The Pagan States of America

The United States is a Christian nation, right? That's what the TV preachers tell us. Christianity might be good enough for the masses who toil in the private sector, but their masters who rule from the public sector look to the classical world for inspiration.

This struck me during a visit to the Minnesota state capitol building in St. Paul. The artwork inside the building's rotunda is uniformly and inescapably pagan. I take responsibility for the poor quality of the photos that follow, but the inherent pagan imagery is clear. Nothing Christian to be gleaned.

Outside the capitol building is the iconic gold-leafed copper and steel statuary group, "Progress of the State." According to the Minnesota Historical Society, "The four horses represent the power of nature: earth, wind, fire and water. The women symbolize civilization and the man standing on the chariot represents prosperity." Why should secular government pay homage to the elementals?  (image from the MN Historical Society web site)

And if you're visiting Minnesota's twin cities, be sure the check out the lower level of the old Hennepin County courthouse in downtown Minneapolis. There you'll find this impressive statue of the Father of Waters, a personification of that venerable elemental force, the Mighty Mississippi. 

 

A visit to the Wisconsin state capitol, in Madison, confronted me with similar imagery in the form of statuary, shown below.  

Where in all this are Adam and Eve? Noah and the ark? The exodus from Egypt? The arrival at the promised land?

Where's the immaculate conception? The loaves and fishes? The crucifixion and the ressurrection?

Isn't the United States a Christian nation?.     

I suppose that the dearth of Biblical imagery in seats of government has something to do with the notion of a Constitutional wall that separates church and state. And the reason pagans get a free ride might have to do with that word, "church," as opposed to, say, "temple." Curiously, Mormons maintain both churches and temples, covering the bases, I suppose.

In any case, it's clear that Christianity is good enough for Joe and Josephine Blow, but paganism the elite retains to itself for its own veneration.

Time to Sacralize the Profane

The Sacred and the Profane. This is how Mircea Eliade, historian of religions, distinguished between two conceptions of time. The former typifies Non-Western traditions. It is time as a cycle. Sacred time revolves culturally around what Eliade called the Myth of the Eternal Return, the archetype of time as a recursion, anchored by a Golden Age, the perfect state of the universe’s origin. In Sacred time, all durations aim to return the world to its original perfection. Religious ordeals and ceremonies attempt to re-instate the aboriginal condition, ritually, through theatrical re-enactments.

Any digression from the perfection of origins is a descent into folly, into degeneracy. Novelty is to be avoided. Innovation is a cosmic error. The obligation of culture is to assist nature in its striving to cycle back, through seasonal, lunar, generational and the countless other natural cycles to re-establish the perfection of the aboriginal world.

The challenge to this conception came from the West. Profane time—the unidirectional, linear time of history—is a brainchild of the Western mindset, originating in Judaic tradition. (After plowing through Thomas Cahill’s "The Gifts of the Jews", I gather this is the guy’s point.) From the Profane conception grows the modern notion of historical progress. Events are going somewhere. Time does not just cycle back endlessly recapitulating the past. There IS something new under the sun. And limited only by our powers of invention, the future is open-ended, tending toward infinite novelty.

Or?

Is the linearity of historical time merely apparent? Think about the apparent flatness of the Earth. To the casual observer, the Earth’s surface is an endless expanse. But that apparent flatness is an artifact of the enormity of the Earth’s circumference. So it is with Profane time. The apparent progress of history occurs within a cycle of such enormity that it is not perceived as an overarching, cyclical context for history. Hence, time seems flat.

But natural and human histories unfold within the stellar life cycle. Recognizing this context re-sacralizes time. All of our inventiveness serves the needs of the stars. To recognize historical advance as the recursion of the stellar life cycle is to transmute the profane into the sacred. This is how profaned humankind (re)claims its sacred place in nature.