All posts tagged Satan

The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski (2009)

Warning: this review contains graphic descriptions of torture and mutilation.

Were you forced to kill any of your relatives or neighbours?
Were you forced to chop off people’s hands or feet with a machete?
Were you forced to gouge out people’s eyes?
Were you forced to rape women?
Were you forced to burn people alive?

(Part of the questionnaire given to freed child soldiers in north Uganda, quoted in The Night Wanderers, page 38)

Wojchiec Jagielski

Wojchiec Jagielski is a Polish journalist who specialises in reporting from the world’s worst conflicts. Hence, for example, ‘Towers of Stone’, his 2009 book about the gruesome brutal wars in Chechnya, along with books on Afghanistan and South Africa.

But it’s not not just reporting – Jagielski is interested in the psychology created by terrible conflicts and, beyond that, in the voodoo, spectral elements, the worlds beyond normal human experience which extreme situations create, the deprivation, degradation, demoralisation spread over long periods, which create new psychic zones.

For this reason – for Jagielski’s interest in moods and alternative states and his interest in depicting them in prose which is often more about poetry and fleeting perceptions than the journalist’s tradition fare of facts and dates – he has often been compared to the famous master of such writing and fellow Pole, Ryszard Kapuściński.

No surprise that snippets of praise from Kapuściński are found on the jackets of Jagielski’s books (”A stunning and beautiful book…Jagielski has scaled the heights of reportage’), or that Kapuściński wrote the introduction to one of his books, or that this very book was nominated for the Ryszard Kapuściński Prize.

Part 1 (Gulu and its night wanderers)

Ugandan elections 2006

The Night Wanderers is set in Uganda in 2006. Nominally Jagielski was in Uganda to cover the February 2006 general election and party politics are, accordingly, described in part 2. But the meat of the book is his descriptions of the appalling plight of the thousands of children abducted by the rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by the psychopath Joseph Kony. J.M. Barrie wrote about the Lost Boys but it was a fairy tale compared to this lost generation of Ugandan children.

The Acholi

The north of Uganda is inhabited by the Acholi people. Some 2 million of them have been driven out of their villages, forced to abandon their homes, their fields and crops, to leave behind the graveyards full of ancestral spirits, and instead herded into about 200 refugee camps where they have built huts and live, but which they can never regard as home.

Exemplary cruelty

The rebels terrify civilians by attacking villages, hacking people to death with machetes, chopping off their hands, slitting their throats, clubbing them to death, hacking them to pieces with axes, raping the women, herding people into huts and burning them alive. The cruelty is exemplary: it is punishment for not believing in the wonderfulness of Joseph Kony, and also to terrify entire regions into submission. Thus:

On the orders of their commanders, the guerrillas killed the villagers in extremely cruel ways. They butchered and burned them alive, forced the prisoners to commit cannibalism and infanticide. They raped and tortured, cut off people’s lips, gouged out their eyes, and chopped off their hands and feet. They left behind bloodied corpses and gutted houses. (p.138)

(Why does the LRA cut off people’s lips? As a warning to others not to report encounters with them to the authorities or to the Ugandan Army, p.296.)

Refugee village headman

Jagielski meets Abola Imbakasi, headman of one such refugee camp, Palenga. His meek son, Robert, was taken by the guerrillas for 3 months (p.18). On returning he had to be exorcised by a priest but is still not the same. His mind has been permanently damaged by what he saw and was forced to do.

The children’s treatment centre

Jagielski meets Nora who runs a rehabilitation centre (a ‘children’s treatment centre’) for children who’ve escaped or been rescued from the guerrillas. All of them have killed, multiple times. Jagielski watches one of the therapy methods which is to let them act out what they did as a kind of gruesome pantomime, some of them acting out their own roles, some of them playing the villagers who they hacked, burned, tortured, shot and burned. The terrible questionnaire (p.38).

The journalist’s responsibility

Jagielski explains that he’s never had problems interviewing the commanders and leaders who order massacres and atrocities. They’re always confident it was the only way to achieve justice or peace. They are always full of excuses, justifications and blame others (see Putin’s justifications for murdering civilians in Ukraine).

In his experience it is always much harder talking to the victims of atrocities. For many their story, their experience, is all they have left. Therefore sharing it with a journalist is like a precious trust. Part of which is they think that by sharing their story, it will bring about justice in the outside world, and will bring them peace and closure. It is far harder dealing with these poor people when neither of those things happen, when the world doesn’t suddenly galvanise itself to address their wrongs, when they are left feeling even worse than they did before they told their stories (p.33).

Rebel magic

The ferocity of the attackers, the way they chiefly emerged at night, the way they hid in the jungle and picked off anyone foolish enough to stray into the darker jungle, all this gave rise to folk stories and legends: that they could dematerialise at will, could appear anywhere like witches, had magical powers, that they change the children they kidnapped from humans into savage animals (p.39)

And indeed, villagers, adults, normal civilians who haven’t been inducted, regard returnees from the rebels as ‘spirits of the forest’, as bewitched, soulless, voodoo, jinxed, bad luck (p.49).

Initiation killing

Jagielski learns from Nora’s interviews with countless child soldiers how new initiates into the LRA were forced at gunpoint to murder their own fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, best friends, neighbours, in front of everyone, in front of plenty of witnesses, because then there was no going back, then they were forced to stay. This was the initiation ceremony into the Lord’s Army (p.45).

The boy Samuel

Jagielski is particularly interested in interviewing Samuel, who was abducted at age 9 and was soon afterwards forced to kill his first person, a boy from his village, and whose story Jagielski tries to piece together. Nora tells him the best age to create a child soldier is 9, old enough to be independent, young enough not to really know right and wrong. Mouldable (p.57).

Jackson the journalist

After trips to refugee camps or to interview the children, Jagielski returns to the bar at Franklin’s Inn where he regularly meets Jackson, now a radio journalist, himself inducted into the guerrillas many years earlier. Jackson plays the role of sardonic, satirical commentator on Jagielski’s efforts, claiming that no matter how many questions he asks, he’ll never understand what it’s like (p.46).

Atrocities

The narrative is regularly punctuated by descriptions of the most appalling atrocities, for example on pages 45, 50, 72, 138, 144, 146,

When they had finished their interrogation, the older guerrillas started killing the villagers. The commanders forbade them from shooting unnecessarily, to save bullets, and also because the noise of shots would alert the army. The peasants were tied up and made to lie on the ground, as the guerrillas unhurriedly murdered them one by one – men, women, old people, and also small children who weren’t fit to be prisoners. They killed them with machetes, axes, hoes and large knives usually used as agricultural tools. None of the villagers put up resistance or fought for their lives. Terror and a sense of doom had taken away their capacity for any kind of action. (p.137)

Or the story (repeated twice) of the LRA attack on a funeral procession when they forced the mourners to cook and eat the remains of the deceased, allegedly on the orders of Onen Kamdalu (p.241).

Gulu

Jagielski bases himself in Gulu, administrative capital of north central Uganda and each evening observes the same eerie ritual: every evening as the sun sets thousands of children (as many as 15,000) arrive having trekked from all the surrounding villages, for their own safety, to avoid the risk of being kidnapped and conscripted by the LRA. It is this silent army of forlorn children who arrive every evening and make beds in public spaces and on the sidewalks, who Nora calls ‘the Night Wanderers’ which give the book its title (p.58).

Jagielski describes the arrival of these tens of thousands of silent children in spooky spectral terms. The way the town of Gulu changed its atmosphere. the way adults departed abandoned the streets to the thousands of ghostly children. The peculiar way these children inspired irrational fear in the adult population, harbingers of evil (p.59).

Jagielski tells us he stayed at the Acholi Inn Hotel (p.91). This is a real place, still exists, and you can book a stay there, if you want.

Jagielski tells the history of how Uganda was created as a nation by the British, yoking together completely different peoples and tribes, the Buganda – agriculturalists – in the south, the Acholi, Lango and other peoples who lived by grazing and cattle, in the north.

Milton Obote and Yoweri Museveni

At independence in 1962 the British tried to reconcile these different peoples, making Milton Obote from the Lango tribe prime minister and the king of the Buganda, Frederick Mutesa II, president. But in 1966 Obote overthrew Mutesa and declared himself president. In 1971 Obote was overthrown by his own army chief of staff, Idi Amin from the Kwakwa people. In 1979 Ami invaded Tanzania but was swiftly repulsed and overthrown by the Tanzanian army (for a vivid description of Amin’s horrifying rule and the Tanzanian invasion, see Giles Foden’s powerful novel The Last King of Scotland).

Obote returned to power and swiftly commenced violent repression even worse than Amin’s triggering the Ugandan Bush War against him, led by members of Obote’s army plus tribal opponents. They crystallised into the National Resistance Army (NRA) and attracted support from the many Rwandan Tutsi exiles and refugees living in southern Uganda (who were to go on to form the Rwandan Patriotic Front and invade Rwanda in 1990).

In 1986 Obote was overthrown for the second time and the leader of the NRA, Yoweri Museveni, came to power. Museveni began a campaign of intimidation against the powerful Acholi people in the north and it was this which inspired Acholi resistance.

Alice Auma

Jagielski gives a pen portrait of Alice Auma, a withdrawn young woman who had failed to get pregnant by two husbands and been returned to her father in shame, before she began having visions and claimed to have visitations from spirits and announced she was a prophet of the Lord. She named the chief spirit visitor Lakwena (p.74).

Alice became known as Alice of the Holy Spirit. She set up a temple where she could heal the sick and the mentally disturbed. Then announced she was establishing an army which would not just defend the Acholi from the Ugandan Army’s depredations, but conquer all of Uganda and establish religious rule. She gathered followers from conventional guerrilla forces who were losing encounters against the army. She promised if they sprinkled holy water on their guns every bullet would find its billet, and if they smeared holy oil on their bodies they would be invulnerable.

Although this didn’t actually happen, the intensity of their belief led them to surprising victories over the conventional army and word spread. Conventional troops fled in panic when they heard the psalm-singing Alice army approaching. The army grew to several thousand and fought its way south to within 100 miles of the capital. But then her spirits abandoned her. Her troops said it happened when she crossed the White Nile and went beyond the borders of Acholi land. The central army also recruited powerful witches and magicians and defeated Alice’s army in November 1987.

Alice fled to Kenya where, ten years later (1997), Jagielski interviewed her. She didn’t say much. She claimed to have found a spirit cure for AIDS. She died in 2007.

Joseph Kony

Her father tried to take up her baton for a while but lacked the charisma. Then a new prophet arose in Acholiland, Joseph Kony. He claimed to be visited by Lakwena who had instructed him to create a new army, the Lord’s Army, and liberate Acholiland. One by one other rebel groups folded and ceasefired with the Ugandan army. Only the most fanatical opponents or those who had committed the most barbaric crimes held out and gravitated towards Kony’s army which, by a process of selection, became full of psychopaths, ‘vile, bloodthirsty, accursed creatures’ (p.81). (Jackson explains more about Lakwena, pages 198 to 200).

But they lacked manpower and the villages were no longer as keen to hand over their sons as they had been for Alice’s Army. So Kony took to kidnapping children on an industrial scale. Jagielski thinks the force Kony renamed the Lord’s Resistance Army might be the only child army in history.

Interview with Kony

Jagielski gives extended quotes from what I initially took to be a newspaper interview Kony gave, in which he disclaimed all responsibility for kidnapping children, claiming the mutilations were carried out by the Uganda army not him, swearing that his cause is just etc (pages 201 to 203). In fact the material comes from this video interview carried out by Sam Farmer, who must, as the saying goes, have balls of steel to doggedly track down a known mass murderer to his lair.

Warning: this video contains graphic and upsetting images of mutilation.

Sister Rachele Fassere

The story of Sister Rachele Fassere who tried heroically to rescue the 139 girls abducted by the LRA from the most eminent school in the region, St Mary’s convent school in Aboke.

Britain’s imperial behaviour and legacy: pages 71, 104, 154,

The stock African accusation against imperialists, the British, against all outsiders:

‘And that’s where the problem lies – in the names,’ said Jackson…’You give your own names to whatever you find in your country, and you’re convinced that once you’ve named it all, you’re also going to understand it all. But we have our own names too, but we look at things in our own way.’ (p.114)

Part 2 (Kampala)

In part 2 Jagielski leaves Gulu, travelling south by bus (with Jackson) to the capital of Uganda, Kampala. Thus we get a pen portrait of Kampala’s history – one of the few cities in all Africa that existed before the Europeans arrived i.e. that Europeans didn’t found. Winston Churchill was delighted with it and called it the pearl of Africa (p.154)

Jagielski checks into the Speke Hotel where all the foreign correspondents say, meet and swap knowledge (p.122). How western journalists co-op or rip off the hard-earned knowledge of local African journalists (pages 123 to 126).

Spirits

Alice Auma, and Joseph Kony after her, both triumphed because of the nearly universal belief in spirits. The book adverts again and again to spirit belief. For example, the passage about the area around Luwero where so many villagers were slaughtered that there was no-one to give them burial rites and so the spirits of the dead were trapped in this world and entered the bodies of the living (p.146).

Extended passage naming some of the spirits who take Kony, how he behaves when possessed etc, chief among them Lakwena (pages 166 to 169).

Jackson’s family believed that when his father came home from the war he was possessed by a spirit which eventually drove him to hang himself. The entire family and village were too scared to cut the rope he’d hanged himself by under the belief that anyone who did so would themselves be possessed and die, and had to bribe an old, old lady, known to be an ajwaka or healer, to do it.

Part 2 has more history and politics in it than part 1, which was more about individuals like Nora, Samuel et al. Jagielski is quite a repetitive writer. Some ideas are repeated in nearly the same phrasing. The dispossessed refugee men of Penga often raped women:

as if only by inflicting rape could they come alive and shake off their inertia (p.18)

Two hundred pages later, Nora complains that Acholi men are ‘useless’. They steal the money their womenfolk earn, simply abandon them, or rape them:

as if only through violence, by inflicting pain and harm, could they restrain something beyond their control which was causing their former world and old way of life to slip away before their very eyes. (p.237)

In a bigger example of repetition, the sequence of events whereby the British left Obote as Prime Minister and the king of Buganda as president, then Obote overthrew the king to become a dictator (1966), was himself overthrown by Amin (1971), who was overthrown by the Tanzania War (1979), which brought Obote back to power (Obote II), how Obote was even more bloodthirsty than Amin (maybe as many as 500,000 Ugandans died under his second regime), how this triggered the Ugandan Bush War (1980 to 1986), which eventually overthrew Obote and replaced him with Museveni – this narrative is repeated at least twice, some parts of it 3 or 4 times.

Part 2 goes into more detail about the biographies of all three players, Obote, Amin, Museveni, plus the restored king of Buganda, King Kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi or ‘King Ronnie’ (p.140).

Pages about Amin and the mutual loathing between him and Julius Nyerere (pages 142 to 144); ‘the personification of horror (pages 155 to 166, including some of the scenes described in ‘The Last King of Africa’).

Another thing Jagielski repeats is the claim that Uganda became a place of war, horror and death. Because he repeats this kind of phrasing, stretched out to paragraphs, many times, and because the narrative is non-chronological but hops about in time, it becomes hard to figure out which leader it happened under and why it happened. Many passages like this:

Presidents changed but the nightmare continued and Uganda never stopped flowing with blood, as if it had been sacrificed to the god of war and evil. (p.145)

Wracked by lawlessness and violence, Uganda continued to be a bloodbath, doomed to horrific destruction, curse with an apocalypse. (p.164)

After almost two decades of the tyrannical regimes of Obote and Amin, civil wars, massacres, lawlessness and bankruptcy, plague and famine, and one and a half million corpses, it had come to be known as a doomed country… (p.170)

The bravery of British journalist William Pike, who edited the newspaper New Vision without fear or favour, and his lead journalist, Allio Ewaku Emmy (pages 126 to 129).

What triggers the more political flavour of part 2 is that Museveni had prided himself on not being like the old dictators, not hanging on forever…and yet, at the time Jagielski is writing, Museveni was trying to alter the constitution in order to allow him to run for president more than two times (as most constitutions require). That happened in November 2005, which dates the writing of these sections to that moment, rolling on to the subsequent elections of February 2006.

(In fact as I write, at the start of 2024, Museveni is still president of Uganda, having held the post since 1986, 38 years and counting.)

Museveni

Pen portraits of Museveni on pages 129 to 133, 139 to 140, 144 to 145, 170 to 177. Museveni surprised everyone by changing quickly, on taking power, from a firebrand socialist revolutionary guerrilla to a pragmatic head of state prepared to work with western banks and let capitalism thrive.

Museveni on slavery

Museveni discomfited other African rulers with a few home truths:

‘We like to complain about the whites, but have we ever wondered why only Africans let themselves be enslaved? Why didn’t we put up resistance? It was our own greed and quarrelsome nature that ruined us. That’s why we were defeated and conquered. We ourselves are to blame. It was our chiefs, waging fratricidal wars, who took people prisoner to sell them to slave traders from Europe. It was those black traitors who bear the blame for slavery.’ (quoted on page 171)

1. The kind of thing a white person could never say or think.

2. I think he’s wrong though, in two ways. Firstly, the reason Africa was so prey to depredation was because it was the most economically, socially and technologically backward of the continents (with the exception of Australia) due to the reasons laid out at length in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

But there’s a second thing going on here which is that Museveni, like most modern commentators, is thinking within the framework of black and white that has been firmly established over the past 100 years, which has created a false homogeneity among black people. I’m continually impressed, on a pretty much daily basis – reading the papers, listening to the radio, going to exhibitions – how black activists think there is some kind of inherent unity among black people, that all black people share the same interests and concerns. This seems to me wrong, wrong about any community or group of people.

What I’ve read in the books by Jeal or Hochschild or Segal give the impression that the Africans we’re talking about, in the 1700s and 1800s, didn’t have this simplistic modern binary between Black and White, nor share the modern idea that all black people share a common identity, common goals, need to be united etc. This all seems, as far as I can tell, to have sprung up among black people in the West, whether civil rights movements or black power or Nation of Islam or Black Lives Matters – all these groups define themselves by contrast with whites (and mostly derive from America).

My reading of the sources is that back in the 1700s and 1800s this kind of ‘black consciousness’ simply didn’t exist. Instead Africans identified themselves with tribes, maybe religions, with regions and languages, and regarded all Africans outside their tribal or religious group as others, others who could be quite legitimately enslaved or waged war on or whatever. They had no need to feel guilty as they were smiting the enemy and then selling them into slavery, thus boosting their own prowess, preserving their tribe, making their family wealthy, and that’s what mattered to them.

In a nutshell, Museveni is projecting back onto his ancestors a kind of black consciousness which is a twentieth century (and mostly American) creation and (like America) simply didn’t exist so no-one was aware of it and no-one acted on it, in the period he’s projecting it back onto.

African unity

3. Finally, yet again the strong impression given is that the whole concept of black unity in Africa is a joke. Here’s Michela Wrong describing the moribund Organisation of African Unity:

The summit of the Organisation of African Unity, that yearly get-together where insincere handshakes were exchanged, 29-year-old coup leaders got their first chance to play the international statesman, and the patriarchs of African politics politely glossed over the rigged elections, financial scandals and bloody atrocities perpetrated by their peers across the table.

(‘I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation’ by Michela Wrong, p.357)

Biafra. The Rwanda genocide. The wars in Congo. The civil war in South Sudan. Just the history of Uganda alone makes clear how difficult Africans find it to live in peace with other Africans. One and a half million Ugandans dead in 20 years of civil wars and insurgencies is proof of something.

Look at how the insurgency of the Lord’s Resistance Army got mixed up with ongoing enmity between all the regional nations: at various points the governments of both Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo gave the LRA aid and support, while Sudan backed Kony in retaliation for Uganda’s longstanding support of the secessionist movement in South Sudan.

Where is the ‘African unity’ in any of this? In fact Jagielski’s description of the poisonous backstabbing rivalry between African states is bleakly hilarious (pages 195 to 196).

The Ugandan opposition

Jagielski visits the HQ of the opposition party, the Forum for Democratic Change.

Portrait of Nasser Sebaggala, opponent of Museveni and mayor of Kampala from 2006 to 2011.

Portrait of Museveni’s slighted mistress Winnie Byanyima, who has blossomed into an international figure (pages 178 to 180). Winnie married Museveni’s one-time physician, Dr Kizza Besigye, and encouraged him to become a leading political opponent, to stand in the presidential election against Museveni (180 to 181).

As usual with the African elections I’ve read about, nobody talks about policies, instead the campaigns rotate solely around personality and character i.e. Museveni is the ‘great leader’ who has saved Uganda or Museveni has hung on too long and must go. Playground level.

Bounty hunters

A page on freelance bounty hunters around the world. The international community put a bounty of $1.5 million on Kony’s head, which attracted freelancers (p.193). In that case surely the question is, how come nobody tracked him down and killed him? Simply because he’s surrounded by trigger-happy bodyguards?

Bishop Joseph Kibwetere

Auma and Kony aren’t the only ones possessed by spirits. The story of Bishop Joseph Kibwetere who gathered a large following when he predicted the end of the world for 31 December 1999. He and his followers all burned to death in a church fire in March 2000. Or did he escape? Prophets and visionaries appear whenever there’s a natural disaster, droughts, floods, epidemics (p.209). (It doesn’t so much sound like, as actually is the European Middle Ages.) The ebola epidemic of the early 2000s which was, of course, seen as another attack of bad spirits and, like so many evil things, came from the Congo (pages 210 to 212).

Jagielski’s unhelpful way of describing disease

Jagielski writes about disease in a melodramatic, anthropomorphised way which undermines your trust in his descriptions of other things. Here he is describing the action of AIDS:

But the invisible virus was alive inside her, lying in wait, and when it launched its lightning attack, giving no chance for defence, it was too late to save her. (p.214)

This isn’t a very useful way of talking about or thinking about infectious diseases. Anthropomorphising disease like this is not far short of the local belief in spirits, except that Jagielski doesn’t have the excuse of no education. He’s dumbing down from dramatic effect.

In fact it has two deleterious effects. 1) Talk to any health professional and they’ll tell you we need to remove moralising and stigma from infectious disease. This kind of dumbed-down anthropomorphising encourages scientific illiteracy and folk attitudes. Most western nations are facing health crises, specifically over measles, caused by the decline in MMR vaccinations, triggered by rumour and false information. Many people thought the COVID vaccines were some kind of state-run conspiracy. For this reason discourse about illness should be kept scientific, factual and precise.

2) The second bad effect is that anthropomorphising illness like this, using this kind of emotionalising, unscientific way of describing disease, opens the door to moralising which quickly leads to judging victims, for example the way AIDS was initially stigmatised as a ‘gay plague’ or more recent slurs about monkeypox. Medieval worldview. Burn witches etc. People need to be encouraged to think about disease in the correct scientific, objective fashion.

A journalist’s complaint

Another thing I didn’t like was his self-centred hand-wringing about the moral challenges and compromises involved in being a journalist.

Messy, abandoned friendships, business started and interrupted, then forgotten, littered the routes of all my journeys. (p.216)

Well, I reflected, as I read the fifth or sixth such passage, if you don’t like it, get a job in an office. A lot of journalists seem to imagine that when I buy a book on a particular subject I’ll really appreciate lots of stuff thrown in about how hard their job is and how they have to continually make work-life compromises and let people down and oh it’s so difficult. Well, I don’t. Boring.

In a way the journalist’s profession has betrayal encoded into it. It demands gaining people’s trust and extracting confidences from them, purely in order to publicise and reveal them, all for a sense of a job well done, for satisfaction, applause and prizes. (p.216)

Like going to see your doctor with troubling symptoms and just wanting a diagnosis and treatment but instead having to listen to a long lecture about how badly paid doctors are and there’s never enough time to see patients and all their other gripes. No. Just diagnose and treat me. Same with journalists: don’t tell me all about your sensitive scruples and heroic regrets. Just tell me the bloody story.

Part 3 (back to Gulu)

To his own surprise, Jagielski didn’t hang around in Kampala to wait for the results of the election. He had unexpectedly bumped into Jackson and decides to return to Gulu. On the way Jackson tells him something extraordinary: most of the guests at the Acholi Inn Hotel where he’s staying are former guerrillas, people who have carried out the most appalling atrocities.

He describes the standard military corruption: all Ugandan soldiers are all corrupt. Their officers keep all their pay for themselves so the ordinary soldiers are forced to steal from the locals, hold them up at temporary roadblocks, even sell their arms and ammunition to the guerrillas.

Not only that, but many of the shops in Gulu sell goods stolen from country villages which the guerrillas  have looted and then send on here. And that the guerrillas, who kidnap other people’s children, send their own children to good public schools here in Gulu. This isn’t a dysfunctional society so much as dysfunctional people. When so many people dysfunction what hope is there for ‘normal’ society?

‘Where two elephants fight, the greatest victim is the grass.’ (Acholi proverb, p.229)

Rehabilitating child brides

Jagielski returns to the child treatment centre. It’s pretty obvious he fancies Nora and she’s quite happy to flirt with him. He admires her tight-fitting jeans. The other care worker, Christine, is careful to knock on Nora’s door, even when it’s open, so she doesn’t walk in on them kissing or worse. I found these scenes a bit icky (for example, page 249).

Lunch. Watching the children at crafts. The eldest girl is 16. All of them who were capable of it, were taken as child brides by guerrilla leaders and have borne children. On returning to the world they are shunned by their families. So the centre teaches them to sew, makes crafts, open market stalls. This is the route to financial independence and, once they’ve earned some money, to interesting some man into marrying them.

Refugees

Refugees are people who may not have lost their lives to war, but their existence has been robbed of its meaning. War has taken away all their faith, hope, dreams and energy. (p.234)

Former guerrilla leaders

Jagielski talks to the former LRA leaders now living quietly at the Acholi Inn:

Jagielski carries out an extended interview with Banya (pages 240 to 248), a characteristic figure in that he had been a senior figure in the formal Ugandan army but quit when Museveni came to power, disgusted that Museveni overthrew the interim rulers (who succeeded Amin) through violence, and also worried Museveni would start persecuting the Acholi (as he did). One day envoys from Kony arrived at his home and told him to come now or they would kill his entire family. So he went with them and was never allowed back.

Christine returning the lost boys

At the centre Nora works alongside Christine. They dislike and avoid each other. Nora thinks Christine obeises herself to a husband who’s moved to Kampala and is rumoured to have taken a second wife. Christine denies all this and thinks Nora is disreputable for not having married and settled down.

A long passage seeing things through Christine’s eyes, the arrival of the first liberated child soldiers at the centre, Christine’s opinion that they need love and support and, above all, to be told it’s not their fault. All of them were forced to kill or mutilate under threat of it happening to themselves.

The best medicine for these damaged children turned out to be routine: wake-up same time, breakfast, chores etc (p.259).

Jagielski accompanies Christine as she takes some of the last boys in the camp back to their various villages, observing their receptions (pages 259 to 269). Life in the dirt poor refugee camps, with absolutely no purpose, is hard for the reclaimed boy soldiers. Many of them run back into the bush, where there’s at least a purpose, and food. Or are so shunned by former neighbours and even their own family that they become embittered, violent. Some of them spontaneously kill.

Mato oput

Jagielski witnesses a ceremony of mato oput meaning reconciliation for a crime, and learns the complex traditional methods for a wrong-doer to admit their guilt, the compensation to be paid by his family, the road to acceptance and reconciliation (pages 266 to 269, 273 to 282).

A detailed description of Acholi beliefs about dead people’s spirits, specially how they persecute the living if they’re not happy (pages 269 to 273). Worth mentioning that a Catholic priest, Father Remigio, accompanied Christine and Jagielski on this trip, and was by his side explaining all aspects of the mato oput ceremony, their provenance and meaning.

The Acholi king

The Achioli king is named David Onen Acana II. His shabby court looks like a provincial post office. Some facts about the Acholi who migrated into north Uganda from Sudan where they were nomadic shepherds, hunters and fishermen.

When he arrives the king is discussing the future of Kony with one of his advisers, Chief Lugai. They’d been invited to meet Kony in the bush but when they got there he didn’t show up. The king and Chief Lugai say Museveni needs to pardon Kony and the International Tribunal at the Hague drop its charges. Only then will Kony come in, and he must be handled with traditional Aconi rites i.e. Mato oput (p.288).

The king then laments at length how the old tribal ways are being destroyed not only by the war, the enforced relocation of 2 million people, but criticism from Christian missionaries and Muslim imams and the new young generation in cities who turn to the West (pages 289 to 291). In other words, the inevitable process of ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’.

Father Cosmas

An interview with the Catholic priest Father Cosmas who is quite clear that Alice was possessed by satanic spirits but that Kony is Satan himself (p.294). Stories he has heard from children who have been rehabilitated and made their confessions to him.

Severino Lukoya

Jagielski says goodbye to Nora, with the uneasy feeling that he has wormed his way into her and Samuel’s affections merely to exploit them for his book then dump them. And that’s what she accuses him of.

The last thing he does in Gulu is go to visit Severino Lukoya. He was the father of Alice Auma who, after Alice’s forces were defeated, claimed that the spirits had entered him and that he was now the spokesman for Lakwena et al. In the event the forces he led were defeated by the Ugandan Army even more heavily than Alice’s, he fled to Kenya, and the mantle passed to Joseph Kony who lied that he was Alice’s cousin. So it’s a family romance, of sorts.

Anyway, Severino quietly returned to Gulu, built a church for his own denomination, and has been living quietly, left in peace by the authorities. Jagielski discovers he is now a very old, weak old man. Severino is assisted by Martin the chaplain who seats him on a chair and hands him one of the holy bottles. Then Jagielski witnesses the old man being possessed by Lakwena.

Severino speaks in Acholi, Martin translates, and it’s basically a recap of Severino’s career i.e. being chosen by God, trying to preach the word of God, going off to bush to live by himself, choosing water to purify and stones to act as weapons and incite his men to fight for the Last Judgement…

Then it’s over and the old man shrinks in his chair, exhausted.

Thoughts

1. This is a very, very good book which doesn’t so much explain as immerse you in the bloody, complex history of modern Uganda and especially the horrifying reality of the LRA’s campaigns and their terrible aftermaths for all concerned.

2. It’s a fount of information not only about the LRA and about Uganda’s troubled history, but many aspects of the folklore and traditional beliefs of the Acholi people, above all their profound belief in the role of spirits in all aspects of human life.

3. It also gathers together a range of valuable eye-witness accounts: from children directly involved, from some of Kony’s henchmen, from Nora and Christine, plus Jagielski’s witnessing of the mato oput ceremony, the knowledge of Father Remigio, the opinion of Father Cosmas, Jackson’s conveying of the voodoo mysticism of the Acholi people which no outsider can really understand.

4. It’s a real shame the book doesn’t have an index as I found myself wanting to reread certain passages or flip through the explanations of particular topics which are scattered in fragments through the text and so hard to re-find unless you’ve made a record or turned down the page. Part of my motivation in making such detailed notes and providing precise page references in this blog is to create such indexes, as best I can, for my own use and as, hopefully, a help to other readers.

5. Jagielski is in the same ballpark as Kapuściński but not in the same class. Kapuściński can be, by turns, genuinely philosophical, reaching deep into human nature, or lyrical, or quirky and drily humorous (as throughout his book about Haile Selassie). Jagielski attempts the same kinds of thing and they’re interesting enough, such as his fairly frequent personification of abstract entities:

The day fixed for the elections overslept and got up late, looking grey. For ages it couldn’t gain full consciousness and get itself going. (p.187)

This kind of thing is entertaining enough, but without the real depth or lyricism of his mentor.

6. Obviously most of the subject matter of The Night Wanderers is beyond appalling but, if you’ve read 20 or 30 books about contemporary Africa, as I have, you get used to Africans massacring each other, generally in the most brutal, sadistic ways possible.

What it makes me wonder is … you know how anti-colonial critics, post-colonial writers and anti-colonial historians often criticise the Europeans for, among countless other crimes, imposing their notion of the nation state onto cultures which were more flexible and fluid, based around tribes and traditional rulers … well, in descriptions of the collapse of whole regions of supposed ‘states’ (such as Rwanda or Congo or Uganda or Sudan) into violent anarchy, I wonder if it’s simply a matter of older traditional African culture reasserting itself, of societies rearranging themselves around their core attachment to tribes…and that the endless guerrilla wars are just the modern name given to the age old tradition of warlords gathering supporters and fighting the ruling king…

They’re called warlords and guerrillas these days but, from my reading of Gerald Segal’s book about Islamic slavery, I learned a lot about the continually shifting, rising and falling kingdoms and empires of west Africa, rising as new warrior chiefs achieved ascendancy, falling as other states seized land and towns under violent new leaders…

So isn’t the violent chaos in many African countries simply a continuation of the old traditions, but now with Kalashnikovs? That’s the strong impression you get from Jagielski’s extended description of the tangled web of insurgencies, civil wars, militias and guerrillas, which completely ignores state borders and sprawls across a huge area of north Africa taking in Somalia, Sudan north and south, Uganda, Congo, Darfur, Chad, Central African Republic, as far west as Niger, large parts of which are under no state control (pages 195 to 197).

And stepping right back – isn’t this patchwork quilt of petty kingdoms based around local chieftains in fact the way most humans have lived through most of history? Wasn’t this the same continually warring tribal world the Romans encountered everywhere they advanced, for example the complex tribal networks of Gaul and Britain endlessly at war with each other as described in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars? Or, hundreds of years later, the equally complex, warlord-based societies of Dark Age Britain and, indeed, right across post-Roman Europe? Isn’t it, in fact, the natural way most humans have lived in most of history – and the huge, secular, technocratic and democratic states we in the West take for granted, aren’t these the oddities and exceptions to the rule?

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

A word on the translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It reads very well indeed. The word order and use of subordinate clauses do not feel as if converted from another language, as often happens with translations from French or German. It reads like English and very well written English at that. There are a few odd turns of phrase, which I enjoyed:

  • When Museveni announced new presidential elections that he intended to win again and extend his reign, Dr Besigye cast him a challenge and stood for election too. (p.180)
  • Museveni had the victory in his grasp. (p.184)
  • Emmy cast him a look but didn’t say anything. (p.194)

The only blemish on her style is her very frequent use of the word ‘whom’ which regular readers of this blog will know I have developed an irrational dislike of. I dislike it’s prissy formality. Nobody says it in actual speech. It is becoming a literary fossil.

There he had met Nora, the first person to whom he had told everything he had seen and endured. (p.187)

‘What about those who don’t even know whom they have killed?’ (p.283)

Despite being British, Lloyd-Jones uses the word ‘pants’ for trousers (p.248) and ‘line’ for queue (p.172). Maybe the sub-editors at the New York publishers insisted. But these are microscopic quibbles. It’s a highly readable, fluid translation.

Credit

The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski was published in the Polish original in 2009. The 2012 English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones was published by Old Street Publishing (OSP). References are to the OSP paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on January 31, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/31/the-night-wanderers-wojchiec-jagielski/

Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud (1938)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘Moses and Monotheism’ was Freud’s last published work, written when he was wracked by painful cancer of the jaw, and anxiety about the Nazis who had taken over his native Austria in March 1938. This relatively short pamphlet (just 50 pages in the Pelican Freud Library edition) is characterised by much hesitancy, repetition and apologies, most unlike Freud and unlike the ‘Outline of Psychoanalysis’ (1940)’ written at the same time, which is a masterpiece of confidence and brevity.

1. Moses an Egyptian (10 pages)

The Bible tells us Moses was born the son of poor Israelites in bondage in Egypt who abandoned him in a basket and let him drift down the river where he was found by a princess of the Egyptian royal family and adopted by Pharaoh. Freud says Moses was an Egyptian for two reasons:

1) his name takes the same form as the Egyptian suffix for child, ‘mosis’, frequently added to parental forms, thus Tuth-Mosis or Ra-Mosis (Rameses) mean child of Tut and Ra.

2) The second reason is longer. Otto Rank, Freud’s faithful amanuensis, in 1909 wrote ‘The Myth of The Birth of The Hero’ which shows a surprising similarity between ancient myths of heroes. Sargon, Cyrus, Oedipus, Paris, Romulus, Gilgamesh – according to Rank, a hero is someone who has the courage to stand up to his father. Almost always the hero is made the child of an aristocratic couple – then oracles or prohibitions lead the father to decide to abandon him – he is found and reared by a lowly family (or even animal, in Romulus’s case) – and returns in glory to take revenge on his father and become the leader of the people.

Rank/Freud psychoanalyse all these stories as fictional reworkings of every child’s prehistory. The child’s earliest years are dominated by an enormous overvaluation of his parents – they are the king and queen of fairy tale. Later, disappointed by their banality and weakness, the child figures himself the real son of an aristocratic family who have for some reason abandoned him to these two losers. This pattern of fantasy, repeated by all children, Freud names the Family Romance. Thus the two families of myth are one. (Freud doesn’t mention it but also this myth helps ratify the power of whichever strong leader arises to rule the tribe by linking him in a subterranean way with the established royal line.)

Fine. But the Moses myth actually stands out from this pattern because the process is reversed: his first family are lowly Israelites, his second family, from which he must rebel, royal. Freud says the other way of considering this myth is to realise that the first family (i.e. the long-lost aristocratic family which the angry child constructs for itself in the Family Romance) is always a figment. Why not apply this to the Moses myth? Thus, the lowly Israelite family is a figment added by later chroniclers, to explain the embarrassing fact that their national leader was in fact an Egyptian aristocrat.

2. If Moses Was An Egyptian… (40 pages)

According to Freud, Moses was a follower of the reforming Pharaoh Akhenaten. As a result of the military exploits of the great pharaoh Tuthmosis III, hero of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt ruled a vast empire stretching from Sudan in the south as far as Syria and Mesopotamia in the East. Around 1375 BC, towards the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the young Pharaoh Amenophis IV came to power. The Empire was dominated by a complicated theology involving hundreds of local gods – some of the most important of which were Ra, the sun god, Osiris, god of the afterlife, and Amon, god of life. Maybe no religion in history has been so obsessed with the afterlife and ensuring the safe passage of its leaders to Elysium (witness the Pyramids).

Amanhotep IV came to power and set about replacing the polytheism of his people with belief in one god, Aten. He changed his name to incorporate the new deity – Akhenaten. This is commonly held to be the first monotheistic religion in the world. But, as Freud dryly remarks, barely did you have monotheism before you had persecution. Akhenaten supervised the destruction of existing gods’ statues and struck the names of earlier gods off stelae.

The new emperor, obsessed with his religious reforms, ignored the state of the Empire which began to suffer from enemy incursions. The affronted priests, the frustrated generals and the common people angry at the loss of their traditional gods rose up and overthrew Akhenaten, whose end is obscure. He died in 1358 BC. Briefly his son-in-law ruled, a boy called Tutankhaten who was forced to change his name to remove the offending Aten-suffix and replace it with the name of the traditional god, Amun: Tutankhamen. The old gods returned and there was a time of civil war. Around 1350 BC the Eighteenth Dynasty ended. This much is historical fact. (cf Philip Glass’s opera, Akhenaten).

What we know of Akenhaten and his new religion is found at the ruins of the new capital he tried to establish around the new worship; after his fall this was sacked and plundered. But enough remains to give an indication of what his religion was like. Akhenaten’s was the first attempt at monotheism recorded anywhere in the world. It preached one sole god, creator of the universe. It proscribed magic and ritual; no visual imagery has been found of Aten. Lastly there is no mention of the dead, of an afterlife, of the all-powerful death god Osiris who dominates orthodox Egyptian worship. Suspiciously like what came to be called Judaism, eh?

In the Bible Moses is described as being a great Egyptian general before he discovers the truth about his Jewish lineage; surely it is clear, says Freud, that he was a great Egyptian general fighting for the new Pharoah, and that the chaos caused by the overthrow gave him the opportunity to take away a whole people and subject them to Akhenaten’s monotheism, now overthrown in the land of its birth. A clue is given by circumcision, a common Egyptian practice which Moses imposed on his new people.

But Moses’ beliefs never really caught on except among the narrow circle of his Egyptian soldiery. After years of tyrannical rule the Jews rose up and killed their leader, Moses (cf Freud’s fantasies about early human societies in ‘Totem and Taboo’, the Oedipus myth and the passion of Christ).

According to the historians Freud refers to, soon afterwards another part of the Jewish people, meeting at Kadesh near the Midianite kingdom, adopted belief in Yahweh, a volcano god from the Saudi peninsula.

(Freud observes the interesting correlation between Yahweh and Jove, ‘the thunderer’. A cult of the volcano god may have derived from the cataclysm which swept away ‘Atlantis’ i.e. the Minoan civilisation about 1300BC i.e. a generation or two after Akhenaten. Freud speculates that the cataclysm may also have swept away the prevailing matriarchies in favour of a powerful masculine thunder god.)

Some Jews, then, adopted the new religion of Yahweh; the others clung to the memory of their Egyptian exile and the great leader. At a further stage the two parts of the tribe became reunited. After negotiations it was decided to coalesce the two histories: the national liberator became a servant of Yahweh. This coalition explains discrepancies in the story, one Moses being violent and impatient (as you’d expect a great general to be) the other, the founder of the Yahweh cult, gentle and mild. Soon afterwards the Jews were ready to invade Canaan and set up a nation state.

The historical record is thus: The events of the Exodus c 1300 BC. Of the first four books of the Pentateuch the oldest part was written by J (since he refers to God as Yahweh or Jehovah) around 1000 BC; sometime later bits were added by E (so-called because he refers to God as Elohim). After the collapse of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC a Jewish priest combined J and E and added some of his own material. In the seventh century the fifth book, Deuteronomy, is added. In the period after the destruction of the Temple, 586 BC, the revision known as the Priestly Code was made. The Jewish character and religion was finalised by the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century before Christ.

It is during this process that the teachings of Judaism are formulated, that Moses and his monotheism are given an honourable prequel in the lives of the Patriarchs, all of whom are given initial contacts with Yahweh and the special covenant devised. That retrospective fabrication parallels the prospective history as the Prophets call the people of Israel back to the pure monotheism of Moses and that tradition becomes more central.

(Freud then rehearses his earlier theory: the human family, i.e. early communities, underwent a similar history to individual families: early trauma, repression, latency, puberty and return of the repressed. Thus some early trauma occurred in prehistory and its resultant neurosis is religion – ‘Totem and Taboo’, the exiled brothers band together to overthrow the father of the horde, kill him, eat him. This is the origin of law and morality; law because they realise they can’t all have what the father possessed; morality because they create a ban on incest. The tribe sets up a totem animal as a representative of the father’s authority and a guarantor of the new morality. In the course of time the animal totem is humanised into a god, maybe with animal parts or accompanied by an animal. This involves into polytheism where the gods jostle under civil constraint (as the sons do). And eventually to the return of the repressed Father as a single god of unlimited dominion.)

The uniquely monotheistic tradition of the Jews accounts for their uniquely concentrated guilt. Their idea of being the Chosen of God gave them a unique sense of coherence and high calling. And the high spirituality and concern with morality associated with Jews is connected with their Advance In Intellectuallity:

  • their prohibition of all graven images (so you can only think about God)
  • the embodiment of religion in texts which have to be guarded and interpreted by sophisticated schools of rabbis
  • their diaspora after the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD which made preservation of the texts and their right interpretation essential

Finally, the repressed guilt returns in the figure of Paul of Tarsus, a Roman Jew who sets out a theology around the figure of an obscure Nazarene preacher. The Good News is that the (repressed) historic guilt is atoned for, says Paul, and we have entered a new era of Love. The Son has atoned for the primal guilt all of us sons feel, having inherited the guilt of the primal crime. Christianity was able to reintroduce many elements of the old Atum religion, and incorporated elements from its time – a mother goddess, lesser gods (the angels), a dark spirit (Satan) much magic and spells, an afterlife with a heaven and hell. It represents a step back intellectually from Judaism but – in analytical terms, in terms of dealing with guilt and the unconscious – it is a step forward.

Antisemitism

Is due to specific historic reasons: 1) the Jews’ outsiderness and 2) their surprising success at intellectual activities for their numbers. Also 3) a deep resentment among their ‘host’ populations, of their supposed arrogance, of their thinking they are the ‘Chosen’ people. And also due, Freud thinks, to 4) their not having consciously acknowledged responsibility for killing the Father. The Christians can say we killed our Father-returned-as-the-Son, we acknowledge it, we live in a new era, redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of all of us; but the Jews won’t face it. Paul reformed Judaism by re-enacting its repressed secret and in so doing made Judaism a fossil.

How does all this work?

Freud gives a resume of the topographical theory of the psyche: ego, id and the repressed. He then says analysis has shown that children appear to remember an archaic heritage, composed of memory traces of the childhood of the race ‘memory traces of the experiences of earlier generations!’ (volume 13, page 345)

If we assume the survival of these memory traces in the archaic heritage, we have bridged the gulf between individual and group psychology: we can deal with peoples as we do with an individual neurotic…Men have always known in this special way that they had a primal father and that they killed him.

The crucial premise is that these events are stored in the unconscious; because only unconscious forces are capable of generating the amount of irrational compulsion we see produced by religion. A rational response to clearly perceived events would lead to discussion etc. Only the unconscious can produce such forces. And after a period similar to the latency period in individuals, the Prophets mark a pubescent revival of the original fervour. Freud then goes on to explain the mechanism of pride associated with advances in intellectuality. Renouncing instinctive wishes is, in a sense, automatic for the ego. But it can bring definite affects from the superego. The superego of the Jews is the memory of Moses; with every renunciation of the life of the spirit, the Jews acquired more pride.

The superego is the successor and representative of the individual’s parents who supervised his actions in the first period of his life. It keeps the ego in a permanent state of dependence and exercises a constant pressure on it. Just as in childhood the ego is apprehensive about risking the love of its supreme master; it feels his approval as liberation and satisfaction and his reproaches as pangs of conscience. When the ego has brought the superego the sacrifice of an instinctual renunciation, it expects to be rewarded by receiving more love from it. The consciousness of deserving this love is felt as pride. (13:364)

So, according to Freud, the Jew’s pride is based on:

  1. renunciation of primitive wishes by the adoption of monotheism and becoming the Chosen people
  2. the evident growth in ethical and intellectual superiority this led to

Both achievements, alas, only generated more resentment of the Jews in the less psychologically advanced populations they found themselves living among, whether that was first century Romans, nineteenth century Russians or twentieth century Germans.

Thoughts

Freud was right to adopt a tentative and hesitant tone in this, his last published work, because pretty much every expert in ancient history, the history of the Jews or Egyptians, regards the book as a farrago of distortions, fantasy and wild speculations. I enjoyed the judgement of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who described Freud’s theories about the origins of Judaism as ‘painfully absurd’.

Freud’s speculations about early history (Totem and Taboo, Moses), and to some extent his naive and obsessive attacks on religion, demonstrate what a fool a clever thinker can make of themselves when they stray well beyond their field of expertise, especially when they start dabbling in big cultural and historical speculations. Stick to what you know.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘Moses and Monotheism’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 13 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1985.

Related links

Freud and religion reading list

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
  • Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
  • Totem and Taboo (1913)
  • On Transience (1915)
  • A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
  • The Future of An Illusion (1927)
  • Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
  • Group Psychology (1930)
  • Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
  • Moses and Monotheism (1939)

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by Simon on July 10, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 10, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/10/moses-and-monotheism-sigmund-freud/

The Question of a Weltanschauung by Sigmund Freud (1932)

Caveat

To avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today.

However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and many other axioms of his theory. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into psychoanalysis. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ is the last in Freud’s 35 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. It is a polemical defence of psychoanalysis seen as the vanguard of science, and an attack on established religion seen as the main obstacle in its way and which it must vanquish.

Weltanschauung is the German word for ‘worldview’. Many people ask Freud if psychoanalysis has a worldview of its own and this irritates him for 2 reasons: 1) psychoanalysis is a branch of psychology and thus shares the general scientific worldview, but 2) science itself can’t even be said to have a proper worldview because it is not complete.

A Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence on the basis of one overriding hypothesis which leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.
(Pelican Freud Library Volume 2, page 193)

A Weltanschauung, in Freud’s view, is a bad thing. It represents people’s wish to have the answers to everything, including the meaning of life. Science cannot provide this. Science proceeds by trial and error. Its theories are contingent, provisional upon verification. Therefore, science doesn’t have a Weltanschauung in the fullest sense.

Science is the merciless unblinking quest for Truth and:

Truth cannot be tolerant. It admits of no compromise or limitations. Research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and must be relentlessly critical if any other power tries to take over part of it. (2:195)

There are three other worldviews which challenge science: art, philosophy and religion. Art is not a threat because everyone knows it doesn’t aspire to scientific truth. Philosophy is ludicrous because it is always having to change its theories as science discovers more truths about the world and the mind. So religion is the only real enemy to the scientific worldview and, in its bid for a complete explanation to everything, may lay claim to being the most thorough Weltanschauung devised by the human mind.

Why does religion exert such a powerful hold over the human mind?

  1. Religion offers an explanation of how the universe came into being and why we’re here, thus satisfying the human thirst for knowledge.
  2. Religion assures us of ultimate happiness and reward despite the tribulations of life, thus fulfilling the childish wish to be comforted.
  3. Religion lays down precepts for behaviour ie it enforces a morality.
  4. In a word: religion represents a childish wish-fulfilment, the longing for illusions to conceal the brutal realities of life.

How is it that a pseudo-scientific cosmogony, a system of punishment and reward, and an ethical system are always combined in religion?

Because religion is based on the Father, your father, as he appeared in all his magnificence and omnipotence to you when you were a small child. This Father is the reason you exist: he gave you life. He is the source of punishment and praise when you’ve behaved well or badly, even if you don’t quite understand why.

And he is the ultimate source of a steady stream of instruction on how to behave = morality. All the instructions of the Father, all the conditionality of having to behave well to be loved and rewarded, these are introjected by the child to form the superego or conscience, in the first few years of childhood. Later, in puberty, all these rules and conventions are projected outwards onto the Father-figure conveniently offered by organised religion from your earliest youth. Just as you’re making the stormy transition from adolescence to adulthood, society offers you an attractive, age-old and aesthetically pleasing system within which to sublimate many of your strongest drives.

(N.B. Freud said the child is highly sexual between 0 and 5 years of age, during which it undergoes a development through fixed stages: 0-1 oral, obsessed with the breast, pleasure and sustenance through the mouth; 1-3 anal, where you learn to enjoy controlling your bowels and their product, faeces; phallic, when you realise you have a little winkle and your sister doesn’t because Daddy has cut hers off for being naughty. This terrifying realisation results in the Castration Complex and this contributes to the grand resolution of childhood sexuality in the Oedipus Complex, a wish to overcome your father and take possession of your mother. The Oedipus Complex is duly overcome and the child lapses into the Latency Phase (6-11) when you largely forget the upsets and turmoil of the earlier years and become more socialised, introjecting the commands and morality of your parents into the superego. With the eruption of the hormones in puberty many unconscious fears and desires from the infant period are revived and largely dictate how you respond to the new sexual and social demands being made on you. It is at this stage that society holds out organised religion as a way of overcoming many of the problems which face you, notably the perceived weakness of your real father as against the ego-ideal you have set up in your mind; and the fear of loss of love as you move away from your parents. Those childhood feelings of awe and fear and abasement can now be projected onto a Big Daddy in the sky. The strong but confused and contradictory sexual drives which are awakened in adolescence can also be sublimated into adolescent infatuations with the suffering Christ. And this explains why so many adolescents undergo a religious infatuation before settling into the common light of day.)

Freud then recapitulates the argument of ‘Totem and Taboo’. Briefly, he sees societies and their religions as going through fixed developmental stages rather as the human child does. This parallel allows him to make many comparisons between infantile states and early religious beliefs. This parallelism also allows him to say that, just as neurotic, hysterical and obsessive behaviours are the result of a reversion to childhood experiences which exert an unconscious power over the adult – so, by extension, various religious beliefs or practices are reminiscent in appearance and actually identical in structure to mental illnesses.

(This insight first saw the light in Freud’s paper ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1907) where he compares compulsive religious observance to the kind of obsessive behaviour often practiced by neurotics; for example, obsessively washing your hands or tapping every railing on the way to the Tube etc, and explains how failure to carry out these actions leads to guilt and self-punishment out of all proportion to their external value.)

To return to the analogy between the growing child and the growth of religion: the childish belief in the omnipotence of its thoughts in the child’s oral phase is paralleled in religious history by the development of animism, where the woods and streams are haunted by spirits. The child/primitive man’s tool for propitiating these spirits also relies on the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ = Magic. Primitive man makes things happen by re-enacting them (performing a rain dance, painting pictures of a successful bison hunt on cave walls). Freud compares primitive ritual to the child’s gameplaying to overcome, to internalise events in the outside world beyond its control (see ‘Beyond The Pleasure Principle’).

Then, just as the child learns to talk and this new skill vastly expands its ability to control the coming and going of its parents, so the primitive mind develops language and is stunned by the effect of this huge leap forward. In religion the full plenitude of language is, again, projected onto God, of which our own language is a puny copy. Let there be light, says God, and there is light. Adam names the animals and knows them. Mastery of language brings to the child, and to the ‘primitive’, alike, a mystical sense of oneness with, and control of, the world. The myth of Babel is necessary to explain the transition from the childish power of language to its sadly limited capability in adult life.

Then comes totemism, where many of the fears of spirits have been concentrated onto the tribal totem, a feared and worshipped animal. The totem is also the nexus of complicated systems of morality based around kinship and marriage. In ‘Totem and Taboo’ Freud says these all boil down to barriers to incest which are powerfully close to the surface in the primitive mind. (In line with the Freudian principle that nothing is ever lost to the psyche, many relics of the age of animism survive to this day in the form of superstitions – black cats – or are incorporated into mainstream religious belief – the enduring belief in ‘dark forces’ and ‘the Evil Spirit’, Satan etc.)

How primitive it feels even to think about Satan, much more exciting than thinking about God – sending us back to a time of primal thrills and excitements and terrors.

For Freud, then, the investigations of the 19th century (and particularly the encyclopedic work of Sir James Frazer, ‘The Golden Bough’ with which ‘Totem and Taboo’ is saturated) show that religion has a natural history like any other human institution. Freud has contributed to this an explanation of how the fulfilments of the wishes of different parts of the developing mind were satisfied by different components in religion which drew them together in evermore sophisticated syntheses.

As to the present day, Freud’s view is that religion is starting to crumble before the investigations of science, of which psychoanalysis is at the cutting edge. Religion’s attraction in the modern world is the guarantee of an all-powerful God who looks after your destiny and rewards virtue. However:

It seems not to be the case that there is a power in the Universe which watches over the well-being of individuals with parental care and brings all their affairs to a happy ending. On the contrary the destinies of Mankind can be brought into harmony neither with the hypothesis of a Universal Benevolence nor with the partly contradictory one of a Universal Justice. Earthquakes, tidal waves, conflagrations, make no distinction between the virtuous and pious and the scoundrel or unbeliever. Even where what is in question is not inanimate Nature but where an individual’s fate depends on his relations to other people, it is by no means the rule that virtue is rewarded and that evil finds its punishment. Often enough, the violent, cunning or ruthless man seizes the envied good things of the world and the pious man goes away empty. Obscure, unfeeling and unloving powers determine men’s fate; the system of reward and punishments which religion ascribes to the government of the universe seems not to exist. (2:203)

The latest contribution to the critique of the religious Weltanschauung has been effected by psychoanalysis, by showing how religion originated from the helplessness of children and by tracing its contents to the survival into maturity of the wishes and needs of childhood. (2:203)

Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But religion cannot achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant trust of the childhood of humanity. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is no nursery. The ethical demands on which religion lays stress need, rather, to be given another basis; for they are indispensable to human society and it is dangerous to link obedience to them with religious faith. (2:204)

Freud, then, does not set out to subvert conventional morality. On the contrary, he sees some form of morality as vital to civilised life and fears it will be eroded if it remains attached to crumbling religious belief. Freud calls for morality to be rebuilt on the more solid ground of science and a scientific understanding of what is best for human beings.

Religion may well reply to Freud’s attack, ‘What right have you to criticise or judge the noblest creation of the human spirit, inspired by the Divine Creator Himself?’ Freud:

We reply by saying that what is in question is not in the least the invasion of the field of religion by the scientific spirit, but on the contrary an invasion by religion of the sphere of scientific thought. Whatever may be the value and importance of religion, it has no right in any way to restrict thought. (2:206)

Here Freud clearly shows himself the heir to the spirit of the rational Enlightenment.

The prohibition against thought issued by religion to assist in its self-preservation is also far from being free from danger either for the individual or for human society. Analytic experience has taught us that a prohibition like this, even if it is originally limited to a specific field, tends to widen out and become the cause of severe inhibitions in the subject’s conduct of life. This result may be observed, too, in the female sex, following from their being forbidden to have anything to do with their sexuality even in thought. Biography is able to point to the damage done by all religious inhibition of thought in the life story of nearly all eminent individuals in the past. On the other hand intellect – or Reason – is among the powers which we may most expect to exercise a unifying influence on men – on men who are held together with such difficulty and whom it is therefore scarcely possible to rule… Our best hope for the future is that intellect – the scientific spirit, Reason – may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man. The nature of reason is a guarantee that afterwards it will not fail to give man’s emotional impulses and what is determined by them the position they deserve. But the common compulsion exercised by such a dominance of reason will prove to be the strongest uniting bond among men and lead the way to further unions. Whatever, like religion’s prohibition against thought, opposes such a development, is a danger for the future of mankind. (2:208)

Here we get to the heart of Freud’s argument; religion is not only an irritating sign of immaturity and the childish wish to live in a world of illusions. It is positively dangerous insofar as it hinders the movement towards the triumph of reason. So what is this scientific spirit which Freud goes on about so much?

Scientific thinking does not differ in its nature from the normal activity of thought, which all of us, believers and unbelievers, employ in looking after our affairs in ordinary life. It has only developed certain features: it takes an interest in things even if they have no immediate, tangible use; it is concerned carefully to avoid individual factors and affective influences; it examines more strictly the trustworthiness of the sense-perceptions on which it bases its conclusions; it provides itself with new perceptions which cannot be obtained by everyday means and it isolates the determinants of these new experiences in experiments which are deliberately varied. Its endeavour is to arrive at correspondence with reality – that is to say, with what exists outside of us and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfilment or disappointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real external world we call ‘truth’. It remains the aim of our scientific work even if we leave the practical value of that work out of account. (2:206)

Freud then turns to consider other Weltanshauungen of our times, the intellectual relativism generated by modern physics and the ‘new religion’ of Russian communism etc (cf his savage critique of Bolshevism in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’).

Thoughts

This is Freud’s best single work outlining what science is, how psychoanalysis fits into it, the origins and growth of religion, and why religion presents a mortal threat to science’s attempts to build a better world. Indispensable even if, by the end, you come out disagreeing with most of his premises and conclusions.

Also, after reading Totem and Taboo, Future of An Illusion, Civilisation and its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism, with their relentless attacks on Christianity, not to mention the countless places in other essays where he suddenly starts attacking Christianity, the reasonably impartial reader can’t help being struck by the deep-seated and lifelong animosity Freud felt, thought and expressed against Christianity at every possible opportunity.

As Pfister’s writings make clear, it was perfectly possible to be a devout Christian and a thorough-going psychoanalyst as well. The more you read of it, the more antiquated and Victorian Freud’s anti-religious prejudice seems, the optimistic anti-Christian positivism of his student days in the 1880s carried over into the 1920s and 30s, and revived any time anyone reads one of these dusty old works.

It feels more than ever outdated in a world where a) religious belief is on the rise, across the Muslim world, the Hindu world, and in Christian Africa; and b) when a central premise of our times, in the multicultural West, is about fluidity of identities and allegiances. In the modern context Feud’s simplistic binary opposition of Science versus Religion seems almost 18th century, Voltairian, and his naive belief that rational science will lead us to some utopian future feels all the more dusty, dated and irrelevant.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 2 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’, published in the 1973.

Related links

Freud and religion reading list

Freud reviews

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by Simon on July 7, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 7, 2023

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Freud on religion

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motivation of human behaviour and thought, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian, bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘God is at bottom nothing but a projection of the father.’

The influence of Darwin

In his later writings, in the 1870s, Charles Darwin hinted at the implications of his theory of evolution by natural selection for human psychology. In the 1890s Sigmund Freud, like many other scientists and psychologists of his generation, picked up on these hints by developing a theory of human nature which aimed to be entirely materialistic, secular and biological.

But in Freud’s writings this project became closely linked to his lifelong, systematic and remorseless attack on religion, specifically Roman Catholic Christianity – leading to a lifelong obsession with rewriting Christianity’s history, concepts and present-day appeal in purely secular, materialist, psychological terms.

Freud takes Darwin’s insights into the natural world (i.e. that all life evolved from less organised to more organised forms via countless trillions of variations, with no divine intervention or plan) and applies them to the life of the mind. He aimed to show that the mind, as much a part of the natural world as our legs or eyes, also evolved by a process of natural selection, by trial and error, from below, rather than being divinely created from above.

Freud’s theory of the mind

Building on this foundation Freud went on to claim, and try to prove, that the mind is a complex overlay of different strategies, instincts and forces which are frequently in conflict with each other. It is the conflicts between different instincts in the mind which account for much of our unhappiness, our sense of being at odds with ourselves or with the world.

Freud divides the mind into different compartments or functions which engage in the struggle for survival among themselves: predominantly this is a battle between the unconscious, instinctive part of the mind, the ‘id’, and the rational, strategic, forward-looking ‘ego’.

Freud developed a technique, the so-called talking cure, whereby patients were helped to express these unconscious conflicts in order to become fully conscious of them and so cope with them better. The technique and the theory together came to be called psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis has been used differently in the hands of different practitioners, but with Freud it went hand-in-hand with Darwin’s idea that religion, ethics and so on are to be dealt with naturalistically, as products of the developing human species, rather than as supernatural gifts from God.

The roots of Freud’s anti-religion

Freud’s lifelong animus against religious belief was:

  1. partly a product of the antisemitism he encountered from childhood onwards in the Austrian capital, Vienna
  2. partly due to the fierce anti-clericalism of the German, rationalist, materialist tradition which he imbibed at school and while studying science at university

Both these sources were further confirmed by the hypocritical and hysterical attacks made on him by churchmen of all denominations as he published the results of his new discoveries of the mind throughout the early 1900s. As with Darwin, the stupidity and ignorance of the Christian attacks on him confirmed Freud in his low opinion of Christian authorities and ‘thinkers’.

Freud’s critique of religion

Freud critiques religion in a number of ways, approaching the issue from various angles, which this blog post will describe in the following order:

  1. by providing an alternative, purely secular psychological account of religious experience
  2. by demonstrating that religious feeling is at bottom wish-fulfilment, to which we are all susceptible
  3. by drawing an analogy between religious rituals and neurotic obsessions
  4. by analysing specific religious phenomena in secular terms
  5. by rewriting religious history (of Judaism in particular) in purely psychological terms
  6. by showing how harmful religious belief is in modern life, both to the individual and to society as a whole

1. The psychoanalysis of religious experience

Religion, Freud claims, is the fulfilment of mankind’s oldest, deepest wishes, namely:

  • to have a coherent explanation of why we’re here
  • to have our path through the world watched over by a benevolent Providence
  • to have clear-cut guidelines as to how to behave and the promise of reward if we behave well
  • to live forever
  • to be loved unconditionally

Religion answers all of these wishes by creating an all-powerful God:

  • who made the world
  • who watches over and protects all of us so that not even the falling of a sparrow goes unnoticed
  • who created us free to choose, and planted a knowledge of morality in us and a little watchdog in our brains – our ‘conscience’
  • who will reward us for obeying its promptings with eternal life

But for Freud individual religious belief is an illusion because none of the above is true. Very obviously all the qualities attributed to ‘God’ are based on the child’s view of their all-powerful father, or are designed to address the anxieties and uncertainties we all face as adults.

As for society as a whole, society-wide religious belief is a type of mass delusion and, at its most extreme, actually takes the form of mass delusions, from the group weddings of the Moonies to the religious hysteria of entire nations e.g. the Iranians in the aftermath of their revolution, or periodic outbreaks of ‘end-of-the-world’ hysterias.

You don’t have to delve far back into European history to uncover evidence of mass, society-wide outbreaks of madness, many of them centred around hysterical religious fervour, not least the 130 years of social turmoil and civil war which came to be called the Wars of Religion (roughly 1520 to 1648).

In addition to the, as it were, ‘rational’ or sympathetic wishes listed above (the wish to be looked after, protected, comforted etc), religion offers a range of other satisfactions:

  • by teaching you to turn away from relying on the outside world and concentrate on ‘spiritual affairs’, religion helps in the avoidance of the pain inevitably caused by the outside world; for example, the inevitable ageing and death of ourselves and those we love
  • religion helps you sublimate your basic instincts into socially acceptable routes; for example, a powerful sexual drive can become sublimated into a love of all humanity, or into exhausting works of ‘charity’; aggression can be practiced as long as it’s against acceptable objects, like ‘heretics’, ‘the infidel’, Jews etc
  • religion helps you feel part of a gang, of a large organisation which you can devote yourself to, and so helps you to forget your personal difficulties, or submerge them into working for a higher cause
  • religion offers the pleasure of feeling superior to outsiders – ‘I’m saved. You’re damned’ – which has been such a feature in Christian theology

2. Religion as wish-fulfilment

When we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas we see that they are not the precipitates of experience or the end-results of thinking; they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. The infant’s terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood arouses the need for the protection provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life makes it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one.

Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fears of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilisation; and the prolongation of a earthly life in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place… It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father complex – conflicts which it has never wholly overcome – are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.

When I say these things are illusions I must define the meaning of the word. An illusion is not the same as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Aristotle’s belief that vermin arose out of dung was an error. On the other hand it was an illusion of Christopher Columbus’s that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies. The part played by Columbus’s wish in the illusion is obvious. He wanted to discover a new route to the Indies. And so on the slightest evidence he thought he had.

Thus what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. Illusions need not necessarily be false – that is to say, unrealisable, or in contradiction with reality. For example, a middle class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible and a few such cases have occurred. But that the Messiah will come and institute a golden age is much less likely, that is, it includes a larger proportion of pure wish-fulfilment… And so we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation.

(The Future of an Illusion, section 6, Pelican Freud volume 12: pages 212 to 213)

Thus, at the heart of religious belief – or religious illusion – there is a real truth, the truth of our infantile, helpless dependence on our parents and our experience of the unconditional love they showed us. And religious belief arises from a long-suppressed wish to return to such a state of unconditional belovedness.

Submission to an organised religious creed, with its offers of punishment as well as reward, amounts to a compromise between a) the Pleasure Principle’s bottomless need for love and b) the Reality Principle, the rational ego’s knowledge that endless love is difficult if not impossible to attain in this hazardous world. Between optimism and pessimism.

This explains why religious ‘conversion’ is commonly experienced as a breakthrough into a realm of radical happiness, happiness such as we thought we could never have again because it is the re-experiencing of childhood simplicities.

Freud’s theory says that the sense of ‘victory over death’ described by converts is a purely internal, psychological victory of the love-wanting, wishful part of our mind over the mature, realistic, pessimistic part. It is thus a ‘real’ experience, just that it has no reference to events outside our minds.

Christians’ mistake is the elementary one of thinking that this breakthrough inside their own heads is reflective of an objective reality; is fed by, or part of, a great cosmic struggle between good and evil. It is the same mistake made by drug-users, drunks and psychotics of projecting their inner experience onto the universe.

Thus, on Freud’s theory, the success and endurance of religion is its ability to fit the individual’s powerful libidinal wishes into an acceptable, nay, an eminently respectable social structure, the form and hierarchies of the church. In the church the most personal and private, semi-conscious, infantile fantasy-wishes are united with eminently grown-up, sophisticated, objective realities. Are approved.

Where else outside the Church could ordinary, boring, middle-aged men dress up in purple skirts, be adored and worshipped by pretty young boys, move solemnly through an atmosphere rich in incense and gold, and play-act that they have infinite power of judgement, of the forgiveness of sins?

Where else could their rather mediocre opinions and ideas about life be listened to, soaked up and debated with fervour by a large, devout congregation? The power of that experience must be intoxicating. And, since all enjoyment is suspect in Christianity, the very thrill of power and control itself might make the subject think he is being tempted by to the Devil’s sin of Pride. Which explains, in Freud’s view, why so many Christians go around and around in a self-confirming cycle of hyper-self-awareness, doubt, spiritual agonies, religious breakthrough etc etc, all the time convincing themselves that they are not boring, insignificant cyphers who will grow old, grow ill and die – but are at the centre of a great cosmic battle between good and evil.

How boring non-believers’ mundane lives seem in comparison. How lost and unfocused they seem.

3. Religious rituals as forms of neurotic obsession

Freud was the first to draw attention to the similarity in psychological structure between the religious believer’s performance of religious rituals and the array of bizarre obsessions displayed by some mental patients:

It is easy to see where the resemblance lies between neurotic ceremonials and the sacred acts of religious ritual; in the qualms of conscience brought on by their neglect, in their complete isolation from all other actions, and in the conscientiousness with which they are carried out in every detail.

(Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, 1907)

On the face of it, though, obsessive compulsions – like not walking in cracks in the pavement in case the Devil snatches at your feet, or closing all the doors in a house in a certain fixed order – are meaningless, whereas religious ritual is charged with the highest meaning.

No. This has been psychoanalysis’s greatest achievement: revealing that even the silliest behaviour, the kind of deviant behaviour that in previous ages resulted in witches being burned and lunatics locked up in Bedlam or dismissed as ‘hysterics’, is in fact supercharged with meaning for the subject.

This meaning may be either historical (the compulsive repeating of a real trauma) or symbolical (i.e. a disguised defence mechanism against a perceived threat, where the threat – for example, of a long-dead father’s punishment – no longer exists in the outside world, but is still a terrifying reality in the patient’s mind).

A good deal of Freud’s work consisted in listing compulsive behaviours which seem weird in isolation and showing their origin and root in real unhappiness experienced in a patient’s life. And Freud’s distinctive contribution was to show that often this unhappiness was caused by the repression of an instinctual need.

At the bottom of every obsessional neurosis is the repression of an instinctual impulse which was present in the subject’s constitution and which was allowed to find expression for a while during his childhood but later succumbed to repression. In the course of the repression of this instinct a special conscientiousness is created which is directed against the instinct’s aims; but this psychical reaction-formation feels insecure and constantly threatened by the instinct which is lurking in the unconscious.

Analysis of obsessive actions shows us that the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt. This sense of guilt has its source in certain early mental events but is constantly being revived by renewed temptation…. This sense of guilt of obsessional neurotics finds its counterpart in the protestations of pious people that they are miserable sinners and the pious observations (such as prayers, etc) with which pious people preface every daily act.

As the mental protection slips, crumbles, the subject – threatened with a return of the repressed and forbidden instinctual wish, and warned of the return by symptoms of anxiety or hysteria – erects ever more frantic mental barriers against its inadmissible return into consciousness, actions which will ward off the unacceptable truth by, as it were, magic.

The same psychic mechanism thus underlies superstitious belief (not walking under ladders), obsessive behaviour (washing of hands, not walking on cracks in the pavement), the games of children with arbitrary but crucial rules (hopscotch), the propitiatory behaviour of primitive peoples towards their gods (for fear that omission of one aspect invalidates the entire ritual and thus will call down the anger of the gods), and the propitiatory behaviour of Christians towards their God (saying three Hail Marys, crossing yourself as you pass in front of the altar in a Church etc).

The formation of a religion, too, seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses. These impulses, however, are not, as in the neuroses, exclusively components of the sexual instinct; they are self-seeking, socially harmful instincts, though, even so, they are usually not without a sexual component.

A sense of guilt following upon continual temptation and an expectant anxiety in the form of fear of divine punishment have, after all, been familiar to us in the field of religion longer than in that of neurosis.

For some reason the suppression of instinct proves to be an inadequate and interminable process in religious life also. Indeed, complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people than among neurotics and these give rise to a new form of religious activity, namely acts of penance, which have their counterpart in obsessional neurosis.

4. Aspects of organised religion explained in psychoanalytical terms

Communion

A reversion to the primitive oral phase of childhood when we try to control the environment, to assimilate the outside world, by eating it: watch any two-year-old.

Conscience

‘Conscience’ is the superego, the absorption into your psyche of the instructions and demands of your parents from your earliest years, a function of the mind then expanded by later teachers and other authority figures. It hurts to disobey them but we do, and guilt is the result. Guilt is no proof of Man’s uniquely moral nature, as some Christians argue. It is the purely mechanical result of transgressing our early training. Think of dogs who disobey their masters, and then look sheepish.

Conversion

Being ‘born again’ is the result of returning, after a detour, to the sense of being loved by, and of loving, the God-like figures of our parents as they appeared to us in our childhood. Most ‘born-again’ Christians are in fact returning to the religion of their childhood which they had rejected at some stage. Two examples I know of are W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis who were both brought up in Anglican households, underwent student and early manhood years of light-hearted atheism, and then returned to the religion of their boyhoods with an overwhelming sense of relief and illumination, which went on to underpin all their writings from the moment of their (re)conversions until they died.

God

God is a projection onto the universe of the demanding, caring, loving, all-powerful father as we experienced him in our earliest infancy, in the first couple of years of life.

The devil

The devil is an equal and opposite projection of the father in his bad, punishing aspect. In the Old Testament the two are mixed together in the figure of Yahweh, the demanding, violent jealous god. The achievement of Christianity was to extract and focus on the figure of the God of Love implicit in the Old Testament. Unfortunately, this psychological or theological development also had the effect of bringing into greater clarity the image of the anti-God, the figure of pure malice and evil, the Devil. This explains why there is little mention of the devil in the Old Testament but why he comes to play such a central role in the New Testament.

Immortality

Immortality is everyone’s deepest wish, for death does not exist in the unconscious mind. It is a creation of the conscious mind which we can never quite fully believe. Everyone else might die, but not me.

Morality

Morality is a system of approved behaviour worked out by society, instilled in a child by its parents, and reinforced by later authority figures. Some Christians use the alleged existence of a moral sense in human beings as proof that there is a moral God. But:

  1. the so-called moral sense boils down to a person’s accumulated training in how to behave and not behave
  2. it is, to put it mildly, extremely variable, in content and effectiveness, across individuals, societies, and cultures
  3. it is entirely absent in some people, so God demonstrably did not implant the moral sense in some people – why not?

Guilt

Guilt is an internal psychological response to the act of disobedience to the rules and regulations which have been so strongly inculcated by your parents and other authority figures. It is a purely psychological reaction, a form of fear that punishment will be inflicted if we do something wrong. Inflicted by whom? By our parents, even if they’re dead, because their image and prolonged training live on in our minds, whether they are alive or dead, present or absent. It is the legacy of our earliest, deepest training, which is almost impossible to shake off.

Spiritual feelings

Spiritual feelings are reawakenings of the earliest narcissistic phase of childhood when the child hadn’t yet differentiated between its feelings and the reality of the outside world. These feelings, just like the earliest infantile feeling of fear or abandonment, can be revived in later life. This is the explanation of all forms of religious feelings of the sublime or ‘oneness with the universe’.

Original sin

Original sin combines two emotions:

1. The deeply held feeling all of us have of having been in some way expelled from a paradise of love and physical bliss. Freud says this was the experience of babyhood at the mother’s breast, the immensely powerful, pre-linguistic, pre-conscious experience of inhabiting a wonderland of union and fulfilment.

2. Along with obscure feelings of punishment at the hands of our parents.

Each of these can be experienced individually. What’s interesting is that some individuals, and even entire cultures, fail to combine the two into ‘original sin’ as Christians wish them to.

The two main sources of ‘original sin’ can be explained as the inevitable result of the natural processes of human growth and development, with no supernatural overtones whatever.

Prayer

Prayer is a relic of ‘magic’, a reversion to the child’s primitive belief in ‘the omnipotence of its thoughts’, the childish conviction that the universe revolves around us and can be altered by our wishes and commands. It can’t.

We are taught to pray to ‘our Father’ to make things right, look after us and our loved ones. What could be more transparent?

Superstition

Superstition amounts to relics of animism and primitive (i.e. childish-neurotic) beliefs which have been discarded by religion under the modernising influence of the rational Enlightenment (for example, burning witches, epileptics are possessed by devils, evil omens and unlucky days).

But these primitive psychological formations, anxieties and fears, still threaten to grip the ignorant, the simple, or the extremely repressed. or any of us when we’re in a stressful situation.

5. A psychoanalytical history of Judaism and Christianity

Central to Freud’s theory is the Oedipus Complex. Each of us is born into the world with the problem of how to grow beyond the boundaries of our parents’ care into autonomous individuals. To put it another way, how to overthrow the sometimes terrifying authority of our Father and build on the love and nurturing of our Mother.

In our unconscious minds, swarming with uncontrollable feelings, we act out countless inchoate scenarios of revenge and possession. How effectively we repress these earliest fantasies determines our later character.

Freud (who was, of course, himself Jewish, although a non-believing, atheist Jew) thought that Judaism is the religion of the Oedipus Complex par excellence.

He believed the Jews stood out in the ancient world due to their more advanced ethical code but that this was intimately connected with their greater fear and reverence of a demanding Father-God.

Freud thought that the Jews’ especial devoutness stemmed from an actual historical event when they actually played out an Oedipal scenario. He thought that the Israelites actually rose up and killed their obstinate leader, Moses, who tried to impose his version of monotheism onto the Jews’ primitive worship of the thunder god Yahweh – and were forever afterward guilty about this murder.

Slowly, over the following centuries, the primitive belief in Yahweh was spiritualised by the higher ethical and intellectual content of Moses’ monotheism. A belief grew among the spiritual elite that the Israelites were the chosen people because Moses, the prophet of the One God, had quite literally chosen them.

The Old Testament records a succession of prophets rising up to recall this stubborn, backsliding people (the Israelites) back to the high spiritual requirements of Moses’ idol-less, afterlife-less faith.

Sometime around the fifth century BC priests compiled the various stories handed down by tradition into a coherent and chronological account of:

  • the creation of the world
  • the era of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob etc)
  • the era of the Kings (Solomon, David)
  • the era of the Prophets (Ezekial, Isaiah, Jeremiah)

Central to the entire religion are the ‘covenants’ or promises made between the Chosen People and God. Because the Israelites are constantly falling away from God’s detailed and demanding law, they are in continual need of forgiveness.

This process – adoption of pure monotheism and the sorting out of their holy writings – was substantially complete, and the Jewish religion formalised, by about the fifth century BC.

The Jews’ survival was due, paradoxically, to the fact that they were repeatedly conquered and hauled off into bondage, first to Egypt, then Babylon and finally, after the failed wars with Rome, in 70 and 135 AD, expelled from Palestine altogether.

These experiences left the Jews no land or capital or buildings, nothing but a written tradition requiring the highest ethical standards, which both produced a tremendous ethnic cohesion, confidence and success, but also triggered suspicion and resentment of them wherever they went.

Saul of Tarsus was a deeply religious Jew, a Pharisee, steeped in the Orthodox tradition. When he heard about the crucifixion of an obscure wandering preacher in Judea he set about persecuting his blasphemous followers.

But then Paul had a literally blinding insight which changed his life and the course of history. For a thousand years Judaism has been a guilty Father-religion, the purest form of the social memory of the struggle all human beings undergo to wriggle free of their parents’ domination.

Judaism was saturated in the sense of letting the Father down. According to Jewish scripture and tradition, again and again and again the Chosen People fell away from the laws and purity demanded by their God and Father, which resulted in a permanent sense of guilt and unworthiness.

It was Saint Paul who realised that the death of this man who called himself the Son of God had the potential to bring a millennium of crushing guilt to an end. From now on Christians could openly acknowledge the importance of Original Sin, an idea only vaguely formed in official Judaism, because they have been relieved of it. The execution of the Son relieves us of the guilty memory of being the Father-hating children we all were in childhood. In the ultimate sacrifice of the crucified Son, all true believers are freed from their primal guilt and so experience the wonderful psychological liberation of being ‘born again’, of starting a new, guilt-free, sin-free life.

In the decades after Jesus’ execution it quickly became clear that Christianity and Judaism were incompatible. The Jews doubled down on their religion of guilt while the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire swiftly fell for the new religion of liberation, especially as it proved capable – unlike the racially and geographically restricted religion of the Jews – of claiming to be universal, of welcoming everyone, rich or poor, man or women, free or slave, of any ethnicity.

Christianity also had the advantage of being flexible. In its early inchoate form it had the ability to assimilate a lot of the fringe beliefs which were floating around the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire. For example, Christianity easily assimilated:

  • doctrines based on the oriental Mother goddess
  • the idea of a family of Gods (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, plus the Holy Mother)
  • the idea of a terrifyingly powerful Evil Spirit who came to be called Satan, derived, ultimately from Zoroastrianism
  • a sky full of angels
  • a complicated system of punishment and reward in a place called ‘hell’, only vaguely hinted at in Jewish scripture but worked out by Christians in terrifying detail

In this sense (in Freud’s view), although a step forward psychologically (insofar as it presents a solution to the perennial Oedipus problem), Christianity actually operates at a much lower intellectual level than the rigid monotheism of the Jews. It leads to much more florid and bizarre behaviour (as history, indeed, records: monks, stylites, self-castrators, martyrs, miracles).

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.

Christianity triumphed because of its ability to combine Jewish high ethical standards with pagan superstition, thus providing a comprehensive home for most people’s deepest fantasies and wishes – of salvation, of punishment, of eternal life.

The notion of an all-powerful all-seeing God who nonetheless allowed His Creation to be wrecked by evil, pain and suffering is a logical nonsense but who cares? It is a bold and imaginative attempt to explain and justify, in mythological terms, the fundamental psychological need of human beings to reconcile the childish experience of our all-powerful, all-seeing parents with the traumas of adult life – and then to project this fantastical narrative onto the (in reality, blank and uncaring) universe.

We need to be helped. We want to be protected. We want to be loved. If something’s gone wrong it must be our fault. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, say you forgive me.’

So we try to reconcile this deep need for there to be an all-powerful, all-seeing father guiding the universe, with the evidence before our noses that the world is harsh and arbitrary, amoral and terrifyingly indifferent to our little lives.

The doctrine of Original Sin is a mythological way of reconciling these opposite desires. The fact that it makes no sense to those outside the cult is a matter of indifference to those inside the cult; for them it is vital because the deeper ‘Original Sin’ has plunged us into the depths of misery and guilt, then the more intense the feeling of liberation, of being ‘born again’ through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, becomes. The longer the foreplay, the more intense the feeling of release.

So, in Freud’s view, the psychological mechanism at the heart of Christianity is extremely effective in channelling and resolving very real psychological feelings which we all experience, but it comes at a price: the price being that you accept a good deal of weird, often deeply irrational, beliefs, superstitions and legends.

But even this problem has long ago been worked through and resolved by Christianity’s many, very brilliant, apologists: ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform,’ as the 18th century poet William Cowper wrote i.e. don’t think about any of this too hard or the illogicality and irrationality will undermine your faith. Just accept it.

Jesus himself said: ‘You must become as a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ (St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 18, verse 3). Exactly. Just as Freud said, almost all of our problems, our anxieties, our achievements, our characters, stem from our earliest childhood experiences. One difference between Freud and Christianity is that the latter calls us to relinquish adult intelligence, and adopt a sentimentalised, simplified version of childhood, all submission and innocence. Whereas Freud knew what anyone who can remember their childhood knows, that those years are far from being paradise but often full of dread and anxiety, awash with uncontrollable emotions, and sometimes the scene of terrible experiences which we spend the rest of our lives trying to come to grips with.

6. Religion’s harmful effects

Christianity imposes impossible ethical requirements on people, which result in failure and a crippling sense of guilt (for example, the impossible requirement to ‘love your enemy as yourself’). Imposing these impossible commandments on young children warps their personalities and leads to neurotic illness in later life.

Christianity’s forbidding of open-ended debate, and limiting the spirit of scientific enquiry, damages the prospects of creating a better society.

Christianity suppresses perfectly natural sexuality in a way calculated to produce the maximum number of neurotics and perverts. By restricting sexual activity to heterosexual, adult, married, genital-focused copulation, exclusively for the purposes of procreation, Christian teaching drives people into illness or the arms of prostitutes, makes them choose between madness or immorality; or, more simply, makes them disobedient to their teachers and moral leaders and so habituates them to a life of lies and hypocrisy.

Relying on religion to underpin morality is dangerous because, since religious belief is visibly crumbling away (Freud wrote in the 1920s), so will the foundations of our social morality. Quite obviously, morality needs to be put on a firm, secure, secular basis in order to survive the coming social changes.

Conclusion

In his more optimistic moments Freud thought that organised religion would wither away in a new world shaped by reason and technology – but this turned out to be misplaced optimism.

Indeed, the whole tenor of his work undermines and disproves his own hope. The whole point of his work was to establish the existence of the vast, unconscious, irrational aspects of the mind – primitive, inexpressible urges whose attempts to enter the conscious mind can only be controlled at the expense of a variety of compulsions and obsessions, personal rituals and beliefs.

Precisely the penetrating nature of his critique of religion as an appeasement of so many of our deeply irrational instincts should have alerted Freud to the fact that religious belief will continue as long as human nature continues to be what it is, because – although irrational in form and content – religion does, often very effectively, alleviate many of the anxieties and fears which all human beings will always be prey to.

Therefore, it was childish of Freud to imagine that organised religion and religious belief would die out. They will quite clearly be around as long as there are anxious irrational humans i.e. forever. And in times of stress and uncertainty they will revive and flourish and there is nothing the hyper-rational psychoanalyst can do about it.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. All the works cited here were translated into English as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. My quotes are taken from the versions included in the relevant volumes of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1980s.

Freud and religion reading list

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
  • Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
  • Totem and Taboo (1913)
  • On Transience (1915)
  • A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
  • The Future of An Illusion (1927)
  • Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
  • Group Psychology (1930)
  • Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
  • Moses and Monotheism (1939)
  • Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)

More Freud reviews

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Posted by Simon on July 3, 2023

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Feminine power: the divine to the demonic @ the British Museum

This is the first major exhibition ever held at the British Museum focusing solely on goddesses – on female spiritual beings from mythological traditions from around the world – and it is absolutely fabulous!

Queen of the night relief, c. 1750 BCE, Iraq, painted clay © The Trustees of the British Museum

Questions about women and femininity

The exhibition sets out to ask questions about images and ideas of the divine: How do different traditions view femininity? How has female authority been perceived in ancient cultures? Are sex and desire the foundations of civilisation or their disruptors? To what extent do female deities reinforce patriarchal social systems or subvert them? What relevance to goddess from ancient or remote cultures have for us, here, today?

To ‘answer and explore’ these questions the exhibition brings together female divine and demonic figures feared and revered for over 5,000 years from traditions all round the world. It includes painted scrolls from Tibet, Roman sculpture, intricate personal amulets from Egypt, Japanese prints, Indian relief carvings, statuettes and figurines, alongside contemporary sculptures.

Ancient and modern

It’s important to realise that the exhibition combines ancient and modern. It brings together historical artifacts – ancient sculptures and sacred objects relating to female goddesses from all around the world – but also includes modern and recent works of art by contemporary female artists such as the renowned American feminist artist Judy Chicago, and the creations of less well-known woman artists from various cultures, such as this fearsome headpiece from India.

Dance mask of Taraka, workshop of Sri Kajal Datta (1994) India, papier mâché © The Trustees of the British Museum

The aim is to explore the multitude of ways in which femininity has been perceived, conceived, created and depicted across the globe, from the ancient world to today. The exhibition explores the embodiment of feminine power in deities, goddesses, demons, saints and other spiritual beings, associated with the widest possible range of human experiences and attributes, from sex and fertility, through wisdom, passion and nature, to war, mercy and justice.

18th century Chinese porcelain of Guanyin, the Chinese translation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, with child and attendants © The Trustees of the British Museum

Treasures

What makes the exhibition so enjoyable is not necessarily its feminist aims (although many visitors will, of course, identify with these) but a much simpler factor. Recent British Museum exhibitions about Nero or Stonehenge featured fabulous objects but also a lot of run-of-the-mill coins or skeletons or shards of pottery. These were important because they tell us about the subject’s archaeology and history, but sometimes they can get a bit, well, boring.

Here, by contrast, having selected 50 or so of the most interesting, relevant or thought-provoking goddesses from traditions around the world, the curators were free to pick only the very best objects to represent them. Almost all of the objects are from the museum’s own collection and they showcase its extraordinary breadth and range. But more importantly, lots and lots of them are really beautiful or, if not beautiful, then striking and fascinating.

Statue of Venus, 1st to 2nd century Rome © The Trustees of the British Museum

I studied the labels and read the extensive feminist commentary but then I have read the same kind of thing thousands of times, and read it every day in the papers and hear it every day on the radio and TV. Discussions of gender and sexuality and gender stereotyping and #metoo and the gender pay gap and female empowerment and strong independent women and women pioneers in culture and science and sport are now part of the permanent background hum of modern life.

What is not an everyday experience is to be able to take a walk through the mythologies of the world, to savour the beauty and force of a carefully curated selection of exquisite and surprising and fascinating historical and cultural artifacts.

Not all the objects on display are masterpieces, but many of them are really, really beautiful, and all of them have fascinating stories to tell and many of them shed lights on countries and cultures I knew little or nothing about. The exhibition amounts to a kind of David Attenborough odyssey through the weird and wonderful products of the human imagination.

Mami Wata headpiece, Nigeria, early 1900s, painted wood and metal © The Trustees of the British Museum

Five themes

One of the curators explained that they went out of their way to consult far and wide, with heads of departments across the museum, with stakeholders and members, in order to draw up a long list of themes and subjects relating to female power. Alongside this they drew up a long list of objects to illustrate the themes, at the same time drafting a list of feminist commentators who might be interested in commenting on them.

The outcome of this long process of consultation and consideration has been to divide the exhibition into five themes, each of which is introduced and explained by the curators – and then a leading contemporary feminist was invited to contribute thoughts on the theme and reflections on the objects.

The five themes are:

  • Passion and Desire, introduced and analysed by Classics Professor Mary Beard
  • Magic and Malice, commented on by writer and podcaster Elizabeth Day
  • Forces of Nature, commented on by psychotherapist and campaigner against violence against women, Dr Leyla Hussein
  • Justice and Defence commented on by human rights lawyer Rabia Siddique
  • Compassion and Salvation commented on by writer, comedian and podcaster Deborah Frances-White

Thus each section each of the individual exhibits has two panels, one a factual description by the curators and one a subjective and thoughtful comment by the contributors. There are also some standalone video ‘thought-pieces’ of the five commentators giving their thoughts about women and power.

Creation and nature

To give an idea of the sheer number and range of goddesses and deities involved, this is a list of some of the exhibits in just the first section, devoted to ‘Creation and nature’.

  • Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes with flaming red hair and a fiery temper
  • Sedna, the Inuit mistress of the sea
  • Lashmi, the Hindu goddess of abundance
  • Oshun, the Yoruba orisha of water, coolness and healing
  • Mami Wata, the mother water of African spiritual traditions
  • Izarami-no-mikoto, a creator deity of both creation and death in Japanese Shinto mythology
  • sheela-na-gigs, the primitive stone figures found in the Middle Ages across Britain, France and Spain
  • Papatūānuku, the mother earth figure of In Māori tradition, who gives birth to all things, including people

You get the idea. Not so much about the goddesses as such, but the impressive range and diversity of cultures represented.

Kali

The exhibition includes a newly acquired icon of the Hindu goddess Kali by contemporary Bengali artist, Kaushik Ghosh, the first contemporary 3D representation of Kali in the collection.

As one of the most prominent and widely venerated goddesses in India, this devotional image of Kali reflects the living tradition of her worship, important for millions of Hindus around the world today.

The statuette was commissioned especially for the exhibition, together with the London Durgotsav Committee, who run the annual Kali Puja festival in Camden, in Kali’s honour.

According to the curators: ‘Loved and feared for her formidable power and aggression, Kali is the goddess of destruction and salvation, who transcends time and death, destroys ignorance and guides her followers to enlightenment. Although superficially terrifying, the bloodied heads that she wears and carries represent her power to destroy the ego, setting her followers free from worldly concerns, and the belt of severed arms signifies that she liberates them from the cycle of death and rebirth, by the many weapons she wields.’

Kali Murti, Kaushik Ghosh, India, 2022. Image © The Trustees of the British Museum

Ancient and modern

There’s a kind of doubled or paired approach to everything. I’ve mentioned the way many of the exhibits feature a panel giving the historical and cultural facts, as written by the curators, and next to it a panel giving the more subjective view and reflections of the guest commentator. Doubling. Two perspectives.

But I mean it in another way as well, which is the curators’ deliberate juxtaposition of the very old and the very contemporary. This is announced right at the beginning of the exhibition (although it was only when the curator pointed it out that I understood it).

Right at the beginning of the ‘Creation and nature’ section they have two exhibits, not quite next to each other, a bit more subtly placed than that. One is a trio of Cycladic figurines of women, those primitive, flat faced half-abstract figures which date from as long ago as 3,000 BC.

A figurine of a woman, from the Cyclades, over 4,000 years old.

These are so beautiful as objects and shapes that I could look at them all day. Anyway, just round the corner from them the curators have hung a print titled ‘The Creation’ by the American feminist artist, Judy Chicago (born in 1939 and still going strong).

I needee a bit of help deciphering this but it is an image of a woman giving birth, taken from between her parted thighs, with her two breasts as hills on the horizon, one a volcano exploding. Obviously it’s heavily stylised, and features strata of creation on the right including sea life and, above them, lizards and apes and humans.

The Creation, Judy Chicago, USA, 1985, coloured screen print in 45 colours on black paper. Image © The Trustees of the British Museum

In other words, it’s a stylised image of the creation of life on earth. An interview with Chicago is quoted in which she jokes that Michelangelo’s famous image of the ‘Creation’ depicts a man (Adam) lying lazily on his back while a complacent God reaches out and touches his finger. Chicago wanted to counterpoint this patriarchal fantasy with a depiction of the more effortful, bloody and seismic moment of creation in a woman giving birth, but at the same time give it modern mythic overtones, reflecting our knowledge of geology and evolution.

So far so interesting and both works are examples of what I meant by saying that all of the exhibition’s artefacts are powerful and beautiful. It also exemplifies the juxtaposition of ancient and modern I was talking about.

History and art

But it is a dichotomy or duality on another level, as well, which is that the Cycladic figures are conventionally thought of as being of predominantly archaeological and historical interest whereas the Chicago piece is clearly a modern ‘work of art’.

So the curators are enacting another form of doubling: they have deliberately mixed together works which come from the staid academic world of history and anthropology with living works of art.

So there are, arguably, three sets of pairing or doubling going on throughout the exhibition: ancient and modern, curator and commentator, history and art.

These juxtapositions set up forcefields of energy between ancient objects of worship and veneration whose purpose was clearly ‘religious’ and modern works of art whose purpose is, well, what?

In her speech the curator said she was explaining the difference between the consciously ‘sacred’ objects (depicting goddesses and ritual) and the modern ‘profane’ art works to an exhibition sponsor, and the sponsor asked: ‘Is there a difference?’

Good question, and the exhibition provides a fascinating field of study for similar questions and reflections, either prompted by our own impressions as we stroll among these weird and wonderful objects, or by the factual summaries of the curators, or by the reflections of the feminist commentators, or by the vibrant juxtaposition of objects from such different times, places and cultures.

The visitor strolls not only between beautiful objects but amidst a complex matrix of factual information, aesthetic experiences, and intellectual discourses, jangling and buzzing, prompting all manner of thoughts and feelings.

Lilith

Take the figure of Lilith. Since the late first millennium AD, Lilith has been known in Jewish demonology as the first wife of Adam and the consort of Satan. Her origins are thought to lie in Mesopotamian demons. The exhibition includes several representations of this talismanic figure, including a ceramic incantation bowl from Iraq (500 to 800 AD), featuring a rare early image of Lilith in female form. Buried upside down under the thresholds of houses these bowls were inscribed with charms to protect the owners (who are named in the text) from demonic forces. They regularly name Lilith as a demon to be warded off, sometimes as grammatically singular and feminine, but also masculine or plural, one among many indications of the gender fluidity found in many mythologies.

Ceramic incantation bowl from Iraq (500 to 800 AD) © The Trustees of the British Museum

So far, so historical or archaeological. But the exhibition also includes a very striking sculpture of Lilith by American artist Kiki Smith, made in 1994. Smith’s sculpture is cast from the body of a real woman and the striking thing is that this life-size black metal sculpture is attached half way up the gallery wall. This would be a striking installation in a gallery of contemporary art but in the staid world of the British Museum with its glass cases carefully spotlighting tiny coins and bits of pottery, it makes a huge statement, visually and physically. The artist herself writes of her work:

Lilith becomes this disembodied spirit that goes off and wreaks havoc and doesn’t want to be subjugated. Here she is transcending gravity and the constraints of her body.

Yes, the legends about Lilith and the havoc she wrought we may or may not be familiar with. But it’s the fact that she is a life-size sculpture hanging upside down on the gallery wall which makes the statement.

Lilith by Kiki Smith (1994) image © Pace Gallery

The exhibition poster

Of all the objects in the exhibition, the Lilith sculpture is the one the curators chose to go on the poster and promotional material. Personally, I think that was a mistake. I think it would have been better, more accurate, to use a montage of 3 or 4 of the most striking objects to give a true sense of the exhibition’s breadth and diversity. It’s also a bit boring that out of all the cultures of the big wide world, the curators have chosen an artist from America. Disappointing. As if we don’t hear enough about American artists already. Would have been more genuinely diverse to promote a work by a Hindu or Nigerian or Inuit artist.

But then again, it is a strange and disturbing object. Maybe it recaptures, in our blasé culture, some of the shock and mystery and weirdness that many of the more obviously ‘religious’ objects on display conveyed to their contemporaries, long ago and far away.

Lots of goddesses

If nothing else, the exhibition shows that there have been lots of goddesses and female spirits, in all societies, at all times. In the second half of the show I noted a fourth kind of doubling, which is where the curators have a panel describing an important goddess in a general sense, and then introduce a specific instance of the goddess, drawn from their vast collection.

So there’s a curator panel describing the figure of Eve, explaining her provenance and significance in Christian theology; the curators then give an example of the iconography of Eve in the form of a striking woodcut by Renaissance artist Cranach the Elder. Then one of the feminist commentators gives a more subjective assessment of the importance of Eve in shaping and projecting ideas of femininity in the Christian tradition.

A similar two-panel treatment (general explanation, then specific artifact) was meted out to (to name just the ones that really struck me):

  • Radha (Hindu)
  • Ishtar (Babylonia and Assyria)
  • Aphrodite (Greece)
  • Lilith (Jewish-Christian)
  • Tlazo Iteotl (Aztec)
  • Hekate (Greek)
  • Circe (Greek)
  • Cihuateteo (Aztec)
  • Rangda (Bali)
  • Taraka (Hindu)
  • Sekhmet (Egypt)
  • Athena (Greece)
  • Luba (Congo)
  • Mahadevi (Hindu)
  • Kali (Hindu) Isis (Egypt)
  • Maryam (Islam)
  • Mary (Christian)
  • Guanyin (China)
  • Tara (Tibet)
  • Medusa (Greece)
  • witches (Christendom)

Women and gender identity

The curators assert that the representation of feminine power in world belief and mythology has played – and continues to play – an important role in shaping global cultural attitudes towards women and gender identity.

I suppose this is true of many places, still, but…. there’s something not quite right with that statement. On reflection I think it’s that the curators are pushing it a bit far when they say the exhibition explores or investigates the role religion, and female deities, goddesses and spirits have played in representing, defining, limiting and empowering women through the ages. To really properly do that would require a library full of books and studies of religious sociology and anthropology. To be blunt the exhibition, big and broad though it is, only scratches the surface of a vast, global, pan-historical subject.

As an example, the exhibition includes a section devoted to the Virgin Mary who is (obviously) the most prominent female figure in Christianity, itself the most widespread religion on earth. This section contains five artefacts connected with her veneration, which is more than most of the other goddesses get, but, still… It would obviously need quite considerably more than that to amount to a proper ‘investigation’ or ‘exploration’ of the role of Mary in defining and limiting women’s roles in Western society over the past 2,000 years. Vastly more. Thousands of books and objects. A huge exhibition could be devoted to Mary alone. And that’s just one among the 50 or 60 female deities on display here.

And that thought brings out the exhibition’s weakness, which is that a lot of the very broad (and very familiar) generalisations which the feminist commentators make about gender and identity are not really supported by the exhibits.

The curators tell you the facts about Rangda (Bali) or Taraka (Hindu) or Sekhmet (ancient Egypt) and then the commentators shoehorn onto them one of the handful of familiar feminist concerns about gender stereotyping or gender fluidity or the power of desire or women as strong independent figures and so on. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s spot on. But sometimes it feels…contrived. You feel the unknowable weirdness of some of these objects, the strange worlds they inhabit and the fearsome spirits they represent are being hijacked to pad out a Guardian editorial.

A friend of mine, a designer, goes to lots of exhibitions and makes a point of never reading the labels. She likes to engage directly with the objects on display, unmediated by the curators’ editorialising. The commentators opinions are over familiar and tend to drag you into the squabbling world of the modern media and culture wars and twitter and so on.

Whereas the exhibition’s great strength is the way the objects themselves open doors in your head to weird and wonderful otherplaces and otherminds, leading you through the looking glass, through the back of the wardrobe, into a huge range of times and places and cultures.

And the way these beautiful or fascinating objects have been carefully juxtaposed with notable works of contemporary art to set up all kinds of resonances and vibrations. This – the often strange, haunting beauty of the objects themselves, and resonances set off by their artful positioning – is what I responded to, what I found very stimulating and rewarding.

(To be fair, the exhibition is accompanied by a big heavy catalogue packed with essays by feminist academics, and this does go into considerably more detail about the issues around women and gender and sexuality which the exhibition references. Read the catalogue blurb to get the publishers’ summary of it. ‘The publication concludes with a discussion of contemporary feminism…’)

The curators speak

Here are the voices of two women closely involved with the exhibition. Belinda Crerar, curator, British Museum, writes:

This exhibition is a tour through history and around the world to see the different ways that female power and authority have been perceived in spiritual belief. The diversity of these goddesses, spirits, enlightened beings and saints, and their profound influence in people’s lives today and in the past, gives us pause to reflect on how femininity – and indeed masculinity – are defined and valued now and in the future.

Muriel Gray, Deputy Chair of Trustees of the British Museum, writes:

The Citi exhibition Feminine power: the divine to the demonic is brimming with magic, wisdom, fury and passion. I am very proud that through the breadth and depth of the British Museum’s collection, alongside special loans, we can tell such powerful and universal stories of faith and femininity from the most ancient cultures to living traditions around the world. I would like to thank Citi, whose ongoing support has allowed the Museum to realise this ground-breaking exhibition.

A word from our sponsor

The exhibition is sponsored by Citi. Citi is the swish new name of what used to be Citigroup Inc, an American multinational investment bank and financial services corporation headquartered in New York (where Kiki Smith lives and works). A spokesman for the bank writes:

As a global bank, our mission is to serve as a trusted partner to our clients by responsibly providing financial services that enable growth and economic progress. Success in our mission is only possible if we can continue to foster a culture of equality and inclusion that enables and encourages diversity of thinking. To drive that message of equality and the power and influence of women over time, we are delighted to see the Museum use its collection, along with some spectacular loans, to create a thought-provoking look at the diversity of representations and complex meanings of the divine female over time.

So the exhibition, which the curators and contributors like to see as ‘subverting’ the patriarchy and ‘questioning’ masculinity and ‘interrogating’ gender stereotypes etc – is wholeheartedly aligned with the values of American multinational investment banks and financial services corporations.

Whether you like it or not, ‘equality’ and ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’ are now fully integrated into the lexicon of international capitalism, and it is money from American capitalism which makes possible exhibitions like this, makes possible the curators’ good intentions and the feminist commentators’ ‘subversive’ comments. What do you think of that, O goddesses of fire and flood and fury?

Tiare Wahine, Tom Pico, Hawai’i, 2001, Ohi’a wood © The Trustees of the British Museum

I’m not especially singling out this exhibition. It’s the same kind of irony which meant that the huge sculpture lamenting the transatlantic slave trade made by the American artist Kara Walker (also based in New York) was hosted at Tate Modern, a gallery founded by sugar plantation owner Henry Tate who, although he never owned slaves, made a fortune out of black labourers descended from slave in the Caribbean, whose name the Tate organisation insists on retaining despite protests.

Or that until recently Tate, whose exhibitions routinely campaign for a better world, was funded by BP, the oil corporation, which is actively engaged in destroying the world.

Ditto the National Portrait Gallery, which is only ending its funding by BP this year, having only just noticed global warming and oil companies’ role in creating it.

Or that the Serpentine Gallery in London has only just (2021) dropped ‘Sackler’ from its name because of the Sackler family’s involvement in selling the opioid painkillers which have made large numbers of Americans into addicts, wrecking hundreds of thousands of lives. (A link I was making two and a half years ago, Patrick Staff: On Venus @ Serpentine Sackler Gallery.)

In fact I attended a press launch of an exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery which was addressed by its Chief Executive, Yana Peel, and I squirmed a bit as she imperiously lectured us about sexism and racism (it was the exhibition by African-American female artist Faith Ringgold). So I was all the more surprised and amused when Peel was then forced to step down from her post after the Guardian revealed her involvement in ‘the NSO Group, an Israeli cyber intelligence company whose software has allegedly been used by authoritarian regimes to spy on dissidents’.

And then, of course, there are the many, many art galleries and cultural institutions which have spent the last 30 years deeply entwining themselves with the money or support of Russian oligarchs. Russia. Oligarchs. Putin. Nice company to keep.

So I’m just adding this exhibition to the many which promote high-minded values about gender and race, and advocate for sweeping social change, while being funded by money from harmful or immoral or deeply reactionary sources. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to find this kind of irony hilarious. There’s no point getting upset, it’s the way of the modern world. But you are allowed to smile at the ironies.

For young readers

There is, of course, a sumptuous catalogue accompanying the exhibition, but a book has also been written for younger readers, what the press release describes as a ‘fascinating and empowering introduction to 50 female figures from around the globe’, entitled Goddess: 50 Goddesses, Spirits, Saints and Other Female Figures Who Have Shaped Belief, written by Janina Ramirez and illustrated by Sarah Walsh.

Related links

Other British Museum exhibitions

2 Comments
by Simon on May 25, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Art, Exhibition, Mythology
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Posted by Simon on May 25, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/05/25/feminine-power-the-divine-to-the-demonic-british-museum/

Content warnings at Tate

Warning: This blog post contains strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including depictions of slavery, violence and suffering.

Baroque Britain

When I visited the Baroque Britain exhibition at Tate Britain I was surprised that there was a Content Warning at the entrance to the second room. This warned us that some of the images were disturbing and might upset visitors. Specifically, a massive painting by Benedetto Gennari the Younger which shows black people in collars and chains. Slaves, in other words.

Portrait of Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin by Benedetto Gennari the Younger (1674)

A handful of other paintings show rich people – men and women – being served or accompanied by black servants, but this is the only one where the black people (all boys, I think) are wearing very obvious metal slave collars round their throats.

William Blake

This is the second warning notice I’m aware of Tate putting up. The William Blake exhibition last year also warned visitors, in these words:

The art of William Blake contains strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including some depictions of violence and suffering.

That’s putting it mildly, seeing as Blake illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy with its extensive descriptions of thousands of sinners being subjected to all sorts of tortures and torments in Hell, and Milton’s Paradise Lost which opens with Satan and the fallen angels languishing in agony in a lake of fire. Presumably it was these images of fire and brimstone which the warning was talking about.

Satan, Sin and Death: Satan Comes to the Gates of Hell by William Blake (1807)

Although when you actually look at Blake’s images, they are pretty inoffensive, aren’t they? Is an image like the above really thought to be so scary that visitors to an art gallery need a warning about it?

I wonder if the curators have ever seen a Hollywood film? Or even an average episode of Eastenders? Chock full of threat and violence. I can think of plenty of other Tate exhibitions which were full of much more genuinely upsetting images.

Notes and queries

Maybe visitors do need to be warned that art galleries and exhibitions contain images of slavery or violence or threat, but this new trend obviously raises a few questions:

Slavery 1 – black slavery

There must be thousands of images of black slavery scattered around the art world. Will every single one of them eventually require a Warning? For example, the huge memorial sculpture to slavery by Kara Walker currently on display in the atrium of Tate Modern. I don’t recall there being a warning for visitors about to encounter this. Should there be one?

Much more appalling and upsetting than any painting is actual period photographs of black slaves, which survive by the tens of thousands. I suppose if there’s an exhibition about slavery, or about these kinds of photographs it will be self-evident but, presumably if they’re included in exhibitions focused on other subjects – like the American Civil War or American history – presumably any photos of slavery will require a warning, as well.

Slavery 2 – white slavery

Most pre-modern societies had some form of slavery: ancient Rome and ancient Greece were based on slavery, and the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings traded in slaves (it’s estimated that at the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066, 1 in 10 of the British population were slaves).

The Mayans and Aztecs kept slaves in the Americas, as did the Sumerians and Babylonians in the Near East. The Egyptians employed huge numbers of slaves, including Israelites, Europeans and Ethiopians. Slave armies were kept by the Ottomans and Egyptians.

In Imperial Russia, in the first half of the 19th century, one third of the population were serfs who, like the slaves in the Americas, had the status of chattels and could be bought and sold.

In fact the English word ‘slave’ is derived from Slav, the white ethnic underclass of Eastern Europe that provided the bulk of medieval-and-later slaves, not only to Europe but to the Turks, Arabs and Tatars.

SLAVE – late 13the century, ‘person who is the chattel or property of another’, from the Old French esclave (13c.), from Medieval Latin Sclavus ‘slave’ (source also of Italian schiavo, French esclave, Spanish esclavo), originally ‘Slav’; used in this secondary sense because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples. (Etymological dictionary)

Will any gallery displaying any images of slaves from any of these historical cultures, from any period of history, from anywhere around the world, require there to be warning messages for visitors?

‘Trade negotiations in the country of Eastern Slavs by Sergei Vasilyevich Ivanov (1909)

If not, why not?

Violence 1 – secular

Human history is more or less the ceaseless history of wars and empires, human history is saturated with conflict and violence. Will notices warning of ‘strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including some depictions of violence and suffering’ have to be placed outside every gallery which includes any images of conflict and war?

The first VC of the Great War won by Capt Francis Grenfell of the 9th Lancers at Audregnies, Belgium on 24th August, 1914 by Richard Caton Woodville

Violence 2 – religious

Christianity is saturated with violence. Its central image is of a man being tortured to death, and is closely accompanied by the stories and images of countless thousands of other Christian martyrs, most of whom died blood-curdling deaths.

Will all of these images require a warning notice? They would have to be put up in every gallery which includes images of the Passion of Christ or of the saints and, if we follow this logic through, outside every Roman Catholic church in the world.

Crucifix at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, Alabama, USA

Why now?

Why now? The painting by Benedetto Gennari the Younger has existed for 340 years and been sporadically on public display throughout that period, the Blake images for over 200 years during which they have featured in numerous books and exhibitions.

Why are these warning notices making their appearance now?

It’s not as if we are suddenly more opposed to slavery – the Campaign to Abolish the Slave Trade got going during the 1780s, 240 years ago, and used as many images of atrocities against slaves as it could find. Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest international human rights organisation, was founded in London in 1839 and is still very active. I.e. graphic images of slavery have been in the public domain for over 200 years.

As to images of threat or violence, my God what have most movies for the past 100 years been about, plenty of plays and countless hundreds of thousands of art works not to mention millions of photographs taken of every war since the Crimea or the Indian Mutiny.

What is it in contemporary society which suggests that art lovers, old and young, native and foreign, have, for the last 300 years or so, been able to confront and process images like this without any kind of warning… but now they can’t.

Re. the slavery images, is it because the black population of the UK has reached a kind of tipping point where images like this are no longer acceptable, even in an obviously academic and historical context?

Have changes in social attitudes across the British population suddenly made images of black people in chains unacceptable?

But what about the warning about Blake’s pretty harmless cartoons? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Or is it not British society, is it the attitudes of art curators which have changed?

Is it not the British public that the curators are concerned about? Is it the art curating profession which has been swept by progressive views, and whose modern woke training has told them that images like this are objectionable.

When they envision visitors being offended, is it really themselves and their progressive cohorts who they are envisioning?

Conclusion

So I’m not belittling the impact that images of black slavery might well have on black, or any other, visitors to an exhibition like this, or the emotional impact of images of threat or violence might have on gallery goers more broadly.

But up until a year or so ago, curators of pretty much every gallery and museum in the world were happy to assume that gallery visitors were grown-up enough, adult enough, to take images like this in their stride. To be shocked, maybe, maybe even to have an emotional response, but to be able to cope with it.

I’m genuinely curious to know 1. what has changed and 2. where this new trend will go.

And 3. am I going to have to put warnings at the top of every one of my blog posts which is about war or slavery or violence or conflict or threat? Because that’s most of them…

Reviews of other Tate exhibitions

2 Comments
by Simon on March 3, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 3, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/content-warnings-at-tate/

Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom by Norman Cohn (1975)

Norman Cohn (1915 to 2007) was an English academic historian. In the 1960s he became the head of the Columbus Centre, which was set up and initially financed by Observer editor David Astor to look into the causes of extremism and persecution. As head, Cohn commissioned research and studies from other academics on numerous aspects of persecution, and himself wrote several books on the subject, namely:

  • The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) which traced the long history of millenial, end-of-the-world cults which, more often than not, seek scapegoats when the Great Awakening or Rapture or whatever they call it fails to happen
  • Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (1993) which traced millennial religious themes to their sources in ancient civilizations
  • Warrant for Genocide (1966) about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-semitic forgery which surfaced in Russia in 1903 and claimed to describe a Jewish conspiracy for world domination

Europe’s Inner Demons is roughly in two halves: what it builds up to is a description of the witch craze and witch trials of early modern Europe and America (i.e. the 1600s and 1700s). But it’s the first half which interests me more. In this Cohn describes the origin and meanings of many of the absurd accusations which were later to be brought against the ‘witches’, following them from their origin in pagan times, through the early medieval period, and climaxing with their deployment in the arrests, torture and execution of the Knights Templar in the early 1300s.

It happens that I’ve just finished reading a book about the Knights Templars, which mentions Cohn’s book, and so I was inspired to read the first half, up to and including the Templars trial.

Cohn shows that:

  • In pre-Christian, pagan Rome writers and authorities attributed inhuman and uncanny activities to minority, outsider groups who they associated with secret societies dedicated to overthrowing the state. Chief among these was the (originally traditional) event of the Bacchanalia, which, originally, was an orgiastic festival celebrating the god Bacchus but, over time, became associated with dark nights, wine and promiscuous sex. Cohn shows how traditional Roman writers came to associate it with darker, anti-social motivations. A fateful link was made between tiny, minority sects who held secretive activities – the worry that these sects were in some way anti-social, dedicated to social revolution – and the attribution to them of increasingly absurd accusations, such as child murder, ritual sacrifice, the drinking of human blood, and deliberately indiscriminate sex – all designed to undermine traditional values and hierarchies and relationships.
  • In the early centuries of Christianity, pagan and Roman writers redirected the tropes they’d developed to blacken the followers of the Bacchanal at the new Eastern religious sect, accusing the Christians of unholy rituals at which they drank the blood of ritually murdered individuals, or engaged in promiscuous sex. Cohn points out that these are easily understandable distortions of a) the Eucharist, where Christians really are enjoined to drink the blood of Christ and b) the Loving Cup or various other references to group love, team love, Christian love, which had a purely Platonic, non-sexual meaning. But not for the accusers and propagandists who scraped the barrel of the human psyche to dredge up all the worst crimes they could think of.
  • Once Christianity had become established (by, say, around 400) the powers-that-be began to persecute Christian heretics and Cohn shows how these heretics now found themselves subject to the same slanders and propaganda as the early Christians had been – dark rumours of midnight masses, perverted rituals, the slaying of a victim whose blood was then drunk and body eaten. And he shows how the ritual victim was all-too-often said to be a baby.

Medieval pessimism

A big-over-arching idea which I found particularly powerful was Cohn’s contention that as the Middle Ages progressed, Christianity – and western culture, such as it was in the early Middle Ages – became more pessimistic.

Going back and reading the early Church Fathers – Tertullian and Justin Martyr and St Jerome and so on – he says you are struck by their conviction that the end of the world is just around the corner and the Day of the Lord is at hand. The early Christians are strong in their faith and happy, burning with conviction that the End is Nigh, that any day now the Lord will return in splendour and all their sufferings will be justified.

However, as the years, then decades, then centuries go by, hopes fade, the Roman Empire is overthrown, societies sink into less advanced forms, the economy collapses, waves of barbarians fight their way across the old imperial lands. And Jesus does not return. By around 1000 AD, medieval culture can be described as depressed. And in its disappointment, it looked with ever-greater desperation for scapegoats.

The atmosphere was changing. Fantasies which in the early Middle Ages had been unknown in western Europe were turning into commonplaces. (p.41)

This is reflected in the rise of the figure and role of Satan and his demons. Cohn has a fascinating chapter (pp.16-34) describing the development of Satan, the Devil. In the Old Testament he is barely mentioned. When bad things happen it is generally because the Old Testament God is wilful and capricious and swayed by his bad moods. Satan does appear in the Book of Job but he is more of a collaborator with God than his enemy; it is Satan who comes up with new ways to persecute Job. It is in the so-called inter-testamentary period – between the last of the accepted books of the Old Testament, written about 300 BC and the first books of the New Testament, written about 50 AD, that Satan undergoes a sweeping change of character. Historians usually attribute this to the influx of Eastern, Zoroastrian and Manichean ideas coming from the Persian Empire in the greater multicultural atmosphere created by the triumph of the Roman Republic and then Empire.

Anyway, in the New Testament, Satan has become a completely new thing, a tormentor and tempter sent to oppose Jesus at every step. Satan’s demons possess innocent people and only Jesus can exorcise them. In the climax of a series of tests, Jesus is made to go out into the wilderness to be confronted and tempted by the Devil in person.

Cohn shows how in the early centuries of the church, saints and holy men were still supposed to be able to drive out demons and Satan’s helpers, merely by revealing the consecrated host or a cross or saying Jesus’ name. But in line with the growth of medieval pessimism, the years from around 1000 AD saw greater and greater anxiety that the Devil was taking over the world which translated into ever-more paranoid fears that secret societies and heresies were flourishing everywhere, dedicated to the overthrow of existing society and to establish the triumph of the Antichrist.

Slowly and steadily, the myth of Devil worship, and the details of how this worship was carried out – by murdering a baby, drinking its blood or its ashes mixed with blood, and then weird rituals to do with black cats (lifting its tail to kiss its anus) – were carefully elaborated by successive generations of highly educated and paranoid Catholic intellectuals.

The stereotype of the Devil-worshipping sect was fully developed, in every detail, by 1100. (p.76)

Heretic hunting and the inquisition

Cohn devoted a chapter to the rise of inquisitions, carefully delineating the difference between secular courts and their power, and the power vested in one-off inquisitors by the pope. He describes the hair-raising campaigns of heretic-hunting inquisitors in Germany and the South of France in the 1200s, notably the egregious Conrad of Marburg appointed inquisitor in central Germany in 1231, or John of Capestrano, appointed heresy inquisitor by the pope in 1418. Already, in 1215 the Lateran Council, by insisting that bishops do everything in their power to suppress heresy on pain of dismissal, had incentivised people across society to come forward with denunciations. Basically a lot of people were tortured into confessing and then burned to death. A lot.

Along the way we learn about the beliefs, the demographics and then the terrible persecutions endured by groups such as:

The Paulicians

A Christian sect which was formed in the 7th century and rejected a good deal of the Old and much of the New Testament, originally associated with Armenia and horribly persecuted by the Byzantine Empire.

The Bogomils

Asect founded in the First Bulgarian Empire by the priest Bogomil during the reign of Tsar Peter I in the 10th century, a form of opposition to the Bulgarian state and the church, they called for a return to what they considered to be early spiritual teaching, rejecting the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Dualists or Gnostics, they believed in a world within the body and a world outside the body, did not use the Christian cross, nor build churches, as they revered their gifted form and considered their body to be the temple, giving rise to many forms of practice to cleanse oneself through purging, fasting, celebrating and dancing.

The Waldensians

Originated in the late twelfth century as the Poor Men of Lyon, a band organized by Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant who gave away his property around 1173, preaching apostolic poverty as the way to perfection. Waldensian teachings quickly came into conflict with the Catholic Church and by 1215, the Waldensians were declared heretical and subject to intense persecution.

The Fraticelli ‘de opinione’

Members of the Franciscan order of monks who rebelled against its growing worldliness and corruption (St Francis had died in 1226) and tried to return to a really primitive material life, owning literally nothing, and having no food from one day to the next. Declared heretics in the 1400s, Cohn goes into great detail about the trial of leading Fraticelli in 1466.

The Cathars

From the Greek katharoi meaning ‘the pure’, the Cathars were a dualist or gnostic movement which became widespread in Southern Europe between the 12th and 14th centuries. They believed there were two gods, one good, one evil – diametrically opposed to the Catholic church which believes in only one God. The Cathars believed the God of the Old Testament, creator of the physical world, was evil. Cathars thought human spirits were the genderless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of the evil god, and destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through the consolamentum, when they could return to the benign God of the New Testament.

The self-fulfilling nature of torture

Cohn introduces the reader to each groups’ likely beliefs and social origins, then describes how the secular and religious authorities (i.e. the King of France or Holy Roman Emperor or pope) launched an inquisition, sometimes even called a ‘crusade’, against each of them. (The crusade to exterminate the Cathars in the south of France became known as the Albigensian Crusade, 1209 to 1229).

And then he makes his over-arching point which is that, time and time and time again, the use of torture made ‘heresies’ appear to explode, appear to be held by huge numbers of people, at all levels of society, as innocent victims were roped in and tortured and, quite quickly, would say anything and implicate anyone in order to stop the torture (or, more cruelly, to prevent their family and children being tortured, too).

Yet as soon as they were free to speak in front of secular courts, again and again these supposed ‘heretics’ recanted and said they only confessed to the bizarre rituals, murder, cannibalism and orgies, because they were tortured into saying so.

Cohn shows that there were real heretics i.e. groups who rejected the worldly corruption of the Catholic Church and tried to return to the simple, pure, ascetic life of the early apostles and that, on its own terms, the Church was correct to be concerned about them and to try and bring them back within the fold.

But that the way it did this – by trying to blacken their name by getting members to confess under torture to midnight masses where the Devil appeared in the shape of a black cat, and then a baby was ritually burned to death and its ashes mixed in with wine which all the followers had to drink to assert their membership — all this was fantasy cooked up in the feverish brains of Catholic propagandists and the inquisitors themselves.

What interests Cohn is the way these fantasies became formalised, and turned into part of received opinion, official ‘knowledge’ – not least when a list of these perverse practices was included in a formal papal bull, Vox in Rama, issued in 1233, which included the accusation that the Devil in person attended the midnight covens of the Waldensians and other heretics. In other words, by the early 13th century these absurd fantasies had received official sanction and recognition from the highest religious authorities on earth.

Although each of the heretic-hunting frenzies Cohn describes eventually burned out and stopped – sometimes due to the death or discrediting or, in the case of Conrad of Marburg, the assassination of the lead inquisitor – nonetheless, the period as a whole had established the absurd practices of all heretics and enemies of the Church as accepted, indisputable fact, sanctioned by the pope and the entire church hierarchy.

The crushing of the Knights Templar (pages 79 to 101)

Cohn then goes on to show how precisely the same old tropes, the same accusations of unnatural and blasphemous crimes, were dusted off and dragged out to accuse the Knights Templars, in their trials which lasted from roughly 1307 to 1309. His account is largely the same as Michael Haag’s in The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States namely that the whole farrago of trumped-up accusations was made by King Philip the Fair of France in order to get his hands on the Templars’ vast amounts of gold and land. Its more proximate cause was that Philip wanted to merge the two great crusading orders, the Templars and Knights Hospitallers, into one super-order and then place himself at the head of it in order to lead a mighty new crusade – but that was never very likely to, and indeed never did, happen.

Instead Philip’s loyal bureaucrats pounced, arresting all the Templars on the same day and submitting them to torture to force them to admit to the same litany of crimes: that at the initiation ceremony they were forced to spit on the cross, to kiss their initiator on the lower back, buttocks or mouth, agree to sodomy if requested by a senior brother, and other blasphemous acts such as worshiping a malevolent satanic head.

All the Templars who were tortured signed confessions agreeing this is what they had done – understandable, seeing that the tortures included:

  • having your hands tied behind you, being hauled up via a hook secured to the ceiling, then suddenly released, coming to a stop with a jerk, so that the tendons, muscles and sometimes bones on your shoulders and bones were abruptly torn or shattered
  • having your feet covered in grease and pit in a naked fire, where they roasted until the toe and feet bones fell out of the cooked flesh

As one Templar said, rather than submit to the tortures he would have confessed that he personally murdered Jesus Christ. The sorry saga dragged on for three years because Pope Clement feebly tried to rescue the order which was, theoretically, answerable only to him. But being himself French and a nominee of the French crown, and based in Avignon on French soil, he eventually, feebly acquiesced in the crushing of the order, the confiscation of its wealth and the burning at the stake of its four most senior officers (plus at least a hundred others).

The fate of the Templars is a sorry, sordid tale of greed, corruption and unbelievable cruelty, but for me is one more proof that the nominally Christian Middle Ages were a complicated mixture of genuine religious belief, almost incomprehensible religious fanaticism, alongside staggering cruelty, all underpinned by very recognisable motives of greed and ambition.

More generally, Cohn’s review of how society has tended to demonised outsider groups – from as far back as we have records – sheds sobering light on this permanent tendency of human nature, and shows how even the most ridiculous prejudices and bigotries can be entrenched as established ‘fact’, and then revived as and when needed to persecute the different, the strange, the non-conformist, the helpless. Couldn’t happen now? Well, the career of the fanatical heretic-inquisitor Conrad of Marburg could be usefully compared to that of Senator Joe McCarthy. And in our own time, right now, 2019, we are seeing the revival of all kinds of tropes and stereotypes designed to justify prejudice and persecution. At least we don’t strappado people or burn them to death – but the underlying impulses of human nature haven’t changed one whit.

Some Knights Templar being burned at the stake, illustration in the Chroniques de France ou de St. Denis.

Other medieval reviews

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by Simon on May 27, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Christianity, European History, History
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Posted by Simon on May 27, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/27/europes-inner-demons-norman-cohn/

Johnson’s Life of Milton (1777)

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.

Since the end of poetry is pleasure, that cannot be unpoetical with which all are pleased.

The characteristic quality of his poem [Paradise Lost] is sublimity… Its end is to raise the thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures… his natural port is gigantic loftiness… he can please when pleasure is required, but it is his peculiar power to astonish… his great excellence is amplitude.

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets are not pleasurable to read because they are not underpinned by a strong central thesis. Instead he relates separate facts about each poet and comments on them in discrete paragraphs. They feel bitty.

Given Johnson’s complete lack of sympathy with Milton’s politics – and his critique of Milton’s appalling selfishness and beastly behaviour to his two daughters – it is notable how generous he is to Milton the poet.

It is striking how profoundly Johnson misunderstands Milton the man, for example:

  • He deplores Milton’s lack of regular church attendance; Johnson thinks the discipline of church attendance is vital; this is what makes him a Tory; he can’t conceive of people whose spirituality is more free, independent, no less sincere.
  • Similarly, he attributes Milton’s republicanism to jealousy of power, and surly resentment, ‘an envious hatred of greatness… a petulance impatient of control’ – utterly failing to grasp Milton’s ideas about freedom – that everyone should be free to express themselves & rule themselves; that hirelings shouldn’t be appointed in the church just as men shouldn’t be subjected to arbitrary power in civil life.

Paradise Lost

With respect to design, it is the ‘first’ i.e. greatest product of the human mind.

Le Bossu says an epic requires first a moral – Johnson concurs that to justify the ways of God to men is the highest conceivable moral.

Second, the moral has to be enacted in a fable, i.e. a plot: ‘a narration artfully constructed so as to excite curiosity and surprise expectation.’ In this Milton equals every other poet in his design i.e. the creation of the world, its end, and everything in between, are carefully placed.

Johnson then considers the various characters, the angels, Satan, Adam & Eve.

Of episodes

Johnson correctly points out ‘episodes’ i.e. passages extraneous to the main action, as being:

  • Raphael’s long account of the war in heaven, the creation, the universe
  • Michael’s second book vision into the future as far as the crucifixion and resurrection and second coming

Between them they prepare the background, and then explain the sequel, to the Main Event.

The hero

Dryden says Adam can’t be the hero; but why not? His posterity will triumph and the feeling of the end of the poem is upbeat.

Style

Milton chose a subject appropriate to the vast luxuriance of his imagination and powers. ‘Sublimity is the general and prevailing quality of the poem.’

Moral sentiments

‘In Milton every line breathes sanctity of thought and purity of manners.’

Criticism

Johnson’s criticism is that the super-elevated subject of the poem matter allows for very little human interest. Milton’s achievement is vast in bringing to bear a lifetime’s reading and knowledge to adorn and vary a well-known story – but in the end it feels heavy. ‘None ever wished it longer than it is.’

The poem is undermined by the confusion of spirit and matter: the angels are sometimes pure spirit, other times hit and wounded in battle. Incongruity.

Johnson dislikes the incorporation of Sin and Death – abstract ideas – as real actors in the narration: ‘one of the greatest faults of the poem’. It is mixing allegory with story. I actively like this because it makes the story a) vivid b) highly visual c) Spenser made a career out of bringing allegorical figures to life e.g. Rumour. But I agree that it feels different in kind and style from, say, Michael’s discourse.

Faults in the narrative

  • Why did Gabriel let Satan simply go away after he was arrested by the angels?
  • If Man is created to fill the void left by the fall of the rebel angels, how come Satan had heard a rumour about man before his fall? Presumably because God foresees all.

Fault of tone

Johnson particularly deprecates the Limbo of Fools in Book II, as inappropriate satire, as lowering the tone.

Diction

Both in prose and verse he had formed his style by a perverse and pedantic principle. He was desirous to use English words with a foreign idiom.

Nonetheless, Johnson judges that this large fault is overwhelmed by the sheer imaginative power of the poem.

Rhyme

Johnson thinks rhyme is superior to blank verse because it distinguishes poetry more easily (rather as he thinks a Christian ought to physically attend church rather than just pray in his house because it distinguishes holy thoughts from mundane thoughts).

Nonetheless, Johnson can’t wish Paradise Lost rhymed. (It’s a shame he makes no comment on Dryden’s rhyming version of the same subject, State of Innocence.)

He correctly points out that nobody in their right mind would wish Paradise Lost any longer.

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by Simon on July 19, 2006  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 19, 2006

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2006/07/19/johnson-life-of-milton/

Paradise Lost, Book 11 by John Milton (1667)

Paradise Lost, Book 11 (901 lines)

The ostensible subject of this book is Michael showing Adam visions of the future. More generally Michael is inducting Adam into the implications of the Fall – fighting, murder, disease, old age, God’s anger, one sole holy man standing out against the giddy crowd, Enoch, Noah (a self portrait of Milton embattled among he returning Royalists).

And Michael imparts simple wisdom: the Middle Way. Moderation.

Summary

1-21 Adam and Eve stand penitent. Their prayers go up to heaven.

22-44 The Son intercedes on their behalf, reminding everyone he will eventually die for them.

45-71 The Father agrees forgiveness but they cannot stay in Eden.

72-83 a trumpet blown to assemble all the angelic host.

84-125 The Father explains that, lest the man also eat of the fruit of the tree of eternal life, he will expel him. The father calls & instructs Michael to expel man from paradise, but to do it gently and give him a vision of the future; and set up cherubim to guard the entrance to the garden.

126-140 Michael prepares to descend. Cut to Adam and Eve.

141-161 Adam says he thinks God is listening to their prayers; their lives shall be meliorated; he ends by blessing Eve for being mother of mankind. [We’ve come a long way from their suicide pact].

162-180 Resigned, Eve says let’s get to work.

181-192 But they both notice a change: the sky lours; a bird of prey chases another; a bear chases fawns. The world is Fallen.

193-207 Adam points this all out to Eve, plus he’s seen lights falling from heaven.

208-225 Michael and his cherubim touch down.

226-250 Michael approaches, manly not dazzling.

251-262 Michael announces he’s exiling them.

263-285 Eve laments having to leave the flowers and bower she has dressed.

286-292 Michael says there’s no choice: they will be together.

293-333 Adam manfully acquiesces: if Eve will miss the flowers, Adam will miss meeting with God face to face.

334-369 Michael assures Adam God will be everywhere and his grace follow him, with signs. Come up this hill & I’ll show you the future.

370-422 Adam ascends the hill whence he can see the whole world, and Michael closes his eyes with magic drops.

423-460 Vision 1 They foresee Cain murdering Abel.

461-499 Adam asks, Is this Death? Vision 2 Michael shows him a cave full of desperate sick people dominated by Death…

500-514 Adam asks, Why are we born when life is so horrible? Can the image of the Maker be so degraded?

515-525 They don’t degrade God’s image; they degrade their own, says Michael.

526-546 Michael says it is best to live in moderation; however old age and its infirmities cannot be avoided…

547-552 Why prolong life, asks Adam, to which Michael replies:

Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv’st
Live well, how long or short permit to heav’n.

556-637 Vision 3 the Giants marry the daughters of Cain. Seems happy, but Michael explains the daughters of Cain are atheists and wantons.

638-673 Vision 4 a populous plain and city, but war breaks out between the two populations, waste and destruction: a prophet, Enoch, rises up and appeals for peace but everyone turns on him and he is whirled up to Heaven.

674-711 Michael makes it plain he disapproves of the warrior code & ethos, the worshipping of might. Enoch’s righteousness is praised and an example of all the righteous whom God will save.

712-762 Vision 5 amid a world of decadence Noah builds his ark, and Adam watches while his entire posterity is wiped out in the great Flood.

763-786 Adam is appalled: he hoped things would improve not decline. What next?

787–839 Michael makes Milton’s ethics crystal clear: all military might and heroism is an empty sham; it leads to luxury and wantonness, and then to extermination. Only one man in a dark age shall sound the note of warning (cf Abdiel brave in the concourse of the fallen angels) a self-portrait of Milton. But also a crystal clear rejection of the entire ‘heroic’ ethos of Satan.

840-901 Vision 6 Adam sees the ark alight on a mountaintop and the waters recede and a rainbow in the sky and Michael interprets it as God’s promise never again to flood the earth.

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by Simon on July 18, 2006  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 18, 2006

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2006/07/18/paradise-lost-book-xi-john-milton/

Aspects of Paradise Lost

Theology

Does Paradise Lost succeed in justifying the ways of God to man?

No. The whole argument hangs on four or five very debatable points:

  • Whether you accept the assertion, repeated over and over by God, the Son, the angels and the narrator – that worship from created beings is only meaningful if it is freely given i.e. created beings have to be free – and that freedom involves the freedom to do wrong and well as right. To which one replies: a) couldn’t God have created a world in which there was no evil? Hence, no temptation? Lost of freedom and choices: just nothing Evil. b) couldn’t God have intervened at various points to prevent the tragedy? The obvious answer is, Yes.
  • Whether you accept the assertion that all mankind deserves to be punished for something done before they were born. Obviously not.
  • Whether God could have forgiven them there and then and said, I’ll give you a second chance. Why not?
  • (All this is accepting the hard-to-understand but much-repeated point that merely because God foresees something, does not make it pre-ordained. Let’s accept that.)
  • (And accepting the strange idea that God makes a universe knowing it will be wrecked – why?)

The solution to the entire problem with Milton’s theology is to realise that Christianity is not designed to tell a logical story of the creation: Christianity has devised a myth which explains the current state of mankind, society and people.

For those who buy into the myth it has tremendous psychological power but it is a myth, created retroactively to make sense of the status quo – if you examine the same myth as if it were a logical story explaining the origin of the universe then it becomes highly questionable, because you are essentially saying that God created an imperfect world – and there’s no way out of the paradoxes that throws up – because the Christian response – that, no, God created a perfect world and we, humanity, screwed it up – certainly works if you relate that myth to your own personal life story, which will inevitably involve screw-ups and failings (that’s what the whole myth is designed to do). But fails as a stand-alone account of the creation of the whole world, viewed in the abstract.

Thus Milton tries heroically, epically, but fails to justify the ways of God to man. God’s ways seem harsh, cruel and arbitrary.

After all, if Paradise Lost succeeded in its big ambition, surely it would be snapped up to be part of the syllabus at any Catholic or Protestant seminary school. But no because, by taking the story so literally, Milton lets the cat out of the bag.

Architecture

Does the poem lay out its pretty well-known story in a suitable way?

Milton succeeds admirably in taking the well-known story and adapting it for the traditional methodology of epics i.e. starting in media res and telling key events in flashback – just as Odysseus tells all his exotic adventures in flashback, or Aeneas tells the people of Carthage his story ditto, thus Raphael tells the origins of the rebellion and the War in heaven and the Creation of the universe in flashback; and just as Aeneas is vouchsafed a vision of the futurity of Rome, so Adam is given a vision of the future of humanity. Top marks.

However, it is a major flaw that the poem tails off as it drags on – that Raphael’s account of the Creation or Michael’s prophecy are so boring. Why? Because we’ve read them before, described much more snappily, in the Bible.

Style

Does Milton’s style help or hinder one’s reading? Is it answerable to the subject matter?

Although the essence of Milton’s style remains the same throughout (the Latinate grammar, the odd use of syntax, Latinate vocabulary) no-once can doubt that the poem goes off. The best books are the first four. Why? Several reasons:

  • In Hell Milton is free-est to invent episodes; thereafter he is more constrained by the Biblical account. Thus in Book X it is a breath of fresh air when Satan encounters Sin and Death again, making their way up to the Universe.
  • Milton seems to have put more effort into fully imagining these early books: one simple indicator is that they are packed with epic similes – whereas the long books of Raphael’s are almost barren of similes – making you realise how refreshing they had been, to add variety to the style and rhythm.
  • If books VI, VII, X, XI and XII are boring because they have to retell large chunks of Genesis without using similes, other sections of books V and so on are just as boring because they have to convey long gobbets of Christian theology. Long stretches are not much more than versified pamphlets.

Epic poem

Does PL succeed as an epic poem in the tradition of Homer, Virgil, Camoes, Tasso?

Yes.

Aesthetics

Taken all in all, is Paradise Lost a success?

A limited one, or Yes, with reservations. These reservations stem from:

  • The failure of the theology to allay big doubts about God, its fundamental aim.
  • The failure of the later books to maintain the imaginative force and novel subject matter of the earlier ones.
  • The consequent flattening or failure of the style, which becomes pedestrian and boring for long stretches.

It seems to me axiomatic that Milton was a devout Christian who wrote the poem with the explicit aim of justifying the ways of God to men. The facts are the following: the first four or so books are the best. ‘Best’ means they are most enjoyable to read because containing the highest proportion of vivid and memorable language.

From Book 5 onwards the poem becomes more stodgy – the Raphael books: his account of the origins of the devil rebellion i.e. Satan’s revolt against the Son up till Abdiel standing up against the rebels (5), the actual War in Heaven (6), the creation of the universe and of Man – all this feels already-read (7), and then Raphael’s deliberately vague description of the Universe; then Adam’s memories of waking & meeting God (8).

The whole of Book 9 is an account, told in real time, of Eve leaving Adam, then being seduced by the serpent to eat the fruit, then persuading Adam to eat it. This ought to be the dramatic centrepiece of the poem but is the dullest – we know what’s going to happen so there’s no drama – instead there is lengthy and hard-to-follow argumentation between the snake and Eve – she eats – and then more argumentation between Eve and Adam – he eats – they make love – then feel guilt and shame.

Given a choice, which would you rather read – books 1, 2 and 3 or books 9, 10 and 11?

Book 10 where the Son quickly judges the pair is only enlivened by the great scenes of Sin and Death building a path up to the earth.

Book 11 where Michael lays out the future of the human race is dull.

Milton’s style

Debate ranges over Milton’s style: at one end of the spectrum, people say it’s recognisably English phrasing and syntax – at the other end, Dr Johnson and co say it’s written in a style heavily influenced by Latin and unlike any English ever spoken. I’m at the Dr Johnson end, but then most poetry is unlike the language actually spoken by ordinary people. The question is not the disputed source or origin of Milton’s style, it’s whether it works for what he intends.

Christopher Ricks’ book shows in minute detail that Milton’s style is highly considered, carefully wrought, and meaningful i.e. for long stretches. On other words, it does work.

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by Simon on July 17, 2006  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Christianity, History, Literary criticism
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Posted by Simon on July 17, 2006

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2006/07/17/aspects-of-paradise-lost/

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