Wilderness Cult

Rituals of Exit

If the world had run its ordinary course, John would not have become that wildman in the desert, eating insects and honey. His father had spent the long days of his life in the temple, built by Herod the Great; a priest, keeping the customary prayers and offerings of incense, grain and blood, and wandering quietly among those great warm stones.

There’s no tale told about John’s exit from the family vocation. If he was to become a priest, as he was supposed to, he would have begun at the customary age of thirty. But we might infer from what is written that John was about thirty years old when he instigated that legendary wilderness cult. Perhaps it was a dramatic flight from the temple that sent him into the wild at that time. Perhaps years of misgivings had finally boiled over. Or maybe he had set his course a long time before. Perhaps secretly, or perhaps he had openly abdicated years ago and wandered Jerusalem as a son of peculiarity.

In any case, what he chose and what he abandoned tells its own tale. He left the encircling walls of the Judean capital with its spectacular temple and went out to the open. He chose not to be a keeper of that managed space and became a creature of the kingless wild. He decided it was not his task to maintain a code of entries, but sought a place of truth telling outside the city, down by the riverside.

I want to know how John arrived at his vision. How did he imagine this space he would host in the wilderness; this performance that he would co-create with those who showed up? Were there others doing similar things, or was it a vulnerably novel endeavor? Did he go out knowing what he would do, or did he discover what to do by going out, by being with God and the animals and the outsiders in the outlands? What gave him the audacity to gather and enact this spectacle? What did he think he was doing?

For a long time, I have been inclined to think that the prophets might be better understood as ancient performance artists, than simply as “religious figures.” For some reason, we don’t seem to wonder about the thoughtful intentionality of religious figures. It’s as though they were just birthed by the mystery of the universe into pious action. But we know that artists and radicals think about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

“Forget all the standard art forms,” says the artist Allan Kaprow in his eleven rules for How to Make a Happening. “The point is to make something new, something that doesn’t even remotely remind you of culture. You’ve got to be pretty ruthless.”

In the 1950s, Keprow began inviting people to participate in loosely scripted happenings, situations that would interrupt the normal run of things: human forests, summertime igloos, purposeless rendezvous. People travelled out of New York to the farm of sculptor George Segal to take part. The events were both ritualistic and party-like, where art, religion and real life became difficult to distinguish. Such things happen by thoughtful intention. Where to begin? Well, firstly, “make up your mind when and where a happening is appropriate…” 

John is an artist: he envisions and facilitates a happening in the wilderness: an alternative space in which things take place, which might not happen of their own accord. It is a participatory space, made of the people who are there. They are able to symbolically narrate and speak out their individual and common needs for some new thing to occur. They gather to perform and embody their own exit from the present order of things, which has reached its end point. They gather around a shared ritual for their common longing.

John is a political radical who finds some outsider space where the disaffected congregate. Here is space for all the voices. Here they are, exo-mologumenoi: “speaking out together.” Here they are at this festival of metanoia: this space of “re-thinking” everything. These words are traditionally translated “confession” and “repentance.” They do not denote the quietest introspection and self-gaslighting character they've picked up in those religious cultures that turn individuals upon themselves. This was a gathering for the uttering—the outering—of buried truths, and for overturning the present patterns under which life laboured in miserable toil. 

John is a priest who was never a priest. He takes the cultic symbols and rituals and language and he places them all in a different context: outside the city walls. Out here they seem to mean quite different things. Ritual washing was a symbol of purity, which enabled a person to enter into sacred space. Out in the wild, in the cool river, John's ritual of immersion seems to denote something more like liberation out to the open: a tear in the fabric through which a person might exit the present order of things, leave behind all the debts and renounce all the masters within their stone walls.

John is a prophet of the wild. He wanders out of civilisation, and becomes a creature again. He follows the prophets of old who wore animal skins and ate insects and honey. He finds for himself the garb of those old characters and dresses himself so. He learns to eat their strange out-liers diet. His body becomes a living performance until the performance becomes his body. “Work hard to keep it blurry,” says Kaprow.  John lives in the wild: in the sacred, or, the undesecrated places. The wild is integral to the ritual of exit. Jerusalem and Judea, and the Jordan settlements all “went out” to him, so it says, to be immersed in that river.

“You’ve got to be involved physically.” says Kaprow. “Happeners have a plan and go ahead and carry it out. To use an old expression, they don’t merely dig the scene, they make it.” 

After a while, the grown-ups show up: establishment figures from Jerusalem’s two ruling parties. He waves as they approach: “You brood of vipers!” Is he grinning? I hope so. He shouts across the way, “Who told you to flee…?” Are they also wishing to exit the present order of things, where they sit atop of so much power? John doubts it. He doesn’t want to be co-opted back into the establishment by their empty gestures. He doesn't want to be packaged and sold back to himself, like some new trend. They embody what he has chosen not to be.

“If you like being busted by the cops, you might think of working jail into the happening,” says Kaprow. He might have learned this from John. John would learn it soon enough, if he didn’t already know.

There’s a reason stories of exit are usually first enacted in religious rituals and symbols, and in happenings and art and story. The structures we may have cause to leave are also the keepers of the resources: food systems, employment, security and so on. Don't bite the hand that feeds. If you want to benefit from the Roman peace, you'll have to accept the spectre of Roman violence. If it turns out that Roman violence is the rotten law beneath all law, how will you leave? Where will you work? What will you eat? Will you not find yourself in the wilderness saying, “Take us back to Egypt where we used to eat cucumbers and melons and leaks!” No doubt, most of those who went out to spend time with John and to be immersed in the river, went back to their lives sooner or later. An exodus is not so easy, and perhaps for this reason, it will always be enacted first in art, and in ritual, and in story and dance and performance, in passing embodied experiences and in temporary autonomous spaces. It's difficult to realise what hasn't first been imagined. But it’s possible that, over time, the life that performs the liberation it imagines is gradually swallowed up by the liberation it performs.

John's extraordinary performance of another pattern of life became the prologue of the messianic movement. Even so, his father's lifelong priestly office is not scorned or deconstructed by those biographers, the gospel writers. Zachariah is considered to be a person of integrity. There is a time for everything; a time for gathering stones and a time for scattering, as it says. After John is born, his mother Elizabeth announces that he'll not be named after his father in the expected fashion. The perplexed community look to her husband for clarity, and old Zachariah confirms: his name will be John. Even they who kept the threshold knew there was a time to leave it, and even those who left it honoured those who had truthfully kept it.