A Transgressive Reading of Religious Metaphor A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Religious Studies University of Regina By Sean Brian Campbell Regina, Saskatchewan © 2010: S.B. 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Canada UNIVERSITY OF REGINA FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH SUPERVISORY AND EXAMINING COMMITTEE Seari Brian Campbell, candidate for the degree of Master of Arts in Religious Studies, has presented a thesis titled, A Transgressive Reading of Religious Metaphor, in an oral examination held on December 14, 2009. The following committee members have found the thesis acceptable in form and content, and that the candidate demonstrated satisfactory knowledge of the subject material. External Examiner: Dr. Mark Anderson, Department of History, Luther College Supervisor: Dr. William Arnal, Department of Religious Studies Committee Member: Dr. Jacoba Kuikman, Department of Religious Studies Committee Member: Dr. Darlene Juschka, Department of Religious Studies Chair of Defense: Dr. Philip Hansen, Department of Philosophy and Classics ABSTRACT In this thesis I comment on a selection of metaphors from the bible and related literature. I read the texts through a transgressive lens. These readings will demonstrate other possibilities for the meaning of scripture. There is never one exclusive meaning to religious mythology. The meaning-making I establish is distinct from devotional exegesis. My intention is to demonstrate that religiosity can take surprising - and wholly non-traditional - forms, that scripture can be turned into many things. By applying a transgressive reading to religious texts, the flux of meaning is expressed. The transgressive approach allows for a certain amount of methodological freedom. My readings are creative and justifiable insofar as the commentary is derived from the actual text. The creative narrative route allows the reader a more visceral reaction. The referent of a metaphor is not essential. Information never exists by itself. It is constantly manipulated. In this paper I offer an a-theological application of meaning to religious metaphor. It makes room for other perspectives of the already bizarre, yet commonsensical-sized, human strangeness that is constituted as religious. The possibilities of meaning behind religious discourse are numerous. The effectiveness of the metaphor depends on the justifications and ramifications of the particular interpretation. In my commentary I try show that there is never one exclusive "meaning" to religious mythology. A creative narrative transgressive approach provides a forum of openness with regard to the ambivalence of religious truth. The readings provide reminder that god is not beyond humanity because it is part of humanity. I attempt to provide a different type of exegesis. Religion is not one thing. Scripture can be - and has been - turned into many things, reared in nothing. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research. A Transgressive Reading of Religious Metaphor Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. The Path of the Goat 6 Lilith 8 Screech Owl 17 Sympathy for the Dragon 21 Jesus as Necromantical Vampiric Exorcist 24 Tertullian, King James and the faeries 33 3. Conclusion 45 Bibliography 53 1 A Transgressive Reading of Religious Metaphor In this thesis I comment on a selection of metaphors from the bible and related literature. I read the texts through a transgressive lens. These readings will demonstrate other possibilities for the meaning of scripture. There is never one exclusive meaning to religious mythology. The meaning-making 1 establish is distinct from devotional exegesis. My intention is to demonstrate that religiosity can take surprising - and wholly non-traditional - forms, that scripture can be turned into many things. By applying a transgressive reading to religious texts, the flux of meaning is expressed. The transgressive approach allows for a certain amount of methodological freedom. My readings are creative and justifiable insofar as the commentary is derived from the actual text. The creative narrative route allows the reader a more visceral reaction. The referent of a metaphor is not essential. Information never exists by itself. It is constantly manipulated. In this paper I offer an a-theological application of meaning to religious metaphor. It makes room for other perspectives of the already bizarre, yet commonsensical-sized, human strangeness that is constituted as religious. The conceptual angle is chaotically and freely carried over from Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Nietzsche's article "On Truth and Falsity in their Extramoral Sense." Nietzsche writes: What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions 2 of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses. (5) This characterization is the rationalization and centerpiece for all the following readings. History is based on metaphor. Not a traditional metaphor; it is metaphor rooted in the idea "to carry over" (the word's literal meaning in Greek). The concept is carried over from Nietzsche's reading of Aristotle's Poetics: '"a metaphor is the carrying over of a word whose usual meaning is something else, either from the genus to the species, from the species to the genus, from species to species, or according to proportion' (Rh, p.317; ET, p.55)" (Schrift, 1990, 125). Nietzsche takes Aristotle's concept, which is limited to linguistics, and carries it over, "and comes to regard any transference from one sphere to another (e.g. physical to spiritual, literal to figurative, audible to visual, subject to object, etc.) as an instance of metaphor" (Schrift, 1990, 126). The process is carried over through the application of metaphors. It is an ongoing state of active meaning-making. Nietzsche expresses the concept through a biological metaphor: everything, anything, which exists and which prevails anywhere, will always be put to new purposes by a force superior to itself, will be commandeered afresh, will be turned and transformed to new uses; all "happening" in the organic world consists of overpowering and dominating, and again all overpowering and domination is a new interpretation and adjustment, which must necessarily obscure or absolutely extinguish the subsisting "meaning" and "end." (2004) The discourse will be as effective as its position among other socio-discursive strata allows: "the nature of this new identity will depend on the connotative dimensions of the domains... [and] their respective places in history and culture" (Murphy, 2001, 4). Manipulation of the topic for some desired group-specific accomplishment is a methodological factor that is often expressed in terms of reified classifications, a 3 phenomenon which, in what follows, will be explored via the example of classifications of heavy-metal music. Lines of normality are instigated through ideological devices, and defined within group-specific discourses. It is important not to get carried over in the concept of "carry over": "Aristotle's definition of metaphor could not be retained as such by Nietzsche since it is based on a division of the world into well-defined genra and species corresponding to essences, whereas for Nietzsche