Swimming around aimlessly online recently (far too listlessly and without direction to justify calling it 'surfing'), I ran across
this collection of Bad Movie reviews, a topic understandably close to my heart -- these folks poke at movies even more deeply and at greater length than I do, as well as a much lower profanity percentage, so if you like that sort of thing, I recommend skidding over there. From that site I was further directed to
And You Call Yourself A Scientist, which (just in my taste) is even more entertaining, hooking me in by finally articulating some of the things I
loathe about the character of Ian Malcom in
Jurassic Park.
But this particular post isn't just a random plug for these sites (not just); rather, I was moved to write in response to almost identical comments made by 'Lyz' and Douglas Milroy about the same movie, Exorcist II: the Heretic (which does emerge sounding like the sort of crap I might really enjoy watching). It's not a complaint, it's just that there's something about both author's expressed perplexity -- something about the thought processes and assumptions involved -- which strikes me as singularly telling about the modern mind.
Not that I'm prepared right at the moment to explicate exactly what it tells, but it's certainly indicative of something.
Anyway, there is apparently a point in
Exorcist II: Ecclesiastic Boogaloo in which it is explained that Satan has sent the demon Pazuzu into the world to accomplish some dark purpose or other. Aside from the obvious -- that if you want to horrify an audience of English speakers, you might want to pick a deity of less silly-sounding name -- both of these reviews (
here and
here, to save you some hunter-gathering around the sites in question) point out that Pazuzu is a Mesopotamian deity, and that it is therefore odd for Satan to be in command thereof.
As Milroy puts it, "...as Pazuzu is a part of ancient Mesopotamian mythology, saying that the Judeo-Christian Satan has sent him to do something is rather like having Quetzequoatl sending a couple of Shub-Niggurath’s offspring down to the local 7-11 to fetch some beer and chips before Darmok and Jalad stop by on their way to Tanagra."
Well, this is kind of interesting. Both of these authors -- by their own descriptions (and like myself) skeptics of no religious affiliation, but with wide experience of spiritual, mystical and fantastic concepts as fiction -- approach this situation as a sort of unauthorized crossover, a conceptual confusion on the part of the makers of the film. The implication is that the Mesopotamian pantheon and the Christian God (and the Adversary thereof) are, in a sense, creatures of separate continuities; or at least, separate jurisdictions.
Very similar ideas are found all over the modern fantasy landscape -- as in White Wolf's World of Darkness, in which there literally are entirely different afterlives (with separate metaphysical rules) attached to different cultures; as in the Marvel Universe (now to be known as the Micky Marvel U, one assumes), wherein a variety of different pantheons are shown to have their own borders and subdimensions, and at times the various Sky-Father Gods are shown hanging out in a kind of UN Really Supreme Council; as in Steve Jackson Games' In Nomine, wherein the 'Ethereal' Gods are entities separate from the realms of Hell and Heaven, and have largely been subject to the exact kind of treatment at the hands of Heaven that most of the world outside of Europe have historically gotten from the blue-eyes.
So what?
Well -- and I want to emphasize that there's nothing wrong with any of this, it's just interesting -- there's a fascinating gulf of time and culture here, by which I mean that even if a movie featuring Pazuzu as a possessing force of evil had been made several decades earlier than this one, it is almost entirely impossible that any English-speaking critic would have conceived this particular quibble about it prior to maybe around the mid-1960's, and I would call it at least highly unlikely until well into the 1980's.
To the two reviewers I'm discussing, to the authors of the works mentioned above, to most of my own contemporaries and even to me, it seems entirely natural that, for example, Thor, Athena, Pazuzu and Jehovah are beings of separate context. To the extent that we allow their existence at all (as a conceit for fiction, mostly, rather than as things which actually, really really exist), it's intuitively satisfying to assume that the domain of a deity is essentially defined by the geographic and temporal boundaries of its active worshippers. When we encounter Pazuzu of Mesopotamia acting in service to Satan, it immediately and reflexively seems 'off', even laughably so.
But here's the thing: from a Christian standpoint, from a position in which the movie takes a specifically Catholic doctrine as its standing point for suspension of disbelief, there is no error here. As far as the Catholic viewpoint is concerned, Pazuzu may or may not exist, but if he does, he must necessarily be a servant of Satan -- as he's certainly not an angel, and there is not another category of supernatural being. The ancient Mesopotamians were not legitimately worshipping an alternative power to God the Father, a being having its own spiritual jurisdiction separate from God's borders; they were dupes worshipping a demon, having the misfortune of living prior to Christ's ministry to show them the truth. Taking The Exorcist and by extension its sequel (however awful it may be) on their own terms demands that the viewer understands this -- that "the power of Christ compels" even a pre-Christian deity because there is only one God, and everything that is not one of His servants is a tool of Hell.
To the creators of Exorcist II, who might find themselves forced to nod ruefully at most of the criticisms of the film found here, the side note about Pazuzu's misplacement would almost certainly be entirely baffling -- a complaint as strange and counter-intuitive to them as the conjunction of Mesopotamian and Judeo-Christian entities appears to the two internet reviewers here discussed (and, quite likely, to the overwhelming majority of people who read either these reviews or this current post of mine).
William Peter Blatty, who wrote the book upon which the first Exorcist was based, was born in 1928; William Goodhart, screenwriter of Exorcist II, in 1925; and director John Boorman in 1933. Throughout their childhood and well into maturity, even up to and past the 1977 release of E2, just about every cultural voice available in the Western world either overtly expressed or was tacitly based on one of two assumptions: either supernatural forces exist and therefore God and Satan are real, or the supernatural does not exist and therefore neither do any deities or spirits at all. The notion that other pantheons or belief systems might be considered on an equal footing with the Bible, or in even greater extremity, that some other system might be true while the Judeo-Christian one is not, is all but entirely silent until very late in the 20th century.
Not entirely absent, of course. Lovecraft notably posits a world of supernatural entities entirely separate from anything in the Christian understanding of metaphysics; occultists and early neo-pagans were certainly out there expressing their ideas at least as far back as the Romantics; and there have always been fantasists whose work is simply eccentric and sideways to Christian beliefs (as often by being muddled and poorly thought-out as by being creative and ingenious).
But in terms of the sphere of ideas available to a reasonably educated adult literate in English and not immersed in any particularly odd subcultures, the kind of curiously pragmatic approach to the supernatural which leads to the idea of Yahweh as only one of a range of beings of similar nature, all of whom have their own legitimate right (and power) to exist and to define their own systems of morality, is probably still largely found only in works which Blatty and Boorman (Goodhart having passed on in 1999) have not read or viewed, or at least not paid any serious attention to.
So what changed? A complete examination would go way beyond the scope of an idle blog entry, but I'll take a couple of stabs at the rough outlines.
The civil rights movement and the rise of cultural relativism in social sciences almost certainly laid a lot of the groundwork; certainly, the idea of a supernatural world in which the separate sovereignity of different pantheons is respected and respectable must come more naturally to people whose view of the real world has shifted away from regarding foreign cultures as intrinsically backward, misguided, ignorant or literally 'lower' on a ladder of progress which has 'Industrialized Christian Democratic Nation' at the top.
'Serious' occultists, philosophers and magicians, such as Crowley, Gardner and even Castaneda, probably made large contributions as well, if not directly, then through their influence on students and rebels of the 1960's. I would hazard, though, that the popular media of the later 20th century probably had a lot more to do with it, not by deliberately propogating ideas per se, but by building up such a voracious need for story after story, just to fill the airspace, theater screens, bookstores and comic racks, that over time more and wilder ideas almost inevitably came bubbling up, colliding and reproducing in the strange manner of the fictional. In such conditions The Ten Commandments or The Exorcist, based on Christian concepts of the supernatural, come to seem no more or less fantastic, and no more or less 'real', than Clash of the Titans or The Craft.
To go back down to specifics, the particular talking point that kicked off this bizarrely long article -- that it seems odd for Satan to command Pazuzu -- can be, not exclusively but more directly than any other one person, tracked to Gary Gygax, of all people. Say what you will about general cultural matrices and the genesis of concepts, I don't think it's going too far out on a limb to say that, among my contemporaries, Deities and Demigods did more than any other single book not only to introduce us to names and faces of various historical pantheons, but to plant the idea that these entities all have an equal degree of existence, and that they share the world and have territories between them in much the same way that human political leaders divide the material realm. By placing the Gods of the Vikings, the Egyptians, the Greeks and even the Cthulhu mythos into the same context it becomes very easy to make the jump to considering Yahweh and Satan part of the same general order of being -- and to take them no more or less seriously than any of the others.
Of course, the same book also teaches us two other important facts about Gods. First, although they may be very powerful, they can still be beaten to death by an adequately equipped party of adventurers, some of them more easily than a really tough dragon. And second, Bast has really spectacular tits.
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