Religion and Outer Space [1 ed.] 9780367542245, 9780367542276, 9781003088264

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
About the Contributors
Introduction
PART I: Religions Imagine Outer Space
1. Outer Space in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature
2. The Myth of Ancient Indian Airplanes
3. Mahāyāna Mind-Bending: Buddhist Visions of Outer/Inner Worlds
4. The Early 19th Century
5. “Event Horizon” & “The Space NDN’s Star Map”
PART II: Religious Imaginings of Outer Space
6. When Faith is Out of This World: Exploring the Religious Imagination through Science Fiction
7. The Evolving Light: The Transformation of Christianity in Deep Space Travel
8. Barbies and Celebrity Saints: Religion in John Varley’s Eight Worlds Stories
9. Space Dust, Religious Practice × Blackness
10. Utopian Art, the Sublime, and Outer Space Imaginaries
PART III: Imagining Religion in Outer Space
11. I Aim at the Stars, But Sometimes I Hit London: The Glorious and Deadly Rockets of the Early Space Age
12. Outer Space Religions, 20th Century & Beyond
13. Aliens in Outer Space: Myth, Diversity, and the Final Frontier
14. Astronauts as Chosen People: Religious Ways of Understanding the Astronaut Experience and Life After Space
15. The Wrong Way Home: St. Elon’s Digital Cult of Personality, Messianic Mediations of Mars, and the Musketeer Meme Militia
Index

Citation preview

RELIGION AND OUTER SPACE

Religion and Outer Space examines religion in and on the final frontier. This book offers a first-of-its-kind roadmap for thinking about complex encounters of religion and outer space. A multidisciplinary group of scholarly experts takes up some of the most intriguing scientific, spiritual, trade/commercial, and even military dimensions of the complex entanglements of religion and outer space. Attending to the historical reality that the interconnections between religion and the heavens are as old as religions themselves, the volume starts with an examination of “outer space” elements in the most sacred writings of the world’s religions. It then explores some of the religious questions inevitable in this encounter, analyzing cultural constructions (both literary and actual) of religion and outer space. It ends with examinations of the role of religion in the very real and very present business of space exploration. What might motivate the spread of religion (or at least fantasies of religion in its myriad possibilities) into new interior and exterior dimensions of the cosmos? Only the future will tell. Religion and Outer Space is essential reading for students and academics with an interest in religion and space, religion and science, space exploration, religion and science fiction, popular culture, and religion in America. Eric Michael Mazur is Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Wesleyan University, USA. Sarah McFarland Taylor is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, USA.

RELIGION AND OUTER SPACE Edited by Eric Michael Mazur and Sarah McFarland Taylor

Designed cover image: The Pillars of Creation, NASA. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Eric Michael Mazur and Sarah McFarland Taylor; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Eric Michael Mazur and Sarah McFarland Taylor to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mazur, Eric Michael, editor. | Taylor, Sarah McFarland, 1968-, editor. Title: Religion and outer space / edited by Eric Michael Mazur and Sarah McFarland Taylor. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022061863 | ISBN 9780367542245 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367542276 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003088264 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Religion and science. | Outer space. Classification: LCC BL240.3 .R456 2023 | DDC 201/.652--dc23/eng/20230425 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061863 ISBN: 978-0-367-54224-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-54227-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08826-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003088264 Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

For my aunts and uncles (z”l)—Shirley & Leon Gitomer; Estelle & William Pitts; Lillian & Israel Joseph Weintraub; Renée & Conrad Yarmoff; and Bernard Aroesty—who were all with me at my launch. EMM For my beloved son, Brody—my North Star in working for a better future for the planet. SMcFT

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsx About the Contributors xii Introduction1 Eric Michael Mazur and Sarah McFarland Taylor PART I

Religions Imagine Outer Space

7

1 Outer Space in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature Catherine Hezser

9

2 The Myth of Ancient Indian Airplanes Wendy Doniger

25

3 Mahāyā na Mind-Bending: Buddhist Visions of Outer/Inner Worlds34 James Mark Shields 4 The Early 19th Century Lisle W. Dalton

53

5 “Event Horizon” & “The Space NDN’s Star Map” Lou Cornum

69

viii Contents

PART II

Religious Imaginings of Outer Space

85

6 When Faith is Out of This World: Exploring the Religious Imagination through Science Fiction Douglas E. Cowan

87

7 The Evolving Light: The Transformation of Christianity in Deep Space Travel Jason Batt, Alires Almon, and Theodore Vial

101

8 Barbies and Celebrity Saints: Religion in John Varley’s Eight Worlds Stories Wendy Gay Pearson

114

9 Space Dust, Religious Practice × Blackness130 Philip Butler 10 Utopian Art, the Sublime, and Outer Space Imaginaries145 Catherine L. Newell PART III

Imagining Religion in Outer Space

159

11 I Aim at the Stars, But Sometimes I Hit London: The Glorious and Deadly Rockets of the Early Space Age161 Darryl V. Caterine 12 Outer Space Religions, 20th Century & Beyond176 Benjamin E. Zeller 13 Aliens in Outer Space: Myth, Diversity, and the Final Frontier195 Eric Michael Mazur 14 Astronauts as Chosen People: Religious Ways of Understanding the Astronaut Experience and Life After Space216 Deana L. Weibel

Contents  ix

15 The Wrong Way Home: St. Elon’s Digital Cult of Personality, Messianic Mediations of Mars, and the Musketeer Meme Militia233 Sarah McFarland Taylor Index255

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Much of the energy for this volume comes from our personal histories. Eric grew up near the NASA Langley Research Center and often visited the space mementofilled home of early NASA psychologist Robert Voas (and his family). Sarah got a firsthand lesson about the upcoming Apollo-Soyuz mission from Walter Cronkite (see Figure 0.1). But in most ways, we are both representative of our generation— thrilled by launches, enthralled by landings, and saddened by disasters all related to the human venture into outer space. Additional energy for this volume comes from our shared time as graduate students in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a place where we learned the tools of our trade but more importantly made friends with a great network of scholars young and old—some of whom agreed to join us in this particular endeavor. Each edited volume rests on the abilities of those who contribute to it, and we consider ourselves lucky to have been able to work on this project with some of the most talented. Of course, we are unmeasurably grateful to our authors—be they longtime friends or new acquaintances—for their hard work, insight, and creative thought. We also owe a great thanks to Rebecca Shillabeer and Iman Hakimi at Routledge for their help (and patience) as the project developed. And we would be remiss if we did not thank various people—known and unknown— across numerous states (and countries) who listened patiently as we tested ideas on panels and at public lectures over the years. —The Editors

Acknowledgments  xi

FIGURE 0.1 Sarah

McFarland Taylor and siblings at Mission Control, Kennedy Space Center, as Walter Cronkite explains the upcoming Apollo-Soyuz mission, 15 July 1975.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Alires Almon is the Founder of Deep Space Predictive Research Group and

founding member of the 100 Year Starship Project and Project Lodestar. Alires is a Partner Director at the Artificial Intelligence Institute and the Iliff School of Theology. She is a Ph.D. student in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, whose research focuses on the psychological impacts of human deep space exploration. Jason D. Batt is a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation explores mythological for-

mation during space travel. He is co-founder of Deep Space Predictive Research Group and Project Lodestar. He serves as the 100 Year Starship Creative and Editorial Director. He has edited Strange California (Falstaff 2017) and Visions of the Future (Lifeboat Foundation 2018) and written Young Gods (StoryJitsu 2016), and Onliest (Falstaff 2019). Philip Butler is Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Posthuman Artificial

Intelligence Systems at Iliff School of Theology, working primarily on the intersections of neuroscience, technology, spirituality, and Blackness. He is the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational artificial intelligence with mental health capacities, and a Partner Director of the Iliff Artificial Intelligence Institute, where he leads the 8020 Project, working to change how computers see people. He is the author of Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Spirituality and Technology and editor of Critical Black Futures: Speculative Theories and Explorations and has published in such journals as The Black Scholar, Journal of Posthuman Studies, and the Journal of Future Studies. Darryl V. Caterine is Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His

areas of academic interest include religion and popular culture, metaphysical/occult

About the Contributors xiii

religions in America, and Latinx religions. He is the author of two ethnographies: Conservative Catholicism and the Carmelites (2001) and Haunted Ground: Journeys through a Paranormal America (2011); co-editor of The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape (2019); and author of several articles on religion and popular culture in the United States. He lives in the burned-over district of central New York. Lou Cornum (Diné/Bilagáana) is Assistant Professor of Native American Studies

in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Their research interests broadly encompass Indigenous Cultural Studies with particular attention to Native American literature and Indigenous Futurism. They are the author of “Radioactive Intimacies: The Making of Worldwide Wastelands in ­Marie Clements’s Burning Vision” (Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, 2020), co-editor of “Decolonial (Re)Visions of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror,” a special ­issue of Canadian Literature (2020), and a founding editorial collective member of Pinko: A Magazine of Gay Communism. Prior to joining the faculty at NYU, Cornum was the Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Native American Studies at Wesleyan University. Douglas E. Cowan is Professor of Religious Studies and Social Development

Studies at Renison University College. He is the author of numerous books on religion and popular culture, including Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen; Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television; Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes: How Religion Shapes Fantasy Culture; America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King; and, most recently, The Forbidden Body: Sex, Horror, and the Religious Imagination. He lives in Waterloo, Canada, with his wife and their black Lab. Lisle Dalton is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Hartwick College in

Oneonta, New York. He also co-chairs the Honors Program and coordinates the Public Health Major and Minor. He teaches courses in the history of American religions, new religious movements, religion and science, religion and medicine, and other topics focusing on the relationship of religions to modern culture. He has published various articles on the religiosity of prominent scientists, the pseudoscience of phrenology, Alexis de Tocqueville, Walt Whitman, and The Simpsons television program. He recently co-edited, with Eric Mazur and Richard ­Callahan, The Bloomsbury Reader in the Study of Religion and Popular Culture (2021). Wendy Doniger [O’Flaherty] (B.A. Radcliffe, summa cum laude, Ph.D., Harvard

University; D. Phil., Oxford University) is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, ­Emerita, and the author of 50 books, most recently The Hindus: An Alternative History [2010], Hinduism in the Norton Anthology of World Religions (2014), The Ring of Truth: Tales of Sex and Jewelry (2017), Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences

xiv

About the Contributors

of Sex and Politics (the 2014 Terry Lecture at Yale, 2018), The Donigers of Great Neck: A Mythologized Memoir (2019), Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Mythology (2021), After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata (2022), and An American Girl in India: Letters from 1963-4 (2022). Catherine Hezser is Professor of Jewish Studies at SOAS, University of London,

UK. She holds a Dr. theol. (Heidelberg) and a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies ( JTSA, New York). Her main areas of research are the social history, literature, and legal tradition of Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman periods in the context of GraecoRoman and early Christian cultures. Amongst her main publications are Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (2005), The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine (2010, pb 2020), Jewish Travel in Antiquity (2011), Rabbinic Body Language: Non-Verbal Communication in Palestinian Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity (2017), Bild und Kontext: Jüdische und christliche Ikonographie der Spätantike (2018). Eric Michael Mazur is the Gloria & David Furman Professor of Judaic Studies

and Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Wesleyan University. He is the author of articles, chapters, and encyclopedia entries on various aspects of religion in American culture, including religion and the arts, film, and literature, as well as the editor and co-editor of various volumes on religion and popular culture, including God in the Details (with Kate McCarthy, 2001; 2nd edn. 2010), the Encyclopedia of Religion & Film (2011), the Routledge Companion to Religion & Popular Culture (with John Lyden, 2015), and the Bloomsbury Reader in the Study of Religion & Popular Culture (with Lisle Dalton and Richard Callahan, 2021). Catherine L. Newell is a scholar of the conjoined histories of religion and sci-

ence. Her first book, Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and the Final Frontier (University of Pittsburgh Press), traces post-World War II American zeal for space exploration back to 19th-century religious belief in American manifest destiny and focuses on the artists, historians, and scientists who popularized space exploration as the conquest of the final frontier. Her most recent work, Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating (forthcoming from Lexington Books), explores how individuals use scientific concepts about food and diet as the basis for a spiritual practice. Additionally, she has published articles and book chapters on dystopic science fiction and nature religion; the religious origins of American vegetarianism; and how Biblical injunctions to “rule over the Earth” still inflect debates about environmental science and management in the 21st century. Sarah McFarland Taylor is the award-winning author of Green Sisters: A Spiritual

Ecology (Harvard University Press) and Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue (NYU Press). An Associate Professor of Religious Studies, American Studies, and Environmental Policy and Culture at Northwestern University, she specializes in the study of media, religion, environment, and public

About the Contributors xv

moral engagement. Director of the Canceling the Apocalypse Project (CAP), based at Northwestern University, Taylor works with students, academic professionals in both the sciences and humanities, and entertainment industry mediamakers to teach and promote effective climate communications that engage both climate deniers and climate fatalists in productive ways. Wendy Gay Pearson is Chair of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the

University of Western Ontario. Pearson teaches sexuality studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cinemas, and science fiction. Pearson is co-editor with Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, and Keren Omry of The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction (forthcoming). With Susan Knabe, Pearson is the co-editor of Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context (2014) and the co-author of Zero Patience (2011) on John Greyson’s eponymous film. Pearson is also co-editor with Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon of Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (2008) and a past winner of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Innovative Research Award (formerly the Pioneer Award). In 2019, Pearson was appointed as a 3M National Teaching Fellow. James Mark Shields is Professor of Comparative Humanities and Asian Thought

at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA). Educated at McGill University, the University of Cambridge, and Kyoto University, he conducts research on modern Buddhist thought, Asian and comparative philosophy, Buddhist ethics, and political theory. He is the author of Critical Buddhism: Engaging with Modern Japanese Buddhist Thought (Ashgate) and Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan (Oxford) and co-editor of Teaching Buddhism in the West: From the Wheel to the Web (Routledge), Buddhist Responses to Globalization (Lexington), and The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics (Oxford). His current work examines the implications and possibilities of Buddhist experimentation with radical politics across Asia and in the contemporary West. Born in the Maritimes, Canada, with ancestral ties to Scotland, Ireland, Spain, and the Philippines, he currently lives in central Pennsylvania but considers Kyoto and Montréal as spiritual homes. Theodore Vial is Potthoff Professor of Theology and Modern Western Reli-

gious Thought at the Iliff School of Theology, and Vice President of Innovation, Learning, and Institutional Research. He has published Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford University Press 2016) and Schleiermacher: A Guide for the Perplexed (T & T Clark 2013). His current research is in two areas: Artificial Intelligence and theories of human nature, and the construction of Judaism and gender in the modern world. Deana Weibel, Professor at Grand Valley State University, is a cultural anthro-

pologist whose work focuses primarily on religion, especially the topics of pilgrimage, sacred space, the mutual influence of scientific and religious ideas, space

xvi

About the Contributors

tourism, and religion and space exploration. Her current work focuses on religion as a motivation for and influence on space travel and outer space-based sciences, with ethnographic research conducted at multiple NASA field centers, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Mojave Air and Space Port, and the Vatican Observatory, as well as conferences and other transient gatherings of space professionals. Her early fieldwork in Rocamadour, France resulted in the book A Sacred Vertigo: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Rocamadour, France. She is the chair of the Chicago/Great Lakes chapter of the Explorers Club and a co-organizer of Roger That! A Celebration of Space Exploration in Honor of Roger B. Chaffee, an annual Grand Rapids, Michigan event since 2017. Benjamin E. Zeller is Professor and Chair of Religion at Lake Forest College

(­Chicago, USA). He researches religious currents that are new or alternative, including new religions, the religious engagement with science, and the quasireligious relationship people have with food. He is the author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion (NYU Press) and Prophets and Protons: New Religious Movements and Science in Late Twentieth-Century America (NYU Press), editor of Handbook of UFO Religions (Brill), and co-editor of Religion, Attire, and Adornment in North America (Columbia University Press), Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (Columbia University Press), and The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements (Bloomsbury). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard University. He is co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions.

INTRODUCTION Eric Michael Mazur and Sarah McFarland Taylor

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Most readers will recognize this as the first words of the Book of Genesis. Some may also recall these words being read to millions of people on Earth in 1968 by the astronauts aboard Apollo 8. But many will wonder what significance these words—or any religious sentiment—have as humans venture farther into space. In part, this may be because many of us have been led to believe that there is some inherent contradiction between the two, that space exploration threatens the very foundation of religion. Consider the years between 1633 and 1705. In 1633, Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei was tried and condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for advocating a scientific theory that denied Earth’s role as the center of the universe. Just over 70 years later, British mathematician Isaac Newton was knighted by Queen Anne. While Newton may have received the honor for his (possibly unwitting) assistance in furthering the Crown’s political interests rather than with his work on the laws of motion, gravity, optics, or calculus, it is worth noting that the man whose mathematical formulae confirmed the heliocentric theory of ­Galileo (and Copernicus before him) was given the highest honor by the royal head of his faith community rather than one of the worst punishments of Galileo’s. In the period of one lifetime, the place of humanity shifted, and with it the place of religion in the Western world. The Church lost its monopoly, not only over the meaning of Christianity in the West, but also over the way in which those in the West understood the place of humanity in the cosmos, divine or scientific. The shift over the last century has been just as dramatic. In October 1957, the former Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first human satellite to circumnavigate the globe. Four years later, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003088264-1

2  Eric Michael Mazur and Sarah McFarland Taylor

orbit the planet; eight years after that Apollo 11 brought three Americans to the Moon. And in 2012, Voyager 1 became the first satellite constructed by humans to exit Earth’s solar system and enter interstellar space. Today, even as the James Webb Space Telescope looks farther back in time—back to Creation, in a sense—­ preparations are underway for humanity’s first visit to another planet. And even as we plan to make this next leap, we have also taken enormous strides in our ability to know if there are others out there—somewhere—looking back at us. The “Drake Equation,” developed in 1961 by American astronomer Frank Drake, provided a formula for calculating the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy capable of communicating with others. In 1984, Drake, with fellow astronomer Carl Sagan, founded the SETI Institute dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Among other things, Sagan had been instrumental in the development of the “Golden Record”—recorded evidence of human life and civilization put aboard Voyager 1 (launched in 1977 and now beyond the reaches of Earth’s solar system) on the chance that it might be recovered by intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. In January 1992, the first “exoplanet” was discovered; as of this writing, more than 5,000 had been confirmed (NASA Exoplanet Archive” n.d.). In 2017, not only was the first interstellar object detected entering Earth’s solar system but, based on that object’s unusual speed and orbit, there was serious scientific speculation that it might have been set in motion by intelligent life in another solar system (George and Strickland 2018). Probes on the Moon and other planets have confirmed the presence of water, and the United States Navy has confirmed accounts of pilot experiences with “unidentified aerial phenomena” (Cooper et al. 2019). It would seem that the only place for religion in all of this is in the naming of celestial bodies.1 Most of us don’t often consider the intersection of religion and outer space, maybe because, since the Enlightenment, many in the West have been taught that religion and science represent different, mutually exclusive categories: religions deal with Heaven; science deals with outer space. If religion has anything positive to contribute to conversations about outer space, many in the modern world believe, it is to be done from the sidelines. The fact that the Vatican has maintained an observatory for centuries—a fact likely unknown to most non-Catholics— seems only to amplify the metaphor. Theologians ponder what it might mean for their religious communities to encounter beings from other worlds. The Pope prays for astronauts and cosmonauts. Amongst themselves, the religious conjure plans to replicate, or conversely transform, institutional material manifestations of Earthly religious worship that persist even within imagined extraterrestrial settings. In 1967, New York architect Maurice Lavanoux, for instance, designed a chapel on the moon, the tipi-like plans for which were featured in a special issue of Liturgical Arts that focused on lunar colonies. More recently (2019), artist Jorge Manes Rubio, a member of the European Space Agency’s Advanced Concept Team, designed a “Moon Temple” as a non-denominational space within a lunar colony for unified human contemplation (see Wall 2017).

Introduction  3

But beyond the confines, dogma, theology, and ritual strictures of institutional religion lies a primal human fascination with the mysterious “more” of the universe (see Orsi 2012). Observes astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Before there was biology, before there was chemistry and before there was anything, people were looking up at the night sky … There is something deep in the human condition that crosses time and crosses cultures, where no matter who we are, no matter where we’re born, we have all looked up and wondered what’s out there. (Harmon 2003) Not only have we looked up and wondered what was out there; we have imagined it, told each other stories about it, revered those who went there—as well as those who (we were told) had gone there—and tried to imagine how we could get there, too. We may be more than Homo sapiens; to borrow religion scholar Mircea Eliade’s term, we may be homo religiosus (1959). This insatiable fascination with exploring the territory of “the more,” some argue, is quite literally part of our DNA. According to science writer Elizabeth Kolbert, Homo sapiens possess what she calls the “madness gene.” This gene gave us (and not our Neanderthal ancestors) the insatiable itch to cross large bodies of water and spurred us to move and explore. More specifically, Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo theorizes that a genetic mutation that evolved in our Homo sapien ancestors generated a “Faustian” tendency in humans that drives us to restless exploration regardless of risky consequences. “How many people must have sailed out and vanished in the Pacific before you found Easter Island?” ponders Kolbert; “And why do you do that? It is for the glory? For the immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop” (2014, 251). Religion, its components—belief, belonging, and behaving—­ along with its prophetic qualities and visions of alternate worlds, constitutes a critical part of the human story of “moving on” amidst dreams of discovery. Sociologist of religion Peter Berger—himself a committed Lutheran—defined religion as “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant” (1967, 28). It is, for him, a “sacred canopy,” a mechanism for sustaining a stable enough worldview to maintain social order in the face of apparent chaos; nothing happens without an explanation, whether knowable to humans or not. At its very root, then, the religious impulse has amplified our basic DNA, making us not only look up at the stars; not only wonder what was there; and not only endeavor to find out, but also to make the finding out central to our understanding of who we are and how we fit into the unending vastness that is space. The exploration may have challenged how we articulate some of the basic elements of our religious traditions, but those religious traditions have kept us from falling into the chasm of existential despair, particularly as we realize the true scope of our galactic environment.

4  Eric Michael Mazur and Sarah McFarland Taylor

This volume is organized to provide you with a glimpse of the developing and ongoing conversation between religion and outer space from the past to the present and into the future; from the earth to the heavens. The organization is itself a model of the human voyage into outer space. In the first section (“Religions Imagine Outer Space”), we begin our journey here on Earth, on the ground but looking up (and out) into the heavens. Because it is likely that most of our readers are from the English-speaking world dominated by Judaism and Christianity, we first delve into the out-of-this-world elements from the foundation of these traditions. Catherine Hezser engages in a close analysis of this material in her chapter, “Outer Space in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature.” Drawing from both the traditional and the mystical works of Judaism and Christianity in the Hellenistic and Roman period, Hezser teases out from these texts the ways that ancient Jews and Christians engaged the cosmos, making the distinction between this world and another, higher sphere. In her work “The Myth of Ancient Indian Airplanes,” Wendy Doniger then examines the assertion that ancient Hindu literature describes not only how modern flying machines were anticipated but also built and flown, and the role those notions have played in Hindu nationalist arguments in contemporary India. Ultimately, she finds that, though ancient aircraft are imaginary, the political influence of those same airplanes is very real. James Mark Shields, in his chapter “Mah āyā na Mind-Bending,” describes the Buddhist visions of both outer and inner worlds. While it would be anachronistic to speak about a Buddhist concept of “outer space,” Shields argues that Buddhist cosmologies certainly point toward the possibility of “other worlds” (spatially, not simply temporally), which can be reached by advanced meditators as well as those who have achieved the status of bodhisattva or buddha. Lisle Dalton brings us into the more recent past in “The Early Nineteenth Century,” an examination of religions (found initially in the United States) that, before the 20th century, relied on (or heavily integrated) what today we might call “outer space” elements into their belief systems. Dalton brings us into deeper theologies of space inflected by European esoteric and hermetic traditions, while also illuminating ways in which utopian social experiments such as Fourierism and the legacy of Emanuel Swedenborg fostered the contemplation of new worlds. Providing us with a bridge from the past to the present, Lou Cornum examines the relationship between Native Americans and outer space exploration—both good and bad—in two pieces (published previously), “Event Horizon” and “Space NDN.” For Cornum, fusion of the indigenous and the highly technological, blended images of indigenous outer space explorers and rockets ships all importantly trigger cognitive dissonance in those who would confine indigenous peoples to an imagined or romanticized past. From here we leave our planetary home for our journey into space, and in the second section (“Religious Imaginings of Outer Space”) we enter the creative world of imagination, where the images of religion and outer space are less

Introduction  5

historical and more artistic, to see how religion in outer space might look. Doug Cowan, in “When Faith is Out of This World,” helps us understand religion in science fiction—not the religion of little green men, but religion as we understand it, here on Earth, as we project it into space and science fiction. In “The Evolving Light,” Jason Batt, Alires Almon, and Theodore Vial help us to understand the possible futures of Christianity based on the creative imagination of contemporary science fiction authors Frank Herbert (author of the Dune series) and Dan Simmons (author of the Hyperion series). Wendy Gay Pearson, in “Barbies and Celebrity Saints,” sharpens our focus by examining the intersection of both gender and sexuality with religion in the “Eight Worlds” work of author John Varley, while Philip Butler enables us to see through his eyes in “Space Dust, Religion Practice × Blackness” into the world of Afrofuturism and the nexus in space of religion and Blackness. Last in this section, Catherine Newell shows us in “Utopian Art, the Sublime, and Outer Space Imaginaries” how the realistic and yet emotionally powerful images created by Chesley Bonestell helped transform space from bad science fiction to a realistic destination and enabled a generation of Americans to imagine actually being in space. The final section (“Imagining Religion in Outer Space”) takes us from the Earth to outer space, where we can explore the religious impulse of those who express it as they travel to other worlds. In “I Aim at the Stars, But Sometimes I Hit London,” Darryl Caterine invites us into the compelling world of Wernher von Braun, inventor of the first rocket to enter outer space and arguably America’s leading rocket engineer throughout the mid-twentieth century. The inventor’s creations and rocketry more generally would become an obsession in American popular culture, as Caterine details its pervasiveness in everything from automobiles to kitchen designs, to television shows, sci-fi films, and theme park experiences. In “Outer Space Religions, 20th century and Beyond,” Benjamin E. Zeller explores “space religions” and finds counterintuitively that, while reaching toward the heavens, these religions tend to say very little about outer space itself. Instead, outer space religions have much to say about our own planet and assume a remarkable Earthly focus. Eric Mazur, in his chapter “Aliens in Outer Space,” examines how the shift in myths narrating the American space program revealed aspects related to religion, race, and gender that have long been a part of American culture. Mazur demonstrates that rather than religion being an “add-in” to the space program, Christian elements, practices, ideals, and communist-vanquishing goals were baked in from the start. Continuing our explorations of religion and the space program, in “Astronauts as Chosen People,” Deana Weibel illustrates the many ways that astronauts themselves, seemingly superhuman in their capabilities, have come to take on a kind of god-like status in popular imagination. Presenting data from original ethnographic research, she offers us three case studies of American astronauts who identify as religious, who see providence as an active force in their lives, and who speak of their experiences as astronauts from within a religious framework. In

6  Eric Michael Mazur and Sarah McFarland Taylor

“The Wrong Way Home,” Sarah McFarland Taylor challenges the apocalyptic, fatalistic, survivalist narrative of the urgent need for human Earth exodus marketed by Elon Musk and his company SpaceX. In so doing, Taylor examines the free digital labor performed by fervent Musk followers in the mediasphere, and how their mediamaking evokes religious resonances, exalting Musk as a superhuman, if not messianic, figure in public imagination. What might animate the conversation between religion (or at least fantasies of religion in its myriad possibilities) and outer space as we venture farther from our terrestrial home? Only the future will tell. In the following pages, we think seriously about some of the ways we got to this point and provide a possible roadmap of the encounter of religion and outer space as we venture forth. Note 1 For example, the first “exoplanet” was named Draugr, after the “undead” creatures of Norse mythology.

Works Cited Berger, Peter L. (1967). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean (2019). “‘Wow, What Is That?’: Navy Pilots Reported Unexplained Flying Objects.” New York Times (27 May): A14. Eliade, Mircea (1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard Trask. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. George, Steve, and Ashley Strickland (2018). “Interstellar Object May Have Been Alien Probe, Harvard Paper Argues, But Experts are Skeptical.” CNN.com (6 November); available online: (accessed 17 November 2019). Harmon, Amy (2003). “Reviving Romance with Space, Even as ‘Space Age’ Fades.” New York Times (4 February): F3. Kolbert, Elizabeth (2014). The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company. “NASA Exoplanet Archive” (n.d.). NASA Exoplanet Science Institute; available online: (accessed 15 December 2022). Orsi, Robert, ed. (2012). The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Wall, Mike (2017). “Visit the Moon Temple: Artist Jorge Manes Rubio’s Lunar Vision in Images.” Space.com (28 March); available online: < https://www.space.com/36218moon-temple-artist-jorge-rubio-project-gallery.html> (accessed 16 December 2022).

PART I

Religions Imagine Outer Space

1 OUTER SPACE IN ANCIENT JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN LITERATURE Catherine Hezser

While the worldview and cosmological knowledge of ancient Jews and Christians differed considerably from our own, they clearly differentiated between life on earth and outer space as another sphere that surrounded them and to which humans generally lacked access. Like other ancient Near Eastern societies, ancient Jews and Christians identified outer space with the heavens (Hebr.: shamayim, pl.), a godly sphere above the earth (Wright 2000, 4). Already in the Hebrew Bible, not only God (Ezekiel chapter 1) and his angels as divine messengers are imagined as travelling between heaven and earth; individuals such as the prophet Elijah are also said to have ascended to heaven in a chariot (2 Kings 2:11). Whereas Elijah’s ascent marked the end of his life, “round trips” to heaven are mentioned more frequently in post-biblical Hellenistic Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts (Segal 1980; Dean-Otting 1984; Carlsson 2004). They reappear in medieval Jewish Kabbalistic texts such as Hekhalot Rabbati (Hezser 2021). In these texts, travellers to outer space enjoy the privilege of seeing things that ordinary humans cannot and telling others of their experiences. The association of heaven with the afterlife (McDannell and Lang 2001) is usually based on a distinction between the perishable body and the immortal soul that was alien to biblical (and later rabbinic) anthropology which considered humans to be physical and spiritual units. It should be noted that Ezekiel’s vision of the resurrection of bones in Ezekiel 37:1–14 imagines the recreation of living earthly bodies. The idea of heaven as an eternal resting place for the souls of the deceased considered worthy of this “reward” by divine judgment is a later development that appears in Hellenistic Jewish texts and early Christian literature and seems to be based on Zoroastrian (Hintze 2019) and/or Hellenistic influence (Endsjø 2009, 106–113; Elledge 2013). While rabbinic Judaism resisted speculation about

DOI: 10.4324/9781003088264-3

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the afterlife, from late antiquity onwards Christian authors created romantic and idealized images of the deceased’s sojourn in heaven. Heaven was imagined as an otherworldly paradise in which worthy souls could dwell in peace in the company of angels (Augustine, City of God book 14 on the heavenly city, see Klein 2018, 135), without worries and liberated from earthly pains (Ryan-Byerly and Silverman, 2017). In antiquity, even more than nowadays, outer space beyond earth was the great unknown. The lack of knowledge of the universe gave rise to speculation and imagination originating from the religious worldviews and life experiences of the authors and tradents (people who pass down traditions). In the case of ancient Jews and Christians, such speculation was at least to some extent confined by monotheistic beliefs. Rather than being seen as deities themselves, space travelling angels and humans were considered subordinate to God, the foremost occupant of the heavens. Angels could function as divine messengers and heavenly gatekeepers who enabled or prevented access from one spatial realm to the next (Yoshiko Reed 2020; Ahuvia 2021). While ancient readers and audiences may have considered human space travellers to possess superhuman qualities, the Jewish and Christian authors of the texts present them as intermediaries between the known human and the unknown divine spheres. Imagined contacts between these spheres and their “inhabitants” could lead to conflicts of authority, however, which are evident in rabbinic and Kabbalistic texts (Segal 2002). Ancient Jews and Christians were divided over the image of Jesus as a divine figure, “exalted at the right hand of God” (Acts 2:33). Those who claimed a special knowledge of the divine outer sphere—through narrated visions, heavenly journeys, and ascents—were able to gain followers who venerated them. Ancient Cosmology

Ancient Jewish and Christian views of outer space are based on ancient cosmology, that is, visions of the world and the universe ( Jacobs 1975). As far as Jews are concerned, during the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE or even earlier, Babylonian cosmological views were adopted and combined with older biblical traditions. Babylonian cosmology reckoned with three main levels of which the earth constituted the solid stratum in the middle, with waters underneath and (several) heaven(s) above (Yarbro Collins 2000, 27, based on Lambert 1975). This “three-tiered universe” reappears in the Hebrew Bible, which “is not particularly interested in the structure and geography of the heavenly and earthly realms” (Schäfer 2005, 39). The Babylonian worldview is mainly based on the creation myth in Enuma Elish which, according to George (2016), needs to be viewed together with other ancient Mesopotamian sources that may be contradictory. Crucial is the separation between earth and sky, after their initial union (intercourse of Father Sky and Mother Earth), either by a third party, the god Enlil (“Lord Air”), or on its own

Outer Space in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature  11

(George, ibid.). In Enuma Elish, the (mingling male and female) waters (primordial ocean) play an important role in the creation story, with earth and sky being the creation of these waters. As Horowitz (1998, xii) has pointed out, “ancient Mesopotamian understandings of the universe remained remarkably constant over the 2,500 years or so … until the end of cuneiform writing.” The gods were associated with the region of the heavens above the visible sky. Underneath the earth, an underworld was imagined underneath the waters (see the scheme, ibid.). Since the ends of the physical world remained undefined, the outer reaches of the earth left space for the imagination, as the late antique Alexander stories indicate: Alexander the Great was imagined as travelling to the ends of the earth, exploring the heavens above and the waters below (see the contributions in Moore 2018; Hezser 2013). The Hellenistic study of cosmology and astrology and the perception of the heavens integrated older Babylonian ideas, as Stevens (2019, 33–93) has shown. She argues that cosmology and the study of the heavens in particular was “the area in which contact between Mesopotamian and Greek intellectual culture arguably had the most significant impact” (ibid. 33). Greek and Latin authors from Aristotle onwards often referred to the celestial knowledge of the Chaldaeans (an ancient Semitic people in Babylonia who practised astrology) and trace information about the zodiac and planetary movements back to pre-Hellenistic times. The influence of Babylonian mathematical astronomy in the Greek scientific exploration of outer space, for example, concerning the movements of the celestial bodies, is evident from the astronomical papyri from Oxyrhynchus in Roman Egypt (ibid.). Allegedly, such scientific approaches did not conflict with religious notions of a divine impact on celestial phenomena on the earth, although “[e]xactly how the relationship between god and heavenly body was imagined is still not fully understood” (ibid. 68). When many things were left unexplained and open to speculation, there was much space in heaven for the gods (Couprie 2011, 180). Ancient Jewish and Christian notions of the earth and outer space developed within this context of Babylonian and Greek cosmology. Whereas the Hebrew Bible is more interested in cosmogony than cosmology, Jewish apocalyptic texts from the Hellenistic period show “an almost scientific curiosity in the geography and composition of the cosmos” (Schäfer 2005, 39). These apocalypses associate one or more heaven(s) with the space that God inhabits and distinguish it from the earth. Through heavenly “sightseeing,” biblical figures such as Enoch and Ezra acquire a knowledge of the universe and the divine beyond the scope of ordinary people. The Ancient Middle Eastern and Hellenistic cosmological environments are still noticeable in late antique rabbinic notions of the nature and structure of the heavens, as Simon-Shoshan has shown: “Cosmology is one of the few realms of rabbinic endeavour that directly overlaps with an important area of concern for both Greek and Mesopotamian writers” (2008, 67–68). Both mythological and scientific traditions reappear in rabbinic texts and are developed into a new

12  Catherine Hezser

synthesis (69). The sky (rakiah) is viewed as a dome (kippah) above the earth and below the heavens (72). Rabbis also reckoned with a primordial ocean out of which heaven and earth emerged (Genesis Rabbah 4:2, quoted ibid. 73). Water was associated with the sky to explain rainfall (81). The sun and moon were believed to move and appear at the firmament at particular times. Simon-Shoshan shows that “the rabbis self-consciously place their own cosmological speculations into a comparative, cross-cultural context” (85). Accordingly, “the rabbis’ view of the nature and structure of the heavens closely parallels Ancient Near Eastern perceptions on the matter, both in its broad conception and in many of its details” (88). While ancient rabbis may not have been particularly interested in cosmology (Genesis Rabbah 1–12 may be an exception), “echoes of rabbinic cosmology” reappear in Jewish mysticism and in Hekhalot literature in particular (Leicht 2013, 276). Leicht concludes that the authors and tradents of this literature were more interested in God and his angels than in the physical aspects of the universe (277). Similarly, Schäfer argues that speculation about the heavens in rabbinic and Jewish mystical literature must be seen within the context of theology, that is, “the relationship between God in heaven and his people of Israel on earth” (Schäfer 2005, 50, 58). Ascents to Heaven

In ancient Jewish and Christian texts, journeys to heaven are always imagined as journeys into the divine sphere, to obtain religious rather than scientific knowledge, to enter a special relationship with God and his angels, and to engage in a heavenly liturgy. The space traveller may be perceived as entirely human or angel-like (cf. 2 Enoch 9:17–19), that is, of higher standing than ordinary people. He—it is usually a male traveller—returns to earth and tells his co-religionists about his experiences. In early Christian texts, Jesus is sometimes perceived as a superhuman who, after his resurrection, is believed to be “exalted,” sitting “by the right hand of God” (Acts 2:33) until his eventual return to earth at the end of times, an era that was considered to be imminent by some of his early followers. In the Christian imagination, several aspects of ancient ascent narratives seem to be merged: the Jewish apocalyptic motif of the heavenly journey, the Hellenistic notion of the resurrection of the souls of the deceased, and apotheosis narratives associated with Graeco-Roman emperors. In the Hebrew Bible, divine journeys between heaven and earth appear as part of a prophetic vision. The base text for the so-called merkavah (divine chariot) tradition, which reemerges in later Jewish mysticism, is Ezekiel’s vision ­(Ezekiel chapter 1) of a wheeled chariot, made up of or attached to a four-faced, part-­ animal, part-human winged creature, “lifted up from the earth” (1:21) and moving towards the firmament and the heavenly throne of God. As Schäfer has pointed out, “God … does not simply sit on his throne but hovers, so to speak, above his

Outer Space in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature  13

entourage that fills the heaven…”; he “rides upon ‘Aravot,’ in other words, cruises the seventh heaven apparently in a vehicle” (Schäfer 2005, 49). In his encounter with “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord” (Ezekiel 1:28), Ezekiel receives a message and instructions from God (Ezekiel chapters 1–6). The vision serves to ensure his audience of the legitimacy and divine inspiration of his prophetic speech. Ezekiel himself is imagined as earthbound here. Human ascents to heaven are a characteristic feature of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature. Himmelfarb (1993) has traced the development of the ascent motif from Ezekiel to the Book of the Watchers (fallen angels) in 1 Enoch 1–36 (esp. 14–16) and other Jewish Hellenistic and Christian apocalypses from the third century BCE to the second century CE. She stresses that despite differences “these apocalypses are all shaped in important ways by the belief that human beings can become equals of angels,” that is, “that the boundary between humanity and the divine is permeable” (4). Not only the imagined heavenly journeys and revelatory visions but also the appearance of the space travellers was thought to assimilate to that of angels as heavenly creatures as a consequence of their particular closeness to the divine sphere. Since heaven was considered the divine realm, those who approached and entered it left earth and their human nature behind and became somewhat god-like, both as far as their intellectual perception and their physical bodies were concerned. In his review of Himmelfarb’s study, Halperin points to the problem of “the remoteness of the divinity” (Halperin 1993, 155), which may have motivated authors to create accounts of heavenly journeys and the heroes’ transformation into partly heavenly beings. 1 Enoch is all about the relationship between heavenly and earthly beings. The “heaven of heavens” is presented as God’s dwelling place (1:4, tr. R.H. Charles 2007), from which he may journey towards the earth and Mount Sinai in particular (ibid.). Enoch is shown “the vision of the holy one in the heavens” by the angels or Watchers (1:3), called “children of the heavens” (6:1), and his description is to be preserved in writing for future generations. As part of his observation, Enoch mentions the fixed order and seasonal movements of the heavenly bodies and their impact on the earth (clouds, rain, etc., chapters 2–5). Some bad angels crossed their boundaries and had intercourse with human women, who gave birth to giants who caused bloodshed (chapters 7 and 8). Azazel “has taught all unrighteousness on earth and revealed the eternal secrets which were (preserved) in heaven” (9:5). Enoch is asked to reprimand Azazel and the Watchers for the damage they have done (chapters 12 and 13). They are to be bound to earth eternally (14:5). Enoch then has a vision of his own ascent to heaven: “Behold, in the vision clouds invited me and a mist summoned me, and the course of the stars and the lightnings sped and hastened me, and the winds in the vision caused me to fly and lifted me upward, and bore me into heaven” (14:8–9). Heaven is a place beyond the visible sky. Enoch needs to cross a wall of fire to enter the heavenly precincts imagined as a lavish building: “a large house which was built of crystals: and the walls of the house were like a tessellated [geometrically designed inlaid] floor

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(made) of crystals, and its groundwork was of crystal. Its ceiling was like the path of the stars and the lightnings …” (14:10–11). The walls and portals are guarded by fire. Inside the building, “it was hot as fire and cold as ice” (14:14). He sees a second house: “in every respect it so excelled in splendour and magnificence and extent that I cannot describe to you its splendour and its extent” (14:16–17). Within it, Enoch finds a throne made of crystals, with wheels like the sun, “and the Great Glory sat thereon” (14:20), surrounded by angels. This vision of the divine on a throne within a heavenly palace or temple is a motif that reappears elsewhere in Jewish apocalypticism and Hekhalot literature (see the contributions in Boustan and Reed, 2004). In 1 Enoch, heaven is associated with secret knowledge. As Reed has pointed out, “[a] special concern with knowledge is reflected in the projection of many different types of wisdom into heaven, encompassing both spatial and temporal planes of existence” (Reed 2004, 48). As a righteous individual, Enoch “rises” to heaven to obtain such “salvific truth” and reveal it to his earthly fellow humans (ibid.). His visionary journey into space serves as the narrative introduction to this revelation. The imaginary nature of the heavenly journey indicates the ancient authors’ awareness of the impossibility of humans to literally travel into and know about space. This contrast between real and imagined is more pronounced in 4 Ezra. In his conversation with the angel Uriel, Ezra points out that he cannot answer Uriel’s questions about the nature of the universe (“How many dwellings are in the heart of the sea, or how many streams are at the source of the deep, or how many streams are above the firmament, or which are the exits of hell, or which are the entrances of paradise?” 4:7) because he has never accessed the spaces believed to exist beyond (i.e., below and above) the earth: “I never went down into the deep, nor as yet into hell, neither did I ever ascend into heaven” (4:8). In dream visions and with the help of his angelic guide, Ezra undertakes an imaginary journey to heaven, however, and is able to see the heavenly palace with God’s throne and surrounding angels (8:19–22). In his prayer, Ezra refers to God “whose upper chambers are in the air, whose throne is beyond measure and whose glory is beyond comprehension” (8:20–21). Outer space becomes the abode of the transcendent and unknowable Jewish God here: “God’s throne and glory are placed in apposition and both are beyond human comprehension” (Kanagaraj 1998, 129). The heavenly throne vision also appears in the Christian Book of Revelation (4:2). Here God’s throne is surrounded by 24 seats with crowned elders (4:4), who fall down before and worship the divine (4:10). Common motifs associated with apocalyptic throne visions, such as fire and crystal, reappear (4:5–6). The particularly Christian aspect of this vision is the reference to “the [slain] Lamb” (5:6, 8; 6:1), obviously identified with the risen Christ, standing “in the midst of the throne” (5:6) and worshipped like God himself: “And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sits upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever”

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(5:13;  cf.  7:10). Only the Lamb is able to open the book with seven seals that contains secret messages alluding to past experiences of the author’s community (e.g., 6:9: persecution) and predictions of the future. Here secret knowledge is associated with Jesus after his resurrection, who was believed to now permanently dwell in the heavenly palace next to God (see also Acts 2:33). The destroyed ­Jerusalem Temple is imagined as a heavenly temple that serves Christian worship (11:1–2; for the literary-historical development of the motif, see Lee 2001): “And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail” (11:14). Even Mary, the mother of Jesus, appears in the heavenly vision: “And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne” (12:5). Miraculous beasts (e.g., “a great red dragon” in 12:3) and a space war scenario (“Michael and his angels fought against the dragon,” 12:7) add excitement to a narrative which propagates Christian beliefs: “And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night” (12:10). Salvific power is attributed to Jesus’ crucifixion (“the blood of the Lamb,” 12:11) and this insight unites the “saints” (13:10) and their followers, who hope for the violent destruction of their enemies (Pagels 2012). Heavenly journeys are also associated with paradise. In 2 Corinthians, Paul refers, in the third person, to a vision he had 14 years ago, when he was “caught up to the third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2) and “caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (12:4). While the nature of paradise is not further described, it is associated with the revelation of secret knowledge, as in the apocalypses mentioned above. Wallace has studied the passage in the context of a vast scope of traditions of ascents to heaven in Graeco-Roman and ancient Jewish and Christian literature (Wallace 2011). The heavenly ascent can serve as a metaphor for philosophical enlightenment and religious experiences. That Paul plays down this experience has usually been interpreted in relation to his views on apostolic authority, excluding the legitimacy of ecstatic experiences (Wallace 2011, 12). From a tradition-historical perspective, however, Paul’s claim to a (visionary) ascent to heaven has a long tradition in Jewish texts from Jewish Hellenistic apocalypses to Hekhalot (esoteric and revelatory) texts, something that had been noted by Gershom Scholem already (Scholem 1960, ­17–18). Accordingly, Segal views Paul as a representative of an apocalyptic-mystical form of Judaism (Segal 1990, 22). Viewing Paul’s text within this wider context, Wallace argues that he did “not … disparage ecstatic experience” but “configure its place in a continuum of extraordinary experiences” (Wallace 2011, 28). Rather than being a merely literary motif, reports of heavenly journeys may have determined relations between religious leadership figures and their followers and communities, with regard to the kinds of authority and distinction from

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ordinary practitioners the space travellers claimed (ibid. 31). Whereas some ancient Jews and Christians seem to have valued claims of otherworldly experiences, others may not. The latter was generally the case with rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash, whose authority was based on Torah scholarship and halakhic expertise rather than on charismatic reputation. Narratives about tannaitic rabbis (who lived between 70 and 200 CE) and amoraic rabbis (who lived between 200 and 400 CE) engaging in heavenly ascents are therefore extremely rare in classical rabbinic literature. An exceptional case is the story of the four rabbis who entered paradise, which exists in various versions in the Tosefta (t. Hag. 2:3–4), the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds (Talmud Yerushalmi Hagigah 2:1, 77b; Talmud Bavli Hagigah 14b), the late Midrash Song of Songs Rabbah (1:4), and Hekhalot (postTalmudic Jewish mystical) literature (Schwartz 1995). According to the story, four men entered pardes, a term that literally refers to a “garden” and is usually understood to refer to paradise: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Acher (Elisha ben Abuya), and Rabbi Aqiba. It may be noteworthy that only one of them bears the title “Rabbi.” The implication seems to be that they engaged in mystical speculation, a practice that was not common for ancient rabbis. In 2 Corinthians 12:4, paradise is linked to Paul’s heavenly journey and such a visionary ascent to paradise seems to be implied in the rabbinic story too. The gist of the story is that all except for Rabbi Aqiba were harmed by the experience: they died, became demented, or deserted Judaism. Only Rabbi Aqiba emerged unharmed, since he was sufficiently advanced in Torah scholarship to properly understand and interpret what he encountered. The lesson the story tries to teach is that only senior Torah scholars should engage in mystical space travel if they are keen on returning to earth. This notion also appears elsewhere in rabbinic literature. When Rabbi Eleazar asked Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai to teach him about the works of the merkavah (divine chariot mentioned in Ezekiel chapter 1), his teacher refuses and states that this topic can be discussed only with a mature sage who is able to understand the text on his own (Talmud Yerushalmi Hagigah 2:1, 77a). At the end, Rabbi Eleazar proves worthy, that is, sufficiently advanced in Torah scholarship, to engage in the discussion of this topic with Rabbi Yochanan. Rabbis’ fears of mental space journeys were probably not unfounded. Their main function was to show their Jewish contemporaries how to live a God-­ pleasing life in the here and now, through worldly practice. Speculation about what lay beyond the visible world was rejected if it went beyond what was written in the Torah itself. The book of Ezekiel, which contains the passage about the merkavah, was not part of the Torah and was used in Jewish and Christian mystical circles that fantasized about the contents of the various heavens and claimed that certain individuals undertook space journeys to obtain secret “higher” knowledge. In general, tannaitic and amoraic rabbis distinguished themselves from such individuals and practices. In some marginal late antique rabbinic circles, however, mystical speculation does seem to have been practised. In Hekhalot Rabbati, one of the so-called

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Hekhalot (“heavenly palaces”) texts of Jewish mysticism, some rabbis of the first centuries are presented as space travellers. In Hekhalot Rabbati, the worldly authority of the rabbi who sits teaching in his study house is replaced by the rabbinic celestial traveller who meets the one “who sits crowned on the throne of His glory” (105, tr. Smith 2009). Rabbi Nehunya Hakkana allegedly instructed his student Rabbi Yishmael, known from rabbinic sources, to assemble sages before him so that he could reveal “the hidden, the concealed secrets, wonders of the ascent” and show them a ladder that reaches from the earth to the celestial “throne of glory” (201). The session is meant to teach them about the merkavah, truths that were hidden to them until then. While knowledge and observance of the Torah, Mishnah, Midrash, Halakhah, and Aggada is a prerequisite (239), the knowledge of the heavens, the divine throne, angels, and heavenly liturgy obtained by the visionary space traveller is clearly viewed as a higher type of knowledge that separates certain mystical sages from ordinary rabbis and Jews (Hezser 2021, 51–52). What the space travellers are supposed to do once they reach the heavenly realms is described as follows: “Behold and see and give ear and write down all that which we say and all that which you hear from before the throne of glory” (228). They are supposed to become witnesses to the divine glory, like Nehunya Hakkana before them, and to instruct others in the truths they received through visual and auditory experiences. The divine throne is situated in the “chambers of the palace of the seventh heaven” (82). The space traveller able to reach this chamber is supposed to “stand before the throne of His glory” (172) and engage in the heavenly liturgy with the angels. He will also come across the “heavenly court of justice” (92), to which only a select number of mystical initiates are able to gain access. Their high status is not based on their Torah scholarship only but also on their higher visionary expertise, imagined closeness to the divinity, and participation in the angelic liturgy. Heavenly Beings

Since journeys into space were imagined leading the travellers into the divine realm of (the) heaven(s), they were spatial approximations to the divine on his chariot or throne of glory. At times, these spatial approximations went hand in hand with an imagined partaking in the divine nature; that is, some of the space travellers were believed to be partly divine themselves. Such possibilities existed both within the Graeco-Roman context, where unions between gods and humans were imagined, and in biblical texts, where the great distance between humans and God is crossed by angels as divine messengers. In Christianity, Jesus was believed to cross the divide and merge human and divine qualities. In the gospels, he is called “the son of God,” who was considered to have been physically resurrected after his death, sitting “at the right hand of God” in heaven (Acts 2:33). In the dogmatic disputes of late antiquity, the divine nature of Jesus was hotly discussed and disputed by Arian Christians. Jesus was

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turned into the quintessential superhuman, believed to be sojourning in heaven, at his divine father’s side, until his eventual return journey to earth in future times. In some Christian circles, a partly divine nature and heavenly domicile was also associated with Mary, qua her role as theotokos or god-bearer, especially in the Eastern Orthodox Church since the third century CE (e.g., among the Cappadocian fathers Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa; Cyril of Alexandria and John of Damascus, see Shoemaker 2016, 167 and the contributions in Maunder, 2019). A cult of “the virgin” Mary developed in some quarters of the church. Heavenly ascents were also associated with some Christian martyrs such as Perpetua (ca. 182–203 CE), who allegedly followed Saturus on a ladder as a “one way ‘stairway to Paradise’” (Bremmer 2017, 370). In Christian beliefs about Jesus’ heavenly abode, Graeco-Roman traditions about the apotheosis of the emperor played a contributing role. This is especially evident in the Gospel of John, where Jesus is said to have been “glorified” (12:23) and “lifted up from the earth” (12:32) and where the theme of Jesus’ “kingship” is prominent (Wright 2019). Roman emperors such as Augustus and Claudius were granted apotheosis by their successors and senatorial decrees after their death; that is, they were glorified and exalted to the likeness of the gods and expected to be worshipped by their imperial subjects. Several texts refer to an emperor’s anima or psyche being carried upwards (e.g., Dio Cassius, History 56.42.3, Ovid, Metamorphosis 15.855-857). Ovid (Fasti 3.701-2) even suggests that Venus snatched ­Caesar’s physical body away into heaven. Granger Cook has argued that the notion of the apotheosis of emperors is very similar to New Testament narratives about the post-resurrection ascension of Jesus, with the difference that “only the emperors’ souls ascended to the gods, while Luke affirms that Jesus’ risen body was taken to heaven” (Granger Cook 2018, 454). Yet some ancients seem to have reckoned with the emperor’s physical ascent. Plato (Republic 10, 614B) and Plutarch (De Sera Numinis Vindicta 563ff ) mention mythical bodily resurrections associated with otherworldly journeys (Bolt 1998, 73). Ancient Jewish literature generally emphasizes the unity and uniqueness of the Jewish God. Jewish monotheism differed from both pagan polytheism and Christian trinitarianism in its insistence on the one God who occupied the heavenly throne. Yet Segal and Schäfer have argued that Judaism also knows of gradations of divinity, so much so that Segal’s book is entitled Two Powers in Heaven (2002) and Schäfer’s Two Gods in Heaven (2020). Segal mostly draws on rabbinic texts that implicitly or explicitly mention conflicting views on heavenly powers, angels, and Metatron, sometimes associated with the merkavah tradition in Ezekiel. Such other divine powers could be complementary or in opposition to the biblical God. Views about rival divinities are usually attributed to minim (heretics) from whom rabbis distinguished themselves. Since there was no orthodoxy in ancient Judaism, divergent views would have reflected varieties of ancient Jewish beliefs and practices. Segal points to connections and similarities between heavenly ascent traditions in Jewish apocalypticism and later merkavah mysticism (72–73). He assumes

Outer Space in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature  19

that rabbis would have known such traditions and visionary practices and considered them dangerous at least from the third century CE onwards (73). Heavenly ascents were associated with prominent biblical characters such as Adam, Moses, Isaiah, and David. Techniques for ascents were propagated in the magical papyri (Himmelfarb 2013, 297). As we have seen above, late antique rabbis did not reject mystical speculation altogether but tried to safeguard it by limiting it to the interpretation of biblical texts (Ezek. 1) and to experienced senior sages. Schäfer (2020) goes further than Segal in pointing to similarities and connections between ancient Jewish and Christian notions of two divine beings, God and the Son of Man, “who rule side by side and together—in different degrees of agreement and correlation … in the Jewish heaven” (6). He finds evidence for such ideas in rabbinic texts about the Son of Man and especially in the figure of Metatron as a “lesser God” in early Jewish mysticism. Schäfer notes that in some early Jewish texts (e.g., 3 Enoch) Metatron is envisioned as enthroned in the seventh heaven like God, whereas in others he merely functions as a scribe who writes down the merits of Israel (114–117). Metatron is clearly distinguished from other angels: he “becomes God’s representative in heaven, his vice-regent, who acts on his behalf and whom all angels have to obey” (109). There are degrees and hierarchies of divinity, then, ranging from God on the highest and most precious throne to Metatron, other angels, human space travellers and visionaries, to ordinary humans. Imaginary journeys into space brought the space travellers to the divine sphere and separated them from fellow humans, even after their return. Their alleged vision and participation in things beyond gave them superhuman qualities that won them followers and worshippers on earth. The World as a Simulation

As pointed out above, ancient Jews and Christians distinguished between this world and another, higher sphere. The world humans live in and are able to perceive was considered to be subordinated to and ruled by this other outer sphere, of which humans lack proper knowledge. These concepts are reminiscent of contemporary ideas about the world as a simulation, put forth by philosophers (Baudrillard 1983, 1994; Chalmers 2022), physicists (Hilgevoord 1994; Al-Khalili 2020), and computer scientists (Turkle 2009; Virk 2019). The notion of a reality beyond our perception, which guides us, plays (with) us, or merely observes us, has also found expression in popular culture such as movies (The Matrix, 1999, and sequels) and video games Our familiarity with virtual reality and the increased significance of the virtual domain enable us to view ancient religious notions of God, heaven, and a personal afterlife from a new perspective. Underlying the notion of the world as a simulation is the belief that humans are part of a much larger reality that we cannot fully perceive but whose existence is nevertheless noticeable (see Figure 1.1). In the past, this belief gave rise to religious speculations, such as the notion of the covenant and the giving of the Torah at

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FIGURE 1.1 

Graffiti in Tel Aviv, Israel (Photo by Author).

Sinai and intermediary figures such as the “son of God.” If the world is considered a simulation or game played by some higher authority, the giving of the Torah can be seen as the “revelation” of the rules of the game. Players who refrain from adhering to these rules are taken out or punished in some other way. Intermediary figures such as Moses or Jesus serve to remind humans of this other, higher reality and, quite literally, put them in their place, that is, make them aware of their limitations as humans and of the world they live in as governed by external forces. Whereas rabbinic Judaism focused on playing the game as well as possible by fine-tuning the rules to avoid transgressions, Pauline Christianity and subsequent church fathers downplayed the significance of the world altogether and shifted attention away from it to an alleged “world to come,” “kingdom of heaven” or hereafter. In the Christian approach, everything humans do is preliminary and, ultimately, futile. According to rabbis, on the other hand, the way in which humans participate in the game has huge consequences for the ways in which the ultimate reality deals with the world. Ultimately winning the game (messianic age; “redemption”) is only possible if everyone sticks to the rules. The end of the game is also the end of the world as a simulation. These ideas became especially prominent in medieval Kabbalistic circles, where “the Messianic ideal” was seen “as man’s infinite progress and perfectibility” until “infinite perfection” is reached (Scholem 1971, 37). At this stage, the simulation ends and the gap between this world and the infinite and superior other sphere is closed.

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Baudrillard’s post-modern theory about simulation differs radically from traditional religious views of the world. For Baudrillard, everything is simulation and simulation is all there is: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none” (1983, 1). This-worldly figures, signs, and behaviors are no longer seen as pointers to a higher “truth.” Starting with reference to the book of Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) asserting that “the simulacrum is true” (cf. 1:2: “all is vanity/simulation”), the very definition of the real is turned upside down. In contrast to ancient Jews and Christians, for ­Baudrillard it is not a divine or heavenly sphere that is “real” and constitutes “truth” but “that which is always already reproduced,” that is, the world that is continuously recreated artificially by humans. The film The Matrix (1999), on the other hand, seems to be much closer to the traditional religious and philosophical worldviews. Not only does it contain biblical imagery and allusions, but it also assumes that the “truth” must lie outside of the human sphere. Humans are trapped in a simulated reality from which they need to be freed, that is, “redeemed,” to perceive the truth. William Irwin considers Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (Republic 514a–521b) fundamental for a proper understanding of the film (Irwin 2002, 12). According to Socrates’ tale, humans are caught in a dark cave where their sensual perception of objects is limited to their shadows, which they perceive as real. Only those who emerge to the light can see what is real but, based on their experience in the cave, may confuse ­illusion and reality. Once he is freed from the Matrix, Neo perceives “the desert of the real” (ibid.). By revealing lived experience as a simulation, Neo becomes a redeemer figure, not unlike the Christian perception of Jesus (Bassham 2002, 112, 113). Yet he could also be seen as a representation of the messiah or Buddha, in line with the religious pluralism of the film (ibid. 116–121).

Works Cited Ahuvia, Mika (2021). On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Al-Khalili, Jim (2020). The World According to Physics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bassham, Gregory (2002). “The Religion of the Matrix and the Problems of Pluralism.” In The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, ed. William Irwin, 111–125. Peru, IL: Carus Publishing Company. Baudrillard, Jean (1983). Simulations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bolt, Peter G. (1998). “Life, Death and Afterlife in the Greco-Roman World.” In Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker, 51–79. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Boustan, Ra’anan S., and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds. (2004). Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Bremmer, Jan (2017). Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity: Collected Essays I. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck. Carlsson, Leif (2004). Round Trips to Heaven: Otherworldly Travelers in Early Judaism and Christianity. Lund, Sweden: Lund University. Chalmers, David J. (2022). Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Charles, Robert Henry (2007). The Book of Enoch, trans. R.H. Charles, with an introduction by Rev. W.O.E. Oesterley. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Available online: (accessed June 21, 2022). Collins, Adela Yarbro (2000). Cosmology and Eschatology in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism. Boston, MA: Brill. Couprie, Dirk L. (2011). Heaven and Earth in Ancient Greek Cosmology: From Thales to Heraclides Ponticus. Maastricht, Netherlands: Springer. Dean-Otting, M. (1984). Heavenly Journeys: A Study of the Motif in Hellenistic Jewish Literature. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang. Elledge, C. D. (2013). “Resurrection and Immortality in Hellenistic Judaism: Navigating the Conceptual Boundaries.” In Christian Origins and Hellenistic Judaism: Social and Literary Contexts for the New Testament, eds. Stanley E. Porter and Andrew Pitts, 101–134. Boston, MA: Brill. Endsjø, Dag Øistein (2009). Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. George, Andrew R. (2016). “Die Kosmogonie des alten Mesopotamien.” In Anfang & Ende: vormoderner Szenarien von Weltenstehung und Weltuntergang, eds. Marion Gindhart and Tanja Pommerening, 7–25. Darmstadt, Germany: von Zabern. Granger Cook, John (2018). Empty Tomb, Resurrection, Apotheosis. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck. Halperin, David (1993). “Review of: Martha Himmelfarb. Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.” AJS Review 21: 153–157. Hezser, Catherine (2013). “Ancient ‘Science Fiction’: Journeys into Space and Visions of the World in Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman Literature of Antiquity.” In Christian Origins and Hellenistic Judaism: Social and Literary Contexts for the New Testament, eds. Stanley E. Porter and Andrew Pitts, 397–438. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Hezser, Catherine (2021). “‘He Who Sits Crowned on the Throne of His Glory’: Body Posture in Hekhalot Rabbati and in Rabbinic Literature.” In La “sacerdotalisation” dans les premiers écrits mystiques juifs et chrétiens, eds. David Hamidovic et al., 41–56. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Hilgevoord, Jan (1994). Physics and Our View of the World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Himmelfarb, Martha (1993). Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Himmelfarb, Martha (2013). Between Temple and Torah: Essays on Priests, Scribes, and Visionaries in the Second Temple Period and Beyond. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck. Hintze, Almut (2019). “Defeating Death: Eschatology in Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity.” In Irano-Judaica VII Studies Relating to Jewish Contacts with Persian Culture Throughout the Ages, eds. Julia Rubanovich and Geoffrey Herman, 23–72. Jerusalem, Israel: Ben-Zvi Institute. Horowitz, Wayne (1998). Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

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Irwin, William (2002). “Computers, Caves, and Oracles: Neo and Socrates.” In The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, ed. William Irwin, 1–15. Peru, IL: Carus Publishing Company. Jacobs, Louis (1975). “Jewish Cosmology.” In Ancient Cosmologies, eds. Carmen Blacker and Michael Loewe, 66–86. London, UK: Allen and Unwin. Kanagaraj, Jey J. (1998). ‘Mysticism’ in the Gospel of John: An Inquiry into Its Background. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press. Klein, Elizabeth (2018). Augustine’s Theology of Angels. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Lambert, Wilfred G. (1975). “The Cosmology of Sumer and Babylon.” In Ancient Cosmologies, eds. Carmen Blacker and Michael Loewe, 42–65. London, UK: Allen and Unwin. Lee, Pichan (2001). The New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation: A Study of Revelation 21-22 in the Light of Its Background in Jewish Tradition. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck. Leicht, Reimund (2013). “Major Trends in Jewish Cosmology.” In Hekhalot Literature in Context. Between Byzantium and Babylonia, eds. Ra’anan Boustan, Martha Himmelfarb, and Peter Schäfer, 245–278. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck. Maunder, Chris, ed. (2019). The Oxford Handbook of Mary. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. McDannell, Colleen, and Bernhard Lang (2001). Heaven: A History, 2nd edn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Moore, K. R. (2018). Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Alexander the Great. Leiden, ­Netherlands: Brill. Reed, Annette Yoshiko (2004). “Heavenly Ascent, Angelic Decent, and the Transmission of Knowledge in 1 Enoch 6-16.” In Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions, eds. Ra’anan S. Boustan and Annette Yoshiko Reed, 47–66. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Reed, Annette Yoshiko (2020). Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Pagels, Elaine (2012). Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation. London, UK: Penguin. Ryan-Byerly, T., and Eric J. Silverman, eds. (2017). Paradise Understood: New Philosophical Essays about Heaven. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Schäfer, Peter (2005). “From Cosmology to Theology: The Rabbinic Appropriation of Apocalyptic Theology.” In Creation and Re-Creation in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Dan on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, eds. Rachel Elior and Peter Schäfer, 39–58. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck. Schäfer, Peter (2020). Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scholem, Gershom (1960). Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition. New York, NY: Jewish Theological Seminary. Scholem, Gershom (1971). The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York, NY: Schocken Books. Schwartz, Howard (1995). Four Who Entered Paradise. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Segal, Alan F. (1980). “Heavenly Ascent in Hellenistic Judaism, Early Christianity, and Their Environment.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 23: 1333–1394. Segal, Alan F. (1990). Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Segal, Alan F. (2002). Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

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Shoemaker, Stephen J. (2016). Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Simon-Shoshan, Moshe (2008). “‘The Heavens Proclaim the Glory of God’: A Study in Rabbinic Cosmology.” Bekhol Derakhekha Daehu–Journal of Torah and Scholarship 20: 67–96. Smith, Morton (2009). Hekhalot Rabbati: The Greater Treatise Concerning the Palaces of Heaven, trans. M. Smith, corrected by G. Scholem, transcribed and edited with notes by D. Karr. Available online: (accessed March 12, 2023). Stevens, Kathryn (2019). Between Greece and Babylonia: Hellenistic Intellectual History in CrossCultural Perspective. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Turkle, Sherry (2009). Simulation and Its Discontents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Virk, Rizwan (2019). The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree: We Are in a Video Game. Los Angeles, CA: Bayview Books. Wallace, James Buchanan (2011). Snatched into Paradise (2 Cor 12:1-10): Paul’s Heavenly Journey in the Context of Early Christian Experience. New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter. Wright, J. Edward (2000). The Early History of Heaven. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wright, Arthur M., Jr. (2019). The Governor and the King: Irony, Hidden Transcripts, and Negotiating Empire in the Fourth Gospel. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications.

2 THE MYTH OF ANCIENT INDIAN AIRPLANES Wendy Doniger

The argument sometimes put forward in India today, that ancient India had airplanes, claims to draw upon very ancient texts for its evidence. The oldest of those texts is the oldest document of ancient Indian religion, the Rig Veda, composed in Sanskrit c. 1500 BCE; this text speaks often of airborne chariots (rathas) drawn by horses and driven by gods, particularly the Sun god and Indra, the king of the gods. The idea that these chariots were airplanes, with the technology of airplanes, is based largely on one particular hymn of the Rig Veda, a famous riddle hymn, which says, among many other things, “Seven yoke the one-wheeled chariot drawn by one horse with seven names” and refers to “this seven-wheeled chariot,” “the twelve-spoked wheel of order,” “the seven-wheeled, six-spoked chariot,” and “this five-spoked wheel” (Rig Veda 1.164.3, .11-13; and 1.48; see Doniger O’Flaherty 1981, 76–81). The Indian philosopher Dayanand Saraswati (1824–1883) cited these and other verses of this hymn to make his argument that the text referred to an airplane. He took the line, “when the rain-clouds enliven the earth, the flames enliven the sky” (Rig Veda 1.164.51), and several other references to “the heavenly bird that flies,” as well as one to “twelve fellies, one wheel, three naves” (Rig Veda 1.164.48), and interpreted them to mean “jumping into space speedily with a craft using fire and water … containing twelve stamghas (pillars), one wheel, three machines, 300 pivots, and 60 instruments” (Mukunda et al. 1974, 7). Contemporary scientists do not find this persuasive. Ravana’s Flying Palace, the Pushpaka Vimana

Though Indian arguments about airplanes often refer vaguely to “the Veda,” they usually draw their main material from a much later Sanskrit text, Valmiki’s Ramayana, probably composed between 200 BCE and 200 CE. This Epic poem refers DOI: 10.4324/9781003088264-4

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often to a flying palace called a vimana, which the standard Sanskrit-English dictionary of Sir Monier Monier-Williams defines as “a car or chariot of the gods, any mythical self-moving aerial car, sometimes serving as a seat or throne, sometimes self-moving and carrying its occupant through the air; other descriptions make the vimana more like a house or palace, and one kind is said to be seven stories high.” The greatest of these vimanas belonged to the villain of the Ramayana, the ogre Ravana, and was called Pushpaka, “Little Flower” (see Figure 2.1). This flying

FIGURE 2.1 

The flying palace of the Ramayana, ca. 1650; Edward Binney Collection, San Diego Museum of Art (Wikimedia).

The Myth of Ancient Indian Airplanes  27

palace was created by the divine artisan, Vishvakarman, for the Creator, Brahma, who gave it to Kubera, the god of wealth, as a reward for Kubera’s great feats of asceticism. But Kubera’s brother, Ravana, took it from Kubera by force and used it to steal Sita, the wife of Rama, the hero of the Ramayana. When Rama killed Ravana and rescued Sita, he took the flying palace and used it to transport himself and Sita back to his own kingdom and to make an aerial survey of that kingdom. The many descriptions of the Pushpaka vimana in the Ramayana suggest not a chariot but a palace. It towered above the other great mansions and was covered with gems and carvings, with flowers of coral and gold inlays. It was a spacious, exquisitely constructed place. It had windows of pearl and was adorned with many mansions, covered on every side with penthouses. It was supported by pillars of gold and silver and had golden staircases and raised platforms and ornamental skylights. It is said to have been indestructible in battle because it was hedged by divinity (Rig Veda 7.21.15 deva-nishthana-bhuta). If it was anything like a plane, it was certainly more like the Hindenburg than the Concorde. But all that we learn about its means of locomotion is that, as is said over and over, it flew wherever you desired it to fly and was swift as thought. More specifically, it rose so powerfully that the air itself seemed to have substance. And, finally, the only even remotely practical suggestion: it was yoked to geese (Rig Veda 7.68.10). Vimanas continue to fly through a variety of South Asian Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain texts. In India, the Samarangana Sutradhara, a technical treatise attributed to the ninth century CE poet and king Bhoja, included a chapter on machines that tells you how to construct a flying machine: Build a great bird made of light wood, with a fine, tightly knit outer covering, and place within its belly a liquid mechanism that will function as a receptacle for a blazing fire. Through the power of that mercury and the force of the air released from the wings [of the bird] flapping in unison, a man mounted on it may travel a great distance through the sky.1 This text also offers some details about copper piping but does not tell us precisely how to build such a machine, nor is there any historical evidence that anyone ever did build one. As a group of contemporary scientists pointed out about the Bhoja book, “Bhoja states that detailed description of the construction [of the aircraft] and other features will not be given lest the same be used for evil purpose by people” (Mukunda et al. 1974, 7). Moreover, the text “blurs the lines between the magical and the technical in its descriptions of elaborate plumming [sic], automatically refilling oil lamps, motorized menageries, robotic soldiers, and alchemically enabled combustion engines” (Henry 2019). A few medieval Sri Lankan and Pali works mention a “wooden peacock,” but the mechanical flying bird finally came into its own in the twentieth century, in the Textbook of Vimanas (Vaimanika Shastra), a text of some 3000 Sanskrit verses; a Hindi translation was published in 1959 and the Sanskrit text with an English translation in 1973 (Childress 1995). The text covered such topics as the “definition

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of an airplane, a pilot, aerial routes, food, clothing, metals, metal production, mirrors and their uses in wars, varieties of machinery” (Mukunda et al. 1974, 6). It claimed that the vimanas mentioned in the Ramayana were advanced aerodynamic flying vehicles. One, the shakuna vimana, or “Eagle Plane,” was shaped like a bird but contained four heaters, an oil tank, two wings, a tail portion, a hollow mast, etc. It had several tiers, each containing different machines, and “the drawings show parts like cylinder, piston worm gear, and pumps” (Mukunda et al. 1974, 8). The assertion that these ancient vimanas were actually very much like our modern airplanes—motor-driven, aeronautically sound, and so on—brings the argument directly into the path of science. The Vaimanika Shastra says that it was written by Pandit Subbaraya Shastry ­(1866–1940), who claimed that it had been psychically delivered to him by the ancient Hindu sage Bharadvaja (Childress 1995). A 1974 study by a group of reputed aeronautical and mechanical engineering researchers in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (“all of them by the way genuine lovers of Sanskrit,” as one report noted; see Narasimha 2015), concluded that the aircraft described in the text were “poor concoctions” and that the author showed “a complete lack of understanding of the dynamics of the flight of heavier-than-air craft” (Mukunda et al. 1974, 9, 12). The parts of the Eagle Plane “seem entirely modern (beyond 18th century)” and “no data have been given about the weights of crafts and their components. This is serious since weight is fundamental to the flying of heavier-than-air machines” (Mukunda et al. 1974, 8, 12). One of the machines was supposed to fly at around Mach 10. The designs violated Newton’s laws and even got the sign wrong for the thrust of their engines. The work seems traceable to an original dictated by a self-taught, impoverished but serious Sanskrit scholar in Karnataka sometime between 1900 and 1922, and “could not have been Vedic by any criterion” (Narasimha 2015). But the legend lived on and on. In 1985, Dileep Kumar Kanjilal took up the idea of the “mercury vortex engine” in his short book, Vimana in Ancient India: Aeroplanes or Flying Machines in Ancient India (Kanjilal 1985), which became something of a cult text among people who go for that sort of thing. In 2019, a tour guide in Sri Lanka told a visiting scholar, Justin W. Henry, that Ravana “had an airplane powered by a mercury vortex engine. We had such technology in those days” (Henry 2019). Henry went on to write an article on the subject, including this useful report: For years a statue of airborne Ravana stood outside of the international airport at Katanayake. Drawings of Ravana and his technological marvel appear in Sinhala newspapers … and even now in textbooks designed for secondaryschool history courses. In the mountain town of Ella … for $20 you can take a spin on the ‘Flying Ravana’ zipline. This April Sri Lanka sent its first research satellite into low orbit around the earth, the ‘Ravana One.’ (Henry 2019)

The Myth of Ancient Indian Airplanes  29

Moreover, as Henry remarked to me, “Among educated readers in India and Sri Lanka, … the whole business of the historicity of the Ramayana has become something of a national obsession. (I had a meeting with some producers for a documentary …, wherein it was revealed these 100% bona fide New Delhi liberals also believed in Ravana’s jet-powered flying craft, etc.).”2 Ancient Indian Aviation under the Raj

Why are Indian intellectuals doing this? As is so often the case, we may blame the British Raj. By assimilating British Protestant judgments, followers of the Reform Hinduism movement came to admire both British science (particularly as expressed in technology such as trains) and British moral codes, in essence British ethical and social dharma—progressive in opposition to aspects of Hindu social dharma such as suttee (Doniger 2009, 596–597). These Hindus accepted the idea of moral progress as an integral part of scientific progress. But then, in a kind of compensatory reaction against their uncomfortable admiration of their colonizers, many Hindus kept the foreign values but denied that they were foreign. They asserted that the Veda, back in 1500 BCE, had already anticipated European science. They claimed that ancient Indian scholars had made major scientific discoveries not only in grammar and mathematics (which they had, though not in the Vedas) but also in aeronautics (which they had not, ever). Those who made these claims referred to the Vedas for their authority, ignoring the far more scientific textbooks (the shastras), for two reasons. First, because it’s always easier to argue that something is “in the Vedas” than in a later text, since Vedic language is so archaic (it is to classical Sanskrit what Beowulf is to Shakespeare) that only relatively few priests and scholars know what’s in the ­Vedas well enough to contradict anyone who cites the Vedas as their authority. And second, because the Vedas, being much older than the shastras (indeed, even older than the Bible), have more authority—particularly, of course, religious authority. Hindu Nationalists, working to expel the British from India, therefore advanced a series of two-pronged arguments, not just “You are scientific, but we are spiritual” (though this was often said, too), but also, better, “Our religion is wiser than your science—and our religious texts contain science much older than yours.” And, finally, “We’re better than you, in religion and science, because our religion is scientific and our science is religious, and we want you to quit India.” In yet another reversion to the Raj mentality, many Hindu Nationalists blamed Europe for the suppression of Indian science. One claimed that in 1895 a Sanskrit scholar named Shivkar Bapuji Talpade had used an ancient Indian treatise on airplanes to build and fly an airplane. Talpade allegedly flew an unmanned heavier-than-air machine on a beach in Bombay, having built the aircraft on the basis of Vedic texts, powering his machine with mercury and solar energy and getting it to rise to 1,500 feet before it crashed. One Hindi news channel claimed

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that ­Talpade’s machine was not just the modern world’s first airplane but, since it had been operated with a remote control, could also rightfully be described as the world’s first drone. There are no contemporaneous accounts of the flight (Deb 2015). Talpade’s treatise had been forgotten because of “the passage of time, foreign rulers ruling us, and things being stolen from this country,” or the cultural amnesia injected into India by foreigners ruling the country. A Hindi news channel claimed that Talpade’s design for the first airplane was eventually stolen from him by a British company under the pretext of helping him and that it was quite likely this design that ended up in the hands of the Wright brothers. British-controlled media then also allegedly edited Talpade’s invention out of history (Deb 2015). Airplanes in Hindutva and under Narendra Modi

Aeronautical mythology in India continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and took a sharp turn to the right under the impetus of a Nationalist movement known as Hindutva, “Hinduness.” This term was invented by the nationalist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his 1923 pamphlet entitled Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? Hindutva’s members call themselves Hindutva-vadis (“Those who profess Hindutva”), but one can call them, more simply, Hindutvats (on the analogy of bureaucrats). They propound a Bowdlerized Hinduism that owes much to the Reform Hinduism of the nineteenth century, now heavily laced with antiMuslim and anti-woman sentiments. The seeds of ambivalent resentment (what Nietzsche would have called ressentiment) sown during the Raj found fertile ground after Indian Independence in 1947. V.S. Naipaul, in 1976, was appalled by “the prickly vanity of many Hindus who asserted that their holy scriptures already contained the discoveries and inventions of Western science” (cited in Mishra 2014). But the situation changed dramatically a few decades later, when the BJP (the right-wing Hindu party3) took power in 2014 and Narendra Modi became prime minister. Government allegiance to Hindutva is now coupled not only with strong anti-Muslim agendas but also with virulent repression of other versions of Hinduism and its history, particularly those that contradict the skewed construction of Hindu history proclaimed by Hindutva (Barry 2016; see also Doniger 2014a,b). Mythoscience thrives on the climate that was created by the Modi regime, which encouraged the by now entrenched bad habit of seeking scientific authenticity in religious rather than scientific texts from the past. The Modi government set up ministries of yoga and Ayurveda (ancient Hindu homeopathic medicine) to peddle their versions of these ancient Hindu sciences (“PM Modi Now Has a Minister for Yoga, Ayurveda” 2014). And Modi commissioned a number of revisions of textbooks (the modern heirs to the ancient shastras) mandated as supplementary reading for all government primary and secondary schools. Many of these books, including Dina Natha Batra’s 125-page book Tejomay Bharat (Brilliant

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India), had originally been published in 1999 in Gujarat; Modi had written the forewords to Batra’s books when he was chief minister in Gujarat and now reissued the books and wrote new forewords for them (“PM Modi Takes Leaf from Batra Book” 2014; Sharma 2014; Rahman 2014). The most notorious of the wildly counterfactual claims in the revised history textbooks insist that the Vedic Indians knew about airplanes (see Mukherjee and Mukherjee 2001, 10, citing Sarsanchalak K. S. Sudershan), claims that “capture the imagination of this resurgent, neo-Hindu India like nothing else” (Deb 2015, 51). Apparently Vedic sages not only described the construction of airplanes but also discussed details such as “what types of aeroplanes would fly at what height, what kind of problems they might encounter, how to overcome these problems, etc.” The claim that the ancient Indians knew about airplanes was already included in textbooks that the BJP revised when it came to power earlier, in 1999 (see Mukherjee and Mukherjee 2001). These revised textbooks maintain that the Hindu god Rama flew the first airplane (Rahman 2014), an argument that, as we have seen, has deep roots. On one occasion, Modi remarked, “If we talk about space science, our ancestors had, at some point, displayed great strengths in space science” (“PM Modi Takes Leaf from Batra Book” 2014). Vedic Airplanes at the Science Congress in 2015

The Indian Science Congress, a prestigious event that dates back to 1914, held its 102nd meeting in Mumbai in January of 2015. It included programs on scientific advances ranging from India’s 2013 Mars orbital mission to developments in cancer biology, with talks by Indian and foreign scientists, among them a number of Nobel laureates. Prime Minister Modi opened the Congress, and Y. Sudershan Rao, the man Modi had recently appointed to head the Indian Council of Historical Research, spoke of Vedic aircraft (vimanas) capable of interplanetary travel and invisibility, possessing radar systems and mine detectors (Deb 2015, 51). An assistant professor of computational linguistics at the Department of Sanskrit, University of Delhi, insisted that the flying palace on which Ravana flew through the air ran not on fuel but on mercury. “It’s really not that difficult,” he added; “if the science can exist today, it could have existed in ancient times as well” (Daniyal 2015). G.R. Josyer made a presentation at the Congress on the subject of “ancient Indian aviation technology,” based largely on the Vaimanika Shastra that we have considered above. The paper, which described four types of vimanas from the “ancient” books, was greeted with scorn: “This effort at creating a false history of Indic science is a spectacularly bad example of the absurd lengths to which ­attempts at glorification of our past can go” (Narasimha 2015). Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a structural biologist at Cambridge University who was born in Tamil Nadu and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009, declared the Science Congress “a circus” and refused to attend it ever again (Kanwar 2016). Alluding “to a

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claim made by a participant at the 2015 Congress in Mumbai about planes having been invented by a sage in the Vedic era,” he said: “The idea that Indians had airplanes 2,000 years ago sounds almost essentially impossible to me. I don’t believe it. The point is that if that technology was produced in a method so described that anybody could replicate it, then it becomes science” (Kanwar 2016). The arguments about Vedic airplanes are causing great embarrassment to Indian scientists, who have strongly objected to what journalists call the Modification of science (Deb 2015). Ramprasad Gandhiraman, an Indian materials scientist affiliated with NASA, started an online petition on Change.org against the epidemic of “pseudo-science.” The campaign quickly garnered 16,000 supporters (Deb 2015). Another online petition, signed by more than 200 scientists, objected to the mixing of mythology with science (Rao 2015). The petition read, “We as a scientific community should be seriously concerned about the infiltration of pseudo-science in science curricula with the backing of influential political parties” (Rao 2015). Those Vedic airplanes may not have been real, but they are having very real effects in India today. Notes 1 Samarangana Sutradhara chapter 31, verses 95 and 96 (cited in Henry 2019). 2 Justin Henry, email to Wendy Doniger, 20 August, 2021. 3 BJP stands for Bharatiya Janata Party (Party of the People of India). Its militant branch is the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or Society for the Self-Service of the Nation).

Works Cited Barry, Ellen (2016). “‘A Censor Is Seated Inside Me Now’: Hometown Wrath Tests a Novelist.” New York Times (22 August); available online: (accessed 19 July 2022). Childress, David Hatcher (1995). Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India and Atlantis. Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press. Daniyal, Shoaib (2015). “At Delhi University’s Vedic Chronology Seminar, Discussions on Flying Chariots, Mahabharat-era TV.” Scroll.in (1 October); available online: (accessed 19 July 2022). Deb, Siddhartha (2015). “Those Mythological Men and Their Sacred, Supersonic Flying Temples: What Tales of Ancient Vedic Aircraft Tell Us about India’s Place in the Modern World.” New Republic 246, 5 ( June): 48–55. Doniger, Wendy (2009). The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York, NY: Penguin Press. Doniger, Wendy (2014a). “Banned in Bangalore.” New York Times (6 March): A29. Doniger, Wendy (2014b). “India: Censorship by the Batra Brigade.” New York Review of Books (8 May): 51–53.

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Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy (1981). The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics. Henry, Justin (2019). “Ravana’s Mechanical Flying Peacock.” Council of American Overseas Research Centers (10 June); available online: (accessed 19 July 2022). Kanjilal, Dileep Kumar (1985). Vimana in Ancient India: Aeroplanes or Flying Machines in Ancient India. Delhi, India: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar. Kanwar, Shimna (2016). “Science Congress a Circus: Nobel Winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan.” Times of India (6 January); available online: (accessed 20 July 2022). Mishra, Pankaj (2014). “Modi’s Idea of India.” New York Times (24 October); available online: (accessed 19 July 2022). Mukherjee, Mridula, and Aditya Mukherjee (2001). “Communilisation of Education: The History Textbooks Controversy, An Overview.” In Communilisation of Education: The History Textbooks Controversy, Delhi Historians’ Group, 4–11. New Delhi, India: Delhi Historians’ Group; available online: (accessed 20 July 2022). Mukunda, H.S., S.M. Deshpande, H.R. Nagendra, A. Prabhu, and S.P. Govindraju (1974). “A Critical Study of the Work ‘Vyamanika Shastra.’” Scientific Opinion, 5–12. Narasimha, Roddam (2015). “The ‘Historic’ Storm at the Mumbai Science Congress.” Proceedings of the Indian Natural Sciences Academy 81, 2 (March): 339–341. “PM Modi Now Has a Minister for Yoga, Ayurveda” (2014). NDTV (10 November); available online: (accessed 20 July 2022). “PM Modi Takes Leaf from Batra Book: Mahabharat Genetics, Lord Ganesha Surgery” (2014). Indian Express (28 October); available online: (accessed 19 July 2022). Rahman, Maseeh (2014). “Indian Prime Minister Claims Genetic Science Existed in Ancient Times.” Guardian (28 October); available online: (accessed 20 July 2022). Rao, Yogita (2015) “Heard at Science Meet: Ancient Indian Planes Flew to Planets.” Times of India (5 January); available online: (accessed 20 July 2022). Sharma, Ritu (2014). “Man Who Got Wendy Doniger Pulped Is Made ‘Must Reading’ in Gujarat Schools.” Indian Express (25 July); available online: (accessed 19 July 2022).

3 MAHĀYĀNA MIND-BENDING Buddhist Visions of Outer/Inner Worlds James Mark Shields

Introduction

Like all the major religious traditions of the world, the collection of Asian teachings, practices, and ritual behaviors known collectively since the 19th century as “Buddhism” is linked to a set of beliefs regarding the cosmos, some, if not most, of which predate the earliest forms of the tradition that emerged in the Himalayan foothills roughly 2500 years ago. Even more than other religious traditions, however, Buddhism tends to complicate—and at times radically conflate—the external and internal, such that the “cosmos” was sometimes understood to be a representation or holographic manifestation of mental and affective processes—a map of consciousness, as it were, or even a path to liberation. While it would be anachronistic to speak about a Buddhist concept of “outer space,” Buddhist cosmologies, in both classical and Mah ā yā na forms, point toward the possibility of “other worlds” (spatially, not simply temporally), which can be reached by advanced meditators as well as those who have achieved the status of bodhisattva or buddha. Moreover, in describing these “buddha lands,” the authors of such texts also speculated on the nature of space and time and posited various ways in which awakened beings might manipulate and even transcend these categories. In this chapter, I first outline the most influential cosmologies and cosmogonies associated with a few of the major Buddhist traditions, before examining these through conceptual and theoretical lenses associated with the genres of utopia and speculative fiction. Ultimately, I make the case that certain significant Buddhist texts might be best read as examples of speculative fiction.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003088264-5

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Other-Worldly?

Before turning to the first of these cosmological visions, I feel compelled to address some of the ambiguities involved in speaking of Buddhist “other worlds”—and “otherworldliness.” In the modern Western and oftentimes Asian imagination, Buddhism generally—and Zen more specifically—is often understood as being disengaged, promoting a form of awakening that is not only, as the classical Zen phrase has it, “beyond words and letters,” but also ultimately “supramundane” in focus and affects. Of course, this assumption is challenged if not entirely belied by the contemporary movement known as Socially Engaged Buddhism, which posits an understanding of Dharma (i.e., Buddhist law or teachings) that is explicitly “worldly” in form and thrust (see, e.g., Queen and King 1996; Kraft 1999; King 2009). Moreover, decades prior to the work of south Asian reformers such as B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) and Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022), East Asian Buddhists such as the New Buddhists of Japan and China’s Taixu (1890–1947) were making a similar case for a “this-worldly” Buddhism (the New Buddhists insisted that “modern” Buddhism required a cosmological foundation in “pantheism” [ Jp. hanshinron]; see Shields 2017a, chapter 3). That said, these modern and contemporary Buddhist activists were cognizant of the fact that most ­traditional— institutional—forms of Asian Buddhism were focused on cultivating cognitive and affective qualities in the individual that would lead him or her (mostly him) to states of being that transcended the affairs of “this world” in some fashion. New and Engaged Buddhists might dismiss traditional Buddhism as being, among other faults, overly superstitious, but it is important to point out that the achievement of “supramundane” states does not in itself assume a cosmology (let alone cosmogony: how, and why, the cosmos came into being) of “other worlds.” In short, premodern forms of Asian Buddhism did maintain that true human flourishing involved a “transcendence” of ordinary states of being—i.e., in nirvāṇa as the ultimate goal, at least of the monastic if not lay practitioner. In addition, this “transcendence” of ordinary existence was associated with various “supramundane powers”—particularly at the level of buddhas and bodhisattvas (i.e., “buddhas to be”). And yet, this was often combined with an insistence on a singular reality or cosmos so that the transformation involved in awakening could be read as a matter of purely internal dynamics, i.e., the “other world” (or, to use the language of the tradition, “other shore”) as nothing more than “this world” correctly understood and experienced. Suffering and Skillful Means

Before going further, a few words about “Buddhism,” a term fraught with definitional ambiguities. First and foremost, there is not, and has never been, a single thing—whether we want to call it a “religion,” “philosophy,” “ritual tradition,”

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or “institution”—called Buddhism.1 Even setting aside the fact that “Buddhism” is a Western term of relatively recent coinage,2 significant cultural, linguistic, and sectarian variations among those who have followed some version of the Dharma render it foolhardy to suggest an “essence.” At any rate, many of the classical texts push strongly against the search for “essence” (Sk. svabh āva) to anything. I see this definitional fluidity less as a limiting factor than as an opportunity, though one we must approach with the cautionary tales of a century or more of Western orientalism (both negative and more recently, partly due to the work of popularizers such as D. T. Suzuki [1870–1966] and Alan Watts [1915–1973], romantic and idealizing). At any rate, while there can be no single definition of a set of rituals, practices, values, and ideas as diverse as those which are labeled “Buddhist,” I hold it uncontroversial to claim that, whatever else may be involved, the various Dharmic traditions provide methods for the amelioration if not elimination of “suffering” (Sk. duḥkha) among sentient beings.3 Without this, I suggest, whatever is being discussed cannot make a reasonable claim to being “Buddhist.” And yet, early on within the Dharmic tradition, we see the emergence of a doctrine or method that would allow for significant flexibility as to how the “end” of eliminating or ameliorating suffering was to be achieved—up āya kau śalya, i.e., “skillful” or “expedient means.”4 Suffice it to say that in its earliest usages, up āya implied that the Buddha, and by implication any buddha or fully awakened being, would suit his instruction to the capabilities of his particular audience. In short, it was a pedagogical technique, one that both attested to the wisdom of the Buddha as the Supreme Teacher, while also helping to account for the diversity within and among early Buddhist texts. Later on, as the Mahāyā na streams of Buddhism began to emerge in India and West Asia and find a home in Tibetan and East Asian Buddhist traditions, up āya became even more significant. In early Mahāyā na texts such as the Lotus Sutra, “skillful means” appears to be the central teaching of buddhas and bodhisattvas—and thus the foundation of Dharma itself.5 When we apply this centralization of “whatever works” to Buddhist cosmology, several things happen. On the one hand, traditional or rival cosmologies may be “bracketed” as lesser means toward the end of ameliorating suffering—akin to what Plato in the Republic called a “noble lie.” At the same time, it also opens up the floodgates to even more speculative and elaborate cosmologies, since these may be more “suited” to particular—in Mahāyā na terms, this generally meant more “advanced”—audiences. Indeed, texts such as the Heart Sutra polemically undercut traditional (“Hinayana”) Buddhist teachings of all sorts, boldly asserting their nullity or “emptiness,” even while foregrounding increasingly elaborate visions of “other worlds” intersecting with our own. Classical Cosmologies

Let us return, however, to the classical texts, in search of early Buddhist pictures of this and other worlds. Most scholars concur that the earliest and most influential

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Buddhist cosmology, the six-world system, contains pre-Buddhist, pan-Indian elements, including a widespread belief in karma and rebirth. In classical Buddhist cosmology, temporality and spatiality are deeply interfused—though we will consider Buddhist cosmogony separately below. That said, there is little cosmology to be found in the early Pali suttas that purport to record the teachings of the historical Buddha. The Buddha makes oblique references to the overwhelming age of the universe and the general expanse of time, as perceived by buddhas, as well as the ability of awakened beings to traverse various planes of existence— “the three thousandfold and the great thousandfold world system”6 —should they choose. While this might be dismissed as a purely rhetorical move, one among the many that emphasize the extraordinary powers associated with full awakening,7 it presages a cosmology that allows for the existence not only of various planes of consciousness but also of many (buddha) worlds, which may occasionally interconnect but can also exist independently. It is worth noting here that while ancient Indian cosmogonies exaggerate the scope of temporality—the classical Hindu kalpas or progressive world cycles were generally considered to last billions of years, if not longer8 —the Buddhist understanding foregrounds a sense of multidimensionality, or what we could call today parallel universes or the “multiverse.” Six Realms of Desire and Rebirth

As noted, early Buddhist cosmology is rooted in what is sometimes called the “six world system,” according to which the Earth itself contains six “realms” inhabited by different beings at various levels of awakening (and thereby experiencing different levels and types of suffering).9 These six realms are the abodes of: (1) hell beings; (2) animals; (3) pretas or “hungry ghosts”; (4) humans; (5) asuras or “wrathful spirits”; and (6) devas, i.e., heavenly beings or gods.10 While this might sound like Dante’s formulation of the late medieval Christian cosmos—trifurcated into Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, each with its own levels—in the classical Buddhist understanding, these six worlds all exist in the same place and time, and a being can, in theory at least, move between them via the continuing cycle of rebirth (directed by karma). As noted above, it is not entirely clear whether these (or other “worlds”) are intended to be taken seriously as “real” places, as opposed to metaphorical, symbolic, or “mental” states; however, it seems likely that, whatever the Buddha or later monks and scholars might have intended, most regular Buddhists likely believed them to be so.11 Of these six realms, the “highest” realm of the gods or devas functions to some degree as the Western Christian and Islamic concepts of Heaven or Paradise, with the important distinction that, while rebirth in the deva-gati is full of bliss, it will not lead one to the final goal of Buddhist practice—i.e., nirvāṇa, complete liberation from suffering (and thus, rebirth)— since all this ease and pleasure leads to further attachment and suffering. That said, as many scholars have noted, for the vast majority of lay (i.e., non-monastic) Buddhists rebirth in this realm is in fact the conscious goal of their practice. By

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the same token, the lowest of the six realms, the abode of “hell beings,” functions as an equivalent to the Islamic and Christian hell, where beings are punished in various (and often extremely creative!) ways for their “sins.” While one can, at least in theory, “escape” these hells, the Buddhist practitioner wants to avoid them at all costs. Finally, above and literally “beyond” the six realms that govern rebirth (and are thus associated with the “wheel of samsara”) are the various realms that a Buddhist practitioner can reach via meditative concentration. These are much less “spatial” in description and more clearly relate to levels of consciousness—though again, one cannot make a hard and fast distinction between “real”/external and “symbolic”/internal. The Fall: Aganna Sutta

A distinctive but highly instructive alternative cosmological vision is found in the Agañña Sutta (AS) of the Pali Canon.12 While the bulk of the AS is concerned with the questions of caste and morality,13 in the second part of the text, the Buddha explains these matters by way of a discourse on the origins of the Earth and human social development—two topics that are not often found in ancient Buddhist writings. According to the AS cosmogony, the universe goes through long cycles of expansion and contraction. In the early stages of this process, as the cosmos expands but before the emergence of land or light of any sort (as Genesis might have it: when all was “wild and waste”), a number of ethereal beings are born in the world: “mind-made, feeding on delight, self-luminous, moving through the air, glorious.” To make a somewhat long story short, a transformation begins to occur by which the Earth is converted with a thin, sweet film, which some of the “creatures of light” promptly begin to ingest. Thus begins a long but steady “Fall” into greed and rapaciousness, which brings about not only corporal bodies but the sun and moon and night and day—and by extension, temporality itself, or at least the possibility of change and decease. Over a long period of progressive “materialization,” social distinctions begin to appear, including gender, caste, and class differences.14 As always, it is hard to know how to interpret the AS origin story as a statement by the Buddha about what “really” occurred in this historical past. Some or all of this may have simply been to get across a point about the socioreligious issues raised by the Buddha’s interlocutors. And yet the “speculative fiction” of the origin of life on our planet emerging sui generis from luminous, highly intelligent, disembodied beings presents a powerful cosmogenetic image and one that clearly verges into what we would now call “sci fi” territory. Mahāyāna Mind-Bending I: Lotus Sutra

Sometime around the 1st century CE, a division began to arise in some Buddhist communities in India. While the precise origins remain vague, the emerging movement known as the Mahāyā na or “Great(er) Vehicle” would come to

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have a tremendous impact on virtually all later forms of Buddhism in Tibet and East Asia.15 Though the Mahāyā na seems to have arisen due to competing interpretations of monastic discipline, several important doctrinal innovations would eventually emerge via foundational Mahāyā na texts such as the Lotus, Avata ṃsaka (Flower Garland), and Sukh āvat ī (Pure Land) sutras. Here, I will examine these texts with respect to the significance of their cosmological or “other-worldly” aspects. The Sutra on the White Lotus of the Sublime Dharma (Sk. Saddharmapuṇḍar īkas ūtra), commonly known as the Lotus Sutra, is arguably the most influential sutra of Mahāyā na Buddhism and certainly one of the most revered sacred texts in East Asia.16 The Lotus Sutra is a devotional text rather than a philosophical one; i.e., it seems intended to work on the level of the emotions and the senses rather than the intellect. Within its spectacular scenes and various parables, the Lotus Sutra presents the following core ideas of Mahāyā na Buddhism: (1) the doctrine of up āya ( Jp. h ōben), or “skillful means,” as the way in which buddhas and advanced bodhisattvas teach the Dharma to less advanced beings; (2) perfect awakening or Buddhahood as a realizable goal for all beings; (3) the way of the bodhisattva and the practice of compassion as the highest goal of Buddhism; and (4) the eternal and transcendent character of the Buddha. Though less immediately apparent, other significant Mahāyā na doctrines such as emptiness (Sk. śūnyāta), Buddha-nature (Sk. tath āgata-garbha), and the three bodies of Buddha (Sk. trik āya) have also been read into the text by later exegetes. Contemporary scholars divide the text of the Lotus Sutra into several parts, with chapters  10–22 (along with the introductory chapter but excluding chapter  12) representing a later group of writings. These chapters focus on the transcendent powers of the Buddha (and of buddhas more generally), one of the most significant innovations in Mahāyā na thought. This is vividly expressed in the sixteenth chapter, “The Lifetime of the Tathāgata.” The chapter follows a scene in which the bodhisattva Maitreya shows confusion as to how the Buddha (Śā kyamuni) could have possibly converted innumerable bodhisattvas, as he claims to have done, in the short span (roughly 40 years) since his initial awakening under the bodhi tree. Here Śā kyamuni answers Maitreya’s question, in the process effectively reinterpreting the concept of Buddhahood by way of the doctrine of skillful means. We are informed that the Buddha in fact achieved awakening many aeons in the past and has spent an inconceivably long time since leading other beings to full awakening or nirvāṇa. Thus, the biography of the “historical” B ­ uddha—including his birth, renunciation of wealth and family, awakening, and “final” nirvāṇa—is revealed as expedient means employed by the (virtually) eternal and transcendent, fully awakened Buddha to most effectively teach the Buddhist teachings or Dharma. Beyond the reiteration of the importance of skillful means, one implication of this chapter is that the Buddha remains “in the world” out of boundless compassion for the suffering of living beings, but also that he does so as an extraordinarily

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powerful being, one who is able to control space and time at will. Here, the early Buddhist understanding of nirvāṇa as “extinction” (i.e., of suffering and rebirth) is overturned—a move that would have significant implications for East Asian Buddhist doctrine and practice. This teaching of the “primordial” or “eternal buddha” would find more elaborate expression in the Chinese interpolation of the so-called three bodies of buddha, in the doctrinal formulations of Tiantai sect founder Zhiyi (538–597), and in the development of original enlightenment ( Jp. hongaku) thought in Japan, which suggests that not only buddhas but all living beings and even non-sentient things are always already awakened. By granting not only “sentience”—understood as the capacity for suffering—but also fully awakened consciousness to all forms of matter, our conventional assumptions about life, death, space, and time are put into question, invoking confusion and curiosity, but also, one assumes, a certain measure of awe and humility. Mahāyāna Mind-Bending II: Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland) Sutra

Though arguably less influential than the Lotus Sutra, the Avata ṃsaka or Flower Garland sutra, composed just a few centuries later, doubles down, as it were, on the mind-bending aspects of an awakened Mahāyā na Buddhist consciousness and may be the single most “sci fi” of all premodern Buddhist texts.17 In particular, whereas the Lotus Sutra centralizes the doctrine of “expedient means,” the (much longer) Avata ṃsaka Sutra highlights the concept of interdependence, a Mahayana radicalization of early Buddhist doctrines such as dependent co-origination noself. Whereas early Buddhist texts point out that a) all forms arise from various causes and conditions and b) human beings, in particular, lack a single, stable “essence” or ātman, in the Mahāyā na this is extended to all entities (Sk. dharmas), which are now considered to be completely “empty” of self-being. Furthermore, all entities not only arise from causes and conditions, but also mutually interpenetrate one another in a complex matrix that thwarts our ordinary conceptions of space and time. In the Avata ṃsaka Sutra, “awakening” becomes, quite literally, a “mind trip”—a Buddhist pilgrim’s progress described by one scholar as “fractal,” “holographic,” and “psychedelic” (Fox 2015). In the context of East Asian Buddhism, the sutra is generally understood as providing a glimpse of the so-called Dharmadhatu or the world as seen by a fully awakened buddha; i.e., as a vast, interpenetrating web of phenomena, in which even the smallest of particles (the text says “dust,” but we might say atom or quark) contains an infinite regress of fields full of “beings” and “assemblies.” As in the contemporary Matrix films, this insight into the emptiness/interpenetration of all things comes with the power to control space and time:18 “Having realized that this world is like a dream, and that all Buddhas are mere reflections, that all principles are like an echo, you move unimpeded in the world” (Gómez 1967, 81).19 In terms of classical Buddhist doctrine, of course, the infinite knowledge and power of awakened beings are primarily there to provide comfort and “salvation”

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to the vast legions of suffering sentient beings over space and time, a point reiterated by the great bodhisattva Samantabhadra at the very end of the Avata ṃsaka Sutra. And yet, as in other Mahāyā na texts, the reader gets the distinct impression that the author or authors are enjoying engaging in speculation about cosmic wormholes and portals to other dimensions. Here is a passage from Book 4: The Formation of the Worlds: The exceedingly profound ocean of virtues of wisdom Appears in innumerable lands throughout the ten directions, Its light shining everywhere, turning the wheel of the teaching In accord with what the various sentient beings need to see. The ocean of lands of the ten directions is inconceivable; Buddha has purified them all, over immeasurable eons; In order to edify beings and cause them to mature He appears in all lands. … Sentient beings are infinite Yet Buddha guards them all in his thoughts; Teaching the truth, reaching all: The power of Vairocana’s realm. All lands are in my body And so are the Buddhas living there; Watch my pores, And I will show you the Buddha’s realm. (Cleary 1987, 183–184)20 Ultimately, according to the Avata ṃsaka Sutra, there is one “cosmic” Buddha— known as Vairocana or Great Radiance—whose very “body” pervades the universe, such that the infinite worlds of space and time, including all other buddhas and sentient beings, are somehow contained within him. Any being (e.g., the “historical” Buddha) who achieves the highest level of awareness in that moment “becomes” or “realizes” Vairocana. Again, we see a reiteration of the idea that a) multiple worlds and dimensions are real; b) these can be accessed, but only by those who have gone through a lengthy training series as bodhisattvas and (ultimately) buddhas; and c) one who achieves this state cannot only “see” these other worlds and dimensions but can access and manipulate them at will. The following passage, also from Book 4, reveals the powers available to “enlightening beings”: Enlightening beings can cultivate the universally good practice, Traveling paths as numerous as atomic particles in the cosmos, In each atom revealing countless lands Pure and vast as space.

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They manifest mystic powers equal in extent to space And go to enlightenment sites where the Buddhas are; Upon their lotus seats they reveal many forms, In each and every body containing all lands. In a single instant they reveal past, present, and future, Where all oceans of lands are formed. (Cleary 1987, 186)21 The most interesting and, scholars assert, oldest section of the Avata ṃsaka Sutra comes in Book 39 (Entry into the Realm of Reality), where we read of the Buddhist layman Sudhana (Excellent Riches) journey to various lands, both worldly and other-worldly, in his personal quest for awakening.22 More Bunyan than Dante, but with a decidedly Mahāyā na sci-fi overlay, we follow Sudhana as he embarks on his quest, meeting an eclectic series of 53 teachers along the way, including 20 women—one of whom, Vasumitra, also happens to be a sex worker who informs the eager young acolyte that sexual intercourse can itself be a means to awakening!23 Sudhana’s quest reaches a climax with his final three instructors— three of the most accomplished bodhisattvas, Maitreya, Mañjuśr ī, and Samantabhadra—who usher him into a realm of vastly expanded consciousness. Then Sudhana, seeing the miraculous manifestation of the inconceivable realm of the great tower containing the adornments of Vairocana, was flooded with joy and bliss; his mind was cleared of all conceptions and freed from all obstructions. … With physical tranquility, seeing all objects without hindrance, by the power of production everywhere he bowed in all directions with his whole body. The moment he bowed, by the power of Maitreya, Sudhana perceived himself in all those towers … Sudhana, by the power of the enlightening being … his intellect having entered into the inconceivable wisdom of enlightening beings, saw the whole supernal manifestation, was perfectly aware of it, understood it, contemplated it, used it as a means, beheld it, and saw himself there. (Cleary 1987, 1490 and 1497) 24

Mahāyāna Mind-Bending III: Sukhāvati (Pure Land) Sutras

Last but by no means least, let us turn briefly to several Mah āyā na texts known collectively as the Sukhāvati or “Pure Land” sutras, which provide a different take on “other worlds” from either the Lotus or Avata ṃ saka.25 These texts, probably composed in West Asia (Kusha/Gandhā ra) in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, posit a “pure land of bliss” that can be reached by devotees of a powerful, supremely merciful buddha called Amitayus or Amit ābha (“Infinite Life” or “Infinite Light”).26 As the Mahāyā na began to penetrate China in the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Pure Land sutras and associated schools emerged as some of the

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most popular. Later, this would happen again in Japan, where to this day Pure Land Buddhism is the form with the largest number of adherents. The Longer Pure Land sutra begins with the Buddha Śā kyamuni (aka the “historical” Buddha) telling his disciple Ā nanda that in a past existence he was a king who renounced all worldly goods and pleasures to become a bodhisattva (“The Larger Sutra,” section 5). Soon after embarking on this path, the bodhisattva (now called Dharmā kara or Dharma storehouse) is granted a cosmic vision of an infinite expanse of “buddha lands” extending in all directions, upon which he spends “five aeons” or kalpas coursing in deep meditation, during which he gains immense merit (and power), enabling him to create Sukhāvati, a “land of bliss” for any and all sentient beings who call on his name (“The Larger Sutra,” sections 6–9). The sutra goes on to describe Amitabha’s Pure Land in great detail, with an emphasis on its beauty and sensuous qualities that no doubt surprised some of its readers then as now, given Buddhism’s reputation for moderation if not strict asceticism.27 As we have already seen, the notion of numerous and perhaps infinite numbers of “buddha lands” or “realms” beyond this one has deep roots, going back to some of the earlier Buddhist texts. And yet, rarely were these lands or realms described in any detail, leading the reader to wonder whether they were intended to be understood as “real” places. With the Pure Land texts and schools, however, these ambiguities fade. While an important aspect of Pure Land practice involves visualization or meditation on the features of Sukhāvati, here is little doubt that the authors and adherents of Pure Land Buddhism believed Sukhāvati—as well as other, similar pure lands—to be actually existing places that one could (and should) reach upon one’s death in this “fallen” world of ours.28 In short, the ability to “imagine” Sukhāvati is a necessary preparatory stage for one’s eventual rebirth there. One could say, then, that the Pure Land teachings allow the possibility of “mental” access to another “world” while alive in addition to the “surety” (assuming one is genuinely faithful) of complete—I hesitate to write physical, but certainly sensual—access after death.29 The “onboarding” process involves a sudden “descent” ( Jp. raigō) of Amit ābha, on a “purple cloud” ( Jp. shiun) formation that we might loosely call a spaceship, surrounded by his assistants (including musicians!). Along with depictions of Sukhāvati itself, paintings of Amida’s descent to retrieve one of the faithful would become a staple of East Asian—and particularly Japanese art (see, e.g., Okazaki 1977). In Tibetan Buddhist traditions, funerals sometimes involve a tantric technique allowing for the ritual transference of consciousness (Tb. phowa) to the Pure Land. Here are some of the highlights of the other-worldly paradise of Sukhāvati, which is said to exist far to the West, beyond the realms of ordinary rebirth or samsara: the Earth is composed of seven types of precious metals and stones, all of which produce light rays that “intermingle and create manifold reflections, producing a dazzling illumination” (“The Larger Sutra,” section 10; see Figure 3.1). The trees are also covered in jewels, bells, and other adornments, as are the various palatial structures and towers, making the entire realm glow in a soft light.

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FIGURE 3.1 Amitabha,

the Buddha of the Western Pure Land (Sukhavati) (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

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There is abundant water in pools and streams, each exhibiting excellent qualities and water levels, which can be changed at will (convenient!). While there are no mountains, seas, valleys, or gorges, these can be manifested at will by the Buddha’s power. Pleasant sounds abound, from the songs of various birds to the tinkling of the bell and jewel-encrusted trees. Finally, there are no seasons, but the temperature is always moderate and pleasant. In the center, on a massive lotus in a terraced pond, sits a boundlessly immense Amitabha himself—attended by the great bodhisattvas Avolakiteśvara (Ch. Guanyin; Jp. Kannon) and Mahā sthā maprātpa—in deep contemplation but ready to instruct whenever a supplicant requires it. Despite his appearance of deep meditation, Amitabha is always ready to provide teaching to arrivals in the Pure Land,30 as well as to the numerous bodhisattvas from other realms who have arrived by portal to hear the good news.31 As in other classic Mahayana sutras, the boundaries of space and time are permeable, and awakened beings travel at will both spatially and temporally in order to provide release from suffering (or “salvation”) for sentient beings, in particular humans. It is worthy of note that the Chinese jingtu 浄土 can mean both a nominal “pure land” and also an agential “purification of the land” by a buddha or bodhisattva. Indeed, this latter sense may have been primary, as it reflects the focus of the Indian Mahāyā na on bodhisattva practice, but over time and the transfer to East Asian cultural forms, the term came to imply the place itself as much as the action of transformation.32 Indeed, while the power of Amida Buddha never recedes, we might say that it is Sukhāvati itself that performs the “purification” of those souls reborn in its midst. In short, Sukhāvati, the Land of Bliss or Pure Land of Amitabha Buddha, is a “world of another dimension,” conceived both “spatially as a faraway and separate, and temporally as different from this one.” And yet, through the “saving grace” of Amitabha Buddha, sentient beings can access this realm, mentally prior to and “physically” after their earthly demise. What makes the Pure Land distinct from other “realms” within classical Buddhism—such as those enumerated above, such as the dwelling places of the gods, hungry ghosts, or hell beings—is that it is, unlike them, entirely beyond the cycle of suffering, and of birth and death (Fujita and Otowa 1996, 46–47). “The word Sukhavati actually refers to the place where the absolute and other-worldly bliss of nirvana reigns. It is thought that this word skillfully describes this in material terms, making use of images taken from the relative and worldly plane of human desire … The Pure Land is not simply the ‘other world’; it is none other than the world of the ‘other shore,’ which transcends the cycle of birth and death” (ibid., 47). Buddhist Utopia?

Although the conception of utopia is not identical to that of “other worlds,” given the overlap between utopian writing and science fiction since the mid-20th century, it may be worthwhile to turn briefly to the way that utopian thinking is

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manifested within Asian Buddhist traditions, before looking more closely at an example of Buddhist-inflected science fiction writing. Steven Collins helps us to better situate the ascetic and “other worldly” elements of classical Buddhism in the context of Indian conceptions of the sacred and society. The Indian tradition of renunciation, Collins argues, as embodied in the “heterodox” traditions of thought and practice, is a renunciation of “ritual practice” above all else and, by extension, represents a rejection of “faith” in the powers of revelation (and perhaps, the aspiration to transcendence) that undergirds so much of traditional, “this-worldly/other-worldly” religion (Collins 2013, 189). That said, Collins acknowledges the dichotomy in early Buddhism between lokiya and lokuttara, “which can be translated as ‘worldly/superworldly,’ and which parallels in certain ways the social dichotomy of layman/monk” (Collins 2013, 190). Working with Collins’s insight, we might suggest that Buddhist asceticism—always, at any rate, tempered at least in theory by the appeal to moderation—involves first and foremost a radically different form of relating to things of the world, including, of course, other people. It could be, then, an intensified this-worldliness—this, I argue, is the way that Japanese New Buddhists understood their “secular” Buddhism (albeit for the New Buddhists this transformation was only possible outside the monastic setting; see Shields 2017b). Collins emphasizes the sociality of the Buddhist monastic community, one that is rooted in a deep sense of friendship that “resists commonplace reproductivekinship relations” (Collins 2013, 194), and thus (perhaps unintentionally) opens up other, explicitly utopian possibilities of alternative models of economic and political relation. And yet, Collins is ultimately unwilling to classify the sangha in classical Buddhism tradition as “utopian” in the full sense. In Buddhism, “one can see various versions of an ‘ideal society’ … But one cannot, as far as I can see, trace anything comparable to the utopian mode proper, and still less any sense that the monastic community might be a prototypical form of such a perfectly planned community” (Collins 2013, 210). Setting aside Collins’s doubts as to the universalizability of the Buddhist monastic ideal as found in the early sangha, one finds an unmistakable utopian element in some later Mahāyā na formulations, such as that of Japan’s Hokke or Nichiren sect, based on the Lotus Sutra as well as the writings of Nichiren. This is especially due to the collapsing of spheres that the Lotus Sutra seems to engender—between text and “reality,” theory and practice, and this and other worlds. For Nichiren, “there is only one sah ā world. Vulture Peak, the place where the Lotus Sutra is taught, represents both this world of ours and the most perfect world, the only possible ‘paradise’. There is no other reality, neither for humanity, nor for the Buddha” (see Dolce 2002, 232–233). The point is not, for Nichiren, that we are presently living in the perfect world, but rather that we are living in a world that is, with faith, dedication, and great effort—“perfectible.” As Linda Dolce puts it, his emphasis “is not on the absolute per se, but on the relative that has to become absolute” (Dolce 2002, 235). For modern Japanese Buddhists working

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on Nichirenist premises, this works as a call to social and political engagement (see Shields 2013). However, for premodern adherents of Nichiren or the Lotus Sutra, the primary driver of this transformation was the radical reconfiguring of ­“reality”—and associated “powers”—that comes with Buddhist awakening. Buddhist Sci-Fi?

This chapter has explored some of the ways that classical Buddhist texts and particularly Mahāyā na sects have dealt with the broad topic of “other worlds.” In this final section, I briefly explore some instances of the reverse: i.e., where Buddhist thought has had an impact on science fiction writing, particularly on the themes of other worlds. While it is fair to say that, in general, modern science fiction writing in the West has largely abandoned traditional Western religions of Judaism and Christianity, Asian religious and philosophical traditions get more sympathy in 20th- and 21st-century speculative fiction.33 One major 20th-century writer of speculative fiction whose work delves somewhat more deeply into Asian religious concerns is Ursula Le Guin (1929–2018), author of classic works such as The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and Always Coming Home (1985). In The Dispossessed (subtitled: An Ambiguous Utopia), Le Guin relates the struggles of Shevek, a brilliant scientist who travels from his “utopian” home world of Annares to the “home planet” of Urras, which more closely resembles the Earth of the Cold War era. While Le Guin refrains from uplifting Shevek’s world as a perfect utopia, the collectivist and quasi-Luddite mentality of the Annarestians is contrasted with the consumerist and hierarchical norms of the Urras. While these progressive concerns are not, of course, intrinsically “Buddhist,” the novel makes explicit reference to the problem of suffering as a focus for Annarestian social life. At one point Shevek says: “Suffering is the condition on which we live … no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain or that pain, yes, but not Pain” (Le Guin 1974, 60). Moreover, the solution posited by Shevek is precisely that of classical as well as Mahāyā na Buddhism: “If instead of fearing [suffering] and running from it, one could … get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It is the self that suffers and there’s a place where the self—ceases” (Le Guin 1974, 60). Here Buddhism (and, arguably, Daoism) is a source for a generalized resistance against capitalist modernity and associated political structures—i.e., as a foil to combat technophilic futurism. In contrast to the more generalized appropriations of “Asian” cosmological tropes as one finds in the “Daoist” Force of the Star Wars series and arguably Upanisadic understanding of awakening in the Matrix movies, Le Guin employs specific, foundational Buddhist teachings to suggest an alternative, possibly “better” way of individual and social being. And yet, as it becomes clear throughout the novel, the protagonist Shevek is dissatisfied with the social reforms instituted in his homeland, which suggests that a more “Buddhist” approach may add a dimension lacking in the anarcho-communist society

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of Annares. Moreover, toward the very end of the story, Shevek appears to achieve some level of awakening via his scientific work on “the fundamental unity of ­Sequency and Simultaneity,” in which what was once separate and distinct becomes u ­ nified—in ways that parallel the “powers” achieved by buddhas and bodhisattvas in the various Mahāyā na texts cited above. Conclusions

By way of conclusion, I suggest that at least certain significant Buddhist texts, including the Mahāyā na sutras discussed above, might be best read as examples of speculative fiction. Though broadly defined—and generally intended to cast a wider net than the more confining label of “science fiction”—speculative fiction is a literary genre that deals with elements that do not exist in history, nature, or the present universe. While this may occasionally include aspects of the “supernatural,” as I understand it, this term better belongs to so-called fantasy literature.34 Beyond sheer entertainment, of course, the point of much speculative fiction— including the works of Le Guin—dovetails with the purpose of the older genre of utopian (and dystopian) writing: i.e., to present alternative realities as a way to help the reader confront current and potential future problems, both individual and collective, particularly forms of suffering that, without a radical change in the way we perceive the world, we might not otherwise notice.35 In this reading, speculative fiction plays the role of a critical lens, in which (as with utopian fiction) the imagination is employed to shift our ordinary assumptions and perspectives not only with regard to what is possible, but also on what is “real” and “true.” This, I suggest, is precisely the aim of early Mahāyā na texts such as the Lotus, Avata ṃsaka, and Sukh āvati sutras, all of which employ grandiose language and explosive imagery to suggest that “reality” is or can be quite different from the way things normally appear and that “awakening” to this fact provides a measure of power and control over one’s life—and one’s suffering—that is currently unimaginable. Notes 1 While I appreciate Bernard Faure’s work on dismantling overgeneralizations about “Buddhism” in order to restore “the complexity and richness of the Buddhist tradition,” this sentiment can be taken too far, such that it becomes impossible to make any claims at all about “the Buddhist tradition” (Faure 2009, 4). 2 “Buddhism,” first employed in a Western text in 1801, was derived from “Buddha,” coined in the 1680s to refer to the founder of the tradition, based on the Pali root ­buddha- (to awake, know, perceive). 3 Though there are countless sources in the Buddhist canon for this basic teaching (e.g., the Four Noble Truths), in thinking through what this means for ethics, I default to the Buddhist formulation of the “Golden Rule” as found in the Sa ṃyutta-Nik āya: “For a state that is not pleasant or delightful to me must be so to him also; and a state that is not pleasing or delightful to me, how could I inflict that upon another?” (cited in

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Harvey 2000, 33). What should be underscored here is that this logical reflection is derived from a naturalistic, even Epicurean premise—which Schmidt-Leukel calls a “fundamental insight” of classical Buddhism—that all beings “[…] yearn for happiness and recoil from pain” (Majjhima-Nik āya 51; see Schmidt-Leukel 2010, 54). 4 In Chinese: 方便 ( fangbian) and Japanese: 方便 (h ōben). As Richard Gombrich writes: “It is true that the term translated ‘skill in means’, upaya-kausalya, is post-canonical, but the exercise of skill to which it refers, the ability to adapt one’s message to the audience, is of enormous importance in the Pali Canon” (Gombrich 1997, 17). 5 To the point where a modern reader of the Lotus Sutra is left wondering whether this fascinatingly weird book has, to borrow from Gertrude Stein, “any there, there”; in other words, whether, to invoke Marshall McLuhan, the Lotus Sutra is in fact all medium, no message. 6 Aṅguttara Nik āya 3. Tika Nip āta 8. Anandavaggo. 7 The early suttas contain many references to such powers; see Powers 2012. Often these are associated with the ability to move between the “world systems”; see, e.g., Anguttara Nikaya 3. Tika Nipata 8. Anadavaggo: “Here Ānanda, the Thus Gone One pervades the three thousandfold and the great thousandfold world system with an effulgent light, so that those sentient beings see it, then the Thus Gone One makes a sound. In this manner an announcement is made to the three thousandfold and the great thousandfold world system if he desires.” 8 One classical Buddhist metaphor for this almost inexpressible unit (often translated as an “aeon”) is the time it takes to erode a solid rock measuring 1 cubic mile by brushing it with a silk cloth once a century. Other versions exist involving butterflies. 9 The six world system cosmology is a product of the Abhidharma—commentary on the earliest Buddhist texts begun as early as the 3rd century BCE that attempted to provide a more systematic guidance for Buddhists—and appears to have been pieced together from hints found in the early Pali suttas as well as the vinaya (monastic codes); see Gethin 1988, chapter 5. 10 Generally the first three of these realms are considered “lower,” while the last three are “higher”; i.e., more fortunate, realms in which to exist and be reborn. In the earliest versions, there are only five realms, with the “wrathful spirits” or “demigods” added later, perhaps for the sake of symmetry. East Asian texts frequently further subdivide these six realms into dozens of sub-realms. 11 Perhaps the closest analogue with Dante are the various “hell scenes” that adorn a good number of Japanese Buddhist temples screens and scrolls, some of which put the tortures of the damned in Dante’s Inferno seem positively quaint. 12 The AS is the 27th sutta of the D īgha Nik āya collection and was composed between the 3rd century BCE and the 2nd century CE. 13 There is some debate within Buddhist Studies on the question of whether the AS should be read as a critique and/or satire of the caste system. See, e.g., Gombrich 1988, 85; Sugunasiri 2013. 14 There are interesting parallels here to the Chinese classic Daodejing, composed at the same time or slightly earlier, which also posits an origin story that begins in pure formlessness and “declines” into form, matter, and social and conceptual distinctions; see Ames and Hall 2003. 15 Mahāyā na Buddhism also flourished in West Asia, but those areas (i.e., parts of present-­ day Afghanistan and Pakistan) would eventually convert to Islam, leaving West Asian Buddhists a tiny remnant. 16 Some of what follows has been adapted (with permission) from Shields 2011. 17 Whereas the Lotus Sutra formed the foundations for several prominent East Asian sects—such as Tiantai/Tendai and the Lotus or Nichiren sect—and was also revered in the Chan/Zen traditions, the Avata ṃ saka’s impact was mainly felt in one sect, the

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Huayan ( Jp. Kegon) school, whose influence was much stronger in Japan than in China. See Cleary 1987. 18 Unlike The Matrix, of course, here there is no “deeper reality” beyond the “illusion”; see Ford 2003. 19 Translated by Gomez; cited in Williams 2009, 121. 20 Avata ṃ saka Sutra, Bk 4 (The Formation of the Worlds), pp. 183–184. 21 Avata ṃ saka Sutra, Bk 4 (The Formation of the Worlds), p. 186. 22 Known separately as the Ga ṇḍavy ūha (Excellent Manifestation) Sutra, this text dates to roughly 200 CE. 23 “This woman was settled in a polluted, fearsome realm, making it hard for people to believe in her; so the land was called Danger. By means of meditation, she entered into defiled realms and turned them all into spheres of knowledge; by virtue of great compassion, she remained in the ordinary world, and by virtue of knowledge she remained unaffected, so her city was called City of Jewel Arrays” (Cleary 1987, 1599). 24 The mind melting experience of Sudhana has much in common with that of Hayy ibn Yaqzan (or “Life Aware-son”), the protagonist and spiritual seeker of Ibn Tufayl’s masterful 12th-century work of Islamic thought; see Goodman 2009. 25 Technically, there are hundreds of texts in the Chinese Buddhist canon that speak of Amitabha and his Pure Land, but Japanese tradition has focused on three texts chosen as canonical by sect founder Honen (1133–1212): The (Longer) Sutra on the Buddha of Infinite Life, the Sutra on the Visualization of the Buddha of Infinite Life, and the (Shorter) Sutra on the Buddha of Infinite Life. 26 The Sanskrit sukha is, in fact, a direct opposite of duḥkha or suffering, which all forms of Buddhism attempt to ameliorate if not eradicate. As a form of joy or pleasure, sukha is thought to be lasting, as opposed to preya, transient pleasure. 27 On one level, we might attribute this focus on the overwhelming beauty and sensuousness of Sukhāvati to the general Mahāyā na penchant for iconoclastic reversals of traditional Buddhist ideals, but the more significant reason is surely that, as in other traditions, such imagery acted as a powerful inspiration to ordinary, non-literate believers. Comparatively speaking, in terms of “worldly” splendor, neither the Christian heaven nor even the Islamic paradise (Ar. Jannah) comes close. 28 It is true that from the early 20th century Pure Land Buddhist thinkers in Japan have at times suggested that the Pure Land of Amida is best conceived as a “state of mind,” but this is a product of Buddhist modernism. 29 While all who call on Amida with a faithful heart are guaranteed rebirth in Sukhāvati, not all are reborn into the same location or condition: e.g., those with doubts must remain in their lotus bud rebirth pods for 500 years before setting foot onto the Pure Land. 30 Pure Land doctrine teaches that the traditional Buddhist goal of awakening or nirvana can only be achieved once one has been reborn in Sukhavati, as our ordinary world is mired in a long period of decline ( Jp. Mappo), which renders traditional Buddhist methods insufficient. 31 The text specifically mentions 14 of these other “buddha lands,” including our own, called Sahā, where Śā kyamuni dwells (“The Larger Sutra,” section 27). 32 See Fujita and Otowa 1996, 34, also 48, where the authors discuss the purification of our own Sahā world, beginning with Vulture Peak, by the Buddha Śā kyamuni (as noted in the Lotus Sutra). Even in this case, the “Pure Land” might “conform” to our world, but is distinctly not “of ” it. 33 Various lists of “Buddhist-inspired” sci-fi can be found on the Internet; some of the books listed include Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967), Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (1989), Victor Pelevin’s Buddha’s Little Finger (1996), Terry Pratchett’s The Long Earth (2012), Sally Ember’s This Changes Everything (2013), Ramez Naam’s cyberpunk Nexus

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trilogy (2012–2015), and even—though it seems more of a stretch—Robert Heinlein’s 1961 classic Stranger in a Strange Land. 34 Here I diverge from Le Guin, for whom science fiction is the branch of speculative fiction that involves a “realistic” approach to what’s possible, while fantasy deals in things that could not happen in our world. 35 Many scholars have elaborated on the theme of “utopia as critique”; see Morrison 1984, 139–140; Jameson 2010; and Sabia 2002. For science fiction as a critique, see Tunić 2018.

Works Cited Ames, Roger T., and David L. Hall (2003). Daodejing: A Philosophical Translation. New York, NY: Ballatine. Cleary, Thomas (1987). The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra. Boulder, CO: Shambhala. Collins, Steven (2013). “Monasticism, Utopia and Comparative Social Theory.” In Self & Society: Essays on Pali Literature and Social Theory, 1988-2010, 185–226. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books. Dolce, Lucia (2002). “Between Duration and Eternity: Hermeneutics of the ‘Ancient Buddha’ of the Lotus Sutra in Chih-i and Nichiren.” In A Buddhist Kaleidoscope: Essays on the Lotus Sutra, ed. Gene Reeves, 223–239. Tokyo, Japan: Kōsei Publishing. Faure, Bernard (2009). Unmasking Buddhism. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Ford, James L. (2003). “Buddhism, Mythology, and The Matrix.” In Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix, ed. Glenn Yeffeth, 125–144. Dallas, TX.: Benbella Books. Fox, Alan (2015). “The Practice of Huayan Buddhism.” In Chinese Buddhism: Past, Present and Future, 259–285. Yilan, Taiwan: Foguang University Center for Buddhist Studies. Fujita, Kōtatsu, and Rebecca Otowa (1996). “The Origin of the Pure Land.” The Eastern Buddhist, New Series 29, 1 (Spring): 33–51. Gethin, Rupert (1988). The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Gombrich, Richard (1988). Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo. New York, NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gombrich, Richard M. (1997). How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings. New Delhi, India: Munshiram Manoharlal. Gómez, Luis Oscar (1967). “Selected Verses from the Gandavyuha: Text, Critical Apparatus and Translation.” PhD Dissertation. Yale University. Harvey, Peter (2000). Introduction to Buddhist Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, Lenn Evan (2009). Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Frederic (2010). “Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future.” In Utopia/­ Dystopia, eds. Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, 21–44. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. King, Sallie B. (2009). Socially Engaged Buddhism. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Kraft, Ken (1999). The Wheel of Engaged Buddhism: A New Map of the Path. Boston, MA: Weatherhill Publishing.

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“The Larger Sutra” (2003). In The Three Pure Land Sutras, trans. Hisao Inagaki, 1–31. Berkeley, CA.: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research. Le Guin, Ursula K. (1974). The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York, NY: Harper Voyager. Morrison, Alasdair (1984). “Uses of Utopia.” In Utopias, eds. Peter Alexander and Roger Gill, 139–151. London, UK: Duckworth. Okazaki, Jōji (1977). “Pure Land Imagery.” In Pure Land Buddhist Painting, trans. and adapted by Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, 103–130. New York, NY: Kodansha International. Powers, John (2012). A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity, Sex and the Body in Indian Buddhism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Queen, Christopher, and Sallie B. King (1996). Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Sabia, Daniel (2002). “Utopia as Critique.” Peace Review 14, 2: 191–197. Schmidt-Leukel, Perry (2010). “Buddhism and the Idea of Human Rights: Resonances and Dissonances.” In Buddhist Approaches to Human Rights: Dissonances and Resonance, eds. Carmen Meinert and Hans-Bernd Zöllner, 41–61. Berlin, Germany: Verlag. Shields, James Mark (2011). “Lotus Sutra.” Milestone Documents of World Religions, ed. David M. Fahey, 372–389. Dallas, TX: Schlager Group. Shields, James Mark (2013). “Political Interpretations of the Lotus Sutra.” In A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy, ed. Steven Emmanuel, 512–523. London, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Shields, James Mark (2017a). Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Shields, James Mark (2017b). “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism and the ‘Religious Secular’.” Japan Review: Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies 30: 79–96. Sugunasiri, Suwanda H. J. (2013). “Devolution and Evolution in the Agañña Sutta.” Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies 9: 17–104. Tunić, Srdan (2018). “Science Fiction between Utopia and Critique.” Uneven Earth (11 June); available online: (accessed 30 June 2022). Williams, Paul (2009). Mah āyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations. New York, NY: Routledge.

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The psalmist takes a still loftier flight. He leaves the world and lifts his imagination to that mighty expanse which spreads above it and around it. He wings his way through space, and wanders in thought over its immeasurable regions. Instead of a dark and unpeopled solitude, he sees it crowded with splendour, and filled with the energy of the Divine presence. Thomas Chalmers, “A Sketch of the Modern Astronomy,” 1817

The works of God continue, And worlds and lives abound; Improvement and progression Have one eternal round. There is no end to matter; There is no end to space; There is no end to spirit; There is no end to race. Hymn, “If You Could Hie to Kolob,” by William W. Phelps (1856)

Introduction: Space and Religion in Early America

Other worlds whose inhabitants possess special powers, hold curious beliefs, and live in distinctive social and political systems are a staple of the science fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. The many Star Trek television series (1966–present), for example, often send their main characters to planets populated by aliens or human-like characters who cultivate alternative philosophies, aesthetics, moral systems, and religions. Across the science fiction genre, explorations of alternative worlds on other planets and galaxies often feel tailored to a distinctively modern DOI: 10.4324/9781003088264-6

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cultural context, steeped in technologies, like telecommunications, rockets, and space travel, that only emerged in the 20th century. Historians of ideas, however, have found that speculations about life on other planets have a rich and deep history, stretching back into ancient thought and gaining new currency during the rise of modern science and the Enlightenment. “Pluralism,” or the belief that many planets beyond that of earth support intelligent life, had a surprisingly robust influence on a wide range of early American religious thinkers and movements. Furthermore, these speculations afford insights into the dynamics between science and religion during the early national period. The “new astronomy” served as a creative, if variable, muse for thinkers and groups who pursued theological innovation, cultural critique, and bold attempts to reimagine social life. In early America, religious groups had various spatial agendas, often built upon more generalized cultural trends. Perhaps the most far-reaching developments were decidedly terrestrial and political as the nation aimed to extend its borders via a combination of warfare, treaty, legal policies, migration, and colonization. In the most basic terms, religious groups saw their task, in part, as planting and missionizing an expanding nation, thus filling up the American landscape with communities of their denominations. American spatial growth, of course, brought its discontents. As the population grew almost eightfold from the Revolution to the Civil War, familiar patterns of family, work, political stability, and social authority became stressed, if not wholly eclipsed by rapid change. General surveys of the religious history of the era find a lively mix of denominational growth, revivalism, new religions, utopian communities, and social movements which made varied attempts to restructure social life. Patterns of exploitation and exclusion also developed as the slave system grew and became more intertwined with the general economy. In spite of supposed freedoms granted by the Constitution, minorities, religious and otherwise, often found themselves targets of hostile majorities. A wide spectrum of religious movements emerged across the era, most especially revivalism and broad reform movements which aimed at securing more rigorous personal piety and public morality. Innovations were also pursued in comparatively small communal experiments which aimed to revise essentially all the major elements of social life, and secretive groups (slave and free) often cultivated distinctive and contrarian liberation theologies yearning for freer spaces. At the imaginative edges of these efforts, frontiers and borderlands were particularly potent, most especially the notion that on the fringes of the civilized world there might be opportunities, physical, cultural, and legal, for innovation. Over the antebellum period, this stimulated varied effort to form voluntary reform societies, aimed at creating more perfect citizenry and social relations, as well as intentional “New Jerusalems,” restored “Edens,” or perfectionist utopias (Bestor 1950). Finally, notions of American space were interwoven with new technologies, like railroads, canals, roads, and telegraphs, which rapidly reshaped perceptions of speed and distance. Could these new extensions of human abilities be projected beyond the bounds of the earth itself? Varied religious thinkers, both

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within the mainstream and on the margins, saw tantalizing possibilities for outer space, most especially as an alternative template for imagining new theological ideas and new social arrangements, but also as an area for apologetic work to defend the prerogatives of more “mainstream” Christianity. Deeper Theologies of Space

Although many aspects of theology were hotly contested during this era, strains of natural theology with deep roots in monotheistic traditions provided many religious thinkers with broad conceptual resources to engage the rise of modern science. In general formulations, God was reckoned as creator and sustainer of an expanding concept of the cosmos, but also dwelt in the details of the created order—from the tiniest of creatures to the movements of stars and planets. Teleological interpretations of nature, well exemplified by books like William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), circulated widely. Nature was evidence, everywhere, not only of the engineering skill of God, but also the generally benevolent character of divinity (Paley 1802). These works could look back admiringly at the works of Isaac Newton (1848), Robert Boyle (1690), and other advocates of “physicotheology” who had retained a strong theistic orientation while laying the scientific groundwork for the modernization of disciplines like astronomy, physics, and chemistry. Key concepts included “voluntaristic” views that argued that although the visible universe was law governed, an omnipotent being was unconstrained and could create the cosmos as it pleased (Davis and Winship 2002, 125). For a benevolent deity, this pleasure generally favored abundance and structure. Therefore, to look upon a new planet or system of stars was to view a place that God built with intention and care, presumably, to populate with some kind of created beings. Important questions arose in response, “Just what kind of beings and what were they like?” “Were they in need of redemption?” “Could technology be developed that would enable human beings to see and communicate with them?” Telescopes, while improving, were not quite able to resolve into granular detail the implications of pluralism, but that hardly limited the traverse of dreams, ­v isions, and revelations. Other strains of religiosity, rooted in European esoteric and hermetic traditions, also lent themselves to speculations about space as a source of secret wisdom and occult influence upon life on earth. Sometimes these included notions of a resonant cosmic harmony that could integrate lives “above” with those “below.” Conceptual support for imagining space as a more perfected realm of existence was fully integrated into the classical cosmologies of Aristotle and Ptolemy, who theorized bodies in supralunar space made of an ethereal substance and moving in a circular motion. These ideas held sway in European thought until the 16th century and elements of them survived the Copernican and sidereal revolutions in astronomy. The notion that heavenly bodies and stars emanated occult influences and sympathetic powers that influenced life on earth (sublunar realm) supported

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astrology, alchemy, and other forms of magical belief and practice. These “correspondence” ideas could also be refined into claims about prophecy, divination, and human perfection. Thus occult secrets could reveal messages of hope for some kind of ideal life beyond the earth, as well as the wisdom that might lead to more perfect societies on the earth. Many studies of early American religious culture demonstrate the survival of these ideas in the early national era, often cultivated alongside the more familiar forms of theistic religion (Butler 1992; Brooke 1994). Science in Early America: Dialogue and Engagement

Although Alexis de Tocqueville would famously portray American scientific thinking as pervasively focused on practical applications rather than abstract theories (Tocqueville 2000, 428), surveys of the period find fairly high levels of engagement with scientific ideas at nearly all levels of society (Pandora 2009). A growing infrastructure of educational and scientific institutions, newspapers, journals, almanacs, and even sermons could serve as venues for exploring scientific ideas. Books on scientific topics were widely circulated and discussions of key topics, like new discoveries in astronomy, seem to have been extensively entertained, especially in popular almanacs (Zochert 1976; Jaffee 1990; Tomlin 2014). How did this interest in science interact with religious thought? Variably, to be sure. While a generation of historians has now thoroughly dismantled the notion that science and religion inevitably fall into “warfare,” there remain considerable complexities to sort out. Notably, while there was widespread interest in fostering some manner of reconciliation with “science” broadly construed, differences about how to do this and what to emphasize remained. Another challenge is the flexible use of the category of science during this era, especially on the pens of popularizers. In addition to the natural knowledge of trained experts, “science” could connote empirical observations and technological developments steeped in “common sense” and broadly accessible as “natural facts.” Thus, an era that saw the foundations of American scientific infrastructure established in various societies, governmental agencies, and educational institutions also witnessed the widespread enthusiasm for movements like phrenology, mesmerism, and spiritualism, hailed as potent new “sciences.” Often, as many studies have documented, the boundaries between “science” and other cultural forms, ideological, theological, artistic, and popular, were quite porous (Tomlin 2014). The intellectual framework for thinking about space was a reinvigorated debate about life on other worlds, which, as historian Michael Crowe has demonstrated, was widely entertained by scientists, religious figures, philosophers, and the general public during this era. Books, lectures, sermons, newspaper articles, and other media often discussed the possibility of “pluralism” in terms of other life-sustaining planets and solar systems (Crowe 1986). This debate had emerged in ancient thought, where atomists like Lucretius and Democritus (favoring many worlds) were countered by the Greek thought of Plato and Aristotle, who argued

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for “one only-begotten and created heaven” (Crowe 1986, 5). The early modern development of sidereal astronomy, built upon the various achievements of the Scientific Revolution, revived this debate and expanded its scope. By the time of the Enlightenment, leading astronomers had mapped a universe with multiple galaxies and star systems. Many of the leading astronomers and commentators gave sustained attention to the possibility of life on other planets. These, in turn, fueled public discussion and debate about pluralism. Religion in an Expansive Universe: The Contours of Debate

Religious responses to the possibility of cosmic pluralism emerged alongside the new scientific knowledge and in time would cultivate a wide range of views. ­A rguably the larger contours of this debate can be grasped by briefly examining two prominent types of responses: deistic and Christian apologetic. Pamphleteer and political agitator Thomas Paine, writing in The Age of Reason (1794), composed perhaps the most forceful and widely circulated deistic interpretation of the new cosmology. Paine regarded Christian notions of salvation, in particular, as no longer sufficient on a planet that was now understood as one among many. To believe that God created a plurality of worlds, at least as numerous as what we called stars, renders the Christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air. The two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind. (Paine 2002, 224) Paine recommends his readers follow a “progression of ideas” to the conclusions of modern astronomy—a vast universe with many stars and planetary systems. Furthermore, he reasoned that given the abundance of life found in every corner of the earth, “why is it to be supposed that the immensity of space is a naked void, lying in eternal waste? There is room for millions of worlds as large or larger than ours” (Paine 2002, 226). His argument then adopts some themes of natural theology, but severs them from Christian apologetics. Our idea, not only of the almightiness of the Creator, but of his wisdom and his beneficence, become enlarged in proportion as we contemplate the extent and structure of the universe. The solitary idea of a solitary world, rolling or at rest in the immense ocean of space, gives place to the cheerful idea of a society of worlds, so happily contrived as to administer, even by their motion, instruction to man. (Paine 2002, 228) To this, Paine adds a bit of satire targeting the “solitary and strange conceit, that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection,

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should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world, because they say one man and one woman had eaten an apple!” Would Christ have to do this on all the planets across the universe? If so, “He would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary interval of life” (Paine 2002, 229). And what of the possibility of religions to be found in other worlds? Paine suggests religious pluralism should be expected, but converging on a common morality and theology. There may be many systems of religion that so far from being morally bad, are in many respects morally good: but there can be but one that is true; and that one necessarily must, as it ever will, be in all things consistent with the everexisting world of God that we behold in his works. (Paine 2002, 229) Paine thus retains much of the benevolent optimism of the natural theological tradition in spite of his strong critique of Christianity. The pluralistic universe shows the wisdom and abundant goodness of the Deity and many planets and likely includes aliens enjoying many benefits akin to humans on earth. Furthermore, insofar as these denizens of outer space were good scientists, observant of their natural worlds and the laws that guide them, they would come around, quite naturally, to deistic views. Christian apologists, taking the full measure of the new astronomy as well as the deists’ critiques, would eventually develop responses which embraced pluralist ideas in service of more mainstream theological views and, at times, even expanding them in areas like Christology. Many of these enjoyed wide circulation in the United States. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817 and a strong advocate of enhancing the faculty and curriculum with more science, nonetheless penned a cycle of 173 sermons for his undergraduate students aimed at preventing any slide toward infidelity. Eventually published posthumously as Theology Explained and Defended (1818), these works, according to the analysis by Crowe, “reveal an author open to the sciences, attracted to natural theology, and convinced of pluralism” (Crowe 1986, 175). Sprinkled throughout the sermons are references to astronomy and the possibilities of life beyond earth. “The firmament, with the innumerable and glorious bodies which it contains, have ever been far the most wonderful part of the visible creation.” Planets were likely “inhabited, in all probability, by endless multitudes of beings, rational and immortal.” These “inhabit her lucid regions… [and are] probably far better and happier than ourselves” (Crowe 1986, 176). Dwight did not, however, conclude with Paine that these “Beings” would be natural deists. Instead, he projects a kind of cosmic Christ principle into the expanded universe. Throughout immensity, [Christ] quickens into life, action, and enjoyment, the innumerable multitudes of Intelligent beings … From the vast store house of

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his own unchangeable Mind informs the innumerable host of Intelligent creatures with ever-improving virtue, dignity, and glory. (Crowe 1986, 177) Would these “hosts” be in need of endless acts of sacrifice by a nomadic Christ traveling the cosmos like an overworked redeemer, per Paine’s satirical comment? Not necessary according to Dwight who suggests that only our planet earth rebelled and thus only our earth needed the high drama of the sacrificial redemption recounted in the Gospels. In addition to sermons, many American readers found additional support for Christian outer space pluralism in the writings of two Scottish theologians, Thomas Dick and Thomas Chalmers, whose works were widely read in the United States. Dick was an enthusiastic pluralist and natural theologian, who focused on the implications of extraterrestrial life for Christian thought, starting with The Christian Philosopher in 1826 and expanding his arguments in later works. Often his titles bespoke his enthusiasm for finding God in the new astronomy: Celestial Scenery, Or the Wonders of the Planetary System Displayed; Illustrating the Perfections of Deity and a Plurality of Worlds (1838) and Sidereal Heaven and Other Subjects Connected with Astronomy, as Illustrative of the Character of the Deity, and of an Infinity of Worlds (1844). In the tradition of Anglo-American natural theology championed by William Paley and other clergy-naturalists, Dick found “evidences” of God’s creative intelligence and character in natural objects and processes: That the doctrine of a plurality of worlds is more worthy of the perfections of the Infinite Creator, and gives us a more glorious and magnificent idea of his character and operations than to suppose his benevolent regards confined to the globe on which we dwell; that it is more accordant with the infinity and eternity of the Divine Being, and with his wisdom and benevolence, than the opposite position; that wherever any one perfection of Deity is exerted, there also all his attributes are in operation; and, consequently, wherever Omnipotence is seen to operate, there likewise wisdom, benevolence, rectitude, and every other Divine perfection must be displayed in reference to intelligent beings. (Dick 1844, 271) Dick was conversant with existing scientific ideas, but he could also run to excesses in his elaborations of them. For example, he did an analysis of the land surfaces of the known planets and their satellites and argued, based on their supposed similarities to earth, that they could cumulatively sustain a population of almost 22 billion persons (Dick 1838, 306). The more subtle and philosophical Chalmers contributed A Series of Discourses on the Christian Revelation, Viewed in Connection with the Modern Astronomy, based upon a series of public sermons he had given in Glasgow in 1815 (see Figure 4.1). The text sold well immediately and met with wide acclaim, eventually going through

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FIGURE 4.1 A

Series of discourses on the Christian revelation, viewed in connection with the modern astronomy (Chalmers 1817).

multiple editions in both the British Isles and the United States. Chalmers was a dedicated evangelical and member of the Church of Scotland, as well as a talented writer and preacher. His primary goal in the sermons was to engage a popular audience curious about the new astronomy, which offered “an imposing splendour”

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that could “at times dazzle and mislead an inquirer” (­Chalmers 1817,  5). Well aware of the skeptical and deistic attempts to leverage astronomical arguments, his sermons aimed to rebut the “Infidel” while demonstrating a full appreciation for and acceptance of the insights of the era’s astronomers. This included long explanations, contra Paine, that “modesty” was warranted in light of the new learning, not a radical shift away from Christian doctrine. It is by the narrow outlet of the eye, that the mind of man takes its excursive flight over those golden tracks, where, in all the exhaustlessness of creative wealth, lie scattered the suns and the systems of astronomy. But how good a thing it is, and how becoming well, for the philosopher to be humble even amid the proudest march of human discovery, and the sublimest triumphs of the human understanding, when he thinks of that unsealed barrier, beyond which no power, either of eye or of telescope, shall ever carry him. (Chalmers 1817, 126–127) In other discourses, he recognizes that the traditional appeals of Christian ­evangelicals—to affections, scriptures, and piety—could be sustaining, perhaps even more necessary, in light of an expanded universe. True to form, he concludes with a long appendix of biblical references to space, heavens, stars, and like topics, reaffirming the relevance and potency of scripture for finding meaning in the contemplation of outer space (Chalmers 1817, 257–275). Space in Three Alternative Movements: Mormons, Fourierists, Swedenborgians

Three alternative religious movements are particularly rich sources for “outer space” thinking: the early Mormons, Fourierist phalanxes, and various groups influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg. Each had, in distinctive ways, deep investments in affirming the possibilities of life in other worlds and each attempted social practices that radically departed from the American mainstream. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began with a series of visions reported by a New York farm boy, Joseph Smith, who, until his death in 1844, led an elaborate and highly controversial new religious movement. Smith’s visions led to the emergence of a new sacred text, the Book of Mormon (1830), and he quickly gained adherents who accepted him as a new “prophet, seer, and revelator.” As the movement grew during the 1830s and early 1840s, Smith provided additional “revelations, translations, and narratives” which extended the growing church’s theological vision, eventually published as The Doctrine and Covenants (1835) and The Pearl of Great Price (1851). In these works, Smith elaborated his views on an afterlife with continuous spiritual development and three “degrees of glory” corresponding to one’s earthly activities. Save for a few of the most egregious sinners, all persons would have some kind of embodied afterlife in one of three ranked

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“kingdoms”—celestial, terrestrial, or telestial (Smith 1845). One text, “The Book of Abraham,” purportedly a translation of an ancient Egyptian papyrus, includes references to a heavenly firmament of stars, called “Kokaubeam,” and a star (sometimes interpreted to mean “planet”) proximate to God, called “Kolob.” And I saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; and there were many great ones which were near unto it. And the Lord said unto me: These are the governing ones; and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God: I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest. (Smith 1851) Mormon historian Robert Paul, surveying the sources and use of pluralist ideas among early Mormon leaders like Smith and Brigham Young, notes their coemergence with the more famous Mormon views on plural marriage and temple practice and affirms their “profound religious significance.” Theologically, astronomical pluralism is a necessary feature of the other forms of Mormon pluralism — wives and gods … God (male/female) propagates spiritual and eventually physical progeny, requiring, of course, worlds for inhabitation. Thus the complex of pluralism — wives, gods, worlds — establishes the fundamental basis of nineteenth-century Mormon cosmology. (Paul 1986, 32) Mormon temples in which various ritual innovations took place, including the “eternal sealings” of family members, were simultaneously “a microcosm of the universe” representing in symbolic forms “the various heavens of Mormon afterlife.” Within this general plan of belief and practice, Paul concludes, “the plurality of worlds doctrine for Mormonism allows for the completion of the divine creation process. In this sense, Mormonism possesses an eschatological orientation that looks towards pluralism in its various dimensions for its ultimate justification” (Paul 1986, 32). Later Mormon writings, including theological treatises, sermons, leadership talks, and the popular hymn “If You Could Hie to Kolob,” demonstrate the wide acceptance and importance of pluralist views in Mormon thought. Charles Fourier was a French social theorist who, over the early decades of the 19th century, published various works advocating intentional communities based on cooperation and liberated “passions” (Fourier 1996). Starting from a method that called for “doubt” and “deviation” with regard to civilized habits of thought and social norms, he theorized small communities called “phalanxes” as an antidote to the “perfidy, rapine, egotism, and … vices” which governed socalled “philosophy” and “civilization” (Beecher 1986, 195–196). These organized “phalansteries” would gather groups of people with diverse talents, personalities,

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and proclivities, who would work collectively to eliminate poverty and transform the nature of work, sociability, and human sexual relations. Fourier’s ideas pointedly rejected the idea that human beings were doomed to tragic lives wracked by poverty, deprivation, and unhappiness. In contrast, he felt his ideas could “guide the human race to opulence, sensual pleasures, [and] to the unity of the globe” (quoted in Guarneri 1991, 16). Central to his thinking was his view on the central role that “the passions” held in human nature and how, in a perfect social order, these would not be suppressed by enforced discipline, social proprieties, or subject to excessive self-regulation via reason or rational restraint. Rather, they would be liberated and fully exercised, especially in “attractive work” which would encourage variable activities, open to both men and women of all ages, that would sustain worker interest and emotional engagement. In the words of historian Jonathan Beecher, work was the site of “the gratification of man’s deepest needs and the fullest expression of his powers” (Beecher 1986, 274). Workers would be compensated not by wages but by dividends and other distributed resources. Eventually, Fourier inspired a number of experimental utopias in both Europe and the United States, mostly based around agricultural work in rural areas. In the United States, Fourier’s theories were simplified and adapted to an American context, in places like Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and the North American Phalanx in Colts Neck, New Jersey. In spite of considerable early enthusiasm, most of the Fourier-inspired communities only lasted for a short time (Guarneri 1991). Fourier’s interest in the passions also led him into a very progressive stance on human sexuality and variability, per Beecher, a “vision of instinctual liberation” that broadened his legacy beyond his much more widely entertained views on economy and work (Beecher 1986, 298). Works like Le Nouveau monde amoureux (1967), although not published in his lifetime, suggest the phalansteries would accept a range of sexualities more akin to the liberation movements of the late 20th and 21st centuries. In some sense, love, work, and community were all connected for Fourier and intimately linked to his theological vision and cosmology (Katsaros 2012). As with his views on sexuality, Fourier’s cosmology was highly unconventional and often marginalized in the wider phalanstery movement. His main point was that the planets were living beings, bisexual in nature, with dual souls, and possessing the powers of procreation. In more general terms, Fourier felt that if harmonious relations could be established within the phalanxes, a kind of sympathetic response would reverberate throughout the cosmos, much like a pleasant melody that inspires a great musical piece. [O]ur passions… actually play the most important part, after God, in the movement of the universe. After God, they are the most noble things in the universe, because it was his wish that the whole universe should be organised in the image of the effects they produce in the social movement. (Fourier 1996, 38)

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Some American readers considered his theories about pluralism as they worked to build phalanxes. For example, in 1846 the Brook Farm journal, The Harbinger, published translated excerpts of Fourier’s manuscript Cosmogony, on space, planets, and life beyond the earth. The editors noted that this work captured Fourier’s thoughts “in all their vastness and in all their strangeness” and served as the “theoretic complement, the illimitable sky and background, to his most practical and definite ideas of … Phalanx, which will be the germ of the combined social order throughout the globe” (Fourier 1846, 13). Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist and prolific visionary writer of the 18th century, emerged as one of the great inspirations to alternative religions in the United States during the early 19th century. His various works were translated into English and commented upon in books, journals, and reading groups, including in a famous essay by American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (Emerson 1850). Swedenborg’s ideas inspired social reformers, alternative religious movements, and various religious communities, including a small denomination, “the New Church” (Hawley 1937; John Haller 2020). Although Swedenborg had been, in his earlier life, an esteemed scientist and engineer, his later religious writings were based on elaborate visions and dreams which he detailed in various long books. His philosophy was grounded in a “correspondence” cosmology, linking outer space to human life: “the angelic heaven is so immense that it corresponds with all the particulars with man, myriads corresponding to every member, organ, and viscus, and to every affection of each” (Swedenborg 1962, 3; see Figure 4.2). These in turn colored his biblical hermeneutics, most especially his views on a more communal practice of Christianity and a spiritual life after death that included continuous improvements and refinements (Albanese 2007, 140–143). In terms of space, his visions claimed direct knowledge of “spirits and angels” residing on other planets, including details on their dispositions and character, modes of worship, and social organization. The Mercurians, for example, … do not tarry in one place, or among assemblies of the spirits of one system, but wander through the universe. The reason is that they have reference to the memory of things, which requires to be continually enriched; therefore it is granted them to wander about, and everywhere acquire knowledges. (Swedenborg 1962, 10) On Jupiter, however, life was more stable and communal, “distinguished into clans, families, and households, and that all live together with their own, separate from the others.” Jovians had no desires “to covet any of the goods of another, much less to obtain them by any artifice, and still less to attack and plunder them; this they consider a crime contrary to human nature, and horrible” (Swedenborg 1962, 23). This view aligned with Swedenborg’s view on earth’s human history, which held that in its primitive forms, social life was sharing and communal (Hawley 1937, 207–208). On Jupiter, worship was monotheistic and focused on

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FIGURE 4.2 

Series of Discourses on Christian Revelation (Chalmers ,1822).

the same God as on earth. They also knew “the One only Lord is Man … because in their earth He has been seen by many as a Man; and that He instructs them concerning the truth (veritas), preserves them, and gives eternal life to those who worship Him from good” (Swedenborg 1962, 33). Swedenborg’s American admirers included many social reformers, missionaries (including the famous John Chapman), and curious readers. In general terms,

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these were sympathetic to other antebellum reforms like anti-slavery, temperance, public education, and theological modernism. A few Swedenborgian communities, mostly German immigrants, attempted to build “New Jerusalems” on the basis of communal sharing. These included a New Church group in Ohio that joined an Owenite experiment in Yellow Springs and others that attempted communitarian townships in Iowa. The latter even signed a compact to live by the “doctrines … given to the world by Emanuel Swedenborg” (Hawley 1937, 219). All struggled to sustain their communal ideals for very long, however, undone (in Bestor’s accounts) by disputes over social rank and the relative value of skilled and unskilled labor (Bestor 1950, 211). Conclusions

To suggest outer space as a plenipotent muse for varied religious thought begets additional questions, most especially “Why did outer space step into this role in the religious imagination?” Arguably, a looming sense of anomie shadowed the new astronomy, especially its newfound sense of vastness. As early as the 17th century, philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, contemplating the new Copernican model of the universe, confessed, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me” (Pascal 1995, 73). Thus, some of the intellectual energies of this era can be seen as compensatory—imaginative “stretching out” that drew upon theological resources to populate these newly realized “empty” spaces with divine presences and intelligent beings. It is also helpful to look at Crowe’s conclusions to his sweeping survey (which goes from ancient times to the early 20th century). He finds interest in space and the possibility of life on other worlds grounded in three characteristics: “unfalsifiability, flexibility, and richness.” The first, borrowing from the philosophy of science of Karl Popper, suggests the “science” of outer space had an interesting imaginative advantage. While it was constantly extending its scope via better technologies, the vastness of its field limited the ability to bring full scrutiny, and the full measure of the reductive powers of scientific inquiry, to bear. Doubters of life on Mars or Jupiter or the outer reaches of the Milky Way always had to admit that their misgivings lacked full documentation. So too the flexibility could be built upon the “unknowns” of a wider vision of space and allowed for varied projections of what may lie there, outlined but as yet unresolvable in our telescopes. Chalmers put this eloquently, But why subject the dominions of the universe to the eye of man, or to the powers of his genius? Fancy may take its flight far beyond the ken of eye or of telescope. It may expatiate in the outer regions of all that is visible — and shall we have the boldness to say, that there is nothing there? … that the creative energy of God has sunk into repose, because the imagination is enfeebled by the magnitude of its efforts, … which sweep endlessly along, and merge into an awful and mysterious infinity? (Chalmers 1817, 42)

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Finally, the richness of outer space thinking can be seen across theological musings, antebellum reform ambitions, and utopian experimentation. Ironically, these were often motivated by very terrestrial concerns, such as apologetic rivalries or discontents about work, property, family structure, and sexuality. Deists and orthodox clergy alike found in outer space excellent opportunities to score theological points against their opponents. Alternative thinkers like Smith, Fourier, Swedenborg, and their admirers looked deep into space and found it signaling back the possibility of a new order of existence that might overcome the vices and injustices of earthly society. Like many other Americans of their era, emboldened by a sense of being new and novel, excited by the fecundity of frontiers and new technologies, they found outer space to be a bountiful and hopeful partner of the religious imagination. A “novus ordo seclorum” is envisioned in space as much as time. Works Cited Albanese, Catherine (2007). A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Beecher, Jonathan (1986). Charles Fourier: The Visionary in His World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bestor, Arthur (1950). Backwoods Utopias, The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America: 1663–1829. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boyle, Robert (1690). The Christian Virtuoso; Shewing, That by Being Addicted to Experimental Philosophy, a Man Is Rather Assisted, Than Indisposed, to Be a Good Christian. London, UK: Edw. Jones for John Taylor. Brooke, John L. (1994). The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Jon (1992). Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chalmers, Thomas (1817). A Series of Discourses on the Christian Revelation, Viewed in Connection with the Modern Astronomy. Glasgow, UK: John Smith and Son. Crowe, Michael (1986). The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Dick, Thomas (1838). Celestial Scenery, or The Wonders of the Planetary System Displayed; Illustrating the Perfections of Deity and a Plurality of Worlds. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers. Dick, Thomas (1844). Sidereal Heaven and Other Subjects Connected with Astronomy, as Illustrative of the Character of the Deity, and of an Infinity of Worlds. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers. Davis, Edward, and Michael Winship (2002). “Early Modern Protestantism.” In Science and Religion: An Historical Introduction, ed. Gary Ferngren, 123–125. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1850). Representative Men: Seven Lectures. Boston, MA: Phillips, Sampson & Company. Fourier, Charles (1846). “Cosmogony.” Translated by John S. Dwight. The Harbinger, vol. II, no. 1, December 13, 1845, 1, 23, 33, 52. Boston, MA: Redding and Company. Fourier, Charles (1996). The Theory of the Four Movements and of the General Destinies, ed. Gareth Jones and trans. Ian Patterson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Guarneri, Carl (1991). The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Haller, John, Jr. (2020). Swedenborg’s Principles of Usefulness: Social Reform Thought from the Enlightenment to American Pragmatism. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation. Hawley, Charles Arthur (1937). “Swedenborgianism and the Frontier.” Church History 6, 3: 203–222. Jaffee, David (1990). “The Village Enlightenment in New England, 1760–1820.” William and Mary Quarterly 47, 3: 327–346. Katsaros, Laure (2012). “A New World of Love.” Massachusetts Review 53, 3 (Autumn): 405–411. Newton, Isaac (1848). Newton’s Principia: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Andrew Motte. New York, NY: Daniel Adee. Paine, Thomas (2002). “The Age of Reason.” In The Extraterrestrial Life Debate: Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book, ed. Michael Crowe, 221–229. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Paley, Willam (1802). Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from Appearances in Nature. London, UK: R. Faulder. Pandora, Katherine (2009). “Popular Science in National and Transnational Perspectives: Suggestions for the American Context.” Isis 100, 2: 346–358. Pascal, Blaise (1995). Pensees and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi. New York, NY: ­Oxford University Press. Paul, Robert E. (1986). “Joseph Smith and the Plurality of Worlds Idea.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 19: 12–37. Smith, Joseph (1845). The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 3rd edn. Nauvoo, IL: John Taylor. Smith, Joseph (1851). The Pearl of Great Price, Being a Choice Selection from the Revelations, Translations, and Narrations of Joseph Smith. Liverpool, UK: F. D. Richards. Swedenborg, Emanuel (1962). Earths in Our Solar System. London, UK: Swedenborg Society Inc. Tocqueville, Alexis De (2000). Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Tomlin, T. J. (2014). A Divinity for All Persuasions: Almanacs and Early American Religious Life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Zochert, David (1976). “Science and the Common Man in Antebellum America.” In Science in America Since 1820, ed. Nathan Reingold, 7–32. New York, NY: Science History Publications.

5 “EVENT HORIZON” & “THE SPACE NDN’S STAR MAP” Lou Cornum

Event Horizon: Thinking about Space Demands New Ways of Thinking about Humanity1

The face that launched a thousand spaceships was the face of the Earth. The 1969 televised image of Earth as seen from Apollo 11 was a solidifying moment of national theater as Americans with television sets gathered around to confront and experience the possibilities of their country’s expansion. More than the lunar footprint, the eye of memory looks back toward a vision of Earth. From that first image on, the delicately suspended globe was supposed to be a lasting revelation— the “pale blue dot” that Carl Sagan described in the images of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. Sagan referred to Earth as such to illuminate the minor position of humans in the universe, to belittle the reckless folly of anything humans deign to call achievement or advancement. There is an unnoted irony in that the scientists who gather at the Carl Sagan Center, home to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), claim to be “conducting the most profound search in human history.” What Sagan spoke of could suggest a reordering of human hubris into a way to live as a species oriented toward mutually sustaining vulnerable life. The SETI Institute, in line with most contemporary interests in outer space, has chosen instead grand proclamations of discovery for the future of all-too-human humanity. The fragile, quivering mass of Earth is not in such concentrated focus as it was when those images from space first came to us. Cosmic scenes that captivate and circulate online are high-definition, high-quality images of very, very far away, usually made available directly from NASA. On Twitter, you could follow the last moments of the great content creator Cassini, which sent back pics DOI: 10.4324/9781003088264-7

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from its journey to the outer limits and then was thrown onto the surface of Saturn. One of my favorite accounts sends out close-up images of Martian textures, @BitsofMars. But on other accounts, in other stories, we see half the Earth burning, another part drowning. When we avert our gaze to outer space, it is all color-corrected wonder, blissfully bereft of context or history. As global disaster spreads and becomes more widely visible, missions to take humans to space become more prevalent and more appealing. Every time an exoplanet with a certain biological signature is noted, there’s a brief spike in press rekindling the idea that people might be able to start anew somewhere else. How many times a year do we see and perhaps circulate a story of some newly discovered Earth-like exoplanet? It’s not just the drive of wonder. It’s the panic. The panic of sitting on a world on fire, yes, but also the panic to make a profit. This is speculation; there is a return. There’s always a newer world waiting. *** In 1893, Frederick Turner announced the frontier of the American West closed. This suture in the flow of national expansion would be an originary wound for American democracy in its rugged rite of passage. Turner of course was wrong, as many historians have contended for decades. The frontier never closes. Not in California, not in the 19th century. If it isn’t the West, it’s the moon, then cyberspace, and then Mars. The frontiers do not close but rather lap over each other like waves where people and capital crash and flow. It seems cliché that the tech and space industries would be located primarily in the West. Silicon Valley could only ever have been in California, just as Spaceport America seemed manifestly destined for location outside the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. These Western territories have been continuously opened up for further privatization and expansion in world-warping acts of violence made invisible by the making of a supposedly better new world. It is not only that capitalism and colonialism need new spaces to expropriate; these processes also always require a future on which to speculate. At the precipice of one receding frontier, they find another one to ride. The word pioneer, usually attached to innovation, is never too far from people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. These men’s careers in tech startups, their origins in the digital commerce boom, and their pioneer identities were forged on the electronic frontier. Like pioneers of the industry in the colonial expansion of the Americas, these men operate on the knife’s edge of sovereignty as it cuts a path for both state and capital to consolidate power. In space, these men see a chance to loosen further the bonds that still restrain the endless capital they’ve been chasing in their imagined rocket ships. Investors, architects of the financial and material future, have taken to using the term “NewSpace” to refer to the

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almost accessible ventures of asteroid mining, space shipping, spaceship travel, and other forms of space commerce. Still, there are minor contractual obstacles. Even at the void’s edge, there is a treaty. A couple of treaties actually. Out there the governments still rely on these dusty remnants of the dying beast of nation-state sovereignty and the apparatuses of international relations first created to aid and abet the global distribution of white men’s control. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which has a more precise formal name—Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies—may seem surprisingly benevolent. It is sometimes summarized as saying that nobody can own space. But while it outlaws national appropriation, it allows incorporation without the state. In a demotion from the sensual feel of its phrasing, “celestial bodies” become the body politic, managed sites of bans and requirements. While the United States did sign the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, it did not sign the 1979 Moon Treaty, more formally known as the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. The Moon Treaty, among other directives, bans any state from claiming sovereignty over any territory of celestial bodies; bans any ownership of any extraterrestrial property by any organization or person, unless that organization is international and governmental; and requires an international regime be set up to ensure safe and orderly development and management of the resources and sharing of the benefits from them. It also bans military activity such as weapons testing or the founding of extraterrestrial military bases (though it’s hard to see US presence anywhere in the stars or on Earth as anything other than militaristic; see Deudney 2020). Evoking the common heritage of “mankind,” the Moon Treaty could appear as a pie-in-the-sky attempt at more equitable relations to land than have been established on Earth since the advent of private property and national borders. But it is of course expressed only in the stop-gap measure of treaties that assign power to states, governments, and resource-management regimes. The power of the treaty is in its possible revoking. In making the decision to sign the treaty or not sign the treaty, the collectives state their unquestioned right to make decisions in space at all. Space is a place where old and new sovereignties, like asteroids desired for mining, are colliding or sometimes colluding. There is a line connecting the Dutch East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company, and SpaceX. These companies begin as corporate endeavors, but then as now the nation-state is sticky: It finds a way to adhere. Take the case of Luxembourg, a polity that lives on tax loopholes (allowing large corporations to move money in and out of the nation with utmost secrecy and minimal charges) where, as Atossa Araxia Abrahamian reports for the Guardian, private space companies are finding their funding allies for financed trips to the moon, Mars, and the interstellar spots for satellites (2017). The mixing

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of business and research mixes the money and power hungering of technocrats who don’t just want to own businesses but want people to see their businesses as the shareholders of humanity’s future. *** In middle school we didn’t have a Model UN, but we did have a model Earth. For field trips, we’d be taken away to Biosphere 2, a site for space-colonization experiments built by Space Biosphere Ventures but owned by Columbia University by the time I visited. In these field trips to the desert outside a town auspiciously named Oracle, we walked around the display vivarium, always being reminded to call it Biosphere two—Biosphere one was the earth outside, the one we had momentarily left behind and one day might leave behind for good. That old planet was a past prototype. But the new prototype was itself already a defunct research facility. The closed-system experiment with human subjects had failed twice in the 1990s, and it now rests as one of the many dreams littering the desert of a new world. When a world is new, it creates alongside a space held for the older worlds. This is the drama between what can be brought from before and what will be made anew. It is why Aeneas carried his dying father Anchises on his shoulders out of Troy on his way to found Rome. The traveler always brings baggage. Jeff Bezos would like to be the one who carries that baggage to space or controls the robots and poorly paid temporary laborers who accomplish the carrying. In this supposedly new space, the regimes of inequality will be quite familiar. The space-goers insist it is something called humanity, with the ingrained hierarchical legacies of this category, that will be going. Leaders in the industry who have always wanted to be world leaders are now positioning themselves as leaders of outer worlds. Elon Musk makes union busting seem like a cosmic necessity for the continuation of human life. The material and subsequent cultural valorization of certain kinds of work in the tech industry, wherein the “great minds” make all the money and those who maintain the machinery of day-to-day existence are treated like the shit they’re supposed to take, does not end at the stratosphere. Even the more lofty moral considerations of outer-space ethics (e.g., is terraforming ever morally acceptable?) often ignore their fundamental basis in deathly processes still very much situated on Earth. Any outer-space endeavor today or in the near future will be an extension of the life-destroying capacities of capitalists and their colonial countries. On the Deep Space Industries page for asteroid mining, the exploitation and extraction of minerals are heralded as “an unlimited future for all mankind.”2 The endless extension of capitalist accumulation comes with an extension of this delusion of “all mankind.” As if all such projects, the project of humanity itself, have not always been an exclusionary one.

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SETI may appear to inhabit a different realm of speculation than that of the grandstanding services-and-commodities pioneers. But its project also follows a willful ignorance about human history and the exclusions that make humanity as a class possible. SETI proponents, much like Musk and his ilk, view themselves at the forefront of a new breakthrough not necessarily of capital but of knowledge. Their sites of expansion are not centered so much on the territories capital requires in order to enclose, privatize, and extract until depletion (though they can be intimately connected, as in the development of the university and research centers as global actors of dispossession), but on sites of encounter. Outer-space commerce and funded extraterrestrial contact-seekers operate on and reinforce damaging notions of land, life, and the future that actually hinder the survival of most Earth dwellers rather than provide anything like meaningful hope (e.g., see Hill 1994). *** Stories of contact are only ever understood as colonial stories. Every inquiry of future contact with extraterrestrial life, from academic and government-funded to amateur and whimsical, relies on the same stale comparisons of colonial conquest. Columbus, of course; Captain James Cook, often. Every episode of the podcast Making New Worlds features historical authorities commenting on colonial situations of the past and comparing them to hypothetical situations with extraterrestrials. The topics convened by those who are granted the authority to speak on them are conducted under the tyranny of certain givens, the most persistent and damning of them being contact as conquest. Science fiction should allow us some way to bend around these frames, and occasionally, in the right hands, it does, though it more often does not. Donna Haraway, whose work takes on the tones of science fiction, sees the science fiction tradition as a form of theorizing. She repeats across her different writings that “it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with” (see 2016, 118). And while I do not take her up on thinking with the “chthulucene” (an epoche in which environmental refugees will come together [Haraway 2016]), I do come to science fiction in a similar way, to think through the science and the fictions that constitute our realities. I want science fiction that doesn’t make heroes of pioneers and that leaves space open for other kinds of speculation. If the villains of my space saga operate on the understanding that there is always a newer world, how do we tell a different story? A different approach to the new, a different understanding of different. What we should be preparing for in outer space is not sameness on a different scale, the neatly reflected sides of an analogy, but refracted difference. What is the life in the search for extraterrestrial life? Astrobiologists, like those who study extreme forms of life in deserts like the Southwest in preparation for Martian ecosystems, are searching for the translatable other. Nathalie Cabrol from the

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SETI institute says that the question astrobiologists ask is the question of difference: How to approach a different type or version of the life. Yet in movies like Arrival, I’m disappointed with the limits of alien imagination and the clichés about language and conquest. In the short story by Ted Chiang that Arrival is based on, “Story of Your Life” (2002), the aliens are not large octopuses but heptapods whose radially symmetrical bodies are like seven-eyed barrels hovering “suspended at the intersection” of seven fluid-moving limbs. The most interesting thing about their description is that it is so hard to picture. Unfortunately, only two pages into the story, the linguist narrator draws on a made-up account of linguistic confusion between Captain Cook and indigenous inhabitants of current-day Australia, making a seemingly necessary gesture to the anxiety that extraterrestrial intelligence will always inhabit the position of the colonizer. The story is never different enough. We can’t always see difference differently enough. And yet there are times we get a glimpse of what that different difference might be. On scales from a parasitic romance to multi-generational future epic, Octavia Butler wrote about multiple worlds of a time after Earth as we know it, when human survival seems dependent on adapting to and becoming alien. The short story “Bloodchild” (1984) and the three-part trilogy Lilith’s Brood (2000; which I will refer to hereafter by its original title, Xenogenesis, which is both more badass and more accurate) are texts about the transformations and exchanges that precipitate the post-human. Though these stories are far from utopic, Butler also emphasizes that the story of post-Earth humans would not be “the British Empire in space.” She envisions contact as a moment of exchange. In “Bloodchild,” this is not without loss and unequal stances of power, but there is also love of a different kind between an insectoid and the host to whom she feeds subduing eggs. All this beautiful bug being asks in return for otherworldly hospitality is that her beloved open himself up to implantation of eggs that, if not removed promptly through a torso-wide incision upon birth, will proceed to eat through his flesh. “Who knows what we humans have that others might be willing to take in trade for a livable space on a world not our own?” *** Land and life are the categories of thought that outer space can call us to interrogate, to repair not only by some future metric of what has never been done but also by what might have been possible had colonialism not happened as it did, if exploration and contact could have happened in another way. These are the what-ifs of a science fiction that turns away from the frontier to other spaces of transformation and invention. These are stories that do not call for a future for humanity but a time and people co-constituted according to different logics, those of interdependent collective living in the now.

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In Butler’s Xenogenesis series, the Oankali are a technologically superior race that also embody and enact what has previously been considered primitive on Earth. On their ship-world, for instance, they live across a different division of animate and inanimate in which the ship is capable of remarkable acts of generation and sustainability, not because of machine learning but because it is itself a living, reproducing creature-thing. The Oankali are the mouthpiece for Butler’s idea that humans have a social tendency to create hierarchies so entrenched in inequality and domination that they result in mass war, and that this hierarchical tendency is genetic. It is with a similar cynicism that the narrator of Joanna Russ’ 1977 novel We Who Are About To… decides it is best to kill herself and her fellow crew members rather than try to continue human life on a crash-landed planet. While I love these texts and find myself often in their fatalism, I also see their potential to guide us to change before we are killed off by the will to death and domination practiced by those who have been in power for far too long. I see sequels to these works in which our species learns or relearns the need for different needs. In these other stories, the alien is not the harbinger of doom but all the tense dynamic potential of the encounter. A face turned toward the landscapes of Arizona or New Mexico is always about to say, “It looks like Mars” (see Figure 5.1). All that red rock and the surprisingly organic shapes the sandstone makes. The seeming inhospitality of the afternoon desert. It all signals the alien, but it is certainly not alien to the people who live

FIGURE 5.1  Earth

or Mars? Monument Valley in Navajo Country, Arizona, from low-Earth orbit. (NASA.)

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in these landscapes. And yet Navajo filmmaker Nanobah Becker used footage of Monument Valley to represent Mars in her sci-fi short film The 6th World (2012). What is in part the cleverness of low-budget filmmaking is also an act of un-alienation that creates a sympathy between ancestral Navajo territory and a Navajo novum on Mars. In Becker’s film, indigeneity is not only defined by prior occupancy but, more important, by a set of practices that attune to difference but are not incapable of making a home in the alien. To go to outer space, rather than preserve humanity, we cannot stay human. Any critique of the human, including mine, is hugely indebted to Black studies, a site that contends that the development of the figure of the human is inseparable from the racial orders that classify people as human, not quite human, and nonhuman wherein human is always proximity to whiteness and nonhuman is proximity to blackness. This is what Alexander Weheliye has argued in his book Habeas Viscus (2014), drawing from Black feminist critique to rouse all other minoritarian subjects to abandon our bids into the human project and refuse the calculus that grants others personhood always at the cost of further exclusion and violence against black people. The Jamaican philosopher, novelist, and playwright Sylvia Wynter has stated that one of the projects of Black studies is an inquiry into and enactment of other ways of being a species, ways counter to the form of human that is taken to mean the Enlightenment’s rational man. This is a refutation of the idea of the human as a self-possessed sovereign being, defined by his ability to possess and improve property. When I think of how else humans could be, this means operating under different modes of production and different relations to land and being that are communist, nonhierarchical, and deeply pleasurable. Returning to the late 1960s and that first view of the world from the outside, I consider the failure of vulnerable Earth’s image to enact planetary action against borders, war. But if the extra-industrialists have their sights and sites on the celestial bodies, and if this Earth will soon be flooded and inflamed, those routinely exiled from the class of humanity that space exploration is in service of need our own space programs, and with it, a deprogramming of the human. Outer space gives us a place to socially, sensorially, think how we want to think. If the search for an “out there” does truly prompt a shift in consciousness, it should be one that helps us inhabit the present, to study together on Biosphere one until we find another way of living that doesn’t leave so many dead. This is not a statement against outer space or exploration. What I want, what I need, is a space program for the people. The Space NDN’s Star Map3: The Creation Story Is a Spaceship

The first time I saw a space NDN4 was in The 6th World, a short film by Diné director Nanobah Becker that extends the Diné creation story into outer space, where humanity’s future is made possible through ancestral corn crops on Mars.5 The movie was released in 2012, and the same year Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of

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Indigenous Science Fiction was published, the first-ever anthology of its kind (Dillon 2012). This was the official inauguration of indigenous futurism. The movement is in part about speaking back to the science fiction genre, which has long used indigenous subjects as the foils to stories of white space explorers hungry to conquer new worlds. Given these continuously rehashed narratives of “the final frontier,” it is no coincidence that Western science fiction developed during a time of imperial and capitalist expansion. Science/speculative fiction author Nalo Hopkinson, known for her use of creole languages and Caribbean oral stories in her works, writes that people of color engaging with science fiction “take the meme of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with humor and also, with love and respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things” (Hopkinson 2004, 9). Perhaps because science fiction is so prone to reproducing colonial desires, it has become seductive to the “colonizee” who finds pleasure and power in reversing the telescope’s gaze of who is exploring who. This reversal is no mere trick, though. It is a profound deconstruction of how we imagine time, progress, and who is worthy of the future. Following in the rocket trails of black authors such as Hopkinson, the space NDN is also in a long tradition of NDN interstellar exploration, using technologies such as creation stories and ceremony as her means of travel. For some, she is a startling and unsettling figure. As Philip Deloria argues in Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), settlers are upset and confused when the seemingly contrasting symbolic systems of indigeneity and high-tech modernity are put in dialogue, as demonstrated in the shocked reactions to a 1904 photograph of Geronimo in a Cadillac.6 This estrangement arises from “a long tradition that has tended to separate Indian people from the contemporary world and from recognition of the possibility of Indian autonomy in the world.” In the colonial imaginary, indigenous life is not only separate from the present time but also out of place in the future, a time defined by the progress of distinctively Western technology. If colonial society cannot accept Geronimo in a Cadillac, it can hardly conceive of him in a spaceship. The Indian in space seeks to feel at home to undo her perceived strangeness by asking: Why can’t indigenous peoples also project ourselves among the stars? Might our collective visions of the cosmos forge better relationships here on Earth and in the present than colonial visions of a final frontier? Many of the ideas deemed strange or newfangled in Western sci-fi come naturally to the space NDN. The all-pervasive “force” or similarly the super brain connecting all beings. The animism and agency of cyborgs, AI systems, and other nonhuman people. Alternate dimensions and understandings of nonlinear time. These are things the space NDN knows intuitively. This is not the future but historical knowledge. The future is reclaiming these technologies not for domination but for new organizations aimed at better worlds. I am reminded of Octavia

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Butler’s words, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” Instead of imagining a future in bleak cities made from steel and glass teeming with alienated white masses shuffling under an inescapable electronic glow, indigenous futurists think of earthen spacecrafts helmed by black and brown women with advanced knowledge of land, plants, and language. Indigenous futurism seeks to challenge notions of what constitutes advanced technology and consequently advanced civilizations. As settler colonial governments continue to demand more and more from the Earth, indigenous peoples seek the sovereign space and freedom to heal from these apocalyptic processes. Extractive and exploitative endeavors are just one mark of the settler death drive, which indigenous futurism seeks to overcome by imagining different ways of relating to notions of progress and civilization. Advanced technologies are not finely tuned mechanisms of endless destruction. Advanced technologies should foster and improve human relationships with the nonhuman world. In many indigenous science fiction tales of the futures, technology is presented as in dialogue with the long traditions of the past, rather than representing the past’s overcoming. In the recent iteration of the constantly repackaged tale of white men planting flags in space, Interstellar’s all-American space boy Matthew McConaughey stares into the distance and announces, “We are explorers, pioneers, not caretakers” (2014). As if one cannot be both an explorer and a caretaker … For the space NDN the two roles are intertwined. The advanced technology of the space NDN does not separate technical from natural knowledge. Technology is not divorced from or forced upon land but develops in relation to lands and the many beings land supports. The space NDN’s disavowal of Western progress makes clear the difference between indigenous futurism and early 20th-century forms of futurism, which were compatible with the interests of fascist and oppressive governments. Unlike those futurists, who were in an antagonistic relation with their literary and cultural predecessors, indigenous futurism is centered on bringing traditions to distant, future locations rather than abandoning them as relics. Indigenous futurism does not care for speed so much as sustainability, not so much for progress as balance, and not power but relation. God is the Red Planet

For many, the image of the Indian in space is jarring not just because of the settler perception of indigeneity as antithetical to high-tech modernity, but because Indian identity is tied so directly to specific earthly territories. What happens to indigeneity when the indigenous subject is no longer in the location that has defined them? This is not just a question of outer space. Already the majority of Native people in the United States and Canada live in cities away from their traditional territories. Of course, at one point these places would also have been viewed as indigenous territories. While many nations have worked very hard to

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dispel the notion of nomadic Indian tribes, there is a history of movement among many of our peoples. Colonial forms such as reserves, reservations, nation-states, and borders have made these traditions of movement nearly impossible. And the need to defend our rights to live on our lands without harassment has created the political necessity of claiming our land-based political and cultural identities. But land based does not have to mean landlocked. This insistence on indigenous people having to always be located on or closely connected to one particular area also erases those who are unable to return to their traditional territories, such as Mohawk women who are kicked out of their tribe for marrying non-Mohawk men or Afro-Indigenous people stolen from their lands. There is also the simple fact that NDNs may want to move around. There’s an old cliché that every Indian story is about going home. But what about the Indians who can’t go home, or simply want to go away? I sometimes describe myself as a diasporic Diné in order to bring the often-disparate ideas of indigeneity and movement into closer proximity. Those we consider diasporic are often violently robbed of their indigeneity and those we consider indigenous are often on the move. The space NDN looks into the void and knows still who they are. Nanobah Becker shot the Mars scenes in The 6th World in Monument Valley, one of the sacred territories of the Diné. The red rock canyons and cliffs make a convincing Martian backdrop. They also offer a symbol of dynamic sacredness. These distant lands are connected. Just because the Diné have not lived on Mars since time immemorial, it does not mean our plants and teachings cannot take root there. I am reminded of the time before a ceremony on a college campus when we washed our hands in a drinking fountain. I am reminded of Betonie, the medicine man in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977), who makes medicine bundles from trash heaps. I am reminded of pow-wow regalia ornamented with semiconductors. I am reminded of the descendants of slaves telling and retelling their stories on new, bloody ground. Finding ourselves in new contexts, we are always adapting, always surviving. This is the seed of many indigenous technologies: the ability to continue and sustain ourselves against all odds (e.g., see Dunbar 2016). The challenge of the space NDN is how to apply knowledge of the worlds toward nondestructive ends. Any form of travel or exploration comes with the dangers of exploitation and upheaval. Nobody knows this better than the inhabitants of those places constantly divvied up between colonial nation-states. The figure of the space NDN is not an attempt to simply put an indigenous face on the outer space colonizer. Indigenous futurist narratives try to enact contact differently. Not all encounters with the other must end in conquest, genocide, or violence. The space NDN seeks new models of interaction. We do not travel to the distant reaches of space in order to plant our flags or act under the assumption that every planet in our sights is a terra nullius waiting for the first human footprint to mark its surface. Robert Sullivan’s poem “Star Waka” (1999) captures the complexities of indigenous space travel. Waka is the Maori term for a canoe and Sullivan’s epic

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poem relates the journey of this star waka to outer planets to find new homes for the Maori people. The crew of the ship wonder how their prayers will work in the cold vastness of the stars and how they can approach these distant worlds in a good way. The Indian in space does not abandon their home, their people, or their teachings. Dynamic traditions, themselves a type of advanced technology, help the space NDN to understand how to foster the kind of relationships that make futures possible. All our interstellar relations

For indigenous futurism, technology is inextricable from the social. Human societies are part of a network of wider relationships with objects, animals, geological formations, and so on. To grasp our relationship with the nonhuman world here on Earth, we must also extend our understanding of how Earth relates to the entirety of the cosmos. We live on just one among millions of planets, each an intricate and delicate system within a larger, increasingly complex structure. For the indigenous futurist endeavor, striving to understand the ever-multiplying connections linking us to the beginning of the universe and its constant expansion also entails unraveling the intricate relations that make up our Earthly existence. Zainab Amadahy, who identifies as a person of mixed black, Cherokee, and European ancestry, grounds her writing practice in illuminating and understanding networks of relationships: “I aspire to write in a way that views possible alternatives through the lens of a relationship framework, where I can demonstrate our connectivity to and interdependence with each other and the rest of our Relations” (quoted in Dillon 2012, 172). Her 1997 novel The Moons of Palmares examines the relationships, both harmful and collaborative, between indigenous peoples and descendants of slaves in an outer space setting that merges histories of the Black Atlantic with the colonial frontier. In a provocative bit of plotting, she casts an indigenous character, Major Eaglefeather, as an oppressive foreign force in the lives of an outer space labor population that has shaped its society in remembrance of black slave resistance in North/South America and the Caribbean. The story follows Major Eaglefeather’s decision to reject his ties to the corporate state and support a rebel group of laborers. The name Palmares is taken from a real-world settlement founded by escaped slaves in 17th-century Brazil, which is also known to have incorporated indigenous peoples and some poor, disenfranchised whites. In a chronicle written in the late 17th century, these quilombos are described as networks of settlements that lived off the land and were supplemented by raids on the slave plantations where the inhabitants were formerly held. It is said that in Palmares the king was called Gangasuma, a hybrid term meaning “great lord” composed of the Angolan or Bandu word ganga and the Tupi word assu. The word succinctly captures the mixture of cultures that banded together in Palmares to live together on the margins of a colonialist, slave-holding society. While Palmares was eventually destroyed in a military campaign, it lives on as

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a legend of slave rebellion and the utopian possibility that Amadahy finds well suited for her outer space story about collaborative resistance to state power and harmful resource extraction processes.7 Outer space, perhaps because of its appeal to our sense of endless possibility, has become the imaginative site for re-envisioning how black, indigenous, and other oppressed people can relate to each other outside of and despite the colonial gaze. Amadahy’s work is crucial for a critical understanding of the space NDN. The space NDN cannot allow himself or herself to fall into the patterns of domination and kyriarchy that have for too long prevailed here on Earth as well as speculative narratives of outer space. Afrofuturists have looked to space as the site for black separatism and liberation. If the space NDN is truly committed to being responsible to all our relations, it is imperative for our futurist vision to be in solidarity with and service to our fellow Afrofuturist space travelers. Our collective refusal of colonial progress (namely, our destruction) means we must chart other ways to the future that lead us and other oppressed peoples to the worlds we deserve. The Moons of Palmares works toward this end by revealing the strong connections between indigenous and black histories, narratives, and ways of living. Indigenous futurism is indebted to Afrofuturism: Both forms of futurism explore spaces and times outside the control of colonial powers and white supremacy. These alternative conceptions of time reject the notion that all tradition is regressive by narrating futures intimately connected to the past. Science fiction and specifically the site of outer space give writers and thinkers the imaginative room to envision political and cultural relationships and the future decolonizing movements they might nourish. This focus on the relationship, especially as posited by Amadahy, also accounts for those forms of indigeneity that persist among peoples either stolen from their lands or whose lands have been stolen from them. As the writer Sydette Harry recently posted on Twitter, “Black people are displaced indigenous people.” However, because of the processes of forced relocation and slavery and continuing anti-black racism, black people are often denied claims to indigeneity. There is also a pernicious erasure of black NDNs in America and Canada. In exploring outer space, black authors are also able to assert their own relationship to land both on Earth and in the cosmos. The Black Land Project (BLP), while not an explicitly futurist organization, fosters the kind of relationships to land on Earth that futurist authors and thinkers envision in outer space. In a recent podcast, Blacktracking through Afrofuturism, BLP founder and director Mistinguette Smith discusses how walking over the routes of the Underground Railroad brought forth alternate dimensions and understandings of time outside the settler paradigm of ownership. These are aspects relating to land that the Afrofuturist and the space NDN (identities which can exist in the same person) bring with them on their travels. This focus on the relationship rather than a strict idea of location speaks to the way in which the space NDN can remain secure in their indigenous identity even while rocketing through dark skies far from their origins. This is not to demean

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the work of land protectors and defenders who risk serious repercussions for resisting corporate and state encroachment on indigenous territories. The space NDN supports those who are able and choose to remain on the land, while also hoping to broaden understandings of indigeneity outside simple locations. Locations of course are never simple. It is the settler who wishes to flatten the relation between place and people by claiming land through ownership. Projecting themselves forward into faraway lands and times, the space NDN reveals the myriad ways of relating to land beyond property. Notes 1 This article was originally printed in Real Life magazine [available online: ] on 12 March 2018 and is used with permission. 2 EDITORS: By the time this chapter was being prepared for republication; Deep Space Industries had been purchased by the Bradford Space Group in 2019. 3 This article was originally printed in The New Inquiry magazine [available online: ] on 26 January 2015 and is used with permission. 4 “NDN” is a shorthand self-descriptor, mostly used on social media within North American indigenous discussions, to mean “Indian.” It can also be used as an acronym for “Non-Dead Native,” a reference to US General Philip Sheridan’s extermination policy: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” It is generally frowned upon for nonnatives to use this shorthand, as it is an in-group term for digital communication, such as #NDN, NDN Country, NDN Rights, etc., deployed within text communications and other indigenously defined digital spaces and communities. 5 The film can be seen in its entirety online at The 7th Matrix: 6 For the backstory of the photo, “Geronimo in a Cadillac,” see Katerberg (2015) and the Geronimo biographies of Utely (2012) and Debo (1976). 7 For a history of Palmares, see Cheney (2014).

Works Cited Abrahamian, Atossa Araxia (2017). “How a Tax Haven Is Leading the Race to Privatise Space.” Guardian (15 September); available online: (accessed 24 October 2022). Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (1979). U.N.G.A. Res. 34/68 (5 December); available online: ; (accessed 2 November 2022). Amadahy, Zainab (1997). The Moons of Palmares. Toronto, ON: Sister Vision. Butler, Octavia E. (1984). “Bloodchild.” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine ( June): 34–55. Butler, Octavia E. (2000). Lilith’s Brood. New York, NY: Aspect/Warner Books. [Originally published as Xenogenesis (1989), Guild America Books.] Cheney, Glenn Alan (2014). Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil’s Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves. Hanover, CT: New London Librarium. Chiang, Ted (2002). “Story of Your Life.” In Stories of Your Life and Others, ed. Ted Chiang, 91–145. New York, NY: Penguin.

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Debo, Angie (1976). Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Deloria, Philip J. (2004). Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Deudney, Daniel (2020). Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Dillon, Grace L., ed. (2012). Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Dunbar, Meghan French (2016). “The Native-Owned Power Company Bringing ­Sustainable Energy to the Pine Ridge Reservation.” SOCAP Global (5 March); available online: (accessed 11 December 2022). Haraway, Donna J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hill, Jack (1994). “Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?” New York Times (29 May): SM36. Hopkinson, Nalo (2004). “Introduction.” In So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, eds. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, 7–9. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press. Interstellar (2014). Dir. Christopher Nolan. Paramount Pictures. Katerberg, Will (2015). “What’s in a Picture?” Historical Horizons (18 December); available online: (accessed 4 December 2022). Russ, Joanna (1977). We Who Are About To… Boston, MA: Gregg Press. Silko, Leslie Marmon (1977). Ceremony. New York, NY: Viking Press Sullivan, Robert (1999). Star Waka. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press. Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (1967). U.N.G.A. Res. 21/2222 (19 December); available online: ; (accessed 2 November 2022). Utely, Robert M. (2012). Geronimo. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weheliye, Alxander G. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

PART II

Religious Imaginings of Outer Space

6 WHEN FAITH IS OUT OF THIS WORLD Exploring the Religious Imagination through Science Fiction Douglas E. Cowan

What happens to Ferengi when they die? Intended originally as a Federation adversary to rival the Klingon Empire, the Ferengi Alliance was introduced in early episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but assumed a more prominent role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Although the Ferengi often take the stage as comic relief, their various plot lines (not to mention their devious plotting) remain among the latter series’ most popular narratives and the Ferengi themselves are fan favorites throughout the Star Trek multiverse. Rather than Klingon love of combat and the bloody honor of dying in battle, Ferengi culture is built on trade, commerce, and interstellar wheeling and dealing. On the homeworld, Ferenginar, life is guided in all respects by the Rules of Acquisition, which both “structure Ferengi society” and “govern relationships within and without the Ferengi Alliance” (Cowan 2010, 142). The Rules, though many, are simple: all Ferengi are judged—in this life and the next—according to the accumulation of profit. Indeed, “for a Ferengi, commerce is religion: the Rules are his sacred text, acquisition his ultimate concern, his quest for transcendence mediated only by profit and loss” (Cowan 2010, 146; see 142–48). So, what happens to Ferengi when they die? In the fourth-season DS9 episode “Little Green Men,” warp core failure and “temporal flux” have thrown the series’ three main Ferengi characters— DS9’s barkeep and resident black marketeer, Quark (Armin Shimerman), his tremulous brother Rom (Max Grodénchik), and precocious nephew Nog (Aron ­Eisenberg)—across the Alpha Quadrant to an army airfield outside Roswell, New Mexico, and back in time to just after the Second World War (Conway 1995). This, of course, is screenwriters Ira Behr and Robert Wolfe’s homage to the famous 1947 incident that established Roswell as one of two epicenters of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003088264-9

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don’t think we’re in … the other place?” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993)

FIGURE 6.1 “You

American UFO subculture (the other being Rachel, Nevada). Coming to in the base infirmary, the Ferengi are not unreasonably confused by their surroundings and quickly begin blaming each other for their predicament. At one point, Nog wonders if they have actually died and if this is the Divine Treasury, the Ferengi afterlife. “Don’t be ridiculous!” Quark says, looking aghast at the olive drab surroundings. “The Divine Treasury is made of pure latinum,” the most precious commodity in the Ferengi economy. “Besides,” he continues, “where is the Blessed Exchequer? Where are the Celestial Auctioneers, and why aren’t we bidding for our new lives, hmmm?” (Conway 1995). “You don’t think we’re in … the other place?” whispers Rom. “The Vault of Eternal Destitution?” Nog asks, his eyes wide. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Quark repeats. “The bar was showing a profit!” (Conway 1995; see Figure 6.1). Thus, as I wrote in Sacred Space: When Ferengi die, their place in the afterlife is determined by the profit the Rules allowed them to accumulate in life. Paying his bribe to the Registrar upon his arrival at the gates of the Divine Treasury, a deceased Ferengi presents his lifetime profit-and-loss statement to the Blessed Exchequer and, in a kind of posthumous audit, is assessed on how well he followed the Rules of Acquisition. Those who show sufficient profit hope to enter the latinum precincts of the Ferengi heaven; those in a loss position go … elsewhere. (Cowan 2010, 146) Now, it would be easy to read an episode like “Little Green Men” as nothing more than a light interlude set among the pressing concerns of Deep Space Nine’s larger narrative arcs, or, as some critics do, dismiss the Ferengi themselves as

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“boorish” and “culturally parochial,” forever indentured to religious beliefs that “[mirror] their culture’s narrow preoccupation with business and profit” (Wagner and Lundeen 1998, 37). This would be a mistake, however, and implies little more than the provincial horizons of one’s own limited imagination. After all, consider the number of explicitly religious concepts embodied in just this one scene, and how much we learn from it about the nature of Ferengi beliefs. We learn, for example, that they do believe in an afterlife and have a culturally specific understanding that what we experience here is not the end but continues after death. Setting aside the particularities of pantheon, doctrine, and ritual, this is, arguably, the sine qua non of the religious imagination itself. A species-wide awareness of death awakens what we have come to know as the religious impulse (see Cowan 2018, 63–87). In the Ferengi case, this impulse means some manner of negotiated reincarnation. While others may not recognize the Blessed Exchequer as “God,” per se, he is clearly the higher power to whom Ferengi pray, and who is attended by a court of lesser deities (the Celestial Auctioneers). Taken together, we learn that Ferengi believe in an ongoing correspondence between this life and the next, a relationship which is mediated through these divinities and brokered according to particular beliefs, rituals, and mandates. Indeed, another way of putting this, as psychologist and philosopher William James did in his classic text, The Varieties of Religious Experience, is that the Ferengi believe “that there is an unseen order” and that their “supreme good lies in harmonious adjustment thereto” ([1902] 1999, 61). Quark, May I Introduce William James?

Obviously, when James presented his Gifford Lectures at the turn of the twentieth century, he was not referring to fictional extraterrestrials set in a late-century televised space opera. Rather, he proffered a definition which he felt could include as many different varieties of religious experience as possible, while excluding as few potential examples as strictly necessary, and, most importantly, avoiding any need to adjudicate between them. Among other things, his definition—that “the life of religion … consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmonious adjustment thereto” ( James [1902] 1999, 61)—highlights the reality that how we define religion determines, regulates, and ultimately controls what we are willing to count as religion. For that reason, his definition proves especially useful as a way of looking at religious traditions different from our own, whether we find them on Earth or in outer space. While I have discussed these advantages in more detail elsewhere (Cowan 2018, 41–42; 2021, 8–11), three aspects are particularly helpful when exploring religion and science fiction. First, James’s definition posits only the belief that there is “an unseen order,” but specifies it no more closely than that. It does not say in what that “unseen order” consists or what it entails upon those who believe in it. This deliberate ambiguity obviates the need for gods, especially a god or the god, when

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considering how to define something as religious. It says nothing more than that ‘this is not all there is.’ On the other hand, where some form of divine pantheon is present, whether nonbelievers consider them ‘gods’ or not becomes irrelevant. A number of different narrative arcs in Deep Space Nine, for example, explicitly turn on the question of divinity and perspective (Cowan 2010, 141–170). The Bajorans revere the timeless beings who exist in the stable wormhole between the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants as “the Prophets”—“They’re our gods,” says one character to another (Burton 1997)—while to almost all others they are simply “wormhole aliens.” The Vorta and the Jem’Hadar, on the other hand, are species that have been genetically modified to revere the Founders, a liquid life-form indigenous to the Gamma Quadrant, as gods, and neither could imagine any other possibility—despite the fact that both are aware of their circumstance. This leads to the next advantage of James’s definition: there is no need to discuss the authenticity of a religion, whether historical or fictional, in order to explore how it discloses the religious imagination at work. Popular culture, especially science fiction, horror, and fantasy, often demonstrates this imagination at work in real time, as it were, and James’s definition implies that assessing the reality of this god or that, evaluating the efficacy of one ritual over another, is a fool’s errand at best. Far more important is exploring the lived effect of belief and practice in the lives of these beings—whether they live across the street from us or across the limitless gulfs of outer space. As Bajoran liaison officer Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) says to Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) when he arrives on DS9 in the series pilot, “Our religion is the only thing that holds my people together” in the wake of their brutal occupation by the Cardassian Empire (Carson 1993). Although easy to overlook, small details such as this brief bit of dialogue are important because in the rush to find out what happens in a larger narrative, we often miss what is actually happening in the story. However they have been memorialized over time, bound by doctrine, ritual, and sacred text, and whether adherents insist on their literal truth or not, all religious traditions are the product of story and storytelling. And, rather than get caught up in adjudicating theological difference and faith-based minutiae, remembering religion’s fundamental grounding in story frees us to ask deeper questions about the nature of the stories that are told, the effects they have on the people who tell them, and the potential meanings they may open up for us. Not unlike any number of unfamiliar religious traditions on Earth, for example, simply because we do not believe in “Ferengi fairy tales,” as another character puts it (Posey 1998), does not mean that their religious beliefs lack an internal cultural consistency and a clear theological rationale; just because we cannot appreciate their rituals does not render them meaningless in their extraterrestrial context; and just because we do not recognize in the Blessed Exchequer, the Celestial Auctioneers, or the Rules of Acquisition elements of religious belief and practice familiar to us does not mean that we have nothing to learn from Ferengi faith.

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Indeed, even a brief historical survey discloses how often this precise kind of anthropological parochialism has marked the interaction between different religious cultures on our own planet. Finally, James’s definition allows us to conceive of religions apart from their appearance in the ‘real’ world and opens up the religious imagination without the need to ensure some superficial correlation between the religious beliefs of an alien race and traditions as they exist—or are imagined to exist—right now on Earth. Certainly, the extraordinary range and variety of human religious experience suggest that religions that are out of this world can—and often will—reflect those on our world. But they don’t have to, and that’s the point. Many religious traditions, for example, maintain some form of moral or spiritual profit-and-loss accounting and operate on the basis of divinely mandated rewards or punishments. Economic bases for religious practice ranging from the Roman Catholic sale of indulgences to the Protestant “prosperity gospel” and price lists for Hindu puja (ceremonies) are found around the globe, but that doesn’t mean that religion in science fiction “must correlate in some way to religion in the real world, as though religion as we commonly encounter it on the street or in the pews provides a necessary limit-case for consideration of the religious imagination” (Cowan 2021, 11). The Great “What if…?”

Bearing all this in mind, if nothing else picturing Ferengi faith encourages us to imagine what religion might look like when it is, literally, out of this world, when the great “What if…?” of science fiction turns its attention to problems of ultimate concern, divine providence, and “the unseen order.” Because, whether implicitly or explicitly, in its guise as so-called “hard sf ” or as sociological speculation, whether as a horror or fantasy hybrid, and whether set in familiar surroundings or on “strange new worlds” among “new civilizations,” “What if…?” underpins every science fiction story ever told, every exploration of who we are, what we might become, and who we might encounter along the way. What if a robot set out on an interplanetary journey to research its doctoral thesis on the nature of comedy and to attempt a mathematical representation of humor, a human impulse certainly no less mysterious than the religious (Idle 1999; see also Heinlein 1966)? What if our robot creations return one day to confront us with their own gods and their own questions about mortality, resurrection, and the nature of the Divine? (Moore and Eick 2004–2008; Cowan 2010, 225–260). What if a host of alien civilizations come together on a remote space station to share their various religious beliefs, practices, and rituals ( Johnston 1994; Cowan 2010, 197–224)? What if our first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization provokes both religious euphoria and hysteria, both skepticism and fanaticism (Sagan 1985; Cowan 2010, 71–104)? What if it forces a reevaluation

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of everything we thought we knew about the universe (Lee 1995, 1999), or appears as the worst of our terrestrial religious imaginings (Clarke 1953)? What if it is so utterly unlike anything we could imagine that we struggle to understand even its most basic aspects and fundamental implications (Dick 1970, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1985)? In terms of the intersection of religion and science fiction, what if … what if … what if … really is limited only by the horizons of our imagination. Indeed, to return to the Star Trek multiverse, what if a television franchise used science fiction to explore a variety of different models for understanding death, the alpha and the omega of the religious imagination, the ur-question nagging at our species’ deepest fears and underpinning our most ardent hopes? In the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Emanations,” for example, the crew encounter a society that has ritualized euthanasia—not only for medical end-of-life reasons, but also when the family agrees that the person has become too much of a burden through sickness or injury. On this planet, very few die of natural causes. Instead, presided over by a priestly class of “thanatologists,” each Vhnori voluntarily enters a “Cenotaph” which ends their life on one plane of existence and supposedly takes them to a new life in “the next emanation” (Livingston 1995). A transporter accident in the midst of the ritual, however, transposes a young Vhnori woman and Voyager crew member Harry Kim (Garrett Wang), ­a llowing the writers to explore some of the most pressing questions of the religious imagination. “Emanations,” however, does not simply explore the notion of alien death beliefs and rituals, but also considers what happens when one’s religious convictions waver, when fear replaces the certainty with which countless Vhnori have placed themselves in the Cenotaph for the “Transference Ritual.” Awakening to find herself in Voyager’s gleaming sick bay, the transposed Vhnori woman is no less confused by her circumstances than are the Ferengi in the drab Roswell infirmary. Indeed, not entirely convinced that she is not dead, she is terrified that everything she has been taught about the afterlife and the “next emanation” is wrong. “I’d like some answers about what happens to my people when we die,” she says, suddenly caught in the profound cognitive dissonance that so often lies between expectation and experience. After all, she continues, “we’re supposed to evolve into a higher level of consciousness when we die. We’re supposed to gain a greater understanding of the universe. All of our questions are supposed to be answered” (Livingston 1995). Another man who is scheduled to die soon finds himself doubting the faith of his people in light of their contact with Harry Kim. If, as sociologist Peter Berger maintains (1967, 29; see Berger and Luckmann 1966), “all socially constructed worlds are inherently precarious,” then the Jenga tower of his religious beliefs is tottering and his world is in danger of crumbling around him. “It’s just that I’m starting to wonder what really happens when we die. If I’m really going on to a higher level of consciousness,” he confesses to his wife. “All Harry has done

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is made me stop and think about something we’ve always taken for granted”— which is to say, the consensus reality of his entire people (Livingston 1995). Unlike “Emanations,” “Coda” is a time-loop story, the product of a “temporal anomaly,” the quintessential plot device for exploring speculation and decisionmaking, in which Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) dies multiple times: choked to death by a Vidiian in one “incarnation,” while caught in a shuttle explosion in another, and, in a third, euthanized by Voyager’s holographic doctor (Robert Picardo) after contracting the “Phage,” a virulent disease that promises only “a lingering, painful death, marked by increasing periods of dementia, and eventual insanity” (Malone 1997; for a very different vision of the dying-and-resurrection process in science fiction, see Rymer 2006). In this episode, though, which proffers itself as a meditation on near-death experience, Janeway actually hovers between life and death, her brain invaded by an alien entity which feeds on a being’s “death energy.” Appearing in one iteration as her long-dead father, the alien tells her, “This is what my species does. At the moment just before death, one of us comes to help you understand what’s happening, to make the crossing over an occasion of joy” (Malone 1997). It promises that her spirit will exist forever in “our matrix, where your consciousness will live” in “a place of wonder,” a realm that “can be whatever you want it to be” (Malone 1997). Just in time, though, Janeway realizes this is all too good to be true and refuses to give in. “You’re in a dangerous profession, Captain,” the alien warns, just before disappearing. “You face death every day. There’ll be another time, and I’ll be waiting. Eventually, you’ll come into my matrix, and you will nourish me for a long, long time” (Malone 1997). In the bridge banter that often closes out Star Trek episodes, Janeway asks her first officer, “Do you think it’s possible, that each of the near-death experiences we’ve heard about are the result of an alien inhabitation?” And, in what is arguably the weakest line in the entire series, given everything else they’ve ­encountered— not least that, in the blink of an eye, their starship has been hurled across the galaxy to the Delta Quadrant—Chakotay (Robert Beltran) replies, “That’s a little hard to believe” (Malone 1997). Apparently, he’s not the only one. Failures to Launch and the Prime Directive

Having considered these few “What if…?” examples from the Star Trek multiverse, it’s important to draw attention to a couple of less-helpful approaches to the problem of religion in science fiction, two particular “failures to launch,” as it were, each of which appears in two aspects: (a) analogy and assimilation and (b) assessment and archetype. Now, just to be clear, if someone buys a ticket, purchases a book, or subscribes to a streaming service, they are entitled to interpret the story as they please. For me, though, the guiding question should always be: does one’s interpretation invite audiences into a deeper investigation and appreciation of the

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story, or does it foreclose on further exploration and inquiry, satisfied that it has “the answer”? Following from this, I propose what I take to be the “prime directive” for the study of religion and science fiction. Failure one: Analogy and Assimilation

Treating religion in science fiction as a metaphor for something else comes in two basic forms: analogy and assimilation, the former often dismissing religion when it is encountered, the latter bending the story to fit one’s own theological narrative. A New York Times’ mid-series review of Deep Space Nine typifies the problem of analogy: reading the various alien characters as though they are not meant to be taken seriously in themselves, with their own stories to tell and their own questions to pose, but understood instead only as metaphorical representations of “exaggerated human tendencies” (Pareles 1996, H26). Thus, “the ultracapitalistic Ferengi” become “the Shylocks of space,” while “the enzyme-addicted Jem’Hadar troops”—recall that these are one of two species who have been genetically engineered to worship the Founders as gods—are dismissed as “crackheads in uniform” (Pareles 1996, H26). Even the Bajorans, the principal extraterrestrial race in a television series that is consumed with religious issues from pilot to finale, are reduced to analogy and caricature: “With their religious rituals, caste systems, pierced ears and newly won freedom from the Cardassian Empire, [they] might be Indians or Palestinians” (Pareles 1996, H26; see Cowan 2010, 141–170). To which one can only reply, “Seriously?” Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more superficial perspective from which to approach the question. “By reducing Deep Space Nine’s various nonhuman species to a series of cultural or political caricatures,” I point out in Sacred Space, the author and his readers are relieved “of any responsibility to ask deeper questions, to understand the series in anything but the most banal terms” (Cowan 2010, 144). Treating religion in science fiction only as an analogy for this form or that of terrestrial faith presents the story as nothing more than a puzzle to be solved, rather than a landscape of the imagination to be explored. It’s not that a particular analogy is necessarily incorrect or inapplicable, it’s just that the use of analogy often limits any further questioning. Once we’ve made the analogical connection or identified the metaphorical relationship, we have, as it were, solved the story for X. The problem with this, as it is with so much of religion and science fiction, horror, or fantasy, is that critics are often satisfied with “solving the analogy” of the narrative arc—as though that answers the questions posed by the episode. The story has no more to tell us than that, and they feel the need to go no further. Make the Triannon suicide bombers in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Chosen Realm” (Dawson 2004) the equivalent, say, of Muslim extremists or Tamil ­Tigers, for example, and you have your answer. Make the deity-characters in The Original Series’ “Who Mourns for Adonais” (Daniels 1967) or The Animated Series’

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“How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth” (Reed 1974) stand-ins for ancient terrestrial gods, and you have your answer. Only very rarely, though, do these kinds of analogical associations get to the deeper questions of the religious imagination posed by such popular culture products. Why, for example, imagine these characters as gods at all, and what does that say about the ambivalent relationships we have with our own versions of the unseen order? Or what does it say about those gods when we are willing to inflict mass causalities either on their behalf or at their behest? What does it say about the nature and power of religious belief? Put differently, if we follow the analogical approach, how much more do we actually know, either about the stories or about ourselves? Because they simply purport to tell us what the story is about—that is, because they can make a plausible off-screen reference—they don’t even begin to tell us what the questions implicit in the story might mean. The answer becomes more important than the question—which is arguably the death knell of science fiction itself. The second aspect of this particular problem is not dissimilar. For Star Trek fans, as well as those who cannot avoid its ubiquitous presence in pop culture, certain phrases have become iconic: Spock’s “Live long and prosper” is one, while the Borg Collective’s “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile” is another. If reading religion in science fiction only as analogy reduces the significance of the questions it implies, assimilation renders significance a function of whether the story can be made to fit one’s own religious beliefs and theological agenda. This is what I have called elsewhere, “the Gospel according to insert-pop-culture-product-here problem” (Cowan 2010, 264–269; 2019, 68–71). Although Jesuit film critic Richard Blake insists that popular culture “must not be baptized and then coerced into ecclesial servitude” (1991, 289), this happens so regularly, and with such a wide variety of horror, science fiction, and fantasy stories, that it often either passes without notice or becomes the expected mode of interpretation. Thus, Christian pastor Timothy Jones can guide his readers through the Star Wars saga in hopes of Finding God in a Galaxy Far, Far Away (2005), while systematic theologian John McDowell wonders whether there really can be a Gospel According to “Star Wars” (2007). Although arguing that Star Trek is “based on a doggedly humanistic worldview,” Kevin Neece still excavates The Gospel According to Star Trek (2016), unearthing parallels between the different television series and feature films, and his conservative form of Protestant Christianity. It’s important to note, though, that given the vast array of human religious experience, it would be difficult not to find some analogy for any extraterrestrial faith. But once again, having done so, and even if the relationship is reasonable, how much more do we know? More often than not, these “Gospel according to…” examples—which are not limited to Christianity, it needs be said—are about reality maintenance, about making science fiction concepts theologically palatable for specific religious communities. (For other examples of this, ranging from Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter, see Neal 2008; Neese 2016; Pinskey 2004; Staub 2005; Wood 2003.) If the

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fundamental question animating science fiction is “What if…?,” lying at the bottom of the analogical problem is the more vexing question, “So what…?” Failure two: Assessment and Archetype

Rather than look for a terrestrial analogy, some critics insist that “we should not fall into the trap of discussing [the Bajoran religion] as though it were real” (Linford 1999, 77), though presumably the principle holds for any extraterrestrial faith. In the first extended academic discussion of religion aboard Deep Space Nine, Peter Linford writes that he is less concerned with “religion itself as portrayed in DS9” than with “the way in which religion is treated by the characters within the series” (1999, 77)—which seems to be a distinction without much of a difference. For Linford, the Bajoran faith cannot be “real” because it “shows little evidence of being a personal one,” the Bajoran gods “are always spoken of collectively,” and, perhaps most tellingly, “facets we might expect to see in a religion are more clearly absent”—not least that there seems “little reason given for the Prophets to be worshipped” (Linford 1999, 78). Never mind that this could describe any number of terrestrial faiths, the important point is that, at one and the same time, Linford both cautions us not to treat science fiction religions as though they are real and then criticizes them for not measuring up to what he considers “real” faith. This is the problem of familiarity and the availability heuristic, the social psychological principle that the more easily we can draw to mind an example of something, the more likely we are to think that thing true or significant. And, conversely, the more likely we are to reject those things with which we are not familiar. Because it does not look like what we may be used to seeing as religion, it cannot be religion. Familiarity, though, the certainty that they know what religion is and, more importantly, what it isn’t, leads some critics to contend that science fiction may have something to teach us about religion, but, at best, can only approximate or simulate the religious imagination at work. That is, writes theologian Richard Grigg, “science fiction can never take us beyond the imitation of the sort of potent sacred [sic] that the world religions claimed to offer and may have in fact given to consciousness” (2018, 120). Underpinning this kind of analysis is a commitment to terrestrial religion as a sui generis phenomenon that no other imaginative product can hope to approach. This becomes even more explicit when he insists that “the sacred as depicted in the world religions ought to remain the benchmark for understanding what should count as most genuinely sacred” (Grigg 2018, 11). This is a position that begs far more questions than it answers, if for no other reason than that the term “world religions” is more than a little contested in the field of religious studies. What about faith traditions which could not in any way be considered “world religions”? Are they somehow less capable of imagining the “genuinely sacred”? And if so, why? Insisting that so-called world religions can function as some sort of archetype for evaluating religions in science fiction

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does little more than perpetuate the hegemony of a particular understanding of religion, but does nothing to reflect the kaleidoscopic visions of the unseen order that have captivated and terrified homo religiosus since our species first wondered about the gods, let alone whatever religious beliefs we might imagine beyond the paper-thin atmospheric bubble on our “pale blue dot.” The Prime Directive

By now, I suspect, the outlines of what I consider the prime directive for religion and science fiction should be coming into focus: questions are more important than answers, especially the questions implicit in the religious imagination: who are we? Where do we come from? What happens to us when we die, and is it something we should look forward to—or dread? Is there something or someone else out there, and, if so, does it care about us? And, at the heart of all these, arguably the most basic question of all: do we matter? Questioning what we see is more useful than assuming what we think we understand. Questioning less in terms of what we think something is, what we believe we recognize, but in terms of what we imagine it could be. Recall that we began by wondering what happens to Ferengi when they die. Although I have used Star Trek throughout this brief chapter, I have done so only because it is likely familiar pop culture territory for readers. In the same way we should not be limited to terrestrial religious considerations as the boundaries of potential religious experience, we need not limit ourselves to one medium of science fiction. The religious imagination is no less at work in Robert Heinlein’s classic Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), for example, than it is in the massively popular Warhammer 40K, where the horror of galactic warfare is rooted explicitly in institutionalized religious conflict (see, for example, Abnett 2001a, 2001b, 2015, 2018; Swallow 2018). Although, as the historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith argues, our species has imagined its various “deities and modes of interaction with them” for as long as we have had records, and millennia before that, we have “had only the last few centuries to imagine religion” (1984, xi). In a passage that never fails to confound my students, he continues that “while there is a staggering amount of data” for what, by whatever criteria, we would characterize as “religious” (which is only a part of what I am calling “the religious imagination”), “there is no data for religion” (Smith 1984, xi; emphasis in the original). Rather, for Smith, “religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study,” a concept “created solely for the scholar’s analytic purposes by [their] imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy” (1984, xi). Since this seems so deeply counterintuitive, if not entirely wrongheaded, what could he possibly mean? No such thing as religion? How absurd. He answers this, if obliquely, by pointing out that “for the self-conscious student of religion, no datum possesses intrinsic interest. It is of value only insofar as it can serve as exempli gratia of some fundamental issue in the imagination of religion” (Smith 1984, xi).

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No datum possesses intrinsic interest. Or, put in the context of a sociology of religion, nothing is inherently sacred, but is so only by ongoing agreement among those who regard it as sacred. That is, religion is not something sui generis. This is particularly significant for scholars of popular culture who “[accept] neither the boundaries of canon nor of community in constituting [their] intellectual domain” (Smith 1984, xi). It is difficult to overstate the importance of this insight, especially in terms of religion and science fiction, or what happens when faith is out of this world. In this context, stories of any kind are only useful as exemplars for exploring the landscapes of the religious imagination. That is, they are less important in themselves, in what we learn about them, than in what they disclose, discover, or discomfort about us. This point is often missed by those who adopted approaches intended only to provide answers, make analogies, or promote assimilation. Rather, following our prime directive, any discussion of religion and science fiction should be considered invitational rather than exhaustive, and it should provoke further exploration rather than foreclose on any other questions. As the everenigmatic Q ( John de Lancie) says to Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) in the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation: “For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you, not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence” (Kolbe 1994). As much as anything, each of these brief examples points not only to how little we actually know about the great mysteries of our existence, but about the religious and philosophical beliefs, the ceremonies, rituals, and practices that imbue so many of our lives with purpose. By considering these as questions to be explored rather than answers that foreclose on further discussion, we open ourselves to the surprise of science fiction, the ongoing “What if…?” moment that ignites the fires of the religious imagination and engages the engines of meaning once again. Works Cited Abnett, Dan. 2001a. Malleus. Nottingham, UK: Black Library. ———. 2001b. Xenos. Nottingham, UK: Black Library. ———. 2015. Hereticus. Nottingham, UK: Black Library. ——— 2018. The Magos and the Definitive Casebook of Gregor Eisenhorn. Nottingham, UK: Black Library. Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Penguin Books. Blake, Richard A. 1991. Screening America: Reflections on Five Classic Films. New York: Paulist Press. Burton, LeVar, dir. 1997. “Resurrection.” Written by Michael Taylor. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 6, Episode 8 (November 17).

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Carson, David, dir. 1993. “Emissary.” Written by Michael Pillar. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 1, Episode 1 ( January 4). Clarke, Arthur C. 1953. Childhood’s End. New York: Del Rey Books. Conway, James L., dir. 1995. “Little Green Men.” Written by Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 4, Episode 8 (November 6). Cowan, Douglas E. 2010. Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. ———. 2018. America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2019. Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes: How Myth and Religion Shape Fantasy Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ———. 2021. “Consider the Yattering: The Infernal Order and the Religious Imagination in Real Time.” In Theology and Horror: Explorations of the Dark Religious Imagination. Edited by Brandon R. Grafius and John W. Morehead, 3–20. Lanham: Lexington Books. ———. 2022. The Forbidden Body: Sex, Horror, and the Religious Imagination. New York: New York University Press. Daniels, Marc, dir. 1967. “Who Mourns for Adonais?” Written by Gilbert Ralston and Gene L. Coon. Star Trek: The Original Series, Season 2, Episode 2 (September 22). Dawson, Roxann, dir. 2004. “Chosen Realm.” Written by Manny Coto. Star Trek: Enterprise, Season 3, Episode 12 ( January 14). Dick, Philip K. 1970. A Maze of Death. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1981. The Divine Invasion. New York: Timescape. ———. 1981. VALIS. New York: Bantam. ———. 1982. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. New York: Timescape. ———. 1985. Radio Free Albemuth. New York: Vintage Books. Grigg, Richard. 2018. Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Heinlein, Robert A. 1961. Stranger in a Strange Land. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. ———. 1966. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. New York: Ace. Idle, Eric. 1999. The Road to Mars. London: Boxtree. James, William. [1902] 1999. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Modern Library. Johnston, Jim, dir. 1994. “The Parliament of Dreams.” Written by J. Michael Straczynski. Babylon 5, Season 1, Episode 5 (February 23). Jones, Timothy Paul. 2005. Finding God in a Galaxy Far, Far Way: A Spiritual Exploration of the “Star Wars” Saga. Sisters, OR: Multnomah Press. Kolbe, Winrich, dir. 1994. “All Good Things….” Written by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 7, Episodes 25 and 26 (May 23). Lee, Gentry. Bright Messengers. 1995. New York: Bantam. ———. 1999 Double Full Moon Night. New York: Bantam. Linford, Peter. 1999. “Deeds of Power: Respect for Religion in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” In “Star Trek” and Sacred Ground: Explorations of “Star Trek,” Religion, and American Culture. Edited by Jennifer E. Porter and Darcee L. McLaren, 77–100. Albany, GA: State University of New York Press. Livingston, David, dir. 1995. “Emanations.” Written by Brannon Braga. Star Trek: Voyager, Season 1, Episode 9 (March 13). Malone, Nancy, dir. 1997. “Coda.” Written by Jeri Taylor. Star Trek: Voyager, Season 3, Episode 15 ( January 29).

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McDowell, John C. 2007. The Gospel According to “Star Wars”: Faith, Hope, and the Force. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Moore, Ronald D., and David Eick. 2004–2008. Battlestar Galactica. NBCUniversal Television. Neal, Connie. 2008. The Gospel according to Harry Potter: The Spiritual Journey of the World’s Greatest Seeker. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Neese, Kevin C. 2016. The Gospel according to Star Trek: The Original Crew. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Pareles, Jon. 1996. “When Aliens Start to Look a Lot Like Us.” New York Times (May 29): H26. Pinskey, Mark I. 2004. The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Posey, Steve, dir. 1998. “Treachery, Faith, and the Great River.” Written by David Weddle and Bradley Thompson. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 7, Episode 6 (November 2). Reed, Bill, dir. 1974. “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth.” Written by Russell Bates and David Wise. Star Trek: The Animated Series, Season 2, Episode 5 (October 5). Rymer, Michael, dir. 2006. “Hero.” Written by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. ­Battlestar Galactica, Season 3, Episode 8 (November 17). Sagan, Carl. 1985. Contact. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1984. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Staub, Dick. 2005. Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Swallow, James. 2018. Sisters of Battle: The Omnibus. Nottingham, UK: Black Library. Wagner, Jon, and Jan Lundeen. 1998. Deep Space and Sacred Time: ‘Star Trek’ in the American Mythos. Westport, CT: Praeger Press. Wood, Ralph C. 2003. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in MiddleEarth. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox.

7 THE EVOLVING LIGHT The Transformation of Christianity in Deep Space Travel Jason Batt, Alires Almon, and Theodore Vial

Introduction

For most of human history, space has been the untouchable canopy above us. The stars were viewed as the abode of God or the Gods. Jesus, Elijah, and Muhammed each ascended to Heaven. Today, rockets retrace these paths, ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station. Humanity has entered a realm once considered both mythic and unexplorable. Now, we stand on the threshold of a wide-spreading future in space—to travel to the very stars themselves. In Cosmos, astronomer Carl Sagan concluded: “Space exploration leads directly to religious and philosophical questions” (2013, 63). Frank Herbert tackled these questions in his sprawling space epic series Dune. In this speculative history of space travel, he declares: “There is a fifth force which shaped religious belief, but its effect is so universal and profound that it deserves to stand alone. This is, of course, space travel—and in any discussion of religion, it deserves to be written thus: SPACE TRAVEL!” (2005, 632). In the following pages, we will consider religion and deep (intergenerational) space travel. But religion is already present in space. The concept of religious expression off-planet is not just a consideration for the future; it has happened and continues to happen. Where humans go, they take their religion with them. James Hartfield, the spokesman for the Johnson Space Center, said: “Although NASA does not provide spiritual resources, religious objects—crosses, Bibles, icons, prayer cards—are among the most common personal items taken into space.”1 Buzz Aldrin, an Apollo 11 astronaut, performed communion on the moon. On Christmas Eve in 1968, while aboard Apollo 8 in orbit around the moon, William Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman read the first ten verses from the book of Genesis. We will not tackle the larger question of the future of religion in space; rather, we will explore two potential paths ahead for Christian religions by reviewing DOI: 10.4324/9781003088264-10

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two distinct speculative futures within Dan Simmons’s Hyperion series and the previously mentioned Dune series by Frank Herbert. We focus on Christianity in part because of our own disciplinary competencies, but most importantly because various kinds of Christianity form the pool of rituals, myths, and symbols from which Simmons and Herbert draw, whether consciously or unconsciously—the archetypal wellspring that Carl Jung postulated.2 First, we draw on Charles Long’s definition of religion as an orientation in time and space. Second, we utilize Long’s theorizing of pilgrimage as a journey that contains a structural tension between stability and curiosity, a tension that can be the occasion for a reorientation of the inner space of travelers as profound as their experience of new orientation is physical space. Third, we consider two possible reorientations of Christianity that might result from intergenerational space travel. It seems likely that intergenerational space travel will occasion a further splintering of Christian sects, a phenomenon we have seen before in the Renaissance and Reformation, time periods from which Long draws much of his material on pilgrimage. However, in both Hyperion and Dune, splintering leads not to exclusivism but to a kind of pluralism among the new divisions. We expect a kind of religious flourishing in space. The drastic disorientations and curiosity provoked by space travel will require precisely the deep inner reorientation of humans; this vital process of orienting is, in Long’s view and in ours, what religion is. What Is Religion and What Is Travel to a “New World”?

Charles Long’s theories on religion provide us with both the definition of religion and an understanding of the interaction between it and travel. Long defines religion as an orientation rather than a set of beliefs, framing religion as an “orientation in time and space.” He argues that Columbus saw his voyages as pilgrimages, and his “first impressions of this New World … open[ed] up a new inner space alongside the reorientations characterized by the terms Reformation and Renaissance” (1999, 110). As Long puts it, The pilgrimage is that peregrinative ritual which retains the older meaning of the human as a being who moves across space … This tradition of pilgrimage expresses a tension between two religious attitudes contained within the structure of the pilgrimage—stability and curiosity … Leaving home offered the pilgrim the chance to realize the spiritual value of forsaking the familiar world for an alien environment. (1999, 99) It is not hard to draw a parallel between the reorientations caused by the exploration and colonization of the “New World,” and the kinds of reorientations that could be occasioned by space travel.

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In this chapter, we face the obvious challenge of finding some kind of data about which to theorize. In other words, as we speculate about future developments in religion, we must question what kinds of facts we can draw on to which we can tie our speculation so that we operate in the realm of theory than in the realm of fantasy. In a conversation about religion and violence, theorists Rene Girard and Walter Burkert identify scapegoating and animal sacrifice (respectively) as the “generative principle[s] of mythology, ritual, primitive religion, even culture as a whole.” Jonathan Smith seems to retract his own theory playfully: “We have here a discussion among assumptions about things that we can’t know for sure” (Hammerton-Kelly 1988, 106, 206). We recognize that we stand on unsettled ground by taking science fiction as our data for thinking about religion and deep space travel. Science fiction does not provide a reliable roadmap for the future. Rather, it serves as a laboratory of potential futures, explored aspects of the human experience within our larger universe (both internal and external). As Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty) argues, while science fiction is largely “devoid of a formal, communal, ritual religious element” that we normally think of as belonging to religious myths, it often has “an individual, personal, mythical religious element” (1989, 32). “Science fiction,” she continues, provides a body of literature in which great mythological classics take refuge in a demythologized age. It is one of the few places in which we continue to create superheroes, the last survival in a kitsch mythology of atheism. Science fiction seems to be the only form of adult literature that can handle mythology with panache. (1989, 31) Pilgrimage itself is at the core of science fiction. Notes Adam Roberts: [T]he roots of what we now call science fiction are found in the fantastic voyages of the Ancient Greek novel; … [S]tories of journeying through space form the core of the genre … [and] are the trunk, as it were, from which the various other modes of SF branch off. (2016, ix–x) Science fiction as a genre of pilgrimage becomes a practical vehicle to explore the religious implications of that very travel. From Greg Bear’s (1991) Heads to Ender’s Game to Dan Simmons’s Hyperion series to Kurt Vonnegut’s (2005) SlaughterhouseFive to the classic Dune, religion is carried by humanity to the stars. In some fiction, it is beneficial. In others, it becomes imperialistic. A survey of science fiction literature presents a range of possible futures for religious ideologies and practices amongst the stars. This is not a new relationship. “[W]hen interplanetary travel romances return to western culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they are all vitally concerned with the theological implications of the aliens they

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describe … When Francis Godwin’s hero travels to the Moon and meets aliens there,” writes Roberts, referring to a character in Godwin’s (1638) work The Man in the Moone who discovers a race of Christians living in a utopia, “his first words are ‘Jesus Maria’” (Roberts 2016, xiii). Yet, we do not need to rely solely on science fiction to explore the effects of religion on space travel. Those who travel in space have already encountered the impact at the intersection of religion and space travel. Based on interviews with a significant number of current and recent astronauts, philosopher of space Frank White concludes that the experience of space travel altered them all (2018, 2021). White calls this “shift in worldview reported by astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit, in transit between the Earth and the Moon” the Overview Effect and defines it as “the experience of seeing firsthand the reality that the Earth is in space, a tiny, fragile ball of life, ‘hanging in the void’” (2021, 5). As comparative religions scholar Jeffrey Kripal notes, “Political borders and nation-states—much like religions—are imaginary lines drawn on maps to mark the temporary results of the ongoing debates, compromises, and violence of human history. No such borders and no such religions,” he concludes, “can be seen from space. It’s all one blue planet floating in the seeming infinity of space-time” (2014, 397). Christian philosopher of science Del Ratzsch, extrapolating the impact of the Overview Effect farther into the future, notes that “Some of our astronauts have become near-mystics after their short stays in space. What might be the effects,” he asks, of long-term residence in space? Kant claimed that the starry heavens above was one of the two phenomena that filled him most with wonder, and the Psalmist spoke of the heavens declaring the glory of God. How might a typical human respond to having the starry heavens as the overwhelmingly dominant feature of his environment, to not having it merely overhead part of the time, to not having to see it from the bottom of an ocean of air? Many might find that “the heavens are declaring the glory of God” in a paralyzingly awesome way. (1988, 111) We have now entered the realm of science fiction and true speculation: what will this experience mean for entire populations abiding in space? Many early endeavors into space consisted of one nation-state (the United States or the Soviet Union) sending fairly homogeneous crews to space: Caucasian males with very similar backgrounds (see Mazur, Chapter 13 in this volume). As space exploration has expanded to include diverse individuals—representing gender and cultural diversity—crew composition has become a bit more complex and cohesion more challenging to achieve. Essentially, crew members are flying with strangers, individuals who differ from each other in custom, culture, and

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life experience. In deep space travel, religion could function as a Durkheimian “socially effervescent” cohesion or, as Steven Lukes (2012) points out, a force that causes oppositional subgroups to cohere. A global effort is necessary for sustained exploration efforts, requiring us to continue to include representatives from more than one part of society to participate in these endeavors. Mission success will depend on engendering a safe space for inclusion and equality so that crew members remain engaged in the mission. Like situations on Earth, when people are met with external forces that have a negative impact on their sense of agency, it is through a spiritual connection that they find ways to cope. An increase in religious involvement following natural or man-made disasters is one example. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program, Suedfeld et al. (2011) analyzed the journal entries of astronauts who participated in space missions with multinational crews.3 Individuals who were part of the “minority” nationality often used “spirituality” as a coping mechanism when they were trying to solve problems. They found that for “minority sources only,” “[s]pirituality increases, indicating a growing internal recognition of transcendental values that is often found among astronauts and is apparently not thwarted—and may in fact be ­enhanced—by being the ‘odd person out’ in the crew” (2011, 168). This seems to support our second claim (above) that space travel will cause an increase in religious behavior and importance. “Spirituality” is a notoriously ill-defined term, and debates among scholars over its relationship to “religion” can be contentious. Charles Long is helpful here. “Growing internal recognition of transcendental values” that is a coping mechanism and aids in solving problems can best be viewed as a reorientation. There is a tension here between stability and curiosity (1999, 99). Rather than the awe or reverence of the Overview Effect, we have something closer to fear; fear occasioned both by being in a new and precarious situation, and fear that one is an outcast. Religion could, in this setting, be expressed as a kind of clannishness of the minority. But it also could be a support system, a source of stability, but also curiosity about travelers from other countries, not something that an ousted group relies on for their own survival at the expense of the greater community. This is one possible cause of the splintering we predict in our first claim above. Speculative Potentials When Thinking about Religious Developments in Deep Space

The reorientation occasioned by deep space travel brings us to our two chosen works: Dune and Hyperion. Both address the influence of religion on space travel and the influence of space travel on religion. Both show us a far-off future where the vestiges of Christianity are still present although quite different from what we experience today. They predict a future where humanity has conquered most of the observable galaxy. The presence of alien life is scant. A vast empire rules the inhabited planets, although it is not the only power. Each work begins with a

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pilgrimage to a new world—a pilgrimage filled with Christian imagery and implication. For both, this new world hosts the first discovery of alien life. For Dune, the pilgrimage is Paul Atreides’ journey to the desert world of Dune (known as Arrakis) and the encounter with the sandworms, their prescienceinducing creation of Spice, and his ascendancy as a new messiah of the galaxy. For Hyperion, the pilgrimage is primarily that of Father Lenar Hoyt’s travel to the planet Hyperion, his encounter with a cross-shaped alien parasite that provides eternal life through the gift of resurrection, and his ascendancy as Pope of the revived Catholic Church. The first book of Hyperion is a series of tales told in the Canterbury style, framing each of its seven narrators as a pilgrim to a singular sacred site. Hyperion is the name of the planet that serves as the destination of the pilgrimage. Initially, there is no object of Catholic veneration on the planet. Instead, this is a pilgrimage of those outside. The first tale is told by Father Lenar Hoyt in a chapter titled “The Parson’s Tale.” Within Hyperion, Christianity still has a presence in the greater galaxy. However, it has waned and, when the story starts, the religion is in its twilight. The Catholic Church has established itself on its planetary capital, Pacem. The novel introduces two Jesuit priests. The first, Father Paul Dure, is a follower of the real-life Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In fact, the series weaves several of Teilhard’s concepts into its plot, in particular, his postulation of the Omega Point—a singularity sometime in the future where all of the universe will be joined together in an intelligent, all-powerful point. Within Hyperion, that Omega Point is expressed as the Ultimate Intelligence at the end of time. Acknowledging the presumed and imminent decline of the Church, Dure comments regarding Hoyt: “It’s no fault of youngsters like him that the Church is in its final days. It’s just that his brand of happy naivete can do nothing to arrest that slide into oblivion which the Church seems destined for” (Simmons 1990, 32). Later, in his journals, Dure laments the state of the Church and his own waning faith: I thought my travels would stir my old beliefs in St. Teilhard’s concept of the God in Whom the Christ of Evolution, the Personal, and the Universal, the En Haut and the En Avant are joined, but no such renewal is forthcoming. It is growing dark. I am growing old … Was it so dark a sin to interpret such ambiguous data in a way which could have meant the resurgence of Christianity in our life time? Yes, it was. But not, I think, because of the sin of tampering with the data, but the deeper sin of thinking that Christianity could be saved. The Church is dying … [a]nd not merely our beloved branch of the Holy Tree, but all of its offshoots, vestiges, and cankers. The entire Body of Christ is dying as surely as this poorly used body of mine … (1990, 37)

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Yet the desolate state of the Church is on the threshold of change. On the planet, Hyperion, Dure and his disciple Father Lenar Hoyt discover a cross-shaped alien parasite. Known as the Cruciform, and originally encountered by the human subspecies the Bikura, the parasite provides its host body a seemingly endless ability to resurrect itself. Dure’s initial encounter with the Bikura is confusing. They have no understanding of Christ nor the Church, yet their entire cosmology is wrapped around the image of the Cross and its granting of immortality. The size of a neck-worn crucifix, the parasite is immobile yet bonded to a person by shooting tendril-like roots into the skin, binding it permanently. While the initial process is painful, the Pax Church develops the process to be nearly flawless. Interpreted through Long, the encounter with the truly alien provides a reorientation in time and space for religious understanding. The Cruciform provides not only the resurrection of the soul but also of Christianity. Now providing the possibility of true eternal life from a source visually tied to the symbol of the crucifixion, the Catholic Church finds itself revitalized in this new Sacrament of Resurrection, becoming a vast political and military power: “Tau Ceti Center had been ripe for born-again Christianity, for the New Catholicism, and when the Church missionaries … [arrived], conversion of the few billion planet’s survivors was sincere and universal” (Simmons 1996, 304). Christianity’s encounter with alien species does not erode faith but instead bolsters it. The process of resurrection through the Cruciform is given shape in two later novels, Endymion and Rise of Endymion. On the planet Hyperion, in its earliest manifestations, the resurrection of persons wearing the Cruciform is a messy affair without much semblance of ritual. Within the revitalized galaxy-spanning Catholic church, resurrection is defined as the Sacrament of Resurrection, a sacrament in which all believers must participate. The process is not relegated to a hospital but instead is watched over by a priest who performs a reverse form of last rites, ushering the resurrected body back into its second life. Most of what is revealed about the Sacrament is glimpsed in shadow—there are characters forced to endure a resurrection overseen just by machines without the ritual aspect and they are concerned about undergoing a “ritual-less” resurrection. Elevated to this sacred state, this new Sacrament becomes the cornerstone of the church’s operation. Ultimately, the Cruciform is revealed to be a parasitic composition of artificial intelligence nodes that develops its own mass mind between each host ­connection—the more that convert to Christianity, the more bodies to fuel this ever-growing singularity of AI. In a manner, the Ultimate Intelligence/Omega Point, a presence vast enough to be called God itself, evolves through the shape of the Cross as it merges with each individual person. Within the story, the Cruciforms are placed in the past to allow this evolution to happen. Extrapolating from Teilhard’s concepts, God gives birth to God through the human race and its collective faith. However, the Cruciform is not alone in embodying Christian archetypal imagery. Another alien creature strides across Hyperion: the Shrike. Covered in

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blades, the Shrike seems to serve only one purpose: the cleansing and atoning of humanity through violent pain. A religion arises around the Shrike called the Church of the Final Atonement. The Shrike is described as “a quicksilver chrome construct, more than three meters tall, four arms with retractable blades on each finger, a head spike, thornspikes on its forehead, around its neck, and on its body, metal teeth, and most prominently thousand faceted eyes that radiate a red, illuminating flame” (Senior 2012, 221). Father Dure is brought to the Shrike by the Bikura and the Shrike crucifies him upon his Tree of Pain—a metal construct of blades that appears to stretch endlessly to the heavens. The Shrike is described as “the Lord of Pain and the Angel of Final atonement, come from a place beyond time to announce the end of the human race” (Simmons 1990, 223). The Shrike’s appearance and activity naturally attract biblical language: “From its quasi-human mephitic appearance to its monstrous filleting, the Shrike incarnates the devil” (Senior 2012, 221). The Church that arises around it finds itself worshiping in the language and practices of Christianity, yet targeting something distinctly nonChristian in nature. The Church calls itself “The Church of the Final Atonement,” borrowing Christian language in its nomenclature. The central tenet is that the Shrike is the future punishment for humanity’s sins. Again, utilizing Christian language, humanity’s sins are seen now as unpardonable by this new religion and thus deserving of all the punishment the Shrike doles out. Even in divergence, the imagery of Christianity finds itself psychologically empowered amongst the stars Frank Herbert’s Dune gives us a universe where ecumenical efforts are successful, and the varieties of Christianity and other religions are scant. Mahayana Christianity appears to be a merger of Christianity with Mahayana Buddhism where the first Messiah is followed by other Messiahs. The tenets of this sect are codified within the Orange Catholic Bible (hereafter the O.C. Bible). The development of the ecumenical book provides us with the best overview of Herbert’s speculative future of Christianity. The O.C. Bible was a production of the Commission of Ecumenical Translators (CET) soon after a massive war with artificial intelligence. This council was intended to have all religious practitioners meet “in the common belief that there exists a Divine Essence in the universe” (2005, 633). According to the Dune Encyclopedia, “The O.C. Bible is more than a revised amalgamation of the ancient holy scriptures. It considerably extended the traditional canon, although it also abridged and reordered it” (McNelly 1984, 556). The O.C. Bible Liturgical Manual provides a system to practice under the new amalgamated texts. For example, Wednesdays were now “Honorary Sabbaths,” a time when people can worship as they chose in the morning but must participate in an ecumenical service in the evening. Seven years of controversial work produced the O.C. Bible. It held the additional titles of “The Fundamental Scripture of the Imperium,” “Koranjiyana Zenchristian Scriptures,” “Accumulated Book,” and “Zenchristian Navakoran.” The CET met with a singular purpose: “We are here to remove a primary weapon

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from the hands of disputant religions. That weapon—the claim to possession of the one and only revelation” (Herbert 2005, 633). Yet, it is also revealed that, in a mystical manner, they intended to produce “an instrument of Love to be played in all ways” (ibid., 634). Ultimately, the production of the O.C. Bible results in a startlingly mystical perspective on religion which spreads like wildfire throughout the galaxy: Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, and that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you’ve always known. (2005, 636) The O.C. Bible retains much of the original scriptures. As McNelly explains in detail about the canonical adjustments: The Book of Job passed through the furnace almost unscathed, for some reason, as did Preacher, Revelation (not to be confused with Revelations) was quite unchanged … In the former Old Testament and New Testament, there was, in general, a great simplification, evident in the reduction of the number of books that remain from them, as well as the compression of their contents, when this can be observed in the unmelded texts. The books that remain are Genesis, Exodus, Laws, Promises, Kings, Refugees, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Preacher, Prophets, Gospel, Apostles, Epistles, Revelation … The most difficult work of harmonization may be seen in the production of Gospel, the first diatessaron to establish itself beyond competition from the four evangelists, which now became relegated to mere names and symbols. (1984, 556–557) The titles of the new works suggest a compilation that aligned the texts with the roles of the assumed traditional authors of the texts. In the O.C. Bible construction, there are echoes of the original Church Councils that canonized the Christian scriptures as we have them today. Herbert assumes that the work of canonization has not yet been concluded. More so, this speculation demonstrates that space travel’s acceleration of the branching of humanity destabilizes what is considered a stable structure. While the revisiting of the scriptural canon would seem highly improbable in today’s religious climate, Herbert speculates that space travel will necessitate this very reconsideration. In one example of these changes within the Dune universe, the Hebrew scriptures are “reinterpreted, permitting God to say: ‘Increase and multiply, and fill the universe, and subdue it, and rule

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over all manner of strange beasts and living creatures in the infinite airs, on the infinite earths and beneath them’” (2005, 633; compare Genesis 1:28). Herbert points to the forces behind this: “The first space experiences, poorly communicated and subject to extreme distortion, were a wild inducement to mystical speculation” (2005, 632). In a way, Frank White’s Overview Effect runs amok as the human soul finds itself in the domain of the Gods. Thus, the elimination of borders between religions becomes a natural result of the elimination of borders between nations. Space reduces the earth-bound distinctions to zero and supplements them with a shared mystical experience—all of the ingredients necessary for significant religious evolution. Yet, the CET do not limit themselves to revising scripture but also added to it. A controversial but most helpful feature of the O.C. Bible is its addition to the canonical scriptures of the books of Holy Lives and Testimonies, without which we very likely should not have the histories of many saints, martyrs, sectarian founders and missionaries. (McNelly 1984, 557) The texts of the mystics and various teachers are canonized alongside the initial works of scripture. In a manner, the O.C. Bible affirms what many Christian mystics would assert: the revelation of God is still ongoing. The text produced from those contemplative lives has now been elevated into scripture. As well, it is not just Christian works that are brought into the O.C. Bible: “The pure Quran was represented … by the books of Saari and Kalima” (McNelly 1984, 557). The O.C. Bible serves as a living text for the arrival of the Messiah of ­A rakkis, Paul Atreides, the one known as Muad’Dib, in his ascension to the throne of Emperor and his later role as that of the Preacher. Paul’s early life is affected by Dr. Yueh, “a religious influence in the old Ortho-Catholic spirit” (McNelly 1984, 561), who gives Paul his first copy of the O.C. Bible. In his various stages of life, the words of the O.C. Bible are pronounced in Paul’s voice. Yet, as the Preacher, Paul seeks to remind his followers of their Zensunni heritage. Paul declares: “the only business of the Fremen should be that of opening his soul to the inner teachings” (ibid., 565). Moving in and out of the desert in self-chosen exile and meditation, Paul the Preacher retraces the steps of the Desert Fathers of old Earth. Rather than reigniting Zensunni faith, “Paul himself seems to have reverted more to a Navachristian, even a Judeoislamic style of thought” (ibid., 565). Paul’s use of the title Preacher harkens back to the original Hebrew wise man, Solomon, who is referred to in the O.C. Bible by that title. “The speeches of The Preacher are not only full of biblical texts but also redolent of biblical rhetoric” (ibid., 565). In his sermons, Paul shouts scripture from the fictional O.C. Bible and from the actual Christian Bible. Both Dune and Hyperion share conclusions that speculate about the future of Christianity. First, both see Christianity diverging significantly from its current

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form. The pilgrimage of space travel disrupts the stable structure of religion as it exists today. Each step on that pilgrimage invites further disruption and thus the evolution of the religions and their concept of God. Interestingly, both works fall in line with Jung’s predicted decline of Protestantism—at least symbolically: “Protestantism will become even more boring and penurious than it already is. It will also continue, as before, to split up endlessly, which is actually the unconscious purpose of the whole exercise” (1999, 273). Perhaps the decline of Protestantism is due to its resistance to the pluralistic evolution of thought. Protestantism tends to split, not merge. Both Dune and Hyperion envision further development and acceptance of pluralism. As religion scholar Julia List points out, Dune (and by comparison Hyperion) “reflect[s] this cultural shift towards pluralism and the encouragement of free religious thought” (List 2009, 22). What remains is something quite unexpected—an extrapolation of our present religious landscape full of new sects and augmented personalization. Within Herbert’s universe, the number of different systems of belief and religions is long. Present-­d ay fan-curated listings go for pages and envision sects such as Astronomical Christianity, Baptismal Cosmotheism of Shingon, Cathloa Church of ­Erzulie, the Calvinistic Genetical Determinant Elect Body, Incorporated, Catholic Protestant Tribe of Deri, the Catholic Zenvestranism, Christian Zionist Pilgrims, and many more. Each name suggests a potential wild evolution of belief due to the scattering of humanity amongst the stars. Yet, central to all these are the O.C. Bible and the ever-present Bene Gesserit. The Bene Gesserit define themselves as areligious yet are clothed in the terms of Catholicism. They work to sow religious seeds amongst the gatherings of humans across the galaxy through a directive they called the Missionaria Protectiva. Undergirding this is the key tenet: “Man may not be replaced.” The anti-artificial intelligence thought that arose in the aftermath of the Butlerian Jihad (a revolution of humans against the dominant artificial intelligences that ruled the universe) became the central belief across all religions. In a way, the sacredness of man was now seen as universal and possibly the first true evidence of the divine in the universe. Yet, within this new religious landscape, the personal participation in religious practice and reflection is still strong. Paul Atreides is immersed in the O.C. Bible by several of his teachers. First, he is guided in the teachings of the O.C. Bible by his father’s strategic guide, Thufir Hawat. Later, he is handed a traveler copy of the book by the traitor Dr. Yueh (in fact, it’s Yueh’s own personal copy) and the two read passages from the book together. Leader of the Atreides’ military forces, ­Gurney Halleck often quotes from the O.C. Bible in Paul’s presence—in fact, most of the quotes from the O.C. Bible within Dune are spoken by Halleck. We find Paul quoting from the O.C. Bible often in his adventure across Arrakis. From this we see that Paul has a personal relationship with the text, allowing it to modify his own thoughts and perceptions. Finally, supporting Jung’s speculation of the future, both Dune and Hyperion contend that religions will continue to grow as they become tools to explore the

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language of the unconscious. This is an outcome of pilgrimage. Charles Long looked back at the arrival of religion in the New World and those activities’ capability to “open up a new inner space” (1999, 101). Both works see the archetypal imagery and language of Christianity as maintaining its significance, being recycled, and reinfused with psychic power and meaning in the encounter with the truly alien. This is not to say that either work is optimistic that Christianity will evolve past its obsession with dogma and doctrine. Both works show exacting political machinations that work to keep those two very tools actively sharpened for their use. As with all futurist efforts, we cannot expect either of these works to be projections of an actual history. That does not negate the possibility that their contents speak to us meaningfully. Through them, we may consider our own future— speculation as to what may be. Pilgrimage itself begins from such a point: speculating about what lies beyond and taking the journey to get there. The future of Christianity is the pilgrimage on which it travels even now. Knowing the power of pilgrimage, the pilgrim should anticipate being radically altered along the journey. Notes 1 The quotation is from an article posted on July 8, 2011, by Kate Shellnut (“Exploring the Heavens, Christian Astronauts Reflect on Their Creator”) on a blog operated by the Houston Chronicle. The blog has since been archived but can be found at . 2 To be sure, there is also a broad corpus of literature on Dune and Islam; see Nardi and Bierly (2022, passim). 3 The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program (LIWC) is a word-count software application that identifies a variety of affective/emotional, cognitive, sensory/­ perceptual, and social processes, as well as references to personal space and orientation, motion, work, leisure, financial and metaphysical issues, and physical states.

Works Cited Bear, Greg. Heads (1991). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Card, Orson Scott (1992). Ender’s Game. New York, NY: Tor. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy (1989). “The Survival of Myth in Science Fiction.” In Mindscapes: The Geographies of Imagined Worlds, eds. George Edgar Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, 16–33. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Godwin, Francis (1638). The Man in the Moone or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales. London, UK: John Norton. Hammerton-Kelly, Robert, ed. (1988). Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Herbert, Frank (2005). Dune. New York, NY: Ace Books. Jung, Carl G., and Murray Stein (1999). Jung on Christianity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2014). Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. List, Julia (2009). “‘Call Me a Protestant’: Liberal Christianity, Individualism, and the Messiah in ‘Stranger in a Strange Land,’ ‘Dune,’ and ‘Lord of Light.’” Science Fiction Studies 36, 1: 21–47. Long, Charles H. (1999). Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Aurora, CO: Davies Group. Lukes, Steven (2012). “Is Durkheim’s Understanding of Religion Compatible with Believing?” Religion 42, 1 ( January): 41–52. McNelly, Willis E. (1984). The Dune Encyclopedia. New York, NY: Putnam. Ratzsch, Del (1988). “Space Travel and Challenges to Religion.” The Monist 71, 1, ( January): 101–13. Roberts, Adam (2016). The History of Science Fiction. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Sagan, Carl (2013). Cosmos. New York, NY: Ballantine. Senior, W. A (2012). “Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos: The Fantasy Within.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 18, 1–2 (Spring-Fall): 213–226. Simmons, Dan (1990). Hyperion. New York, NY: Bantam. Simmons, Dan (1996). Endymion. New York, NY: Bantam Books. Suedfeld, Peter, Kasia E. Wilk, and Lindi Cassel (2011). “Flying With Strangers: Postmission Reflections of Multinational Space Crews.” In Psychology of Space Exploration: Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective, ed. Douglas A. Vakoch, 143–175. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Vonnegut, Kurt (2005). Slaughterhouse-Five, or, the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. New York, NY: Dial Press. White, Frank (2018). The Cosma Hypothesis: Implications of the Overview Effect. Littleton, CO: Morgan Brook Media. White, Frank (2021). The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, 4th edn. Denver, CO: Multiverse Publishing.

8 BARBIES AND CELEBRITY SAINTS Religion in John Varley’s Eight Worlds Stories Wendy Gay Pearson

Introduction: Sex, Religion, and the Human Diaspora

Science fiction involves imagining futures, generally with the goal of critiquing the present. The state of religion in the present is undeniably complex: some cultures have more believers than non-believers; some states are or aspire to become theocracies; some societies tolerate or even celebrate a multiplicity of beliefs while others are prepared to wage war over religion. None of that answers either the question of what role(s) religion will play in the future or what role(s) it plays within science fiction as a genre. As Farah Mendlesohn has pointed out, science fiction is extremely diverse in its depiction of religions: extant religions may survive into the future, as with Catholicism in Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959); new ones may arise, as in Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993); and attitudes towards religion may be negative or skeptical, seeing it as destructive (Heinlein’s “If This Goes On—” [1940]), ambivalent (Russell’s The Sparrow [1996]), or simply irrelevant. One of the flaws of science fictional portrayals of religion is the inclination to assume that every planet has a single religion; Star Trek did this all the time (Mendlesohn 2003, 267). Both in the real world and in science fiction, despite some feminist interventions which generally privilege reinventions of paganism and mother goddesses, religion can be and often is used as political and even legal justification for regulating and enforcing ideas about gender, sexuality, race, and so on (ibid., 271). As Perales and Bouma note, Research has demonstrated associations between religious beliefs and patriarchal attitudes … In the context of gender relations, this involves supporting the maintenance of a status quo that emphasises patriarchal gender roles for men and women in the social system. (2019, 324) DOI: 10.4324/9781003088264-11

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I had a right-wing evangelical poster on my office door for a while to highlight the ways in which some religions conflate gender, sexuality, and race as evils. The sign said, “It is a sin to be LGBT,” and defined each of those letters: “lesbian, gay, black, transgender.” It is possible to simply dismiss the misinterpretation of “B” as “black” rather than as “bisexual” as simple ignorance, yet it underscores the deep connections between racism, homophobia, and transphobia in some contemporary religious and political discourse. As Mendlesohn writes, religion “provides a discourse of power” (2003, 270). LGBT Americans live today in a world where religion, usually but not solely some form of Christian evangelicalism, is used to justify everything from banning books to forbidding schools to recognize the gender identities of trans and nonbinary students or to talk about sexual identity. Generically, science fiction provides a great deal of space/time to imagine diverse approaches to these issues by depicting human futures differently and by taking advantage of the almost infinite possibilities of imagining alien species. Science fiction’s aliens might have no religion(s), multiple religions, or religion(s) with varying degrees of importance. Similarly, science fiction’s aliens might have no genders, genders which they see as unimportant and unrelated to questions of identity, multiple genders, shifting genders, and a range of sexual practices, ethics, and taboos, while science fiction’s future humans may have widely varying belief systems and relationships to epistemologies and ontologies of sex and gender, whether human, alien, or both. John Varley is an American science fiction writer who has won three Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, and ten Locus Awards. Though he has been recognized for doing interesting work on gender, he has not attracted a great deal of critical attention in academia.1 Varley’s work deserves more attention for how it might inform a variety of approaches to science fiction and its ability both to critique and to reimagine human social behaviours, including both gender and religion. The fictional worlds that Varley creates reflect the ways that religious ideologies, mythologies, images, and language about gender and the body play a foundational role in determining norms for both. Varley takes advantage of science fiction’s commitment to the thought experiment to play creatively with the category of gender, to experiment with norms and expectations of the body, and thereby to open space for us to question and reimagine these things in the real world. Varley presents readers with a future world that is as multiplicitous as our own, but one in which religion has been to some extent sidelined. Citizens of Varley’s future worlds deal daily with the nearly god-like entity that is the Central Computer (CC)—and, concomitantly, suffer when the CC itself becomes mentally ill from the stress of being a best friend, wise counsellor, and, in some cases, judge and executioner for every single person. The CC has taken over some of the roles religion plays for believers in the contemporary world, providing solace and advice.2 However, while a conscious entity, the CC is not a deity nor does it wish to be regarded as such. Religion is still practised in Varley’s future worlds, but it is not universal. Despite this, when the CC undergoes a massive, if temporary,

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failure, religion is one of the places to which some citizens turn to try and make sense of things. Varley’s work includes four novels and a number of short stories set in what is known as the “Eight Worlds” universe, as well as the Gaea trilogy, and the four novels in the “Thunder and Lightning” series, plus some one-off novels and short stories. Varley’s first short story was “Picnic on Nearside” (1974), but his world-building scenario was already well-established. This scenario provides the background common to many, but not all, of the Eight Worlds works. Many of Varley’s Eight Worlds stories are set on the Moon (Luna), although some are set on other planets or in space, particularly among the rings of Saturn. Almost all involve some form of body modification, which includes memory transplants into cloned bodies, creating quasi-immortality, but also “null suits,” which replace one lung with an automatically generated pressure suit, and “peds,” handlike replacements for feet commonly adopted by people who spend a lot of time in zero gravity. It also includes access to cheap, easy, effective, and reversible sex changes. Sex mutability and body modification are recurrent and consistent themes throughout the Eight Worlds universe, although it is otherwise deeply inconsistent.3 In some stories, humans have been exiled from Earth by the Invaders, an unknown and unseen alien species who seem to have an affinity with whales and dolphins and whom Varley later described as beings who, “if they weren’t actually God, could pinch-hit for him” (2004, 410). Although some humans remain on Earth, they do so in a primitive state with little in the way of technology. In contrast, humans on the Moon, Mars, and other worlds live in highly technologized societies in environments that have been adapted to support human life. In other Varley stories, the Moon is still in touch with the Earth and shares some of the same political pressures. In yet other stories, not only have the Invaders swept humanity from the Earth, but also human technology has been massively enhanced by information beamed mysteriously along something termed the Ophiuchi Hotline. Varley makes a surprising number of references to religion, even though none of his central characters are believers. Varley appears to see people’s turn to religion as either an inability to thrive in Lunarian society or a result of deep trauma, as is the case with journalist protagonist Hildy’s search for religious solace in Steel Beach (1992) following the death of their child. However, it is also clear that Varley depicts those few people who cling to old religions as incommensurable with contemporary life on the Moon (and elsewhere), largely because of their rigid opposition to all forms of bodily plasticity, but, most notably, the near-universal practices of both sex changing and memory transplantation into cloned bodies. The details vary: in some stories, cloned bodies are force-grown and the individual’s memory and personality are transplanted into the new body (which also provides the aforementioned quasi immortality, since memory recordings are so

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precise that each clone is unaware that they are not the original). In other stories, characters achieve sex changes surgically in “body shops” of varying degrees of sophistication, fashionability, and cost. Of course, some body modifications are more frivolous, including changes in height or other aspects of body morphology, or are done as purely decorative modifications, such as growing sable fur on one’s ankles—something the protagonist and all her clones do in The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977). Religion in Varley’s Eight Worlds lies somewhere between ideological obsession and entertainment. Lunarians or Loonies,4 moon-dwelling humans, are generally not particularly religious—but a few are so religious that they join the Standardists. Varley describes the Standardists as “an off-beat religious sect” or “religious order” that preaches “the community of all humanity, denigrate[s] free will, and elevate[s] the group and the consensus to demi-god status” (1980, 58). In this “religious sect,” or what some readers might consider a cult, everyone’s goal is to have their bodies altered to meet the very precise set of specifications laid down by the Great Engineer. The resulting bodies are identical and sex/gender neutral—literally, as they have no genitalia of any kind. Lunarians in general refer to Standardists as “barbies,” after the genital-less Barbie™ doll so prevalent in the 20th century. In contrast to the Standardist barbies, who take their religion very seriously, is the First Latitudinarian Church of Celebrity Saints (FLCCS or “Flacks”), which worships celebrities from the entertainment industry, such as Elvis. At one point in Irontown Blues (2018), Christopher Bach, the human protagonist, notes that everyone on Luna knows Elvis’s music because the Church broadcasts it every day. The irony here is that the Church’s broadcasts familiarize listeners with the music, but without luring most people into participation; it is also, of course, a somewhat scathing comment on contemporary celebrity worship, particularly of entertainers (think “Elvis lives”). It is somewhat hard to tell if the FLCCS is really a religion or a form of entertainment that takes itself far too seriously. Old Lester, the Barbies, and the Value of Sin

None of Varley’s protagonists are religious in a sense that would be meaningful in the reader’s extradiegetic world. Instead, they are bemused, bored, tolerant …. Nevertheless, various iterations of religion and even of religiosity form part of the cultural context for the inhabitants of the Eight Worlds. In “Picnic on Nearside” (1974), the teenage protagonist, Fox, and his friend Halo find themselves confronted for the first time in their lives with a true believer, named “Old Lester.”5 Old Archimedes on the nearside of the Moon is an area Loonies avoid because it forces them to confront the vision of the Earth they have lost. Fox’s flight to Archimedes is motivated by both his fury with his mother, Carnival, for insisting that he wait to get a sex change until he’s officially an adult (at 13: Lunarians speed

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up childhood and adolescence) and his desire to avoid immediate sex with Halo. Halo has just turned up on his doorstep as a woman when the previous day he had been Fox’s best buddy, “who made love to the same girls I did and compared notes with me later when we were alone” (Varley 1980, 239). Fox is unnerved by Halo’s very evident desire to try out her new equipment and irked that Halo was allowed to do what he himself has been forbidden. Since humans abandoned Old Archimedes, the Central Computer no longer maintains receptors there. Fox and Halo lose contact with the CC long before arriving on Nearside, so they have no one to turn to for help or advice. Instead, what they find is Old Lester. Lester was born on Earth and emigrated to the Moon a few years before the Invasion; he’s currently 257 and, except for a new heart, he’s entirely unreconstructed. This is shocking to Fox and Halo because, although they know others in roughly that age range, the others have all had their memories transplanted to new bodies. Lester is just old, as are his mores and particularly his religious notions. Lester is also Christian, a religion with which neither Fox nor Halo has any real familiarity. As is common in Varley’s work, religiosity is not associated with progressive values, but largely with clinging to old belief systems and practices, both of which are represented by Lester’s weird ideas about sex, gender, and the possibility of relocating his memories and consciousness into a younger, healthier body. Lester may be the last old-fashioned Christian left on the Moon. He believes that heterosexuality is normal, other forms of sexuality are sinful, and sex should be reserved for adults, preferably married; he also believes that altering one’s bodily form, whether through sex changes or otherwise, is immoral. He is not wholly comfortable with nudity, which is normal in the entirely climate-controlled atmosphere of Lunarian warrens, although he shrugs and says, “It ain’t no business of mine” (Varley 1980, 250). As time goes by, however, Lester starts taking more of an interest in the two young people: Old Lester had plainly adopted us. He said he’d be our father, which struck me as a funny thing to say since who the hell ever knows who their father is? But he began by behaving in the manner I would call maternal, and he evidently thought of as paternal. (Ibid., 251) Lester’s attitudes differ from the Lunarians’ in three particular areas: ideas about gender, ideas about sex, and ideas about the plasticity of the corporeal body. Lester’s refusal to be fixed (to have all of his many health issues resolved, either medically or by transfer of his memory into a new cloned body) is particularly shocking to Fox and Halo, who see no reason to suffer pain and loss of function or even to develop wrinkles. The two are especially shocked when they discover that Lester, who clearly is sexually attracted to Halo (despite believing his desires to be wrong), is incapable of getting an erection. Fox asks Halo if she’s had sex with

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Lester since he obviously wants to (and spies on the two teens) and is confounded by Halo’s response: We haven’t. And not because I haven’t tried. And not because he doesn’t want to. He looks, looks, looks; he never takes his eyes off me. And it isn’t because he thinks it’s a sin. He knows it’s a sin, but he’d do it if he could. I still don’t understand, then. … I just told you. He can’t. He’s too old. The equipment won’t function. (Varley 1980, 256) The idea of impotence, an idea for which Fox doesn’t even have a word, is so shocking to Fox that it makes him feel sick. Of course, he’s an adolescent, but it’s not just his youth, it’s also his expectations as a citizen of a highly technologized world in which virtually all forms of illness and bodily incapacity have been eliminated. But, of all the differences between the world in which Lester lives in his chosen isolation and the world in which Fox and Halo have grown up, it’s the idea of changing sex that confounds Lester the most. Fox concludes that this is a function of Lester’s religiosity (expressed in his ideas, but also in the Christian icons with which he surrounds himself ): He didn’t know much about Changing, except that he didn’t like it. It was Changing that finally decided him to separate himself from society. He said he had been having his doubts about joining the migration to Farside, and the sexchange issue had been the final factor. He shocked us more than he knew when he revealed that he had never been a woman. I thought his lack of curiosity must be monumental, but I was wrong. It turned out that he had some queer notions about the morality of the whole process, ideas he had gotten from some weirdly aberrant religion in his childhood. I had heard of the cult, as you can hardly avoid it if you know any history. It had said little about ethics, being more interested in arbitrary regulations …. I came to realize that this religion was at the bottom of the puzzling inconsistencies I began to notice about him. His “do as you please” may have been sincere, but he did not entirely live by it. It became clear that, though he thought people should have freedom of choice, he condemned them if the choices they made were not his own. (Varley 1980, 253) In some sense, it might be possible to read this passage as a condemnation of the kind of mainstream Christianity Lester represents. The passage about “arbitrary regulation” instead of ethics is more than a little damning, as is the self-­ righteousness of blaming others for making “wrong” choices. And yet, Varley, who self-identifies as a “lapsed Lutheran,” represents Old Lester with affection and respect. Certainly, the two protagonists come to love him, even as they are more

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than a little “freaked out” by what, to them, is his weirdness and particularly his insistence on dying rather than getting himself treated and rejuvenated. What is interesting here is the depiction of a future in which Christianity is barely a memory, buried primarily in the entertainment channels, with their fixation on 20th century movies and music, and in the study of history. Nobody in the Eight Worlds seems to feel religion to be something worth fighting over. It is less that there’s a resistance to religion among the general population, more that there’s a complete indifference to it. Of course, if one thinks of the large picture, this makes sense. God, Allah, Yahweh, an entire pantheon of deities, have all failed to protect their people from eviction by the Invaders. When confronted with a force as overwhelming and as incomprehensible as these aliens, a belief in a deity who centres humanity at the forefront of their concerns is bound to become a little strained. Moreover, society has changed technologically in ways that make the patriarchal regulation of gender and sexuality in many human religions completely meaningless. What is the point of clear-cut gender roles if you can be a woman today, a man tomorrow, and completely sexless the day after? In fact, in Steel Beach (1992), Brenda, an apprentice reporter, initially presents as completely lacking in primary or secondary sex characteristics. Whereas the barbies opt for gender neutral embodiment because they believe this is the body the Great Engineer intended for humans, Brenda chooses genital-less embodiment as a response to having been sexually abused as a child. Options: The Plasticity of Bodies, Sex, Gender, Religion …?

The plasticity of the body in Varley’s works means that limiting human choices to two sexes/genders makes very little sense. Yet in most of Varley’s work, particularly the novels in the Eight Worlds universe, the protagonists tend to be either male or female.6 Neuter characters like Brenda are relatively rare in these stories, with the exception of “The Barbie Murders” (1978a). And unlike contemporary nonbinary-identified people, “neuters” in Varley’s works aren’t gender neutral, but physically neuter in rejecting genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. Brenda is not the only Varley character who opts for becoming neuter. In “The Barbie Murders,” the protagonist, Lieutenant Anna Louise Bach (like Fox, one of Varley’s few recurring characters), has been assigned to investigate what appears to be the “no-brainer” of a murder that took place before witnesses as well as being caught on camera. The problem: the murder took place in the barbie colony and both the victim and the perpetrator are barbies. Barbies all live and work together in the Standardist Commune in New Crisium, where the murder took place in the tube station. Arriving there to begin the investigation, Bach notes that Every one of the fifty people [I] could see was identical to every other. All appeared to be female, though only faces, feet, and hands were visible, everything else concealed by loose white pajamas belted at the waist. They were all blonde;

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all had hair cut off at the shoulder and parted in the middle, blue eyes, high foreheads, short noses, and small mouths. (Varley 1980, 55) Barbies are intensely communal, banning names and refraining from the use of the pronoun “I.” They refer to themselves communally as “we,” except when forced by Bach’s insistent questioning to refer to themselves as individuals, at which point they resort to awkward circumlocutions: “this one,” “this body,” etc. Obviously, it’s difficult to solve a murder when the murderer, the victim, and the onlookers are all indistinguishable one from another. As a result, Bach heads off to a body shop with a copy of the Standardist Bible to have herself transformed into a barbie so that she can go undercover. After all, even the barbies can’t tell each other apart: “We all look the same to this one” (Varley 1980, 58). The body shop operator tells her that there’s no way to identify a barbie visually: I take off the fingerprints and footprints. I don’t leave any external scars, not even microscopic ones. No moles, freckles, warts or birthmarks; they all have to go. A blood test would work, and so would a retinal print … A voiceprint would be questionable. I even that out as much as possible. (Ibid., 62) Somewhat oddly, there’s no discussion of using genetic markers to identify individual barbies. This might simply be because “The Barbie Murders” was written in 1978, almost a decade before the police started using DNA testing (the first case was in the UK in 1986). More important for our purposes is how the barbies are positioned, somewhere between religion and cult (as the latter term is popularly used). Loonies are generally tolerant of what might seem eccentric, and while most Lunarians have no intention of joining the Standardists, there’s little in the way of critique of the barbie movement. Moreover, the solution to the murder lies in the linkage of religion, sexed bodies, and sexuality. Bach discovers a group of barbies meeting in secret to play sex games. An important ritual in these games is to dress up as gendered, largely by flaunting merkins (pubic wigs) and drawing nipples on their chests. The forbidden nature of a gendered identity, an individual identity, gives the players a thrill, but it also inspires retribution by other barbies. As Halo notes of Old Lester in “Picnic on Nearside,” some of the barbies need a little sin to spice up their otherwise banal lives: “He needs a little sin, Fox.” Huh? … He thinks drinking is sinful, and until we came along it was the only sin he could practice. Now he can practice the sin of lust, too. I think he needs to be forgiven for things, and he can’t be forgiven until he does them. (Varley 1980, 255)

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Not very surprisingly, Fox thinks this is crazy, but he also is unable to deny that it seems to explain some of Old Lester’s attitudes and behaviours. In the case of the Standardists, their communal hive-like organization leaves no room for either individuality or sexuality; combining them provides barbies with an opportunity for sin, as it were, by allowing them to imitate gendered people expressing sexual desire contrary to both the Standardists’ rules and their raison d’être. However, breaking the rules is not without consequences; it was the particular barbie’s participation in these forbidden sexual acts that precipitated her murder. Bach concludes that the woman was a pervert, by the only definition that made any sense among the Standardists. She, and presumably the other dead barbies, had an individuality fetish. When Bach had realized that, her first thought had been to wonder why they didn’t simply leave the colony and become whatever they wished. But then why did a Christian seek out prostitutes? For the taste of sin. In the larger world, what these barbies did would have little meaning. Here, it was sin of the worst and tastiest kind. (Varley 1980, 77) Although Varley never explicitly elucidates it, many of the attitudes of the Standardists reflect American populist notions of religion. While most of the stories I am concerned with in this chapter were written between the mid-1970s and the turn of the millennium, the strong strands of both gender hierarchy and sexual prudery present in American evangelicalism were already in play. In the decades between the publication of “Picnic on Nearside” and now, Americans have faced a roller coaster of both progressive and regressive policies and practices, particularly around women, LGBTQ people, and racialized people. While Roe v Wade ­legalized abortion in 1973, shortly before Varley began publishing, the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated; now, of course, Roe v. Wade has been overturned, sex education is under attack, and so are LGBT people, particularly trans children. The opposition between progressive attitudes towards gender and sexuality and a regressive, authoritarian notion of religion is extremely marked. While the religious Right attempts to impose standards of sex and gender meant to enforce a patriarchal gender hierarchy and rigid notions of masculinity and femininity, the Standardists’ refusal of individualism, by contrast, results in a refusal of sex/gender which, in turn, creates a kind of hive-like egalitarianism. The barbies perfectly illustrate religious discomfort with bodies, particularly with the diverse ways in which bodies can express and perform sexual desire, yet they do so without reinstating patriarchal rules and privileges. Paul’s insistence in the New Testament that it is “better to marry than to burn” (1 Cor 7:9) would make little sense to the Standardists since the Eight Worlds’ highly technologized state means that they can create forms of embodiment which allow them neither to marry nor to burn. Marriage does not really exist in the Eight Worlds stories, in part because it makes little sense in a world where people can live for centuries (at least in cloned

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bodies), gender (or sex) is random and frequently altered, and no one is allowed to have more than one child. The one child limitation means that few people are prepared to waste their reproductive opportunity on fatherhood. Varley’s logic is that the mother’s connection to the baby is much more intimate, and, in a world with routine, easy, reversible, sex changing, everyone has the option to experience being a mother. Of course, this is dependent on a much more effective sex change technology than is available in the early 21st century. Brenda is a rare case of a child brought up by both a mother and a father, not that this is a benefit to her given that her father sexually abuses her. Hildy’s response to learning of the abuse that motivated Brenda to reinvent herself as a genital-less neuter is to meditate on the role of fathers: Sometimes I think our society is screwed up about this father business. Just because we can all bear children, is that an excuse to virtually eliminate the role of father? Then I think about Brenda and her old man, and about how common that sort of thing used to be, and you wonder if males should be allowed around little children at all. (Varley 1992, 588) This is an interesting comment that perhaps illustrates how extremely difficult it is for even the most willing 20th century Westerner to imagine a world in which sex change practices have made the distinction between men and women both arbitrary and performative. If anyone can be a male at any time, what sense does it make to consider maleness as grounds for determining access to little children? Hildy Johnson, the journalist protagonist of Steel Beach, has a somewhat conflicted attitude towards religion.7 This is not surprising when you consider the various ways in which Hildy encounters matters of religious belief and extant religious institutions, notably represented in Steel Beach by the FLCCS. Hildy is aware that people use religion to provide themselves with consolation, to find assistance in difficult times, and to try and understand the universe and the meaning of life (and is not unaware that religion also offers plenty of scope for hierarchical behaviours, power grabs, and old-fashioned greed). Towards the end of the novel, Hildy gets pregnant, quite casually, and is largely indifferent to the child, Mario, until he’s born, at which point she falls in love with him; when he dies of SIDS, Hildy tries to kill herself. After she gives that up, she turns to religion to try and find solace and meaning in Mario’s death, but it doesn’t work. She says, When it became apparent to me that I was going to live, when I gave up heaping blame on myself…, when I’d learned the how of his death, I became obsessed with why. I started going to churches again. I usually did it with a few drinks under my belt. Somewhere during the service I’d stand up and begin an angry prayer, the gist of which was why did You do it, You slime-sucking Son of a Big Bang? I’d stand on pews and shout at the ceiling. Usually I got ejected quickly. Once I got arrested for tossing a chair through a stained glass window. (Varley 1992, 556)

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The reference to churches and stained glass windows suggests that Hildy is engaging with some form of Christianity. In fact, Hildy spends most of the novel hanging out in the West Texas disney, a warren specifically designed to imitate life in 19th century Texas, although its inhabitants remain connected to the CC and can get real education, medical care, etc. if they wish. During her time in New Austin, Hildy’s search for meaning sends her to multiple religious institutions; she tells her friend and occasional lover, Cricket: “I go to church every Sunday.” He probably thought I meant the Baptist Church at the end of Congress. I did go there from time to time, usually in the evenings. The only thing Baptist about it was the sign out front. It was actually non-denominational, non-sectarian … non-religious, to tell the truth. No sermons were preached but the singing was lots of fun. Sunday mornings I went to real churches. It’s still the most popular sabbath, Jews and Muslims notwithstanding. I tried them out as well. I tried everybody out. Where possible I met with the clergy as well as attending a service, seeking theological explanations. Most were quite happy to talk to me. (Ibid., 379) Of course, part of Hildy’s church attendance is the requirement to live in the West Texas disney as if one were living in the historical time frame. So churchgoing in the disney is not necessarily a reflection of religious habits throughout the Moon. In fact, Hildy specifically notes that Surveys say sixty percent of Lunarians are atheist, agnostic, or just too damn stupid or lazy ever to have harbored an epistemological thought … Of the forty percent who claim membership in an organized religion, the largest single group is the F.L.C.C.S. After that, Christians or Christian-descended faiths, everything from the Roman Catholics to groups numbering no more than a few dozen. There are appreciable minorities of Jews, Buddhists, Hindoos, Mormons, and Mahometans, some Sufis and Rosicrucians and all the sects and offshoots of each. Then there were hundreds of really off beat groups, such as the Barbie Colony out in Gagarin where they all have themselves altered to look exactly alike. There were people who worshiped the Invaders as gods, a proposition I wasn’t prepared to deny, but if so, so what? All they’d demonstrated toward us so far was indifference, and what’s the use of an indifferent god? How would a universe created by such a god be any different from one where there was no god, or where God was dead? … There were even people who worshiped the CC as a god. So far I’d stayed away from them. (Ibid., 379) For a novel in which religion supposedly plays a very minor role, it still seems remarkably important to Hildy in her quest to find meaning in her life. However,

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even Hildy’s somewhat obsessive search through diverse religions does not speak to a search for transcendence, a function of religion that is largely omitted in Varley’s works (insofar as the stories deal with a form of transcendence, it is experienced primarily by the symbs, symbiotic pairings created by the merging of humans with alien beings who bond with each other far more intensely than any potential human or human/animal relationship).8 Part of the reason religion in the Eight Worlds stories seems relatively unimportant has to do, as Hildy notes, with the omnipresence of the god-like, unseen Invaders and part has to do with the creation of a highly technologized society controlled by the CC, whose function in turn seems strangely god-like. The CC has the capacity to form a persona to interact with every single one of the millions of Lunarians and an ethical obligation to function as an advisor, confidante, and best friend to every one of them, regardless of their character and behaviour. The CC knows of Brenda’s abuse because its relationship with her father is just as close as its relationship to her. Being required by law to “be the best friend of paragons and perverts” and to treat them all equally creates a kind of schizophrenia, a conflict that the CC has no idea how to handle (1992, 541). This results in what comes to be known as the Big Glitch, a catastrophic computer failure that results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, every one of whom believed they could rely absolutely on the CC to keep them safe and comfortable. The distinction between the utter indifference to humans of the Invaders and the over-investment of the CC reflects two of the main ways in which humans have conceptualized ­deities— indifferent and perhaps capricious overlords versus all-knowing caregivers. Yet neither, in the long run, can guarantee human life, much less human comfort. And, in this particular case, neither has spawned any form of organized religion. Regulating Gender and Sexuality

It is not hard to understand why most institutional religions might be uneasy about the idea of humans effectively becoming immortal (itself usually a perquisite of gods); it is also not hard to understand why some patriarchal religious institutions might be discomforted by the ability of humans to change their bodies in quite dramatic ways, particularly when those changes affect how humans engage in sexual relationships. Strassfeld notes in “Transing Religious Studies” that “the history of religious studies (and feminist scholarship in the field) has colluded with transmisogyny” and that it is time to ask what it would “look like to trans religious studies” when those studies “have been positioned as cisgendered” (2018, 39). Western society is currently at a historical juncture where, on the one hand, the US Supreme Court has just assailed the rights of women to control their reproductive choices and maintain bodily autonomy and, on the other, legislative and other assaults on transgender people, in particular, are increasing dramatically. Varley’s works can provide significantly alternative perspectives to the compulsory heteronormativity and cisgenderism that reactionary forces across

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the West are trying to enforce, whether religion or biology (or both) are offered as justification.9 In the first three months of 2022, journalists Lavietes and Ramos documented almost 240 legislative assaults in the United States on members of the LGBTQ community. The legal assault seems to be firmly targeted against women, trans people, and queer people—in other words, anyone who might have an interest in overturning patriarchy and ending gender hierarchies. Part of the assault on transgender and queer people rests on the twin beliefs that trans people are mentally ill and queer folk are perversely choosing homosexuality over heterosexuality. In Varley’s worlds, there is certainly recognition that religion is one of the major factors that complicates human gender and sexual expression. Religion comes up repeatedly as characters attempt to make sense of their situations, yet most, like Hildy, remain unable to find a religion that works for them. One of the obvious issues with cheap, easy, and reversible sex changes is the impact that has on sexual relationships. If one changes sex from female to male, what becomes of one’s heterosexual (or homosexual) relations? Does a woman who becomes a man still desire men? Hildy is clear about her own orientation, which remains heterosexual no matter what her own sex: I am hetero-oriented. Which is not to say I have never engaged in sex with a partner of my current sex; hasn’t everybody? Can anyone remain truly heteroist when they have been both male and female? I suppose anything’s possible, but I’ve never encountered it. What I find is that sex for me is always better when there is a man and a woman involved. Twice in my life I have met people I wanted to become more deeply attached to when both of us were of the same sex. In both cases, one of us Changed. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t believe anyone can really explain reasons behind their sexual preferences, unless they’re based on prejudice: i.e., this or that practice is unnatural, against God’s law, perverted, disgusting, and so forth. … The fact is, when I’m a boy I’m intensely interested in girls, and have little or no interest in other boys, and vice versa when I’m a girl. I have friends who are precisely the opposite, who are homo-oriented in both sexes. So be it. I know people who cover the whole spectrum between these two positions, from the dedicated males and females, homo and hetero, to the pansexuals who only require you to be warm and would be willing to overlook it if you weren’t, to the dysfunctionals who aren’t happy in either sex, to the true neuters, who identify with neither sex, have all external and internal attributes removed and are quite glad to be shut of the whole confusing, inconvenient, superfluous, messy business. (Varley 1992, 155-6) This passage does an excellent job both of summing up the dilemma easy sex changing creates and of revealing common Lunarian attitudes towards it. Jérôme Goffette (2006) proposes new vocabulary for this dilemma, suggesting “monosexual” for those who retain their object choice and “altersexual” for those who

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change it. Insofar as traditional religious institutions, particularly patriarchal ones, remain obsessed with maintaining gender hierarchies and regulating sexual and reproductive behaviour, religion in the Eight Worlds is often depicted as out of touch with both technological and social realities of Loonie life. As with Old Lester, sex changing becomes the fault line that reveals the way Varly depicts religions struggling to come to terms with more egalitarian ways of doing both sex and gender. Again, this can be understood as a commentary on the role of religion and religious studies in sustaining and propagating both transphobia and transmisogyny; Strassfeld particularly notes the role of “radical feminist theologians” like Mary Daly in depicting transsexuals, notably trans women, as “a central metaphor for patriarchal religion” (2018, 45). In this sense, Varley’s depiction of a world of universal value-neutral sex changing is a rejection of both radical feminist theology and conservative practices within patriarchal religions. At the end of Steel Beach, faced with the ongoing trauma of the loss of her baby, Hildy returns to the body modification shop and requires the technician, Darling Bobby, to render her asexual, like Brenda when I first met her. This was probably foolish and certainly extreme, but I found that I couldn’t bear the thought of sex, and in fact loathed that opening that had brought Mario into the world for his short, perfect time. I had even less interest in being male again. So I jumped off the sexual choo-choo train and I’m not sorry I did it. I think I’ll be ready to board again any day now, but it’s been a relief not to be at the mercy of hormones, of either polarity. I may do it every twenty years or so, as sort of a sabbatical. (Varley 1992, 564) In the end, it is not religion that brings Hildy relief, despite her many attempts to locate one that might work for her. Instead, it is the actual technology of sex changing that allows Hildy the option to step off the sexual railroad. Having more and broader options for embodiment, particularly sexual embodiment, is one of the reasons Varley himself has labelled the Eight Worlds stories “a semi-utopian environment” (Varley 2004, 120). If religion has any hand in the creation of that environment, it would seem to reinforce the notion of the Invaders as indifferent or hostile deities and the CC as a benevolent, but not entirely trustworthy, one. Nevertheless, the kinds of high technology represented by the CC are primarily what allows the Moon and the rest of the Eight Worlds that semi-utopian status. If 21st century humanity, still without this technology, is to reach even a semi-utopian state, particularly one that retains its utopian character for women and LGBTQ people, we need to think carefully about the roles we have thus far allowed religions to play in enforcing gender hierarchies and regulating human sexual behaviour. In Varley’s works, the primary conflict is not between religion and science or religion and technology, but rather between religion and the lived experience of plastic embodiment, particularly as understood through people’s

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ability to move between genders and even sexual orientations. For good or bad, religion is depicted as a fixed point in a fluid universe. Notes 1 A very early exception is Donna Haraway’s discussion of “Persistence of Vision” ­( Haraway 2013; Varley 1978b). This is not an Eight Worlds story but is about a utopian community of deaf/blind people. 2 Paul Nahin’s overview of “computers as gods” in Holy Sci-Fi (2014) omits the possibility the CC represents, that of the computer as benevolent, but fallible, god. The CC is not Hal (in 2001: A Space Odyssey). 3 Varley writes in the introduction to the reprint of “The Barbie Murders” that he never considered his Anna Louise Bach stories to be part of the Eight Worlds series, since the Invasion to which they refer either hasn’t yet happened or never will. Yet Bach’s son, Christopher, turns up in the final Eight Worlds’ novel, Irontown Blues (2018). The loss of the Earth leaves humanity with eight planets, since Pluto was still considered a planet at the time. 4 Readers of science fiction will recognize Varley’s many references to the work of ­Robert A Heinlein, particularly his novel of Moon dwellers and their supercomputer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). 5 “Girlfriend” doesn’t exactly fit the case, since Fox’s friend Halo has just transitioned from male to female, while Fox, who wants to, is in rebellion against his mother for forbidding him to get a sex change–-although, perhaps ironically, she had his sex changed at birth because she wanted a son. Fox is made nervous by Halo’s desire to try out her new body, saying that, like all first-time changers, she exaggerates her new gender, mincing around “like something out of a gothic novel” (Varley 1980, 240). 6 Sherryl Vint (2002) argues that “gender identity remains an essential category of identity to Varley's characters,” whereas I see Varley’s play with 20th century gender stereotypes as less essential than performative. 7 Since Hildy is female for the majority of the novel, the pronoun “she” seems most apt. 8 See “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance” (Varley 1976) and “Equinoctial” (Varley 1977). In terms of religion as an approach to transcendence, Mendlesohn notes that a non-Eight Worlds story, “The Persistence of Vision,” “infused earlier understandings of religion as ritual with a sense of religion and sensory experience” (2003, 271). 9 Ideas about religion and particularly the peculiar notion that morality is somehow a function of religion are invoked to justify misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic legislation. “As feminist scholars Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen argue in their analysis of sodomy laws, morality is often the term employed in legal contexts to disguise Protestant values as neutral or secular” (Strassfield 2018, 41).

Works Cited Butler, Octavia E. (1993). Parable of the Sower. New York, NY: Warner Books. Goffette, Jérôme (2006). “John Varley et Les Sexes Métamorphes.” Les representations du corps dans les oeuvres fantastiques et de science fiction, ed. Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay, 267–283. Paris, France: Editions Michel Houdiard. Haraway, Donna J. (2013). Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York, NY: Routledge. Heinlein, Robert (1940). “If This Goes On—.” Astounding Science-Fiction (February): ­9 –40; part 2 (March, 1940): 116–151. Heinlein, Robert A. (1966). The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. New York, NY: Putnam.

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Lavietes, Mark, and Elliot Ramos (2022). “Nearly 240 Anti-LGBTQ Bills Filed in 2022 So Far, Most of Them Targeting Trans People.” NBC News (20 March); available online: