Patreon Topic 91: On Miasma Theory

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From Cunnian comes this topic:

“Miasma theory. I struggle with not hating this because – while practical in a bronze age sort of way – dross happens and devaluing this essential phase of being seems problematic. And delegating lower-purity beings to deal with it for you seems more problematic. This ends up involved with the cleanness issue. (I think my solution is to accept that the dross is as holy as anything else but is at a dangerous phase when it must be handled carefully but that letting the shit roll downhill is wrong and attract more rather than less moral hazard. ) So I am kind of looking for perspective and troubleshooting on the whole knot.”

To get us started let us look at a basic idea of what miasma is. Baring the Aegis also goes over this here.

“Miasma (μίασμα) means “stain, defilement” or “the stain of guilt” in Greek. It is usually translated as “pollution” in English, although there is no concept in English that precisely corresponds to miasma. Miasma is a god-sent disease that is caused by a murder that has not been atoned for (with proper purification rituals). A miasma can fall upon an entire city when one man in that city is guilty of a murder and has not atoned for it. A miasma can infect everyone on board a ship if one man on that ship is guilty of murder.

Miasma can spread like a disease, and it seems to be the objectification of guilt.”

While I cannot make you not hate miasma as a concept or theory, I find it is very useful in explaining spiritual dross, dirtiness, and yes, even pollution. I think taking much of the morality out of it save where certain actions invite miasma in is a useful way of approaching it. Some tasks are just going to make you dirtier than others. This is true whether you are waking up from sleep and you are sweaty, using the bathroom, digging a trench, or slaughtering an animal. I would hope in any of these cases you are at the least washing your hands. That is what I look at most methods of removing miasma as: the spiritual equivalent of washing your hands.

Where I think miasma can get complicated is when it goes into the realm of a whole town paying for someone’s fuckup. The way I see this round peg squared, though, is that the failing is not merely a moral one of a single individual. When it comes to a town getting caught up in miasma, it is a failure of the town to keep itself clean, to take care of its people. When the whole of a town or city is caught up in the effects of miasma I generally see it is because of a systematic failure to address what needs addressing. The story in Mythology Unbound’s entry on miasma clearly demonstrates this idea:

“When Oedipus the King begins, the city of Thebes is infected with a miasma: a disease has fallen on the crops, the cattle are dying, a plague is raging through the land, and all the children are stillborn. The Oracle at Delphi proclaims that the miasma is caused by the unexpiated murder of Laius, the previous king. Apollo declares that the murderer is still living in Thebes and that he must be found and punished (either by banishment or death) in order for the miasma to come to an end.”

The systematic failure here is not just the murder of the previous king, it is because that murder is unexpiated. Through this example we can see a city coming to fall under miasma due to any number of failures. Justice not being done is part of keeping the city clean, which yes does have moral and spiritual dimensions as surely as hand-washing does for us, especially given how easy it is for disease to spread without it. Systematic injustice manifests as harm for its citizens, whether or not the citizens themselves are aware of it, and for that miasma to lift the injustices must be expiated.

For us as individuals or even as small communities, the divides we experience between mundanity and the sacred are rather easier to address. We wash our hands, we communicate and resolve differences, we seek to resolve conflict with one another, we cleanse with khernips or katharmos of another kind, or the equivalent for whatever our tradition(s) are. When these sources of pollution rise higher than that, whether in complexity, the power involved, or the number of people involved, we encounter issues like that of Oedipus.

I actually do not think accepting the dross itself as holy is the thing here. The ways we get dross on us, in other words how we get dirty, that may be holy, such as getting good sleep leading to communicative dreams, digging a trench for planting crops to make offerings, or slaughtering an animal for sacrifice. Then again, many of the ways we get dirty may be wholly mundane, such as getting sweaty from sleeping under covers, getting dirt under our nails from weeding the garden, or cleaning up after our animals so they stay healthy. Without cracking open what remains to us of the various Orphic and non-Orphic katharmos (purification), the way I relate to most of these methods of cleansing is akin to washing the hands or bathing the body. Indeed, at least some of the ways of dealing with miasma was to literally wash your hands.

For the most part I put aside moral issues or objections to miasma or dross. It just…happens. You live, so you get dirty. Unless you do something deeply morally objectionable like straight up murdering someone or helping someone to be murdered, or doing something monumentally disrespectful like intentionally defiling a sacred space, most of the issues from miasma can be cleared away with simple purifications. Rather than devaluing the dirty parts of life, the idea of miasma and cleaning it is actually encouraging us to be respectful of the holy, sacred, and the things we should approach in a clean way. It’s not that having dirt on your hands is morally impure, it’s just…dirty, and needs cleaning. It’s mundane. If we understand that there is a separation from mundanity and the sacred, and from what is unclean from clean, then this recognition is a both a consideration of respect for mundanity and the mundane, and the holy Beings and holy places.