The Good Old Days



I’ve been reading John Tanner’s autobiography, The Falcon, (Download).  He was born in Kentucky in 1780.  At age 9, he was kidnapped by the Ojibwa, and adopted by an Ottawa chief.  Tanner spent 30 years living as a wild hunter-gatherer, wandering in the wilderness between the Red River of North Dakota and Lake Huron in Michigan.  He once tried to return to his birth family, but white society was intolerably creepy.

One day on the prairie, he met an odd fellow.  The stranger brought news of a Shawnee prophet who had a vision for a great healing.  Ever since the disease ridden, pale faced, radicalized Christian terrorists had washed up on the shores of Turtle Island, life had gotten ugly for Native Americans.  The terrorists, who seemed incapable of honesty, kept pushing the tribes westward, generating much tension and bloodshed.  At that time, the Sioux of the plains were pushing back hard against the unwanted immigrants displaced from their traditional lands in the east.  Nobody was happy.

Tanner listened to the prophet’s list of instructions.  Never allow your fire go out.  Let no dogs live.  Never steal, lie, strike others, get drunk, or go against your enemies.  If you follow these instructions, you will become invisible to the Sioux, and can live in peace.  A flashback slithered into my boggy old thinker.  This story sounded familiar.  Computer magic remembered my notes on Alvin Josephy’s book, 500 Nations, pages 305-306.  Bingo!  They read:

305 In Indiana in 1805, Lalawthika (the noise maker), an alcoholic brother of the heroic warrior Tecumseh, fell into a trance, and visited with the Creator in a vision.  306 He quit drinking and changed his name to Tenskwatawa, meaning “the open door.”  He was later known as the Prophet.  He preached to many tribes about declining morals and the need to return to traditional values.  They needed to reject Christianity and return to their old religion.  They should drop the selfishness, envy, and lust for possessions that the whites had taught them, and return to the way of sharing.  They should cast out of their lives domestic animals, woven clothes, and metal tools.

Upon reading this, a name farted out of my boggy old thinker: Donald Trump.  I was startled at this weird association, and then burst into a big smile.  This led to another flashback, a passage on the Ghost Dance I had written for What Is Sustainable.  Here’s a bit of it:

In the 1860’s, deranged Europeans rode their brand new railroads into the Great Plains and commenced the Buffalo Holocaust.  By 1890, the buffalo were at the brink of extinction.  For the Indians, the buffalo were the core of their existence.  With the buffalo gone, their traditional hunting life became obsolete and impossible.

In January 1889, a Paiute prophet named Wovoka had a vision.  He encouraged folks to perform the Ghost Dance.  They should gather and dance five days and four nights, then on the fifth day bathe in the river.  It was powerful dancing, with up to 500 in a large circle.  Many enjoyed manic frenzy, some fell into hypnotic trances, some collapsed and became unconscious.  The Ghost Dancing spread from tribe to tribe, eventually expanding over a vast region of the American west.

The vision was that if the Ghost Dance was properly performed, a great flood would come and wash the whites back across the ocean to their European home, where they belonged.  The ancestors and the buffalo would be reincarnated, the epidemics of white diseases would cease, and life would return to the good old days.

A different version of the Ghost Dance story, described by Lame Deer, used the metaphor of rolling up and disposing a filthy old carpet, which was a symbol for the white man’s world.  Imbedded in the filthy carpet were roads, mines, cities, farms, factories — every form of ugliness that civilization brought with it.  When the old carpet was rolled away, beneath it was revealed a healthy wild Fairyland — the land as it was prior to the invasion of the whites and their diseases.

The Ghost Dance became so popular that the white invaders began to get spooked.  They were intimidated by the fact that large numbers of Indians were enthusiastically dancing, with the goal of cleansing their lands of the white race forever.  They perceived (incorrectly) that the natives were conspiring to launch a violent rebellion.  The army was called, and several hundred Ghost Dancers were exterminated at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890.

This story spurred the recall of another memory, an old rant on the vision of Nongqawuse, in South Africa.  Some snips:

When the Dutch Afrikaners (Boers) invaded the Eastern Cape region of South Africa, the Xhosa tribe fought them long and hard.  Beginning in 1779, eight bloody frontier wars were fought.  In 1806, the British replaced the Afrikaners and continued the struggle to conquer Xhosa land.  In 1853, a lung disease began killing off the Xhosa’s cattle herds.  Problems worsened when a severe drought hit.  Things started looking grim.

Then, in 1856, after decades of terrible struggles and misfortunes, an 11-year old Xhosa girl named Nongqawuse had a vision.  She communicated with spirits of the dead and they informed her that the colonist invasion was the result of their cattle having been cursed by witchcraft.  The spirits then gave her some important instructions in order to remedy this situation.

To lift this curse and return to days of peace and plenty, the living Xhosa had to do three things:  stop cultivating their fields, destroy their grain reserves, and kill all of their cattle.  If they did this, the whites would be driven into the sea, the dead would return, and they would refill the granaries, restore the crops in the fields, and bring herds of immortal cattle.

At this point, the Xhosa split into two groups, the believers and the non-believers.  In 1856 and 1857, the believers did as the ancestors instructed them.  They dumped their grain and slaughtered 400,000 cattle.  Having destroyed their food supply, tens of thousands then proceeded to die of starvation.  Tens of thousands were forced to go to towns and take oppressive low-paying jobs.  Only 37,000 remained on their lands, out of 105,000.  By the 1870s, white settlers occupied most of the Xhosa’s lands.  The surviving Xhosa were rounded up and moved to reserves in British Kaffraria.

Anyway, these stories emerged from cultures whose good old days were behind them, following bloody collisions with civilization.  The present was out of balance, miserable, a dead end.  It was time to perform big ceremonial magic, return to the traditional path, and live in peace and prosperity.

As I write in early 2017, Donald Trump is the new U.S. president.  His mantra is “Make America Great Again.”  It’s time for Americans to perform the Trump Dance, and restore the good old days of cheap and abundant oil, coal, iron, and timber, when men had good jobs, mothers stayed home to raise large families, minorities knew their place, and Kennedys boogied in the White House.

To return to the traditional path, we must expel the crazy, dangerous Mexicans and Muslims.  We must replace public schools with private religious schools, and graduate kids who are blissfully ignorant about evolution, climate change, and overshoot.  We must let the Reaper take the commoners, and reserve health care for people who matter.  We must eliminate all restrictions on loggers, miners, ranchers, and bankers so our wheezing economy can have one last screaming squirting orgasm of mindless destruction.

This time, it will work, by golly!

Image: “The Ghost Dance by the Oglala Lakota at Pine Ridge.”  Illustration by Frederic Remington, 1890.

A Druid Perspective

John Michael Greer is a writer, philosopher, bookworm, mage, and Grand Archdruid.  He’s brainy, articulate, and a notorious outside-the-box thinker (see his interview on PeakMoment.TV).  On some issues, my conclusions are different from his, but he’s a stimulating lad.  I’m just going to jabber a bit about a few of the ideas presented on his blog.

For many years, I struggled to find a solution to the Earth Crisis.  I learned a lot along the way, but was never able to discover a silver bullet cure.  I failed because I didn’t comprehend the vital difference between problems and predicaments.  A problem is something that can be eliminated by a solution — if my bicycle falls over, the solution is to lift it back up — the problem ends.  A predicament is something that has no solution, like the Earth Crisis.  No matter what we do, we can’t make it go away.  All we can do is experiment with various responses, and some may be more helpful than others.

When I was a schoolboy, there was an imaginary line that divided the world.  On one side was capitalism (good), on the other was communism (evil).  Today, it’s democracy (good) and terrorism (evil).  Are you a liberal or a conservative?  Are you saved or damned?  Binary thinking limits perception to just two possible variables: A or B, where A is the opposite of B.  Devious creeps are famous for using binaries to confuse and manipulate the unclever.  “Gosh, if I’m not A, then I must be B.”  Whoa boy!  What about C, D, E, and F?  In his classes for druid cadets, Greer would have them find the numerous binaries in the daily paper and identify the options not mentioned.  Once you grasp this, binaries become easy to see and step around.

One of Greer’s job titles is mage (synonyms: conjurer, sorcerer, wizard, etc.).  It’s an art with old roots.  Magic cannot fix the Earth Crisis predicament, but it can influence how we think and behave — for better or worse.  Dion Fortune, a venerable magician, once defined magic as “the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will.”  Will (desire) is essential.  Most consumers lack the will to abandon their quest for excess, so efforts to change their consciousness will fail.  According to Greer, magic “can be seen as the use of psychologically potent symbolism to influence consciousness and, through consciousness, the universe as we experience it.”

A popular tool for magical work is incantations.  For example, “drill, baby, drill!” encourages infantile fantasies.  Incantations can also be used for good.  During World War II, Rosie the Riveter posters had this incantation: “We can do it!”  This empowered women to leave home and work in factories to help the cause.  Hitler was a master of dark incantations.  Magic without ethics is toxic.

“We are passing from an age of unparalleled abundance to an age of scarcity, economic contraction, and environmental payback,” says Greer.  This is a predicament, because neither magic nor science is capable of providing us with infinite quantities of cheap, environmentally harmless resources.  It is possible for magic to change our consciousness, but first we must wrap our heads around the notion that the sun is setting on the age of reckless excess.  We must be willing to hurl our illusions overboard, and open our minds to exploring new realms of thinking, but few are willing to do this.  No will, no magic.

Many are lost in a trance.  The myth of progress bombards us with a dodgy incantation: “the future will be better.”  Almost none of our ancestors lived in an era when they anticipated a brighter tomorrow.  They just played the cards that life dealt them, to the best of their ability, without daffy daydreams. 

Modern folks, suffering from vivid hallucinations of utopia just around the next corner, are hobbled by irrational expectations.  For protection against this incantation, Greer gives us the counter spell:  “There is no brighter future ahead.”  This spell provides grounding and strength to those having the will to resist the trance, but it’s meaningless to the legions of the lost. 

The collective imagination of a society shapes its culture, which is based on an assortment of narratives, or stories.  Most folks whine when he calls them myths, but that’s what they are.  The myths of our culture are like water to a fish.  Most of us have blind faith in the myth of progress, for example.  We are the greatest.  Better times are coming.  More is better.  In an era of calamitous change, the old myths are wheezing and sputtering, and the new ones remain embryonic.  This leads to confusion, and cripples our ability to reason.  Greer refers to this as cultural senility.

Greer has some issues with the activist community.  Folks who protest climate change “show no signs of accepting the limits that they hope to impose on others.”  They typically demand “that somebody else do something.”  Also, organizations tend to oppose the bad, rather than envision the good and pursue it.  Greer believes that the path to healing must include wrapping our minds around L.E.S.S. (less energy, stuff, and stimulation).

A powerful tool for transformation is mindful contemplation.  “What you contemplate, you imitate,” says Greer.  If I contemplate recreational shopping, and focus on all the cool stuff I want, I’m likely to wander away to the mall.  Or I could contemplate the satisfaction that would result from living less wastefully.  I could contemplate the vital difference between wants and needs, and redefine my priorities.  I could contemplate the responsibilities involved in living an honorable life.

Modern societies (“magician states”) manipulate the minds of the masses.  Popular culture conjures “mass thaumaturgy” (a powerful spell), which induces a trance state in many people, who seem to be sleepwalking.  The trance weakens their mental powers, making them easier to manipulate.  The air is always thick with trance-inducing incantations trying to penetrate your mind.  Remaining free of the trance requires clear thinking and a strong mind.  Find paths that distance you from the fog of dark incantations.  Deliberately reduce your exposure to them.

 (1) Completely disconnect from popular culture inputs, “your television will do you more good at the bottom of a dumpster than it will sitting in your living room.”  It’s a fire hose of garbage, and it hobbles the mind.  Stop this toxic habit right now, cold turkey, not gradually.  This will free up many hours for pursuits that enrich your journey.

(2) It’s very easy to receive popular culture incantations second hand, from people who live in the trance, whose minds seem to consist of little more than mass media sound bites.  You don’t need to live in a cave, but it is wise to be mindful about who you hang out with.  Don’t let the zombies bring you down.

(3) Replace the garbage inputs “with something worth reading, watching, hearing, or doing.”  Seek out living green oases in the desert of the collective consciousness.  Seek what helps you grow.

Stepping outside of the mass mind can provide a thrilling sense of liberation, like waking up from a nightmare.  It reveals new and better paths.  It’s good for you.

Techno-hint:  Google allows you to restrict a search to the contents of a single website.  For example, to search all of Greer’s blogs for “Apollo,” type this command in the Google search field: apollo:thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com

Lightning Bird

There is no such thing as coincidence, right?  Sitting here in Oregon, I wrote a story about a guy in New Jersey, sent it to a site in England, where it was read by a guy in Greece, who pointed me to a story from South Africa, about a man I’d never heard of: Adrian Boshier (1939-1978).  His life was described in Lightning Bird, a biography by Lyall Watson (1939-2008).  Watson was the inventor of “the hundredth monkey,” a magical thinking meme that once went viral.  The book was just what I needed: a visit to an old-fashioned society.

Boshier was an Englishman who moved to South Africa when he was 16.  He was a reckless, brainy, and extremely lucky man who had a short, fantastic life — a whirlwind adventure in rewilding.  He lived in the bush for most of his first six years in Africa.  Unlike other whites, Boshier walked wherever he went, ate what natives ate, and drank their water.  He would head off into wild country with nothing but a pocketknife and a bag of salt (for trading), and live off the land for as long as he wanted. 

He became highly skilled at catching and befriending dangerous snakes.  Walking into a village wrapped up in a 14-foot python, he terrified the natives, giving birth to his reputation as a powerful magician.  He would catch an eight-foot cobra, milk its venom, and drink it before a wide-eyed crowd.  They called him Rradinoga, the father of snakes.

By and by, Boshier met Raymond Dart, the archeologist who discovered Australopithecus africanus.  Dart took him under his wing, and arranged museum work for him.  The lad also made some money selling snake venom to labs.

Boshier was forced to unlearn his narrow Englishness.  Natives taught him the juicy delights of gobbling three-inch caterpillars.  Eventually, he learned how to chase down a young antelope and strangle it with his bare hands.  When a leopard killed an animal, he would race at it screaming, scare it off, and snatch a hunk of flesh.  He once tried to swipe some fresh meat from five lions, unsuccessfully, but he lived to tell about it.

He was fascinated by native culture, and decided to learn more about diviners or witch doctors.  An elder told him to go to Makgabeng, a mountainous land that was home to fearsome spirit power.  The mountains were so dangerous that you shouldn’t even point your finger at them, let alone walk into them.  Boshier walked into them.  Before long, he gained the respect of the residents.

Their chief introduced him to the keeper of the traditions, who told Boshier that the spirits had brought him to Makgabeng to learn.  Why?  “The lessons that the spirits bring cannot be doubted and they must not be ignored.  If you disregard the experience offered by the sprits, you will fall.  You may even die.  But if you follow the path along which they lead, you will learn.  You will gain power and your sprits will be happy.”

A witch doctor reinforced this message.  She told him that his health problems resulted from his resistance to the spirits.  “The hospitals in your cities are full of the hornless ones, those who have been called and would not go.  No one asks for the spirits and it is not easy to live with them.  Everyone fights in the beginning, but in the end one must obey them and do their work.  You should be dead.  I do not know why they let you live.”

Eventually she taught him the skills of a witch doctor, and he was honored by an initiation ceremony.  But whenever he got too stressed, he would flee to Johannesburg and spend time with the whites.  He straddled two incompatible worlds, and never felt at home in either one.

In the mountains, he visited many caves, and studied the paintings on their walls.  Some were recent, and some were very old.  He met elders who understood their meaning.  They were not just decorative graffiti.  The images recorded information, something like writing.  Tribes who spoke different languages all understood the painted symbols in the same way, because they were like a universal form of communication, archetypal images.

The bright climax of the book occurred when a severe drought came to Makgabeng.  Since he was a powerful witch doctor, the people asked him to make it rain.  He responded in a beautiful way.  He found their sacred drums in a forgotten cave, where they had been hidden 50 years earlier, when German missionaries demanded their destruction.  A black bull was sacrificed to provide new hides for the drums.  To bring rain, everyone had to be initiated in the old ways, and the ancestors fully honored.  The people were united by an empowering healing process.  It rained.  Joy!

“There is in African custom an essential harmony, an equilibrium with the land which seems to be lacking in our lives.”  Africa is a special place.  The roots of the old culture go “all the way back, in one long unbroken line, to the origins of man.”  For all of us, a journey to Africa is a homecoming.  “There are few things in traditional life in Africa that can be identified as distinctively sacred in the sense that they can be separated from the rest of life.  For Africans, the whole of life is sacred.”

The megafauna of Africa did not go extinct, because humans coevolved with them.  Living in the tropics, we needed no clothes or substantial shelters.  A sumptuous buffet was available year round — lizards, snakes, roots, berries, nuts, grubs.  We got by with very simple tools for a long, long time.  This was the normal, time-proven, sustainable mode of human living — a mode that our genetic evolution had fine-tuned us for (with the same genes we have today).

Then, folks migrated out of Africa, to non-tropical lands where living conditions were less perfect, and survival was more challenging.  Dwelling outside of our evolutionary homeland turned us into something like moon explorers.  Without technological crutches, we would have been unable to survive.  Be clever or die!

The dark climax of the book was one of humankind’s big tragedies.  Some old cave paintings that Boshier studied had images of sheep.  Sheep were not indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa.  They came from the Middle East, where clever people had reduced strong and powerful wild mouflon into fuzzy, sub-intelligent freaks that could not survive without human care.

Portraits of sheep indicated that the clever moon explorers had returned to sacred Africa, bringing with them domesticated livestock, sacks of seeds, and the consuming mindset of the colonizer and domesticator.  “The introduction of a pastoral economy, starting perhaps three or four thousand years ago, seems to have marked the beginning of a relentless destruction, now almost complete, of the earliest way of human life.  It was the end of a society that had discovered how to live in harmony with — rather than at the expense of — nature.”

The archaeological community was always on the lookout for evidence of the miraculous transition, when primitive hominids, who lived by instinct, crossed the Rubicon and became self-aware Homo sapiens with complex brains — incredible modern humans!  Well, here we are, neck deep in a bubbling cauldron of toxic progress soup, big brains and all.  Success!  These days, the primitive side of the Rubicon is looking more and more like where we really belong — home.  Can we learn something here?

Boshier was an epileptic.  To Europeans, epilepsy was a disease.  To Africans, he was blessed by the spirits, very special.  Near the end of his life, he was having as many as 30 epileptic attacks per week.  On 18 November, 1978, Boshier waded into the waters of the Indian Ocean and died.  The next day, a storm raced into the bone dry Makgabeng, the thunder rumbled, and “it rained and rained and rained.”

See a photo of Boshier here: http://www.williamjames.com/History/SHAMANS.htm

Watson, Lyall, Lightning Bird — The Story of One Man’s Journey into Africa’s Past, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1982.