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 )

Humanity Owes Our Females a Huge Debt

The Gender of Debt: The Last 50,000 Years – Mariano Pavanello (2019)

When I began this book review journey, my wife asked me what I hoped to be a good end-result for this endeavor.  I told her that I wished to create a resource, a website that readers could use to find interesting books to read, and that it would be awesome if writers thought enough of my commentary to seek me out so I could provide a review of their work.  I specifically considered writers of science books, science history, and other such work to be ones I would love to collaborate with and provide reviews of their writing.  Through hard work and diligence, this has indeed come to pass.  I am contacted regularly by book publishers and authors with requests to review their work, which is extremely satisfying.  However, receiving an email from a renowned anthropologist asking if I would consider reviewing their book on my site was a tremendous thrill.  Reading the work, and understanding the implications this book could have on our understanding of human social development, is a privilege.

Mariano Pavanello’s aim with The Gender of Debt is to shed some light on the erroneous assumptions that many anthropologists still hold in regards to the role of labor sharing in early humans, and the motivations that drove the specializations of hunting and food gathering into a sexual division that we still take for granted today.  He seeks to correct the social debt that human males owe to human females, a debt which is never acknowledged in our patriarchal society.

It is currently assumed that what drove humans to develop the society and culture we see around us today was the increase in meat provided by the male hunters of early tribes.  Meat is highly nutritious and full of energy.  The idea was that, as this great resource requires a large expenditure of effort and energy, and came fraught with danger, the risks associated with hunting became more and more a male dominated pursuit, leaving women to tend the camps, care for children and elderly, and gather up other food items such as plants, tubers, honey, and other such food sources as could be collected not too far from their camps.  This, they assume, is what drove the push to patriarchy and male control over women.  Mr. Pavanello goes into great detail explaining why previous researchers and scientists drew these conclusions, and then adroitly points out why these assumptions are dead wrong.  The complexities of human social order do not fall so neatly into the categories our assumptions place them in.

One of the most interesting chapters in this book delves into the scientific literature to explore exactly what we know about how tribal people throughout the world manage to subsist.  Various charts are used to explain the variations between the amount of labor that goes into hunting and the amount of labor that goes into food gathering.  What the data shows, and what is not present in the modern conversation about early man, is that, for the most part, the food gathering side is the crucial one.  It is the side that allows for all other functions of humanity to continue, including long, arduous hunting excursions. Many groups could survive on just food gathering alone, but no one could survive on just hunting alone.  In fact, without the steady, constant work of the food gatherers the hunters would have no sustenance to support their physical work.

Mr. Pavanello posits that, because the hunters realized how much they depended on the gatherers, they began to implement cultural methods by which they would control the females, assuring the hunters of constant food, constant care for their children, and autonomy in the hunting process.  This was not done by coercion or force necessarily, but by the strict codes of societal control, such as food sharing, child care, daughter exchange for marriages, etc.  Most tribal cultures share all food items as a rule.  The gatherers will share their supplies with all in the tribe, while the hunters would divide up the kill for all people to share.  This reciprocity is integral to understanding early human cultures.  It is because of this system that humans thrived in a manner that our Neanderthal and other relative species could not.  Assuring communal survival through food sharing allowed humans to develop free time, to eventually come up with higher social structures such as religion, markets, etc.

What is evident throughout this book is that humanity indeed owes a huge debt of gratitude to the females of our species, for without their abilities, knowledge, and wisdom we humans would have stayed tribal peoples, never developing the complexity and intricacy of our modern human society.  I hope more people read this book, or at least study its conclusions, so that as a society we all accept, understand, and appreciate the achievements of the female of our species, instead of solely focusing on the achievements of male humans in our history.  

This is quite a dense treatise, and explores far more data and ideas than I could possibly cover in this review.  I hope it is a touchstone for scientists and social anthropologists to view the human condition through a new spectrum.  The debt humanity owes to our females is over 50,000 years old, and needs to be addressed sooner than later.  We are all one humanity, with shared goals and shared credit for our successes. 

(This book can be purchased here: Cambridge Scholars Publishing )

Are you looking for the motherload? This is the motherload.

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion – James George Frazer (1890)

            There are very few books that truly qualify as seminal works.  These are books where the content is so original, insightful, and fresh that they create whole worlds of study and exploration in their wake.  Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species (1859) is one.  Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) is another.  In the former, Charles Darwin proposed such well-reasoned and evidenced ideas that 150 years later they still scare the crap out of people whose world-view is barely above a fanciful children’s fable, even though most of the world has accepted Darwin’s conclusions.  The latter book shattered hundreds of years worth of stagnant thought about the nature of our Universe and allowed the development of our modern sciences and society, providing the mathematical tools to greatly expand humanity’s ability to understand and explain the physical nature of our existence.  James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) is of an equal importance, but in the world of comparative religion/mythology and anthropology.  This one book is the main reason that that these fields of study exist.  Without The Golden Bough our modern world would be a very different place. 

            Because of its deep primacy as a source text, The Golden Bough is a book I have seen and read referenced more times than I can imagine as I have read through the works of Joseph Campbell, Robert Anton Wilson, and the like.  In fact, any work of comparative mythology draws from the Golden Bough, if only to try and refute it.  Frazer originally published a one volume edition of this work, only to expand it to two volumes in a second printing a few years later.  For the third printing, Frazer went ahead and included as much of his anthropological and ethnographic research as he could, expanding the whole work to twelve volumes, creating the mother-load for any and all folklorists, mythologists, and comparative religion researchers to draw from.

The book was an immediate success, in part because it scandalized so many “learned” people in England due to its inclusion of the Christian church’s myths and rites and the parallels and origins of these rites that Frazer saw reflected worldwide in nearly every culture he researched.  Even though Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, and Judaism is a codification of Semitic nomad culture’s folklore and beliefs, the “true believers” cannot accept that their holy church is anything other than a brand new revelation, with no parallels or precursors in human history.  This led to The Golden Bough becoming the kind of book that one read and shared in secret, for the power of the church to destroy those it deemed heretics was still strong at the end of the 19^th century.  The devout cannot handle their belief system being called a “myth” for they believe their myths are factual truths.  This has been the truth as long as humans have deluded themselves into believing the lies religions feed them.  However, taking a step back and seeing how one’s beliefs share a common intellectual and “spiritual” thread with beliefs from around the world should in fact do the opposite, at least in an open mind.  It is nothing if not amazing how similar the paths of mythological thought and beliefs are for all people.  We are all one human race after all, regardless of the level of sophistication our culture may be at.

This book starts out as an exploration of a specific myth which relates the story of the King of the Wood, who was tasked with protecting a grove of trees sacred to the goddess Diana near the town of Nemi.  The folklore states that this King of the Wood was chosen to serve for a set amount of time, after which he was sacrificed to the goddess and a new King chosen.  This evolved over the decades and centuries to a situation where the King of the Wood had to fight off challengers to his position at a set time every year or two.  Frazer explores the origins of this myth and then realizes that throughout the cultures of the world similar rites have developed, and that they all draw from even more ancient myths and beliefs, all the way back to a pre-agricultural nomadic human existence.  Primitive man, and indeed many currently tribal peoples, worshipped the animals and vegetables as gods in their own right.  Over the centuries the idea that everything on Earth had its own spiritual existence evolved to where every similar thing was ruled by a specific god external to the object being worshipped.  All corn was ruled by the corn goddess.  All deer existed due to the whims of the deer god.  All of these gods had to be appeased.  Because of this, specific rites relating to life, death, and rebirth were crafted and utilized.  These rituals gave order to the cosmos, allowing man to think he could control the weather, the crop yields, or the bounty of wildlife purposefully through his actions and prayers (magic).  They were all self-consistent.  Eventually, after millennia, the idea developed that the gods were wholly separate from the matter of reality, and that their whims could not be directly controlled by human ritual and magic, but instead the gods must be supplicated and appeased so that they may bestow their favor upon the most worthy.  Once this became the norm humanity created a specific class of human that could intervene with the gods on behalf of the rest of us.  This became the shaman/priest class, and it was them that began codifying their culture’s belief systems.  This is the start of religion as opposed to magic.  Magic was understandable by all, and usable by all.  Religion is not usable by all, and definitely not understood by all, for the very shaman priests designated to aid instead made it more difficult for the individual to have a full picture of their own personal myths.  The “truth” had to be explained by the priest class.  This exists to this very day in all the churches of the world.

          For example, the idea of sacrifice, whether human, animal or plant, arose as a direct response to seeing the world’s vegetation and animals seemingly die every winter and be reborn every spring.  Death brings life.  All life survives by killing.  This was self-evident to primitive man.  Even before the use of agriculture humanity sacrificed to the spirits of nature for a return of the bounty of spring.  Once humanity developed agriculture, the seasonal sacrifices became ever more crucial to ensure that next year there would be rains and a proper harvest.  The rituals of sacrifice from around the world and throughout history share such common features that it is plainly obvious they share a common ground in the human mind.  After sacrificing virgins, first-born sons, captives, and animals, humanity started sacrificing the children of their kings, and their kings themselves.  What would please a god more than the soul of a lofty individual after all?  Frazer goes into great detail about all of this and it is amazing to see the parallels to the sacrifice of Jesus in the Bible.  For most, the sacrifice was the personification of their god.  Many cultures ate of the being they sacrificed in a ritual communion much like Christians eat what they are taught to believe is the actual blood and flesh of Jesus Christ every Sunday at communion.  Nearly all ancient civilizations had religions that spoke of a redeemer god, who died and was resurrected, who was the son of a virgin and who by his sacrifice saved humanity.  Old ritual magic is transformed over time into codified religion, and most of the followers have no idea this is the case. 

          I have wanted to read this book for nearly twenty years, but I was intimidated.  Only after exploring the world of folklore and mythology have I been able to fully absorb what Mr. Frazer is writing about.  One of my goals is purchasing the full twelve volume set of The Golden Bough for my own personal library. For many people who benefit from keeping masses of us ignorant and devout, this book is still very dangerous.  It challenges their right to lord their beliefs over us, and to force us to comply.  There is so much insight and information in The Golden Bough that I know I will enjoy revisiting this book in the future.  Sometimes supposedly seminal works are disappointing, but not this time.  What an amazing piece of intellectual work this is.

(To download or read this book in .PDF format, click here: 
www.templeofearth.com/books/goldenbough.pdf )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

You never know what you will find when you explore, but you will never be the same once you do.

Keep The River on Your Right: Tobias Schneebaum (1969)

In the same vein as the previously reviewed Beasts, Men & Gods, This short book is the first-hand account of a man’s trip into one of the remote regions of our planet, his experiences there, and the changes wrought upon him by his journey.  Whereas in the aforementioned book, the writer was escaping the reach of a destructive and dangerous political revolution, in Keep the River on Your Right, Mr. Schneebaum heads out into the jungles of Peru on a scholastic and artistic mission.  This affords him the time and mentality to explore his inner world and question what he is experiencing and why.

Tobias Schneebaum was a young man who was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to go to Peru and paint.  He hitchhiked his way from New York to Peru and eventually found himself more interested in exploring the wild, unknown jungle than in completing paintings.  He headed out alone and went from small towns, to villages, and ended up in a distant mission, headed by a slightly demented Spanish Priest, and several dozen native people.  He lived with them for several months until hearing about an even more remote tribe, about 6 days travel away.  He headed out alone and upon arrival was welcomed by the group he found.  He describes his assimilation into that tribe, and their day to day lives, all the while detailing his own internal journey. 

This all takes place in a journal that Mr. Schneebaum keeps as he travels.  His writings, purportedly being scribed with several old friends he names “C” and “M” as the audience, read like a mind in discourse with itself.  His descriptions are personal, embroidered with an artistic sensibility, and contain deep thoughts which vex, torment, and delight him as his “old self” dissolves away, leaving him to reconcile who he thought he was with who these native people are.  Being a gay man in the 1950’s USA, his discovery that the men of these tribes regularly engaged in what the western world terms “homosexual” behavior with no shame, or guilt, or anything other than familial kindness and caring really stands out.  The tribe’s interpersonal relationships, their daily lives, and the ever-present lushness of the jungle, are wonderfully described.

This book gained a real level of notoriety, not only because of the openly homosexual subject matter, but because the author details how, after weeks of living with this tribe, and taking part in their hunting parties, fishing expeditions, and daily rituals, the men all gathered up, and went off into the woods together.  They traveled for days, arriving at another tribe’s camp, and the author’s companions proceeded to attack and kill every male in the tribe, leaving the author in shock and violently nauseous.  They then butchered the people, saved some of the meat to take back with them, and cooked some of the flesh.  When one of his tribe-mates offers him a piece of the flesh to eat, he does, and that moment haunts him deeply. 

This book is widely seen as one of the few first-hand accounts of cannibalism that is not tainted by judgmental damnation, such as the accounts of the early Spanish priests in the New World.  It is just one small part of this story, but it weighs heavily on the author, understandably so.  Having lost himself in this insular world where the only concerns are waking up, eating, laughing, loving, and sharing what is available, he finds that who he is cannot be tossed aside so easily.  What he sought was an escape from the world he originally knew, but what he found was that he was a product of that world and could not leave it behind without losing many of the things which made up who he was at his core.  It is a good lesson. 

Mr. Schneebaum was coaxed to travel back to Peru by filmmakers almost 40 years after he departed that world.  He was afraid that he would have to confront his cannibalism, and that all the people he knew would be dead, but he did find some of them again.  They were not unchanged by time.  They had been “civilized,” wore clothes, accepted christianity, and did not speak of their past as cannibals except to show the shame and revulsion experienced by those who had only recently learned that they were “sinning” previously.

(The documentary where Tobias Schneebaum goes back to visit the places he lived in in his youth can be seen in its entirety here: https://youtu.be/hsy2SRu79yw ) 

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )