“Nature,” “wilderness,” and “space” – in addition to “wild,” “civilized,” and “desert”—appear in many permutations and re-definitions in this collection of essays. It features insights spatial theory can bring to the study of religion (or myth), past and present.
The Israelites fleeing Egypt in the book of Exodus, for example, wandered in a wilderness for generations, but their wilderness was a desert, not the Urwald most inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere visualize when the word “wilderness” comes to mind. “Nature,” word of a thousand definitions, often appears in present-day conversation as meaning “untouched by humans, wild, indigenous,” but how many places on the present-day earth really fit this definition, and above all, how would we know? Are there still “forests primeval,” to use Longfellow’s term? Were there ever any? To make things even more complicated, deserts, considered wildernesses in this set of essays, also drift, fluctuate, and, with more or less rainfall, can become steppes for grazing herds or flocks, or revert to scrub land valuable only as a kind of no-man’s-land separating more valuable land, land that human armies may fight over. Laura Feldt, the editor of this collection, sees a nature-culture continuum, rather like the space-time continuum in physics.
The editor’s article in this collection, which constitutes chapter 3--“Wilderness and Hebrew Bible Religion”--uses spatial theory to re-examine the use of space in biblical accounts of the Israelites en route from slavery in Egypt to the homeland God had promised them. Firstspace, according to this schematic, is the measurable, quantifiable space found on maps or aerial photographs; secondspace is the conceptual space in assertions of authority, ownership, or other theoretical, intangible qualities--“my home town,” the haunted house on the corner, or “the American frontier.” Thirdspace is lived, inhabited space, and how humans use the space. It contains elements of firstspace and secondspace, but in varying proportions. Space is not something neutral or vacant, waiting to be filled up, as it turns out (4-5). It is not an empty stage; the play has already begun.
Feldt argues that the liminal space of wilderness--and she is fully conscious of van Gennep’s definition of the term “liminal” here–-is for the purpose of linking Yahweh to the nourishment/survival of the Israelite wanderers by means of agriculture, and of effecting a transformation of their identity, one of the reasons, perhaps, why the nomadic period lasted as long as it did (55). The Hebrew Bible conveys the wilderness/desert as a real place in the real world, and at the same time as a form of alternate reality, a dream-place, a place where anything imaginable and unimaginable can and does happen (58). This goes beyond literary-style motifs to command a suspension of disbelief in every sense of the word.
Other articles present various other dwellers in the interstices of the “real world” and the wilderness. Jan Bremmer’s article deals with centaurs in the context of ancient Greek worldview. Amalgams of human and horse in a physical sense, they are boundary-crossers in every sense of the word, living in wild places, but acting as wise educators of their own and of the Greeks’ sons. They riot. They engage in calm ratiocination. They are a puzzle now as they were when the stories first arose.
Wilderness, its inhabitants, and the exigencies of agriculture for purposes of nourishment and survival return in Anne-Christine Hornborg’s discussion of European settlers in the New World and their encounters with “savages.” The form of naming and definition the colonists used--the secondspace aspects--of the term “wilderness,” justified, indeed required as one’s Christian duty, the domination/enslavement of the indigenous peoples; this would “liberate” them from their erroneous, un-Christian way of life. Again, as Feldt noted, pragmatic aspects of life’s building blocks--such as food, water, and a roof over one’s head--belong to the process. Supernatural nourishment and protection work temporarily, until the wilderness experience transforms the fleeing or wandering one’s identity and worldview.
In Thomas Hoffmann’s discussion of the concept of wilderness in the Koran, we learn that its root in Arabic means “nakedness.” Half-forgotten root words, according to Hoffmann, ghost around haunting related terms in their newer uses (171-172). The term “wilderness” appears three times in the Koran, once with regard to Adam and Eve: the voice of God promises that they will neither go hungry, nor thirst, nor suffer excessive heat of the sun, nor go naked. Another instance is in the story of Jonah, swallowed by a great fish, then spat out by it into the wilderness, where God sent plants to cover his nakedness and to feed him.
The wanderers in the book of Exodus received manna from Heaven, and guidance from a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The fierceness of the wilderness and the gigantic scale of God’s rescue operation are immense, overwhelming. God’s intervention may seem more like coddling, given the resistance of the Israelites and of Joshua to God’s commands. On the other hand, new identities and worldviews come together among the humans thus coddled.
Folklorists will find new perspectives here on myth and worldview, to unravel puzzling configurations of spatialities in various contexts, and to find helpful intersections with eco-folklore and neo-paganism in twenty-first-century culture as well.
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[Review length: 874 words • Review posted on October 3, 2013]