Over the past few weeks, I have been listening to some of the Emergence Magazine podcast episodes that are exploring ways in which we can think of our finite lives in terms of the entire lifespan of the planet — from the rocks under our feet and with which we adorn ourselves to the trees older than us that we walk past without considering that they are our elders. I have appreciated these because they have given me fresh perspective about the world.
It’s one of my first conscious encounters with the rhetoric of self-othering, especially in the piece about trees where the author discusses feeling alienated from the world due to not believing in spirits — someone who has probably never tried giving a nymph offerings and who uses as an excuse not having grown up doing so. So a polytheist or animist listener’s mileage may vary during these narratives’ moments of voyeuristic wistfulness.
But I don’t want to focus on those aspects.
My favorite listen so far has been Marcia Bjornerud’s “Wrinkled Time: The Persistence of Past Worlds on Earth” that I found very spiritually beautiful. I recommend listening to it, especially if you’re disillusioned by the spiritual merch industry.
It occurred to me later that that house on a Croatian hillside embodies the way we in the modern world thoughtlessly scavenge the monuments of the geologic past. Our cities are just scaled-up versions. Every asphalt roadway and concrete structure contains fragments, often still readable, from the chronicles of prior geologic regimes, irreverently blended and reconstituted. The metals in our cars, phones, and computers, having been separated from their source rocks, are more akin to individual letters in a shredded manuscript, but still whisper of their deep geologic origins. All the coal, oil, and natural gas we’ve burned — the photosynthetic memories of earlier ecosystems — hovers now in the air, the ghosts of combustion that haunt us in the Anthropocene.
The other thing I found spiritually beautiful about the piece was how Bjornerud lays out geology as if the Earth herself is writing her story, especially when the piece contrasts the planet we move and breathe on with other worlds in our solar system. If we lived in another society, a piece like this would have been written overtly like a hymn.
This November, because Google listens to everything we say or do, a few videos came into my feed about revitalizations of polytheistic traditions around the world. The videos I am sharing below focus on African traditions. They’re both about two years old, but that doesn’t matter when it comes to the YouTube algorithm.
One thing that came into my recommendations was a tad unusual because I haven’t invested a lot of mental energy in this topic. The recently deceased Buddhist monk Tsem Rinpoche, who was apparently a bit controversial because he had some friction points with the Dalai Lama about some Tibetan Buddhist practices, has a lot of videos on YouTube and elsewhere. It seems like people in his center are cutting the videos apart into sections and posting clips on the social media channels where Shorts/Reels/&c. are common.
The video was about spirits and malevolent entities. When I say I haven’t invested a lot of mental energy in this topic, I actually mean it. Every time the topic comes up in pagan and polytheist conversations, my brain goes into study mode because it reminds me of my childhood fascination with ghost stories (which seems to have percolated into my fiction), and I also think of a horror movie I watched a long time ago where one of the protagonists had undiagnosed OCD and it manifested through compulsive folk magic warding practices.
The video ended up being about ghosts, which explains why I hunted down the full lecture to watch.
It was an excellent opportunity to spark my memory of the book Living Theravada from several years ago, which acquainted me with folk customs in adjacent areas (but not Malaysia itself) that could footnote some of what was said. Tsem Rinpoche said that many of these spirits are dead people who have not moved on and who are disturbed. For lay people, having a solid loving-kindness/compassion (metta) practice is the best way to handle most types of entities within one’s home. This allows someone to direct, with kindness, those feelings of friendliness towards the dead, locative spirits, and so on. Most of the time, the practice will make the phenomena worse for a short time, but then everything will soften into harmony, and this pattern is a sign that it is working. He added the caveat that, uncommonly, a spiritual specialist is needed for more advanced work. I appreciated the frankness of his discussion and how quick he was to dispel the audience’s fear about these things. It also reminded me of my hypothesis several years ago that pronoia-based meditations are powerful when done sincerely.
This December 26 is the anniversary of the 2004 tsunami, which killed a quarter of a million people and displaced 1.7 million people. To remember the victims and survivors, a new four-part documentary has been released, which has compiled footage together from camera sources that have not often been part of the main media coverage. Every episode follows several people’s experiences during the disaster as they are separated from loved ones in the chaotic surge of water, and the episodes are structured so we feel the uncertainty about their loved ones’ fates until we learn which of them lived. There are numerous memorials across the impacted region to remember the dead, and because this is the twentieth anniversary, look out for news articles about the in memoriam observations.
I was seventeen, and it was the first major disaster that I remember seeing on the news. The 2004 tsunami was also the natural disaster where I learned that international Christian aid organizations coerce conversions from people in exchange for basic necessities like food and water; the areas impacted by the tsunami were predominantly Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu. Once I connected that to the hostility that American pagans were facing at the time, especially in parts of the country where religious disclosure can lead to harassment and being driven out, I became very angry.
When I asked about it, I learned that the Christians around me were not making sure that their donations were going to ethical organizations — they thought that an organization being Christian made it inherently ethical, both because they thought winning souls was a good thing and because they believed that Christians are inherently more ethical than non-Christians. This is the event that made me so anti-missionary because I started doing research on humanitarian conversion coercion, and the more I read, the more horrified I became. It bothered me that people in the USA were voluntarily converting to the most coercive and bullying sects, ones that had and are causing so much harm abroad, instead of ones that had a more mature view of their faith, such as the Quakers, who do not proselytize. (Interesting fact: The woman overlooked for the pulsar Nobel Prize was raised Quaker, and the reason she was able to study science was because she complained to her parents about sex segregation between home economics and science classes; they were able to argue with the school on religious grounds to get her in science coursework.) Over the years, I investigated how the Doctrine of Discovery contributed to this mess. I learned that events like the Boxer Rebellion were washed of what actually happened — for example, that converts were destroying shrines and idols (at the behest of the missionaries) and the state tried to push back against that. I grew to suspect that if someone ever did a dissertation on religious conflict and which religions were involved, at least 80-90% of the conflicts would involve one or more exclusivist evangelizing religions, and it would probably frequently be conflict instigated by iconoclastic vandalism or forced conversions. I was just as impacted a year or two ago reading Davi Kopenawa’s The Fallen Sky, especially once I learned that the missionaries didn’t care that people were dying of contact-initiated diseases as long as those missionaries could bring Bibles into uncontacted or lightly-contacted areas. What if instead someone had come in with vaccines and an honest desire to establish friendliness with a group of people with no strings attached?
During a pronoia meditation in late November, I started crying spontaneously. I felt a sudden wave of anger about 2004 and similar events. It’s so strange how an injustice that I did not experience directly was enshrined in an occulted place in my heart. Maybe some of us get very agitated by specific moral wrongs to the point at which we are activated in the image of an Erinys, snakes and all. The Buddhist teacher had mentioned that when things get harder during a metta practice, it’s a sign of healing. Perhaps that is true here, too. If I stopped caring about this, it would be me ignoring injustice … but is there a way to route this sense of right and wrong constructively — with compassion and friendliness?
KALLISTI 