Religion in the News: Outer Space and the Sacred Image

Today in the New York Times there is an article by an NYU professor discussing the religious resonances that were struck across India when their republic's first unmanned lunar mission, the Chandrayaan, set off on its way to the moon.

Despite its glib title, “Fly Me to the Deity” makes some interesting observations. The author was clearly trying to convey the peculiarities of Indian spirituality to an audience who probably can't tell Vishnu from Zeus (nor would wonder if there's a difference), lauding the "genius of modern Hinduism" to encounter and integrate "science" into their structures. For the most part, this is an admirable project, and in my opinion is something that desperately needs to be done (if only to expand narrow minds in the West), although the author still seemed to be pulling punches.

In the modern West's picture of religion, science is a bad word, and there's often cognitive dissonance when the two get roped together and playing nice. Truthfully though, if you look down the long history of Indian spirituality, from the Vedic Golden Age to the Upanishadic Revolution, to the birth of Bhakti and Tantra, integration and re-formulation in the face of new ideas is the name of the game. There just simply isn't anything else; India has never (well, at least before the British messed them up) been a land of binary dogmas. Regardless of these facts, Hinduism often gets the gold star of approval from the West for its "modernity," reframing this particular penchant and view of religion as something progressive, to be admired and copied.

Stepping aside from ideas about science/modernity and religion, I think it may be interesting to think about these Indic correspondences not as science-and-religion, but rather images-and-religion. After all, anyone who has heard of Indian devotional films such as "Hail To The Mother of Satisfaction" know that the filmic medium has succeeded in inserting itself into the Hindus' circuit of images, pushing little-known deities from hamlet obscurity to national veneration. In India, a land whose religious relationship to the sacred image is rich, unique and often puzzling to the idol-smashing Judeo-Protestant, the coming of film and even the "cold" eye of the TV camera have not interrupted anything. To quote the article:

Days after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a model of the lunar module was placed in a courtyard of the most venerable temple in the city. The Hindu faithful were hailing man-on-the-moon; there was no suggestion that the Americans had committed sacrilege.

And of course, none of the worshippers had actually seen the spacecraft...but rather its television double. Just as film can bring far-afield deities into play through virtue of its reproduction, so too does the Apollo 11 enter the temples of India. With the image detached and promiscuous, it can enter new contexts with great ease and zeal. Especially in a land where the image and the sacred are almost always bedfellows.