There is very large and packed audience. Deafening music pours from the speakers. The spotlights are blinding. The atmosphere is thick with excitement. Hands clap, feet stamp, and cheers strain the voices. Ecstasy mounts to the point of torture. Most people in the audience are enraptured, their spiritual, physical, and sexual energy boils, brims, and needs desperately to be vented. Some are breaking their seats, others are yelling things no one understands, themselves included (supposedly in an unknown tongue), while still other are pushing their way to the podium, their clothes and hair in disarray, as though running away from a disaster. All eyes are glued to the podium, to one person onstage who is hypnotizing them, holding their very souls in his hands. That person and his environment join thousands of people to that “source of divine inspiration” and self-abandon, relieving them of all restraints of civilization, giving them instead some blissful liberation from their own selves.
What is it? Where does this happen? Who can whip up a contemporary audience to such a state? What kind of people fill this audience? These questions cannot be answered with certainty, because such scenes can be witnessed in all kinds of theaters and shows starring people like Michael Jackson. However, something akin to such wild carnivals can be seen in an altogether different environment, during sermons delivered by charismatic (from the Greek kharis, meaning favor or grace) preachers supposedly inspired by the Holy Spirit. On such occasions pious Christians, expected to concentrate on a quiet thoughtful prayer, tend to act dangerously like some crazy fans of some celestial biker.
In both cases the age-old shaman’s craft is at play with its own laws, traditions, and the invariable audience. The phenomenon is nothing new, of course, contrary to what some modern moralists allege, regarding it as a sign of “the last days.” Suffice it to remember the rituals staged in honor of the god of wine Bacchus (Dionysus). On such occasions drunken crowds raced through the streets of Rome with people going wild, acting like they never would in a normal state. This was especially true of women who could do whatever came to their bleary minds and used it to the best advantage. Neither age, sex, social standing, nor family connections were protection from their frenzy. People let their hair down during the Bacchanalia so much that in 2 BC, long before Christianity with its strict morals, the Senate banned them and sentenced to death those bringing especially generous sacrifices to the altar of Bacchus.
Actually, there is no need to seek examples in the republican and pagan Eternal City so deep in history. There were also frenzied zealots in the Russian Empire, the Christian flagellants, for example, a sect distantly echoing Western European Protestantism. At their religious meetings they “communicated” with the Holy Spirit, sending themselves into a frenzy often ending in a most carnal orgy, so that practically every woman present could in due time become a “mother of God.” Also, there were the castrates, but there is no sense in describing their particular inhuman ritual, allegedly prompted by the Holy Spirit. The trouble is that members of some modern sects, likewise “inspired,” acting contrary to reason with which the Lord has so generously bestowed His mortal children, pull plastic bags over the heads of their children and then their own, so they can make an early entrance into the Great Beyond. The question is, Will they be welcome?
At all times, in all societies there have existed individuals given to exaltation, hysteria, ready to perform what can only be described as a spiritual striptease. More often than not such individuals have suffered personal tragedies and are denied the simple joy of communicating with fellow human beings in a normal way; they have been deprived of friendship, love, and human warmth. Day-to-day life seems to them something colorless and cold. They are not interested in all those things that bring us our little joys. Thus there are always gurus, characters like Rasputin, Stalin, or Kashpirovsky, all those cunning fortune-tellers and charismatic preachers. The sick, aging, and helpless are drawn to them like a moth to a flame. They expect salvation. At such moments the human mind with its sophisticated mechanisms providing balance is put on idle, giving way to irrational emotions that are not very attractive outwardly. After all what makes one attractive? Perhaps it is common sense, self-control, a desire to listen and understand.
In our multifaceted world, respect for others’ convictions and religious beliefs is one of the most important obligations, however different such convictions and beliefs may be from our own. This is far from easy. It is especially difficult to show tolerance toward people who consciously ignore the dictates of common sense, turning a deaf ear on its simple truths. What is man, let alone the soul, without reason?
