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.

SEX AND THE CLERGY

Evenki shaman, Feder Poligus, and his spirit helpers.

The sexual morality of the clergy depends upon the context.  The shaman has no concern for the standards of contemporary urban dwellers.  The sequestered meditating person may pray for the poor and suffering but never see them.  The priest must live a celibate and sometimes impoverished life in the midst of opulence and abandon, listening to troubles for which he can offer only otherworldly comfort unless he accepts secular counseling techniques.  The protestant evangelical lives in a world of emotion that can overrun its boundaries.

I entered the ministry thinking it would be an intellectual path, simply putting such sexual matters as family and lovers behind me.  I was forty years old, two hundred years out of sync, and the wrong gender.  Two changes had come along: one the sexual revolution of behavior once the pill really worked and the other a "leveling" of clergy, insisting they were no better than anyone else.  I didn't really pay attention to either one. 

Installation of Clarke Wells, 1966, Portland, OR

At the time, 1978, I had just been gob-smacked by PNWD Leadership School, a retreat situation meant to put people in touch with themselves and lower our barriers against others.  It worked all too well -- we were supposed to become lay leaders but I wanted to be a minister, to know everything and everyone but only professionally.  There was doubt about what "professional" meant. http://www.uua.org/governance/leadership/199065.shtml  
Okay, there was a little arrogance and pretension in there.  In the Pacific Northwest District of the UUA, most of the pulpits were occupied by physically vital, intellectually superior, well-respected men.  Men.  There were one or two women, mostly entering through their personal relationships with those male ministers.  Other women aspired to that, one way or another.

One satellite minister -- out of fellowship -- sometimes was mentioned and other times not.  He was gay and predatory.  Secretly, there were troubles afflicting others, maybe most of them, addressed by a Good Offices member of their company and also by a buddy system that partnered men in pairs like cops, who then had the obligation of listening and -- in an extreme situation like alcoholism or prowling -- intervened as much as they could.  Often men ran into oppositions with their congregations, who were characteristically defiant and questioning.  This was part of the reason for devising Leadership School, which included large quantities of organizational design.

In those days money was not so important as it is now.  There were no older women in reduced circumstances seeking pulpits, no beginning clergy unable to find placement, not so many of the tiny marginal fellowships out there somewhere.  Big city pulpits in affluent communities, relatively stabilized after the wild Sixties and Seventies, were close to being sinecures.  We didn't realize how good the times were.  

Michael Servetus

Portland First, after what seemed like a century with devoted, idealistic, professorial men like the Eliots and Steiner, boomeranged (as so many congregations do) to Clarke Wells, charismatic and brilliantly verbal but maybe a little too inclusive, who buckled under the pressure of homeless hippies sleeping in the pews when one of their more psychotic members set the church on fire.  After that, solidly conventional church-builder Alan Deale created a civic footprint that would last past his retirement through another boomerang: one of those sweet feminists who counseled so much comfort and ignored the meat-market aspect of such approaches.  By then the Michael Servetus singles group for cruisers had sort of self-snuffed and was only a joke:  Servetus was a crusty old monotheist who was burned at the stake by John Calvin because he wouldn’t mute his obsession.  He never threw his car keys into the middle of a circle to see who would go home with him.

Today nothing will hurt the established Portland First but arrogance or failure to adapt.  Their current senior minister was formerly the president of the UUA.  “The Emerson Avenger” does not spare him, though I have no idea what evidence he had, but the situation lends itself to playing the race card against the sex card.  http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com/2009/01/uua-president-bill-sinkford-alleged.html

Ultimately, the pot on the table will determine who wins.  Portland, the city, is booming now.  When it begins to collapse, Sinkford will be old enough to retire.

Not the Vicar of Dibley

Men in my congregations approached me for sex, straightforwardly, so I returned the attitude:  “I charge a helluva lot more to be the temple whore.”  They thought I was stuck up and punitive and went away.  Goodbye.  In other churches things were more flexible.  One woman minister told me she slept with a guy who bought her a car which she really NEEDED.  Another laywoman told me proudly that she’d slept with every UUA president until she aged enough to lose her charm.  It wasn’t that long ago.

Sex, physiologically, is not in the genitals but rather (this is provable on fMRI scans) dwells in the cortex between the neurons for violent control and those for tender nurturing, both of which are components of spirituality but not bureaucratic institutions.  One minister tenderly counseled married women in their own marital beds, assuring them that they needed to have a man show them how to make love “properly.”  Found out and ejected from all recognition or endorsement, he was charming enough to be hired by a clueless little church where I assume he went on being a dog.  (UU’s are congregational polity -- no one can tell a congregation what to do.)

A woman minister discovered her husband was having an affair.  He left her, so she and the woman’s spouse had a little affair, which consoled them both, and then she decided men were too much trouble and has had a happy and faithful female partnership in the decades since.  Not everyone is capable of such freeform adaptation, nor is every congregation capable of following the “order of service” in such cases.

Then there is always the problem of more conservative outsiders, including the law.  The minister who became absorbed in the sexual freedom era of the Venusian Church, which was a sort of restrained orgy involving being stroked with feathers by naked people, was closed down by the secular law.

An honorable church that serves those on the edge.

Clinical Pastoral Education is a program meant to help future ministers handle the challenges of the real world by confronting their own obsessions.  My specific leaders used the teaching vids of the Glide Memorial Church, which has since become a foundation.  The films showed people having real sex in various terms: newlyweds, oldsters (pre-viagra but they’d found vibrators), and idyllic sybarites on a tropical island with unbelievable staying power but without clothes.  The most perverse part of the session was the snickering leaders (all male) enjoying the discomfort of the nuns in the group.  

The main rule of sex, if you have the luxury of safety, is like that of driving at night -- don’t drive so fast that you can’t stop within the reach of your headlights.  That will vary with the state of the vehicle, the road and the weather.  The old joke the PNWD ministers used to tell was about how to sneak around safely by driving far enough away not to be recognized.  Travel a hundred miles away to have sex with someone not your spouse, five hundred miles away if the escapade is same sex,  and to a different state if it’s interspecies.  (Sheep jokes go here.)  As the politicians are discovering, in the Internet Age there is NO safe place.  Therefore, don’t do anything you wouldn’t want on YouTube.  

Only the indigenous shaman lives where the real world doesn’t impose restraints.  Remember that ayahuasca will make you puke, which will probably not attract a congregation.  Those are the people who write the checks, baby.

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