Astrology and alchemy
TO STUDENTS IN PROFESSOR SCOTT SCULLION'S “RELIGION IN THE PAGAN WORLD” CLASS, ASTROLOGY AND ALCHEMY WOULD BE CONSIDERED RELIGIOUS PHENOMENA. OR, AS SCULLION PUTS IT, “IMAGINATIVE CONSTRUCTS IN A PAGAN WORLD.”
ASTROLOGY AND ALCHEMY ARE JUST ONE SMALL PART OF THE COURSE, WHICH EXPLORES
CULTS IN GREECE AND ROME FROM THE PREHISTORIC TIME OF HUNTERS AND GATHERERS THROUGH THE CLASSICAL PERIOD TO 'THE ROMAN EMPIRE.
BUT SCULLIONS TEACHING OF ASTROLOGY AND ALCHEMY PROVIDES AN INTERESTING LOOK AT WHAT “RELIGION IN THE PAGAN WORLD” IS ALL ABOUT.
IN HIS LECTURE, SCULLION MOVES BEYOND MERELY EXAMINING THE “RELIGION” AND LOOKS AT WHY THESE CULTS WERE POPULAR. HE PUSHES HIS STUDENT'S 'TO DO MORE THAN STUDY THE PRINCIPLES OF A RELIGION; HE WANTS THEM TO
ABSORB THE LIVES OF THE ANCIENT PEOPLE AND UNDERSTAND THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN THEIR COMMUNITIES.
“TODAY, WE'RE INCLINED TO DISMISS ASTROLOGY AS HOCUS-POCUS:' HE SAYS. “IN FACT, THOUGH, THE
ANCIENTS VIEWED IT AS SCIENCE.”
HE EXPLAINS THE COMPLEXITY OF THIS SCIENCE AND EXPLORES THE ROLE OF ASTROLOGY IN 'THE LIVES OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS. “WHAT'S THE BASIC FUNCTION OF THIS WHOLE ASTROLOGICAL REALM?” HE ASKS. TO THE ANCIENTS, ASTROLOGY WAS FAR DIFFERENT FROM THE HOROSCOPES IN 'THE DAILY PAPERS OF TODAY. IN THEIR INCREASINGLY URBANIZED, ALIENATED WORLD, HE EXPLAINS, THE OPPORTUNITY TO VIEW ONE'S SELF: AS UNIQUE AND SPECIAL “THROUGH
ASTROLOGY WAS VERY ATTRACTIVE. “IT GAVE ORDER TO CHAOS;' HE SAYS.
THE ALCHEMISTS, WHO HOPED 'TO TRANSMUTE BASE SUBSTANCES INTO SILVER AND GOLD, ALSO WERE SEARCHING FOR THE ELIXIR OF LIFE AND SOUGHT TO PERFECT THE SOUL
BY THROWING THEMSELVES INTO ONLY ONE THING. SCULLION SAYS THAT THE ALCHEMISTS BELIEVED THAT IF YOU LEARN ONE THING TOTALLY, YOU WILL LEARN EVERYTHING ABOUT YOURSELF BY CHANNELING YOUR ENERGY. LIKE ASTROLOGY, THIS PROVIDED A SENSIBLE SYSTEM FOR SOME PEOPLE TO LIVE BY, ESPECIALLY DURING 'THE TUMULTUOUS TIMES OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.
FINALLY, MAKING THE LINK TO 'TODAY OBVIOUS, SCULLION ASKS, “SO WHAT IS 'THE WAY TO BECOME WISE, TO BECOME ONE WITH 'THE UNIVERSE?” THE
STUDENTS ARE PENSIVE, AND NO ONE IS WILLING TO VOICE HIS OR HER ANSWER. BUT THE QUESTIONS LEAVE THEM THINKING-THINKING MORE THAN JUST ABOUT ANCIENT RELIGIONS. AND 'THAT'S WHAT SCULLION HOPES TO DO WITH THIS CLASS.
Talking with Professor Scott Scullion about his course on religion in the pagan world quickly becomes a conversation about the discipline of classics and his feelings about its importance as a part of liberal education.
Q: How did you become interested in the classics?
When I was going into high school, I wanted to take Latin. But the principal decided that there wouldn't be enough students for Latin to be a going concern by grade twelve. He decided to get rid of Latin altogether, starting by not offering the introductory level.
So, that year, I happened to take a geography course that was directly across the hall from Mr. Smith, who was teaching Latin to an upper-level class. I sat near the door, and since Mr. Smith had a very histrionic style of teaching, usually I could hear much of his lecture from my seat in geography.
I soon became fascinated with what he was doing, so I just introduced myself one day and told him that I was one of the people who hadn't been able to take Latin and Greek. He
offered to teach me on the weekend. I went to his house on Saturdays, and he started me on his own Greek course, and later on Latin.
When I went to the university, I thought that I'd be an English major, but I soon discovered that the Greek and Latin courses fascinated me far more. I often say that studying your own language and your own culture is like kissing your sister. The real opportunity to expand your mind, your tastes, and your tolerance is to study something removed in the linguistic family and, ideally, removed in time. These ancient pre-Christian cultures and their languages and great literatures
exercised an attraction I couldn't resist.
Q: What courses do you teach?
I've taught introductory and upper-level classes in Latin and Greek language as well as “Survey of Ancient Epic,” “Greek and Roman Comedy and Romance,” “Greek and Roman Tragedy,” “Religion in the Pagan World,” and a seminar titled “Individual, Community, and Divinity in Ancient Literature.” The last looks at the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and a couple of Greek works from the point of view of examining special problems connected with literature that has become canonized as part of the central religion of the culture.
Q: What do you hope students will gain from your courses?
I hope that they gain habits of mind-an increased capacity for thinking critically and independently about linguistic and cultural issues and, in general, developing their logical faculties.
Of course, different sorts of courses do this in different ways. In Latin or Greek language courses, students learn from struggling over time with difficult, highly inflected languages that force them to deal with complex yet coherent systems. They learn to find their way with relative ease; they also
learn how to find their way around in any complex system in a relatively straightforward way.
With the courses that we teach in translation, in which we look at the content rather than the verbal form, students work, in a way, more directly in concepts.
Q: Such as?
People tend to think of the Greek and Roman authors and cultures as the beginningthe fountainhead-of so-called Western tradition.
But there are many important qualifications that have to be made here. For me, the most important is that they form part of the Western tradition largely because of the way they were received and interpreted by the Christian West-that is to say, the ways in which people in subsequent centuries read them. In fact, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the tendency among scholars has been to try to free ourselves of traditional ways of regarding pagan antiquity and to try to see the Greeks and Romans as they were, as opposed to comfortably sitting back and seeing them through the spectacles of Western Christian tradition.
When you try to do that, it's soon obvious that in very basic ways their views about many things are radically different. It's one thing to look at, for example, Greek mythology from the point of view of its allegorization and usage as poetic equipment by Western poets and thinkers and theologians. But it
is another thing to look at it from the point of view of a polytheistic religion whose notions of ethics, in many ways, couldn't be more radically different from the Christian tradition.
Q: And that leap is what you try to get your students to make?
I try to help them think themselves into the sandals, I suppose, of the ancient Greeks and Romans. I want them to try to feel how the world looked to the ancients and to understand what sorts of assumptions they made about it, and to try to feel the ways in which the ancients' philosophical, religious, and literary approaches to the world were, in their own terms, perfectly coherent and satisfying.
Having done this, I hope my students will make the comparison with our own various ways of looking at the world today. If they have succeeded in feeling the internal coherence and appeal of these ways of life, then that should help them understand some of the assumptions and ways of thinking they've been brought up with.
Q: So examining the past can help the examination of the present.
I want students to understand that often our ways of thinking and points of view are more or less unexamined. The best way of becoming capable of examining them-which
doesn't mean, of course, to subvert them-is to think your way into the way of life of people who lived and thought quite differently in many ways.
It is possible in this way to gain real insight into the degree to which philosophical, scientific, and religious views about the world are the result of some kind of coherent imaginative vision that works for people, as opposed to a set of absolute and universal values that come from some unidentified, authoritative source.
Q: How, then, do you get students to this level of understanding?
Once I've gotten them, or they've gotten themselves, to the point where they begin to feel the appeal of the polytheistic society, they begin to see that different constructs and different ideologies will have varying success depending on the circumstances in a given place at a given time. I think that the habit of mind that I try to inculcate in them in looking at specific religious phenomena by implication leads them to do some thinking of their own about how religion in general works.
Q: How does studying the classics fit into liberal education?
“Liberal” education, after all, is a Roman word that means an education in being free. One of the key aspects in being free is the capacity to bring into consciousness latent assumptions, presuppositions, and prejudices that our upbringing left dormant in us. It allows us to question and understand whether and how they fit into a coherent intellectual and spiritual context.
Studying similar but different peoples is one of the best ways of doing that. It helps students to understand that the cultural envelope in which they live is one way of looking at the world-but not the only con
ceivable way.
The point isn't, of course, in any way to lead them to devalue that tradition. In fact, their sense of the value of their own cultural tradition may very well be reinforced by the process of looking at these other ways of life.
But they should understand that their culture is not a given -that it had to be made, and that the making of a cultural tradition is a constant process of activity and creativity, not a passive process of leaning back and having it spoon-fed to you. In the long term, I think that it is most important that students learn that every day we are creating a society, every day we are creating and exercising modes of thought, and that process only happens from an active involvement and a selfconscious involvement -and there's a real danger in accepting such things passively.
Q: So the agenda, if you will, is more than just the content of the course.
Obviously, in my courses, like any course at the College, I hope there's a fascination and interest in the content. Beyond that, students should be developing habits of thought and skills that they can carry away and apply to new content.
There is no sense, ever, in isolating people for four years just to cram their brains with content. What you want to help emerge are people who will have the intellectual skills-and, if you like, the spiritual skills-to be interested in and capable of dealing with new areas of content. Above all, you want people who are able to approach, assimilate, and create things on their own because they've learned to love doing it, not because someone is giving them an assignment or a grade.