Bleeding Fiction

Remind me of an old college debate over the works of Aristophanes and the like. How do you frame plays that make satire of the gods? Did people believe the literal stories or were they secular? Could you draw comparison between The Birds and say, the appearance of Jesus on South Park?

Hhm. Were you committing a typo there, Erik, or did you want me to remind you of some debate that you and I had in college?

Because the closest thing I can remember that you and I talked about was the nature of the modern study of religion; how modern religious scholars (Philosophy of Religion or Comparative Religion types, as opposed to Religious Historians) look at a world of myth and religion; through the lens of metaphor and soteriology and philosophy and so on. I think this is probably when we talked about Campbell's view that mythology is not about trying to change the way things are (i.e. through prayer or magic ritual) but rather to cope with things as they are.

The Greek dramas... well, if I'm remembering it right (it's been a while and I don't have any of my relevant textbooks on hand) early on the stories were a form of prayer and the gods were literally seen as real. Later the playwrites and audience were more, well, secular in their enjoyment of the plays.

But, in either case, you could make a comparisson between The Birds and Jesus on South Park. Mark Taylor (who's the dude I talk about here), for instance, would likely argue that South Park is a manifestation of the sacred in the modern world and certainly no less worthy a satire than, say, Chaucer made of the religious climate of his time in the Canterbury Tales.

I'm going to guess that you're trying to suggest, by your line of questioning, that many secular things (fairies included) were once sacred. Which wouldn't be inaccurate. But I have to confess it's not, particularly what I'm interested in here.

It's... well, you know I make this big stink about certain superheroes (say, DC's iconic Justice Leaguers) as "modern mythology." And I mean that in the same way Joseph Campbell wrote about classical mythology. Superheroes are icons that are "psychologically sacred," part of a way of helping us cope with the world as it exists.

But there's also something to be said for the fact that superheroes are purely secular wish-fulfillment fantasies or social commentary and so on. There's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, they have to be. But it's a form of supernatural wholly divorced from any sense of the sacred.

It's... hhrm. I still really don't know where I'm going with this. Secular's the key, something about that odd blend of the supernatural and the profane (i.e. non-divine) world. It's right on the tip of my tongue...

yeesh.

That was a typo.

I think that, as so often happens in religion and philosophy studies, you are putting too much emphasis on sematics. In western intellectualism we draw a distinct line between the spiritual and mundane worlds of human behavior, even when examples from our own literature do not support that even division. There are plenty of things that people do, think, and say all the time that speak to the supernatural world without speaking to the sacred world, all of which we lump under spirituality.

We have faiths both venerable (faith in God, Christ, Allah, etc.) and secular (belief in psychics, ghosts, aliens, wearing luky socks).

I could go into some detail, but I don't have the patience for these kind of discussions online.

In any case, that sounds like a poor prologue to the book, except to point out that the fairie stories discussed do not fit into any kind of canon Christian worldview, they simply exist as is.

Kind of like Mage and Vampire. Technically they exist in the same world, but they work better if you simply don't mix them. :)

To paraphrase Hank Scorpio: You can't argue with the little things, Erik. It's the little things that make up life. In other words, yes, it's semantic, but semantics are important to some degree.

Anyway, I'm not trying to hold up fairies as an example of something unique. As you say, we also have psychics and aliens as examples of the supernatural and secular. But what I'm getting at is that they're never framed that way. You don't often hear about UFOs as explicitly secular, making the active point that they're not messengers from God or whatnot. This may be because it's so implicit in the conception of what a UFO is that the suggestion that it needs to be pointed out as seperate from the sacred is just silly.

But, I think it's sort of important to think about it, anyway. With UFOs, turn it on its head. What if UFOs were part of the sacred? What if they were messengers from God? What does that say about God? What does that say about humanity, about aliens, about the universe? You could answer the question any number of ways, and that could lead you to the God-planet from The Authority or my natural disasters story from a while ago or to a hundred other places.

In the case of the fairy, think about the implications for medieval history. You have this society that's so culturally grounded in the sacred, that's so concerned with the duality of the divine and infernal, that the sacred is secular (church as central gathering place and key political power, morality plays as theater, art and literature being religious in tone, &c.). But you also have, coexisting with that, this set of the "other" that doesn't fit into that frame.

That isn't news. Pretty much any book of fairy tales (and, doubtless, half the New Age books out there...) will tell you as much, and you said as much in your comment. But what's interesting (to me) is that I've never heard anyone use the word "secular" to describe it before. What I think I'm working towards, here, is a way to play with that, to twist it around like UFOs get twisted around, and see what comes of it.

Dave says he remembers you whining about carrying it around in your backpack.

"Sissy," he says.

(He's too lazy to type. *Everyone* dictates to me.)

Ah. Then I must've bought it when I was at the Cloisters with you guys. In my defense, though, I had like four other books to carry, too. But that was a fun day.

Ditto. Too bad we won't be able to do it again for a while. :-(

Or you can live vicariously through Erik.

We'll get to go again soon enough, I'm sure. In the grand scheme of things, anyway...