Proofs for God, Again

According to Scott Siskind, people on the Internet are once again debating proofs of the existence of God. He calls our attention to an alternative explanation, Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, which posits that all possible mathematical objects exist. I do not find this any more interesting than most proposals in this field. Siskind lists these various arguments for god's existence:

• Cosmological: Why is there something rather than nothing?
• Fine-tuning: Why are the values of various cosmological constants exactly perfect for life?
• Argument from comprehensibility: why is the universe so simple that we can understand it?
• First cause argument: All things must have a cause.
• Teleological argument: Why does the world have interesting structures like living things?

All of these, it seems to me, boil down to saying that the universe cannot be explained by its own laws; therefore, something outside the universe, or not bound by its laws, is required to explain it. To that I would say, first, that we do not understand the laws of the universe well enough to make that claim, and second, so what? If we cannot understand that thing outside our universe in any way, or know anything about its purposes or whatever, what difference does it make what we call it? What is the point in talking about it?

The universe is a mystery; we do not know why it is here or why it is the way it is or whether we have some special role in it. What does the word "god" add to that basic insight? If by "god" you mean, "whatever explains what we can't explain," I can't really object. I simply don't get why taking the old notion of "god" as a superpowerful sort of being and using it in this abstract way is helpful. 

Rather than toward Max Tegmark, I would direct those concerned with this problem to David Hume. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion he created a dialogue between Philo, a skeptic, and Demea, a deist:

Philo the skeptic says that we cannot understand or know anything about a transcendent reality that explains or sustains the ongoing order of nature, while theists such as Demea say that we cannot understand or know anything about the transcendent reality, which is God, that explains or sustains the ongoing order of nature. Since the inserted clause does not help us in the least, the difference between them is merely verbal. And this is Hume's conclusion.

Hell in Nineteenth-Century China

Life is Short, a demon

In his amazing history of what we usually call the Taiping Rebellion, God's Chinese Son: the Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, (1996) Jonathan Spence takes a long look at the ritual calendar of southern China in the early 1800s. It was astonishingly dense. Essentially every day was sacred to some being or another, from Bodhisattvas to the spirits of local springs, so a superstitious person of the era must have been very busy propitiating all those powers. For example, the first day of the first lunar month belongs to the Maitreya Buddha, who rules the future, usually depicted as a fat and smiling man; he should be propiated with prayer and by vows to respect the will of heaven. 

The eighth day, in contrast, belongs to Yan Luo, known to all as the king of hell. Strangely, though, the Jade Record notes that Yan Luo has lost his former proud position as lord of the first of the hellish palaces. In that role, long ago, he proved too compassionate to those who had been unjustly killed, and allowed them simply to return to earth again to lead new lives.

This Jade Record was one of the most widely circulated religious Chinese tracts in the 1820s and 1830s. Because its folk Buddhist theology seemed to Spence to be important background to the rise of Hong Xiquan and his loosely Christian "Heavenly Kingdom," he devoted several pages to its horrifically detailed description of what happened to souls in the afterlife. This disgression within a digression is my favorite part of God's Chinese Son, which may say something interesting about my own taste in history.

According to the text, those who spread copies of the Jade Record and encourage others to read it

not only escape the worst torments of hell, and bring prosperity to their families and descendants, but in the transmigration of their souls may be reborn as human beings, or even move to higher stages of life – men to the happy lands, and women to the lives of men.

but

those who ignore, deface, or mock the tracts will find no such mercy, but be condemned at death to descend to the lower layers hell and, according to their crimes on earth, move through each of the ten hellish places in turn.

Pictures in the Jade Record show, for those who cannot read, how the judged souls are transformed. Only a few return as happy, healthy humans. Of the others, some are allowed to stay human, yes, but condemned to be ugly, misshapen, poor, and ill; while many, according to their sins, return as horses, dogs, birds, fish, or creeping things.

Near the palace of the first hell is a tower 63 measures tall (= 9x7, so the product of two magical numbers; among their other accomplishments the Chinese created the world's most extenisve numerology). Devils take the unfortunate souls to the top of the tower, from where they can view the families they left behind and see that rather than mourning their loss they are 

cursing the dead one's memory, defying his instructions, selling off the goods and property he so painfully acquired, and battling through lawsuits for what is left.

After this discouragement they are assigned to one of sixteen dungeons.

Under the Highest God's general supervision, each of the other nine gods of hell has his holy day, and an invocation that, if correctly and respectfully uttered, may war off his rage. Cumulatively, among themselves, they judge every foible of which humans are capable, and few will escape bing punished by them. The role of the god who rules the first hell is a prelimninary scrutiny of the newly dead, prior to passing them on to others. In his palace hangs a mirror, called the Mirror of Reflection, where all must see their own sins through their own eyes. 

The catalog of sins and sinners in the Jade Record is very extensive:

Thither go the quack doctors, the priests who deceive children of either sex to be their acolytes, people who sequester other's scrolls or pictures, marriage go-betweens who lie about their clients charms. Hither come shop clerks who deceive their customers, prisoners rightfully condemned who escape from jail and avoid punishment, grave robbers, tax evaders, posters of abusive bills, and negotiators of divorce. . . .

Death Has Gradations, another demon

Souls are guided through this process by two demons known as Life is Short (that's him at the top of the post) and Death Has Gradations, above. 

It is always hard to know what to make of such notions. On the one hand, there was no shortage in China of all the things the lords of hell were supposed to punish, so the warnings may not have been very effective. On the other, people have devoted a remakable amount of effort to propitiating unseen powers: building temples, performing pilgrimages, carrying out rites of a thousand kinds. Belief, as I have said many times, is a hard thing to quantify, but there are certainly senses in which it matters a great deal.

Tanit

Tanit was the chief goddess of Carthage, but that is where agreement about her ceases. She was usually  represented in this striking geometric way. So it is easy to find thousands of images of her from all across Carthage's empire.

As to where she came from, well, just her wikipedia article says in one paragraph that the name obviously comes from Berber and is thus North African, in another that the name comes from Ugarit, and in another that it may be derived from Astarte, the Phoenician mother goddess, equivalent to Ishtar. So, yeah. 

Probably best to think of her as the local variant of the Great Goddess worshipped across the Middle East. Some online sources say that before Carthage became independent of Phoenicia in the 6th century Astarte was the main goddess, and Tanit only emerged after 500 BC. So perhaps her rise was attached to local Carthaginian pride.

In Roman times she was assimilated to various Greco-Roman deities, and started to look like this.

One of my favorite things about these great goddesses is the number of things they were associated with: fertility, virginity, civilization, farming, the moon, war, plague. And, sometimes, human sacrifice. But then I suppose there is no special reason a powerful, immortal being has to have limited interests.

Three-Faced Gods

Above, some Celtic three-faced gods from Roman Gaul. The obsession of our Indo-European ancestors with the number three has of course spawned a lot of speculation, much of it focusing on the quirks of our language. But I am not really convinced by any of it. There is a wonder to these triplings, a mystery, something we can almost grasp but that remains just outside our grip, a notion that things can be the same in some ways but nonetheless distinct, a basic idea that the divine world does not follow mundane laws. I would look to that sense of mystery rather than to any "explanation."

Anyway, these carvings did not disappear with Christianity, as you can see from the medieval versions below, all in French churches of the 12th to 15th centuries. Love the three-faced Pope, which hints that there used to be more of these images in now-vanished church paintings.

Again, I am reluctant to assign much meaning to these. Maybe they have something to do with the Trinity; maybe they are memories of ancient three-faced gods; maybe they are just arresting, provoking images that are really fun to carve.

T.M. Lurhman on the Anthropology of Faith

American anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann's whole career has been about trying to refine the notion of "belief." In her studies of British Wiccans, American evangelicals, and others, she has shown that people's statements about what they "believe" vary dramatically from day to day and situation to situation. What is core to religion, in her view, is experience, and belief is often secondary or even irrelevent to religion.

For as long as it has existed, anthropology has been partly about describing other societies and partly about critiquing the anthropologist's own society. Consider Tacitus using the supposed marital fidelity of German tribesmen to attack the morals of Rome, or Margaret Meade using Samoan practices to question the sexual repression of the early twentieth-century west. In this fascinating essay, Luhrmann asks how that works when it comes to religion. We often see anthropologists praising the child-rearing practices of those they study with the idea that westerners should copy them, but not so much when it comes to religion. Published anthropological studies almost all take a view that might be called methodological atheism, that is, one simply does not get into whether religious beliefs are true or false, or good or bad. 

Yet god is the most radically other of radical otherness. One might think that exploring this otherness might be the greatest challenge any anthropologist could bring to the everyday expectations of the world back home. Why have we not done so?

A group of anthropologists sometimes called "ontological" have indeed done this to some extent:  

The ontological turn might seem to be the place anthropologists have risen to this challenge of confronting radical otherness. The early ontological writings certainly seemed as if they would. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Morten Pederson, and Martin Holbraad wrote fiery texts about the ways that most anthropologists examined the belief commitments of people like those in Amazonia, Cuba, and Siberia. These ontologists argued that most anthropologists treated such beliefs with scorn.

They argued that most anthropological observers presumed that such beliefs must be wrong, or that we needed to provide an account of why people held false understandings—and that view, the ontologists argued, was driven by deep-seated colonialist impulses or a kind of scientific imperialism. The point of the ontological turn was to insist that we should abandon these presumptions and decolonize anthropological thought. Willerslev and Suhr quote Viveiros de Castro: “Anthropologists must allow that ‘visions’ are not beliefs, nor consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively; not world views, but worlds of vision” (2011: 133).

But these ontological anthropologists have not brought back observations from these local worlds in order to reimagine their own. One strongly doubts that Viveiros de Castro himself believes that women can become jaguars (to borrow the famous example). Neither Martin Holbraad nor Morten Pedersen has argued for an ontological understanding of his own world that seems different from the one he held before setting out to do fieldwork. Instead, in the recent (and admirably clear) summary of their position, they both appear to have pulled back from the claim that these other beliefs are veridical accounts of reality. To the extent that Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) accept these non-European belief commitments (the woman became a jaguar), they simply insist that these beliefs are veridical to others—and that, as James Laidlaw (2012) so articulately points out, leads us not into ontological confrontation but into epistemological relativism, the position that anthropologists have always held.

The anthropologists who are interested in how westerners might be changed by the encounter with others often focus on their own experience in a radically individual way:    

Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr make a different intellectual move. They focus on moments that are intellectually inexplicable from within an anthropologist’s secular worldview, and yet common in the lives of many fieldworkers.

Willerslev and Suhr draw from these moments a disciplinary epistemology of uncertainty and openness. They take the lesson that these events are the way that anthropological insights are made—that it is the shock of such moments that leads people trained into a certain worldview to break open into a different way of seeing. Anthropology grows, they say, with the ability to doubt what one knows, and through doubt, to change what one imagines. “This personal commitment to existential transformation of the self is as essential to the anthropological project as it was to Socrates” (73)

But since Luhrmann's study is focused on experience rather than belief, she sees the question differently:

To my mind, the powerful insight that arises out of the encounter with an alien god—alien to the anthropologist, that is—is that the purpose of life itself can be imagined differently as a result. We secular observers focus on the concept of “god” as a claim to a kind of stuffness— a real immateriality, a nature beyond ordinary nature (a supernature); perhaps, as George Eliot put it, the sound on the other side of silence. We often miss the important social fact that those of faith also take god to be radically other, too, and as a result, are often more committed to moral purpose than to supernatural reality. As an observer of the faithful, I want to point out that the most fundamental observation about faith is not that divine stuff exists, but that moral purpose in the face of uncertainty will change the world as we know it.

Faith is about seeing the world as it is and experiencing it—to some extent—as the world as it should be. Faith is about having trust that the world is good, safe, and beautiful. The blunt fact that these commitments are held in a world that is often brutal and unfair tells us that faith is hard and requires effort. Belief in a just, fair, good world is not some kind of mistake, not a deluded misconception that observers need to explain, but the fundamental point of the faith commitment—regardless of the supernatural nature of the divine. Faith is about holding certain commitments front and center in your understanding of reality even when the empirical facts seem to contradict them. That is why faith takes work and why faith changes the faithful. It is also why the encounter with the radical otherness of divinity should be central to anthropology, because it encourages the anthropologist to imagine how his or her own world and own life could be fundamentally different. . . .

The anthropological problem with god is that we treat the belief in the supernatural stuff as the heart of the matter. It is not. Far more central is the concept of radical otherness and its concomitant commitment that a sense of moral purpose can change the world as it is into the world as it should be whether anything empirical about that world changes at all.

Luhrmann, along with Weston La Barre, changed my own view of religion. I used to be a naive young atheist who always wanted to ask, "how can anyone believe that?" Now I see belief as a secondary phenomenon, something that arises from a commitment to a certain way of living and a strong desire to see meaning in the world, and I no longer wonder how smart people can immerse themeselves in it.

But I also find that I personally can't get away from belief. The problem, for me, with church services and the like is that people are always referencing beliefs that I don't share. Even a phrase like "Jesus said" launches me into questions about what we actually know about Jesus. I have met atheists who love divine music, but at least when it is sung in English I always get caught up in the theology. I am by nature an overthinking intellectual whose musings about divinity always start from facts, like those two trillion galaxies I like to reference. Regardless of what I feel, I can never shove the facts as we know them from the center of my mind long enough to experience the world in any other way.

Apollo Lord of Hounds

Near the wonderfully named village of Nettleton Shrub in Wiltshire, England, sit the remains of a Romano-British temple. This is actually a rarer sort of thing than you might imagine; only 150 temples are known from all of Roman Britain, when medieval England and Wales had about 10,000 parish churches. Like most such constructions it had a small temple building holding the cella, or sacred sanctuary, surrounded by a bank and ditch. The Fosse Way, one of Roman Britain's most important roads, ran through the enclosure. The temple seems to have been built where the road crossed a pleasant stream.

This category of temple is known to archaeologists as a "Temple of Local Pilgrimage." That's because the main thing we find at them is offerings made by people who travelled there for some specific religious purpose. Sometimes they were offering thanks, and sometimes they were asking the god to smite somebody.

This temple seems to have been dedicated to a deity known as Apollo Cunomaglus, who is named on this altar and on other artifacts from the site. That would mean something like "Apollo Lord of Dogs," although Ronald Hutton renders it "Apollo Dog Lover."

There is also a faction that insists on translating the name as "Apollo Lord of Wolves" and tying the site to an (imagined) ancient Celtic wolf cult. Given that the people of Roman Britain raised a lot of sheep I doubt they venerated wolves, so I am going with the dog people on this one. But even if we settle on dogs we still have not ended the argument, because one faction of dog people says this means dogs as the best friends of men and sheep and another faction wants to talk about dogs as guardians of the underworld. 

The most famous artifact from the site is a curse tablet that says

I give to the god Maglus him who did wrong from the slave-quarters; I give him who (did) theft from the slave-quarters; who stole the cloak of Servandus. . . . I give (that the god Maglus) before the ninth day take away him who stole the cloak of Servandus.

The inscription includes a list of twenty possibly culprits, one of which was later crossed out, so the god had a little help here.

Given that the temple straddled a much-used road, some historians think it likely served as a sort of inn, offering accommodations and food to travelers in exchange for "offerings." But there isn't any physical evidence of this, beyond the location.

Here is a quick history of the site from the National Heritage List:

The temple itself was situated on the south bank of the Broadmead Brook. In its first phase, built soon after AD 69, it comprised a simple circular shrine. In about AD 230 the shrine was surrounded by an octagonal podium and precinct wall with a gatehouse but 20 years later the whole structure was burnt. It was replaced with an octagonal temple incorporating the remains of the podium. The new temple was more elaborate and comprised an inner chamber or cella surrounded by eight chambers and enclosed by a covered walkway. This coincides with the most prolific building period within the complex and reflects a growing interest in the temple. 

Here is a nice little artifact from the temple's glory days.

But eventually the empire ran down and the legions left and everything went to hell:

By the early fourth century the temple had fallen into a state of disrepair and was adapted and repaired. Alternate chambers were blocked and the plan of the building took on a cruciform aspect, possibly reflecting the conversion of Rome to Christianity. At a slightly later date, the building was once again used for pagan worship. A makeshift altar was constructed of reused columns. After AD 370 a build up of straw, manure, animal bones and household rubbish imply that the building was being used as a homestead or animal byre. Disarticulated human bones at the top of the sequence displayed cut marks particularly to the neck, implying a massacre at the hands of raiders.

And so it passed into history, until archaeologists showed up to poke around its ruins and bring its story back into the world. 

Ronald Hutton and the Checklist of Egyptian Magic

Stela Depicting Tutu, a Protective Spirit often Evoked in Roman Egypt

Ronald Hutton is a historian of British religion who has written books about everything from the Druids to Oliver Cromwell. I don't really recommend his books because he is the kind of historian who thinks that telling cool stories might call his scholarly credentials into question. "The sources do not really sustian. . ."

Which makes him, in a way, the perfect historian to take on his topic in this one-hour lecture: the western magical tradition. The western tradition of learned magic really is just a long string of books mainly composed of pieces of other books, without any very cool stories, and Hutton is the man to give us that.

Like every other authority I know, he traces the tradition to Egypt. But not to the Old Kingdom; he focuses on the Greco-Roman period. See, in ancient Egypt there was no distinction between religion and magic. What look to us like spells or other magical acts were used to compel gods, and nobody found this strange. Enter the Greeks, who were strongly prejudiced against using magic to force the gods. The gods, they thought, should be approached in an attitude of humble prayer. So they began driving magical practice out of the temples, and the Romans finished the job. This left Egypt's magician-priests without employment or income. They found, though, that there was still a big public appetite for the services they used to render as priests, so they went into private practice. It with these men, the private magicians of Greco-Roman Egypt, that our magical tradition really begins. They mixed old Egyptian lore with bits and pieces of other religions and styles of magic, always with an eye toward pleasing the customer. The continuity from our oldest papyrus fragments to 16th-century grimoires is amazingly strong, with long sentences surviving word-for-word across 1500 years. Hutton mentions that the Egyptians describe how to make pens from papyrus, how to achieve various effects with olive oil lamps, and how to make potions from the hearts of hoopoes, and these same formulae appear in books written in Scotland or Sweden by men who had never seen any of these things.

Image from a Greek Magical Papyrus, Roman Period

I was moved to write about this lecture for two reasons. The first was Hutton's insistence that our distinction between religion, which is good, and magic, which is at least suspect and probably sinister, goes back to Roman Egypt. The basic idea that religious people beseech the gods while magicians try to manipulate them is found in Roman legal texts. In the second century AD there were even pogroms against magicians that may have been bigger than any carried out in Renaissance Europe. But magic was, he says, like the drugs of the ancient world, in that it may have been illegal but everyone knew where to find it.

The second reason was Hutton's Checklist of Egyptian Magic. When you see all of this stuff, he says, you are in the magical tradition of imperial Egypt:

Emphasis on the physical and moral purity of the practitioner.
A willingness to command and personify deities.
The importation of foreign, exotic deities and spirits.
The employment of animal, vegetable and mineral substances.
The use of images, especially statues.
A belief in the power of the spoken word and knowing true names.
Use of obscure, ancient, or made-up languages – “gobbledygook.”
The use of human mediums.
The gathering of spells in books.

And this does strike me as a useful primer on the stuff learned magicians have done throughout the past 2,000 years.

Hutton identifies three major additions to the tradition, one coming from each of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Jewish contribution is the invocation of angels and the power of the one true name of God. Medieval Christian magi pioneered a focus on mathematical and especially geometrical manipulations – magic squares, pentagrams, magic circles. Medieval Islamic magi emphasized what Hutton calls Astral magic, that is, tying magical operations to the sun, the moon, and the stars. (Which, he adds, probably came from ancient Mesopotamia, but it was in medieval Islam that this was fused to the Egyptian tradition.)

Since this is the thing I write about, I note again the complete lack of any theoretical underpinnings for these practices. Not once in his hour of talking does Hutton say a single word about why any of this was supposed to work. In his telling it developed through the interaction of magicians with their clients, and those practices survived that sold the best to the kind of people who consulted magicians. It was then preserved because it was old and presumably authoritative.

Robert Irwin, "The Arabian Nightmare"

David Roberts, Tombs of the Caliphs, Cairo, Detail

If you're looking for something fantastical and very weird, this might be the book for you.

Robert Irwin (1946-2024) was a British scholar of medieval Islam who in his twenties tried to become a Sufi saint and lived for a time in a Dervish monastery in Algeria. Among other things he was an expert on The Arabian Nights. So he knew Islamic culture very well, especially in its more fantastic versions.

The Arabian Nightmare (1983) focuses on an Englishman who journeys to Cairo in 1486 in the company of several Venetians and other western travelers. It's hard to describe what happens next, except to say that he falls into madcap misadventures that involve sleep. Also hidden gardens, talking apes, magicians, athletes of self-harm, and so on, but especially sleep. He spends much of the book unsure whether he is asleep or awake, "waking" from one dream only to enter another, and so on and so on. He begins to wonder if he has something called The Arabian Nightmare, which, well, here is Irwin's description:

The Arabian Nightmare is obscene and terrible, monotonous and yet horrific. It comes to its victims every night, yet one of its properties is that it is never remembered in the morning. It is therefore the experiencing of infinite pain without the consciousness that one is doing so. Night after night of apparently endless torment and then in the morning the victim rises and goes about his daily business as if nothing had ever happened, and he looks forward to a good night's sleep at the end of a hard day's work. It is pure suffering, suffering that does not ennoble or teach, pointless suffering that changes nothing. The victim never knows that it is he, though he may well know the story and speculate on it, but there will be people in the marketplace who will know him by certain signs. There will be talk behind his back, for he has been marked — as a sort of idiot Messiah, perhaps. That is the Arabian Nightmare.

If nothing else, the book is an extraordinary feat of imagination. In its pages we meet the Knights of St. Lazarus, a crusading order who are all lepers; the craziest game of three wishes with a djinn ever played; "the gnostic escapologist who wriggles free from any body he may be entrapped in"; and many others.

The plot, alas, is utter nonsense. As things go along the reader starts to think that this or that scene is a pointless distriaction from the main story, but then wonders – wait, what was the main story anyway? At one point the tale dissolves into a tangential story, within which is another story, and another, and so on until you suspect that the goal is to set the world record for story nesting. 

But as I read, sometimes entertained and sometimes only baffled, one thing kept nagging at me: Robert Irwin was both a scholar of Sufi mysticism and, for a time, a practicing mystic. He later moved away from Sufism but this was his first novel, and I wonder if he had a lot of Sufi thoughts he needed to get off his chest. Is this book really some kind of exploration of Sufi theology, or maybe a riff on Sufi themes? The problem is, I know next to nothing about Sufism, and I can't find a review of this book by anyone who does, so I am left in the dark.

There is ceretainly much here that is at least vaguely philsophical. The theme of waking from one dream into another is a common one for Christian mystics, so it would not surprise me to hear that it is known to Sufis. One keeps coming across sentences like this:

It seemed that the friar must speak, that the friar himself must confess and admit there was no struggle between good and evil in the World, that there were not two parties to the struggle but only one, the party being of those who knew, and that those who did not know were their playthings. (172)

I did find one academic article about the book, but the authors either know less about Sufism than I do or consider that theme unimportant compared to obscure musings on "post-modern fantasy." (I am not surprised to encounter a scholarly discourse on modern fantasy, but after this taste I am resolved never to read a word of it again.) These professors do call The Arabian Nightmare a "mixture of popular fantasy with learned intertextuality," another hint that there might be something a little deeper going on. They also report that Irwin once said, "I am more interested in giving the English reader a taste of the authentic strangeness of the medieval Arab past, and its sheer alienness," which once again makes me think that he was trying to convey something about Sufism.

The theme of suffering may also have religious meaning. Irwin once said, "There may be ecstasy, but there is also a lot of suffering in Sufism." 

On the other hand, Irwin also once said that while some Sufis are religiously strict, others are "merely playing lateral-thinking-style mind games." "Lateral-thinking-style mind game" might be a perfect description of The Arabian Nightmare.

Another way to think about this book would be to consider it a mediation on dreaming, and the relationship of dreams to stories. I thought Irwin conveyed quite brilliantly the confusion and frustration that are central themes in my own dreaming. Of all the things people claim to be able to do, lucid dreaming might be to me the strangest. To me, a state of powerlessness is central to almost all my dreams. Dreams are something that happens to me, not something I do. I am sometimes able to do small things, but only with great effort, and usually not with any very good result. Also, I regularly find myself in stupid situations that are bad, but in ways that my waking self would immediately dismiss as preposterous. My dream self, alas, lacks the facility to identify the absurdity, leaving to experience real angst from nonsense like crashing my car by driving from the back seat with my eyes closed. 

The Arabian Nightmare is more like a dream than any other book I have ever read. It has the absurdity of a dream, the mystery, the sense of narrow constraints and shifting geography. It unfolds with the logic of dreams: rather than being causally or coming in temporarl order, one scene inspires the next by a sort of free association. This is an achievement of sorts, but it also brings out how different most dreams are from stories. Irwin has one of his characters, the storyteller who is supposed to be telling this story, comment on how weird everything is, and apologize for being so distracted.

As well he should. He has given us a collage of scenes from dreams and nightmares, richly enlivened with his knowledge of Islamic history and lore, but shapeless, senseless, and, so far as I can tell, ultimately pointless.

Augustine's Restless Longing

Fra Angelico, The Conversion of St. Augustine

I read once that there are only two people from the ancient world about whom one can write a real biography: Cicero and St. Augustine. This was my motive in finally taking on Peter Brown's famous biography, Augustine of Hippo (1967): given that there are only two people from that whole era one can truly get to know, I thought I might as well get to know both of them. But while Augustine's life is a fascinating window into his time, I found myself captivated by something else: the way Brown portrays Augustine's intellectual journey. In this telling he evolved from a questioning young philosopher who thought he could personally solve the problems of human existence to an old man convinced that humans, by themselves, can achieve nothing. We are, the mature Augustine believed, completely dependent on God, and any attempts we make to save ourselves are doomed to failure. Indeed God has already decreed whether we will be saved or damned before we are even born. Because he wrote so openly about his struggles, and made no effort to hide the many changes in his thinking over his long life, we can trace this evolution. Because the old Augustine became the Catholic Church's most famous and powerful apologist for the violent suppression of heresy – one of his sobriquets is "the father of the Inquisition" – the story of his life may help us come to grips with other people who end up defending authoritarian violence.

The reason one can write a biography of St. Augustine (354-430) is that so many sources about his life survive. His philosophical and theological works fill seven fat quarto volumes, and his writings make frequent reference to events of his life: works he has read, famous men he has met, troubles he has encountered, contemporary issues to which he is responding. We have a substantial biography from a contemporary who knew him and could include snippets from letters Augustine wrote to him in the text. We have more than a hundred sermons he his is supposed to have preached to his congregation in Hippo, 269 private letters, and his own spiritual autobiography, the famous Confessions. It is more than we have for all but a few people of modern times, and it allows for an amazingly detailed portrait of both his thinking and his material circumstances.

Augustine was born into the kind of family one meets so often in the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontës, the people clinging to the bottom of the genteel class. He received a good education but then had to scramble to earn some kind of living from it; several of his friends became teachers of rhetoric. What he loved above all things was to hang out with his friends and talk. They were a bunch of aesthetes who loved music, sunsets, literature, and philosophy. They kept hatching schemes to withdraw from the world together, perhaps to some country estate, where they would cultivate perfect friendship with each other and seek perfect understanding of the universe and the human soul. They disagreed on many things. Some were Catholics, some Manicheans, some pagans. This did not matter; what mattered was free, open-hearted discussion, all sharing equally in their quest to know.

In this period Augustine became for a while a follower of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus. I personally find Plotinus' writing to be an impenetrable mishmash of mysticism and jargon, but Augustine was one of thousands who have found this particular mishmash irresistible. Plotinus believed that we could come to understand the universe through logic and introspection. Our interior worlds are vast and enormously complex, and if we come to understand them fully we will come to know what our souls are, where they come from, and where they are going. When God made us, he left enough of himself in our makeup for us to be able to understand his whole creation and our place in it.

That entranced Augustine for a while, but it did not last. He eventually decided that he could not really reason his way to perfect understanding; obstacles kept arising, and he could not honestly say he had overcome them. Brown:

The mold into which Augustine had poured his life as a convert was capable of holding educated Christians of different temperaments, in different parts of the Roman world, for the whole of their lives. Yet Augustine broke this mold in a decade — one suspects, partly because it could not withstand the terrific weight of his own expectations of it. . . . Augustine followed Plotinus in believing that the inner world was vast and complex, but while Plotinus was confident that the wise man could become master of this universe, Augustine had doubts: "There is, indeed, some light in man; but let them walk fast, lest shadows come." (178)

 Augustine once described the place he sought as "a place of rest . . . the full enjoyment of the absolute and true good; breathing the clear air of serenity and eternity." (150) Unable to reach this Eden via philosophy, Augustine tried faith. He threw himself into the study of Scripture, had himself baptized into the Catholic fold, became a priest and then a bishop. Christianity gave him a physical place, and a community, but it did not still his restless soul. He kept worrying over certain problems, especially that of evil: "Above all, there was the burning problem of the apparent permanence of evil in human actions." (148) He realized that he did not really understand human will or human freedom, could not figure out why we can know the right thing to do but still fail to do it, over and over.

He is a man who has realized that he was doomed to remain incomplete in his present existence, that what he wished for most ardently would never be more than a hope, postponed to a final resolution of all tensions, far beyond this life. (156)

He grew obsessed with death. In one of his sermons,

He reminds his listeners that while they are listening to him, their hair is growing, and they are getting older: "while you stand around, while you are here, while you do something, while you talk — you are passing away." (246)

Eventually he ended up with the theological position he argued for in The City of God and Of Grace and Free Will: we are entirely helpless and can only be saved by God's grace, which we can do nothing to merit. We can do nothing but what God wills, which was all fixed at the dawn of time.

Ruins of Hippo, with the Basilica of St. Augustine behind

When Augustine became the bishop of the North African town of Hippo, it was divided between two kinds of Christians: Catholics and a local sect called Donatists. As the Catholic bishop, Augustine preached against the Donatists, and he wrote a tract refuting their arguments, but he did not really do anything about the situation. Then, for reasons of imperial politics, the reigning western Emperor declared the Donatists to be heretics and ordered their suppression. This put Augustine in a tough spot. He was on record arguing that it was wrong to use force in matters of faith, because God only wanted love and devotion that was freely given. But he decided, given his new theological position, that all talk of freely given devotion was meaningless. It would be better for everyone, he thought, if there were only one Christian church to which the whole community belonged. So he lent his weight to the persecution of Donatists, which he justified in two substantial tracts.

People have been arguing ever since about whether Augustine's theology of predestination and his enthusiasm for persecution were related. So far as I can tell, Peter Brown did not take a firm position. But I think they are absolutely linked. Both rely on a dismissal of freedom as an important value. Augustine's personal journey had taught him that his own freedom was meaningless; by himself he could not will himself to happiness or a sense of salvation. Only surrender could save him. Thus it was pointless to care about the freedom of Donatists, since they could not save themselves, either.

I also see in Augustine a contempt for ordinary human life. From his youth he sought to withdraw from human concerns into some rarefied realm of perfection; as a Christian he longed for heaven. This hostility toward life as we generally know it drives many human ambitions, among which is the longing for apocalyptic political change. 

The piece of Augustine's puzzle that most interests me is the way his best characteristics dovetailed with his worst. Intellectually he was the most honest of philosophers, ruthless with his own ideas, always ready to discard his own past work; in the end this drove him to positions that I and many others have found dismaying. He sought, not power or riches, but truth; he struggled all his life toward a blissful vision of human happiness. But in the end he was unable to solve his problems except via surrender, which feels to me like an expression of despair. He accepted cruelty toward Donatists, I think, partly because he was so sensitive to human pain, and so aware that he could not think his way to a better kind of world.

As I see it, what drove Augustine to embrace violence was, ultimately, his inability to reach his "place of rest" by his own free efforts. 

This strikes me deeply because I see in Augustine a perfect paradigm of much that I consider illiberal and antidemocratic: an insistence on finding final answers to question that I think will always remain open, a need for completion in a world where we will always be incomplete, a desire for perfect community in a world of difference. Yes, life is hard, and people do evil; yes, distant political powers hem us in with their decrees. It is true that we cannot will ourselves into heaven. But that is no reason to give up on making the world better and kinder when we can, one small act at a time.

I think Augustine longed too much for heaven. Perhaps that made him a saint, but it made him a very dangerous philosopher.

Gnosticism, Numerology, and Gods with Snakes for Legs

Here is a peculiar object, a carved gem (intaglio) depicting a being with snake legs and a rooster's head. It is one of hundreds such stones that survive from the Roman world. Some depict only this being, but others combine the snake-legged one with other strange beings, Jewish symbols, Egyptian symbols, images of Mithra, or text. The most common text is the word ABRAXAS. Somtimes this is rendered ABRASAX, and sometimes one finds both.

What, if anything, does it mean?

So far as I can tell, most authorities agree that Abraxas began as a magical nonsense word like Abracadabra. Likewise, the image of the snake-legged, rooster-headed being was just one of many such monstrous images that people used in their magical symbolism; fearsome and strange, but not necessarily referencing any particular being or even particular cosmology. So it meant nothing at all, on purpose.

Later, though, this nonsense word and nonsensical being acquired quite a lot of meaning, which I find fascinating. If you look up these intaglios online, at least half the sites will say that they are Gnostic. Which most of them are not. 

But there is a connection. Around the year 180 AD an orthodox Christian bishop named Irenaeus wrote a book called Against Heresies. One of the heresies he fulminated against was Gnosticism, and it is from this account that we learn much of what we know about that movement. Historians have long argued over how seriously to take the accounts of heretical beliefs given by orthodox writers in such books. Why would we assume that they accurately portray the ideas of those they are attacking? But this is by far the best source we know of, and it generally agrees with the Gnostic sources recovered from the Nag Hammadi Library, so we go with what we have.

One of the writers Irenaeus attacked was the Gnostic Basilides, who wrote what may have been some of the first philosophical commentaries on the Gospels before he died around 130. The Jewish Encyclopedia tells us:

According to Irenæus ("Adversus Hæreses," i. 24, 3-7), the Gnostic Basilides gave the name of Abraxas to the highest Being, who presides over the 364 kingdoms of spirits (52 x 7 = 364), because the numerical value of the letters of this name is equivalent to 365 (a = 1, b = 2, r = 100, a =1, x = 60, a = 1, s = 200)—i.e., the 364 spirits + the Highest Being Himself. . . . In a magic papyrus it is expressly stated that Abraxas is equivalent to 365, the number of days in the year 

Which is interesting, and the numerology may explain how ABRAXAS came to have magical assocations in the first place. According to Irenaeus, Basilides imagined the cosmos in Neoplatonic terms, with lots of emanations:

In the system described by Irenaeus, "the Unbegotten Father" is the progenitor of Nous "Discerning Mind"; Nous produced Logos "Word, Reason"; Logos produced Phronesis "Mindfulness"; Phronesis produced Sophia "Wisdom" and Dynamis "Potentiality"; Sophia and Dynamis produced the principalities, powers, and angels, the last of whom create "the first heaven". They, in turn, originate a second series, who create a second heaven. The process continues in like manner until 365 heavens are in existence, the angels of the last or visible heaven being the authors of our world. "The ruler" [principem, i.e., probably ton archonta] of the 365 heavens "is Abraxas, and for this reason he contains within himself 365 numbers".

I've always found this kind of cosmic speculation absurd, and not just because it is weird. Even if you accept all this, what then? A birthed B from which emanated C, D, and E, which created F, which transformed into G, and – what are we supposed to do about it? With Gods, one is supposed to worship them, but there is no evidence that anyone ever worshipped Abraxas. Who would worship an emanation? I suppose this is part of what we mean by Gnosticism; the main point was to know, not to worship or be good. 

One of the things orthodox Christians hated about Basilides was that he considered the material world stupid and irrelevant, and therefore denied that Jesus could have suffered and died. Suffering and dying are stupid things of the irrelevant material world, and Jesus was, to Basilides, beyond all that. But the business of all those Principalities and Powers ruling the world was very widely believed among early Christians; St. Paul seems to tell us that Jesus came to earth to overthrow their rule.

But I can get weirder than that. The author of wikipedia's article on Abraxas, which comes with a lot of warnings about the citing of questionable sources, seems to be an adept of some kind of strange lore. He or she tells us,

The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, for instance, refers to Abrasax as an Aeon dwelling with Sophia and other Aeons of the Pleroma in the light of the luminary Eleleth. In several texts, the luminary Eleleth is the last of the luminaries (Spiritual Lights) that come forward, and it is the Aeon Sophia, associated with Eleleth, who encounters darkness and becomes involved in the chain of events that leads to the Demiurge's rule of this world, and the salvage effort that ensues. As such, the role of Aeons of Eleleth, including Abraxas, Sophia, and others, pertains to this outer border of the Pleroma that encounters the ignorance of the world of Lack and interacts to rectify the error of ignorance in the world of materiality.

Got that?

As I have written here several times, one of the most striking things about classical magic is how much of it seems to be based on no theory of or even consistent attitude toward the non-material world. You just take symbols from old traditions mix them up with words that sound impressive when chanted and maybe some lighting effects, throw in the most expensive ingredients you can afford, and presto, you can invoke magical powers. If you have no idea what the name ABRAXAS means or where the snake-legged beings comes from, so much the better, that must mean it is truly arcane.

I have the same feeling about the kind of theology we see in Basilides. I find this stuff about the unbegotten father producing mind which produces mindfulness which produces Logos, or the Aeons of the Pleuroma, to be just a more intellectual version of Abracadabra Alakazam.

I do understand that Gnosticism has a serious theological point to make, which is that things are so bad in this world that a good and omnipotent creator cannot possibly be in charge. Perhaps people found (and still find) that thinking of the universe in this way gives them hope. If this world is under the power of the evil demiurge but might be saved by the intervention of the Uncreated Father, maybe that is a way to remain theologically optimistic without wishing away the horrors of earthly life.

But, really, 365 heavens, one for each day; what happened to the quarter heaven for the quarter day that Caesar put in the calendar 150 years before any of this stuff was written? Why does Nous produce Logos, rather than the other way around? Why are there principalities, powers, and angels? And why not a fourth or fifth or 365th category of immortal being?

I'm sorry, I find all of this Baroque multiplication of spritual beings and creative events absurd. There is not, in the Gnostic tradition, even any clear idea about where this supposed knowledge came from: no tablets handed to Joseph Smith by an angel, no revelation in the desert. Basilides, so far as I can tell, offers no justification at all for his statements about things I regard as unknowable. (The Apocryphon of John comes 200 years later).

I find it spectacularly apt that the centerpiece of this crazy theology is a being that, so far as we can tell, is just a made-up name attached to a made-up image. ABRAXAS went from a nonsense word carved on stones to the name of the supreme creator of the universe. Why not? To me, this Gnostic theology adds nothing to the strange face staring from the stone. To me, it just piles words and names that sound magical and cool on top of one another until the reader is either bedazzled into some kind of meditative state or throws the scroll into the fire in disgust. 

Whatever these stones depicting ABRAXAS mean, theological works like those of Basilides seem to mean exactly the same thing. I suspect it amounts to little more than a belief or feeling that there is more to the world than we can see, and more happening in the cosmos than the general run of petty human events.

What's Happening in Iran?

A while back the announcer at an Iranian soccer game asked for a moment of silence for the people of Palestine, but the crowd instead erupted into boisterous shouting.

It was a small thing, but I found it telling; many Iranians are so embittered by their own Islamic government that they can't even muster sympathy for fellow Muslims under Israeli bombardment.

This came to mind because Tyler Cowen linked to a tweet about the study from which the chart at the top comes, documenting the steep decline in religion in Iran. Based on survey data, the study found that more Iranians claimed to be atheist, agnostic, or "none" than Shiite. Cowen's comment section then filled up with supporting posts from people who claimed knowledge of Iran and said things like:

1. Islam is seen by younger people as the doctrine of a failed government staffed by a bunch of crooks.
2. And it's a foreign, Arab imposition, while the "real Iran" - the Achaenemids - were Zoroastrians, but quite willing to allow non-judgemental religious pluralism.
3. The IRGC is staffed by redneck losers, or by non-Iranians. (Iran has a separate "regular army" that all Iranian men must join as conscripts.)
4. There is a rather vast city-country divide, with people in the big Iranian cities largely non-religious or dabbling in Zoroastrianism, with the last stronghold of Islam being rural areas, particularly near Afghanistan (and around some of the religious cities).

Or:

Based on my interactions in person and online, most Iranians hate their terrible government and everything it stands for.

And this:

I don't support the US killing Iranians - too many innocents and future friends there.

Which I think is very wise.

But that doesn't answer the question of what is likely to happen in Iran now. The mass protests of the past couple of years showed that hundreds of thousands of Iranians hate the regime and its form of religion, but they were unable to budge it. Does that mean the anti-regime forces are weaker and less numerous than they seem from a western perspective? Or that the regime is willing to hold onto power using force and fanaticism? Experience seems to show that 25% is enough support to keep a dictatorial regime in power, especially when they are the most determined and violent part of the population.

I don't see the Iranian regime falling soon, but I wonder what happens as the people increasinging turn against the mullahs and their ideology.

Coptic Magical Papyri

I just discovered the web site of the Coptic Magical Papyri project, devoted to assembling all of the known Coptic magical texts from late antique Egypt. They have cataloged about 600 of these texts, mainly spanning the 3rd to 7th centuries AD, with a few from later centuries. Most are written on papyrus but a few were scratched onto potsherds.

The collection spans the transition from paganism to Christianity to Islam; the texts note the changes in the names of the beings evoked, but otherwise remain much the same. Of the text above they write:

on the left is a prayer attributed to the Archangel Michael (depicted at bottom right, with his two "powers"), while on the right are a series of recipes for which the prayer can be used – a curse to put someone into a coma-like state, a reconciliation spell, a spell to ensure fidelity, another to protect animals from evil sorcery, one to protect a children in childbirth, and a general ritual of protection.

In this blog post, they explore the different kinds of spells in their collection. As you would expect, healing and protection are the most common types, with a lot of overlap between them. "Unlcear" are mainly prayers, which they say are probably also protective. The most fun categores are love spells and curses, especially the curses aimed at breaking up couples or ruining their sex lives. Fascinating that they have a few spells that were supposed to give the patron a better voice; whether this was for singing or speaking is not specified.

The web site opens a door into a scholarly kingdom of magic, with links to other digital projects, conferences, printed collections, and so on. Most of these people justify themselves by saying the magical texts are great sources for social history, but it seems to me that many of them just love reading spells and incantations in arcane languages. There is no topic in this field that somebody is not investigating, from the role to scent in magical ritual to the law surrounding cursing. To give you an idea of the depth of this scholarship, consider this article:

The Greek magical papyri are full of marginalia, in which scribes make notes to themselves, or correct or add to the text, but these have generally been ignored in the past since they are almost invisible in the existing editions and translations. This article provides a detailed overview of the marginal notes in the manuscripts of the Theban Magical Library.

The project blog actually covers a wide variety of magical texts, including Aramaic incantation bowls, one of which includes this text:

By my door I sit, I, Gusnazdukt daughter of Ahat; the Babylonian (spell) I cast. In the rubbish I sit, I Gusnazdukt daughter of Ahat; the (spell) of Borsippa I cast into the crumbling earth, I whom no-one restrains.

The importance of gates of various kinds, including ordinary doorways, might be one of the "principles" of magic that I always mourn the absence of. And shouldn't there be some kind of demonic being called "I whom no-one restrains"?

An Old Jewish Ritual for Sufferers

Mishnah Middot 2:2 

All who entered the Temple Mount entered by the right and went round to the right and went out by the left, save for one to whom something had happened, who entered and went round to the left. Each one going around to the left was asked: “Why do you go round to the left?” If he answered, “Because I am a mourner,” they said to him, “May He who dwells in this house comfort you.” If he answered, “Because I am excommunicated”, they said: “May He who dwells in this house inspire them to draw you near again,” in the words of Rabbi Meir. But Rabbi Yose said to him: you make it seem as if they treated him unjustly. Rather they should say: “May He who dwells in this house inspire you to listen to the words of your colleagues so that they may draw you near again.”  

The Szeged Synagogue

Designed by Lipót Baumhorn, completed in 1902, it served the Hungarian Jews known as Neologs. So far as I can tell, this was (and is) the Hungarian equivalent of Reformed Judaism in the US.

Protection from Animal Bites in medieval Turkey

This 800-year-old bowl was found at Hasankeyf in southeastern Turkey, in a drain pipe under a small fortress. 

The idea with these bowls, which were common in the medieval Middle East, was that you swirled water in the bowl and then used it to wash wounds or just splashed it on your body protectively. This one, according to excavator Zekai Erdal's reading of the text, was specifically for healing of or protection from animal bites.

Besides the dog in the center it features a tour of greatest hits in magical stuff: a magic knot, a star of David, three pentagrams, a scorpion, a two-headed dragon, two magic squares and some verses from the Koran. Covering all the bases.

The Crane Bag and the Domestication of Myth

The Irish myths are really weird.

They are full of grotesque details, like, when the hero Cuchulainn went into his battle frenzy he had a fountain of frozen blood six feet tall sprouting from his forehead. They loop around in time, so that a man potrayed in one story as another's father will appear later as an infant in the house of his son. People keep being transformed into animals, or dying and being reborn. Sometimes gods create people, but in other stories people create gods. There is no beginning to the unvierse, and no end, just events that echo other events in a pattern more like a four-dimensional weaving than a linear narrative.

Nineteenth-century rationalists argued that this confusion meant the stories had somehow become "corrupted." Some thought this had happened in the course of oral transmission, while others pointed to the moment when they were written down by Christian monks. I subscribe to the view that, no, they were always like this. I think these stories reflect a view of time and the universe developed by the Druids around 500 to 350 BC, when Greek philosophers were also devoting a lot of attention to time and change. The Druids ended up teaching, I think, that linear time is an illusion, and that in a universe with no beginning and no end events keeping moving in cycles that echo, but do not exactly repeat, those of other times.

This brings me to the Crane Bag. In myth there is only one Crane Bag, with a story something like this:

The celebrated bag of Irish tradition was made by Manannán mac Lir and contained many treasures. Aífe [a famous woman] is transformed into a crane by a jealous rival, Luchra; she subsequently spends 200 years in the household of Manannán mac Lir. When she dies, he uses her skin to hold things precious to him. These included his knife and shirt, the king of Scotland's shears, the king of Lochlainn's helmet, the bones of Assal's swine, and the girdle of the great whale's back. At high tide the treasures are visible in the sea, but at ebb tide they vanish. 

Ok, so, on the one hand, this sounds like a bag made of bird skin, but on the other it holds the bones of an enormous whale. Also, it fills with sea water at high tide, and the treasures in the bag are "visible in the sea;" in fact there are a couple of points on the Irish coast that are supposed to be the place from which the treasures are visible.

Many modern interpreters, going back to the eighteenth century, have argued that what the bag actually held was the letters of the Ogham alphabet. There are some obscure verses that may say the form of the letters was copied from the positions of a crane's legs, and some clever person figured out how to connect the objects in the bag (knife, shirt, shears, helmet, pig bones, girdle) to the first six Ogham letters. Well, maybe, but it sometimes seems to me that with a little work you can connect anything in the Irish stories to literally anything else, which, again, may be part of the point. Plus, these clever commentators have not been able to explain why a bag holding the alphabet has tides.

Which brings me to yesterday, when I did a quick search for Crane Bag. (Don't ask.) What I found was, not references to this arcane tradition, but ads from crane bag sellers (the one above could be yours for $75) and instructions on how to assemble the contents of your own. These are, the ads assure me, "traditionally carried by druids."

Here's one example:

My Crane Bag is the size of a small messenger bag and holds some personal spiritual talismans, a few stones and crystals that help me focus, a couple of acorns, a feather, some shells and a few odds and ends. Because I like to strike out into unpopulated spaces, I’m practical, so also carry a Swiss army knife, compass, always a notebook and a couple of pens and pencils and a pencil sharpener since words are my system of divination. The best part? There’s still enough room for my keys and wallet. I’m prepared wherever I go and don’t need to take anything else. This leaves my hands free, so I can touch trees and stones and whatever else draws me.

This is an entirely modern tradition; there is in Irish myth only one Crane Bag, and it was not carried by a druid. I am not sure when this habit of making and carrying these bags developed, but so far as I can tell it is post-World War II. The obvious source for this kind of thing is Native American spirit bundles.

Here's a modern Druid who at least understands that this is a distortion of the myth:

Symbolically speaking, the Crane Bag isn’t a bag to hold things. The concept is actually closer to the Irish version of the Grail. According to legend, it appears and disappears, shifts guardianship and even shifts worlds – from sea to land, from god to hero. The crane is associated with death and rebirth and the labyrinth path between the worlds. So when you think on that, basically, the concept encompasses all the realms and planes and really becomes a representation for the interconnectedness of everything and the unity and harmony between all things in one.

Now, I don't want to tell other people how to be spiritual, and really what they choose to carry in their $75 bags is none of my business.

But I wanted to comment on this because it represents a human tendency that I think constantly gets in the way of understanding myth: taking things literally. You know, Plato tries to tell a story about an imaginary perfect city,  and the next thing you know people are diving off the Azores and claiming to find pieces of it. The Voyage of Saint Brendan is a distorted narrative of an actual journey to America. Robin Hood was really [insert the historical Robert you prefer]. 

The basic structure of this discourse is: X is really Y. 

One of the most common forms in this genre is the search for the oldest form of a myth, the most authentic form, which is sometimes dubbed the "original" version. If there are five different stories about the great magician Math son of Mathonwy, in some of which he is clearly human, in others apparently immortal, well, there must be an original version in which he was one or the other. 

Caesar tells us that the Druids refused to write down their doctrines. I understand their thinking, because as soon as you write something down, even something as bizarre as the old Irish myths, somebody comes along as says, "Oh, you really meant this." Or, "Why is your teaching so garbled? It must have gotten corrupted. Here, let me help you reconstruct the original version."

(The druids throw up their hands and stomp away, muttering, We had better rebel against this Caesar fellow before he and all the other rationalists ruin Gaul. Call Vercingetorix.)

Sometimes X may actually be a distorted memory of Y; that happens a lot in myth. But that doesn't in any way imply that you can understand the meaning of X, to the person who told the story, by reference to Y. 

After forty years of thinking about Celtic myth, and myth in general, I believe more and more that the details of the stories matter very little. When you are presented with half a dozen similar stories about similar-sounding people, you should probably not obsess over the differences. Don't try to put them in order; don't try to figure out which is more authentic. Don't try to arrange the characters in a neat family tree. If a story makes no sense to you, maybe rather than trying to "figure it out" you should step back and ask what kind of feeling it evokes, just as it is. Let the words wash over you; let the story shock you and move you.

Don't, whatever else you do, try to put it in a bag.