So by now, Kit Traverse has been traveling across Asia with a British divinity scholar named Dwight Prance in search of the fabled Shambhala. Way out in Eastern Russia, Kit and Prance get into a discussion about the nature of Shamanism (pgs 776-777). It's great. Check it out.
Prance says:
"Shamanism. There isn't a primitive people anywhere on Earth that can't be found practicing some form of it. Every state religion, including your own, considers it irrational and pernicious, an has taken steps to eradicate it."I love this notion that the religious debate is not really about faith v. reason, or theocracy v. secularism, but between oppressive state power and ecstatic personal freedom. What complicates western history is that sometimes the Church is the State, and most everyone sees themselves in the role of the Shaman, the holder of the true cause, battling the powerful forces arrayed against them.
"What? there's no 'state religion' in the U.S.A, pardner, we've got freedom of worship, it's guaranteed in the Constitution -- keeps church and state separate, just so's we don't turn into something like England and keep marching off into the brush with bagpipes and Gatling guns, looking for more infidels to wipe out. Nothing personal o' course."
"The Cherokee," replied Prance, "the Apache, the massacre of Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, every native Red Indian you've found, you people have either tried to convert to Christianity or you've simply killed."
"That was about land," said Kit.
"I suggest it was about fear of medicine men and strange practices, dancing and drug-taking, that allow humans to be in touch with powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of official church to mediate it for them. The only drug you've ever been comfortable with is alcohol, so you went in and poisoned the tribes with that. Your whole history in America has been one long religious war, secret crusades, disguised under false names. You tried to exterminate African shamanism by kidnapping half the continent into slavery, giving them Christian names, and shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible down their throats, and look what happened."
"The Civil War? That was economics. Politics."
"That was the gods you tried to destroy, waiting their hour, taking their revenge. You people really just believe everything you're taught don't you?"
In the Soviet Union atheism was the state's way of dealing with the shamanistic beliefs of the Eastern church and the Tsars. In the modern U.S., atheism and neo-paganism are quasi-shamanistic belief-systems that are oppressed by the Christianist state-empowered majority. American Christians in the mode of the Left Behind series see themselves as an oppressed minority of believers battling the evils of the anti-Christ, one world government, and secular humanism. In the war on terror, al-Qaeda and Jihadism represent a desire to achieve state power in order to battle the shamanisitic free-wheeling, feminist, liberal, gay-friendly, artistic West. But they themselves believe that the western nations conspire against their shamanistic version of Islam, and for them 9/11 was nothing less than their God's revenge.
It's not about what you believe, but how you believe. Are you free? or are your experiences mediated for you by the powers that be: consumerism, Christianism, nationalism; Fox news, neo-conservatism, and the religious right. Do you believe everything you're taught or are you in touch with powerful gods hidden in the landscape of art, literature, music and culture?
