Photo by Caroline Forbes

An Interview with Patrick Harpur

by Gyrus

Gyrus: The threefold division of ‘body, soul & spirit’, as opposed to the dualistic mind/body model so common in our culture, seems central to your work. Could you sketch it briefly, and discuss how you feel “soul” has come to be distorted, misunderstood, or lost?

Patrick: You’ve started with the hardest possible question! I’ve just jotted down 14 ways in which the word ‘soul’ can be used, and there are many more. It’s impossible to define. But this flaw is also its strength. Like ‘God’, it’s a portmanteau word, ‘empty’ in itself, yet taking on meaning in different contexts and in relation to other things.

Soul in relation to body likes to personify itself as Jung’s anima, for instance, or as the personal daimon whom Plato describes in his myth of the geezer called Er who returns from the dead at the end of The Republic. It’s different from soul in relation to spirit, which is where I prefer to use the word as the Neoplatonists used it. For them, soul was a whole realm intermediate between the spiritual or intelligible world (nous) and our own familiar sensory, material world. It was Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World, wherein dwell the daimons who link us, as Socrates remarked, to the gods.

However, this all-pervading collective realm was paradoxical: it could also manifest individually, as individual souls—in other words, as us. Since the chief faculty of soul is not reason but imagination, it likes to imagine itself in many different ways, cutting its cloth to suit the times. Thus it re-imagines itself now as Imagination itself—a powerful autonomous realm beloved of the Romantics whence all the myths come—now as Jung’s collective unconscious. It supplies the root metaphor for such modern re-inventions as the earth-spirit Gaia and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field.

But, in another sense, soul and spirit can be thought of as symbols of the two main perspectives through which we view the world—the two perspectives which create the world we see. We experience them as a tension within ourselves between the spiritual longing for Oneness, unity, purity, light, transcendence etc. and the imaginative need to recognise Manyness, multiplicity, labyrinthine entanglement, darkness, immanence etc. It’s because, historically—ever since the Enlightenment—Western culture has emphasised the preeminence of ‘masculine’ upward-striving Apollonian reason and science that I have tried to emphasise the neglected ‘soul’ perspective which is dark, moon-struck, downward-spiralling and Hermetic or Dionysian—the Affirmative way of the artist, as the medieval mystics might have put it, instead of their own Negative way, which disdains and seeks to overcome the images and myths which soul, willy-nilly, besieges us with and which we find so hard to free ourselves from in spiritual disciplines. The great ascents of the spirit into rareified mountain realms where the One dwells in blinding light can be read as a disastrous neglect, even repression, of the Nekiya—the underworld journey of the soul whose course is tortuous and mazy, moving towards darkness and death. That’s why, as far as any sort of gnosis goes, I prefer the soul’s way, death and resurrection, the painful initiatory dismembering of the shaman, to the rather unsexed and anodyne rebirth system of ‘spiritual’ paths.

I prefer, as Jung says, wholeness to perfection. That’s the short and incoherent answer to your question.

Gyrus: I was quite surprised when I learned that James Hillman had travelled quite widely, in Asia and Africa—his work is so consciously rooted in, and confined to, the Western tradition. You’re steeped in the same tradition, from Greek antiquity, through the Neoplatonists, to the Romantics and depth psychology; but you also freely draw inferences from anthropology, from animist traditional cultures. Have your own experiences while travelling led to this influence?

Patrick: Actually I’ve barely travelled at all—my daimon has always kept me tied to my desk, insisting that I travel metaphorically through the realm of imagination rather than literally… So, no—my influences are all from books. But I did hitch-hike round Africa with a mate in my gap year, when I was seventeen—when everyone else was travelling to India—and it did leave a deep impression on me. I constantly wondered what was going on in the minds of the Biafran refugees, or the Cameroonian villagers or the Masai or the Bushmen or the Ethiopians and so on.

I’m still trying to find the perfect work of anthropology, as it were—the book which gets inside the mind of wholly different culture from my own; which imaginatively empathises with its tribe rather than applying ‘scientific’ principles. I mean, how can you trust an anthropologist who can’t study witchcraft properly because he doesn’t believe in its possibility? I want anthropology to be like the works of Carlos Casteneda or that essay of Benjamin Whorf’s on the language of the Navajo or Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.

Gyrus: How does the perception of deep problems in the “comparative” approach to religion and myth, exemplified by J.G. Frazer and Mircea Eliade, impact your thinking? What remaining value do you see in wide cross-cultural surveys of things like folklore and shamanism, the alleged dangers and past mistakes of this approach notwithstanding?

Patrick: That’s very pertinent and difficult to answer. I laugh at the idea of this approach being ‘dangerous’—it’s often what academics often call ideas which contradict their own. Who’s in danger? What’s more dangerous is the modern presupposition that all cultures are isolated and opaque to each other, and so studies are confined to details and minutiae, without any attempt to draw wider inferences about how different cultures can be compared, and whether or not they share a common humanity.

But if you believe that humanity is informed by a common imagination whose autonomous products, the myths, are, as Ted Hughes says, ‘as alike as the lines on the palm of the hand’, you see that no myth is truly alien to us, no matter how outlandish it appears at first sight. And if no myth is alien, no culture is. And if the contents of the myths seem strange, then Lévi-Strauss’s structural approach has been very useful in showing how the mythopoeic imagination obeys certain archetypal rules—rules of symmetry and inversion, for example—which illuminate myths by showing how one story, which looks wholly different from its neighbour, is in fact a transformed version of that neighbouring tale. This is how I hit upon the notion that the tall tales of modern science concerning black holes and dark matter and the abyss of space etc. are in fact only literalised versions of those Gnostic myths which were suppressed by orthodox Christianity 1500-odd years ago.

So, while I sometimes despair of ever understanding a single thing about another culture, I also rejoice in how much of that culture is in fact available to me through our common imaginative substrate. Incidentally, it was my elaboration of what I call ‘daimonic reality’—a version of Jung’s ‘psychic reality’—which proved the most useful tool in understanding that relationship with the world which ‘tribal’ peoples seem universally to have, and which we Westerners used to have: a reality which lies between the literal and metaphorical, which has one foot in the Otherworld, which obeys Blake’s ‘double vision’ (something shared by all artists), which is participatory rather than objective, and so on. I’d call myself an animist if that weren’t already a rather insulting term for one who has a clear vision of how everything that is, is ensouled and participates in that great World-Soul whose images constitute the flagstones of reality which underlie this poor phenomenal world of ours. And this is how ‘tribal’ people see the world: they’re natural Neoplatonists.

And of course Eliade et al. may be wrong in certain details; but the impulse is, surely, invigorating and engaging in a way that most mythography and anthropology isn’t—we suffer loss of meaning, even a loss of soul as benighted primitives say, when we lack an overarching world-view, a sense of a bigger picture from which no culture is excluded, don’t we? (Frazer was, by the way, very different from Eliade—he literalised one ‘solar hero’ myth and sought to explain most other myths by recourse to it. In this he was more like a Darwinist than a comparative mythographer).

While I appreciate the agonising of post-colonial, post-imperial, post-modern critics, I just can’t interest myself in it. It’s a fault, I know. But my deepest impulses are religious, I think. I’m a Christian, for instance; but I don’t like other Christians much. That’s why I was so happy to find my own people among the Christian Neoplatonists (who are also pagan!) such as the alchemists, the Renaissance magi, the Romantic poets. A religion or religious perspective, at once Christian and pagan, such as they held, seems just what’s needed in our times of Christian and Scientistic fundamentalism. I’d like to propagandise it more; but unfortunately it can’t of its nature be subjected to the tools of propaganda because it’s subtle, humorous, tricky etc, and has to be just seen, like a joke or a dream, to be grasped. It’s the opposite of fundamentalism because it sees the root metaphors or myths behind every belief, including itself!

Gyrus: Is there not a hint, at least, of the unifying ‘spiritual’ urge in looking for a “common humanity”—with current academia, perhaps ironically, serving ‘soul’ in its desire to retain distinctions, to emphasize particular characteristics of specific cultures, to champion multiplicity?

Patrick: Yes. And yes.

Gyrus: In your work you make very lucid, revealing comparisons between tribal initiatory structures and spontaneous modern experiences such as UFO abductions. Could you discuss these associations and what fascinates you about them?

Patrick: Yeah, the Attack of the Little Grey Men. Wasn’t that interesting folklore? With all the requisite memorates and fabulates, as those annoying folklorists with their quasi-scientific jargon call them…

Like anyone fascinated by UFOlore, I racked my brains to come up with some sort of reason why 80% of all Americans (it seemed at the time) were being snatched into circular uniformly-lit ‘spaceships’ and subjected to bestial probings by those truly frightening little greys with their now-iconic all-black eyes (the cover of Whitley Streiber’s book [Communion] still gives me the willies).

One of the theories I liked was that they were the demonic spirits of the millions of aborted foetuses getting their revenge! But it just seemed to me that what these abductions most resembled was the painful initiation of shamans by daimons, and, indeed, the imitative initiation of pubescent boys who are abducted at dead of night by masked elders posing as daimons, and subjected to scarring and circumcision etc. before being given secret knowledge. I was also struck by a remark of Jung’s—that the unconscious shows to us the face that we show to it. And I wondered if the ‘greys’ were probing us in a heartless empirical way in some parody of the way we investigate Nature.

Anyway, there is no ‘explanation’ for the widespread abduction epidemic—it is not a problem to be solved but rather a mystery to be entered—but I gave it my best shot vis-a-vis finding anthropological and Jungian parallels. While I liked the late John Mack, the Harvard Professor who researched abductions, I didn’t like the way his latest book seemed to ‘work’ with abductees, hypnotising them etc., until the ‘greys’ became sort of relatively benign harbingers of, yes, you guessed it, the imminent ecological crisis—thus effectively repressing the idea that unless we find news ways of initiating ourselves into the Otherworld, we run the risk of being forcibly initiated, against our will, by daimons who have become apparently demonic by virture of our neglect of them.

Gyrus: What is your fantasy for more conscious initiatory rituals in our society—or do you think society is now too unwieldy to manage like this, and true initiations will now continue to be emergent phenomena?

Patrick: I wouldn’t be surprised if the need for initiation has become urgent. It seems to be, after all, a universal requisite—there’s no society which doesn’t or which didn’t at one time attach the highest importance to initiation. So, now that we’ve abandoned formal rites, we must expect to pay the price: a catastrophic severance of relations with the Otherworld, for example, and a lack of certainty about identity and adulthood among youth.

Luckily youth has its own means of self-initiation—drugs, piercings, raves, Mediterranean ‘holidays’ etc.—but these can all of course be merely destructive if they are not performed in a sacred context, the ritual pain succeeded by revelations of the tribal secrets and myths. I think children probably long for initiation if reality TV is any guide: whenever they’re subjected to real hardship in a meaningful context—Brat Camp etc.!—they respond gratefully.

I can’t think what religion is doing, adopting secular liberal caring values where everything must be comfortable and all suffering is medicalised. The whole point of religion is not to provide a cure for suffering but, as Simone Weil says, a supernatural use for it. Only suffering can provide the deep energy required for self-transformation. (Luckily, once again, there’s often enough suffering to go round in the course of everyday life—illness, bereavment, unhappiness in love, whatever—but it’s usually treated when it could instead be pressed into the service of initiation.)

But I’m beginning to rant now. It’s just that i’m furious at the deprivation of meaning, enchantment and transformation that young people suffer at the hands of our culture.

Gyrus: What were your most significant initiations into your relationship to daimonic reality?

Patrick: Well, you know, I was brought up believing in Spiritualism because my grandmother was a first-class medium and my mother a believer, who, wherever she lived, always managed to dig up a local medium / healer to talk to the dead or cure us kids of our childish malaises.

Meanwhile I was very aware of my Dad’s psychic powers, which he played down, even denied, having made of himself a hard-headed business man. But he saw the fairies twice as a young man in his native Ireland—all the more surprising because he was Anglo-Irish, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, who was not supposed to see or believe in the Sidhe.

So I grew up with the supernatural and, instead of forgetting or rubbishing it all once I was exposed to education, I always tried to fit it in—ultimately this meant writing my own book. I was lucky at Cambridge to be supervised by the great Shakespeare and Yeats scholar, Tom Henn, who was another Anglo-Irishman. He, too, believed in the supernatural—he experienced Panic while fishing a stream in Galway, and heard the banshee keening on a train to Birmingham (his brother died at that moment)—and he showed me rare books from the Order of the Golden Dawn, and generally encouraged me to use my beliefs, as Yeats had, to make sense of the world.

However, my real initiation didn’t come until I immersed myself in alchemy for my book, Mercurius; or, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth. I thought I could crack alchemy in three months, but, three years later, I lifted my half-crazed, tear-stained face up off the nth Latin manuscript in the British Library and realised I’d never ‘crack’ it. For every book about alchemy perforce becomes a book of alchemy, and I had felt the hand of Mercurius move my hand and what I wrote didn’t come from me—I felt the centre of my volition shift and I was no longer myself. This, I suppose, is the central prerequisite of initiation: the awful uprooting as the Muse, or personal daimon, or self, ruthlessly seizes you and usurps the ego. From then on, I had a new topsy-turvy and Hermetic perspective on things, out of which I wrote Daimonic Reality and The Philosophers’ Secret Fire.

Gyrus: To apply Jung to his own lineage, what do you see as the Shadow side of the tradition of alchemy and Neoplatonism that you subscribe to? How do you relate to it?

Patrick: Your question is a difficult one. It may be an incoherent one. I don’t know that I can answer it.

I want to say that alchemy and Hermetico-neoplatonism (if such a thing exists) is itself the turbulent mercurial underground stream which shadows the orderly canals of religion and reason, welling up in times of transition and crisis to form the flood of culture we have called the Renaissance or Romanticism. That’s to say, in itself, the ‘perennial philosophy’ I favour includes its own shadow, like the Nigredo of the alchemists. That’s part of its great attraction: it is concerned with wholeness and with realising the totality of the psyche; it holds the great dividing forces within psychic life—forces I’ve called ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ (tho’, pace Nietszche, Apollonian and Dionysian would do)—holds them in tension so that nothing is repressed and no shadow forms.

I think Jung said that Christ redeemed mankind but left out Nature, which groaneth and travaileth. Nature is therefore Christianity’s shadow. It was part of the alchemists’ (unconscious) purpose to complete the work of redemption by raising up Nature. But in a sense this is no more than poetry does—there’s something redemptive about all great poetry, isn’t there? Poetry, like alchemy, doesn’t merely copy Nature (as Plato feared), but (as Plotinus says) completes the work of the Creator by returning to the original archai or archetypes which the Demiurge looked into in order to make the world.

The whole point of a daimonic philosophy (to put it another way) is that it doesn’t subscribe to the brilliant Apollonic lighting effects of monotheism and, later, rationalism which are themselves intrinsically shadow-forming—soul is always neglected and forced into the darkness underground. Rather it operates in lunatic twilight, between the light and the dark, where it is half light and half shadow, and so the problem of ‘the shadow’ is not so much resolved as dissolved altogether…

Sorry, gone off the point a bit. Or have I?

Gyrus: I get the idea of this hidden tradition “containing its own shadow”. But surely there’s a shadow that’s missed by everything that can be called a “tradition”. With alchemy and Neoplatonism, I wonder if social concerns, engagement with communal politics and so on, the whole quotidian world of people and their mundane necessities—isn’t this neglected by most exponents of the tradition? Maybe Blake manages to transcend even that… But the modern occult / hermetic “scene” can be woefully insular. And I look at the arc of James Hillman’s work, and it seems his merging of the concepts of Anima Mundi with things like urban architecture and environmental concerns came quite late in his career, like the “real world” out there was the last bastion. Of course he had his Neoplatonic take on it—that we repress beauty, and our environment suffers from this…

Patrick: Yes, I take your point about there always having to be a shadow of some sort—in the case of the Neoplatonic tradition, the quotidian world etc. I don’t know, but I always thought that that was something those guys took in their stride. When you read Porphyry’s life of Plotinus, you don’t get the sense that he was in any way sealed off from the world or sitting, Hindu-like and silent, in a sacred grove, or living in an academic ivory tower etc. Rather the reverse—like most mytics worth their salt, he seems to have been embedded in life and as pragmatic as St Teresa, who achieved union with the Godhead only to burst out of the convent and found many more, her letters full of practicality and worldly advice.

I dare say periods of retreat were necessary for the Hermetic lads, during stages of their advancement—as it is for us all. But I think they attended to God’s immanence in the world, and hence to the world, just as much as to His transcendent aspect. They had both perspectives, and held that contradiction in tension by means of Blakean ‘double vision’.

On the other hand, I’m only guessing. But I’m probably, as so often, right.

Photo by Mark Pilkington

A discussion with Dale Pendell

[Question about who taught DP about the occult in Los Angeles.]

Dale Pendell: His name’s not really important. He kind of hid his traces, because he insisted on being without credentials. Anytime I would look for credentials, like, “Where did you get your Zen training, Carl?” “Why do you ask? Is that gonna make you believe something I say?” So he would never tell me. But he had a personal teacher. What he taught was the importance of a personal teacher. His personal teacher was a woman named Mary. And that’s as far back as I know the transmission. But I get a sense of high knowledge being passed on that way: through personal relationships, with some occult structure overt.

I don’t know, he was able to walk in and out of Zen temples like he belonged there. He was an artist, and sat with Suzuki, Roshi in San Francisco, and they palled around like old friends. When Trungpa came to town, they palled around like old friends—he was his driver for a while. Every place he went, he liberated people; he gave people permission. He constantly violated expected behaviour, and laughed a lot. I still consider him my true teacher. I would like to be able to give people permission the way he did.

So, I can’t speak for any occult tradition. I just know there are transmissions of higher knowledge.

[Question about what specific traditions or techniques of magical practice DP uses.]

Very eclectic. But I certainly look to general magical theory, magical dynamics and magical laws. So I would look to… I mean I read Crowley, and Lévi… I mean, it was harder to find stuff, back in the sixties. From the poetic tradition, like the charming song tradition of the Inuits, where charms are like spells. They had different kinds of songs; one group of songs you sing just for the joy of seeing the sun rise, or fresh snow on the ground or something. And then there’s the songs of derision that you sing to make fun of somebody. And they would share all these songs. But one class of songs they wouldn’t share at the “songfest”, and those were charming songs. Charming songs were meant to change, like change the weather, renew luck.

So I kind of combine those any way I can. I kind of feel my way into it, sensing, trying to feel or see, sense the presence someplace.

I have a favourite story. An anthropologist was talking to his Native American informant at the edge of a field, and he said, “So, I suppose you think that all of these rocks out there in the field are alive?” And his informant goes, “No… But some of them are!” The art is in the “some of them”, and figuring out which ones.

Working with charms, and remembering that if you use magic, you are vulnerable to it… It’s very delicate work. Like María Sabina said, relations with the mushrooms are muy delicado—very delicate.

[Mention of DP's characterization, in his talk, of tobacco as a "diplomat".]

Tobacco is good. It brings up certain questions. That is, we’re all kind of rational, educated. What difference could it really make to the world to leave a tobacco offering at the base of a plant? What difference could it make to say grace before a meal? How is that really going to change the world in any way? In fact, maybe you can just skip the whole meal, and just swallow a pill or something, and get on with what’s really important.

There is perhaps some step of faith here. That doing something beautiful, something proper, that seems to put the world in balance, is a worthwhile thing to do, and makes a change in the universe.

I have a poem on this subject. In poetry and literary criticism, they have something called the “pathetic fallacy”. Pathetic fallacy is when you say, “The sky was weeping.” Giving human emotions to inanimate things. I think they haven’t gone far enough. So I’m for what I call the cosmic fallacy. This is called ‘Last Specimen’, it’s about plant collecting, pressing [????] specimens.

In the bank of a gravely wash
A mile from the road in Saline Valley
I found the desert paintbrush.
Not a rare plant
Just one I didn’t have in my collection.
The brilliant scarlet-tipped bracks of the inflorescence
Were still enfolded.
Kneeling down, I gently pulled them open
To inspect the corolla
And then saw, still a child.
It’s not that anyone else would come by here
But that you live to blossom
Alone, here, beneath an empty sky
Does mean that somewhere a soldier won’t die
Or that on a dried planet somewhere in Cygnus
It will rain.
And I return with an empty press.

And all the people who have lived close to the earth for a long time seem to respect these rites and rituals. They feel a sense of gratitude. God, even Nietzsche said, “A sense of gratitude is seemly.” Our existence here rests on many lives who have gone before us, generations of people. And not only people; all sorts of beings that have lived, and suffered, and died, and micro-organisms creating even the air that we breathe, and the topsoil, and all of it. So every day of our lives is a gift of countless generations that have provided it, for our benefit. So a sense of gratitude is right, and it is good to give something back. It’s good to take a moment to place an offering, or a word or something. Ultimately I don’t think we can prove this. But I say, the other side can’t prove their way either. It comes down to a wager. And I put my wager on a green square, and to do these things, to find a way to move in beauty ourselves, does change the world. It’s the only way we can change the world.

So, that’s a long way of saying that that’s the ultimate basis of my magic. [laughs]

[A question about Zen, psychedelics, koans and healing.]

I’ll come back to that. I have one more thought on magic, another kind of magic that I dabble in. And that’s charms to change things. I call it demon work. Principles of working with demons, getting to know them. It all revolves around this business of diplomacy. So, give them a place to go. You can make a little shrine for your demons, and it’s good if you can name them. I have one called “She’ll Be Hurt” that’s stopped me from doing all kinds of things that had nothing to do with “she” or “her”[?]. Then I learned she had a big sister called “She’ll Be Angry”. [laughter]

In that way I invoke a being I call “The Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva”. The Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva sits with his middle finger up, and he looks like an ape. I made a clay model of him, he’s got big nails sticking out of his head, and I have this shrine with this incense for him. Anybody who has a worse inner critic than I have has either quit writing, committed suicide-or both! So when I get the voices saying, “You’re not good enough to do that”, I get to where I can recognize it, and go “Aha!” I go over to the Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva, put a stick of incense in, and get on about my business.

I even made a scourge at one point, very wicked-looking. Magic has to with changing reality, so you do physical manipulations. So I made a scourge, a cat o’ nine tails with these leather thongs and twisted, very wicked-looking pieces of wire on them, and wrote all kinds of stuff on it (in blood actually), like, “Bring it to the surface”; or “You’re doing it to yourself anyway”. And when I would get a critic attack, all these voices saying, “You’re kind of fucked up” or “You can’t do it”… “Aha!” I would go get the scourge. And go, “Right! I get it! Thank you!” [mimes hitting himself over the back]

I look on all those operations as magical operations. It’s a wonderful field to be creative in. All good art is magic. All the best art is magic. So you can use aesthetic criteria to help find your way.

[A question about precautions necessary in "unbinding magic".]

I’m not sure it’s a problem with unbinding. Unbinding is not really… You’re not asking for something for yourself. It’s like releasing a bird. I think the dangerous magic is when you’re trying to get something for yourself; that’s a binding magic. Or trying to hurt somebody else. Any of those things, the vibration, the colour of it is so different, you can feel it right away. The best unbinding magic is invisible, there’s nothing there that anything can catch on; you can draw teasel through it. That’s the goal, and we come as close to it as we can. We usually end up with something that things still catch on, cling to; but that’s the ideal.

[Questioner remarks that in unbinding there is sometimes resistance, that things seem to prefer to stay bound.]

[sighs] Yeah. [long pause] The ocean is salty because of Kwan Yin‘s tears, when she realized she could not really save any beings. That’s what I heard. Any being at all.

[A return to the question of koans and healing, advice on koan practice.]

Sure, I’ll be bad. Go right into koan practice. Why not accept several hundred obstructions right away? [laughs] They help you get unobstructed! Koans are quite wonderful, there’s a lot of misconceptions about koan practice. Like, some people think, they don’t really have answers, you just have to do something spontaneous, or they have strange ideas about the answers. But there’s hundreds of them, and many of them are quite specific. Some actually have particular presentations. Maybe you’ll come up with a variation or something, and your teacher will say, [uncommitted, slightly dismissive tone] “Yeah, that gets the point.” Then he’ll say, “But the traditional answer is so-and-so.” And you always go, “Ah yes, that hits it right on the head.”

They’re kind of like brain candy. Very seductive. They’re meant to absorb your whole power of thought and mind, attention. Doesn’t that sound like fun? [laughs]

Not all Zen schools use them. The Soto schools don’t really use them, but in Rinzai Zen and some of [????], there’s a transmission.

[Questioner asks about koans and tripping.]

Like, my intention for that trip is to solve a koan? I don’t know of any rules. If you’re working with a teacher, he gives you a koan. You go back to your cushion… “OK, OK, sound of one hand, what’s that?” You go back to the teacher, and you present your answer. And he’ll probably go, “Hmmm, back to the cushion. Sit with this some more.”

Some of the great teachers worked on the first koan for years. One was about to kill himself, he worked on it for seven years. All of his friends had already solved it, you know, they were all whipped off to be Buddhists someplace. He was about to jump off a balcony or something… when he got it. He went on to be the great Mumon.

It becomes so all-encompassing. It should be, good practice; to where it’s all you think about, all the time, it’s what you’re thinking about. That’s good, that’s the way it should be.

So, tripping at such a time… I don’t know. It wasn’t my way. Maybe some people have gotten answers that way. Salvia divinorum has the best shot, I think. But the best is just going back and focusing on it, on your cushion. But one never knows, and there’s no rules on this-so, whatever works. It’s probably wise to try the way that people have been doing it for a long time.

Laura Pendell: Or it’s like the story you told about Gary [Snyder]. He came up with the perfect answer…

DP: Yeah, he came up with the perfect answer, that’s what it usually seems… Marijuana seems to do that, too. You get “perfect answers”—but it’s not the point of the koan.

Go work on this some more. [sly laugh]

[Question about the use of psychoactives in Buddhist history.]

Tea. They made an early alliance. In fact, tea is even said to be Bodhidharma’s eyelids. He fell asleep, and he was so upset that he ripped his eyelids off so he wouldn’t fall asleep again. He threw them behind him and they grew into the first tea plants.

[Someone thanks DP for his books introducing them to the pleasures of tea.]

The interesting thing is that all the major religions have abandoned whatever use of entheogenic substances that they once had. Sometimes I’ll think about why… Going back and reading early accounts of psychedelic administration, even Oscar Janiger, who collected hundreds and hundreds of accounts, made a point of giving LSD to people for the first time without them knowing anything about it, without them knowing what to expect, because he was collecting information. Almost everybody felt positive about it. About a third of them had bad trips… I don’t know, it’s very time-consuming, it goes all over the place. So we find lots of traces of entheogenic substances at the origins of religion, and in tribal religions, shamanic religions. All of the cosmopolitan schools have abandoned them, except for the saddhus. Who else?

[A woman in the group talks about finding motivation, about having interest in psychology and writing and helping the world, but feeling lost and directionless. She starts crying halfway through, telling DP she feels she trusts him. She has to support her family but nothing seems to have sense, the world doesn't need her help.]

Maybe try some of this magic stuff? Leaving a little flower offering, or tobacco offering at four cardinal points, or by your door every day. It doesn’t take much, some of the old ones said, to push the world over into the right direction. It just needs a little help, from you. There’s nothing you have to write[?]. Just leave a little offering; something that makes the world a little more beautiful. If we can get out without making the world worse, we have succeeded. That’s all we need to do, is find a way not to make things worse. That’s good enough.

Add a little bit of beauty someplace. You will see. It is OK to be in this state; it’s a very good place. A very good place. It’s very open, you’re kind of stretching out this open moment. Spiritual teachers have a word for that, they call it acedia. It’s like the “dark night of the soul”, it’s this point of not recognizing your own way, your own worth, just where you are in the spiritual process. But it’s a very pregnant and rich point. So, stretching that out is… painful. But it’s very good. Something very good, something very good is going to happen to you. Lay out a nice offering; invite the good spirits in: “Here’s some flowers for you. Here’s some hazelnuts.” I don’t know.

[An American woman says, "You think the world doesn't need your help? I live in a country that needs a lot of help."]

[A question about the relationship of the psychoactive effects of the poppy to Zen practice.]

Wow. That’s a very esoteric question! I’ll have to think about it to make a connection; I’m sure there’s a way to do it… What I think of with the hallucinogenic effects of poppies is Greek healing, and the temple of Apuleius, where with a drink from the poppy, sick people would go in to have dreams-and the dream would reveal to them why they were sick.

If you approach it right-you know, you have to walk through the door the right way, you don’t want to offend the gods. Again, it’s a matter of ritual propriety. Confucius made a big deal of ritual propriety—what’s the Chinese word, li? I think so. It’s one of the foundations of his whole system, you can almost feel that it’s a carry-over from the older animistic traditions. Ritual propriety. Keeping everything clean with the spirits—that’s what you want to do. That’s the basic magical law.

María Sabina with the leaves, and Eve in Paradise Lost, that’s ritual propriety. With the Salvia leaves, it becomes almost palpable. If you have stems with some parts that are left over, you wouldn’t just throw them out anywhere, that would be shocking, you know? The great Japanese flower masters would dig graves, dig a little hole in a special place to put the old flowers in. You don’t just put them anywhere. And this matter of ritual propriety is much neglected by our culture. There’s no sense of presence… In the animistic world there are spirits that live in streams and trees and rocks and places, little nooks, this little nook has its spirit. People who’ve lived close to the earth for a long time all seem to have some sense of the presences around, and recognition that they do not want to offend that presence. It would be a desecration. Our culture kind of moved all that, had it taken out of the environment and boxed up in the Kirche, in the church, where it’s clear, that’s a sacred space and you wouldn’t think of throwing trash on the ground in the church. That’s pretty clear. We have it all boxed into this special place, but it’s in all of Earth’s places around us. This matter of presences is again one of the fundamental principles of all shamanic magic. You can kind of build the whole system up pretty much from that. Recognizing that there’s presences, you don’t want to offend them, you want to keep them in balance, and trying to find propriety.

If you don’t always know, you need to come up with some means of divination. Divination is another neglected art, it’s a kind of hazy area. It’s still a big part of our world, but we pretend that it’s… We flip a coin at sporting events-who goes first? That was to get the will of the gods. What do the gods have to say about this? Now we call it “chance”.

When you talk about using tobacco, how do you use it? Offering, or smoking?

You don’t have to smoke it. Tobacco offerings are very traditional; tobacco moved around the world very quickly after Columbus.

[A question about the tobacco industry and chemical additives.]

Well, you can’t look to me for purity. [laughter] I do grow tobacco, and it’s very good to grow one’s own magical plants. Kat [Harrison] made the point in her talk [on her fieldwork with the Mazatec Indians in Mexico] that with sacred medicines, any shaman wants to know who’s touched them, where they came from, their history. And making magical objects, the materials, and the history of the materials is all very important. You don’t want to get boorish on this, but the more you can refine that, the further you can trace that out, the more powerful the magic is gonna be, and it’ll probably be better art, also.

[Question about tobacco as an offering.]

Yeah, and you can use it as a purifier. Smoke some, burn some on charcoal and you can clean things. It’s very famously used as a cleaner. You can clean bad vibes off something with tobacco.

Something else I’ve found is good for cleaning bad vibes I learned from the Chinese, which is firecrackers. Wanna get the bad spirits out? That’ll work. Whole strings of them, let ‘em off all at once!

There’s a great wealth of lore, ways different peoples dealt with things for a long time. Much of it is neglected, but we can still find these very useful things.

And if magical thinking goes against your grain because you’re educated, and you don’t want to be superstitious, look at it as art, use aesthetic principles. Look at it as art and theatre, and you can do the same thing that way.

[Question about magical propriety and sacred space in dense urban environments.]

It is more challenging, yeah, but you can use all the same principles. I’m kind of “seat of the pants”, so I started hanging yarrow in the door. Something like that. In the sixties we all made these gods’ eyes. I still have one—shows how bad I am. I’m sure there are lots of people who do stuff like that. Over huge parts of the world people have all these charms and amulets as protection against the Evil Eye. So yeah, start with charms and amulets. I like yarrow, that’s good.

I don’t know what to do about sound. You’ll think of something. [laughs]

I’m very excited, and damnably lucky, to have been granted a press pass for this year’s World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland (21st to 24th March). I’ll be interviewing a number of the luminaries and “rising researchers” there, and using these interviews as the basis for an in-depth feature for Dreamflesh Journal (as well as posting the full interviews here).

I’m looking forward to seeing for the first time Stanislav Grof, Dennis McKenna and Ralph Metzner. Hopefully I’ll get round to interviewing Jeremy Narby, after nearly doing so a couple of times. And if Christian Rätsch rustles up anything approaching his impression of himself turning into a panther on his first acid trip that he did at Bath in 2004, I’ll be more than content.

Of course, as with all conferences, the real gems will be found hidden away in unexpected encounters between scheduled events, buried deep in late-night conviviality, and crystallized out of nowhere by the cumulative force of the ideas surrounding you.

I know of the people behind the event, the Gaia Media Foundation, from back in the ’90s—they used to stock Towards 2012. It’s great that they’re still going, stronger than ever, and putting together such catalytic gatherings.

[audio:2007-11-06-metageum-pauldevereux.mp3]
(Download 99 MB MP3)

by Gyrus

In this culture, in this age, ego death can be slow and painful.

The Out of Order Order, Liber 111-111 (=000)

Experience

Glastonbury Festival, June 1993. I had finished my final degree exams, and was standing on the edge of a cliff. Behind me lay the rocky certainty of passage through the educational system; ahead lay the uncharted depths of the ocean commonly known as the Real World. At university I had been initiated into illicit drug use, and had fallen foul of a nervous breakdown precipitated by a broken relationship, and the subtle slip into drug abuse that sometimes follows initial ecstatic experiences. Here, among the hallowed hills of Somerset, the residues of this breakdown were to culminate in my facing Death.

The first days were quite uneventful, measured on the scale of the festival’s notoriously hectic hedonism — doughnuts, dope, blazing sunshine and glowing campfires. I ate little, slept little, and danced abundantly. I felt curiously disturbed by the appearance of a raving acid casualty, a girl who bounced around the stage area in the aftermath of The Orb’s appearance, burbling out an incomprehensible gush of verbal torrents that obviously served to help her precariously hang on to some reality among the shifting states she seemed lost in. “Trippy! Trippy! Trippy!” she would exclaim, obviously elated, making a small leap with each word, before degenerating into a disturbing paranoid rant. She eventually vanished into the darkness, and I bumped into a friend and temporarily forgot the incident.

Sunday was the final blow-out. Constant consumption of dope in the Jazz Field, and then preparation for the final night’s festivities — amphetamines, a pill which I hoped contained at least some MDMA, and a pure grass & hash joint. As I dabbed the speed in my tent, a companion poked his head around the zip flap and made a jokey comment about speed being deadly — I laughed it off, having happily ingested far greater quantities at other times, with only good effects.

I dropped the ecstasy before Porno for Pyros, and tried my best to thrash around in the sunset, surrounded as I was by drunken stoned people looking on dumbly at Perry Farrell’s antics. They finished, and I passed the joint around my friends in the dim twilight. Spiritualized took to the stage, which at once erupted into a blaze of searing white light and sculptured white noise. I felt instantly uncomfortable, but my love for the music and my conviction that I WAS going to enjoy myself kept me there for several tracks. Being outside, my glowing sunburn exposed to the chilly onset of night, didn’t help; neither did the fact that it’s impossible to dance to the mono-drone of Spiritualized, so I was unable to release any of the energy that I felt surging up inside me. Most significantly, I was quickly aware of very uncomfortable blocks in the energy flow around certain areas of my body. My left arm gradually passed from electrical tingling to numbness. My heart was beating rapidly, and its seemingly irregular pounding echoed around my body. I felt painful knots of muscles in my upper left back, and vainly tried to massage them out. I sensed that my entire left half, defined in an alarmingly precise way, was either tingling uncomfortably or numb. I feared a heart attack.

On top of this, I realised that I was standing in the same area as the acid girl had been in the night before. I fancied that her disequilibrium and general freaked-outness was seeping into me and not finding its way out.

I remember it vividly. The track being played was ‘Medication’ (a synchronistic irony which added to that of the band’s name, in relation to what was about to happen). The intensely bewildering white lighting, strobes and search-lights, began to seem disturbing, vaguely menacing. I crouched on the floor, partly to avoid the light and dull the sound, and partly to ‘steady’ myself. Rather than look at someone’s backside, I closed my eyes, but found that I could still perceive the forest of legs around me. And mingling with the muffled sound of the band (which was also carried through vibrations in the earth) was a sinister babble of whispering, all the conversations in the field floating around below head-level. Looking up, and opening my eyes, I saw an incredible thing in the sky, which I actually enjoyed watching for a moment, such was its spectacle. The band’s light show, reflected from the night’s clouds and shaped by my altered perceptions, smoothly coalesced into a vast, swirling vortex of light above me, rotating madly like a whirlpool into infinity. I decided to stand up… and after my body had straightened out to full height, I, my consciousness, felt as if I was continuing to rise. I felt as if the point of perception that is essentially me was rising up my spine and threatening to escape out the back of the crown of my skull, towards the vortex in the sky. My thought processes rocketed, and I felt absolutely positive that I was going to die. NOW. Or rather, I had the option — I could fight it off if I wanted to live strongly enough. My responses to this became a rapid oscillation between positive and negative, “Yes!” and “No!”, flitting insanely back and forth like a strobe. I eventually hung on to the positive long enough to decide to walk away.

I asked my friends to take me to the medical centre, which they managed to do with admirable efficiency under the circumstances. I was ferried across the site in an ambulance, and was examined at the medical centre… there I was told that my heart was fine and I was in no danger at all. I ranted for a bit about how E should be legalized so it could have guaranteed purity, and how they (the docs) should give me something to calm my metabolism down; but I was finally shown to a stone barn that served as a medical ‘chill-out’ zone. I found it very difficult to chill out in a brightly lit room full of fellow freak-outs, some crying uncontrollably, one occasionally pointing at me with a quivering hand and an expression of wide-eyed horror. I eventually wandered back to my tent with my friends, and watched the sunrise with a sense of gratitude I had never before experienced.

The months that followed were peppered with other, less intense, death-fear panics; usually, though not always, occurring after smoking cannabis. I would catch glimpses of that feeling I experienced at Glastonbury, of staring into the void of Death, contemplating with clarity and fear the black emptiness that would result from my experience of Life simply ceasing to exist. I was once accidentally given a coffee full of dope, and panicked severely on taking the last sip and discovering the huge flakes of slate at the bottom. Seeking shelter at a friend’s house, I found myself sat behind a television, listening with growing fear to the programme that was on, a hospital drama — the blip-blip of a heart monitor levelling out to a high-pitched tone amidst the sound of panicking doctors. A paranoid, synchronistic mind-media feedback loop often accompanied the death-fear syndrome.

I only began to feel release from the recurring death-fear after a particularly intense dream experience, several months after Glastonbury. As I drifted off to sleep, I heard hypnagogic chants and voices, and slipped imperceptibly into a dream set in the same room as I was sleeping in. All my teeth fell out. I began to feel my blood flow clogging up. The friend who was sleeping in the same bed as me called an ambulance (it was the same friend who had guided me to the medical centre at Glastonbury), and hugged me Goodbye. A crowd had gathered outside when the ambulance arrived, and they cheered me incongruously as I clambered in, apparently praising my degree results. At the hospital, I walked into a tatty, yellowish room lined with mirrors, full of decaying medical equipment and bustling nursing staff. My perceptions were distorted, giving everything the grimy, too-real appearance common on rough acid come-downs. Am I dying or tripping? Or both? If I’m tripping, how can I tell these doctors, who seem to be in a different world, to get me some thorazine? I looked at myself in one of the mirrors, and the instant that I saw my reflection, stark horror in my eyes and blood running from my toothless mouth, time slowed down and made all movements syrupy. I began to fall down to the floor, infinitely slowly, always staring fixedly at my reflection. I quickly remembered a tip a friend had given me for coping with Bad Trips — to place the palms flat on the front and back of the head, and to imagine a beam of blue light linking them. I did this, and everything grew instantly brighter… and brighter… and brighter… and brighter, until it reached a peak intensity, and all I could see was searing white light. I had finally died.

And then I woke up.

Maps & Models

After this dream, I began to intensively research areas that may shed light on my experiences — psychology, religion, shamanism, magick, dreamwork, meditation techniques. I slowly realised that my spontaneous experiences, uninformed at the time by anything save the barest inklings of these various bodies of thought, appeared to resonate with human mythologies and experiences that reached back into the prehistory of our species.

It may be tempting for many people to pass my experiences off as mere aberrations brought about by the careless use of chemical compounds. I cannot (perhaps of necessity). Extensive experience of altered states of consciousness, drug-induced and otherwise, has taught me that such monumentous experiences as these cannot, and should not, be sheltered from analysis and deeper understanding by the cosy blanket of reductionism. I believe my drug use enhanced and intensified my experience of processes that were already present in my situation. Although I ran the danger of mental and/or physiological damage, perhaps such an experience was necessary for certain ways of thinking, certain perceptions, to burst through the rigid layers of my social conditioning. And despite the fact that I acknowledge the stupidity in my abuse of chemicals, I believe that this stupidity stemmed largely from the society and culture that I was raised in — where potentially beneficial substances are criminalized indiscriminately, leading to misinformation and ignorance about their benefits and dangers. The same obsessional behaviour that taboos against sexuality lead to may also manifest in drug use when these substances are banned, and thus closed off from informed debate. For myself, it took an experience like this to shock me into self-discipline with regard to drug use, and to open me up to an intensive, experiential awareness of my own mortality — an awareness that can paralyse one into passive fear, or goad one into a more vital appreciation of the living of Life.

I never have one model. I always have at least seven models for anything.

Robert Anton Wilson

What I intend to do here is to summarise my research and intuitions about this experience, and its possible implications for myself and others in this culture. I’m trying to write what I would have liked to have read two years ago. I will make specific references to my own experiences to clarify the relevance of certain analogies, but I will leave much of the comparison work up to the reader. There is no overall ‘structure’ intended, although there are many resonances between separate sections. However, underlying all the different perspectives and traditions through which this raw data of experience may be filtered, there are several basic assumptions. These are the assumptions I hold now, after my research, and are, like all assumptions, expedient.

• The experiences I have described are not, in their essence, idiosyncratic aberrations; nor are they necessarily universal.
• My delusion that I was about to die was due to ‘crossed connections’ in my mental circuits. An impending dissolution (death) of a set of mental patterns (ego) was misperceived as the impending death of myself as a biological organism.1
• The processes involved in my experiences are intimately connected to ‘initiatory’ processes — both those natural to an organism’s socio-biologic evolution and those rituals found in tribal societies and esoteric mystery schools.

Throughout, I shall refer to the core process that I feel underlies my experiences as IF (Initiatory Fear), for reasons that I hope will become clear.

Shamanism

The most ancient models for IF processes lie in shamanism, which Mircea Éliade has defined precisely as techniques of ecstasy.2 Shamanism is not a religion — the set of techniques that define it exist within many mythological and religious traditions. However, investigations into surviving tribal cultures (in which shamanic practices have survived in their least diluted forms since their origins in human pre-history) have revealed some key, almost universal, mythological motifs in shamanic practices.

Of prime importance here is the initiatory ritual of death and resurrection. A shaman enters his vocation in one of several ways, usually through inheritance or through a spontaneous ‘call’. This often takes the form of an initiatory sickness, which may be an illness, an accidental brush with death (e.g. being struck by lightning) or a general breakdown.

The shamanic cosmos consists of three worlds: this world, the earthly realm; the underworld, populated by ancestral spirits and demons; and the upper world, where gods and celestial beings dwell. This cosmos is usually represented by the symbol of the World Tree; the underworld in its roots, the celestial realms in its branches, and this world where the trunk meets the ground. During hir initiatory sickness, the shaman’s soul travels down into the underworld, and is torn apart by spirits. The mutilated pieces of the shaman’s body are then brought back together, usually in a large cauldron, or in a blacksmith’s furnace. Often an extra organ or magical stone is included in the body as it is re-forged. This is followed by an ascent into the celestial realms, where the shaman meets the tribes’ gods. SHe then returns to this world, healed (often hir body has been lying prone, unconscious, in a tent or hut for several days while hir soul voyaged to the underworld). It is the fact that the shaman has healed hirself, through hir ecstatic journeys to the other worlds, that grants hir the power to heal others (one of the many social functions of the shaman). In healing others, the shaman induces in hirself an ecstatic trance, through drumming, dancing or hallucinogenic plants, which enables hir to journey again to the underworld, to battle with the spirits that have caused the illness, and to recover the client’s lost soul. The shaman also uses hir powers for divination, finding lost objects (or people), and for conducting the souls of the recently deceased to their place in the underworld.

From the reports gathered, it seems that the shaman’s perception of hir soul-body being ripped apart by spirits has a very literal character — many accounts convey an extremely gruesome event. Often, the shaman is decapitated so that sHe may witness hir own dismemberment. Here, while the physical body lies in a tent on the earthly plane, the shaman experiences hir mental and spiritual reconfiguration in a drastically physical way. If the death and resurrection motif of shamanic initiation is seen as a hypernormal ego deconstruction/reconstruction process, the misperception of ego-death as biological death in my own IF experiences can be seen to have strong historical precedents. Of course, my own experiences are more diffuse and distorted — they lack the ritualized focus and mythological structure of true shamanic initiation.

A final analogy is from a less traditional source of shamanic experience. In True Hallucinations, Terence McKenna describes his journey with his brother, Dennis, and several others to the Amazon basin, where they conduct an experiment in consciousness expansion using indigenous psychoactive mushrooms. 24 hours after their key experiment, during the night, Dennis went on a wild ramble in the surrounding jungle; or at least he believed that he did — nobody saw him go or return. Whatever the reality-status of the experience, he had wandered into the jungle and found an especially tall tree.

On impulse, he had climbed it, aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the Siberian shamanic journey. As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and as he reached the highest point of his ascent, something that he called “the vortex” opened ahead of him — a swirling, enormous doorway into time. He could see the Cyclopean megaliths of Stonehenge and beyond them, revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane, the outlines of the pyramids, gleaming and marble-faceted as they have not been since the days of pharaonic Egypt. And yet further into the turbulent mass of the vortex he saw mysteries that were ancient long before the advent of man — titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined by us, the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled. This machinery, these gibbering abysses, touched with the cold of interstellar space and aeon-consuming time, rushed down upon him. He fainted, and time — who can say how much time — passed by him.

Again, the parallels are vague and diffuse, but nevertheless there. This account seems to indicate some of the experiences that the “vortex” phenomena may yield when the ego can be released from its painfully desperate attempts to maintain its mastery.

Esoteric Yoga

The most curious aspect of the peak of my Glastonbury death-panic was the sensation of my consciousness threatening to rise above my physical body, out of the top of my skull. There is an obvious connection here with the onset of a near-death experience, but the fact that I do not believe I was actually near physical death, only ego-death, causes me to look for other models (despite the fact that near-death experiences may parallel certain aspects of ego-death).

There is a striking similarity between the anatomical location of my consciousness’ near-escape route and the processes described in the ancient Indian esoteric practice of Kundalini Yoga. This is based around the theory of the chakra system in the human body. Briefly, there are seven separate chakras, or energy centres, each relating to different manifestations of energy in the human organism. They are located in the base of the spine, the genital area, the solar plexus, the heart, the throat, the ‘third eye’ (between the eyebrows) and in the crown of the skull. Each is related, due to its location, to different forces in human life, e.g. the base of the spine is associated with basic survival instincts, and the ‘third eye’ is associated with psychic perceptions. In addition, there is (in certain traditions, and in the correspondences of Leary & Wilson’s Eight-Circuit Brain model) an eighth chakra, located above the head, which is associated with out-of-body experiences. The Kundalini power is envisaged as a snake of energy, or life-force, that lies coiled in the base chakra. If it is activated, through yogic practices, it will surge up through the successive chakras. However, if there is a ‘block’ in any of the chakras above it, the Kundalini snake will rebound downwards, and manifest as a powerfully distorted force in the energy centre immediately below. But if all the chakras are functioning smoothly in their processing of energy, the snake will be experienced as a glowing fiery power that surges up through the spine and out of the top of the skull. Certain energy blockages probably caused the knotted muscles in my back, but the Kundalini seems to have burst through all the chakras to an extent, only to be prevented from free release by terrified ego-mechanisms.

Also, Antero Alli has made an interesting observation with regard to Kundalini experiences:

The activation of Kundalini does not always occur from practising Kundalini Yoga, etc. … It has been known to erupt spontaneously in those people on the verge of major spiritual breakthroughs, regardless of their ideas of how enlightened they are.

However, as my own experience showed, lack of preparation in this process may cause considerable panic, and false, potentially destructive perceptions.

The Dark Night of the Soul / Chapel Perilous

The sixteenth century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, wrote his treatise The Dark Night of the Soul in the years following his escape from prison at Toledo. In it, he describes the Dark Night as a “passive purgation”, a necessary period of spiritual dryness and despair through which every soul must pass on it journey towards God. In his introduction to the treatise, Rev. Benedict Zimmerman describes this process as the wilting collapse that follows the finite’s brush with the infinite: “There is one other reason why the soul should pass through the trials of the Dark Night. Its ultimate destiny is union with God. Now the soul is finite, and God is infinite. The disproportion between the two is so enormous (being, in fact, infinite in itself) that the mere comparison must have a crushing effect upon the finite being. … When the finite comes into contact with the infinite it realises its utter nothingness; it is humbled to the ground. The contrast causes it the most intense pain.” Stripped of the Christian theology, I find this to be a nice model to look at the vortex/void experience with. An experiential perception of the void (which is by definition infinite) shatters the puny ego with its incomprehensible vastness, and the ego vainly struggles and claws to hold on to itself — tearing at and cramping the natural psycho-biological flow of energy in the process.

Following in St. John’s footsteps, Robert Anton Wilson renamed this joyless phase of individual evolution ‘Chapel Perilous’. Antero Alli elucidates this idea in great depth in his Angel Tech. He feels that the cause of a soul’s entry into Chapel Perilous is a tremendous SHOCK. The soul, unable to deal with this, migrates from the body, leaving the individual in a barren, literally ‘soulless’ state.

This conception is strongly shamanic. An article I read on the Internet, long since lost in cyberspace, tied up the shamanic idea of soul-loss with modern psychotherapeutic methods of re-experiencing trauma. The combined theory suggests that when someone experiences a traumatic shock to their system, part of the psyche or soul is ‘frozen’ or ‘trapped’ at that precise intersection point in the space-time continuum. The modern model of recovery from this is that the individual has to vividly ‘relive’ that moment in time, and to fully feel the pain and shock that was repressed the first time around — thus ‘thawing out’ the trapped part of the psyche. The shamanic model sees this process as the recovery of the soul; the shaman travels into the underworld (which underpins the space-time continuum) and, after struggling with the evil spirits that kidnapped the soul from its owner in the first place (‘trapping’ it), brings the soul back to hir client, and restores it in its proper place.

Alli explains the process thus:

…[shock] often produces a sense of Limbo, floating feelings and an overall disconnectedness.3 Depending on how traumatic the shock is, we’ll enter into anything from ‘spaciness’ to the Permanent Vocation of Psychosis. Shock temporarily disconnects the soul from the body and sends it to CHAPEL PERILOUS to learn the lesson of the sermon. This process of returning to ourselves … will be referred to as INITIATION.

The initiatory nature of the Dark Night is now explicit. Alli sees the actual initiation in the rebirth aspect of the process. The death aspect occurs when the soul flees the body, and the individual is ‘reborn’ when the soul is recovered.

Initiation is a creative response to the shock of the unknown. Since SHOCK disconnects us, how do we reconnect and where do we begin? One creative way to respond to shock is by reconnecting ourselves to new habits and routines which increase our intelligence and make us happy. During the phase of our disconnection, we are perhaps most vulnerable to impressions and suggestions from ourselves and others. It is during this time that new directions may be initiated and crystallized when the ‘gap of our death’ eventually closes down again and we stabilize. … If we are naive to this effect and don’t reconnect ourselves creatively, we lapse back even deeper into our previous habits… like them or not. (Alli)

The Chaos Paradigm

A key influence on the conception of initiatory processes in this article has been ‘The Cycles of Chaos: Deconstructing Initiation’ by Kalkinath & Vishvanath. The impetus behind Chaos Magic,4 to strip dogma and glamour away to reveal the bare bones of magickal structures (and then to use glamours as tools) has been applied here to recognise that ‘initiation’ is not necessarily a cut-and-dried event that occurs once and instantly reveals great secrets, or ushers one on to an authentic ‘path’.

Initiation is described here as a “threshold of change”, and Kalkinath & Vishvanath make clear three important points about what I have termed IF processes:

• Initiations are processes. They may take many different forms, and vary in scope and impact. Here, the process of initiation is divided into three cycles — (a) peaks (initiatory crises), which can take the form of intense over-load experiences, crushing breakdowns or accidents/illnesses; (b) troughs, in other words Dark Nights of the Soul, dryness of spirit and an oppressive sense of emptiness; and (c) plateaux, where “nothing much seems to be going on”.
• Initiatory processes are fractal. Here, they are described in terms of Macroscopic and Microscopic initiations. That is, Big Ones and Little Ones; different scales of process which share a basic similarity in structure, and which often contain elements, motifs or archetypes that resonate across space and time.
• The key to dealing with initiatory cycles is recognition. Through examining your own experiences, you can become consciously aware of the particular process you are moving through. Kalkinath & Vishvanath’s method for dealing consciously with IF processes is the A PIE formula: Assess — stop and realise you are at a turning point, examine possibilities open to you, use option lists, divinatory techniques, “be vulnerable to the forces of change.”; Plan — decide what you need to do, gather resources necessary for its implementation; Implement — do it! Follow things through, do not give in to inertia; Evaluate — assimilate your experiences into your Self, real-ize the lessons you have learnt.

In line with a major practical technique in the Chaos tradition, the inevitable fear associated with these processes is not seen as something to be avoided and suppressed. Rather, full awareness is maintained; the fear is fully experienced, and transformed into wonder or excitation. “Transform fear into fuel” — a redirection of energy flow.5

Psychedelic Research

Ego-Death

In the mid 1960s, ex-Harvard professor Timothy Leary collaborated with colleagues Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner on a re-vision of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, renamed The Psychedelic Experience. Their central thesis in this new interpretation is highly relevant to the general ideas presented here in relation to IF processes. The Book was traditionally seen as a guide-book for the dead, to be read to the dying or recently deceased in order to guide them through the successive realms, or bardos, of the Tibetan Buddhist model of the afterlife — and to enable them to successfully find a nice new body to be reincarnated in. With the guidance of Tibetan Buddhist Lamas, Leary revealed that this was merely the exoteric reading of the Book. Its hidden, esoteric meaning was that it was designed to guide people through the death/rebirth initiation rites of Tibetan mystery schools.

So, with the intention of providing Americans with a safe guide to turning on, he and his friends re-wrote the Book in modern psychedelic parlance. In a journey directly analogous to that supposedly taken by the departed soul between the end of one life and the beginning of the next, the tripper is guided through the death of hir old ego (resulting in the classic ‘merging with the Clear Light’), and, on the come-down, advised regarding creative choice of new ego patterns, more flexible ‘game routines’.

Speaking of the difficulties often encountered by those new to intense psychedelic experiences, the book confirms my own intuition regarding the misperception of ego-death:

…another impasse is the imposition of physical symptom games onto the biological flow. The new somatic sensations may be interpreted as symptoms. If it is new, it must be bad. Any organ of the body may be selected as the focus of the ‘illness’. … All physical symptoms are created by the mind. Bodily sickness is a sign that the ego is fighting to maintain or regain its hold over the outpouring of feeling, over a dissolution of emotional boundaries.6

Perinatal Matrices

As we venture [on LSD] beyond the biographical events of early childhood, we enter into a realm of experience associated with the trauma of biological birth. Entering this new territory, we start experiencing emotions and physical sensations of great intensity, often surpassing anything we might consider humanly possible. Here we encounter emotions at two polar extremes, a strange intertwining of birth and death, as if these two aspects of the human experience were somehow one. Along with a sense of life-threatening confinement comes a determined struggle to free oneself and survive.7

Stanislav Grof is a pioneer in the application of the psychedelic experience to clinical psychiatry, and in the mapping of the human psyche. His principal contribution to human psychology seems to be his research into how our experiences in the womb, and during the birth process, affect our life experiences as adults.

During many LSD sessions, involving both himself and patients, he noticed that most people eventually spontaneously re-lived their pre-birth experiences — even back to being a sperm struggling towards its goal, at the same time as being the egg waiting for the triumphant sperm. Their fusing would be experienced as a titanic explosion of creative energy, followed by the mysterious differentiation of cells that forms the foetus. Many experiences of foetal life and birth related by patients in psychedelic therapy were later confirmed objectively by medical records, parents and adults present at the birth. Without prior knowledge, people established through LSD sessions very specific details about their mother’s lives while pregnant and various events or complications surrounding their birth.

Grof discovered profound connections between the physical experiences of the womb and of birth, and later manifestations of aberrant behaviour and psychology, as well as intense spiritual experiences. He called the complex emotional constellations that threaded through the key experiences of an individual’s life COEX systems (for “systems of COndensed EXperience”). An individual will usually have several COEX systems in their unconscious mind, each one dominated by a major theme, e.g. humiliation, claustrophobia, or rejection (there are also positive COEX systems, however). As a result of his research, covering both LSD experiences and physical birth processes, he concluded that a major, possibly fundamental, part of each COEX system is a corresponding stage in foetal development and birth. He called the residues of these experiences Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs).8 He hypothesizes that many traumatic or ecstatic life experiences involve a re-invocation of BPMs whose dominant themes resonate with the specific experience. More radically, he suggests that certain compulsive or obsessive traits (e.g. the repetitive seeking-out of humiliating experiences) are governed by BPMs — we search, consciously or not, for situations that re-invoke certain birth processes, which consequently augment the corresponding COEX system. He feels it is necessary to fully re-experience, and integrate, such BPMs in order to resolve the conflict patterns they have engendered.

He divides the BPMs into four successive stages, each one representing a specific constellation of motifs (represented on LSD by vivid hallucinations and emotions), each one a basis for an ongoing COEX system. I shall briefly describe his definitions of these stages, and add comments regarding their relevance to this essay as appropriate.

• BPM I — The Amniotic Universe: Often associated with the passive, oceanic ecstasy of classical mysticism; every need being instantly fulfilled, floating in a warm, comfortable aquatic environment. However, recollections of various toxins in the mother’s body (alcohol, cigarettes, spicy foods, ‘toxic’ emotions like anger or bitterness) can manifest as feelings of suffocation, agonizing physical pains, muscular spasms, the felt presence of insidious evil entities or alien intrusions.
• BPM II — Cosmic Engulfment & No Exit: Finds its basis in the onset of the birth process, the realisation that the bliss of the Amniotic Universe is about to end, but without any idea of what will follow. The uterine cervix is still closed, but contractions have begun, and various hormonal and chemical changes are taking place. “The contractions, closed cervix, and the unfavorable chemical changes combine to create a painful and life-threatening environment from which the fetus can sense no possibility of escape. It is no wonder the death and birth are so closely related in this matrix.” Grof relates the common occurrence of paranoid ideas during the reliving of this matrix (radiation, evil forces, secret organizations, extraterrestrial influences) to the chemical changes of the onset of contractions, which may be perceived by the unborn child as disease or intoxication. He also relates the pessimism of the existentialists to this process, noting that Sartre called one of his most famous theatrical statements of crushing anxiety No Exit.
  There are two specific quotes here that may shed light on the key experiential themes of this essay:

  As these threatening experiences continue and deepen, the person may have a vision of a gigantic whirlpool and feel in the middle of it, being drawn relentlessly to its center.9

  Experiences of BPM II are best characterized by the triad: fear of death, fear of never coming back, and fear of going crazy. I have already discussed the predominance of the theme of death; this often includes the sense that one’s own life is seriously threatened. Once this feeling is present, the mind is capable of fabricating any number of stories that provide a rational ‘explanation’ of why this is happening — an impending heart attack or stroke, an ‘overdose’ when a psychedelic drug is involved, or many others. The cellular memory of birth can emerge into present consciousness with such a force that the person believes beyond any doubt that real biological death is possible and actually imminent.10

  And, echoing Kalkinath & Vishnvanath’s advice about ‘relaxing into the fear’, Grof states: “Paradoxically, the fastest way out of this situation is to fully accept the hopelessness of the predicament, which really means conscious acceptance of the original feelings of the fetus.”

• BPM III — The Death-Rebirth Struggle: A continuance of the above process, although now there is a little ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, as the very apt cliché goes. “In the previous matrix, the cervix was closed; now it is open, allowing the fetus to move through the birth canal. Although the fight for survival continues, there is now a sense of hope, a belief that there will be an end to the struggle.” Reliving this process involves a titanic experience of pressure (due to the vast pressure of the pelvic opening on the child’s head and body), and the intense physical proximity between the child and the mother often results in an oscillating identification between the child and the mother. This frequently involves intense sexual arousal, due to the involvement of the genital area. Grof believes this to be a stage of violently merging contradictions, where death is intertwined with sexuality, pleasure with pain, aggression with love — he terms this experience “Dionysian” or “volcanic” ecstasy, as opposed to the passive bliss of BPM I.
• BPM IV — The Death-Rebirth Experience: A traumatic yet triumphant culmination of previous sufferings and struggles, resulting in an experience of total ego annihilation. Their is an intense purgation that bursts through the pits of despair and violence of BPMs II & III. There follows a sense of deep relaxation, serenity and quiet excitement. Grof warns that an incomplete re-experiencing of this stage, due to complications in BPM III, may result in a hyperactive mania; the cosmic insights and feelings of triumph at this stage can manifest in people wildly proclaiming their revelations to others and making grandiose plans to change the world.

Although Grof occasionally runs dangerously close to a reductionist position (intense emotional experiences in adult life are nothing but the re-emergence of perinatal matrices), the primal nature of the birth process does indicate that experiences of it may be of great importance in assessing and understanding many archetypal human experiences of death-rebirth.

Individuation, Culture, and Awareness of Mortality

In surveying the neo-Jungian literature dealing with the different stages of human life, and the transitional phases/crises between them, I was struck by the fact that the crisis provoked by an encroaching awareness of self-mortality is placed categorically in the mid-life crisis transition. In his wide-ranging study, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, Daniel J. Levinson acknowledges that the concept of death does play a role in all the various transitional phases:

Some preoccupation with death — fearing it, being drawn to it, seeking to transcend it — is not uncommon in all transitions, since the process of termination-initiation evokes the imagery of death and rebirth.

However, Levinson says that “…the experience of one’s mortality is at the core of the mid-life crisis.” Why? In this standard model of the human life-structure, the biological and social imperatives come first: the crisis of the early adult transition (approx. 17-22) is focused around entering the adult world, with the primary aims of getting married, raising a family, and getting a job (and social status) to facilitate this. When these duties are accomplished, and the person in question is rendered redundant in terms of their biological service to the species; then sHe will begin to realise the horrible fact of mortality.

Although I have not found any statement backing this up, Levinson’s assertions about the awareness of death in the mid-life crisis seem to contain an implicit commentary on Jung’s conception of how cultural evolution is carried out:

Man has two aims. The first is the natural aim, the begetting of children and the business of protecting the brood; to this belongs the acquisition of money and social position. When this aim has been reached a new phase begins: the cultural aim.11

A young person has not yet acquired a past, therefore has no present either. He does not create culture, he merely exists. It is the privilege and task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture.12

It isn’t too wild an assumption to see a connection here between awareness of mortality and participation in the evolution of culture. Lust for some form of immortality (fired by awareness of death) has often been cited as the drive responsible for culture in the first place. Jolande Jacobi has elucidated Jung’s philosophy further with a quote from Schopenhauer:

Life may be compared to a piece of embroidery, of which, during the first half of his time, a man gets a sight of the right side, and during the second half, of the wrong. The wrong side is not so pretty as the right, but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together.13

I don’t think that Jung’s and Schopenhauer’s views here stem from some youth-hating bigotry. This model of the individual’s relation to culture was probably quite valid for their respective eras. However, as most people reading this must know, it is no longer just over-40s who create all the culture that surrounds us and permeates our existence. Since World War II, the progressive emergence of specific youth sub-cultures has created zones of autonomy in which young people can manifest their own cultural environments: beatnik, hippy, punk, mod, goth, industrial, rave, cyberpunk… These radiate outwards into mainstream culture, where they are usually assimilated and emasculated; but the continuing existence of thriving sub-cultures keeps the young one step ahead of the mainstream. Jung and Schopenhauer would have had to radically remodel their ideas if they had been zapped into the future and taken to a rave festival in the backwoods of rural England.

The DIY ethic of all the most radical elements of today’s youth cultures is a conscious rejection of the model of cultural evolution that seems to have existed from the beginning of settled civilisations until about fifty years ago.

A Stab in the Dark Night

What follows is just one model in which to place IF processes in relation to human evolution in general. I’ve only found this one so far — I’d be interested to hear of others. I’ve taken the step of making quite a wild generalization, extending from my own personal experiences out into cultural evolution theory for two reasons: (i) The fact that most people I know have experienced some form of breakdown (at least) or confrontation with Death (at most) in their early twenties. Several cases have borne vivid similarities; and (ii) it’s a possibility, so I’ll throw it out there for it to be ripped apart and analysed by others, and to pass or fail the test of time.

It seems that in the context of my own (and many other peoples’) experiences, the awareness-of-death crisis, that traditionally hits you when your brood have flown from their nest, has been shoved backwards down the ladder of life to become the focus of the early adult transition crisis. It is true that many of the ‘confrontations with Death’ I spoke of above involved assorted hallucinogens, or pseudo-hallucinogenic cocktails of other substances. Firstly, beware of reductionism, of ‘explaining away’. Secondly, it may well be that in certain sections of the population the awareness of mortality is being shoved backwards because of the widespread use of psychedelics. The intimate connections that have been traced between the explosion of psychedelic usage in the sixties and the parallel emergence of youth culture seems to confirm that these compounds have played a great part in the toppling of the Jungian model of culture.14 Of course, psychedelics make you aware of more than just your own death — but this seems to be a glaringly powerful factor in the hypothesis that is emerging here.

Jacobi acknowledges that there have always been those freak individuals who end up looking at the wrong side of Schopenhauer’s embroidery in the first half of their life cycle. He describes these as “the introverted, the seekers, the quiet and reflective ones.” He sees this as a tragedy — they supposedly spend the first half of their life moaning about how screwed up the world is, and then mourn the missed opportunities of youth in their old age. This seems to be a completely illogical way of looking at things. To go back to Schopenhauer’s analogy — surely the woMan who looks naively at the ‘right’ side in youth, then sees the thread structures in middle age and starts trying to add hir own contribution, surely sHe will be pretty frustrated that sHe has realized the pattern can be re-made — after hir youthful energy has passed hir by. Surely we should look at the ‘wrong’ side as soon as possible, try to improve it, or re-thread it, as best we can. Then we can relax as we approach old age, enjoy the fruits of our labours, and watch the new generation with pride as they valiantly add their own improvements to life’s embroidery.

It seems that youth culture in the late 20th century holds at its core this very idea, of looking at the wiring under the board and re-engineering, long before one is ‘supposed’ to. Perhaps we have been forced to do this, such is the blatancy of the toxic mess our ancestors have made of our culture and the planet we inhabit. And, on surveying the writings of Arthur Koestler, it can be seen that this lowering of the age of cultural participants has possible evolutionary implications.

Paedomorphosis, or Juvenilization, is an evolutionary strategy much lauded by Koestler.15 Although it has gained credence from the work of biologists such as Garstang, Hardy, de Beer, Koltsov, Takhtajan and Julian Huxley, it is not an established argument in the study of biological evolution. But, as we shall see, it is of undeniable importance in cultural evolution.

In general, paedomorphosis is seen as an evolutionary strategy for the escape from the dead-ends of over-specialization:

It indicates that at certain critical stages evolution can retrace its steps, as it were, along the path which lead to the dead end and make a fresh start in a new, more promising direction. The crucial event in this process is the appearance at the foetal, larval or juvenile stage of some useful evolutionary novelty which is carried over into the adult stage of the organism’s progeny.

An example given by Koestler of this process in biology is that of the sea cucumber. This creature ordinarily sits on the sea bed like an inert sausage. However, its larvae float about in the ocean, like a plant’s seeds in the wind. These larvae show features, like a ciliary band (a forerunner of the nervous system), that make them closer to fish than the adult cucumber. It is hypothesised that some of these larvae, subjected to stronger selective pressures than the adults as they drifted in the oceanic currents, gradually became more fish-like, and eventually some reached sexual maturity while still in the larval state — “…thus giving rise to a new type of animal which never settled on the bottom at all, and altogether eliminated the senile, sedentary cucumber stage from its life history.”16 Paedomorphosis “involves a retreat from specialized adult forms to earlier, less committed and more plastic stages in the development of organisms — followed by a sudden advance in a new direction … In biological evolution the escape is brought about by a retreat from the adult to a juvenile stage as the starting point for a new line; in mental evolution by a temporary regression to more primitive modes of ideation, followed by the creative leap forward.” Thus, biological juvenilization finds its parallel in cultural evolution.

Now, perhaps, the ‘archaic revival’ proposed by Terence McKenna, and the term ‘modern primitive’ popularized by the Re/Search body art manual, can be seen in an evolutionary context. The prime characteristics of rave culture — the use of psychedelics, the utilisation of percussive music for altering consciousness, its neo-tribal structure, the rise in nomadic lifestyles, the popularity of body-piercing and tattooing — may be seen as a cultural return to a more primitive model. From this point, having regressed back beyond the cultural and social blind alleys of recent human history, a “creative leap forward” may be made to escape WoMan’s over-specialization.

Hopefully, out of this quaggy mire of pop science, the reader will have already dredged up my main argument, relating to IF processes. It is probable that our culture has reached a dead end. The intense selective pressures that today’s young face, adrift during their larval phase in overloaded media landscapes and societal breakdowns,17 may be dramatically collapsing the awareness-of-death crisis back to the point at which the security of the parental/educational nest is left behind — and often even further. The breakdown-restructuring process that this awareness necessitates, when experienced in the “more plastic” stages of adolescence/early adulthood, will enable some to restructure themselves, and eventually their culture, into more viable, less destructive phenomena.

Koestler also talks about the process of regeneration in relation to paedomorphosis. Apparently, in animals that are able to regenerate lost limbs or organs, like amphibians, the “magic [of regeneration] is performed according to the undoing-redoing formula; the tissue cells near the amputation stump de-differentiate and regress to a quasi-embryonic state, then re-differentiate and re-specialize to form the regenerated structure.” Koestler’s examples progress up the evolutionary tree to rats, whose brain tissues can similarly de-specialize then re-specialize if their optical cortex is removed.

Lastly, in our own species, the ability to regenerate body structures is reduced to a minimum, but compensated by man’s unique power to re-mould his patterns of thought and behaviour — to meet critical challenges by creative responses. And thus we have come full circle through biological evolution back to the various manifestations of human creativity, based on the undoing-redoing pattern, which runs as a leit-motif from paedomorphosis to the revolutionary turning points in science and art; to the mental regeneration at which the regressive techniques in psychotherapy are aimed; and finally to the archetypes of death-and-resurrection, withdrawal and return which recur in all mythologies.

And we have come full circle, back to the shamanic initiatory theme.

It is fascinating to note the connection between a culture’s provision of initiation rites for its young (shamanic or otherwise) and the level of crime and mental illness in that culture. Jungians never tire of pointing out our lack of culturally sanctioned rites of passage, and its connection to retarded personal development. But what do WE have to be initiated INTO? In tribal societies, a youth undergoes severe ordeals as part of hir initiation into adulthood, and “During the heightened suggestibility of this state, he is instructed in tribal lore, myth, secrets, traditions and the arcane wisdom of the ancestors.”18 What if the culture doesn’t work anymore? What if the majority of the ‘elders’ are as ignorant of the (toxic) culture they live in as they are of the (toxic) air they breathe? They are then in no position to initiate anyone into anything. But the initiatory process will not just fade away — “…although our culture no longer provides rites of initiation, there persists in all of us . . . an archetypal need to be initiated.“19

What I am proposing here is that we may be seeing the emergence in certain individuals of spontaneous initiation, into the culture that the individual chooses to help create.20 Please read the previous sentence again and think about it. The forces of cultural evolution may be thrusting vastly traumatic, and potentially highly creative, mental breakdowns upon young people; unprompted and unasked-for initiatory crises that lack a rigid formula for the re-structuring phase… and hence burst open the vertiginous possibility of a radically new vision of human culture and society.21

Appendix

What follows is a compilation of extracts from letters received from an individual who has had a similar set of experiences to the myself. His account is interesting in that he seems to have facilitated a return to the death-panic state, and actually ‘went through’. It should be borne in mind that these words were never intended, originally, for publication. My grateful thanks to (you know who you are) for allowing this account to be published, and for helping me put my own experiences into perspective.

I had the same type of experience (the opening up of the universe and a type of vortex pulling me up) about 9 years ago. I had been smoking hash and drinking most of the night. I suddenly began seeing (I was in a pub) that my life could stay exactly like it was, and that I would be like the other people in the pub, just sitting around wasting their lives. I left the pub, and as I began walking down the road, my mental universe seemed to give way. The ‘vortex’ type effect came and I knew I had the choice to live or die. My heart began beating so loud and fast that it dominated my consciousness. Something inside me knew it was going to pack out. I also knew that I had to go forward (upward) and die, but oh, oh, oh, what fear and panic. I didn’t want to make the choice, and so I collapsed on the floor (luckily no one was about or I would have felt a right turkey).

After this experience I was no longer capable of living the life I had been living, but also couldn’t go forward and work out where I was going next — I had a great sense that I had failed the experience and should have died. After a lot of anguish and lack of direction, I was eventually born onto the Magickal Path, i.e. I read a few Crowley books and felt these may lead to an understanding of the experience. I began practising various magickal and yogic methods, which served as a good discipline. I had slight rumbles of the life/death/panic experience, but nothing so heavy as the first one for about 7 years or so.

Then, late in ’92, I again had the experience, the whole bloody “I’m going to die” panic. I managed to control it this time, but on my birthday I was again there. I really knew I was going to die. I was sobbing and shaking. My heart was again going crazy, time seemed to have slowed down, so each moment was an eternity, every thought seemed to have infinite significance. My girlfriend eventually called a doctor, and I was told it was a ‘panic attack’. I had these ‘panic attacks’ (although not as intense) for quite a few months after this. Every time I went through them it was always a choice of life or death, Death a forward decision and Life a backward decision. And I always came away from them with a sense of failure. On the early morning of 6.7.93, I had another. This time I used all of my discipline (from yoga/magick work) and rode the panic. I rode it all the way up. I lost all consciousness of my body and material surroundings. I came to the point where I knew I would die or not. I knew to back out would somehow lead to failure. I knew I had to die. It was the end of my life. It was a type of block that separated life from death. I then pushed forward and surrendered to death. All I can say after this is that I later started ‘coming down’, knowing I was ‘reborn’ (horrible Xtian-type word) and that I had completed my life/self.

Since that day I have been able to ride the ‘vortex of light’ without the Pan-ic, and had been riding it the night before I got your letter. I think the experience is linked to the Greeks’ Pan concepts, Pan being the all-begetter, all-destroyer; death, all and not. Thus the Pan-ic felt when the life/death choice comes. This is just one map I have since found that seems to describe this experience. Another is that the vortex equals Kundalini, and the ‘death leap’ equals the reaching of Nirvana. They all seem to fit the experience, using different symbolism. As I was saying, I now seem to be able to ride the vortex without the same Pan-ic. I can do this by mixing yoga and hashish, although I now find that the ‘Great Leap’ is impossible for me, as it seems to be a one-off experience — you can only die twice!

I found it very interesting to read in your letter how after your Glastonbury experience you occasionally felt the vortex opening up again. I too had (and still have occasionally) the same feeling. It’s as if the near-death experience cuts you free of gravity, and at any moment you can be sucked up into infinity. Incidentally, I was reading a ‘Women’s Own’ type magazine a few weeks ago, and came across an article about the increasing occurrence of ‘panic attacks’ amongst the population recently. It seems from the article that doctors aren’t really sure why this is, or what can be done about it. Reading this, I came to the theory that they (the ‘panic attacks’) could be some kind of evolutionary mutation, brought on perhaps by the increase in information and a growing awareness of there being no one basic reality. Thus the person’s sense of security is weakened, opening up the ‘fear-vortex’.

Footnotes

1. If I drop dead of a cardiac arrest tomorrow, I don’t believe it would invalidate my ideas here. The fact that I am writing this now proves that my fear of imminent death at Glastonbury was unfounded. Also, several medical check-ups since then have shown that my heart is perfectly healthy. This is one of the reasons I have interpreted my experience as a transference of a mind-based process onto the physical aspect of my organism. [back to text]
2. The word ‘ecstasy’ is not used here in the standard narrow definition of ‘rapturous joy’. Its roots lay in the Greek word ekstasis, literally ‘to stand outside oneself’. Overwhelming joy may be experienced, but shamanic ecstasy, soul-travel, is not confined to one emotion, or even standard conceptions of emotion. [back to text]
3. Both myself and my correspondent (see Appendix, above) experienced this sense of weightlessness. I felt it as a very worrying sense of insubstantiality, of not being ‘grounded’ in any way. [back to text]
4. For more information on Chaos Magic, see Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter Carroll, and Prime Chaos and Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine. [back to text]
5. John C. Lilly has expressed this view in an interview in Mavericks of the Mind. Asked what he thought the purpose of fear is, he replied, “From Orthonoia to Metanoia through Paranoia. Orthonoia is the way most people think; they’re creating simulations that everyone accepts. Metanoia is where you leave all that and you’re experiencing higher intelligence. But the first time you do this, you’re scared shitless. On my first acid trip in the [flotation] tank, I panicked. Suddenly I saw the memorandum from the National Institute of Mental Health: ‘Never Take Acid Alone.’ That’s all I could think of. Luckily, I was scared shitless, had no idea what was going to happen, and boy, that was rocket fuel if ever there was one! I went further out in the universe than I’ve ever been since. So the Paranoia is rocket fuel to get you into Metanoia.” Incidentally, Lilly’s concept of metaprogramming in his books The Human Biocomputer and Centre of the Cyclone precisely anticipated the basic principles of Chaos Magic (as exemplified in Pete Carroll and Phil Hine’s work), which came along about 10 years later. [back to text]
6. A note here on the fears that are abound about ‘the end of the world’. To put it glibly… equate, if you will, the individual ego with the collective consciousness, and individual biological organism with the biosphere. Is it not possible that, just as impending ego-death may be experienced in the distorted form of the terror-inspiring feeling that Death is approaching, humanity’s fears of an ‘apocalypse’ may be just a (potentially dangerous) mass misperception of an impending release from our petty collective ego? [back to text]
7. The Holotropic Mind, p.28 [back to text]
8. Perinatal means near or around childbirth. [back to text]
9. The Holotropic Mind, p.48. In correspondence, Margaret Andreas commented on my ‘vortex’ experience, “Surrender to the Void. The Void is the Womb from which we will be reborn.” [back to text]
10. The Holotropic Mind, p.51 [back to text]
11. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, par. 114 [back to text]
12. ‘Women in Europe’ in Civilization in Transition, p. 132 [back to text]
13. Essays from the Parerga and Parelipomena, p. 102 [back to text]
14. See Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens. [back to text]
15. And Timothy Leary. At a Nova Convention in the late 70s, Leary, with his customary jovial hyperbole, described paedomorphosis as “the hottest issue in evolution, the number one tactic that the DNA code has always used.” Leary’s application of the idea of paedomorphosis to sixties youth culture has greatly influenced my ideas. [back to text]
16. Koestler also puts forward the tentative hypothesis that the ‘missing link’ between ape and man may be the ape embryo. He quotes numerous examples showing that the ape embryo resembles the human form more strongly than does the adult ape – for instance, lack of body hair, lighter skin, less protrusive eyebrow ridges, larger cranium, and numerous other structural similarities. In a highly speculative mode, it is fascinating to take on board the idea that the foetal form of an organism prefigures, to some extent, its next stage in evolution. The re-connection with foetal life in Grof’s psychedelic therapy may be seen as personal, micro-scale paedomorphosis – as may shamanic initiation. Also, it is interesting to look at the human embryo with this concept in mind. Here we have an even larger cranium, in relation to total body mass, possibly indicating greater mental capacities in our future evolution. Finally, compare the human embryo form to popular representations of advanced extraterrestrials (developed from supposed contactee eyewitness reports) – their bodily forms possess an uncanny embryonic or foetal quality. [back to text]
17. See also notes in Appendix, above. [back to text]
18. On Jung by Anthony Stevens, p. 128 [back to text]
19. On Jung by Anthony Stevens, p. 130. Perhaps modern WoMan’s endemic fear and denial of death (and hir consequent susceptibility to manipulation by cynical priests and advertisers) stems from this very lack of initiation rites. A living relationship with the death and resurrection archetype that lies at the heart of all initiations would probably go some way towards enabling individuals to deal better with the prospect of biological death. The acceptance of death as a natural stage of life in tribal and shamanic cultures seems to confirm this. [back to text]
20. Alternatively: “Our initiation is more OUT OF the society than INTO it.” (Margaret Andreas) [back to text]
21. Margaret Andreas notes that the real meaning of the word ‘radical’ is ‘from the root’, which places it closely in relation to paedomorphosis, regression to womb life, and to the thematic core of the death-rebirth motif. [back to text]

Bibliography

• Gneurosis #2, published by The Out of Order Order
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• Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW, Vol. 7), by Jung
• The Seasons of a Man’s Life, by Daniel J. Levinson
• The Psychology of Death, by Robert Kastenbaum & Ruth Aisenberg
• Janus: A Summing Up, by Arthur Koestler

An Interview with Jason Louv

by Gyrus

Gyrus: What was your awareness as a teenager of youth cultures, their cycles and histories?

Jason: I was extremely self-aware on this topic to the point that my determination to not identify with any social group probably prevented me from truly fitting in with any. I was a goth at the ages of 13-15 like most people who end up in my, er, “line of inquiry,” but at the time I was the only goth in my school and it felt like assembling an arcane tradition out of cast-down fragments from previous generations—Joy Division albums; black trench-coats, hair dye and nail polish; William Burroughs books; the tail end of Mondo 2000; drinking weird green booze in the back of math class—the usual suspects. It was tacky, but a proud and individual kind of tacky, and fully surpassed by the horror of the onslaught of Marilyn Manson, who made goth into a major trend. By 15 I was a bitter old man of the goth world at my school, waving my fist at the new kids popping up everywhere who had (gasp) never heard of Arthur Rimbaud but did really like when Marilyn Manson carved evil Satan stuff in his chest. So of course I had to hide in the anonymity of white t-shirts and jeans rather than be associated with these upstarts who had ruined my fun. Which may have been for the best since it’s really hot in Southern California all the time and the trench-coats were a bit much. By the time I was ready to graduate, Columbine happened and the whole thing was put into a very very unfortunate context. By that point I was all into chaos magic and determined to become completely invisible from the social order while doing my utmost to erase my own tenuously-constructed and barely-born identity. Which didn’t stop me from being frisked by the authorities, but still…

Gyrus: We talked about Columbine a bit when we met last year, specifically in relation to cycles of youth culture. Pete Carroll wrote about sunspot cycles a bit, and I published a piece by Iain Spence in Towards 2012 where he maps 22-year solar cycles onto youth movements. The idea is of an evolution in the Transactional Analysis grid, from friendly weakness (Hippy), to hostile weakness (Punk), to friendly strength (Rave), to a (then, in ’97) projected hostile strength current (he terms it “Storm”). [Readers might want to check out Iain's site, where he's updated and evolved his theories.] There was no coherent “movement” of this nature, but certainly a lot of aspects in youth culture—albeit scattered and refracted through commercialism and millennial confusion. Columbine certainly expressed it, horrifically. You were the same age as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—how did the incident affect you at the time, and how did it feed into your cultural and magical awareness at the turn of the millennium?

Jason: I was pretty aware of that hypothesis at the time and was trying to play my life into it. I had it pegged for 1999 which was what Grant Morrison was talking about at the time. Peter Carroll called it for 2001, but I think 1999/2000 was when it seemed to be the most noticeable.

I think almost all that energy got sucked into the Internet because the kids at the time who would have been most affected by it were in many cases working out their identity crises in online forums instead of in a more physical realm, so there was no unified “look” or music or anything like that. I think the anti-WTO movement focusing around the Battle in Seattle was the most visible manifestation though. Columbine happened around the same time and that was another one. Actually, somebody on Barbelith at one point had the theory that the 1999 energy went into radical fundamentalism, which was certainly interesting if maybe disturbingly accurate. I hope that Generation Hex is a document of that “surge” hitting and some of the people who were affected by it, at least in the realm of magick. It took us all a few years to really process it.

Around the time that Columbine occurred it seemed like there was another big school shooting every week in the US. Columbine was just the biggest and most dramatic. I don’t really know where to lay the blame for all that other than to say that in the moment it seemed obvious to me that the whole institution of American public schooling was outdated and pretty good at producing uneducated, sociopathic (sometimes psychopathic) consumers and not much else, and it couldn’t handle a generation of kids raised in an ultramodern media sphere, and that this was the result—though I’m not sure if Columbine was representative of much more than a couple of absolute idiots being absolute idiots. It was, however, one (comparatively early) incident in a LONG string of “terror” events that have been used by both ends of the political spectrum to completely lock down the country, so in that it really did represent a swinging point away from the tail-end of Clinton-era optimism and towards Bush’s Death Race 2000. It only took the dot-com crash and the election steal to transition from “friendly strength” to “hostile strength” but I didn’t see that acted out too much in youth culture per se. Maybe we have to entertain the idea that “youth culture” may be an artifact of the late Twentieth Century, an outdated marketing strategy from a less fragmented time.

On a personal level, when Columbine happened I was automatically seen as “the enemy” by my school’s administration because I wore black a lot and was moody. At one point I got dragged into the office and forced to change my clothing because I was wearing a Taxi Driver t-shirt; some of my friends who wore trench-coats every day (peaceful nerd types) got pelted with rocks by other students (in speeding SUVs) on multiple occasions and were all strip-searched by the administration at one point, and were just constantly harassed by students and administration alike. We had one teacher who started wearing a black leather jacket every day out of solidarity which was very nice but in general every sensitive goth type in the school was now expected to kill everybody. The entire thing had the effect of polarizing me completely even from the “rebel” stance of the nonconformist student and leading me to feel truly unwanted and completely disassociated from my life. At this point I was heavily into chaos magic and trying to get an “outside” perspective on everything anyway. It helped fuel that stage of initiatory crisis in a way, through complete disassociation.

Gyrus: Obviously detachment and an “outsider” perspective is an essential part of the initiatory process, but it seems clear that many people in our society have problems with getting attached to this—both because of how unattractive the idea of “rejoining” society currently is, and how rebel stances have been codified and rigidified by consumer culture. But part of contemporary magic that is evident in Generation Hex (and on discussions on Key23.net) is the desire to connect with communities, to earth the abstractions and postures of post-modern occultism back into social awareness and activism. How has that tendency touched you, and what are your observations of it unfolding around you?

Jason: Yes, I think ultimately it’s impossible to be an outsider, and I think there really is a tendency right now to want to reconnect magic with communities, which I think is a manifestation of what Frater Achad first identified as the Aeon of Ma’at in the 1940s.

In the US that’s very prevalent with Burning Man. I’ve never been to Burning Man so I can’t say too much about it, but I’m less interested in a once-a-year dress-up and more interested in actually putting these things to use in the unglamorous daily grind of mundane life, and using them to slowly but surely improve our lives and the lives of the people we’re close to. In New York there’s a lot of that centered around Alex Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, which is great. I think that’s a great model for a community center, and something that all cities would benefit from immensely.

The internet’s also been great for bringing people together but to be honest I’m sick of the internet, and the problem, especially with discussions about magic, is that it can be hard to separate out the people who have actually practiced magic in any kind of deep or meaningful way, and those who just like to talk about ideas. Both are great but for those who are just getting started and are looking for actually useful and meaningful information it can be a real mess. But I suppose that’s how it’s always been with magic, anybody looking to get some proper information has always had to sift through small landfills’ worth of charlatanry. Internet discussion forums and even books like Generation Hex are just puffery really when compared to the experience of sitting down or going out in the world and actually doing magic, so the most I can hope for in the current occult “climate,” even my own little corner of it, is that hopefully people will take away enough of a sense that there are other people out there doing this stuff and that helps it become OK for them to actually take that first step and do some experiments without having to feel like they’re completely alone or crazy.

Gyrus: The standard view of tribal societies sees the shamanic vocation as the province of the very few; yet there are examples, like the San in southern Africa, where practitioners are numerous, up to half the population, and healing ceremonies are highly communal. How do you see modern occultism relating to communities in the near future? And how do you see the role of the contemporary magician in relation to the tribal shaman? Healing in service of the community is perhaps the prime function of the shaman, but both healing and community seem to minor elements in the western occult traditions.

Jason: That’s very interesting about the San, I hadn’t heard that before. Certainly I have huge amounts of fun and have often felt at my most human when doing magic with large groups of people who are all experienced magicians in their own right, so I hope those types of experiences can be more accessible for people. Of course finding out where the party is, or organizing your own, is definitely its own initiation.

As far as the community view, I certainly wanted to prompt that with the book. Healing is something that’s a bit more overlooked though. There can be a lot of emphasis on healing in the occult but it’s often of the practitioner him or herself; i.e. healing the division from spirit or healing the damage one is assumed to have incurred from a “materialist” socialization. On the other hand, once you look beyond the occult ghetto, homeopathic medicine and forms of healing based on magical thinking are now big business in the West, which is another facet of what I was expressing in the introduction to Generation Hex, that magical thinking is now everywhere.

Stephen Grasso is somebody who talks a lot about the role of the magician as being the person in the community who sorts out people’s problems that can’t be sorted in other ways. That’s close to the experience of shamanism I had in Nepal—shamanism is a form of healing that people seek out when they don’t have access to Western medicine. Of course in the West forms of healing based on magical thinking are the ones you go to when Western medicine isn’t enough.

Robert Anton Wilson said that out of any hundred people, one will be the shaman or trickster figure. That’s the widest angle to view the phenomenon from, a lot wider than looking at who’s read the right books or who’s got the right tattoos or whatever, or who calls themselves a magician. In a lot of ways standing up and calling yourself a magician or shaman seems to automatically disqualify you from being such, so I guess I’ve invalidated myself and everybody else in Generation Hex in a way!

Gyrus: What’s the plan with the idea of “Ultraculture” and the associated website?

Jason: Well it was originally going to be a kind of cross between an occult order and a social networking system along the lines of Indymedia or even MySpace, but after weighing it for over a year I think that the potential pitfalls of directly networking people together and taking on that responsibility outweigh the potential benefits.

As I’ve just left Disinformation, I’m going to be putting a lot of time into retooling the Ultraculture site into something useful. At this point I want it to be kind of an open artistic collective which people are welcome to participate in, and I hope to use it as a kind of goad for activating people and prompting further magical renaissance.

There are some Ultraculture-related projects that are going to be upcoming in the next few months which should give people a taste of what’s going to happen.

Gyrus: What other things are you working on, and how are your recent (or not so recent) experiences of magic informing them and the Ultraculture ideas?

Jason: Right now most of my focus is going into Tantra, incorporating what I’m learning there with my previous learning. When I was developing Generation Hex I was fully into Crowley and that kind of mad, racing sense of urgency that goes along with his writing. My focus has been all Western Esoteric Tradition so it’s good to have some change. I tend to kind of hover on the balance of doing lots of ritual magic and just going out and seeing life as a magical process. Right now I’m back in the laboratory refining my ideas and my approach to magic, trying to break up some of my assumptions and get further into the core.

I have had some fairly bizarre experiences in connection with the Ultraculture eidolon, though, which suggest that it’s already operating as a slipstream within the morphogenetic field. I suspect the complete crassness of the idea is a kind of smokescreen for something much more involved and intelligent. Developing rituals to contact it might be of use to anybody with interest in the concept, but I suspect it may be much bigger than I or anybody else previously suspected…

One that struck me particularly was my off-the-cuff use very recently of the phrase "open source philosophy". Obviously, posting every day means you think about posting, and writing, a little more than usual, and I’d been homing in on something to describe what I like writing here, and that something turned out to be "open source philosophy". It’s obviously not strictly open source—my ideas here aren’t really presented in a way that’s that closely analagous to the nature of open source software. Like much of my writing, I’m maybe more concerned with the spirit than with the letter here. Including my wrong turns, not being too concerned about revealing various peccadilloes, disclosing (some of) my personal investments and biases… All this hopefully adds up to a flow of thinking that’s a little more accessible than traditional, professional philosophy, where the arguments have been built into daunting edifices through years of mental labour, and much of the gaffer tape and idiosyncratic, less than stable underpinnings in the foundations are hidden behind confidence and rhetorical polish.

Well, shit, that might describe me to some people! There are infinite lessons in relativity… But really, it’s an ideal, not a fully formed reality, and I’ve other concerns that pull in other directions—like sounding cool and convincing everyone that I’m right. It’s also another attempt to define my slippery self—as with my shift in section labelling here from "articles" to "essays"—and a get-out clause.

In any case, a couple of days later I’m checking out Douglas Rushkoff’s site and I see he’s got an interesting-looking recent book out, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism. And a web project to accompany it: Open Source Judaism.

It’s an inevitability, this conjunction of libertarian concepts of software development and these long-standing human institutions of mind and spirit. It’s just odd, and nice, how first-use and first-encounter like to huddle together in time.

The technical structure of the internet, as we all know, is the prime factor in this wave of enthusiasm for "open source", for transparent collaboration, for harnessing collective intelligence. When I first got my head around building web sites in the late nineties, I was deep into some rather intensive, poetically-inclined etymological research. It’s still all in notebooks and ancient Microsoft Works files somewhere (I think), an enthusiastic amateur rumble through Indo-European languages for associations between words related to the Pole Star, centrality, naval navigation, and cheese-making (don’t ask—yet). At the time I enthused about building an openly collaborative website, dumping it all in there, and getting others with similar strange habits to add their research to the mix.

The idea came up once with Julian Cope, hanging in the Stones restaurant next to Avebury Henge, and he warned me against it. He had a load of etymological speculation—etymosophy he called it—in his then upcoming tome, The Modern Antiquarian, and some of our research had overlapped. I recall his reasoning being that there’s a dissipative effect in just splurging your research on the web mid-stream. I guess it depends on where you want to go with it. There’s also some sound advice on personal creativity there—allowing something to gestate for its proper time before it comes to term.

But there are new ways of generating novelty and connections emerging, not without their pitfalls and ambiguities, but certainly worth exploring. There’s been some interesting buzz recently about the free, radically open online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. A journo in Syracuse, New York, published something a few weeks ago where a librarian was quoted emphasising the lack of trustworthiness of this web resource where anyone can edit nearly anything. Communications boffin Alex Halavais set about testing the responsiveness of the Wikipedia non-system, by seeding a bunch of intentional errors. All thirteen were spotted and corrected by the amorphous collective editing process within a couple of hours. (Though please read this strong caveat before "testing" Wikipedia yourself.)

Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche

This has become such a truism to me that it is rather difficult to take on board this kind of "collective intelligence". (Nietzsche would probably have been horrified at such inflexibility of conception. Or he might have just erupted with misanthropic bile, hitting the table and shouting, "Bollocks! They’re all stupid bastards out there!") But orgs like The Co-Intelligence Institute (via WorldChanging) seem to be the tip of an iceberg that’s been steadily accumulating weight as computer networking has reshaped society and ecological research has revealed and delineated the power of sheer numbers: millions of heads are better than one.

So what about open source religion? It may be an oxymoron whose time has come. If we go back to the likely origins of religion (and much else besides), shamanism, I think even then real "open source" is impractical. The way I see it, even before the Microsofts of the human spirit, the priestly horders of divinity, came along with their coded texts and zealously guarded secrets, powers and privileges, the shaman as the "technician of the sacred", however non-elitist the social structures she was embedded in, had to keep some stuff to herself. I think part of the deal with shamanic healing is the persona of the shaman, the mask of power and knowledge.

Not that this mask or persona implies any lack of real power or knowledge—far from it. These things seem to me to be very sophisticated tools, interfaces between the shaman’s actual power and the social group, that are part of her power to effect healing and transformation. People need to believe they can be healthy again, and this slippery, almost ungraspable shift in mental constructs often needs a bit of trickery to accomplish.

An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life—may be the ultimate Poetic Terrorism. The Poetic Terrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.

Hakim Bey, ‘Poetic Terrorism‘

Of course Bey isn’t talking about shamanism (or is he?), but the sentiment is the same. The vitality of archaic trickster figures, and their degeneration into our Devil, "the father of lies", speaks volumes about our loss of sensitivity to the ambivalence of both lies and honesty.

So, a shaman, in a professional, socially benevolent capacity, needs to keep some cards close to their chest. But—in case you hadn’t noticed—we don’t live in a tribal society anymore. Previously secret indigenous traditions revealing their wisdom and techniques, due to a perception that our world’s up shit creek and needs any paddles that can be thrown at it, seems to be an increasingly common occurrence (despite the fear and mistrust in indigenous societies that we have dragged into shit creek with us, without a boat, let alone a paddle). The ways of the world ebb and flow, but I don’t think this flow of esoterica into the open is needing to ebb just yet—our problem is almost certainly that it hasn’t flowed enough.

The gates need to be opened, the seals broken. Let’s put our cards on the table.

by Gyrus

pagan n. & adj. —n. a person not subscribing to any of the main religions of the world, esp. formerly regarded by Christians as unenlightened or heathen. —adj. 1 a of or relating to or associated with pagans. b irreligious. 2 identifying divinity or spirituality in nature; pantheistic. [ME f. L paganus villager, rustic f. pagus country district: in Christian L = civilian, heathen]

The Concise Oxford Dictionary

I’ve spent some time wrangling over what’s implied by calling this part ‘Paganism’, and it was an odd surprise to find a pretty good approximation in the dictionary definition given above. To be pagan is to be concerned with ‘spirituality’ (or the realities behind this illusion-saturated word), and to work with it outside the ‘world religions’. It involves being seen by many Christians as ‘unenlightened’ (we’ll take that as a compliment). It should, in my view, involve being ‘irreligious’, if ‘religion’ is defined as pompous, uncritical, fanatical or just dull spirituality. Above all, it involves finding divinity, life-source, in the physical environment, and in our bodies.

Of course it’s a lot more complicated than this at the end of the twentieth century. Paganism changes character depending on who you speak to—such is the rejection of dogma. ‘Pagan’ was originally just a term used by urbanized early Christian cultures to refer to the peasants, rustics and country folk. In academia, ‘pagan’ is now usually used to refer to polytheistic, usually agricultural societies like the early Greeks or the Celts. But today mutated paganism thrives in the hearts of cities. ‘Urban paganism’ is nothing new—the Romans, for example, were very urban, and, pre-Christian conversion, very pagan. Modern urban pagans are usually more aware of the hideous drawbacks of ‘civilization’. But cities are still environments—as the Velvet Underground said, they are "flowers made out of clay". In Chaotopia!, Dave Lee discusses a TV interview with an Amazonian shaman:

Just before the occasion of the interview, the shaman’s son had taken him into a town for the first time. They had ridden on a bus and gone to see a film at the cinema. The old man was tremendously excited by all this; he had lived all his life in the forest, and had learned the spirit songs of animals, plants, rivers, elemental forces. Suddenly he had been precipitated into an environment where he knew very few of the spirit songs. To him, a car or a cinema was as worthy a subject of a spirit quest as any creature or object he had been brought up with. He told the interviewer how he was performing his spirit vision quests to learn to sing the song of the car, and the song of the cinema! Since these things were now in his mind, part of his mental environment, he saw no reason why they should not have songs, songs that would be his tools for improving his power relationships with them. Such an approach is far away from the guilt-ridden anti-technology attitudes of new age "shamans", and is of the essence of the ancient current.

Well, ‘techno-paganism’ has been a fashionable buzzword for some time now; hopefully the chaff of hype will fall away quickly and leave us with a basic awareness that technology is not inherently destructive, and can, even must form a part of modern paganism.

A driving impulse behind modern paganism, though, is the desire to reconnect to the source of our life, the natural environment. Some, hearts set on stellar travel, may see this as regressive—just as Freud saw ‘oceanic ecstasy’ as a regression to ‘womb-consciousness’. Both are victims of linear models of progress, assuming that ‘the past’ is a relic, a dead weight to be shed; not a living foundation, perpetually drawn on and re-created. That said, the lifeforms that have evolved here will have to leave their native cradle some time in order to survive. It’s odd that most people who favour sticking with the Mother in preference to space exploration see the planet as an organism. This view, in my book, would make the Earth mortal (which, according to most cosmologies, both mythical and scientific, it is). We’ll have to leave well before she dies her natural death.

On the other hand, futurist evangelists who try to convince us that we have to leave the planet now, to avert ecological catastrophe, seem to me to be unwittingly siding with a grossly irresponsible aspect of humanity. "Oh shit! We fucked this place up, let’s go find another one!" I thought of this when I saw Independence Day. Besides the high humour of the president’s speech and the cheesy gung-ho, the film showed a classic case of humans projecting their skeletons-in-the-closet onto aliens (either people of different ethnic backgrounds, or, in this case, literal aliens). The aliens were seen as marauding parasites who hop from planet to planet, draining resources and screwing up eco-systems along the way. A similar idea lay behind the alien/Egyptian god in the abysmal Stargate. In both these films, the vampiric beasts from space are opposed and conquered by… American martial force. And we all know the impeccable ecological record of the US military-industrial complex! It’s these corrupt scum who’ll probably end up being humanity’s interstellar ambassadors—more power to the Autonomous Astronauts, we say.

America was, by its nature, colonized by the West’s frontier-breakers. Some were anti-law drop-outs, searching for freedom from Europe’s repressive social systems; some were religious libertarians, seeking new ground for the realization of Heaven on Earth. But the land was not a blank slate of wilderness; it was an ecosystem that already included fully developed human cultures. And despite the links formed between the drop-outs, libertarians and natives, it was the disrespectful, patriarchal and nature-fearing/hating frontier-breakers who ultimately triumphed (for the meantime). Do we want the same human impulse that massacred Native Americans and ultimately became the US powers-that-be to spearhead our birth into space?

Earth is a temporary home, our cradle; but maybe we’re fooling ourselves if we think we’re grown-up enough to colonize other worlds just yet. Some may see the alienation of modern urban life as necessary preparation for the rigours of isolated interstellar life—a rehearsal for final separation from the biosphere’s matrix. Too often it appears to me to be preparation for an ignorant future of parasitism and cosmic disrespect. The real question we need to ask is: does our longing for space come from a sense of joyous overflow, of loving expansiveness? Or does it stem from bored restlessness, alienated aggression, and a discontent that will never be sated, always destroy?

Despite the energy, resources, and exciting fervour of the city, we still value and love the natural environment. There’s not much ‘natural’ environment left though. So much has been physically destroyed or spoilt by unharmonious capitalist expansion. There’s a more subtle level to this as well. I used to think that I was walking across untrammelled ‘natural’ land when I roamed about the moors here in northern England, only to discover later that these open moors were once covered in forests—which began to be cleared by humans as early as 8,000 years ago.

What’s left of nature is often conceptually boxed up, and has all its wonders theorized away by overly self-conscious modern thought, which stresses the illusory quality of ideas about ‘naturalness’. It’s important to realize how ‘nature’ is usually filtered through human mental constructs and models. But this awareness of our distance from nature is not a revelation granted to us by recent theorists. For me it is the basis of paganism—along with the realization that we are part of nature at the same time. Look at the old Germanic word Hagzissa, meaning ‘hedge sitter’. It is the root of the modern German Hexe (witch), and refers to those people in a community who straddled the gap—symbolized by the hedge—between the world of the human community and the world of non-human nature. If shamanic cultures really saw themselves as living ‘at one’ with nature, as many Western pagans see them, shamans would have no need to venture out into the wilderness alone, for what Native Americans call ‘vision quests’. This archetypal adventure away from the community is an acknowledgement that the community is, to some extent, cut off from nature by its consensus illusions. In the woods, mountains or deserts, the isolated shaman is progressively stripped of his or her cultivated perceptions and ego-barriers, and thus becomes open to contact with the spirits of nature. In pagan northern Europe, this practice was known as ‘utiseta’ (‘to sit outside’, the whole night). It is this experience that still retains the potential to burst the shell of separation from nature that modern thought often still perpetuates, with its sophistic and self-referential theories.

Of course, the shaman returns to the community after immersion in wilderness, to share the wisdom and power gained there—an activity that differentiates shamans from free-range nutters who wander off and live in their own world (not such a bad idea, but it ain’t shamanism). It is here, in the return to society, that culturally conditioned ideas of nature influence the nature-contact. I would say that the efficiency and flexibility with which this influence is mediated defines the health of a community.

There is the argument that any ‘contact with nature’, however removed from human communities, is inevitably governed by cultural constructs. Nature spirits and primeval elemental forces are masked by idiosyncratic ideas about them, however much conceptual baggage is ripped away. This can be seen in the phenomenon known as UFOs (remember what that first letter stands for!). Those from a technocratic space-age culture can see them as alien craft from other galaxies; those with an open scientific mind can see them as possibly sentient energy-forms created by tectonic stress along faultlines in the Earth’s crust (‘earth lights’); rural folk can see them as faeries or ‘the little people’; tribal cultures can see them as ancestor spirits or the disembodied souls of shamans. In terms of the intellect, and post-experience rationalization (the detritus of experience), cultural conditioning is inescapable. But in terms of experience itself, it is possible that while contact with this type of phenomenon is happening (as with intense psychedelic states) conditioning is suspended to reveal raw, concept-free communion with nature that is unmediated—at least to the extent that being human allows. And we have yet to discover the limits of being human.

The use of the word ‘shaman’ has slipped in here almost unnoticed, and it deserves special attention. It comes from the word saman, used by the Tungus people of Siberia, meaning "one who is excited, moved, raised." In anthropology it came to replace terms such as ‘medicine man’, ‘witch doctor’, ‘sorcerer’, or ‘seer’, used to describe healers or spiritual specialists in various cultures. Mircea Éliade famously defined shamanism as "techniques of ecstasy", emphasizing its lack of religious dogma, and its focus on methods of entering altered states of consciousness on behalf of the community. Nowadays the term has passed into popular use, and academics often descend into spasms of despair and indignation at how casually it’s bandied about. It’s suffered most in the hands of New Agers, who use the word to conjure up a feeling of ‘authenticity’ (which always rakes in more money), and debase it by glossing over some of the less palatable and marketable aspects of shamanism in tribal cultures (like sorcery, tortuous initiation rituals, and a deep concern with the experience of death and dissolution).

Technically, ‘shamanism’ should be understood to refer to a traditional practice whereby a particular individual enters extreme states of consciousness, communicates with and masters particular spirits, and utilizes these relationships for the benefit of the community—usually to heal. (Often shamanic activity isn’t really individualistic—see ‘The San & The Eland‘ in these pages.) But despite the New Age’s rose-tinted shades, I still think the words ‘shamanism’ or ‘shamanic’ can be used intelligently with a broader view than that of the academic—to refer to a range of interactions with otherworlds and the spirits that dwell there, and to mythological motifs with obvious, if indirect roots in these experiences. And however you define it, I think shamanism is one of the most fundamental phenomena behind ‘paganism’. I’ve no grand theory about this, but my own experience and research has led me to believe that the basic motifs and perceptions found throughout shamanic cultures—soul-travel, the many-levelled cosmos, an animistic worldview, death/rebirth, shape-shifting—form a good, basic map of possibilities for human interaction with the more esoteric aspects of the biosphere and the body itself. But that’s just my view.

The archetypal death and resurrection experienced by the tribal shaman can’t be directly assimilated into our culture. Modern people who, spontaneously or otherwise, undergo a similar experience, have no fixed, culturally-sanctioned net of belief to be caught by. None of us can ‘become a shaman’, because a shaman is universally accepted by his or her culture as a uniquely gifted and magickally potent individual. Try going around today believing this about yourself and see where it gets you!

As our culture has fragmented, so have our identities. More than ever before, paganism and magick today involve an acceptance of different self-images, and a willingness to allow these to shift, dissolve and reform as our personal circumstances move on. The modern West is witness to the first humans to become pagan, rather than to be born into a pagan culture. In an age dominated by consumerism and the image-obsession fostered by advertising and the mass media, consciously ‘becoming’ anything often involves more concern with the image that this new identity projects to others than with what it means in terms of experience and genuine mutation. Paganism is particularly prone to this, because it supplies such a vast wealth of images and visual styles, as well as conceptual identity-supports, that can be picked up and recycled. I don’t think anyone’s immune from some form of image-obsession, so it’s a bloody good idea to be aware of it. And to surrender the whole lot on a regular basis through whatever form of ego-shattering and rebuilding you have access to.

This, like all sound paganism, requires the exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Altered states, drug-induced or otherwise, are simply a human birth-right; in some ways they are the essence of being human. Some anti-hedonists see the revival of experimentation with altered states in the West as a "phase", part of some pre-millennial decadence. Non-ordinary states of consciousness are not a phase. If there is a "phase" involved, it is the period we are about to emerge from, a period where ecstatic consciousness is demonized and the illusion of ‘ordinary consciousness’ holds sway. Altered states have never left us and never will. Cultures like our own that suppress them by restricting access to them—through drug prohibition, sexual repression, persecution of ecstatic religions, clamping down on uninhibited communal revelry—find them popping up in nasty ways, like mental illness or mass hysteria. It is in deeper states of consciousness like trances, dreams and trips that we brush against the roots of ‘normal’ consciousness. We travel in realms that spatially and visually represent the structures underpinning the little worlds we call ‘reality’. Paganism, for me, with its multi-faceted, interconnected and non-linear apprehension of ourselves and the world, is rooted in these realms. But then again, so is everything else. I suppose paganism is distinguished by the feeling that these otherworlds are not absolutely separate from the flesh, juice, air, fire and earth that make up this world. They are related, and influence each other through a process that we can, if we want to, take part in.

The articles collected here are not a ‘summary’ of paganism, they’re just a few views on it, or expressions of it. Some contributors may call themselves Pagan. Some may use a small ‘p’ in the word, to try and shed the idea that paganism should become some new world religion. And to shed the idea that individuals are just ONE thing. Some may hate the word because of the baggage it’s been made to carry. Some might not be arsed at all about the word. The title of this issue is really just a convenient term to tag onto the spiritual ideas and perspectives that interest me.

The heavy focus on natural landscapes and archaic monuments is a reflection of my current obsessions. It’s a mistake, though, to think that paganism today has to be rooted in some ‘unbroken’ lineage of paganism from the past, especially as we’re just guessing about, and creating the past most of the time. Interpretations of prehistory inevitably say more about us than our ancestors. Well, to me this is often why looking into the past is so interesting. Even if you only vaguely brush against the ‘actual’ views of prehistoric people, you usually manage to expand your own horizons and learn about yourself and your culture in the process. The ‘creative’ use of archaic spirituality has got a bit of a dodgy reputation, understandably in light of the Nazi’s appropriation of northern European paganism. That doesn’t mean there can’t be other interpretations that are more intelligent, more concerned with human freedom, and less self-critical and pompous!

There’s plenty here to please or annoy people of most persuasions, hopefully in a creative way. Ideally, there’ll be something in here that will inspire you drop your search for the ‘true path’, and do something. Education in these realms, as in all others, comes from action, involvement, risk, failure, play and persistence. The path is not straight—it bends, curves, spirals and shifts. It is not given to you—it comes out of you. You do not work towards it—you’re already on it. And you move along it every time your senses remake the world.

In my last article, I wrote of the Native American spiritual path of the Sacred Warrior. To Native Americans, the path of the Sacred Clown is ALSO considered a spiritual calling, essential to the smooth functioning of the tribe:

In the days before the invaders came. . .we had clowns. Not clowns like you see now, with round red noses and baggy costumes. Our clowns wore all kinds of stuff. Anythin’ they felt like, they wore. And they didn’t just come out once in a while to act silly and make people laugh, our clowns were with us all the time, as important to the village as the chief, or the shaman, or the dancers, or the poets.1

Most every tribe had their Clowns. The Oglala and Lakota called them Heyoka ("crazy"), the Arapaho called them Ha Hawkan ("holy idiot"), and both peoples considered them religious specialists. The Salish people honor the memory of a Clown who (not so long ago) challenged a missionary. The missionary was enticing people to come to his church by handing out little mirrors to them while urging them to cover their bodies with white folks’ clothes. It is told with a smile that the Clown (a woman!) walked into the church one Sunday wearing nothing but a hat and old shoes! Read the book to find out what happened!2

The Hopis protected their Sacred Clowns by incorporating them into their Katchina ("Cloud spirit") ceremonies where the Clowns make a hilarious entrance from a roof, descending a rope ladder into the plaza where the Katchinas are dancing. "Look down there!" they exclaim, "Everything is bountiful and beautiful!" Their descent is very precarious, usually head-first, and causes much laughter as they tumble over each other and fall the last few feet. They do not see the Katchinas until they bump into them, and then they say "This is MINE!" or "This many are MINE!" They act silly, childish, greedy, selfish, and lewd. As they pretend to become aware of their surroundings, they mock tourists, anthropologists, neighboring Indians, even themselves! They beg for food. Their guessing games and balancing acts please the crowds. The dancing Clowns sometimes pretend they are invisible, heightening the joke.3

The survival of these ritual clowns gives us a clue as to how important a Clown was to the community-spirit of each Native American tribe. Nothing was sacred to a Sacred Clown. She was a social critic of the highest order. Her funny mimicry and joking exposed hypocrisy and arrogance. Her portrayals of ridiculous behavior showed the people (in a very humorous way) their own foolishness and blind-spots. "A clown was like a newspaper, or a magazine, or one of those people who write an article to tell you if a book or a movie is worth botherin’ with. They made comment on everythin’, every day, all the time. If a clown thought that what the tribal council was gettin’ ready to do was foolish, why the clown would just show up at the council and imitate every move every one of the leaders made. Only the clown would imitate it in such a way every little wart on that person would show, every hole in their idea would suddenly look real big."4

With the arrival of the "invaders", this sacred office got to be a most dangerous one—maybe more dangerous than that of the Warrior. Perhaps this is why most of the Sacred Clowns disappeared from sight! As the Cree Medicine Woman says in the story, Flight of the Seventh Moon, "No wonder we never got along. . .my people and your people. They were all the time getting peeved at each other and much hatred grew between us. It was unavoidable, because my people had great pride and humor. Yours had the jitters and wanted to shoot those who were laughing at them. Yet I still find you white people very amusing. I have to laugh at you because you never let yourself go. Every word to you is a completeness or else a long way off. You like to bludgeon the meaning of something to fit your own stupidity. It would serve you well to quit being so brittle."5

The Sacred Clown of the Salish people mentioned earlier made a trip to Hudson Bay, Victoria, to clown about the way her people were trading seal and otter skins for rum. The white company-men soon had enough of her, and when she was later found shot in the head, all her people figured that a white man did it. The Indians themselves strictly forbade doing any kind of violence to a Sacred Clown.

These Clowns were dangerous to tyrants and exploiters because they were so disorganized and so completely honest. They could see with the eyes of a child, and because of this, could spot a phony a mile away. They were sometimes called "destroyer of heroes." The white invaders hated them, of course, so it was either be killed or find a way to hide. Those who were killed are remembered with much respect by their people. Those who survived did so by learning to be Tricksters, to change their form, to become invisible if necessary.

A negative religious figure (such as the Sacred Clown) seems odd to most non-tribal people. Most Native Americans, however, LOVE the humor of it and tell stories about a mythic Trickster whose pranks and mishaps teach the tribe moral lessons. The Trickster takes many forms, but the favorites seem to be animals who are exceptionally curious, resourceful and adaptable—SURVIVORS, such as spider, raven, rabbit, owl, bat, coyote and crow. The stories are full of funny situations with the Trickster being mischievous, being in turn made a fool of, and even getting involved in obscene affairs. "Mostly, Trickster likes pullin’ antics and tellin’ dirty jokes."6 Perhaps it is this appreciation for the Trickster that has given the Native American the ability to survive against all odds. The Trickster makes a lot of mistakes, and usually has a hard time learning from them. However, She keeps on keepin’ on. She doesn’t drown Herself in despair, doesn’t kill Herself in frustration. She survives.

Trickster shows us how we trick OURSELVES. Her rampant curiosity backfires, but, then, something NEW is discovered (though usually not what She expected)! This is where creativity comes from—experiment, do something different, maybe even something forbidden, and voila! A breakthrough occurs! Ha! Ha! We are released! The world is created anew! Do something backwards, break your own traditions, the barrier breaks; destroy the world as you know it, let the new in.

Sacred Clowns function as the eyes of the Trickster in this world: mirrors in which we see our folly as well as our resilience. As the Salish clown said to the people who were seduced into the missionary’s church by the pretty, shiny mirrors he handed out, "There are better mirrors—the mirrors in the eyes of the people you love."7 We’re reflections of each other. When we begin to take ourselves too seriously, there is the Clown to give us a laugh! When we become too heavy with self-importance, there is the Clown to knock some of that load away and lighten us up! The power of the Clown is the power of life itself. Acknowledge the pain, then let it go. Don’t carry it around with you. Focus on the joy, the mystery, the happiness, the cosmic joke. When Clowns delight in eating and in sexual horseplay, they are showing this love of life.

It’s a little more difficult to spot a young clown than it is to spot a young warrior. Those who describe a child as being "too sensitive" need to be aware that the little one may be a Sacred Clown in the making. The child may be shy, or she may be a temperamental show-off, sometimes both in different situations. In any case, a young clown is an explorer in the world of emotions. She tests the limits of her feelings as surely as a young warrior tests the limits of her will. She can amuse herself for hours playing pretend games, exercising her fantastic imagination. She will often mimic animals in her play. Just as often, she will have an ear for music and a talent for drama. Physically, she will have an excellent sense of balance.

The initiation for a Sacred Clown happens as she realizes that even people who love each other can be cruel to each other, or that Life itself can be cruel. Her own intense reaction to a personal experience of abandonment, betrayal of trust, or shattered romance may result in extreme depression, emotional imbalance, a nervous breakdown, or (in extreme cases) a suicide attempt. A Heyoka remembers her initiation thus, "I didn’t care about my life or what happened to me. I didn’t realize it, but there is big medicine in that abandon."8 If she can somehow find her emotional equilibrium, somehow go THROUGH the pain and come out on the other side, learn to dance on the knife edge of her own Soul, the experience becomes a gateway THROUGH the illusions of life and into the truth of life.

What is truth? This question propels the Clown into the sacred dimension. The Truth the Clown intuits is the interconnectedness of all life. She KNOWS (although she cannot prove) that no part is more important than any other part—no matter how big or how small—and that the tiniest change in one part produces a profound change in the Whole. She SEES (although she cannot explain) that imbalance or blockage of the Life Force is the result of a person or group believing themselves to be more important than another. And she can’t help puncturing that over-blown self-importance with her sharp humor!

A Clown becomes Sacred by opening herself. Like a child, she is vulnerable, fluid, and open to the Life Force. Unlike a child, however, she has learned to shield herself and move safely through an insane world by using masks, disguises, tricks and transformations. In a sane world, she might risk a bit more exposure.

Native Americans say that Sacred Clowns are great lovers of children, healing them and protecting them. In addition, one of their powers is to bring fertility to barren people and situations. If the Sacred Warrior personifies the Sun, the Sacred Clown personifies the Void—that great black openness of space, the great Womb from which we all are born. In the Hopi Katchina ceremony, it is said that long ago the Sun was given the responsibility to people the earth, but that "it failed to lift itself,"9 preferring instead to follow its own personal ambitions and desires without regard to the tribe. For this reason, the responsibility to carry out the plan of Life was shifted to the Clowns. In the Hopi ceremony, the Clowns do not appear until after noon, until "the sun reaches its zenith and is on its down slope."10 "First here was the Sun, who was young once and is now a grandparent of many powers. But the Sun will one day go into the Void. That’s the power of the Heyoka—the Void."11

The power of the Void is the power of wombness in us all, the power of true creativity. The power of being open is sometimes regarded as a weakness, but the Sacred Clown gives us this paradox: The weakest can be the most powerful. The dumbest can be the most wise. "In a clown’s craziness, she can be obscene or test any of the existing structures and ideas to see if they are true and real—and she gets away with it. She herself is weak, but her very weakness is her power."12

In modern times, Clowns sometimes emerge into the public eye as comediennes, actors in guerilla theatre, critics, ritualists/artists/musicians who break the boundaries of "good taste" and aesthetics. But usually, they keep to the guise of normal, everyday people who know how to get other people to laugh at themselves.

If you decide to travel on this Path with a Heart, you’ll be travelling backwards! Remember, though, to look behind you (or in front of you) once in a while. It just could be that another Sacred Clown is clowning YOU up! And that could be worth a good belly laugh for sure!

Footnotes

1. Granny, from Daughters of Copper Woman by Anne Cameron, 1981, Press Gang Publishers, 603 Powell Street, Vancouver, B.C. V6 A1 H2, pg. 109 [back to text]
2. ibid., pg. 108-114 [back to text]
3. Talayesva, Don C., Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, Leo W. Simmons, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press [back to text]
4. Granny, from Daughters of Copper Woman, pg. 109 [back to text]
5. Agnes Whistling Elk, from Flight of the Seventh Moon, pg. 74 [back to text]
6. Philbert, Powwow Highway (Video Movie), 1982, Hand-Made Films [back to text]
7. Clown, Daughters of Copper Woman, pg. 112 [back to text]
8. Agnes Whistling Elk, Medicine Woman, pg. 117 [back to text]
9. The Hopi Ritual Clown: Life As It Should Not Be by Hieb Louis Albert, 1972, University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI, pg. 146 [back to text]
10. ibid. [back to text]
11. Ruby Plenty Chiefs, Flight of the Seventh Moon by Lynn V. Andrews, 1984, Harper & Row, NY, pg. 185 [back to text]
12. Zoila Guiterez, Jaguar Woman by Lynn V. Andrews, 1985, Harper & Row, NY, pg. 121 [back to text]

"Hoka Hey!" exclaims the Sioux warrior riding into battle, "Today is a good day to die." A true warrior dares to do the impossible. She dares death and she respects death, both. A story about Native American warriors puts it this way, "Warriors live with death at their side, and from the knowledge that death is with them, they draw the courage to face anything. The worst that can happen to us is that we have to die, and since that is already our unalterable fate, we are free; those who have lost everything no longer have anything to fear."1

The Path of the Sacred Warrior begins with the awareness that we are mortal beings, that we are going to die. Knowing this, we can see our lives in better perspective. Knowing this, we can act ALWAYS so that we will be able to die centered, beyond fear, at peace with what we have made from the stuff of our lives. The goal is to live our lives well in order to eventually die well, so that what is eternal about us (our Spirit?) will be set free. We must each come to terms with our own personal Deaths. For instance, I like to think that my body is offspring of an act of love between my Spirit and the Elemental world. I like to think that MY death will be a final consummation and bittersweet orgasmic consumption of that love!

The Sacred Warrior walks her path with her Death at her side. And her Death makes Herself available to the Sacred Warrior as an advisor, teacher, and friend. This relationship with her Death calls the Sacred Warrior to be who she truly is, to live her life fully and completely, to use the power-from-within. As Agnes Whistling Elk says in the story Medicine Woman, "You can only be dangerous when you accept your death. Then you become dangerous in spite of anything. You must learn to see the awake ones. A dangerous woman can do anything because she will do anything. A powerful woman is unthinkable because the unthinkable belongs to her. Everything belongs to her, and anything is possible."2

In Native American lore, stories of warriors often reveal a childhood filled with inner turmoil and outward aggressiveness. Baby warriors are keen to explore the world and they don’t want anyone or anything to get in their way. They may fight with their siblings or test the parents mercilessly. Warriors often seem to have come into life with an excess of energy. Their temperaments are fiery; their wills, strong. A young warrior who is thwarted in her physical expression will almost certainly compensate with surplus mental or emotional energy.

The story of the Tewa Cottonwood Warchief, Pohaha, illustrates this theme. Always angry when young, she rebelled when coaxed to do domestic work. Finally, her tribe consented to let her go to battle, where she distinguished herself mightily. After that, it was said, her constant anger disappeared and "she became a good woman."3 Her name, Pohaha, means "wet-between-the-legs-ha-ha" because of her habit of pulling up her dress to taunt her enemies with the fact that she was a woman! Eventually, the great Pohaha was elected "Warchief" by the elders. As War Chief, she would have to lead her people against enemies, protect them from sickness and treat them as her children. She took her charge seriously; and when she died, she left her mask and said it would represent her even if she was dead. "I will be with you all the time," she told her tribe, "The mask is me."4 The Cottonwood people keep her mask, and tell her story, to this day.

A young warrior is hard to control. But once that warrior is trusted with a challenging task, she is on her way to SELF-CONTROL. Native Americans begin the warrior-training with hunting lessons, along with basic wilderness-survival skills. They teach the young huntress a respect for her "prey." They show the young one that to learn from one’s Death (the Ultimate Huntress), one needs to develop humility, patience, and an ability to keep a clear head—or, at least, to clear one’s head, fast! The wilderness-survival training is a good idea for a Sacred Warrior—it gives her a true knowledge of her world, and of her relationship to it. It gives her Nature as her first Opponent. She learns that one cannot "compete" with such a powerful Opponent. Yet she also learns that this Opponent is a mirror to her own heart, and as such deserves respect and, even, love. From this realization, she goes on to learn self-defense and self-reliance.

Obviously, this is a path of courage. Native Americans call their warriors "Braves" for a reason. The more courage one showed, the more honored the warrior! "Braves" (both female and male) who rode into battle did not seek to kill the opposition. It was considered much braver to humiliate ("count coup on") the opposition by getting close enough to simply touch, or to capture the opposition’s ceremonial pipe, war bonnet, shield or bow.5 To kill another warrior was considered a dubious accomplishment. To kill "innocents" was considered cowardly. In ancient days, it is said that great warriors would not attack a camp, but would enter and be welcomed. They would be put up in the "enemy tipi" to rest and be fed. Then all the young warriors of the camp would come to challenge the great warrior, hoping to "count coup" but usually just lucky to hold their own. No doubt they received a few lessons in the holding.

"Capturing" (what we might call "stealing") became one of the greatest warrior feats. Since there was no idea of property, it was more like "reclaiming." This is where the White insult of "Indian-giver" originated. Entities (like horses) or places (like a forest or a plain) could not be "owned" by anyone; therefore they belonged to those who took care of them.

In the modern world, our battles are usually fought in somewhat different arenas. Many writers and re-claimers of Herstory are Sacred Warriors, realizing that "The pen is mightier than the sword". "Say you were a writer and you decided to pick Anaïs Nin as your worthy opponent. You tried to beat her in creativity and ideas. In a sense, you would use her to see yourself. You don’t want her to fail—you would lose your model. What does a medicine person want you to do? They want to give away to you until you have power so that you can become a worthy opponent to another worthy warrior."6 What IS opposition, anyway? This question is central to the Sacred Warrior’s Path. It does NOT involve contempt. It is wasteful to feel contempt for people or other entities. A Native American warrior speaking to a group of White Americans put it this way, "You people have such anger and fear and contempt for your so-called criminals that your crime rate goes up and up. Your society has a high crime rate because it is in a perfect position to receive crime. You should be working WITH these people, not in opposition to them. The idea is to have contempt for crime, not for people. It’s more useful to think of every individual as another YOU—to think of every individual as a representative of the universe. Even the worst criminal in life imprisonment sitting in his cell—the center of him is the same seed, the seed of the whole creation."7

So what is the feeling that the Sacred Warrior cultivates within herself? Detachment is important. "Everyone who wants to follow the warrior’s path has to rid herself of fixation: the compulsion to possess and hold onto things."7 It is easy to see that walking with one’s Death at one’s side can help one remember that "you can’t take it with you." Besides, a fluid warrior needs to be free of burdens, needs to be free to think clearly, and move at a moment’s notice. She also needs to be able to live in the present. In order to cultivate detachment, a warrior develops her sense of humor and a great sense of resourcefulness. These become her shields. She can feel her strong and passionate emotions and then let them pass THROUGH her. She can laugh at herself.

But there is a danger in detachment. A warrior can become so self-reliant that she becomes arrogant and uncompromising. She becomes incapable of compassion. What brings the "sacredness" to the path of the Sacred Warrior is LOVE. To the Sacred Warrior, Love is felt when the heart is open. Great warriors are said to have great hearts, and even the strongest, most skilled, most dangerous warrior becomes Sacred when she puts herself in service (as a Guardian or a Champion) to a child, a needy group, a holy place, a worthy task. MOST of all, the Sacred Warrior is at the service of those who truly require her. She does this not for them, but for herself. Her love and service are free, without attachment or expectation—unconditional. She knows, perhaps more than anyone else, that to truly love is the most dangerous and most daring act a Sacred Warrior can perform. An Apache maiden, Lozen, became a powerful and respected warrior. Expert in riding and roping, she was always able to bring back enemy horses. She was dedicated to helping her people. It is said that once she found herself alone in enemy territory with a young mother and her baby. She spent several gruelling months leading them to safety, when she could have just as easily rode away by herself. As she matured in her compassion, she began to develop the uncanny ability to determine the location of the enemy, and became a welcome voice at tribal strategy meetings.9 Throughout Native American lore, there are many such stories of big-hearted Braves. While they are much admired and honored for their hunting, fighting, and survival skills, they are even more respected and loved for their compassion and kindness.

In the past, Sacred Warriors battled for the protection and survival of their tribes, and for personal satisfaction. This is still true, but in our Age, the definition of "tribe" can vary. The Sacred Warrior who travels on "A path with a heart" must find her own sacred battlefield. The fight may be for justice, or peace, or respect—whether personally or publicly. Many Sacred Warriors fulfil the Native American prophecy of the "Warriors of the Rainbow" that says, "When the Earth is sick and dying, all over the world people will rise up as Warriors of the Rainbow to save the planet."10 This prophecy is furthered by the words of a modern Native American/Eskimo who says, "Great are the tasks ahead, terrifying are the mountains of ignorance and hate and prejudice, but the Warriors of the Rainbow shall rise as on the wings of the eagle to surmount all difficulties. They will be happy to find that there are now millions of people all over the earth ready and eager to rise and join them in conquering all barriers that bar the way to a new and glorious world! We have had enough now of talk. Let there be deeds."11

Footnotes

1. Quote from Don Juan, Yaqui Medicine Man, from The Fire From Within by Carlos Casteneda, 1984, Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, Inc., NY. [back to text]
2. Agnes Whistling Elk, from Lynn Andrews’ book Medicine Woman, 1981, Harper & Row, NY. [back to text]
3. From the book Daughters of the Earth by Carolyn Niethammer, 1977, MacMillan Publishing Co., NY. [back to text]
4. ibid. [back to text]
5. Indians of North America by Geoffrey Turner, 1977, Blandford Press. [back to text]
6. Agnes Whistling Elk, from Medicine Woman. [back to text]
7. Mad Bear, from Rolling Thunder by Doug Boyd, 1974, Dell Publishing Company. [back to text]
8. La Gorda, quoted from Carlos Casteneda’s book, The Second Ring of Power, 1977, Simon & Schuster, NY. [back to text]
9. Daughters of the Earth, Niethammer. [back to text]
10. Greenpeace literature. [back to text]
11. William Willoya, Warriors of the Rainbow: Strange and Prophetic Dreams of the Indians, 1962, Naturegraph Publishers, P.O. Box 1075, Happy Camp, CA 96039. [back to text]