It’s because of caves, or cavelike openings in the earth, that we have the grotesque. The word is derived from the Italian term grotte: once used to describe the cavelike excavations uncovered because of a Roman thirst for origin stories. During the Italian Renaissance antiquarians began to dig deep pits in the city of Rome, in search of all the histories the church had buried. Much of what they uncovered were old tombs. Naturally, the grotte came to be understood as a space of death. But because it also began to offer Romans a new sense of self, there was an element of truth and beauty to the cavelike grotte as well. A grotte offered a new way of seeing: a form of rebirth.
Our sense of the grotesque seems to have shed much of this truth and beauty. But Victoria Nelson argues that there’s much buried in the grotesque that we don’t tend to see, and so don’t understand. Notably, Nelson argues that for most Americans today, what used to be sacred has become grotesque.
In her book The Secret Life of Puppets, Nelson argues that in the wake of secularization, and scientific revolutions, western culture underwent a paradigm shift that “banished” the heavens above (the overworld), as well as the underworld below, from an increasingly rational, materialist, scientific cosmology. These worlds could be studied, of course, as long as they were subject to some sort of empirical investigation. But the old idea that the world above and the world below were filled with spiritual phenomena (supernatural beings like ghosts, miraculous remains of the holy dead, angels, demons, and gods themselves) became taboo in the discourse of educated people. It became an antiquated storytelling device, a curious relic from an old world.
This prohibited material did not disappear, Nelson argues. Instead, it was transposed. In secular modernity, religious things died and went underground. They became part of modernity’s own animated underworld—the space where its dead went, to live.
Art, according to Nelson, became the site where these religious things were entombed—a kind of storage container for the once-sacred. The “cult of art” has “supplanted scripture and direct revelation,” she writes. And we can look to art to recover what has been long sublimated and repressed by modernity. “We can locate our repressed religious impulses by looking at the supernatural in fantastic novels and films, where it is almost universally depicted as grotesque and demonic, she notes,” not “benign and angelic.” Horror, in other words, has preserved whatever’s left of the holy and sacred. Religion (in the mainstream) has become horrific, and horror is a storehouse for religious things. Art is what illuminates it.
I think the idea that the angelic is benign is, itself, a product of the sanitizing energies of western modernity. Angelic beings in biblical texts and ancient literatures are often quite grotesque, in their own right. The desire to see an angel as something pure, gentle, and benign is a newer, fresher, modern desire shaped by the selective reading tensions of secularization. For some people, secularization has offered the promise that we will be liberated from religion. But for many others, secularization offers a strategic reading of old ideas: one that can clean them up, and take the nasty stuff off of them. To secularize, for many, is to modernize and make appropriate.
There’s also so much that we could describe as “religious” that seems exempt from this analysis. I’ve been talking about “McMindfulness” (the corporate use of mindfulness) with my students recently. We’ve been discussing the fact that, while mindfulness is a practice appropriated from a religious tradition, it’s also read as highly marketable in the American economy. It’s religious, but far from horrific. I think it was the case, for a very long time, that American and European anthropologists treated spiritual figures and rituals from indigenous traditions as if they were primitive (and, so, horrific for modern civilized men). But today, I think the spiritual connections that indigenous traditions often illuminate between human and more than human worlds has really shifted the way that these traditions are spoken about in both popular and academic contexts. What’s horrific, now, is the way that indigenous traditions have been treated and spoken about by westerners.
So there are a few points where I might take issue with Nelson’s reading. There are things it leaves out. But, in general, I found myself deeply engrossed in this book. I think it’s a really interesting story about what happened, over the course of western modernity. Like all stories, it’s partial (even if it’s very mythic in scope). I’d picked it up as a resource on the relationship between religion and horror, which I’d been thinking about a bit recently. But incidentally, I discovered that it was totally relevant to my project on underworlds (which have their own horrific dimensions, of course).
The Secret Life of Puppets was one of those books that feels like a brilliant combination of what had been—previously—several distinct streams of inquiry for me. I’ve long been interested in the relationship between religion and horror, especially since writing my book on death (where the horror theories of Eugene Thacker proved incredibly helpful). And my interest in what secularization represses is at least as old as my first graduate degree in theology—my curiosity about what “the secular” is, what it claims to be, and what it hides, is the reason that I entered this field of study in the first place. My interest in underworlds felt newer. But now, I’m left seeing new folds and intersections between all of these things.
It’s also left me thinking, with more curiosity, about a question that occurred to me almost as a silly provocation not long ago. A question about what happens to gods, when they die. And what this has to do with where they came from, in the first place.
Modernity, as Nietzsche declared and theologians later came to agree, killed God (along with the rest of the gods). From the perspective of a modern analysis, religious people are worshipping a specter (of their own imagination), not something real. So God has gone underground and become ghostly (in a metaphorical sense, at least). Perhaps this is why American theologians stopped referring to “the holy ghost” and instead spoke about “the spirit.” When I asked Sallie McFague about this, she told me it’s because the holy ghost is “too creepy.” But maybe it just felt too real, and not fantastic enough. The gods went to the underworld when they died, we could say. It wouldn’t be the first time that this happened, of course. The Apostle’s Creed has solidified Jesus’s post-resurrection descent to the underworld as an article of faith.
But it’s interesting to note that modernity collapsed cosmology in a couple of different directions: it banished both the world below and the world above. A world above and a world below were evacuated of a certain form of meaning and potency. If religious things went “underground” in modernity, then this underground wasn’t just below our feet, but above our heads as well. We could think of modernity’s underworld as a great, sweeping, fantastic, cosmological nether-region above and below. Modernity’s underworld, we could say, is more like a galactic underworld. And isn’t this galactic netherworld (in a primal form of space, beyond the earth) the sort of space where the gods were said to originate, in the first place?
Perhaps, if the gods are out there in that galactic underworld—like disruptive dead stars—they are doing just as much work, or just as much damage. We should never discount what happens, in the realm of the dead. And I think we do ourselves a disservice to imagine that realms of the dead are spectacles of pure horror. What happens in the realm of the dead, in the underworld (whether it be above us or below us), can also have beautiful and mundane effects.