zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — messianisms as madness ]
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The Economist has a fascinating piece out about Iran’s multiplicity of messiahs (lower panel, below) which reminded me strongly of the Jerusalem syndrome (upper panel).

I suspect that was “bad adab” – bad manners, not bad clothing – but never mind.

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The Economist piece is worth reading in full, if you also take the time to read Tim Furnish — who tones down the rhetoric a couple of notches:

I seriously doubt that Iranian jails are full of thousands of self-styled mahdis; I suspect many of them are guilty of nothing more eschatological than complaining too publicly about the price of gas or having too large a satellite TV antenna on their homes. But even if reduced by a factor of ten, the Islamic Republic does nonetheless appear to have a serious problem with apocalyptic antipathy toward the government. And a regime predicated, in no small part, on Mahdist ideology finds itself being hoist by its own philosophical petard.

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Meanwhile, back in Jerusalem:

In Israel, Jerusalem Syndrome is taken very seriously. Everyone involved in security, tourism, or health is on the lookout for afflicted visitors. In an average year, three or four tourists develop real, palpable Jerusalem Syndrome. In l999, more than 50 visitors were diagnosed, the increase possibly attributed to millennial activities.

Why the security concern? Well, because occasionally those afflicted try some pretty dangerous stuff. Dr Yair Bar-El wrote in The British Journal of Psychiatry (2000) 176: 86-90:

A Protestant from South America conceived a plan to destroy Islamic holy places in order to replace them with Jewish holy places. The second stage of his plan was then to destroy them in order to start the war of Gog and Magog so that the Anti-Christ would reveal himself, after which Christ would reappear. The patient succeeded in gutting one of the most holy mosques in Jerusalem. Psychiatric examination was ordered by the court, and he was diagnosed as being unable to differentiate between right and wrong, not responsible for his deeds and therefore not fit to stand trial. He was admitted to a local psychiatric institution and later transferred to a mental health institution in his own country

I think “gutting” is overstating what happened — but you can sense the risk…

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DoubleQuote Sources:

The Savvy Traveler, 2000

The Economist, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — and I should add that I don’t think it’s a matter of a minor side street crossing a grand boulevard ]
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I have high regard for Mark Juergensmeyer, whose book Terror in the Mind of God is rightfully a classic, and I don’t by an means always trust tweets from a TV channel… but in this case I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if NBC Nightly News had it right, and Mark Juergensmeyer was shading things just a bit too cautiously.

Sources:

Mark Juergensmeyer, Don’t Blame Religion for Boston Bombings

NBC Nightly News, on Twitter

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But look, I feel the way I do about the intersection of religious and political motives — in this and other cases — because I have some personal understanding of how passionate a matter religion can be, and a sense, too, that our secularizing age wouldn’t mind at all if religion quietly dropped off the edge of the world.

Having said that, I like to listen to the voices of those who may see things in a different light, so perhaps I may point you to two recent articles by two of the keener observers of the Islamist political scene — Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel:

Olivier Roy, Boston: More Like Sandy Hook Than 9/11

Gilles Kepel, Après le printemps arabe, l’hiver islamiste… Est-ce une bonne description de la réalité

Two people with very rich exposure to the varieties of contemporary Islam speak to us in those two pieces.

[ by Charles Cameron — in response to Steve Engel ]
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Phpto credit: MDeeDubroff

My friend Steve Engel wrote regarding the Boston bombers and my elucidation of a Mahdist video that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had seen and “liked”:

Thank you, Charles, for your close examination of nuances that may underlie the actions of people who envision themselves as warriors for the sake of ancient prophecy. Those among us who feel that they dwell in meaningless sorrow make likely customers for purveyors of self-hypnosis–whether of this brand or some other flag-waving, self-justifying cruelty.

I’ve been pondering how to express my reasons for paying particular attention to religious and a fortiori eschatological motives for terror for some time now. The varieties of end times thinking have been an interest of mine for decades, to be sure, and both religion and its specifically end times variants tend IMO to be easily ignored in our so rational post-Enlightenment and high-tech times — so I have both personal and analytic reasons to be keenly interested. But there’s more, and I believe StevE’s comment may be just the thing to pry loose a better explanation than I have given up till now.

I’ll use the well-worn phrase, “work expands to fill the time available” as my starting point.

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Turning to StevE’s point about potential recruits to terrorism or other crimes…

It’s easy, it seems to me, to think that just any old ideology would do, that the disgruntled simply pick one and use it as a cover or rationalization — but I suspect that emotions can “intensify to fill the ideology available” to paraphrase the other phrase, and that certain ideologies have structural features equivalent to high ceilings in an architectural space, so that “intensifying to fill the ideology available” can have a certain fierce purity when the ideology is a religious one and pious self-dedication a possibility — even more so when “martyrdom” can be aspired to — and yet more so again where one perceives oneself under divine sanction in the culminating battle of all time, immediately prior to judgment.

I’ve been to two “fire walkings” in my life — the first at Mt Takao, where crowds gather for a yearly ceremony in which one writes one’s sins on a sliver of wood and cast it into the fire, the coals of which which the Yamabushi mountain monks then walk across (see image above), followed by intrepid amateur ascetics…

The second — ah, the second was pitched as an occasion where you could “prove the power of mind over matter” for yourself, and come away from the experience “knowing you had achieved the impossible”. And when the instructor went around the room afterwards and asked people, “Now you know you can do the impossible, what’s next for you?” he got answers like, “I’ll have the courage to ask my boss for a $25 a month raise…”

Times are hard for many of us, and I don’t want to knock either the courage it takes to ask or the value of a $25 monthly raise — but if you’ve just “done the impossible”, is this the most you can ask?

Apocalyptic arousal hopes for more than $25 a month — in most cases it longs for the sudden and immediate reversal of all the good fortune that appears to befall “bad” people right now, and the no less sudden reapportionment of all those blessings on the heads of the “good” people — oneself prominent among them. It shakes the world to its foundations, and it cleanses it.

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I’ll let Richard Landes give you a sense of how believing oneself a participant in apocalypse can make the everyday moment deeply significant, and give the “end times we live in” importance beyond measure — with an excerpt from his great book, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience:

For people who have entered apocalyptic time, everything quickens, enlivens, coheres. They become semiotically aroused — everything has meaning, patterns. The smallest incident can have immense importance and open the way to an entirely new vision of the world, one in which forces unseen by other mortals operate. If the warrior lives with death at his shoulder, then apocalyptic warriors live with cosmic salvation before them, just beyond their grasp.

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Image source:

http://www.weirdasianews.com/2009/08/27/firewalking-festival-hot-japanese-ritual/

Thanks again to Steve Engel for prompting these reflections.

[ by Charles Cameron — Hugo Chavez was not only a friend of the Twelfth Imam to Ahmadinejad, but a disincarnate great spirit to Spiritualists & a near-savior to many Catholics ]
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altares de santos with Hugo Chavez, image credit likely Reuters

A short while back in Chavez and the Second Coming? I reported on Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s fulsome tribute to the late president of Venezuela Argentina, Hugo Chavez, of whom he said, “I have no doubt that he will return alongside Jesus Christ and the Mahdi to establish peace and justice in the world.”

Well, there’s more…

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The seventh World Spiritualist Congress brought some 1,500 delegates from 24 countries to Havana, Cuba a week ago. The Voice of Russia reported:

The central personality of this mystical congress was the former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. “He is a great spiritualist who has disincarnated,” Enrique Alemany, president of the Spiritualist Federation of Havana, said.

Okay, that’s Shiite Islam and global spiritualism taken care of. How about Catholicism, South American style, with an intriguing mention of the recent papal election?

From yesterday’s National Post, under the title ‘I saw him as a kind of God’: In death, Hugo Chavez reaches divine status among Venezuelan followers:

Chavez’s die-hard followers considered him a living legend on a par with independence-era hero Simon Bolivar well before his March 5 death from cancer. In the mere three weeks since, however, Chavez has ascended to divine status in this deeply Catholic country as the government and Chavistas build a religious mythology around him ahead of April 14 elections to pick a new leader.

Chavez’s hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, has led the way, repeatedly calling the late president “the redeemer Christ of the Americas” and describing Chavistas, including himself, as “apostles.”

Maduro went even further after Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis earlier this month. Maduro said Chavez had advised Jesus Christ in heaven that it was time for a South American pope.

That comes as Maduro’s government loops ads on state TV comparing Chavez to sainted heroes such as Bolivar and puts up countless banners around the capital emblazoned with Chavez’s image and the message “From his hands sprouts the rain of life.”

“President Chavez is in heaven,” Maduro told a March 16 rally in the poor Caracas neighborhood of Catia. “I don’t have any doubt that if any man who walked this earth did what was needed so that Christ the redeemer would give him a seat at his side, it was our redeemer liberator of the 21st century, the comandante Hugo Chavez.”

Chavistas such as Munoz have filled Venezuela with murals, posters and other artwork showing Chavez in holy poses surrounded by crosses, rosary beads and other religious symbolism.

One poster on sale in downtown Caracas depicts Chavez holding a shining gold cross in his hands beside a quote from the Book of Joshua: “Comrade, be not afraid. Neither be dismayed, for I Will be with you each instant.” The original scripture says “Lord thy God,” and not “I,” will accompany humanity each instant.

And if Ahmadinejad expected that Chavez would return with Christ at the Second Coming, it’s worth noting that Chavez was also present — at least in a crèche from Caracas last year — at Christ’s nativity.

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With hat-tips to Ben Zeller, Jean-Francois Mayer and the crew at the New Religious Movements mailing list.

Chag Sameach, Christos Aneste, Happy Holidays…

[ by Charles Cameron — on the religious and irreligious attributes of the sovereign citizen movement, with a glance at syncretism and the Grateful Dead ]
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There’s something of a question as to whether the US sovereign citizens movement is religious and perhaps apocalyptic, or basically secular in nature. As I said in part I of this double post, its main manifestations haven’t seemed particularly religious, and I have accordingly not been paying them a whole lot of attention.

This sense — that the movement is primarily legal rather than religious in emphasis, is nicely captured in this personal communication from JM Berger:

Very few of the beliefs that we use to define the sovereign citizen movement are by definition religious. The things that most often define a sovereign have to do with interpretations of secular law. Athough those interpretations are sometimes supported by religious concepts, the beliefs themselves are centered on what adherents think is a pragmatic reading of law. So to explain that, most sovereigns wouldn’t refuse to answer a policeman’s questions by citing a religious principle. They would instead cite some secular legal principle they believe is valid. But some sovereigns do mix religion in more aggressively, such as those who follow outgrowths of the old Moorish Science Temple religion. But even they rely on legal arguments.

The most common sovereign how-to materials and recruitment websites tend to be pretty secular and based on a reading of history that, while fanciful, is predicated on a misreading of history rather than on ideas we would normally consider religious. In fact, I think the big challenge in understanding this movement is figuring out how these ideas take such powerful hold having neither a consistent religious dimension nor any evidence — even subjective or anecdotal — that they work on a practical level.

JM is the author of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam and of the New America Foundation report, PATCON: The FBI’s Secret War Against the ‘Patriot’ Movement… His views as expressed in the quote above are based on recent research.

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Jean Rosenfeld is also a researcher with an interest in both foreign and home-grown violent movements. She authored what may have been the first detailed inquiry into Al-Qaida from a religious studies perspective, The `Religion’ of Usamah bin Ladin: Terror As the Hand of God, back in 2001, edited the anthology Terrorism, Identity, and Legitimacy, and was one of the FBI’s advisory scholars during the [“sovereign”] Justus Freemen standoff, see her article The Justus Freemen Standoff: The importance of the analysis of religion in avoiding violent outcomes in Cathy Wessinger, ed., Millennialism, Persecution & Violence.

Also in a private communication, Jean writes:

Sovereign citizen ideology is basically a religious ideology. It is deviant, of course, and is often mixed with Christian Identity religion. It comes out of the same “cultic milieu” as the Posse Comitatus of the 1970s and CSA of the 1980s.

Setting these two opinions regarding the religiosity or otherwise of the sovereign citizens side by side, what strikes me most is the juxtaposition of the Moorish Science Temple in JM’s quote with the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord in Jean’s. Both are “new religious movement” of considerable interest to scholars of such things.

For more on the Moorish Science Temple, see Peter Lamborn Wilson‘s Lost/Found Moorish Time Lines in the Wilderness of North America [part 1 and part 2]. For more on the CSA, see Kerry Noble‘s book, Tabernacle of Hate, with an Introduction by Jean Rosenfeld.

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Given my interest in the religious imagination — which is manifesting itself these days in a wild profusion perhaps unmatched since the times of Qumran , Nag Hammadi and the Corpus Hermeticum — I was intrigued, in looking a little deeper into the US Sovereign Citizens movement, to find at least one individual with an approach to religion that’s suitably sui generis.

The deliciously named (and I quote) ©H.I.R.M. J.M. Sovereign: Godsent™ is the author of TITLE 4 FLAG SAYS YOU’RE SCHWAG! The Sovereign Citizen’s Handbook (version 3.1), in which we read:

The source of all Sovereignty is God. God holds Absolute Sovereignty, meaning He rules over all He surveys and answers to no-one above Himself, every force in nature including human conduct is His subject and under the control of “The Laws of Nature”. For example, “gravity”.

The author then quotes 1 Chronicles 29:11-12

Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all. Both riches and honor come from you, and you rule over all. In your hand are power and might, and in your hand it is to make great and to give strength to all.

and follows this directly with the seal of the “Church of Sovereigns” depicted at the top of this post, right. On the left of the same image is a graphic taken from a video titled Calling the Sheriff 2.1.2012, which, if you recognize it, will give you an immediate and visceral sense of the Deadhead spirit of this particular writer.

Here, by way of confirmation, is his bio:

©H.I.R.M. J.M. Sovereign: Godsent™, a veteran of the 2nd American Civil war, A.K.A the “War on Drugs” was born sovereign and free out of the the love generation but, was cast into slavery at age 5 in the police state of New Mexico, when his parents divorced. Struggling with the contradictions between society and the laws of nature, Godsent spent the next 33 years casting off the shackles of institutional conditioning, with the ultimate triumph of regaining the throne of his very own sovereign nation and setting new standards in the way Sovereign Americans and government employees interface.

Shown the path of ahimsa (non-violence) at an early age, he is a lover of music and art, who has traveled the world to dance with friends at over 400 Grateful Dead shows in 5 countries. Surviving repeated attacks at shows and on the streets, by public employees, and noting the patterns and the damage done, he concluded that the World needed a treatise on Sovereignty and Reservation of Sovereign Rights. With the Investment of 23 years of field research, networking and litigation, and 7 years of writing, he has recently authored the definitive treatise on Reservation of Sovereign Rights. Along with the first automated sovereignty e-course, accompanied by an inspirational soundtrack, network services, a private, third-party document tracking system and educational videos.

A monk of the 9 Sacred paths of Catholic, Buddha Rasta, Tao, Maya, Jain, Shvaite, Vaishnava, and Eckankar, he has traveled the world in search of priceless wisdom, humor, melody and artifacts. He has learned the most confidential knowledge and has been given the keys the Kingdom of God, by the enlightened masters, which he gives entrance to you here, in this book. He has never owned a weapon in his life.

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I am not totally immune to the charms of the Grateful Dead, and take an interest in Catholicism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shaiva tantra myself.