By Gloria Feman
Orenstein
In this
fascinating essay, published for the first time
through
EVE Online, Gloria Orenstein discusses
many shamanic issues from an ecofeminist perspective
including, biotechnology, surrogacy, and soul
retrieval.
Please be
aware that her essay is fairly long, about 30-double
spaced pages. Also note that all footnotes
are on a separate page.
Gloria Orenstein is a professor of Comparative
Literature in The Program for the Study of Women
& Men in Society at the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles. She co-edited one of the
first and still important ecofeminist anthologies,
Reweaving the World: The
Emergence of Ecofeminism, as well as The
Reflowering of the Goddess.
By Gloria Feman Orenstein
Footnotes
In her recent book, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of
the Living World,1 Native American feminist
writer, Linda Hogan tells about how she had once prayed for
an eagle feather from a living bird. After many years of
prayer, she dreamed she was inside a Temple, and she told
those who accompanied her to "Look Up". Then she
woke up, and saw a large golden eagle fly towards her window.
When she ran outside to see where it was, there was a feather
in the road.
About this event she writes: "I know there is a
physics to this, a natural law about lightness and air. This
event rubs the wrong way against logic. How do I explain the
feather, the bird at my window, my own voice waking me, as if
another person lived in me, wiser and more alert. I can only
think there is another force at work, deeper than physics and
what we know of wind, something that comes from a world where
lightning and thunder, sun and rain clouds live. Nor can I
say why it is so many of us have forgotten the mystery of
nature and spirit, while for tens of thousands of years such
things have happened and been spoken by our elders and our
ancestors."2
As an Ecofeminist and a student of three female spiritual
teachers, two from authentic shamanic lineagesone The
Shaman of Samiland (from Alta, northern Norway)3,
the other a Jewish Clairvoyant, from France, Canada, and now
California4, and the third, a Psychic Healer,
Rosalyn Bruyere, a chakra specialist, energy Healer, and
trance medium (with whom I studied for over ten years), I am
compelled to address the absence of a serious discussion of
Shamanism within Ecofeminist Theory.
Although we have identified the many ways in which western
patriarchal Enlightenment civilization has constructed
dualisms and hierarchies that link women, non-human nature,
and indigenous and third world cultures in a category of
"subordinated Others", we have omitted the spirit
world from our consideration. Yet, by excising the spirit
world from our world-view, we are disregarding numerous
"others" whose agency and guidance actually affect
our lives in powerful ways.
Here I am referring to the Creator or Creatrix, the
ancestors, the unborn and deceased souls and spirits, the
deities, and hosts of other beings and entities that cultures
throughout time and across the globe refer to in their
cultures' creation myths and other narratives (mythic for us,
real for them), that their prophets have seen and heard, that
their singers and tellers of tales have honored in music and
story.
Western scientific civilization has constructed three
basic amnesias: 1) Gynamnesia, our loss of memory of the
civilization of the Goddess. We are now recovering this
memory of some 35,000 years of history in which, according to
the studies of Archeologist Marija
Gimbutas, humans lived in more gender egalitarian
relationships with each other, revered nature, and were more
peaceable than we are. 2) Ecoamnesia, our loss of memory of
our human connection to non-human nature. The Ecology,
Environmental, and Ecofeminist movements are currently
enabling us to recover that memory. 3) Shamanic amnesia, our
forgetfulness of our interconnectedness to the spirit world
of the ancestors, spirit guides, deities and the
Creator/Creatrix of all Life. It is this third amnesia that
is not being adequately addressed either by our contemporary
feminist or ecology movements.
Having now studied with two authentic spiritual teachers
who come from a shamanic lineage, that is whose parents and
grandparents were shamanic healers and clairvoyants,
themselves, I want to stress the importance both of
experience over time and of cultural authenticity and
integrity in the teachings that derive from a long lineage in
which generations and generations have practiced and
transmitted these difficult arts. It does take several
generations in order for one to observe the myriad ways in
which our actions, prayers, ceremonies, healings, etc.
interact with the spirit world, and bring about visible
changes in our lives in the material world, here on Earth.
I argue here that what we need in order to make real
change are leaders whose spiritual knowledge has been learned
over generations of time. Since we have all but eradicated
such knowledge in the west, it is time that we took it
seriously, and began to train people with such gifts, the
"differently abled" spiritual guides now. It is
this kind of knowledge that we might call wisdom. I would
refer those who join me in a critique of the "weekend
shamanism" that is being sold by New Agers of the white
upper class to read Monica Sjöö's caustic analysis of this
approach to so-called reclaiming spirituality in her book, New
Age and Armageddon5.
Whether we refer to that "other" dimension as
the spirit world, the realm of the ancestors, the Land of the
Dead, the Land of the Unborn, etc., we must agree that as the
third world and indigenous populations6 are
undergoing a genocide that is intrinsically linked to the
ecocide of the planet and the rape of their lands, connected
to the hegemony of patriarchal civilization, and since these
are the people who have traditionally been the guardians of
shamanic knowledge, we (both the indigenous peoples and
the western world) are losing all knowledge of the spirit
world with them.
All this loss of land, indigenous cultures, and knowledge
of the spirit world has grave consequences for women,
everywhere. With our destruction of forests, rivers, land,
and with the colonization of seeds via the imposition of
western technology on cultures with earth-based spiritual
practices, we are excising shamans, medicine women, native
healers, spirit doctors, psychic surgeons, herbalists,
mediums, Priestesses, and visionaries of all kinds, and with
them all knowledge of the laws and functioning of the spirit
world and its interconnection with the phenomenal world of
our life on Planet Earth.
Simply stated, western civilization is raping the entire
world of its soul. If we are, indeed, interested in
attending to the discourses of indigenous peoples, as we
claim to be, then we must take seriously what they tell us
about the sacred relationships among humans, the planet, and
the unseen dimension of the spirit world, populated as it is
with ancestors, souls, spirits, power animals, deities, and a
wide variety of other spirit species, this spiritual
dimension of life has been suppressed in the west, and
whenever people have spoken of it as if it were real and not
symbolic or mythic, they have been labeled "mad".
Indeed, westerners who experience visions, who converse
with deities, spirit animals, spirit guides, plant spirits,
angels, or God, Great Spirit, Goddess, etc. are usually
placed in mental asylums, treated with electro-shock therapy,
potent and toxic drugs, or given lobotomies, which reduce
them to a comatose or robotized state of being.
French feminist writer Jeanne Hyvrard has expressed the
passion and desperation of a woman who is put in a mental
institution because she has memory of a time before
patriarchy, before a holistic vision was shattered, before
dualities, before colonization, and she reaches out to
commune with her protector deity, Mother Death, the goddess
with bare breasts, serpents in her hands, and a dove upon her
head--the figure we now recognize as The Cretan Goddess. Just
as the knowledge of the figures of goddesses that have been
marginalized and erased from patriarchal historical
narratives can serve to prove the sanity of women who either
see them or have memory of them, shamanic knowledge of the
spirit world can also validate the sanity of those
"differently abled" people who perceive them.
However, proving the sanity of visionaries is not the only
reason we should embark on a quest for shamanic knowledge of
the spirit world. As most native peoples will tell us, the
reason for validating the information gleaned from prophets
and visionaries is rather to enable and empower us to give
adequate thanksgiving to those spirits for their beneficial
interventions in our lives, for it is via our spiritual
communication with the spirits that safeguards the balance
and harmony of the planet.
Within the Ecofeminist movement, largely through the work
of scholars such as Marija Gimbutas we have begun to recover
the shamanic dimension of ecofeminist spirituality within our
contemporary reclamations of the ancient Goddess Religion
that predated patriarchy for millennia.
Through ritual and ceremony, using drumming, dancing, art
and music, both women and men have been guided towards a
celebration of the Great Earth Mother, Her mysteries, Her
sacred sites, and Her powers. Ecofeminist spirituality has,
it seems to me, used the Goddess as an all-embracing symbol
under whose aegis a multitude of spiritual practices were
explored. However, as Monique Wittig counseled in Les
Guerilleres, "There was a time when you were not a
slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you
bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection
of it. Remember.....You say there are no words to describe
this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an
effort to re-member. Or, failing that, invent."7
Contemporary women have both remembered and invented. They
have remembered by journeying to sacred Goddess sites and
shrines, and they have remembered by entering trance states
in rituals of the earth and the moon. They have also invented
via intuition and the arts.
While we cannot personally address, interview, or study
with a mentor from Minoan Crete or Catal Huyuk, we can begin
to listen to the teachings and the voices of those spiritual
teachers from a wide diversity of indigenous traditions
living today all over the planet. In warning us of the
ecological disasters and the genocidal rape of their land and
their people, these voices are also telling us that at the
very heart and soul of their cultures is their connectedness,
not only to the Earth, but to the spirit or soul of the earth
and to the spirit of the Creator of the Universe.
The death of the soul (or spirit) accompanies largely
atheist and agnostic scientific cultures. Our western
Enlightenment monoculture is a shocking example of the death
of the soul. As we have de-souled the earth through our
science and technology, we are also de-souling humanity; we
are alienating ourselves from the spirits of all of non-human
nature in the cosmos.
It is traditionally one of the roles of the Shaman (as
diverse as these roles are in a multitude of different
cultures) to perform acts of soul retrieval.8 I
would like to consider shamanism and soul retrieval as my
reflection on additional problems posed by the New
Reproductive Technologies. Both Mircea Eliade9 and
Michael Harner10 have written extensively on
Shamanism. Michael Harner has begun to train white westerners
in the techniques of what he refers to as "core
shamanism". An advanced practice that his Foundation for Shamanic
Studies (headquartered in Mill Valley, California)
teaches is soul retrieval. One of his students, Sandra
Ingerman, now a Shamanic Counselor, has written two books on
soul retrieval. She is a white western woman engaging in an
ancient shamanic practice.
The word Shaman comes from the Tungus word (Tungus are
people who live in Siberia and Mongolia), and it means
"one who sees in the dark". Having personally
studied with a Sami Shaman, and having spent some time in
Alta, Norway in the winter, I experienced both the effects of
prolonged periods of darkness (when the sun would set at 9:00
a.m.) as well as the effects of the magnetic North Pole on my
energy field. Indeed, as we would venture out in the snow at
midday in total darkness, we had to learn to see in the dark.
And, the dark can be understood metaphorically as well, for
my Shaman, always taught me that "the spirit grows in
darkness". She said that the darkness she spoke about
also referred to tests and trials involving suffering,
sacrifice, and discipline. But it also reminds us that
something is alive and growing in the darkness.
Shamans generally enter ecstatic trance states of
consciousness via drumming or psychoactive plants in order to
journey to dimensions one may conceive of, as Michael Harner
has named them, "non-ordinary reality", in order to
perform a healing by consulting the spirit guides, power
animals, and deities. Quite often a healing is a soul
retrieval.
According to Sandra Ingerman, who has performed hundreds
of soul retrievals, the major cause of illness from the
shamanic perspective is soul loss. She used the word soul to
stand for vital essence or the spiritual part of a person.
She informs us that soul loss is often the result of such
traumas as incest, abuse, surgery, illness, addiction, loss,
violence, injury, abortion or miscarriage, and the stress of
combat and addiction.
The symptoms of soul loss include chronic depression,
illness, feelings of emptiness, feelings of alienation,
disconnectedness, fragmentation, incompleteness,
listlessness, and trauma. When trauma occurs, a part of a
person's soul may flee as a defense against the pain. This is
diagnosed by psychiatrists as "dissociation". It is
often a feeling of not being in one's body. Actually
"soul loss is an adaptive strategy to the original
trauma"11. While it protects one from feeling
the pain, it leaves one feeling fragmented and empty.
It is interesting to note that soul loss is frequently the
result of emotional and physical abuse, violence, battery,
incest, sexual abuse, and rape. Considering the prevalence of
violence towards women in our society, we might add soul loss
to the long list of afflictions from which women suffer, many
of which have been referred to as "gynocide"
,"femicide"12 and matricide. Thus, it is
particularly important for women to pay attention to the
teachings of shamanism, for this ancient practice enables us
to retrieve the lost or fled soul fragments, and to restore
wholeness to our lives.
In Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self,13
Sandra Ingerman gives many detailed descriptions of the
healing of specific cases of soul loss by the shamanic
journey to non-ordinary realityto The Upper World, The
Middle World, or The Lower World in order to search for,
locate, and bring back the missing part of the soul that has
fled from the sick person. Often this is accomplished with
the help of spirit guides and power animals. Many people
suffer from multiple soul losses, and are missing more than
one part of their soul. I suspect that soul loss is involved
with what we have been calling "women's fatigue
syndrome" and other chronic states of illness from which
women now suffer and that the medical community cannot cure.
However, it is not my purpose to describe the practice of
soul retrieval. Rather, I wish to consider soul loss as a
possible result of the manipulation and abuses of the New
Reproductive Technologies as they are performed on women.
Moreover, since these technologies involve the creation of
life, itself, we are obliged to realize that our definition
of life in western science is intrinsically materialistic.
Have any of the scientists working on genetic engineering or
reproductive technology ever considered the soul as they
fiddle around with the material constituents of life?
In this paper I affirm that the shamanic dimension to
Ecofeminism considers the definition of life, itself, to be
larger than the biological, genetic description, and that the
spiritual dimension of the "seed" (as discussed by
Vandana Shiva) is an expanded but inherent aspect of the
fundamental constituents of life, itself. Radical feminists
and ecofeminists in the international Finnrage
network have critiqued the new reproductive technologies
thanks to the pioneering work of Renate Klein, Jan Raymond,
Gena Correa, and Robyn Rowland, among many, and have noted
the multiple ways in which the cycle of reproduction centered
in the female is being dismembered, how women are being
turned into egg producers, egg donors, uteri, and so-called
"surrogate mothers"; how the mother is being
fragmented, and, indeed, how reproduction is being separated
from sexuality, in general. This will soon erase the
asymmetry in human reproduction, in which women's wombs have
always played the most important role.
However, with the new reproductive technologies, when the
egg and sperm are joined in a test tube, they are considered
to be playing an equal role in the reproductive process. This
is because reproduction via test tubes ignores the womb and
the nine important months of gestation within the woman's
body. Janice Raymond in Women As Wombs14has
shown how "the significance of pregnancy, labor, and
birth have been shrunk to the size of a sperm"15
in cases of "surrogacy" which is also a misnomer
for motherhood. Since it is the environment within the womb
that for nine months creates the child, we may assume that
so-called surrogate mothers who have to give up their child
will most definitely experience soul loss, as well might
their children, who for nine months have bonded to the blood
and spirit of the body of their prenatal mothers. It is the
womb of the so-called surrogate mother that affects fetal
survival, birth weight, adult weight, bone structure, rate of
growth, and other important vital elements of the life of the
child.16
In Primal Connections: How Our Experiences From
Conception to Birth Influence Our Emotions, Behavior, and
Health17 Elizabeth Noble argues that
newborns have already learned a lot in utero. "Newborns
clearly remember music, stories, and songs to which they were
exposed in the uterus. Verified memories relating to events
experienced in prenatal life, such as concerts, carnivals,
train whistles, and explosions, can be found in the
literature."18
Similarly, newborns are affected by the pains and trauma
that their mothers experienced when they were being carried
in the womb. Pre-natal memories can be retrieved via hypnotic
regression and rebirthing. "The recording of one's own
conception suggests the presence of a soul."19
"The fact that ovulation, conception, and
preconceptional states come up in dreams shows a psychic
relationship between a woman and her ovum..."20
The transcription of prenatal and perinatal memories of
clients under hypnotic regression yields evidence that
neuroses in later life can be traced to events surrounding
conception, implantation, delivery, the death of a twin in
utero, labor, surgery and all the complications of these
processes. What kinds of neuroses will wombless births breed?
It is clear that the womb is a highly specialized
environment, and it is sobering to speculate on what kind of
being will be born who has not been nurtured in an organic
womb, but only in a mechanical one.
My reflections on shamanism and on the cosmologies in
which it is practiced, which envisage the spirit world as an
extended part of all reality (although one not ordinarily
visible) is the following: Contemporary science has sought
technological means for creating and perfecting (according to
whose values???) life as we have known it.
The "technodocs" who engage in research on the
New Reproductive Technologies and Genetic Engineering
participate in a definition of life that ignores the soul or
spirit, and thinks about creating life without considering
the effects of their technologies on the souleither of the
mother or the child, the earth, or by further extension the
effects of these technologies on the ancestors or the other
inhabitants of the spiritual realms. When I think about
eliminating all forms of "imperfection" labeled
"abnormal" via genetic engineering, not only do I
reflect upon the definition of "abnormal" that the
technodocs have established in the west, but I also pause and
take time to express a serious cautionary consideration that
has spiritual implications.
Moreover, when I think about eradicating all illness, I am
immediately reminded of the fact that Shamans generally
receive their calling via illness. Irene Diamond in her
recent book Fertile Ground: Women, Earth, and the Limits
of Control21 has warned us that modern
science continues to trample upon the unexplained mysteries
of life and death by eliminating chance, and also, I would
add, by eliminating the will and moral agency of women.
Indeed, the shamanic calling is primarily heralded by an
illness that often leads one to the brink of death.
Native healer, Medicine Grizzlybear Lake describing his
own calling writes "The calling comes in the form of a
dream, accident, sickness, injury, disease, near-death
experience, or even actual death."22 Medicine
Grizzlybear Lake had four near-death experiences in which he
met his spirit guides and teachers.23 He writes
that death, dying, and illness are the school of shamanhood.
It is also through power dreams and visions that the guardian
spirits and spirit guides appear.
He writes: "As a young child I had nightmares,
encounters with monsters, premonitions of accidents or
illnesses, disasters that came true, changes in the weather
before they occurred, discussions with talking animals,
birds, fish, snakes, and dead relatives, and even trips to
other planets in flying saucers. I had dreams of falling off
cliffs, drowning, being chased by people who tried to kill
me, monsters that tried to rip me apart, sleeping in a nest
full of snakes, flying over cities, attending parties and
gatherings, meeting people who in later years became a friend
or spouse, and even dreams about my children before they were
born. I actually "saw" my children before they
became a physical reality."24
This leads us to consider the way in which the soul
becomes a physical child. Most cultures have concepts of who
delivers the unborn soul to the germplasm of the fetus and
when this occurs. The Sami believe that the Great Goddess did
this. None of this can be measured in a modern medical
office. Since the activities of the soul and the spirit
remain mysteries to us, it seems to me that we should pay
attention to the teachings of native visionaries who would
advise us to interrogate and respect and illness before we
submit it to modern technologies for extinction. It may bring
us important information, and it may be a gateway towards
communication with another dimension. Indeed, as we have
seen, the illness itself might be avoided if we learn how to
stop attacks that occur in spiritual dimensions that we can
access via our dreamsor that Shamans can access for us.
Shamanism calls into question our entire western concept
of illness. Now that we have medicalized normal physical
events such as pregnancy and childbirth, we are also
medicalizing states of mind that shamans use to access
non-ordinary reality, and labeling them "madness".
If we continue to do this, we will miss out on the
information that they bring us. Of course, I am not
suggesting that we not treat illness. But I am arguing
that there are other ways of healing that respect the wisdom
of the spirit and the body in which the illness is lodged,
and that cures and methods that do not poison the body with
toxic substances, but work on the source of the disease,
which is often in another dimension, are a viable alternative
to our current medical practices.
However, the apprenticeship to become this kind of Healer
does not reduce to four or even eight years as does medical
training. It takes at least twenty-five to thirty years. My
own Shaman teacher trained for thirty years before she was
allowed to heal anyone outside of her family, and she
ultimately died of a sorcery attack. So perhaps even that
amount of training was insufficient. I am making a strong
case for seriously reclaiming shamanism for I, myself, have
been healed from serious illness over the past two and one
half years by prayer, ritual, and shamanic techniques, or
healing done in the spirit world by my healer in a deep
trance and at a considerable distance from my body (over 90
miles away).
I have also been thinking about the traffic in eggs,
fetuses, and all sorts of body parts within the context of
shamanism. If shamans receive their training in lineages,
from those in their lineage who have been shamans before
them, and who know and transmit the laws of the spirit world
and the methods and techniques of effecting healing and
communication with spirits, what happens when those beings
who were to have been born in a certain culture are born
elsewhere, because the eggs and sperm have been frozen and
transported to other parts of the world? Thus, if a child is
born into a westernized monoculture, but this child has
inherited the gift for shamanism, whether this gift is
bestowed via the spirit world alone or is also transmitted in
the genes, the result is that the child will be born into a
culture that has no means of developing this gift, for
western enlightenment monoculture is excising medicine people
and institutionalizing visionaries.
If I raise this question at all, it is because I, myself,
come from a rather strange lineage of power and also of abuse
of power. My own paternal grandmother was a Tarot Card reader
in Yiddish on the Lower East side. She was a woman of great
spiritual power, but who often used her power to curse
instead of to bless. In fact, she was often thrown into jail
(I learned very late in life, because no one wanted to talk
about her) both for illegal Tarot reading and for other
things no one wants to mention. My father, one of her ten
children, inherited her power, but could make nothing of it,
for there was no one to train him. His mother was a negative
force, and there were simply no other people who could guide
him. My memory of him is of a "New Age Man" well
before there were any "New Agers". In the fifties
he used to go on long walks to breathe in the sun. He would
spend time standing on his head, studying yoga, going on
strange health diets, and he had several severe spiritual
crises when he became very religious for short periods of
time.
Apparently I inherited power in this lineage. As a young
child I left the body frequently, but when I would tell my
mother about this, she would laugh at me. I also have a
history of callings to a spiritual path via illnesses that
the medical profession could not identify. But it wasn't
until I was forty-seven that an actual shaman teacher, the
Shaman of Samiland, came into my life, found me via
the spirit world, and put a name on all that had been so
weird about my life. She told me that The Great Spirit had
called me, and in 1987 I went to Samiland to begin my work
with her. There I saw my spirit guide, I heard the voices of
the dead ancestors calling me, and, over the four and one
half years in which she lived (she died at 47 in 1991), I
learned a great deal about the interconnection between the
earth, humans, and the spirit world.
The irony of all this is that I come from N.Y., where I
had been a "taxi addict", and I seemed a most
unlikely candidate for treks into the mountains and across
the tundra at the North Pole. However, I did accomplish all
that thanks to my spirit guides and to God, which they call
The Great Spirit. The fact that I am alive today, having
developed the same illness that she died of, is, to my mind,
a miracle. She would have said that she died of an illness
caused by an attack by a sorcerer in a spirit war.
Today I am with a new teacher of a lost Jewish (I call it
shamanic) matrilineage of power. Under her tutelage, and with
her spiritual power, we are unraveling the threads of my
bizarre personal history. However, the sadness of all this
for me is that my culture did not provide a framework, a
construct, or a cadre of professionals that could explain my
experiences and illnesses to me, could diagnose and heal
them, and could lead me on the life path of my destiny at an
early enough age so that I could make use of my knowledge and
power in more than a rudimentary way today. Since a shaman
does inherit spiritual gifts and spirit guides from her own
family25 (including ancestral spirits), if one is
born via test tube to a different culture, particularly one
that does not practice shamanism, how can the future shaman
be trained? This is especially poignant when the states of
consciousness necessary for this practice are labeled
"insanity", and the potential shaman may be put
into a mental asylum.
My personal example is that of a white western woman who
laments the loss of sacred Jewish shamanic knowledge, but was
blessed to encounter, in my lifetime, the one living person
who embodies that knowledge. But native peoples are also
suffering from the loss of their own traditional knowledge,
especially when their religious rites (occasionally when they
make use of sacred herbs like peyote) are deemed illegal.
In New Age and Armageddon26 Monica
Sjöö critiques the ways in which white western upper class
capitalists have profited from shamanism and other indigenous
teachings. She notes that "in 1988 The Open Gate Trust
ran a course in 'shamanistic studies' at a cost of forty
pounds." She writes: "Shamanism seems to be lifted
out of its context of tribal life and native people's
struggle for survival and sacral communication with the
Earth, Her plants and animals and cosmos, and used by wealthy
and privileged white people as another form of healing and
therapy."27 Sjöö talks about several New
Age Shamans who are womanizers and of others who are creating
an upper class of New Agers as an alternative aristocracy.
She also identifies shamanism as women's ecstatic
experience based upon the research into Aboriginal Shamanism
by Mary Antoinette Crispine Czaplicka, who wrote about
Shamanism in Aboriginal Siberia in 1914.28
In various Siberian tribes male shamans wear female dress
when they shamanize. "Androgyne shamans of transvestite
type have been reported from northeastern Siberia among
Chukchis, Koryaks, Asiatic Eskimos, and groups on
Kamchatka....It is interesting however, that among Koryaks
the transvestite shaman was considered the most powerful
shaman of all shamans."29
Sjöö extrapolates, and concludes that women were the
original shamans, and that their knowledge was passed down in
oral lore over time. My experience with the Sami did not
indicate that shamanism was either specifically connected to
women or that women were the most powerful shamans, despite
the fact that my own shaman teacher was a woman and that she
was extremely powerful. My Western perspective on gender
roles in this specific culture was that the female shaman was
trained to think in ways that we in the West would consider
"masculine". She believed it was important to be
physically strong, and never shirked from tasks that we might
associate with male construction workers such as building a
teepee single handedly or going hunting for weeks at a time.
Nor did she shirk from responding physically to physical
assault. As she used to say: "A shaman must handle all
things--even drunk men."
While I do not agree that we can conclude that Shamanism
is originally linked to women (everywhere), I do think that
women shamans can deconstruct our gender stereotypes and
myths for us. I am certain that in Samiland when a female
shaman goes hunting or out on a solo pilgrimage over 50 miles
to a sacred site, she is thought of as "feminine"
and not as "masculine". Indeed, I discovered that
all Sami women, non Shamans, were encouraged to undertake
tasks requiring enormous physical strength that would have
been delegated to men in our culture.
Vandana Shiva has analyzed "maldevelopment" and
"monocultures of the mind" in her important books Staying
Alive: Women, Ecology and Development30 and Monocultures
of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and
Biotechnology.31 In addition to destroying indigenous
knowledge of plants and ecology, western monoculture is
excising shamanism and shamanic knowledge of the spirit world
from the planet.
In speaking about the arts of destruction and warfare,
Vandana Shiva writes: "To legitimize the development of
these arts of destruction, women, nature, and the colonies
had to be robbed of their 'human' quality, their soul. They
became spiritless matter, raw material."32
It is through spiritual ritual and ceremony linking humans
and the land to the spirit world and the cosmos that women,
as custodians of biodiversity, have been conserving the seed.
According to Vandana Shiva "Sacred seed is perceived as
a microcosm of the macrocosm ..."33
Conserving seed and respecting biodiversity are sacred acts.
"For women farmers, the essence of seed is the
continuity of life. For multinational corporations the value
of the seed lies in the discontinuity of life."34
Seeds that are engineered, like fetuses that are
engineered, violate the sacredness of the spiritual relation
of the seed to the entire cosmos and its natural cycles of
which both women farmers and mothers, in general, have been
the custodians throughout time. Shiva reminds us that
"profane seed violates the integrity of ecological
cycles and linkages, and fragments agricultural
ecosystems."35
At this point we might take a look at the wisdom contained
in the Mother Goose Rhyme of Humpty Dumpty. Some have said
that the Mother Goose rhymes passed on information about the
Goddess Religion via the oral tradition. Mother Goose reminds
us of Mother Goddess. Thinking about the engineered seed and
genetically engineered egg, we now read:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the King's Horses and
All the King's Men
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again.
Humpty Dumpty, the egg, is always depicted as a male. This
is the "technodocs'" egg--the egg that has been
taken over by the patriarchy. This is the egg that had a
great "Fall" (from the Mother Goddess reverence for
the female) from its previous female generative source (not
its male engineered source). Not one single man from the
patriarchy could ever restore it to its former wholeness.
The Humpty Dumpty rhyme is a warning about gynocide,
femicide, and and matricide as well as about the Fall of
women from the Goddess civilization into patriarchal
colonization of the egg and of the seed, now we know how, via
the new reproductive technologies and genetic engineering.36
We might ask whether an egg that has been harvested and
frozen, then defrosted and combined with an unknown sperm in
a test tube, is a form of rape, since the woman whose egg has
been combined with that sperm did not give her consent to
that particular mating.
In a very different poetic text entitled "Seed
Dreaming," Robert Lawlor author of Voices of the
First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime,37
expresses the Aboriginal vision of the seed's relation
to both the physical and spiritual worlds. "The seed is
permeated with and surrounded by a field, a pre-formative
entelechy drawing all growth toward a prescribed form and
destiny/ Within the dreaming of the Seed pulses/the entire
drama of genesis......From the realms beyond, of the Unborn
and the Dead, the plant gathers its vital force"38
Whether in the plant world or the human world, the seed of
life always has its spiritual counterpart. "To the
Aborigines, no occurrence is caused only by physical
mechanisms, especially the events and processes associated
with life. They tend to see all causation as a combination of
physical and spiritual forces acting in harmony with
energetic emanations of the earth."39
Thus, by consulting the primal peoples, we see that the
land and the spirit are intimately interconnected. "The
phenomenal world is considered the dream of the ancestral
beings. Neither the dream nor the phenomenal world is
considered an illusion; rather, together they constitute
reality."40
If the visible world is perceived as the trace of the
dreams and activities of the ancestral spirits, then we can
begin to understand how our rape of the land may affect the
ancestral spirits as well. Everything we do to the phenomenal
world affects the spirit world. Hence, the colonization of
the human seed, with the violence and abuse it undergoes
(being harvested, frozen, bred, defrosted, genetically
manipulated, trafficked, implanted into an unknown body,
etc.) will not only affect the soul of the child and the
mother, but will also do violence to the ancestral souls via
the violence and abuse of the spiritual dimension of that
seed.
Considering soul loss as one result of abuse, might we not
be heading towards a world of humans whose soul fragments
have fled, might we not be breeding future humans who are
open to all kinds of illness, depression, to dangers of all
sorts, etc.?
Throughout time Aboriginal peoples have respected,
honored, and celebrated these spirits through rites and
prayer. The western patriarchal monoculture has abandoned
these practices.
We are responsible for the fate of the universe, for as we
participate in acknowledging and honoring the spirits, we
co-create with them a world from which they will not flee.
Earth without indigenous peoples, humans without soul parts
that must be retrieved by Shamans, who will have been excised
by our New Reproductive Technologies...this is our current
story, and without anyone to perform a soul retrieval on all
the manipulated and desacralized matter, both human and
non-human from which the soul has fled, our monoculture's
Universe Story will end tragically with the death-in-life
soul loss of modern western civilization.
I strongly suggest that one way out of our current impasse
is to reclaim shamanismnot as a new age commodified exotic
self-indulgence trip, with weekend packaged tours to primal
peoples, who perform ceremonies for rich white westerners
(who rip them off, and return nothing to them and nothing to
the land, and nothing to the spirits,) but as a serious
cosmic world-view. We must begin now by training gifted
psychic mediums, spiritual healers, who, in many cultures are
women, as shamans, and we must respect their rootedness in
their particular and diverse cultures and lineages. We must
also begin to inculcate the values of respect for the
inhabitants of the spirit world from birth onward, throughout
the life cycle. In other words, we must pay back our enormous
debt to the Earth Mother, to The Creator of All That Is, to
all the inhabitants of the spirit world for the gifts of life
and creation.
My personal story proves that a white Western woman from
an agnostic background can be identified and discovered by
the spirits and even returned to her power, BUT there had to
be responsible, experienced teachers available to guide me.
However, I have lost almost 50 years of training time. Our
concept of time also needs to be discussed from the shamanic
perspective, for it is possible that I have not lost any time
at allonly in our linear concept of it. Nevertheless, it
remains to be seen whether in this lifetime I will be able to
develop my innate powers. Fortunately, I have had three
extraordinary female teachers, and I am deeply troubled by
the idea that we could be creating a future in which such
people would no longer exist or would be locked up.
The shamanic dimension of an ecofeminist narrative would
say that via our western patriarchal Enlightenment
hierarchies and dualisms we have established humans as
separate from and superior to both non-humans in the
phenomenal world and to all of the spirit world, by simply
discounting its existence. In the western scientific
definition, life is conceived of as material, as genetic
matter. No account is made of the spiritual dimensions of
matter. Yet, these are the dimensions that ritual and
ceremony have preserved intact so that the seeds of life, be
they vegetal or animal, may be viable and quicken.
In a new ecofeminist cosmogenesis we would include spirit
as a dimension of reality, and we would teach our children
that everything we think or say affects everything else in
the universe including our ancestors, all the spirits, and
our Creator.
Indeed, most religious traditions, whether patriarchal or
not, conceive of the Word as a powerful creative force. In
order to regenerate the world, we must begin to pay homage to
the Creator of all that is, and to acknowledge the aliveness
and agency of spiritual entities as diverse as deities,
guides, ancestors, and angels. To do so would be to RESOUL
the universe, and it is incumbent upon us to do this
immediately.
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