ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IS NOT WHAT I'M DOING

No, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m still thinking about it. But thinking is not exactly what I’m doing either. This is not introspective philosophy where one follows logic and definition to some conclusion. This is not religion sponsored by an institution which tries to control the thinking and lead it to a conclusion that supports the institution. This is not “spirituality” which is pretty much indefinable anyway but can lead to a particularly poisonous sort of self-delusion and a variety of oppressions.

Self-delusion is the whole problem and it is encouraged by the idea that introspection and/or emotional impulse are at the heart of faith — that one leaps to some position and calls it a commitment. I’m not a theologian because I don’t believe in theos of any kind. I’m not a Buddhist, though I try to be empty and non-yearning, but I still respond to suffering and anguish. Maybe a Taoist, but why do I have to be an “ist” at all?

Heraclitus

Who demands these labels? Though I’m attracted to the incomplete ideas of Heraclitus, partly because they ARE incomplete and partly because he seems to speak of constant change and interacting opposites, a sort of dignified version of Bibfeldt, who was a deliberate fantasy anyhow. It’s a bit of a problem that the Wikipedia entry writer is not identified, so it’s impossible to tell what his angle is. There’s always an angle.

“From the lonely life he led, and still more from the apparently riddled and allegedly paradoxical nature of his philosophy and his stress upon the needless unconsciousness of humankind, he was called “The Obscure” and the “Weeping Philosopher”.

“Heraclitus was famous for his insistence on ever-present change as being the fundamental essence of the universe, as stated in the famous saying, “No man ever steps in the same river twice” This position was complemented by his stark commitment to a unity of opposites in the world, stating that “the path up and down are one and the same”. Through these doctrines Heraclitus characterized all existing entities by pairs of contrary properties, whereby no entity may ever occupy a single state at a single time.”

When I used a “travel sermon” that I repeated whenever I was a pulpit guest, I based it on the phenomenon of “sweet spots” in time — the moments when one briefly feels the vastness of the universe but also one’s embedded belongingness in it. It was a Universalist point of view, quite unlike the “frozen-hearted” Unitarian logic and steely mechanisms. 

The two denominations never quite reconciled. Formally they joined in 1961, but were actually joined only by their heretical status in a world dominated by Calvinistic damnation. Each of the four professors at Meadville evaded the problem in his own way: Godbey went to history, Engel went to environment, Shadle went to social service, and Reeves went to physics. They were all dominated by the U of Chicago Div School objection to phenomenology, which seemed to challenge the Christian fantasy, and which stood (seemingly) as the Calvin to their UU variousness.

But I kept thinking about those “sweet spots.” It was also a sweet spot in terms of the work some people were doing on the same campus. Csikszentmihalyi was proposing “flow” as a key to happiness.  Gendlin was close by with "focussing."  Victor Turner was just developing his ideas of the three part “liminal” nature of African ceremonies and Bernie Brown was absorbed in using the concept, though others thought that “liminal” was just another term for “dissociated” but didn’t put it that way. When Jim Jones caused tragedy in Guyana, they said, Calvinistically, “You see how dangerous that liminal state is? Those people were led into psychosis and couldn’t get out.”

Carl Rogers was around, carefully using empathy, and Bettelheim was working with fairytales, though he was later accused of abusing kids. Toulmin was thinking hard but the Derrida folks didn’t like him. In terms of writing, Norman Maclean was in the early stages of Alzheimers, wondering what to do about it. Richard Stern and his love of narrativity helped me. I stole the title of his textbook — “Honey and Wax” — for my “sweet spot” sermon. The thinkers of that time who have come to be crucial to what I and many others are thinking about are Lakoff and Johnson in the frame of metaphor.

Eliade

Mircea Eliade had just the right mix of scholarship and mystery to become a point of pilgrimage for many young aspirants, so he was hidden in our seminary where we passed him in the hallway, too civilized to be a shaman but too elemental to be academic, trailing aromatic tobacco smoke. His basic book, “The Sacred and the Profane” remains one of my most valued sources.

Robert Schreiter, CPPS

The other was Robert Schreiter’s "Constructing Local Theologies” in which, as a priest in orders, he addressed the dilemmas of Christian specifics in a culture that had none of the relevant symbolism. For instance, the pre-contact Inuit ate only meat — that’s all there was — so what could bread and wine mean to them? What is a cross in a land of no trees? Schreiter urged the search for the most essential and deep symbolisms of all people. Technically, he was teaching Catholics how to be missionary celebrants of the Mass.

These are the reference points I acquired academically and still use in my thought. They are phenomenological — perceivable through the senses — even the feeling of the sacred that Eliade asserted. Perhaps sacrality is halfway between institutional theologies and the seductively flowering kudzus of “spirituality.” (Including the gothic ivies of academia, the spirituality of the intellectual.) Perhaps sacrality is a process, an interaction. There are sacralities of evil. Aesthetics of the body and forthright sexuality can be sacralities.

Instead of building a physics-type theory structure, I’m concentrating on defined, time-limited, symbol systems of ceremony that might never be analyzed except through outside observation and imposed definitions, so thoroughly real to the believers that they can't imagine anything different. This is the substance of the second book, “Come Through the Door.”  

I’m trying to find ways to consider the concepts as a celebrant or even a poet. Sacralities should move both ways, both controlled and uncontrolled. Sweet spots might respond to preparation, coming from the poet/celebrant or acting on the poet/celebrant.

“Susanne Langer’s unexplored thesis revolving around the connection of consciousness and aesthetics as well as her unusual use of language in her writing ultimately caused her to be scrutinized by her fellow scholars.” (Wikipedia) I found Langer but was waved off by advisors. She was  female AND phenomenological. Now I find that she is appreciated again, not least because she found and explored past thought in this domain of the “felt”. 

http://www.anthonyflood.com/gardnerlanger.htm 

I’m not bothering with the past very much. I don’t have time. Don’t have the philosophy background and don’t agree, as I’ve said, with introspective rationalisms.

The newest research about the brain is redeeming the great majority of the tissue and connections that result from animal evolution and still go on managing our bodies, certainly our emotions, and sometimes our minds. We have been so arrogantly insistent on logical, ethical, mathematical pre-frontal cortex operations that we have neglected the entire autonomic in-body system, deranging and limiting ourselves.

"The Sacrality of Love" by chicourano

Much social and particularly academic prestige and accomplishment depends upon this theoretical rational domination, gender-assigned to the male. I’m finding that when I explain the necessity of the sensuous and emotional, many upper-class men become angry and denying, particularly if I step over to the rough, stigmatized language of the oppressed. So I do it. Sacrality can be fun, but not if it throws you out of your endowed chairmanship. And this is where the third book, “Patterned Tumult”, is focussed: survival.

WHAT IS A MINERAL AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Sometimes a silly question turns out to be a revelation.  I was reading about the "mineralome" of the human body and about the mineralization of the Cambrian one-celled creatures when it struck me that I don’t really know what a mineral “is.”  It turns out that it depends.  The thumbnail is five criteria:

To meet the definition of "mineral" used by most geologists a substance must meet five requirements: 

• naturally occurring

• inorganic

• solid

• definite chemical composition

• ordered internal structure

Steel is not a mineral because it is an alloy produced by people. "Inorganic" means that the substance is not made by an organism. Wood and pearls are made by organisms and thus are not minerals. "Solid" means that it is not a liquid or a gas at standard temperature and pressure. 

"Although liquid water is not a mineral, it is a mineral when it freezes. Ice is a naturally occurring, inorganic solid with a definite chemical composition and an ordered internal structure.”  But ice cubes made by humans are no longer mineral.

This is mind-blowing stuff, because we think there are only three categories: animal, vegetable and mineral — but it turns out this idea is “old science” (archaic, says one source!) from “the Linnaean taxonomy in which all things can be assigned to the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms.”  “The Linnean Society of London is the world’s oldest active biological society. Founded in 1788, the Society takes its name from the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) whose botanical, zoological and library collections have been in its keeping since 1829.”  Nice website.

They are newly relevant since the recent revolutionary and sometimes disturbing information from DNA needs to be reconciled with the Old Science idea of direct experience, palpable and comparable.  That is, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck — the New Science says it still might not turn out to be a duck.  The Linneans had saved a drawer of duck hides (study skins), just in case. 

These ducks are hybrids.

Mineral “is used in reference to the many inorganic chemicals that organisms need to grow, repair tissue, metabolize and carry out other body processes. Mineral nutrients for the human body include: iron, calcium, copper, sulfur, phosphorus, magnesium and many others.”  That list is the “mineralome”, so-called to align it with the terms for the genome, the epigenome, the proteome, et al.  But once a mineral is in the body, it can’t by definition be a mineral anymore, can it? 

“The word "mineral" is also used inconsistently in geology. In mining, anything obtained from the ground and used by man is considered to be a "mineral commodity" or a "mineral material". These include: crushed stone, which is a manufactured product made from crushed rocks; lime, which is a manufactured product made from limestone or marble (both composed of the mineral calcite; coal which is organic; oil and gas which are organic fluids; rocks such as granite that are mixtures of minerals; and, rocks such as obsidian which do not have a definite composition and ordered internal structure.”

“There are approximately 4000 different minerals and each of those minerals has a unique set of physical properties. These include: color, streak, hardness, luster, diaphaneity, specific gravity, cleavage, fracture, magnetism, solubility and many more. These physical properties are useful for identifying minerals. However, they are much more important in determining the potential industrial uses of the mineral.”

Around here, if we could figure out how to market gumbo, a major feature of our soils, we’d have a new industry.  This has been investigated because gumbo is an excellent lubricant that some say is the secret to creating the Egyptian pyramids and the standing stones of Europe.  It’s also an ingredient in cat litter and used for plugging exhausted oil wells.  In fact, if you put cat litter down your toilet, which seems logical, it will seal off your sewer system.  The problem with marketing is transportation of something so heavy and slippery.

So minerals are as inconsistent as the rest of life, dancing in and out of the definition.  Some suggest that the mineral composition of clays along waterways were what provided the scaffolding for the first genome to begin organizing.  Lately I was absorbed by an article detailing how evolution began in the Cambrian Era.  Those little softies in the sea, one-celled eukaryotes, learned how to use minerals to create hard structures: skeletons, shells, teeth and at that point the Hobbsian principal of survival of the fittest in conflicts became relevant. The evolution of bones made it possible to leave the support of the sea and climb onto land, beginning the long evolution to us.

He won't get far on land.

Now I’m going to append a long quote from Eliade. One of the purposes of this blog is to simply put things where I can find them.  I will come back to talking about bones on another post later, because it strikes me that minerals, which we think of as solid and unchanging, are in fact transformed and transforming like everything else in the New Science world of quantum physics and “-omes”.  This is key to our present thinking paradigm.

Myths, Dreams and Mysteries by Mircea Eliade

PP. 83-84

This mystical experience (qaumeneq) is related to the contemplation of his own skeleton, a spiritual exercise of great importance in Eskimo shamanism, but which is also found in Central Asia and in Indo-Tibetan Tantrism.  The ability to see oneself as a skeleton implies, evidently, the symbolism of death and resurrection; for, as we shall not be slow to see, the “reduction to a skeleton,” constitutes, for the hunting peoples, a symbolico-ritual complex centred in the notion of life as perpetual renewal.  

Unfortunately, the information that we have about this spiritual exercise of the Eskimo shamans is rather lacking in precision.  Here is what Rasmussen reports of it:  “Although no shaman can explain how or why, he can, nevertheless, by the power that his thought receives from the supernatural, divest his body of flesh and blood, so that nothing of it remains but the bones.  He then has to name all the parts of his body, mentioning each bone by name; and for this he must not use ordinary human language, but only the special and sacred language of the shamans that he has learned from his instructor.  While seeing himself thus, naked and completely delivered from the perishable and ephemeral flesh and blood, he dedicates himself, still in the sacred language, to his great task, through that part of his body which is destined to resist for the longest time, the action of sun, wind and weather”

Such a spiritual exercise implies the “exit from time”, for not only is the shaman, by means of an interior vision, anticipating his physical death, but he is finding again what one might call the non-temporal source of Life, the bone.  Indeed, for the hunting peoples the bone symbolizes the ultimate root of animal Life, the matrix from which the flesh is continually renewed.  It is starting with the bones that animals and men are re-born; they maintain themselves awhile in carnal existence, and when they die their “life” is reduced to the essence concentrated in the skeleton, whence they will be born anew according to an uninterrupted cycle that constitutes an eternal return.  

It is duration alone, time, which breaks and separates, by the intervals of carnal existence, the timeless unity represented by the quintessence of Life concentrated in the bones.  By contemplating himself as a skeleton, the shaman does away with time and stands in the presence of the eternal source of Life.  So true is this, that in the ascetic technique of mysticisms as highly developed as Tantric Buddhism and Lamaism, meditation upon the image of one’s skeleton, or divers spiritual exercises done in the presence of corpses, skeletons or skulls, still play an important part; such meditations, among others, reveal the evanescence of temporal duration and, consequently, the vanity of all incarnate existence.  

But evidently this “going out of time” by means of the contemplation of one’s own skeleton is different evaluated among the shamans of hunting and pastoral peoples, and among the Indo-Tibetan ascetics; for the former, its aim is to re-discover the ultimate source of animal life and thence to participate in Being; while, for the Indo-Tibetan monks, it is to contemplate the eternal cycle of existences ruled by karma; and hence to dispell the Great Illusion (maya) of Cosmic Life, striving to transcend it by placing oneself in the unconditioned, symbolized by Nirvana.

"Soul-Catcher"

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/

DEEP HISTORY AND HUMAN THOUGHT

The Flesh Made Word

Two books, which are related, have flung open the doors to a paradigm shift that I welcome.  (Also they are the entering edge of a new field of thought.)  They come out of an interaction of several forces:  the new exploration of pre-writing history that reaches unbelievably far back to include “hominins” via traces  -- just like CSI! -- dependent on intense technology analyzing clues never available before, and something like the same examination of the morphology, evolution, mutation and response to environment of the human body.  We now see that it is best to understand the neurology of the whole body as “thinking,” not just the brain.  It’s so new and strange that many well-educated people just can’t get their heads around all this, let alone their "gut."

The two books are “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory” by Clive Gamble  (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and “On Deep History and the Brain” by Daniel Lord Smail (University of California Press, 2008).  To some thinkers the ideas here are seen as destructive, tearing down convictions the academic community has felt were absolutely “true”.  Learning those ideas is what justified their Ph.D.  But this is mistaken or at least not eternal.  The new ideas ought to be seen as extensions, exploring underlying assumptions to challenge social contradictions we badly need to resolve.  It does ask the prevailing authorities to consider a broader understanding of hominins, history, and the canon.

Neubauer Collegium

It’s rather ironic that this material, which is EXACTLY the direction I’ve wanted to go for many decades, came to my attention because of Smail’s interval at the Neubauer Collegium where he gave a talk on “Containers,” in the broadest and most metaphorical sense.  The Collegium is housed in what was once “my” seminary, Meadville/Lombard Theological School, which is now leasing in the Chicago Loop.  

In my day (’78-’82) Eliade occupied an office on the top floor and lived next door.  There was a kind of “force field” around him.  People who see religious subjects in terms of “belief,” “dogma,” “prescribed ritual”, and so on -- not just as phenomena to study but as required faiths -- will have trouble with Eliade, myself, and maybe others too tactful to say so.  We operate on “feelings” but “feelings” have been classically defined as ephemeral, possibly neurotic, and unreal.  Every time I raised the issue, it was defined away as Phenomenology, trivial.  Then came post-structural analysis.  Now every phenomenon is a potential metaphor, possibly with great social power.  Like the metaphor of “God.”

UU “principles” are vague enough to evade quarreling, but there is still dogma despite protestations.  It takes a while to pick up the near-subconscious prioritization of academia, publishing, British Empire class systems, prestige and so on.  Inordinate valuing of eminent persons and national or ideological victories have caused neglect of all the post-structuralist revelations.  UU’s are just realizing it themselves, but now what?  Multi-national reconciliation?  The adjunct faculty these days is not the usual old white guys.  But the new people are too assorted to gel into a coherent entity.  And minorities often make progress by accepting the standards of the majority, a strategy of assimilation.

Smail is nimble enough to go around all that to the physiological basis of psychotropic mechanisms that influence our behavior and identity though rarely revealing the dynamics in the blood and organs where we base our thinking.  If the “dashboard” of thought were visible as dials and gauges exhibited on our chests, we could see thinking as clearly as with a brain fMRI, though in a different dimension, revealing the molecules in liquid that are messengers.  (We assume that nerves are like wires carrying info and the brain is a hard-drive.  There’s no good simile for blood molecules.  I use "soup" teasingly.)   

Smail is among new thinkers responding to research.  Many naive people consider “consciousness” to be the verbal description of one’s awareness and reasoning, but the “real” thought is underneath, not conscious.  If words are the pinnacle of human-ness, one must admit it’s a small footing that depends upon deep, broad and unseen forces which as plate tectonics, which are what throw up mountains in the first place.

I do not underestimate the anguish of being forced to give up sources of identity because new research and social forces have dispersed what previously was key.  Once I attended a “peace” conference in which the main address took as theme, “Abba,” Father, and explored the idea that a loving father was protective as a religious truth.  It was very nice, so long as you were actually remembering a loving father, and I suppose the supposition that a father would take a child on his lap for other purposes than protection would not be “nice” and therefore should not be considered.

Being mischievous, in the following discussion I asked the speaker what advice he would give a child who had been raped by the father.  How could that child see God as other than a rapist, or -- slightly better -- a vengeful punisher for wrong-doing.  What of the child who loves the rapist in the bonded way that children do, which is normally a protection?  The speaker said I didn’t “play fair” and avoided me for the rest of the conference.  But I was serious.  All metaphors carry significance that believers may not recognize -- may not want to.  Maybe some abused children do not want to be lambs.  Maybe a better God image for them is a protective wolf pack. 

This quote is from page 113 in Smail’s book:

“ . . .The large human brain evolved over the past 1.7 million years to allow individuals to negotiate the escalating complexities posed by human social living.  This is still what we use the brain for today -- most of the time, at least.  And then there are all the noncognitive features of the brain.  Many of the things we do are shaped by behavioral pre-dispositions, moods, emotions, and feelings that have a deep evolutionary history.  These body states are not ghostly things flitting mysteriously through consciousness.  Recent work in neuropsychology and neurophysiology has shown that they are physiological entities, characteristically located in specific parts of the brain and put there by natural selection.  some of them, including emotions, are relatively automated, no different  from the other areas of life governance -- basic metabolism, reflexes, pain, pleasure, drives, motivations -- that are routinely handled by the brain in all hominoids.  

Most, perhaps all, are also associated with an array of hormones and neurotransmitters such as testosterone and other androgens, estrogen, serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, prolactin, vasopressin, epinephrine, and so on.  Produced in glands and synapses throughout the body, these chemicals facilitate or block the signals passing along neural pathways.  They induce the somatic states revealed on and in our bodies and help determine how feelings actually feel.  We share virtually all of these chemicals with other animals, though the nervous system of an iguana, say, will not necessarily use testosterone in the same way ours does.  In a sense, each of these chemicals has its own natural history.”

Some people are distressed that I have no faith stance that I can describe as doctrine, except the provisional map my path has suggested so far.  But though I insist on staying put in a place I’ve known a long time, it’s because it’s not my body that travels -- just my mind and heart.  But then it turns out that they ARE my body! 

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.

FELT MEANING

All my efforts to understand the feeling of the Holy have led to the conviction that all contemporary religions are institutions that claim knowledge of and access to the sacred, but -- hopelessly --  can only echo and derive because they are based on writing.  Words can only point to “felt meanings,” which are inexplicable and unique products of persons interacting with the world that are better expressed by the arts: music, dance, arts, and the other uses of the creating senses.

There is always a lot of interest among people to “create,” but a reluctance to seek felt meanings by interacting with the world, which is the source of what is called “creation” but is really “translation” from felt meaning to its metaphors, which might be only a chord or a shape or a gesture.  It is the metaphors that the institutional religions seize on and claim are unique and privileged: owned.

The felt meanings are bodily sums of the human sensorium.  The written analysis of them in tracts and Bibles and sermons are products of rational thought about the instinct-infused felt meanings.  It is like the analysis of how to paint like Rembrandt, dance like Nureyev, and even suggestions of how to do it oneself -- but though the descriptions might help you understand it better, they will never enable you to actually do it.  Because the actual creation is in the realm of “felt” meaning, not constructed rational definitions.

I bought a book called “The Felt Meanings of the World: a Metaphysics of Feeling,” by Quentin Smith, which is a careful and reflective observation of what people feel, sorting the happening.  I haven’t read it yet though I’ve had it a while.  Suzanne Langer was doing something similar in her own way.  Universities -- even Divinity Schools -- are about rationality, introspective reflection, theories of analysis.  If you get too emotional, they’ll send you for therapy.  At a Pentecostal Bible school, they’ll accept your ecstasies and miseries, but push them into pre-existing Christian categories, not very sophisticated ones but ones expressed in writing.  The poetic passages -- Song of Solomon or the Psalms -- the ones related to prayer and metaphor -- come closest.  

Otherwise, one must go to the anthropological non-literary religions that the Abramic world will refuse to accept as legitimate.  They are called animistic because they work directly in the metaphors of real objects instead of words, for instance, the skins of animals associated with dance and song that carry the concepts in the Thunder Pipe Bundles of the Blackfeet. 

Religion in words is a hostage to academia and legalistic argument.  Feeling the sacred cannot be argued -- one either feels it or not, though it’s possible to have some sense of it through empathy.  Because of pre-existing definitions meant to capture the power of metaphors, institutional religion cannot allow re-definition of concepts like “God” so that it must always contest the claims of primal, instinctive, poetic perception of the Holy.  This is done by defining, appealing to precedent, invoking authorities, and basically never leaving the functions of the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, a product of mutation and evolution that allows language to be a filter of experience.  This requirement limits accounts of the sacred to those who have mastered professional (professing) systems supported by institutions. 

But systems exist in juxtaposition to other systems, including those of physiology, physics, and even aesthetics, though they are “about” human experience rather than exemplifying it.  Because these macro-categories or disciplines start from different ways of experiencing, they can oppose each other or reinforce each other without arguing about dogma.

Thus, the Bernini portrait of St. Theresa in the throes of spiritual orgasm is inarguable.  It just IS.  And the ISness of it means that sexual experience can be -- as in Song of Solomon -- legitimate, though it is not wordless.  Part of what legitimizes sex is that it is involved in “attachment,” or “bonding,” or the phenomenon of love that has become so badly corrupted, partly through overdependence on words rather than experience.  Quite like religion.

One of the most useful texts for me is Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane.”  In it he points to the feelings we have in what Turner calls “the liminal space.”  We can actually experience the difference between standing or passing through a doorway, or up or down a height, or at the edge of something like the ocean or in a place where something significant has happened.

No doubt this is physiological, a feeling produced by the brain and its subtle sensorium that animals use to keep from falling over cliffs or returning to a dangerous place, though this is a negative way of putting it.  Still, even a one-celled animal senses molecularly what to avoid and what to approach.  As evolution has proceeded, those functions have been elaborated, but any creature that didn’t have those abilities was likely to be eliminated.

It’s a long leap from a paramecium to Gerard Manley Hopkins, but even something as complex as his poetry is basically a construct of senses filtered through language. One could reverse-engineer it to the original experience, and -- indeed -- that’s basically what we do as we read.  Of course, in some times and places authorities will insist on literal meanings and burn you at the stake if you say god/father is just a metaphor.  Some fathers, who believe THEY are god, will also insist with near-lethal punishment and this is the core evil -- not the concepts of god or fathers, nor even their confusion into entitlement -- but the departure from reality, which often means giving up control and recognizing suffering, if only through empathy.  There is no way prosperity is either a privilege or a virtue.  It’s just another ISness.

The first step towards Felt Meaning is awareness through all the senses, every way that the body interacts with the world including gravity, which way one is facing, memory, the state of muscles including the gut, sound, the present chemistry of one’s blood.  The second step is the neurology of recognizing and sorting the information.  The third step is deriving meaning from all those factors.  The fourth is acting on the meaning and sharing evidence with others, writing poems and painting pictures as well as defining words and arguing about them in shared strategies of rational thought.  

The fifth step is renewing awareness of embeddedness, which is a Felt Meaning.  A human is woven of the universe, an instrument of the planet able to produce consciousness and response, thus part of the flow of change, the velocity of creation.  One can feel it.  This is where the future will come from.