On Ultimate Realism

I haven't written much yet publicly on the new perspective or belief system I have been attempting to formulate over this past year, a perspective that I call Ultimate Realism, which is perhaps best summed up by the quote from Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornogrpaher: "Everything which man can imagine, dream, or conceivably want to exist... does exist."

This view first occurred to me one day last year during a week of spiritual-existential difficulty. I had gone to a local bar and ran into an acquaintance, who said, having not seen me in ages due to my focus on school and writing, "welcome back to the real world," to which I could only reply, but isn't everywhere also just as real? and then wandered down the street struck by the total implications of everything around me being that real. There is some sense in which we tend to believe that only those habits and experiences that we usually have are really real, or at least of the most real importance to us, forgetting that other experiences we don't have are just as real. And beyond existing situations, every content of our imaginations and the stories we tell is real, in that these have real effects in the real world. And ultimately, any perspective that will allow us to articulate our lives in the whole of such a multifaceted reality, and perhaps allow us to formulate a perspective of global significance and understanding, will have to put us in relation to that whole, not just as it is scientifically and historically understood, but in relation to all that humans have said, imagined, believed, and dreamed.

This view has come out of years of questioning spiritual beliefs and the nature of the stories we tell. How do we, as human beings in a world with other human beings, deal with the fact that people have divergent and often contradictory views on what the world is and our place in it? Historically, belief systems have clashed, and continue to clash because each side takes their perspective as most true and right, whereas if one view was somehow objectively true and right there should be no cause for conflict; and yet there is. In my own life I have struggled with such limited perspectives, not knowing in what to believe, as the beliefs always seemed too small, and yet needing to believe in something, to tell some kind of story, and finally recognizing that any belief I would want to hold would have to be large enough to contain all possibilities of believing.

Similarly I fear global destruction due to the clash of these limited perspectives, and that we as a species do not have the stories to set us in relation to where we are now that might allow us to continue into the future in a meaningful, healthy, and positive way. The stories we are prone to tell today are often too small, quotidian, dealing with failure, comeuppance, and the meaningless joy ride of post-modernity, whereas we need a perspective that can address the Universe as a whole, for future generations of humanity in this Universe. These stories must be ultimate in order to place us and our actions in the widest set of meaning or significance necessary for survival.

My old professor, Dr. Fred Clothey (a student of famed mythographer Mircea Eliade), suggested that the stories we tell can tell us about ourselves, in effect modeling our understanding of reality in order to authenticate current actions and allow future actions. Our stories/ myths/ beliefs/ perspectives, etc. can do this precisely when they are cast in an "aura of ultimate significance," that is, by referring us to the widest possible scope of experience and understanding, to our cosmic and social beginnings, to our longed for and feared endings, to our ideals taking on human form. We find our place and being in between the limits of the real as we know it.

One such ultimate signifier, that has had a direct effect on real occurrences, is the concept of God(s). While belief in supernatural beings has allowed articulation of our relation to society and mortality, is has, perhaps most clearly and distressingly, served as a justification for centuries worth of horror and cruelty: crusades, inquisitions, terrorism, or just plain ignorance. But we are prone to forget in our polarized times that this personification of ultimate ideals was also a necessary and integral perspective for the development of scientific reasoning, framing an objective and total perspective that we humans could then hope to achieve ourselves, a belief that has existed coterminous to science up through the 20th century. Contemporary atheists might be glad that God is no longer a reference for rational understanding, but "His" death has negative impacts as well: God has traditionally not only been a signifier for ultimate perspective and knowing, but also for perfection and goodness, in short, ethical understanding of behavior, without which we do things like build the atomic bomb. Technology runs rampant when not placed in the widest relation to how it might rightly be used, or the lack of an ethical signifier allows the cultural insecurities that haunt us to become manifest, and such horrors not only be imagined but made real. One imagines a similar lack of ultimate significance in the perspectives that have allowed western culture's unparalleled material consumption, environmental destruction, and continued ideological warfare on the rest of humanity.

I am not arguing here for a return to a belief in the traditional monotheistic God or earlier gods. These stories, as we have seen, are just too small and conflict-provoking compared to those perspectives that now need to be adopted. I am arguing though for a greater belief in the reality and efficacy of the contents of our stories and imaginations, and an awareness of how these otherwise subconscious narratives influence the real world.

One of the problems to this approach is the primacy we give to literal truth, vs. the obvious falsity of our "true" representations of reality. I am a huge fan of stories of the fantastic, of the magical, supernatural, weird, heroic, or sci-fi, which, looking at the predominance of these themes in the current cultural media and imagination, I believe I am not alone in. But why do we love supermen, zombies, and the end of the world? There has been a trend in storytelling, dating from the late 18th century, of attempting to represent reality as it "really is," social or quotidian realism, and not as an allegorical reference for otherwise real things. Fiction, when it first was read as not literally true, was cast as "petite histories," in order to accept stories they had to mimic reality while being divorced from talking about reality. My immediate response to all this is, there's already too much of the world we experience on a daily basis, why create more of it, when stories beyond the everyday may raise possibilities of experience and understanding more than that which we are already familiar with. That familiarity constrains us, by being real, to the obviously inadequate belief systems we now live under. We hold up what we believe is a mirror and say, this is real, and because we say it, that marks the bounds up what we will allow to be really real.

My second issue with realism is that it is not reality despite how it primps and masquerades itself as such. It may represent aspects of reality, but does so by relying on and reaffirming our assumptions about how the world is and should be, which constrains us to accepting those views and realities as more true or valid, to the exclusion of wider views. And today it seems our view of the real is that it frankly sucks and nothing matters anymore. And any attempt to actually discuss real human issues in an emotionally valid way is negated by the irony and scorn with which we articulate the real world. The fantastic however, by being non-real and symbolic of the real (mythopoetic in Tolkien's terms), precisely allows us to highlight those human themes and conditions we want to examine in truthful ways. But in order to even accept the contents of fantastic stories we must (as Coleridge first suggested) suspend our disbelief of those things that couldn't be literally true in our everyday experience. We no longer have a problem leaping into wizard fights or across star systems, we can suspend disbelief but we are never asked to truly believe, and thus are not as prone to take such fantasies as being symbolic or ultimately significant for how we really are or could be in the world. We are content to let them be mere entertainments and diversions rather than suggestions of possibility.

Yet, are ghosts and gods really real, or is this even the right way of framing the question? There is a sense that certain things are existentially real, they commit us to accepting their physical reality, being right in front of us. The invisible and imaginative do not so commit us; one can not empirically and scientifically prove a god's actual existence. To argue one way or the other for this is to miss the entire point about gods. But one can clearly see the effects that belief in such unprovables has on our world, both on our perspectives and psychologies and in actual historical occurrences. Ignoring and belittling the immaterial causes of such beliefs and effects does little to add to our understanding of ourselves in the world, allows the results of inappropriate or too-small beliefs to continue unchecked, and limits the human imagination to articulate new possibilities of being and understanding being, which are necessary for our current and continued survival, let alone enjoyment and well being. On the other hand, if we do not remember that the stories we tell are only stories, that have been made up despite their real effects, we run the risk of mistaking the stories as literally true, thus causing us to act in dangerous and inappropriate ways, when imagining better stories to live by and through is always an option (and it is this lack of awareness of the power of our symbols that I mean by the absent narrative).

I do not know where we will go from here, but I am wary and sick of the post-modern skepticism that rejects any ultimate significance in favor of what we can directly lay our hands on (and in so doing, strangle it to death). I would prefer to see interconnections of the layers of reality rather than the whole's deconstruction and rebuttal. Acting as if we know everything and nothing really matters is perhaps the smallest and most dangerous perspective one could hold. Ultimately, we exist in a Universe which we barely understand, and in which we are a bare speck, and perhaps in that widest view humanity is indeed meaningless and fated to extinction for lack of any better options. And yet it is also possible to believe, and live by the belief, that life and our consciousness of life may be more than a random fluke or evolutionary mistake; not that we serve some clear teleological purpose or extant will of God, but that for all these unknowns we are still real, and still here, and confronted with the implications of that for all reality.

Though reality may be inherently meaningless we have the choice to take on meanings and act on those meanings, to continue to be and gather greater understanding and significance, both on this planet and in the Universe as a whole, should we choose to accept this mission. Anything less than such an Ultimately Realist perspective sells ourselves short, and will only propel us down the road of meaninglessness and destruction. But if we can perhaps articulate a perspective wide enough, not just for all humans, but all life in general and beyond life, then perhaps we can continue on until that perspective, and all else we can imagine, becomes real.

Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

Every quest has a goal, but sometimes these goals contain subtler, more far-reaching effects than their stated purpose. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the explicit goal is to save the world of Middle-Earth from the evil of Sauron by destroying the One Ring. While this act certainly rids the world of evil, it also serves another purpose for its inhabitants, cultures, and environment: that of allowing this reality to continue into the future. In this sense, ‘saving the world’ preserves or records what has come before for those who are yet to come. And though we do not find ourselves slaying evil warlocks in our daily lives, we too can participate in this quest through the symbolic applicability of the ideals in The Lord of the Rings to our modern life. This paper will examine the ways in which this preservationist sense of ‘saving the world’ is illustrated in the history of Middle-Earth, in the early stages of the ring quest, and in the writing and reception of Tolkien’s masterpiece in our own reality.

If the whole world is at stake in the quest, we must first understand what that world is before it can be saved. The epic story told in The Lord of the Rings is only the tip of the iceberg, or the dénouement, of a long and winding history stretching back thousands of years before men, much less hobbits, were even conceived. In many places in the text, references are made to historical persons and events that, while not bearing directly on the tale, are still an integral part of that reality. In a letter to his publisher, Milton Waldman, Tolkien discusses this history, suggesting that Middle-Earth grew out of or was invented to house his imaginary languages of the Elves (143). Already we can see this world as a kind of record, moving from creation myths to the histories of the Elven people, respectively recorded by Tolkien in the Music of the Ainur and the Silmarillion (146). Middle-Earth is a world created by the gods (who imagined it as a story), but it is incomplete. In order for the world to be fully made it has to be made for someone: the Children of the Gods, who are the Elves, and later Men (147). The world is made in order to pass it on, like a grand inheritance, including all the cultures and ideals that world contains.

As the history of Middle-Earth deals primarily with the Elves, it is necessary to look at how Elven culture helped shape the Middle-Earthian ideals of preserving the world. Elves are immortal, and thus concerned with, “the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change” (146). Elven magic is a sub-creative art rather than a dominating power, and they desire to use magic to “benefit the world and others,” including the environment, through the “adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts” (146, 151). Tolkien similarly points out that Elrond’s house represents Lore; the art of the Elves includes, “the preservation in reverent memory of all tradition concerning the good, wise, and beautiful” (153). If the elves have a flaw however, it is in wanting to preserve this beautiful world around them as it is, despite the passage of time. But as the world inevitably changes, their art eventually becomes ineffectual, “a kind of embalming” (151). The main purpose of the Rings of Power stems from (and perverts) this Elven desire: “the prevention and slowing of decay” (152). This brings out another facet of ‘saving the world,’ that we can only safeguard reality for those who come after us, and not for ourselves.

While the Elves are First-born, it is their duty in turn to fade like the gods, and to pass Middle-Earth on to the Followers, Men. Having no magic of their own, Men are not as concerned with the preservation of goodness and beauty in their world, and they more readily fall prey to the dark forces at work in Middle-Earth. The elves however passed on to Men a “strand of ‘blood’ and inheritance” on which the art and poetry of man depends (149), that is, the ability and desire to pass on their own ideals through the art of cultural transmission. This is highly significant, because unlike Elves, Men are mortal. In his article, The Quest Hero, W.H. Auden suggests that quests serve as “symbolic descriptions of our personal experience of existence as historical” (33). The telos, the goal or end point, of any life is in death, and as such the quest is always in some way an attempt to defy death, which is attempted in two drastically different ways. The Men in the Second Age of Middle-Earth are denied immortality, but still act out of the received Elven ideals of preserving themselves, by desiring either more time in life or to escape death altogether (Tolkien Letters, 154-5). This desire for eternal life unfortunately results in the aligning of the kingdoms of Men with Sauron against the gods in a terrible and world-twisting battle (ibid, 156). On the other hand, Men can face death by saving the world: by both defeating the evil forces that encourage destruction and by leaving behind cultural records for the benefit of the world that follows. At stake in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, in which The Lord of the Rings takes place, are not only the world itself, but also the ability to continue to save the world through the preserved legacies of mankind.

Sauron is not defeated until the end of the third book of The Lord of the Rings, but the ways in which the story’s heroes can save the world through cultural legacy are already suggested early on in the quest, in The Fellowship of the Ring. The history of the One Ring itself highlights some of the personal challenges reflected in this theme of inheritance. As Elrond recalls the story during the Council of Elrond, the Ring was taken from the hand of Sauron and then lost by the human Isildur (320), who wanted to keep its power for himself. Isildur’s heir, Aragorn, inherits the Sword of Elendil, the broken blade of which symbolizes Aragorn’s duty to mend the damage caused by his ancestor’s greed. Aragorn does this by first protecting the peoples of the North, and then joining the quest that will restore him to his inherited place on the throne at Minas Tirith. While the One Ring passes from Isildur to Golem, these characters loose the ring because they want to preserve themselves and not their world. The next inheritor though, Bilbo Baggins, chooses to give up the ring to his nephew Frodo on his own accord (79). Frodo is Biblo’s heir, for his property, wealth, and stories. But it is the act of being given the Ring freely that allows Frodo the ability and desire to want to, “save the Shire” (96), and by extension, the rest of the world of Middle-Earth, which he does by going on the quest to destroy the Ring. The Ring is passed on for the sake of the future.

The quest to resolve the inheritance of the Ring is not the only way that the inhabitants of Middle-Earth in the Third Age are attempting to save their world. One might even say from the amount of stories, songs, and knowledge recorded in the text that the chief pastime of the Middle-Earthian races is the preservation and transmission of their cultural realities. Beyond the large-scale histories preserved through their retelling by Gandalf and Elrond, other historical events are recorded in the Elf-songs to Elbereth, Gil-galad, and Eärendil (117, 250, and 308), sung not just by Elves, but also by Samwise and Bilbo. Though the Elves are fading into legend their history is preserved in song, and more importantly their language is also being preserved, as Bilbo teaches Frodo the Ancient Tongue of the Elves (119). And it is not just the high culture of the Elves that is preserved; Glóin reounts the Dwarven attempt to reclaim their own cultural heritage by excavating Moria (316), and even Hobbit history is recorded, as in the legend of Gorhendad Oldbuck and the school song about trolls (141 and 276). Beyond these cultural inheritances, knowledge of the land itself is preserved in the stories of Tom Bombadil. The ancient Tom not only knows the secret stories of the trees and environment of Middle-Earth, but also willingly shares these with the Hobbits, so that they too can pass on the full history of their world (181). As we see from the Notes on the Shire Records that opens the text, Frodo’s three Hobbit companions go on after the quest is finished to record information on the legends, names, languages, calendars, and herblore of Middle-Earth (37), effectively preserving everything that has come before for the future ages of their world.

While these introductory Notes on the Shire Records bodes well for the result of the quest, they are only possible by the quest being both completed and recorded. And these are achieved through two instances of the intersection of individual inheritance and cultural legacy that highlight the theme of saving the world in The Fellowship of the Ring. The first of these instances is Gandalf’s search through the libraries of Minas Tirath for proof of the One Ring: a scroll written by Isildur that accounts for the inscription on the Ring. Despite Isildur’s desire to keep the ring for his own inheritance, he leaves this account, “lest a time come when the memory of these great matters shall grow dim” (331). Even the caretakers of the library had forgotten this scroll, and if Gandalf had not had the knowledge to find these memories of the past, the inhabitants of Middle-Earth would have been condemned to repeat their forefathers’ desire to hide or use the One Ring. It is the finding of the record of the inscription that ends Gandalf’s quest and begins Frodo’s journey. But once the journey is finished, how are the future inhabitants of the world supposed to remember the quest, much less we the readers, unless better records are left behind? To this end, Bilbo wants to record Frodo’s story as a book, and even asks him to bring back any old songs and tales he comes across on the way (327 and 364). Bilbo is already recording Middle-Earthian cultures and legends; a selection of his Red book of Westmarch has been published (in our own world) as The Hobbit (20). As such, Bilbo’s act of recording Frodo’s journey ultimately saves their world, as it becomes for us the books of The Lord of the Rings.

While the world of Middle-Earth began as a linguistic exercise, Tolkien suggests in his letters that he wrote The Lord of the Rings as an attempt to conclude and encapsulate all the histories and themes of his imagined world (159). There was however another goal at stake in Tolkien’s invention of Middle-Earth: the creation of a mythology which would fill a lack of that kind of story in his own country (144), if not in our whole modern world. Though there is no agreed upon definition of mythology, contemporary myth-theorists like University of Pittsburgh’s own Fred Clothey might argue that myths are symbolic narratives that order a people’s experience of reality and serve as paradigms for how that reality is to be lived. The reality in which Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings was a chaotic and rapidly changing one. The world was involved in a second global war, new technologies were destroying the environment, and cultural transmission was being devalued by the new medium of movies into mere entertainment. Tolkien stresses in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring that while his story is not allegorical for the real world it is certainly applicable. The war over the Ring serves as a symbol for the dangers of global warfare; the concern of the Elves for the environment of Middle-Earth, and the living desires of that landscape itself, serve as symbols for the need to preserve our own respect of nature. The focus on acts of remembering and recording the past serve as a strikingly paradigmatic symbol for us to not forget our own histories and cultural traditions.

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings thus fulfills its author’s intention of being written as a myth, but it cannot fully become one until it too is passed on, and is accepted as myth by the people whose reality it records and symbolizes. While it was relatively unread during the first decade of its publication, Tolkien’s story eventually became the second most read book after the Bible. During the ‘60s, “Frodo lives!” was graffitied in New York subways, a suitably mythic response to that decade’s need for new cultural explanations. What really attests to the books’ power as myth is that they continue to hold such fascination and relevance for our contemporary century. These stories were recently made into a series of critically acclaimed and high-grossing films that seem likely to continue to pass on Tolkien’s vision and ordering of reality for generations to come. As such, the stories of Middle-Earth, in their history, text, and modern relevance, serve as Tolkien’s own inheritance to us. The Lord of the Rings literally saves his world and its cultural values so that we in turn will remember to keep saving our own world.


Bibliography

Auden, W.H. “The Quest Hero.” Understanding the Lord of the Rings. Eds. Rose
Zimbardo and Neil Isaacs. Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston: 2004

Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Fellowship of the Ring.” Ballantine Books. New York: 1965

Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Houghton
Mifflin Co. Boston

Magic Chords

Taking a break from working on my dream novel, I was trying to catch up on the internet, and decided that I haven't written much under the topics of magic, music, and ritual. These three modalities often go hand in hand, and Dr. Clothey even suggested that it would be interesting for someone to look closer at the intersection of music and religion.

Music and performance in the modern world often take on highly ritual aspects, a charged atmosphere, the priestly musicians encanting powerful rhythms that effect the audience on a deep physiological level. From the reunion of Led Zeppelin a band charged with magical iconography and Crowleyan flair, to a description of watching someone play Guitar Hero as a spiritual experience, people are often caught up in what seems to be the sheer mysticism of music. Certainly rhythms have pervaded ritualizing throughout history, and the act of playing music can seem to transcend time, but it is the effect on the listener that holds the most magic and mystery, whether as a cue for emotional catharsis, ecstatic dancing, social communitas or revolution. Woodstock and the Beatles, punk rock as a determining factor in culture, spilling far beyond the edge of the stage. No one knows quite how the tension caused by the dissonance and resolution of vibrating air molecules can have such profound effects, even to the point of certain chord patterns like the tritone being cast as unholy, and countless stories arising of songs being taught by the devil (from Tartini to Robert Johnson). In my dreams the devil plays the violin, and I am a priest in a rock and roll cathedral.

From my years of experience playing music to packed crowds, I can say that it was always somewhat breathtaking to be able to cast such swaying spells over so many people with just the movement of fingers on a guitar, to see everyone break into song on the chorus and afterwards spill into the streets still singing into the night. Even the act of playing with other people, regardless of an audience, is ritualistic in itself, the way that musicians jamming together will stumble upon a song, and suddenly find themselves transported, carried on waves of sound that seem to come from a much deeper place, where it is not the musicians writing the song, but riding it, the music a great beast writhing to its own rhythm for all eternity that we can just tap into sometimes, like the ancient alchemists debating the harmonic song of the spheres. Talk about a reaffirmation and transcendence of the self, or better yet, sing.

As music guru David Byrne suggests in a discussion of the future of music with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, "You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends," and in his survival guide for emerging artists, "in the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory."

The Future of Religious Studies

I just had my last talk with Dr. Clothey before the end of the semester and his return to retirement. He mentioned that he has a few more books left in him, including a collected essays on mythology that sounds intriguing, and we debated a little about boundary situations, the need for religious studies to branch into other fields such as literature and music (as well as into other cultures than the current fascination with Hindu and Judeo-Christian religions), modern atheism vs. spirituality, and the necessity of balancing historical vs. comparative studies (a topic that has been increasingly engaging my mind as I struggle to figure out just how it is possible to still give credence to the occurrence of religious phenomena for a particular people while at the same time attempting to understand deeper structures or meta-symbols that may occur throughout human spiritual experience). While Clothey seemed particularly glad of my interest in this field he seemed a bit saddened by the state of Religious Studies both at Pitt and through other Universities. Though many of these programs are growing, most of the interesting journals no longer exist, and any of the really interesting people to study under are either retired or retiring. Furthermore, he suggested that it might be difficult to get a job in the field without a specialization in some particular culture, and even then it's certainly not something to do for the money. Of course, I'm not fascinated by spiritual narratives because I think anyone will pay me to look at them, rather because I think there is something of inestimable value to be learned that may still be useful to understanding human experience, even if this means having to puzzle through all this myself. Thank goodness there are libraries.

Before our talk I checked out "The Forbidden Forest," Mircea Eliade's epic novel which weaves together in a narrative many of his thoughts on myth and symbol, and was quite pleased to find these thoughts in his introduction, which seem to sum up so much of my own desire to study narratives of dreams and beliefs:

"...literature is, or can be, in its own way an instrument of knowledge. Just as a new axiom reveals a previously unknown structure of the real (that is, it founds a new world), so also any creation of the literary imagination reveals a new Universe of meanings and values. Obviously, these new meanings and values endorse one or more of the infinite possibilities open to man for being in the world, that is, for existing... The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and in his own interior world. That it is a matter of a structure of the human condition is shown, inter alia, by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales...

"Quite as revealing in my view are the experiments carried out... in connection with the psychology and physiology of sleep... they confirm the organic need of man to dream- in other words, the need for "mythology." At the oneiric level, "mythology" means above all narration, because it consists in the envisioning of a sequence of epic or dramatic episodes. Thus man, whether in a waking state or dreaming... has need of attending upon adventures and happenings of all sorts, or of listening to them being narrated, or of reading them. Obviously, the possibilities of narrative are inexhaustible, because the adventures of the characters can be varied infinitely. Indeed, characters and happenings can be manifest on all planes of the imagination, thereby making possible reflections of the most "concrete" reality as well as the most abstract fantasy...

"...man- is continually fascinated by the chronicling of the world, that is, by what happens in his world or in his soul. He longs to find out how life is conceived, how destiny is manifest- in a word, in what circumstances the impossible becomes possible, and what are the limits of the possible. On the other hand, he is happy whenever, in this endless "history" (events, adventures, meetings, and confrontations with real or imaginary personages, etc.) he recognizes familiar scenes, personages, and destinies known from his own oneiric and imaginary experiences or learned from others."

Haunting Tradition: Ritual Failure in the Lakota Ghost Dance

Haunting Tradition: Ritual Failure in the Lakota Ghost Dance

On December 29, 1890, U.S. soldiers massacred over three hundred and fifty Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, in response to a supposed “Indian Outbreak” (Mooney 119). Both the agents in charge of the Lakota reservations and the Bureau of American Ethnology believed that a ritual form, known as the Ghost Dance, might have been responsible for the hostility of the Lakota tribe that led to the Wounded Knee massacre (Wallace vii). The Ghost Dance doctrine, as it was preached by the prophet Wovoka of the Paiute tribe in Nevada, may have originally contained a message of interracial peace, but the Lakota, who adopted the ritual in early 1890, believed that this dance would bring about an “Indian millennium,” both destroying their white oppressors and restoring all aspects of their traditional way of life (Mooney 14, 19). Extreme socio-economic deprivations may have led the Lakota to practice this version of the Ghost Dance (Mooney 73), and though some scholars, such as Alice Kehoe, argue that the Ghost Dance revitalized Lakota life prior to, and after, the Wounded Knee massacre (Kehoe 143), this ritual may also have failed to achieve its hoped for millenarian purpose. By looking at specific ways in which the ritual form of the Lakota Ghost Dance was derived, and deviated, from both Wovoka’s original doctrine and traditional Lakota ritualizing, and by applying Ronald Grimes’ classifications of ritual sensibilities and infelicitous performances, it may be possible to offer an interpretation of if and how the Lakota Ghost Dance failed.

Prior to European-American settlement in North America, the Sioux held an immense territory across the Great Plains, on which an unlimited food supply of buffalo and the acquisition of horses in the 1600s made them the largest and strongest Native American tribe until the middle of the 19th Century (Mooney 69). Though Sioux is the common name for these tribes, it is derived from a derogatory term given to them by the Ojibwa tribe, the Sioux’s traditional enemies; the Sioux called themselves Lakota, Dakota, or Nakota, which in their own dialect mean “allies” or “friends” (Mooney 293). Historically, the Sioux organized their tribe from a large number of smaller hunting bands (DeMallie and Parks 6), and were divided into three distinct linguistic divisions, depending on geographic location across the plains: the eastern Santee, middle Yankton, and western Teton (Mooney 293). Lakota is the self-designation from the Teton dialect, the tribal division living in what are now the states of North and South Dakota, who constituted more than two-thirds of all the Sioux (DeMallie and Parks 6-7, and Mooney 294). The Lakota were the wildest of the Sioux branches, pursuing extreme warlike behavior against neighboring tribes, and displaying an “air of proud superiority” that the ethnohistorian James Mooney found unusual among the Native Americans he had visited (Mooney 295-6). Of the 20,000 Sioux who took up the Ghost Dance, 16,000 were from this Lakota or Teton division (Mooney 61).

Written records of Christian missionaries show that the Lakota had contact with European-Americans as early as 1665 (DeMallie and Parks 7). However, in the decades following the Civil War in 1865, the United States government waged an increasing war on Native American tribes, who were seen as a hindrance to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny (Mooney 28), the expansion of European-American settlement across the entire continent. In 1868, the government negotiated a treaty with the Lakota to cut back their land into reservations; the coming of railroads, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, the Custer War in 1876, a host of epidemics, and the surrendering of more territory over the next thirteen years further reduced their hunting grounds, until the Lakota subsisted solely on government rations and the farming of arid land (Mooney 69-72). By the time the first rumors of Wovoka and his new Ghost Dance religion reached the Lakota in the winter of 1888-9, they were suffering from starvation (Mooney 29), and had become increasingly enculturated by European-American churches, farming, schools, businesses, the railroad, and the postal service (Wallace vii). In the last two decades of the 19th Century, the Lakota had been transformed from a traditionally prosperous hunting and warring lifestyle into poor farmers wearing the clothes of European-American civilization (DeMallie and Parks 12). Though scholars have generally focused on the socio-economic factors leading to the Lakota adoption of the Ghost Dance, the Sioux may still have been in a better economic position than other tribes that did not take up the Ghost Dance (Wallace ix). It is also worth noting that in the 1880s, the U.S. government had prohibited the primary Lakota ritual of the Sun Dance, due to a perception of the ritual cutting and hanging from hooks as a form of self-torture (Amiotte 75, 88), and the Lakota may have embraced and modified the new ritual in order to fill this void. These social, economic, and religious crises my have led the Lakota to perceive the rumors of a new messiah as a hope that would lead them out of their cultural deprivation (Kehoe 39).

After the Wounded Knee massacre, James Mooney was dispatched from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D. C. to investigate the Ghost Dance religion, and its messiah Wovoka, of the Paiute tribe in Nevada, who was blamed for riling up the Sioux (Kehoe 3). Mooney talked with Wovoka in person about the Ghost Dance doctrine, and was shown the ‘Messiah Letter,’ a document copied by an earlier Arapaho delegate that Mooney describes as the “genuine official statement” of the Ghost Dance religion (Mooney 22). Wovoka told Mooney that he had experienced a vision during a solar eclipse in which he had seen God living with all the Native Americans who had died, and was instructed to tell his people to be honest and to live in peace with the European-Americans (Mooney 13-4). If these instructions were followed, and the Ghost Dance performed at intervals for four consecutive nights, along with ritual bathing and feasting, the Native Americans would soon be reunited with their dead friends and families and the whole earth would be renewed (Mooney 19-20, 23). This doctrine may have drawn from Christian and Mormon theology that framed Wovoka’s upbringing in Mason Valley, Nevada, as well as from the traditional Paiute Round Dance and an earlier, failed version of the Ghost Dance in 1870 (Mooney 6, Hittman 84, 93, and 96), but it was surely a powerful promise for a people suffering from epidemics, the loss of resources, malnourishment, and cultural genocide (Kehoe 8). Despite the Ghost Dance’s origins, the Native Americans revered Wovoka as a direct messenger from the “Other World” (Mooney 7), and delegations were sent on pilgrimage to Mason Valley from around the country to seek guidance and healing for their tribes (Kehoe 6).

Wovoka’s message spread through a process of Native Americans visiting neighboring tribes, observing the ritual, becoming inspired, and returning to their own tribes with the new faith (Kehoe 8). The ritual had been communicated to the Lakota by the northern Arapaho and Shoshoni tribes of Wyoming, and a delegation was sent West by the Lakota in order to confirm the rumors (Mooney 61-3). When they returned in the spring of 1890, the Ghost Dance ritual was immediately accepted and inaugurated by the majority of the tribe (Mooney 29). According to James McLaughlin, the agent at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the Lakota were excited about the prospect of an “Indian millennium:” if they believed in and practiced the Ghost Dance their dead families and buffalo herds would return, they would be impervious to bullets, and the European-Americans would be annihilated that coming spring (Mooney 29). However, this idea of an “Indian millennium” does not seem to have been part of the original Ghost Dance doctrine; it was only among the warlike Lakota Sioux that the Ghost Dance assumed this hostile expression (Mooney 19).

Part of the reason for the broad acceptance and distortion of Wovoka’s Ghost Dance message was that the doctrine was abstract enough to allow for a variety of local interpretations (Wallace viii). Each tribe reconstructed the central Ghost Dance beliefs in a return of the dead and the regeneration of the earth from their own mythology, and each believer filled in the details from their own life and trance experiences (Mooney 19). The idea that the earth must be renewed was common to a number of Native American tribes (Mooney 27). The Lakota believed that this renewal of life would occur in the early spring, when the earth’s natural regeneration takes place, and was the time of year when their annual Sun Dance ceremony was formerly held (Mooney 19-20), in which a sacrifice is performed in order to recreate the world and reactivate the wakan, or sacred power of the Universe (Amiotte 76). Similarly, the Lakota strongly believed that the spirits of the dead still exist in the world and can be reached for support (DeMallie and Parks 21). Wovoka’s message, “when your friends die, do not cry,” was interpreted by the plains tribes as forbidding their customary funerary practice of killing horses, burning property, and gashing the mourner’s body, and instead trances were performed during the dance in which they could communicate directly with their dead (Mooney 24, 186). More importantly, Wovoka’s suggestion of living in peace was interpreted as a call to put down the war dances, scalp dances, and the self-inflicted violence of the Sun Dance, that had been an integral part of life for warring plains tribes like the Lakota (Mooney 25).

However, there may have been some discrepancy in Wovoka’s original message that allowed the Lakota Sioux to interpret it in such a millenarian way. It is possible that Wovoka had different revelations that he offered to his different visitors, reflecting doctrinal shifts before and after the perceived involvement of his Ghost Dance in the Wounded Knee massacre (Hittman 98). Black Elk, a Lakota wicaša wakan, or holy man, recounts that Wovoka told the Sioux delegation that a “cloud was coming like a whirlwind” that would crush the old world and restore the buffalo (Neihardt 233). This prediction may have spoken to the central Lakota myth of the White Buffalo Woman, wherein two men hunting buffalo come across a mysterious woman and one of them is filled with evil thoughts towards her. The woman destroys this man with a cloud, reveals herself as Wakan Tanka, a manifestation of the “Great Mystery,” and gives the other man a sacred pipe, the tribal rituals, and the sanction of the buffalo as an everlasting food source (Looking Horse, 68 and DeMallie 28, 31). The offering of the pipe was the primary means of prayer for the Lakota Sioux, and was ritually accompanied by the physical and spiritual cleansing of the sweat lodge, and the communal sacrifice of the Sun Dance, which had been practiced without interruption throughout the previous century (DeMallie and Parks 14). When the Lakota adopted the Ghost Dance in 1890, they included in their adopted version several aspects from these rituals, as well as their mythic desire to see the “evil man,” now embodied by the European-Americans, destroyed in a similar supernatural cloud, altering both the original Ghost Dance doctrine and their own traditional religious practices.

Lakota religion was not separate from everyday life, and due to man’s ability to share in the wakan power, no distinction was seen between man and nature, or between nature and the supernatural; the world was characterized by a sense of unity or oneness (DeMallie 27-8). This relationship to the sacred, established in the myth of the White Buffalo Woman, was symbolized as a fixed and unending circle, and characterized Lakota ritualizing until the advent of European-American settlement and the decline of the buffalo (DeMallie 31). The traditional rituals, whether public or private, taught through myths or personal revelation, were all patterned in accordance to this circular relationship with the Wakan Tanka (DeMallie 33). The Lakota had no standardized theological beliefs; though the tribe shared basic spiritual concepts, individuals formulated specific knowledge of the wakan, whereas the rituals eventually reached an accepted public structure through continual repetition (DeMallie 34). Lakota rituals were often spoken of in terms of “pleasing” the all-powerful wakan beings, and it was believed that if they were left unsatisfied, the Wakan Tanka would do great harm to mankind (DeMallie 33, 29). Consequently, the power of the rituals made their performance dangerous, and if executed incorrectly the rituals would fail to produce their desired results, bringing on the wrath of the wakan beings, which led to an importance of proper instructions for novices and a greater uniformity of rituals (DeMallie 34). Despite pre-established ceremonial forms, Lakota ritualizing was not static, and could be changed through the influence of each individual’s visionary experience (DeMallie 42-3, and Kehoe 71). Mooney felt that such innovative visionary states were the primary feature of the Ghost Dance, and that Native Americans have an implicit faith in the content of such dreams and visions (Mooney 186, 16). Lakota participants would strive to imitate whatever they had seen while entranced, creating new songs, objects, games, and articles of clothing to be used in the next dance (Mooney 186). This mutability of Lakota ritualizing possibly accounts for what may have been a rapid, and spiritually dangerous, accruement of ritual innovations in their Ghost Dance over against Wovoka’s original doctrine.

The Lakota Ghost Dance had many features in common with Wovoka’s Ghost Dance, and with the traditional Paiute Round Dance: the ritual leaders sat in the middle of the dance circle, fires were kept on the outside, no instruments accompanied the ritual songs, and both men and women danced with joined hands, moving from right to left in the direction of the sun (Hittman 93-4, Mooney 179, 185-6, and Neihardt 237). The Lakota also participated in the communal feast that was part of every large Native American ceremony, and in the continuation of the Ghost Dance over four nights, as four was considered a sacred number in most Native American belief systems (Mooney 24), presumably indicating the four cardinal directions. Like in Wovoka’s original Ghost Dance, the Lakota ritual began with the wicaša wakan painting the dancers faces with a red-ochre paint given to the Lakota delegates by Wovoka, which the Paiute collected from their sacred mountain, Mount Grant, and was supposed to ward off illness and assist in the mental vision of the trance (Mooney 20-1). The Lakota however used other colors of paint determined by individual trance visions, and a variety of specific tribal designs that were painted on the dancer’s cheek or forehead (Mooney 68, 184).

Other differences arise between the two versions of the Ghost Dance, drawn from traditional Lakota ritual forms. While the Lakota followed Wovoka’s instruction to bathe in a stream, in order to wash away evil and dirt after the ritual, they also began the Ghost Dance with a large version of their traditional sweat lodge, in which a circular framework of willow branches is covered with blankets, and then filled with the steam from heated stones splashed with water in order to ritually purify those within (Mooney 186, 66-8). The Sweat Lodge was used to begin all Lakota ritualizing, representing the mother’s womb from which the ritual participants would be reborn (Mooney 29, and Looking Horse 72), in the same way they believed that they had been born from the womb of the earth in unity with the buffalo (DeMallie 27). A tree was also raised in the center of the Lakota Ghost Dance circle from which a sacred bow and arrows were hung, along with other ritual objects (Mooney 182, 30). The inclusion of the sweat lodge and a central tree were not found in the Paiute Ghost Dance, though a non-sacred pole was used in the traditional Piute Round Dance in order to orient the dancers in the circle (Mooney 46-7, Hittman 94). Due to Wovoka’s explicit message of peace, weapons like the bow and arrows were specifically disallowed in the Paiute Ghost Dance (Mooney 30). Finally, though trance visions became a dominant feature of the Ghost Dance for many tribes, including the Lakota, Wovoka claimed that there were no innovative trances in the Paiute Ghost Dance, a statement Mooney confirmed through eyewitness reports from neighboring ranchmen (Mooney 14). However, it does seem that Wovoka demonstrated visionary trance performances to the Lakota delegation as part of his preaching campaign, which may have helped lead the Lakota to adopt both the Ghost Dance and the use of trances in their ritual (Neihardt 231-2).

The Lakota use of a tree in the center of the Ghost Dance circle, and the opening ritual sequence associated with the tree are of particular significance as an example of individual innovation from the established ritual form of the Sun Dance. Mooney notes that at many Lakota camps, after the preparatory face painting, the Ghost Dance participants gathered in a circle around the tree, and a woman signaled the beginning of the dance by shooting four sacred arrows, made in the traditional fashion with bone heads dipped in the blood of a steer, towards each of the four cardinal directions. These arrows were then tied to the tree along with the bow, a gaming wheel and sticks, and a horned staff, while the woman remained standing throughout the performance holding a sacred redstone pipe stretched towards the west, from where the messiah was supposed to appear (Mooney 68). A wicaša wakan may also have taken the horned “ghost stick,” which was roughly six feet long and trimmed with red cloth and feathers, and waved it over the participants heads while they faced the sun in the east (Mooney 178-9). Short Bull, a Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation who had been part of the delegation to visit Wovoka, was said to have been responsible for the innovations of the woman holding the pipe and shooting arrows (Mooney 299, 31). Upon their return, the delegates proselytized for the Ghost Dance and acted as its ritual leaders, often changing it to fit their own cultural precepts (Mooney 65). In Short Bull’s version of Wovoka’s message, a tree should be raised in the middle of the dance circle, and objects representing the Lakota and surrounding tribes were to be placed in the four directions (Mooney 31).

However, Short Bull may have derived some of these innovations in the Lakota Ghost Dance from aspects of the Sun Dance. The focus in this traditional ritual was a tree placed in the center of the sacred circle to act as an axis mundi, connecting above and below into a place where the wakan powers could descend to communicate with mankind (Amiotte 79). Like in the Ghost Dance, the Sun Dance tree was painted with the sacred red paint, and hung with offerings, cloth, and sacred bundles, which represented all the things that mankind needed in order to construct and preserve life (Amiotte 83). Likewise, in the Sun Dance, a woman touched the tree with the sacred pipe as an offering to the wakan powers; she was supposed to represent the White Buffalo Woman, while the pipe symbolized the center of the world and the tobacco expressed all things in the universe being gathered in this one place (Amiotte 85). However, as this traditional earth renewal ritual had been recently prohibited, Short Bull seems to have taken the inward-looking Sun Dance symbolism and directed it beyond the boundaries of their established religious forms. Perhaps there was a hope that the Ghost Dance ritual would be able to renew their culture both from within the ritual tradition of the sacred tree and pipe, and from without, through the messiah in the west, the wakan power of the sun in the east, and the support of all the surrounding Native American tribes who were also participating in the Ghost Dance. It is possible that such innovations and adaptations are an integral part of the ritual process, serving to legitimate new religious forms in relation to traditional patterns of behavior (Clothey 5), and while the Lakota seem to have adapted their version of the Ghost Dance to their traditional rituals, there are still innovations that may not have been founded in their desire to ritually “please” the wakan powers.

The horned staffs that were hung on the tree and waved over the dancer’s heads may have originated in a trance vision Black Elk had during his first participation in the Ghost Dance. In the account of this trance that he gave to the poet John Neihardt, Black Elk claims that he saw these red-painted sticks being used by the dead in the spirit world, along with “ghost shirts” that he afterwards made for other members of the tribe (Neihardt 241-4). While the staffs seem to have been one of many other innocuous innovations envisioned into the Ghost Dance, the Ghost Shirts became an integral part of the Lakota ritual and constituted the most significant break from both their own traditions and Wovoka’s original doctrine.

The Ghost Shirts were made in a traditional fashion from white cloth and sinew, fringed and adorned with feathers, and painted with a variety of designs drawn from mythology and trances (Mooney 31-4). All adherents to the Ghost Dance religion, men, women, and children, wore the Ghost Shirts as an outside garment during the ritual and under their ordinary clothes at all other times (Mooney 31). Along with the rejection of European-American clothing in favor of the Ghost Shirts, the Lakota did not allow any metal in the Ghost Dance, especially the jewelry and belts of German silver that had become an important part of their tribal costume (Mooney 30, 186). What is most striking about this ritual garment is that the Ghost Shirts were believed to be impenetrable to weapons and bullets (Mooney 34), an idea that may have readily lent itself to the Lakota doctrine of an “Indian millennium,” or helped ferment their resistance to the European-Americans, but at the very least seemed to betray Wovoka’s message of peace (Kehoe 13). When reservation police tried to disband a Ghost Dance ceremony in June of 1890, possibly the first at which the Ghost Shirts were worn, the Lakota reportedly lowered their guns and said that they would defend their religion with their lives, though by this time they may already have been defiant due to starvation (Mooney 92). The neighboring Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes rejected the innovation of Ghost Shirts as being an example of “Sioux belligerency” that distorted Wovoka’s doctrine (Kehoe 14, and Mooney 35), and when Mooney asked the messiah about the Ghost Shirts in person, Wovoka disclaimed any responsibility for this war-like novelty, and said it was better for the Native Americans to peacefully “adopt the habits of civilization” (Mooney 14).

While Black Elk claims some credit for devising the Ghost Shirts in his trances, and introducing them to other Lakota reservations (Neihardt 249), Mooney suggests that Kicking Bear, another of the delegates sent to Wovoka, was actually the idea’s originator (Hittman 85), or at least its disseminator (Kehoe 13-4). It is worth noting that on first seeing the Ghost Dance performed, Black Elk told Neihardt that he was surprised at how much the ritual coincided with a vision he had experienced earlier in his life, but had not told anyone (Neihardt 249, 237). While this may say something about the efficacy of visionary experiences, or the interconnectedness of Native American symbolism as a whole, the belief in the invulnerability of the Ghost Shirts may have been equally inspired from outside of Lakota cultural practices. Lakota warriors were customarily protected by feathers, tiny bags of sacred powder, war paint, or animal claws twisted into their hair, and went into battle naked above the waist, as any covering would have hindered their movements (Mooney 34). It is instead possible that the Ghost Shirts were motivated by observations of Mormon “endowment robes,” a white and symbol-clad badge of office (Mooney 34), that the Mormons believed would protect them from disease, death, and even bullets (Kehoe 13, and Hittman 85). The Mormons living in the Nevada area had a long contact with and interest in the local Native Americans, and the concept of invulnerable articles of clothing may have spread to the Lakota through other tribes (Mooney 35). Furthermore, while Wovoka disclaimed credit for the Ghost Shirts in his talks with Mooney, independent reports suggest that Wovoka claimed to be invulnerable to bullets himself; among the various magical tricks and visions he used to demonstrate his powers as a prophet to the Native American delegates, Wovoka would apparently let himself be shot at and yet remain unharmed (Hittman 83-4). Perhaps the Lakota delegates saw the messiah’s act of invincibility, which along with reports of the Mormon “endowment robes,” and their own war-like nature, lent credibility to Black Elk’s vision of the Ghost Shirts as a central vestment of the Lakota Ghost Dance ritual.

While a belief in the invulnerability of the Ghost Shirts and the immanent destruction of the European-Americans may have added to the Lakota feelings of discontent and defiance, the official U.S. government statement on the causes of the Wounded Knee massacre suggests that these were only symptoms of and a defensive reaction to the already staggering cultural and economic deprivations suffered by the Sioux tribes (Mooney 74-6). The Lakota did not actively revolt until troops were called onto their lands in November 1890, in response to the fears of the reservation agents that they were losing control of the Native Americans (Mooney 73, 95). Even after the prohibition of the Ghost Dance on the reservations; the death of Sitting Bull, a conservative chief whose camp had become a center for plotting resistance to the government; and the panicked flight of Short Bull, Kicking Bull, and many Lakota from the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations into the Badlands of South Dakota after the arrival of troops, Mooney believes that there was still no premeditated “Indian Outbreak” leading to the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek (Mooney 99, 108, 119). However, on the morning of December 29, 1890, when the Lakota were being rounded up from the Badlands to be disarmed and returned to the reservations, a wicaša wakan named Yellow Bird continued to urge the Lakota warriors to resist by claiming that their Ghost Shirts would keep them safe (Mooney 115-8). This final incitement, along with what was most likely a rather tense situation, may have proved a tipping point; when Yellow Bird threw a handful of dust into the air, the Lakota took this as a signal to attack, precipitating the return fire of the government troops (Mooney 118), and the interment of the Lakota Ghost Dance as a historical anomaly. One wounded woman said after the massacre that she no longer wanted her Ghost Shirt, as it had failed to protect her from the bullets (Mooney 34), and though a few Lakota leaders continued to proselytize for the Ghost Dance afterwards (DeMallie and Parks 8), the majority of the tribe gave up the new religion, as they may have become convinced that their expectations of invulnerability, and of a coming supernatural assistance for their plights, were groundless (Mooney 200).

While ritual studies have generally ignored rites that do not work, participants may experience ritual failure as often as success, and to engage in ritual criticism may presuppose that rituals can “exploit, denigrate, or simply not do what people claim they do” (Grimes, Ritual 284, 282). It is, however, necessary to determine on what grounds the Lakota Ghost Dance ritual did not work. As the ritual theorist Ronald Grimes suggests, one difficulty in critiquing rituals is that there is often no separation between “failure in” and “failure of” the ritual; is the problem in the performance of the ritualists, in the ritual itself, or in the relation between the ritual and its surrounding “religiocultural processes” (Grimes, Ritual 290)? In the Lakota Ghost Dance we have the hostility and trance innovations of the Lakota, the inclusion of Ghost Shirts and weapons within the originally peaceful ritual, and a discrepancy between the stated desires of the Lakota Ghost Dance and both traditional Lakota ritualizing and their current socio-economic crises. Another difficulty Grimes raises in critiquing ritual is the point of view: do the ritual participants or observers determine if the ritual has actually failed (Grimes, Ritual 290)? It may be too simplistic to take a modern, rational perspective and argue that the Lakota Ghost Dance failed because Ghost Shirts cannot really protect someone from bullets, or because a supernatural cloud that will destroy the European-Americans could not really happen. Instead it is important to take the failure of the Lakota Ghost Dance on its own terms, as a ritual that could have brought about these changes if something had not gone wrong with its performance. As mentioned previously, the Lakota themselves believed that their ritualizing could fail and bring about the disastrous retribution of the wakan powers. That the Lakota stopped performing the Ghost Dance after the Wounded Knee massacre suggests that they may have believed that their ritual had failed.

In order to discuss just how this ritual may not have worked, it is first necessary to articulate what it intended to accomplish, by applying Grimes’ six modes of ritual sensibility, the “embodied attitudes, that may arise in the course of a ritual” (Grimes, Beginnings 35). The first mode, “ritualization,” establishes the relationship of the participants to their ecological and psychosomatic environments through stylized gestures (Grimes, Beginnings 36-7). In the Lakota Ghost Dance the participants would move in a circle following the direction of the sun, and all the songs were adapted to the measure of this dance step (Mooney 185), thus identifying themselves with their physical environment and spiritual powers in accordance with their traditional belief in the unity of man, nature, and the supernatural. The Lakota expressed the second mode of “decorum,” or their conventional interpersonal intentions (Grimes, Beginnings 40-1), by having the men and women dance together, and by intentionally not disturbing those who fell in trance (Mooney 181). While the Lakota placed a high value on such trance states, the spiritual powers of men and women were considered qualitatively different, reflecting a rigid distinction between their roles in everyday life (DeMallie 34). However, as women were much more likely to succumb to trances (Mooney 199), it may have been necessary to break this convention and encourage a new social unity in order to assure the success of the ritual. The third mode of ritual sensibility, “ceremony,” expresses the political or ideological power to conserve or create change (Grimes, Beginnings 41-2). Here we see the Lakota rejecting European-American clothing and tools in favor of the Ghost Shirts, and attempting to articulate their prohibited cultural heritage by offering the pipe and sacred arrows to the messiah and wakan powers. These actions, and the Lakota Ghost Dance songs that refer to the coming of the messiah and the establishment of their cultural practices in the myth of the White Buffalo Woman (Mooney 297-8), express a “liturgical” sentiment, a sense of cosmic necessity that waits on the coming of sacred powers and serves as a preparation for a coming transformation (Grimes, Beginnings 43, 49). The last mode, a “celebratory” expression of play and spontaneity (Grimes, Beginnings 48), may have only arisen in the Lakota trance innovations, and employment of new songs and sacred objects. It seems however that the Lakota were most concerned with rendering themselves invulnerable to and capable of destroying the European-Americans, as well as with restoring the buffalo and their traditional way of life. Anxiously seeking these transcendent and empirical results, the Lakota Ghost Dance ritual may be best expressed in Grimes’ terms as the sixth, “magical” mode of ritual sensibility (Grimes, Beginnings 45).

Desire is an essential factor in the efficacy of magic rituals (Grimes, Beginnings 46), but it seems unlikely that the Lakota “abused” the Ghost Dance ritual through a lack of sincerity, performing their dance without the feelings, thoughts, or intentions necessary in order to make it succeed (Grimes, Ritual 286). If anything they may have been too overzealous to revitalize their decaying religiocultural processes. Instead we must turn to other types of infelicitous performances, which Grimes adapted from J. L. Austin’s Speech-act theory. Austin makes a distinction between descriptive language, and “performative utterances:” words that do something, or fail to do what they intend, and Grimes suggests that while speech-acts only constitute one dimension of ritual action, rituals can be seen as a convergence of several performative genres that likewise have the possibility of doing something, or infelicitously failing to do something (Grimes, Ritual 283).

Beyond the “professed but hollow” abuse type of ritual infelicity, that does not seem present in the Lakota Ghost Dance, Grimes posits a typology of ritual “misfires,” based off of Austin’s own categorizations, where the ritual formula is not effective (Grimes, Ritual 284). Perhaps most directly relevant would be a “nonplay,” where the ritual procedures are either illegitimate or do not exist, among which Grimes includes rites that have been recently invented or borrowed, without being grounded in structures that might legitimate them (Grimes, Ritual 285). While some aspects of the Lakota Ghost Dance seem to be grounded in their traditional Sun Dance and sweat lodge rituals, the Lakota borrowed the main ritual form from Wovoka’s Ghost Dance teachings, itself adapted from the Paiute Round Dance, and invented several elements of their own, including the Ghost Shirts that do not seem to be supported by either religious tradition. While Wovoka’s Ghost Dance may have been a legitimate ritual for the Paiute Native Americans, for the Lakota it was possibly a “misapplication,” their desperate circumstances and warlike nature were inappropriate for the performance of a ritual originally designed to bring interracial peace (Grimes, Ritual 285). Grimes proposes that ritual participants will often blame themselves for a ritual’s failure rather than the rite itself, or blame part of the rite rather than the whole (Grimes, Ritul 291), but it seems that after the discontinuation of the Ghost Dance, the Lakota may have admitted that their ritual contained a “flaw” (Grimes, Ritual 285); their pronouncement that the Ghost Shirts would make them invulnerable proved to be incorrect, and this may have cast doubt on the efficacy of the Ghost Dance as a whole to bring about the desired millennium and earth-renewal. In this case the Ghost Dance may have produced one of Grimes’ own infelicitous types, the more serious “ineffectuality,” where a magical ritual fails to cause its intended changes (Grimes, Ritual 286). Finally, it might be worth noting that the Ghost Dance succeeded to some degree, in stirring up the Lakota to resist the European-Americans in favor of their own cultural traditions, but in doing so served as an example of ritual “contagion” (Grimes, Ritual 287); the Ghost Dance was unable to contain the Lakota’s desire for resistance and an apocalyptic destruction, and this will to violence contaminated their social relationship with the government to the point of precipitating the Wounded Knee massacre.

Grimes admits that this typology of infelicitous rituals needs more testing through application to specific rituals, but he also suggests that the right to criticize a ritual is bought with participation in it or through a richness of observations and interpretations (Grimes, Ritual 290-1). It is unfortunately too late to participate in the Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890, and even Mooney himself, who was in a better position to do so, was told by the Lakota he interviewed that, “The dance was our religion, but the government sent soldiers to kill us on account of it. We will not talk any more about it” (Mooney, 296). However, even relying on the interpretation of relevant texts alone presents challenges to fully examining the Lakota Ghost Dance. The complex multivalence of symbolism and action makes ritual one of the most difficult human behaviors to evaluate; it is complicated to show that a rite has completely failed; while it may not have achieved a particular stated goal, a ritual can still have other social repercussions (Grimes, Ritual 283).

While the Lakota Ghost Dance may have failed to bring about a magical “Indian millennium,” it possibly fulfilled another aspect of ritualizing: to affirm and transform the participants’ identities and social contexts (Clothey 1-2). Alice Kehoe suggests that prior to the Wounded Knee massacre, the Ghost Dance revitalized the Lakota Sioux by reformulating their cultural patterns to better suit their needs and preferences (Kehoe 142-3). The ritual may have offered them hope of communal identity and transformation during their cultural and economic deprivations at the end of the 1800s. Though the Lakota discontinued the Ghost Dance in early 1891, the ritual spread to the Yanktonai Sioux at the Standing Rock reservation and into Canada (DeMallie and Parks 8), where the Saskatchewan Sioux gave up the practice of trances and the invulnerability of the Ghost Shirts, and incorporated the Ghost Dance into their traditional Dakota Medicine Feast (Kehoe 46-8). For the Lakota, the discontinuation of the Ghost Dance allowed them to sign a new treaty in February 1891, for increased rations and an end of hostilities with the U.S. government (Mooney 145). Black Elk was also inspired by this new need for an effective ritual, and he reorganized the traditional Lakota religious practices, albeit within a Christian framework (Kehoe 40, 71), but including a revival of the Sun Dance in 1924 (Amiotte 75). In 1973, Leonard Crow Dog, a Lakota activist in the American Indian Movement, tried to revive the 1890 Ghost Dance, along with hostilities towards the European-American government, but the only result was a second Wounded Knee massacre (Kehoe 51, 86-7, and DeMallie and Parks 8), suggesting that a hostile version of the Ghost Dance truly was not an effective ritual for cultural transformation.

Little belief in the Ghost Dance ritual survives among the Lakota, besides the recollection of the more poignant Ghost Dance songs (DeMallie and Parks 8), but many of the basic spiritual concepts of the Lakota continue to develop in the context of modern life (DeMallie 27), and the Lakota reservations in South Dakota continue to serve as a locus for contemporary religious revitalization (DeMallie and Parks 7). In adopting Wovoka’s Ghost Dance over against their own cultural traditions, and altering the ritual by the inclusion of the violence-provoking Ghost Shirts, the Lakota were unable to bring about a destruction of the European-Americans through their participation in the Ghost Dance. Though this primary, magical intention failed, the performance of the Lakota Ghost Dance, during their critical period of cultural deprivation at the close of the 19th Century, may have succeeded in expressing something vital to the United States government. The Lakota desired to practice their traditional religious forms, and after the disgrace of the Wounded Knee massacre they were again allowed to do so, leading to an eventual rebirth of their cultural and spiritual beliefs that continues through the present day.


Bibliography

Amiotte, Arthur. “The Lakota Sun Dance: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 75-89

Clothey, Fred. “Rhythm and Intent.” Madras: Blackie and Son, 1982

DeMallie, Raymond J. “Lakota Belief and Ritual in the Nineteenth Century.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 25-43

DeMallie, Raymond J., Parks, Douglas R. “Introduction.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 3-22

Grimes, Ronald. “Beginnings in Ritual Studies.” Lanham: University Press of America, 1982

- - - “Ritual Criticism and Infelicitous Performances.” Readings in Ritual Studies. Ed. Ronald Grimes. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1996. Pp. 279-293

Hittman, Michael. “Wovoka and the Ghost Dance.” Expanded edition. Ed. Don Lynch. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997

Kehoe, Alice Beck. “The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization.” 2nd edition. Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc., 2006

Looking Horse, Arval. “The Sacred Pipe in Modern Life.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 67-73

Mooney, James. “The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965

Neihardt, John G. “Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988

Wallace, Anthony F. C. “Introduction.” The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965

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.

A Definition Among Many

"Myth (may be) a symbol system expressed in story form generally modeled from the given factors of the human situation and expressing a people's or possibly an individual's view of reality by chronicling past events perceived to be definitive and authenticating and ascribing them an aura of ultimate significance so that the story often serves as a paradigm for human activity." -Dr. Fred Clothey's final words on myth, from his lectures on Myth, Symbol, and Ritual.

I finished writing my research paper in time to hand it in at class this evening, though when I laid down to sleep I started thinking about particular themes and symbols from the myth that I wasn't able to touch on in the paper, nor frankly was sure just how to interpret. I realized that though I felt I did a good job trying to show how Indra-Vṛtrahan may have been a manifestation of the power of the Vedic nobility, I may never really know what some of the symbols mean, nor for that matter what the entire myth actually meant for its culture. Which returns to Dr. Clothey's perspective that interpretation, and theories in general, are themselves a form of mythmaking, and we can never quite keep from brining our own subjective givens to whatever we look at.

We transitioned into our discussion on symbol tonight and Clothey stressed the distinction between direct signification and the potentiality of meanings possible in symbols, in that signs act like religious dogmas that delimit and exclude other perspectives, and symbols openly invite thought and community. To illustrate this he contrasted Western discourse's use of A/not-A logic to the Jain philosophical arguments of "Viewpoints" (nayavāda) and "Maybe" (syādvādha), which are taken together as the "Doctrine of Manysidedness" (anekāntavāda) in which discourse can have a conception of possibilities that recognizes the finitude of individual perspectives. I asked why, if such open and flexible discourse is possible, is Western Culture still stuck on A/not-A? Dr. Clothey, who had just been very animated in his discussion, suddenly grew quiet and after pointing at Plato as the origins admitted he didn't know. Then he went on tell how in all his years studying religion and trying to promote open dialogues in religious communities around the world, he had seen that whenever violence was done in the name of religion it often stemmed from a fundamental ignorance of the other guy's position, and an inability to recognize the finitude of one's own. Holding back both evident tears and growing rage he said that often, if not always, you can't understand your own perspective until you look someone else in the eyes and take their perspective seriously. After which he apologized for ranting, asked for our papers, and told us to go home.

Faster than a Speeding Pharisee

I finally nerved myself up to talk to Dr. Clothey in person, which if anything will allow me to finally get some sleep and stop imagining what I might say to him. Admittedly I was a bit surprised by how unresponsive he was to the work I've done and plans for studying dreams and myth, but perhaps that was mostly due to being a bit more nervous than I expected to be and not presenting myself clearly. And when it comes to dreams, Clothey claims to not treat them as all that important, rather looking down on Jungian ideas (as well as on Campbell, for the understandable reason that Campbell has tried to draw too many broad parallels in myth without considering individual cultural differences).

However when I started asking specific questions Clothey got much more animated, particularly when it came to the topic of modern myth. I was surprised and a little pleased later to find him recycle much of our conversation into his class discussion, even touching briefly on eschatological myths. As far as modern mythemes that are active in the American landscape (his term, I'd perhaps say mindscape, or symbolscape), he tried to draw a thread from the Mesopotamian myth of Marduke slaying Tiamat and creating the world from her body, a justification of war, land ownership/division, and the concentration of power in the city-state, to our modern mythology of manifest destiny. John Wayne and the Wild West, the demonization of nature and Native Americans, the valorization of war and concretization of power in a figurehead, as we see with George Bush and Iraq, one more conquering saint against his draconic nemesis. Also interesting was Clothey's insistence on the modern myth of the "incompetent male," where once men where supposed to be like John Wayne, now they are portrayed in the media as idiots, yahoos, sexually and culturally impotent, with recourse only in "viagra and guns." Which of course made me want to consider what other sorts of mythemes might be at work to counter such a grim Babylonian vision of America. The environmental and anti-war movements were his two suggestions, though I imagine there could be much deeper mythological themes that could be brought to bear, and may be necessary in order to reorient the direction our culture is heading in...

Today Sophie asked if comic book superheroes might be part of our modern mythology, an idea that I've been pondering for years. She suggested that maybe they related to Nietzsche's idea of the 'superman,' which I thought more suggestive of the Taoist 'supreme man,' a state of self-transcendence. A good number of superheroes on the other hand repair to this world in order to save humanity or establish a new order or morality. The story of Superman paralleling the myth of Jesus, even down to them dying, extolls the need for an external salvation. Of course, many other superheroes were normal people who somehow became more than just that, and in doing a spot of research I came upon a review of a book called "The Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and Popular Culture," where one of the essayists actually does compare Batman as the Nietzschean 'ubermensch,' and as mythologically important for the modern individual. We are asked to be no longer John, but Bruce Wayne.

Ironic, or synchronistic to all this was an odd dream last night of attending Sophie on some sort of similarly superheroesque quest she was on, complete with a large number of costume or disguise changes. Also during class yesterday Sophie called just as we were discussing the creation mytheme of demiurges and all the incarnations of the goddess Sophia.


[Edit: I'd get some sleep if I wasn't now too busy trying to track down obscure Easter Island and Aztec mythologies to figure out what to focus my paper on. No rest for the curious.]

exploding mythologies

It looks like my Myth, Symbol, and Ritual class will be the most exciting, and most challenging, of my courses this year. The professor, Fred Clothey, was a student of the renowned mythologist Mircea Eliade, a gruff imposing man who founded Pitt's Comparative Religion department and immediately threatened to scare all the freshmen out. Apparently he retired last year, but the University was unable to find another teacher for this course, and I feel highly honored to learn from an authority in this field and not some gawky grad student. Asking us what a myth is, he shot down all our uncertain ideas, and though I recognize that having not been in school for seven years I really need to relearn how to frame my vocal arguments, I feel certain I will have all my assumptions about myth questioned and learn a great deal in this field which I perhaps have the most personal investment in.

As opposed to the six page final paper for my Critical Reading class, here I am expected to write three 7-10 page essays (the first due next month), each dealing with one of the topics, myth, symbol, and ritual. On top of that I must also write my own personal myth and an observation of a ritual outside of my everyday experience, all things that I currently push myself to do in my personal writing, but perhaps not with nearly the critical intent that the professor might hope us to bring. Thankfully, I am fascinated by these themes, and already have thousands of ideas for subject matter.

For the myth I will take one of the apocalypses with which I am familiar, possibly Revelations but more likely the Norse Ragnarok, which has exerted it's influence on my psyche since I first read it in fourth grade, interpreting its symbols as well as through a mythological theory (I'm not sure just whose yet), in order to show that though it describes an end of the world (in illo tempore), it is also a creation myth which paves the way for this present reality.

For the symbol I immediately decided on that of the Tower, perhaps the most pervasive symbol in my own mythology, and fitting because that's exactly the phase of life I'm in. The Tarot's blasted tower, the tower of Babel, the World Trade Centers, Tolkien's White Tower, Stephen King's Dark Tower, the current race for the world's largest skyscraper, and even Oakland's infamous gothic edifice, the Cathedral of Learning (or Tower of Ignorance), in which I have all my classes. Building not just as recreation of world, but as the human folly of trying to become the gods. I could probably tie in the internet as modern parallel of Babel.

For the ritual, I had already been planning on attending a Jewish Temple service with Sophie at some point soon, which could be interesting in comparison to my Catholic upbringing. But I also had the opportunity to participate in a Peyote ceremony in the spring on which I took extensive notes, and could potentially participate in another one specifically to examine for the class. What's interesting about that is the ceremony is removed from its traditional context (in the Yaqui shamanism Castaneda studied), and literally smuggled into the modern American world, an angle which might interest Clothey, who extensively studied religious diasporas in Southern India.

Regardless of what I actually end up writing about it is certainly already getting me thinking much more critically in these terms again, and making me reconsider the idea of doing a double major, in creative writing and comparative religion.