thread: 2006-09-08 : Picky-choosy religion, 3 views
On 2006-09-09, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Oh, and Vincent, in his very first statement: Taking a powerful symbol out of context robs it of its power.....It's symbols in context that are dangerous...and of course the only religious symbols that we can take in context are the ones we're immersed in. Christianity for all of us Americans, plus various other bodies of symbols as our individual upbringings provide.
Vincent, this is fine phrasing but sloppy thinking, and I've rarely seen the latter from you. If I have any response to a particular symbol (or text, or ritual) at all besides "huh?", then it by definition has some power to affect me: That's what my response is! If my response is strong enough that I decide to remember that symbol, let alone incorporate it into some kind of personal theology, then I am giving it more and more power.
Certainly, the symbol may well not mean to me what it meant to people immersed in the culture that created it. Indeed, there may be only a tiny sliver of the original meaning being communicated that becomes the seed crystal for a huge amount of my own interpretation and projection. But even a small seed crystal can impart its structure, good or evil, to a large amount of hitherto uncrystallized material.
And unless the symbol in question is so abstract as to be a kind of Rorschach inkblot, then it probably conveys more than a sliver of its meaning across cultural divides. Human beings are not so different from each other, after all. We fear snakes and the dark by instinct; we are upset by the sight of the dead bodies of our own kind, even when replicated beautifully in miniature upon a silver cross; most of us respond to small children and babies in their mothers' arms with affection and protectiveness; we think stars and bright colors are pretty.
If the idea of Dread Cthulhu didn't have the power to affect people—people who can't possibly have been immersed from childhood in Lovecraft's symbolism, since he made it up less than a century ago—then it would just be a character in a long-forgotten, rather poorly written short story by an obscure and mentally ill author. If the image of the Madonna holding the Christ Child did not strike some instinctive chord entirely independent of theology, it would not be so common in artwork appealing to the illiterate and barely-educated who have formed the mass of humanity in all ages—nor would it be so similar to pagan mother-goddess imagery that has very different theological associations but very similar emotional resonances.
