This Saturday I (finally!) finished my presentation for the upcoming American Academy of Religion that will be in Montréal next weekend. The AAR meets annually and jumps around North America. Thousands of religion professors get together to give papers on new research, to discuss how to be more effective in the classroom, and to check out the city and its museums. The AAR has managed to coordinate wonderful timing with various exhibits—in Washington D. C., we had the extraordinary treat of the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian putting on a Bible to the Year 1000 display. In Toronto we got to see the James Ossuary at the Royal Ontario Museum, the funerary box that many thought had a unique inscription from Jesus’s time referencing him, James, and Joseph. This turned out to be a later forgery but the jury was still out when we saw it. Not only is it amazing to see these artifacts live and in person, it is amazing to watch a few hundred religion professors swarming around them muttering about Coptic script or carbon dating limestone. The first time I witnessed this I felt terribly for the poor guy who worked for the museum, engulfed by a crowd seven-people deep around the exhibit, each asking a more arcane question than the last one.
And then it occurred to me, this must be this guy’s best day! When is he ever going to have a more appreciative audience for his work?
When the AAR was in Chicago recently, the Field Museum had a great visiting exhibit on the Aztecs. I went with two of my favorite alumnae who are both finishing their doctorates in Religion. This is me with the Olmec head at the entrance!
The paper I just finished, however, is not on Coptic script or Second Temple archaeology or, well, anything that high-minded. It’s about… television. I realize that as a professor I probably should not say this, but I love tv. And no Discovery Channel for me. I traffic all day in serious thinkers and when I get home I want schlock.
But that doesn’t mean that television and popular culture in general cannot tell us something important about our world. The chatter of the culture, the sort of stuff you would mutter about in the shower rather than write a paper on, takes place on television. It’s where we let our guard down. My paper is on my favorite guilty pleasure, the show Supernatural. If you haven’t seen it, the show is the story of two brothers who inherit the family business of fighting demons. Like Buffy who was not smitten with vampire-slaying, they are not thrilled about this prospect. It is simply something that has to be done and they have had the misfortune of getting the job. That they hunt demons while driving around the heartland in a ‘67 Chevy listening to classic rock is merely icing on the cake. Demons, witches, ghosts, Wendigos, it’s all on the menu. Armed with rock salt, holy water, and an absurdly good knowledge of Medieval Latin, our heroes take evil down weekly.
I am currently teaching a class on Religion, Science, and Occultism, in which the students and I are reading a Western history of magic and esotericism. We examine how forbidden knowledge gets transmitted through time and how it interacts with authority in different epochs and places. Secret knowledge can most often be found on the underbelly of a culture. The dead speak in Classical spells for winning chariot races or lawsuits, Medieval grimoires that describe how to make demons do your bidding, or alchemical images that look like two-headed hermaphrodites but were chemical codes for those in the know. Ghosts and demons in prime time are just the latest iteration of a long-held desire to interact with an invisible world. It’s going to be a while before television programs end up in a museum, but in the mean time, we can still think serious thoughts about it.
Categories: Alumnae, Religion, ghosts, museums, pop culture