The Orifice as Sacrifical Site: Culture, Organization, and the Body

The Orifice as Sacrificial Site

SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE pi

Aldine de Griryter Series of Tests and Monographs

SERIES EDITORS Bernard Phillips, Boston Uniuersihy, Emeritus arold Kincaid, University of Alabama, Bir17zingham

Tames Aho THE ORIFICE AS SACRIFICIAL SITE Culture, O r p i i z a t i o n , arid the Body Lawrence Buscli THE ECLIPSE OF MORALITY Science, State, and Market Leo d’Anjou 3CIAL MOVEMENTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE The First Abolition Cniiipaign Rcuisitcd Frank Hearn MORAL ORDER AND SOCIAL DISORDER The Aiiiericaiz Search for Civil Society David R. Maines THE FAULTLINE OF CONSCIOUSNESS A View of InteractioiZisiiz in Sociology Pierre Moessinger THE PARADOX OF SOCIAL ORDER Linking Psyc/zology and Sociology Bernard Phillips BEYOND SOCIOLOGY’S TOWER OF BABEL Xeconstrlictii~gthe Scierztifc Method

The Orifice as Sacrificial Site Culture, Organization, and the Body

JAMES

AHO

Aldine de Gruyter New York

ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Aho is Professor of Sociology at Idaho State University. Among his earlier books in the Sociology of Religion are two celebrated studies of survivalist and hate groups in the northwest, The Politics ofXig71teozisizess and This Thirig of Darkmss. Copyright 02002 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ALDINE DE GRUYTER A division of Walter de Gruyter, Inc. 200 Saw Mill River Road Hawthorne, New York 10532 This publication is printed on acid free payer @ Library of Congress Catalogiiig-in-Publication Data Aho, James Alfred, 1942The orifice as sacrificial site : culture, organization, and the body / by James Aho p. cm-(Sociological imagination and structural change) Includes bibiliographical references and index. ISBN 0-202-30673-9 (hard : alk. paper) -1SBN 0-0202-30674-7(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Body, Human-Social aspects. 2. Body, Humaii-Symbolic aspects. 3. Body, Human-Religious aspects. 4. Generative organs-Social aspects. 5. Mouth-Social aspects. 6. Anus-Social aspects. I. Title. 11. Series GN298 .A46 2002 2001008575

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii ix

Preface 1

Introduction

2

The Orifice Experience

Interlude 1:Hand Over That Hamburger

1 15 27

3

Mifzvoth of the Mouth

29

4

Unhinging the Gate

45

Interlude 2: The Specter of the Dalit

61

5

The Dharma of the Lower Doors

63

6

Tantric Revelations

81

Interlude 3: Gay Pride Days

97

7

The Sabbat of Orifices

99

8

A Politics of the Orifice

117

9

Holy Hole

135

Works Cited

145

Index

153

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Acknowledgments My colleagues at Idaho State University have not always understood my motives for researching various social exotica, much less agreed with my findings, but they have invariably supported it. The present investigation was conducted with the help of Faculty Research Grant no. 681-548-01. Two people deserve special mention: Ann Hunter for her unswerving loyalty and perseverence and Don Pierson for his good humor and tolerance of weirdness. Michael Blain of Boise State University allowed me to inflict some of my ideas on a captive audience at the Pacific Sociological Association meetings in 2001. I incorporated the recommendations made by Jen Hawkins and Gesine Hearn on earlier versions of chapters. Bernard Phillips of Boston University provided a number of penetrating insights and suggestions that enabled me to integrate this project into the existing literature. As did John O’Neill of York University in Canada. I thank Richard Koffler for his faith in me and sound editorial advice. As ever I am inspired by the adventure-filled examples of Ken, Kevin, and Kyle. But even more by Margaret, my wife. She has broken through my defenses and opened my pores to receive the world. This is book is dedicated to Margaret Aho.

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Preface

America was just recovering from a morning-after headache following an ”ecstasy of sanctimony,” as Philip Roth describes the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, when Idaho State University awarded me a grant to conduct this study in 1999. I was already aware that this particular trial of a president for sexual malfeasance (and perjury) was not the first time that ”life in all its shamelessness, . . . [had]confounded America.” Both the Victorian era and the Progressive movement had witnessed their own gossipy campaigns against dirty books, demon rum, ”the weed with roots in hell” (marijuana), birth control, and ”white slavery” (Wagner 1997). Nevertheless, like many citizens I was shocked and disturbed by what the Clinton scandal revealed about the depths to which American political discourse could descend. And as I had done in the past, I reflexively sought to allay my concerns by turning to sociology. The product of my mulling is this book, a historically informed, cross-cultural account of body politics. For what I quickly (and in an oddly consoling way) discovered is that, far from being uniquely American, events like the Clinton debacle (and worse) have been repeatedly played out in the Islamic, Judaic, and Hindu worlds. Furthermore, I found that precedent for America’s own ”new puritanism” goes back much earlier than the late nineteenth century, perhaps to the founding of the nation itself. All of which raises another point. Without exception, these and other body commentaries are universally enframed in religious terminology. This book thus ended up to be a sociology of comparative religions, as these bear on the body’s entryways and exits. The Orifice as Sacrificial Site bases its argument on expert histories and on primary documents of selected religions, but it is neither a survey of these histories nor is it a technical contribution to textual analysis. Although I occasionally touch on concerns raised by specialists to lend depth and sophistication to my treatment, and comment where appropriate on the documents I utilize, in the end this is a sociology. That is, its goal is to discover explanatory principles of orifice management, rather than to

ix

Y

PREFACE

expound on the peculiarities of individual faiths; to find the attributes religions share, instead of the qualities that differentiate them. The methodlological rule I follow is this: Sociology is empty without the treasures supplied by area specialists, but area studies are futile if not informed by ;sociologicaltheory. I hope the reader understands that definitive proof of (anygeneralization, especially in a ”soft” science like sociology,is a logically impossible demand. The most that can be hoped for is that they find corroboration; I think those in this book do. The very minimum that can be asked is that they be testable, and not simply circular, arguments. I have much more to say about the theory informing this book later, but this is a good place to differentiate what I am doing here from other types of endeavors. I call it the method of ”sociological imagination,” a phrase coined nearly a half century ago by C. Wright Mills. Mills (1959) writes that the ”sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society” (6). That is, it attempts to account for the most intimate aspects of selfhood by taking into consideration the values that structure peoples’ lives plus the routine interactions in which they participate. In the following pages, the shorthand terms I use to stand for these two factors are culture and social organization. My basic proposition is that however much our characters may be inscribed in our DNA, at bottom we are constituted by our cultural and organizational milieus. Now, there is nothing more closely entwined with our private existence in the world, nothing nearer to selfhood, than the sense we have of our own bodies. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) has gone so far as to argue that embodiedness is more fundamental to selfhood than any other element, including the considered state of our own souls. Hence, the body is a particularly inviting place in which to study the impact of culture and organization on people. Here, I am not interested in the human body in general, but only in its minutest parts. Indeed, in contrast to the heart, lungs, brain, and bone, they often are not even recognized as present things at all, but merely as a series of sites representing nothing, emptiness: the body’s holes. My argument, very simply, is that these preeminently private sites are in reality ”publicly accomplished.” That is to say, the most secret reaches of our personal geographies, our orifices, are products of more encompassing structural circumstances, of which we have only a dim grasp. Thus, we can speak of a prototypical ”Jewishmouth,” so to say, and of a uniquely different ”Christian mouth”; of orthodox ”Brahmanic genitals” and of their diametric opposites, ”tantric genitals.” My task in the following pages is to elucidate the nature of these mysterious precincts and, above all, to demonstrate how they have come to acquire the qualities they do. In order to do this I attend to two things: first, to the prophetic moment of a people’s cultural ethos, the circumstances surrounding that point in

PREFACE

xi

time during which their dominant faith acquired its characteristic ”orifice signature”; and second, to the organizational matters concerning that faith, by which I mean its boundary concerns, internal hierarchies and disputes, external market situation, and the like. For all my words about the sociological imagination, the reader will find it hard to position this book in the academic ”tower of babel,” as Bernard Phillips calls the modern university, in which knowledge about humanity has been parceled into minute specialties, each with its own hermetically sealed jargon. The Orificeas SacrificialSite moves from the most secret dimensions of private carnality to all-encompassing social structures and back again as these course through time. It draws where appropriate from historiography, philosophy, anthropology, political science, and religious studies; as well as from subfields in sociology itself, including stratification, social conflict, race relations, phenomenology, and gender studies, to name just a few. I am fully aware that this opens me to charges of dilettantism, but I am convinced that the present state of information in our era, or more accurately de-formation, when each of us is at risk of drowning in a flood of seemingly isolated factoids, urgently demands truly interdisciplinary sketches of human embodiment. These are accounts broad enough historically and cross-culturally to faithfully capture our carnal being in all its wonderfully subtle social complexity. If one did not already know it before picking up this book, it should become abundantly clear by the last chapter that the strictures societies emplace around orifices are largely arbitrary. Beef is a clean food in Orthodox Judaism, but in Hinduism it is considered kakka (feces).Marijuana is condemned in America as an occasion of pothead lassitude and indifference. But in Colombia, peasants swear that cannabis is an agent offzierza and animo (force and spirit); a substance that allows them to labor in the field for hours without tiring. Originally, tobacco growing was punished as a capital crime by the Ottoman Empire; today in America it is subsidized by the state. While orifice taboos typically are experienced by their adherents as god-given, rational, universal, and natural, in reality they are relativistic human artifacts that promote the partisan interests of specific groups. Exposing their ontological status as social constructs is one of the boons, if it can be expressed this way, of the sociological imagination. Technically, it is known as the procedure of ”destroying” or destabilizing the ”natural,” naive attitude toward the things of the world (Aho 1999, 6-7). But a caveat is in order. Although my other biases should become evident later, nowhere do I imply that because they are social inventions can we therefore rid ourselves entirely of orifice restraints. In other words, this is not a libertarian tract. As a sociologist, at least, I am not a conscientious objector to humanity’s unending ”wars” on drugs, on fat, on gays, on abortion, on pornography, sex education, graven images, rock ’n’ roll

xii

PREFACE

lyrics, incorrect speech, heresy, body odor, and so on. (My position on these issues as a private citizen, naturally, is another question.) While such wars invariably end up infringing on what may be considered individual liberties, they are nonetheless crucial for social order. Born with few, if any, instinctual guarantees of peaceful life together, humankind is compelled to manufacture its own. And if it is true, as Georges Bataille once wrote, that man goes constantly in fear of himself, there is a very good reason for his apprehension. For those who live outside the law are either gods or beasts. Even Christianity and Tantrism, which, as will soon become clear, systematically set about easing the yoke of old orifice laws, found it necessary to reimpose on their confessors new, occasionally more onerous, regimens. Orifice rules, then, should be understood not just as tragic, but also as necessary. Call them tragic necessities. Whether one set of orifice proscriptions or another corresponds more closely to a putative natural law is the subject of another discussion. However, one thing should become clear, if I have done my work well in the following pages. Such taboos not only promote social order by constraining individual appetites and desires; when attended to in the proper frame of mind-which is to say ”religiously,” with care-they also can occasion ”glimpses of the Cosmos,” to borrow a phrase from Lester Ward. That is, they can enable dutiful practitioners to gain insight into a Mystery behind the otherwise ordinary (profane) acts of eating, defecating, and sex. Reminding readers of this is, I think, the real, abiding purpose of The 01.ifice ns

Sacyficinl Site.

I Introduction

Thankfully, sociology no longer suffers what Bryan Turner recently called ”theoretical prudery” regarding the body. While John O’Neill could still speak of the ”oddity” of a carnal social science as late as 1985, in fact its ”furtive, secret history,” as Turner dubs it, was over some time before that. At least since the English translation of Michel Foucault’s (1978) trilogy on the history of sexuality, it has become a truism in the discipline that the lived-body, the prototypical, everyday experience of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty 1962),is fundamental to being human. The central importance of lived-embodiment for human existence becomes evident in the very first moments of postnatal existence, a state mediated through fondling, breast-feeding, and bathing, which is to say, physical touch. As Foucault (1977) has shown, its salience for selfhood is also vividly documented in the logic of punishment (from poeizrz, meaning ”pain”), which in its most distinctive, primitive forms always involves physical violation: the cutting, piercing, burning, and poisoning of recalcitrant flesh. Indeed, it is probably more accurate to picture socialization as a process of ”corporealization” (the attainment of a sense of bodily comportment in the world) than as simply the acquisition of ideas, values, and attitudes (Turner 1996b, 494). For cultures do not just imprint abstractions on our minds; they also carve patterns into our flesh. Or as O’Neill (1985) would say, society is not just ”out there”; it resides ”in our bones” (24): in augmented breasts, liposuctioned hips, surgically lifted faces, tattoos, implanted stainless steel nose rings, and malformed feet; in food tastes, postures, eye play, and gait. Except for rare moments when our body’s reliability ”disappears” and it becomes visible to us as a distinct object, we don’t merely ”have” bodies; we m e bodies. We move through our worlds carnally, through handshakes, smiles, couplings, and sleep; tactically adorning, perfuming, and veiling certain body parts. Ernest Becker (1975) once called us mobile digestive systems. We careen through the world in an ”alimentary” manner, he says, frantically gobbling up other living beings and leaving behind 1

2

INTRODUCTION

trails of fuming excrement (Becker 1975,l-2). On good days we raise our heads over fields of corpses, smile into the sun, and affirm life. At other times we feel uncomfortable and ill disposed. But neither contentment nor its opposite is simply a physiological condition. Both are equally cultural accomplishments. Take health. In addition to implying a state of considered skeletal, biochemical normality, health echoes with positive selfregard, existential meaningfulness, equanimity, and completeness. (The words wlzole, hale, health, and even holy, all originate from the same root.) By the same token, lived-illness involves infinitely more than organic pathologies. It includes among its psychological qualities a sense of discredit, shrinkage, confusion, and pain (Goffman 1986; Kleinman 1988).For some people, furthermore, it resonates with sin (Aho 1999, 117-19). And while it may be true that human pain is anchored in the nervous system, ”it [definitely] labors under the dominion of the mind”(Morris 1991, 152-60). In other words, its physical locations, intensities, causes, and varieties-its being a throb, a sting, a burn, a shock, or a sear-and particularly its significance are constituted linguistically. Even the identification of a sensation as painful or pleasurable is culturally defined. In fact, sociologists are now coming to appreciate that our lived-sexualities-not merely our gender roles, which goes without saying, but our sexual identitiesthese, too, are at least partly cultural events (Weeks 1991). As Foucault (1978) says in his typically obscure way, sex is ”historically subordinated to sexuality”(1, 157). In short, then, for human being there simply can be no body apart from society. Among the most telling organs in the anatomy of the lived-body are its entry and exit points, its orifices. In all religious literatures, perhaps in all cultures universally, there exist rules regarding the display of body openings-eyes, ears, nose, mouth, genitals, anus, and skin pores-what is permitted entry into them, as well the disposal of their excreta (Loudon 1977). There are menstrual taboos and there are conventions concerning the disposal of feces and bodily ”vegetation” (nails, hair, sweat, ear wax, and odors). There are sexual mores, food proscriptions, and strictures limiting what is permissible to hear, see, and say. This book is a sociology of the orifice. It addresses the question of how orifice regimens vary from one society to the next, and it proffers reasons for these differences. Finally, it examines the role they play in legitimizing hierarchies and in promoting campaigns of persecution. Bryan Turner (1996a) argues that the proper study of the body is politics, and that ultimately the body lies “at the centre of [all] political struggles”(67).It is hard to dispute this, if it is understood that by politics, Turner is not referring to voting behavior, electioneering, and the like, but to the general subject of policing, governing, and disciplining body exhibits and

1NTRODUCTlON

3

appetites. All the same, Turner’s body politics betrays an objectionable bias. Specifically, he believes that the restraints emplaced around personal bodies parallel the economic requirements of a given society. The capitalist era of robotic, assembly-line production needed workers who could quell their passions, Turner says. So, it set about creating the appropriate puritanical body ethic. But this style of body government ’/nolonger conform[~] to the. . . requirements of the [postindustrial consumer] economy” (56).Nowadays, to maintain consumer demand, human passions must be ”extended,” ”detailed,” ”commodified,” and ”stimulated,” not restrained. In the postindustrial era, therefore, ”the labouring body” is superseded by the ”desiring body”(2). The Orifice as Sacrificial Site shifts emphasis away from economics to religion. To rephrase Turner’s proposition, my argument is that the proper study of the body is religion, and that the body lies at the center of all religious discourse. This is not to say that Turner himself does not display a deft and sophisticated appreciation of the role of religion in body politics. To cite just one example, while he demonstrates how the Protestant ethic arose to legitimize efforts by capitalist magnates to discipline factory labor (96-loo), Turner also acknowledges that as a vehicle for attaining salvation, Protestant ministers originally called for bodily control regardless of its economic utility (85-86).At first, he says, Protestant moral reformers limited application of the ethic only to household affairs. Only later did they extend its provisions to the factory, classroom, penitentiary, and asylum. In the twentieth century, however, the salvific underpinnings of the ethic have disappeared. Its ordinances have become medicalized and scientifically grounded in the principles of modern managerial technique. These points are all well taken. To my mind, however, they barely do justice to the actual-which is to say, ubiquitous-place religiosity occupies in the government of bodies. For, among other questions, it begs that of why: Why should Christian eschatology, and Protestantism in particular, find orifice control theologically congenial at all? And why has Christianity historically attended to some orifices-most pointedly, the genitals-while remaining largely indifferent to others, such as the mouth? As will be seen momentarily, the answers to these questions have little, if anything, to do with economics. For all the light he throws on the subject of body politics, at least in the account before me, Turner appears to repeat a misstep still too common in sociology. Technically speaking, his theory seems overly ideographic instead being more properly nomothetic. In other words, Turner gives the impression that the puritanical orifice regimens of the Victorian era (as well as postindustrialism’s ”baroque cultivation of desire”) are somehow unique to Western civi1ization.l This being assumed, he then feels justified in explaining them by invoking economic circumstances unique to the

4

INTRODUCTION

Occident, namely, rational bureaucratic capitalism. Later, I examine societies entirely unfamiliar with this form of capitalism, but which nonetheless have orifice restrictions far more onerous than anything known to Victorian Protestantism; and also societies with virtually no surplus product, but which nonetheless enjoy surprisingly "postindustrial," even licentious, cultures of desire. Norbert Elias (1982),using a power schemata rather than a strictly economic viewpoint, has offered a brilliant analysis of the evolution of European table manners. He explains the rise of belching, flatulence, nose blowing, defecation, and eating courtesies by pointing to the rise of the absolutist French court and to the disciplines it imposed on its courtiers. While in other writings Elias (1978,258)suggests that analogous processes also might have occurred at the ancient imperial courts of China, India, and Persia, he does not investigate this possibility in any depth. Thus, while he avoids the indictment of being definitively ideographic, by attending almost exclusively to modern European developments, he gives the impression-intended or not-that European civility and its causes are somehow exceptional. Here, I undertake what might be called a Copernican twist to the study of orifices. I assume, first, that there is little in Western orifice traditions not found elsewhere, at other times; second, that the relative lenience and rigidity of these traditions follow general "principles," for want of a better word; and third, that these principles have everything to do with two attributes of the religious groups that formulate those traditions: one, their organizational patterns (by which I mean their competitive situations visa-vis other religions, their hierarchical arrangements, and the security of their borders); and two, their prophetic cultures. Social anthropology has had a good deal to say about these matters, but it has failed to address them in an entirely convincing way. Let me spend the next few paragraphs showing how this is so. ANTHROPOLOGIES OF THE ORIFICE Rational Hygiene- Ecological Theories

According to some anthropologists, orifice taboos are rationally composed solutions for problems of living, which are then given religious sanction to encourage compliance. According to Marvin Harris (1985),for instance, Hindu law bans beef eating because the preservation of cattle confers ecological benefits to a simple agricultural folk. Cows can be milked, periodically bled for a protein-rich drink, their feces used as fertilizer, and their muscle power used to plow grain fields and to move water. Harris uses an analogous argument to explain the biblical and

ANTHROPOLOGIES OF THE ORlFlCE

5

Qur’anic injunctions against pork. In addition to being unable to sweat and thus to flourish in hot, arid climates, he says, pigs are inefficient converters of plants into meat protein. Therefore, as human population densities increased in the ancient Middle East, it became necessary to ban pig farming, while devoting more and more land to the production of grains. Biblical proscriptions that outlaw the ”spilling of seed,’’ incest, and adultery can be explained in analogous terms. Masturbation frustrates human reproduction; incest and adultery in addition confuse statuses, role obligations, and inheritance rights. Outlawing them therefore seems perfectly rational. So does the biblical banning of contact with menstruants. Menstrual blood may not actually be toxic, goes the argument, but it does (allegedly) emit an odor that repels ungulates and attracts predators. Either way, it impinges negatively on the survivability of hunter-gatherer societies. I have more to say about this orientation later. At this point, it is sufficient to defer to experts who, while admitting its appeal, insist that it ”remains controversial at best” (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988,20). Or as John O’Neill (1985) might say, hygiene-ecological theories may be ”tempting,” but they are far from ”complete”(61). Take the case of menstruation. The economic base of Indian society for centuries has been primarily agricultural, not hunting/gathering. Yet some of the most intricate and fearsome menstrual taboos ever devised are found in ancient Hindu scripture. Roman civilization, which also was rooted in agriculture, had its own elaborate menstrual rules. But in contrast to Hinduism, the Romans viewed menses as vivifying, not as toxic. It was used both as a pharmaceutical agent and as a fertilizer. Pliny recommended it for gout, goiter, puerperal fever, and worms (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988,21). Consider beef eating. The ”untouchable” rural poor, Harijans (or, as I call them later, Dalits or Candalas), who might have profited ecologically from observing the Hindu beef taboo, were sometimes its greatest transgressors. As a smirking Brahman recently said in justifying the government’s failure to provide them irrigation pumps: ”Harijans prefer buffaloes. It is easiest for them. They like tanning [an ’unclean’ occupation]” (George 1986, 86). Vice versa, the nonagricultural, prosperous, ”twiceborn” urbanites, such as the Brahman just cited, who have the least to gain from the beef taboo ecologically, are among its most devoted guardians. As for pork: If the animals’ being desert-averse, inefficient protein converters explains the Jewish/Muslim pig horror, then why did the Canaanites, a Semitic people who resided in the same area with a comparable technology, center their fertility feasts around the pig? True, swine are ecologically inefficient sources of protein. Nevertheless, they are over two-and one-half times more efficient than cattle. But cattle are a licit food source in both the Torah and the Qur’an. Finally, if taboos against incest, adultery, sodomy,

6

INTRODUCTION

and onanism exist to secure lineage and social order, why does Hindu Tantrism, while acknowledging their validity, also extol their systematic infraction? Evidently, there is something more at stake when it comes to the management of orifices than simply matters of hygiene and ecology. To begin with, a distinction must be made between orifice vziles, which may be explainable one way, and orifice taboos proper, which ”must be analyzed as taboos.” To do otherwise, according to Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (1988),”is to deny the nature of religion itself” (24). Taboos, after all, are symbolic devices. And while they may appear trivial and even silly to outsiders, for adherents they stand for things other than themselves that are far from small or stupid. But what might these be? Male Usurpation Theory

One answer, promulgated by feminist historians, is that they once again metaphorically present the conquest by patriarchy over female sensibilities.2Originally, so the argument goes, human settlements had largely selfsufficient, localized gardening economies in which women played pivotal roles as cultivators and decisionmakers. Their dominance was reflected, among other ways, religiously in the central importance paid to goddesses and to the female mysteries: birth, menstruation, and sexuality. The introduction of irrigation meant a shift from gardening to large-scale agriculture. It brought with it centralized states, standing armies, warfare, and, above all, male hegemony over the people’s cult. In the history books of the Hebrew Bible, in Hesiod’s cosmogony, in the Rig Veda, in the Babylonian Enuma elish, and in the Aztec codices, this usurpation is mythically memorialized in the same way; namely, as the conquest of the Great Mother (and her serpent consort) by a male hero: Yahweh, Zeus, Indra, Marduk, Huitzilopochtli. Theirs is the victory of culture over nature; and it is also signified by the pronouncements of a male lawgiver: Hammurabi, Moses, Manu. In the hands of this prophet, menstruation, birth, and sexuality are transformed into unclean things, poisonous, contagious, and deadly. As a result, they are tabooed and surrounded with elaborate protocols. This theory has the advantage of recognizing genitals and their discharges as symbolic of chthonic forces. But it condescendingly assumes that genital regulations have been created by men, for men because (among other things) ”the sight or thought of a person who bleeds from the genitals . . . is frightening . . .” to men (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988,93). But as Buckley and Gottlieb point out, while some genital rules do restrict women, others restrict access to women and may function in reality to keep females from being polluted by men. ”The possibility should not be ruled out that women themselves may have been responsible for originating the custom [of menstrual taboos and the like] in many societies” (13;

ANTHXOPOLOGIES OF THE ORlFlCE

7

cf. 9-15). In any case, as compelling as this theory may be in other respects, it does little, if anything, to explain the policing of nongenital orifices. Furthermore, it fails to appreciate that genital taboos are universal. Their existence bears little relationship to the level of civilization or to the type of economy. Indeed, hunting / gathering and gardening societies are sometimes known to impose greater disciplines on the genitals than ”maledominated” societies. Psychoneurotic Theories

Psychological approaches to orifice governance begin by acknowledging the existential condition of humanity, and with it species-wide phobias. These phobias can become neurotic fixations subject to obsessive efforts at control depending on culturally specific (mainly childhood) traumas. Bruno Bettelheim (1954), for instance, explains the practice of male genital mutilation-as exemplified by the so-called island of menstruating men, the Wogeo of New Guinea-in terms of ”vagina envy.” William Stephens (1962) understands menstrual taboos as expressions of ”castration angst.“ Norman Brown (1959) accounts for scatological rites by invoking the Freudian idea of ”anal eroticism.” William Lederer (1968) writes that the male terror of female genitals owes itself to ”mother complexes.” James Brain (1979), following the lead of cultural thanatologist Ernest Becker (1973), has reduced all these fascinations and dreads to a single anxiety, death. Out of terror of their own mortality, human beings devise legends about body openings and invent ceremonies to police their display and effusions. When attended to in the right attitude, these tales and rites allow humans to pretend that they transcend perishable matter; that they are essentially immortal spiritual beings. Brain goes on to improvise a mental revulsion scale for judging products of orifices in terms of their symbolic proximity to death, and by that to the density of personal obsessions and ceremonies surrounding them (204).3 Tears are farthest from death, hence the least revolting and the least subject to regulation. Next in rank come hair, nails, and sweat, followed by spit, nasal discharge, and vomit. Urine and scat are nearest to death. In fact, Brain quotes the natives of southwestern Tanzania as saying, ”the corpse is filth, it is excrement” (74). This explains the preoccupation with its disposal in all societies. As for the genitals, Brain cites the poet William Butler Yeats as writing, ”love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement’’ (58-59). And insofar as the distance between the vulva and anus is ”the narrowest bridge in the world,” then sex, too, is regarded as “dirty” and suppressed. Or, its animality is sublimated, hidden from view, and refined into romantic love. As far as it goes, the Brain-Becker thesis seems unassailable.4 The problem is that it does not cover enough distance to comprise a plausible

8

INTRODUCTION

sociology, which is my concern here. This is because it focuses on the presumed terrors of individuals. It neglects to show how these terrors actually translate into social institutions. Social life, after all, is rarely if ever a simple accretion or iteration of individual acts. ”Social facts,” as Emile Durkheim (1950 [1895]) might have said, must be accounted for in their own terms by other social facts. A glimpse at what exactly these explanatory social facts might be in the case of orifice regimes awaits the next section. Before getting to it, let me return momentarily to the other psychological theories listed previously. These, I think, can be dismissed as impositions of twentieth-century European neuroses onto non-Westerners. Not only is little evidence provided by Bettelheim, Stephens, Brown, or Lederer of the alleged mother complexes, castration anxieties, anal eroticisms, and vagina envies, apart from the various orifice customs they presumably explain, more important, they implicitly display contempt for these practices by categorizing them as medical pathologies. True, this is a considerable advance over the m o d condemnations of orifice customs issued by such nineteenth-century evangelical anthropologists as W. Robertson Smith (1972), who calls them “savage superstitions” that arise from ”demon” (as opposed to God) worship (119-37). Nevertheless, the psychoneurotic orientation betrays a failure to view alien practices in a way that the practitioners themselves could identify. Nor is the proper answer to moral judgmentalness a reflexive invocation, a la Harris, of rationalistic (hygiene-ecological) explanations. It is instead to penetrate more deeply into the lived-worlds of the people in question. In teIlec tuaI Theories

Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (1992) offers an example of what I have in inind. He, too, acknowledges that body politics are symbolic, but claims that such politics have little to do with psychology, let alone with neuroses. Rather, they involve efforts by intellectual workers to resolve ”contradictions” in the basic texts of their cultures. In ancient Judaism, these efforts took the form of legalism and casuistr-y. Hebrew Bible legislation regarding genital discharges, Eilberg-Schwartz argues, arose from a contradiction between the idea of humans being created in God’s ethereal image and likeness, and the lubricious reality of sexual procreation. This contradiction had a special salience for the levitical priests because they attained their positions solely through birth. How, it was asked, could God’s disembodied essence be reconciled with the very earthy origins of His servants? Eilberg-Schwartz’s answer is this: ”The multiplication of rules [in Leviticus had] . . . the effect both of mastering. . . and of glossing the generative conflict. Under the weight of legal minutiae, the original contradiction [was] lost from view” (19).

ANTHROPOLOGIES OF THE ORlFlCE

9

Apart from the fact that Eilberg-Schwartz’s theory suffers the same defect noted previously with Turner and Elias-it is overly ideographic and not general enough-it fails to account for the most seminal Jewish taboos of all, which, as we shall see, concern not sex but food. Furthermore, Eilberg-Schwartz admits that sexual contradictions are probably even greater in Christianity-which simultaneously admonishes sex for reproduction, but condemns it as a sin-than in Judaism (20). If this is true, then Christian sexuality should be even more encumbered with taboos than Jewish sexuality. Whether this is true or not, he fails to pursue a very promising lead. The most telling problem, however, is this: EilbergSchwartz decontextualizes cultural documents. That is, he tries to make sense of them without looking at the social milieu, as opposed to the intellectual problematic, out of which they emerged and which might have produced them. In other words, he emphasizes the desire by the Levites for logical consistency instead of examining their practical power interests in the formulation of Jewish law.

A SOCIOLOGY OF THE ORIFICE

In fairness, let me acknowledge at the outset that for all its failings, at least anthropology has tried to deal with the subject of orifices in an honest way. This is a far cry from American academic sociology, which, even if it no longer suffers from prudery, remains largely blind to the significance of body cavities. Still, anthropology’s formulations don’t add up to a satisfyingly plausible account of orifice taboos. This, because they either focus on the psychodynamics of individuals at the expense of the exigencies of group life (as in the psychoneurotic and intellectual theories) or, as in the case of rational-hygiene theories, they fail to deal with taboos as such, as opposed to mere rules. While male-usurpation theory does address social structure, it expresses feminist resentments of male hegemony. In so doing, it fails to come to grips with the actual complexities of body politics. What seems to be called for, then, is a theory less mechanical, less heavy-handed, and, above all, more socially adept, as it were; one, furthermore, that attends to the religious dimension of human existence. To say it differently, to more faithfully grasp the elusive emptiness of the orifice, what is required is a heavy dose of sociological imagination. If there is one fact upon which intellectual historians agree, it is that ”human beings think society with their bodies”(O’Neilll985,28).In other words, human anatomy and physiology routinely are employed in a metaphorical way to understand collective life. Societies are said to have their own ”circulatory” and ”nervous” systems (their own transportation and communication routes); their ”hearts”(hearths = homes); their

10

INTRODUCTION

”digestive organs” (economies); and ”heads”(governments). In both Hinduism and in St. Paul’s poetic of the ”body of Christ” (I Cor. 12:4-26) carnal analogies are taken so far that human body parts become attributes of the Absolute. In the Rig Veda’s ”Hymn to Purusha” we are told that the mouth of cosmic Man is the Brahman (the priest); its arms, the Kshatriyas (or warriors); its legs, the Vaisyas (traders); and its feet, the Sudras (servants) (10:190,11-12).Nor is this kind of thinking unique to advanced peoples. In his essay on embodied worlds, John O’Neill(l985) cites the belief systems of the west African Dogon and Fali folk as examples of ”carnal cosmologies.” For both of them the world is a human body writ large (30-37). O’Neill (1985) calls carnal analogizing ”anthropomorphism.” A better term, which he also uses, might be mirroring. For in truth we not only attribute body features to societies-which fact comports with the strict meaning of anthropomorphism-”too, we think our bodies with society” (51). That is to say, we use social classifications and processes to under,.L--A

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cel Mauss (1963) account for the origin of taxonomic systems. ”The first logical categories were social categories. . . . It was because men were grouped, and thought of themselves in the form of groups, that . . . they grasped other things [including their own bodies] . . .” (82).In the following pages I follow O’Neil’s (Durkheim’s and Mauss’s) intuition. At the risk of expressing the idea too rigidly, I posit that the experience of our personal bodies reflects the workings of our societal arrangements. In particular, I take our private exit and entry zones, our orifices, to stand for the doorways out of and penetration routes into the social bodies of which we are members. And further, I interpret the disciplines imposed on eye, mouth, anus, genitals, ear, nose, and pore to symbolize efforts by groups to stave off contamination, invasion, or absorption by other groups. I am indebted to the Durkheimian social anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966,1975a)for this notion and to her celebrated treatment of the themes of purity and danger. According to Douglas, personal body margins are analogous to social margins; and orifices, their exuviae and infusions, to society’s ”specially vulnerable points”(121). The terror of personal pollution strikes when beloved social forms are believed pregnable. In one society, the invader may be imagined as an alien food or drug, the members’ mouths serving as the signifier of vulnerability, which therefore become the focus of policing. In a second, the semen of outsiders may be seen as the vehicle of attack, the symbol of group weakness being the vaginas of its females, which are then subjected to discipline. In still a third, foreign words and pornographic images may be taken as the culprits. To avert the possibility that the eyes of the body politic might be contaminated, censorship is called for (Oboler 1974). Elsewhere, it might be the members’ noses or their ears that are inscribed as penetration routes, submitted to

SOCIOLOGY OF THE ORlFlCE

11

surveillance, and regulated by law. In his analysis of the dangers attributed to unconventional musical forms such as syncopation and jazz-I could just as well cite rock ’n’ roll, punk, or rap-sociologist Scott Appelrouth (2001) shows how throughout history the ear has been considered one of the foremost sites of group vulnerability. This, because a people’s aural receptors cannot be shut to the ”envelope” of sound, which can therefore ”dominate the space in which it is heard.” Henry David Thoreau (1963 [1854])once warned that “even music may be intoxicating. Such [an] apparently slight cause destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America” (147).The point is that other things being equal, thick, nonpliable group walls entail tight orifice strictures; lowered group defenses imply a loosening of restraints on appetites and effusions. It is worth acknowledging that insofar as ”we think our bodies with society,” the specter of group endangerment may give itself to consciousness as an anticipation of one’s own physical demise. This would explain the panics that sometimes precede declarations of war against various orifices and the gleeful ferocity with which the wars are fought. Think of book and record burnings staged by fundamentalist churches at night, of street demonstrations against porno shops led by self-authorized defenders of public morality. Recall the bombings of ”graven images” (Buddhist statues) by Taliban fanatics in Afghanistan in the summer of 2001, or America’s recent experience with antiabortion assassins and gay-nightclub arsonists. In all of these instances, terror of the apocalypse culminates in a political effort to control a single, supposedly elemental, body cavity. The personal body, then, is a metaphor of the social body; orifices in particular stand for a group’s weak spots. The more defensive and exclusionary a group is, the more pressure is placed on its members to police what goes into and what comes out of their bodies. My task in the next chapter is to show why such disciplines typically take the form of veligiozis taboos, as opposed to merely mundane, ”profane,” rules. Again, Douglas supplies the clue. Because they are zones of transition between our insides and outsides, she says, orifices and their products are experienced as anomalous. Being neither quite one thing, nor yet the other, they harbor a numinous, sacred quality. They mysteriously repel at the same time that they beguile; horrify as they enchant. Although it will become clear later that Douglas objects to the implications of her own insight, here I take it to its obvious conclusion; namely, that the body’s holes are, as it were, ”holy.” Chapters 3 through 6 describe orifice taboos in four self-evidently significant religions: ancient Judaism, Christianity, Brahmanism, and tantric Hinduism. My goal is to isolate, as exactly as historical documents permit, the founding or ”originary moments” of these religions, when each received its characteristic ”orifice ~ignature.”~ These moments occurred when clear differences in speaking and writing about body openings

12

INTRODUCTION

showed themselves: the inaugurals of the Jewish and Christian mouths and of the Brahmanic and tantric genitals. My argument is that the puritanical dietary and sexual regimes of Judaism and Brahmanism, respectively, were composed at the very instants they adopted policies of temple and caste exclusivity. In Christianity and Tantrism, these same dietary and genital taboos were lifted simultaneously as each embraced attitudes of inclusiveness toward outsiders. These four case studies should demonstrate unequivocally that the proper institutional context for understanding orifice regulation is religion and that orifices lie at the center of momentous religious disputes. This proposition is underscored in chapters 7 and 8. Earlier, I show how statuses in ancient Judaism and Brahmanism were conferred on the basis of moral ”cleanliness,” that is, on the degree to which devotees supposedly adhered to their respective orificial ethics. Now, focusing exclusively on Christianity, I point out how the evils attributed to marginal groups are accounted for by allegations of massive orifice transgressions, which I summarize under the phrase ”Sabbat of Orifices.” I then inquire into what sociologically might motivate Christians periodically to undertake campaigns to cleanse the world of so-called sabbat celebrants. This subject I entitle the politics of the orifice. In brief: When a religion believes itself besieged by competitors, it not only calls on its confessors to police their own body openings as a symbolic defense; it also mythologizes the competitors as threats to those same orifices. This legitimizes their persecution. Again, the idea is that everywhere and always orifices represent group vulnerabilities. In fighting the alleged orifice transgressor, the religion is saved, and with it the world. As these last few sentences indicate, the operational orifice ethic of a religion at any one time is far from being a product of its founding prophecy alone: its ”originary moment.” Of comparable importance are its organizational features, including the practical interests of its main carriers-its priests, ministers, and teachers-its always-mutable competitive (if the reader prefers, ”market”) situation, and the needs of its laity. What makes a sociology of the orifice so challenging is that these organizational exigencies sometimes occasion orifice rulings that appear on the surface to confute the original prophecy of the religion in question. Although I will have the opportunity to discuss these matters in detail later, two illustrafinm might be helpful here. For their time, Muhammad’s revelations were uncharacteristically tolerant, especially in regard to ”Peoples of the Book,” Christians and Jews. ”Allah is the Patron for all Believers,” speaks the Angel Gabriel through the prophet’s mouth (Qur’an 2:257). A legally binding lzndith attributed to Muhammad admonishes the faithful not to ”wrangle over that which you know not; try to excel in good works; when you shall return to God, He

SOCIOLOGY OF T H E ORIFICE

13

will tell you about that which you have differed” (quoted in Ali 1974, 212-13). Predictably, then, the taboos that the Qur’an places on the orifices of believers are comparatively limited in number. Except for a condemnation of swine meat and an oblique warning against wine (where it is mentioned with gambling and divination [2:219; 5:93]),those concerning food are identical to the apostle James’s extraordinarily liberal (for their time) Christian rulings (Acts 15:19-20, 29). Meat offered to idols is forbidden, that of carrion, and blood (Qur’an 5:2,4-6; 6:145-46). And even these few taboos are null and void during times of nutritional “emergency,” if they are eaten under compulsion, or if the consumer later does ”righteous deeds” in atonement. For as the Qur’an says, ”God is indeed oft-forgiving, most merciful.” As for the genitals, apart from the single mention of the ”pollution” of menstruation (2:222),there is only a vague warning against ”adultery and fornication” (24:2-3), an insistence on premarital chastity (24:33), and an admonishment (to both genders) to dress ”modestly” (24:30-31). Christian-style sexual asceticism, while deemed admirable in some cases, is judged unnatural, extreme, and unnecessary for salvation (5:96). Nevertheless for all this, wherever Islam has become tribalized, as among the warlike Bedouins of the Middle East or the sub-Saharan region, Muhammad has been appropriated to bless the imposition of harsh, occasionally bloody, orifice regimes. By mutilating the vulvas of its females in rites of passage to adulthood, they are denied the genital sensations of pleasure. This presumably mitigates their legendary propensities for promiscuity and symbolically secures tribal boundaries from invasion (Eisler 1995, 20, 94-95, 411 nn.19-20). The fundamentalist Muslim practices of seclusion and of veiling the ”shame” of the female form, especially the face, which harbors several points of symbolic (tribal) vulnerability, likely serve analogous functions (Eisler 1995, 97-99, 424 n. 45, 425 n. 47). The Taliban, who practice an extreme form of Wahhabi puritanism, have gone so far as to establish a Ministry of Virtue and Vice that demands imprisonment, lashing, and occasionally stoning to death of females whose domiciles have transparent window panes, women seen reading, women listening to ”monotonous music” set to tambourines, or frequenting public places without legitimate adult male supervision. Compare this to Judaism. As explained later, ancient Judaism was unique for its day in its intolerance of both local guest peoples and foreigners. And, as predicted, it was uncommonly strict in regard to body appetites and diet. Partly in response to Israel’s hostile Muslim neighbors (and at an earlier time due to the anti-Semitic atmosphere of Russia and Poland), its Orthodox carriers insist on maintaining its exclusive tenor, while adhering to orifice restrictions whose sheer mass are unparalleled among the major world religions. As the first vignette in this book shows, some of these restrictions are still enforced by Israeli officials today. Reform

24

INTRODUCTION

Jewry, on the other hand, a movement of loyal dissenters that arose out of the accommodating democratic atmosphere of Napoleonic France and from Enlightenment sentiments, explicitly rejects the idea of the selfimposed ghetto, and with it the onerous orifice irzitzvotlz (obligations) of halachic orthodoxy. Instead, it considers the core of faith to be action consistent with liberal bourgeois notions of biblical charity and justice.6 To reiterate, a particular religion may inaugurate itself with a liberal prophetic ethos in regard to body openings, tarry for a while with a decidedly antiliberal ethic, and return again to the presumed stance of its founders. The outcome all depends on the material and ideal interests of the intellectual carriers of the faith during the time in question, plus the social circumstances, especially the competitive environment, they face. In other words, rarely can orifice taboos or their lack be traced to a single influence. Which brings me back to the four anthropologies of the orifice reviewed earlier. For, if they have an overriding weakness, it is precisely their reductionism. In their rush to map the body’s geography from the standpoint of one simple cartographic projection-be it ecology, neurosis, male domination, or the rules of logic-each slights its intricacies. An acceptably sophisticated biography of the lived body necessitates that it be situated both in the prophetic traditions of relevant societies and in the organizational workings-the hierarchies, boundary disputes, market concerns, and pastoral problems faced by their respective faiths. The point is not to construct one more abstract, mechanistic model; that would defeat my whole purpose. Instead, it is to comprehend the most personal of things, things so ”there” as to be nearly invisible in the most artfully subtle, sociologically imaginative way possible.

NOTES 1. Elsewhere, Turner avoids this evident problem (Turner 199613). 2. For a sample of writing from this perspective, posed in lay terms, see Eisler (1995).For a more comprehensive, scholarly account, see Campbell (1970). 3. For a comparable, if more sophisticated disgust scale, see Haidt, McCauley, and Rozin (1994). 4. For a recent discussion of this notion with a review of experimental findings bearing on it, see Goldenberg et al. (2000). 5. The search for ”founding moments” is based loosely on the Nietzschean idea of genealogy, as advanced by Martin Heidegger, and later by Michel Foucault. I discuss it in more detail in the final chapter. See also Aho (1999,13948). 6. The continuing relevance of these matters for modern Judaism is documented in Frank (1993).

2 The Orifice Experience ”Can we say that the waste of a holy man is holy waste? . . . Can we say that the anus of the holy man is a holy anus? . . . On the human body we have many orifices, but which orifice does the baby come through, the most special one?. . . But doesn’t urine also come out of there? Think about it, . . . Do you think that hole is a dirty hole or a holy hole?”(Maass 1998,48) These questions were posed recently by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church. In his typically unsettling way, he was trying to get his audience to consider the possibility that body openings and the stuff that comes from them might be more than just defiling. They also might be holy: filthy and sacred at the same time. In the following pages, I take up Moon’s challenge to reflect on this paradoxical possibility more closely. This, by conducting a ”phenomenology of the orifice,” an inquiry into the prototypical qualities of the primitive orifice experience. By primitive, I mean those qualities given to consciousness prior to their being overlain by strata of theological, moralistic, and biological thinking. ”All body openings,” says Erich Neumann (1963), “eyes, ears, nose, mouth (navel),rectum, genital zone-as well as the skin, have, as places of exchange between inside and outside, a numinous accent for early man” (39).lThat is to say, they present themselves to ”early man” as sacred. But they are also experienced as unclean. Rheum is icky; semen, disgusting; spit, disease-ridden; scat and urine, polluting; vomit, revolting; vaginal blood, poisonous; and so on with less highly charged discards: sweat, hair, nails, ear wax. Now the French equivalent to ”unclean” is l’immoizde (Cixous 1993, 117); the Portuguese word is imzindo. Imundo refers to what lies outside the common everyday world, the inzindo of propriety, order, and cleanliness. But that which resides beyond the boundaries of convention, which is to say the extraordinary, the unbelievable, the impossible, is precisely what is meant by the sacred. Radically unclean things are imundo; orifices and their effluvia are radically unclean.

15

16

THE ORIFICE EXPERIENCE

ORIFICES AND DIRT

Dirt, writes Mary Douglas, is "matter out of place" (Douglas 1966, 35-36; 1975a). In other words, nothing in itself is filthy. What makes it unclean when it is so, is that it offends our sense of form and rightness. Dirty things confuse; they bring together what is intended to be separate. Car parts and front yards by themselves are perfectly acceptable. Only when promiscuously mixed is the city health officer called in to demand that the "rubbish" be cleaned up. Clothes and furniture are fine when left apart. If thrown together, a "mess" is produced.2 Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (1988) use Douglas's characterization of dirt to explain the pollution almost universally attributed to menstrual blood: Its effusions are relatively rare (thus odd) among routinely pregnant "premodern" females; it is mysteriously tied to lunar cycles; and, most notably, it flows out of the same opening from which human life emerges (26-27, 44-47). For these reasons, they write, "again and again menstrual discharge has . . . been granted the extraordinary powers of the anomalous . . ."-powers that can either magically bring harm or boons to society (34-39). Douglas employs her definition of dirt to elucidate the meaning of biblical food taboos (Lev. 11-30; Deut. 14:3-20). Take the case of pigs. Pigs are an abomination, Douglas argues, not because they were known at the time they were outlawed to harbor parasites, nor because pork spoiled in hot climates before refrigeration was invented. Instead, their uncleanliness arises from their being cloven-hoofed quadrupeds that do not chew cuds. As such, they are beings that fall outside the conventional category of cloven-hoofed ruminants such as sheep, cows, and deer. The pig is an "other thing" (davarahar), unmentionable by name in the Talmud. Douglas does not deny that use of pigs by the Greeks, Egyptians, and Philistines in their worship of underground female deities might have scandalized the sensibilities of the Israelites, who themselves worshiped a male god of mountaintops and thunderstorms. This is an argument used by celebrated biblical scholar Jacob Milgrom (1991,650-52,728) to explain their uncleanliness. But Milgrom's theory does little to account for the revulsion felt by the Israelites toward the Syrian hyrax, for example, toward the camel, or toward the rock badger.3Douglas says that the hyrax is considered monstrous because it has the appearance of an earless rabbit, but is equipped with rhinoceros-like teeth and small hoofs. Like the pig, then, it seems to mix things that in God's creation are presumably intended to remain separate. Likewise, the camel and the rock badger. Both appear to chew cuds (although technically, they do not), but they move on paws, not hooves (even though a camel's paws are clefted). Therefore, they are experienced as beasts that are not entirely of the

ORlFlCES

AND DIRT

17

mundane world. They are I'immonde, unclean, perverse (tebhel). Even worse are snakes, which propel themselves across the earth without any feet at all, and whose very touch therefore contaminates. The same goes for bats, who reside in the air like birds but have no feathers, and clams and crabs, who live in water but have neither fins nor scales. Douglas goes on to address the pollution attributed to marginal human beings: misshapen products of the womb, children born of incest, of race miscegenation, or to unmarried parents. There are aborted fetuses, homosexuals, and so on. In being neither quite one thing nor completely the other, but in transition, they are ambiguous and, as such, frightening, dangerous, repellent. Their existence is somehow felt to imperil the integrity of the world. They represent anomie, chaos, death. As to the subject before us-orifices-they, too, are precincts of marginality, sites of transition between our insides and outsides. And what is emitted from them-tears, blood, milk, sweat, urine, feces, breath, flatus, and semen-are not entirely of the world of orderly things. They, too, are suspect. Equipped with Douglas's lenses, we are positioned to see the act of cleaning and the state of cleanliness in new ways. Handkerchiefs, toilets, paper wipes, sanitary napkins, table manners, and so on are infinitely more than biological matters, although hygiene may be an accidental consequence of their use. Rather, they are ritual paraphernalia and gestures used to reorder visible signs of anomie and ultimately death, the waste material of our bodies. They are instruments in the regimentation, the policing, of orifices. These taken-for-granted, hence largely unconscious, regimental ceremonies come in several forms. There is, first of all, the practice of studiously "not seeing" what fails to fit into received categories, "matter out of place": the spinach morsel stuck to the incisor of a blind date, the foul odor arising from a worshipful congregation. "Any type of 'material' on the [toilet] seat (hair, urine, blood) is repulsive. I feel nauseous just thinking about it." So confesses a student advice columnist for a local college newspaper. Next, is the gesture of gently trying to reform the anomalous to make it more "fit," more acceptable. Here fall all manner of dietary therapies and twelve-step abusologies, two major growth industries in the early twenty-first century. Third, are dramatic displays of abominations for public edification, parades of so-called exceptions that prove rules. An example is the "addict," whose evident slavery to unacceptable substances provides a cautionary lesson for normals. Then come the carefully modulated ridicule of and laughter at oddity, cartharses from the discomfort produced when things that should remain separate are brought together: the salacious fundamentalist preacher, the crack-dealing Amish youth, the alcoholic Mormon. Fifth is the violent elimination of things whose presence in our midst horrify conventional standards of morality.

18

THE ORIFICE EXPERIENCE

A case in point: Death Penalty for Homosexuals Is Prescribed in the Bible (Peters 1992).And let us not forget the even rarer gesture of begrudgingly altering our worldview to accommodate what is initially unacceptable, or of attempting to consciously embrace confusion, to live on the margins in ambiguity without being destroyed by it. ”Controlled liminality” is the term anthropologist James Brain (1979, 89) gives to one form of this. It refers to licensed infractions of orifice regulations, staged annually at carnivals and at Dionysian feasts. POLLUTION AS SACRED

Orifices and their products, then, are unclean, and unclean things reside beyond the horizon of normal, everyday possibilities. Which is to say, they are extraordinary paranormal, sacred. As a good Roman Catholic, accustomed to associating sacredness with moral rightness, Douglas (1966) eventually balks at the implications of her own theory. Dirt as holy? Outrageous! ”To talk about a confused blending of the Sacred and the Unclean is downright nonsense” (159).While she begrudgingly acknowledges that occasionally religions do indeed sacralize the very things they reject with abhorrence as filth, Douglas insists that this is because of the positive role dirt sometimes plays in creation myths. One example is the Winnebago Indian trickster who is said to have produced the world from his own excrement (119). His medieval European counterpart, Mercurius (Hermes), has the same fertilizing function. Mythology has him residing in dung heaps (Hyde 1998, 182).Still another case is the Japanese Shinto trickster known as Susa-no-o. By bringing shit into the sterile (and dead) world of the sun goddess, he makes earthly life possible (179).I return to the generative power of filth later. Here, however, I want to emphasize the following point: Even zuithotit the addition of a positive, fructifying aspect, the radically unclean resonates with sacred, holy power. As a consequence, dirt can be abominated and revered, or both abhorred and yearned for, at the same time. It was the nineteenth-century religious ethnographer W. Robertson Smith who first acknowledged the sacredness of pollution by showing how in Semitic cults holiness ”present[s] the most startling agreement in point of detail with savage [i.e.,Polynesian] taboos” (Smith 1972,153,154). ”And this being so,” he concluded, ”I do not see how any historical student can refuse to classify the holy with savage taboos” (449; cf. 446,450, 452). For, whether expressed as the Greek hagios, the Hebraic qlzdosh, or Latin’s slzcey (sacred), the holy embraces the same paradoxical combination of revulsion and fascination, uncleanliness and enchantment. Sacer, for example, is defined as a precinct separated out from ordinary affairs and

POLLUTlON AS SACRED

19

dedicated to demons. This is quite comparable to the meaning of taboo, namely, that which is simultaneously filthy, yet superlatively good. Taboo (from ta, meaning ”mark,” and pu, indicating adverbial intensity, hence “to mark well”) things are marked off from mundane affairs by the tactical placement of wands by priests (Steiner 1956, 31-34).4 In the semiotics of both holiness and taboo, of course, a crucial distinction must be made between mere ”dirt” and hyper-kinetically-charged pollution, my interest here.5The former can be carelessly broomed away without risk to the sweeper. The latter, in contrast, is so wonderfully terrible that one is forbidden to tread on it ”without shoes”(e.g., Ex. 3:5). For doing so would not only violate It; it would imperil the transgressor’s life. This is why the Hebrew Bible warns that ”the stranger [gev] who approaches [the holy sanctum] shall be put to death” (Num. 1:51;3:10,38; 18:7).Or, as the case of Nadab and Abihu illustrates, flames of their own accord may suddenly leap from the altar and destroy them (Lev. 10:1).6It is for this reason that Moses covers his face when he approaches the abode of God. Failure to do so would put him at the risk of personal destruction (Ex. 33:20), just as glancing at a taboo chieftain would mean automatic death to the Polynesian islander. The upshot of this is that, Douglas’s objections notwithstanding, the quality of holiness is not originally equivalent to purity, at least phenomenologically (experientially). Nor is opposite of holiness the experience of dirt. Instead, the true antithesis of pollution is chol: what is of no account, the pointless, what is for man alone, the commonplace, the mtindus, which is to say, the profane (Steiner 1956,36, 82).7It is worth noting that the biblical scholar Milgrom (1991) initially seems to agree with this when he writes that in primitive Semitic cultures pollution routinely gave itself to consciousness as a ”malignant power of supernatural origin.” ”They [the pre-Israelites] conceived it as demonic, aggressively alive, contagious not just to touch, but reaching out through air and solid matter to assail its victims” (976).Unfortunately, he then goes on to insist-I think incorrectlythat for the Jews themselves the phenomenon of holy impurity ”completely disappeared.” He soon has reason to temper this comment, however, admitting that even among the Jews ”traces remain” of the experience of holy filth: traces found in the ”electromagnetic charge” and ”virulent force” exuded from corpses, scale disease, tabooed beasts, and, most pointedly for my purposes, from the genitals (976-81, 999).8 Again, most readers, like Douglas, having learned to equate holiness with purity, especially ethical purity, are likely to be uneasy at this point. Milgrom shares their sentiments. The ”seat” of biblical holiness, he writes, could never be filth. Instead, holiness must mean purity, and purity necessarily implies the affirmation of life. The unspoken rationale behind all Hebrew Bible taboos, he argues, is nothing less than the denial of death

20

T H E ORIFICE EXPERIENCE

(Milgrom 1991,70442,766-68,1000-1003). But, and this is important: The issue before me here is not the "unspoken rationale'' for orifice taboos; it is the quality of the primordial experience of orifices and their products prior to their being theoretically glossed and rationalized; prior to their being given eschatological, moralistic, or hygienic justifications. And this much is certain: At the most ancient levels of the Hebrew Bible-those concerning the patriarchs-holiness most definitely is not presented as an ethical quality, much less as the modern Euro-American denial of death. On the contrary, qadosh (holiness) originally referred to natural power points such as desolate rock outcrops, wild marshes, fire, thunderstorms, and orifices and their wastes. As for Yahweh, he was originally pictured less as a benign abba (daddy) than as an unconscious, amoral being; a capricious combination of violence and mercy, trusting and jealous alike (Jung 1958a)."In the end, even Milgrom confesses discomfort over a presumably just and life-affirming Yahweh's hunger for "an undiminishable torrent of animal blood" and, above all, his endorsement of the blood-thirsty practice of herein, the ban1" As perhaps nothing else can, the notion of herein illustrates the paradoxical coupling of holiness and pollution in the psyche of "early man," the reverence accorded the abominable. THE BAN

As untracked regions receded in the face of settlement by Semitic folk, distinctions began to be made between the dwelling places of God proper and the savage, uncultivated realm of demons ( jiniz, meaning "genies"). In the Pentateuch, demon worshipers who still reside in the land "promised" Israel by God are placed under the ban (herem) (Josh. 12:7-24). Herern refers to human beings set aside or donated to the Temple for God's use alone (Milgrom 1991, 473-75).11 True, they are not precisely qadosh or holy (415-16, 974-75). Yet relative to other gifts such as tithes, gold implements, and first fruits, herem constitutes "the ultimate dedication: It is 'most sacred to the Lord,' which means that it can never be redeemed"(346; Lev 27:29). Hence, to treat it as mere chol (ordinary, mundane stuff) by trading with it, eating with it, enslaving it, or marrying it is tantamount to stealing it from God; and this would be "the worst sacrilege of all" (Milgrom 1991, 355). For all practical purposes, then, the herein are holy. Indeed, the Hebraic herein is closely related haranz, the Arabic equivalent for the word Izoly. Haram also refers to things set apart, particularly to sacred places, notably Medina and Mecca. Like the carefully guarded royal harem (which is derived from haram), it is off-limits to nonbelievers whose presence would corrupt ( h a ~ a m aits ) sanctity.

21

THE NLlMlNOLlS ORlFlCE

Herem, then, is extraordinarily good. But it is also prohibitively bad (Steiner 1956,68-69). Those labeled as such in the Hebrew Bible are idolaters of Molech, Ba’al, Astarte, and Dagon. In short, they are the living embodiments of filth. To emphasize this point, the prophet Ezra equates them with the most revolting impurity imaginable, rziddn, the menstruant and her blood. ”The land you are entering to posses is a land unclean ( ~ z i d d dbecause ) of the foulness (~zidddf)of the natives . . . and of the abomination with which their impurities have infected it from end to end” (Ezra 9:ll). Thus, they are ”banned,” which implies two things. First, as I said, the Israelites are forbidden everyday contact with them lest they themselves become contaminated. Second, the only proper way to dispose of herein is to destroy it, preferably by fire. Thus, say the law books, ”as regards the towns of those peoples which Yahweh your God gives you as your own inheritance you must not spare the life of any living thing. You shall utterly destroy them” (Deut. 20:16; 13:13-19; 17:17). Failure to abide by the commandment to kill what is banned is itself punishable by death. This is because, as I just pointed out, herem is meant for God alone; it is ”the most sacred to the Lord” (Joshua 7; 1 Sam. 15:9-23). THE NUMINOUS ORIFICE

Like the biblical / z e r e i ~orifices , and their discharges have visible, audible, olfactory, and tactile qualities that can stir those so attuned to be charmed, terrified, and dumbstruck all at once. That is, they can conjure in witnesses the emotion Rudolf Otto has named numinosity, sacredness. They can disclose themselves not just as neutral stimuli, but as active ”portents” of larger mysteries; as ”rumors of angels,” to borrow a phrase from Peter Berger (1969). This is because they and their exuviae are imzmdo. They unsettle comfortable routines, shatter everyday boundaries. I appreciate that this announcement probably grates on ears habituated to hearing nice whenever the term l d y is mentioned. But just as ”it i s . . . dangerous” for those with refined musical tastes to exclude [children’s ditties] from consideration as music (Otto 1923, 74), it is intellectually perilous to refuse orifices admission to the altars of the sacred. For the izziirziizoszim, as Otto points out, is ”more ancient than god” (132). And before it visits in other forms, it knocks first at the back and front gateways of our own bodies, garbed in the stuff either gratefully received there or left behind as refuse. What, then, is the numinous experience? It is, says Otto (1923) ”a mental state. . . perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other” (7). It includes:

22

THE ORIFICE EXPERIENCE

a sense of eeriness, horror, danger, dread, and awe, ”which may gently steal over the subject as a mood, but may . . . be so . . . great that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making the [person’s] hair bristle and his limbs quake” (16). fascination, wonder, potent charm, so that ”the creature who trembles before it utterly cowed. . . has. . . at the same time the impulse to turn to it” (13). slack-jawed, abashed amazement. This is not merely puzzlement over a conundrum or a problem posed for a solution, but ineffableness. No reasonable account of it seems possible. This is because it has no place in mundane affairs. It is extraworldly, ”wholly other,” beyond words. It should be obvious by now that these are precisely the attributes of the primordial experience of our body’s doorways and what enters and exits them: deadly, contaminating danger and revulsion; stupefied allurement; astonished befuddlement in the face of what seems a bizarre combination of opposites. In the Hebrew Bible the ingestion of lobsters, bats, flying insects, and carrion-eating birds is considered sakashzi: menacing, detestable. So is the eating of blood, of clean animals improperly slaughtered, or of calves boiled in their mothers’ milk. The carcasses of the quadrupeds mentioned earlier-pigs, hyraxes, and camels-are in addition to this tame. They pollute merely by contact (Milgrom 1991, 656). Yet the allurement of what is forbidden is implied in the frantic urgency of the warnings issued against them. Consider the taboo against eating blood: ”But you must not ingest blood. . . but make sure that you do not ingest blood: for blood is the life, and you must not ingest life with flesh. You must not ingest it.. . .You must not ingest it” (Deut. 12:16, 23-25; Lev. 17:10,12, 14).12Clearly, like scale disease, fungi, molds, menses, feces, and semen, the blood that is so terribly bad is at the same time mysteriously enchanting. What issues from some orifices, as well as what goes into others, is a weird intermingling of opposites, which is to say, the izziininosziiiz. At the earliest levels of human experience, the uncleanliness attributed to orifices has yet to acquire moral relevance. And only after nourishment in the soil of institutional religiosity does it evolve into a category of theological resonance. And only much later still does it begin assuming biological stature as something nonhygienic. In fact, there exists at least one orificial effluent today that continues to conjure feelings eerily reminiscent of more primitive levels of experience, namely, feces. In his recent exploration of constipation in America and England, James Whorton (2000) shows that for decades compacted waste matter has served as a global signifier for the maladies alleged of civilization, urbanization, and sedentary life. Premature enfeeblement, chronic indigestion

THE NLIMINOLIS ORIFICE

23

and ulcers, gallstones, indolence, varicose veins, neurasthenia, and cancer: All of these, at one time or another, he says, have been attributed to feces retained too long in the digestive tract. Sitting there it is believed to molder; decomposing, it insinuates itself into the circulatory systems of victims, producing ”auto-intoxication,” a state that even the most progressively educated sophisticate seeks to avoid, and at nearly any cost. The standard remedies are well known. They include ”deep cleansing colonic irrigation” (enemas), eight glasses of water daily, laxatives, and fibrous foods. Severe cases call for more radical interventions, such as Dr. Koch’s Glyoxylide treatments, which supposedly oxidize and purify feces-infected blood, or Dr. Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators, progressively larger metal suppositories that are advertised to tone ”flabby” rectal muscles. In the most extreme cases surgical extirpation of the offending body part may be prescribed. None of these are accurately grasped if seen merely as profane pharmaceuticals and neutral medical procedures. On the contrary, insists Whorton, they are quasi-religious instruments and ceremonies. Although they may be posed in scientific jargon and designed to modern specifications, in reality they are fetishes of sorts, gestures and equipment shaken, often in states of panic or despair, at the poisonous spirits believed to lurk in our personal inner sanctums. What exactly is it about the anus and feces-to say nothing of the vagina, penis, mouth, ears, eyes, pores, and their influents and effluentsthat induce feelings of unease, dis-ease? It is, simply, that they are l’inzinoiide. They occupy ambiguous, transitional statuses in the ordinary world and hence give themselves to consciousness as anomalies. They are ”other things” in the geography of the lived body, passages and districts of otherness, holy holes. Because of this, throughout the ages they have been prime candidates for ritualization, of elaborate sacramental schemes of avoidance or attraction, or some combination of the two. Some religions encumber selected orifices and their in- and exfusions with covering laws to protect those not ordained with sacred powers from being contaminated, injured, or killed. Two classic illustrations of this are ancient Judaism and Brahmanism. The first focuses priestly attention primarily, but not exclusively, on the mouth, surrounding it with literally scores of mandatory, precautionary mitzvotlz, which have come to distinguish Jews as a ”people apart,” specially favored by the Lord. While Brahmanism also attends to matters of diet and food preparation, it concerns itself mainly with female chastity and with the maintenance of high semen quality. For want of a better phrase, I call this regime the dharma (eternal way) of the lower doors. As for the second prototypical response, which encourages openness toward the body’s mouths (and as will be seen later, receptivity to the world in general), the cases of ancient Christianity and Hindu Tantrism may be cited; the first focusing its attention on the mouth, the

24

THE ORIFICE EXPERIENCE

second on the genitals. Christianity and Tantrism are understood here as ongoing polemics with the Judaic and Brahmanic orifice traditions out of which they emerged and against which they rebelled. I begin my account with a consideration of Judaism, turn next to Christianity, then shift my gaze to the East, to consider the case of Brahmanism. I conclude with observations on the tantric tradition. NOTES 1. Cf. pp. 40-43. 2. Ethnological critiques of Douglas’s definition of dirt maintain that while not wrong, it is not precise enough to account for all pollutions across cultures. An additional criterion concerns the value of the ambiguity in the specific culture in question. Thus, among the Hua who reside in the New Guinea highlands, izii (vital energy) from various organs is considered polluting if it comes from a stranger, but is positively valued if from a blood relative. Again, while this refines Douglas’s definition, it does not refute it. See both Meigs 1978 and Tambiah 1969. 3. Milgrom argues that Douglas’s theory is ”replete with errors.” However, except for her analysis of the pig taboo, he agrees with the tenor of her argument. 4. Cf. the Tongan tabu and the Hawaiian k a p . 5. In her study of Kannada, a southern Indian dialect, Susan Bean shows that the meanings of common dirt, ritual impurity, disorder, and sin are arranged on a single continuum. Hence, while distinguishable, they are not semiotically separable from one another. To understand the complete meaning of any of the terms in the series, there must be a grasp of the others. See Bean 1981. 6. Cf. Uzzah’s fate in 1Chron 13:lO. 7. The equivalent Polynesian word is noa. In one place, Milgrom (1991)insists that the antonym of qadosli is f a m e (impure) (731-33, 1002-3). On page 977, however, he writes that the ”opposite” of qadosh is clzol, which corresponds to the position argued here. 8. It is worth noting that a qadeslzi, for example, is a temple prostitute (Steiner 1956,69). 9. At various places in the Bible, Saul is said to be ”infected” by ”an evil spirit from Yahweh,” which causes him to act in ways that result in his being punished by Yahweh (1Sam. 16:14-15; 18:lO; 19:9). 10. Milgrom’s (1991) explanation for the incongruity of a life-affirming God’s appetite for blood is that ”what God has created he has a right to recall” (736).For Milgrom’s defense of his position against Howard Eilberg-Schwartz’s objections, see page 1003. 11. The ban was an ancient Semitic rite originally having to do with certain spoils of war marked for the royal household or for its deity. The Israelites themselves were ”devoted” to the god Chemosh by their Moabite victors in the ninth century B.C.E.See Boling (1982,207 n. 17).Boling claims that the Islamic notion of holy war (jilzad) is ”a direct borrowing . . . from Jewish traditions”(28).

NOTES

25

12. Compare the hysterical character of this admonition to that concerning the requirement to eat only unleavened bread at Passover. "For seven days you must eat unleavened bread. . . . You are to clean all leaven out of your houses, for anyone who eats leavened bread . . . shall be cut off from Israel. . . . [This] is an irrevocable ordinance. . . . You are to eat unleavened bread . . . no leaven must be found in your houses, because anyone who eats leavened bread will be cut off. . . . You must eat no leavened bread; wherever you live you must eat unleavened bread" (EX. 12:15-20).

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Interlude 1 Hand Over That Hamburger

Hand over that hamburger-it’s a violation of the lazo. That’s the message froin Israeli government inspectors checking plates f o r food o n restaurant tables and confiscating bread and other leavened products, enforcing a strict religious edict that is also a n Israeli law. Jewish lazo dictates tliat during the zoeeklong holiday of Passover . . , Jezos m u s t not possess, m u c h less eat, bread or other products zoith leaven in them. B u t i n Tel Aviv, zohere the overwhelming majority of residents are nonobservant Jews, m a n y restaurants continue serving the forbidden food. They used to get away w i t h it. Nozo they’re facing the bread police. W i t h the ultrnOrthodox Jewish Shas party i n charge of the Interior Ministry, the edict is being enforced in a zoay that angers even the lazomakers who wrote it [in 19931.Explaining the raids, ministry spokesmen . . . said ”This lazo exists to safeguard the Jewish character of the state, and zoe intend to enforce it.’’ A t Cafe. Alexander, a popular Tel A v i v zoatering hole, black-suited inspectors entered the restaurant, checked f o r bread o n diners’ plates, confiscated incriminating evidence-a rollandfined [the] o w n e r . . . 100 shekels, about $25. -Idaho State Journal, April 12,2001 Reprinted with permission of the Associated Press

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3 Mitzvoth of the Mouth As every Bible reader knows, after the Canaanites were ”vomited out” of the Promised Land as a penalty for their ”faults” (Lev. 18:25),filth kept springing up in the most unlikely places, at untoward moments, in the very heart of God’s people, requiring unending washings, burnings, and in extreme cases, ki1lings.l Here, it emerges from the shadows in the form of leprosy (Lev. 13:45-46), there as ”scale disease,” a still medically unidentified condition signified by scabs, boils, rashes, and white spots (Lev. 13:46).Now it appears in fungi and molds (Lev. 13:47-59); then in corpses (Num. 5:3; 6:7; 19:ll-16). It lingers around human feces, which, as a result, must be interred safely away from camp (Deut. 23:13-15). Impurity erupts from the ”shame” of uncut penises and in emissions from those that are (Lev. 15:7). It is hardly surprising that bestiality, a practice gossiped about small stockholders like the ancient Israelites, was considered befouling (Ex. 20:14; 22:19; 20:15-16; Deut. 27:21; Lev. 18:23). Likewise, it is perhaps understandable that ”that hateful thing,” sodomy, be taboo (Lev. 18:22; 20:13), and that premarital sex. (Deut. 22:13-21), adultery (Deut. 22:22,27; 20:22-23; Lev. 18:6-20; 2O:lO-14, 17-21), prostitution (Deut. 23:17-18; Lev. 19:29), onanism, nocturnal emissions (Deut. 23:lO-12; Lev. 15:16-17), and rape (Deut. 22:23-26) all be judged polluting (although battlefield ”marriage” is permitted). After all, ancient Israel was a patriarchal society, and each of these acts entails seminal discharge into objects that might confuse or frustrate male lineage. But if that is true, why does even marital sex render both partners ”unclean until evening” (Lev. 15:18)? Is it perhaps because the womb harbors frightening, enchanting, supernaturally charged things: menstrual blood (nidda) (Lev. 15:19-30) and living beings (Lev. 12:l-8)? Whatever the reason, even to gaze on the naked female form (or for that matter on that of the adult male) was viewed as an occasion of uncleanliness in ancient Israel (Ex. 20:26; Lev. 18:8).Ham, reputed father of the Canaanites, who forever after are biblically associated with orgiasm, is

29

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MITZVOTH OF THE MOUTH

punished with the fate of slavery for seeing his father’s nakedness (Gen. 9:22-25). To be sure, this level of fastidiousness only approaches that found in other primitive cultures. Among the Hua of the New Guinea highlands, for example, not only are the genital discharges, feces, and urine of others sivo na (taboo);so are their sweat, hair, body oils, nails, and even their odor, breath, and shadows (Meigs 1978).All the same, except for the nose and ears, all the body’s orifices in ancient Judaism are as closely monitored as the gates of Israel herself. And the most notable of these orifices are not the genitals, but the mouth. Jacob Milgrom (1991) says it this way: ”Because the demand for holiness occurs with greater frequency and emphasis in the food prohibitions thaiz in any other cornmandrnents, we can only conclude that they are the Torah’s personal recommendation as the best way of achieving this higher ethical life” (731, my italics; cf. 729, 730).2Gillian Feeley-Harnik goes on to suggest that a good way to read biblical history is as a series of food dispensations from God to humanity. Indeed, some observers have supposed there to be an etymological link between the Hebraic word for covenant, b’vith, and barn (to eat) (Feeley-Harnik 1981, 86). All the sectarian schisms that Judaism has suffered over the centuries have revolved around issues of the mouth (91-96). The question for us, then, is what is the probable sociological basis for Jewish dietary law? What were the cultural and organizational circumstances of ancient Judaism that conduced it to emplace one of history’s most severe regimens around what seems outwardly, at least, such a harmless body opening? POSING THE QUESTION

Already, Mary Douglas (1966) provides the preliminary answer. ”The Israelites,” she writes, “were always in their history a hard-pressed minority. [Therefore]in their beliefs, all the bodily issues were polluting, blood, pus, excreta, semen, etc. The threatened boundaries of their body politics would be well mirrored in their care for the integrity, unity and purity of the physical body”(142).To paraphrase the proposition offered in chapter 1:Because it experienced itself as continually besieged by enemies, Jewish leaders undertook what might be considered obsessive efforts to police the Jewish community’s symbolic points of vulnerability, the orifices of its members. Or as Leviticus would word it, Jewry vividly enacts its separation from the impurity of the Gentiles by ritually regimenting access to its believers’ genitals and, particularly, to their mouths. Whichever terminology one prefers, by all indications Jewish dietary taboos originally had little if anything to do with matters of health, hygiene, discipline, or allegory

POSING THE QUESTION

31

(that is, that pork was outlawed because pigs symbolize swinishness, taloned birds because they stand for rapacity, or weasels because they are sneaky, and so forth [Stein 1957,146-48,149-501). Rather, they were ”fixed from eternity,” to quote the Bible, solely to separate God’s chosen people from the Gentiles: ”I am your God who set you apart from other peoples. So you shall set apart the pure [foods] . . . from the impure in your personal lives” (Lev. 20:24). So far, so good. Yet, for all its insight Douglas’s theory, to quote Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (1992), is ”not entirely satisfying”(22). For the question still remains of how the connection between Jewish exclusivity and dietary law was accomplished historically. In other words, if Douglas’s account is not false, it is certainly incomplete. And its incompleteness probably is due to Douglas’s own professional bias as a structural functionalist. Structural functionalists explain enduring social patterns by inquiring into the social purposes they purportedly serve. They are indifferent to the actual sources of those patterns. This, of course, is understandable given that the societies they often study have no histories in the modern sense, that is, empirically grounded accounts of their own origins. (Douglas, for one, is the world’s expert on the Lele people of Africa [1975b]).But it is precisely the question of origins that I want to address here. The task before me is to isolate as closely as possible the founding or originary moment, as I call it in chapter 1, when the connection was made between Jewish dietary restrictions and tribal exclusivity. This will not be easy. Prior to 300 B.c.E.,the historiographies of the relevant texts are ”woeful,” and none more so than those concerning the law codes.3Nevertheless, several claimants to the title of originary moment offer themselves for consideration. First, there is Jehu’s attempted purification of the Temple in the name of ”Moses’ Law,” from 841 to 814 B.C.E. (2 Kings 10:18-27). Then, there is Hezekiah’s similarly motivated destruction of the Ba’al cult and the murder of its priests a little more than a century later (2 Chron. 29:3-17). Finally, there is the ”discovery” of a legal code-most likely, an early version of Deuteronomy-by a priest named Hilkiah in 621 B.C.E. King Josiah subsequently would use it to authorize a cleansing of the national religion of alien elements and to centralize sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. It was also used to revise the history books of the Hebrew Bible: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.4 Just as previous reform movements had taken place amid dire threats from external enemies, King Josiah also is said to have ”burned the sacred poles,” ”pulled down the houses of male prostitutes,” and destroyed ”Molech’s furnace’’ to stave off national calamity. But as was true for past temple purges, his efforts were to no avail. For within twenty years Jerusalem would fall to the Babylonians anyway, its leading circles deported to present-day Baghdad. As it turns out, in other words, ”Yahweh would [still] not forgive” His people their idolatry. Yet historians concur that with

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MITZVOTH OF THE MOUTH

Hilkiah’s so-called discovery of the Law and in its belated enactment, Judaism received its ”decisive imprint of exclusiveness” (Weber 1952,336). Here, most likely, is the moment for which I have been looking. A PEOPLE APART

Ancient Middle Eastern powers had standard policies for controlling subject populations. For their part, the Babylonians displaced them en masse to foreign territories, where revolts would be more difficult to organize. Even in Babylon, however, the exiled Judahites were tolerated. In addition to this, politically reliable elements were given de facto authority to rule the exile community on behalf of the emperor (cf. Jehoaichin in 2 Kings 24:29-30). It was in this environment that the code earlier found by Hilkiah would be redrafted into a law book by his great-grandson, a bureaucrat (scribe) known today as Ezra. Once the emperor declared it compulsory for the exile community, Ezra’s Book of Law was read and interpreted annually, probably in Aramaic, to the assembled populace. According to some experts, this initiated Judaism’s Midrash tradition. Henceforth, Ezra’s code would serve as the legal charter of Jewish national life, first in exile and then shortly thereafter, when Ezra himself led an imperial mission to reestablish the Judahites in Jerusalem. Ezra’s charter no longer looks forward to the reestablishment in the new Jerusalem of Davidian rule, whose perfidies were believed to have occasioned the exile in the first place. Instead, it suggests that even rule by a foreign prince is preferable to that of a petty Jewish magnate, if the latter fails to obey Moses’ Law. This is so, however, only if that prince is ”just,” that is, only if he places day-to-day control of the exile population in the hands of the levitical priesthood. Second, to keep the Judahites from being contaminated by their benignly indifferent Babylonian neighbors (thereby threatening the practical interests of these Levites), it insists that an ”impenetrable fence” of ritual proscriptions be erected to separate the two populations. Included in the proposed fencing material are dietary taboos. The utopian prophecies of the exile seer, Ezekiel, reiterate Ezra’s exclusivist vision. In them Ezekiel warns that any Israelite who goes “beyond all bounds with . . . filth” shall be banned permanently from the Temple in Jerusalem, on pain of death (Ezek. 44:6-9).5Furthermore, any Levite even suspected of having sacrificed to alien gods shall never again serve as a priest (10-14). Finally, all those ordinances that accomplish ritual purity, originally binding only on those priests, shall henceforth be actionable for the laity as well. These include the dress code, the rules against touching corpses and unclean discharges, the injunction forbidding marriage with non-Israelites, and the dietary proscriptions. In sum, ”almost at the moment when Israel lost its concrete territorial basis,” says Weber, ”the

A PEOPLE APART

33

Table 3.1 A Chronology of Ancient Judaism (all times B.c.E.; originary moment in formulation of rnitzvoth of the mouth in bold italics) Conquest of the Promised Land (1250-1020) King David’s reign (1010-970) David’s son, Solomon’s,reign; building the Temple in Jerusalem (970-931) Schism and establishment of the dual kingdoms, Israel and Judah (926) Military prophet, Jehu, cleanses the Temple of foreign elements (841-814) First prophecies of doom (780-740) King Hezekiah destroys the Ba’al cult (ca. 700) Assyria defeats Israel; exiles its population to modern-day Turkey (721) Judaic high priest Hilkiah’s ”discovers” Code of Law (an early version of Deuteronomy);revision of historical books of Old Testament (622) Judaic king Josiah (reigned 640-609) enforces Code of Law to ward off Yahweh’s punishment at the hands of its enemies; reinstates Passover Babylonia defeats Judah; beginning of deportations to modern-day Iraq (599);capture of Jerusalem;new deportations (587) Ezekiel’s vision of a racially pure Judaic utopia (ca. 594) Hilkiah’s great-grandson, Ezra, redraps Code of Law into Leviticus; it is endorsed b y the Babylonian emperor and read in public t o the Judahites. I t requires Judahites t o separate themselves from theirs neighbors connubially and commensally (ca. 470) Persia conquers Babylonia; emperor Cyrus encourages Judahites to resettle in Jerusalem and organize themselves after Leviticus; Ezra’s first mission to Jerusalem (458) Nehemiah’s mission to Jerusalem (445-444)

ideal value of the political territory was definitely and ritually fixated . . .” (Weber 1952,338). Persia replaced Babylonia as the leading Middle Eastern power in 539 B.C.E. Emperor Cyrus not only continued the practice of tolerating foreign religious customs and employing exile priests as indirect rulers over subject peoples, he augmented it. (Ezra was so enthusiastic about Persian policy that he interpreted it as commanded by Yahweh Himself. Cyrus becomes transmogrified into a ”servant” of the Jewish god [Ezra 1:1-41). Agents of subject peoples were absorbed into the imperial court, the Judahite eunuch Nehemiah, for example, being promoted to the status of ”cupbearer” to the king. Religious paraphernalia earlier confiscated by the Babylonians were returned to their devotees; and the exiles themselves liberated from captivity, led home, and encouraged to rebuild their houses of worship.

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MITZVOTH OF THE MOUTH

To this end Nehemiah was awarded a commission from the emperor to strengthen the walls around Jerusalem, reconstruct the Temple, and to reorganize the newly returned Jewish community on the basis of Ezra’s Book of Law. Predictably, the first reported act of his postexile theocratic rule was to segregate the Judahites connubially and commensally from their neighbors, the Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and Samaritans. Technically, these were known as the gerim, Semitic but heterodox, local ”strangers.” Apart from the resistance the gerim allegedly had fostered against the return of the settlers-sending messages to the emperor accusing the Judahites of undermining Persian authority, for example-they are slandered by Ezra for their ”foulness . . . and of. . . abominations with which their impurities have infected [the land] from end to end” (Ezra 9:ll). A court was set up to adjudicate questions of miscegenation between Judahite and ger. The names of race ”traitors” were published, confessions of ”sins” heard, and those willing to obey Ezra’s code took self-condemnatory oaths to ”put away” their alien wives and children. To guarantee compliance, their names were fixed in writing, henceforth ”to walk according to the Law of God.”6(Some years later, in his second mission to Jerusalem, Nehemiah found to his horror that the Judahites had broken their contract and had begun intermingling with the gerim. ”I reprimanded them,’’ he boasts, ”and called down curses on them. . . . I struck several of them and tore out their hair and made them swear by God, ’You shall not give our daughters to their sons or take their daughters either for your sons or for yourselves”’ [Neh. 13:23-261). Given the sorrow expressed in Ezra’s memoirs over the implementation of these antimiscegenist measures, it would not be entirely fair to indict Nehemiah with gratuitous cruelty. For his part, he justifies his orders as necessary to stave off Yahweh’s rage. ”Would you [God] not be provoked to the point of destroying us,” he plaintively asks, ”so that not even the smallest remnant would survive,” were not race mixing stopped? (Ezra 9:15; cf. Neh. 13:26-27). True, by ritually segregating the Judahites from their neighbors, the levitical monopoly over sacramental powers in the resettled territory was permanently secured. Nonetheless, by all appearances, an infinitely more important motive for enacting laws of exclusion must have been this: ’’I purged them [the Judahites] of everything foreign” (Neh. 13:30).

THE OTHER IN THE PRE- A N D POSTEXlLlC ERAS ”Never, in the ancient [pre-exilicHebraic] tradition,’’according to Weber (1952), were ”other nations reproached in the name of Yahweh for worshiping their own gods” (340; cf. 339).On the contrary, the traditional cus-

T H E O T H E R IN THE PRE- A N D POSTEXlLlC ERAS

35

tom was to voluntarily admit Samaritan, Edomite, Moabite, and Ammonite into the ritual order. This if for no other reason than to win patronage for the Temple. ”All of you stand here today in the presence of Yahweh . . . and the stranger [ger] too zuho is in your camp . . . about to enter into the covenant . . .” (Deut. 29:lO-12, my italics; cf. Deut. 31:12;Josh. 8:33-35). If, in addition, the gevim were known to have come to Israel’s aid in war, as did Rahab at Jericho (Joshua 2), they were rewarded with land grants. Seir was given to Esau, father of the Edomites, for instance; Moab, to Abraham’s brother, Lot (Deut. 2:4-7/9-10). In short, ”you are not to regard the Edomites [and the other gerim] as detestable, for he is your brother; nor the Egyptian, because you were a stranger in his land” (Deut. 23:8). In the beginning, then, despite the cultic and racial diversity characteristic of ancient Palestine, ”xenophobia was lacking” says Weber (1952). Resident aliens were subject to the same prohibitive commandments to avoid eating blood and not to offer their children to the fire (Gen. 9:5-6; Lev. 17:10,12,13; 20:2). They were admonished to observe the same onceweekly day of rest as their hosts (Lev. 16:29),to consume only unleavened bread during Passover (Ex. 12:20),and in atoning for sins to ”make burnt offerings” to Yahweh (Num. 15:27-29). Indeed, if circumcised, they were permitted to celebrate the entirety of Passover (Ex. 12:48),a privilege never granted to foreigners (nokri) such as Greeks or Hittites. For as it was said, ”there shall be only one law for you and for the settler [gerim]among you. There is to be one law only . . .” (Num. 15:13-16). This is not all. The pre-exilic Israelites themselves not only were permitted to acknowledge alien gods with respect while visiting foreign courts, Kings David and Solomon reciprocated the gesture by honoring them at their own tables (1 Kings 11:5-8). Furthermore, they could dine on strange foods. Noah, we are told, was permitted to eat ”every living and crawling thing” but blood. Nothing at all was forbidden him (Gen. 9:3-4). That the Israelites and their Egyptian hosts are reported in Genesis to have feasted separately was only at the latter’s insistence, who ”have a horror of [commensalism]” (Gen. 43:32-33). This fact is considered just one more reason for the unacceptability of Egyptian customs to the ancient Israelites. As for intermarriage, Jacob gave his daughter, Dinah, to the still uncircumcised Shechem (who, however, was murdered before the ceremony could be consummated) (Genesis 34), and the Moabite Ruth married the Yahwehpleasing farmer Boaz (Ruth 4:12-22). Battlefield concubinage with ”pleasing” alien women was not only countenanced; it was surrounded with elaborate protocols, indicative of its widespread practice (Deut. 21:lO-13). Finally, as every reader knows, Solomon accepted both local strangers and ”many foreign women” into his harem (1Kings ll:l).7 Realistically, like people everywhere and always, the pre-exilic Yahwists probably treated nontribalists cynically at best, even when the law

36

MITZVOTH OF THE MOUTH

urged charity. But after the Exile, and with the enactment of Ezra’s law code, the differences between in- and out-groups were magnified. Unequal treatment became mandatory. The Canaanite geu, who were tolerated earlier, now evolved into Yahweh’s archetypal enemy, destined either for slavery or for extermination under the ban (herein). As for slavery itself, Israelite custom originally permitted it to be imposed on any debtor, regardless of tribal affiliation, including on fellow Israelites (Ex. 21:l-11). In contrast, the postexilic law book Leviticus 25:44-46 allows it only with foreigners and explicitly outlaws it even for Israelites who fall into debt (Deut. 23:6; Lev. 25:3943). Neither is interest on loans to one’s ”brother” Israelites allowed, while it may be charged to strangers (Deut. 23:20; Lev. 25:35-38). This would subsequently become the basis of John Calvin’s revolutionary injunction, centuries later, that usury be permitted every Christian, because each man in essence is a ”stranger” to the other (Nelson 1947). In postexilic law, offerings of strange foods to God at sacrifices are condemned (although such foods may be given either to aliens or sold) (Deut. 14:21).”For Yahweh’s name is the Jealous One; he is a jealous God” (Ex. 34:14-17; Num. 25:l). Weber (1952) calls this ruling ”unique in Antiquity”(356). Likewise, connubialism with guest peoples ( gerim): It is unequivocally prohibited. This is indicated, among others ways, by various metaphorical warnings against combining different kinds of threads, animals, and seeds (Deut. 22:9-11; Lev. 19:19).Indeed, any ”pact with the inhabitants of the land”( geriin) is null and void, especially intermarriage with such people as Ruth’s Moabites (Ex. 34:15).If anything, the preferred policy is to ”take all [their] leaders and impale them for Yahweh, here in the sun” (Num. 25:l-4; 31:7-19). Thus, when Zimri brings his Midianite wife into camp Phinehas, a priest, runs both through with a lance to avert God’s judgment (Num. 25:6-18). Later, he leads the Israelites on a mission to wipe out the Midianites entirely. Yahweh expresses his ”burning anger” when they fail to carry out the ban (Izeueipz). ”Devour them, show no pity,” God cries (Num. 31:7-19).8 As for individual miscegenists, Deuteronomy commands that they be taken outside the city walls and stoned to death (12:2-19; 16:1-7). To separate the Judahites from nonbelievers, circumcision, a practice originally binding only on the army (Josh. 5:2-9), eventually became mandatory for all male confessors. (According to some experts, it became widespread only during the Maccabeean period, circa 160 B.C.E. [l Mac. 1:63;2 Mac 6:10]).Surnames formed on the rootjalz, instead of one//evolved into preferred personal identifiers of in-group membership. The group itself came to be called ”Jew,” after ”Yehuda,” a possible corruption of ”Yahweh.” Later rulings extended to the wearing of distinctive clothing markers like tzizit (fringes),phlacteries (teffilin),and the yarmulke, or skull-

37

THE KOSHER M E A L

cap. Visibly recognizable beards and sideburns, together with tattoo-free skin, completed the costume (Lev. 21:5). Most important, painstaking dietary rules (kashvut, meaning ”religious observances”), which appear to have little basis in ancient Hebraism, assumed a place of prime importance. THE KOSHER MEAL

Enough has already been said about beasts that Jews are forbidden to eat. They include creatures that ”swarm,” cloven-hoofed nonruminants, carrion-eating birds, sea-dwellers without scales and fins, and so on (Lev. 11:23-43, 61-65; Deut. 14:l-21). But this is not the half of it. The ritually clean Jew in addition must never eat the rump of an otherwise clean animal.9 This is in tribute to Jacob’s (meaning, Israel’s) sciatica incurred during his fight with the angel at Peniel (Gen. 32:33). Furthermore, acceptable creatures must neither have died natural deaths nor been lacerated by accident nor prey (Lev. 17:15).Finally, there shall be no consumption either of their fat or of the membranes about their livers and kidneys (Lev. 3:3, 8-9, 10, 14-15; 7:24-25). Nor of their blood (Lev. 7:26-27; 17:lO-14; Deut. 12:23-25). This all necessitates that their lungs and other body parts be ”carefully” inspected by ”competent authority” to espy blemishes and the like, that the meat be pickled and drained with salt ”neither too coarse nor fine,” and that a specialized butchering process (shelzitah) be undertaken by a rabinically certified shohet to remove the blood vessels and other relevant tissues. In lieu of cattle, sheep, or goat fat, vegetable oils may be substituted for cooking. Dairy products and meat (not including fish) must not be cooked together, nor eaten together within six hours (with allowances for local custom and an exception made for soft cheese). The complete kosher kitchen therefore must be equipped with separate pots and glassware, ”carefully marked” utensils and saltcellars for meat and milk dishes, and preferably with separate ovens. All this, plus separate towels, rags, and sinks, or if the latter are not available, separate wash pans or separate dishwasher racks and rinses. If one acquaintance is eating dairy while another meat, they must dine at separate tables or in some other way be visibly distinguished from each other. To minimize risks of contamination, dough should never be kneaded with milk nor with fat, nor bread baked with meat. Hence, the legendary significance of the water-boiled bagel. Hence, too, the injunction against purchasing bread from non-Jews. After all, the ingredients and methods of preparation in non-Jewish kitchens are unknown and therefore perilous. Besides the kosher butcher, then, use of a kosher baker is a sine qua non of ritual observance. But insofar as the latter is occasionally unavailable,

38

MITZVOTH OF THE MOUTH

rabbinical practice considers the bread clean if at least one known Jew has a role in its preparation. To avoid inadvertently consuming minute swarmers-bugs, mites, and worms-unless it is known to be pure, drinking water should be filtered, and one should never drink in the dark nor directly from a stream. Furthermore, fruit, fish, nuts, and flour should be inspected for infestation. This also occasionally requires consultation with competent authorities. Although bees swarm, honey is considered clean. Locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers are also licit foods (Lev. 11:42). Glass or metal utensils purchased from non-Jews or nonobservant Jews must be immersed in water with a blessing before being used. However, wooden or nonglazed earthenware need not be ritually cleansed-this, because what comes from earth is itself considered ”clean.” Glazed pottery no longer has this quality and must therefore undergo ablutions. Different rules apply if, instead of being purchased from non-Jews, the utensils are merely ”hired.” Besides being merely immersed, vessels that in addition are believed to have contained unclean foods must be put through the flames (assuming they will not thereby be destroyed). While one may ”profit from it” by sale, wine touched by non-Jews is taboo, except for that used in cooking, the uncleanliness of which presumably will be boiled off, or that which comes in double-sealed vessels and is thus protected from contamination. If only the container is nonJewish, but the wine Jewish, then before using it, the container must be immersed, preferably in boiling water, for twenty-four hours. The rules regarding wine, as it is said, are ”varied and intricate,” necessitating consultation with a rabbi; and if not this, then the presence of a rabinically certified vintner. Some of these prohibitions are already anticipated in pre-exilic documents. Hence, their existence cannot be attributed to the postexilic experience alone. The rule regarding water filtering, for example, would have been prudent for such peoples as the ancient Hebrews who frequented strange oases. Likewise the need to examine fruit, nuts, fish, and flour for infestation by insects. The pig taboo is also traceable to a period centuries prior to the exile, when the still seminomadic Hebrews would have disdained the chthonic pig sacrifices of settled cultivators. And almost certainly the disgust at blood eating reflects an antifertility cult bias.1° However, the extension from the pig to scores of otherwise edible beasts is not so easily accounted for. These proscriptions therefore must be ”not old,” concludes Weber (1952), ”but a product of priestly schematization” (352) that took place during the postexilic era. Again, rulings regarding the untouchableness of naturally dead or savaged carrion would be reasonable for a pastoral folk, and thus can be attributed to the pre-exilic period. But the intricate protocol of shehitah is not found in the Bible. Therefore, it

39

CONCLUSION

too must be a postexilic invention. Rabbinic tradition implicitly concedes this by claiming that the steps in kosher butchering ”were given orally to Moses” at Sinai and secretly passed on to the Levites (Appel 1977, 234).” Finally, the law prohibiting the cooking of a kid in its mother’s milk (Ex. 23:19;34:26;Deut. 14:21):Originally, this may have been based on the rejection of another pre-exilic Canaanite custom. But it originally applied only to goats, not to ”meat” in general-definitely not to fowl. In any case, there is no mention in pre-exilic custom of not enting meat and dairy together, or of the painstaking precautions to be undertaken to prevent this. These, too, therefore, must be postexilic rulings. Perhaps they were intended to reinforce the lesson that different kinds of things should not be promiscuously mixed. This, at least, is offered in the Kitzzr~Shtillzntz Amkh as the reason for the taboos against consuming non-Jewish wine and bread. These rules exist, we are told, ”to prevent social conviviality” that might lead to intermarriage with unclean peoples (Appell977,273-74). That these and related dietary rnitzvotlz (obligations) functioned sociologically to maintain the solidarity of the Jewish community is certain (Feeley-Harnik 1981, 11-14). But it is crucial for outsiders never to lose sight of how they were (and still are) intended for individual diners. For apart from their alleged social function, the various oral mitzvotlz are mnemonic rites, the performance of which remind Orthodox Jews of the presence of the Holy of Holies in their midst. Indeed, it is precisely this that explains the ritual emphasis on the mouth in the first place, instead of on the nose, eyes, or ears. The mouth after all is not merely one of a number of facial transfer points between our insides and outsides, arbitrarily chosen. Instead, it is the entryway par excellence into the body-retort. That is to say, it is the site where, through a mysterious alchemy, inanimate ”stuff” is incorporated and reconfigured into energy, heat, breath, life. In being reverently and exactly (which is to say, ”religiously”) prepared, served, and consumed, kosher food aids believers to recognize (re-know) the immanence of a mysterium tremendum in an otherwise eminently ordinary activity, eating. It is this that accounts for one final, overarching mitzvah, that the diner express ”joy,” ”eagerness,” and ”non-perfunctoriness” in the enactment of the meal (Appell977,131-32). CONCLUSION

Weber (1952)likens Orthodox Judaism to the Hindu caste order, saying of its confessors that they are a ”pariah people.” ”All essential traits of Jewry’s attitude toward the [social]environment can be deduced from” its pariah status, he says (3). This is both revelatory as well as misleading. First of all, the term itself is unfortunate given its negative connotation,

40

MITZVOTH OF THE MOUTH

even if Weber takes pains to warn readers that the association is not intended as a judgment. Technically, just as the pariah (Sanskrit for "player of the leather-skinned drum," hence cattle murderer) is set apart from the "twice-born" in Hindu law, Jews are segregated from Gentiles in Jewish law. But the analogy stops here. For the pariah was rendered untouchable by the Brahmanic priests because of their alleged filth; Jews originally set themselves apart because of their presumed cleanliness.12 Like all purity-based religions Judaism has endured countless sectarian revolts against backsliding and complacency. Many of these revolts are remembered today by the names of the military prophets who led them: Jehu, Hezekiah, Josiah, Phinehas, Maccabaeus, and so on. The most significant renewal movement was that just recounted, orchestrated by Ezra and Nehemiah, the movement that produced the Orthodox Judaism of today. But by no means was this the end of the story. For just as the Jewish community under Ezra's leadership separated itself from the gerim to maintain its cleanliness, the Pharisees (from p e r z d w , meaning "one set apart from the impure"), out of fear of defilement from nonobservant Jews (including priests [Sadducees]), segregated themselves from their fellow believers (the ain ha-aretz, meaning "the common folk"). The Essenes ("pious ones"), in turn, a primarily male religious order whom Philo once described as "athletes in virtue," revolted against what they considered to be the world-compromising laxity of the Pharisees. The eventual product of these and later schismatic rebellions such as the Zealots, the Therapeutae, the Sicarii, and so on-was a stratification system based on cleanliness reminiscent of (if not nearly as complex. as) the Hindu caste system. Hence, the wisdom of Weber's equation of Jewry to Hinduism (Weber 1952,387-415). As recent Qumran excavations demonstrate, the most fervid Essenes inured themselves from contamination by taking vows of chastity and moving en masse to a particularly inhospitable part of the Dead Sea valley (Mowry 1962).There they could imagine themselves secure from pollution by less worthy souls, including women. It is probably not insignificant that the most notable architectural achievements of the Qumran sectaries were a gigantic bath (for purification purposes) and a kosher kitchen. The Qumran charge? "To clear a way for the Lord" through the filth of the average man, to build "a holy house of perfection" for Israel. It is sufficient for present purposes merely to point out once again that this filth had to do with orifices and what goes into and out of them. Like the untouchableness of the pariah in Hindu law, orifices and their issue were never experienced by Qumran monastics as simply ordinary dirt. Rather, their pollution echoed with supernatural energy. They were terrible things, fascinating, and mysterious all at once.

41

NOTES

NOTES 1. Unless otherwise specified, all biblical quotations are from the Jerusalem Bible. 2. Gillian Feeley-Harnik (1981) agrees: ”As God’s word came to be concentrated in the law, so food came to represent the whole law” (96,107). 3. For this assessment and an attempt to work around it, see Ackroyd and Evans (1970, I, 67- 231). Customarily, the Torah is presented as the creation of a single prophet, Moses. But law does not come into being this way. In the first place, there is not one, but several Jewish law books: the Yahwistic Decalogue or Ten Commandments proper (Ex. 2O:l-21; Deut. 5:7-21), the Book of the Covenant (Ex. 20:22-26/21-23), the Book of Numbers, the Book of Deuteronomy, and the Priestly and Holiness codes of Leviticus (respectively, 1-16 and 17-26). None of these simply list statutes, but also issue warnings, and add theological interpretations. The Priestly Code is dated after the sixth century B.C.E. and is considered a refinement of Deuteronomy. The prophet Malachai (ca. 470 B.c.E.) displays no familiarity with it, although he does cite Deuteronomy. The Holiness Code, too, is probably preexilic, but was thoroughly revised after the Exile. Both codes display a ”theological zeal for consistency” not found in the other codes, which lends credence to their late appearance (Weber 1952,75). For a detailed discussion of the issues relating to dating, which disagrees at points with the preceding, see Milgrom (1991,3-34). Complicating the problem of dating is that none of the codes were produced by a single author. Leviticus, for example, comprises two sources, P and H, representing the outlooks of two different schools, with P the prior. None, furthermore, are today in their original form, but have been modified, with material both deleted and added over the centuries. Most important, hlaknli, the actual operating principles for daily living, does not end with the biblical Torah; it merely uses this as its starting point. Layers of commentary on the Torah, the first centuries of which are transcribed in the Talmud, are proof of the dynamic nature of Jewish law (Lewittes 1966).In sum, then, Jewish law is ”a legislative snowball that has rolled down the avenues of time, gathering more and more material from various sources the further it rolled and taking on new forms with every change in the course” (Meek 1960,57). 4. Although ancient Jewish historiography is highly controversial, it is probable that Israel and Judah originally were independent Hebrew military consociations comprised of seminomadic, donkey-riding folk, dwelling, respectively, in northern Palestine near Canaan and in the proximity of Egypt. While biblical history presents the two federations as actors in a single drama-the conquest of the Promised Land-this is partly nationalistic propaganda on the part of the priests who composed it. Except for a brief period, starting with King David and ending with his son Solomon, Israel and Judah were uncomfortable allies at best, and then only when facing a common enemy in the form of the Philistines. Among the houses associated with Israel were Asher, Issachar, Gad, Dan, Zebulum, Joseph, and Napthali. They were united under a military covenant consisting of simple laws overseen by a divine Guarantor-possibly, the Canaanite fertility bull Ba’al. Led by Joshua, Israel took advantage of local political intrigues, and

42

MITZVOTH OF THE MOUTH

using guerilla warfare tactics characteristic of poorly armed, nonprofessional armies, moved west across the Jordan River and gradually insinuated itself onto vacant Canaanite lands. It also overran a number of Canaanite towns, including Jericho, whose ”walls,” legend relates, crumbled when the war trumpets were blown (Josh. 6:1-16). The conquest of the land ”promised them’’ by their god, the ferocity of which is still evident today in archaeological excavations, was likely completed around 1400 B.C.E. This was two centuries prior to Exodus. Meanwhile, a smaller aggregate of Hebrews, including remnants of the tribes of Judah, Reuben, Simeon, and Levi, seeking pastures for their own herds, were welcomed into Egypt. At first prospering there, they evidently fell into slavery during the reign of Ramses 11. Led by Moses, like the Israelites earlier had done, they confederated under a covenant overseen by the tribal god of Judah, named Yahweh. Taking advantage of an Egyptian military vacuum in the area south of Jerusalem, they pushed their way north and settled down to farming. Yahweh was originally an Arabian storm god adopted by Judah as its own tribal patron. But Judah was a ”lion’s whelp who [had] grown up on prey” (Gen. 49:8-12). In time it extended its authority over lesser Hebrew tribes, including Moses’ Levites. Each, in turn, adopted Yahweh as their own divine protector. Having no claim to a particular land as a probable result of some long-forgotten dispute, the Levites were relegated to overseeing the Yahweh cult. When both Hebrew kingdoms were brought together under the rule of the Judean king David in 1010 B.c.E., Jerusalem became both capital of the state and site of Yahweh’s main temple. The Levites now wrote of Yahweh as patron of the entire Hebrew nation; and He was said to have been the object of devotion by the legendary Hebrew patriarchs, all along: the old mountain deity El Shaddai, merely given a new name. It was also at the hand of the levitical revisionists that the two migrations just described were telescoped into a single narrative of exodus and conquest. Glory for victory over the Canaanites is still accorded Joshua. However, he is not pictured as acting on behalf of Ba’al the bull, but as Yahweh’s retainer, following rules of warfare dictated by Moses, the first Levite, and enforced by the priests. This account is not intended to be definitive. It is based primarily on Meek (1960)and Weber (1952).For a readable presentation of the various debates around early Jewish history, see Gottwald (1985). 5. The Temple of Herod in the days of Jesus had the following notice: ”Let no alien pass beyond the balustrade and wall surrounding the sanctuary. Whoever is caught doing so will have only himself to blame for the death which will be his penalty.’’ 6. The order for dissolving marriages, Ezra 9:12; the list of guilty priests, Ezra 10:1844; the confession, Neh. 9:14; the ”firm agreement in writing,’’ Neh. 1 O : l . 7. The ancient Hebrews disdained Bedouin life. In Genesis, Cain, the reputed father of the Bedouins, is condemned ”to be a fugitive and a wanderer” in the desolate sands ”east of Eden” for murdering Abel(4:9-16). Nonetheless, the Hebrews adopted several Bedouin customs, most notably, that of hospitality to strangers. In the age of the patriarchs, being hospitable to guests was considered more important ethically than preserving the virginity of one’s own daughter (Gen. 19:8;Jud 19:24). Transgressing the custom meant automatic vengeance, as witnessed by

NOTES

43

God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:23-26) and of the Benjamites of Gibeah (Judg. 20:29-48). It is in this context that pre-exilic charity toward strangers might best be seen. 8. This legendary hero is the inspiration for today’s so-called Phineas [sic] Priesthood, a neo-Nazi terrorist group functioning in the Pacific Northwest. 9. For these and other rulings on knshnit, see Appel (1977, I, 231-81). The rulings of this book are compiled from the late medieval Kitztrr Sliti17inn Amkh adapted to modern circumstances. 10. Weber suggests on the basis of Isaiah 66:3 that originally the proscription against blood eating applied only to pig blood. For possible refutation, see 1 Sam. 14:33-34. 11. For the details on kosher butchering, see Milgrom (1991,717-18). 12. Judaism may have generated its own ghettoization originally to maintain its purity. However, contemporary anti-Semites have encouraged the arrangement out of their own terror of being contaminated by Jews. Weber completely overlooks this second component of the relationship, insisting that ”the decisive factor” in Jewish/Gentile antagonism was never ”antisemitism” (which by setting off with quotes, he seems to doubt) but the ”misanthropy of Jews” themselves. This was ”always the ultimate and decisive reproach” (1952,417). Having an encyclopedic grasp of historical detail, while at the same time being unaware of antiSemitism except for a vague reference to ”Antiquity,” can only be attributable to a blind spot in Weber, if not to something worse.

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Unhinging the Gate After being proclaimed king of the Palestinian realm in 175 B.C.E. (following Alexander’s defeat of the Persians), ”an evil offshoot,” as he is called in the Bible, Antiochus Epiphanes IV inaugurated a program to unify his subjects under the banner of Greek culture. Soon thereafter, as it is said, Israel became ”infected” with Hellenism. A gymnasium and youth center were built in Jerusalem, the Jewish Temple sacked, and above the altar ”an abomination of desolation’’ was erected in honor of Father Zeus and the divine patron of athletics, Hermes. Jewish men stripped naked, masked their circumcisions from public view, and commenced to compete in games. The Temple was ”filled with. . . debauchery by the pagans, who took their pleasure with prostitutes” and feasted on things ”proscribed by the laws as unclean” (2 Macc. 6:4-6). The Mosaic Law books themselves were confiscated and burned, and circumcised observers of the dietary proscriptions hunted down and executed. In response, after the death of his father Mattathias (whom the Hebrew Bible compares to assassin-hero Phinehas), Judas Maccabaeus and a handful of followers, reenacting an ancient custom, withdrew to the wilderness ”to avoid contracting defilement”(5:27).There they prepared themselves for battle. Only a single event from the ensuing six years of terror need be mentioned, and this to underscore the significance of dietary purity in the cult of ancient Judaism. It seems that seven brothers were arrested with their mother and brought before Epiphanes. In his presence each in turn was given the choice of either being whipped and scourged, or of eating pig’s flesh. All of them refused the tabooed meat. Enraged, the king then offered each the choice between eating pig and execution. At their mother’s insistence, each brother, beginning with the eldest, opted for death over compromise. As a result, each was detongued and scalped, and his extremities amputated. They then were fried alive in a giant cauldron. In this way, they went to their end ”undefiled and with perfect trust in the Lord”(2 Maccabees 71.l

45

46

UNHINGING THE GATE

Like the Pharisees, the Essenes, the Qumran puritans, and the Maccabees, indeed like ancient Judaism itself, which sought redemption by separating itself from unclean people and things, Christianity also began as a renewal movement. In fact, Weber (1952) calls it ”Pharisaism intensified” (410). But as he points out, the prophecy of Jesus moves Pharisaism in a radically new direction. It ”sublimates” the desire for purity, purifying the quest for purity, as it were, not by becoming more onerous and exacting, but by the opposite: relativizing and devaluing the desire altogether. The revolutionary words are these: ”What goes into the mouth does not make a man unclean; it is what comes out of the mouth. . .” (Matt. E l l ; Mark 7:14- 23). When the disciple Peter asks Jesus to explain this comment that seems to contradict everything he has learned as a Jew, Jesus replies with exasperation, Don’t you understand yet? ”Can you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes through the stomach and is discharged into the sewer? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart”(Matt. 15:18).2I entitle Jesus’ lesson to Peter the ”Unhinging of the Gate.” Before retracing its impact on the pupil, a cautionary note is in order. An amateur like myself cannot but pause and gape at the staggering feast of exegetical literature on the New Testament before deigning to bring his own crumbs to the table. Being untutored in Aramaic and Greek, unfamiliar with the subtleties of biblical hermeneutics, and only nominally familiar with the gospels themselves, it takes considerable audacity to imagine that I could add anything of importance to what has been said countless times already over a period of twenty centuries. But the reader and I are on safe ground if we both keep in mind that the following comments are based on a selective reading of the canonical redactions of Jesus’ life and the early Church only, and only as these bear on orifice taboos.3As in the last chapter, my goal is to situate the originary moment of Christianity’s orifice teachings culturally and in the organizational milieu out of which they emerged. I make no claim that the way in which the sociological imagination interprets these matters in any way comports with orthodoxy. This said, let me return to Jesus’ dietary instructions to Peter. For their practical effect is to radically suspend the restraints Judaism has strategically deployed around the mouth. Henceforth, God’s chosen people are rendered vulnerable to invasion by all manner of impurity. To express it sociologically: For over a millennium, ancient Jewry had erected an elaborate fortress to defend itself against human refuse, with the believer’s mouth serving as the preeminent symbol of access into the community. Now, one of these believers has announced that no edible substance in itself is polluting. In an instant, what was once a refuge for saints is trans-

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1ESUS AND THE OTHER

formed into a haven for sinners, a place wherein ”those now last. . . will be first, and those now first . . . will be last” (Luke 13:30). JESUSAND THE OTHER

In the Abrahamanic covenant, Israel separates itself from the pagan (~zokri), marking its difference by ritually excising the foreskins of its males. Under the guidance of Nehemiah in the period immediately after the Exile (ca. 445-44 B.c.E.), Judaism proper separates itself from local strangers (Suirn), those who, like the Samaritans, worship alien Semitic gods. It does this through the tactical utilization of the kosher feast. Later, the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Zealots hold themselves apart from their less observant brothers (the mn ha-aretz) by insisting on scrupulous adherence to the most exact provisions of the Law. Finer grades of purity are eventually announced: Friends of the Synagogue, Observers of the Law (who remain uncircumcised), and Proselytes of the Covenant. The first two are permitted entree into the synagogue, but not into the inner precincts of the Temple. Proselytes are granted this last privilege. However, only after three generations are their descendants considered full converts to the faith. With the advent of the Jesus movement, this caste-like arrangement begins to unravel. Instead of fleeing into the uncontaminated sterility of the desert in the manner of his predecessors, Jesus, like John the Baptist, goes directly into the towns to seek out the ”lost sheep of Israel.” These are the very m n ha-lzretz whom the Pharisees despise: the poor, the morally disreputable adulteresses and prostitutes, the chronically menstruant, the crippled, blind, leprous, and possessed. Technically, the a m ha-aztz are petit bourgeois, little folk, whose occupations render them ritually suspect (Luke 14:13). Of the early followers of Jesus (himself a carpenter’s son), Matthew is a toll collector; Peter, a fisherman; Simon, a tanner; Tabitha, a seamstress; Aquila, a leather goods dealer; Paul, a tentmaker; Erastus, a minor official. It is the nature of this decidedly undistinguished audience that partly explains several well-known stylistic features of Jesus’ teachings, most notably his use of parables instead of convoluted legalistic case studies, and especially his choice of food-related metaphors, which underscore the salience of the mouth in Judaism: banquet, mustard seed, wine, gluttony, bread, lamb, honey, milk, fish, salt (Feeley-Harnik 1981,71-106). Jesus’ mission reached out to the same folk looked down upon by Jewish virtuosi. This is certain. Still, ”we are guilty of an alarming simplicity,” according to Matthean authorities, to suppose that he saw himself as anything but a faithful proponent of Jewish law. True, Jesus attacked the Pharisees. However, this was not because of his disgust for the Torah (Luke

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16:17),but because of the Pharisees’ ”pettifogging concern with [its] minutiae”(Matt. 23:13-32). The fact is that the early Christian congregation in Jerusalem was notable for its Jewish piety. It went as a body to the Temple daily, recited the required prayers, undertook lustral rites together, and broke bread in a manner consonant with both Law and custom (Acts 2:42-47; Gal. 2:12). In addition, it required members in good standing to be circumcised (Gal. 2:12) and that they celebrate the annual calendar of ancient festivals (Gal. 4:lO). In short, the practices observed by Jesus’ followers, like those of the prophet himself, varied ”not one iota from the inherited Jewish tradition”(Mowry 1962,184).Most pointedly for my purposes, with the exception of the accommodating stance assumed toward the am ha-aretz, Jesus (and his followers in Jerusalem) exhibited much the same exclusivity toward outsiders as the mother confession. Some examples. In Matthew 10:5, Jesus is reported to have forbidden the disciples from preaching the Good News to the gerim (although a later interpolation has him equivocating [Matt. 12:50;24:14]).Evidently, he has absorbed the legend that the Samaritans, like the Philistines, are a people whom God the Father ”detests” (Ecclus. 50:25-26). True, Jesus rebukes the disciples for desiring to call down fire on a Samaritan village that had refused them hospitality. And in doing so, he displays a liberality rare for his time (Luke 9:55-56). A close reading of the incident, however, shows that the inhospitality of the Samaritans grows from their own resentment at Jesus’ refusal to linger with them and preach. Instead, the story relates, he heads “resolutely” straight to Jerusalem, where his true charges, ”the lost sheep of Israel,” the lzrrz ha-arefz reside. At various places the gospels describe Samaria as little more than a territory that ”has” to be crossed in order to reach the Jewish homeland. In the most notable of these crossings, Jesus is said to have been left alone while the disciples are away on other business. Greeting a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, he asks for a drink. ”What?” she answers. ”Youare a Jew and you ask me, a Samaritan, for a drink? Jews, in fact, do not associate with Samaritans.” When the disciples return, they exhibit ”surprise” at finding Jesus engrossed in conversation not just with any woman, but with an outcaste. A Jewish stereotype from the period held that Samaritan females are menstruants from birth, hence perpetually unclean and never to be trusted (Brown 1980, 170).Because Jesus subsequently is reported to have converted not only the woman herself, but a handful of her fellow villagers, the incident is routinely cited by Christian apologists to prove that Jesus knew all along that he was savior of the entire world, not merely ”king of Israel” (John 4:142). The problem with this reading is that the story of the Samaritan woman is recited only in the Gospel of John; there is no independent evidence of it actually happening. Indeed, there is no mention of a Christian mission to Samaria until long

TESUS A N D THE OTHER

49

after Jesus’ death, when the Hellenic congregation, led by Philip, undertook a campaign to proclaim Christ’s resurrection to non-Jews (Acts 8:l-25). Skeptical of the historicity of the event (as well some of the other healings mentioned later) New Testament scholar Raymond Brown attributes it to its author, John’s, desire to read into Jesus’ life his own universalistic worldview, coupled with a taste for hyperbole (Brown 1980,175-76). If Jesus’ stance toward the native geuim is problematic at best, his stance toward the pagan nokri is clear. In a word, he maligns them (Matt. 5:48; 6:7; 18:17).The most graphic illustration occurs in the course of an encounter with a Canaanite (Syro-Phoenician)woman who pleads with him to exorcise her daughter of a demon. Again, while the event typically is viewed as another case of Jesus’ ecumenism, it is more safely understood as an index of the exclusionary tenor of the age, which Jesus himself exemplified. At first Jesus ignores the mother’s cry altogether. The disciples ask that she be ”sent away.”When she continues her badgering, Jesus turns to her with this stinging reply, ”I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. . . . It is not fair to take children’s food and throw it to the house-dogs”(Matt. 15:21-28; Mark 7:24- 30).4Evidently agreeing with this pejorative comment on her ethnicity, the mother answers, ”Ah yes, sir; but even house-dogs can eat the scraps that fall from their master’s table.” Upon hearing these words, Jesus appears to relent and honors her request. In any case, the daughter finds herself cleansed of the evil spirit. But unlike Jesus’ other cures, hers is not accomplished directly by the laying on of hands, but merely by an announcement of the fact, and then from a distance. I don’t want to give this incident undue significance. For one thing, Apostle Mark’s account of the affair is posed in softer language than Matthew’s, perhaps reflecting the changed circumstances of the Christian community at the time he was writing. Mark uses the term lczivzarsa (puppies), not lczrnes (dogs). But as C. S.Mann (1986) warns, ”This should not necessarily be taken as softening the near harshness of Jesus’ saying. However, the fact that the dogs in question appear to be domestic animals somewhat mitigates the saying” (321).This caveat aside, it is disturbingly ironic that whatever happened in fact, biblical accounts of the affair have been appropriated gleefully by contemporary American racists to bolster their claim that Jesus was one of their own. ”The contrast in the story of the Canaanite woman is race!” says Jarah Crawford (1984),a well-known Christian Identity preacher. ”Israelites and non-Israelites. Israelites, the pure, unadulterated seed of Adam versus the half-breed seed which God had not. . . created. Jesus was not concerned with those who walk the earth who are not the creations of God. He ignored them when he could. Is this not made absolutely clear in this situation?” (35). The depiction of the Canaanite daughter’s cure is identical to that of the servant of the Roman centurion (and Friend of the Jews) mentioned in

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Matthew 8:5-13 (cf. Luke 7:l-10). It also resembles that of the ”ten lepers” who appear along the border between Samaria and Galilee. In both incidents the cures are accomplished telesomatically instead of directly. In the latter case, Jesus is once again reported to have first dismissed the lepers’ request for help with a seemingly nasty retort, ”Goand show yourselves to the priests.” Although the priests are not specifically named, it is likely they were associated with the Samaritan cult of the socalled five demons: Nergal, Ashima, Nighaz, Succoth, and Adramelech (2 Kings 17:24-34). That one of the lepers returns to praise God for his cure is used by Jesus to instill a lesson in irony: Even a Samaritan may have as much faith as a Jew (Luke 17:ll-19). While the irony may be lost on modern readers, in the context of the day it would have been obvious. This is not the only place in the gospels where Jesus comes into contact with nonJews who, allegedly incapable of authentic religiosity, ”astonish” him with their piety. ”Not even in Israel have I found faith like this,” he concedes more than once. The classic example is the tale of the Good Samaritan, a phrase that would have seemed oxymoronic to Jesus’ audience. (It was then part of the common stock of knowledge that ”he who eats [a Samaritan’s] bread . . . is like one who eats the flesh of swine” [Feeley-Harnik 1981, 531.) Yet here is a Samaritan immeasurably more neighborly than either a priest or a Levite, two ostensible stalwarts of Jewish devotion (Luke 10:30-37). What this sample of incidents adds up to is a fracture in the wall that had been erected to separate the punctiliously observant Jew from the ain ha-auetz, these from the gerim, and the latter from the nokui. While limited in intention and effect, Jesus reaches over the parapets to the diabolic other, destabilizing tradition. Still, the ultimate shattering of the wall, the so-called originary moment in the invention of the Christian mouth-the moment I am searching for here-would have to await Jesus’ followers. BREAKING DOWN THE WALLS

Luke, a physician and Syrian convert from Antioch, writing from a distance of four decades after the event, describes it this way (Acts 1O:l-48). It is around ten years after the Crucifixion, about 43 C.E. Cornelius, a ”godfearing” Centurion and Friend of the local synagogue at Caesarea, having received a vision advising him to seek out the kosher-conscious Jewish Christian Simon Peter, has just embarked for Jaffa with a retinue of servants. Meanwhile, Simon Peter himself is on the roof of his seaside house praying, just prior to breaking fast. Not surprisingly, he has a hungerinduced vision of food. But this particular vision disturbs him. ”Heaven [was] thrown open and something like a big sheet [let] down to earth by

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its four corners; it contained every possible sort of animal, and bird, walking, crawling or flying ones.” Avoice says, ”Now, Peter; kill and eat.” Peter indignantly replies, ”Certainly not, Lord; I have never yet eaten anything profane or unclean.” The voice admonishes, ”What God has made clean, you have no right to call profane.” Later that evening, Cornelius’s party arrives and knocks on Peter’s door. While his first inclination is not to answer it-after all these are pagans-something deeper urges him to greet the visitors and provide them lodging. Attempting to justify the scandalous gesture of showing hospitality to untouchables, Peter tells them, ”You know it is forbidden for Jews to mix with people of another race.” But now God, he says, ”has made it clear . . . that I must not call anyone profane or unclean. . . . The truth I have now come to realize . . . is that God does not have favorites, but that anybody of any nationality who fears God and does . . . right is acceptable. . . The following day, as Peter preaches the Good News to his guests, they are seized ecstatically and begin speaking in tongues. The other Jewish Christians in attendance are ”astounded.” How, they ask, can noncircumcised, nonobservant folk be ”just as much” faithful as we? Peter commands that the pagans be baptized. Peter’s are the words that turn the followers of Jesus from a commensally closed Jewish sectarian movement into a bona fide world religion. In fact, Weber (1958) interprets their utterance as ”the hour of conception for the occidental ’citizenry.’”For they rip apart the voluntary ghetto in which Judaism had imprisoned itself, granting the faithful freedom to consort with noncompliant others for the first time as equals. And while their implications would not become evident for a thousand years, they laid the linguistic groundwork for the eventual overthrow of Europe’s landed aristocracy. ”For without commensalism-in Christian terms, without the Lord’s Supper-no oathbound fraternity and no medieval urban citizenry would have been possible” (37-38; cf. 114, 127-28).5 The significance of Peter’s revelation for Church history is underscored by Luke’s use of three literary devices. First, he glosses the meeting between Cornelius and Peter by having their visions divinely inspired and coincidental. Second, Luke weaves the various events surrounding the encounter together with Peter subsequent appearance before the Christian assembly in Jerusalem where he is called to account for infracting Jewish Law (Acts 11:l-18). Here, Peter justifies his dining with and baptizing of ”unclean” people by arguing that while Jesus originally was concerned solely with Israel, in truth he is Lord of all peoples (10:36, 42-43). Luke then has the elders of the assembly immediately agreeing with Peter that ”God cmz evidently grant even the pagans the repentance that leads to life”(my italics). Third, Luke follows the formal hearing with a recounting of how a church was soon established among the pagan Greeks in Antioch. .’I

I s

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Table 4.1. An Apocryphal Chronology of Early Christianity (dates in parentheses are at best approximate. Originary moment in formulation of Christian dietary ethic in bold italics) Ministry of Jesus to petit bourgeois Jews (am~ Z L Z - C I Y C Peter’s ~Z). observance of iizitzvotlz of the mouth criticized as insufficient for salvation (27-30) Last supper celebrated, possibly the day before Passover; Jesus executed (30) Paul commissioned by Sanhedrin to suppress Jesus cult (33) Stephen martyred; dispersal of Jesus cult from Jerusalem (36-37) Peter’s vision t h a t no food nor people are unc1ean;first conversions of non-fezos in fa#a (43) Peter’s baptisms of non-Jews endorsed by the Christian assemblies in Jerusalem; henceforth, converts are exempt from Jewish law; minimalist dietary ethic announced (46-48) Paul, Barnabas, and Mark embark on first mission to the world, establishing churches in Cyprus and Asia Minor (47) Paul’s second mission to Galatia, Trosas, Philippi, Athens, Corinth (50-53) Paul’s third mission to Ephesus (53-57) Paul arrested in Jerusalem for provoking riot; imprisoned in Rome (60); martyred (64?) Second Jewish temple in Jerusalem destroyed by Romans (70) Christians formally excommunicated from Judaism (90) Luke’s account of originary moment of Christianity written near end of first-century Gospel of John written, anywhere from ca. 75 to 110

”It was at Antioch,” he writes, ”that the disciples were first called ’Christians.”’(Acts 11:26). (Whether in fact Luke would have known the term Ch~istiaizis a matter of conjecture among experts.) From this church the original Christian mission to the pagan world is said to have embarked. That the elders’ formal affirmation of Peter’s behavior among the pagans was perhaps not quite as unanimous as Luke initially suggests is indicated by the fact that several chapters later he revisits the subject in the context of a second tribunal in Jerusalem before which the missionaries Paul and Barnabas are called to appear (ca. C.E. 46-48). Luke reports that the ”Pharisees’ party’’ objected to the pair’s mass conversion of pagans, insisting that all converts must first be circumcised and display their adherence to Jewish dietary law. He uses this encounter as an opportunity to amplify what would become the standard Christian ethic regarding the mouth.

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Luke begins by having Peter repeat his argument: If the Church imposes on converts legal requirements that its own members and their ancestors were themselves unable to abide by, this will only provoke God’s ire. For God judges people not by outward distinctions of diet and scar, but by the contents of their hearts (Acts 159-12). James arises to agree with Peter and then proposes an ethic well within the capacity of the average confessor. Instead of over six hundred separate obligations, including the mitzvoth of the mouth, Christians henceforth shall ”merely” (the word is his) abstain from idol worship, fornication, the eating of blood, and the flesh of strangled beasts (15:19-20, 29). This does not mean they may ”despise the scrupulous,” he warns. But those who choose to continue obeying the old Law must not look down on the less strict. If each takes with gratitude what has been given him, then both the fastidious and the relaxed ”honor the Lord’’ (Rom. 14:3, 6). The bottom line: ”No food is unclean in itself” (14:14). ”Do not wreck God’s work over a question of food” (14:20).Preoccupation with what is forbidden to touch, taste, smell, or eat betrays a concern with things that perish in the end. As for the mitzvah of circumcision, I need only turn to the Pauline epistles for instruction: ”It means nothing” (1 Cor. 7:18-19). As for those who ”disturb” you on this issue, Paul prays that ”the knife slips” and they end up castrated (Gal. 15:12).For a ”real” circumcision is not delivered to the genitals, but to the heart (Rom. 2:29).It is a wounding cognizance (like that of Jacob’s late-night realization of his betrayal of his brother Esau) of one’s own acquiescence in evil. At this level, ”there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one” (Gal. 3:26-28).6 THE CHRISTIAN MEAL

Although canon law has never recognized diet as a criterion of Christian identity, eating together at Mass or Communion is the central feature of the Christian liturgy-this, even though there is no evidence of the Eucharist being celebrated before 150 C.E. (Jung 195813,204).And while its lineaments are found in all the gospels (Matt. 26:17-29; Mark 14:17-31; Luke 22:14-34; John 13:21-28), it did not assume its final sacramental form with the characteristic censors, reliquaries, genuflections, elevations, monstrances, bells, elaborate altar pieces, and the like until early in the thirteenth century (Bynum 1987, 48-60). Whatever its history, depending on one’s viewpoint, the Jewish Passover Seder feast is either the ”model” for the Last Supper or its historical ”rehear~al.”~ Many details of the ceremonies are virtually interchangeable, even if they are not performed precisely in the same order.

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There is the same washing and drying of hands in preparation of the meal (the zrrehatz or ablutio) by the chief celebrants, with untainted water poured from vessels specifically made for that purpose. There is much the same garb, including (in the event that a bishop presides over the Mass) the presence of a shepherd’s staff. Words with similar intent are uttered in the blessings over the food and drink (the motzi or ezrclzaristia): ”We thank thee Lord.” These are followed in both banquets by grace (the barech or grat i n ) . There is the same recommended attitude by the diners of quiet reverence, attention, and care (the shzilhan artikh or conzmti~zio),in the course of which the respective redemption stories of the two faiths are recited. The same stylized removals of remains and serving plates. Even ”’do this in remembrance of me,’ would not have been out of character in a Jewish prayer,” says Gillian Feeley-Harnik (1981,64).In addition, from the countless condiments around which the meals conceivably might be basedwhy not figs and fish?-for both, it is bread and wine.8 Before being blessed, the bread (which in the Roman order of the Mass, but not in that of the Eastern Church, is unleavened) is either crosshatched with incisions and stabbed or it is broken (thefractio). This corresponds to the ritual yahatz in the Seder meal (Jung 195813,216).In Passover, the precutting is done so that the bread might be distributed to the congregants without delay. In Mass, the comparable slicing, lancing, and/or breaking of bread symbolize the Crucifixion. Following it, in both Christianity and Judaism, the celebrant places his hands on the loaf, raises it for all to see (the elevatio), and pronounces the name of Him who is invisibly present. ”Behold this is the bread of affliction,” says the Jewish prayer leader. ”Let all who are hungry . . . eat thereof.” This is also done with the wine chalice (or in the Seder meal, with the four chalices, each of which symbolizes one scene in the story of Israel’s redemption). After filling the cup to the brim, the Jewish prayer leader lifts it with his right hand and acknowledges God (the knddtrslz): ”Blessed [the Unnamable] Who hast chosen us from all peoples . . . and sanctified us by Thy commandments.” In both the Mass and Passover, the culminating spectacle is the actual or figurative slaughter, roasting, and consumption of the firstborn (bestquality), unblemished lamb of the flock. As the lamb’s blood is smeared on the door lintels and posts, the Jewish household recalls Israel’s salvation from the Angel of Death (Ex. 12:27).Just so, by eating and drinking consecrated bread and wine-the body and blood of the ”lamb of God,” Jesusthe Christian community commemorates its salvation. The words recited at the moment of consecration in the Christian feast are taken directly from Exodus and are virtually identical to the kaddzrsh over the wine and the blessing of the bread: ”This is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat”; ”Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you” (16:15; 24:8).9 There is no actual murder (mactatio) in the Mass. Instead, the violence of the act is sublimated as an incrtiente iimzolatzrr, a

THE CHRISTIAN M E A L

55

bloodless offering. Nonetheless, the scent of the lamb’s burning essence (its spirit) being wafted (offered to heaven at Passover) is figuratively replicated in high Mass by the censing of the altar (Jung 195813,204-5). As just mentioned, bread and wine figure prominently in both sacred meals, and for good reason. First, because human labor plays a role in their production, they can be seen as offerings of what is humankind’s best to God. At a deeper level, however, they provide an opportunity for God’s miraculous beneficence to be disclosed. For within each substance dwells a quality that can never be provided by human beings alone. This is the ”stuff” which enables it to fortify and sustain life in the first place: the p i z e z i i m of the grain (honored in some cultures as the Maize Goddess) or the ”spirits” that are fermented grapes (Frazer 1951, 463-91). Bread and wine, in other words, are more than human creations. Each harbors a daimon of sorts, which gives life energy and occasionally ecstasy. They can therefore be seen as gifts freely bestowed by a Giver, manna from God’s own mouth to ours (Ex. 16:32-35). Of course, there is a fundamental difference in the manna given to the Jew and to the Christian, a difference that has occasioned centuries of hostility between them. That bestowed to Israel was a yet to be clearly identified white, honeyed wafer or seed, which only had to be gathered and boiled before being eaten (Ex. 16:14, 31). The ”hidden manna” of Christianity is a person, Jesus (John 6:31-33/49-51; 1Cor. 10:5),who first had to undergo public humiliation and dismemberment before he could nourish, before he could feed. Yet, just like Israel’s manna, Jesus’ flesh is ”real food,” his blood, ”real drink’’ (John 6:53-55). For this reason, while the Christian repudiates the Jew for preferring ”food that perishes” over that which ”gives eternal life” (John 6:27), the Jew condemns the Christian for transgressing the most binding commandment of all: Eat neither blood nor human flesh. ”How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” John reports them asking, finding the idea of sacred cannibalism ”intolerable” (6:52-53). This is not the place to resolve the ageless question of what or who is eaten at Passover and Mass. Given the preceding observations, however, at least from a distance the dispute appears to illustrate what Sigmund Freud once entitled the Narcissism of Minor Differences. This he uses to explain how brothers-think of Cain and Abel or Isaac and Ishmael-can hate each other more passionately than strangers. His argument is that in order to accomplish individual identities brothers must dramatize their singularity, and the more alike they are, the more exaggerated these enactments must be (Freud 1961,72-73). Expressed sociologically and applied to the case at hand: To establish separate corporate identities, Christianity and Judaism were compelled to magnify minor divergences between their central feasts because it was only minor divergences that distinguished them at all. The first synoptic gospel, composed just after Jesus’ death, resonates with anti-Jewish vitriol. The ”unbelieving” and ”hypocritical” Pharisees

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”plot” to ”kill Christ” out of ”jealously”: ”you serpents, you brood of vipers”(Matt. 23:29-35). By the time of John’s bitter polemic (composed ca. 75-110 c.E.) against ”the Jews,” a phrase he uses no less than seventy times, always with derisive overtones (as in ”your father, Satan”[8:44, 54]), the Church’s mission to the Jews is over. The Church no longer looks toward converting Jews, but to countering them (Brown 1980, lxx-lxxv). And ironically, to paraphrase Rosemary Ruether (1979), the most cunning weapon in the Christian arsenal of hate is the Pauline notion of love. But diabolization is equally evident in contemporaneous Jewish literature. Acts reports on the expulsion of the Hellenic Christian congregation from Jerusalem (ca. 36-37 c.E.), as well as on the execution of Stephen at the hands of the Sanhedrin (Acts 7:55-60). After the destruction of the second Temple in 70 c.E., when Jewish devotion turned increasingly to fine points of dietary law, the chief prayer recited in synagogues (the Shernoneh Esreh) contained a curse on Christians as heretics. In 90 c.E., they were formally excommunicated. The gospel of John was written in the context of these developments and comments on them (9:22; 12:42; 162). The details of the fratricidal war between Christian and Jew can be ignored here (cf. Ruether 1979).It is enough to observe that as the gates of each community was bolted fast to the other, the personal orifices of Jew and Christian alike both fell under closer supervision. For Jews, this meant the mouth; for Christians, the genitals. In subsequent centuries, whenever the Church felt itself besieged, it would reengage two procedures. First, it would vilify and repress sexuality among its own confessors; second, it would accuse outsiders of outrageous genital crimes. I examine this second tactic, the Sabbat of Orifices, later in detail. But first, a clarification. CH RISTIA N ITY’S M A 1IG NED OR1Fl CE

Medievalist Caroline Bynum (1987) argues that at least for pious medieval women, diet constituted a more seminal sign of Christian devotion than either chastity or virginity and that ”eating God” was employed routinely by mystics such as Mechtild of Magdeburg (1217-1277) as a metaphor of divine union (3, 133, 256, 186). Indeed, ”fasting became an obsession so overwhelming that modern historians have . . . thought their stories preserve the earliest documentable [sic] cases of anorexia nervosa’’ (4). ”What the first man lost by eating,” she quotes Maximus of Turin (d. ca. 420 c.E.) as saying, ”the second Adam recovered by fasting” (35). During the early years of the Church, however, the mouth was far from having reached this fabled status. Even Bynum (1987) admits that fasting did not become a practice of the general Christian community, as opposed to the lifestyle of spiritual adepts, until early in the fourth century (34).As

CHRISTIANITY’S M A L I G N E D ORIFICE

57

we just saw, the Apostle James restricts only blood and the meat of strangled animals from the Christian diet. True, during the medieval era, milk and eggs were added to the list. But this applied only to special times such as Fridays or Lent, from which children, the infirm, and elderly were exempt anyway. There was never any canonical itemization of food taboos in Church law. To requote Paul, the operating rule remained, ”no food is unclean in itself.” Sexuality, on the other hand, is another matter entirely. To be sure, there is nothing novel in Paul’s denunciations of ”fornication” (1 Cor. 6:12-20), incest (5:l-13), adultery, sodomy, and ”catamites” as unclean (1 Cor. 6:9-11). This merely reiterates Jewish law. But when he goes on to extol the virtues of virginity (7:l-9) and to denigrate the moral and eschatological significance of marriage (7:32-38), he enters regions outside the boundaries of ancient tradition. His suggestion that spouses ”live [chastely] as though you had none” (7:29)is entirely foreign to the far more carnally accommodating Judaism of his day, when rabbis were encouraged, if not required, to marry. Three centuries later, St. Augustine would permanently fix the Church’s legal position regarding sexuality in The City of God. There, he argues that it is the fact of our genital being that predestines us to wickedness and damnation. Because the human species springs from the ”seed” of sexual lubriciousness, he says, our ”nature has been soiled by sin and doomed to death and justly condemned”(l950, book 13, ch. 14).Augustinianism provides the theological basis for orthodoxy’s insistence on Christ’s virgin birth and on the requirement that priests of the Jesus cult be sexually uncontaminated males. Sexual phobia is also the subtext of the medieval and post-Reformation penitential handbooks, used by these same priests to hear lay confessions. To cite just one example-a very early one at that-TIzc Peiziteiztial of Ciiimiemz (ca. 650 c.E.) distinguishes between the following types of lust: ”evil word or glances, yet did not wish to commit bodily fornication,” ”polluted by a violent assault of the imagination,” ”lured by imagination to commit fornication, and repels the thought too gently,” ”willingly polluted during sleep,” ”is unintentionally polluted during sleep,” ”defiles his neighbor ’s wife or virgin,” ”defiles a vowed virgin and begets a son,” ”does not beget but defiles,” “if he enters in unto his woman-slave,” ”if he begets a son by her,” and so on (McNeill and Gamer 1938, sec 11:12-27). Each of these is a separate iniquity calling for its own specific punishment.1° From at least the time of the fourth Lateran Council (1215), a general confession of sins was never considered sufficient for atonement in Roman Catholicism. On the contrary, absolution required that every circumstance of each sin’s commission-the with whom, the what, the where, the why, the how, and the how many-be divulged to the priest. For, as it is said, ”no physician can treat the wounds of the sick unless he familiarizes himself with their foulness” (23). In regard to sexuality in particular, this

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meant relating to the priest the exact postures assumed in the act, the gestures made, the secret words shared, the body parts fondled, the nuances of pleasure enjoyed, the desires craved, and so on. Michel Foucault (1978) observes that the recommended modes of priestly inquiry into adultery, onanism, bestiality, and sodomy had become so elaborate by the eighteenth century that the penitential handbooks themselves had to be banned as ”institutional incitements” of the very evils they were intended to deter (I, 18-21).

1. Roman Catholicism honors the brothers as martyrs to the Church. For a gruesomely detailed, apocryphal account of their martyrdom, see 4 Maccabees 5-18. That observant Jews were willing to reciprocate the violence done to them by torturing and executing their less observant fellows, see (the also noncanonical) 3 Maccabees 7:14-15. 2. Jesus adds that what issues from the mouth originates in the heart, but the human heart is pernicious. Therefore, the product of the mouth is murder, theft, slander, and the like. 3. Unless otherwise specified, all citations are from the Jerusalem Bible. Since this chapter relies principally on the gospels, a few comments are in order. The gospels are positioned in the New Testament in the supposed order of their composition: Matthew (40-50 c.E.), Mark (ca. 64), Luke (ca. SO), and John (75-110). The first three are so similar in content to justify their being called synoptic (with one eye), although each successively elaborates on the prior, occasionally adding new events and leaving out others. The fourth gospel is sharply different from the others in several respects, most notably in its manichaeistic dualism, perhaps reflecting an Essene influence. It is also much more interested in revealing the meaning, both symbolic and sacramental, of Jesus’ life. Essentially it sees Jesus as fulfilling and superseding Jewish prophecy and liturgy. John writes of a ”Christian Passover,” for example, of Christian baptism as taking the place of the ancient lustral rites, of Jesus as the ”bread of life” offered to a ”hungry” and ”thirsty” Israel, and so on. Above all, there is an anti-Jewish spirit running throughout the fourth gospel. Anti-Semitic bigots and racists for centuries have found rich ammunition in John for the cause (cf. Crawford 1984). I return to several of these points in the text. None of the gospels are histories in the technical sense, but were written to edify, encourage, and defend the faith. Yet they are reports of actual events, devoid of the kinds of extravagant fantasies that permeate Hindu literature. That none can be taken as precisely accurate is indicated, simply, by variations in detail, different orderings of events, and different wordings used by their authors. Nevertheless, together with Acts (which is also attributed to Luke) and the various letters of Paul to the original Christian communities soon after the crucifixion, they constitute a body of relatively reliable original data on which to rely in sketching a portrait of this time and place.

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4. Elsewhere, also referring to the nokri, Jesus admonishes his audience to ”not give dogs what is holy. And do not throw your pearls in front of pigs or they may trample them and then turn on you and tear you to pieces” (Matt. 7:6). 5. For Paul’s extended comment on Christians as ”citizens in God’s household,” see Eph. 2:11-22. 6. In Galatians 11:12, Paul repudiates Peter for withdrawing himself with other Jews from the nonobservant congregation at Antioch, and thus being a hypocrite to his own words. 7. The original account of the Last Supper is in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (11:23-26). A description of Mass may be found in any comprehensive, preferably pre-Vatican 11, Roman lay missal. For Passover, see Exodus 12,13:1-16. Passover was not widely celebrated until the postexilic period. The Seder meal was first described circa 175-200 C.E. For a detailed description of the Passover liturgy, see Idelsohn (1932,173-87). 8. Some Jews did expect to be fed fish at the moment of salvation (FeeleyHarnik 1981,89),specifically, the remains of the sea dragon, Leviathan, as obliquely promised in Isaiah (27:l). 9. The Jerusalem Bible phrases the prayers thus: ”That . . . is the bread Yahweh gives you to eat,” and ”This . . . is the blood of the Covenant that Yahweh has made with you.’’ 10. Czmmcmz also distinguishes between kinds of gluttony (sec. 1:l-11).But no mention is made of particular condiments, only of overeating generally.

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Interlude 2 The Specter of the Dalit I t zuns n zunrm, moist evening. All of iis hnd long beekz asleep euherz euefirst heard the screnm. ”Manta, manta.” The village is on fire! W e shall n11 die! A survey of the premises qziickly nsszired zis thnt the nlnrm wns fnlse. I t hnd been rnised by aiz old man lost in a liquor-iizdziced trnnce, iiiznble to distinguish nightinares f r o m reality. Iizterviezuirzg h i m soinetime later, w e learned earlier that inorrziizg he hnd chnnced ncross n Dnlit, an ziiztoiichnble, secretly driizkiizg f r o m the coininitnity well. While the Indinn Constitution estnblishes a coizdition of legnl equality ninoizg the citizenry, the vnst mnjority of H i n d u s still cling to n psychology of cnste, believing thnt people caiz be rnnked irz terins of their cleanliizess. Dnlits stnizds f o r denth enfleshed. To have oneglnrzce at yoii, to have his shndozu fnll across your pntlz, or to iizndvertently drink eunter toiiched by his lips is taiztninozint to being contnmiiznted by hiiriiniz feces. Evidently, the old inniz hnd traizsposed his frightening inoriziizg eizcoziiztcr into m z archetypal hnlliicinatioii of cosrnic peril, fire. -As related to me by an Indian graduate student, May 2001

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5 The Dharma of the Lower Doors

If the record of ancient Jewish history is ”woeful,” as pointed out earlier, that concerning the Hindu past is virtually nonexistent. This is for a very good reason, as illustrated in the following tale from the Brahmavaivarta Purana, as told by Heinrich Zimmer (1953,3-18). With a lightning bolt, Indra, god of thunderstorms and cousin of the Olympian Zeus, has just shattered Vritra, the fire-breathing, footless dragon, symbol of the all-consuming powers of earth. Now the living waters have burst forth, nourishing the thirsty land, making life possible. To memorialize the event, Indra orders his mason to erect a magnificent palace. However, upon beholding the finished product he demands that more and still more pools, fountains, gardens, and ells be added. Exhausted and in despair at ever completing the project, the mason appeals to Brahma for respite. The Cosmic Creator in turn consults with Vishnu, the boar upon whom all creation sits. Acknowledging the validity of the mason’s plea, he sends a beautiful, dark-skinned, sloe-eyed boy, Krishna, to intercede in his behalf with Indra. Krishna thenceforth presents before Indra an endless Parade of Ants, each of whom in its former life was a life-giving Indra in its own right. By so doing, the boy impresses on his elder the pettiness of his desires and the insignificance of his achievements relative to the slow-moving, relentless wheel of Truth. Not only are individual souls born again and again according to the balance of their sins and virtues, Indra learns; the entire cosmos has come into being, evolved, and declined repeatedly. In the Hebrew Bible there is but one beginning and one end. Time originates with Creation and unrolls like a scroll. Every occurrence, being unique in its own way, is infinitely precious. There has been a single ”special creation” of the human species for all eternity, for example, just as there will be a singular apocalypse. Given that lived-time is a continuum, historiography (and biography) is conceivable, which is to say the exact positioning of events in time and the interpretation of their meanings (Voegelin 1956).For this reason, as ”woeful” as its ancient historiography

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may be, Judaism at least has a history. And if the exact reckoning of God’s theophanies on the temporal scroll is subject to debate, at least the job of dating is deemed important to believers. And if the historical significance of these theophanies may never be definitively disclosed, at least the past is assumed to have a meaning. In contrast to this, Hindu time unfolds in endless cycles, each of which comprises ”trillions of oceans of years.” ”The reach into the boundlessness of the Indian mind . . . epitomized in . . . the ’period of countless years’ by which . . . precise numbers are rendered imprecise, has so dilated the cosmic spectacle that the actualities at hand are simply unworthy of. . . notice” (Campbell 1970,II, 233). For this reason, there is nothing in Indian literature comparable to Livy‘s Amals, which attempts to empirically trace the rise of Roman power, or to Herodotus’s Histories, which uses documents to recount the Greek wars with Persia. The encounters of the Indian subcontinent with Alexander, Seleucus, the Parthians, Huns, and Tamur the Lame, which figure so prominently in Western history, are at best obliquely mentioned in Hindu tales. Instead, in their place stands ”the richest, most subtle and comprehensive mythological system-or rather, galaxy of systems-known to man” (322). That they inhabit such variant temporal worlds, then, makes the following fact all the more remarkable: Both history-sensitive Jewry and theosophic Hinduism consider orifice purity an ultimate concern. For the Orthodox Jew, it is the mouth; for ”twice-born” (baptized) Hindu, the genitals. Their respective obsessions, furthermore, correlate with fastidiousness regarding the integrity of group boundaries: for the former, the sanctity of Yahweh’s temple; for the latter, the purity of caste ( j a t i ) . Before us, then, is the outcome of a natural experiment of sorts; one, furthermore, that corroborates the thesis of this book. For if two religions, differing in other respects, nonetheless share a common significant feature-here, puritanic regulation of body exit and entry zones-then that feature may be attributed to an independent variable they share; in this case, communal phobias concerning aliens in their midst. Correlations, of course, do not prove causality. It also must be shown how the ostensible cause actually produced the effect. In chapter 3, I argue that Orthodox Jewish commensal and connubial taboos were devised during and immediately after the Babylonian Exile (ca. 630 B.c.E.) in order to segregate the Chosen People from their nonbelieving neighbors. This, if not to consolidate the Levites’ monopoly over temple offerings, then to maintain the purity of faith fundamentals in the face of the seductive tolerance of the surrounding populations. Unfortunately, offering an explanation of comparable exactness for the Hindu law of orifices is considerably more challenging. First, the law books (hereafter called dhavrnashastras) cannot be dated precisely. Even the

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order of their appearance is not certain.' Furthermore, given the relative indifference of Hindu storytellers to such matters, the social-political events with which they might be associated in order to establish a context for the dharinashastras are largely unknown. My task, then, is to reconstruct scraps and shards of historical material-coins, cave inscriptions, and legends-into a sociologically imaginative, if not imaginary, narrative of the events in question. ANT IC IPAT10N

Hinduism stands for a welter of orientations, only one of which is focused on here, which I call Brahmanism or Brahmanic orthopraxy. For the distinguishing attribute of Brahmanism is not a particular r m t a (doctrine), to which it is generally if not entirely indifferent, but an emphasis on caste duty, dharma (Dumont 1970, 191-92).2Since the history of the caste system has been dealt with more than adequately elsewhere, I need only touch on it here.3Before beginning, however, an important clarification is in order. A serious error is made in equating, as popular sociology often does, caste with economic class. Caste ( jafi)is a fifteenth-century Portuguese term closely related to "chastity" (from the Latin castzis, meaning "purity"). More than anything, then, the caste system is a congeries of occupationally interdependent, endogamous groups ranked in terms of their comparative cleanliness, not their respective wealth (Dumont 1970, 21). While this undoubtedly oversimplifies the situation, it is not entirely untrue to say that the entire life-world of the Brahman revolves around the axis of purity and dirt. As early as the age of six, children begin learning about filth and pollution; they are introduced to defecation rites; and come to associate peoples of inferior caste (chastity) with feces (Carstairs 1961,67, 162). The Brahmans lost their legal privileges in the Constitution of 1950, yet a half century later a destitute Brahman will refuse to associate with a poor "untouchable," even if this promises to ameliorate their shared class condition. And although India passed an Untouchability Offenses Act in 1955, wealthy, college-educated Harijan (untouchable) department heads still report being treated with contempt by their Brahmanic clerks (George 1986, 180-94). Already in the Rig Veda, the earliest Brahmanic literature (ca. 1400 to 1200 B.c.E.), which lauds the Aryan "conquest" of the Indus Valley, there exists a connection between purity and skin color (uawza). The Aryans are said to be "white." They have noble lineage and are virtuous and clean. They worship a pantheon strikingly similar to that of the Greeks, Persians, and Germans of the time; and their language betrays their possible origin as somewhere west of the Hindu Kush near present-day Afghanistan. The

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natives, on the other hand, are reputed to be dnsa, dark, a word related to the Greek dia-bobs. They are feces-redolent demons (nsz~vas), those ”thrown apart,” everything the Aryan is not (n~znvya).They have ”no noses” ( a ~ a s a l zread: , they have proto-Australoid facial features); they are impious (akv~ltzi); they are avrata (disobedient of Law). Like the Greek barbarian, whose foreign tongue was taken as a sign of stupidity, the dnsas too are derided as asnt, incapable of truth. Most scandalously, they are rumored to worship the phallus god (sisna-deua). In the later dhnvinashastvas (law books), dasi simply comes to designate ”slave.” The Rig Veda boasts that soma-quaffing ”Indra helped the Arya sacrificer. . . .” In the person of the Aryan Kshatriyas (warriors), ”Indra punished. . . the dnsas who do not observe ordinances; Indra having killed [them,] protected the Avya vnv~za.[He] . . , mowed down fifty thousand dark (men), [and] shattered cities as old age shatters good looks” (”Hymn to Indra,” 3.34:9;4:16:13).For all this poetic bluff and swagger, in actuality the dasas appear not to have been extinguished. More likely, they were preserved to serve their conquerors. This is the probable origin of the ”onceborn” Sudras (servants), likely so named after a long-forgotten dnsa tribe of the Vedic period. Once-bom refers to the fact that Sudras are not ”baptized” and thus not permitted to wear the sacred thread over their left shoulders. Following universal principles of race relations, the ”twice-born” Aryan invaders probably tried to protect their corporate integrity by separating themselves as a group from the Sudras connubially and commensally, using the most visible marker available, skin color. Although skin color (uavm) is not the same thing as caste ( j n t i ) , historians have long agreed that this ”is unquestionably one of the main sources of the . . . caste system” (Rapson 1922, I, 85). For with the demarcation of vav~znsalso came elaborate protocols for maintaining the color line, while at the same time permitting socially needful collaboration between master and slave, which is to say, the sacred duties of what would eventually become castes. And with this emerged the notion that Aryans who inadvertently or willfully touch or are touched by human scum thereby become polluted themselves. To this day, despite no longer being recognized in law, villagers use variations of the vavnn theory (or ”ideology,” as Marxists would prefer) to rank the j n t i (caste) of persons with whom they come into daily contact, particularly strangers. Once knowing their ranking-which might well be disputed by the stranger in question-the villager has a clearer idea of how to behave in that person’s presence. Notwithstanding Aryan racist attitudes, given the likely scarcity of pure-blooded Aryan females except for sons of distinguished families, most of the twice-born were compelled to find wives among the Sudras. Centuries later this would be formulated as nizziloma marriage (literally,

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marriage ”with the hair”) (Gau 4:14-15; Bau 1:8:6-8; Vas 18:7; Manu 10:6). Children of antiloma love relations were scorned by their racially pure fellows and (at least according to some accounts) eventually devolved into what are called in the Rig Veda ”the people,” Vaisyas (free commoners). Patviloina marriage, however-marriage ”against the hair”-was another matter. For a Sudra male to penetrate the genital cleft of an Aryan female was not just shameful; it was mahapatakn, a horror tantamount to a foreigner breaching the walls of the Aryan br~therhood.~ It was believed to imperil the very world. This being so, children from such encounters came to be judged not simply as inferior; they were experienced as outcastes, Candalas (or as they are known today, as Harijans or Dalits). As such, they fell outside the realm of the truly human. Candalas are the ”lowest of men,” writes Manu, the mythic Hindu lawgiver (10:12). Like dogs and crows (Gau 15:25), even their shadows or glances contaminate; food smelled by them is rendered garbage. For this reason they must reside outside the village (Manu 10:51-56), dress as the walking corpses they are, and strike wood to warn others of their presence. The dhavmashastvas associate the impurity of Candalas with that of physicians (who are pus), unchaste women (who are semen), usurers (ordure),and weapons dealers (dirt) (Manu 3:150-66; 4:220-22). So there we have it, the ideal five-level Brahmanic social order: Brahmans (priests), Kshatriyas (soldiers), Vaisyas (farmers and venders), Sudras (servants),Candalas. This is by no means to say that the dharmas of the different castes, or that the articulatedjajmani system of scores of endogamous, occupationally closed groups, appears full blown in the Vedas. One Vedic sage is reported to have boasted about a long-forgotten wordsmith of the period: ”He was a poet, [but] his father a physician, and his maternal grandfather a stonecutter” (George 1986,148).Not until literature of some five centuries after the Aryan invasion is there clear evidence that even kingship is heritable (as implied in the term vajaptitra, ”son of a king.”), to say nothing of other positions. By this same time a schism has appeared among the Vaisyas, with vathacavas, chariotmakers, having lost status due to their involvement in ”dirty work.” And only now are Brahmans written as privileged in court and immune from corporeal punishment, and a distinction has been drawn between those who serve as chaplains to noble houses and the less reputable pastors of the common folk. Still, Brahmans have not yet transmogrified from mere ”sacrificers” into ”lords of all created beings . . . who alone deserve (to possess) the whole earth” (Manu 1:98-105). Again, while by 800 B.C.E. there is already an obsession with sziva (liquor) and dirty nails (in anticipation of the countless phobias which later find a place in the law books), and daughters are being portrayed as ”a source of misery,” genital regulations are limited to incest, the dangers of falling in caste for marrying outside it, and ”embryo murder.” These hardly

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approach the punctilious examinations of semen quality and female body marks and the discussions of clean and dirty foods described later in this chapter. In other words, the originary moment in the full formulation of the dharma of the lower doors is not to be found here, but at some later time. To isolate this date more precisely, let me move my attention forward several more centuries. ORIGIN OF THE DHARMASHASTRAS

In 327 B.c.E.,Alexander of Macedon invaded the Indus Valley and overran the armies of several local Indian magnates. His short rule was soon replaced by that of the Greek Seleucid satraps. One of these satraps dispatched Megasthenes as an envoy to Chandragupta Maurya’s court in Pataliputra, capital of the first bona fide Indian empire (ca. 300 B.c.E.), located on the Ganges River northwest of modern Calcutta. In reports home, Megasthenes describes what he calls the ”seven-caste” order and the Brahman’s dominant position in it. As we come upon the scene, Chandragupta’s grandson, Ashoka (reigned ca. 273-232 B.c.E.), is being installed on the throne. But now a surprise: Having just witnessed the butchery of a war with the state of Kalinga ”in which so many pious souls were lost,’’ Ashoka proclaims his conversion to Buddhism and publicly renounces the presumed eternal dharma of the Kshatriya, battle (Manu 7:98).Henceforth, he declares, his house shall devote its energies to the attainment of ~ i z o k s h , release from the eternal wheel of reincarnation (Thapar 1961). Always more concerned with personal salvation, according to Weber (1958), ”not [with] the welfare of neighbors,” Buddhism never contemplated political overthrow of the Brahmanic status quo (209, 206-8, 226-27). Instead, it calls for extinguishing desire altogether, including hope for a more just society.5In this respect the Buddhist ethic is comparable to Jesus’ decidedly otherworldly stance toward the Jewish world of his time. Nevertheless, just as Jesus’ nonrevolutionary propensities ”brought scorn and doubt of his gifts of grace” from the Pharisees, Buddhism elicited the ”unquenchable hatred” of the Brahmans (227).For Buddhism teaches that it is not through birth that one attains ”true Brahmahood, but through acts. And not just empty ritual acts (read: Brahmanic sacrifices), but acts of real moral consequence. But this means that now even those not born into the priestly caste could conceivably become a devotee of a mystic, or an arhd themselves. Hence, Buddhism’s appeal to its first converts: educated Kshatriyas, distinguished Vaisyas, and an occasional Sudra. The reader may recall that Siddhartha Gautama himself, who subsequently became the Buddha, was not a Brahman, but a nobleman’s son.6 ”

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Table 5.1. Chronology of Brahmanism (originary moment in formulation of dharma of genitals in bold italics) Aryan ”conquest” of the Indus River Valley; establishment of the four varnn (color)Brahmanic order (ca. 1400-1200 B.C.E) Slow emergence of the jati (caste)system from the varna order (ca. 1200-300 B.C.E)

Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) flourishes (ca. 563483 B.C.E) Alexander of Macedon invades Indus River Valley; establishment of Seleucid empire (327 B.C.E) Seleucid ambassador, Megasthenes, describes the ”seven castes” of the Brahman-dominated Mauryan empire (ca. 300 B.C.E) Buddhist dynasty established under Ashoka (reigned ca. 273-232 B.c.E). He renounces the Brahmanic caste order and patronizes Buddhism; first Buddhist missions to the world Pushyamitra, a Brahman, organizes a successful coup d’ktat against Ashoka’s grandson, Brilladratha, establishing the Shunga dynasty. This signifies full restoration of Brahmanic power (184 B.C.E) Final rendition of caste obligations in the L a m of Manu, enjoining female and male chastity t o protect caste lines (ca. 200 B.C.E-200 C.E) Ashoka’s grandfather, Chandragupta, was reputedly the son of a Sudra concubine. Ashoka himself was rumored to be the offspring of a barbarian (Seleucid) princess. Thus, in the eyes of the Brahmans the legitimacy of Mauryan rule had already been long in doubt. When Ashoka undertook vows of ntzi~zsn(noninjury) toward all living things, renounced hunting, prohibited slaughterhouses in the capital, and ridiculed animal sacrifices, this merely confirmed Brahmanic suspicions. But Ashoka went further. He declared ”welfare” (of souls in the Buddhist sense) an imperial charge. He established an office of state censors ( d h n m n mahnrata) to edify and police public morals according to Buddhist standards. He took monastic vows and became an itinerant missionary to wild tribes. He presided over the council that fixed Buddhist canon in writing. In short, Ashoka became the first Buddhist ”pontiff.” True, he patronized all faiths, including Brahmanism. However, he bestowed the most lavish gifts on his chosen confession. It is said that during his reign, the Mauryans underwrote construction of eighty-four thousand stupas, monuments, and shrines. How is it, then, that within a few centuries after Ashoka’s death Buddhism ”was almost completely exterminated” in northern India? (Weber 1958, 291). There are two sides to the story, both worthy of comment. First, the Brahmans continued to flourish during the Buddhist era, often in Buddhist monasteries, where they toiled as priests, teachers, and

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bookkeepers. This was because originally Buddhism existed primarily for the mystical illumination of arhats. The responsibilities of their lay followers (zipasakas) were limited to financing their quests while they still lived and preserving their relics after death. This arrangement eventually would evolve into monastic landlordism of the sort still associated with the Hinayana (Small Ship) Buddhism of cloistered monks. Certainly, tipasakas could gain prestige by patronizing a particularly notable arhat. They could earn credit toward their next earthly incarnation, and they could even acquire reading skills in a monastery school. But all this failed to satisfy their needs for magical amelioration of daily problems and especially for an easily trod path to salvation. Enter the ”Buddhist Brahmans,” as they were called, to service the market. Within a few decades, they transformed monkish otherworldly Buddhism into Mahayana (Great Ship), a style of worship compatible with the needs of the laity. The rudiments of this development are already evident by 100 B.C.E. (Weber 1958, 244-56). By then Buddhist catechism was being conveyed orally and preserved in Sanskrit, the preferred language of the Brahmans, and the Brahmanic sacred books, the Vedas, were being used to provide daily solace and assurance to the ill, infertile, and impoverished. The idea of a personal savior, a bodkisattva, was introduced. This is one who has selflessly foregone the bliss of nirvana, returned to earth, and by example shows others how to achieve eternal release. An obvious concession to Brahmanic interests was the notion that a bodhisattva can only come from a twice-born caste. In the end, stone effigies of Brahma and Indra, two major Brahmanic deities, would find themselves positioned alongside the Buddha to guard temple gates. Buddha himself would be absorbed into the Hindu pantheon as an avatar of Vishnu. In short, during the very time that Buddhism was sweeping over the Indian subcontinent, the Brahmans were using the occasion to tighten their hold over the Indian soul. By so doing they continued to capitalize on their ancient prerogatives. But this is only half of the story, and the less important half at that. Even if their prestige was visibly tarnished during the Mauryan era, the Brahmans never entirely relinquished de facto powers. Because they were the sole literates of the population, they continued serving as clerks in the expanding patrimonial administration, as royal chaplains, or as political consultants to the emperor. Now the year is 184 B.C.E. One of these ministers, Pushyamitra, an elder from a Brahmanic clan named Kanva, has arranged the murder of the last Mauryan magnate, Brihadratha, Ashoka’s grandson. Commander-in-chief of the armed forces at the time, Pushyamitra is said to have accomplished the deed during a military review. The assassination inaugurated the Shunga regime, a Brahman-dominated puppet government named after a minor tributary tribe to the Mauryans.

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While the immediate motive for Brihadratha’s murder remains hidden, its historical significance is clear. It is analogous to Jehu’s bloody revolt against the royal syncretism that had imperiled the office prebends of the Jewish Levites seven centuries earlier.7 That this is so is indicated by Pushyamitra’s first order of business, the declaration of Buddhism as a heresy. Pushyamitra’s second official act was to announce the forthcoming destruction of the grand monastery of Kukkutarma, built by Ahsoka, and the placement of a price of a thousand-dinar reward on the head of every monk. His third official act was to resurrect the previously outlawed Vedic Horse Sacrifice (nsun-medhn), the mightiest Brahmanic rite. The Horse Sacrifice involves letting the emperor (here, Pushyamitra) in the guise of a stallion wander freely along the borders of the imperial domain, its armed retainers fending off challenges to the horse’s ”authority” to rove at will. (After Pushyamitra’s violent ascension to the throne, his grandson, Vasumitra, served as chief of the horse’s guard.) After a year of jousts, the beast is returned to the palace and ritually killed. In the concluding ceremony, the empress is made to feign intercourse under a blanket with the corpse to stylized, erotic banter (Campbell 1970, 11, 190-97). Upon completion of the ”royal couple’s” figurative marriage, the emperor is formally declared c~zakrnvarti-sa1?zrn~ (master of the world). In reality, after the fall of the Mauryans, the Hindu world disintegrated into a blur of feudal enclaves, each headed by its own self-proclaimed devayzitrn (son of god) or a petty rnjntirnja (king of kings), each staging nsvniizedhns in his own honor. Cave inscriptions from the period boast of kings once again upholding dharma and of overseeing immense sacrifices with previously unheard of donations to the Brahmans, involving tens of thousands of cows, thousands of horses and elephants, treasuries of gold, entire villages8 As for the Shunga dynasty, after three generations of rule, its last magnate was violently dispatched. Accounts of the event vary. One has him dying at the hands of his concubine’s daughter, posing as the queen. Another puts the weapon directly in the palm of another Kanva Brahman. ”Being over fond of drama [thespians, like Candalas, are untouchable in Hindu law], [he] was attacked. . . in the midst of actors, with a scimitar shorn like a lotus stalk, of his head” (Rapson 1922, I, 521). In either case, it is clear who was secure in the saddle of the Great Horse, the Brahmans. Equally evident are the consequences of their usurpation. The most notable of these was the ”stereotyping [of] caste ritual . . . in the form of the law books [dharmnshastras] of the first century of our time calculations” (Weber 1958,293).Here at last, then, is the moment for which I have been searching, when the ”eternal law” of the genitals was strategically deployed to defend the sanctity of the caste order, and with it the worldly stakes of the twice-born.

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THE DHARMA OF THE LOWER DOORS

THE WAY OF THE GENITALS

In the anatomy of the Hindu lived-body, the head is pure; what lies below the navel is impure (Manu 1:92). Being the reservoir of semen, power, and virility (viiyn),the head is tended, hatted, wrapped, oiled. The clzoti growing from the vertex of the head is the marker of male strength. While facial entryways themselves are clean-even a woman’s mouth is pure (Manu 5:130)-what falls from them is not: ear wax, rheum, spit, vomit, crumbs (Manu 5:132; 11:153).Touching any of these requires a ritual sprinkling of the offending part from one’s water bag (lots). The size of one’s Zota is said to reflect the person’s piety (Carstairs 1961, 81). The foot is the lowest part of the anatomy. Visitors show respect by doffing their shoes in the host’s home; at other times, shoes are used as cudgels to communicate contempt in street fights. By holding his feet, the Hindu wife displays subservience to her lord (78-79). Also below the navel are anus and genitals. Both they and their products are sources of pollution. Feces, urine, semen, and menstrual blood all are treated under the legal category of corpses. Contact with each requires sprinkled ablutions or full immersions before one is considered publicly presentable (Manu 5:58-83, 126, 144). While there exists an elaborate protocol for dealing with both anus and genitals, my attention here is limited to the latter.9 FEMALE CHASTITY

If sexual organs are dirty, it is clear who is responsible for their distensions and effusions: She is. ”So soon as a woman sees a handsome man, her vulva becomes moist . . .” (Mahabharata XIII, 38-43).1° But in truth, so it is said, woman cares neither about handsomeness nor age. ”It is enough that he is a man” (Manu 9:14).And if a ”hunchback, simpleton, dwarf, or cripple” is not momentarily available to sate their ”fathomless” cravings, ”they . . . fall on one another” to complete coition artificially. For just as fire cannot get enough logs, or the sea enough rivers, so woman’s sexual appetites are unceasing. It is she, not her lover, who has the most pleasure in sex (Mahabharata XIII, 12).11And until they are elderly, none can be trusted. The gods are said to have created women out of their fear of ascetics who, by storing their semen, threatened to achieve divine powers (Mahabharata XIII, 3843).I2 With their roving desires, base natures, evil tongues, and lusts, they are perennial threats to chastity (caste). No expense must be spared in keeping them under the ”guardianship” of a male relative (Manu 9:15-16). Ironically, it is this that explains the preference in Hindu law for formally free nuptials, instead of marriage by purchase. For only if

FEMALE CHASTlTY

73

she is unbought, so it is believed, can a wife truly be ”owned” (because only then does she freely submit to her spouse). And only if owned is she secure from impropriety (Nar 12:54). As chief signifier of chastity (and of caste security), a premium is placed on premarital female virginity. Public display of the blood-spotted ”cloth of bliss” on the morning after the bridal night is a celebrated event in family and caste life (Meyer 1953, I, 25-39). Defloration of a high-born maiden outside of marriage, on the other hand, is equivalent in law to incest or to violating a guru’s bed. It is ”the most heinous thing there is” (44, n. 2). To this end, then, while she still ”looks pretty without clothes” (that is, around eight years of age) and is not yet, as it is said, an occasion of sin for men, the dlznunzaslznstrns urge that she be betrothed (Manu 9:88; Vas 17:70)? Failure to find a spouse for one’s daughter by the time she reaches puberty condemns one’s ancestors ”to drink the blood she sheds every month” (Meyer 1953, I, 55, n. 2). If after three menstrual periods she still has not been answered for, both she and her father become complicitous in ”embryo murder” (Vas 17:70-71; Bau 4:1:12; Nar 12:25-27), one of three great female crimes (the others being adultery and spouse murder). As a result, she is rendered a pariah. Being unguarded, she is available for anyone, without guilt (Manu 9:93). Virginity, then, is a paramount criterion in mate selection, and if the potential bride has no male relatives, she should be avoided because claims concerning her purity are suspect (Manu 3:lO). Failure by a father to warn the groom ahead of time of his daughter’s nonvirginity automatically nullifies their betrothal (Manu 8226; 9:196; Gau 4:l; Nar 12:36).But virginity is far from the only consideration in finding a suitable spouse for one’s son. Above all, a matter of concern is her j n t i (caste) and her gotm (family) relations. Here, the rule is simple: marry within the j n t i at risk of being excommunicated from it; marry outside the p t m on pain of committing incest. Gotm relations are those with whom the groom shares substance (piizda) to five generations (Manu 11:172-73).14Miscellaneous considerations concern whether the bride’s family has male progeny, a history of consumption, or leprosy. Finally, come attributes of the maiden herself. She must carry no inauspicious marks (Manu 3:7-10): neither red nor overly thick hair, dimples, redundant body parts, yellow or red eyes, nor an unfortunate name. Preferably she is small-waisted, soft-limbed, is blessed with even teeth, and has the gait of a swan. In all her adult forms the female fascinates and rouses terror in the male heart. Her icon is the naked Kali (Radha, Devi, Lakshmi): she of long eyes, perfect hips, voluminous breasts, and luminous skin, who laps blood from the beheaded neck of the consort with whom she is simultaneously locked in embrace. As a parturient, she is taboo for forty days, after which both she and the child must bathe before being readmitted to male company (Manu

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2:34-39). As a menstruant, she is even more contagious. Even if ”mad with desire,’’ a spouse should avoid her, lest his ”vitality [along with his wisdom] utterly perish’’ (Manu 4:4142; 3:45-50). Sex with a menstruant is legally equivalent to staining a guru’s bed (Manu 11:171-79; Bau 2:2:11;Nar 12:73).But there is more to it than this. Anything the menstruant touches or merely glances upon, especially food, must be thrown out (Manu 4:207-17). Her words are ”unclean” (Manu 3:239).Therefore, to converse with her, to witness her sneeze or even to yawn can be perilous (Manu 4:43,57). The point is that menstrual blood (ritzr) carries with it evil. This is why after menses (and after a ritual bath), the woman is rendered entirely clean, no matter how bad her sins were prior to her menstrual periodeven if she were to have sex with a Candala. (In this case, it is recommended that until her cleansing period, the culprit should atone, fast, and be entombed up to her neck in cow dung [Bau 2:2:44;Vas 28:4].)This being so, four days following menstruation, the wife is free to communicate her availability for intercourse with the phrase ”Rittinz dehi” (”Give me the rittr embrace that my ritzr not be in vain”). Honoring these words is a legally binding obligation on her spouse, failure of which constitutes embryo murder (Mahabharata VI, 17:28-36; XIII, 162:4).15 The gravest threat to chastity (caste), of course, is adultery (slzmgvlzhaiza) (Manu 8:353). It is also the most harshly punished. Adulterers are threatened in the next life with impotency, but only first after having lived as a Candala or worse: as a vulture, crane, snake, pig, cat, or insect (Meyer 1953, I, 247). Meanwhile, as their souls wander in hell awaiting incarnation, they are roasted like fish on a spit and condemned to meals of blood and dung (Mahabharata XIII, 37-40). In this life, on the other hand, law prescribes death for both parties to adultery. (Not surprisingly, this excludes the lawgivers themselves, who are subject only to fines and banishment [Manu 8:383].) However, exceptions are made for degrees of ”adultery,” which can include little more than ”secretly conversing” with another’s wife (354), offering her presents, touching her sari, and so on (358).Furthermore, caste status determines the harshness of penances. If a low-caste female ”seduces” an upper-caste male, this is regrettable, but only natural and ”with the hair” (antilonza); no punishment is called for (365).But if the seducer of a high-caste female is from a lower caste, then there shall not only be words, but the administration of pain: excommunication, branding, castration, being ”shaved with the urine of an ass,” or being paraded through the streets naked on the back of an donkey (Manu 8:374-75,384-85; Apa 1:9:25:1;Gau 23:lO; Vas 20:13; Bau 2:1:1:15).16And in the event that the male perpetrator is a Sudra and his victim a Brahman, only death can balance the wrong. He shall either be burnt on a red-hot iron until dead (Manu 9:104; Gau 22:8; Bau 2:1:1:13),immolated on a grass fire (Manu 8:377; Bau 2:2:52), or after ”having cut off his organ and his

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testicles and having taken them in his joined hands, he may walk straight towards the southwest” until he expires (Manu 10:105).As for the adulteress in this case: ”Her nose, lips, and ears having been cut off, she shall be paraded through the streets and plunged into water” (drowned);or she shall be ”devoured by dogs in a place frequented by many” (Manu 8:371; Brihaspati 26:16). With such esteem is the integrity of caste (chastity) held. As it is said, ”all castes . . . would be corrupted (by intermixture), all barriers would be broken through,” chaos would reign supreme, were there no laws against adultery (Manu 7:24). MALE CHASTITY

There is a paradox in Brahmanism. Sex is bad because it entails loss of male viryn,virility; sex is necessary because without it sons are impossible. Only sons can perform sacrificial offerings in behalf of their ancestors. This is why, although he may gain -merit in this life, ”a son-less man is born to no end; at death he becomes a ghost; for him no door to heaven is known” (Meyer 1953, I, 149-59). During the Golden Age, it is taught, sons could be secured through concentrated thought alone; in the Silver Age, through thought and touch; but in the fallen Dvapara Age, only through copulation.17This explains the necessity for the otherwise inexplicable custom of proxy marriage (niyop)whereby either a Brahman or a brother-in-law can stand in for an impotent or dead husband (Meyer 1953, I, 159-71).18 Although injection of the seed is in such cases ”farmed out,” the ”fruit” produced from such arrangements remains in the possession of he who ”owns the field,” namely, the husband (Manu 9:31-55).19 As virginity is to female eligibility sexual potency is to male suitability for marriage (Carstairs 1961, 85-86, 167).Two things imperil it: bad food and bad acts, specifically, sexuality undertaken for reasons other than reproduction. This includes putting one’s phallus in an inappropriate orifice: that of animals (Manu 11:174-75), other men (homosexuality is ”dreadful”), a mouth (”upside down sex”), one’s own hand (2:180-81, 11:121),or a female other than one’s wife. The rule is ”neither outside the vulva, nor in the vulva of another (nonhuman) being” (quoted in Meyer 1953, I, 245 n). Unnatural positions condemn one’s ancestors to a month awash in semen (Vas 12:22). Baudhyana likens it to Brahma murder (3:72). ”The bun-doers, evil-livers, very foolish ones, . . . who find their delight in intercourse with a base womb (especially of an animal, but also a woman of low rank), and with men, are born again as men incapable of begetting” (Mahabharata XIII, 145:22). When done correctly, at the proper time with a clean wife ”fit for delight,” sex produces sons, or at worst daughters (Manu 2:16, 26; Bau

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4:6:1; Gau 8:14).At other times and places, ”restraint of organs” is called for. Ogling a naked woman can occasion semen loss (Manu 4:53),and even the licit satisfaction of desire never quenches one’s appetite for sex. ”It only grows stronger like a fire (fed) with clarified butter” (2:94),the result being ”semen of terrible form.” Continence, therefore, is always preferable. Continence ”burns up evil”; one’s semen becomes ”rich and viscous, like the cream of unadulterated milk.” He ”glows with radiant health,” becomes a superman capable of bilocation, levitation, conversation with animals (Carstairs 1961, 84). Good food (pa1cka) has the same beneficent effect. Pakka is sat (pure, true) and ”cool.” It nourishes without inflaming passions. Like the semen it sustains, it is light colored, pourable, thick. White sugar, corn flour, rice, honey, and cow milk products, particularly clarified butter (ghee), are all pa/kka (Dumont 1970, 142-43). At weddings, young men vie with each other to consume the most ghee. Forbidden foods are kakka. 20 A substance becomes lcalclca in two ways. Either it has been prepared and served in a defiling manner: Candalas, menstruants, or dogs have breathed on it; the cook has unclean fingernails; the table has not been strewn with purifying cow dung; eaters of different castes are promiscuously mixed in the dining area; the proper blessings have not been performed (Manu 2:239-40; 4:207-9, 212, 217; Apa 1:5:16:19-20, 24, 29). Or it is I’cakltn because it is naturally dark and difficult to pour. Unrefined molasses-based sugars, dark liquor (szm), paprika, red meat (pointedly, that from one-hoofed or clawed [carnivorous] beasts), and yellow oils are examples. So are ”red exudations from trees,” leeks, beans, onions, turnips, mushrooms, and garlic, all of which incite and are therefore taboo (Manu 5:5-6, 8/19;Apa 1:5:17:25-27; 2:8:18:2; Vas 14:33-40; Gau 17:27-31). The legal attitude toward the consumption of fruits and roots is equivocal (Manu 5:54).21 Good acts and good food, then, assure good semen. But how is the quality of semen ascertained? Consider these words of Narada, which must be unprecedented in the world of jurisprudence. (However, the reader should bear in mind our own puritanically inspired ”urine tests.”) Only after passing both mental and physical examinations, says Narada, the latter of which includes a semen test, is a man permitted to marry (12%).For the wife is the field and her husband the seed. ”The field must be given to him who has the seed. He who has no seed is unworthy to possess the field” (12:19). How, given the stricture against masturbation, semen shall be collected, Narada does not disclose. But if it is determined that his semen is thin and watery, evil smelling, or colored, the candidate may not marry. “If,” on the other hand, ”his semen, when thrown into water, does not swim on the surface; and if his urine is rich [like ’molten silver’] and foamy [and, as later commentators add, ’smells of lotuses’]: by these tokens may a virile man be

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known. . .” (12:10).22 Narada goes on to enumerate fourteen kinds of impotency. Not all automatically nullify a betrothal. One rectifiable type is due to ”timorousness.” ”Such a feeble man shall be stirred up by bringing before him other men’s wives or young maidens, etc.” (12:17).Again, how this ”bringing before” can be reconciled with Brahmanic injunctions against naked bodies, Narada does not tell. In any case, if after marriage his feebleness persists, this is grounds for divorce (18).

CONCLUSION

To modern readers, smzghusha (coitus) is simply “sex.” It is a physiological phenomenon that one commentator has described as ”the bring[ing] of one’s genitals into contact with someone of the opposite sex” (Marcuse 1956,166).Relative to this, the Hindu way of mating seems peculiar, archaic, gratuitously complicated, dare I say, inefficient. Like the kosher meal, it encumbers some while excluding others. It infringes on individual freedom, wounds our democratic pride. But in the Brahmanic life-world coitus is nothing less than m i t h i i m , a sacred rite. As the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad teaches, ”woman, verily, is a sacrificial fire, 0 Gautama. The sexual organ, in truth, is its fuel; the hairs, the smoke; the vulva, the flame; when one inserts, the coals; the feelings of pleasure, the sparks” (6:2:13).As such it provides an ideal occasion for remembrance. Not only are two persons ”re-membered” in one flesh; the participants are compelled to recall what is so easily forgotten in the hum-drum routine of everyday life, namely, that the ground of Being is invisibly here and now in their very midst. Again, as for ancient Judaism, special arenas have been selected to convey this lesson, orifices: the yoizi or vaginal ”fire hole” and the seed-spilling lingam (phallus). These are unsurpassed for the pedagogical purposes they serve, for they are transition zones between our insides and outsides. Hence, we should not be surprised to learn that when lingam is placed into yoizi at the proper time, the partners in straight lying position, something extraordinary occurs. Nine months later out of that very same place issues a ”human being fit for Veda study”: a miracle! (Manu 2:16; Bau 4:6:1; Gau 8:14). Or as the Upanishads say, ”in this oblation the gods offer semen. From this oblation a person ( p z m i s l z ) arises” (Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad 6:2:13).23

NOTES 1. We use six major dlzarnzashastras, each named after their reputed author: Gautama, Baudhayana, Vasishtha, Apastama, Manu, and Narada (henceforth,

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designated as Gau, Bau, Vas, Apa, Manu, and Nar). All of these have been translated into English and published in the Sacred Books of the East series. Technically, the first four books are prose szitras, not shnstms or code books, although the difference is ignored here. Dating the dlznmzasl~astrns,as P. V. Kane says, has ”been difficult to settle.” Conclusions are based on which texts are cited by whom, their relative levels of systematization, and their rules of evidence (e.g., ordeals versus document use). Nar is the most sophisticated regarding courtroom matters; it endorses leverate marriage (iziyoga), but allows widows to remarry. It recognizes fifteen kinds of slaves, permits gambling as a source of state revenue, and describes various kinds of impotence in detail. In all these respects it is placed subsequent to Manu, which is more primitive, less detailed, and more intolerant. The problem with relying on these criteria is that all but Nar contain different strata, representing the likelihood of their having been produced by persons from widely variant centuries. Thus, while in most respects Bau seems more ancient than Manu, it cites Manu as an authority. Vas’s treatment of evidence is more developed than Manu, although it was probably anterior to it. Apa acknowledges the Puranas, which are products of the eleventh century C.E. Because most of the slzastras have multiple authors, their teachings are sometimes self-contradictory. Manu 8:204 asserts that if a girl is promised to a bridegroom and then another is given in her place, the groom may purchase both for the price of one. Earlier, however, he says unequivocally that a father may not even take a small price for a daughter (3:51).He simultaneously condemns i z i y o p and approves of it in the same passage (9:59-69). Elsewhere, he teaches both that one can (3:12-13) and cannot have (4:14-19) a Sudra (once-born) wife. In 5:51-52, he allows flesh eating; in 5:48-50, he outlaws it. Not only are there internal contradictions within separate dhnri~znslznstrns, there are also conflicts between them. In cases of conflict, Hindu jurisprudence follows the practice of recommending that action preferred by the majority. If that does not suffice, Manu is considered the final word. Manu is the most celebrated and often cited Hindu lawgiver. For these and related points, see the seminal work on the dharimslmstrns (Kane 1930-62, I). We follow Kane in affixing these approximate dates to them: Gautama, no later than 600 to 400 B.C.E. Baudhayana, 500 to 200 B.C.E. Apastamba, 600to 200 B.C.E. Vasishtha, 300 to 100 B.C.E. Manu, 200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. Narada, 300 to 400 C.E.

2. If there is an identifying Brahmanic doctrine, it is that the Vedas are holy. But the Vedas are mostly compilations of hymns and magic formulas to be recited at sacrifices. They contain little theology. The modern Hindu gods, Shiva and Vishnu, are rarely mentioned; the wheel of reincarnation (lcarmn-sainsaw) is nowhere in evidence; and the various ways of being released (i?zokslza)from that wheel are not yet known. Not even the principle of dharma (the Way) is in the Vedas, although its loose equivalent, Yita, is. 3. While written before the archaeological excavations of Indus civilization, Weber’s (1958) account of the origins and evolution of caste is still unsurpassed.

NOTES

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See also the illuminatingly subtle account in Dumont (1970) and the essays in Searle-Chatterjee and Sharma (1994). An excellent journalistic analysis of the persistence of caste sensibilities today is found in George (1986). For a heterodox account of the caste order that denies the notion of an Aryan conquest, see Frawley (n.d). The classic ethnography of a Brahman community is Carstairs (1961). I have also consulted Rapson (1922), Majumdar (1951-69), and Flood (1996). 4. The Special Marriage Act of 1872 declared both pntriloim and a~ziloiiznmarriages valid if solemnized according to British colonial procedures; otherwise, pntrilomn marriage was invalid (Kane 1930-62,11,451; cf. 447-50). 5. Compassion plays a central role in Buddhism, especially in the Mahayana idea of the bodhisnttva. However, Buddhist compassion seeks to allay pain by silencing the ego hungers of the sufferer, not by ameliorating their material condition. 6. Buddhist doctrine emerged in part from the Upanishads. In these, the Brahmans are displayed as ignorant louts relative to the wise Kshatriyas, who disclose to them the truths of reincarnation, Atman (Soul), mokslzn (release), and the various yogas. Buddhism originated in eastern India, which at the time was far from completely Brahmanized. As evidenced by the Jatakas, part of the Buddhist canon, there existed considerable intercaste contact. Although born Kshatriya, Siddhartha’s playmate was a Brahman child (for comparable examples, see Rapson 1922, I, 208-9). 7. For an historical account of the Shunga dynasty, see Rapson (1922, I, 517-23). 8. For an example of one inscription honoring king Rudradaman, see Thapar (1966, I, 98-99). 9. For the dharma of handling fecal products, see Manu 4:151-52,5:45-52, and 5:134-38. 10. All translations of the Mahabharata are by Meyer (1953). For the relevant quotes concerning this issue, see I, 130-37; 11,496-98. 11. Meyer 1953,II, 376-80. 12. For comparable libels directed toward females, see Meyer (1953, I, 260-62; 11,496-596) and Kane (1930-62; 11,576-81). 13. This law was actionable until the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 fixed the minimum age of marriage at fourteen (Kane 1930-62,11,443-46). 14. Cf. Kane (1930-62,11,447-52). 15. Cf. Meyer 1953, I, 220. 16. Exceptions are made for contact with ”unguarded” women-widows and prostitutes-or with female chattel whose masters permit them male company (Nar 12:78. But see Manu 8:363). In one place it is taught that ”if a man is begged for it as for pious alms [with the words ’pour in the seed’] lying with the wife of another does not put a stain on law and virtue’’ (Mahabharata XII, 35:27). This is limited to wives whose husbands refuse to honor their request for the ritu embrace. 17. In the present time, the Kali Age, because all men have evil intent, copulation must be regulated by dharma. 18. All the Pandu and Kuru heroes of the Mahabharata originate from proxy couplings (Meyer 1953, I, 234-36).

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19. Nar disagrees (8:17).Apa 2:6:13:6 and Bau 2:23:33 agree with Manu. Vas 17:6 merely offers the debate. 20. Knkkn comes from the Indo-European root knk, meaning "feces." Cf. the Old English "cackhand," the left hand, to be used only for wiping; the Old Norse kzikn, the Greek knkos, which means bad or wrong; and the Latin cncnw, to defecate. 21. The consumption of flesh is generally discouraged, if not because of its impact on semen, then because it necessarily harms animate beings. "Let him therefore shun (the use of meat)" (Manu 5:4849). "There is no greater sinner than [he] who . . . seeks to increase . . . his own flesh by the flesh of other (beings)" (51; cf. 52-55). Nevertheless, in emergencies, rhinoceros, iguana, tortoise, and hare meat, all of which are forbidden in Deuteronomy, are considered edible in Hindu law (18). Like Deuteronomy, however, "fish without scales'' are taboo (Manu Gau 17:36). 5:14-16; Vas 14:41-42; 22. Semen quality is still cited in modern Hindu medical texts as a measure of male health (Das 1985,197-200). 23. For auspicious times for sexual intercourse, see Kane 1930-62,11,801-2.

Tantric Revelations THE SETTING

Two consequences flowed from the Brahmanic restoration described in the last chapter. First was the codification of the dharma of the "lower doors" by highly cultured Brahmans, serving at the time as advisors and chaplains to royal families. The second was accomplished by plebeian swamis (masters) and gurus (teachers), the subjects of this chapter. This involved the absorption of a myriad of folk cults into Vedic orthodoxy, producing the first redactions of the Hindu epics (the Mahabharata), the composition of the Puranas, and the initial editions of the Tantra s z i t ~ n s . The object of this chapter is to show how, while ostensibly upholding orthodoxy, tantric myth and ritual actually subtly undermine it. And they do so in a manner consonant with the proposition informing the three previous chapters, namely, that open private bodies signify pliant public groups. In fact, the alert reader will observe an uncanny parallel between the Christian/ Jewish dialogue and that of Tantrika and Brahman. With this major difference: The first pivots around the mouth, the second turns on the genitals. I can only imagine what might have motivated itinerant gurus and swamis to acknowledge the legitimacy of gods and devotions that on the face of it are antithetical to the Vedas. And I can only wonder why lowercaste Sudras and untouchable "human dogs," Candalas (Dalits or Harijans), accepted Brahmanic suzerainty over their religious affairs. On the Brahmanic side, one factor that must have loomed large was the desire to assure themselves a continual source of gifts from the masses in the face of competition from Buddhist monasteries and traveling monks. While affairs could never have been as mechanical as the following comment suggests, P.V. Kane (1930-62) characterizes the calculation this way. "Masses of common people were being drawn towards Buddhism. The founders of Hindu Tantrick [sic]cults wanted to retain them to the Hindu fold. As common people drank wine and ate meat, they were told that they 81

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could attain higher spiritual levels even while indulging in meat and drink, provided they followed Tantrik gurus and practices . . .” (V, 1077). From the viewpoint of the once-born and untouchable population, the story is probably more complicated. In the first place, the traditional Vedic liturgies for securing release (moksha) from the remorseless wheel of death was permanently shut to lower castes, just as entry to the temple was denied them and the secrets of the Vedas forever closed. The analogy comes to mind of the pharisaic policy of restricting access by the gcrinz and a m ha-aretz (guest peoples and plebians) to the Jewish sanctum sanctorum. To have their sacraments recognized as valid soteriologies, then, must have seemed a boon. Second, being identified once and for all as bona fide Hindus would have sanctified the occupational monopolies of various local tribes, guilds, and clans and conferred on them rights to govern their own domestic affairs by means of their own caste courts. Of course, there was a price to both parties for these accommodations. The folk cults were forced to rid themselves of human sacrifices, cannibalism, and sexual orgies-practices still rumored to take place occasionally in rural districts-before they could pass Brahmanic muster. For their part, the Brahmans had to accede to the validity of scandalous non-Vedic ceremonies before the folk would deign to renounce the most extreme forms of devotion. Evidently, both parties found that the benefits of compromise outweighed the costs. The reconciliation of Vedic orthodoxy to folk myth and magic was accomplished during the so-called Golden Age of India ( 320-467 c.E.), an era presided over by the Gupta dynasty. It is clearly traceable in the various Puranas or Hindu “bibles.”*In these, two minor Vedic gods, Vishnu and Shiva, are elevated to positions of preeminence in the orthodox pantheon, appropriating powers from such ancient Aryan gods as Varuna, Indra, and Agni, who dim and eventually disappear. As Shiva’s status increases, his wildness is tamed. He evolves from a crude jungle dweller, unfit for marriage to an Aryan daughter, into a serene, white-complexioned deity with a Himalayan abode; moving from mere guardian at the heavenly gate into a Mahadev (a great God), protector of the Brahmans. Next, genealogies of divinized tribal heroes and sages such as Krishna, Nayarana, Ram, Lakulin (and even Buddha himself, who is mythologized as an agent sent to lead the wicked astray) are rewritten to show that they are avatars or incarnations of Vishnu and Shiva. Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, and the like are then ”married” to local fertility goddesses with names like Radha, Lakshmi, Uma, Parvati, and Kali. Besides symbolizing wisdom, beauty, nurture, and death, the goddesses are reinterpreted as animating energies (slzaktis) of their passive male consorts. Creation myths now are refashioned to show how the world has come into being from the coupling of these various ”pairs of pairs.” Finally, other folk deities such as Skanda and Ambika and

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tribal totems such as the Elephant (Ganesh) and the Bull (Nandi) are incorporated into the orthodox pantheon as ”children” of the divine couples. The members of these holy families exhibit by word and example the validity of bhnkti and tantric yogas for attaining salvation. Originally, as practiced by the folk, the ”inner heat” (tapas) produced by the chanting of sacred syllables (e.g., Om),by breath control, by the concentrated focus on images (yaiz frns),by the consumption of hallucinogenic intoxicants (such as bhnng), and by dance and sex were believed to confer on practitioners magical powers (siddhis), such as carnal immortality, bilocation and levitation, the capacity to shrink to invisibility or to occupy another’s body, the ability to weave deadly spells or seduce beautiful maidens. In the hands of enterprising Brahmans these same practices were ”theologized.” That is, they were reconfigured into yogas, vehicles for ”yoking” consciousness with That ”though. . . hidden in all things, . . . yet. . . is seen by subtle seers. . .” (Katha Upanishad 3:12).Weber writes of this as the ”intellectual spiritualization of the orgy,” a propaganda for folk worship entirely compatible with Brahmanic interests. The Vedic pantheon attained living flesh while the masses became subject to Brahmanic control. THE TANTRlC TWIST

Tantric literature is best understood as ”extend[ing Vedic] knowledge” (Eliade 1958,200). It is a corpus of technical supplements to the Puranas, which, as just noted, are mainly comprised of myths about Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, their divine lovers, and their totemic incarnations.2What makes the Tantras fascinating for Occidental students is the emphasis they place on physical enjoyment (bhogn) for the attainment of supreme liberation, namely, by means of the ”five boons” or ~nnknrns:madya, munsn, mntsyn, rnzidrn, and rmithzirza. Instead of insisting that ”you must abstain,” the Tantras instead admonish devotees to ”raise your enjoyment to its highest power, and then use it as a rocket-fuel” (Rawson 1973,9). For the right-hand (dnkshiunhnrn) Tantras, the five ~nnknrasrefer, respectively, to the stylized consumption of coconut milk, white beans, ginger (sesame or garlic), red radish, wheat or rice cakes, and childlike submission before the holy Mother. The left-hand (unmnchnrn) Tantras, by contrast, interpret the five maknrns as elements in the so-called Kula rite of lovers, which is performed under auspices of a long drawn-out eucharist known as chnkrnpja (circle worship). In it believers are enjoined to defy every Brahmanic tenet surrounding oral and genital orifices. They are to drink alcohol, eat red meat and fish, contemplate the naked female form, and, above all, engage in ritual intercourse. The Puranas consider left-handed Tantrism appropriate only for Sudras and Candalas, not for the twice-born.

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The Kulachudamani Tantra agrees, saying that its secrets must be transmitted from guru to initiate, ”mouth-to-mouth,” and never be divulged to the twice-born, to fools, to atheists, or to beginners (pastis [more on which later]), lest they be misunderstood (2:25).In any case, inaithzina is considered an essential component of chakvapzija; a step which, if foregone, frustrates its ultimate purpose. Thus, while convenience may necessitate the use of substitutes for the other makavas, there is no acceptable alternative to the fifth and ”most difficult discipline,” sex (Renfrew-Brooks 1990,113-14; Kane 1930-62, V, 1093). The kuladhavim (Kula way) not only enlists sexual coupling for religious purposes, it does so in a manner expressly intended to scandalize Brahmanic moral sensibilities. First, it is to be undertaken with someone other than one’s spouse, sometimes with one chosen entirely by ~ h a n c eIn . ~the notorious (and perhaps largely legendary) kancdi (bodice) cult, each yogini deposits her vest in a box at the temple entrance and becomes ”kin” for a night to him who blindly selects it (Kane 1930-62, V, 1089-90). The yogini may either be a low-caste female wife of another, or she may be a prostitute. The more depraved, the better. Occasionally, it is suggested that she be taken from one’s own gotm (extended family), the ritual intercourse thus constituting a form of incest. More often the Tantras expound on the preferability of a ”washerwoman” (dornbi), whose occupational contact with impurity renders her untouchable, in principle. ”Oh doinbi!” reads one prayer. ”Thou art all besoiled. . . . Some call thee ugly. But the wise clasp thee to their bosoms. . . . 0 doinbi! No woman is more dissolute than thou” (from Kanha’s Carya, quoted in Eliade 1958,261, n. 204). Hopefully, the yogini is menstruating at the time of the ceremony, and the ritual itself conducted in a haunted place such as a dark-wooded glen, a crossroads, or preferably in a cremation ground, the partners besmeared with the ashes of burnt flesh. Sometimes it is recommended that i m i t h u m be performed while the couple straddles a human corpse. Instead of the legally favored evening hours, daylight is the recommended time for the rite. All positions, other than the male superior, lying posture are admonished. Originally, ejaculation was encouraged as an offering of ”sacred oil” to the divine couple in whose name the ceremony is conducted. Over time, however, coitus reservatus became de r i g e ~ r However .~ this may be, adherence to all these rules guarantees that the sexual encounter will be barren, and for this reason ”unnatural,” and outwardly, at least, beyond the Brahmanic pale. It hardly needs to be said that justifying the Kula path to Brahmanic orthopractitioners has constituted an immense intellectual challenge for its formulators, most (if not all) of whom are Brahmans themselves. Not that Brahmanism is entirely unfamiliar with the idea of a religious dimension to sexuality. On the contrary, as observed earlier, the ”Great For-

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est Book,” the Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad, explicitly recognizes conjugal coupling as a holy event, a religious ceremony with its own incantations and stylized gestures. The wife, it says, first ”removes the clothes of her impurity” by bathing, then prepares a meal of rice for her spouse. Depending on the desired skin color of the hoped-for son, the rice is cooked either with fresh milk and ghee (for white skin), sour milk (for tawny), or water (for swarthy). If in rare cases the couple wishes a daughter, the rice should be boiled with sesame and ghee. Having had his semen fortified by the rice dish, the husband offers libations to the gods, turns to his wife, washes his hands, sprinkles her with water, and recites a final prayer to rid her of demons. ”This m a n . . . am I; that woman,. . . thou!. . . Come, let us two together clasp! Together let us semen mix, . . .” Then, gently spreading her legs he inserts his penis; they join mouths, and he strokes her three times, saying ”Let Vishnu make thy womb prepared.. . . Let the Twin Gods implace thy germ.” In the event that the couple does not desire conception, the appropriate cant reads, ”With power, with semen, I reclaim the semen from you” (6:4:4-22; cf. Chandogya Upanishad 2:13:1-2). Given that the idea of sacred sexuality is ”strange but old,” then, it is reasonable that the kz~ladha~nza be understood as completing the Vedas, not as contradicting them; as surpassing the Vedas, not as evading them; as ”hyper-nomian” instead of anarchically antinomian. Indeed, this is precisely what the Kularnava Tantra asserts. ”One who has studied the four Vedas but is ignorant of kzrladhn~17za,”it says, ”is inferior to a Candala, while a Candala who knows the kz~ladha~/7za is superior to a Brahmana. If all dharmas such as sacrifices, pilgrimages, and vratyas are put on one side and k z h d h a m a on another side, kuladlzarina is superior” (KuIarnava Tantra ll:ll).5 Again, ”Oh all-knowing One, if thou knowest Me then of what use are . . . [Vedic teachings and sacrifices]. [But] if Thou knowest me not, then of what use are [the same]” (Kulachudamani Tantra 1:24).6It is the very onerousness of tantric obligations, not their laxity, that explains the recent decline of Tantrism. ”The complex obligations and time-consuming rituals which the tantric takes on for life can hardly be accommodated within the schedule of the modern employee” (Sanderson 1988, 662; Eliade 1958, 206). Beyond daily morning observances dedicated to, among other things, various kinds of Kula trees, the disciple is required to offer daily thanksgiving to his guru, to conduct morning ablutions, and to meditate daily on ya~ztradiagrams. But this is not the half of it. The Mahanirvana Tantra declares that in the present (Kali) age of corruption wherein superficiality, banality, and blindness reign supreme, authentic religiosity must begin with something self-evidently true; not with robotic rites, vapid preaching, nor thoughtless prayers. But for the average person, the most indubitable experiences concern their own feelings, specifically, their feelings of bodily pleasure; and more

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particularly still, sexual pleasure (snmnvasa) (1:20-29,37-50). Sexual feeling by itself, however, is by no means sufficient to guarantee religious insight. For, as it is said, ”donkeys and other animals wander about naked, too. Does that make them yogins?” (Kularnava Tantra 5:48).Most assuredly, it does not. After all, “if by merely drinking wine a man were to attain siddhi [magic power] . . . , then all wretched drunkards may attain siddlzi. If, by merely eating meat a holy goat were to be secured then all meat-eaters in the world would be holy men. [And] if by mere intercourse with a woman . . . nzokshn [salvation] was to result, then all men in the world may attain liberation” (2:117-19, 122). Tantrism therefore distinguishes between types of participants, according to the attitudes they bring to the rite (Renfrew-Brooks 1990, 168). It is the guru’s responsibility to assess the quality of these attitudes and to determine the level of worship appropriate to the devotee (83-$5,114-15). First is the ordinary man of passions, the beginner (pasz.1) to whom, like any semiconscious beast, the significance of the ceremony is largely lost and who would be at risk of falling into carnality were he to engage in it. Here, the following warning applies: ”He who partakes of wine and the rest merely for pleasing himself falls into a terrible hell” (Parananda Sutral6-17). Lest he be ensnared in the ”noose of his own desires,” such a one is urged to continue austerities and to adhere closely to everyday convention (Tripura Upanishad v. 13).7Next is the advanced student (vim, meaning ”hero”), who is qualified to commence disciplines in the company of women as indicated by the generosity of his spirit, patience, good will, meager appetites, and habitual reverence. Over a several-month period of escalated temptations with the opposite sex-serving her, sleeping at her feet, reclining with her at first fully clothed, then naked first on the left side then on the right, gazing on her nakedness, then embracing her, and so on (a process which Eliade [1958] calls ”long and difficult” [266-671 and which the Kularnava Tantra likens to ”walking on the edge of a sword” [2:122])-the hero learns to quell his lusts. This, by prayerfully keeping in mind that this is no mere female he attends; nor is she simply a sign of divinity. Instead, she is the Goddess Herself: ”0Mother! 0 Devi! The pure One Who art Brahma” (Kulachudamani Tantra ch. 3). Analogously to the Roman Catholic Mass during which bread and wine are rendered literally into the body and blood of Christ by the words and gestures of the priest, the yogin’s reverential service to his yogini ”transubstantiates” her into something not entirely of this world: a slznkti, a vehicle of the very energy that animates the universe.8 Having recognized the immanence of the transcendent in this particular instance of womanhood, the disciple is now judged a divyn (saint) or a perfected master (siddha) and is considered ready for ritual coupling. The subsequent adultery, however, is no longer as it appears to the pasu, a sin.

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This is because sin arises from the intention to do wrong. But through months of practice the perfected master becomes ”unbound” to convention. He becomes ”impervious to the thought ’hence I did wrong’ or ’hence I did right.”’ Thus, ”verily he overcomes them both” (Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad 2:4:22).9To employ a paradoxical Buddhist phrase, the actions of the siddha become ”actionless.” Regardless of what his body does, his soul suffers no karmic effects. He resides beyond good and evil. ”What he has done and what he has not done do not affect him.” This being so, he is capable of attaining through adultery (the same behavior that causes others to burn in hell), the bliss ( a m n d n ) of heaven. As Krishna says to the quavering warrior Arjuna on the eve of battle: by the same act (in this case, murder) that would cause others to be reincarnated as a dog, the selfdisregarding yogin gains eternal liberation (Bhagavad-Gita 3:1-16,27-32; 4: 14-34). The Tantras are posed in what Eliade calls enigmatic ”twilight” language. While this secrets their lore from the prying eyes of noninitiates, the result is that ”it strikes with wonder and bewilders even the wise. It is replete with numerous and bewildering meanings. . . . It is [the preeminent discipline] according to all doctrines and is at the same time blamed and reprobated by all doctrines.” Therefore, ”follow it with care” (Kulachudamani Tantra 1:40). To avoid drowning in a morass of erotic homologies and double entendres, the student requires the guidance of a certified guru. But there exist scores of guru lineages each distinguished by perspective. Earlier tantric interpreters view the /cziIad/za~ma”externally,” that is, as culminating in a concrete sexual act. The Kularnava Tantra, for example, even provides recipes for making the wine to be used in chakmpzija (2:126) and then goes on to describe the etiquette to be followed in drinking it (1~22-35). The Saktisangama Tantra, however, authored in the sixteenth century after Tantrism had fallen into obloquy, reads the same sentences esoterically as referring to events taking place in one’s own psyche. Here, the Kula way is not something to be performed at all, but merely to be closely studied so as to discern its deeper meaning (Renfrew-Brooks 1990,3-11; Eliade 1958, 249-53).1° Madya, for instance, is said to refer not to wine, but to ”the nectarine stream issuing from the cavity of the brain where the soul resides; inatsya [not to fish but to] . . . the suppression of vital airs, m i i i s a [not to red meat but to] . . . silence, and mait/izriia [not to sex but to] meditation o n . . . [the mysteries of] creation and destruction” (quoted in Kane 1930-62, V, 1080-81). It is primarily in this second sense that Tantrism has infused Vaishnite Hinduism and its ”bible,” the Bhagavata Purana. A pivotal tale in the Bhagavata Purana concerns the married cowherdess Radha’s affair with none other than Lord Krishna Himself. While the story has inspired a library of erotic, even pornographic literature, it is

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understood by most commentators to be an allegory of the soul’s hunger for god, comparable to Psyche’s pursuit of Eros in Greek mythology, or to the odes of Sufi poet Hafiz of Shiraz (Dimock, Jr. and Levertov, 1967). The longing of Radha’s forced separation from Krishna, for instance, can be read as standing for the soul’s agony in being estranged from god; her rising desire, as the sweet wound of god’s anticipated arrival; sai?zbhoga, (the pleasure Radha takes in having sex with Krishna), as the ecstasy of the union between man and god; and so on. When the king who is listening to the Purana asks, ”But how then, 0 my Teacher, how possibly, could the creator, expounder, and upholder of the laws of virtue [i.e., Krishna] have allowed himself to violate every order of religion by seducing others’ wives?” the teacher answers: All who abide properly by the tale (that is, who understand it esoterically) will be roused to devotion, ”as were their husbands who were not made jealous but only more fired by the force of Krishna’s words” (Campbell 1970,II, 350). One of the deepest esoteric readings of tantric wisdom begins with the assumption that the ”subtle body” of the devotee is a microcosm, the universe writ small. The head is said to be the ”heavenly abode of the gods”; the spinal column, the axis around which all creation pivots; the limbs, the four major continents; breathing, the cosmic winds; and the veins, arteries, and nerve circuits, the world’s creeks and rivers. To avoid mistaking the organs and processes of the subtle body for those of modern physiology, Eliade calls this style of analogizing, ”mystical physiology.”11No other doctrine takes organic homologies so far. For my purposes, the most telling anatomical features of the subtIe body are its nine orifices, or, as they are called, ”gates” to the cosmic “city.” The entryway par excellence is the so-called monster Mouth, the yoizi (vagina), out of which the entirety of the phenomenal world, including time, is said to be poured. This is pictured in abstract tantric art as a blood red, downward-pointing triangle, symbol of the animating power of femaleness ( p ~ a k r i t i )But . insofar as energy alone is merely catabolic and directionless unless given material on which to work, the female symbol usually is portrayed in the company of a semen-colored white, upwardpointing triangle, representing passive male substance (pzuz~sha,meaning ”matter”). When mutually juxtaposed, the two triangles constitute the classic s h i ymzt~a,symbol of the ultimate ground of worldly being, on which the devotee meditates. A comparable, but more vivid yaiztva pictures the god and goddess in human form, locked in rnalzapad17zavaiza~the father/mother position, lingam in yoni. A still more powerful yarztm depicting the same principle is the culminating step in tantric worship, inaithuiza, the love embrace of the yogin and his consecrated courtesan, his ”jewel in the lotus.” By the act of ritual coupling, the disciples reiterate in shadow form the genesis of the universe in their own bodies.

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Essential to this ceremonial reiteration of creation is that the pair be enwrapped so intimately-the female is routinely pictured in the yab/yzm posture, facing the sitting male while on his lap, with her legs entwined around his back-that they no longer are conscious of gender, skin color, purity, age, time, or any other difference between them. Together, they are one. In this state they momentarily glimpse, taste, feel, and hear the cosmic unity of the undifferentiated One, Soul (Atman). This is Atman prior to Its becoming conscious of itself as a separate thing and saying "I am," experiencing fear and desire, and splitting itself into the multitude of creatures (Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad 1:4:1-5). The mutual pleasuring of yogin and yogini in inaithuna prefigures the eternal ecstasy of nondifferentiated unity promised after they complete their brief sojourn here on earth as isolated, terror-filled, desiring beings. TANTRlC COMMUNITY

Hindu, Muslim-there is no difference, Nor are there differences in caste. Kabir the bhakta [Krishna worshiper] was by caste a Jola But drunk with prema-bhakti [nonmarital love]. He seized the Black Jewel's [Krishna's] feet. One moon is lantern to this world, And from one seed is the whole creation sprung.12 Notwithstanding its use of sexuality for salvific ends, the most distinctive feature of Tantrism, at least according to Hindu scholar Douglas Renfrew-Brooks (1990), is not this but its radical destabilization of the Brahmanic notion of purity, and with it the caste (chaste) hierarchy (71).This it accomplishes in two ways. First, the tantric ceremonial insists that the yogin visualize the basest of females, the so-called clombi, as an incarnation of the divine Mother Herself. Second, it compels that same yogin to acknowledge his own taintedness, his own pollution, by insisting that he engage in conventionally immoral acts. In these ways, presumptions of black and white are undermined; good and evil, pure and impure, are destroyed, or more accurately, deconstructed. A space is created for the possibility of egalitarian community. In other words, Tantrism corroborates the proposition that undefended personal orifices comport with unbarred public doors. Just as the suspension of Jewish oral taboos by the early Church signified the communion of humanity in Christ (which in turn prefigured the notion of the Occidental citizen), tantric sexuality dramatizes in an unmistakably vivid way the existence of an inclusive, transcaste world: the unity of all people in Krishna, Vishnu, or Shiva. The

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Tripura Upanishad expresses the idea poetically. "One who has performed [chnkunpzija]according to injunctions . . . [even] if he [dies] . . . in the house of the butcher [and hence is unclean] or in [the holy city of] Kasi there is no difference; he is liberated while yet living" (v. 15). None of this is to say that Tantrikas historically have been rebels against the Brahmanic order (although this has happened occasionally) anymore than Buddhism (or for that matter, Christianity) was originally an ideology of class revolt (Sanderson 1988,662;Flood 1996,170).On the contrary, most Tantras urge that clznlcrnpzrjn be conducted in private precisely so as m t to mislead ordinary persons about their mundane caste responsibilities (Kularnava 6:14-15). In this way the Tantrika can pursue his own pleasurefilled enlightenment in a highly heterodox manner while at the same time maintaining a facade of public respectability (Renfrew-Brooks 1990, 113-16,124-25). Many Tantras, furthermore, insist that even though during the performance of chnlcrnpzijn the lowest Candala should be treated as equal to the best Brahman, upon completion of the eucharist each should marry and dine only with those who share their caste (Kane i93V-62, s/: 1059).As for all Indian pieties, in other words, Tantrism, too, has always been more concerned with personal liberation than with social justice. Still, Tantrisrn definitely harbors revolutionary potential. This is evident in both Vaishnavism and Shaivism, the two preeminent Hindu denominations. Vaishnavism originally flourished in northern India; Shaivism, in the south. While they honor different gods, the major difference between them is that Vaishnavism has a more orderly, rational, Apollonian flavor; Shaivite rites are typically more ecstatic and Dionysian (Flood 1996, 150, 192). Both, however, have been indelibly imprinted with tantric wisdom and with it belief in the pivotal importance of the personal guru from whom initiates receive their mantras. Additionally, both at various times have assumed critical attitudes toward the caste system. Two of the foremost examples of this are Sahajiya Vaishnavism and Lingayat Shaivism.13 Sahajiya Vaishnavism

Sahajiya piety originated in Buddhism as a reaction against ritual encumbrances and philosophical debates that were believed to interfere with direct experience of the savior. Instead, it extols the natural way (snhnjn) to God, including the use of sublimated sexual energy. It was incorporated as a renewal movement into Vaishnavism by the eminent Brahman Caitanya (fl. ca. 1468-1533) in Muslim-ruled Bengal, and it flourished by that name for several centuries after his death.14Legend has it that while on a pilgrimage to perform oblations for his dead relatives, Caitanya was "slain in the spirit" by a vision of Krishna. Soon thereafter, he was initiated into soh+ and changed his name to Krishna-Caitanya (Krishna Consciousness) in acknowledgment of his conversion. Today,

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effigies of Caitanya are routinely found in Vaishnava temples alongside icons of the godhead, Vishnu. Both are worshiped as one in the same. Theologically, Sahajiya Vaishnavism bases itself on the Puranic account of Radha’s and Krishna’s love affair, as recounted previously. The tale is understood as a metaphor of the soul’s craving for union with God. At the moment of zinio mystico, ”each is both,” as it is said; mundane dualities are abolished, everyday polarities recombined, and the devotee is liberated from the eternal wheel of reincarnation. In its earlier days, the central liturgy in Sahajiya revolved around sexual intercourse, the female participants being other men’s wives, either untouchables or of low caste (Dimock Jr. 1966,127). Because the adultress, Radha, is pictured in the Bhagavata Purana as a dark-skinned spouse of a lowly herdsman, Sahajiyites in a sense reenacted the Puranic tale. As is common for religious renewal movements, however, within a generation of its founding the Hindu Sahajiyites split along conservative and liberal lines. The liberal followers of Caitanya’s presumed favorite, the ”casteless” Avadhuta, insisted on not deviating one iota from the prophet’s revelation. They continued to emphasize the promiscuous sexual element, and along with it-the point to be emphasized here-Caitanya’s radically anticaste sentiments. This explains the attraction of this branch of Sahajiya not only to the lower castes, but also to Buddhist monks and to Muslims, two groups considered heathens in Brahmanic orthodoxy. ”It is my promise made with my own mouth,” Caitanya is reputed to have once said, ”that ignorant. . . low-caste and humble people will float upon the sea of ptw’na [illicit love]’’ (54). Arrayed against the Avadhutans were the conservative Advaitas (or gosvamiizs, meaning ”pastors”). These were orthodox Brahmanic formalizers of Caitanya’s preachings and their twice-born followers. Two rulings characterized their position: One, female participants in the rite of inaithzim must hereafter be the yogin’s legitimate wife; two, caste lines must be strictly observed at all times. Anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) likens the Advaitas to the conservative Franciscan Conventualists, and he compares the dispute within the Sahajiyite movement to that which eventually split the Franciscan order in thirteenth-century Europe. In the case of the Franciscans, of course, the issue never concerned the propriety of different sexual partners. Rather, it revolved around the legitimacy of private property. Yet there is a definite parallel between the two conflicts. The liberal Avadhutans condemned the personal use of one’s own wife (suakiya) in the sexual rite, precisely because she is one’s private property. Likewise, the Franciscan Spiritualists condemned private property generally as un-Christian.15In contrast to the Avadhutans and Spiritualists were the more exclusivist, as it were, ”closed-orificed” Advaitas and the propertyrich, ”uptight” Franciscan Conventuals. The analogy does not end here. At the behest of the Conventuals, the Pope repudiated the antiproperty

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Spiritualists as heretics, and in 1323 he excommunicated them from the Church. Similarly,Avadhuta’s liberal followers suffered persecution at the hands of their orthodox Brahman detractors, eventually disappearing altogether except for the minor heterodox Baul cult of low-caste believers. After waning in importance during the bulk of British colonial rule in India, the conservative, orthodox Sahajiya line enjoyed a resurgence early in the twentieth century. In an esoteric, nonsexual form it flourishes today in various countries under the title Krishna Consciousness. Lingayat Shaivism

Lingayat Shaivism is so called because its members acknowledge their ”slavery” to Shiva by wearing a lingam pendant, the phallic symbol of Shiva, given them at birth by the family guru and either placed in a shrine or worn on special occasions.16Because of the passion of their devotions, the Lingayats have been celebrated as ”staunch Shaivites,” or more paradoxically as ”impurity eaters,” capable of ”burning” impurities against which others must take precautions. In any event, from the outset they were adamantly anticaste and antiritualistic. Weber (1958) describes them as ”a type of particularly sharp and principled Protestant reaction to the Brahmans and the caste order” (19; Bradford 1985,79). Like the Sahajiyites, the Lingayat movement was the product of a Brahmanic rebel, in this case one Basava (fl. ca. 1106-1167). While little else is known about him, it is certain that at the time of his revelations he was serving as prime minister to King Bijjala of Kalyana. Basava exhibited a highly unconventional solicitude toward the traditionally disparaged Hindu female by denouncing child marriage and approving widow remarriage. In addition, he advocated an egalitarian, caste-free community of faith and insisted on intercaste residency, dining, and marriage, even after ”church” services. Although conflicting legends make it unsure precisely what happened, the most memorable event in the history of the movement is said to have occurred when Basava presided over the wedding of the daughter of a Brahman and a Candala son. Recall that in Brahmanic orthodoxy intercaste matrimony of any sort is condemned. But pntrilonzn marriage is not just intercaste; it is also ”against the hair.” Knocking the supports from under the world, it is a harbinger of chaos. For this reason, King Bijjala denounced the pair and had both fathers publicly executed. A riot ensued, and Bijjala himself was assassinated, according to one account, by Basava’s own henchmen. The legend goes on to say that to avoid what would have been excruciating tortures administered by the hand of Bijjala’s vengeful son, Basava in turn took his own life. The Lingayats were subsequently suppressed and survive today in a largely conventional form. Among other things, this means that the move-

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ment has become dominated by conservative Brahmans. In rural districts it is now rigidly stratified on lines of gentility and cleanliness. Weber (1958) speaks of this development as analogous to the ”process of status differentiation . . . claimed by the descendants of the Mnyjozoer Pilgrims in New England” (20). Today, no less than eighty subcastes of Lingayats can be identified, each distinguished by its own guru lineage. Nevertheless, the anticaste Lingayat tradition remains alive in a splinter group organized under auspices of the democratic Virakta Party founded after World War I. In his field research on Lingayat communities in southern India, N. J. Bradford (1985)found support for the Virakta Party strongest among wealthy urban merchants. In one of these Party towns, Somvarpethe, the neighborhoods are fully caste integrated. In addition, the Party oversees a community-wide church campus, equipped with all the appurtenances of modernity, including an intercaste dormitory and cafeteria, nonsegregated public lounges, a library, and phone system, as well as a common school and an open enrollment junior college. Meanwhile, the temple of the conservative Brahmanic Panacacarya Party in Somvarpethe has fallen into disrepair. In the evenings, Bradford (1985)reports, residents gather at the Virakta temple to worship Shiva in what is called ”innocent devotion.” This kind of devotion means standing equal before God, sharing a common experience in a generous and un-self-conscious devotion. Innocent devotion ”signifies brotherhood, unity, and closeness, albeit within an accepted hierarchical scheme” (100). This hierarchical scheme, however, is no longer grounded on the ancient Brahmanic principle of purity and cleanliness. Instead, it is based on the modern bourgeois theme of social class difference. To say it in another way, the storied egalitarianism of the Virakta Party in reality legitimizes a new form of inequality, this time based on income. Broken glass still is strewn tactically atop the high temple wall to deter trespassers, just as in the old days. But now the trespassers no longer are from discriminated-against castes, which, according to the Viraktas, no longer exist. Rather, the walls spurn the ”little people” who reside in the ”little houses” of the town; in short, the poor.

NOTES 1. I rely on Campbell (1970,II), Majumdar (1951-69), Weber (1958),and Flood (1996) for the following account. 2. There are Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu Tantras. This chapter concerns only the latter. For a discussion of Buddhist Tantras, see Eliade (1958) and Kane (1930-62, V, 1065-73). While no written Tantras can be dated before 600 c.E., there is independent evidence that the oral traditions on which they rest existed centuries before this. According to Eliade (1958,296-358), the Tantras precede the Aryan migrations

94

TANTRIC REVELATIONS

to the Hindu subcontinent. Remnants of the oral traditions are evident in the practices of non-Brahmanic ascetics who reside in cremation grounds. Called ”skull men” because they carry a skull-topped staff and a human cranium begging bowl, today they are found in the Aghori cult (Parry 1985). The first tantric literature appeared in Kashmir in northwest India. It spread from there to Tibet, and then to Bengal and Assam in the east, penetrating the geographic outskirts of tlie Brahmaiiic world. By the end of the first Christian millennium, it had come to dominate tlie Bralimanic heartland. Thus, while the authors of the Puranas repudiate the Tantras as anti-Vedic revelations, the Puranas nonetheless betray a tantric influence, particularly in regard to ritual. For a clear, concise, yet detailed discussion of the incorporation of tantric wisdom into Hindusim, see Flood (1996)and Sanderson (1988). The Kula division of the Tantras, on which the body of this chapter rests, concerns worship of the Goddess. Like all Taiitras, the Kula Tantras are organized in the form of conversations between the Goddess and her inquiring consort. Our discussion is based primarily on the Kula Tantra, which Artliur Avaloii (1914)considers ”foremost,” the Kularnava Tantra, and on what he calls tlie ”crest jewel,” the Kulachudamani Taiitra. Unless otherwise specified, the translations of tantric texts are by Kaiie (1930-62). 3. The Kaulavali-niriiaya Tantra asserts simply that ”all women are fit for intercourse to a . . . worshipper except the wives of his guru.” Furthermore, there is no prohibition on any sexual act, nor is anytliiiig enjoined. ”To the pure everything is pure, it is only the hankering that is blameable” (Kane 1930-62, V, 1093-94). In contrast, the Malianirvana Tantra, written in tlie eighteenth century, insists iii verse 8:40 that the disciple confine himself to his wife. It subsequently introduces two kinds of ”marriage”: that entered into for life, and ”clznkra marriage” with a consecrated courtesaii (9:261-64). It goes on to rule that only children from the former marriages have inlieritance rights. In another accommodation to Brahmanic interests, the Malianirvaiia requires that except during the performance of tantric rites, caste lilies are to be strictly observed (8:150).During c71nkrnpirja itself, however, even the Caiidala is ”like the best brahmana” (Kaiie 1930-62, V, 1073-76). 4. Eliade (1958) claims that in mnit7zurzn, properly conducted semen must ”never” be emitted (266,267). However, this was probably never a general rule. 5. Cf. the opinion of the Tripura Upanishad in Renfrew-Brooks (1990,150). 6. Translated by Avalon (1914). 7. Translated by Renfrew-Brooks (1990). 8. Although tlie central figure in it is a female devotee, tlie following Hindu tale is apropos: A certain damsel, hearing of tlie many good qualities of a particular gallant, fell in love with him before she had seen him, and agitated by her passion and unable to suffer the pain of iiot seeing him, wrote to him a love letter descriptive of her condition. He at once came to her, but when she saw him she did iiot recognize in him the qualities she had heard about; he appeared much the same as any other man, and she found no gratification in his society. So soon, however, as she recognized those qualities in him, as her companions pointed them out, she was fully gratified. In like manner, though the persoiial self be manifested as identical with the universal soul, its manifestation effects no complete satisfaction so long as

NOTES

95

there is no recognition of those attributes (Abhinavagupta Vasugupta v. 12-13, quoted in Majumdar 1951-69, IV, 303). Tripura Upanishad v. 15 in Renfrew9. Cf. Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad 5:14:8; Brooks 1990,187; Parananda Sutra 16-17; Kularnava Tantra 2:22-23,29. 10. Even the Kularnava (5:107-12) contains esoteric renderings of chakrapzija. 11. Eliade (1958) says, Careful reading of the texts suffices to show that the experiences in question are transphysiological, that all these [organs]represent . . . states that are inaccessible without . . . spiritual ascesis. Purely psychophysiological mortifications and disciplines are not enough to ”awaken” the [organs] . . . ; the essential and indispensable factor remains meditation, spiritual ”realization.” Thus, it is safer to regard ”mystical physiology’’ as the result of. . . [spiritual] experiments undertaken from very remote times b y . . . yogins . . . [who] performed their experiments on a ”subtle body.” (235) 12. Dimock Jr. 1966,264. 13. Other examples could be cited. Johnathan Parry (1985,63,68-69/71) in fact considers the modern Aghoris, a Shaivite sect, to confirm Mary Douglas’s theory of open orifices and pliant group boundaries. See also the case of the Shri Shankaradeva Sangha, founded in 1933, a Vaishnite renewal movement. ”Members of the Sangha eat with Untouchables who have joined the organization, but they refuse to eat with Brahmans observing Brahmanical rites” (Cantlie 1985,141). 14. The definitive history is Dimock Jr. (1966). His account has been criticized for overemphasizing the Sahajiyite influence on the prophet Caitanya and his disciples. 15. According to Avadhuta, only the ynrakiya, she who is another’s wife, can accomplish a valid sexual eucharist. 16. For an introduction to the Lingayats, see Bradford (1985). Cf. Flood (1996, 170-72) and Majumdar (1951-69, V, 367-70).

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Interlude 3 Gay Pride Days During the dog days of late summer 2002 ,activists from a small Rocky Mountain college town announced they were going to stage ”Pridaho, a three-day celebration of gaylesbian identity. They boasted that it would draw over three thousand revelers from across the country. The news was not greeted happily by local fzindamentalist Christians. When they learned that the city planned to close off one block of a thoroughfare for the pageant, street festival, and dance, the response of the fundamentalists was one of terror followed by indignation. The city council defended its position on constitutional grounds. In the days leading u p to the event, however, it reported receiving the ”ugliest hate mail” in recent memory. Among other things, the mail threatened violence if the ”cess pool of trash and crime” were permitted to proceed. Radio talk shows became channels of slanderous gossip about ’ g a y agendas” and ”perversion. One rumor reported that HIV is generated from homosexuality itself; another, that the Holiday Inn had rented out a suite of 24 rooms to facilitate the seduction of ”targeted” youngsters. Thirty-one protest letters were printed by the local newspaper (out of a total of 82). Some repeated ancient biblical warnings about consorting with ”sorcerers, idolaters, whore-mongers ,, and ”dogs,, (which term, readers learned, is a biblical metaphor for sodomites). Others insisted that homosexuality subverts ’yamily values ”;still others, that it is analogous to ”white supremacy” and f’eco-terrorism. One letter announced that homosexuals are 45 times more likely to have car accidents than straights. Another promised to gays that “heaven will be an awesome place,” but then it added if they wanted to go there, theyfirst had to repent their ”sins. Finally, one mother threatened to pull her children out of public schools and leave town ifPridaho were staged. ( Aplayful rejoinder published the next day recommended that she protect her children by ensconcing them in ”bubble wrap. ”) The paper also published human interest stories of newly “out” residents, several of whom revealed that they had earlier been devoted churchgoers themselzies, Mormon missionaries, and now lived happily in monogamous relationships. For balance it also solicited the observations of the leading opponent of Pridaho, the minister of the Calvary Chapel Church. (He subsequently devoted an entire week of religious broadcasting to the subject.) Thegood reverend opened his commentary ”

”

”

”

b y ritzially invoking his "love" f o r g a y people as "individzinls. He then soleimly nnizounced his responsibility to speak "honestly" nbozit their lifestyle and of the risks of orzficinl contnmination it constituted f o r the general popzilntion. As pointed out earlier, the mozith seldom hns been n siibject of concern i n Christian orthodoxy. A n d predictably, the minister acknowledged thnt there ions indeed little to fenr from enting in proximity to gnys. After all, "iiz a restnzirant the titeizsils are sanitized." He theiz shifted his gnzefioirz the table to the bed. To be sure, he agreed, "in a hotel the sheets might get washed. " B u t eulznt got through tlzeinfirst onto the mattress?" Ize onzinously asked. " A r e the m t t r e s s e s tzirned and sanitized? A n d whnt nbozit tlze quilt? I ' m told thnt they m e not washed very often. HIV cnn live zip to t w o days on n d r y szirfnce. A s it tzirned out, only aboutfive h i d r e d celebrnnts shoeved tipf o r the festival; USA Today nrzd C N B C both honored the city cozincil f o r its tolerance; and the visible presence of heavily armed police averted civil zinrest. A n d thmzkfzilly/ at least to m y knoeoledge, no o m event home ilzfected. Like polllition panics elseeoheye and at other times, Pridnlzo too had begun w i t h a roar and ended w i t h a edzirnper. 'I

I'

-1dnho

Stnte Journal, August 1 to September 6,2001

7 The Sabbat of Orifices BACKCROUN D

Accusations against religious deviants in Christian civilization and elsewhere echo with standard themes. Taken together they comprise a paradigmatic libel I call the Sabbat of Orifices. A virtual library now exists showing how this libel was applied routinely to late medieval witch covens (Cohn 1975). Indeed, I borrow the term sabbat from the name occasionally used to describe the ceremonies alleged of these covens. However, many of the features of the sabbat also are found in defamations by early Church spokesmen (and latter-day Nazi propagandists) of Jews.American anti-Semite Elizabeth Dilling’s (n.d.) influential Plot against Ch~istimzity,for example, indicts ”seed of Satan” Jews for participating in all the essential features of the sabbat, including child rape, incest, ritual murder, and human flesh eating1 Furthermore, as we shall see shortly, at various times in American history, Roman Catholics and Mormons have found themselves on the receiving end of the libel. Even the nineteenth-century camp meetings of Methodists were not above suspicion as sites of drunken revelry and sexual excesses. According to Roger Fink and Rodney Stark (1992), ”It was widely said along the frontier that during camp meetings as many souls were conceived as were saved” (96). This is to say nothing of the defamatory rumors concerning ”sodomite homosexuals waiting in their lusts to rape,” satanists ”sexually mutilating people,” or ”Negrobeasts of the field . . . [whose] cannibalistic fervor shall cause them to eat the dead and the living” (Prepwe War n.d., 19). Nor has use of the libel been restricted to the discourse of American and European bigots2Nineteenthcentury British commentators on Tantrism, otherwise disinclined to judge alien folkways, describe it as being at best ”brainless hocus-pocus’’ and ”nonsensical extravagance.” At worst, it is ”lust, mummery, and black magic. . . of the crudest and filthiest kind,” ”wickedness and obscenity,” ”a veritable devil’s mass.”

99

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THE SABBAT OF ORIFICES

The Hindu system is the most puerile, impure, and bloody system of any system of idolatry that was ever established on earth [among] an idle, effeminate, and dissolute people who frequent their temples not for devotion, but for the satisfaction of licentious appetites. . . . A mixture of Bacchus [and] Don Juan, . . . a pit of abomination, as set apart from God as the mind of man can go. (all quotes in Avalon 1914, viii-xi)

In somewhat more muted tones, this characterization has been repeated by contemporary ethnologists (Carstairs 1961, 102-4), comparative religionists (Campbell 1970, 11, 345, 359-61), and even by Western-trained Indian scholars (Kane 1930-62, V, 1090).All of this being so, it is hard to avoid concluding that the Sabbat of Orifices constitutes what Car1 Jung (1969) would call a psychocultural archetype. In other words, it is a universal gestalt of inherited images that appears in dreams, fantasies, and delusions, ready at hand to be deployed against otherness. It is not a summation of empirical facts about the behavior of any group in particular. In the next chapter I speculate on some possible sociological reasons for the deployment of the sabbat archetype by protagonists. At this point, it is enough to say that the various acts of orifice violation that comprise it have largely eluded explicit identification by analysts as constituting its core feature. Instead the incest, cannibalism, bestiality, drug use, and adultery are presented as having little more rhetorical importance than the charges of secret oath taking, conspiratorialism, and exoticness.This chapter rectifies this oversight by emphasizing the central place of body cavity violations in the sabbat. While none of the following themes are usually found in any single indictment, the complete Sabbat of Orifices is purported to involve the following activities: (1)There is a sexual orgy of adults with children (the socalled Oedipal-mating theme), plus debauchery between married and unmarried adults of either or both genders. (2) There is infanticide followed by the cannibalistic consumption and drinking of the victim’s flesh and blood. This is the Thyestean feast theme, named after the children of Thyestes, who were killed by his brother Atreus and served to him at a banquet. (3) There is the preparation of foul-tasting intoxicants made in part from liquid and solid human and nonhuman excreta. (4) This is consumed in the presence of mythic dung-eating animals such as dogs, crows, donkeys, and goats. (5) There is the utterance of self-condemnatory oaths binding the participants to secrecy, (6) taken in darkness, at midnight. (7) The whole affair is orchestrated by a charismatic demigod, occasionally black-skinned. THE SABBAT THROUGH HISTORY

Most contemporary liberal commentators, having limited their observations to the European witch craze, understand the sabbat libel to be a

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THE SABBAT THROUGH HISTORY

hyperbolic description of pagan rituals. This is a viewpoint inspired in English-speaking countries by mythologist Tames Frazer (1951) discussion of magic and folklore. The most notable proponent of the liberal position is Margaret Murray (1961 [1921]),whose work has profoundly influenced feminist theologians. She views allegations of a witch’s sabbat as a perverse expression of the Church’s largely unjustified terror of harmless pagan ceremonies, coupled with its own unexamined misogynist traditions. Norman Cohn (1975,99-125), however, takes issue with Murray. He argues on the contrary, that close examination of transcripts from the witch trials shows that Murray purposively purged the confessions of their most outrageously repulsive allegations. This to give readers the impression that what the defendants were being tried for was involvement in pantheism and fertility rites. He goes on to argue that far from portraying a benign earth-centered pagan mythos, the confessions constitute lurid depictions of medieval Europe’s deepest ”endopsychic demons.” These are desires so horrifying and repellent as to be not merely forbidden, but consciously inconceivable to the respectable citizen, yearnings that repudiate in their entirety the time’s sexual and culinary conventions. As for the confessions themselves, they were extorted, says Cohn, sometimes under torture, from persons considered threats to local government and ecclesiastic authorities, to isolate them from the general population and legitimize their destruction. In other words, the sabbat is far worse than anything that might reasonably be associated with paganism; second, as such, the sabbat can only be considered a product of repressed, overactive imaginations. However this may be, in neither the Middle Ages nor in any of the other cases to be cited later would it be correct or fair to attribute the Sabbat of Orifices archetype to Christian body phobia alone. While church officials occasionally have been responsible for mobilizing popular support to rid communities of alleged practitioners of rnalificia, according to Cohn (1975, 6), the first documented mention of sabbat themes goes back to the Roman historian Sallust and his report on the so-called Catiline conspiracy which took place around 65 B.c.E., at least one century prior to the establishment of Christianity as an ecclesiastical organization. My own impression, however, is that Cohn is too conservative on this point. True, Sallust does describe debauched ”criminal intercourse” between ”men [who] forgot their sex,” oath taking, and even the drinking from goblets of wine tinctured with human blood (Sallust 1931, sec. xxii; cf. xiii-xiv, xxv). But these are presented only as minor events in a political-military coup, instead of as ceremonies in a bona fide sabbat. I believe that more telling anticipatory sabbat legends can be found in Greco-Roman mythology three to five centuries before this. This is to say nothing of comparably aged Hebrew Bible indictments of the ”abominations” of the Canaanites, Samaritans, and Greeks. I s

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To be sure, virtually nothing is known about an autonomous cosmic principle of Evil in the theology of the ancient Hebraic patriarchs, which attributes good and bad fortune alike to the same divine source, Yahweh. This definitely eliminates the seventh feature (see preceding) of the Sabbat of Orifices from earlier biblical strata. But under the influence of Zoroastrianism, with which the Jewish community became intimately familiar during the Exile (ca. 600-500 B.c.E.),Yahweh eventually was dissociated from any hint of malevolency, coming to stand exclusively for goodness. As this occurred, the powers of evil came to be progressively transferred onto an independent diabolic principal, Satan. The culmination of this transformation is clearly visible in the noncanonical book of Enoch, which was authored perhaps as early as the second century B.C.E. Here, Azazel, the name of the scapegoat originally offered to Yahweh to atone for Israel’s sins (Lev. 16.20-21), is transmogrified into God’s mortal enemy. He becomes chief of the “fallen angels.” These are the characters written of in Genesis 6.1-4 who desire the daughters of men and who through them produce a species of giants. 1 Enoch 6-8 (cf. Jubilees 5) caricatures Azazel as a goat-man who oversees a Sabbat of Orifices at which the entire panoply of crimes listed previously are enacted, from sexual excess, cannibalism, and bestiality, to blood drinking. In the pre-Christian Dead Sea Scrolls, the giant offspring of Azazel’s reputed orgy are written of as the ”sons of darkness” against whom the ”sons of light” will take up arms in the Last Days. During the Christian Middle Ages, they were considered the invading Huns. By the modern era, they had evolved into the Jewish Khazars. In all three of these visages, they are said to secretly labor toward satanic world conquest. This corpus of slanders was projected onto Christian dissenters from Judaism during the first decades after Jesus’ crucifixion when the communities were competing for scarce clientele. Christianity left itself open to the indictment by virtue of its central mystery, the Eucharist, at which the body and blood of God were said by believers themselves to be consumed-detractors claimed, cannibalistically. In his ”exceptionally welldocumented” persecution of Christians in 177 c.E., Marcus Aureliussome say purposively-confused the Christian love feast with the condemned orgiastic Greek Bacchanalia (Cohn 1975,3).But soon enough, the tables were turned. By the second century, Christians were attacking pagans for scandalizing the Christian god through their own alleged orifice violations. And after Christianity was legally recognized by Emperor Constantine I in 313, the calumnies began to be deployed against its own apostates and heretics, who went by such names as Montanists, Manichees, and Paulicians. By 1000 c.E., the practitioners of the gossipedabout sabbat rites were said to be the Bogomiles; a century after that they were known as Cathars and Waldensians; and later still, as Luciferians and

THE SABBAT THROUGH HlSTORY

2 03

Fraticelli. In the fifteenth century, the charge came to rest on witches, soothsayers, and magicians. Again, in our age the chief instigator of sabbat crimes is rumored to be the "international Jew" (Leese 1938).While the titles of the accused have changed over time, the basic charge against them has not. These are orifice violators! Nor have the circumstances of their respective persecutions been essentially different. In almost all cases, they were motivated by political chicanery. This is vividly illustrated by the antisabbat campaign launched against the Knights Templar early in the fourteenth century. Evidently, because of their military and financial clout, the Templars had become a threat to Philip the Fair's pretensions to the throne of Holy Roman Emperor (Cohn 1975,75-98). To win public support for actions against them, Philip's propagandists invented the patently unbelievable claim that the chaste, simple-living monks were engaged in unimaginable orifice crimes. Saint Augustine (345-430) was probably the first early Church father to repeat the ancient sabbat slanders in his revelations of the "carnal shamelessness," "vile fornications," and "sacrifices to the devil" allegedly committed by the Manichean cult of which he himself had one time been a member (Augustine 1960, books 2-5). In subsequent centuries, canonized theologians such as Saint John Capistrano and Saint James of March elaborated on the narrative. There were also minor contributions by various archbishops and, eventually, popes. The stories were dutifully copied by holy brothers and drawn upon in sermons by local pastors for the edification of their flocks. In this way the Sabbat of Orifices evolved into a fullfledged literary tradition in Christian civilization.At the same time, details began to be added to the original themes. Toads and other night animals joined the bestiary of ceremonial witnesses. The Cathars, for example, were said to have derived their name from the cat [cattzrs],which presumably oversaw their illicit feasts (Cohn 1975, 22, 57, 266 n. 121). Subterranean caves were introduced as ritual sites. The infant whose flesh is supposedly eaten was said to be the product of incestuous couplings by the celebrants and is reputedly killed by being roasted. Its ashes are blended into a narcotic, then drunk in a diabolic reversal of wine drinking at Mass. Later, additional charges were aired; the legend became even more bizarre. The participants were said to fly to the sabbat, either alone or in the company of con-celebrants, shrieking along the way. A naked, wrinkled-skin, cloven-hoofed Devil was introduced to preside over the affair. Sometimes pictured as a Negro, sometimes as an Arab Moor, he was rumored to multiply himself, varying his sex to suit his partners. He became ubiquitous, taking up residence in the vulnerable areas of the body: voids and holes, from which he besieged his (her) victims by tempting them to sin (Cohn 1975,71).Insofar as females are congenitally softer, more pliant, and "hollow," suspicions about their malevolence increased. The secret compact

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between them and their satanic incubus was reported to be sealed with intercourse, which fact was retrospectively confirmed by a fleshly stigmata, such as an unsightly wart, a hairy mole, or blemish. The infamous Malletis Maleficauum, authored by two Dominican monks, compiled these legends into a single volume in 1486. Cohn claims that the importance of this text ”has been exaggerated” (225). The fantasy prototype had already been fully developed at least fifty years before its publication.

THE FREE SPIRITS

People sometimes act unwittingly in ways that confirm suspicions about themselves. The Tantrikas, for instance, probably deserve much of the scorn heaped on them by the Brahmans by virtue of their own writings. This is also true of certain medieval heretical movements, most notably the Free Spirits, so called because they gave the impression of being above the laws of Christian morality. ”No impartial observer can doubt” that the impetus behind the Free Spirits (and many comparable groups such as the Humiliati, the Cathars, the Albigensians, the Arnoldists, and the Beguines) was a widespread yearning on the part of mainly female Christian laity for an existence more rigorous than convention then allowed (Grundmann 1995 [1935], 11).Like the apostles, after whom they modeled themselves, the Free Spirits lived communally in poverty, simplicity, and chastity. They refused binding oaths and spent their days wandering from town to town evangelizing the masses. In short, like the Knights Templar, they were the very opposite of what we might imagine of the ideal-typical sabbat ~ e l e b r a n tThe . ~ problem was that having an exalted sense of their own spiritual perfection they came to view the material world and particularly the Church nzajesteuiuin and its sacraments of ordination and marriage as impediments to truth. This naturally opened them to charges of ontological dualism and by implication to accusations of involvement in the kinds of sabbat crimes that Augustine attributes to the Manichees. It did not help that adult males and even monks were reported to mingle too ”intimately” with the ”ripe [but morally unformed] maidens” of these groups, without clerical supervision. For now legends were sounded of secret meetings between them held in underground dwellings, of drunkenness, unbridled debauchery, child murder (147).In other words, although their opponents were rarely able to indict them with specific crimes, not even with heresy, they nonetheless fell under ”one great category as objects of suspicion,” as violating in private the vows of abstinence they proclaimed in public. From the standpoint of the lay apostles themselves, the ”freedom” they extolled had little if anything to do with sexual license. Instead, it meant

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liberation from restraints placed on religious expression by the Church; particularly ecstatic ”muscular” expression of the sort familiar to modern Pentecostalism: jerking, barking, swooning, tongues, catatonia, and the like. Making these seizures doubly apt to misunderstanding was the use by some spiritualists of erotic language to interpret them. Mechtild of Magdeburg (1217-1277), the famed Bavarian mystic, provides an excellent example. In her autobiographical account of her religious experiences, she writes of being ”beside herself” with love for God, and He of ”burning with desire” for her. She goes on to liken herself to a shy, but ”hungry” bride, led to a forest glade by her chambermaid to meet her lover. There they dance. He then leads her to the ”bed of love” where she ”undresses” at his command so that ”nothing can come between them.” On the bed she offers him her ”jewel,” which he proceeds to ”fill with infinite riches.” ”What happens to her then,” says Mechtild, ”she knows, and I am content with that, . . . ” But evidently not, for she continues. ”The more his desire grows, the more tightly he holds her and the greater is the happiness of the bride. The more fervent they embrace, the sweeter the taste of the kisses. . . . The more he gives her, the more she consumes. . . . The hotter she remains, . . . the more she burns, . . .” (Buber 1983, 51-66).4 This is redolent of Krishna’s tryst with Radha in the steaming jungles of Bengal. No wonder prurient Christian clerics, like their salacious Brahman counterparts, prated, orated, bruited at length about what really transpired at night in the ”underground” conventicles of the Free Spirits. Could it be anything less than orgiastic wickedness? (Grundmann 1995 [1935], 170, 175-76). And now the clincher: The Free Spirits, like the Tantrikas, claimed that while in connubiziin spirituale, matters of good and evil were rendered irrelevant, trivial. In fact from the transcendent, otherworldly perspective of their perfected souls, considerations of Christian moral teaching and its associated feelings of remorsefulness and guilt were considered impediments to clear seeing. While this idea is common to mystical discourse universally-indeed, I quote almost identical comments from tantric texts in the previous chapter-in the minds of ordinary citizens they sowed c o n f ~ s i o nAnd . ~ to those charged with policing public morals, they were anathema. Using their own words against them, the Church in one grand inquisition tried and then placed unrepentant Free Spirits under interdiction as self-admitted sabbat criminals. TWO AMERICAN SABBATS Catholic Convent Crimes

The legend of a worldwide papal conspiracy has a long history in America. The idea originated in Reformation diatribe against the Catholic

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”whore of Babylon,” a prejudice carried to this country by Pilgrim colonists and subsequently broadcast by Presbyterian and Congregational ministers. It also was inspired by eighteenth-century republican ideologues such as John Locke, who, upon viewing efforts to suppress bourgeois European revolutions by the Holy Roman Alliance, feared a reversion to medieval despotism. These suspicions were given impetus by the fact that Catholicism was imported to North America by seeming aliens, first in the persons of the French and Irish, and after 1870 by swarthyskinned eastern and southern Europeans. While dogmatic and secular conspiracy themes both play important roles in anti-Catholic literature, not surprisingly its primary appeal has always been its titillating features, that is, its frank disclosures of presumed sabbat festivities committed in nunneries. These, as Joseph Mainard (1981) points out, have always fascinated Protestant Americans ”as no other facet of Romanism.”6One explanation for this gossipy enchantment is the very cloisteredness of the convent. To morbidly curious outsiders, seclusion seems to confirm suspicions of illicitness. To paraphrase Mainard, the exposes provide readers the opportunity to condemn alleged Catholic depravity guiltlessly while enjoying the pornography that describes it. Of course, revelations of any sabbat orgy gain credibility when the celebrants themselves ostensibly author them: the “sisters” of Illuminati conspirators, for example, disaffected runaway Mormon wives, or, in the case before us, runaway nuns. The heroines invariably portray themselves as fleeing their ”sepulchral abodes of hypocrisy and pollution” while being pursued by Mormon ”assassins” personally sworn to ”blood atonement’’ or by leering, black-coated (Jesuit)”panders of depravity” and their frothing guard dogs. Despite this, they claim to offer ”unaffected and plain relation[~] of facts” (Reed 1835,14).This, ”after long, deliberate, and, we may add, prayerful consideration of the dictates of justice, truth, and religion” (11).All by a woman of ”remarkable . . . innocence and integrity, as well as piety and firmness, . . . of timid and retiring habits, of extreme sensibility . . .” (12). Who but the most black-hearted fiend could doubt her words? According to Jenny Franchot, the two most noteworthy examples of American anticonvent literature are Rebecca Reed’s Six Moiztlzs iiz n Coizueizt (1835) and Maria Monk’s Awfzrl Discloszires of the Hotel Diezi Nzuzizery (1836).7The first enjoyed sales of ten thousand copies in its first week alone; the second was outsold only by UizcIe Toin’s Cnbiiz during the entire nineteenth century (Franchot 1994, 154). To these can be added a third: George Bourne’s Lorettc: The History of Loziise, Dniiglztcr of LI Caizadiniz Niiiz (1833), which may have inspired both revelations, particularly Monk’s, which is situated in the same locale, Montreal. Prepublication rumors concerning Reed’s expos6 inspired the burning to the ground of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in

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1834 by an Indian-garbed mob of bricklayers. Among the rumors were that after fleeing, a sister was forcibly returned to the nunnery and murdered (Franchot 1994,13745). As it turns out, after vigorous spadework, the mob failed to locate her corpse in the convent yard. For all their trouble, neither Reed nor Monk profited from their books. Reed died in 1838 of tuberculosis, allegedly contracted through the rigors of convent life which included, among other ”tortures,” making the sign of the cross on the floor with her tongue as penance (Reed 1835, 82). The once ”young and pretty” Monk, meanwhile, is said to have died a ”sordid” death as an indigent prostitute at thirty-two. Maria Monk (1836,6,15) claims she was still a schoolgirl when she first heard stories that under the guise of cautioning against sin, priests sometimes used confessional interrogations to instill prurient thoughts in their female charges. Because such priests are ordained with the keys to heavenly life, writes Monk, what would be wicked for other men is virtue for them. Discounting the warnings, however, Monk is received as a novice into the Congregational Nunnery in Montreal, hoping thereby to secure herself ”eternal happiness.” And indeed the balance of her disclosure is filled with descriptions of the contented daily routine of a nun. There is needlework, Spartan meals taken to readings from Lives of the Sniizts, prayer, ”recreation,” and sorority-like frolicking (68-80). Not until she assumes the veil, and it is too late to recant her vows of silence and obedience, is Monk introduced to the ”disgusting, shameless familiarities” transpiring behind the cloistered walls. That evening, as if to publicly acknowledge her forthcoming complicity in the sabbat, she is ”brutally used” by three priests in a room supposedly set aside for the examination of conscience (28-29). Although Monk’s breezy style suggests that she seems none the worse for this alleged initiation into the religious life, others are not as fortunate, including one fourteen-year-old who, Monk says, died as a result (84,86). Only after this rude defloration is Monk given a grand tour of the facility that is to be her home. She is shown the inner apartments, off-limits to noninitiates, the underground passage that connects the convent to the seminary across the street, the concealed bell rung at night by male visitors to the dormitory, and the hisses and clucking sounds used to certify their identity as priests. Which fact, Monk relates, was not always necessary, for ”often they were in our beds before us” (81). These debauchees would come in without ceremony, concealing their names, both by night and day. Being within the walls of that prisonhouse, . . . where the cries and pains of the injured innocence of their victims would never reach the world,. . . without remorse or shame, they would glory, not only in sating their brutal passions, but . . . in torturing, in the most barbarous manner, the feelings of those under their power. . . . The more

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they could torture us, . . . the more pleasure they took in their unclean revelling [sic];and all their brutal obscenity they called meritorious before God. (118)

Emplaced along the walls of the cellar, Monk writes of discovering straw-floored cells where ”English” (read: American) nuns are entombed (88-90, 107-8). These are such who have not yet learned ”they are not their’s alone; whatever ordered to do must be obeyed” (43). To instill this lesson, positioned nearby are drawers laden with gags, straps, suspension cables, and irons, the pains of which Monk herself will soon experience directly (106-16, 122-23). Most horrifying is the discovery of a seemingly bottomless, lime-stained pit (48-49).This is where the infant products of the wicked unions between priests and nuns are thrown, after first being baptized and strangled; before, Mother Superior smilingly relates, they can sin (25-26,99-100). (In his fictional expose, George Bourne [1833] reports that quick death by throttling is employed only for male births. Females are preserved, sometimes to be given into prostitution to their own clerical fathers. This is because ”father and mother and sister, even son and daughter to them are unmeaning appellatives,. . . hence.. . incest,. . . [is] a crime which they can not commit” [208,176-771). The cellar pit is also final destination for those such as ”blond, blueeyed” Sister Francis, who is accused of speaking out against the ”murder of harmless babes.” In the course of an inquisition overseen by the bishop and Mother Superior, she is forced to a bed, gagged, bound with cords, and trampled to death by five priests. She is then tossed into the pit and covered with lime (Monk 1836, 59-65). (While it may be a literary coincidence, it is worth noting that Sister Francis is also the name of Rebecca Reed’s confidant in Six Morztlzs irz IZ Corzverzt. Reed has the stubborn Mary Francis taken at night from the Charlestown nunnery, never to be heard from again. It is rumored, says Reed, that she has been shipped by carriage to Montreal.) The Mormon Seraglio

The nuns’ tales are best understood as little more than gigantic projections of repressed neo-Calvinist male libido. The circumstances surrouiiding the Mormon Seraglio, however, are a bit more subtle. As early as 1837, and possibly before that, Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, had taken a second ”wife,” Fanny Alger. He subsequently was ”sealed” to scores, if not hundreds of other women, including (by proxy) several Catholic saints. This is to say nothing of other Church leaders, most notably Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, whose Beehive House, consisting of separate apartments for each of his wives still stands downtown in Salt Lake City. The Church position justifying plural marriage was published first in 1852

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and appeared in the listing of official revelations a quarter century later (Doctrine and Covenants 1985, 132:61-62). The compositional style of the revelation indicates that it was written to overcome the objections of Smith’s first wife, Emma (51-52). Evidently unimpressed, she is reported to have angrily thrown the document into a fire. She subsequently renounced the Church altogether. Smith was awaiting trial in jail on charges of bigamy when he was murdered in 1844 by a mob. Given what we know of the moralistic Presbyterian and Methodist backgrounds of the early Mormon authorities and the piety of their Scandinavian and English followers, it is hard to believe that sexual salaciousness was a primary motivation for the institution of Mormon polygamy. The foremost expert on the subject, B. Carmon Hardy (1992), gives three alternative possibilities: the egalitarian ”dynamics of c o ~ ~ z m u ~ i t m the , desire to ”build up the kingdom” by making ”tabernacles” (bodies) for human spirits, and, most importantly, the ”courageous” theological impulse to ”restore the gospel in its fulness” in these, the ”latter-days” (5-15). All the early Hebraic patriarchs, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Gen. 25:6, 12, 30; Ex. 21:10), as well as Kings David and Solomon, enjoyed multiple wives and concubines. It therefore may have seemed natural that Mormon elders do the same. Nevertheless, the notion that polygamy was a male ”privilege”-as in the phrase, ”Brother, are you living the privilege?”-and public disclosure that wives who resist the arrangement are threatened with destruction by God (Doctrine and Covenants 1985,132:64,54,65) were bound to provoke outrage. It did not help when, in his typically gruff manner, Brigham Young once asserted, ”If I had forty wives in the United States, . . . I live above the law, and so do this people” ( J . ofDiscozrrses I, 361). Because the revelation regarding plural wives permanently replaced parts of an earlier revelation sanctifying monogamy (no longer found in sec. 110 of Doctrine and Covenants), fundamentalist detractors to this day insist that polygamy is still actionable in principle; proof that Mormonism is a satanic cult whose goal is world domination (Decker and Hunt 1984, 140-76). This despite vigorous pronouncements to the contrary by Church authorities.g Over fifty anti-Mormon novels were published in the nineteenth century, four ostensibly by women, one of which became a bestseller, was translated into four languages and was still being printed in 1913.9The reason for their success? The ”buyers expected to find prurient descriptions of lust, licentiousness, and sensuality” (Arrington and Haupt 1968,244,n. 5).And rarely were they disappointed. For the themes already familiar to us from the convent tales are found here, too, with stereotypes of the far West augmenting the standard line. There are imprisonments of female victims in wilderness redoubts, escapes from captivity by means of rock-lacerated hands, ”guided only by the stars.” There are daring rescues ”

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by men on horseback, gunfights, Bowie knives; even federal troops. Above all, there are vivid accounts of ”degraded delights.” But now, Jesuit finesse is replaced by bucolic boorishness. Here is one description of a clumsy attempt at seduction gone awry: ”Don’t be skeered, little un; don’t yeh be skeered; and nobody won’t hurt yeh,” said the Elder [Bungrod], advancing. . . . The young girl flattened herself against the wall with a look of dismay and horror,. . . and when his hands touched her she cried out wildly, slipping from him, flew. . . out the door and down into the fields. With a stifled curse, Bungrod kicked the chairs out of his way and trampled after her. . . . ”I kin wait. . . an’ you’re worth waitin’ fer.” (quoted in Lambert 1968,66)

For all their lubriciousness, accounts such as this were known by ”gentile” (non-Mormon) readers to be fiction. They could be savored, perhaps, but not taken seriously. The same cannot be said of the allegedly nonfiction exposes of Mormonism by one-time insiders: ”wife number nineteen,” Anna Eliza Young (1875),for example, or John C. Bennett (1842). Little is known about Bennett except his birth in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in 1804. He was an ambitious man who variously passed himself off as a physician, professor, and military tactician. The official history of the Church describes him as ”a man who seems to have been without any moral character, but who had filled positions of importance.” It was as an obsequious, Latin-quoting Quartermaster General of the Illinois Militia, offering his services to a defenseless people, that he came to the attention of Joseph Smith. In the self-congratulatory preface to his expose, Bennett claims to have infiltrated Mormonism in behalf of the United States government. This upon hearing of a scheme by Smith to conquer the far West. Just as Napoleon had professed Islam falsely in order to gain the trust of Egyptian military leaders, so as to defeat them, Bennett honors himself as doing the same. He eventually became mayor of the Mormon enclave of Nauvoo, Illinois, commander of the Mormon Nauvoo Legion, and Smith’s trusted assistant. Within a short time, however, he was excommunicated for lechery and officially denounced as ”an adder in the path, and a viper in the bosom” of the Church. His “history is therefore best read as a case study in literary revenge. For his ”faithful unexaggerated account of the most enormous and detestable system of depravity. . . [ever] concocted’’ by man (225), Bennett claims to have been marked for assassination (279-92). It is Bennett who coined the phrase ”Mormon seraglio.” I can only speculate on its source. It may well be that he had come across The Lustful Turk, published in 1828, one of a series of such accounts growing from recent British misfortunes with the Ottoman empire. This book is described as a series of letters from a ”young and beautiful” Englishwoman to her cousin in which ”one virgin after another is ceremoniously deflowered in delight’I

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ful detail.” Whatever the origins of the metaphor, Bennett’s expose is rife with hackneyed orientalism. There are ”liquid Tartarean lavas,” ”Cyprian maids,” ”Mormon pashas,” and ”argus-eyed Viragos.” Instead of the dark and stark gothic castle of the convent tales, there is instead an Endowment House. This equipped with plushy-pillowed divans, silk curtains, water pipes, scimitars, and guards in bloused Turkish pajamas. Three ”degrees” exist in the female lodge, Bennett tells his readers (218-25). Members of the lowest order, the Cyprian Saints (or as they are publicly known, the Female Relief Society), are distinguished by white veils. These have been found guilty of some Church infraction and have as a result become available on command ”for licentious purposes, forever after,” to satisfy through ”extreme unction’’ ”the vilest appetites of the . . . priests” (that is, essentially any fully ordained adult Mormon male). The second degree is comprised of green-veiled Chambered Sisters of Charity. These “indulge their sensual propensities without restraint,“ by permission of the prophet and without guilt. Many live ”in licentious intercourse with other women,” not infrequently ”with other men’s wives.” The Cloistered Saints, the elite, comprise the third order. They are distinguished by black veils. Specially selected for their beauty, they are kept apart for the sole use of the most eminent Church leaders. Through training in the arts of the harem, they constitute “the ne plus ultra of depravity.” To give the impression of balance, Bennett admits that not every Mormon woman submits to these ”pollutions steeped in the blackest dye” (226-53). However, conscientious objectors, he claims, are fated to broken hearts, ridicule, abandonment in poverty, madness, wasting disease, and suicide. In any case, the few exceptions that are offered merely prove the rule, namely, that Mormonism is a world ”which can find no parallel in history without going back to the engulfed ’cities of the plain [Sodom and Gomorrah]’” (234). Orvilla Belisle (1855) describes it this way. The intrigues of the prophet and his patriarchs were only samples which the more humble followed, . . . and extended from the hoary sinner of four score years to the jacketed boy at school. . . and from the wrinkled hag bereft of every vestige of loveliness, to the miss in pantelettes. . . . Cupid’s missives flew thick, fast, and indiscriminately from the old beldame to him who was yet unbroken by vice. From the husband and the father to his neighbor’s wife, or daughter, and from the wife and daughter, wherever their wanton eye rested. (403)

CONCLUSION

Allowing for variations in scene, the indictments of Catholicism and Mormonism are nearly identical to each other. They are also virtually indistinguishable from period accusations of Illuminati crimes (Davis

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1960, 206-7, 208). Furthermore, they display an uncanny resemblance to abolitionist accounts of plantation slavery, to diatribes against prostitution, and even to cautionary warnings against masturbation (Walters 1973).This hardly comes as a surprise. Many of them were authored, if not by the same persons, then by members of the same families or by individuals close to them. With no attempt at being exhaustive: Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent is said to have first been related orally to Theodore Dwight who then allegedly transcribed it. Actually, there is some suspicion that Dwight himself co-ghostwrote the entire piece together with his friend, Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher. Some years earlier during a Fourth of July speech, Dwight had rhetorically asked his audience, ”Shall . . . our daughters [then become] concubines of the Illuminati?” (Lipset and Raab 1970, 36). Even before hearing Reed’s tale, its other alleged auditor, Beecher, had broadcast news of a Vatican Cotzspiracy against the Liberties of the United States. The arson attack on the Ursuline nunnery mentioned previously was sparked in part by three blistering Beecher sermons delivered in the neighborhood just the week before. A generation later the father’s alarm would be repeated by his son, Edward, in The Papal Coizspir.ncy Exposed (Beecher 1855). The antiCatholic animus of the Beecher family was widely enough known in American literary circles as to have its own title, ”Beecherism.” As every student of American history knows, Lyman’s daughter’s, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s, Uncle Toin’s Cabin eventually became the single most important vehicle in the literary attack on chattel slavery in the northern states. However, it is less commonly appreciated that it also served as the immediate stimulus for the spate of anti-Mormon novels published after 1852, all of which follow a comparable story line: female capture, followed by degradation under conditions of forced constraint, and heroic escape. While this has yet to be confirmed, it is possible that Uncle Tom’s Cabiiz in turn was inspired in part by Rev. George Bourne’s own abolitionist commentary. In his Slavery aizd Its Effects tipon Wonza~aizd Society (1837)’ Bourne argues that in its ”unrestrained communication’’ between the races, slavery constitutes ”one great Sodom,” a ”vast brothel,” (and interestingly) a ”Turkish harem.” Analogous observations on Catholicism are found in Bourne’s pseudobiography of Louise, the so-called nun’s daughter. Because he was raised in Baltimore, strictly speaking, Bourne cannot be considered a New England ”Brahmin.” However, he was closely tied to the Beecher circle. After being expulsed from his (southern) Presbyterian pulpit for heresy

after condemning slavery on biblical grounds, he moved to New York, where he became a frequent contributor to William Lloyd Garrison’s Libevlztov and became co-founder of the Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison himself was a member of Lyman Beecher’s congregation and is considered one of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s foremost teachers on the subject of slavery. It was Garrison who eventually convinced the father of the institution’s immorality. Harvard-educated Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, was rumored to have once been engaged to the notorious Maria Monk, a relationship that horrified his colleagues (Schultz 1999, xvii, xxxi n. 12). He spoke out against Catholic evils as vehemently as his father, Charlestown Congregationalist minister Jedediah Morse, had against the Illuminati. In both cases, to quote the latter, ”You will perceive, my brethren . . . that we have in truth secret enemies . . . whose professed design is to subvert and overturn our holy religion and our free and excellent government” (Lipset and Raab 1970,37).

I could go on, but the point is clear enough: With the possible exception of Bourne, these names are included in lists of New England’s leading nineteenth-century ”Brahmins.” And this, for more than just their literary illustriousness. For their exposes of convent crimes and Mormon mischiefs not only are interchangeable with each other; they also correspond to orthodox Brahmanic suspicions about Tantrism. The real danger of the Tantrikas to their antagonists, recall, was not just their libertine sexuality, which was bad enough. Rather, it was their systematic assault on the sanctity of caste boundaries that, among other things, imperiled the inherited rights of the Brahmans to gifts and offerings. Analogously, it was not only the illicit eroticism alleged of Catholicism and Mormonism (or Illuminatism, slavery, and prostitution) that scandalized the ”Boston Brahmins.” It was that in loosening restraints over sexual appetites, these institutions were thought to put at risk the corporate integrity of a social system in which they had an immense financial and political stake. Without restraint, warns Bourne, ”licentiousness [threatens] to pervade the whole land,” ”infecting the nation with the leprosy of Sodom” (quoted in Walters 1973, 190). Once again, we observe the common thread wending itself through the case studies comprising this book: If people fear that the group with which they are identified is threatened-in this case, America-then their fears will be expressed in terms of an imagined invasion of the personal bodies of those close to them. By sacrament or force, each in its own way, nunnery and Endowment House (Illuminati lodge, plantation, and brothel) were considered to institute a Sabbat of Orifices, a regime not merely of biblical depravity, but of archetypal proportion: an arrangement corruptive of both perpetrator and

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victim. Regarding the former, critics claimed that the sabbat ”deals death to all sentiments of true manhood” (Froiseth 1881-82,113). It ”feminizes” him, softens him, renders him passive. Anti-Mormon cartoons of the day picture the typical Church elder cowering in bed with multiple wives or standing behind their petticoats. He is the contemptible opposite of Concord’s legendary Minuteman, the volunteer who stands guard at the portals of the nation, protecting it from invasion. As for the victims, the consequences were believed to be even grimmer. The sabbat ”crucifies every God-given feeling of her nature” (113).l0 Let me name this victim Liberty. Imagine her pious, blue-eyed, blond, innocent. She is the heart of the American body politic. She stands for everything that nourishes the national flesh. Now insofar as neither Catholicism nor Mormonism, at least so readers were told, recognize the validity of Liberty’s (Protestant) marriage, then she and her sisters are ”prey ;o any who can win them.” Renegade ex-Catholic priest William Hogan claims to ”have seen husbands unsuspiciously and hospitably entertaining the very priest who seduced their wives in the confessional, and was the parent of some of the children who sat at the same table with them, each of the wives unconscious of the other’s guilt, and the husbands of both, not even suspecting them” (Hogan 1845,224).Making the wife vulnerable to seduction, Hogan tells us, is auricular confession. While kneeling unsupervised before him in a dark corner of a deserted room set aside for that purpose, she reveals confidences she would never deign to divulge to her spouse. Meanwhile, armed with centuries-old Church manuals on vice, the priest artfully moves his inquiry so as to ”work up her passions to a tension almost snapping.’’When she is at the very height of vulnerability, he pounces (254-55).11 Mormon elders also were accused of invoking the privileges of office to extort sexual favors from docile victims. But additionally, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were suspected of using their personal charisma, their ”animal magnetism,” to wile, enchant, ensnare, and ultimately paralyze their prey (Young, 1875,440-41,433,453). Different tactics, same result. In either case, republican civilization was said to be penetrated by an agent who, if not literally foreign, represented a principle alien to Americanism, imperiling the national Union (Davis 1960,212). NOTES 1. For an analysis of Dilling’s text, as well as comparable material, see Aho (1994,68-82). 2. For numerous examples of sabbat themes from non-Euro-American cultures, see Stevens Jr. (1991).

NOTES

115

3. Cohn (1970) vigorously disputes this, saying of the Free Spirts that they constituted ”an elite of amoral supermen.” Although the practical consequences of this belief could vary, one possible consequence was certainly antinomianism or the repudiation of moral norms. The ”perfect man’’ could always draw the conclusion that it was permissible for him, even incumbent on him to do whatever was commonly regarded as forbidden. (150; cf. 151,177-81) I am not arguing that all medieval religious movements were innocent of orifice violations. All one need do is generalize from recent experience of the fundamentalist Children of God to see how Christian ”love” can be given a pernicious, antinomian twist. For a definite example of this from the Middle Ages, see Cohn’s (1970,271-80) account of the messianic reign of John Leyden. The dispute between Grundmann and Cohn is due partly to the different definitional extensions they give to the term Free Spirit.For Cohn, it is a term inclusive of groups functioning well into the Reformation and throughout Europe and Russia. Grundmann restricts it to a specific period and to southern Germany. 4. Carolyn Bynum provides numerous examples of medieval erotic mystics. For the case of Hadewijch (fl. ca. 1200-1250), a Flemish beguine, see Bynum (1987, 153-56). Cf. 24649. 5. Cohn acknowledges, like Grundmann, that the erotic language of many of the Free Spirits was intended by them to be understood esoterically (Cohn 1975, 183). 6. It is worth noting that a similar thrill of disgust followed publication of Proofs ofa Conspiracy in 1789, which alleges an Illuminati plan to establish a ”sisterhood” in service to the craven appetites of male Free Masons. 7. Both of these books are reprinted in Schultz (1990). 8. For the Church’s official position on polygamy, issued October 6, 1890, by President Wilford Woodruff, see Doctrine and Covenants (1985,291-92). As to the reasons for this position, see pages 292-93. 9. They are Alfreda Eva Bell’s Boadicen, The Mori?mz W f e (1855), Orvilla Belisle’s The Prophets;07; Mowionism Exposed (1855), Metta Victor Fuller M o r m i ? Wives:A Narmtive ofFacts (1856),and “Maria Ward,” Feiizak Life among the Morinons (1855). 10. In a letter to Cato dated March 1778, the Illuminatist Spartacus proposes a ”sisterhood in subserviency to the designs of the Illuminati,” which will suit ”charmingly the taste o f . . . members who are lovers of the sex.” He goes on to boast of having in his possession receipts for the procurement of abortions, a recipe for an abortion-inducing tea, and a receipt for a aphrodisiac ”ad excitnizc2tinzfzirorenz ziteriniim” (Robison 1967 [1798],79). Minos writes to Sebastian agreeing that Spartacus’s proposal is ”excellent.” He then asks, ”How shall we get hold of them?” Sebastian replies, ”You must contrive pretty degrees, and dresses, and ornaments, and elegant . . . rituals. . . . This will make them become more keen, . . . Leave them to the scope of their own fancies, and they will soon invent mysteries which will put us to the blush. . . . Think of the Danaids-think of the Theban Bacchantes” (99-100).

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John Robison (1967 [1798]), the editor, comments: ”There is nothing in the whole constitute of the Illuminati that strikes me with more horror than the proposal. . . to enlist. . . women in this shocking” project (142). For the story of the notorious Illuminati lech, Karl Friederich Bahrdt, based on his autobiography, see pages 191-201. 11. For further analysis of the theme of confessional seduction, see Franchot (1994,121-26).

A Politics of the Orifice SATANIC LEGENDS

”Satan,” writes Phillips Stevens Jr. (1991)of events during the decade of the 1980s, ”has not been on such a rampage since the New England witch hunts of the seventeenth century.” Even though, he adds, ”there is no hard evidence that any of the horrible things described in the demonology . . . actually happened’’ (33).The ”horrible things” to which Stevens refers are enumerated in the last chapter as the constituents of the Sabbat of Orifices. In the hysterias of the 1980s tm7o themes not feund in ear!.; P,merican antisabbat literature stand out. First, the focus of concern is redirected away from the innocent adult Victorian female toward the innocent (mainly female) child. Second, the sabbat is no longer said to be staged in the convent, Endowment House, Masonic lodge, brothel, or plantation, but in the day care center or preschool. Nevertheless, the fundamental meaning of the sabbat remains unchanged. Catholicism, Mormonism, Illuminatism, prostitution, and slavery each were rebuked as threats to the sanctity of the monogamous family, and by this, to the Republic. Likewise, the child care facility (by arrogating to itself family functions) is suspected of imperiling ”traditional family values” upon which the well-being of the Nation rests (Bromley 1991,64-68). In either case, an imagined invasion of the American body politic is enframed symbolically as the ritual penetration of the bodies of its most dependent and helpless citizens. Research on thirty-one satanist ”rumor-panics” during the 1980s indicates that all of them occurred in rural districts or in small towns and that leaders of fundamentalist Christian churches, child protection services, feminist counselors, ”cult awareness” groups, law enforcement officials, and the local media were deeply implicated in them (Victor 1991).To illustrate this, consider an outburst that took place in 1990 to 1991 in the Burley-Rupert area of southern Idaho, a region populated by irrigation farms and cattle ranches.l 117

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It was two years after newspapers reported the discovery of the charred, dismembered remains of an Hispanic infant, ”Baby X,”in a local landfill that five graphic scribblings by eleven-year-old ”Timothy” were turned over to the Rupert police department by school officials. These were interpreted as depicting male organs, frowning mouths, and sex acts. When asked by a counselor to describe their contents, Timothy recounted being ”put on a table” in the midst of eighteen people. ”The devil is there. . . . They hurt me in the private parts (’they hurt my mom, too, in her private parts. People watch’). . . . They have sacrifices. . . . They sacrifice all animals. . . . They even sacrifice babies. . . . Where do they get the babies, I don’t know. . . . They just put them on the table and pretty soon the devil makes a fire and thev are on fire.” As if to underscore the veracity of this bizarre story, Timothy several times repeated the phrase, ”it’s in the real Bible.” The counselor admitted to being ”scared” by Timothy’s tale. State child protection authorities were immediately notified and urged to investigate. The possibility that Baby X had been a victim of satanic ritual abuse was given credence by an unsigned letter (written in 1990), published in the same issue of the paper. This described women in the surrounding area being ”used as Breeders for the seed of satan.” Because the mothers are frequently drugged, said the letter, the babies usually are born severely retarded. ”Many only ma[k]e mewing sounds.” In their ritual murders, ”a curved incision [is] used,” slicing open the abdomen up to the sternum. ”The heart [is] then taken out. This [is] always done with a live child.” Occasionally, the letter continued, the arms and legs [are] ”pulled off at the j oints.” One month after the appearance of Timothy’s article and the accompanying letter, the local sheriff released to the newspaper a second letterthis, authored by a Robert Crawford who had slashed himself to death in 1990. While his sister denied Robert’s involvement in satanism, and while he himself was diagnosed as schizophrenic, what Robert wrote could only aggravate civic concern about goings-on at night behind drawn curtains in the neighborhood. ”What if you woke up each day and you waited: And you knew and you waited. And they came in your house and they took y o u . . . and cut you with knives and burned you with fire,. . . and your screams only fed their lust for cruelty.” Robert goes on to write of children being hung upside down and of being doused with gasoline and burned; of ”crooked crosses” and ”obscene sex acts”; of feces eating; and of the murder of friends with a ”ball bat.” The letter closes with a warning to ”Tommy”: ”Save yourself from torture. . . . Do not talk!” In seeming defiance of Robert’s warning, the floodgates to the underworld opened full flush. Less than a week after the publication of Robert’s last words, ”Patty,” a twenty-four-year-old mother, related to the paper

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how, while undergoing psychotherapy, she ”recovered” the memory of witnessing as a child the ceremonial disembowelment of ”this pretty little white bunny,” and of how she was warned that this is what would happen to her if she told. Like Timothy, Patty, too, remembered seeing babies cut up and roasted. But she went further, claiming to have seen the chief celebrants feasting on their flesh and blood. As for herself, she reports having been variously beaten, whipped, drugged, and raped. ”To this day, I do not let anybody touch the inside of my elbow because I am still sensitive there from all the shots I got as a child.” One day later, a second news item appeared. This recounted the ritual abuse of six-year old ”Tina” and her brother, ”Billy.” Now the story line read that the child victims were hung upside down and ”shot repeatedly with a cross-bow.” In addition, a little boy’s penis was chopped off. Events came to a head the following week. The local Nazarene preacher, a self-proclaimed expert on cult brainwashing, called for a prayer vigil to stand up to evil. In perhaps the first demonstration of its sort ever held in America, and in the presence of the mayor, five hundred protesters from Idaho, Utah, and Colorado sang, prayed, and lit candles on behalf of the victims of the satanic sabbat. Patty appeared on the podium, along with “Linda,” whose grandmother, she said, had served as high priestess in a satanic cult. Linda claimed to have witnessed the ritual murders of her two-year-brother and her three-year-old cousin. ”Cynthia,” another ”survivor,” recited a poem, ”Crucified,” which likened the victims of the sordid rites to Jesus. She proposed that Baby X be given a name. The Friday night vigil was endorsed by a Sunday editorial, ”Light Must Be Shed on Abuse Perpetrators.” It opened with the assertion, ”Ritual abuse is real. It exists.” As if to acknowledge beforehand the futility of practically doing anything about the problem, however, it lamely endorsed Patty’s suggestion that the problem could only be fought by exposing it to the light of truth. ”Turn on the light and they scatter,” she was quoted as saying, ”like cockroaches.” The editorial agreed. In 1994 I conducted nonstructured, goal-directed interviews with two adult females, neither of whom admitted knowing the other, but both of whom had been raised in the same valley about one hundred miles east of Burley-Rupert. Both at the time were undergoing memory recovery by an outspoken, licensed woman’s advocate. Their stories not only contained identical themes, their contents were virtually interchangeable with the tales recounted previously by Patty, Cynthia, Linda, and the rest. More alarming, both implicated several of the same persons by name, including prominent church and business leaders, as high priests in a satanic coven. Although the counselor and others in her office personally assured me that indictments were imminent, none were ever issued. Like rumor-panics elsewhere in America, no evidence of a satanic conspiracy was ever

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uncovered in Idaho. The interviewees I spoke to take this to mean that law officers themselves are somehow implicated in the conspiracy. In a largely empty gesture, presumably intended to mollify antisatanist sentiments, the Idaho state legislature in 1990 passed a measure to protect victims of sabbat rites from being ritually abused. WHY?

For present purposes it is not important to determine whether the events confessed to by the preceding parties actually transpired. What is important is that throughout Western history, down to today, there have been periodic explosions of conviction in a Sabbat of Orifices and with them civic campaigns to control or extirpate its celebrants: a ”politics of the orifice.” Typically such a politics is played out according the niceties of institutional procedure, using formal subpoenas, investigations, hearings, and, occasionally, trials. Take, for instance, the infamous McMartin Day Care center trial in Manhattan, California, in the middle 1980s, which uncovered allegations of hundreds of children having been ritually abused by Satan worshippers. Comparable panic-driven legalistic inquiries occurred, among other places, in Wenatchee and Olympia, Washington; Missoula, Montana; and in Jordan, Minnesota, about the same time. But a politics of the orifice also can assume a riotous form. A case in point is Mormonism. While Mormons faced legal opposition wherever they settled, including in Idaho (where the original state constitution prohibited them from holding office or voting), it was mob violence that drove elements of the Church from Missouri to Illinois, and finally into exile altogether. The following quote from an announcement issued by the more fervid ”gentile” citizenry of Jackson County, Missouri, in 1833gives a flavor of the hostility faced by the Saints. ”We will rid Jackson County of the Mormons, peaceably if we can, and forcibly if we must. If they will not go without, we will whip and kill the men; we will destroy the lives of their children, and ravish their women” (Roberts 1965, 338).2 With the aid of Jungian psychology, Norman Cohn (1975)has provided what appears to be an unassailable account of a politics of the orifice. The instigators, he writes, are motivated by unconscious negative transference, wherein ”un-assimilated” psychic material, forbidden and horrifying, is attributed to those who are in some way significantly different from themselves (260-62). Following the same line of argument, Richard Hofstadter (1963)calls right-wing extremism (which has the same sanctimonious preoccupation with orifice violations) ”projective politics.” This he describes as ”the projection of interests and concerns, not only private but essentially pathological, into the public scene” (100).

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As compelling as the Cohn-Hofstadter thesis is, it does not constitute an adequate social politics of the orifice. For while it may be able to explain the content of libels directed against putative enemies, it says little about the timing of antisabbat campaigns or who is likely to participate in them. After all, presumably every Euro-American has what Cohn calls ”Thyestean” and ”Oedipal” cravings, but not only are moments of orifice hysteria relatively rare; only a minority of Euro-Americans join them. Thus, while such ”endopsychic demons” may be necessary for such a politics, they are not sufficient to produce it. This chapter offers a corrective to this deficiency.It begins by reviewing briefly four standard explanations for projective politics, and concludes by offering a less problematic, I think more imaginatively sociological, alternative. The four theories I call the arguments from ignorance, neurosis, anomie, and insecurity. No suggestion is made that these exhaust all possible approaches to the phenomenon. Ignorance

Anecdotal evidence suggests that participants in antisabbat campaigns are overrepresented by persons from lower social-economic status groups. Recall the bricklayers who burned the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in the early 1800s; consider the vigilante riffraff who broke into the county jail and assassinated Joseph Smith. This is not because of their financial insecurity, however, at least not this alone. According to the theory of ignorance, it is because low-status people lack a liberal education, as indicated by their comparatively fewer years of formal schooling (Lipset 1960,87-126). Not everyone who harbors unconscious deviant sexual and dietary cravings is available for recruitment into antisabbat campaigns, goes the theory. This is because most people have adopted habits of political forb e a r a n ~ eThey . ~ restrain their tongues, tolerate differences, and confront ambiguity without reducing it to empty slogans. In rare cases they are able to consciously acknowledge and digest their own ”shadows,” the parts of their psyches not otherwise permitted expression and which are therefore at risk of projection. In short, they play fair according to the standards of civil democracy. But cognitive habits of this sort can be instilled only by a school curriculum grounded in the liberal arts: philosophy, history, and the classics. With proper schooling, people acquire debate skills, become aware of human variety, learn how to assess evidence, realize their own complicity in the social conditions they decry. The crucial adjective here is p y e l : No amount of technical training nor native intelligence can take the place of immersion in the liberal arts. Equal, compulsory liberal education not only enhances job opportunities; more important, it immunizes a citizenry from infection by antiorifice contagions.

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Neurosis

The words hystevical and pathological, often used to describe projective politics, imply an explanation for it. It isn’t that antisabbat protagonists have been illiberally taught. If that were true, then how could the polemics of a Beecher, a Bourne, a Morse, a William Lloyd Garrison, or a Theodore Dwight be explained? These were among the best-educated members of their generation, yet they also served as chief spokesmen for the antiCatholic, anti-Illuminati, anti-Mormon movements. When he issued his diatribes against Romanism and Illuminatism, Dwight was the sitting president of Yale College. If there is indeed anecdotal evidence that mobs sometimes are drawn disproportionally from less-educated strata, there are also reports that an overabundance of humanities doctorates filled the ranks of the German Nazi party of the 1930s. But this is possible only if human behavior is not generated by reason-an assumption underlying the ignorance thesis-but by darker forces of which the actors themselves may be unaware. The argument from neurosis claims that ”the presence or absence of extreme[ly] . . . prejudice[d] . . . individuals . . . tends to be related to a complex network of attitudes. . . relating to the family” (Adorno et al. 1969 [1950], 6). Specifically, if one has been traumatized by physically or emotionally abusive child-rearing practices, that person will acquire an authoritarian (fascist)personality. This is characterized by paranoia, rigid conventionalism, admiration of physical power, apocalypticism, a contempt for weakness and vulnerability, and, above all, an obsession with orificial gossip. This last is indicated by agreement with such comments as ”the wild sex life of the old Greeks and Romans was tame compared to some of the goings-on in this country, even in places where people might least expect it.” Authoritarianism is not the product of conscious choice. Rather, it is a “defense mechanism’’ unconsciously adopted by ego to protect itself from real or imagined parental harm. The upshot of this is that regardless of their levels of formal education, authoritarian personalities are attracted to movements that condemn suspected violators of sexual and culinary norms, while at the same time extolling ”manly virtues.” By way of deterring such movements, this theory calls not for more formal schooling, but in-depth psychoanalytic therapy.

Anomie Antisabbat campaigns frequently occur in locations undergoing rapid social change, particularly places impacted by the juggernaut of modernity. Change shatters comforting routines, destabilizes conventions. Out of normative chaos emerge movements that seek to renominize (reorder) the world. What this means is that the determining factor of a politics of

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the orifice is neither deficient classroom curriculum nor toilet-training traumas. It is instead the collapse of community. Human beings hunger for assurance of their place in time and space. Normally, this craving is nourished through their associative involvements: their memberships in charitable clubs, recreational groups, and the like, or their work ties and religious affiliations. If social change disrupts, undermines, or "eclipses" such ties, then the hunger for community can be sated only by an alternative "family" of sorts: a cult, a gang, a commune, or, as in the case before us, by an extremist political movement, the ideology and structure of which seems to its members to permanently secure for them a meaningful place in the cosmos. Among the most beguiling of such movements to an estranged population is one embarked on as a campaign against chaos; chaos, as represented by moral depravity, orifice violations. "Where there is widespread conviction that community has been lost," writes Robert Nisbet (1953), "there will be a conscious quest for community in the form of association that seems to provide the greatest moral refuge." He goes on to say that the "eager acceptance" of Nazism by "otherwise intelligent Germans" is "inexplicable" without this (34). More recently, the same argument has been used to explain the rise of puritanical fundamentalist religions in India, Indonesia, and the Middle East (Juergensmeyer 2000). Insecurity

Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab (1970) agree that normlessness can produce what they call a politics of unreason. A presumed example is Father Coughlin's cryptofascist National Union for Social Justice, which flourished in the 1930s (153-54, 165-66). But they insist that the most pointed explanation for a politics of the orifice is status insecurity. Those moving up in the world gravitate toward progressive, pragmatic causes that enhance their class interests: labor unions, antidiscrimination programs, and pro-democracy movements. By contrast, the ranks of reactionary antisabbat campaigns are filled with people symbolically attempting to shore up their faltering sense of social worth by inflicting their morality on others. They are neither stupid, mad, nor confused (that is, ignorant, neurotic, or anomic); they are psychologically normal people facing the specter of social displacement. It is this, according to Joseph Gusfield (1963), that explains establishment of the American Anti-Saloon League in the late nineteenth century, a classic case of orificial politics. It drew its most avid support from rural fundamentalist Protestants, a demographic whose once-dominant position in the world was threatened by non-Anglo-Saxon, urban Catholics and Jews. Instead of (just) attacking their antagonists directly by name, temperance activists directed their hostility toward the symbols of their lifestyles, namely, their consumption of "non-Christian" substances: liquor, hop-brewed beer, vodka, and wine.

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The same theory also can be used to account for the authorship of antiIlluminati, anti-Mormon, and anti-Southern (abolitionist) tracts by New England ministers and their wives and daughters in the decades just prior to the Civil War. ”New England leadership. . . had become increasingly frustrated over [its] . . . lost. . . influence on the country.” It had become a “downgraded” elite, an ”elite without a function” (Lipset and Raab 1970, 62, 63). A N ALTERNATIVE ANSWER

With their respective emphases on the pivotal importance of educated reason and status concerns (as opposed to class interests), the ignorance and insecurity theories tend to appeal to non-Marxist, liberal AngloAmerican theorists. The neurosis and anomie accounts, on the other hand, reflect a continental European outlook, with its characteristic skepticism of the capacity of informed intelligence to control subconscious drives and its anti-individualistic bent. Nevertheless, these four notions should not be considered contradictory. As in all matters human, it is probably safe to conclude that a complex myriad of factors lies behind any outburst of projective politics: collective stupidity, lunacy, alienation, and fear. Having said this, it is also true that all four narratives share a similar weakness, at least as they are customarily used by analysts. Specifically, each typically is invoked in an ad hoc manner to underscore a supposed psychological difference between the relatively few antisabbat activists in a population and the inactive, indifferent majority. But rarely, if ever, is any evidence offered that the purported differences actually exist, apart from the fact of an orificial politics itself. To say it more simply: How do we know that antisabbat campaigners are indeed ignorant, crazed, or anomic? Well, because they wouldn’t act in such a fear-ridden, closed-minded, irrational way if they ~ e r e n ’ t . ~ To illustrate the problem of circularity, take the theory of status insecurity, perhaps the most sophisticated of the lot. Given the fluidity of the term’s meaning, virtually any circumstance could-and probably has at one time or another-been taken as an indicator of it. Some of these appear to make intuitive sense. For example, in their discussion of the antiCatholic American Protection Association of the 1890s, Lipset and Raab (1970) cite the influx of Catholic immigrants into American cities and the status threat they themselves, factory work, and machine politics posed to Protestant artisans, Republican politicians, and small-town life (83-87). However, when attempting to explain the rise of McCarthyism in the 1 9 5 0 ~a ~period of unparalleled middle-class prosperity, the authors are forced to revamp their characterization of what insecurity means. ”With

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the possession of status [due to the GI Bill and postwar boom] comes the fear of dispossession” (210-11). In other words, while intuition might suggest that economic booms would allay status insecurity, Lipset and Raab insist that the good fortunes they bring aggravate insecurity by providing potential opportunities for displacement. It is worth noting that Lipset and Raab invoke status insecurity theory to explain the overrepresentation of Christian evangelicals in ranks of the antigay, antiabortion, antisatanist ”culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. The social statuses of movement leaders, they claim, were threatened by ”aspects of modernity” such as women’s rights, sexual freedom, drugs, and sky-rocketing inflation. In response, they struck out angrily at the symbols of things modern: the mass media, public schools, New Age gurus, and rock and roll (Lipset and Raab 1981). The problem with this otherwise compelling account of the period’s politics, the Reagan Revolution included, is that it fails to acknowledge two facts. First, evangelicalism already had been isolated from the American mainstream since at least the 1930s, when the Prohibition Amendment was repealed and the Scopes ”Monkey” trial revealed many preachers to be teetotaling loudmouths and bullies. Second, since the 1950s onward these same churches have enjoyed phenomenal growth. If anyone’s ”statuses” have been in decline, it has been the promodernist denominations of the National Council of Churches. Assuming the Lipset-Raab theory is accurate, then, the evangelicals should have climbed on the reactionary bandwagon a half century earlier than they did. And it should be Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians who are organizing a politics of the orifice today, not Baptist and Pentecostal preachers. That neither of these has been the case suggests that something is amiss. This is not to dispute the various facts Lipset and Raab cite to support their argument, but merely to point out the inherently malleable, hence tautological nature of the theory of status insecurity. Indeed, I sympathize with the two authors. Given the lack of extant documentation on the mind-sets of individual activists from any era in American history, avoiding circularity would be an heroic accomplishment. Part of the problem of circularity owes itself to the fact that standard theories of projective politics focus on the psyches of individual antisabbat activists. But group phenomena are more than sums of individual behaviors. An orificial politics is a reality in its own right with emergent qualities not directly reducible to the alleged attributes of its participants: their educational disadvantages, neuroses, isolation, or insecurities. This said, let me rewrite a narrative of projective politics, this time in sociological terms. Rodney Stark (1985) is credited for the ostensibly paradoxical, if not impalatable, idea of the religious marketplace; that religious groups, like businesses and political parties, are in never-ending competition with each

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other for scarce money and members. When religious groups become monopolistic, receiving patronage and protection from government sponsors, they have little incentive to attend to consumer demands. Like medieval Roman Catholicism, the Church of England, and the Russian Orthodox Church, they become complacent, lose their competitive edge and occasionally whatever market advantages they once had. Given the first amendment to the Constitution which prohibits an established church, America has had an open and unencumbered religious market from the time of its founding. As a result, religious competition in America has been perennially fierce. Religious innovation is constant (as new ”products” are offered to meet volatile consumer demands), and an emphasis is placed on marketing (missionary outreach and mass advertising) to win new converts to the fold. Successful ad campaigns, says Stark, promise consumers both ”rewards” (novel seating arrangements, pleasant music, child-care services, business and political connections, food and shelter, and so on) and what is peculiar to religious enterprises, ”compensators.” Compensators include such things as salvation at the right hand of God the Father, positions of privilege during the thousand-year reign of Christ, or authority over planets populated with deceased relatives. Like IOUs, religious compensators are redeemable only upon the believer’s death. Admittedly this is a metaphor. If taken to extreme it trivializes the livedexperience of faith. But all social theories at bottom are allegories. The advantage of Stark’s is that at least it can be compared to the historical record without the risk of circularity. Stark himself not only has employed the notion of the religious market to explain the ”churching of America” from 1776 to 1990 (Finke and Stark 1992); he has used it to account for the evolution of Christianity itself from a disreputable Mediterranean cult into a world religion (Stark 1996).My proposal is that elements of the theory be generalized to sociologically explain periodic outbursts of antisabbat zeal. The idea is simple. Skilled religious vendors naturally extol their own product lines by proffering rewards and compensators. However, they also disparage their competitors, a point Stark does not explicitly address. This is done, among other ways, by fabricating tales about how these competitors transgress moral conventions hallowed by religious consumers. Two types of religious groups are most apt to resort to ”negative advertising.” First are those most sensitive to the contested reality of the religious marketplace. Usually, if not always, these are upstarts, technically known as cults and sects, which are trying to secure niches in the emporium of faiths.j Second, are those I want to focus on here, ”losers,” groups trying to protect dwindling shares of the religious market. My proposition is this: Because both upstarts and losers adopt defensive stances toward an indifferent, if not overtly hostile world, their symbolic vulnerabilities, the orifices of their

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members, come under close supervision: their diets, appetites, bedroom behaviors, and tastes in art. At the same time, each issues sanctimonious condemnations of their rivals for violating those same orifices. That is, they engage in a politics of the orifice. This theory has many implications, not the least of which is that far from being products of collective idiocy, madness, loneliness, or confusion, it understands a politics of the orifice as a relatively rational group enterprise. Without explicit evidence to the contrary, in other words, it assumes that those who launch antisabbat campaigns are for the most part interest-driven, practical, hence morally responsible actors. This includes ”born again” Linda, Patty, and Cynthia, the Nazarene preacher, the sheriff’s deputies, school counselors, and newspaper editorialists cited earlier. The material and ideal interests served in any specific case of orificial politics, of course, is a matter requiring further investigation. To be sure, as posed mechanically like this, my narrative hardly does justice to the often barely conscious, frequently clumsy, sometimes outrageously hypocritical efforts of religious groups and their allies to aggrandize themselves morally. Nevertheless, without completely contradicting Lipset and Raab, it improves on their idea of status insecurity in two ways. To being with, it attends to the documentable market situations of religious groups to explain their behavior, instead of to the always-elusive private anxieties of their members. By doing so, it positions us to avoid the problem of tautology noted earlier. Additionally, and more importantly, it accounts not only for the who, where, and when of a politics of the orifice; it also addresses the what, which is to say, the Sabbat of Orifice libel, which is deployed to defame rivals. On this last question Lipset and Raab seem singularly unconvincing. According to Lipset and Raab (1970), exclusivist, projective extremism is born from despair for a lost world ”by groups which are declining in a felt sense of importance,. . . as a result o f . . . change i n . . . society” (29). This they seek either to stem or reverse altogether. But to win political support, reactionary movements must appeal to a populace ”within the framework of their own values.” Lipset and Raab call these values the ”cultural baggage” of causes. In Japan, it might consist of btishido, the feudal code of the samurai; in Germany, it might be encompassed in the sagas of tragic Teutonic heroes. In America, the cultural baggage of projective politics is a blend of antielitism, rugged individualism, and Arminian morality. The crucial point is that, according to Lipset and Raab, ”any congruence” between the baggage of a reactionary movement and the reactionary impulse itself “is in one sense [merely] a historical accident.” In America, ”moralism [and the other values just listed] does not create rightwing extremism. Desperately preservative. . . movements . . . require an aggressively moralistic stance and will find it somewhere” (117; cf. 118).

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I disagree. Not only is the term moralistic unacceptably vague, a prurient preoccupation with orifices is infinitely more than passengers’ trunks accidentally loaded onto a train embarked on a quest to reverse history. My argument is that an obsession with orifices is endemic to any group experiencing itself as besieged. As part of a strategy to protect its corporate integrity, it therefore will do two things. First, it will impose regimens on the symbolic invasion routes into the group, its weak spots, the members’ orifices-their eyes, ears, mouths, pores, and genitals. Second, it will project anxieties about orifice crimes onto the besiegers. True, the orificial obsessions of endangered groups may well be enframed in terms of local mythologies-in terms of how ancient heroes successfully faced impossible odds after undertaking ascetic disciplines, how yogis accrued magical powers (siddhis) by denying their own bodily appetites, how pillar saints earned eternal rewards through their systematic renunciation of the world. But the crucial point is not how orifice concerns are enframed, although this is a worthwhile question; it is tlzat orifices are the ultimate concern of defensive groups. Although my theory focuses on the market situations of religious groups instead of the psyches of individuals, some speculation on the mind-set of a major status category of any religion is not entirely inappropriate. Clergy are the chief intellectual carriers of a confession. They are also typically in a state of ”participation mystique” with it. That is, they lack clarity about where they as individuals end and where their beloved faith begins. They feel expansive, proud, confident when it flourishes, if for no other reason than its growth validates their own convictions. By contrast, its losses are experienced vicariously as a prefiguration of their own personal demises, with all the ”endopsychic demons,” to borrow Norman Cohn’s phrase, that this possibly conjures. As Ernest Becker (1975) has shown repeatedly, one response to the fear of actual or fictive death is reactionary politics: the taking up of arms against its supposed embodiments. This is an Other who, by transgressing orifice taboos, is considered at fault for one’s own imperilment. In standing tall against iniquity, angst-ridden clergy not only presume to save their church; they symbolically redeem themselves6 CONCLUSION

The Stark narrative, coupled with my additions, is consistent with what we now have learned of the founding moments, as near as these can be discerned, of ancient Judaism’s dietary taboos and of the Hindu dharma of the genitals. The motivation appears to have been a desire by Levites and Brahmans, respectively, to consolidate their monopolies over offerings and

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gifts in the face of stiff competition, respectively, from (among others) Samaritan ritualists and Buddhist (and Jainist) monks. At the outset of the modern era, levitical hostility was directed to another potential competitor, calling themselves Christians. A comparable attack, about the same time, was mounted against the left-handed Tantrikas by Brahmanic orthopractitioners. As we have already seen, both Christians and Tantrikas were defamed by their antagonists as sabbat criminals. Once the Roman Church secured control over the means of salvation in western Europe (and by this, over religious prebends), populations reluctant to acknowledge the Church’s sacramental authority, if not ignored or co-opted into religious orders, were routinely crushed. This, as we saw, was the unpleasant fate of the largely female-dominated movements known today as the Bogomiles, Beguines, and Free Spirits. It was also the probable impetus behind the Church’s persecution of witches in the late medieval period and, soon thereafter, of Jews. For various reasons, not the least of which were the hearing of confessions, prophesying, and lay healing, noncloistered pious medieval women were increasingly viewed by the male rmjesterizim of the Church as competitive threats (Nelson 1975).In response, Pope Innocent VIII issued a bill in 1484 declaring witchery a heresy and ordering his bishops to expunge it. The particulars of the ensuing horror can be ignored here. What must be emphasized is that the persecution of witches (like those of the other groups listed previously) was given legitimacy by allegations of their involvement in a Sabbat of Orifices. The Mallclis Maleficnmnz, the canonical textbook used for inquisitions into witchcraft, glosses the reference in Proverbs 30:16 from its original assertion that a ”barren womb” can never say ”enough,” into the incendiary accusation that the wombs of females generally hunger for sexual gratification. It is from this supposed ”insatiable” sexual appetite, write its Dominican authors, that ”all witchcraft” comes. ”Blessed be the Highest Who has . . . preserved the male sex from so great a crime” (Sprenger and Kramer 1970 [1486],47). Turn now to the slanders issued by Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers and their families against Catholics and Mormons as recounted in the last chapter. In a brilliant use of long-ignored census data, Stark has shown that while Presbyterianism and Congregationalism grew slightly in total memberships during the nineteenth century, both lost substantial portions of the American religious market to competitors. He estimates that in 1776 each of the denominations controlled about 20 percent of the market. But within decades this had dropped precipitously to 6.8 percent in 1890 for Presbyterians, and to 4.0 percent by 1850 for Congregationalists. This despite creative and energetic recruitment efforts that included (in the cases of the American Home Missionary Society, the American Tract Society, and the Sunday School Union) allying together as ”Presbygationists” against

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Baptist and Methodist preachers. At the same time, several groups were enjoying explosive growth, among them those same Methodists and Baptists, along with Catholics, ”Christians” (Campbellites), and Mormons (Finke and Stark 1992,55,113,146). In 1776, only 2.5 percent of American religious adherents could be identified as Methodist. By 1850, this had increased to over one-third of the religious public. Meanwhile, the originally negligible proportion of Catholics in 1776had grown to 14 percent by 1850,26 percent by 1870, and 32 percent of the American religious audience by 1900. Mormonism did not come into existence until after 1830. Therefore, its expansion cannot be traced in national statistics until after 1920 when about 1 percent of American believers identified themselves as Latter-day Saints. During the twentieth century, however, the growth rate of the Church has averaged over 40 percent a decade, making it one of the fastest growing new religions on earth (Stark 1994).And in the nineteenth century its growth rate probably exceeded even this. Whether locally or nationally, as the demographics of religious competition played out, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, and Mormons all fell under suspicion by citified Presbyterians and Congregationalists for staging variations of orifice sabbats-the former two at their notorious weeklong camp revivals. It did not help matters that these were frequented primarily by Scots-Irish country folk. ”In their frantic agitations,” writes one scandalized reporter, female attendees ”unconsciously [tear] open their bosoms and assume indelicate attitudes” (Ferguson 1971, 130). They shriek, crawl around on all fours, bark at the devil like dogs. Whites are seen to intermingle freely with slaves, and women with men, whom they promiscuously hug and kiss. Women preach. There is whiskey drinking, the selling of wares, mass catatonia, necromancy, whoring. One rumor describes a debauchee found in flagrante delicto under the grandstand with six male worshipers. Apart from occasional attacks by groups of local rowdies, Methodists appear not to have suffered physically because of these allegations. Nevertheless, they undertook efforts to disarm detractors by enforcing a rigid discipline on revival attendees. Bishop Asbury posted camp codes that, among other things, required tent candles to be kept lit throughout the night to discourage shenanigans. Curfews were enforced with the help of volunteer police watches, camps laid out according to the specifications of a T square to enhance supervision, and equipped with partitions to separate sexes and races. As already noted, Catholics directly suffered the brunt of Presbyterianand Congregationalist-inspired hostility. In the early 1700s,Massachusetts declared Catholic missionizing a capital crime. A century later, arson attacks such as that in Charlestown were repeated in Philadelphia and New York City, and Catholic neighborhoods ransacked in the name of God (Billington 1952).As for Mormons, B. H. Roberts (1965) lists by name each

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of the nine ”sectarian priests”-most likely Baptist and Presbyterian ministers-who played key roles in the mob action against them in Jackson County, Missouri, in 1833 (323-24, n. 6). A comparable list could be drawn of the leaders of the citizen militia who ran them out of Nauvoo, Illinois, a short time later. We will never know whether the spokesmen for these and other outbreaks of American orificial politics were certifiably neurotic, transiently anomic, personally insecure, just plain stupid, or all of these at once. But one thing is certain: The movements were led by members of groups in furious competition with religious rivals; a contest, furthermore, they were losing. To defend the faith, and by extension themselves, these religious leaders resorted to the cheapest, most compelling ploy available, accusing their opponents of outrageous sins against the body’s entryways and exits. For the sake of balance, it should be noted that Presbygationists have never been alone in trying to corner the American religious market by slandering competitors for their ”fleshly lusts” and ”idle amusements.” Being aware of the contested nature of the market in their own right, Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, and Catholics all have tried to enhance their bargaining positions by means of orificial rhetoric. The difference is that Presbygationists historically employed centralized Church disciplinary courts to impose their orificial codes on the public. And when these failed to do the job, they reflexively turned to the school, the asylum, and the penitentiary, i.e., to secular law. During the first half of the nineteenth century they led political movements to eradicate ”white slavery,” whiskey, inhumane child treatment, and chattel slavery from the country by force and to impose on it a compulsory Sunday Sabbath. Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, and Mormons originally were marginalized from national power centers. Hence, they feared Presbygationist activists and their ”blood-sucking monster conspiracy,” which they believed would ”consume” their religious freedoms under the guise of Christian benevolence. Instead of enlisting the state to enhance the nation’s morals they therefore looked first to the individual confessor’s own spirit-infused inner voice or ”free agency.” John Wesley, for one, spoke of this as the condition of ”entire sanctification.” It was a ”second blessing” promised those who, after being reborn in the blood of Christ, surrendered their wills to God and thus freely chose to live abstemiously. Even before the nineteenth century had come to an end, the political situation in America had changed dramatically. Well-ensconced in the socalled monster institution themselves, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, and eventually Mormons now could see the wisdom of using law as a means to protect the American body politic from orifice violators. Baptists and Methodists eagerly enlisted in the prohibition movement alongside Presbygationists to rid the nation of rum and its mythical associate, Romanism.

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(It is worth noting that by the time that the Anti-Saloon League was founded at Calvary Baptist Church in 1895, both Methodists and Baptists had been losing religious market shares to Catholicism for nearly half a century [Finke and Stark 1992,1711. The prohibition movement therefore may be taken as further support for the thesis that ”losers” are especially prone to preside over a politics of the orifice.)As for Catholics, they established an uneasy alliance of convenience with their erstwhile antagonists to pass various ”Comstock Laws.” These prohibited the mailing, transporting, or importing, of ”obscene, lewd, and lascivious” material (read: birth control information). By the late twentieth century, of course, the Sabbat of Orifices had long since shifted from the Endowment House, convent, and camp-meeting to other sites. In the 1970s the object of suspicion was the ”cult”: the Scientologists and their ”brainwashing” sessions; the Unification Church and its ecclesiastically-arranged mass weddings; the Children of God’s ”flirty fishing” expeditions that, it was rumored, employ ”attractive females . . . trained in the arts of seduction” on ”the estate of an Italian duke” to win souls for Christ (Streiker 1978, 61). In the 1980s the forbidden rites were rumored to take place in child-care facilities (Bromley 1991). Today, we are far too close to events to draw definitive conclusions about where, allegedly, the Sabbat of Orifices is being performed. However, three candidates recently have been trotted out for consideration: wicca covens, apostate Mormon bigamist communes, and extreme fundamentalist Protestant enclaves, such as the Branch Davidians. The important point to keep in mind is not just that the suspicions about these groups are probably exaggerated; rather, it is that lurking behind the various name changes and alterations in garb resides the same ancient specter. It is the latest competition in America’s open religious market, a threat to the status quo. NOTES 1. The following account is based on articles published in the Soiitlz Idalm Press, Sept. 9 and 13, and Nov. 6 through 10, 1991.I am indebted to Professor Mark McBeth, Idaho State University, for the news items. 2. For Missouri governor Bogg’s ”Order of Extermination” against the Mormons, Oct. 27,1838, see Roberts (1965,479). 3. The first large-scale empirical study of this proposition is reported in Stouffer (1966).Its findings have since been independently confirmed in cross-national surveys. 4. Preliminary findings from research on several hundred self-proclaimed radical Christian patriots residing in the upper Rocky Mountain region in the late 1980s suggests that they are not at all atypical when compared to their politically moderate neighbors. They have attained comparable, if not somewhat higher

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levels, of formal education; they are no more geographically transient; their rates of marriage instability are no greater; they are not more involved in "structurally isolated" occupations like mining, timber, and farming; and most report themselves to have been raised in a mainline denominations. Furthermore, evidence from psychological reports on the most dangerous of the radicals, those awaiting trial for terrorism, suggests that while their beliefs are extreme, their psychological functioning is within the limits of normality (Aho 1990). 5. Sects are dissenting religious movements claiming to renew a traditional faith; cults are dissenters offering a new revelation. 6. For more on these dynamics, see Alio (1994,23-34). 7. For an illuminating discussion of the following matters, see Johiison (1993).

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Holy Hole Ochre-stained, footless ”venuses,” the first dating from around thirty thousand years B.c.E., cover a vast arc from the Russian steppe, to the Indus Valley, and from Africa to western Europe.’ Whether in the form of stylized vulvas or as pubic triangles, they are the only extant expression of art for twenty thousand years. In whatever ways they might have been used-as icons displayed at religious sacrifices, perhaps, or merely as lucky charms buried with the dead-they testify to the power attributed to holes throughout the Stone Age; especially to ”that most special hole,’’ to use Rev. Moon’s way of saying it, the female cleft. Like the Hindu goddess, Kali, this secret passage often has presented itself to men as a ravenous spider who consumes her consort while locked in embrace with him. This is seen in the Greek figure Lamia (gaping mouth), who has a woman’s face and breasts and a serpent’s body. It is also expressed in the legend of the vampiric Babylonian goddess, Anath. Ancient mythology draws this conclusion: She is Vagina Dentata, the insatiable toothed vagina, source of leeches and eels, who sucks away male virility.2Everywhere and always the task of the hero is to break through her briar, fend off the monster guarding her cave, free the maiden trapped within, and return to earth’s surface, all without being enfeebled.3 However this may be, the female fire hole rarely has been experienced only as an object of malevolence, as an obstacle to be overcome. True, Kali and her sisters, Lakshmi, Parvati, and Uma, devour the cosmos. But they also are its shaktis. They personify the energy (prakuiti)that animates it. And while the Aztec goddess, Coatlicue, may wear the skull-faced countenance of death and don a rattlesnake skirt, she also holds to her breast her son, Huitzilopochtli, the god whose radiance makes life possible. Aphrodite, Venus, and Astarte, may beguile, ensnare, and emasculate male power; but they also serve as the matrons of beauty, love, and springtime. Without them, earth would remain sterile. What this all means, of course, is that this most special site is not just horrible; it is horribly good. It is dangerous and

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enchanting, awful and beguiling at the same time; a precinct of iizysteriziiiz tremendzim etfascinavrs. In short, a holy hole. In this chapter, I want to retrieve this paradoxical truth. And one of the best places to begin is by critically reexamining our received prejudice toward the void that orifices represent. PROCE E DI NG NE G AT IVE LY

As part of our common stock of knowledge we have inherited the conviction that holes are voids. Being empty, they lack; lacking, they are to be a ~ o i d e dIn. ~prison, the ”hole” is where the most despicable criminals are thrown. A squalid, dingy residence is judged a ”hole.” A ”hole” in one’s argument is a gap, a weakness. One in an embarrassing situation finds themselves in a ”hole.” The death of a loved one invariably leaves a ”hole” in one’s heart. A hole, in other words, is a not. It is an absence of being. And to Plato, who first announced this (now our) wisdom, an absence of being is precisely what characterizes physis, the Greek equivalent to matter. For only Forms (Eidae) are real beings. Matter, like the mater (mother, ma, maw, mouth) to which it is related, is not-a-thing at all. It is nothingness, the nonordered emptiness, the ”nurse” and ”receptacle,” to quote Plato, upon which Forms are imprinted. Plato goes on to say that just as the vacuity of glass enables it to serve as a mirror, the void that is matter allows it to reflect Being back to the knowing eye. But such reflections are never more than maya, illusions. They are not real beings. At one time Greek legend maintained that the adult female has not just one but two precincts of emptiness, two lipped mouths (stonzne). And because of this she was held to be congenitally prone to ”leakage” (Carson 2000). Without proper (male) supervision, her very existence was viewed as a threat to the vromos, the laws, the boundaries of the polis. She was considered an agent of defilement and pollution, a harbinger of nizomos, chaos and death. Out of her vaginal opening, so it was said, drips the monstrosity of menstrual blood, a sign of thwarted birth. From her mouth issues the unsettling sound of hysteria, overwrought and ”wet.” In contrast to the firm, emotionally neutral, ”honest” voice of dry, ”hot” male reason, it is a sobbing, high-pitched, ululating wail (Carson 1995).Hysteria is the sound uttered by a wounded womb (Izystera). Because it resembles the haunting shriek of the wolf, signifier of anomie, those who have ”no door on their mouths” (including ”watery men”) were admonished from accessing the agora. Instead, the poet Sophocles teaches, their ”cosmos” was to be silence. This is a refrain that has been echoed in variant forms throughout the ages in ancient Brahmanism, Judaism, and in Christianity. And it is a lesson that has been absorbed as well into the rhetoric of modern psychopathology.

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At birth, according to Sigmund Freud, ”the little girl . . . is a little man” who harbors the same narcissistic impulses as her brother. During the socalled Oedipal stage of psychic development, however, she makes the humiliating discovery that she has no way to represent herself physically, as a boy. Lacking a penis, having no ”thing” visible to be seen, she experiences herself as anatomically flawed. She becomes a ”hole” in the adult sexual economy, a mutilated creature, scarred and inferior: ”an open wound, drawing to [herlself . . . energy. . . from all directions, . . . emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished” (quoted and paraphrased from Freud in Irigaray 1985, 25, 48, 50, 67, 70, 71). Out of this all-consuming nothingness emerge the characteristic female neuroses: penis envy, mother spite, father love. Now the opposite of a lack, the opposite of absence, is presence, an object already here, ready at hand, existing. And an entity is presentable when it is considered suitable for an appearance. The present is not just worthy of being seen; as always already here, it is capable of being seen and of being represented verbally or in art and song by independent observers. In other words, presence resides in the realm of empirical possibility, and as such it is reasonable and good. To be sure, not all objects, not all empirical realities, are equally good. Nevertheless, as present here before us they can never be entirely bad. Only evil can have that quality. But as Saint Augustine, the platonic moralist, would say, evil has no ontology in itself. It is an absence of Being. It is another word for the leaky, formless, boundless matter, mater, mother, ma, maw, mouth spoken of previously. Evil is void, nothingness, the distinguishing attribute of orifices. Let me take a few moments to unsettle this prejudice. This, by ”proceeding negatively,” by arguing from and for the orifice. The originary moments of worlds, as I have called them in this book, take the form of lightning flashes that once and for all upset ancient teachings and practices. Think of Hilkiah’s ”discovery” of the legal code that prefigured the kosher meal, of Simon Peter’s dietary revelation, of the Brahman Caitanya’s insight after being ”slain in the spirit” of the injustice of the caste system. Martin Heidegger (1977) maintains that such world inaugurals occur during times of great peril, apocalypses. Apocalypses, he says, obtain when one-time sacrosanct routines lose their legitimacy and the inanity of received wisdoms becomes transparent. Anthony Wallace (1956)writes of these moments as taking place when peoples’ cultural ”maze ways,” their traditional problem-solving customs and beliefs, give way in the face of environmental challenges. Whichever way the idea is formulated, the shattering of worlds occasions spaces, cracks, openings, ”orifices,” as it were, for ”flashings of Being” (Seiizsgeschick, to use Heidegger’s term); or for what Max Weber calls charisma, grace-given announcements of new ways of life; or for what Luce Irigaray identifies as heretofore suppressed voices from the vent, the womb, of Being. In saying this, Heidegger, Wallace, Weber, and

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Irigaray reverse the Platonic-Augustinian position regarding holes. For far from being sites of emptiness, and hence places to be avoided, holes may be considered saving powers, inasmuch as they provide the silence, the room, the absence required for ”bringing the saving power” of new ways of thinking and seeing out of concealment. To instill this point, Heidegger quotes the poet Stephan George as saying, ”where the word breaks off nothing may be.” He rephrases it into the assertion that ”an ’is’ arises where the word breaks up” (quoted in Vattimo 1988, 65). Revelations of Being erupt when everyday words for objective things fail, when we are struck dumb by the impossibility of our situation. And when old words no longer work, old worlds cease to be. The security of the present, of presence, is replaced with a discomfiting absence, a vacuum. Out of this vacuum, through the mouth, the ovis of the prophet, so to say, in the language of the hysteric, Being speaks. While the details of the event are permanently lost, we can pinpoint with certainty the catastrophe suffered by ancient Israel-the hole into which it fell-out of which glimmered the revelation known today as Judaism. It was the experience of exile in a foreign land. Briefly phrased: We are God’s chosen people, yet we suffer the humiliations of exile. From a distance of centuries, it is hard to imagine the agony that this must have produced. Perhaps the closest thing to it is the question put to God by Jews today in light of the Holocaust. Why us? Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s answer, at least, is this: It is because we have broken our covenant with the Lord. How, then, may we be redeemed? We first must fix the six hundred or so provisions of the Torah, especially the dietary laws, and then deviate not one iota from them. For ”Yahweh’s name is the jealous One; he is a jealous god.” The old way of benignly tolerating and syncretically absorbing alien folkways and deities evidently has raised His ire. Let us therefore separate ourselves from nonbelievers forever, commensally and connubially. With allowances for hyperbole on Luke’s part, we also can isolate the individual, Peter, and the fracture, the pore, in this apostle’s world, through which flashed Christianity. To reiterate what was said earlier: We, the Jews, crave redemption, and we have learned from our ancestors that salvation is contingent upon exact adherence to God’s Law. But insofar as this is humanly impossible, therefore we shall never be saved. Peter’s illumination occurs at the instant of highest tension when, hungering after a fast, the utter impossibility of Israel’s position becomes clear to him. At this moment his inherited world fractures, a food-laden sheet drops from heaven, and a voice declares that neither any condiment nor people shall be considered unclean. Given the paucity of documentation, it may never be possible to do much more than speculate about the nature of the crises occasioning Hindu prophecy, even were we to know the personal names of the prophets, which

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for the most part we don’t. As mentioned before, this owes itself to the indifference to historiography endemic to Indian culture. However, we can characterize definitively the essence of Hindu apocalyptic revelation. It can be summarized by a phrase first uttered in the most ancient Upanishad, the Brihad-aranyaka: neti, neti; ”not this, not this” (2:4:22), which is to say, the utter indescribability of the Absolute. Recall the Bhagavata Purana’s tale of Krishna’s seduction of Radha and the cowherdesses of Bengal in chapter 6. According to the story, upon hearing the lilting notes of his flute, every one of the once-dutiful Hindu wives leaves her husband’s embrace to cavort adulterously with Krishna under the moon in a gigantic circle worship (chakvapz~jn).During the dance, Krishna manifests himself to each devotee as hers alone, gratifying the secret desires of each. But when dawn breaks above the forest he disappears without a word. Lewis Hyde (1998) describes it this way: Like oracles everywhere, Krishna is ”an erasing angel who cancels what humans have so carefully built,” in this case, the dharma of conventional marriage. But then unlike the prototypical Occidental prophet-Moses, Jesus, Muhammad-each of whom issues a positive affirmation of an eternal Reality transcending mundane reality, Krishna mysteriously ”cancels hirnsey,” leaving no declarative message for his followers (287). Occidental prophecy, in other words, is katnphasic. It assumes the linguistic form, ”You have heard it said, but I say unto you. . . .” Hindu prophecy, in contrast, is npophnsic. It declares nothing: ”You have heard it said, but I am silent.” Moses reveals a Law, an eternal Present, lying beneath the motile, illusory present. It is operationalized as the mitzvoth of the mouth. Jesus reveals a Present transcending even this; call it the Law of Love. It is not what goes into the mouth that makes one unclean, he says, but what comes from it. Krishna, however, proclaims nothing. His visit leaves a void. It refuses to announce any one thing about Being. Krishna’s silence implies the linguistic non-en-framable plenitude of Being. That is to say, Krishna’s self-erasure serves as ”a breeder of multiple meanings” among the devotees left alone in the jungle dawn. There are as many interpretations of Him, his flute, and the orgiastic clznkroptija as there are believers. SOCIOLOGY AND GIFTS

Whether npophasic or kntaphnsic, authentic prophecy can be considered an offering of sorts from a fissure in the present. It is a gift; and the crack itself, the giver. Likewise, the eruptions from our own bodies: ejaculations of semen, menstrual secretions, ejections of fecal matter and urine, projectile vomiting, fetal products, the acrid odor of sweat, tears, matted hair, and nails. These often unpredictable, occasionally alarming, visitations

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have always been intuitively sensed by ”primitive man”-meaning all of us, before professionally ingrained prejudice tempers enchanted ways of seeing and thinking-as gifts. But why, if this is true, are they viewed with such wariness? The short answer is that unlike presents, gifts are diabolic (from dia [apart] + bobs [to throw]). They are ”thrown apart” from the world, whereas presents, by creating relationships of debit and credit, sustain it. Gifts, in other words, are imtindo, otherworldly. Instead of reifying the ”Idol of the Present,” to paraphrase John Caputo (1997), they correspond to the void of absence written of previously. Consider presents. In the Polynesian Kula Ring, visitors to one island exchange cowry-shell necklaces for bracelets with their hosts on another island. They, in turn, repeat the process with their hosts on the next island, and so on, until at year’s end, everything comes back full circle. Through the getting and giving of presents the island cosmos is rejuvenated again and again. The Kwakiutl potlatch, a form of ceremonial combat in which he who gives away the most (and creates the most debts) becomes the big power man, accomplishes the same purpose among Northwest Indians (Mauss 1954 [1925]).Likewise, the orgy of guilt-riven spending that passes for modern Christmas. Without it the modern economic system, and society as we know it, would collapse. In contrast to all this, gifts are unsolicited, gratuitously given, and nonredeemable. Far from maintaining orderly affairs, they typically scandalize reigning pieties and upset treasured routines. And they always seem to show themselves at ”wrong” moments. To express it differently, presents comport with and reaffirm conventional paradigms. For this reason they are greeted with smiles and open hands. Gifts are anomalous; they undermine accepted ways of thinking and seeing. As a result, they are less than enthusiastically received. Sometimes they are viewed as downright revolting. Orifices and their effusions provide the perfect illustrations. Consider the vagina. How, it might be asked, can blood, urine, and human life-three not only different but completely contradictory things-all come from the same aperture on a woman’s body? Impossible! Again, in regard to the mouth: How could one deign to swallow a davar alzar (an other thing), a cloven-hoofed beast that does not also chew a cud, or worse, a footless land dweller, a snake? Ugh! Finally, how could a man even think of ”lying with a man as he would with a woman?” Monstrous! This is what I have in mind by gifts: unimaginable, repellent, outrageous things, things refused by the world, refuse; what the world cannot digest, garbage. Although it is rarely acknowledged in such bald terms, the sociological imagination has always displayed a keen interest in gifts in this sense: in ”things of darkness,” enemies (Aho 1994);in ”nuts and sluts,” to quote a critic who once took issue with this preoccupation; in ”mud people,” as they are known in the argot of American bigotry, racial, religious, and eth-

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nic minorities. This book extends this traditional concern to include filthy words, polluting images, foul odors, corrupt music, dirty sex acts, and impure food: which is to say, matters of the orifice. One of the seminal questions the sociological imagination asks about unclean stuff is this: How and why did this particular person, group, or belief-or in the case before me, this specific body opening, orificial practice, influent, or effluent-come to be experienced as filth? In other words, what have been the cultural and organizational circumstances of its identification, mythical elaboration, public dissemination, and embedment in the minds of younger generations as trash fit for disposal? Corollary to this, what are the social conditions by which one-time garbage is assimilated-when it is-into the ordinary life world as clean, pure, and edible? How does imundo become mundane? These are the questions that have animated The Orifice as Sacrificial Site. The sociological imagination has never been interested in enemies, deviants, marginal folk, and dirty things out of sheer perversity; even less because it sees itself as a handmaid to the police, issuing recommendations about cost-effective ways to monitor and discipline otherness. On the contrary, it concerns itself with objects of revulsion because (to paraphrase a famous golfer), it understands that it all starts in the mud. Mire is the universal fertilizer. It is the limicoline, the slimy (lirntrs) otherness (colus, meaning ”distaff”) that makes life together p ~ s s i b l eThe . ~ term ”distaff,” implied in limicoline, originally referred to the slit through which wool was drawn to make thread, symbol of the empty, infinitely fructifying female cleft. In these pages, T let it stand for all the body’s orifices; and the thread, for their influents and effusions. This is the primordial Scheiss, the basic stuff on which all social differences are drawn, the raw material of social order. Orificial slime and its human icons accomplish, rejuvenate, and preserve an orderly world in several ways. First, by their negative existence they edify ”nice people” (you and me) about what is clean. They bear witness to the limits of propriety, providing us with firm ground on which to stand: the bad without which goodness makes no sense, the foul that makes fair possible. Second, these elements of limicoline not only teach us what is pure; they teach us that we are pure. They serve as scapegoats that allow us an ”escape” from having to deal with our own ”shadows,” the things we are most reluctant to acknowledge about ourselves, namely our very own sliminess (Abrams and Zweig 1991). Third, limicoline constitutes the soil, so to speak, the dirt upon which self-proclaimed welldoers can pretend to work their magic, transforming the world into a presumably better, neater, cleaner place, thereby gaining a sense of their own cosmic significance. Fourth, when they partake in ”liminoid moments,” as it were, staged transgressions of convention, during carnivals, spring riots, fertility rites, harvest feasts, and the like, these elements of limicoline pro-

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vide comic relief from the humdrum of everyday routines. They are “safety valves,” relieving pressures that might otherwise destroy what is in fact an eminently fragile world. Finally, limicoline opens to us previously unimagined possibilities of being, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. This is because it represents the unimaginable, relative to conventional reality. If we can overcome the initial temptation to vomit out what sticks in our collective craw, limicoline may serve as ”saving powers,” to re-cite Heidegger, enabling us to break through the seemingly hopeless impasses of the present: vicious cycles of recrimination and revenge, environmental catastrophe, abject poverty amid riches. Without a formal invitation and without first knocking, then, the limicoline, the mud dweller, the other, crashes our festivities bearing five distinct gifts: knowledge of goodness, ethical solace, heroic opportunities, tension release, and creative insight. Before prematurely celebrating our common fortune, however, a caveat is in order, and with it an appeal for a less stridently liberal, more flexible sociological imagination. Good sociology, we are often taught, like a good story, should ”end well.” It should ”reach closure.” It should tightly secure breaches in its arguments from the penetrating gaze of critics. More pointedly, as a homily in a ”secularized form of the Protestant ministry” (as Peter Berger once likened it), it should conclude on an uplifting, hopeful note-one that heartens and renews the faithful. But if what I have just said about gifts is plausible, then perhaps a bit of restraint is called for, the reason being that definitive conclusions, whether liberal or conservative, invariably enclose. They circumvent. They emplace walls around vents, and by so doing put off, again and again, appearances of gift-giving limicoline. In other words, like the Kula Ring, the potlatch, and commercialized Christmas, conclusions reify the present. The job of the sociological imagination, however, should not simply be to reengender the present. It should also alert us to the absent, to what is invisibly there. Like its near cousin, critical theory, it should labor to create gaps in the present through which gifts can gleam. It should do this by challenging smugly complacent habits of thinking, seeing, and recalling the things of the world, among them orifices. It should explode dangerous orificialbanalities that pass as common sense. With this difference: Contrary to critical theory, I suggest that the sociological imagination no longer promise a cornucopia of ”emancipatory” benefits to those with open borders, open bodies, and open minds. As an alternative, I offer instead the apaphasic example of the Bhagavata Purana, which encourages us to temper declarations about what openness might imply, especially positively (but also, of course, negatively). True, Lord Krishna gives himself to his lover, the cowherdess Radha, as an amorous, tightly muscled blue-skinned youth. To the warrior Arjuna, on the other hand, he manifests himself as a ravenous, many-armed ogre: ”death, . . . Who shatters worlds”

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NOTES

(Bhagavad-Gita 11:12, 26-32). The point is that not all gifts are pleasant; some are unspeakably horrifying. Some come in the form of throat-choking beauty; others, on the wings of hijacked jets. Good endings, almost without exception, are pleasantly acceptable (nondiabolic) endings. As such, they foreclose the possibility of truly risky ventures. The role of the sociological imagination-so, at least it seems to me-should not be to lock doors tight against visitations of the diabolic, but to assume an attitude of readiness to acknowledge it for what it is and learn from it if possible, even if not to blindly receive it. To be sure, this is not quite the same as a definitive conclusion. But it is a very good place to start: sociology as adventure. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Neumann (1963)contains plates of "venuses" from across cultures. For this and a survey of related myths see Lederer (1968). For the hero motif in mythology, see Campbell (1956). The following comments are indebted to Irigaray (1985). I am indebted to Margaret Aho for making me aware of this term.

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Works Cited

Abrams, Jeremiah and Zweig, Coniiie (eds.). 1991. Meetiug the slzailosu. Los Angeles: Tarcher. Ackroyd, P.R. aiid Evans, C. F. (eds.). 1970. Cariibrid