Bonus Sample: Swan Song Series 5 | Michelle Remembers: Themes & Framing
In the second of three episodes on Michelle Remembers, we recap its Catholic contexts, and Lawrence Pazder's quest to transcend the limitations of psychiatry through mystical nightmares. We then explore the front matter: how Pazder introduces his project (and himself), and the ambivalent endorsement of Remi de Roo, Archbishop of Victoria. In Pazder's many clerical alliances, a crucial theme is established: the rapprochement between psychiatry and the priesthood, in which the former submits to the latter to restore the reality of the supernatural. We also look at the pre-emptively defensive intro penned by the publisher, Thomas B. Congdon Jr. He claimed to have verified the substance of the book through interviews, and thought that Pazder and Smith were very earnest and forthcoming people when he hosted them for editorial meetings. Okay sure.Show NotesRemi De Roo - WikipediaThomas B. Congdon, Editor of Best Sellers Like 'Jaws,' Dies at 77The Beginning of a Community
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This bonus sample comes to you from our early access Patreon collection called Swan Song Series, in which we examine the historical and cultural roots that inform and fuel the teal swan spectacle.
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The irony of Satanism for me is that all of the most powerful spiritual experiences I have had personally, if spiritual is the right word, I'm not sure it is, but they have all been built on moments of demystification.
The opposite of having a revelation or the revelatory experience.
of recognizing that something is not sacred.
You know, so these are moments in which something that I once believed was sacred suddenly appeared as very normal and mundane.
And in that moment, I realized that the division in my brain between the sacred and the mundane is artificial, it's unnecessary, it's burdensome, there's some inner authoritarianism and anxiety that's keeping that going and propping it up.
Yeah, I just need to pause you there because I so relate to this, and to me one of the ways I frame it is that it's recognizing that any symbology that refers to the sacred actually is referring to something located in the seemingly mundane everyday life of being human.
That there's a kind of awakening you're describing, an experience, and awakening of course is a tarnished word at this point.
A kind of coming to oneself and coming to the world as being in and of itself.
Sacred in a way that doesn't require the extra step somehow.
And what's wild about this, we'll talk about this a little bit more later, is that Pazder refers to Rollo May, who's actually an existentialist psychologist, who you could have just been quoting, who talks about existential anxiety as something that we need to learn how to tolerate.
Or that, you know, for his sort of self-actualization type process, tolerating that existential anxiety and having those kinds of encounters with reality and with our own human existence, that he defines that as a kind of breakthrough in terms of his psychological theory. - Right. that he defines that as a kind of breakthrough in Right.
Yeah, we'll get to why Pazder actually quotes Rollo May in his preface and then seems to drop every single ball of psychological literature and training throughout the entire book and what the mystery might be there.
But yeah, I mean, I'm thinking I may be 10 years old, 11 years old, I'm a Catholic boy, I'm standing in front of an icon of the Virgin in the cathedral, and suddenly I understand that it's made of plaster.
Just like the plaster cornices at the tops of the walls.
I understand that it was painted hastily by somebody who might have been bored or underpaid.
That it was no different in substance from my school uniform or my lunchbox.
And this meant Two things, it meant that not only were sacred things everywhere and maybe nowhere, but also isn't it funny and melancholic that we try to make these special amulets, right?
It's so strange that we put so much effort in.
So what does this have to do with this liturgical music that sounds like it's from the Newport Folk Festival?
I think it implies that the music of God, I think those guitar effects imply that the music of God can be anywhere, can be engaged with by anyone.
The musicians can wear jeans, sideburns, they can use a lot of effects.
And the reactionary response to that is, I think, an infantile allergy to all of those possibilities.
To saying, you know, the person is saying, the guitarist is saying, hey man, God is no big deal.
Let's hang out.
But if you have built your identity around othering yourself from people through piety and discipline, that can be a really awkward proposition.
I think it can be painful and even loathsome.
And I think we have to understand that piety generates enormous sunken costs, and that if someone like Pazdur lets it sink in, That this line between sacred and non-sacred things is all in his head and it was put there by somebody else, talking of intrusion and projection.
He'll realize he's a hypocrite.
And I empathize with people who are stuck at that halfway point in demystification because they've gone far enough to feel ungrounded by a loss of their devotional objects, but maybe not far enough to feel that maybe reality surrounds and holds them anyway.
Yeah.
It's interesting in a much simpler and probably more contained way that was specific to a smaller phenomenon.
I feel like we watched exactly these kinds of tensions play out in the 90s in the American yoga scene.
You know, there were all these appeals to lineage, to using Sanskrit, to protecting the practice in ways that would remain consistent with the 5,000-year-old ancient tradition.
And all of that was framed in stark contrast with new developments like power yoga.
Like using music in classes, or teaching using the anglicized names for the postures instead of the Sanskrit, or failing to locate the scriptural basis of yoga in Patanjali when training teachers, even though, you know, most of the people who were training the teachers were, you know, had only a passing familiarity with that text.
And this only increased as yoga's popularity exploded and all of the new marketing gimmicks emerged and you end up with like, you know, beer yoga and goat yoga, etc.
But, oddly enough, there's a weird paradox here, too, that a more social justice-informed lens coming into the yoga sphere also then made a generation, and you and I bore witness to this with a lot of confusion, there's a generation of yoga teachers in the late 2000s who were vulnerable to taking the Hindu nationalist line as an antidote to legitimate problems with cultural appropriation.
Very strange bedfellows between yoga lefties and Hindu nationalists through the 2000s, right?
And some of that, you know, I think there were Hindu nationalist kind of operatives online who knew that they could exploit that.
Oh, for sure.
No doubt, no doubt.
On a personal note, you know, the stuff I was talking about before of a kind of like A fetishizing of a seemingly traditionally pure idea within the yoga community really turned me off.
And I didn't spend a lot of time with with quote-unquote mainstream yoga people.
It's also part of the appeal of Anna Forrest for me was that she wasn't doing any of that.
She had a very, she had a critique where she said, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these male figures who are being so idealized and turned into God-like figures, they're not so great, and in fact, they're abusive.
Like, she's one of the very first people I ever heard say anything bad about Iyengar or Batabi Joyce.
So yeah, weird.
But it seemed to me like a lot of the religious fundamentalist tropes I was familiar with from Christianity, but now they've been dressed up in organic cotton and mala beads and a little Om tattoo on a very toned belly, right?