Cosmic War and Cosmic Conflict

The enduring image of cosmic war is evidence that the religious imagination is steeped in violence. Biblical bans, Christian Crusades, Islamic jihads, and the warfare of Hindu epics all attest to it. Religiously sanctioned battles may be discerned even in the Buddhist epics of Sri Lanka. The evidence is not only ancient but contemporary. At the turn of the 21st century, it seems as if violence in the name of religion is appearing everywhere. What motivates this? Competing claims to proper conduct or to sacred places drive some of this violence. In other cases, conflict is seen as etched into a turbulent universe, as if the very powers of righteousness were under siege.

Images of great warfare—sometimes conceived in moral terms as the forces of good versus evil, sometimes in metaphysical terms as the power of social order versus the chaos of disorder—have been part of religious thinking since antiquity. The image of Chaoskampf, “the war against chaos,” is an ancient mytheme rooted in narratives of divine combat, wherein a supreme god defeats chaosmonsters such as Leviathan, Bohemoth, Tiamat, Yam, and Mot. Its seeds have been traced to a variety of contexts but mainly to Ugaritic, Mesopotamian, and biblical literatures. As summarized by the historian Norman Cohn (1993), the Chaoskampf conveys a sense of cosmic war: “a conviction that a mighty spiritual power intent on maintaining and furthering life in an ordered world is locked in struggle with a spiritual power, scarcely less mighty, intent on destroying life and reducing the ordered world to chaos” (p. 105).

In the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, dramatic incidents of terrorist acts have been carried out in the name of religion, most spectacularly the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Though some of these incidents might be attributed to ideologically manipulated battles for land, authority, or opportunity, many of them were seeped in the rhetoric of ultimate warfare between the forces of light and darkness. It was as if the ancient Chaoskampf motif had returned in the guise of contemporary acts of terrorism. The first scholar to make this connection and to describe these images as “cosmic war” was the sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer in an article in 1987, later elaborated in books published in 1993, 2003, and 2008. Other social analysts also took up the phrase to describe this compelling religious articulation of situations of contemporary conflict. Not only scholars of religion but also national security experts have used the concept in trying to grasp, for instance, the ritualized dimensions of suicide. Cosmic conflict is thus not just a term for ancient mythic themes but an emerging rubric for understanding religious terrorism.