A Zoroastrian, a Catholic, and a Rabbi walk into a bar. Is the bar clean or unclean?

Saturday, cigarette #2

I've been threatening to write about purity for a week now, and I suppose it's no good waiting for something timely and purity-related to show up in the news, so here goes nothin':

1.) Zoroastrian Purity Laws: "Wait, did you say unconsecrated bull's urine?"

Among Irani Zoroastrians, hair trimmings and nail parings are gathered separately and placed on scraps of cloth. Furrows are drawn around these scraps with the chanting of the required holy words. Then the cloths are tied up or sewn shut, placed in another cloth, and carried in the left hand to the "place of nails" (N.P. lard, nākhondān), which is situated on the outskirts of the village. This structure has no door, only an opening in the flat roof and steps leading up to the opening.

Alternatively, the nails and hair are simply placed in a metal vessel, which isolates and confines the pollution, covered with cloth, and emptied into the lard. In this case, however, the bearer has to undergo a threefold purification: three stones are set within a pure space marked by a furrow, and ablutions are performed with unconsecrated bull's urine on the first stone, with dust on the second stone, and with water on the third stone. The vessel is rinsed with unconsecrated bull's urine, scoured with dust, and washed with water.

The reason for quoting this passage from Purity and Pollution in Zoroastrianism: Triumph Over Evil is not to make you laugh at Those Zany Persians, but to give an example of what it looks like to think of morality in terms of purity and impurity, because . . .

2.) . . . Christianity Doesn't.
Kate (a.k.a "Heavily Annotated") mentioned in class the other day that medieval canon law understood crimes as sins against a sacrament. Bestiality, for example, was a sin against the sacrament of marriage because it distracted from and therefore damaged properly ordered sexual activity within marriage. I mention this one in particular because . . .

3.) . . . This Story from Plymouth Colony Complicates Things

There was a youth whose name was Thomas Granger. He was servant to an honest man of Duxbury, being about 16 or 17 years of age. He was this year detected of buggery, and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. Whereas some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them, others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not... First the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle were killed before his face, according to the law, Leviticus 20:15, and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a great and large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them.—William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation

In Zoroastrianism, whether a man repents is less important than whether he performs the appropriate sanctifying ritual. One consequence of tossing out purity/impurity is that repentance becomes the most important part of atonement. (Yeah, yeah, the sacrament of reconciliation, whatever. Even in the case of confession, it's the mental state that's most important.) The fact that William Bradford was careful to cast the violated cattle into a large pit and "make no use of any part of them" suggests that his kind of Christianity was able to talk about purity in the way that the Zoroastrians and rabbinic Jews could and medieval Christians could not.

Christianity is credited with turning the West into a guilt culture rather than a shame culture, but I know at least three conservatives who like talking in terms of shame more than talking in terms of guilt and want very badly to find a Christian way to do so. I've been trying for the last week to do the same kind of thing with purity with no luck. The bestiality story from William Bradford's journals makes me think that there should be a way to do it, though . . .