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Yearly Archives: 2016
Sunday Inspiration: Reality
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
― Philip K. Dick
Paissas: Fair Folk of the Great Lakes Region
Ne-Sou-A-Quoit, a Fox chief (via Wikipedia)
In the Central Algonquian languages spoken around the Great Lakes, one finds reference to a faery creature called (in various forms) a paissa. There are numerous variations on this term based on which specific language one is dealing with, but the word is almost always pronounced something like pah-ee-sah, and the plural form is paissake (pronounced pah-ee-sah-kee or similar). I’m using the Sauk term for simplicity’s sake. Some of the variant forms are:
- Apa’iins or Pa’iins (Anishinaabe)
- Apayaciha (Fox)
- Pahiins (Ojibwe)
- Pa’is (Potawatomi)
- Paissa or Apayashiha (Sauk)
- Paisa (Illini)
- Páyiihsa (Miami)
- Piesiihia (Kickapoo)
In whatever form, the word simply means “small person.” It can refer either to a mythological being or to an ordinary human who is short of stature. For example, “Pa’is” is a common man’s nickname in Potawatomi, similar to “Shorty.”
Paissake are usually described as about two feet tall. In most stories, they are portrayed as mischievous but generally benign nature spirits. They may play tricks on people but are not truly dangerous. In other stories, however, paissake have more formidable magic powers. They are even able to pose a credible threat to humans and even to the semi-divine culture hero Wisahkeha (Wisake, Wisakechak, etc.)—but usually only if they are provoked.
It is very likely that “little people” in these cultures are actually more than one type of faery creature. According to one online source, the Anishinaabe and Cree languages, the cognate term apa’iins is used to refer to at least three different types of being:
- The apa’iins properly so-called: a dangerous trickster spirit, sometimes with great magical powers.
- A generally benevolent child-sized creature called either a memekwesiw (Cree) or a memegwesi (Ojibwe)
- A tiny, insect-like faeries called wiings.
These “little people” don’t fit neatly in Mason Winfield’s “two-tribe” model of benevolent and powerful “Healers” and mischievous if not malevolent “Tricksters.” In broad terms, however, the model may still work. On the one hand, “paissa” occasionally refers to powerful eldritch beings. On the other hand, the term “paissa” can refer—and more often does—to mischievous but benign creatures. There are still two tribes, but rather than “Healers” and “Tricksters,” it seems to be more “Dangerous Tricksters” and “Benign Tricksters.
Sunday Inspiration: Purpose
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.
—Dolly Parton
Sunday Inspiration: Patience
Patience is bitter but its fruit sweet.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
August 2016 Biblical Studies Carnival
The Monday Morning Theologian has the honors this month. So go over to J. K. Turner’s blog for all the best of biblioblogging for the month of August.
Scooby Doo is Fun TV but a Lousy Worldview
Over at JesusCreed, Jonathan Storment has written an intriguing review of Reviving Old Scratch by Richard Beck. This is a book about spiritual warfare—but Storment urges us not to roll our eyes just yet.
I want you to know this isn’t like the other spiritual warfare books out there. It is written specifically for the kinds of Christians who stopped believing in the Devil/Demons a long time ago, by someone who went down that same road.
The best way I could summarize Beck’s work is that he quotes the Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylor, lots of Scripture, lots of theologians, and talks often about Scooby Doo.
After providing some necessary philosophical background based on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, Storment sums up Beck’s train of thought with these words:
…Scooby Doo is a perfect example of what it looks like to live in a disenchanted age. Think about every Scooby Doo episode you’ve ever seen. It starts out with an enchanted world. They’re in some haunted mansion, chasing down a ghost or goblin of some kind. All of them are terrified because they are vulnerable to the spiritual forces of the universe and at some point Shaggy runs away screaming and Scooby says “ruhroh.”
But then the turn comes. And the ghost trips over some chair or accidentally overplays its hand, and these detective kids suddenly realize that this isn’t a ghost at all.
Then there is the great unmasking, where they pull back the disguise and sure enough…there are no demons in the world, this is just Old Mr. Dickerson, the greedy banker trying to get rich.
Beck says
When the downward pressure of skepticism win and the enchanted world is emptied out, all that is left is the flat, horizontal drama of human action and interaction. This is the trajectory of a Scooby-Doo episode, the journey to discover that, in the end, there are no ghosts or gods or devils. In the final analysis, at the end of the thirty-minute adventure, there are only human beings.
Which sounds fine to a lot of progressive Christians. We really want to focus on human beings, we want Christianity to be good for human beings, we love humanity…until we don’t.
And here is Beck’s sweet spot, because I know him well, I really appreciated this section, because I’ve seen him live it out. What happens when progressive, disenchanted Christians try to follow Jesus into the messy places of the world without a robust theology of Spiritual warfare?
The battle becomes precisely against flesh and blood.
You Just Don’t Mess with Elves
Via Atlas Obscura:
The “elfin lady stone” was actually covered up back in 2015 after road work was conducted to clear a landslide near the town of Siglufjordur. The rock, which according to local folklore, was sacred to the elves, was buried without the workers even taking much notice. Until the calamities started.
Tolkien notwithstanding, the elves of northern Europe have kind of a shady reputation in folklore. Just saying.
Sunday Inspiration: Reading
How can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading?
—John Adams
Sunday Inspiration: Light and Love
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
Say!
Who put that blurb for The River of Night up over there?
Darrell J. Pursiful 