A Perennial Digression
A Perennial Digression
The Spectral Forum
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The Spectral Forum

On Phantasmagoriai
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The Cult of Mae Nak | Sirinya's Thailand

One of the most important things that was ever said to me, as a graduate student in Religious Studies taking a seminar in Theravada Buddhism, was this: we must resist essentializing religion. What my professor—a first-rate scholar of Theravada, especially in Sri Lanka—was saying was that there is a temptation for scholars of religion, especially when they are being formed, to rely on conceptual categories like “religion” or specific religions like “Buddhism” or “Christianity” to do a lot of their intellectual legwork for them. The comment was inspired by our reading for that week: Justin McDaniel’s The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand, looking at the things that actually consume time and attention in Thai Buddhist practice: things like hungry ghosts, magic, and Brahmanic deities, things that, theoretically, Buddhists are not supposed to be interested in. The book’s charming title comes from the Mae Nak legend and ritual cult—quite popular in Thailand—seeking to appease the trapped spirit of a dead bride who was, according to the story, locked away by Somdet To, an 18th/19th century Thai monk renowned for his magical abilities. This story—and the observation my teacher drew from it—constituted a paradigm shift for my thinking: the rigidity of my approach to scholarship of religion, and my approach to theology, came home in a way that it had not yet before. Here were people that were definitely, clearly, inarguably Buddhist: simultaneously, their Buddhism had relatively little to do with what I usually thought of as Buddhism.

Virtually every religious system that we abstract from its local instantiations is similarly deconstructed when we think about it in very great detail. There is something appropriate about naming someone like me, a 20-something 21st century American man, by the same designation of “Christian” alongside someone like St. Antony the Great, the 3rd/4th century Desert Father; but only in the most generalized way, and there’s another sense in which what “Christianity” was for Anthony and what it is for me are so wildly different that classifying them together stretches credibility. In some sense modern Jews practice a religion that is generally related to that of ancient Israelites; in another sense, the religion of David the King and of David Novak are so different from one another that calling them both something like “Judaism” without qualification is kind of ridiculous. There’s a sense in which Vaisnavas and Saivas in India are both “Hindus,” and a sense in which this is an intentional sidestepping of their religious incommensurability, the same othering and stereotyping that folds all variants of Hinduism into a kind of pan-Hindu identity in the United States.

Essentializing is born from our sometimes holistic and sometimes reductive desire to understand the heart of things: to get at what things are, we think, we need to catalogue the fundamental features of a phenomenon and at the same time to taxonomize their potential variants. But essentializing limits our vision because it divides us from the thing itself in its phenomenology by our conceptual interpretation of the phenomenon: our frameworks take on a life of their own that often end up making our data difficult for us to relate to. This can be true of readings of texts, especially texts of religious significance: when we need texts that matter to us to say a certain thing, we are more likely to try and force texts into our expectations. It can be just as true for our interpretations of artifacts, events, people, and interactions: the imposition of our mental constructs onto the events themselves often obscure our ability to really get at the heart of them, ironically, in the very act of trying to get to that ultimate center of the phenomena that draw our gaze. If we are going to stretch out our contemplative minds towards the truth of things, essentialization—the reduction of the subject to some abstraction about its nature—is unlikely to be much help, at least beyond a certain point.

Hungry Ghosts of Buddhism - Definition

Sticking to the theme evoked by the mention of Mae Nak, this is also a good rule for thinking about ghosts. In antiquity, ghosts were a regular part of religion and daily life.1 In Homer, the eidola or psychai of the dead are skiai, “shadows” that flitter about the underworld but which may be coaxed to speak by the offer of blood (as, for instance, in Odyssey XI). Yet beyond Homer, the Greek world knew many kinds of “ghosts,” phasmata or phantasmata. Alastores or elasteroi were vengeful ghosts, somewhat overlapping with erinyes, the furies, or more generalized keres; their parallel were the palamnaioi, who could be both murderous ghosts bent on continued bloodshed or ghosts avenging such killings. Such ghosts may or may not have been aoroi or aorai, men or women who died too young, and of the latter group, aorai may well be gelloudes, lamiai, mormones, mormolukai, or striges, all female ghosts who attacked women and children, known and feared well into the Byzantine world. Funerary rites often involved threnoi and gooi, songs and emotional dirges of lament, whence the goes, the magical expert in ritual dealings with the dead, the nekuia, hence the name for his art, goeteia. Through goeteia, a nekuomanteion—an oracular prophecy of a ghost—might be gained, or a haunting averted. Sometimes this was a matter of life or death: hungry ghosts, like the brykolakas, the revenant or vampire, threatened Greece and the Balkans from at least the Neolithic period, at least if the millstones placed on corpses to keep them in their sepulchers are any evidence. The Roman larvae, lemures, and manes were counterparts, though not always interchangeably so, with this complex postmortem world as it was known to ancient Greek religion, and as it was developed in conversation with the Near Eastern world through the advent of Hellenism. Macedonian conquerors and Greek citizenry were, after all, quite interested in native Egyptian religion as it survived and morphed through the Hellenistic period, and performed all sorts of linguistic and cultural translations and conflations of afterlife concepts in both mystery cults and philosophical schools. Iranian, Jewish, and Asian concepts of life after death were also mixed into the cultural zeitgeist concerning the dead, such that a vast, international, and not entirely systematic taxonomy for talking about postmortem apparitions existed for late antique people.

It is important to note that while all of the post-Homeric ghosts were, for ancient people, really tangible in various ways, they were not officially conflated with postmortem corporeal immortalization of the sort mythologically predicated of figures like Asklepios, Herakles, and Romulus or kerygmatically announced concerning Jesus of Nazareth. Greeks, like Jews, knew about resurrection as a separate category of postmortem appearance: when, for example, the Gospel of Luke seeks to stress that the risen Jesus is not a ghost, the goal is to differentiate what has happened to him from other kinds of otherworldly phenomena that ancient people would have known and expected, perhaps especially of a great sage or prophet (Lk 24:39; compare, for example, Odysseus’ questing for the shade of Tireseias in particular). Candida Moss is almost certainly correct when she argues that the Johannine Jesus shows the scars, not the fresh wounds, of his hands to the doubting Thomas by way of showing that his body is alive and indeed is healing; he is not like, for example, the ghost who appears still in his chains to Athenodorus in Pliny the Younger’s 83rd epistula.2 But the difference between resurrected and ghostly apparitions simply underlines the ubiquity of a multiethnic religious culture in the Mediterranean and Near East at the time surrounding the myriad possibilities for what could become of the dead. It also testifies to the excessive difficulty of classifying ghostly phenomena in a reliable way: that Jesus has to clarify the distinction implies that it was often less than fully obvious. Moreover, the chthonic taxonomies of antiquity also permit for multiple simultaneous afterlives of individuals: cue, for example, the human half of Herakles that exists as a shade in the underworld while the divine half of Herakles parties in his immortal body on Olympos.

File:Carl Goos - Orpheus and Eurydice - KMS276 - Statens Museum for  Kunst.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Conclusive wisdom about the world of the dead was difficult to obtain, apart from the iron certainty of death’s finality and irreversibility. Orpheus emerges as a purveyor of secret divine wisdom only after his botched katabasis to and anabasis from the underworld: he fails to reclaim Eurydice, but he now possesses the gnosis necessary to bypass the ordinary ghostly existence of the underworld and to achieve a beatific, divine afterlife (this, at least, is how the Orphic Mysteries would have understood him, though it is not explicit in his portraiture in Vergil’s Georgics IV.453-527 or Ovid’s Metamorphoses X.1-85). Heroes, demigods, and gods of older myths who had made such katabaseis—Asklepios, Herakles, Osiris, and so forth—were valuable for the knowledge about the life hereafter that they had brought back with them as much as for the personal immortality they had achieved and could potentially impart through ritual (at least in Osiris’ case). Early Christians may have believed more of Jesus than this, but they certainly did not believe less. In Early Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, the theme of descent to the underworld and ascent to the heavens, as in the Apocalypse of Zephaniah and the Testament of Abraham, was increasingly popular, both as a way of previewing the punishments of hell and the rewards of heaven as well as for catching glimpses of the social circles of the spirits that populated the nonhuman kosmos.3

In this late antique setting, and throughout the early middle ages, the spectral forum of the dead was still quite populous and intelligible to the philosophically monotheistic minds of pagans, Jews, and Christians. Varied spaces for ghosts—in the depths of the sea (e.g., Rev 20:13), at the sites of their unjust deaths, near tombs, at places of dark, numinous wonder, in the underworld, en route to heaven—made sense to a cosmic mentality still largely defined by hierarchy, and the relativity of ontic, moral, and locative status. In the Greek East, where theology was largely divided between those on the one hand who believed in the postmortem survival of the soul and its ongoing mutability after death, capable still of transition, education, and glorification, and those on the other who believed effectively in soul sleep, ghosts continued in folk consciousness but were now problematic in the mainstream, official theological perspective. This was also true in the Latin West, where a stratified system of hell, purgatory, and heaven was increasingly settled upon over the course of the medieval period, complicating the available interpretations for ghost sightings and encounters. From early modernity to the present, it has been increasingly difficult for Christians to speak about ghosts without the temptation either to dismiss them as psychological fictions or as demonic, in both cases out of a perceived loyalty to an inherited ideology (modernism or a massively oversimplified dogmatic binary of cosmic beings). Ghosts of course can be psychological fictions; it is conceivable that if there are demons, they might well behave like ghosts in some circumstances. What is more interesting, though, is what contemporary Christians feel threatened by when they have such allergic reactions to the phantastic. What is it about ghosts that unnerves us so? Minimally, of course, they upset our categories, or what we take to be our categories, about the fate of the soul after death: yet what else is unveiled when they are?

The Ghost of Samuel Appearing to Saul

One thing that ghosts do—and that good ghost stories do—is to unnerve through deconstruction. Ghosts make settled spaces liminal and liminal spaces settled: the phantasmagoria of the graveyard can be as unsettling as the specter in the parlor or the poltergeist in the quiet suburban home. Much of life is about the movement from settled to liminal space and back again, and much of mature living is about recognizing the ways that all spaces are settled and liminal dependent on our perspectives on and relations to them; ghosts force us to do this at paces that we may not feel comfortable with and at times we may not find convenient. Ghosts also relentlessly remind us that we ourselves are going to die. I suspect that this is actually what stands behind evangelical discomfort with ghosts: for all talk of dying and going to heaven to be with Jesus, the governing assumption in most evangelical talk about heaven is that celestial life will essentially be like life now, only sexier. Ghosts force us to reckon with the ways that death unwinds who we think we are, what we think we are about, and what kinds of things we think appropriate for creatures like ourselves. Ghosts can, of course, be ciphers for our fixations, but they can also remind us of the transience of this life and the things in it that we love: ghosts might pitter about libraries and pubs they once frequented, surely, but Patroklos’ phantom cannot finally grasp his living lover, nor be grasped, just as cannot Eurydice’s. Ghosts remind us that this life is at best pedagogy for the divinity of the life to come and, at worst, the best thing we will know, of which all our postmortem existence may be but a shadow, actually or literarily.

The criterion here is perhaps the most destabilizing aspect of the nekuia: ghosts remind us that our choices in this life will live beyond us, affecting us and those around us. Homeric ghosts, and Greek ghosts generally, are psychic imprints of the person at the moment of death: they do not usually seem to have much command over their appearance or mannerisms. Like Athenodorus’ ghost or like Jacob Marley, we will wear the chains we forge in this life, or else the ones we do not forsake; our initiation into the moral wisdom of the heavenly world is of paramount necessity to avoid any number of dehumanizing fates in the life hereafter. Even if God saves the spirit (1 Cor 5:5), God may well destroy both body and soul in Gehenna (Matt 10:28): the moral consequences of this life are severe, and the ghostly world, in all its lingering loss and longing lusts, testifies to the divine justice which is wrought upon the false self, turning the memories of our psychic darkness into admonitory exempla, and even our genuine righteousness into prophets of doom. It is no accident that neither Tireseias come to Odysseus’ moat of blood nor Samuel wakened by Endor’s witch bring gladsome tidings.

Of course, there is room for the kindliness of the shades; there is room for melody in the macabre, for comedy even in the caress of death. While most ghost stories arguably lend themselves towards the uncanny and the dooming, there is another stream of literary spiritualism that celebrates the friendship which may exist between the living and the dead, perhaps more frequent in our own era than in those past. From one vantage this is of course the natural order of things: the threat which the dead pose to the living is in large part a response to bad manners on the part of the living towards the dead. And the epiphanic, apocalyptic quality of the ghostly encounter is undoubtedly meant for the moral reformation of the seer: the ongoing concern of the dead for the living seems well attested by those who have toured hell, whether in the body or not. From another, this shift may reflect our own cultural preoccupation with ourselves and therefore poor receptivity to what ghost encounters are for.

How to deal with a dybbuk - The Jewish Chronicle

It does not ultimately matter what ghosts are. For what it’s worth, I believe that they are real; I even have various conceptual frameworks for understanding them that I prefer, like the notion that they are departed souls or psychic echoes or what have you of the previously alive, or at least that some of them are; that others might be the epiphenomena of folded points in time and space, or that others still might be some other sort of cosmic being whose interior emptiness leaves it only to ape the living it has known or been near, or, indeed, that still others might simply be illusions or tricks of the mind (though in a universe that emerges from Mind, a “trick of the mind” is never simply a trick of the mind). But my belief about them is not worth much; it certainly does not constitute a dogmatism, an attempt to essentialize what is fundamentally resistant to classification by discursive reason as an experience. If ghosts are real, my notions of them are probably wrong, no matter how well-read; the very categorization “ghost” implies a certain amount of scientific knowledge which is mine to pretend in characterizing as a singular entity phenomena which are inherently multifaceted and complex.

And in any event, the reality of ghosts—like the reality of other mythological, folkloric, and otherworldly beings—matters less than what ghosts mean, culturally and personally, to us. Most of us are unlikely to encounter ghosts terribly often other than in stories, and those who do encounter them often do so by way of briefly shared loci and briefly heightened awareness. Whether ghosts are aware of us is a secondary and unanswerable question; that we, when we become aware of them, are often powerless to do anything for or about them, that our sightings of them will not invite, for most of us, the real opportunity of any kind of assistance or resolution that otherwise delights us in film, is depressing but obvious. The banal mundanity with which our experiences of what is often called the “paranormal” must certainly be characterized by some higher observer lingers even in the extraordinary fixation of such epiphanies themselves: we are still left most of the time to make our own meaning of these apocalypses.

The darkness and macabre of the ghostly thus does what the monstrous in general does: that is, “shows” (from Latin monstro, monstrare) us something significant, whether intentionally or not, about who and what we are—that is, the transient. And remembering that momentary vanity, the convenient fiction of the self which may shatter a million ways on the rocks of life or on the icy waters of death’s black sea, is both proper ghostly uncanniness as well as the very sweetness of the resurrection’s victory. Where presently in the spectral haze of this life, we only ever “see in a mirror, darkly” (1 Cor 13:12), in the beatific vision of that one we shall see things as they really are—because we shall see Christ as he really is (1 Jn 3:2).

1

What follows is reliant on the taxonomies found in Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), especially the “Frequently Used Terms” of the front matter. See also Patrick R. Crowley, The Phantom Image: Seeing the Dead in Ancient Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

2

See Candida Moss, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 22-40.

3

For the evolution of such anabaseis, see Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and my talk with Mark would not hurt either.

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A Perennial Digression
A Perennial Digression
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