Carole M. Cusack

Ritual, Liminality and Transformation: secular spirituality in Sydney's gay bathhouses

Abstract In the twentieth century religion was radically transformed, as the sacred uncoupled from the institutional Churches. This enabled the sacred to be experienced through what were previously ‘secular’ activities, including sport, rock music, psychoanalysis and sexuality. Individualism and prosperity combined to encourage a focus on personal transformation as the primary religious process. The 1960s also saw calls for self-determination and equality for previously oppressed groups—women, blacks and gays. This paper uses the model of secular ritual and Victor Turners concept of liminality to investigate the role that the gay bathhouses had in enabling gay men to experience the sacred and to transform themselves. This paper is grounded in empirical research on Sydneys gay bathhouses that sheds light on rites of passage, the role of pleasure and its relationship to religious ecstasy, and the development of a specifically gay askesis (way of becoming). It is also argued that the gay bathhouse is a crucial transformative space for all those men who were its initiates.

The Melbourne Cup: Australian identity and secular pilgrimage

Recent sociology of religion has emphasized the collapse of the sacred into the secular, and noted the shift in Western identity-formation from stable, institutional, religious sources of identity to fluid, individualist, consumerist sources of identity. One significant consequence of these changes is the sacralization of secular phenomena such as sport and shopping, and the corresponding commercialization of religious phenomena. This essay analyses the place of the Melbourne Cup, an annual horse racing event held on the first Tuesday of November, in contemporary Australian identity-formation. Further, it explores the ways in which attendance at the Cup and other modes of participation in the race, which might be viewed as ‘secular’ activities, have become quasi-religious or ‘spiritual’. Pilgrimage best characterizes attendance at the Cup; and observance of the Cups traditions (sweepstakes, ceasing work for the duration of the race, champagne breakfasts) are best understood as postmodern consumerist rituals for individual Australians, reinforcing personal identity.

Spiritual Dimensions of Self-Transformation in Sydney's Gay Bathhouses

Interview-based research among patrons and proprietors of Sydneys gay bathhouses, asking about experiences of homosexual being from the 1960s to the early 1980s generated intriguing findings. Despite the apparent disconnect between traditional religious affiliation and the outlaw gay lifestyle of the bathhouses, a majority of interviewees asserted that spirituality and self-transformation was as important to them as sexual exploration and liberation from societal restraints (both as motivations for and outcomes of the bathhouse experience). Some of those interviewed adhered to mainstream religion (including Christianity and Judaism), but a significant number expressed a commitment to eclectic, personalized spiritual paths. Interestingly, both groups described the bathhouses as “churches” and “temples,” the activities that took place there as both collective and individual “rituals,” and attributed their spiritual growth and development to their experiences in the bathhouses.

Play, narrative and the creation of religion: Extending the theoretical base of ‘invented religions’

What may be termed ‘invented religions’, self-consciously fictive movements that emerge from alternative subcultures in the West from the 1950s to the present include Discordianism, the Church of all Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius, Jediism and Matrixism. This study employs the model of origin and development of religion from Bellah [Bellah, Robert N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press], focusing particularly on the centrality of play, to establish three crucial propositions. The first of these is that play, narrative and experiences of an order other than the quotidian are central to the emergence and maintenance of religion. The second is that different types of social organisation and political organisations will foster different types of religion. Bellah argues that these are related to the four modes of human developmental psychology, characterised as unitive, enactive, symbolic and conceptual. This claim is significant, because it links recent cognitive models of the origin and development of religion to older social constructionist theories. Third, it is argued that invented religions are important because they render transparent the process of the origin and formation of religions from play and narrative. It is concluded that invented religions are a particular cultural form of the human impulse to religion, appropriate to the twenty-first century West.

Charmed Circle: Stonehenge, Contemporary Paganism, and Alternative Archaeology

Abstract The impressive stone circle Stonehenge is understood by academic archaeologists to be a site of ritual significance to the prehistoric inhabitants of Wiltshire. It is constructed on cosmological principles based on a solar alignment, reflecting “a distinctive idea of time, which revolved around the cyclical movements of sun, moon, and stars across the heavens, as indicators of the passing seasons” (Fagan 1998:160). This article sketches mainstream archaeological interpretations of Stonehenge, then contrasts them with the popular narrative of its Druidic origin and purpose, which emerged in the seventeenth century. Modern Druids have negotiated the right to perform rituals at Stonehenge with English Heritage, the custodial body with responsibility for the monument, and Druidry has been recognised as a religion in the United Kingdom in 2010 (Beckford 2010). Modern Druidry, an “invented tradition,” conflicts with academic archaeology in its claims regarding Stonehenge (Chippindale 1986:38–58). Postmodern archaeological theories, which privilege “popular folk archaeology” (Holtorf 2005b:11), are more open to vernacular interpretations of artifacts and sites. These perspectives are broadly compatible with the deregulated religio-spiritual marketplace of the twenty-first century, which is characterized by a plethora of new religions and a pluralistic model of religious truth. 1

Handbook of new religions and cultural production

Contributors include: Joseph Azize, Chiara Baldini, Lauren Bernauer, Anthony Blake, Liselotte Frisk, Kennet Granholm, Christopher Hartney, Graham Harvey, Graham Hassall, Jay Johnston, Jenny McFarlane, Elisha McIntyre, Milad Milani, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, Rod Pattenden, David Pecotic, Johanna Petsche, Adam Possamai, Alphia Possamai-Inesedy, Jason Prior, Eric Repphun, Stephen D. Ricks, David G. Robertson, Bettina E. Schmidt, Justin Snider, Graham St John, Michael F. Strmiska, Mona Suhrbier, Jaap Timmer, Garry W. Trompf, and Benjamin E. Zeller

The religion in Olympic tourism

Olympic tourism has been likened to pilgrimage [Weed, M. (2008). Olympic tourism. Oxford: Elsevier], and Olympic sites called ‘shrines’ for the ‘pious sport tourist’ [Gammon, 2004]. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, promoted the ‘cult of the human being’ [Ruprecht, L.A. (2008). Greek exercises: The modern Olympics as Hellenic appropriation and reinvention. Thesis eleven, 93, pp. 72–87], which had distinctly religious overtones. Sport may be a functional equivalent of religion in the modern world [Cusack, C.M. (2010). Sport. In R.D. Hecht & V.F. Biondo (Eds.), Religion in everyday life and culture (pp. 915–943). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger], and as a global spectacle, the Olympics perform the ideal of de Coubertins ‘harmony of nationalisms’ [Moltmann, J. (1989). Olympia between politics and religion. Concilium, 101–109]. This acting out and collective affirmation of humanist principles is civil religion; quasi-religious beliefs and practices connected with citizenship and political community, which here affirm the pre-eminence of the human individual. Olympic tourists celebrate human achievement, and participate in a mediatised mass spectacle of consumerism. Olympic tourism has similar religious significance to other mass-mobility events (the Hajj and the Kumbh Mela), which take on significance for visitors beyond the immediately theological. Yet, the religio-spiritual elements of Olympic tourism have received less attention than other secular pilgrimages (battlefields and the World Cup). We argue Olympic tourism is a quasi-religious pilgrimage that moves participants closer to, and through, a spectacle event upholding certain socio-cultural ideals of the wider project of the affluent, Western culture and identity, embodied in the Olympics.

Introduction: Making it (all?) up – ‘invented religions’ and the study of ‘religion’

The editors of the special issue ‘Invented Religions: Creating New Religions through Fiction, Parody and Play’ outline the aims of the collection and place it in the context of debates on ‘invented religions’ and the ‘invention of tradition’. We introduce key concepts employed by contributors, place the category of ‘invented religion’ in a wider constructionist context, contrast it with the seminal notion of ‘invention of tradition’ and note some of its specific features which reward analysis as a separate category. We argue that the category of ‘invented religions’ is descriptively interesting and theoretically useful, and we suggest that developing the latter aspect in particular can encourage this new area of enquiry away from an exotic niche and into the mainstream of explanatory theorising in the academic study of religion/s.

The Role of Pliability and Transversality Within Trans/Disciplinarity: Opening University Research and Learning to Planetary Health

In recent decades, there have been calls to open university research and learning through transdisciplinarity. The inference here is that the increased specialisation of disciplines has created isolation, division, exclusion, separation and fixity within research and learning. This chapter explores the potential for openness in university research and learning through a discussion of the relationality of transdisciplinarity and disciplinarity. An examination of this relationality is valuable, given that transdisciplinarity and disciplinarity are intimately connected and co-dependent. This relationality is explored through two concepts that we argue constitute its potential to create openness in university research and learning: pliability and transversality. This chapter argues that disciplines, be they science, planning, law, health or religion, manage to be both open to change, constantly becoming-other, and universal, abstract, and eternal. Whilst this pliability of disciplinarity is often translated as disciplinary inadequacy, we argue that this pliability is a valuable component of disciplinarity, and that it provides the site for the transversality of transdisciplinarity. We explore these concepts through reference to a recent problematization of disciplinary research and learning at the human and environment nexus, which has given rise to the notion of planetary health, and its call for a substantial and urgent opening of research and learning to understand and address emerging geo-social assemblages such as the Anthropocene.

Fiction into religion: imagination, other worlds, and play in the formation of community

Research into religions founded upon explicitly fictional sources is a recent development in the study of religion. Such research is social scientific in orientation and emphasises: the persuasive power of shared narratives among subcultural groups; the ‘cognitive’ methodological turn that has gained ground since the 1980s regarding the origin and function of religion; and the individualistic and affective ways that elements from traditional religion, popular culture, and a wide range of social artefacts and phenomena are used to create new religions and personal spiritualities. In certain cases, exposure to, prolonged immersion in, and social vindication of highly affective narratives (science-fiction novels and films that are sensuous and have tangible impact in experiential terms) may trigger the formation of a religion. This article examines the Church of All Worlds, which is a fiction-inspired religion founded by Tim Zell (b. 1942) and Lance Christie (1944–2010), two students at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, in April 1962. Zell and Christie read Robert A. Heinlein’s science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (London: New English Library, 1961 [1987]), and initiated a ‘real world’ version of the fictional Church, founded by Martian-raised Valentine Michael Smith in the novel. Identification with Stranger’s characters, and lifestyle choices designed to recreate the social milieu of the novel, reinforced and made ‘real’ this initially fiction-based religion, which is now over 50 years old, has a vibrant print and online presence, and braches (called Nests) in countries including the United States, Britain, Germany, and Australia.