Religious Shit
Mary Douglas: “Shit signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything.”
There is no other matter so vehemently repressed, hated, and dissociated than feces, and yet we are full of it! We are shit factories disgusted with our own product! Abjection incorporated, in it as much as it is in us, shit is so laden with significance, it’s an “entity” or “phenomenon” with agency at this point. How is it addressed in our religions?
Punishment and Poison
Vedic texts connect feces to poison that must be excreted. Evidently, Hindu and Christian ascetics would fast until their shit became odorless and “clean” (Born Again Bodies). If you’re really good and healthy, your poop became clear. In early America, the body was imagined to absorb the excrement and evil of the world “re-excreted, re-absorbed and re-secreted,” poop back and forth forever, and everything the excrement touched became “dirty.”
Dante described the people he encountered in the eighth circle of hell as “dipped in excrement that seemed as it had flowed from human privies.” Poop is punishment. Martin Luther, the creator of the Protestant religion, described the devil he met as “black and filthy… permeated by a train of foul odor.” In Life Against Death, Norman Brown concludes that “the Devil is virtually recognized as a displaced materialization of Luther’s [and our] own anality.” Our monsters look like our poop, but we also meditate while on the toilet — the revolutionary Protestant Ethic was purportedly revealed to Luther while he was pooping! What is revealed to you?
Milan Kundera says in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2004) that “shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil,” because somehow a perfect God is responsible for it; God’s perfect creation in his image defecates?; the name Adam comes from the Hebrew word for dirt, a symbol for shit, God’s excrement. It’s also why the angels got so pissed off: God’s favorites were made out of lowly matter (after all, even Satan comes from Heaven, is made of Heaven). “The opposite of one profound truth is another profound truth;” The Coincidentia oppositorum; a Zen koan; an irreconcilable paradox that when played with can momentarily dissolve the mind into enlightened revelation.
‘Fully man,’ Kundera talks about the formative experience of seeing God illustrated in a children’s book, and how he couldn’t handle that God-as-a-man implies his eating and defecating. Similarly, when Carl Jung was 12, just the thought of God pooping induced “pure grace and unutterable bliss.” This happened while he was repeating to himself, “Don’t think of it! Don’t think of it!”
Why is it so taboo? Rozin thinks shit and disgust foreshadow our own rot. James Brain, in The Last Taboo: Sex and the Fear of Death (1979), says everything boils down to repressed thanotophobia. In Orifice as Sacrificial Site, James Aho draws attention to this death terror by examining different holes in the body and “the density of personal obsessions and ceremonies” surrounding their excreta. Like the rest of us, he uses a “mental revulsion scale” for judging excretions in terms of their symbolic proximity to rot/death/fecality. Tears, according to this scale, are the farthest away, “hence the least revolting and the least subject to regulation.” They can be touched and even kissed without a problem. Rachel Herz explains this is because tears are mostly water. Next is hair, then nails, sweat, oils — all gross but not that gross — followed by spit, snot, urine, blood, vomit, then poop. In fact, Brain quotes Indigenous leaders in Tanzania as saying, “the corpse is filth, it is excrement.” The Bible also likens dead bodies to “dung upon an open field.” We bury our shit and our dead. We also bury trash.
There is the animal reminder factor as well, the theory that disgust is a way to strenuously ignore the mountain of evidence that we are, in fact, animals. Not only shit but the whole anogenital region is associated with animality, “lower” classes, death and sex. Yeats: “Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.” Sex is dirty because dirt is sexy. Aho: “its animality is sublimated, hidden from view, and refined into romantic love.” All sex is associated with fecal matter (not only gay male sex). Thoughts of shit and actual shit mix with kissing, licking and “eating” during love making, as normal taboos and aversions to body fluids are momentarily suspended.
Where it all Began
Psychoanalysts with their theses on feces like to point out that during the ‘anal stage’ of our early physical and psycho-social development (age one to three), we learn to control our bowel movements, and this is how we start to explore the boundaries, openings and muscles of our bodies. It’s also when we learn to feel intense humiliation and shame in order to conform to the demands of the (m)Other. In Cultivating the Heart of Compassion, Ram Das jokes about how our parents “wanted to love us unconditionally, but they also had to socialize us, and they would tighten up if you shit on the living room floor. We learn early on what not to do to make it work.” We abject (part of) ourselves, and this causes a foundational boundary to form in our self image. However, the repressed material (physical and psychological) eventually always gets out. All boundaries crack in the end. Poor babies!
…what drastic measures the child must resort to, in order to enforce on its own this prohibition imposed from without in its own inner life and consciousness. And once again compulsive neurosis can show us impressively in this context to what point of life-stupor the ambivalences of love and of hate that derive from these conflicts can bring us.
The fig leaf was brown.
Our psyches and our societies are built on it. Florian Werner: “Shit is indispensable to our self-understanding as modern people.” It accompanies us throughout our whole life in our blind spot, alongside a constant policing of our orifices and excretions. We are so ashamed that our bodies produce such a putrid substance, that we “shadow project,” and our fictional monsters look like our poop.
Let’s remember that the word monster comes from the latin monstrare meaning to demonstrate and to warn.
Gendered Shit
Poop is laden with power, horror, and humor, a truly magical thing. It’s universal, but our reaction to it is not. The experience of shit is probably sexed and gendered, as male bodies deal with a different type of horror when it comes to the body’s excreta in general. To contain their fears of being permeable and therefore feminized, ‘manly’ men imagine themselves as closed, dry and clean, the opposite of the female sex. In Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (1987), Klaus Theweleit explores dirt and swamps as metaphors for women in Nazi art and literature. Art historian Anne Hollander similarly argues that Mermaids in the Western European imagination were the expression of a “horrified disgust at the monstrous female anatomy.” She thinks women wore dresses to erase their genitals and legs — becoming mermaids — which further differentiated them from the men, who are ‘human,’ have legs, and appropriotely wear pants. (I can’t believe there was a gender war for the right to wear pants).
This isn’t good for anyone. Bjorn Krondorfer articulates the problem in Men’s Bodies, Men’s Gods (1996): “A closed body isolates and imprisons man, and dries him up spiritually.” To remain clean and virtuous is to remain irresponsible and uncaring.
One antidote to this toxic masculinity and toxic spirituality is to look at our shit, figuratively, literally, and allegorically. Slam on the brakes and let the stuff in the back seat fly into the front for a second where it can be examined, released, and integrated. We need to make the darkness conscious. The authors of Poop Worlds, Shaka McGlotten and Scott Webel, conclude:
It is closer to food than abject waste, and it embodies sunlight, power, shared madness, at once vulgar and innocent. It is matter inside out, our collective shame and untapped fortune. It is inside you right now, waiting to be recuperated.
Ground of Being
Everything is built on shit. Our cities are built above gigantic sewage systems. Our metabolism and with it our life itself rely on shit, and as Florian Werner puts it:
…it is only when we draw a line of separation from shit, we come to know what culture is. Without shadows, there is no light, without dirt, no cleanliness.
We’re haunted by this putrid demon living/dying/rotting inside each and every one of us. We hate it, ban it to the bowels of the city, but we also can’t look away. It’s mysterious tremendum and mysterius fascinans.
It’s also gold treasure. Temporary surrender to the gross, uncivilized and “wild” enables one to get to know the other within oneself. By trespassing taboos, through the help of religious stories, art, and the imagination, we come into contact with aspects or dimensions of ourselves that have become alienated to us. Meditation and prayer alone can’t do this, because you can’t see the repressed material from the inside first-person witnessing awareness. Ken Wilber argues that researchers have known for decades that meditation “won’t cure shadow issues and often inflames them.” You’ve got to reach out to others and to the Other. You’ve got to examine your shit.