Where the remainder pile in that bookshop is concerned, i have no free will. Books often come in pairs, but today I couldn’t leave without a set of three; God’s Last Words, The Book of J, and The Devil in the Shape of a Woman.
Why am i reading about how the Bible has been read? In part this goes back to my fascination with the combination of Taoism with misogyny+anti-technology elisions in Ecclesiastes. I knew i was groundless in understanding, missing connection to a world of biblical hermeneutics, without which i’d be underequipped to think this through. I took a look at the tradition and shied right away; no ten years in a theological seminary for me, looking for questions that i’m half-sure I won’t find, finding too much that I cannot accept. S’s mother, perhaps keen to reclaim her seed’s seed for Judaism, offered God Is A Verb and a syncretic approach not unlike S’s own pick-and-mix mysticism. I enjoyed it, didn’t fire with it, and dropped the thread for some time.
Recently T drove a spike through my mind, pile-driven with puritan sermons supporting a Word-literalist worldview unlike anything i have known a peer to express; a complete and perfectly-circular honesty of intent; a meta-framework for understanding what has been meant.
The King James is a great program; it makes my thoughts ring in syncopated metre. It jars me all the time with statements like “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” (I was told that i was a witch once, by a person who otherwise called me very accurately from almost no context. This was meant in the “we are all witches” / “we are all christ” sense, but i found some “truth” (or at least “truthiness”) in the statement. (Not in the wiccan sense; i still think that’s mostly disingenuous schlock and self-involved creative anachronism.) Thus the third book I picked up; while i’m in the geopsychic hotspot of puritanism and its discontents, i might as well learn in-place about what happened here hundreds of years ago.) I’m more or less scared to get to the post-gnostic bits near the end, Paul of Tarsus‘ flashes of casual violence and offhand misogyny; how can one read past this, if one cannot draw a line in the text?
Yet if all of us have been for some time cursed; to be subordinating and subordinated; to be conflicted with desire; in communication only to be displaced; then i always want to know why, with the insistence of a six-year-old child; to help figure out how the curse is lifted. I don’t expect to find out myself, but am glad to have an extra reason to try, wanting to understand my friend.
You, a witch? As an instigator-in-Universe, I think you more than qualify.
“The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.” –Robert Anton Wilson
Local terms always vary. Sub shaman/witch/hacker/whateva. The point is you’re jumping into a complex system to make change in the direction you would like to see things go.
In the same vein, I’ve always liked Bucky Fuller’s insistence on Universe as verb (not “the universe” as noun). Sub God/Allah/Universe/WSOGMM as required by local convention… A verb still fits the model better than any noun.