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via positiva and ancient traditions We have suggested that religions evolved in prehistoric times as forms of Shamanism, a form of Nature religion that saw the elements of the world as spirits. The priest, or Shaman, communicated with the spirits and interceded on behalf of the population, he also made sacred the everyday world (through 'sacrifice', meaning to make sacred, but now corrupted to mean only sacrificial killing). In time the spirits were personified as deities, leading to the many polytheistic religions of ancient history, the Greek religion being a good example. These religions evolved into or gave way to monotheistic religions, which can be seen as close to a religion of transcendence. Contemporary Hinduism is unique in that it contains elements of all these three categories of religion. The Shamanistic and polytheistic traditions have little emphasis on renunciation, so we we would expect to find material in support of via positiva from these sources. Unfortunately there is little written material associated with Shamanism, its study and understanding undertaken mainly by anthropologists, whose frame of reference is rather different to ours here. The Greek polytheism is largely optimistic, but then it is hardly a religion of transcendence. It is in some of the ancient Hindu texts, particularly the Upanishads, that we find a mixture of via positiva and via negativa that form the kind of balance being promoted here. Another Hindu tradition which later entered Buddhism is that of Tantra, where we find a transcendent spirituality that makes explicit use of all the dimensions of human activity, including sex. Saraha's 'Royal Song' is the classic Buddhist Tantric text, prescribing transcendence through activities that were explicitly prohibited by the Buddha in his teachings as described in the Pali Canon.
In Taoism and Zen we can also find Nature elements and via positiva elements, popularised through such activities as calligraphy, the Zen garden, or sporting activities such as archery and other martial arts. We should not of course always place the emphasis on traditions with a textual basis. If one has a chance to encounter any pagan, Shamanistic or Earth religions through their present representatives then one can study at first hand how the spiritual life is compatible with a deep acceptance of life, the body and Nature. Such encounters are rare, so we turn instead to two great areas of human endeavour, art and science, and see how they can be interpreted in terms of via positiva.
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