IMPLICATIONS FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION OF OCCULT BEHAVIOR IN THE YOUTH CULTURE ANDREW M. GREELEY National Opinion Research Center University of Chicago There are a number of different but interrelated strains to be observed in the deviant wing of upper-middle-class youth culture: ( 1 ) The Woodstock syndrome: a passive, unaggressive, withdrawal from the larger society-either temporary or permanent-into a subculture shaped by hallucinogenic drugs and rock music. (2) The political protest phenomenon: ranging from the Weathermen of the far left to various liberal and moderate groups concerned with active participation in the existing political processes. (3) The &dquo;communitarian&dquo; communes of Taos or movement: ranging from the the Big Sur to various kinds of encounter and sensitivity groups. (4) The &dquo;neo-sacral&dquo; or occult, religious or quasi-religious activities of both individuals and groups. AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a revised version of a paper presented at the meetings of the American Sociological Association in Washington, D.C., August 31, 1970. 131 Downloaded from yas.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016 [132] All four of these components of upper-class youth culture interact with one another. Astrology, for example, is popular with the communitarians, the protesters, and the psychedelics ; and marihuana permeates all four groups. Furtheryoung person can move from one another with relative ease; someone &dquo;doing his more, a emphasis to thing&dquo; can be astrology, and now a engaged now in protest, now drugs, now Maher Baba commune. The first three elements of the upper-middle-class youth culture are taken very seriously by social analysts, though the fourth has thus far not been subject to much in the way of serious investigation. But if psychedelia, political protests, and communes are thought to be important social developments, there is no logical reason for excluding interest in the occult from careful social scientific analysis. Although one is tempted to suspect that many sociologists would rather like to exclude it, drugs, political protests, even the communes are somehow &dquo;legitimate&dquo; forms of deviance, but astrology, witchcraft, or diabolism-that is indeed another matter. The characteristic reaction of many social scientists when the subject of occultism among their students is brought up is to suggest that it is a passing phenomenon or a fad that will soon go away. Psychedelia is not a fad, left-wing political movements are not fads, communes are generally not dismissed as being a fad, but occult behavior can only be explained as a fad. One need not delve too deeply to find the reasons why the neo-sacral is embarrassing: it simply should not have happened. For, in the classical model according to which most social scientists approach religion, we are now in the late phases of the &dquo;secularization&dquo; process. The race is presumed to have evolved away from a mythological society to a scientific society.Man no longer needs to postulate gods to explain storms or the progression of the stars across the heavens. Therefore, it is argued, he no longer needs the sacred or the religious. The more enlightened of progressive modem men, Downloaded from yas.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016 [133] if they are not atheists, are at least agnostics, requiring neither an ultimate explanation nor any contact with &dquo;the sacred.&dquo; Those who still profess a faith or engage in religious ritual are considered representative of a somewhat earlier stage of the evolutionary process-but a stage which is rapidly becoming vestigial. Such a model is rarely stated quite so baldly or explicitly, yet it is, one suspects, implicit, existing just below the surface of most social science consciousness. Obviously, such a model cannot cope with the new manifestations of the sacred on the college campus and in the communes where the collegians go when they flee from the campus. It is bad enough if the superstitious-particularly the bizarrely superstitiousremains anywhere in advanced industrial society, but for it to break out in the supposed bastion of secularity-the great university-is clearly an affront to decent, pious, agnostic men. FORMS OF THE NEO-SACRAL But despite its scandalous nature the neo-sacral is still very much with us. There are, it seems to me, three principal forms it takes: (1) Divination-that is to say, attempts either to foretell the future or to obtain divine guidance in decision-making through such traditional methods as astrology, the I Ching, or Tarot cards. (2) Mysticism-frequently of the Oriental variety and on occasion demanding long hours of silent contemplation and reflection. The Maher Baba groups seem to be particularly popular. (Indeed, one hears of a Baba commune in Idaho called Babashire.) Bizarre cultist groups such as witchcraft covens, diabolic (3) communities, spiritualism groups, and the White Legion. There also exist some rather strange relationships, to which I must confess a lack of complete understanding, between science fiction and the various neo-sacral movements. Downloaded from yas.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016 134 In the emerging literature on the communitarian movesees that it is increasingly acquiring religious dimensions. Some of the communes, of course, are explicitly religious while others use religious or quasi-religious concepts to explain their purpose and behavior. Thus, the &dquo;open land&dquo; ideology frequently argues that land &dquo;belongs to God&dquo;; and the emphasis on &dquo;organic food&dquo; stresses that such food is ment one &dquo;natural&dquo; or &dquo;the way God intends man to eat.&dquo; It is easy enough to dismiss such comments and, indeed, the whole resurgence of the occult as being &dquo;not serious,&dquo; or &dquo;a put-on&dquo; of the scientific, rational society. The young people who say, for example, that organic food is &dquo;God’s way&dquo; do not really mean God in the sense of some transcendent being, but whether they do or not is, of course, precisely a question for research and not a valid a priori assumption. Much of what is going on in the deviant youth culture today claims to be religious and looks and sounds as though it were religious. The serious social scientist, therefore, must deploy his tools of research in the sociology of religion and determine to what extent he can build useful models for understanding the current craze for the occult. Whether or not it will last is to some extent a research question and to some extent a question that must be left to future analysis. The relevant issue at present is to what extent the perspectives of the sociology of religion enable us to understand the phenomenon. PERTINENCE OF RELIGIOUS SOCIOLOGY I should like to suggest that at the present state of the the sociology of religion sees four principal functions that religion plays in human life: it provides meaning; it is a basis for community; it is an attempt to establish contact with the &dquo;sacred&dquo;; and it provides or reinforces norms according to which a man may live. Clifford Geertz (1957: 426) has argued that religion is a &dquo;culture system&dquo; providing a &dquo;template&dquo; by which man can discipline, Downloaded from yas.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016 [135] &dquo;interpret&dquo; those phenomena which baffle him. When science, common sense, ideology, and art are not sufficient to cope with crises of interpretation and man finds himself in a situation where interpretability itself is at stake, he turns to his &dquo;ultimate&dquo; cultural system to find an explanation. Religion, in other words, is man’s world view. What sacred symbols do for those to whom they are sacred is to formulate the image of the world’s construction and to program for human conduct.... A people’s world-view is their picture of the way things in sheer actuality are-a concept of nature, of self, and of society. It contains their most comprehensive idea of order. Religious belief and ritual confront and mutually confirm one another. An ethos is made intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life. The world view is made emotionally acceptable by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs of which such a way of life is an authentic expression. Geertz’s frame of reference is essentially Weberian. In the Durkheimian tradition, religion is seen both as the source and the result of community ties. It is the feeling of the bond of community which gives rise to the religious experience, and it is religion through which the society interprets and defines itself. Writers after Durkheim saw religion reintegrating the community in time of crisis (for example, Malinowski’s analysis of piacular rites as reintegrating a society in time of death) and as providing social location and self-definition in the midst of a complex industrial society (Will Herberg’s development of this theme has become almost classic). More recently, Thomas Luckman has pointed out that one feels the need of an &dquo;interpretive scheme&dquo; precisely in the act of discovering oneself as different &dquo;over against&dquo; others; but the interpretive scheme is both learned from others-as part of the early socialization experience-and also makes possible social behavior with others. Authors writing from such diverse perspectives as Mircea Eliade and Edward Shils have pointed out that human Downloaded from yas.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016 136 religious rituals are a means of establishing contact with the &dquo;really real&dquo;; that is, the basic order of things which underpins the universe. Shils ( 1968) is quite explicit about the place of the sacred in the human condition: This I regard as given that cognitive powers the constitution of man in the same way locomotive powers are given. Like those, they are unevenly given and unevenly cultivated, so that the sense of the &dquo;serieuse, &dquo; the need for contact with the charismatic or sacred values differs markedly among human beings within any society. Some persons, a minority, tend to have it to a pronounced degree and even relatively continuously; others, far more numerous, will experience it only intermittently and, except rarely, without great intensity. Finally, there is a minority which is utterly opaque to the &dquo;serieuse. in or &dquo; Although relatively little has been written about the relationship of religion and ethics, it is implicit in the notion that religion is a &dquo;cultural system&dquo; or an &dquo;interpretive scheme&dquo; that religion also provides ethical meaning for life. Geertz (1969: 101, 426) has made the link explicit. Religion, according to him, is the &dquo;struggle for the real.&dquo; It is rooted in the &dquo;insufficiency of common sense as a total orientation towards life ... the events through which we live are forever outrunning the power of our every day moral, emotional, and intellectual concepts to construe them, leaving us as a Javanese image has put it, ’like water buffalo listening to an orchestra.’ And he adds: &dquo;The force of religion in supporting social values rests on the ability of its symbols to formulate a &dquo; world-view in which those values as well as the forces opposing the realization are fundamental ingredients.&dquo; The &dquo;ethos,&dquo; then, and the world view are but different sides of the same coin. The world view tells us the way things really are, and the ethos, how we must live to be in harmony with the way things really are. Downloaded from yas.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016 [137] NEO-SACRAL RESEARCH TODAY In the present state of research on the new occult phenomena, one cannot describe with any absolute certainty the functions that the new interest in the sacred plays in the lives of the devout and the initiate. But one can at least observe that the young people who are involved do most strongly assert that their sacred, mystical, or occult interests do indeed provide them with meaning, with community, with a contact with the transcendent, and with norms by which to live. Indeed, they are quite explicit in contending that they have turned to-or returned to-the sacred precisely because the scientific, technological society has failed to provide them with faith, community, transcendence, and morality. If what they are engaging in is not a more or less authentic form of religious behavior, one wonders what kind of behavior would be acknowledged as authentically religious. Those members of the political new left who are not yet into the neo-sacral nonetheless seem to share the viewpoint of the neo-sacralists. Thus, Roszak’s counterculture and Schaar’s &dquo;new leadership&dquo; both assume that the hyperrationalism of positive and empiricist science has dehumanized the human being and human societies, and that only a return to knowledge which embraces other human skills in addition to abstract rationalization will save the race from destruction. Schaar’s (1970) description of how a political leader ought to behave if the rational and objective mode of cognition is abandoned is strikingly religious: Humanly significant leadership bases its claim to authority on a knowledge which includes intuition, insight, and vision as indispensable elements. The leader strives to grasp and to communicate the essence of a situation in one organic and comprehensive conception. He conjoins elements which the analytic mind keeps tidily separate. He unites the normative with the empirical, and promiscuously mixes both with the moral and the esthetic. The radical distinction between subjective and objective is unknown in this kind of knowledge, for everything is kind of Downloaded from yas.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016 138 personal and comes from within the prepared consciousness of the knower, who is simultaneously believer and actor. When it is about men, this kind of knowledge is again personal. It strives to see within the self and along with other selves. It is knowledge of character and destiny.... The language in which the knowledge appropriate to humanly significant leadership is expressed is also very different from the language of rational and objective discourse. It is a language profuse in illustration and anecdote, and rich in metaphor whose the human body and the dramas of action and responsibility. This language is suggestive and alluring, pregnant, evocative-in all ways the opposite of the linear, constricted, jargonized discourse which is the ideal of objective communication. Decisions and recommendations are often expressed in parables and visions whose meanings are hidden to outsiders but translucent to those who have eyes to see. Teaching in this language is done mainly by story, example, and metaphor-modes of discourse which can probe depths of personal being inaccessible to objective and managerial discourse. Compare the Sermon on the Mount with the latest communique from the Office of Economic Opportunity in the War on Poverty, or Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address with Nixon’s first. sources are The argument of Schaar-and many of his fellow critics from the new left-seems to be that &dquo;not by reason alone doth man live&dquo;; but if man must have something beyond reason, then he comes dangerously close to needing something that traditionally would be called &dquo;faith,&dquo; and this is precisely what the colleagues of the new left in the neo-sacral movement would have us believe. Is, then, the new cult of the occult to survive? Perhaps in the final analysis it will depend upon how deep, how pervasive, and how permanent the alienation of a substantial segment of the population from what they take to be the scientific and technological society. If a sufficient number do continue to be convinced that the nonrational or the transrational-or even the irrational-are an essential part of human living, then the sacred in one form or another is going to be with us for a long time to come. Downloaded from yas.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016 139 The while of religion should not be surprised; for the one hand he may be inclined to accept a long-range strain toward secularization, he knows his Weber and Durkheim well enough to be skeptical about man’s capacity to do without faith or the sacred. While he may be somewhat startled by the vigor and variety of the new sacred manifestations, he realizes on reflection that Max Weber probably would not be at all surprised, and Emil Durkheim would even clap his hands and say, &dquo;I told you so.&dquo; There will always be religion. Or, to put the matter somewhat more abstractly, a simple, unidirectional model of religious evolution from the sacred to the secular is not able to cope with the new sacred among sociologist on upper-middle-class young people. Furthermore, a more sophisticated model based in part on the Weberian notion of man as a meaning-seeking animal and the Durkheimian notion of man as a community-creating animal has no difficulty in coping with the new sacred-not, at least, after the first shock on hearing of the existence of a witchcraft 1 coven in the apartment next door.’ But while the sociologist of religion will not be completely taken aback by the resurgence of the sacred among the younger generation, he is, nonetheless, presented with something of a problem, a problem which neither Durkheim nor Weber was able to resolve. For if the sociologist of religion is an agnostic, as the two masters were, he is caught in the somewhat ambiguous position of arguing that society needs religion-or that man needs ultimate meaning-while simultaneously asserting that he himself and most of his academic colleagues need neither religion nor meaning. Religion and the sacred are part of the human condition, but they are also a part of the human condition from which the academic considers himself exempt. He is more than somewhat dismayed that some of his students do not wish to avail themselves of such exemptions and, indeed, are on occasion wont to imply that he is somehow less than human himself because he has taken the exemption. Downloaded from yas.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016 140 NOTE 1. A student of mine descended upon my office last fall to announce that he had been in contact with the devil. A normally sober, responsible, industrious, Methodist-turned-agnostic, the young man was visibly shaken by his experience with the diabolic. He and some of his friends had engaged m an emotionally supercharged bout with a ouija board on Halloween night and became persuaded that the devil had taken charge of the board. As my young friend pointed out, the board knew answers to questions that nobody in the room could possibly have known. For example, the board was able to tell the assembled group the year of Plato’s birth and, as my friend pointed out, it was only three years off. (I did not raise with him the issue of what kind of devil would make a mistake.) I asked him what he had done with the board, and he said that he and his friends had been so terrified by the experience that they took the board to a local Roman Catholic rectory where the priest had sprinkled it with holy water and told them to break it into many different pieces and put each piece in a separate garbage can. Having some familiarity with the staff at that rectory, I can imagine that the story provided much suppertime amusement for several days afterward. The young man promised to bring me tape recordings of the Halloween interlude with the devil (and what kind of a devil would it be that would permit himself to be tape recorded?), but returned the next day to say that his friend who had been keeping the tapes became terrified of the possibility that the devil might "adhere" in them, and had burned them. All this at the University of Chicago! REFERENCES GEERTZ, C. (1969) Islam Observed. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. (1957) "Ethos, world view and the analysis of sacred symbols." Antioch Rev. (December): 426. SCHAAR, J. H. (1970) "Reflections on authority." New Amer. Rev. 8: 75-77, ——— 78. SHILS, E. (1968) "Ritual in Boston: Beacon Press. crisis," in D. R. Cutler (ed.) The Religious Situation. Downloaded from yas.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016
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