Abstract
Religious experiences with sacred nonhuman natural beings considered to be “persons” remain only vaguely understood. This essay provides a measure of clarification by engendering a dialogue between psychoanalytic self psychology on one side and, on the other, religious experiences of cattle and Tulsi plants as holy mothers at a Hindu cattle sanctuary in the United States. Ethnographic data from the Hindu center uncover experiences of sacred maternal natural beings that are tensive, liminal, and colored with affective themes of nurturance, respect, and intimacy, much like psychoanalytic maternal selfobjects. Devotees protect cattle and ritually venerate plants because these actions facilitate a limited experiential grounding of religiosity on what is perhaps the most fundamental of all relationships, the relationship with the mother, within a theological worldview that somewhat embraces nonhuman natural beings in both doctrine and practice.
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Notes
Melson (2001, pp. 117–118) explores several cases of animal-assisted therapy with children in which a child fails to respond to many possible animal selfobjects yet still develops a special bond with a particular animal, showing how individualized natural world selfobject experiences can be. Why humans respond as they do in this way remains understudied and hence unclear. Of course, New Talavana energetically promotes conscious devotional attitudes toward cattle and Tulsi, thus structuring human encounters with nature from the outset. When I asked New Talavana devotees whether they also reverenced other natural beings beyond cattle, Tulsi, and other entities promoted by the tradition such as holy Indian rivers, every devotee responded in the negative. Thus, at least among the devotees with whom I spoke, New Talavana teachings, rituals, and lifestyles tend to produce a fixed canon of natural selfobject choices.
There exist a number of fine translations of the scriptural texts that I cite. Here, I will use the same paper and electronic translations of scriptures that devotees use in order to share the most authentic rasa or flavor of New Talavana spirituality.
I should mention that the superiority of humans within New Talavana theology remains mitigated somewhat by the realities of Hindu reincarnation. The souls of all living beings remain essentially the same across transmigrations, and species identity arises as a temporary rebirth outcome, since I may be a human in this life but a cat in my last life and a lizard in my next life. In this way, species identity is important in New Talavana theology, as my informants stressed, but species differences in some ways remain a matter of degree rather than of kind.
Some commentators criticize Hindus when they do not offer what some would consider to be compassionate euthanization for elderly cattle. I lack space here to enter this argument genuinely. However, I should mention that many humans avoid euthanizing their human mothers, similar to the Hindu avoidance of euthanasia of cattle, thus providing another contact point between maternal humans and maternal Mother Cow.
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Capper, D. The Maternal Personhood of Cattle and Plants at a Hindu Center in the United States. Pastoral Psychol 65, 427–441 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-016-0695-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-016-0695-3