I’m pretty sure Peanuts is the apex product of the midcentury American canon, and more specifically the Charlie Brown holiday TV specials.

Like, A Charlie Brown Christmas, 1965, the first one.

Coca-Cola commissioned a 30-minute animated film with a jazz soundtrack based off the breakthrough comic strip repackaging depressive cynicism for kids. The plot is that the protagonist is depressed and so his psychiatrist tells him to conduct religious rituals to gain a sense of purpose but no one’s even taking the rituals seriously so they don’t work and the climax is literally straight-up King James Bible verses about our savior Jesus Christ reminding them to take the Christmas rituals seriously, at which point everyone is happy.

And America was like “yes, correct, this is so correct that we want to incorporate it itself into our national-popular Christmas rituals every year”, like the Swedes and their Donald Duck thing.

In fact, how about more like that, let’s reenchant every holiday in the civic canon with this vision of Protestant reserve in the face of failure. Let’s do Halloween, let’s do Thanksgiving, let’s do Election Day, Valentine’s Day, let’s… GAINAX made a Charlie Brown holiday special in 2002? What the fuck.

Let’s do Easter, come the ‘70s let’s do Arbor Day (that one didn’t catch on)…

Aaaaaaah, you know what I’d been forgetting for a while when I picture the Crucifixion? The crown of thorns. That is such a great detail. I was just thinking about flower crowns and realized I’d forgotten about it for years.

(Really, wouldn’t “universal donor” have been a better label than “INRI”?)

lotusglitter:

wifihunters:

someone asked me to draw my entire angel headcanon really fast i don’t thINK THIS WORKED??

#i had a dream that ended in the words ‘We are geometric law and fluidity in one’ and it became my inspo #six wings one head long flowy robe and however many hands needed #fabric like nebulas and translucent /sphere/ halo so it’s a perf circle no matter where you look from #light it like molotov cocktail and boom angel from the book of amanda

I take holidays very seriously. Culture and cultus and all. The thing that most bugged me about the reign of Bush the Younger was declaring September 11th as “Patriot Day”. HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO CELEBRATE PATRIOT DAY? Parades? Barbecues? Mattress sales?

(I threw a Jenga tournament.)

Anyway. Christmas made the transition to post-Christianity pretty well. It’s the feast of one half of the new Santa Claus/Batman dual god, one of the biggest holidays of the year, strong enough that people make up knockoffs.

(and don’t think you’re daring for pointing out that Kwanzaa is bullshit, actual black nationalists realized that by, like, Nia of 1966)

But Easter, man.

I think part of that is the secular aspects haven’t kept up with the times. Christmas gifting went from rare exotic fruits and nuts to rare consumer electronics, Easter from rare chocolate and candies to trivially ubiquitous chocolate and candies.

I mean that’s the only time you get bunny chocolate (pf, no one cares about the Easter bunny) and creme eggs (fair) but psh.

So, ideas:

• expand the egg hunt thing, make it a day for huge scavenger hunts, like the Herald Hunt. (Dave Barry is a national treasure.)

• deprecate it in favor of Good Friday. This sets up a 3-day weekend in its role as “spring festival” and reorients it around death. That’s weird for a spring festival, but it could work. In one direction, as a celebration of the time humanity managed to kill a god, in another set it up as the “Batman” feast, maybe by transposing the Crucifixion elements of Marian cultism.

Raised nominally Catholic so I got the Princess Bride version of the Bible - an elder figure reading us the Good Parts Version.

Did actually read it myself once before, in like 3rd grade, book by book to earn Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizzas. Gave up somewhere before the New Testament.

So rereading it’s been a blast, really. It’s better and weirder than I remember and I’m picking up on all sorts of stuff.

Like the creation of Eve and the temptation reads as a mythologizing not of gender but of language and metacognizance - man’s said to name the animals in Gen 2:20 but doesn’t clearly speak until 2:23 now that he has someone to talk to (and be heard by).

And then Genesis 3, that the snake’s temptation is the first actual conversation in the bible, speech up to now being proclamative - the forbidden fruit is eaten because people can talk.

And the first-order reading is “language introduces corruption and deceit”, but more interesting is language introduces the self. It’s because of language that they recognize their nudity - which is to say, they’re able to model how they’re seen by others. And the episode dramatizes how language, and thus persuasion, require the cultivation of a sense of self with enough “mass” to resist argumentation - this whole conflict coming from the way man and woman had simply done the will of whoever spoke to them last.

The snake totally isn’t the rebel Lucifer or the adversary Satan, he seems more like an abortive trickster figure. He’s useful to add a third party to the temptation (language also means your kin are vectors for invasive memes), and also my headcanon is he’s the same figure who tempts Jesus during his 40 days in the desert, and possibly the reason for the 40 years in the desert when he steps in after God exhausted himself with the plagues and Red Sea and stuff.

Genesis 3:22-24, woah I missed this. God’s like “now man’s aware like us(!), nothing stopping him from eating the immortality fruit, better gate it with a boss fight”. How has that plot thread not paid off somewhere? You’ve got grail romances and the fountain of youth and the philosopher’s stone, how have I not read an immortality quest that uses the hook in the opening of our culture’s foundational text?

Is Genesis 4:1 implying that Cain’s conception was an act of God (but in 4:2 Abel’s just happens)? That’s one of those Old Testament precedents I don’t remember hearing.

Genesis 6 is ridiculous. After a page of begats it’s all “And there were all these hot chicks, and these superhumans, and the superhumans banged the hot chicks, and their kids were all badass warrior heroes”, and then God’s like “UGH, this is too grimdark, I regret making it.”

THE FLOOD WAS GOD REBOOTING HIS EMBARRASSING T&A HACK & SLASH WEBCOMIC TO MAKE A SRS BZNS FANTASY EPIC

You’d think the whole “create women” thing backfired on God, but by Noah’s ark when he goes for a do-over he doubles down on the sexual complimentary thing, sons and wives and even the animals paired.

But that’s God for you, eventually he comes around. That’s what I’m picking up, his character doesn’t really read as an essence of perfection or really as a tyrant - he’s distant, a little pompous, a little out of touch but ultimately seems to want good things and eventually comes around in the end.

And my mind’s like “you mean, like some sort of… patriarch?”

And I’m like “yes, exactly like an… oh. Huh.”

Saying “the Bible is a love letter to patriarchy” sounds so banal but it really is, it really really is. The Old Testament is in a lot of ways a narrative about the triumphs and frustrations of a first-time father, one of those photomosaics composed of lots of little explorations of fathers and fatherhood.

I’m looking forward to reading the Book of Job imagining Calvin’s Dad as God.

Well this came in a while ago, but it’s referencing something even older. Someone was archive diving, took me a while to even find that one to link. That you, lovegodsmashtyrants? morosombrero?

Eh. I don’t believe in any gods, but I do practice worship of the local gods wherever I go. Down in Echo Park I gave offerings to Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde, when I was up in the Idaho Panhandle the whole place was clearly sanctified to Jesus so I gave thanks to him. I don’t think any divinities have established clear dominion over Portland, but the Germanic forest gods seem to have as strong a claim as anyone.

One of the (two or three) religions I’ve had it in my head to found eventually is Library Judaism.

(I grew up around Philadelphia, where the local Jewish community stretches back to colonial merchant families for whom it essentially became the Hebrew-ethnic branch of mainline Protestantism, Reform before Reform or even Mendelssohn; there was some immigration later on but the existing population set up settlement houses right quick to assimilate them lest the old guard be tainted by an association of Jewishness with yokeldom. The generation or two before me the community shifted to, and then from Freudian Judaism, by my youth the local Jewish families were mostly distinguished by taking their children seriously and having all walls of least one room of their house lined with books and I wanted in on that. Later on with more experience and further travels I encountered Orthodox [Modern and otherwise] Judaism; grievance-mongering Shoah Judaism; and the ethnochauvinist Staten Islanders, equivalent to the Boston Irish and Jersey Italians; those communities and styles impressed me less.)

The idea being that each house of worship would consist on one hand of a library, secular in orientation, housing humanistic works - a core canon plus whatever the particular congregation saw fit to focus on. And on the other hand a temple including a shrine to one particular diety drawn from any religious or representative tradition that the congregation would be named for, plus two lesser “junior” shrines.

And sects could form around one of the junior focuses and eventually calve off from the parent church, and it would be possible to use the shrines to syncretize with any existing religion - you could have a God the Father//Christ the Son/Holy Spirit setup for example, which wouldn’t be orthodox trinitarianism obviously but “imperfectly orthodox” and “new syncretic religion” kind of go hand in hand you know.

(And obviously it’s a stretch to call it Judaism to begin with, but I mean, “claiming continuity with traditional Judaism” is a pretty successful strategy for a startup religion - look at Christianity, and Islam, and Mormonism, and Adventism, or even say Reform, or even Rabbinical Judaism, to say nothing of the variants in the previous parenthetical paragraph.)

And then I thought on it a bit more, and the Google-equivalent in my brain was like

You searched for: pan-Western humanistic religion with strong elements of syncretism

Did you mean: the Roman Catholic Church?

But the thing is, I was raised Catholic, ish, enough. Taken to weekly Masses, was in CCD but kicked out before I could be confirmed which fair enough, I don’t, and didn’t, believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died, and was buried, rose from the dead, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father, in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who came upon the apostles at Pentecost, in the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting, and was honest enough that I would have told the bishop so.

And oh, well, of course that’s just the fault of the degraded post-Vatican II church that drained the mystery and magic from Catholicism, that can’t catechize for shit, yada yada yada, right?

But I honestly find all the enthusiastic traditionalist-bordering-on-sedevacantists who peddle that line a little ridiculous. For one, because the idea of communicants being so obsessed with recovering and upholding The Proper Theology in the face of a church corrupted by concessions to the fallen world is more Prot than any modern Protestantism I’ve ever encountered, which tends to focus more on charisma and the born-again experience.

For two, their obsessive hate of On Eagle’s Wings. I loved On Eagle’s Wings, it was my favorite song in church. Precisely because it wasn’t as intricate as the ~beautiful~ choral music they fetishize, anyone with no particular training could just belt it out and feel part of something. (If you had put me on the spot to guess where it had come from, I would have said maybe a 19th century Boston Protestant hymn.)

Because my father, the guy who even tried to raise me Catholic in the first place, was an altar boy back before Vatican II. He told me what those old Latin Masses were actually like - a series of posture changes set to bells, while a priest spoke inaudibly to a wall in a dead language and the real energy was in the pews, where veiled widows from the old country rocked back and forth clutching at their fetishes and wailing prayers, basically attempting to cast magic spells.

And he told me of how he and an Italian altar boy (who would later be my godfather, and operate a motel just over the Philly border known for hosting prostitutes and outlaws, with an impressive pool/gym complex in the basement that I only ever saw used by him and my father and I on Friday nights, though I hear it was open to members of the local police as a courtesy) would get assigned to all the high-tipping funeral and wedding Masses, in return for kicking back some of their share to the priest, a genial old Irishman of the drunken, gambling, whoremongering type.

Because like, that’s what “true” Catholicism always was - as a practice, thinly whitewashed peasant paganism; as an institution, a collection of corrupt local elites, no different from your typical backwater courthouse gang, only with priests for lawyers and the parish for the county.

The scholasticist tradition the neotraditionalists hark back to was never more than a sideshow (albeit one that could occasionally accomplish something when by chance a power vacuum opened up to be filled by someone who took it seriously) conducted by a bunch of ivory-tower monks and minor nobility who were looking for an alternative hierarchy they could scramble to the top of. And the whole Chesterbelloc, Inklings thing was never more than an arcadian fantasia by a bunch of podunk punks too in love with themselves to notice that the sedate, “properly ordered” rural landscape and society they loved so much wasn’t a remnant of the good old days but the very product of the enclosure and industrialization that had driven all the peasants and all the productive activity to the dirty, squalid cities they recoiled from. Nothing more than a bunch of pompous pipe-smokers smoking each others’ pipes over how wise and noble they must be for rising to the top of this backwater society when the truth was there was nothing and no one left to rule over and no one of any ambition and competence could be bothered to compete.

And pf. Bitch, please.

skelenabones:

i find the use of the term “witchcraft” when people are discussing actual popular historical magical practices from the early modern or medieval periods of Europe to be vexing and confusing, because the way people use it tends to carry along an ahistorical set of assumptions that has more to do with early neopagan misunderstandings of history than anything else. namely, when people seek ‘witchcraft’ in these time periods they are usually seeking non-christian folk magical practices and beliefs. a big reason this is the case is because early neopagans like Gardner bought into poor scholarship that suggested that during the period of the witch trials there existed sects of surviving pagan practitioners who did magic, and that often these practitioners were the target of the trials. most people seeking historical witchcraft know this was never true, these witch cults did not exist, but the way they use the term witchcraft means they’re ironically basically looking for the mythical practices Gardner and others believed in. why this is especially vexing is that it causes people interested in ‘witchcraft’ to skip entirely over the large corpus of christian magical practices that are decently well documented and were practiced by people in almost every level of society from the bottom to the top. pro-tip you know who was the most prevalent professional magical practitioner in most medieval western European towns, almost certainly even surpassing wise women and other similar folk? the village priest

pureamericanism:

kontextmaschine:

I myself think that Batman is the flip side of Santa Claus, who - as I’ve said - in turn is the modern vision of the Christian God.

The lineage follows that in the age of desert nomadism, God was a force that created water and food in the desert and rearranged inconvenient geography - mountains, seas; that in the age of early settlement and tribal war he demanded ethnic solidarity, granting in return victory in war; that in the era where settled tribes were subsumed into Mediterranean empire, he was a fisherman/shepherd who unified mankind and ended war; that in the era of courtly feudalism he was at the head of heirarchies of angels, saints rewarded with face time to press their clients’ claims; and so obviously in the age of bourgeois democracy he’s an industrialist who rewards socially approved behavior with consumer goods and punishes its opposite with violence.

“Santa Claus is a god. He’s no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn’t ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially-garbed priests in all the department stores. And don’t gods reflect their creators’ society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption?”

—From “Nackles”, by Donald Westlake

adactivity:

monetizeyourcat:

pretty much everything we know about Jesus’s appearance comes from the fairly reasonable argument “if he looked different from the expected appearance of a religious leader or messiah in some way it would have been remarked on”

Isaiah remarks that he (the messiah) would be “No beauty that we should desire him” but that’s classic PUA strategy of “negging” the messiah through reverse psychology to make him so love the world etc.

bloodandhedonism:

kontextmaschine:

headcanon: Joseph Smith discovered a more efficient means of extracting mana, the LDS Church drew down the reserves of the Burned-Over District and then (with the Azusa Street Revival, Taos mystics, and LA neospiritualists) drained the American Southwest and now is powered mostly by the extensive reserves of the Pacific islands

This sounds like it would be a good story. Develop it.

“story”?

Seriously, though, I’ve had a few universes in my head that might fit into. That pilot I mentioned was for sort of a Xena of the Americas - all the history and mythology mashed together. (Don’t know the native mythologies that well so it mostly would be settler mythologies OF the native mythologies) The migration of African gods with the slaves, the Mormon stories about Jesus in the Americas, the challenge of enlightenment rationalism.

Also since this was 2009 it had zombies (Baron Samedi), pirates (the protagonists) and steampunk elements (Freemasons).

Also I’ve had ideas for stories of the Wandering Jew, who’s actually a North African tribesman whose beloved was sacrificed to a river god, rebelled, and made it his mission to kill all gods, complicated by the fact that by now he essentially is the god of toolmaking and humanity. Jahweh’s his great enemy and a lot of the shit that falls on Jews was his devising, to attack God’s power base. He’s the one who gave Hitler the Spear of Destiny for example, because after all he *was* Longinus.

headcanon: what makes a place particularly supernaturally active is not leylines but mana, which is to the spiritual as humus and petrochemicals are to the physical: a residue of old dead life. Conscious life can both use and replenish mana at greater volumes. Like petrochemicals and soil mana can be exhausted when use exceeds replenishment; this is how cultures decline and achieve palingenesis through war and genocide

I’m playing Minecraft and it’s a problem, i keep getting dirt or sand worlds but I grew up Catholic* so I kept hearing not to build my house on sand so i have to dig

*it was kind of like Princess Bride, we got a wise older figure to read us the Good Parts Version