Re: Reliligion

[Peter Byrne Manchester <PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu>]

       Chris Williams <chrisw@fciad2.bsd.uchicago.edu> cites kirke 
<smc@gandalf.rutgers.edu> (without attribution) and replies:
>> Chris,  I disagree with your contention that examination of the
>>sources from which Kate Bush may have drawn her material is irrelevant,
>>and I think that you are personally uncomfortable with it, thus
>>motivating your responses.
>
> This is a misrepresentation of my position. I have done plenty of
>examination of source material myself. That is a worthy thing, but
>my objections came true. Several people have used this "research" as
>an excuse to pour hundreds of lines of nonsense verbage only tangentally
>related to the song onto rec.music.gaffa.

       Sorry Chris, but I think kirke is right.  First of all, a number of 
people here, myself among them, specifically encouraged the posting of a good 
description of the pentagram ritual.  As happened, kirke and Robert Henderson 
hit the same slot (lh digest #9.332 12/23/93), but each post had its own 
virtues.  The one kirke re-posted, credited to Rodrigo Ferres and responding 
to a serious request by Fiona McQuarrie, is just as kirke says:
>                                       ....  It is well-done, accessable 
>      and the person who originally posted it did a good deal of work 
>      explaining and simplifying aspects of it (rodrigo@vnet.com). 
Robert Henderson specifically thanked IED and |>oug for encouragement, and 
gave an account of the same ritual but more from the point of view of the 
practitioner, which made it an instructive supplement to Rodrigo's more 
scholarly description.  He then went on--and this is where I am really 
perplexed, Chris--to accept your test of relevancy to understanding "Lily," 
with what I happen to view as complete success.  But surely you can 
acknowledge the effort?!

       Apparently not:  "hundreds of lines of nonsense verbiage only 
tangentially related to the song."  Well, Fiona, IED, and |>oug can speak for 
themselves; but that rhetoric affronts *me*.

       That's not the point, though.  I got hit upside the head by drukman 
the first time I posted anything substantive four years ago <pardon:  that's 
Mr. Drukman>, so I've been initiated.  But take a look at this next 
exchange:
>>  This person could be a witch, a Jewish mystic, or a
>>ceremonial magician, or just an occultist drawing on what works from
>>various
>>paradigms.  Kate herself may fit into any of these categories.
>
>   Kate may also be a hurt, confused person who has fallen into the
>clutches of a table-tapper. From what we can gather from the credits
>and interviews, Lily is a real person, probably the elderly woman who
>appears in the song and the _Rubberband Girl_ video.
>
>   People who have lost a loved one are often victims of "spirtualists"
>and "mediums" who promise to contact the dead. That this has never
>succeeded has not stopped the "seekers" (there's one born every minute.)
>
       Add Peter at Homeground to those who have confirmed that "Lily is a 
real person," and I agree with you that it is probably she who speaks the 
prayer that opens "Lily" and she who appears in the *film* (clips from which 
are used in the US video for RBG), apparently in a pivotal role.  The prayer 
itself puts me in mind of the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner [does anybody 
know?], but certainly nothing about it or the ritual behind the song is 
remotely suggestive of "table-tappery" or contacting the dead.  Trusting that 
you are indeed, as you say at the end of your post, "*hyper-reasonable*", I 
have struggled to reconstruct a line of thought that runs from anything that 
we know about Lily or "Lily" to mediums and contacting the dead.  All I can 
come up with is "that you are personally uncomfortable" with any aspect of 
religion to the point that you are unable to make even elementary 
phenomenological distinctions (here, between angels and the dead).  And it 
gets worse:
>I'll be kind and credit Lily with simply being deluded, rather than
>actually evil. She may well believe that she can contact the dead, or

       This is a real person, as you stipulate.  She is someone close to Kate 
and perhaps to her family as well, someone Kate invites to step into the 
spotlight of her work with her in the same unlikely yet signature Katelike 
way in which Hannah Bush appears in the videos for SiG and TBS, and you see 
it as "kind" to allow that she may simply be "deluded, rather than actually 
evil"!?!

>she may not even be engaged in that hateful charade, and may only be
>advising Kate on "protecting" herself from "psychic attack."
>
>(The fact that "psychic attack" does not exist gives the "psychic"
>tremendous lattitude in claiming success.)

Forget that this kind of rhetoric is glib and self-congratulatory:  I assume 
that it means that you, for one, are not worried about coming under 'psychic 
attack' and therefore disdain help concerning it.  What worries me is that by 
dismissing it as non-existent, rather than trying to sensitize yourself to 
what others may be trying to express symbolically in such terms (and they are 
not the terms that I would chose), you may visiting 'psychic attacks' on 
others, however unwittingly and unintentionally.  Surely it has caught your 
attention that a number of new voices, reflective and in control of their 
need for self-assertion, have complained lately about feeling bullied in this 
area?

       I've cast about all evening here for an analogy that features the same 
logic as the one I'm trying to convey:  imagine this guy, eyes like a hawk, 
keen of ear, master of tools--but he doesn't "believe in" B.O.  Only his 
friends can tell him.  And if they are friends, they should.

       Just to return to the point of all this:  the context in which it is 
going to be relevant to know the details of this pentagram ritual is not just 
the song "Lily" but the film, which most of us still haven't seen.  Kate's 
character, captive to the mania of the red shoes, seeks protection.  And 
apparently Kate saw theatrical and choreographical possibilities in something 
she knew about from Lily.

       Finally, I'm inclined to vote with Vickie on the apparently switched 
(or rotated, or inverted) placement of the angels:  Kate admitted that 
'organon' for 'orgonon' was a simple mistake, not a hidden pun or allusion.  
But then again....

............................................................................
                                                            Peter Manchester
       "SNOWY weather!"                        pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu
                                                    72020.366@compuserve.com