People didn’t expect much from us, and we had little responsibility towards them, whereas now if someone is hungry, he deems us directly responsible for that…the Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day.
Side A: The Repression of the Storm God
Most rituals centre around a ceremonial contract: a performed exchange. The liege demands sacrifice (which could include human or animal life, the fruits of labour, and/or money), and/or worship in exchange for granting the supplicant’s wishes. In some ritual economies, the weightier the wish, the heavier the price.
There are different ways to conceal this exchange. Worship, for instance, can be framed as an exercise in aligning the inferior and occluded will of the supplicant with the powerful and superior will of the liege. Sacrifice can be framed as a means to ensure ritual purity. What exactly do these devices conceal? Even if the liege is in some way supposed to be above desire, she eventually is not. She desires attention, money, wheat, sex, and blood. In as much as the liege is an egregore, the desires of the people congeal into her and emanate from her. She becomes an outlet both to moderate and engorge these desires. The nature of the liege in some way captures the kinds of desires she sublimates.
In the high places of the ancient Near East, people worshipped their father god through seat and stele and goddess pole. El, the wise bearded patriarch bull-god of the Canaanite pantheon beheld animal sacrifices performed for him on ceremonial slabs, seated next to his fertile consort Asherah. Like other father gods, part of El’s role was mediating conflicts between his children (more specific and bounded egregores) and his people (supplicants). His attributes are thus virility, wisdom, mercy, and compassion. He is also the shrouded god, his face covered in mystery. Perhaps it is difficult to hang attributes from such a generalist.
Around the early Iron Age, warring bands from the southern provinces brought their thunderstorm god of war up north to the high places. We do not what exactly he was called, but what remains is four letters: YHWH. In the convention adopted by his followers after the Babylonian exile, we shall call him Adonai or lord (liege). A much-revised song in the book of Judges carries the seed of Adonai’s long journey north. When he marched out from Edom, “the earth trembled, and the heavens poured, the clouds indeed poured water. The mountains quaked before Adonai, the One of Sinai.”
The storm god’s journey was thus not a furtive escape but a war party, thundering and raiding through the demure high places of El and Asherah. When the party cooled, what remained was the gradual process of conciliation and convergence: consensus building. Where (and indeed when) compromises failed, Adonai transitioned from sonship in El’s vast progeny into becoming El himself: El-Shaddai (the almighty god). In the psionic plane, Adonai’s near-libidinal appetite for violence is palpable. He divorces his mother-wife Asherah, absorbs her attributes and then summarily prohibits first her worship and then her very being. His prophets decimate the prophets of his competitor, the Canaanite storm god Baal. As he becomes an egregore of accretion, the inquisitor-king Josiah and the Deuteronomist scribes chain his physical presence down in the holiest of holies: a secret place in the temple of Jerusalem. Josiah’s prohibition of the high places concentrates all this erstwhile scattered and federated ritual activity. Many hundreds of steles, seats and Asherah poles become one: the god who is.
When you assimilate, you lose quite a bit of yourself. For Adonai to assimilate into El, the rage and violence must be tempered with compassion and mercy. The god of the wilderness must be gentrified into El’s clothes. This has got to hurt, at least a little. It goes some way to understanding the routine whiplash you experience reading the Hebrew Bible: a creator god who dabbles in genocidal fantasies about his creation.
If assimilating into the gentle, wise, father-god of the Canaanite pantheon was a gut punch, how much harder it would be to stomach the civilising mission of an apocalyptic preacher from Nazareth (one among many)? In a way, Adonai probably saw it coming. In the fertile breeding ground where the post-exilic temple intelligentsia came into contact with the wisdom of the Greeks, his eventual disembodiment was imminent. Christ was unperturbed by the threat of demolishing the temple, as he threatened in turn to rebuild it in three days. This new temple is not one where Adonai’s physical form can sit in the dark, waiting for blood. It is one where this usurper egregore (El-Adonai-Christ) exists as a spirit, gently guiding the hearts of man. In this cosmology-in-flux, for Adonai to become a spirit, he must first be murdered. The marauding storm god of the south must fall on his sword.
We can only intuit from his silence to Christ’s plaintive request that this cup of suffering be taken away from him, and his petulant ripping of the temple veil at the time of Christ’s death, what all this must have felt like for him.
In the two thousand years following this rupture and in the many Christianties that have followed, we might be tempted to attach subsequent acts of violence and control to the storm god who accepted defeat on cavalry. A more plausible explanation is that new desires beget new egregores. The death march of territorial expansion, conquest, feudalism and capitalism create their dread gods who last for a time and then fade away, elements of their psionic essence lingering. However, in the wake of the canon, El-Adonai-Christ has been crystallized forever. They have been warped back in time and fused with their wayward, roaming spirit. In the beginning, we are told, was the Word.
But when the gentle spirit came, he came with fire and incoherence. On the day of the Pentecost, he brought glossolalia with him.
Side B: Glossolalia as Release
Samarin’s now seminal work on glossolalia revealed decisively that it is psuedogrammatical: a rearrangement of syllables common in the speaker’s language with the right rhythms and intonations to give every illusion of human speech while remaining entirely meaningless. As a ritual act, this is now difficult to understand.
There is something to St. Paul’s understanding of the ritual in 1 Corinthians 14. What he says in the latter part of the chapter about the interpretation of tongues collapses in light of Samarin. The interpretation of tongues is similar to interpreting Rorschach tests or reading tea leaves: scrying meaning from randomness. Is this the sort of ritual that is at play?
Perhaps the bit about interpretation is a smokescreen, for earlier in the chapter he says that “those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God; for nobody understands them since they are speaking mysteries in the Spirit.” If it is for god, it harkens back to a different sort of ritual, the kind you practice in front of stele and seat and Asherah pole. But if it is a ritual we perform for god, the question is, which god?
What Christ demands of you is repentance and submission-as-acceptance and consumption, a trifecta that is regularly ceremonially performed in the ritual of the eucharist. What El demands of you is what he has always demanded: attention and grain and sacrifice. That leaves Adonai. While his footprint in the Hebrew Bible is more prominent than his predecessor-father, we are not sure what Adonai wants from us today. What place is there in theology and praxis for the storm god of yore? In the aftermath of Christ, the servant king, where is he allowed to indulge in his violence?
It is wrong to say that the history of Christianity is a non-violent one. To say so of evangelical Christianity is absurd. But evangelicalism has a peculiar relationship with the exercise of the kind of libidinal violence that birthed Adonai. Violence becomes less about the enactment of storm like rage and more about games of subjugation and control. The suppression of libidinal impulses (getting drunk, swearing, fighting, fucking) sometimes involves the deployment of a little righteous rage. If you look back to Adonai’s blood thirst, this sort of thing wouldn’t so much as whet his palette. A more likely place to look is the violence to come: the eschatological murder fantasy of the evangelical death cult. This is where (and when) Christ shall come not just in love but in rage, to winnow the chaff. Perhaps this is when Christ finally embodies the storm god he rejected. This would work well, if only this violence hadn’t been deferred for quite so long. This is much akin to generations-long foreplay, with both liege and supplicant begging for release (in fact, Christ himself knows not the day nor the hour).
The desires of the egregore and his supplicants are reflexive. A hungry, leashed Adonai is a hungry, leashed Christian. This specific form of denying the flesh involves years of verbal self-flagellation in the face of an all-forgiving, all-loving, but silent god. And consider this god: El-Shaddai, slayer of the Leviathan, the burning bush, the storm out of Edom, a creative fountain of genocidal plagues. He sits with you and listens as you tell him how you succumbed once again to thinking unkindly about your co-worker, to a road rage incident, to a late-evening bout of internet pornography.
Glossolalia creates an outlet for this violence, for you and Adonai. St. Paul deprioritises the benefit of the spiritual gift of tongues to the church simply because it has very little to do with the church. It does nothing to build up the body of Christ, does nothing to counsel, to heal, to reveal. You see people speak in tongues all your life and even if you accept Samarin’s position, you know when someone is faking it and when someone is partaking in the ritual for real. You can see the glint in their eyes and the thunder in their voice. You can see them partake in the divine mystery of screaming the storm god’s war cry as he screams it back at you.