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[Main Blog Post] [Book] Thoughts on The Ancient City
I've been hearing a lot about The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and I finally got around to reading it. Very short version is that it's a good and interesting book, but unless it intersects with some particular interests of yours, you might be fine with a summary. Here's my attempt at such a summary, with some thoughts on what I got out of it (and wanted to, but didn't).
As always, any and all thoughts are most welcome.
As always, any and all thoughts are most welcome.
no subject
One thing that dawned on me way after the fact is that The Ancient City could be thought of as a work of early social science; a sort of anthropological study or perhaps archaeosociology. By that, it is the latent materialist reductionism we see all throughout the book is perhaps a bit more understandable, considering the type of intellectual habits that were en vogue during the time period the book was written.
Your "undead theory" of ancestral worship is fascinating and I think something that warrants further contemplation; perhaps I'll muse on this topic sometime around Samhain ;) I do agree that the term, "the ancestors" we see tossed around a lot in neopagan and eclectic occultist circles is rather vague and murky. I suspect the origin of this term is largely a product of people in those circles dabbling in ATR practices. From the reading I've done on this topic (by practitioners), it seems that "the ancestors" in those traditions is an umbrella term for what's actually a grab-bag of different spirit entities; some of them not-so-nice. The unflattering reality for present-day westerners is that we've been cut off from the practice of ancestor worship for more than a millenium, thus we really don't have anything remotely experiential to go on, besides simple things like keeping photos of deceased relatives up on the mantle piece and occasionally offering them words of respect and fond memory. As you mention, we end up borrowing practices out of context from alien cultures; I'm convinced that this might not be so helpful in the long run. I also agree with you that the "family cult" of yore cannot be insta-memed back into existence; these are things that take many, many centuries to evolve organically. I frankly have no idea how ancestral worship might manifest in whatever future cultures emerge from our own. Also, that the ancient family cultus (and tribal/national traditions) was a lot more varied and nuances than Coulanges might suggest, of course makes tons of sense for anyone who has studied natural religious practices and spirituality in depth using the knowledge we now have.
So many other fascinating things you bring up in your summary, but sadly there's not enough hours in the day for me to comment on even half of them.
no subject
1) I think characterizing it as an early or proto- form of anthropology or sociology is spot on. He takes the beliefs of the ancients seriously as their beliefs, and seeks to use that to explain things, rather than other mechanisms, but he adopts an outside perspective, remaining, at most, agnostic on whether they had any good reason to hold such beliefs - he just takes them as a premise and goes from there. There's value to such a viewpoint, but it has its limits (I was having a conversation recently in a group chat about how there is value in both the "insider" and "outsider" viewpoints on religion, but both also have their drawbacks, and it's hard to find folks who combine them effectively. I might expand that into a blog post sometime soon).
2) Yeah, ever since being exposed to JMG's explanation of the mound burial technology and its debased form in vampires, I've looked at a lot of old school ancestor worship practices in a whole new light. I'm reading The Deities are Many by Jordan Paper now (you might have been the first to recommend that to me, can't remember), and the description of Chinese ancestor veneration also seems to fit the bill. In case I wasn't clear in the review, I think that such practices can be good and beneficial to all involved, even if it is "keeping the etheric body (ghost) alive past its normal span," but it seems especially prone to "going wrong" if everyone involved doesn't a) know what they're doing, and b) take doing it right seriously. As such, I have become very wary of incorporating practices that seem to support that mode of interacting with the dead in a cavalier fashion. Luckily, modern burial practices render it almost certainly moot, as JMG points out in the section on vampires in Monsters, so clueless eclectics aren't very likely to accidentally create vampires, but I could certainly see a situation where ill-informed approaches to "veneration" hinder the souls of our loved ones moving on in the way they might want or need to.
2) Agreed that dabbling in ATR practices strikes me as a bad idea. Some of this might just be lingering cultural bias, seeing things like voodoo as "scary" and "wrong" due to inherited Christian prejudices, but also, some of it really does sound kinda scary to me (like spirit possession - I know there are lots of legitimate religious traditions that make use of it, but it seems really prone to going to bad places if not done scrupulously). Even if such practices are healthy and worthwhile in the right context, I suspect that trying to borrow here and there, give them a shot without proper training, and so forth, is a recipe for some bad news. Am I saying such practices don't have anything to teach us outside of their cultural contexts? Absolutely not, but I'd err pretty far on the side of "look, but don't touch, until you're absolutely, positively, 100% sure you know what you're doing."
3) Which nicely brings me to your point about the difficulty of establishing any kind of organic, authentic ancestor worship in our culture moving forward. I agree that anything robust will take a good, long time to take root and grow, but I also feel like, well, here I am, I've gotta do something. For that, I have so far found JMG's guidance on magical ethics and dealing with spirits generally to be good guardrails for not doing anything too stupid. Don't automatically trust spirits to be who they say they are, pay attention to how they make you feel and what kind of thing they tell you, make consent an utmost priority through things like "my blessings, if you'll have them" or "if that is best for all involved" and so forth, and overall, when in doubt, ask the Gods to do what is right rather than trying to do it myself. I also combine this with something like the dulia/latria distinction: the "worship" I offer ancestors is not exactly the same in feeling, intent, or practice as what I give to the Gods. When in doubt, I err on the side of more "remembering" and "honoring" ancestors rather than "praying to" them, other than offering and asking for the most general sort of blessings.
Altogether, I have a very tentative "I'll be respectful and grateful and careful, and go from there" approach, which I hope will prove fertile ground for more specific or robust practices to develop, but I suppose we'll see (even if it's only when our great-great-great-grandkids are offering us incense ;)).
Lastly, hah, I know the lack of time all too well, but if you happen to find some and have more to share, I'm always glad to hear it.
Cheers,
Jeff
no subject
2. Oh yeah I'm also quite familiar with what JMG has had to say on this topic. Regarding the "keeping the etheric body (ghost) alive past its normal span" magical technology, my dollar store take is that such a practice made a ton of sense once upon a time in a culture and place when everyone had a numinous worldview and close relations with the land spirits and other nonphysical entities was the norm for a given tribe's spiritual authorities and other ritual specialists. In today's hyper-urbanized, uber-materialist society I simply can't see any context where this practice would be workable or desirable for Westerners. Even in small-scale, land-based societies it seems like a bad practice (hence the devolution of the practice into vampirism) unless its practitioners thoroughly understand the magical dynamics that underpin it, and most importantly, memorizing a "spiritual bestiary" that describes what the post-mortem human spirit guardian will be dealing with. I suspect that such magical knowledge was lost over time and that a lot of peoples kept performing some approximation of the original practices by rote, probably out of simple reverence to ancestral customs. Where some knowledge was retained, the practice became rife with abuse once the original intent was forgotten, i.e. witches and sorcerers hoarding the knowledge and selling their services to corrupt or ignorant tribal elites whom they could dupe into accepting the false promise of "immortality." Of course, all of this is very loose speculation on my part.
3. That all sounds like very good advice. These sorts of practices will have to be experimented back into workability and having a hefty set of guardrails in place is key.
4. As an aside, I think what "ruins" literal ancestor worship for for me is my tentative occult knowledge of reincarnation; that the dead don't actually linger around forever in the same "place" and with the same personality in a murky torpor of an afterlife. Nay, the individualities of our forebears move onto other incarnations, but their memories remain if we keep them in our memory; and that there are likely astral residues (i.e. shades or phantoms) of those deceased personalities which linger around somewhere for quite a long time. Simply keeping their memories alive and expressing gratitude for what they've done is my understanding of what ancestor veneration entails. And the closer the ancestor is to my own time and the more knowledge I have of their lives and stories, the more meaningful that veneration is going to be (I do realize this could possibly be a very self-centered way of looking at this).
5. I'm terribly sorry to keep recommending books to you, but there is once called Ritual Offerings which provides first hand, present-day practitioner accounts of how these practices work and are experienced. The book itself is a compilation of essays from various occultists on the eclectic/postmodern end of things. Fascinating accounts, though some of them come off the me as rather morally grey and potentially dangerous if done carelessly or for bad reasons. At least several of the articles are about ancestral practices, and one of the them is specifically on ATRs and after reading it I was forever turned off toward even investigating what those practices are all about; the author himself is refreshingly-honest about how utterly chaotic and dangerous it can be to mess around with. I got the impression that a lot of the spirits that tradition works with are rather grubby ones from the lower astral, and that practices themselves are of a mostly transactional nature; basically, people of very limited material means bribing dodgy spirits to give out numinous goodies.
https://www.amazon.com/Ritual-Offerings-Aaron-Leitch/dp/0998708127
no subject
2. That all basically jives with my impressions and the conclusions I've tentatively drawn from them. I suspect/hope that this is one of those cases where yes, there are potential benefits to the practice (if done all the way right), but maybe most/all of those benefits can be found in less risky ways (for "crop fertility" for example, some combination of: organic farming, permaculture, temple construction, "normal" prayer and offerings to Gods, and so forth).
3. That's the hope anyway!
4. Yeah, this is for sure a puzzler, and my tentative answers are not yet very satisfying. At its simplest level, I have "well, my tradition says to honor the ancestors, and the occult philosophy I study says we reincarnate, but other places in the world have faced this conundrum (Chinese Buddhists, perhaps), so that's weird, I guess, but oh well." Beyond that, there's what you talk about, that at a minimum ancestor veneration is a great way of cultivating awareness of where you come from and gratitude for everything you depend on that you didn't make yourself. More specifically, my current (unsatisfactory) way of squaring this circle is something like the following:
a) between incarnations, some amount of a soul's attention can/may be directed toward helping material descendants of the last incarnation. This would square with the advice in some traditions to give specific veneration for ~30 years after a life, but no longer. It would also likely depend on specific ancestor's level of spiritual development - if grandma is working through a lot on the astral plane, she doesn't have much attention for the grandkids on this plane, but if she got all that out of the way and is waiting for the next go-round, maybe she can send some positive vibes our way.
b) On a longer time horizon, some souls will wrap up material incarnation, and now that they have incorporated all of their lessons and can see/remember their past lives clearly, they might take some interest in helping out those of us still on the wheel. This might account for what happens to deified dead humans and culture heroes, at least partially.
c) As shared endeavors into which folks put time and energy, families would likely generate their own egregores, and worship/veneration would be a way to strengthen and improve these. I suspect this may be one of the major drivers for "the ancestors" as a collective focus of veneration, and that it would be strongest in societies where families have a strong identity (like clans), and weakest in more atomized, nuclear-family-focused cultures. For this piece of it, passing in and out of incarnation just means contributing (for good or ill) to that egregore for as long as you're linked to it, whether by incarnating within the family, or immediately after death, but the egregore itself could keep on existing - like an institution that persists even after the death of its founders.
d) The more personal, "figurative" sense that you talk about where specific folks "live on" in the memories of those of us left behind and influence us on a more personal level. Whether my mom is exerting any direct spiritual influence from the astral between incarnations, has finished incarnation and is functioning as a spirit who still thinks well of me, or has contributed the egregore I am still a part of by virtue of living in the Russell family, the way I am as a person has been shaped by her direct actions toward me as a person, and honoring that helps me to focus on where those influences have taken me.
5. Never apologize for recommending books! I may not get to all the books I want to read in this lifetime, but I like knowing what options to consider. That sounds like it might be interesting, and opens up a new avenue for exploration I hadn't considered: looking into writings by the parts of the occult scene I am not interested in to get counter-examples. I'll have to give that some thought.
Thanks again for your thoughts,
Jeff
The spooky side of ancestor worship
(Anonymous) 2024-09-25 06:11 am (UTC)(link)1. I think his surname was actually "Fustel de Coulanges," three words starting with a capital "F" rather than just "de Coulanges." At any rate, that's how the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica alphabetizes him, with the F's. See link here. (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Fustel_de_Coulanges,_Numa_Denis)
2. Apparently his motive in writing the book (or one of his motives) was that Napoleon III kept making speeches about his Empire as a restoration of the Roman Empire, and F de C wanted to make the point, "No, you have no idea what you are talking about." đ
3. I totally agree with the connection you make between the rule of the dead in F de C and JMG's description of the same thing in his chapter on vampires from Monsters. But you can take the idea a lot farther.
Walter Otto, in his book The Homeric Gods, argues that the Olympian Gods were genuinely new gods, and that we can see the traces of a (largely undocumented) religious revolution in Greek prehistory. He traces vestigial survivals of the older forms of worship, in a variety of sources but most dramatically in Aeschylus's Eumenides. And he insists that the older worshipâworship of the Titans and other powers like themâwas a worship tied to the earth and to blood, a worship that bound together the living and the dead and the natural powers in a single community. He says that as long as you lived in line with that community it could be very nurturing; but step out of line, and the powers were implacable and terrifying. He also adds, almost as an aside, that "This belief presupposes interment, by which the body returns to the bosom of the earth whence it came." (p.26)
So far, this sounds almost identical to the regime that F de C describes. But Otto goes on to remind us that the Olympians, by contrast, had a horror of the dead and never approached them. Liminal deities like Demeter and Persephone, or Dionysus, might have some connection with the dead. But the primary OlympiansâZeus, Apollo, Athene, and others like themâwere clearly the Undying Ones. What is more, Olympian religion involved cremating the dead!
Put these three authors togetherâI mean F de C, Otto, and JMGâand you get a very clear picture of what might have happened, maybe in the Mycenean period or a little before, and maybe in other times here and there across Europe. The picture starts with a religiosity of earth and blood and the dead, among people who inter their dead in the ground and then worship them. Over time, the air gets thick with predatory spirits, spirits who drink the blood that is poured out (as the Erinyes were said to do) and who harass the living to demand ever more etheric nourishment. Then finally there is a revolution and even a war (remembered in myth as the Titanomachy), in the name of new gods who are disgusted by the dead and who have a very ambivalent reaction even to bloodâand the revolutionaries announce their sharp break with the old ways by burning their dead so that the bodies cannot possibly be used as a home for hungry ghosts!
[FOOTNOTE: The picture is not quite complete, because it does not explain why the Olympians were still worshipped with animal sacrifice. But it is possible that Walter Burkert can answer that question when he says that men still needed the permission of the gods to perform butchery even for food, because the awe and terror that they felt instinctively at the act of killing and shedding blood were otherwise so debilitating. In any event, I think this last part is not critical for the rest of it.]
Anyway, I don't know if the story I've told here is correct as history, but I find it a compelling story all the same. I'd love to hear your feedback.
Hosea Tanatu
I wish there were a way I could subscribe to comments, so I'd be notified if you reply. As it is, I'll try to check back from time to time. Also you can find me at hosea DOT tanatu AT gmail DOT com.
Re: The spooky side of ancestor worship
Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts!
1) Ah, thanks for the correction! I wasn't sure how to parse his full name, so this is useful. I'll go in and fix it and update the post accordingly.
2) Hah! I didn't know that, but I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. I assumed his comments about folks of his day assuming they knew things about the ancients that were wrong were entirely aimed at fellow academics, but I guess not.
3) I'll have to check out Otto's book, it sounds very interesting, though if your hypothesis building on his is correct, I'd be inclined to move it back quite a bit, possibly before the Indo-European speakers split up into groups, for the simple reason that the Olympian Gods have clear parallels in the bodies of other Indo-European myths. A sky father who is king of the Gods, a thunderer who beats up monsters and protects humans, a sexy Goddess of sovereignty, and so forth. Also, burial practices seem to have switched back and forth between inhumation and cremation, with some variation, from a very long time back, which implies that the switch from Mycenaean inhumation to Classical cremation might not have been a dramatic one-time thing for cause. All that being said, one way to maybe reconcile the old, old stuff I'm talking about Otto's more recent proposal is some kind of interaction between the religion of the folks who were already in Greece when the Greeks showed up (the Pelasgians and whoever else, whose names we might not even have). As for Burkert, I haven't read Homo Necans since becoming religious, so it might be worth revisiting. Also, I'd be interested in comparing with a wider range of looks at indigenous practices around killing animals, since the mid to late twentieth century had a lot of well-known and oft-cited literature on things "intrinsic to humans" that haven't held up super well (a nearby example: S.L.A. Marshall's report that most soldiers didn't directly fire their weapons at human targets and the supporting studies for it have all come under a lot of fire for problems with their methods).
4) As for subscribing to comments, yeah, unfortunately, the only way I know how is with a dreamwidth account (free, but you do have to give them your email address), and even then, it's painfully inconsistent. It seems to do alright notifying about direct replies by the post owner, but everything else is hit or miss, even with a paid account.
Cheers,
Jeff
Re: The spooky side of ancestor worship
(Anonymous) 2024-09-26 05:19 am (UTC)(link)I was thinking about the Indo-European parallels as I was writing my earlier post, but I didn't have time to re-read all the relevant chapters to remind myself whether or how Otto addressed them. He has to have been aware of the research that was being done on the early Indo-Europeans: apparently he finished his doctoral work in 1911 and died in 1958, so his floruit overlapped Georges Dumézil (who was 24 years younger). Yes, presumably the Pelasgians would be one way to make the story work. But also, Otto recognizes that some of the Olympians seemed to change their nature and function over time. He argues that Poseidon seems more archaic than Zeus in a number of his attributes, as well as being wilder, more chaotic, and more closely tied to natural phenomena. He also makes similar arguments about, for example, Demeter and Hermes. So I could imagine "rescuing" my story also by suggesting that in some cases, perhaps, some gods may have "changed sides," if you will.
Also, remember that the story I advanced makes no claims to scholarship. It is more of a jeu d'Ă©sprit, where I am burbling, "Oh look how cool it is if you take these three authors and mash them up together just so!" đ If it turns out that my story doesn't work, I haven't invested a lot in it.
Best as always,
Hosea