Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  “And this particular Indian stranger was holding a very beautiful powwow dance outfit, a woman’s powwow dance outfit. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was all beaded blue and red and yellow with a thunderbird design. It must have weighed fifty pounds. And I couldn’t imagine the strength of the woman who could dance beneath that magical burden.” Every woman in the world could dance that way. “Well, this Indian stranger said he was in a desperate situation. His wife was dying of cancer and he needed money to pay for her medicine. I knew he was lying. I knew he’d stolen the outfit. I could always smell a thief.” Smell yourself, Ted. “And I knew I should call the police on this thief. I knew I should take that outfit away and find the real owner. But it was so beautiful, so perfect, that I gave the Indian stranger a thousand dollars and sent him on his way. And I kept the outfit.” Whoa, was Ted coming here to make a confession? And why had he chosen my grandmother’s funeral for his confession? “For years, I felt terrible. I’d look at that outfit hanging on the wall of my Montana cabin.” Mansion, Ted, it’s a mansion. Go ahead; you can say it: MANSION! “And then I decided to do some research. I hired an anthropologist, an expert, and he quickly pointed out that the outfit was obviously of Interior Salish origin. And after doing a little research, he discovered that the outfit was Spokane Indian, to be specific. And then, a few years ago, he visited your reservation undercover and learned that this stolen outfit once belonged to a woman named Grandmother Spirit.” We all gasped. This was a huge shock. I wondered if we were all part of some crazy reality show called When Billionaires Pretend to be Human. I looked around for the cameras. “Well, ever since I learned who really owned this outfit, I’ve been torn. I always wanted to give it back. But I wanted to keep it, too. I couldn’t sleep some nights because I was so torn up by it.” Yep, even billionaires have DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL. “And, well, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I packed up the outfit and headed for your reservation, here, to hand-deliver the outfit back to Grandmother Spirit. And I get here only to discover that she’s passed on to the next world. It’s just devastating.” We were all completely silent. This was the weirdest thing any of us had ever witnessed. And we’re Indians, so trust me, we’ve seen some really weird stuff. “But I have the outfit here,” Ted said. He opened up his suitcase and pulled out the outfit and held it up. It was fifty pounds, so he struggled with it. Anybody would have struggled with it. “So if any of Grandmother Spirit’s children are here, I’d love to return her outfit to them.”

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  independence of these powers is vastly augmented, both in the collective nomos and in individual consciousness. The projected meanings of human activity congeal into a gigantic and mysterious “other world,” hovering over the world of men as an alien reality. By means of the “otherness” of the sacred the alienation of the humanly constructed world is ultimately ratified. Inasmuch as this inversion of the relationship between men and their world entails a denial of human choice, the encounter with the sacred is apprehended in terms of “total dependence” (25). This may or may not involve a masochistic attitude, though, as we have seen, the latter is an important motif of religious consciousness. Now, it is important to recall here that the relationship between human activity and the world produced by it is and remains dialectical, even when this fact is denied (that is, when it is not present to consciousness). Thus men produce their gods even while they apprehend themselves as “totally dependent” upon these their products. But, by the same token, the “other world” of the gods takes on a certain autonomy vis-à-vis the human activity that ongoingly produces it. The supra-empirical reality posited by the religious projection is capable of acting back upon the empirical existence of men in society. Thus it would be gravely misleading to regard the religious formations as being simply mechanical effects of the activity that produced them, that is, as inert “reflections” of their societal base (26). On the contrary, the religious formations have the capacity to act upon and modify that base. This fact, however, has a curious consequence—namely, the possibility of de-alienation itself being religiously legitimated. Unless this possibility is grasped, a one-sided view of the relationship between religion and society is inevitable (27). In other words, while religion has an intrinsic (and theoretically very understandable) tendency to 116

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Whatever faults the general's son had, his manners were those of the French nobility, therefore perfect; his stately gait might even have graced the court of the grand Monarque ; his politeness was unrivalled—in fact, he possessed all those 'small, sweet courtesies of life,' which, as Sterne says, 'beget inclinations to love at first sight.' He was about to usher us in, when Teleny stopped him. "'Wait a moment,' said he, 'could not Camille have a peep at your harem first? You know he is but a neophyte in the Priapean creed. I am his first lover.' "'Yes, I know,' interrupted Briancourt, sighing, 'and I cannot say sincerely, may you long be the last.' "'And not being inured to the sight of such revelry he will be induced to run away like Joseph from Mrs. Potiphar.' "'Very well, do you mind giving yourself the trouble to come this way?' "And with these words he led us through a dimly-lighted passage, and up a winding staircase into a kind of balcony made out of old Arab mouchambiè , brought to him by his father from Tunis or Algiers. "'From here you can see everything without being seen, so ta-ta for a while, but not for long, as supper will soon be served.' "As I stepped in this kind of loggia and looked down into the room, I was, for a moment, if not dazzled, at least perfectly bewildered. It seemed as if from this every-day world of ours I had been transported into the magic realms of fairy-land. A thousand lamps of varied form filled the room with a strong yet hazy light. There were wax tapers upheld by Japanese cranes, or glowing in massive bronze or silver candlesticks, the plunder of Spanish altars; star-shaped or octagonal lamps from Moorish mosques or Eastern synagogues; curiously-wrought iron cressets of tortured and fantastic designs; chandeliers of murous, iridiscent glass work reflected in Dutch gilt, or Castel-Durante majolica sconces. "Though the room was very large, the walls were all covered with pictures of the most lascivious nature; for the general's son, who was very rich, painted mostly for his own delight. Many were only half-finished sketches, for his ardent yet fickle imagination could not dwell long on the same subject, nor could his talent for invention be long satisfied with the same way of painting. "In some of his imitations of the libidinous Pompeian encaustics he had tried to fathom the secrets of a bygone art. Some pictures were executed with the minute care and the corrosive paints of Leonardo da Vinci; whilst others looked more like Greuze's pastels, or wrought in Watteau's delicate hues. Some flesh tints had the golden haze of the Venetian school, whilst —— " "Please finish this digression on Briancourt's paintings, and tell me something of the more realistic scene."

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  A devout Mussulman is never ashamed to perform his devotion in public, whether in the mosque, or in the street, or on board the ship. Regardless of the surroundings, feeling alone with God in the midst of the crowd, his face turned to Mecca, his hands now raised to heaven, then laid on the lap, his forehead touching the ground, he goes through his genuflexions and prostrations, and repeats the first Sura of the Koran and the ninety-nine beautiful names of Allah, which form his rosary.202 The mosques are as well filled with men, as many Christian churches are with women. Islâm is a religion for men; women are of no account; the education and elevation of the female sex would destroy the system. With all its simplicity and gravity, the Mohammedan worship has also its frantic excitement of the Dervishes. On the celebration of the birthday of their prophet and other festivals, they work themselves, by the constant repetition of "Allah, Allah," into a state of unconscious ecstacy, "in which they plant swords in their breasts, tear live serpents with their teeth, eat bottles of glass, and finally lie prostrate on the ground for the chief of their order to ride on horseback over their bodies."203 I will add a brief description of the ascetic exercises of the "Dancing" and "Howling" Dervishes which I witnessed in their convents at Constantinople and Cairo in 1877. The Dancing or Turning Dervishes in Pera, thirteen in number, some looking ignorant and stupid, others devout and intensely fanatical, went first through prayers and prostrations, then threw off their outer garments, and in white flowing gowns, with high hats of stiff woolen stuff, they began to dance to the sound of strange music, whirling gracefully and skilfully on their toes, ring within ring, without touching each other or moving out of their circle, performing, in four different acts, from forty to fifty turnings in one minute, their arms stretched out or raised to heaven their eyes half shut, their mind apparently lost in a sort of Nirwana or pantheistic absorption in Allah. A few hours afterward I witnessed the rare spectacle of one of these very Dervishes reeling to and fro in a state of intoxication on the street and the lower bridge of the Golden Horn.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  problem of allocating power among its members and typically develops political institutions in consequence. The legitimation of these institutions has the special task of explaining and justifying the requisite employment of means of physical violence, which employment indeed gives their peculiar “majesty” to the institutions of political life. Again, the mystification of the empirical character of political arrangements in question transforms this “majesty” from a human to a more-than-human property. Realistic, empirically grounded apprehension concerning people with the power to chop off heads becomes transformed into numinous awe before the “dread sovereignty” of those who represent the divine will on earth. If circumstances should then develop that make head-chopping politically expedient, the activity in question can be made to seem as but the empirical result of supra-empirical necessities. Le Roi le veult becomes, as it were, an echo of “Thus says the Lord.” Again, it is easy to see how the “programs” of political institutionalization are strengthened in this way—once more, by alienating them from their roots in human activity. In both this and the previous example, it must be strongly emphasized that, when we speak of “transformation,” we do not imply a chronological progression from non-alienated to alienated apprehensions of these institutions. On the contrary, the progression, if it takes place at all, moves in the opposite direction. The institutions of sexuality and power first appear as thoroughly alienated entities, hovering over everyday social life as manifestations from an “other” reality. Only much later does the possibility of de-alienation appear. Very frequently this appearance goes together with a disintegration of the plausibility structures that previously maintained these institutions. Mutatis mutandis, the process of mystification extends to the roles clustered in the institutions in question. In other 111

• From Going Clear (2013)

  When Hana was about fifteen, she learned that Blavatsky had prophesied a new race that would arise in the Americas in the 1950s; Hana was under the impression that it would be led by a man with red hair. Hana escaped her traumatic family situation to become a nurse in Johannesburg, South Africa. A medical student there gave her a copy of Dianetics . It made immediate sense to her. She went to the local organization and said she wanted to learn more. “ There’s a course starting tonight,” she was told. In the hallway of the office Hana noticed a photograph of Hubbard standing outside the Saint Hill headquarters. She was transfixed by his red hair. This must be the man Blavatsky was talking about, she decided. “That sealed it for me,” she said. She moved to Saint Hill and became Clear #60. For three weeks she was in a state of euphoria, feeling slightly detached from her environment and her body. “This is who we were in eons past,” she thought. She was convinced that Hubbard was a returned savior who would bring all humanity to an enlightened state. Slender and stately, Hana was one of the first thirty-five Sea Org recruits. The mission of the Sea Org, according to the contract she signed, is “to get ETHICS IN on this PLANET AND THE UNIVERSE .” She agreed to “subscribe to the discipline, mores and conditions of this group.… THEREFORE, I CONTRACT MYSELF TO THE SEA ORGANIZATION FOR THE NEXT BILLION YEARS .”4 Hana married another Sea Org member, an American named Guy Eltringham, but they were separated when Hubbard ordered her to Las Palmas, where he was refitting an exhausted fishing trawler called the Avon River . The decks and the hold were coated with decades of fish oil that had to be scraped away. During the two months the Avon River was in dry dock, Hubbard would often linger for dinner with his Sea Org crew, and afterward he would sit on the deck and regale them with stories. Hubbard’s depression had lifted and he seemed completely in control—relaxed and confident, even jovial. The crew were mainly drinking Spanish wines, but Hubbard favored rum and Coke—an eighth of a glass of Coke and seven-eighths rum—one after another through the evening. The heavens seemed very close in the dark harbor. Hubbard would point to the sky and say, “ That is where the Fifth Invaders came from. They’re the bad guys, they’re the ones who put us here.” He said he could actually spot their spaceships crossing in front of the stars, and he would salute them as they passed overhead, just to let them know that they had been seen. During a session with her auditor, Hana revealed the story of Madame Blavatsky’s prophecy of the red-haired man. Soon afterward, Hubbard came up on deck and gave her an intense look. From that point on, she became his favorite.

• From Between Us

  Gerrod Parrott, “Basic Emotions or Ur-Emotions?,” Emotion Review 3, no. 4 (2011): 406–15. 152 Awe . . . awareness of how small you are compared: Yang Bai et al., “Awe, the Diminished Self, and Collective Engagement: Universals and Cultural Variations in the Small Self,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 2 (2017): 185–209. 152 acceptance and calmness . . . depression: Frijda and Parrott, “Basic Emotions or Ur-Emotions?” 152 or not know where to move . . . (depressed, hopeless): Frijda, The Emotions, 97. 152 will occur in all human societies: Some of these moves described by Frijda, “The Evolutionary Emergence of What We Call ‘Emotions.’” 153 amaeru . . . amayakasu: Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behaviour. 153 depends on the emotion concepts that are available in your culture: Barrett, How Emotions Are Made; Beatty, Emotional Worlds. 153 Marie, a U.S. American student: Shaver et al., “Emotion Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach.” The name is fictitious, the original vignette was written in first person voice (p. 1073). 154 bring online . . . cultural knowledge: Beatty, Emotional Worlds, but also Barrett, How Emotions Are Made. 154 without a concept, there is no emotion as we know it: I do not mean to say that there needs to be one word for an emotion; the emotion can get conceptualized in many ways, including expressions consisting of several words, drawings, gestures. I also want to point out that my friend and colleague Lisa Feldman Barrett has often been misunderstood as to say that we need a word to have a feeling (e.g., Fiske, “The Lexical Fallacy in Emotion Research: Mistaking Vernacular Words for Psychological Entities”). That is not what she writes (e.g., 2017). Rather, her argument is that we need a concept to have an emotion (and it is true that many important concepts are lexicalized). 154 sparking movements for justice: Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan, The Moral Psychology of Anger (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 154 This is not true everywhere: Owen Flannagan, How to Do Things with Emotions. The Morality of Anger and Shame across Cultures (New York; Oxford University Press, 2021). See also chapter 4 of this book. 155 “a fundamentally destructive sentiment”: Shweder et al., “The Cultural Psychology of the Emotions: Ancient and Renewed,” 416. 155 “expresses a person’s reluctance to do what is required”: Gerber, “Rage and Obligation: Samoan Emotion in Conflict,” 128–29. 155 shame . . . is taboo: Scheff, “Shame and Conformity: The Deference-Emotion System.” 155 And, if acknowledged as shame: June Price Tangney et al., “Are Shame, Guilt, and Embarrassment Distinct Emotions?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 6 (1996): 1256–69, measured these as: “felt inferior to others,” “felt physically smaller,” “was overcome in inward experience of feeling.” 156 not having a word for sadness in Tahitian: Levy, Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands, 305.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  In Hubbard’s own written account of the event, he remembers voices crying out as he is being restored to life, “ Don’t let him know!” When he came to, he was “still in contact with something.” The intimation that he had briefly been given access to the divine mystery lingered for several days, but he couldn’t call it back. “And then one morning, just as I awoke, it came to me.” In a fever, he dashed off a small book he titled Excalibur . “ Once upon a time, according to a writer in The Arabian Nights, there lived a very wise old man,” the book begins, in the brief portion that the church has published of the fragments it says it has in its possession. The old man, goes the story, wrote a long and learned book, but he became concerned that he had written too much. So he sat himself down for ten years more and reduced the original volume to one-tenth its size. Even then, he was dissatisfied, and he constrained the work even further, to a single line, “which contained everything there was to be known.” He hid the sacred line in a niche in his wall. But still he wondered, Could all human knowledge be distilled even further? Suppose all the wisdom of the world were reduced to just one line—suppose that one line were to be written today and given to you. With it you could understand the basis of all life and endeavor.… There is one line, conjured up out of a morass of facts and made available as an integrated unit to explain such things. This line is the philosophy of philosophy, thereby carrying the entire subject back into the simple and humble truth. All life is directed by one command and one command only—SURVIVE. Hubbard sent excited telegrams to publishers in New York, inviting them to meet him at Penn Station, where he would auction off a manuscript that would change the world. He wrote Polly, “ I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all the books are destroyed.” But Excalibur was never published, leading some to doubt that it was ever written. The stories Hubbard later told about the book added to the sense that it was more mythical than real. He said that when the Russians learned of the book’s contents, they offered him money and laboratory facilities to complete his work. When he turned them down, they purloined a copy of his manuscript from his hotel room in Miami. Hubbard explained to his agent that he ultimately decided to withdraw the book from publication because the first six people who read it were so shattered by the revelations that they had lost their minds.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  In this darkness, something caught his eye, a brightness where there hadn’t been brightness before, a speck of orange and yellow across the floor of the high desert at the base of the opposing mesa, and then Sonny realized what he was looking at. “Fire! Across the valley,” he told Lola. “Looks like the Miller place.” While Sonny loaded the truck with shovels and gunny sacks, along with gloves, jackets, and helmets—the basics—Lola phoned the other members of the local volunteer fire department. They were already awake because of the storm. With no other fire department to call on out here, neighbors had to take care of each other. Grass was money, especially now, but in this drought it was also explosively combustible. The month before there had been a fire on the other side of the mountains that shot up a plume like a hydrogen bomb. Wildfires were finishing off the West. It took half an hour to get to the Miller place, even with Sonny driving at high speed, and by that time the wind had blown the blaze across the prairie, the shriveled yellow grass gulping the flames and creosote bushes feeding sparks to the wind. The earth glowed in an awful majesty so bright it illuminated the clouds, which seemed almost in reach. A Ford 350 with a water pump in the bed served as the nearest fire engine. It was already at the Miller place, along with a couple dozen overwhelmed volunteers. Some had never fought a fire before, at least not one this big and hungry, and amplified by lightning strikes that kept everyone off guard. Lola passed out gunny sacks to those who didn’t have them, which they soaked in the stock tank and used to bat out the flames, trying to keep the inferno away from the house and the barn directly downwind. As chief of the volunteer force, Sonny raced his pickup across the field to intercept the pump truck, which was doing no good by spraying the back of the fire. Sonny honked until he got the attention of the driver, Frank Acosta, who looked at Sonny as if he had no idea where he was. Lightning danced all around, landing like mortar shells, reminding Sonny of Iraq, but he couldn’t think about that now. He had learned that much from war, you set some thoughts aside to be pondered when you were alone and safe. Or maybe you never revisited those thoughts at all, you just put them in a casket and buried them, along with friends now gone. The job was to live. He motioned Frank to follow, directing him toward the front of the blaze. It had crept within a hundred yards of the house. You could watch it move from clump to clump through the yellow grass and then suddenly jump ten feet in the air. George Miller was standing by the house, stupefied by the scope of the disaster that was ripping his life apart.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Many religions—including Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even Christianity—have known scorn and persecution. Some, like the Shakers and the Millerites, died out, but others, including Mormons and Pentecostals, have elbowed their way into the crowded religious landscape of American society. The practice of disconnection, or shunning, is not unique to Scientology, nor is the longing for religious sanctuary. America itself was founded by true believers who separated themselves from their non-Puritan kinfolk by placing an ocean between them. New religious leaders continually appear, giving expression to unmet spiritual needs. There is a constant churning of spiritual movements and denominations all over the world, one that advances with freedom of expression. One must look at L. Ron Hubbard and the odyssey of his movement against this historical backdrop and the natural human yearning for transcendence and submission. In the late 1970s, I lived for several months in an Amish and Mennonite community in central Pennsylvania, researching my first book.1 Their movement had been nearly annihilated in Europe, but in the 1720s they began taking refuge in William Penn’s colony, the “holy experiment” of Pennsylvania. Amish life has remained essentially unchanged since then, a kind of museum of eighteenth-century farm life. The adherents live sequestered lives, out of the drift of popular culture, on a kind of religious atoll. I was moved by the beauty and simplicity of their lives. The Amish see the Earth as God’s garden, and their duty is to tend it. The environment they surround themselves with is filled with a sense of peace and a purposeful orderliness. Individuality is sanded down to the point that one’s opinions are as similar to another’s as the approved shape of a bonnet or the regulation beard. Because fashion and novelty are outlawed, one feels comfortably encased in a timeless, unchanging vacuum. The enforced conformity dims the noise of diversity and the anxiety of uncertainty; one feels closer to eternity. One is also aware of the electrified fence of orthodoxy that surrounds and protects this Edenic paradise, and the expulsion that awaits those who doubt or question. Still, there is a kind of quiet majesty in the Amish culture—not because of their rejection of modernity, but because of their principled non-violence and their adherence to a way of living that tempers their fanaticism. The Amish suffer none of the social opprobrium that Scientologists must endure; indeed, they are generally treated like beloved endangered animals, coddled by their neighbors and smiled upon by society. And yet they are highly schismatic, willing to break off all relations with their dearest relatives on what would seem to an outsider to be an inane point of doctrine or even the question of whether one can allow eaves on a house or pictures on a wall. As adorable as the Amish appear to strangers, such isolated and intellectually deprived religious communities can become self-destructive, especially when they revolve around the whims of a single tyrannical leader.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “As your doctor, I have access to your medical records,” he reminded me, when I asked how he knew. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going. He loaded me into his car and played a rap song. Six months ago my music was wordless, now I was listening to rap. Isaac was a virus. The Devil’s Backbone is curved like a serpent; it’s a steep rock path you half walk, half skid down. Isaac held my hand as walked, dodging boulders that jutted out of the ground like knobs on a spine. When we stepped into the circle of the trees, the moon was already hanging over the carousel. My breath caught. Right away, I knew there wasn’t something right. The colors were wrong, the animals were wrong, the sentiment was wrong. Isaac handed five dollars to an old man sitting at the controls. He was eating sardines out of a can with his fingers. He stuck the five dollars in the front pocket of his shirt, and stood to open the gate. “Choose wisely,” Isaac whispered as we crossed the threshold. I went left; he went right. There was a ram and a dragon and an ostrich. I passed them by. This felt important, as if what I chose to ride on my thirtieth birthday said something. I stopped beside a horse that looked more angry than scared. Black with an arrow piercing its heart. Its head was bowed like it was ready for the fight, arrow or not. I chose that one, glancing over at Isaac as I swung my leg over the saddle. He was a few rows up, already on a white horse. It had a medical cross on its saddle and blood on its hooves. Perfect, I thought. I liked that he didn’t feel the need to ride next to me. He took his decision as seriously as I took mine, and in the end we each rode alone. There was no music. Just the swish of the trees and the hum of machinery. The old man let us ride twice. When it was over Isaac came over to help me down. His finger stroked my pinkie, which was still wrapped around the cracked pole that speared my horse. “I’m in love with you,” he said. I looked for the old man. He wasn’t by his post. He wasn’t anywhere. “Senna…” Maybe he went to get more sardines. “Senna?” “I heard you.” I slid off my horse and stood facing Isaac. My hair was pulled up or I would have started messing with it. He wasn’t very far from me, maybe just the distance of a single step. We were wedged in between two gory, death-infatuated carousel horses. “How many times have you been in love, Doctor?”

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The only faith tradition that does fit the modern Western notion of religion as something codified and private is Protestant Christianity, which, like religion in this sense of the word, is also a product of the early modern period. At this time Europeans and Americans had begun to separate religion and politics, because they assumed, not altogether accurately, that the theological squabbles of the Reformation had been entirely responsible for the Thirty Years’ War. The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state.10 The philosophers and statesmen who pioneered this dogma believed that they were returning to a more satisfactory state of affairs that had existed before ambitious Catholic clerics had confused two utterly distinct realms. But in fact their secular ideology was as radical an innovation as the modern market economy that the West was concurrently devising. To non-Westerners, who had not been through this particular modernizing process, both these innovations would seem unnatural and even incomprehensible. The habit of separating religion and politics is now so routine in the West that it is difficult for us to appreciate how thoroughly the two co-inhered in the past. It was never simply a question of the state “using” religion; the two were indivisible. Dissociating them would have seemed like trying to extract the gin from a cocktail. In the premodern world, religion permeated all aspects of life. We shall see that a host of activities now considered mundane were experienced as deeply sacred: forest clearing, hunting, football matches, dice games, astronomy, farming, state building, tugs-of-war, town planning, commerce, imbibing strong drink, and, most particularly, warfare. Ancient peoples would have found it impossible to see where “religion” ended and “politics” began. This was not because they were too stupid to understand the distinction but because they wanted to invest everything they did with ultimate value. We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our physical and psychological frailty. We find it astonishing that we are here at all and want to know why. We also have a great capacity for wonder. Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The fatherland of Islâm is Arabia, a peninsula between the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. It is covered with sandy deserts, barren hills, rock-bound coasts, fertile wadies, and rich pastures. It is inhabited by nomadic tribes and traders who claim descent from five patriarchal stocks, Cush, Shem, Ishmael, Keturah, and Esau. It was divided by the ancients into Arabia Deserta, Arabia Petraea (the Sinai district with Petra as the capital), and Arabia Felix (El-Yemen, i.e. the land on the right hand, or of the South). Most of its rivers are swelled by periodical rains and then lose themselves in the sandy plains; few reach the ocean; none of them is navigable. It is a land of grim deserts and strips of green verdure, of drought and barrenness, violent rains, clear skies, tropical heat, date palms, aromatic herbs, coffee, balsam, myrrh, frankincense, and dhurra (which takes the place of grain). Its chief animals are the camel, "the ship of the desert," an excellent breed of horses, sheep, and goats. The desert, like the ocean, is not without its grandeur. It creates the impression of infinitude, it fosters silence and meditation on God and eternity. Man is there alone with God. The Arabian desert gave birth to some of the sublimest compositions, the ode of liberty by Miriam, the ninetieth Psalm by Moses, the book of Job, which Carlyle calls "the grandest poem written by the pen of man." The Arabs love a roaming life, are simple and temperate, courteous, respectful, hospitable, imaginative, fond of poetry and eloquence, careless of human life, revengeful, sensual, and fanatical. Arabia, protected by its deserts, was never properly conquered by a foreign nation.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Although Hubbard had explicitly told Operating Thetans not to use their powers for “ parlor tricks,” there was a section of Advance! , a magazine for upper-level Scientologists, titled “ OT Phenomena,” where members could report clairvoyant or paranormal experiences. Parking spaces magically made themselves available and waiters immediately noticed you. “I saw that my goldfish was all red and lumpy,” one Scientologist writes in Advance! “My husband, Rick, said that he’s had goldfish like that before and they don’t recover.” The correspondent relates that she used her abilities to “flow energy” into the fish “until a big burst of matter blew. I ended off. When I went home that night the fish was completely healed.” She concludes, “It was a big win for me, and the fish. It couldn’t have been done without the technology of L. Ron Hubbard.” Even if such effects were random and difficult to replicate, for those who experienced them life was suddenly full of unseen possibilities. There was a sense of having entered a sphere of transcendence, where minds communicate with one another across great distances, where wishes and intentions affect material objects or cause people to unconsciously obey telepathic orders, and where spirits from other ages or even other worlds make themselves known. “ A theta being is capable of emitting a considerable electronic flow,” Hubbard notes, “enough to give somebody a very bad shock, to put out his eyes or cut him in half.” Even ordinary actions pose unexpected dilemmas for the OT, Hubbard warns. “ How do you answer the phone as an OT?” he asks in one of his lectures. “Supposing you get mad at somebody on the other end of the telephone. You go crunch! And that’s so much Bakelite. The thing either goes into a fog of dust in the middle of the air or drips over the floor.” To avoid crushing telephones with his unfathomable strength, the OT sets up an automatic action so he doesn’t have to pick the receiver up himself. “ Telephone rings, it springs into the air, and he talks. In other words, through involuntary intention the telephone stands there in mid-air.” The promise of employing such powers was incredibly tantalizing. Carrying an empty briefcase, Haggis went to the Advanced Organization building in Los Angeles, where the OT III material was held. A supervisor handed him a manila envelope. Haggis locked it in the briefcase, which was lashed to his arm. Then he entered a secure study room and bolted the door behind him. At last, he was able to examine the religion’s highest mysteries, revealed in a couple of pages of Hubbard’s handwritten scrawl. After a few minutes, Haggis returned to the supervisor. “I don’t understand,” Haggis said. “Do you know the words?” “I know the words, I just don’t understand.” “Go back and read it again,” the supervisor suggested. Haggis did so. In a moment, he returned. “Is this a metaphor?” he asked. “No,” the supervisor responded.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The sage kings had discovered an orderly design in the cosmos that showed them how to organize society; similarly the military commander could discern a pattern in the chaos of the battlefield that enabled him to find the most efficient way to achieve victory. “The one with many strategic factors in his favor wins, the one with few strategic factors in his favor loses,” explained Sunzi, a contemporary of Mencius. “Observing the matter in this way, I can see who will win and who will lose.”85 A good commander could even defeat the enemy without any fighting at all. If the odds were stacked against him, the best policy was to wait until the enemy, believing that you were weak, became overconfident and made a fatal mistake. The commander should regard his troops as mere extensions of his will and control them as the mind directs the body. Even though he was of noble birth, an able commander would live among his peasant soldiers, sharing their hardships and becoming the model to which they must conform. He would inflict terrible punishments on his men to make them fear him more than death on the battlefield; indeed, a good strategist would deliberately put his troops into such danger that they had no option but to fight their way out. A soldier could have no mind of his own but should be as subservient and passive in relation to his commander as a woman. Warfare had been “feminized.” Indeed, feminine weakness could be more effective than masculine belligerence: the best armies might seem to be as weak as water—but water could be extremely destructive.86 “The military is a Way [dao] of Deception,” said Sunzi. The name of the game was to deceive the enemy: Thus when able, manifest inability. When active, manifest inactivity. When near, manifest as far. When far, manifest as near. When he seeks advantage, lure him. When he is in chaos, take him. When he is substantial, prepare against him. When he is strong, avoid him. Attack where he is unprepared. Emerge where he does not expect.87 Sunzi knew that civilians would look askance at this martial ethic, but their state could not survive without its troops.88 The army should therefore be kept apart from mainstream society and be governed by its own laws, because its modus operandi was the “extraordinary” (qi), the counterintuitive, doing exactly what did not come naturally. This would be disastrous in all other affairs of state,89 but if a commander learned how to exploit the qi, he could achieve a sagelike alignment with the Way of Heaven: Thus one skilled at giving rise to the extraordinary is as boundless as Heaven and Earth, as inexhaustible as the Yellow River and the ocean. Ending and beginning again, like the sun and moon. Dying and then being born, like the four seasons.90

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “As your doctor, I have access to your medical records,” he reminded me, when I asked how he knew. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going. He loaded me into his car and played a rap song. Six months ago my music was wordless, now I was listening to rap. Isaac was a virus. The Devil’s Backbone is curved like a serpent; it’s a steep rock path you half walk, half skid down. Isaac held my hand as walked, dodging boulders that jutted out of the ground like knobs on a spine. When we stepped into the circle of the trees, the moon was already hanging over the carousel. My breath caught. Right away, I knew there wasn’t something right. The colors were wrong, the animals were wrong, the sentiment was wrong. Isaac handed five dollars to an old man sitting at the controls. He was eating sardines out of a can with his fingers. He stuck the five dollars in the front pocket of his shirt, and stood to open the gate. “Choose wisely,” Isaac whispered as we crossed the threshold. I went left; he went right. There was a ram and a dragon and an ostrich. I passed them by. This felt important, as if what I chose to ride on my thirtieth birthday said something. I stopped beside a horse that looked more angry than scared. Black with an arrow piercing its heart. Its head was bowed like it was ready for the fight, arrow or not. I chose that one, glancing over at Isaac as I swung my leg over the saddle. He was a few rows up, already on a white horse. It had a medical cross on its saddle and blood on its hooves. Perfect, I thought. I liked that he didn’t feel the need to ride next to me. He took his decision as seriously as I took mine, and in the end we each rode alone. There was no music. Just the swish of the trees and the hum of machinery. The old man let us ride twice. When it was over Isaac came over to help me down. His finger stroked my pinkie, which was still wrapped around the cracked pole that speared my horse. “I’m in love with you,” he said. I looked for the old man. He wasn’t by his post. He wasn’t anywhere. “Senna…” Maybe he went to get more sardines. “Senna?” “I heard you.” I slid off my horse and stood facing Isaac. My hair was pulled up or I would have started messing with it. He wasn’t very far from me, maybe just the distance of a single step. We were wedged in between two gory, death-infatuated carousel horses. “How many times have you been in love, Doctor?”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The act was scandalous and prolonged. Bending over, supported by his hands, leaning upon the crest of a little hillock facing the thicket where I lay, the young master exposed naked to his companion in debauch the impious sacrificial altar, and the latter, whom the spectacle filled with ardor, caressed the idol, ready to immolate it with a spear far more awful and far more colossal than the one wherewith the captain of the brigands of Bondy had menaced me; but, in no wise intimidated, the young master seemed prepared unhesitatingly to brave the shaft that was presented to him; he teased it, he excited it, covered it with kisses; seized it, plunged it into himself, was in an ecstasy as he swallowed it up; aroused by criminal caresses, the infamous creature writhed and struggled under the iron and seemed to regret it was not yet more terrible; he withstood its blows, he rose to anticipate them, he repelled them.... A tender couple lawfully connected would not have caressed one another so passionately... their mouths were pressed together, their sighs intermingled, their tongues entwined, and I witnessed each of them, drunk with lust, bring his perfidious horrors to completion in the very vortex of delight. The homage is renewed, and in order to fire the incense nothing is neglected by him who cries aloud his demand for it; kisses, fingerings, pollutions, debauchery's most appalling refinements, everything is employed to revive sinking strength, and it all succeeds in reanimating them five times in swift succession; but that without either of them changing his role. The young lord was constantly the woman and although there was about him what suggested the possibility he could have acted the man in his turn, he had not for one instant even the appearance of wishing to. If he visited the altar corresponding to the one in him where sacrifices were performed, it was in the other idol's behalf, and there was never any indication the latter was threatened by assault. Chapter 11 Ah, how slowly the time seemed to pass! I dared not budge for fear of detection; at last, the criminal actors in this indecent drama, no doubt surfeited, got up and were prepared to start along the road that was to take them home, when the master drew near the bush which hid me; my bonnet betrayed me... he caught sight of it....

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Koran is unquestionably one of the great books of the world. It is not only a book, but an institution, a code of civil and religious laws, claiming divine origin and authority. It has left its impress upon ages. It feeds to this day the devotions, and regulates the private and public life, of more than a hundred millions of human beings. It has many passages of poetic beauty, religious fervor, and wise counsel, but mixed with absurdities, bombast, unmeaning images, low sensuality. It abounds in repetitions and contradictions, which are not removed by the convenient theory of abrogation. It alternately attracts and repels, and is a most wearisome book to read. Gibbon calls the Koran "a glorious testimony to the unity of God," but also, very properly, an "endless, incoherent rhapsody of fable and precept and declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment or idea, which sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds."175 Reiske176 denounces it as the most absurd book and a scourge to a reader of sound common sense. Goethe, one of the best judges of literary and poetic merit, characterizes the style as severe, great, terrible, and at times truly sublime. "Detailed injunctions," he says, "of things allowed and forbidden, legendary stories of Jewish and Christian religion, amplifications of all kinds, boundless tautologies and repetitions, form the body of this sacred volume, which to us, as often as we approach it, is repellent anew, next attracts us ever anew, and fills us with admiration, and finally forces us into veneration." He finds the kernel of Islâm in the second Sura, where belief and unbelief with heaven and hell, as their sure reward, are contrasted. Carlyle calls the Koran "the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read, but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself In words;" and says of Mohammedanism: "Call it not false, look not at the falsehood of it; look at the truth of it. For these twelve centuries it has been the religion and life-guidance of the fifth part of the whole kindred of mankind. Above all, it has been a religion heartily believed." But with all his admiration, Carlyle confesses that the reading of the Koran in English is "as toilsome a task" as he ever undertook. "A wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; insupportable stupidity, in short, nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran. We read it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber, that we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man." And yet there are Mohammedan doctors who are reported to have read the Koran seventy thousand times! What a difference of national and religious taste! Emanuel Deutsch finds the grandeur of the Koran chiefly in its Arabic diction, "the peculiarly dignified, impressive, sonorous nature of Semitic sound and parlance; its sesquipedalia verba, with their crowd of prefixes and affixes, each of them affirming its own position, while consciously bearing upon and influencing the central root, which they envelop like a garment of many folds, or as chosen courtiers move round the anointed person of the king." E. H. Palmer says that the claim of the Koran to miraculous eloquence, however absurd it may sound to Western ears, was and is to the Arab incontrovertible, and he accounts for the immense influence which it has always exercised upon the Arab mind, by the fact, "that it consists not merely of the enthusiastic utterances of an individual, but of the popular sayings, choice pieces of eloquence, and favorite legends current among the desert tribes for ages before this time. Arabic authors speak frequently of the celebrity attained by the ancient Arabic orators, such as Shâibân Wâil; but unfortunately no specimens of their works have come down to us. The Qur’ân, however, enables us to judge of the speeches which took so strong a hold upon their countrymen."177

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Mohammed, an unschooled, self-taught, semi-barbarous son of nature, of noble birth, handsome person, imaginative, energetic, brave, the ideal of a Bedouin chief, was destined to become the political and religious reformer, the poet, prophet, priest, and king of Arabia. He was born about A.D. 570 at Mecca, the only child of a young widow named Amina.150 His father Abdallah had died a few months before in his twenty-fifth year on a mercantile journey in Medina, and left to his orphan five camels, some sheep and a slave girl.151 He belonged to the heathen family of the Hàshim, which was not wealthy, but claimed lineal descent from Ishmael, and was connected with the Koreish or Korashites, the leading tribe of the Arabs and the hereditary guardians of the sacred Kaaba.152 Tradition surrounds his advent in the world with a halo of marvellous legends: he was born circumcised and with his navel cut, with the seal of prophecy written on his back in letters of light; he prostrated himself at once on the ground, and, raising his hands, prayed for the pardon of his people; three persons, brilliant as the sun, one holding a silver goblet, the second an emerald tray, the third a silken towel, appeared from heaven, washed him seven times, then blessed and saluted him as the "Prince of Mankind." He was nursed by a healthy Bedouin woman of the desert. When a boy of four years he was seized with something like a fit of epilepsy, which Wâckidi and other historians transformed into a miraculous occurrence. He was often subject to severe headaches and feverish convulsions, in which he fell on the ground like a drunken man, and snored like a camel.153 In his sixth year he lost his mother on the return from Medina, whither she had taken him on camel’s back to ’visit the maternal relations of his father, and was carried back to Mecca by his nurse, a faithful slave girl. He was taken care of by his aged grandfather, Abd al Motkalib, and after his death in 578 by his uncle Abu Tâlib, who had two wives and ten children, and, though poor and no believer in his nephew’s mission, generously protected him to the end. He accompanied his uncle on a commercial journey to Syria, passing through the desert, ruined cities of old, and Jewish and Christian settlements, which must have made a deep impression on his youthful imagination.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In one of my own children, two years and three months old, I saw a trace of what certainly appeared to be shyness directed toward myself, after an absence from home of only a week." Every parent has noticed the same sort of thing. Considering the despotic powers of rulers in savage tribes, respect and awe must, from time immemorial, have been emotions excited by certain individuals; and stage-fright servile terror, and shyness, must have had as copious opportunities for exercise as at the present time. Whether these impulses could ever have been useful, and selected for usefulness, is a question which, it would seem, can only be answered in the negative. Apparently they are pure hindrances, like fainting at sight of blood or disease, sea-sickness, a dizzy head on high places, and certain squeamishnesses of æsthetic taste. They are incidental emotions, in spite of which we get along. But they seem to play an important part in the production of two other propensities, about the instinctive character of which a good deal of controversy has prevailed. I refer to cleanliness and modesty, to which we must proceed, but not before Tire have said a word about another impulse closely allied to shyness. I mean— Secretiveness, which, although often due to intelligent calculation and the dread of betraying our interests in some more or less definitely foreseen way, is quite as often a blind propensity, serving no useful purpose, and is so stubborn and ineradicable a part of the character as fully to deserve a place among the instincts. Its natural stimuli are unfamiliar human beings, especially those whom we respect. Its reactions are the arrest of whatever we are saying or doing when such strangers draw nigh, coupled often with the pretense that we were not saying or doing that thing, but possibly something different. Often there is added to this a disposition to mendacity when asked to give an account of ourselves. With many persons the first impulse, when the door-bell rings, or a visitor is suddenly announced, is to scuttle out of the room, so as not to be 'caught.' When a person at whom we have been looking becomes aware of us, our immediate impulse may be to look the other way, end pretend we have not seen him. Many friends have confessed tome that this is a frequent phenomenon with them in meeting acquaintances in the street, especially unfamiliar ones. The bow is a secondary correction of the primary feint that we do not see the other person.