Five Hours in Vegas
What a week.
Where politics are urgently concerned: I hope all of you are following the unfolding story behind the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. In addition to being scary and tragic, this event is likely to have an enormous impact on the politics of the entire region. With his usual swiftness, Ali Eteraz has compiled information from several sources and written a personal analysis as well. Click over and read.
Our flight from Seattle to Denver last week was delayed (along with hundreds of others), the result of which was that Omar and I spent about five hours held against our will in Las Vegas. We arrived at midnight to find that the rumors are true: there are slot machines at the gates in the airport. Too tired and dirty to hang out in any more terminals, we got a room at a nearby hotel for a few hours so we could shower and pray and get a little sleep. If you’re ever in the mood to permanently alter your perspective, take a cab along the Strip in the middle of the night when you haven’t slept in 24 hours. I think you could probably see those eight blocks from space--they were lit up as bright as the death of some star; metallic and blue and totally without shadow. It was beautiful in the way that anything pushed to an extreme is beautiful--I go back and forth about whether such overreaching is cheap or brilliant. Our hotel was a trumped up version of the one we always stay at in Luxor (the real Luxor), which we simply call “And Horse” because of a strangely aphoristic advertising slogan the management once used to lure people to its New Years Eve party. By which I mean it was beyond tacky...the thing actually contained a tiki lounge. I’d always assumed tiki lounges were a myth invented by Quentin Terantino. I was wrong.
In Boulder, I met up with some old high school friends who are magicians. No, I’m serious. Two are in PhD programs; the third is a deep-sea diver. The most accomplished of these studies ancient religions at Yale and speaks Coptic, Greek, Latin and Aramaic, has full-sleeve tattoos and plays in a metal band. I hadn’t sat down with these three together in eight or nine years. All of us used to look at the world in a very similar way: filtered through a diligently researched, Ecco-esque blend of many forms of paganism. I was always the ascetic and wanted something more stripped-down and abstract; for me monotheism was inevitable. It was interesting, now that we’re all adults, to see how their ideas, which followed the Left Hand much more closely than my own, have developed. I asked at one point--this is the question I ask all polytheists--how they navigate a truth that assimilates the facets of the world separately rather than as a system. In other words, how does one reconcile the existence of (for instance) a sea god and a moon god who are independent of each other, when the moon has been proven to affect the tides? “The alternative is too massive,” said the deep-sea diver. “I’m conscious of the great white light [tongue in cheek], but it’s too big for me to approach directly.”
Food for thought.
Hope everyone has had a merry Christmas, a happy Hannukah, a blessed Eid and a joyful Yule.
Posted by on 12/28 at 09:03 PM
Salamaat,
Isn’t it ironic(?) that some polytheists have greater awe for the magnitude of “God” while many Monotheists fall into a trap of compacting Him into narrow spaces?
Posted by
Maliha on 12/31 at 03:39 PM
Polytheism is something I would like to understand--if you think about it long enough you can get to a kind of intuitive understanding of almost any religion, I think, so that even if it contains nothing that attracts you spiritually you sense why it might attract others. I understood polytheism on an intuitive level when I was a teenager, but I don’t anymore. I think you’re right that monotheists are often guilty of shrinking God, however...ironically what I think they shrink Him into is something almost like a god in a polytheistic pantheon: a deity with limited powers, human emotions of boredom and anger and jealousy, and who occupies physical space (ie, who exists in some places but not in others). So while a polytheist might say “There is only one God, but the wise know him by many names” (this is an actual Hindu saying), there are monotheists out there who say “There is only one God, and he is as small and petty as any irritable Apollo or Zeus.”
God will judge which is the more enlightened.
Posted by Willow on 12/31 at 06:34 PM
Happy New Years
Back when I was getting “Spiritual” but wasn’t a Muslim yet, and kinda poking around, I talked to a couple idols. Never really did much for me; I think, for lack of a better word, polytheism tends to be too ‘personal’ for my understanding. You’re worshipping limited, flawed beings just as messed up as you are; why not just let my neighbors push me around and take my stuff and thank them and pray to them for it?
What’s monotheistic and what isn’t is a bit tricky though. I don’t accept the Salafi superman esque version of Allah, who leads me back to the same problems I had with polytheism, Ibn Arabi’s psuedo-pantheism makes more sense to me but is really difficult to understand, and there are several other views. Several strains of Hinduism believe in ‘gods’ but also hold that worship of these gods isn’t nexcessary since a person can reach the absolute of Brahman through meditative practices; some varieties of Hinduism (a very slippery, broad term) are as absolutely monotheistic as Islam, Judaism, or Sikhism, and some are simultaneously believers in the Vedas and consdier themselves atheists living in an impersonal universe. Some schools of Daoist thought believe in gods but don’t really pay much heed to them, believing them unimportant when pursuing the Dao. Some Shia pray to Ali but deny vehemently that he is a god, simply that they want him to put in a good word with god (this doesn’t make sense to me on an Islamic basis, but I’d hesitate to call them polytheists). Hazrat Inayat Khan said that many polytheists had simply personified various attributes of Allah and forgotten that they were a united entity; the same way someone might, not understanding Tawhid, take Al-Muhayim and Ash-Shahid to be different beings.
A very good friend of mine is a Tibetan Buddhist teacher (well, he’s actually an Italian American, but you know what I mean) and I gotta say, it seems really tied into a very, rvery complex system of rituals, favors, symbols, and beings to go to. It’s interesting on one level to me, but seems really cluttered and not horribly practical. Less emphasis is put on moral and ethical dimensions and more on what “empowerment” you got from whatever teacher. Plus, as with most polytheistic systems (and I think it qualifies as one, though the Dharma teachings sort of tie it together), I always get the distinct impression that the adherents don’t really BELIEVE in the beings in question. I met a couple Asatru people when I lived in Norway, and they would talk in terms that made me think they didn’t consider Odin or Thrall to be real beings, more like archetypes or a folk revival. Same with black Khimet practitioners who often seem to just regard it as them recaliming their ethnic roots, or Santeros who probably don’t believe that the Orixa they were talking to was an actual, listening creature who would help them out. In my humble opinion.
Sorry for such a long ramble. Is wearing an Isis hoodie polytheism? Cos they’re a sweet band.
Posted by
Dave "Islamofascism Not Isis" on 01/05 at 05:19 AM
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