The Blackberry Walk

The flurry of posts is in part due to me returning to half finished older articles - this one has been sitting in my browser for nearly a year! Sati: the Hindu practice of the self-immolation of widows. Upon her husband's death, the wife, often against her will, had to fling herself upon his funeral pyre. Backing out wasn't an option: it was a custom after all. The British upon seeing this were horrified; the practice was essentially human sacrifice. But, it was also part of the Hindu religion, and the British were cautious about changing too much local religion in their colonies, since it could only lead to unrest. Yet the voice of the public, once word of the practice arrived home, was unanimous: they wanted the practice eradicated. How though? How do you change a practice without changing the religion? Tom Holland in his book Dominion argues the British did this by distinguishing culture from religion. By secularising the custom, saying that sati was not part of 'Hinduism' but rather a mere tradition, sati could be changed. But what is the difference between a religion, a culture, a tradition, a custom.. the list goes on. What are they? Hinduism never existed in the past - of course Hindu practice has always been around, but the classification of 'religion' is a distinctly Christian one. The name 'Hindu', after all, has its roots of the Indus river: it is a belief tied to the Indo-Europeans of a specific geographical location. Indeed, pagan belief is tied to a people, a location, an ethnicity; lineage, and the conception of family gods is key to pagan cultures. Typically the father of a family - and we aren't thinking of nuclear families, but rather extended ones - is a kind of spiritual conduit for ceremony with the family gods. In many ways there are parallels to Christianity, although in Christianity priests have no necessity to be tied by lineage to their flock - the development of ethnos to nation (bear in mind though this is not an aping, but rather pagan rituals are imperfect attempts at what worship ought to be). In short, for pagan cultures, the blood tie cannot be separated from the custom nor the belief in their gods. The clear objection to this is syncretism. Syncretism is the seeming blending of gods from one culture into another - take for instance much of the Roman world participating in the gods of their conquered subjects. Syncretism is to say that my gods are the same as your gods and though our method of worship may differ, we simply have different names for the same phenomena. Often this seemingly naive assumption was true however, with many of the Indo-Aryan world possessing the same set of gods by tradition. This can be traced in quite interesting ways, with the Germanic Aesir having a parallel with the Hindu Asura and the Persian Ahura, all of which occupy a kind of Titan-like position in their respective beliefs. The Holy Land can be a kind of meeting point where Indo-Aryan civilisation of the north meets the Semitic civilisation of the south. Civilisations can be further stratified into two types: Titan-worshippers and Olympian worshippers. The figure of Prometheus is a strange one - he seems like a kind of hero, and in Persian paganism he was since their culture was a Titan worshipping one. In the Med on the other hand, whilst Saturnalia was a kind of Titanic festival, the Titans were something to be suppressed by the ruling Olympian eltes only to be revealed in a kind of Carnival. Unfortunately true paganism is hard to find now in the Indo-European world. Hinduism isn't a pure form of paganism, since it underwent a kind of counter-reformation in opposition to the Buddhist axial revolution. Returning to topic, the belief that every religion has a god, or many gods, has a set of core tenants, even a holy book is a hilarious post-Christian projection. Rishi Sunak in becoming prime minister swore his oath on the Bhagavad Gita, a strange act of cultural projection, albeit given that he grew up in this milleu it might not have been too strange to him. The concept of a religion being separate from culture has it's origins in St Augustine's conception of the saeculum, meaning 'lifetime', which is where the very idea of 'secular' originates. For Augustine, who was a highly neurotic Neoplatonist at heart, the Saeculum's limitedness was in contrast to the city of God - although since he was a Neoplatonist, the divine realm shone down into the saeculum of creation. This, in my view, is the original chip that fractured into the Great Schism - the autocephalous structure of the Orthodox church (where there are national churches in communion, like Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox), allows culture and church practice to be undistinguished since national character and the national church can mutually mold each other, whilst the internationalism of the Augustine-shaped West necessitates a division of culture and religion. My intuition is that Augustine's Christology in contradistinction to Eastern Christology a la St Gregory of Nyssa is the cause, but I can't quite put into words how. The Protestant reformation then was a pendulum swing back to national churches, albeit without their communion. Returning to topic once more, Augustine's innovation of the secular develops into Aquinas' distinction between the natural and the supernatural (notably not connected by Platonic emanation), eventually leading to the modern day where culture and belief are distinct. For many now, 'Belief' has near no connection to the what one actually believes, with their true heart-felt beliefs originating in modern post-Christian doctrine: the crumbs of Christ. In a sense, the psychotechnology of the secular has managed to convert the world by cleaving custom from the spiritual, making spirituality a cerebral thing instead of something embodied. Thankfully Sati has been vanquished as a practice. But how much have we lost? Our cultural march of iconoclasm has sacked traditions both good and bad; like an antibiotic, both bacteria harmful and helpful have been destroyed. One can spend their whole life mourning, but past mourning there must be a morning, a new beginning, where as a society we must build back up instead of tear down. Just think how mediaeval castles were build out of Roman roads. Today there is so much quality rubble out of which to build the future. The future need not be a chimeric zombie patchwork of parts, but something fresh, organic, and living. Today, what would we be without Plato? But always remember that Aristophanes in The Clouds called Socrates a libtard.