Prospero's Books

Whence came you?

On XM Radio's vintage radio channel, I stumbled on an old series that I'd never heard of: Quiet, Please. In the episode being played is an exchange that will interest my Masonic readers. The narrator, Austin, an Indiana Jones prototype working in Egypt, is showing his friend Abe around a dig site:

ABE FELDMAN: Oh.  What does this say?

AUSTIN: What?

ABE FELDMAN: Uh, this slab here.

AUSTIN: Let's see. Uh... (reads and slowly translates) 'Here was I... Ho-Tep,
presented with a...' I guess you'd say, 'invested with... the working tools of
those who... build.  In my hand, I, Ho-Tep, did take' -- uh -- 'took... the
tools of the second...' -- uh -- 'grade... of workmen in stone, the,' -- uh -- 
'plumb, the square, and the...'

ABE FELDMAN: The level, huh? 

AUSTIN: How'd you know?

ABE FELDMAN (amazed): There were Masons in those days.

AUSTIN: Well, sure.  How do you think they built all this stone stuff?

The series, which aired from 1947 to 1949, was the creation of writer Wyllis Cooper, an active Freemason. So my Masonic readers, knowing well the language of Masonic ritual, will not be surprised that this episode, titled "Whence Came You," begins with the line "I came from Jerusalem."

(Audio and text files of this episode [number 37] and others are available on the fan site Quiet, Please.)

The cosmic dance which is always there

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

--Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

(Thanks to God's Politics for the quotation.)

       

With the whole tribe or whole earth in mind

In his book A Time before Deception, Thomas W. Cooper writes (p. 93) that native peoples around the world have "specific moral standards for communication." Those he lists are provocative standards for all of us who speak or write--that is, all of us:

1. listening fully with the heart, no matter how trivial or wrong the discussion may seem;
2. not interrupting another's communication;
3. not walking between conversants;
4. speaking softly, especially to elders;
5. speaking only by invitation when among a group of elders;
6. avoiding slander and defamation of all kinds;
7. communicating as an individual (contributing independent ideas to the council) first, then communicating in synch with the group (once policies have been set);
8. truth-telling;
9. inner communicating (morning and evening sanctification, periods of guidance) must precede outer communicating, openness to the Great Spirit is essential;
10. communicating with the whole tribe or whole earth in mind so as to honor others.

The God Delusion 2

Despite my negative take on Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion in my last post, I'm grateful that the book's simplistic theology has prodded me toward defining my own. Here are some working notes:

1. I am in awe of the cosmos, first that it exists at all (that there's "something" rather than "nothing") and then that life and consciousness have evolved within it.
2. My response to that awe is (appropriately, I think) gratitude.
3. To whom or what am I grateful? To the great unnameable mystery that lies not only beyond space and time, but also beyond existence itself. The traditional word for that mystery is "God." Among the best definitions I've found for "God" is Paul Tillich's "the ground of being." (Unfortunately Tillich doesn't appear in Dawkins's extensive bibliography and index.)
4. The only way I know to express gratitude to God is by addressing God in the only way I know, the way I address the most complex, loving things I know: other people. So I consciously anthropomorphize God, not to limit God, but to concede my own absolute inability to know God as God is.
5. I experience God not only as the mystery beyond the existence of the cosmos, but also as the mystery beneath my own existence, my own consciousness. The traditional language for this experience is that God is both transcendent and immanent. I feel God's transcendence in nature, especially in nature's systems. I feel God's immanence in art and ritual (signs and stories), in other people, and in the depths of my own meditation and prayer.

If you're on a spiritual quest, you may want to read The God Delusion. The experience may help you define your own theology.

A largely ceremonial explanation

I'm finally reading a clipping from the January 2000 issue of Harper's, an extract from David Berlinski's The Advent of the Algorithm. I had clipped it because his earlier book on the calculus had helped me better understand that subject (no small feat, considering that, astonishingly, no math was required of liberal arts majors at my undergraduate university in the 1960s). One paragraph from the Harper's excerpt has especially caught my attention:

The complexity of human artifacts, the things that human beings make, finds its explanation in human intelligence. The intelligence responsible for the construction of complex artifacts--watches, computers, military campaigns, federal budgets, this very essay--finds its explanation in biology. Yet however invigorating it is to see the algorithmic pattern appear and reappear, especially on the molecular biological level, it is important to remember, if only because it is so often forgotten, that in very large measure we have no idea how the pattern is amplified. Yet the explanation of complexity that biology affords is largely ceremonial. At the very heart of molecular biology, a great mystery is vividly in evidence, as these symbolic forms bring an organism into existence, control its morphology and development, and slip a copy of themselves into the future (19-20).

Drifting transformed into pilgrimage

A clipping from the Summer 1992 issue of Noetic Sciences Review carries a short piece on labyrinths by Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Jones writes:

The labyrinth represents the spiritual journey of humanity which does not proceed in a straight line but meanders in seemingly repetitive circles which nevertheless lead to a healing center.

Human beings have long known that their drifting needs to be transformed into pilgrimage (25).

And in a sidebar, Keith B. Critchlow notes:

The labyrinth is itself an astoundingly precise model of the spiritual understanding of the universe. Not only are the exact cosmic rhythms built into it but, as well, the other sacred measures that represent our relationship to the "journey back" to our spiritual wholeness (25).

A message in the formless flow of things

In tonight's Joyce seminar, I read my students a passage from No Souvenirs, a twelve-year journal by religious historian Mircea Eliade. The passage describes well the day-long journey of Leopold Bloom in the novel Ulysses, but it also describes the well-lived life:

1 January 1960
    Every exile is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The path toward Ithaca, toward the center. I had known all that for a long time. What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the "powers" which decide historical, earthly destinies). But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and of understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and as so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center). That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods of everyday life. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren't there; if one sees them, one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts (84-85).

In this life we are all exiles. Knowing that, and reading the signs, can help us find our way home.

Our earliest rituals?

Ritual and religion may be almost twice as old as we've thought, according to scientists who have examined artifacts in a cave in Botswana. According to Reuters, the find seems to indicate religious ritual among Stone Age people as long ago as 70,000 years. Before this discovery, the earliest indication of religion was in European caves about 40,000 years ago.

From a Reuters story by Alister Doyle:

Ancestors of Botswana's San people apparently ground away at a natural outcrop about 2 meters high and 6 meters long (6 by 20 ft) to heighten its similarity to a python's head and body, said Sheila Coulson, an associate professor at Oslo University. . . .

"The snake symbol runs through all the mythologies, stories, cultures, languages of southern Africa," Coulson said.

(On a personal note, Botswana is one of my favorite places in the world. I've never experienced more beautiful skies or more welcoming people.)

The mystery of Hiram Abiff

When I received my Master Mason degree yesterday, the central part of the ritual concerned Hiram Abiff, the "widow's son," the legendary master builder of King Solomon's Temple who chooses death over loss of integrity.

The origins of the legend are unknown; it hasn't been found in written form earlier than the late 17th and early 18th centuries. But the late Conrad Hahn, Executive Secretary of the Masonic Service Association, offered an intriguing theory in his paper "The Importance of the Legend of Hiram Abiff":

Just where did the legend of Hiram come from? No one really knows; scholars have yet to discover its origins and its introduction into Freemasonry. My own scholarly prejudices lead me to believe that it's a re-working of some mediaeval mystery play, whose original may yet be discovered in a private library or the rubbish of an ancient building.

Mystery plays were the most popular form of public entertainment in the Middle Ages. Each guild or trade had its own preferred dramas; most of them were Biblical in origin. They were produced, staged and acted by members of the guild, first in churches, and then in public squares, to which they were banished when the plays became too boisterious and irreverant for the sacerdotal authorities.

These dramas were called mysteries, not because they treated of witches, ghosts, or detectives, but because they were produced by craft guilds or "mysteres," which is variant of the French word "mestaire," a craft or guild. So the plays became known in England as mysteres, or mysteries, because they were produced by "mestaires," or guilds. The expression, "the mysteries of Freemasonry," therefore, originally meant the ritualistic ceremonies, or work of the Lodge.

Theories of the origin of any of Freemasonry's practices must be examined very critically, since the legendary has often been mistaken—or deliberately substituted—for the historical. But Hahn's theory does make some sense. Even if the story of Hiram Abiff is taken as an 18th-century invention, it must certainly have been influenced by the traditions of English drama, traditions that included the mystery plays.

As an English teacher, I've long taught about the mystery plays, especially as precursors to Shakespeare. So for me, an important part of yesterday's experience was the chance to participate in a 300-year-old ritual that may be a direct descendant of those plays.

(Thanks to Ken at On the Level for making Hahn's paper available.)

Emergences in Shakespeare

Today's two Stratford Festival performances were both Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 1, and Much Ado about Nothing. Although the two plays were probably written within a year or two of each other, they are superficially very different: the first chronicles a year in the life of an historical English king and his heir apparent, while the second, set in a mythical Sicily, follows the ups and downs of two pairs of lovers.

But seeing the two plays the same day made me realize that they are both about initiations, rites of passage. Prince Hal, the future Henry V, comes of age, in a psychological sense, during the year covered by his play. Like many rites of passage, his journey moves through separation (from the world of his father and his father's court, into the world of Falstaff), initiation (in a series of situations where the two worlds meet), and return (to the side of his father in the play's final battle scenes).

In the opening scene of this production of Henry, the king (played by Scott Wentworth) meets with his counsellors around a kind of conference table, proceeds to disparage his absent son, then ends the scene by knocking to the ground the chair in which that absent son would have sat. When the stage is transformed, largely in the dark, into Falstaff's tavern, furniture is rearranged--except for the fallen chair. During the following scene, Prince Hal (David Snelgrove), as he speaks, offhandedly rights the chair, as if to say "Father, don't count me out yet. I am present, and I know what I'm about. I shall return."

In Much Ado, the structural hero, Claudio, must go through the same journey of separation (by jumping to devastatingly wrong conclusions about his fiancee), initiation (in part through his fiancee's feigned death), and return, in order to achieve the maturity that will make him worthy of Hero's hand. And the play's two main characters, Beatrice (Lucy Peacock) and Benedick (Peter Donaldson) pass through the same three stages, in order to emerge as people who understand, for the first time, what love is.

Emerge is the right word, because both plays demonstrate well the emergence of new complex systems unpredictable by the study of their parts. Hal's responsibility and courage, Claudio's willingness to see love as a commitment beyond physical attraction, and Beatrice and Benedick's new web of knowledge of themselves and of each other are all higher-ordered complexities that could not have been predicted by the situations of their plays' openings.

In this way, dramatic works (and other stories) create and resolve tension in their audience by revealing outcomes that could not have been predicted (except in a very general way, through the conventions of genre), but outcomes that, in retrospect, seem inevitable.

(Several other posts on this blog have also dealt with the issue of emergence.)