Yesterday, a friend sent me the blog of a woman we had met at the Consciousness Society, a "wing-nut" division of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) that we had both enthusiastically embraced, and even contributed our own wing-nut theories as well. This woman is a great New Age artist, and in her blog, she showed both some of her work and told us breathlessly of her world tour last year, including many symposiums and art banquets for achievement, as well as visits to exotic (traditional) peoples in Africa. It made me realize what a piker I really am in the scheme of human endeavor, which is probably good for me, but also something else: how deeply mystical all world's cultures really were. I had always known that, and that is what brought me to anthropology, but normal anthropology usually only exploits a social version of modern science. Seldom does it get to the lived meaning of culture - and thus our participation with the "wing-nuts" who strove to do so.
This reminded me of the artist's lecture at one of the Society's meetings. Here, she tried to show how our alphabet was derived from circumstances of nature. For instance, for an "A," she showed a slide of reeds crossed in a swamp that looked very much like the letter "A." In this, she was trying to prove that a basic feature of our civilization was born from raw nature, linking us holistically with it.
This was of interest, since her pictures were great, but unconvincing. For instance, just because a burnt spot on a piece of toast looks kinda like the face of Jesus does not mean that Jesus originated in toast.
Still, it reminds one of our roots. According to my encyclopedia, our alphabet was taken from the Greeks and modified by the Romans into what we recognize today, but the Greeks got it from the Phoenicians and the Phoenicians from those marvels of civilization genius, the Egyptians. Our alphabet is based on phonetics, that is, on an approximation of the sound of the spoken word, but that came later. The Egyptians used hieroglyphs, which, like Chinese writing, are based on pictures of actual things in nature. But also something more: on the social-religious meaning of things in nature which were often transposed into features of the gods. Thus writing itself was a holy endeavor, calling forth our relationship with nature and the gods. It is, in part, for this reason that scribes were so honored in ancient times (recall the Jewish hierarchy of the Scribes and Pharisees, putting religion and writing together). But the Greeks and Romans, in a bloom of practical knowledge, replaced the pictures with a limited number of symbols, that borrowed from the hieroglyphic of say, a bird, taking the symbol as a representation of the sound "B" in bird (only an example. The ancient Greek word for bird probably does not start with a "b"). Thus, all was simplified, and any child could learn to turn simple conversation into writing within a few years.
This has affected our current civilization in profound ways, making everyone, in a way, a high priest. Because we now share the same language as those who once spent years bringing nature and god and culture together, we are both democratized (not a bad thing) and secularized, which is often not a good thing. In ancient times, we were placed beneath those of knowledge - but we knew that this knowledge, this depth, was there. Now we are equals, but often do not recognize our own depth. We have been "flattened out," allowed to scramble at the surface without even understanding that this, our world reality, is only a surface.
Last night I also bought a book, The Spiritual Life by Fr. Tanqueray, that was recommended by our not-so-new (now) priest, Fr. Peter. Fr. Peter, it seems, has lost some of the congregation because of his long and sometimes rambling sermons, as well as because of the conservative message in some of these sermons (too much at times, I admit, on sex). However, if one listens, his message is really about Being Saved. This, of course, is the message in one way or another of all religions, but in the modern churches, the emphasis has been placed on social issues. This is understandable because, as with writing, we have become a practical people, but Fr. Peter is desperate to show us that this is only the beginning.
And so I bought the book. It is a long and heavy one, and I will have to read it over months, interspersed with others. It is not only not entertaining like a novel, but not inspirational, like many popular books on spirituality. It is, to paraphrase the author, a science book, except that the science he speaks of is about how to reach God, rather than, say, fly to the moon. And with this I realized two things: one, that the mysticism that so enamors me is not some sort of side-show of the weird, but a central tenant of even the hide-bound Catholic Church. In this book, transcendence is treated as no more of an oddity than is a rocket by an aerospace engineer. And another: it once again makes apparent how little we know of what we think we know. Just as with writing, most of us wander into our churches or synagogues or yoga classes thinking we know what we are doing, but most of us (and I include myself) do not really have a clue as to the depth and sacredness of that which we witness and purport to believe. Religion has become trivialized, stream-lined so that anyone can participate without effort.
It may well be that in any groupings of people beyond the extended family, we have two choices: adhering to a belief in equality, which takes away the excesses of the divine right of leadership; or in hierarchical knowledge, which poses the inevitable risk of dictatorship or theocracy. Yet, so much is lost with democratization, where the truly vulgar can become the staple of normalcy, and the greater and deeper is thought to be pretentious, an invented abstraction meant to demean "the people." Is it possible that this dichotomy is one of the fundamental problems of society today? And how best to counter it than by proclaiming, as Jesus famously did, that we are all unique and equal under God, but are also fully responsible for our own souls, no exceptions? For with equality comes great responsibility, a burden I think others in other times understood well and traded in for hierarchy and complacency. FK
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