ALMOST AT THE NORTH POLE: LAPLANDERS

Laplanders or Saami (a controversial term like Eskimo)

It’s not very possible to get farther north than the Saami or Laplander culture.  The writer at this site linked below, Michael Drake, is happy to claim that their solstice ceremonies are shamanic, while still acknowledging the interaction with European Christianity or forest mythology.  He also pushes pop stuff like bicycling through Oregon. But if you’re looking for a stocking full of ideas, here you go!

http://shamanicdrumming.blogspot.com/2013/12/winter-solstice-star-ceremony.html

The underlying aspects of the various cultural Winter Solstice celebrations lies rooted deep in Shamanic origins. Amongst the Saami (Laplanders) and Siberians, Buryats and Altaic tribes, all of the far northern climes, there was and is a very common motif in the Shamanic practices surrounding the Winter Solstice ceremonies. There, the people would present the Shaman with gifts of value, according to the nature of each their own culture to officiate the request, be it food, furs or firewood, coin, caregiving or copper. 

A Sacred Tree, or Pole of Ascension, the Axis Mundi, was erected in the center of the Shaman's house or in the common house. This officiated the Shaman being called upon by the people to undergo a Shaman's Little-Death. In this Little-Death the Shaman moves into an intentional near death experience, enabling the Shaman's Spirit to go free of the body and then to travel into the realms and domains accessible to one in that state. ...Shamanic drumming is another method of achieving the prerequisite state of altered consciousness that allows the Shaman to ascend in spiritual ecstasy, or Spirit Flight. The motif of Santa Claus riding the magic sleigh pulled by his flying reindeer is borne from this ancient rite. The Shaman is then able to follow the Spirit Path, represented by the Sacred Tree, that guides him/her to the North Star and from there into the Cosmic Realms.

Earlier times

Drake suggests this is all guided by the ingestion of an entheogen, amanita (potentially deadly) mushrooms, so it rather echoes a peyote ceremony.  His whole approach is very Eliade/Campbell, quite New Age, and for some people a potent alternative to Christian dogma.  “The people call upon the Shaman to go forth, upon their behalf, through the Realms of Darkness - that of the Longest Night, representing the Darkness of their own Souls. The Shaman is engaged to carry the burdens of the Soul - the Soul Essence - of each person and is furthermore charged with the return of a blessing for each. 

“It is to the North Star that we, as Shamans, go. The North Star we refer to as the 'Heart of the Eagle', or the 'Compassionate Heart of Purification'. Emerging from atop the Sacred Tree we come into the presence of the Star that sits above the Tree (sound familiar?). The Shaman is engaged to carry the burdens of the Soul - the Soul Essence - of each person and is furthermore charged with the return of a blessing for each.”  To a modern Christmas Christian, this is not a surprise. 

To a traditional Blackfeet this would strongly echo the “Star Boy” story.  I would love to be able to understand the ideas in the original language and the world-view of the tribe.  I suspect that you could come closer to the original ideas of the Saami than you could in English, as Campbell and Drake must.  (Eliade spoke a number of languages.)  Saami lodges look like Blackfeet lodges and both were drummers, but Saami had no buffalo, so they used reindeer.  Saami were herders and Blackfeet were hunters, so that’s an important difference.

The subject of shaman is a vexed one.  Some people insist that the term may be used only for the specific kind of special person far to the north who was described as dying, riding a nightmare horse into some kind of abyss where his bones are replaced with white quartz, contacting persons who have been dead a while -- rather like Orpheus-- and then reviving, bringing word from that dead person.  But others use the term far more loosely, applying it to almost any indigenous and visionary person.  But this kind of argument applies to almost all spiritual or religious matters, some wishing to be generous and others claiming that it is a corruption not to have every detail specific and effective.

If one takes a purist approach to Christmas, there won’t be much sympathy from those who love to mix the elements and think up more -- Mommy kissing Santa, Rudolph with a red nose bright enough to be a fog beacon, Frosty the Snowman, and whatever the fancy mixed drink of the season might be.  In the days of the Puritans landing in New England, one did at Solstice what those rigid folks always did: fast and pray.  It was always personal -- some overwhelming humanoid choosing to oppress them.

If one pays attention to Eliade and Campbell, the ordinary world becomes filled with the sacred and it is wonderful to think that Saami reindeer might pull a Danish sleigh through Italian skies.  But there is a fundamental difference between the jolly festivals of Christmas when people go deeply into debt and make themselves sick with rich food, versus the Solstice watchers who keep vigil over the dying of the Sun in the cold dark and then its slow return.  Who is the optimist?  The one who eats the last food  -- eat, drink, and (as my ex used to joke) “make Mary” -- run into debt as a vulgar and extravagant defiance of fate?  Or the one who stoically regards the skies with hope?  Or even faith.  Who is the one who will have survived to see the first signs of spring?

I was looking for a nonhuman example of solstice, since festivals are human responses to a cosmic world, and I found it.  This is about reindeer migration, illustrated with photos taken from cameras the animals are wearing.

https://journalofanimalecology.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/the-secret-life-of-wild-reindeer/

WRITING BETWEEN CULTURES

from Terraturepossessions.com

In every human culture there is a mystical edge of magic where what is taken for granted meets the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.  This boundary can create a kind of person who seems able to cross over into some other world and return to the rest of us with powerful new systems and ceremonies.  This includes the resurrection cult we call Christianity with its saints and heretics.  I’m composing this on Saturday as though I were a Seventh Day Adventist or even observing Shabbat, because the European number cult valorizes the number Seven.  Of course, you may be reading it on Sunday because as a cultural Christian I’m just in the habit of the Seventh Day post being a little more concerned with religion than the others, so tend to choose religious subjects for that day.

In the world of indigenous people there are many examples of this phenomenon but they mostly operate in an oral society where their stories are told and ceremonies are enacted privately, or even secretly, in order to escape from a larger dominating culture that would label them and try to eliminate them.  But to a certain kind of seeker, this hiddenness only adds to their power, their sense of privilege.  Those who hurt or wonder or seek solace are MORE attracted than those already content with the mainstream.

The people on this edge who are Blackfeet tend to connect it to political empowerment.  Others pull in sex, dissociation (traditionally among Blackfeet achieved by fasting, dehydration, torture, exposure, rather than drugs), and the ecology itself, emphasizing sun and altitude instead of the Christian water and wind.  Animal symbolism in the north is more about horses and eagles than the SW where coyotes and crows are the messengers.  Phenomena of this sort arrange themselves according to their own logic but then are assigned labels by investigators.  One of those labels is “shaman,” which originally applied to a certain sort of person in the far tribal Russian north.  The concept doesn’t always apply in other contexts, so it is controversial.  The idea of the "medicine man" is related.

Castenada

Though we know Louis Riel, Crazy Horse, and other indigenous visionaries, two others have broken over from oral to written documents:  Black Elk and Castenada.  Both had ties -- interpreters -- in the white academic world.  In fact, Castenada earned a Ph.D. by representing his work as comparative religion.  Black Elk was interpreted and edited by Joseph Epes Brown, a professor at the University of Montana.  Castenada paid little attention to Christianity while Black Elk, who once traveled Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, who was at the original Wounded Knee where a bullet grazed his leg, AND at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was a Christian convert who only slipped his “Sun Worship” below the surface without losing his faith in it.  He said he did this for the sake of his children, who would have to live in a Christian world.

The difficulty in moving from one religious system to another, especially when adding the desire for holocaust-level destruction that constantly invades them, is in trying to locate and resist the supernatural.  The rival is labeled Evil which legitimates killing, whether Crucifixion or Genocide or just Holy War.  Even police pursuing "Law and Order."  

Nationality gets mixed in, confusingly, and values shift between generations over time.  Violence and criminality can act as a validation of the importance of a rival system like Charles Manson’s.  Even a benign movement like Greenpeace can be criminalized.  Even the supposedly beatific Mother Theresa can be seen as a cult leader when one discovers after her death that she was obsessed with depression and lack of faith and all the donations she was sent were not spent on food and medicine, but hoarded in a secret bank account.

Black Elk and Neihardt

From anonymous in Wikipedia:  “Black Elk Speaks” is a 1932 book by John G. Neihardt, an American poet and writer, who relates the story of Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota medicine man. Black Elk spoke in Lakota and Black Elk's son, Ben Black Elk, who was present during the talks, translated his father's words into English.  Neihardt made notes during these talks which he later used as the basis for his book.”  

Black Elk was interpreted by Joseph Epes Brown as a ceremonialist and a benign guru, acceptable to any conscientious person.  Brown's book, called “The Sacred Pipe,” was about those ceremonies.  I asked Professor Brown if I could audit a class of his, which he resisted.  The content was a ritual that was supposed to be performed at a young woman’s coming of age, using the red earth pigment that is common in prairie ceremonies.  Brown said the pigment was supposed to represent the cow bison’s practice of breathing bloody foam from her nose over a calf in order to protect it.  It sounded to me more like a way to attract wolves, but I didn’t say anything.  Brown was a handsome, graceful man, very dignified, fond of turquoise jewelry.  Not a person with whom to pick a quarrel.

from Thehouseofvines.com

Later I realized that he was setting up his class, who busily wrote down this ritual, so that in the following session he could reveal that he’d been playing the trickster in order to raise their consciousness about over-credulous acceptance of faux nature-knowledge.  Tricksters abound in the liminal edge between the primary culture and breakaway systems.

Genre (or, more pejoratively, “pulp”) fiction loves all this stuff.  Montana Gothic fiction uses it poetically to create whole worlds of visions and exploits, extraordinary people, and embeddedness in nature.  It also makes a space for a novel like “The Fancy Dancer,” which is a gay romance between a priest and a motorcyclist, a half-breed escapee from Leather Lit.  It's by Patricia Nell Warren, a white contemporary Montana writer.

Grass Dancer

Mainstream critics will attack such stories on grounds that they are immoral or hoaxes or sacrilegious, which are all code for “they are outside my culture stream and therefore I’m justified in condemning them.”  But consciousness of the suffering of Native Americans as the continent was cleared by force, as smallpox and other diseases accompanied the massacres, as the de-cultured impoverished people became addicts to substance dysphoria, as family and ceremonial systems were smashed, others defended the indigenous entitlement to their own ways.  Castenada and Black Elk were therefore honorable.

Lit critics don’t address these dozens of best-selling books.   Black Elk was using his own language, so his books are essentially translations.  Castenada, born in Peru, was also bringing a non-English point of view.  Comparative religion people like Eliade or Campbell are happy to write about them.  They so vividly and persuasively illuminated the numinous.