Category Archives: The Religious Studies

Academia and a Convocation Bacchanal

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I am a highly trained professional with exceptional skills.

Academia both creates and erodes confidence in this fact. Yes, fact. (For those PhDs that doubt yourself at the moment, I feel you, and you need to hear it.) If you’ve made it through a PhD program (or even if you didn’t) you have demonstrated all those wonderful buzzwords such as talent, drive, ambition, hard work, and dedication. But between you and I, just us squirrel friends, every PhD student I know views systematic issues within academia as personal failures. And when we interpret these broader problems as somehow a lack of individual moral character and integrity, the ensuing depression and self-doubt corrodes our very motivation for being in academia in the first place.

I don’t know all the reasons others decided to do a PhD. I did it because I fell into it, of sorts, then embraced it, and then loved it. Loved it so much that as I sit in my current beleaguered limbo—uncertain of where to direct my energies next—I mourn the potential loss of an academic career if I go elsewhere. If academic professions can be parsed, they come in three general compartments: teaching, research and writing, and administration. When I first entered the doctoral program I considered my prospects in these areas to be excellent: I thoroughly enjoy teaching and am enthusiastic about student ideas; researching was and continues to be a creative and fulfilling act; and I have fifteen years of admin experience in the healthcare field.

But as I near the end, facing some difficult choices, broke, tired, and frustrated with systemic failures to address the issues of doctoral programs and the dismal reality of the academic job market, I am considering all my options and asking, “What kind of work allows me to research, write, teach, and also be a funny bitch on Twitter without getting fired?” I think about how all my online content could be a detriment for some professions, but when I fantasize about my ideal job I imagine someone valuing my sex-and-fart jokes as much as they do my academic skills.

So when I get glum about my future, I dream of my graduation party. I fantasize about a convocation bacchanal the way some people dream of their marriage rite. I’m wearing a hot pink metallic 70s inspired spaghetti strap wrap dress. And vintage 70s pink sneakers. And body glitter. LOTS OF IT. Shiny green eye shadow and a wickedly perfect cat eye. Big hair. Hoop earrings.

My mom’s there. She’s in sexy new boots that she can move in. She’s the first person I dance with. Enthusiastically. Giddily. With abandon. We got through this shit together, dammit. My brothers mope in the corner until they get tipsy enough to join the fun. All my close friends are there and they better not goddamn cancel because they’re too tired or busy. This is my major life event. Consider this shit my wedding and you’re all my fucking bridesmaids. So show up and rock out with your tits out.

The DJ goes through eras to please everyone. Maybe starts with some Motown to get everybody grooving. Then moves into 70s funk. Some deep groove stanky funk too, not just the pop hits. Because my DJ is skilled, she can mix in heavy guitar riffs from Black Sabbath to please the goths. We jitterbug and shuffle, bogo and air guitar. In the 80s set it’s synth wave pop and pop pop, because Cindy Lauper and Madonna are timeless. Depeche Mode and Wham. Prince and the NPG.

But the 90s/2000s hip hop is where the party really comes alive. We get Tribe, Bahamadia, Pharaohe Monch, Jean Grae, Dead Prez, Mobb Deep, Snoop, Dre, Ice Cube, Heltah Skeltah, Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples, Black Moon, and any beat by Premier or Dilla. Erick Sermon, Black Rob, Missy, OutKast, Rah Digga, Lil Kim, Biggie, Beanie Seagal, Necro, EPMD, Jay Z, Wu-Tang, Apani, Beastie Boys, LL, Nas, and Saul Williams.

Then there’s an interlude with RnB where everyone gets to dance like Ginuwine in Pony. I MEAN EVERYONE, DAMMIT. You better practice your moves now because we are partying away the stress of eight years of the PhD, one autoimmune disease, and one severe depression.

Ideally it’s a barn party. I can miraculously afford a nearby hotel room for everyone. The bar is open and weed is legal so get as fucked up as you want. Midnight poutine is passed around to keep the dancers fuelled ‘til dawn.

At some point, at the height of the frenzy, all my religious studies colleagues perform a ritual to mark my rite of passage. They flank me as I walk between them. I am ceremoniously whipped with marked essays and printed out student evaluations, before I grab them all, throw them in a bin, and light them on fire. A crown of laurels is placed on my head. I throw pomegranates and apples into the crowd.

(In the fantasy, past students are there too and hand me papers I’ve actually graded where they didn’t like the mark and tell me, “You did your fucking job well and now you get to BURN THIS SHIT!” and push me towards the fire, papers in hand.)

Then someone yells “MOSH PIT!” and I finally get to experience this staple of white culture and launch myself into the throng of enthusiastic headbangers.

I periodically throw my middle fingers in the air as a message to all the haters, especially if I’m grinding on someone hot. There are streamers. And cake. And maybe even a food fight. (I have put down a large deposit and also grossly overpaid the cleaning staff.)

Exhausted, delirious, happy, and sweaty, we emerge at dawn to sausages and pancakes and coffee before heading to crash into a soft, down bed. Maybe the next day there’s a chill bonfire with hot dogs and marshmallows. I wear jeans and flannel. I make out with a crush or three.

I take a solo midnight nude swim in a cold lake. Plunging as deep as I can, I compel my lungs to breathe underwater—the way I imagined doing as a girl. This time it works. And I stay for hours, exploring the muddy depths, growing webbed fingers and gills behind my ears.

When I return to the quiet, comfortable gathering of loved ones murmuring around the dimming fire I never tell them that I am now transformed, part amphibian. I keep this secret. It’s mine.

Life continues. I work. I make decisions towards my goals. I flirt. Pay bills. Help my mom. But now I am a Doctor.

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Cim’s iTunes Playlist

 

Cimminnee in the Multiverse

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I need a job. Like, badly. Currently in the homestretch of the doctoral degree, I’m in this bizarre liminal stage where I am both thrilled and distressed by all the possibilities. Where do I go from here?

Inspired by the excellent show Russian Doll lead by the talented Natasha Lyonne (we share a kinship for smart bitchiness in my fantasy life), here are some alternate universe future selves.

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The Witch Doctor

She has published both her scholarship and works of fiction. She teaches university courses on magic and popular culture as an adjunct professor. Dressing like a pin-up, she poses seductively for alternative e-zines in her cool thrift-shop-decorated Victorian apartment as they write up flattering profiles about her. Her blue humour has miraculously never stood in the way of an academic career. Labels that she negotiates seamlessly are: feminist, witch, burlesque performer, academic, writer, and animal rescue advocate. She’s dating multiple interesting people and is sexually satisfied in every way.

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The Sarcastic Bitch

She writes for a comedy show where she translates her superior research skills and expert knowledge into biting social commentary via dick and fart jokes. She wears pyjamas a lot. Even to work. Her Twitter feed is fire.

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The Depressive Void

She took an administrative job out of economic necessity and, despite being good at it, the uncreative and unchallenging aspects of her work have slowly eaten away at her sense of self and purpose. If she acknowledged how disappointed she was by life she’d be dangerously depressed, so as a coping mechanism she obsessively trains her body, joining the Crossfit cult. She’s boring. She suppressed her humour so as not to make waves at work and is now incapable of talking about anything but fitness and clean eating. She’s proud of her RRSP.

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The Perpetual Graduate

Stuck in a time loop of higher education hell because she did a post-doc, she oscillates between hope for a stimulating future where she can apply her skills and creativity and the crippling terror of never accomplishing all the things she wants in life. She doesn’t like her senses dulled one damned bit, but then weed became legal in Canada and she found herself starting smoking in her goddamn forties and is struck by how fucking fun it is. She never did drugs as a teenager because her parents were addicts that couldn’t get out of poverty, but age has elicited compassion for them. She has an intellectual crush on Neil Gaiman that induces intense fantasies about some of his characters. Her animals are her best friends. Her mom comes over to clean occasionally because she leaves her dirty dishes for a full week and it’s gross. She has seventy bucks in her bank account.

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The Yvette

She never overcame her upbringing and is back on welfare like all throughout her childhood. She’s regressed and deliberately chooses second-hand clothes that reflect bad eighties fashion. Her hair is big and dry and permed. She carries her inhaler next to her cigarettes. She started a web series titled, Putains All De Way S’Ti, where she calls all her friends whores as she drinks Labatt gossiping at the kitchen table, interjecting curses in joual, tabarnak. Despite the frenglish, she insists that her speech is du bon français crissement ben parler, calisse!

***

The Hermit

She published her memoir to widely popular acclaim, then felt exposed and vulnerable by seedy Hollywood attention, retreating instead to an isolated private life. With the proceeds from her book, she bought land and a hobby farm in rural Canada, keeping company with animals and books. Occasionally she agrees to the visit of a journalist or writer on the condition that they join her in the daily labour of farm work. Her careful speech and direct gaze discompose them as she answers their questions while chopping firewood. There are rumours that she welcomes members of a secretive cabal to perform occult rituals under the full moon deep in the woods of her vast property.

***

The Whore

She’s a poor grad student and needs rent money. Send her kizzash via PayPal at paypal.me/CimminneeHolt.

 

 

New Article on Religious Satanism

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I’m delighted to finally share my latest publication, an article in the peer-reviewed journal: La Rosa di Paracelso. Click on title to access the journal and download the free PDF.

Cimminnee Holt

Abstract

The concept of “Total Environments” (1988) is outlined by Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan (1966), in response to the question: “What do Satanists do?” The query itself prompted by religious Satanism’s seemingly lack of recognizable “religious” traits: as an atheistic religion, they reject notions of the divine, demonic, and spiritual; there is no belief in a Golden Age myth to which to return; and no evangelical mandate or desire for mass conversion. What then, do members of the Church of Satan do? The answer, in part, is for Satanists to create the conditions for their individual desires to be reflected in the sensorial and material world.

This paper centralizes the sensorial and material qualities of religious Satanism as outlined by LaVey and understood by members of the Church of Satan. First, it discusses the objects used in Greater Magic rituals to demonstrate how these idiosyncratic items function as mediations of personal desire; and secondly, how LaVey’s ideas on insular spaces outside of ritual space—his concept of Total Environments—reveals that Satanists perceive their entire lives as an ongoing extension of the will. Living “satanically” in the world is a continued magical act mediated by materiality itself. LaVey’s concepts on magic contribute to the historical discourse and study of magic, and this paper suggests that LaVey’s framework can be used to study the lives of Church of Satan members as a whole. That is, applied religious Satanism is, ideally, creating a Total Environment.

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From La Rosa di Paracelso, No 2 (2017) (special issue)

Diabolus in singulis est: The Devil, Satan and Lucifer

“The most recent studies by Massimo Introvigne, Per Faxneld, Jesper Aagard Petersen and Ruben van Lujik have highlighted, under various aspects, the relief of the figure and symbolism related to the Devil. Such historical importance concerns the History of Ideas in the same way, as well as that of the Western Esotericism of the New Religious Movements. It is clear, for example, that a certain conception of the devil distinguishes the work of Anton Szandor Lavey (pseudonym of Howard Stanton Levey, 1930-1997) and his Californian Church of Satan, or the films of director Kenneth Anger (pseud by Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer, 1927 – still alive), or the thought of Robert de Grimston (weigher of Robert Moor, 1935 – still living) and Mary Ann Maclean (1931-2005), as well as of the group they founded The Process Church of the Final Judgment. Diaballein, of the luciferic fallen angel, as well as an androgynous being or a “spirit of the earth or of opposition” have influenced and continue to interest the most diverse historical, social and cultural dynamics concerning the groups and various currents of Satanism, past and present.

The most recent studies by Massimo Introvigne, Per Faxneld, Jesper Aagard Petersen and Ruben van Lujik have highlighted, in different manners, the prominence of the figure and the symbology of the Devil. And in the domain of the Western esotericism and in the New Religious Movements. One of them, understand, for a certain idea of ​​the Devil marks the work of Anton Szandor Lavey (pseudonym of Howard Stanton Levey, 1930-1997) and of his Californian Church of Satan, or of the films of director Kenneth Anger (pseudonym of Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer, b. 1927), or of the thought of Robert de Grimston (pseudonym of Robert Moor, b. 1935) and Mary Ann Maclean (1931-2009), and of the group of the Final Judgment. Diaballein, of the Luciferian fallen angel, with an idea of ​​an androgyne being of the spirit of the earth or of the ‘have impressed and continued to interest the most different mechanics from a historical, social and cultural point of view, concerning groups and various currents of Satanism, past and present.”

 

I’m Published in a Book! A Real Live Book!

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Get yourself a copy of The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion, Sexuality, and Gender, edited by Donald L. Boisvert and Carly Daniel-Hughes (both professors in the department of Religion and Culture at Concordia University).

It is an excellent introductory text to the cross-section of gender, sexuality, and religion. I highly recommend it, and not just because I’m in it.

——-

Table of contents

Part I: Bodies
1. Introduction
2. Stereotypes, False Images, Terrorism: The White Assault upon Black Sexuality. (Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective) Kelly Brown Douglas
3. Sin (Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America) Lynne Gerber
4. Blood, Sweat, and Urine: The Scent of Feminine Fluids in Anton Szandor LaVey’s The Satanic Witch.(International Journal for the Study of New Religious Movements)Cimminnee Holt
5. Sex (Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism) Janet Gyatso
6. The Ultimate Man (A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity, Sex, and the Body in Indian Buddhism) John Powers
7. Mitzvot Built into the Body: Tkhines for Niddah, Pregnancy and Childbirth. (People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective) Chava Weissler
8. Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law. (Women in Middle Eastern History) Paula Sanders
9. “Mildred, Is It Fun to Be a Cripple?” The Culture of Suffering in Mid-Twentieth Century American Catholicism.” (Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them) Robert Orsi
10. Discussion Questions
Part 2: Desires
1. Introduction
2. Introduction: Axiomatic (Epistemology of the Closet) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
3. Scientia Sexualis (The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: Volume I) Michel Foucault
4. Law and Desire in the Talmud (Eros and the Jews) David Biale
5. Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood.” (Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology) Michael Warner
6. Sexual Desire, Divine Desire; Or, Queering the Beguines (Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline) Amy Hollywood
7. Kukai and the Tradition of Male Love in Japanese Buddhism (Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender) Paul Gordon Schalow
8. The Passions of St. Pelagius (The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology) Mark Jordan
9. Masturbation, Salvation, and Desire: Sexuality and Religiosity in Colonial Mexico (Journal of the History of Sexuality) Zeb Tortorici
10. Discussion Questions
Part 3: Performances
1. Introduction
2. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Judith Butler
3. Witches, Female Priests, and Sacred Manoeuvres: (De)stabilizing Gender and Sexuality in a Cuban Religion of African Origin. (Gender and History) Carolyn Watson
4. Mama Lola and the Ezilis: Themes of Mothering and Love in Haitian Vodou (Unspoken Words: Women’s Religious Lives) Karen McCarthy Brown
5. (Per)formative Selves: The Production of Gender.” (With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India) Gayatri Reddy
6. Toward a Queer Theology of Flourishing: Transsexual Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Moral Agency (Queer Religion: LGBT Movements and Queering Religion) Jakob Hero
7. Intimacy Surveiled: Religion, Sex, and Secular Cunning (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society) Mayanthi Fernando
8. Release from Bondage: Sex, Suffering, and Sanctity (The Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives on Sexuality) Daniel Lehrman
9. “Nakedness, Non-Violence, and Brahmacharya: Gandhi’s Experiments in Celibate Sexuality.” (Journal of the History of Sexuality) Vinay Lal
10. Discussion Questions

 

Of Interest: “Ethnographic approaches to understanding Trump/Brexit/new rise of conservatism” compiled by @aliciablumross

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List compiled by Alicia Blum-Ross, “Ethnographic approaches to understanding Trump/Brexit/new rise of conservatism”

See list here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yA-qV1Qd8SCmOlmaUZ5F2HVnamsnv9Smea3qRUPSzhM/edit

 

Concordia Valedictorian 2016

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This is long overdue, but I’d like to highlight the achievement of Daniel Santiago Saenz, a graduate of the Department of Religion at Concordia University, and 2016 Valedictorian. I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing Daniel’s exceptional performance throughout his Bachelor degree. We share a supervisor, and his insights and critique have always impressed and elucidated. There’s enough cut-throat competition in academia to keep us all on our toes, but let’s not forget to celebrate the successes of one of our own! I look forward to his future career in academia.

Here is his speech from the graduation ceremony held in June of this year.