Impietas III: Frith

Every one of you reading this has warrior dead in your line. You wouldn't be here otherwise. Every one of you has people, men and women both, who made the hard, necessary, and sometimes brutal choices of taking up arms to defend their families, their villages, their traditions. Honoring the military dead ... is honoring that spirit that says "you may destroy my nation, my people, my family, you may take everything but it will not be with my help. It will not be today. It will not be now. It will not be without a very bloody price that you may not wish to pay."

There’s a lot of talk about 'frith' in our communities. Well, frith is built on the blood and bone, the guts and screams and tears of your warriors. Only warriors truly understand the cost of frith. You want to honor your peace-makers? Honor first the ones who took their place on the firing line.

Galina Krasskova

Today Get Carter is considered one of Britain's greatest films, certainly its finest crime drama.  1971 audiences reacted to this gritty tragedy with shock, disgust and horror. Director Mike Hodges' vision was unleavened by the wisecracking wit of Dirty Harry or the stylized ultraviolence of A Clockwork Orange or The Wild Bunch.  Set amidst the smoldering scrap heaps and dive bars of an impoverished northern England town, Get Carter looked like it was filmed in a dirty ashtray.  Protagonist Jack Carter (Michael Caine) was a vicious contract killer, no better than the whores and ruffians he dispatched with steely-eyed efficiency.  Most critics and cinema-goers dismissed it as a nasty film about nasty people doing nasty things to each other.  After its release it sunk into obscurity, forgotten by all but a few cinephiles.  (Most notably two young directors named Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie).  But as Swinging London gave way to Maggie's Millions and Free Love was replaced by the Age of AIDS, Get Carter looked less like a dog-end in a punchbowl and more like a harbinger of things to come.

While Get Carter is lauded today as a Very Important Movie, many of its fans remain entranced by its brutal violence and even more brutal characters.  They see Carter as a celebration of nihilism, when in fact it is as ordered and moral as a Greek tragedy.  Their confusion is understandable: the ethical system underpinning the film hearkens back not to Christianity but to pre-Christian Anglo-Saxonry and Jack Carter acts not to bring justice but to restore frith.

* * * * *

The oneness of the kindred was no mere conceptual ideal; it was implemented and practiced as a matter of course in everyday life, and the name for this many-faceted thew was frith. "Frith is something active, not merely leading kinsmen to spare each other, but forcing them to support one another’s cause, help and stand sponsor for one another, trust one another... The responsibility is absolute, because kinsmen are literally the doers of one another’s deeds." (Groenbech, Vol I., pp. 42-43)... 

Frith was nothing if not partisan: focused on security and stability of the kindred, it had no application to those individuals and groups who lay outside the boundaries when it came to a conflict of interest between the two. Nor could any notion of absolute, unbiased justice make a dent in it: defending one’s kindred was always right, no matter how wrong their actions were. Frith was the paramount thew, taking precedence over all others.

Winifred Hodge

Outside the confines of respectable society reside those who are neither respectable nor particularly social.  This is the world Jack Carter inhabits, a place where he has earned some success as a foot soldier to a London mob boss.  Like many of the mercenaries slashing their way through sagas Carter has escaped both his humble beginnings and his earliest crimes.  He has no reason to pry when his estranged brother dies in a drunken accident, no reason to go against the friendly advice his employer proffers like a velvet glove.  No reason save that an empty whisky bottle was found in the wrecked car and his brother always hated whisky.

Yet still Carter returns home, taking the northbound train with his assassin seated behind him and Chandler's Farewell My Lovely on his lap.  He is well-acquainted with the rules of this game and knows its inevitable ending.  Expiating his own sin against his family, he plumbs the depths of this new violation and methodically repays everyone involved.  As he turns from the last corpse a sniper's bullet sends him to the ground, frith restored and blood answered with blood. Like most sagas, Get Carter is a cautionary tale. When frith is lacking in the larger community -- in this case the criminal underworld -- the family is not safe. When the family is not safe the community is not safe.  Our ancestors knew firsthand a blood feud's terrible cost.

While kindred ties often lead to violence, they just as often prevented conflict.  When you are held liable for your brother's antics you have a powerful incentive to keep those antics in check. When slurs thrown at a random stranger might be met with a response from that stranger's extended family you chose your words carefully.  You did unto others as you would have them do unto you because you know they would return the favor.  As with pietas, frith worked in a series of concentric circles.  One was tied by blood to kin, by kin to community, by community to the Gods.  To our contemporary eyes Jack Carter seems a godless brute.  Yet in the eyes of his northern European ancestors (who were driven by shame and had to be taught guilt) Carter's behavior would be seen as laudable: what we call  murder they called right action.

Impietas II: Misericordia

To the Romans pietas and patriarchy walked hand in hand. For most of Roman history the paterfamilias (oldest living male in the family) held absolute power over the family's financial affairs and could punish or even kill other family members without fear of legal sanction. But while the paterfamilias held an autocrat's power over his clan, he was expected to rule with love and compassion.  Tradition and public opinion, powerful forces in conservative and status-conscious Rome, defined the paterfamilias' role and delimited his power.  In those cases where that was not enough, the Emperor might step in to restore right order. Hadrian, who ruled from 117-138, banished a father who had killed his son.  Although the son's crime was great -- he had committed adultery with his stepmother -- Hadrian ruled against the murderous patriarch, declaring "patria potestas in pietate debet non in atrocitate consistere" (a father's power must rest in pietas, not cruelty).

This same beneficence was expected of the one entrusted with the absolute power of the toga purpura. Writing to Nero in the winter of 55 CE, Seneca the Younger explained:

To "the Father of his Country" we have given the name in order that he way know that he has been entrusted with a father's power, which is most forbearing in its care for the interests of his children and subordinates his own to theirs. Slow would a father be to sever his own flesh and blood; aye, after severing he would yearn to restore them, and while severing he would moan aloud, hesitating often and long; for he comes near to condemning gladly who condemns swiftly, and to punishing unjustly who punishes unduly. 

Given Roman history Seneca's advice might seem a bit idealistic. (It certainly appears to have had little impact on Nero's behavior).  But it was rooted not in wooly-headed lovingkindness but in shrewd political calculation.  Seneca saw clementia as a tool which a ruler used to mollify one's enemies and ensure the love and loyalty of one's subjects.  As Galina Krasskova notes in a currently unpublished paper entitled "The Paradoxical Ambivalence of Giving: Seneca and the Virtue of Clemency," clementia incurs an obligation in its recipient.  

Ultimately, clementia is something of a situational virtue. As an oblique form of gift giving it may, at times, have been an uncomfortable trait for Romans, particularly the Roman elite. At the same time, it was not necessarily a negative one. Gift-giving, the exchange of items and/or favors, inevitably carries with it certain tensions.  It is an ambivalent exchange.  As a means of navigating social hierarchy, the cycle of exchange was also a means whereby “face” might be gained or lost. As such, clementia, an aspect of gift-giving intimately connected to imperium was dangerous virtue, an ambivalent trait, fraught with the potential for abuse.

Although the word "pity" derives from pietas, its closest Latin cognate would be misericordia.  Most often translated into English as "pity," "mercy," or "compassion" misericordia comes from miser (wretched) + cor (heart) and describes an empathic sharing in the sufferings of the afflicted.  From its earliest days Christianity has held misericordia in high esteem.  Notre Dame della Misericordia (Our Lady of Mercy) is one of the Virgin Mary's most popular praise names.  Fr. Thomas Ryan has noted that for St. Thomas Aquinas:

[C]ompassion reveals the other-oriented and inter-personal character of human existence.  Its necessary condition is a healthy love of self.  In that sense it is, with shame, a 'defining' emotion and a virtue.  The worth of the 'other' as a person is revealed through an affectively resonant responsiveness to them.  Second, compassion as To be sad at another's gifts and success or to take pleasure in another's plight indicates defective self-esteem. One's moral character is flawed. Finally, Aquinas sees any deeper realization of compassion in the context of friendship and devoted love through identification with the plight of the other... The divine image made for creative self-direction is gradually realized through responsiveness to others and to God.

By contrast, Stoics like Seneca saw misericordia as a dangerous flaw, especially in a ruler.  Clementia was based in logic and reason.  It was extended to those who deserved mercy when upholding the letter of the law would violate its spirit.  It was offered to the vanquished when they no longer posed a threat to the Empire.  It stayed the Emperor's hand when punishment would serve no purpose.  Krasskova points out how Seneca compares Nero to a surgeon and says "if there is ever a need to let blood, you should restrain the blade to stop it cutting more deeply than necessary."  By contrast, he says

[U]nder the guise of strictness we fall into cruelty, under the guise of mercy into pity. (per speciem enim severitatis in crudelitatem incidimus, per speciem clementiae in misericordiam). In the latter case a lighter risk is involved, it is true, but the error is equal in both, since in both we fall short of what is right. Consequently, just as religion does honor to the gods, while superstition wrongs them, so good men will all display mercy and gentleness, but pity they will avoid; for it is the failing of a weak nature that succumbs to the sight of others' ills. And so it is most often seen in the poorest types of persons; there are old women and wretched females who are moved by the tears of the worst criminals, who, if they could, would break open their prison. Pity regards the plight, not the cause of it; mercy is combined with reason. 

An emperor who acts out of misericordia extends an olive branch or grants a pardon without first considering the consequences.  Although his acts may seem laudable they are rooted in selfishness.  Feeling the pangs of sorrow at some wretch's plight, he seeks to eradicate that pain.  The prisoner in chains is freed to return to his brigandry; the siege is lifted and the enemy left to regain strength; hospitality is extended to strangers at the expense of friends and the needy are succored while the worthy are ignored.

Impietas I: Pietas

In the tale of Verginia, an assault upon a woman’s chastity exemplifies the threat of a corrupt government to Rome’s traditional sense of honor and hard-won freedom. The central Roman virtue of pietas, and by extension the regard for law and order, respect for a father’s rights, the insistence on honor and liberty even at the cost of death, and the suppression of personal desires in order to promote the public good, are all in evidence of the actions of the story’s noble characters. Conversely, Livy displays Appius Claudius as the epitome of immorality: he is lust-driven, power-mad, and lacks pietas. 

Jennifer Hutchinson, "Livy, Virgil, and the Traditional Values of Rome"

From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition... Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god. 

Martin Heidegger, Der Spiegel Interview, 1966

Today "pious" is most frequently used as an insult:  to be pious is to be a repressed bluestocking who equates fun with sin.  "Pieties" are sanctimonious finger-wagging condemnations of someone else's lifestyle, or meaningless pablum offered in response to difficult questions.  At best piety is a matter of personal belief, of spending the appropriate amount of time in prayer, meditation and Godly contemplation.  It's a virtue connected entirely to the spiritual world, one which has little relevance in our daily lives on this material plane.  

Yet to the Romans pietas, the root of our "piety" and "pity,"  was foremost among the social virtues.  Among the multiple definitions given in the Oxford English Dictionary, "faithfulness to the duties naturally owed to one's relatives, superiors, etc.; affectionate loyalty and respect, esp. to parents; faithfulness, dutifulness" comes closest to pietas.  Over the centuries this usage has drifted out of fashion.  By the 19th century, English translators of Confucius could only convey this meaning by the term "filial piety"-- a phrase which would have been as redundant to the Romans as "brotherly brotherhood." 

Pietas called for a right relationship with one's family and with one's community.  In fulfilling those responsibilities, one would be in right relationship with the Gods.  Because the Gods were the keepers of the traditions which made your community a community.  Honoring the ancestors and your fellows, "taking pity" on those in need and offering them the help due to a brother, fulfilling your responsibilities -- all those things were ways in which you ensured those traditions would continue.

Pietas was a religious virtue, yes.  But it was a religious virtue which called adherents to action, not contemplation. In the ancient world praxis was more important than belief.  It didn't matter whether or not you believed in the Gods.  Indeed, the idea the Gods needed our individual attention was somewhere between blasphemous and simply laughable.  What mattered was that you behaved respectfully toward Them.   Those who defiled Their temples and profaned Their rites attacked the axle around which your identity revolved.

Wars, migrations and trade brought Gods to new lands. Sometimes They became part of the local pantheon; sometimes They subsumed it entirely; sometimes They drew the boundaries within which a minority community could form. But throughout that world it was implicitly understood that the desecration of sacred space was a serious violation. Guests were expected to treat your Gods respectfully in your land and you in theirs. 

Above all,  those entrusted with the service of your Gods were expected to observe the holy laws and rituals. Priests who betrayed this trust put the community at tremendous risk.   The ancients believed their blasphemies might be punished with war, famine, or other spectacular sorts of divine retribution. But they also realized the greatest danger of impietas -- the community's decay and ultimate destruction. 

We are animals who learn by mimicry: we take on the mannerisms and attitudes of those around us. Not only are we what we eat, we are who we break bread with. And if we entrust our Gods and our traditions to those who take them lightly, in time we will come to take them lightly as well. They will become a trivial thing, nothing that will sustain us in times of trial or provide us models by which we can give our lives meaning. We will forget Them and They will forget us. And in that process we will forget ourselves.

Out with the Old, In with the Moldy: a New (of sorts) Fiction Release from Kenaz Filan

To ring out 2013, I dug up (ba-dump CHING) some old fiction I wrote between 2002 and 2005 and put together my first Kindle Direct Publication.  Covering the period between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, It's a Wonderful Afterlife describes the continuing misadventures of Afterlife Orientation Guide Charley DelCruccio and his metabolically challenged friends on the other side.

Others may promise you the secrets of the dead. It's a Wonderful Afterlife delivers... and at a reasonable cost!   You get six big stories for $1.99: that's at least a dozen trips to the toilet with your new Christmas iPad. If you've got Amazon Prime you can even borrow it for free.  So you can drop a deuce with Charley, Dr. Ira, St. Gerard Majella and even Jesus Christ himself -- and it won't cost you a dime.  (Sorry, toilet paper not included in this deal: it's electrons all the way down).

Act now. Or don't. It ain't like the dead are going anywhere.

That out of the way: Happy New Year to one and all.  May New Year's Eve 2014 leave us all happier, healthier and more prosperous than we are today.

The Heaven of Animals: for Ursula Roma and Ruth Waytz

Recently two friends lost their longtime animal companions.  As often happens I find myself silent in the face of grief and love.  All I can offer is these words from poet James Dickey.

Rest in peace, Maggie Roma: may your memory be blessed, Lefty Waytz. 

The Heaven of Animals

Here they are. The soft eyes open.   

If they have lived in a wood

It is a wood.

If they have lived on plains

It is grass rolling

Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,   

Anyway, beyond their knowing.   

Their instincts wholly bloom   

And they rise.

The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,   

Outdoing, desperately

Outdoing what is required:

The richest wood,

The deepest field.

For some of these,

It could not be the place

It is, without blood.

These hunt, as they have done,

But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.   

They stalk more silently,

And crouch on the limbs of trees,   

And their descent

Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years

In a sovereign floating of joy.   

And those that are hunted   

Know this as their life,

Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge   

Of what is in glory above them,   

And to feel no fear,

But acceptance, compliance.   

Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle’s center,

They tremble, they walk   

Under the tree,

They fall, they are torn,   

They rise, they walk again.

Die Kehre: Anton LaVey after 1975

1966-1975 (Anno Satanas I - IX, if you prefer) is often considered the Church of Satan's Golden Age. Three weeks before Walpurgisnacht 1966 Time magazine asked "Is God Dead?" But while the faithful kept vigil at a heavenly hospice, Satan was alive, well and playing to an ever-growing crowd. Grottos were springing up all around the world; celebrities like Sammy Davis Jr. and Jayne Mansfield proudly proclaimed themselves Satanists; major newspapers and magazines featured LaVey's scowling visage and provided a sympathetic platform for his ideas. 

Then Anton LaVey tore down the edifice he had built. After years of publicity-seeking ranging from pet lions to topless Witches' Sabbaths, he turned away from the spotlight: he dissolved the Grottos and reduced the Church of Satan to a membership card and an irregularly-produced newsletter. When he finally re-emerged, the one-time Black Pope had reinvented himself as a "junkyard philosopher" whose carnal religion was now a mere "aesthetic ideal."   His post-1975 work drew from sources ranging from totalitarian art to film noir but showed little interest in the occult trappings of the early Church.  And while The Satanic Bible was an affectionately sarcastic message to the benighted, LaVey's later  writings feature a bleak misanthropy reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. 

This material is generally ignored by LaVey's most ardent imitators, while The Satanic Bible gets extensively plagiarized, misquoted and misunderstood. The visual cliches of Satanism -- Baphomets, black robes, shaved heads and goatees, etc. -- are displayed in a style which can best be described as the bastard spawn of Hammer Films and Hot Topic.  Then there are the inevitable Jackass-level stunts to "raise public awareness" and "make Satanism relevant again." Instead of looking back to the days of Nehru jackets and love beads, they might consider why LaVey rejected what they find valuable. 

Much as he thought he could keep a lion in a San Francisco Victorian, LaVey thought he could tame and control the human religious urge. In 1970 he commented that he gave people “Ayn Rand’s philosophy with ceremony and ritual added.” An early Church handout, reproduced in The Satanic Bible as "The God You Save May Be Yourself," makes his intentions clear.

Man needs ritual and dogma, but no law states that an externalized god is necessary in order to engage in ritual and ceremony performed in a god's name! Could it be that when he closes the gap between himself and his "God" he sees the demon of pride creeping forth - that very embodiment of Lucifer appearing in his midst? He no longer can view himself in two parts, the carnal and the spiritual, but sees them merge as one, and then to his abysmal horror, discovers that they are only the carnal - AND ALWAYS WERE! Then he either hates himself to death, day by day - or rejoices that he is what he is! 

If he hates himself, he searches out new and more complex spiritual paths of "enlightenment" in hopes that he may split himself up again in his quest for stronger and more externalized "gods" to scourge his poor miserable shell. If he accepts himself, but recognizes that ritual and ceremony are the important devices that his invented religions have utilized to sustain his faith in a lie, then it is the SAME FORM OF RITUAL that will sustain his faith in the truth - the primitive pageantry that will give his awareness of his own majestic being added substance.

LaVey envisioned ritual as a celebration and a release valve. You rid yourself of unnecessary guilt and "white light" conditioning; you express anger or desire; you discharge unnecessary tension. After the ritual ends you do something worthwhile and enjoyable with your life.  Ceremonies were tools and Satan was a useful symbol: both were a means to an end, not an end in themselves.  But for many of his followers the map became the territory. LaVey told them there were no gurus and they made him their guru. He said no god gave a shit about them and they swore eternal allegiance to their Lord and Master Satan. They turned tools into holy symbols and psychodrama into worship: the cure became yet another form of the disease.

Though the Church of Satan grew dramatically during that period, LaVey learned that bigger is not always better. Bigger means more warm bodies seeking entertainment. Bigger means more broken people looking for a healer. Bigger means delegating responsibility to subordinates -- something that never came easy to Anton LaVey -- and being blamed when they pull stunts ranging from embarrassing to criminal. As LaVey told Blanche Barton in Secret Life of a Satanist.

It became rather embarrassing after a while. I’d step off the plane and there they’d be, all huddled together to meet me in their black velvet robes and capes with huge Baphomets around their necks. Many of our grass-roots people didn’t know how much about subtlety then, or decorum. I was trying to present a cultured, mannered imager and their idea of protest or shock was to wear their ‘lodge regalia’ into the nearest Denny’s.

What arose in place of the Grotto System was closer to the Magic Circle from whence the Church of Satan had sprung. Rather than reaching out to the masses LaVey focused on those who understood his message and were acting on it.  These people had worked out their anger against Big Daddy Jesus long ago and were ready to move on to the next step.  In those heady early days LaVey might have dreamed that Satanism would become a world movement. By 1975 he was more interested in a festival of friends where like-minded people could put his ideas into practice.  And "occultniks" were not welcome at the party.

Alas, Anton LaVey had called up that which he could not put down. Now that Ol' Splitfoot had a bible and a church, it became clear to many that he wanted to be worshipped. Understanding that bible, or even reading it, was optional. Satanic Metal took devil worship and turned it up to eleven, giving new meaning to the words "infernal noise." Later the Internet spawned a plethora of "Satanic" websites chock full of spinning skulls, inverted crosses, and spelling errors.  

Much of this material is easy enough to ignore or to mock. A sociologist might note that it functions much as the Church of Satan's early public rituals did.  A metal show or a debate on the Infernul Order of Leviuthun's forum entertains the participants: it introduces them, in a garbled fashion, to Satanism and Anton LaVey. Most will go on to other distractions. Others will miss the point entirely while some will understand. Of those a few may even become valuable and productive CoS members.  But all are internalizing elements of Anton LaVey's philosophy and disseminating them to a wider audience.  

Of Poppies, Philosophy and Mystical Woo: for Daniel S. Hummel II

In his 2-star Amazon review of The Power of the Poppy, Daniel S. Hummel II complained that "it's loaded with way too much mystical woo and pseudo-science for [his] tastes." He further advised that I should have done more research and "better acquainted [myself] with reality before writing a book." (I'm not sure how this would have helped, since he also believes "writing and thinking are probably not [my] best qualities.")

To be or not to be?

I can't blame Mr. Hummel for being disappointed. Looking at some of his other reviews, he appears to be a diehard atheist who finds mysticism useless. A book which treats plants as sentient beings with their own agendas is likely to leave him cold.  He gave me credit for including "a few morsels of good info" so his critique was fair if harsh.  (I'm glad he didn't find Power of the Poppy a complete waste of time and wish him luck in finding a book more suited to his needs).  And while he obviously missed my point, it's my job to make my ideas clear. Perhaps I can do so by reference to one of the 20th century's most opaque thinkers, Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger is often dismissed (or celebrated) as a Luddite. As Hubert Dreyfus points out, his views on technology and science are considerably more nuanced.  In his 1954 essay "The Question Concerning Technology" Heidegger described technology as a "mode of revealing," a way of understanding and interacting with our world. He illuminates this in a famous passage:

The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears as something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, “The Rhine” as dammed up into the power works, and “The Rhine” as uttered out of the art work, in Hölderlin’s hymn by that name. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.  

I called Papaver somniferum an ally. I could instead have discussed its relationship with Homo sapiens in terms of symbiosis.  Because it generates morphine, a plant which originated on a small strip of the Mediterranean coast now grows on six of seven continents. And while contentious at times, the relationship has by and large been mutually beneficial: most contemporary analgesics are derived directly or indirectly from opium poppies.

There's nothing mystical or pseudoscientific about symbiosis. Many flowering plants depend on pollen-carrying insects for propagation.  Others use sweet fruits to attract animals who will later scatter seeds (no pun intended) in their dung.  P. somniferum appears to use morphine as a tool to attract human attention and cultivation. This claim does not require recourse to supernatural explanations.  Nobody points to durian seeds in civet shit as proof of Intelligent Design. Neither does anybody dispute that humans can cause rapid evolutionary changes.

"Symbiosis" would be a perfectly acceptable word, one which correctly described poppy/human interaction. But it would not tell the whole story. In Heidegger's words, it would "[set] nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance [and order] its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way." It would leave intact what Galina Krasskova calls "the Monotheism filter:" it would reaffirm the comfortable notion that H. sapiens is set apart from every other living being on the planet, endowed by the Creator evolution with an immortal soul free will and the capacity for reason.

Throughout Power of the Poppy I suggest that poppy has agency and sentience.  You can take that as a metaphor if you like.  Read Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire: consider the ways in which we have improved the lives of rats and cockroaches.  From there you might reconsider humanity's place in the ecosystem.  Instead of reveling in our ability to manipulate our environment, you might realize how much our environment manipulates us.  Power of the Poppy could become not a teaching tool but a catalyst for "letting-learn," an experience which changes the way you relate to yourself and your surroundings.

Do I believe that poppies literally have sentience?  I'm not entirely convinced that humans are sentient.  The jury is still out on free will: evidence suggests reason is more often used to win arguments than to discover Truth.  Crows have complex societies. are capable of co-ordinated efforts, and pass knowledge down through generations.   Gerhard Roth and Ursula Dicke note that intelligence has appeared independently among different classes of vertebrates (birds and mammals) and among different orders of the same class (i.e. dolphins and chimpanzees).  Even cabbages may be able to remember and respond to information.   I think it exceedingly unlikely that poppies have developed anything which resembles human intelligence. The concerns of plants are not the concerns of toolmaking primates: their experience of space differs vastly from that of creatures endowed with mobility.  Hummel and I share a distaste for anthropomorphism. Where our thinking diverges is on anthrocentrism.

Hummel takes it as a given that humans can only interact with nonhumans in what Heidegger disciple Martin Buber would call an "I-it" relationship. Yet for much of human history we have felt it possible and even desirable to have an "I-thou" relationship with nonhumans, to treat them as beings rather than objects.  This does not, of course, mean that those beliefs are correct simply because of tradition (the argumetum ad antiquitatem fallacy).  But it suggests, to me at least, that the misunderstanding may be on our end rather than theirs. We view their experience through our own prejudices: we assume their conception of "gods," "spirits" and suchlike are identical to our own.  This conflation lets us dismiss traditional beliefs as superstitious nonsense. But it also leads us to think we are debunking delusions when we are merely burning straw men.