The Domestication of Gods

Reading Theory of Religion by Bataille has inspired something; this is to say that whatever this essay is, it’s not a review of his philosophy or opinion. I am far from knowledgeable to criticise his or anyone’s work. In a sense, I wouldn’t even label this as a true essay; it is simply an exploratory letter written in real time while engaging with Bataille. I do not intend for it to be a structured argument or conclusion. I am learning to let go of searching for answers by relearning to ask the questions.

The imagery and poetic language had me wrapped in a bubble of transparency with my own opinion and beliefs as they stand today. It made me realise that if I am to venture into the world of the Divine, I must void myself of everything, become an empty well and wait for the heavenly rain. It will come muddy, and it will be up to my soul to filter through it for God. With soiled hands and ink drying under my nails, this is the work I need to do. Bear with me.

If I were to start with my choice of title, which was written well before the essay itself, for some reason. I suppose I should start with the question: What exactly are we “domesticating”? One of the many things that tensed in my jaw was the moment I understood that Bataille saw the Divine as complete chaos, that humans cannot be without structure, and so, in an attempt to contain the chaotic nature of the Divine without entirely losing it, religion was born to provide order to that which is not made to be ordered. So in favour of religion, this was truly a noble approach to accept that there are aspects of the Divine that will escape us, they will find a way into our experiences one way or another, and if that is the case, then one might as well expose these aspects through a contained and well-controlled ways: scriptures, sainthood, and sacrifices, wars and violence, but all in the name of that which has no name.

In my humblest opinion: humans were/are power-tripping over the Sacred and needed to micromanage it (funny fact: I initially misspelt Sacred and wrote scared here.), microdosing us on the thrills that come with glimpsing the shadow of it passing us by, softening the edges of the dangers it means to our egos and fragile minds.

This invited many questions to my table, but I only had enough tea to sit with the following: Is domestication something done to the Divine or something done in perception? Or is intention an element here? When religion “softens” the Divine, is it simplifying reality? Or translating something too vast for human cognition? Is the chaos in the Divine… or in our inability to hold and comprehend it?

I found my intuition pushing against this framing. My ignorant soul was suggesting that the Sacred might not be “the raw vs the ordered,” but it’s already whole, and we fragmented it. In the same manner, a mind would fragment itself and awaken multiple personalities to face an unbearable reality due to exposure to unplantable, repetitive, and prolonged trauma experienced during early childhood. We somehow managed to fragment the Sacred, perhaps in hopes of forgetting the agony of our separation? Perhaps we needed to cut up ‘God’ into bite-sized pieces, so we do not choke on the totality? Since man needs to find or give meaning to everything, to observe and categorise, I wonder if our poor sight is what caused this domestication process to take the wheel. Should the Sacred be so docile that we can approach it and find peace within its bosom? But that is not the reality of anything that is truly Sacred, is it? The image that comes to mind is how man managed to breed certain beasts into toy sizes, something they can pick up and carry around, all dressed up in pearls and jingling bells. If I can't have the beast, then maybe something that has some of its traits, but isn’t quite as wild, will do.

Still, there are a few who are into the exotic wild creatures, some who appreciate the beauty of their uncontrollable and unexpected nature, they observe in awe and wonder and allow themselves to be entirely taken by their reality, without any effort to come any closer to it, fully understanding the consequences of even trying. Others, with an ego as hot as the sun, would dare to capture these creatures, not only to ‘own them,’ caged; they are subjected to a heavy process of domestication. Is that then what it means? To domesticate the Sacred? To cage and starve it? Force it to depend on us because we refuse to accept that we depend on it? When a pack of animals hunt together, it becomes a massacre. Is this what we are doing to the Source? What has religion evolved into? And is it a God-hunt? And yes, maybe witnessing the totality of the Source can only be done through the collective eyes; however, the realisation or intimacy with the Source surely must be on an individual level. So why religion? If not to tear the Source apart, eat what suits and squander the rest?

I do believe that our inability to fully comprehend the Sacred, to fully accept the lack of ‘good and evil’, the nonexistence of anything cruel or kind in the world of Gods, pushed man into sifting through all the characteristics they could actually grasp within themselves and projecting them not only on the world around them, but on the Sacred. And now that I am here, I hear another knock and enter all the Gods and Goddesses I grew up with, and I feel so small. My name suddenly dropped like a feather off Nephthys’ wings and suddenly lost all meaning. I had to face their nagging questions: where they went, what happened to their names, who still fell to their knees in their temples. I dare not tell them what became of their temples, so I grant them three more questions: Do polytheistic systems preserve complexity better than monotheism? Or do they just distribute the same incomprehensible totality across multiple masks? Is “one God” a purification… or a reduction?

They ask me not to look at them as “different religions, separate from one another” and start seeing them for what they are: different coping mechanisms for not collapsing under the infinite, a way to keep ourselves sane when becoming intimate with the Divine. And oh, do I want their intimacy. So, I sit a little longer with Bataille’s paragraph, “Paradoxically, intimacy is violence, and it is destruction, because it is not compatible with the positing of the separate individual.” Will I subject myself to such agony and offer my consciousness and soul up? Or will I succumb to the anguish of separation? I don’t know.

In this case, I would have to take a stand beside Bataille and agree that, broadly speaking, the archaic and polytheistic religious worlds are closer to immanence, it holds Sacred excess ever so dearly, and surrender to the cyclical nature of life and death, with nature. Monotheism, on the other hand, especially in its moral and rationalised forms, tends toward transcendence, order, separation, utility, and prohibition. Upon the domestication and fragmentation of the Sacred, the probability of, thy will be done’ leans favourably towards the will of man and of no Sacred being. I suppose there is no purification without reduction, which begs the question, is the notion of “many Gods” closer to the truth than “one God”, and reduction/unifying is a simplification of that truth?

As I move on, letting this simmer for a few days, my mind begins to harass me with vivid dreams, ones that could easily be characterised as chaotic to say the least, which, needless to say, brought me back to “Divine chaos”. Is the Divine chaotic in nature as Bataille would argue? Or is chaos the manifestation of what the human mind experiences when it cannot unify it or grasp its totality?

Now I ponder… When humans encounter something too large, do they perceive it as chaos? Or is chaos an actual property of the Sacred? Part of its totality? Is it the totality of the Divine as I believe Bataille intended to explain in his chapter, Dualism and Morality, when he wrote, “Originally, within the divine world, the beneficent and pure elements opposed the malefic and impure elements, and both types appeared equally distant from the profane. But if one considers a dominant movement of reflective thought, the divine appears linked to purity, the profane to impurity. In this way, a shift is effected starting from the premise that divine immanence is dangerous, that what is sacred is malefic first of all, and destroys through contagion that which it comes close to, that the beneficent spirits are mediators between the profane world and the unleashing of divine forces, and seem less sacred in comparison with the dark deities”? But then again, is Divine immanence truly dangerous or did humans choose to believe so in hopes of simplifying it and finding comfort? What would “seeing the whole” even mean for a finite consciousness?

This is not an attempt to disable Bataille’s argument, as he leans toward excess being real rather than merely perceived or subject to individual experiences. What I am trying to unravel here is a second possibility, or rather layer, maybe the “dark deities” are not a thing-in-itself, but a cognitive failure mode of partial vision. Humans are known for their love of comfort. By undressing the Sacred of its ‘darker, harsher and dangerous’ robe, are we allowing ourselves a piece of lighter, silkier, perhaps even flashier fabric to create our own design?

I think I need a break from this tour into the rabbit hole called God, so allow me to step outside the realm of theology for a moment and look at Bataille’s fixation on what reality is and isn’t. He wrote beautifully, “The supreme being, the sovereign deity, the god of heaven, is generally only a more powerful god of the same nature as the others. The gods are simply mythical spirits, without any substratum of reality. The spirit that is not subordinated to the reality of a mortal body is a god, is purely divine (sacred). Insofar as he is himself a spirit, man is divine (sacred), but he is not supremely so, since he is real.” Still, I wonder: what is the price of experiencing “too much reality/being real”? What does it feel like when something exceeds our ability to interpret it? Do we experience awe, fear, erotic charge, paralysis, unity, dissolution? And if Man is not supremely divine, why is it then that he acts as God? The centre of creation.

These questions led me to start reading The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Which I guess will turn into another endeavour that will only multiply my questions. I suppose I landed here because a part of me chooses to believe that a lot of what we call mental illness might not be illness at all. It might have been a small price for a priceless experience. I am only scratching the surface at the moment, and this might lead to more questions and no answers whatsoever, but I guess religion or being with the Sacred, for me, needs to be witnessed as an individualised experience; the Divine is the force that chooses what to show to whom, yet we label the experiences of others as if they were some lab animals under a weird experiment, excluding ourselves from what we ourselves choose to believe and discard: Is this dissolution truth, or due to overload? But this is a topic for another inquiry. Are you still following? Because right now, I, myself, have turned into a snake devouring its own tail. Asking again, when religion splits God into faces, giving the Sacred different names, is it a distortion or an attempt at survival? Does dividing the Divine into forms (Gods, saints, archetypes) betray the unity we so morbidly crave? Or is unity itself too much to survive unmediated? Are we too frail to survive this unity, so we settle for the carnage of what once was? Is naming a God an act of violence against the Sacred or an act of care and an attempt to approach the Divine? Like an infant unable to formulate words yet, labelling things mindlessly.

Ah! This is where Bataille becomes useful but not sufficient for me, because he sees fragmentation as the containment of excess, whereas I am asking whether fragmentation is also a way of loving what cannot be held whole. If I cannot have the whole of the Divine, which God will suffice? Which God can my soul tolerate? What parts can I do without so I can at least have some sort of grace? I know it sounds very similar to my poodle analogy, but believe me, the motive here is quite the opposite. It’s out of pure desperation and adoration and not at all a question of control. It is a form of submission to and not dominance over the Sacred.

I’ve been trying to chew the pieces of this short book slowly, digest it bit by bit over the last few days and not rush into any conclusion. Probe rather than resolve, as it becomes my ethos moving forward, when it comes to scratching the itch that is anything God-related.

This essay is a can of worms that bred one what-if question after another, like: what if the “excess” is not just in the Divine, but in the act of perception itself? What if this changes everything in the sense that domestication becomes cognitive, not just religious? What if fragmentation becomes necessary, not merely political and “many Gods” becomes epistemology, not mere mythology? So, I guess, the question I need to ask myself and contemplate is, again and again, when and where I see the Divine as fragmented, am I witnessing its domestication, or my own limits of perception? A lesson in wahdat al-wujūd is overdue here, perhaps.

Oh, wait, another guest is showing up unexpectedly and asking what if… the theory of remembrance is true, and all we can remember is what we make of those Gods and not what they truly are?