Ramblings about the role of knowledge in doctrinal religions

So I was talking to Bunny the housemate the other day about some of the CSR (cognitive science of religion) stuff I've been reading lately. Bunny is originally from Hong Kong, and we were talking about Robert F. Campany's essay 'Xunzi and Durkheim as Theorists of Ritual Practice'. Campany describes the views on ritual held by the Chinese philosopher Xunzi (a Confucianist or group of Confucianists from sometime around the 3rd century BCE). Xunzi apparently believed that ritual was a very important part of every day life, but disagreed with the opinion (mainstream within his own society) that it was important primarily because it appeased gods, spirits, ancestors and other supernatural beings. Xunzi argued that although his society's rituals contained numerous appeals to supernatural beings, their main purpose was not to appease these beings but to help cultivate and civilise the human participants, by providing a "model" for behaviour (see p.207, 211).

Anyway, we were talking about this, and Bunny mentioned something I thought was interesting: as far as she knows, the concept of "forbidden knowledge" doesn't really exist within traditional Chinese culture. She thinks that in general, the assumption seems to be that more knowledge can only be a good thing (both in the sense that it provides opportunities to better your material position, e.g. by passing exams to get a better job, and also in the sense that it potentially brings you closer to spiritual enlightenment in the Buddhist sense, or Taoist immortality).

Whereas in Western culture, the idea of "forbidden knowledge", "that which man was not meant to know", etc, seems to be pretty pervasive. I don't know if there's actually a continuous line of intellectual descent between the idea as it currently exists and, say, the Tree of Knowledge in the original Genesis account, but it seems like you could plausibly argue at least for continuity in medieval attitudes towards demonology and the more recent image of the "mad scientist" (both being examples of someone who's believed to so hungry for knowledge that they're willing to sacrifice their humanity to get at it).

More recently we've had Lovecraft, and the general idea that progress in ANY field of knowledge will inevitably lead to you learning something terrible which you'll be unable to live with comfortably (obviously Lovecraft was a fiction writer rather than a philosopher or theologian, but his ideas do seem to have resonated with a fair number of people). So while Western culture also frequently endorses the idea that more knowledge is a good thing (e.g. by encouraging greater and greater numbers of people to pursue tertiary education), there are definite contexts in which people become uncomfortable with that idea.

We were wondering whether the roots of this distinction might lie in the Christian idea that your relationship with God is paramount, and everything else is secondary (so that knowledge is good if it brings you closer to God, bad if it threatens to distract you or lead you astray). This would seem to be opposed to the traditional Chinese concept of deities who make certain demands on their followers, but don't seem to assume that they will or should be the immediate focus of anyone's attention 24/7. You further seem to have the concept that spiritual development based purely on knowledge is possible, rather than having a personal connection to a specific being be a necessity for the process.

I hasten to add that these perceived distinctions are highly speculative, and so are probably Just So Stories- I know virtually nothing about Chinese culture. I guess the relevant question is: can anyone here think of a Chinese story or belief system which seems to draw on the concept of "forbidden knowledge"? And if so, does that seem to be a borrowing from Western culture, or something that Chinese culture has traditionally found intuitive?

Reading 'Shamanisms Today', part 2

Picking up from where we left off...

Researchers may feel that ASCs are the thing that sets shamans apart from their clients- but presence of ASCs is not necessarily an important defining feature of shamans from an emic perspective. (p.313)

Some people argue that shamanism gives people access to a type of revelatory information which mainstream Western society lacks (from the context given, I'm uncertain exactly what sort of information we're talking about, but I'm guessing it's information about how to handle individuals' transitions between different social roles, like from childhood to adulthood). R. Ridington argues that actually, it's not that the modern West lacks this information, but that the distribution of this information is centralised. This means that our society de-emphasises the importance of individual transformations (since we've got institutions that are designed to make them routine), and focuses instead societal or political transformations (since these affect institutions, and thus millions of individual people) (p.312). Or, I think that's what he's saying. I'll have to chase up the original article.

A. Siikala argues that a shaman communicating with spirit is basically a person taking on different roles, using techniques which in the West are referred to as 'hypnosis' (p.312). Noll apparently argues that the defining feature of shamans is not that they see visions, per se, but the fact that they go into a controlled visionary state and then actively engage with the visions they encounter (presumably in contrast to, say, possessed people) (p.313). Dreams may be very important in shamanic practice, but their role hasn't really been emphasised by most social scientists (at least, not since Tylor) (p.313). Atkinson argues that Western social scientists have a tendency to stress the idea of shamanism as a kind of alternative medicine because this makes it easier for us to understand (whereas if you stress the idea of shamanism as a religious practice, then more social scientists are likely to see it as weird and scary).

Additionally, comparing shamans to doctors or psychotherapists can sometimes be a way of mocking the latter professions, by suggesting they're not as 'scientific' as they think they are (to be fair, some psychotherapists, notably Jungians, have responded by trying to apply shamanic insights to their own theories) (p.313-4). Various people have offered explanations for why shamanic healing works- the usual ones involve psychotherapy and/or the placebo effect, although Kulcsar has apparently suggested that !Kung trancers might treat people by way of sweating out opiates and then rubbing them into their patients' skin (p.313). An increasing number of researchers are reacting against the tendency to portray shamans as ethereal and otherworldly, by looking at how they have reacted to political movements like colonialism and ethnic conflict (p.315-7).

Some people define 'shamans' as people who adopt a relatively commanding attitude towards the spirits they communicate with; giving them instructions in an authoritative way rather than adopting a supplicatory attitude towards them. This is supposed to be what distinguishes them from other kinds of people who communicate with supernatural beings, like priests or possession mediums. Eliade went so far as to say that shamanism never involves possession and always includes some sort of out-of-body experience or belief in magical flight. The difficulty with this is that Lewis' research suggests that the archetypal shamans (the Tungus ritualists from whom we get the name) do actually engage in all the stuff Eliade said we needed to exclude from the definition of 'shamanism' (p.317).

Still, it's possible to argue that shamanism involves more of a commanding attitude towards spirits than possession cults* do. However, it sounds like a possible upshot of this approach is that women who communicate with spirits are less likely to be labelled 'shamans', at least when researchers are working in cultures where women are expected to adopt a relatively meek and placatory attitude in public (whether they are talking to mortal men or to spirits). It seems to me like the same might hold for cultures where men are generally expected to adopt a concilliatory sort of attitude towards others (I don't know enough about Japan to state this with confidence, but maybe this would be one example- perhaps this is why Shinto ritualists are referred to as 'priests' rather than 'shamans'?) (p.317).

Another implication of this line of thought is that it may undermine the argument that possession cults represent a unique opportunity for marginal people to seize some power for themselves (by claiming to be possessed by a very powerful and authoritative spirit). This argument seems to be largely based on the idea that a disproportionate number of possessed people are female, poor, transgendered or in some other way disqualified for most routes to power. If the only difference between possession cults and shamanism is the degree to which a researcher sees their leaders as acting in an authoritative way, then there may be a tendency to label cults made up of women and poor people as 'possession cults', while cults composed of men and local political leaders are referred to as 'shamanism'. That could imply that the whole thing is a definitional tautology, not a causation issue- that is, rather than it being the case that possession cults attract marginal people, or that marginalised cults place a greater emphasis on possession, it could just be that marginal cults get labelled as 'possession cults' rather than 'shamanism' at the point where researchers get involved.

Having said this, I need to get around to reading Lewis' Ecstatic Religion, so maybe I'm overstating the critique- for example, if it turned out that there's some sort of well-defined difference between 'possession' and 'shamanic trance', then the basic argument would still hold. The argument would also hold up if it turned out that in most cultures low-status people can get away with speaking authoritatively to spirits, whether or not they're considered to be 'possessed' at the time (cf p.317, although I'm not sure to what extent Atkinson would agree with what I'm saying here).

There's also the complicating factor that women in many cultures HAVE been labelled as 'shamans' by researchers (e.g. see Koreans, Inuit, Taiwanese shamans, p.317-8). I'd be interested in knowing whether these researchers are also using the 'person who speaks authoritatively to spirits' definition of 'shaman'. It might be that different regional specialists have gotten into the habit of using the word in different ways- or, alternatively, I could just be talking rubbish.

One person who apparently DOES use a definition of 'shamanism' at odds with the 'authoritative spirit-communicator' model is Taussig, who apparently emphasises the idea of 'shamans' being people whose main role involves disrupting and decentering power structures (it's not clear from this whether he thinks this is shamanism's emic raison d'etre, either from the perspective of shamans or their clients; or if he thinks that this is just the EFFECT which shamanism has on a culture, regardless of whether shamans intend it). Atkinson argues that this needs to be balanced against shamans' efforts to maintain order, whether this is at an individual, household or community level (p.319).

So, to sum up, the definitions of 'shaman' identified by this article would seem to be:

-a specific kind of ritualist found in certain cultures in Siberia and perhaps also Central Asia.
-an outdated and potentially ethnocentric term for ritualists from any culture who strike Westerners as 'exotic'
-someone who has a mental illness but lives in a culture which does not recognise it as such (this definition seems to have fallen out of favour)
-any ritualist who experiences ASCs.
-a ritualist who experiences a specific kind of ASC called an SSC (which may be objectively identifiable via brain scanning)
-someone who uses hypnosis to take on different roles or alter egos as part of their religious practice
-someone who goes into a controlled trance and actively engages with the spirits they encounter
-someone who adopts a commanding attitude when communicating with spirits
-the above, plus also must have out-of-body experiences and/or the sensation of magical flight. Does not usually experience spirit possession
-a ritualist who disrupts and decentres power structures



*Just to reiterate: 'cult' here isn't meant in the pejorative sense, just in the sense of a subset of a wider religious tradition.

Reading 'Shamanisms Today' by Jane Monnig Atkinson (Part 1)

(1992, Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, pp.307-30)

I'm in a pedantic mood, so this summary may drag on quite a bit. Also, the review article is very good, but it's almost 20 years old now. I'm going to stick with the present tense when discussing the current state of play, but obviously it's possible that the debate has shifted since then.

Geertz and Taussig felt shamanism was a dead category. Various people have tried deconstructing it, pointing out that there's a lot of variation between different kinds of shaman in Siberia (where the word comes from), let alone in the world as a whole. People have also argued that it's probably better to analyse ritualists in the context of their own culture and the people who attend their rituals, rather than comparing them to fellow 'shamans' who might have lived a century ago and on a different continent). As an upshot, D.H. Holmberg argues that 'shamanism' should no longer be considered worth discussing as a global phenomenon, in the same way that 'totemism' no longer is. This kind of sentiment means that people who are still interested in doing comparative studies on shamanism often struggle to find the kind of case studies they need- not because people aren't researching the kind of rituals they're interested in, but because this research doesn't use the word 'shaman' and so mostly ends up getting read by regional specialists (p.307-9).

However, Atkinson reckons that since the 80's we've seen a resurgence of interest in 'shamanism' from various disciplines, especially psychology. Crucially, psychologists have argued that it doesn't matter how much cultural variation there is within 'shamanism', because the phenomenon is unified on a neurological level. That is, 'shamans' can be defined as people who pursue a particular kind of ASC (altered state of consciousness)- it doesn't matter if they pursue it in different ways, or construct different kinds of religious model to explain it. Similar views are held by many of the Westerners who are interested in exploring ASCs themselves (e.g. people in the Pagan and New Age movements) (p.308).

Meanwhile, those ethnographers who continue use the term 'shamanism' apparently often do so simply because they find it a convenient gloss for some specific local practice. These ethnographers aren't necessarily going to be interested in asking questions like "to what extent do the people I call 'shamans' resemble the people who other researchers have labelled 'shamans'?" (p.309)

There's a debate that went on for several decades over whether shamans in other cultures are experiencing what our culture normally calls 'symptoms of a mental disorder', such as schizophrenic delusions. It looks like that debate has now petered out, with the general consensus being 'no'- or at least, it's not as straightforward as saying shamanism is a symptom of mental illness in and of itself (although in some cultures the rate of mental disorders may be higher among shamans than among the community at large, e.g. because people with chronic health problems like mental illness are more likely to study shamanic techniques in order to treat the problem) (p.310).

So these days, 'shamanism' is still seen as being defined by abnormal mental states, but they're referred to as 'ASCs' or 'trance' rather than 'symptoms of mental illness' (Atkinson thinks these terms were chosen because they sound more academic than Eliade's term, 'ecstasy'). Some researchers go so far as to say that all shamans experience a specific kind of ASC, which Harner refers to as an SSC ('shamanic state of consciousness'), while other researchers argue this same ASC is characteristic of all religious experiences, not just shamanic ones. Others treat the words 'shamanism' and 'ASC' as being basically synonymous. Meanwhile, R. Walsh has attempted to to categorise ASCs involved in shamanism and compare them to those involved in yoga or Buddhist meditation. There is relatively little consensus between these researchers over whether ASCs associated with 'shamanism' should be considered distinct from those associated with 'possession' (p.310).

There's been some speculation that shamanism might be associated with a specific type of unusual brain state (P.A. Wright goes so far as to claim that he can identify a specific brain state associated with SSC and distinct from those associated with possession, although it sounds like at the time of Atkinson's articles, it remained to be seen whether this result would be replicated). In general, it sounds like the amount of actual experimental research on the brains of practicing shamans is relatively low in comparison to the amount of speculation about what might be going on, but maybe that's been corrected by now (p.311).

Obviously all this focus on individual mental states, especially individual brain states, is going to trigger the anti-reductionism response in anthropologists, who are going to want to read the behaviour in terms of the sociocultural context. Atkinson herself argues that "to analyze shamanism primarily as a trance phenomenon is akin to analyzing marriage solely as a
function of reproductive biology" (p.311).

Reading 'Shinto and the State: 1868-1988', Introduction and Chapter 1

(Helen Hardacre, 1989, Princeton: Princeton University Press)


I'm somewhat disappointed by this book. I think that's probably a result of mistaken expectations, though. It would probably be a pretty useful book if you were planning on doing a project on Shinto and had a bunch of other sources, but wanted to check you'd covered all the key events during a certain period. Hardacre also explicitly states that she decided to devote minimal attention to the excitingly-controversial WW2 period, since so much has already been written about it in relation to Shinto. That's a reasonable decision, but the end result was a book which felt quite dry and left me feeling like there were lots of things she'd brought up which I would have liked her to go into more detail about (in particular, the relationship between Shinto and Buddhism).

If I'm reading Hardacre right, then here's a potted summary of Shinto's development over the last couple of centuries. It sounds as though Shinto in the mid-nineteenth century was pretty similar to traditional Chinese polytheism (in the sense that it didn't really exist as a unified entity with its own name or institutions, and ordinary people didn't have any issues about mixing and matching it with Buddhism). At least, they sound pretty similar at a village level- I know virtually nothing about how pre-20th century Chinese religion worked at a government level, so I'm not sure how the comparison holds up in that respect.

Hardacre stresses that up until the late nineteenth-century priests who worshipped the kami (Shinto gods) were markedly low-status compared to Buddhist priests. This was apparently made quite clear by the Japanese system of formal ettiquette (for example, Shinto priests got seated lower than Buddhist clerics at village assemblies- p.15). True, the imperial court patronised both Buddhist and Shinto rituals, but in the Tokugawa era the real power (and hence the money to fund rituals) lay with the Shogunate, who sound as though they didn't hold the kami in particularly high esteem (or at any rate, they don't seem to have stressed the relationship between themselves and the kami in order to legitimate their power, as later Japanese governments have done) (p.11).

Most Shinto shrines were located within Buddhist temples, and only staffed parttime. Shinto priests were also all legally required to register with Buddhist temples and receive Buddhist funeral services when they died. Meanwhile, the kami were referred to as the protectors of Buddhist divinities (and their "phenomenal appearances (suijaku)"- whatever that means), implying that they were lesser beings. Ise (one of the top Shinto shrines) believed it was necessary to chant Buddhist sutras before the kami's altars, so that the kami could attain salvation (which is interesting because it sounds a bit like the way that Jains see the gods as being dependent on the Tirthankars' teachings, since they're otherwise doomed to the cycle of rebirths just like everyone else is). See p.14.

Hardacre remarks that "this situation did not pass entirely without protest, but organised resistance among Shinto priests was virtually unknown before the Meiji Restoration" (p.15). To me, this raises a question: to what extent did Tokugawa Shinto priests actually see this situation as problematic?

Hardacre seems to imply that the average Shinto priest resented being under the thumb of Buddhism and wished that they could operate independently. Obviously Hardacre is an expert on this topic, whereas I've read a grand total of one other book on Shinto (which wasn't primarily focused on Japanese history). So Hardacre's sense of the priests' perspective is going to be much more reliable than mine- I'm just wondering whether the majority of priests necessarily resented the situation. I can imagine a situation where the average Shinto priest saw their lower status as a matter of course (maybe even feeling grateful towards Buddhist temples for being gracious enough to offer their patronage to Shinto shrines). Or maybe you could have a situation where many Shinto priests dreamed of being as high-status as Buddhist priests were- but they mostly aspired to quit their jobs and become Buddhist priests, or something similarly high-status, rather than wishing that their current role could be more prestigious.

I'm having a particularly hard time guessing how Shinto priests felt about the legal requirement that they should have Buddhist funerals. John K. Nelson has given me the impression that Shinto's death taboo renders the concept of Shinto funerals pretty emically problematic (they do happen, but seemingly not that often, even when the deceased was a major patron of a Shinto shrine. See Enduring Identities p.281-2). Under those circumstances, is it possible that most Shinto priests didn't really care what sort of funeral they got (and were happy to delegate the nasty, ritually-impure business of funeral-conducting to someone else)? Again, I'm aware that Hardacre knows more about this topic than I ever will- apart from anything else, there's the fact that greater government support for Shinto would later lead to a brief wave of Shinto priests vandalising Buddhist property, which suggests there must have been some level of latent hostility (see p.63). I just wish she'd go into a bit more detail.

I also have no idea how Buddhist priests felt about Shinto in general- did they see its priests as potential competitors, or as subordinates doing a low-status but necessary job (spiritual janitors, maybe)?

The relationship between Shinto and Buddhism shifted in the Meiji period, due to the influence of a group of nationalist intellectuals known as the National Learning school. They had been around for some time, but the upheaveal of the Meiji period resulted in their radical ideas getting attention from politicians. The National Learning writers believed that Japanese culture needed to be purged of all foreign pollution (including Buddhism, since that had originated outside Japan). The arrival of Perry's fleet in 1853 led some of them to decide that the Japanese people needed to be united under a common ideology- this was the only way to strengthen the nation enough to expel the Western barbarians (p.16-17).

Phase One of Operation Expel The Western Barbarians seems to have involved a lot of fighting fire with fire. The plan basically seems to have been: let's capture Christianity, clone it, drain off all the theological content, and then shove Shinto into the vacant structure, bending it into whatever shape it needs to be in order to fit (the result looking maybe kind of like Krang and his robot suit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or maybe some sort of cyborg Wicker Man. Whatever the case, it should definitely be drawn by Keith Thompson). This process is apparently known as the Great Promulgation Campaign, which I can only hope sounds catchier in Japanese.

I can't imagine that many religions would survive this process well, but Shinto seems like a particularly stupid choice. The National Learning goal was to end up with a belief system that was very focused on doctrine- specifically, on an integrated set of doctrines under central control, and phrased in such a way as to make them sound militaristic and authoritarian (in the sense of focusing attention on the national government and its Strong Leader). In particular, they were expected to exalt the virtues of Japanese soldiers who had died in war. The priests of this new religion were also expected to adopt a pastoral role, moulding the lives of ordinary Japanese subjects (as well as preaching the standard theology to their congregations).

In other words, Shinto priests were expected to adopt a role which they were almost uniquely ill-suited to. Most of them had very little experience in public speaking, pastoral work, or disseminating doctrine to the public. This was the sort of thing that Buddhist priests specialised in- and Buddhist priests abandoned the Great Promulgation in droves as soon as it became apparent that the endgoal was to render them obsolete (although there were some who stuck around, using their superior preaching experience to subtly insert Buddhist doctrines into campaign sermons and so convert government-backed projects into stealth Buddhist evangelism drives. It didn't help that preachers were expected to fund these programmes themselves- the Buddhist clergy could depend on generous donations from long-standing parishioners, while the smaller Shinto shrines seriously struggled to fund their speakers. See p.45-6).

This is all in addition to the fact that Shinto priests were now suddenly supposed to be actively competing with Buddhists for the right to conduct funerals, and thus were effectively expected to ignore Shinto death taboos in order to perform rituals which many felt were beneath their dignity (although apparently the fact that funerals were a good source of income helped soften the blow for some. See p.47, 35). The general upshot seems to have been that the Campaign got mocked a lot for fermenting religious tension while trying to make Shinto priests do Buddhism's job (p.44). This impression was presumably not improved by bizarre incidents like the one where the Campaign's Great Teaching Institute moved into a building which had previously been a Buddhist temple patronised by the Tokugawa family. For some reason which I'm still struggling to grasp, the installation ceremony involved getting Buddhist priests to do a Shinto ritual while disguised as Shinto priests (using wigs and robes). The Institute itself soon came to be known as the Bureau of Indecision, or the Siesta Office (p.44).

The whole thing seems particularly badly-planned since it doesn't even seem to have made a serious attempt to capitalise on Shinto's existing support base. The Japanese public seems to have viewed Shinto priests as people whose job was performing a set of necessary rituals which required a certain amount of specialist liturgical knowledge. The exact form which these rituals took varied fairly widely from shrine to shrine. If you were really intent on turning Japan into an industrialised authoritarian state, then I'm sure there must have been SOME way to convert these familiar local rituals into a propaganda tool. Instead, Great Promulgation tried to abolish variation in favour of a nationally standardised system which most priests and worshippers seem to have found shallow, dull and confusing.

For example, the new state pantheon emphasised the role of the Three Deities of Creation. Only one of these deities (Amaterasu, in the form of Tenshōdaijin) had any kind of popular following. There was also a kind of official creed, in the form of the Three Great Teachings (which were apparently meant to reassure Buddhist priests that the Campaign had a solid doctrinal basis and hence was worth their participation). The three tenets were:

1. patriotism and respect for the gods
2. "making clear the principles of the Way of Heaven and the Way of Man"
3. reverence for the emperor and obedience towards the imperial court

Which is fair enough, but if you're trying to indoctrinate people en masse, it helps NOT to try using an ideology which has no existing basis in popular thought. This is especially true if you really suck at explaining the ideology to the people who are expected to be propagating it. It doesn't help that the whole philosophical system seems to have boiled down fairly quickly into a list of religious duties for the pious citizen (including exciting responsibilities like paying your taxes, supporting conscription and accepting various aspects of Western culture in the name of "civilisation"). See p.43-4.

As a final added bonus, the Campaign succeeded in pissing off the priests at Izumo shrine (one of the nation's most important Shinto centres) by refusing to include their patron deity in the new core pantheon (as the official god of the underworld). This sparked off a row which split Shinto into factions and ended up encouraging most priests to believe that they should be trying as hard as possible to avoid discussing theology (since it only seemed to cause trouble). In the end, the Great Teaching Institute wussed out of making a formal decision on whether Izumo's god (Ōkuninushi no Mikoto) should be made official lord of the underworld or not. They just announced that Shinto priests above a certain rank were henceforth banned from ministering directly to parishioners. This meant that people like Izumo's top priests were now officially prevented from conducting funerals. The logic was apparently that if they weren't conducting funerals, they'd have no opportunity to make public pronouncements on which deity (if any) was in charge of the underworld. See p.49.

It's apparently incidents like this one which have led some Shinto-supporters to argue that Shinto is not a religion (since they feel that 'religion' implies a focus on doctrine, plus undignified stuff like funerals and prayers for the this-worldly benefit of parishioners). The argument seems to be that Shinto is, by contrast, a system of necessary rituals which transcends mere religion. Priests, it seems, should be striving to limit their performance of mere religious rituals to the bare minimum necessary to secure enough support from parishioners to keep the shrine running and funded (see p.34-5).

This is interesting, because it suggests a worldview very different to the one which drives the tension that sometimes gets described by Western theologians as doctrine vs praxis. It also suggests a big difference from the argument (often voiced by Western humanists) that various East Asian belief systems are not really 'religions' since they don't prioritise god-appeasing rituals clearly enough (thus making them secular philosophies by default). I'll have to see if I can find anything that elaborates further on the issue.

Religions of Rome, part 2

Religions of Rome keeps on giving. A couple of nice tidbits:

p.126-8
Obnuntiatio was an established convention whereby someone could legitimately prevent the process of legislation by claiming that he had seen bad omens (or perhaps simply that he would be watching for bad omens; the surviving texts aren't clear). However, the standard procedure for this involved making an official statement to the magistrate that you would be watching the skies (de caelo spectare). This caused a certain amount of legal confusion in 59 BC, when the consul Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus apparently became unable to leave his house for fear of being beaten up by Julius Caesar's henchmen (instead staying home and repeatedly sending messages that he was still watching the sky and so passage of Caesar's land redistribution plan should be halted immediately. Leonard Nimoy would be proud).

p.130
"Throughout his account of these events [Clodius' trial] in his letters to Atticus, Cicero huffs and puffs- deriding (as he had to) almost every aspect of the procedure, from the mistaken tactics of his own allies to the failure at one stage in the voting proceedings to produce any ballot papers with the option 'yes' on them."

More generally, the book is turning out to be interesting in the context of the debate over whether 'religion' is valid as an etic term. A lot of effort has been put into this debate over the course of the 20th century, so I'm not going to do it justice properly here- but the basic point is that it appears to be very very difficult to come up with a definition of 'religion' which:

• covers all human cultures


• is not tautological


• excludes everything which most Westerners are uncomfortable labelling as 'religious' (e.g. Marxism, humanism, science)


• includes all the things which most Westerners want to label as 'religious' (e.g. Confucianism, Buddhism)

Several people have had a go at this game, but so far no one has succeeded in fixing their definition as the standard for academia (although arguably this says more about the social sciences and its aversion for fixed terms than it does about religion per se, and admittedly some people like Spiro and Geertz have at least produced definitions which are widely drawn on). Basically, the problem seems to boil down to the fact that while Western culture has a relatively clear distinction between stuff that is 'religious' and stuff that is 'secular', other cultures don't appear to. This leads to the argument that 'religion' is a word which only makes sense in relation to the West and cultures which have been significantly influenced by the West (although admittedly the number of people in the latter box is increasing these days).

One book which makes this argument pretty well is Peter Beyer's Religions in Global Society (2006, London: Routledge). His view is that the concept of 'religion' as a distinct social sphere did not exist in most cultures until extensive contact with the West happened, and that nowadays the debate over whether something is or is not a religion is less a definitional issue and more of a political and legal one (i.e. asking a social group "are you a religion?" is not really asking them "do you fulfil some well-defined abstract criteria?" -it's more a case of asking things like "do you want to qualify for certain kinds of tax break? Do you want to appeal to the kind of people who regard themselves as atheists?")

A nice example of this is Shinto- Beyer argues that since the West led Japan to adopt the idea of 'religion' as a concept distinct from other aspects of society, there's been an ongoing debate between Shinto-supporters who want it defined as a religion and those who don't. To some extent, this is a question that can be rephrased as: "to what extent do we want Shinto to resemble Christianity in the modern West?" E.g. "is state support for Shinto compatible with postwar Japanese laws of separation of religion and the state? Does labelling it as 'religion' imply that it's possible for someone to renounce it, and if so, is this the message we want to be sending people? On the other hand, does calling it 'religion' stress the idea that it's worthy of a kind of default respect which a 'secular' philosophy might not be?" (see also John K. Nelson's excellent ethnography Enduring Identities: the guise of Shinto in contemporary Japan. Beyond this and Beyer, I don't actually know very much about Shinto, so I may be misrepresenting the emic debate. I'm currently borrowing a copy of Hardacre's Shinto and the State, which apparently goes into the issue in more detail, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet).

So I've frequently seen the argument that 'religion' is a distinctively Western concept, but so far I haven't read anything that attempts to trace the concept's genesis in any great detail (this is probably because I haven't specifically gone looking yet; it seems like an obvious thing for someone to go write about). As such, looking at what we now term 'religion' in pre-Christian Rome seems like a good idea. So, does Beard et al.'s book give the impression that 'religion' existed in Rome as an emic concept?

So far the answer seems to be 'no'. Granted, Beard et al. haven't yet tackled the question head on (although I'm only up to the section on the early imperial period). I'm also sure that there's a source somewhere which attempts to answer this question from the perspective of someone who's actually studied Classics (unlike me). But the impression I'm getting at the moment is that the sort of rituals which my society would normally label 'religious' in Rome were pretty tightly bound up with stuff that I'd normally be inclined to label as 'secular politics'. One example of this is the stuff I mentioned in my previous post over the extent to which the modern concept of 'priest' is applicable in Ancient Rome. Since then, Beard et al. have mentioned other things which feed into this debate. Some examples which I need to think about:

"It would have made no sense in Roman terms to have claimed rights to political power without also claiming rights to religious authority and expertise." (p.135, stated in relation to the plebeians' struggle to gain places in the pontifical and augural colleges- in other words, to gain access to what we might today see as high-status 'priesthoods').

"Crucially, there is no sign in any Roman political debate that any public figure ever openly rejected the traditional framework for understanding the gods' relations with humankind. Political arguments consisted in large part of accusations that 'the other side' had neglected their proper duty to the gods, or had flouted divine law. It was a competition (in our terms) about how, and by whom, access to the god was to be controlled- not about rival claims on the importance or existence of the divine. So far as we can tell, no radical political stance brought with it a fundamental challenge to the traditional assumptions of how the gods operated in the world. There were, to be sure, as there always had been, individual cults and individual deities that were invested (for various reasons) with a particular popular resonance. The temple of Ceres, for example, as we have seen, had special 'plebeian' associations from the early Republic; likewise the cult of the Lares Compitales (at local shrines throughout the regions (vici) of the city) was a centre of religious and social life for, particularly, slaves and poor (and was later to be developed by Augustus precisely for its popular associations) [...] There was always likely to be choices and preferences of this kind in any polytheism. But if these cults did act as a focus for an entirely different view of man's relations with gods, no evidence has survived to suggest it." (p.139)

"The honours granted to Julius Caesar immediately before his assassination suggest that he had been accorded the status of a god- or something very like it: he had, for example, the right to have a priest (flamen) of his cult, to adorn his house with a pediment (as if it were a temple) and to place his own image in formal processions of the images of the gods. Shortly after his death, he was given other marks of divine status: altars, sacrifices, a temple and in 42 BC a formal decree of divination, making him divus Julius. Ever since the moment they were granted, these honours- particularly those granted before his death- have been the focus of debate. If you ask the question 'had Caesar officially become a Roman god, or not, before his death? Was he, or was he not a deity?" you will not find a clear answer. Predictably both Roman writers and modern scholars offer different and often contradictory views." (p.140-1)

Sidenote: I've always been given to understand that Caesar was killed because people were scared he was trying to turn himself into a king. Possibly this is a popular misconception- if not, it makes the whole thing even harder to get my head around, since it seems to suggest that people at the time were more uncomfortable with the idea of King Julius than with Julius the Living God. Anyone have any insight on this?

"Traditionally religion was deeply embedded in the political institutions of Rome: the political elite were at the same time those who controlled human relations with the gods; the senate, more than any other single institution, was the central locus of 'religious' and 'political' power. In many respects this remained as true at the end of the Republic as it had been two or three centuries earlier. But at the same time, we can trace- at least over the last century BC- the beginning of a progression towards the isolation of 'religion' as an autonomous area of human activity, with its own rules, its own technical and professional discourse. In this section we shall look at two particular aspects of this process: first, the development of more sharply defined boundaries between different types of religious experience: between the licit and the illicit, between religion and magic." (p.150)

"In the late Republic, in other words, we begin for the first time to hear of practices designated as 'magical'. Many of these practices had, in fact, been part of religious activity at Rome as far back as you could trace; what was new was precisely their designation as 'magical' and the definition of magic as a separate category. [...] magic is not a single [cross-cultural] category at all, but a term applied to a set of operations whose rules conflict with the prevailing rules of religion, science or logic of the society concerned. And so, for the historian, the interest of what we may choose to call 'magic' lies in how that conflict is defined, what particular practices are perceived as breaking the rules, and how that perception changes over time." (p.154, emp. mine)

"We have almost no evidence at all for the circumstances that led to the destruction of the shrines of Isis in (probably) 59, 58, 53, 50 and again in 48 BC; nor, for that matter, for those that led to the expulsion of the astrologers (Chaldaei) from Rome in 139 BC. But we can make a plausible guess at one or two factors that may have lain behind such an action. The cult of Isis, with its independent priesthood and its devotion to a personal and caring deity could represent (like the Bacchic cult) a potentially dangerous alternative society, out of the control of the traditional political elite. Likewise astrology, with its specialised form of religious knowledge in the hands of a set of religious experts outside the political groups of the city, necessarily constituted a separate (and perhaps rival) focus of religious power. Although it did not offer a social alternative in the sense of group membership, it represented (as we have seen in other areas before) a form of religious differentiation which threatened the undifferentiated politico-religious amalgam of Roman practice." (p.161)

Finally, there's an interesting source from a contemporary Greek writer named Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who apparently argued that the Romans were more Greek than the Greeks (on the grounds that they had taken "the best customs in use among the Greeks" while rejecting "all the traditional [Greek] myths concerning the gods, which contain blasphemies and calumnies against them." He elaborated that by 'blasphemies and calumnies', he meant:

• theogonies (stories in which the gods fight for supremacy- e.g. the story of how Zeus overthrew Kronos)


• stories in which gods warred with mortals or were subjugated by them (e.g. the bit in the Iliad about how Apollo briefly served as a herdsman to the mortal King Laomedon)


• rituals which made reference to gods dying, or which required worshippers to behave disreputably (e.g. the mysteries of Dionysius or Persephone)

Wikipedia says he died some time relatively soon after 7 BC- that's a shame; I would have liked to see what he made of Christianity.

I've still got just under half the book to finish. If I decide to keep trawling ancient Roman stuff, I might have a look for readable translations of Cicero, since Beard et al. make him sound like an interesting guy (although I'd probably have no idea who he was if I hadn't read Allan Massie's fictional autobiography of Augustus, ages and ages ago- quite a good book for getting your head around the period, although like almost all autobiographies it suffers from a lack of neat character arcs). While I remember: I should also attempt to track down a library copy of CS Lewis' The Problem of Pain, because I skimmed the first part in Waterstone's the other day and it looks like he's come up with a theodicy which I hadn't heard of before.