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

[lb_lee]

Mori: I've read that too! Heh, wonder if your classmate read the same book...

When asked "do you believe in...?" It's almost always a trick question to make you display whether you're one of the "good ones" or not, I figure. It's also maddening: if Being is RIGHT THERE and can fuck you up because it's RIGHT THERE and a part of daily life, belief is irrelevant!

Me, nothing I have heard of fairies makes me want to cross one. I would avoid bulldozing their stupid mound just to keep them AWAY.

[talewisefellowship]

it's possible, I can ask next time I see her.

And yeah its true that thats not a question you could answer yes to without losing face, and its true, belief is irrelevant. Honestly I've felt like the debates that christians and atheists of christian origin get into as to whether or not god exists is missing the point. the point isn't whether or not god exists the point is whether or not god(s) have any sort of presence in the world you inhabit, which is a very different question with different answers for different people. And my answer to that question is that the world is full of gods. I think there are thousands all over the world, but I'm only drawn to a very small number of them. I don't know all or even most of these gods, I just know that the world is teeming with them.

As for the ancient monuments, fairies or not, I wouldn't want to destroy them anyway just because they're ancient and have history. Which is another way of saying I have a basic reverence for past people or ancestors as they're more commonly called (they dont have to be my ancestors necessarily), which is itself an ancient way of thinking. Incidentally, it turns out that in irish folk belief, some fairies are ancestors so that comes full circle and makes sense as to why they'd hang out around fort ruins and such.

--Janusz

[talewisefellowship]

Update: I asked my friend and apparently the anecdote came from her own personal experience talking to people in Ireland, and then she later read that this was a common response.

I found the papers she cited for her presentation, here they are:

A New Solution of the Fairy Problem
Author(s): David MacRitchie
Source: The Celtic Review, Vol. 6, No. 22 (Oct., 1909), pp. 160-176
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30070215

Ringforts or Fairy Homes: Oral Understandings and the Practice of Archaeology in
Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ireland
Author(s): Máirín Ní Cheallaigh
Source: International Journal of Historical Archaeology , June 2012, Vol. 16, No. 2,
Archaeology, Memory, and Oral Tradition (June 2012), pp. 367-384
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23258947

Unfortunately I've not had time to read these even though I'd really love to. If you're interested but need help accessing the articles, the Hub of Science is available on the internet.

--Janusz

[lb_lee]

Ooh sweet, thank you! Yeah, we heard it from a book of fairy oral traditions, definitely not either of those.

[talewisefellowship]

Yeah it seems like a common enough occurrence in Ireland that it's probably been mentioned in multiple sources.

--Janusz