The Dude Abides

This week has marked something of an event in my life: I have become an ordained minister. This particular ministry I currently share with more than 250,000 other like-minded individuals worldwide – that’s something over half of the total estimated number of Catholic priests. Mind you, [1]ordination into the ministry of The Church of the Latter-day Dude is accomplished with a few mouse clicks by merely applying for a certificate of ordination on their official [2]website. But the smooth ease of the process does not in itself explain the phenomenon that has come to be known as Dudeism.

Begun in 2005 by the journalist Oliver Benjamin, Dudeism takes its inspiration from The Dude, the ultra-laid-back character portrayed by Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brother’s 1998 film The Big Lebowski.  Dudeism draws heavily upon Ancient Chinese Taoist beliefs and philosophy, and its statement that ‘the Dudeness which can be known is not the real Dude’ is typical of its style. As with the Tao, The Dude simply goes with the flow of any situation in which he finds himself, and we also can find his existential attitude mirrored in the practices of Zen. The Dude does not ‘do’. The Dude simply ‘is’.

The point with Dudeism, however, is not to wilfully emulate the Dude’s lifestyle (a gesture of mere mimicry which would be considered un-Dude-like), but to take his lead in simply being yourself – whatever that ‘self’ happens to be. That, and to resist (or perhaps more accurately, to be impervious to) the social pressures which come at us from all sides to conform to the expectations of others, to consume stuff we don’t really need, to pursue a need for status, recognition and respect from those who in their turn are too busy pursuing these goals for themselves to have time for us anyway.

For whatever reasons the movement began, it has gone on to project itself as an urban counter-culture that finds its expression in disdain for (or, again perhaps more correctly: indifference to) all the doctrinal issues which have caused such deep division between denominations in conventional religious expression. A church which has no doctrine also has no potential causes for friction within its ranks. It has largely been disagreements over points of doctrine which have created the 30,000-odd different Christian denominations, most of whose adherents probably would not worship in the church of a different denomination.

Is it possible to be a Dudeist and still maintain one’s own existing personal beliefs? Certainly. Dudeism, like Taoism, is more of an expression of a way of life, a stance towards one’s own existence, than a religion as such. And unlike one or two of the religions which currently dominate our world, it is gender-blind. Men and women have equal status. A sexist ‘glass ceiling’ does not exist within Dudeism in the way in which it does in, for example, the Catholic Church, in which by Vatican decree the aspirations for women are swiftly reached at the lowly level of the mother superior of a local convent.

In seeking answers as to why Dudeism has taken off in the way in which it has, we might find one possible answer in the alternatives. The current major players in world religions have been with us for millennia. On the one hand this might be seen as a sign of their staying power. But looked at from a different angle, their very longevity seems to square awkwardly with our mercurial 21st-century world. Social concerns and moral values which applied – literally – to the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, and which were intended to address the issues and the world views of those distant times, do not sit well in a world of apps and wifi.

In stark contrast, Dudeism is very much a product of the Internet age. It not only sits comfortably in our contemporary urban environment: it addresses the issues which make that environment the pressure-cooker of stress which it has become for so many. Attempts to update existing religions only seem to produce churches whose [3]architecture is stridently ‘modern’, or the toe-curling embarrassments that are overtly-Christian rock and metal bands. And other beliefs which have arisen in our own time, and which do come with a body of doctrine, seem not to be able to shake off their cultish mind-control image. I’m sure you can think of one or two examples without too much prompting from me.

Will Dudeism survive? Even to care about the answer to this question seems a distinctly un-Dude-like thing to do. What matters is what is ‘now’. And Dudeism, like Zen, values the Now: the precious present moment which we are all-too-ready to sacrifice in pursuit of those phantoms with which a consumer society distracts us. Dudeism is live-and-let-live. Dudeism is being kind and decent to your fellow human beings without attempting to force your own lifestyle and beliefs upon them. In the catchphrase from the film: The Dude abides. Perhaps he might yet confound us all by ‘abiding’ longer even than his creators might have imagined.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Dudeist ministers actually are allowed to officiate at weddings and other civic functions, local laws permitting. The official website (below) offers support with providing any necessary further credentials. Dudeism has been described as an 'open source' religion. Its adherents may input their own thoughts about it. Put another way: If you prefer to have your thinking done for you by someone else, then you're probably best off with the top-down autocratic structures of existing conventional religions.

[2] Dudeism.com. Go for it.

[3] I am thinking of my local examples here in the Netherlands. We have one new church on the outskirts of town which looks like nothing so much as the vertical stern of the Titanic just before it plunges beneath the waves: an unintended and unfortunate symbolism which apparently was lost upon those who approved this particular architect’s plans. Every time I drive past I half-expect to see Rose and Jack clinging to the roof.

Sources:

Photos from The Big Lebowski, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, featuring Jeff Bridges as The Dude and John Goodman as Walter, distributed by Polygram Filmed Entertainment, Working Title Films.

Pandora's Box

We might think that we know the myth. Pandora, the first created woman, arrives from Olympus in the world of mortals together with a box. The box contains all the evils and pestilences which otherwise would plague humankind, but as long as they remain safely shut away then the world is a peaceable place. In her innocence, Pandora peeks inside the box to see what it might contain. Bad idea. The terrible contents are released into the world, and humankind has been afflicted with them ever since. Pandora just has the time – and the presence of mind – to shut the lid before the last thing escapes. That thing is Hope: only Hope is preserved safely, to be nurtured for the times when it is needed.

Pandora opens the box, as imagined by John William Waterhouse in the 19th-century.

The story has a familiar echo. We need only think of that other first woman to be awake to the parallels of both stories. Eve in the Book of Genesis also had her problems with human curiosity, of crossing the line of deific instructions to release blight and death upon all of humankind. In a [1]previous post I have mentioned that this literal reading of Genesis points us towards only a superficial truth. And yet it is this ‘storybook’ truth which has dominated Western thinking – and our attitudes towards womankind – ever since. Eve the Woman is the cause of all our misery, and the active agent in releasing evil into what up till then had been blissful paradise. 

Such shapers of early church doctrine as [2]Augustine and [3]Tertullian were in their writings only too eager to hammer this particular nail home. Woman is evil. Woman is a temptress. Woman is only good for bearing children. That canonical texts appeared to support such rampant chauvinist views gave enough legitimacy to such conclusions, even to the extent that right here in the twenty-first century the ideas of guilt, shame and sin still leave their traces on the minds, not only of the ‘faithful’, but also on the minds of those who seldom if ever set foot in a church.

The sign above this languidly reclining Pandora, painted by Jean Cousin in the 16th-century, makes the parallel with Eve crystal clear. The artist is actually correct in showing this Pandora with a vase or jar. The original myth specifies that it was a jar. It was a mistranslation from the Greek that turned it into a box, and the mistranslation has endured ever since.

That the story of the Fall in Eden can be interpreted in profoundly different [4]ways, and in ways which do not weigh down all womankind with the crushing burden of guilt, has gone largely unnoticed for centuries – mainly because the texts of these other versions were destroyed by the Augustines and the Tertullians of their world. What remains of these other texts has been down to the [5]chances of history, of surviving against all the odds. But we do have them, and they are in our world. But if it is possible to redeem Eve, to come at the story from a radically different angle, might the same be possible for the story of Pandora’s box? Does the apparently over-curious Pandora, that other first woman of Ancient Greek myth, actually display a profound wisdom?

A repentant Eve portrayed by Anna Lee Merritt in the 19th-century. But is such deep and bitter contrition by Eve - and also by Pandora - misplaced? 

All we humans who have come after Pandora might have continued to live in a state of carefree bliss. But is this truly what is intended for us? How can we progress if for us sorrow remains an unknown? How can we taste sweetness if bitter regret also is not part of the human condition? So carefully, carefully, Pandora opens the box, and the world becomes as we experience it, with all its joys and its sorrows, its pains and its heartaches. It is not that we experience pain and loss. It is what we do with these emotions which potentially opens the door to growth of the spirit. But what of Hope?

Hope is left behind, sealed shut. Wise Pandora knows the folly of hope. Hope can be a false god, for so often hope can foster false expectations. Only by relinquishing hope are we truly free to act from a position of strength. With hope we might be fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. Without hope our actions are unlimited by any thoughts of ‘wishing for’, that otherwise might constrain us. As with Eve and her forbidden fruit, perhaps we instead should be grateful to Pandora for opening her box – and also for shutting it just in time.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Please see my post Eve's Story.

[2] Writing in the 5th-century, Augustine said: “What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman... I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.” Augustine was instrumental in propounding the doctrine of original sin specifically as being sexual sin, and the fault of the Woman for seducing the Man. Before Augustine, the sin of Eden was principally viewed as being disobedience to God.

[3] Writing in the 3rd-century, Tertullian tersely commented that “Woman is the gateway of the Devil.” Tertullian is now viewed as the originator of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity – a concept nowhere mentioned in scripture – although the idea of the Trinity is found in the pre-Christian (and therefore pagan) mystery schools.

[4] Please see my posts Adam, the God who Failed, and The Enlightened Insight of the Woman, for two of these ‘profoundly different ways’.

[5] Those chances happened as recently as last century, when many Gnostic texts, both Christian and pre-Christian, were discovered by chance, having been buried in a sealed jar in the Egyptian sands for sixteen long centuries.

Thecla: A Woman between Rain and Fire

The Roman governor of Iconium must have wondered at the forces which seemed to be sweeping through his city. Only recently he had detained a man called Paul whose teaching activities had become so popular that they had caused civic unrest. Now before him stood this striking and charismatic woman, reported by her own mother and indignant fiancé for breaking her vows of betrothal in favour of becoming a follower of that same Paul. The woman’s silent and dignified refusal to recant must have been troubling to the governor. But the mother’s insistence of the deep shame which her daughter had brought upon the family honour seems to have swayed the case. The woman called Thecla was condemned to be burned.

Thecla, as with so many names which have come down to us, occupies an uncertain place between fictional stories, folklore, legend and actual history.

In the city’s amphitheatre Thecla was stripped and tied to the stake. Flaming torches were set to the pyre, and the flames rose. How to account, then, for the sudden darkening of the skies on such a clear day? How to account for the heavens opening and pouring such a deluge of rain upon the scene that the burning pyre beneath Thecla was quenched? Shaken, and perhaps even afraid at witnessing this seemingly supernatural turn of events, the governor ordered that Thecla be freed.

Now his travelling companion, Thecla journeyed with Paul to the city of Antioch. On the streets of the city Thecla was accosted by a nobleman named Alexander who, besotted with her [1]beauty, attempted to rape her. In her struggles to resist, Thecla tore the nobleman’s cloak. This apparently inexcusable insult to a member of the nobility brought Thecla before the governor.

The remains of the Roman amphitheatre in Antioch as they are today. The footprints of Thecla remain in the sand, in story if not actually in history.

Another city, another governor – and another amphitheatre. This time it was not fire which threatened to end the newly-condemned Thecla’s life, but the wild beasts of the arena. Standing once more alone and naked in the sand, again Thecla found herself at the mercy of forces seemingly greater than herself. But other forces greater even than these would again conspire to save her. The howls of protest from the women in the crowd at the injustice of Thecla’s fate turned first to cries of disbelief, and then to shouts of astonished joy as the lionesses among the animals moved to circle protectively around Thecla, fighting off the big maned males when they came too close.

And then it seemed to the astonished crowd that Thecla became enveloped in a garment of bright and shining fire: yet more seemingly supernatural occurrences which ensured her pardon and release. When the wondering governor presented her with garments to cover herself, Thecla is said to have replied: “He that clad me when I was naked among the beasts, the same in the day of judgement will clothe me with salvation.”

************

The above incidents are the substance of the Thecla legend. They can be found in the apocryphal Acts of Paul, a manuscript written some 130-140 years after the events which they describe by the presbyter of an [2]Asian orthodox church. [3]Tertullian, the author and shaper of Christian doctrine, informs us that this presbyter was charged with imposture and stripped of his office. This would seem to make the writer of the Acts a distinctly dubious source, but the vivid recounting of such apparent wonders emanating from on high evidently has been enough evidence for orthodoxy to grant Thecla sainthood, the criteria for which include such miracles of faith as these.

Following her redemption in Antioch's Roman amphitheatre, Thecla journeyed to Myra in the southern province of Lycia to continue her ministry. Seleucia in what was then the eastern province of Syria is the site of her supposed tomb. Greek copies of the Acts relate that she lived into her 90's, spending her last years in reclusive meditation.

But if the Thecla of legend is not the real Thecla, might we discover the woman behind the stories? However much legends embroider upon more prosaic realities, they draw us towards them because of the human truths which they contain. What we recognize and respond to in Thecla’s legend are the fundamental truths of injustice: injustice by those in positions of authority, and the shockingly obvious injustice perpetrated against women by men. The story even emphasizes this injustice by describing the reaction of the women in the amphitheatre crowd. Thecla is not just a woman thrown upon the mercy of beasts: she is a woman who must navigate her way in a man’s world, where men have not only the authority but the greater physical strength. Thecla is, in short, as much a woman of our time as she is of her own distant world.

The remains of the library at Ephesus. As with these ruins, so with the scrolls and manuscripts which they once contained: what has survived is at one and the same time a reminder of what has been lost to us forever. We sometimes know of these lost literary masterpieces of antiquity only through their being mentioned and praised by other writers in the works which have survived.

Thecla’s world was not as we now tend to envisage it. Paul and Thecla lived a scant few years after the events of the crucifixion. It was not an emerging [4]‘Christian’ world in the sense in which we would now use the term. There was no ‘Bible’. Many different texts were in circulation among different groups, and no one text had more authority than another. Iconium, Antioch, and even northern Galilee were subject to Hellenist and therefore pre-Christian Gnostic influence. A 5th-6th-century [5]mural in Ephesus in present-day Turkey portrays Thecla and Paul side by side, both of them with upraised right hands to indicate both their teaching status, leadership status and equal status with each other: a gender equality which would have been the norm in Gnostic or pro-Gnostic communities.

This regional inscription bears the name of the city of Iconium. The city was real enough, but those who might or might not have walked her streets could have been phantasms. Perhaps this also includes Thecla: a ghost in an actual place, like a fictional Hamlet wandering the real-enough corridors of Denmark's Elsinor Castle.

So how is it possible that Thecla has become a saint of the orthodox Church? It would seem that she joined that dubious list of those who, however remote their principles from those of orthodoxy, have been reinvented at a later date by those orthodox individuals who sought to fictionalize what they could not change in life, and then pass off that fiction as historical reality: a list which includes ‘Saint’ Mary Magdalene, ‘Saint’ Anthony – and ‘Saint’ Paul himself.

But in the end perhaps it does not matter greatly who ‘claims’ Thecla for their own. What we are left with is the essence of a strong, beautiful and principled woman who burned with the bright fire of her faith, but who also touches us with the gentle rain of her grace, and so lifts us up with her.

Hawkwood 

Notes:

[1] Independently of the description of Thecla in The Acts of Paul, Paul himself mentions that he was concerned that Thecla’s striking beauty might distract her audience from her ministry. Paul himself was described as being bow-legged, balding and very short. 

[2] ‘Asia’ in this context was a province in what is now Turkey (please see my map above).

[3] Tertullian of Carthage (left) is conventionally credited with the Christian concept of the Trinity, although the concept can be traced back to the pre-Christian Ancient Greek mystery schools.

[4] The author of The Acts of Paul has Thecla make ‘the sign of the cross’ as she resigns herself to be burned. But (apart from the obvious physical impossibility of doing so when her hands were tied to the stake!) no such sign would have been current at this early date. The sign seems to have originated well over a century after Thecla lived, in the unknown author’s own time - a clear indication of the gap which exists between legend and history, and of the clues offered to us for discerning between the two.

[5] Please see my post "Behold This Woman". The Catholic Encyclopedia is careful to stress that Thecla needed Paul's permission to begin her ministry, and describes her as 'the pupil of Paul' - a description which the existing mural (right) in Ephesus depicting her as Paul's apparent equal contradicts. As Catholicism only emerged in a recognizable form some two centuries after Thecla's time, the moral and ethical question has to be: can the Catholic church claim someone to be a 'saint' of that church if that person lived before Catholicism as such even existed?

Sources:

The Acts of Paul. From: The Apocryphal New Testament, Translated and with notes by M.R. James. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.

Elaine Pagels: The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters. Trinity Press International, 1975.

Valerie Bockman: The Role of Women in the First Century Church: A Model for Today. PDF document based on a talk given at the Orthodox Conference hosted by St. Mark's Orthodox Cathedral Church in July 1991. Presbyteria Bockman states that: “In Christian Tradition veils denote sacredness, being set apart. When a woman veils her head, it is not a demeaning act. It denotes, rather that her femininity is sacred, special, to be revered, and simultaneously that she... is a handmaid of the Lord.” This statement has guided my own imagined portrait of Thecla seen at the head of this post.

Possession

What is possession? The several months of work which I have just spent creating a video of my own version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula gave me time enough to ponder this question while I was occupied with this project. To be clear: I do not mean ‘possession’ in the exorcist casting-out-devils sense, which I regard as a separate issue. I mean: the will to possess another, to gain mastery over someone else’s independence, even over that person’s life.

Lucy Westenra: the ghostly pallor of a life unnaturally sustained beyond death itself.

In Stoker’s classic tale of the struggle against evil, despite the heroic efforts of the Dutch vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing to prevent the encounter, the notorious Count stalks and finally overcomes the hapless Lucy Westenra, and she wastes away and dies. Van Helsing and his associates visit the place of her interment only to discover that her coffin lies empty. Having been bitten by Dracula, Lucy has herself become one of the ‘Un-Dead’: has herself become a vampire, neither alive nor truly dead.

Dracula's letter of welcome to Jonathan Harker containing instructions for his journey to the Count's castle - instructions that Harker would come to regret acting upon.

Dracula, the supreme vampire, is also the supreme possessor. In contemporary profiler terms, he is a pathological control freak. He is ‘evil’ in the context of the story’s classic Gothic theme, but (again in contemporary terms) his pathological nature leaves him merely indifferent to the sufferings which he causes to others, including the loved ones of his victims, who are left to cope with the loss of their dear departed who become stranded in a terrible no-man’s-land between life and death.

In my video, Transylvania, while initially being an actual place on the map to which the characters journey, becomes ultimately, not so much a geographical location as a state of mind. ‘Transylvania’ is where you find yourself as a victim of a predator, and it is a frightening place to be. And if you are in that place, two choices lie open to you: the first is to remain aware of your situation, and attempt an escape (as the story’s young realty agent Jonathan Harker actually does). The second choice is to succumb, to (again in contemporary terms) go over to the dark side: to surrender your own will to that of your possessor.

The grim edifice of Dracula's "...vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light."

Does all this talk about vampires and Transylvania seem rather remote from the usual themes which my posts here address? Think about the many religious and quasi-religious cults and the ways in which they manipulate and control their followers. Cult leaders often-enough have a ‘Dracula’ profile: they can be intensely [1]charismatic, and that charisma at times can have a sexual tint. Cult leaders (almost invariably male) may demand – and receive – sexual favours from their female followers, whether or not those followers have partners. And the news will at times carry stories of the openly pedophile activities of such leaders. It’s not really about sex. It’s about feeding off the energy of one’s victims during such encounters, and perhaps also about cementing their loyalty and drug-like dependence upon the leader. And when true and sincere love finds no place in the act, the transfer of bodily fluids becomes vampiric, an expression of mere brute mastery and power. Ask any victim of rape or sexual abuse.

Transylvania as a place on the map. Using maps of the story's 19th-century period in tandem with Stoker's text, it was possible for me to plot Dracula's overland route to the Black Sea port of Varna, and thence by schooner to the English harbour town of Whitby. For the Count, as for voyagers of today, the Bay of Biscay was a place of storms.

It is typical of cults that the leaders will encourage or even insist upon their followers severing contacts with their past lives, including with their families. This is usually demanded under the pretext that the cult is their new ‘family’, and the leader is their new father and mother rolled into one. The true reason, as the cult leader well knows, is that any such contacts, were they to be sustained, would undermine the new ‘reality’ which the leader has constructed. But all this manipulation need not be confined to religious cults.

‘Transylvania’ also can exist within an individual relationship. A person with a particularly possessive nature might move to ensure that a partner’s family contacts are damaged or even destroyed. The means to accomplish this might vary, but the result is the same: that partner (perhaps out of a misguided love) will become isolated from his/her own family or parents, and become encased within the new ‘reality’ – and dependent upon the possessive partner – in the way that such a possessive relationship demands. To more-aware others, such a relationship might have the outward appearance of a cult, and itself might actually function using the manipulative emotional mechanisms similar to a cult – but with one [2]leader and one member. It is possible that you might even know of someone in such a situation.

Once on English soil the Count uses his shapeshifting abilities to transform into both a wolf and a bat: metaphors for the subtle and not-so-subtle masks of human predators in our own reality.

It is likely that at some time you have had on your doorstep the members of one or other church denomination who proselytize from door-to-door in the hopes of making a new conversion. Such proselytizing activity might actually be a requirement of one’s faith, as it is for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known as the Mormons), or for Jehovah’s Witnesses. But is trying to persuade someone (in such cases, a complete stranger) to believe the same things in which you believe an act of conversion, or an act of possession? We find it reassuring when someone else believes the same things that we do, simply because it provides us with a confirmation that what we believe must be ‘right’, and gives us a sense of communal belonging. But however well-intentioned it might be, such persuasive attempted conversion by its very nature and intent is also spiritually predatory – and doubly so when forced conversion is involved, as it has been both in [3]history and in our [4]present-day world.

The eyes of a predator mirror the same intentions, whether that predator is animal or human.

Transylvania, it seems, is far from being just a place on the map. As a state of mind it can be anywhere and everywhere, and is real enough. If ever we find ourselves in that terrible place, like Stoker’s young hero Jonathan Harker we need to resist the easy option to succumb and instead struggle to stay awake and alert, and escape if we can to seize our own life back – although we might need the help of loyal friends and loved ones on the 'outside' to accomplish this. And they might not always have fangs and wear swirling black cloaks, but vampires as well are real enough.

Hawkwood 

Notes:

[1] Eastern faiths will caution novices about the dangers of becoming beguiled by and ‘stuck’ in the charismatic stage of spiritual development, which is recognized for what it truly is: a mere doorway to further spiritual progress. In the West there are no such cautionary restraints, and you can see the results on any evangelical television network: many such preachers become enamoured of their own charismatic powers, and so stay at that stage rather than moving on into calmer and more humble spiritual waters.

[2] Such a pathologically possessive partner can be a consummate actor. A casual contact with such a type might well leave you concluding that the person is friendly and sincere. I have even seen an interview with an experienced psychiatrist who admitted that, had he not previously read his patient's unnerving case file, he would have been totally fooled into concluding that the man was entirely compliant and normal. If you have seen the film, think of Clarice Starling's first meeting with the courteous and considerate Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Anthony Hopkins' performance was accurate to type - and the more chilling for being so.  

[3] The occupying Roman forces in the Near East and Europe famously executed those locals (either Christians or pagans) who refused to make an offering to their gods. In later centuries, during the Christianization of Europe, the dubious favour was returned by such Christian rulers as Charlemagne, who had 4,500 pagans who refused to convert to the faith beheaded in a single afternoon, after which he retired to attend mass. During the Papal-instigated Albigensian crusade, Christian Cathars were given the choice either to convert to Catholicism or be burned alive. Many chose for the flames.

[4] The recent terrible case of the kidnapping of 200 Nigerian Christian schoolgirls by Muslim radicals carries the news by those radicals that, not only had the schoolgirls ‘embraced’ Islam, but they had ‘decided’ to take Muslim husbands. The girls' whereabouts are still unknown.

Sources:

All images are the copyright of the © David Bergen Studio, and are taken from my video which can now be seen on YouTube here: Dracula: Darkness Rising.

Jephthah's Daughter: Darkness in Gilead

There stands great Jephthah of Gilead, dumbstruck. The [1]Ammonites who had been harassing his people finally had been defeated at his hand. Before the conquest he had made a [2]vow to God that if victory would be his, then he would offer to God whatever first happened to come out of his house when he returned home. Now the victorious returned warrior watches horrified as his beloved only daughter emerges joyfully from his house and comes dancing to greet him.

Distraught, the father tells his daughter of his vow to God. We are told that the daughter [3]urges her father nevertheless to keep his vow, but asks for two months to sojourn in the mountains with her companions to lament her virginity (that is: her unmarried state), at the end of which time she promises to return. She duly and dutifully does so, and the vow is fulfilled. We are not told the manner of the daughter’s death, and neither is the [4]killing even mentioned by name. We merely are discreetly told that “at the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had made.”

But supposing that scripture instead were to confront us with specifics? Supposing, instead of merely ‘doing with her’, we were to read that “at the end of two months, she returned to her father, who according to his vow then slipped a cord about his daughter’s neck and tightened it fast until the veins of her throat burst, and her life blood flowed away.” This [5]scenario of the manner of her death is one likely reality, but reading it might not hold our sympathies either for Jephthah or God as much as the sanitized version which scripture offers us, as the unknown writer of this passage appears well to have realized.

During her two-months sojourn in the mountains with her companions, the daughter contemplates her coming fate and seeks some form of reconciliation with events.

The daughter was a young woman in the bloom of life. She had to be killed somehow. Scripture introduces her father by telling us that he was [6]‘a mighty warrior’. But the text then informs us that he had a background in common brigandage: this was a man used to killing with weapons, to taking life with his own brute strength. However he killed his daughter, it would have been a grim and bloody hands-on business. But the actual killing only fulfilled the first part of Jephthah’s vow. He also had promised God that he would make a burnt offering of whatever he sacrificed. We must assume that this was done as well, although scripture discreetly leaves the deed unmentioned once the killing has taken place.

A burnt offering is exactly what the term implies: it is the carcass of an animal or the corpse of a human that has been slain for sacrificial purposes, which is then completely burned on a pyre so that the smoke from the burning flesh can waft heavenwards to give pleasure to the god or gods in whose name the sacrifice has been made. Since this was a part of his vow, and since Jephthah ‘did with her according to his vow’, he must have done this also. Having killed his daughter, he would then have burned her corpse, not as a cremation, but as part of the sacrificial ritual. But again the clear impression from the text is that the writer sensed the grim distastefulness of this final act of the vow, and so deliberately avoided mentioning it after the killing had occurred.

Smoke from the daughter's pyre begins to drift heavenwards. As a burnt offering, the burning is not a cremation, but a part of the sacrificial ritual.

Intriguingly, we instead learn from the text that from that time ‘the daughters of Israel’ observed a four-day period of lamentation each year for the daughter of Jephthah. The yearly observation (by women, nota bene) is for the slain daughter. There is no mention of any observance of the father’s obedience to God in keeping his vow, and neither the vow nor the sacrifice are further mentioned in Jephthah’s continuing story. When reading this passage in scripture, there is an unstated undercurrent that the writer sensed that things had gotten way off track, that Jephthah went too far, but that the basic message of obedience to God nevertheless had to be pushed home. The undercurrent is felt, not so much in what is openly said, but in the grim details which have been discreetly omitted. 

Another detail which has been omitted is painfully obvious: we never [7]learn the daughter’s name. One might perhaps argue that this is incidental to the point of the story, but would it have been overlooked if the object of the sacrifice instead had been Jephthah’s only son? It certainly is not the only [8]story in scripture in which the name of a principal female protagonist remains unmentioned. This young woman who became a human sacrifice to God remains forever anonymous.

And the most distasteful aspect of the story is not that the daughter was the victim of sacrifice (however reconciled she might have been to her fate), but that the apparent point of including the story in scripture is instead to laud her father’s obedience, however misguided, to his vow to God. Nowhere in scripture are this man’s actions condemned, or even critically scrutinized. In fact, when Jephthah is mentioned in the New Testament (Hebrews 11:32-33) it is not to condemn him for his inhuman actions, but to praise him for his faith.

When Abraham was moments away from sacrificing his son Isaac, the angel of the Lord made a timely appearance to stay the hand that held the knife. The same angel seems to have been strangely reticent to save Jephthah's daughter when she found herself in the same situation, and the knife was thrust home.

This is morality turned on its head. A sordid story of actual human sacrifice in God’s name is presented as a scriptural morality tale of observance of one’s vow to God. Unlike the story of [9]Abraham and his intention to sacrifice his son Isaac (again at God’s demand), no angel of the Lord miraculously appears to stay the hand holding the knife once the protagonist had shown his full intention to carry out the deed. In the story of Jephthah, the knife is actually driven home. The daughter actually dies. It is a story unrelenting in its gothic grimness.

But whether or not the incident actually happened, whether it is history or metaphor, is irrelevant to the reality of the moral question which it presents. The moral values of Jephthah are in reality those of a murderer. That the story happens to appear in scripture does not in some obscure way change those moral values for the good, and if we think that it does, what does that say about our own moral values?

Jephthah's daughter: a ghost without a name. Her sacrifice to God at the hands of her father creates a moral darkness which apparently left the writer of the Book of Judges avoiding uncomfortable details.

Well, such ‘moral values’ are exemplified in a Christian Apologist [10]website article about this incident which, in striving to justify what is actually morally reprehensible, makes the guarded observation that [11]“no indication is given in the text that God actually approved of the action.” Really? God, I was always told, is all-knowing, so he would have known at the time that Jephthah made his vow who was going to come out of the house first. And God is also [12]all-powerful, so if he saved the day before by having his angel intervene to spare Isaac, then he could have done so on this occasion as well – or just shuffled the deck by having a chicken run out of the house instead. He did, after all, manipulate the previous situation to ensure that a ram was substituted for Abraham’s son.

Tacit inaction, to paraphrase Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is tantamount to action in support of injustice. In this light, and in spite of what the above apologist article attempts to excuse, God seems to have been pretty okay with the way things went down on that dark day in Gilead. And for Jephthah’s daughter, whose very name remains unknown to us, there was to be no timely last-minute intervention by the angel of the Lord. 

Hawkwood

The complete story of Jephthah’s daughter can be read in The Book of Judges 11:29-40. The quotations from scripture in this post are from the Revised Standard Version. An abridged version of this story can be read in my post Frontier Justice in the Promised Land.

Notes:

[1] Two Tribes: The Ammonites were one of two tribes (the Moabites were the other) founded by the sons of Lot’s two daughters resulting from their incest with their father. The Ammonites’ incursions into Jephthah’s territory were not invasive. They previously had been displaced eastward by Joshua’s earlier conquest of the area, and three centuries later made this bid to reclaim their lost homelands.

Three Ammonite cities - Aro'er, Abel-keramim and Minnith - are mentioned by name as being conquered by Jephthah, although scripture assures us that twenty cities in total were overrun 'with a very great slaughter'. Jephthah then returns to his home city of Mizpah, the site of the sacrifice.

[2] What is Really Sacrificed? One pro-scriptural argument is that the story is a salutary lesson in making rash promises, particularly to God. I would suggest that it is a salutary lesson in the reckless folly of keeping a vow when holding to that vow means not only sacrificing one’s daughter, but also one’s own humanity. The Book of Judges maintains a stony silence about the morality of Jephthah’s actions, and any ‘salutary lessons’ which are supposed to be drawn from the story are passed over.

[3] Who Consoles Whom? In this emotion-charged scene it is actually Jephthah who tears his clothes in despair, even to telling his daughter that by her actions it is she who is “the cause of great trouble” to him. While her father indulges in despairing self-pity, it is the daughter who remains resolute and strong, even to the point of consoling her distraught father and then calmly making a plan for the coming event. When push comes to shove, the woman is stronger than the man. Just like in real life.

[4] Words as well can be Sacrificed: In fact, at no time does scripture actually use the word ‘sacrifice’, either about the daughter or in relation to what takes place. But since a burnt offering clearly must first be sacrificed as part of the ritual, this is a further indication that the original writer of the text and all subsequent translators were aware of how distasteful this incident was, and were attempting to gloss over the difficult reality in order to make the story more palatable. 

[5] Knife or Rope? Although a burnt offering was usually sacrificed with a knife, a female human victim could have made strangulation a possible alternative option. My description of the act is loaned from the author Cormac McCarthy in his book No Country for Old men. It is always possible that the original unknown writer assumed that his readers would be aware that a knife would have been used as the traditional means of sacrificing a burnt offering. 

[6] A Man of Valour? The phrase “a mighty warrior” appears in the Revised Standard Version (Judges 11:1). In the King James Version the phrase is “a mighty man of valour”. You may choose whether or not you consider ‘warrior’ to be equitable with ‘valour’ in relation to Jephthah.

[7] Where is the Mother? The text is also mysteriously silent about someone else. No mention is made of the daughter’s mother. Perhaps Jephthah was a widower, or perhaps his wife was anonymously present: another unnamed woman who has remained a cypher, a shadowy presence whose existence is confirmed only obliquely by the existence of the daughter. I tend to assume that Jephthah was a widower, or at least a man living without the mother of his child. His misguided and callous behaviour lacks a woman’s restraining hand.

[8] More Unnamed Daughters: In the story of Lot and his escape from the city of Sodom (Genesis 19:1-38) we never learn the names either of Lot’s wife (who turned into the famed pillar of salt) or of his two daughters who feature prominently in the story as their father's seducers, although the names of their sons from this incest (Moab and Ben-ammi) are supplied as soon as they appear on the scene. Painting (right) of Lot being Seduced by his Daughters, by Robert von Stutterheim. Please see my post Lot and his Daughters: The inside Story.

[9] Jephthah’s Only Son? Abraham’s only beloved son Isaac was saved from sacrifice by God’s intervention. The point needs to be made that the angel of the Lord might have been more readily prompted to swing into action and intervene on Jephthah’s only daughter’s behalf had she been Jephthah’s only son. Please see my post Abraham, Isaac and a Stressed Out Ram.

[10] Where is the Body? The apologist article in Apologetics Press (Jephthah's Daughter, by Eric Lyons, M.Min.) on the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter (left, by Pietro Vecchia) strives to wriggle out from under by instead suggesting that her father did not actually kill her at all, and that the ‘sacrifice’ is a mere figure of speech referring to offering her (as the article suggests) for “religious service in the Tabernacle.”

[10 cont.] Hence this Apologetics Press article’s astonishing conclusion that: “Jephthah was not upset because his daughter would die a virgin. He was upset because she would live and remain a virgin.” Seriously? This startling apologist claim that no killing actually took place because the ‘sacrifice’ is intended to be read as a mere euphemism, collapses when we remember that the sacrifice became a burnt offering: difficult to achieve with no body to burn. The scriptural text is unambiguous: Jephthah vowed a burnt offering. The daughter became the unwitting object of the vow. Jephthah "did with her according to his vow which he had made". Therefore: the daughter became the vowed burnt offering. This conclusion drawn from the text leaves no room for 'nicer' interpretations, however much apologists might wish it so.

[11] Taking Sides: The logic of such apologist arguments is wholly partisan. As I point out in my post on the Book of Joshua about that particular Israelite ‘hero’, had Jephthah happened to have been ‘on the other side’ (that is: a non-Israelite), and had he nevertheless acted exactly as he does in the Book of Judges, apologists would be falling over themselves to piously condemn him as a despicable monster, and his murder of his own daughter in the name of his god as a wretched deed of truly heathen darkness. 

[12] An Interventionist God: I am all too aware that, in their attempts to find some justification for such dark deeds in the name of God, apologists will protest that God allows us (and therefore Jephthah) to exercise our own free will: that he gives us the freedom to determine our own actions and so learn by our errors. But the God of scripture is an interventionist God. He intervenes to drown his own creation. He intervenes to destroy Sodom and other Cities of the Plain. He intervenes to feed his starving people in the wilderness of the Exodus. He intervenes on the battlefield to fight alongside Joshua. He intervenes to save Abraham’s son. He does not intervene to save Jephthah’s daughter.

Daughter on Pyre. A powerful image by contemporary artist Barry Moser, from his illustrated King James Bible. Here all 19th-century romanticism and melodrama have been stripped away to confront us with a difficult reality that scripture shies away from mentioning.

Sources:

Top image: Jephthah and his Daughter, painted for this post by Hawkwood for the David Bergen Studio © All Rights Reserved. based upon the sculpture by Emil Wolff, from a photo by Haffitt. 2nd image; The Lament of Jephthah's Daughter, by George Hicks. 3rd image: Jephthah's Vow: The Martyr, by Edwin Longsden Long. 4th image: Abraham and isaac, by Laurent de la Hyre. 5th image: marble statue of Jephthah’s Daughter in the Art Institute of Chicago, by Chauncey Bradley Ives, photographer unknown. Map and other graphics by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio.

The Enlightened Insight of the Woman

Adam is a pushover for the dark powers to corrupt. He is already compliant to the suggestions of the serpent. But within Adam’s innermost secret being lies a mysterious purity, a wise and essential other Self, which will prevent his further corruption. To weaken Adam further, so that he will become a willing participant in the [1]creator’s schemes, the creator knows that he must extract this pure and powerful essence from Adam, and so causes Adam to become unaware. Now with Adam in a state of unawareness his creator can, as it were, make a forced entry into Adam’s being.

And so within the deepest recesses of the Man’s inner being the creator is able to locate and remove this secret Self, this enlightened Insight from Adam. The creator places this Insight inside a female form, because this is the form which most closely mirrors the perfect Self that the creator had seen in a vision. In this way this essential part of Adam is removed from him and given its own independent existence: a form which reflects the purity that once had been an integral part of Adam’s own being, a form which embodies this precious quality of enlightened Insight.

Adam now sees this shining new form standing beside him. At this same moment his state of unawareness vanishes as enlightened Insight lifts the veil that has covered his mind. In this new being Adam recognizes his partner, his equal, his true other Self. And although they are now two separate beings, together they are a reflection of the unity that once had existed, and will do so again.

*****

When compared with the widely known version in the Bible, the above story is an unfamiliar recounting of the creation of Eve. In the [2]second chapter of the Bible’s Book of Genesis Adam literally is sent into a ‘deep sleep’, during which God physically removes one of his ribs from which he then creates the Woman. The Genesis recounting of these events is literal indeed, and has the Woman being formed from the actual flesh of the Man. In Genesis, Eve is a creation from [3]second-hand material.

But the above first version of the creation of Eve concludes by assuring us that, although the Woman was extracted from the Man, it was a process of mysterious essence, and not, as the text emphasises, involving any physical modification of Adam’s anatomy, as [4]Moses describes in Genesis. This first version actually names Moses and ‘Adam’s rib’ in its striving to correct what it clearly considers to be an erroneously literal version of the creation of Eve.

In this 16th-century woodcut by Heinrich Aldegraver of the creation of Eve, a pontifical deity physically extracts Eve from the side of a sleeping Adam. However fervently we as believers might read the scriptural text, a literal depiction of the event confronts us with an anatomical absurdity.

What we notice in the above first version is that, far from being the rather condescending literalist description of Eve’s creation which Genesis offers us, it instead honours the Woman. In this version, the form of the Woman – her very body – is itself the embodiment of this precious quality of enlightened Insight. The Woman does not just ‘have’ insight: she actually is Insight. What at first seems to be an adjustment to the literalist Genesis account is actually a radical revision – a ‘re-visioning’, and we must weigh the two alternatives: the Genesis version which treats the Woman as a sort of creative [5]afterthought, and the other which, in the manner of her creation, grants her both status and dignity.

The Biblical version of the creation of Eve from Adam’s flesh is, as we know, recounted in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis. The other less familiar version related here is told in The Secret Book of John, one of the texts now known as the Nag Hammadi scriptures, after the nearby Egyptian village where they were discovered by chance in 1945. For over sixteen centuries the literalist version of scripture is the one which has had the official Church stamp of approval. Of the other, all known copies were burned or otherwise destroyed in the 3rd-4th-century purges organized by the Church. The text of The Secret Book of John discovered at Nag Hammadi is one of only [6]two known copies which we have.

  

Both of these versions of the creation of Eve are stories, not history. But stories also can be ways of transmitting greater truths, and we must decide for ourselves which [7]stories carry the most truth and meaning for us personally. But supposing that our choice of which story to take on board carries with it a moral responsibility, and with this in mind the weighing up of such a choice can have huge, even momentous significance, with consequences for our perception of womankind that will echo down the centuries. So: of these two stories of the creation of Eve, which version, the Gnostic or the Biblically orthodox, shows womankind more respect, and gives her creation – her very existence – a greater meaning and dignity?

Hawkwood  

   

Notes:

[1] The identity of this creator will be the subject of a future post. 

[2] Although it is the familiar version in the second chapter of Genesis which is featured in this post, please see my post Lilith: Spirit of the Night for a separate and conflicting version of the Woman’s creation in the first chapter of Genesis. Please also see my posts Adam: The God who Failed and Eve's Story for other alternative versions of the Eden story.

[3] ‘Second-hand’, because in Genesis 2 God already has created the Man, and then creates the Woman from the material which already has been created. 

[4] Tradition names Moses as the author of the first five books of the Old Testament (the Jewish Torah), although this attribution is unsupported by scholarship.

[5] My use of the term ‘creative afterthought’ is justified by scripture itself, which relates that God, having created the Man, then decides that he needs a ‘help meet’ (K.J.V. Genesis 2:18). In the Revised Standard Version the term is ‘helper’. Apparently it only occurs to God to create the Woman once the Man has been created - and then not as his equal partner, but merely as his 'helper'.

[6] The other copy was discovered in a monk's tomb in the 19th-century. And while I am always cautious about floating the idea of conspiracy theories, it is possible, even plausible, that other copies of these Gnostic texts (and other such texts which the Church deemed to be heretical), which have yet to be evaluated or even viewed by impartial scholarship, were kept at the time for record and archival purposes, and to this day remain under seal either in the Vatican Library or in the Vatican Secret Archives.

[7] The current resurgence of alternative spiritual views and values did not grow out of a historical vacuum, but reflects the Church’s loss of control as the arbiter of truth in such matters. Only a little less than two centuries ago the Church still could – and did – impose the death penalty for any view which it considered heretical, with the last execution for heresy being carried out by the Inquisition as recently as 1826. The breaking of the Church as a political power altered the whole game plan – but it should never be forgotten that such countries as Iran and Saudi Arabia still provide a chilling example in our own time of what happens when religion has a political power base. Under Islamic law the death penalty for apostasy is still current. Keeping the adherents to one’s faith in line through threat and fear of the consequences has long been an option for those who wield religious power.  

Sources:

The Secret Book of John, translated from the Coptic by John D. Turner and Marvin Meyer, can be read in its entirety with all textual notations in: The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. Published by Harper One for Harper Collins, 2008. The story retold in my post is only one episode in this text, which contains both further narrative events regarding the expulsion from Eden and the Flood, and advice about the soul's journey. The entire book is in the form of a first person narration by Jesus.

No illustrated version of The Secret Book of John exists. The first, second and the last images suggesting the events from this text have been painted for this post by Hawkwood for the David Bergen Studio © All Rights Reserved.

Please see my post The Ecstasy of Eve for several other versions of the creation of Eve by different artists.