The old in-out

In 1640, a bronze tablet was discovered in Apulia, southern Italy. This tablet is now in the city of Vienna, the very city in which Sigmund Freud dissected the testicles of myriad eel, in hope of achieving an understanding of their elusive life cycle.

Like this Freudian endeavor, the tablet was also unsuccessful. It bears an inscription created by the Roman senate in 186 BCE prohibiting Bacchanalian rituals without specific Senate approval. Although there were many executions in the service of enforcing the prohibition of the orgiastic rites associated with Bacchus, the god of wine, the practice survived. The devotees and this Roman god, the liberator through wine, ecstasy, and madness, can even be seen in Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings. They are voluminous flesh, pouring out like the wine itself, onto each other and into the world. Like the raving maenads and perpetually erect satyrs who came earlier with the Greek Dionysius, they intrigue us.

Rising up straight and stiff out of Puritanical roots, true to form, we have our Halloween celebrating summer’s end and the coming of the dead of winter. There are plastic pumpkins and laughing children in front of hushed intercourse about pagans in our midst. Perhaps pagans are the newest aliens. Without clear identification they come in, illegal, and are put out, foreign barbarians.

The word pagan might come from a Latin root that means country dweller, bumpkin, one not in the know, one out of touch with the in-crowd sophistication of clear city vision. Whatever is the root of this word, present understanding of its meaning is amazingly multi-dimensional. The gamut of suggestions

include polytheists, heathens, those with no religion or hedonists. Also suggested are non-Abraham originating systems. Christians, Jews, and Muslims all come from the common ground of father Abraham. So any Asian, or Aboriginal, or other outlier belief systems would be pagan in this perspective. One of my favorite definitions puts it simply: Pagans are all those outside the true religion revealed by the one God.

I tend to feel like Wonderland’s Alice. She said that if she had a world of her own, that everything there would be nonsense. “Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise; what it is it wouldn’t be and what it wouldn’t be it would. You see?”

Maybe our word pagan really comes from the Latin root meaning to fix, to fasten. The pagan seems unwittingly to provide opportunity to define, to fix, to fossilize meaning. Thanks to the pagan for providing context for fearful prohibition, bronzed, lasting attempts to clarify and to concretize identity: What is in over and against what is out. Alice’s chaos be damned, out, out, pushed out to the hinterlands beyond the prudent boundaries of political correctness.

Who needs the betweenness of liminality, the ambiguous, open, indeterminate, crepuscular meanderings of pagans? Or of the illegal immigrants or the transgendered or those of mixed ethnicity?

Who needs anything reminiscent of shape shifters or tricksters?

There are many pagan movements, comings and goings between the up and down, the in and out. Like wounds they are doors between the in-out-in-out, menstrually bloody, isolated in tents apart, far away from even the outskirts. There the being of their toothed gash is rabbit hole and worm hole. Like seaweed between water and earth they are solidly wet Siren singings. Like mistletoe between sky and earth they are airy kissings, wet and waving.

If they tell us we are neither and both, that we are Schrodinger’s cat, persistently vegetative fetuses as well as gods in sexual embrace, will we love them beyond belief? Or will we believe them into bronze?

Who needs this in between outlying? I don’t know. Contrary wise, for pirates there are only tricks and treats. 

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the muse. Make contact if you dare.