What is an “Invented Religion”? Why should scholars take these religions seriously? What makes these “inventions” different from the revelations in other religions? What happens when an author does not want their story to become a religious text?
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In this interview with David, Carole M. Cusack (Associate Professor in Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney) answers these questions and more, exploring her notion of “Invented Religions” and introducing the listener to a wide variety of contemporary and unusual forms of religion. Discussion flows through a range of topics – from Discordianism and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to Scientology, Jediism and the New Atheism – and demonstrates how the works of authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Robert A. Heinlein can be transformed by others and take on a life of their own. In her own words, “This is a fiction so good it should be true…”
[N.B., Carole asked me to let you know that when she said that George Adamski founded the Aetherius Society, she meant George King. Both Georges encountered Venusians in 1954, but Adamski was in the US and King in the UK. A forgivable error, I’m sure.]
Carole Cusack trained as a medievalist and her doctorate was published as Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (Cassell, 1998). Since the late 1990s she has taught in contemporary religious trends, publishing on pilgrimage and tourism, modern Pagan religions, new religious movements, the interface between religion and politics, and religion and popular culture. She is the author of The Essence of Buddhism (Lansdowne, 2001), Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Ashgate, 2010), and The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 2011.
She has published in a number of edited volumes, and is the editor (with Christopher Hartney) of Religion and Retributive Logic: Essays in Honour of Garry W. Trompf (Brill, 2010). With Christopher Hartney (University of Sydney) she is editor of the Journal of Religious History (Wiley) and with Liselotte Frisk (Dalarna University) she is editor of the International Journal for the Study of New Religions (Equinox). She serves on the Editorial Boards of the journal Literature & Aesthetics, and of the Sophia Monograph Series (Springer).
View Carole’s page on Academia.edu. Of particular relevance to the topic of this interview is her article
Science Fiction as Scripture: Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and the Church of All Worlds in Christopher Hartney, Alex Norman, and Carole M. Cusack (eds), Creative Fantasy and the Religious Imagination, special issue of Literature & Aesthetics, Vol. 19, No. 2, SSLA, 2009, pp. 72-91. The full text is available here if you have an Academia.edu account (and if you don’t have an Academia.edu account, and are looking to increase your networking and ability to access the most up-to-date research in your area, we suggest that you get one now!).
If you have institutional access to the International Journal for the Study of New Religions, you may also find the following article of interest: Discordian Magic: Paganism, the Chaos Paradigm and the Power of Parody, International Journal for the Study of New Religions, Vol. 2, No. 1, May 2011.
Abstract:
Discordianism, founded in 1957 and generally regarded as a “parody religion,” has only recently received scholarly consideration as a valid religious expression within modern Paganism (Cusack 2010). Yet ritual practice within Discordianism remains largely unexamined; Hugh Urban’s brief discussion of Discordian magical workings as a sub-category of Chaos Magic is the extent of academic discussion of the subject to date (Urban 2006). This article elaborates on Urban’s tantalising classification of Discordian magic. A brief history of Discordianism is sketched; then ritual and magic in the Discordian tradition is explored through an examination of key texts, including Malaclypse the Younger’s Principia Discordia (1965), and Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975). Similarities between Chaos Magic and Discordianism are noted, and an analysis of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), a magical order founded by British performance artist Genesis P-Orridge and others in 1981, elucidates the relationship between Chaos Magic and Discordian magic. It is argued that the essentially unorganised nature of Chaos Magic and Discordianism, and the trenchant resistance of both to any form of “orthodoxy,” justifies classifying Discordian magic as a form of Chaos Magic. Chaos magicians and Discordians both have a deconstructive and monistic worldview, in which binary oppositions collapse into undifferentiated oneness, and neither conformity of belief nor unity of practice is required to be an “authentic” Discordian or Chaote.
