Pervasive presence—or just ordinary ubiquity—is one of the main strategies in Oprah’s attempt to serve as a guide through the jumble of consumer choices, spiritual makeovers, and “original individuality” that is “secular” living in contemporary North America. Reading The Gospel of an Icon gave me a heightened awareness of this ubiquity, a new recognition of the way in which Oprah really is everywhere. As Lofton puts it in one of her clarifying turns of phrase: “She is the divine pervasion.” Some have mused about and imagined what this divine pervasion might entail—Oprah as Messiah, or as saviour of Chicago. Others have pointed to Lofton’s impressive analytical insights: how thinking with Oprah allows her to brilliantly juxtapose “religion,” commodification, and mediation, while also thinking carefully and creatively about how this African-American woman has become so remarkably successful by drawing from, while transforming, Christian testimonial genres and emotional practices.

My own “public” reading of the book is, like those of other contributors, part confession and part analysis—one small step away from Oprahfication itself, perhaps? According to Lofton, when Oprah encourages her viewers and readers to embark on a perpetual “journey” of self-improvement through self-examination, she also counsels them that to make such change happen, they need to surround themselves with the right goods and services. To best participate in the “rituals of reading” prescribed by her Book Club, for example, readers need to create their own private libraries-cum-“sanctuaries” filled with stuff they love: candles, scented oils, bound copies of O Magazine. Reading the Book Club book, like watching the TV show, is supposed to “change your life,” but that can’t happen without the properly decorated “ceremonial space.”

Keeping in mind Oprah’s eye for detail and Lofton’s thesis of divine pervasion, I started thinking about the various environments of my own reading of The Gospel of an Icon—a book that sticks with you even when you’re not turning its pages in a comfy chair with a hot cup of pomegranate green tea at your side. While reading Lofton’s conclusion and epilogue in my favorite, resolutely independent, non-franchised coffee shop, the grey-haired man sitting next to me told his friend of a recent trip to Chicago to visit his new girlfriend. Amid other details that I tried to block out with one finger in my ear, he told his friend about driving along the parkway and hearing the drone of a helicopter overhead as it circled in the sky. There were only two options as to who the passenger might be, the man said with a laugh: Oprah or Obama. This overlap of Os was uncannily—or maybe just coincidentally—the very subject of Lofton’s concluding words, which I was reading at that moment.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been listening so closely to another’s conversation, you might suggest. But isn’t the coffee shop the alternative confessional, where we tell our companions our latest troubles, regardless of who can hear? Baring your soul over a latte in a cheek-by-jowl café is perhaps not quite the same thing as what Lofton calls “Oprahfication,” namely, “the makeover that happens when individuals agree to subject their private selves to public display.” But the coffee shop confessional (along with streetcar cell-phone tell-alls) is a remarkable testimony to how comfortable people are with revealing the details of their personal relationships, medical procedures, and workplace conflicts to both friends and complete strangers. The difference perhaps lies in what you hope to get out of a coffee shop confession in contrast to submission to Oprahfication: a jolt of high quality caffeine, the understanding of a friend, the prurient interest of a woman reading a yellow book, or abundant gifts of cars and iPods, along with a new and better you.

But Oprah was not only in the coffee shop. Earlier in my reading, at a point when I was about midway through the book, I cycled down a neighborhood street to find a watchful Oprah beaming at me from a billboard high above. “OWN TV,” the message trumpeted, is now available in Canada. Having once been one of those smug people proud to say that they do not even “own” a television, and remaining someone who denies her children the joys of cable, the message didn’t have its full effect on me. But then I realized that, despite never having watched an episode of Oprah from start to finish, I felt a familiarity with Lofton’s descriptions of the narrative arc of Oprah’s version of televised “confessional production”: the extraction of a secret, weakness, or insecurity, the revelation that change is possible, and then the consumer goods that provide the path to realize that change. “At every turn,” Lofton reveals, “there is a hug of self-love and the slap of self-scrutiny.”

Inevitably, it might seem, even reading Lofton’s book did the work of effecting Oprah’s pervasion. Not only did I notice her on the streetscape or in the coffee shop, but I also found her, channeled so convincingly by Lofton, turning up in that running inner dialogue that comes along with reading. Maybe a footstool of just the right height, in a pleasing color would actually help me to concentrate more fully on my reading; maybe a better closet solution would help me de-clutter, or even change, my life. Even with the distancing aid of theoretical scrutiny to hand—the frame of Foucault’s “pastoral practice,” or the revealing but maybe not entirely true insight of Erving Goffman that “a coerced show of feeling is only a show”—Lofton never quite exempts her reader, or herself, from being implicated in the confessional production that is Oprah’s work. Though Oprah as a subject of scholarly analysis may be both a sitting duck and a curiously “profane” choice of focus, Lofton shows us that Oprah’s “spiritual revolution” is part of a larger shift that most North Americans have bought into, to varying degrees: “one of the great success stories of Oprah’s years has been the complete conversion—the conversion of a nation—to consumption as the adjudicating determinant of our relative freedom.”

There are, however, limits to Oprah’s O. I saw them when I raised her as an example while teaching an anthropology course in Germany this past winter. None of my students had heard of her. She was a complete unknown. Recalling this, I realized that The Gospel of an Icon, is a continental, American story, not a fully globalized one, despite the global aspirations of Oprah’s “missionary gifts.” Maybe Oprah really is “provincial.”

Writing from and within a collective “we” that she both scrutinizes and calls to account, Kathryn Lofton offers her book as scholarly analysis and humble jeremiad (if such a genre is possible). The Gospel of an Icon is a historically learned account of how and why Oprah has resonated with Christian traditions of self-improvement, at the same time that she has entertained a diverse public, encouraging them to achieve more with more. She is, as Jason Bivins already intimated, an anti-Nietzsche, who declared in his own autobiography, “I do not want in the least that anything should become different than it is; I myself do not want to become different.”

But then again, in that same book, Nietzsche, in a spirit that Oprah could recognize, also gave a great deal of morally intentional diet advice, such as: “No meals between meals; no coffee, coffee spreads darkness.” Who is the prophet and who is the charlatan? How to speak from the self and of the self? These too are circling questions that none of us can ever entirely escape.

Global Christianity, Global Critique

James K. A. Smith, seeking to trouble what he calls the “tidy and triumphalistic divide between secular critique and religious irrationality,” cites Saba Mahmood’s argument that what secular “critical reason remains blind to is its own disciplinary formation, its moral and structural unconsciousness.” In a more broadly sensual register, C.J.C. Pickstock suggests that “liberal theologians,” exemplified by Karen Armstrong, end up unwittingly underwriting a desensitized “modernism [that] denies the cognitive relevance of emotions, desire, commitment, and ritual performance.” And in an argument with very different—and not expressly theological—goals, Birgit Meyer names a “Protestant lens,” shaped by liberal Protestant thinkers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Max Weber, that misreads Pentecostalism because it is “blind to the importance of sensation.” There are many good reasons to critique liberalism in its various guises, but anthropologists of Christianity should be particularly wary of too easily assuming that theological critiques of liberal Christianity—whether from the perspective of Radical Orthodoxy or from that of Pentecostalism­—are the same as anthropological or historical analyses of liberal Christianity, or that liberal Protestants and Catholics have not had their own robust, if imperfect, traditions of global critique.

That the metaphor of blindness should come so easily to scholars writing in relation to contemporary theorizing about the apostle Paul, himself traditionally portrayed as having been struck blind on the road to Damascus, might be understood as the latent effect of a powerful story. But in these scholarly narratives, the blindness of Protestants, of adherents to secular reason, and of liberal theologians is not redeemed by a visionary encounter—instead, their blindness persists as a position of handicap or ignorance, diagnosed by those critics who have the eyes to see.

For Pickstock, this means writing, not in the ethnographic present, but in the theological present, to effect a “recovery of the Christian liturgical tradition.” She seeks to demonstrate at once the uniqueness and the universality of Christianity and its ongoing liturgical blend of the senses and reason. Beginning with a seemingly offhand description of Christianity as a “great religion,” Pickstock does not catalogue any other religions among this group. In a meditation that is largely theologically declarative within a Christian scope, one of Pickstock’s few comparative statements contends that the “principle of solidarity” effected by Christian ecclesia disturbs worldly hierarchy and maintains a balanced tension between individual and tradition: “The spiritual does not obliterate the political, as for Hindu caste hierarchy, nor does the loyalty to the sovereign political center obliterate the dignity of the person, as for modern secular post-Hobbesian politics.”

Obliteration—the blotting out, rendering invisible, or annihilation of something—is a strong word to encapsulate both Hinduism and the modern secular in opposition to (an idealized) Christian solidarity. Obliteration, however, is not a word or image that fits well with what anthropologists such as Nicholas Dirks have shown to be the highly articulated and visible historical relationship among caste, the modern secular, and Christianity. Can the categories of spiritual, political, sovereignty, and person really obliterate one another, or are we ourselves responsible for what we see and the practices of recognition and illumination that we cultivate in conversation with a diversity of others?

With a focus on Pentecostal challenges to the “self-congratulatory,” “cool rationality of secular criticism,” Smith also argues with ritual to hand. Smith contends that paying attention specifically to Pentecostal worship, in which “bodies matter,” illustrates the hopeful and prophetic critique implicit in Pentecostal social imaginaries, compared to the rest of the world: “In many ways, the broader culture lacks the imagination to imagine the world otherwise, and it is the Pentecostal vision of a coming kingdom that can both contest and loosen up the petrified imagination of a world culture bent on consumption, violence, and the pursuit of power and exploitation.”

It seems that not only secular liberals are living with blinkers on—indeed, the entire world culture, Pentecostalism excluded, suffers a fate worse than physical blindness in its inability to see with its mind’s eye anything other than rampant greed and destruction. Working with rather tightly bounded categories—in which, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., can only be understood as theological, and not as secular—Smith’s goal is not to think through an “anthropology of the secular” but to use the liberal secular as a container for all that is not prophetic, not sensual, and “unquestioned.”

In stark contrast to the varieties of Christian universalism offered by Pickstock and Smith, Birgit Meyer suggests her concept of “sensational forms” as a path to understand how all “politico-religious formations,” and not just Christianity, are processes of mediation. This, too, one could argue, is a kind of universalism, working with (anxious) commitments to the categories of politics and religion, instead of dogmatic commitments to Eucharistic rites or Pentecostal eschatologies. But, with my admittedly disciplinarily focused eyes, Meyer’s is the universalism I best recognize as my own, even if I do not entirely agree with her account of what she calls the “Protestant lens” (largely because much early liberal Protestant “Religionswissenschaft” was obsessed with feelings, emotions, and bodily tremors, even if the desire to evaluate “good” and “bad” religion was not one in which Catholic pieties or newer Protestant “enthusiasms” fared well).

As Goldstone and Hauerwas suggest, the scholarly “lexicon” for analyzing Christianity has been profoundly shaped by “dominant strands of Protestantism”—a legacy of categorization with which all scholars of religion must contend, as Meyer shows. A diagnosis of liberal, secular blindness does not countenance the ways that anthropologists and religious studies scholars—some Protestant, some Catholic, some Jewish, some Muslim, some “secular,” etc.—have long been pointing to the historical and political situatedness of such intellectual categories as religion, magic, Christianity, and the senses in the course of acknowledging the limits of any attempt to categorize human commonality and diversity. Scholars with such different disciplinary formations and agendas as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Stanley Tambiah, Robert Bellah, Jonathan Z. Smith, Talal Asad, and Leigh Eric Schmidt have undertaken this task under various rubrics and influences, including secular reason, anthropology, and liberal Protestantism. As Simon Coleman contends in his contribution to the volume, the Christian underpinning of anthropological discourse, while formative, “is not the only possible genealogy to trace.”

Anthropologists, dedicated as they are to a project of thinking about local knowledge and cultural difference undergirded by a commitment (again, an anxious one) to a notion of a “universal” human being, should be immediately suspicious of concepts such as “world culture,” or of any wholesale dismissal of a group—including liberal theologians and liberal secularists—as blind or otherwise sensationally challenged. Quite apart from how such generalizations and dismissals ignore the multiplicity of what blindness can mean in the sensorial life of an individual, the rhetoric of blindness seems too easy—and too categorical.

In this regard, Goldstone and Hauerwas’s argument about “disciplined seeing” might offer a more helpful perspective. Clearly rooted in a theological commitment to “the Church,” Goldstone and Hauerwas offer the proposition that “aspect-blindness,” what Wittgenstein called the condition of “human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something,” is a kind of partial seeing with potentially devastating consequences. In the case of the rationality of the modern bureaucratic state, they argue, “aspect-blindness turns out to encompass more than a debased ethical disposition; it turns out to name an indispensable modality of effective governance.”

In the close reading of Luke-Acts (largely contra Badiou’s Paul) that follows, Goldstone and Hauerwas propose that aspect-blindness might prevent anthropologists who are not themselves Christian from being able to adequately narrate Christianity in a manner that Christians themselves could recognize. Quoting the work of Kavin Rowe, they concur: “The resurrection of Jesus actually creates a new mode of seeing—‘light.’ To miss the resurrection of Jesus, therefore, is to forfeit the ability to see.” In their conclusion, however, Goldstone and Hauerwas suggest that despite its damaging and obscuring effects, “aspect-blindness might well be our normal condition.” Though Goldstone and Hauerwas may not agree, I contend that in a world in which Christianity is one way (really, multiple ways) of seeing and sensing amidst many others, the task of the anthropologist is not only to “faithfully” recast that vision but to place it in global, local, and temporally comparative perspective.

Being aware that we all have elements of aspect-blindness, but also that through the responsible exercise of disciplined seeing we have something worth saying—or worth exposing to the critique of others—is a starting point that anthropologists have long endorsed, if only imperfectly practiced.  In this regard, anthropology as an academic discipline shares a common disposition with the “critical liberalism” described by political theorist Courtney Jung: “The intuition that lies at the core of critical liberalism is that blindness to injustices, in which even people fighting to right wrongs fail to recognize patterns of unfairness all around them, is a permanent feature of social and political life.” The temptation to return to Paul being too great, I close with a reference to one of Paul’s letters that has been of profound importance to Pentecostalism, which, while acknowledging aspect-blindness, promises, as I cannot, that such impaired vision will be overcome: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

First, there is contentious debate about whether health care is a commodity or, alternatively, a human right and an obligation of a society to its sick. Liberal Protestants, the focus of my forthcoming book, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity, have long argued the latter. Over the course of the twentieth century, liberal Protestants have worked as doctors, politicians, and medical missionaries, inspired by a version of “religious healing” that calls on scientific medicine and state legislation as well as on the “spirit” to act as agents of healing. At once unambiguously bodily and yet ensnared by the demands of both science and the market, health care in North America has also been a complex site of spiritual politics that encompasses intimate anthropologies of the body, professional, religious, and civic identities, and transnational networks shaped by both colonial and anti-colonial politics.

A second fissure lies underneath the largely shared assumption of biomedicine’s primacy: is healing necessarily a biomedical concern, or is it a process that can also be complemented by services in a church sanctuary or treatments on a Reiki table? Though liberal Protestants were at the heart of the process of medicalization, and though they once argued strenuously against faith healing and for biomedicine as the essential healing technique, they are now likely to endorse a modified version of faith healing and the healing touch of Reiki alongside biomedical care. Like most North Americans, they live in post-biomedical bodies, in that they continue to rely on access to biomedical care while simultaneously drawing upon religious or alternative therapies. This plurality of approaches fits well with the liberal Protestant understanding of healing as an unfinished process that is at once political and bodily, about self and society, and not, in the end, primarily about efficacy or even cure. Without resigning themselves to disease and debilitation, liberal Protestants have often warned against an “idolatry of health” in which the natural processes of bodily decline are not acknowledged, denied either by what they call the distortions of “magical” thinking or by the arrogance of biomedical mastery.

Not many people, scholars or otherwise, characterize liberal Protestants as spirit-filled Christians, but seeing the spirit only in charismatic Christians is to miss how a politics of the spiritual has deeply shaped the contours of both “liberal” and “conservative” Christianity in North America. We can see this particularly in the 1960s, when liberal Protestants, with the help of psychiatric discourses, questioned in new ways what counted as “pathological” in terms of spiritual and sexual practice. Provoked by their own politicized missionaries and new converts to take responsibility for the sickening effects of western (and Christian) colonialism, liberal Protestants grew increasingly open to non-Christian religious practices, including those deemed broadly therapeutic, such as meditation and yoga. They practiced a kind of supernatural liberalism that was a “spiritual” sibling of the disenchanted, papery liberalism that more often appears in scholarly and popular accounts.

The dawning awareness that homophobia, sexism, and colonialism were themselves pathologies of modernity inhabiting North American Christianity infused the spiritual politics of liberal Protestant healing in the 1960s. This was a politics in which the concept and power of “spirit” were themselves at issue, as two competing yet interconnected anthropologies of the spiritual body were at play in debates over the relative authority of theology, church governance, medicine, and the state in the process and definition of healing. I use anthropology here in a doubled sense: both with echoes of its classic Christian theological sense, as the ways that Christians have imagined the divine to interact with, or inhabit, human nature, and in its related, and presently more common, academic disciplinary sense, which takes the study of what it is to be human as its goal.

In mid-century North America, both conservative and liberal Protestants shared an anthropology that divided human nature into “body, mind, and spirit.” But within this ubiquitous trinity, there were competing accounts of what fostered spiritual health and of how God worked on the human, which I call spiritual equilibrium and spiritual intervention. Advocates of spiritual equilibrium often set their analyses within the wider contexts of what they saw as immoral capitalist economic systems, the pathological effects of imperialism, and distortedly inhibited views of sexuality. For their part, spiritual interventionists took on charismatic influences and focused largely on the recesses of sin and distress that inhered in the individual body and memory, which could be healed not by better social programs, but by personal repentance and the forgiveness of God.

The tensions between spiritual equilibrium and spiritual intervention were at play within 1960s liberal Protestantism itself—that once dominant, even default, version of Protestantism that considered itself in step with its times, though perhaps not quite in the mode of Donald Draper and his Mad Men counterparts. Like many admen, however, liberal Protestants embraced psychology with a whole new enthusiasm in the midst of the newly supernatural 1960s, as they encountered self-help movements, developed pastoral counseling clinics, and read the crossover bestsellers of theologians and ministers—books such as Thomas Harris’s I’m O.K., You’re O.K. and Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be. At the same time, the charismatic movement was making its way into sanctuaries, especially in Episcopalian and Anglican circles, and exorcism dueled with psychoanalysis as the best technique for the cure of the soul and body.

For example, in 1965, Mervyn Dickinson, a minister and pastoral counselor trained at Boston University, who then directed the United Church of Canada’s Pastoral Counselling Institute of Toronto, came out strongly in support of homosexuality in the national church newspaper. Dickinson wrote a feature article for the United Church Observer condemning the church’s support for the “highly repressive sexual ethic of western culture.” Based on his conversations with gay men at a downtown Toronto bar, Dickinson’s article suggested, with reference to psychiatric theories, that homosexuality “may not be as totally ‘unnatural’ or pathological as we like to think.” Going further, Dickinson urged that the church openly welcome homosexuals and bless committed homosexual relationships, while also pressuring the government to revoke “prejudicial legislation.” Psychology provided the authoritative knowledge to challenge theological, medical, and legislative prejudices against homosexuality, allowing for the view that gay men (lesbians weren’t discussed until later) did not need healing, but did need the equilibrium provided by a balance of body, mind, and spirit.

At the same time in another part of downtown Toronto, Canon G. Moore Smith of the Anglican Church of Canada was leading a prayer and healing group in his small high church congregation of St. Matthias, based in part on the models offered by U.S. Episcopalian lay healer Agnes Sanford. In 1967, Smith’s increasingly insular group was forced onto the pages of the daily newspapers when a young woman residing in the manse died from meningitis, with no medical aid provided. Instead, she was repeatedly “spanked” and exorcised by Smith and other male leaders of the prayer group, until the last hours of her life. Even after the young woman’s death, Smith and his assistant, clothed in their vestments, visited her body in the city morgue to perform rituals meant to bring her back from the dead. Smith’s version of spiritual intervention was eventually the focus of a coroner’s inquest, which absolved him of legal responsibility, but charged the Anglican Church with investigating this flowering of faith healing in its midst.

The resulting Commission on the Ministry of Healing, convened by the Anglican Bishop of Toronto, and peopled by psychiatrists, ministers, and religious studies professors, ended up endorsing spiritual equilibrium at the expense of spiritual intervention. After chastising what they considered to be Smith’s misinterpretations of spiritual healing, the Commission advocated a pragmatic theology of the “wholeness” of body, mind, and spirit, which accepted that the perfection of wholeness could never be fully achieved, and that a “healthy” self was always “becoming” but never “finished.” The Report declared that healing should never be imposed but only offered, and that all future exorcisms required the written permission of the Bishop. Suggesting that the prayer for the Anointing of the Sick in the prayer book might contribute to inappropriate expectations for bodily healing, the Commission urged a revision: “If the word ‘bodily’ could be removed, it would permit ‘health’ in this prayer to be taken in its fullest sense—the whole person, including body, mind and spirit.” Shifting even more conclusively to a psychiatrically-monitored spirituality, the Report also recommended the establishment of a Centre for Pastoral Services, the expansion of Clinical Pastoral Education, and that chaplains be obligated to meet the accreditation standards of the Canadian Council of Churches.

Spiritual equilibrium and spiritual intervention both arose as aspects of a “modern sense of healing” that insisted on a holism of the material, the psychic, and the spiritual. Their overlapping holism, however, contained serious cleavages; the clearest difference between the two lay in the emphases they placed on the three pivots in the balance of body, mind, and spirit. Supporters of spiritual equilibrium, in accordance with their psychological affinities, were more likely to argue that healing came from honestly accounting for mental anxieties and fears (including those that were culturally induced), acknowledging the limits of the body, and acting with spiritual confidence as Christians who could transform a materialistic world in cooperation with tools of modern social organization. These views fuelled the many liberal Protestants who worked, together with allies of various sorts, to secure the passing of the Medical Care Act in the Canadian Parliament in 1966, granting universal, publicly funded access to the care of physicians. Health care, in their view, was not to be primarily oriented by capitalist models of economic and social organization, and healing need not be limited to explicitly Christian energies. Spiritual interventionists, on the other hand, gave an explicitly Christian shape and power to spiritual energies, alternately mediated by Jesus, by divine vibrational energies, and, in more perilous forms, by Satan. At the forceful insistence of such spirits, mind and body were permeable and open to change, whether through “instantaneous healings” or psychic realignment. There was nothing in the body that could not be cured by the spirit—be it cancer or sexual desire—if the Christian were receptive and truly patient.

Holistic healing, among Protestants, has operated as a metaphor that could contain markedly divergent ideologies: social responsibility vs. personal guilt as the etiology of illness; individual self-knowing mediated by biomedicine vs. divine intervention by the “finger of God” as paths to healing. The unity of all-embracing wholeness has been most severely tested when disciplines of the body have come to the fore: in the death of a young woman given exorcism and spanking instead of medicines, in the seed of transformation planted by the revolutionary suggestion that the church stop trying to heal gays and lesbians and welcome them as healthy and whole in their embodied selves. The Bishop’s Commission on the Ministry of Healing hoped that excising the word “bodily” from the prayer for the Anointing of the Sick would allow Anglicans to understand “‘health’…in its fullest sense,” and would help to restore the appropriate weighting of body, mind, and spirit. The very demarcations of body, mind, and spirit, however, ended up not so much establishing the equilibrium of the healthy Christian self as revealing the precariousness of its balance.

Getting rid of the body in the text was not quite the same as getting rid of the body in practice. Far from living as disembodied, “spiritually dead” pew-sitters—as their Pentecostal and charismatic critics have long charged—1960s liberal Protestants tapped into a longer tradition of liberal supernaturalism to infuse the body with a spiritual politics that has led to a transformation of both their ritual and their sexual lives. Practicing yoga, therapeutic touch, and eventually Reiki, and not only experiencing, but also talking openly about a wider array of sexual pleasures (and sexual abuses) changed the tenor of liberal Protestant discourses of healing, without abandoning the more conventional version of civic engagement represented by their lobbying efforts for state-funded biomedical health care, especially in the wake of HIV-AIDS. Tapping into currents of spiritual healing flowing within the same stream siphoned by their charismatic kin, liberal Protestants marshaled these energies into a spiritual politics dominated not by rhetorics of deliverance but by those of liberation.

(This essay is based largely on Chapter 4 of my book, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity, Berkeley: University of California Press, Forthcoming.)

Instead, the new metaphysicals travel long distances to stand on “power spots” far away in Sedona or Stonehenge, journey back in time to live in the spiritual skin of a past incarnation in a distant land, and spin out of their own flesh and place to see the world from an astral body. “Refusing,” or at least ignoring more local metaphysical pasts, the new metaphysicals are not intrigued in the same way as Courtney Bender was (an intrigue, by my guess, that many of her readers will share) by their proximity to the power spots of Cambridge: William James’s study, for instance, or the salon of Cambridge matron Sarah Bull, who hosted earlier spiritual crossings with, among others, Swami Vivekananda.  That the new metaphysicals feel a lack of history and a dearth of “religious culture” in such a storied place is more than just ironic for Bender. This sense of rootlessness and loss is in fact at the heart of their spirituality: “To the shopworn question of how contemporary spirituality shapes a response to feelings of alienation that attend to modernity, we must necessarily ask how contemporary spirituality itself articulates social alienation in the center of its projects.”

Before going any further, I should acknowledge that I have lived in parallel to The New Metaphysicals for quite some time, as I talked with Courtney Bender about her fieldwork—reading a chapter here and there—and shared references with her while writing my own book on Protestant “supernatural liberalism.” Shaped by our conversations, and perhaps a little synchronicity, my reading of her book was nevertheless an experience of both surprise and recognition.

First, the surprise. Even though I had read some of this material before, I was startled anew by the confidence of some of Bender’s interlocutors, especially the educated woman who believes that past life regression demonstrates that she was a Nobel Prize-winning Jewish scientist who avoided the fate of Nazi death camps. Strong in her own conviction, she then goes on to convince a woman she meets at a mystical discussion group that in her past life she was the scientist’s depressed wife. Akin to Mormons baptizing your dead whether you asked them to or not, believers in past lives use metaphysical/theological warrants to pluck the dead from the past, invigorating their own lives in the present. Like Michael Saler and Andrew Perrin, I wanted Bender to “prod” them on their assertions and the implications of their willful appropriation of the pasts of other—very specific—people.

Bender, with her evocative and gentle prose, however, is not interested in exposing either naiveté or vampirical spiritual resurrections. Instead, throughout all the chapters of The New Metaphysicals, she works tirelessly to show why the practices of contemporary spirituality—however bizarre a scholar or skeptic might find them—make a kind of sense that we should find, not just surprising, but also uncannily similar to our own.

And this is where the recognition comes in. With reference to both theory and methodology, Bender makes a strong case for why the line between her secular self and their metaphysical selves was always potentially breachable, despite the fact that she persisted in holding to her own ways of thinking, exempt from the chains of enchantment that linked the stories of her respondents. The overlap occurs in the shared sense that interpretation is the key to “freedom”—a freedom that is not an “escape from the system,” but an ability to understand how and why we are in the predicaments we inhabit, whether a personal debt crisis or a crisis on an international scale. As Bender writes: “To live within metaphysical projects is to accept the reality of forces that work on everyday life and to learn to interpret things in the world as results of their effects. And while there is no reason for us to collapse the difference between popular sociology’s invisible forces (“the state,” “the economy”) and metaphysical forces (“karma,” “energy,” “soul clusters”), metaphysical practitioners had no difficulty in doing so. Each system articulates individuals as embedded within systems, social processes, or “forces,” and each domain presents moral stories about how these can be changed, resisted, and lived within.”

Michael Saler challenges Bender for suggesting, if not actually claiming, that soul clusters and the economy share a certain kinship as conceptual “forces.” Saler insists that there really is a difference between the forces of “astral energy” and “the economy,” since the “latter tends to be employed self-reflexively and contingently, whereas the former tends to be buttressed by mere assertion and blind faith.” Having just lived through the G20 meetings in Toronto, however, I find it hard to credit that talk about “the economy” is either self-reflexive or contingent. Though perhaps not as easy to join as a mystical discussion group, this most recent power spot gathering of “world leaders” was full of assertions and blind faith. A day after pledging at the G8 to devote $1.1 billion to global maternal and child health over five years, Canada’s government went on to spend $1 billion over three days as they hosted the summit in the heart of downtown Toronto. And after dispensing this extraordinary sum, much of which was spent on the visibly invisible force of “security,” the Canadian Prime Minister proudly announced that the G20 nations had all agreed that they would cut their deficits in half (or would at least try to do so) by 2013. Self-reflexivity was not the first word that came to mind in this latest performance of economic reasoning and expenditure.

On the level of methodology, Bender’s insights are equally unsettling of boundaries, as she describes the disjuncture between what she considers an “interview” and what her interlocutors consider a “conversation.” Just as her new metaphysicals resisted history, Bender resisted synchronicity; similarly, just when she thought she was “interviewing them,” they thought they were conversing.  Well aware that the attention of a social scientist was a potential path to credibility—whether in the eyes of their own community or on the stage of science—the people who spoke to Bender were not willing to accept her views or experiences as outside of their webs of interpretation. At its boldest, conversation could become a “penetration of the self,” in which interlocutors could access each other’s “energetic interiors,” as when Wes, an “energy intuitive,” attempted to intuit the quality of energy inside Bender’s mother’s womb when she had carried her, and invited Bender to return the favor.

Though Wes does not succeed at teaching Bender the techniques of energetic intuition, he does get her thinking about just what kind of social (and) scientific encounter the interview might be. If metaphysicals (and other religious practitioners) use the interview as a form of testimony, in which they confide their “religious experience” to a questioning scholar, it is also the case that scholars have long used the interview to pin down “religious experience.” As elicited in narratives, religious experience also ends up being a concept “shared” and worked at by both metaphysicals and social scientists alike. Whether willing or unwilling, the shared nature of this project can be keenly demonstrated in the classic crossover book, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, a scientific text with a popular appeal—in Bender’s words, “a pedagogical textual environment in which it is expected that readers will encounter the residue of others’ strongly resonant, singularly authoritative experiences and thereby seek their own.” Pointing to these shared conceptual spaces elicited both through our methods, in which “experience” is signified, and through our theories, in which we imagine active forces that we cannot see, Bender goes a long way toward confronting what she calls “the deep mystifications of our secularisms.”

The New Metaphysicals is an elegant book that does the work of shoveling fog with remarkable concision. The book’s stories do not convince me that embracing the promise of the moment frees anyone from the burdens of the past—at least when looked at from the vantage point of the social scientist or humanist. However, sitting with these stories of chakras, power spots, and synchronicity should be enough to convince anyone that to ignore or deride their tellers is to close one’s ears to modalities of thought and experience that resonate across a wide range of “religious” and “secular” frames, including those that we are more accustomed to thinking with, whether Protestant, Catholic, or capitalist. Listening to the new metaphysicals, as Courtney Bender channels them, is an experience in retuning the scale of analysis, not in its scope but in its key.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Political Religion”

Once he was elected President, the candidate of hope, Barack Hussein Obama, sought to dispel the messianic expectations placed on him by his followers at home and abroad—an attempt at hope management that had mixed results. Among scholars, however, his election has clearly carried with it the power to resurrect a scholarly category that some had declared well and truly dead, namely, civil religion. In the heady weeks after his election, which occurred just the day after the American Academy of Religion meetings closed in a Chicago that had been awash in pre-election social sentiments of anticipatory pleasure and dread, the North American Religions Group and the Religion and Politics Group of the AAR decided to hold a panel on “Revisiting Civil Religion” at the 2009 meetings in Montreal.

Montreal was a particularly appropriate site for such a return. A civic polity not part of the United States, shaped by both the political traditions of Rousseau and the Roman Catholic Church, its very foreignness forced the US-based panelists to catch themselves when using what David Kyuman Kim called the “register of the collective ‘we’.” At the same time, Quebec’s own conflicted history of “civil religion,” rooted in profound contests over sovereignty, was a reminder of how civic identity is premised, at least in part, on the violence of imperial conquest—in this case, the French subjugation of the Mohawk, Cree, and other First Nations, and in turn that of the French by the English. These legacies of conquest still haunt any possibility of civic covenant in North America, and probably always will.

Civil religion, in its 1967 revision by Robert Bellah, was a powerful discourse brewed from a mix of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s argument for rooting the authority of the state in the social contract and what Bellah argued were some of the most testing trials of US history: the war against the British monarch for independence; the violent struggle to abolish slavery’s legitimating conceit that one human being could own another; and the simmering, as well as boiling, conflicts over the global influence of capitalism vs. that of communism, as Americans were faced with, in Bellah’s words, the “problem of responsible action in a revolutionary world.” Bellah argued that US civil religion—as the symbols, rituals, and beliefs of the nation-state expressed outside of the parameters of organized religious institutions—was in sore decline. At the same time, he pleaded for a “world civil religion” that could establish a “genuine transnational sovereignty” in the United Nations or a similar, globally legitimated institution, and which would draw on religious traditions beyond “the sphere of biblical religion alone.” All of Bellah’s trials, rooted as they were in the spilling of blood in the service of three very particular forms of freedom, were also trials of sovereignty—of where the power to govern others was to be located, and on what grounds it could be claimed and preserved.

For Rousseau, such sovereignty was best rooted in three bases: “the sacred nature of the social contract, and of the laws,” the existence of a “powerful, intelligent, beneficent, prescient, and provident Divinity,” and the cultivation of “sentiments due to a society” that would make for both “good citizens” and “faithful subjects” engaged in the “passion of being-together.” Any kind of religious intolerance was anathema to civil religion for Rousseau, who largely—but not entirely—saw such intolerance coming from Christian sources: “But whosoever should presume to say: There is no salvation out of the pale of our church, ought to be banished [from] the State, unless indeed the State be an ecclesiastical one, and the prince a pontiff.” Drawing a genealogy of civil religion that traced the path of sovereignty through Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim examples, Rousseau clearly wanted to banish most Christian versions of “political religion” from his ideal, without entirely letting go of the power of the Christian-inflected deity.

Drawing more from Bellah and Max Weber than from Rousseau, Philip Gorski is engaged in a new project to revivify civil religion, in which he distinguishes among three types of American traditions for imagining the relations between religion and politics: civil religion, religious nationalism, and secular rationalism. Since he clarifies them himself in his own post, I won’t do so here. Gorski frankly states that his project is aspirational—in fact, normative. He sees civil religion as the best way forward, against the spectre of violence and intolerance in religious nationalism and the impractical myopia of the secular rationalists. Civil religion makes space for both overlap and independence of the religious and the political, argues Gorski, an overlap that then allows for an effective balance of pluralism and solidarity. Gorski, with Barack Obama as his most eloquent spokesperson, argues for American civil religion as a mode of civic engagement that can overcome—or perhaps avoid—conflicts over first principles, or the specificities of theological convictions, by way of a shared commitment to justice, liberty, and democracy.

David Kyuman Kim, by contrast, puts Obama’s speeches to a very different end in his call for the “mourning” of American exceptionalism and the cultivation of an “elegiac temperament.” For Kim, Obama’s eloquence risks reinscribing the ideology of American imperialism, albeit in a friendlier guise. He argues that the myth of American exceptionalism underwrites Obama’s pledge that America’s “beacon” still burns bright enough to defeat its enemies, but that this is an exhausted exceptionalism that must be mourned with what he hopes is the death of American imperialism. At the same time, Kim, with Abraham Lincoln as his inspiration, hopes for an America that will be, in the future, a more perfect union.

Approaching civil religion neither from Gorski’s normative framework nor from Kim’s elegiac hope, David Morgan, in his argument about the material culture and embodied sensations of civil religion, demonstrates why scholars need more methodological reflexivity in their use of political speeches as data for their arguments for or against civil religion. Exploring the “social sentiments” of civil religion and the aesthetics of its performance, Morgan argues, would show how the “social body” imagines the nation in idealizations of the past and the future. In a similarly decentering approach, Ebrahim Moosa argues for a comparative approach to gauge both the utility and problems of the concept of civil religion. Moosa is less optimistic than Kim that such a “future perfect” can be achieved without a more profound break from what Kim describes, following Bellah, as the “pieties” of civil religion. For Moosa, “American civil religion is part of the problem, and not part of the solution.” In a world where yet another war, or set of wars, is being waged with American civil religion as one of its fundaments, the “mourning” of civil religion is perhaps premature. Revisiting civil religion, then, requires examining when and for whom it works as an aspirational project.

How different, then, are Canadians and Americans invested in the notion of civil religion from the Greeks, who rediscovered their gods in the barbarians only to assert their natural sovereignty over them? Rousseau came to this insight, of course, at the same time that the French and the British were making their own fantasies of sovereignty into reality, in the Thirteen Colonies, New France, and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Whether Roman Catholicism, varieties of Protestantism, or capitalist expansion (or, in complicated ways, all three) undergirded their projects, the British and French clearly leaned on economies of transcendence to achieve the displacement and destruction of Native peoples.

A few minutes after chairing the lively AAR panel on revisiting civil religion, I moved to another room in the Montreal Convention Centre to chair a very different session, entitled “Our Home and Native Land: Colonial Encounters and the History of Religion, Spirituality, and the Secular.” This panel, convened together with my AAR colleagues Ebrahim Moosa and Lou Ruprecht, gave me a remarkably divergent perspective on the question—or even the possibility—of civil religion. Bringing together scholars of colonialism and Native American traditions in the Americas—Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Ines Talamantez—with the documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin and the poet and literary critic George Elliott Clarke, the panel clearly and painfully articulated the violent effects of fantasies of sovereignty. The panelists showed that whether at the level of language imposition, scholarly categorization, or the continued battles over fishing rights and “land claims” in Canadian and US courts of law, sovereignty is still actively contested in North America. George Elliott Clarke’s reading of his poem “The Gospel of X” was a virtuoso performance of the possibilities of transforming what counts as “civility” or even “religion” in a vivid play with language. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Ines Talamantez, and Alanis Obomsawin all demonstrated, in different ways, how colonial languages have been one of the primary tools for the enactment of colonial sovereignty. Obomsawin, in her more than forty years as a filmmaker with the National Film Board of Canada, has used imagery and conversation to both depict and challenge the contested, and far from natural, construction of sovereignty in Canada, in both religious and political registers. In a conversation after the panel, I asked Obomsawin what she considered to be the path forward, if not to a future perfect, then at least to a future. Her reply: “to listen.”

As an aspirational project with such deeply colonial convictions of political power, can civil religion really function as a critical tool for the scholar of religion? So clearly indebted to a Christian political theology of covenant (informed in various ways by older and more recent traditions of Jewish thought) that has been premised on the violent destruction of other lifeways, most notably those of Native Americans, can civil religion be a category that describes anything more than sovereignty premised on a powerful Deity that is not always beneficent? In North America more broadly, the culture of the law—and its rule—is premised on a displacement of indigenous traditions of social and legal organization, a fact that is still being challenged by First Nations peoples in courts of law, as well as through both activism and the revitalization of indigenous models of justice. That the Christian-inflected culture of law has played a large role in constructing the category of religion itself, and forcing First Nations people to make themselves “religious,” suggests that the construct of civil religion is problematic for its claims of both civility and religion.

There is nothing natural about the sovereignty of US or Canadian law, which is not to say that these systems will disappear any time soon. There is much about these legal systems that is worth protecting, perhaps even through their transformation. The sovereignty of the United States and Canada is aspirational, and premised on initial acts of violence that must be remembered. To work towards the always out of reach goal of future perfection will necessitate a full re-encounter with the visions of sovereignty of the First Nations traditions that U.S. and Canadian political theologies attempted, unsuccessfully, to eradicate. Within our community of scholars, as a starting point, this will take the kind of listening that we are only slowly learning to do.

It seems as if Western culture were making a prodigious effort of historiographic anamnesis. It seeks to discover, ‘awaken,’ and repossess the past of the most exotic and most peripheral of societies, from the prehistory of the Near East to the ‘primitive’ cultures on the verge of extinction. The goal is no less than to revive the entire past of humanity.

Mircea Eliade
“Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting”
History of Religions (1963)

Youth without Youth is in many ways a movie about the erotics of scholarship, in which a man’s passion for unlimited knowledge largely overwhelms his desire for flesh and blood human relationships. As Dominic Matei, the protagonist of the film, pursues his “life’s work” of isolating the historical origins of language and consciousness, he loses his true love; twice. Dominic’s single-minded drive to “revive the entire past of humanity” is fueled by the hope that human memory, when channeled through paranormal experience, is an infallible record of the past capable of documenting the reality of the supernatural. It is also deeply shaped by the mythic (and Eliadean) narrative that “Western” men are autonomous seekers of spiritual truth, and women and “primitive cultures” are its instrumental vessels.

By some sort of happy coincidence—or to use the surrealist term referenced by Jeremy Biles, “objective chance”—I watched Youth Without Youth the same day that I viewed another movie about the “facts” of enchantment as they appeared in the twentieth century, Fairy Tale: A True Story (1997). Though doing so with admittedly different artistic aspirations and audiences, both movies allude to historical characters and controversies in the study of religion. Set in the Yorkshire countryside during World War I, Fairy Tale retells the story of two young cousins, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, who claim to witness and photograph what came to be known as the “Cottingley Fairies.” In the movie, the girls’ amateur photographs catch the attention of theosophists, of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and of Harry Houdini. Not surprisingly, Doyle, the convinced spiritualist, is portrayed in the film as a champion of the girls and their fairy photos, while Houdini, the renowned magician-skeptic and debunker of frauds and superstitions, has a more suspicious, though ultimately kind, approach to the girls.

Fairy Tale and Youth Without Youth are both films about unsuspecting yet well-primed witnesses of the supernatural. Prior to their photographic exploits, the girls inhabited a world of drawings and stories, like Peter Pan, that urged them to keep the faith of childhood by believing in fairies. In Youth Without Youth, the elderly Dominic Matei has been made ready for his cosmic fate by years of studying ancient languages and exploring his “old passion,” philosophy of religion. Living in Romania at the beginning of World War II, Dominic is struck by lightning, becoming a “post-historic” man whose body itself becomes a record of the supernatural, as he is endowed with superhuman powers of perception and memory, as well as the body of a 40-year-old. Living in skeptical ages, the young girls and the old man are supernatural witnesses who become unwilling celebrities, relentlessly hounded by the curious and the unscrupulous.

Both films encourage us to “believe,” in fairies or metempsychosis, and both share a story of the burden of proof set upon any modern person bold enough to make assertions about the reality of the supernatural or paranormal. However, each film makes a distinct claim about the ways supernatural experiences shape social relationships and call forth the past. The girls photograph the fairies in part as a response to grief-Elsie’s brother has died of pneumonia and Frances’ father has gone missing in action in France-and they hold their knowledge of the fairies between them as a bond. The fairies help them to bear the pain of separation in this life, and to reunite them with those they love. Though skeptics consider the fairies to be fanciful and nostalgic creatures of a bygone era, the girls think them real and present.

By contrast, Dominic’s electrification by lightning occurs when he is on the verge of committing suicide as a lonely old man. Never having completed his scholarly magnum opus, Dominic has also never forgotten his fiancée, Lara, who called off their engagement years before, giving up her love for the young Dominic (and her own interest in his research) to allow him to fully devote his time to his true passion, his scholarship. Armed with his supernatural powers of memory Dominic plunges into the past, drawn by scholarly and physical desire.

Retelling Youth without Youth with Women in the Picture

Other bloggers have retold aspects of the film with their own foci—as John Lardas Modern discussed Eliade’s fascination with technological reproducibility and Jeffrey Kripal discussed how the story fits within the “major epiphanies of modern science, what we might call, Electricity, Mutation, and Radiation.” An equally persuasive trinity of terms to summarize the movie comes from the title of an article that Eliade wrote in 1971, “Spirit, Light, and Seed,” in which he catalogued symbolic connections among divine light and semen, arguing that across religious traditions, incursions of “supernatural Light” have brought forth existential awakenings, or anamnesis, in men. Dominic-struck by lightning, given paranormal powers, and renewed sexual functioning-is the personification of spirit, light, and seed. As he sets out to repossess the past with his newfound paranormal powers, Dominic enacts what was aptly described by Jeremy Biles as a “scholarly wet dream of perfect recollection.”

As a post-historic man, he uses his supernatural gifts of perfect memory and youthfulness to explore his scholarly passions and his sexual desire in a way seemingly denied to him in his previous, “ordinary” life. To borrow Eliade’s words, when making sense of a “meeting with the Light,” “each man discovers what he was spiritually and culturally prepared to discover.” In dealing with his light-spurred bid to repossess the past, I would argue, Dominic Matei had been prepared—by Eliade, by Coppola, by “Western culture”?—to experience his anamnesis, or awakening, within predictably gendered and sexualized tropes of spiritual discovery.

To demonstrate these tropes of gender and sexuality, allow me to recount aspects of the plot focused on women that were not summarized in earlier blogs. With echoes of Kierkegaard and Regine Olson, Dominic is tragically haunted by memories and dreams of Lara, his lost love, who dies in childbirth after having married another man. The post-historic, electrified Dominic is given a second chance, however, when he crosses paths with (what I took to be) Lara’s reincarnated twenty-five year old self, Veronica, in the Alps. (To back up a bit, this is after he has escaped the Nazis in Romania, who discover the secret of his time-bending, superhuman, linguistically prolific self by luring him to into the arms of a beautiful nameless woman with lacy, swastika-patterned lingerie who keeps a copy of Mein Kampf under her bed. In his altered state, Dominic thinks he is having erotic dreams at night, only to find out that, thanks to his newly refreshed body, he really has been enjoying fabulous sex with the Nazi in the next room. As the Nazis pursue Dominic—”the most valuable human specimen on Earth”—his Nazi lover proves her devotion to him, when she steps between him and a gun-toting mad Nazi doctor-futurist).

With two women having sacrificed themselves for him, electrified Dominic is set to continue his life’s work of finding the origin of language and consciousness. Throughout, he is egged on by his somewhat sinister “guardian angel” doppelgänger, who first appears to Dominic in mirrors after his electrification. With the classic spiritualist gambit of a material “apport” from the spiritual world, the guardian angel cements his reality by making two red roses appear in Dominic’s outstretched palm. Either leering or blowing smoke rings when Dominic is in bed with his lovers—and seemingly never enjoying the intimacy himself—the doppelgänger knows the future and the past in ways that Dominic only gradually sorts out.

While in Fairy Tale, the fairy photos provide the paranormal “fact” that scientists and technicians attempt to authenticate, in the case of Youth Without Youth the uncanny facts are Dominic’s lightning-induced superhuman status and then the mysterious transformation of Veronica (Lara’s reincarnation), when she too is struck by lightning. There’s a big difference between Dominic’s and Veronica’s encounter with supernatural light, however. After her electrification, Veronica does not repossess the past; the past repossesses her.

Instead of developing self-aware “post-historic” perceptions and linguistic abilities, Veronica is thrown back in time, losing her identity and tri-linguistic abilities. Inhabiting fully her past life as Rupini, a 14th century woman descended from the first Indian family to convert to Buddhism, Veronica cowers in the corner of her hospital room, speaking only Sanskrit, making Dominic her only conversation partner in town.

Obsessed by the possibility that her 14th century memories could be “fact,” Orientalist scholars, her medical doctors, and Dominic fly Veronica’s traumatized, drugged body to India for “verification” of the places and actions she recounts. The bodily exploitation of Veronica’s memories continue apace once she reawakens to her twentieth century self, as Dominic whisks her away from the media’s glare to a villa in Malta, where she undergoes nightly possessions by her increasingly primal past lives, from Egypt to Babylonia.

With his massive tape recorder always at the ready on the bedside table, by night Dominic captures Veronica’s guttural voices speaking in strange languages, and by day he plays her words back relentlessly, phrase by phrase, to transcribe them, as an exhausted Veronica listens, claiming to be happy to help her scholar-lover in whatever way she can. Her assistance comes at great cost, however, since for some reason Veronica’s electrification has not rendered her more youthful, as did Dominic’s, but has caused here to age rapidly. (For a break from all this past life regression, Dominic takes her dancing and somehow she finds a stunning, cleavage-rich black dress that rivals the Nazi lover’s lingerie for its stylish sexiness). Just when he is on the verge of getting the possessed Veronica to go back to the “inarticulate” origins of language itself, Dominic heroically decides he can no longer use her as his vessel of discovery, as every minute she spends with him she moves closer to death. This time he tells her that he must leave her, for her own good, so that she can go back to her beauty and her youth (but not to her research). Clinging to him, abject in her grief, she reluctantly lets him go. Next time we see her, she is young and beautiful, with two French-speaking children in tow, seemingly having put behind her all her past lives and loves.

Women and the grounds of awakening

In the “true story” of the Cottingley fairies, i.e. not the movie version, Elsie Wright admitted as an old woman that the photographs were fakes, but she and Frances continued to insist that they really had seen the fairies-she abandoned the technological proof, but retained her role as a privileged witness of the magical. In the “fictional story” of Dominic’s cosmic electrification, he too abandons proof (and saves Veronica) by switching off the tape recorder and ending his possession sessions and his relationship with Veronica. He realizes that the past and the supernatural exceed the methods of documentation by which he has sought to possess them.

Throughout his journey, Dominic never directly repossesses the past or witnesses the supernatural. For that, he had to depend on Veronica as the channel to the past-he could translate her bizarre utterances with his amazing linguistic talents and he could interpret her past to her because of the voluminous quantity of data stored in his post-historic brain, but he could not possess the past without her body as a conduit. Among its many other narratives, then, Youth Without Youth tells a very old, and seemingly eternally recurring tale—women are cast as the immanent grounds for a great man’s ethical and intellectual achievements, with their unknowing and lovely bodies as the tools for his self-awareness, his sensual gratification, his historical significance, and his cosmic anamnesis. The depiction of women as handmaids to the pursuit of knowledge may have been somewhat true to the setting of Eliade’s story (though less so to that of its composition in 1975). Veronica’s possession by the past was certainly in keeping with the gendered division of labour among psychical “research” of the early twentieth century, in which women were most often the mediums who put aside their selves to let the spirits speak and write. Told today, however, a story that premises one man’s cosmic awakening on the cosmic unconsciousness (and near destruction) of his muse would benefit from a greater dose of self-awareness and irony than that offered by this retelling of an Eliadean tale.