WHY DON'T YOU JUST PRAY TO GOD? SHAMANISM AND RELIGION

 There are many good reasons for praying to God, depending on how you perceive God of course. In my experience, the best and most pure reasons are praise and gratitude. Love for God is an upwelling of the soul, and prayer is one way to express it. 

I have not found that God will do things for me or give me advice. I know that many people do experience God in that way, and good for them. Clearly I have got a different God or a different relationship with God.

Shamanism works with helping spirits. One way of thinking about these helping spirits is as step down transformers. The Shaman works with power, here meaning a vital force that is more positive than just energy. Helping spirits moderate that power. Too much power is as unworkable as too little. If you think of the Divine as infinite power, helping spirits are almost literal step down transformers. 

Helping spirits can be deities. If you are a soft polytheist, those deities can show up in different religions or in pagan pantheons, or as local spirits. Some are more powerful than others, but that does not make them necessarily less amenable. In the Upper World especially, the Shaman is introduced to great figures from different religions as helping spirits. 

Shamanism is not a religion or a belief system. It is a practice. It is the practice of working with spirits to effect change, such as healing or divination. The Shaman travels in Non Ordinary Reality to do this. It is a social role for a practical purpose.The spiritual world view behind this is animism. Animism is not a religion. I will explain why I think this. 

Animism underlies much of the great religions. It is not a primitive form of those religions or a precursor to them. It is like the substrate. If religion is the carpet, animism is the underlay. It is our oldest spiritual practice and we were animists for 90 percent of our history. You can't say first we had animism and then we had religion, because animism is still there underneath the surface. You just don't see the underlay when you walk on the carpet. 

Animistic ideas leach into religious ones. All religions are syncretic. The gods of the old faith become the demons of the new. Sometimes they become the saints, or mythical heroes, or local nature spirits. I have written before about the Roman Catholic practice of using holy water to bless an item as if it is animate. Older and more complex forms of religion have animism shot through them like shimmers of light on silk. 

Religious ideas leach into animism.Shamanic practice is in part culturally influenced - in Non Ordinary Reality we experience what we are primed to experience, to some extent. I don't believe there is any 'pure' Shamanic experience, but in my culture we read and write and talk so much about everything it would be even more impossible to experience something that was not informed by previous understandings. Shamans work with the helping spirits of their religious cultures. They may identify with a religion and practice Shamanism alongside it, or they may practice something more obviously syncretic.

Modern Christianity in particular emphasizes belief. I am a little careful here because I suspect the original use of the word 'credere' meant something like 'you will understand it best once you have had a go at it'. Modern Christian conversion stories talk about belief as being an overwhelming certainty that does not rely on outside evidence.This is described as exhilarating and sustaining. One's experience is governed by belief. For animists, it seems to be the opposite. There is a very low standard of belief. It really matters little what you believe. What matters is what you experience in relationship. Noting is autochthonous. Experiences beget ideas and experiments in consciousness are looped back into praxis. Useful questions might be 'What does it do for you? How does it help the community? Where does it change you? How can this be supported?'

The idea of persons is helpful in animism. We are human persons, but there are non-human persons, other-than-human persons, and more-than-human persons. The only religions I know anything substantive about are Islam and Christianity (perhaps Judaism by extension). Both religions abound in persons that are not human. In Islam, we share the earth with various Jinns, angels and demons. Christianity gives us saints who may well have been seen as not human originally, as well as the usual angels and demons. Our ancestors are also once-were-human persons who crop up within religious culture even if not in the written canon. Ancestor veneration is important within the religions of Taoism and some Buddhism.

It would not surprise me if the great Manifestations of God, founding religious figures, did Shamanic things. I think of the miraculous Night Journey of the Prophet Muhammad, where in one night he rode a magical horse from Mecca to Jerusalem and then up into the heavens, and in graded levels of NOR he  met the previous Prophets. He took this journey at a time of great travail among the new community of Muslims, and while grieving the loss of his wife. On his return, he was able to describe things he could not have seen in Ordinary Reality. This sounds to me like an Upper World journey. I am not saying here that prophets such as Muhammad were just Shamans, only that they did things that seem to be Shamanic. 

Animism is not a religion because it is not systematic. It is informal and pluralistic. I was taught by the Foundation for Shamanic Studies that there are three worlds - Upper, Middle and Lower. For many animistic world views this is true, but not always. In Norse animism there are nominally nine worlds, but the relationship among these is expressed differently in different places. From the early modern period onwards, Europeans have loved taxonomies. Putting things in places is an aesthetic joy. But our sense of orderliness falls over when it comes to the many different expressions of animism. The worlds of spirits tumble over each other in an entanglement that just gets bigger and richer the more you explore them. I have experienced the three worlds, but not as a static, discrete system that I can easily describe. As Walt Whitman said 

 'Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)'

 It is a wonder that we can share language about these worlds, but they have enough in common that we can. The worlds of the Shaman are interactive with the Shamanic experience. You roll the carpet out in front of you as you go, while also being aware that thousands of practitioners have also rolled out their carpets. 

 

Further: Nordic Animism YouTube Channel is an interesting take. Thanks to Kevin Turner of FSS for the analogy of the step-down transformer. The Night Journey of Muhammad is attested in many hadith. When you read about it, you will find other examples within religion. 

 

 

 

 

WHY YOU SHOULD BE FARED WELL: YES, YOU NEED A FUNERAL (OR DO YOU?)

 People tell me they don't want a funeral. There are the rational reasons: that funerals are expensive, that they would rather leave money to their loved ones, that gatherings are a waste of resources and too difficult during these Covid times. There are the personal reasons: that no one would come, that their families are absent or would not want to take responsibility, that family gatherings end in fights, that it is too sad to think about. 

There are some answers to these issues that are more worldly, and some that aren't. 

Firstly, there is a whole movement towards taking control over the funeral process, including what to do with the body. Home funerals, straight-to-crem options, eco burials, are all options here in Aotearoa. The funeral industry looks like a juggernaut and its history implies a kind of cultural hegemony, but that is not necessarily true. You can build or pre-buy a coffin. You can have a body at home without embalming. You can transport a body. You can do the paperwork yourself. The advantage of having a funeral professional take over it all is that you don't have to do the work, and it is work. So DIY funerals are best for functioning families with time and some resources. Good funeral directors listen and understand that funerals are more personalized these days. 

It was a funeral director who explained to me that the opposite trend, towards no funeral, is not ideal for grieving. A funeral has a moment of realization in it, that the person is dead. That this is a farewell. This realization needs to happen at a social level. Regardless of how messy the family is, how fraught the grieving, how difficult the relationships, there still needs to be this social acknowledgement that the person is dead. Whether you do shots during the speeches or burnouts in the car park or play the whole of  Handel's Messiah is less important than that moment of truth. The rest of it is just how you get to that moment. 

I have said before that the time between the death and the faring well, however you do it, is a tender and liminal time. A limen is a threshold. The soul, or the part of it that leaves, is at the threshold. What we do and how we handle ourselves can have an effect on the soul. Because we are in a tender and liminal state too.

Martin Prechtel in his beautiful book 'The Smell of Rain on Dust' talks about death processes in Meso American societies. There is a river between the village of the living and the village of the dead. The soul crosses that river in a boat made of tears. It follows that the job of the living is to make the boat. They need to cry. What happens if the person who died was a asshole? They still need to cry. Because if the soul does not cross the river, they are stuck in the village of the living. Then they are suffering, and they make the living suffer too by haunting them. 

That liminal time between the death and the farewell is not safe. It depends on your view of death itself. In white North cultures we are trying to normalize death and lose our fear of it. We want to consider it a natural part of the order of things. Other cultures see death as an evil brought into the world, perhaps because of human sin. A bad or sudden death denotes serious wrongdoing. Death is never welcome. It must be treated directly and with bravery and care. There is a hint of this in the Bible. Humans were meant to live for ever but for the sin of Adam and Eve. 

To have a right relationship with the soul of the newly dead is not just about our own emotional passage. It is about the safe passage of the soul. The soul must be guided and even propitiated. As if it were dangerous, which it can be. 

In te ao Maori, death was not there at the beginning. Hine Titama, the goddess of the rainbow, discovered herself to be the product of incest. In her shame, she retreated to the underworld where she became Hine Nui Te Po, the great lady of the night. It was then that death came into the world, and it is Hine Nui Te Po's loving position to receive us all in time. The Maori tangi lasts for days, and is a major social event. For important people, there is often a fierce argument over the body and where it belongs. This indicates respect, but it is not just a token. It is a heated and painful exchange. The movie Waru (2017) has moving sequence where the two kuia from each side of the family argue over who should have the body of the boy Waru, who has died. The tangi is also not the last ceremony for the dead person. A year later, the unveiling of the grave takes place, where a veil is drawn over the grave stone.  This is a hint of a more traditional ceremony of disinterring and reburying the bones. 

https://www.nzfilm.co.nz/films/waru

In parts of Africa, much work must be done to ensure the respected person who has died goes to the land of the ancestors. In Ghana among the Ga people, 'fantasy coffins' are made to display the talents and interests of the dead person. An example might be a coffin in the shape of a Mercedes Benz for a taxi driver. The coffin is carried in a wild drunken procession by young men through the town, partly to give people a chance to say good bye, but partly to confuse the dead person so they can no longer find their way back to their house. Here is a common mix of respect, and sorrow, along with the concern that the soul must find its way to the ancestors and just as importantly, not come back. 

Back to the North society I am used to, we may not have the socially sanctioned belief that the soul is in need of help or that this tender time is dangerous, but we can consider the needs of our souls nevertheless. Anglo Saxon style funerals can be deeply connecting and emotionally satisfying. Even up into the early modern period, we took our deaths seriously. Here is the Lyke Wake Dirge, a truly scary dirge sung to the dead either during the wake,, or on the way to the graveyard,  in order to help the soul be received by Christ and go to heaven:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3JyVHOq7PQ

 Chances are they are not going to play the Lyke Wake Dirge at your funeral. Or run your coffin through the street. Or grieve openly for days. If the funeral you attend for the person you care about is not emotionally satisfying, or does not engage with that tender and dangerous liminality, do your own. Have an alt-funeral, even if you do it informally. Here we are:

A young man dies of cancer. His funeral is large, as they usually are for the young, and mostly the preserve of the family. Lots of aunts, lots of hugs, little cousins, sandwiches, the crematorium booked for an hour and the next funeral party waiting as everyone leaves. At the 'after party' some uncles get ridiculously drunk, and there are more little cousins twirling in their fairy dresses. It's a generic celebration. It could be anything. 

But it isn't.

Blessed reverence comes to his friends the next night. They meet up more or less accidentally. They light a fire on the beach where he used to surf. They smoke probably too much pot and cry more than they expect. They talk about him, only a little, but they feel his life as it streamed through their lives, and they feel it streaming still.

 

  The photos are from the book 'Soul of Africa: Magical Rites and Traditions' (1999) by Christoph, Muller and Muller. 

FARING WELL: BEING BORN INTO A SAD FAMILY

 

 

In 1968, two year old Jefferie Hill went missing while playing near a creek near his home. Distraught family members searched the creek, which was narrow and full of rubbish, because they were sure he had not been swept away. They believed he had been taken. He was never found, dead or alive.  

Radio New Zealand covered Jefferie’s story as one episode in a series call The Lost. 

https://www.radionz.co.nz/programmes/the-lost/story/2018622831/the-lost 

Jefferie’s family members were interviewed for this series and talked about how they had coped with this difficult and unresolved loss. I was most interested in the words of his younger sister Laura. A reverend had told Jefferie’s mother that in order to get over the loss of Jefferie, she should have another baby. So she did, and it was Laura. Laura talked about how if it had not been for Jefferie going missing, she would not exist. And she said this: 

‘I was born into a family of sad people’. 

I wondered what it is like being born into a family of sad people, so I asked my friend Anne Marie. 

Anne Marie had her first baby very young, a beautiful boy Callum. Circumstances were not ideal, but she was firercely proud of Callum and did all she could for him. Then one day she went in to check and Callum was dead.  

Anne Marie already had various authorities sniffing around in her life, and she was used to adversity. When she saw Callum, she just knew he was dead, there was no ‘denial stage’. She thought, very calmly, people will come, I had better clean the house. She cleaned the house, set out tea and biscuits, and rang the Police, and rang her mother, and settled down to wait, dry eyed and dissociated.  

Anne Marie drank her way through the next few so-called ‘stages of grief’. She was bored and tired all the time, slept a lot, played first person shooter all through the nights, thought about Callum all the time, without actually thinking at all. She would stand in the street in the middle of the night and shout Callum’s’s name. She would drive drunk to Calllum’s grave and lie there for hours. It was the wild party of despair, the frantic psychic search through all the dark and muddy fields of the soul.  

When she got pregnant again, she was at first indifferent, but love grew and Zoe was born. Zoe, like Laura, was born into a family of sad people. She was so loved. Unlike Callum, Zoe was bonny and big almost ridiculously bright and healthy. Anne Marie indulged her new daughter quite deliberately. Now married, and in stable accommodation, she knew Zoe both was, and was never, a replacement for Callum. Despite her robust nature, Zoe was born with a shadow on her, to a mother who still ran from time to time in those dark and muddy fields. She was born to a family of sad people.  

There is no tidy ending to Anne Marie’s grief. Anniversaries relating to Callum are still hard for her. Her marriage ended badly. Her husband took custody of Zoe, and then sent her to boarding school.  However, some years ago Anne Marie became an active Christian, and her faith community supported her grief in sober and caring ways. She told me that the funeral for Callum was terrible; it was tainted by family conflict and Anne Marie had no say over how it took place. It left her feeling more alone than ever. So her faith community created a new funeral for Callum. It was a traditional funeral with a eulogy and speeches and afternoon tea afterwards. This time, Anne Marie was able to express her grief safely among friends.  

Anne Marie is an experienced and sophisticated griever. She knows that grief is a part of her, and that there is no simple ‘getting over it’ with time. The emotional parts of our brains have no time frames – trigger us the right way and we are right back there, all over again. She told me about a poem she read once, and this is how she described it: 

There are people one this side of the shore, and the dead person is placed in a ship, and the ship sails to the other shore, where it is awaited by the community of the dead. The farther away the ship gets from us, on the living side, the closer it gets to the shore of the dead. Thus, the soul’s farewell by us of the living, gently passes her to the welcome of the dead.  She is always accompanied. * 

 

*Here is a link to the poem. 

https://allpoetry.com/gone-from-my-sight