The study of the ways in which religious movements begin is a difficult one. This is in part because those religious movements which have become most successful - such as (in their various forms), Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism - are so old that few reliable records exist documenting their origins, and we are forced to rely either on their own substantially mythologized retellings of history, or else upon the occasionally propagandistic reports of their contemporaries and competitors. The question of religious origins and behaviour becomes even more confused when we attempt to study the emergence of new religious movements and to extrapolate from this to learn about the origins of ancient, successful faiths, for several reasons. First, the act of observing and studying a group in the process of emerging can often influence the members in various ways, just as can any interaction with outside individuals with worldviews opposed or simply incompatible with the cult's. Second, the social climate and patterns of social interaction now have changed from those present when the major world religions were founded: any religion being the product of its society (or in the extreme Durkheimian view, the worship of it), such changes change the content of a religion, and therefore, to some extent, its form (since form and content are rarely so clearly delineated as we might like to believe). Third, the very concept of religion is a social construct: rather than being an innate human category, it is developed and invented as much as any other concept used to describe human behaviour. This means that the patterns followed by any group which self-describes as a religion will tend to be (semi-consciously) follow those set by the templates determined by the primary examples of the category, which in part determine the socially constructed form of "religion" as such: they will either emulate or specifically reject the very patterns related in the mythologized or propagandized pseudo-histories of old, established religions whose authenticity we originally questioned. The result of this is that any attempt to study religious origins which does not take into account deliberate falsification, the flexibility of socially constructed categories, and the self-referential awareness of the effect of observation upon the system being observed will produce a theory which is, at best, on shaky ground.
This essay, then, is an attempt to further muddy the waters by discussing MOOism, a religion for whom the very concepts of deliberate falsification, flexibility of conceptual categories, and self-reference are in fact the very content and model of divinity. However, since I as writer and observer of the cult (or religion, or, to use the MOOist amalgam of these terms, "collision") am also one of the very first individuals to become involved in the entity, and certainly the most active, I am in a unique position to both report on the total history of the phenomenon's development and to take into account these ideas in the analysis. So although this essay is, in itself, further disinformation, it is a part of the process of the evolution of the religion itself, and in fact an attempt to partially reconstruct the social category of "religion", at least for the more enthusiastic reader.
MOOism's early history would lead any normally socialized member of modern society to reject its classification under the social category of "religion". It might more naturally be described as some kind of joke: a running gag, a semi-surrealist jest, or some kind of adolescent or sophomoric prank or parody of religion. To be sure, it certainly meets many of the requirements we generally have for inclusion in these social categories. No process, however, least of all a social process, is either static, or, in the long run, stable. With the passing of time, the character of MOOism has changed, and I suggest that this is true of most other religions as well. What begins as, for example, an individual's private spiritual, moral, or metaphysical theory may develop into a discussion with friends, thence into a group oriented to spiritual speculation, which may acquire a charismatic leader whose ideas dominate, until the process acquires cult-like characteristics, leading to proselytization of the group's worldview, the growth of the group, and eventually the transformation of what was initially a private phenomenon of speculative character into what might typically be included in the constructed category of world religion.
What, then, was MOOism when it first began? What is it now? How did it change from the one to the other? The answers to these questions can be answered and documented, but it is worth remembering as one reads that any history, including the memories of an individual person, is a narratization based on a variety of influences. Some of these, certainly, are the facts of the case. Others include the "mythologization" or "narratization" process which the teller uses to provide the bare events with meaning and context, and (in a related process) the way in which memory is well-known to be influenced by our conceptual categorization of the world both at the time of committing an event to memory and at the time or recall. It is this last process, in fact, which may be largely responsible for the way in which, after undergoing radical changes in belief structure, memories which contrast sharply with the new worldview seem to conveniently disappear: the context in which they were stored is not available, and the psychobiological process of recollection becomes more difficult, since the memory was stored using certain assumptions about the nature of the world, which could be used as shortcuts or abbreviations to avoid storing an eidetic recording of all life experience. Those assumptions absent, the memory becomes unintelligible, and cannot be recalled clearly. This process explains the narratization and mythologization of the past as the result of attempts to retain a sense of identity with our past selves by continually recontextualizing and re-storing the memories of past events to accord with our new belief systems - simply so that they can be retrieved later - with the net effect of producing a myth, which tells as much about the subsequent history of the individual as it does about the event being remembered. This phenomenon is strongly visible in people who have entered or become involved in a religion, whether new or pre-existing, and who then re-narratize their past life as an instructive fable whose moral is precisely those tenets of their new belief-structure which most differ from those they previously held. This is particularly true of the story I am about to tell.
Let us begin at the beginning: where and how did MOOism form?
When MOOism began, its constituents had never met face to face. Most of them had no strong religious inclinations. They were between the ages of 15 (myself) and 21, from a variety of backgrounds and life-histories. Their only point of shared experience was the Ottawa BBS scene - a loose network of several hundred messaging and file-sharing systems run by amateur computer users over local phone lines. Of the several hundred Ottawa boards, the founders of MOOism most commonly frequented about ten - the Alternative Boards, those run by and for people less interested in computers and the conventional social discussion typical of many other boards than in the community of users itself. It was a community of several hundred members, of which maybe fifty or a hundred were the most active. Within the most active, there were several mutually interpenetrating cliques of shared interest and mindset. The fifteen or twenty most active users on the Psycho-Shoppe BBS - who formed the initial converts to MOOism - were mostly those who appreciated the community and the textual environment the message areas (and to a lesser extent, the file areas) on Psycho-Shoppe provided.Leaving for the moment the complex question of its message areas, let's look first at the file areas of the Psycho-ShoppeLike many alternative boards, the Psycho-Shoppe had the usual assortment of "anarchy files" - texts with information on building bombs, phreaking phone lines, hacking into computers, producing and using psychedelic drugs, and a variety of other illegal activities. This is hardly uncommon in a certain type of board, and enjoys some popularity - mostly among frustrated, alienated kids and adolescents, for all the reasons one might expect. But although this was hardly an incidental feature of the Psycho-Shoppe (indeed, until MOOism it was a major feature), it was not a particularly distinctive one. What made the Psycho-Shoppe different was the flavour of its community: the most prominent and active users of the board (as distinguished from the lurkers, and particularly from the "Tots"), although they found these things amusing and interesting, generally considered them to be a kind of immature rebelliousness which, while occasionally inspiring, was not inspired. The other file areas - which contained users' stories, programs, and other such electronic mescellany - had both more variety, more volume, and more traffic.
Considering the message areas of the Psycho-Shoppe, a taste of the community begins to emerge: aside from the general public and private chatter areas, the Psycho-Shoppe carried FidoNet echos (message areas shared around the city, country, or occasionally even around the world) on surrealism, drugs, conspiracy theory, pagan religion, and - significantly - some bizarrist literary Echoes. The TEEVEE echo (the Flog Channel) was devoted entirely to messages which consisted of the most bizarre, taboo-transgressing, grotesque, surreal, complex, involuted, or otherwise "twisted" scripts designed to mimic the programming on a television station run by the local Ottawa BBS figure Flog Sonata. Over its frequently banal, often bizarre, and occasionally repugnant 800 message history, the Flog Channel probably did more than any other single echo on the Psycho-Shoppe (despite the fact that only about a quarter of the posts originated from major Psycho-Shoppe users) to stretch the boundaries of semantic reality for those who later became the first MOOists. Discussions and instances in local areas and in echo areas of neopaganism, conspiracy theory, science-fictional pseudoscience, surrealist humour, Fortean research into weirdness, psychedelic drugs, and a great variety of other highly liminal, marginal, or taboo subjects (including, of course, a smattering of sex and violence which, though liberal by conventional standards, was used on the Psycho-Shoppe less gratuitously and in a way more calculated to offend and to break taboos than to titilate).
Consider the semantic environment: it was one in which, through overuse, juxtaposition, satire and direct questioning, virtually all of the socially constructed concepts which form the prominent foundations of values in conventional society had been deconstructed, stretched or outright removed. Moral and ethical questions seemed not only unanswerable, but meaningless. The idea of literally existent reality seemed laughable. Laws and restrictions imposed by social structure were scoffed and satired, but certainly not respected. Radical ontological anarchy as postulated in Discordianism had infiltrated, but below consciousness - the closest thing to Discordianism which had penetrated was neopaganism, a religion which several regulars practiced, but few regarded as having any absolute claim to unique Legitimacy.
A historian of religion, in retrospect, might see some similarities between this mental climate and the clandestinely held attitudes of some ecstatic religious groups, such as dervishes, gnostics, certain left-hand-path Tantrists, some small number of less-than-usually quietists Taoists, shamanic practitioners, and so forth. The differences, however, may be more significant than the similarities. A climate in which social status is gained by extending the prevailing nihilism and decadence one step further, by challenging yet another fundamental assumption or taboo, is a climate in which one might reasonably expect the participants in the social process to come to feel a lack of structural organization. We could hardly retreat to any conventional or previously existing concepts without losing face in front of a group of people whom, though most of us had never met, except perhaps briefly and in passing at the various Fests which the Alternative Boards collectively held every few months, and most of whom we knew only by the pseudonyms ("pseudos") they used on the boards, we nevertheless valued highly as friends, and thus as critics of our behaviour. That such structure was provided by a shared joke which was a parody on religion is hardly surprising, then. What may be surprising, without further thought, is the combination of the offhand and seemingly random way in which that shared joke began and the subsequent investment of effort and energy which went into it, eventually moving it beyond the category of a joke - or perhaps stretching the boundaries of that social construct.
MOOism began innocently enough when a user whose pseudo was Yari, a total unknown - appeared in Area 8 (the Land of Flytop J) and said, simply, "MOOOOOO!". Unsure what to make of this, several others replied by repeating the MOO. One week later, on its second call to the board, Yari noted this, and left a third message, saying "Why not say MOOOOO? It feels good. Try it.". Several more regulars MOOed, for no better reason, perhaps, than that it was so easy to do so. Others, perhaps being critical for its own sake, perhaps as a half-parodic criticism of blind conformity, accused them of being unimaginative. One more week went by, in which this exchange evolved into a playful mock-argument between, on the one hand the MOOers and on the other hand the anti-MOOers, two camps whose members kept switching sides. At the end of the second week, Yari reappeared for the third and last time, leaving a short, cryptic message since labelled the "Gospel According To Yari". That message, in its entirety, read:
Once upon a time, a long time ago, the world was but a vast tundra where penguins flourished. But then the god of MOO used the sacred MOO powers. The world exploded into tiny little bits. One of these bits was round, so they named it Earth. People crawled out of the sea to see what had happened. Then they grew legs and learned to talk. But before this the god of MOO made cows. They were cool. Cows made the noise MOO that is a secret worship to the god of MOO. People made their own language, but today in a last attempt to get more MOO worshippers, the god of MOO enlightened a select few people. These cool people would enlighten others. These people are the Apostles of the Church of MOO.
With the posting of the Gospel According to Yari, shape was given to a process which had been gradually emerging from the stew of the Psycho-Shoppe message areas. A name had been given to the worldview which those present already spent many hours each week - sometimes many hours in a day - involved in. The Church Of MOO now existed as a socially constructed entity, subject to emotional involvement both for and against. In that moment, we may say that MOOism came into existence as a structure which could be conceptually distinguished from the rest of the mental world, and which, by the very way in which we chose to identify it with what we were already doing, we could accept as our own. MOOism had been born.