Ritual Thwartedness

My first semester back in school is winding down to a close, and though I look forward to the winter break I find myself slightly disappointed that I will no longer be in Myth, Symbol, Ritual class, which has been immensely informative and is really reshaping, or reaffirming, the direction of my life.

For my last research paper I decided to look at the Ghost Dance among the Lakota Sioux, which in the first steps of tentative research fascinated me as an example of a ritual response to oppression, as the Sioux at the time of Ghost Dance, in 1890, were terribly distraught over vanishing food supplies, the encroachment and lies of the American Government, and the prohibitions against their performance of their traditional ritual Sun Dance. However, in looking closer at the subject, what began to emerge was this picture in which the Ghost Dance, as practiced by the Lakota Sioux, failed to work. Instead of reviving the earth and promoting peace, as the prophet Wovoka had urged people it would, or bringing about a millennial destruction of the white oppressors, the Ghost Dance only led the Sioux into the bloody massacre at Wounded Knee. This led me to ask, just what in the way that the Sioux had taken up the Ghost Dance was the cause of this ritual failure? How did it draw on their own religious traditions, how did it distort the original, peaceful message of its messiah? Most peculiarly, just where did the doctrine of Ghost Shirts come from, the special articles of clothing worn only by the Lakota Ghost Dancers that they believed would protect them from bullets, and by playing into their warlike nature may have led them into a more active resistance against the US military?

The idea of ritual failure is not one discussed by many theorists on ritual, despite the fact that it is experienced with almost as much frequency as ritual success by participants. While researching the Soma sacrifice in the Vedic rituals earlier in the semester, I came upon one theorist who had suggested that rituals of sacrifice had at one point contained an element of death or danger as their driving force. But by the time many of these practices had become codified in the Brāhmaṇas the only thing the priests had to fear was that they might perform the rituals wrong. For some reason this idea fascinated me, and I began to pay more attention to examples in my own life where a given set of actions didn't go according to plan, and the resulting cognitive dissonance that results. For instance, I ordered a book online last week, and yesterday received the wrong item in the mail. Not that this is a big deal, but it created an extra amount of effort on my part to rectify the problem. Mainly though it seemed a breach of conduct, a situation where something was supposed to happen one way, but then happened some way else, and instead of the smooth system of transaction I'd always experienced before with online shopping I was faced with a moment when the whole system was cast into confusion. How much more disastrous would this feel when the rituals that go wrong are not just something so trivial, but are relied upon to ensure the functioning of your whole reality, the continuation of life as you know it?

I suppose the real source of my fascination with ritual failure comes from an existential situation I call "thwartedness." Last year while trying to organize all the symbols and themes that occur in my dreams, I kept finding situations in which something was supposed to happen but couldn't. The desire to go somewhere but you end up somewhere else, walking down the street but suddenly realizing that you are not wearing any clothes. I was struck by the way in which these dream failures could show something very explicit about just what isn't working in my life (though thankfully this thwartedness has lessened with the years). And after asking around I determined that this was a situation many people found themselves in during their dreams, if not in their waking lives as well. But why would we subconsciously want to thwart ourselves? What is it in that peculiar brew of human desire and fear that continually throws up barriers, self-sabotage? The Lakota adopted a doctrine that they believed would make them invulnerable, but did not test it due to unshakeable belief in the power of the Ghost Shirts. When doctors told one women that they would have to remove her Ghost Shirt to treat her wounds, she told them to go ahead, she didn't want it or believe in it anymore, since it failed to keep her safe.

Democracy vs. Reincarnation

In a startling break from century-old tradition, the Dalai Lama proposed that Tibetan Buddhists vote for his successor, instead of seeking his next incarnation after he is dead.



Ironically, China's atheist communist government, which has moved to stifle Tibetan independence since its takeover in 1951, objects that the Dalai Lama's new referendum is "a blatant violation of religious practice and historical procedure." However, Tibetans fear that the Chinese government will take control over the search for the new Dalai Lama, and the current Dalai Lama suggests that this may be a way of granting Tibetans "real autonomy." This raises the question of if or when an ancient ritual practice stops functioning in the way it should in the modern world, just what is the best method of continuing to live in a traditional manner?


And in other news, The Vatican issued a music video starring the late Pope John Paul II, in order to encourage people to vote him into sainthood.

Dreams of Identity in Everett’s "Erasure"

Dreams of Identity in Everett’s "Erasure"

Of the various literary devices made use of in Percival Everett’s "Erasure," perhaps the most revealing is that of dream narratives, whereby Monk Ellison, and Van Go Jenkins, the narrator of Monk’s fictional novel My Pafology, dream events which, though not ascribed as “real” events in the narrative, nonetheless carry a significatory weight that can elucidate other aspects of the text. At the beginning of the novel, Monk says, “the society in which I live tells me I am black” (1). He believes that race, and personal identities in general, are purely a social construct of language. But throughout the novel we see that this language of race and identity, as displayed in the cultural acceptance of the ghetto dialect in which Monk writes My Pafology, is the only language his society knows, leading to a conflict where Monk begins to identify with his stereotypical nom de plume, Stagg R. Leigh. Monk’s dreams portray this encroaching conflict of identity, in which his personal interests, education, family dramas, psychological difficulties, and creative intentions are pitted against societal expectations that would violently erase personal identity.

In the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung, dreams can tell us something about the identity of the dreamer; either repressed, childhood concerns, or dynamic, self-affirming principles. Regardless of the methodology or theory used, such dream interpretation often relies on knowledge of the individual dreamer’s life, as well as on symbolic archetypes that may or may not exist in all human expression. Though not intentionally created by the dreamer, a dream could thus be taken as a signification of that person’s life, and the individual as the dream’s “author.” We might assume that though the author of a text writes the dream narrative, it is similarly supposed to function as an unconscious or symbolic measure of the dreaming character’s life. Roland Barthes, in his essay, “Death of the Author,” suggests that the history and personality of a novel’s author may not serve as an accurate guide for interpreting their text. Barthes instead posits a scriptor, the narrative voice born in the act of writing itself, which allows interpretation to proceed as a disentanglement of narrative elements within the text. While dream narratives may not signify anything about the actual author, they may serve as textual clues for the interpretation of the scriptors or characters in a book, which are merely aspects of the text. This being the case, it is possible to look at dream narratives, such as those in Erasure, as a narrative layer that can further help disentangle the threads of the character’s identities.

Early in the novel, Monk dreams that his father is telling him stories about certain African-American authors, and then finds himself to be younger, watching a school of fish from a pier. Shortly, Monk discovers, “Then my sister was with me and she was trying to tell me something, but she was, uncharacteristically, beating around the bush.” She asks, “‘Did you see him?’ I stopped her and asked, ‘See whom?’ But she laughed at me for having said whom and would not come back to the subject” (41-2). Childhood memories, fishing, and the lives of artists fill a considerable part of Monk’s attention throughout Erasure, and they may be part of his way of expressing his unique identity versus his concerns that, “some people in the society in which I live… tell me I am not black enough” (2). But it is Monk’s relationship to his family that is more significantly explicated in this passage. Though his father is dead, Monk occasionally remembers his father’s pride in the young Monk’s decision to become a writer. Furthermore, this paternal encouragement often separates him from his siblings, who are both doctors, and take offense at Monk’s precocious use of the English language. Monk’s “whom” may reflect his solid education and supportive upbringing, but this personal use of language puts him at odds with reviewers, like the one who is at a loss to understand what his experimental writing, “has to do with the African American experience” (2).

Prior to this dream, Monk eats lunch with his sister, Lisa, in a Capitol Grill restaurant in D.C., and during a conversation about Monk’s writing career and inability to talk to other people Lisa says he is different. “Different from whom?” is Monk’s reply (26), perhaps not only to Lisa, but also to an unknown man who Monk catches staring at his sister, though she claims not to know him, or to the picketers shouting “Murderer!” in front of the abortion clinic where Lisa works (29). The next day, Monk learns that his sister has been killed, presumably by the pro-life protestors, and due to the linguistic similarities between Monk’s dream and the scene in the Capitol Grill, it might be tempting to read Lisa’s dream-question “did you see him?” as referring to the unknown man in the restaurant as her potential murderer. This use of a prophetic dream as narrative foreshadowing may however be a manipulative device of the text in order to conceal what is actually going on in the novel.
After eating with his sister, and before learning she is dead, Monk reads a review of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ bestselling novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a distortion of African-American life, and is asked by his editor that he imitate this form in order to be “black enough” (43) for his audience. In light of Monk’s revulsion when he first hears of Jenkins’ book, it is possible that Lisa’s question in the dream instead refers to Monk, and his concern about being an educated, black author whose, “work was not commercial enough to make any real money” (42). If the dream acts as narrative foreshadowing, it is a premonition not of his sister’s murder, but of the eventual birth of Stagg R. Leigh, Monk’s imaginary nom de plume. This stereotypically black, incommunicative ex-con has no identity of his own and is compared by Monk to being as mercurial and immaterial as the character Rinehart in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Though Monk does not see him now, this dream passage raises the suggestion that there is someone else to be seen, a version of Monk Ellison that would not reply, “See whom,” and who is capable of writing in the ghetto dialect that makes My Pafology a publishable novel.

Out of his disgust with the success of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ book, and his alienation after his sister’s death that forces him to move to D.C. and take care of their ailing mother, Monk writes My Pafology, his own take on black stereotypes that is intended to mock We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. Everett includes the entirety of this novel within Erasure, and fittingly begins it with another dream. In this passage, the main character of Monk’s My Pafology, Van Go Jenkins, stabs his mother to death, claiming that he does this because, “…I love her. Cause I hate her. Cause I ain’t got no daddy” (66). It is this dream that sets the tone for Go’s actions throughout the rest of the novel-in-a-novel, including a fight with his knife-wielding mother and his shooting of Willy, a man who claims to be Go’s father. Go’s excuse for this latter action is that Willy brought him into this world where he “ain’t shit” (124). By describing such violent actions in an extreme racial dialect, Monk attempts to offer a parody of ghetto life.

This parody of black identity and actions is further conveyed in another dream sequence where Go wants to have children with a parade of beautiful women. After imagining what he might name these kids, Go has a startling revelation, “I looks down and I see that my dick ain’t nuffin but a bump” (82), prompting jeers from the women until one of them tells Go that she doesn’t care if he doesn’t have a penis, except that she turns into his mother and Go stabs her over and over again. These two dreams suggest that Monk decided to portray the real problem with such stereotypical “ghetto life” not in terms of socio-economic deprivation, but as a case of Freudian psychological repressions. The “ho” that becomes Go’s mother, his desire to stab her because he doesn’t have a father, bespeak more of castration anxieties and an Oedipus complex rather than a lack of education as the cause of Go’s desires to criminally dehumanize women. Monk casts “ghetto life” as a sense of inferiority bred from a lack of clear family identities and values. With the lack of a strong male role model, does Go’s mother become the mythical black “Matriarch,” who he must stab in order to affirm his self-worth, and in the process stab out at the rest of society?

It is possible that in writing this parody on African-American life in the same style as We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Monk is assuming the identity of Juanita Mae Jenkins and using her own language against her. However, textual references suggest that Monk may be also referring to his own life in My Pafology. In Go’s second dream sequence, two of the names that he imagines for the children he would have with the dream “hos” are Fantasy and Mystery, names which refer to an earlier conversation Monk has with his sister, where he says, “I come up with shit for a living and I couldn’t have come up with that” (26). The reality of African-American life that would lead someone to use these two names is too absurd for Monk’s educated sensibilities. Similarly, the castration theme of this dream, where Go’s penis “ain’t nuffin but a bump,” is referenced later in a somewhat disembodied interlude during Monk’s struggle to maintain his own identity despite Stagg R. Leigh’s literary success, where Monk says, “Somehow I managed to take myself, the writer, reconfigure myself, then disintegrate myself, leaving two bodies of work… I had caught myself standing naked in front of the mirror and discovered that I had nothing to hide and that lack was exactly what forced me to turn away” (257). Monk then says that he cut off his own penis, using a variety of slang words for this member, suggesting that the body which we think of as the most real and personal part of our identity may also be nothing but a construct of language. As Monk struggles to deal with his own mother’s mental decline, his own inability to take care of her, and the absence of a father in his own life, it is possible that the somewhat psychologically repressed dreams of Monk’s character Van Go Jenkins may really be referring to Monk’s own psychological difficulties. The creation of Stagg R. Leigh as the fictional author of My Pafology may not only serve to further the book’s insistence on being a parody, but may also serve to protect Monk from the startling fact that though he and Go have different identities, they are somehow the same: caught in familial difficulties and socially constructed roles that do not allow them to express themselves or their race as they really are.

While events and characters in My Pafology may or may not refer to Monk’s actual life, he certainly insists that he intended the book to be a parody of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, and its black stereotypes. By explicitly framing his intentions, Monk may be trying to call into question Barthes’ assertion that a text is not representational of an author’s life and intentions. However, Monk may have fallen for this intentional fallacy himself, as his publisher, reviewers, and audience all end up taking the book as a true statement about African-American life. The text becomes indexical not of Monk’s life and intentions, but of its fictional author, Stagg R. Leigh, an identity that Monk assumes in order get the book published and to promote it on the Kenya Dunston show. This may be an example of Barthes’ suggestion that an author’s identity does not precede their text, but is created from the process of writing, leading to Monk’s final inability to disentangle himself from the fiction that he created.
Between Monk’s appearance as Stagg R. Leigh on the Kenya Dunston show, and the acceptance of Stagg’s book for the National Book Award, Monk has one last dream sequence that suggests the depths of his crisis of identity before loosing touch with reality altogether in Erasure’s climax. In this passage, Monk dreams that he cannot wake up from being pursued by Nazi soldiers. He sees the Germans burn down a house and bayonet a painting of Starry Night, describing that concurrently, “I felt a sharp pain in my middle, grabbed my stomach and when I looked down at my hand I found it was covered with blood” (255). The soldiers burn Monk through the painting before he finally mows them down with a machine gun, but one wounded Nazi bleeds all the way into his foxhole and speaks, “The wounded man looked at me, at my own blood on my shirt, and said, ‘Wie heißen Sie?’ And I didn’t know” (256).

Two of Monk’s earlier imagined conversations take place between Hitler and Meister Eckhart, who discuss their writings that attack Jews and secure the German race. These fictional dialogues, and Hitler’s rise to power in general, may serve as examples of the danger spread from racial stereotypes and the defining of identity on one’s racial group alone. Within the last dream sequence, Monk’s thoughts on race and identity, as spelled out in the text of these conversations, have re-created him as someone intimately involved in Hitler’s Germany, as someone on the opposite side of the Nazi dialectic of racial affirmation and destruction. However, the imagined conversations between other artists whose work is being burned also lead Monk to identify himself with a work of art, to the point of being wounded along with it, in much the same way that he has so viscerally identified himself with the fictional Stagg R. Leigh. In particular, the painting is Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, whose name is referenced in Van Go Jenkins, identifying Monk with his fictional character. By shooting back at the German soldiers, Monk is further identified with Go Jenkins, who dreams of stabbing his mother and goes on a violent rampage at the end of My Pafology, but also perhaps with the unknown murderer of his sister and all those who might perpetuate violence in the name of belief or racial identity.

Monk’s inability to tell just who he is culminates in the dream when the wounded soldier asks, “Wie heißen Sie,” which in English translates as, ‘what is your name?’ Monk no longer knows how to answer this seemingly simple query, and in the novel’s final scene this conflict comes to a head. When his book is given the National Book award and the author is asked to stand up, Monk rises and experiences a sharp break with reality. He is shown a mirror in which he sees the face of Stagg R. Leigh, and finally remarks into a TV camera that he is on television, just as his character Go does at the end of My Pafology. The narrator is no longer clearly Monk Ellison, for he has now also become both the stereotyped author and character whose identities stemmed from Monk’s desire to parody those stereotypes in the first place. However, it is also possible that when the dream-soldier asks for his name, Monk says he doesn’t know not just because he no longer knows his own name, but also because he is unable to understand identity when it is couched in terms of racial dialects or dialectics. Society wants Monk to say that he is a black author addressing black themes, or that if he is black he ought to act out of the same kinds of violent and thuggish stereotypes he is trying to protest, but this is unintelligible and even inimical to Monk’s other identities, as a child, a sibling, a fisher and woodworker, an educated and experimental novelist, and finally perhaps a human being struggling with the same kinds of psychological concerns that plague any other individual.

Confronted with the religious zealotry that may have killed his sister, the education and authorial intentions that distinguish him from other authors, the stereotypes of “ghetto life” that make best-selling novels, and the uncertainty of the role of art to the most real aspects of life and personal identity, when Monk is finally asked to define himself on society’s terms, both in the soldier’s question and in claiming authorship of My Pafology, he cannot answer. Unable, or unwilling, to turn to the violent responses of Go, his sister’s murderer, or of the soldiers in his dream, that are necessitated by the dialectics of race and belief, Monk’s identity itself becomes a dream, and he states in Latin as the book’s last line, “hypothesis non fingo” (265), ‘I do not form a hypothesis.’ By the end of Erasure, the text seems to suggest that Monk’s personal identification is irrelevant to how he is perceived, and that if social constructs, stereotypes, and language itself were to become erased, then identity could not exist.

There is No Religious "Right"

Religious persecution is nothing new, nor is a religious or ritual response to oppression. Gandhi, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance, even, some might say, Jesus Christ, offered resistance to mainstream religious narratives through their faith and preaching of peace and tolerance. Sadly, words become distorted, and the cycle of violence continues. Over the last several days, in Malaysia, the Tamil sect of Hindus protested against decades worth of unfair treatment by the government, and in Tehran, a Sufi monastery was torched by Shiite vigilantes. [via Technoccult]

My teacher, Dr. Fred Clothey, spent many years working with the Tamil, both in India and in various diasporas here in America, trying to promote religious discussion and peace. As he put it, most religious intolerance occurs out of a fundamental inability to take the other person's point of view into consideration, and that it is perhaps not possible to even understand our own beliefs until you've been able to directly empathize with those who believe something entirely different.

On the Death of the Critic (or the Rebirth of Intention)

When I first read Roland Barthe’s essay “The Death of the Author” I thought it reeked of repressed Nietzschean overtones to somehow kill off the exact creator on which literary criticism thrived. As a writer myself, I felt that my intentions did indeed matter to what I was trying to say, regardless of how a reader might take my utterings. Of course, the question really comes down to the motivations of modern critics, who in positing the Intentional and Affective Fallacies have effectively neutered both the writer and the reader as essential to the meaning of a text and instead instilled themselves, and the techniques of The Academy, as the sole judges of interpretation. If the Author’s life were important to the meaning of a text, then it would be impossible to understand their work without getting somewhat of a biographical or psychological sketch, which a critic is perhaps less qualified or driven to do when they can just sit in their armchairs and ruminate on the text itself. However, looking at the mass of modern literature and art, without recourse to their creators or socio-cultural contexts, it is hard to see any of them as being all that meaningful. Stereotypically flat doctors, lawyers, and detectives abound, but they seem to say more when considering that these are modern cultural hero-types that ultimately sell. One thing that can be said about the authorial geniuses of the 1900s is that they could actually write, and not being burdened with fears of actually being attached to their work, poured their hearts onto their pages.

Literary criticism is a relatively recent phenomenon, and as such should be compared to other forms of textual interpretation, especially hermeneutics, which dates back far beyond divine medieval auctors to Greek attempts to interpret ancient mythologies. One of the biggest challenges that arises in interpreting myths, symbol systems (or perhaps any given literary text), is just how much the meaning is derived from the socio-cultural context in which the story was originally told. The fantastic exploits of gods and demons make about as much sense as modern comic book superheroes outside the cultural givens in which every act and symbol might offer some reflection on the beliefs of the culture. Through centuries of use in interpreting religious texts, hermeneutics eventually emerged within a broad philosophical framework that attempts to do justice to a work’s origins, to take a people seriously whose words might be otherwise meaningless or inconsequential to modern, Western perspectives. The Authors may be long dead, but what they intended is perhaps of a much greater importance, and texts can tell us an infinite amount about those who created them. Certainly an Author’s words can be misunderstood, but just because we can choose to ignore their intentions does not mean that what they meant for their writing does not also have some validity. Furthermore, this hermeneutic approach also requires the interpreter to empathize with the authors, to enter into an emotional dialogue that truly wants to understand them, and to do the ethnological, historical, and psychological work that is necessary to achieve any true understanding of a text, instead of hiding lazily under the dust-jackets.

Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science

Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science

"One who grasps [written Hebrew’s] … structure deeply and by the roots, and knows how to keep that [structure] fitted to the fields of knowledge will have a pattern and a rule for the complete discovery of anything that can be known."
–Pico della Mirandola (Copenhaver, Number 41)

Scholars have often seen the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola as the most prominent harbinger of modern culture, especially in his Oration’s espousal of the ‘dignity of man’ (Copenhaver and Schmitt 163). Frances Yates suggests that Pico reformulated the position of European man as a Magus, who by acting upon the world through magic and the Cabala could control his destiny with science (Yates 116). While this concept of a new relationship between human will and the world may have aided the Scientific Revolution, through its focus on analysis and technological operations, Renaissance magic and occultism were often viewed as illegitimate by orthodox religion, philosophy, and the growing scientific approach to reality (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 262, 280). Pico’s active interest in magic has led scholars such as Lynn Thorndike to dismiss his influence on science altogether (Copenhaver, Number 26). However, Recent studies by Brian P. Copenhaver may show that Pico della Mirandola’s focus on language and hermeneutic interpretation in the Cabala helped broaden the fields of textual analysis, mathematics, and the precision of scientific languages.

Like most Renaissance philosophers, Pico was interested in history, physics, mathematics, and other ‘natural philosophies’ that formed the basis for the Scientific Revolution, but his research did not exclude the more Humanist concerns of poetry, art, grammar, and ethics that were seen as culturally useful knowledge (Copenhaver and Schmitt 24, 28 and Copenhaver, Number 30). Such diverse learning was a prevalent tool in Renaissance philosophy, and Pico saw this eclecticism as an aspect of man’s freedom, with which he tried to construct a broader sense of truth from diverse texts without adhering to any particular philosophy (Copenhaver and Schmitt 59, 167-8). In 1486, Pico wrote the Oration to introduce his 900 Conclusions (Copenhaver and Schmitt 165-6), which were intended to be a total synthesis of all current knowledge (Yates 94), and empower man to transcend his ontological and moral positions in the world (Copenhaver and Schmitt 166-7). Though the recovery of ancient texts and the study of classical manuscripts was a prime concern of Renaissance philosophers (Copenhaver and Schmitt 33), Pico embraced systems of thought rejected by other Humanists and little known to most European Christians (Copenhaver and Schmitt 171). In his Conclusions, Pico attempted to harmonize Plato and Aristotle with the translations of semi-philosophic religious manuscripts called the Hermetic Corpus, as well as Pythagorean, Orphic, Chaldeaen, and Cabalistic texts that formed the basis of Renaissance ‘natural magic’ (Copenhaver and Schmitt 16, 168).

In 1462, Marsilio Ficino translated the Hermetic Corpus for Cosimo Medici, and his On Arranging One’s Life According to the Heavens served as the most influential text on magic theory for several centuries, giving educated Europeans a philosophical basis for their beliefs in magic, astrology, and the occult (Copenhaver and Schmitt 146-7, 159-60). Philosophical and pious Renaissance Magi replaced medieval notions of disreputable and necromantic wizards (Yates 107), and for Ficino, the aim of their natural magic was to put “natural materials in relationship with natural causes” (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 281). The decline of magic as a legitimate concern of natural philosophy was one of the most important features of the Scientific Revolution, but empirical occultism remained a significant source of natural and historical information for Renaissance philosophers (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 290, 280). This magical world-view also expressed the same impulse of “turning towards and operating on the world” essential to the development of the mechanical and mathematical sciences (Copenhaver, Number 263).

After meeting Ficino in the 1480s, Pico hoped to combine Ficino’s natural magic with his own unified theories, in order to overcome philosophical sectarian discord (Copenhaver and Schmitt 174). However, Pico recommended magic much more openly than did his colleague, in the form of a practical Cabala that could tap the higher powers of the cosmos through the invocation of angels and the names of God (Yates 84). Having studied languages in several different universities, Pico learned of Cabala from Elia Del Medigo while in Padua, and later from the Sicilian rabbi Flavius Mithridates, who translated several thousand pages of Cabalistic texts for the young philosopher (Copenhaver and Schmitt 170-1). Cabala is a Jewish mystical tradition, supposedly handed down from Moses as a source of ancient wisdom, and developed in 13th Century Spain in the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah, or “Book of Creation” (Yates 92). For Pico, Cabalism was comparable to the Hermetic Corpus of the mythical Hermes Trismegistus (Yates 84-5). At the core of Cabalistic doctrine are the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Sephiroth, or ‘enumerations,’ the ten names most common to God that were used to create the world (Yates 92). In the Hebrew account of creation, as told in Genesis, God spoke the world into existence. Thus, the Cabalists saw the Hebrew words and letters as containing the creative language of God, and they developed interpretative techniques to understand the nature of the world from the text of the Scriptures (Yates 85, 92).

Of particular interest to Pico’s studies on the Cabala were the 13th century commentaries on Maimonides by Abraham Abulafia. This Spanish mystic developed a technique of combining Hebrew letters in endless permutations, called a ‘revolving alphabet,’ which became a primary source for Pico’s textual analysis (Copenhaver and Schmitt 171-2, and Yates 93). At the suggestion of his translator, Flavius, Pico innovated the Cabala by linguistically deriving the name of Jesus from the names of God, as an encoded Christian secret in the Scriptures (Copenhaver and Schmitt 172). He went so far in his Conclusions as to claim that magic and Cabala could give the most scientific certainty about Christ’s divinity, a statement that the Christian Church found heretical, which prompted their refusal to let Pico print his work (Copenhaver and Schmitt 169, 166). But even in his formal Apology to the Church, published in 1489, Pico still defended his magical use of Cabala, by dividing it into a theoretical or contemplative branch and a practical branch that magically operated on the names of God (Copenhaver and Schmitt 169). Pico called this later Cabala the “practical part of natural knowledge,” classified it as a science that could “make practical the whole of formal metaphysics and of lower theology,” and claimed that no magical operation worked without its use (Copenhaver, Number 34-6, Yates 95, and 91).

According to Copenhaver, the importance of these Cabalistic studies, and Pico’s ultimate insistence on their operative use, relies on the last thesis of his Conclusions: “Just as the true astrology teaches us to read in the book of God, in the same way Cabala teaches us to read in the book of the Law” (Copenhaver, Number 25). Pico was fascinated with the idea that the Universe was a vast and original book that could be interpreted through the magical languages of shape and number (Copenhaver, Number 29-30), in much the same way that the Scriptures could be interpreted through the Hebrew Language. Hermeneutics, the Cabalist method of textual interpretation, had taught Pico that nothing in the Torah lacks meaning, even individual letters contained secrets that could be penetrated through specific techniques (Copenhaver, Number 52, and Copenhaver and Schmitt 172), such as linguistic abbreviation or transposition, called notarikon and temurah (Yates 93). The most complex technique that Pico used in his practical Cabala was gematria, a system in which numerical values are assigned to each Hebrew letter. Through the intricate linguistic arithmetic of gematria, calculations between numbers and words could reveal “the entire organization of the world in terms of word-numbers” (Yates 93 and Copenhaver, Number 41), a revelation that was bound to appeal to Pico’s explicit goal of synthesizing all knowledge.

By recommending such linguistic signs as magically operative over natural substances, Pico had to make a distinction between the shape or figure of letters and their linguistic messages, in order to avoid the charge that his magic communicated with demons (Yates 88-9, and Copenhaver, Number 61, 39). As such, Pico built on medieval theories of signification and supposition, as well as on Thomas Aquinas’s semiotic theories in which Scriptural parts of speech mean something by themselves, outside of their semantic content. Pico suggested that there is a difference between God’s original use of language, which signifies the creation of the world, and the priest or Magi’s repetitious and onomatopoeic language, that does not actually signify anything (Copenhaver, Number 39-40). In his Conclusions, Pico states that any speech is powerful if informed by the speech of God, but Hebrew letters were meaningful in themselves as “characters and figures,” like those used to mark amulets in astrology or alchemy, because their shape revealed the shape of God to medieval Cabalists (Copenhaver, Number 33-4, 37). Characters and figures were in the safe realm of natural action because they shared the powers attributed by Pythagorean philosophers to mathematical entities, and this conjunction between shape, number, and word in Cabalism further articulated a magical arithmetic for Pico (Copenhaver, Number 37, 60, and 34). This mathematical use of language, along with Pico’s focuses on the precision of significant speech and hermeneutic analysis of texts, were themes taken up and expanded by later natural philosophers, such as Giambattisto Vico and Galileo Galilei.

Hermeneutics, as a theory of interpreting linguistic and non-linguistic expressions that might have deeper, non-literal meanings, descended from Greek philosophy through Renaissance Biblical studies, and eventually came to include the study of all classical texts. Vico, in his Scienza Nuova of 1725, argued that thinking is always rooted in a specific cultural context, and that textual interpretation, from poetry to technical vocabularies, must involve historical and cultural studies as well as self-understanding (Ramberg and Gjesdal). These ideas have become essential to modern hermeneutical analysis, and may have resulted from Renaissance Humanists like Pico, who modernized the study of classical manuscripts by improving knowledge of ancient languages and specific cultural-historical settings (Copenhaver and Schmitt 33). Furthermore, as a tool for revealing layers of symbolic meaning, hermeneutics shares with scientific languages the attempt to provide a foundation for meaning through a critical attitude and precise terminology (Rasmussen 22-3). Drawing on his Cabalistic studies in which the phonetics of language were more corporeal than the semantic contents, Pico criticized rhetoric as a superficial obfuscation of truth, and stressed that philosophical language must be a tool of clarity, accuracy, and seriousness (Copenhaver and Schmitt 170-1). In this light, Pico’s Cabalist conclusions may have revealed “new tools for understanding nature as God’s creation,” which scholars such as Ernst Cassirer and Eugenio Garin believed had methodological, ethical, and epistemological consequences for the development of science (Copenhaver, Number 26-7).

In the last years of his life, Pico della Mirandola wrote a refutation of predictive astrology, Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem, an attempt to defend human freedom from astral determinism that became his largest project (Copenhaver and Schmitt 176). Downplaying the magical aspects of astrology that interested Ficino and other natural philosophers, Pico argued that the Cabalistic deciphering of shapes in the Torah could teach astrologers how to more accurately read signs in the stars (Copenhaver, Number 61). Not only did this project defend the human importance of finding meaning in nature, but distinguished mathematical-physical causality from astrological causality, and suggested that phenomena could only be understood through experience; themes that may have foreshadowed the works of Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, and Newton (Copenhaver, Number 25-7).

Galileo also made the claim that the Universe was a book that could be read in a language of characters through mathematics, which may have inspired Descartes’ coordinate geometry, that was also viewed by its critics as a form of magic using shapes as explanation (Copenhaver, Number 29). Though Galileo’s hermeneutics of reading shape into the stars detached Scripture from nature to form a mathematical science, this development from natural philosophy may not have been possible without Pico’s correlation of nature to text in his work with the Cabala (Copenhaver, Number 61-2). By focusing on textual interpretation, the relationship between form, number, and language, and the need for accurate linguistic signification, Pico was able to transform the mystical system of the Cabala into an operative magic, which became a tool for Renaissance natural philosophers to begin exploring their world in a scientific manner.

Bibliography

Copenhaver, B. “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala: The Upright Tsade, the Closed Mem, and the Gaping Jaws of Azazel.” Natural Particulars: Nature and Disciplines in Renaissance Europe. Eds. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999

--- “Natural Magic, Hermetism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science.” Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Eds. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990

Copenhaver, B. and Schmitt, C. “Renaissance Philosophy.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992

Rasmussen, D. “Symbol and Interpretation.” The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974

Yates, F. “Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964

Ramberg, B. and Gjesdal, K. “Hermeneutics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Online. 9 Nov. 2005. Available http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/

Narrative Validity

I have an immense respect for other people's narratives and beliefs, regardless if they can be proven objectively true, because what is most important is the way that people live based on these stories.



While working on my research paper about the symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent for the Gunwinggu tribe of Indigenous Australia I came upon the belief that if a person ate in secret, spoiled a crying child, cooked on a dangerous riverbank, or generally misused the limited natural resources, the Rainbow Serpent Ngaljod would rise from its waterhole and, causing great storms, drown or eat the tribe. There were no public sanctions against these food taboos outside of the very real fear of a mythic or narrative retribution.

While editing the paper I chanced to comment that this prohibition was somewhat like my close friend's assertion that if she drinks (or uses in general), her whole life would fall apart. This of course upset her as belittling her situation, because for her not drinking is a very real fear that really would have drastic effects on her life. I had to make clear that I completely understood the emotional importance of her claims, and that the Indigenous Australians likewise had very real fears of not having enough to eat. What I had attempted to point out was that in both situations there was no external compulsion or law against a certain behavior, but a subjective story that described what would certainly happen if that action was unfortunately performed. As far as the story works in affecting the way one lives than I am prone to consider it "true," and any objectivity about what might actually happen is entirely beyond the point.

Of course, I can recognize, albeit slowly, that it is extremely difficult to talk to people about their deeply held beliefs in an objective or intellectual manner, or to compare them to other beliefs. For my friend, this story of her life falling apart if she uses is a very real, important matter that she lives with on a daily basis, and to suggest that it is a narrative (not, mind you, a fictive narrative), removes it from the emotional importance it needs to be effective. I imagine that that the Indigenous Australians may have been similarly outraged if a visiting anthropologist tried to tell them that the Rainbow Serpent was only a myth. For them it was a very real creature living in the local waterholes that really would drown them if they broke certain taboos. I am inclined to take their words for it at face value, while recognizing that there is possibly a deeper psychological mechanism at work. Granted, there are vast differences between these two kinds of stories, but in trying to respect that I think there is some value in pointing out the similarities of how people use narratives in their lives.

I know for a fact that I have done the same thing for a long time (and perhaps this is something many people do in order to determine their lives), telling stories of my social or familial roles, or perhaps more relevantly, using archetypal figures from my dreams as examples for how I lived. Some of these stories were very true for me, and if questioned I too would probably have responded with some amount of hostility. It took me a long time to realize that my personal narrative of the world ending if I didn't go on some deep personal quest to save it was, objectively, just a story. Not even to mention my real beliefs in meeting an angelic anima figure that haunted my dreams for years; but that actually happened, which is another story altogether. I think what I finally learned, though I think I knew it all along, is that on one level it is vitally important to have stories to describe how we want or have to live, but on another level it is perhaps just as important to recognize that these are in fact just stories we tell ourselves, that they have the most valid weight for us alone (unless of course they are mass political stories like those that have caused many of the world's atrocities), and that if our particular stories are no longer working to narrate our lives properly than we can change them. Of course, changing one's beliefs is extremely difficult as it often calls into question everything else about our lives, but sometimes, I think, it is necessary to do just that.

Triangles of the Gods

Late last night Sophie and I were laying around talking, and she asked me to explicate a point I had tried to make about dreams being much more related to art than to science, as she knows I expressed uncertainty about being back in school and being able to make clear arguments vocally in class. This lead into a much larger discussion about the roots of psychology and science in the ancient philosophers, and I was surprised to discover how much I was able to tie in points I had learned in class, as if I am actually already learning this stuff. It made me realize how much I miss good intellectual conversations, which seem so few and far between in my life right now but have never really drawn on source material the way I will be expected to do for school.

For my history of philosophy class, Magic Medicine and Science, I was asked to read Plato's "Timaeus," the ideas of which are perhaps pivotal to the modern view of science and medicine, but what immediately struck me was how much it sounded like a load of hogwash. Full of Demiurges and half-formulated mathematical theorems, an attempt to explain the creation of the world in terms of the four elements which would be laughed down if published in the modern world, and yet still held such an impact on all trains of rational thinking that followed. I felt that with his preponderance on just how the Demiurge created the world, the soul, and all the creatures, the "Timaeus" read almost more like a creation myth I would discuss in my Myth Symbol and Ritual class, although with the supernatural beings replaced by the peculiar triangles of the Platonic solids. And yet I could still see how it was the root of logic, that it attempted to offer an explanation of the processes of the natural world without recourse to a pantheon of gods. It is kind of difficult to wrap my brain around the fact that Plato existed simultaneously with the myths of Zeus and his pantheon, despite the hoakiness of his theories it seems like two entirely different views of reality.

Of course, amidst all the elements cutting each other to create color and getting mixed about in the 'Receptacle' of reality, there is still some very practical wisdom that seems almost forgotten in this modern age. Particularly, Plato suggests that psychological disorders are a result of an imbalance of attention and of bad education, and recommends that if one is sick due to intellectual overbalance to go do some gymnastics, but to resort to medicine as the last course, as it will fuck you up more than it helps you. As much as science, psychology, medicine drew on these ancient philosophies it seems to have overlooked such obvious sense and instead we have the pharmaceutical industry.

Vivid Wanderings: The Gunwinggu Rainbow Serpent as Symbolic of Indigenous Australian Life

Vivid Wanderings: The Gunwinggu Rainbow Serpent as Symbolic of Indigenous Australian Life

Throughout Indigenous Australian belief systems there consistently arises the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent, a mythological being known by various names to individual tribes but generally linked with water (Berndts, World 251). In other cultures, the rainbow has often symbolized a connection to the heavens, whereas serpents may serve as intermediaries to the unmanifest, chthonic realms; though both these symbols occasionally share a common connection to water, it is perhaps solely in Indigenous Australian myth that rainbows and serpents are portrayed in one entity (Cowan 22). According to the anthropological studies of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Rainbow Serpents were generally depicted as living in deep waterholes and are responsible for rainbows, rain, and the quartz crystals used by Indigenous Australian medicine-men (19). While the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent may have its source in natural phenomena, it was far more than just a rainbow or a snake (Eliade 115). Ngaljod, the Rainbow Serpent of the Gunwinggu tribe of west Arnhem Land, was portrayed with a host of other meanings. She was attributed with the creation of the landscape, animals, and spirit-children, and was associated with certain religious rituals and socio-economic taboos (Mountford 78-9). These characteristics of the Rainbow Serpent were more common in northern Australia, but there was often disagreement over the sex and number of Rainbow Serpents, and occasionally other creatures would take on roles attributed to these iridescent ophidians (Maddock, Introduction 2-5). Such cross-continental ambiguity makes it difficult to assign an ultimate meaning to the Rainbow Serpent for all Indigenous Australians. By placing the phenomenon of Ngaljod first in its specific socio-cultural context, and then in contradistinction to the diffusion of Rainbow Serpents across the continent, it may be possible to offer a hermeneutical interpretation of what this symbol meant for the whole life of the Gunwinggu tribe, and why, despite its variations and current cultural degradation, the multivalent symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent spanned Indigenous Australian belief.
As the Indigenous Australians did not keep historical records beyond their myths, it is difficult to date their culture or its specific symbols. Based on scant archeological evidence it is believed to be possible that they settled in Australia roughly 30,000 years ago (Berndts, World 4). However, traces of red ochre found on skeletal remains from that period imply that there was already a substantial spiritual tradition, placing the date much earlier (Cowan 7). Either way, linguistic lineage suggests that the first Australians migrated from Southern Asia and reached the continent by sea (Cowan 9), eventually landing on the northwest coast (Berndts, World 2-3), which could explain why the Rainbow Serpent picks up cosmogonic connotations in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land regions.

The Gunwinggu were one of over 500 distinct tribes that existed in Australia prior to European contact (Cowan 68). Their traditional territory was on the western and southwestern side of what is now the Arnhem Land Reserve in northern Australia, a coastal environment well supplied with natural resources and water (Berndts, Man 1-3). Like the other Indigenous Australian tribes, the Gunwinggu had a minimum of material goods, did not live in permanent houses, and hunted and collected their food with the aim of sustaining their natural environment (Berndts, World 7-8). The tribe was bound by actual or implied genealogy and common rules for behavior and language (Berndts, World 32-6), but in the typical Indigenous Australian pattern, lived in small, dispersed foraging groups that occasionally coalesced into larger units for religious ceremonies and trade (Berndts, Man 105). Unlike most tribes, matrilineal descent was primarily used by the Gunwinggu to establish social and marriage relationships (Berndts, World 61), though patrilineal decent was effective in delineating land ownership and religious responsibility (Berndts, Man 111). Typically men hunted and performed the rituals while women collected food and raised children (Berndts, World 119). Tribal economy relied on these natural resources, and was based on reciprocal gift exchange and trade (Berndts, World 132), but magico-religious beliefs served as the major focal point of their culture and life (Berndts, Man 112).

Though Indigenous Australian life has been characterized by cultural isolation and the rejection of outside influences (Cowan 19-20), the Gunwinggu have had a long history of interaction with others (Berndts, Man 1). Not only did they trade goods and ideas with other tribes, but also there was sustained contact with Indonesian traders whom they called Macassans, and later with Japanese pearling fleets. A group of unidentified islands to the northwest called ‘Macassar’ became the vague point of origin for both these traders and the Gunwinggu’s mythological characters (Berndts, Man 4).

The Indigenous Australians explained their origins through long myth-cycles variously translated as the Eternal Dream Time, or the Dreaming, which described a time before mankind when supernatural beings or ancestral heroes appeared and wandered across the land, creating life and culture in the process (Eliade 42-3). The Dreaming was the most fundamental aspect of Indigenous Australian life, and offered much more than an account of creation. The myths described how the supernatural power of the ancestral heroes was embodied in the Australian landscape, as well as in the social precepts and rituals of the Indigenous Australians in a way that made those powers available for current life (Charlesworth 9-10). The Dreaming conjured an immediate or eternal present where the actions of the mythic beings were still occurring, particularly during ceremonies (Cowan 26), thus setting a precedent for all human action and relationship (Eliade 43).

Like the other Indigenous Australian tribes, the Gunwinggu myths did not tell of the creation of the earth or sky. The land was already in place when the first people arrived, and after altering the featureless landscape and preparing it for human habitation, the mythic beings left their spiritual essence or djang behind (Berndts, Man 18), often in sacred sites which marked their final resting place (Eliade 45). A djang also lived in every representative of a given species (Berndts, Man 114), in ritual objects, as spirit-children that women found at waterholes in order to become pregnant, and as the men in which these ancestral beings were presently incarnated (Eliade 49-50). This Indigenous Australian belief, generally called totemism, allowed man to express his direct spiritual connection to the world and the Dreaming (Cowan 39). In a totemic fashion, the Gunwinggu considered any rainbow to be the original Ngaljod serpent, and men could summon her great floods by smashing a rock associated with the serpent’s djang, which in myths was performed as an act of revenge or suicide (Berndts, Man 114, 27). As opposed to the ancestral heroes who created man and culture, only those beings connected to a local site were considered djang, except the Rainbow Serpent, who was both a creator and a local spirit (Berndts, Man 19).

The Gunwinggu word for rainbow, mai?, generally included a class of living beings; animals, reptiles, and birds that were biologically male, but when referring directly to the rainbow the term was affixed with the feminine prefix ngal- (Berndts, Man 20). The Rainbow Serpent Ngaljod, also known as Ngalmud or Ngaldargid, was often credited in the myths with giving birth to the first humans as the archetypal Mother (Berndts, Man 20). She came underground from ‘Macassar,’ carrying spirit-children inside her; she made humans’ feet, hands, and eyes, her urine became water, she taught men how and where to dig for food and what to eat, explained the djang and myths, and gave breath to children in the womb (Berndts, Man 117-8). Furthermore, Ngalmud was the Gunwinggu word for the Dreaming, the timeless spiritual quality that all djang share with the Rainbow Serpent (Berndts, Man 75). The fertile Mother was a widespread mythological character throughout Indigenous Australian belief, spanning form the Victoria River District in the east to the western Kimberley Range (Berndts, World 256). As a predominantly matrilineal tribe, it makes some sense that the Gunwinggu might have expressed this Mother figure in relation to the more terrifying symbol of the Rainbow Serpent. Many of their myths are concerned with Ngaljod as being both a protective and destructive mother (Berndts, Man 147), particularly in relation to maintaining the environment and social structure.

As their myths prescribed a spiritual connection with the land, the Indigenous Australians saw themselves as an integral part of their environment (Berndts, Man 113). Most Indigenous Australian myths described how the ancestral beings wandered from one waterhole to the next, naming and commemorating these sites as sacred places (Berndts, World 137), and almost every rock, spring, or waterhole was connected to mythic events (Eliade 57). The Indigenous Australians mapped every detail of their territory (Cowan 12), but some sites were more important because of religious associations or prohibitions (Berndts, Man 12). These places were set apart as potentially dangerous for women and uninitiated men (Charlesworth 11). Though people moved freely over the land belonging to other tribes, they did not trespass on their sacred sites without permission (Berndts, World 141). In the Gunwinggu tribe these sites existed in territories called gunmugugur, which were associated with and protected by units of patrilineal descent (Berndts, Man 54). Like other Indigenous Australian tribes, the Gunwinggu were semi-nomadic, but the men spent most of their time in and around their gunmugugur, where they were intimately familiar with the natural resources and sacred features (Berndts, Man 101, 107-8), including which waterholes may have housed Rainbow Serpents.

Throughout Indigenous Australia, the immense Rainbow Serpents were thought to inhabit certain waterholes. Men would take great care when drinking or bathing from these sites to obey strict laws and taboos out of fear that the serpents would create storms and drown them (Mountford 23). The Gunwinggu similarly feared the Rainbow Serpent, who might swallow them and spit out their bones, thereby making the site taboo for water and food (Berndts, Man 20-3). These stories were often connected with food taboos, and nearly all Gunwinggu myth contains some reference to cooking, gathering, or eating (Berndts, Man 43). Stories warn against cooking animals on sandy banks or rocks near the river, which may have been unstable places to cook, but the sizzling noise would surely bring the Rainbow Serpent (Berndts, Man 50). Occasionally an orphan child cried for food and the noise summoned Ngaljod, a common theme in myths throughout the region that may have served as an example to not spoil children (Berndts, Man 21-3). In another myth, a man eats secretly, and as a result the Rainbow Serpent drowns his tribe (Berndts, Man 45). Though there were no public sanctions against going to and eating in certain places, these taboos and prohibitions were unequivocal and may rarely have been broken. The Gunwinggu did not take the religious retribution of the Rainbow Serpent lightly (Berndts, Man 28). While the myths set out land ownership and a responsibility for specific resources by particular groups, it seems that the food taboos symbolized by Ngaljod may have encouraged the sharing and proper division of resources that would have been necessary to survival (Berndts, World 142-3), and the Rainbow Serpent’s feminine aspect may have related to the fact that the food collected by women was the most dependable part of the Gunwinggu diet (Berndts, Man 109). The supply of resources varied over place and season, and these prohibitions based on age, sex, locality, and ritual helped define what foods were socially considered available (Berndts, Man 35).

Ngaljod was also feared for bringing the rains and floods, an aspect of the Rainbow Serpent particularly dominant during the wet season, which lasted from November to March (Berndts, Man 144, 31). Throughout the dry season Ngaljod was depicted as a colorful, whiskered serpent living in the local waterholes, but when the rains struck she appeared in the sky as the rainbow (Mountford 71). The central feature of the wet season in northwest Australia was the monsoon, which pelted the coast and inlands with occasional cyclones and became the point of reference for marking the year (Berndts, Man 32). During this season the Gunwinggu migrated to higher ground, where their camping sites were based on mythological precedent; even if they were not djang or ritual grounds, they were most likely the richest in resources, and served as meeting places for the tribe (Berndts, Man 106-9). Throughout the monsoon season, jira songs were sung to pacify the Rainbow Serpent and ward off the harsh weather, while also narrating accounts of the first rains (Berndts, Man 144). Like other Indigenous Australian stories, these myths may have impressed upon the Gunwinggu the responsibility for keeping the land fertile (Eliade 50). Faced with having either too little or too much rain to make the most use of their resources, many of their myths and rituals reflected a strong interest in maintaining the balance of nature (Berndts, Man 51). The threatening aspects of nature symbolized by the Rainbow Serpent mythology may have reinforced this feeling that the land was sacred, but it was primarily through elaborate rituals that man could recapitulate and sustain his environment (Berndts, Man 207, 108).

Indigenous Australian ritual governed all transitions in life (Cowan 53), and allowed mankind to assure the continuation of their world (Eliade 65). The Gunwinggu ritual cycles were related directly to their territories, showing a concern with the cyclical progression of life through ritual intervention, and the three major rituals, the ubar, maraiin, and kunapipi, were dominated by the figure of the Mother (Berndts, Man 115, 117). In each of these ceremonial initiations, the men symbolically entered the Mother’s womb in the shape of the sacred ground, and though she was here symbolized as the Rainbow Serpent, Ngaljod took on a background role in the rituals, intermediated by other mythic beings (Berndts, Man 147, 227). In the ubar ritual a male serpent, Yirawadbad traveled over the country, and in the maraiin the Rainbow Serpent followed Lumaluma the whale and was later stolen by the Laradjeidja brothers (Berndts, Man 119-23). Though many of these rites were performed for the increase of animal and human species, they also formed a basis for economic obligation and moral action (Brendts, World 291-2), and most served as initiations where sexually maturing men were removed from their family orientation and placed in dependence to the older men of the tribe (Hiatt 50). Gunwnggu initiation did not include practices of circumcision or subincision like other Indigenous Australian tribes, and instead focused on the teaching of myths and ritual actions in association with food taboos that emphasized the sacred quality of the initiatory state (Berndts, Man 115). In the ubar ritual men poked the ground with sticks to ward off the Rainbow, and if the initiates ate certain foods Ngaljod would eat them (Berndts, Man 130-1). However, this “pre-enactment” of death, symbolized by being swallowed and reborn into the community, was the central aspect of the rituals (Berndts, World 167), and the snake, which appears to die when it sheds its old skin, was perhaps a fitting symbol for this transitional period of initiation (Turner 237). The last of the Gunwinggu initiation rituals, the kunapipi, began with the swinging of bullroarers, whose sound symbolized the Rainbow Serpent calling the initiates into the sacred ground to be swallowed, and thus reborn (Berndts, Man 139).

The Rainbow Serpent was an integral part of the Gunwinggu kunapipi ritual, but many sections of it resembled the eastern Arnhem Land kunapipi myths of the Wawalag or Wauwalak sisters, and the Gunwinggu themselves recognized the rites as an imported cult (Berndts, Man 122-3, 139). In the stories of the Murngin tribe, the Rainbow Serpent is Yurlunggur, who, enraged by the smell of blood, caused storms and ate the sisters after one of them gives birth (Eliade 101). Like Ngaljod, Yurlunggur was a harbinger of rain and fertility and becomes pregnant after eating the sisters (Eliade 109, 103), but the Rainbow Serpent of east Arnhem Land was more clearly symbolic of the penis, which the initiates had incised during the ritual (Cowan 101). Yurlunggur was the Great Father who called the young men to the sacred ground and served as a cosmic intimidation beyond that of their human fathers (Hiatt 50). Despite the ambiguity in the Rainbow Serpent’s sex, both versions of the kunapipi contained serpents and female mythic characters that ultimately assured fertility (Eliade 100), and signified the transition from the dry season to monsoonal flooding (Berndts, Man 228). Furthermore, the depiction of parental figures as monstrous beings may have shocked the initiates into a deeper understanding of social and environmental relationships (Turner 240) and the Gunwinngu association of Ngaljod with the Mother may once again have been due to their greater focus on matrilineal descent. Either way, the kunapipi ritual itself was from further south, and though undergoing a slight shifting of identities, found suitable mythologies in both Arnhem Land territories for its expression (Berndts, World 286).

It is worth noting that much of Gunwinggu mythology did not belong to them originally but came from outside tribes or from the Macassan traders (Berndts, Man 124), so it is difficult to offer definitive interpretations for any one symbol within an individual tribal context. Each local group was responsible for particular mythic episodes and rites associated with stops the ancestral beings made in their wanderings (Eliade 60). No one tribe “owned” a whole myth cycle, just those parts associated with their territory (Berndts, Man 243). Even within the tribe, there were as many versions of a myth as there were men telling it, and full details were often omitted (Berndts, World 242). Outside of a ritual context myths were told informally, and their main themes were elaborated, cut short, or omitted altogether depending on the speaker and situation (Berndts, Man 17, 40). Often it was the men who controlled the religious sites and rituals whose version were considered the most authoritative (Berndts, Man 16-7), but even then they often kept certain parts of the myths to themselves (Berndts, World 241). Women did not have knowledge or access to the secret-sacred myths and rituals, and it is possible that they took accounts of what happened on the men’s sacred ground as factual or symbolically true (Berndts, Man 16, 287). The myths also gained validity through contemporary experience such as the more portentous accounts of floods and monsoons (Berndts, Man 50). It is possible that depending on when or with whom anthropologists collected their material, they would have been given highly different versions of Indigenous Australian mythology, which could explain not only the multivalence of the Rainbow Serpent symbolism within the Gunwinggu tribe, but its diffusion across all of Australia.

Though there was no central Indigenous Australian authority or religion, a strong resemblance existed between the myths, rituals, and languages of the 500 distinct tribes (Charlesworth 7, Berndts, World 21). Each tribe kept mostly to themselves, but tribal territories were highly flexible (Berndts, World 22, 33), and local traditions were vivified by transmission from neighboring clans (Maddock, World 87). During intertribal ceremonies people met to exchange both goods and religious ideas, and there was a constant movement of both material and spiritual capital along trade roads that crossed the whole continent along waterhole routes (Berndts, World 16, 128). It is possible that the Dreaming tracks left by the migrating Rainbow Serpents along these routes represented a potential network of communications for the Indigenous Australians (Berndts, World 243). The anthropologist Charles P. Mountford suggests that the myths of the Rainbow Serpent reached Australia through the Cape York area in the northeast, becoming more complex in the eastern and northern coasts where external influence was greatest (93). It seems equally possible that these myths started in the northern and northwestern territories, such as the Arnhem Land region inhabited by the Gunwinggu tribe, from where external influences may have eventually diffused through the rest of the continent (Berndts, World 21).

Looking at a broad selection of Rainbow Serpent beliefs from a variety of different tribes, primarily collected by Mountford in his essay, “The Rainbow-Serpent Myths of Australia” (see Appendix One, Rainbow Serpent Types), it is possible to divide the symbol into several main functions that roughly correspond with certain geographical regions of Australia, though these are by no means clear cut distinctions. As mentioned previously, Rainbow Serpents in the north and northwest are often credited with the creation of the land, life, and culture during their mythic wanderings. In the east and northwest the symbol is associated with the powers and quartz crystals of medicine men. For the northern to west-central desert tribes the Rainbow Serpent is primarily a harbinger of rain, living in deep waterholes, and in southern Australia other mythic creatures such as the bunyip replace the serpent symbol altogether.
Like Ngaljod, many of the northwestern rainbow serpents arrived from off-shore and wandered into the middle of the continent leaving spirit-children at waterholes, but further into Australia this path is reversed; Jarapiri, the Rainbow Serpent of the Winbaraku tribe of Central Australia creates life as he migrates from the mountains to the sea, perhaps retracing the Indigenous Australians’ own migrant origins (Cowan 31-2). Kunukban of the northwestern Wardaman tribe was also credited with the creation of culture, but unlike the Gunwinggu Ngaljod who gave birth to mankind, this Rainbow Serpent stole culture from another ancestral being, Ekarlarwan, whom he chased across the continent (Cown 31-4). In myths from the Murinbata tribe in the Northern Territory the Rainbow Serpent Kunmanggur created animals and spirit-children only after a flying fox or his son speared him for stealing women (Maddock, Introduction 5-7, Moutnford 79-80), bringing up potential sexual taboos not present in the Gunwinggu’s mythic focus on food. Perhaps the most interesting variation on the Rainbow Serpent creation theme occured among the Unambal and Ungarinyin tribes who neighbored the Gunwinggu in the Kimberley Range area to the west. Here the Rainbow Serpent Ungud dreamt of the faceless figures called wondjina, who are painted on rocks throughout the region and are representative of rain (Eliade 69), and after raising the land from the sea laid these spirits as eggs across the country (Maddock, Introduction 14-6). Ungud however is only credited with the creation of nature and faded into the mythic background, while the wondjina are held responsible for the active creation of culture (Eliade 73, Mountford 84-5), a division of roles the motherly Gunwinggu Ngaljod does not express.

Another distinction between these two beings is that Ungud was also responsible for giving the mekigar medicine men their powers and quartz crystals (Cowan 36), a role often found in east and northwest Australia (Mountford 93). Each tribe had these “men of high degree” who played a central role in the rituals, healed the sick, defended the community from black magic, and were the only ones who could really see and converse with mythic beings like the Rainbow Serpents (Eliade 128-9). Often in shamanic initiation, magical objects such as crystals and a magic rope-snake were inserted into the medicine man’s body (Eliade 149); these objects were thought to represent magical power bestowed by the Rainbow Serpent (Cowan 86-8). Kanmare, the Rainbow Serpent of the Boulia District tribes of Queensland in the northeast, would drown men and make them sick before bestowing its magical powers (Radcliffe-Brown 19); men from the Wiradjuri tribe of New South Wales in the east would follow the rainbow to waterholes were the Rainbow Serpent Wāwi would teach them new songs for the rituals (Eliade 155). Targan, the Rainbow Serpent in Brisbane, Queensland, vomited quartz crystals when it rained, and the medicine men would know to look for them where the rainbow ended (Radcliffe-Brown 20-1). The Gunwinggu tribe also contained medicine men, some of whom had personal Rainbow Serpents that they could summon at will (Berndts, Man 146), but there was no connection between Ngaljod and quartz crystals, perhaps because these magical objects were not available in the Arnhem Land region.
Moving further south and west, the symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent became more concerned with its relationship to rain and waterholes, as well as with physical descriptions of distinct, terrifying beings. The Kajura of the Ingarda tribe and Wanamangura of the Talainji tribe, both in west Central Australia, are connected primarily to the rain totem (Radcliffe-Brown 22), and Unurugu, the Rainbow Serpent of the western Broome tribe, caused rainstorms if it was killed (Mountford 35). In the tribes around Perth in western Australia the Wogal is a winged Rainbow Serpent that lives in waterholes and is dangerous to approach (Radcliffe-Brown 22), and in the Central desert waterholes live many Wanambi who fly into the air and attack intruders with whirlwinds and rainbows (Mountford 52-3). Like many Rainbow Serpents these are depicted as being multicolored and bearded, with large eyes and long ears (Mountford 40). Some, like the Wollunqua of the Warramunga tribe in the west Central area, were so huge that they could touch the skies and had a reach of over 150 miles from their waterholes (Mountford 36). While the Gunwinggu Ngaljod also lived in waterholes and bore these kinds of physical characteristics, she also had a distinct and metaphysical quality that is missing from the western and southern Rainbow Serpents. Ngaljod was certainly associated with the monsoonal rains in Arnhem Land, but in the barren deserts it seems that the Rainbow Serpent symbolism is stripped of all other qualities besides those of maintaining the potable water necessary for survival.

In southern Australia, particularly in the Victoria region, beliefs in the Rainbow Serpent were superceded altogether by a variety of beings that lived in waterholes and drowned trespassers (Mountford 26), though rarely were they associated with religious structures or socio-economic taboos. Generally these beings were called bunyips, and they could take various forms depending on local sites (Mountford 30). Perhaps most Rainbow Serpent-like was the Myndie from the Melbourne District, a large serpent that would attack both people who broke laws and those who didn’t (Mountford 31-2). Other ferocious beings were the Gourke, a swamp-dwelling emu, and the Turden, an enormous dingo, who also attacked the Indigenous Australians of the Victoria region (Mountford 32-2). Similarly, on Groote Eylandt and Bathurst Island off the Northern Coast the beings associated with bright colors and rain were not serpents but the Ipilja-ipilja geckos and Maratji lizards respectively (Mountford 86-8), and it seems what was a highly developed Rainbow Serpent symbolism for the Gunwinggu tribe may eventually have lost most of its deeper significances with either distance or cultural isolation. But the question still remains of what the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent actually meant.

The theorist Paul Riceour suggests that unlike signs, which often have a one-to-one correlation with the things they represent, symbols conceal their meaning in a “double intentionality” that invites thought and reflection between the primary and latent meanings like a curtain drawn back at the theater (2-3). The symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent may have held much more than just this two-fold meaning behind the symbolic curtain, for the Gunwinggu tribe used it to express many facets of their life: their mythic origins, their relationship to land, food, and seasons, and their socio-economic structures and taboos. For Riceour, to offer a hermeneutic interpretation of a symbol one must start with the phenomena itself, but unlike comparative religious studies that seek to place a symbol in a larger homogenous system, it is only possible to bring out the truth of a symbol if one becomes personally involved in the life of that one symbol in its original context (8). The Rainbow Serpent has been compared to many mythological beings outside Australia, such as the naga of India, taniwah of New Zealand, water serpents of the Kalahari Desert (Mountford 92), the Babylonian Tiamat (Eliade 80), or the Chinese dragon, which is associated with moisture and iridescent pearls (Radcliffe-Brown 25). One might also look at the Biblical rainbow given to man as a covenant after the flood (Boyer 17); or at the Norse juxtaposition between the heavenly rainbow bridge Bifrost and the two serpents that live in the waters and under the world tree, Iormungund and Niddhog (Sturluson 15-26), whose names bear a slight phonetic resemblance to the Arnhem Land Rainbow Serpents Yurlunggur and Ngaljod. However, as Radcliffe-Brown points out, such comparisons may only be valid after intensive cultural studies in each separate belief system (25), and the radical diversity of Rainbow Serpent symbolism within the unique cultural milieu of Indigenous Australia already offers more than enough material for consideration.

Even within the context of Australia, many of the theorists and anthropologists looking at the symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent have tried to draw broad, abstract conclusions from all the instances in which it is portrayed, while perhaps neglecting many of its individual distinctions between tribes. Ronald and Catherine Berndt interpret the serpent as the male counterpart of the uterine All-Mother (Maddock, Introduction 2), and Géza Róheim also suggests a psychosexual interpretation in the penile fear of being swallowed back into the womb (Hiatt 46-7). Both Radcliffe-Brown and Kenneth Maddock view the Rainbow Serpent as a striking representation of the creative and destructive forces in nature (Maddock, World 94-6) though Radcliffe-Brown reduces the possibility that there were many distinct Rainbow Serpents into one symbolic being (Maddock, Introduction 3). Mircea Eliade, in line with his own theories of interpreting symbols, claims that the Rainbow Serpent is a religious structure that unites opposites (Eliade 79). Religion certainly dominated Indigenous Australian life, and while the various serpents portrayed ambiguities between many and one, male or female, living above or below the ground, or being either anthropomorphic or zoomorphic creatures (Maddock, Introduction 8), it is possible that Eliade, and the majority of these theorists, are projecting their own systems of classification on what is most likely not a homogenous totality or abstract symbolism. It is clearly evident from anthropological accounts that even after European contact, the Indigenous Australians had a very strong belief that these seemingly mythological serpents were real beings that still inhabited the country’s waterholes (Mountford 58). Though they were both characters in mythic narratives and symbols in a metaphysical system of thought (Maddock, Introduction 10), it is necessary to not disregard the Indigenous Australians’ own lived fear that the Rainbow Serpents actually existed, perhaps as cryptozoological survivors of Australia’s ancient mega-fauna. Even the earliest European settlers seemed to have some real belief in these mythological monsters (Mountford 26). As Riceour notes on the process of interpretation, “You must understand in order to believe but you must believe in order to understand” (9).

A morphological comparison of distinct Rainbow Serpent beliefs reveals that this symbol was generally connected with water and often feared by the Indigenous Australians unless certain rites were performed, but for the Gunwinggu tribe the Rainbow Serpent nearly achieves the status of a supreme being (Mountford 76, 94). Ngaljod was connected to their location on the hospitable and accessible northern coast, their focus on matrilineal descent and economic division of resources, and their interest in ritually maintaining the seasonal and social landscapes. As one of her names, Ngalmud, referred to the Indigenous Australian concept of the Dreaming that underscored their whole existence, it is possible to see how the Gunwinggu conceptualization of the rainbow, as an overarching and omnipotent serpentine mother, allowed them to articulate and organize all of the multifaceted aspects of their life into one vividly striking symbol.

However, even recognizing the Rainbow Serpent’s ability to unify the various levels of reality for the Gunwinggu tribe is not enough to offer a thorough hermeneutic interpretation (Riceour 8). The Indigenous Australian way of life, in which the Dreaming served to interconnect the past and present of their land, myths, and socio-cultural contexts, is radically different from the modern Western conception of reality. Due to the sheer depth with which this symbol is rooted in the interconnectedness of Gunwinggu life, an adequate interpretation of the Rainbow Serpent may require a much more thorough analysis of their culture than is possible with the amount of information available. Even then it may not be possible to bridge the cultural gap, and truly enter into the kind of emotional and critical relationship that Riceour suggests is necessary in order to understand how a symbol was actually lived. Furthermore, European contact essentially stripped the Indigenous Australians of their land and traditional way of life (Berndts, World 497-8) so that many of the myths and rituals surrounding the Rainbow Serpent may no longer be available for further anthropological study. Though such studies have recorded these oral beliefs and made them available to the rest of the world, this was only possible due to European contact, and has come at the expense of the entire culture under question.

In the traditional perspective, if the sacred rituals were neglected, the world would regress into the chaos that existed before the Dreaming and the ancestral beings, which is precisely the crisis faced by the Indigenous Australians in the present era (Eliade 65). What was once a distinct and vibrant way of life, that allowed the Gunwinggu tribe to articulate such a colorfully multivalent symbol as the Ngaljod Rainbow Serpent, has been all but decimated by policies of assimilation, Methodist missionaries, and the modern world-view in general (Berndts, Man 199-200). Though there is some current interest in reviving the ancient traditions, and Gunwinggu mythology had always adapted to outside influences in the past, these stories may no longer be relevant to a people who have lost their spiritual connection to their land (Berndts, Man 205-7). The Rainbow Serpent may have represented the vital and dynamic connection that the Gunwinggu had between their sacred history, physical environment, socio-economic structures, religious rituals, and whole manner of being in the world; but as that traditional world-view passes out of existence, so too does that vivid living symbol of the Rainbow Serpent become yet another mythological landmark in the static burial grounds of religious history.

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