The hardcover third edition of A Course in Miracles is bound in navy blue rexine with embossed gold lettering. No author is listed on the front cover or the spine, no compilers, no editors. Instead, under the title are simply listed the contents that make up the Combined Volume—Preface, Text, Workbook for Students, Manual for Teachers, Clarification of Terms and Supplements—and centered at the bottom of the cover, the publisher: the Foundation for Inner Peace. This text, ‘scribed’ by Columbia psychologist Helen Schucman from a channeled inner voice that she attributed to Jesus and published in 1975, resembles nothing so much as a combination of college textbook and Gideon’s Bible, works whose authority is often materially inscribed in their packaging and presentation: leather binding, pages with gold trim, distinctive typography. A yellow sticker is affixed to the front proclaiming this volume as “The only COMPLETE Course ad authorized by its scribe & published by its original publisher.”

But there are other versions of A Course in Miracles: an ‘urtext’ that consists mostly of unedited transcriptions of the divine messages dictated to Schucman, a version of the Course given to the son of Edgar Cayce and deposited in the archives of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, and another, curious version typed and bound in six black thesis binders that was photocopied and circulated in the summer of 1975. This latter version was described in testimony given by co-founder of the Foundation for Inner Peace Judith Skutch Whitson during a case involving copyright infringement on the Course. Skutch Whitson stated that she permitted the xeroxing, “and it seemed very right that people would pass it along, copy it over and copy it over, until finally people’s copies were getting so light that they couldn’t see them anymore.” This promiscuous sharing did seem appropriate for a book that encouraged its readers to experience the plenary nature of existence by giving in the name of the Holy Spirit, by recognizing that, “to spirit getting is meaningless and giving is all,” and that in giving, “all of it is still yours although all of it has been given away.” This expansive and emphatically optimistic understanding of the world is a guiding idea throughout the text, underpinning a spiritual process by which the individual ego is overcome and a complete and fulfilling union with God can be accomplished.

This unofficial photocopied version was circulated before publication as a means to generate interest in a project that had theretofore been kept secret by Schucman and her co-editor William Thetford. On a trip to San Francisco, Skutch Whitson put copies in the hands of a number of people interested in new methods and modes of spiritual practice, including Dr. Edgar Mitchell, founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, researchers at the Stanford Research Institute who were working on parapsychological research and the limits of human potentiality, and others across the Bay area. These figures represented nodes in a distributed network of spiritual practitioners, people who could potentially turn A Course in Miracles from a tentative experiment in channeled authorship into a canonical text of contemporary spirituality.

Separated by roughly thirty years, these two contrasting versions of A Course in Miracles—one professionally bound, elegant in design, authenticated by the original publisher and the other incomplete, passed from hand-to-hand, repeatedly copied—indicate two alternate visions of spirituality and the nature of contemporary religious organization. The first vouchsafes its religious legitimacy through rigorously controlled and highly centralized publication practices; the other generates its own organic authority by circulating in a non-centralized and informal network of readers, its movement constituting the very relationships that make up an interconnected spiritual community. The tension between these two visions—a tension between dissemination and control—has played out in the recent history of A Course in Miracles. Indeed, copyright litigation over different versions of the text has not only circumscribed the horizon of spiritual practices but also shaped the contours of the communities in which those practices take place.

In 1999, the Foundation for Inner Peace filed a copyright complaint against the New Christian Church of Full Endeavor whose Endeavor Academy was printing an adapted version of the Course as part of their core curriculum. Endeavor’s defense during the ensuing trial asserted that the Foundation’s copyright was invalid and the text had entered the public domain. They argued that the work was ineligible for copyright protection due to its divine authorship, as Schucman had been specifically instructed by Jesus to keep her name as author off public records. They also claimed the plaintiffs’ assertion of copyright constituted an infringement on their freedom of religion and that the publication and use of the text was permissible as fair use. All of the aforementioned defenses along with eight other arguments were dismissed save one: prior publication. Endeavor Academy successfully determined that un-copyrighted manuscripts—the ones circulated by Skutch Whitson in San Francisco in 1975—had been generally distributed before publication, thus nullifying the later filing for copyright. Had the Foundation for Inner Peace demonstrated that they distributed the book to a limited and select group of people, then distribution would not have qualified as prior publication and the copyright would still have been legitimate. Instead, in the summary decision on the case the presiding judge wrote, “The Court is unable to see in this picture any definitely selected individuals or any limited, ascertained group or class to whom the communication was restricted…An interest in spiritual experience fails to define a class adequately.”

The question the court raised was a serious one and one that carries repercussions for the ways in which we conceive of organizations that arise around the self-conscious practice of spirituality. At what point does a distributed network of interested individuals cohere into an apprehensible group of like-minded followers, a united community of believers? For the many Americans who claim to be spiritual but not religious, how do they imagine their spiritual allegiances, their relationship to religious experience, their consumption of sacred texts? Are their actions simply tactics deployed in the service of individual self-improvement, self-exploration and therapy, or are they understood as being part of a shared set of practices among a community of like-minded seekers? The issue with A Course in Miracles was that the early version of the text was not distributed to a predetermined group precisely because its circulation in the early stages of its existence was serving to constitute the group itself. The movement of the text between hands constituted the very mechanism by which a network of individuals could be linked together, who could then become visible to themselves as a unified community of followers.

Ironically, both the assertion of property rights used to prohibit infringement and the free distribution of copies of an earlier manuscript were practiced by the Foundation for Inner Peace at different times in its publication history. What the courts saw as mutually exclusive and self-negating modes of distribution, the Foundation may have seen as mutually enforcing and supplementary methods of dissemination. The Foundation claimed that they copyrighted the work only so that it might be distributed more broadly and they could more effectively satisfy growing demand in the text. But the later recourse to intellectual property law by the Foundation in order to assert control over a revelation came across as disingenuous to many, including the court. The presiding judge wrote, “The decision to copyright and thereby to control and profit by the distribution of the Course was made after the distribution of the xerox copies described above…The mystical experience reported by Wapnick and Skutch Whitson [co-founders of the Foundation and stewards of A Course in Miracles appointed by Schucman and Thetford] was converted by Skutch Whitson into a property right.”

In response to their subsequent loss of copyright, many at the Foundation felt the need to explain their failed legal maneuvers. Joseph Jesseph, member of the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, wrote in his publishing history of the text, “There are some who still feel that true spiritual works such as A Course in Miracles hardly need the mundane protection of copyright,” a right that he described as being associated with and affirming precisely the same ‘ego framework’ that the text was working so hard to undo as the cause of many personal problems. But he provided the following apologia:

The Foundation—with regard to the fiduciary responsibility given to it—trusts in the fact that when Jesus directed Helen [Schucman] to perfect the copyright in A Course in Miracles, he intended that the Course be protected by copyright limitations within the ego framework. In effect, this ensures that the Course will remain intact and exactly as it was given, so that it will never be diluted, distorted, or changed.

Jesseph thus presented a rationale that described the use of copyright as a necessary compromise with human law put in the service of divine warrant. Instead of explaining the foundation’s use of intellectual property rights as simply being in the service of economic and distributional efficiencies, Jesseph instead described it as a mechanism for the maintenance of a divinely sanctioned message. The content of A Course in Miracles was susceptible to distortion, alteration and misinterpretation by the corrupting practices of those outside the Foundation’s networks of circulation, thus legal recourse to prevent such distortion was an entirely appropriate, even spiritually motivated strategy.

Jesseph’s justification does not conform to dominant understandings of copyright in the United States that usually depend either on a rationale grounded in the protection of the moral rights of [ostensibly human] authors or economic incentives designed to promote the production of creative goods. Nevertheless, he resurrected a sublimated theme within the law regarding intellectual property as intimately tied to questions of propriety. Foundation co-founder Kenneth Wapnick extended this logic even further in his statements after the case, describing the reading of current public domain versions of the Course (the urtext or the Cayce version) as a moral violation of the privacy of Schucman and Thetford, akin to listening in on a private conversation conducted between the scribes and Jesus and not yet reshaped into an official document destined for public consumption.

So what are we to make of the role of intellectual property as a determinant of the nature and role of a spiritual text within a religious organization? For those who inhabit non-traditional, unchurched types of spiritual community, communities whose coherence lies not in a centralized space like the church but instead in the realm of literary works and other forms of shared religious media, intellectual property law may provide a uniquely effective means to reestablish a measure of control. By providing legal tools capable of administering the texts by which intrinsically ephemeral beliefs and practices are mediated, intellectual property law can help to establish official works and stabilize their religiously approved meaning while also permitting the patrol of the very channels of distribution that move those beliefs and practices between members of a newly articulated community. For those organizations that still market spirituality but distance themselves from traditional forms of religion, they may look to new mechanisms to assert a measure of authority and control over their product. And as the physical, sacred property of the church becomes less central to contemporary practice, so may the intangible and ephemeral, yet equally sacred intellectual property move to take its place.

THE TJURUNGA

begins as a digging stick, first thing the Aranda child picks up.

When he cries, he is said to be crying for

the tjurunga he lost

when he migrated into his mother.

Male elders later replace the mother with sub-incision.

The shaft of his penis slit, the boy incorporates his mother.

I had to create a totemic cluster in which imagination

could replace Indianapolis, to incorporate ancestor beings

who could give me the agility

—across the tjurunga spider’s web—

to pick my way to her perilous center.

(So transformationally did she quiver,

adorned with hearts and hands,

cruciform, monumental,
Coatlicue

understrapping fusion)

Theseus, a tiny male spider, enters a tri-level construction:

look down through the poem, you can see the labyrinth.

Look down through the labyrinth, you can see the web:

Coatlicue

sub-incision

Bud Powell

César Vallejo

the bird-headed man

Like a mobile, this tjurunga shifts in the breeze,

beaming at the tossing

foreskin dinghies in which poets travel.

These nouns are also nodes in a constellation called

Clayton’s Tjurunga. The struts are threads

in a web. There is a life blood flowing through

these threads. Coatlicue flows into Bud Powell,

César Vallejo into sub-incision. The bird-headed man

floats right below

the pregnant spider

centered in the Tjurunga.

Psyche may have occurred, struck off

—as in flint-knapping—

an undifferentiated mental core.

My only weapon is a digging stick

the Aranda call papa. To think of father as a digging stick

strikes me as a good translation.

The bird-headed man

is slanted under a disemboweled bison.

His erection tells me he’s in flight. He drops

his bird-headed stick as he penetrates

bison paradise.

The red sandstone hand lamp

abandoned below this proto-shaman

is engraved with vulvate chevrons—did it once flame

from a primal sub-incision?

This is the oldest aspect of this tjurunga, its grip.

Recalculating.

When I was six, my mother placed my hands on the keys.

At sixteen, I watched Bud Powell sweep my keys

into a small pile, then ignite them with “Tea for Two.”

The dumb little armature of that tune

engulfed in improvisational glory

roared through my Presbyterian stasis.

“Cherokee”

“Un Poco Loco”

sank a depth charge into

my soul-to-be.

This is a tjurunga positioning system.

We are now at the intersection of Coatlicue

and César Vallejo.

Squatting over the Kyoto benjo, 1963,

wanting to write, having to shit.

I discovered that I was in the position of Tlazoltéotl-Ixcuina.

But out of her crotch, a baby corn god pawed.

Recalculating.

Cave of

Tlazoltéotl-Ixcuina.

The shame of coming into being.

As if, while self-birthing,

I must eat filth.

I was crunched into a cul-de-sac I could destroy

only by destroying the self

that would not allow the poem to emerge.

Wearing my venom helmet, I dropped, as a ronin, to the pebbles,

and faced the porch of Vallejo’s feudal estate.

The Spectre of Vallejo appeared, snake-headed, in a black robe.

With his fan he drew a target on my gut.

Who was it who sliced into the layers of wrath-

enwebbed memory in which the poem was trussed?

Exactly who unchained Yorunomado

from the Christian altar in Clayton’s solar plexus?

The transformation of an ego strong enough to die

by an ego strong enough to live.

The undifferentiated is the great Yes

in which all eats all

and my spider wears a serpent skirt.
 

That altar. How old is it?

Might it cathect with the urn in which

the pregnant unwed girl Coatlicue was cut up and stuffed?

Out of that urn twin rattlesnakes ascend and freeze.

Their facing heads become the mask of masks.

Coatlicue: Aztec caduceus.

The phallic mother in the soul’s crescendo.

But my wandering foreskin, will it ever reach shore?

Foreskin wandered out of Indianapolis. Saw a keyboard, cooked it in B

Minor.

Bud walked out of a dream. Bud and Foreskin found a waterhole,

swam.

Took out their teeth, made camp. Then left that place, came to

Tenochtitlan.

After defecating, they made themselves headgear out of some hearts

and lopped-off hands.

They noticed that their penises were dragging on the ground,

performed sub-incision, lost lots of blood.

Bud cut Foreskin who then cut Bud.

They came to a river, across from which Kyoto sparkled in the night

sky.

They wanted to cross, so constructed a vine bridge.

While they were crossing, the bridge became a thread in a vast web.

At its distant center, an immense red gonad, the Matriarch crouched,

sending out saffron rays.

“I’ll play Theseus,” Bud said, “this will turn the Matriarch into a

Minotaur.”

“And I’ll play Vallejo,” Foreskin responded, “he’s good at bleeding

himself and turning into a dingo.

Together let’s back on, farting flames.”

The wily Minotaur, seeing a sputtering enigma approaching, pulled a

lever, shifting the tracks.

Foreskin and Bud found themselves in a roundhouse between

conception and absence.

They noticed that their headgear was hanging on a Guardian Ghost

boulder engraved with breasts snake-knotted across a pubis.

“A formidable barricade,” said Bud. “To reach paradise, we must learn

how to dance this design.”

The pubis part disappeared. Fingering his sub-incision, Bud played

“Dance of the Infidels.”

Foreskin joined in, twirling his penis making bullroarer sounds.

The Guardian Ghost boulder roared: “WHO ARE YOU TWO THE

SURROGATES OF?”

Bud looked at Foreskin. Foreskin looked at Bud.

“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” they said in unison.

Then they heard the Guardian Ghost laughing. “Life is a joyous thing,”

she chuckled, “with maggots at the center.”

⁂

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I was first alerted to the tjurunga (or churinga, as it is also spelled) by Robert Duncan in his essay “Rites of Participation” (from The H.D. Book), which appeared in Caterpillar #1, 1967. Duncan quoted Geza Róheim (“The tjurunga, which symbolizes both the male and female genital organ, the primal scene and combined parent concept, the father and the mother, separation and reunion… represents both the path and the goal”), and then commented: “This tjurunga we begin to see not as the secret identity of the Aranda initiate but as our own Freudian identity, the conglomerate consciousness of the mind we share with Róheim… the simple tjurunga now appears to be no longer simple but the complex mobile that S. Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command saw as most embodying our contemporary experience: ‘the whole construction is aerial and hovering as the nest of an insect’—a suspended system, so contrived that ‘a draft of air or push of a hand will change the state of equilibrium and the interrelations of suspended elements… forming unpredictable, ever-changing constellations and so imparting to them the aspect of space-time.’”

Reading Barry Hill’s Broken Song / T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession brought back and refocused Duncan’s words. In Vol. 13 of The Collected Works, Jung writes: “Churingas may be boulders, or oblong stones artificially shaped and decorated, or oblong, flattened pieces of wood ornamented in the same way. They are used as cult instruments. The Australians and the Melanesians maintain that churingas come from the totem ancestor, that they are relics of his body or his activity, and are full of arunquiltha or mana. They are united with the ancestor’s soul and with the spirits of all those who afterwards possess them…In order to ‘charge’ them, they are buried among the graves so that they can soak up the mana of the dead.”

In my poem “The Tjurunga,” I propose a kind of complex mobile made up of the authors, mythological figures and acts, whose shifting combinations undermined and reoriented my life during my poetic apprenticeship in Kyoto in the early 1960s. At a remove now of some 45 years I see these forces also as a kind of GPS (global positioning system) constantly “recalculating” as they closed and opened door after door.

In the thick of breakthroughs often interpreted by my confused mind as obstructions in Kyoto, I was able to complete only one poem that struck me as true to my situation and destiny as a poet: “The Book of Yorunomado.” Thus I opened the poetry section of The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader with this poem and closed this section with “The Tjurunga.”

With bookends in mind, I see these two poems as the “soulend” supports holding the rest of my poetry in place. Thinking back to Vallejo pointing at my gut in 1963 and indicating that I was to commit seppuku, I was struck by the following quotation from James Hillman’s Animal Presences: “The theological message of the Siva-Ganesha, father-son pattern can be summarized in this way: submit that you may be saved, be destroyed that you may be made whole. The sacrificial violence is not the tragic conclusion but the necessary beginning of a passage into a new order… the God who breaks you makes you; destruction and creating ultimately spring from the same source.”

Brazilians are fond of saying that god is Brazilian. No other country in the world is blessed with so many natural wonders, gifted practitioners of the jogo bonito (the beautiful game–soccer), and a pervasive joie de vivre. This expression, however, has always been uttered with a heavy dose of irony, coupled with the affirmation that Brazil is the “country of the future and always will be.” In the face of recurring repressive, corrupt regimes, and persistent poverty, this future never seemed to arrive. Brazil always seemed to fail to live up to its potential.

Lately, things have changed. Brazil is now a stable democracy with an expanding urban middle class and one of the most dynamic economies in the world. With a blistering 7.5% growth rate, the country seems poised to surpass Britain and France to become the fifth largest economy of the world, and, in the process, to transition from a regional to a global power.

A central dimension of Brazil’s global projection is its vibrant and variegated religious field, which has become a key node in a new global cartography of religious production, circulation, and consumption. From “Neo-Pentecostal” churches that unabashedly espouse a prosperity gospel and resurgent African-based religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda to shamanistic religious movements that use psychoactive substances to induce altered states of consciousness, such as Santo Daime and União Vegetal, and spiritist mediums who conduct bloodless surgeries like John of God, Brazil is now at the cutting edge of a global “hyperanimism,” a transnational outpouring of the Spirit and/or spirits that is redefining the place of religion in late modernity.

This polymorphous global hyperanimism transgresses the colonial gaze that gave rise to the concept of animism in the first place. E. B. Tylor coined the term to characterize what he understood to be the most “primitive” form of religion, namely, the simple belief in spirits. Tylor argued that modern religions such as Christianity evolved from animism as societies and cultures became more complex. Present-day animism, however, is not some atavistic remnants of humanity’s past. Rather, this “New Animism,” as Graham Harvey calls it, is populated by a variety of vital and effective agentic forces that dwell not only in “nature” but in the commodities and images that we consume daily. Present-day animisms thrive by in-forming and using the advanced tools (such as global culture industries and electronic mass media) of a modernity that was supposed to have superseded religion through a relentless process of secularization and disenchantment.

Ever since the days of Aimee Sample McPherson, Pentecostalism has shown that it is particularly adept at bridging the local and global, the personal and universal, by blending popular culture, entertainment, glamor, the latest advances in media, and good old-fashioned face-to-face evangelization to perform the works of a deterritorialized and deterritorializing Holy Spirit. In competition with Nigerians, Ghanaians and, of course, Americans, Brazilians have elevated the performative dimensions of Pentecostalism several notches, contributing to the creation of a global pneumatic culture of the spectacle, a “charismatic corpothetics,” to draw from anthropologist Simon Coleman, that is disseminated globally through the Internet, TV, and DVDs and other religious paraphernalia.

The exploits of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God are relatively well known in this regard. Considered one of the largest Brazilian transnational corporations, the UCKG has 4,700 temples in more than 170 nations, including Angola, Mozambique, the U.K., France, Germany, the US, Japan, India, Australia and throughout Latin America. Every Tuesday night, a dramatic struggle takes place inside UCKG temples. In what church members call sessões de descarrego (sessions of discharge or release), pastors enjoin those suffering from illnesses, domestic conflict, drug addiction, and unemployment to come to the front of the temple. Once there, the possessing spirits that are causing these problems are summoned in the name of Jesus Christ. The spirits, often the Orixás or African ancestors, oblige and come out to insult the pastor and the congregation in loud and distorted voices, twisting and shaking the bodies of their victims. After some verbal sparring through which the head pastor forces the evil spirits to identify themselves and state the tangible injury they are inflicting and why, a hand-to-hand combat ensues. The pastor literally wrestles the embodied demons down to the ground, while the whole congregation screams: “Burn! (Queima!)” “Burn!” “Leave! (Sai!)” “Leave!” Even though this is a very local spectacle, a fight against territorial spirits that afflict specific people, it is also a cosmic struggle waged by a universal Holy Spirit. And it is a struggle that is being filmed and can be seen on YouTube.

While the UCKG is a global force to be reckoned with, it may no longer be at the forefront of pneumatic innovation in Brazil. The Igreja Renascer em Cristo (Rebirth in Christ Church), founded by bishops Estevam and Sônia Hernandes in the mid-1980s, was described by The New York Times as a vast “religious and business structure that includes more than 1,000 churches, a television and radio network, a recording company, real estate in Brazil and the United States, a horse-breeding ranch and a trademark on the word ‘gospel’ in Brazil.” Renascer em Cristo has also the distinction of counting until recently Brazilian soccer superstar Kaká among its members. By drawing on Kaká’s worldwide visibility, Rebirth in Christ introduces a definite Brazilian flavor to Neo-Pentecostalism’s seamless mixture of business, media, popular culture, and religious performance. Kaká is part of a new breed of Brazilian religious performer-entrepreneurs, who, taking advantage of the country’s world-class prowess in soccer, travel abroad to places as diverse as Japan and Dubai not only to showcase the sport but to spread Brazilian transnational Pentecostalism. These athletes-entrepreneurs-missionaries are performers in a global stage, in a multi-media spectacle. As they score goals, they remove of their team jerseys to reveal “Jesus Saves” or “I belong to Jesus” T-shirts, or torsos tattooed with crosses. They use their bodies as billboards to deliver a holy message for millions of TV viewers. Underlining the blurring of sacred and profane genres, Kaká has declared that he plans to become a pastor after he retires from soccer.

Rebirth in Christ seeks to target the untapped market of a restless young generation who has grown up with a steady diet of images. This is a generation whose lives are deeply imbued with hyperanimism, with a highly mediatized immediacy that blurs the boundaries between virtuality and reality, producing vivid enchanted simulacra, intense self-referential experiences such as being in the middle of combat (World of Warcraft), or being part of a violent heist (Grand Theft Auto) or a plot to kill an important historical figure (Assassin’s Creed). To compete with and co-opt the hyperanimism of contemporary consumerism, youth culture, and cyberspace, Rebirth in Christ has produced its own extreme experiences. After all, as George Bataille tells us, religion is about excess and violent intimacy. Simulating the simulation and re-orienting virtual violence within the framework of pneumatic Christianity, Renacer organizes “extreme fight nights,” setting up rings at churches where pastors and wrestlers clash, showing their technique in vale tudo (literally “anything goes”), a Brazilian type of martial art that mixes multiple styles. These extreme fight nights become “deep plays,” to use Clifford Geertz’s term, where the cosmic struggle between Jesus Christ and the devil is displayed in and through the bodies of the fighters. As in the Balinese cockfight, for followers of Renacer em Cristo attending and participating in extreme nights serves as “a kind of sentimental education,” where a generation weaned on caffeine, adrenaline, and virtuality learns what Neo-Pentecostalism’s embodied “ethos and . . . private sensibility look like when spelled out externally in a collective context.” As a pastor told participants, “You need to practice the sport of spirituality more . . . [y]ou need to fight for your life, for your dreams and ideals.”

Reborn in Christ is hardly alone in creatively reworking the ludic aspects of Brazilian culture and religion. Igreja Bola de Neve (Snowball Church), founded by beach-goers and surfers, has specifically targeted Millennials and the Net Generation through a hip mixing of Christian reggae, rock, and Brazilian funk with avid blogging, surfing, and other extreme sports. Bola de Neve now has churches in places as diverse as India, Canada, Russia, the U.S. (Los Angeles) and Australia, where it has a célula (cell) in Harbord, close to the Sydney’s northern beaches. Other churches include video games, tattoo parlors, and child miracle healers as part of their outreach strategies.

All these examples point to a pervasive hyperanimism, a thorough spiritualization of the material and materialization of the spiritual that characterizes late modernity’s dialectics of over-production and scarcity, virtuality and reality, mediatization and immediacy, and of visibility and invisibility. Pneumatic religions are truly at home amid these dialectical spirals, produced and disseminated by new national and transnational actors and media in an emerging post-colonial economy of the sacred. Scholars need to develop a new transnational, comparative-yet-non-totalizing, post-Hegelian phenomenology of the spirit capable of taking into account the creative and diverse embodied and emplaced interactions among pneumatic religions, capitalism, media, sports, entertainment, and popular culture, interactions which are taking place at multiple nodes in a polycentric global cartography of religious production, circulation, and consumption.