Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings; Watts; Yoo

Edited by

James W Watts [+–]

Syracuse University

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James W. Watts is Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. His publications include How and Why Books Matter: Essays on the Social Function of Iconic Texts (Equinox, 2019) and Understanding the Bible as a Scripture in History Culture and Religion (Wiley, 2021).

Yohan Yoo [+–]

Seoul National University

Yohan Yoo is a Professor of Comparative Religion at Seoul National University. His previous publications include three books in Korean: Myths of Our Era (2012), Understanding Religious Studies (2020), and Understanding Religious Symbolism (2021). He has also co-authored Cosmologies of Pure Realms and the Rhetoric of Pollution (Routledge, 2021) and co-edited Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings (Equinox, 2021) with James W. Watts.

Human cultures, especially religious groups but also secular artists and performers, often ritualize bodies as sacred books and books as divine beings. An international team of scholars addresses this theme of books as sacred beings in this volume through an impressively diverse range of primary material and perspectives. These studies show the wide variety of ways in which books, bodies, and beings intermingle in material sacred texts manipulated by human bodies, and also in literary and artistic depictions of transcendent textual bodies. The boundary between material immanence and spiritual transcendence turns out to be very thin indeed when people use books. The chapters on specific book practices in different cultures are bracketed by an introduction to the collection and by a concluding essay that extrapolates on the widespread theme of books as sacred beings.

Series: Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts

Front Matter

List of Figures vii

James W Watts,Yohan Yoo FREE

Syracuse University

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Seoul National University

Chapter 1

Introduction [+–] 1-7

James W Watts FREE

Syracuse University

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Introduces the volume and summarizes each of the chapters.

Chapter 2

Performing Scriptures: Ritualizing Written Texts in Seolwi-seolgyeong, the Korean Shamanistic Recitation of Scriptures [+–] 9-24

Yohan Yoo £17.50

Seoul National University

Rituals frequently manipulate material scriptures while also expressing their contents using words and images. It is less common for recitation rituals to also physically reproduce scriptures on the spot in writing and graphic displays. In the first essay, Yohan Yoo describes one set of rituals that does so: shamanistic rituals of scripture reading and reproduction in North and South Chungcheong Provinces, South Korea. In contrast to shamanistic practices in other parts of Korea, here their principle ritual activity involves seated recitation of scriptures while also writing key names and cutting out symbols derived from the scriptures on paper banners. Ritualizing the expressive and iconic dimensions of formerly Daoist and Buddhist scriptures in this way is believed to invoke the gods’ presence, drive away demons, and bring healing to the sponsors of the rituals.

Chapter 3

Embodying the Qu’ran [+–] 25-35

Katharina Wilkens £17.50

Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich

Interfaculty Programme Study of Religion
Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich

Katharina Wilkens builds on her previous research on imbibing Qurʾanic verses and ideologies of reading (2012 [2017]) to describe the aesthetic ideology that governs rituals of embodying and sounding the Qurʾan as well as drinking its letters. The description of the Prophet Mohammed as “a walking Qurʾan” epitomizes the goal of Qur’anic memorization to sanctify the student by embodying the scripture. Combining these examples with a review of recent academic theories about the aesthetics of religion, Wilkens lays out the case for distinguishing semantic from aesthetic ideologies of literacy in Islamic discourse as well as in academic studies of it.

Chapter 4

Scriptures, Materiality, and the Digital Turn: The Iconicity of Sacred Texts in a Liminal Age [+–] 37-50

Bradford A. Anderson £17.50

Dublin City University

Brad Anderson, Associate Professor, School of Theology, Philosophy, and Music, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland.

Much discussion today about written textuality focuses on the transformative changes brought about by e-books and online texts. Though many people lament the loss of physical contact with material books, little of this discussion has actually focused on digitization’s effects on iconic texts. That is the topic broached by Brad Anderson, who surveys popular as well as academic discussions of the digitization of religious scriptures. Despite much discussion of the ritual use or misuse of digitized texts, he finds that iconic ritualization of scriptures still tends to utilize, with very few exceptions, a material book rather than its digital equivalents. Contemporary investigations of materiality in religious practices underscore the agency of physical objects in ritual practice, and elsewhere. Ritualizing iconic books, therefore, draws attention to the limitations of digital formats.

Chapter 5

Being the Bible: Sacred Bodies and Iconic Books in Bring Your Bible to School Day [+–] 51-66

Dorina Miller Parmenter £17.50

Spalding University

Dorina Miller Parmenter is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Her research interests include material uses of the Christian Bible.

Dorina Miller Parmenter describes the development of a very recent Bible ritual in the United States: Bring Your Bible to School Day. This attempt to counter the appearance of secularization in American schools and culture has mobilized as many as 650,000 Christian school children to carry and display their bibles at their schools. Parmenter analyzes the rhetoric around this Evangelical movement on the basis of traditional Protestant doctrines of scripture dating back to the sixteenth century. She points out how processing bibles and the images of doing so in news media, advocate websites and social media engage both Lutheran and Calvinist theologies of scripture. In the end, it is not the bibles but the children carrying them whom the books index as “showing God” to their schoolmates and teachers.

Chapter 6

Body Building in the Hindu Tantric Tradition: The Advantages and Confusions of Scriptural Entextualization in the Worship of the Goddess Kali [+–] 67-82

Rachel Fell McDermott £17.50

Barnard College

Professor
Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures
Barnard College

Rachel Fell McDermott analyzes Bengali Tantric poetry dedicated to the goddess Kālī. Culling examples from her previous publications about this tradition, she shows how Bengali court poets in the eighteenth century popularized the esoteric Tantric traditions that had become associated with Kālī over the preceding millennium. These traditions emphasized entextualizing Tantric teachings through meditation so as to reproduce the macrocosm within the microcosm of one’s own body. However, later Bengali poets reflect the rising popularity of bhakti traditions that simplify the tradition into pure devotion to the goddess herself, rather than trying to reproduce her journey within the body. McDermott thus charts the transition from esoteric to exoteric tradition that, for most people, changed their dedication to this Tantric deity from practices to be mastered into feelings of love and devotion.

Chapter 7

Saints’ Lives as Performance Art [+–] 83-96

Virginia Burrus £17.50

Syracuse University

Virginia Burrus is The Bishop W. Earl Ledden Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University.

Some people become famous for going to ascetic extremes, and as a result attract admiring hagiographers who chronicle their lives. In an essay added to this collection after the Seoul conference, Virginia Burrus recounts some vivid early Christian examples. She compares their practices to those of modern performance artists who use their own bodies as the medium for their art. Burrus notes that how the bodily performances of saints and artists affect their audiences vividly and viscerally, but also how both depend on mediation to extend their performances: the ancient saints through the texts of their hagiographies, the modern artists through photography and video technology. More than other kinds of textual mediation, however, the bodily performance draws readers’ and viewers attention away from its forms of mediation. Burrus argues that the saints’ performances get mediated also by art in the form of iconography and by things in the form of relics. They thus exhibit three dimensions of performativity: textual, visual and thingly.

Chapter 8

Aspiring Narratives of Previous Births: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Written and Visual Media in Ancient Gandhara [+–] 97-114

Jason Neelis £17.50

Wilfrid Laurier University

Jason Neelis is Associate Professor and Chair, Religion and Culture, at Wilfrid Laurier University.

It has long been known that Buddhist sutras have functioned as relics to embody the Dharma since at least the first centuries C. E. Jason Neelis focuses on narratives of the Buddha’s past lives to show that these stories also transmit the Dharma both verbally and visually. He describes the religious lives of these narratives by tracing them in the iconographic programs of reliefs from ancient Gandhāra, some of the earliest extant examples of Buddhist art. Gandhāri scribes and artists appropriated these narratives by associating them with local people and shrines. As a result, people made pilgrimages to these places from as far away as East Asia in order to retrace the path by which the Buddha became enlightened across his many lives. Neelis argues that the goal of such pilgrims, and of the artists who marked their routes for them, was to come closer to enlightenment themselves by bodily following the spiritual path of the Dharma as described in these narratives.

Chapter 9

Daoist Writs and Scriptures as Sacred Beings [+–] 115-135

Jihyun Kim £17.50

Seoul National University

Associate Professor

Department of Religious Studies

College of Humanities

Seoul National University

There is a mystical tendency in many religious traditions to consider their scriptures transcendent in one way or another. There are, for example, old Jewish and Muslim claims that the prototype of the Torah or Qurʾan was written by God at the creation of the world and continues to reside in heaven. Jihyun Kim describes how Daoists made an even more fundamental claim. They regarded their scriptures as embodying qi, the fundamental energy of the cosmos. It produced scripts and scriptures even before the creation of the world, and the look and sound of sacred texts brought it into being. Daoist ritual uses of scripture therefore aimed to engage a transcendent and primordial state of being.

Chapter 10

Books as Sacred Beings [+–] 137-149

James W Watts £17.50

Syracuse University

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The tendency of books to be ascribed agency like people and deities leads James Watts, in the last chapter, to explore why that is. Books manifest interiority like people: we speak of both as material containers for immaterial ideas. Books also generate common out-of-body experiences, they can be reproduced in multiple copies, and encountering them often changes us. Books are therefore material artifacts whose common use generates analogies that reinforce widespread hopes for bodily transcendence, resurrection or reincarnation, and theophany.

End Matter

Author Index 151-154

James W Watts,Yohan Yoo FREE

Syracuse University

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Seoul National University

Subject Index 155-160

James W Watts,Yohan Yoo FREE

Syracuse University

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Seoul National University

Reviews

This collection challenges readers to think more expansively and daringly about books/texts and what beyond content-meanings they are about or, in my view of things, are made to mean or do. Such phenomenological interests are important in terms of making the attempt to fathom as widely and as deeply as possible the ongoing dynamics and effects of human-making. The volume will be of interest to scholars working in areas having to do with the history and theory and problematics of reading, of books, of embodiment and dynamics of sacralization.
Vincent L. Wimbush, Ph.D., Director, Institute for Signifying Scriptures

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings

James W Watts [+–]

Syracuse University

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Yohan Yoo [+–]

Seoul National University

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