It appears that humanity has always ridden the Mindway in search of wisdom, insight, and community

 

The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World – Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello, Karen Polinger Foster, Editors (2022)

 

            While I treasure and adore all books, it is books such as this one that thrill me the most because of the amazing amount of information included within.  Having read books on shamanism, ancient humans, and myth creation recently, I was thrilled when this book appeared in my hands while browsing the stacks.  The editors of this work, Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello, and Karen Polinger Foster have provided the world with a magnificent resource exploring a seldom-analyzed part of our collective human past, that being the use and exploitation of what the writers term “Altered States of Consciousness,” ASC for short.  For far too long archeologists and anthropologists saw ancient man through our own modern “enlightenment” principles, ignoring all “subjective” experience such as trance, spirit possession, hallucinations, etc., in favor of empirically verifiable data.  This created a vast chasm of ignorance regarding the spiritual and mental lives of our ancestors.  It is the aim of this work to rectify that and to help guide the exploration of our distant human past towards a better understanding of the role ecstatic experiences had in the shaping of our species.  It is an impressive achievement.

            Formatted much like a textbook, each section presents a case for the omnipresence and importance of ecstatic experience in understanding the cultures of our ancient past.  The first section of three chapters, titled “Setting the Stage,” explores the history of ASC dismissal by biased researchers and explorers of our past, providing a firm foundation upon which to expand the explorations each writer takes in turn, and showing how universal these ecstatic experiences were.  These chapters also expand on what used to be the definition of “ecstasy” to include all types of societal, spiritual, and shamanic altered states of consciousness.  The third chapter of the first section aims to provide empirical models to define ritual practices and ecstatic experiences, from ancient man to today’s modern world.  It helps place these studies, and ASC’s themselves, within the greater study of humanity and its development, something which mainstream archeology and anthropology has dismissed for centuries.

            The second section seeks to elucidate the evidence we have for the various types of psychoactive compounds, plants, and substances used by our ancestors to achieve ASC states.  Evidence from archeological digs, mass-spectrometry, and other modern tools is given to show the wide variety of ingestible, smokable, or otherwise applied natural materials used in ecstatic rituals.  The full gamut of intoxicants is analyzed, from botanical specimens and residue found within sealed jars, to the early use of fermentation to create drinkable alcohol, to the various mind-altering plants used by the Babylonians, Hittites and early Egyptians, all recorded in their language and art.  To emphasize the communal use of these substances, the final chapter of section 2 discusses a type of ceramic container found throughout ancient sites.  The Ring-Kernoi is a device consisting of a ceramic tube, shaped into a donut, with four to five adorned containers attached to the ring.  Looking at these artifacts through the lens of ASC experience, the author describes their use in ritual communion.  Each adorned section contained wither a different psychoactive compound, whether opium, cannabis, mandrake, etc., meant to be smoked in sequence and passed around, or they contained different liquid substances which, when mixed up in the Ring-Kernoi, created an intoxicating brew capable of easing the passage into ecstasy.  For our ancestors, the divine, experienced through ecstatic states, was a communal activity, a very important way to define their culture and self-identity as individual groups. 

            The third section of this awesome book goes into detail exploring the numinous world of ecstatic experiences, as described by ancient humans in their own words.  Starting with a dive into the most ancient archeological sites we have found, such as Çatalhöyük, and the discovery of a communal imbibing of alcohol, whether plain or adulterated with other psychotropic substances, which took place in massive megalithic spaces, many of them underground or only accessible through narrow openings.  These are the first evidence for the types of communal, spiritual experiences out of which the human need for religious communion arose.  Delving into ancient rituals for the goddess Ishtar, the writings concerning the dead from Egypt, and the ASC’s described by the ancient residents of Crete and the Minoan civilization that followed, helps us grasp the constant flow of ideas and wisdom that propelled our humanity forward.  From these ancient civilizations we then move onto ritual experience in ancient Greece, and the various cults and oracles which took advantage of ASC’s to promote their ideology.  Ecstatic experiences were a critical part of many cults, including those of the healer Asclepius, and the gods Apollo and Dionysius. As with all roads, the section ends with an analysis of the ecstatic funeral processions recorded from ancient Rome.  These chapters help bridge the gap between our assumed knowledge of the ancients towards a more factual and historical basis, drawing from the many written records we have of Greece, Rome and their neighbors at the time.

            The final section of this great work focuses on the evidence we have from our collective past pointing to, or describing, the experiences of the “Ecstatic” mind.  This section builds on all the previous ones and shares great insights into such topics as spirit possession and prophetic ecstasy as described in Mesopotamian texts, the psychedelic art from the Aegean, and the progression from personal or communal ecstatic experience to that of rigorous, sacerdotally-dictated ASC’s utilized by the very powerful in all societies to control the masses (think of a modern Catholic service, with its rituals, chants, music, incense, and repetition, intended to draw the congregation together into a shared experience).  The insights found in these final chapters help us understand the evolution and propagation of personal ecstatic experiences into the collective religions we see all around us in our “modern” world.

            This book is a masterpiece of research and science.  I hope to see it used as a foundational text, allowing younger researchers to continue down the same path of exploration, and guiding the elders in these fields towards new ideas and possibilities for scholarship.  When we as a culture disdain “unsavory” aspects of our past, dismissing wholesale anything to do with mysticism, or our long-standing use of chemicals, fauna, trance, song, or rhythms to achieve altered states of consciousness, we negate aspects of ourselves that help us understand each other.  It creates divisiveness where these old rituals and experiences sought to create inclusivity.  It is such a shame that our modern world sees everything we do as the pinnacle of human achievement, all the while forgetting that for most of our human existence we have all had the capability of communing with the divine, of understanding ourselves and our place in the world around us, and of accepting that reality is far greater than the basic facts we all choose to agree upon.  This book is a great step in the right direction, and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in humanity’s psychological and spiritual development.

(This great resource can be purchased here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Ecstatic-Experience-in-the-Ancient-World/Stein-KieltCostello-PolingerFoster/p/book/9781032108483 )

Joan Halifax Elucidates the World of the Shaman for us Wanna-be's

 

Shaman: The Wounded Healer – Joan Halifax (1982)

 

            Sometimes the good books just keep coming!  Whether through synchronicity, plain coincidence, or just dumb luck, this amazing book found its way to my hands, and I am exceedingly glad it did.  Joan Halifax has managed that most-rare of feats, to write a slender volume packed with information and wisdom that is able to elucidate exactly what a shaman is, how they come to be, how their visions and experiences are seemingly universal, and how shamans themselves communicate about the experiences they endure for the betterment or benefit of the tribe around them.  It is eye-opening and quite a departure from the many other ethnographic and historical books I have read about shamanism and the role of the shaman in their respective cultures.

            In a very real and basic sense, the shaman is the one tasked with experiencing pain, death, and rebirth in order for them to understand and act upon the various otherworldly forces and powers that threaten, disrupt, or wrongly influence the tribespeople.  This is why this book is titled “the Wounded Healer.”  Only someone with the experience of death and rebirth can travel the worlds above and below ours.  Only they can talk to the spirits, travel through space and time, and come back to our mortal coil safely with their consciousness intact.

            Joan Halifax describes the various symbols which seem to be near-universal among shamans worldwide.  Some of them, such as the eagle, are emblematic of the shaman’s spirit rising to the world above.  Other symbols, such as the swan, or the water lily, serve as stand-ins for the shaman, for they not only inhabit, but thrive, in all three realms.  The Swan is just as comfortable flying in the heavens, walking around on land, and swimming on and in deep waters, just as the shaman is comfortable existing in our world, the underworld of demons and primal forces, and the aboveworld of the divine and beneficent spirits.  One universal symbol of shamanism is the World Tree, which serves as the Axis Mundi, or center of the world.  The roots of the World Tree reach down into the primordial lower world.  The trunk rises through our corporeal world, and the top of the World Tree reaches into the heavens.  It is this World Tree that shamans “climb” in their journeys and initiations.  The pictographs and artwork showing the World Tree are found everywhere humanity exists.

            One of the most profound statements in this book is a quote from an Iglulik Eskimo (Inuit) shaman told to the explorer Knud Rasmussen,

            “The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls.  All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, souls that do not perish with the body and which must therefore be (pacified) lest they should revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.”

            It is this truth that runs through all shamanistic activity.  If we have souls, then everything has souls, and because of that, everything has its own consciousness.  Shamans do not claim that a stone is as intelligent as a human, but they do claim that the stone has its inherent right to exist just as we do, and that it carries a form of consciousness which is far older than short-lived human creatures.  The same is true for everything we see around us, including mother Earth, and the Universe itself.

            Shamans know that the process of creation, the birth of the Universe and of Life, is always ongoing.  They also are aware that the process of destruction, of the end of things, is also constantly occurring.  They do not see Time as a linear, step-by-step process, like a recipe, or a list of Ikea furniture instructions.  Everything exists in the ever-present Now, and only our faulty human senses show the world to be past, present, and future.  This is how the energy of creation can be harnessed by the shamans, and how they lose the fear of inevitable destruction that we all experience as the fear of death.  It makes for a powerful, if lonely existence. 

Most shamans lead solitary lives, devoted to their calling, and do not interact much with the tribes they protect.  The wisdom and experience gained by their shamanistic initiations and study distance them from the everyday people they serve.  Many people fear the shaman and their powers, yet they are an invaluable and requisite part of human society.  Our modern world, with its emphasis on technology and scientific advancement, has turned its back on shamans, but even so, individual humans seek out and explore the shamanistic way.  Something in our nature is drawn to the unknown, to the rarely explored, and many of us are especially attracted to the inner life of the mind.  The shamans are still all around us, separating themselves from the day-to-day static noise we call human endeavor, exploring that which cannot be seen, and holding the forces of the universe at bay for the rest of us.

Mircea Eliade Guides Us Through Humanity's Use of Initiations' Rites and Symbols

 

Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth – Mircea Eliade (1958)

 

            Sometimes the smallest books can be the most gratifying and educational.  This slim, 136-page volume (not counting the large Notes and Index sections) is loaded with extra jelly. Translated from the original French by one Willard R. Trask, Mircea Eliade’s writing shines as it explores and compiles our knowledge of Initiations, and the various rites and symbols used by all of humanity for this purpose.  It is an amazing piece of writing by the man who was Chairman of the Department of the History of Religion at the University of Chicago.

            As Eliade differentiates at the start of this book, there are essentially two types of initiations.  Both seek to “kill” the previous version of the initiate, in order to rebuild, teach, and create a new human being. The most primordial type is the “puberty” initiation.  In this type of initiation, whether for a male or a female child, the purpose is to end the period of childhood, with its lack of responsibility and participation in adult society, and to “create” a full adult, capable of participating and perpetuating the sociocultural knowledge of the tribe.

            Male and female children are removed from their families for an extended period of time, ranging from several days to over a year in some tribes.  The earliest, simplest initiation rituals for boys consist of the separation from the mothers, whose children are then led away from the tribe by the shaman and elders.  The children are symbolically “buried” under branches and blankets, where they must sit and wait.  This is the time of symbolic death.  All around them, their male elders dance, ritualistically, and through the songs and dances teach the children what is happening.  They are experiencing a death, the death of their carefree childhoods.  They learn that in this death they are taken up to the abode of the gods, and private, secret knowledge is given to them.  This knowledge is what makes them new men in the eyes of their tribe, giving them a cosmology and reason for existence.  After a period of time, they are released from their “grave” and return to the world of their people, assuming the full role of an adult male in the tribe. Their mothers mourn them as if they truly died, for they no longer reside with their moms and aunts and cousins and sisters.  Instead, they now belong to the men of the tribe, until such a time as they themselves marry.  Most simple initiations function in this manner, with the exact details of the instruction and lessons given changing depending on the tribe.

            The more complex puberty initiations of men take on far more danger and pain.  There is the addition of deprivation, such as long days spent in the wild without clothing, or without fire or food.  There is the use of pain, or ritualistic surgeries, such as circumcision and scarification, or even the risk of death against animals or the elements themselves.  Whereas the simpler initiations explain the cosmology of the respective tribe involved, the more complex ones seek to recreate the cosmology, with the initiates taking the place of the initial hero who, through either the will of the gods or his own human intelligence, attains wisdom and knowledge equal to the gods and shares it with his fellow men.  These initiations help the men inculcate the new generation with the history and ancient truths of their tribe.  The young men who return from initiation are reborn as full humans, ready to participate in the world around them.

            The initiations of females differ from the initiations of males, both in method and purpose.  Females have a special clock which dictates their maturity, unlike men.  This clock being the initial start of menstruation.  Female initiations are even more secretive and esoteric than the male ones, for it was the ability of the females of any species to perpetuate life that provided humanity with its first taste of the infinite.  Women and their bodies were the initial symbols used to explain the world around us.  The world of women required a separate initiation. 

            The initiations of young women do not revolve around death and rebirth, but instead focus on attainment.  The onset of maturity is a time for celebration, and the young women are gathered together within a space reserved solely for females.  One of the greatest taboos in the world of tribal humans is that of a man entering the sacred spaces of a woman.  The punishments are severe and swift.  In many tribes, if a man interferes with the initiations of the women, the women have the right to kill that man in order to protect their secrets. 

            The young women are taught about their cosmology and how the universe/earth is a womb, producing the life seen all around.  They are taught to understand that the process of life is universal, which is evident after studying the animals and plants around them.  The initiates learn of their cosmic role in the process of life, and how to care for each other.  These initiations also helped bond all of the tribe’s women together, helping foster mutual altruism.  Women likely held the secret of biological procreation for centuries before males found out.

            One of the critical ideas that Eliade brings is that the rituals and symbols used during these initiations were not just mimics of the initial creation process, but were intended to manifest the sacred and allow the initiate to recreate the very events that created the world around them.  Each initiation is a recreation, literally, of the initial birth of our universe.

            The other type of initiation is that of the shaman.  There are three ways to become a shaman.  The first is when the elders or elder shamans choose an individual child (usually male, and the offspring of a shaman) to be taught and trained.  Another is when a child actively seeks to learn the ways and wisdom of the shamans, as if born to do so.  The third method is when the child’s mental state, attitude, and behavior is so erratic and bizarre that they are then pushed to shamanism so that they may learn to control their minds.  This last method is tribal human’s way of dealing with the mentally ill or unstable among them, allowing that person to have a place in their society, even if it is one removed from the day-to-day world of the tribe, such as the shaman’s.

            Most cultures keep their shaman separate.  They live in privation, do not take part in hunts, and rarely interact with the rest of the tribe.  The shaman’s life is spent fine-tuning their connection to the divine, whether through prayer, fasting, drug use, chanting, or any other such method.  It is this rigor which allows them to commune with the spirit world, detect malicious entities causing harm or illness among the tribe, see the far past and the far future, and travel out of their bodies to what mystics refer to as the Astral Plane.  The shaman is feared as much as he is needed.  Their respective initiation ceremonies shed light on this.

            Whereas in puberty initiations the initiate spiritually “dies” and is “reborn,” the shamanistic initiate is instead fully recreated.  The shamans speak of how, during their initiation, their skin, muscle, and sinew are stripped away, leaving just a skeleton, which their god then re-creates, adding new material until the shaman is reconstituted as a new type of being, one capable of existing in the profane, material world (symbolized by his keeping his initial skeleton), and in the supernatural divine world (symbolized by the new organs, muscle, and skin grafted onto him by the gods).  Once recast as a shaman, they climb the World Tree, the Axis Mundi, and have access to the upper worlds of the gods and the lower worlds of demons and spirits.  Shamanistic initiation is mentally traumatic, and some initiates do not make it back from their foray into the divine.  Recreating the mythical death and rebirth of their god’s/universe’s creation has that effect on some people.

            I found this book fascinating, and resonant to my previous readings on the topic.  By focusing solely on initiations, Mircea Eliade avoids discussions of theology, allowing the reader to think about initiations as a continuing human endeavor.  Eliade describes how, even after the advent of revelatory religion, and monotheism, initiations for other organizations/groups continued to use the framework described above, that of a symbolic death, and a rebirth into a new state of being, a more truly “human” state.  Anyone with knowledge of the Masonic initiations into their 3^rd degree will see the correlations.  Books such as this provide us with knowledge that expands our minds, and helps us understand that human consciousness is an ongoing process, constantly drawing from the deep wells of our past shared humanity, and providing deeper and richer meaning for our lives.

(This book can be downloaded and read here: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.6032/page/n9/mode/2up )