US Gov't Funding Cultural Genocide in Haiti

"Cultural genocide extends beyond attacks upon the physical and/or biological elements of a group and seeks to eliminate its wider institutions. This is done in a variety of ways, and often includes the abolition of a group’s language, restrictions upon its traditional practices and ways, the destruction of religious institutions and objects, the persecution of clergy members, and attacks on academics and intellectuals. Elements of cultural genocide are manifested when artistic, literary, and cultural activities are restricted or outlawed and when national treasures, libraries, archives, museums, artifacts, and art galleries are destroyed or confiscated."

[David Nersessian, Rethinking Cultural Genocide Under International Law]

Abe Sauer has written an explosive expose on the predatory activities of Christian missionaries in Haiti since last year's devastating earthquake: Our Government-Funded Mission to Make Haiti Christian: Your Tax Dollars, Billy Graham's Son, Monsanto and Sarah Palin.

Most explosive of all is the fact that these missionaries are directly funded by the United States government!

These missionaries are hell-bent on nothing short of a sweeping cultural genocide in Haiti. Vodou is practiced by as much as 80% of Haiti's population, and represents a direct continuation of the religious traditions that the ancestors of Haitians brought with them from Africa centuries ago. US based, and US funded, Christian missionaries wish to completely eradicate this religious tradition, which lies at the very heart of Haitian society.

In addition to Sauer's excellent piece, also check out these:

• Comparing World Vision and Hezbollah
• World Vision: Only Christians Need Apply
• "A form of ministry" (Push Polling for Jesus)

ALSO: "Exporting Faith", a Boston Globe four part series:
(some background on how we got to this point)
Part 1: Bush Brings Faith to Foreign Aid
Part 2: Religious right wields clout
Part 3: Together, but worlds apart
Part 4: Healing the body to reach the soul


Finally, having cursed the darkness, let us light a candle or two:

• Support Haiti. Support Vodou. Buy Barbancourt Rum.
• Angelique Kidjo on Voodoo and Catholicism
• 200 Million African Pagans
• Secret knowledge, sacred knowledge (on Candomble)

Hat tip to Jason at the Wild Hunt!

Did the Yaquis Convert to Christianity?

A spectrum of questions
A funny thing happened as I was digging more deeply into the research that has been done on Yaqui religion over the last 30 years or so. I discovered that a number of prominent scholars who study Yaqui culture have openly questioned whether the Yaqui Indians actually converted to Christianity in the first place!

It's a tricky issue, and very basic questions about the nature of religion and religious identity are involved here. The trickiest issue, and the most basic question of all is: what does it mean to say that the Yaquis converted? It is very easy to overlook this question. I mean, well, everyone knows what "conversion" means, right? Wrong.

Exhibit A: When Dr. Carlos Gonzales, a Yaqui, did the opening prayer at the recent memorial service in Tucson, Arizona, he called upon the spirits of the Four Directions, on Father Sky, and on Mother Earth, and so forth. He did not mention Jesus, but there was a reference or two to "God", along with "creatures that walk, swim, slither or move on four legs and two legs." So, does that sound like someone from a society that abandoned its own indigenous religious traditions in favor of Christianity four hundred years ago?

But there's more at stake here than just what heading Yaqui religion properly belongs under in the family tree of human religions. The nature of conversion is also of fundamental importance for understanding all of the conversions to Christianity and Islam that have occurred over the last 1700 years. These "conversions" now account for over half of the human population! Properly understanding these "conversions" is also essential to the question of the relationship between modern and ancient Paganisms.

Long before anyone began to wonder whether or not the Yaquis had really converted to Christianity or not, indeed, long before the time when they supposedly did convert, serious doubts were raised about the completeness of the process of Christianization in Europe. In fact, throughout the entire history of Christianity, and right up until quite recently, it was widely accepted that, long after Christian conversion had officially taken place, remnants of ancient Paganism continued to exist as pockets of resistance within Christendom. The motif of the "Witches Sabbath" was based on just such a belief, although this provides but one (in)famous example.

Another example is the notion that there was a revival of Paganism during the Renaissance, a view held by modern historians such as Ludwig von Pastor (1854-1928) and George Voigt (1827-1891). It was not until P.O. Kristeller's work in the mid 20th century that the theory of a "Pagan Renaissance" was seriously undermined among academics (although Kristeller's revisionism was never universally accepted and is now facing real challenges.)

Belief in the survival of Paganism persisted into the 20th century, as is demonstrated by the popular, and even scholarly, interest in the writings of Charles Godfrey Leland and Margaret Murray, both of whom claimed that at least some of those accused of "witchcraft" really were representatives of surviving pre-Christian (or, more precisely, pre-Christianization) religious traditions. Carlo Ginsberg provides a more recent example of scholarly support for the idea that non-Christian religious traditions in Europe successfully survived the process of Christianization.

Nowadays, one routinely encounters people (including many "Pagan" "scholars") who insist that all such notions about the survival of Paganism have been thoroughly debunked and irreversibly consigned to the dustbin of bad history. The simple fact is that nothing of the sort has taken place. Even Ronald Hutton has repeatedly conceded that modern Wicca has a "distinguished and long pedigree". Although vanishingly few people demonstrate any familiarity with the more subtle aspects of Hutton's writings on the subject of Pagan history, it is clear that he, at least, readily accepts that the issue is not reducible to the binary choice: "did Paganism survive or not?".

Notwithstanding the fact that he is often understood to be saying the exact opposite, Hutton's writings unambiguously demonstrate that instead of simplistic dichotomies, we must pose a whole spectrum of questions about the degree to which Pagan beliefs and practices survived, the ways in which they did so, the manner in which these persistent beliefs and practices evolved in Christian dominated societies, the mutual interactions between Paganism and this thing called Christianity, etc. Most importantly of all, there is no doubt that there are many and varied ways in which modern Paganism is meaningfully related to, and is therefore a continuation of, ancient Paganism.

Well, did the Yaquis convert, or didn't they?
But back to the Yaqui. In his 1980 book, The Yaquis: A Cultural History, Edward Spicer raised serious doubts about the wisdom of blithely asserting a Yaqui conversion to Christianity. Two decades later, Kenneth Morrison summarized Spicer like this:

"By 1980, Edward Spicer ... carefully developed an argument that the Yaquis only partially accepted the Jesuit missionaries' teaching about Christian cosmology. Spicer shows that the Yaquis came to accept the great others [that is, Jesus, Mary, and the Saints] of Catholicism as well as their distinctive location in heaven, or glory. At the same time, however, the Yaquis neither rejected their traditional cosmological system, nor accepted the Jesuits' distinction between a perfect heaven and a tainted worldly existence."

Morrison then moves on to more recent research that builds on the work of Spicer:

"Two recent works on the Yaqui, Muriel Painter's With Good Heart (1986), and Lawrence Evers and Felipe S. Molina's Yaqui Deer Songs (1987), have brought together a great deal more ethnographic information on Yaqui religion. Significantly, they agree with Spicer's view that the Deer Dancer derives from pre-contact Yaqui tradition. The richness of their data makes it possible to see that Yaqui acceptance of Catholicism hardly amounts to conversion in its usual sense of turning away from the truths of tradition to the truths of another. Instead, the Yaqui extended the religious insights of tradition to make sense of their relationship with the great others of Christianity. Unlike Spicer, then, Evers and Molina, and, to a lesser degree, Painter, locate the 'sacred' characteristics of Yaqui religion, its understanding of traditional and Christian power, in the pre-contact tradition."
[Sharing the Flower, Kenneth Morrison, 2002, pp. 110-111]

Even more recently, there is David Delgado Shorter's (2009) We Will Dance Our Truth, in which we read that

"historical claims of conversion not only fail to tell the whole story of native agency in colonial zones but also overlook the role of indigenous performance in historically narrating a consistent and practical precolonial ritual logic." And also this: " Tropes of religious conversion assume that European cultures were superior, that Christianity provided a undeniable 'truth', and that precontact religiosity was abandoned."
[p. 235]

We Will Dance Our Truth won the 2010 Chicago Folklore Prize, awarded by the American Folklore Society and the University of Chicago. Shorter provides a fresh look at the history of the original "contact" between the Yaquis (who are also referred to as Yoemem) and the Spanish, and the early post-contact history unfolds:

"The Yoemem defeated Spanish armies at least three times between 1533 and 1609 and therefore negotiated a contact situation on their own terms. Their engagement with the newcomers was selective and tactful. Yoemem invited Jesuit missionaries to their pueblos in 1617 and kept the Spanish conquistadors at bay at the same time. Yoeme strength clearly controlled the influence of Catholicism on precontact traditions. Like other early colonial encounters, this control included a significant amount of indigenous agency and maneuverability. Yoemem enforced and strategically maintained their territorial adn cultural boundaries and sustained sovereign control of their land from pre-Columbian times through the period of Jesuit collaboration.

To understand Yoeme cultural dynamics, we must grasp that roughly 30,000 Yoemem decided to befriend five or six Jesuit missionaries, ultimately choosing which aspects of Christianity and European life were sensible and adoptable. Yoemem also decided which practices were to be rejected. Control maintained continuity in a time of change."
[p. 8]

In his redaction of this history, Shorter clearly (and sometimes greatly) exaggerates the "agency" of the Yaquis in determining the course of their own destiny.

In the sphere of religion, this "agency" was indeed significant. However, the Yaquis were forced to accept Jesuit political rule over them. They were forced to accept being reorganized into mission villages, with Jesuit appointed leaders, in the same way other Indian groups. They were forced to allow Spanish settlers access to their ancestral lands. They were also, like all Indios, subject to the various forced-labor laws that mandated periods of unpaid work in the mines and haciendas of the Spaniards. And over the course of the subsequent decades the Yaquis also lost control even of their own agricultural output, which the Jesuits appropriated.

Most egregiously of all, Shorter inexcusably denies the simple reality of the blatantly coercive nature of the situation the Yaquis were in when they "negotiated" with the Spanish. No amount of appeals to "agency and maneuverability" can obliterate the fact that the Yaquis, like all indigenous people, essentially (or even literally) had guns pointed at their heads during all their dealings with the Spanish. In the end, all agreements made under such circumstances must be viewed as falling in the class of "offers they couldn't refuse." Nevertheless, especially when it comes to the subject of religion, Shorter's narrative does provide a necessary corrective to the standard "tropes of religious conversion".

In fact, one begins to get a clearer appreciation of the scale of the savagery involved in the European conquest of the Americas when one considers just how fortunate, relatively speaking, the Yaquis were! And Shorter's point really is that this is not simply a matter of "fortune", but rather a quite striking example of the principle: fortes fortuna adiuvat.

Also see this previous post: The true story of how the Yaqui people were conquered and converted to Christianity

Nergal has been released: "in a pretty fuckin’ good condition"

Behemoth's official website has announced that Nergal (Adam Darski) has been released from the hospital. Nergal himself summed things up like this:

"After almost half of year of treatment in various hospitals, several cycles of chemotherapy, irradiation and bone marrow transplant I have been finally released home in a pretty fuckin’ good condition. I’m feeling ok, taking the intensity of treatment under consideration. That was not an easy period of my life, but, as I envisaged, I left the hospital victorious. I never considered any other options."

The true story of how the Yaqui people were conquered and converted to Christianity

“I’m Yaqui and Yaquis have been Roman Catholics since 1650. We were one of the first tribes in Mexico to actually peacefully absorb Catholicism."
[Dr. Carlos Gonzales to CNS.Com (Christian News Services), Jan. 14, 2011]

The actual manner in which the Yaqui people were conquered and converted to Christianity is somewhat different from the impression given by Dr. Gonzales' characterization of this historical process as the "peaceful absorption of Catholicism". In fact, the conversion of the Yaqui is inseparable from the larger story of the violent, indeed, genocidal, subjugation of all the peoples of the Americas.

Mexican historian John P. Schmal has written a fascinating, detailed, and well-sourced article on The History of Indigenous Sinaloa. The State of Sinaloa (see map) is the region of modern day Mexico where the Yaquis lived when they first came into contact with Europeans and their Christian religion. The historical facts of how this "encounter" played out are not in dispute. Nothing substantive in John P. Schmal's account is in any way controversial, other than the fact that some people would prefer that we just not talk about these matters plainly, openly and honestly.

A brief excerpt from Howard Zinn on the Spanish conquest of Mexico will help to place Schmal's recounting of the story of the Yaqui and other peoples of Sinaloa in it's proper context (taken from Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress, which is Chapter One of Zinn's A People's History of the United States):

What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.

The Aztec civilization of Mexico came out of the heritage of Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures. It built enormous constructions from stone tools and human labor, developed a writing system and a priesthood. It also engaged in (let us not overlook this) the ritual killing of thousands of people as sacrifices to the gods. The cruelty of the Aztecs, however, did not erase a certain innocence, and when a Spanish armada appeared at Vera Cruz, and a bearded white man came ashore, with strange beasts (horses), clad in iron, it was thought that he was the legendary Aztec man-god who had died three hundred years before, with the promise to return-the mysterious Quetzalcoatl. And so they welcomed him, with munificent hospitality.

That was Hernando Cortes, come from Spain with an expedition financed by merchants and landowners and blessed by the deputies of God, with one obsessive goal: to find gold. In the mind of Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, there must have been a certain doubt about whether Cortes was indeed Quetzalcoatl, because he sent a hundred runners to Cortes, bearing enormous treasures, gold and silver wrought into objects of fantastic beauty, but at the same time begging him to go back. (The painter Durer a few years later described what he saw just arrived in Spain from that expedition-a sun of gold, a moon of silver, worth a fortune.)

Cortes then began his march of death from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy-to paralyze the will of the population by a sudden frightful deed. And so, in Cholulu, he invited the headmen of the Cholula nation to the square. And when they came, with thousands of unarmed retainers, Cortes's small army of Spaniards, posted around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows, mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved on. When their cavalcade of murder was over they were in Mexico City, Montezuma was dead, and the Aztec civilization, shattered, was in the hands of the Spaniards.

All this is told in the Spaniards' own accounts.

Zinn's narrative above takes us to 1521, the year that Hernan Cortes became ruler of Mexico. Turning now to Schmal's article (referred and linked to at the top of this post), we read that eight years later:

In December 1529, the professional lawyer turned Conquistador, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, led an expedition of 300 Spaniards and 10,000 Indian allies (Tlaxcalans, Aztecs and Tarascans) into the coastal region of what is now called Sinaloa. Before arriving in the coastal region, Guzmán's army had ravaged through Michoacán, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Nayarit, provoking the natives to give battle everywhere he went. The historian Peter Gerhard, in The North Frontier of New Spain, observed that Guzmán's army "engaged in wholesale slaughter and enslavement."

The Yaquis, however, were at first spared. But that did not last long:

In 1533, Diego de Guzmán (the nephew of Nuño) fought a brief battle with the Yaquis along the banks of the Yaqui River. "His force dispersed the Indians," notes Professor Spicer, "...but he nevertheless seems to have lost heart for further conquest and did not follow up his victory. He was greatly impressed with the fighting ability of the Yaquis who opposed him."

Thus, the small province of Culiacán, according to Peter Gerhard, "became a distant enclave of Spanish power, separated by a hundred miles of hostile territory from the rest of" the Spanish Empire. In 1562, the area was included in the newly established Spanish province of Nueva Vizcaya (which - at the time - included the modern day states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango).

By the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, Spanish authorities had organized many of the Indians in Durango and Sinaloa into encomiendas. Although encomienda Indians were supposed to provide labor "for a few weeks per year," the historian Susan M. Deeds [in her article "Indigenous Rebellions on the Northern Mexican Mission Frontier: From First-Generation to Later Colonial Responses", see references at bottom of post] explains that "they often served much longer and some apparently became virtual chattels of Spanish estates." She goes on to say that the Jesuits' "systematic congregation of Indians into villages" starting in the 1590s encouraged the development of encomiendas by making Indians more accessible to their encomenderos." In practice, Dr. Deeds concludes, encomiendas usually resulted in the "tacit enslavement of Indians."

For the rest of the 16th Century, the region inhabited by the Yaquis remained "a distant enclave", and the Yaquis successfully maintained their autonomy.

But the noose was tightening. In 1599 the Spaniards "waged a vigorous military campaign that subjugated the Cáhita-speaking Indians of the Fuerte river." (see map) At about the same time the Acaxee, who lived inland in the the Sierra Madre Occidental in northwestern Durango and eastern Sinaloa, were subjugated, which involved not only conversion, but they were forced to cut their hair, wear European style clothing, and they were forcibly resettled under Jesuit supervision. After this, the Mayos, who live along the Mayo river, signed a peace treaty with the Spanish, allowing Jesuit missionaries access to Mayo lands. That was 1609. The Yaquis (who lived along the Yaqui river) were next.

The Yaquis drove away the Spanish in 1609, and when the Conquistadors arrived with a larger force in 1610, the Indios prevailed again. But then in 1617, the Yaquis also capitulated. Mass conversions took place immediately. In addition to conversion, the Yaquis were also forced to accept being "reorganized" into so-called "mission villages", whose leaders were appointed by the Jesuits. The Yaquis also had to allow Spanish settlers to come and live on their land.

The Jesuits promised to protect the Yaquis from the excesses of the forced-labor system and other abuses visited upon Indians by the Spanish authorities. But the fact is that forced-labor (and other forms of tribute) were required from Indians as a matter of law, and, at most, the Jesuits could do no more than see to it that the letter of the law was followed, and even this they did not do. The forced-labor system required all Indians to work, for free, for Spanish landowners and mine operators. By law, the amount of forced labor was limited, but in practice it was, in essence, slavery in all but name.

In 1739, the Yaquis and the Mayos rose up in revolt. This was not the first such revolt in the region. As early as 1601 the Acaxee had risen up in an attempt "to restore pre-Columbian social and religious elements that had been destroyed by the Spanish conquest." That revolt had been led by an Indian named Perico who claimed "to have come from heaven to save his people from the false doctrines of the Jesuits." The Acaxee revolt was crushed. Perico and 47 others were executed, and his followers were sold into outright slavery.

Although the Jesuits had promised to protect the Yaquis from the predations of the Spanish rulers, by 1739 the Yaquis found themselves sending delegations to the local Spanish authorities, and then to the Viceroy in Mexico City, in order to air their grievances ... against the Jesuits! In addition to seeking relief from forced labor on the haciendas and in the mines, the Yaquis also wanted to elect their own leaders. On top of everything else, the Jesuits were also appropriating the Yaqui's own, often significant, agricultural output, and using it to finance their ongoing missionary activities.

But in addition to sending official delegations, the Yaqui rose up in open, armed rebellion. Churches were burned. Priests and settlers were attacked. The Spanish responded with overwhelming force. Before it was all over, an estimated 5,000 Yaquis were killed in quashing the revolt.

The bottom line is that there was nothing peaceful about the conversion of the Yaquis. The Spanish were systematically subjugating and forcibly converting all the Indians who had not already been brought under their political and ideological rule. The Yaqui distinguished themselves as warriors. Their ability to hold their own against the armor and the weapons of the Conquistadors helped them, to some extent, to influence the terms of their own surrender. But there can be no doubt, to paraphrase Rev. Dr. Timothy M. Njoya (of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa), that the Yaqui became Christian through conquest and submission, not through peaceful conversion.

Also see this follow-up post: Did the Yaquis Convert to Christianity?

Sources (from John P. Schmal's article):

• Susan M. Deeds, "Indigenous Rebellions on the Northern Mexican Mission Frontier: From First-Generation to Later Colonial Responses," in Susan Schroeder, Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, pp. 1-29.
• Departamento de la Estadísticas Nacional. Annuario de 1930. Tacubaya, D.F., 1932.
• Peter Gerhard, The Northern Frontier of New Spain. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982.
• Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI). Estadísticas Históricas de Mexico, Tomo I. Aguascalientes: INEGI, 1994.
• Cynthia Radding, "The Colonial Pact and Changing Ethnic Frontiers in Highland Sonora, 1740-1840," in Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (eds.), Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, pp. 52-66. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998.
• Daniel T. Reff, Disease, Depopulation and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518-1764. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991.
• Robert Mario Salmon, Indian Revolts in Northern New Spain: A Synthesis of Resistance (1680-1786). Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1991.
• Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1997.

From the Vedas to MLK: Tracing Back the Radiance

During a period of soul-searching, he had, in his words, "despaired of the power of love in solving social problems." At this point, he was coincidentally introduced to the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi in a sermon by Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University, who had just returned from a trip to India.

King was so moved that he immediately bought a number of books on the Indian nationalist leader. He read with fascination of the life of one who had successfully transformed the ethic of nonviolence into a political instrument against British colonial rule.

The impact they made on him is best described in his own words: "As I read, I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance. As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform."

[Gandhi's Influence on King, by Placido P. D'Souza]

"Russia gave me Tolstoy, a teacher who furnished a reasoned basis for non-violence. He blessed my movement in South Africa when it was still in its infancy and of whose wonderful possibilities I had yet to learn. It was he who had prophesied in his letter to me that I was leading a movement which was destined to bring a message of hope to the downtrodden of the earth."

[Letter to American Friends, Mahatma Gandhi, August 3, 1942]

"Do you know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I've never experienced before. I have procured all his works and have been reading them and still am doing so -- I have also read through Kant. And surely not a single university student ever studied so much and learned so much as I this summer. I do not know whether I shall ever change my opinion, but now I am convinced that Schopenhauer is the greatest genius of humankind."

[Leo Tolstoy, August 30, 1869, in a letter to Afanasy Fet]

"If I wished to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I should have to concede to Buddhism pre-eminence over the others. In any case, it must be a pleasure to me to see my doctrine in such close agreement with a religion that the majority of men on earth hold as their own, for this numbers far more followers than any other. And this agreement must be yet the more pleasing to me, inasmuch as in my philosophizing I have certainly not been under its influence. For up till 1818, when my work appeared, there was to be found in Europe only a very few accounts of Buddhism."

[Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Chp. 17]

"If the reader has also received the benefit of the Vedas, the access to which by means of the Upanishads is in my eyes the greatest privilege which this still young century (1818) may claim before all previous centuries, if then the reader, I say, has received his initiation in primeval Indian wisdom, and received it with an open heart, he will be prepared in the very best way for hearing what I have to tell him. It will not sound to him strange, as to many others, much less disagreeable; for I might, if it did not sound conceited, contend that every one of the detached statements which constitute the Upanishads, may be deduced as a necessary result from the fundamental thoughts which I have to enunciate, though those deductions themselves are by no means to be found there."

[The World as Will and Representation, Preface]

“The next life or the next breath, which will come first is uncertain.”

Check out Michael Dunham's review of the new book In the Shadow of the Buddha, by Matteo Pistono.

Here is a taste:

Pistono, the spy: During the last decade, the author has made numerous trips to Tibet to surreptitiously photograph evidence of Chinese oppression inside Tibet and to smuggle out written documents that have become essential data to international human rights organizations, as well as to the US State Department. His fearless information gathering has contributed greatly to a deeper understanding of Tibet, normally off-limits to Western reporters.

Pistono, the Tibetan historian: By weaving in the biography of the 19th century Tibetan mystic Terton Sogyal, the author brings a deeper understanding of the importance of spiritual lineage in Tibetan culture – both from religious and political standpoints. Terton Sogyal’s recorded lineage began with Padmasambhava – the adept who brought Buddhism to Tibet twelve centuries years ago – gained renewed importance during the politically pivotal era of the XIII Dalai Lama, and remains extremely relevant to the XIV Dalai Lama, as well as to Terton Sogyal’s present-day incarnation Sogyal Rinpoche, (author of the best-seller Tibetan Book of Living and Dying).

Also be sure to check out Matteo Pistono's website, where you can learn more about the author, read an excerpt, and pre-order the book.

[The quote that is the title of this post is actually from Sogyal Rinpoche. See Dunham's review for the context.]

Good Witches

As a child I learned, from The Wizard of Oz, that there are good witches, and bad witches. From Caspar the Friendly Ghost I learned that not all departed spirits are to be feared. From Felix the Cat I learned that magic can be put to good use. From Kung Fu I learned that there is wisdom to be found in non-Christian religions.

Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900. Baum famously included two "good witches" in this book. But the idea of "good witches" does not originate with Baum. A year earlier (1899) Charles Leland's Aradia: Gospel of the Witches, already appeared, but even before that (in 1892) he had come out with his Etruscan Roman Remains in which he writes in the Introduction:

"Here in Northern Italy a mountain district known as La Romagna Toscana, the inhabitants of which speak a rude form of the Bolognese dialect. These Romagnoli are manifestly a very ancient race, and appear to have preserved traditions and observances little changed from an incredibly early time .... Among these people, stregeria, or witchcraft -- or, as I have heard it called, "la vecchia religione" (or "the old religion") -- exists to a degree which would even astonish many Italians. This stegeria, or old religion, is something more than sorcery, and something less than a faith. It consists in remains of a mythology of spirits, the principal of whom preserve the names and attributes of the old Etruscan gods, such as Tinia, or Jupiter, Faflon, or Bacchus, and Teraina (in Etruscan Turnis) or Mercury. With these there still exist, in a few memories, the most ancient Roman rural deities, such as Silvanus, Palus, Pan, and the Fauns. To all these invocations or prayers in rude metrical form are still addressed, or are at least preserved, and there are many stories regarding them....

Closely allied to the belief in these old deities, is a vast mass of curious tradition, such as that there is a spirit of every element or thing created, as for instance of every plant and mineral, and a guardian or leading spirit of all animals; or, as in the case of silkworms, two -- one good an one evil. Also that witches and sorcerers are sometimes born again in their descendants; that all kinds of goblins, brownies, red-caps and three inch mannikins, haunt forests, rocks, ruined towers, firesides and kitchens, or cellars ...."

Even earlier still, Jacob Grimm's Teutonic Mythology appeared in 1835. In his chapter on Magic (in volume III) Grimm first makes clear that heathen (pre-Christian) Germans knew of both beneficial magic and harmful magic, but that this distinction became confused with the introduction of Christianity. According to the new religion "all heathen notions and practices were declared to be deceit and sinful delusion: the old gods fell back and changed into devils, and all that pertained to their worship into devilish jugglery."

From here, Grimm launches directly into a discussion of terminology associated with witchcraft: "Before proceeding with our inquiry, we have to examine the several terms that designated witchcraft in olden times." The reader is then treated to eight pages of words related to witchcraft, sorcery, conjuring, potion making, charms, spells, prediction, soothsaying, incantations, etc, in Old High German, Old Norse, Middle High German, Low German, Anglo Saxon, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, Old English, Gothic, etc, to all of which Jacob Grimm provides his equivalents in Latin and sometimes, for comparison, the Greek as well.

For example: "The AS [Anglo Saxon] also has the two forms: both wiccian fascinare [first he gives the AS italicized, followed by the Latin equivalent unitalicized], wicce saga, wiccungdom or wiccancraeft ars magica .... The English has witch = wicce; and the AS verb has survived its partic. wicked (perversus, maledictus), and Old English has an adjective wikke meaning the same ....."

Grimm also tells us that the modern (of his day) German word "hexe" could be given in Latin as saga, strix, striga, venefica, lamia, and furia. Grimm also points out that sometimes the hexe is assumed to be an old woman, while at other times she is young, and that the word "hexe" can also be used to complement a beautiful woman, or to mean "wise woman". The bottom line is that the ambiguity and multivalency of the modern English "witch" is not something that has been forced onto this word artificially and only as a result of a self-conscious campaign of politically correct revalorization. Nor have "good witches" been historically limited to the realms of story telling and story collecting, but have been with us always and ubiquitously as living human beings throughout European history, before, during and well "after" Christianization.

A Witch Burning in Ghana: How the role of Christianity has been obscured (Part One)

In November of last year, Ama Ahima, a 72 year old Ghanaian woman, was brutally murdered by a mob who accused her of being a witch. After holding her captive and abusing her violently for hours, they doused her in kerosene and set her on fire.

Although there are some conflicting accounts, the main facts of the case are not in dispute. It is important to emphasize that the following have been agreed to by the accused themselves (a number of sources are listed at the bottom of this post):

1. On November 20 Pastor Samuel Fletcher Sagoe accused Ama Ahima of being a witch.
2. Sagoe gathered together a group of six people (including other members of his family) to "deliver" Ahima, that is to conduct an exorcism. Alternatively, this has been described as an effort to forcibly make Ahima "confess" through torture.
3. The exorcism (and/or attempt to extract a confession) proceeded for several hours, until Ahima was doused in kerosene and set on fire.
4. At this point a neighbor intervened and Ahima was taken to the hospital, where she died the following day.

Amazingly, an concerted effort has been made to obscure the role of Christianity in Ahima's murder. Even more amazing is the fact that this has not only been largely successful, but at the same time many people have been convinced that African Traditional Religion, not Christianity, is to blame!

At first glance, this might seem to be an impossible attempt at full-bore Orwellian propaganda. After all, the accusation that Ahima was a witch was made by a Christian Pastor. The subsequent attempt to exorcise Ahima and/or force her to confess is in line with longstanding Christian traditional practice. Ahima's execution by burning is also part of Christian tradition with respect to the punishment of witches, heretics and others accused of being in league with Satan.

But there is, already in-place and ready to go at a moment's notice, a highly successful formula for damage control in situations like this.

1. First and foremost it is insisted loudly and repeatedly that this kind of horrific violence is the sad result of the inherent ignorance and irrationality of Africans themselves.
2. Then the role of Christianity is explained away by insisting that real Christians would never do anything like this, therefore what was at work was not real Christianity, but rather Christianity tainted by African ignorance and superstition.
3. If further obfuscation is required it is then implied broadly, or, if necessary, explicitly asserted, that the Christians involved were "Pentecostalists" or "Evangelicals" and, therefore, not representative of modern, enlightened, well-behaved, "mainstream" Christianity.

These days, of course, it is not fashionable to present Christian apologetics openly and plainly. But that is just as well, since the whole purpose of this line of "reasoning" is precisely to obscure the role of Christianity in the first place.

Therefore the whole presentation, while primarily constructed out of the above three elements, is embedded within a master narrative whose theme is not the spreading of the Christian gospel to the Heathen, but rather the noble upliftment of ignorant savages out of their native state of mental enthrallment, in which their their poor deluded psyches are darkened by magical thinking, up, up to the bright new day of Modern Western Reason.

When properly "spun" like this, a glaring example of Christian mob violence, such as the murder of Ama Ahima, is turned into evidence that Africans are in need of more missionaries, more NGO's, more "aid", etc, and that this will be the case until such a time, if ever such a time should come, that Africans are finally capable of thinking properly for themselves.

to be continued ....

Here are some of the media sources concerning this incident:

• Ghana Shocked by Witch Burning (David Amanor, BBC, November 26)
• Human Burning Case In Court (Rose Hayford Darko, Daily Graphic, November 28)
  
• My Mum Is Not A Witch (Della Russell Ocloo, Daily Graphic, November 29)
• 72-year-old grandmother burned alive in Ghana for being a ‘witch’ (Daily Mail, November 29)
• Ghanaian Woman Burned To Death For Being A 'Witch' (David Smith, Guardian, November 29)
• Ghana "Witch" Killing Points to a Broader Culture of Fear and Superstition (by Clair McDougal, Huffington Post, December 2)
• Autopsy Delays Burnt Woman's Case (Accra Mail, December 2)
• Don't Condemn Old Women As Witches (Vicky Wireko, Modern Ghana, December 9)
  
• Setting Ablazeof 72 Year-Old Woman Case Adjourned to Dec 23 (Della Russell Ocloo, Modern Ghana, December 22)
  
• Why are 'witches' still being burned alive in Ghana? (Cameron Duodo, Guardian, December 31)

Al Giordano on the Tucson shootings

If you've never heard of Al Giordano, well, it's high time you did. Below you can read an excerpt from his long and very thoughtful essay: "Tucson: An Eye for an Eye Blinds All", but you really should go to the link and read the whole darned thing.

I don't agree with everything Giordano has to say, but his is such a unique voice that this really should go without saying.

Much ado has been made in recent hours about Sarah Palin’s map that expressly “targeted” Arizona US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ district, and others, with graphic gun sights, and also of Palin’s (and others’) ham-handed attempts to “scrub” her own images and statements from the Internet, as well as similar use of lock-and-load ballistic language by Republicans, including by the 2010 campaign rival of Giffords who, contrary to the initial hurried media reports, still lives (for now) after a bullet went through her brain on Saturday. And, yes, all such propaganda was and is stupid and reckless, bad speech that can only be countered by good speech.

And certainly there is truth to the statement by Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik after Saturday’s shooting in his county: “I'd just like to say that when you look at unbalanced people, how they are—how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths, about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

And yet the existence of good and decent Arizonans like Sheriff Dupnik, like Congresswoman Giffords, like the heroic intern Daniel Hernández and others at the scene of the crime who saved her life and subdued the shooter, also cuts against liberal bigotries and prejudices that arise when the word “Arizona” rings like Pavlov’s bell and liberal dogs begin to salivate so smugly that they are superior to conservative canines. The self-satisfied belief by so many coastal and urbane and “educated” Americans that they are superior to other countrymen and women not like them has been pricked once again by human events.

But if I had a nickel for every Facebook status update I’ve seen in the past two days directly calling Palin the “assassin” and saying, without a hint of nuance or irony, that “hate speech” caused the violence in Tucson, I might be able to buy Zuckerberg out and put the entire social network out of its misery. To this came the predictable calls to legislate or outlaw said “hate speech,” like that of US Rep. Bob Brady (D-Pennsylvania) who is getting media attention by announcing he’ll introduce legislation “making it a federal crime to threaten or incite violence against a member of Congress or a federal official.” (Interestingly, when Hugo Chávez backed similar laws in Venezuela, the US media called it an attack on free speech and democracy, which either it is or it isn’t in either country, but it can’t be one thing in Venezuela and a different thing in the United States, can it? How about, say, in Iran, where dissidents by the thousands shout “death to the dictator” from rooftops at nightfall? Is that "hate speech" that the State is justified to punish?)

Of course, the delicate matter of who decides what constitutes a threat or incitement to violence is the 900-pound gorilla in any such attempt to legislate what can or can’t be said. In that sense, Brady and others beating that drum are the 2011 versions of Ari Fleischer of 2001. Please, just look in the mirror: Have the past 48 hours turned you, too, into a "liberal" version of Ari Fleischer?

Jack Shafer at Slate – whose first instincts on matters of speech are almost always the best instincts an American can have – decries, “The awesome stupidity of the calls to tamp down political speech in the wake of the Giffords shooting," in his essay, yesterday, “In Defense of Inflamed Rhetoric”:

“For as long as I've been alive, crosshairs and bull's-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates. Such "inflammatory" words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing, burying, knee-capping, and others have similarly guided political thought and action. Not once have the use of these images or words tempted me or anybody else I know to kill. I've listened to, read—and even written!—vicious attacks on government without reaching for my gun. I've even gotten angry, for goodness' sake, without coming close to assassinating a politician or a judge…

“Any call to cool ‘inflammatory’ speech is a call to police all speech, and I can't think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power.”

Within weeks of the September 11 tragedy, I wrote similar thoughts in The Nation (“Never Shut Up, New York,” November 5, 2001), pushing back against efforts by the Bush administration and the media to silence dissent, wielding that moment’s trauma as its bludgeon. How heartbreaking to see, today, some of the same people who cheered that defense of speech against right wing efforts advocating to quell it now promote silence and censorship if inflammatory speech comes from the right instead of the left!

The national left-vs.-right political dysfunction in the United States has been on full display since Saturday. It’s so palpable that when Keith Olbermann, on Saturday, offered a nine-minute commentary on MSNBC, eight minutes criticizing the speech of right wingers like Palin, one minute of introspective self-criticism over times his own passions had caused him to say inflammatory things he now says he regrets, and zero minutes criticizing “the left,” that the reaction from many self-proclaimed “left” circles was to accuse him of stating “false moral equivalencies.” The vested interest among many of pinning the alleged homicidal acts of 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner on Republican politicians and their partisans reveals, I fear, more worrisome impulses among the accusers than among the accused. It is too many "progressives" today, revealing that their sense of politics is no more than another version of "an eye for an eye," the same as when it comes from their conservative adversaries.