BOOK-BOUND RELIGION

What originally got me interested in religious studies, beyond the usual Christian American preoccupation with denominations, was participating in Blackfeet Pipe Bundle Ceremonies in the Sixties, just before those old folks died. They were born in about 1880, spoke Blackfeet, and were for the most part illiterate. The last remnants of what might be called the Buffalo Culture, they actually grew up in that period of deprivation and loss after the buffalo had disappeared. From that point of view they might be called blanket Indians (without pejorative meaning) who had to replace their original from-the-land stores with dependence on government provisions, generally short and of poor quality. Nevertheless, they were able to remain on a remnant of their land as refugees from the past.

Sitting with the old people then was a enactment not much changed from the performance of this Blackfeet-language high-prairie ceremony as it must have been much earlier -- before Blackfeet writing except for image stories painted or chipped on surfaces and before anthropologists who wrote up the ceremony -- except that the main object, the “calumet” or long, decorated pipestem, was made of industrial age Euro materials: a lathe-shaped rod, drilled at the center lengthwise (perhaps with gun barrel technology), studded with brass tacks, and decorated in part with brass falconry bells. Paul Dyck thought this ceremony came into use about the time that smallpox (also a Euro import) came to the prairies and was, in part, a response to the epidemics. Others suggest that the pipe ceremony, or a version of it, may have originated as far south as the Aztec or Mayas.

Today this ceremony, called "Thunder Pipe Bundle Opening" has persisted among the descendants of those old people with whom I sat. In part, they are guided by memory but few to none are really fluent Blackfeet speakers, so the talk among them is in English. Most of the songs and practices have been kept, they tell me, but I don’t attend and wouldn’t be able to tell even if I did. So far as I know, no one has made a comparison of the records of old-time Bundle Openings with the contemporary ones, in part because the old-timers resisted any recordings or photographs. Even so, there are accounts and photos in Walter McClintock’s “The Old North Trail.” Adolph Hungry Wolf has also made an heroic effort to preserve whatever he could find.

I’m not going to explore that very much in this blog. What I’m after is the difference between ceremonies that have nothing to do with words, esp. written-down words, and those that are word-dependent: religions of the “Book” which are the mode of most of the religions with Middle Eastern roots: Christianity, Judaism, and the Koran. Book-based religion allows these characteristics:

1. An invariant record of actions and words.
2. A “priestly” class of experts who interpret these records, creating secondary books and records.
3. Control of the record, which empowers the possessor, usually that same priestly class.
4. A tendency for worship to split between those who enact and those who watch, participating only through empathy or directed actions.
5. The advent of heresy, since the invariant record might not be agreeable to everyone and therefore priests might argue among themselves or the worshipers might argue with the priests. Because power is involved, this can become involved with governance and lead to rebellion and war.

We know how those wars go. We’re still struggling with them.

Pre-book celebrations were, by contrast:

1. Performances by everyone in attendance, though women were often subordinated, through a loose pattern that allowed individual spontaneous embellishments.
2. All participants “do” what needs to be done, which is often organic in structure (for instance, the stages of human development with the Umeda), without any secondary competing opinion or even consciousness that anything could be otherwise.
3. The most important participants are determined by status in the community, a matter of consensus. Status among the Blackfeet was a combination of prowess at hunting or warfare, generosity with the results, general trustworthiness within the group, industriousness, friendship circles, "virtue" (for women) and longevity. No one “owns” this. No one can “inherit” it.
4. The split between those who perform the important parts and those who don’t is only temporary -- one can hope to “grow into” the important role in the course of things. In the case of the Blackfeet, Bundles moved among “keepers.”
5. Wars are between villages, not within them. There ARE variations in the ceremony from one group to another, but no thought of forcing other villages to do things “our” way. Groups are small and though there are valued wise people, most things are done by consensus.

However, sorcery is alive among both book-people and pre-book people. Paranoia, blame, suspicion, envy and other forms of psychological terrorism appear to be so deeply human that they are beyond the reach of religion, even those who preach against such emotions. Mostly religion gives them shapes and names and there will be much “magic” (which is an attempt at control) aimed at protecting oneself, but this doesn’t rise to the level of worldview, an overall deep understanding of existence.

What we know about the development and function of the human brain is still far from complete, but some things seem persuasive so far. One is that as the brain develops within the human body, it is connected to the world by the senses. The world in its concrete manifestation, its ecology of interwoven beings, meets the reports of the senses that the brain receives and interprets. As the sensations come in, the brain sorts them and interprets them. Not only that, the brain “grows around them” so that they become real and are valued, while the unperceived phenomena (either not there at all or not “felt”) are dropped as irrelevant. The key experiment might be the kittens who were raised in an environment that consisted only of verticals (hard as that is to imagine) so that they could not understand the concept “horizontal,” and fell over drop-offs because they didn’t “see” them.

Beyond that, instrumentation has made it clear that waves and entities all around us, even interwoven with us, cannot be perceived by ordinary human senses. It’s not that we have no frame of reference -- it’s that they don’t exist until we have a microscope or oscilloscope or an x-ray machine.

Much of Euro religion is an attempt to “see” what’s beyond this world. What is the color not-green? What is the taste of something never tasted. How big is eternity? What might heaven be like? But these questions are mostly the results of word-based, book-based reflection accumulating over a period of time: philosophy.

The pre-book experience (not pre-language because there’s plenty of that and words for things that a modern human might not know exist), I would maintain, is poetic. Things and their “shadows,” one might say, because every word has its conceptual sensory image in the mind or poetry wouldn’t “work.” Thus I am interested in ritual from a poetic point of view (oral poetry, which might include song) rather than a philosophical point of view. I’m speaking of the experience itself, not the theological justification. Hold up a crucified Jesus to the Umeda, and one would get gasps at the cruelty, but not the sense of sacrifice. Lead a Christian to the cassowary in the zoo and they would see only a Big Bird.