Racism and Christianity in Culture, Part Two
This is a continuation from the previous post. There will be no "fun for werd nerds" this time around, though there will be two book reviews.
Warnings
1. ) This post will get very dark, very fast. I have hesitated posting this because of the horror involved, but I've decided that the message is necessary. Both the "woke" and "anti-woke" mobs might want to skip this because I'm presenting a third path, which may be antagonistic to both.
2. ) Because of the subject matter, and the fact that I may need to state the "opposing view"; there is the possibility that what I'm going to say here can be misunderstood (intentionally or not) to support what I am in fact denoucing. Some of the statements I'm going to make may be seen as egregious or inflammatory (or both) if taken out of context (in the same way that politicians frequently do to each other's statements). Readers: Please read this post to the end before forming an opinion, and respect the blogger and the copyright here. Do not "lift" any statements from this blog post, especially to bolster a contrary opinion.
Analysis, part one (Though I reviewed Planet Narnia on the local public library's website, I posted none of the following there.)
As I menioned in the previous post, there is a disturbing thread of racism in the Narnia books, not mentioned in “Planet Narnia” and barely noticed (by me) when I was younger. It doesn’t actually appear until the later books in the series, and isn’t in all of those, but: the Calormenes (kuh-LOR-menes) are obviously objects of ridicule. (Lewis probably derived the word from Latin for “heat”, because they live in a desert south of Narnia, but it sounds close to “color”, and they are of darker skin than the human Narnians. Draw your own conclusions.) Their religion turns out to be demonic when their god Tash appears and fights with Aslan (the obvious Christ-figure in the Narnia books).
What are we to make of this? There’s probably some Islamophobia as well as racism there (even though the Calormene’s religion is technically polytheistic). Is it all simply because of the culture in which Narnia was written? Well, certainly, that’s partially true. But culture itself could be the problem. Culture (with a capital C) may even have been colonized by something evil, as in the second book I review here. (Similar criticism may be levelled at LOTR: the idea of orcs, degenerate humanoids who are forever beyond redemption, could be considered a racist concept even though they, like Lewis’ Calormenes, are obviously fictional. The LOTR movies mange to sidestep this issue in a clever though stomach-churning manner, as orcs are brought out of mud and slime, and animated by wizardry. Thus, orcs are artificial.)
Disclaimers
From this point on in this blog post, I will treat Christianity (or at least monotheism) as a “true” religion. Bear with me if that is not your particular frame of reference.
The following are excerpts from a journal I kept in the early 2000’s. Some of the incidents reported are long after the fact.
The First Book
American Indian Stories
by Zitkala-Ša
(I read this book some years ago, so the review here will be more cursory.) This is a short book, but an important one. The first half is a memoir which includes memories of the missionary school that was designed to strip children of their tribal cultures and replace these with knowledge of another culture (one which treated the children as inferior). The second half is a collection of traditional tales mixed with short stories about everyday life among the Sioux in the early 20th century; these, together with the memoir section, form a particularly harrowing read.
There is one particularly disturbing tale, “The Soft-Hearted Sioux”. Here, a Sioux man travels east, goes to school somewhere in the “White Man’s World”, converts to Christianity, spends time “seeking after the soft heart of Christ”, then returns as a missionary. There is the inevitable conflict with the members of the traditional religion, and finally the entire village moves away from the protagonist and his mother and father (the latter whom is dying). The unnamed protagonist spends the next few days in prayer for his father. He is finally convinced to go get some food (his father says “Your soft heart will kill me!”). Finding some cattle, he kills one and cuts off a chunk of meat. He is attacked by a rancher who is probably the owner of the cattle, and the rancher is killed. The protagonist returns to his mother and father, but is arrested and hanged for the murder of the rancher. End of story.
Analysis, part two: Racism in Culture
This is a grim account of part of a genocide, and incidents like this (whether this particular one is fiction or not) were certainly commonplace. Read by itself, that’s what it’s about. But it’s not by itself, and in context it’s even more scathing — and in a most uncomfortable direction.
Other of Zitkala-Ša’s stories include the theme of Christianity as an enemy religion, part of a culture that is bent on destroying their culture and way of life. Few would disagree with this. There is also a story about it being a “bigoted faith” seen though the eyes of a pantheist who worships the spirit of nature; the latter is seen as a grand, all-inclusive, and ultimately fulfilling religion.
“Some world views are spacious, and some are merely spaced.” –Rush (band).
Obviously all of this is a protest against the encroachment of a hostile alien culture. I would feel the same way if, say, a foreign cult decided to take over and systematically destroy everything that was familiar to me, replace my world view with another, and threaten to kill me if I didn’t oblige. But therein lies the problem.
The question of a “bigoted faith” actually has three possible answers.
1. Yes, Christianity is a “bigoted faith”, and Christians are therefore bigots. They naturally treat members of other faiths (and ethnicities?) badly. Racism and genocide are the natural results.
2. Yes, but Christianity is the True Faith, and all others need to be set aside (or at least altered) to make way for the Kingdom of God. This is not really the same as the first answer. It does not necessarily imply the attrocities in Zitkala-Ša's book. A person may be converted to a different religion in the presence of helping hands and education in a new system. Unbiased education, that is, not the repression of the "Missionary Schools". This is the way that I think a religion (any religion!) should be spread, though historically it seldom has been because racism and “my culture is superior to yours” have always intervened.
3. No, Christianity is the True Faith but other worldviews have something to contribute. The barbarism practiced by Christians against other cultures is an aberration.
(Notice that I seem to be equating religion with culture here. Hold that thought. I’ll come back to it.)
The third view (in my list above) sounds the most “spacious” as in Rush quote. Certainly it is the one that is most popular nowadays among Christians (or at least it was until the last few years of political turmoil). Some of the most popular books (produced by Western culture) of the 20th Century were written to express this view, particularly the works of the “Oxford Christians” or, as these authors informally called themselves, the Inklings. Lewis and Tolkien were in this group. Lewis’ Narnia books are set in a fairytale world full of “pagan” (i.e. pre-Christian European) creatures, but they are all subordinate to Aslan, obviously a Christ figure. In Perelandra, Lewis spells it out even more plainly: the “old myths” are probably “truer” than the “new myths” (meaning, in this case, scientific ideas — though Lewis was not anti-science; he was merely against what he thought was an aberration of scientific implications, the idea that God was not necessary.) Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, the world of The Lord of the Rings, is even more “other than Christian” on the surface: here is a world of elves, dwarves, dragons, trolls, magic, and a host of things that Tolkien simply made up. “Ents” have an air of nature worship about them. Literary critics have found existentialist and Buddhist ideas embedded in the narrative. So it would seem to be a (possibly haphazard) combination of all sorts of things, “such a paisley world” as a friend of mine in college commented (actually referring to Narnia). Obviously all of that stuff is there; The Lord of the Rings has so many layers that one could pick it apart for years. That’s probably part of its popularity. But a closer look reveals that it’s shot through with Christianity. In a lecture that I heard in college, one critic pointed out that there is not only one Christ-figure in the mix (see my review above): obviously Gandalf (Christ the Prophet), who dies to save others, comes back to life with more power, and at the end “ascends” to the realm that stands for Heaven in Tolkien’s world. But also Frodo (Christ the Priest), making the sacrifice (of himself, not only the ring), and Aragorn (Christ the King), who treads the paths of the dead and then comes in glory. But the pre-Christian myths are also there, in the same characters: Gandalf looks a lot like Odin, Merlin (traceable farther back to Myrddin), and the central European mountain spirit Rübezahl of Krakonoš. The Ring? Obviously it can stand for sin, but there are convincing arguments that it stands for the Atomic Bomb. (Speaking of bombs, does anyone really know what Bombadil is about?) Tolkien himself said that there weren’t such one-to-one correspondences in his writing anyway, so maybe all of this discussion is moot.
So the third view on my list is the one that tends to show up in literary masterpieces. But does it have any basis in reality? I used to think that this was a silly question (with possible negative answers leading to the horror I mentioned earlier) until I read the next book here.
The Second Book
The Twilight Labyrinth: Why Does Spiritual Darkness Linger Where It Does?
by George Otis Jr.
In this disconcerting book, the author takes a survey of world cultures (as well as psychology and neurology) and finds something nasty (or literally “demonic”) lurking beneath. The book is written from the view of (Pentecostal) Christianity, though Otis mentions that the same demons have infiltrated there as well. In mythology and folklore, this thing often takes the form of a serpent or dragon, guards treasure, usually appears in the air (between earth and “the heavens”), and is often associated with disaster (or, in what sounds like some form of cosmic extortion, protection from disaster to those who give it tribute). In society at large it manifests as hate, addiction, violence, weird cults, pornography, and war. After a number of accounts (all related to Otis in conversations from those who had experienced them), he goes on to tell how he was threatened by something supernatural that appeared in his bedroom at night (it said that if he published this book, it would harm his children); and one of his children nearly drowned the next day. He also notes the tendency in the modern world to discount such stories as fiction or superstition, and gives “alternative” readings of science and culture where they could be admitted to reality. It is here that the book faulters: much of the science is purely speculative and based on erroneous suppositions such as “young earth creationism” (the earth is only 6000 years old) — which I see as equally “demonic” because it implies that God is a liar. (If one tends to paranoia, one could connect the dots here and see an even deeper darkness: the thing that threatened Otis didn’t want him to publish this exposé of the demonic world even though some of it was erroneous, in order to further fool people into believing that the mistakes were also true…!) At any rate, it’s a fascinating book that will shake your world view. Just don’t read it before going to sleep.
Analysis, part three: The Demonic World
Otis’ book caused a great deal of confusion in my mind. I remember thinking that he had an interesting idea there, and maybe that was as far as it went; but again, if anything about it was “true”, then it would affect my own writing. The “Cloud Dragons” in my Tond books needed to be changed into something bad, or expunged from the novels entirely. (I eventually chose the latter option; nothing remains of them in any of my stories except the Fyorian word I invented for them. I reassigned it to something else.) So again, Otis’ book affected my own books, but that might have been as far as it went if I didn’t have chilling glimpses into the ”twilight labyrinth” myself, over the following several years.
(These are all true to the best of my knowledge. All three of these happened at a Pentecostal church that was experiencing a “revival” in the early 2000’s. They do not include simple “glitch in the matrix” experiences, which are probably due to faulty memory.)
1. The first night I attended the revival. My emotions of terror were completely unexpected and could not be explained. There was nothing to be afraid of; this was not even an alien religion to me (I had attended this kind of church service before). A “normal” reaction would be either to believe what was transpiring (and participate) or to not believe it. It has been said that one’s first reaction to an encounter with God is fear (there are Biblical precedents for this) but on the second night that fear was literally knocked out of me and sent running. I remember that I was suddenly simply no longer afraid, as if the fear had taken a physical form and then left. I didn’t feal anything leaving per se, but I found that afterwards, the “wall” (or total lack of feeling) between myself and spiritual things was gone. I fictionalized this incident in my book “Ussers and the Echo of Nothing”; there I bring up the possibility that I — or the protagonist Tony — had been hypnotized. I do not consider this a contradiction; such “religious experiences” can involve altered states of consciousness.
2. Exorcisms (known in Pentecostal parlance as “deliverances”): these happened several times in the same series of “revival” services. Again, hypnotism could explain the writhing on the floor and the screaming, but there are a couple where this is not the case. In one (which I did not see), all attending were talking about how the self-inflicted scars on a man’s arm had disappeared. In another (which I did witness), a woman was screaming in two voices — not her regular voice and an overtone or undertone (as in throat-singing) but two independent voices, both from her mouth, alternating but overlapping.
3. The most frightening of all. David Hogan, a missionary and guest speaker for several days, had been working in Mexico. He told a number of tales that seemed over the top (resurrections; broken or fractured bones suddenly healing on their own and going back into wounds from which they’d been protruding; driving a truck blindly under a large river to reach a village on the other side). I would tend not to believe such stories if it were not that, since he was speaking about God, he would be held responsible by God for lying. One of his stories involved real-life sorcery in the most graphic of terms. I don’t remember all of it, but he saw the victim of an actual curse, a deathly ill woman who was covered in running sores and growing bony spines out of her vertebrae (he called them “horns” and tried to pull them off, thinking they’d been glued on to frighten him, only to find that they were attached). Later in the same day Mr. Hogan and his friends were followed by something invisible that opened and closed a gate on its own and then exploded. He went on to say that the thing was defeated when it exploded; he went back to the cursed woman later to find the “horns” gone and the sores healed. This happened during a single night.
(As I’m thinking about this now, I realize that there’s a way that this could have been faked, though I think a “sores with spines” suit would work in a movie — see “The Fly” — but probably wouldn’t fool anyone in real life. And, what would be the point of faking this, anyway?)
4. During these “revivals”, at least two people I know (one was me) seemed to go temporarily insane (in a paranoid and egomaniacal manner) and later recover. I don’t know how or if this is related, but it again brings up the possibility of demons. (Insanity was, of course, blamed on demons before modern psychiatry and medicine.)
The horrific nature of these stories agrees with The Twilight Labyrinth that there is something nasty out there, lurking below the “normal” world, and able to affect our minds and bodies (and even our DNA) in grotesque ways. It’s almost as if the worst evils I’d invented in my Tond books had come to life (i.e. Lijnan-Kwarhmaki and grosks).
…Which brings us back to those literary fantasies far greater than mine. Books based on myth and folklore will naturally dredge up stories about demons and dragons and curses, and Christian authors at least need to know how to deal with them. It is also necessary to avoid any ideas of racism or bigotry that could easily appear if the demons and dragons and curses are said to be the property one particular culture or people (even a made-up one as in Lewis’ Calormenes). Modern scientific culture, of course, scoffs at such things and relegates them to the realm of pseudoscience and imagination (and it is too easy to blame anything bad on a demon), but in Otis’ book demonization of peoples (racism and bigotry) is much the same as worshipping actual demons. Therein lies the rub. Teaching a religion must be distinguished from teaching (or indoctrinating) other aspects of culture, and the bad must be discarded along the way. Including evil in one’s lesson simply breeds more evil, hence (back to the very beginning of this post) the idea that Christmas in not “politically correct”. I first encountered this in California some 25 years ago; it’s obviously based on the facts that 1.) Christmas is a Christian holiday, and 2.) Christians have been responsible for much of the horror in the past two millennia. The demons have gotten in with the preaching of the Gospel. Recently they’ve resurfaced in the American “Christian Nationalism” and border walls. I, for one, stand against them, and celebrate Christmas as the birth of the Anointed One.
Warnings
1. ) This post will get very dark, very fast. I have hesitated posting this because of the horror involved, but I've decided that the message is necessary. Both the "woke" and "anti-woke" mobs might want to skip this because I'm presenting a third path, which may be antagonistic to both.
2. ) Because of the subject matter, and the fact that I may need to state the "opposing view"; there is the possibility that what I'm going to say here can be misunderstood (intentionally or not) to support what I am in fact denoucing. Some of the statements I'm going to make may be seen as egregious or inflammatory (or both) if taken out of context (in the same way that politicians frequently do to each other's statements). Readers: Please read this post to the end before forming an opinion, and respect the blogger and the copyright here. Do not "lift" any statements from this blog post, especially to bolster a contrary opinion.
Analysis, part one (Though I reviewed Planet Narnia on the local public library's website, I posted none of the following there.)
As I menioned in the previous post, there is a disturbing thread of racism in the Narnia books, not mentioned in “Planet Narnia” and barely noticed (by me) when I was younger. It doesn’t actually appear until the later books in the series, and isn’t in all of those, but: the Calormenes (kuh-LOR-menes) are obviously objects of ridicule. (Lewis probably derived the word from Latin for “heat”, because they live in a desert south of Narnia, but it sounds close to “color”, and they are of darker skin than the human Narnians. Draw your own conclusions.) Their religion turns out to be demonic when their god Tash appears and fights with Aslan (the obvious Christ-figure in the Narnia books).
What are we to make of this? There’s probably some Islamophobia as well as racism there (even though the Calormene’s religion is technically polytheistic). Is it all simply because of the culture in which Narnia was written? Well, certainly, that’s partially true. But culture itself could be the problem. Culture (with a capital C) may even have been colonized by something evil, as in the second book I review here. (Similar criticism may be levelled at LOTR: the idea of orcs, degenerate humanoids who are forever beyond redemption, could be considered a racist concept even though they, like Lewis’ Calormenes, are obviously fictional. The LOTR movies mange to sidestep this issue in a clever though stomach-churning manner, as orcs are brought out of mud and slime, and animated by wizardry. Thus, orcs are artificial.)
Disclaimers
From this point on in this blog post, I will treat Christianity (or at least monotheism) as a “true” religion. Bear with me if that is not your particular frame of reference.
The following are excerpts from a journal I kept in the early 2000’s. Some of the incidents reported are long after the fact.
The First Book
American Indian Stories
by Zitkala-Ša
(I read this book some years ago, so the review here will be more cursory.) This is a short book, but an important one. The first half is a memoir which includes memories of the missionary school that was designed to strip children of their tribal cultures and replace these with knowledge of another culture (one which treated the children as inferior). The second half is a collection of traditional tales mixed with short stories about everyday life among the Sioux in the early 20th century; these, together with the memoir section, form a particularly harrowing read.
There is one particularly disturbing tale, “The Soft-Hearted Sioux”. Here, a Sioux man travels east, goes to school somewhere in the “White Man’s World”, converts to Christianity, spends time “seeking after the soft heart of Christ”, then returns as a missionary. There is the inevitable conflict with the members of the traditional religion, and finally the entire village moves away from the protagonist and his mother and father (the latter whom is dying). The unnamed protagonist spends the next few days in prayer for his father. He is finally convinced to go get some food (his father says “Your soft heart will kill me!”). Finding some cattle, he kills one and cuts off a chunk of meat. He is attacked by a rancher who is probably the owner of the cattle, and the rancher is killed. The protagonist returns to his mother and father, but is arrested and hanged for the murder of the rancher. End of story.
Analysis, part two: Racism in Culture
This is a grim account of part of a genocide, and incidents like this (whether this particular one is fiction or not) were certainly commonplace. Read by itself, that’s what it’s about. But it’s not by itself, and in context it’s even more scathing — and in a most uncomfortable direction.
Other of Zitkala-Ša’s stories include the theme of Christianity as an enemy religion, part of a culture that is bent on destroying their culture and way of life. Few would disagree with this. There is also a story about it being a “bigoted faith” seen though the eyes of a pantheist who worships the spirit of nature; the latter is seen as a grand, all-inclusive, and ultimately fulfilling religion.
“Some world views are spacious, and some are merely spaced.” –Rush (band).
Obviously all of this is a protest against the encroachment of a hostile alien culture. I would feel the same way if, say, a foreign cult decided to take over and systematically destroy everything that was familiar to me, replace my world view with another, and threaten to kill me if I didn’t oblige. But therein lies the problem.
The question of a “bigoted faith” actually has three possible answers.
1. Yes, Christianity is a “bigoted faith”, and Christians are therefore bigots. They naturally treat members of other faiths (and ethnicities?) badly. Racism and genocide are the natural results.
2. Yes, but Christianity is the True Faith, and all others need to be set aside (or at least altered) to make way for the Kingdom of God. This is not really the same as the first answer. It does not necessarily imply the attrocities in Zitkala-Ša's book. A person may be converted to a different religion in the presence of helping hands and education in a new system. Unbiased education, that is, not the repression of the "Missionary Schools". This is the way that I think a religion (any religion!) should be spread, though historically it seldom has been because racism and “my culture is superior to yours” have always intervened.
3. No, Christianity is the True Faith but other worldviews have something to contribute. The barbarism practiced by Christians against other cultures is an aberration.
(Notice that I seem to be equating religion with culture here. Hold that thought. I’ll come back to it.)
The third view (in my list above) sounds the most “spacious” as in Rush quote. Certainly it is the one that is most popular nowadays among Christians (or at least it was until the last few years of political turmoil). Some of the most popular books (produced by Western culture) of the 20th Century were written to express this view, particularly the works of the “Oxford Christians” or, as these authors informally called themselves, the Inklings. Lewis and Tolkien were in this group. Lewis’ Narnia books are set in a fairytale world full of “pagan” (i.e. pre-Christian European) creatures, but they are all subordinate to Aslan, obviously a Christ figure. In Perelandra, Lewis spells it out even more plainly: the “old myths” are probably “truer” than the “new myths” (meaning, in this case, scientific ideas — though Lewis was not anti-science; he was merely against what he thought was an aberration of scientific implications, the idea that God was not necessary.) Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, the world of The Lord of the Rings, is even more “other than Christian” on the surface: here is a world of elves, dwarves, dragons, trolls, magic, and a host of things that Tolkien simply made up. “Ents” have an air of nature worship about them. Literary critics have found existentialist and Buddhist ideas embedded in the narrative. So it would seem to be a (possibly haphazard) combination of all sorts of things, “such a paisley world” as a friend of mine in college commented (actually referring to Narnia). Obviously all of that stuff is there; The Lord of the Rings has so many layers that one could pick it apart for years. That’s probably part of its popularity. But a closer look reveals that it’s shot through with Christianity. In a lecture that I heard in college, one critic pointed out that there is not only one Christ-figure in the mix (see my review above): obviously Gandalf (Christ the Prophet), who dies to save others, comes back to life with more power, and at the end “ascends” to the realm that stands for Heaven in Tolkien’s world. But also Frodo (Christ the Priest), making the sacrifice (of himself, not only the ring), and Aragorn (Christ the King), who treads the paths of the dead and then comes in glory. But the pre-Christian myths are also there, in the same characters: Gandalf looks a lot like Odin, Merlin (traceable farther back to Myrddin), and the central European mountain spirit Rübezahl of Krakonoš. The Ring? Obviously it can stand for sin, but there are convincing arguments that it stands for the Atomic Bomb. (Speaking of bombs, does anyone really know what Bombadil is about?) Tolkien himself said that there weren’t such one-to-one correspondences in his writing anyway, so maybe all of this discussion is moot.
So the third view on my list is the one that tends to show up in literary masterpieces. But does it have any basis in reality? I used to think that this was a silly question (with possible negative answers leading to the horror I mentioned earlier) until I read the next book here.
The Second Book
The Twilight Labyrinth: Why Does Spiritual Darkness Linger Where It Does?
by George Otis Jr.
In this disconcerting book, the author takes a survey of world cultures (as well as psychology and neurology) and finds something nasty (or literally “demonic”) lurking beneath. The book is written from the view of (Pentecostal) Christianity, though Otis mentions that the same demons have infiltrated there as well. In mythology and folklore, this thing often takes the form of a serpent or dragon, guards treasure, usually appears in the air (between earth and “the heavens”), and is often associated with disaster (or, in what sounds like some form of cosmic extortion, protection from disaster to those who give it tribute). In society at large it manifests as hate, addiction, violence, weird cults, pornography, and war. After a number of accounts (all related to Otis in conversations from those who had experienced them), he goes on to tell how he was threatened by something supernatural that appeared in his bedroom at night (it said that if he published this book, it would harm his children); and one of his children nearly drowned the next day. He also notes the tendency in the modern world to discount such stories as fiction or superstition, and gives “alternative” readings of science and culture where they could be admitted to reality. It is here that the book faulters: much of the science is purely speculative and based on erroneous suppositions such as “young earth creationism” (the earth is only 6000 years old) — which I see as equally “demonic” because it implies that God is a liar. (If one tends to paranoia, one could connect the dots here and see an even deeper darkness: the thing that threatened Otis didn’t want him to publish this exposé of the demonic world even though some of it was erroneous, in order to further fool people into believing that the mistakes were also true…!) At any rate, it’s a fascinating book that will shake your world view. Just don’t read it before going to sleep.
Analysis, part three: The Demonic World
Otis’ book caused a great deal of confusion in my mind. I remember thinking that he had an interesting idea there, and maybe that was as far as it went; but again, if anything about it was “true”, then it would affect my own writing. The “Cloud Dragons” in my Tond books needed to be changed into something bad, or expunged from the novels entirely. (I eventually chose the latter option; nothing remains of them in any of my stories except the Fyorian word I invented for them. I reassigned it to something else.) So again, Otis’ book affected my own books, but that might have been as far as it went if I didn’t have chilling glimpses into the ”twilight labyrinth” myself, over the following several years.
(These are all true to the best of my knowledge. All three of these happened at a Pentecostal church that was experiencing a “revival” in the early 2000’s. They do not include simple “glitch in the matrix” experiences, which are probably due to faulty memory.)
1. The first night I attended the revival. My emotions of terror were completely unexpected and could not be explained. There was nothing to be afraid of; this was not even an alien religion to me (I had attended this kind of church service before). A “normal” reaction would be either to believe what was transpiring (and participate) or to not believe it. It has been said that one’s first reaction to an encounter with God is fear (there are Biblical precedents for this) but on the second night that fear was literally knocked out of me and sent running. I remember that I was suddenly simply no longer afraid, as if the fear had taken a physical form and then left. I didn’t feal anything leaving per se, but I found that afterwards, the “wall” (or total lack of feeling) between myself and spiritual things was gone. I fictionalized this incident in my book “Ussers and the Echo of Nothing”; there I bring up the possibility that I — or the protagonist Tony — had been hypnotized. I do not consider this a contradiction; such “religious experiences” can involve altered states of consciousness.
2. Exorcisms (known in Pentecostal parlance as “deliverances”): these happened several times in the same series of “revival” services. Again, hypnotism could explain the writhing on the floor and the screaming, but there are a couple where this is not the case. In one (which I did not see), all attending were talking about how the self-inflicted scars on a man’s arm had disappeared. In another (which I did witness), a woman was screaming in two voices — not her regular voice and an overtone or undertone (as in throat-singing) but two independent voices, both from her mouth, alternating but overlapping.
3. The most frightening of all. David Hogan, a missionary and guest speaker for several days, had been working in Mexico. He told a number of tales that seemed over the top (resurrections; broken or fractured bones suddenly healing on their own and going back into wounds from which they’d been protruding; driving a truck blindly under a large river to reach a village on the other side). I would tend not to believe such stories if it were not that, since he was speaking about God, he would be held responsible by God for lying. One of his stories involved real-life sorcery in the most graphic of terms. I don’t remember all of it, but he saw the victim of an actual curse, a deathly ill woman who was covered in running sores and growing bony spines out of her vertebrae (he called them “horns” and tried to pull them off, thinking they’d been glued on to frighten him, only to find that they were attached). Later in the same day Mr. Hogan and his friends were followed by something invisible that opened and closed a gate on its own and then exploded. He went on to say that the thing was defeated when it exploded; he went back to the cursed woman later to find the “horns” gone and the sores healed. This happened during a single night.
(As I’m thinking about this now, I realize that there’s a way that this could have been faked, though I think a “sores with spines” suit would work in a movie — see “The Fly” — but probably wouldn’t fool anyone in real life. And, what would be the point of faking this, anyway?)
4. During these “revivals”, at least two people I know (one was me) seemed to go temporarily insane (in a paranoid and egomaniacal manner) and later recover. I don’t know how or if this is related, but it again brings up the possibility of demons. (Insanity was, of course, blamed on demons before modern psychiatry and medicine.)
The horrific nature of these stories agrees with The Twilight Labyrinth that there is something nasty out there, lurking below the “normal” world, and able to affect our minds and bodies (and even our DNA) in grotesque ways. It’s almost as if the worst evils I’d invented in my Tond books had come to life (i.e. Lijnan-Kwarhmaki and grosks).
…Which brings us back to those literary fantasies far greater than mine. Books based on myth and folklore will naturally dredge up stories about demons and dragons and curses, and Christian authors at least need to know how to deal with them. It is also necessary to avoid any ideas of racism or bigotry that could easily appear if the demons and dragons and curses are said to be the property one particular culture or people (even a made-up one as in Lewis’ Calormenes). Modern scientific culture, of course, scoffs at such things and relegates them to the realm of pseudoscience and imagination (and it is too easy to blame anything bad on a demon), but in Otis’ book demonization of peoples (racism and bigotry) is much the same as worshipping actual demons. Therein lies the rub. Teaching a religion must be distinguished from teaching (or indoctrinating) other aspects of culture, and the bad must be discarded along the way. Including evil in one’s lesson simply breeds more evil, hence (back to the very beginning of this post) the idea that Christmas in not “politically correct”. I first encountered this in California some 25 years ago; it’s obviously based on the facts that 1.) Christmas is a Christian holiday, and 2.) Christians have been responsible for much of the horror in the past two millennia. The demons have gotten in with the preaching of the Gospel. Recently they’ve resurfaced in the American “Christian Nationalism” and border walls. I, for one, stand against them, and celebrate Christmas as the birth of the Anointed One.
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