(no subject)
The other day, dad gave me a two-part biography of Selma Lagerlöf written by Elin Wägner. No occasion, except that he found it in a second-hand book store and it only cost 10 kronor (about one dollar and 35 cents), so knowing how much I love Selma's stuff he bought it.
I'm halfway through the second book, and it has made me think of my own relationship to Selma's literature. Most of all, what she and people like her have meant to my view on religion and mysticism - my being a polytheistic monotheist, if you like.
For those of you who don't know of Selma Lagerlöf, or know of her only as the writer of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (IMO one of her less than brilliant books, and in fact one that was originally written as a schoolbook in geography), she's a Swedish icon who died in the 1940s. Everyone knows of her, yet literary speaking, she's not all that respected; she tends to be dismissed as a teller of fairy tales. Which, you know, isn't wrong, but it isn't right either.
Selma wrote some kind of magical realism, mixing things everyday stuff with anecdotes of people from her home county and folk lore. She never separated one from the other, and reading her, I got the impression that it was as natural for people to see signs or talk to animals as it was for them to eat dinner and go to bed at night. Everything in her world was animate, and she drew no line between the lived truth and the impossibility.
Nor did she draw a line between Christian mysticism and folk lore. Her legends of Christ are very similar to her legends of spirits from the woods and waters. Worship and magic blends together. Not only were the plants, animals and spirits all creatures with a soul and mind, but they could be good and wicked, reward and punish, sometimes in accordance with Christian morals, sometimes according to standards of their very own.
I've later seen that this attitude is in no way unique to her writing. Doing a paper on ethnology, I compared folk lore and superstitions with acts done by priests, barbers and informal doctors, and I found that the difference between magic, science and religion was mostly a question of class, not of the acts themselves. The same beliefs could be found in witch and cleric.
And I remember how surprised I was when I read recently that "the idea of a disembodied soul is foreign to Christanity" considering that I had personally met a woman who believed she had sent a ghost haunting a building back to God by reading prayers by the grave. It's all a question of looking at theology or looking at people. To people, making different world views blend isn't such a tricky thing.
I think it was Neil Gaiman who apropos American Gods talked about how people had lost their old gods when they travelled to their new homeland. The gods had stayed behind. So taking what he said to the logical conclusion, that means the only spirit worth taking into consideration would be the Almighty - the old gods were gone, and the immigrants neither could nor wanted to take over the Indian ones.
I don't think that's specifically American. The same tendency can be seen in the move from countryside to city. The old spirits belonged to forests and streams and farms. What spirits are there for highways and pipes and apartments? We are left without any souled being between human and God-with-capital-G, and thus the world remains a mystery, no matter how much we dissect i.
I'm not saying I believe in everything, wood spirits and water spirits and whatnot. Just that I treat it like I treat religion - even if what's being said isn't the absolute truth, it's being said for a true reason.
I'm halfway through the second book, and it has made me think of my own relationship to Selma's literature. Most of all, what she and people like her have meant to my view on religion and mysticism - my being a polytheistic monotheist, if you like.
For those of you who don't know of Selma Lagerlöf, or know of her only as the writer of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (IMO one of her less than brilliant books, and in fact one that was originally written as a schoolbook in geography), she's a Swedish icon who died in the 1940s. Everyone knows of her, yet literary speaking, she's not all that respected; she tends to be dismissed as a teller of fairy tales. Which, you know, isn't wrong, but it isn't right either.
Selma wrote some kind of magical realism, mixing things everyday stuff with anecdotes of people from her home county and folk lore. She never separated one from the other, and reading her, I got the impression that it was as natural for people to see signs or talk to animals as it was for them to eat dinner and go to bed at night. Everything in her world was animate, and she drew no line between the lived truth and the impossibility.
Nor did she draw a line between Christian mysticism and folk lore. Her legends of Christ are very similar to her legends of spirits from the woods and waters. Worship and magic blends together. Not only were the plants, animals and spirits all creatures with a soul and mind, but they could be good and wicked, reward and punish, sometimes in accordance with Christian morals, sometimes according to standards of their very own.
I've later seen that this attitude is in no way unique to her writing. Doing a paper on ethnology, I compared folk lore and superstitions with acts done by priests, barbers and informal doctors, and I found that the difference between magic, science and religion was mostly a question of class, not of the acts themselves. The same beliefs could be found in witch and cleric.
And I remember how surprised I was when I read recently that "the idea of a disembodied soul is foreign to Christanity" considering that I had personally met a woman who believed she had sent a ghost haunting a building back to God by reading prayers by the grave. It's all a question of looking at theology or looking at people. To people, making different world views blend isn't such a tricky thing.
I think it was Neil Gaiman who apropos American Gods talked about how people had lost their old gods when they travelled to their new homeland. The gods had stayed behind. So taking what he said to the logical conclusion, that means the only spirit worth taking into consideration would be the Almighty - the old gods were gone, and the immigrants neither could nor wanted to take over the Indian ones.
I don't think that's specifically American. The same tendency can be seen in the move from countryside to city. The old spirits belonged to forests and streams and farms. What spirits are there for highways and pipes and apartments? We are left without any souled being between human and God-with-capital-G, and thus the world remains a mystery, no matter how much we dissect i.
I'm not saying I believe in everything, wood spirits and water spirits and whatnot. Just that I treat it like I treat religion - even if what's being said isn't the absolute truth, it's being said for a true reason.