, its aura of fine culture, its religious connotation, or merely its decorative value in an ensemble of wallpaper, shelving, and related objects. What becomes clear is that the object’s value is not simply enclosed within itself but consists in the connection of its physical qualities to the history of art, to the Bible, to the artist who made it, to the market that makes the object available, to the objects it is displayed with, to the domestic setting in which it is displayed, and to those who behold it wherever they happen to encounter it. In other words, viewers do not encounter objects in isolated aesthetic purity; rather, they discover them arrayed within an ecology of other objects, places, texts, memories, lore, and people. If we [ 2 ]

Introduction

wish to understand something, we need to scrutinize the dense context in which we experience it. Without that, a thing is unspecified, an object without context, an entity afloat on a nondescript sea of possibilities. It might be anything, rather than the something that stares back at us. This account suggests that a religious artifact or space is also about more than this or that object. Indeed, the thing about religion only b ­ egins with all the paraphernalia that religions produce and use: holy water, medals, crystals, chalices, miters, wands, and pendants, sacred books, relics, amulets, and caps, paintings, gems, and polished bits of stone. It continues with the places that matter—shrines and temples and sacred springs, caves and altars and pilgrimage sites. And the sounds and silences of such places. And the food people eat and the clothing they wear. The thing about religion, in other words, is the stuff of religious life—the material character of the look and smell and sound that make a religion what it is in the daily lives of its adherents. And still, there is more to the story. There is the stuff many are less likely to admire—the weaponry, devices of torture, the towering walls and bloody altars, the gallows and pyres and glowering pageantry of authority that keeps little people in their place and put monarchs on their vaunted thrones. Readers of this book will encounter examples of all these and will consider how they make sense in relation to the cultural and biological complexity of the human body and the social worlds that human beings produce.

Things

This is a book about how things matter to the academic study of religion. But what is a thing? In modern English usage, the word thing commonly refers to a physical object whose proper name, function, or history one does not know. “What is that thing?” we may ask of something we do not recognize. The word implies vagueness, obscurity, or uncertainty. In a colloquial sense, English speakers say, “I have a thing for chocolate,” or “There is something I want to talk with you about.” The word is oblique, refusing to name just what it is that concerns the speaker. The thing at issue is veiled indefiniteness or indeterminacy. This makes a thing somewhat different from an object, which is a certain, specifiable entity, with an identifiable function and name. An object is the counterpart of a subject— a conscious being who has a use and a name for the object. Thus, an object is subject to specification, which means that it can be assigned a purpose and placed within a class of related objects, a species. [ 3 ]

Introduction

The word thing designates whatever falls into a kind of limbo, a gray place where its purpose and nature are not apparent.2 But two different senses of the word’s use arise. Sometimes, the mist clears and we discover what the thing is. This is the process of objectification: we are able to specify what the thing is supposed to do, what class of objects it belongs to. In this case, a thing is an unspecified object. Once we can determine its species, we know what kind of thing it is and how to use it. We answer the question, “What is that thing?” by determining what kind of an object it is. We need a term like thing to designate a category for items that have lost their place or use or whose novelty or complexity or nature are unclear to us. Practically speaking, the thing about religion includes this category of oblivion or mystery because people may seek to conceal the strangeness or otherness of artifacts that belong to religions other than their own, to religions from the distant past, or to experiences of their own that do not fit the commonsense reality that governs everyday life. People may do so by applying to things names that make them familiar. But sometimes the mystery remains and we are not able to fit a thing into a secure taxonomy that tells us what it is and how to use it. In this case, a thing is not just unspecified: it may appear to be unspecifiable. It cannot be assigned an enduring place within a system of classification. People who have encountered spectral beings in visions or haunted places often speak this way, regarding what they have experienced as shrouded in mystery. There was something there, but they are not sure what. This sort of thing, though it remains obscure, can exert an influence on those who have encountered it. Gods, demons, angels, ghosts, and such beings may elude precise definitions, may resist being defined as controllable objects, yet still exert influence over people and events. Believers may have a name for such things, but they are compelled to treat them differently than objects. It is not what they are so much as who they are that directs interaction with such beings. In such moments of mystery, the second sense of the word thing is important as a category because it captures how people struggle with the unexplained that presses upon them. They strain to put in words what they have experienced. But by feeling their way through the confusion, awe, and fear, they may come upon a new perception, and their experience might take the shape of a significant encounter. They continue to struggle to understand it, but the elusive nature of the thing is precisely what compels them to persist. Thingness consists of what resists becoming reduced [ 4 ]

Introduction

to a useful object, something that one can appropriate and use. In this sense, a thing is alienated from conventional utility. We might say that a thing eludes the status of objecthood, demanding that people address it as something more, even as a subject, as a being equal or superior to themselves. People are therefore impelled to regard what their moral and emotional relation to the thing may be rather than what use they may find for it as an object. In the experience of an apparition, for example, the alienation resulting from the strangeness of the event reveals the superior subjecthood of the mysterious thing. The human subject will never be able fully to objectify this Other but must discover a different relation to it. In this book, thing refers to both senses—the yet to be specified and that which is not (readily) specifiable. Yet there is another aspect of things to bear in mind—the way in which objects become unspecified, and so take on thingness. The things that matter most to people, to which they feel closest, inevitably lose their clarity and concreteness as they fade into the oblivion of neglect, decay, and forgetting. If the strange can resist familiarity, sometimes that which was familiar grows strange. In this sense, thingness is a condition that creeps up and befalls objects or places. Things are always changing. They exhibit an instability that turns out to be important because it means that their use and the interpretation of their value are not constant. That is because everything exists in time, which is another way of saying that everything changes—inwardly, by wearing down or decomposing, for example, and outwardly, in their relation to other entities, including human beings. Things also change because people change. What once mattered slips away (or is deliberately thrown) into the past and suffers a loss of value. In the second portion of the book, we will follow several things over time in order to understand how they and their contexts undergo change. In those chapters, we will track objects moving around the world, compare objects in very different cultures, and study the same object (a building) over hundreds of years. In each case, it will become apparent that things are not self-­enclosed and enduring but always on the move, always awash in time.

Enchanted Matter

To say that things matter seems clear enough if we are talking about stone temples or wooden carvings or fresco paintings or the colored cloth of tunics or togas. But how do angels or saints or spirit beings matter in the same way? In both senses of the word as I have identified them here, a [ 5 ]

Introduction

thing is a thing by virtue of its capacity to act on us or on other things— either mysteriously or directly. Materiality, in other words, consists of agency. People report that they experience intangible things like angels, ancestors, or ghosts. They do so by being touched or moved or frightened or inspired by them. All of these sensations imply some manner of experience that takes the form of an encounter or relationship because the thing that launches it refuses to become no more than an object of human use. It is common to split the universe between spirit and matter. Insisting on their absolute distinction is called dualism, a philosophical position that is not helpful for the material analysis of religions since dualism strongly privileges the spirit side, where it is believed that thought and soul and gods and truth are located. I want to suggest that spiritual does not simply mean nonphysical. Spiritual things are those operating under the second sense of the word thing: the indeterminate or unspecified or mysterious way that something acts on other things, including human beings. This is an important point because it will allow us to discuss the actions of things like angels and saints, gods, demons, and spirit forces without becoming obsessed with whether they actually exist. We may never know such things in their nature, or even believe they exist, but we can describe the difference such things make in the lives of religious practitioners and their communities. The material study of religions is, among other things, the study of agency—how things act on one another. Agency is conventionally understood to mean the special sense of intentional action that is reserved largely for human beings. But if we think of agency in causal terms, anything can act on other things. Agency is an ascription that depends largely on the scope or relevance of its consequences. The wind blowing through grass is the cause of its movement. But when the wind desiccates crops or topples houses, it becomes the agent of destruction, receiving a name and a character of malevolence. In ancient Greece, for example, the south wind, Notos, was the one that burned crops and delivered adverse weather. The poet Hesiod counseled his brother to undertake maritime travel within the fifty days following summer solstice and not to delay return, waiting until the time of “new wine and the autumn rains, the onset of winter and the fearsome blasts of the South Wind [Notos], which stirs up the sea as it comes with heaven’s plentiful rains of autumn, and makes the waves rough.”3 Clearly, agency can be the ascription of intentionality to nonhuman events or forces. Yet in either case, as a god or a natural force, [ 6 ]

Introduction

the wind is a cause, and if we wish to understand the material domain as taking an active role in religious life and imagination, we need to expand the definition of agency to embrace the broad scope of material conditions. To say that things act does not mean that they simply react in a lifeless, indifferent chain of actions and reactions. Human beings are interested observers and participate in what they observe, endowing it with value that it may have only for them. This endowment is more than a fiction. Humans invest the material world with agency that in turn enables them. But that agency is more than merely projected by human beings. In a very real sense, human beings cooperate with objects. Tools, for example, allow us to do things we could not do by ourselves. Thus, because a tool transforms its human user, it is an agent, or a coagent. The human species is dependent on tools, from the simple broom or hammer to modern technology. The relationship is so fundamental that the species may be defined as the one that relies on tools such that it could not exist without them. If we accept this definition of humanity (homo faber, Latin for “humankind as maker”), it is not difficult to recognize the coagency of anything in the world that helps humans thrive. We do not understand human being properly if we think of it as essentially a sovereign consciousness. A human being is something deeply enmeshed in the world, incomplete and impossible without the things that extend, penetrate, and interface with the body. But such a view becomes heavily anthropocentric if we fail to realize that we are not the only form of animation at work in the world around us. In fact, much of the world is alive—not only as animals or insects but as microbes, as bacteria that consume organic matter. And matter behaves in ways that exhibit intricate and extensive order. Think of the mineralization that produces fossils, the formation of crystals, the wave action of water, or the patterns that wind creates in soil or sand. Matter exhibits a clear tendency toward ordered behavior and interactive balance. Of course, matter also exhibits entropy, the tendency toward dissolution or disorder. Human beings make use of both tendencies, and the two senses of the word thing outlined here capture them—objecthood, or endurance, and change. But is the tendency toward order apparent in matter a soul? Do souls direct the many things that humans rely on to thrive in their ordered worlds? Is a tool really an agent in the full (human) sense of the term? Most of us would probably say no. At least, those of “us” who are products of modernity, the cultural condition that the social theorist Max Weber [ 7 ]

Introduction

described as having disenchanted the physical world, drained it of magic understood as a means of salvation or manipulating divine forces.4 Disenchantment intensified, according to Weber, under the rise of economic rationalism in the form of capitalism, which resulted in an indifference if not hostility toward religion.5 Weber’s notion of the elimination of magic from the world as a broad historic process or evolutionary development reflects the influence of earlier scholars of religion such as the anthropologist and folklorist Sir James Frazer, who regarded magic as primitive science and amassed detailed accounts of folklore as the remains of earlier, premodern forms of thought. Among his documentations was a feature of interest to us on the matter of animated things. Frazer described what he called “the external soul” in folktales: “A warlock, giant, or other fairyland being is invulnerable and immortal because he keeps his soul hidden far away in some secret place.” 6 He provided the example of a secret society on the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea: every new member “receives a stone in the shape either of a human being or of an animal, and henceforth his soul is believed to be knit up in a manner with the stone. If it breaks, it is an evil omen for him; they say that the thunder has struck the stone and that he who owns it will soon die.” 7 Inspired by a view of progressive cultural evolution that favored the modern West as the paradigm of rational and scientific thinking, writers like Frazer and Weber relegated magic to earlier phases of cultural development. Folktales were ways of understanding how the world used to be enchanted but is no longer. Yet the evidence does not support this view. Magic and enchantment are alive and well today. Things continue to exhibit the power to act. Large numbers of people seem to enjoy believing this, or at least being entertained by the idea. Magic and enchantment remain very appealing features in film and fiction. For instance, Frazer’s discussion of the external soul hidden in objects may have inspired the “horcrux” in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, “the word used for an object in which a person has concealed part of their soul,” most notably, of course, the soul of Lord Voldemort.8 An instructor at Hogwarts explained the use of the horcrux as follows: “You split your soul, you see, and hide part of it in an object outside the body. Then, even if one’s body is attacked or destroyed, one cannot die, for part of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged.” 9 Whether or not Rowling ever read Frazer, the idea that [ 8 ]

Introduction

things have souls is even more common than the idea of the horcrux or external soul. Frazer, for instance, discussed tree spirits and the souls of animals, as well as the transference of evil to inanimate objects, animals, and humans.10 Modern Wiccan spirituality has an even more expansive view.11 Crystals and certain sorts of rock, trees, plants, rivers, and mountains are possessed of powers and spirits that can benefit human beings in various ways. Roman Catholicism, a religion of 1.2 billion members worldwide, regards the consecrated bread and wine of Holy Communion as bearing the “real presence” of Jesus Christ.12 The power of spirit-­filled things has been carefully studied in many parts of the world.13 For example, Hindu worship before images is not merely symbolic but is experienced as engaging the presence of the deity, often in a visual exchange between devotee and deity called darśan.14 It is clear from these several instances of religions in the modern world that modernity has not banished magic or enchantment or spirit-­filled things. There is no shortage of amulets or lucky charms or belief in gods, destiny, predestination, or other spiritual forces. It would be difficult to name many religions that do not endorse some kind of spiritual power at work in objects, human events, or nature. So it should not be surprising to find many people practicing forms of enchantment—even among those who espouse no religion at all.15 We cannot understand the relevance of materiality to the study of religion unless we learn to look beyond the idea that matter is a dead, passive, neutral substance manipulated by the sovereign subject of the human mind. Materiality is not like pliable clay or cookie dough in which we impress our will. It is how the world pushes back against us, bends or shatters our ideas, joins with us to make something bigger or longer lasting than our bodies. Agency does not belong only to human beings but is shared by all kinds of things. Tools are things people make to extend the efforts of their bodies. But everything that composes our worlds exerts influence on us by interacting with our bodies, whether it was fashioned to do so or not. Let me try to make this clearer for the study of religion by examining the origin of how things act on us. I count at least six ways in religious thought and practice by which things are said to acquire agency: 1. A supernatural being can endow an object with the power to act. 2. A ritual treatment can consecrate an object, giving it power. [ 9 ]

Introduction

3. An object can resemble something and exert an influence on the basis of the likeness. 4. Certain objects possess power intrinsically because of their relation to a sacred person or place. 5. Some objects behave as tools or instruments that augment the capacity of the human body to act and do so in a way that transforms it, cooperating with the tool. 6. Some objects act on people by virtue of their sensuous features. The origin of agency is different in each case. Examples of each will show what I mean.

Forms of Agency

In December 2019, Patrick Chauvet, the rector of the Cathedral of Notre-­ Dame de Paris, sadly announced that for the first time since the French Revolution, there would be no midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in the church. Instead, the rite would occur in a nearby church, Saint-­Germain l’Auxerrois, while the cathedral underwent restoration following the catastrophic fire in the spring of the year. As a consolation, one of the signature pieces of sculpture to survive the fire, the Virgin of Paris (fig. 2), had been moved to the church of Saint-­Germain for the Christmas Eve Mass. Chauvet enthusiastically described a new meaning of the sculpture: “It’s a miraculous virgin. Why? Because at the time of the fire, the vault of the cathedral completely crashed. There were stones everywhere, but she was spared. She could have naturally received the vault on her head and have been completely crushed.” But that did not happen. As a result, her survival had come to serve as assurance of the eventual return of the cathedral itself, along with the faith it embodies. Chauvet reported that having the figure present for the Mass at Saint-­Germain was comforting because “she lived very much in Notre Dame. She watched the pilgrims, all the 35,000 visitors a day. . . . It keeps us going.” 16 The agency at work in figure 2 is an encouraging presence to many in France. The chances of her emerging unscathed from the conflagration seem too small to those who regard her well-­being as a sign of divine action. Our Lady, the Virgin Mary, protected her image as a message of hope. Nature, as Chauvet suggested, does not exclude disaster, but miraculous intervention imbued the sculpture with a message of hope that refuses to give the randomness of the disaster the final word. The Virgin of [ 10 ]

Introduction

Figure 2. Virgin of Paris, 14th century, Notre-­Dame de Paris. Godong / Alamy Stock Photo.

Paris is a special thing precisely because it defied the entropic nature of reality. There is at work an agency external to the sculpture but manifest in its material condition. If the agency of figure 2 originates in a source external to it, the result of a divine action, a second form of agency occurs as the result of human ritual conduct. This form of agency is ritually installed in things. An example is the Hindu ritual practice of bringing a deity into temple statuary, an intricate ritual operation that must be carefully executed by qualified priests, who perform the rite as prescribed by revered and ancient texts. [ 11 ]

Introduction

Figure 3. Lingam, Shiva’s aniconic symbol, 8th century or earlier, stone, Kashmir. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Courtesy Art Resource, NY.

The result is an installation of the presence of a god in an object such as figure 3. The rites have been carefully studied by Richard Davis, who describes it as follows. The process begins with the priest and artisan who, in search of a piece of wood, “undertake a field trip to the forest, and take care to choose only specimens that bear an innate resemblance to the intended deity.” 17 Once the raw materials are secured, the sculptor “must follow iconographic and iconometric guidelines, to insure that the image properly represents the god visually and symbolically.” 18 As the artisan carves, the priest recites a mantra to invite the deity into the image as it takes shape. The next phase begins to awaken the figure, called “opening the eyes.” The priest draws the eyes on the surface of the figure, applies unguents, reciting mantras that call to the deity, and anoints the figure [ 12 ]

Introduction

with ritually prepared substances. Then the figure is taken to the temple and installed in its shrine, where the priest conducts formal worship in the presence of the god-­infused image. One can point to other examples of this ritual installation of divine presence in other religious traditions. Ancient Egyptians, for instance, ceremonially prepared statues to receive the soul of the mummified pharaoh. And the Christian rite of the Eucharist is a comparable practice of installing divine presence in bread and wine by priestly ritual. Although the lingam is considered “aniconic,” that is, not representing a deity’s figure and face, there is a rudimentary imagery involved in figure 3: a phallic form with the minimal demarcation of the features of a penis. This presents yet another mode of agency: likeness. The object affects viewers on the basis of what it resembles, visually or otherwise physically. Mimetic agency is very common in the history of religion and magic. Indeed, a great deal of magic operates on the basis of likeness, which Frazer called homeopathic or imitative magic.19 And human beings respond almost instinctively to images that resemble anything they fear, admire, trust, or desire. Likeness exerts the power to produce emotions and feelings, or affects, associated with the object of representation such that the image acts on people as what it resembles. Other kinds of objects possess a special presence within them that is neither supernaturally or humanly placed there but is inherent to the object, present by virtue of nature. Think, for instance, of relics: the tooth or hair or bone of a saint or sacred figure bears an intimate connection to the deceased person such that to pray before the relic is to pray in the presence of the saint. Another kind of relic is any natural object such as a sacred tree, a spring, or a stone that is understood to bear a power or presence that was not ritually created but is native to the place or object. An example is the Black Stone cemented into the eastern corner of the Kaaba in the center of the Great Mosque at Mecca (fig. 4). The stone is protected by a metal shield in the Kaaba, which bears the kiswa, the black cloth that covers the shrine and is parted to reveal the Black Stone. Tradition states that the stone fell from paradise to earth as a gift to Adam when he was expelled from Eden in order to allow him to receive forgiveness. The stone was later used by Ibrahim (Abraham) when he and Ishmael built the cubic shrine. According to tradition, the stone was once white but has turned black by absorbing the sins of pilgrims who kiss or touch it while on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. When the Prophet Muhammad took Mecca [ 13 ]

Figure 4. The Black Stone in the eastern corner of the Kaaba, Great Mosque, Mecca. Orhandurgut / Alamy Stock Photo.

Introduction

by force in 630 CE, he purged the Kaaba of 360 idols in order to restore to the shrine its ancient authority, now as the center of Islam.20 A fifth instance of agency consists of the power of tools of various kinds that combine with the human body to transform it into something else, to shape its appearance or augment its performance, or to work as extensions of it. In the industrial age, we are much more familiar with mechanical devices that do our bidding: the remote control operates the television set; the automatic seatbelt straps us in when we enter an automobile; the wall switch turns a light on or off; prosthetic devices replace missing body parts. But whether ancient tools or modern technology, we may speak of instrumental agency as involving devices that work in tandem with the human body and on behalf of human will, extending human agency in order to accomplish work that our bodies alone might be incapable of performing. A hammer, after all, can do something the human hand alone cannot. Putting the two together augments human agency. The hammer contributes an important part and needs to be understood as cooperating (literally, working with) the human body. The two together are more than what they are alone. Physical contact is the fundamental character of instrumental agency, typically by means of the intimate sensory means of touch, smell, or taste: the substance or thing becomes part of the body, even literally entering into it. We should also mention chemical substances that affect human behavior such as psychoactive narcotics, whose power to affect consciousness and perception is another instance of instrumental agency. Examples are abundant. In the realm of religious material culture, we might consider the vestments or robes that religious figures wear. Buddhist monks and nuns, for example, wear robes that serve to enact their detachment from the world of desires and to communicate to others their difference, in particular their presence for the purpose of donations or gifts of food. The Burmese monks pictured in figure 5 wear saffron-­colored robes, the color preferred by the Theravada tradition of Buddhism. The kasaya, the outer of three garments that compose of the monk’s robe, is designed to obscure the body, subordinating it to the monk’s ascetic tasks and office as ordained monk, rather than celebrating it or calling attention to the body. The robes often (but not always) are undistinguished by marking or design to indicate rank, and traditionally monks are allowed to possess only three sets of robes. Moreover, garments such as these produce a uniform social body that shapes the community within the monastery and presents the monk in public as devotee rather than individual. [ 15 ]

Introduction

Figure 5. Buddhist monks on Pagoda Road, Rangoon, Burma, 1908, stereographic card, detail. HIP / Art Resource, NY.

Although the robes are imbued with value by virtue of their ritual reception when monks and nuns take formal vows, their work on the body, in the monastic community, and on laity derives historically from the devotee’s commitment to the teachings of the Buddha. The robes practice detachment and were originally composed of rag cloth, being sewn together from smaller pieces of fabric.21 The sixth and final category of agency I want to outline here pertains to things or physical conditions that affect human observers by being seen or heard. This mode of agency may be called aesthetic, a term derived from the Greek word for perception or sensation. The aesthetic agent works [ 16 ]

Introduction

Figure 6. Crest from the Escrain de Charlemagne, mounted in the 9th century, Collection of the Treasury of Saint-­Denis, Paris. © BnF, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

neither as a symbol or sign conveying information nor by physical contact; instead, it operates through visual and aural perception to shape feeling. A fascinating example is the interior and finely crafted objects of the twelfth-­century Gothic abbey of Saint-­Denis in Paris, constructed under the direction of Abbot Suger. The so-­called Crest of Charlemagne (fig. 6), composed of gems and a carved crystal from the first century CE, was assembled in the ninth century. The crest was part of a panel or screen that was placed on the altar and is the only part of it to have survived. Its in[ 17 ]

Introduction

tricate beauty remains striking. In 1143, Suger described the building and appointments of the church, including the Crest of Charlemagne, in an account that conveyed his special affection for gems, a large number of which also adorned the cross displayed on the main altar of the church: Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the jasper, the chrysolite, and the onyx, and the beryl, the sapphire, and the carbuncle, and the emerald. To those who know the properties of precious stones it becomes evident, to their utter astonishment, that none is absent from the number of these (with the only exception of the carbuncle), but that they abound most copiously. Thus, when—out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliness of the many-­ colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to be that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.22 Suger, like many of his contemporaries, accorded to gems certain intrinsic powers, which recalls the agency we described above in the case of relics. Some taught that the color of gems exerted beneficial effects. One scholar summarized these as follows: “The blue sapphire soothed fevers and pains; the purple amethyst supported wisdom and guarded against evil; the green emerald increased wealth; and the red ruby promoted health and protected against poisons.”23 Some even ground up certain gems to be ingested for the inherent properties they offered.24 This suggests that we regard the agency of gems in the framework of pharmacology, yet it is much more likely that they exerted their effects through a system of belief that required a knowledge of lore and lapidary literature, of which there was a good deal.25 And there was another way in which gems worked on medieval people. A distinctive feature of the gems and the objects they adorned in the church was their beauty, that is, their ability to move human beings by virtue of their visual and tactile medium and design—gold, silver, jewels, finely cast bronze, and architectural features ranging from altars and arches to soaring vaults. These qualities moved Suger in what he called [ 18 ]

Introduction

“an anagogical manner” (anagogico more), which the editor of his account indicated meant literally as “the upward-­leading method,” that is, transporting the viewer from the realm of earthly “slime” (in terrarum fæce) to a superior state of spiritual contemplation.26 The power of the gems was an aesthetic engine, the agency of art that exerts effects on viewers by virtue of beauty. In other words, in addition to the notion of intrinsic power in relics that produces healings and other miracles, the sensuous qualities of some objects influence people by virtue of aesthetic pleasure, fascination, wonder, or rapt attention, turning the mind from mundane matters to the heavenly.

Understanding How Agency Works: Assemblages

With these six kinds of agency—external, ritual, mimetic, inherent, instrumental, and aesthetic—we have six primary ways in which things are understood to act. But scrutiny of each example will show that such a simple characterization of their agency falls short of accounting for how things act. In fact, things act, not alone, but in concert with their circumstances, often, but not always, including human actors. Humans bring a variety of needs and expectations to the things acting for or against them. Because things interact with other, nonhuman, actors, agency is not only about human interests, and certainly not always under human control. But because religions exhibit a fundamental concern to shape human behavior and attend to human interests, the six forms of agency outlined here as materially constitutive of religious experience involve human beings. Yet if we wish to understand how things act, we must think beyond the limited range of human intention. We must look for a larger setting in which to understand agency because things act within an ecology of other things. To understand this, it will be helpful to return to the examples we have discussed. The Virgin of Paris shown in figure 2 came dramatically to life when a devastating fire and piles of rubble fallen around it threatened the national icon and shocked a nation into recognizing an act of God in its random survival. Figure 3 is a very fine example of a complex array of ritual actions that collectively enable the image of a deity to assume its presence for worshippers. The indwelling of the deity in the Shiva lingam ensues from the long procedure of priestly actions, chanting, procession, and the application of substances such as water, milk, honey, and ghee. Figure 4 [ 19 ]

Introduction

is circumambulated, saluted, touched, and even kissed. The location of the stone in the Kaaba, the storied structure at the geographical heart of Islam, the structure’s orienting location in daily prayers the world over, the Black Stone’s marking of the starting point for circling the Kaaba as the high point of the Hajj—all are the conditions under which the stone’s capacity as a relic is brought to act on pilgrims. The robes pictured in figure 5 combine with the body of the person wearing it and the bodies of others in the community to enact detachment from the world. Providing food and other gifts to those marked out as monks by their robes renders karmic merit to laity. Figure 6 was displayed on the altar of one of the first Gothic churches in Paris and was part of a larger decorated panel that stood amid an array of such lavishly designed objects as a gilt cross, massive candles, silver vessels, ivory tablets, and more. As a device attributed to the court of the great leader of the Frankish empire and the renewer of the Holy Roman Empire, the Crest of Charlemagne surmounted the main altar of the Parisian church long associated with the kings of France, conferring on the church and the king the venerable stature vouched for by its beauty. What matters in every case is a configuration of elements—not by an object itself. Agency is not encased in an object but made to happen by a variety of enabling circumstances—an encompassing ecology. Agency, in other words, is the result of an assemblage, a constellation of interactive components, which includes attitude or disposition—religious belief. The shape of materiality is webs. Objects, spaces, and people are nodes within these webs that mediate the relations among individuals, groups, and entire networks. The six forms of agency described here assemble components in their distinctive ways. For example, figure 7, a stupa, or Buddhist burial monument in Nepal, contains a relic of the Buddha and is therefore a special site for pilgrimage and prayer. The stupa operates as the interface of pilgrims, ritual practice, sacred site, and religious teaching with the relic enclosed within the stupa—the place where all of these elements come together to produce the act of honoring the Buddha. Pilgrims circle the stupa and spin prayer wheels there in order to generate merit favorable to a higher rebirth because honoring the Buddha’s body is a way of honoring him and his teaching. The circular movement is understood as setting in motion the wheel of dharma, the law, or teachings of the Buddha, which begins with the observation that life is suffering, that suffering is caused by craving, that liberation from suffering and craving is possible, which is pursued by the Eightfold or Noble Path consisting of eight forms [ 20 ]

Introduction

Figure 7. Boudhanath Stupa, Kathmandu, Nepal, height 118 ft., begun in the 8th century CE. © Gilles Mermet / Art Resource, NY.

of practice regarding wisdom, conduct, and mental discipline. These form the eight spokes of the wheel of the law that is inscribed in the circular form of the stupa. Circumambulating the burial mound is therefore a way of interfacing with an assemblage of actors. It is also important to note that different forms of agency variously work together. For example, a set of monk’s robes such as those pictured in figure 5 may be experienced as exerting agency that draws on several sources: a monk may have received the robe as part of a ritual occasion; and the robe may have been passed to him from a master, thus operating as a kind of relic; and it works on the monk and those around him in the form of an instrument. So ritual, relic, and instrumentality invest the robe with the power to act. Knowing the different forms of agency helps us recognize the variety of combinations at work in any given instance. Yet some devices may be difficult to classify. Think of a drum used in religious rites: its beat resounds in the ears, but its rhythm presses against the flesh and seems to act directly on the bodies of participants, moving them to keep the beat or to dance. Is the drum an instrumental agent or an aesthetic one? It is probably best to say both. Sound is a vibration of air or another [ 21 ]

Introduction

medium that registers in the vibration of the ear drum, which translates the vibration into patterns of nerve pulses. But sound is also registered on the flesh as discernible, and the human response can be deeply sympathetic. Sound touches and moves us.27 The material study of religions refuses to reduce artifacts to abstract meanings or doctrines. The sensory, emotional, and felt characteristics matter as much as intellectual assertions. Combining all of these is the task of an enriched understanding of how religions work and what they do. The agency of things in religious experience is perhaps most apparent in the way they engage human beings. Objects, spaces, and places invite, threaten, scare, comfort, and inspire people interacting with them. And for this reason, people form relationships with such things that endure over time and shape personal and social life.28 In the chapters that follow, I hope readers are engaged to think through the agency of the material features of religion. Part I consists of three chapters that explore a range of theories and definitions. Chapter 1 considers how dominant accounts of religion have long tended to dematerialize religions. Chapter 2 explores approaches to the study of religions that help us recognize their manifold materiality. Chapter 3 delves into a number of ways in which religions happen materially. These three chapters work together to set out a range of theories and concepts that are basic to the academic study of religion. The chapters comprising Part II put these ideas to work by examining three topics: chapter 4 traces the history of wands as power objects; chapter 5 focuses on a single building and site over many centuries; and chapter 6 follows objects that forcibly migrated from the South Seas, where missionaries gathered them, along their meandering path through several museums and institutions in Boston and London, showing how words and things interact to shape the perception of religious artifacts. Part II consists of chapters that trace objects over time. Because this book seeks to understand ways in which things affect how people think and feel, it is necessary to recognize time as a framework of human existence. That is because human beings think and feel in time, and cultures invest a great deal in parsing and observing time. Religions are engrossed in measuring time—as what separates the present from a sacred event in the past or in anticipation of one in the future; as the rhythm of sun, stars, or moon as the structure for worshiping the power they manifest; [ 22 ]

Introduction

as the origin of the cosmos or its end. And for their part, scholars, too, are obsessed with time. Critical thinking relies on historicizing artifacts, places, and practices. The thing about a religion is the temporality that practitioners observe and the historicity that the academic study of religion strives to describe. The chapters of Part II, therefore, approach the understanding of the materiality of religions by describing the stream of objects through time and the unremitting emergence of new meanings and forms of agency over time. Last, a number of useful resources have been gathered at the end of the book. These include lists of primary texts that may be used as supplemental readings for each chapter. There is also a list of key terms drawn from each chapter, and a number of online resources that could be used in class to support discussion or writing projects. A writing guide may prove helpful as students prepare papers that investigate the material characteristics of religions. The bibliography offers a wide variety of scholarly literature on religious material culture as references for student writing and includes a number of resources on topics beyond those discussed in the book. Inevitably, readers will miss discussion of one medium, genre, technique, or another. Indeed, there are countless media that are not included owing to limitations of space. But comprehensive coverage is not my aim, so readers are encouraged to use the bibliography supplied in each chapter and at the end of the book to explore themes, media, and techniques that interest them.

[ 23 ]

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[ Pa rt I ]

The o r i es an d D e f i n i t i o n s •••

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[ O ne ]

H ow S o m e T he o ri es of Re ligion D e materi a l ize It ••• Many approaches to religion do not consider material characteristics to be important. So this chapter is devoted to tracing the history of such theories, indicating how and why they operate as they do, and pointing out the problems with doing so. The point is not to argue that materiality is the essence of all religions or that the material study of a religion is more important than any other. Instead, the task is to demonstrate the difference that studying material aspects of religions makes in understanding them.

Images and Relics as Delusions, Distractions, and Idols: The Priority of Philosophy and Theology

The academic field of religious studies has inherited much from the history of philosophy and theology. That is because philosophy and theology formed the intellectual life of Christianity, and particularly Christian universities in Europe since the eleventh century, long before such modern material disciplines as archaeology, art history, or paleontology came into being. So if we want to understand why some theories of religion give material life little attention, it is necessary to begin with what influential philosophers and theologians have thought about images and objects. Of course, the record is starkly split in the sense that some regarded material things as distractions or even dangers even while the Catholic theology and practice of the Eucharist was robustly material and inspired a rich and varied art and architecture for the devout staging of the rite.1 It is best not to reduce the tradition of Christianity (or any other religion, for that matter) to a single view. In the twelfth century, the spiritual reformer and mystic Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to William of Saint-­Thierry, a friend and admirer who [ 27 ]

Theories and Definitions

Figure 8. Detail of carved capitals, cloister of the abbey church of Saint-­Pierre, Moissac, France, 12th century. Alinari / Art Resource, NY.

was the abbot of a Benedictine monastery in France, to complain about what he considered the material excess of Benedictine churches: their “vast height, . . . their immoderate length, their superfluous breadth, the costly polishings, the curious carvings and paintings which attract the worshipper’s gaze and hinder his attention.”2 The decorated capitals of the cloister of the abbey church of Saint-­Pierre at Moissac, France, a Benedictine monastery that was rebuilt in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (fig. 8), are just the sort of thing that Bernard had in mind, particularly since they adorned the cloister, or interior courtyard, a part of the monas[ 28 ]

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tery that only monks would see.3 Bernard acknowledged that decoration and scale might be done for God’s honor but insisted that bishops had an excuse that monks like Bernard and William did not: “Unable to excite the devotion of carnal folk by spiritual things, [bishops] do so by bodily adornments.” But monks, Bernard claimed, are committed to dismissing “all things fair to see or soothing to hear, sweet to smell, delightful to taste, or pleasant to touch—in a word, all bodily delights.”4 Then Bernard leveled an economic critique of artistic adornment in religious settings: wealth produces more wealth, and the quest for it operated independently of spiritual motives. “Thus, wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bringeth money; for I know not how it is that, wheresoever more abundant wealth is seen, there do men offer more freely.” The problem was the magnetic power of lavish decoration on the spiritually undisciplined nature of the worldly. “Their eyes are feasted with relics cased in gold, and their purse-­strings are loosed. They are shown a most comely image of some saint, whom they think all the more saintly that he is the more gaudily painted. Men run to kiss him, and are invited to give; there is more admiration for his comeliness than veneration for his sanctity.” 5 And the effect on the spiritual inhabitants of abbeys and cathedral churches was no less a problem—spiritual distraction from the monk’s proper activity: “In short, so many and so marvelous are the varieties of diverse shapes on every hand, that we are tempted to read in the marble than in our books, and to spend the whole day in wondering at these things rather than in meditating on the law of God.” 6 For Bernard, material forms were considered not only to miss the point of religious life but to subvert it by indulging an obsession with material wealth. Decorative and artistic forms are often the target of iconophobic reformers because they are criticized as perverting the spiritual purity of rites and institutions, often because of their association with commerce and the exertions of wealthy patrons. Iconophobia (the fear or avoidance of images) and iconoclasm (the breaking or removal of images) are an attitude and a practice commonly associated with religious reform—and even revolution, since the destruction of images often means an assault on the political and economic orders that installed the images and drew support from their veneration. In the Byzantine era, for example, a series of emperors banned the use of icons, or religious images, in Orthodox Christian worship during the eighth and ninth centuries. In 754, the iconoclastic emperor Constan[ 29 ]

Theories and Definitions

tine V called a synod or council of bishops to address the matter of images, among other matters. The council indicted “the deceitful colouring of pictures, which draws down the spirit of man from the lofty worship of God to the low and material worship of the creature.” 7 Specifically, the Council of Hieria stated that “the sinful art of painting blasphemed the fundamental doctrine of our salvation, namely the Incarnation of Christ.” How was that the case? What avails, then, the folly of the painter, who from sinful love of gain depicts that which should not be depicted, that is, with his polluted hands he tries to fashion that which should only be believed in the heart and confessed with the mouth? He makes an image and calls it Christ. The name Christ signifies God and man. Consequently, it is an image of God and man, and consequently he has in his foolish mind, in his representation of the created flesh, depicted the Godhead which cannot be represented, and thus mingled what should not be mingled. Thus, he is guilty of a double blasphemy, the one in making an image of the Godhead and the other by mingling the Godhead and manhood. Those fall into the same blasphemy who venerate the image.8 Already in the eighth century we find a contrast between “belief ” and “material worship” that is still commonly associated with Protestantism. The distinction is premised on the conviction that any attempt to depict the divine is not only mistaken but a confusion of a human invention with what is invisible and immaterial. With this official finding in place, Constantine V proceeded against the venerators of images, especially directing his efforts at the monasteries, which were producers of icons and communities independent of imperial cities. Monasteries, which were also pilgrimage centers for the display of icons and relics, resisted the imperial ban and struggled for more than a century before they were able to see icon veneration officially reestablished and vindicated as a central feature of Orthodox worship, which it remains to this day.9 The history of iconoclastic reform is not limited to Christianity. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-­century China, a reform initiative succeeded at modifying Confucian practice, replacing sculpted images of ancestors in Confucian temple shrines with spirit or ancestor tablets, that is, wooden plaques bearing the names of ancestors. A spirit tablet appears in an important Confucian shrine at Jiading, China, positioned before a statue of Confucius (fig. 9). A fifteenth-­century Confucian scholar named Ch’iu [ 30 ]

Figure 9. Main hall with spirit tablet displayed before the figure of Confucius, Temple of Confucius, Jiading, China. The temple was built in 1291 and restored in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY.

Theories and Definitions

Chün argued that the use of sculpted images such as the one that also appears in figure 9 departed from the venerable ancient Confucian tradition. He also claimed that their use was imported from Buddhist practice and therefore not Chinese by nature. And he pointed out that such images often failed on their own terms to visualize ancient Confucian sages because their likenesses were not recorded during their lifetimes, meaning that any image of them was nothing more than the product of an artisan’s imagination.10 The spirit tablets presented only the name and title of the spirit (teacher, sage, ancestor) to which Confucian sacrifice and prayer was directed. The name, uttered in ritual, was regarded as the more adequate means of reference since spirits, according to Ch’iu, bore no features. They were formless, colorless, odorless, and soundless.11 Their presence was to be apprehended only within the context of ritual sacrifice. Thus, even when representations are eliminated, when iconoclasm replaces images with text, a material means of invocation remains. Incense, name plaque, altar, and the sonorous recitation of ritual formula created the stage on which worship took place. Still, Ch’iu focused his iconoclastic arguments on the use of images of sages in the setting of temples in the imperial academies at Beijing and Nanjing. He conceded that he would not remove images from shrines in military districts and “cities of the realm, however, for to change things there would disturb the common people.” 12 Ch’iu’s critique of cult imagery is not altogether different from the Protestant rejection of imagery in church sanctuaries, an attitude that many Protestant groups developed in the sixteenth century as they split from Roman Catholicism and struggled to establish their reform of religion in the new political circumstances that arose in the German territories, Switzerland, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and the Scandinavian states farther north.13 North American Protestantism was firmly established during the British colonial era and continued to exert a strong influence on national attitudes into the twentieth century. For instance, as Asian immigration to the United States got seriously under way in the later nineteenth century, many Anglo Protestants expressed alarm and anxiety at the growing numbers of non-­Christian Chinese and Japanese, especially in the coastal regions of New York City and San Francisco. Figure 10 registers what amounts to a perennial American concern about immigrants, who alarm some Anglo-­Americans because they regard newcomers different from themselves as a threat to their racial and ideological dominance, which they consider to be integral to the divinely mandated [ 32 ]

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mission for the nation, which they view as properly Protestant in origin and identity. Race and religion can be so deeply interwoven as to be inextricable in the imagination of those who consider nation, state, or empire as the political circumstances for realizing divine purpose. Figure 10 certainly conveys this anxiety regarding national identity. It was published in Harper’s Weekly, which regularly printed cartoons intended to stoke alarm about Catholic immigrants from Europe and non-­ Christian immigrants from Asia as threats to the purity of the nation’s democracy and its foundations in Protestantism. In the illustration, a Chinese priest burns joss-­sticks at an altar in San Francisco, before the portrait of a deity or sacred figure, which is surrounded by spirit tablets, while those behind him bow deeply in reverence as their prayers are conveyed to the figure in incense. Entitled “Burning the Prayers—Chinese Superstitions,” the engraving is a piece of Protestant anti-­immigrant propaganda aimed at ritual that we have already encountered. In an accompanying text, we read that “the vending of ready-­made prayers is a profitable business. They are printed on slips of paper, and a man’s devotion is limited only by the resources of his pocket. Taking the slips home, or into a temple, the devout worshipper lights them in the flame of the lamp or candle, which burns before the image of his deity, and with immense inward satisfaction, if not edification, watches the smoke ascend into the air.”14 Resentment of Chinese immigrant labor often turned on the willingness of Asian laborers to work for less than native Anglo workers, so caricatures of Chinese religion like figure 10 may reflect this economic anxiety. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882 to curb competition from Chinese immigrant labor in the western states, specifically prohibited “skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining” from entering the United States for ten years.15 The Harper’s piece may also have intended to reduce Chinese worship to an economic transaction in order to privilege the theology and form of worship practiced by American Protestants. Buying one’s salvation had long been criticized by Protestants as a Catholic and ancient Jewish practice of sacrifice. Asian “idolatry” struck many Protestants as just another version of these imperfect religions, which they considered to misconstrue relations with the divine in terms of a ritual quid pro quo. Moreover, Protestantism was held to be essential to the success of the American republic. In his widely read book Our Country (1885), the prominent Protestant minister Josiah Strong wrote that Anglo-­Saxons represented two of the great ideas of civiliza[ 33 ]

Figure 10. G. Mauraud, “Burning the Prayers—Chinese Superstitions,” Harper’s Weekly, August 23, 1873, 745. Photo by author.

H o w S o m e T h e o r i e s o f R e l i g i o n D e m a t e r i a l i z e It

tion: civil liberty and “pure spiritual Christianity.” It was the Saxons of the Reformation, “a Teutonic, rather than a Latin people,” who rose up against “the absolutism of the Pope” to champion religious purity, that is, Protestantism.16 And Strong confidently insisted that North America was “to be the great home of the Anglo-­Saxon, the principal seat of his power, the center of his life and influence.” 17 This rising white, manly, and English-­speaking force in the world was to model the Christian faith that rivaled and would one day triumph over all other religions. Strong approvingly quoted another Protestant writer who coupled religion and race in a scheme of Anglo-­Saxon Protestantism that forecasted a global hegemony: “In every corner of the world there is the same phenomenon of the decay of established religions. . . . Among the Mohammedans, Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, traditionary creeds are losing their hold.” “Old superstitions,” Strong reiterated, “are loosening their grasp.” The age of Protestant American world dominance was taking shape: “While on this continent God is training the Anglo-­Saxon race for its mission, a complemental work has been in progress in the great world beyond.” 18 It is important to realize, however, that anxiety about the images of a group other than their own does not mean that Confucians or Protestants (or Jews or Muslims—other groups said to be aniconic, or opposed to images) actually avoided images or cult objects. Protestants used illustrated Bibles and tracts, displayed portraits of their founders and culture heroes, and enthroned Holy Writ in their church sanctuaries, courtrooms, public schools, and parlors. The difference is that “our” images were not idolatrous or sensuous like “theirs.” “Our” images were virtuous, spiritually driven, and acknowledged the true deity and form of worship. And that attitude tended to dematerialize them. Protestantism, in Strong’s words, was a “pure spiritual” religion that set it off against all others, and its racial basis was yet another, related version of purity. Racial thinking was not new in Strong’s day, but it was increasingly elevated to a dominant way of thinking about nations, languages, religions, and cultures. Protestantism was spiritual and immaterial by nature, a purity of race, will, and revealed Word of God. All other religions were understood to take their place in a hierarchy of races, modes of idolatry, and forms of error that confused matter with spirit. The material culture of worship and devotion that belonged to other religions was associated with their “idolatry” and attachment to human motives. Only Protestantism was understood to be truly “spiritual.” [ 35 ]

Theories and Definitions

The social theorist Bruno Latour has made the point powerfully regarding “our” images versus “theirs” in his discussion of one of the primary inventions of Western attitudes toward non-­Western peoples and the materiality of their religion: the fetish. He imagined a conversation in the sixteenth century between a Portuguese trader and a group of Blacks on the coast of West Africa.19 Seeing the ritual objects prized by the Africans, the trader, himself bearing a crucifix and amulets of the saints and Our Lady, points out to the Africans that their objects were made by their own hands and could not therefore be anything but idolatrous. Things cannot be both made and divine, the Portuguese insists. Idols are what humans make and call gods. Fetish was the term developed by European intellectuals and literati to designate such handmade objects with divine power in them. It derived from the Portuguese adjective feitiço, which means made, artificial, or enchanted. Fetish is what colonial outsiders called the power objects of indigenous groups in contrast to the truth of their icons and sacraments.20 Although Latour imagined the encounter between Portuguese Catholics and West Africans, a nineteenth-­century British missionary, John Williams, recorded an actual encounter between a Tahitian Protestant missionary named Papeiha, working for the London Missionary Society, and a group of inhabitants of Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands in Polynesia. On reaching the shore, the missionary was taken to an audience with the tribal chief, who asked him why he had come to the island. Papeiha replied that he had come to bring knowledge of Jesus Christ to the Rarotongans, “in order that they, like the inhabitants of Tahiti, the Society, and other islands, might burn the idols of wood, of cloth, and of birds’ feathers, which they had made and called gods.” The assembly responded with “surprise and horror,” we are told, exclaiming, “What! burn the gods! what gods shall we then have, and what shall we do without the gods?”21 We do not need to imagine what the islanders thought of the deity of the Protestant missionary since we learn it from Williams’s narrative: “As Papeiha carried his Testament [Bible] with him, it frequently elicited curious remarks. While walking about the settlement, the people would say, ‘There! there’s the god of that man! What a strange god it is, he carries it about with him, but we leave ours at the marae [Polynesian open air temple].’ When they saw him reading, they would say that he and his God were talking together.”22 Of course, John Williams intended for his (Protestant) readers in England to grimace at the Islanders’ mistake. But [ 36 ]

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is it not fair to say that the Rarotongans recognized that Protestants have a fetishism of their own? How would Protestants have responded to a visitor’s announcement that he had come to Britain or America to burn the Bible? In light of how some Protestants cherish the Bible as an object— a book without error, authored by a deity, sworn on in court, enthroned on altars, and able to read the mind of its god through various forms of divination—the Rarotongans make Latour’s point very powerfully: any god is both deity and material fabrication for those who cherish the deity and its physical form. The challenge to the academic study of religion is to understand how the transformation of object into god takes place. Fetish and idol are closely related terms, and both are deeply embedded in how modern Westerners think, feel about, and act toward images of a religious nature. Both are terms bathed in theological attitudes and express a religious perspective that is by no means neutral. Both terms allege forms of self-­deception, ignorance, and error. Both assert a confusion of “mere” matter with spirit. Whereas fetish is a modern coinage and linked to the colonial encounter with and the domination and enslavement of colonized peoples, idol is a much older word. Idol designated the object or image to which worship was wrongly directed, according the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible. In the book of Isaiah, the practice of idolatry is portrayed as a human production that vainly mimics the creative power of God, resulting in nothing but human delusion. All who make idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. . . . The carpenter stretches a line, he marks it out with a pencil; he fashions it with planes, and marks it with a compass; he shapes it into the figure of a man, with the beauty of a man, to dwell in a house. He cuts down cedars; or he chooses a holm tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest; he plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Then it becomes fuel for a man; he takes a part of it and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread; also he makes a god and worships it, he makes it a graven image and falls down before it. [44:9, 13–15] The author situates the material production of idols within everyday life in order to contrast the resulting deity from the god of the Bible, who proclaims earlier in the chapter that he is the first and the last, “Besides me there is no god. Who is like me?” (44:6–7). He was the creator of the universe and the savior of Israel. The gods that human beings craft come [ 37 ]

Theories and Definitions

from the same material that makes their fires burn to warm them and to bake their bread. Such gods, the prophetic writer insists, are nothing more than wood. Iconoclasm is intended to reveal the singularly material nature of images, that is, their adamantly nonspiritual nature with the idea that true religion is not material. This is precisely what Protestant iconoclasts in Utrecht put into action in 1580 when they removed the faces of ten figures in a sculptural group in a burial chapel in the city’s Cathedral Church (fig. 11), as the city swung to the Protestant side during the Reformation in the northern Netherlands. The sculptural figures included Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, the Christ Child, Mary Magdalene, and God the Father. By removing their faces, the iconoclasts disabled the figures from presenting themselves to viewers as points of connection with the sacred beings they imaged. The faces could no longer function as masks returning the gaze of devoted viewers. By leaving the imagery in its damaged state, the interface was permanently thwarted. The Protestant theology of John Calvin, the French reformer who exerted wide influence and inspired iconoclasts in Utrecht and elsewhere, formulated an ardent opposition to the use of images in churches, objecting to them as idolatrous and recalling on several points the position taken by the Council of Heiria in 754. In 1536, Calvin wrote one of his most influential treatises, Institutes of the Christian Religion, in which he contended, “Seeing there is one true God whom the Jews worshipped, visible shapes made for the purpose of representing him are false and wicked fictions; and all, therefore, who have recourse to them for knowledge [of God] are miserably deceived.”23 For Calvin, the problem was the human imagination itself: deprived of the revealed Christian truth, whenever human beings try to imagine the deity, they produce a mental fiction of it. Any artistic representation of the imaginative fiction simply extends the mistake. Thus, he could confidently assert that “the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols.”24 This meant that images ought to play no role in teaching Christian belief or in conducting Christian worship. Only the Bible, the revealed word of God, could properly inform teaching and worship. Human thought that does not anchor itself to Holy Scripture is quickly led astray by the free play of imagination, replacing divine revelation with human fabrication. Idolatry, then, for Calvin was a confusion of human desire for the true object of knowledge—divine truth. Idolatry was an act of ignorance that results in an act of criminal rebellion: “What[ 38 ]

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Figure 11. Altar of the Three Generations: Saint Ann, Mary, and the Christ Child, ca. 1500, sandstone, Burial Chapel of Jan van Arkel, bishop of Utrecht, Domkerk, Utrecht. Photo by author.

ever is bestowed upon idols is so much robbed from [God].”25 The Calvinist understanding of the task of Christian conversion, as the anthropologist Webb Keane has pointed out, stresses the agency of belief over against material objects and ritual practices, which Calvin insisted bear no agency or efficacy in themselves, except, Calvin asserted, the ability to trigger the imagination to dupe human beings.26 Keane coined the term semiotic ideology to denote sets of assumptions about “what words and things can or cannot do, and to how they facilitate or impinge on the capacities of [ 39 ]

Theories and Definitions

human and divine agents.”27 Thus, Calvin’s semiotic ideology maintained that the efficacy of any act was “mediated not by any material practice in itself but by the faith of the communicants, in conjunction with God’s ­actions.”28 The power of images to deceive human beings is an old fear in Western thought. Plato, for instance, recorded Socrates’s apprehension of images as untruths. The famous Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic conveys the view of Socrates that images fall far short of what is truly real. What people take to be real are merely shadows cast on the cave wall by shapes held up before a flame. Only philosophical inquiry can arrive at what is really true. Images, we read in another part of the Republic, are only copies of copies. If what is truly real is the idea in the divine mind, and if the natural objects we encounter in the world around us are manifestations of it, then what painters produce are yet another remove from the real, showing only an illusion, not the real thing. For Socrates, dialectic, or reason, is the only assured way of proceeding from the lower realms of matter and human imitation to the lofty height and divine realm of truth. Discourse is the medium of movement toward it. Images are a danger precisely because they fool us into thinking we have the real thing in them, just as Calvin would later insist regarding his sharp distinction of scripture and imagery. And as Calvin would allow no painter to decorate the altar of a Protestant church, Socrates gave no place to poets or painters in his ideal city-­state since their art indulged what he called the “lower elements in the mind.” The higher elements consisted of words, ideas, and the operation of philosophical reason.29 Images indulge the body; words and ideas foreground mind or intellect. In figure 12, the contentions of Plato and Calvin seem to merge in a seventeenth-­century Dutch engraving by Jan Saenredam after a painting by Cornelius van Haarlem that illustrates Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We see the huddled masses of humanity on the right, crowded together in the thrall of delusion, gazing on a set of shadows on the wall before them. They are unaware that the shadows are cast by a group of what appear to be religious statues. Among them, we can discern the figures of Silenus, sacred to the rites of Bacchus in ancient Hellenistic culture, and Eros, god of love and the archer son of Aphrodite. But also among the group are figures from Christian mythology: an angel with two trumpets, often shown heralding the birth of Jesus, and what may be two saints, one holding a cross and the other with what may be an anchor, possibly [ 40 ]

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Figure 12. Jan Saenredam, after Cornelius van Haarlem, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, 1604, engraving.

representing Saint Clement of Rome, who was martyred at the end of the first century CE by being strapped to an anchor and thrown into the sea. The appearance of the Christian figures in an image celebrating Plato’s ancient allegory makes perfect sense in the context of Holland’s Calvinist Protestantism, where images were ripped from churches as forms of idolatry only twenty years before this engraving was produced. Catholic saints joined Greek gods in a pantheon of idolatrous deities that were responsible in Calvinist theology for misleading human beings from recognizing divine truth.

The Academic Study of Religion

The notion that true religion takes the shape of ideas and the intellect was a basic premise of what may be one of the first classics in the academic study of religion—the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s Natural [ 41 ]

Theories and Definitions

History of Religion (1757). Hume framed his inquiry in terms of what he called religion’s “natural history,” that is, as a phenomenon comparable to any other part of nature. He contrasted this with what he considered the superior foundation for religious belief—reason. This allowed him to gather virtually all examples of religion into one cluster as originating entirely within “human nature,” subject to its whims and weaknesses, errors, and anxieties, and to contrast this with the true religion whose genesis was in reason, the faculty that carried human understanding beyond the liabilities of human nature. “The whole frame of nature,” Hume asserted, “bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.”30 Yet the two frames were joined into one by virtue of “the natural progress of human thought.”31 Religion had two origins: one in the fear that characterized the primitive human condition, which produced superstition and idolatry and took the original form of polytheism; and the other in the evolved rationality that gave birth to monotheism. Hume’s approach helped establish the modern study of religion by stressing psychological and social factors, arguing for a purely human origin of religion, and recognizing evolutionary change as a fundamental feature of the historical nature of religions. Certainly, progressive evolution and the deism that powered Hume’s rationalist account are not features widely embraced today in the study of religions, but his approach departed markedly from the theological and biblical accounts of history and the definition of religion. Unfortunately, Hume’s framework regards all material dimensions of any religion as woefully missing true religion since they substitute for reason, the true faculty of revelation, something driven by fear and need, and so reduce the deity to something “subject to human passions, pains, and infirmities.”32 Examining a series of devices and bodily practices adduced by several different religions, Hume contended for their inferiority to reason. Take, for example, what he had to say about Jewish circumcision and the use of scapulars as amulets by Roman Catholics: How much more must human conception fall short of [the Almighty’s] infinite perfections? His smile and favour renders men forever happy; and to obtain it for your children, the best method is to cut off from them, while infants, a little bit of skin, about half the breadth of a farthing. Take two bits of cloth, say the Roman Catholics, about an inch or [ 42 ]

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an inch and a half square, join them by the corners with two strings or pieces of tape about sixteen inches long, throw this over your head, and make one of the bits of cloth lie jupon your breast, and the other upon your back, keeping them next your skin: There is not a better secret for recommending yourself to that infinite Being, who exists from eternity to eternity.33 Hume saw such technologies or bodily techniques as perversions of genuine religion. And he sounded very much like Calvin (he was, after all, a Scot raised in the Presbyterian Church) when he described the mental basis of religious superstition and idolatry as error. Religion begins in the human ability to grasp what Hume called the “unknown causes” of human woe in nature. Human nature transforms them into something else, into divine beings that can be negotiated with. He described the process as follows: “By degrees, the active imagination of men, uneasy in [the] abstract conception of objects . . . begins to render them more particular, and to clothe them in shapes more suitable to its natural comprehension. It represents them to be sensible, intelligent beings, like mankind: actuated by love and hatred, and flexible by gifts and entreaties, by prayers and sacrifices. Hence the origin of religion: And hence the origin of idolatry or polytheism.”34 Although the Christianity of his day failed to satisfy his criteria for true religion inasmuch as it stressed supernatural revelation, miracles, and faith over reason, Hume avoided direct criticism of it. What he could say in its defense was that, unlike “ancient religion,” it was “scriptural,” that is, set down in written form that enabled the formulation of “fixed dogmas and principles,” which served as the basis for theological reasoning.35 Thus, like Calvin, he disparaged imagination and, like Plato, insisted that discourse and reason were the way to truth. And for Hume that meant that religion remained problematic: “The empire of all religious faith over the understanding is wavering and uncertain, subject to every variety of humour, and dependent on the present incidents, which strike the imagination.”36 Put more directly, “Ignorance is the mother of Devotion.”37 It is better, he concluded his essay, to “happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.”38 And in this he recalls Saenredam’s engraving of the Allegory of the Cave (see fig. 12): to the left, a group of what appear to be priests from a variety of religious traditions gather beneath the flame that projects the shadows of the statuary. They peer [ 43 ]

Theories and Definitions

at the fire and discuss it among themselves but do nothing to inform the crowd. Nor do they join the distant figures who have left to cave to gaze directly upon the Sun, the real source of knowledge in the allegory. Like Plato, Hume looked to philosophy rather than religion as the surer demonstration of truth. Scripture, myth, doctrine, and belief have formed the enduring core of the definition and study of religion for many scholars and theologians well into the twentieth century. Indeed, for many theologians and religious scholars, they still do. Belief as an interior, mental, or volitional state of avowing as true a tenet or body of formulations is a common way of defining religion. One reason for this is because religion has often been understood as a matter of private opinion, which the legal tradition produced by the American Constitution seeks to protect from incursions by the state. The idea that religion is private opinion readily accommodates the Christian conception of the affirmation of or belief in creed, dogma, and doctrine as summarizing a Christian’s identity, that is, what one holds in common with all other Christians of a particular sect. This led to viewing all other religions in a comparable way. Thus, Buddhism is a body of distinctive beliefs, as is Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Native American religions, and so on. It is clear that this approach to defining religion has little need for the material aspects of religious practice. If you want to know what a religion is, ask what its proponents believe, not what they do or how they do it. Yet a material approach to the study of religions errs if it abandons belief entirely. The fact remains that belief is a part of any religion, though not in the same way it may be for many Protestants. Most religions do not have creeds or even scriptures. And “faith” is an idea that is at home in Christianity but not in most other religions, if by faith one has in mind a form of trust grounded in a covenant established by a merciful parent-­god. That aptly characterizes how many Christians experience their relationship with their god, but it has little to do with most other religions, especially those that have no interest in salvation as Christianity does. And yet it seems true that if we mean by belief the acquired disposition to pray by posing the body in a certain manner, to dress in prescribed ways on ritual occasions, to eat certain foods and not others, to seek the merit of suffering or of offering alms, to recognize the power of devotional images to convey petitions to the sacred persons they represent, to venerate holy sites, or to bury the dead in a particular way, then belief is a relevant cate[ 44 ]

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gory in the material study of religions. Belief in these instances and many more is not comparable to reciting a catechism or publicly avowing a creed but consists of performances that generate their own value. Doing them is an act of material belief, the efficacy of which may depend not at all on what one thinks or intends but on the very act of doing of them. That idea may offend those who treasure a highly intentional conception of religion. But the point I wish to make in this chapter is that intentionality characterizes how some religious practitioners render invisible or marginal the material means and settings that are nonetheless present and active in their religious practices. Not only is their rejection of other religions unacceptable to the academic study of religion, but their tendency to ignore the material coordinates of their own practices generates misconceptions that are not helpful. For years, I studied the images that Protestants reproduced in their devotional and instructional books, displayed in their Sunday School rooms, and in their homes and workplaces, only to hear again and again from some Protestants that they had no use for imagery.39 Clearly, that was not the case. I was intrigued by the ideological myopia that tended to conceal images from them. Scholars of religion need to balance ideas and objects, intentions and practices, in a material conception of belief that does justice to the lived reality of religions. We need to do more than read what people say; we need to watch what they do.40

The Study of Religion at Present

We have seen so far the prominence of language as the focus and primary data of religion as it has been treated by theologians and philosophers for a very long time. In chapter 6, we will explore the power of words and taxonomies to affect the perception of the world. But a material approach to the study of religions urges us to dismantle the underlying dualism at work in language-­based approaches. Reality is not composed of a stark split between mind and matter. Words, ideas, feelings, sensations, objects, spaces, and atmospheres intermingle. When we speak, we utter sonic waves that rebound through the material medium of air, bouncing off of walls. Words and their utterance are shaped by bodies, history, use, and physical setting. A mind or consciousness is not a different substance from everything else but a certain version of the physical universe, enormously complex and subtle, to be sure, but a physical reality that comes into existence and one day ceases to exist. And the signs we use are not simply arbitrary signifiers. We fashion a very comfortable and deeply felt [ 45 ]

Theories and Definitions

connection with the words, objects, images, spaces, clothing, and food we rely on in everyday life. Signs are more than abstract symbols—they have a history of formation that undermines claims about their arbitrariness. And there are other forms of signs than symbols. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce counted dozens but, most importantly, grouped them under three categories: symbols, icons, and indexes.41 Icons are signs that resemble what they represent; and indexes, or traces, are signs that bear the evidence of their cause, such as a scar, as the sign of an injury, or a hole in a window, which signifies the object that flew through it. Signs, in other words, are motivated by usage, by history, by events, by the process of their own making, by what they repeat, even by the system of rules or grammar that may generate them, as in the case of symbols. This makes the use of signs less whimsical and more social—a medium that joins human beings as communities of sign-­users. But what is critical to grasp in this for the material study of religions is that language is not the only way people assemble meaningful worlds. Of all the theories of religion that threaten to dematerialize it the most, poststructuralism is the most menacing. Poststructuralism is a philosophical and largely literary approach to signs that stresses their indeterminate and contingent reference.42 One dominant model of what is called social constructionism relies heavily on language to fashion worlds of human experience and value. According to this approach, concepts, expressed as words, are the primary tools human beings use to make sense of what they experience, indeed, to produce the meaning that they claim to find there. In describing how differently people regard the same thing, one scholar of religion, Craig Martin, author of a thoughtful introduction to religious studies, puts it this way: “What the world looks like to them—what they see—depends on what concepts they use to look at the world.”43 The truth of this claim is considerable: we do not see things-­in-­themselves, as if in some pure and universal state. We see them as they matter to us, as our ideas and preferences, cultural dispositions, tastes, and interests condition them. And we commonly ignore what we have no interest in seeing. And yet, things are also there, separate from us. Not, to be sure, identical to what we think or imagine them to be, but we do not in most cases simply invent them with our words or ideas. Things have properties that impinge on us, that resist us, push back, even threaten or harm us. This is another way of saying that their materiality matters. Thus, when Craig Martin turns to explain his observation, his claim takes a strongly imma[ 46 ]

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terial turn: “To my knowledge, the best metaphor is to think of the stuff of the world like a roll of cookie dough. What cookies are contained therein? Of course that depends on what cookie cutters we select. For all practical purposes, we can consider concepts as cookie cutters: with them we bring into relief the stuff of the world for us. If we use different concepts, we get different results.”44 Martin is surely correct that the interpretations we get depend significantly on the tools (cookie cutters) we use to achieve them. But is the material world no more than blobs of unvarying cookie dough, a gooey, passive uniformity whose structure depends entirely on the concepts we use to shape it? Material culturalists will find this idea absurd because it utterly ignores what they call the recalcitrance of matter, that is, its resistance to human appropriation. Try to carve granite with a spatula or scoop water with a sieve or mix concrete with a toothpick. Is the failure in each case due only to the nature of the tool? Hardly. The result is a combination of material and tool. Change the tool, and the result is more successful because the right tool engages the medium with much greater efficacy. Any medium has its own affordances, that is, intrinsic features that lend it to particular uses and processes of manufacture.45 We use pavement for making roads because its mixture of materials is enduring, relatively easy to apply, and able to provide conditions for safe driving in a variety of kinds of weather. Walking is an act that depends on more than having a pair of legs: it is successful only when one’s feet meet with a surface like pavement that accommodates this form of locomotion. Walking through thick mud is a different matter. The characteristics of materials are part of the matrix or network of conditions that coordinate the agency of the actors (human and otherwise) that compose it. Different kinds of materials afford different treatments and uses, resulting in meaning or value that is not merely imposed by concepts of the viewer but produced in a much more integral manner. Materiality matters, and tools are one important way of proving that. Reality is not a blob of cookie dough but a vastly varied range of material media, objects, and contexts. And that is not all that is required to understand the production of value. To medium and instrument, we can add skill and intention. And to those we must annex additional conditions: the market for acquiring materials, for selling them, and for displaying them. And then we must consider audiences—those who see the result, discuss it, and develop tastes and ideas about it, often diverging from one group to another. All of these contribute to the object’s career. We need to thicken the idea of [ 47 ]

Theories and Definitions

“social constructionism” to include a much fuller range of factors. Martin’s approach might be better dubbed “conceptual or discursive constructionism.” As such, placing undue stress on what human beings say and think, it fails to account for the much fuller range and integrative character of factors that produce human value.

Giving Matter Its Due

The recalcitrance of matter requires that we look beyond words and ideas in order to understand how value is constructed. And the first step is to recognize that the recalcitrance of matter does not simply mean resistance to human will. In a much larger sense it means the tendency of matter to behave in certain ways, depending on its physical features and the environments in which this or that kind of material is found. The tradition of humanism developed in ancient Greece and Rome and hailed during the Renaissance inspired the rise of republican ideals in the modern era and invested in human beings as self-­determining citizens of the modern state. Obviously, humanism produced something that is still valued today. But the shadow side of that recognition of the inherent value of the human individual is a tendency to place human beings at the center of nature, regarding the species as the pinnacle of the natural world. Religious traditions readily endorse this tendency with a variety of mythical narratives such as the Bible’s story of creation. Yet this anthropocentrism comes at considerable cost, as the modern technological-­industrial world shows in the impact on the environment, the extinction of a wide range of species, and the constant toppling of ecological balances that reduces the variety of species in order to accommodate the interests of one—human beings. In addition to the ecological cost, the understanding of human worlds is skewed by this anthropocentrism. Human beings emerge as the one, big agent at work in the world, marginalizing the rest of it as lifeless objects for human manipulation. A number of writers in recent years have developed a strong ethical and politically minded critique of this disposition and in doing so have sought to recognize the agency of things and environments as distinct from human needs or interests. One of them, Jane Bennett, a professor of political theory, says in her most widely read book that she seeks to develop the idea of what she calls “thing-­power” to describe “that which refuses to dissolve completely into the milieu of human knowledge.”46 She notes that this is comparable to certain theological treatments of the abso[ 48 ]

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lute, the divine, the “radical otherness” of what some theologians characterize as God. This kinship signals something of the character of Bennett’s ecological project. Ecology is not only a descriptive term but a passionately ethical one. By removing human beings from center stage, Bennett and others seek to bring forward not so much the divine but the marginalized, instrumentalized, exploited character of nonhuman things as active agents in the world around us. Recognizing the vitality of things is for these writers a kind of political liberation that will change our understanding of the world at a critical moment. Thing-­power is a useful way to register the elusive, indeterminate nature of things, their capacity for resisting the imperial claims made by human concepts and the nomenclature of knowledge production. Our words, but also our conceptions and uses, are never equal to the richness of things, which are not discrete, finite, inert entities waiting to be discovered and dominated by human objectification. According to object-­ oriented ontology (OOO), a school of philosophical thought developed since the 1990s, “the external world exists independently of human awareness,” meaning that the being of things is never exhausted by human knowledge of them and that they are more than their components and the effects they exert on other objects.47 Like posthuman studies generally, OOO refuses to make a dualistic distinction between human knowledge and the universe. A related way of thinking called actor-­network theory (ANT) regards things as active, evolving, unfinished networks of many participants, actors, or “actants,” as ANT theorists have termed them in order to avoid privileging human actors or imposing subjective agency on inanimate things.48 As I noted in the Introduction, one powerful sense of the word thing is able to convey the mysterious nature of those things that surpass specification, that is, refuse to be reduced to a comprehensible object that human beings can understand and manipulate. Of course, humans insist on objectifying such mysteries because they want the benefit of a useful relation to the power that some mysteries emanate. We will consider an example shortly. New materialism is the term that has emerged over the past decade or so to describe a large and developing sensibility that has devoted itself to pushing human interests from the center of how causation and agency are understood.49 The new materialism is sometimes discussed by scholars of religion as part of what is referred to as the material turn, one among several such changes in the focus of method, theory, and subject matter that [ 49 ]

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periodically sweep through the academic world like an intellectual fashion wave.50 There is a stream of such turns: the linguistic turn, the ethnographic turn, the visual turn, the material turn, the spatial turn, the affective turn, and more.51 Yet such change is not merely frivolous. Scholarship is always a form of conversation that bears its own history. Scholars are always talking with one another through their work and their profession. In the case of the new materialism in the study of religions, the turn follows a broader shift over the past few decades toward material things and practices as primary evidence. The new materialism amounts to the recognition that things are not inanimate, passive, and neutral but driven by their own interests, affordances, and material characteristics to interact with other things to produce the results they do. These results may include human beings as other forms of agents or actors but not as the end or point of their existence. Humans are not the story. They act among a cloud of other actors. The point is to enrich our accounts of causation but also to temper the exploitative and myopic nature of anthropocentrism. There are important consequences for the way scholars study religion. Let us consider three. First, though religions are eminently human constructs, they are riddled with nonhuman actors such as insects, animals, oceans, mountains, earthquakes, floods, meteors, comets, star clusters, eclipses, the lunar cycle, winds, droughts, and rain. As storied as each of these becomes in religious art and myth, none of them is merely a human projection, a discourse draped over neutral physical circumstances. The material reality of all of these nonhuman agents resists such passivity. As omens or forms of divine punishment, they kill, maim, doom, warn, starve, or otherwise harm human communities on many occasions. They are actors in religious dramas but also actors whose performance can be so inscrutable that human beings must struggle with their recalcitrance. Humans must constantly adapt to what can be the harsh treatment they receive from the physical worlds in which they live. Yet it is exciting to ponder how our approach to understanding religions will change as we begin to recognize the diversity of agencies at work in the production of religious practice, belief, narrative, and ideology. It is possible that taking materiality seriously will lead us down very new pathways, changing the landscape of explanation in dramatic ways. The second implication that thing-­power and the new materialism enjoin in material studies is the importance of considering how things resist objectification. By asserting recalcitrance, things may in turn act on [ 50 ]

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humans and others. For example, when the material basis of a thing fails by breaking or wearing out, it no longer performs the function on which various actors had relied. Its status as an identifiable, reliable object— a wrench, river embankment, sturdy soil rooting a massive tree—gives way, thus changing the configuration of parts that constituted the situation. Another instance of recalcitrant thingness is anything that eludes measure or apprehension, thus defying specification and use. The resulting mystery may inspire fear or awe. As we will see in chapter 6, another example of thingness coming to the fore is the mismatching of names and things. What we do not recognize, we are likely to misinterpret, calling it by a name that fails to situate it within the ecology that accounts for it. In each case, things push back, resisting our attempts to colonize, control, and exploit them. The third implication for how we study religion as a material reality emerges from the recognition of the plurality of agents at work in any event of religious value. As I noted in the Introduction, the task is to describe as many of them as possible in order to assess their various roles in making something come to pass. Many scholars have found useful for this task the idea of the assemblage, a temporary, interactive networking of any number of human and nonhuman actors whose effects on one another may be synergistic. At the very least, agency is distributed among the players, all of whom contribute in varying ways according to their material affordances and the dynamics of their interaction. But how does the network bring power to the devotee? What I have called a focal object, often in the form of an image or artifact, may provide interface with the extended network of agents.52 Consider a familiar devotional image such as Our Lady of Fátima (fig. 13). Three children tending sheep originally described an unidentified figure, a small lady, who appeared to them in 1917 with a flash of light and boom of thunder, hovering over an oak shrub on the hilly flank of a mountain range in Portugal. For a few moments on several occasions over the course of six months they saw her in dazzling veils of light. Eventually, the figure identified herself as Our Lady of the Rosary. But devotional response from local Catholics was immediate. The children struggled to articulate what they saw and heard as pilgrims gathered each month at the site to catch a glimpse of the apparition they believed to be from heaven. By 1920, a sculptor named José Ferreira Thedim had been commissioned to produce an image that was informed by the descriptions offered by the [ 51 ]

Theories and Definitions

Figure 13. José Ferreira Thedim, Our Lady of Fátima, 1920, polychromed wood, with crown installed in 1946, height 40 in., Chapel of the Apparitions, Fátima, Portugal.

children. The sculpture (fig. 13) was placed in a small chapel erected on the site of the apparition, where it remains today. It quickly became the official image of devotion to Fátima and was widely reproduced in devotional literature and postcards. Yet the only child of the original three to survive childhood, Lúcia dos Santos, who went on to become a nun, eventually expressed dissatisfaction with the appearance of Our Lady in figure 13. When Thomas McGlynn, an American priest and artist, visited her in 1946 with his own artistic conception of the apparitional figure, Sister [ 52 ]

H o w S o m e T h e o r i e s o f R e l i g i o n D e m a t e r i a l i z e It

Lúcia also took issue with its appearance, conveying to Father McGlynn that what she remembered seeing was not the compact character of a solid object: “There were two waves of light, one on top of the other.”53 When McGlynn asked her about what Thedim had treated as a golden line on the mantle, Lúcia replied that “it was like a ray of sunlight all around the mantle.” And McGlynn’s own simple translation of the luminous effect as tangible forms in the material language of sculpture also failed to do justice to the thing she saw: “No matter what you do,” Sister Lúcia told him, “you won’t give the impression of the reality.”54 As a focal object, the image does not capture the full reality of the mysterious thing it portrays, but it does serve as the compelling point at which devotees may address themselves to the mystery.

[ 53 ]

[ Two ]

W h at I s the Mate ri a l Study of Rel i gion? ••• In the first chapter, we considered the history of defining religion as something immaterial. That helped us to begin to see how important material considerations of religion as lived practice actually are. In this chapter, we turn to the positive task of defining in some detail what it means to undertake the material study of religion. In ancient Roman society, it was common to offer sacrifices to gods. The occasions for doing so were many and varied. But wherever one was, pouring wine or oil, offering a portion of grain or fruit, or slaughtering a dove or piglet, lamb, or, on festive occasions among the wealthy, a bull, meant doing so on altars, including those that resembled the one reproduced here (fig. 14), carved from sandstone, which was dedicated, the inscription tells us, to “Father Rhin[e]” by “Oppius Severus, legatus of Augustus,” that is, the commander of the Eighth Legion of Rome. Oppius Severus held the position under the Roman emperor Hadrian from 122 to 134 of the common era. The altar may have been created as an ex-­voto or pledge to the god of the River Rhine, or it may have been a gesture to the German soldiery under his command, since the legion was stationed in the region. A Roman-­style altar dedicated to a Celtic deity would have bridged the two cultures and may stand as evidence of the proliferation of Roman religion in the area. The altar is carved from a single block of stone and bears the typical features of a Roman altar: a waist-­high surface, with familiar components. Either side of the altar exhibits depictions in relief of implements commonly used in ritual procedures: on the left, a pitcher (urceus) for pouring libations of wine; on the right, a double-­headed ax and a case with three sacrificial knives.1 The top of the altar consists of two bolsters, or cylindrical cushion shapes, lying perpendicular to the front. They are [ 54 ]

What Is the Material Study of Religion?

Figure 14. Roman altar dedicated to “Father Rhine,” first half of the 2nd century CE, sandstone, Musée Archéologique, Strasbourg. Photo by Ji-­Elle, Creative Commons: CC BY-­SA 3.0.

joined in a slightly concave surface and support a small depression on top. From the front, the altar is crowned by what may be incised representations of the flowing river in the center. To either side of this appear two deep cuts in front and back that received a removable metal or ceramic frame, which was used when sacrificial burning was involved (so as not to harm the stone infrastructure).2 The final common feature of the altar is an inscription that indicates the donor’s status or rank and commemorates his recognition of the deity to whom the altar is dedicated. The text [ 55 ]

Theories and Definitions

is written clearly in capital letters on the face of the altar, which would have been visible to anyone approaching it. The altar was placed before a temple or shrine in the military encampment, so that those using it could gather around for the ritual practice of making gifts to the god.3

Defining Religion

Cato the Elder, a distinguished Roman soldier, senator, historian, and farmer in republican Rome, probably did not have such an altar on his farm, located near Rome, since this sort of altar was more likely to be placed before a temple, where it was meant to be the site for public rites. Cato more likely used a portable altar in the shape of a metal tripod in the atrium, or open court, of his home.4 That he had an altar of some sort, however, is clear from his book On Agriculture. In it, Cato offered to farmers a wide range of wisdom on everything from conserving olives and making wine to producing medicines for sick livestock and specifying appropriate prayers and sacrifices to gods for the use of land and wood. In order to cut down trees and make a clearing, Cato instructed farmers to “use the Roman rite,” which meant anointing the victim with salted flour and wine before slitting its throat, as one said the following: “Whatever god, whatever goddess you may be to whom this place is sacred, since it is proper to sacrifice the expiation swine for the taking of this sacred place, therefore, may what I do or what another by my order does be rightly done. Therefore, in slaughtering for you this expiation swine I pray with good prayers that you be willing and favorable to me, to my house and household and to my children; wherefore, accept the slaughter of this expiatory piglet.” 5 You might think it would be more useful for Cato and his readers simply to stick to practical matters—such as the medicinal use of cabbage, which, he tells us, has the power to move the bowels. And we learn about contracting with workers to harvest olives, about the speculative sale of wine, about renting pasture during the winter, and where to buy the best farm equipment in the vicinity of Rome. Why worry about appeasing offended gods with animal sacrifices? The answer is simple: because angry gods cause problems. And that makes dealing with them a matter of great practicality. In fact, all of the advice that Cato offers is about how to make a farm work as a profitable enterprise. Sacrifices to deities known or unknown share equally in the rational management of resources. Farming, it is clear from his little book, is an entanglement of one’s interests in the [ 56 ]

What Is the Material Study of Religion?

land, in equipment, in the interests of others, in speculative futures, and in what belongs to the gods. In Roman religion, as in many other traditions elsewhere across the world and in human history, places and objects are sacred to particular deities. To make use of a grove of trees or to divert a spring means encroaching on something a god or spirit cares about. In many cultures, places, trees, rocks, rivers, and lakes are inhabited by spirits or are dear to them and guarded by them as caretakers. So a farmer owes the god something for making use of the terrain. That suggests that gods participate in a material economy that intertwines gods and humans in a system of exchange, which is regulated by protocols that require observance for smoothly operating relations. When humans forget or neglect to do so, problems arise. Treating gods right is consistent with knowing how and when to make the harvest or take care of one’s animals. A bad move can destroy the wine, fail to heal one’s oxen, violate a labor contract, or anger Mars or Jupiter. When it comes to public cult or worship, conducted by priests as a distinct and aptly adorned caste of trained ritualists who perform their work in part for the public effect that such performance affords, it is natural to think of religion as elevated above everyday matters. But Cato’s advice about farming seems to suggest that, at least for him and his contemporaries, it was not. In some real sense, gods were part of the larger landscape in which human beings lived. Appeasing the gods, or avoiding their offense, or paying them for their favor was as practical as planting trees or selling sheep since failing to get it right could yield unpleasant consequences. Religion very often means traffic with gods, spirits, ancestors, the dead, demons, angels, or other creatures who exercise agency in human affairs as beings or forces that are not strictly human or any other form of animal life. Whether they inhabit or animate the grove or stream or exert some right over it or simply hold it as dear to them, such beings are forces to be dealt with in a way that avoids disagreement. These beings are not exactly supernatural, that is, not in the way that monotheism and modern science use that term. They are in fact part of the natural world, engaged within it, exerting certain powers over parts of it that are their responsibility or correspond to their natures. For ancient Romans, gods were like humans, but more powerful and immortal and possessed of abilities and knowledge be[ 57 ]

Theories and Definitions

yond human capacity. Yet they remained intimately connected to nature, lingering in groves, springs, forests, seas, and mountains. Indeed, they might be better described as hypernatural than supernatural since they were so intimately associated with the natural order. The river god was the spirit of the river. The river participated in his character or responded to his disposition and obeyed his commands. The sea was the extension of Poseidon’s nature, and that was what made offerings to the god of the ocean effective. He responded to flattery with seas favorable to sailors and to offenses committed against him with earthquakes, storms, or floods. In his second-­century CE Description of Greece, the Greek traveler and geographer Pausanias wrote that in the city of Argos “is a sanctuary of Poseidon, surnamed Prosclystius (Flooder), for they say that Poseidon inundated the greater part of the country because Inachus and his assessors decided that the land belonged to Hera and not to him. Now it was Hera who induced Poseidon to send the sea back, but the Argives made a sanctuary to Poseidon Prosclystius at the spot where the tide ebbed.”6

Religion and Magic

Are what Cato and Pausanias record instances of magic rather than religion? Is there a significant difference between these? James Frazer famously distinguished magic from religion by arguing that magic treats nature as an impersonal process that is mechanically affected by incantation whereas religion “assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be turned from their purpose by persuasion.” 7 This was based on his definition of religion as “a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.”8 Magic was an early and imperfect form of science, in Frazer’s view. In that he followed the influential work of the anthropologist Edward Tylor, who defined magic as “occult science” as a faulty application of the association of ideas, and made a point of distinguishing magic from religion since magic was a form of knowledge production and application.9 For Tylor, religion, by contrast, originated in the animation of things and the belief in the soul as surviving death, resulting in the spiritual beings that are the hallmark in every religion from “the lower races” to modern society.10 Frazer’s understanding of the personal dimension of gods drew from Tylor’s view that animism was the basis of all religions. But how impor[ 58 ]

What Is the Material Study of Religion?

tant is it that a strong distinction between personal and impersonal be in force? Deities may exhibit something like a personality on some occasions and not on others. Their fury can be brutal and deeply impersonal. They may jump to anger so rapidly at some offense as to be quite inhumane. What does “personal” mean? Subject to negotiation, or “conciliation,” to use Frazer’s word. But if the devotee knows that the god or goddess favors a particular food, gifts of gold, or offerings of wine, then the relationship consists of flattery and persuasion based on a kind of compulsive weakness for some substance. Sometimes gods are irrational, acting unpredictably, overreacting, or acting not at all, abandoning their devotees in indifference. One day they are compassionate, the next they are not. And every religion exhibits what Frazer called magic—benefits achieved by the careful performance of ritual procedures, where success depends on proper execution. Or procedures such as forms of divination that convert randomness into divine intention through some intermediate mechanism. Think, for instance, of the practice of bibliomancy in religions that possess sacred scriptures in the form of codices: some Muslims and some Christians use their sacred books—the Koran and the Bible—as devices for determining divine will by randomly opening them to a page. Where the eye of the devotee first falls is understood to be a message from the divine. Strictly speaking, any claim that the divine is subject to human ritual action necessarily blurs the line that Frazer wanted to draw between magic and religion. Drawing down divine action through ritual procedures is defined as theurgy in polytheism and was a common practice in late antiquity. But is that fundamentally different from invoking divine blessing in prayer over the sacrament of Baptism or Holy Communion in Christianity? Doesn’t the performance of the ritual ensure that it achieves what the religion says it will do? If so, the difference between magic and religion is only polemical. In fact, the Roman Catholic doctrine of ex opera operato (from the work performed) insists that the efficacy of the sacraments depends, not on the faith of the operator, but on the proper execution of the rite. The sacraments confer divine grace by the act of consecrating and receiving them. Their efficacy does not depend on the faith of the individual receiving the sacrament.11 Protestants may dismiss this as another form of magic, but they sometimes use their Bibles as magical devices, invoke Jesus to turn hurricanes from the United States, and exorcise demons from people and things. The difference is the autonomy of the material object or ritual, as [ 59 ]

Theories and Definitions

Webb Keane has argued of the Protestant view of the Roman Catholic Eucharist: Is the rite a symbolic commemoration, or does it exert an independent influence?12 Rather than pitting magic and religion against each other as somehow mutually exclusive, we do well to recognize that they are both forms of enchantment: ways of crafting a favorable situation in the world. People may do this by negotiating with a variety of beings but also by relying on the manipulation of events through ritual intervention or by determining the most fitting times and ways in which to act—or not to act. In any case, one seeks either to change matters or to recognize they are unchangeable and therefore best avoided. Enchantment happens within but also without religions. One asks God to end a famine, but one can also use astrology or other forms of divination to determine ill omens that help one prepare for or avoid it. Luck does not need a deity to work for good or ill. Another important scholar in the modern study of religion, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, also excluded magic from the definition of religion. Durkheim recognized the degree to which magic and religion were mutually interwoven, even if, as he understood them, they were hostile toward each other.13 But he contended that magic was different from religion on one key point that mattered greatly for his definition of religion: “The magician has a clientele, not a Church, and his clients may have no mutual relations, and may even be unknown to one another. Indeed, the relations they have with him are generally accidental and transient, analogous to those of a sick man with his doctor.” Religion, Durkheim claimed, “is inseparable from the idea of Church.” 14 He did not mean by the term church (l’eglise, in French) the specifically Christian community of a parish or congregation; rather, he meant the “moral community” of participants who publicly share beliefs and practices in a common ritual life. For Durkheim the sociologist, “religion must be an eminently social thing,” and that is what his formal articulation of a definition makes clear: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” 15 This eloquent and succinct definition is attractive for its clarity. And it freed the definition of religion from the “spiritual beings” that were critical for Frazer’s definition and for Tylor’s definition of animism. For Durkheim, the existence of gods is not a metaphysical necessity. The divine gaze [ 60 ]

What Is the Material Study of Religion?

emerging from the totem is the collective gaze of the society objectified in order to return to them as the shaping force of the divine. This makes Durkheim’s theory of religion interesting for scholars of material culture because it accords an important place in social life to the totemic artifacts that perform this divine gaze in rites that call members of the group to a higher common standard, a social ideal that exalts the spirit of the group over individual interests. In this way, religion is an engine of social life, according to Durkheim.

Enchantment

Instead of magic, I am inclined to use the term enchantment to designate the power of objects, substances, or places to achieve effects that exceed their nonritual capacity. A small gesture acknowledging a god, an ancestor, or a saint, such as pouring a libation onto the ground or saying a prayer before a saint’s image at a shrine, produces a disproportionate effect: a safe journey, a successful business transaction, the return of good health. And this is not a thing of the past. There is no shortage of examples in the present: think of the use of good luck charms or other amulets, consulting astrology, tarot cards, or any number of other versions of divination, practices like knocking on wood, throwing salt over one’s shoulder, avoiding certain numbers such as 13. Enchantment engages powers that do not have to work but are persuaded or inclined to do so by gift, vow, or devotional recognition.16 Enchantment is about how things and beings are persuaded to help. Science in the modern era and the rationality of modern thought as Max Weber described it came to regard things as inanimate and dead people as incapable of persuasion. Enchantment is a different relation to how the world works. Religions can also seek to enforce strong difference between themselves and magic, often because the two are more deeply interdependent than religious authorities would like them to be. In a major study of the history of magic in European society, Stephen Wilson showed with extensive evidence that Christianity intermingled effectively with long-­standing traditions of magic, pointing out that “some important Christian rituals like baptism could be regarded as magical in themselves. The cult of the saints was a particularly fruitful adjunct to the magical repertoire, with relics and shrines becoming the focus for a range of ritual practices intended to ensure the fertility of fields, livestock and humans as well as good weather and good health.”17 Saints are persuaded by action on their relics, devo[ 61 ]

Theories and Definitions

tional images, feast days, and appeal to their special interests. Material culture is the medium of inducing them to act. The distinction of magic and religion is far more ideological than empirical. Religions remain enchanted to this day.

Belief

Those defending religion as bearing a unique or special quality often attack magic as a superstitious preoccupation with material things—the stuff adherents are shamed for believing is full of power. For apologists of religion, usually those defending an orthodox view of a monotheistic religion such as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, magic is wrong belief in contrast to the correct belief they endorse. The notion that religions are all beliefs that can be compared with one another goes to the foundation of the academic study of religion. In 1788, the British writer William Hurd published his New Universal History of the Religious Rites, Ceremonies, and Customs of the Whole World: Or, A Complete and Impartial View of All the Religions in the Various Nations of the Universe. The frontispiece of the book (fig. 15) assembles what the author described in a note as a “general emblematical representation” of “the Christian Religion, as well as that of the Jewish, Mohametan, Pagan, and Heathen systems; including also symbols of the faith, embraced by the Persians and the various idolatrous nations.” 18 What Hurd meant by “impartial” is certainly not what the word has come to mean for he points out that the female figure with the chalice and cross in the center “represents the Protestant or Reformed Church, at whose feet are placed the pope’s crown, crosier, etc. and likewise a monk on a prostrate attitude, with the beads, mask, etc. denoting the ignorance and duplicity of that persuasion, and shewing the great decline of superstition, and that the Reformed religion, from its reasonableness and agreement with the Holy Scriptures, is the most consistent with the divine attributes.”19 In other words, Hurd’s method was to portray discrete religions beside one another, symbolized by material artifacts, as systems of ideas or beliefs, which constitute different “faiths,” as if they were all on the same plane. The idea was to compare a series of similar features that religions present: prophets, scriptures, images, sacred architecture, and forms of worship, all of which respond to the same divine reality that radiates above, beyond the frame, as the Hebrew tetragrammaton, or abbreviation of the name of the biblical deity. This scheme allowed Hurd to assemble in his encyclopedia descriptions of different religions as discrete [ 62 ]

Figure 15. Frontispiece, William Hurd, A New Universal History . . . (London: Alexander Hogg, 1788). Photo by author.

Theories and Definitions

comparanda, that is, as versions of the same thing that could then be organized along an axis that plots the “decline of superstition,” culminating in the religious system that is “most consistent with the divine attributes.”20 This approach to studying religions, which became a standard in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, regarded material things as symbolic and superstitious: things signify ideas and represent wrong belief. It is one of the hurdles that a genuine study of materiality must negotiate in the academic study of religion because it substitutes symbols for things. Hurd’s various descriptions do indeed focus on embodied practices, on ritual action, on sacred spaces, and often on material artifacts. But they are always finally “emblematical” of beliefs, to use his term. And they are steeped in the notion of wrong belief or superstition. He displays impartiality only in providing extensive coverage to the many sects of Protestantism, which constitutes a good portion of the entire book. That certainly helped market the book among a wide range of Protestant readers (the book went through many editions and is still in print), and it confirmed a persistent view among Protestant apologists that true religion was not about things or places or sacred substances at all but about correct belief. In the end, we must concede that the term religion itself is problematic since it is so deeply skewed in favor of Protestantism.

Embodiment and Discipline

Recognizing the central role that the material dimensions of religious practices take depends on grasping how fundamental embodiment is to a proper understanding of what religions do. The human body is a plastic medium that forms around the patterned use of things and places. We do well to speak of “embodiment” rather than only “the body” because embodiment stresses the unfinished, ongoing nature of being an adaptive body. A human body is not an inert tool but an active and changing matrix that produces one’s sense of what is real. Bodies are our principal interface with the world around us. We affect the world, and it affects us through the flesh. And the flesh provides both our connection with the world through sensation and the deeply felt sense that we are a step removed from it all, watching, feeling, thinking about it from the intimate distance of our fingertips.21 But enchantment is not the only occasion on which the materiality of religion is at work shaping the body. There is also the disciplinary role that things perform on the body. Some things or situations enchant us; [ 64 ]

What Is the Material Study of Religion?

others coerce us, subtly or grossly. A parent’s reproving tone, a teacher’s threat, a passerby’s frown, a bully’s punch, a police officer’s stern look, a turnstile’s stiff revolution, a locked door, a traffic barrier, the empty stare of a roomful of bored students—all of these things compel or forbid us to behave in a particular way. They work on our bodies in unspoken material ways. We feel the pressure they emanate. They do not enchant us so much as work to impose a discipline of obedience that, with regularity, becomes engrained in the body. To discipline is to learn by coercion, to internalize the enforcement in a bodily routine so that one masters the self. The word discipline is derived from the Latin word for student, discipulus.22 We learn to sit properly, walk in the right way, drive according to traffic rules, and respond to the looks we receive. We become so accustomed to this nonverbal communication that we don’t even need to think about the signals. We respond intuitively. A discipline is something we learn with pain as a negative reinforcement. And disciplines become a matter of second nature. They are so fundamental to observing proper behavior that we readily cease being conscious of them. Rising early to pray or learning to sit in meditation will be painful and annoying until learned, that is, until it becomes part of an embodied routine that allows the act to slip from consciousness as one’s attention focuses on the purpose of the activity. Both enchantment and discipline shape the perceived or imagined fit in the worlds people inhabit. But so does a third category of religious material culture: extreme experience. This mode of religious embodiment does not pertain to everyone, only to the religious pioneer, visionary, prophet, martyr, medium, shaman, mystic, mythic hero, and in some cases divine figures such as Osiris or Jesus. Both Islam and Christianity exhibit the “holy fool” whose madness exhibits extraordinary spiritual vision. Indian sadhus undergo remarkable self-­deprivation of food and conventional hygiene and sometimes endure gruesome forms of mutilation as ways of subduing the self.23 Consider the paradigmatic suffering of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and son of the Prophet’s cousin and son-­in-­law. Disputing as unjust the dynastic appointment of an Umayyad ruler as caliph, Husayn refused to pledge allegiance to him. As a result, the ruler ambushed him and his family and executed most of them, including Husayn. His refusal to sanction an unjust leader continues to inspire Shi’a Muslims today, who celebrate the Day of Ashura to remember the death of Husayn. Some do so by cutting themselves with swords or knives and allow their blood to flow freely in public procession. [ 65 ]

Theories and Definitions

For some scholars of religion, this domain of extremes has been the most important focus of study. William James, for example, divided religion into institutional and personal. The first defines religion “as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods.” It was the second aspect that concerned James: “In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre of interest, his consciences, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness.”24 James happily ignored the institutional and ecclesiastical aspects of religion. Religion was a form of human experience—but not the everyday experience of the devout person since, as James put it, “His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-­hand religious life.”25 James defined personal religion in terms of individuals who are “geniuses in the religious line,” religious leaders who have been “subject to abnormal psychological visitations” and exhibit “exalted emotional sensibility.” Among the examples he drew on were the late medieval mystic Thomas à Kempis, Puritan author John Bunyan, founder of Quakerism George Fox, Carmelite mystic Teresa of Ávila, and Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. These are the creators of real or firsthand religion, according to James, the font of all the imitations that constitute everyday religious life. It is worth specifying what James assumed because it allows us to clearly distinguish our considerations from his. The value of studying the everyday life of religions, their institutions, social organization, the role of clergy, the range of lay devotional practices, and what scholars have come to call lived religion is very clear to most historians, sociologists, and anthropologists nowadays.26 Yet James’s interest in the extremes, in the extraordinary individuals whose experiences have often generated new forms of piety, have expanded, challenged, or run afoul of official theological and institutional authority—this is indeed something that many continue to share.

Emotion, Feeling, Sensation

What this meant for James was special interest in the felt qualities of the interior questing of individuals. Religion consists of “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”27 Why are they each driven in their individual ways to seek the divine? James’s answer returns to the spiritual beings we encountered in [ 66 ]

What Is the Material Study of Religion?

Frazer and Tylor, but certainly not in Durkheim, whose sociological approach refused to make supernatural beings the basis for his definition of religion. James, who was solemnly engaged in the study of psychical phenomena, put it this way: “It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something out there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.”28 Feeling, affect, emotion, and sensation are key features of the study of the material culture of religion because they register the nonrational response to and engagement with objects, spaces, and events that are so much a part of human embodiment. We cannot understand the material characteristics of religions without attending to the emotional and sensory investment in them that gives them a powerful presence in human life. But it would be a mistake to think of feeling and emotion in unilateral terms. They are not simply projections of the human being onto an otherwise indifferent world. Emotion is a form of engagement with the world. The world hails human beings with its sensory features, and humans respond emotionally. And human beings participate in creating their environments to exhibit the features that they want to address them. Emotion and feeling are an integral part of how human worlds are webs of relationships—what people produce and what shapes them. The study of affect, for example, throws important light on the question of agency since affect is sometimes defined as the autonomic production of feeling that affects human behavior in the manner of an instinctual reaction. This occurs before cognitive processes code feelings as identifiable emotions. Common affects are dread, trauma, distress, and arousal, which result in unfocused but powerfully felt moods or dispositions. They lack specified objects at first and are therefore akin to thingness as an unspecified object. This lack of fixture to an object can locate affect within and beyond the individual, resulting in a strong sense of an external agent working on the self.29 The sense that human beings are engaged in ongoing dialectical relations with one another and the worlds in which they live is something that has informed recent work in religious studies and in particular among scholars interested in materiality of religion. This development has focused on religions as forms of mediation. That can mean different things. For the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whose work exercised enormous influence during the closing decades of the twentieth century, [ 67 ]

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religion was to be understood as a medium for thinking and feeling about the world. More particularly, he spoke of religion as a kind of model of and for: models of what people believe but also models for the practice of believing it.30 The models Geertz had in mind were not intellectual schemes dictating behavior. In describing Balinese theater as his principal example, he made clear that two eminent figures that captivate audiences perform what they mean rather than teach it. As such, villagers come to know them as “genuine realities,” not moral precepts or theological formulations. Geertz recalled what James said about the palpable “sense of reality” that religion bestows: “They are, then, not representations of anything, but presences. And when the villagers go into trance they become— nadi—themselves part of the realm in which those presences exist.”31 Yet when he offered his formal definition of religion, Geertz used language that seems to suggest that the “real” is not “out there” but a mental or conceptual representation that only appears to be real, that is, religion is a medium for modeling or representing: “A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-­lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”32 As real as religion may seem to his practitioners, it remains a model, a “system of symbols,” a conception of “a general order of existence” clothed in “an aura of factuality.” Religion, in other words, is a collaboration of what is in the head and what is being instantiated in various forms of practice, though his definition seems to stress the mental side as a form of representation. Geertz’s influential notion of religion as model has been criticized among others by Robert Orsi, who acknowledged that many share the view that religion is “a medium for explaining, understanding, and modeling reality” but sets out in Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (2005) to treat religion “as a network of relationships between heaven and earth involving humans of all ages and many different sacred figures together.”33 The distinction between a “medium for modeling” and “network” is of fundamental significance for the material understanding of religion. As Geertz characterizes it, a model is a normative device rooted in a scheme of ideas that exists in a two-­way relation with the external or nonmental world, whereas a network is an assembly of diverse actors or agents, a configuration running in many directions. A network is not premised on the dualis[ 68 ]

What Is the Material Study of Religion?

tic idea of inner and outer, subjective and objective, mental and material. Religion, Orsi asserts, is not a web of meanings, as Geertz contended, but a web of relations.34 Placing emphasis on embodied relations as the focus of a definition of religion opens the way to a new understanding of how religions work in material terms. They are not merely the projection of the human mind, nor are they the joint creation of a social experience or simple physical realities. Religions are assemblages of many actors, some human and many nonhuman. To understand them, we need to rely on a better way of describing the interface of the human organism with the environments in which it lives. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-­Ponty provides something useful to this end. In his major work, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), he argued that sense experience is that vital “communication with the world that makes it present as a familiar setting of our life. It is to it that the perceived object and the perceiving subject owe their thickness. It is the intentional tissue which the effort to know will try to take apart.”35 Merleau-­Ponty did not propose a dualist split of consciousness and world because the mind-­body and the world are joined in the thick tissue of perception. Consciousness is not an abstract space of representation, set off ontologically from the world as a thinking substance, but consists of intricate relations between the body and the world taking the shape of sensation and movement. “Consciousness is being-­towards-­the-­ thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world,’ and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation.”36 The body interfaces with things to create a world it inhabits. Far from cut off from the world, the body-­mind lives within its ecology; indeed, perception produces a world to inhabit in the medium of the body. “To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being-­in-­the-­world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.”37 The body is forever intermingling human and nonhuman. Things matter because they are how we connect to the world, how we participate within it, experience oneself as part of it. Things are the world touching us. The comedian Marc Maron makes this especially clear in a [ 69 ]

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routine he does about a derby that someone gave him. “Someone sent me a hat. . . . It was a nice hat, but I would have to change my entire life to accommodate that hat.” When he opened the box it arrived in, he knew immediately, “It’s never leaving the house on my head.” He imagined walking down the street with the hat on and receiving strange stares: “Why is everyone looking at my hat? Did I make a mistake?” The hat brought with it a version of himself that did not match Maron’s persona, and he imagined the disjuncture would be visible to everyone. He quickly restricted himself to wearing the hat about the house, then to displaying it on the wall to be admired, and finally gave it to Goodwill, where he imagined that a “hipster dude” happened on it and bought it. When the hipster put it on his head, “It looks like they’ve been together for centuries, a perfect symbiosis, on a soul level. Everything makes sense, two things have been brought together to make a whole.”38 Clothing is not arbitrary, but fits self-­image and the shared taste of what looks good. You have to be the person who fits a derby. It is more than a hat—it is a tool for fitting into a particular kind of world as a particular sort of person. Maron’s point is that fashion is not only a personal choice. There is some deeper sympathy or antipathy at work. The hat suits a particular role that either matches oneself or does not. This is so real that if I want to wear the hat, it is I who must change to fit it—and that change would mean changing my entire world since my self is not a single, indivisible reality but a role, or set of roles, on a complex social stage.

Social Bodies

Maron’s observation about the derby is striking because it is not just his reaction. We laugh at what he says because it is true for anyone. Dress is a social phenomenon. We wear what we do not just because it pleases us to do so but because it is a way of favorably presenting ourselves to others. As I noted in the Introduction, clothing is an agent, a device that works on our bodies to change how we experience ourselves and with our bodies to affect those around us because we live in webs of relationships (see fig. 5). Almost everything else we do includes this social aspect as a form of communication, but also of communion—that is, as a way of indicating who we are to those who do not know us and as a way of being with those who do. For example, in addition to the way we dress, we are also constituted by how we move, stand, sit, and even breathe. You can recognize friends at a great distance, in a crowded space, by how they walk, the tilt of their [ 70 ]

What Is the Material Study of Religion?

Figure 16. An Orthodox Jewish teacher distributes prayer books among five-­ year-­old boys at the Temple Mount, Jerusalem, June 2005. Photo by author.

head, what they do with their hands. People share these characteristics as members of different social bodies. Groups tend to dress, speak, or move similarly, both to distinguish them from others and to liken themselves to one another. Members of a family exhibit common mannerisms; members of a military unit learn to march together in order to participate in and identify as a single social body. Religious communities learn to practice many behavioral routines as the basis of their communal worship: when to stand or kneel in worship, how to pray, what to wear on various religious occasions, what to eat, and what not to eat. Doing things together is one of the most effective ways of cultivating and maintaining a social body. For example, the Orthodox Jewish boys who visited the Western Wall one summer to receive their first siddur, or prayer book, at five years of age, also received shiny golden paper Torah crowns to mark the occasion (fig. 16). Note how each boy is dressed more or less the same, in black trousers and white shirts, some with vests, and all cap their esprit de corps with the crown. The manner of dress and their carefully shepherded configuration on the occasion assures that none of them is left alone but always remains part of the group. Seeing and being seen by one another, they are at least in one sense versions of one another. [ 71 ]

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The exchange of a common gaze assures each member that he belongs to the group. For this reason, uniforms or common dress are familiar features of religious communities, most often among priests, nuns, monastics, officialdom, and officiates of formal rites, but also among laity such as members of a confraternity or students in parochial schools. Religions rely on material means such as dress to fabricate shared identity, to construct a social body, which may be defined as the shared presentation of self to the group to mirror likeness and to nonmembers to signal difference. The feeling of participation in an extended collective reality is produced by material means such as dressing uniformly, displaying or using the same imagery, or performing the same practices such as songs, recitations, liturgies, or ritualized meals, especially practices that have been deeply internalized by years of rehearsal. A social body is a larger whole intuited by feeling, sensation, and imagination. Mediated by an image, a dance, a song, a space, a gathering of congregants, the social body looms as a larger version of the group and the self that envisions it. The material study of religion will stress that this body is not principally an intellectual message but a performed sensation. We see the Orthodox teacher busily engaged among the boys about him. He does not simply stand up and announce to the boys that they are members of a single group. Instead, the group collectively performs its unity by dressing similarly and coming to the Western Wall together on this ritual occasion. The boys’ knowledge of their identity is an enacted and embodied knowing, a felt cognition. More than abstractly knowing who they are, they perceive, feel, or sense their relatedness to one another and to the extended community whose transtemporal coherence is materialized in the sacred site of the wall and the social practice of praying there. Communities do not engage in collective experiences merely because it is convenient to do so. The teacher does not bring the boys to the Western Wall on this occasion for the sake of efficiency, simply because conducting a group consumes less time than bringing the boys individually to the site. It is crucial for the material study of religion to recognize that collective experience, doing things together, calibrates feelings and emotions as social media keyed to commonly experienced events, rites, places, things, dress, food, song, music, movement, or totemic figures. Commonly experienced artifacts become social media that educate the senses and operate as forms of sociality. Waiting anxiously in line, receiving gifts, dressing the same are ways of belonging to the group, creating a cohort whose experi[ 72 ]

What Is the Material Study of Religion?

ence manages shared emotions and teaches the children to feel together, to do religion together. The feelings generated by these practices affect social cohesion, group identity, communal relations, and the compelling power of social participation. Examples of the social body in the material study of religion are plentiful. Group worship in a number of traditions, but most obviously perhaps Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, works on the community and does so by means of crafting the individual body into a social body. Music, chant, and song exert powerful effects on worshippers, generating a shared disposition that provides a sense of unity. Christians worship in groups in part because they affect one another by singing and praying together. Liturgies direct and inspire shared feeling. Buddhists meditate and chant together. Muslim collective prayer is another example of a choreographed performance in which each person participates by executing the same gestures and posture of prayer that produces the experience of being part of the community (fig. 17). Not all forms of prayer in Islam are collective and formally structured.39 But the formal prayer that is a fundamental feature of Muslim collective worship, known as salāh, consists of a series of formal actions (rak’ah) that are performed in unison. By performing the rak’ah together, more or less mirroring one another in demeanor, gesture, and dress, Muslims assemble a unified social body, a shared somatic regime that endows them with a mutual identity. Muslims prize the execution of the positions since prayer at mosques is public, performed together by men arranged in long, parallel lines in one section (fig. 17) and by women likewise arrayed in another part of the building. Knowing how to pray properly is even taught by diagrams that illustrate each step and explain its significance and the prayers recited in unison in each position. The Internet offers many different examples of these diagrams. The acquisition and performance of bodily routines is an example of what Marcel Mauss aptly called “techniques of the body,” and it is something that parents seek to make even the youngest children master.40 The impact of an assembled body of practitioners performing a routine in unison should not be minimized. Their joint action affects one another. By acting on themselves, they act on the group; by submitting themselves to the ethos and behavior of the group, they act upon themselves. Embodiment is at the heart of this dialectically collective and individual enterprise. According to Mauss, the shared character of techniques of the body revealed what he called “the social nature of the habitus,” borrowing the [ 73 ]

I

Theories and Definitions

1 ,.

Figure 17. Prayer at Jumma Mosque, Delhi, India, on the last day of Ramadan, 1904, stereoscopic card, detail. HIP / Art Resource, NY.

term from Aristotle to describe the acquired habits that comprise the “collective and individual practical reason,” that is, routines of behavior that help render the world intelligible.41 The shared character of the habitus reminds us of that religion, as Mauss’s uncle and colleague, Durkheim, put it, is “an eminently collective thing.”42 The anthropologist Birgit Meyer has applied the term “sensational form,” akin to the idea of habitus, to religious performance in order to explore how bodily mediation works.43 Mediation refers to any action or object that brings into presence what is absent. Religious traditions and communities rely on particular media to generate the shared sensations [ 74 ]

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that bring them together, maintain their relation to their tradition, and create the means for addressing their worship to their gods, saints, or ancestors. The sensational form is a grounded, historical, inherited, and always evolving practice that newcomers—children and converts—must learn in order to be part of the group. It produces presence as that community understands it—the deity may be present in the sacraments or cult image, it may be close to the worshipper’s heart, it may be shared in the feelings generated by the experience of worship or embodied in the medium in a séance or spirit-­possession rite. Forms of presence vary considerably, but Meyer’s point is that presence is evoked by the particular sensory forms of ritual action.

Defining the Material Study of Religion

Perhaps we are in a position now to return to the task of defining religion in terms of material practice. Recall what Cato advised the Roman farmer to do. If the farmer must cut down a group of trees, one should offer a piglet in expiation to the deity to whom the trees are sacred, asking that the deity accept it as a gesture of respect. A number of trees and the space they occupy is certainly worth more than a small pig. But the point was not financial exchange value; it was acknowledgment of the god’s right. Enchantment is not about commercial purchase but about the recognition that everything exists within a web of relations. Every action affects the network. The piglet is the sacrificial equivalent of a salute, an act of honor with consequences. Neglecting to offer it is an offense to the superior being but also to the very idea of hierarchy and respect and to any sense of what the god may owe the farmer. As Marcel Mauss argued in his classic study, The Gift (1925), Cato’s piglet is a gift to the god that carries with it the expectation of reciprocation.44 But not in kind. Cato did not want another pig to replace the one he offered. He wanted the god’s promise not to be angered by the removal of the trees. Cato felt he owed this acknowledgment to the god because he feared the god’s power of revenging an affront. But the possibility of affront suggests a deeper awareness that god and farmer shared life on a single terrain. And they shared a history of interaction and cooperation. The farmer and the god were thus part of a network of compelling relations. The deeper we peer into their history of relatedness, the more we see that they depend on each other. The connection is not simply a unilateral matter of the god’s superior power. Durkheim put this quite well: [ 75 ]

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Even face to face with his gods, man is not always in such a marked state of inferiority, for he very often uses physical coercion on them to get what he wants. He beats the fetish when he is displeased, only to be reconciled with it if, in the end, it becomes more amenable to the wishes of its worshipper. To get rain, stones are thrown into the spring or the sacred lake where the god of the rain is presumed to reside; it is believed that he is forced by this means to come out and show himself. Furthermore, while it is true that man is a dependent of his gods, this dependence is mutual. The gods also need man: without offerings and sacrifices, they would die. I will have occasion to show that this dependence of gods on their faithful is found even in the most idealistic religions.45 Religion is never an exclusively private matter. Cato, after all, was writing not for himself but for anyone who wished to practice farming successfully. Religion is always about the group, too, its internal relations and power structure, and its relation to other groups—social, economic, religious, ethnic, racial. This means that the webs of relations entangle many different actors or agents. Some are human, some are metahuman, some are places, things, images, foods, pharmacological substances, temples, altars, songs, and music. In short, any material substance that compels particular forms of behavior on the order of Maron’s derby. All such things interweave with the human body to give it its shape, emotional range, and social stage on which to engage power, authority, love, fear, respect, joy, hatred, gratitude, community, collaboration, suffering, and death. Therefore, the material study of religion examines whatever artifacts, bodies, substances, or environments do to produce and to maintain a web of relations that brings human beings to what really matters to them— their people, their land, their gods or ancestors, the next life, the mythic past, or the world as it ought to be. This means investigating the webs of human and nonhuman agents acting on one another by describing their material linkages. The web or assemblage of things whose interaction constitutes a religious event consists of objects, from microbes to rocks to human beings, but also environments and all kinds of substances—air, water, earth, fire, sunlight. The material study of religion means studying what things do to make religions happen. In the next chapter, we will examine several ways in which this works.

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[ Th r ee ]

H ow Rel i gions H app en Mate rially ••• The material study of religion means investigating how the physical characteristics of things and bodily practices enable thought and feeling, how they perform the cognitive aspect of religions, and how ideas, beliefs, discourses, arguments, and ethical claims are shaped by materiality. A great deal of what people think and believe takes shape in what they do. Practice is not simply the expression of ideas but often their very origin. Belief often comes after practice, not only before it. The act of doing or performing religions creates a reality for them, a perceived necessity around which human values take shape. It is not helpful to regard the cognitive or intentional character of belief as essentially religious and material forms as no more than its representation. The material study of religion discerns the complex relation of the cognitive and the material aspects of human behaviors that comprise a religion. This chapter sets out to do that by focusing on seven instances of how religions happen materially. There are many more than these seven to discuss, but space limits me to those I have selected for the clarity and scope they offer to understand how religious thought and practice are variously engaged in material practices and artifacts. The chapter examines forms of treating the body, ingesting substances, punishment as social control, the power of faces, images as ideological devices, forms of sacred exchange, and practices of divination. I might have included many more—such as gender, sexuality, the built and natural environments, soundscape, dress, commemoration, and visualization, all of which are very clearly robustly material and fundamentally important to religions around the world. The bibliography at the end of the book contains many resources on a great variety of the material dimensions of religions.1

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Body Work: Ornamentation, Healing, Modification

The human body is the focus of much religious practice—from tattooing, piercing, and scarification to eating and healing. As discussed regarding the idea of embodiment in the previous two chapters, the body works in numerous categories as a plastic substance that takes the shape imposed on it and then hosts an agency that shapes the mind, feelings, and behavior, influencing both itself and others. People feel and think differently when specially dressed, and think and behave differently when they have ingested various kinds of substances. The body is of course implicated in virtually every form of religion, but when working on it produces forms of display, a class emerges that may be called body work. When the focus of work on the body shifts to its interior processes by the ingestion of food or other substances, I treat that class of practices separately (see below). Healing takes many forms, but in religious traditions it means much more than treating a physical ailment since most religious people frame a sickness in larger than strictly physiological terms. Both communal and personal imbalance and disharmony, the evil eye, spirit possession, impurity, moral violation, guilt, transgression, intergenerationally transmitted sin, impiety, giving offense to a deity or spirit, neglecting an ancestor—any of these may manifest or result in sickness. But to treat the matter effectively, the cause must be addressed. This may involve wearing amulets, a shaman’s services, ritual healing, herbal concoctions, penance, expiation by sacrificial offering or another means, yogic procedures to reachieve balance, spiritual cleansing, and exorcism.2 Something as transient as dress and accessories and as permanent as tattooing and scarification shape the body into an actor, an agent that works on others as well as on oneself. The decorated body may act as signage, indicating rank or status, or it may serve to transform the self into another being, the medium for spirit possession, for mystical journey, or joining with others in ritual communion. Most commonly, the body is the site for the manifestation of spiritual power in healing, blessing, worship, devotion, or spiritual work such as penance or pilgrimage. In ascetic traditions, severely disciplining the body by fasting or the use of devices that cause pain or discomfort such as hair shirts or cinctures treat the body as a disobedient or rebellious aspect of the self that must be brought under control in order to allow spiritual development.3 Body modification is extremely common in cultures around the world [ 78 ]

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from ancient times to the present and has been practiced for many reasons. These include fashion (for example, foot wrapping among Chinese women, body painting among ancient Egyptian men and women, and the many forms of plastic surgery that are widely popular in the modern era), punishment (sterilization, castration, branding, tattooing, amputation of nose, hand, or breasts), social marking to denote status and membership (scarification, dental filing, earlobe and lip insertions), and as a means of moral control (clitoridectomy).4 Religious purposes for altering the appearance of the body commonly concern indication of rank and status such as membership in a group and as sacrificial acts to appease a deity or conform to religious law (circumcision as sign of membership, finger amputation as a form of mourning).5 Bodies are complex things. They can challenge every resolve of intellect, will, and decorum with hunger, itching, flatulence, indigestion, tooth decay, fatigue, exhaustion, or discoloration. Some Buddhist and Hindu practitioners spend many years working at meditation and yogic exercise to bring mind and body into a disciplined relation. Many rites of passage involve some version of pain, even if only symbolic. But the pleasures of the body also play a key role in religious life, most commonly produced by feasting with family or kin on ritual occasions. The body is the most personal and public form of signage—conveying to family and community the status of the individual. Many religious traditions express concern to control the unwieldy body and the will that is seated powerfully in the liver or heart or spleen or stomach, as the case may be. Religious formation invariably involves effort to train the body and will to submit to the disciplines of ritual, devotion, study, moral code, or communal authority. The body must be enlisted or conscripted in the sense that by passing through the boot camp of rites of passage and forms of instruction and purification, the human person emerges as transformed, a new being in its social world. Flesh and bone are educated or disciplined to assume the routines and duties of life in the social body. The body’s pain and discomfort are powerful dimensions in the training since pain and pleasure are effective forms of motivation. The display of hair, eyes, teeth, bodily stance, and the angle of the head are prehominid behaviors that homo sapiens inherited from predecessors as primary forms of communication. Managing as well as enjoying bodies is fundamental to human sociality. As cultural forms dedicated to ordering and maintaining human rela[ 79 ]

Theories and Definitions

Figure 18. Jewish men apply tefillin at the Temple Mount, Jerusalem, June 2005. Photo by author.

tions and to imagining transcendent orders as the basis for human fortune or misfortune, religions consist of fundamental uses of the bodies of their adherents. Consider the way in which some Jewish men prepare for prayer at the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by winding leather straps called tefillin about their arms (fig. 18). Orthodox Jewish men who arrive at the Western Wall in Jerusalem wrap one arm in a leather strap, place another around their heads (each of these tefillin, or phylacteries, holds a small box with Torah inside), and cover their shoulders with a tallith, or prayer shawl, as bodily practices of prayer. If we say that the essence of religion is what people utter in prayer or worship, these leather straps are mere epiphenomena, inessential embellishments. And yet, for Orthodox Jews, observing the practice of binding the arm is an obligatory [ 80 ]

How Religions Happen Materially

part of prayer. It is the way they were taught to pray. It is a practice they share with one another, with their fathers, and the tradition that they instantiate and maintain as an act of obedience. The body is made to mediate the individual and his tradition as well as the individual and the divine. Prayer with the tefillin constitutes a material way of practicing the religion as something one feels in one’s flesh. Prayer is a bodily practice, not merely an intellectual state of consciousness. The men hold the prayer manual as they stand or sit before the wall and recite prayers while bobbing rhythmically to immerse their consciousness into the somatic act of prayer.

Ingestion: Eating, Fasting, and the Use of Pharmacological Agents

This class consists of practices using the human body’s internal chemistry to ingest food as a form of religious behavior; the use of psychoactive substances to change the range of feelings and mental activities; and the use of botanical resources for medicinal ingestion. The body’s interior becomes a religious means or instrument, an affordance for modifying or attuning the body as a medium for religious experience. Eating nourishes, but also purifies, and communes, linking one to those who eat likewise or to the deity to whom the food is sacred. Eating foods and ingesting other substances also act as direct agents on the body. In some sense, we certainly are what we eat. Ingestion means linking the body to an extended network that is allowed to move from outside the body into its deepest interiors. Examples of religious food are endless, and each can be seen to integrate the religious consumer in various networks that include the divine. Prasad is the fruit or sweets or flowers offered to Hindu deities and then made available to worshippers, circulating what the deity has enjoyed.6 Eating is also structured by divine command—the terms halal, among Muslims, and kosher, among Jews, refer to categories of purity that restrict diet.7 Ritual consumption of certain kinds or preparations of foods is very common on holidays or feast days. Catholics traditionally do not eat meat on Fridays or during Lent; Orthodox Christians avoid meat and dairy during Lent; Jews eat prescribed foods for the seder, or Passover meal (matzo, wine, roasted meat, bitter herbs). Not eating, or fasting, is encouraged by the Orthodox Christian tradition as a way of asserting control over appetite rather than being controlled by it, which is taken as an instance of the many others kinds of control. As one website operated by the Orthodox Church in America put it, “The [ 81 ]

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point of fasting is not only to avoid certain foods, but also to avoid the control we allow food to have over us. If we can’t discipline ourselves in terms of what goes into our mouths, we will hardly be in a position to discipline ourselves with regard to what comes out of our mouths.”8 Observant Jews fast on Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement. The Koran teaches that fasting is a submission to God: “You who believe, fasting is prescribed for you, as it was prescribed to those before you, so that you may be mindful of God.” 9 Fasting from dawn to sundown during the month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar, facilitates the daily rite of breaking fast in evening meals shared by family members and friends. After sundown during Ramadan, mosques often provide iftar (dinner) to members of the community to break the fast together. Among Puritans, fasting was a collective practice of penance, a public imploring of God to forgive a national transgression. More extreme forms of fasting alter blood chemistry and can induce hallucinogenic experiences that are received as revelations. This is sometimes used by ascetics in a number of religious traditions and by those seeking the benefit of a potent connection to the forces moving through nature, as in Native American traditions. We learn about this in the biography of the Nez Perce warrior named Yellow Wolf, who was a member of the band of Nez Perces led by Chief Joseph, which successfully eluded the U.S. Army for several months in the Montana territory in the summer and fall of 1877. Yellow Wolf discussed with his biographer the ritual process whereby a boy or girl underwent the quest for wyakin, the mediating link to the primordial forces at work in all things. At the proper age—in general, from nine to fifteen years—the child candidate was sent, unarmed and without food, to spend a given time— perhaps only one night, or possibly a week—in fasting and silent contemplation in the solitude of the mountain or desert. . . . However long the votive period, the fasting could not be broken, nor could a fire at night be built. Water in strictly limited amount was permissible in case of intolerable thirst. Night and day the mind must be kept steadily on the object of the quest. In time the candidate would fall into a comatose state of mind. It was then that the Wyakin revealed itself, sometimes merely as a voice, or at other times as a recognizable apparition.10 Other native traditions have relied on pharmacological substances to enhance consciousness in the search for transformative insights or experi[ 82 ]

How Religions Happen Materially

ences. A recent and controversial one was the use of peyote among members of the Native American Church. Peyote is a small cactus that contains several psychoactive alkaloids, including the hallucinogenic mescaline, whose ingestion can produce dramatic visual and auditory effects. Peyote has been used for many centuries, possibly even two millennia, by indigenous groups in Northern Mexico, where the cactus is native. Its use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Native Americans, especially the Comanches and Kiowas, in the Southern Plains of the United States, began in the 1880s.11

The Performance of Punishment as Social Control

Using punishment to enforce social order as a theme in the material study of religion means recognizing the body as a political medium of exercising and sustaining power. The worlds that religions build and maintain on a broad social level rely on what might be called a theatrical exercise of power. An obvious but instructive example of the politics of religious power is the Catholic Inquisition, which was instituted in the Middle Ages in response to the perceived menace of heresy, which the church responded to by enforcing the correct thinking of orthodoxy (a word derived from the Greek term meaning “right teaching or opinion”). The Dominican Order was invested with the task of conducting the Inquisition as the arm of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith. Francisco Rizi’s large painting Auto-­da-­Fé on the Plaza Mayor of Madrid (fig. 19) portrays an actual event that took place in Madrid on June 30, 1680, the culmination of a five-­day process. An auto-­da-­fé was the final portion of the tribunal formed to investigate charges of heresy. To be charged was to be presumed guilty. The purpose of the tribunal was to demonstrate the guilt with confession, which was coerced with torture or the threat of it. The entire event was a public process of vindicating religious authority for the sake of protecting the faith. The punishment phase was perhaps the most dramatically conceived in the theatrical way it was conducted. Once the trial stage was completed, the auto-­da-­fé followed, consisting of a Mass, the procession of the guilty parties, and the proclamation of their punishment. The auto-­da-­fé was staged out-­of-­doors so that large crowds might attend. Religious and civil authorities were on hand to frame the event with the full measure of authority. As Francisco Rizi’s painting suggests, large groups of people attended in formal dress and fanfare. The Plaza Mayor, or central square in Madrid, [ 83 ]

Theories and Definitions

Figure 19. Francisco Rizi, Auto-­da-­Fé on the Plaza Mayor of Madrid, 1683, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

normally the site of the main market, was especially prepared for this event. A large arena measuring 190 by 100 feet with several levels was built of wood. Bleacher seating and a complex set of platforms staged the auto-­da-­fé, providing maximum seating and visual access to the proceedings, which involved a presentation of prisoners before the tribunal, seen in the center, and their processing along the aisles.12 A large group of the condemned stand to the right in a bleacher, awaiting their appearance before the court. Prisoners were dressed in sanbenitos, sackcloth garments painted yellow (in traditional iconography the color of Judas, the betrayer of Jesus), bearing various markings that indicated the nature of their offenses. And they wore tall conical hats (which may have inspired so-­called dunce caps later worn by students convicted of classroom misdemeanors). After the reading of the tribunal’s sentence, prisoners were lead to different stations to perform penitential acts, surrounded by a cloud of friars or priests who proffered the crucifix and led the convicts in prayer. Rizi portrays penitential prisoners and their attendants throughout the [ 84 ]

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painting. Nearly two hundred prisoners participated in the event that day, among them Jews and Muslims. Many were condemned to death. Their tall, colorful hats assured their constant visibility to the audience. Those subject to torture or death were finally led from the square to the place of punishment by a military detail visible at the bottom of the painting. The auto-­da-­fé was a social machine, a public ceremony designed to reinforce the allied authority of state and church. In the upper center of the canvas, King Carlos II is enthroned in a decorated tribune with his wife and his mother, and with members of the royal family and the mayor of Madrid. Don Diego Sarmiento Valladares, inquisitor general and bishop of Oviedo, attended by other church officials, appears in full regalia on a carpeted platform before the king. Members of the royal court sit behind the king. Among those seated in bleachers to the left of center are members of the Council of the Inquisition and the Tribunal of the Royal Court; ladies sit together in the balconies behind the royal booth. Military officers and soldiers gather in the foreground of the image. In the bleachers to the right are the condemned and their family members, awaiting the pronouncement of sentence. Citizens sit in crowded places that offer less panoramic views, tucked away below the main platform. In the center is the courtroom, where two figures, dressed in the familiar costume of the condemned, appear before the panel of judges. The spectacle drew on all levels of Spanish society and preached its corporeal and performative message of obedience in a municipal theater to all citizens as well as to the condemned.13 Rizi’s massive painting, which measures nearly 141/2 feet wide by 71/2 feet high, was commissioned by the Council of the Inquisition and hung in El Palacio del Buen Retiro, one of the royal residences in Madrid. The image’s expansive size and the spectacle it depicts proudly celebrated the monarchy’s endorsement of Catholic orthodoxy and the efforts of the Inquisition.

Facing the Sacred

Images of saints, gods, mythic heroes, ancestors, or spiritual powers do many things, but one of their most important acts is to facilitate the face-­ to-­face encounter with the person whose power, assistance, or blessing devotees seek. Human beings care about faces. They are especially sensitive readers and users of the face as a nuanced set of signs. People are so interested in seeing faces as rich sources of information that one anthro[ 85 ]

Theories and Definitions

pologist has suggested this is the reason why we see faces in accidental formations and readily anthropomorphize, morphing virtually any phenomenon into a divine disclosure or omen.14 We commonly see human characteristics in the faces of animals and insects because we assume that their faces are like our own, intimately attached to the interior domain of feeling and intentions that is expressed on the visible surface of the face. We read human faces with astonishing subtlety and rely on our own faces to engage those before us in communication and communion.15 Humans possess a remarkable ability to identify faces. Standing in the mulling crowd of a train station, you can scan hundreds of passing faces and find the one that you know. Human perception is strongly inclined to attend to the face very carefully, particularly the eyes, which can convey crucial information about intention and the relationship between ourselves and those we face. Portraits are compelling because they deploy a culture’s formalized semantics of the human face. Not only do we recognize period costume, gesture, and expression in a portrait, but we regard the painted or engraved likeness with the strong expectation that we are seeing the soul of the sitter and, in some cases, that we ourselves are even seen by the portrayed person. We easily imagine that pictures of faces are looking at us, returning our gaze, seeking to engage us in conversation or the silent colloquy of looks. This reality of the likeness is grounded in the sensitive, proactive way in which human beings see faces. Infants learn this immediately. From the earliest age, humans watch the faces of those they encounter for evidence of disposition, for feedback, for a sense of how they themselves are being received. The human face is not an arbitrary signifier but an emanation of presence. Its features are directly linked to musculature, which is wired to the interior domain of biochemistry and the nervous system, the seat of feeling and response to the world around us. Images, like faces, are intelligent surfaces that anticipate our look and reward it by triggering thought and feeling in us. Because images are modeled on the human face, we are inclined to treat them as persons. The image of a person can appear to return our gaze and disclose something about us.16 The power of the face to address viewers in the form of an embodied relation is evident in Hellenistic Roman mummy portraits such as those in figure 20. These portrait images were painted from life on wood, then attached after death to the mummified bodies when they were wrapped in linen. The two depicted here are children from Hawara, an ancient city in the Faiyum region of Egypt, just south of where the Nile fans out to meet [ 86 ]

How Religions Happen Materially

Figure 20. Funeral portraits of the children of Aline from Hawara, Faiyum Oasis, Egypt, Roman period, ca. 50 CE, tempera on canvas, Aegyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung. Erich Lessing /Art Resource, NY.

the Mediterranean. They were buried in a family tomb that included several mummies. The girls were interred with their mother, whose name was Aline, and their father. Dating to the first half of the first century CE, the portraits are frontal views and peer directly at the viewer. Some evidence suggests that such panel paintings were framed and displayed in the home before death, then retouched with new details before being attached to the mummy.17 This was not the customary way to portray the dead in Egyptian tradition, but reflects the influence of Greek and Roman art and cul[ 87 ]

Theories and Definitions

ture.18 Yet, whereas the style of the paintings bears the influence of the Greco-­Roman traditions, the idea of affixing the likeness of the deceased to their mummified remains was an ancient Egyptian practice, serving to provide the visual means for enabling the continuity of the self after death. Mummification secured the body, and portrait images completed it. We know from the circumstances of burial (the grave goods that accompanied the mummies) and from details in the portraits themselves (their jewelry and clothing) that the practice of such portraiture belonged to the upper caste of Roman Egypt. Roman religion gave an important place to images. Ancestor masks, wax effigies taken from molds applied to the living person’s face, were revered items displayed in the atria of upper-­class Romans and were regulated by law.19 They were not religious objects in a formal sense but totems celebrating family lineage and achievement. Yet images of the departed could become religious when they served as means of maintaining contact with the dead. In a moving poem, the first-­century CE Roman poet Statius mourned the death of his father and speaks to him in words that convey the relationship with the dead through tomb and image: But you shall not wholly be snatched away, nor shall I send your ashes far. Here I shall keep your spirit, within these walls. You shall be guardian and master of the hearth, all your folk shall obey you. Rightfully beneath you, always in second place, I shall constantly offer meat and drink to your sacred spirit and worship your images. Now shining stone and line of cunning wax shall bring you back in semblance; now ivory and tawny gold shall imitate your countenance. From them I shall ask rule of conduct, the judgments of a long life, words of love and counseling dreams.20

Imaging Ideology

Images are an effective means for conveying messages because they can be easily reproduced in a variety of media, work among literate and illiterate audiences, are easily memorable, and, like songs and music, trigger strong emotions. And there is something else to observe about images: they are able to operate on viewers with an immediacy that makes them beguiling. People are often inclined to believe what they see, as if an image were an encapsulation of reality. Images do not state a truth—they perform it, as if on a stage. As forms of communication, images enact what some[ 88 ]

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one wants or believes to be the case. Rhetorically, images are very adept at affecting opinions, and that is why they are commonly used in political propaganda and commercial advertising. Images can be readily adapted to purpose by changing features of their performance. An image, or any part of it, can recycle, replace, or refit features, thereby changing how the image works on its viewers. This plasticity of imagery is especially useful when visualizing an ideology, or way of regarding the world of others in relation to one’s own group. The following example will make this clear. Figure 21 is an engraving by Romeyn de Hooghe, from a Dutch edition of a history and commentary of the Bible, published in 1707 by the French Protestant pastor and linguist Jacques Basnage de Beauval.21 We learn from a long verse that accompanies the image, which is the frontispiece to the volume on the history of the Old Testament, that the figure is the New or Second Covenant. This is the phrase used in the New Testament (Heb. 8:6–7) to designate what early Christians considered the new relationship between humanity and God, replacing the Old or First Covenant proclaimed by Moses and his tablets of the Law, which the figure in the engraving pushes aside. Engraved on her breastplate are the scales of justice, meant to signify the new law established by redemptive work of Jesus. Her other arm rests on an open codex, the book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. Its seven seals described in Revelation 5:1 are visible. This text rests on the cornerstone that became the foundation of a new temple (Eph. 2:20). The stone carries the emblem used in the first centuries to signify Jesus Christ and was, according to tradition, the monogram of Christ (consisting of the first two Greek letters of Christus, chi and rho), which appeared in a dream to the emperor Constantine on the eve of battle with the command, “Conquer under this sign.” Constantine did so, won, and paved the way for Christianity to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. The book of Revelation appears to indicate the final age of human history, when Jesus was expected to return and be acknowledged by all. The verse ends by describing the response of the four continents to the open book: Europe kneeled down, America bowed, The realm of Asia is irradiated by the Divine Light, And Africa humbles itself before the Holy Face. The four of them bow humbly before the triumphant figure of Christian redemption. It is striking that the personification of the New Covenant [ 89 ]

Figure 21. Romeyn de Hooghe, after an anonymous artist, “Frontispiece of the Old Testament,” from Jacobus Basnage, ’t Groot waerelds tafereel . . . (Amsterdam: J. Lindenberg [1707]). Photo by author.

How Religions Happen Materially

gazes only in the direction of Europe (in the lower left of the image), who is set apart from the other peoples of the earth in responding to her.22 Even more than the verse it illustrates, de Hooghe’s image captures something powerful about the colonial era in which it was created. He conjures a scene before us, as if we were standing before a stage, and we behold a moment in which the New Covenant performs as the pivot of action. But de Hooghe did not depict anything he saw. Following Basnage’s prompt, he evoked in allegorical fashion a worldview or ideology that was how Protestants imagined the world in which they lived. Protestant Christianity appears at center stage, orchestrating a global movement of religions about herself. Consider, first, her gesture toward Moses. The assertion of the superiority of Christianity to Judaism is of course a very old contention, one that is even found in portions of the New Testament, where we learn of the rivalry of Judaism and the Christian sect, which began as a Jewish messianic movement and then became a distinct religion as it moved into non-­Jewish, Greek-­speaking Asia Minor. But there are other religious rivals apparent in de Hooghe’s print. Note that the figure of the female personification stands beside an inscribed stone block. This may be a reused Roman altar, the sort of which we discussed in chapter 2 (see fig. 14). Instead of the sacrificial animals that Romans and Jews burned on their altars, de Hooghe places the symbol of Jesus, the paschal sacrifice. And what appears to be a Chinese figure with the headwear of a Confucian priest bows at the right of the altar. A Saracen figure mounted on horseback above him represents Islam. An African is visible behind the stone block with hands clasped in the lower right. And an indigenous figure with feathered headdress from the Americas is in the lower right. All these represent additional enemies of Christ from the four corners of the globe who had been subdued through colonial conquest by de Hooghe’s day and brought to the foot of the central figure, who treads on a writhing snake. With this last detail, Jacques Basnage’s Protestant disposition shows forth. In the book of Revelation, chapter 12, we read about a woman who is described as wearing a crown on her head with twelve stars. The Catholic tradition has long regarded her as the Virgin Mary, and she is shown treading on a snake in images of the Immaculate Conception. For the Protestant Basnage, she personified the triumph of true faith as Protestant Reformers understood it. The contrast of the two Christian strands becomes especially clear when we compare Romeyn de Hooghe’s image [ 91 ]

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with Andrea Pozzo’s magnificent fresco (fig. 22), completed only a few years earlier in the church in Rome dedicated to the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola. The Society of Jesus (founded in 1548) was a militant arm of the Catholic Church’s response to both Protestant heresy and the call for global missions as the Catholic nations of Spain and Portugal dramatically expanded their empires around the world. Jesuit missionaries accompanied ships to New Spain, Brazil, Japan, China, and India, among other nations, to ensure that the new additions to empire were Catholic. This global project is clearly registered in Pozzo’s fresco at the heart of the Jesuit order in allegorical representations of the four continents at each corner of the ceiling. Africa in the upper right, Asia in the lower right, Europe in the lower left, and America in the upper left. The human personification of each continent sits enthroned above writhing figures who represent heathenism and heresy, which attending angels attack with downturned torches, banishing the darkness of superstition and wrong belief with the light of true religion (the words of Jesus are quoted in Latin on a bronze shield just above the altar end of the fresco: “I am come to send a fire on earth, and how I wish it were already kindled,” Luke 12:​49, NIV—in which the Latin word for fire, ignis, plays on the name of the saint, Ignatius). In the luminous distance above them, in the center of the fresco, Saint Ignatius rises on a cloud as Christ with his cross descends to meet him. An angel holds a large buckler with the initials of the name of Christ, IHS, which was also the seal of the Society of Jesus, replaying Constantine’s dream of the monogram of Christ. The Jesuits were those who conquered in the name of Jesus, spreading the fire that Christ had ignited, that Constantine had stoked, and that the Jesuits would fully achieve. When we add all of this up, de Hooghe’s print, and the poem it portrays, are a Protestant vision of religious truth that is defined at the expense of all its rivals. And this sense of triumph and superiority coincides with and endorses the Protestant self-­understanding of nations (Britain and Holland) engaged in global competition with such Catholic nations as Spain, France, and Portugal as part of the final age of the earth as outlined in the book of Revelation. For his part, Pozzo envisioned the Jesuit ambition of converting the colonized world to the faith of Rome, and defeating the renegade Protestantism in the process, bringing the name of Christ to the four corners of the globe such that the apotheosis of Saint Ignatius might be a fulfillment of Christ’s intentions and a harbinger of his [ 92 ]

Figure 22. Andrea Pozzo, Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius, ceiling fresco of the church of Sant’Ignazio, Rome, 1685–94. Photo by author.

Theories and Definitions

Second Coming. Both the Catholics and the Protestants for whom these images were produced understood all space and time to bend to the arc of Christian truth, which each interpreted as the special mission and privilege of their party. Images were partners in ideological conflict between their producers.

Sacred Exchange in the Material Economies of Religion

Deities, ancestors, saints, spirits, ghosts, demons, faeries, elves, and trolls are very different kinds of beings, but they all have at least one thing in common: traffic with human beings for the benefits they can bestow if properly venerated, flattered, or otherwise compensated, or the injury they can render when offended. No religion is without a variety of economies of exchange that regulate the interaction of humans and such nonhuman beings.23 These other beings are anything that can harm or help humans in need. Animals, places, trees, oceans, mountains, even rocks can have souls, or can be sacred to powers who must be honored or compensated for using or occupying them. Sacrifice is a form of exchange embedded in ritual practice. It is a material act that exchanges tribute for a desired favor or pays tribute in gratitude for a favor received. This takes place in the context of ritual and means losing something—a handful of grain, a cup of wine or oil, an animal. The underlying structure of sacrifice is debt and fulfillment of debt. One owes a ghost or a deity or an ancestor or spirit guardian of a place tribute for traversing their domain, using their grove of trees, or taking the life of an animal sacred to them. Or one offers homage in the hope of securing the other’s favor or assistance. Or one makes sure to acknowledge the divine gift by sacrificial offering. Gods and saints are not obliged to bestow their benefits, but they are more likely to do so if they are flattered or properly respected. To forget the tribute is to risk their displeasure. To remember them is to give them their due—what they are owed. Sacrifices and votive offerings (expressing gratitude or vowing payment) are material forms of mediating a relationship.24 According to one dictionary, expiation means “the act of making amends or reparation for guilt or wrongdoing; atonement.”25 Sacrifice is a form of payment. One scholar of Indian traditions has said that in Vedic practice making offerings to gods, ancestors, and living and ancient sages delivers oneself from the innate debt or obligation inherent to everyone.26 The materiality of sacrifice is critical because the act is meaningless [ 94 ]

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without material loss, however token it may appear. The material side involves things of value—cattle, bulls, goats, sheep, birds, grain, wine, oil, butter, flowers—which are offered up as a loss of assets for the sake of making tribute. The ritual process of pouring out, burning, or slaughtering, paired with sacred recitations and prescribed procedure, conveys the offering to the other party, transforming and transferring it beyond the human domain. Sacrifice is how religious practitioners transfer living or useful things and convey respect to gods or spirits in order to secure forgiveness, favor, or benefit from the forces that can affect events in human life. The transfer of value from human to divine performed by the transformation of material is the business of fire in sacrificial practice. Ancient Judaism and other religious cultures from India to Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome practiced animal sacrifice, which burned portions of slaughtered beasts on altars, generating smoke and scent that ascended to the deities as the offering. But the sacrifice itself could also bring the deity to the scene. In their classic study of sacrifice, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss described the invocation of the deity in early Vedic sacrificial rites in India: “The divinity is not only invited to be present at and to participate in the sacrifice, but even to descend into the offering. What takes place is a veritable transubstantiation. On hearing the appeal the goddess arrives, bringing with her all kinds of mythical powers.”27 In the Rig Veda, the oldest tradition of ritual hymns, Agni, the god of fire, is the intermediary who secures the gods’ attention to the sacrifice: Agni I praise, the household priest God, minister of sacrifice, Invoker, best bestowing waste. Agni is worthy to be praised, By present as by seers of old: May he to us conduct the gods. The worship and the sacrifice, Guarded by thee on every side, Go straight, O Agni, to the gods. May Agni, the invoker, wise And true, of most resplendent fame, The god, come hither with the gods.28 [ 95 ]

Theories and Definitions

Figure 23. A Hindu priest performs havan, or yajña, a sacrificial fire to ward off the coronavirus during the nationwide lockdown imposed in the wake of the COVID-­19 pandemic, Calcutta, India, April 28, 2020. Pacific Press Agency / Alamy Stock Photo.

The fire ritually prepared and tended by the priests conducting the sacrificial rite called yajña mediated human and divine as the site for chanting the sacred hymns of the Vedas and remains the prototype for latter-­day Hindu practice. We see this at work in the photograph of yajña reproduced here (fig. 23): a priest in Calcutta, India, performing yajña to ward off the coronavirus, which gripped the world in a global pandemic beginning in February of 2020. Small, red simulacra of the coronavirus appear in the foreground. Participants dropped them into the fire during the ritual. This example of the ritual fire captures the very practical nature of Vedic sacrifice. As Hinduism scholar Julius Lipner put it, there are “verse-­spells for protection against life’s problems such as fevers and sicknesses, enemies, sorcery, snake-­bites, bad dreams, and also to bring about certain objectives, e.g. the goodwill of others, victory in battle, success in love, health in cattle, good crops and rain, virility, and good standing in society.”29 The sacred fire of the Vedic tradition is a kind of worship that forms the material basis of the sacred exchange or economy of human and divine in[ 96 ]

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vested in a priesthood. Words and ritual performance, costume, time or season, dedicated space, and the use of particular materials all accompany and situate the sacrifice, with the fire as the focal point that unifies all aspects of the rite.30

Divination: Harvesting Purpose from Chance

One of the most familiar and widely practiced aspects of religions is divination, which means a ritual practice of learning the mind of the god or gods. In practice, divination consists of turning randomness into information. To do so requires a material apparatus that autonomously generates the “noise” in which a petitioner finds an interpretable “sound.” This conversion may be effected in the use of devices such as oracular sounds from trees, springs, or rocks, the markings discovered on the entrails of sacrificed animals, instruments such as astrology, tarot, tea leaves, or the sticks of I Ching, or bibliomancy (opening a book such as the Bible or Koran at random and pointing to a verse), or by drawing lots or casting dice. Any generation of randomness becomes revelatory when the result becomes a sign whose authority is underwritten by its random origin. Because the result of a procedure was not produced by human intention, it is considered to be the product of a higher being or wisdom. What may appear random to us is taken by the client of divination as the will of god. In this way, religions around the world offer something that human beings find almost impossible to resist: techniques for harvesting purpose from chance. Divination works both in and beyond the bounds of religions. It is a form of enchantment that does not require gods or ancestors or spirit beings. For instance, visitor-­tourist-­pilgrims to a massive Buddhist temple dedicated to Kannon, the great bodhisattva, in the Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, enter down a long avenue of shops selling religious articles as well as tourist souvenirs. Japanese schoolchildren are fond of purchasing fortune sheets. If the fortune is favorable, they take the sheet with them. If it is bad or irrelevant, they fold it up and tie it to a trellis (originally a tree), where it will be removed from their futures (fig. 24). The economy of belief operates very closely to the steady presence of chance or randomness in human life since negotiation with the powers governing events is a way of turning their whimsy to one’s advantage.31 The seven forms of material practice examined here capture the inherently material characteristics of religions, showing that religions are not [ 97 ]

Theories and Definitions

Figure 24. Schoolgirls tie paper fortunes to a trellis for disposal, Sensoji Temple, Asakusa district, Tokyo, April 2005. Photo by author.

at heart cognitive or spiritual essences that sometimes seek material expression. Indeed, religions are embodied, material processes that shape societies, prompt behavior, affect interaction with the physical world, and organize relations among human beings—doing all of this in the way people interact with bodies, images, objects, places, clothing, food, and pharmacology.

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St u d y i ng M at er i a l R e l i g i o n •••

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[ F our ]

The Pow e r of Things A History of Magic Wands

•••

A familiar feature of religions around the world is the special objects and substances that can be used to perform wonders, lending those who wield them powers that they do not otherwise command. The Greek poet Hesiod, writing in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, opened his Theogony, a poem on the origin of the gods, with an account of his own inspiration as poet. The Muses, daughters of Zeus, descended to the lowly shepherd as he watched his flock and taught him fine singing. Hesiod tells us that “they plucked a staff, a branch of luxuriant laurel, a marvel, and gave it to me; and they breathed a divine voice into me, so that I might glorify what will be and what was before, and they commanded me to sing of the race of the blessed ones who always are.” 1 Bay or laurel (Laurus nobilis) was an important wood in ancient Greece. It was used to craft the laurel wreath, which was the prize for victory at the Pythian Games, an athletic contest held every four years in honor of Apollo at the shrine at Delphi. And it was bay leaves that the Pythia or Oracle at Delphi was said to chew in order to achieve the trance in which she saw the future. She appears in the fifth-­century drinking cup reproduced here (fig. 25), seated on the tripod, holding a vessel of water drawn from a sacred spring, peering intently into it as she grasps a sprig of laurel in her other hand. Her client, King Aegeus, awaits her prophetic utterance regarding his need for an heir. The sprig shook as the spirit of Apollo possessed the Oracle.2 The staff that the Muses gave Hesiod was not the long tool of the shepherd but something the size of a wand or scepter. Indeed, the Greek word that Hesiod used was σκηπτρο, or scepter. The purpose of the wand was to celebrate the poet’s divine inspiration and lend his account the credibility of revelation. Pharmacology and wands also played a role in Homer, who produced the Iliad and the Odyssey about the same time that Hesiod did his Theog[ 101 ]

Studying Material Religion

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Figure 25. Kylix depicting Priestess Themis as the Delphic Oracle with King Aegeus before her, ca. 440 BCE, Antikensammlung, Berlin.

ony. In the Odyssey, Odysseus was able to counter the magic of Circe with the use of a plant given him by Hermes, messenger of the gods. Leaving his ship to rescue his men, whom the goddess on the island of Aeaea had turned into swine, Odysseus encountered Hermes just before he reached the house of Circe. Hermes had come to help the hero and shared the magical means of doing so: Look, here is a drug of real virtue that you must take with you into Circe’s palace to save yourself from disaster. But I must explain how she works her black magic. She will begin by mixing you a pottage, into which she will put her poison. But even with its help she will be unable to enchant you, for this antidote that I am going to give you and [ 102 ]

The Power of Things

Figure 26. Annibale Caracci, Ulysses and Circe, fresco, ca. 1590, Palazzo Farnese, Rome.

describe will rob it of its power. When Circe strikes you with her long wand, you must draw your sword from your side and rush at her as though you meant to take her life. She will shrink from you in terror and invite you to her bed. Nor must you hesitate to accept the goddess’ favours, if you want her to free your men and treat you kindly. . . . Then the Giant-­killer [one of Hermes’s names] handed me a herb he had plucked from the ground, and showed me what it was like. It had a black root and a milk-­white flower. The gods call it Moly, and it is an awkward plant to dig up, at any rate for a mere man. But the gods, after all, can do anything.3 Nowadays it might seem that what Hermes provided was no more than pharmacology, a chemical antidote to a drug that made mortals “lose all memory of their native land.” But an imperial Roman era writer indicated that the “Moly” Hermes gave Odysseus grew from the blood of a giant slain on Circe’s island.4 And the drug Circe used was combined with the magical effect of her wand, which the immune Odysseus countered with a talismanic weapon of his own. We see the two, poison and wand, held by Circe in Annibale Carracci’s sixteenth-­century fresco of the subject in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome (fig. 26). She is handing a bowl of poisoned food to Odysseus, her wand in the waiting, just as Hermes rushes in to apply [ 103 ]

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the antidote. Carracci emended the narrative since he wanted to show all three figures in a single scene gathered in the moment of highest drama, just when Circe was about to touch the hero with her magical implement to transform him into a pig. Circe used her wand for magical purposes, but the passage from the Odyssey also refers to Hermes, dubbed by Homer “god of the golden wand,” as wielding his own device, the caduceus, or herald’s staff—the emblem of his role as the god of trade, heralds, merchants, commerce, roads, and travelers. A fifth-­century BCE Greek vase is decorated with a prancing image of the god holding his famous wand (fig. 27). Carracci’s fresco allows us to compare the two kinds of devices. Circe’s wand is long and slender, a form serving to extend the gesture of the hand as she touches her victim in tandem with the incantation she may utter. In contrast to Hermes’s caduceus, her wand is not meant to call attention to itself. Indeed, as a slender, featureless length of wood, it is barely visible. The caduceus, however, is meant to be displayed. Two snakes wrap about the wand and meet face to face at its end. The meanings attributed to the symbol vary widely.5 By holding the staff, heralds gained safe passage and access to the desired recipient of an official message. Because the caduceus could serve as the emblem of envoys seeking peace in warfare, the device was only used in Roman history as a flag of truce.6 It signified the official bearer of a message and provided the protection of the office of a herald. To speak with the herald was to speak reliably with the one who dispatched him. Within art and literature, the caduceus identified Hermes, or Mercury, his Latin counterpart. As an insignia of office, the wand is a scepter, which is what a king receives as the emblem of his office. It is his to hold, a sign of his status and right. But it was also a sign with theatrical impact. The Persian king Xerxes, called Ahasuerus in the biblical book of Esther, used his scepter in a gesture of mortal command: “All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law; all alike are to be put to death, except the one to whom the king holds out the golden scepter that he may live” (4:11). In ancient Egypt, the god Osiris held a small crook-­scepter, which eventually became associated with pharaonic rule. In the Bible, the book of Micah addresses the kings of Judah as “shepherd to thy people with thy staff, the flock of thy inheritance” (7:14), [ 104 ]

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Figure 27. Attributed to Tithonos painter, lekythos with image of Hermes, 480–70 BCE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

following the Egyptian practice of regarding the shepherd’s crook as the emblem of royal office. For many years, scholars have tried to trace the origin of the caduceus, only to find that it has many and far-­flung roots.7 In fact, devices similar to the caduceus, wand, staff, and scepter are found around the world in many religious traditions. They are often associated with royalty such as mortal kings and ruling deities, doubling as signs of office and weaponry that represent authority as well as the decisive action associated with the value or [ 105 ]

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meaning of the deity. In Mahayana Buddhism, for example, Manjusri, the bodhisattva of insight, swings a sword that cuts decisively through human delusion and ignorance to make way for insights into the nature of things. In Tantric Buddhism, the Vajra knife serves the same function. The Vajra scepter is another item used ritually by deities and lamas to convey power over the realm of existence.8 In traditional African society, kings wield ceremonial swords, staffs, fly whisks, and scepters as insignia of high office but use them also as talismans. Thus, “the ceremonial swords of the Ashanti [an ethnic group from what is modern-­day Ghana, in West Africa] kept in the residence housing the royal seats are supposed to protect the seats and the altars that accompany them, and to hold the power they receive from the gods.”9 The same holds for the staff wielded by the king: it is derived from what was once a deadly weapon and now distinguishes the king as a person of authority. The insignia of an African king, says one scholar, “are the materialized words of the king.” 10 As such, they operate as symbol or metaphor with a far greater range of action and suggestion than an actual weapon might do. By symbolizing threat, power, determination, or pride, the insignia participate in a physical discourse that often takes the place of actual violence or is able to move a group to engage in or stand down from violence. In this intensely symbolic capacity wands, scepters, staffs, and ceremonial weaponry can resemble one another as objects of power. Yet a magic wand operates in a different web of connections than a sign of rank. When Zeus had decided that Odysseus would no longer languish as prisoner to Calypso’s love, he dispatched Hermes to her island to deliver the news. As he departed Olympus on this errand, Hermes “picked up the wand which he can use at will to cast a spell upon our eyes or wake us from the soundest sleep.” 11 Hermes used the wand to effect various transformations. Thus, the function of a magical wand is not to be confused with what a caduceus does. To explore what a wand is and what it can do, we may begin with a fascinating early chapter from the history of the wand: ancient accounts of Moses. His narrative begins at the opening of the book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible.

Wands and the Story of Moses

After killing an Egyptian official for beating a Hebrew slave, Moses fled Egypt and became a shepherd. One day Moses encountered a burning bush and heard upon approaching it the voice of God, who told him to re[ 106 ]

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turn to Egypt and take his people from there to a land flowing with milk and honey. Moses replied to God: who am I to do so? (Exodus 3:13). God ordered Moses to return to the people of Israel and stand up to Pharaoh, who would be compelled only by “a mighty hand. So I will stretch out my hand and smite Egypt with all the wonders which I will do in it” (3:19– 20). But Moses remained unsure, so God had to convince him. As a shepherd, Moses carried a staff to prod and protect his sheep. God asked him, “What is that in your hand?” “A rod,” Moses replied. God told him to cast it to the ground. When he did, the rod became a snake, and Moses was terrified. “But the Lord said to Moses, ‘Put out your hand, and take it by the tail’—so he put out his hand and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand.” The metamorphosis was an example of what God would do so “that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers . . . has appeared to you” (4:2–6). A history of the Bible published in the mid-­eighteenth century includes an engraving reproduced here (fig. 28) that captures the moment with a mixture of terror and humor. The angel representing God in the midst of the fiery bush looks on with a smile as Moses is startled by the writhing serpent that had been his shepherd’s staff only a moment ago. But overcoming his fear, Moses did as he was instructed, taking the snake by the tail, and saw it return to the form of his staff. The story’s use of a staff/snake as a sign of power was no accident. In Egyptian religion, a staff in the form of a snake was used to “open the mouth” of the deceased person (as well as all of one’s senses) so that the deceased could speak during the judgment process of the soul that followed death. The Egyptian Book of the Dead illustrates the rite and provides the prayers that were recited to conduct the transformation (fig. 29). The deceased, now mummified, occupies his erect coffin, which is held by the jackal-­headed Anubis, god of tombs and embalming and guide of the dead. A priest and attendants conduct the rite of “opening the mouth,” which centers on the use of objects to strike the mummy case in order to activate the senses of the dead man.12 One of the objects, directly in front of his face, is a short staff in the form of a snake, which the attendant holds by the tail. In two lower hands are adzes, which are also used in the rite. Once he was awoken, the dead man was led by Anubis to have his heart weighed in a judgment process recorded by Thoth. If he were found virtuous, he was taken to Osiris, god of the dead and Lord of Eternity, and entered an afterlife of bliss. If he was judged less than virtuous, his heart was consumed by a crocodile-­headed monster. [ 107 ]

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Figure 28. Moses and the Burning Bush, Exodus 3:2, from Thomas Stackhouse, A New History of the Bible from the Beginning of the World to the Establishment of Christianity (London: John Hinton, 1752). Photo by author.

In Exodus, Moses told God that he was not able to act as his spokesman because he was “slow of speech and tongue” (4:10). In the Book of the Dead, when the deceased man’s mouth has been opened, he responds: “My mouth is opened by Ptah and what was on my mouth has been loosened by my local god. Thoth comes indeed, filled and equipped with magic, and the bonds of Seth which restricted my mouth have been loosened.”13 Seth is the god of violence, chaos, and disorder who killed his brother, [ 108 ]

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Figure 29. Opening of the mouth ceremony, Egyptian Book of the Dead of Hunefer, ca. 1275 BCE, British Museum, London.

Osiris. Ptah is the creator deity that existed before all things and thought the world into existence. Thoth, the divine recorder of the verdict of judgment, is invited to do his work. But instead of opening Moses’s mouth, freeing him of his impediment, God appoints his brother Aaron to speak on his behalf, and equips Moses with a now powerful staff to perform the signs that will tell Israel of Moses’s authority and Pharaoh of God’s will for the Israelites. “You shall speak to him [Aaron] and put the words in his mouth; and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and will teach you what you shall do. He shall speak for you to the people; and he shall be a mouth for you, and you shall be to him as God. And you shall take in your hand this rod, with which you shall do the signs” (4:15–17). It is a hierarchy in which authority passes downward without losing its divine [ 109 ]

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power since God is to Moses as Moses is to Aaron. And the rod? It is the sign of power that produces signs of power. At God’s instruction, Moses and Aaron entered the Egyptian court and Aaron “cast down his rod before Pharaoh and his servants, and it became a serpent” (7:9). But the Egyptian ruler was not impressed. He called forth his magicians and they did the same “by their secret arts,” casting down all of their rods, which turned to serpents. Not to be outdone, “Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods” (7:12). Yet Pharaoh would not relent. So the theater of signs continued. God told Moses to tell Pharaoh: “I will strike the water that is in the Nile with the rod that is in my hand, and it shall be turned to blood” (7:17) and then told Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Take your rod and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt . . . that they may become blood.’ ” The performance of signs delivered with the rod continues over the next several chapters of Exodus as Moses and Aaron unleash successive plagues on Egypt. The rod of Moses reappears on many occasions thereafter, perhaps most dramatically at the edge of the Red Sea (14:​16). Pursued by Pharaoh and his army, the Children of Israel appeared trapped. But then God tells Moses to “lift up your rod, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it.” A frescoed wall in a third-­century CE synagogue at Dura Europos, located in modern-­day Syria (fig. 30), pictures Moses with the rod, having split the waters of the sea. The Israelites behind him cross over while on the other side of Moses the waters come together once again to drown Pharaoh and his troops pursuing the Israelites (14:​26). The association of Moses and his rod with the hand of God is made explicit in the fresco as two large hands spread over the scene, both separating Pharaoh and the Israelites and affirming the heroic stature of his chosen servant, Moses, who appears twice: to the right splitting the waters that drown the Egyptians and in the center of the scene, rod in one hand.

Wands in Early Christianity and the Middle Ages

The story of this magic wand continued in the Christian era but underwent considerable reinterpretation. In the New Testament’s Gospel of Matthew, the story of Herod’s enforced infanticide recalls Pharaoh’s slaughter of newborn Hebrew males. Like Moses, who received the law on Mount Sinai, Jesus delivered his fulfillment of the law in his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:17). The association of Jesus and Moses continued in early Christian era. Especially interesting for the history of the wand is [ 110 ]

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Figure 30. Moses Divides the Red Sea, synagogue fresco, 3rd century CE, Dura Europos, Syria. CPA Media Pte Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.

the third-­century Roman sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus (fig. 31). At the left end of the front of the coffin appears Moses in a long line of figures. He is seen with wand in hand, striking the rock to produce water for the thirsty Israelites (Exod. 17:5–6). At the opposite end of the sarcophagus appears Jesus, also wand in hand, reviving Lazarus from the dead. And at the center of the group of figures Jesus appears twice more wielding his wand—transforming water into wine and changing a few loaves of bread into many baskets of it. Jesus is also shown healing a man born blind by touching his eyes with his fingers. In every case, touch performs a miracle, whether by wand or by fingers. And in every case, the task recalls Moses’s use of the rod to produce wonders as signs of his authority. Jesus’s use of the wand compares him directly to Moses and stresses the power of touch as sign—ultimately as the sign of his power over death, which is why the subject was chosen for a sarcophagus. Most of the miracles displayed on the sarcophagus are from the Gospel of John, which is noteworthy because it is there that Jesus compares himself to Moses in a dialogue with Nicodemus: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14). The reference may be to the brass serpent that Moses erected at God’s command (Num. 21:6–9). [ 111 ]

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Figure 31. Sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus with scenes from the Old and New Testaments, 330–335 CE, marble, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome. Photo by author.

If so, Jesus appears to present himself as a newer, better Moses, which is a Christian motif that has long expressed a tension between the two religions. The rod of Moses became part of this in the sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus and remained a signal feature of the Christian understanding of Christ’s superiority to Moses. For instance, an engraving of the Brazen Serpent from an early eighteenth-­century edition of the Book of Common Prayer shows Moses beside the bronze snake (fig. 32), pointing to it with his wand. There is no mention of the wand in the biblical text of the serpent. The Christian tradition has seen the incident as a prefiguration of Christ’s crucifixion, as figure 32 suggests by portraying the serpent hanging on what is actually a cross. Significantly, the wand in this image is no longer a wonder-­working device. It has become a pointer that makes of Moses a prophet foreseeing the messiah. By pointing to the figure on the cross, Moses underscores the visual aspect of redemption that comported with a Christian visual piety of looking to the Crucified Jesus for salvation. Christians have understood the “New” Testament to complete or fulfill rather than to replace the “Old” Testament. The title page of a German edition of Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, published about 1700, [ 112 ]

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Figure 32. “The Brazen Serpent,” from The Common Book of Prayer (London: Charles Bill, 1708). Photo by author.

makes this very clear (fig. 33). Moses grips the tablets of the Law with one hand and a wand with the other. The wand points to Jesus, who stands opposite him, bearing the cruciform staff associated with his resurrection, the banner hanging from it indicating his victory over death. Paired with the banner-­bearing cross of Jesus, Moses’s rod is only a pointer. It has become a wispy wand that no longer performs miracles but serves to direct the viewer’s attention to the one whom Christians understood Moses to foretell in texts such as Deuteronomy 18:​15 and 18. Thus, the wand of Moses anticipates Jesus’s staff of victory. The title page of Luther’s trans[ 113 ]

Figure 33. Gabriel Ehinger after Johann Jacob von Sandrart, engraving of Moses and Jesus on the title page of a German Bible (Nuremberg: Johann Andreas, 1700). Photo by author.

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lation of Old and New Testaments is designed to convey their unity as the Word of God, in which the old prefigures the new. But the concept of prefiguration does not equate the two components—it ranks them. The first is shadowy and obscure, coming into focus only when its fulfillment appears in the second, superior form. From the perspective of Christians such as Luther, Moses represented the Old Covenant of a people whose purpose was to anticipate the arrival of the messiah, who established the New Covenant. It is the same idea we saw at work in figure 21. In figure 33, the cross from which the bronze serpent hung became the sign of triumph-­ to-­come. The new instrument of power, according to Christianity, is the cross that enabled Jesus to perform salvation. As such, the cross became the new wand during the early Christian era and after.

Wands in the Modern Era

There are more sources to consider for the modern history of the wand than Christianity and Judaism. First of all, the rather lurid interest in witchcraft evident in persecutions conducted by the Catholic Inquisition and by the Puritan obsession with witchcraft stocked the modern imagination in Europe and North America with imagery, including the wand-­ wielding conjuror. A long line of painters exploited the iconography for its sensational and Romantic drama. The most common subject was the biblical account of King Saul’s nocturnal visit to the Witch of Endor in order to summon up the dead prophet Samuel (1 Sam. 28). As early as the seventeenth century, the witch is depicted holding a wand.14 The subject of the Witch of Endor remained a favorite among painters through the early nineteenth century, when Arthurian legend and Homer’s account of Circe became more appealing to artists and their publics.15 A striking example of the nonbiblical portrayal of a witch is John William Waterhouse’s painting The Magic Circle (fig. 34). Like many artists in the final decades of the nineteenth century, Waterhouse was drawn to tragic heroines and femmes fatales, women whose fateful lives or mystery and power over men made them beguiling and exotic. He painted Circe and the Oracle at Delphi several times, as well as sirens beckoning men to their deaths. Waterhouse was particularly fond of female victims of high tragedy such as the Shakespearean figures of Ophelia, Miranda, and Juliet, and similar figures from classical mythology such as Echo, Pandora, and Ariadne.16 With The Magic Circle, he reflected the growing interest in druids and Celtic lore, particularly wizards, sorceresses, and witches in fin-­de-­siècle [ 115 ]

Figure 34. John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London. © Tate Britain.

G1. Amilcare Santini, Head of Michelangelo’s David, 1960s, cast polymer, height 6 in. Photo by author.

G2. Virgin of Paris, 14th century, Notre-­Dame de Paris. Godong / Alamy Stock Photo.

G3. Crest from the Escrain de Charlemagne, mounted in the 9th century, Collection of the Treasury of Saint-­Denis, Paris. © BnF, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

G4. Main hall with spirit tablet displayed before the figure of Confucius, Temple of Confucius, Jiading, China. The temple was built in 1291 and restored in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY.

G5. Altar of the Three Generations: Saint Ann, Mary, and the Christ Child, ca. 1500, sandstone, Burial Chapel of Jan van Arkel, bishop of Utrecht, Domkerk, Utrecht. Photo by author.

G6. Francisco Rizi, Auto-­da-­Fé on the Plaza Mayor of Madrid, 1683, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

G7. Andrea Pozzo, Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius, ceiling fresco of the church of Sant’Ignazio, Rome, 1685–94. Photo by author.

G8. A Hindu priest performs havan, or yajña, a sacrificial fire to ward off the coronavirus during the nationwide lockdown imposed in the wake of the COVID-­19 pandemic, April 28, 2020, Calcutta, India. Pacific Press Agency / Alamy Stock Photo.

G9. Opening of the mouth ceremony, Egyptian Book of the Dead of Hunefer, ca. 1275 BCE, British Museum, London.

G10. John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London. © Tate Britain.

G11. Wandrille de Préville, Notre-­Dame de Paris in flames, April 15, 2019, photographed from the Quai de Montebello. Creative Commons, License: Attribution-­Share Alike 4.0 International.

G12. Jean Jouvenet, Mass of the Canon de la Porte, or the Main Altar of Notre-­ Dame de Paris, 1708– 10, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-­ Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

G13. The Emperor Swears the Oath of the Constitution at Notre-­Dame Cathedral, from Sacred Festival and Coronation of Their Imperial Majesties, Paris, 1804. HIP / Art Resource, NY.

G14. Consecration of Napoleon and Coronation of Josephine by Pope Pius VII, December 2, 1804, from Sacred Festival and Coronation of Their Imperial Majesties, Paris, 1804. HIP / Art Resource, NY.

G15. Polynesian creator deity, A’a, from Rurutu, 17th century, sandalwood, height 3 ft., 10 in., British Museum, London.

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Britain. With her long wand, the witch etches the circle in the ground about the tripod and cauldron from which rises a spectral column of light and vapor. The purpose of the circle was to create the enchanted space in which her conjuration takes place. The circle marks the focus of power that even the ravens and toads, symbols of dark magic, will not cross as they gather about the scene in Waterhouse’s painting. The witch is shown walking to the right as she drags the wand across the earth and is about to complete the circle, which began in the lower right. Doing so appears to generate the magical power of conjuring a spirit, which begins to take shape before her. Waterhouse’s painting combines a number of strands from literary legend and ancient mythology. Figures embroidered on the witch’s skirt are archaic Greek, the sort that appear on ancient vases. It has been suggested that the architecture in the background appears Egyptian. And the circular knife she holds in her left hand is a druidic device used in gathering herbs for magical rites.17 Waterhouse’s painting is not a document of actual pagan practice but rather an artistic imagination of a subject whose exoticism and dark mystery appealed for its drama. But that appeal was not foreign to the rebirth of interest in paganism in nineteenth-­century Europe. As we shall see, art, literature, and imagination are fundamental ingredients in the modern revival known as neopaganism. Within the domain of actual religious practice, the wand emerged as a special part of modern neopaganism. This term is a broad designation that includes Wiccans but also many others who look to druidism as a primary source of wand use and lore. Druidism was an ancient Celtic religious tradition that had confronted ancient Rome’s colonial incursions into western Europe and later clashed with Christianity. There is some material evidence to suggest that curved staffs were part of ancient druid divination practices.18 Archaeological finds from Celtic sites dating to the Roman period provide examples of wands of office or scepters.19 Studies of Celtic lore and mythology have shown literary evidence of wands used among druids in Ireland, Wales, England, and France, made of various local woods such as yew, hawthorn, and rowan wood (Ireland) and oak (France).20 According to scholar Lewis Spence, the wand is “a constant factor in Celtic tale.”21 In Irish folklore and storytelling, for example, the wand is often wielded by druids and fairies to transform humans into animals and back again.22 In Wales, wands could be used in divination rites, [ 117 ]

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in which it helped determine the virginity of a maiden. In Yorkshire, the north of England, the broomstick took the place of the wand in this lore. Another source of wand lore contributed a dizzying synthesis of kabbalah, Freemasonry, hermeticism, astrology, tarot, and alchemy and owes a great deal to Rosicrucianism, an esoteric body of lore that emerged in the seventeenth century and claimed to be rooted in perennial wisdom that sounds like hermeticism—the late antique mystical and occult corpus of literature associated with the name Hermes Trismegistus.23 The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a secret society active for a few years in late nineteenth-­century Britain and devoted to esoteric teachings that drew from all of these sources to conduct its magical conjurations. The proper ritual execution of these spells invoked spirits to perform service such as protection, divination, making one invisible, or help in seeking favor or love. Begun by three British men who were members of Masonic lodges, William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell Mathers, and William Robert Woodman, the Golden Dawn founded a temple where they practiced their rites. One of the three founders, and a leading force among them, William Wynn Westcott, claimed to have received permission to establish a temple in London in 1887 from a German noble who was a Rosicrucian medium. Westcott had himself photographed sometime in the next several years dressed in the ceremonial garments of the Rosicrucians and holding a caduceus or scepter (fig. 35). Wands are mentioned in many of the texts that emerged from the Golden Dawn. Samuel Liddell Mathers, one of the founders of the group, produced a translation and highly edited version of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-­century Hebrew manuscript in the British Library. Mathers’s translation and edited version, Greater Key of Solomon the King, first appeared in 1889 and provides a few references to wands.24 We read, for instance, that the wand should be made of hazel or a nut-­tree, and “in all cases the wood being virgin, that is of one year’s growth only.” And the prescription for preparing wands continues: They should be cut from the tree at a single stroke, on the day of Mercury, at sunrise. The characters shown [on an accompanying diagram] should be written or engraved thereon at the day and hour of Mercury. This being done, thou shalt say: adonai, Most Holy, deign to bless and to consecrate this Wand, and this Staff, that they may obtain the necessary virtue, through Thee, [ 118 ]

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Figure 35. William Wynn Westcott in the ceremonial garment of the Rosicrucians with caduceus. Photograph taken before 1891.

O Most Holy adonai, Whose kingdom endureth unto the Ages of the Ages. Amen.25 The day of Mercury is Wednesday, and the hour of Mercury is the sixth hour from midnight. Mercury is the Latin version of Hermes, the wand-­ bearing god. Hazel wood, we learn later, is to be used to create the fire for any sacrifice to Mercury, so the wood is sacred to him.26 Unfortunately, we learn nothing from Mathers about the actual use of wands in the conjurations. The text indicates in another section that it is necessary for the [ 119 ]

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master of the rite to carry the wand himself into the sacred circle in which the conjuration will be conducted.27 But again, there is no indication of how the wand is actually used. The notorious Aleister Crowley, who was initiated into the Golden Dawn by Mather in 1898, was an avid practitioner of ceremonial magic in which he made ritual use of wands. He discussed this in his later work, Magick in Theory and Practice (1912–13), where he described the proper production of a wand, its consecration, and its use. The magician, he wrote, is to take the wand in hand “and imagine that it is that hollow tube in which Prometheus brought down fire from heaven, formulating to himself the passing of the Holy Influence through it. In this and other ways he will perform the initiation.”28 The Golden Dawn shares a good deal of the responsibility for making the wand a pervasive tool of the occultist and witch in the modern era. It was another member of the group, Arthur Waite, who was initiated into the group in 1891, who circulated the most popular imagery of the wand operator. In 1910, Waite published his tarot deck with the Rider Company, which still bears their names, and sometimes the additional name of Smith—Pamela Colman Smith, the artist who produced the imagery and was also a member of Golden Dawn. The lesser arcana of the deck consists of four suits, one of which is wands. Among the cards of the major arcana is “the magician” (fig. 36), which features a magician holding a wand above his head with a sword, pentacle, staff, and chalice on the table before him—the four essential items for casting spells (they are the four suits of the minor arcana of tarot and correspond to the four elements: air, earth, fire, and water). The Waite-­Rider tarot deck thus disseminated the wand’s place in ceremonial magic as an occult artifact and central feature of conjurations and spells. No doubt owing at least in part to all of this, there is no shortage of wand lore in circulation today among neopagans for whom the wand is an esteemed part of their practice. Recalling Spence’s broad claim about the wand in Celtic lore, one American practitioner of druidic neopaganism posted online the view that “there is no symbol more central to the ancient image of the Druid than the wand or scepter.”29 The wand “is the tool by which you send a voice into the Otherworld. While you can surely invoke with your voice and power alone, the Wand acts as an amplifier and a torch that makes your call stronger. To raise the wand to call to the Gods is to participate in a ritual gesture as old as our ancestors’ ways.” [ 120 ]

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THE MAGICIAN.

I!

Figure 36. Pamela Colman Smith, “The Magician,” 1909, from the Rider-­Waite-­Smith Tarot Deck. Ben Molyneux / Alamy Stock Photo.

Characteristic of neopaganism, the writer combines diverse traditions to inform his practice: “One of the core symbolic associations of the Wand is the Thunderbolt of the heavens. The Sanskrit Vajra, the Hellenic double-­ trident lightning-­bolt, [and] the Celtic Gae Bolga (lightning spear), all tie the divine scepter into the shining, swift power of the sky.”30 A modern druid, Alferian Gwydion MacLir—the druidical name of author and wand-­maker James Maertens—has written a good deal about wand lore and what he calls “real magic wands,” which he sells commercially. In The Witch’s Wand: The Craft, Lore, and Magick of Wands and [ 121 ]

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Staffs, MacLir writes, “Wands are usually wood and so come from living trees. As such, they preserve some of the dryad spirit of the tree, and this active energy or personality aids the witch’s own will in the trans-­material planes.” He derives his understanding of the wand from a variety of sources, including hermeticism, Celtic lore, Golden Dawn, alchemy, and tarot. The dryad, or spirit of the tree, “is the secret of the tree and the secret of the magic wand. For it is a transcendent spirit who lives long and lives a life of utter interconnection. The dryad, or consciousness of a tree, is in the tree’s physical body and extends beyond it, interlaced with surrounding trees, in competition with them, in cooperation and sympathy with other members of the plant and animal kingdoms.”31 Even the fantasy fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien helps MacLir explain the wand. Interacting with human beings, trees “sacrifice themselves for human will in the making of shelter or fuel for fire. The ‘thinking’ of dryads, if one can use the term, is slower than ours and non-­verbal but far more deliberate. J. R. R. Tolkien captured this quality when he created the Ents of his fictional Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings.”32 Because the tree is alive and animated by a spirit, taking a branch from it requires giving something in return to the tree in a gesture of exchange that enacts the relationship between practitioner and the natural world, which recalls the sacrificial practice described by Cato discussed in chapter 2. MacLir and other neopagan writers urge the wand maker “to talk to the tree and ask its permission first,” and then to thank it.33 MacLir’s account of wands bears out the importance of nature among neopagans as an ecological web. The wand is engaged within this web as a device that interfaces with the human body to integrate the user into a larger habitat. As MacLir puts it, “When you create a wand with a dryad spirit from a particular tree, you join with that spirit and with all the qualities of that tree to enhance your own powers and become something far larger than yourself.”34 MacLir’s reference to Tolkien is noteworthy because it highlights an important role of the arts in neopaganism, but also in virtually every religious tradition to a greater or lesser degree. Literature, song, folklore, and the visual arts often serve as the means of transmitting subject matter for adoption. The arts, generally speaking, have been the media whereby ideas, themes, and practices have moved from one generation and region to the next within religious traditions, but also often moving beyond them to interact with other religions or cultures. Words, images, symbols, and tunes migrate, traveling with pilgrims, soldiers, slaves, immigrants, and traders. [ 122 ]

The Power of Things

The arts mediate past and present, local and foreign, insider and outsider, old-­fashioned and newfangled. This is especially apparent in the modern world in the retelling of folktales. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collectors of folklore made the stories of oral culture available in print, thus transmitting and certainly reshaping a wide range of cultural legacies in the folktales that went on to inform modern mass culture through literature, verse, song, opera, and film. For example, in 1697 Charles Perrault wrote the version of “Cinderella” that has remained part of modern popular culture. Although the primary narrative is ancient and global in history, Perrault introduced one of the most familiar features in the person of the wand-­wielding fairy godmother, who is not included in the version of the story set down by the Brothers Grimm. Perrault’s introduction of the wand features prominently in visual portrayals of the story, such as Émile Bertrand’s poster for Jules Massenet’s operatic rendition of Cendrillon, which premiered in Paris at the Théâtre Nationale de l’Opéra-­ Comique in 1899 (fig. 37), as well as in the most popular portrayal of Perrault’s version: Walt Disney’s animated feature Cinderella (1950). Distraught that she may not attend the prince’s ball, Cinderella watches her haughty stepsisters depart for it. Bertrand’s art nouveau spectacle shows the fairy godmother in the midst of conjuring her protégé’s magical means of attending the fete. As requested, Cinderella brings a pumpkin to the fairy, who “tapped it with her wand, and suddenly the pumpkin was transformed into a beautiful golden coach.”35 Fairies join druids to usher the magic wand into the modern imaginary and blend it there in the cauldron of the modern imaginary as a mash-­up of diverse mythologies, esoterica, and the identity construction of neopaganism. All of this might seem strange to some, drawing as it does on exotic and far-­flung sources, abounding in obscure terminology and arcane snatches of Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and Celtic uttered in wooded ceremonies among circles of adepts dressed in robes and gowns. But careful scrutiny of any religious tradition’s texts, arts, and rites will reveal an intimate blending of diverse sources. In the present day, the gamut of occult sources has been made sensationally popular for a new generation by J. K. Rowling’s series of novels comprising the saga of Harry Potter, the first novel of which appeared in 1997. We learn with the young Harry about wands when he is taken to “Ollivanders: Makers of Fine Wands since 382 BC,” on Diagon Alley in the magic district of London, to shop for his matriculation at Hogwarts School for wizards. Although the ancient [ 123 ]

Figure 37. Émile Bertrand, Cendrillon, poster, 1899. Restored version © Adam Cuerdon.

The Power of Things

shop suggests that wands are commodities purchased by wizards, Mr. Ollivander tells Harry that it is actually the reverse: wands choose their wizard owners. Made of various woods such as oak, yew, mahogany, and holly, wands vary according to what they are used for—charm work or transfiguration, for example—and come in lengths in proportion to the user’s size. Harry also learns that every Ollivander wand contains “a core of powerful magical substance.” The proprietor explains to him that “we use unicorn hairs, phoenix tail feathers, and the heartstrings of dragons.”36 Rowling suggests that a wizard’s wand enjoys a special interface with its owner and that the discernment of that relationship is not up to the consumer. This recalls what MacLir indicates regarding the witch’s relation to the vast web of nature, mediated by the wand. MacLir urges the wand user to “attach yourself to your wand. If it is a wand that has been enchanted to awaken the dryad of the tree it was made from, then you at once have an intelligent ally. The spirit of the wand, however conceived, makes it a living thing, not merely a poking stick.”37 Rowling conveys the “life” or animation of the wand in terms of some “magical substance” placed within it. Wands possess an intrinsic power that intermingles with the person of the selected user. MacLir seems to agree with this, though wands appear to play a more essential role in Potterdom than in actual modern witchcraft. Like most neopagans, MacLir does not consider the wand absolutely necessary for the work of magic: “Like all magic tools, the witch’s wand is a symbol. One does not need to use a wand at all when casting spells; it isn’t the wand that contains the magic. A pointed finger or sharp gaze can serve just as well to direct one’s intention. The advantage of using a wand is that it makes the intention visible in a dramatic way. The mind and cosmos respond on a primordial level through symbols.”38 It might appear that MacLir is not altogether consistent since he regards the wand in one instance as a tool but in another as a living thing bearing the dryad or spirit of the tree. But perhaps the overriding logic of his neopaganism, which is hardly unique to him, is a particular notion of the symbol. Rather than an arbitrary signifier, a device that bears no inherent relation to what it refers to, the magic symbol is a metaphor, performing the role of something that turns into another thing. The performance weaves a meandering web of connections whose principal effect is on the mind and person of the witch and those privy to the spell or charm. Wands in neopagan practice and Rowling’s fiction do not autonomously exude power, but neither are they empty or inert objects. They are instead [ 125 ]

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devices that work with witches and wizards to focus their will or intentions put to work in a spell. A learned Wiccan writer, Gypsey Elaine Teague, who published The Witch’s Guide to Wands, argues that the wand’s power and role derive from neither the wand nor the witch alone; rather, they lie within “a partnership between the witch and the wand.” She describes a satisfying interface between the tool and the user that generates a power by virtue of symbiosis: “Wands are like shoes or jeans or shirts or your favorite little black dress. When it’s right, it’s just right and you know it.”39 This is why, according to another Wiccan practitioner, a necessary process of finding, making, and consecrating wands personalizes them, honing a proper fit between the witch and the tool of her or his craft.40 Wands must be properly harvested from certain kinds of trees, ritually prepared, and then used under proper conditions.

The Power of Wands

So we return in the end to the question posed at the outset: What is the nature of the power of a special object like a wand? Neopagan wand lore and Rowling’s story distinguish wands, at least in their modern version, from Moses’s rod, which was said to have been stored in the Ark of the Covenant, as a fifteenth-­century manuscript illumination shows it, still flowering beside the stone tablets of Sinai and the open codex of scripture.41 And a host of other items such as relics, amulets, talismans, and the eucharistic host all exhibit inherent powers and manifest them by working miracles. Yet their agency does not draw from a single source, as noted in the Introduction, as they variously combine external, inherent, mimetic, ritual, instrumental, or aesthetic abilities to act. For example, wands must be made of certain substances, crafted in a particular way, and consecrated and deployed by those skilled at or privileged with their use. Aleister Crowley described the dense mesh of interrelated items and practices that were the wand’s ecology: the magician wants a wand, “and in order to cut and trim it he needed a knife. It was not sufficient merely to buy a new knife; he felt that he had to make it himself. In order to make the knife, he would require a hundred other things, the acquisition of each of which might require a hundred more; and so on. This shows the impossibility of disentangling one’s self from one’s environment.” In producing his implements by himself, Crowley said of the magician, “he will understand how one thing depends on another; he will begin to appreciate the meaning of the words ‘the harmony of the Universe.’ ”42 [ 126 ]

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In fact, I suspect that we can generalize this point in the claim that all power objects operate as devices that integrate their users into a web of relations—with other people, with the past, with gods and spirits, angels and demons, ancestors and saints, with astrological forces, with the natural world, with themselves. Enchantment is the product of a web.43 The power of a wand might be compared to an electric drill. Like this tool, wands operate within a matrix of conditions. Drilling a hole successfully consists of interweaving at least four necessary conditions: the drill, a power source, a material to be drilled, and a person with the skill to activate and direct the tool with a purpose in mind. Each of these is a form of causality because the hole would not result without each of them in force. A wand likewise combines a number of agents. Wands require more to operate successfully because the connection of the device to a power source is different than plugging an electric tool into a wall socket. The power source of the wand consists of the beliefs, will, knowledge, procedure, and need of the operator as well as the proper material and the ritual preparation of the wand for the use. If the witch casts a spell of protection to avoid harm, and no misfortune befalls her or him, the result will have been caused by all of these agencies. MacLir speaks to this as a practitioner: “A wand is directive, like the baton of a maestro leading an orchestra. It directs powers latent in ourselves and the cosmos, potentialities for creation. Just as the maestro’s baton causes a response in the musicians of an orchestra, so the witch’s wand causes a response in the spirits of nature, those underlying intelligences and forces woven together to create the infinite music of causality.”44 The wand extends and completes the body of the witch, translating and sending the will to interact with forces beyond the body. One might say that the wand is a power tool plugged into the body of its operator. Yet as MacLir pointed out earlier, the witch does not require the wand to cast spells since one might simply use one’s finger. That suggests that the wand is the extension of the witch’s body. As a device, the wand operates within and on a fabric of factors or conditions, inserting the body and will of the witch into a web of intertwined forces. The wand assists imagination or visualization. It is a dramaturgical device, a prop that enhances theatrical performance by facilitating the creative action of desire or will, the motive force that propels ritual as imagined action. The wand, but also robes, altars, incense, and other paraphernalia of ritual performance, collaborate to enact in material terms what the operator is imagining. The “reality effect” of using these items is [ 127 ]

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familiar to anyone who has ever acted on stage or conducted role-­playing in therapy. Props help craft a bridge from actor to audience, making the performance more credible and effective. Imitation has a way of becoming what it imitates. Religious ritual exhibits the same effect as work on participants. Imagine a sacred rite such as the Eucharist without priest and altar attendants in robes, without incense or a choir chanting Latin or organ music, without the high theater of the elevation of the Host or the solemn posture of those receiving it. In the absence of these, it’s no longer the Mass. In practice, all of these are vital components of the rite. Ritual efficacy depends on props, demeanor, and stage setting because it is their collaboration that enacts the interface of devotee with the extended network, which, for Catholics going to Mass, includes Jesus himself in the bread and wine of the rite. The power of wands is the power of human beings working on themselves and the larger web of actors accessed through the intermediary of the device. The wand is a clear instance of a focal object: it projects the body of the witch as an actor into the network whose circuitry pulses with the power that he or she seeks to tap. By joining with it, users achieve something larger than themselves. The whole exceeds the parts. Creative work rises above the creator, augmenting the artist’s agency with something more. The influence of the arts on modern wand use becomes clear: both are creative assemblages of many components that undergo a kind of synergy, a transformation that yields something larger than its parts. The magic lies in the enchanting difference between part and whole.

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N o tr e- D ­ am e de Paris Religion and Time

•••

If you ask people, “What is Notre-­Dame de Paris?” you will receive any one of many answers: a church, a shrine, a national monument, a political symbol, a relic, the setting for a novel, an opera, a film, or an animated feature, an icon of Frenchness, a monument of French Catholicism, the first Gothic cathedral, a tourist site, a form of municipal revenue, the heart of Paris. In fact, the building at the center of Paris has been all of these over its long history. Ironically, while it is reassuring to think that a classic site such as Notre-­Dame is unchanging, the very plurality of what the building is to different people suggests that its identity is not fixed. Nothing remains the same forever—even something as seemingly obdurate as a massive building. If you take the opportunity to examine it, you will see that every ancient structure is riddled with the marks of time: the signs of decay, wear and tear, repair, and renovation. No building material escapes erosion, and use changes over time. This chapter takes the Cathedral of Notre-­Dame de Paris as a case study of a building whose rich history bears the material evidence of religion’s entanglement with politics, economics, national consciousness, conflict, and municipal pride. We will learn that the thing called Notre-­Dame de Paris is much more than we might have assumed. Notre-­Dame is bigger than the stone and glass we see. It is far older, and it is part of the shifting terrain and context on which we encounter it. In some sense, the visible building is the tip of a much larger, much older proverbial iceberg.

When Destruction Is a Kind of Revelation

We don’t know how important something is until we face losing it. It is easy to take a thing for granted, even a giant thing like a Gothic cathedral. This realization came to me shortly after midday on April 15, 2019, when the news flashed over my phone that the Cathedral of Notre-­Dame [ 129 ]

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Figure 38. Wandrille de Préville, Notre-­Dame de Paris in flames, photographed from the Quai de Montebello, April 15, 2019. Creative Commons, License: Attribution-­Share Alike 4.0 International.

in Paris was on fire. When I saw the images online (fig. 38), I found it hard to believe. How could this majestic, 850-­year-­old building be engulfed in flames? For a few moments of sheer denial, the idea seemed improbable. As the days passed following April 15, news stories about Notre-­Dame dominated the media, covering the fire and its cause, but also how the destruction affected people. Henri Astier, a French journalist who writes for BBC News, published a short piece on the following day: No other site represents France quite like Notre-­Dame. Its main rival as a national symbol, the Eiffel Tower, is little more [ 130 ]

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than a century old. Notre-­Dame has stood tall above Paris since the 1200s. It has given its name to one of the country’s literary masterpieces. Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-­Dame is known to the French simply as Notre-­Dame de Paris. The last time the cathedral suffered major damage was during the French Revolution, when statues of saints were hacked by anti-­clerical hotheads. The building survived the 1871 Commune uprising, as well as two world wars, largely unscathed. It is impossible to overstate how shocking it is to watch such an enduring embodiment of our country burn.1 Astier’s observation that watching the building burn was shocking because it was “an enduring embodiment of our country” is a fascinating point. Such a massive building, originally built and still used for purposes of religious worship, makes a remarkable claim on French citizens today, Astier asserts, because it “is also much more than a religious site.” Millions of French were gripped in dismay at the sight of the flames, but not because they were observant Catholics. Most are not. The sadness, Astier claimed, was “shared by believers and non-­believers alike in a nation where faith has long ceased to be a binding force.” Astier also noted that he himself had not been inside the cathedral more than three or four times, and then only in the company of foreign visitors. Indeed, one imagines that most Parisians do not visit the church. That is something that tourists and scholars do, and the Catholic faithful who attend any of the more than two thousand religious services held annually at Notre-­Dame. Interestingly, only when the building is threatened with destruction does it suddenly become visible, meaningful, iconic, a massive material edifice for which the French express deep affection, even if they had never paid much attention to it before. Why is that? Astier gives us a compelling insight when he says that Notre-­Dame was “an enduring embodiment of our country.” There are two key ideas in this observation: “enduring embodiment” and “our country.” The building has stayed around for a very long time and has come to embody something as vague but forceful as the French nation. What exactly is a nation? It is not a simple thing. A nation is a vast collection of people, narratives, languages, races, ethnicities, religions, customs, food, clothing, lore, buildings, landscapes, and much more. And it is all of these over a [ 131 ]

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great deal of time. And it is all of these in a contested way—consider debates over Catholicism as the most important religion or the status of the modern French language over others long spoken within the geographical territory of France, such as Occitan, Norman, Breton, and Flemish. Perhaps the pressure of internal forces threatening social disruption makes the idea of a nation as an organic whole very attractive. Modernity itself seems to be defined by the mystique of nationhood as some sort of innate status we inherit at birth and carry with us to death. A nation is a social body to which citizens bear a sacred connection. People define themselves today by their national citizenship rather than by more local coordinates such as village, valley, region, or dialect. And religion plays a contested role in this: many citizens around the world want to insist that their nations are by nature defined by a particular religion, whereas other citizens counter that monarchy, parliament, or constitution are the proper basis of national identity. Notre-­Dame has come to incarnate all this over hundreds of years. The prospect of losing that tradition and collective experience in a few hours of raging firestorm is what Astier aptly described as “dismay.”

A Cultural Biography of Notre-­Dame de Paris

Henri Astier’s few lines capture an important feature of the church—its historical layering of meanings. As another writer noted, “To summarize the history of Notre-­Dame is to summarize the history of France, its glories and its sorrows.”2 This is an especially storied building. But before we can appreciate the many layers of meaning adhering to the church as a material structure over the long course of its life, we need to plunge into the very ground on which it stands. A material understanding of things means not only the object and what people do with it but the physical environment in which the object was created and has evolved. Long before the medieval cathedral was built, the place had been selected by others as meriting the construction of important structures. The Île de la Cité (fig. 39), one of two contiguous islands that split the River Seine into two branches 650 feet wide for about half a mile’s distance, was the site of an ancient settlement of a Gallic tribe called the Parisii, which suffered attack by the Roman army during the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar in the first century BCE. The Parisii had no doubt selected the low-­lying island because it was a convenient place to cross the river and it was friendly to trade—but also because it served as a de[ 132 ]

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Figure 39. Île de la Cité, 1609, detail from a map of Paris by Vassalieu dit Nicolay, reproduced in Estienne Cholet, Remarques singulières de Paris (Paris: Quantin, 1881). Photo by author.

fensible site, though not against the Romans.3 The Parisii lost their settlement, yet their name remained throughout the Roman period that followed, and ever since. Using the island as a port, the Romans developed a city on the Left Bank (south side) of the Seine during the first century CE. When Germanic tribes raided in the third century, the inhabitants moved to the Île de la Cité for greater defensibility, using stone from the former site to construct a wall around the island.4 By the early fourth century, the settlement was known as Paris. A shrine to Jupiter stood at the eastern [ 133 ]

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end of the island, where Notre-­Dame now sits. In the mid-­fourth century, the settlement was upgraded to the status of a garrison town, meaning that it was surrounded by a wall for purposes of defense and to house troops serving Rome’s need to defend the empire’s northern border. The garrison town became an imperial residence shortly later to accommodate three emperors who briefly resided in the city. When Rome converted to Christianity in the fourth century, Paris became a city with a bishop. By 362, when the bishop of Paris hosted a council, there was already a cathedral on the site of the present cathedral. It was a large church, consisting of five aisles. The interior included antique columns, white marble capitals, and a mosaic floor. One scholar asserts that the extant evidence suggests that the ancient cathedral was “worthy of comparison with the grandest basilicas of its day,” namely, those in Rome.5 By the sixth century, the imperial palace that had been built to house the emperors living in Paris became the residence of Clovis I, the Merovingian ruler who made Paris the kingdom’s capital in 508. Although we do not know a great deal about what was built on the Île de la Cité, we know enough to realize that there was a succession of sacred shrines on the site of the cathedral—from the Roman shrine to Jupiter to the fourth-­century “ecclesia parisiaca,” which was renovated and added to over several hundred years until the twelfth century, when it was torn down to make room for the cathedral that has endured to the present. A map of the city from 1609 (see fig. 39) shows the location of the cathedral at the east end of the Île de la Cité and the royal palace at the west end. Since the ninth century, a community of canons or priests serving the cathedral lived north of the building in residences that eventually became a canonical close annexed to the cathedral. It was necessary to remove existing buildings and extend the island northward to do so. Over time, the chapter of canons at Notre-­Dame assumed increasing authority over the cathedral and were even pitted in the twelfth century against the bishop when he resisted spending money on the restoration of the building, whose roof was failing. Only royal pressure induced the bishop to concede.6 But when Maurice de Sully became bishop of Paris in 1160, the balance of power shifted from the canonical chapter to the new prelate, who wasted no time in preparing to build a new church that would join the wave of new cathedral construction in France since the 1140s, including the projects of Abbot Suger at the abbey church of Saint-­Denis just north [ 134 ]

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of Paris, a building that included some of the very first Gothic elements. Suger’s abbey church was massive, measuring 355 feet in length, and Suger had written a famous description of its interior and various appointments (see fig. 6), which was quoted in the introduction.7 But at 402 feet long, Sully’s cathedral would be bigger.8 At the time of its construction, Notre-­ Dame was “the largest and highest building yet erected within an urban framework.”9 Sully may have felt that the cathedral of Paris needed to contribute to the vision of a Frankish nation ruled by the king and the ambitions of the Capetian line of kings advanced by Louis VI before he died in 1137. The strongest of the Frankish kings since Charlemagne, Louis VI had moved toward establishing a centralized government of the kingdom, reining in the territorial powers of dukes to make the royalty a dominant force. Assisted by his counselor, Abbot Suger, Louis VI made important additions to the royal palace on the island, which served as the residence of Frankish kings from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries. A grand new cathedral of Paris, as Sully conceived it, would complement the king’s aim, balance Suger’s ambitions for Saint-­Denis, and help fulfill the role that the leading diocese of France should play in the Gallican Church—the version of Catholicism on French soil, where the king reserved rights over the management of the national church otherwise claimed by the pope in Rome. A special relationship developed between the monarchy and the cathedral of Paris a short distance from the palace. Louis VII noted in 1147 that he was convinced that “we should remember to honor the Paris church for how long it has been closely allied to the crown.” 10 King and bishop oversaw the city together, and the city had become the capital of France. To build the grand new cathedral, which would cover more than 59,000 square feet, the new bishop would need to expand the available land as well as raze the existing cathedral. To achieve the surface space necessary, Sully engaged in negotiations with land- and homeowners, filled in the river separating the main island from a smaller one to the south, and demolished structures belonging to the church complex, including the hospital governed by the chapter of canons, the Hôtel-­Dieu. He designed a building that would include a square or parvis at the west end, forming the main entrance to the cathedral (a decision that has shaped the experience of the cathedral down to the present), and placed a road running from the west portal to the west, which accessed the two bridges connecting the island to the Left Bank to the south. Both features were vital links to the [ 135 ]

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surrounding city and secured the cathedral’s engagement in municipal life. Excavation of marshy terrain to the south and east had to go as deep as 30 feet before finding solid ground on which to begin construction. Layers of loam and gravel, saturated with water, had to be drained and removed. Landfill was brought in on barges. Construction ensued once the foundations were set. Wood and stone from local timber and quarries were ferried to the site. Because the cathedral would take many years to complete, it was necessary first to finish the surrounding buildings—the bishop’s palace, the Hôtel-­Dieu, and the canonical residences. Demolition of the ancient cathedral on the site was gradual since it continued to operate as the new church took shape. Construction began at the east end of the church. Called the chevet, this portion consisted of an ambulatory, two vaulted aisles that allowed visitors to circumambulate the interior of the cathedral at the eastern end where the aisles wrapped about the altar. The unvaulted chevet was completed by 1177. The choir, or section east of the transverse portions forming the transept (a transverse axis perpendicular to the long axis of the church), was completed five years later when the high altar was consecrated by a papal legate, assisted by the bishop, in 1182.11 After that, the sequence of construction was not simply a march westward. Examination of the building indicates that different portions were worked on simultaneously. Art historian Caroline Bruselius argues that work on the nave had begun while the upper stories of the choir were being completed and that work on the west end was under way while work on the nave continued.12 At the time of Sully’s death in 1196, the nave remained incomplete. Work on the west facade and bell towers still had not begun. About the time the unvaulted chevet was finished, the original architect was succeeded by a new one who proposed changes that Sully sanctioned. Another two or three master builders and four bishops came and went before the entire structure was completed about 1245. Yet even before it was done, the cathedral was already serving the critical function of French political life for which it had been undertaken. After a long series of battles with the counts of Toulouse, the Crown subjugated and annexed the county of Toulouse in the region of Languedoc. Philip Augustus, son of Louis VII, had answered the call of Pope Innocent III for a crusade in that region to fight the heresy of the Cathars in 1208. The king’s deeper motive was the acquisition of territory, which paid off twenty years later, albeit six years after his death, when the Count of [ 136 ]

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Toulouse came to Notre-­Dame on April 12, 1229, to submit to an elaborate rite of humiliation before Louis VIII inside the cathedral. As one historical account described it, the count “was stripped to his shirt and breeches, a cord was placed around his neck, and he was dragged down the whole length of the nave to the high altar. There, to complete his shame, he knelt and was scourged by the cardinal-­legate of the pope.” 13

The Cathedral and the Material Entanglement with Power

The interdependence of church and state is especially clear in the response of the French king and Parlement of Paris to the rise of the Reformation. On the morning of Sunday, October 18, 1534, Parisians walking to worship encountered printed broadsides (posters, or placards, in French) that carried the title, “True articles on the horrible, great and insufferable abuses of the papal Mass invented in direct opposition to the Holy Supper of Our Lord, only Mediator and Savior, Jesus Christ.” 14 The text lamented how the Catholic Mass misled the people, substituting for true knowledge of Christ a sensuous theater that submitted the laity to priestly abuse. In the Catholic Mass, the placards asserted, “the time is occupied in chimes, chanting, ceremony, lights, incense, costumes and such manner of singing whereby the poor people are miserably corralled and misled like sheep and ravaged, mangled, gnawed, and devoured by these wolves [priests].”15 The text also attacked the Catholic understanding of the sacrament of the altar. It seems doubtful that most Parisians could read or understand the densely written theological text, which focused on a radical Protestant view of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The German reformer Martin Luther taught that the body and blood of Jesus were really but mysteriously present in the bread and wine, but the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, in his famous debate with Luther at Marburg, Germany, in 1529, sharply rejected this view. Zwingli insisted that the bread and wine were symbols serving to commemorate Jesus’s sacrificial body and blood, which was no longer on earth and could not therefore be present in the elements of the rite. Christ was not in the symbols but in heaven, where he went after his resurrection. The placards posted in Paris and elsewhere in France took the Zwinglian view, as the following excerpt makes clear: [Catholic theologians,] adding error to error, have in their frenzy taught that after being breathed or spoken on, the bread, which they take be[ 137 ]

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tween their fingers, and the wine, which they place in a chalice, remain neither bread nor wine, but, as they say with the grand and prodigious word, Transubstantiation, Jesus Christ is hidden and enveloped beneath the accidents of the bread and of the wine, which is the teaching of demons, contrary to all truth and clearly contrary to all scripture. And I ask of these greatly misled ones where they invented or found this big word Transubstantiation? Sts. Paul, Matthew, Mark, and Luke and the ancient fathers never speak in this way; but when they do make mention of the Holy Supper of Jesus Christ, they clearly and simply say bread and wine.16 Even if they could not fathom the theological argumentation taken up by the placards, the people of Paris responded dramatically with rumors that “reformers were about to sack the Louvre, burn down the churches and massacre the faithful at Mass.” 17 Catholic preachers took to the city’s pulpits to fan the flame of popular opposition to Protestantism. No doubt pressure from the ecclesiastical establishment added anxiety about Protestant heresy to fear of social disorder.18 When more placards appeared in January, King Francis I banned all printing, then planned a robust response that fully engaged the material religion of the Catholic Church and its royal partner to make “reparation” to God for the heretical affront.19 The print culture of the upstart religious protest in France was met with the juggernaut of medieval Catholicism. To make a powerful public statement of unity and royal endorsement of the church, Francis ordered an elaborate expiatory procession through the streets of Paris in honor of the Blessed Sacrament. He decreed that work in the city cease on that day so that everyone could attend the procession. An official ordinance specified the composition of the process. Chroniclers add to our knowledge of this document to give us a detailed sense of how the Crown, the Parlement, and the church collaborated to stage a theatrical response to the menace of Protestantism. Clerics led the procession, followed by the clergy and rector of Notre-­Dame de Paris paired with the rector and faculty of the university, who in turn were followed by the royal Swiss Guard and clergy from Sainte-­Chapelle, the royal chapel. After them came bishops, fully robed and mitered, carrying relics and attending the consecrated host of the Blessed Sacrament, which was carried by the bishop of Paris, who walked beneath a canopy supported by the sons of the king. Behind them walked the king, bareheaded and dressed in [ 138 ]

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black. After the king came a long line of nobles, church officials, municipal authorities, and military officers. The king’s archers lined the streets to keep order. Yet it did not end there: next came a winding stream of banners and crosses representing all parishes of Paris as well as trade guilds, religious orders, and monastic communities.20 The spectacle continued in the Cathedral of Notre-­Dame with a solemn Mass led by the bishop of Paris, after which the king dined with the prelate. Following a round of speeches by the king, the bishop, and the mayor, the ritual took a grisly turn. The king and queen left after hearing the heretical prisoners plead for mercy in the cathedral square. Then the condemned were carted away to the pyres, following a wagon filled with large sacks of “books of the false and evil doctrine of Luther.”21 Francis and the Parlement orchestrated the massive public event to generate unity in the face of contempt for the Catholic Church and its principal mystery, the Eucharist. Notre-­Dame de Paris was the focal point for the stability of church and state. In fact, Notre-­Dame had long been the destination for processions from parish churches throughout Paris on the liturgical festival of Corpus Christi. Such processions carried the Blessed Sacrament under a canopy, followed by king and queen, if they were in the city at the time, and other nobles of high rank taking their place when they were not in order to embody the social hierarchy.22 The procession responding to the Protestant placards was therefore clearly patterned on the annual practice of celebrating Corpus Christi. And in coming years, processions to proclaim royal opposition to Protestant heresy followed the pattern of the 1535 procession, parading the Blessed Sacrament and relics, then celebrating Mass at Notre-­Dame.23 The massive towers of the cathedral faced the city of anxious leaders and laity as an immovable, ancient, and triumphal bulwark against the buffeting winds of heresy and rumors of war.

Notre-­Dame in State Celebrations and Revolutionary Iconoclasm

As time passed, the cathedral remained the privileged site for staging political pageantry in French civil religion, but as tastes shifted, it became necessary to undertake extensive efforts at redressing the Gothic structure to do so. This could mean permanent alteration to suit prevailing needs or temporary changes keyed to particular events. For instance, already in the first decades of the fourteenth century, chapels had been added to the [ 139 ]

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choir. These expanded the number of altars in the church at which daily masses were performed by the priests who belonged to the chapter. In later centuries, the Gothic style that the cathedral had helped introduce to the world came to be seen as the style of a backward age suffering from darkness and superstition. Thus, during the long reign of Louis XIV, the main altar was modified to reflect current architectural taste. The floor was raised in a series of levels. Columns were clad in marble and given capitals in gilt bronze and ornaments that recalled the Italian High Renaissance such as the palatial grandeur of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The changes are evident in a painting completed in 1710 of Mass before the main altar (fig. 40). Louis XIV also added monumental marble sculptures of himself and his father, Louis XIII, to either side of the altar. Though it was never realized, Louis’s architect even envisioned an ornate canopy towering above the altar as an allusion to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s massive sculpted bronze canopy over the main altar at Saint Peter’s. Behind and above the altar, a niche was created to receive a massive figure group portraying the Descent from the Cross, whose baroque figures could not be more different than the Gothic and Romanesque statuary on the west portals of Notre-­Dame. But temporary redecoration was more common, especially as the cathedral aged, making the Gothic design and décor less relevant, even old-­ fashioned. State events such as royal marriages and funerals, for instance, deployed the work of decorators on a massive scale to modify the interior to suit contemporary tastes and ceremonial needs. The Gothic style was far out of date by the time Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, was married to Francis II in 1558, so the interior was fitted with temporary structures and drapery in Renaissance style for the wedding.24 In 1741, the choir of the cathedral was the site for the pompous funeral of the queen of Sardinia, Elisabeth Therese of Lorraine, grandniece of Louis XIV and sister of the Duke of Orleans. Ordered by the Duke of Rochechouart, a peer of France and court member of King Louis XV, the funeral was a lavish ceremony celebrating the noble class. Figure 41 shows the transformation of the space to accommodate the privileged audience. An undulating line of candles stretches along each side, attached to the balustrade of the gallery level. Dark drapery beneath the candles encloses the space in a shroud of black, focusing attention on the very baroque construction of a catafalque, which mounts upward from a stone base recalling a fountain, on which is poised a nude river god before the base of the ornate sarcophagus. From [ 140 ]

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Figure 40. Jean Jouvenet, Mass of the Canon de la Porte, or the Main Altar of Notre-­Dame de Paris, 1708–10, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

each corner of the pedestal rise wreathes featuring skulls to the height of the gallery level, topped by dense configurations of candles. The entire structure is a fanciful allegorical conceit crafted for great spectacle to mourn the unexpected death of the young queen following the birth of her third child. The décor has nothing to do with the Gothic space it eclipses.25 In the fall of 1789, the National Assembly of the revolutionary government installed itself in the bishop’s palace of Notre-­Dame and shortly later declared that all church properties and possessions belonged to the [ 141 ]

Figure 41. Charles Nicolas Cochin II, Grand Funeral at Notre-­Dame de Paris for Elisabeth Therese of Lorraine, Queen of Sardinia, September 22, 1741, 1756, engraving.

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French people. The cathedral’s treasury was raided, the chapter of canons was dissolved, and the bells were removed from their tower perches with the intention of melting them down for reuse. During several months in 1793, in a period now known to historians as de-­Christianization, the Commune (the revolutionary governing body of Paris) sought to remove all effects of Catholicism and therefore ordered the removal of the long course of statues of biblical kings from the West facade, arrayed above the three arched portals. The figures were thought to portray kings of France, so their removal signified a purging of royal authority and its alliance with the Catholic Church in France. The manner of their removal brutally conveyed the violence of the Revolution: the sculptures were pulled by rope from their perch, falling to the pavement some sixty feet below, where they burst into fragments that were left to lie there for three years. The rubble did not affect the operation of the cathedral because the government forbade any further Catholic ceremonies and converted it into a Temple of Reason.26 The long tradition of redressing the interior of the cathedral for funeral and wedding decorations and for ceremonies of state encouraged a new and politically radical form of stage managing during the French Revolution. Recognizing the power of pageantry that Louis XIV had brought to its highest degree of political theater, the new government used the cathedral to host a Festival of Reason (fig. 42), which ridiculed as superstitious the rituals of Catholicism but zealously substituted for them the veneration of Reason. Borrowing sets from the Paris Opera, where a play entitled Homage to Liberty was being performed, the altar reconstructed by Louis XIV was covered, as shown in the print, and made into a stage space. The temple dedicated to Mary was now devoted to Philosophy. But philosophy and reason garnered little devotion among the people. The habits of Catholicism were far older and entrenched in popular sentiment. It became clear to many of the Revolution’s leaders that ritual exerted a strong hold on the populace. One could dismantle the apparatus of the church’s liturgical life, secularize churches, and reform the priesthood, all of which appealed to the anticlerical resentment for the ancien régime’s church-­state alliance. But the felt life of religious practice was rooted deeper. So the cult of Reason was replaced by a new cult of the Supreme Being. The French Enlightenment thinker Jean-­Jacques Rousseau had sought to diminish the role of the official church in civic ritual by stressing the utility of what he called “civil religion,” that is, public ritual [ 143 ]

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Figure 42. “Festival of Reason,” Révue de Paris 215 (1793): 210.

that exerted a powerful social adhesive on the body politic by appealing to a few minimal ideas. According to Rousseau, all that was necessary was a deism that endorsed the existence of a divine being, the afterlife, and the punishment of the wicked and the reward of the just.27 For Maximilien Robespierre, short-­lived president of the Revolutionary Government’s National Convention, this provided the essential armature for a civil religion that claimed virtue as the foundation of the republic. Celebration of the collective recognition of equality, brotherhood, and liberty was the function of civic ritual, behind which hovered a vague deity but one that might serve as a transcendent origin of virtue. For Robespierre, atheism lacked the metaphysical means to produce social cohesion. But with his execution during the brief period of the Revolution called the Terror, nothing came of the new religion. Notre-­Dame entered a kind of limbo. No longer used for Catholic worship or the fleeting cult of the Supreme Being, it became a warehouse, and some of its chapels were put up for sale. A few called for the church’s demolition and reuse as building material. Yet a small group of Catholics requested to use a portion of the interior for religious worship and were granted the space of the north transept to do so.28 A new chapter in the life of Notre-­Dame began with the rise of Napo[ 144 ]

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leon Bonaparte. Also a deist, Napoleon had no interest in restoring Catholicism for its own sake. But he found the Catholic Church useful as an institution that he could control because manipulating an old faith is easier than launching a new one. And the French monarchs had long insisted on broad priorities of the French state on religious matters, limiting the authority of the papacy on all temporal matters. The Declaration of the Clergy of France, issued in 1682 under Louis XIV, had formally established the operating principles of Gallicanism.29 Accordingly, Napoleon quickly modified the terms of the Concordat that he negotiated with Pope Pius VII in 1801, changing them in the following year to make all papal decrees subject to his government’s consideration. Still, the church had its uses. The old religion had roots and material culture already in place, and a history Napoleon found indispensable for his imperial ambitions. Yet he did not seek to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor in the traditional site for crowning kings of France—the Cathedral of Reims. Instead, Napoleon staged his coronation as emperor of the French in 1804 in Notre-­Dame de Paris. Why? No doubt in part because doing so reversed the abuse that the iconic church had suffered during the period of the Commune. But no less important, siting his coronation in Paris gave him a way of distinguishing himself from the tradition of kingship, which was what the Revolution had sought to end. Situating the event in Paris helped manufacture a continuity between his reign and the frustrated aims of the Revolution, to which he professed allegiance. And more than mere continuity, his coronation in Notre-­Dame de Paris corrected the violent malfunction of the Terror while also nodding to the association of the cathedral and the royal palace nearby. The limbo into which the cathedral had fallen provided the new emperor with the occasion to appropriate it for the imperial cult and to reestablish the Gallican Church’s stance within Christendom. The appropriation of the church was carried out materially in its decoration for the event, which was carefully scripted and published in 1805.30 A Gothic porch (imitating the transepts on the north and south sides of the nave) was added to the central arch of the west facade, and two galleries were extended on either side of it. On the porch appeared statues of Clovis and Charlemagne, Napoleon’s imperial counterparts in French history and “founders of the French monarchy,” as the program noted.31 Inside, as figure 43 shows, a grand triumphal arch was placed at the entrance of the nave, and under its arch was the imperial throne, recalling the arches of imperial Rome. The extent of the redecoration of the church [ 145 ]

Figure 43. The Emperor Swears the Oath of the Constitution at Notre-­Dame Cathedral, from Sacred Festival and Coronation of Their Imperial Majesties, Paris, 1804. HIP / Art Resource, NY.

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was customized to the occasion. One entered the nave only by walking to the right or left of the imperial throne. Color was everywhere in drapery and banners, and twenty-­four chandeliers, suspended from the vaults, brightened the twilight of the interior. Carpet covered the floor of the nave, choir, and sanctuary. The interior and the west facade were transformed for the regal event. Pius VII attended the ceremony, sitting quietly as Napoleon crowned himself. Rather than kneeling to receive the crown from the supreme pontiff or an archbishop, the traditional rite of crowning French kings, Napoleon placed the crown on his own head as a way of asserting a nonreligious right to office. And he had built into the nave an imperial throne. Yet he chose the main altar of Notre-­Dame to receive the papal blessing as emperor. Napoleon’s pageant master restored the main altar to the Virgin, which is evident in the print reproduced here (fig. 44). This image shows a sculpture of the Pietà above the main altar, which is dwarfed by the towering but empty papal throne on the left. It is noteworthy that Pius VII did not perform the consecration of the new emperor from this throne but moved to the seat placed before the altar, as shown in the print. Napoleon designed the ceremony to use the pontiff and the church to affirm his stature, but he did not bow to papal authority. The pontiff was there to acknowledge the coronation, not to perform it. This subordinated the church to imperial power. In fact, the pope had left the sanctuary altogether when Napoleon swore the civil oath, “to govern in the sole interest, happiness and glory of the French people.”32 Napoleon’s use of Notre-­Dame for his coronation was effectively reversed by the Bourbon Restoration following his fall in 1814. On May 29, 1825, Charles, Count of Artois, son of Louis XV and brother of Louis XVI and Louis XVIII, was crowned king of France at the traditional site for coronations—the Cathedral of Reims. The old cathedral of Paris had too many memories to serve the return of the ancien régime. But its neglect would continue for only a few years. Victor Hugo would soon change everything with a novel.

Notre-­Dame as Modern Visual Culture

The material history of Notre-­Dame de Paris continues with two dominant patterns: restoring the cathedral from its dilapidated state and disseminating its fame in an endless flurry of reproductions. The spark that ignited both was Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-­Dame de Paris, published in [ 147 ]

Figure 44. Consecration of Napoleon and Coronation of Josephine by Pope Pius VII, December 2, 1804, from Sacred Festival and Coronation of Their Imperial Majesties, Paris, 1804. HIP / Art Resource, NY.

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1831. This book, as we shall see, engulfed the cathedral in waves of reproduction that continue to the present. Hugo was dismayed by the sad state into which the cathedral had fallen and the poor and neglected conditions of Parisian medieval architecture generally. He deplored the modifications and poor restorations conducted by later architects. In a note to one edition of his novel, Hugo lamented what he considered the decadence of modern architecture, indeed, the “death” of the art. Yet he hoped for its regeneration and called in the meantime for the preservation of the old buildings. “Let us inspire the nation, if possible, with a love of our national architecture. Such, the author declares, is one of the main aims of this book; such is one of the main aims of his life.”33 Hugo argued in his novel that architecture was the universal form of writing before the advent of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, when printed books replaced buildings. But did Hugo, author of mass print, bemoan the rise of print? He did not. “The invention of print,” he wrote, “is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolutions.”34 And one of these revolutions produced deep and lasting opposition to Catholicism. “Before printing, the Reformation would just have been a schism; printing made it a revolution. Take away the printing press and heresy is enervated. Be it fate or providence, Gutenberg was Luther’s precursor.”35 This is in fact a view that many cultural historians have taken in the present day.36 To Hugo it meant that “the stone Bible and the paper Bible” each deserve recognition for their historical role in the history of European culture. That required not denying what Hugo called “the grandeur of the building raised in its turn by printing.” Hugo, in effect, would say that the Parlement and Francis I rightly saw the Affaire des Placards in 1534 as an ominous threat to the order of the day. He seems to anticipate it in his novel, which is set in the fifteenth century. But he also saw the threat as a promise of cultural progress, change that was not tragic but moving toward a higher social ideal. Hugo the republican saw the role of print as progressive. This did not mean that he endorsed Protestantism but rather that he saw religious change as part of a larger cultural shift to which material culture also belonged. The changes effected by the development of print culture did not simply mean the replacement of architecture as the primary conduit of cultural knowledge. We need to recognize what print culture came to mean for the Cathedral of Notre-­Dame de Paris in the nineteenth century and after. [ 149 ]

Studying Material Religion

Architecture and print were not simply on a collision course that resulted in the decline of architecture. “The printing press, that giant machine, pumping without respite all the intellectual sap of society,” is the sentiment of the novel’s villain, Dom Claude Frollo, the perverse deacon of the cathedral, as explained by the narrator. Dom Claude regarded print as the triumphant enemy of the old regime of the faith represented by architecture. Yet Hugo’s novel and the industry of mass-­produced postcards and photographs in the nineteenth century helped make the cathedral something it was not before, endowing it with a life beyond its eroding material existence.37 Mass-­produced visual media converted the medieval structure into a new visual entity that circulates in various media. But to understand how this could take place, it is necessary to consider additional factors that unfolded in the nineteenth century. Another cause of the new focus on Notre-­Dame in Hugo’s day was its environmental reframing in the largest project of urban renewal of the modern era: Napoleon III’s project to remake Paris as the emperor Augustus had remade imperial Rome. And the emperor wished to do so in a way that would avoid the problem that helped bring down his predecessor, King Louis Philippe, in the revolutionary upheaval of 1848: a vast underclass of unemployed workers whose poverty fueled deep discontent. So Napoleon III embarked on a major, long-­term public works project that would put thousands to work for fifteen years clearing out old and decrepit portions of the center of Paris, shifting streets, and building new structures. Louis Philippe had endorsed the restoration of Notre-­Dame, and Napoleon III in turn supported it with significant funds (and chose the cathedral for his inauguration in 1852—no doubt with his uncle’s imperial coronation in mind—and for his marriage in 1853 to the empress Eugénie and for the baptism of their only child, a son, in 1856). As the restoration of the cathedral continued, Napoleon III launched a much larger campaign of redesigning Paris. The urban designer in whom he invested enormous license to redesign Paris was Georges-­Eugène Haussmann. Baron Haussmann treated some of the city’s major historical monuments—the Louvre, the Hôtel des Invalides, and Notre-­Dame—as sacrosanct monuments, “pieces of urban sculpture to be set apart,” “unencumbered by the cityscape.”38 At Notre-­Dame, his changes to the parvis and the milieu of the Île de la Cité accomplished just that, opening up the formerly crowded square before the western facade of the cathedral by demolishing a large number of private buildings. These structures had comprised one of the [ 150 ]

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Figure 45. Panoramic view of Notre-­Dame and the Seine, postcard, ca. 1930. Photo by author.

worst slums in Paris. They were nearly entirely removed by Haussmann.39 Not everyone was happy with the result for Notre-­Dame. One writer referred to “Haussmann’s absurd disengagement of the edifice. . . . The proportions of the parvis now are in absolute contradiction with those of Notre-­Dame and with the traditions of the Middle Ages.”40 Elsewhere this author asserted that Haussmann’s conception of the space, “much too large and absolutely bereft of character, insolently falsified the proportions of the façade of the cathedral.”41 For those who wanted to preserve the late medieval situation of Notre-­Dame, this critique of Haussmann may seem just, but the flood of images that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century clearly exploited the larger space since it offered much less obstruction to photographing the western face of the cathedral. This is clearly visible in postcards such as figure 45. As a result of Haussmann’s reframing of Notre-­Dame in the surrounding city, the cathedral came to be seen as a giant piece of scenery, which is how it appears in tourist artifacts such as postcards and street art. Like an establishing shot in films, the massive edifice identifies any scene as unmistakably Paris. The cathedral has been transformed into a work of art framed by its urban surroundings. As Haussmann refigured the face of Paris, the cathedral was under[ 151 ]

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going a comparably extensive facelift. But even before Haussmann’s project started, a movement emerged among the Parisian intelligentsia to restore Notre-­Dame that was inspired by Hugo’s novel. The government of King Louis Philippe sponsored a competition to restore the cathedral. In 1844, the young architect Eugène-­Emmanuel Viollet-­le-­Duc, and a colleague, Jean-­Baptiste Lassus, were selected. Their plans for restoration were extensive because the cathedral was in a dire state. In addition to several major aspects of the exterior to be replaced, they wanted to remove all the classical features installed by Louis XIV in the choir because these bore no relation to the Gothic style, thus reversing the desire of Louis to eclipse the outmoded style.42 But the restorers were not allowed to do so because Louis’s changes had become firmly implanted in the experience of the cathedral. For the exterior, “restoration” did not mean restoring many existing sculptures that were heavily damaged but producing new ones based on contemporary models at other Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres and Amiens. Nearly all the gargoyles and chimeras now on the cathedral are not original but careful productions crafted under the restorers’ supervision. The twenty-­eight kings destroyed in 1793 were reproduced from fragments or taken from contemporary models. Although the architects wanted to remove accretions and return the cathedral to its original vision, that turned out to mean far more interpretation than the two men had originally indicated.43 As the scope of intervention widened, and especially after Lassus died in 1857, Viollet-­le-­Duc even undertook additions to the cathedral interior and exterior. A historian described the restoration as guided by the idea of creating “an ideal Notre-­Dame such as, in [Viollet-­le-­Duc’s] belief, it must have been in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The cathedral became the basis of his own creative activity, turned not towards the future but towards the past.”44 An architectural historian noted that “in spite of all his scholarship, [Viollet-­le-­Duc] still had a Romantic approach to Gothic architecture. The idea of seeing Notre-­Dame ‘as it was’ in fact required him to restart it to an extent that went beyond the consolidation and restoration of missing parts.”45 In his version of a restoration, Viollet-­le-­Duc removed whatever he felt diverged from the original plan of the cathedral. The result has been called a “re-­ creation” of a medieval church rather than the relic itself.46 Ironically, restoring the cathedral meant destroying substantial aspects of its history. In the end, the building became hyper-­medieval—that is, more medieval in concept than medieval in history. [ 152 ]

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Notre-­Dame de Paris and the Nation Today

We have seen centuries of development spurred by the interaction of the French state, the monarchy, the national church, the site at the heart of Paris, and the nation, as it has been variously understood—as a region leading a country, as a king, as a state, as a people, and as a national religious identity. And that does not exhaust the cast of actors. Bishops, nobles, shopkeepers, Protestants, riots, novelists, tourists, and restorers— and now a president. Shortly after the devastating fire in April 2019, President Emmanuel Macron announced that the damaged cathedral would be rebuilt so that it would be “even more beautiful than it was.”47 His vow launched a new round of controversy that seemed to revive an old pattern put in place by Hugo and Viollet-­le-­Duc, which leads us to ask, what exactly does restoration mean? Macron injected the progressive idea of improving on the original, or we should say “original” in light of the extensive renovations and innovations conducted by Viollet-­le-­Duc. Macron also sounded another familiar note by using the venerable cathedral as a way of thinking about French nationhood. “We are a people of builders,” he said.48 A host of architects, curators, and academics rushed to urge the ambitious president to take more time before launching into an aggressive campaign of innovation.49 The French senate passed a bill urging that restoration be restricted to returning the building to its appearance just before the fire.50 But it should not be surprising that an energetic national leader should want to change the old building. We saw that with Louis XIV and Napoleon, although their modifications were on a smaller scale and in most cases impermanent. But they introduced changes that did not question something that has since largely faded from the French national perception of the structure: its distinctly Roman Catholic function. For Macron and most French citizens today, the building is not about the Catholic faith but about the French nation. As one Parisian, an engineer, put it, “We are French, we are going to try to rebuild Notre Dame as it was before, because it is a symbol.” 51 What matters today is the Frenchness of this symbol. That is to suggest not that the cathedral has lost religious value but that the religion in question has changed: from Catholicism as the religion of the French people to the national cult of France. But we should not limit the function of religion as a social force to sectarian religion. Civil religion is religion, too. [ 153 ]

Studying Material Religion

The French response to the disaster of the fire remains a deeply religious one—civil religion rather than sectarian. One may be Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, or atheist and still, as a French citizen, regard the need to rebuild the cathedral as a matter of national urgency. Émile Durkheim’s analysis of the social nature of religion seems quite pertinent. The religion in question is not about deities or spirit beings, the afterlife, or transcendent powers of any sort. It is about something far more immanent and in need of continuing effort: the nation. The cathedral is the thing—the totem, the engine of the collective reality of the French people, the very thing that embodies and produces them as a people. The efflorescence of concern over the damaged cathedral reminds us that in addition to everything else it is, religion is about social life, collective memory, a sense of belonging, and a feeling of shared purpose. And that, to riff on Durkheim, is an eminently material thing.52 I suppose one could speak of the cathedral as a focal object, but it is more than that. Notre-­Dame de Paris gathers up in its skin and structure and site the many lives this totem of Frenchness has led. We find there traces of them all and of the history that preceded the building. More than a focal object, the building and its site are as close as we might come to thingness itself, the very thing, the vast material network that people feared they would lose to towering flames. The prospect was unbearable, so rebuilding in some form is beyond question.

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[ S ix ]

W o rd s a n d T hings ••• We have seen how images, clothing, amulets, wands, and places are agents that act on human beings. The imposing edifice of Notre-­Dame de Paris inspires faith in the pious visitor. The Temple Mount in Jerusalem fires the pilgrim’s prayer with intensified fervor. The devotee is affected by the vestments of the priest or priestess or by the gaze of the saint. Agency can be discerned in the sound of music, the movement of heavenly bodies, the silence of caves, the terror of forests. We might be tempted to think of words as immaterial, but as mental, verbal, and graphic devices they work with things in subtle and potent ways. Naming something brings it into the light of understanding and use, taking it from the shadowy world of a thing to the concrete purpose and value of an object. And when they are used to name us, our friends, or our enemies, words become forms of action that pelt and wound, caress and sooth, haunt and punish. Words are speech, ideas, and inscriptions, which means that they slip easily from one’s mind into world and then into other minds. Words are therefore private and public, concrete and abstract. We need to understand what difference this makes for our apprehension and experience of objects, places, and people.

Words as Agents

As pointed out in chapter 2, the material study of religion examines the complex interweaving of thought and practice. In this chapter I want to demonstrate how words as signifiers and concepts collaborate with other human and nonhuman actors to affect the ability of religious artifacts to act on human beings. This is important because the study of religion means using words and concepts to classify and analyze them. Scholars must consider what their terms and ideas do to the religions they study. The names that groups select to refer to religious objects often signal how the names connect to the broader array of actors forming the networks to which the objects are attached. The relation between words and things is as powerful to religious practitioners as it is to scholars of religion.1 [ 155 ]

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To show what I mean, what follows is a biography in seven chapters that traces the migration of objects acquired by missionaries in the South Pacific during the early nineteenth century to settings in Boston and London, where they have been displayed in different ways, even down to the present. At every stop along the way, different terms were used to describe and categorize the objects. In the process, their ability to act changed. Each change registered what the anthropologist James Clifford has called a “taxonomic shift.”2 By that he means the change in classification that renames and respecifies the artifact, and therefore shapes the perception and interpretation of it. In the realm of religious artifacts, taxonomic shifts happen for many reasons: viewers bring needs of their own to the object; theological discourse and popular lore clothe the object with different expectations; the material circumstances of viewing the object change. At every step, the words used to label the artifact work on people who interact with it and affect the experience of the artifact itself. But at every step, the artifact continues to be something of a misfit, refusing to conform entirely to the categories used to define it as a particular kind of object. Its “thingness” resists complete appropriation or redefinition.3 The trajectory of words that we will trace in this biography takes the following sequence. These are the principal terms used successively in the nineteenth century to name the artifacts, beginning in the South Seas and ending in England and the United States: 1. A’a, Ta’aroa, Oro, Tane 2. Idols 3. Prisoners, trophies of Christianity 4. Collected curiosities 5. Specimens of ethnology 6. Aesthetic objects, works of art This trail of changing names plots the long arc of artifacts traveling from their original setting to museums in Europe and North America. From the god’s indigenous title to the status of “idol,” “evil spirit,” and from “trophy” to “specimen” and “art,” unfold a succession of attitudes that recognize in the object varying kinds of power drawn from the object’s location within a matrix, or network. These terms all serve as the handles that have been used to regard the artifacts as well as the cultures and peoples who made them. Of course, words do not work alone. In what follows, we will consider how material objects, their physical location, their forms of dis[ 156 ]

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play and treatment, the emotions they incite, and the forces of divinity, nationalism, authenticity, and authority they invoke correspond to each taxonomic shift. In every period of their lives, the artifacts behaved differently, and part of the reason for that was the effect of their names, which participate among the assemblages in which the artifacts are variously objectified.

The Occidental Journey of Polynesian Deities: A Cultural Biography in Seven Chapters

Chapter 1. Before the West Arrived Ta’aroa, the first and oldest deity, his son Oro, first of several war gods, and Tane, god of the forest, were said by inhabitants of Polynesia to have been “born of Night, or Chaos.” A’a may be a version of Ta’aroa, or not, but he was a primary deity on Rurutu, an island south of Tahiti, where an image of the god was acquired by missionaries and celebrated for its uniqueness (fig. 46).4 For Polynesians, these gods were the beginning of things because they emerged from the chaos of night and produced the gods who oversaw everything that made up the Islanders’ world—sea, sky, rock, wind, forest, plants, pigs, volcanoes, and the professions of human beings. Life on the islands of Polynesia was not irenic. Rivalry of many sorts animated social life, periodically breaking out in violence over leadership, which consisted of local chieftains among whom the office of kingship shifted. Sacred images and artifacts played an important role as totems and trophies of the prevailing group in a long history of political struggle among Islanders. These objects were commonly stored and displayed at marae, open-­air temples or courts that featured a solid stone pyramidal structure called an ahu at one end of an enclosed court (fig. 47). The ahu was the most sacred site in the marae and was mounted only by priests, who attended the wooden and stone figures of deities (too) displayed there. Figures of family deities and ancestors were kept in the domestic setting (fig. 48).5 On the occasion of principal festivals such as pae atua, and at the festival of first fruits (maoa raa matahiti), the gods were brought out from their resting places, unwrapped, anointed with oil, and displayed for the public, which was usually restricted to men.6 Tapa, fabric crafted from bark, clothed some of the sacred artifacts and was replaced with fresh wrapping on each occasion.7 “Throughout Polynesia,” William Ellis wrote in 1831, after spending eight years on a number of Polynesian islands as a Protestant missionary, “the ordinary medium of communicating or extending [ 157 ]

Figure 46. Polynesian creator deity, A’a, from Rurutu, 17th century, sandalwood, height 3 ft., 10 in., British Museum, London.

Figure 47. The great marae of Temarre at Papeete, Tahiti, from James Wilson, A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean . . . (London, 1799). Photo by author. Figure 48. “The Family Idols of Pomare,” Missionary Sketches, no. 3 (October 1818), cover. Photo by author .

Studying Material Religion

supernatural powers, was the red feather of a small bird found in many of the islands, and the beautiful long tail-­feathers of the tropic, or man-­of-­ war bird. For those feathers the gods were supposed to have a strong predilection.”8 As a result, feathers were the votive objects that were most valuable to offer the gods. Not long before he was baptized in 1819, Pomare II gave to missionaries at Tahiti a number of his “family gods,” those items kept in his home for votive purposes, and these included feathers and objects wound in cinet (the fiber of a coconut husk, see fig. 48). Feathers were so much at the heart of their religious practices that when speaking to Christian missionaries, the Tahitians referred to their deities as “the gods of feathers.”9 Some of the sorts of objects that Ellis described appear among the items handed over by Pomare. Devotees brought feathers to the festivals and gave them to priests attending the deities. A’a (see fig. 46) was a wooden figure hollowed out to create compartments on its back side. Into these were placed feathers and other objects to remain there until the next such ritual occasion, when, now charged with the deity’s presence, they would be removed and exchanged for the feathers brought to the festival. Feathers could also be attached to the many uncarved divine figures displayed at the marae. Since, as Émile Durkheim noted, the sacred was contagious, it transferred to the objects placed within the cult deities. The feathers taken away “were thought to possess all the properties of the images to which they had been attached, and a supernatural influence was supposed to be infused into them.”10 In order to secure the power absorbed by the feathers, the priest offered a prayer to the principal deities of the shrine, then declared that the feathers were indwelt by the gods and distributed them among the worshippers. The sacralized feathers were then taken home and placed in small bamboo or wooden containers. Chapter 2. The Christian Presence in Polynesia A great deal of what we know about the history of Polynesia comes from records produced by Christian missionaries who first arrived there in the late eighteenth century. Many European explorers preceded them. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Spanish and Dutch voyages crossed the South Pacific, reaching the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Samoa, the Marquesas, and the Cook Islands, among others. In the 1760s and 1770s, British expeditions led by Samuel Wallis and James Cook visited Tahiti, New Caledonia, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). In 1795, the Protestant organization called the London Missionary Society (LMS) formed [ 160 ]

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with the intention of evangelizing Islanders in the South Pacific as its first global task. The society purchased a ship, hired Captain James Wilson to lead the mission, and set sail for Tahiti with thirty missionaries on board in 1796. They arrived in the next year and by 1802 had acquired enough of the Tahitian language to begin to preach to the native populace, at least to those who would listen.11 The missionaries encountered the king of Tahiti, Pomare I, who had recently united the island under his rule. He greeted the British and maintained a friendly relationship with them after he abdicated in 1791 in favor of his son, Otu (ca. 1782–1821), though Pomare served as regent until his death in 1803. After his death, Otu took his name, becoming Pomare II. In 1816, William Ellis, a twenty-­two-­year-­old clergyman, arrived at Moorea, an island eleven miles from Tahiti, to work as a missionary for the LMS. He studied Polynesian languages in Sydney, New South Wales, on the way, and his command of Tahitian grew over the next six years. In 1822, Ellis moved to Hawaii, where he remained for two years before returning to London. He published his well-­received Polynesian Researches, a four-­volume account of his time on Polynesian islands, between 1831 and 1833. In 1844, the first volume of his History of the London Missionary Society appeared. It is no accident that a few years after arriving, Christian missionaries fixed their attention on describing the destruction of marae on Polynesian islands as evidence of religious conversions. The marae were the focal point of religious life and the domain of the priests who served the gods, conducted rituals and festivals, and worked closely with the chief and his family members, who were often themselves members of the priesthood. But the Christians were hardly the first to take aim at the marae. Indigenous struggles had long taken place at these sites, far in advance of the arrival of Christian missionaries. In fact, only four years after their arrival in Tahiti, the Protestant missionaries witnessed this sort of conflict, which on this occasion centered in the powerful wooden form of Oro. According to Ellis, the figure of Oro “was a straight log of hard casuarina wood, six feet in length, uncarved, but decorated with feathers.” 12 Casuarina is native to western Pacific islands and is an evergreen tree that grows to 115 feet in height. Its leaves are long, slender, round forms that form rich plumes of featherlike masses on the trees. The resemblance to feathers may have enhanced the sacred stature of the tree as the material used to craft the body of the deity Oro. In any case, as the god of war, and the [ 161 ]

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principal deity of Tahiti, Oro became the central device over which political rivalries were conducted. Since his figure was about six feet in length, he was housed in what Ellis described as an “ark or residence of the idol,” which was loaded onto a canoe to transport Oro from one marae to another.13 His movement was not incidental but highly contested. Oro had been located in a marae at Pare, on the northern shore of Tahiti, which was where Pomare was a chief and his son was born. Early in 1802, the god was seized by chiefs from Atehuru, who took him to their marae.14 The group that did so was agitating against the kingship of Otu, as successor to Pomare I.15 Possession of the god’s body, as it was referred to, became the focus of struggle and the cause of war. Otu seized the figure of Oro from the marae at Atehuru, on the eastern coast of Tahiti, and took it to his marae at Tautira, on the southwestern coast. This resulted in a bloody series of battles and reprisals in which the British took the side of Otu, providing him with arms to fight the party from Atehuru, led by a chief named Rua.16 Rua and his forces surprised the king at Tautira, and retook the figure of Oro. But with the assistance of a British armed ship and forces, Pomare I attacked Atehuru, and was able to capture Rua, and executed him. This galvanized resistance among Rua’s forces, who demanded Pomare’s death in expiation for the killing of Rua. With that, Pomare and the British determined to withdraw, unwilling to engage in further battle. So ended the War of Rua, as it is known in Tahitian history. Although the figure of Oro remained at Atehuru, the crisis brought Pomare and Otu closer to the British missionaries. After his father’s death, Otu went on to cultivate a relationship with the missionaries, eventually becoming baptized. The religion of the missionaries urged the destruction of the Polynesian deities and the disbanding of the hereditary priestly caste attending them. Eventually, Otu obliged his British allies. Deprived of the god who migrated from one marae to the next, marking the indigenous Tahitian rhythm of political power, Tahitian culture shifted to a Christian-­inflected system of municipal order that eventually saw the marae become the community centers and tourist sites that they are today. Chapter 3. Christian Conversion and the Destruction of Idols The missionaries were frustrated by the enduring power of the indigenous religion and shocked by its object worshiping rites, especially by the practice of human sacrifice. So when political affairs made it possible, namely, [ 162 ]

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Figure 49. “Destruction of the Idols at Otaheite [Tahiti],” Missionary Sketches, no. 6 (July 1819), cover. Photo by author.

the alliance and eventual conversion of Pomare II, the missionaries encouraged the destruction of religious sites and artifacts. They usually did so through the intermediary of native converts, with ax or flame, sometimes with fanfare. Smashed and burning idols, after all, made great copy for the folks back home in England, who enjoyed reading missionary news reports and likely found it easier to donate to the cause when the dramatic news of advancing the kingdom of Christ could be imagined vividly in bonfires (fig. 49). Widespread destruction of temples and cult figures in the islands of the South Pacific took place from 1815 to 1830—at the Tahitian Islands (1815), the Society Islands, the Hawaiian Islands (1819), and the Cook Islands (1830).17 On Tahiti, rival groups continued to fight over issues of dominance and came to split along lines of adherence to the traditional deities and adherence to the new religion of Christianity. Pomare II had long worked with the British and the LMS to overcome resistance to his rule and succeeded in 1815 and 1816, when a number of local chiefs, first on Moorea and then on Tahiti, proclaimed allegiance to him and destroyed the morae as sites devoted to the indigenous religion. The war that ensued, as Ellis tells the story, was Pomare and his Christian allies on Moorea and among the British versus “the idolatrous party” that had promised its supporters an easy victory in the name of Oro.18 Gathering a large number of [ 163 ]

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forces in November 1815, Pomare II met his enemy. When Pomare’s group eventually routed them, he assembled a group of warriors to proceed to Tautira, where they were to destroy the marae, all idols, and particularly the body of Oro, which was there at the time. When they arrived at the marae, they explained to the priests there what had occurred and met no resistance as they undertook Oro’s ritual humiliation: At length, they brought out the idol, stripped him of his sacred coverings and highly-­valued ornaments, and threw his body contemptuously on the ground. It was a rude, uncarved log of aito wood, casuarina equisatifolia, about six feet long. The altars were then broken down, the temples demolished, and the sacred houses of the gods, together with their covering, ornaments, and all the appendages of their worship, committed to the flames. The temples, altars, and idols, all round Tahiti, were shortly after destroyed in the same way. The log of wood, called by the natives the body of Oro, into which they imagined the god at times entered, and through which his influence was exerted, Pomare’s party bore away on their shoulders, and, on returning to the camp, laid in triumph at their sovereign’s feet.19 It was a military defeat that secured Pomare’s sovereignty and triumphantly proclaimed the new religion’s power over the old. Religion and state walked hand in hand. But Oro’s humiliation was not yet over. His body was subsequently fixed up as a post in the king’s kitchen, and used in a most contemptuous manner, by having baskets of food suspended from it; and, finally, it was riven up for fuel. This was the end of the principal idol of the Tahitians, on whom they had long been so deluded as to suppose their destinies depended; whose favour, kings, and chiefs, and warriors had sought; whose anger all had deprecated; and who had been the occasion of more bloody and desolating wars, for the preceding thirty years, than all other causes combined.20 No doubt the propaganda value of the continued disgracing of the god’s body accrued to Pomare’s benefit. Certainly, his missionary allies appreciated the sentiment. Oro was made to suffer longer in order to attenuate the old religion’s defeat. The god’s enduring bondage meant that his religion was not coming back. The woodcut reproduced here (see fig. 49) entitled Destruction of the Idols at Otaheite; Pulling Down an Altar; Building a Christian Church, [ 164 ]

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appeared on the cover of the sixth number of the LMS publication Missionary Sketches, published in July 1819. The image is a kind of digest of recent events, conveying the process of destruction and creation that the society celebrated as the fruit of its labor on Tahiti. Rather than a documentation of a particular event, the image shows a group of Tahitians casting their former gods into the flames as two British gentlemen stand in the distance, admiring the native force at work constructing a church, while another group of Tahitians on the left side demolish a morae. Perhaps the two figures in the foreground, silhouetted against the roaring flames, are priests of the morae who impotently lament the destruction before them. If so, that might help explain why the wooden deity shown in the center appears to be alive, flying helplessly into the blaze, gesturing in desperation at his fate. Perhaps the idol is alive the better to suffer his destruction. Yet he seems to signal a mixed message: Are idols empty blocks of wood, or are they weaker spirits, demons, who have been overpowered by the might of the True God? Both messages are part of the biblical tradition, and both were used by missionaries at work among polytheistic religious cultures. The two characterizations differ in their explanation of the agency of idols: in one case the idol is understood to work because of the psychology of the polytheist who merely imagines their animation under the duress of superstition; in the other case, idols really are powerful because they are the devices of Satan and his demons. In both cases, the objects are understood as agents, though with different sources of power. Chapter 4. On the Matter of Agency: What Makes Images Do Things? It is useful to pause here to reflect on the power of things in Polynesia during the first years of the missionaries’ presence. The survival of ritual artifacts is noteworthy because they did not all die in flames or mold away in the bush. The Christians saved some and the gods lingered, even if only for the sake of the missionary desire to humiliate them. Still, this raises the fascinating question of their agency—the continuing ability of images and other artifacts to act and survive. Their grip on indigenous society was such that that missionaries felt it necessary to undertake ritual destruction of their images in order to release the Islanders from the strong hold that their so-­called superstitious religion exercised over them. For missionary William Ellis, the hold was part of a broad and material technology of place. He described the flora of the dense tropical islands as a [ 165 ]

Studying Material Religion

Figure 50. The marae of Tane, at Maeva, Tahiti, from William Ellis, Polynesian Researches (1833), 1:341. Photo by author.

powerful agent in shaping the emotional lives of the indigenous, which Ellis illustrated with an engraving of a forest view of the marae at Maeva in Tahiti, dedicated to Tane, god of the forest (fig. 50): [The] interwoven and dark umbrageous branches frequently excluded the rays of the sun; and the contrast between the bright glare of a tropical day, and the somber gloom in the depths of these groves, was peculiarly striking. The fantastic contortions in the trunks and tortuous branches of the aged trees, the plaintive and moaning sound of the wind passing through the leaves of the casuarinas, often resembling the wild notes of the Eolian harp—and the dark walls of the temple, with the grotesque and horrific appearance of the idols—combined to inspire extraordinary emotions of superstitious terror, and to nurture that deep feeling of dread which characterized the worshippers of Tahiti’s sanguinary deities.21 Ellis suggests that affect, the autonomic production of feeling, was a powerful agent in indigenous belief, indeed, so powerful that Westerners were able to understand the beguiling effect of terror and dread as the [ 166 ]

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;):>1?q ~,o~a .... ·>:;: ,~.:;; r 'i1 t F. . •; . ~ .. !! ·~ ! !; , ! •. ;.. ., :fl ! l 5i iJ ! _i

'£

hc:;.t,:n; ·.1%U ) ":,

{ : J:

')~JO :'"!n'.:!'.· ~;;

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u

:11JL,i I;:

Figure 51. Aeolian harp, from Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650). Digitized by Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

natural consequence of the jungle setting. The reference to the Aeolian harp is noteworthy. It was a device much beloved of Romantic writers in early nineteenth-­century Europe and is pictured here in an engraving from the work of the Jesuit seventeenth-­century polymath, Athanasius Kircher (fig. 51). The image shows Aeolus, keeper of the winds in ancient Greek mythology, blowing into the device, which channels the wind to elements that vibrate, producing sound without a human agent. The Aeolian harp, as described in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem, offered a prospect of enchantment that the poet’s beloved rejected with evangelical fervor but whose magic Coleridge managed to register in his poem (1795) before he sobered up to his lady’s Protestant temperance. . . . And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise, Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-­Land.22 The sound of the wind at work on the harp was the music of elves riding the wind. The Aeolian harp operated solely on the basis of wind pass[ 167 ]

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ing over its strings, producing eerie tones for which there was no human maker. Ellis, it would seem, wanted to suggest that the very nature of the jungle on South Sea islands could account for the enchantment that bewitched the Islanders, which would have meant, of course, that it could bewitch Protestant missionaries, too, if they did not dampen its magic with the sober resolve of faith just as Coleridge’s lover did. Given the missionaries’ view that the material conditions of life on the islands encouraged belief in the power of Polynesian gods, it is not surprising that they adapted Christian demonology to the task of convincing Polynesians to abandon their traditional deities in favor of the Christian deity. Rather than dismiss the indigenous gods as unreal, many LMS missionaries argued that they were real as demons but less powerful than the God of the Bible. For instance, in 1817, Joseph Kam, LMS missionary on Ambon in the Maluku Islands of Indonesia, gave the following account of his role in an entire community’s ritual act of iconoclasm: When I lately arrived at a large village . . . northwest from Amboyna, upward of 800 persons, in order to convince me of the reality of their faith in the only true and living God, brought all their idols before me, and acknowledged their foolishness. I advised them to pack them all up in a large box (into which they formerly used to be put for their night’s rest), and to place a heavy load of stones upon them, and to drown them in the depth of the sea, in my presence. They all agreed to follow my advice: a boat was made ready for the purpose; and with a great shout, they were carried out of the [village], and launched into the bosom of the deep. After this business was over, we sang the first four verses of the 136th Psalm. This is the fruit of the Gospel of Christ.23 The psychology of the ritualistic act that Kam enjoined the community of converts to perform was shrewd: by sinking the idols in a boat made for the purpose, the gods were drowned, that is, killed en masse by the village gathered together for the purpose of a collective act of transformation. The selection of the first verses of Psalm 136 reinforced the intention behind Kam’s instructions for the rite of iconoclasm. Verse 2 reads: “O give thanks to the God of gods, for his steadfast love endures forever” (emphasis added). The act of launching the boatload of older gods into the sea, where they sank to the bottom and drowned, did not deny their reality but rather asserted their inferiority to the God of the Bible, the God of gods, including the vanquished gods of Kam’s converts. Conversion did not mean, at [ 168 ]

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least not immediately, demythologizing the indigenous deities as errors of thought or delusions enforced by fear. Instead, the strategy was to convince the people of their gods’ submission to the Christian deity. The way to remove their hold on the world and lives of the Islanders was to execute the gods at the hand of the new and more powerful deity. Apparently, missionaries found that it was sometimes easier to remove non-­Christian gods from the lives of converts by executing them than by doctrinal pontifications on their nonexistence. But this concession to indigenous disposition could also mean recognizing some form of agency among the “idols” as surviving conversion. William Ellis himself found the matter of agency both fascinating and vexing. He pointed out that since the Islanders had embraced Christianity, “they believe they are now exempt from an influence, to which they were subject during the reign of the evil spirit.”24 And yet Ellis acknowledged that some indigenous Christians remained susceptible to the “dark” influences of sorcery. Why should the sorcery remain powerful? Ellis considered several explanations. “It is possible that in some instances,” he wrote, “these sufferings may have been the effects of imagination, and a deep impression on the mind of the afflicted individual, that he was selected as the victim of some insatiable demon’s rage.” Perhaps more compelling than a psychosomatic account was the idea of chemical agency: “It is also possible that poison, of which the natives had several kinds . . . might have produced the violent convulsions that sometimes preceded dissolution.” And still others suggest the belief, according to Ellis, that “they were so completely under the dominion of the evil spirit, that his power extended to the body as well as to the mind.” Ellis refused to take a position on the matter, but he concluded by pointing out that many of the Islanders who had converted to Christianity “have expressed their deliberate belief that their bodies were subject to satanic agency.”25 But about the images worshipped by the Islanders he could report a view that would have satisfied Durkheim. During several conversations with a former image maker on Raiatea, in the Society Islands, Ellis asked the man whether he really believed that the “idols” he carved “were the powerful beings which the natives supposed; and if so, what constituted their great power over the other parts of the tree from which they were hewn?”26 He assured me, that although at times he thought it was all deception, and only practiced his trade to obtain the payment he received for [ 169 ]

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his work; yet at other times he really thought the gods he himself had made, were powerful beings. It was not, he said, from the alteration his tools had effected in the appearance of the wood, or the carving with which they were ornamented, but because they had been taken to the temple, and were filled with the atua [the gods], that they became so powerful.27 The gods dwelt in the objects during certain times or when priests invoked them, according to Ellis. During this time, Polynesians regarded the images themselves as very powerful. But after the god had departed, though the images remained very sacred and had to be treated properly, “their extraordinary powers were gone.”28 Perhaps this lingering potency is why, as Ellis reported of the final fall of Oro, those who eventually destroyed Tahitian gods liked to stage dramatically violent forms of ritual, a kind of theater of humiliation. It was not enough to demolish an artifact. One had to enact a ritual execution of the material figure so that the deity could not return. And according to one reviewer of Ellis’s volumes, those destroying them included a ritual utterance of their Polynesian names as they did so. A priest, we read, gathered up wooden figures, laid them on the ground before the burning pile, and “tore off the sacred cloth in which they were enveloped from vulgar eyes, and stripped them of their ornaments; then, one by one, he threw the idols into the flames, sometimes pronouncing its name and fable pedigree.”29 Their names were meant to burn no less than their wooden bodies, rooting out the divine presence from mind and speech as well as sight and touch. Chapter 5. A Missionary Exhibition in Tahiti Although given permission to burn the idols on the island of Rurutu, 355 miles south of Tahiti, two Christian converts from the island of Raiatea named Mahamene and Puna refrained from destroying them all. On August 9, 1821, when a boat returned to the island of Raiatea, it came “laden with prisoners” taken in a “bloodless war.”30 The inhabitants of Raiatea wished to see these “trophies of victory.” In order to gratify their desire “and to fan the Missionary Flame,” the missionaries “set apart an evening for the exhibition of the Rurutu Idols.” And they did so in a clever way, choosing to stage the exhibition in the church. This effectively substituted the worship space of the “true God” for the former exhibition of Polynesian deities in the marae during ceremonies. The objects were explained [ 170 ]

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by local religious leaders. In presenting A’a (see fig. 46), as John Williams identified him (Ellis said he was Ta’aroa), as the national deity of Rurutu,31 one of the native speakers, Paumoana, noted to the assembly of Christians that “formerly . . . war must have ensued, and blood must have been shed, before the Evil Spirits would have been given up.” But their loss now took place “by the power of God alone.” Uaeva, another one of the speakers, invited the gathering to behold the gods, “and remarked on the superiority of this war to all the wars in which they had ever been engaged, ascribing the victory to Jesus, the Great Conqueror.”32 The artifacts were no longer dangerous because the evil spirits that powered them were defeated. The result of the exhibition of Rurutuan gods was so pleasing that shortly later the LMS missionaries curated another exhibition, this time of Raiatean gods. As on the previous occasion, native Christians served as docents. Arising after an opening hymn, “Blow, let the trumpet, blow,” Te Mauri pointed to the images hung throughout the chapel and said, “The teeth of these monsters are blunted by the word of Jesus. They will devour no more men or children in the island.” Another speaker, Mataute, directed his audience to behold the manifest power of the true God in the spectacle of the exhibited images: “Every man with his own eyes may see the effects of that power.” Exhorting his listeners to scrutinize the “trophies of [the Gospel’s] victory,” he gestured to the gods that once exerted power: “Behold them hanging in degradation before us.”33 As “prisoners,” the defeated gods who had been spared immolation were not yet dead. Stripped of power, they were shipped off to London to serve an indeterminate sentence, bearing the degrading titles of “prisoner” and “trophies of victory.” Chapter 6. Missionary Museum in the Metropole On several occasions, defeated gods were presented to missionaries as proof of conversion. The missionaries delighted in the acquisitions. Those they did not condemn to flames, they made a habit of collecting for their own curiosity, or forwarded them to London, the heart of the British Empire and the international British missionary enterprise. A letter from the Reverend Samuel Marsden to the LMS in the fall of 1816 made this quite clear: “I have now the unspeakable satisfaction of forwarding to you the idol gods of otaheite, as the glorious spoils of Idolatry. No event could have given me more pleasure. They are now lying prostrate on the table before me; and were we not certain of the fact, we could not be[ 171 ]

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And the idols he shall utterly abolish.-Isaial, ii. 18. (See page ll6.)

q2

Figure 52. The presentation of tapa-­wrapped deities to LMS missionaries at Rarotonga, May 1827, from John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands (London, 1837). Photo by author.

lieve that any human beings could place their salvation in these wretched images.”34 It seems the gods could not die once and for all. They kept dying over and over. Prostrate before the good reverend, the images submitted themselves to his gaze, which stripped them of their power and left only incredulity at the degradation of their former worshippers. After he established the new regime at Tahiti and destroyed the national gods, which had commanded the collective worship of all Tahitians, Pomare delivered his own family gods, inherited from his predecessors, to LMS missionaries (see fig. 47). He included a letter, which the missionaries translated and sent to London with Pomare’s gods. “If you think proper,” Pomare wrote, “you may burn them all in the fire; or, if you like, send them to your country, for the inspection of the people of Europe, that they may satisfy their curiosity, and know Tahiti’s foolish gods.”35 An illustration from an 1837 best-­seller (fig. 52), Missionary Enterprises, by LMS missionary John Williams, shows the artifacts lying on the ground before the missionaries seated in front of Williams’s new home on Rarotonga in May 1827. He described the scene as orchestrated by indigenous evangelists who clearly wanted to make an impression on the newly arrived European missionaries.36 The artifacts had been carried there on a [ 172 ]

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rack by a group of locals. A single erect god remains to be laid before them. It is difficult to say whether the figure is positioned on the rack or standing beside it. The figure does appear to be much larger than those before the missionaries and may therefore be sitting on the ground, possibly in the way it would have in ritual use since the figure possesses a head at the narrow end and a wider end that would have offered a stable base for it to stand erect. That the other figures are “lying prostrate” before the missionaries is significant for it suggests they had become trophies of Christian victory, vanquished “prisoners” in a spiritual warfare. Since the staff figures sported a naturalistic penis at the end opposite the head, their ritual use may have involved the sexual organ to enact fertility as the figures stood upright.37 If that is so, then displaying them prostrate may have been an explicit denial of their fertility. Other examples that have survived lack the phallus, which sometimes appears to have been broken off, suggesting perhaps that they were destroyed by the missionaries or converts. In any event, Williams described varied fates for the artifacts: “Some of these idols were torn to pieces before our eyes; others were reserved to decorate the rafters of the chapel we proposed to erect; and one was kept to be sent to England, which is now in the Missionary Museum.”38 This triumphant gaze gloating over idolatrous defeat was something the LMS endorsed and took quick steps to institutionalize in broadcasting its trophies. The principal means of doing so were a missionary museum and an illustrated monthly magazine. The missionaries at Raiatea sent twelve gods and relics and explanations of them, which the society deposited in its new museum in London, created in 1814 for the purpose of collecting and displaying to the British public the “trophies of Christianity” taken in the society’s missions around the world.39 The museum was a repository of items from around the world, as the image here, published in the Illustrated London News in 1859, suggests (fig. 53). The purpose of the museum throughout the course of the nineteenth century, as the following passage from the Catalogue of the Missionary Museum shows, was to bolster the sense of Christian triumph and purpose in the world. Written sometime in the final decades of the century, the Catalogue states that the London Missionary Society proudly displayed its trophies in the hope that they would inspire the spectators with gratitude to God for his great goodness to our native land, and in favouring us so abundantly with the means of grace, and the knowledge of his salvation; and at the same time, with [ 173 ]

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Figure 53. “The Museum of the London Missionary Society,” Illustrated London News, June 15, 1859, 605. Photo by author.

thankfulness that these blessings have, in some happy degree, been communicated, and by our means, to the distant isles of the Southern Ocean. Many of the articles in this Collection are calculated to excite, in the pious mind, feelings of deep commiseration for the hundreds of millions of the human race, still the vassals of ignorance and superstition; whilst the success with which God has already crowned our labours, should act as a powerful stimulus to efforts, far more zealous and extended, for the conversion of the heathen.40 Idolatry was something the LMS did not wish to give up because the organization found in it a powerfully affective engine for motivating Christian yearning and action. In a sermon delivered at the society’s annual meeting in 1818, a Reverend Mr. Wardlaw preached on the topic of “The Contemplation of Heathen Idolatry an Excitement to Missionary Zeal,” in which he presented the affective utility of gazing upon idols. “The contempla[ 174 ]

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tion of heathen idolatries should excite indignant grief for the dishonor done to God—amazement at the weakness and folly of human nature—­ abhorrence of human impiety, and compassion for human wretchedness.”41 To this one might readily add revulsion at the sight of the objects, as described by missionary literature. “For what sort of deities must they be,” asked the Reverend Wardlaw, “of which images so ridiculously fantastic, so monstrously uncouth, so frightfully distorted, as many of the heathen idols are . . . ?” All of these affects join the cocktail of feelings intended to induce action among Christians. Their mobilization suggests that the captured objects garnered a new form of agency. An 1843 account of the Missionary Museum indicates that it had become “an indispensable appendage to the great anniversary meeting” of the society, which took place each spring in London. “Thither, after their meetings, the friends of mission are wont to repair, to revive their sympathies by an actual inspection of those idol gods which it is the first aim of the society ‘utterly to abolish.’”42 Recalling what the Catalogue of the Missionary Museum stated, the “idols” were to inspire gratitude among British Christians for enjoying divine favor and for the success of their effort at evangelizing the Polynesians—but also to excite pity for the many who remained under the power of ignorance and misbelief. And they should promote efforts of Christians or move them to convert heathens. By no means inert, the artifacts discovered a new career. They testified to Britain’s elect stature in a world order that made far-­flung unbelievers the duty of God’s people. But the captive objects spoke not only to the British. The Missionary Cabinet, established in the 1830s by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, was a room at the organization’s headquarters on the Boston Common (fig. 54).43 In this room were assembled objects gathered by American missionaries from around the world. The door to the room carried the title “Cabinet of Curiosities.” Once inside, a narrative written for children and published in 1847 directed the visitor’s eyes to something “dark and grim” in the opposite corner, referring to a tiki, or divine image of Kū, the Hawaiian god of war, who appears near the center of figure 54: Come, let us look at it a little nearer. It has legs, and arms, and a body, and a head, and staring eyes, and a big mouth. It is quite erect, and looks a very little like the image of a man; and yet it does not look like a man, for no man was ever such a hideous object. [ 175 ]

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Figure 54. Interior view of the Cabinet of Curiosities, Boston, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, from Helen C. Knight, Missionary Cabinet (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1847). Courtesy of Congregational Library and Archives, Boston.

“What is it? It is made of wood, and it seems as if it were pretty old, too.” That is a god! “A god!” you will exclaim, “I am glad it is not my God. Whose god was it?” It was a god of the Sandwich Islanders, a god to whom they used to pray and offer sacrifices—a god, who, they believed, taught them to leave their old parents to die alone in the forests, and to bury their little sick babies in the mud, because they did not want the trouble of taking care of them—oh, it was a wicked god! Yes, indeed, you will allow, while you shudder at the thought of worshipping such a being. The poor Sandwich Islanders were heathen then, bowing down to blocks of wood and stone.44 [ 176 ]

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The author, Helen C. Knight, who wrote pious children’s literature for several American evangelical publishers at midcentury, paired repulsion at several artifacts in the collection with the Islanders’ ignorance and ultimate rejection of their wooden deities. At one point, she described what sounds like a Polynesian staff god: “Do you see that long round pole fastened to the legs of this long table in the middle of the floor? It is eight or ten feet long. Now look at the top. Sure enough, it is surmounted by a little, thin, grinning head. Yes, that too is a god, a long, slender pole-­of-­a-­god as ever was. It was a national god.”45 Inspection of figure 54 does not confirm that anything is there. The figure may not yet have been affixed to the table when the woodcut was made. Knight related how Polynesians gave up their sacred objects to the missionaries, who brought them back to Boston, where they became schoolchildren’s curiosities. Fastened to the legs of a long table, the “pole-­ of-­a-­god” now occupies a new existence—more pole than deity, but still god enough in order to merit being imprisoned in furniture, which punitively reduces its enthroned gaze to an impish grin and further transforms its divine being into what Knight and Evangelicals everywhere understood to be the inanimate substance of wood. Incarcerated in its own substance, the god lacked transcendence, which gods such as Oro actually exhibited on Tahiti—dwelling in cult images or artifacts for only a time, as William Ellis had written. But captive in the Christian museum, they could be no more than the substance they were made of. Knight’s pedagogy treated her young readers as the intellectual equivalent of Polynesian heathen converted to Christianity. Her description of the figures in the Boston missionary museum pretends to keep the gods alive, at least in a lingering way, safely imprisoned and shamed, but sufficiently alive to demonstrate to children the propriety of their repudiation. They are like animals in a zoo, their caged ferocity applied to confirming among young visitors the superiority of Christian faith. Knight makes this very clear when she asks her young readers to pause before the first case in the museum: “Let us make a bow to these rows of little idols, and tell them we are very happy to see them so snugly locked up in this case; they may consider themselves mighty well off, considering the mischief they have occasioned in the country where they came from. They can do no harm where they now are, and perhaps a bit of good. Yes, they may at last do a bit of good, in making us feel more thankful than ever, that we are not born in their dominions.”46 What was once the bow of worship in the [ 177 ]

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bush becomes a bow of smug gratitude in the American museum. Rather than producing fear and awe, the gods were now to evoke pity, disgust, and scorn. The utility of these emotions became clear as Knight’s text unfolded in a brisk tour of the museum from case to case. The reader is led from Polynesia to Thailand, China, and India, then to Egypt, Syria, Russia, Borneo, Israel, and Catholic Europe. The world looks different than one might expect because it bears the peculiar structure of the museum’s installation, a menagerie of heathen nations that young Americans were urged to feel glad they saw from the safe distance of the favored nation of their Christian birth. Chapter 7. An Ethnological Specimen in a Modern Museum The final chapter in our cultural biography of Polynesian artifacts finds them in our own day resting securely in the appreciative arms of science and art. By 1859, the Missionary Museum in London was thinking differently about its collection. One of the sons of John Williams rearranged the collection and display that year, and the London Illustrated News registered the new presentation of items in a way that signaled a shift in thinking (see fig. 53). “The contents of this museum are not only valuable in consequence of their interest as specimens of peculiar phases of art-­ workmanship, but also from their being connected with imminent missionaries. These objects are now carefully labelled, so that we can pass along with both pleasure and instruction.”47 Science and religion could work together in “the cause of human civilization,” as the article put it. In 1890, several of the artifacts were transferred from the Missionary Museum to the ethnographic collection of the Pitt-­Rivers Museum at Oxford and to the holdings of the British Museum in London. An essay by a curator at the museum appeared in 1891 and provided a new framework for viewing them: “It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the ethnological importance of these specimens, an importance due in the first place to their intrinsic merits, and in the second to the fact that at the time they were obtained the religions and habits of the natives had been but little disturbed by European influence.”48 The word specimen marked a new chapter in the life of the artifacts, evoking the scientific rhetoric of classification (specimen derives from the Latin verb, specere, to look at, so a specimen provides a sample of a class to inspect such that to see the one [ 178 ]

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is to see the whole). Ethnology replaced theology as the dominant frame for understanding the artifacts. But the colonial task remained squarely in place. It was the founder of comparative religion, Max Müller, who adapted the military strategy of “divide and conquer” into “classify and conquer” as the tactic of “the science of religion.”49 Applied to the Polynesian artifacts, the term specimen documents their passage from the civilizing techniques of colonial religion, which pressed the Christian faith and European morality on subject peoples, ending such practices as nudity, open sexual coupling, and human sacrifice in Polynesia, to science, which fitted the surveyed cultures into scientific schemes of classification that determined their place in the hierarchy of races and in the universal history of social and intellectual progress. But the new categories also allowed for the transposition of the artifacts into registers that stressed their “art-­workmanship” and “intrinsic merits,” that is, features that were able to manifest the individual genius of the people and insert the objects into more expansive accounts of cultural achievement. The “staff or stick god,” the term of preference, originally rested vertically, as we can see in the Museum of the London Missionary Society (see fig. 53). But in the British Museum it has been positioned in horizontal display. The reason is not to portray a defeated culture in submission to Christian victory, as was the case in figure 52. The purpose of the British Museum is to preserve the artifact owing to its fragile state and to do so in accord with the value that its rarity and historical uniqueness bestow on it in the museum setting. The British Museum’s website points out that the artifact on display is “the only surviving wrapped example of a large staff god.” 50 The bark-­cloth wrapping is now two hundred years old or more. Since such coverings were once changed during ritual occasions, this means that the fabric has lasted far longer than was originally intended. Removed from its indigenous setting, the artifact has long since become fragile and must be conserved in accord with the mission of the modern museum, which places a premium on rarity, authenticity, and permanence. The consequence is a resacralizing of the object in aesthetic terms. The museum encourages viewers not to worship it but to be moved by its precious character as a unique material specimen of a world that has vanished. A final chapter in this cultural biography might investigate the return of artifacts to their original locales on Tahiti and other Polynesian islands [ 179 ]

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in the process known as repatriation, which is occurring at the present day.51 Doing so would confirm once again that at every stage, new ways of viewing and talking about the artifacts emerge to shape their experience and meaning. And in the process, things act as objects in ever new ways on the human beings who gather about them to see the gods that once lived in the South Seas.

[ 180 ]

[ C o n c lusi on ]

T hin g s, N e t w o r k s, a n d A g en t s •••

The definition of religion has long leaned heavily on concepts and texts because it has widely been regarded in Western culture as a system of right belief, invested in and derived from a book culture whose learning has been used to endorse ethical and legal rules for human behavior. The practice of relying on theological formulations of religious truth has been reinforced by alliances between religious institutions and the state. Dukes, princes, monarchs, emperors, bishops, and popes have joined two domains of power in governance, with the result of enforcing right versus wrong belief as the basis of maintaining social order. This alliance of church and state owes much to Christianity as the dominant religion in the history of Europe and its colonies around the world. This particular religion is based on divine revelations conveyed by a canonical literature known as the Bible, a word that is derived from the Greek βιβλία, or books. Christianity’s understanding of truth is grounded in the proper interpretation of sacred texts. While Christians may define their religion as they see fit, scholars should avoid accepting a sectarian definition of religion and applying it to all other social phenomena they call religions. Sacred scriptures and creedal statements of belief are peculiar criteria for defining religion if that term represents a species of human behavior that is forty or fifty thousand years older than Christianity and its Bible. The academic study of religion is an approach that takes its subject to be a material, social, cultural, and historical phenomenon in which the very definition of religion is always subject to critical review. This means that whereas right belief, sacred text, and moral precepts are part of many religions, they do not constitute anything like an overarching essence of religion and should not be privileged in the task of characterizing any single religion unless there is clear evidence for doing so. The problem with adhering to a theory of religion that foregrounds such criteria as confessional beliefs, scriptures, and moral precepts is that all religions end up looking like versions of Christianity. But the problems do not stop there. In [ 181 ]

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addition to the inherent colonialism of such a narrow-­minded approach, religions are dematerialized, reduced to ideas and words. Bodies, feelings, objects, art, clothing, food, places, terrains, weather, landscape, and all of nature become secondary or even irrelevant. For radical monotheism, which places god outside of and prior to the universe, and steadfastly insists that the deity may not be commingled or confused with any finite thing, this relegation of materiality to the background is deemed suitable in order to preserve the sovereignty of the deity. The point is not to argue that religion is essentially material. Neither is it to state that the materiality of a religion is the proper and most authoritative aspect of a religion to study. The task this book has tried to set before readers is to learn to recognize the difference that material features and conditions make in understanding how religions operate. All religions exhibit material features, but not all have written scriptures, confessional statements of right belief, or even deities. Indeed, in the present world, many people have no religion at all. And it is important to say that religion is not an essential part of human beings. If we define the word very generally as ritual practices that engage a transcendent aspect, we might say that a wide variety of religions are to be found in many, perhaps most human societies over the past forty or fifty thousand years. There need not be gods or immortality or animated beings for a practice to count as “religious.” But there will be some form of enchantment, some way of producing an efficacious ritual, one that achieves a transcendent purpose. By transcendent, I mean anything that surpasses a present state of affairs by connecting to higher or broader powers, the sort of power that dwells within the unseen and extensive dimensions of things. The gems in the Crest of Charlemagne, which we examined in the Introduction, for instance (see fig. 6), participate in a larger domain of powers, mediating astrological forces, connecting the individual to celestial phenomena controlled by angels and the divine. Or the relic housed in the Buddhist burial mound (see fig. 7) connects the devotee to the Buddha and the power that practicing his dharma or teaching offers. Both of these examples indicate that the materiality of any religion resides in the networks that link humans to the broader array of human and nonhuman forces that organize both the cosmos and the local social reality of everyday life. The material study of religion is devoted to learning what these special kinds of objects have to teach us about how humans participate in the production and maintenance of their worlds. About this, I would like to touch a [ 182 ]

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final time on three central themes as a way of drawing the book to a close: things as networks, focal objects, and agency. Things have been the focus of this book. And the word thing is more than a synonym for object. A thing, as was noted in the Introduction, is a network or assemblage, a gathering of many human and nonhuman actors. And it is always more than humans can perceive or control. It changes over time, as we have seen, and it means many different things to different people. A thing has a history and a scale that may be concealed. When we look at the Cathedral of Notre-­Dame, there is much more there to be seen than we are likely to recognize. There are traces of other versions of the cathedral, restorations of features that never existed, replacement of things gone, and guesses at what they might have looked like. There are many changes to the building and an even older history of buildings and sites and peoples who were there before the cathedral that we see—in postcards, art history books, newspapers, and tourist photographs. Even this mediated nature of our impressions of the building— most people know the structure only through photographs or prints of it—discloses another feature of the network that links us to it. Representations are a vital actor within the web of connections that shape our relation to the cathedral. And today the fire-­damaged structure faces a new round of repair and transformation, which means another layer of connection and interpretation. Things are networks, and objects are limited interpretations of them. The history of Notre-­Dame de Paris teaches us that a thing is always more than the object we perceive it to be. That is because the thing in its encompassing history and ecological breadth precedes and surpasses our concept and use of the object we take it to be. We may think we know what an object is. But its thingness is always more since a thing is actually an ecology that blurs clear boundaries. Things are not cleanly circumscribed or discrete entities. Take human beings, for instance. If you remove them from oxygen and gravity, deprive them of food and water, prevent them from relying on their tools and their relationships with other people, their dwellings, villages, and citizens, their languages and cultures, and their broader habitats, they will cease to be human. Humans do not exist apart from their environments. The ecology of a thing is the gathering of its constitutive parts and setting. Networks consist of a wide variety of actors, some human and many not human. Humans participate in a network by using certain kinds of power [ 183 ]

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objects, which interface with a web of agents that form a network. These actors or agents may be gods, planets, mythic creatures, rivers, trees, spirits, mountains, animals, weather, words, thoughts, artifacts, and other people. They are both imagined and actual, mental and physical entities that cohere by virtue of association, cause and effect, lore, science, or ideology. I have referred to power objects as focal objects because they are nodes within a network, places where a number of strands fuse, enabling access to the broader network. Action on the node or focal object is action on the extended network. In religious ritual, examples of focal objects are many: altars where sacrifices are offered to the divine, reliquaries containing the remains of saints, devotional images of saints or deities where petitions are made to them, the person of the priest conducting rites before the faithful—and magic wands, as noted in chapter 4. The history of the magic wand has something important to teach us about how networks operate. As a focal object, a wand works within a configuration of forces and conditions that it draws into action by extending the user’s will. Wands are instruments that translate the will of users into the action of their bodies and, combined with spell and incantation and proper ritual procedure, project intention into the world. The relationship of the wand and its user is critical. One Wiccan specialist on wands compared the relation to dating: “Think of building your relationship with your wand as dating. You may go out on a number of dates with a number of different people before you get the right spark. . . . Work for the spark, but don’t expect overnight success.” 1 Another author writes that “a wand that is attuned to you and your style of magic can be a remarkable tool to enhance and focus your spells. As a note, care must be taken in the selection of your wand. If done correctly, it can feel like an extension of yourself.”2 Still another asserts that “ritual tools are as much a part of Witches as their arms and legs.”3 Successful use of wands requires the proper execution of the spell but relies first on the appropriate selection of the wand, which depends on the type of tree and the astrological sign of the user since different kinds of wood exhibit characteristics that align with the Zodiac.4 Once the wand is prepared, it must be activated by aligning it with the earth’s magnetic field, enchanted by casting a spell on it,5 or purified by ritual “to remove any negative energy or even strong energy residue from the wand.”6 According to more than one writer, the wand becomes a “living entity” by being enchanted, which links the wand to what some practitioners call [ 184 ]

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the “astral plane of existence,” the loftiest level of reality.7 Many authors indicate that wands may be combined with crystals or with rune magic by inscribing runes on the wand.8 With the primary tool in place, the practitioner must select and master the spell. Spells are often keyed to seasonal festivals, so knowledge of these and related lore is important. Additional features of successful magic depend on a correctly built and consecrated altar and a proper understanding of the forms of energy that are invoked by the spell.9 Commonly, the practitioner works with a group of fellow magi, so the presence of other operators is part of the network. All of these constitute the web of relations that links the magus to the broader universe, which one writer characterized as four separate “planes of existence.” 10 But it is the wand, the intimate extension of the practitioner’s body, that serves as the focal object. Action with the wand is action upon the extended constellation of actors in a network because the wand is how practitioners insert themselves into the webs that distribute agency and act on the world. Last, the question of agency came to the fore in chapter 6, in which we traced the transport of Polynesian ritual artifacts from their original setting to museum collections in London and Boston. The artifacts passed through a succession of contexts in which their names changed, in which they were displayed in various ways. In each instance, different forms of agency were ascribed to them. The object drew its power from the place in which it was situated. The thing is the gathering that is accessed by the focal object. The marae was the first place we considered, the indigenous site of power where cult objects were displayed and ritually engaged. In his precontact world on Tahiti, for instance, the god Oro was the center of ritual life, enshrined in one marae, then wrested from it to be transported to another in the violent contestation for dominance among rival chieftains. When the winning group led by the chief Pomare converted to Christianity, Oro was captured, disgraced, and eventually destroyed. Rather than asserting that the figure was an empty piece of wood, the god was subjected to humiliation as a focal object in order to be made to do a different kind of cultural work. Oro was forced to acknowledge the superiority and victory of the Christian deity who had allied with Pomare. Agency is not simply a function of a discrete object but rather determined by the object’s place within a network. Entities and artifacts belong to ecologies. It is the ecology that is the thing in a full sense. People nominate one aspect of the network to serve as its face, the focal object, through [ 185 ]

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which they address the whole, which may not be visible except through the medium of the focal object. Agency is what the object is empowered to do by the ecology that encompasses it. Oro could act powerfully as a god of war when his devotees went to battle. Their victories were his own. Yet Oro could also be made to act in humility, showing his defeat, when he was removed from the indigenous setting or ecology and placed within the new social order created by the victorious king, Pomare. And ritual artifacts acquired by the missionaries and recontextualized for display behaved differently, now being seen to proclaim the victory of Christianity and the superiority of the civilizing force of Britain. Captive in the new circumstances of Boston and London, the gods spoke words of defeat and shame to Christian audiences. The taxonomic shift from one setting to another transformed the artifacts from objects of indigenous ritual power to trophies of Christian triumph. The artifacts still exercised some agency, but within the confines of a new ideological context. Today, in yet another taxonomic shift called postcolonialism, the artifacts acquire a new voice, the voice of repatriation, a long return to a homeland that is no longer the same as it once was (Christianity took root across Polynesia). Yet the artifacts meet a new situation in which they can offer something welcome to those who regard repatriation as a legal means for asserting cultural self-­ determination in the wake of colonial domination. The material life of a religion resides in the webs of things that flash with agency in the amulets, icons, statues, shrines, clothing, and food that engage the bodies of practitioners. If the purpose of the academic study of religions is to understand how they build and maintain functional worlds for their adherents, the power of things contributes significantly to the enterprise.

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R eso u rc e s f o r C l a ss r o o m Use This book can be paired with primary and secondary readings from beginning to end in order to help readers engage the literature in a materially grounded way. To that end, the first section here lists primary texts that constitute some of the most important literature in the history of the academic study of religions, along with key words and ideas for discussion in class and use as writing topics. Secondary sources for every chapter are available in the notes. The bibliography is not a summary of sources discussed in the text but rather a list of books and articles on a variety of topics that students may peruse as they frame their writing topics. Instructors may wish to incorporate the recommended online videos listed in the classroom discussion of each chapter. Simply enter the listed items under “Online links” directly into a computer browser and the video will appear. The videos listed below vary considerably in length, topic, and character. Some are themselves to be considered as primary sources because they often convey the perspective of participants in religious traditions. Others are produced by academic experts and take a scholarly approach. Videos covering religions not discussed in the chapters are also listed because faculty may wish to expand the range of discussion in the classroom. In the second section, students will find a brief writing guide for use in the analysis of material artifacts. For visual representations of all kinds of religious material culture, online search engines will be very helpful. Additional resources are journals such as Material Religion; websites such as the Baron Thyssen Centre for the Study of Ancient Material Religion at the Open University (www.openmaterialreligion.org/resources), the Jugaad Project (www.thejugaadproject.pub), MAVCOR (mavcor.yale.edu/material -­visual-­cultures-­religions), Google Arts & Culture (artsandculture.google.com); the searchable databases of image vendors such as Art Resource, Getty Images, and Alamy; and most major museum collections.

Primary Texts, Key Terms, and Online Resources Introduction

Primary Sources Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Collier Books, 1950), chaps. 46 and 47, pp. 773–86, 787–802. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-­Blood Prince (New York: Scholastic, 2005), 492–512.

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Resources for Classroom Use Key Terms and Themes thing objectification external soul six forms of agency ecology darśan How do the following things operate as agents? church organ mezuzah eruv hamsa scapular holy water icon devotional statue prayer beads prayer wheel qibla wall yantra incense turbah prasad taqiyah hijab Select a religious artifact or space that exhibits more than one form of agency at work in its use and experience. What kinds of agency are they, and how do they work together? Online Links for Use with Introduction • “Exclusive Look at the Statue of the Virgin Mary in Notre-­Dame” (5 min.) • “Buddhist Pilgrimage at Bodhgaya, Clear Vision Trust” (3 min., 20 sec.) • “The Kaaba’s Black Stone Is a Cornerstone with an Essence of Heaven” (2 min.)

Chapter 1

Primary Sources Carl Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 174–205. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Apologia,” to William, Abbot of Saint Thierry, reprinted in A Documentary History of Art, vol. 1: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. [ 188 ]

Resources for Classroom Use Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), 18–22. Charles Joseph Hefele [Council of Hieria, 754], A History of the Councils of the Church, from the Original Documents, 5 vols., trans. William R. Clark (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1896), 5:309–13. Josiah Strong, Our Country, ed. Jurgen Herbst (1885; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 200–218. John Calvin, “Impiety of Attributing a Visible Form to God; The Setting Up of Idols a Defection from the True God,” Institutes of the Christian Religion [1536], trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), 90–103. Plato, “The Simile of the Cave” [255–64] and “Art and Illusion” [359–74], in The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1987). David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Hume, Principal Writings on Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 134–85. F. Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in February and May (1870; reprint, London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 1–51. Key Terms and Themes body and technology body-­mind religion and wealth Iconoclastic Controversy Confucian spirit or ancestor tablets superstition idolatry fetish language and religion poststructuralism social constructionism recalcitrance affordance thing-­power new materialism assemblage Online Links for Use with Chapter 1 • “Confucian Ancestor Worship,” YouTube BBC (1 min., 35 sec.) • “Plato on: The Allegory of the Cave,” YouTube (6 min., 15 sec.) • “First Iconoclast Controversy, 726–87 CE,” YouTube (32 min.) • “Animating Poststructuralism,” YouTube (9 min.) [ 189 ]

Resources for Classroom Use

Chapter 2

Primary Sources Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918). For a description of the art and shrine at Delphi, see book 10, chaps. 5–10, pp. 391–427. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Collier Books, 1950), chaps. 3, 4, pp. 12–69. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, 6th ed., 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), chap. 11, pp. 417–502. Norman P. Tanner, S.J., ed., “On Invocation, Veneration and Relics of the Saints, and on Sacred Images,” Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 2, Council of Trent (session 25), pp. 774–76. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Open Press, 1995), 21–67. William Hurd, D.D., A New Universal History of the Religious Rites, Ceremonies, and Customs of the Whole World: Or, A Complete and Impartial View of All the Religions in the Various Nations of the Universe (London: Alexander Hogg, 1788), preface and explanation of the frontispiece. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), lectures 2, 3, pp. 35–77. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2 (1973): 70–88. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990), 1–18. Key Terms and Themes sacrifice altars sacred economy magic and religion animism definitions of religion shamanism enchantment belief embodiment feeling, affect, emotion social body techniques of the body sensational form material religion [ 190 ]

Resources for Classroom Use Online Links for Use with Chapter 2 • “CLC 102 Web 1 Roman Religion and Ritual,” University of Mississippi (31 min.) • “The Story of the Wailing Wall, Jerusalem, Israel” (6 min.)

Chapter 3

Sources are cited in the notes for each of the specified ways in which religions happen materially. Additional materials appear in the bibliography at the end of the book. Instructors should note that the list of themes in this chapter is by no means exhaustive. Students should be encouraged to enumerate further categories and to distinguish them as they apply or fail to apply to different religious traditions. Additional categories might include movement, gender, sensation, pain, decay, time, or seasonality. Key Terms and Themes body ornamentation and modification body control social body tefillin prasad halal kosher iftar pharmacology and religion social control auto-­da-­fé sanbenitos face sacred exchange sacrifice yajña divination bibliomancy visualization Online Links for Use with Chapter 3 • “Vedic Fire Sacrifice in Sri Dham Mayapur, India,” YouTube (3 min.) • “Kajol Seeks Blessings at Durga Puja, Distributes Prasad,” Durga Puja 2016 • “Tripping the Way to God: Hallucinogens and Religions” (2 min., 40 sec.) • “Peyote: The People Who Take Drugs to See God,” BBC News (3 min., 45 sec.) • “Islam as a Religion Is against Permanent Tattoos,” Huffpost (3 min., 20 sec.) • “Aboriginal Initiation Ceremony in Borroloola, Australia” (4 min.) [ 191 ]

Resources for Classroom Use • “Gender Inequality in Religion” (6 min., 30 sec.) • “What Is Divination? Wicca,” YouTube (2 min., 20 sec.) • “Roman Augury” (2 min.) • “Afa Divination: Togo, West Africa” (10 min.) • “Medicine Woman, the Navajo Way of Healing” (3 min., 30 sec.) • “A Diné Ceremony of Restoration,” YouTube (3 min., 15 sec.) • “Introduction to Jainism, Belief ” (2 min., 30 sec.) • “Uncovering the Long-­Hidden Secrets of Stonehenge,” CBS News (6 min., 45 sec.)

Chapter 4

Primary Sources The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day, trans. Raymond O. Faulkner, with additional commentary and translation by Ogden Goelet, Jr. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994). Robert of Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople, trans. Edgar H. McNeal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians (Wellingborough, U.K.: Aquarian Press, 1983). Alferian Gwydion MacLir, The Witch’s Wand: The Craft, Lore and Magick of Wands and Staffs (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2019). Gypsey Elaine Teague, The Witch’s Guide to Wands: A Complete Botanical, Magical, and Elemental Guide to Making, Choosing, and Using the Right Wand (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2015). Dorothy Morrison, The Craft: A Witch’s Book of Shadows (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2017). J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1997). Key Terms and Themes caduceus wand scepter phurbu staff rod opening the mouth hermeticism neopaganism [ 192 ]

Resources for Classroom Use Online Links for Use with Chapter 4 • “Ancient Egypt: Religion, Myths, Gods, and Symbols” (3 min., 11 sec.) • “Imhotep Book of the Dead” (2 min., 10 sec.) • “Last Judgement of Hunefer, from His Tomb,” YouTube (7 min., 40 sec.) • “Let My People Go—The Ten Commandments” (1/10) movie clip, 1956 (2 min., 30 sec.) • “Vajra,” YouTube Audiopedia (10 min., 30 sec.) • “How to Use the Vajra and Bell (English) by Geshe Ngawang Tsering” (52 min.) • “The World of Midrash—Moses’ Magical Rod,” YouTube (20 min.) • “Wicca and Paganism: Making Wicca Wands” (1 min., 37 sec.) • “Making Your Own Wand,” YouTube (4 min., 30 sec.) • “Harry Potter: 10 Most Powerful Wands!” (10 min.)

Chapter 5

Primary Sources Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-­Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 57–71. John Calvin, “Impiety of Attributing a Visible Form to God. The Setting Up of Idols a Defection from the True God,” in Institutes of the Christian Religion [1536], trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), 90–103. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, “Civil Religion,” chapter 8 of The Social Contract, in Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, rev. J. H. Brumfitt and John C. Hall (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 268–77. “Declaration of the Gallican Clergy, March 19, 1682,” in Church and State through the Centuries: A Collection of Historic Documents with Commentaries, trans. and ed. Sidney Z. Ehler and John B. Morrall (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1967), 207–8. Victor Hugo, Notre-­Dame de Paris, trans. Alban Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 119–27, 163–70, 173–206. Eugène Viollet-­le-­Duc and Jean-­Baptiste Lassus, “On the Restoration of the Cathedral of Notre-­Dame de Paris” [1843], in The Architectural Theory of Viollet-­Le-­Duc: Readings and Commentary, ed. M. F. Hearn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 279–88. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Open Press, 1995), 207–31. Alex Greenberger, “Let’s Take the Time to Diagnose: In Open Letter, Experts Urge Emmanuel Macron Not to Rush Notre-­Dame Restoration,” ARTnews, April 29, [ 193 ]

Resources for Classroom Use 2019, https://www.artnews.com/art-­news/news/notre-­dame-­experts-­open -­letter-­macron-­12461/. Key Terms and Themes Frenchness innovation/renovation chevet transept altar flying buttress Affair of the Placards Transubstantiation Calvinism Gallicanism de-­Christianization Festival of Reason civil religion deism the invention of print Baron Haussmann Viollet-­le-­Duc restoration Online Links for Use with Chapter 5 • “Paris: The Great Saga—How Notre Dame Was Built” (4 min.) • “The History of Notre Dame,” YouTube Kings and Things (7 min., 30 sec.)

Chapter 6

Primary Sources The Māndūkya Upanishad, trans. and commentary by Swami Krishnananda (Shivanandanagar, India: Divine Life Society, 1996), 1–6. William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, during a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands, 4 vols. (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1833), chap. 14, pp. 353–81. William Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” 1795. John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands (London: John Snow, 1841), 464–87. Mrs. Helen C. Knight, Missionary Cabinet (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1847), 5–18. Key Terms and Themes taxonomic shift marae Oro [ 194 ]

Resources for Classroom Use Pomare I and II agency Aeolian harp London Missionary Society idols trophies of Christianity staff god specimen Online Links for Use with Chapter 6 • “History of Polynesia,” YouTube (4 min., 30 sec.) • “Tahiti, Exploring the Ancient Sacred Religious Sites (Marae), Pacific Ocean” (33 min.) • “New Investigations into the Tahitian Mourner’s Costume, British Museum,” YouTube (13 min.) • “Inside the Pitt Rivers Museum,” YouTube (4 min.)

Writing Guide Questions to Pose in the Material Analysis of Artifacts

The following sets of questions are organized under major headings of interest for the historical study of artifacts (objects, images, clothing, buildings) as material evidence. The interrogation that these questions undertake begins with the physical appearance of the artifact and the physical features of its style and subject matter. From there, the method of investigation moves toward maker, patron, and purpose and then to circulation, social life, and reception. The overarching trajectory moves from analysis to interpretation, beginning with the concrete and then reverberating between particular and general, posing questions of the artifact and its physical worlds (temple, home, ethnographic museum, art museum, collector’s shelf, history textbook) as a way to illuminate the object’s social career. It is important to note that meaning is not permanent or universal but historically developmental. The sequence of this line of questioning is intended not as a rigid template for writing but as a way of prompting material investigation. The questions are intended to launch inquiry by training attention on various aspects of the object, its ecology, and its meandering path through time. It is likely that some questions do not apply to every artifact. But papers that begin with concrete impressions will not go wrong by doing so. 1. Regarding the physical appearance of the artifact. What is the item made from? How large is it? What technique did the maker use in producing it (for example, crosshatching, rough chiseling, refined polishing, machine manufacture—forged, pressed, molded, cast, stamped)? Was the item mass-­produced or made by hand? [ 195 ]

Resources for Classroom Use What is the material it is made from? What affordances does this material offer to the production process and the final result that help you understand why it is made of this material? Does the work exhibit a particular style? If so, what are the style’s essential features? Does this style belong to a single individual, a school, a city, or a region? What do the medium, size, presentation, and technique of the work tell you about its use and meaning? 2. Regarding the subject matter of the artifact. If the object is a work of art, a cartoon, a book illustration, an advertisement, or a toy, it likely represents something. What is the subject matter? Is there a narrative or story behind the image? If a human figure is depicted, is it historical, fantastic, legendary, mythic, or allegorical? Is the figure placed in a real, ideal, abstract, or symbolic world? Does the object portray a subject that is part of an iconographical tradition of representing it? If so, how does the object affirm and vary from its precedents? Whether or not the artifact represents anything, what is its relation to other objects of its kind that were produced before, at the same time, and after it? 3. Regarding the maker of the artifact. Who made the artifact? How do you know? Is there a signature or maker’s mark? Does the work resemble the style of a known artist or artisan? What seems to have been the maker’s intention in creating this object? Did the maker seek to create something beautiful, ugly, shocking, commercially lucrative, practically useful, truthful, amusing, or descriptive? What special knowledge regarding the maker or producer does one require in order to decipher the artifact’s significance? 4. Regarding the spatial location of the artifact. Where, when, and how was the object displayed? What was its immediate physical ecology? Was it used in a church, temple, shrine, palace, gallery, library, civic building, public square, or private home? What does the location imply about the use and meaning of the artifact? Does the object address viewers or users in a particular way? Does it ask to be seen, touched, or experienced from a particular direction? How does the object participate in creating a spatial field for engaging it? If it is a building, how does it relate to other structures in its vicinity? How does it shape space before and around it? 5. Regarding the temporal location of the artifact. Artifacts move and circulate, and they are relocated, exchanged, displayed, and concealed. They exist in time. What is the biography of the object before you? How does its movement and life over time change it? Does the object belong to an identifiable national, political, regional, or religious tradition? What was the urban, rural, municipal, governmental, cultural, or military context in which the object was created, displayed, venerated, or destroyed? 6. Regarding the purpose or function of the artifact. For whom did the maker fashion the artifact? Was he or she working with a particular public or audience in mind? [ 196 ]

Resources for Classroom Use Was the object commissioned or purchased? How much did it cost? Who paid for the object’s production? What do you suppose the patron intended to accomplish? How did the mode of manufacture suit the object’s value, circulation, and use? 7. Regarding the reception of and response to the artifact. How did contemporaries respond to the object? What use did they make of it? What meaning(s) or value did they ascribe to it? How have subsequent generations of viewers regarded the artifact? Are there different kinds of contexts in which it has been used that diverge from its original or intended setting (for example, temple, shrine, palace, private residence, commercial exchange, or public building)? If it circulated in any way, what are the spaces and times through which the artifact has traveled? What is the history of its ownership and display? How has the location of the object in different institutional settings changed or added to its layers of meaning? 8. Regarding the ideological purposes of the artifact. Beyond the matter of the item’s practical function, what kind of cultural or ideological work did it do? Did the artifact’s use or display tell some people who they were within a certain scheme of thought? Was there a worldview that the artifact endorsed? Did its value among a certain group depend on attitudes toward gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, or class? 9. Regarding the prevailing economic and political conditions of social life in which the object was produced, moved, and was experienced. Objects appeal to people under conditions of need and usefulness. Demographic, economic, and political conditions shape the production, perception, and use of artifacts. Think of how differently the following conditions might affect how your artifact is valued: migration, transnationalism, globalization, economic downturn or boom, deregulation, currency devaluation, democratization, neonationalism, religious disestablishment, political unrest, colonialism, slavery, and imperial conquest. Any of these may have formed the broad political, economic, and social context in which the item you are studying first came to be or subsequently was used and valued. How did the artifact participate in any of these larger rhythms of social life and economic organization?

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B i bl i og r a p h y t o S u pp o rt Stud en t R es ea rch Appel Kunow, Marianna. Maya Medicine: Traditional Healing in Yucatán. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Awekotuku, Ngahuia Te. Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Bautista, Julius, ed. The Spirit of Things: Materiality and Religious Diversity in Southeast Asia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2012. Beck, Guy L. Sonic Liturgy: Ritual and Music in Hindu Tradition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012. Bielo, James S. Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Bland, Kalman. The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Blier, Suzanne Preston. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Boldrick, Stacy, Leslie Brubaker, and Richard Clay, eds. Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2013. Bolton, Andrew, ed. Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. Bouttiaux, Anne-­Marie. Persona: Masks of African Identities Hidden and Revealed. Tervuren, Belgium: Royal Museum for Central Africa, 2009. Brubaker, Leslie, and John Haldon. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Buswell, Robert E., Jr., and Donald S. Lopez Jr. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2011. Castelli, Elizabeth A., with Rosamond C. Rodman, eds. Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Chidester, David. Religion: Material Dynamics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. Chipps Smith, Jeffrey. Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. Coquet, Michèle. African Royal Court Art. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Corrigan, John, ed. Feeling Religion. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017. [ 199 ]

Bibliography to Support Student Research Cosentino, Donald J., ed. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995. Davis, David J. From Icons to Idols: Documents on the Image Debate in Reformation England. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2016. Davis, Richard H. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Dean, Carolyn. Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. DeMello, Margo. Encyclopedia of Body Adornment. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2007. Doss, Erika. Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Droogan, Julian. Religion, Material Culture, and Archaeology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Dwyer-­McNulty, Sally. Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Eck, Diana L. Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Engelke, Matthew. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Featherstone, Mike, ed. Body Modification. London: Sage, 2000. Ferrara, Nadia. Healing through Art: Ritualized Space and Cree Identity. Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2004. Finaldi, Gabriel, ed. The Image of Christ. London: National Gallery, 2000. Fine, Steven. Art, History, and the Historiography of Judaism in Roman Antiquity. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Fleming, Benjamin J., and Richard D. Mann, eds. Material Culture and Asian Religions: Text, Image, Object. London: Routledge, 2014. Flower, Harriet I. Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter. Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. Gabriel, Theodore, and Rabiha Hannan, eds. Islam and the Veil: Theoretical and Regional Contexts. London: Continuum, 2011. Gilchrist, Roberta. Sacred Heritage: Monastic Archaeology, Identities, Beliefs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Glassé, Cyril, ed. The New Encyclopedia of Islam. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Gosling, David L. Religion and Ecology in India and South Asia. London: Routledge, 2001. [ 200 ]

Bibliography to Support Student Research Graziano, Frank. Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Grieser, Alexandra K., and Jay Johnston, eds. Aesthetics of Religion: A Connective Concept. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Gross, Aaron S., Jody Myers, and Jordan D. Rosenblum. Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food. New York: New York University Press, 2020. Gruber, Christiane, ed. The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam across the World. London: Gingko, 2019. Hahn, Cynthia. Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–­circa 1204. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. Harvey, Graham, and Jessica Hughes, eds. Sensual Religion: Religion and the Five Senses. Sheffield, U.K.: Equinox, 2018. Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Hodder, Ian. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Malden, U.K.: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012. ———, ed. Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society: Vital Matters. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Hooper, Steven. Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia, 1760–1860. London: British Museum Press, 2006. Houtman, Dick, and Birgit Meyer, eds. Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Hughes, Jessica. Votive Body Parts in Greek and Roman Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hume, Lynne. The Religious Life of Dress: Global Fashion and Faith. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Huntington, Eric. Creating the Universe: Depictions of the Cosmos in Himalayan Buddhism. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. Hutchings, Tim, and Joanne McKenzie, eds. Materiality and the Study of Religion: The Stuff of the Sacred. London: Routledge, 2017. Huyler, Stephen P. Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Insoll, Timothy. Archaeology, Ritual, Religion. London: Routledge, 2004. Ivanič, Suzanna, Mary Laven, and Andrew Morrall, eds. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Jacobsen, Knut A., ed. South Asian Religions on Display: Religious Processions in South Asia and in the Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2008. Jain, Kajri. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. [ 201 ]

Bibliography to Support Student Research Jenkins, Willis, and Christopher Key Chapple. “Religion and Environment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011): 441–63. Jensen, Robin Margaret. Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2005. Johnson, Paul Christopher, ed. Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-­ Atlantic Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Jørgensen, Hans Henrik Lohfert, Henning Laugerud, and Laura Katrine Skinnebach, eds. The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Meditation in the Middle Ages. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2015. Jotischky, Andrew. A Hermit’s Cookbook: Monks, Food, and Fasting in the Middle Ages. London: Continuum, 2011. Kaell, Hillary. Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and the Holy Land. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Kasl, Ronda, ed. Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World. Bloomington: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2009. Keane, Webb. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Keoni, Francesca, ed. Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016. Kerin, Melissa R. Art and Devotion at a Buddhist Temple in the Indian Himalaya. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Kieschnick, John. The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. Kilde, Jeanne Halgren. “Approaching Religious Space: An Overview of Theories, Methods, and Challenges in Religious Studies.” Religion and Theology 20 (2013): 183–201. King, Anna S. “Krishna’s prasadam: ‘Eating Our Way Back to Godhead.’” Material Religion 8 (2012): 440–65. King, David Shaw. Food for the Flames: Idols and Missionaries in Central Polynesia. San Francisco: Beak Press, 2011. Knott, Kim. The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. London: Acumen, 2005. Koo, Angela, ed. Magic Markings: Tantra, Jain and Ritual Art from India. London: Joost van den Bergh, 2016. Langer, Rita. “The Transformative Power of Food: The ‘Milk Mothers’ in Sri Lankan Buddhism.” Material Religion 15 (2019): 529–52. Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Liljeblad, Jonathan, and Bas Verschuuren, eds. Indigenous Perspectives on Sacred Natural Sites: Culture, Governance and Conservation. Boca Raton, Fla.: Routledge, 2018. [ 202 ]

Bibliography to Support Student Research Lyden, John C. Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Macnair, Peter, Robert Joseph, and Bruce Greenville. Down from the Shimmering Sky: Masks of the Northwest Coast. Seattle: University of Washington Press and Vancouver Art Gallery, 1998. McLean, Ian. Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art. London: Reaktion, 2016. McDaniel, Justin Thomas. “The Agency between Images: The Relationships among Ghosts, Corpses, Monks, and Deities at a Buddhist Monastery in Thailand.” Material Religion 7 (2011): 242–67. ———. Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia’s Museums, Monuments, and Amusement Parks. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017. McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Malddonado-­Estrada, Alyssa J. Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. New York: New York University Press, 2020. Meyer, Birgit, ed. Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. “Religion as Mediation.” Entangled Religions 11 (2020): 1–21. ———. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Meyers, Eric M., and Mark A. Chancey. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Vol. 3: Alexander to Constantine. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012. Miller, Mary Ellen. The Art of Mesoamerica: From Olmec to Aztec. 6th ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 2019. Mohan, Urmila. Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2018. Morgan, David. The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. ———, ed. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief. London: Routledge, 2010. ———. The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Morgan, David, and Sally M. Promey, eds. The Visual Culture of American Religions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Narayanan, Vasudha, ed. Wiley Companion to Religion and Materiality. Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2020. Neal, Lynn S. Religion in Vogue: Christianity and Fashion in America. New York: New York University Press, 2019. [ 203 ]

Bibliography to Support Student Research Nelson, Louis P., ed. American Sanctuary: Understanding Sacred Spaces. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2006. Nooter Roberts, Mary, and Allen F. Roberts, ed. Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History. New York: Museum for African Art, and Munich: Prestel, 1996. Orsi, Robert A. History and Presence. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. Paine, Crispin. Gods and Rollercoasters: Religion in Theme Parks Worldwide. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pal, Pratapaditya, ed. Buddhist Art: Form and Meaning. Mumbai: Marg, 2007. ———, ed. Puja and Piety: Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist Art from the Indian Subcontinent. Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art in association with the University of California Press, 2016. Park, Chris C. Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion. London: Routledge, 1994. Pattison, Stephen. Seeing Things: Deepening Relations with Visual Artifacts. London: SCM, 2007. Pearce, Michael. “Accommodating the Disincarnate: Thai Spirit Houses and the Phenomenology of Place.” Material Religion 7 (2011): 344–73. Pentikäinen, Juha. Shamanism and Northern Ecology. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Pinney, Christopher. “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion, 2004. Plate, S. Brent, ed. Key Terms in Material Religion. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. ———. Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-­Creation of the World. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Promey, Sally M., ed. Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Proser, Adriana, ed. Pilgrimage and Buddhist Art. New York: Asia Society, and New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010. Richards, William. Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Roberts, Allen, and Mary Nooter Roberts. A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts in Urban Senegal. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2003. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Sissons, Jeffrey. The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolutions and the Seasonality of Power. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Smoak, Jeremy, and Alice Mandell. “The Material Turn in the Study of Israelite Religions: Spaces, Things, and the Body.” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 19 (2019): 1–42. [ 204 ]

Bibliography to Support Student Research Stolow, Jeremy, ed. Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Strong, Mary. Art, Nature, and Religion in the Central Andes: Themes and Variations from Prehistory to the Present. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Swan, James A., ed. The Power of Place: Sacred Ground in Natural and Human Environments. Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1991. Torrence, Gaylord. Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. Trainor, Kevin. Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism: Rematerializing the Sri Lankan Theravāda Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Troncoso, Andres, Felipe Armstrong, and George Nash, eds. Archaeologies of Rock Art: South American Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2018. Walker, Susan, ed. Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Routledge, 2000. Watkins, Greg, ed. Teaching Religion and Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Weiner, Isaac. Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Weinryb, Ittai, ed. Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place. New York: Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 2018. Wesler, Kit W. An Archaeology of Religion. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2012. Wharton, Annabel Jane. Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Whitehead, Amy. Religious Statues and Personhood: Testing the Role of Materiality. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Winfield, Pamela D., and Steven Heine, eds. Zen and Material Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Winkler, Mary G., and Letha B. Cole, eds. The Good Body: Asceticism in Contemporary Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. Zito, Angela. “Secularizing the Pain of Foot-­Binding in China: Missionary and Medical Stagings of the Universal Body.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75 (2007): 1–24.

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N o t es Introduction

1. Saul Levine, “The Location of Michelangelo’s David: The Meeting of January 25, 1504,” Art Bulletin 56 (1974): 31–49. For a brief bio of Amilcare Santini (1910– 1975), see https://www.lonestartradingcompany.com/noname163.html. 2. An important discussion of things is Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1–22; for a discussion of “thing” in terms of religious material culture, see David Morgan, “Thing,” in Key Terms in Material Religion, ed. S. Brent Plate (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 253–59. See also Matthew Engelke’s discussion of objectification and thing in A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 26–27. 3. Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 673–77, in Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M. L. West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 57. 4. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992), 61, 71. 5. Weber, 32. 6. Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1922), 775. 7. Frazer, 788. 8. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-­Blood Prince (New York: Scholastic, 2005), 497. 9. Rowling, 497. 10. Frazer, Golden Bough, chaps. 9, 55, 67. 11. See Dorothy Morrison, The Craft: A Witch’s Book of Shadows (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2001). 12. Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–24. 13. See, e.g., Paul Christopher Johnson, ed., Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-­Atlantic Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Julius Bautista, ed., The Spirt of Things: Materiality and Religious Diversity in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2012); and Justin Thomas McDaniel, “The Agency between Images: The Relationships among Ghosts, Corpses, Monks, and Deities at a Buddhist Monastery in Thailand,” Material Religion 7 (2011): 242–67. 14. Diana L. Eck, Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Stephen P. Huyler, Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 36. 15. I discuss this in my book Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 23–45. [ 207 ]

Notes to Pages 10–22 16. Thomas Adamson, “Notre Dame Cathedral to Miss First Christmas Mass in Centuries,” December 20, 2019, AP News. 17. Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 34. Here I summarize Davis’s detailed discussion on pp. 34–37. 18. Davis, 35. 19. Frazer, Golden Bough, 14. 20. The Black Stone is widely discussed in lore and on the Internet. For a brief discussion, see Cyril Glassé, “Black Stone,” in The New Encyclopedia of Islam (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 91–92. 21. For a discussion of the history of Buddhist robes and a focus on Zen robes in Japan, see Diane E. Riggs, “Golden Robe or Rubbish Robe? Interpretations of the Transmitted Robe in Tokugawa Period Zen Buddhist Thought,” in Zen and Material Culture, ed. Pamela D. Winfield and Steven Heine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 197–228. 22. Erwin Panofsky, ed. and trans., Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-­Denis and Its Art Treasures, 2nd ed. by Gerda Panofsky-­Soergel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 57, 59. 23. Roberta Gilchrist, Sacred Heritage: Monastic Archaeology, Identities, Beliefs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 135, also 114. 24. Gilchrist, 113. 25. On medieval lapidaries, or manuscripts devoted to the description of precious stones, the lore that surrounded them, and virtues or powers attributed to gems and stones, see, e.g., Joan Evans, Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), 51–94, and, on gems in reliquaries and religious objects, Evans, 133–39. For discussion of the legacy of lapidary virtues in the early modern era, see Rachel King, “The Reformation of the Rosary Bead: Protestantism and the Perpetuation of the Amber Paternoster,” in Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World, ed. Suzanna Ivanič, Mary Laven, and Andrew Morrall (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 193–210. 26. Panofsky, Abbott Suger, 21. 27. In his discussion of the effect of drumming in Native American sacred song, Bryon Dueck makes the point that the drum affects “not just the ears but the whole body,” in “North American Indigenous Song, the Sacred and the Senses,” in Sensual Religion: Religion and the Five Senses, ed. Graham Harvey and Jessica Hughes (Sheffield, U.K.: Equinox, 2018), 171. For a discussion of how touch and vision work together in the experience of art, see Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 79–102. 28. For further discussion of the relational dimension of the agency of objects, environments, and materials, see Amy Whitehead, Religious Statues and Personhood: Testing the Role of Materiality (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 125– [ 208 ]

Notes to Pages 27–32 52; Stephen Pattison, Seeing Things: Deepening Relations with Visual Artifacts (London: SCM, 2007); and Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000).

Chapter 1

1. For a consideration of materiality in medieval Christian thought and practice, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Sacrality of Things: An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages,” Irish Theological Quarterly 78 (2013): 2–18. 2. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Apologia,” to William, abbot of Saint-­Thierry, reprinted in A Documentary History of Art, vol. 1: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), 19. 3. For an illuminating discussion of Bernard and Romanesque art, see Meyer Schapiro, “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art,” in Romanesque Art (New York: G. Braziller, 1977), 1–27. 4. Bernard, “Apologia,” 20. 5. Bernard, 20. 6. Bernard, 21. 7. Charles Joseph Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church, from the Original Documents, 5 vols., trans. William R. Clark (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1896), 5:310. 8. Hefele, 5:310. For a translation of the council’s final statement as it comes down to us, see Stephen Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm during the Reign of Constantine V, with Particular Attention to the Oriental Sources (Leuven, Belgium: Corpussco, 1977), 68–94. For lengthy historical discussion of the controversy in Byzantium, in particular Constantine V and the Council of 754, see Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 156–97; for a good translation of the core passages of the Horos of the Council of 754, see Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, 194–96. 9. For a discussion of the debate over images in Eastern Orthodoxy, see Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, and Jaroslav Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 91–133. 10. Deborah A. Sommer, “Images into Words: Ming Confucian Iconoclasm,” National Palace Museum Bulletin 29 (1994): 8–10. For a discussion of Confucian name tablets and ancestor portraits in Korea, see Insoo Cho, “Materializing Ancestor Spirits: Name Tablets, Portraits, and Tombs in Korea,” in Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief, ed. David Morgan (London: Routledge, 2010), 214–28. 11. Sommer, “Images into Words,” 6. 12. Sommer, 17. 13. See Carlos M. N. Eire, War against Idols: The Reformation of Worship from [ 209 ]

Notes to Pages 33–40 Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and David J. Davis, From Icons to Idols: Documents on the Image Debate in Reformation England (Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2016). 14. “Burning the Prayers—Chinese Superstitions,” Harper’s Weekly, August 23, 1873, 746. 15. “Chinese Exclusion Act (1882),” Our Documents, https://www.ourdocuments .gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47. 16. Josiah Strong, Our Country, ed. Jurgen Herbst (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 201. 17. Strong, 206. 18. Strong, 216. Strong quotes James Anthony Froude, “Romanism and the Irish Race in the United States,” North American Review 129 (1879): 535–36. 19. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, trans. Catherine Porter and Heather MacLean (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 2–5. 20. Latour developed a third term to capture the way moderns produce their own facts and call them truth, actually doing just what the Portuguese trader accused the Africans of doing to make their fetishes. Latour coined the term factish to approximate the modern scientific “fetishization” of facts (Latour, 21–22). For a discussion of the lineage of fetish in anthropology and the study of religion, see Peter Pels, “The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 91–121; Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 76–82, 176–81; and Tomoko Masuzawa, “Troubles with Materiality: The Ghost of Fetishism in the Nineteenth Century,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 647–67; for a discussion of the term in the domain of art history, see William Pietz, “Fetish,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 197–207. 21. John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands (London: John Snow, 1841), 146. 22. Williams, 150. 23. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), 95. 24. Calvin, 97. 25. Calvin, 98. 26. Keane, Christian Moderns, 59–72. 27. Keane, 59. 28. Keane, 62. 29. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1987), 373 (bk. 10). [ 210 ]

Notes to Pages 42–47 30. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Hume, Principal Writings on Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 134. 31. Hume, 135. 32. Hume, 157. 33. Hume, 158. 34. Hume, 159. 35. Hume, 172, 173. 36. Hume, 173–74. 37. Hume, 185. 38. Hume, 185. 39. David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 40. For further consideration of this, see David Morgan, “Introduction: The Matter of Belief,” in Religion and Material Culture, 1–12. For a critique of the dominant Protestant sensibility in religious studies, see Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016). 41. See James Hoopes, ed., Pierce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Peirce is another challenging writer to read, but one whose work continues to exert influence. 42. Jacques Derrida is the figure most commonly associated with poststructuralism. In his early and highly influential work Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), Derrida developed the view that signs do not carry their meaning within them, as some form of presence, but naturally deconstruct, that is, disassemble in a play of signifiers referring to other signifiers, deferring the final meaning of any text by virtue of this play. Reading the text tends to replace the importance of composing it as the act of generating meaning. For an examination of poststructuralism in regard to the study of material culture, see Bjørnar Olsen, “Scenes from a Troubled Engagement: Post-­ Structuralism and Material Culture Studies,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer (Los Angeles: Sage, 2006), 85–103. 43. Craig Martin, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2017), 35. 44. Martin, 37. 45. This word was coined and discussed by the American psychologist James J. Gibson in 1968 in his study of visual perception set within the physical environments in which it operates, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 1986), 127: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.” For a more recent discussion of the idea in the context of anthropological investigation, see Webb [ 211 ]

Notes to Pages 48–53 Keane, “Perspectives on Affordances, or the Anthropologically Real,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (2018): 27–38. 46. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. 47. Graham Harman, Object-­Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018), 10. 48. Actor-­network theory is the mode of inquiry developed by a group of sociologists and scholars, including Bruno Latour, from the 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-­first century. They approach the description of things as networks of actants. See, e.g., Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­ Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 49. Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann and Joost van Loon, eds., Discussing New Materialism: Methodological Implications for the Study of Materialities (Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer, 2019); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–43. Birgit Meyer organized a forum of brief reflections by several scholars on the topic of the new materialism and material approaches to the study of religion, published in Material Religion 15 (2019): 620–31. 50. See Peter Bräunlein, “Thinking Religion through Things: Reflections on the Material Turn in the Scientific Study of Religion(s),” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 28 (2016): 365–99; Sonja Hazard, “The Material Turn in the Study of Religion,” Religion and Society 4 (2013): 58–78; and Dan Hicks, “The Material-­ Culture Turn: Event and Effect,” in Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25–98. 51. For considerations of material and visual turns in the study of religion, see Christoph Uehlinger, “Approaches to Visual Culture and Religion: Disciplinary Trajectories, Interdisciplinary Connections, and Some Suggestions for Further Progress,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 27 (2015): 384–422; and Jeremy Smoak and Alice Mandell, “The Material Turn in the Study of Israelite Religions: Spaces, Things, and the Body,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 19 (2019): 1–42. Matthew Engelke has made the prudent point that “all religion is material religion” and that “material culture has never been truly absent from religious studies,” in “Material Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert A. Orsi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 209–10. 52. For further discussion of the focal object, see David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 77, 85. 53. Fr. Thomas McGlynn, O.P., Vision of Fatima (1948; reprint, Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute Press, 2017), 65. 54. McGlynn, 65. [ 212 ]

Notes to Pages 54– 60

Chapter 2

1. Helen Cox Bowerman, “Roman Sacrificial Altars: An Archaeological Study of Monuments in Rome” (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1913), 87, notes that the pitcher containing wine frequently appears sculpted in relief on the left side of Roman altars, where the ritual attendant (camillus) would stand, holding the pitcher; and on the right side of the altar often appears a bowl (patera) because right-­handed priests would stand to the right of the altar, facing worshippers, to pour libations with the bowl held in the right hand. 2. Bowerman, 8. 3. Jean-­Jacques Hatt, Argentorate Strasbourg, Collection Galliae Civitates (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1993), 19–20; see also the entry online for the object at the Musée Archéologique de Strasbourg, https://www.musees.strasbourg.eu. 4. For an illuminating discussion of sacrifices in Rome, see John Scheid, “Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors,” in A Companion to Roman Religion, ed. Jörg Rüpke (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 263–71; and John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion, trans. Janet Lloyd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 79–110. 5. Cato Varro, De Agri Cultura, trans. William Davis Hooper, rev. Harrison Boyd Ash, Loeb Classical Library 283 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 121 (para. 139). 6. Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), 365 (2.22.4–5). For discussion of Pausanias’s fascinating descriptions of religious images, see Pausanias, Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, ed. Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jaś Elsner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 7. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Collier Books, 1950), 59. 8. Frazer, 57–58. 9. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, 6th ed., 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), 1:115–21. 10. Tylor, 424. 11. This was the determination of the Council of Trent, responding in the sixteenth century to the Protestant claim that the sacraments depended on the faith of the individual recipient; see Norman P. Tanner, S.J., ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 2, Council of Trent (session vii, canon 8), 685. 12. Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 59–60. 13. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Open Press, 1995), 39–40. 14. Durkheim, 42. [ 213 ]

Notes to Pages 60– 67 15. Durkheim, 44. 16. For further discussion of magic, religion, and enchantment, see David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1–22. 17. Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-­ Modern Europe (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), xxviii. 18. William Hurd, D.D., A New Universal History of the Religious Rites, Ceremonies, and Customs of the Whole World: Or, A Complete and Impartial View of All the Religions in the Various Nations of the Universe (London: Alexander Hogg, 1788). 19. Hurd, New Universal History, “Explanation of the Frontispiece,” ii. 20. It is no surprise that when Hurd discusses Christianity, he describes it as “that religion which has the true God for its author” (111). 21. On the senses and feeling in the study of religion, see Graham Harvey and Jessica Hughes, eds., Sensual Religion: Religion and the Five Senses (Sheffield, U.K.: Equinox, 2018); John Corrigan, ed., Feeling Religion (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017); Sally M. Promey, ed., Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); and Webb Keane, “The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14, suppl. (2008): 110–27. 22. See Talal Asad’s essay on disciplinary practice, “On Discipline and Humility in Medieval Christian Monasticism,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 125–67. 23. Sergey A. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Simon Franklin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Michael W. Dols, Majnūn: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Robert Lewis Gross, The Sādhus of India: A Study of Hindu Asceticism (Jaipur: Rawat, 1992); Colleen Ward, “Thaipusam in Malaysia: A Psycho-­Anthropological Analysis of Ritual Trance, Ceremonial Possession and Self-­Mortification Practices,” Ethos 12 (1984): 307–34. 24. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902; reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 36. 25. James, 19. 26. See David Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 27. James, Varieties, 39. 28. James, 61. 29. For discussion of recent thought on affect, see Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). On emotion and the study of religious material culture, see John [ 214 ]

Notes to Pages 68– 77 Kieschnick, “Material Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, ed. John Corrigan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 225–37; on emotion as a social form of embodiment, see Piroska Nagy, “Making a Collective Emotional Body: Francis of Assisi Celebrating Christmas in Greccio (1223),” in Emotional Bodies: The Historical Performativity of Emotions, ed. Dolores Martín-­Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 151–74. 30. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 114. 31. Geertz, 117. 32. Geertz, 90. 33. Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2. 34. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 5; compare Geertz, “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (Interpretation of Cultures, 5). 35. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 61. For a helpful discussion of phenomenology in the study of materiality, see Julian Thomas, “Phenomenology and Material Culture,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer (Los Angeles: Sage, 2006), 43–59. 36. Merleau-­Ponty, 159–61. 37. Merleau-­Ponty, 166. 38. Marc Maron, Too Real, 2017, Netflix, at 51 minutes, 34 seconds into the set. 39. My thanks to colleagues Professors Mohsen Kadivar and Pooyan Tamimi Arab for information on Muslim prayer. See also Cyril Glassé, “Prayer,” in The New Encyclopedia of Islam (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 363. 40. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2 (1973): 70–88. 41. Mauss, 73, emphasis in original. 42. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 44. 43. Birgit Meyer, Mediation and the Genesis of Presence: Towards a Material Approach to Religion (Utrecht, Netherlands: University of Utrecht, 2012), 26–27. 44. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies [1925], trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990). 45. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 35–36.

Chapter 3

1. This chapter offers a variety of key themes and terms as fundamental features of the study of the material study of religion. Readers may wish to consult a useful lexicon for further assistance: S. Brent Plate, ed., Key Terms in Material Religion (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). [ 215 ]

Notes to Pages 78–81 2. On healing, see Brett Hendrickson, The Healing Power of the Sanctuario de Chimayó: America’s Miraculous Church (New York: New York University Press, 2017); Amy DeRogatis, Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Patrisia Gonzales, Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012); Candy Gunther Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Nadia Ferrara, Healing through Art: Ritualized Space and Cree Identity (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2004); and William S. Lyon, Encyclopedia of Native American Healing (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-­CLIO, 1996). 3. Carl Olson, Indian Asceticism: Power, Violence, Display (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Richard Finn, Asceticism in the Graeco-­Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Eliezer Diamond, Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Stephen Eskildsen, Asceticism in Early Taoist Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Mary G. Winkler and Letha B. Cole, eds., The Good Body: Asceticism in Contemporary Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994). 4. On body modification, see Margo DeMello, Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2007); and Angela Zito, “Secularizing the Pain of Foot-­Binding in China: Missionary and Medical Stagings of the Universal Body,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75 (2007): 1–24. For discussions of body modification in the contemporary world, see Bernadette Wegenstein, The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012); Mary Nyangweso Wangila, Female Circumcision: The Interplay of Religion, Culture, and Gender in Kenya (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2007); and Mike Featherstone, ed., Body Modification (London: Sage, 2000). 5. On tattooing, see Aaron Deter-­Wolf and Carol Diaz-­Granados, eds., Drawing with Great Needles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Isabel Azevedo Drouyer, Thai Magic Tattoos: The Art and Influence of Sak Yant (Bangkok: River Books, 2013); Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); and Frances E. Mascia-­Lees and Patricia Sharpe, eds., Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 6. Anna S. King, “Krishna’s Prasadam: ‘Eating Our Way Back to Godhead,’” Material Religion 8 (2012): 440–65. 7. On food, eating, and religion, see Zena Kamash, “The Taste of Religion in the Roman World,” in Sensual Religion: Religion and the Five Senses, ed. Graham Harvey and Jessica Hughes (Sheffield, U.K.: Equinox, 2018), 63–83; Rita Langer, “The Transformative Power of Food: The ‘Milk Mothers’ in Sri Lankan Buddhism,” [ 216 ]

Notes to Pages 82–85 Material Religion 15 (2019): 529–52; Andrew Jotischky, A Hermit’s Cookbook: Monks, Food, and Fasting in the Middle Ages (London: Continuum, 2011); Dorinne Kondo, “The Way of Tea: A Symbolic Analysis,” in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 192–211; R. S. Khare, ed., The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); and Daniel Sack, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000). On pharmacology, see Alexander S. Dawson, The Peyote Effect: From the Inquisition to the War on Drugs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); William Richards, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Fructuoso Irigoyen-­Rascón with Alfonso Paredes, Tarahumara Medicine: Ethnobotany and Healing among the Rarámuri of Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015); Robert Forte, Entheogens and the Future of Religion (Rochester, N.Y.: Council on Spiritual Practices, 2012); Marianna Appel Kunow, Maya Medicine: Traditional Healing in Yucatán (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003); Gordon Wasson, Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); and James Kirkland, ed., Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992). 8. “Orthodox Fasting,” Orthodox Church in America, https://oca.org/questions /dailylife/orthodox-­fasting. 9. Sura Al-­Baqara 2:183, The Qur’an, trans. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 20. 10. Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, Yellow Wolf: His Own Story (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1940), 295–97. 11. Omer C. Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). The use of psychoactive substances in other traditions is well known. See for instance the role of nightshade in Tantric Buddhism, detailed in Claudia Müller-­Ebeling, Christian Rätsch, and Surendra Bahadur Shahi, Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 17–18. In his novel House Made of Dawn (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday describes a Native American prayer meeting using peyote (111–12). 12. For details of the entire event, see María Victoria Caballero Gómez, “El Auto de Fe de 1680: Un lienzo para Francisco Rizi,” Revista de la Inquisición 3 (1994): 69–140; for discussion of the stage design and seating, see Gómez, 81–85. 13. Edward J. Sullivan, Baroque Painting in Madrid (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 6–7. For other instances of the role of imagery and objects in power dynamics, see David Chidester, Religion: Material Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); Anna Niedźwiedź, The Image and the Figure: Our Lady of Częstochowa in Polish Culture and Popular Religion (Krakow: Jagiel[ 217 ]

Notes to Pages 86 –94 lonian University Press, 2010); Christopher Pinney, “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Images and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004); and Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999). 14. Stewart Elliot Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 15. Vicki Bruce and Andy Young, In the Eye of the Beholder: The Science of Face Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 16. Useful studies of faces, images, and masks include Hans Belting, Face and Mask: A Double History, trans. Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017); Anne-­Marie Bouttiaux, Persona: Masks of African Identities Hidden and Revealed (Tervuren, Belgium: Royal Museum for Central Africa, 2009); Robin Margaret Jensen, Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2005); Peter Macnair, Robert Joseph, and Bruce Greenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky: Masks of the Northwest Coast (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Vancouver Art Gallery, 1998). 17. David L. Thompson, Mummy Portraits in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1982), 8–9. 18. Susan Walker, ed., Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Routledge, 2000). 19. For a comprehensive study of Roman ancestor masks, see Harriet I. Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 20. P. Papinius Statius, “Consolation Addressed to Claudius Etruscus,” in Silvae, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 197–98 (bk. 3, lines 194–202). 21. The Dutch edition was a translation and retitling of Jacques Basnage’s French original, Histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament. The first Dutch edition of the translation was published in 1702 in Rotterdam by Marcus Doornick en Pieter; the second edition appeared in 1704 from Jacobus Lindenberg in Amsterdam. 22. A major work that grounds the study of religion within the power relations of colonial empire is David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); for discussion of colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid as material dynamics in the academic study of religion, see David Chidester, Religion: Material Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 104–31. 23. For discussion of “economy” as a material aspect of religions, see Chidester, Religion, 89–103; on the materiality of sacred economies in modern Christian thought and practice, see David Morgan, The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 71–104. [ 218 ]

Notes to Pages 94–103 24. Studies of votive objects left at shrines as material testament to and gratitude for healing or other favors include Ittai Weinryb, ed., Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place (New York: Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 2018); Jessica Hughes, Votive Body Parts in Greek and Roman Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Frank Graziano, Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 25. “Expiation,” Lexico, https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/expiation. In Christian tradition, expiation and propitiation are the English terms often used to translate New Testament expressions of the sacrificial significance of Jesus’s death (Rom. 3:25, Heb. 2:17, 1 John 2:2 RSV). 26. Michael Witzel, “Vedas and Upanishads,” in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 78. 27. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, trans. W. D. Halls (1898; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 42–43. 28. XXVI hymn to Agni, verses 1–3, 5, from Hymns from the Rigveda, selected and trans. A. A. Macdonell (Calcutta: Association Press [Y.M.C.A.], 1922), 72. 29. Julius Lipner, Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2010), 42. 30. For a discussion of Vedic sacrifice and yajña, see Swami Harshananda, “Vedic Sacrifices,” Hindupedia, http://www.hindupedia.com/en/Vedic_Sacrifices. 31. On divination and material objects, see David J. Kim, “Divination and Its Potential Futures: Sensation, Scripts, and the Virtual in South Korean Eight-­ Character Fortune Telling,” Material Religion 15 (2019): 599–618; John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion, trans. Janet Lloyd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 111–26; John Pemberton III, ed., Insight and Artistry in African Divination (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000); and Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, “Memory in Motion,” in Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (New York: Museum for African Art, 1996), 177–209. On luck and material objects, see Inge Daniels, “Scooping, Raking, Beckoning Luck: Luck, Agency and the Interdependence between People and Things in Japan,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9 (2003): 619–38.

Chapter 4

1. Hesiod, Theogony, Work and Days, Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5. 2. For a description of the Oracle and the process involved in her divination, see William J. Broad, The Oracle: Ancient Delphi and the Science behind Its Lost Secrets (New York: Penguin, 1999), 34–40. 3. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1946), 163 (bk. 10, lines 304–6). 4. Ptolemaeus Chennus, New History, lost; summarized by Photius, Biblioteca, [ 219 ]

Notes to Pages 104– 7 codex 190: “The plant ‘moly’ of which Homer speaks; this plant had, it is said, grown from the blood of the giant killed in the isle of Circe; it has a white flower; the ally of Circe who killed the giant was Helios; the combat was hard (mâlos) from which the name of this plant.” http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/photius_copyright/photius _05bibliotheca.htm. 5. For example, Pliny the Elder wrote that the intertwined snakes refer to snakes in heat, when they produce eggs that are highly prized for their ensuring success in lawsuits and favorable reception with princes: “It is this entwining of serpents with one another, and the fruitful results of this unison, that seem to me to have given rise to the usage among foreign nations, of surrounding the caduceus with representations of serpents, as so many symbols of peace—it must be remembered, too, that on the caduceus, serpents are never represented as having crests.” Natural History, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley, 5 vols. (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855), 5:388 (bk. 29, chap. 12). 6. Livy, History of Rome, trans. Rev. Canon Roberts, 6 vols. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1912–24), 5:4–5 (bk. 8, chap. 20, ): “Some state that the city [of Privernum, a city in Gaul] was stormed and Vitrubius taken alive; other authorities aver that before the final assault the townsmen came out with a caduceus and surrendered to the consul, whilst Vitrubius was given up by his own men.” 7. See, e.g., a late nineteenth-­century study by Count Goblet D’Alviella, The Migration of Symbols (1894; reprint, Wellingborough, U.K.: Aquarian Press, 1979), 226–37. 8. Krishna Ghosh Della Santina, The Tibetan Tantric Vision (New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 2003), 165–67. For further discussion of Vajrayana in Tantric Buddhism, see Paul Williams with Anthony Tribe and Alexander Wynne, Buddhist Thought: A Complete Introduction to the Indian Tradition, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2012), 143–85. For a discussion of a variety of related devices in Zen, see Steven Heine, “Thy Rod and Thy Staff, They Discomfort Me: Zen Staffs as Implements of Instruction,” in Zen and Material Culture, ed. Pamela D. Winfield and Steven Heine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–36. 9. Michèle Coquet, African Royal Court Art, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 112. For examples of fly whisks as a chief ’s or king’s authority among the Baule in Ghana, see Hans Himmelherr, “Gold-­Plated Objects of Baule Notables,” in African Art and Leadership, ed. Douglas Fraser and Herbert M. Cole (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 186–88. 10. Coquet, African Royal Court Art, 115. 11. Homer, Odyssey, 89 (bk. 5, lines 71–72). 12. For a discussion of the rite as portrayed in the Book of the Dead, see The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day, trans. Raymond O. Faulkner, with additional commentary and translation by Ogden Goelet Jr. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), 157. [ 220 ]

Notes to Pages 108–18 13. Book of the Dead, 48 (chap. 23, pl. 15). In fact, there is no evidence to show that large numbers of Jews had been held captive in ancient Egypt. However, Jerusalem fell to the army of Ramesses II (reigned 1279 to 1213) during his third Syrian campaign. And versions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, published during his regime, would have provided knowledge of Egyptian rites and lore. Authorship of the book of the first fifteen chapters of Exodus, detailing the Egyptian ordeal of Israel and ending with the death of Pharaoh in the Red Sea (for which there is no historical evidence whatsoever) may have been projecting onto the past an account that helped address the present. It is noteworthy that the first mention of Israel by an external source occurred in 1207 BCE, when a stele recorded the Egyptian military campaign in the Mediterranean. 14. See Gabriel Ehinger’s drawing Saul Speaking to Samuel’s Spirit with the Witch of Endor, 1675, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. 15. See, e.g., Alessandro Magnasco, Witch of Endor, painted in the first half of the eighteenth century; Benjamin West, Saul and the Witch of Endor, 1777; and Washington Allston, Saul and the Witch of Endor, 1820. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the dreamy Romanticism of the Pre-­Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose fascination with the femme fatale made witches especially interesting, turned a corner on the biblical theme of the Witch of Endor. See, e.g., the works by John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886, and Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus, 1891. 16. For a discussion of this set of themes in his work, see Patty Wageman, “Dream or Reality? Waterhouse’s Women and Symbolism,” in J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-­Raphaelite, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn et al. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008), 51–61. 17. Robert Upstone, “The Magic Circle,” in Prettejohn et al., J. W. Waterhouse, 106. 18. See Miranda Aldhouse-­Green, Caesar’s Druids: Story of an Ancient Priesthood (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 164–65. 19. See Miranda J. Green, The World of the Druids (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 62–63. 20. Lewis Spence, The History and Origin of Druidism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), 147–48; W. Y. Evans-­Wentz, The Fairy-­Faith in Celtic Countries (1911; reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1966), 343–44. 21. Lewis Spence, The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain (1945; reprint, London: Constable, 1995), 27. 22. Spence, 27; Marc Zvi Brettler, How to Read the Jewish Bible (New York: Ox­ ford University Press, 2005), 24. 23. On Rosicrucianism, see Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 2015); on hermeticism, see Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times, tr. David [ 221 ]

Notes to Pages 118–22 Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); on alchemy, see Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); on kabbalah, see Daniel C. Matt, The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism (New York: Harper One, 1994); and on freemasonry, see Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). An account by a former member of the Golden Dawn is very helpful for its narrative of issues, dates, personalities, and events: R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians (Wellingborough, U.K.: Aquarian Press, 1983); see p. 63 of Gilbert’s book for a discussion of wands in the Golden Dawn. 24. There are several versions of the manuscript that Mathers translated, in Hebrew, Latin, and Italian, some of which do not mention wands. Indeed, the Latin word is baculum, which is staff, scepter, or stick. Wand is a Middle English word that derives from Old Norse and is close to Swedish (vand) and Danish (vaand), and may represent Mathers’s insertion because he translated the baculum as both “wand” and “staff,” rendering the word twice. For a digital version by Joseph H. Peterson, with a helpful commentary and recension of various manuscript versions, see Twilit Grotto: Archives of Western Esoterica, http://www.esotericarchives.com /solomon/ksol.htm. For two earlier English versions, which date to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Twilit Grotto: Archives of Western Esoterica, http:// www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/ad36674.htm. 25. The Greater Key of Solomon the King, trans. and ed. Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, in The Three Magical Books of Solomon (Dallas, Tex.: Mockingbird Press, 2017), 223–34. 26. Greater Key, 245. 27. Greater Key, 129. 28. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice (Alicia Éditions, 2019; printed in Columbia, S.C.), 90. This work is extracted from Crowley’s Magick (Book 4), which was first published in 1912–13. 29. IanC, “The Druid’s Wand,” April 21, 2010, Into the Mound: Druidic Occultism & Pagan Sorcery, http://intothemound.blogspot.com/2010/04/druids-­wand.html. For a scholarly discussion of the meaning of the term neopagan in relation to magic, druids, and Wicca, see Helen A. Berger, “Witchcraft and Neopaganism,” in Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America, ed. Helen A. Berger (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 28–54. For an insider account of “the Druid way,” see Graeme K. Talboys, Way of the Druid: The Renaissance of a Celtic Religion and Its Relevance for Today (Hampshire, U.K.: O Books, 2005). 30. IanC, “Druid’s Wand.” On the neopagan practice of cultural borrowing, see Sarah M. Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 153. 31. Alferian Gwydion MacLir, The Witch’s Wand: The Craft, Lore and Magick of Wands and Staffs (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2019), 29. [ 222 ]

Notes to Pages 122–34 32. MacLir, 29. 33. MacLir, 122, 124. 34. MacLir, 30. 35. Charles Perrault, “Cinderella, or The Little Slipper Made of Glass,” in The Complete Fairy Tales, trans. Christopher Betts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 184. 36. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1997), 84. For a Wiccan author’s discussion of the wands in the Harry Potter books, see Gypsey Elaine Teague, The Witch’s Guide to Wands: A Complete Botanical, Magical, and Elemental Guide to Making, Choosing, and Using the Right Wand (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2015), 198–203. Teague discusses only the types of wood that compose the wands of individual characters, making no mention of magical elements installed within wands. 37. MacLir, Witch’s Wand, 134. 38. MacLir, 13. 39. Teague, Witch’s Guide, 6. 40. Dorothy Morrison, The Craft: A Witch’s Book of Shadows (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2017), 58–62. 41. The manuscript illustration of the open Ark of the Covenant is on fol. 11v of Ms 139, Speculum Humane Salvationes (Mirror of human salvation), Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. 42. Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 86–87. 43. I consider this at length in Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 69–89. 44. MacLir, Witch’s Wand, 6.

Chapter 5

1. Henri Astier, “Notre-­Dame Fire: What the Cathedral Means to the French,” BBC News, April 15, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­europe-­47942786. Over the following days, Astier continued to provide thoughtful reflections on the impact of the cathedral fire; see “Notre-­Dame Fire: Eight Centuries of Turbulent History,” BBC News, April 20, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­europe-­479 71044. 2. Yvan Christ, “Notre-­Dame,” Dictionaire de Paris (Paris: Larousse, 1964), 364. 3. Richard and Clara Winston, Notre-­Dame de Paris (New York: Newsweek, 1971), 18. 4. Thierry Sarmant, Histoire de Paris: Politique, Urbanisme, Civilisation (Paris: J.-­P. Gisserot, 2012), 14. 5. Alain Erlande-­Brandenburg, Notre-­Dame de Paris, trans. John Goodman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 16–17. 6. Erlande-­Brandenburg, 19–20. [ 223 ]

Notes to Pages 135–44 7. Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-­Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). 8. For further discussion of Notre-­Dame’s architectural rivalry with the Abbey of Saint-­Denis, as well as other contemporary cathedrals, see Abbot Suger, 78. 9. Abbot Suger, 78. 10. Latin original quoted in Caroline Bruselius, “The Construction of Notre-­ Dame in Paris,” Art Bulletin 69 (1987): 540n2. 11. Erlande-­Brandenburg, Notre-­Dame de Paris, 55. 12. Bruselius, “Construction of Notre-­Dame in Paris,” 540–69. 13. Winston and Winston, Notre-­Dame de Paris, 72. 14. Antoine Marcourt, Articles véritables sur les horribles, grands et insupportables abus de la messe papale inventée directement contre la Sainte Cène de notre Seigneur seul médiateur et sauveur Jésus Christ. For the full text, see Gabrielle Berthoud, Antoine Marcourt: Réformateur et pamphlétaire du “Livre des marchans” aux placard de 1534 (Geneva: Droz, 1973), 287–89. One of the original broadsheets appears online at Gallica, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8626365b/f9.image. 15. Berthoud, Antoine Marcourt, 289. 16. Berthoud, 288, my translation. 17. R. J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 315. 18. Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-­Century Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 145–58, esp. 149. 19. Michel Felibien, Histoire de la ville de Paris, ed. D. Guy-­Alexis Lobineau, 5 vols. (Paris: Guillaume Desprez and Jean Desessartz, 1725), 2:997. 20. See J. K. Farge, ed., Religion, Reformation, and Repression in the Reign of Francis I: Documents from the Parlement of Paris, 1515–1547, 2 vols. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015), 1:§310, 420; also Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron, 316–17. 21. Berthoud, Antoine Marcourt, 198. 22. Berthoud, 39. 23. Berthoud, 47. 24. Winston, Notre-­Dame de Paris, 96. 25. For a brief discussion of state funerals in Notre-­Dame, see Yves Bottineau, Notre-­Dame de Paris and the Sainte-­Chapelle, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), 34–35. 26. For discussion of de-­Christianization, see Michel Vovelle, The Revolution against the Church: From Reason to the Supreme Being, trans. Alan José (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991). 27. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, “Civil Religion,” chapter 8 of The Social Contract, in [ 224 ]

Notes to Pages 144–52 Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, rev. and augmented by J. H. Brumfitt and John C. Hall (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 268–77. 28. Winston, Notre-­Dame de Paris, 118. 29. “Declaration of the Gallican Clergy, March 19, 1682,” in Church and State through the Centuries: A Collection of Historic Documents with Commentaries, trans. and ed. Sidney Z. Ehler and John B. Morrall (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1967), 207–8. 30. [Louis Philippe, Comte de Ségur], Procès-­Verbal de la cérémonie du sacre et du couronnemont de LL. MM. l’empereur Napoléon et l’impératrice Joséphine (Paris: L’Imprimerie impériale, 1805). 31. [Louis Philippe, Comte de Ségur], 1. 32. [Louis Philippe, Comte de Ségur], 58: “de gouverner dans la seule vue de l’intérêt, du Bonheur et de la gloire du people français.” 33. Victor Hugo, Notre-­Dame de Paris, trans. Alban Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10 (“Note to the Definitive Edition [1832]).” 34. Hugo, 200. 35. Hugo, 202. 36. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-­Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 37. Hugo, Notre-­Dame de Paris, 206. 38. David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York: Free Press, 1995), 60. 39. David H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 87–91; Stephanie Kirkland, Paris Reborn: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013), 213–22. 40. Y. C. [Yvan Christ], “Notre-­Dame,” in Dictionnaire de Paris (Paris: Larousse, 1964), 366. 41. Y. C., “Cité,” Dictionnaire, 132. 42. Eugène Viollet-­le-­Duc and Jean-­Baptiste Lassus, Rapport: Adressé à M. le Ministre de la Justice et des Cultes (Paris: Lacombe, 1843), 74. 43. Viollet-­le-­Duc and Lassus, 9–10. Viollet-­le-­Duc and Lassus conveyed their philosophy of restoration in their proposal in 1843 to the government ministry in charge of the restoration of churches. 44. Bottineau, Notre-­Dame de Paris, 43. 45. Daniel D. Reiff, “Viollet le Duc and Historic Restoration: The West Portals of Notre-­Dame,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30 (1971): 30. 46. Bottineau, Notre-­Dame de Paris, 44. For an insightful and detailed study of the restoration of the cathedral, with special attention to the gargoyles and chimeras, see Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-­Dame: Medievalism and the [ 225 ]

Notes to Pages 153–56 Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3–50. For a study of Viollet-­le-­Duc, see Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-­Emmanuel Viollet-­le-­Duc, 1814–1879 (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2014). 47. Pauline Bock, “Notre Dame Is Becoming a Symbol of Macron’s Gung-­Ho Presidency,” Guardian, June 10, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2019/jun/10/notre- ­dam-­macron-­presidency-­french-­people- ­cathedral-­resto ration. 48. Bock. 49. Tom Ravenscroft, “Notre-­Dame Must Be Restored to ‘Last Known Visual State’ Says French Senate,” Dezeen, May 29, 2019, https://www.dezeen.com/2019/05/29 /restore-­notre-­dame-­cathedral-­french-­senate/. 50. Alex Greenberger, “Let’s Take the Time to Diagnose: In Open Letter, Experts Urge Emmanuel Macron Not to Rush Notre-­Dame Restoration,” ARTnews, April 29, 2019, https://www.artnews.com/art-­news/news/notre-­dame-­experts-­open-­letter -­macron-­12461/. 51. Quoted in Jeffrey Schaeffer and Angela Charlton, “Notre Dame Rector: Fragile Cathedral Might Not Be Saved,” AP News, December 25, 2019, https://apnews .com/48fee6c01627bca5f212c0f2e35d81cf. 52. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Open Press, 1995), 44: “Religion must be an eminently social thing.” For Durkheim’s discussion of totem, see 208, and on civil religion, 222.

Chapter 6

1. The topic of the relation of words to things has been treated by several prominent scholars of religion. See, e.g., the influential work of three anthropologists: Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 176–96, 255–69; Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 171–223, 236–43; and Simon Coleman, The Globalization of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 117–65. 2. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 196. 3. A fascinating book that inspired the approach in this chapter is Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). Davis took his inspiration from an influential essay by anthropologist Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91. [ 226 ]

Notes to Pages 157– 62 4. For detailed studies of the image of A’a that was eventually sent back to the Missionary Museum in London and is today in the British Museum, see Steven Hooper, “Embodying the Divinity: Life of A’a,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 116 (2007): 131–79; and Julie Adams, Steven Hooper, and Maia Nuku, A’a: A Deity from Polynesia (London: British Museum Press, 2016). For discussions of Polynesian deities, see Robert D. Craig, Handbook of Polynesian Mythology (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC Clio, 2004): “Ta’aroa,” 42, 191; “Oro,” 119, 266–67; “Tane,” 239, 266. Craig also provides discussion of Polynesian creation myths, 39–51, and the Polynesian cosmos, 51–57. 5. For a description of the marae, see William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, during a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands, 4 vols. (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833), 1:261–62; for further discussion, see Steven Hooper, Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia, 1760–1860 (London: British Museum Press, 2006); E. S. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, Bulletin 34, Bayard Dominick Expedition, Publication no. 12 (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1927), 80–85, 166–83; and Raymond Firth, Rank and Religion in Tikopia: A Study in Polynesian Paganism and Conversion to Christianity (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), 118–24. 6. Ellis described a frequent festival in Polynesia called pae atua, which replaced the bark-­cloth wrapping about sacred figures, in Polynesian Researches, 1:269–70. 7. These are described by Ellis, 1:350–52. 8. Ellis, 1:338. 9. Ellis, 2:51. For a number of such objects, see David Shaw King, Missionaries and Idols in Polynesia (London: Beak Press, 2015); and David Shaw King, Food for the Flames: Idols and Missionaries in Central Polynesia (San Francisco: Beak Press, 2011). 10. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 1:339. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 224, 323, 328. 11. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2:50. 12. Ellis, 1:354. 13. Ellis, 2:51. The canoes could be quite large, nearly seventy feet long, according to Ellis. He described them at length, 1:152–59, and included two wood engravings. For a discussion of Polynesian canoes, see Craig, Handbook, 74–79. 14. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2:41. 15. John Paton Davies, The History of the Tahitian Mission, 1799–1830, With Supplementary Papers from the Correspondence of Missionaries, ed. C. W Newbury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Hakluyt Society, 1961). 16. Henri Vernier, Au vent des cyclones: Missions protestantes et Église évangélique à Tahiti et en Polynésie française (Paris: Les Bergers et les Mages, 1986), 9–10. For an account of the conflict, see Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2:45–52. A scholarly [ 227 ]

Notes to Pages 163– 7 1 study of the political function of Pomare’s iconoclasm is Jeffrey Sissons, The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolutions and the Seasonality of Power (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 48–61. 17. For a harrowing account of the series of temple and image burnings in 1830 on the island of Rarotonga, see the “Translation of a Letter received from Papeiha, Native Teacher at Rarotonga,” Transactions of the Missionary Society, April 1831, in Quarterly Chronicle (1833): 291–93. The London Missionary Society expressed general approbation of this iconoclastic violence in Missionary Sketches: see “Destruction of Idols,” Missionary Sketches no. 22 (July 1823): 4. 18. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2:151. For a detailed historical account of the war that roots it deeply in Tahitian culture, see Sissons, Polynesian Iconoclasm. 19. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2:156. 20. Ellis, 2:156. Using carved deities as columns to support roofs of nonreligious constructions such as cook houses happened on at least one other occasion, as documented by missionary John Williams about 1821 on Aitutaki, among the Cook Islands, where he reports having seen “two grim looking gods in a more dishonourable situation than they had been wont to occupy, for they were sustaining upon their heads the whole weight of the roof of a cooking-­house. Wishing to make them more useful, we offered to purchase them from their former worshipper. He instantly propped up the house, took out the idols, and threw them down.” John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands (London: John Snow, 1841), 54. Williams did not indicate what better purpose he had in mind, though it may have been that he purchased the figure to send back to the Missionary Society Museum in London. 21. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 1:341–42. 22. From William Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” written in 1795 and published in 1796. 23. “Destruction of Idols,” Missionary Register 8 (1820): 127. 24. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 1:362. 25. Ellis, 1:368. 26. Ellis, 1:337. 27. Ellis, 1:337–38. 28. Ellis, 1:337. 29. Review of William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, in Quarterly Review 43 (May 1830): 11. 30. “Renunciation of Idolatry,” Missionary Register 10 (1822): 536. 31. Hooper, “Embodying the Divinity,” on the matter of the figure’s identity. 32. “Renunciation of Idolatry,” 539. 33. “Extract from the Journal of Mr. John Williams, Missionary,” Scottish Missionary Register 6 (1825): 222–23. [ 228 ]

Notes to Pages 172– 75 34. The Reverend Samuel Marsden, letter to the Secretary of the London Missionary Society, quoted in “Abolition of Idolatry,” Missionary Register 6 (1818): 66. 35. Pomare, February 19, 1816, in Missionary Register 6 (1818): 70. 36. It is worth noting that the illustration portrays the staff gods as fewer in number and much smaller than Williams’s account describes them: the native porters “dropped at our feet fourteen immense idols, the smallest of which was about five yards in length. Each of these was composed of a piece of aito, or iron-­wood, about four inches in diameter, carved with rude imitations of the human head at one end, and with an obscene figure at the other [said to be a phallus], wrapped around with native cloth, until it became two or three yards in circumference.” Williams, Narrative, 98. 37. For reproductions of the staff figures and discussion, see Hooper, Pacific Encounters, 222–25. 38. Williams, Narrative, 99. For several midcentury images of the interior of the museum showing the large staff god that Williams mentioned, as well as a rich examination of the collection put together by the LMS, see the informative research of Chris Wingfield, “ ‘Scarcely More Than a Christian Trophy Case’? The Global Collections of the London Missionary Society Museum (1814–1910),” Journal of the History of Collections 29 (2017): 109–128; and Rosemary Seton, “Reconstructing the Museum of the London Missionary Society,” Material Religion 8 (2012): 98–102. On the history of the LMS and the objects collected in Polynesia, see Chris Wingfield, “The Moving Objects of the London Missionary Society: An Experiment in Symmetrical Anthropology” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012). 39. Explanations of the deities and the other objects, including a headpiece and fan, appeared in the Missionary Register 6 (1818): 70. The phrase “trophies of Christianity” is quoted in the undated Catalogue of the Missionary Museum (iv), a fifty-­ five-­page document printed by the museum, which was located in Blomfield Street, Finbury, in London. In 1890, the LMS gave a large section of the museum’s collection relating to the South Pacific to the British Museum—those items “formed by the pioneers of the Society, Ellis, Williams, Tyerman, Bennet, and others, during their residence among the islands of the Eastern Pacific.” C. H. Read, On the Origin and Sacred Character of Certain Ornaments of the S. E. Pacific [source of publication unknown] (London: Harrison and Sons, 1891), 139. Some items went to the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford. 40. Catalogue of the Missionary Museum, iv, copy in SOAS Library, University of London. 41. Quoted in “The Family Idols of Pomare,” Missionary Sketches, no. 3 (August 1820): 16, emphasis added. 42. “London Missionary Society,” London Illustrated News, May 20, 1843, 342–43. [ 229 ]

Notes to Pages 175–84 43. My thanks to Jamie L. Brummitt for bringing this book to my attention. 44. Helen C. Knight, Missionary Cabinet (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1847), 10–14. 45. Knight, 18, emphasis added. 46. Knight, 33–34. 47. “The Museum of the London Missionary Society,” London Illustrated News, June 15, 1859, 620. 48. Charles Hercules Read, On the Origins and Sacred Character of Certain Ornaments of the S.E. Pacific (London: Harrison and Sons, 1891), 139. 49. The original publication of 1870 lectures states “classify and conquer”: see “Lectures on the Science of Religion; Second Lecture,” Fraser’s Magazine, May 1870, 581–93, quotation on 587. But by 1882, the term had changed to “classify and understand”: F. Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 68. For an insightful discussion of Müller’s approach, see David Chidester, “ ‘Classify and Conquer’: Friedrich Max Müller, Indigenous Religious Traditions, and Imperial Comparative Religion,” in Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (New York: Routledge, 2004), 71–88. It is useful to note that Augustus Henry Lane-­Fox Pitt Rivers, an English army officer and ethnologist, assembled a massive collection of objects, in part during his years abroad in service to the crown. This collection became the basis of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, founded in 1884. 50. See the British Museum’s online entry for the object: https://www.british museum.org/collection/object/E_Oc1978-­Q-­845. 51. See Cynthia Scott, Cultural Diplomacy and the Heritage of Empire: Negotiating Post-­Colonial Returns (London: Routledge, 2019); and Karolina Kuprecht, Indigenous Peoples’ Cultural Property Claims: Repatriation and Beyond (New York: Springer, 2014).

Conclusion

1. Gypsey Elaine Teague, The Witch’s Guide to Wands (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2015), 6. 2. William C. Wilson, The Practitioner’s Guide to Wand Magic (N.p., 2011), 31. 3. Dorothy Morrison, The Craft: A Witch’s Book of Shadows (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2001), 55. 4. Wilson, Practitioner’s Guide, 44–52. 5. K. P. Theodore, Wandlore: A Guide for the Apprentice Wandmaker, rev. ed. (Glasgow: Erebus Society, 2015), 162; Wolfrick Ignatius Feuerschmied, Magical Wands: A Cornucopia of Wand Lore, 2nd ed. (Pittsburgh: Donald G. Firesmith, 2014), 93–94; Alferian Gwydion MacLir, The Witch’s Wand: The Craft, Lore and Magick of Wands and Staffs (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2019), 143–46. [ 230 ]

Notes to Pages 184–85 6. Wilson, Practitioner’s Guide, 53. 7. Feuerschmied, Magical Wands, 100, 34. 8. On crystals, see Feuerschmid, Magical Wands, 106–7, 290–344; and MacLir, Witch’s Wand, 101–9; on runes, see Morrison, Craft, 67; and MacLir, Witch’s Wand, 163–65. 9. Wilson, Practitioner’s Guide, 21–26. 10. Feuerschmied, Magical Wands, 34–35, 463.

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I n d ex Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. A’a. See Polynesian deities actor-­­network theory (ANT), 49, 212n48 Aeolian harp, 166–68, 167 aesthetic resacralization, 179 Affaire des Placards, 137–39, 149 affect, 67, 166–67, 174–75, 214n29 affordances, 47, 211n45 African emblems of rank, 106, 220n9 agency, 6–7, 9, 19, 50, 128, 183–84, 208–9n28; aesthetic, 16, 19; external, 10–11; and focal objects, 185; forms of, 9–19; of idols, 165–70; inherent, 13, 19; instrumental, 15, 21; mimetic, 13; objects as agents, 155; ritual, 11; satanic, 169; of wands, 126. See also words altars, 3, 54–55, 213n1; Altar of the Three Generations, 39; “Burning the Prayers,” 34; Roman altar, 55 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 175 American Constitution, 44 amulets, 3, 9, 42 animism, 60, 182 anthropocentrism, 7, 48, 50 apparition, 5, 52, 82 archaeology, 27, 117 Aristotle, 74 art history, 1, 2, 27 assemblage, 20–21, 51, 69, 76, 128, 183. See also network; webs Astier, Henri, 130–31 astrology, 60, 97, 184 Atehuru, 162 authority, 66, 83, 97, 111, 143, 147 auto-­da-­fé, 83–85; as social practice, 85; as theatrical exercise of power, 83

Basnage, Jacques, 89, 91 belief, 44–45, 62, 64, 169, 181–82; economy of, 97, 218n23 Bennett, Jane, 48 Bible, 35–38, 59, 89, 181; as divinatory device (see bibliomancy) bibliomancy, 59, 97 Black Stone of Kaaba, 13, 14, 20, 208n20 body: human, 5, 69, 83; interface with wands, 122, 127; modification of, 79, 216n4; techniques of, 43–44, 70–71, 73. See also body work; embodiment; social body body work, 78–81 British Museum, 178–79 Bruselius, Caroline, 136 Buddha, 16, 20, 182 Buddhism, 15, 20–21, 32, 73 Buddhist robes, 15–16, 21, 208n21 Caesar Augustus, 150 Calvin, John, 38–40 Carracci, Annibale, 103–4; Ulysses and Circe, 103 Cathedral of Reims, 145, 147 Cato the Elder, 56–57, 75–76; On Agriculture, 56 chance, 97 Charlemagne, 17, 20, 135, 145; crest of the Escraine of Charlemagne, 17, 20, 182 Chinese Exclusion Act, 33 Ch’iu Chün, 30, 32 Christianity: Catholic (see Roman Catholicism); ideology of, 89, 91; medieval, 17–18, 27; ­Orthodox, 29–30, 81–82; Protestant (see ­Protestantism)

[ 233 ]

Index Circe, 102–4, 115 civil religion, 139, 143–44, 153 Clifford, James, 156 clothing, 15–16, 70–72, 179. See also Buddhist robes Clovis I, 134, 145 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 167–68 colonialism, 36, 91–92, 181, 186, 218n22 commune, 143 Confucianism, 30, 35, 209n10; “Burning the Prayers,” 34; main hall with spirit tablets, Temple of Confucius, 31 consciousness, 69 Constantine, emperor of Rome, 89 Constantine V, emperor of Rome, 29–30 conversion, 105, 163, 168–69, 185 Cook, Captain James, 160 coronavirus, 96 Council of Heiria, 30, 38, 209n8 Council of Trent, 213n11 Crowley, Aleister, 120, 126 crystals, 7, 231n8. See also gems cult of the Supreme Being, 143 darśan, 9 Davis, Richard, 12 de-­Christianization, 143 deism, 42, 144, 145 Delphic Oracle, 101, 115, 219n2; Kylix depicting Priestess Themis as the Delphic Oracle, 102 Derrida, Jacques, 211n42. See also poststructuralism Dharma, 20 deities. See divine beings; Egyptian deities; Polynesian deities divine beings, 4, 6, 57, 60, 76, 157; images of, 85; as trophies of Christian victory, 171, 173 discipline, 65, 79, 82, 214n22 divination, 97–98, 219n31; schoolgirls in Japan tie paper fortunes to a trel-

lis, 98. See also bibliomancy; Delphic Oracle divine gaze, 61 Dos Santos, Lúcia, 52–53 dread, 166 druidism, 117, 120, 222n29 drumming, 21, 208n27 dualism, 6, 45, 68–69 Durkheim, Émile, 60–61, 75–76, 154, 160, 169 ecology, 19–20, 48–49, 51, 69, 122, 183, 186 Egyptian Book of the Dead, 107–8, 220n12; opening of the mouth ceremony, 109 Egyptian deities: Anubis, 107; Osiris, 107; Ptah, 108–9; Seth, 108; Thoth, 108–9 Ellis, William, 157–58, 161–62, 169–70; History of the London Missionary Society, 161; on idols, 165–67; Polynesian Researches, 161 embodiment, 64–65, 70, 73, 79–81, 131 emotion, 66–67, 157, 166–67, 174–75, 214–15n29; utility of, 178. See also affect enchantment, 9, 60–62, 64–65, 127, 167–68 Eucharist, 9, 27, 59, 128, 137–39; Mass of the Canon de la Porte, 141 exchange, 94–98 expiation, 56, 94, 138, 219n25. See also sacrifice extreme experience, 65, 82 faces, 85–86, 218n16 fasting, 78, 82 Father Rhine, 54 feathers, 160–61 Festival of Reason, 143; “Festival of Reason,” 144 fetish, 36–37, 76, 210n20 Florence Cathedral, 2

[ 234 ]

Index humanism, 48 Hume, David, 41–43 Hurd, William, 62, 64; New Universal History, 62

focal object, 51, 97, 128, 154, 183–86 food, 78, 81–82, 216–17n7 Frazer, James, 8–9, 58–59, 60 Frenchness, 153–54 French Revolution, 141, 143–45 Francis I (king), 138, 149 Frollo, Dom Claude, 150 funeral portraits from Hawara, 87 Gallicanism, 135, 145 gargoyles, 152 gaze, 38, 71–72, 86, 173, 177 Geertz, Clifford, 67–69 gender, 35, 71, 73, 80, 157 Gibson, James J., 211n45 gems, 18–19, 182, 208n25. See also ­crystals Gothic style, 129, 135–36, 140–41, 152 Gutenberg, Johannes, 149 habitus, 73–74 Hajj, 20 halal, 81 hallucinogenics, 15, 82–83. See also pharmacology Haussmann, Georges-­Eugène, 150–52 Hawara (city in Egypt), 86 healing, 78, 216n2 heresy, 83, 92, 139 Hermes, 102–4, 106; lekythos with image of Hermes, 105 Hermes Trismegistus, 118 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 118–20, 122, 222n23 Hesiod, 6, 101 Hinduism, 9, 11–13, 79, 94–97 Hogwarts, 8 Hooghe, Romeyn de, 89, 91; “Frontispiece of the Old Testament,” 90 horcrux, 8 Hôtel-­Dieu, 135–36 Hubert, Henri, 95 Hugo, Victor, 147, 149; The Hunchback of Notre-­Dame, 131, 147

iconoclasm, 29–30, 38; Altar of the Three Generations, 39; “Destruction of the Idols at Otaheite,” 163; in Polynesia, 163–65, 168, 170 iconophobia, 29 icons, 30, 209n9 ideology, 32, 45, 88–94; semiotic, 39–40 idolatry, 35, 38, 171, 174 idols, 36–38, 41, 156, 163–70; in Polynesian exhibition, 170–71; materiality of, 38, 177 iftar, 82 Île de la Cité, 132–34, 133, 150 images: agency of, 165and darśan, 9; and faces, 86; as forms of communication, 88; and ideology, 88–89; as performing truth, 88; power of, 40, 88; and worship, 88 imagination, 38–39, 43, 72, 117, 127, 169 imitation, 13, 128 Innocent III (pope), 136 Inquisition, 83, 85, 115 Ishmael, 13 Islam: embodiment in, 65–66; prayer, 66, 73–74; fasting and eating, 82; representation of, 91 James, William, 66–67 Jerusalem, 80 Jesuits (Society of Jesus), 92 Jesus: as new Moses, 110–12; with Moses on title page of German Bible, 114; on sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus, 112; with wand or staff, 111– 13 Judaism, 71, 73, 80, 81, 82, 91 Julius Caesar, 132

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Index Kaaba, 13, 15, 20 Kam, Joseph, 168 Kannon, 97 kasaya, 15 Keane, Webb, 39, 60 Kircher, Athanasius, 167 kiswa, 13 Knight, Helen C. 177–78 Koran, 59, 82 kosher, 81 Lassus, Jean-­Baptiste, 152 Latour, Bruno, 36–37 laurel, 101 Left Bank, 133, 135 libation, 54 likeness, 13, 32, 71–72, 86, 88 Lipner, Julius, 96 London Missionary Society, 36, 160–61, 163, 168; Museum of, 171–75, 178–79 Louis VI (king), 135 Louis VII (king), 135, 136 Louis XIV (king), 140, 143, 150, 152 Louis-­Philippe (king), 150, 152 luck, 60–61 Luther, Martin, 115, 137, 139, 149 MacLir, Alferian Gwydion, 121–22, 125, 127 Macron, President Emmanuel, 153 magic, 8, 58–60, 61–62; homeopathic, 13 marae, 157, 160, 162, 165, 185; great marae of Temarre, 159; marae of Tane, 166 Maron, Marc, 69–70, 76 Marcus Aurelius, 2 Martin, Craig, 46–47, 48 Mastroianni, Marcello, 2 materiality, 6, 9, 38, 45, 47, 94–95, 209n1 material turn, 49–50, 212n51 Mathers, Samuel Liddell, 118, 120 matter, 7, 47, 48

Mauss, Marcel, 73, 75; The Gift, 75; “Techniques of the Body,” 73 McGlynn, Father Thomas, 52–53 Mecca, 13 mediation, 74, 81, 123, 183 medium, 45–47, 62, 68–69 Mercury, 119 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 69; The Phenomenology of Perception, 69 Meyer, Birgit, 74–75, 212n49 Michelangelo, 1–2; Head of Michelangelo’s David, 1 missionaries, 160–62 Missionary Cabinet, 175–78; interior view of the Cabinet of Curiosities, 176 monotheism, 42, 62, 182 Moses, 91; and “The Brazen Serpent,” 113; and Exodus, 221n13; and Jesus, 110–15; and Burning Bush, 108; Moses Divides the Red Sea, 111; and Pharaoh, 109–10; rejected by New Covenant, 89; on sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus, 112; story of, 106–10 Müller, Max, 179, 230n49 mummies, 86–88, 107 naming, 155–57 Napoleon, Bonaparte, 144, 147; Consecration of Napoleon, 148; The ­Emperor Swears the Oath, 146 Napoleon III, 150 National Assembly, 141 nationhood, 131–32, 153 Native American Church, 83 neopaganism, 120, 122, 222n29 network, 47, 51, 68–69, 75–76, 182–85. See also assemblage; webs New Covenant, 89, 91, 115 new materialism, 49–50, 212n49 Nez Perce, 82 Notre-­Dame de Paris, 129–54, 183; and Capetian line of kings, 135; construc-

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Index tion of, 135–36; Grand Funeral at Notre-­Dame de Paris, 142; and Hugo, 147, 149; Mass of the Canon de la Porte, 141; as national symbol, 129– 31, 153–54; Notre-­Dame de Paris in flames, 130; panoramic view of, 151 object, 3–4, 7, 51, 101, 155–56, 180, 182–85 objectification, 4, 49, 50 object-­oriented ontology (OOO), 49 Odysseus, 102–3, 106 Old Covenant, 89, 115 Oro. See Polynesian deities Orsi, Robert, 68–69; Between Heaven and Earth, 68 Otu. See Pomare II Our Lady of Fátima, 52 Parisii, 132–33 Parlement of Paris, 137–38 Pausanias, 58, 213n6 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 46 Perrault, Charles, 123 pharmacology, 76, 81–83, 217n7, 217n11. See also hallucinogenics phenomenology, 215n35; The Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-­ Ponty), 69 pilgrimage, 3, 20, 78, 97, 155 Pitt-­Rivers Museum, 178, 230n49 Pius VII (pope), 145, 147 Plato, 2, 40–41, 43; Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, 41 Pliny the Elder, 220n5 Polynesia, 157, 160 Polynesian deities, 157, 160; A’a, 156–57, 158, 160, 171; ; as focal object, 185; marae of Tane, 166; Oro, 157, 161–62; Oro’s capture and humiliation, 163– 64, 170, 177, 186; Tane, 166 polytheism, 42–43, 59, 165 Pomare I, 161, 162 Pomare II (Otu), 160, 161–64, 172; alli-

ance with British, 162; conversion to Christianity, 163, 185; “The Family Idols of Pomare,” 159 Poseidon, 58 postcolonialism, 186 poststructuralism, 46, 211n42 Potter, Harry, 8, 123, 125 power, 83, 165, 217–18n13, 218n22; of wands, 117, 122, 126–28 Pozzo, Andrea, 92; Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius, 93 practice, 71–72, 77. See also ritual prasad, 81 prayer, 56, 73–74; prayer at Jumma Mosque, 74 presence, 13, 67–68, 74–75, 88 print culture, 149–50 procession, 138–39 propaganda, 33, 89, 164 Prophet Muhammad, 13, 65 Protestantism, 30, 32–33, 35–37, 59, 62–64, 82, 92; in France, 137–38; and imagery, 44–45; and print, 149 Raiatea, 169, 170–71, 173 Ramadan, 82 Rarotonga, 36, 172, 228n17 recalcitrance, 47, 48, 50–51 Reformation, 38, 137, 149 relics, 13, 20–21, 30, 139, 173, 182 religion: and belief, 62, 64; definitions of, 57, 60–61, 66–69, 181–82; material study of, 6, 22, 27, 76–77, 182; and race, 33, 35. See also Buddhism; Christianity; Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, neopaganism, Polynesian deities, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Rosicrucianism, Native American religion, Wicca repatriation, 180, 186 Revelation, Book of, 89, 92 ritual: action, 19; Buddhist, 20–21, 79; Christian, 13, 27, 42–43, 59, 81; civic, 143–44; Confucian, 32–33;

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Index drumming, 21–22; efficacy of, 59; Egyptian, 13, 88; and focal object, 184; Hindu, 11–13, 79, 94–96, 96; iconoclastic, 168; Jewish, 42, 71–72, 80–81; Muslim, 65–66, 73–74, 81; occult, 118–20; Polynesian, 157; Roman, 54–57, 88, 133–34. See also sacrifice Rizi, Francisco, 83–85; Auto-­da-­Fé on the Plaza Major of Madrid, 84 Robespierre, Maximilien, 144 Roman Catholicism, 9, 32, 59, 85, 131–32 Rosicrucianism, 118 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 143–44 Rowling, J. K., 8, 123, 125 Rua, 162 Rurutu (Polynesia), 157, 170–71 sacred exchange, 94–96, 218n23 sacrifice, 32–23, 54–55, 56–57, 75, 94–96, 122, 213n4; as form of payment, 94; human, 162, 179; Roman altar, 55; Vedic, 96–97. See also ­expiation Saenredam, Jan, 40, 43; Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, 41 St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 27–29 Saint-­Denis, Abbey, 17, 134–35 St. Ignatius of Loyola, 92 Saint-­Pierre, Moissac, 28 sanbenitos, 84 Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i), 160, 161, 163, 175–76 Santini, Amilcare, 1–2 semiotic ideology, 39 sensational form, 75 Shiva lingam, 12, 19 siddur, 71 signs, 45–46, 79; as symbols of belief, 62–64 social body, 70–73, 132 social constructionism, 46, 48

social control, 83–85 Socrates, 40 sound, 21–22 specimen, 156, 178–79 Spence, Lewis, 117, 120 spirit tablet, 30, 32; main hall with spirit tablet, Temple of Confucius, 31 staff gods, 172–73, 177, 179 Statius, 88 Strong, Josiah, 33, 35 stupa, 20, 182; Boudhanath Stupa, 21 Suger, Abbot, 17–19, 134–35 Sully, Maurice de (bishop of Paris), 134–35 supernatural, 43, 57–58, 160 symbols: as arbitrary signifiers, 62–64; as conventional signs, 46, 79, 137; magic, 125; religion as a system of, 68 Tahiti, 36, 157, 160, 185 tallith, 80 Tane, 166; marae of Tane, 166 tapa, 157, 179; presentation of tapa-­ wrapped deities, 172 tarot, 120; “The Magician,” 121 tattooing, 79, 216n5 taxonomic shift, 156, 186 Teague, Gypsey Elaine, 126, 223n36 tefillin, 80–81; Jewish men applying, 80 Temple Mount, Jerusalem, 80, 155 the Terror, 144, 145 Thedim, José Ferreira, 51 theology, 27, 41, 156, 181 theurgy, 59 thing, 3–7, 9, 49, 154, 156, 180, 183, 185–86, 207n2; thing-­power, 48, 50–51 time, 22–23 Tolkien, J. R., 122 tools, 7, 9, 15, 47, 120, 126–27, 184–85 Torah, 71 transcendence, 80, 144, 182

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Index trophies of Christianity, 156, 171, 173, 186, 229n39 Tylor, Edward, 58, 60 Vajra knife, 106, 121, 220n8 Viollet-­le-­Duc, Eugène-­Emmanuel, 152–53 Virgin Mary: Immaculate Conception, 91; Our Lady of Fátima, 51–53, 52; Virgin of Paris, 10, 11, 19 visualization, 77, 127 Voldemort, Lord, 8 votive objects, 219n24. See also feathers Waite, Arthur, 120 wands: as caduceus, 104; and Celtic lore, 115, 117; of Cinderella’s fairy godmother, 123, 124; of Circe, 103; etymology of term, 222n24; in Golden Dawn, 118–20; of Hermes, 104, 123; and neopaganism, 120, 122; production of, 122; as prop, 127–28; Romantic conception of, 115–17; in Rowling’s Potter novels, 123; as scepter, 104, 106; as shepherd’s

crook, 105; as sign of office, 105–6; in story of Moses, 106–10; as symbol, 125; as tool, 120, 126–27, 184–85 Waterhouse, John William, 115, 117; The Magic Circle, 116 Weber, Max, 7–8, 61 webs, 69, 75–76, 122, 125, 127, 183, 185, 186 Westcott, William Wynn, 118, 119 Wicca, 9, 184, 222n29 Williams, John, 36, 172–73, 178, 228n20, 229n36, 229n38 Wilson, Captain James, 161 Wilson, Stephen, 61 Witch of Endor, 115, 221n14, n. 15 words, 22, 45–46, 226n1; as agents, 155–56 wyakin, 82 yajña, 96; Hindu priest performing, 96 Yellow Wolf, 82 Yom Kippur, 82 zodiac, 184 Zwingli, Ulrich, 137

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