Oops, we're also a religious system

[lb_lee]

Mori: Well, it took me a while, but I finished Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. It didn't take me this long because I was bored by it; on the contrary, I took like twenty pages of notes, way more than the other stuff I've been reading lately. I still don't have the guts to take on Jung's The Red Book yet (the last time I tried to read Jung, it was a SLOG), so on to Leslie Desmangles's Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti! And Desmangles, quoting Deren, sums up a big part of why it took us so long to figure out we're also a religious-based system:

The concept of belief in Haiti does not have the same connotation that it does in English (Deren, 1972). The English word belief suggests an intellectual activity by which one may or may not choose to identify with a system of thought. Vodouisants never think of believing in something in the sense of identifying with a system of thought--or, by extension, with a community that affirms such a system [...].

Asked if they believe in the Vodou deities, notes Maya Deren, Vodouisants never reply that they believe in the gods; rather, they answer, 'I serve the lwas,' or 'I obey the Mysteries of the world' (1972, 73-74).The significance of their statements lies in their outlook on the nature of belief in general, for they do not think of religion in abstract terms, but in practical ones. [...] Vodouisants cannot afford the self-surrender of mysticism, nor can they permit themselves the luxury of an idealism that seeks to mask the miseries and frustrations of their existence. Their needs are too immediate for that. Their religion must satisfy actual needs rather than merely invite them to high-flown intellectual exercises of theology. Deren observes that they have neither the time, the energy, or the means for inconsequential activity. She notes that in Haiti, religion 'must do more than give moral sustenance; it must do more than rationalize [the Vodouisant's] instinct for survival when survival is no longer a reasonable activity. It must do more than provide a reason for living; it must provide the means of living. It must serve the organism as well as the psyche. It must serve as a practical methodology, not an individual hope. In consequences, the Haitian thinks of his religion in working terms.'

(Desmangles, pg. 4-5)

We were forever getting hung up on the hook of, "you don't BELIEVE this nonsense, do you?" and thus wasting time trying to figure out our beliefs when they were irrelevant. We were putting the cart before the horse. It is not our intellectual systems of thought that create our religious experiences; it is through living, working through, and understanding the experiences that we build appropriate actions surrounding them. The actions come first; the abstractions, the boxes humans make to put stuff in, come later.

So much for origins! Every time we ask, the answer is "yes and." "Yes, you're a soulbonder, AND you've got the DID/DDNOS/OSDD depending who's looking at you, AND you're gonna have to deal with that religion shit, which will conveniently fail to mesh with others' so you'll just have to make it up as you go along... good luck, kid!"

Comments

[feotakahari]

I don’t get the distinction between intellectual exercise and usefulness. My impression is that for a lot of people, the intellectual exercise IS what’s useful.

[lb_lee]

Mori: In our case, it's the difference between intellectual pondering and "I need to not die now. How do I not die?" Intellectual exercise can be useful, but our needs were/are more immediate and physical. It's like pondering food when you're starving--you can't THINK your way out of starvation.