Primal Religions 2025

 Otto describes the "numinous" as something that is terrifying yet fascinating at the same time. I have definitely had experiences like that particularly out in nature where there is not much civilization around. Trees sound like they are talking as the wind swims through the leaves, water that has no seeming end to it's depth, being miniscule in the presence of a rock face, thunder that booms like gunshots, and the sixth sense of feeling like you're being watched. All of these phenomena makes the hair on my neck stand, they give me a deep primal fear, but at the same time they are just so alluring to me. Something about knowing I can only control how I react to the things that happen to me and not the things themselves brings me peace, and the time this is most prevalent is during these events. Otto says religious experiences are a push and pull at the same time. This made me realize how many everyday happenings can be viewed as holy, one great example would be eatin...

 As the semester comes to a close and finals rear their ugly head memorization becomes important because most classes don't give you a cheat sheet on exams. Ong made a point that oral cultures relied on memory without having written records. I have to memorize monologues for my theatre class, which at times can be challenging. I could not even begin to imagine what it would be like to live in a society where you have to memorize history, law, and rituals through repeated storytelling. Writing is so normalized and with the technologies of today memorization is not required for survival, shit I have known people who used directions everyday to get to a place that they had worked for 3 years. (That is absolutely baffling to me) People rely on written language as an external storage tool instead of committing things to internal memory. It made me wonder if our ability to remember things has been harmed by writing? What would happen if we stopped relying on writing so much and formed a ...

 A buddy of mine and I had randomly gotten into a conversation about the Sanskrit language. I mentioned that I had heard it was a language that was written and not spoken. Neither of us were actually sure, so when we looked it up we found that that wasn't the case at all. Sanskrit is a spoken language, but it is rarely heard in conversation compared to modern Indian languages like Hindi or Tamil. Looking back on what we have been studying, obviously a language would have to start as oral before it can ever become written. It makes sense why a younger me would not have thought twice about it possible to have a written language without a spoken one but I cant believe it took me so long to question that belief and have a bit of cognitive dissonance. Sanskrit has a huge oral tradition with it being used in religious texts, getting memorized and chanted for generations before it was ever written. So for someone to say, "it wasn't really spoken" is a load of bull, its more ...

 The passage of time is an interesting thing. There is nothing that can be done to stop it, as my dad says, "Father Time is undefeated". It is an inevitable force of nature. Oral cultures measure time through cycles like moons and seasons. Time is told by experiences, not numbers, it isn't tracked by dates. But when symbols come into play things change. Time can be broken down into years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. I can say August 19th 2007, and that is an exact time, locked in place forever. Writing transforms time from something you feel into something measurable. 

I really liked the Black Robe movie we watched in class. I thought the juxtaposition between the Jesuit missionaries and the Indigenous Algonquin religions is stronger in the beginning of the movie. For example, when the main missionary, Black Robe, wrote in his notebook about the Algonquin man's wife who passed away, the man was amazed and called Black Robe a demon. The Algonquin tribe is an oral society, so they do not have a word for "book." At first, the relationship between the Natives and the Jesuits are tentative and suspicious because of the two different societies - one oral, one with written texts. I wondered while watching the movie whether the Algonquins would have a different reaction to written word if what was written on Black Robe's notebook was not private and personal to one of the members of the Algonquin tribe. Were they only averse to the writing system because the personal information was revealed public?  Additionally, I really liked how the mor...