Of ancient gods, modern demons … and the US election
Three headlines to ponder:
‘Ancient gods did not exist, and those ancients who held otherwise were fundamentally mistaken both about the nature of reality and their own lives.’
‘Tucker Carlson claims a ‘demon’ attack left him bleeding in bed.’
‘Tucker Carlson credits demons for the invention of nuclear technology.’
Which of these challenge you, leave you incredulous?
The first is mine –an abandoned exam question felt to be too unkind- but probably the one most readers will find least controversial, even if ungenerous and (in the words of Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones) ‘patronizing’ to the Greeks because ancient Greek gods in fact ‘stood for forces that can be seen working in the world’.
The second and third are taken from last week’s Guardian (Fri 1st Nov 2024, Mon 4th Nov 2024). And they are likely to elicit a very different response. (I’m imagining an eye roll and something like ‘yeah right, ‘demons’ -who believes in them? Crackpot Christians is who, religious fanatics, irrational people who we shouldn’t take seriously.’)
And then there were the events of last week…
And as the dust settles and the US turns to making sense of a landslide political victory –approaching 75 million Republican votes - CNN exit polls report that 72% of white American Protestant worshippers, 61% of Catholics, 81% of those who identify as evangelicals or born-again, all cast their vote for Trump - bolstering the correlation sociologist Fanhao Nie earlier this year (in a sociology journal called Social Currents) had shown to exist between the belief that the Biden administration was under the influence of demonic forces and Republican support. (‘White Christians made Trump president—again’, another headline reporting on this data reads).
So, we dismiss(ed?) the Carlson headlines at our peril. They mattered. And they meant something. And they leave us -and the rest of the world- with the question of what to do with that fact? After all – now quite problematically- we read past those headlines because we know better.
So how to respond? And how to imagine this demographic of the voting population of the US? Are we to imagine millions of Americans manipulated by -or disingenuously complicit in- a cynical rhetoric of religious fundamentalism, or perhaps millions of devout believers under the delusion of the Christian belief in malign spirit beings whom we know do not exist (or some mix of both)?
And what would it mean to take those headlines (and voters) seriously? (What would it have meant to have done so last week or month or year?)
Of all respondents, we Classicists, perhaps, should have the training to know. (After all, demons are themselves only ancient gods (daimones, or perhaps better, daimonia) Christianized).
But what has most of our training taught us? What do we do closer to home? What of our first headline about ancient gods, those divinities who as figures of myth, poetry, art, film, tv, are never very far away from the popular mind in modernity. As we celebrate those gods in all the ways that we do, they become even more sedimented as just so many artful, playful, vibrant, transgressive, (add your own adjective here), representations -whether ‘powers’ or ‘persons’ as the old debate used to put it- by which the Greeks and their later readers made sense of their lives.
But as happy as we are with that safe characterisation, to be indelicate for a moment, ‘getting real’, they didn’t really exist, right (even if on a Regius Professor’s concession, they did stand 'for forces ... working in the world.’) They were cultural figurations of things we know differently and of course better: rivers, or mountains, or wind, or love, or war, phenomena we know as they really are, just believed to be gods by the ancients. And I write ‘believed to be gods’, in the way Jean Pouillon long ago observed critics do, because I am imagining the Greeks believing in their gods only in the same way that I imagine I would, if I did, which of course I don’t because ours is a secular world dominated by science, and now we know better. (And this is why, alongside our celebrations of the ancient gods, a little unease persists amongst us enthusiasts. Trying to take the Greeks seriously, we worry as did Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks believe in their myths?)
Perhaps science might help, some of us have thought: and newly bolstered by the branch of science that seeks to get under the hood to the cognitive mechanics of religious belief - the cognitive science of religion (CSR) - temporary respite has been found by following the spirit of nineteenth-century intellectualists such as E.B. Tylor to the workings of the human mind. Now the problem it seems is not the Greeks’ alone; the ancient gods are no different in fact to all other religious representations generated by cognitive equipment universally prone to posit figurations of all shapes and forms, a mind we all have that wants to clothe the natural world in supernatural agency. So, seeing things as they are, we see what we know to be rivers and mountains, the Greeks on the other hand, unaware of the propensities of their own minds to deceive them, naively believed that such things were gods. But, of course they did, that’s how humans are wired, we explain away. We now just know better.
And here has been born not only a charter for a significant strand in the study of Greek religion but also for a programme of enquiry in the ancient environmental humanities: for with the power of science turned inwards, we can explain what happened when ancient minds, in meeting the world, engendered worlds full of gods, whereas turned outwards, to the study of the world that they met, we can reveal the ‘really real’ things they so represented. Here for instance the Greeks believed a god was angry, whilst in reality -ice cores or whatever reveal- a volcano was in fact erupting, and it was in fact the effects of the volcano spreading widely across the Mediterranean that caused, in turn… (add your chosen historical phenomenon) … although in this project, we have to be content, as we speak over the perspectives of those we are trying to understand, with eliding the awkward question: if human events are the outcome of choices, and choices are informed by local understandings of the world and all that is in it, what can top-down knowing-from-the-outside-the narrative of the volcano, not the god - furnish us in terms of meaningful explanations of why exactly ancient people made the choices they did?
That question is awkward, because it runs on: …what in terms of meaningful explanations, apart, that is, from an epistemology of error, the explanation of misunderstanding?
Because what emerges from this approach to the question of the ancient gods is the same quandary as that which emerges from the hanging implication of our Carlson headlines from the US election: the unhappy contention, born of our own befuddlement, of millions of lives lived out in misapprehension, some perhaps well meaning, but all deluded, caught suspended in cultural illusions of their own construction – and of a multitude of choices (read: votes) made because of the fundamental misperceptions of the world that follow, all misperceptions of religious belief.
And here is the crux of our problem: the classic propensity of the concept of ‘belief’, well known to anthropologists from 1970s onwards, to reorder by sleight-of-hand, commitments self-evident in their veracity and continually renewed in experience, into a language of religious experience that consigns the convictions of others to the lowest rung of a hierarchy of knowing. They always believe, it implies, as religious folk do, but we know better.
And yet as anthropologists -and those of us influenced by them- have long argued, all that is bound up in such top-down ‘outside-in’ approaches, as Ingold puts it, both misunderstands religious conviction and misconceives the nature of the world there is to know. For, as Ingold has argued, the former (sc. religious conviction) does not involve a process of (mis)representing what already exists, it involves participating in a reality that is ever emergent, and the latter, what exists (sc. the world), as the quantum physicists agree, does not pre-exist us, but rather becomes what it is in our very encounter with it. To this extent, worlds are made and experienced in dialogue with what is known, and knowledges are world-making practices.
So, what, then, in matters of ancient gods and modern demons might it mean to take others seriously, to know as they do, ‘from the inside’ (again, Ingold)? And how more generally should we approach understanding the choices and the lives of others (both in antiquity and now)? Abandoning the reductive and distorting hierarchies of ‘belief’ (however rehabilitated) and with it, our eliding and spurious scientific certainties (all top-down ‘knowing from the outside’), for one thing. Because, as the Classical Greeks -and their post-Classical Christian appropriators- knew and continue to know, in the real world (and not only in the world as imagined) the influence of daimones/daimonia or demons is everywhere to be known, if only you know how to see. If we really want to understand real world choices - why things happen- and the convictions born of real experience that inform them, then and now, as surely all of us do, we Classicists need to know how to know better.
With thanks to Charlie Kerrigan, Christine Morris, and Paul Cartledge for comments on an earlier draft.
Ashley Clements is Associate Professor in Greek literature and Philosophy & Head of Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin.
His most recent book is Humans, among Other Classical Animals (Postclassical Interventions). Oxford University Press (2021)