Of the sacred, III: saliva redux
[ by Charles Cameron — yet another angle on religious violence ]
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Religion can be a lot stranger than one might think.
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Wrathful deity, Tibet
Here, I’m going to tie in my recent post about Iranian clerics claiming Khamenei‘s saliva could cure diseases with the notions of religious danger and religious violence.
Bear with me, this will give us a richer understanding of how religious violence may work with people who are naturally rule-averse — and I’m thinking here of criminals who get into a mix of religion and violence, including criminals who get involved in jihad, but also the cultic side of cartel violence in Mexico.
My aim is not to explicate either of these phenomena specifically, nor to claim they necessarily resemble each other or the punk or Hindu practices I’ll reference, but simply to suggest again, from another angle, how astonishingly diverse, powerful — and frankly surprising, disgusting and on occasion dangerous — religious expressions can be.
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In my post about Iranian clerics’ claims of virtue for the Ayatollah’s saliva, I drew on other examples in Islamic, Hindu and Christian traditions where the saliva of saints was considered capable of conferring blessings. Marcus Ranum replied with a hilarious, down to earth comment about Chuck Norris‘ saliva, and Derek Robinson then chimed in with a link to a story about punk rockers and spit:
It was the glorious contemptuousness of spitting, of course, that lay behind its enthusiastic adoption by rock stars and others attempting an instant badge of streetwise chic. Spittle’s finest hour came when the activity was adopted as a collective pastime by fans of punk in the 70s, although, according to Jon Savage, the author of England’s Dreaming, a history of the period, the affection for flob may initially have been accidental. “There are various theories as to how it all started but it seems to have originated, with Johnny Rotten blowing his nose on stage when he had a bronchial problem. He may have started the whole thing, unconsciously.” What probably gave the habit legs, he says, was the penchant of the Damned to go to other bands’ gigs and spit at them from the mosh pit as a sign of disapproval.
“The interesting thing about punk spitting was that it was supposed to be friendly, a gesture of solidarity. It was a clever inversion by the punk audience: if you call us disgusting, we’ll show you that we can be disgusting. Bands at the period routinely complained about having to come offstage because they couldn’t play with their hands slipping all over their guitars, however, and if you look at footage of the period – there is some of the Clash in 77 – they are operating in a hail of spit. Completely disgusting.” The power of sputum in punk reached its zenith when Joe Strummer, the band’s lead singer, caught hepatitis after accidentally catching a blob of goo on stage.
What’s clear from this quote, I think, is that the idea behind all this spitting is what some scholars call “transgressive” — there’s a delight here in going beyond accepted boundaries? — and I think FWIW that that’s very much part of what some tantra is about.
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So we’re in the realm where excitement is generated by doing what’s against the code — moral, legal, social, whether written or unwritten. There’s a frisson of excitement there, in crossing the line, and in religion the technical term for religious practices that explore the crossing of lines and breaking of taboos is “antinomian”.
There are plenty of examples of antinomian behavior in religion. They often crop up when new religious movements are born in defiance of an existing order perceived as unjust, corrupt or hypocritical — as when some medieval heresies held that stealing from wealthy bishops to share food with the poor was more in line with Christ‘s teaching than paying tithes to support the bishop in his splendor.
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