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I’ve been immersed in Biblical scholar Bruce Chilton’s Rabbi Jesus: An intimate biography, a text that seeks to ground the Christ story within history, cultural, political, and economic norms, architecture and archeology of Galilee and Judea and in the world of Judaism.
And there is much that is rich, rebellious and revolutionary about Chilton’s imaginal and scholarly exercise, and much that could be said, but what has been rattling around in my head this past week has little to do with the central points of this biography, and nothing to do with ancient history. Just this, now:
The atmosphere of impurity that Roman culture engendered did more than simply repel the sensibilities of observant Galileans like Jesus. It heightened their sense that demons – supernatural agents of impurity – threatened them. Herod Antipas’ regime was a particular source of distress… When an ancient cemetery was discovered on the land being cleared for the new city (Tiberias), Herod Anitpas arrogantly pressed ahead rather than change the city’s design. He desecrated ground set aside to keep corpses separate from God and Israel and subjected residents to pollution… The defilement radiated outward across Galilee like a contagious disease. Unclean spirits were not perceived as a ghoulish flock of ghosts but a seeping infectious miasma.
This named something for me about how I am experiencing the moment we are in. A slowly rising, choking, deadly miasma ushered in, promulgated by the filthy indulgences of murderously greedy rulers and oligarchs.
Disease, literal, metaphorical, and spiritual planetary spreading out across the land. I’ve been smelling it my whole life. Trying to survive the collective illness. Trying to keep others alive. Healing. Trying to survive the collective illness Trying to keep others alive. It has always been here, but is now cumulative, thick, inescapable, and for many at the ever-expanding sites flooded with fouled air, un-survivable. Fascism, colonialism, imperialism, are not only fixated on notions of purity, but are themselves perverse, impure, spirit-wind. A spreading, compounding fart across the land. Impurity. Miasma. I don’t think there is a fascist problem and just before that there was a pandemic. I think it is a wholly entangled, flickering sequelae, chicken and egg and chicken event. A climate collapse, a plague, wealth disparity, technofascism, ecofascism, immigration, populism, eugenicist movements, extremism, gun violence, mental health crises. And it is also a profound spiritual disease. It is a cloud demon, a viral bacterial fog, an airborne disease carried into each other’s nostrils through fear and pheromones and knowing that it was all going to break down when the seasons started destabilizing but we weren’t ready to face it. It was a kind of pollution in the air we breathe that was unpleasant but had to be ignored for the most part. Like the inhabitants of Tiberius, who knew what lurked under the ground they lived on but who also didn’t want to know. Serving the will of a Herod who joyfully built a city of indulgence over of sacred ground. They knew the smell. They had to, or chose to, just get used to it. Same. And this to me means, in some form, that there is an opportunity to think about the problem of evil in a way that relives my heart in a way that I can’t quite understand but maybe because it is too true and too elemental to comfortably name. This is about the miasma that travels around the world from place to place, expanding, abating, annihilating, destroying, polluting. Traveling.
An ill-wind blows. And this is an interesting way to think of practices of exorcism as a response to an imaginary miasmic-evil. Not as a battle with ghoulish flock of ghosts, a not even slightly individualized haze of particles, contaminants. The fumes waft in. The community collapse starts subtly, too low-grade to notice. The symptoms are so varied it takes a long time for a culture of individualized specialists to notice that the imbalances are in the air we breathe, in our heart beats, in and among the herd. All inhale it. No one notices. And those who do notice must do whatever they can, gather anyone they can, to summon a cleansing wind. What if celebrity villains and politicians and greedy billionaires are but one symptom of planetary national, cultural disease? What if the problem is, more shaped like a inescapable vapor that belches out of the earth itself when it is pressed into imbalance? What if this is what it meant, what it means, to do battle with toxic gassy unclean spirits? What are the implications of “exorcism” as a community practice that calls the winds to clear away the miasma?
See, I’m so tired of evil being only being tied to news-worthy individuals. I’m sick of those individuals. Truly. I need a different metaphor, a wider lens. And I don’t want to carry any of this alone. What would an organized, collective response to the dangerous contaminated wind, a global exorcism even look like? What would the Whos in Whoville come up with? A giant yellow fan that required everyone in the world to flip a switch setting off some Rube Goldberg shenanigans to start the fan and save each other? And the nations, with stars on their bellies or none upon thars, dance with glee together that they have blown away, exorcised the contaminated, infectious deadly fog. A group project. What if this is the job of spirit-workers psyche-ologists and activists, meditators, fantasy and scifi writers, visionaries, all those who pray or listen or create? To work on driving out the miasma that viral violence and oppression create and feed on.
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