A remarkably fine boar

Apropos of the fired up demonstrators who do not see Gillian Gibbons, a Liverpool primary schoolteacher, within their field of vision but only an archetype that lives vividly in their imagination, who are easily caught up into an imaginary world of monsters, demons and angels and who seek to destroy the demons ... both deeply within this imaginary world and tenuously but devastatingly outside it ... I have been reading a book on Roman Britain by Peter Salway, who talks, on page 33, of how religion provides the most telling evidence for the assimilation of Roman and native because it 'affected the deepest levels of consciousness'.

The book is very short and he moves quickly on, but there is an interesting ambiguity in the sentence. Does he mean that religion then 'affected the deepest levels of consciousness' (as opposed to now), or does he imply that this is a permanent feature of religion? If the former, then we should have to ask, and so what now 'affects the deepest levels of consciousness'? And if the latter, and maybe it almost comes to the same thing, how does religion affect these deepest levels? We could make it a criterion of 'religion' that it operates at these depths, and then the two questions coincide, particularly if we agree that formal religion at least has largely lost its grip on the imagination. So what is happening within our imaginations? Blake.

But perhaps the point is that 'religion' only works in extremis.

In any event, a Roman cavalry officer in Wearsdale gives thanks to Sylvanus 'for a remarkably fine boar that no one had previously been able to catch'. And 'Diodora, a Greek priestess, dedicated an altar at Corbridge in her own language to the demi-god Heracles of Tyre' (p 34). Surely we know both these people quite well. At least in the former case some muscular Christian officer in the British army might have offered up a similar prayer after a day's hunting. And the Greek priestess ... well, amulets, essential oils, crystals? But what is a Greek priestess doing in Corbridge on the A68. Maybe she was formidable rather than flakey.

There is some sense in the familiar thought that the good and evil, light and darkness, angels and demons dualism is deeply embedded within our pyches and is perhaps most apparent under conditions of existential extremity. Thus there is nothing at all Islamic in the commotion in Sudan, it is much more primeval than that: nor do I mean that they are primeval, whereas we are not. Much depends on how close one is to the edge, though that proximity is also in part a function of education. How does one negotiate with these deep sources of action except through the development of judgment: are we really dealing with demons and monsters here?-the moments of reflection available before and after engulfment. Standing alone and above what is herdlike in our nature, forming a new and free association ... but our own danger is that we forget how to fight monsters and do not recognise them when we see them.