{"id":293,"date":"2009-07-30T13:42:38","date_gmt":"2009-07-30T20:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/?p=293"},"modified":"2009-07-30T13:46:53","modified_gmt":"2009-07-30T20:46:53","slug":"new-age-spirituality-is-no-more-pure-than-old-time-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/?p=293","title":{"rendered":"New Age Spirituality is No More Pure than Old-Time Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
We must make this article required reading for Mystery School<\/a> members.<\/pre>\n
DO SHAMANS HAVE MORE SEX?\r\nNEW AGE SPIRITUALITY IS NO MORE PURE THAN OLD-TIME RELIGION\r\nBy Robert Wright\r\nSlate<\/a>\r\nJuly 29, 2009\r\n\r\nWouldn't it be great to be back in hunter-gatherer days? Back before the\r\nhuman spiritual quest had been corrupted by the \"relentless onslaught of\r\nWestern scientific materialism\" and \"dogmatic male-dominated religion\"? Back\r\nwhen there were shamans -- spiritual leaders -- who could plug us into \"the\r\nrealm of the magical,\" show us \"the reality behind apparent reality,\" and\r\nthus lead us to understand \"how the universe really works\"?\r\n\r\nThe quotes come from Leo Rutherford, a leading advocate of neo-shamanism,\r\nwhich is a subset of neo-paganism, which is a subset of New Age\r\nspirituality. But the basic idea -- that there was a golden age of spiritual\r\npurity which we fallen moderns need to recover -- goes beyond New Age\r\ncircles. You see traces of it even in such serious scholars as Karen\r\nArmstrong, who wrote in A History of God<\/em> that early Abrahamic religion had\r\ncreated a gulf \"between humanity and the divine, rupturing the holistic\r\nvision of paganism.\"\r\n\r\nAs the author of the just-published book The Evolution of God<\/a>, about the\r\nhistory of religion, I'm primed to do some debunking. But before I start, I\r\nwant to stress two points:\r\n\r\n1) I think it's great for people to find spiritual peace and sound moral\r\norientation wherever they can, including neo-paganism;\r\n\r\n2) I don't doubt that back before Western monotheism took shape there were\r\nearnest seekers of a \"holistic vision\" who selflessly sought to share that\r\nvision.\r\n\r\nWhat I do doubt is that these earnest, selfless spiritual leaders were any\r\nmore common in the heyday of shamanism than today, or that the spiritual\r\nquest was any less corrupted by manipulation and outright charlatanism than\r\ntoday, or that there was a coherent philosophy of shamanism that makes more\r\nsense than the average religion of today.\r\n\r\nOf course, there's no way to resurrect long-dead cultures to find out, and\r\nthere is by definition no such thing as a written record of prehistoric\r\nsocieties. But we have the next best thing: accounts from anthropologists\r\nwho visited hunter-gatherer societies before they had been corrupted by much\r\ncontact with modernity. These anthropologists observed shamans doing what\r\nshamans do: prophesying, curing people, improving the weather, casting\r\nspells, casting out evil spirits, etc. And the anthropological record\r\nsuggests the following about the age of shamanism.\r\n\r\n1) There was a lot of fakery. Eskimo shamans have been seen spewing blood\r\nupon contact with a ceremonial harpoon, wowing audiences unaware of the\r\nanimal bladder full of blood beneath their clothing. The sleight of hand by\r\nwhich shamans \"suck\" a malignant object out of a sick patient and then\r\ndramatically display it works so well that anthropologists have observed<\/tt><\/pre>\n
this trick in Tasmania, North America, and lands in between. Other examples\r\nabound: http:\/\/evolutionofgod.net\/tricks<\/a>\r\n\r\n2) Shamans -- lots of them -- were in it partly for the money. In exchange\r\nfor treating a patient, a shaman might receive yams (in Micronesia), sleds\r\nand harnesses (among the Eastern Eskimo), beads and coconuts (the Mentawai\r\nof Sumatra), tobacco (the Ojibwa of northeastern North America), or slaves\r\n(the Haida of western Canada). In California, if a Nomlaki shaman said,\r\n\"These beads are pretty rough,\" it meant that he would need more beads if he\r\nwas to cure anything that day.\r\n\r\n3) Shamans -- some of them, at least -- were in it for the sex. In his\r\nclassic study The Law of Primitive Man, E. Adamson Hoebel observed that,\r\namong some Eskimos, \"A forceful shaman of established reputation may\r\ndenounce a member of his group as guilty of an act repulsive to animals or\r\nspirits, and on his own authority he may command penance. An apparently\r\ncommon atonement is for the shaman to direct an allegedly erring woman to\r\nhave intercourse with him (his supernatural power counteracts the effects of\r\nher sinning).\" Nice work if you can get it. Sometimes the magic-for-sex swap\r\nwas subtler. Ojibwa shamans, one anthropologist reports, received \"minimal\r\nremuneration,\" working for \"prestige, not pay. One of the symbols of\r\nreligious leadership prestige was polygyny. Male leaders took more than\r\none wife.\"\r\n\r\n4) Shamans -- some of them, at least -- ran protection rackets. Here is\r\nanthropologist Edward Horace Man on shamans in the Andamanese Islands: \"It\r\nis thought that they can bring trouble, sickness, and death upon those who\r\nfail to evince their belief in them in some substantial form; they thus\r\ngenerally manage to obtain the best of everything, for it is considered\r\nfoolhardy to deny them, and they do not scruple to ask for any article to\r\nwhich they may take a fancy.\" Among the Ona of Tierra del Fuego, payment for\r\nservice was rare, but, as one anthropologist observed, \"One abstains from\r\nanything and everything\" that might put the shaman \"out of sorts or irritate\r\nhim.\"\r\n\r\nAs for the \"philosophy\" of shamanism -- the vision that, in Rutherford's\r\nwords, shows us \"how the universe really works\": Well, for the most part,\r\nthe worldview of shamans was a lot like that of followers of early Abrahamic\r\nreligion, except with more gods, more evil spirits, and more raw\r\nsuperstition (though there's more raw superstition in the Bible than most\r\npeople realize).\r\n\r\nOf course, some shamans did have the advantage, compared with biblical\r\nfigures, of psychedelic drugs. An Amazonian drug, as described by one\r\nanthropologist, led the shaman to lie in his hammock, \"growl and pant,\r\nstrike the air with claw-like fingers,\" signifying that \"his wandering\r\nsoul has turned into a bloodthirsty feline.\"<\/tt><\/pre>\n
\r\nSo if shamanism is so crude, how did it get glamorized? In 1951, the\r\nesteemed scholar Mircia Eliade published a book called Shamanism. While he\r\ndidn't whitewash shamanism, he did his best to see its more refined side. He\r\nwrote that Eskimo shamanism and Buddhist mysticism share as their goal\r\n\"deliverance from the illusions of the flesh.\" And shamanism, he said,\r\nfeatures \"the will to transcend the profane, individual condition\" in order\r\nto recover \"the very source of spiritual existence, which is at once 'truth'\r\nand 'life.' \"\r\n\r\nIt's certainly true that ordinary consciousness could use some transcending.\r\nThanks to our designer, natural selection, we tend to be self-absorbed, with\r\na wary sense of separation from most of humanity. And it's true that various\r\nshamanic techniques -- fasting, for example -- can improve things in this\r\nregard (though fasting can also, as in the Native American \"vision quest,\"\r\nconvince you that you've been adopted by some spirit that will, say, help\r\nyou kill more people in battle). Anthropologist Melvin Konner once partook\r\nof the Kung San curing dance, which can last 10 hours and send the dancer\r\ninto a trance state that converts his or her healing energy into useful\r\nvaporous form and fosters discourse with gods. Konner didn't speak to any\r\ngods, but he did report getting \"that 'oceanic' feeling of oneness with the\r\nworld.\"\r\n\r\nI'm for that! In fact, I once did a one-week Buddhist meditation retreat\r\nthat gave me just that feeling. And there are traditions within Judaism,\r\nChristianity, and Islam that are big on oneness. I recommend trying one of\r\nthem -- or trying neo-shamanism. But if you try neo-shamanism, don't be\r\nunder the illusion that you're helping to recover a lost age of authentic\r\nspirituality. Religion has always been a product of human beings, for better\r\nand worse.<\/tt><\/pre>\n
*<\/pre>\n
Robert Wright's new book The Evolution of God is here: \r\n http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0316734918\/esoterictheologi<\/a><\/pre>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We must make this article required reading for Mystery School members. DO SHAMANS HAVE MORE SEX? NEW AGE SPIRITUALITY IS NO MORE PURE THAN OLD-TIME RELIGION By Robert Wright Slate July 29, 2009 Wouldn’t it be great to be back in hunter-gatherer days? Back before the human spiritual quest had been corrupted by the “relentless … Continue reading New Age Spirituality is No More Pure than Old-Time Religion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,128],"tags":[183,185,85,184],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","category-religion","tag-atheism","tag-charlatanism","tag-new-age","tag-shamanism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":295,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions\/295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}