The Tree of Life Foundation

Links for 2011-04-04 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 PDT

Noam Chomsky
just Noam Chomsky

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/entheoradio.rss

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:28:55 PDT

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/entheoradio.rss

Quoted with deep admiration and respect, click on his name, linked to the greater body of his work:

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 05:02:23 PDT

Search Amazon.com for coyote medicine
offered by Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D.

"...Native American medicine has been practiced on the North American continent for at least 10,000 years. When Europeans arrived in North America, Native people of this continent were a healthy lot. Plagues and epidemics from Europe soon changed that, but do not mitigate against the effectiveness of Native American methods for attaining long-term survival and avoiding chronic disease. Conventional medicine has lost this wisdom for transforming illness into health through mind-body-spirit integration - a fundamental concept among Native North Americans and most of the remainder of the indigenous world. Conventional psychotherapies have also fallen short of their ability to transform people's lives. They have parceled out therapeutic time in hourly increments in frequencies of once or twice weekly. Weekly one-hour appointments or even yoga classes before work allow us to address only our most critical and immediate concerns. The time needed for inner exploration, for personal transformation, and for the exploration of how personal issues, nutrition, family problems or spiritual matters affect our health is sorely lacking.

Conventional therapies have neglected opportunities to facilitate a profound change within a short period of time. They have also ignored the power of ceremony and ritual in treatment. Ceremonies couple the patient's intention to heal with the power of belief and faith in the ceremonial process. They lead to peak experiences that kindle insight into our condition and increase our belief in our own abilities and capabilities. Since medical school graduation, I have been working to integrate the thoughts and techniques of traditional Native American healing elders with more common behavioral medicine techniques and psychotherapies. I have wanted to find the most effective and most aesthetic way for me to midwife people's personal transformations and healings. To improve my approach, I interviewed a number of Native American healers to learn how they conceptualized their work and how they thought it could be translated into modern American culture.

The traditional healers told me that time is the first important ingredient in the healing journey, comparing starting this journey to beginning to push a rock up a hill. It takes a lot more effort to get the rock moving at first than to keep it moving. They wondered how seeing someone once or twice weekly could provide enough "oomph" to start the healing process. "How can you push a rock up a hill if you keep stopping and letting it roll back down?" they asked.

In organic and biochemistry, an energy of activation is required to initiate a reaction. Once initiated that reaction may proceed irreversibly to completion without much further energetic input. Without sufficient energy of activation, the reaction never occurs. A cake without sufficient energy of heat remains mush. A minimal level of heat is needed to actually cook the cake (transforming the internal arrangements of its molecules). The healers loved these comparisons to chemistry, and reflected upon how nature is the same at every level. In systems science, we say that each layer is isomorphic to the other.

The healers related that they typically stayed with the sick person until the job was done. They rarely helped more than one person at a time, and people often traveled great distances to see them. These great distances necessitated an intensive approach, since the journey from home to the healer could not be made many times.

The healers would concentrate their work over a number of consecutive days with multiple hours spent each day on healing. Ceremonies often took place every night. Lakota healers would do sweat lodge ceremonies at night, sometimes followed by yuwipi ceremonies. Dineteh healers would perform nightly chants lasting as long as ten days as in the Blessing Way or the Coyote Way. When sufficient progress had been made, the person would be sent home with instructions to return at a later date for further treatment. Because their healing was more directive, their patients would leave with specific instructions for tasks to complete during the interval apart.

The traditional healers emphasized how they helped people become aware of their inner world - their anger, sorrow, bitterness, rage, and hatred, so that it could move again. They pointed out how modern American culture teaches people to ignore their inner world and their feelings. Children are taught in school to ignore their body needs for elimination until it is convenient for the teacher. They are taught to ignore their wish to play until scheduled recess. Civilization, as it is now constructed, requires a level of ignoring emotions for smooth functioning that the traditionals found sad.

Traditional healers pointed out how strange it is for a secretary to be unable to take time off if overcome by sadness from a tragic case history she was typing. In this example, they thought it was odd that the bosses could imagine that a human being could type a document without entering into the story that the document conveys. They reflected on how emotions got in the way of efficiency in the modern world. They related how their society used to be less hurried. Hurry has become the watchword of modern society, since the faster we go, the more money we make.

In the days before modern pharmaceuticals, rest was a key ingredient of any therapy. Healing may best begin by putting the client to bed. This disturbs daily routines and breaks old habits. It allows the body's repair mechanisms to take over from the defense mechanisms; the parasympathetic nervous system to calm down the sympathetic nervous system.

Traditionals mentioned the importance of a number of ceremonial procedures, including purification ceremonies, which are also important for the inner life. They see becoming well as a journey - a journey that takes time."

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 04:06:10 PDT

From the website, "The Republic of the Lakotah"

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:12:22 PDT

The Sun Dance: Sacrifice, Integration, Reciprocity, and Regeneration

October 30, 2009 by Thunder Horse

Generally, each sun dance has a sponsor, usually the main dancer, who bears the expenses of the ceremony. The event ordinarily involves about a week or more of activity consisting of an early private period, during which preparations are made and instruction and prayer take place, followed by the public phase of dancing. Construction of the sun dance lodge is accompanied by complex rituals in which a special tree is cut for use as a center pole, with the dance enclosure erected around it. The entrance faces east, and in some tribes sunrise ceremonies mark each days dawn during the dance. Inside, an altar is constructed, usually featuring a decorated buffalo skull. Dancers fast and abstain from drinking during the three or four days of dancing. While special songs are chanted by drummers near the lodge entrance, each participant moves rhythmically back and forth from the periphery of the lodge to the center pole. Dancers continuously blow on eagle- bone whistles, fixing their eyes on the crotch in the center pole that is typically known as the Thunderbird’s Nest or eagles nest. Periods of rest alternate with intervals of dancing. At the end of the sun dance, purification rites are held and the participants may drink water and break their fast. The lodge is then abandoned, its components remaining briefly as a reminder of the ceremony before returning to the elements.

Voluntary torture was part of the climax of the sun dance in certain tribes such as the Lakota and Cheyenne. In those cases, the dancers were pierced through the breast or shoulder muscles by skewers which were tied to the center pole, and they danced by pulling back until their flesh tore away. Sometimes the thongs inserted in the sufferer’s bodies were attached to a varying number of buffalo skulls rather than to the center pole.

A very important consideration in understanding the Native American’s perception is that the buffalo is a highly social animal, naturally sociable. That is a trait with which the Plains people could identify, finding similarities to the broad allegiances and communal relationships characteristic of their own social organization. Unlike more solitary species, the buffalo, as a herd animal, is often referred to by the natives as a “tribe” or “nation.” The movements and whereabouts of that “buffalo nation” influenced the Lakota tribal structure and location at a given season. Generally, the Lakota’s interactions with buffaloes do not involve personal contact with individual animals, but rather the whole species or population. Calling the animal “Buffalo” always implies reference to the group or at least a member who represents that group. One specific buffalo is rarely, if ever, singled out or named as is often the case in many societies with any animal who is to be eaten. This practice helps in combating the revulsion that may accompany the consumption of flesh from a familiar individual being. The communal ritual reconciliation is made with the species as a whole: human society appeases the buffalo nation.

Helping to relieve the guilt resulting from killing and eating conscious creatures, too, is the persistent belief that animals willingly offer themselves to hunters. This idea is reflected in the observation that “the Lakota spoke of their hunt not as ‘driving’ the buffalo but as ‘leading them’; not ‘chasing,’ but ‘calling’” them. Certain men possessed “the power of charming the buffalo into a corral or over a cliff.” They accomplished this feat by disguising themselves in buffalo robes and imitating the animals’ movements and sounds. The conviction that the buffalo voluntarily give themselves to be killed for the benefit of human beings is closely associated with Plains people’s sense of identification with the animal and with the force of reciprocal obligations toward it. As expressed by members of one tribe, “Since buffalo allowed themselves to be used in order that the Lakota people could live, it seemed fitting . . . to offer a part of themselves to the sun and other spiritual persons.”

Therefore the sacrifice of the dancers through fasting, thirst, and self-inflicted pain reflects the desire to return something of themselves to nature, with special reference to the life- sustaining buffalo, in exchange for past and future benefits. Elements of the Lakota sun dance are almost certainly derived, features the self-torture of participants by means of buffalo skulls.

Additionally, men disguised as other animals including grizzly bears, eagles, antelopes, swans, rattlesnakes, beavers, vultures, and wolves, imitated the sounds and behaviors of their respective species. The players enacted interrelationships involving struggle between various forms of life. Animals growled and chased each other and meat-feeding scenarios took place. This performance represents the expression of a theme dealing with predator-prey relationships. Evidently, the ambiguities of carnivorous behavior were being explored through ritual. To a greater or lesser degree depending upon the tribe, the sun dance includes the elements of sacrifice and pain on the part of participants. The ultimate gift is the offering of one’s own body. In a deep sense, this phenomenon of undergoing physical agony relates the supplicants to the rest of nature; it is atonement in the true meaning of “at oneness,” with reference to the unity of the cosmos. For all living creatures are subject to suffering and share a common capacity for pain. According to Oglala tradition, “This truth of the oneness of all things we understand a little better by participating in this rite, and by offering ourselves as a sacrifice” Death, represented by undergoing torture, signifies that the profane man has been killed and the participant has come to life regenerated in body and soul. The person must “die” through the ordeal of “being cut to pieces” in order to bring about his symbolic resurrection. The meaning of the cutting and bleeding of the Lakota dancer who is pierced, the pain that results is “the natural complement of his figurative death.” The flesh that is tom away when the thong breaks loose “represents ignorance,” which “should always be behind us as we face the light of truth which is before us.” Therefore the sun dancer is reborn, mentally and spiritually as well as physically, along with the renewal of the buffalo and the entire universe.

The great sun dance ritual establishes the tenet that there is no final death, for all living things can be renewed. Human beings, however, like all their fellow creatures, must cooperate in order to bring about universal regeneration. By feeding grass to the buffalo skull, the cycle of life is symbolically perpetuated. To appease the buffalo who gives so much to people, appreciation and good intentions must be shown, and deferential behavior is mandated. By significant acts like refraining from eating buffalo flesh after the animal has provided a vision, leaving some of the meat to make peace with the animal’s spirit after a buffalo is slain, and planting a piece of sacred buffalo tongue back into the ground during the ceremonial feast, honor is given to the spiritual presence of the buffalo. Because the animal’s spirit still remains when the buffalo is killed, death is not final; eternal return is assured for both buffalo and humankind through reciprocal actions that maintain the harmony of the natural world. So at the close of the Oglala sun dance, Wakan-Tanka is addressed: “You have taught us our relationship with all … beings, and for this we give thanks… May we be continually aware of this relationship which exists between the four-leggeds, the two-leggeds, and the wingeds. May we all rejoice and live in peace!”

Links for 2010-06-01 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Internet Archive Search: fractal

"Upon suffering beyond suffering:

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 07:45:25 PDT

the Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world. A world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations. A world longing for light again. I see a time of Seven Generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole Earth will become one circle again. In that day, there will be those among the Lakota who will carry knowledge and understanding of unity among all living things and the young white ones will come to those of my people and ask for this wisdom. I salute the light within your eyes where the whole Universe dwells. For when you are at that center within you and I am that place within me, we shall be one."
- Chief Crazy Horse, Oglala Sioux (This statement was taken from Crazy Horse as he sat smoking the Sacred Pipe with Sitting Bull for the last time, four days before he was assassinated.)

David Chalmers on Consciousness

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 06:05:32 PDT

How Shinzen Became Involved in Native American Spirituality

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 04:12:35 PDT

The Native American Sweat Lodge Ceremony - Part 1 of 2 ~ Shinzen Young

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 04:09:37 PDT

The Native American Sweat Lodge - Part 2 of 2 ~ Shinzen Young

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 04:06:43 PDT

Babongo of Gabon - The Iboga Ritual - Part 7

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 03:58:35 PDT

Babongo of Gabon - The Iboga Ritual - Part 6

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 03:57:48 PDT

Babongo of Gabon - The Iboga Ritual - Part 5

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 03:56:55 PDT

Babongo of Gabon - The Iboga Ritual - Part 4

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 03:55:36 PDT

Babongo of Gabon - The Iboga Ritual - Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 03:54:14 PDT

Babongo of Gabon - The Iboga Ritual - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 03:51:22 PDT

Babongo of Gabon - The Iboga Ritual - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 20 May 2010 03:48:45 PDT

WE MAKE THE ROAD BY WALKING : An interview with mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:47:57 PDT

Q: What would the mythic imagination have to tell us about our current ecological crisis?

An image I have been having recently is that underneath the soil and arrowheads, the countries of the world are really huge,dreaming animals. Maybe the hysteria around climate change-although very real-is too mental, too heady, and we need to take our attention downwards, back to the murmurs these animals may be sending us. It's like we collectively need to put our ear to the earth and get quiet. Quietness like that will always invoke images, because it is always a stimulant to imagination. The power of the image carries a different kind of impact to just a written idea. The eco-conference at Copenhagen recently would have benefited from storytellers from each country attending and sharing culturally specific stories, so the animals underneath the countries had achance for the image-language to speak for them. I think these animals have quite different characters and desires.

    I am making a very rash leap here-that certain ancient stories somehow offered a voice for non-human energies that also exist on (or are) the planet. I am appalled at the idea that myth is merely the neurosis of mankind trying to work out its place in the universe. That completely neglects the porosity of mythic intelligence-that no dialogue of consciousness exists past the ends of our fingertips. That is the world of Alexander Pope-and what has got us into this predicament in the first place.

      So a great quietening would be useful. At this moment it is snowing outside. Snow is a great opportunity to slow footfall, to walk deliberately -it's a muffled, pregnant universe. Liminal in its way, and open to unusual associations. So winter could be a step towards catching the images coming up through earth. Walk alone more, pay attention to dusk, make work at the very edge of your understanding. Remember you are loved. Allow yourself to feel complicated and slightly magical. Many of our artists are no longer attuned to that process, so its down to all of us, from any walk of life, to be receptive to the edge of imagination that rubs against open meadows and the flank of the leopard.

     I feel that we are expecting a straight line of thought to accommodate the very multi-dimensional process that climate change offers: that we are actually animals with vast souls, and to be divorced from that fact creates such acute dislocation we are capable of creating lunatic damage to our very home. This is more than a need for a manipulation of science to 'save us', this also involves a difficult opening in our own psyche. We need to take account, we need to grieve, and we need to muster courage. It's a time to wake up-no one else can quite offer what you have.

     We also need to reclaim time. It seems to have a harsh, worried, pulse to many people. It is vital to reach back through it to a community of ancestors. I don't mean some vague concept but in the work of vitalising folks down the centuries. It is a travesty for us to claim personal impoverishment when we are connected to the legacy of Emily Dickinson, Taliesin, Vaughn Williams, Mirabai, Black Elk, Wolfram Von Eschenbach, John Coltrane or Georgia O'Keefe. Find a specific soul- teacher from history and follow their lead. Our perception of personal community should move back into history rather than trying to squeeze it into the literal constantly. This will also broaden and deepen time around us, and in the same moment makes us more genuinely present. Their work will actually give us a sense of spaciousness.

So, in all of this anxiety is actually huge opportunity.

Q: So what would this opportunity look like?

     I think this is an opportunity to develop some manners. Manners to the earth, stars, and animal powers. We could describe any real movement back to an accord with the earth as 'dark chivalry'. Its darkness is twofold:

It carries the sobriety of living through hard times and crafting deeper, more authentic beauty. By using the word 'dark' it acknowledges the intelligence of night, soil, depth, hidden places. It is a mode of being that one grows towards, that has deep roots in the ground of ones experience. Where do you hold your own night intelligence?

In many indigenous cultures darkness is seen as another kind of light- a light that requires a new way of seeing. The Mongolians actually denote beauty with the word dark.

So to see a situation with new eyes, to carry the whiskery genius of our own lives elegantly, and to create new expressions of dynamic gratitude to existence engenders a chivalrous attitude-that you serve something higher than just the grubbiness of personal ambition. The Troubadours of the 12th century had a feeling for this, as do some Trickster stories from tribal cultures. The Troubadours bring amor, rather than just eros or agape-both slightly impersonal in their way. They bring a kind of heart intoxication. This whole thing is about a big old love affair.

The whole atmosphere of the Troubadours was clear that at the back of your head lives an ecstatic man or woman. To wake them up requires a courtship-both to them and out into the world. A courtship with walled gardens, rare flowers, and love of both eloquence and solitude. This is part of that chivalry-and also opening up to the possibility that to have influence in this world you can also be connected to goodness.

Dark Chivalry is something that would originate from a Culture of Wildness. As soon as you separate the word 'culture' from the image of wildness you begin the process of dislocation, that you are no longer 'making-soul' with the land itself. Here's a quote:

    "Culture…had meant, primarily, 'the tending of natural growth', and then, by analogy,a process of human training. But this latter use, which had usually been a culture of something, was changed, in the nineteenth century, to culture as such, a thing in itself." ----Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, (The Hogarth Press, 1958) p.xvi

     We could think about what constitutes culture, and the return to the use of a culture 'of'…its current, rather monolithic status, in the face of ecological issues, appears shaky to say the least. This assumption of culture or wildness (wildness is not chaos), has created a legacy we see daily writ large all around us. We could say that we have seen the Culture of Wildness in some very ancient tribal initiations. It would be interesting to look at the root meanings of the words.
      An association of the etymology of the word 'culture' is colere, which means 'to till'. To till is to dig, to sweat, to make contact with the texture of soil, root, and worm; it is this move downwards again, towards the subterranean. Its seeks relationship to the information of earth- through a certain labour and discipline- that ultimately flourishes into clear wine for the wider community.

The etymology of the word 'wild' includes associations of 'astray, bewildered, confused' which indicates its very genius lies next to vulnerability and the bereft. It is a culture of inclusiveness, and suddenly the Gods are everywhere; implicit in conversation, symptoms of illness, fetish, relationship-we start to possess a vision-language of the deity that stands behind the impulse. In this way we start to understand the reasons why we do crazy things-personally and societally.

I would say that earth is relaying a lot of information right now, and not all of it is accessible with statistics and logic. I believe it is a call to the prophetic within us-a big word. The pastoral-creative work designed to appeal and comfort mass-civilisation, completely lacks the receptivity for the task.

However, without a process similar to the one I am describing it would be very difficult to engender the psychic readiness required. To be clear: to function in their deepest vocation, the storyteller-or artist-or cunning man or woman should stand in the ground of prophetic image, a scarecrow of words, pushed by the invisible winds.

I am working on a big essay to deepen all these associations, and the Westcountry School of Myth and Story is a place where we try to embody this kind of work.

So if countries are dreaming animals we need at least fifteen storytellers, artists and musicians at any serious ecological conference, and fifteen women and men fasting in the surrounding wildlife-opening to the wild land dreaming. If you combine this with the radical intelligence of many climate-groups you begin to get a relationship between the tacit and the explicit, the rational and the intuitive. This level of attention to listening and beauty is a dark chivalry, something birthed from a culture of wildness. That in itself creates an expression of art that is prophetic and open to the Mysteries to speak through. Simple!

Antonio Machado says, "We make the road by walking" and he's right.

It's time to walk.

Martin Shaw is the author of ‘A Branch From The Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness’. Shaw is Director of the Westcountry School of Myth and Story in Devon in the United Kingdom.

SAVING THE INDIGENOUS SOUL: AN INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN PRECHTEL by Derrick Jensen

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:11:11 PDT

Martin Prechtel:

For the last couple of years Martín Prechtel, author of “Secrets of the Talking Jaguar” and “Long Life, Honey in the Heart,” has been conducting very successful creative writing workshops where the prose writer, non-writer, poet, and lovers of spiritual literacy can all come together, learn from each other and Martín.

To be released this fall [this article was published in 2001], Martín Prechtel's eagerly awaited new book, "The Daughter You Get," a traditional Mayan story with revolutionary insights, is already receiving advance praise and critical acclaim."

Published in "The Sun", April 2001

Martín Prechtel was raised in New Mexico on a Pueblo Indian reservation where people still lived in the old, pre-European ways. His mother was a Canadian Indian who taught at the Pueblo school, and his father was a white paleontologist. Martín loved the culture there, and the land. "I spent the whole of my very early life," he says, "in a state of weepy terror about the possibility of the total annihilation of this beautiful world at the hands of a few white men who couldn’t understand the beauty we had in this way of life." He began to work against this dangerous, beauty-killing power. "The natives called it ‘white man ways,’ " he says, "but it was more than that. Its infectious power had eaten the whites, too, and made them its obvious promoter. This horrible syndrome had no use for the truly natural, the wild nature of all peoples."

In 1970, after his first marriage ended and his mother died, Prechtel went to Mexico to clear his head. Seemingly by accident, he ended up going into Guatemala. He traveled around that country for more than a year before he came to a village called Santiago Atitlán. The village was inhabited by the Tzutujil, one of many indigenous Mayan subcultures, each of which has its own distinct traditions, patterns of clothing, and language.

In Santiago Atitlán, a strange man came up to Prechtel and said, "What took you so long? For two years I’ve been calling you. Let’s get to work!" So began his apprenticeship to Nicolas Chiviliu, one of the greatest of the Tzutujil Mayan shamans.

The apprenticeship lasted several years. As a shaman, Prechtel would learn how to correct imbalances in people’s relationships with the ancestors and the spirits. He also had to learn the Tzutujil language. (Women taught him at first, and because women and men talk differently, he was a great source of amusement when he began to speak in public.)

Though not a native, Prechtel became a full member of the village. He married a local woman and had three sons, one of whom died. When Chiviliu died, Prechtel took his place, becoming shaman to nearly thirty thousand people. He also rose to the public office of Nabey Mam, or first chief. One of his duties as chief was to lead the young village men through their long initiations into adulthood.

Prechtel wanted to stay in Santiago Atitlán forever, but during the time that he lived there, Guatemala was in the throes of a brutal civil war. The ruling government — with its U.S.–backed death squads — had outlawed the thousand-year-old Mayan rites. Ultimately, Prechtel was forced to flee for his life. "I was going to stay," he says, "but before my teacher died, he asked me to leave so that I wouldn’t get killed. He wanted me to carry on the knowledge that he had passed to me."

Prechtel brought his family to the U.S., where they "just kind of starved for a while until Robert Bly and men like him found me." (Bly, a poet active in the men’s movement, has high praise for Prechtel, whom he describes as "a short kind of pony that gallops through the fields of human possibility with flowers dropping out of his mouth.") Though Prechtel’s wife decided to return to her native Guatemala, he remained in the U.S. with their children and currently lives not fifty miles from where he grew up.

Prechtel is the author of "Secrets of the Talking Jaguar" (Tarcher), in which he writes — musically, clearly, and respectfully — about the indigenous traditions in Santiago Atitlán. He gives glimpses of his training, yet never reveals details that would allow readers to steal the Mayans’ spiritual traditions the way others have stolen their land. In his most recent book, "Long Life, Honey in the Heart" (Tarcher), Prechtel describes the structure of the village, the Tzutujil priesthood, and everyday village life before the arrival of the death squads. In addition to his writing, Prechtel paints scenes from the daily activities and mythology of the Mayan people and is a musician who has recorded several cds.

Prechtel appears around the world at conferences on initiation for young men. ("I’m working with women on that, too," he says, "but it’s a little bit slower — mostly because I’m not a woman.") He also leads workshops that help people reconnect with their own sense of place and the sacredness of ordinary life. "Spirituality is an extremely practical thing," he says. "It’s not just something you choose to do on the weekends. . . . It’s an everyday thing, as essential as eating or holding hands or keeping warm in the winter."

When I went to interview Prechtel at his home in New Mexico, I was embarrassed to find that my tape recorder wasn’t working. Fortunately, his present wife, Hanna, had a recorder I could use. It worked for about forty minutes, then started to run backward. Martín apologized, saying this sort of thing happened all the time. "I just seem to have this effect on machines," he said. "My dentist won’t let me come in his front door anymore, because I freeze up all his computers."

I made a note never to travel with him.

Hanna was able to coax the recorder to work again, and we finished the interview. My own tape recorder began working again the next morning, when I was about seventy miles away.

Jensen: What is a shaman?

Prechtel: Shamans are sometimes considered healers or doctors, but really they are people who deal with the tears and holes we create in the net of life, the damage that we all cause in our search for survival. In a sense, all of us — even the most un- technological, spiritual, and benign peoples —are constantly wrecking the world. The question is: how do we respond to that destruction? If we respond as we do in modern culture, by ignoring the spiritual debt that we create just by living, then that debt will come back to bite us, hard. But there are other ways to respond. One is to try to repay that debt by giving gifts of beauty and praise to the sacred, to the invisible world that gives us life. Shamans deal with the problems that arise when we forget the relationship that exists between us and the other world that feeds us, or when, for whatever reason, we don’t feed the other world in return.

All of this may sound strange to modern, industrialized people, but for the majority of human history, shamans have simply been a part of ordinary life. They exist all over the world. It seems strange to Westerners now because they have systematically devalued the other world and no longer deal with it as part of their everyday lives.

Jensen: How are shamans from Siberia, for example, different from shamans in Guatemala?

Prechtel: There are as many different ways to be a shaman as there are different languages, but there’s a commonality, as well, because we’re all standing on one earth, and there’s water in the ocean wherever we go, and there’s ground underneath us wherever we go. So we all have, on some level, a commonality of experience. We are all still human beings. Some of us have buried our humanity deep inside, or medicated or anesthetized it, but every person alive today, tribal or modern, primal or domesticated, has a soul that is original, natural, and, above all, indigenous in one way or another. The indigenous soul of the modern person, though, either has been banished to the far reaches of the dream world or is under direct attack by the modern mind. The more you consciously remember your indigenous soul, the more you physically remember it.

Shamans are all trying to put right the effects of normal human stupidity and repair relationships with the invisible sources of life. In many instances, the ways in which they go about this are also similar. For example, the Siberians have a trance method of entering the other world that is similar to one used in Africa.

Jensen: You’ve mentioned "the other world" a few times. Most modern people would not consciously acknowledge such a place. What is the other world?

Prechtel: If this world were a tree, then the other world would be the roots— the part of the plant we can’t see, but that puts the sap into the tree’s veins. The other world feeds this tangible world — the world that can feel pain, that can eat and drink, that can fail; the world that goes around in cycles; the world where we die. The other world is what makes this world work. And the way we help the other world continue is by feeding it with our beauty.

All human beings come from the other world, but we forget it a few months after we’re born. This amnesia occurs because we are dazzled by the beauty and physicality of this world. We spend the rest of our lives putting back together our memories of the other world, enough to serve the greater good and to teach the new amnesiacs — the children — how to remember. Often, this lesson is taught during the initiation into adulthood.

The Mayans say that the other world sings us into being. We are its song. We’re made of sound, and as the sound passes through the sieve between this world and the other world, it takes the shape of birds, grass, tables — all these things are made of sound. Human beings, with our own sounds, can feed the other world in return, to fatten those in the other world up, so they can continue to sing.

Jensen: Who are "they"?

Prechtel: All those beings who sing us alive. You could translate it as gods or as spirits. The Mayans simply call them "they."

Jensen: There’s an old Aztec saying I read years ago: "That we come to this earth to live is untrue. We come to sleep and to dream." I wonder if you can help me understand it.

Prechtel: When you dream, you remember the other world, just as you did when you were a newborn baby. When you’re awake, you’re part of the dream of the other world. In the "waking" state, I am supposed to dedicate a certain amount of time to feeding the world I’ve come from. Similarly, when I die and leave this world and go on to the next, I’m supposed to feed this present dream with what I do in that one.

Dreaming is not about healing the person who’s sleeping: it’s about the person feeding the whole, remembering the other world, so that it can continue. The New Age falls pretty flat with the Mayans, because, to them, self-discovery is good only if it helps you to feed the whole.

Jensen: Where does the Mayan concept of debt fit in?

Prechtel: As Christians are born with original sin, Mayans are born with original debt. In the Mayan worldview, we are all born owing a spiritual debt to the other world for having created us, for having sung us into existence. It must be fed; otherwise, it’s going to take its payment out of our lives.

Jensen: How does one repay this debt?

Prechtel: You have to give a gift to that which gives you life. It’s an actual payment in kind. That’s the spiritual economy of a village.

It’s like my old teacher used to say: "You sit singing on a little rock inthe middle of a pond, and your song makes a ripple that goes out to the shores where the spirits live. When it hits the shore, it sends an echo back toward you. That echo is the spiritual nutrition." When you send out a gift, you send it out in all directions at once. And then it comes back to you from all directions.

Jensen: It must end up being a complex pattern, because as you’re sending your song out, your neighbors are also sending theirs out, and you’ve got all these overlapping ripples.

Prechtel: It’s an entangled net so enormous the mind cannot possibly comprehend it. No one knows what’s connected to where.

Jensen: How does this relate to technology?

Prechtel: Technological inventions take from the earth but give nothing in return. Look at automobiles. They were, in a sense, dreamed up over a period of time, with different people adding on to each other’s dreams — or, if you prefer, adding on to each other’s studies and trials. But all along the way, very little, if anything, was given back to the hungry, invisible divinity that gave people the ability to invent those cars. Now, in a healthy culture, that’s where the shamans would come in, because with every invention comes a spiritual debt that must be paid, either ritually, or else taken out of us in warfare, grief, or depression.

A knife, for instance, is a very minimal, almost primitive tool to people in a modern industrial society. But for the Mayan people, the spiritual debt that must be paid for the creation of such a tool is great. To start with, the person who is going to make the knife has to build a fire hot enough to produce coals. To pay for that, he’s got to give a sacrificial gift to the fuel, to the fire.

Jensen: Like what?

Prechtel: Ideally, the gift should be something made by hand, which is the one thing humans have that spirits don’t.

Once the fire is hot enough, the knife maker must smelt the iron ore out of the rock. The part that’s left over, which gets thrown away in Western culture, is the most holy part in shamanic rituals. What’s left over represents the debt, the hollowness that’s been carved out of the universe by human ingenuity, and so must be refilled with human ingenuity. A ritual gift equal to the amount that was removed from the other world has to be put back to make up for the wound caused to the divine. Human ingenuity is a wonderful thing, but only so long as it’s used to feed the deities that give us the ability to perform such extravagant feats in the first place.

So, just to get the iron, the shaman has to pay for the ore, the fire, the wind, and so on — not in dollars and cents, but in ritual activity equal to what’s been given. Then that iron must be made into steel, and the steel has to be hammered into the shape of a knife, sharpened, and tempered, and a handle must be put on it. There is a deity to be fed for each part of the procedure. When the knife is finished, it is called the "tooth of earth." It will cut wood, meat, and plants. But if the necessary sacrifices have been ignored in the name of rationalism, literalism, and human superiority, it will cut humans instead.

All of those ritual gifts make the knife enormously "expensive," and make the process quite involved and time-consuming. The need for ritual makes some things too spiritually expensive to bother with. That’s why the Mayans didn’t invent space shuttles or shopping malls or backhoes. They live as they do not because it’s a romantic way to live — it’s not; it’s enormously hard — but because it works.

Western culture believes that all material is dead, and so there is no debt incurred when human ingenuity removes something from the other world. Consequently, we end up with shopping malls and space shuttles and other examples of "advanced" technology, while the spirits who give us the ability to make those things are starving, becoming bony and thin, which is one reason why anorexia is such a problem: the young are acting out this image. The universe is in a state of starvation and emotional grief because it has not been given what it needs in the form of ritual food and actual physical gifts. We think we’re getting away with something by stealing from the other side, but it all leads to violence. The Greek oracle at Delphi saw this a long time ago and said, "Woe to humans, the invention of steel."

Jensen: Why does this theft lead to violence?

Prechtel: Though capable of feeding all creation, the spirit is not an omnipotent force, as Christianity would have us believe, but a natural force of great subtlety. When its subtlety is trespassed on by the clumsiness of human greed and conceit, then both human and divine nature are violated and made into hungry, devouring things. We become food for this monster our spiritual amnesia has created. The monster is fed by wars, psychological depression, self-hate, and bad world-trade practices that export misery to other places.

We inflict violence upon each other as a way to replace what we steal from nature because we’ve forgotten this old deal that our ancestors signed so long ago. Instead, we psychologize and objectify that relationship as a personal experience or pathology, rather than a spiritual obligation. At that point, our approach to spirituality becomes rationalist armoring, a psychology of protection for the part of us that creates the greed monster, which causes us to kill the world and each other. As individuals, we become depressed, because the beings of the other world take it out of our emotions.
Jensen: How so?

Prechtel: When we no longer maintain a relationship with the spirits, the spirits have to eat our psyches. And when the spirits are done eating our psyches, they eat our bodies. And when they’re done with that, they move on to the people close to us.

When you have a culture that has for centuries, or longer, ignored these relationships, depression becomes a way of life. We try to fix the depression through technology, but that’s never going to work. Nor will it work to plunder other cultures, nor to kill the planet. All that is just an attempt not to be held accountable to the other world. If you’re to succeed as a human being, you’ve got to live meaningfully, passionately, and fully, so that even your death becomes a meaningful sacrifice to the spirits, feeding them. Everybody’s death was a meaningful sacrifice until people started to become "civilized" and began killing everybody else’s gods in the name of monotheism. As you grow older, your life becomes more and more meaningful as a sacrifice, because you give more and more gifts to the other world, and the spirits are better fed by your speech and prayers.

Jensen: How do you respond to someone who says that the notion of paying a debt to the spirit world for making a knife is just inefficient, which is why we’ve wiped out all those cultures. In the time your group spends making one knife, my group will make three hundred knives and cut all your throats.

Prechtel: If you take up that strategy, then you will have to live with the ghosts of those you’ve murdered — which means you’ve got to make more and more knives, and you will become more and more depressed, all the while calling yourself "advanced" to rationalize your predicament.

Jensen: What are these ghosts?

Prechtel: Before we talk any more about ghosts, we have to talk about ancestors, because the two are related.

Often, you’ll hear that you have to honor your ancestors, but I believe it’s much more complex than that. Our ancestors weren’t necessarily very smart. In many cases, they are the ones who left us this mess. Some of them weregreat, but others had huge prejudices. If these ancestors are given their due, then you don’t have to live out their prejudices in your own life. But if you don’t give the ancestors something, if you simply say, "I’m descended from these people, but they don’t affect me very much; I’m a unique individual," then you’re cursed to spend your life either fighting your ancestors, or else riding the wave they started. You’ll have to do that long before you can be yourself and pursue what you believe is worth pursuing.

The Mayan way of dealing with this is to give the ancestors a place to live. You actually build houses for them — called "sleeping houses" — and put your ancestors in there. The houses are small, because the ancestors don’t take up any space, but they do need a designated place, just like anything else. Then you feed your ancestors with words and eloquence. We all have old, forgotten languages that our languages are descended from, and many of these languages are a great deal more ornate. But even with our current language, we still have the capacity to create strange, mysterious, poetic gifts to feed the ancestors, so that we won’t become depressed by their ghosts devouring our everyday lives.

If we can get past the prejudices of the last ten thousand years’ worth of ancestors, then we can find our way back to our indigenous souls and culture, where we are always at home and welcome.

Jensen: My ancestry is Danish, French, and Scottish, but I live in northern California, so how can I find my way back?

Prechtel: The problem is not that your ancestors migrated to North America but that, when they died, their debts were not properly paid with beauty, grief, and language. Whenever someone dies, that person’s spirit has to go on to the next world. If that person has not gone through an initiation and remembered where she came from and what she must do to go on, then she won’t know where to go. Also, when a person dies, her spirit must return what has been taken out to feed her existence while she was on earth. All of the old burial rituals are about paying back the debt to the other world and helping the spirit to move on.

One of the ways those who remain behind can help repay this spiritual debt is simply by missing the dead. Let’s say your beloved grandmother dies. Some might say you shouldn’t weep, because she’s going to "a better place," and weeping is just pure selfishness. But people’s longing for each other and for the terrain of home is so enormous that, if you do not weep to express it, you’re poisoning the future with violence. If that longing is not expressed as a loud, beautiful wail, a song, or a piece of art that’s given as a gift to the spirits, then it will turn into violence against other beings — and, more importantly, against the earth itself, because you will have no under-standing of home. But if you are able to feed the other world with your grief, then you can live where your dead are buried, and they will become a part of the landscape in a way.

Many old cultures had funeral arrangements whereby the dead were annually fed by the living for as long as fifty years, with the living giving ritual payments back to the world and the earth for the debts incurred by the deceased. When that grief doesn’t happen, the ancestors’ ghosts begin to chase the culture.

It’s difficult enough when you have only a few dead people to mourn, but what happens when there are too many dead, when there is no time to mourn them all? When you get not just one or two ghosts (which a shaman might be able to help you with), but hundreds, or thousands, or millions of ghosts, because not just your ancestors, but the beings who have been trespassed against — the women who have been raped, the animals who have been slaughtered for no reason, the ground that has been torn to shreds — have all become ghosts, too?
Jensen: Are you speaking metaphorically here?

Prechtel: No, I’m talking literally. The ghosts will actually chase you, and they always chase you toward the setting sun. That’s why all the great migrations of the past several thousand years have been to the west: because people are running away from the ghosts. The people stop and try to live in a new place for a while, but the ghosts always catch up with them and create enormous wars and pain and problems, which feed the hungry hordes of ghosts. Then the people continue on, always moving, never truly at home. Now we have an entire culture based on our fleeing or being devoured by ghosts.

Jensen: What can we do about the ghosts?

Prechtel: On a finite planet, we can’t outrun them. We’ve tried to develop technology that will keep us safe: medicines to numb our grief, fortresses to keep the ghosts away. But none of it will work.

In a village, if a family is beset by a ghost, the shaman will capture the ghost, break it down into its component parts, and send them back to the other world one at a time. Then the shaman and the family will set up a regular maintenance program, to get back on track in their relationship with the other world. This is the maintenance way of living.

I’m not sure how Western culture could do this. How can members of a culture that considers the earth a dead thing possibly repay all that debt? How can they possibly get away from all those ghosts? With everything that has gone on for so long, can they ever really be at home again?

To be at home in a place, to live in a place well, we first have to understand where we are; we’ve got to look at our surroundings. Second, we’ve got to know our own histories. Third, we’ve got to feed our ancestors’ ghosts, so that the ghosts aren’t eating us or the people around us. Lastly, we’ve got to begin to grieve. Now, grief doesn’t mean sitting around weeping every day. Rather, grief means using the gifts you’ve been given by the spirits to make beauty. Grief that’s not expressed this way becomes a kind of toxic waste inside a person’s body, and inside the culture as a whole, until it has to be put in containers and shipped someplace, the way they ship radioactive waste to New Mexico.

This locked-up grief has to be metabolized. As a culture and as individuals, we must begin feeling our grief — that delicious, fantastic, eloquent medicine. Then we can start giving spiritual gifts to the land we live on, which might someday grant our grand-children permission to live there.

Jensen: What’s the relationship between grief and belonging to a place?

Prechtel: In the Guatemalan village where I lived, you don’t belong someplace until your people have died there and the living have wept for them there. Until a few of your generations have died on the land and been buried there, and your soul has fed on the land, you’re still a tourist, a visitor.

While I lived in this village, one of my sons, a baby, died of typhoid. When I lost a child, I mysteriously and suddenly became a true, welcomed resident of the land. It wasn’t as if I owned the land, but I was an honorable renter who’d paid with grief, artistically expressed in ritual. My child had merged with the land, so now I was related to the rocks and the trees and the air in a bodily way that I hadn’t been before. And since the other villagers were all related to these same rocks and trees and air, that made us all relatives.

Now, you might say that all your ancestors from Denmark, France, and Scotland have been put in the ground in North America, so why aren’t you welcome here? Why aren’t you related to the rocks and the trees and the air?

It’s because your ancestors who died are most likely still ghosts, still uninitiated souls who have not yet become true ancestors, because their debts were not paid with grief and beauty. Once they become true ancestors, you merge with the region, and you begin to help this world live. At that point, you’ll find that you have less need for toasters and machinery and computers — less need for everything. You’ll finally be starting to live well.

For us to get to that stage, we have to study eloquence, grief, and sacrifice. I’m not just talking about the type of sacrifice where somebody takes three days off to work in the neighborhood, although that may be part of it. I’m talking about giving to the non- human, as well as to the human.

Jensen: So you’re saying that we need to deal with the ghosts, and once we’ve dealt with them . . .
Prechtel: Then we have to talk about maintenance, which is far more important than corrective measures. This culture is based on fixing things, as opposed to maintaining them. But once we start to maintain instead of constantly fix, the problems that vex us will become much easier to solve. It will no longer be a matter of fixing something as we think of it today. Right now, fixing something means getting our way. It should mean asking: "What do I need to do here?"

Our culture also emphasizes individual freedom, but such freedom can be enjoyed only when there is a waiting village of open-armed, laughing elders who know compassion and grasp the complexity of the spirit world well enough to catch us, keep us grounded, and protect us from ourselves.

If the modern world is to start maintaining things, it will have to redefineitself. A new culture will have to develop, in which neither humans and their inventions nor God is at the center of the universe. What should be at the center is a hollow place, an empty place where both God and humans can sing and weep together. Maybe, together, the diverse and combined excellence of all cultures could court the tree of life back from where it’s been banished by our literalist minds and dogmatic religions.

Jensen: Speaking of dogmatic religions, how did the Mayan traditions survive the influx of Spanish missionaries?
Prechtel: The Spaniards came to our village in 1524 , but they couldn’t get anybody to go to their church, so they demolished our old temple and used the stones to build a new church on the same site. (This was a common practice.) But the Tzutujil people are crafty. They watched as the old temple stones were used to build the new church, and they memorized where each one went. As far as the Tzutujil were concerned, this strange, square European church was just a reconfiguration of the old. (When I was learning to be a shaman, I had to memorize where all those damn stones were, becausethey were all holy. It was like being a novice taxi driver in London.)

The Catholic priests abandoned the village in the 1600 s because of earthquakes and cholera, then came back fifty years later and found a big hole in the middle of the church. "What is that?" they said.

By then, the Indians knew the priests destroyed everything relating to the native religion, so the Indians said, "When we reenact the crucifixion of Jesus, this is the hole where we put the cross."

In truth, that hole was a hollow place that was never to be filled, because it led to another hollow place left over from the temple that had been there originally, and that place was connected to all the other layers of existence.

For four and a half centuries, the Indians kept their traditions intact in a way that the Europeans couldn’t see or understand. If the Spaniards asked, "Where is your God?" the Indians would point to this empty hole. But when the American clergy came in the 1950s, they weren’t fooled. They said, "This is paganism." And so, eventually, they filled the empty place with concrete.

I was there when that happened, in 1976. I was livid. I went to the village council and ranted and raved about how terrible it was. The old men calmly smoked their cigars and agreed. After an hour or so, when I was out of breath, they started talking about something totally unrelated. I asked, "Doesn’t anybody care about this?"

"Oh, yeah," they said. "We care. But these Christians are idiots if they think they can just eradicate the conduit from this world to the next with a little mud. That’s as ridiculous as you worrying about it. But if you must do something, here’s a pick, shovel, and chisel. Dig it out."

So some old men and I dug out the hole. Then the Catholics filled the hole back up, and two weeks later we dug it out again. We went back and forth this way five times until, finally, somebody made a stone cover for the hole, so the Catholics could pretend it wasn’t there, and we could pull the cover off whenever we wanted to use it.

That’s how the spirit is now in this country. The hole, the hollow place that must be fed, is still there, but it’s covered over with spiritual amnesia. We try to fill up that beautiful hollow place with drugs, television, potato chips — anything. But it can’t be filled. It needs to be kept hollow.

Jensen: Why is a hollow place holy?

Prechtel: The Mayan people understand that the world did not come out of a creator’s hand, but grew out of this hollow place and became a tree whosefruit was diversity. Human beings weren’t on that tree, but everything that was on that original tree eventually went into human beings. You have gourd seeds in you, and raccoons, and amoebas — everything.

When the tree finally grew to maturity, flowered, and bore fruit, the fruit was made of sound, and every piece of it that dropped to the ground sprouted and gave birth to the diverse kinds of life. Then the old tree died and became humus consisting of ancient sounds, out of which all things flourish to this day. Everything we feel, touch, and taste is actually a manifestation of that original diversity, which means that the tree isn’t really dead, but dismembered, and it’s constantly trying to "re-member" itself.

Every year in my village, when it was still intact, the young men and women who were to be initiated into adulthood went down the hole into the other world to try to bring the parent tree back to life. They put the seeds of their holy sounds and their tears into that hole where the old tree used to live long ago. And the tree grew back. But the rest of the year, the village devoured the tree’s diverse forms, creating an annual need for new initiates to re-member the old provider tree back to life. The initiates were able to go down into that hollow place and restore the tree to life because they knew how to be eloquent, how to grieve, and how to fight death instead of fighting and killing other beings.
Jensen: When you say "fight death," do you mean they resisted or denied its inevitability?

Prechtel: No, on the contrary, I mean they wrestled with death. In order for there to be life, there has to be a spiritual wrestling match with death; otherwise, it becomes a literal battle that can kill you.

The problem with death is that its gods are rationalists. The Mayans have thirteen goddesses and thirteen gods of death. These deities have no imagination, which is why they have to eat and kill us — to get our souls, our imagination. Once death has your soul, it is happy and stops killing for a while. But then you must go down and ask death — with all your eloquence — to please give back your soul. When death refuses, you’ve got to gamble with death, because death obeys only one rule: the rule of chance. And so you use gambling bones and try to beguile death with your eloquence. That’s what we call "wrestling death." You can’t kill death, of course. The best you can hope for in such a match is to bring death to a standoff. Then death willsay, "OK, I’ll tell you what. I’m going to give you back your soul if you promise to continue to feed me this eloquence on a regular basis, and to die at your appointed hour."

During initiation, when the young men and women wrestle death, what they’re doing, essentially, is signing a contract that says, "I give up the idealistic notion that I should live forever." Your soul is then returned, but you must ritually render a percentage of the fruit of your art, your eloquence, and your imagination to the other world. That’s the only deal you’re going to get from death. If you try to strike a better bargain, you’re going to end up killing a lot of people. When an entire culture tries to make a better deal, or refuses to wrestle death with eloquence, then death comes up to the surface to eat us in a literal way, with wars and depression.

Jensen: Tell me more about the indigenous soul.

Prechtel: Every individual in the world, regardless of cultural background or race, has an indigenous soul struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile environment created by that individual’s mind. A modern person’s body has become a battleground between the rationalist mind — which subscribes to the values of the machine age — and the native soul. This battle is the cause of a great deal of spiritual and physical illness.

Over the last several centuries, a heartless, culture-crushing mentality has enforced its so-called progress on the earth, devouring all peoples, nature, imagination, and spiritual knowledge. Like a bulldozer, it has left a flat, homogenized streak of civilization in its wake. Every human on this earth, whether from Africa, Asia, Europe, or the Americas, has ancestors whose stories, rituals, ingenuity, language, and life ways were taken away, enslaved, banned, exploited, twisted, or destroyed by this mentality. What is indigenous — in other words, natural, subtle, hard to explain, generous, gradual, and village oriented — in each of us has been banished to the ghettos of our heart, or hidden away from view on reservations inside the spiritual landscape. We’re taught to believe that our thoughts are actually the center of our life. Like the conquering, modern culture we belong to, we understand the world only with the mind, not with the indigenous soul.

And this indigenous soul is not something that can be brought back in "wild man" or "wild woman" retreats on the weekend and then dropped when you put on your business suit. It’s not something you take up because it’s fun or trendy. It has to be authentic, and it has to be spiritually expensive.

Jensen: Let’s talk for a moment about co-optation. There are two common positions on the wider use of indigenous traditions. One is that there’s nothing wrong with making a sweat lodge in your backyard for weekend retreats, while continuing to be a stockbroker on weekdays.

Prechtel: The consumer method.

Jensen: The other, which I subscribe to, is that we must respect the privacy of indigenous traditions and not mine them for our own purposes.

Prechtel: I’ve made a huge effort never to do that. The truth is that I never wanted to write books about Mayan traditions in the first place. On the Pueblo reservation where I grew up, it was taboo to write, because writing freezes knowledge, and also because much knowledge becomes useless when it is not kept secret and used only under sacred conditions. And often the things that are the most sacred are the most simple and ordinary. Whenthis ordinariness is framed in subtle, time-honored ways, it becomes extraordinary and maintains its spiritual usefulness.
Jensen: The traditions you write about are not your native Southwestern traditions.

Prechtel: No, but I lived in Santiago Atitlán, in Guatemala, for many years and made my life there. I was married, with children. Then, when the U.S.–backed death squads came, more than eighteen hundred villagers were killed within seven years: shot, beaten, tortured, poisoned, chopped up, starved to death in holes, beheaded, disappeared. This took place in a village where, prior to 1979, most people had never heard a gunshot. I had a price on my head and was almost killed on three different occasions in the 1980s. I returned to the U.S. and brought my family with me. My wife later went back home, taking our two sons with her, and we separated. The boys
soon returned to live with me and are now grown men.

Then, in 1992 , there was another massacre, and I had to go back to Guatemala. Some young Tzutujil men met me in a pickup truck, which was strange in itself: before, nobody had owned an automobile. They put me in the back with a bunch of squash, under a tarp. Whenever we came to an army roadblock, the soldiers saw just the squash and let us pass. They didn’t look very hard. (Most of the soldiers really don’t want to kill anybody: they have to be goaded into it. But they do kill.)

When we’d gotten past all the roadblocks, I got to sit up front. The other passengers were all kids. This was only eight years after I’d left, and already they had forgotten the name of my teacher, who had been one of the greatest and most famous shamans around.

As we drove, they’d ask, "Do you know the story of that mountain over there?"

"Yeah," I’d say, "that’s called S’kuut. It was originally in the ocean and was brought up on land by the old goddess of the reptiles."

"Who’s she?"

Pretty soon the truck was going about three miles an hour because they were re- discovering, through their ancestors’ ancient stories, every mountain, ravine, and boulder along our route. After about two hours, I asked, "How come you don’t know any of this?"

"Well," said one, "these two are Christians, so they’re not allowed to know, and the rest of us don’t have parents. They were killed in the 1980s."

So there I was, this blond half-breed from the U.S. — not even any blood relation to these kids — telling them their own people’s stories. I realized then that these children, as well as my own two sons, would never know the richness of village life. They were losing their connection to this place. I had to write down what I knew, but I couldn’t write down the specifics — that we went to the lake and did this and put this offering there — because then those rituals could be expropriated.

My decision to leave out the details of the rituals has irritated many people in the U.S. They insist I tell them "how to do it." I always respond, "It’s not technology."

Jensen: You’ve said explicitly that the power of shamanism is not in the specific words or the prayers.

Prechtel: My teacher always said that, if there is to be any hope whatsoeverof living well on this earth, we have to take the ancient root and put new sap in it. That doesn’t mean we need to do something new, but to do something old in a new way, which takes great courage.

I decided that if I could write these books such that the oral tradition is evident to readers, memories of their own indigenous souls might begin to arise. Of course, I tell people not to get on a plane and go to Guatemala. That would bring nothing but more heartbreak and plundering. The answer must be found in your own backyard, where you live. The only reason to explore another culture is to be able to smell the poverty in your own. Even if you go to another culture and are accepted in some way, you still have an obligation not to abandon your own culture, but to return to your homeland and try to coax its alienated indigenous traditions back into everyday life and away from tribalism, fundamentalism, and corporatized, nihilistic greed.

This is true whether we’re talking about traditions or natural resources. Right now, "genetic prospectors" are going to Brazil to study plants used by indigenous peoples. Why? So they can save rich, white North Americans from diseases caused by the stupidities of their own culture. They’re mining other peoples’ traditions to fix, mechanically, illnesses that would be much better addressed if they stayed home and dealt with their own culture’s lack of imagination and grace, grieving collectively about the inescapable reality of their mortality.

People should also be aware that many things that are touted as indigenous are not. Many of the sweat-lodge ceremonies, for example, are about as Jesuit as you can get. No Indian had ever heard of the Great Spirit before the 1850s. That’s all from the Jesuits.
Jensen: You’ve said that one problem with Western culture is its use of the verb to be.
Prechtel: When I was a child, I spoke a Pueblo language called Keres, which doesn’t have the verb to be. It was basically a language of adjectives. One of the secrets of my ability to survive and thrive in Santiago Atitlán was that the Tzutujil language, too, has no verb to be . Tzutujil is a language of carrying and belonging, not a language of being. Without to be, there’s no sense that something is absolutely this or that. If two people argue, they’re said to be "split," like firewood, but both sides are still of the same substance. Some of the rights and wrongs that nations have fought and died to defend or obtain are not even relevant concepts to traditional Tzutujil. This isn’t because the Tzutujil are somehow too "primitive" to understand right and wrong, but because their lives aren’t based on absolute states or permanence. Mayans believe nothing will last on its own. That’s why their lives are oriented toward maintenance rather than creation.

"Belonging to" is as close to "being" as the Tzutujil language gets. One cannot say, "She is a mother," for instance. In Tzutujil, you can only call someone a mother by saying whose mother she is, whom she belongs to. Likewise, one cannot say, "He is a shaman." One says instead, "The way of tracking belongs to him."

In order for modern Western culture to really take hold in Santiago Atitlán, the frustrated religious, business, and political leaders first had to undermine the language. Language is the glue that holds the layers of the Mayan universe together: the eloquence of the speech, the ancestral lifeline of the mythologies. The speech of the gods was in our very bones. But once the Westerners forced the verb to be upon our young, the whole archaic Mayan world disappeared into the jaws of the modern age.

In a culture with the verb to be, one is always concerned with identity. To determine who you are, you must also determine who you are not. In a culture based on belonging, however, you must bond with others. You are defined by where you stand and whom you stand with. The verb to be also reduces a language, taking away its adornment and beauty. But the language becomes more efficient. The verb to be is very efficient. It allows you to build things.

Rather than build things, Mayans cultivate a climate that allows for the possibility of their appearance, as for a fruit or a vine. They take care of things. In the past, when they built big monuments, it wasn’t, as in modern culture, to force the world to be a certain way, but rather to repay the world with a currency proportionate to the immense gifts the gods had given the people. Mayans don’t force the world to be what they want it to be: they make friends with it; they belong to life.

Jensen: You’ve spoken a lot today about the importance of maintenance. How does that relate to the Tzutujil practice of building flimsy houses?
Prechtel: In the village, people used to build their houses out of traditional materials, using no iron or lumber or nails, but the houses were magnificent. Many were sewn together out of bark and fiber. Like the house of the body, the house that a person sleeps in must be very beautiful and sturdy, but not so sturdy that it won’t fall apart after a while. If your house doesn’t fall apart, then there will be no reason to renew it. And it is this renewability that makes something valuable. The maintenance gives it meaning.

The secret of village togetherness and happiness has always been the generosity of the people, but the key to that generosity is inefficiency anddecay. Because our village huts were not built to last very long, they had to be regularly renewed. To do this, villagers came together, at least once a year, to work on somebody’s hut. When your house was falling down, you invited all the folks over. The little kids ran around messing up what everybody was doing. The young women brought the water. The young men carried the stones. The older men told everybody what to do, and the older women told the older men that they weren’t doing it right. Once the house was back together again, everyone ate together, praised the house, laughed, and cried. In a few days, they moved on to the next house. In this way, each family’s place in the village was reestablished and remembered. This is how it always was.

Then the missionaries and the businessmen and the politicians brought in tin and lumber and sturdy houses. Now the houses last, but the relationships don’t.

In some ways, crises bring communities together. Even nowadays, if there’s a flood, or if somebody is going to put a highway through a neighborhood, people come together to solve the problem. Mayans don’t wait for a crisis to occur; they make a crisis. Their spirituality is based on choreographed disasters — otherwise known as rituals — in which everyone has to work together to remake their clothing, or each other’s houses, or the community, or the world. Everything has to be maintained because it was originally made so delicately that it eventually falls apart. It is the putting back together again, the renewing, that ultimately makes something strong. That is true of our houses, our language, our relationships.

It’s a fine balance, making something that is not so flimsy that it falls apart too soon, yet not so solid that it is permanent. It requires a sort of grace. We all want to make something that’s going to live beyond us, but that thing shouldn’t be a house, or some other physical object. It should be a village that can continue to maintain itself. That sort of constant renewal is the only permanence we should wish to attain.

Gays: Guardians of the Gates

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Mon, 10 May 2010 05:53:11 PDT

Gays: Guardians of the Gates, by Malidoma Some

by Malidoma Some

This article apeared in the Sept 1993 issue of M.E.N. Magazine. It consists of an interview with Malidoma Some by Burt H. Hoff.

During one of the Conflict Hours at the Mendocino Men’s Conference Malidoma spoke eloquently on indigenous people’s views of gay men. He kindly agreed to elaborate on his views as he sat with me among the redwoods of Mendocino.

Bert: At Conflict Hour you told us that your culture honors gays as having a higher vibrational level that enabled them to be guardians of the gateways to the spirit world. You suggested that our Western view limits itself by focusing only on their sexual role. Can you elaborate for our readers?

Malidoma: I don’t know how to put it in terms that are clear enough for an audience that, I think needs as much understanding of this gender issue as people in this country do. But at least among the Dagara people, gender has very little to do with anatomy. It is purely energetic. In that context, a male who is physically male can vibrate female energy, and vice versa. That is where the real gender is. Anatomic differences are simply there to determine who contributes what for the continuity of the tribe. It does not mean, necessarily, that there is a kind of line that divides people on that basis. And this is something that also touches on what has become known here as the "gay" or "homosexual" issue. Again, in the culture that I come from, this is not the issue. These people are looked on, essentially, as people. The whole notion of "gay" does not exist in the indigenous world. That does not mean that there are not people there who feel the way that certain people feel in this culture, that has led to them being referred to as "gay."

The reason why I’m saying there are no such people is because the gay person is very well integrated into the community, with the functions that delete this whole sexual differentiation of him or her. The gay person is looked at primarily as a "gatekeeper." The Earth is looked at, from my tribal perspective, as a very, very delicate machine or consciousness, with high vibrational points, which certain people must be guardians of in order for the tribe to keep its continuity with the gods and with the spirits that dwell there. Spirits of this world and spirits of the other worlds. Any person who is at this link between this world and the other world experiences a state of vibrational consciousness which is far higher, and far different, from the one that a normal person would experience. This is what makes a gay person gay. This kind of function is not one that society votes for certain people to fulfill. It is one that people are said to decide on prior to being born. You decide that you will be a gatekeeper before you are born. And it is that decision that provides you with the equipment (Malidoma gestures by circling waist area with hands) that you bring into this world. So when you arrive here you begin to vibrate in a way that Elders can detect as meaning that you are connected with a gateway somewhere. Then they watch you grow, and they watch you act and react, and sooner or later they will follow you to the gateway that you are connected with.

Now, gay people have children. Because they’re fertile, just like normal people. How I got to know that they were gay was because on arriving in this country and seeing the serious issues surrounding gay people, I began to wonder it does not exist in my own country. When I asked one of them, who tad taken me to the threshold of the Otherworld, whether he feels sexual attraction towards another man, he jumped back and said, "How do you know that?!" He said, "This is our business as gatekeepers." And, yet he had a wife and children -- no problem, you see.

So to then limit gay people to simple sexual orientation is really the worst harm that can be done to a person. That all he or she is is a sexual person. And, personally, because of the fact that my knowledge of indigenous medicine, ritual, comes from gatekeepers, it’s hard for me to take this position that gay people are the negative breed of a society. No! In a society that is profoundly dysfunctional, what happens is that peoples’ life purposes are taken away, and what is left is this kind of sexual orientation which, in turn, is disturbing to the very society that created it.

I think this is again victimization by a Christian establishment that is looking at a gay person as a disempowered person, a person who has lost his job from birth onward, and now society just wants to fire him out of life. This is not justice. It’s not justice. It is a terrible harm done to an energy that could save the world, that could save us. If, today, we are suffering from a gradual ecological waste, this is simply because the gatekeepers have been fired from their job. They have been fired! They have nothing to do! And because they have been fired, we accuse them for not doing anything. This is not fair!

Let us look at the earth differently, and we will find out gradually that these people that are bothering us today are going to start taking their posts. They know what their job is. You just have to get near them, to feel that they don’t vibrate the same way. They are not of this world. They come from the Otherworld, and they were sent here to keep the gates open to the Otherworld, because if the gates are shut, this is when the earth, Mother Earth, will shake -- because it has no more reason to be alive, it will shake itself, and we will be in deep trouble.

Bert: Christianity has separated spirit from body and spirit from Earth. And earlier you talked to us about Christianity suppressing your culture. So there’s a suggestion here that suppression of homosexuality would be the way for the Christians to shut down the gateways, shut down the spirit, and shut down our connection with the Earth.

Malidoma: Yes! That’s right! Christianity stresses postponing living on earth, as of we are only here to pack up our baggage and prepare for a life somewhere else "out there." Jesus Christ is right here, man! And of course anyone else who knows more, who knows better, will be suppressed.

And you start with the gatekeepers. You take the gatekeeper and you confuse his mind. You threaten him and you throw him in the middle of nowhere. Then nobody knows where the gate is. As soon as you lose the whereabouts of the gate, then you have a culture going downhill. What keeps a village together is a handful of "gays and lesbians," as they call them in the modern world. In my village, lesbians are called witches, and gay men are known as the gatekeepers. These are the two only known secret societies. These are the only groups that will get together as a separate group and go out into the woods secretly to do whatever they do. And if they find you during their yearly symposium, they have the right to kill you.

Unless they go out on their yearly symposium, the village cannot be granted another year of life. They have to go out to do what they do, in order for the village to feel safe enough to live the way it has lived before. This is why, to me, we’re playing with our lives.

Bert: So our culture may not be granted another year of life.

Malidoma: That’s right! Every year it feels like the number of years that this culture is entitled to live is getting smaller. So God only knows how close to the chasm this culture is. This constantly- reiterated discomfort and hatred for the gay person is again another indication that every year we might as well be prepared for the apocalyptic moment when the stars start to fall to the earth.

You see, unless there is somebody who constantly monitors the mechanism that opens the door from this world to the Otherworld, what happens is that something can happen to one of the doors and it closes up. When all the doors are closed, this earth runs out of its own orbit and the solar system collapses into itself. And because this system is linked to other systems, they too start to fall into a whirlpool. And the cataclysm would be amazing!

Ask the Dogon, they will tell you that. The Dogon. They’re a tribe that understands this so well, it’s amazing, mind-boggling. And it is a tribe that knows astrology like no other tribe that I have encountered. And the great astrologers of the Dogon are gay. They are gay. There is a dull planet that, in its orbit, is directly above the Dogon village every 58 years. Who knows that, but the gay people.

I mean, I’m not just trying to make gay people look fine. This is the truth, man! I’m trying to save my ass!

Why is it that, everywhere else in the world, gay people are a blessing, and in the modern world they are a curse? It is self-evident. The modern world was built by Christianity. They have taken the gods out of the earth sent them to heaven, wherever that is. And everyone who aspires to the gods must then negotiate with Christianity, so that the real priests and priestesses are out of a job. This is the worst thing that can happen to a culture that calls itself modern.

Bert: That theme came up earlier with you and Martín, the Mayan shaman here, that if a modern society wants to shut down another culture they will go out and kill the keepers of the ritual.

Malidoma: Oh, yes! Because they know that this is where the life-pulse of the culture is. This is where the engine room of the tribe is. So if you go and bomb that place, then the whole mechanism shuts down. That’s pretty much what’s at work in the third world, and what has happened here with the Native American culture. And the thing about it is that humans are going to be begetting gatekeepers, no matter what. This is the chance that we’ve got. So maybe that means that sooner or later we’re going to wake up to the horror of our own errors, and we’re going to reconsecrate our chosen people so that they can do their priestly work as they should. Otherwise, I just don’t understand. I just don’t understand. My position about it is not so much that gays be just forgiven. That’s just tokenism. But that they serve as an example of the wrong, or the illness, that modernity has brought to us, and that we use that to begin working at healing ourselves and our society from the bottom up. That way, by the time we reach a certain level, all the gatekeepers are going to find their positions again. We cannot tell them where the gates are. They know. If we start to heal ourselves, they will remember. It will kick in. But as long as we continue in arrogance, in egotism, in God-knows-what form of violence on ourselves, no, there’s that veil of confusion that’s going to continue to prevail, and as a result it’s going to prevent great things from happening. That’s all I can say about that.

Amazing how Wikipedia can lead you, serendipitously, into great stuff........

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:22:59 PST

Play, Festival, and Ritual in Gadamer:
       On the theme of the immemorial in his later works1

                      Jean Grondin

            Translated by Lawrence K. Schmidt

(paru dans L. K. SCHMIDT (Dir.), Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer's Hermeneutics,
Lanham (Maryland) : Lexington Books, 2001)

In the following, I intend to follow the sequence of play-festival-ritual in the development of Gadamer's aesthetics in order to sort out a central theme in his philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer began his aesthetics, as is well known, [with] the concept of play. Although Gadamer had already related this concept to the idea of festival in his major work, Truth and Method (1960), this relationship did not receive a full examination until his 1974 Salzburg lecture on "The Relevance of the Beautiful."2 The same thought has lead Gadamer in his most recent works to the concept of "ritual," through which he attempts to approach a basic phenomenon of human existence, towards which his hermeneutics has been aimed from the beginning. Play-festival-ritual indicate, therefore, the constancy of a theme in Gadamer's work that I would like to
characterize in a preliminary way as the immemorial nature of human rationality. I hope that my presentation will be able to clarify what could be meant by this unpalatable sounding philosophical concept.

Gadamer's impressive adaptation of the concept of play resulted from the context of an aesthetic contemplation that aimed at demonstrating the inappropriateness of the modernist concepts coming from Friedrich Schiller's aesthetics. Schiller's fundamental aesthetic category was clearly also play, which
he effectively contrasted with the earnestness of theoretical science and practical acting. In play the subject was to be involved with himself alone and, so to say, freed from the pressures that assailed him in science and ethics. For Schiller the autonomy of the aesthetic was grounded on this free play of the subject within himself. Only in the aesthetic was the subject actually free, i.e. free from the rules of knowing and acting.

Gadamer, however, uses just the category of play to demonstrate the limitations of Schiller's concept and even those of all modern aesthetics. In the play of art, Gadamer argues, the subject is not restricted to himself, nor is he freed from his theoretical and practical expectations. Just the opposite holds: Play for Gadamer makes evident that the observer of an artwork is interwoven into an event, that he does not control and in which he cannot freely dispose of his normal horizons of experience and expectations. The reader of a novel, the opera listener, or the painting's viewer finds him or herself drawn into a place, which is experienced as a "more excellent reality."3 Who can say what happens, when one is taken in by a piece of music, a painting, a building, or a poem? Everything that one could express about this experience in a medium other than the work's, affects us as terribly trite. What enchants us in a beautiful piece of music? We cannot rightly say. Clearly one may have recourse to a plethora of banal expressions: it is magnificent, masterly played and directed, with precision, better, played with soul, everything imaginable, but in order to understand it one must be there or have been there when the piece was played. One must, so to speak-and this is not a misplaced metaphor for Gadamer-"play along." Art, Gadamer says as well, is a statement that resists transposition into another medium. Yet, it is also for him a statement, since it is a proposition that comes from the play of art. One needs only invoke any great artwork in order to know what is meant here. If I mention the names of Mozart, Kafka, Titian or Woody Allen, everyone will immediately perceive a whole world of "meaning" and "proposition"is intended. This is also the case, if, for example, one has not read a novel by Kafka in the last ten years. Something impresses itself upon us and in a mysterious manner is not forgotten, unlike the content of a philosophical lecture, perhaps, that is fully forgotten in ten minutes (if one was "there" at all when it was held - surely not often the case). How is it possible that an artwork can so speak to us, can be so much "truer," than an academic argument? In a work of art there is, therefore, a statement, also a truth, that one can only understand, if one allows oneself to be lifted into its play.

This play is thus not to be thought of as an irresponsible, subjective playing with the work, but rather as the playing of the work with us. According to Gadamer, we are more players in the play, the ones spoken to, and in the happiest case, taken up. In playing we are not so much the ones playing, as the ones played, perhaps even the out-played. Who would say here that play is something purely playful? Is the contrary of play really, always and primarily, seriousness? Does the play of art mean nothing more than a disingenuous
"diversion," "entertainment"? No, answers Gadamer. In play, in every play, there is something like a "sacred seriousness."4 This is true not only for art, but also for athletic games, child's play, and also for the most trivial social games of all types.

Hence, even when we are playfully concerned with something, we are also seriously there, with "sacred seriousness." Only someone who does not play along is not serious about the play. One who observes the play with sovereignty from outside acts as a spoilsport, because exactly he does not play along. Playing behavior is a being engrossed in the play. With the metaphor of play, therefore, Gadamer criticizes the irresponsible, subjective understanding of art. The aesthetic experience is not, as Schiller meant, an experience of a sovereign subjectivity, who, all at once and playfully, enters into a completely foreign,
imaginary ("aesthetic") world, where one is freed from the pressures of everyday concerns. The experience of an artwork is rather one of falling into a play that overcomes us and, at the same time, pulls us into it, where our whole being is at stake. For Gadamer this is the true experience of the play: a being drawn into.
The contrary to play is, therefore, not seriousness, because play is also something serious, but rather a not taking part [Nichtdabeisein].

The concept of play marks thereby the boundary of the objectifiable, that we know from the methodical sciences: "The mode of being of play does not permit the player to relate to the play as to an object. The player knows well what play is and that what he does is 'only a game,' but he does not know what he
'knows' here."5 This passage emphasizes that the experience of art (and beyond that, as we will see, the experience of understanding, of being with one another, and of speaking with one another) is not a relating to an isolated object, which one could objectify. The play of art does not lie in the artwork that stands in front of us, but lies in the fact that one is touhed by a proposition, an address, an experience, which so captures us that we can only play along. Who would want to clinically differentiate here between where the addressing and where the answering lies? Is it the work that places us in question, or is it we who recognize in the work, our questioning or our rhythm? What so fascinated Gadamer in the experience of art is that such an objectifying differentiation is out of place here, and yet that truth is still experienced, a truth to which we
belong in an indirect manner.6

Therefore, a specific "temporality" belongs to the experience of art, the temporality of taking part for a time.7 The play of art will never be conceptually grasped; we may only participate in it to the extent that we allow ourselves to be moved by its magic. When we hear a musical work, we are at the same time inextricably invited to sing along and to dance. We cannot avoid an inner humming along, a tapping of fingers or foot, a following along, almost an accompanying "directing." In any case, we play along when we hear music. The most authentic mode of execution for music is, therefore, to dance along. In just the same manner we recognize ourselves in a poem or painting; we are captivated by a novel or tragedy. It concerns us; it speaks to us. Gadamer's thesis concerning the concept of play is that this going along with is not external to the work, but belongs to its statement: it is "art" only if there is this addressing. Every experience of art is one of answering to the address of the work. At the time of Truth and Method, Gadamer preferred to speak here, in an almost Neoplatonic manner, of the "representation"(Darstellung) that necessarily belongs to art. That means that there is not at first a work and in addition to it a representation that depends upon its particular production and context. Every work "exists" only in its representation, i.e. as a representation for someone and for awhile, which is the time of our temporal Dasein. Later Gadamer preferred to speak of completion (Vollzug), of a completing together, following a usage from the early Heidegger. Therefore, the volume that collects Gadamer's aesthetic interpretations for his collected works is entitled Hermeneutik im Vollzug
(Hermeneutics in Execution).8 A work of art always wishes to be executed in this manner, i.e. to be "gone along with."

It is not surprising that Gadamer adopted the concept of the festival to express this going along with. He also endowed festival with paradigmatic meaning for his whole aesthetics, and beyond this, for our whole experience of the world. The reason is that a festival is characterized by a certain temporality into which we are enticed. It occurs at a given time and all who participate in the festival are elevated to a festive state and, in the best case, are transformed into a festive mood. To the essence of the festival belong, therefore, a time or place that is festive. This essence is revealed in an exemplary fashion in the return of festivals. It is however not the case, as Gadamer rightly notes, that a festival is said to return because it enters a particular order of time, but rather the other way around-the ordering of time occurs due to the returning of the festival.9 In this
manner our temporal being is given rhythm through festivals, whether we are expressively aware of it or not. In a festival it is clear that those who participate in it are embedded in a play that goes beyond their subjective choice, activity, and intending. Who would ever want to "objectify" a festive mood? It is simply
there and we "share" it. A festival-as every work of art, yes, as every understanding-has its being in its accomplishment and the community, in which it is celebrated. Even though most festivals can be traced back to an enactment event or time, they exist only in their contemporary fulfillment by being celebrated. Take, for example, the Christmas celebration, which is called a Fest in German. Naturally it refers back to an enactment event, but the Christmas celebration, that is celebrated, is not simply the repetition of an event that happened 2,000 years ago. It concerns primarily the present: the celebration that takes place this year, 2001, and it is this celebration that puts us into a festive mood (or not, but then one speaks not of a celebration but of an obligatory visit to the in-laws). This intonation or attunement of the presence of the celebration happens, for Gadamer, in every experience of art, even of understanding. The celebration or festival fulfills itself only through this representation, in this temporal happening. In it the horizons of the present and the past "fuse." In the return of the festival there lies a moment of the representation of the past, but also just as much in the re-presentation there is just as much a necessary relating to the present. So every festival represents a
present sui generis. No celebration or festival is like another, also and especially, when the same festival or celebration returns periodically. One is taken up by something that is there, and affects us through its presence, and changes us.

In Truth and Method Gadamer particularly emphasized the element of participation in the essence of the festival. Whoever celebrates a feast or joins in, is there, is along with, is immersed or included. In his 1974 Salzburg lecture, he placed the communicative side of taking part and being addressed in the forefront, since the celebrating of a festival includes a potential commonality. One cannot celebrate alone. Gadamer writes in "The Actuality of the Beautiful": "The festival is a commonality and is the representation of commonality itself
in its consummated form."10 For, whoever participates in a festival wants to communicate. Communicating means, however, not necessarily an exchange of words, but rather more a being with one another, involvement in others. Being and coming together is more important than agreeing about this or that.11

Even an academic conference can be understood as such a festival. The participants are all there because it is important to them to be there and to be with one another, and not just because they want to be taught something by the lectures. Of course, they are also here because of the papers (this vanity may be
granted to the speakers), but much more is at play in the taking part in a conference or a festival. Although a conference may be very much aimed at research results, there is still something of the character of a play and a festival in it. The word symposium, taken from the Greek, still expresses this: beyond all the perfect organization, beyond all the precise and soon forgotten statements, speeches and results, perhaps the essential aspect is that one is with one another (and eats and drinks), that one encounters others and becomes involved with them in this being together. Even a conference is a returning festival, and this returning has its importance. It has something festive, celebrative and ritualistic. But what returns, what comes over us and occurs, comes from perhaps further away than we can imagine and know, and has in itself something of the reverential stature of the ritual. We may be thankful for such a festive community, which has grown so seldom in our increasingly anonymous world.

It is the same in other festivals: religious, secular, and family festivals. The solidarity of being together that they promise means much more to us than the particular content, which may also be shared. Festivals are so: taking part is everything. In Salzburg one naturally thinks about the return of the "Festspiele." Particular attention should also, in my opinion, be given to the beautiful German expression "Festakt" that has no real equivalent in the latin languages or English. It indicates that the festival is itself an act and this is most essential. I have a vivid memory of the Festakt in Heidelberg for Hans-Georg Gadamer's ninety-fifth birthday on 11 February 1995. The jubilee was celebrated and honored by many commemorative speeches, but also by music and flowers. I have completely forgotten the content of the speeches. The festival, the Festakt, remains for me unforgettable, and to such an extent that I can hope a Festakt will occur for his hundredth birthday. That will be a festival! And taking part will be everything. A retention of the perishable lies in the communicative essence of the festival. This, as well, belongs to the temporality of the festival. A festival always celebrates the enduring in the perishing, but in such a way that the enduring as well as the perishing are contemplated at the same time. When we celebrate a person, Christmas, this year's Schubert anniversary, soon a Goethe anniversary, we commemorate the enduring, but this includes a consciousness of the disappearing. When we participate in such a festival, we ask ourselves often with a mixture of gratitude and anxiety, "How many more Christmases will we celebrate together?" The festival always marks a self-
collecting of time over itself, a wish to retain the moment, which we also know does not allow itself to be held. So every festival contains a consciousness of human frailty. Every festive joy, yes, every joy, is perhaps the other side of an inexpressible, unutterable.

In this context, Gadamer speaks of the "unique time" of the festival. The time of the festival is a "fulfilled" time, a festive one, where calculating time, that one usually controls, is brought to a standstill.12 But the time with which we usually calculate and which Gadamer calls "empty" time, is a self-forgetting temporality. It is the time to do something, time for something. Only in the festival do we become aware of time itself, namely as the gift that we are.

From festivals we become aware, therefore, that we stand in time and thereby nolens volens in traditions, in which past, present, but also future are intimately wedded. We like to imagine that we are sovereign over traditions: oh, Christmas, oh, the Schubert jubilee, how does that concern me? Like rulers, we act as if we were the free fabricators of our fate. We so willingly imagine ourselves to be self-conscious, autonomous beings, who control their time and direct their life. In this we forget how much a sending, how much tradition and not-knowing, belong to our fate. We live in a time when one apparently can objectify everything and so control it. There are statistics and prognoses for everything. One can control everything: especially time, naturally the economy, soon the weather, in any case what one eats and so one's appearance, births and finally even the genes, from which we are woven. Before, these were all the results of fate, that occurred and one had to accept. Certainly we can now control much for our own good, but are we not deceiving ourselves in our addiction to control? We control everything as if we were gods. But perhaps, the insanity lies just in this, that we forget our own temporality and mortality. According to Gadamer's hermeneutics we stand much more in traditions than we are ready to admit due to our puritanical drive to control. The return of festivals reminds us of this standing in traditions,13 in which we live but continually only in the fleeting presence of our scintillating present.

With this point in mind, Gadamer has spoken of the forgotten ritual character of life in his latest works.14 What does ritual mean here? It means the totality of our acting, thinking, and speaking that is carried through through mutual agreements, morals, and customs. The correctness of our actions is not always based on laws, proven norms, or formal steps of reasoning. Much of what we do, say, and are, is supported in its correctness by an ethos, which, in its hidden effectiveness, is more practiced, and applied, than actually known consciously. This can be established quite clearly, for example, in the trivial forms of greeting and civility, that determine our interaction. We do not really know from where they come and often wonder whether they are not superficial, but we find it all too painful when they are ignored. Against what does one offend if a greeting is overlooked or a word slips out that causes dissonance? The conviction of the later Gadamer is that the arena of rituals in our lives is far more encompassing than what science and even language can objectify. What is not all eclipsed, when an objectification is undertaken? How much of ritual does not enter into our forms of education, of being together and speaking with one another? Does it always concern the objectifiable and expressible content, of which we can become conscious, or rather, are there not at work here other forms of human living that carry and support us ?

There are, for example, such immeasurable forms of living that differentiate a Spaniard, from an Indian or an English woman. What is different here? Not so much life, not only biology, but rather ritual, the way and manner of how one lives, without one being able to-or having to-objectify this otherness. One can also consider the difference between the sexes and the rituals of approaching one another. Modern phraseology likes to speak about "culturally" conditioned "roles," as if we could simply step out of them and could refuse them at will. However, these are not just roles that we play, but there are also forms of life that constitute our being beyond our willing and thinking.

With this concept of the ritual, of the ritualistic in every accomplished understanding, Gadamer continues, if I am correct, his contemplation of the essence of play and the festival, radicalizing and extending, however, its
anthropological meaning and range of application. Knowing and correct acting are not dissolvable into objectifications. The effective realm of what obliges and holds us together, stretches far beyond the narrow area of that which is susceptible of an express justification. Therefore, the concept of the ritual, and the silent reverence that it implies, would then replace tradition in Gadamer's philosophy and would at the same time make the concept of tradition more able to be understood. Gadamer's hermeneutics is not a defense of the inherited as such, what one could easily, as has often happened, devalue as a traditionalism, but rather concerns the boundaries of the objectifiable as such. Human understanding, acting, feeling, and loving (for we relate ourselves to the world not only and perhaps not primarily epistemologically) have less to do with
planning, control and being consciously aware, and much more to do with a subcutaneous fitting into the rituality of life, in forms of tradition, in an event that encompasses us and that we can grasp only stutteringly. Gadamer's fundamental idea, however, is that this hidden15 ritual, into which life enters, represents less the boundary of, and more the enabling possibility for human reasonableness and freedom. It is the dream of a freedom aimed against the forms of play in tradition and in ritual life, that perhaps embodies a modern and ominous abstraction. The foundation of our reason, our thinking and feeling, is something, to speak with Schelling, "immemorial."16 It hides "behind" our reason in two senses, i.e. as what reason can never encompass, but at the same time, as what makes reason possible. The later Gadamer is on the way to this "immemorial" character of our experience of the world, when he pursues such untimely categories as those of play, the festival, and the ritual, and follows in this the lead of the experience of truth in art.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

1This paper was given at a symposium "Der spielende Mensch" held at the University "Mozarteum" in Salzburg, Germany and published in their collection, Fest und Spiel: Homo Ludens--Der Spielende Mensch (Musikverlag Bernd Katzbichler, München/Salzburg, 43-52. [Tr.]

2 GW 8, 94-142. Translation in Gadamer, The relevance of the beautiful and other essays, Tr. Nicholas Walker (New York; Cambridge University Press, 1986) [Tr.].

3 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GW 1, 115.

4 GW 1, 107.

5 GW 1, 108.

6 Concerning this "hermeneutic truth," for which it is constitutive that the one who understands must belong to it, compare my essay "Zur hermeneutische Wahrheit: Heidegger and Augustine," in E. Richter (ed.), Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (Frankfurt a. M., 1993), 161-173.

7 "Das Dabeisein für eine Weile" [Tr.]

8 GW 9, Aestetik und Poetik II: Hermeneutik im Vollzug, Tübingen, 1993. It follows the theoretical volume on aesthetics and poetics, entitled Kunst als Aussage [Art as [Proposition]] (GW 8). This last title means that art announces a message, a truth, a proposition, that can only be experienced in an executing, that is, only when one accepts the work's offer of a conversation. One is reminded further of the title of Gadamer's earlier interpretations of poetry: Gedicht und Gespräch [Poem and Conversation] (Frankfurt a. M., 1990). Concerning Heidegger's understanding of the festival, compare the exceptional dissertation of Alfred Knödler, Heideggers seinsgeschichtliche Wesensbestimmung des Festes im Ausgang und Abstoß von der
Tradition, Philosophy Faculty, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany, 1997.

9 Die Aktualität des Schönen, GW 8, 132.

10 GW 8, 130.

11 See GW 8, 416: "It is exactly the distinction of the festive, not that one is in good conversation, but that everyone is involved, for example, through music or through celebratory speeches. If it is not a festival of joy, for example a funeral, it is still similar."

12 GW 8, 133.

13 See GW 8, 138f.: "As finite beings we stand in traditions, whether we know these traditions or not, whether we are conscious of them or so blinded as to believe that we begin anew. This does not affect at all the power of tradition over us. However, it does make a difference if we face the traditions in which we stand and the future possibilities that they preserve for us, or whether one conceitedly imagines that one
could turn away from the future into which one is living and program and constitute ourselves in a new way. Clearly tradition does not mean mere conservation, but rather a passing along, but this include that one does not leave things unchanged and merely conserved, but that one says anew and learns to grasp anew something old."

14 One thinks especially of his essay from 1992: "Wort und Bild-'So wahr, so seiend'" and especially "Zur Phänomenologie von Ritual und Sprache," in GW 8, 373-440. See further the intimations in the conversation at the end of Gadamer- Lesebuch, Tübingen, 1997.

15 This dimension of the "hiddenness" of our most evident experience of the world, constitutes an important motif for the later Gadamer. Recall here the title of his book Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit (Frankfurt a. M. 1993) [The Enigma of Health, tr. J. Gaiger and N. Walker (Standford: Standford University Press, 1996)] as well as the subsection title, with which his recent study "Zur Phänomenologie von Ritual und Sprache" begins: "The hiddenness of language" (GW 8, 373).

16 For Gadamer's reference to Schelling's thinking of the immemorial, see GW 2, 103, 334; GW 3, 236; GW 8, 366; GW 10, 64. But it also concerns here a relatively late adaptation of the concept of the immemorial, which is missing in Truth and Method (concerning this see my essay on "Die späte Entdeckung Schellings in der Hermeneutik," in I. M. FEHÉR und W. G. JACOBS (Hg.), Zeit und Freiheit : Schelling - Schopenhauer - Kierkegaard - Heidegger, Akten der Fachtagung der Internationalen Schellinggesellschaft Budapest, 24. bis 27. April 1997, Budapest, Ketef Bt., 1999, 65-72). In Truth and Method Gadamer spoke of the "substantiality," that lies behind every "subject." See the later exposition on the concept of substantiality in GW 8, 327: "Substance means here that supporting that does not come forth, that is not raised to the light of reflective consciousness, that never completely expresses itself, but that is yet necessary so that the light, consciousness, expression, communication, and the word that reaches can be. Substance is the 'spirit that may bind us together'. Rilke's phrase that I quote here indicates that spirit is more than each individual knows and knows of himself."

A great post-Jungian post

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 04:57:04 PST

from: http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73784/symbolic1.htm

Symbolic Poverty

This article is also published in the PelicanWeb Journal, Dec 2009,
here.

Abstract: The article tries to pinpoint a collective complex unconsciously affecting all people belonging to the Western cultural sphere. The capacity to relate symbolically with life has become lost. Symbolic poverty implicates a serious deficiency of spiritual relatedness. The lack thereof is being compensated with many strange preconceptions, partly deriving from everyday indoctrination. Most conspicuous is the inability to accept suffering, and the reluctance of enduring it. Western man is losing his capacity of relating symbolically to the dark side of existence, by way of ritual conceptions. Against this, a new attitude toward evil and the destructive forces is proposed. The article hopes to challenge the reader's preconceptions, many of which have been drunk in with the mother's milk.

Keywords: suffering, evil, symbol, ritual, welfare state, Earth-Mother, Chuang-tzu.

Introduction

General consciousness in the Western world has become ensnared by an idealistic and naive form of morality. Conscious moral standards are today conditioned by an unconscious collective complex which can be characterized as a grand mother-myth. Central to current political consciousness is the paragon of a world-encompassing benign community, including notions such as democracy, welfare, and market economy for all the world's inhabitants. A future global society is envisioned as a good mother and a safe garden for its children. Accordingly, all people of the earth have the right to the boons of the welfare state. The other side of existence, the dark forces of unconscious nature, including the unpredictable "power of the divine", have today been shut out from collective consciousness. It is being replaced by material goods and chattels, especially. Accordingly, people have become very materialistic, very focused on material welfare, rather than spiritual growth. This is the expression of a resurgent mother complex.

The missing feminine

M-L von Franz (1980) says:

This pronounced lack of a feminine personification of the unconscious has therefore been compensated by the radical materialism which has gradually taken hold of the Christian tradition. One could say that practically no religion began with such a highly one-sided spiritual accent and has landed - if you think of Communism as the end form of Christian theology - in such an absolutely one-sided materialistic aspect. The swing from one to the other is one of the most striking phenomena we know of in the history of religion; it is due to the fact that from the beginning there was an unawareness, an unbalanced attitude towards the problem of the feminine goddess and therefore of matter, because the feminine Godhead in all religions is always projected into and linked up with the concept of matter.

Only yesterday I had in my hand - this is in the nature of a digression, but quite an interesting one - a book by Hans Marti entitled 'Urbild und Verfassung', which could be translated as "Archetype and Constitution." Marti shows that since man originally conceived of the constitution of a democratic state -he is mainly concerned with the Swiss Constitution - a secret switch has taken place from the patriarchal concept of the State (the juridical State, the State being a legal concept, a kind of father spirit) to what he calls the Welfare State. Swiss democracy in its beginnings, let us say until the last fifty years, was chiefly administered by a Club consisting of men - you know women in Switzerland still cannot vote -and the basis of the Constitution was a certain number of laws, the main object of which was to guarantee the freedom of the individual, freedom of religion, freedom of possession, and so on.

Into this slowly crept, as Marti very beautifully demonstrates, another idea, namely that of the Welfare State, a mother archetype where the State has to care for the health of the people, their material welfare, old age pensions, etc. Marti points out very clearly that this is a switch, that the State is no longer the father but has become the mother, and as such interested in the physical welfare of her children. He shows how, according to Swiss law, the State now has the right to impose certain regulations on the possession of land, in order to protect agricultural areas, for instance.

Some years ago the State assumed control over water rights - water is a feminine symbol - in order to protect people since the water gets so dirty and unwholesome, and slowly it has acquired the right to issue laws to fight epidemics. If, for instance, there is some kind of plague, or rabies, then the State can issue regulations which did not previously exist. Formerly mankind was not so interested in the people's physical and material welfare. If they died of the plague or were bitten by mad dogs, that was just a part of life and not important; the emphasis was on spiritual freedom while physical welfare was rather neglected. Over the last fifty or sixty years physical welfare has gradually become an important concern of the State, and with that it has by degrees become more and more the carrier of the projection of the mother, and less so of the father image. We are slowly and without noticing it gliding into a matriarchal situation.

Marti shows very clearly how certain emotional factors are unconsciously at play, that the people conceive of the State in some vague archetypal form and from that standpoint vote for certain laws. But what seems to be self-evident, i.e., that the State should look after its children, is really the projection of the mother image, and that is not self-evident. He ends his book very intelligently by saying that we should become conscious of what we are projecting onto the State and begin with a real Auseinandersetzung, or confrontation, and not change our laws by just projecting a mother image.

This book describes a small aspect of a slow turn which on a large scale has happened in the whole Christian civilization and which one could call a secret unobtrusive return to matriarchy and materialism. This enantiodromia has to do with the fact that the Judaeo-Christian religion did not face the archetype of the mother consciously enough. It had to a certain extent excluded the question. It is well known, also, that when Pope Pius XII declared the assumptio Maria his conscious aim was to hit Communistic materialism by elevating, so to speak, a symbol of matter in the Catholic Church, so as to take the wind out of the Communists' sails. There is a much deeper implication, but that was his conscious idea, namely that the only way to fight the materialistic aspect would be by raising to a higher position the symbol of the feminine Godhead, and with it matter. Since it is the Virgin Mary's body which is raised to Heaven, emphasis is on the physical material aspect. (von Franz, 1980, pp.212-15)

Since the seventies, when von Franz made this interview, things have gone worse. Today the Western welfare states have taken upon themselves the yoke of all the hapless people of the earth, who must now have their provision for free. To my country - Sweden - refugees arrive en masse. However, these people often end up in passivity, spending their time watching cable TV from their home country, while waiting for the next social allowance by post. I fear that such a misguided humanitarianism can create the danger of a blackhearted compensation from the unconscious. A backlash, on lines of racialist or Übermensch ideals, could result in a total unconcern for the well-being and lives of people.

Toleration of suffering

Should we begin to better accept suffering as an integral part of earthly life, then we would lessen the momentum of the unconscious compensatory reactions. By the rules of an age-old psychic economy, suffering is forced upon people to be carried vicariously. People who are not mature enough to carry their own suffering, at heart, will inevitably force it upon others. Collective victimization, well-known from history, again and again comes to expression in a feverish search after sacrificial victims. History tends to repeat itself, and in times of distress, such outbreaks tend to occur more often.

To grow and mature, and to leave an inferior state of consciousness behind, remains a path of hardship. It is implied in a well-known saying: "Come, take up the cross, and follow me" (Mark 10:21). Unconscious suffering on part of the masses is normally projected on others, or carried vicariously by other people. Conscious suffering, on the other hand, or a conscious acceptance of suffering, can put an end to the process of sin transference[1].Judging from history, if the Western state isn't out to relieve the world of all mankind's afflictions and poverty, then it is equally determined to create colossal suffering in humankind. This pendulum movement, to and fro, of unconscious obsession with suffering, must cease.

While many a young person these days is lacking in personal identity, he can acquire an identity by becoming a welfare idealist. He or she then belongs to the 'Gutmenschen', who do this to feel good. Much of today's concern for others is not rooted in instinct or in heartfelt motives, especially if it involves wholly unrelated people living on another continent (empathy is what you feel for the human being, or the cat, whom you are living with every day). Instead it builds on a moralistic ideology, which makes people feel that they are involved in something meaningful and larger than themselves, much like how the Communist pioneer felt, in the heydays of USSR.

The Earth-Mother

In 'The Feminine in Fairytales' Marie-Louise von Franz argues that the crux of Western consciousness is the total disregard of the dark side of the feminine principle, the darkness of the Earth-Mother, in fairytales portrayed as the witch Baba Yaga, for instance. The repression of dark nature creates an inability to accept suffering as an integral part of life, and it also makes us deny the inner darkness of our own nature. She says:

The whole of natural life is based on murder. That is a terrible thing to realize, but, at the same time, if one is not very morbid by nature, such a realization brings acceptance and, strangely, the wish to live and the desire to accept one's guilt individually, for that is the guilt of living and living is guilt, in a certain sense. The realization of destruction and the wish to live are very closely connected. (1993,p.205)

According to von Franz "[Jesus] warned against the all too human tendency, the inflation actually, to pursue shadow problems which are not one's own. One should say, 'I have done my human best and have not succeeded, but have been shown my own limitations.' " (p.199) Von Franz is here referring to the passage in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus urges his disciples not to resist evil (Matthew 05:39). But pursuing "shadow problems which are not our own" are exactly what we are doing today, on a megalomaniacal scale. She explains:

Jung once went so far as to say that goodness which is beyond instinctiveness is no longer good, and wickedness which is anti-instinctual cannot succeed either. If I try to be better than my instincts permit, I cease to do good. If I want to do evil in order to survive, this is only possible as long as my instinct goes with it. If I do more evil than my instinct allows, then I destroy myself. Instinct, or the animal, is the final judge, for that is what gives my good or evil intentions the right measure. (p.208)

But how, then, can evil be countered? Von Franz continues:

Once at a Fastnacht, Jung made up a wonderful verse about the poisonous dragon, to the effect that if a poisonous dragon appeared, one should not get upset, for the dragon had only forgotten his own fate: that he had to eat himself - the uroboros! So you must just remind the dragon of his duty, and he will say, "Oh, yes," and will eat himself up! But you have to remind him, that is, bring a little bit of consciousness into the situation. It doesn't mean letting things go, but putting a little drop of consciousness in and then retiring. (p.204)

Von Franz also discusses the advanced subject of the healing effect of the unconscious archetype, in terms ofsynchronicity:

The psychological analogy [with alchemy] seems to have to do with the fact that when one succeeds consciously and positively to relate to an archetypal constellation, there is a widespread effect. If the rainmaker, or the medicine man, gets in touch in the right way with the powers of the Beyond, rain falls over the whole country. Confucius said that if the noble man sits in his room and has the right thoughts and writes down the right things, he is heard a thousand miles around. The Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzualways comments on the point that as long as the ruler of the country tries to do the right thing, actively making good or bad laws, the empire will get worse and worse. If, on the contrary, he retires and gets right inwardly, then the problems of the empire are solved by themselves too. (p.179)

Moral infantilism

In the present day, inflationary and banal conscious values are contributing to the reinstatement of theGreat Mother (Magna Mater), in the shape of out-and-out materialism ('mater' = mother). An archaic mother-myth is filling up the empty space created by the poverty of symbols. Under its influence the individual is likely to develop into a state of moral infantilism. In today's Western world, along with archaisms and childish ways of human relations, a primitive matriarchal conception is unconsciously on the rise.

It seems as if the seemingly benign mother goddess, in accordance with her indiscriminate and enveloping nature, accepts a manifoldness of thoughtways, and gathers everyone under her auspices. Inclusiveness, multiculturalism, and multiethnicity, have become the catchwords of the present era. The present situation forms a glaring contrast to traditional society. Joseph Campbell (1973) says:

In earlier times, when the relevant social unit was the tribe, the religious sect, a nation, or even a civilization, it was possible for the local mythology in service to that unit to represent all those beyond its bounds as inferior, and its own local inflection of the universal human heritage of mythological imagery either as the one, the true and sanctified, or at least as the noblest and supreme. And it was in those times beneficial to the order of the group that its young should be trained to respond positively to their own system of tribal signals and negatively to all others, to reserve their love for at home and to project their hatreds outward. Today, however, we are the passengers, all, of this single space-ship Earth (as Buckminster Fuller once termed it), hurtling at a prodigious rate through the vast night of space, going nowhere. And are we to allow a hijacker aboard?

Nietzsche, nearly a century ago, already named our period the Age of Comparisons. There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning, and hurricanes all around.[...]

And now, among the powers that are here being catapulted together, to collide and to explode, not the least important (it can be safely said) are the ancient mythological traditions, chiefly of India and the Far East, that are now entering in force into the fields of our European heritage, and vice versa, ideals of rational, progressive humanism and democracy that are now flooding into Asia. Add the general bearing of the knowledges of modern science on the archaic beliefs incorporated in all traditional systems, and I think we shall agree that there is a considerable sifting task to be resolved here, if anything of the wisdom-lore that has sustained our species to the present is to be retained and intelligently handed on to whatever times are to come. (Campbell, 1973, pp.262-3)

Non-reflecting tolerance

The "sifting task" depends on a mature and discriminative consciousness, capable of making distinctions, something which enables it to sift the wheat from the chaff. Such a task cannot be accomplished by a naive and indiscriminate type of moral consciousness, characteristic of the matriarchal sentiment. Sadly, in the present day, this way of thinking commands the discourse, at least in my country. Against this, philosopherHerbert Marcuse (1965) has argued that indiscriminate tolerance can have a markedly destructive effect, on democracy as well as in the developing individual:

This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested. [...] Tolerance is turned from an active into a passive state, from practice to non-practice: laissez-faire the constituted authorities.[...]
Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, [...] the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandising, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives. (1965, pp.82-3)[...]

But even the all-inclusive character of liberalist tolerance was, at least in theory, based on the proposition that men were (potential) individuals who could learn to hear and see and feel by themselves, to develop their own thoughts, to grasp their true interests and rights and capabilities, also against established authority and opinion. This was the rationale of free speech and assembly. Universal toleration becomes questionable when its rationale no longer prevails, when tolerance is administered to manipulated and indoctrinated individuals who parrot, as their own, the opinion of their masters, for whom heteronomy has become autonomy.
The telos of tolerance is truth. It is clear from the historical record that the authentic spokesmen of tolerance had more and other truth in mind than that of propositional logic and academic theory (p.90)[...]

Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to "the people" for its deliberation and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this basis, the evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.
In the contemporary period, the democratic argument for abstract tolerance tends to be invalidated by the invalidation of the democratic process itself. The liberating force of democracy was the chance it gave to effective dissent, on the individual as well as social scale, its openness to qualitatively different forms of government, of culture, education, work - of the human existence in general.[...]

But with the concentration of economic and political power and the integration of opposites in a society, which uses technology as an instrument of domination, effective dissent is blocked where it could freely emerge: in the formation of opinion, in information and communication, in speech and assembly. Under the rule of monopolistic media - themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power - a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society. (pp.94-5)
Impartiality to the utmost, equal treatment of competing and conflicting issues is indeed a basic requirement for decision-making in the democratic process - it is an equally basic requirement for defining the limits of tolerance. But in a democracy with totalitarian organization, objectivity may fulfill a very different function, namely, to foster a mental attitude which tends to obliterate the difference between true and false, information and indoctrination, right and wrong.[...]

The result is a neutralization of opposites, a neutralization, however, which takes place on the firm grounds of the structural limitation of tolerance and within a preformed mentality.[...]

If objectivity has anything to do with truth, and if truth is more than a matter of logic and science, then this kind of objectivity is false, and this kind of tolerance inhuman. And if it is necessary to break the established universe of meaning (and the practice enclosed in this universe) in order to enable man to find out what is true and false, this deceptive impartiality would have to be abandoned. (Marcuse, 1965, pp.97-8)

Relativism, cultural and ethical, once threatened ancient Greek society with disintegration and moral dissolution. In those days, Platonic thinking managed to put a curb on the destructive development. Today, a comparable relativistic thinking has gained a strong momentum thanks to an underlying dependency on the mother, expressing itself in banal materialistic convictions. In the individual, this takes the expression of a moral infantilism that is now having a corruptive influence on the democratic societies. Needless to say, our democracies are dependent on mature and autonomous individuals, innovative citizens who are capable of thinking for themselves. The forging of personality, within the social context, is a very important issue. Marcuse also highlights the effects of a "repressive tolerance" on the identity-seeking consciousness of the individual:

From the permissiveness of all sorts of license to the child, to the constant psychological concern with the personal problems of the student, a large-scale movement is under way against the evils of repression and the need for being oneself. Frequently brushed aside is the question as to what has to be repressed before one can be a self, oneself. The individual potential is first a negative one, a portion of the potential of his society: of aggression, guilt feeling, ignorance, resentment, cruelty which vitiate his life instincts. If the identity of the self is to be more than the immediate realization of this potential (undesirable for the individual as human being), then it requires repression and sublimation, conscious transformation. This process involves at each stage (to use the ridiculed terms which here reveal their succinct concreteness) the negation of the negation, mediation of the immediate, and identity is no more and no less than this process. "Alienation" is the constant and essential element of identity, the objective side of the subject - and not, as it is made to appear today, a disease, a psychological condition. Freud well knew the difference between progressive and regressive, liberating and destructive repression. (Marcuse, 1965, p.115)

Symbolic poverty

As von Franz has pointed out, a weakness in the symbol-forming process, within the realm of the feminine spirit and dark nature, especially, has backfired and caused materialism and fixation on welfare. The motherly sentiment incorporates such notions as safety and material comfort. An inability to relate consciously, via the symbolic function, with the spirit of the feminine, forces the same to enter through the backdoor, as it were, by the route of the unconscious collective complex. This is the reason why it assumes such a vulgar and naive expression, and why the conscious tenets emerge as banal and empty, lacking both in analytical depth and heartfelt sincerity. As an overcompensation of banal content it appears like a materialistic religion is being emulated, containing tenets of faith: "safety, healthcare, democracy and material comfort, are blessings that, by birthright, belong to all inhabitants on earth."

This is a goodness which is not anchored in instinct and true warmheartedness, but produced from an empty overblown creed of consciousness, an ethics by decree, as it were. Secular society is, unconsciously and secretly, turning into a matriarchal religious society - unsimilar to the historical counterparts, but a vulgar and banalversion - imbued as it is with archaic motherly sentiments. Orrin E. Klapp (1969), who diagnoses the condition as 'symbolic poverty', asks:

What is symbolic poverty? Not lack of factual information, but of kinds of symbols which make a person's life meaningful and interesting...[At] the nondiscursive level modern society suffers a more serious poverty of symbols, including a lack of: reassurance from the gestures of others (that one is loved, understood, needed, somebody special) - what Eric Berne calls "strokes"; ritual which gives a person a sense of himself and fills his life with valid sentiments; place symbols, the familiar world where one belongs, home; the voice of the past, a sense of contact with prior generations; psychological payoffs in recognition for work; and, above all, centering.[...]

Few, even among leaders of business, have personal reputations that amount to much; and, for almost all, loss of job by retirement or unemployment turns a person easily into "nobody." Above it all is the lack of mystique, of faith in something "more," so characteristic of secular society.[...]

From the standpoint of social policy, the nub of the matter is that we do not know how to design a context of human relations in the abundance of a mobile, modernistic, traditionless society which will provide the individual with nondiscursive symbols to give him an interesting life and satisfying identity.

This is the problem of banality. A person whose interactions lack psychological payoffs will find life unutterably boring. The success symbols, though he has them, will seem empty. Practical measures, such as economic progress, political reform, even welfare legislation, will seem irrelevant to him, because they do not deal with the real problem - of banality. He will, therefore, have a tendency to become a dropout or a deviant, turning to escapes or kicks for compensation.[...]

His argument might be as follows: If the social order denies me a feeling of integrity as a person, something is wrong with it; therefore, I have a right to go outside its codes to the extent necessary to find myself. Such a point of view divides people - not between haves and have-nots, or political parties -but between those who who feel dissatisfied with their identity and cheated by the social order -therefore searching, escaping unconventional, rebel, extremist - and those who are satisfied with their identities because the psychological payoffs are satisfactory to them.[...]

Surely one cannot resuscitate such symbols merely by shooting people full of information "about" such things. Factual, historical, technical, discursive information is next to irrelevant for the meaning of nondiscursive symbols. This is perhaps the predicament of our society: trying to replace dying nondiscursive symbols (some of which we call tradition, some of which we call human relations) by material comforts, technological efficiency and design, and impersonal information. (Klapp, 1969, pp. 317-23)

An inflated political consciousness

Symbolic poverty, I argue, goes hand in hand with an inflated consciousness. It depends on the way in which people cling to stale and bloodless values of consciousness. Consciousness is being overvalued, something which creates an inflation of the human ego. A most conspicuous example is the well-known political ambition that all forms of human suffering must be removed from the face of the earth. Such an exaggerated idealistic standpoint cannot bear with the dark side of existence, which is, ceremonially but not effectually, brushed aside and neglected. A most popular conscious agenda of today is the conceited notion that evil, in all its forms, can and will be conquered by the human endeavour. Hidden behind this notion is an unconscious rationale. An inflated, idealistic, conscious standpoint is really predicated on overcompensation, a defensive attempt at holding the dark forces of unconscious nature at bay.

We can observe a similar phenomenon at times of looming crisis. At the very point when things start to go bad, companies furnish their luxurious office buildings with fountains and hanging gardens, and executives are lavished with great bonuses. In this fashion, due to a compensatory tendency, conscious notions are inflated. By an almost religious logic, the entirety of the global community must needs be involved. All people have the "right" to all the boons of the welfare state and must henceforth be thoroughly relieved of suffering.

It is interesting to compare the current ideal with the Islamic state, and the Third Reich, where the doctrine of world dominion is equally central. Here, the ultimate goal is to achieve a comfortably controlled existence in the life of the subject, who is not expected to think for himself. A society of this kind is not unlike a protected Kindergarten where each and everybody is expected to lead a wholly automated life. Under such circumstances a person will never learn to grow up to become a psychologically independent individual. The tenets of consciousness are to rule uncontested, especially if they are formulated in a book such as the Quran. True and heartfelt expressions of unconscious nature, and of true spirituality, are being suppressed by a conscious rule which has become inflated, stale, and bloodless.

Chuang-tzu

The Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu (4th century B.C.) was bitterly antagonistic to the strong society, in any form. He is a true fount of wisdom, yet his thinking contrasts strongly with the general frame of mind of today's Westerner. He sometimes tends to the extreme, but this makes his cogent points all the clearer. His thoughts are almost antithetical to today's celebrated notion of society as a good mother. Chuang-tzu's philosophy is a potent remedy for the upsurge of matriarchal sentiment and its close attendant, namely the inflationary conscious ideas and mores. From the chapter 'Broken Suitcases':

To guard yourself against thieves who slash open suitcases, rifle through bags and smash open boxes, one should strap the bags and lock them. The world at large knows that this shows wisdom. However, when a master thief comes, he simply picks up the suitcase, lifts the bag, carries off the box and runs away with them, his only concern being whether the straps and locks will hold! In such an instance, what seemed like wisdom on the part of the owner surely turns out to have been of use only to the master thief!

I will try to explain what I am saying. What the world at large calls a wise man, is he not really just someone who stores things up for the master thief? Likewise, isn't the one they call a sage just a guardian of the master thief's interests?

How do I know all this? Long ago in the state of Chi, all the little towns could see each other and the cockerels and dogs called to each other. Nets were cast and the land ploughed over an area of two thousand square miles. Within its four borders, ancestral temples were built and maintained and shrines to the land and the crops were built. Its villages and towns were well governed and everything was under the guidance of the sage. However, one morning Lord Tien Cheng killed the ruler and took his country. But was it just his country he took? He also took the wisdom of the laws of the state, created by the sages. SoLord Tien Cheng earned the title of thief and robber, but he was able to live out his days as secure as Yao or Shun had done. The smaller states dared not criticize him and the larger states did not dare attack. So for twelve generations his family ruled the state of Chi. Is this not an example of someone stealing the state of Chi and also taking the laws arising from the wisdom of the sages and using them to protect himself, although he was both robber and thief?

I will try to explain this. What the world at large calls someone of perfect knowledge, is this not in fact the person who stores up things for a great thief? Those commonly called sages, are they not responsible for securing things for the great thief?[...]

So it is that the sage brings little to the world but inflicts much harm.[...] When the sage is born, the great thief arises. Beat the sages and let the thieves and robbers go, then the world will be all right. When the rivers dry up, the valley is empty. When the hill is levelled, the pool is filled.

If the sage does not die, then great thieves will continue to arise. The more sages are brought forth to rule the world, the more this helps people like Robber Chih. Create weights and measures to judge by and people will steal by weight and measure; create balances and weights and people will steal by balances and weights; create contracts and legal agreements to inspire trust and people will steal by contracts and legal agreements; create benevolence and righteousness to ensure honesty and even in this instance benevolence and righteousness teach them to steal.

How do I know all this? This one steals a buckle and he is executed, that one steals a country and he becomes its ruler. Yet it is at the gates of rulers that benevolence and righteousness are professed. Surely this is a case of the wisdom of the sages, benevolence and righteousness being stolen? So people rush to become great robbers, to seize estates, stealing benevolence and righteousness, and taking all the profits of the weights and measures, balances and weights, contracts and legal arguments. Try to prevent them with promises of the trappings of power, they don't care. Threaten them with execution, and this doesn't stop them. For by profiting those like Robber Chih, whom none can stop, the sage has made a great mistake.

It is said, 'Just as you do not take the fish away from the deep waters, so the means of controlling a country should not be shown.' The sage is the means of control, so the world should not see him clearly.[...]
Ignore the behaviour of Tseng and Shih, shut the mouth of Yang and Mo, purge benevolence and righteousness, and the true Virtue of all under Heaven will display its mystic power. When people have true clear vision, no one in the world will be duped;[...]
Those such as Tseng, Shih, Yang, Mo, the musician Kuang, craftsman Chui or Li Chu showed off their virtue on the outside. They made the world aflame with admiration and so confused the world: a way of proceeding which was pointless.[...] This is the fault of those in authority who search for good knowledge. If those in authority search for knowledge, but without the Tao, everything under Heaven will be in terrible confusion. (Chuang-tzu, 1996, pp.76-80)

A decaying society

A strong society is being built, whether it's a welfare society or a dictatorship, by resort to doctrinal concepts, detailed legislation, social engineering, etc. But ambitious efforts only contribute to society's demise. Sweden's strong welfare system is today undergoing decay. A perfectly bizarre example is the way in which people, especially immigrants from Africa's horn, are making use of their right to social allowance and child benefit in order to give birth to very many children, sometimes as many as fifteen. People from this part of the world have their roots in a matriarchal culture, meaning that motherhood, in itself, and to beget many children, is regarded as model conduct. To have many children, combined with little or no work, is regarded as a marker of status. Thusly, many people will build a life exclusively on the shoulders of other people, relying wholly on the welfare system.

Of course, the drone mentality stands in sharp contrast to the mores of the society in which the welfare system originated, while it has its roots in the patriarchal conception. It was always taken for granted that people shall have acquired an earned income before deciding to marry and settle down. The system wasn't meant to be used in this way. So the excellently thought-out system, produced by the "sages" of social welfare, is now working against the very foundation of society. This example is, after a fashion, a counterpart of the Robber Chih story and illustrates finely Chuang-tzu's point.

Remarkable, also, is the way in which the old notions of "fair and just" have acquired a much different meaning. Today, it is viewed as a "right" to get one's provision, along with food on the table. It has come to be viewed as only "fair and just" that everyone should be able to beget many children. After all, rich people have recourse to all the goods of life, so why shouldn't everybody on earth? Originally, it was only regarded as "fair and just" that they who should be rewarded are the ones who make good use of their moral and intellectual resources, and workers who have made their daily toil, whereas the drone is justly being reduced to simple circumstances.

Somewhat oversimply, the latter standpoint portrays the original and patriarchal view of justice and fairness, originating with the juridical State. It is remarkable how, in many a Western society, justice and fairness have come to mean something very different. European countries are today bound by law, national and supranational, to accept more and more immigrants. They are also expected to support third world nations in a way which only passivates and corrupts these states, and enables the inhabitants to have even more children. Moreover, within the EU, parties are working toward a new legislation that makes the European states legally bound to provide a certain level of welfare for the individual. The individual shall have the legal right to always have all his fundamental needs satisfied. This is matriarchy with a vengeance. Another appropriate term is socialism, although it doesn't bespeak the underlying unconscious motif, as being described in this article.

Creative mythology

The fundamental question remains, the one which O. E. Klapp asks above, namely what it means to awaken the symbolic consciousness. How can we tackle banal materialism, and its inherent destructiveness, which lurks behind its splendid facade? In Joseph Campbell's terms, our society is lacking in the expression of "creative mythology." The ability to relate to symbolical existence - in an alternative reading; spiritual presence - has a wholesome effect on the individual, and therefore also on society. The "Dream Time" of the traditional Australian aborigine is a parallel spiritual realm, transcending and overlapping material reality. An individual always stands in relation to this sphere. In fact, mankind has always lived in a semi-spiritual world. Later in history, the book religions came to condemn the creative and flexible relation with the symbolical realm, while the symbol had once and for all been fixed in the creed. Today's culture is become permeated with bookishness - in this respect the book religions have succeeded.

Historically, only the mystic has been able to lead a symbolical life, provided that he shut his mouth about it. Discursive information has a much higher status than non-discursive symbolic imagery, an imbalance which it is urgently necessary to rectify. Rejecting literalism and rationalism is today becoming more and more urgent, if we're not going to end up in a collective neurosis. Campbell (1968) discusses this problem:

[When] the symbolic forms in which wisdom-lore has been everywhere embodied are interpreted not as referring primarily to any supposed or even actual historical personages or events, but psychologically, properly "spiritually," as referring to the inward potentials of our species, there then appears through all something that can be properly termed a philosophia perennis of the human race, which, however, is lost to view when the texts are interpreted literally, as history, in the usual ways of harshly orthodox thought.

Dante in his philosophical work the Convito distinguishes between the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical (or mystical) senses of any scriptural passage. Let us take, for example, such a statement as the following: Christ Jesus rose from the dead. The literal meaning is obvious: "A historical personage, Jesus by name who has been identified as Christ (the Messiah), rose alive from the dead." Allegorically, the normal Christian reading would be: "So likewise, we too are to rise from death to eternal life." And the moral lesson thereby: "Let our minds be turned from the contemplation of mortal things to abide in what is eternal." Since the anagogical or mystical reading, however, must refer to what is neither past nor future but transcendent of time and eternal, neither in this place nor in that, but everywhere, in all, now and forever, the fourth level of meaning would seem to be that in death - or in this world of death - is eternal life. The moral from that transcendental standpoint would then seem to have to be that the mind in beholding mortal things is to recognize the eternal; and the allegory: that in this very body which Saint Paul termed "the body of this death" (Romans 6:24) is our eternal life - not "to come," in any heavenly place, but here and now, on this earth, in the aspect of time.[...]

"The true symbol," [Thomas Merton] states again, "does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself. A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle, not to another point on the circumference. It is by symbolism that man enters affectively and consciously into contact with his own deepest self, with other men, and with God."[...]

The poet and the mystic regard the imagery of a revelation as a fiction through which an insight into the depths of being - one's own being and being generally - is conveyed anagogically. Sectarian theologians, on the other hand, hold hard to the literal readings of their narratives, and these hold traditions apart. The lives of three incarnations, Jesus, Krishna, and Shakyamuni, will not be the same, yet as symbols pointing not to themselves, or to each other, but to the life beholding them, they are equivalent. To quote the monk Thomas Merton again: "One cannot apprehend a symbol unless one is able to awaken, in one's own being, the spiritual resonances which respond to the symbol not only as sign but as 'sacrament' and 'presence.' The symbol is an object pointing to a subject. We are summoned to a deeper spiritual awareness, far beyond the level of subject and object."

Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions, are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a "presence" or "eternity" that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great poetries, and all mystic traditions are in accord; and where any such inspiriting vision remains effective in a civilization, everything and every creature within its range is alive. The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill if it is to render life to modern lives is that of cleansing the doors of perception to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves, and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind. Whereas theologians, reading their revelations counterclockwise, so to say, point to references in the past (in Merton's words: "to another point on the circumference") and Utopians offer revelations only promissory of some desired future, mythologies, having sprung from the psyche, point back to the psyche ("the center"): and anyone seriously turning within will, in fact, rediscover their references in himself. (Campbell, 1968, pp.264-66)

Conclusion

A personification of the dark feminine has been missing in symbolical consciousness. Symbolic poverty has allowed the spirit of the feminine to unite with matter, by means of a projection. The projective content is what underlies the materialistic and bodily fixated welfare state, and the inflation of banal conscious values.

Moral infantilism is conditioned by a psychological mother dependency. The natural darkness of existence is not heeded as a genuine and quintessential aspect of reality. Hence a naively idealistic consciousness finds suffering and the diverse forms of evil unacceptable. Moral weakness implies an incapacity to carry suffering in one's own heart, and it follows that its existence must be suppressed or engineered away.

Goodness is not coupled with instinct anymore. From the original Christian "morality of the heart" the Western world has gone over to an ethics by decree. This tells us Europeans, for instance, that we must take responsibility for all peoples of the earth, and also allow them shelter and free provision in our countries. But there is no feeling adaptation in this, it is a mere ethics of the intellect, wholly lacking in instinct. The intellectually moralistic aspiration that all suffering can be eradicated, is a form of inflation, which will have dire repercussions on society in the future.

In fact, the historical Jesus of Nazareth renounces riches and an opulent lifestyle. Instead he advances a frugal lifestyle. It's a mystery how his message has turned into its opposite, so that we now think that helping people out of poverty is the ideal Christian conduct. As is obvious from the scripture, Jesus saw material privation as a prerequisite of spiritual advancement. But we destroy people's chances of meaningful lives. We don't need to assume the role of benign worldly benefactors, spreading the gospel of materialism and worldly goods. This is downright anti-Christian.

A reappraisal of the natural morality of Chuang-tzu is necessary, and a return to the original teachings of Jesus. The latter taught us not to resist evil. He warned against the all too human tendency, the inflation actually, to pursue shadow problems which are not one's own. The conceited notion that evil can be conquered by means of rational designs is refuted both by history and the teachings of Chuang-tzu. Purportedly, the many forms of evil and destructive forces can be conquered by rational engineerings, also interventions in other countries. Perhaps it would have been better to leave Saddam Hussein be, instead "putting a little drop of consciousness in and then retiring". Eventually, the snake will eat itself up.

The discursive intellect, fixated as it is on information, has overruled the symbolic and ritual way of relating to reality, also in the realm of ethics. To remedy this, we must begin to take non-discursive imagery seriously. What's necessary is an heightened awareness of the unconscious, hence to overcome the naive mentality coloured by literalism, base concretism, and overly strong attachment to the material and the bodily, indicative of an unconscious dependency on the mother complex.

Our inability in the symbolic realm has divested us of the rituals, well-known to primitive man, by which the child is taken up into the fellowship of men, thus acquiring manhood and full human value. Comparatively, in the present era, enormous resources are invested in the prematurely born child. Since it has all the bodily organs, a rationally determined ethics accords the foetus with human value. Every technological means of prolonging its life is employed, while the consequences of physical and mental debility are disregarded.

Historically, thanks to our relation with symbol and ritual, mankind has always been able to deal with moral problems of this kind. Today, machinelike rationality goes to any length trying to evade the problem of death, and the gruesome side of life on this earth.

© Mats Winther, 2009

Notes

sin transference: the notion of sin transference did not begin with the moral conceptions of the world religions. It derives from the archaic functioning of the psyche. Sin, in its original meaning, is a survival of the animistic era. It is almost like a substance, and therefore it is a neutral concept. It is what destroys wholeness and health, and what causes devitalization. The transfer of sin to a victim, like in the human sacrifice of the innocent, has a therapeutic function in that the participators are relieved of their own failings, which are transferred to the victim.

References

Campbell, J. (1968)	Creative Mythology. Penguin Compass.
------- (1973)	Myths to Live By. Bantam Books.
Chuang-tzu (1996)	The Book of Chuang-tzu. Penguin. (transl. Palmer/Breuilly.)
Franz, M. L. v. (1980)	Alchemy - An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology. Inner City Books.
------- (1993)	The Feminine in Fairy Tales. Shambala. (orig. publ. 1972.)
Klapp, O. E. (1969)	Collective Search for Identity. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
Marcuse, H. (1965)	'Repressive Tolerance' in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Wolf, et al., 1970). Beacon Press.

Jerome Kills Small - Sisoka Luta

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 03:44:45 PST

We Act Out the Creation Story

I'm Jerome Kills Small from the Pine Ridge Reservation in western South Dakota. My Lakota name is Sisoka Luta (shee-sho-kah Loo-tah), which translates to Red Robin, but I always say Cardinal .

I'm from the Red Star side of the family. My ancestral grandfather is Man Afraid of His Horses, and Young Man Afraid of His Horses. Young Man Afraid of His Horses had three other brothers. The first one, his name was Black Mountain Sheep, and they called him Chinska (sheen-sh-ka), Spoon, because we make spoons out of the mountain sheep horn. We boil it and make it soft, and we make ladles and spoons, and I have mountain sheep spoons and buffalo horn spoons and ladles. I keep them for memory of what I was told, and I still live that way.

Every chance I get, I like to show off my ancestral name. Man whose horses are feared was one of my grandfathers. Young Man Afraid of His Horses, one of his brother's names is Tashunk Kokipa pi (Tah shoon-kah Ko-kee-pah pee). In English the name is translated as Man Afraid of His Horses. Another one was Clown Horse and these came all from a dream. The old man named all of his relatives through Hambleceya. He went to the Gray Horn Butte, what we know as Devil's Tower. He did his fasting there and named each of these boys, and the last one's name is Red Star, and I'm a direct descendant of Red Star on my mother's side. We're a matriarchal society, so we generally take the last name of the mother. So my name on the tribal rolls is Red Star, and Kills Small secondary, which is my father.

When I was a small boy I remember being blind. When I was healed and I came to, I was in Kyle (Medicine Root), South Dakota, Medicine Root District, they say, and it's Peji Haka (Peh-zhee Hka-kah) They always say there's a lot of medicine in that Yellow Bear Canyon. It's a big canyon down there by Allen, South Dakota. Well, we lived on the edge of Yellow Bear Canyon in Kyle, South Dakota. That's where I knew that I was alive and the first time my mind started to record, I started to know these people. They were Grandma and Grandpa Louisa and Edward Spotted Crow. They were in their nineties when I was a small boy. They're the ones that helped to heal me when I was blind.

A medicine man by the name of Jess Steed is the one that made me see, and I like to say his name because I'm his document, I'm his doctoral thesis. I'm his doctoral dissertation. I'm the example. I'm the document of that medicine man. So it's up to the people to say who's the medicine man not the medicine man himself. It's the people who are the documents. If many documents say that that person healed me, then he must be the right person to go to. Then we know, by that circle of people, of how our stories run, through individuals.

They would tell a lot of things, and I'd just sit there and listen, and sometimes I would hear about their travels all over this land. They even talked about the depression. When there was no food, nothing could grow, a lot of grasshoppers, they tell about that. They used to say they went all the way to Wyoming. There was a store over there where things were very, very cheap, and they said that it was the Gray Medicine, Sage, Peji Hota (Peh-zhee-Hko-tah) that means Wyoming. It's called the sage land because of the sage brush, and they said when they went over there, they would remember when they used to go to the He Ska (Hke-skah). the Rocky Mountains. They used to go over there to look for medicine. We get the mountain sage and a lot of the medicines over there. They would come back through the Scotts Bluff area, back this way. They would tell all the places where they roamed, just to complete their shopping (you-sh-taahn), their going around and bringing things home for the winter.

So they were in touch with other tribes. We have relatives in Montana, in Lodge Grass, from the old days we went through. My great-grandparents went through adoption ceremonies over there, and we're related to the La--LaForge over there in Lodge Grass, and I go over there and they welcome me. I met a lot of those people over there. We go over there for Christmas powwow, when holidays were starting to become popular, when I was a small boy. So I started to see the land, where we traveled, and see those kinships. They were not of our tribe, but we had Hunka (Hoon-kah) or making of relatives ceremony with other tribes a long time ago.

So the textbooks, it kind of knocks it on the head that we were traditional enemies. It just doesn't work with me, as a traditional person. I think that's propaganda. I don't think it's true because we intermarried through those big trade fairs. I said, "At least they'll peek into the window of the ancient ones, the ones who had created that foundation of respect." That foundation was not written. The foundation of our life is written in our hearts. We have oral traditional history. It's written in each and every person, and that's the comfort because it's in each and every one of us. We are the ones that tell the stories by acting it out. We are the ones who, if we say "Genesis, Creation," it's written down in the holy books that we have, and if they're written down, they're for everybody.

For us, the Lakota and many tribes who are like us, what we do is act out creation through the purification lodge. Each time the man, who is the spiritual person, pouring the water on the stones, the breath of life licks you in there, and it comes to you. It licks you, and you feel refreshed. They put different types of medicines on them, so they're able to, during that nostalgia of the old ones, if you lived this way, and your ancestors lived this way, for time long lasting, then it's probably in our DNA because some medicines, when I smell them, I would say, "You know, I smell this someplace, but where?" I forgot, on the surface level, but my say deep structure, or this collective unconscious that we all have together, in there someplace it's informing me that we had done that before, or our ancestors did. So it's good to see that happening to my body. My body is being reminded that somebody did this for you before, and it brings that good feeling back. So now, when I sing in the Inipi (ee-nee-pee), the sweat lodge (ceremony), and they put certain medicines on the stones, and I smell them, all of a sudden my grandma and grandpa feel like they're in there in that dark, because I went through this with them, too, in that dark. It feels like that spirit's there, through that smell and it feels so good to know that I'm doing the same things they did, and I'm hoping that somebody else will remember me that way. We pass on that spirituality through even smells and sound. We pass it on.

And so when they put the stones, and then the water on the stones, and the mist comes to us, I always, as a scholar of spirituality, remember even in Genesis, it says that God breathed life onto man, but we didn't write it. We act it out. We breathe. We made it breathe onto us, and we act out the creation story all over again, the soup of life. This is how it was, a long time ago, when it wasn't written in the books. This is how it was. We did it for time everlasting, to be able to know that it feels human. Ikce Wicasa (Eek-cheh Wee-chah-shah), ordinary man.

*************************************************************************************

Jerome Kills Small, Red Robin, of Pine Ridge, South Dakota is Oglala Sioux. Jerome's great grandfather's name was Old Man Afraid of His Horses. He had four sons; Young Man Afraid of His Horses, Red Star, Black Mountain Sheep and Clown Horse. Red Star is the father of Jerome's Mother. Old Man Afraid of His Horses chose his son's names by experiences he had during Hanbleceya (vision quest ceremony) at Grey Horn Butte (known as Devil's Tower). He is the oldest of eight children and was always raised by his grandparents. He was blind as a child until a medicine man, Jess Steed, healed his eyes. He attended Holy Rosary Mission and spent summer vacations in Porcupine, South Dakota. Originally the Oglala occupied land west of the Missouri to the Big Horn Mountains south to the Platt River and north to Montana. The Lakota treaty land gradually shrank to the Black Hills area for a short time until the discovery of gold and then the reservation system was developed. Today, the reservation is next to the Badlands. The terrain consists of range, valleys, meadows great for alfalfa, fields of corn and sugar beets, creeks and streams and the hilly higher altitudes have lots of pine trees.

Jerome is the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from South Dakota Humanities Council, Reconciliation Award from the Governor of South Dakota, George Nickleson, University of South Dakota Poet of the Year in 1994, and he has awards and certificates for speaking at Red Road Retreat and the Building Bridges Conference. He has been in several videos for Iowa State University.

Jerome has many talents and as a traditional storyteller and oral historian, he presents workshops for both adults and children. Presently he portrays Tecumseh and Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, the first medicine doctor of the Lakota people, for the Nebraska and South Dakota Speaker's Bureau and Chautauqua Series. He knows the origins and stories behind the flag song, patriotic songs of the Lakota, ceremonial songs, songs of the Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee and Big Foot. He is an arena director, conducts ceremonies, and explains cultural protocol. He makes drums and drum sticks, does feather work, made the staff for the first sun dance at Vermillion and constructs sweat lodges. Jerome and his wife grow and harvest foods and medicines in the Lakota tradition.

PRESENTATIONS OF JEROME KILLS SMALL

Trickster Stories

Jerome tells funny stories of the trickster, Iktomi. Jerome acts out the story to make up for the expletives that are lost in telling a trickster story in English. Expletives are spontaneous sounds made to forecast the content of a sentence in the Iktomi story. So if Iktomi was to do something shameful a fitting Lakota expletive would be uttered at the beginning of a story line. The sounds are absent in writing a Lakota story that were necessary to set up an expected response.

THE HERMIT, OR THE GIFT OF CORN

noreply@blogger.com (John L Cannon) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 02:27:53 PST

In a deep forest, far from the villages of his people, lived a
hermit. His tent was made of buffalo skins, and his dress was made
of deer skin. Far from the haunts of any human being this old
hermit was content to spend his days.

All day long he would wander through the forest studying the
different plants of nature and collecting precious roots, which he
used as medicine. At long intervals some warrior would arrive at
the tent of the old hermit and get medicine roots from him for the
tribe, the old hermit's medicine being considered far superior to
all others.

After a long day's ramble in the woods, the hermit came home late,
and being very tired, at once lay down on his bed and was just
dozing off to sleep, when he felt something rub against his foot.
Awakening with a start, he noticed a dark object and an arm was
extended to him, holding in its hand a flint pointed arrow.

The hermit thought, "This must be a spirit, as there is no human
being around here but myself!" A voice then said: "Hermit, I have
come to invite you to my home." "How (yes), I will come," said the
old hermit. Wherewith he arose, wrapped his robe about him and
followed.

Outside the door he stopped and looked around, but could see no
signs of the dark object.

"Whoever you are, or whatever you be, wait for me, as I don't know
where to go to find your house," said the hermit. Not an answer
did he receive, nor could he hear any noises as though anyone was
walking through the brush. Re-entering his tent he retired and was
soon fast asleep. The next night the same thing occurred again,
and the hermit followed the object out, only to be left as before.

He was very angry to think that anyone should be trying to make
sport of him, and he determined to find out who this could be who
was disturbing his night's rest.

The next evening he cut a hole in the tent large enough to stick an
arrow through, and stood by the door watching. Soon the dark
object came and stopped outside of the door, and said:
"Grandfather, I came to--," but he never finished the sentence,
for the old man let go his arrow, and he heard the arrow strike
something which produced a sound as though he had shot into a sack
of pebbles. He did not go out that night to see what his arrow had
struck, but early next morning he went out and looked at the spot
about where he thought the object had stood. There on the ground
lay a little heap of corn, and from this little heap a small line
of corn lay scattered along a path. This he followed far into the
woods. When he came to a very small knoll the trail ended. At the
end of the trail was a large circle, from which the grass had been
scraped off clean.

"The corn trail stops at the edge of this circle," said the old
man, "so this must be the home of whoever it was that invited me."
He took his bone knife and hatchet and proceeded to dig down into
the center of the circle. When he had got down to the length
of his arm, he came to a sack of dried meat. Next he found a sack
of Indian turnips, then a sack of dried cherries; then a sack of
corn, and last of all another sack, empty except that there was
about a cupful of corn in one corner of it, and that the sack had
a hole in the other corner where his arrow had pierced it. From
this hole in the sack the corn was scattered along the trail, which
guided the old man to the cache.*

From this the hermit taught the tribes how to keep their provisions
when traveling and were overloaded. He explained to them how they
should dig a pit and put their provisions into it and cover them
with earth. By this method the Indians used to keep provisions all
summer, and when fall came they would return to their cache, and on
opening it would find everything as fresh as the day they were
placed there.

The old hermit was also thanked as the discoverer of corn, which
had never been known to the Indians until discovered by the old
hermit.

*Hiding place.
This etext was created by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska.
The equipment: an IBM-compatible 486/50, a Hewlett-Packard
ScanJet IIc flatbed scanner, and Calera Recognition Systems'
M/600 Series Professional OCR software and RISC accelerator board
donated by Calera Recognition Systems.
Myths and Legends of the Sioux
by Marie L. McLaughlin

October, 1995 [Etext #341]

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Myths and Legends of the Sioux
by Marie L. McLaughlin.

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