not blind, but bone-deep
Bear with me here.
I am a religious person. A lot of the things about me--my words, my values, my politics--that many of you appreciate about me come out of this, even if I don't bring it up much. The answer to "what religion, then?" is extremely complicated, and that answer has changed, drastically, more than once, though it is reasonable, as far as reasonability goes, to roughly call me an ancestor venerator. I was brought up essentially as an Abrahamic agnostic, and, following a conversion experience in my early teens, wandered far, far astray.
For right now, though, there is a safe thing to say:
I am a particular devotee of the Goddess Kapo, to whom I do far too little honor, all blessings to Her.
Religious language spooks a lot of you, doesn't it?
That's okay. Part of what I want to talk about is the inherent spookiness. A lot of us scrub our Gods clean of worry and danger and terror and awe, of weirdness. A lot of us want omnibenevolence and omniscience and omnipotence from our deities, all at once, even though these things contradict, we want someone perfect who's always there and always wants for us what we think is good for us. I disagree with the notion, but I respect it, when it comes to others' faiths; I get edgy around perfection, around the absence of the uncanny.
My Kapo, Whose I am, is not scrubbed clean of danger. In Hawai'i She is called sister to the poison Gods, Red Eel-Woman, She Who Paints the Color of the Night Sky. She is invoked by dancers and by curse-flingers, and connected to uncanniness and lightning-storms and magic and often death. Her sister is the fury of a volcano and the kind of creation that burns all it touches. And when it comes down to it, it is Red Kapo Who protects that sister Pele.
Pele was nearly sexually assaulted by one of the Gods, you see, as the story goes. The volcano, She ran, the pig-God in hot pursuit. Uncanniness saves the day; as the story goes, see, Kapo detached Her vagina and sent it flying through the air to lure and distract the offending deity, drawing Him over the ocean and sending him on a wild goose chase after a humming, speeding vulva that finally hit a mountainside with such force it left a dent in the rock and a cave locals still name after Her. So She is also called Kapo-kohe-lele, Kapo of the Flying Vagina.
This is true.
It also means, by many accounts, that if an islander dreams of a woman without a vulva, it is a portent of Kapo. It means that priestesses to Kapo must either have nonstandard genitals or a blessing of protection cast over their vulvas so She will not tear at them.
This is a thing I only learned after nearly a decade of religious devotion to Red Kapo the Eel-Woman of the Storm. I made loud noises of shock, and there was a lot of laughter. After all, I didn't go looking for Her in a book; I stumbled into an initiatory ritual in a holy grotto behind a waterfall, was bowled over and awed and overwhelmed by an experience I still have trouble describing, and then did some looking to make sure that what I had seen and felt, in those moments, matched up to what I could be told about the shrine in that spot, and Whose it was, and what She was like.
For all my neglect, She still finds ways to surprise me. And ways to knock me around. And ways to look after me.
And you're probably wondering, "Does she really buy into this? Wasn't this just a rhetorical device, this 'religious devotion to oldschool Goddesses' thing, to win an argument? Does she really structure important life choices around an obscure Polynesian Goddess Whose remaining devotees can be counted on your fingers and toes?" And I can only spread my hands and say, look, it wasn't my idea. If I were making it up, I'd come up with something much more plausible. I'd come up with a story that doesn't involve following a ghost fish to an underwater coral chapel. I'd come up with a deity you'd heard of, or claim She made me Her special anointed one, or something, or claim that teenage me, sorely lacking in emotional maturity, was instantly transformed with insight.
We found each other, and we worked something out. Gods are, among other things, ideas, and ideas need people, too.
If you want, you can take this all as metaphorical. If it makes you more comfortable. I don't really care what you call factual; I only know what's true.
And that's where we start getting at the heart of things. People often make the best metaphors about religion--metaphors about lattices of metaphors, meta-meta-metaphors--when they compare it to something else we all know well.
"How do you know what faith feels like?"
"How do you know you're in love?"
(You may have heard this elsewhere, too, with its implicit answer: "How do you know what your identity is? How do you know you're a this instead of a that?" "Well, how do you know you're in love?")
You might or might not talk to Gods who might or might not answer back. It's your business, not mine. I can't know what it's like for you, and you can't know what it's like for me. Why? Well, how do you know whether or not you're having a spiritual experience? What's the difference between doing a mundane thing like cooking or ploughing or hiking, and doing it religiously? What's the difference between a loss and a sacrifice, a poem and a hymn? How do you know you're in love?
For me, love informs my faith, and faith informs my love, see. Because I try to treat a deity with love, and hope for love in return. Not endless blessings, or miracles, or sacrificed oxen, for that matter. Love. I think of parents, and siblings; sometimes loving means not saying "yes." Sometimes loving means moving in a way that makes no sense. Sometimes love sits battered in the face of endless disappointments and confusions, but love doesn't care. Love is stupid. Love is a wonder. It has no idea how to bow to what's good for us, or nutritious, or wise; it sings another language, one full of need and connection and burning. No one can convincingly tell you what it will be like, should be like, and it's every time unique, and it never cancels out other love, different love, love elsewhere.
See?
It goes both ways. Because in love, I speak the language of religion. I say, love has sacrifices in it. I hear, if it doesn't bleed, can you trust it? Most of all, I don't expect it to make sense. Nobody can effectively say, "You can't feel that love, because it's not a good idea, because it doesn't make sense, because it doesn't follow the rules." It stays. The feeling stays, in the face of logic, of evidence to the contrary, to everything. It comes from somewhere deeper, somewhere made of tendons and arteries and contradictions and needs. It's a connection that doesn't care whether or not it makes sense. It's bigger than that. You're in love, or you're not. Only one way to know for sure.
I prefer a Goddess Who doesn't make sense. I prefer wondering why eels, and why someone as obsessed with getting the world to hug each other was claimed by a Goddess whose jurisdiction involves a lot of terrifying things, a sister to poison, a hisser-in-the-night. And it doesn't matter what I prefer, anyway, after all--can you decide not to be in love? I prefer a religious life that insists that multiple contradictory truths can coexist, and that the facts are another matter for other purposes, that lets the sacred stay weird.
I prefer to remember that love, like faith, is not tidy, is not a well-scrubbed construct of quartz and white light. It's a mess, a seething, toothy mess; it's worthy of awe, and terror, and wonder. It's worth bleeding for. It's something bigger than anything that can be cleaned up or discussed comfortably.
It's spooky. Certainly it's dangerous. It changes what you are by its simple presence, and by the risks and vulnerabilities it demands. It changes everything, but not how anyone expected. It connects things. And if Love conquers all, it frequently does so armed.
St. Valentine's Day's origins acknowledge this. Its Christian origin-legend is about bucking government control for romance, about risking lives to marry people forbidden their unions, about martyrdom for the sake of connections that exist and throb and grow in spite of the laws and bonds and weapons in their way. The scaffold of Lupercalia it's built on was a Roman fertility-festival involving wolf-howling priests anointing naked young men in sacrificial blood and sending them out to run the city, whipping the women they wanted to be fertile with, restoring the life of the city's foundations with death and bloodstains and outdoor, frantic, ecstatic sex. It wasn't always greeting cards and pink ribbon.
Sacred isn't always pretty, but you always know it when you feel it, the way you know your own skin. You know it the way you know you're home.
How do you know you're in love?
I am a religious person. A lot of the things about me--my words, my values, my politics--that many of you appreciate about me come out of this, even if I don't bring it up much. The answer to "what religion, then?" is extremely complicated, and that answer has changed, drastically, more than once, though it is reasonable, as far as reasonability goes, to roughly call me an ancestor venerator. I was brought up essentially as an Abrahamic agnostic, and, following a conversion experience in my early teens, wandered far, far astray.
For right now, though, there is a safe thing to say:
I am a particular devotee of the Goddess Kapo, to whom I do far too little honor, all blessings to Her.
Religious language spooks a lot of you, doesn't it?
That's okay. Part of what I want to talk about is the inherent spookiness. A lot of us scrub our Gods clean of worry and danger and terror and awe, of weirdness. A lot of us want omnibenevolence and omniscience and omnipotence from our deities, all at once, even though these things contradict, we want someone perfect who's always there and always wants for us what we think is good for us. I disagree with the notion, but I respect it, when it comes to others' faiths; I get edgy around perfection, around the absence of the uncanny.
My Kapo, Whose I am, is not scrubbed clean of danger. In Hawai'i She is called sister to the poison Gods, Red Eel-Woman, She Who Paints the Color of the Night Sky. She is invoked by dancers and by curse-flingers, and connected to uncanniness and lightning-storms and magic and often death. Her sister is the fury of a volcano and the kind of creation that burns all it touches. And when it comes down to it, it is Red Kapo Who protects that sister Pele.
Pele was nearly sexually assaulted by one of the Gods, you see, as the story goes. The volcano, She ran, the pig-God in hot pursuit. Uncanniness saves the day; as the story goes, see, Kapo detached Her vagina and sent it flying through the air to lure and distract the offending deity, drawing Him over the ocean and sending him on a wild goose chase after a humming, speeding vulva that finally hit a mountainside with such force it left a dent in the rock and a cave locals still name after Her. So She is also called Kapo-kohe-lele, Kapo of the Flying Vagina.
This is true.
It also means, by many accounts, that if an islander dreams of a woman without a vulva, it is a portent of Kapo. It means that priestesses to Kapo must either have nonstandard genitals or a blessing of protection cast over their vulvas so She will not tear at them.
This is a thing I only learned after nearly a decade of religious devotion to Red Kapo the Eel-Woman of the Storm. I made loud noises of shock, and there was a lot of laughter. After all, I didn't go looking for Her in a book; I stumbled into an initiatory ritual in a holy grotto behind a waterfall, was bowled over and awed and overwhelmed by an experience I still have trouble describing, and then did some looking to make sure that what I had seen and felt, in those moments, matched up to what I could be told about the shrine in that spot, and Whose it was, and what She was like.
For all my neglect, She still finds ways to surprise me. And ways to knock me around. And ways to look after me.
And you're probably wondering, "Does she really buy into this? Wasn't this just a rhetorical device, this 'religious devotion to oldschool Goddesses' thing, to win an argument? Does she really structure important life choices around an obscure Polynesian Goddess Whose remaining devotees can be counted on your fingers and toes?" And I can only spread my hands and say, look, it wasn't my idea. If I were making it up, I'd come up with something much more plausible. I'd come up with a story that doesn't involve following a ghost fish to an underwater coral chapel. I'd come up with a deity you'd heard of, or claim She made me Her special anointed one, or something, or claim that teenage me, sorely lacking in emotional maturity, was instantly transformed with insight.
We found each other, and we worked something out. Gods are, among other things, ideas, and ideas need people, too.
If you want, you can take this all as metaphorical. If it makes you more comfortable. I don't really care what you call factual; I only know what's true.
And that's where we start getting at the heart of things. People often make the best metaphors about religion--metaphors about lattices of metaphors, meta-meta-metaphors--when they compare it to something else we all know well.
"How do you know what faith feels like?"
"How do you know you're in love?"
(You may have heard this elsewhere, too, with its implicit answer: "How do you know what your identity is? How do you know you're a this instead of a that?" "Well, how do you know you're in love?")
You might or might not talk to Gods who might or might not answer back. It's your business, not mine. I can't know what it's like for you, and you can't know what it's like for me. Why? Well, how do you know whether or not you're having a spiritual experience? What's the difference between doing a mundane thing like cooking or ploughing or hiking, and doing it religiously? What's the difference between a loss and a sacrifice, a poem and a hymn? How do you know you're in love?
For me, love informs my faith, and faith informs my love, see. Because I try to treat a deity with love, and hope for love in return. Not endless blessings, or miracles, or sacrificed oxen, for that matter. Love. I think of parents, and siblings; sometimes loving means not saying "yes." Sometimes loving means moving in a way that makes no sense. Sometimes love sits battered in the face of endless disappointments and confusions, but love doesn't care. Love is stupid. Love is a wonder. It has no idea how to bow to what's good for us, or nutritious, or wise; it sings another language, one full of need and connection and burning. No one can convincingly tell you what it will be like, should be like, and it's every time unique, and it never cancels out other love, different love, love elsewhere.
See?
It goes both ways. Because in love, I speak the language of religion. I say, love has sacrifices in it. I hear, if it doesn't bleed, can you trust it? Most of all, I don't expect it to make sense. Nobody can effectively say, "You can't feel that love, because it's not a good idea, because it doesn't make sense, because it doesn't follow the rules." It stays. The feeling stays, in the face of logic, of evidence to the contrary, to everything. It comes from somewhere deeper, somewhere made of tendons and arteries and contradictions and needs. It's a connection that doesn't care whether or not it makes sense. It's bigger than that. You're in love, or you're not. Only one way to know for sure.
I prefer a Goddess Who doesn't make sense. I prefer wondering why eels, and why someone as obsessed with getting the world to hug each other was claimed by a Goddess whose jurisdiction involves a lot of terrifying things, a sister to poison, a hisser-in-the-night. And it doesn't matter what I prefer, anyway, after all--can you decide not to be in love? I prefer a religious life that insists that multiple contradictory truths can coexist, and that the facts are another matter for other purposes, that lets the sacred stay weird.
I prefer to remember that love, like faith, is not tidy, is not a well-scrubbed construct of quartz and white light. It's a mess, a seething, toothy mess; it's worthy of awe, and terror, and wonder. It's worth bleeding for. It's something bigger than anything that can be cleaned up or discussed comfortably.
It's spooky. Certainly it's dangerous. It changes what you are by its simple presence, and by the risks and vulnerabilities it demands. It changes everything, but not how anyone expected. It connects things. And if Love conquers all, it frequently does so armed.
St. Valentine's Day's origins acknowledge this. Its Christian origin-legend is about bucking government control for romance, about risking lives to marry people forbidden their unions, about martyrdom for the sake of connections that exist and throb and grow in spite of the laws and bonds and weapons in their way. The scaffold of Lupercalia it's built on was a Roman fertility-festival involving wolf-howling priests anointing naked young men in sacrificial blood and sending them out to run the city, whipping the women they wanted to be fertile with, restoring the life of the city's foundations with death and bloodstains and outdoor, frantic, ecstatic sex. It wasn't always greeting cards and pink ribbon.
Sacred isn't always pretty, but you always know it when you feel it, the way you know your own skin. You know it the way you know you're home.
How do you know you're in love?
Labels: monstrous, religion, remembered, turning points
posted by little light | 9:32 AM
19 Comments:
I love hearing finding-gods-in-unusual-ways stories. Thank you. Thanks also for reminding me of Lupercalia. Somehow I unwittingly celebrated it starting right around midnight last night! Much better than a traditional Valentine's day celebration, if you ask me.
How do you know you're in love?
I know when I'm in love because it feels good and hurts like hell at the same time.
I don't understand religion very well, though. I can wrap my head around a god/goddess that's both kind and has a terrible well of fury unless they claim to be omniscient and all powerful as well. I was raised Baptist, and that god confused me. In retrospect, I think it was the combination of all knowing, benevolence, and all powerful. If one was all knowing and completely benevolent, how could they act so terribly dim and harsh? It seemed like a dichotomy to me, and to be truthful still does.
Thank you for posting this today. I occasionally need reminding. *grin*
~Faeth
Thank you for once again writing movingly and beautifully. I've found that I can only fall in love with people though, not gods. But I'm glad you did and chose to share.
As always, you write so beautifully and say things that just kind of reach into my soul and cling and don't want to let go, and I don't want to let go of them, though often I don't have enough hands. Thankyou for that feeling, and the memories it invokes.
I linked to this.
great post.
This is a wonderful post.
Imma go link it now.
And Goddesses that are not fluffy are the best kind ;)
I love the way you write.
But I'm gonna fess up to being one of those folks who says "Huh?" Or, as if you were inside my brain, I'm thinking, "Does she really structure important life choices around an obscure Polynesian Goddess Whose remaining devotees can be counted on your fingers and toes?"
LOL!
Religious language doesn't spook me. I seem to lack the desire for religion. I've never been interested in knowing the answers to why we exist or what happens after we die, or any of those other "big" questions that religious belief can answer for so many people. In a way, that makes your experience of being chosen by a goddess more believable to me.
So now I'm wondering if you are Polynesian. And if not, are you concerned about cultural appropriation?
When your God(dess) reaches down and touches you, you know. It can't be explained clearly, you just...KNOW.
"When your God(dess) reaches down and touches you, you know. It can't be explained clearly, you just...KNOW."
Amen.
(Pardon the pun.)
Man, trin, you took my joke.
Anyway, ll, I really appreciate this post. I still have a lot of doubts about myself and my faith, and I fall into the meta-metaphor trap a lot. It's so good to hear that other people have the same wacky sorts of experiences that I do, that I'm not the only one who wants to commit to the gods being real and not metaphor.
Holly: nicely done.
Faeth: you know I always do my best, hon.
lilcollegegirl and ravenm: it's like I said. You're either in love or you're not, and you're the only person who can say for sure. Experiences of various iterations of divine reality, as far as I'm concerned, are either real for you or they're not. Much of what I believe in isn't a matter of belief any more than I "believe" in rocks and trees and my left hand. For my atheist friends, the terrain is just different. For my friends of other religions, the same applies; I refuse to be so arrogant as to assume that what's real and true for me must be so for everyone else, especially if the favor is returned.
Going through the motions of religious devotion when you don't feel connected to their object, don't get vibrated like a violin string by connection to something that resonates with you, isn't--in my opinion--really different from going through the motions in a loveless marriage. Some people feel the need, because of their values. There are some benefits to sticking around, certain kinds of security, certain habits hard to break. Ultimately, though, it's unfulfilling, and might get in the way of something else you find that resonates and makes your life meaningful and grand.
As far as I'm concerned, I'd much rather a person who doesn't get that connection from religion not bother, and go somewhere else to find it, you know? Why bang your head trying to force yourself to fall in love with someone you can't, when there's someone else out there? Why devote your life to a God you don't find truth in, when you could devote your life to music, or carpentry, or family, or activism, and find real connection to the world around you that way? And why would any reasonable God expect anything else, or want half-assed, hollow prayers from a frustrated, insincere follower? There are so so many more important things for people to do.
Also, Ravenm, your question is a good one.
I'm part Polynesian, and feel a strong connection to that portion of my heritage--much of the structure of my religious belief is built on basic Pacific Islander patterns.
I am not, however, Hawai'ian. I consider folks from other parts of the Pacific to be sort of cousins, you know? We all come from the same group of migrating people, and the Hawai'ians just managed to get farther than my own ancestors did before settling. And because there's no writing in that part of the world and much of our ancestral beliefs were stamped out by colonists and missionaries, it's difficult to say whether or not I had ancestors who prayed to Kapo, even if I know they had other deities in common with our long-lost Hawai'ian brothers and sisters.
But it's a sticky situation, and I ask myself a lot about cultural appropriation.
I think part of it comes down to respect. I have tried hard to learn as much as possible about the religion I participate in, and I defer whenever necessary to my elders and to folk raised with these traditions. I'm a sincere convert, as it were, which is a difficult middle ground to negotiate, even after nearly a decade. It's one of those questions that's worth asking over and over, and it's not a situation I'd have dreamed of involving myself in beyond the level of "interest" if I hadn't felt personally called by Kapo to get on board.
A God says jump directly, you generally say "how high" after you're in the air already.
And a very happy Ash Wednesday to you, Little Light. :)
And different gods speak different languages, make for different romances. Dance the dance you love, you know?
And, y'know, maybe other people are dancing with the same things I am, but they don't share the language that I do, so they use different words. Life is like that sometimes; we learn each other's languages, we speak a little, we continue dancing. Sometimes "I call that thing this" is a profound thing, sometimes it's just a blip, a difference in interpretation of things that don't matter.
Some people think that being given severed plant genitalia is a valuable sign of affection, which is a source of profound wonderment to me. Not everything works in translation.
(I add to all of this miscellaneous comment that my blogger handle means 'Adorer of Hathor'. This is not a name chosen flippantly.)
As ever, impressed.
little light, humblest apologies for drifting your thread:
Old Lady Sadie, are you the artist known as the one and only Mrs. Jones, from the bygone days of The Strife ?
If so, the artist formerly known as alsis is very happy to see that you're still on the 'net. Cheers.
Holy shit. Those are some powerful and thoughtful words. Since my brother's murder, I am so disenamored of the idea of God, yet somehow cannot let go of it. Glad to have found you.
Oh, yes!
The sacred comes through doors we don't expect. For me it came first through the Kingdom of Dreams. Fiction blurred into my reality. Five years of age, I wandered into vast and starry spaces, crystal labyrinths of story...the Dream King's palace.
And reading of my monarch, and of his place, later on, I heard him described as a harsh master, sometimes cruel, and a liar. And part of me said no, and part said yes, but I don't care, and part of me shouted that's not the whole story!
And when I 'gave in and admitted God was God'-that the order, the justice, the benevolent creator was an idea in my mind that I believed in, always had, always would, couldn't change however I tried-I wondered how it was possible to be a subject of the King of Dreams, but also follow the Just One Who is truth and truth revealed. I still wonder that, but apparently it is possible. It must be, as I'm doing it.
And here I am, sewing a patchwork gown, a technicolour dreamcoat, a religion of mine cobbled together from scraps of things that none thought sacred. This is mine; it fits better than any proscribed orthodoxy. This fits me, and teaches me, and keeps me warm.
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