From God or the Devil: The Debate over Music …

The lawfulness of music has been the subject of an ongoing debate from the time of the advent of Islam. Opponents and proponents alike have accepted the basic concept that music works on the emotions; the question has been whether or not music seemed to contradict religious faith, as its opponents have argued in numerous writings.

There are many differing views within Islamic culture about the proper role for music: what it is, what it does, and what its importance is in people’s lives. There is a sharp contradiction between supporters who show a predilection for music and others who express a marked mistrust, which in the most extreme cases becomes hostile denunciation and a call for complete banishment of the art. As a result, we are confronted with a gamut of conflicting opinions.

The central concept shared by all parties is that music produces emotions. Its innate message is thus realized through its influence upon the soul. Since music is essentially a language of the heart, the musician’s art should emphasize emotion, relying to a great extent on instinctive control and inner wisdom. Although the musician is an indispensable part of the trinity--music, musician, and listener--the relevant literature on Arab music is more concerned with the nature of the effect on the listener and his physical or spiritual response to music.

The philosophers of the first centuries of Islam considered the variety of effects aroused by particular melodies; it was considered that these melodies in turn inherently possessed the character that they imprinted on the listener. In contrast to this sophisticated theory, however, most authors prefer to refer vaguely to the power of music, without troubling themselves to consider the question of whether a specific type of music caused a specific effect. They assumed that human beings are necessarily responsive to the charm of music and are incapable of resisting its power, whatever its character may be. This “truth” is reflected in a statement made by a mystical author, al-Hudjwiri, who lived during the 10th century in Ghazna, Iran: “Anyone who says that he finds no pleasure in sounds and melodies, is either a liar or hypocrite, or he is not in his right senses and is outside the category of men and animals.”

A central concept thus emerges within Islam ascribing to music an overwhelmingly influential power whose effect may take different forms: religious ecstasy and mystical union, ethical equilibrium, sensual excitement resembling intoxication, and healing for physical and mental disturbances if administered to possessed, haunted, or anguished patients.

The great importance attached to the actual effect on the listener, especially in a religious context, was expressed by the term sama. This word means “hearing” and, by extension, “the thing heard”--music. It contrasts with the term ghina (singing), which is used to designate secular urban learned music. Under the general title sama, one can, in most treatises on mysticism, find sections dealing with instruments, performing, practice, dance, and the perennial debate on the lawfulness or morality of music.

While accepting the basic concept that music possesses an overwhelming power capable of exerting a strong effect on human beings, the leaders of the different mystical orders offered a wide variety of explanations. The first manifestations of mysticism as an organized movement go back to the middle of the eighth century. By the time the first organized ritual emerged, music and dance were already playing a prominent role in the spiritual exercises that sent the worshiper into ecstasy and mystical union. The problem of music was thus vital. In the numerous beautiful lyrical poems dedicated to music, there are statements crediting the sound of music with the power to awaken spirits immersed in the slumber of ignorance and to make them stand up and dance like the dead who will rise at the resurrection to the sound of the last Trumpet. (Dance helps people uproot their feet, which are stuck in the terrestrial mud, and transports them upward to the summit of the world.)

Beyond such eloquent reflections and sayings, the mystic leaders also paid attention to allegations regarding the harmful effect of music. One of the early Sufi leaders, al-Darani, said, “Music does not produce in the heart what is not in it.” This aphorism was widely used in subsequent periods to argue that music is not directly responsible for the effects it produces; the effect depends exclusively on the virtues of the listener or the degree of mystical initiation. More explicit are the words of al-Hudjwiri: “Listening to sweet sounds produces an effervescence of the substance moulded in men; true if the substance be true, false, if the substance is false. When the stuff of man’s temperament is evil, that which he hears will be evil too.” Therefore, virtue, spiritual preparation, and premeditated attention are essential factors in receiving the true message through music. This high achievement was not and perhaps could not be attainable by everyone, even including adepts of the mystical brotherhoods, many of whom belonged to the lower social classes, as well as the marginal groups that turned to extravagances and practiced exorcism through frenetic trance and self-mutilation.

Set more or less within the same traditional material and on the fringe of the mystical doctrines and philosophy is the 10th century treatise of the ikhwn al-Safa (Brethren of Purity). One of the most comprehensive and eloquent presentations of music theory and behavior in Arabic sources, the treatise was part of a comprehensive encyclopedia composed by a group of scholars who called themselves the Brethren of Purity.

Different currents of thought are combined in his treatise, centering on the concept that music equals harmony in its broadest sense, that is to say, as a symbol at equilibrium and orderliness in the universe (the macrocosm) and in humanity (the microcosm). Human beings cannot know all that is in the universe by going about and studying it. Life is too short in the world too large; only by studying oneself can one attained knowledge of all things, which already exists within one. Music is said to act as a focus whose purpose is to explain and illuminate the wonders of creation, the phenomena of nature, and matters lying within the domain of human creation.

The declared aim of the Brethren was to release the reader's soul from its bonds by awakening the knowledge of the exalted harmony and unity of all created things, and the knowledge of possible progression beyond material experience. Musical harmony in its most exalted and perfect form is embodied in the heavenly spheres and the music that they make. Earthly harmony, including that characterizing the music made by human beings, is only a pale reflection of that same lofty universal harmony. Whoever sets his mind to that task will necessarily acquire the knowledge that, in order to enjoy the pleasures of the most celestial and exalted music, one must free oneself from the defilement of matter and release oneself from the shackles of this world.

The last part of the treatise includes sayings of philosophers and anecdotes that illustrate the blessed benefits of music and its determining power to affect the souls of its listeners, ideas illustrated In the following home, which extols the capacity of music to speak and teach the mysteries of the heart:

Do not be astonished if the plant of the zir (the
highest pitched string of the lute) draws the
savage beasts of the desert.

Although not a narrow, from time to time, it
pierces the heart, like an arrow.

Sometimes it weeps, sometimes it moans at the
break of day and during the day until the dawn.

It speaks without tongue. Who can interpret the
speech If not lovers? Sometimes it restores
good sense to the mad, sometimes it
enslaves the man of sense.

The ideas sketched above formed part of the everlasting debate, which began soon after the advent of Islam, on the lawfulness of music. Since all the opponents accepted the basic concept of music as a producer of a motion, Islamic writers asked in what way music contradicted religious faith on the ideological or ethical grounds, or whether the opponents of music were reacting to the discrepancies between religious normative expectations and the actual behavior and experience characterized by the flourishing of learned music and its Increasing importance in social life.

— Amnon Shiloah (from The World & I
A Chronicle of Our Changing Era
- Feb 1987)

(This was a secondary text inserted into the story from the preceding post, originally a magazine article … and it deserves to be printed along with it)
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Music in Arab Life …

The initial encounter of Easterners and Westerners with each other’s music did not, in most cases, result in love at first sight, or rather sound. Instead of poetical associations or feelings of delight, the other’s music often reminded the novice listener of a dog’s barking.

In the mid-tenth century, an early Iraqi traveler to Europe, Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, reported, “I have never heard worse singing than that of the people of Schlesvig. It is a humming that comes out of their throats, like the barking of dogs, but more beastlike.”  In August 1648, the French traveler M. de Moncoys attended a dervish ceremony in Cairo, which he described in macabre terms: “They all danced for more than an hour with horrible shoutings and screamings; they whirled with violence and a vertiginous speed to the extent that their dance went beyond what the wildest imagination can conceive of the witches’ Sabbath … They frequently alter their screaming to voices which sound now as enraged wolves and now as the barking of suffocated dogs.” More courteous in his observations was the Ottoman envoy to Spain, who wrote in 1780, “All the great men, by order of the king, invited us to meals, and we suffered the tedium of their kind of music.”

Coming closer to our time, we find from the sardonic pen of the French composer Hector Berlioz such evaluations as, “The Chinese sing like dogs howling, like a cat screeching when it has swallowed a toad.” Or the following judgment on Oriental music, “They call music that what we designate by charivari … Their song consists of nasal, guttural, groaning and hideous notes similar to the sounds that dogs emit, when after a long sleep they stretch their limbs and yawn with a marked effort.”

Music is not automatically a universal language. It is subject to misunderstanding as are other aspects of culture, but music, the language of feelings and symbolic values, reflects thoughts and beliefs, and is thus able to encounter other worlds.

The Development of Arab Music

The general name Arab music covers a variety of musical genres with a long history of development, spreading over a huge geographical area stretching from central and west Asia to the Islamized lands of black Africa. It comprises the communal songs and dances of the desert Bedouin going back to the period before the advent of Islam, diverse rural styles found among the numerous ethnic groups that embraced Islam, the learned and sophisticated type of music which was elaborated in the context of the supranational Islamic civilization, and, last but not least, the sacred music of various forms and complex relationships of different religious denominations.

The advent of Islam in A.D. 622, its rapid expansion over vast territories and its encounter with old and prosperous civilizations led to profound social transformations including changes in musical concepts and behavior.

One of the most striking illustrations of transformation was that even in the first century of Islam, the two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, became celebrated places of entertainment and diversion. Witnesses recount the magnificence of the daily gathering in the literary salons that attracted crowds of female and male musicians, poets, intellectuals, and notables of the ruling class. There were competitions and distribution of prizes, and well-known musicians demonstrated their talents to an enthusiastic audience.

A contemporary musician's chronicle, in which a great deal of legend is found, describes the brilliance of these musical fêtes. One account tells that on the occasion of a concert the great crowd gathered to take delight in the singing of a famous musician, but their combined weight caused the collapse of the balcony on which they stood. Another account comments on the magnificence of the Medina songstress Djamilla’s cortège on her pilgrimage to Mecca. She was escorted by fifty singing slave girls who, lutes in hand, accompanied her singing. On her arrival in Mecca, she was welcomed by leading musicians and poets with great pomp and ceremony. In the same way, the charm exerted by the singing of the eminent Meccan musician ibn ‘Aicha occasioned a huge traffic jam on the way to the holy shrine of the Ka’aba.

The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1405) wrote in his Prologmena to History that Islam on its first appearance avoided music to some degree, because the art of music is naturally associated with luxury and easy living, usually originating in a society free from the necessities and urgent needs of survival. After the great conquest, he says, “Luxury and prosperity came to them, because they obtained the spoils of the nations. They came to lead splendid and refined lives and to appreciate leisure.” So, following the example of the Byzantines and Persians, they encouraged the elaboration of a new musical art to which numerous talented musicians contributed, both Arab and “alien” slaves and freemen from different parts of the Empire who brought their traditions and the fruits of their talent to it.

No one can tell us now how this music sounded. It was transmitted orally. Information about it is confined to thousands of pages that describe and extol its characteristics and marvels, sometimes in anecdotal form and sometimes with a scholarly speculation. The character assigned to music in these writings is sometimes entertaining, sometimes sensual, and sometimes embodies the excitement associated with getting drunk. Only the philosophers continued to extol its moral virtues.

Emotion and Music

Tarab, a common and recurring concept encountered in most Arab sources to define the effect of music, originally designated a strong feeling of joy or of sorrow stirred, for instance, by hearing beautiful verses. Later it was applied particularly to the emotion engendered by music. Some related forms were derived from the word. Thus, musical Instruments were called alat al-tarab, the musician mutrib, and the science of music al-ilm al-matribi. In its various occurrences in the literature the term covers the whole gamut of sensations engendered in the heart on hearing an expressive song, ranging from a sweet sensual feeling to intellectual delight and solace, and including exaltation and uncontrolled excitement.

Since we are concerned in this context with learned music, assumed to conform to accepted rules and established norms and to arouse the response of well-informed listeners, it is interesting to look at the role played by the musician in tarab. Is the musician expected to experience the feeling supposedly being stirred in the listener’s heart?

The evidence provided by the sources clearly indicates that the desired emotional ambience in a public performance was achieved by an interaction between those who produced the music and those who listened and responded to it. An account of the Meccan musician Ibn Jami‘, who lived in the eighth century, says that he could attain the height of his expressiveness only when he experienced sorrow. In order to test this quality, the caliph gave an order to forge a letter announcing the death of the artist’s cherished mother. The stratagem was successful. Indeed, under the shock, Ibn Jami’ intoned a song so moving that the whole audience began to weep.

To render expression more effectively, the performer usually has recourse to facial and bodily postures as well as to special vocal productions. In turn, the response of the audience is manifested by concrete and frequent applause, which encourages the artist and stimulates his creative imagination. This indispensable give-and-take plays an important part in determining the quality of the performance as well as the content of the music.

One of the important aspects of this type of music making is the relative freedom enjoyed by the artist in rendering the traditional material. This freedom is expressed by a great deal of improvisation, a technique that achieved great prestige and cultural centrality. Another significant factor of this music making is the affection manifested by Oriental artists for the details composing a work. It is as if they were less concerned with a preconceived plan than with allowing the structure to emerge from the details. However, something like a hidden mechanism of control acts toward preventing the work of art from becoming just a random association of ideas. This kind of creative representation, which in theory can be extended infinitely, is also found in other Muslim arts and sciences.

Because the representation of living beings was prohibited, Muslim art developed an abstract art form known as arabesque, to which one geometric or plant-like shape grows out of the other, without beginning or end. This approach may give rise to almost innumerable variations that are only gradually detected by the eye. Similarly, the decoration of a carpet can be endlessly extended by the variations of its forms.

The Arabic classical poem elaborated in the pre-Islamic period is based on strict formal rules and fixed meters, with the use of monorhyme at the end of the multiple verses, each of which should be independent and represent well-rounded ideas. Successful verses may migrate from one poem to another and be incorporated in their new context. Generally speaking, therefore, an Arabic poem is not judged as a unit but according to the perfection of the individual verses.

This carpet-like pattern also characterizes many historical works in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Such writings, especially in classical times, contained valuable information that was put together without being shaped into a single cohesive work. Only rarely does the historian or philosopher reach a comprehensive, systematic view.

In music, the lack of deliberate “architectural” constructions, which characterizes the modal concept and composition, embodies a general value of the culture involved. Like the artist, the poet, the storyteller, the litterateur, and the historian, the musician embroiders on a canvas, improvising within the framework of given melodic patterns attached to modal variations of the greatest subtlety. The mode chosen may also be imbued with an ethical virtue and attached to a particular emotional meaning. The performer has recourse to specific timbres, which constitute a vital element in characterizing a style. Indeed, the microscopic occurrences in this monophonic music have an important role to play in music making. Timbre is the most difficult parameter to define because it does not lend itself easily to measurement and comparison. Individual artists basically draw their material from the traditional repertory, which they enrich by their own contribution in accordance to their creative capacity. Some of these contributions may take the form of innovation.

In many cases, musicians ascribed novelties to inspiration received from supernatural beings. Numerous accounts in the classical literature report that a djinn (genii) suddenly appeared from nowhere, usually at night, disguised as an old man come to teach the astonished musician a particular novelty or a new song. He disappears furtively leaving his host stunned. Eager not to let the new song be forgotten, the inspired musician urgently calls to his service a member of the family or a singing girl to have that person memorize it.

With the emergence into the modern world, some of the above-mentioned characteristics underwent certain transformation or transvaluation. Indeed, foreign modes, instead of being integrated, were allowed to substitute for certain traditional forms and norms.

Islam and Music

After the advent of Islam, this sophisticated music became a “universal” element of the new supranational civilization. It was widely accepted, spreading over the vast territories under Moslem domination. Its great success came from the integration of disparate elements through a subtle process of Arabization of the diverse foreign borrowings. This process involved the predominance of the Arabic language, the adoption of Arabic poetry, prosody, imagery, vocal ideals, and intonations, together with the Bedouin’s aimless structure (which probably endowed musical creativity with its characteristic of freedom). Thus, the manifestation of foreign borrowings in an Arabic context was experienced as genuinely Arabic.

Considering this universal music in the broadest sense, we must ask, how, if at all, it fits into the religious message of the Arabic prophet Mohammed, from which Islamic civilization developed. Was music included in the authoritative framework of questions and answers concerning the universe and humanity’s behavior in it?  In trying to discuss this fundamental question, we run up against the major difficulty: In the Quran, the holiest book containing the original core of the religious message, there is simply no reference either censuring or exalting music. The opinion that Mohammed rejected it is based on an interpretation of his denunciation of poets regarded as soothsayers and of poetry identified with a form of possession.

If we examine the facts, it seems more likely that the whole issue of the lawfulness of music is a later question, generated by the transformations imposed by the expansion of Islam, including new standards of life and ideals, as well as the extension of intellectual horizons. In their attempt to give an authoritative answer to the problem of music’s lawfulness, the theologians and legists were most probably concerned with what they saw as the disruptive effect of the dark and sensual aspect of fashionable urban aristocratic music and the growing attention paid to it. However, the equivocal nature of the evidence to which the antagonists referred gave rise to the conflicting interpretations that fill numerous polemic and apologetic writings.

The banishment of music does not usually involve the basic forms of folk musical traditions. Moreover, on a conceptual level, folk songs and dances are not considered as music, and the term music is not applied to them. Music is exclusively reserved for the learned urban art form. Therefore, folk music may be regarded as something that is not to be listened to for itself; it is subordinate to the predominating text, communal rather than personal. Its presence is useful because It is said to fulfill necessary functions in the life of the community.

The same reasons are valid for the rudimentary forms of cantillation admitted in the framework of worship--the solemn reading of the Koran and the call to prayer with occasionally a few simple hymns, close to folk tunes, used to enhance religious feasts. Hence, we may say that with the exception of the ceremonial music of the mystical brotherhoods, officially, Islam does not possess specific mosque music after the manner of church and synagogal music.

Among the arguments advanced by theologians and legists, the question of effect occurs frequently. In connection with the concept of tarab, we encounter in this context a corresponding term, lahw, which designates game, pastime, amusement. In the diatribe of the intransigents, the verb laha, from which lahw is derived, is usually defined as denoting an action aimed at amusing and at securing tarab. In the same way that tarab and its derivatives were extended to music, musicians and musical instruments, lahw, and the derived term lalahi, became synonymous with music, musical instruments, and even dance and dancer. We may assume that those associations had some bearing on theological attitudes toward music.

One of the earliest virulent attacks on music is contained in a treatise called The Condemnation of Malahi. The author, Ibn abi ‘Ioh-Dunya, a Baghdad theologian and jurist who died in A.D. 894, argues violently against music, which he regards as one of the chief catalysts of diversion from the life of devotion and piety. He links music with games and other types of pleasure. All dissipation, he claims, begins with music and ends with drunkenness. The oldest extant work of this kind, this treatise became a source of inspiration for later generations of theologians and jurists who were opposed to music.

Diversion is only one aspect of the argument. A recurrent denunciation concerned the intoxicating effect of music: In their highly emotional state, listeners lose control over their reason and act under the dominance of their passions. Hence the music, as an intoxicant provoking worldly passions in the soul and associated with sensual pleasures such as drinking and fornication, has a harmful effect on the behavior and judgment of people, who are driven to act like lunatics. This quasi-somnambulistic state was held by opponents to go against the exigencies of the rationalized religious precepts. On a more sophisticated level, the competitive influence of a humanly created world of sounds might have been regarded as a kind of polytheism.

Among the religious leaders who defended music, one finds criticism of inconsistencies in the opponents’ attitudes. Al-Nabulusi, a 17th century mystic leader and theologian born in Damascus, wrote in his treatise The Clarification of Proofs Concerning Listening to Musical Instruments: “It is astonishing to see that some of the legists attend mystical ceremonies in privacy and take pleasure in the music whether sung or played on instruments, yet when they are in the mosque they deliver sermons against it.”

Most of the antagonists found further support for their doctrines in the ultimate origin of music, ascribing to it devilish inspiration. Ibn al-Djawzi, a 12th-century jurist and preacher, delivered a violent attack in his book, The Devil’s Delusion, against the allegations of the mistakes concerning music, dance, and ecstasy. The author argues that music is basically a devil’s temptation or delusion. The devil dominates the soul and makes it the slave of its passions. The devil’s devices are illustrated in a conversation between a theologian and the devil: “‘What are these anklets on your foot?’ asked the theologist. ‘I shake them for man,’ replied the devil, ‘to make him sing or to make somebody else sing for him.’”

In support of his views, Ibn al-Djawzi cites the theory of the historian al-Tabari (d. 922) concerning the invention of musical instruments. The tradition reported by al-Tabari states that the first inventor of the instruments of music (malahi) is a descendent of Cain called Yubal. This refers to Genesis 4:21, “The father of them that play upon the harp and the organ.” Al-Tabari claims that Yubal invented the reed instruments, drums, short-necked and long-necked lutes, the zithers, and the lyres. The sons of Cain were plunged into amusements, and their behavior was reported to the inhabitants of the mountains--the descendants of Seth. Some of the latter went down to the plain, attempting to turn the sons of Cain from their depravity, but they themselves fell into the snares of beautiful women, music, and intoxicating liquors. All the elements of this tradition are found in Jewish Midrashim--the homiletical interpretative literature on the stories of creation, on which Arab authors most probably drew.

The better-known tradition than al-Tabari’s is that crediting Yubal’s father, Lamech, with the invention of the first oud (lute) and the first song. This tradition, which recur is in the literature in numerous variations, relates that Lamech in his old age lost his only male infant. He grieved sorely on the premature death of his beloved son and refused to be separated from the corpse. He hung it on a tree until the flesh fell from the bones. Then he modeled a lute from the skeleton and sang a lament to its accompaniment, the first of its kind in human annals. This myth of creation is also based on elements found in Jewish exegetic literature, which contains other interesting motives such as the relationship between music and the human body, the perpetuation of the body as a musical instrument, the symbolism of rebirth, and the like.

The battle against music has not waned even in the present day, as recent events in the fundamentalist Islamic world testify--official banishment of musical manifestations and even public burning of musical Instruments.

The Origin of Music

At this point the beach a split in the ideas concerning the origin of music. The first, we have the opinion put forward in ibn al-Djawzi’s Devil’s Delusion crediting the devil with the invention of music in describing his permanently active role in music making. This point of view corresponds to the popular belief that the inspired poet, musician, and the crazy lover are mad nun (possessed by a spirit).

In considering music as an irresistible sorcery inspired by the double we have a denial of the basic concept of a transcendental divinity ruling absolutely over the world and all human deeds. Secondly, the attribution of the invention of music to a descendant of Cain the sinner and its assimilation with depravity implies that music is a human invention reflecting human weaknesses. As such it is full of vanity and the company’s activities incompatible with the basic requirements of religious ethics.

In the opinions of attacking music, certain mystic doctrinaires considered music as God’s creation and divine effusion. They connected the music used in divine worship with the idea that everything that existed potentially before the creation of man became actual with his creation--including song. In this respect, the mystics also sought evidence in the antedeluvian legends in support of their arguments.

An Arab legend that refers to the origin of the flute illustrates this point of view and may conclude this tour d’horizon. This flute, held in great esteem by many mystics, expresses by its groaning, according to Djalal al-Din al-Rumi, the separation of man from God and invites him to unity. The legend tells the Adam was given at divine secret by the Archangel Gabriel. When he was expelled from Paradise, the secret troubled him and caused him in great pain. He was advised by Gabriel to throw it into a well. Adam did so and was relieved. Around the well grew reeds, from which were fabricated special flutes for playing hymns of praise to God.

— Amnon Shiloah (from The World & I
A Chronicle of Our Changing Era
- Feb 1987)

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on color

I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson because I know that the smell of an orange is not the smell of a grapefruit. I can also conceive that colors have shades and guess what shades are. In smell and taste there are varieties not broad enough to be fundamental; so I call them shades. There are half a dozen roses near me. They all have the unmistakable rose scent; yet my nose tells me that they are not the same. The American Beauty is distinct from the Jacqueminot and La France. Odors in certain grasses fade as really to my senses as certain colors do to yours in the sun. … I make use of analogies like these to enlarge my conceptions of colors. … The force of association drives me to say that white is exalted and pure, green is exuberant, red suggests love or shame or strength. Without the color or its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness.

Thus through an inner law of completeness my thoughts are not permitted to be colorless. It strains my mind to separate color and sound from objects. Since my education began I have always had things described to me with their colors and sounds by one with keen senses and a fine feeling for the significant. Therefore, I habitually think of things as colored and resonant. Habit accounts for part. The soul sense accounts for another part. The brain with its five-sensed construction asserts its right and accounts for the rest. Inclusive of all, the unity of the world demands that color be kept in it whether I have cognizance of it or not. Rather than be shut out, I take part in it by discussing it, happy in the happiness of those near me who gaze at the lovely hues of the sunset or the rainbow. 

 Hellen Keller
The World I Live In
pp 105 ff.

THE WORLD IS COMING

high and wide, in the vacant air . . .

straight through the four white walls of the real

until it no longer appears

different

from what the eye sees.

(Ronald Johnson, "Poem," Poetry, 120 (1972), p 144)

Unitarian Easter

Entering here, I hope the confetti
Can jazz up a burden

The pastor, for instance, calling birds, head back,
Or dancing an old French dance, hopping and kicking.

And now the congregation winds around the chancel,
Carrying damp, strapping forsythia sprigs, slanting them into a vase
Beside the kotoist, her song plucked and bent, a few blossoms raining on the strings.

God's weather today—sandals in puddles.
The moment of silence—raindrops on the roof, no comment
On the matter of God.

Sandra McPherson 

Captain Beefheart's Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing

1. Listen to the birds. 
That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere. 

2. Your guitar is not really a guitar. 
Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one. 

3. Practice in front of a bush. 
Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread. 

4. Walk with the devil. 
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub. 

5. If you're guilty of thinking, you're out. 
If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing. 

6. Never point your guitar at anyone. 
Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field. 

7. Always carry a church key. 
That's your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He's one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song "I Need a Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty — making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he's doing it. 

8. Don't wipe the sweat off your instrument. 
You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music. 

9. Keep your guitar in a dark place. When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it. 

10. You gotta have a hood for your engine. 
Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can't escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.

How not to worship . . .

You have felt, doubtless, at least those of you  who have been brought up in any habit of reverence, that every time when I in this letter have used an American expression, or aught like one, there came upon you a sense of sudden wrong — the darting through you of acute cold. I mean you to feel that: for it is the essential function of America to make us all feel that. It is the new skill they have found there; — this skill of degradation; others they have, which other nations had before them, from whom they have learned all they know, and among whom they must travel, still, to see any human work worth seeing. But this is their specialty, this their one gift to their race, — to show men how not to worship, — how never to be ashamed in the presence of anything.

John Ruskin

Fors Clavigera, vol I, 1871, letter 12

a parable ...

PART I

A PARABLE

I am today twenty-five hundred years old. I have been dead for nearly as many years. My place of birth was Athens; my grave was not far from those of Xenophon and Plato, within view of the white glory of Athens and the shimmering waters of the Aegean sea.

After sleeping in my grave for many centuries I awoke suddenly—I cannot tell how nor why—and was transported by a force beyond my control to this new day and this new city. I arrived here at daybreak, when the sky was still dull and drowsy. As I approached the city I heard bells ringing, and a little later I found the streets astir with throngs of well dressed people in family groups wending their way hither and thither. Evidently they were not going to work, for they were accompanied by their children in their best clothes, and a pleasant expression was upon their faces.

"This must be a day of festival and worship, devoted to one of their gods," I murmured to myself. Looking about me I saw a gentleman in a neat black dress, smiling, and his hand extended to me with great cordiality. He must have realized I was a stranger and wished to tender his hospitality to me. I accepted it gratefully. I clasped his hand. He pressed mine. We gazed for a moment into each other's eyes. He understood my bewilderment amid my novel surroundings, and offered to enlighten me. He explained to me the ringing of the bells and meaning of the holiday crowds moving in the streets. It was Sunday—Sunday before Christmas, and the people were going to "the House of God."

"Of course you are going there, too," I said to my friendly guide.

"Yes," he answered, "I conduct the worship. I am a priest."

"A priest of Apollo?" I interrogated.

"No, no," he replied, raising his hand to command silence, "Apollo is not a god; he was only an idol."

"An idol?" I whispered, taken by surprise.

"I perceive you are a Greek," he said to me, "and the Greeks," he continued, "notwithstanding their distinguished accomplishments, were an idolatrous people. They worshipped gods that did not exist. They built temples to divinities which were merely empty names—empty names," he repeated. "Apollo and Athene—and the entire Olympian lot were no more than inventions of the fancy."

"But the Greeks loved their gods," I protested, my heart clamoring in my breast.

"They were not gods, they were idols, and the difference between a god and an idol is this: an idol is a thing; God is a living being. When you cannot prove the existence of your god, when you have never seen him, nor heard his voice, nor touched him -- when you have nothing provable about him, he is an idol. Have you seen Apollo? Have you heard him? Have you touched him?"

"No," I said, in a low voice.

"Do you know of any one who has?"

I had to admit that I did not.

"He was an idol, then, and not a god."

"But many of us Greeks," I said, "have felt Apollo in our hearts and have been inspired by him."

"You imagine you have," returned my guide. "If he were really divine be would be living to this day."

Is he, then, dead?" I asked.

"He never lived; and for the last two thousand years or more his temple has been a heap of ruins."

I wept to hear that Apollo, the god of light and music, was no more—that his fair temple had fallen into ruins and the fire upon his altar had been extinguished; then, wiping a tear from my eyes, I said, "Oh, but our gods were fair and beautiful; our religion was rich and picturesque. It made the Greeks a nation of poets, orators, artists, warriors, thinkers. It made Athens a city of light; it created the beautiful, the true, the good—yes, our religion was divine."

"It had only one fault"' interrupted my guide.

"What was that?" I inquired, without knowing what his answer would be.

"It was not true."

"But I still believe in Apollo," I exclaimed; "he is not dead, I know he is alive."

"Prove it," he said to me; then, pausing for a moment, "if you produce him," he said, "we shall all fall down and worship him. Produce Apollo and be shall be our god."

"Produce him!" I whispered to myself. "What blasphemy!" Then, taking heart, I told my guide how more than once I had felt Apollo's radiant presence in my heart, and told him of the immortal lines of Homer concerning the divine Apollo.

"Do you doubt Homer?" I said to him; "Homer, the inspired bard? Homer, whose ink-well was as big as the sea; whose imperishable page was Time? Homer, whose every word was a drop of light?" Then I proceeded to quote from Homer's Iliad, the Greek Bible, worshipped by all the Hellenes as the rarest Manuscript between heaven and earth. I quoted his description of Apollo, than whose lyre nothing is more musical, than whose speech even honey is not sweeter. I recited how his mother went from town to town to select a worthy place to give birth to the young god, son of Zeus, the Supreme Being, and how he was born and cradled amid the ministrations of all the goddesses, who bathed him in the running stream and fed him with nectar and ambrosia from Olympus. Then I recited the lines which picture Apollo bursting his bands, leaping forth from his cradle, and spreading his wings like a swan, soaring sun-ward, declaring that he had come to announce to mortals the will of God. "Is it possible," I asked, "that all this is pure fabrication, a fantasy of the brain, as unsubstantial as the air? No, no, Apollo is not an idol. He is a god, and the son of a god. The whole Greek world will bear me witness that I am telling the truth." Then I looked at my guide to see what impression this outburst of sincere enthusiasm had produced upon him, and I saw a cold smile upon his lips that cut me to the heart. It seemed as if he wished to say to me, "You poor deluded pagan! You are not intelligent enough to know that Homer was only a mortal after all, and that he was writing a play in which he manufactured the gods of whom he sang—that these gods existed only in his imagination, and that today they are as dead as is their inventer[sic]—the poet."

By this time we stood at the entrance of a large edifice which my guide said was "the House of God." As we walked in I saw innumerable little lights blinking and winking all over the spacious interior. There were, besides, pictures, altars and images all around me. The air was heavy with incense; a number of men in gorgeous vestments were passing to and fro, bowing and kneeling before the various lights and images. The audience was upon its knees enveloped in silence —a silence so solemn that it awed me. Observing my anxiety to understand the meaning of all this, my guide took me aside and in a whisper told me that the people were celebrating the anniversary of the birthday of their beautiful Savior—Jesus, the Son of God.

"So was Apollo the son of God," I replied, thinking perhaps that after all we might find ourselves in agreement with one another.

"Forget Apollo," he said, with a suggestion of severity in his voice. "There is no such person. He was only an idol. If you were to search for Apollo in all the universe you would never find any one answering to his name or description. Jesus," he resumed, "is the Son of God. He came to our earth and was born of a virgin." Again I was tempted to tell my guide that that was how Apollo became incarnate; but I restrained myself.

"Then Jesus grew up to be a man," continued my guide, "performing unheard-of wonders, such as treading the seas, giving sight, hearing and speech to the blind, the deaf and the dumb, converting water into wine, feeding the multitudes miraculously, predicting coming events and resurrecting the dead."

"Of course, of your gods, too," he added, "it is claimed that they performed miracles, and of your oracles that they foretold the future, but there is this difference -- the things related of your gods are a fiction, the things told of Jesus are a fact, and the difference between Paganism and Christianity is the difference between fiction and fact."

Just then I heard a wave of murmur, like the rustling of leaves in a forest, sweep over the bowed audience. I turned about and unconsciously, my Greek curiosity impelling me, I pushed forward toward where the greater candle lights were blazing. I felt that perhaps the commotion in the house was the announcement that the God Jesus was about to make his appearance, and I wanted to see him. I wanted to touch him, or, if the crowd were too large to allow me that privilege, I wanted, at least, to hear his voice. I, who had never seen a god, never touched one, never heard one speak, I who had believed in Apollo without ever having known anything provable about him, I wanted to see the real God, Jesus.

But my guide placed his hand quickly upon my shoulder, and held me back.

"I want to see Jesus," I hastened, turning toward him. I said this reverently and in good faith. "Will he not be here this morning? Will he not speak to his worshippers?" I asked again. "Will he not permit them to touch him, to caress his hand, to clasp his divine feet, to inhale the ambrosial fragrance of his breath, to bask in the golden light of his eyes, to hear the music of his immaculate accents? Let me, too, see Jesus," I pleaded.

"You cannot see him," answered my guide, with a trace of embarrassment in his voice. "He does not show himself any more."

I was too much surprised at this to make any immediate reply.

"For the last two thousand years," my guide continued, "it has not pleased Jesus to show himself to any one; neither has he been heard from for the same number of years."

"For two thousand years no one has either seen or heard Jesus?" I asked, my eyes filled with wonder and my voice quivering with excitement.

"No," he answered.

"Would not that, then," I ventured to ask, impatiently, "make Jesus as much of an idol as Apollo? And are not these people on their knees before a god of whose existence they are as much in the dark as were the Greeks of fair Apollo, and of whose past they have only rumors such as Homer reports of our Olympian gods—as idolatrous as the Athenians? What would you say," I asked my guide, "if I were to demand that you should produce Jesus and prove him to my eyes and ears as you have asked me to produce and prove Apollo? What is the difference between a ceremony performed in honor of Apollo and one performed in honor of Jesus, since it is as impossible to give oracular demonstration of the existence of the one as of the other? If Jesus is alive and a god, and Apollo is an idol and dead, what is the evidence, since the one is as invisible, as inaccessible, and as unproducible as the other? And, if faith that Jesus is a god proves him a god, why will not faith in Apollo make him a god? But if worshipping Jesus, whom for the best part of the last two thousand years no man has seen, heard or touched; if building temples to him, burning incense upon his altars, bowing at his shrine and calling him "God," is not idolatry, neither is it idolatry to kindle fire upon the luminous altars of the Greek Apollo,—God of the dawn, master of the enchanted lyre—he with the bow and arrow tipped with fire! I am not denying," I said, "that Jesus ever lived. He may have been alive two thousand years ago, but if he has not been heard from since, if the same thing that happened to the people living at the time he lived has happened to him, namely—if he is dead, then you are worshipping the dead, which fact stamps your religion as idolatrous." And, then, remembering what he had said to me about the Greek mythology being beautiful but not true, I said to him: "Your temples are indeed gorgeous and costly; your music is grand your altars are superb; your litany is exquisite; your chants are melting; your incense, and bells and flowers, your gold and silver vessels are all in rare taste, and I dare say your dogmas are subtle and your preachers eloquent, but your religion has one fault—it is not true."

M.M. Mangasairian
The Truth About Jesus
(Introduction)
1909

an Ambrose Bierce keeper . . .

I keep an Ambrose Bierce quote widget over on my other blog. I wanted to keep this particular quote handy because I think it relates to some of the things I have been thinking and blogging about lately.

"There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know."

(We just don't know that we don't know them).

2 bits - Ken Kesey on the function of the artist ...

[...] from Shakespeare [...] get an audience [...] he went around in front of them and he'd grab them by the ears and he'd say,

— you listen to me!

That's what the artists have to do. There in public. Otherwise you'll be watching MTV and reading Ditmer's guide and drinking CocaCola. As I've often told Ginsberg, you can't blame the president for the state of the country. It's always the poet's fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision. They don't have it in them. The poets have to come up with a vision and they have to turn it on so that it sparks ... and catches on.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

What's the job [...] of the writer in contemporary America?
Right now.
Hmm. I'm not sure.
But here I'll give you an example[...]

You're gonna be walking along one day and suddenly there's gonna be a light. You're gonna look across the street, and on the corner over there, God is gonna be standing there.
And you're gonna know it's God because it's gonna have this beautiful curly hair that sticks up through his halo like Jesus. He's got little slitty eyes like Buddha. He's got a lot of swords in his belt like Mohammed.

And he's saying:

— Come . . . . to me.
— Come across the street to me.
— O, come to me.
— I will have the muses whisper in your ear. You will be the greatest writer. You will be better than Shakespeare.
— They will have melon breasts and blackberry nipples.
— Come to me.
— All you have to do is say my praises.

The writers job is to say:

— Fuck you, God! Fuck you!
— Fuck you! Fuck you!

'Cause nobody else is going to say it. Our politicians aren't going to say it. Nobody but the writer is going to say it. There's a time in history when it's time to praise God, but now is not the time. Now is the time to say:

— Fuck you!
— I don't care who your daddy was! Fuck you.

... and get back our job of writing.

24th October 1989
at a Reality Club presentation
.

Philip Wylie on religions

XII

It will be said that, for a man so intent on morals, I have been hard on the church. I would be harder; I would do away with it. This institution, this school for hypocrites and university of ignorance, has resisted attacks from myriad sane and decent quarters since the time it was divinely guided by a witchman with a drum and until the reign of the current Pope. Men of enormous good will, and hope, too--even men within the church, like Emerson--have shaken every timber of its moribund architecture. Yet it does not fall. It has a sinister viability. The church is like the Hydra that guards Hell’s Gate: whenever a successful cut is made at it, a head falls, whereupon two replace it. Let a dissenter penetrate some ignominious churchly superstition and so deprive the parent body of members and behold, one-two-ten denominations are founded on the objection.

Perhaps the old legend--the old archetype--is worth laboring a little farther. Hercules found, when he finally slew the serpent, that if the wounds were cauterized, they seized to breed the devilish double-domes. Some cautery is needed today, some fire of truth, some means of burning away the fission in the serpent's cells.

The church (as I have indicated earlier in this essay), almost any church and nearly every church, is a foundation designed to maintain a particular body of legends. According to the Jungian hypothesis, legends are the tangible forms which instinct takes in man, an inherent property of him and the inherent property of his subjectivity, generating themselves spontaneously in all places and at all times, peopled by resembling characters and telling parallel tales. So this viability of churches is explained by any sect and every sect. Instinctual man is under the necessity of giving some expressed form or other to the opposing forces from which consciousness has gradually emerged.

Out of their mysterious compulsions--will to live and wish to die, urge to procreate and dread of succession--even those island people I imagined as reared without benefit of man would slowly invent legends and archetypes. And until more analytical men discovered what it was they all were doing--how they were merely articulating their animal natures in the very attempt to deny them (by claims of being heroes and owning gods and possessing immortal shades) --the transcendental effort would constantly obscure their true transcendental possibilities. Their “shades” --their souls--would remain but shadows of egos which had taken on the garment of some godliness or other and thereby cast into darkness all view of the eternal time of instinct.

The love and the fear of gods, the adoration and the dread, our fundamental qualities of the interior man--his “religious nature”--blind to itself until his insight becomes pure enough, or scientific enough--if you prefer--to scorch away his old ego and the public estimate of man's importances. In the legendary, the religious patterns, forms themselves are all possessive. Until a man sees that agony and glory, the reasons and the emotions of living, the panoply of his own evolution and of the blazing universe by truth discovered repose in his instinct, the instinct will possess the man and he will generally seek a repository for it. Each church is such a repository; each religion therefore must contain the exalted and the cruel, the noble and the vicious, the pure ideal and the heathen applications. And if a somewhat reasonable man be argued out of one church, he generally must needs join another. He is but converted back and forth among archetypes. He eschews this sect because he has discovered it is too ritualistic, primitive, incredible or barbaric; he has debunked it; then he accepts a new faith which is more up-to-date but no less irrational in that it closes his mind some other way. Or, he wearies of pure reason’s syllogisms, of being a modern man without a god, and the instinctual core of him responds to the drumming of organs and choirs and the holding up of symbols which are not anti-septic but venerable; he is “convinced” by the strength of very real instinctual impressions; and then your liberal atheist is suddenly become a Roman Catholic.

The “need for God” is real to the vanity. It is a need of gods. Of names to put on instincts and on patterns--of a legendary to quiet the questions asked by the mind of the aspiring or the downcast nerves. Why do I do this? Why did I refuse? Why do I feel angry when I should be at peace--happy, when I should be ashamed? The “I” demands descriptions and definitions; these must be commensurate not only with the interior pressures but with whatever altitude of regard “I” has for itself. That is why rich people own such enormous gods. Who else needs or could temple them adequately or support delegated authority enough--the requisite priesthood? The unlonely poor have still small voices. And associations of people organize empires for their gods--states within states--supported by contribution everywhere in the earth-- and their gods can thunder loud enough to quake governments. This gives them all, rich or poor, a collective arrogance in the ego that is great enough to hold instincts everywhere in check, or stasis, or seeming balance, sometimes for generation after generation.

The godmen fear the atheist who, somehow peacefully and with a good demeanor, takes a small, solitary stand in the cosmos without assistance of one of their societies. But most, they fear the individual whose private authenticity has found them out—whose up-winging wisdom commences to descry there fettered situation and to detect in the heavens the more-enveloping pattern and to live in liberty by itself. The man of God and the soaring man are both ruled by instinct; one knows, the others do not. So it becomes the necessary self protective instinct of the mass to try to shoot down this individual. Wherever, in society, any process starts which might tend to undo the blunder of forebears who crept down from trees and slunk through the bushes with dangling arms--whenever there is a sign that the instinct of some man or men is about to investigate itself--the churches unite against the event, be it in pamphlet, a nudist colony, or science itself. For the sake of the peace of mind of all who are compelled, that which compels them must somehow be kept in shadow, where they deem their shades to be--and rightly. This is the explanation of persecution, office of churches, and the so-called will of God.

Since the churches the repository of instinct, it becomes administrator of it--and the archetypal theorem's established again by the shortest search for proof of this in any holy apparatus. One finds among naked savages, and the nearly-as-naked savages on Park Avenue in New York City, that religion owns and controls all human biological procedure. When a man is born, the church must baptize him. When he is adolescent, the church must confirm the baptism. When he mates, the church must marry him. When he reproduces, the church must be handed the offspring, that the cycle start again. If he would put his wife away from himself, the church must assent--or refuse to assent. If he sins, the church must forgive him. If he is sick, the church must take the advantages of comfort. If he is dying, the church must supply prayers and unctions. And when he dies, the church must bury him. Each of these steps costs money. A benediction will stoop to extort a farthing. And after a man is dead, the church expects a portion of his estate. Some churches put a posthumous levy on the entrance of Heaven. The sumptuousness of these offices is scaled by price; there is every class of baptism, wedding and funeral--even two-pants suits for the dead, one to wear in the church and a more durable pair evidently needed for a head start on eternity, in the grave. Though here, I do believe, it is the mortician who exploits the human vanity.

This is a Christian nation, where Sabbath is holiday, the property of churches is not assessed, untaxed donations to God (up to ten percent of income) are permitted by the revenue collector, money bears the name of the Lord, the witness to crime is sworn on the Bible, most violations of the Ten Commandments are punishable by law, and statesmen say grace. Yet there are enough different kinds of Christian churches here to convince any Buddhist or any worshiper of Baal or any Martian that the Christians themselves have no idea what Christianity means or what it intends that they should do.

It is generally asserted that Christians are monotheists but it is hardly possible to find a sect, as I have said elsewhere, which has not split its God into parts and sexes; some, in the person of saints, have as many holy characters as all the other pagans, heathens and idolaters. The clergy produces on-demand definitions of the gods to fit most purses and points of view. In many Christian churches the gods and their symbols are intellectualizations nowadays; but in some, they are still plaster, like any Hindu frieze. In all of them, a cruel creed of crucifixion (and a process of psychological resurrection which may lift the animal some few steps in instinctual awareness and is real to that extent) is offered in counterbalance to the American world and its main excesses. A little psychic pain at Easter, if not every Sunday, compensates the conscience for another year of the hundred and fifty in which we have nervously enjoyed an American Spree.

Half of the nation has little or nothing to do with churches and assumes that “religious freedom” implies freedom of their irreligiousness. It does not. America tolerates all churches. But no church tolerates unchurchliness; because of that, the free mind of the nation is disenfranchised without knowing it. We are enslaved by religions even when we will have none of them. They are one when one of them is criticized. Indeed, the pressure of sanity against them today is driving their sects toward physical reunion.

Liberty--the room for honesty--is everywhere a confining chamber, the theory but not much a practice, a condition believed to exist hugely until its measurements are examined. The intolerant churches have compressed it. Or they have kept it from expanding. This is an incessant catastrophe; it has given the churches their power-- swelled up religious pride where freedom ought to grow--and slain conscience everywhere in the name of Christ. Challenge of the fact is labeled hellish automatically (and, lately, ”communist”). Millions of Christians do not just rage defensively at honest men, but weep in the pity of piety for them, which is the more appealing instinct and attracts new sentimentalists to the altar--for a blindfolding or, more generally, for having the last of their weak sight put out. By now, every industry and profession and nearly every classroom in America has been corrupted to this purpose of the churches: to keep liberty from becoming extensive.

It is possible, in the United States of America, to publish such an essay as this in a book. And that is the outside dimension of the room here for freedom. As a book, it will be stolen from libraries by persons who disagree with what it says--which is not a service to truth but the very exercise of fear and an act of panic. Angered men, who do not like to have their natures or the etiology of their God disclosed, may attempt to confiscate this book by purchase from local stores or to have it banned from State courts. They have done as much before. People may throw copies of it on bonfires--as they have other books--and this, too, is a ritual of assuagement.

But I could not express such thoughts as these on the American radio or by motion pictures or printed in the newspapers or get them published in the magazines. No business has sponsored an atheist on the air--its gross would drop too suddenly and too much. Theoretically, the atheist has as much “right” to argue as the Baptist. Actually, he has no opportunity. The “good” people in our society choke him. For justice, they have absolute contempt. They already “know” that they are “right” and will not hear anything further or permit the public to listen to a syllable of dissent!

In the dominions-- the immense realms--where the church administers instinct, this perfidious circumstance has driven what we know so far away from what we pretend that we are all disoriented, whether we profess God and sit in the Sunday bench, or mock even at morals, and tee off every Sunday morning with a ritualistic oath in warrant of an imperial irresponsibility for man. We have gone insane. We are all mad.

The use of reason has provided us with a world which only reason can use. But not priest or scientist or any layman betwixt them can expose our secrets, separate the collisions, and assembled the schisms, to see what the use ought to be, or to be becoming. The instincts are confused on all sides. The codes that were sufficient for Jerusalem and Rome and Venice-high in for all the artisans and handworkers of time--have become irrelevant or manifestly in error. The new codes of communal association or corporate state breed frenzy. The original incentive of easy riches expires with the gutting of our continent. Nothing suffices. But no one is allowed by the churches to consult with the people on any moral matter in other-than-churchly terms. Examples are endless.

Birth control. Here is a discovery of our biology as fundamental of the learning of the art of fire. It means we must decide in our minds concerning what churches profess to own. Do the radio networks explain it and discuss it, as it revolutionizes man?

Evolution. Is this great discovery of human origin--the only proper introduction to learning--the schoolboy's first course?

Ethnology. Here is the science of tolerance among men, for it proves they are one--not cousins--but the same blood. Where Phoenicia mined tin, Semites bred with the natives. Where the Iberians halted, they brought the Negro stream, through African Moors, and Spanish Moors, with whom they'd lived. Each snobbish Anglo-Saxon may be part a Jew and part a colored man. Has this inexorable circumstance been made clear to every moppet old enough to clutch the Star-Spangled Banner? And does he also know what a torrent of Asia beats in his veins?

A book could be written of the mere lists of truths some men know that all should know, which it is forbidden to speak about in the presence of the general public.

Who forbids it? The church.

The gods and their arrogant servants, the men of God.

It is a pea-soup world. Truth hacks a hole, goes on, and the fog fingers of self-assessed virtue close up the place. The minister intones. The flabby lips of the priest moisten with a smile. The density is restored. The Republic's safe behind its clerical cloak, safe in the arms of Jesus-- that sad and terrible new erotic who have so little insight into himself, such giant ego, and yet such an intuition of the archetypes.

Ye shall know the truth.

Love one another.

Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.

Suffer little children to come unto me . . . for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom of God is within you.

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed.

For whoever hath, to him shall be given . . . but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Even the words of this man, spoken two ignorant thousand years ago, burn like the phrase at Belshazzar’s feast on the walls of every standing church today. These Christians have had that long to add to wisdom and every century they have moved a little farther away from it.

You cannot, today, even mention the sanctified repositories by name in the free press and the other free media of this great, free nation. The right of simple criticism is stopped up. The right to ridicule lies beyond editorial thought. Whatever it is that half the citizens ponder with their free minds, it cannot be constellated or directed toward an inquiry on churches or the correction of a church. England is freer. The English name names and assert critique, lambaste, enjoy the public literature of a liberty that has been murdered here.

You will find--for example--that ninety-odd percent of your fellows in this republic hold the late Mary Baker Eddy to have been part abomination and part fool, a quack in the science of applied psychology, a fat Coué; and yet, were have you seen or heard of a man allowed to dissect the sophistries of Christian Scientists in the public prints? It is tabu. It is a fruitful forest our tribe is not allowed to enter.

The objection to the Church of Rome is also mighty. This House of God has existed for a thousand years on the bodies of exploited human beings. In symbols and rituals it contains just enough awareness of instinct to bury deliberately continents and ages of the human mind. Its mechanics give it an access to that kingdom of heaven which is the human child, and it understands archetypes enough so to indoctrinate him that even though he forgets the experience he will respond to it the rest of his days and beg extreme supreme unction to ready himself even for a gangster's funeral. Freud explained it. Freud's patients, like Catholics, had been bent to their shape in the years of infancy. So with most crooked personalities. Instinct-- instinct. What ways it turns and how man holds the mold!

Wherever in the nation the Roman Catholic Church is able to grasp the public instinct, freedom dies, a tyranny is set up over the citizens to conform with the spiritual and temporal tyranny of this church, and cathedrals flourish while the people grow poor. A night of ignorance is walled around them like a sheepfold. The clergy fleshes up. Science is extinguished as a light among the laity and handed over to the Jesuits who have so employed it that their name of Jesus is a synonym for intrigue. Wherever truth of science interferes with hierachy, it can be rationalized or set aside or put out again.

That the church may seize the human conscience from the man, the Catholic confessional is held. And that the drive of sex may be channeled for the uses of popes and cardinals and bishops, the fear-engendering, worship-provoking symbol of chastity is kept incarnate in living men and women--in priests and nuns--who walk among the contemporary people wearing the garments of their death, the evidence they have married God and Church.

What other proof of instinct do you need?

Only a little while ago, this organism proclaimed (in the Vatican's own press) that a world horrified by the atomic bomb was a world which would at last understand why the Roman Catholic Church had fought science through the centuries. These words of the church's own confession of its central crime.

I know, good reader, my own hazard here, of being called anti-Catholic, or an anti-Christian Scientist, if there be such a term. I know it will be said that I am inconsistent to attack intolerance and speak against sects in the same arguments. I know that it will be said I have seemed to defend Jews while I assailed Protestants. These are the tags of entrenched bigotry by which they dislodge the judgment even of those who strive to be fair-minded. But remember how I began this chapter.

I am against no man on earth, but in a passion for the gain of understanding in every man.

I am against no special church, but all churches, because they employ the instinct of man above all else to maintain themselves, and because they do not preach or even pretend to own the morality of the Jesus they profess. And they do not even vaguely comprehend the overwhelming meaning of his institutions.

I am not an agnostic or an atheist--one who thinks the truth is unknowable or protests there is no God. My sense of truth in the matter is different; I acknowledge there is validity--however savagely distorted--in all these gods.

And I am against the distortion.

Let me be plainer. To every man who believes he knows the True God: I am against his God. For of each God, and then make the gods that render us mad to destroy us--the various Christ-Gods and all the antithetical gods that Christians fear and deplore (and court in secret) --Mammon, for example, and Venus.

Idols in the mind are identical with mud idols and merely look better to people were slightly aware they have minds. But we have at long last learned enough to be done with this one more appalling institution in man's story-- the peonage of the conscience--the church.

Let us make a place in the news of our society, then, for the exposition--lest present scourges, and the eternal advocacy of the idolaters, demolish that small chamber from which our bravest forebears intended such mighty liberties to come for. These Christians! They are at the wheels of every war. They are at the helm of monopoly. They lie in labor's dirtiest ditches. The American mom belongs to Jesus. As statesmen, a trade away humanity through the centuries like strings of beads and barrels of vegetables. These shining Christians! Their holy gleam, on close inspection, proves almost always to be the phosphore of putrescence.

Every man of honesty knows that we human beings are in the primary school of truth: we have barely learned how to learn. What we can find out concerning the nature of Nature, of the universe and of ourselves will inevitably show how stupid and overweaning are the Beliefs of this day. We should hold them ready, always, for surrender. That is bravery. That is greatness. To be foresworn to a dogma is to be shackled and it is also to be made the own worst enemy of one's self, for the part of the mind able to learn more, whenever it stands in the presence of new truth, will hate the part that is pledged to learn no more--even though both parts maintain the bond of the obscene loyalty. This is the thickness of thieves and the fierce, compulsory fealty of conspirators. The man steals from an self and conspires against himself and hence from the whole world when he says, “I know it all”--especially concerning God. If what men have claimed for God were the truth, the world would have been different long ago. So I oppose the claim. To the sincerely reverent, the somewhat honest, this opposition will seem painful. I am sorry. To the hypocrites-- the religionistic professionals--it will be infuriating. I am unmoved. My own pain to reach these conclusions was long and unexpressible; in the description of them my heart holds the steadiest good cheer and only the intellect is sometimes moved to anger as it speaks to the reader for liberty of the mind and equally against all anarchy and all tyranny.

The churches have dug the public habits full of channels to divert all civilized contemplation of themselves. When one churches taken to task, they say that all are being defiled and every Holy Name of God as well. Religious criticism from outside the church, they hold an expression of ignorance and the shameful occupation. It is a Sign of Communism, or anything else the majority despises: a sign of neurosis or sexual perversion. It is, the churches add, a violation of the Constitution, which grants men the right to worship as they please--a vicious national act, un-American in fact and intent. This habitual translation of the Constitution as a red-white-and-blue curtain over religious affairs is their favorite; it influences the most weak minds and has most deprived the nation of the fresh air of reality, fact, truth, and the equal rights of free speech that would oppose bigotry. For the Constitution gives no minority the power to interfere with the individual or his honorable opinions or his press or his legislature.

But the American churches do not hesitate--whenever other measures seem inadequate--to resort to blackmail, extortion, intimidation of free men, threat of assault in the pocketbook--all brands of Godly robbery. And so dear has property become to Americans that those who do not kneel to a creed, do kneel to property--kneel--and crawl when it is invoked by sanctimonious dastards. We will withdraw our advertising, the churches say to the editor. We will refuse en masse to subscribe. If you say anything about us that is not for us, we will boycott you. Print this praise we have written of ourselves. Cut out that speech. It happens every day to the Free Press: the hinting minister--the smiling, apologetic priest--the little talk--and the crime against man's completed in the name of God. I've seen it enough times in the managing editor's office and I have watched it originate in the churches to which I once belonged.

What dirty citizens such people make!

What cowards they are--for their own sakes which they call the sake of Christ.

Because of them, the radio is neuter.

Because of them, the motion picture industries maintain an office headed by some man of prominence check each foot of film against the avalanche of each day's bigotries--how long a skirt may be, how deep a neck this year, how wide a dancer may swing her hips for the Mormons, what double meaning some obscure theology might find in the dialogue, the date when Methodists rescind a taboo on the word screwy, the forbidden chuckle about bishops and all moral significances--that virtue triumph, that never a man or woman lie together unmarried with pleasure and sans punishment, death preferred--and so on and on and on to the outermost reaches of every filthy, sick imagination that has exalted itself in vice for the glory of God.

In sex, especially, and “sex morals”, the churches clench the dominion.

When life and death are not problems of the immediate moment, the problem of man and woman is greatest--as Freud found, and as I have said here, and as every asylum keeper knows. All that man does and is--his family, seen toward ancestors and progeny, the art of himself and his arts--has flowed from the duality of sex since the protoplasm remembereth not when. Thus, if the church cannot order and command the archetypes that represent the myriad opposites in sexuality, the church cannot endure. So its principal energy--its organizational libido--is directed to this end in ten thousand disguises and also by such psychological stratagems as I have already cited: the voluntary self-castration of a holy class of men and women for example--a violence upon life proportionate to the violence of sex instinct itself and cunningly intended to interfere with every private inkling of independence and of real purity, so that the individual will commit himself to the church, awed by this evidence of what seems inhuman might.

Ah! The dreadful crosses Ego invents to spare itself from the sight of instinct!

The church has such a necessity of possessing the public attitudes towards sex that hardly any thought foreign to any religious system is allowed a good expression and in this sense we could call ourselves a Roman Catholic nation, or Methodist, since what offends these is carefully concealed from all. Churchly control of the rules for sex behavior is of such ecclesiastical importance that its exercise has cost the general intelligence all common touch with morals. “Morals” mean sex morals to the masses, and not ethics. That fact provides many incidental conveniences to the church, for it can set up exact rules of sex biology, administer them immaculately, and divided the rest of ethics to suit property--allowing the secret, cheatful doctrines of business holy ascent, and confining virtue to certain alms, the support of arrogant meddling by missionaries, tithes for a new edifice, endowment of parochial schools, and the like.

Morals confused--sometimes unconsciously, but more often deliberately, methodically! Morals without reference to any knowledge that has appeared in the world since Babylon!

In the last half-century, the science of sexuality has been originated. At the same time, our technical society has found various means to prevent conception and has learned ways both to inhibit and to cure venereal disease. The sex instinct is now beginning to be understood. The physical fears--exploited by churches since the Stone Age--are banished. Everything that man knew about his sexual nature is changed and all he has done this subject to revision. The crisis in morals is more desperate here than elsewhere for this is the center of ordinary rally. Dilemma blazes in our promiscuous conduct; yet the brains and integrity of our society are not allowed to be brought to bear upon it--for impartial, public discussion is all but tabu.

Here, in all these churches, these religions, is the collective parallel for the process by which the individual falls blind prey to his own instinct. He imports to his ego every advantage that can be seized or mirrored from objectivity, to be convinced that he is not an animal but more than an animal--and he exports, by the act, all awareness of archetypal opposition, all contact with time and truth. The groups of the godly build their gods to shield the fact that they are animals. They eschew the reason in their heads and the dignities in their hearts, as the price. They will not treat with Nature evenly; Nature is too honest for them--as pure virtuousness and naught else--so they must forever lie. But they cannot be forgiven any longer on the grounds that they know not what they do.

It is possible, now, for them to know.

An Essay on Morals
1947