Guest Post: Endings and Beginnings

[In my pre-coffee haze yesterday morning I thought Lupus was being a bit redundant. Probably because I reprinted his last column instead of the New Year’s post I was supposed to post. Thinking before caffeine doesn’t work well for me. So while I refill my coffee, enjoy this NEW post from the always fantastic P. Sufenas Virius Lupus! – Star]

As the calendar year 2011 comes to a close, I’m reminded of the cliché that every ending is a beginning, and every beginning an ending. Granted, many of us modern Pagans have our sacred year commence at some other point in the year besides January 1—some do it on the Winter Solstice, some at Samain, some at another point—but to the wider secular culture, this is the end of one year and the beginning of the next.

In the past week, there have been some rather heated discussions in other blogs on Patheos.com in relation to the “triumph” of some religions over others, like this one. (I’ll leave aside for the moment the rather questionable semantics of the notion that one religion ”triumphed” over another by adopting many of the defeated one’s practices and external trappings, despite some specific condemnations in its sacred texts against particular such practices, and that the widely celebrated “secular” version of that supposedly “triumphant” religion’s holiday, more-or-less the same as the practices and trappings of the religions that it supposedly “triumphed” over, is in any sense a “triumph” at all. “Pyrrhic victory” seems a more apt term for that than “triumph”!) Thus, I’d like to look at the rather historical question of the beginnings and endings of different religions, or particular cultic practices within certain religions, as a kind of heuristic device to think on these questions further.

Consider the following events:

—The sacred relics of an ancient mountain shrine in Japan are moved from the top of a mountain to its base, where a shrine building is erected, and the practices continue largely unchanged for over two thousand years.

—In accordance with an oracle’s advice, a sacred stone is moved from Pessinus in Asia Minor to Rome, in order to assist with the victory over a costly war with the Carthaginians.

—A young man drowns in the Nile, and according to local custom in Egypt is deified; his cultus spreads throughout the Roman Empire initially because of his connection to the reigning Emperor, but it persists up to and even past the so-called “triumph” of another religion two centuries later.

These three events are all fairly agreed upon historically, and each involves a particular long-running cultus in a polytheistic society. The first is the origin of the Tsubaki Grand Shrine in Mie prefecture in Japan; the second is the origin of the cultus of Magna Mater in Rome in the late third century BCE; the third is the foundation of the cultus of Antinous in late October of 130 CE. Though war and aggression are not independent of some of these circumstances, religion was not the cause of the wars in question. Though the societies that upheld these diverse polytheistic cultic practices were not always tolerant in relation to other religions, I would contend that it is because political problems and issues were what caused some reigning powers to consider other religions a threat, and not some inter-religious issue. (Indeed, modern American Islamophobia is mostly a political side-effect rather than a reality—some Islamic extremists do want to overthrow Western societies and have Islam be the only religion there is, but a very large section of the worldwide Muslim population does not have that as even a vague aim worth pursuing at all.)

Now consider two further important events in which politics changed, and religion changed:

—A junior emperor comes to Rome, fights a decisive battle against one of his rivals at the Milvian Bridge, and is victorious. He then dismantles the tetrarchy, becomes sole emperor of the Roman Empire, and makes the decisive moves that place Christianity as the favored, and eventually the sole, religion of the Empire.

—An overwhelming force of 10,000 soldiers attempts to siege Medina, whose forces number 3,000, and the force of Medina is victorious over its rivals. Over the next few years, the victorious forces grow to over 10,000 strong, and they expel polytheists from the city of Mecca, where they have, since, never returned.

The first of these occasions happened in 312 CE, and was the victory of Constantine over his rival Maxentius. Constantine’s victory was attributed to the Christian deity, and to celebrate his victory, he erected the Arch of Constantine, with sculptural pieces looted from other monuments—including several depicting the hunts of Hadrian and Antinous, from which Hadrian’s visage was removed and re-sculpted to look like Constantine. The second of these happened in 627-630 CE, when Muhammad’s forces faced off against their rivals in Medina, and then eventually re-took Mecca after winning against extraordinary odds—said to be according to the will and attributed to the work of Allah, of course. Because “might made right” in these early bids for preeminent political power in these monotheistic religions, it paved the way for future uses of military force and other political tools to be pressed against whoever would not collaborate with the prevailing religious norms of subsequent periods.

But, here’s the funny thing: rather than re-founding Medina as a new capital and center of religion, Muhammad was insistent that the polytheistic shrine at Mecca that was tended by his ancestors be captured and “cleansed,” its rituals and individual sites of significance re-defined and re-mythologized into a monotheistic context. Constantine did not celebrate the Christian deity in his victory monument, but instead ended up portraying himself as honoring Apollo, Silvanus-Pan, Artemis, and Hercules, erasing the features of the original emperor who had built another monument and had portrayed himself honoring those gods. The subsequent Christian bishops, popes, theologians, and other leaders could quite literally not beat the polytheistic practices of the populace, and instead had to re-define them—and often, not particularly well—for an apparent change of divine management.

While “to the victor goes the spoils” has ever been the rule of such violent engagements, nonetheless it is interesting that these practices and sites of significance could not simply be dismissed or ignored within the new religious frameworks that emerged. (That would have been a much more peaceful way to have gone, in any case!) Creating something from whole cloth, whether a religious site of significance or a set of religious practices and holy days, is nowhere near as easy as co-opting and appropriating things that are already known to work and to appeal to people. Thus instead, these newer religious forms had to captured, subvert, revise, edit, and re-present the sites and practices that had come before as if they were in support of the new religion all along. Just because the victors go on to write history does not mean that the victors’ histories are true, or unproblematic, or even moral.

And, the process of Christianization and Islamicization has never ceased, really. What went before is far too powerful and appealing, and was (and still is!) constantly and ubiquitously re-appearing. For every Inquisition, there is a Renaissance; for every attempt at Puritanism, there is a Romantic Revival; for every excess of fundamentalism, there is a counterculture, with deities new and old emerging and adapting to the new circumstances and tastes of the people concerned. Modern Paganism, whether it draws from old sources that are revived and reconstructed, folk practices that have been continuously re-interpreted, genuine survivals across centuries, independent traditions that are analogous or have been incorporated into one’s practices, or entirely new emergences of religious phenomena and epiphanies of deities, is what humans have always been doing with religion since time immemorial, and is a natural process that, technically, has no official beginning, and will likely have no end either. Over fifteen hundred years of attempted suppression and stamping-out of these practices by two different religio-political juggernauts has not yet succeeded in doing so, and thus the likelihood that they will do so in the future now that it is legally possible (in some places, at least) to question such hegemony, is very small indeed.

In relation to other religions that have emerged and attempted to “win out” over all other contenders, there are some simple facts about religion that must be confronted when suggesting the newer religions’ pre-eminence or when attempting to eliminate all other contenders. Humans, and the religions they follow, are ever-changing, evolving, and advancing, and religions do well when they adapt to this reality. As a result, one religion (or even one singular form of one religion) will never suffice for humans, and new ones will always emerge, just as they have in every generation, in every century. And, what has gone on in the past never entirely loses its power or its appeal, and the gods will continue to fascinate, intrigue, delight, challenge, and transform people, whether they are classed as gods, saints, or something else.

It’s not that the gods have “won,” it’s simply that they can’t be defeated. To live in peace with others is a noble and worthy goal for religions to strive towards, but that cannot be done realistically by insisting on one and only one religion for all people at all times. The death or destruction of a religion doesn’t ever accomplish such a peace or unity—and, no religion has really ever “died” out wholly or ended entirely. If a religion seems to prevail for a while, the victory is only temporary; what was supposedly defeated rarely if ever “loses” entirely, it simply waits and gathers strength, re-emerging later. Gnostic Christianity is doing it now, and has been for over a century, despite the attempts of earlier Christian authorities to destroy it entirely.

The sooner that exclusivistic monotheistic religions realize this persistence of religious alternatives, and understand that it is better to live in peace with one’s neighbors, no matter what religion they happen to be, the more likely it is that people will be able to abandon the talk of one religion or another “winning” at all, as if religions are like football teams. But, no matter what other ways make them dissimilar to one another, religions are like football teams in that no matter how well one “team” does during one season, after the Super Bowl, all bets are off, and an unlikely contender can rise to the top the following year. The question of which religion is “better” is really just a game, then, and betting on which one is the best of all and which should rightly (or even wrongly) “win” in the final score is something that the players on the various teams—and, there are no spectators when it comes to rallying for one religious “team” or another, there are only players—should probably not be legally permitted to do.

May the end of your 2011 be safe, sane, and peaceful, and may all the blessings of that year continue for you into a safe, sane, peaceful, and blessed 2012!