The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade

Source of book: I own this.

 

Just prior to the pandemic, my wife made the decision that she was at the point in her career where she needed additional challenges. When we married, she had one year of school left to get her RN. At the time, she wasn’t sure if she would be going on to get her BSN, but life made that decision for her. About a month after I gave notice at my job, prepared to hang out my own shingle, she got pregnant with our first child. So, instead of continuing with school, she cut back to part time night shift, and we found a rhythm that worked. 

 

Fast forward 20 years (all working night shift) and a total of 5 kids, and she was ready for a change. She enrolled in the BSN program at CSUB, and found herself in the midst of a pandemic, working long hours and studying on top of that. She is, to put it mildly, a badass. 

 

After the 18 month program, she graduated, then applied for and was hired as the ICU manager at a local hospital. 

 

Anyway, the reason I mention all that is that as part of her degree, she needed to take a class totally outside of her area of study. With a number of potentially fascinating choices, she ended up taking one on spiritual journeys - kind of a philosophy/religious studies crossover. The professor was well rated, and it turned out that had met him. He gave the homily at his dad’s gay wedding, which I played at, and I thought he did a great job. My wife enjoyed the class, so if you attend CSUB, consider this a recommendation. 

 

One of the core texts for the class was this book, The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade. I wasn’t particularly familiar with it, but I found our conversations about the class to be really fascinating. I also proof-read her big paper in the class (as I have since we started dating - that extra set of eyes is so helpful), and was intrigued enough to look for a used copy for her. Which I could borrow, of course. 

 

Eliade himself was a complex person, deeply flawed, controversial in his views then and now, yet hugely influential. 

 

To start with, he was Romanian, but left after the communist revolution, eventually becoming a US resident. He was fluent in at least five languages (the book is translated from the French), and passable in others. 

 

During World War Two, he became involved with Christian Fascist organizations, such as Iron Guard, but after the war disavowed politics, focusing on his academic pursuits. After his death, friends said that in private he rejected the elements of fascism he had previously embraced, but take that for what it is worth. 

 

Also worth considering in any discussion of European intellectuals of the time is that neither communism nor facism had been unveiled for the brutal and genocidal systems under Stalin and Hitler that they would eventually be understood to have been. In the context of the time, one tended to have to choose one or the other, and perhaps, like East Germany, end up suffering under both. 

 

His writings have been criticized for overgeneralization (which is probably true, but also true of any general theory of anything), and for a Western-centric bias (which is less true, in my view, but also all too common as the background assumption for mid-20th Century European thinkers generally.) 

 

So, I think in this case, while it is helpful to understand Eliade’s flaws as a person, you have to read his ideas for what they are, and address them on their own terms. Perhaps kind of like Wagner, another complex man who combined the highest aspirations of humankind with toxic beliefs and poor personal behavior. 

 

Whatever his political leanings then and later, I didn’t see anything particularly political in the book - unless you count the universalism of humanity and religion and a call for mutual understanding of our commonality to be political (it kind of is these days…) Certainly nothing I would recognize as fascist. I suppose a fascist could misappropriate lines from it, but they do that from the bible all the time too, which says more about fascists than about Christ. 

 

What there is that can be a bit off-putting is some outdated language, as will become obvious in the quotations. We would not, for example, use “primitives” for earlier humans, or see earlier cultures as “undeveloped.” But considering when this was written, I think Eliade leaned toward a more progressive view of other cultures than most of his time.

 

I suspect I will end up referring to this book and its ideas from time to time. It reminded me in a lot of ways of Joseph Campbell’s influential book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. It is useful not just for what the author says, but for the ways the ideas have influenced our own culture. 

 

From what I can tell, The Sacred and the Profane is somewhat a summary of Eliade’s main ideas, which are fleshed out in more detail in his more academic works. This book is understandable by a lay-person, at least one with some knowledge of philosophy and history and religion. It gives details and citations, but isn’t intended to be an exhaustive look at all of the examples. So, for any point, Eliade tends to cite the great monotheisms and a single example from other traditions - one from the Indigenous Americans, one from Eastern religions, one from Africa, for example. It’s an overview, not a detailed analysis.

 

The core idea is in the title - the idea that religious humans (which he means in the broadest sense, and includes plenty of people who are not religious but who retain the thought patterns from the past) divide reality into sacred and profane, and see the sacred as more “real” than the profane in some cosmic sense. In the four extended chapters in the book, he looks at specific areas in which this applies. First, in the idea of sacred space - those places where the sacred meets humanity. Second, in the realm of time, where festivals and rituals are reiterations of a past or even eternal event. Third, in the realm of nature, which covers both the sacredness of the natural world and the way rituals and symbolism and origin myths relate to nature. The final chapter addresses religious life - initiations, rites of passage, key ideas that pervade pretty much all religions, and more. 

 

I think the biggest surprise to me from reading this book was how well it describes my own experience as a religious person. Despite my years of deconstruction, my disillusionment with the theology I was raised on, and my embrace of scientific thinking, there is still a significant part of me that responds in a recognizably religious way - and very much along the lines Eliade describes in the book. 

 

So, perhaps, more than anything, this book gave me insight into myself, and my own spiritual journey. I resonate with a religious way of being, and I think Eliade’s point that most humans - including the secular ones - do too. 

 

As with any work like this, the best I can do is hit a few highlights and discuss a few ideas. The book is actually better organized and less rambly than I expected, and is a fairly easy read as far as philosophy-adjacent books go. 

 

The introduction in many ways gives a quick summary of the argument before getting into specifics in the chapters.

 

The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane. 

 

Eliade posits that the sacred is revealed to us (or understood by us to be sacred) in the form of “hierophanies” - a physical embodiment of the sacred. The object is not worshiped for what it is in the profane sense, but for what it represents - nay becomes in the sacred sense. This is anything from a sacred tree to the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. 

 

This concept was helpful to me in putting into words some of my own beliefs. I believe other humans are sacred because they represent the divine to me. Nature is sacred to me because I believe it is the handiwork of the divine. And so on. In trying to explain to people why I still consider myself religious (and specifically a Christian) despite no longer believing in Evangelical doctrine, this is an important part of it. I feel connected to the divine, and my beliefs are a way of understanding my relationship to others and nature and my own psyche. 

 

The concept of sacred space also makes sense as to how most of us humans orient ourselves in the cosmos. The point where the sacred is revealed becomes the center of the universe. 

 

For it is the break effected in space that allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for all future orientation. When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also a revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogenous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center. 

 

One might say that this is theological meaning of the creation myth. “The earth was formless and void…” And also, perhaps, related to the way that astrophysicists explain the way an expanding universe makes every point in it feel like the middle. We are centered in our universe, not because there is a true center that all revolves around (like the geocentrists believed) but because the connection between the sacred/divine and us occurs here, and therefore, for us, we are centered where the divine/sacred meets us. 

 

Note that like literally everything else about religion, this can be turned from something good and helpful into toxic beliefs like “God only spoke to our people, and thus we can destroy everyone else.” Humans can do that with literally everything - turn it good or bad as they choose. Choose wisely…

 

The idea of sacred time makes a lot of sense too. At the most basic level, humans have always made time circular. The new year represents to every culture a new start in some way, even for non-religious people. The change of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the movement of the planets - there is rhythm in our universe, and we are still tied to that. 

 

In this chapter, Eliade contrasts truly circular approaches to time - those where the reenacted events of festivals or ritual essentially exist outside of historical time - they have always been happening, or at least since before the universe was as it is now - and the more “modern” religions where a historical (or at least located in historical time) event took place. This too, is everywhere around us, whether in the religious forms found in our holidays celebrating events in the life of Christ (or fill in your other sacred figure), or in our secular holidays and observances. 

 

I think that here too, there is a deep human need to feel connected to the past - indeed to the infinite past - to eternity. For me, this is something that I feel deeply, particularly since my connection to my immediate ancestors has been difficult at best for some time. Here is how Eliade describes it.

 

Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the actualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, “in the beginning.” Religious participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself. 

 

This is, in a way, why I say that I believe in God for the same reason I believe in music. And also why, by “reenacting” music I feel a connection with God. On a more secular note, it is why the old stories still fascinate us - why we watch Shakespeare plays about long-dead kings, and why Homer has never gone out of style. The whole chapter was enlightening in its treatment of ritual and observance. 

 

The third chapter addresses some truths that are very uncomfortable for Evangelicals (and Fundamentalists of all religions.) Many of the things I was taught about the origins of Judaism and Christianity turned out not only to be false in the light of archaeology, but false in light of the actual words in the Old Testament too. 

 

A concept that Eliade explores is how early religions tended to have the “close gods” - the ones that interacted with humans in everyday life. These were fertility gods and godesses, domestic, nature-oriented, for specific things. And these were the ones that were honored during normal times, during the normal rhythm of life. 

 

In contrast were the supreme beings - the god of gods, so to speak. This figure (or small group of gods in some cases) dwelt in the heavens. They were inaccessible, and generally let life go on as it always did. 

 

It was only when some existential threat - some catastrophe struck - that humans would appeal to the highest god. Eventually, in the great monotheisms, the high god is the one that stuck around, but then had to be somehow brought back close enough to earth (perhaps through an….incarnation?) so as to be accessible to humanity again. 

 

The Hebrews turned to Yahweh after historical catastrophes and under the threat of an annihilation determined by history; the primitives remember their supreme beings in cases of cosmic catastrophe. But the meaning of this return to the celestial god is the same in both cases: in an extremely critical situation, in which the very existence of the community is at stake, the divinities who in normal times ensure and exalt life are abandoned in favor of the supreme god. Seemingly, this is a great paradox: the deities that, among the primitives, took the place of the celestially structured gods were - like the Baals and Astartes among the Hebrews - divinities of fertility, of opulence, of fullness of life; in short, divinities that exalted and amplified life, both cosmic life - vegetation, agriculture, cattle - and human life. 

 

I mean, if you read the Hebrew scriptures to see what people did, rather than what the priests thought they should do, the above rings true. And really, we do the exact same thing in our increasingly secular society. We might honor our domestic gods, but in times of cultural upset like now, we call on our higher gods - capitalism, theocracy, and ethnic purity. 

 

Eliade goes on to explain that the sacred retains its power because of the structure of the universe, and the human need to see symbolism. I thought this line was excellent:

 

A religious symbol conveys its message even if it is no longer consciously understood in every part. For a symbol speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelligence.

 

As with everything, this is true for good and evil. 

 

Another thing interesting about symbols is that they are almost never invented out of the whole cloth. Case in point: baptism. Eliade notes (with evidence, by the way) that the ritual of baptism predates not just Christ, but indeed Judaism itself. It is found all over the world, in various religious traditions. I remember running across a reference to it when I assisted on a case involving a Sikh temple back in my law school days. The specifics of the ceremony vary, but the meaning is strikingly similar - a rebirth. And thus it has been for millennia. 

 

We do not say that Judaism or Christianity borrowed these or similar myths or symbols from the religions of neighboring peoples. They had no need to; Judaism inherited both a religious prehistory and a long religious history, in which all of these things already existed. It was not even necessary that Judaism should have preserved one or another myth or symbol “awake,” in its integrity. It was enough if a group of images survived, even though only obscurely, from pre-Mosaic times. Such images and symbols were capable of recovering a powerful religious currency at any moment.

 

This is why I insist that ALL religion is by definition syncretistic. It ALL borrows vertically - from the past, and changes with time. And it also borrows horizontally - from its own and neighboring cultures. Which is why wars over doctrinal differences are usually symbols of a deeper war over ethnicity, culture, and power. (A minimal exploration of the Irish Troubles reveals their origin in English imperialism, rather than doctrinal differences.) So many of the symbols - the deepest layer of religion - are, as Eliade asserts, “the common property of mankind” - indeed, this is a truth acknowledged by the early church fathers in many cases. 

 

I will note another universal that Eliade describes - the desire to be “buried in native soil.” Do we not all feel this in some way? I myself prefer to be cremated or composted to burial, but whatever remains of me, I want to return to my own native soil, so to speak: the mountains and hills of my native California. 

 

Connected to the soil - the earth mother if you will - is the sacred tree. Is it surprising that the idea of the sacred tree is universal? It shouldn’t be. It is one of those ideas that is the common property of mankind, not merely of one doctrinal sect. 

 

[Note: I was raised with the fundamentally ludicrous idea that these universal symbols and stories were “proof” that our particular version of them was the “one true story” and that the rest were all corrupted versions. How did we know ours was the “real” one, even though it developed millennia after the others? Don’t ask that question. We just knew.]

 

In the final chapter, Eliade makes it clear that in order to truly understand the religious human, we have to expand beyond the familiar - Christianity and maybe a few others - and look at the whole of human belief now and in the distant past. Even understanding our present religions require knowledge of what they developed out of. 

 

What we find as soon as we place ourselves in the perspective of religious man of archaic societies is that the world exists because it was created by the gods, and that the existence of the world “means” something, “wants to say” something, that the world is neither mute nor opaque, that it is not an inert thing without purpose or significance. For religious man, the cosmos “lives” and “speaks.” The mere life of the cosmos is proof of its sanctity, since the cosmos was created by the gods and the gods show themselves to men through cosmic life.

 

This was one of those “bingo” moments for me, when I understood that at a deep level, I am a religious man. I think Eliade may be specifically talking about “primitive” religious man here, but he expands to all of us - and that includes the non-religious. Very few of us feel that life is truly without any meaning, that the universe is senseless in its existence. And, for that matter, the answer to the question of “why does the universe exist” cannot be an evasion along the lines of “why not?” which is the grownup equivalent of “because it does” like you might hear on any playground filled with five year olds. 

 

For many of us, we find in the divine - the sacred - an answer to the “why.” Note that this does not mean that we have to reject science - far from it. In fact, science and the study of origins only adds to the wonder of the universe. The “how” does not answer the “why,” but it has revealed to us a far larger - and more bizarre, diverse, and fascinating - universe than even our crazy imaginations could fathom. 

 

This leads in turn to a striking passage. While I disagree with Eliade that the difference is essentially urban/rural - I think it is far more of a mystic/intellectualist divide, or even an experiential/empathetic versus dogma divide - but I think his conclusion is solid. (And I have no illusion that the Middle Ages were better, but there is still a kernel of truth.)

 

As for the Christianity of the industrial societies and especially the Christianity of intellectuals, it has long since lost the cosmic values that it still possessed in the Middle Ages. We must add that this does not necessarily imply that urban Christianity is deteriorated or inferior, but only that the religious sense of urban populations is gravely impoverished. The cosmic liturgy, the mystery of nature’s participation in the Christological drama, have become inaccessible to Christians living in a modern city. Their religious experience is no longer open to the cosmos. In the last analysis, it is a strictly private experience; salvation is a problem that concerns man and his god; at most, man recognizes that he is responsible not only to God but to history. But in these man-God-history relationships there is no place for the cosmos. From this it would appear that, even for a genuine Christian, the world is no longer felt as the work of God.

 

This is why I have found that trying to talk about earth’s ecosystems with modern American Christians is near-impossible. As is talking about other humans as part of that ecosystem. The cosmos has been lost, and it is just about doctrine and theopolitical ideologies. Human experience, and the natural world are disposable. 

 

Moving on to the next topic, it was fascinating to see Eliade’s tour through the “born again” symbolism around the world. This is another area in which Evangelicals lie to us. There is nothing uniquely Christian about being “born again” - it is literally everywhere. 

 

All these rituals and symbolisms of passage, we must add, express a particular conception of human existence: when brought to birth, man is not yet completed; he must be born a second time, spiritually; he becomes complete man by passing from an imperfect, embryonic state to a perfect, adult state. In a word, it may be said that human existence attains completion through a series of “passage rites,” in short, by successive initiations.

 

And later:

 

Here we have a fact of the first importance: for all archaic societies, access to spirituality finds expression in a symbolism of death and a new birth. 

 

And, just as the idea of being born again predates monotheism by millennia, so too does its symbol - baptism. 

 

There is nothing new or unique here, and the path to transcending a tribalist religion is the recognize that fact and its implications - that the sacred has revealed itself to humanity at large, not just the founders of one particular tradition. (Likewise, secularists should recognize that religion isn’t some virus that spread in humanity from one place to another, but represents some universal part of our psyche. The problem isn’t religion per se, but other human flaws. Hence why atheistic groups have the same backbiting and dissension and tribalism that churches do - it’s a human thing.) 

 

Eliade then takes a look at modern times. The old religious ways of thinking have most certainly not gone away. Rather, they have taken on new forms. 

 

For, as we said before, nonreligious man in the pure state is a comparatively rare phenomenon, even in the most desacralized of modern societies. The majority of the “irreligious” still behave religiously, even though they are not aware of the fact. We refer not only to the modern man’s many “superstitions” and “tabus.” all of them magico-religious in structure. But the modern many who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals. 

 

He also notes that Communism is very much a religion - as did Raymond Aron in his book The Opium of the Intellectuals. (I would go one further and say that Communism in its heyday - Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - was not merely a religion but a fundamentalist cult.) While not in the same level of detail as Aron’s tome, Eliade does hit the highlights: the way that Marxism looks strikingly like the eschatological myths of Mediterranean religion, with role of the anointed (the proletariat), the suffering leading to a future golden age, and so on. 

 

The book ends with a quick “chronological survey,” hitting some highlights of religious development around the world, full of sources to the point where it practically reads as a bibliography. 

 

There are a couple of lines that I thought were worth mentioning. 

 

First is his reference to Plutarch’s survey of religion from around 100 CE. Plutarch carefully cataloged the symbols and religious forms and concluded that there was a fundamental unity of religions. It is interesting that this sort of survey has been done by more or less secularist thinkers in many times and places, and more often than not, the person exploring the issue has found the similarities to be far greater than the differences. 

 

Related, though, is the problem posed for the gatekeepers of a particular religion: the need to justify with their religion, and only their religion has the revealed truth. 

 

This led to serious problems, because there were so many resemblances. For early Christian gatekeepers, the fact that the symbols had been clearly borrowed from earlier “mystery” cults and other pagan sources (and that includes Hell, by the way) had to be explained. 

 

Eliade lists four historical “explanations” that should be familiar to most of us steeped in the world of Christian Apologetics our whole lives. The one rarely used nowadays, but formerly popular was the idea that fallen angels came down to earth and mated with human women, leading to demons and idolatry. More popular now is the idea that I referenced above: that all other versions of the symbols and myths were “stolen” from the true faith, and made into counterfeits to fool humanity. Related is the third, that the pagan philosophers (such as Aristotle, who has influenced Western Christianity more than most people realize) stole their ideas from Moses et al. And finally, that since humans have the ability to reason (at least somewhat) in the absence of true religion, they came close to the truth on their own. 

 

The idea that perhaps revelation is more of a universal and less of a sectarian experience is of course unthinkable. Because that might open the whole can of worms: the reality that they may very well be wrong, and other people might be right. 

 

As I said, I just hit some highlights. Overall, the book is well organized, well thought out, well researched, and well stated. 

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Source of book: I own this.

 

About 14 years ago, at a time when we had four small children under the age of seven, I had gotten into a bit of a rut. Although for most of my life, I had been an avid reader, I had gotten away from it, probably feeling a bit low on bandwidth due to the kids in addition to other factors. 

 

My wife took note, and decided that I would be happier and healthier if I got back into reading. In light of this, she started bringing home books from the library for me, ones she thought would interest me, and, she hoped, kick start my love of books again. 

 

The first of these books (if my memory serves) was The Satanic Verses. At the time, I hadn’t really read any Magical Realism, and it opened my eyes to a different kind of writing, a whole approach to literature that I hadn’t experienced before. 

 

This was also at a time when the post 9-11 United States had shifted from national solidarity to an increasingly vicious anti-Islam bigotry. Instead of acknowledging the 3 million Muslims living here in peace, and seeking to understand the difference between Islam and Islamic Fundamentalism, we had calls to burn the Koran, and end immigration from majority-Muslim countries - the sort of asshattery that would later characterize Trump’s fascist rhetoric. 

 

In that context, The Satanic Verses was a very appropriate book to read. As I pointed out, reading it was every bit as effective at hacking off the fundie mullahs as burning a Koran, but it had the added benefits of expanding one’s mind. 

Rushdie, back in the day...

When I first read it, I found the technique of magical realism to be an intriguing way of exploring themes and ideas - of illuminating the psychology of the characters in a new way. I also enjoyed the sheer sprawling world Rushdie created, the crazy maelstrom of humanity across two continents and several centuries. I thought the way Rushdie blurred the lines between history, the present, and the minds of his characters was a thrilling experience. 

 

But I also finished the book wondering what the hell caused the uproar. 

 

This book was published in 1989 - that’s 34 years ago - and ended up causing incredible outrage in Iran (because of its theocratic leaders), the murder of a translator of the book and attempted murder of others, and a bounty on Rushdie’s head that caused him to go into hiding for several years. 

 

And then, just last year, he was attacked at a lecture and stabbed by a man who wasn’t even born when the book came out. He lost an eye, and some use of one arm, and nearly died. 

 

And all this because of what? What is actually in the book that caused Fundies to get their panties in a wad and stoke the murderous rage that filled their hearts?

 

There are two short passages that apparently were used as the ostensible reasons, although I think it is clear that the Mullahs never actually read the book - or probably even the “problematic” passages. Rather, it was the name of the book itself (which wasn’t even the original name Rushdie planned to use, apparently) which referred to a legend about Mohammed. 

 

So, what are those passages? The first is referred to in the title. Remember, this is a Muslim legend, not something Rushdie made up - he just borrowed the incident for the book. Mohammed goes up the mountain to hear the Archangel Gabriel (aka Gibreel) dictate the Koran to him - much like a figure in another Abrahamic monotheistic religion. 

 

As part of Mohammed’s difficulty in promulgating the new religion is how to synchronize it with the old. Allah is already worshiped, but as one of many gods. (Again, this happened in the origins of Judaism too!) So, in an early draft, Mohammed condones the veneration of three goddesses - Allāt, Al-Uzza, and Manāt - not as divine, but as having the same rank as archangels - like Gibreel. 

 

In the legend, Mohammed later realizes that he mistook the voice of Satan for that of Gibreel - hence, these are the “Satanic Verses” which Mohammed later disavowed. 

 

So what the hell is the big deal? I am pretty sure Rushdie himself was surprised about the furor. 

 

As an ex-Fundie, though, I kind of get it. If your “faith” requires that your sacred book be infallible, inerrant, and perfect in every way, then the very idea that some part of it just might have been wrong is a threat to the foundations of your faith. This is one of the pillars of Fundamentalism, along with, of course, all the cultural baggage about gender and race and class. 

 

The second incident is a scene late in the book, when one of the main characters, having had a complete break from reality, buys a trumpet and walks the streets of London trying to rally his followers to him. Or, perhaps, he really IS the reincarnation of the archangel - the line is, shall we say, blurry. The only followers who flock to him, however, are the prostitutes in a brothel. And those prostitutes just happen to share the names of Mohammed’s wives. So, kind of a mild insult, perhaps, in the vein of “your mother is a whore.” Again, anyone who wants to murder people over this has serious issues. The correct response is to either laugh or ignore it. 

 

These two incidents, by the way, are really short - at most a combined total of 25 pages in a book that is 547 pages long. 

 

On a related note, the book isn’t about Islam or Mohammed particularly. Islam is part of the background, the context, of the book. The characters are from India, and have Muslim backgrounds, so Islam is part of their characters in the same way that characters in a book set in Ireland is going to have Catholicism (and perhaps Catholic-Protestant conflict) as part of the necessary background. 

 

Rather, the book is primarily about the experience of being a brown-skinned immigrant in Thatcher-Era London. The inability to be viewed as truly “English,” no matter how English one acts, talks, and lives. 

 

Having read Languages of Truth last year - Rushdie’s essays from 2003 through 2020 - last year (they are excellent - highly recommended), I decided to read Midnight’s Children this year. However, the attack on Rushdie led to a renewed interest in The Satanic Verses, so it was nominated for our book club, and was voted to be our book for this month. I decided to make this my Rushdie book for the year, and will try to read Midnight’s Children next year. 

 

It was interesting to re-read it. I think I saw a lot more in the book this time - and certainly different things. Just one major example: now that I have read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was able to see a lot of references to it in The Satanic Verses, including the butterflies and the windstorm. Rushdie also said that he was inspired to write the book by The Master and Margarita, and I can definitely see some thematic links there. 

 

The way the schedule worked out, we had only three weeks to read the book, and it is plenty long, so only three of us finished it. Which is actually more than I was expecting. As usual, we had an interesting discussion.

 

The plot - plots, really - are a bit all over the place. The main narrative is about two men: Gibreel Farishta, Bollywood star extraordinaire; and Saladin Chamcha, anglophile and voice actor. 

 

The two of them miraculously survive the hijacking and explosion of a jumbo jet (remember the 1980s and Lockerbie?) over the English Channel, and wash up on shore. Then strange things start happening to them. 

 

Gibreel grows a halo, and starts believing that he is the reincarnation of the archangel Gabriel. Saladin, on the other hand, starts turning into a devil, or maybe a satyr. In any case, he grows horns, a tail, and gets a much bigger dick. 

 

But of course, things aren’t that simple. Neither is entirely good or bad, and appearances have nothing to do with reality. And also, the line between the normal world and the supernatural becomes blurred for both of them. 

 

Farishta has come to England in pursuit of a mountain climber, Alleluia Cone, with whom he had a brief affair. He is obsessed with her, and seems to have developed a mental illness after a grave physical illness a few months before. This presents in two ways. First, he sees the ghost of his former mistress, who killed herself and her children when he abandoned her. Second, he begins to believe he is an archangel.

 

For Chamcha, however, everything seems to go wrong. He is arrested as a suspected undocumented immigrant, brutalized in police custody, and eventually hospitalized, before some of his friends are able to assist him. Meanwhile, his wife, believing he is dead (I mean, who can blame her?) starts an affair with one of Saladin’s friends. 

 

Saladin becomes obsessed with the idea that it was Gibreel’s abandonment of him after their miraculous survival that has led to all of his problems, and swears revenge. 

 

That is kind of the bare outline of the plot. But there are a lot more characters and subplots, from community organizing, inter-community drama, neo-Nazi asshats, a possible government conspiracy that is never really explained. (Because, well, nobody really knows what happened…) 

 

There are extended sections giving the back stories on the two main characters, shorter ones giving the backstories on minor characters, and events and rabbit trails that are connected more by theme than plot. 

 

And then there are the two major historical sequences, which may or may not exist only in Gibreel’s head. There is the series of events related to the rise of Islam, the writing of the Koran, and the satanic verses. 

 

The other is a more modern story of a young girl, Ayesha, who has some sort of either a mental break or a spiritual epiphany (take your pick…), strips naked, becomes covered in butterflies, and leads a pilgrimage across India with the intent of reaching Mecca, and a belief that the Arabian Sea will part to allow them across. (Whether it actually does or not is also ambiguous.) 

 

Also found in this book are narratives about Saladin’s troubled relationship with his father, his father’s eventual death, his two wives (in sequence, not at the same time) and a weird concubinage relationship he has with a servant. 

 

As I said, there is a LOT in this book, which makes it a lot of fun, but also a bit frustrating to stay oriented in. I think I may have done better this time, having at least a bit of an idea about where it was going from the last time. 

 

There are a number of themes that pervade the book. The idea of the mountain, or a high place in general, is there everywhere and on multiple levels. Alleluia Cone is also the name of the mountain Mohammed goes to, there are several suicides off of high buildings. It seems people are either trying to climb mountains (trying to find enlightenment), or throwing themselves off or down them - or having it happen to them. This includes the airplane bombing too, if you think about it. Height - or perhaps perspective - changes everyone.

 

The theme of alienation and belonging also pervades the book. Chamcha is kind of a stand-in for Rushdie himself. Born relatively wealthy, to a non-religious Muslim family (kind of like “culturally Jewish”), he was educated at Cambridge, and decided to remain in England. In many ways, Rushdie is like Saladin: almost more British than the Brits themselves. He and Saladin both had to come to terms with being perpetual outsiders in their chosen nations, while never fitting in in India either. 

 

In 2000, he moved to the United States, eventually becoming a US citizen. So, a fairly cosmopolitan background, which comes across in his writing as well. 

 

There are a lot of quotable lines in this book, and I figured I would share some of them. I hope to inspire others to read this book, and Rushdie in general - he has a unique storytelling style, and a perspective that is important in understanding our current cultural, political, and religious moment. 

 

The first one is his account of Gibreel’s Bollywood career. 

 

For over a decade and a half he had represented, to hundreds of millions of believes in that country in which, to this day, the human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the most acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme. For many of his fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had long ago ceased to exist.

 

While on the aircraft, before the hijacking, Chamcha is accosted by one of those “christian” evangelist sorts - American, of course. He rails against Darwin and complains about his supposed mistreatment when his targets ignore his preaching. Chamcha eventually cannot help laughing at him, which finally shuts him up. Later, during the hijacking, he is as useless and self-entitled as you would expect. There is a great line about him:

 

It was a hard fate to be an American abroad, and not to suspect why you were so disliked.

 

In the first Mohammed sequence, the story is told of the (fictional) town of Jahilia (meaning “ignorance” - the state before Islam), and the legend of Hagar. Anyone familiar with the Abrahamic religions knows the story. Sarah, barren wife of Abraham, tells him to sleep with her servant, Hagar, who becomes pregnant. When the son, Ishmael, is born, Sarah gets pissy, and has Hagar and Ishmael sent off into the desert to die. An angel rescues them, Ishmael becomes the father of the Arabic peoples, and the rest is legend. Here is how Rushdie describes the incident. 

 

In ancient time the patriarch Ibrahim came into this valley with Hagar and Ismail, their son. Here, in this waterless wilderness, he abandoned her. She asked him, can this be God’s will? He replied, it is. And left, the bastard. From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say. 

 

This is, shall we say, an ongoing problem. The amount of hate that people use God to justify is horrifying. (It is also a classic example of using the Lord’s name in vain.) 

 

At the end of this narrative, there is a wonderful paragraph. 

 

From the peak of Mount Cone, Gibreel watches the faithful escaping Jahilia, leaving the city of aridity for the place of cool palms and water, water, water. In small groups, almost empty-handed, they move across the empire of the sun, on this first day of the first year at the new beginning of Time, which has itself been born again, as the old dies behind them and the new waits ahead. 

 

The narrative returns to London - or, as the chapter title calls it: Ellowen Deeowen. Saladin is greeted by good old English xenophobia. 

 

It turned out that somebody had reported a suspicious person on the beach, remember when they used to come in fishing-boats, the illegals, and thanks to that single anonymous telephone call there were now fifty-seven uniformed constables combing the beach, their flashlights swinging crazily in the dark…

 

Later, in custody, Saladin is confronted with a whole zoo’s worth of half-human creatures. This magical realism sequence contains a pithy idea about the meaning of being “other” in a culture. One of the creatures explains that they are monsters because the dominant culture sees them that way. 

 

“They describe us. That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.”

 

Something to think about when it comes to all of the “others” in our society: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities, women. 

 

The panoply of immigrants in the London community can be confusing at times, but some of the descriptions are excellent. 

 

Muhammad Sufyan was a burly, thick-forearmed fellow with a belly on him, as godly and as unfanatic a believer as you could meet. 

 

That is the sort of religious person we need more of: godly and unfanatic. 

 

One of the rabbit trails that doesn’t really lead anywhere, but gives a bit of color to the culture, is the story of a fanatical Imam, who broadcasts from London. He says out loud what has always been at the core of Fundamentalism of all sorts - the same thing driving today’s fascists and theofascists and their scorched-earth culture wars against those different from them. 

 

“We will make a revolution that is a revolt not only against a tyrant, but against history.” For there is an enemy beyond Ayesha, and it is History herself. History is the blood-wine that must no longer be drunk. History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies - progress, science, rights - against which the Imam has set his face. History is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day Al-Lah finished his revelation to Mahound. 

 

This is the exact same thing the Fundies I grew up with believe. Just say “God” in English rather than Arabic, and you have the exact same idea. All knowledge was given to men of the past, and anything that looks like progress - particularly science and the idea of human rights - is of the devil. Thus, the way of God is to return to the past, particularly its injustices and hierarchies and abuse of the powerless. 

 

There is an interesting conversation later between Sufyan and Saladin, who is bemoaning his physical transformation. Sufyan, in a misguided attempt to give comfort, drops some literary references. Citing Ovid favorably over Lucretius, he tells Saladin that his soul remains the same, regardless of his “presently varying form.”

 

“This is pretty cold comfort,” Chamcha managed a trace of his old dryness. “Either I accept Lucretius and conclude that some demonic and irreversible mutation is taking place in my inmost depths, or I go with Ovid and concede that everything now emerging is no more than a manifestation of what was already there.” 

 

As he grows larger and more demonic, Chamcha despairs of ever returning to normalcy. The only person who seems to find him attractive in his state is the young woman who is the daughter of the Indian restaurant owners. In one of the most hilarious lines in the book, she tells him, “Hold your horses, we’ll work something out.” Not that even she has an idea what to do. 

 

Eventually, it is his hatred of Farishta that ends up returning Chamcha to his ordinary state. Speaking of Farishta, he and Alleluia do end up together in what is a thoroughly dysfunctional relationship. Her mother isn’t entirely helping either (the whole family is a dysfunction), and makes a comment that is intended to avoid looking like a racial or religious slur, but which clearly is. After a blowup over this, as Alleluia storms out, the mother can be heard to say loudly, “Grand passion. The gift of tongues; means a girl can babble out any blasted thing.” 

 

Farishta, unfortunately, continues to unravel mentally. He becomes insanely jealous (something Chamcha later uses against him), and rather abusive to Alleluia. 

 

The worst thing about him, she tentatively concluded, was his genius for thinking himself slighted, belittled, under attack. It became almost impossible to mention anything to him, no matter how reasonable, no matter how gently put. 

 

Pretty classic narcissist behavior, actually. I have personal and professional experience of this phenomenon. 

 

Not helping, of course, is Farishta’s ongoing mental illness. The question never resolved in the book is where the delusions leave off and supernatural reality begins. There is a fascinating inner dialogue where Farishta concludes that the whole story of Eden got it wrong, and that it was never the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that Adam and Eve ate from - that was a lie the devil told them. It was a different tree, perhaps a tree of death or something. And around and around it goes, as Farishta becomes more and more convinced that he is on a mission to save the world. 

 

Also, he concludes that the English’s “moral fuzziness” is the fault of their cold weather. Without the black and white contrasts of day and night, hot and cold, dry and wet, no wonder they cannot see life in a fundamentalist way. 

 

As the story of Muhammed continues to unfold in Gibreel’s head, the fate of the poor poet who once pushed back against religion becomes dire. He is reduced to hiding out in a brothel, disguised as a eunuch. I wanted to mention a perceptive line in that narrative. 

 

Once he had been affluent, but that was a quarter of a century ago. Now there was no demand for satires - the general fear of Mahound had destroyed the market for insults and wit. 

 

One defining characteristic of fundamentalism is its lack of a sense of humor. Replacing it is the “humor” of insult, of degrading those “below” you - making mean, bullying fun of other people. (Exhibit A: Rush Limbaugh) The art of satire - which is punching up, poking fun of the powerful - cannot exist when the powerful cannot laugh at themselves. 

 

As Islam descends into fundamentalism, some of the true believers become disillusioned with it. This is a feeling I know all too well from my own experiences. As one such follower puts it, “The closer you are to a conjurer, the easier to spot the trick.” 

 

Along with this always comes more and more rules. That is the nature of fundamentalism (which Christ pushed back against): placing ever increasing burdens on people. 

 

Amid the palm-trees of the oasis Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and found himself spouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation. 

 

Another line in this episode was interesting to me:

 

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy. 

 

In another line that rings so true today, the men hiding out from Muhammed have noticed that new revelations seem to happen whenever he wants to do something, whether taking more wives, or straight up “God’s own permission to fuck as many women as he liked.” Not too different from how Brigham Young operated - or how modern preachers justify their wealth and sexual peccadilloes. 

 

“Your God certainly jumps to it when you need him to fix things up for you.” 

 

Again, the narrative returns to the present, and we get some insight into the imploding marriage between Saladin and his British wife Pamela, who is a liberal community organizer. After an argument where Saladin keeps harping on the right wing position, she observes, “You actually do think in cheap debating points.”

 

Wow, that one hit home. I have increasingly had this experience in trying to communicate with the right wingers in my own life. Family included. It was about five years ago that I realized that my parents among others have ceased to be able to debate using current facts and realities. It was just cheap talking point after cheap talking point after slogan after slogan. Just today, I saw another one, in an ill-argued op-ed a friend posted about water issues in California. And, as one could easily predict, it was just a bunch of talking points strung together, with no engagement with the reality of the situation. “Environment over farmers” (even if we ran the Sacramento delta dry, there wouldn’t be enough water during drought years) “Why aren’t we building more dams?” (Where should we be building them? Yosemite Valley? That is never actually answered by any right winger I have met.) “We are wasting all this water by letting it run into the ocean” (Yes, because the lake is full, and the water is going over the spillway - what do you propose we do with it?) And this goes for every single issue. Talking points, talking points, talking points. 

 

Shifting back again to the Ayesha episode, there is a lot of dark humor going on. To understand this one, it helps to know the supernatural characters. Azraeel is the avenging angel, the sword of punishment. So, this old lady sees a vision, and asks the angel if he is Gibreel, the archangel. 

 

“No,” the apparition replied.” It’s I, Azraeel, the one with the lousy job. Excuse the disappointment.”

 

Poor Osman, formerly in love with Ayesha, before her spiritual epiphany, tries to get her to call off the march before everyone gets killed. She replies that she is just the messenger. Osman’s response is something that I have wondered many a time. 

 

“Then tell me why your God is so anxious to destroy the innocent. What’s he afraid of? Is he so unconfident that he needs us to die to prove our love?” 

 

And this goes for things less than death too. Is God really so fragile that he needs humans to harm themselves psychologically to prove their love? To harm others? To do violence to their own inner selves?

 

Also trying to stop the march is Mirza Saaed, whose terminally ill wife has become Ayesha’s lead follower. Near the end, he tells stories to the pilgrims, some of which listen and abandon the question. He tells of Circe, and her enchantment, and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Ayesha calls these the Devil’s verses, spoken in the Devil’s tongue. 

 

But he fails to convince his wife. She accuses him of being angry all the time. His response is perceptive. 

 

“This isn’t anger. This is anxiety, unhappiness, wretchedness, injury, pain.” 

 

I feel this very deeply. As males in our culture, we have been socialized to bury all those other feelings. The only acceptable emotion for men is anger - and that is how fundies can make the claim that women are too emotional, while men don’t have emotions. Once you define anger as “not an emotion,” there you go. I know for me I have often expressed myself in anger, because those other feelings: anxiety, unhappiness, hurt, wretchedness, injury, and pain are not recognized. Looking back, I have tried to express hurt and injury, but they have been brushed off more often than not. Only anger gets results, and that is a problem. (One of the things that I love about my wife is that she encourages expression of the other emotions, and listens when I express them.)

 

I want to end with a couple of lines from near the end, when Chamcha returns to India to say goodbye to his dying father. He runs into the stuttering Bollywood producer, S. S. “Whisky” Sisodia, and the two of them bemoan the sectarian violence that is wracking India. As Sisodia puts it, in a sentiment I very much resonate with:

 

“Fact is, religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts, and gogo God is the creature of evil.” 

 

This could as easily be spoken about religion in the United States today. It is frustrating and horrifying to me to see what can be the vehicle for all that is noble in humankind be debased to petty tribalism and hatred. 

 

The final line comes as Chamcha prepares to see his father. I have to believe that Rushdie put something of himself into this scene - perhaps his own difficult relationship with his father. Given my own difficult relationship with my parents, and our current estrangement, I have some similar dread of how things will go at the end. 

 

Saladin’s father has always been overdramatic and punitive, so he worries about more drama. 

 

Anyone in the vicinity of a dying man was utterly at his mercy. Punches delivered from a deathbed left bruises that never faded.

 

This is the problem, isn’t it. Death gives an advantage to the dying in a way. There is the expectation of a reconciliation, which, given the wasted years before, feels cheap and fake to me. If reconciliation is what you want, do it while you are healthy. Don’t wait until the end. 

 

But I see why this is attractive. The advantage of waiting until death to “reconcile” is that it is now too late to make restitution. There is no making things right on a deathbed, just a gun to the head of “you had better forgive me now, because you’ll regret it if I die without being forgiven.” 

 

In the book, Saladin finds that things go better than he expected. But the reality remains: his father is dead, and they were estranged for decades, largely because of his father’s need for control and dominance. Those years will never come back. 

 

And still, this is a better ending than the tragic one of Gibreel and everyone close to him. 

 

It’s a crazy book, to be sure, and one that goes so many places. You could call it “unfocused” perhaps, but it is also of its time. In the second half of the 20th Century, giant books were all the rage, it appears - you can find them in thrift stores everywhere. Tom Clancy and Leon Uris were on my father’s shelves back in the day, and other people had Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie. And so many others. 

 

These days, you find larger narratives broken up into multiple smaller books. Perhaps to be less intimidating, or perhaps to better monetize literature - it is likely we are more willing to buy three $20 books than one $60 book. So don’t blame Rushdie too much for writing in the style of his times. 

 

I personally love this book. I find its very sprawling to be a giant picture of humanity in a particular place and time. The blurring of reality, magic, and interior life is part of its meaning; and the blending of symbolism and character makes it worth a re-read just to catch more of the connections. 

 

I would love to hear from readers who also enjoyed this book - I only know a few who have read it.