Satan Worship

Huh? Who is this Satan geezer? I was just reading “Is Satan in Islam the same as Satan in the Bible?” but it only got me more confused. Besides, Lucifer is Latin, meaning “the bearer of light,” right? So what is Lucifer doing in verse 12 of chapter 14 of the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, which was written in Hebrew and Aramaic? And whence cometh the word devil? Has it got anything to do with the Romany (Gypsy) word Devel, which means…God???

From American Heritage dictionary:
devil–“ETYMOLOGY: Middle English devel, from Old English dofol, from Latin diabolus, from Late Greek diabolos, from Greek, slanderer, from diaballein, to slander : dia-, dia- + ballein, to hurl; see gwel- in Appendix I.”

Beelzebub: "ETYMOLOGY: Hebrew ba‘al zb

This thread is very interesting and informative. On the technical aspects of “worship”, I would maintain that if food and other items are being set out, incense and certain types of special “paper money” are being burned, there is the appearance of ceremony and ritual, a special place is set up in the home (office, etc.) for this purpose, and all these activities are conducted on a more or less regular schedule, etc., etc. – this goes beyond veneration. This is worship.

As such, if I may extrapolate a bit more on my original posting, and with reference to my 26 years of residence in Taiwan, I believe that these aspects of “worship” to various ghosts or spirits, with the intent of placating them so that they do not do harm to the living, is in direct violation of the Bible. YET, (and here is my point) I do not feel that the Christian/Catholic churches in Taiwan are effectively communicating this fact to their members.

Hence, you have Chinese people who are members of these churches who continue in these practices. Under the Biblical teachings, I don’t think that such behaviour is allowed.

While I was raised a Lutheran, I of course realize that there is no international HEAD of the Lutheran Church. By comparison, of course the Catholics have the POPE. In regard to this matter of whether “the faithful” are allowed to worship spirits or ghosts, I would be willing to accept a formal determination of the Pope. (Hence, I do not feel that any cleric in Taiwan, or Asia, has the right to make a final determination on such a matter, although I suppose I might change my view if one of these Asian clerics agreed to my analysis of the entire situation . . . . . )

Again I repeat that this thread is informative, and it is excellent that we get the relevant issues out for discussion.

I think that is an accomadation to local values and cultures that is quite common in Catholicism on the ground. The word comes down from John Paul, but the people who hear it do very much their own thing with it.

You see it in Latin America where often times indiginous cults (used in the anthropological, not the pejoritive sense) are often overlayed, sometimes thinly with the cult of saints. You see it in culturally Chinese areas with ancestor veneration. I use veneration advisedly because if I remember my history, the early Jesuits in China specifically called it this (or rather the Latin equivalent) rather than worship and said that it was ok. This allowed them to spread the word fairly freely since they weren’t challenging important local values. As I recall, that ended when a pope decided to opt for a strict interpretation and condemn the practice.

You also see it in Italy’s declining birthrate and American “cafeteria Catholics.” This kind of thing has always gone on on the ground with winks and nods from local clergy. It’s almost certainly one of the reasons that Catholicism has been as successful as it has.

Richard,

What’s the story here?

Besides the mention in Exodus of the Old Testament of not worshiping false idols we still haven’t established that this is expressly forbidden as “Devil Worship”.

I can see from a hegemonic point of view that it’s in the Christian Churches interest both to have a damnation clause and a practicle tolerance for veneration (worship, I agree). However, as Tssulia has taken pains to point out, there is really little reference to Satan in the bible. What references do exist are often obscured by translation and use of terms and that little of pagan worship can be interpreted as Devil Worship.

Most pagans would probably take extreme offence at the idea that there beliefs have any association with ‘Devil Worship’ and rightfully so. In fact, Devil Worship properly interpreted is really a cult of Christianity and little or no association with pagan rituals of Europe except perhaps superfically in the borrowing of icons.

That said the spread of the Christian Church through out the world has relied heavily on the adoption of pagan practices. Given that that is a dynamic on going phenomenon, I am surprized by your suggestion here that local Christian practice is in some way out of step with general Church practice in reality.

I can remember when I was working with hilltribes in Northern Thailand, specifically the Hmong, that the old Catholic Jesuit priest there was sponsoring the Sharmon School - good for him, but that just goes to show that he probably didn’t interpret what was going on there as being ‘Devil Worship’. I know that was partly your point, but your original post was asking for clarification on whether or not communing with the nether world in and of itself constitutes Satan Worship.

After reading some of these interesting posts, I have to say that I find it quite amusing to see the book-based western Christian spirituality struggling to conceptually accomodate and yes of course, judge, various Asian religious practices common in this area. This is to be expected. How can we understand anything without fitting it into out frame of reference.

Nonetheless, I would like to argue that it’s immaterial from a non-Christian standpoint as to whether the Taiwanese worship or venerate the ancestor spirits. That’s wholly a Christian issue, not a pagan one. It’s really far more important to enact the rituals per se. Beliefs are more or less irrelevant. In the context of pagan spirituality, what one does is far more important than what one believes.

In any case, faithfully following pagan ritual practices is no doubt in direct contravention of Biblical scripture. Of that I have no doubt. But as someone else pointed out many Christian and Catholic “outposts” have been more than accomodating of the various cultural and spritual realities that they’re faced with when stationed abroad. Of course, there are always exceptions, such as the cultural and poulation genocide of the Maya in the 1500’s. But be all that as it may, there is an obvious difference between dogma and reality after all and many missionizing Christians abroad are well aware of this fact.

Ultimately, as long as we have different cultures, we’ll have different spiritualities, and different ways of expressing them. Ritual itself is so sophisticated and complicated a phenomenon in its own right, that in many cases, it completely supplants sacred texts (bible, qu’ran, etc), dogma, religious philosophy, and teaching, to actually provide the basis for all aspects of a groups spirituality. In other words, put in a more crude and blunt way, ritual isn’t simply part of a religion, it IS the religion.

Something to bear in mind as we run to our holy books to try and make sense of foreign ritual practices.

Picasso, Reading your 2 posts I’m reminded of the line from a Johnathan Richmond song, “Pablo Picasso ain’t no arsehole.”

Something you mentioned in your fist post about Ancestor Worship operating in a completly different pardigm to Christian Ritual: “They are pretty much untransposable both literally, and ideologically except maybe say, if you were to try and research some common universal themes linking rituals to different cultural ideas or so forth.”

You might be interested in reading some Joseph Cambell if you haven’t already. That’s pretty much his whole research. Great Books!

Hi Grasshopper. Actually, I’ve read Campbell’s Power of Myth. You’re absolutely right. An excellent book; he obviously had a very deep understanding of his subject matter. What I liked best about his work is that he managed to draw a very clear distinction between religious metaphor, and the refents of the metaphors (the map is not the territory), and also how he presed home that while religious belief is one thing, ritual activity is quite another thing.

I just wanted to clarify what I had said in an earlier post. I guess I wasn’t very clear. What I meant was that our Christian culture’s idea and understanding of Satan, basically what’s been written and talked about concerning Satan in booke, scriptures, philosophical and theological circles, and what have you, has absolutely nothing to do with ritual in general, and chinese ancestor worship/veneration specifically. Satan is essentially a concept, an idea, an understanding, a philosophical position in relation to our cultural understanding of our God…chinese ancestor ritual is not an idea. It has little to do with ideas. It is essentially codified action, a programmed spiritual activity meant to bring the initiates through various stages of awareness, and more specifically, to address a particular crisis in their lives. (These stages of ritual awareness have been adequately studied & mapped out by cultural anthropologists for over 40 years). In any case the western idea and concept of Satan and the everyday activity of chinese ancestor ritual have little to nothing in common, and in that sense, are untransposable. Christian ritual on the other hand, is another matter.

I’d like to ask a rhetorical question. What Christian sect is most characterized by their ritual activity? Catholicism. Why is that? What is it about Catholicism specifically that lends itself to a heavy reliance on ritual to achieve its spiritual ends?

Way off the original topic, but part of the problem with Campbell is that he ends up doing the same thing that Christians who try to understand ancestor worship in terms of Satanism. He comes at religious phenomenon with his own Eliadean methodology and fits them into the categories he came with, rather than trying to understand them (to the extent possible) in their own terms. He ends up with essentially a religious philosophy of his own.

That’s notnecessarilly always a bad thing. Campbell has interesting ideas and I think they can help an individual who takes a similar pistache approach to religion have a more meaningful experience of life. All the same, it ends up being something different from what the Taiwanese temple-goer, Siberian shaman, or Pennsylvanian Catholic experienced, conceived and did.

That’s funny you should say that Grizzly. I’m familiar with Eliade’s work on Shamanism, and what struck me most about that impressive work is his whole approach to shamanic experience, specifically, through a Merleau-Ponty style “phenomenology” of shamanism. In other words, to bring no academic theory to the phenomena in question (shamanic experiences) but rather, to study shamanism as it is experienced by the aboriginal shamans themselves. Hence the subtitle: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

I’ll side step Eliade for now, as I’ve only read a few of his works and not the one you mentioned. Perhaps his approach worked perfectly on that subject. Haven’t read it, so I won’t venture to say.

What I was aiming at in Campbell was the tendency to see universal archetypes whereever he looked (the hero’s journey, etc.) and to give them the same reading with little attention to the broader cultural context. Moreover, certainly in his less academic works, he seems to regard that interpretation as the real meaning/essence of the religion over and beyond what the religionist thinks or feels is going on.

It seems to me the Eliade’s apporach is similar in the broad cross-cultural search for archetypes. Am I mistaken?

Grizzly,

I think what you said is right, but I don’t know if I’d see it as a criticism of Cambell’s work.

I think Cambell is simply trying to understand for himself the source, through archetypes, and the power of myth traditionally and as it exists today. Certainly, one isn’t going to have a sharmonic experience reading his work; however, it helps people see that that experience is available to them through our common unconcious- a Jungian concept and much of what inspired Cambell’s work.

I found reading Cambell’s work to be quite liberating and exciting as I think many people do. However, as you said, it’s not exactly the real McCoy.

I suggest we get together for a Right’s of Passage up in Yang Ming Shan - see if we can’t capture a little bit of it for ourselves. Given your handle as Grizzly, Picasso and I will give you a count to 100 head start and then start hunting you down. I’m up for it.

On your comparison between Eliade and Cambell, I think they have very similar approaches. However, I’m not sure if Cambell, has a basic philosophical conclusion as to the existential anxiety of man as does Eliade.

Eliade sees time as being both homogeneous (linear) and heterogenous (transgressable to ‘Sacred time’). He sees that myth and ritual give us access to this sacred time which protects us from the “terror of time”.

Very interesting posts…I must confess, Eliade’s work on Shamanism is the only study by him that really interested me, and the only one by him that I’m familiar with.

Campbell definitely follows Jung’s archetypal approach to religion, one that I think is quite intelligent and thoughtful although I’m more dubious about the specifics of the Jungian theory. We all have a yearning for spirituality, but whether this can be termed a collective unconscious related to a personal unconscious in such and such a way, or what have you, well, that I’m not so conviced about.

Be that as it may, I wouldn’t throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water so far as Campbell is concerned. He offers a lot of useful insight into dimensions of ritual and mythology in his work, even if his Jungian paradigms are a little too common, JC still doesn’t just apply Jungian psych. to religious and phenomena and that’s the end of the story. I guess it’s up to the reader to separate the wheat from the chaff (but was it ever any other way?)

Also, no, I don’t think you’re mistaken that Eliade is also concerned about the fundamental common humanity underlying all spiritual and religious phenomena. But again, his approach is not simplistically formulaic, it’s also not even Jungian. Eliade follows the tradition of Parisian existentialism, emphasizing the human condition as essentially one of crisis, at least spiritually speaking. Death, sickness, disease, and time (as Grasshopper pointed out)takes it’s toll on all of us, how are we to cope? Existential thought not so much a theory per se as a basic philosophical perspective through which we can see things in a different light, ask new and fresh questions, and address some fundamental issues whether through art (Dali, Picasso) Literature (Camus, Duras) Philosophy (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty etc.) Religion (Eliade) It was (is) less a theory per se than a whole movement attempting to understand the human in the modern world.

For the existentialist thinker Religion is an eminently human attempt to deal with the fundamental conditions of being a human being on planet earth. We as a species are dealing with it, at least in part, through Religion.

As Grasshopper pointed out:

Eliade sees time as being both homogeneous (linear) and heterogenous (transgressable to ‘Sacred time’). He sees that myth and ritual give us access to this sacred time which protects us from the “terror of time”.

Thanks for the interesting discussion…

Hemingway, Sartre and Miller sit down at a bar in Paris. Sartre looking tired from a day at the typewriter says, “I don’t know guys sometimes I think Man were born two legs astride a grave.”

Miller looks over to him and says, ”Give us a break from all this existential crap will you Jean. If you’re looking for my opinion woman was born two legs astride me. What do you reckon Earnest?”

Hemingway reaching for his fifth scotch says, “Well, first we have to endure I suppose, but you know me, I was born legless and completely at sea.”

Jeez, I spend the last several days writing end of term papers, and this thread gets all theoretical and damn interesting … no time to write a considered post today, maybe tomorrow, once I’m finished writing this paper on the history of Daoism and ritual .

Take care all

I think what this boils down to is less a disagreement over substance than methodology. We seem to agree basically about what Campbell and Eliade do, I just have more misgivings about it.

I agree that there work can be inspiring. I saw the Power of Myth when I was a kid and fourteen years later I’m looking at grad schools for Religious Studies. It seems to me that they’re ideas work well as part of a religious philosophy, rather than as an academic study of religion.

While I would agree that some, though perhaps not all, of the issues you mentioned are universal human issues, the ways that they have been dealt with differ from one another as much as they resemble one another. It seems to me that when religious phenomena are abstracted from their historical and cultural settings for broad comparisons the particullarity often gets lost.

Some people do excellent “theory-oriented” work on religion. For instance, I think Faure often makes good use of post-modern ideas. But I think theory should be applied judiciously or not at all. When you apply a set of concepts or even an orientation such as existentialism that are foreign to the tradition you risk distorting the evidence.

I realize that this will always be true to some extent. We can’t approach the material without an preconceptions or baggage whatsoever (the Humanities equivalent of original sin). However, I do think that there are degrees and that the degrees matter.

By the way, I study the history of Chinese Buddhism. You guys?

Thanks for the interesting post. I think maybe it’s appropriate to now ask, “what do you want and expect out of an academic study of religion or religious phenomena?” Precision? empirical rigour? Philosphical depth? Rich interpretive insight? A very good expose and description without deigning to impose overwrought conclusions and scientific posturings? This is important, simply because that will essentially determine which theoretical or methodological bent will appeal to you the most.

Another issue that is relevant here is certainly the subject matter. What constitutes legitimate evidence in the field of religious studies? Where do the boundaries of culture begin and end? To what degree does culture play a role, if the religion is say, a “mainstream” system, or a counter-cultural movement? How does history play into the aspect of religion under question? Then again, what about the religious adherent’s personal interpretation of that history and how does the “living” religion transform itself in this hermeneutic process?

Clearly, clarity and precision is precisely what the study of religious phenomena lacks. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? That would probably depend upon whether an individual was of a more empirical bent, or on the other hand, was totally comfortable with the dubious scientific nature of religious study, preferring interpretive depth and philosophical richness that religion often inspires. To appraoch religion as a scholar, as a philosopher, as an adherent, as a poet, as an artist? The fruits of these choices colour most aspects of our civilization since the Homeric epics (and even before). Religion in general, much less any particular religion, be it aboriginal totemic animism, or a scripture based large-scale social structure, is too rich and deep to allow it’s essence(s) to be fully probed by any single focus. In a sense, it can be said to accurately mirror the unfathomable diversity of humanity itself.

If man is an animal with an appetite for divinity, then religion is the banquet at which we gorge our hunger. What are the best dishes at the table? How to best understand what it is that we are feeding our selves with? I don’t know. All I know is where my own preferences lie…

Picasso,

At the end of a preivious post you posed this question:

I’d like to ask a rhetorical question. What Christian sect is most characterized by their ritual activity? Catholicism. Why is that? What is it about Catholicism specifically that lends itself to a heavy reliance on ritual to achieve its spiritual ends?

Do you have any insights into why this is the case?

I was discussing this topic with my brother sometime back and he didn’t have anything helpful much to say, but he did mention that there are sects of the Catholic Church now that still practice pre-Vatican 2 Church services. That is they say the Mass in Latin.His only insight into this was Mel Gibson is a follower of this particular kind of Catholicism and as such says his own Masses.

Although I’m no expert on Catholicism, I have a couple of observations on this:

First, historically it’s worth remembering that Catholicism has been around a lot longer than Protestantism (we’ll just leave the Eastern Church aside). After all for a large chunk of the history of the Church the majority of its believers would have been illiterate and uneducated. Thus we might expect that ritual would be an important part of their religiosity.

Also the Catholic church began in more ritualistic times. In the Roman empire, including Roman Palestine, ritual was more common and important part of religion than it is in a lot of places today.

Historically, this ritual focus may be more of a baseline. The question might be why are other Christian denomenations so non-ritually oriented.

Second, Catholicism recognizes tradition and precedent as an important source of authority, as opposed to Protestantism which generally gives overwhelming authority to the Bible. I would imagine this creates a situation where it’s comparatively easy for rituals to be perpetuated (“That’s what we’ve always done”).

Third, at least in the modern age of religious freedom, Catholics are a self-selecting group to a large extent. A lot of people become Catholic because they love the ritual and a lot of people who don’t love it leave.

Fourth, being raised Catholic often seems to inculcate a love or at least affection for ritual. This is often true even for people who leave the Church: an atheist professor I knew freely admitted nostalgia for “smells and bells” and I still enjoy midnight mass on Christmas Eve.

This also bears indirectly on the methodology question in that these are the germs of the sort of questions that I personaly might be interested in asking and that I think could be fruitfully answered. Given that this is Catholicism I’m sure it’s already been done.

And, by the way, Thank you both for the interesting posts.

Grizzly

Good points Grizzly. I agree with your insights. In my opinion, I tend to think that one of the main reasons why Catholicism is so ritually dependent is:

quote:
Originally posted by Grizzly: Second, Catholicism recognizes tradition and precedent as an important source of authority, as opposed to Protestantism which generally gives overwhelming authority to the Bible. I would imagine this creates a situation where it's comparatively easy for rituals to be perpetuated ("That's what we've always done").

Traditionally, Catholics are not really allowed and qulified to go to the Bible for answers. In this sects view, people are inherently sinners, and cannot approach God directly. We need an intercessor, (priest) who can do it for us. Hence, the nedd for confession, and pwnance, etc. This was one of Martin Luther’s big gripes with the church. Robbed of intellectual access to scripture, Catholics were instead treated to a heavily aesthetic and ritual based form of worship. The “smells and bells”. Closer to paganism than it’s more intellectual, book based, and reserved counterpart, Protestantism (although a trip to a black baptist church in the south and exposure to the rich musical and ritual traditions of these denominations will serve to immediately blur my distiction), Catholicism is therefore heavily aesthetic, and heavily ritualized.

But I’m by no means an expert in the field. I’m actually a practicing pagan, and my fields of study were anthropology and painting!