Spirituality
The hardest topic to sum up in a header. What's it all about? At the end of the day, spirituality is the way you live your life and the way you interact with others. No preaching here. Only a search for insights.
To Hell And Back
By Dick Hansom, Speakeasy, No 102, September 1989
"Although I'm not a member of any church, I am religious. I believe that the afterlife is a whole other journey. But I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don't need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy."
It's Alive
By John Hind, Blitz, No 80, August 1989
"I think that what is so divisive in the spiritual life of our species is that people have constantly wanted one simple answer, and wars are fought over the difference between answers. What is much more important is not to find but to seek, to continue to open your mind to a great diversity of possibilities. All things are possible. All things may even be likely. There are valid elements in every spiritual practice that I know. For some people, Catholicism works. For some people, Hinduism works. For some people, sitting alone watching the flowers grow works. For some people, writing works. What is important to say: there are higher selves in us and lower selves, and if we continue to feed the lower self and preen the lower self and value it over the higher self, then we all end as mud.It would be deeply hypocritical of me to critique the way religious practices and religion divide people up and then go on to say that my particular practice is better than yours. I would like to be spiritual twenty-four hours a day, waking or sleeping. I would like to feel that - I haven't achieved this, very far from it, but I would like to think that this is a plausible thing - that by living in the moment and opening my imagination and opening my heart and my mind to the possibilities which confront me moment by moment, person by person, experience by experience, that I can eventually come to the place where breathing is a religious act. And this must include the past and the future. One of the things living in the moment demands is that you are aware of time as a continuum. A misapprehension about this notion about living in the moment is that, somehow, it just means that all there is is 'now'. Well of course all there is is 'now'. 'Now' just became 'then'. In order to write a cogent sentence I have to be aware of the word that went before it and the word I intend to lay after it. That isn't to say that I shouldn't be completely alive to the word I'm actually writing at that moment. It's a universal spiritual concept. There isn't a spiritual discipline in the world that doesn't say that in God's eye all time is one. By 'God', I don't mean Jehovah, I mean in the eye of the divine. The linear notion of time is a redundant one."
The Magic Show
By Nick Vince, Clive Barker's Hellbreed, Vol 1, May 1995
"The truth is, I write religious fiction, though the phrase causes people to pale around the gills. Clearly fantasy and horror are often about the fundamental problems of existence. Horror itself is very often religious in its roots.
"Where else can you credibly deal with the absolutes of good and evil or probe life beyond the grave? Where else can characters converse with the dead? Those are the same tools of the metaphysician...
"But we live in a highly secular culture. At age 15 we cease to ask certain metaphysical questions, but we don't cease to think about them. We're shamed into silence, or we have to let them erupt at the death of a friend or the birth of a baby or see them subsumed by triviality, rendered crude and coarse by the vocabulary of the television evangelist. He takes the honest vocabulary of the metaphysician and turns it into dishonesty...
But what's maddening about the modern evangelist is that he assumes he's the only one who has God whispering in his ear. God also whispers in my ear."
Horror's Roots - Writer Clive Barker On Good And Evil In The Modern World
By Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune, 23 May 1993
"[If marooned on a desert island] I'd take a crate of videos and one book. I'd take the Bible. Because it's this massive, layered, rich, wise, dark, dangerous, ambiguous masterpiece. It seems to me to be a wonderful ragbag of drug dreams and poetry, history, violence and beauty. It's the single most important source of insight and storytelling I've ever encountered. There isn't a collection of videos, however big the crate, which could offer me compensation for that. In my fiction I am critical of the organisational elements of the Church, yes. I have contempt for many of the corruptions of the Church, and I think that when you value the Bible or the Christian message, it's easy to feel contempt for those who judge themselves worthy of carrying that message, whether it be the Swaggarts of this world or the inhumanities of the Vatican and the way its teachings seem to cause universal pain in the name of love. It's difficult to feel benign towards these populist, very often arrogant, self-centred and corrupt individuals who take upon themselves the duty of controlling the message. The distinction I make between the message-carriers and the message itself is very strong. Priests don't come out very well in my books, but the underlying mythologies - the idea of redemption, the idea of having someone to die in order to save, the idea of non- judgmental love and so on - are themes that come up over and over again in my work. But I don't write cynically about the message. I write cynically about the agents. The vocabulary of the fantastique generally is shot through with religious underpinnings of various kinds. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realise that, encoded in a lot of fantasy, science fiction and horror are the large problems which once would have vexed theologians. But the anxieties we feel are not addressed from the pulpit any longer. Well, they are addressed from the pulpit, it's just that there's nobody in the pews. So we look elsewhere. The worst thing you can do to children is thrust one particular religious view down their throats. There are only two ways they'll go as a consequence of that: either become indoctrinated and not think for themselves, or respond so negatively to what they've been taught they become perverse and tainted by the guilt that they're turning their backs on this thing, whatever this thing is. Catholicism is obviously the prime villain; you know, the 'once a Catholic' line. I was allowed to think for myself. I'm a believer in the sense that Blake was a believer. I'm a believer in the sense that I take the Bible as something which is available for very private interpretation, and that interpretation may not sit well with conventional interpretations. The material is there for investigation and investigation on an intimate level. Its lessons, its wisdom, its serenity, its good sense, its absurdities and malice - it's very malicious at times - are all part of what makes it remarkable. So I suppose my reading of it means I've ended up as a strange kind of believer."
A Strange Kind Of Believer
By Stan Nicholls, Million, No 13, January - February 1993
"I think what I write about very often are very commonplace people living ordinary lives, but who have always had at the back of their heads the possibility that the world might be different to the way that they live…We are a religious species; we make gods even if we haven't got them. I don't think it's true that we live in a godless society, I think we've just made rather trivial gods. The idols that we've raised are soap-opera stars rather than real deities. But that doesn't mean that we don't have the urge as a species towards deifying things that are in our imagination, and I think that we are more prepared for the fantastica l in our heart of hearts than we sometimes accept. Or admit."
Clive Barker In The Flesh
By Dave Hughes, Skeleton Crew, III/IV, 1988
"[a character's comprehension of what he is confronting is more important than whether they live or die] In essence, I think that is a very religious point of view . There are mysteries and if you confront these mysteries you take whatever consequences there are."
Clive Barker: Anarchic Prince Of Horror
By Stephen Jones, Knave magazine, Vol 19, No 5 1987
"I don't believe in Divinities as they manifest themselves in Steven Spielberg pictures…I think what most people mean by 'Divinity' is something in the Cloud of Unknowing - the Veil Which Cannot Be Pierced. It's a confrontation with something which is beyond comprehension, beyond analysis. That doesn't interest me at all. Anything which creeps up behind me and says, 'I am wonderful and supreme and extraordinary, however you cannot see me!' is a liar….a confrontation with the unknowable seems to be to me a contradiction in terms. True confrontation has to have an analytical quality. So in my fiction…those confrontations always have an element of analysis in them…my heroes and heroines don't stand slack-jawed in the face of these things…they have to find solutions which are not in the conventional terms… Now confrontations with the very dark or the very bright should be about what you do tomorrow, what that does to your life thereafter. I don't believe these people who've had their paranormal experience and do nothing with this information except to go on the Phil Donahue show and say that they've seen them….these people aren't transformed."
Transcript of talk at UCLA 25 February 1987
Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden
"I go to church for other people's weddings, baptisms and the occasional funeral, and that really is it. [my religious belief is] in system: I believe in life after death. I absolutely assume the continuity, in some form or another, of mind after bodily corruption. I certainly don't believe in any patriarchal god…but I don't think we live in a universe in which anything's ever lost. Transformed, maybe, but never lost. I think that may be the bottom line of my religious belief. And that's probably as far as I'm able to go. But it gets me through the night."
Give Me B-Movies Or Give Me Death !
By Douglas E. Winter, Faces of Fear, 1985
"This one-God hassle also means one viewpoint and one morality. It's this preoccupation with a singularity which is so fucking dangerous, because if you've only got one God you've only got one truth and everything else is therefore lies. That means there are a lot of lies out there and a lot of books to be burnt…and a lot of people too."
Terror Tactics
By John Brosnan, Time Out, 16-28 March 1988
"When [Harry d'Amour] goes to sleep at night, he puts down the crucifix, a statue of Shiva, and a few pagan gods all beside the bed to make sure that he really covers the bases…And I like that. I think it's an interesting and in these sort of atheistic times, a perfect and legitimate response to the world, that you say, 'Well, I'm not sure which god I believe in but I'm not going to bed without believing in at least one.' And, in Harry's case, half a dozen."
Lord Of Illusions - Filming The Books Of Blood
By Michael Beeler, Cinefantastique, Vol 26 No 2, February 1995
"I don't believe there are any true solutions to the world's various ills without spiritual solutions, which for me means imaginative solutions, means reaching what I think is the divine part of us - our imagination. One of the things the imagination does is allow you access to other people's lives; in imagining another person's thoughts and feelings you better understand them. It's the only way to fight the phobias that are in everybody the only way to fight the animal impulse, to view the world tribally, making everybody unlike us the enemy."
Lord Of Illusion
By Charles Isherwood, The Advocate, 21 February 1995 (note : online at the Lost Souls site - see links)
"The fiction of the fantastic, I think, has always preoccupied itself with certain key movements. I think those movements are essentially religious, when I say movements I don't mean in the sociological sense but in the spiritual sense. The figure of the shaman who appears, named as such, for the first time in 'The Great and Secret Show,' but whose earlier manifestations have actually been in other books, is almost representative of that journey-taker. The shaman's position within the tribe is to be a sort of go-between , between the ghost-world, the worlds of the dead and the ancestors arid the minor divinities, of the haunting spirits on the one hand, and the tribe and common-life on the other. And the shaman goes off, takes his or her dream-trip, ventures into these places and comes back with, hopefully, insights, sometimes healing insights, spiritual insights, news from the gods, news from the ancestors. I think in a weird sort of way the writer of the fantastique is doing the same sort of thing, on a much simpler level, obviously, on a much less intimate level, because you don't get to meet the tribe you're serving. But the trip into the sub-conscious which the writer takes, particularly the writer of the fantastique, and then comes back, if he or she is reporting at all truthfully, is interestingly paralleled by the shammanistic journey."
The Edge Interview
By David Alexander, The Edge, 1991 (note : online at www.users.globalnet.co.uk/houghtong/ barker.htm - see links)
"I do believe that after death we take journeys', and I do think that the life that we are living now in the flesh with this particular name attached is just one part of a much larger experience. So to that extent I completely believe, in the sense that I've written about life after death, I certainly believe that that's part of what this being business is all about and that there are journeys' to take, after we've left the body, which will be startling and extraordinary and revelatory. I think we have hints of that, I think in our lives before death we have hints of the great panorama's which await us. I think in moments of epiphany, we sense our spirits seem to open up. They seem to unfurl like the sails of some wonderful sailing ship. Suddenly we have possibilities in our grasp that we didn't have a moment before. All kinds of things can do that to us, the sight of a certain kind of sky, a certain kind of smell in the air, the presence of a certain animal, the presence of a certain person, the wind, gulls; any number of things can be triggers for this opening of our perception. What we see when we enter those brief moments of epiphany, what we feel, is possibility. What we feel is fearlessness. What we feel is that all the anxieties and apprehensions which cluster around us because we live in a fearful world are actually things that we will have to work through but they're finally redundant. There will come a time in our lives, maybe at the very end of our lives, when those fears will no longer be important. When they will drop off like the dead skin off a snake and something new and beautiful and bright will emerge.
"I think that the God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology, is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that the male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it's, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruptions and villanies to grow and fester. In the name of that God terrible wars have been waged, in the name of that God terrible sexism has been allowed to spread. There are children being born all across this world that don't have enough food to eat because that God, at least his church, tells the mothers and fathers that they must procreate at all costs, and to prevent procreation with a condom is in contravention with his laws. Now, I don't believe that God exists. I think that God is creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand years in fact, is that that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort. I'm not saying that it's true of all of them, some of them are working leper colonies and doing extraordinary works in the name of that God. That's a parodox which we probably shouldn't be discussing now, but I'm aware of that. But I'm also aware that there are a lot of very powerful, corrupt men enjoying the power that this tradition, patriarchal tradition, has confered upon them. That's one that Hapexamendios, the villian of Imajica, is the personification of that God. He is the personification of the joyless, loveless, corrupt thing which has over eons created his own city of his own flesh.
"As far as what God in the world is... I see divinity working, I see spirit working, and extraordinary capabilities and richness of life, spiritual life, moving in people all the time. I believe that is a sign of something which is moving in the planet, and I think probably moving in all matter. The great desire to evolve into something new and better. The movement towards something revelatory is apart of who we are at our best. The devil, the forces of evil, are best represented as forces of limitation. Forces that say no, forces that say close your eyes, turn away, limit yourself, live only in the moment and not in the grander scheme of things, live in your desires, live in your pleasures, live only in what you can get by whatever means that you can get it, and never think of something that lies outside yourself. That always seems to me to be a working definition of evil. That's the yin and the yang in a way. The image of the good and the divine in us are the reverse effect. It's about caring for other people , and realising you have a part in a huge system and that you owe it to the larger system to be aware of what influence you have upon it. That you try and service what is best in you, and what is worst in you that you try and look constantly about the effect your having on other people to see weather your actually doing them injustice. All of those things and of course countless others are working definitions of what's best in us, and therefore what is potentially divine in us. "
Confessions
By [ ], Lost Souls, Issue 1, [June] 1995 (online at clivebarker.com - see links)
"As a religious person I believe the world is charged full of wonderful , miraculous things and that part of our duty as creative persons is to talk about that magic and wonder. What I'm trying to do in my work is to make the readers suspend all their prejudices about the world; I want to be able to say to my readers: Everything you thought you knew, everything you thought was certain and fixed and immutable, for the time you read this book, isn't. For the time you read this book, miraculous things are possible; sometimes horrible things are going to happen, sometimes wonderful things will take place and sometimes the terrible things will turn out to have wonderful results. So don't judge anything for the time you read this book."
Addicted To Creativity (Part 2)
By Bill Babouris, Samhain, No 71, January 1999
Click here for Barker's further comments on spirituality
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