March of the pagans, from the Bible belt to Hollywood

Thirty years ago, driving across the hill country in the South, every 50 miles I'd pick up a new Pentecostal radio station with the preacher screaming in tongues in a torrent of ecstatic drivel – "Miki taki meka keena ko-o-ola ka" – the harsh consonants rattling the speakers on my Newport station wagon.  

I had a friend, an ardent Pentecostalist – "shouters", those hillbillies called themselves – whose trailer featured by way of cultural uplift only the Bible and a big TV set permanently tuned to the Christian Broadcasting Network, on which Pat Robertson used to denounce New Age paganism on an hourly basis.
 
Last time I visited, a few months ago, the hillbilly's nice house still featured the Bible, but next to it was a thick manual of astrological guidance – could Geminis pair up with Scorpios with any hope of success, and kindred pagan counsel – and he and his wife surfed through a ripe menu of channels Robertson would not have cared for.

Out on the highway my radio picked up Glenn Beck spouting drivel, but the old Pentecostalists had vanished from the dial. These days, my friend told me, he and his wife didn't tithe to any particular church and pastor. "All crooks," he said dryly. They stay home and hold their own Sunday service there.
 
It's still God's country, but all the landmarks are different. There are millions like my friend – a hillbilly in the Bible belt steering not just by God's compass and the Good Book, but also by the stars and natural forces of a pagan spiritual outlook.
 
The Bible's had a rough time of it in America these past 40 years. In 1967 came Lynn White Jr's famous essay 'The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis', denouncing God's OK to Adam on planetary pillage in Genesis: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion… over all the earth. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it."
 
Late 1960s feminists found much to deplore in the Bible too, starting with God's tough talk to Eve in the Garden of Eden: "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
 
If a conclusive disrespecting of Genesis was required, wouldn't you think Robert Crumb was the man for the job? It would be as seditious as hiring the Marquis de Sade to write the history of the British royal family, a coup de grâce, the final revenge of the antinomian 60s on decency and faith and the bloodthirsty Creator. The patriarchs of the second half of Genesis would be crushed beneath the vast breasts and bottoms, hairy thighs and savage élan of Eve and her daughters.

Crumb encourages such hopes in the bit of his Book of Genesis Illustrated, published late last year, that I happened to read first: the notes in which he pays homage to Savina Teubal's Sarah the Priestess (1984), which argued that Genesis is in part a sequence of clues about the suppression of a powerful matriarchal order in Mesopotamia and Egypt. In Genesis, Crumb writes, "The struggles and assertions of the female characters are all about this."
 
But this is not an overt theme in Crumb's Genesis. Why did Crumb really embark on this task? Maybe the clue is in three inviting words on the cover: "Nothing left out!" It would have been great to have had his frames for all 50 chapters of Genesis back in the 1950s, when we schoolboys had only our imaginations to work with, as Lot's daughters get their father drunk and lie with him, or when Sara tells Abraham to go in unto Hagar. There was Onan too, now frame-frozen by Crumb amid coitus interruptus.
 
But the overall effect is more solemn than satirical. Reading the verses in Chapter 15 in which God, a testy old geezer with a very long beard, makes his covenant with Abraham - "To your seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates" - I wondered whether Crumb, a Catholic long ago, had converted to Zionism. He uses Robert Alter's 1996 translation, and Alter has had a long association with the Zionist periodical, Commentary.

But as a conspiracy this doesn't really hang together. In his interesting writings on Genesis, Alter prudently finesses questions of historical veracity by stressing the book's literary unity, an approach that clearly bothers Commentary's former mothership, the American Jewish Committee, whose website has a somewhat uneasy page about Alter's views of Genesis.
 
What does bounce from Crumb's pages is that Genesis really is about Jews. In the dawn of mankind there were lots and lots of hairy Jews with big noses, herding sheep and often lying on top of or underneath Jewish women who may or may not have been matriarchs.
 
In the end, it seems to me, Genesis defeats Crumb. He never quite settles on which way to go - or what, as a dirty-minded satirist, to go up against.

But paganism wins on another front. In 1975 Stewart Brand printed in the summer issue of his CoEvolution Quarterly Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock's 'The Gaia Hypothesis', which advanced the notion that "living matter, the air, the oceans, the land surface" are "parts of a giant system" that exhibits "the behaviour of a single organism, even a living creature".
 
Thirty-five years later, James Cameron gives us Avatar and the planet Pandora, which is Gaia brought to life in the most savage denunciation of imperial exploitation - clearly American -ever brought to screen. Now a huge hit, Avatar is the most expensive anti-war film ever made (at $300 million, about half the cost of a single F-22). "It is nature which today no longer exists anywhere," a peppery German wrote in 1845. But Rousseau is having his revenge on Marx.

The night I went to Avatar the audience cheered when Pandora, as a single Gaian organism, puts Earth's predatory onslaught to flight and man's war machines are crushed by natural forces. Against Genesis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, pagan mysticism is carrying the day, at the the level of fantasy, just as it is for practical daily scheduling-by-the-stars in those astrological manuals down in the Bible belt. ·