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Religious narrative and the literary fantastic: ambiguity and uncertainty in Ex. 1–18

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0048721x.2011.570798

1096-1151

Laura Feldt,

Historical and Linguistic Studies

Abstract This paper presents a perspective for the analysis of the literary form of myth drawn from literary-critical theories of the fantastic and fantasy. The aim is to demonstrate the value of such analyses for understanding what a religious narrative is and what it does – as an addition to existing approaches (phenomenological, historical, structuralist, formalist, and so on.) To achieve this aim, the paper presents a fantasy-theoretical case study of the Exodus narrative from the Hebrew Bible (Ex. 1–18). The analysis shows that this narrative of the fantastic events at Israel's exodus from Egypt confounds distinctions (natural/supernatural, benign/malign, self/other, hope/horror), generates varied reactions in the personae, foregrounds the uncertainty and ambiguity of the events, and points to its own artifice. The literary strategies are shown to have effects that are apt to unsettle, disturb and fascinate; effects that are both semantic and affective, mobilising the recipients in the interpretation of the status, veracity and meaning of the fantastic events. Proposals are then made about the literary fantastic as a fruitful analytical perspective specifically for narratives about metamorphoses and miracles, and about incorporating destabilisation, uncertainty and ambiguity more strongly into theories of what a religious narrative is and does in the study of religion. Keywords: mythExodusthe fantasticambiguitymiraclesliterary formprocess of receptionmetamorphoses Acknowledgements I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their pertinent comments. I also gratefully acknowledge the fellowships that allowed me to do the work for this paper, one from Aarhus University's Department of the Study of Religion and one from the Centre for Canon and Identity Formation at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Notes 1Arguably, because the study of myth/religious narrative is so multifarious (cf. J.S. Jensen [2009]). Nevertheless, this view may be taken as a standard view in the study of religion. This is confirmed by recent introductions to myth and myth theory, such as Jensen (Citation2009: 8) and McCutcheon (Citation2000: 190–208). 2Cited in J.S. Jensen (Citation2009: 9) as a view of myth to which most scholars of religion would subscribe. 3These literary-critical theories were developed as post hoc critical reflections on fantastic literature and fantasy; see more below in the section 'Perspective and strategy of analysis'. 4Of course various area studies have undertaken literary study, for instance, Hebrew Bible studies, but the findings from these studies do not seem to have been incorporated to a great extent in the general study of religion. Although this seems to be changing (Gilhus and Mikaelsson Citation2001; Gould Citation2001; Hoffmann Citation2007), the theoretical goal of this paper – to examine the literary form of religious narrative and its effects on the process of reception – is far from an exhausted subject. Wendy Doniger's contribution to the general study of religion is a notable exception, to which I will return in the discussion section of this paper. 5In recent years, we have seen strong religious reactions to fantasy fiction in the form of both appropriation – the act of reading as a gateway to adopting a religious stance in contemporary spirituality, the sanction and use of specific works of fantasy in religious communities – and rejection – book burnings, library bans, public denunciations of fantasy novels (discussed in Harvey [2000]; Kruk Citation[2005]; Luhrmann [1989]; Mikaelsson [1999]; Neumann Citation[2006]; Possamai Citation[2007]; Ramstedt Citation[2007]; Sky Citation[2006]; Whited and Grimes Citation[2002]). Anthropological and sociological studies of, e.g., American teenagers' and British neo-pagans' lack of distinction between the images, symbols and supernatural beings of popular culture and those of traditional, organised religions (Clark Citation2003; Mikaelsson Citation1999; Partridge Citation2004; Citation2006) also bear witness to a blurring of boundaries between fantasy and religion. The significant overlap between fantasy fans and New Age practitioners (Clark Citation2003; Harvey Citation2000; Luhrmann Citation1989; Mikaelsson Citation1999; Ringel Citation1994; Selling Citation2005) also points in this direction. 6I use the term 'supernatural' as a more well-known term for religious 'counterintuitive' concepts as consistent with the general perspective applied in this paper, cf. below, and as used more broadly in the cognitive study of religion (see, e.g., Pyysiäinen [2004: 43 and passim]). I use quotation marks to indicate the long and contested history of the term (cf. Saler Citation1977; Hultkrantz Citation1983) and the desirability of a continued theoretical discussion. 7These trends in research history are treated in more detail in Feldt (Citation2011: ch. 1; cf. also Feldt [Citation2009: 33–35, 37–41, 42–44, 47]). 8Generally, it is fair to say that literary critics have avoided Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy in comparison to other biblical texts (Pardes Citation2000: 8). Previous literary readings of the Exodus narrative pay surprisingly little attention to the fantastic elements, to their status, effects and functions (as in Fischer Citation[1996]; Gunn Citation[1982]; Kirk-Duggan [2000]; Polak Citation[1996]; Scholz [2000]; Vater Citation[1982], all treated in more detail in Feldt [2011: ch.1]). The ambiguities, inconsistencies and paradoxes of the fantastic elements are often neglected, as are the varied reactions of the personae. An interesting exception is Ilana Pardes' work, for instance her valuable psycho-analytical/literary reading of the Exodus-Numbers narratives as a national biography (Pardes Citation2000; see also Pardes [1992]). Pardes' deft and inspiring readings pay attention to the different voices within the narrative and do not focus on the deity's utterances only, and she provides convincing analyses of Israel as a character. However, Pardes' work does not focus on the miracles or fantastic elements per se, and they seem often to be viewed as beneficial (Pardes [2000: 7–9, 27]), although Pardes is generally very attentive to ambivalence and ambiguity. 9In these edited volumes, Aichele and Pippin and other authors apply various types of fantasy theory to biblical texts and also investigate the re-use of biblical motifs in contemporary fantasy narrative in valuable ways. However, although some of the articles in the edited anthologies are placed within a more standard analytical-exegetical discourse (for instance, Miscall [1992], and some of Aichele's own articles), many seem to ascribe to a theologically/religiously engaged and/or very postmodern stance (see also Feldt [2011: ch. 1]). Instead, this essay is placed within the analytical-critical study of religion and ascribes to the 'tempered constructionism' described in J.S. Jensen (Citation2003: 130–134). I agree with Jensen that a full-fledged postmodernism would lead to abandonment of the scholarly enterprise. 10Only one short, exegetical article in the three anthologies investigates the Exodus narrative (Miscall Citation1992). However, while Miscall's interesting essay demonstrates the fruitfulness of applying fantasy theory to Hebrew Bible texts, it is short and uses fantasy theory only as a loose source of inspiration, as a way of defamiliarising the biblical text. 11Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is usually named as the first Gothic work (Simonis Citation2005: 31; Wisker Citation2005: 15). 12George MacDonald's, Phantastes. A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), is commonly regarded as the first fantasy novel. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien both published their major works in the 1950s. 13I use this as a convenient shorthand, preferable to, e.g., 'theories of the fantastic, the gothic, fantasy, and horror', and in the absence of an English word for the German/Danish 'Phantastik'/'fantastik'. It is not theoretically without foundation, considering how often the same works of literature (e.g., The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, Dracula and others) are used as primary examples of both works of horror and fantastic literature, and how often fantasy theorists discuss the fantastic and vice versa. Compare, e.g., Wisker Citation(2005) to Sandner Citation(2004). Kathryn Hume has argued in favour of fantasy vs. mimesis as two overarching modes in Western literature (Hume Citation1984); Lucie Armitt favours the fantastic as the name for the general mode, and fantasy as the name of a genre (Armitt Citation1996: 6; similarly, Clute Citation[1997]). The International Society for the Fantastic in the Arts includes fantasy, horror, science fiction, magical realism, utopic writing and so on within its field of interest. Todorov Citation(1975 [1973]) also wrote at length about neighbouring genres. 14Fantasy theory is historically characterised by an interest in definition and the specification of literary features that seem to fall short of the many types of fantasy practice witnessed today (Ivanovic, Lehmann and May [Citation2003: 10–12, and cf. note 5]). 15The terms 'fictions-theoretical' and 'literary-historical' stem from Møller Citation(1987), the terms minimalist-maximalist from Hömke Citation(2006). 16Works such as Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1831) and Potocki's Le manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (1804/1810) are central to the minimalist definitions. Representative of the minimalistic view is Todorov, who rejected thematic content as the dominating genre criterion (the presence of monsters, ogres, werewolves and others), in his work, The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975), and likewise a psychological factor (fear), using instead criteria of distinction in formal premises (reader hesitation produced by the impossibility of assigning either a natural or a supernatural explanation, hesitation shared by leading character, and reader rejection of poetic and allegorical readings). These formal criteria are not all on the same level of abstraction; the theory seems basically to hinge on the reader's hesitation as to whether the fantastic events are supernatural or not. (See Bessière [1974: 57, 156, 237]; Brooke-Rose [1981: 63]; and Lem [1983: 92–122] for discussions and criticisms of Todorov, references in Lachmann [2002: 91], and cf. also Feldt Citation2006; [2011]). Todorov limited the genre of the fantastic to a very narrow sample of works, primarily from the 19th century. It should be noted, however, that although Todorov's work is genre-based, he offers important pointers towards mode-based approaches. 17The word phantasm is not used here in the Lacanian sense, nor in the pejorative sense of 'illusion', but rather as a descriptive noun designating a fantastic event, space or being/person – a fantastic element. 18Lachmann (Citation2002: 29–150) analyses the literary-historical, critical discussion of the rhetorical figures and the thought figures of the fantastic, and shows how fantasy as a cognitive ability and fantasy as a mode of writing were basically inseparable in the history of the literary-historical meta-reflection of the fantastic in the 18th and 19th centuries. This leads me to use the term 'fantastic strategy' to designate the mixture of figure of thought and rhetorical device that are 'instruments' for the elicitation of a fantastic effect. 19The German word Wandlung used by Lachmann can mean both transformation and metamorphosis, and I have chosen mutability as the most appropriate translation. The reason for not using the word metamorphosis is that it can be confused with the specific fantastic strategy labelled metamorphosis, cf. the strategy of analysis, while transformation is not quite adequate either. 20For detailed readings of particular text segments, I refer the reader to Feldt (Citation2011: ch. 3). 21In order to distinguish the fantastic from the everyday, the normal and the natural, of which it represents a violation, I rely on research in cognitive categorisation and the idea of counter-intuitiveness. I assume that even in ancient contexts there is an experience-based common ground of everyday reality, an area of universal, ordinary non-literary experience. One way of approaching this common ground is by means of cognitive science. Counter-intuitiveness is the idea that there are representations that contradict our everyday, intuitive expectations of how people, living kinds and physical objects usually behave. Findings in evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and developmental psychology suggest that much learning is inferential and based on common, human cognitive templates (used in the study of religion by Boyer Citation[1994]; 2001; Citation2000; Sperber Citation1985). Empirical research in cognitive categorisation suggests, but has not yet proven, that approximately five basic intuitive ontological domains exist – person, animal, plant, artefact and natural object (Atran Citation2002: 98; Boyer Citation2001; Hirschfeld and Gelman Citation1994). More recently, Sørensen formulated this in terms of a physical domain, a biological or animate domain, a mental or psychological domain, and a social domain (Sørensen Citation2007: 33–39; with thorough discussion). This work has progressed sufficiently to suggest some universality in human expectations to basic, ontological domains, naïve realism (cf. Bloch Citation2005; Barrett and Nyhof Citation2001; Boyer and Ramble Citation2001; Gonce et al. Citation2006), and the recognisability of counter-intuitive representations. Even if the results of the investigations of cognitive categorisation are inconclusive and preliminary, the general thrust of these investigations is not in doubt – that humans universally share cognitive dispositions, sensory perceptions and corporeal sensations. 22I return to this in section B. 23Ilana Pardes notes the 'bewildering blurring of the boundaries between nature and history' (Pardes Citation2000: 29). Detailed analyses of the text passages mentioned here can be found in Feldt (Citation2011: ch. 3). 24Coincidence, of course, does not belong exclusively to the fantastic mode, but is often important to it (Lachmann Citation2002: 147–150). 25Propp says: 'In fact, it is not quite clear that YHWH is behind the events of chaps. 1-2. The author(s) may have cultivated theories of the interplay of chance, fate, prescience and divine causation […] God's interference has been at most indirect' (Propp Citation1999: 180), cf. also Greenberg's characterisation: on the one hand he stresses that 'the God of the Fathers is absent'; on the other he notices the 'providential nature of the events' (Greenberg Citation1969: 59). 26The translation strong heart/strengthened the heart is better, since in English 'harden' connotes hard-hearted/cruel. YHWH does not make pharaoh cruel, he makes him stubborn, or strong in his resolve (Propp Citation1999: 217); and see Deut. 2:30; Josh. 11:20; Ezek. 2:4; 3:7. The dominant verb used is hzk, to be strong, then kbd, to be heavy, which is used five times, and qšh, to harden, which is used once (Meyers Citation2005: 70). The varied terminology may be literary artistry or a signal of the text's composite prehistory; but whether or not this is so, the present form can be read as literary (cf. Meyers [2005: 78]). 27In effect, this analysis pertains to the levels of narration (Bal Citation1997: 19–31, 32–43). 28Eslinger Citation(1991) expressed the view that the narrator's voice does not express explicit evaluation of the events (1991: 50–52) and argued that YHWH's statements are crucial for the reader's understanding of the events and that they support a triumphalist reading of the narrative, even if such a reading is in fact barred by the hardening of the heart motif (1991: 57). However, I think we should be careful not to overlook the fact that the narrator is also framed, as it were, as is YHWH. Even if the narrator does not explicitly evaluate, the effect of the narrator's comments can still be evaluative in the sense that s/he is the one to explain how to understand the events. 29According to Mieke Bal's narratology, no semantic priority or primacy is accorded to the narrator's text without argument. While character utterances are of course inserted into the narrator's text, making the narrator's text primary in a technical sense, such embedded texts may be related to the narrator's text in various ways. The potential semantic priority of the narrator's text vis-à-vis the utterances of the characters must be gauged in each individual case (Bal Citation1997: 25, 43–50, 52–61). Bal notes that while argumentative parts of a text often give explicit information about the ideology of a text, such statements may be contradicted by descriptive or narrative parts of the text. The evaluation of a text must take into consideration the relationship between different textual forms and voices (Bal Citation1997: 34). I wish also to point to other trends in literary theory, e.g., Bakhtinian perspectives, which emphasise the heterogeneity of any text (Bakhtin Citation1981). For the compatibility of Bal's narratology with Bakhtin, see Bal (Citation1997: 64–66). Others have pointed to the value of Bakhtinian perspectives in analyses of biblical texts, e.g., Ilana Pardes. She notes that such perspectives represent a theoretically well-founded approach to the heterogeneity of the biblical text that was brought to the fore by classical source criticism. She stresses the importance of taking account of the dialogue between dominant and less dominant discourses in a text (Pardes Citation1992: 3–5). In the case of the Exodus narrative, I argue that several textual traits lend support to a questioning of the perspective of the narrator: the emphasis on the ambiguity of the phantasms, the paradoxes and inconsistencies and the broad range of personae reactions. 30In support of this, Propp also notes that hyperbole is one of the striking features of the story (Propp 1999: 347). 31Certain motifs, e.g., turning water into blood. In the composition 'Inana and Shukaletuda' (Black et al. 1998, composition no. 1.3.3., lines 129–138) have parallels in ancient Near Eastern literature; the motif of darkness is found in the Ninevite Gilgamesh Epic XI, 111 (George Citation2003), and others. 32For the sake of comparison, the fantastic elements (e.g., the auditory theophanies) in the patriarchal narratives do not produce expressions of fear in the same way (van Seters Citation1994: 39). 33Interestingly, Albrektsson already suggested that YHWH's redemptive acts in Exodus and conquest were ambiguous (Albrektsson Citation1967: 118–119). 34However, this point exactly (of interpretation as a movens) also enables a rejection of the interpretation given by the narrator and the deity. 35Propp (Citation1999: 349–350) considers the frogs a prank and the mosquitoes humorous. Propp's view does not necessarily contradict my suggestion about the fantastic-uncanny effect here, for the fantastic and the comic may go together. However, although the humorous and the fantastic can be combined, the fantastic rarely allows for a 'laughing away' of the inexplicable and weird according to Lachmann (Citation2002: 11–14), but often the fantastic leaves tensions in place. Ilana Pardes (Citation2000: 27) notes 'the carnevalistic spirit' of the narrative of the plagues. 36Moshe Greenberg also notes that the present text of the Exodus includes considerable artifice and that it is deliberately constructed. The literary artifice of the narrative, with its poetry, metaphors and hyperboles, he finds highly important (Greenberg Citation1969: 3, 193–194). In his judgment, the story of the plagues has more to do with combinatory art than with historical events (Greenberg Citation1969: 202). 37In Ilana Pardes' (2000: 34) words, 'The children of Israel are masters of complaint'. She further notes that the 'representation of national birth in Exodus is not an idealized narrative […] but rather a text that takes into account the darker aspects of national formation' (Pardes Citation2000: 38). 38The fact that the inner-biblical reflection in the Exodus narrative, especially in poetry, is often laudatory and triumphalist does not preclude the existence of differing views in the Exodus narrative itself, also because it is not certain that the views expressed in, e.g., the Psalms, Joshua or Isaiah, are dependent exactly upon the composite narrative of the Exodus that we find in Ex. 1–18, as Eslinger (Citation1991: 45) suggests. Even if the inner-biblical reflection in the Exodus narrative is based on Ex. 1–18, such understandings still do not preclude differences between the Exodus narrative and other texts. 39It is desirable for a theory of religious narrative to not render invisible or totally passive the subject that actualises the meaning potential of the narrative. The fantasy perspective is one way of countering the tendency to stress the closure, hegemony and stability of religious narrative, a tendency that offers little theoretical space to the destabilising and creative work of religious (intersubjective) subject-agents. Undecidability, indeterminacy, ambiguity and uncertainty are all elements in religious narrative that allow/enable some manoeuvring room for a recipient, and allow her to transgress her own horizon as well as possibly those of the era/dominant cultural frames. 40Note the definition of myth in O'Flaherty (1988: 25–33), which does not focus on, or which displays no special interest in, the fantastic or supernatural elements of myths. Wendy Doniger uses a more eclectic approach (1998: 153), while I have tried here to systematically engage a specific body of theory. While eclecticism has merits, so does the use of a specific body of theory. The latter may, in theory at least, lead the analyst to ask questions which s/he would not otherwise have posed, because the theoretical foundation demands it. 41Magic is one of the most contested categories in the study of religion. I refer to Stratton Citation(2007) and Sørensen Citation(2007) for elucidating discussions of the concept. 42Shanafelt shows how early anthropologists such as Radin and Frazer, as well as later ones such as Victor and Edith Turner, make distinctions along these lines (Shanafelt Citation2004: 318–320). If a distinction between magic and miracle is to be upheld in the study of religious narrative, it could, in my view, be done in analyses of how religions use those terms in self-descriptions. In other words, one could see those terms as polemical-political terms in the sense of 'my miracle – your magic' (as in Stratton [2007]). In this way, as a polemical distinction used in identity construction, it is also relevant to the Hebrew Bible. 43There are good reasons to take account of the differences between narratives about magic and magical rituals. While miracles studied sociologically are often more unpredictable than magic and occur in less strongly ritualised contexts than does magic, differences dissolve in written narratives about them. 44Boyer (Citation2001: 90) also speaks in favour of not assuming essential differences between folkloric representations and religious ones, because representations often migrate; cf. Stith Thompson's (1955–1958) index of folk literature. 45The fantasy-theoretical perspective does not oblige us to the view that all stories in which a counterintuitive agent appears have strong fantastic effects. The degree of ambiguity and uncertainty in which the fantastic elements are shrouded may vary. This means that a fantastic effect as outlined in this paper may characterise religious narratives to a greater or lesser extent. Fantastic strategies commonly appear in religious narratives, but the elicitation of a fantastic effect may not be very important for the narrative overall, even if all religious narratives intuitively belong to the larger category of fantastic/fantasy literature understood in the broadest sense. For a comparison of the characteristics of fantasy narrative and religious narrative and the argument that religious narratives are fantasy narratives with specific pragmatic determinants, see Feldt Citation(2006). 46The category that has been used to tackle this terrain previously in the study of religion is that of 'manifestation', which has been related primarily to forms of religious experience especially by phenomenologists of religion Rudolf Otto Citation(1936), Gerardus van der Leeuw Citation(1938 [1933]) and Mircea Eliade (1983: 1–38) (Ryba Citation2000). I do not wish to resuscitate the category of manifestation in the sense of an encounter with the holy, the Other (and so on) out there, whose presence people can meet. Instead, I think the narratives about such fantastic encounters can be studied in terms of their literary form and the aesthetics of reception. This does not necessarily eschew previous work in the study of religion, but could entail a measure of benevolent hermeneutics (à la J. S. Jensen [2003: 75]); because if we refrain from ontologising, there may be – pending further research – positive insights to gain from these largely abandoned scholars. We cannot get to any Erlebnisechtheit of religious experience, for religious experience is a culturally mediated experience, modelled on previous narrative expression and cultural practice. But the literary construal and effects of such narratives can be theorised and analysed, not as reflections of the religious experiences of past peoples, but as flexible media that enable multiple forms of engagement. How the literary interest in 'discourses of alterity' may relate to previous ideas of 'experiences of alterity' represents an interesting avenue of further research. 47Also, today the classification of something as a miracle ranges from unusual life events, such as the miracle of finding the right partner or avoiding a car crash, to bleeding Madonnas and angel visions (Shanafelt Citation2004: 321). 48New studies of miracles and saints (from different perspectives), such as Orsi (Citation1996; Citation2005) and Dempsey Citation(2001), also stress their ambiguity over against traditional accounts. 49Gilhus' work on laughter in religion Citation(1991) similarly stresses both semantic and affective levels. 50The anthropologist Michael Jackson (Citation1998: 28–29) has argued similarly for oral narrative, stressing the importance of 'play' for understanding the existential stratagems involved when people use religious narrative. Likewise R.A. Segal (Citation2004: 138-139; 2006: 353) relates it to the psychological struggle to connect inner and outer reality and to providing relief from that struggle. On the concept of play in the study of religion see also Gill Citation(2000). 51Somewhat similarly, Wanner (2007); cf. Orsi (Citation2005: 143–145), and in concurrence with the gist of McGuire Citation(2008). Beal Citation(2002) also stresses the ambiguity of the monstrous in the Bible, but focuses on Job. 52The traditional view in the study of religion that religious narratives are used to make and sustain meaningfulness can perhaps be said to carry the concomitant 'anthropological' view that humans require, seek meaning (Grant II 2001: 237), and to frame recipients of religious media more as passive sufferers than as creative agents (cf. Arendt [1958: 184], quoted in Jackson [1998: 23]). 53However, with important qualifications that allow room for play and experimentation (Mack Citation2000: 291). 54Myth is thus not a literary category, a genre distinguishable from fable, e.g., but, rather, a 'class of social argumentation found in all human cultures' (McCutcheon Citation2000: 200). 55It is, for some purposes – perhaps especially for distinguishing phenomena of art or sports that resemble religion from religion – fruitful to add a semantic aspect to Durkheim's functional emphasis, as in, e.g., A.W. Geertz Citation(1999). 56Smith (Citation1993 [1978]: 308–309) also pointed in this direction in his description of not only the locative dimension, but also the utopian, as well as the dimension of incongruity (cf. Gill [1998: 288–289]). 57Durkheim's awareness that 'nothing that must be imagined "always exists"' (Durkheim 1995: 14–15; Fields 1995: xlv) can perhaps be seen as an indication of an awareness of the fragility of 'morality' (i.e., society, culture in Durkheim's terminology), of the need for maintenance (H.J.L. Jensen 2005: 11), and so of the implicit weight of change. 58As Riley suggests (2005: 295–296), another reason why this is important is that too much emphasis on the pure sacred will entail a view of the social as consisting of rational proto-intellectuals, while an inclusion of the impure sacred can entail a rejection of the split between intellectuals and masses that, according to Riley, is present in Durkheim, connecting this to the focus on the body in theory. 59For the distinction between theoretical object and subject matter, see Smith (Citation2004: 370–371) and J. S. Jensen (Citation2009: 27). 60Droogers Citation(2010) formulates a wide-ranging scheme for the analysis and evaluation of different religions with respect to their specific configuration of 'power' and 'play' components. Even though I do not share Droogers' political/concerned view of the task of the academic study of religion, or of the field of religion, some of the analytical models in the article constitute a fruitful point of departure for a discussion of the role of play and power in religions. A fuller discussion is desirable, but outside the scope of this paper. Here, let me just note that in the sentence above, I am not alluding to Droogers' definition of play – 'the capacity of humans to deal simultaneously with two or more realities' (2010: 228) – but to the ability to meta-communicate 'this is play' (cf. Bateson Citation[1972]). 61As suggested by Segal (using Winnicott), this can lead to an interaction with psychology and psychoanalysis; in other words, to an interaction with 'fantasy' as a cognitive-psychological faculty.