I was considering the history of the field holler when I came across a YouTube video of a chain gang. It was from the 1930’s and showed a line of African American men shackled together, moving and singing. I won’t link to it because I thought it was truly shocking. What disturbed me most was the thought that this was presented as a cultural artifact. It was recorded by those interested in Negro music and its history, those who cared about music and wanted it preserved.
You can’t tolerate something like this without othering the humans in it. You are bound to think that they don’t feel things like we do, or that their suffering ennobles them, or some sort of shit like that. Otherwise, you look away.
So, sitting in ceremony, in the temple the Madre has had her way and humans are singing and playing guitars. Canta Canta Canta, Aguile Aguile, as they sing the Eagle. I Speak to the small beings that accompany me. Why are you singing in the language of your oppressors, I ask them. They tell me, in their smiling way, Spanish is now our language, we have made it our own.
You would be surprised what you can make your own.
Ayahuasca gets a terrible rap. Oh, it’s the ultimate expression of plastic shamanism. The shiftless middle class, the Insta darlings, bound to the wheel of endless healing and self-improvement, are here having their psyches knocked sideways (for the weekend) with no connection to the culture or the land that holds the medicine.
Until you do it. Then, the wise ones around you, if they are in fact wise, take the deep structure of a culture and with respect and gratitude, they make something of it. Something that might be temporary, that might not ‘stick’, but that works hard against the grain of capitalism and materialism nevertheless. Something proper.
I have Kantian leanings and for me some things are axiomatic.
It is wrong to steal.
It is especially wrong to steal from those who have less than you.
It is even more especially wrong to take things without even understanding or caring about what you have taken.
Appropriation means to make proper or correct. I return discursively to the chain gang singing their songs of suffering and liberation. Originally, black Africans were great appropriators. They took what they had in the new land and they made it their own. Their music did not just transpose African forms, but grew melding and changing new forms. I really want to say something about how sophisticated this was, but I am way out of my lane here. My point is about how perhaps they took what they had, new as well as old, trombone as well as djembe, and they made it proper, they made it true in the singing of it.
I particularly enjoy the work of Zeal and Ardor. This is a Swiss/American Black Metal/Negro Spiritual musical project that explores what might have happened if the African slaves in America had become Satanists instead of Christians. Manuel Gagneux, who grew Zeal and Ardor out of a 4Chan dare, began with the idea that Christianity was imposed on the slaves just as it was imposed on heathens in Norway. In Norway, Black Metal music rebelled against Christian monotheism. What would a similar rebellion have looked like among the slaves? Have a listen. It’s a worthy project, a good set of questions for a young man to ask of his heritage.
How far we have come, in our attempts to understand and to make proper. We are all appropriating these days, it seems.
Shamanism, my rough field, also gets a bad rap these days. You can’t be a Shaman unless you are Siberian, unless you have undergone spontaneous and life-threatening crises as a child, unless yhttps://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/22/zeal-ardor-black-metal-bluesman-brands-fansou have the blood heritage, unless you have been given the title by someone who has the right to give it to you, unless you have studied for years in Peru. Shamanism is a closed practice.
Here is the difficult question about what to call myself. There is a view that the word shaman should be used only by those from Siberia, because it is a word from the Manchu-Tungus language. My own practice owes a lot to Norse heritage so should I call myself a Seidkona, or a Volva? I am uncertain about that, at least in front of other humans. It seems like too big a claim. It is also necessarily a construct for today. I was once told I could not call myself a Volva because I had not done Utiseta. I was amused because firstly, I don’t call myself a Volva. Also, whether or not I have done Utiseta is mine to disclose. Utiseta was the practice of sitting overnight on grave mounds, for divinatory or initiatory purposes. Traditionally, it was carried out wearing a walrus hide and carrying an axe. I can manage a pretty good axe, but I am fresh out of walrus hides I am afraid. No Utiseta for me! Or for most of us. This is one of the problems with reconstructionism in modern heathenry. The lack of walrus hides slows us all down.
I consider the roots of my own heritage, which is northern European and British, a bit of Gael and Gaul and some Scandinavian. Shamanism is not so much closed as all but dead. What did my Shamanic ancestors call themselves? Who do I ask? I can ask them. And yes, they do Speak to me, I am that lucky. But the gnosis I receive is mine alone; while it may be meaningful to me it is not necessarily true or useful for others. Nevertheless, it is important to start with where I come from. I am aware that delving into my own heritage first sounds a bit, well, pure. I do not think my heritage is any better than anyone else’s, nor do I think it is culturally pure or even particularly distinct. And I have no time for purity, my time in Left Hand Path magic knocked that out of me. There is a Maori saying:
Kia whakatoomuri te haere whakamua
about walking into the future looking back to the past, and I strongly want to avoid pillaging anyone else’s. So I walk forward looking back to the Lowenmensch, to the Shaman of Bad Durrenburg, to the rock carvings of Val Camonica, and to the vestiges of animism that survive in folk magic. It’s not everything, but it is a little bit mine.
Which brings me to an analogous practice, that of Yoga.
When
I am attempting downward facing dog in a chilly community centre, and boy do I
hate downward facing dog, the teacher says ‘Yogi’s choice’. Wow I am a Yogi! Except of course I am not. I am an aging
suburban woman doing exercises. Early Yogis, with their lifetime of discipline
and asceticism, would not even recognize what I am up to. Yoga, in the sense of
group exercises focusing on poses in order to strengthen the body and calm the
mind, is in part a western invention. Indian nationalists of the early
twentieth century admired European strength building exercise and brought it
back into their own traditions, and this new form fed itself back into the
European preoccupation with the mystic East. The Nazis loved Yoga. Below is a
truly gorgeous photo of Eva Braun doing a back bend on a river bank – a hint of
the uneasy relationship that exists even now around the far right, eco fascism
and Indian spirituality. Don’t get me started. 
Yoga is not pure.
If we treated Yoga the way we treat Shamanism, we would say you can’t do Yoga unless you are Indian, a Brahmin, a forest dweller, an ascetic, inured to a lifetime of discipline and devoted to the transcendent. That would be very upsetting to my kind and thoughtful teacher who says Namaste to me as I fold my mat. We can go two ways from here. We can say that what we are doing is a bastardized form, diluted for a society that has had all genuine spirituality leached out of it, monetized as a distraction from the aridity of late capitalism. It is white bread with folate and vitamin c put back in. Or we can say this has not been a pure practice for a long time, if ever, that it works for us, that we know who we are and we love what we do, that we value our study and respect our betters.
I don’t call myself a Shaman, because that term is for others, and I will speak later about Shamanism in social context. I call what I do Shamanic because that word is similar to the word Yoga. It describes what was once a specific culturally unique practice, that has gone slowly viral over the centuries. It is not so much a definition as a description. When I say Shamanism, I am aware of the history of the word, and the word is a modern construct. It was first used by travellers from the west, who got it from the Tungus, and then used it to describe similar practices. It has become a universal descriptor. If I was undertaking the practice of a particular indigenous group, I would use their term, if they allowed that.
And in ritual, when Speaking to the powers I work with, I introduce myself with my own titles, which I have earned and which are unique to me.
FURTHER:
The Emerald podcast by Josh Schrei
Zeal and Ardor: strictly anti-racist Black Metal/’Satanic Spirituals’ crossover
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/22/zeal-ardor-black-metal-bluesman-brands-fans
Gods and Radicals Press, early blog entries by Rhyd Wildermuth on Paganism and the far right
Matthew Remski – Yoga, Writing and Enquiry
