The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions

THE THING ABOUT RELIGION

• • •

THE THING ABOUT RELIGION

• • •

An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions

• • •

DAVID MORGAN

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

This book was funded in part by the Warren Roman Catholic and the Dennis and Rita Meyer Endowments in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University.

© 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Set in Miller by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: (front) John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886 © Tate Images; (back) © iStock.com/bushton3.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Morgan, David, 1957– author.

Title: The thing about religion : an introduction to the material study of religions / David Morgan.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020044340 | ISBN 9781469662824 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469662831 (pbk. ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469662848 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Religion and culture. | Material culture—Religious aspects. | Space and time—Religious aspects. | Religion—Study and teaching.

Classification: LCC BL65.C8 M65 2021 | DDC 200—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044340

[ CONTENTS ]

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Acknowledgments

Introduction: How Materiality Matters to the Study of Religion

PART I. THEORIES AND DEFINITIONS

Chapter 1. How Some Theories of Religion Dematerialize It

Chapter 2. What Is the Material Study of Religion?

Chapter 3. How Religions Happen Materially

PART II. STUDYING MATERIAL RELIGION

Chapter 4. The Power of Things: A History of Magic Wands

Chapter 5. Notre-Dame de Paris: Religion and Time

Chapter 6. Words and Things

Conclusion: Things, Networks, and Agents

Resources for Classroom Use

Primary Texts, Key Terms, and Online Resources

Writing Guide

Bibliography to Support Student Research

Notes

Index

[ FIGURES ]

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  1 Amilcare Santini, Head of Michelangelo’s David

  2 Virgin of Paris, Notre-Dame de Paris

  3 Shiva Lingam

  4 The Black Stone of the Kaaba

  5 Buddhist monks, Rangoon, Burma

  6 Crest from the Escrain de Charlemagne

  7 Boudhanath Stupa, Kathmandu, Nepal

  8 Detail of carved capitals, cloister of the abbey church of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, France

  9 Main hall with spirit tablet displayed before the figure of Confucius, Temple of Confucius, Jiading, China

10 G. Mauraud, Burning the Prayers—Chinese Superstitions

11 Altar of the Three Generations, Burial Chapel of Jan van Arkel, bishop of Utrecht, Domkerk, Utrecht

12 Jan Saenredam, after Cornelius van Haarlem, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

13 José Ferreira Thedim, Our Lady of Fátima

14 Roman altar

15 Frontispiece, William Hurd, A New Universal History

16 An Orthodox Jewish teacher distributes prayer books among five-year-old boys at the Temple Mount, Jerusalem

17 Prayer at Jumma Mosque, Delhi, India

18 Jewish men apply tefillin at the Temple Mount, Jerusalem

19 Francisco Rizi, Auto-da-Fé on the Plaza Mayor of Madrid

20 Funeral portraits of the children of Aline from Hawara, Egypt

21 Romeyn de Hooghe, Frontispiece of the Old Testament

22 Andrea Pozzo, Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius, ceiling fresco of the church of Sant’Ignazio, Rome

23 A Hindu priest performs yajña, a sacrificial fire, Calcutta, India

24 Schoolgirls tie paper fortunes to a trellis for disposal, Sensoji Temple, Tokyo

25 Kylix depicting Priestess Themis as the Delphic Oracle with King Aegeus before her

26 Annibale Caracci, Ulysses and Circe, Farnese Palace, Rome

27 Attributed to Tithonos painter, lekythos with image of Hermes

28 Moses and the Burning Bush, Exodus 3: 2

29 Opening of the mouth ceremony, Egyptian Book of the Dead

30 Moses Divides the Red Sea, synagogue fresco, Dura Europos, Syria

31 Sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus, Rome

32 The Brazen Serpent, from The Common Book of Prayer

33 Gabriel Ehinger after Johann Jacob von Sandrart, Moses and Jesus on title page, German Bible

34 John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle

35 William Wynn Westcott in ceremonial garment of the Rosicrucians

36 Pamela Colman Smith, The Magician

37 Émile Bertrand, Cendrillon

38 Wandrille de Préville, Notre-Dame de Paris in flames

39 Île de la Cité, 1609

40 Jean Jouvenet, Mass of the Canon de la Porte

41 Charles Nicolas Cochin II, Grand Funeral at Notre-Dame de Paris for Elisabeth Therese of Lorraine

42 Festival of Reason

43 The Emperor Swears the Oath of the Constitution at Notre-Dame

44 Consecration of Napoleon and Coronation of Josephine by Pope Pius VII

45 Panoramic view of Notre-Dame and the Seine

46 Polynesian creator deity, A’a, from Rurutu

47 Great marae of Temarre at Papeete, Tahiti

48 The Family Idols of Pomare

49 Destruction of the Idols at Otaheite

50 Marae of Tane, at Maeva, Tahiti

51 Aeolian harp, from Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis

52 Presentation of tapa-wrapped deities to LMS missionaries at Rarotonga

53 Museum of the London Missionary Society

54 Interior view of the Cabinet of Curiosities, Boston

[ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ]

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My sincere thanks to Elaine Maisner, executive editor at the University of North Carolina Press, for her support from the genesis of this project to its completion. And to Birgit Meyer, University of Utrecht, for assembling a group of students and faculty to workshop much of the manuscript. My visit to Utrecht and the days meeting with the group were instrumental in improving the book. Birgit and her colleagues were not only careful readers of the text but outstanding conversation partners. Thanks, too, to a number of colleagues who offered helpful comments: Larissa Carneiro, Joyce Flueckiger, Andreas Gregersen, Mohsen Kadivar, Hwansoo Kim, Leela Prasad, and Pooyan Tamimi Arab. I would like to acknowledge the journal Kunst og Kultur, where a portion of chapter 6 first appeared. And for assistance in publishing this book, I wish to express my gratitude to the Warren Roman Catholic and the Dennis & Rita Meyer Endowments in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University.

THE THING ABOUT RELIGION

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[ INTRODUCTION ]

HOW MATERIALITY MATTERS TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION

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This bust of David (fig. 1) was modeled by a twentieth-century Italian sculptor named Amilcare Santini after Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece. The object was purchased by my mother sometime in the late 1970s at an estate sale and placed on a shelf in my childhood home. I passed it each day and admired its indignant glare and thick mane. From a college art history class, I recognized that its origin was the nude figure Michelangelo had been commissioned to carve for the Florence Cathedral in 1501. When it was completed, the massive figure was instead placed in the city square of Florence, where the statue’s determined look was trained defiantly on any enemy of the fledgling Florentine republic.¹

FIGURE 1. Amilcare Santini, Head of Michelangelo’s David, 1960s, cast polymer, height 6 in. Photo by author.

I also liked my mother’s bust of David because it was a creamy resin cast that resembled ivory, a warm, glossy material that was mounted on a simple dark plinth. It recalled the classical busts that middle-class homeowners proudly displayed in their overstocked Victorian interiors. My mother used the weighty bust as a bookend to hold in place five decoratively bound volumes of works by Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius. But when she spoke of the bust, my mother did not refer to classical sculpture or Greek or Roman philosophy. In fact, she never read the books. She was interested in the ornamental accent of their bindings, not their contents. And the bust for her was a classical embellishment with the added value of its subject: the Bible story of a divinely favored shepherd with his meager sling facing a Philistine colossus whom the boy defeated by virtue of a pure heart and divine plan. My mother also told me that she thought the head was handsome. Indeed, the pile of hair towering above the face recalls publicity stills of Marcello Mastroianni in the classic film La Dolce Vita (1960). Perhaps Santini was influenced by glamour shots of the actor.

Figure 1 is not an expensive work of art. It is not a work of art at all, really, but rather a decorative rendition of one. The bust is available today on eBay for as little as thirty dollars. It is a copy of a clay original by Santini that has been reproduced thousands of times in a variety of media and in different sizes and colors. Whatever might be said of Santini’s original work, this figure is clearly a commodity, an inexpensive ornament purchased by those who want to display it in their homes for its artistic reference, its aura of fine culture, its religious connotation, or merely its decorative value in an ensemble of wallpaper, shelving, and related objects. What becomes clear is that the object’s value is not simply enclosed within itself but consists in the connection of its physical qualities to the history of art, to the Bible, to the artist who made it, to the market that makes the object available, to the objects it is displayed with, to the domestic setting in which it is displayed, and to those who behold it wherever they happen to encounter it. In other words, viewers do not encounter objects in isolated aesthetic purity; rather, they discover them arrayed within an ecology of other objects, places, texts, memories, lore, and people. If we wish to understand something, we need to scrutinize the dense context in which we experience it. Without that, a thing is unspecified, an object without context, an entity afloat on a nondescript sea of possibilities. It might be anything, rather than the something that stares back at us.

This account suggests that a religious artifact or space is also about more than this or that object. Indeed, the thing about religion only begins with all the paraphernalia that religions produce and use: holy water, medals, crystals, chalices, miters, wands, and pendants, sacred books, relics, amulets, and caps, paintings, gems, and polished bits of stone. It continues with the places that matter—shrines and temples and sacred springs, caves and altars and pilgrimage sites. And the sounds and silences of such places. And the food people eat and the clothing they wear. The thing about religion, in other words, is the stuff of religious life—the material character of the look and smell and sound that make a religion what it is in the daily lives of its adherents. And still, there is more to the story. There is the stuff many are less likely to admire—the weaponry, devices of torture, the towering walls and bloody altars, the gallows and pyres and glowering pageantry of authority that keeps little people in their place and put monarchs on their vaunted thrones. Readers of this book will encounter examples of all these and will consider how they make sense in relation to the cultural and biological complexity of the human body and the social worlds that human beings produce.

Things

This is a book about how things matter to the academic study of religion. But what is a thing? In modern English usage, the word thing commonly refers to a physical object whose proper name, function, or history one does not know. What is that thing? we may ask of something we do not recognize. The word implies vagueness, obscurity, or uncertainty. In a colloquial sense, English speakers say, "I have a thing for chocolate, or There is something I want to talk with you about." The word is oblique, refusing to name just what it is that concerns the speaker. The thing at issue is veiled indefiniteness or indeterminacy. This makes a thing somewhat different from an object, which is a certain, specifiable entity, with an identifiable function and name. An object is the counterpart of a subject—a conscious being who has a use and a name for the object. Thus, an object is subject to specification, which means that it can be assigned a purpose and placed within a class of related objects, a species.

The word thing designates whatever falls into a kind of limbo, a gray place where its purpose and nature are not apparent.² But two different senses of the word’s use arise. Sometimes, the mist clears and we discover what the thing is. This is the process of objectification: we are able to specify what the thing is supposed to do, what class of objects it belongs to. In this case, a thing is an unspecified object. Once we can determine its species, we know what kind of thing it is and how to use it. We answer the question, What is that thing? by determining what kind of an object it is. We need a term like thing to designate a category for items that have lost their place or use or whose novelty or complexity or nature are unclear to us. Practically speaking, the thing about religion includes this category of oblivion or mystery because people may seek to conceal the strangeness or otherness of artifacts that belong to religions other than their own, to religions from the distant past, or to experiences of their own that do not fit the commonsense reality that governs everyday life. People may do so by applying to things names that make them familiar.

But sometimes the mystery remains and we are not able to fit a thing into a secure taxonomy that tells us what it is and how to use it. In this case, a thing is not just unspecified: it may appear to be unspecifiable. It cannot be assigned an enduring place within a system of classification. People who have encountered spectral beings in visions or haunted places often speak this way, regarding what they have experienced as shrouded in mystery. There was something there, but they are not sure what. This sort of thing, though it remains obscure, can exert an influence on those who have encountered it. Gods, demons, angels, ghosts, and such beings may elude precise definitions, may resist being defined as controllable objects, yet still exert influence over people and events. Believers may have a name for such things, but they are compelled to treat them differently than objects. It is not what they are so much as who they are that directs interaction with such beings.

In such moments of mystery, the second sense of the word thing is important as a category because it captures how people struggle with the unexplained that presses upon them. They strain to put in words what they have experienced. But by feeling their way through the confusion, awe, and fear, they may come upon a new perception, and their experience might take the shape of a significant encounter. They continue to struggle to understand it, but the elusive nature of the thing is precisely what compels them to persist. Thingness consists of what resists becoming reduced to a useful object, something that one can appropriate and use. In this sense, a thing is alienated from conventional utility. We might say that a thing eludes the status of objecthood, demanding that people address it as something more, even as a subject, as a being equal or superior to themselves. People are therefore impelled to regard what their moral and emotional relation to the thing may be rather than what use they may find for it as an object. In the experience of an apparition, for example, the alienation resulting from the strangeness of the event reveals the superior subjecthood of the mysterious thing. The human subject will never be able fully to objectify this Other but must discover a different relation to it.

In this book, thing refers to both senses—the yet to be specified and that which is not (readily) specifiable. Yet there is another aspect of things to bear in mind—the way in which objects become unspecified, and so take on thingness. The things that matter most to people, to which they feel closest, inevitably lose their clarity and concreteness as they fade into the oblivion of neglect, decay, and forgetting. If the strange can resist familiarity, sometimes that which was familiar grows strange. In this sense, thingness is a condition that creeps up and befalls objects or places. Things are always changing. They exhibit an instability that turns out to be important because it means that their use and the interpretation of their value are not constant. That is because everything exists in time, which is another way of saying that everything changes—inwardly, by wearing down or decomposing, for example, and outwardly, in their relation to other entities, including human beings. Things also change because people change. What once mattered slips away (or is deliberately thrown) into the past and suffers a loss of value. In the second portion of the book, we will follow several things over time in order to understand how they and their contexts undergo change. In those chapters, we will track objects moving around the world, compare objects in very different cultures, and study the same object (a building) over hundreds of years. In each case, it will become apparent that things are not self-enclosed and enduring but always on the move, always awash in time.

Enchanted Matter

To say that things matter seems clear enough if we are talking about stone temples or wooden carvings or fresco paintings or the colored cloth of tunics or togas. But how do angels or saints or spirit beings matter in the same way? In both senses of the word as I have identified them here, a thing is a thing by virtue of its capacity to act on us or on other things—either mysteriously or directly. Materiality, in other words, consists of agency. People report that they experience intangible things like angels, ancestors, or ghosts. They do so by being touched or moved or frightened or inspired by them. All of these sensations imply some manner of experience that takes the form of an encounter or relationship because the thing that launches it refuses to become no more than an object of human use.

It is common to split the universe between spirit and matter. Insisting on their absolute distinction is called dualism, a philosophical position that is not helpful for the material analysis of religions since dualism strongly privileges the spirit side, where it is believed that thought and soul and gods and truth are located. I want to suggest that spiritual does not simply mean nonphysical. Spiritual things are those operating under the second sense of the word thing: the indeterminate or unspecified or mysterious way that something acts on other things, including human beings. This is an important point because it will allow us to discuss the actions of things like angels and saints, gods, demons, and spirit forces without becoming obsessed with whether they actually exist. We may never know such things in their nature, or even believe they exist, but we can describe the difference such things make in the lives of religious practitioners and their communities.

The material study of religions is, among other things, the study of agency—how things act on one another. Agency is conventionally understood to mean the special sense of intentional action that is reserved largely for human beings. But if we think of agency in causal terms, anything can act on other things. Agency is an ascription that depends largely on the scope or relevance of its consequences. The wind blowing through grass is the cause of its movement. But when the wind desiccates crops or topples houses, it becomes the agent of destruction, receiving a name and a character of malevolence. In ancient Greece, for example, the south wind, Notos, was the one that burned crops and delivered adverse weather. The poet Hesiod counseled his brother to undertake maritime travel within the fifty days following summer solstice and not to delay return, waiting until the time of new wine and the autumn rains, the onset of winter and the fearsome blasts of the South Wind [Notos], which stirs up the sea as it comes with heaven’s plentiful rains of autumn, and makes the waves rough.³ Clearly, agency can be the ascription of intentionality to nonhuman events or forces. Yet in either case, as a god or a natural force, the wind is a cause, and if we wish to understand the material domain as taking an active role in religious life and imagination, we need to expand the definition of agency to embrace the broad scope of material conditions.

To say that things act does not mean that they simply react in a lifeless, indifferent chain of actions and reactions. Human beings are interested observers and participate in what they observe, endowing it with value that it may have only for them. This endowment is more than a fiction. Humans invest the material world with agency that in turn enables them. But that agency is more than merely projected by human beings. In a very real sense, human beings cooperate with objects. Tools, for example, allow us to do things we could not do by ourselves. Thus, because a tool transforms its human user, it is an agent, or a coagent. The human species is dependent on tools, from the simple broom or hammer to modern technology. The relationship is so fundamental that the species may be defined as the one that relies on tools such that it could not exist without them. If we accept this definition of humanity (homo faber, Latin for humankind as maker), it is not difficult to recognize the coagency of anything in the world that helps humans thrive. We do not understand human being properly if we think of it as essentially a sovereign consciousness. A human being is something deeply enmeshed in the world, incomplete and impossible without the things that extend, penetrate, and interface with the body. But such a view becomes heavily anthropocentric if we fail to realize that we are not the only form of animation at work in the world around us. In fact, much of the world is alive—not only as animals or insects but as microbes, as bacteria that consume organic matter. And matter behaves in ways that exhibit intricate and extensive order. Think of the mineralization that produces fossils, the formation of crystals, the wave action of water, or the patterns that wind creates in soil or sand. Matter exhibits a clear tendency toward ordered behavior and interactive balance. Of course, matter also exhibits entropy, the tendency toward dissolution or disorder. Human beings make use of both tendencies, and the two senses of the word thing outlined here capture them—objecthood, or endurance, and change.

But is the tendency toward order apparent in matter a soul? Do souls direct the many things that humans rely on to thrive in their ordered worlds? Is a tool really an agent in the full (human) sense of the term? Most of us would probably say no. At least, those of us who are products of modernity, the cultural condition that the social theorist Max Weber described as having disenchanted the physical world, drained it of magic understood as a means of salvation or manipulating divine forces.⁴ Disenchantment intensified, according to Weber, under the rise of economic rationalism in the form of capitalism, which resulted in an indifference if not hostility toward religion.⁵

Weber’s notion of the elimination of magic from the world as a broad historic process or evolutionary development reflects the influence of earlier scholars of religion such as the anthropologist and folklorist Sir James Frazer, who regarded magic as primitive science and amassed detailed accounts of folklore as the remains of earlier, premodern forms of thought. Among his documentations was a feature of interest to us on the matter of animated things. Frazer described what he called "the external