One of the most recent and seemingly popular follows a female spirit-medium as she walks around spooky places and talks about the ghosts-spirits with whom she supposedly is interacting. As far as I or anyone else can tell, the whole revolves entirely around her imagination and storytelling. The ratings were apparently good enough for another season. This tells us pretty  much everything we need to know about the viewing audience.

Because these spooky-supernatural programs are so predictable and formulaic, I had never bothered to consider the genesis and evolution of the genre. Fortunately for us, Adam Curtis has posted a brilliant multimedia piece on the genealogy of spirit-poltergeist shows in the United Kingdom. It’s a fascinating romp through the sociocultural thickets of psychic-TV, a place where fiction makes fact and viewers fall prey to the War of the Worlds chimera.

All this aside, Adam’s Medium and the Message blog is a fantastic find; he has an astute eye for weird cultural detail and his mixed-media storytelling really pushes the boundaries. Spend some time with The Bitch, The Stud and The Prawn and you’ll know what I mean.

Once a month my mastiffs and I walk to our local bookstore, located right in the center of a thriving restaurant and arts district filled with locally owned shops. It’s a daylong affair, punctuated by coffee, conversation, and discovery. The owner whom I’ve known for years is always there; she brims with  obscure knowledge and wonderful recommendations. I’ve read at least 20 books this year I never would have considered or even known about without her. I’ve read another 40 books I never would have considered or known about without spending many hours browsing the shelves and stacks. Many are no longer in print and most haven’t been reviewed.

At the end of a magical day, we go next door with a backpack full of books for beers and some food. The dogs like beer. On one of our recent outings I came across Wish and Wisdom: Episodes in the Vagaries of Belief, published in 1935 by Joseph Jastrow. It is curiously written in Victorian style and on the surface appears to be a series of vignettes demonstrating human folly and foible.

Jastrow, an early pioneer in experimental psychology and eccentric founder of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, divides the book into 7 parts that correspond to 7 psychological traits or propensities. When these traits are combined and not overridden by rationality or reason, the common result is mental error and unfounded belief. According to Jastrow, the traits are:

• Credulity: The Urge to Believe
• Marvel: The Appeal of Wonder
• Transcendence: Escaping Limitations
• Prepossession: Finding What You Look For
• Congenial Conclusion: Folk-Mind and Doctrinal Survivals
• Cults and Vagaries: Strange Solutions
• Rationalization: Flaunting Reason’s Banner

At the start of each section Jastrow explains what each trait (which can be psychological, cultural or both) means and how it works. Following this prefatory telling, he then shows each trait or proclivity in historical action. There are 3-4 standalone vignettes for each section; some are well known (Madame Blavatsky, Ouija, Numerology, Phrenology, Clever Hans) whereas others are wonderfully obscure and rescued from oblivion (Leo Taxil, Theological Zoology, Astral Chemistry, Jaeger Woolens). The moral of each story is that humans are psychologically prone to wishful thinking and with cultural reinforcement (which is never lacking) we will believe just about anything.

Jastrow was taking aim at all manner of supernatural, mystical, and magical thinking, yet did so in ways that did not directly attack religion. He reasonably surmised that if the religiously inclined were to contemplate his carefully chosen examples they would realize there could be no principled distinction between one form of folly and another. Jastrow’s friendship with William James may have prompted the book and been a gentle rejoinder to the man who turned toward mysticism later in his life.

In closing, Jastrow — a pioneer in the evolutionary study of language — asks why humans are driven by sincere wishes and dubious confirmations. Without any apparent sense of irony, he roots the problem in language:

I place first vagueness, with its symbol, the cloud. If you would impose, be cloudy, vaporous, misty; soar under conditions of low visibility, trailing a smoke-screen in your wake. Erratic beliefs like wraiths shun daylight; clarity is their vital enemy. And man, by the very necessities of his mental existence — by the urgencies of expression and communication — has, in the supreme invention of language, forged the very instrument of his undoing. Words make effective cloud-screens. As indispensably as they express thought when used lucidly they may as effectively mask it, obscure it, conceal its absence.

In all ages, cultists and propagandists of a hollow or shaky cause resort to verbal screenery. The more successful become adept in linguistic obfuscation. My reference is not to the most common employment, the political appeal, nor to rhetoric, which Huxley called the pestilent cosmetic smearing the fair face of truth. My theme is limited to beliefs and faiths which in intent make an appeal to fact. In another reference, I have called this trend the lure of the obscure, accounting for the wide prevalence of the cult of the occult.

This provides a nice sense for Jastrow’s style, which during the 1960s landed him on the required reading list for undergraduate English majors at Harvard. Rendered differently, it’s a clarion call that hearkens back to Ludwig Wittgenstein and forward to Jerry Coyne.

For me, the moral of this story is not that Jastrow prefigured or presaged recent work in the cognitive study of religion, or that he did it in high style with entertaining vignettes. It is that I never would have found this book or known that it existed by searching Amazon. Had I been Farhad Manjoo, this nothing is what I would have found. Support your local bookstore.

The state-run Saudi news agency announced that a woman named Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was publicly beheaded because she claimed to be a healer who could cure ailments for a fee of $800. The religious police arrested her for practicing “witchcraft,” which in this case sounds like a euphemism for faith healing outside of Wahabbist orthodoxy. In Saudi Arabia it is perfectly acceptable to pray to Allah for healing but it is a death sentence to appeal to any other kinds of spirits or forces for healing.

In an interview with Bikya Masr, a Saudi activist complained: “It is wrong and disgusting to kill anyone in this way. Doing this just gets people thinking we live in the Dark Ages.” It apparently would be better if the unorthodox faith healer had been executed in some other less disgusting way. Saudis are living in a high-tech version of the Dark Ages, even if executions remain low-tech.

At the same time Science reports the Saudis are pumping billions of dollars into flagship universities “to help the country move from an oil-based to a knowledge economy.” It goes without saying that only certain kinds of narrow scientific and technological knowledge are acceptable.

This, however, hasn’t deterred at least 60 scientists from accepting yearly stipends of $72,000 for doing little more than naming Saudi universities as affiliate institutions on all their academic publications. Such listings result in higher rankings for Saudi universities.

Scientists can rationalize this however they want and when money is being offered, they will. Neil Robertson, a mathematics professor at Ohio State, commented:

It’s just capitalism. They have the capital and they want to build something out of it. Yes, visibility is very important to them, but they also want to start a Ph.D. program in mathematics. I’m thinking this might be a breath of fresh air in a closed society.

Robertson is “hopeful that outside influence” will help accelerate social reforms in the Kingdom. Unless Robertson can devise equations which prove that beheading a woman for unorthodox beliefs is wrong, I can’t see it happening. Scientists and other academics should think hard about selling their souls to the Saudis.

When fully modern humans left Africa around 75,000 years ago, they almost certainly carried some form of shamanism with them. It is even possible that humans they encountered along the way — those whose ancestors had left Africa during earlier migrations (such as Neanderthals and Denisovans) — were shamanic. We know that some of these encounters involved genetic mixing; they also probably involved ritual mixing. Indeed, having sex with different looking and sounding strangers may have been richly imbued with ritual.

Whatever the case, one thing is certain: wherever humans went, so too did shamanism. It is found throughout Africa, Near East, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Australia, Arctic, and Americas. If you look at any map which shows migration routes from Africa and colonization of the world, the map shows not just the movement of people over tens of thousands of years: it also shows the spread of shamanisms.

All humans were hunter-gatherers and shamanic until the advent of agriculture some 12,000 years ago. But wherever agriculture takes hold in any kind of intensive way, shamanism is transformed into something that looks more like what we today call “religion.” It becomes, in other words, more organized, systematic, and doctrinal. The primacy of individual supernaturalism, a hallmark of shamanism, gives way to collective supernaturalism or formal religions.

In isolated areas where foraging and small-scale horticulture persisted for longer periods of time, so too did shamanism. Traditional shamanism exists today primarily in small-scale societies such as those found in the Amazon and New Guinea. As an ancient practice which many deem to be closer to the “primordial supernatural source,” it is hardly surprising that it has been appropriated and commodified for global use. Commercial neo-shamanism thrives in places like New York, Paris, and Tokyo.

Traditional shamanism was not, however, wholly replaced by Neolithic religions created to meet the needs of agricultural and large-scale societies. As Robert Bellah frequently observes when discussing the history of religions: “nothing is ever lost.” There is in other words a bit of shamanism in all religions today. Ideas about souls, spirits, gods, other-worlds, after-lives, possession, prophecy, and divination were all developed within shamanism and existed for many thousands of years before the earliest religions formalized and systematized them.

This process of incorporation and domestication did not completely subsume shamanism. Strands of shamanism persisted in more traditional forms, especially in rural areas, and elements of it continued to be practiced at the margins under different names: oracles, mediums, healers, diviners, psychics, seers, clairvoyants, sorcerers, and witches. Within more established religions, people who privileged and cultivated the shamanic substrates of those traditions are known as mystics, sages, gurus, prophets, and saints. Shamanism runs as deep as it does wide, and a splendid book on the shamanic aspects of Christianity is begging to be written.

While waiting for this genealogy of shamanic Christianity, it may be less threatening to trace the transformational course of shamanic practice in Japan, where supernatural syncretism has long been the norm. Where syncretism prevails, it is easier to acknowledge borrowings and debts.

In 1975 Carmen Blacker published The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan and highlighted the prevalence of Japanese “folk” beliefs that run alongside and mix with official Shinto and temple Buddhism. In “Witch Animals” (open), Blacker examines belief in animals who have spirits that can be cultivated as household guardians. This is a common idea among hunter-gatherers in general and Amerindians in particular; the latter famously sought visions to identify an animal whose spirit would become a lifelong companion and protector. In “Exorcism” (open), Blacker examines the belief that physical-mental illnesses are caused by spirit maleficence or possession, the cure for which is exorcism. Similar beliefs are found in nearly all shamanic societies, with the cure being a ritualized extraction or casting out.

Blacker is aware of these shamanic connections and suggests in early chapters (open) that Japanese “folk” practices are rooted in an ancient hunting and gathering past. That such practices have persisted is remarkable in light of Meiji period (1868-1912) efforts to modernize Japan, one programmatic aspect of which was to root out shamanic “superstitions” and create a national tradition which conformed to the Western concept and category of “religion.”

Although such superstitions were by the time of the Meiji period identified mostly with Buddhism, this had not always been the case. When Buddhists first arrived in Japan around 550 CE, they encountered an intensely spiritualized landscape that was deeply informed by indigenous Japanese shamanism. This shamanism arose in conjunction with the Jomon peoples, who hunted and gathered in Japan from 14,000-300 BCE, a spectacularly long run during which they built permanent settlements, made pottery, and developed rituals.

As Buddhism developed in Japan it did so not by displacing traditional beliefs developed over 14,000 years, but rather by incorporating and accepting them. This meant that over the centuries Japanese Buddhism developed into a distinctive amalgam described here by Jason A. Josephson:

During the Tokugawa period [1603-1868] the vast majority of interaction between priests and parishioners was for the purpose of practical, this-worldly benefits (genze riyaku 現世利益) or memorial rituals for the dead (kuyō 供養). The day-to-day life of Buddhist priests of all sects was filled with the performance of exorcisms, funerals, distributing healing charms, and spells for rain.

Many of these rituals were intended for apotropaic purposes, banishing monsters, limiting their negative effects, or transforming the curses of ancestors and kami into blessings. Hungry ghosts (gaki 餓鬼) and demons (oni 鬼 or ma 魔) were an integral part of the worldview promoted by the Buddhist establishment; and one of the main benefits of seemingly unconnected activities such as lay ordination rituals, for instance, was to manage these sorts of supernatural entities. Despite later revisionism, both demons and this-worldly magic were fundamental to Buddhism—in canonical texts and in daily practices.

While Buddhist priests were performing these ancient (shamanic) rites during the medieval Tokugawa period (1603-1868), this had not always been the case. For centuries prior, Buddhist priests had been learning this craft from female shamans known as miko. In a recent article on spirit mediums or miko in pre-Tokugawa Japan, Lori Meeks observes that miko were often ensconced in or around temples where they performed a variety of services that were much in demand but were not on official Buddhist offer:

[W]e can find many examples of miko who engaged in a variety of closely linked spiritual services, such as the transmission of oracles from gods and bodhisattvas, which was thought to occur through divine trance; channeling spirits of the dead; divine petition, which sometimes involved exorcism; fortune-telling; rituals and blessings for romantic relationships and childbirth; and physical healing.

Both shrine miko and arukimiko also developed extensive repertoires of spiritual services meant to meet the needs of individual patrons: the conjuring of dead spirits, divination, love rites, and physical healing.

Although miko were tolerated, accommodated, and sometimes celebrated in medieval Japan, they were often viewed with suspicion by government officials attempting to impose control and maintain order in collaboration with more placid and malleable temple Buddhists. Miko were recognized as shamanic atavists and may have served as reminders of an unruly populace or anarchic past. The fact that miko carried drums and danced connects them directly to shamans, as does the fact they were healers.

When it comes to shamans or those who carry on aspects of shamanic tradition within larger-scale societies, the usual course is for shamanic functions to be co-opted by mainstream religious traditions or relegated to the periphery where they are denigrated as “superstition.” The latter epithet is euphemism for “supernatural beliefs not fitted within recognized religions or traditional doctrines.” From the priest to the palmist, all supernatural practitioners are indebted to the universal shaman.

References:

Meeks, Lori (2011). The Disappearing Medium: Reassessing the Place of Miko in the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan
History of Religions, 50 (3), 208-260 DOI: 10.1086/656611

Josephson, Jason A. (2006). When Buddhism Became a “Religion”: Religion and Superstition in the Writings of Inoue Enryō Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 33 (1), 143-168

Habu, Junko (2008). Growth and decline in complex hunter-gatherer societies: a case study from the Jomon period Sannai Maruyama site, Japan Antiquity, 82, 571-584

Source:LiveScience

This isn’t surprising. Socially constructed and doctrinal lines separate “religion” and “spiritual” from “paranormal” and “magic.”

The common substrate is belief in the supernatural, which arises naturally from ordinary operations of the brain-mind. While these operations can be overridden, they rarely are because nearly all societies reinforce such beliefs with specific supernatural and religious content.

One of the world’s oldest supernatural practices, aspects of which can be found in all of today’s “world religions,” is divination sensu lato. It is no accident that the earliest organized religions, those which arose in conjunction with Neolithic city-states, revolved around divination. And as some city-states grew into empires, divination remained front and center. In China emperors interpreted the tortoise shells and oracle bones, while in Rome they consulted sacrificial livers and conferred with augurs or auspices. When things did not augur well or omens were inauspicious, plans were changed or put on hold. Around the world, the affairs of city, state, and empire were conducted in accordance with divination.

Attempts to ascertain (and by extension control) the future did not originate in classical antiquity. Noting that hunter-gatherers around the world divine the location of game or enemies by “reading” viscera and bones, anthropologists have surmised that the practice is more ancient. Because such inferences rely on ethnographic analogy and backward projection, what was a reasonable surmise long remained uncertain. The discovery of 14,000 year old “dice” and a divining scapula at El Juyo Cave in Spain make it almost certain.

Few Paleolithic archaeological sites are richer than El Juyo Cave. Used extensively by Magdalenian hunter-gatherers 14,000 years ago, it contains what may be the world’s oldest ritual sanctuary, highlighted by a large carved rock face or “spirit” at the entrance.

In “Coping with Chance: Animal Bones and the Aleatory,” Freeman and Echegaray (2005) report on two extraordinary finds from El Juyo. The first is a set of three worked bone pieces, similar in size and shape, which were found stacked on top of one another and which probably were bound together as a set. They greatly resemble “dice” sets used by Amerindians and the authors interpret them as such. The second is a deer scapula or shoulder blade that has been engraved with images of deer, incised, drilled, burned, and shattered. Because this kind of treatment precisely parallels divination practices among known hunter-gatherers, the authors’ scapulimancy interpretation is uncontroversial.

What I like most about the authors’ report is their extended meditation on the relationship between divination and chance:

In the specific cases to be discussed here, bone artifacts seem to reflect game-playing and/or divination, and to attest to early attempts by Upper Paleolithic humans to deal with chance: to cope with the seemingly “uncontrollable” randomness of natural phenomena. [Humans] find it hard to understand that many natural phenomena are simply random, a fact that is at least perplexing if not troubling, and that leads us to invent various means of coping with this randomness.

It is a characteristic of [humans] to behave as though such random phenomena as the availability of game, the likeliness of success in the food quest, and other vagaries of nature could be controlled or, what is the same thing, “divined” or predicted, in the sense of determining their indeterminable future direction.

[W]e can show that there are artifacts such as “dice” and engraved scapulae in the bone inventory from the Magdalenian site of el Juyo (presumably other such pieces have been or will be found in other Upper Paleolithic sites as well) that are most effectively explained as devices showing an awareness of the effects of chance and as implements to predict the direction of the aleatory: to cope with the randomness of nature.

While some may dismiss ancient divination practices as mere “magic” or superstition, it would be well to remember that nothing is ever lost. It is but a short conceptual step from Paleolithic divination to the kinds of prophecy that are so characteristic of Axial or modern religions. If we are going to draw lines, they should not be conceptual lines of sand but rather historical lines of continuity.

Reference:

Freeman, L.G., & Echegaray, J.G. (2005). Coping with Chance: Animal Bones and the Aleatory Munibe (Antropologia-Arkeologia), 57, 159-176

“The Vatican is an extraordinarily hard place to get access to, but we explained we’re not going to try to tell people what to think,” says Discovery president and GM Clark Bunting. Bunting says the investigators believe a demon can inhabit an inanimate object (like a home) or a person. The network executive says he was initially skeptical when first meeting the team but was won over after more than three hours of talks. “The work these folks do, and their conviction in their beliefs, make for fascinating stories,” Bunting says.

Bunting wins today’s credulous award. Only three hours of listening and he’s game for stories. This would be a good time to recall Nietzsche: “A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions.”

So I watched the show, which apparently was not blessed by the Vatican but which also did not oppose it. First impression: if a shaman rather than a Catholic priest were telling these kinds of stories, most would consider the shaman a “primitive” and naive storyteller who believes in all kinds of fantastic magic. When Catholic priests say the same things, it is considered “religious.”

Second impression: everyone kept talking about evidence that supports the stories but no evidence was ever presented. Go figure. The show’s producer speaks to the issue: “It is a show about faith. There’s no empirical way to prove this stuff but science can’t explain everything.” He’s right — anatomists can’t explain this:

Over at Slate, Jeremy Stahl interviews Lawrence Wright for his piece on conspiracy theorists. Wright’s comments sound familiar: “I spent a lot of time trying to reason with various people who had these kinds of perspectives. And it was very frustrating. There was absolutely no way to argue with them because they rejected any kind of factual evidence. What they call facts aren’t typically facts. They sound like facts.” This is why I stopped arguing with creationists more than a decade ago.

Finally, we have the seemingly bizarre (but which should have been expected) news that the Catholic anti-Semite Mel Gibson is doing a film on second century BCE hero of Jewish nationalism Judah Maccabee. Over at The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg comments:

I’m working on a biography of Judah Maccabee…and so it was brought to my attention that Gibson is preoccupied with the subject. (My preoccupation is simple: Judah Maccabee led the first revolt for religious freedom in recorded history, and he is without parallel as a guerrilla fighter and as a man of faith).

A few years ago, I was having dinner with Christopher Hitchens, who had recently launched an excoriating attack on Judah Maccabee in his book, God is Not Great (Hitchens blames Judah Maccabee for, essentially, his success — the Maccabean revolt helped preserve, against the force and power of Greek culture, what Hitchens might call jealous-God Judaism, and thus paved the way for the birth of Christianity, which Hitch, as I’m sure you know, regrets).

This exchange places too much emphasis on Western monotheism and ignores the massive history of Mesopotamian religions that preceded (and profoundly influenced) this tradition. Maccabee did not lead the first revolt for religious freedom and while tribal nationalism can be a matter of faith, we needn’t buy the biblical myth that Maccabee was fighting for Yahweh. It is of course a time honored tradition to cloak earthly goals in the mantle of faith. While I doubt that Gibson’s movie will explore Maccabee’s mundane motivations, let’s hope that Goldberg’s book does.

Though many claim to have read all twelve, such reports are probably apocryphal. Oddly and without explanation, Amazon offers a 15 volume set (clocking in at 5,600 pages and 21 pounds) which 41 people claim to have consumed; 25 of them have given the Bough a superlative rating of five stars.

What precisely was Frazer’s project and how did it come to dominate his life? This is the stuff of legend and it all depends on whom you ask. I will confess to long being baffled by the Bough and having my mind numbed while contemplating the ancient mysteries of Nemi, Diana, the King, and the endless commentaries on what it all means. While Frazer’s obsessive search for the original myth or Ur-religion is a tour de force of story collection and recursive rumination, it is more than a bit bewildering.

Many academics owe their careers to Frazer, and in this sense he is much like Kant. When legions of conflicting books are written to explain the originals, it is often a sign of confusion (either in the originals, interpretations, or both). You would never know this, however, based on the conversations overheard at university cocktail parties: “I was just re-reading [The Golden Bough] or [Critique of Pure Reason] and it reminded me of something you just said.” Sure it did.

It was with this sort of ennui that I sat down last night to read yet another commentary on Frazer, lamely hoping that something good might come of it. Within minutes I realized I had stumbled onto something special. In 1975, Robert Ackerman published “Frazer on Myth and Ritual,” an essay which brilliantly explains Frazer’s ideas and situates them within intellectual history. Although it seems odd that Ackerman, an English professor, should be the one to write perhaps the most cogent of articles on Frazer and the Bough, it is not surprising.

After doing some digging, I came across a book review written by Ackerman (in 1996) which explains his interest and methods:

Twenty years ago I was about to leave the English Department at Columbia University to spend a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton: my project was a biography of J.G. Frazer. At Columbia I had written a dissertation on the literary-critical legacy of the “Cambridge Ritualists”… and had then read a good deal of Frazer, who influenced the Ritualists greatly.

The project held many difficulties. Chief among them was that, because Frazer worked in classics, anthropology and the history of religion, as an outsider I would have to teach myself the history of all those disciplines.

Judging the issue by his essay, Ackerman appears to have taught himself the history of these unruly disciplines exceptionally well (he also succeeded in writing Frazer’s biography). There is another lesson to be learned here: sometimes outsiders, with their fresh eyes and ideas, are the best gardeners.

How does Ackerman trim the bough? He begins with a history of the question (framed first by historians of religion Max Muller and Andrew Lang) which so exorcised Frazer: What is the origin of religion? He then proceeds to the early anthropologists who influenced Frazer: E.B. Tylor, William Robertson Smith, and Wilhelm Mannhardt. Ackerman concludes by expertly analyzing Frazer’s varied explanations of myth (euhemerism, cognitionism, and ritualism). Having explained myth and ritual, or at least tried to, Frazer thought he had explained religion. Whether he managed to do so remains an open question.

Reference:

Ackerman, Robert (1975). Frazer on Myth and Ritual. Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1), 115-134 DOI: 10.2307/2709014

Bonus Link: In a fascinating post on the “Industry of Magical Thinking,” the author nicely summarizes some of Frazer’s main ideas and connects them to advertising. Good stuff!

These dark arts are tuned to aspects of human nature that many would like to forget, or at least ignore. Parker begins with a line from James Frazer, inscrutable author of The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: “We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet.” Frazer’s insight reminds me of another by Somerset Maugham: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”

It is difficult to know what Frazer or Maugham might have thought about heavy metal, but Parker turns some beautiful phrases on his own thinking:

Since its invention, heavy metal has been the popular music most ardently devoted to Frazer’s underground magma pools, and most grandly expressive of their inevitable eruption. Metal’s commerce with the lower realm has been extravagant, ridiculous, and covered in glory.

This lower world cosmology traces its roots to the heavy metalists par excellence, Black Sabbath, a band whose aboriginal angst Parker covers with some gorgeous riffs of his own:

Black Sabbath, from Birmingham, England, was heavy metal. No joy here, nor any wisp of psychedelic whimsy. From the first note, this band sounded ancient, oppressed, as if shambling forward under supernatural burdens.

With his use of horror-movie atmospherics—the tension-building tritone or flatted fifth—and the leering majesty of his riffs, guitarist Tony Iommi redirected the spiritual drag of the blues into an uncharted world of bummers and black holes.

Bassist Geezer Butler, a mystical vegetarian, wrote the lyrics. Raised Catholic, Butler as a youngster had entertained thoughts of the priesthood, and for all the band’s occult trappings, his view of things was essentially orthodox, if a little on the medieval side: God over here, Satan over there, man flailing and biting his nails in the middle.

Vocally, [Ozzy Osbourne] filtered Butler’s Boschian sensibility through his own late-20th-century depression, in front of a band almost overloading with musical power: early live footage reveals the musicians “bobbing,” in the superb phrase of the metal historian Ian Christe, like “marionettes in the hands of God.”

The sound itself dramatized a violent, existential bottoming-out, Iommi’s guitar lines rearing and plunging across the awesomely delayed crashes of drummer Bill Ward, percussions so far behind the beat that their impact was interior, nearly glandular, like the drench of adrenaline after hearing bad news.

Although I have my doubts about heavy metal keeping us sane, I have no doubt that Parker’s pen is dripping with the blood of tormented saints. It almost makes me want to put on some Sabbath for a voyage to the netherworlds of Sturm und Drang.

Modern Japanese understand what happened in scientific terms — crustal plates, subduction zones, and water columns — explain what occurred. But not more than a few hundred years ago, the explanation would have been much different: sea spirits had been angered and were punishing the people.

The Japanese are not alone in this respect. Most humans throughout history have used stories in similar fashion. The resulting oral traditions “are cultural forms that organize perceptions about the world” (Cruikshank 1992:40). Although stories are used to acquire, organize, store, and share information relevant to survival, they are more than this. They also enable people to “make sense of unpredictable destructive natural forces in their landscape” (McMillan & Hutchinson 2002:44).

Like the Japanese, indigenous peoples living along America’s Northwest Coast (near the Cascadia subduction zone) experienced devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. And like pre-modern Japanese, many Northwest Coast peoples told stories about these events and their supposed causes. For many tribes in this area, the explanation was simple: when the mountain dwarfs danced, the earth shook. Those who paid no heed to this shaking — i.e., those who failed to run to high ground or did not lash sturdy canoes to tall trees — were inevitably doomed by the oncoming wall of water.

In “When the Mountain Dwarfs Danced: Aboriginal Traditions of Paleoseismic Events along the Cascadia Subduction Zone of Western North America,” ethnohistorians Alan McMillan and Ian Hutchinson have collected many of these stories and concluded that several recount historically known and archaeologically detectable events. Most involved supernatural beings or dwarfs:

The mountain dwarfs, in Nuu-chah-nulth belief, were responsible for the earth shaking. In discussing supernatural beings recognized by the Nuuchah-nulth, Philip Drucker (1951:154) states: ‘‘There were also dwarfs, who had houses inside of mountains, where they enticed the unwary to dance with them around and around a great wooden drum. Sooner or later he [the unwary visitor] stumbled against the drum, and became afflicted with a peculiar disease called ‘‘earthquake foot’’— every time he took a step the ground shook.

In the Bella Coola Valley, the Nuxalk had a different explanation: “According to their beliefs, the earth is held in place with strong ropes held by a giant supernatural being. Earthquakes occur when the ropes slip from this being’s grasp or when he moves his hands to get a better grip.”

What I find most interesting about these stories is that they demonstrate the fundamental human need for explanation. Any explanation is better than none; the terror of the unknown and unpredictable is too much for most. In addition to providing teleological solace, most of the stories also provide instruction: what to expect when the dwarfs dance and what action needs to be taken. These stories are not just stories; they look much like adaptations.

References:

McMillan, A. (2002). When the Mountain Dwarfs Danced: Aboriginal Traditions of Paleoseismic Events along the Cascadia Subduction Zone of Western North America. Ethnohistory, 49 (1), 41-68 DOI: 10.1215/00141801-49-1-41

Cruikshank, Julie (1992). Invention of Anthropology in British Columbia’s Supreme Court: Oral Tradition as Evidence in Delgamuukw v. B.C. BC Studies (95), 25-42