Believing in ghosts, zombies, and your friendly neighbourhood monster is backward, isn’t it? Stories of Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Chupacabra, hauntings, spirit possessions, and séances – all are shams, the tools of charlatans and con-artists, traps set for unsuspecting marks or the mentally weak. We know enough about the world that these supernatural phenomena are improbable to the point of  completely impossible, and it’s conspiracy theory to entertain seriously the idea that they might exist. Just like the markings on medieval maps “Here be Dragons,” we have explored and claimed enough of our planet to be able to debunk factual aberrations of this scale. We may find a new snail in the Amazon, but a nine-foot bipedal mammal wandering around in Oregon? No dice.

I think that it’s generally a bad idea to assume that cultural phenomena catch on because people are stupid, or are easy marks. The people at this conference were not all frizzy-haired basement dwellers throwing their money at spirit mediums. There were some academics, notably one man presenting his currently-quite-popular book The Psychopath Test, in which he concludes that many corporate CEOs have psychological profiles exhibiting psychopathic tendencies. Also notable was a medievalist presenting illuminated drawings of Blemmyae – monsters with no heads and their faces on their bodies. Presenters considered their work to be a concerted rejection of a body of scientific and cultural beliefs, and an effort to explore their limits. As one Yeti hunter put it in his presentation, “the rule is that you search for the unknown. It doesn’t say, ‘only if you find something.’”

The first part of this rule is second nature to any scientist who has ever dissolved into rapturous visions of discovering a cure for cancer, or a new element. The second part often gets ignored. Isn’t our acquisition of knowledge, our search for the absolute truth of the universe, moving toward a definite goal? Aren’t we all Stephen Hawking, trying in our own small way to find the simplest most elegant Theory of Everything? You have to find something to justify the search. There must be some determinate ground upon which to stand, or at least to hope to stand upon.

Erwin Schrödinger’s famous cat in the box thought experiment illustrates the principle of uncertainty, that there are some things we can never know, and that there is a necessary limitation on our physical knowledge. Since we cannot observe it, and cannot collapse the wave of probability to one particular state of being, we must consider the cat in the box to be both alive and dead (though as author Neil Gaiman points out, if no one opens the box to feed it, it will be two kinds of dead). Uncertainty and indeterminacy seem built into our physical and intellectual universes, but still with limits. No ghosts! No dragons! Absolutely no Yetis!

I am not saying that the Chupacabra is roaming St. Urbain, waiting for us to sacrifice some goats (the panic in Mexico in the 1990s was probably caused by a roaming herd of coyotes with mange). What I am saying is that this obsession with liminality, the indeterminate, uncertain, and cloudy areas of possibility is not constricted to the academic enterprise. A man in the audience with a truly prolific white beard at the UnCon responded to a presentation on canaries and voices of the dead, “We are practiced Forteans, and we are able to live with uncertainty.” U3 Philosophy majors at McGill are not the only ones who have realized the character of the universe.

So why are there shows about zombies? Are they fodder for the degenerates of the world to craft their voodoo beliefs, and ironic pleasures for the enlightened? Or is there something about a zombie, a creature not-alive-nor-dead, something that subverts our expectations of the very nature of ‘creature’ and of ‘entity’.  I recently read a Jacques Derrida comic book (I refuse to read his notoriously confusing actual writings, as I presently wish to retain my will to live) that uses zombies to express the horror of indeterminacy. They poison systems of order, and must be removed, but you cannot kill the undead, you cannot eliminate the elusive. Zombie movies generally rely on magic, or some sort of superior power, which will come in and reverse the living-dead phenomenon, making the zombie either a dead corpse or a living being. Without this superpower, zombies are still an active and present threat.

Warm Bodies will show zombies roaming the McGill campus, but don’t we already have our own non-fictional zombies roaming our intellectual landscapes? Indeterminacy is threatening, and so we attempt to put limits even on the limitless. We are comfortable with a supple, subtle, and probabilistic physical and philosophical universe driven by embracing indeterminacy as the condition for the possibility of possibility itself, but we draw the line at biology. Or do we?

Archiving the Arcane is a column about religion and myth in the modern world. Elena can be reached at arcane@mcgilldaily.com.

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Nowadays, my mother is a pediatric visiting nurse, and often cares for Hasidic children (for there are many in Brooklyn), who she says are preternaturally responsible and well-behaved.  For Christmas, a grateful young wife gave my mother an enormous mottled glass serving platter, knowing it was the holiday season, and my mother would be celebrating.

* * *

In my first year of Arabic, I befriended a particularly bubbly young woman in hijab who answered every question I could throw at her while sitting near a window in the SSMU cafeteria. She was far more religious than her family, none of whom asked or mandated that she wear a hijab, and she was invigorated by her piety. She wore the niqab (face covering) on occasion, to see if she was truly modest enough, to test her own vanity and limitations. I asked her if I was going to hell, as a non-Muslim. She smiled and asked what I believed. I hedged, and so did she. She hoped for an arranged marriage, and was nice enough to tote me along to a Qur’anic recitation class (in which I was, of course, a consummate failure). I saw a picture of her on Facebook a year ago, alongside her boyfriend who appeared to be wearing an army uniform. Her hair was uncovered.

* * *

When I was working in Alaska, I was put on the packaging line alongside the boss’ girlfriend, a tough blonde with an easy smile. I told her I studied Religious Studies and Arabic and she asked me why I would bother learning about people who wanted to start a war against me. I asked her what she meant, and she told me that they want violence, they want war, it’s in “their Bible.” She said they were vicious and bloody, but she knew a couple who were okay. Halfway through the day, running on my second week of 18-hour night shifts, I felt exhausted and couldn’t keep up with my share of the work. She took over without a single complaint, and when I protested, she just smiled.

* * *

I recently read a book by a formerly Hasidic woman who paints a portrait of a community that was repressive and static, characterized by female subjugation and torturous adherence to ritual.  You’ve read (from the political right) countless scare-reports of the political and social dangers inherent in the rise of Islamic fundamentalist movements, not to mention (from the humanitarian left) indictments of their backward and anti-feminist social mores. There are dramatic pseudo-take downs of Christian fundamentalist idiocy all over the internet, starring a Clarence Darrow-style campaigner for truth who shatters the childish magic the foolish believer still clings to. I merely find it problematic that we speak about religion, something so personal and integral to people’s lives, as if it takes place in a vacuum. At best, discussions of fundamentalism are accompanied by zealous testimonies, obvious and stark articulations of what makes this particular person a religious aberration. A person’s context is so much larger than any statement they might make, or any creed they profess. Ignoring the human who speaks, or the life behind the statistic, is a betrayal of the project of the humanities, one that would fall apart in a blink of an eye in gender or race studies.

Fundamentalism is growing in political, social, and cultural significance, and because many fundamentalists are grounded in separatist and isolationist beliefs, their voices may be absent from the popular consciousness. This should not mean that we construct effigies. Maligning the Other is outdated – why should this courtesy not be extended to the secularists’ ‘other,’ the fundamental believers?

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It is nothing new to be inspired by that which is man-made – great works of art, literature, and music have long been lauded as expressions of truth, divinity, and life. But can we only be inspired by that which is born out of artistic or religious inspiration?  Can only the ineffable humanities be a potent source of capital-T Truth? Is the world of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) necessarily excluded? Does the fact that something is physically deconstructable, that we can see its nuts and bolts and break it down to a series of ones and zeroes, does that make anything we find to be an emergent property of it a false imposition?

The iTunes visualizer turns the music you listen to into a quasi-galactic landscape of moving and morphing balls of light. It is the cyber-equivalent of a lava lamp.  A science-oriented friend of mine asserts that because it resembles both the movement of molecules and planets, encapsulates a truth about the universe – that random action is really not so random after all, and that different microscopic and macroscopic phenomena differ only in scale and not in inherent essence.  This friend finds it to be a potent source of meaning, and something worth contemplating and reflecting upon. It is, of course, a computer program, randomly responding to musical frequencies.  But is it impossible to make these synthetic creations into reflections of or channels for the experience of living beings like ourselves? Are the worlds we create for ourselves devoid of meaning, just by virtue of the fact that we are conscious of their craftsmanship?

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I have no economic answer, so everyone pop your monocles back in. It’s just that this question of inequality has been posed in a thousand different spheres, including back in ancient Israel. The Wisdom Literature of the Bible – and here I will only be presenting Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes – is more than anything a series of speculations on cosmic order and disorder, seeking to understand and live in harmony with the underlying principles of the universe. I find it curious that the metaphorical lenses they offer on why the universe is out of sync tally very well with some of the louder sectors of American politics on the issue of poverty.

The Book of Proverbs is essentially a collection of pithy rules for leading a moderate life in accordance with the cosmic order – be righteous, humble, upright, honest, hard-working, prudent; don’t mouth off to your father, you dumb kid, and so on. It’s often written with an if/then structure – if you are righteous, then you will prosper. It follows that if you are not prosperous, you are not righteous. Proverbs is infamous for implying the poor deserve their lot in life (19:7 and 22:7 are pretty egregious), because if you follow the wise exhortations of Proverbs, how could you not be rich and doing great? God has created such a synchronous universe that so long as you live in accordance with its laws, you will be the top of the tops.

But if you’re not swimming in pools of honey and milk, that’s really your own problem. The modern school of prosperity theology, which implies that the rewards of God are primarily financial, owes much to Proverbs in this respect. If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it should. The assumption underlying American free-market ideology is that the market rewards innovation, hard work, and perseverance, and is absolutely impartial. There are a million rags to riches stories embedding this narrative in our consciousness, and to “work your way up” is as American as a white-picket fence. Thus, the elite super-rich are there because they worked hard, because they lived in accordance with the laws of the invisible hand, because they are the wisest. Questioning the invisible hand would be tantamount to questioning the cosmic order governing Israel.

And yet, in Israel, people did question it. The Book of Job deals with a poor guy who was really just in the wrong place at the wrong time. God allows one of his henchmen to make Job’s life miserable in order to test Job’s righteousness. Job laments his lot in life, while his so-called friends patiently explain to him that he is obviously wicked, and that he really should stop whining, because he deserves it. At the end, God comes in and tells Job that it’s really none of his business, and that He knows lots of great and terrible things that Job will never know. Then, He gives him a lot of sheep, and the now-redeemed Job lives on.

But not everyone is so happy to cede this power to a being that is great, but not necessarily good. Another school of American political thought maintains that it is the duty of the government to recognize that the social order is out of whack. Calling itself “liberal” or “progressive” government, it seeks to find and correct systemic inequalities, to prevent against there being an entire class of Jobs running about, being punished through no fault of their own.

Both liberal and conservative views hold that something is fundamentally unfair. The variation is whether those who are suffering trust the system to fix itself. Finally, Ecclesiastes instructs us to forget it. It thinks the notion of cosmic order is idiotic, and that time and chance happens to everyone. The world is crooked, God is unknowable, so we might as well just live out our days chasing pleasure and drinking an awful lot. Similarly, with artists like Ke$ha announcing we’re all going to die young and we might as well get drunk, Drake reminding us you only live once (and kindly suggesting we party hard), and Lana Del Rey announcing we were born to die, it seems like American youth don’t care much whether things are fair or right. So there is a culture for which the cosmic order – the classic American narrative – holds no promise. It’s not even that the if/then statements implied in these structures are unfair, but that they’re irrelevant. This is not a narrative of decline; America is not morally bankrupt. This voice has been speaking for at least two and a half millennia.

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Science and religion are two paradigms that can demand full compliance, full alignment with their precepts and methods, acceptance of all their truth claims as a prerequisite to considering yourself a member of that community. In countless modern legends – such as the Scopes Monkey Trial allegorically represented in Inherit the Wind – we see the freethinkers of science daring to question the backwards dogmatists. That said, science breeds combative scientism, just as religion breeds some virulent fundamentalist movements.  You need only to look at the work of Christopher Hitchens or the Creation Museum to see how little each side cares to listen to the other. Thus, the science versus religion legend often takes the form of war reporting, with one or the other side loudly and proudly claiming a victory. Think of the legendary Galileo Galilei losing to the closed-minded, desperately afraid Catholic authorities.  It requires a dichotomy: us and them. Stephen Jay Gould, a noted evolutionary biologist, posits that the human brain’s tendency to dichotomize is a holdover from our earliest evolutionary choices – fight or flight; eat or don’t eat. Both in our ancient evolutionary past, and in rural America where the Scopes Monkey Trial took place, it’s certainly a lot easier to decide when there are only two choices.

The Scopes Monkey Trial, or the “Hillsboro Trial,” as it’s called in Inherit the Wind, was a small-town dispute in which some big league players took a serious interest. A young schoolteacher dares to read the work of Charles Darwin and teach evolution to his students, violating a state law against it. In the typical liberal narrative, William Jennings Bryan, a highly charismatic populist politician, gives his last hurrah to his real American Bible-thumping supporters, and prosecutes the teacher’s infraction as an attempt to overrule the truth of the Bible and the spirit of his American people.  Clarence Darrow, a brutally successful and controversial attorney, arrives with watertight arguments, scalding rhetoric, and the trumpets of truth and free thought heralding his closing statement, which I was forced to study in no fewer than three history classes as a child.

In my depictions, of course, I am caricaturizing. So too, however, does Inherit the Wind, when it is traditionally staged. Raby had to fight the confines of the play, and of our narrow conceptions of science and religion. She made the play about scientific and religious people. Not just the ideas themselves, but how they come to inhabit the bodies of those who hold them dearly. We see a constant battle between the paradigm and the person, between how much of their self they are willing to take agency over, and how much they sacrifice to the values of science or the precepts of religion. It is enormously easy, especially on a Northeastern college campus, to metaphorically burn the creationists in effigy as a refutation of backwardness and dogmatism everywhere. This production works hard to inject an element of humanity into the debate, and make that impossible.

Importantly, William Jennings Bryan is played by a woman.  Emily Doyle’s Mary Jefferson Brady is obviously used to stumping on the campaign trail, and one of the most stunning moments of the play is her hysterical confession to her husband that “I hate it when they laugh at me.” We see a broken woman, a collapse of confidence, but most significantly, we witness the human dimension of this discourse. Browsing Reddit, it’s hard to read some of the smug put-downs on r/atheism, a “subreddit” dedicated exclusively to discussing atheism, without wondering what it must be like to be these poor religious straw-men, to have your entire worldview put on trial and savagely destroyed by a complete outsider (or so goes the internet narrative). It would be easy to paint Brady in light of our modern legends as a hysterical zealot, or a Tea Party bigot, but there are clear directorial choices that make both this portrait and the audience’s haughty dismissal of the character impossible.

Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow of the play, is another role that could have been easily played as a slick, charismatic, hotshot lawyer, clean where the town is dusty, sharp where the town is dull and rough. Instead, Samuel Steinbrock-Pratt plays his character as combative, repulsive, and completely magnetic. Every joke hits; every argument is crisp, and yet he’s belligerent, almost mean, while his jerky movements and greasy hair were obviously chosen to muddy the waters. Further, his impassioned eleventh-hour defense of Ms. Brady’s character is extraordinarily poignant, and unsettling.

Other standouts are the heartless reporter Hornbeck, played by Matthieu Labaudiniere, whose caustic urban cynicism strikes unfair blow after unfair blow upon the likeable townspeople. And quietly, but with great dignity, Matt Smith’s Cates is the scared, romantic, courageous schoolteacher who sits perched with enough bewilderment that you see the power of true indecision, the cracked and bumpy path of free thought, and the “twilight on top of the mountains,” where here on earth, we just see night and day, to use a metaphor from the play.  With Cates, we see the director’s vision, the point that we should embrace the twilight of indecision and ambivalence instead of forcing ourselves into a day/night dichotomy of true and false.  Drummond speaks the words, but the gentle romance between Cates and his ingenue, young Rachel Brown, played beautifully by Katie Scharf, makes you feel their truth.

There’s a great nostalgia for easy choices among youth. The recent Americana fad, with the work of pop artists like Lana Del Rey, and distressed American flag t-shirts on sale in every H&M and Topshop around the world, reflects the longing for the simplicity of “real America” (as it is called in a thousand stump speeches around the country). With the rise of the scientific atheist community and religious fundamentalists of every stripe, we see this longing fulfilled in belonging to a group or a movement that will answer every question, that are implacable in their beliefs, and flexible in their application.  This play is an important shade of grey amidst a black and white battlefront; a rejoinder against easy characterizations and narratives, a reminder that nothing as complicated as humans can be depicted well in only two colors.  There is a beautiful collage-style sepia tree as the backdrop, a product of nature with the simplicity and charm of the town, with leaves of manifold colors and shapes. So how’s that for a metaphor, oh ye of little faith?

—

Inherit the Wind runs from November 14 to 17, 21 to 24 at 8 p.m. Go to ssmu.mcgill.ca/players/news/ for further information.

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But vampires are disgusting.  Why would anyone want to get with “a bloated, blood-filled corpse which leaves its tomb, bringing disease and death,” to quote the Oxford dictionary of English folklore. What is sexy about the undead? More than that, what is attractive about the forfeiture of our bodies? Why is there a section in American bookstores called “Teen Paranormal Romance”? Why does my 13-year-old cousin dream of a boyfriend who wants nothing more than to suck out her life force and leave her a broken shell of a human being?

Vampires assign some value to life, as an abstract principle.  To have our blood, our life force, coveted by someone, indicates that it’s something worth having. I imagine that I wouldn’t have framed that in such bald existential principles at 13. But craving a crush at that age, craving a secret admirer, is in a very microcosmic way, seeking affirmation of your life – that is your social life, the most potent definition of life to an insecure teenage girl. (For example, when my eighth grade crush went out with my rival, I wrote “MY LIFE IS OVER” in enormous tear-stained letters in my diary). To be wanted for what makes us human, and what makes us alive, is an affirmation of our existence. To frame it in a cheesy chaste romance, like Twilight author Stephenie Meyer does, means that young girls are able to engage with that truth on a level that means something to them. Plus, there is the fact that Kristen Stewart is such a boring Bella, not particularly special or specific in any way, that her abstract and universal applications can stand out all the more. She’s alive, but only nominally. I would hesitate to say that that was the intention of the director, but one can hope that it was an artistic decision.

Second, the idea of vampires carries within it the defeat of death. A classic way to insult religion is to say that it’s merely a coping mechanism to help people deal with the reality of their impending doom. This is far too reductionist, but it is fair to say that much of mythology deals with the transcendence of death. Religion scholar Joseph Campbell boils all mythology down to this basic framework, in his construction of the “monomyth.” Think about the ending of The Twilight Saga, when Bella’s mortal body is superseded by her more-attractive, more-powerful vampire self. Within death, there is the possibility for life. Within sorrow, there is the possibility for love. Within a terrible series of books, there is the possibility for meaning. Mythology is everywhere, you’ve just gotta look for it.

Disclaimer: I’ve seen all the movies. Deal with it.

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Today, we use the word myth as a synonym for false, which is something that makes my Religious Studies professors squeal in agony (try to picture that for fun). Mythology is an attempt to capture truth, to express a construction of the cosmos, one that is necessarily culturally conditioned. In contemporary times, mythology  has been relocated. Meaning is no longer found in the traditional mythological tales of bards, prophets, and princesses. It is found in the courageous hobbits of the Shire, the curious ethics of Dexter, and in mythology’s most obvious heir, superheroes (and supervillains).

Let’s take a look at arguably the most infamous character in film over the last ten years, Heath Ledger’s Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Why was the Joker such a big deal? Granted, Heath Ledger was tremendous, but why was he so universally fascinating, the subject of Halloween costumes and terrible impressions for years to come? Look at it from a comparative mythological perspective. Let’s call the Joker a ‘trickster,’ a pretty easy jump, based on his name. The trickster is a mythic character, present especially in the mythologies of Africa and the Native Americas. He (sometimes she) is the supreme con-artist, manifest as a sexual deviant; a comedian, vainglorious, or completely lacking in morals. In all manifestations he is, and here I am quoting The Dark Knight, an “agent of chaos.”

The Joker cannot be confined to his human personage. He keeps changing his backstory, for one, and has mutilated and painted his face to further distance his role in Gotham from his human self. He is not driven by greed (“It’s not about money, it’s about sending a message”), by sex, nor by the desire for power. There is no negotiating with him, for there is nothing he wants. As Alfred explains to Bruce Wayne, “Some men, Mr. Wayne, just want to watch the world burn.” The Joker brings the “White Knight” into the darkness; he makes Batman compromise his morality in order to operate within the realm of chaos that the Joker has created in Gotham, thus becoming an Orwellian Big Brother rather than a protector of the peace. And as is often the case in trickster myths, he achieves some sort of victory. As a friend of mine pointed out, The Dark Knight is one of the only superhero movies in which the villain achieves what he wants. The Joker embodied and created chaos, and Gotham is forever affected.

While the trickster figure often only operates in mythic time, and is not conceived as a living figure, his role in mythology is as a disruptor to black-and-white conceptions of the cosmos. He mocks the established order, and even the idea that there could be an order at all, and introduces irony and absurdity where once existed truth and sacredness. He explains the presence of suffering and injustice. Think of how the Joker mocked not only Gotham, but also the audience’s approach to superheroes. We are used to endowing heroes with every human and superhuman positive quality we can think of. The Joker in The Dark Knight made us question this. He is a force of chaos not only in the world of Gotham, but also in our own conception of mythology and heroism. We, as a culture, have invented a new dualism in the world of superheroes and supervillains, one that Nolan seems to imply is untenable, and an insufficient reflection of the world as we know it. But this, of course, is no new revelation. The existence of the trickster in mythologies worldwide seems to imply we’ve been rediscovering this fact since the dawn of time.

Try the works of Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and Carl Jung for more on the trickster archetype.

This is Elena Dugan’s first column about religion and myth in the modern world. You can contact her at arcane@mcgilldaily.com.

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